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Political Plastic
Interview with Eyal Weizman
In 2003, architect Eyal Weizman, together with Ra Segal, curated the exhibition A Civilian Occupation1 in which work by photographers. journalists and architects was combined to present a revealing account of the role of architecture in the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Censored by the Association of Israeli Architects, the exhibition demonstrated the potential of this provocative new perspective for shifting debate on the occupation from interminable moral polarisation to forensic examination. Cutting through the endemic euphemisms and evasions surrounding the debate on Israel/Palestine with a carefully-calibrated assemblage of theoretical analysis, interdisciplinary research and reportage, Weizmans book Hollow Land2 expands this project, traversing material and historical cross-sections of the occupation and its territorialities to reveal how the governance of space meshes with disturbing new modes of political and military power. Weizmans architectural practice with Sandi Hillal and Allesandro Petti, Decolonizing Architecture, now proposes direct interventions into formerly colonized spaces with a view to defusing their political charge. In our interview with Weizman we discuss Hollow Land, Decolonizing Architecture and his recent work which extends and develops forensic architecture, the evolving theoretical framework that has emerged from his work.
1. See R. Segal and E. Weizman (eds.) A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (London: Verso, 2003). 2. E. Weizman Hollow Land: Israels Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007).

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 COLLAPSE: In Hollow Land you speak of two distinct senses of the word architecture: Firstly you demonstrate that a reading of even the apparently mundane details of architectural projects under the Israeli occupation, reveals political investments, and the use of architecture as part of an extra-military arsenal. But this materiality of architectural structures per se embodies, develops and sustains the novel political structures which give the second sense of architecture: that of the architecture of the occupation itself, the political process seen as an enterprise of architecture the construction, partition and organisation of (geographical, municipal, domestic ) volumes. We have long known that in being attentive to the practices of architecture and the way that they construct space, we can shed light on aspects of political life; how would you dene your distinctive theoretical approach to this problem? EYAL WEIZMAN: In terms of the second sense, perhaps in a rather abstract way it is probably best to think about this question as bearing on the relation between forces and forms. The assumption is that although in a nondirect and complicated manner historical events are registered in material organisation. Therefore we might be able to glean from a forensic investigation of material spaces and traces the history that produced them, that is folded into them. The question is: How are histories inscribed in spatial products? And how can we make the object speak them? So this meaning of architecture is a tuning in to the complicated reciprocal relationship between forces and forms. The term forensics is really important here: Forensics, from the latin source, means in front of the forum: it is the 268

Weizman Political Plastic art and skill of speaking on behalf of objects narrating convincing histories from objects, convincing enough to become what we call evidence to a forum of citizens or judges. Forensics is one of the methods that allows objects (or things) to speak, or a way of listening to them. So there are in this sense two interrelated sets of spatial relations folded into the term forensics: one is the relation between an event (or histories) and the spaces in which it is registered, and the other is the relation between the spatial representation of history and the forums within which it resonates or which it creates. This forensic dimension of architecture can be understood as an act both of claim-making and forum-building. And it is the methods for exposing this that I was concerned with in HL: A process of forensic architecture that is different from but analogous to, say, forensic archaeology, where one engages in a reading of how historical processes become form, and how, therefore, forms or material organisations are diagrams of the spatial, political and military relationships within them. Forensic architecture thus aspires to reconstruct and narrate undecided or controversial events through a close study of the material properties of the spatial/urban realities in which these events are registered; to turn mute spatial products into active material witnesses that can be interrogated (and cross-examined). In this sense, the architecture in forensic architecture designates, not the product of building design, but an expanded eld of spatial investigation and enquiry. On the other hand, the adjective forensic can be understood as the very condition that enables architecture to become a diagnostic technique, whereby immaterial forces are made manifest and thus proclaim themselves. 269 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 But this process is elusive and contingent. Rather than assuming any straightforward mechanical materialisation of time, or a conclusive, transparent, objective apparatus of truth claims, its reading is inclined towards complex, sometimes unstable, even contradictory, accounts of events. Its more like the murky ground of a fuzzy forensics of probabilities, possibilities and interpretations. Nevertheless, there is a very simple mechanical way to imagine this relation and I think that the Wall is a good example, because it could be read as one of the clearest mechanical manifestations of the relation of forces to form. C: This is the Separation Wall, which serves as an emblem for one of the fundamental contentions of HL: that frontiers and borders can no longer be understood as rigid cartographical boundaries separating territories in two dimensions, but must be understood in three dimensions and as elastic and dynamic. Following Danny Tirza, you describe the Wall as a political seismograph gone mad, registering not only state and international intervention, but also micropolitical actions. EW: Yes, you have a construction line of fortication that is elastic, and you have the politics of the Israeli-Palestinianinternational political system, on the micro and macro levels: The international community, Palestinian resistance actions, and to some degree the residents of the Wall Zone Palestinians, represented by human rights lawyers are all constantly pushing and pulling at the path of this line as it is being built, routing and rerouting it. So that when it dries out which is the term human rights lawyers give to its state after all conicts have been registered in its layout 270

Weizman Political Plastic when it solidies, you can see in every twist, turn and detail of the route itself the material imprint of forces, as they are applied within a particular human and topographical terrain. Now, thats a rather clear way of imagining the relation between forms and forces, but there are many other different ways in which forces are mediated into form, in what is always a complex process, that I hope also to capture or at least to note. Whether or not it achieves it in nished form, the book sets itself the task of thinking this materialisation of time, and it sees matter not only as an imprint of relations, but as itself an agent within the conict. The wall is initially a media space. Walls really do not stop ows. They modulate ows across them differentiating them: money, people, electricity, sewage, water its a system of lters and modulations. And the act of crossing is also always registration, recording, etc. Ultimately, if you want to cross the wall, if youre determined to cross it, you can; there may be a delay but it can be crossed. If not I wouldnt be able to go to work, which is on the Palestinian controlled side of the wall. So its path is seismograph of political forces, and also it registers all things that pass it. C: An actor as well as a register. EW: Yes, the Wall is an archive in these two senses of the term: its an archive of all movements or ows across it, and its own movement (its constant transforming path) is an archive of the formative force elds surrounding it. Because the Wall is one of the objects that registers its environment, environmental forceeld political environment it can read this in a forensic sense. 271 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 So, you can see the politics in things, politics as it is articulated in the relationship between processes, agents, etc. across the territory. Consequently, if we dare to look at politics as a material politics, then architectural methodology is useful to analyse it. Politics cant, of course, simply be reduced to it; but it is incredibly useful to take it seriously, in terms of that kind of forensic relation. C: If we refrain from saying that this second sense of architecture is more profound it is because of your refusal to treat empirical architectural details as semiotic epiphenomena, mere representations or signs of supposedly deeper infrastructural determinants. This seems to provide the key to your conception of the relation between the material practices of architecture and the idea of an architecture of the political. You write of the wall that The logic of the late occupation is not represented by but embedded and saturated within these structures. The Wall itself reiterates some of these built physiognomies.3 The two senses of architecture, therefore, are intertwined in a variety of ways, through the multiple examples of embedding, saturation, reiteration, that HL exposes. EW: Each material, in each example Im writing of, has its own characteristics with regard to the way in which it invites politics to participate in it. So on one hand you could say the Wall is equivalent to a sensitive photographic lm. But not in the sense that it is a representation. Things are printed, not on it (in a symbolic politics of grafti) but in it; its form is a snapshot of certain changing relations.
3. HL 153, our emphasis.

