Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 139

was instrumental in introducing North American literary critics to
the ideas of Deconstruction. A number of critics, most prominently
Paul de Man and J. Hillis Miller of the Yale School, subsequently
took up Derrida's methods as a new paradigm in literary studies.
It was via Ihab Hassan that postmodernism first directly encoun-
tered poststructuralism. Hassan had organized a conference in
Milwaukee on the postmodern in the performing arts, at which one
of the speakers was the poststructuralist French philosopher Jean-
François Lyotard. A one-time member of the militant socialist
organization Socialisme ou Barbarie , Lyotard was probably most
famous at the time of the conference for his topic Economie

libidinale , 15 in which he proposed a kind of erotics of capitalism, as
a way of critiquing the dogmatism of Marx. From his encounter
with Hassan he took the term Postmodern, which he used to define
what he saw as the effects of the arrival of a society in which
information had become the main economic force of production.
This found expression in his short topic La condition postmoderne . 16
In this work, which originated as a report commissioned by the
university council of the government of Quebec on the state of
contemporary knowledge, Lyotard proposed that under the condi-
tions of a computerized information society the great meta-
narratives by which modernity had been legitimized were no longer
sustainable. They could, instead, only be considered as 'language
games', a concept Lyotard borrowed from Wittgenstein, operating
according to different sets of agreed rules. 17 Science in particular had
lost its claim to be a meta-narrative owing to the emphasis on
performativity and efficiency demanded by its increasing technifica-
tion. 18 Lyotard later repudiated La condition postmoderne , claiming
he knew little about the subject in question and had not read many
of the topics referred to in the text. To a large extent, the topic
is really a covert attack on the meta-narrative to which Lyotard
was most implacably hostile, that of Marxism. Nevertheless he
later evinced an interest in the ideas he rehearsed in the essay. He

1974