Inside of Rem Koolhaas' new book/magazine Content is a key essay titled "Junk-Space." This is its first sentence: "Rabbit is the new beef...." This is its last sentence: "The cosmetic is the new cosmic." In between these strong statements are several hundred equally sound sentences that, without the assistance of paragraphs, form the total structure of a very big concept: the arrival and present global domination of junkspace.

"Continuity is the essence of junkspace," proposes Koolhaas, "it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, air conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain.... It promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish, echo)...." On page 165, he adds, "Junkspace is often described as a space of flows, but that is a misnomer: flows depend on disciplined movement, bodies cohere. Junkspace is a web without a spider.... Its anarchy is one of the last tangible ways in which we experience freedom...." Yet, ultimately, "Junkspace will be our tomb." This is an essay about the state of everything that constitutes the now. Though it starts with architecture (junkspace is built space), it steps way beyond the limits of that practice and examines the condition of the present, which is significantly different from the conditions of the past.

"Junk-Space" is important but not original. It is one in a dazzling series of essays that seem to seize and name what it is that defines the situation from which they emerge. And like the other essays in this series, "Junk-Space" is saturated by a sense of ambivalence. The author has discovered the truth, but the truth is riddled with problems. After reading the last sentence, the first question that strikes the mind is, Where exactly does Koolhaas stand in all of this? Is he appalled by the present situation? Is he excited about it? At one point he calls our moment a "low-grade purgatory." Does this mean a high-grade purgatory existed in the past and was much more preferable?

In essays of this kind, essays that aspire to describe what makes up the irreducible present and particularly the way that new technologies have broken the present from the past, this ambivalence is at the very heart of things. For example, one year after what Susan Buck-Morss called in Dreamworld and Catastrophe the last year of the 20th century, 1989, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze published "Postscript on Control Societies." Described by Empire co-author and contributor to Content Michael Hardt as a "short enigmatic essay," "Postscript on Control Societies" says in seven pages everything that Empire a decade later would attempt to say in 500. Basically it is this: Society of the 19th century was, as Michel Foucault explained in Discipline and Punish, organized by sites of discipline (schools, army barracks, prisons, and so on), whereas our present control society is less and less managed by these types of spaces. Specific sites have disappeared as unnecessary appurtenances, but the will to control lives on, all the more effective by being disembodied.

"With the breakdown of the hospital as a site of confinement," writes Deleuze, "...community psychiatry, day hospitals, and homecare initially presented new freedoms, while at the same time contributing to mechanisms of control as rigorous as the harshest confinement." Like junkspace, control society offers what feels like greater freedom, yet is more suffocating, more sinister. And it is this contradiction, one of knowing that things are better than before and yet knowing that the situation has actually worsened (there is less privacy, and an increase in mechanisms for monitoring subjects), that is deeply troubling. Deleuze, however, offers a little light: "It's not a question of worrying or hoping for the best, but finding new weapons."

Fredric Jameson's 1984 essay "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," which opens his most famous book, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Capitalism, and is a part of the tradition that has so far come to end in junkspace, offers no "new weapons" whatsoever. The essay is fascinated by the moment and denounces the gigantic order of late-capitalism only out of a sense of ideological obligation. But for all of its problems and hesitations, "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" at least manages to distinguish/distance itself from Martin Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1936), which had no ambivalence about the inroads technology was making in pre-World War II society because Heidegger maintained a direct solution: Go back to the first order of things--a natural, Germanic/Greek society where plows worked the land and mud was on every honest man's shoes.

Which brings us to the essay that inaugurates this particular tradition of ambivalence, Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"--completed the same year as Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art," 1936. Consistent with all good Marxists who owe everything to history, Benjamin knew very well that he couldn't go back to the age of the "aura." He embraced the new order of mass entertainment and mass production. But, as with Koolhaas, it was not a committed embrace. For Benjamin, it was a matter "of worrying [and] hoping for the best." (Susan Sontag's essay "Notes on Camp" is also part of this tradition, but she lacks the gravity of Koolhaas, Benjamin, and also Karl Marx, whose Communist Manifesto is the ghost of what was to become the father--"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.")

A possible way out of this tradition of ambivalence is proposed in a new essay by David Graeber titled "Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology," which is part of Prickly Paradigm Press' Paradigm series. David Graeber, who is an anthropologist, determines the source of the problem/ambivalence is in the very concept of revolution. "Revolution has always implied something in the nature of a paradigm shift: a clear break, a fundamental rupture in the nature of social reality after which everything is different." "The habit of thought which defines the world," Graeber adds, "or society, as a totalizing system (in which every element takes on its significance only in relation to the others), tends to lead almost inevitably to a view of revolutions as cataclysmic ruptures. Human history thus becomes a series of revolutions."

In keeping with Graeber's characterization of systems thinking, "Junk-Space" describes the moment in terms of a massive break, a revolution. The past was like this and that is over now. The present is like this and we have to live with it (or in it) and "hope for the best." But what if in reality there were no stages defined by radical breaks or ruptures, as Graeber suggests? What if there were no such "clean breaks"? Would anxiety persist? Are these the "new weapons" that Deleuze was trying find? Weapons that, as Graeber puts it, could "blow up [the] walls" of history? Junkspace has so many walls and mirrors.