israel-academia-monitor.com - Israelis in Non-Israeli Universities

So as not to overload your social calenders this week (remember your Interior Design Society is launching this Thursday evening at the Loft across the road), we’ve moved the lecture series to next week.

I’m very happy to announce for this special lecture we’ll be merging with the School of Architecture for the talk by Eyal Weizman next Monday 13 September. Eyal is a friend from Goldsmiths University London who has written certain key texts in the last decade relating spatial politics, philosophy and war. I first became interested in his work when reading his description of Isreali military warfare – where the battlefield is moved from the street into the interior, and the violent reprecussions of this on domesticity.

His writing urgently reminds us how fundamental the politics of space is to how we live, and while you might not see that a talk on the Occupied Territories and Architecture bares much relevance to your own studies, let me assure you that spatial politics defines what is important about what we do. I urge you all to attend it’s a great opportunity to have him in Australia. He’ll also be talking at the MCA on Tuesday 14th September and AIA on Wednesday (see poster)

Sam

Eyal Weizman is an architect and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his PhD at the London Consortium/Birkbeck College. Since 2007 he is a member of the architectural collective “decolonizing architecture” in Beit Sahour/Palestine.
www.decolonizing.ps Since 2008 he is a member of B’Tselem board of directors. www.btselem.org. Weizman has taught, lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide.

His books include The Lesser Evil [Nottetempo, 2009], Hollow Land [Verso Books, 2007], A Civilian Occupation [Verso Books, 2003], the series Territories 1,2 and 3, Yellow Rhythms and many articles in journals, magazines and edited books. Weizman is a regular contributor and an editorial board member for several journals and magazines including Humanity, Cabinet and Inflexions. Weizman is the recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize for 2006-2007 and was chosen to deliver the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Warwick 2010.

Political Plastic poster

"The Art of War: Deleuze, Guattari, Debord and the Israeli Defense Force"
Eyal Weizman

The Israeli Defence Forces have been heavily influenced by contemporary
philosophy, highlighting the fact that there is considerable overlap among theoretical
texts deemed essential by military academies and architectural schools
The attack conducted by units of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) on the city of
Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv
Kokhavi, as ‘inverse geometry’, which he explained as ‘the reorganization of the
urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions’.1
During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of
‘overground tunnels’ carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure.
Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were manoeuvring
simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few
would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s
streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells
and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes
blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as
‘infestation’, seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as
thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of
the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost
liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.

Contemporary military theorists are now busy re-conceptualizing the urban domain.
At stake are the underlying concepts, assumptions and principles that determine
military strategies and tactics. The vast intellectual field that geographer Stephen
Graham has called an international ‘shadow world’ of military urban research
institutes and training centres that have been established to rethink military
operations in cities could be understood as somewhat similar to the international
matrix of élite architectural academies. However, according to urban theorist Simon
Marvin, the military-architectural ‘shadow world’ is currently generating more intense
and well-funded urban research programmes than all these university programmes
put together, and is certainly aware of the avant-garde urban research conducted in
architectural institutions, especially as regards Third World and African cities. There
is a considerable overlap among the theoretical texts considered essential by military
academies and architectural schools. Indeed, the reading lists of contemporary
military institutions include works from around 1968 (with a special emphasis on the
writings of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Guy Debord), as well as more
contemporary writings on urbanism, psychology, cybernetics, post-colonial and post-
Structuralist theory. If, as some writers claim, the space for criticality has withered
away in late 20th-century capitalist culture, it seems now to have found a place to
flourish in the military.

I conducted an interview with Kokhavi, commander of the Paratrooper Brigade, who
at 42 is considered one of the most promising young officers of the IDF (and was the
commander of the operation for the evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip).2
Like many career officers, he had taken time out from the military to earn a university
degree; although he originally intended to study architecture, he ended up with a
degree in philosophy from the Hebrew University. When he explained to me the
principle that guided the battle in Nablus, what was interesting for me was not so
much the description of the action itself as the way he conceived its articulation. He
said: ‘this space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your
interpretation of it. […] The question is how do you interpret the alley? […] We
interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through and the door as a place
forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through,
because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the
doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner,
and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. […] I want to
surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win […] This is why that we opted
for the methodology of moving through walls. . . . Like a worm that eats its way
forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. […] I said to my troops, “Friends!
[…] If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From
now on we all walk through walls!”’2

Kokhavi’s intention in the battle was to enter the city in order to kill members of the
Palestinian resistance and then get out. The horrific frankness of these objectives, as
recounted to me by Shimon Naveh, Kokhavi’s instructor, is part of a general Israeli
policy that seeks to disrupt Palestinian resistance on political as well as military
levels through targeted assassinations from both air and ground.

