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The Dreamlife of Junkspace: Utopia,
Globalization, and the Religious Imagination
Steven Jungkeit
Transport, motorways and tramlines Starting and then stopping Taking off and landing The emptiest of feelings
-Let Down, Radiohead
Hope is a Memory that Desires -Balzac
I
The most famous elevator ride in the history of critical theory took place in downtown Los Angeles, when Fredric Jameson was dropped into the lobby of the Bonaventure Hotel. He writes of his inability to form a cognitive map of the journey he has made, the impossibility of gaining a sense of perspective in the hyperspace of the Bonaventure’s vast interior. The elevator descends into a subter- ranean world unto itself, complete with a lake, restaurants, bars, and shops, all of them surrounded by four symmetrical vertical towers that contain the actual hotel rooms. The space exerts a vengeance upon the casual pedestrian, Jameson writes, for it is impossible to find one’s way around, to the point that old-fashioned arrows and signs needed to be installed to help potential customers locate the retail areas.^1 The Bonaventure was built in 1977, and its visual and spatial strategies have become ubiquitous and almost unremarkable, such that Jameson’s sense of disorientation during his visit in the 1980’s now seems a little quaint. Every time a traveler enters an airport or a consumer strolls through a mega-mall, every time va- cationers enter a casino or professionals hustle through the warrens of a convention center, similar effects take place. Dislocation becomes palpable, visceral, and it becomes nearly impossible to map where one’s body actually is with any accuracy. It’s true, one can learn to orient oneself within a specific hotel, mall, or airport, using whatever visual cues have been provided. But spend enough time in those spaces and a bit of vertigo sets in. Like Fredric Jameson, the shoppers, the gam-
1 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 38-45.
blers, the convention-goers, and the business travelers all find themselves wonder- ing from time to time where exactly on the surface of the globe they actually are. The architect Rem Koolhaas offers an answer. The shoppers and travel- ers, convention goers and gamblers, have landed in Junkspace. If space junk is the debris strewn throughout the atmosphere, says Koolhaas, then Junkspace is the debris of our built environments, the debris of modernity itself scattered across the globe. 2 It’s the sort of space that promotes disorientation by any means, whether through mirrors, echoes, ornaments, labyrinthine passageways, light- ing effects or even, perhaps, in the complete absence of all sensation. Perspective disappears. Geography disappears. Walls become screens, helping to channel a ceaseless flow of human traffic. Most importantly, the borders and outermost limits of this interior space are impossible to discern—one room leads to another and then another, spilling into infinity, like the malevolent and very creepy house in Mark Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves. Similarly, the boundaries between inside and outside become blurred through the use of glass and landscape de- sign, not unlike Frank Gehry’s Santa Monica house, where interior and exterior are seamlessly blended. For Koolhaas, Junkspace is literally a no-place, one that cannot be grasped, following no decipherable rules. He writes that it’s beyond measure, beyond any kind of coding, and thus, it cannot be remembered.^3 It’s infinitely malleable, ceaselessly being reconstructed and reconfigured for new uses. “Pardon our appearance” signs become an almost decorative device in Junkspace. And so it takes on a nearly apophatic quality, defying theoretical categorization. Koolhaas’ text itself becomes a kind of Junkspace, a literary performance of the perceived effects of spatial disorientation, without a discernable beginning or end. To read Junkspace is to become a little lost, to sense Junkspace gazing back upon you, the reader. Though Koolhaas refuses specificity, we can try to hone in on an under- standing of Junkspace by asking what it is, and conversely, what it is not. For example, why is the Mall of America Junkspace, while something like Thomas Jef- ferson’s Monticello is not? Why are all the suburban McMansions with “For Sale” signs staked into the front lawns Junkspace, while Heidegger’s stable stone farm- house in “Being, Dwelling, Thinking” escapes that logic? Borrowing from Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” we might say that Junkspaces are spaces of capital, in which place has been stripped of its aura. By aura, Benjamin means the unique and singular conditions that allow for the emergence of a specific piece of art, that which gives it its self-sufficient and self-referential character.^4 With the advent of mechanical reproduction, that spe- cific aura is lost, so that van Gogh’s “Café on a Starry Night,” say, can be detached from the conditions of its origin, copied, and thereafter distributed to every IKEA in the world. So it is with Junkspace—these are spaces that can be mass-produced
2 Rem Koolhaas “Junkspace.” Contained in the volume Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping , edited by Chung, Inaba, Koolhaas, and Leong (Cologne: Taschen Books, 2002), 408. 3 Ibid., 409. 4 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 221ff.
