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in Christian Ethics

Junkspace: Theology after Monumentality

Neal E. Magee
Studies in Christian Ethics 2004 17: 27
DOI: 10.1177/095394680401700303
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://sce.sagepub.com/content/17/3/27

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JUNKSPACE: THEOLOGY AFTER MONUMENTALITY

27

JUNKSPACE: THEOLOGY AFTER

MONUMENTALITY
Neal E. Magee

Abstract
This article addresses Dutch architect Rem Koolhaass notion of Junkspace
infinitely reconfigurable, physical space that is always-already in
transition, perpetually in a state of becoming and its implications for
theology. 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 drawn
into this framework. While this schema represents the suburban desire
for control and predictability, it consequently flattens 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 lens
for theological reflection, which is now rendered provisional, incomplete,
and migratory.

ince at least Augustines City of God, there has been a quiet affinity
between thinking theologically and thinking spatially. And certainly
one of the most fundamental units of spatiality of civilisation itself is
the city this constantly changing, infinitely reconfigurable thing.
Cities are one of the primary ways in which we leave our mark on this
planet. Consequently, theology has in moments such as Augustines
classic text wanted to contribute to a description of the utopian
city. But I would contend that it is an interesting thing to ask whether
the interplay between theology and the city is fluid and perhaps even
reversible. Can each inform the other? In other words, I am wondering
if the contemporary city can tell us something about the conditions of
or possibilities for theological thinking.
2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks CA and New Delhi)

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What I want to present in this article is a reading a theological

reading of Dutch architect Rem Koolhaass notion of Junkspace.1 It
may help to begin by noting that Koolhaas is an active, prize-winning
architect, teaching at Harvards School of Design, who is fascinated
with very large and public spaces spaces we inhabit, move through
and may only rarely leave. Spaces such as Manhattan or the Pearl River
Delta in China interest Koolhaas because they take on such scale and
importance, but they were never designed as a whole: they are selforganizing systems with no Master design, and no Master Designer.
This interest has led Koolhaas to inquire as to the emerging principles
of such a system what is the driving idea of a modern city? What
does it signify? What draws it together and gives it meaning? Where
are its actual borders: where does it stop and where does it begin? On
what is the city centered physically and metaphorically? Clearly, to
begin to ask such questions is to leave the realm of architecture or even
urban studies and to enter some larger cultural analysis.
Koolhaass conclusion is that the foremost cultural experience of
the city for the new millennium is shopping: it is the last remaining
form of public activity.2 Shopping is the organizing principle for
social relations; it is the algebra that determines which buildings dot
the map, and where. In its broadest sense then, shopping is the most
commanding political force, the most venerable stratagem of global
policy 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 shopping
and the emergence of what he calls Junkspace. In his essay of that title,
which can only be described as dazzling, Koolhaas seeks to trace the
arc of modernisation from the perspective of its creative activity, the
residue of that activity, and the folds within this trajectory.
Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, October 100 (Spring 2002), pp. 17590. His article
appeared simultaneously in a larger volume compiled by Harvard Universitys Project
on the City. See Junkspace, in Chuihua Judy Chung, Jeffrey Inaba, Rem Koolhaas, et
al. (eds), Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Kln: Taschen, 2002), pp. 40821.
This 800-page book in part traces the development of particular technologies and their
relation to shopping: air conditioning, the escalator, the UPC barcode, and so on. In
that volume, I would strongly recommend the more lucid commentary by Sze Tsung
Leong entitled . . . And Then There Was Shopping, pp. 12855.
An appreciation of Koolhaass unique position within the world of architecture
is here important to note: his Rotterdam/New York-based firm, the Office for
Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has designed several celebrated projects worldwide,
including Euralille (the first stop outside the Channel tunnel in France), the two Las
Vegas incarnations of the Guggenheim, and the recent Prada store in Manhattan and
Seattle Public Library. Winner of the 2000 Pritzker Prize in architecture, Koolhaas
was enlisted by Harvard University in the early nineties, where he and his graduate
students comprise the Project on the City.
2
Rem Koolhaas, Shopping, in Stefano Boeri, et al. (eds), Mutations: Harvard Project on
the City (Bordeaux: Actar, 2001), pp. 12483. This collaborative chapter was published
one year before Junkspace and the Guide to Shopping, serving as both the latters
prologue and roadmap.
1