If you still believe, as the IDF would like you to, that moving through walls is a
relatively gentle form of warfare, the following description of the sequence of events
might change your mind. To begin with, soldiers assemble behind the wall and then,
using explosives, drills or hammers, they break a hole large enough to pass through.
Stun grenades are then sometimes thrown, or a few random shots fired into what is
usually a private living-room occupied by unsuspecting civilians. When the soldiers
have passed through the wall, the occupants are locked inside one of the rooms,
where they are made to remain – sometimes for several days – until the operation is
concluded, often without water, toilet, food or medicine. Civilians in Palestine, as in
Iraq, have experienced the unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of
the home as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation. A Palestinian woman
identified only as Aisha, interviewed by a journalist for the Palestine Monitor,
described the experience: ‘Imagine it – you’re sitting in your living-room, which you
know so well; this is the room where the family watches television together after the
evening meal, and suddenly that wall disappears with a deafening roar, the room fills
with dust and debris, and through the wall pours one soldier after the other,
screaming orders. You have no idea if they’re after you, if they’ve come to take over
your home, or if your house just lies on their route to somewhere else. The children
are screaming, panicking. Is it possible to even begin to imagine the horror
experienced by a five-year-old child as four, six, eight, 12 soldiers, their faces painted
black, sub-machine-guns pointed everywhere, antennas protruding from their
backpacks, making them look like giant alien bugs, blast their way through that
wall?’3

Naveh, a retired Brigadier-General, directs the Operational Theory Research
Institute, which trains staff officers from the IDF and other militaries in ‘operational
theory’ – defined in military jargon as somewhere between strategy and tactics. He
summed up the mission of his institute, which was founded in 1996: ‘We are like the
Jesuit Order. We attempt to teach and train soldiers to think. […] We read
Christopher Alexander, can you imagine?; we read John Forester, and other
architects. We are reading Gregory Bateson; we are reading Clifford Geertz. Not
myself, but our soldiers, our generals are reflecting on these kinds of materials. We
have established a school and developed a curriculum that trains “operational
architects”.’4 In a lecture Naveh showed a diagram resembling a ‘square of
opposition’ that plots a set of logical relationships between certain propositions
referring to military and guerrilla operations. Labelled with phrases such as
‘Difference and Repetition – The Dialectics of Structuring and Structure’, ‘Formless
Rival Entities’, ‘Fractal Manoeuvre’, ‘Velocity vs. Rhythms’, ‘The Wahabi War
Machine’, ‘Postmodern Anarchists’ and ‘Nomadic Terrorists’, they often reference the
work of Deleuze and Guattari. War machines, according to the philosophers, are
polymorphous; diffuse organizations characterized by their capacity for
metamorphosis, made up of small groups that split up or merge with one another,
depending on contingency and circumstances. (Deleuze and Guattari were aware
that the state can willingly transform itself into a war machine. Similarly, in their
discussion of ‘smooth space’ it is implied that this conception may lead to
domination.)

I asked Naveh why Deleuze and Guattari were so popular with the Israeli military. He
replied that ‘several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaux became instrumental for
us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not
have otherwise. It problematized our own paradigms. Most important was the
distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of “smooth” and “striated”
space [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the “war machine”
and the “state apparatus”. In the IDF we now often use the term “to smooth out
space” when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. […]
Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are
enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roads blocks and so on.’5 When I asked him if
moving through walls was part of it, he explained that, ‘In Nablus the IDF understood
urban fighting as a spatial problem. [...] Travelling through walls is a simple
mechanical solution that connects theory and practice.’6