Weizman Political Plastic But this has to do with the way it is constructed: the modular units which allow certain kinds of transformation, the way in which some material characteristics determine how it sits on the topography itself. So there are so many features through which politics traverses an object. Some of them are underground in the porosity of rock, the ow of water, in what kinds of plants grow on western side slopes, because the rain clouds come from the west, and drain back to the west. Ultimately, what goes into that kind of layout are so many natural, political, articial, micropolitical forceelds, inuences in which the Wall itself participates as an agent, in this kind of complex ecology of things. We must nd the language to open up political process to these elds of knowledge. I nd that otherwise politics is too often reduced to a kind of intentionality you always need a culprit ... in whose mind an evil scheme is emerging. C: Then the heroic task of resistance becomes that of unveiling the ultimate centre, the face of power behind the complexity EW: Yes, so a lot of the time accounts of the wall are just boringly simple Ariel Sharon drawing a line, Israel wants to do this, and so on but they leave out everything to do with material characteristics. Also the problem of the path of the Wall has to do with the negotiation between security and agriculture: Agriculture is what forms the basis of the Israeli High Court of Justices calculations of proportionality, i.e. the amount of wheat or olives that can acceptably be traded for security. This kind of negotiation is interesting politically, because it means that the Israeli structures are designed not according to their 273 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 explicit political rhetoric, but through actual self-imposed moderations that are the only way they can achieve success. The moderation process of the occupation is more interesting than its naked application of power, because it is in this moderation that calculations take place: life versus security, water versus control, and, beyond these simple binaries, a whole eld of calculations through which the occupation takes shape. This disturbs the simple logic of security, which is very politically determined. The minute this logic is enacted, it becomes a matter of counterbalances all sorts of other agencies come into the picture: farmers, but also underground water, land consistency, real estate interests, community leaders, topography, environment and environmentalists, latitude, height, old graves all these things, all these agents. C: This vision of the multiple agencies involved seems to minimise the role of the state: its agency need no longer be central to understanding the process of colonization. Nevertheless isnt the rhetoric of naturalisation the notion that the process is in some sense the natural outcome of multiple intersecting forces precisely that invoked by the State to dissimulate its power behind an appearance of disappearance? EW: Yes I agree, but its not a case of disappearance, its more a case of the strategic withdrawal of the state: it appears and disappears. Theres a real strong state form, constantly balancing these forces, and then acting visibly and declaring their suspension. Gaza is evacuated we could say, its worse, its still occupied. Nevertheless, something has been done Israeli settlers, by an act of 274

Weizman Political Plastic state, immediately lost the right to live there, their lease on the ground was terminated. So, the power of the state is that it is withdrawn and than reappears. the interplay between chaos and order is extremely useful to it. This might be a particular feature of this colonization: the withdrawal of the state, the appearance of a weak state, the creation of a degree of chaos, are necessary means for having acts done outside and despite the law (international law and Israels own) and outside state agreements and obligations. The complexity of multiple agents and the chaos of the frontier is very much manipulated by this state power. The paradox is that the state must suspend its own laws and rules so as to expand the territory, to land grab and kill, in order to create what it calls pacication, upon which its laws can again be applied. That is, the law has to be disregarded (not suspended) to be later enacted only when the frontier is pacied. Think about the American frontier with its genocides which make way for the normal rules of democracy to apply. This is the reciprocal relation between the frontier and the centre: the centre provides the means, the infrastructure, and when necessary the military support, and the groups are allowed to operate outside state purview. But the frontier also demands things of the centre politics as material reality is undertaken in the frontier. The state, which likes to think its in control of this process, is also more or less dragged behind these processes. It imagines it can control these forces, and sometimes it can, but often the facts on the ground completely steer and shape its politics. So this poses an historiographical problem: whether the settlement geography was planned or whether it emerged out of this interaction, without any kind of top-down planning and clear political will. This historiographical 275 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 problem is similar to that of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 47-8. How did it happen that at the end of the war there were 750,000 Palestinians outside of state borders by design or through a collection of contingent singularities? These debates mirror the historikerstreit the battle of historians over the Jewish genocide in Europe: To what extent was Hitler a weak dictator Kershaws thesis and the beginning of extermination a process of cumulative radicalisation born out of chaos? Mommsen Bozart and Kershaws model is that, although we imagine the Nazi state as very organised, bureaucratic, and so on, what happened was born out of bureaucratic and operational chaos: partly through the fact that that the people who could manage state affairs the Prussian states highlytrained bureaucrats were replaced by the Nazis, who had no experience of government, and who started competing for the attention of Hitler; and partly through the nature of Nazi organization, which was kept deliberately overlapping, with internal conicts and lack of clarity so that each will have a clear relation only to the top rather than laterally. According to this model, when the killings start in 1940 in Poland, there is a level of ambiguity in the orders to the killing groups, the Einsatzgruppe: Each one takes initiatives, tries to outank the other, tries to out-radicalise to get the attention of the Nazi commanders, and from within this chaos a project starts emerging, before it is fully theorised. And the same discussion happens around the aforementioned problem of 1948: There is no question that the Zionists pushed the Palestinians, the Arabs, out of the country; the question is how this reality was created. And military historians such as Benny Morris say, in fact it starts with the battle over the roads certain tactical necessities, 276

Weizman Political Plastic some commanders needed to secure roads and didnt want people and houses by the side of the road, and they start expelling some and later they realise that people leave easily, and that they can make them leave and then slowly that tactic is mimicked by others, until it emerges as a state project of ethnic cleansing and expulsion. On the other hand there are people like Ilan Pappe, who looks for the decision and the organisation in all this, arguing that from 1919 on there was a planned Zionist project of expulsion that was prepared in advance and carried out under orders, from the top down. Now, the cumulative radicalisation theory is nourished by functionalist approaches to history. And although I do not fully subscribe to that approach, I can see how it might be useful in describing the emergence of the elastic and ever-changing forms of the occupation. This is not to exonerate Zionism to say that its a kind of natural process of expulsion. On the contrary. It diffuses responsibility, meaning that every unit or cell in the military knows exactly what to do without an order, it internalises ideology, allowing every single soldier or commander to know what is expected of him without getting the order, or every member of settlement youth to know what to do. So that in fact, if you want to discuss it in terms of responsibility, of liability, it creates a wide diffusion. Its not a matter of separating decisions and their executors the politics runs through the body of every soldier on the ground, the decision runs through them. So ultimately, we can think through functional analysis without making this very easy correlation between naturalisation and exoneration. When ideology operates thus, theres no need for speech. But its not ideology in the modernist sense that we usually understand 277 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 C: And, to go back to HL, what part does architecture (in the rst sense) play in this ideological diffusion? EW: In the organisation of space that we discussed: how does space emerge, how are the networks of settlements formed, what dictates the path of the wall ? Space is not a representation of a politics that would already otherwise exist in the abstract. Politics operates and ows through and in spatial practice. The architects are only part of a widely-diffused set of spatial practitioners, but without the architectural discourse and practice that was developed around the problem of building in mountain terrain, without the development of serial modes of construction, and without the complex principles that I describe in the book as optical urbanism, much of the aggregation of construction would not have been able to take place as it has. C: There are however also rather straightforward examples of the ideological (in the usual sense) charge held by architecture for instance the question of the use of nativism as an aesthetics in settlement architecture. In HL you describe the construction of dwellings that sustain national narratives of belonging,4 with the cladding of Israeli dwellings with Jerusalem Stone and the omnipresent red roofs. This indicates how strongly such imaginary authenticity can (at least for those who have an investment in it) outweigh historical and geographical fact, thus allowing an architectural cosmetics to speed along the process of naturalising occupation. You emphasise the
4. HL, 26.

