Another recent article in The Guardian, Can I learn to be cool – even though I am garrulous, swotty and wear no-show socks?, tries to define “effortlessly, undeniably cool”. It pretty much articulates the notion that cool equals the physical appearance of popular-famous. Consumer fashion. The journalist, Elle Hunt, seeks reassurance she is cool – or at least has the possibility of being considered cool if she dresses the right way.
Once more, the starting point is Pezzuti, Warren and Chen’s paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that argues that there has been a universal crystallization of “the meaning of cool” and reduces it to six attributes: extroversion, openness, hedonism, adventurousness, autonomy and power.
Pezzuti’s interest is in coolness as a form of economic labour or production. His hypothesis is that – just as tribal societies prize skilled hunters, who provide food for the group – today’s information economy turns on creativity and innovation. “Cool” expresses the status and reward bestowed upon individuals who push boundaries, generate new ideas and promote their spread, to collective benefit.
While I don’t doubt that one of capitalism’s (or the dominant culture if you like) major achievements is assimilating and repurposing oppositional aspects – the counter-cultures become fuel for the dominant culture – the “collective benefit” Pezzuti recognises is that of making money. What’s most telling is that, when asked, Pezzuti cites Richard Branson as someone who he considers cool (and, more tellingly, identifies how this has contributed to making him a billionaire). For Pezzuti, you’re cool if you’re popular and rich. He insists that cool can’t be alienating (unlike historical cool).
Joel Dinerstein, professor of English at Tulane University and author of The Origins of Cool in Postwar America does a little better when he is quoted in the article as saying:
“It’s a combination of rebellion, personal style, otherworldly confidence and charisma … It’s actually a very mysterious calculus… a person who’s cool does not give a shit about what you think about them””
And, yet, Dinerstein follows Pezzuti be insisting that coolness is a commodity: “And in today’s consumer economy, to be cool, you must also be marketable.”
Dinerstein tries to separate current cool with what was previously cool and argues that whereas selling out was considered uncool, it’s now the reverse. “Once you are fully immersed in a consumer society, that outlaw sensibility can’t come from anywhere,” says Dinerstein and opines “At this point, cool is correlated with celebrity” and that – based on conversations with his students – only the famous can be cool. Somewhere in his argument is something vague about “perceived authenticity”.
Later in the article, the journalist visits Cora Delaney, founder and director of creative agency EYC Ltd who tells her that ““All the coolest people I know are hustlers,” Delaney says. “If you’ve just had it given to you, then it’s not that cool.””
Cool, to her, is about being an individual and “doing your own thing”.
It’s the conflation of celebrity, market capitalism and vague pop psychology that marks these types of discussions about what’s cool. What’s missing from these discussions of cool is the matter of taste. You have to have informed taste – which is pretty much always anti-mainstream culture (though it might incorporate and subvert aspects of the mainstream). People selling you stuff and telling you they are cool… are not cool. Neither are people desperate to be cool.