Everything Everywhere All at Once All of the Time

Readers of Fredric Jameson’s 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” will recall that he devotes a number of vivid pages to the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles. The hotel, Jameson observes, has no clear entrances; it has elevators that shoot up through the ceiling, a reflective facade so you can’t see in, a color-coded lobby where you can’t get your bearings, and shops on different levels that are impossible to find your way back to a second time. The visitor will feel bewildered. The name of this bewilderment, Jameson says, is postmodernism. Postmodernism “has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.” The hotel is a symbol or analogue of “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves as individual subjects.”