Weizman Political Plastic way in which, with the reducing thickness of the facing required, this became increasingly admission that this was cosmetic signier that blostered the sacred identity of Israeliness, retrospectively creating historical authentication and a biblically-supported sense of permanence.5 this being one way in which political exigencies inuenced and promoted debates within Israeli architecture. Another aspect of this which you discuss is the merging of archaeology into architecture, with new buildings being supposedly only renewed expressions of a rootedness in the earth, and thus guaranteeing the discovery of a meaning of the earth.6 EW: In the latter case there is a kind of literalness in which what is archaeologically preserved is extruded into a volume, and that is very much to do with a directly Heideggerian inuence, or variations on Heideggerian theory, which become apparent in architectural discourse throughout the seventies and eighties; and if you think of it, it makes a lot of sense. Dwelling replaces living meaning is brought back into the anonymous environments of modernism, national causes of solutions replace housing solutions. Here a variation of this discourse comes to resolve the embarrassing paradox of Zionism: In a sense, what could be more unrooted than the early architecture of Zionism, the white boxes, the international (often mistakenly called Bauhaus) style, the kibbutz whose construction on ubiquitous pilotis seem to hover over the surface. So much of the architecture of the colonies around Jerusalem is one of the earliest playgrounds of postmodernism worldwide.
5. HL, 28-37. 6. HL, 41-5.

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Which is what brought to Palestine such luminaries as Louis Kahn and Isaiah Berlin. But I dont know if now the answer to that is a return to abstract modernism C: As we have discussed, you see the occupation developing less as the carrying out of a top-down Zionist state project, which would organise space according to a set of pre-given principles, and more through a selective laissez-faire policy, exploiting the structural advantages that chaos presents, that has allowed a multiplicity of agencies commercial, religious, communicational, infrastructural, economic, pressure-group, legal, etc. to produce a complex interaction, enacted in part through the organization of space, that tends to justify the processes of occupation. Much of what you do in HL is to try to balance the description of the Occupied Territories as a sort of political plastic which does not respond to a single source of power with simultaneously trying not to yield to the temptation to vindicate this strategy of naturalisation. Can we detect here an isomorphism with Capitalism, which, as we have repeatedly seen, can hardly be combated through a head-on refusal or attack on any set of hardwired ideological principles, but employs and absorbs whatever is available, through a similar sort of structured chaos, until it seems there is no alternative to its second nature? EW: I would say yes I think that, lets say, postmodern capitalism and the postmodern occupation are close relatives. We just need to historicise this: It is signicant that the occupation occurs in 67 which Chris Marker called the real 68 a time of antistatism, political complexi280

Weizman Political Plastic cation and fragmentation, and of the introduction of new modes of technological and organisational networks. That mode of capitalism and this mode of occupation are both historical products, and being historical products, are prone to transformation. There is no eternity in any of them. There is a way in which the hysteria of the loss of any ideological alternative articulated by political power has led to this vision of capitalism as eternity i.e. as nature, outside of history. But I dont see how this idea may survives ve seconds of thinking. C: Isnt the problem vis--vis capitalism rather how to overcome its apparent natural status and the resignation that it invites? EW: Natural is being outside history, in a way that came from nowhere, goes nowhere, will remain the same. I think that what we perceive now is a very distinct stage in the history of articulated class, labour relations, trade relations, that articulated this period in that way. There is no historical necessity in that historical product; it is political practice that can make it transform or do away with it. C: Very well, but another aspect of this isomorphism might be as follows: You have spoken of 1967-8 as a turning point for an understanding of the occupation. How would the shifts happening in this time tie together the emergence of what we might broadly call postmodern philosophy, and the movements that you track in HL? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 EW: As I said, I agree with Chris Marker on one thing : that 67 is the real 68 he wasnt referring to the occupation, of course, but its true, one bleeds into the other, in all sorts of military practices and architectural styles. Part of the settlement project is initiated by Jewish communities from the States that come with a strong tradition of civil disobedience, of protest movements; and they protest against the state, they ght against this ossied labour-run state, their ideal is to break the state apart, and they do it with the zeal and some of the style of the sixties generation. Sharon is a state agent who breaks the state the frontier man who despises state order and replaces it with action that legislates in retrospect. Sharon appears as, and behaves like, a 68er with his raids, his kind of trip is going on unauthorised attacks to the desert, shutting off communication, killing, moving, swimming in the sea, you know, whatever, killing hostages, hes in this wild violent orgy. Thats the violent face of the antistatism of the sixties and seventies. C: He inhabits smooth space ! EW: Hes one of the embodiments of 68. So again, its not like a secondary manifestation of 68, like maybe 68 wouldnt have happened without this world The other project that exists is third-worldism, which is broken in 67. So okay, I dont want to put Israel at the centre of everything yes, its Prague, we saw the tanks coming, we understood the Soviets werent so good but the other project tiermondism, that is broken. So, you become NGOs, you become Green, this or that. But this is a moment where those histories are like engines moving each other. 282

Weizman Political Plastic You cant see that kind of face of capitalism as if its the background to the occupation, or the years of Israel of very signicant prosperity at the end of the sixties, which is actually partly the motor of the transformation of the left. Im going back to what we said at the beginning: Its not something on which its registered, its part of it, its creating that. What collapses in 67 is not the West Bank, thats a minor story. Pan-arabism collapse with 67, and this is the loss, Nasser goes his project is dead, America enters the Middle East and there is huge capitalization an immediate undoing of political relations in a way that creates a hugely complex market. So again, its not only what happened in the West Bank the whole Middle East transformed in 67. Pan-arabism, the utopian social semi-communist nationalism that Nasser invented, was replaced with what only now becomes apparent as liberal pan-arabism, on other kinds of networks. So in effect its a moment of cultural, economic, technological transformation, and we absolutely have to see the occupation as happening in that moment. C: Further considering your forensic approach, I wonder whether we ought to try to distinguish it from something like an imagined geo-psychoanalysis, aiming to excavate the unconscious material forces at work behind symptoms such as separation walls, barriers, blockades, closures, road blocks, checkpoints, sterile areas, special security zones, closed military areas and killing zones.7 Chiey because the latter might begin to sound like a species of psychogeography. And indeed you begin Hollow Land with a quote from Patrick Keillers London,
7. HL, 6.

