A genealogy of cool
A friend from college was here yesterday for another friend’s party. He studies linguistics at the University of Illinois and we had a good conversation on his Ph.D. dissertation, a study of Parisian residents’ perceptions of other Parisian residents’ ways of speaking. I eventually steered things towards one of my side-interests: what it has meant to be cool, historically, and the origins of what is cool in contemporary America. I think a good idea for a book—an academic text with an eye towards popular readership—would be a genealogy of cool, spatially, racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically.
I’ve always wanted to know a) what the concept of cool was (if any) in the 16th century Polish hinterland (for instance) and b) who influenced what was cool there. I’m pretty sure no concept of cool can exist without massive amounts of leisure time and some sort of print media, so it must be relatively new (note that I’m not referring to what is known as “popularity”).
I’d like to find evidence of when occurred the shift during which people in the United States and Europe stopped obsessed over the things their economic-elite were buying and doing and saying and began to care more about what their immigrants and impoverished were buying and doing and saying. Were the former Irish and German residents of our inner-cities as “cool” as the current residents of our urban cores? Was it like that in 16th Century Poland?
Creative Commons Licensed photo credit: Pesterussa
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