and manufactured ad infinitum , detached from any notion of place, locale, or region, extended across the surface of the globe in a repeating series of nearly iden- tical spatial effects. To paraphrase Karsten Harries, a philosopher who has devoted his energy to theories of space, Junkspace represents the inability in this cultural moment to wrest place out of space.^5 The art historian John Berger argues that now more than ever, it is space that hides consequences from us, implying the need to read our geographies and built environments with a critical, prophetic eye. 6 So what might be hiding be- hind the neon glow of Junkspace? Is it possible to gain a little perspective within its disorienting confines? Where did it come from? What do these gargantuan in- teriors, which seem to possess no limits, no beginnings, and no endings, signify in our era of globalization? What might these corporate and political megastructures tell us about the very real political borders that determine the lives of immigrants and workers as they struggle to compete amidst the pressures of a global economy? What might these hyperspaces say about those of us who find ourselves perversely fascinated by Junkspace, alternately seduced and repelled by its garish invitations, especially those of us who spend our days thinking about religion? Could Junk- space be construed as a religious phenomenon? My argument is that Junkspaces comprise a spatial ideology of disorienta- tion by any means, which carries with it specific political effects. It is an ideol- ogy that promotes the illusion of a borderless and porous existence, where bodies and goods move in unhindered flows, even as actual borders are constructed and policed, from Iraq’s Green Zone to the string of fences along the US/Mexican border, from the wall dividing Israel and Palestine to the all but invisible lines dividing slums from high rent districts in North American urban zones. Junk- space is the visual and spatial effect of global capital run haywire. It’s no accident, after all, that when Homi Bhabha reads Jameson’s description of the Bonaventure in The Location of Culture , he interprets the elevator ride as a postmodern update to shooting the rapids of the Congo River in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , where the elevator deposits its riders into the unmappable and unrepresentable terrain of financial flows.^7 Instead of producing a reaction of horror, however, Junkspace offers alternating senses of pleasure, comfort, and exhaustion—how else to explain the modular seating arrangements that line Junkspaces, rows of couches and chairs for the weary, with nearby assemblies of caffeine and calories?^8 For those like Jameson and Bhabha, Junkspace becomes the architectural and spatial literaliza- tion of the body’s inability to map the mystifying traffic and flow of global capital, its products, and the people needed to produce those products. As such, the sense of dislocation and ennui in Junkspaces like malls and airports is inversely linked to the spatial controls exerted on populations in other parts of the globe or the city
5 Karsten Harries, “Untimely Meditations: On the Need for a Sacred Architecture,” deliv- ered at Yale University during the symposium “Constructing the Ineffable”, October 19-20, 2007. 6 John Berger, The Look of Things (New York: The Viking Press, 1974), 40. As cited in Post- modern Geographies , by Edward Soja (London: Verso, 1989), 22. 7 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge Classics, 1994), 311-312. 8 Koolhaas, 411.