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 a lm dear to that group of writers that developed this now-popular set of ideas and practices concerning the relation of thought to place. However, the account given in HL seems to tell in very important ways against the tenets of this literary creed. Psychogeography often seems to suggest that merely by reconceptualising the spaces around us, by (in the words of your Keiller epigraph) revealing the molecular basis of [] events, we can effect some sort of transformation and to this extent is essentially a form of magical thinking. But even if understanding the past can help us to see into the future, no such kind of interpretive magic is going to transform the circumstances of the Palestinian people. What is the key to preventing psychogeographical insights from descending into a kind of literary indulgence, and transforming the results of research such as yours into pointers for concrete action in the present? EW: Yes, I think the book is written very much as a polemic against this and Lefebvrian theory, which situationists and psychogeographers refer to, and which really dominates very much critical spatial and geographical discourse on Palestine. For me, the really big problem with this type of literature is that it perceives space as simultaneously too soft and too hard. It is too hard in the sense that the built realities the work of planners and architects and builders is solid, xed and unchangeable. It is too soft because often it sees the possibility of agency existing in the mere literal subversion of the existing, like a de Certeau kind of walking-is-reading-is-writing So you have the domain of planners, those evil guys who designed Paris top-down. Paris is always the conceptual 284

Weizman Political Plastic framework with which this discourse works, and in the West Bank this makes no sense! A hard city, with planners who make straight lines, Paris as a material/political reality has dominated critical post structural discourse, but in applying the spatial theory of Paris to a dynamic frontier you miss its essence of interplay and a certain levelling of agency that operates within it. You cannot solve the problems of Paris on the hills of Palestine! ... And then you have the domain of subversion and resistance, where what is left for our citizens to do is to reimagine, to exist in a playful manner, to walk different paths, and so on. For me this is too soft, and the perception of the planners is too hard. What you do by melting them into each other, by seeing a kind of continuity, an elastic space, you basically put all action on the same level. This levelling is something very important: The Palestinian resistant, the militant, the Israeli planner, the human rights activist, the corporation the interaction between them is very multivalented, very complex call it a forceeld, but it is also an interaction that produces and reproduces space, and for this you need the constant presence of all these actors. Basically, you have to imagine a different consistency of space: rather than space that is paradoxically too hard and too soft which can only mean resistance that ends up soft and oppression that is too hard you need to imagine a common plane, gelatinelike, on which those forces are simultaneously existing and interacting. Of course, this raises another problem, which we have to acknowledge, a political question: how to think resistance when it becomes one of many formative forces of the making of the spaces of the occupation, playing in this arena and according to these parameters. 285 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Are oppositionary actions merely another formative force in the making of the realities of the occupation, and if so, how can we differentiate between this and effective, meaningful resistance? I will give you an example of weak oppositionary action that ends up reproducing the spaces of occupation. Recently I went to meet a representative of the Quartet in Palestine. You know, the US decided it doesnt have enough power to inuence Israel, so they joined with the EU, the UN and the Russians they formed the Quartet. These are four powers that could destroy Earth four times over; and they have put Tony Blair at the head of this joint organisation. And this guy is Tony Blairs representative he is based in the American Colony Hotel of Jerusalem, has a entire oor there. So he invited my partner and I, and we start drawing up visions, and I talk and talk, and at some point I realize that he is somewhere else hes saying, this is all good and ne but actually listen, what we can do now is to propose architectural plans to improve the checkpoints, to make them more comfortable. This is what he wanted to talk to us about. C: The problem is posed exclusively in terms of amelioration. EW: Exactly, so where is the moment of transformation? The other day the former Israeli Chief of Staff said something really derogatory about Zionist leftwing organisations and human rights groups, said they are traitors or something similar, and the current Chief of Staff said no, without these organisations there would be complete chaos! Which we 286

Weizman Political Plastic can understand as meaning that the occupied areas would be ungovernable; and that therefore these groups are also part of the government of the occupation, these organisations are most important for the Israeli project so at this point you just send back your membership card ! C: So once youve conceptualised these agencies as interacting on the same plane, how can you dene resistance except as participation in the same game? EW: If resistance is not complete withdrawal, if it is articulated through some form of action, the question is whether there is a mode of action that might contain the possibility of a break rather than the constant elasticity of material organisation and political evolutions. This becomes a philosophical question which I can only attempt tentatively to deal with. We must think of it in terms of the question of the Lesser Evil, which is the subject of my new book.8 I here try to engage in philosophical and theological concepts, but only insofar as they emerge spontaneously from the problem of how this interaction on the same plane can actually create a new plane, can lead to a transformation, or a phase transition that is, something beyond the rules of the game that already exists. C: The problem recalls the polarisation on the question of the event that we nd between Badiou and Deleuze: Very schematically, Badiou excludes the possibility of novelty emerging from the actualised situation or state of things,
8. Il male minore (Rome: Edizioni Nottetempo, 2009); The Lesser Evil (London: Verso, forthcoming 2010).

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 since the event is precisely something that cannot be read in any of the terms of the situation, and which is drawn out through a subjective delity to a universal truth that cannot but be seen as impossible in those terms. Whereas Deleuze seems to suggest that an effort made against our spontaneous acceptance of the terms of representation or actuality (the image of thought), might enable one to read the landscape of virtuality itself, and prospect within the innite resource of the virtual for intense singular points or lines of ight that can be actualised. Of course, the charges which advocates of these positions make against each other are respectively, that of resigning oneself to a piecemeal re-engineering, re-formation, of the existing world; and that of waiting, militating, for nothing less than a decisive miracle. EW: This bears a lot on the problem; if one is limited to either of these respective camps, it is rather clear where it places me, as it seems to me that the necessary transformative event could only emerge out of our political practice. There is thus a double problem, one of waiting for the arrival of a new political eld, as the condition of a new life, the other that everything one might do would be already in the name of the occupation, because it is carried out under the occupation, in its endlessness. So we need to wait, or to pray, maybe a god can save us I guess one of the ways to complicate this further is to think of the idea of political action in relation to the end, which is embodied in the term that everybody uses, that of the solution the two-state solution, the one-state solution. Yes, in fact, these days the politics of Palestine or the politics on Palestine is indeed locked between two 288

