Patrick Mooney
English 234
17 February 2011
The permanent compulsion to produce new effects which yet remain bound to the old schema, becoming additional rules, merely increases the power of the tradition which the individual effect seeks to escape. Every phenomenon is by now so thoroughly imprinted by the schema that nothing can occur that does not bear in advance the trace of the jargon.
—Adorno and Horkheimer,The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception
Koolhaas' junkspace
— immanent (potentially everywhere, yet impossible to grasp
) yet transcendent (it mediates asymmetrical contradictions, positioning itself as the teleologically necessary endpoint of all development), topologically self-contained and totalizing (there is no outside to junkspace), a classical remainder (as Jameson points out) that engulfs (via escalation
and entropy
) existing spaces and regurgitates them - provides one anchor point for the conceptual framework this week. Koolhaas provides multiple examples of junkspaces: traffic, airport terminals, department stores, nightclubs, bachelor pads, and (especially) the mall. These are spaces that are themselves structured according to the logic of consumer capitalism, insofar as they are flexible (modular/temporary), oriented toward consumption, and framed in ways that suppress their own political implications in favor of a bland consumer joy that replaces more traditional goals: the class struggle, the critical faculty, justice.
Foucault's heterotopias provide the other end of the critical spectrum in the week's readings. Rather than being a totalizing, self-reproducing space that seeks to absorb all other arrangements, heterotopias are defined by their difference from (and yet relation to) everyday
spaces and form a counter-arrangement
of the normal system of spatial relations. Foucault's examples include libraries, fairs, museums, cemeteries, brothels, ships; De Cauter and Dehaene add academia to the list and attempt to situate the other
of Foucault's other spaces
as a broad liminal category, neither private (the oikos) nor public (the agora) but a space defined as sacred by circumscription and play. 1
One of the primary questions raised by both perspectives is the question of the possibility of intervention in the spaces of everyday life and the practices associated with it, both by directly engaging with those spaces (the shopping mall, the airport) and by engaging in spaces more or less separate from them (Disneyland, Dubai, the Ceský Sen supermarket
)? Though we (well, I) tend to take all of these as examples of junkspace, where (as Jameson quotes one author as saying) there will be little else for us to do but shop,
do they constitute nodes where pressure can be exerted simply by virtue of their extravagant visibility? Are they opportunities (again, following Jameson) to write yourself into
the future and to reconquer difference
? Alternately, is the identification of these areas with junkspace perhaps facile, missing the point?
The Disney experience is perhaps the most representative cognitive model for most of us, and it seems fair to say that the Disney company's marketing and development strategy consciously invokes the ludic elements that De Cauter and Dehaene link to heterotopic spaces2 (even if this is not the model that the planners themselves are consciously using). For this reason, I would like to focus our discussion primarily on the Disney experience and supplement it with discussions of the film and of Dubai.
1 As analytically useful as this (somewhat broader) concept of the heterotopia may be, I'm not sure that I find it entirely convincing. Is the space of the cemetery, the ship, primarily defined by a boundary that is drawn around a ludic area?
2 Page 95; reader page 648.