Junkspace_ Theology After Monumentality - Neal E. Magee

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DOI: 10.1177/095394680401700303

2004 17: 27Studies in Christian Ethics Neal E. Magee

Junkspace: Theology after Monumentality

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JUNKSPACE: THEOLOGY AFTER MONUMENTALITY 27

JUNKSPACE: THEOLOGY AFTERMONUMENTALITY

Neal E. Magee

Abstract

This article addresses Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s notion of ‘Junkspace’— innitely recongurable, physical space that is always-already intransition, perpetually in a state of becoming — and its implications fortheology. Junkspace is the logical result of a culture in which ‘shopping’

is the last public activity. All public institutions — churches, museums,the internet, hospitals, universities and airports — increasingly are drawninto this framework. While this schema represents the suburban desirefor control and predictability, it consequently attens intellectual terrain.In other words, we have come to the point of shopping for politics,knowledge, ideology and theology. Rather than critique this hypothesis,the article explores its possibilities for new understandings of the secular,our desire for ‘the new’, and our need to intentionally forget or disavow.I argue that Junkspace may serve as a promising new metaphorical lensfor theological reection, which is now rendered provisional, incomplete,and migratory.

Since at least Augustine’s City of God , there has been a quiet afnity between thinking theologically and thinking spatially. And certainlyone of the most fundamental units of spatiality of civilisation itself isthe city — this constantly changing, innitely recongurable thing.Cities are one of the primary ways in which we leave our mark on thisplanet. Consequently, theology has — in moments such as Augustine’sclassic text — wanted to contribute to a description of the utopiancity. But I would contend that it is an interesting thing to ask whether

the interplay between theology and the city is uid and perhaps evenreversible. Can each inform the other? In other words, I am wonderingif the contemporary city can tell us something about the conditions ofor possibilities for theological thinking.

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28 STUDIES IN CHRISTIAN ETHICS

What I want to present in this article is a reading — a theologicalreading — of Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’s notion of ‘Junkspace’.1 Itmay help to begin by noting that Koolhaas is an active, prize-winningarchitect, teaching at Harvard’s School of Design, who is fascinatedwith very large and public spaces — spaces we inhabit, move through

and may only rarely leave. Spaces such as Manhattan or the Pearl RiverDelta in China interest Koolhaas because they take on such scale andimportance, but they were never designed as a whole: they are self-organizing systems with no Master design, and no Master Designer.This interest has led Koolhaas to inquire as to the emerging principlesof such a system — what is the driving idea of a modern city? Whatdoes it signify? What draws it together and gives it meaning? Whereare its actual borders: where does it stop and where does it begin? Onwhat is the city centered physically and metaphorically? Clearly, to

begin to ask such questions is to leave the realm of architecture or evenurban studies and to enter some larger cultural analysis.

Koolhaas’s conclusion is that the foremost cultural experience ofthe city for the new millennium is shopping: it is ‘the last remainingform of public activity’.2 Shopping is the organizing principle forsocial relations; it is the algebra that determines which buildings dotthe map, and where. In its broadest sense then, shopping is the mostcommanding political force, the most venerable stratagem of globalpolicy at our disposal. And, while a global scope does interest Koolhaas,he wishes to keep his ideas tethered to the space of the city itself, to

actual cities that actually exist, to the relationship between shoppingand the emergence of what he calls Junkspace. In his essay of that title,which can only be described as dazzling, Koolhaas seeks to trace thearc of modernisation from the perspective of its creative activity, theresidue of that activity, and the folds within this trajectory.

1 Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, October 100 (Spring 2002), pp. 175–90. His articleappeared simultaneously in a larger volume compiled by Harvard University’s Projecton the City. See ‘Junkspace’, in Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, etal. (eds), Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Köln: Taschen, 2002), pp. 408–21.