Weizman Political Plastic positions end versus endlessness one demanding the end of occupation and the other claiming that no end is in sight and that there is a certain endlessness of conict. This latter point of view is not about what solution to take this one is good and this one is not good, or the details of a solution, but rather about the idea of whether or not a solution is possible at all. If a solution is not possible, this position goes, we are trapped in an endless present, a historical process without culmination. And without a solution we have to be able constantly to manage the conict. The question then becomes that of nding means of government and the technology much of it spatial technology with which to manage this endless present But we should make it clear that the search for the end was itself always part of the mechanism of the occupation. Every form that the occupation has taken since 1967 has been presented as an attempt to end the occupation. Perhaps the only constant thing about the occupation is that there are always attempts to end it. The geography of the occupation is thus physically shaped by the attempts to end the occupation, or to put it differently, to give shape territorially, economically, and politically to its never-ending end. We are constantly on the brink of having the occupation nished (another small push, another initiative ) and all actions on the ground (building settlements/evacuating settlements in Gaza, building outposts/removing the outposts, erecting the Wall/changing the path of the Wall) are undertaken in relation to this impending end (why dont they let us end it?). Each of the specic constructs that HL unpacks could be understood in relation to the concept of the politics of the (impending) 289 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 end. When discussing the end and looking at the ground, we tend to see yet another layer of physical apparati added to the growing piles of destruction. The occupation is nally nothing but its constant end Therefore we need be suspicious of anyone that runs under the slogan end the occupation they must have yet another spatial apparatus in mind. So this is how I would approach your question: It is by changing the frames of this end, this solution, replacing its terms with others, that we can give rise to another political reality and physical reality. And so, in the context of the research ofce I co-direct with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, what we have done is to replace that word solution with a slightly old-fashioned, very banal word, but one we think is right: decolonization.9 Which in fact refers to principles, to values, to a process rather than to an end-state. Decolonization doesnt mean people need to be moved from one place to another, but it rather means a system of inequalities must be undone, and the rest follows. The system in question is related to the land, to the law, to the military, to anything thats structured by colonialism. In Hollow Land I presented Decolonizing Architecture as a chapter that deals with a project for the Palestinian ministry. Prior to the evacuation of the ground settlements in Gaza in 2005 I was part of a team speculating on different uses for these colonies/suburbs when in Palestinian hands. Issues of architecture were then at the centre of geopolitical debate, with the main question being how to understand and reuse the single family suburban home. The Americans saw its subjectivation potential, with Condoleeza Rice suggesting that its being inhabited as a suburban home by Palestinians
9. See the Decolonizing Architecture project, at http://www.decolonizing.ps/.

Weizman Political Plastic would bet an American agenda that seeks to civilize Gaza by creating a broad-based middle class. In the end, the Israelis opted for destruction, part of the reason being the wish to deny an image of Palestinians living in homes of Jews (demonstrating a certain reversal and thus reversibility of a Zionist project otherwise typied by the opposite). In 2007, I joined together with Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal, with a grant from the Hodenschild Foundation, to form a new version of the project, this time on the West Bank. We decided we did not want to work with the Palestinian ministry, which since 2006 is no longer an elected body. So we formed our own organization, which is independent, and we have an ofce in a house in Beit Sahour, a little town just east of Bethlehem, on the edge of the desert. Initially, we had to change the way that architectural practice works we turned the ofce into a residency. There are many volunteers: architects from Palestine, and internationals. And we run it also as an seminar, with readings and lectures. We hope that, and in some cases see how, our designs start to help in setting the stakes: Politicians or NGOs are using it to claim for land or to make a legal suit for various things. Architecture can become a tool in the political process. To explain the thinking behind this project, lets look at decolonization, and the other concept that might start to guide an egalitarian future in the context of Palestine: return (of refugees). Every return of refugees from where they have been expelled is already a return to the (over) built, a displacement from the rural that will seek a return to the urban; there is no longer a virgin landscape to return to, or else the search for the original landscape will entail horric violence. Like decolonization, return suggests a relation of deactivation and reversal, a relation to the past 291 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 and the future simultaneously; but there is no return to what has been lost, there is only a return to the built, and this return has also an explosive potential to articulate egalitarianism when one thinks about the transformation of realities on the ground. Therefore, by articulating our political action vis--vis that kind of principle, the principle of equality between Israelis and Palestinians across this area, I think this is a much better frame than talking about this state, that state, four states, or whatever. Ultimately thats not what is important. And therefore we think that there are moments of possibility in the present where one can start articulating the idea of equality, seeking to open another trajectory. And these are those moments of the real transformation of the structure of the system itself. But one needs not wait for a miracle to start acting. You show that a relatively small part of the system say a settlement can be liberated, even as part of a compromised political process in relation to the politics of the present; when such a colony is unplugged from the political forces that charge it one may say that it becomes a banal suburb whereas right now such a suburb or colony is charged with the people who live in it, travel to it, come on the roads to it, the soldiers around it, electronics, and so on. It had power does the power that exists in the architecture of colonial exclusion remain in it like a residue, when it is unplugged? The problem is also how to use it in a way that does not reproduce, that really breaks, this relationship of power and form. So: articulated differently, inhabited differently. Not in a kind of soft way lets imagine were in a different world but how do you build something else from it that is real?.

Weizman Political Plastic This action could be accused of being part of the contemporary politics of oppression, but the question is whether there could be something in excess of this order; what is this excess? What other trajectory is it possible to open by refashioning the colonies, and why is it important? We maintain that by operating with the term decolonization, by demonstrating the possible other life that could exist within these moments of liberation, one might open a way to operate in the present in relation to a future that is much further away than the one-state/two-state thing. So its both immediate and very far. C: So the spaces despoiled by power represent an opportunity in so far as they become depotentiated in terms of the existing politics, and operate within this new political temporality. But does your speaking of excess reect a kind of materialist principle of hope (immanent, and set against both the hopelessness of the endless present and the redemptive hope of a solution): That (geographical, architectural) matter is ultimately innocent, that matter, at some level, can be decoupled from power? Isnt that a dangerous assumption? Is matter ever possessed of that kind of divine neutrality, beyond temporal political power? EW: I like your suggestion of a materialist notion of hope. The issue is of course about the residue that is left after this unplugging. This lingering residue is different in each case, with each building and/or military base. The task is to identify this power that remains, this charge, and to attempt to reorient it. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 C: The occupation seems to have continually identied geographical and topological contingencies, accentuating amplifying and exploiting them through architectural intervention. DA employs similar tactics, but in order to defuse colonial power. EW: Again, I think you can say that our aim throughout the project is not to simply undo the power and techniques of the occupation but to reorient them. For instance, we have permission from the Mayor of Beit Sahour to redesign a military base that was evacuated two years ago.10 It is a beautiful area overlooking the town (obviously) and the desert horrible but also beautiful. Its like a big fortress where soldiers piled earth continuously into ramparts until the top of the hill started looking like the crater of a volcano. And in there, in this place, by some uke of nature you know migrating birds travel through

Weizman Political Plastic Palestine on the way from Siberia to Africa, because they all travel through what is called the Syrian African crack; its a kind of navigation and migration route for them. And every year they return to specic hilltops. This is a fantastic spectacle of nature, where for several weeks in fall and spring you have tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of birds circulating in swarms in the air, and somehow landing on those points. One of them is this military base the Palestinians joke that the Israelis abandoned it because of a kind of Hitchcock effect! And in a sense our claim, the legal issue that we participate in because we designed that site, is not on behalf of people but on behalf of nature. We almost want to say, human rights, its claims and its regime is ridiculous here, its too late, and anyway its become part of the language of the occupation itself. So we use birds as the subject of rights in court, something that has rather confused the Israeli authorities. But as you know, this refers to the courts in mediaeval times where animals were standing trial. Our articulation of the idea of return here was a return to nature. C: An example of real naturalization ! EW: Or rather, using nature politically ... Were claiming it back for nature, and designing it simply to be abandoned and used by birds. We design not for a construction but for the controlled disintegration of the building, we accelerate or intervene in the process of its disintegration: Decay as a process of form-making in architecture. My partner Alessandro Petti is a student and a friend of Giorgio Agamben, and the later is sometimes involved in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

10. http://www.decolonizing.ps/site/?page_id=210

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 our discussions. He introduced his concept of profanation as a way of thinking the deactivation of the spatial apparatus of exclusion. Sacralisation follows the spatial logic of the separation of the sacred, when a system of exclusion simply moves down from the order of the divine. If the sacred, as a spatial practice, separates and secludes things out of common use, profanation is the undoing of this process. The dismantling of the power that exists. To profane signied a restoration of things to the common use. For example, one of the main interventions was in the grounds of the settlement Psagot, where our intervention sought to transform parts of this suburban colony into a nucleus of public institutions. We think that at present, our task as architects must be that of transformation of the existing; and in relation to the ground, it must be articulated in relation to the question of ungrounding, a form of construction that creates a different gestalt, a different gure-ground relation, between construction and the landscape. The question of ungrounding is really that the ground is a certain code, both at the operational and symbolic levels: the code of the city its operational logic and its ideology is in the rst fteen centimetres. We are not concerned with the changing of the buildings themselves. Architecture has dealt successfully with the problem of this transformation we know since the sixties that every structure is adaptable to any use the question that remains, however, is that of the surface itself. It is a thick surface in which occurs the designation of private and public, walk/drive/no walk, the relation between gure and ground, between the object and the surface on which it relies. So that is the challenge architecture is facing. And this is where DA intervenes. 296

Weizman Political Plastic C: When you come to rebuild these rst ve centimeters, what models do you rely on to avoid simply creating new problems by unilaterally imposing a new plan? Which agencies would be involved in the re-territorialisation? EW: In some parts of the areas we deal with, the regrounding is undertaken in a way that allows for multiple uses. We called it with situ studio in New York a smart surface a single ground surface area that could be used for driving, walking, growing. This is achieved by a variable density of paving elements produced from rubble. C: This is interesting in its relation to the philosophical discourse on the search for grounds, the Kantian task of properly grounding philosophy, followed by Nietzsche and others repudiation of this architectonic ambition. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Reversing Kants use of ground as a metaphor for philosophical security, could we could say that it is in fact, this very concrete sense, the ground the rst ve centimetres that furnishes us with certain political, social certainties? EW: Yes, as I mentioned before, the city is not spatially governed so much by its structures and buildings but rather by the way it organises and divides the surface. This is why is it essential to seek transformation not only in the buildings but rather in the ground itself; ungrounding is a certain liberation, we feel, from the prescribed order of planning at least part of it C: A key to the nature of the strategy of the occupation is given in one of the epigraphs to HL, where Mourid Barghouti speaks of the duality of intelligence and stupidity. This is a proposition with a double-sense, it describes a double obfuscation: You note throughout HL that the use of sophisticated theory has been a camouage acting to evade responsibility for what are, at base, brutal and murderous processes so that complexity provides cover for stupidity; at the same time, a wilful strategic stupidity and slowness in reacting has also proved useful for allowing irreversible processes to become locked-in which then must be retrospectively recognised (naturalisation). These things take place through very complex processes but, as you show, these processes are quite amenable to a theoretical analysis: so here again, the status of theory is ambivalent the insufciency of thought is professed at in order to resist a theoretical purchase on the complex reality of the situation, but theory is used where convenient to provide a sophisticated faade for brutal actions on the 298

Weizman Political Plastic ground. Was the application of postmodern theory by the Israeli military ever more than an alibi? EW: I dont think this question of theory is particular to the military. The people who most often apply theory, at least around me, are artists and architects. And I think sometimes theory does open up new sensibilities, without being translated literally. But theory, in the context of your question, belongs to a shift in sensibility; and military practice and theory produce, they go on producing in an oblique way, they move in relation to each other. Along with the technological possibilities that were opening up, and the organisational innovations, there were philosophical innovations coming from other sources early network culture for example. So they nd echoes in each other, one language gives rise to a term that starts reorganising things in another system, but usually according to the latters inner necessities and dynamics. So I think the answer is not to say, this or that manoeuvre is rhizomatic and that because military academies read about smooth space, they started walking through walls but rather that the necessity to walk though walls, arriving out of military developments, nds the language with which it can be articulated, explained, and thus extended. Incidentally, I thought I had found the rst manuscript about walking through walls in a nineteenth-century military manual of counter-revolutionary practices, but a colleague showed me recently that in Roman siege manuals, this system already existed In fact, its a natural thing to do if youre a solider and youre moving through the city. But obviously, what I think happened in this case is, the question was how you co-ordinate thousands of people that 299 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 are walking through the solid bulk of the city. To do this you need technology, not just theory; but to imagine that possibility is a leap. On the other hand, I write in HL that the language of theory was not necessarily used against the Palestinians, but was used in the internal conicts of the military itself that some groups within the military created a language that helped them to dene a common interest group within the military hierarchy, which then moved into a prominent position, with its disciples being promoted and gaining power; and then fell just like in academia: Its an organisation an organisation that kills; but with a similar sociology to any other organisation. C: Nevertheless, theory was used to sanitise, to bolster the illusion of precision and sophistication. EW: Of course. In a sense what is otherwise a brutal act against indefensible people, part of the mechanism of oppression, becomes a sexy, cool thing. But this is not all that is at stake. I did not appreciate to what degree that article would have an effect in Israel. The ofcer Aviv Kokhavi who was talking about the room is your interpretation11 threatened to sue myself and the journal that was to publish a translation of this chapter. He cited three alleged mistakes in the article, he took on the biggest law rm in Israel the one the deals with libel issues for the Haaretz Daily that the military could afford him, asking that we remove his name from the article. I really wanted to go to court, because I would have liked to have interviewed him again
11.See HL, Chapter 7.

Weizman Political Plastic in this context, on issues the events of that morning whose exposure might contribute to a better understanding of the history of the occupation. So I wanted to go ahead, but he nally backed off. Now, his demand was that I take his name out, and the editor of the journal a very important journal in Israel, Theory and Criticism who wanted to publish the piece suggested we might take the name out, and even that it would be better for the critique if the name were not mentioned. But here we realised something very important: although theres an existing group of very good academics and writers, a structural analysis, or a post-humanistic attitude still prevails, where individuals and individual responsibility dont matter, where names are not mentioned. So that in fact you can say practically anything radical in academic organs without censorship, but the problem starts when you marry a kind of investigatory journalism with theory. You can nd many theoretical writings on the occupation that mention hardly any names! My work, I think, has these two machines in them, journalism and theory, and I name names. So this started a whole debate about how to write theory into a political event, as a resistance. When one writes into the event and when one investigates a particular scenario, one must write about people that are still acting, about a crime at the moment it is undertaken, exposing and analysing simultaneously. In this sense, libel suits are in fact the indication as to the effect that this writing is having nobody cares when you write against Zionism in general, but naming names and places and units and actions intervenes within the system itself. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 However, whereas newspapers, obviously, have the means to defend against libel suits, academic journals do not. So we must nd new platforms and new ways of writing or ways to secure the legal backing to allow us to write the way that is necessary; otherwise wed always be put off by the threat of libel. We need to change the way of writing criticism into the event, and for that you need to combine a certain journalistic forensics with theory; to do it differently, you need a different technology of writing opposition. There needs to be an invention of a different way of doing things. Who needs this journal, if they cant take the risk, if they back down at any threat. C: Theres perhaps the illusion that theory can intervene without taking any of the risk thats involved. EW: Yes, speaking to other academics we are rather immune. We must face the risks, and this involves all sorts of state retaliation and also of course the nancial risk of libel. At rst, I was willing to go and represent myself, but the journal said, we are also cited on the legal suit, so we have a lot to lose. Its the journalism plus the theoretical frame that did it, it was the journalism in the theory, and this is what I think is important, that there is something that moves the theory along with it, and it does two different kinds of work simultaneously. C: In order to be effective and transformative theory needs to rethink the relation between the abstract and the singular actually-existing objects and people its not enough to position theory on a higher plane, leaving it to the reader to apply it themselves. 302

