AtDDtA(15): A Space No Longer Entirely Readable

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Dave Monroe points us to:

Frederic Jameson:
.. this latest mutation in space-postmodern hyperspace 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. And
I have already suggested that this alarming disjunction point between
the body and its built environment--which is to the initial
bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of space craft
are to those of the automobile--can itself stand as the symbol and
analogue of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our
minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and
decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught
as individual subjects. (pp. 38-9)

http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~hartleyg/authors/jameson/postmod6.html

         Anxious voices out of megaphones hitherto unnoticed began 
         calling the crew to general quarters. Hydraulics engaged, as 
         entire decks began ponderously to slide, fold and rotate, and 
         passengers found themselves, often lethally, in the way of 
         this booming and shrieking steel metamorphosis. Bells, 
         gongs, bos'n's pipes, steam sirens added to the cacophony. 
         Stewards threw off their white livery to reveal dark blue 
         Austro-Hungarian naval uniforms, and started shouting orders 
         at the civilians who moments ago had been ordering them 
         around, and who now mostly were wandering the 
         passageways disoriented and increasingly fearful . . . .
         518

Location for the Stupendica/S.M.S Emperor Maximilian 
[transmutation or bi-location? You Decide!!!] 
becomes unmappable---the Stupendica sails
on, without Kit, who now is onboard the Maximilian:

              Dally allowed herself to be swept gently ashore in the bustle 
         of debarcation. It felt like she was standing still. She had never 
         even heard of this place. Never mind Kit for the moment---where 
         was she? 524

Frederic Jameson:
I am proposing the motion that we are here in the presence of
something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is
that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space,
have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in
the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the
subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this
new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual
habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space
of high modernism.

         Oedipa sat alone and gloomy. She'd decided to come tonight to 
         the Scope not only because of the encounter with Stanley Koteks, 
         but because of other revelations; because it seemed that a 
         pattern was beginning to emerge, having to do with the mail and 
         how it was delivered. COL49, 71