Liu's Ethics of the Database
Vicki Callahan
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and University of 
Southern California
vacall@uwm.edu

Review of: Alan Liu. Local 
Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the 
Database. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Print.

In many ways, one might see Alan Liu's collection, Local 
Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the 
Database, as a kind of retrospective or career long 
response to the issues raised by Katherine Hayles and 
Johanna Drucker's individual reviews in the journal 
Criticism of his earlier book, The Laws of Cool: 
Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. While Liu 
directly responds in the same issue with "Understanding 
Knowledge Work" to Hayles's and Drucker's queries 
regarding the definition and function of history and 
aesthetics--indeed regarding the very "future of the 
humanities"--in the information age, his Local 
Transcendence takes the discussion much further and 
into the world of methodology.  In Local Transcendence, 
Liu not only maps out a critical approach that will draw 
together the diverse terrains of the humanities, arts, 
information, and technology, but also argues that this 
very interdisciplinarity is the crux of the method. 
Interdisciplinarity as method is vital not so much due 
to the breadth of data revealed, that is as additional 
content in itself, but rather because it produces a 
"line of flight" away from established and rigid knowledge 
systems to an "unclosed otherness" (Local 185).
The question for Liu is: can there be an open method for 
history that can tell us anything politically instructive 
or ethically useful, especially in an age that has seen 
the so-called "death of theory," "death of history," 
"death of the author," "death of the subject," "death of 
cinema," etc.? What, for Liu, is left in the absence of 
essential meanings except as Liu notes a sense of the 
"cool?" The "cool" as Liu defines it is basically whatever 
brand we have decided to take on from our corporate and 
media-saturated culture.  Our larger fascination with 
endless flows of information and with perpetual innovation, 
a world-view of "creative destruction," leaves us awash in 
data but strips the world of past knowledge that can anchor 
the present (Local 2-4).  In such an environment, we do not 
have history but rather historicism--that is, only the signs 
or the effect(s) of a history (4).  Moreover, for Liu our 
path of resistance comes from within our "cool culture" as 
a strategy of reversal or "destructive creation" and also 
from within postmodern historicism by turning its symptomatic 
"contingency" into a method (Local 11; "Understanding" 250). 
Ultimately, Liu maps out both the logic and critical method 
for our era of "remix culture," a phrase perhaps more apt 
than "information age" at capturing the blurred worlds of 
creation/consumption, art/culture, data/media, form/content, 
persona/person, public/private of the current epoch.         

To understand the feasibility and value of Liu's method as 
detailed in Local Transcendence--as well as to situate his 
work in relation to a range of current remix practices from 
the archive to the arts to rhetorical strategies--it is 
useful to turn to the Hayles and Drucker essays. Both Hayles 
and Drucker take issue with Liu's "destructive creativity" as 
a value either for the arts or for the humanities. On the one 
hand, Hayles notes that this assumes a ubiquity of corporate 
culture in which we are trapped and can act only as borderline 
terrorists, albeit "critically" destructive ones. As Hayles 
quite rightly points out, the presumed corporate cultural 
"trap" and attendant critical subversion confirm the status 
quo via the negation or erasure of history since they 
effectively eliminate the possibility of imagining a counter-
history or alternative positive possible pathways of resistance 
(236-239).  Drucker is equally troubled by Liu's vision for the 
arts as "destructive," since it replays what she believes are 
tired oppositions from aesthetic discourses regarding the 
"resistance" of art (and specifically of the avant-garde) to 
dominant social/popular cultural order. Rather than a didactic 
or utopian purpose for the arts, Drucker says she prefers 
"embodied examples of a practice that has no purpose whatsoever 
except to be" (246-47).

