ABSTRACT
The gambit of parlaying Los Angeles into the prototypical as well as the archetypical postmodern city, via an exclusive focus on the Bonaventure and its supposedly multifarious powers of symbology, suffers from much the same problem as Davis;s construal of LA as the carceral city. In its effort to hit the mark, the postmodern parlay conceptually reduces Los Angeles to only one of its aspects, albeit an aspect which is supposed to be scintillating with reflections from a multitude of the city;s various other aspects. Yet postmodern theorists slip into a theoretical abyss through this postulation, for what they are proposing itself is a metanarrative entraining grand theoretical constructs in its wake. A narrative such as Soja;s, offering up Los Angeles 1989 as the postmodern bracket to modernism à la Paris 1789, is nothing if not a grand master narrative meant to explicate the last two centuries of the Western tradition.
