Essays
On 25 April 2015, I participated in a panel entitled 'Fact, Fiction and the In-between' at the Art in General What Now? symposium on the Politics of Listening, organized in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.
A book that collates the discussions which occurred during that symposium has now been published, and my talk, entitled 'How To Do Things With(out) Words', which dealt with redacted documents from the war on terror, is on pp.48-53.
Collage by Buntu Fihla
I have an essay out in Chimurenga's excellent magazine, Chronic. I've liked the work Chimurenga has done for a long time, so it was an honour to be asked to contribute.
I wrote an essay about the UN mission in South Sudan, wilful forgetting, and the fantasies of international observers. You can read it here, or below the fold.
Read More
I have an essay out in the catalogue of Jenny Holzer's exhibition, War Paintings, which is running at the Museo Correr in Venice, from 7 May to 22 November. The exhibition was curated by Thomas Kellein, and the catalogue is published in cooperation with the Written Art Foundation.
You can purchase the catalogue here, or you can read my essay here. An earlier version of the essay was published by Media-N, and could be read here.
The essay begins:
Behind the canvas, the water looks cold and unforgiving. It is as if the words were written onto ice crystals, black on blue, and where the canvas is still dark and liquid, I have to step closer in order to read them. Only when I lean in can I see the file number at the top of the page, (0062-04-C | D 369-69278), which indicates that the painting is based on a government document. It is difficult to read the words.
Fig I. in (JIHAD) time, 2014, oil on linen, 57 x 44 in. / 147.3 x 111.8 cm. Text: U.S. government document. © 2014 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.
Slowly, I make out the handwritten lines that begin page 99 of the U.S. military’s report on the actions of the Special Forces personnel that beat and burnt eight prisoners in Gardez, Afghanistan, before dousing them with cold water and sending them out into the snow and ice. It begins: “I that my Renown is mentioned in (JIHAD) time I was a childe.”
Fig. 1. in (JIHAD) time, 2014, oil on linen, 57 x 44 in. / 147.3 x 111.8 cm. Text: U.S. government document. © 2015 Jenny Holzer, member Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Used with permission.
I have a new piece out in Media-N, on Jenny Holzer's redaction paintings. A version of this essay is also forthcoming in the catalogue of Jenny Holzer's 'War Paintings' exhibition, currently on display in the Museo Correr in Venice. The catalogue is edited by Thomas Kellein, and is being produced in collaboration with Frankfurt's Written Art Foundation. You can read the piece at it appeared in Media-N here.
This is the beginning of the piece:
Behind the canvas, the water looks cold and unforgiving. It is as if the words were written onto ice crystals, black on blue, and where the canvas is still dark and liquid, I have to step closer in order to read them. Only when I lean in can I see the file number at the top of the page, (0062-04-C | D 369-69278), which indicates that the painting is based on a government document. It is difficult to read the words.
Slowly, I make out the handwritten lines that begin page 99 of the U.S. military’s report on the actions of the Special Forces personnel that beat and burnt eight prisoners in Gardez, Afghanistan, before dousing them with cold water and sending them out into the snow and ice. It begins: “I that my Renown is mentioned in (JIHAD) time I was a childe.”
A version of my Grammar of Redaction, which was exhibited at the New Museum's Temporary Center for Translation in Summer 2014, was published in Archival Dissonance: Knowledge Production and Contemporary Art (I.B. Tauris/Ibraaz, May 2015). You can read the entire grammar here.
Over at the excellent Creative Time Reports, I have an essay out about the conflict in South Sudan, the United Nations, and the weather, with photographs by the wonderful Jérôme Tubiana.
You can read it here. This is how the essay begins:
February 28, 2015. Chicago, U.S.A.
For months the park below my apartment was a white sheet, the trees pencil drawings on a blank canvas. Winter coats Chicago, and the cold contours everything. Whatever may separate me from the millions who live here, for the long months of winter, we are together, struggling against a wind that makes me feel like I am wading through water. Now though, the snow is beginning to melt, awaking angry patches of red earth. Spring has arrived, and no one is helping anyone else get a car out of the snow. Life is no longer a question of how to bear conditions beyond our control. People’s postures have changed. They walk upright; they can plan again. The city opens up, and with it comes the promise that we can move in space and not simply sit at home, stuck in time.