To understand the IDF’s tactics for moving through Palestinian urban spaces, it is
necessary to understand how they interpret the by now familiar principle of
‘swarming’ – a term that has been a buzzword in military theory since the start of the
US post cold War doctrine known as the Revolution in Military Affairs. The swarm
manoeuvre was in fact adapted, from the Artificial Intelligence principle of swarm
intelligence, which assumes that problem-solving capacities are found in the
interaction and communication of relatively unsophisticated agents (ants, birds, bees,
soldiers) with little or no centralized control. The swarm exemplifies the principle of
non-linearity apparent in spatial, organizational and temporal terms. The traditional
manoeuvre paradigm, characterized by the simplified geometry of Euclidean order, is
transformed, according to the military, into a complex fractal-like geometry. The
narrative of the battle plan is replaced by what the military, using a Foucaultian term,
calls the ‘toolbox approach’, according to which units receive the tools they need to
deal with several given situations and scenarios but cannot predict the order in which
these events would actually occur.7 Naveh: ‘Operative and tactical commanders
depend on one another and learn the problems through constructing the battle
narrative; […] action becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes action. […]
Without a decisive result possible, the main benefit of operation is the very
improvement of the system as a system.’8

This may explain the fascination of the military with the spatial and organizational
models and modes of operation advanced by theorists such as Deleuze and
Guattari. Indeed, as far as the military is concerned, urban warfare is the ultimate
Postmodern form of conflict. Belief in a logically structured and single-track battleplan
is lost in the face of the complexity and ambiguity of the urban reality. Civilians
become combatants, and combatants become civilians. Identity can be changed as
quickly as gender can be feigned: the transformation of women into fighting men can
occur at the speed that it takes an undercover ‘Arabized’ Israeli soldier or a
camouflaged Palestinian fighter to pull a machine-gun out from under a dress. For a
Palestinian fighter caught up in this battle, Israelis seem ‘to be everywhere: behind,
on the sides, on the right and on the left. How can you fight that way?’9
Critical theory has become crucial for Nave’s teaching and training. He explained:
‘we employ critical theory primarily in order to critique the military institution itself – its
fixed and heavy conceptual foundations. Theory is important for us in order to
articulate the gap between the existing paradigm and where we want to go. Without
theory we could not make sense of the different events that happen around us and
that would otherwise seem disconnected. […] At present the Institute has a
tremendous impact on the military; [it has] become a subversive node within it. By
training several high-ranking officers we filled the system [IDF] with subversive
agents […] who ask questions; […] some of the top brass are not embarrassed to
talk about Deleuze or [Bernard] Tschumi.’10 I asked him, ‘Why Tschumi?’ He replied:
‘The idea of disjunction embodied in Tschumi’s book Architecture and Disjunction
(1994) became relevant for us […] Tschumi had another approach to epistemology;
he wanted to break with single-perspective knowledge and centralized thinking. He
saw the world through a variety of different social practices, from a constantly shifting
point of view. [Tschumi] created a new grammar; he formed the ideas that compose
our thinking.11 I then asked him, why not Derrida and Deconstruction? He answered,
‘Derrida may be a little too opaque for our crowd. We share more with architects; we
combine theory and practice. We can read, but we know as well how to build and
destroy, and sometimes kill.’12

In addition to these theoretical positions, Naveh references such canonical elements
of urban theory as the Situationist practices of dérive (a method of drifting through a
city based on what the Situationists referred to as ‘psycho-geography’) and
détournement (the adaptation of abandoned buildings for purposes other than those
they were designed to perform). These ideas were, of course, conceived by Guy
Debord and other members of the Situationist International to challenge the built
hierarchy of the capitalist city and break down distinctions between private and
public, inside and outside, use and func'tion, replacing private space with a
‘borderless’ public surface. References to the work of Georges Bataille, either directly
or as cited in the writings of Tschumi, also speak of a desire to attack architecture
and to dismantle the rigid rationalism of a postwar order, to escape ‘the architectural
strait-jacket’ and to liberate repressed human desires.

In no uncertain terms, education in the humanities – often believed to be the most
powerful weapon against imperialism – is being appropriated as a powerful vehicle
for imperialism. The military’s use of theory is, of course, nothing new – a long line
extends all the way from Marcus Aurelius to General Patton.

