Potential, freedom and space: reflections on Agamben’s potentialities in the West Bank

Abstract

A special kind of infrastructure has emerged around the West Bank, which lays bare Israel's capacity to spatialise its colonial power and to constantly solidify its presence. Reading these spatial devices through Agamben's work, this paper proposes a reflective attempt to read this site of contemporary occupation through a “resistant” lens as a novel take on Agamben's spatial topology and political aesthetics. The paper offers preliminary remarks on the search for alternative theoretical construction of Agamben “potentialities”. The paper allow speculations on the heterotopian nature of Israeli produced infrastructures, perceived at once as actualised potentials in space, and spaces of potential.

Keywords:

• Agamben
• conflicted spaces
• Foucault
• heterotopian infrastructures
• Israel
• potentiality
• West Bank

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Marc Angélil and Stephen Cairns for their close readings of this paper in its draft form and their insightful feedback. And Stephen Graham and Vanesa Castan-Broto for allowing us to present an earlier version of this work at the American Association of Geographer's Annual Meeting.

Notes

1. Worth noting several attempt to collate and archive heterotopian reflections with and beyond Foucault stardom. See for example http://www.heterotopiastudies.com or http://thefunambulist.net

2. The concept of Offshore Urbanism has been borrowed from Alessandro Petti, who developed the notion in depth, using Dubai as a case study (see Petti, 2008).

3. The Oslo Accord has led to the division of the West Bank, which has transferred the administrate of a significant portion of the Palestinian territory to Israeli (all “Areas C”). With this, different planning systems between Palestinians and settlers emerged (see military order 418, which would “later permit the extensive development of the settlements, alongside the imposition of severe building restrictions in Palestinian communities” (Bimkom, p. 39). The same military order annulled local and district committees in all of Area C, creating a centralized power instead: the Israeli military regime (Bimkom, p. 40). See references in: Bimkom (2008) “Prohibited Zone: Israeli Planning Policy in the Palestinian Villages in Area C”, Bimkom: Jerusalem

4. Master planning has been central to Israel's project since 1948, when Bauhaus graduate Arieh Sharon developed the “Sharon Master Plan”: a single vision and layout that guided a series of colonial mega-projects throughout the 1950s until the late 1960s. Its objectives to host 2,650,000 habitants were met in 1966. The Allon Plan (Yigal Allon, Minister of Agriculture and Director of the government Settlements Committee at the time) that followed in the aftermath of the 1967 War would become the second installment in this legacy. Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman documented more recent plans for over 45 settlements in the West Bank in an exhibit titled A Civilian Occupation, which was first presented at the Storefront Gallery for Art and Architecture in New York City, in 2002. An eponymous book followed, which contains an interview by Eran Tamir-Tawil with master planner Thomas M. Leitersdorf, a graduate from the Architectural Association. He is responsible for the masterplans of Ma'ale Edummim and Emmanuel; two of the largest Israeli settlements in the West Bank (see Segal and Weizman, 2003).

5. Decolonizing Architecture's project entitled The Red Castle and the Lawless Line explores this anomaly and the potential that lies within it. The project was presented for the first time at the 4th International Architecture Triennale of Oslo in 2010 at 0047 Gallery. It speculates on the speculative strategies inside the liminal spaces of Areas C as territories. The presentation of the exhibit is available at: http://0047.org/exhibitions/view/55

6. The concept of “imaginative geography” was first developed by Edward Said, and explained at length in Derek Gregory's (2004) The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq.