JUNKSPACE NOW. JUNKSPACE TOMORROW. JUNKSPACE FOREVER.
I had promised birds. The midday disappeared into the highway and I had promised birds. An empty sky hung mutely as the car dragged its absences behind it. Miles trailed off into exits. Sentences trailed off into ellipses. Playlists looped and no birds marked the sky. It had been some years since I had driven in Florida, I began to explain and then stopped.
He shifted in the grey chair, pointed out an out-of-state license plate and then stopped. Some forty minutes north of my parents’ house, the GPS requested a turn. I complied. The westward road led from the beachside city, with its little, pink skyline, to the endless suburban interior, a sprawl of gated communities and squat retail outlets. A sign promised a lake an hour inland. Nothing about the birds. I shut off the music and the road substituted its own static.
Signs gathered: a stretch of farmland, a canal, the silhouette of a watchtower. The GPS again requested a turn. The car clunked over a metal bridge, slowed at a clutch of instructions, swerved around potholes. We had reached the wetland’s northern edge, the map showed, farther away from its entrance than when we had departed. I accepted again its advice to turn, but hit a barrier with a harsh “Do Not Enter” sign. I turned back and tried a different road. The GPS called for an about face and nothing about the scraggy length of asphalt suggested otherwise. We pulled over and walked into the park.
A labyrinth of banks and channels constituted the wetland. Cattails clung to the sharp edges of the shore, playing some important role, a sign half-explained, in water reclamation. A boardwalk spanned ten meters to a small observation deck, amounting to the entire navigable span of this obscure, northern entrance. Some distance further, a dusting of ibises combed the grass for worms. I had promised birds, but not like this, not so few. I could not even follow him down the length of the walkway, but blurted some apology on the way back. A vulture settled atop a pavilion. The stupidity of the digital map and my stupidity for trusting it.
He consoled me. We had after all, if only technically, seen the birds and could now do anything else. Something around here, given we were so unusually far northwest. But I wanted nothing; I wanted, precisely, for a bomb to atomize Florida — birds and all — off the face of the map. I allowed that we might find something on the way back. But really, there could be nothing. Florida was a void.
In fact, worse. A void is at least potentially a place, but Florida is so definitively empty that nothing can be built there. It is a cancer. Driving back was driving from cancer to cancer through cancer. Go more than half a mile inland and Florida is all interstices: roads connect housing complexes to malls, quick service restaurants, gas stations, supermarkets, retail outlets. In a parody of a real place, these vast swaths of tissue promise but do not contain the real places that would justify them. The array of concrete disorients, only the changing names of the intersections marking any sort of forward progress. Without a watch of your own, you would have no idea how close any two points were. Indeed, after the third corner sporting the bland facade of a Pollo Tropical one suspects the nauseating truth that these are supposed to be the real places, the thing on offer. Or, worse, that the distinction between real and junk space has broken down, been washed out by the incubating sun. My hands gripped the steering wheel; I struggled to keep looking down the road.
This condition is not unique to Florida. Rather the anxiety I felt is the effect of what Rem Koolhaas calls “Junkspace.” In his winding essay of that title, Koolhaas sketches but does not provide a clear definition of junkspace. We can get a sense of things by starting with the paradigm case: the mall. For Koolhaas, the mall has three main features that are key to its being junkspace.
Malls are big. This is true not just in the sense of size but in the number of uses a mall has: a broad variety of shops, large indoor spaces connecting them, restaurants, play and waiting areas. You need a map to navigate a mall; you cannot hold the whole thing in your head.
Malls are mutable. A shop inside the mall can fail and close at any point, to be replaced by anything else. Individual shops can rearrange their interiors at any time. As a result, the space of the mall itself has to serve as a bland, neutral backdrop, making minimal assumptions about what will go on inside it.
Malls are for shopping. There are other things that happen in malls, even areas, like playgrounds, dedicated to other activities. But those areas ultimately are in the service of shopping, e.g. they are places to put your kids while you get on with the shopping.
Koolhaas critique of the mall is similarly three-fold. At the level of aesthetics, malls are ugly bits of architecture. Because they have to serve as a neutral backdrop for shops, they are of necessity bland. Since they are big and mutable, they cannot be the product of careful, humanistic design, but spread like so much fat across a broad tarmac. Malls are, to the right kind of leftist, morally offensive: the mall cannibalizes true public places. It is a public place, in the sense that people meet and hang out at the mall, but it is not a place for the public. The mall, unlike the park, the museum, the library, does not provide a public good but instead serves to facilitate so many private goods. If you are in the mall but not shopping, you are loitering and can be removed. This would not be a problem, necessarily, if malls could coexist with these other public spaces.
