In spite of the aggressive commodification process launched by contemporary capitalism, we continue to distinguish cool activities from uncool activities and this is immediately linked to the aesthetics and ethics of alienation. What is cool? Cool resists and refuses linear structures. A rapper is cool, a CEO is not, unless he is a reasonable risk taker and refrains from pursuing success in a linear fashion. A president is uncool when he clings to absolute power, but he becomes cooler as soon as he voluntarily concedes power to opposing parties in order to maintain democratic values. This does not mean that the cool person needs to be an idealist; on the contrary, very few of the coolest rappers are idealists. Idealism can be extremely uncool according to the examples of both self-righteous Darwinists and creationists. When it comes to coolness, the notion of play is more important than anything else because in games, power gets fractured and becomes less serious which enables the player to develop a certain detached style while playing. And this style matters more than the pursuit of money, power, and ideals.

Straightforward search for power is not cool; constant loss of power is not cool either. Winning is cool, but being ready to do anything in order to win is not. Both moralists and totally immoral people are uncool while people who maintain moral standards in straightforwardly immoral environments are most likely to be cool. In a word: coolness is a balance and this is well known at least since the time of cool jazz. The cool person stays close to real life without getting absorbed by it. Coolness implies the power of abstraction without becoming overly abstract. Going with the masses is uncool as well as being overly eccentric. It is not cool to take everything nor is it cool to give everything away; it seems rather that the master of cool handles the ‘give and take’ of life as if it were a game. There is a balance that is created by style alone and not by straightforward, linear rules and laws.

Losing and still keeping a straight face is probably the coolest behavior one can imagine. Coolness is control, but the dictator who controls everything is not cool because he does not face a paradox. Black cool behavior in and before the 1960s, on the other hand, was immediately linked to African American’s inability to control political and cultural oppression. These blacks were faced with the paradox of control, which made their behavior cool. Instead of reveling in either total control or total detachment, the aesthetics and ethics of cool fractures and alienates in order to bring forward unusual constellations. In a word: the cool person lives in a constant state of alienation.

Extract from my book The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity (Forthcoming)

My present Chinese washing machine is a dancing washing machine. Vigorously moving and jumping through the whole room, it keeps me busy for hours. If I don’t hold it tight, it will turn around itself and end the program with the door tightly pressed against the wall. Did you ever try to move a fully grown washing machine back into its right position? What’s worse is that the problem cannot be fixed. The floor is uneven and nobody has managed to make it even. The electrician took the whole machine apart and put it together again. It kept dancing as usual. More compromising people put cardboard paper or sticks under the machine. The only result is that it now jumps into another direction. Tiled walls and the ceramic sink need to be protected with blankets because this machine, left to its own will, will destroy simply everything. Since two months I am working part time as a bullfighter. Holding the machine, pushing it with all my strength against the wall and fighting back whenever it attacks me – it’s a hard job to do this during the 90 minutes washing cycle.