that remain largely invisible in Junkspace, those who are simultaneously hemmed in but dislocated, homeless within a tightly contained sphere of movement. Junk- spaces create the illusion of infinite space and freedom, even as the possibilities of movement within other spheres become tightly circumscribed and finite. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have noted this phenomenon in the rise of “fortress architecture” in cities like Los Angeles, Sao Paulo, and Singa- pore. Even as the gulf between the wealthy and the poor has increased under the regime of neoliberalism, the physical space separating the rich and the poor has contracted. On Hardt and Negri’s telling, private homes, commercial centers, and government buildings “create open and free environments internally by creating a closed and impenetrable exterior.” That leads them to pronounce the end of an outside altogether, which is to say, the end of a free and unregulated public space.^9 So the logic of fences and detention centers and the logic of Junkspaces like hotels and airports are conceptual doubles—even as Junkspace provides this illusion of freedom, that movement is channeled in certain predetermined directions, such that visions of spaces in which humans are suffering the very real effects of uneven geographical development are unseen, unnoticed, or forgotten.
II
If Jameson’s elevator ride into the Junkspace of the Bonaventure updates the colonial experience articulated by Conrad, then Koolhaas’ essay “Junkspace” might be read as the postmodern appendix to another of Walter Benjamin’s works, this one The Arcades Project , the text that will structure the remainder of this essay. Benjamin’s book is a massive and fragmentary set of notes on the development of nineteenth century capitalism, viewed through the lens of the Parisian arcades, the long urban passageways roofed in glass and iron that serve as the prototype to the modern shopping mall, and thus as the prototype to the forms of Junkspace that Koolhaas describes. Here is a fragment that Benjamin includes from an 1856 travel guide published in Germany on the Parisian arcades:
“These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass roofed, marble paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature ”^10
Benjamin is interested in the detritus of material culture, what has been cast off as no longer valuable, and he seeks to read that detritus in a way that will
9 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000),
10 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1999), 31.
scenes are displayed on those windows, creating the impression that the membrane separating the temporal from the eternal is very thin indeed. Cathedral spaces thus work to eliminate certain boundaries, to cultivate a kind of disorientation in the faithful, thus producing a dazzling theological effect in which human beings can’t say where they are any longer, heaven or earth, here or there. When the twelfth century writer Abbot Suger describes the visual effects of what is widely regarded as the first Gothic cathedral, located in St. Denis, a Parisian suburb, he writes that his cathedral exists as a space of transport. Using the language of Neoplatonism, he writes:
“When out of my delight in the house of God, the loveliness of the many colored gems has called me away from external cares, and wor- thy meditation has induced me to reflect…on the diversity of the sa- cred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling in a strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from the inferior to that higher world.”^17
So the cathedral exists as a space of imaginative disorientation, the staging ground for launching one’s mind into a new kind of dwelling, a strange and unan- ticipated region of the universe, which is not quite heaven and not quite earth. As such, the cathedral can be read as a liminal space where the dreams and desires of those fixed by the tight confines of various earthly realities can engage in a kind of utopian flight. Importantly, however, I would argue that this utopian flight is structured by the cruciform pattern in which the cathedral is laid out, so that to enter its space is literally to have oneself immersed in the world of the cross, arguably the detritus of an earlier cultural moment that has been ironically reframed by centuries of theol- ogy and piety. What had been disposed of as refuse is recast as a moment that masks the appearance of the eternal in temporal form. To state it provocatively, to enter the space of the cathedral is to enter a world of camp, where what had once been judged an aesthetic failure is taken up again and given new life by placing it within a different context. Indeed, the cruciform nature of the cathedral’s outline suggests a spatial pedagogy in which human beings themselves are summoned into this camped up world, such that those who had once been cast off as refuse within one form of existence are placed within a new set of social relations, revalued, and thus given a new kind of life. To pick up an earlier refrain, the ironic and camped identities summoned forth by cathedral spaces lead to the performance of certain roles, which itself becomes a moment of profound dislocation. Put impiously, what if cathedrals were a kind of Junkspace from an earlier era, working on one hand to unsettle and unmoor the rigid social and built spaces of religious adherents in a utopian way, even as it reinforced the social control of
17 Abbot Suger, Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and its Art Treasures , Erwin Panofsky and Gerda Panofsky-Soergel, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 65.
various political and ecclesial powers—recall that it is the sight of gems and other forms of wealth that transport the viewer in Abbot Suger’s cathedral? There are important differences here, to be sure, but Benjamin’s tapestry of fragments on the Parisian arcades hints that a certain spatial logic flows from the medieval cathedral to the arcade. Versions of that same logic flow into Rem Koolhaas’ Junkspaces, forms of which are on display throughout North America and Europe, to say noth- ing of the new global cities of Asia.