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JUNKSPACE: THEOLOGY AFTER MONUMENTALITY

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And it is itself a difficult task to convey with precision what

Junkspace is, but we can begin with the drywall-covered spaces
between stores, offices painted neatly with apologetic signs of
Pardon Our Mess . . . or Coming Soon . . . indicative of the
imminent transformation taking place behind that wall (a wall that
Koolhaas also points out is the demarcation between leisure and
labour, cold and hot, comfortable and sweaty, muscular and flabby).
But stepping back, Koolhaas wishes to remind us that all space is now
up for grabs, waiting on line for its turn to be rearranged, reassembled,
renovated, reconfigured, revised, redesigned, returned. All public
space is now transitional and superficial, every territory real or
virtual is now provisional. I would point out that the space we sit
in at this very moment is such a space infinitely reconfigurable,
perhaps playing host to plastic surgeons next weekend but the
very 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, the
new common denominator for designed space, even public space,
is shopping. So architecture and urban planning have become, for
quite some time now, about the production of various envelopes and
containers in which these transactions can take place. Buildings have
become less and less important. So while whole millennia worked
in favor of permanence, axialities, relationships, and proportion, the
program of Junkspace is escalation. Instead of development, it offers
entropy.3 He continues:
If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space
is the residue [hu]mankind leaves on the planet. The built product of
modernisation is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is
what 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 no

interest in superstructure: it is comprised of transient, impermanent
subsystems; interchangeable LEGOS given scale only by their
relation to the grand system of shopping. Junkspace is a web without
a spider.5
So in recent years we have witnessed a mutation of museums,
airports, town centers, schools, hospitals, churches, and even
news 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
4
5
6

Koolhaas, Junkspace, p. 178.

Koolhaas, Junkspace, p. 175.
Koolhaas, Junkspace, p. 179.
Koolhaas, Shopping, p. 125.

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space of physical and virtual transactions, but moreover dominates

metaphorical space. In this way, shopping has become not just another
choice among public activities, but the milieu in which Western culture
nurtures and regenerates itself. Shopping is the means by which our
society 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 identity
of 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. And
this, I would contend, should have significance for theologians and
scholars of religion.
We shop in order to know what we desire. And our shopping list reveals
some 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 of
the features in the landscape of shopping, provides us a reality without
a substance.
Koolhaass exegesis of Junkspace continually dances between the
architectural and the cultural, between actual physical space and the
web of ideas and values we inhabit daily. His essay demands that the
time for thinking of culture in terms of European, American, Sovietbloc or Pacific-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, he
underscores once again that in our world of Junkspace and shopping,
the surface is the depth, that history is really only a marketing
strategy.
*

Admittedly, there are many ways to critique this perspective, this

dominance 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 iek from his recent Welcome to the Desert of the Real
(London: Verso, 2002), pp. 1011.
8
Koolhaas, Junkspace, p. 175.
9
The first such critique, were I to offer only one, is contained within Koolhaass essay
itself, where he writes Not exactly anything goes; in fact, the secret of Junkspace
is that it is both promiscuous and repressive: as the formless proliferates, the formal
withers, and with it all rules, regulations, recourse (Junkspace, p. 183). But it is
interesting 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 to
probe for a kernel of promise. See Jameson, Future City, New Left Review 21 (May/June
2003), pp. 6579. It seems Jameson has an affinity for the theoretical work of Koolhaas:
see Jamesons 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 Wright