But malls cannot leave well enough alone, and this is the core of Koolhaas’ jeremiad. The mall bends the world to its image. It replaces not only other shopping centers, killing Main streets, but replaces public places. Rising in the fifties, the mall becomes the center of the new suburbs and ex-urbs. Indeed, the mall makes a certain kind of car-based suburb possible, a downtown in a box surrounded by parking lots. At the same time, other architecture becomes more mall-like. As The Harvard Guide to Shopping, which contains “Junkspace” as a chapter, details, shopping becomes an increasingly important part of other structures; at the time of writing in 2001, the British Airports Authority, the owners of Heathrow among other airports, was listed as a retail stock. Eventually, the mall transcends particular structures and takes over space in general. Florida becomes nothing but an open-air, drive-through mall, edged with the warehouses and cul de sacs the mall demands for itself.
Rae Armantrout’s poem “Exchange” provides a clean statement of this dystopic picture of the present and the near future.
City of the future in which each subway station’s stairs lead to the ground floor of a casino/ mall.
The phrase “City of the future” summons visions of a High Modernist utopia: somewhere designed to be dense, efficient, and, at the same time, livable. One imagines zeppelins docking to garden skyscrapers, monorails running above pedestrian corridors, parks spilling into the street. The subway station, in particular, has been a site of utopic architecture. Think for example of the Soviet’s Moscow Metro. Opened in 1935, the stations combined Russian classical ornament with Socialist Realist artwork in bright, open spaces.
A subway is, of necessity, enclosed. The bright electric lights of the Moscow Metro replicate the sun where the sun cannot reach. Malls, however, are generally deliberately enclosed. Indeed, as The Harvard Guide to Shopping stresses, the mall was made possible by air conditioning: the extended shopping trips that are the mall’s reason for being only become reliably feasible when one can ensure perfect weather inside. Similarly, the air conditioner also removes the necessity of windows; you no longer have to use the opening and closing of windows to regulate temperature. Eliminating windows serves both a cost-cutting function and indeed can elongate the time shoppers spend in the mall, without an external reference to indicate how long one has spent. Of course, the modern casino is similarly a vast, conditioned interior.
Note that the expression “casino/mall” is ambiguous. It could mean either “casino or mall” or “combination casino plus mall.” The ambiguity suggests that these are equivalent spaces, whether or not they are literally identical: commercial spaces designed to suck up your time and your money. It is worth noting in connection with the previous entry in this series that both shopping and, especially, gambling are abnegatory experiences. The slot machine stimulates without challenging. Shopping requires no greater thought than “Do I like this?” and “Can I afford it?” while throwing up an overwhelming array of textures, colors, and sensations. The effect of such spaces is already a comfortable numbness.
So we move from the interior of a subway, which is an active and purposive place, to the anodyne interior of a casino/mall. This movement replicates the replacement Rem Koolhaas identifies in architecture of ambitious, humanistic projects by junkspace. Actually, “repurposing” is better than “replacement” as the subway still exists but no longer connects to the park, the library, or the project housing.
What counts is the role defined for each piece by a system of rules saying how it can move, not the stuff the piece is made of.
Anything can be a pawn. Of course, there are standards, but the chess pieces are defined neither by material — sets come in wood, plastic, metal, glass, ice, whatever — nor form — from the classic Staunton set to the sharp abstractions of Man Ray’s set to bullet chess sets. What matters is that the players agree on which objects serve the role of which pieces, and those roles are defined by the pieces’ legal moves. In the Bottom episode “Culture,” the chess game between the show’s leads breaks down not because the pieces are improvised but because one of them simply cannot learn the rules.
The same is true also of money. In theory, anything can be money — from pieces of paper to shells to buckskins to lumps of metal to massive pieces of stone to information itself — so long as some community agrees to use it as money. The desire for money, except for the committed numismatist, is a desire not for green pieces of cotton paper but for a certain power over others. Like chess, then, exchange (and, hence, shopping) is a game constituted by rules. And just as chess, in serious tournaments, has its referees, exchange has enforcers of its own rules: security tags, security agents, monetary security features. As Koolhaas writes, “the secret of Junkspace is that it is both promiscuous and repressive.”
Just as what counts about money is what you can do with it, not what it is, what counts in business is not how but how much money is made. Consider chess. Before the modern age of chess, we had the romantic age. In this period, although the rules were the same, chess playing was also defined by a certain etiquette. You played to win, yes, but to win in style. That style involved bold and lovely attacks, the more sacrifices the better. (On the defender’s side, it was considered rude to decline a sacrifice.) Over the course of the 19th century, this style was simply outcompeted by a colder analytical approach, which substituted memorized openings and careful analysis for blind instinct. The late 20th century finalized the erasure of the human-touch as chess engines overtook humans in ability and a competitive edge could be gained only by playing more and more like a computer.