Of course, the discussion of the shape, objective, indeed 
possibility of history and the arts haunts these essays and Liu's 
books, that is, what should teaching and scholarship look like 
given that the objects of study are themselves in question?  
Drucker argues for no less than an "overhaul" of academics from 
the object of study ("static artifacts") to its purpose ("self-
improvement" "moral uplift") ("Games"). While "cultural 
preservation," "critical thought," and "artful expression" are 
core values retained in Drucker's educational re-tooling, the 
revolution in digital media is not insignificant in shaping the 
new practice.  The tools of digital media are not in themselves 
the core, but rather what one learns from the engagement or more 
specifically the practice of these tools--that is, a diverse and 
flexible set of skills across a range of informational, 
expressive, reflective and critical tasks (Drucker 246).

Liu's direct response to Drucker (and to Hayles) in his Criticism 
essay follows closely on Drucker's (new) media literacy/fluency 
model, and indeed, he points to their collective work in assorted 
digital humanities initiatives that reflect the core values noted 
above. But a fault line appears towards the end of the essay when 
Liu draws a parallel between the objectives of formalist "close 
readings" and his own postmodernist approach in line with "deeply 
felt human 'experience,'" which he claims shares an affinity with 
Drucker's and Hayles's attention in their work to "experience" and 
"embodiment," respectively ("Understanding" 257). Setting aside 
whether or not these multiple uses and related terms share precisely 
the same meaning, it is more useful here that Liu's comment seem to 
confirm that we are now forever in a culture of remix (and may very 
well always have been) from which nothing "new" or outside can 
emerge. While Drucker and Hayles may not give up all hope of the 
"new," Liu implicitly exchanges this for the larger goal of 
education: "humanity" (252). 

Is the "humanity" that Liu pursues from within "postmodern historicism" 
any different qualitatively from the formalist, romanticist, or indeed 
enlightenment individualized notions of the self, something from which 
our postmodern "cool" must surely diverge? In Local Transcendence Liu 
both draws important connections between seemingly disparate forms--
especially between romanticism and postmodernism--and shows how such 
linkages provide an insight into his method of "contingency" and have 
implications for our contemporary "humanity."

Both romanticism and postmodernism offer an important counter-movement 
to the singular rational historical line followed by the Enlightenment 
and to the current techno-instrumentalist teleology of "innovation" 
(Local 7). Moreover, both romanticism and postmodernism offer an 
aesthetic or style that can set out the principles to an historicist, 
i.e., non-unitary, method.  Liu's discussion of Wordsworth's The Prelude 
(1805) points to the crucial romantic component--and key historicist 
principle--of immersion, and connects that quality to the "localism" and 
attention to contextual detail found in historicism. Further, Liu notes 
that Wordsworth seems to dislocate description from historical time as 
he blurs past and present temporality into a "now" (13). Thus within 
this aesthetic/critical frame, we are "in" or "immersed" in history 
and yet "free from history"--another key principle--that is, set loose 
from contextual and temporal blind spots and able to see "alternative 
pathways between past and future" (20).  

Liu's third chapter meticulously explores the nuances and workings of 
"context" within cultural criticism. He notes that while it is necessary 
to provide detail for cultural criticism, it is not a sufficient basis 
for his critical approach and is at times a hindrance to what he believes 
should be the postmodern historicist objectives. Too often detail and 
cultural context are set up in stark opposition to theory and method, 
but in fact the rigidity of this resistance to theory, not to mention 
the reification of anti-method, turns into a deterministic method in 
and of itself (116). Here we are at the heart of his critique from 
within postmodern historicism, which is that detail and especially the 
mechanics of historicist detail conceived as a densely layered 
repetitive loop of struggle and resistance lead to a totalizing, 
detached, and far too comfortable observation of culture (137). More 
specifically, the sheer volume of detail, as well as its reiterative 
nature, makes this a "faceless" enterprise that turns away from the 
needed "emancipation seeded within, but not without ethical choice 
[that is] able to emerge from, the complexity of the past" (136, 21). 