didnt worry about whether the roofs of his houses leaked, Koolhaas
doesnt worry about whether his argument leaks a bit. So I want to
suspend those questions for now. Nonetheless, I want to use Junkspace
as 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 reflection? Or how do they pressure
its operations? What might Koolhaas offer to a national meeting of
religious scholars? Is theology or religious reflection to believe that it
stands from no place in its task? Or maybe the more general question
is: from what perspective does one or should one reflect theologically?
I want to suggest three broad implications.
First, one effect of Junkspace is the flattening of intellectual space
and thus the de-centering of theological thinking. In one sense this is
the suburban ideology we find in having Gaps or Starbucks or WalMarts across our landscape: they offer us predictability and control.10
In turn, the metaphysics of shopping, which heralds a so-called free
exchange of ideas renders theology a form of intellectual property to
be bought and sold, cut into a variety of shapes and sizes for the broad
tastes of the shopping public. So we end up with a variety of flavours
within the Christian tradition alone: Catholic, Reformed, Systematic,
Black, Liberation, Feminist, Ecological, Radical Orthodox, Postmodern,
and so on. Another effect of this flattening is that theology has in many
ways, 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, writes
Koolhaas. [I]t is flamboyant yet unmemorable, like a screen saver . . .
Junkspace does not pretend to create perfection, only interest.12
Without belittling the contributions of all the variant forms
of theology, we still have very few ways of understanding their
inter-relations, and feel compelled to somehow adjudicate their
differences. Does not the logic of consumption undergird our very
discipline, where we choose as our tastes demand? You consume
or you dont as you like. The logic of consumption has been our
only recourse when we have wanted to consider them together as
a whole.
Koolhaass presentation of Junkspace actually predicts our predicament: it predicts that we would have a proliferation of theologies, a
cosmopolitan theological mlange which somehow coexist like citydwellers: the fruit stand and the deli, the drugstore and the tattoo
Koolhaas and his students note that the city has twice been humiliated by the
suburbs: once upon the loss of its contingency to the suburbs and again upon that
constituencys return. These prodigal citizens brought back with them their mutated
suburban values of predictability and control. See Shopping, p. 152.
11
Koolhaas, Junkspace, p. 179.
12
Koolhaas, Junkspace, p. 177.
10

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parlor.13 And the provocative thing is that he doesnt see that as a problem, he
sees it only as a sign of vitality. For Koolhaas the problem, the risk, is the
monumental, the edifice when we try to bundle them all together
under one rubric. What shuts our thinking down is when we try to
think a singular meaning to a word such as Manhattan.
The second point is that theology, like Junkspace, is never complete,
always under construction. Junkspace represents that which is in
transition, in metamorphosis from the tarnished past into the glossy
future, while never shutting down operations. Architecturally, we
have witnessed a turn in recent years, where the construction and then
demolition of massive buildings is commonplace. The lifelong effort,
permanence and grandeur of, say, a Medieval cathedral or mosque, are
simply alien to modern construction. There is no desire for a final state;
shopping pushes every concept towards eternal transmogrification. In
other words, reconfiguration is never a problem.
Consequently, we are always in search of the new. Newness and
planned obsolescence are the engines of all market systems, and so
theology is required to disavow continually its former ways in order
to redefine itself alongside its competitors.14 This disavowal, what
Peter Sloterdijk calls enlightened false consciousness15 in which
we consciously set aside or deny certain understandings on the
one hand uncouples theology from its roots, apart from the very past
which has always underwritten its work, but on the other hand enables
theology to propel itself into this economy. And the history of Western
theology is a history of such disavowals: of the irrational, the mystical,
the mythological, disavowal of the dogmatic, of the hyperrational.
This is the history of an enterprise always trying to find itself, trying
to make sense of its role and task, trying to remain relevant.
But this ambiguity and uncertainty should remind us again of a
certain trace of Augustine, who was wary of any complete or confident
strategy. Theology, in so many of its formations, has been about
closure and certitude; it has relied upon oppositions, distinctions and
13
These pairings are, admittedly, somewhat romanticised elements of the city,
in that they do not represent junk-spaced urbanism which has been gentrified by
suburban predictability, tastes or branding. The romanticised version would represent
a city rich with diversity and its ethic of tolerance. Quite the opposite, my reading
of Koolhaas is that the city is diverse among its constituents, but not in respect to the
completely vacuous and overdetermining force of shopping. I am here arguing not
for the former, in terms of acceptance for the diverse panoply of the theological, but
for a way to appreciate the latter as somehow already, by its very nature, theological
on many levels.
14
Koolhaas, Shopping, p. 177.
15
Peter Sloterdijk, The Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987). I would caution that my use of disavowal stems out of its use
by iek (see The Sublime Object of Ideology [London: Verso, 1989], ch. 1 and The Plague of
Fantasies [London: Verso, 1997], ch. 3) in relation to this phrase of Sloterdijks and, while
it is clearly related, should be individuated from Freuds technical psychoanalytic term
Verleugnung (denial, or disavowal).