III
So what is to be done? Can Junkspace be resisted? Subverted? How total- izing is its power? Where might slippages in that power begin to expose them- selves? Benjamin’s Arcades and Koolhaas’ essay provide subtle but important clues in this regard. Both of them remain silent about ethical prescriptions, solutions or strategies of resistance. Benjamin seems dubious that one could wake up from the dream world at all—how precisely would that work? What would waking life be? Wouldn’t that imply a still deeper repression of the unconscious, trying to fully eliminate its effects in favor of cold, rational analysis? So too, at the most literal level, Koolhaas remains aloof about how or if one can escape the effects of Junkspace. Still, both writers maintain an acute ethical edge, which shows itself precisely in the form of their writing. The Arcades Project and the essay “Junk- space” are concentrated literary attempts to attend to the effects of certain spaces on concrete human lives, noticing and observing in minute detail how those effects become explicit, thus exposing their absurdity and frightfulness. As such, both works are attempts to fracture one’s frame of vision within the arcades or within Junkspaces, such that the force and power of those spaces is refracted in different directions. So waking up from the dream world is exactly the wrong metaphor to draw upon. If anything, both thinkers want to shift the direction of the dream itself, to unleash some of the utopian energies at work in Junkspaces, precisely by bringing to the fore their nightmare qualities. For both of these writers, that move seems to be born of the realization that Junkspace and the practices it engenders won’t simply disappear, not anytime soon. Fracturing the frame of spatial vision would open the possibility that Junk- spaces could be wrested back from the powers of capital, put to different, more liberative uses. That’s quite literally what Guy Debord and the Situationists at- tempted to do in Paris in the 1960’s, fracturing the frame of vision in the market- place Les Halles, say, by using that space to throw their bodies in directions and manners that the original commercial purposes of the building couldn’t anticipate or control.^18 It’s that same energy that propels practitioners of Parkour through Junkspaces like abandoned warehouses and factories, resisting the carceral confines of those buildings by gymnastically propelling themselves in directions that could never be programmed or mapped. So too, skate boarding, urban spelunking, and
18 Andy Merrifield, Guy Debord (London: Reaktion Books, 2005).
all-night techno raves in abandoned warehouses, factories, and parking lots disrupt the flow of production and consumption, altering the ways commercial or urban spaces are inhabited. I think these examples might function as parables for the kinds of responses to Junkspace that theologians, clergy, and other religious folk might consider. Liturgical practices and ritual performances contain a profound utopian power, capable of shifting and dislocating our spatial awareness, fracturing the frame of spaces of capital, as it were, such that it becomes possible to take note of real borders and real border crossings by immigrants, workers, refugees, and the like. To cite one example, the Eucharist table is a semi-bounded space that literally marks the edges of material substance and empty air. And yet at best, the table functions as a social space that contains no borders or boundaries, one that draws participants into a single shared space, an imagined utopia in which the all too real borders of nation, class, gender and race might easily melt away. Those social borders are eliminated as participants are joined with one another across space and time in a ritual of bodily nourishment. Within the symbolic space of the Eucha- rist table, those spatial and temporal boundaries are lifted in an act of transgressive consumption. In short, I do not want to underestimate the prophetic possibilities inherent in well-executed and imaginative liturgical moments, especially given the sheer number of people around the globe who undergo those practices on a regular basis. This use of liturgy and ritual would be put to use not to return nostalgically to an earlier worldview, where human beings were placed within a stable and fixed order of the world, but in order to throw into relief the sorts of spatial issues that dominate the present. These insights also highlight the latent religious desires and dream energies at work in Junkspace itself. So many Junkspaces are intensely controlled realms of imagination and longing, realms in which wild flights of spatial fantasy are permitted and encouraged, even as that desire is channeled into predetermined directions. The question