In business, likewise, the winning strategies are defined by their flexibility rather than their specific commitments. Compare even the top 30 of the Fortune 500 between 1988 and 2017.
Note the replacement of resource and manufacturing companies with general retail, holding, banking, and financial companies. It is now more profitable to control general means of consumption than the means of production. No physical space better encapsulates the mutability of modern money making than the mall, with its shifting array of storefronts.
“How it can move” is an issue of more than metaphorical concern when it comes to the exchange of money. As The Harvard Guide to Shopping details, the financial advantage of malls over an ordinary clutch of stores on a street comes from movement. Shoppers are simply willing to walk farther in the relatively noiseless, climate-controlled interior of a mall than the loud and frequently inclement shopping boulevard. The further one walks, the more merchandise one sees, the more chances one has to make an impulse buy.
A feature of games like chess or the economy is that they are easily made virtual. If what matters is how the stuff moves, not what it is made out of, then it can just easily be made out of nothing at all, be a shared fiction, with its “movements” so many entries in some database. During the pandemic, for instance, professional chess took place entirely on line. In the same way, the “death” of physical malls (a quarter of all malls in the United States are expected to close in the next few years) is as much a rebirth of the mall in virtual form.
Online shopping is the apotheosis of the mall. Cyberspace is indefinitely large. Not only is it primarily an interior but it is all interior: websites have no facade. A screen is more mutable, more intrinsically bland than any physical space has been. Consequently cyberspace is inevitably junkspace. Just as, with physical architecture, junkspace infected and overtook utopic designs, cyber-junkspace has consumed the techno-optimism of the early internet. To survive online one needs to accept advertisements, and to accept advertisements is to become just another subway leading to a digital mall. Online, the mall is never more than a click away.
In the intersection, a muscular, shirtless man with small American flags tied to each wrist – so that he looks like a wrestler – pushes, no, shoves then catches, a stroller piled high with plastic bags – his stuff.
The “city of the future” is a vast, interconnected series of interiors dominated by the mall. But, in physical space, there must be something outside the mall. While the inside is defined by shopping, the exchange of money for objects, the outside is where two subsidiary processes occur: production and disposal. Production is the precondition of consumption, disposal the necessary result of both; as Koolhaas writes, “Half of mankind pollutes to produce, the other pollutes to consume.”
Hal Foster, in his companion piece to “Junkspace” titled “Running Room,” highlights the “junk” in “junkspace.” For Koolhaas, junkspace is primarily space that is itself junk: useless, undesirable. But it is also a place that contains and produces junk: fast fashion, planned obsolescence, junk food. Insofar as the mall inverts normal human values — it is a place where human wants and needs are satisfied for the sake of selling goods, rather than being a place where goods are sold for the sake of satisfying needs — it is essentially a junk market, wherein any incidental benefit to shoppers must be regarded as a necessary evil.
The ragpicker, one who trades in junk, is the liminal shadow of the shopper. In the extended sense just identified in which the mall already hawks junk, the ragpicker merely replicates outside what goes within. At the same time, the ragpicker exists outside of ordinary standards of what is valuable, picking up on what others would discard. Baudelaire in “The Ragpickers’ Wine” identifies the ragpicker as an anti-hero, “stumbling and bumping into walls like a poet.”
Armantrout’s shirtless man updates this poetic lineage. He no longer carries his junk on his back but carries junk in more junk. His stroller, in recalling a shopping cart, underlines our identification of ragpicker and shopper. Like Baudelaire’s ragpicker, he exists shamelessly outside of the law, but while Baudelaire imagined a figure of the night, this man is presumably strolling about in broad daylight, jaywalking across the intersection. Consider his movement, pushing or rather shoving the stroller before catching up to it. In this too he is a shopper but a deviant shopper, pushing his cart recklessly where it might bump into someone else. If what counts is how a piece can move, what are we to say about such unacceptable movements? Perhaps that he does not count or cannot be accounted for.
Note too that these movements, while deviant, are not revolutionary. Instead, they have a compulsive, repetitive aspect. The man shoves the stroller only to catch it again, recalling Freud’s nephew in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” who threw his toys across the room only to catch them again. We might apply some of Freud’s speculations about the child’s motives to our shirtless man. Perhaps, for instance, he pushes away his stroller to indicate to himself his mastery over it; he does not need this stuff, it does not define him, but could just as easily be free of it. Or perhaps he does know, after all, that he needs his stuff, and this game of pushing it away is a momentary expression of a self-destructive impulse, a death drive. In either case, we should not be looking to the shirtless man as our ticket out of junkspace. He seems to lack the political potential that Foster, following Benjamin and Baudelaire, placed on the ragpicker.
