Popular Culture Review Vol. 4, No. 1, January 1993 | Page 37

Avatars of the Third Other

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immediate consumption of a humanity made natural
by that glance which transforms it into space (241242).
In short, for the architect Venturi on American freeways and city
streets, and for the writer Barthes in Paris, the meaning of what
nature is has changed. On freeways, one either enters twodimensional psychical space, the corrununicative space of the sign, or
one dies. In the process the Newtonian logic of spatial depths, which
insists that the shortest distance from Point A, the freeway, to Point
B, one's destination, is a straight line, disappears. Signs are friendly;
they represent a kind of salvation, or at least a means of survival.
This new kind of altered space Fredric Jameson calls "postmodern
hyperspace," an entity which "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" (659). In an
illumitutting discussion of Jameson and other postmodern theorists, N.
Katherine Hayles makes a connection between "hyperspace" and the
"cyberspace" of novelist William Gibson, which "images a space that
touches the conventional world at every point but that has
nevertheless undergone a radical transformation" (276). Both Hayles
and Jameson insist that this transformation represents a shift from
"Other" oriented spaces to "inner" oriented spaces. In Jameson’s view,
for instance, the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles "aspires to being a
total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature dty . . . it does not
wish to be part of the city, but rather its equivalent and its
replacement or substitute" (qtd. in Hayles 277).
The postmodern tendency to "cleanse the depths" of threedimensional space is significant because it represents, for the first
time in human history, preference for man-made artificial spaces
over the spaces of nature. It also represents another example of the
American shift in cultural values from thinking of technological
phenomena as extensions of nature (i.e., Marshall McLuhan's
heuristic for a technological society) to thinking of them as
substitutes for nature.
Most of all, the merging postmodern biases for sign over space
represents a shocking contrast to nineteenth century American
attitudes toward space. In Call Me Ishmael, a study of Herman