Journeys through the Offset World: Global Travel Narratives and Environmental Crisis

Abstract

����� ��� In his classic Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson explores the challenge that globalization poses for individuals’ sense of situatedness through contemporary architecture. In a chapter entitled “Spatial Equivalents in the World System,” he focuses on the Frank Gehry House in Santa Monica, a building that consists of a new architectural envelope superimposed on an older structure so as to create spaces not adequately defined as either “inside” or “outside” in the conventional sense. These unsettling transitional spaces, Jameson argues, provide a metaphor for a broader shift in spatial experience as global networks of commerce, media, politics and culture make it increasingly difficult for individuals and communities fully to inhabit a single place. [I]n 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