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Jeffrey Kastner, Tom McCarthy, Nato Thompson and Eyal Weizman “The New Geography: A Roundtable,” Bookforum April-May 2009
[...] Tom McCarthy: This notion of “disruption” might be key. The INS did an elaborate project at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where we broadcast a string of messages over the radio, around the clock. They were short lines of poetry or, perhaps, provocations to do something: Each one began with the words “Calling all agents,” a line we took from William Burroughs. The other influence was Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée, in which a dead poet transmits lines of text over the radio. Cocteau got the idea from the wireless messages sent by the British to the French Resistance during World War II: They’d transmit these lines of poetry, most of which meant nothing, but one in every thousand of which meant “Now blow up the bridge!” or “Now assassinate the colonel!” So you’ve got this overlay of the aesthetic, the technological, and the political—territories of occupation and resistance, acts (again) of violence. The historical template is compelling: I like the notion that both occupiers and occupied listened to these lines during the war and that any one of them had the potential to make something catastrophic happen. All poetry should contain that potential, somehow. Nato Thompson: I often think that people’s interest in geography (or space, for that matter) came out of a malaise of theory. Academics and artists, particularly those with any desire for social change, wanted to literally ground the abstractions of postmodernism. In this sense, many Marxist geographers would claim that of course ideas happen in space, that subjectivity is produced in space. We can walk to a building that houses a biotech firm, an art museum, or a CIA front company, and we can say that the discursive spaces of biotech, art, and militarism are produced in part at these sites. This is what makes these disruptions so interesting and the idea of occupation that Tom alludes to so compelling. When we consider spatial metaphors in terms of a strategic methodology for how to produce meaning in the world, we use terms like occupation, squatting, trespassing, disrupting, and intervening—all strategies for developing a tangible resistance to formations of meaning. Physical borders are important to transgress because they are representations of power and control that move far beyond space, into the production of a public. Eyal Weizman: I want to retell an anecdote from the land of elastic control. In 2004, the first cases were filed in which Palestinian farmers took the state of Israel to the local high court of justice. When their lawyer, Mohammad Dahlah, presented the appeal, he used maps and slide presentations to describe the case in all its geographic com-plexities, including a particular issue with the location of olive groves on a slope facing the 1949 border. After listening for a while, the judges said they didn’t understand and asked the petitioners to come back with a model. The petitioners commissioned a company that produces military-training models to make the model and then drew two lines on it: one in red (the path along which the Ministry of Defense contractors had started to build the wall) and the other in blue (their suggestion for a line that, although built within the occupied area, was a little less invasive and left the groves with the villagers). When the model was finally called for, the porters didn’t know where to place it. Somebody finally brought a table from the cafeteria and placed it in front of the judges’ bench, but they couldn’t see it. So for the first time ever, they stepped down and also asked the parties to step closer. It thereafter seemed that the “object quality” of the model and the situation introduced a new type of legal choreography; the usual legal structure was disrupted, which also changed the discourse and its content. The legal dis-cussion about an alternative, “less invasive” path was undertaken with all parties—judges, villagers, activists, and lawyers for both sides—“navigating the terrain” and demonstrating their points while bending over the model. The parties designed a new path then and there. The groves stayed with the villagers, but for me, the model is the clearest material embodiment of the “lesser evil” doctrine that sometimes allows human rights lawyers to argue on behalf of Palestinians about the excess of violations without challenging the framing conditions. So I find several relevant things here: First, that the model operated not only as a representation but as an object around which a certain dis-cussion was organized, and second, that the “flexibility” of the wall is what allowed the “participation” of the villagers in the design of the mechanism of their dispossession and their “improvement”—which, in weakened form, is pretty much the case with planning in many contemporary cities. Tom McCarthy: That’s a great story. It reminds me of what Thomas Hirschhorn did at Documenta some years back: this big papier-mâché landscape mapping the thought of Georges Bataille. Your example is much more socially direct, of course—although, interestingly, Hirschhorn made his model in collaboration with an immigrant-worker community on the outskirts of Kassel. Both examples make tangible a set of abstract arguments (justice, law, agency, etc.). But then maps are always arbitrary and contested. The Situationists understood this arbitrariness and its implications. That’s why they remade maps by superimposing Algeria on France. The Surrealists, too. Their world map is hilarious: The United States is gone completely, and Mexico (thanks to the presence there of Frida Kahlo) is huge. My favorite map is Lewis Carroll’s from The Hunting of the Snark: It’s pure white, “a perfect and absolute blank.” [...]