Future military attacks on urban terrain will increasingly be dedicated to the use of
technologies developed for the purpose of ‘un-walling the wall’, to borrow a term from
Gordon Matta-Clark. This is the new soldier/architect’s response to the logic of ‘smart
bombs’. The latter have paradoxically resulted in higher numbers of civilian
casualties simply because the illusion of precision gives the military-political complex
the necessary justification to use explosives in civilian environments.
Here another use of theory as the ultimate ‘smart weapon’ becomes apparent. The
military’s seductive use of theoretical and technological discourse seeks to portray
war as remote, quick and intellectual, exciting – and even economically viable.
Violence can thus be projected as tolerable and the public encouraged to support it.
As such, the development and dissemination of new military technologies promote
the fiction being projected into the public domain that a military solution is possible –
in situations where it is at best very doubtful.

Although you do not need Deleuze to attack Nablus, theory helped the military
reorganize by providing a new language in which to speak to itself and others. A
‘smart weapon’ theory has both a practical and a discursive func'tion in redefining
urban warfare. The practical or tactical funct'ion, the extent to which Deleuzian theory
influences military tactics and manoeuvres, raises questions about the relation
between theory and practice. Theory obviously has the power to stimulate new
sensibilities, but it may also help to explain, develop or even justify ideas that
emerged independently within disparate fields of knowledge and with quite different
ethical bases. In discursive terms, war – if it is not a total war of annihilation –
constitutes a form of discourse between enemies. Every military action is meant to
communicate something to the enemy. Talk of ‘swarming’, ‘targeted killings’ and
‘smart destruction’ help the military communicate to its enemies that it has the
capacity to effect far greater destruction. Raids can thus be projected as the more
moderate alternative to the devastating capacity that the military actually possesses
and will unleash if the enemy exceeds the ‘acceptable’ level of violence or breaches
some unspoken agreement. In terms of military operational theory it is essential
never to use one’s full destructive capacity but rather to maintain the potential to
escalate the level of atrocity. Otherwise threats become meaningless.
When the military talks theory to itself, it seems to be about changing its
organizational structure and hierarchies. When it invokes theory in communications
with the public – in lectures, broadcasts and publications – it seems to be about
projecting an image of a civilized and sophisticated military. And when the military
‘talks’ (as every military does) to the enemy, theory could be understood as a
particularly intimidating weapon of ‘shock and awe’, the message being: ‘You will
never even understand that which kills you.’

Notes
1 Quoted in Hannan Greenberg, ‘The Limited Conflict: This Is How You Trick Terrorists’, in Yediot Aharonot; www.ynet.co.il (23 March 2004)
2 Eyal Weizman interviewed Aviv Kokhavi on 24 September at an Israeli military base near Tel Aviv.
Translation from Hebrew by the author; video documentation by Nadav Harel and Zohar Kaniel
3 Sune Segal, ‘What Lies Beneath: Excerpts from an Invasion’, Palestine Monitor, November, 2002; www.palestinemonitor.org/eyewitness/Westbank/what_lies_beneath_by_sune_segal.html 9 June, 2005
4 Shimon Naveh, discussion following the talk ‘Dicta Clausewitz: Fractal Manoeuvre: A Brief History of Future Warfare in Urban Environments’, delivered in conjunction with ‘States of Emergency: The Geography of Human Rights’, a debate organized by Eyal Weizman and Anselm Franke as part of ‘Territories Live’, B’tzalel Gallery, Tel Aviv, 5 November 2004
5 Eyal Weizman, telephone interview with Shimon Naveh, 14 October 2005
6 Ibid.
7 Michel Foucault’s description of theory as a ‘toolbox’ was originally developed in conjunction with Deleuze in a 1972 discussion; see Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, ‘Intellectuals and Power’, in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. and intro. Donald F. Bouchard, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1980, p. 206
8 Weizman, interview with Naveh
9 Quoted in Yagil Henkin, ‘The Best Way into Baghdad’, The New York Times, 3 April 2003
10 Weizman, interview with Naveh
11 Naveh is currently working on a Hebrew translation of Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture and
Disjunction, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1997.
12 Weizman, interview with Naveh

Interior Design Lecture Series Monday week 7 : Eyal Weizman