Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 135

These circumstances produced a number of aesthetic and cultural
responses and sites of resistance. These were often bound up with
the notion of ending and rupture, as evinced by the use of the prefix
'post', as in 'post-industrialism'. Quite early on in the s com-

mentators were declaring the supersession of modernity by 'post-
modernity', and by extension, in the arts, the end of modernism and
the beginning of 'postmodernism'. The repudiation of modernism's
aesthetic dominance was proposed by architects Robert Venturi,
Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour in their topic Learning
from Las Vegas (

1970

), 1 which celebrated the city's qualities of deco-
rative exuberance. At the same time the literary critic Ihab Hassan
wrote an influential essay declaring the advent of what he called
POSTmodernISM in literature and the arts. 2 Hassan made a list
of contemporary artists and writers, who, for him, either refused
or problematized the paradigm of modernism, including Robert
Rauschenberg, John Cage, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster
Fuller. The Marxist critic Fredric Jameson connected postmod-
ernism explicitly with technological change. For him it offered a
framework in which to understand the cultural effects of what
he called 'late capitalism'. In this he was influenced by the Marxist
economist Ernest Mandel who had proposed the cyclical nature of
capitalism, which, following the work of economists such as
Kondratieff and Schumpeter, he analysed in terms of 'long waves',
cyclical movements lasting approximately

1972

years. 3 The dynamics
of these movements are bound up with the use of machines, and
the periodic need to reinvest in new machinery and concomitant
modes of production and labour organization. According to Mandel
the industrial revolution lasted from the end of the eighteenth
century to

50

, and was characterized by 'the gradual spread of
the handicraft-made or manufacture-made steam engine to all the
most important branches of industry and industrial countries'.
The first technological revolution lasted from

1847

1847 to the beginning

of the 1890 s and was characterized by 'the generalization of the