This 800-page book in part traces the development of particular technologies and theirrelation to shopping: air conditioning, the escalator, the UPC barcode, and so on. Inthat volume, I would strongly recommend the more lucid commentary by Sze TsungLeong entitled ‘. . . And Then There Was Shopping’, pp. 128–55. An appreciation of Koolhaas’s unique position within the world of architectureis here important to note: his Rotterdam/New York-based firm, the Office forMetropolitan Architecture (OMA) has designed several celebrated projects worldwide,including Euralille (the rst stop outside the Channel tunnel in France), the two LasVegas incarnations of the Guggenheim, and the recent Prada store in Manhattan andSeattle Public Library. Winner of the 2000 Pritzker Prize in architecture, Koolhaaswas enlisted by Harvard University in the early nineties, where he and his graduatestudents comprise the Project on the City.2 Rem Koolhaas, ‘Shopping’, in Stefano Boeri, et al. (eds), Mutations: Harvard Project onthe City (Bordeaux: Actar, 2001), pp. 124–83. This collaborative chapter was publishedone year before ‘Junkspace’ and the Guide to Shopping , serving as both the latter’sprologue and roadmap.




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And it is itself a difcult task to convey with precision ‘what’ Junkspace is, but we can begin with the drywall-covered spaces between stores, ofces — painted neatly with apologetic signs of‘Pardon Our Mess . . .’ or ‘Coming Soon . . .’ — indicative of theimminent transformation taking place behind that wall (a wall that

Koolhaas also points out is the demarcation between leisure andlabour, cold and hot, comfortable and sweaty, muscular and abby).But stepping back, Koolhaas wishes to remind us that all space is nowup for grabs, waiting on line for its turn to be rearranged, reassembled,renovated, recongured, revised, redesigned, returned. All publicspace is now transitional and supercial, every territory — real orvirtual — is now provisional. I would point out that the space we sitin at this very moment is such a space — innitely recongurable,perhaps playing host to plastic surgeons next weekend — but thevery interesting thing is that this place could really be any place:Honolulu, Cleveland, Hong Kong, Brussels. The task of architecture,for Koolhaas, is no longer the design and production of grand, unique,and permanent structures with a meaning and a legacy. Instead, thenew common denominator for designed space, even public space,is shopping. So architecture and urban planning have become, forquite some time now, about the production of various envelopes andcontainers in which these transactions can take place. Buildings have

become less and less important. So ‘while whole millennia workedin favor of permanence, axialities, relationships, and proportion, the

program of Junkspace is escalation. Instead of development, it offersentropy’.3 He continues:

If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-spaceis the residue [hu]mankind leaves on the planet. The built product ofmodernisation is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace iswhat remains after modernisation has run its course or, more precisely,what coagulates while modernisation is in process.4

Perhaps the most important feature of Junkspace is that it has nointerest in superstructure: it is comprised of transient, impermanent

subsystems; interchangeable LEGOS™ given scale only by theirrelation to the grand system of shopping. ‘ Junkspace is a web withouta spider.’5

So in recent years we have witnessed a mutation of museums,airports, town centers, schools, hospitals, churches, and evennews broadcasts, education, computer networks: all have become‘increasingly shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping’.6 The mall is everywhere. This marketplace has come to not only claim the

3 Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, p. 178.4 Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, p. 175.5 Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, p. 179.6 Koolhaas, ‘Shopping’, p. 125.




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space of physical and virtual transactions, but moreover dominatesmetaphorical space. In this way, shopping has become not just another choice among public activities, but the milieu in which Western culturenurtures and regenerates itself. Shopping is the means by which oursociety continually decides what it is still lacking in order to be happy.

So not only do we shop for things that we need — food, clothing, fuel— but we shop in a certain hope for the future, we shop for an identityof our choosing, we shop around for politics, religion, ideology.Shopping, as Heidegger might say, is a fundamental part of how we‘world our world’, and come to throw ourselves into the future. Andthis, I would contend, should have signicance for theologians andscholars of religion.

We shop in order to know what we desire. And our shopping list revealssome interesting desires: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat,

beer without alcohol, hotels without location, war without casualties,religion without religion, reality television.7 And Junkspace, as one ofthe features in the landscape of shopping, provides us a reality withouta substance.

Koolhaas’s exegesis of Junkspace continually dances between thearchitectural and the cultural, between actual physical space and theweb of ideas and values we inhabit daily. His essay demands that thetime for thinking of culture in terms of European, American, Soviet-

bloc or Pacic-rim is over — they are now simply alternative styles.‘“Identity” is the new junk food for the dispossessed’, Koolhaas writes;

it is a byproduct of globalisation.8

So, in a rather Nietzschean way, heunderscores once again that in our world of Junkspace and shopping,the surface is the depth, that history is really only a marketingstrategy.