If the ethical turn brings us back to the question of "humanity," 
Liu's situating of our "choice" as both within and without history 
shifts the ground from the unique and highly individualized romantic 
self, but not to one completely in the domain of the "cool" 
postmodern "subjectivity."  That said, the model for ethical choice 
and thus our method of contingent postmodern historicism is derived 
for Liu from the intersection of--or perhaps rather the related 
rhetoric found within--romanticism and postmodernism, which we 
might label as assemblage, montage, or remix depending upon the 
context and media forms we might implement.  Time and again, Liu 
references Wordsworth and the romantics for their nonlinear 
pathways, a skipping between, zigzagging around time and objects 
as illustrative of the contingent method.  Perhaps more 
significantly, he likens the contingent "method" to a chain of 
modernist and postmodern "reverie," encompassing cubism, 
Eisensteinian montage, and ultimately, less directly but logically, 
the database form.                                                  

Like Drucker, Liu invokes digital media as important historicist 
tools not for any utopian qualities they have themselves, nor 
primarily for the media fluency required in our digital age (which 
Drucker promotes), but precisely for the rhetorical opportunities 
they present towards a method.  Ethical choice, without moral 
determinism or relativism--that is to say, "humanity" without 
singularity, universals, or moral anarchy--comes from a strategic 
engagement with information (117).  Here, Liu's commentary on the 
"pragmatics" of interdisciplinarity is instructive about his idea 
that rhetoric and diverse media forms are central to his method.  
An interdisciplinary approach is not important because it transcends 
traditional boundaries (since it often only establishes other larger 
ones) but because it can help us rethink the assumptions and 
boundaries within our own "home" disciplines. It accomplishes this 
through the movement or translation of information from one discipline 
(or format) to another.  As Liu notes, the "relation between the home 
discipline and the other or exotic discipline is really the relation 
between what might be termed a convention and a figure for knowledge"
--in effect, a tropology--whose goal is "the very art of doing an end 
run around epistemological closure in order to say the impossible" 
(181). Visual media, images, extend that gap between convention and 
figure, or rather open up more possible pathways against closure (183). 

The digital and networked world transforms the translation of 
information exponentially but also qualitatively. For Liu, that is, 
digital data's immaterial "base" facilitates exchange from one format 
to another, one receiver to another, thereby erasing form/content 
distinctions (234-35). Importantly, however, data translation occurs 
as the result of a highly structured consistent logic, meaning that 
this "open-ended" movement occurs within a "closed" system, and thus 
potentially ensnares us within the ethos of the endless circulation 
of meaningless signs.  How then does the digital fit within Liu's 
paradigm--can it maintain the ethical turn and "humanity" within 
this structure?  Here it is important to remember that Liu's 
strategy is not simply one of movement and displacement; it is a 
contingent, not random methodology.  Liu closes the eighth chapter, 
"Transcendental Data: Towards a Cultural History and Aesthetics of 
the New Encoded Discourse," by asking, "what experience of the 
structurally unknowable can still be conveyed in the structured 
media of knowledge (databases, XML, and so on)?  Perhaps the arts
--if they can just crack the code of ordinary cool and make it 
flower--know" (236).                                           

