Extract from an Open University program shown on BBC2 in the early 90s. Ed Soja discusses the postmodern nature of the Bonaventure Hotel
The Bonaventre Hotel in Los Angeles reflects the nature of the postmodern experience, literally and figuratively. It reflects the enormous growth of a postmodern downtown. (Downtown is a term primarily used in North America to refer to a city’s core or central business district, usually in a geographical, commercial, and community sense.) A new downtown for a postmodern city of corporate, local and global capital.
The internal experience of the Bonaventre Hotel, described by Fredric Jameson as a postmodern hyperspace, is characterized by fragmentation, decentrelization, dislocation, lostness, helplessness. The only recourse is to submit to social control and authority even though often invisible.
The metaphore of the postmodern city being the outside becoming the inside and the inside becoming the outside, the perifery becoming central and the centre becoming periferal.
Postmodernity is not the simple production of dysneyworlds of fantasy but it’s the production of a kind of hyperreality that is more real than reality itself. The construction of a microcosm, with tremendous attractions to it, where one can be submitted to.