* * *

Admittedly, there are many ways to critique this perspective, thisdominance of the economic, but I want to suspend that for now,

because Koolhaas sees his role as a provocateur: obviously to say that

everything is subordinate to shopping is both absurd and compelling.9

7 I owe this insight to Slavoj Žižek from his recent Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 10–11.8 Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, p. 175.9 The rst such critique, were I to offer only one, is contained within Koolhaas’s essayitself, where he writes ‘Not exactly “anything goes”; in fact, the secret of Junkspaceis that it is both promiscuous and repressive: as the formless proliferates, the formalwithers, and with it all rules, regulations, recourse’ (‘Junkspace’, p. 183). But it isinteresting to note that Fredric Jameson, clearly one of the most capable of developing

a critical assessment of Junkspace, has likewise suspended such a critique in order toprobe for a kernel of promise. See Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review 21 (May/June2003), pp. 65–79. It seems Jameson has an afnity for the theoretical work of Koolhaas:see Jameson’s Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).




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He writes to provoke us to think and, just as Frank Lloyd Wrightdidn’t worry about whether the roofs of his houses leaked, Koolhaasdoesn’t worry about whether his argument ‘leaks’ a bit. So I want tosuspend those questions for now. Nonetheless, I want to use Junkspaceas a description of the present, of the morphology of the city today, in

order to ask the following questions: What do shopping and Junkspace bring to the task of theological reection? Or how do they pressureits operations? What might Koolhaas offer to a national meeting ofreligious scholars? Is theology or religious reection to believe that itstands from no place in its task? Or maybe the more general questionis: from what perspective does one or should one reect theologically?I want to suggest three broad implications.

First, one effect of Junkspace is the attening of intellectual spaceand thus the de-centering of theological thinking. In one sense this isthe suburban ideology we nd in having Gaps or Starbucks or Wal-Marts across our landscape: they offer us predictability and control.10 In turn, the metaphysics of shopping, which heralds a so-called ‘freeexchange of ideas’ renders theology a form of intellectual property to

be bought and sold, cut into a variety of shapes and sizes for the broadtastes of the shopping public. So we end up with a variety of avourswithin the Christian tradition alone: Catholic, Reformed, Systematic,Black, Liberation, Feminist, Ecological, Radical Orthodox, Postmodern,and so on. Another effect of this attening is that theology has in manyways, like Junkspace, become both overdetermined and indeterminate.11

That is, it says far too much and yet nothing really at all. ‘Because Junkspace cannot be grasped, it cannot be remembered’, writesKoolhaas. ‘[I]t is amboyant yet unmemorable, like a screen saver . . .

Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection, only interest’.12Without belittling the contributions of all the variant forms

of theology, we still have very few ways of understanding theirinter-relations, and feel compelled to somehow adjudicate theirdifferences. Does not the logic of consumption undergird our verydiscipline, where we choose as our tastes demand? You consumeor you don’t as you like. The logic of consumption has been our

only recourse when we have wanted to consider them together asa whole.Koolhaas’s presentation of Junkspace actually predicts our predica-

ment: it predicts that we would have a proliferation of theologies, acosmopolitan theological mélange which somehow coexist like city-dwellers: the fruit stand and the deli, the drugstore and the tattoo

10 Koolhaas and his students note that ‘the city has twice been humiliated by thesuburbs: once upon the loss of its contingency to the suburbs and again upon that

constituency’s return. These prodigal citizens brought back with them their mutatedsuburban values of predictability and control’. See ‘Shopping’, p. 152.11 Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, p. 179.12 Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, p. 177.




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enclosures in order to prop itself up: divisions and separations betweensacred and profane, religious and secular. In other words, theologyhas been more of a gated community than it has a cosmopolitanurban space. One of Augustine’s greatest legacies is the obligationto openness, a radical openness, in which the unsettling presence of

the unanswered is always present. To ask ‘What do I love when I lovemy God?’ (Confessions X) is to ask this fully aware that I can neveradequately answer such a question — never once and for all. AndKoolhaas here reminds us of the true vertigo such openness bringswith it.

