Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 136

machine-made steam engine as the principle motive machine'. 4 The
second technological revolution was from the

s to the Second
World War, and involved the 'generalized application of electric and
combustion engines in all branches of industry'. 5 The last was bound
up with a 'technological' revolution, which, beginning in America
in

1890

and in other imperialist countries after the War, is charac-
terized by 'generalized control of machines by means of electronic
apparatuses (as well as by the general introduction of nuclear
energy)'. 6 Adopting Mandel's scheme, and his characterization of the
third period of capitalism as 'late', Jameson wrote an essay entitled
'Postmodernism and Consumer Society', which was later expanded
to become the opening chapter of his topic, Postmodernism: or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism . 7 In it he argues that postmod-
ernism was an acknowledgment of the triumph of capitalism, in
which the last enclaves of resistance or autonomy succumbed to
commodification, and that these particular conditions have pro-
duced a number of cultural symptoms, including a concentration on
the autonomy and freeplay of the signifier, the use of the 'randomly
heterogenous and fragmentary and the aleatory', the 'schizophrenic'
experience of language and the world, and the flattening of space. 8
It is possible to observe these cultural symptoms across a number
of fields and to connect their appearance explicitly with the develop-
ment of digital technology, in music, design, art and literature, as
well as in philosophy. The latter included Poststructuralism, the
name in Anglophone countries for the intellectual movement which
developed out of structuralist thinking in France, and for which
the unrest of May

1940

was catalytic. At the same time the industrial
and social upheavals in Italy in the late '

1968

s brought the
development of new forms of left theory and praxis, in particular
that of 'Autonomous Marxism', in which the tenets of communism
were reformulated for the information society. These symptoms
also encompass developments within feminist thought that emerged
out of the shortcomings of the wave of Feminism that emerged in

60 s and ' 70