becomes how this regimented imagination can be set free, such that productive flights of genuine utopian and theological fancy can begin to occur. I would suggest that theologians and religious thinkers (and here I admit my limitations, for it is Jewish and Christian imagery that I know best) are well situated to stimulate that awareness and action, given the profound spatial imagery at work in the biblical texts: I think here of Eden, Babel, the consequent scattering of the nations, the Exodus, Sinai, Exile, Babylon, Temple, Jerusalem, a cattle shed, Golgotha, the Heavenly City, and on and on. These themes have been largely occluded and rendered invisible, not only because of the temporal dimension of prophetic utterances, but also because of the temporal obsessions of Western philosophy and theology as a whole. If John Berger is right, that in our time it is space that hides consequences from us, perhaps it is time for theologians, clergy, and other religious leaders to announce not “A time is to come” but “A space is to come.” The sheer power of degenerate utopias like the Bonaventure Hotel or any other form of Junkspace makes clear the overwhelming desire for alternatives to the fraught and over-policed global spaces we so often encounter in our built environments. In short, there are tremendous resources within the traditions and
texts of theology to begin reimagining and reconfiguring the built environments of early 21st^ century life. But we’ll need a new performative identity to accompany this task, a prophetic counterpart to the pilgrim, the flaneur , the saint, the gambler and the prostitute. The one I would suggest comes from David Harvey’s book Spaces of Hope : the insurgent architect.^19 This is a role that has less to do with degrees from accredited schools of architecture than an ability to read and critique the spatial formations of a globalized economy. On Harvey’s telling, the insurgent architect is a realistic dreamer, always firmly embedded within the concrete conditions of existence, while at the same time having a foot planted in an imagined alternative. Moreover, this person recognizes him or herself as having an array of capacities that can be placed in relationship with other individuals and skill sets in dif- ferent operational theaters, all of which can form a “long frontier” of political and cultural insurgency. 20 So while the insurgent architect might very well be a builder or planner, along the lines of Walter Gropius or Bruno Taut, he or she might equally be found among novelists and journalists, in city halls, among labor organizers, in artists’ collectives, in university classrooms, and in the boardrooms of various corporations and organizations (though that stretches the imagination!). Most importantly, a privileged site for the work of insurgent architects would be religious institutions such as churches, synagogues and mosques, which play such a fundamental role in shaping the most basic dreams and desires within human life. There are few positions of public leadership that are better equipped than that of the pastor, priest, rabbi, or imam for both a radical and prophetic realism about prevailing social conditions on one hand, and the deployment of alternative and even utopian desires for a more equitable and just future on the other hand. And what of that older character, the theologian, laboring among dusty volumes in university and seminary libraries? The theologian is the insurgent architect par excellence , for theology is by its very nature involved in the shaping of human desires and passions, for God, for the future, for the beloved commu- nity, for reconciliation, for justice, for hospitality. For all the rational calculations involved in the production of theological writing, texts like City of God and the Summa Theologica , the Church Dogmatics and the Foundations of Christian Faith , A Black Theology of Liberation and Sisters in the Wilderness can be understood as dream works, literary productions that both emerge from and alter the human un- conscious. At their best, such works have the capacity to reach beneath the surface of conscious knowing and volition, operating at a level of the mind where so many of the dreams, desires, and fears of human life are lodged. The theologian at work is involved in the creation of a public imagination, one that is necessarily situated along the long frontier of political insurgency that Harvey describes. Theology ex- ists as one of the many theaters of collective struggle in our globalized world. The theologian, then, is one among many insurgent architects, working in tandem with other like-minded architects to imagine alternative global spaces and an alternative
19 David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 233-255. 20 Ibid., 234.
