Place in contemporary America has dissolved into overlapping abstract spatial networks

Evidence

We have refused Macrae-Gibson’s account of the symbolic way in which the house anchors itself in its space, which is Santa Monica and the relationship to the sea and the city behind it, the ranges of hills, and the other urban prolongations along the coast. Our theoretical refusal was based on the conviction that in that simpler phenomenological or regional sense, place in the United States today no longer exists, or, more precisely, it exists at a much feebler level, surcharged by all kinds of other more powerful but also more abstract spaces. By these last I mean not only Los Angeles itself, as some new hyperurban configuration, but also the increasingly abstract (and communicational) networks of American reality beyond, whose extreme form is the power network of so-called multinational capitalism itself. As individuals, we are in and out of all these overlapping dimensions all the time, something which makes an older kind of existential positioning of ourselves in Being — the human body in the natural landscape, the individual in the older village or organic community, even the citizen in the nation-state — exceedingly problematical. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 323

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the period-specific dissolution of place — the spatial precondition for the ‘cognitive mapping’ problem.
• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s goal of mapping their own position in the world system; connects to Jameson’s own ‘cognitive mapping’ concept throughout the book. — connects to: Space homogenization clashes with place-based identity, fueling political antagonism — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1628; Bioregional spiritual geography forgets the transnational harms America causes — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 730