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The Cultural Career of Coolness - Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan (Hardcover, New)
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The Cultural Career of Coolness - Discourses and Practices of Affect Control in European Antiquity, the United States, and Japan (Hardcover, New)
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Cool is a word of American English that has been integrated into
the vocabulary of numerous languages around the globe. Today it is
a term most often used in advertising trendy commodities, or, more
generally, in promoting urban lifestyles in our postmodern age. But
what is the history of the term "cool?" When has coolness come to
be associated with certain modes of contemporary self-fashioning?
On what grounds do certain nations claim a privilege to be
recognized as "cool?" These are some of the questions that served
as a starting-point for a comparative cultural inquiry which
brought together specialists from American Studies and Japanese
Studies, but also from Classics, Philosophy and Sociology. The
conceptual grid of the volume can be described as follows: (1)
Coolness is a metaphorical term for affect-control. It is tied in
with cultural discourses on the emotions and the norms of their
public display, and with gendered cultural practices of
subjectivity. (2) In the course of the cultural transformations of
modernity, the term acquired new importance as a concept referring
to practices of individual, ethnic, and national difference. (3)
Depending on cultural context, coolness is defined in terms of
aesthetic detachment and self-irony, of withdrawal, dissidence and
even latent rebellion. (4) Coolness often carries undertones of
ambivalence. The situational adequacy of cool behavior becomes an
issue for contending ethical and aesthetic discourses since an
ethical ideal of self-control and a strategy of performing
self-control are inextricably intertwined. (5) In literature and
film, coolness as a character trait is portrayed as a personal
strength, as a lack of emotion, as an effect of trauma, as a mask
for suffering or rage, as precious behavior, or as savvyness. This
wide spectrum is significant: artistic productions offer valid
insights into contradictions of cultural discourses on
affect-control. (6) American and Japanese cultural productions show
that twentieth-century notions of coolness hybridize different
cultural traditions of affect-control.
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