While Liu prioritizes the arts, especially the romantics and 20th 
century avant-garde, both here and throughout the book, his title 
for chapter eight and his emphasis on "contingency"--what lies next 
to--are particularly instructive. That is, the chapter title situates 
"cultural history and aesthetics" in proximity, or in conversation, 
not in dialectical opposition or hierarchical form.  Here we might 
well return to Liu's attention to the kind of movement he values 
early in his discussion of Wordsworth's The Prelude, which allies 
the poetic and montage (13). The move is nonlinear but relational, 
or to put this another way, both within and outside of a history.  
In many ways, Liu's discussion is reminiscent of assorted proponents 
of montage as a new form of language--or particularly, as in the case 
of the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, a new model for writing history.1 
As James Williams notes, Godard sees montage (in cinematic and video 
form) as offering "a return to a moment before the order of linguistic 
and cinematic syntax has taken over and words and images have lost 
their immediacy, freedom, and innocence" (313).  Godard's epic series 
Histoire(s) du Cin�ma (1988-1998) explicitly reasserts the "promise" 
of cinema and more specifically, of montage, to envision a more 
ethical world.  This failed mission or "promise" is then reconfigured 
by Godard for video and digital media contexts with an intricately 
layered, collage like form that flows effortlessly between historical 
and cinematic epochs with a dazzling interweaving of text, image, 
sound, music, and spoken word collected from across a diverse 
spectrum of the arts and culture.  Alifeleti Brown suggests in the 
journal Senses of Cinema that Godard's Histoire(s) can be seen as 
pioneering model of remix/sampling culture as the work is driven 
exclusively by quotation, certainly testing the limits of copyright, 
while at the same time making no claims for rights for Histoire(s). 
A rich array of related experimental creative and critical efforts 
might then be sketched, which share and/or exceed the terrain mapped 
out by Godard's montage: for example, Gregory Ulmer's extensive work 
on electronic/digital fluency or "electracy"; Critical Art Ensemble's 
assorted activism/artistic interventions and especially their "Utopian 
Plagiarism" in The Electronic Disturbance; Eduardo Navas's history of 
"Remix"; and McKenzie Wark's "Hacker Manifesto," to note but a few.2  
All of these works situate their effort in a dynamic interplay between 
the clearly "contingent" areas of aesthetics and history, and all have 
ethical/political objectives. 

I would like to close by noting that, in my experience, montage can 
play a strategic part when students use it to learn to make compelling 
and coherent arguments by editing together materials that often skip or 
zigzag across disciplinary terrains.  Interdisciplinary translation, 
as we have seen through Liu's investigations, forces reconsideration 
of received knowledge, but the rhetoric of "montage" can helps us to 
envision connections, to discern what is random and what is "contingent" 
(i.e., to see a field of relationships), and finally allows us to make 
ethical choices. Montage may at different times be called the "poetic" 
or a "remix"; it is a powerful method that may lead us out of the 
"cool" as Liu defines it and back to the "human" in its most open-ended 
sense of the term.                                                      

1 Godard's video series, Histoire(s) du Cin�ma (1988-1998), contains 
both the argument and the illustration of cinema as a tool for 
historical method.
2  See also Wark's "A Hacker Manifesto" Version 4.0.
Works Cited
Brown, Alifeleti. "Histoire(s) du cin�ma." Annotations for January 
through March 2008 Melbourne Cin�math�que Screenings. Senses of Cinema. 
2008. Web. 29 Apr. 2010. 
Critical Art Ensemble. The Electronic Disturbance. Autonomedia, 1994. 
2009. Web. 29 Apr. 2010.
Drucker, Johanna. "Games and the Market in Digital Futures." Criticism 
47.2 (Spring 2005): 241-247. Print.
Godard, Jean-Luc, dir. Histoire(s) du Cin�ma, 1988-1998. Film.
Hayles, N. Katherine. "Attacking the Borg of Corporate Knowledge Work: 
The Achievement of Alan Liu's The Laws of the Cool." Criticism 47.2 
(Spring 2005): 235-239. Print.
Liu, Alan. Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and 
the Database. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Print.
---. The Laws of the Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of 
Information. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Print.
---. "Understanding Knowledge Work." Criticism 47.2 (Spring 2005): 
249-260. Web. 29 Apr. 2010.
Navas, Eduardo. Remix Theory. Word Press. 13 May 2010 Web. 29 Apr. 2010. 
Ulmer, Gregory. Electronic Monuments, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 
2005. Print.
Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.
---. "A Hacker Manifesto." Version 4.0. Ed. Joanne Richardson. n.d. 
Web. 29 Apr. 2010. 
Williams, James. "The Signs amongst us: Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) 
du Cinema." Screen 40.3 (September 1, 1999): 306-315. Print.