Weizman Political Plastic EW: Yes, it leaves open questions critical work sometimes tends to assume another convinced agency that will be called to action, rather than taking the action itself. C: You suggest that even if Israel/Palestine presents us with a unique type of political space,12 nevertheless [t]he architecture of Israeli occupation could [] be seen as an accelerator and an acceleration of other global political processes, a worst-case scenario of capitalist globalization and its spatial fall-out.13 As you write: Exported globally [] Israeli practices and technologies have connected the uniqueness of the conict with worldwide predilections to address security anxieties through circulation management14 Not forgetting, of course, that the situation in Israel/Palestine has had a premier role in stimulating the events at created this climate of fear in the rst place. Could you pick apart for us these two terms accelerator and acceleration: In what ways can the occupation be read as an augury for our future, and in what ways has it materially contributed to actually effecting and accelerating that future? EW: Its now an established dogma to say that Israel/ Palestine is a laboratory for weapons, technologies of population control, software wars, and so on. But the question is how does it proliferate: How is it that weve seen bits that look like the Wall in Iraq exactly the same section and similarly with checkpoints, etc.
12. HL, 15. 13. HL, 9-10. 14. HL, 154.

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Does a company go out there and sell it? Not always, or not exactly. Sometimes there is a direct transfer, a corporate or military transfer. But most often, actors in distinct places all draw from a single pool of images that exist through the media. Israel/Palestine is, in bytes per square metre or words per square meter, one of the densest places in the world. It has become a formation of the global consciousness. And very often, security ofcers and resistance borrow through mimicry its not necessarily that he was trained by an Israeli, he just exists in the same culture of which those images are part, and which they form. And then again there are other institutional ecologies, in which various levels of relations and ideas are exchanged; ecologies in which the Israeli military is only one of the nodes. Now what I realised recently, in the next piece that I wrote, Legislative Attack,15 is that the important laboratory here is not necessarily the technological development of weapons, how to kill, how to attack. Theres a much more important front where intervention is meaningful and inuential. And that is intervention on the level that affects our perception of what is tolerable, what is acceptable. And I think from one conict to another, we push it, its an elastic line. There is an elastic line that is constantly being drawn with every action undertaken, the line between what is and is not tolerable, what we will tolerate being done to other people. The momentary state of (also elastic) International Law is a diagram of the tolerable in this context. I feel that the Gaza attack is now redening these limits. And the question is really how Israeli attacks themselves legislate laws in space. In a sense violence directed at a gray area of the law shifts the elastic limits of the law, so violence
15. At http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/legislative-attack.

Weizman Political Plastic itself legislates. Given an undecided legal issue, if it can be attacked with enough guns, you produce a precedent that might shift the terms of the law. So the violence is directed simultaneously against the Palestinians and against the law. And I think that this is the most signicant aspect of the laboratory. People now can tolerate a situation where one state puts barbed wire around a million and a half people and counts the calories in food trucks as they enter and exit, arguing about how many calories a Palestinian man needs and therefore how much potatoes, rice, milk they should let in basing this on the very minimum that would account for them staying alive. So this is the laboratory. Its like the Milgram experiment, where they asked people to send an electric shock How much pain do you allow yourself to inict? How much will be still tolerable not by the victims, of course, but by others who are watching. C: The law conceived as a drawing of the line gives way to something more like the Wall; International Law can be pushed and pulled by the same forces and events that shape the Wall. EW: Yes, it belongs to the same elasticity that is the hallmark of this occupation. C: And you take up this question of the tolerable in The Lesser Evil, where you discuss the transformation of political questions into matters of accounting in which the justication offered for actions is not intrinsic, but appeals to a calculus of harm in which, a quantitative line having been drawn as to what is unacceptable, anything one 305 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

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COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 notch below this (which you satirically symbolize with the number 665, just one short of 666 ) become, given the supposed constraints of the situation, unquestioningly accepted. EW: In LE, Im much more interested in the very techniques of forensics itself. Here, the relationship between space and law what constitutes an evidence, how in the last few years a transformation has occurred by which evidence takes a central place, turning into what might be called a material witness will be unpacked through very detailed and intense case studies. And all this around the background discussion of the moderation of harm. Addressing the notion and dilemmas of the Lesser Evil emerges out of a set of problems encountered in HL. As we discussed at the start of our conversation, HL developed a distinct spatial imaginary in which, via the category of elasticity, space is understood as a political plastic the sum total of forces that operate on and within it which forces could thus, to some extent, be read by examining it. But within these elds of conicts, there grew another powerful agency. Besides the military and other state agencies, the wider eld of contemporary conicts includes corporations, the media and, signicantly, independent organisations and humanitarian and human rights NGOs. So the immediate question is: What is their role in the production and maintenance of the spaces of colonisation and their mechanisms of control? Furthermore, this was a personal question, since my own work was produced through interaction with various agents within this conict, including an (already rather cautious) engagement with the human rights organization Btselem. So a discussion about 306

Weizman Political Plastic the notion of the moderation of harm, through the culture of human rights and humanitarianism, was in place. Some theoretical propositions on this issue that were only outlined in Hollow Land, and some relatively marginal characters in the spatial drama it unpacked, have been expanded in LE. These issues and characters have stepped forward to take centre stage. It is as if the footnotes of a previous work have climbed above the line, to make a new book. This idiom of the Lesser Evil captures much that goes beyond the issue of human rights and humanitarianism; but for them the idiom functions as a sort of vernacular. It seemed to me that, as a form of political expression, the Lesser Evil has become so deeply naturalised in political speech and culture that it seems to occupy the place previously reserved for the term good. The problem of the Lesser Evil is famously concerned with a necessity for a choice of action in situations where the available options are or seem to be limited.The condition by which this choice is articulated afrms an economic model embedded at the heart of ethics one according to which various form of misfortune can be calculated as if they were mathematical algorithms, evaluated, and acted upon. The problem of the Lesser Evil presents a closed economy, in which one cannot question the system that produces and distributed its evils its a system that presents itself as one with no outside. Under its aegis, politics appears as a mathematical minimum problem: how to reduce to minimum the evils generated as the collateral effect of necessary actions. Of course, the problem of the Lesser Evil has its origin in the classical philosophy of ethics and in early Christian theology. In the latter the problem was articulated through the concept of the tolerated sin. But the question still casts 307 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 a long shadow on the politics of the present. Recently, it has been continually invoked in the states effort to govern the economics of violence in the context of the War on Terror, and in private organisations attempt to manouevre through the paradoxes and complicities of opposition action and humanitarian aid. C: How do these developments relate back to the spatial and architectural concerns of HL? EW: Within these elds, the politics and culture of the Lesser Evil has engendered its own technologies. These technologies of lesser evil are technologies with a distinct spatial dimension, an architecture that is articulated in the mobilisation and production of new types of spaces, spatial apparatuses and means of spatial analysis. C: And how has your methodology developed from HL to LE ? EW: In LE I seek to investigate the politics, ideology and culture of the Lesser Evil, both theoretically and empirically, through micro-scale intenseforensic probes of three controversies, each of which is also a spatial controversy. Each is concerned with a specic spatial apparatus, technique, or a set of spatial problems, where humanitarian and military logics intersect; and each is narrated through a protagonist (the relief camp as a media space in Arendt in Ethiopia, the topographical model as an architectural/legal representation through which a certain legal/spatial interaction takes place in Best of all Possible Walls, and the question of the 308