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enclosures in order to prop itself up: divisions and separations between

sacred and profane, religious and secular. In other words, theology
has been more of a gated community than it has a cosmopolitan
urban space. One of Augustines greatest legacies is the obligation
to openness, a radical openness, in which the unsettling presence of
the unanswered is always present. To ask What do I love when I love
my God? (Confessions X) is to ask this fully aware that I can never
adequately answer such a question never once and for all. And
Koolhaas here reminds us of the true vertigo such openness brings
with it.
Third, Junkspace reorients our understanding of the secular. There
is a joke Slavoj iek tells where a priest asks a non-believer: Do you
believe in God? No! Stop dodging the issue! Give me a straight
answer! In a way, the underlying logic is correct: the only acceptable
straight answer for the priest is Yes!, so anything else, including a
straight No! counts as evasion. This essential logic is that of the forced
choice. Any confession of atheism appears as an attempt to skirt the
issue.16 But is it not the same with the binary choice of theological or
secular? The problem with the way the choice is given to us is not
secular, but rather the theological itself: as if somehow the two are
purely separate, as if there were a neat and clean distinction between
the two. We deny the infiltration of each in the other.
But weve known this all along. While theology has so often
denounced secularisation as the other against which it gains its
identity, the truth is what Jacques Derrida, Jack Caputo and Jean-Luc
Nancy have been writing about lately that secularisation always
presupposes a theology to secularise, so that, for better or for worse,
secularism is the continuation of theology by another means. Caputo
continues, there is always what Derrida calls some unavowed
theologeme [quelque theologme inavou] . . . a certain bit of undigested
theology lodged in the throat of even the most secular societies.17
What if one of the features of this theological remnant is the vitality
and spontaneity of form which the secular exhibits? What if this
polyvalent explosion were the logical result of the Protestant dictum
iek, Desert of the Real, pp. 3, 94 n. 42. ieks first telling of the joke here is of a girl
asking her boyfriend about marriage, the second between the priest and layman, but
his larger point is not about the false distinction of theological and secular, but rather
between the political iterations of democracy and fundamentalism. The unexamined
aspects of these two concepts, he argues, are how they not only support one another,
but in fact reproduce each others structure. See pp. 9394.
17
John D. Caputo, Without Sovereignty, Without Being, Journal for Cultural and
Religious Theory 4.3 (August 2003), pp. 926 (12). Caputo is citing Derrida, Voyous
(Paris: Galile, 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 be
marked by a wholly different openness and interdependence. Finally, see Jean-Luc
Nancys The Deconstruction of Christianity, in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds),
Religion and Media (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 12130.
16

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Reformata sed Semper Reformanda (once reformed always reforming)?

Always in search of the new, always transcending itself? To think
this would be to begin to open up a new way of thinking about
secularisation in relation to theology not as a rupture or break with
theology, but somehow its reconfiguration, 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 disavowal
of choice. Or, more accurately, it is the disavowal of the real choices
available by accepting those presented to us. Koolhaas recognizes this:
it is a mode of forgetfulness fostered by ideological Junkspace. And it
is a forgetfulness of our choosing rather than by accident. So through
disavowal we come to see the political choice as simply between liberal
democracy or fundamentalism; or the hermeneutical juridical choice
as between literalism or activism; we see the ethical choice as between
moral relativism and absolutism; or we perceive the theological choice
as a matter of orthodoxy versus secularism. As iek reminds us, it is
when we are presented with [such] apparently clear choices that the
real alternatives to the situation are most obscured.18
Perhaps my real point here is that, like architecture, theology is a
discipline always tethered to what is given. It does not emanate from
some open field, or some other place of a priori metaphysical splendor,
but from this place, this Junk-filled-space. We have repeatedly learned
the dangers of forcing a construction of the monumental. And too often,
I fear, theology bemoans the loss of this dream for finality, certitude,
and the building of something monumental. This dream has only led
theology into cul-de-sacs. Perhaps instead of reading the world around
it, theology has too often expected the world to read it.
The gift of Koolhaass essay is the suggestion that the malleability
of our world, our ideas, our selves, is not all bad. It is yet a further cut
into the modern desire for reassurance, and spills us into yet another
aporia. In an era wary of dominant and totalizing paradigms, but still
quite full of them, Koolhaas here celebrates the dizzying, ambiguous,
cosmopolitan vitality of Junkspace, a place where theology is again
able to throw itself into the future.

18

iek, Desert of the Real, pp. 13.

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