Third, Junkspace reorients our understanding of the secular. Thereis a joke Slavoj Žižek tells where a priest asks a non-believer: ‘Do you

believe in God?’ ‘No!’ ‘Stop dodging the issue! Give me a straightanswer!’ In a way, the underlying logic is correct: the only acceptablestraight answer for the priest is ‘Yes!’, so anything else, including astraight ‘No!’ counts as evasion. This essential logic is that of the forcedchoice. Any confession of atheism appears as an attempt to skirt theissue.16 But is it not the same with the binary choice of theological orsecular? The problem with the way the choice is given to us is not‘secular’, but rather the theological itself : as if somehow the two arepurely separate, as if there were a neat and clean distinction betweenthe two. We deny the inltration of each in the other.

But we’ve known this all along. While theology has so oftendenounced ‘secularisation’ as the other against which it gains its

identity, the truth is what Jacques Derrida, Jack Caputo and Jean-LucNancy have been writing about lately — that secularisation ‘alwayspresupposes a theology to secularise, so that, for better or for worse,secularism is the continuation of theology by another means’. Caputocontinues, ‘there is always what Derrida calls “some unavowedtheologeme” [quelque theologéme inavoué ] . . . a certain bit of undigestedtheology lodged in the throat of even the most secular societies’.17

What if one of the features of this theological remnant is the vitalityand spontaneity of form which the ‘secular’ exhibits? What if thispolyvalent explosion were the logical result of the Protestant dictum

16 Žižek, Desert of the Real , pp. 3, 94 n. 42. Žižek’s rst telling of the joke here is of a girlasking her boyfriend about marriage, the second between the priest and layman, buthis larger point is not about the false distinction of theological and secular, but rather

between the political iterations of ‘democracy’ and ‘fundamentalism’. The unexaminedaspects of these two concepts, he argues, are how they not only support one another,

but in fact reproduce each other’s structure. See pp. 93–94.17 John D. Caputo, ‘Without Sovereignty, Without Being’, Journal for Cultural andReligious Theory 4.3 (August 2003), pp. 9–26 (12). Caputo is citing Derrida, Voyous(Paris: Galilée, 2003), p. 155. Derrida here (and his theme is followed up on by Caputo)makes the case that one such ‘unavowed theologeme’ is the notion of sovereignty itself,

without which the political and ethical — globally and intersubjectively — would bemarked by a wholly different openness and interdependence. Finally, see Jean-LucNancy’s ‘The Deconstruction of Christianity’, in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds),Religion and Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 12–130.




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Reformata sed Semper Reformanda (‘once reformed always reforming’)?Always in search of the new, always transcending itself? To thinkthis would be to begin to open up a new way of thinking aboutsecularisation in relation to theology — not as a rupture or break withtheology, but somehow its reconguration, to celebrate the vitality and

a certain capacity we have to always re-think.The disavowal par excellence in a culture of shopping is the disavowalof choice. Or, more accurately, it is the disavowal of the real choicesavailable by accepting those presented to us. Koolhaas recognizes this:it is a mode of forgetfulness fostered by ideological Junkspace. And itis a forgetfulness of our choosing rather than by accident. So throughdisavowal we come to see the political choice as simply between liberaldemocracy or fundamentalism; or the hermeneutical juridical choiceas between literalism or activism; we see the ethical choice as betweenmoral relativism and absolutism; or we perceive the theological choiceas a matter of orthodoxy versus secularism. As Žižek reminds us, ‘it iswhen we are presented with [such] apparently clear choices that thereal alternatives to the situation are most obscured’.18

Perhaps my real point here is that, like architecture, theology is adiscipline always tethered to what is given. It does not emanate fromsome open eld, or some other place of a priori metaphysical splendor,

but from this place, this Junk-lled-space. We have repeatedly learnedthe dangers of forcing a construction of the monumental. And too often,I fear, theology bemoans the loss of this dream for nality, certitude,

and the building of something monumental. This dream has only ledtheology into cul-de-sacs. Perhaps instead of reading the world aroundit, theology has too often expected the world to read it.

The gift of Koolhaas’s essay is the suggestion that the malleabilityof our world, our ideas, our selves, is not all bad. It is yet a further cutinto the modern desire for reassurance, and spills us into yet anotheraporia. In an era wary of dominant and totalizing paradigms, but stillquite full of them, Koolhaas here celebrates the dizzying, ambiguous,cosmopolitan vitality of Junkspace, a place where theology is againable to throw itself into the future.

18 Žižek, Desert of the Real , pp. 1–3.
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