Weizman Political Plastic forensics of rubble in Only The Criminal can Solve the Crime). C: These protagonists recall what you were saying about the importance of the embeddedness of journalism within theory, and the importance of naming names. The use of protagonists seems to take this a step further; the purchase of theoretical concepts on the real is secured by their demonstrable incorporation into actual people. EW: Yes, the new work takes the idea of embodied theory further I hope: three controversies that are each a moment of changing practices around the problems of the Lesser Evil. Perhaps the most interesting one concerns Marc Garlasco, who is Human Rights Watchs Expert on Battle Damage Assessment their forensic analyst. His work demonstrates a certain transformation of the methodologies of Human Rights thinking: A shift from a close reliance on survivors to material forensics, a shift from empathy to science. As you know, empathy or testimony were the main trademarks of HR work as this suited an ideology that sought to position individual versus state. What Garlasco does is to try and read a certain system or order in the chaos of destruction. He is looking at ruins, discussed their form, looking at ways of destruction; he tries to differentiate between bulldozer destruction and controlled blast by engineers, aerial attack, tank re. He says I needed to paste together the battle story to recreate the chaos of battle minute by minute .... Now, Garlasco mentioned to me, in full frankness, that when hiring me in 2003 [HRW] must have known that I 309 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 was already involved in the killing of about 250 civilians in Iraq. Because before joining HRW as military analyst, Garlasco worked for seven years at the Pentagon. During the Iraq War in 2003 he became Chief of High-Value Targeting, which essentially meant he was a military target assassin for instance, in charge of killing Saddam Hussein and his leadership! A central part of planning these missions was to do with a calculus known as Collateral Damage Estimate, which establishes the right balance of civilian casualties in relations to the military value of a mission. The magic number was thirty, Garlasco explained to me when I met him. That means that if the computer came up with thirty anticipated civilians killed, the air-strike had to go to Rumsfeld or Bush personally to sign off. Anything less than thirty could simply go ahead. This estimation of civilian deaths was done using software called Bug Splat, that synthesised environmental factors such as the size of the building, its construction materials and techniques, the percentage of steel and glass in its envelope, the population density within and around it (varying according to the time of day), weather condition, and so on. These were calculated against factors such as the size and type of the bomb, its fuse and the direction of the attack. So, Garlasco had to study architecture, structural-engineering, and urbanism; the killings he planned were to be undertaken in peoples homes. If the aim is to use the minimum sized bomb to achieve the required effect, designing a bombing mission resembles a mathematical minimum problem. Such calculations are part of the very logic of this weapon a weapon that hits and legitimises, a weapon that kills legally. Garlasco stayed in the war although he didnt agree with it: Whether you agree with the aim of war or not it is 310

Weizman Political Plastic going to happen, he said, so I wanted to do it in the best way I could I had a responsibility to the pilots and the civilians. Responsibility towards the civilians! I didnt try to kill civilians, he continues, I focused on military targets and tried my very best every day to minimise civilian casualties as required by the Geneva Convention. The Question is, of course: Minimised in relation to what? Reduced from what number? After Baghdad fell, Garlasco left the Pentagon to take the job with HRW. HRW was the organisation that sent him to Iraq for the rst time. He had previously only seen the place on military screens. Garlascos credibility as a former Pentagon expert was used extensively in its press releases and the media, where he was often referred to as former Pentagon ofcer. And he has become the celebrity HR analyst. He has also been an extremely effective one: in Iraq, on torture, he helped McCain on the anti-torture regulations; he was in Lebanon during Israels attack, in Georgia during the Russian one, in Afghanistan again and again; his work lead to UN to ratify the agreement on cluster bomb ban. Now, paradoxically or not, it was his military past that gained him the visibility and credibility he enjoyed as a HR analyst. The Washington Post called him the man on both sides of the air war debate and he was often asked about crossing the lines. But did Garlasco really cross any lines? This metaphor might be misleading. Although Garlascos move from the Pentagon to a human rights organisation was understood by many according to the popular narrative models of a redemption story like a St. Paul whose sainthood is only as great as his sin this misses the extent to which, at present, humanitarians and militaries are intertwined in their methods and aims. 311 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

COLLAPSE VI 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Perhaps a better model to consider is the detective genre: like Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Hannibal Lecter the psychotic killer in whose mind lies the clue to solving and stopping ruthless murders. A genre in which a crime can only be solved by those that can think like criminals, by those that have been criminals. This was reected also in his forensic works: the collapse of buildings was the method by which he planned the assassination of the Iraqi leadership, and buildings rubble was also the means by which he would reconstruct the story of an attack for HRW. As he said to me, my forensics is a reverse engineering of the process of military destruction. C: With this example of embodied theory it seems we are close to the state of affairs Deleuze described in suggesting that a book of philosophy should be like a detective story (perhaps, in view of your forensic approach, CSI: Jerusalem! ); and that your protagonists are something like the conceptual personae who, he insisted, inhabit the theatre of philosophy and are necessary to the very functioning of conceptual thought. Only in the theatre of twenty-rst century warfare, the dramatis personae are real people who are the avatars of stranger conceptual formations than could be invented by any philosopher, and which reveal the sometimes grotesque frameworks within which this warfare is carried out. EW: But wait, there is more to the story Finally, although his work has really transformed the capabilities of HRW, on September 15 2009, the very same day of the release of the Goldstone report, HRW announced Garlascos suspension. A few days earlier some pro-Israel blogs publicised that 312

Weizman Political Plastic Garlasco collected Nazi-era memorabilia, and accused him of fetishism. Garlasco explained amongst other things that his geeky fascination with militaria (his fetish) only substantiates the fact he is a good forensic analyst. And I think he is right that forensics is itself a kind of fetish Fetish not in a Marxist or psychoanalytical sense, but in the sense that reading the event from an object always involves the excess that is within the object. The personal story of Garlasco stands behind the power of his forensics ... C: Finally, in the postscript to HL, you ask how architecture as a professional practice can be expected to learn from Israel/Palestine. Do you see any indications that architecture, in general, is beginning to take its political responsibility seriously everywhere, not just in highlyheated zones such as Israel/Palestine? EW: This is an architectural reference, of course Learning from Las Vegas. So its this moment of postmodernism where architecture needs to break the disciplinary barriers and learn from other things. But yes: I dont say its because of this book, but there is increased involvement of architects in territorial-political issues, yes. I dont know if thats a good thing yet C: If Las Vegas (as well as being the original location for CSI ) is the theme park of late capitalism, is Israel/Palestine the darkside Las Vegas ? EW: Interesting, Maybe the light side! The new Las Vegas 313 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31