Cool Example Paper - Rough Draft - 1070+ words

What Cool Is & Isn't

Cool - a red-lined velvet boxy prison that we gladly sentence ourselves to - and flamboyantly throw out the key. Cool is not the ineffable mystery - the je ne sais quoi - that people claim. Its not just our consumer choices. Cool is a synthesis of an interior heroic narrative and exterior social approval. Our worldview - our received cultural maps contain sections - the "hero's journey" and "how should we live" and "getting along well with others"- that dictate our approach to cool. These cultural maps are usually provided to us based on our position in society - gender, race, class, nationality, etc - through core cultural institutions - family, school, media.

Thus - our aspirations, preferences, and self-understanding are very often the product of a crude enactment of a particular demographic. The white young man growing up in the farmer family in western Kansas will (simplified and generalized) watch Fox with his parents and wear a baseball cap and vote Republican and admire George Bush and listen to country music and collect rifles. Obama will not be cool to him. A particular 'cool' sensibility is not primarily the unique gift of a self-expressing creative spirit - it is a consequence of demographics and associated life experiences, values, and marketing.

Goffman (1959) phrased the unfreedom of cool in another way. He theorized that the 'scenes' we participate gloop together into one or more 'characters' which form the core of our 'self'. We aspire to successful and 'natural' performance of these roles - and collect props and bits of costumes and preferences to sustain the character. Falling down jeans were valued by urban youth 2002-2010 not because of creative desires to share boxer designs - but because the falling down jeans served as an effective costume bit for the cartoony character that the urban youth had learned to enact and thus to see himself as - oppositional, preening, conformist, and crude. We're all close captioned (Fugazi).

Why Cool?

Why do we lock ourselves in these well-decorated prisons? I believe we can identify two primary reasons (an 'inner' and 'outer') - the inner compulsion to imprison ourselves is an attempt to escape a sense of meaningless floundering confusion. The outer compulsion is the need to present an attractive consistent 'face' to the demanding performances of the world.

We all know (to some extent) that we're going to die (though we deploy various shields against this knowledge). What are we going to do until then? What can offer our life a narrative thread - a sense of literary cohesion?

And we're surrounded by others in complex social arrangements that demand from us that who we were yesterday should be strongly related to who we will be tomorrow. After all, for everyone else, we're bit players in THEIR drama - and imagine how Rihanna would react if a back-up dancer seized the mic? People like us to play a predictable person - a character - a dependable role player. In fact - they require it - there's lots of penalties for people who can't or won't do that.

So Now What?

The percentage of gringo lefty public school teachers who have been vegetarian and listen to Radiohead and believe that the meaning of life has something to do with deeper understanding and voted for Obama is probably pretty high. Thrift store clothing and uncombed hair typify my subculture as well (and some role distance). Though tattoos have become common among my subculture my family brought me up fundamentally Apollonian and the lack of tattoos goes along with the lack of drug use and having already been done with college by the time body alteration started getting common. I've been shaped into a cartoony character in many ways - by my social position and consequent roles and the scenes I play in.

(An important point to consider - as Foucault pointed out later in his career - is that these social pressures don't just limit us, they also construct us - they produce us - if it weren't for family/school/media I wouldn't be a free and natural organic soul able to dance as I want to - I'd be dead or non-human. Cut the strings and the puppet doesn't dance free!)

So how should I integrate the understanding of myself as performer - as character? Should I experiment with other characters - start wearing falling down jeans and collect some rifles and buy a TV to watch Fox? Maybe that wouldn't be too bad an idea - why do people go overseas to be exchange students when they could experience different positionality and associated cultural cues around the block?

Of course the truth is that I don't want to watch Fox, I can't stand the idea of having to hold my pants up with my hand, it'd be illegal (and I'm glad about that) to start a rifle collection in NYC.

I want to navigate my life by my cultural map - including my sense of cool - my hero's journey, my sense of what is worth appreciation and admiration. The new segments of my map that I gain will come as a result of me using my existing map to find them. I think learning German is cool - and so is philosophy - so now I'm reading Schopenhauer and he might alter my map - but it will be an organic/evolutionary development (a stream of consciousness rather than the interruption of a seizure, an epiphany, a cult).

Does it devalue my life to realize that I'm also one of the ones that Shakespeare was describing? "But a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."

But isn't this realization - that we're performing according to particular cultural scripts - the only chance we have to choose another performance, to be aware of the meaning of our actions, to see our own contradictions, to glimpse our own absurdity? Isn't self-awareness the goal of philosophy (from the ancient Greeks' to the Matrix - "know thyself")? Doesn't this insight help us live a little lighter - a little humorously, taking ourselves a little less desperately seriously?

Despite the benefits the realization of our performedness - our shapedness - our absurdity can make it hard (or rather reveal that it's hard) to figure out what matters, what we should do, who we should become.