This point is underscored by the man’s appearance. Consider the American flag wristbands, almost certainly more repurposed junk. These are an ambiguous symbol. We could read them as parodic, nothing more American, but they could just as easily be a sincere patriotic expression or simply a fashion choice. The optimist, Foster et. al., assigns aesthetic and political potential to such junk reappropriation. Commenting on such artists, Foster in “Running Room” claims the following.
If there is no other side of Junkspace, indeed no outside at all, they are still able to find fissures within this world, to pressure these cracks, and open up a little running room.
Armantrout, following Koolhaas, strikes one as more pessimistic. A fissure, after all, presupposes another side. A fissure is just a jagged little portal. Howsoever inspiring Foster’s rhetoric, the claim seems incoherent. If the shirtless man is, in his way, only another shopper, then it does not really matter why he is wearing the flags, in parody or appreciation. What they are made of does not count. They are only more junk.
Finally, let us talk about wrestling. The thing everyone knows about wrestling, is that it is fake. As Barthes notes in “The World of Wrestling,” wrestling is spectacle rather than sport. Spectators watch wrestling expecting not fair competition but drama, drama presented with all of the subtlety of a morality play. A wrestler’s role should be immediately obvious from appearance — the face should be classically attractive and the heel, nasty-looking — and they should play that role with studied devotion, a kind of method-acting called kayfabe. Wrestling has all of the simplicity and immediate satisfaction of fast food; the wrestler aims to give the audience exactly what they want. In this way, wrestling is junk art and the wrestler a junk artist. Junkspace promises only junk poetry, only the superficial, the immediate, the palatable, the bland.
City of the future, where a tramway to the top of a peak opens onto a wax museum in which Michael Jackson extends one gloved hand
Daniel Lopatin’s eccojam “Demerol” was released as a tribute to Michael Jackson, titled after the pain killer Jackson overdosed on. The song reworks a line from Jackson’s “Morphine,” “Demerol, oh God he’s taking Demerol.” While this is a pretty and gentle sample from a largely dark and intense song, the effects Lopatin layers over it morph it into something uneasy and ominous. It is easy to hear the song as representing drifting off into a morphine sleep, the final terrifying phlanges redolent of death. As later reporting revealed, Jackson had been given the drugs that killed him to treat severe insomnia. These drugs themselves, however, caused a number of issues, including dream deprivation, which likely would have killed Jackson even had he not overdosed.
“Demerol” itself sits uneasily between tribute and sleazy appropriation. After all, the song made it onto a couple of releases. You could buy it, and Lopatin would profit off of Jackson’s work and death. In a way, this is fitting. Michael Jackson after all was an uneasy combination of producer and product, suffering in the role of pop star that was to a large extent chosen for him. “Morphine” dramatizes one aspect of this conflict, Jackson’s dysfunctional relation to his doctors. The song alternates between industrial rock verses, expressing fury at his dependence on these drugs, and an almost new-age bridge from the point of view of the doctor, soothing their patient. Worked into the background is a sample from David Lynch’s The Elephant Man, in which Joseph Merrick, the titular elephant man, expresses similar anxieties over his doctor’s prescription. Jackson felt that he was like Joseph Merrick trapped as a kind of attraction, that instead of actual support he only had handlers.
It is in this respect crucially important that it is Michael Jackson’s wax sculpture that greets us. On “a tramway to the top / of a peak” we should be properly outside, far away from the mall. It “opens onto / a wax museum.” At last. Some culture! Some history! Not the interminable, bland present of the mall. But of course our thesis has been that we cannot really get outside of junkspace, that the mall has left nothing unaffected.
The wax statue of Michael Jackson is the final, cruel victory of the project of turning Michael Jackson into a product. We see in Jackson’s life the same inversion of values that we have seen in the mall: instead of Jackson’s hangers on serving to support and disseminate his artistic achievements, his art was a means for their profit. The same terrible irony exists for art in junkspace. What should be a relief from junk, even a way out, is just more junk. For the Love of God, to pick an easy target, is a fifty-million pound paperweight. As with demerol, the very same stuff which makes your existence bearable can be part of a larger trap. It may even be what kills you.
I know we did not actually get to talking about internet aesthetics this entry. The setup went longer than intended, but this is a natural breakage point. I’ll be back with part 3B soon, covering dead malls, liminal spaces, and a bit more vaporwave.