American Association of Geographers (AAG) Conference, New York City
Panel: Infrastructure Shocks and the Politics of Urban Life: Crisis, Security & Control
Co-Presented with Camillo Boano
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Frederich Nietzsche pinpointed the dialectic between a good and a bad use of competition and virility, where the bad sought the destruction of the adversary, the good meant respecting the adversary while seeking to outdo them. The expansive literature focusing on the competition between Israel and West Bankers epitomizes this dialectic. Israel has developed a complex system articulated at the intersection of these options; it has manufactured a series of ingenious infrastructures by constantly extending its reach, simultaneously aiming to reduce the potential of its adversary.
This paper proposes to build on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, introducing the notion of heterotopian infrastructures. Acknowledging that we have entered “an age when space is presented to us in the form of relations of emplacement” (1967), our aim is to expose ways by which Israel’s military-urbanism has transformed the social and physical networks in the Occupied Territories through a spatial reconfiguration provoked by heterotopian infrastructures. We are proposing an analytical reading of a subset of infrastructures in an attempt to reveal how these have accelerated the separation of West Bankers from their freedom to act, and of Israel from its freedom to not act. Following this argument, we aim to introduce Giorgio Agamben optimism in the complex discourse of violence and architecture broadly.
This extreme case where spatial interventions are no longer developed for the territory but against it lays bare the critical importance of infrastructures in shaping networks within territories governed through differential politics.
