Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 140

returned to some of its themes in his later topics, The Differend 19
and The Inhuman , 20 and in

organized an exhibition at the
Pompidou Centre in Paris, 'Les immatériaux', which looked at
questions of communication, technology and the dematerialization
of the sign. In The Inhuman Lyotard extended his analysis of the
effects of information technology in a curious direction. In what can
only be seen as a meta-narrative, Lyotard proposed that the domi-
nant information culture was part of a cosmic process by which the
universal tendency towards entropy is countermanded by ongoing
complexification.
Lyotard's pessimistic analysis of technology can be compared
to that of Jean Baudrillard, the French theorist who more than
anybody else has come to define a position of postmodern hope-
lessness, and with it a kind of perverse euphoria. Baudrillard was
a pupil of both the Marxist Henri Lefebvre and Pierre Bourdieu,
neither of whom were considered as mainstream structuralists.
Lefebvre in particular repudiated Structuralism. Despite this, and
despite his own Marxist beliefs, Baudrillard's early work resembled
that of Barthes, in, for example, his use of semiology to analyse
the consumer society in his

1985

work Le système des objets . 21 As
his career has progressed Baudrillard has moved away from both
Structuralism and Marxism, towards a position owing more to
Marshall McLuhan, which proclaims the total dominance of the
sign, and of code as the primary organising principle of the social
entity. This and his other key concepts, such as hyper-reality,
simulation and simulacra, presented a seductive if despairing vision
of a world of unlimited semiosis in which meaning is destroyed by
the act of communication, the 'social' no longer exists, and from
which there is no possibility of liberation or escape. Such ideas were,
and indeed remain, controversial, and have been much criticized
from all corners. The height of Baudrillard's capacity to incite was
probably round the period of the Gulf War, about which he wrote
in a series of articles for the newspaper Libération . Before the

1968