Sitting in front of this prelude to spring, my morning takes me to South Sudan, where I spend much of my life. The Sudan Tribune is running a story on the United Nations (UN), which is setting up a sanctions program to target the leaders of the groups involved in the civil war. The conflict, which began in December 2013, sets the government of Salva Kiir, the sitting president, against his former vice president, Riek Machar, and his rebel force. A leaked report on the conflict—of dubious authenticity—recommends excluding both men from a future transitional government, which the report proposes should be overseen by the AU and UN. Only four years after the international community congratulated itself on South Sudan’s secession from Sudan, it is having second thoughts. My inbox contains a litany of NGO reports demanding transitional courts and accountability for war crimes. Historians may no longer agree with Thomas Carlyle that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men,” but they certainly didn’t tell the journalists and politicians. Reading the news from afar, one would be forgiven for thinking that the fate of South Sudan depended on the actions of just a few men—21st-century Napoleons—and that life was simply a matter of their intentions, unconstrained by the world around them.
Skype sounds. It is a friend in Juba, South Sudan’s capital, saying hello. I have only one question: How is the weather?
I have a new essay out in Onsite 32: Weak Systems. It is about Beaumaris, Wales, the British class system, and Brecht, amongst many other things. Read it here. This is the beginning:
The excavator made short work of the sheds. Its power shovel easily broke through their corrugated iron walls, rusted by a century of sea spray, to reveal piles of old fishing tackle and the remnants of half-built boats. Amid the destruction, debris from the sheds fell onto the smooth stones of the beach. The sky had the same green-grey hue as the pebbles, as if God had run out of colours in Anglesey and painted this Welsh island with the murky remnants of his palette.
Further along the beach, a woman is walking her dogs. They sniff at the water’s edge, eagerly searching for a gift offered up by the sea: a small crab perhaps, or else Mr Jones’ unwanted office lunch, tossed out of his car window as he drove along the winding seaside road and now returned to dry land by the tide. The woman is searching, too. Her head is bowed down, as if in prayer, and her eyes scan the water’s wake. She bends down, picks something up, and cradles it in her hand. It’s a shard of porcelain, with fine black ink work depicting a castle, hidden under a hazy glaze of blue, yellow and red. It could be a page from a children’s colouring book, hardened by the sea. ‘Children,’ Walter Benjamin wrote, ‘learn from bright colours, because the fantastic play of colour is the home of memory without yearning, and it can be free of yearning because it is unalloyed.’
She looks towards the sheds.
A Grammar of Redaction. As part of the New Museum's Temporary Center for Translation (Summer 2014), I submitted some materials from an ongoing book project, How To Do Things Without Words, which looks at the aesthetic logic of redacted documents from the American War on Terror. A few pages of the grammar are on display as part of the exhibition. I also wrote a longer grammar analysing some of strange linguistic categories to be found in these documents, as well as a Phrasebook, that contains excerpts from the texts that I discuss in the grammar. You can download both below.
A review of The Lover of the Hand
We in Baghdad have our differences, I know. The dust had not even settled over al-Balkhi's disagreement with Ahmad ibn Fadlan over whether the known geographical world can reoccur again in perfect form, before Ali ibn Sahl Rabban al-Tabari saw fit to reignite the debate with the Christians over whether the Trinity can be understood through human perception.
Despite these differences, my reader, about one thing we can all agree. The perilous doctrine of acquisitionism has no place in our land.
Read MoreIn summer 2013, I took a trip with Tony Craze, my father and a fellow writer, to Gurs, the site of a former internment camp near Pau, France.
We are now writing a book about the trip, On Passage, which is composed of a series of meditations on passage: for each stage of the trip, we both write about a moment of our journey, and then reply to the other's text. It is a conversation in fragments. Slowly, we are building up a patchwork of intersecting meditations on the theme of passage. Below the fold is an excerpt from one of my more recent entries. You can read an earlier excerpt here.
The Borderlands of South Sudan: Authority and Identity in Contemporary and Historical Perspectives is now out with Palgrave MacMillan. It was masterfully edited by Christopher Vaughan, Mareike Schomerus, and Lotje de Vries.
I wrote chapter three, 'Unclear Lines: State and Non-State Actors in Abyei.' You can read an earlier draft of this chapter here.
The concluding paragraph of the essay follows:
"In Abyei, border talk became a frame in which claims about the sovereignty and area of the territory were made visible. None of the actors, however, actually inhabited the frame. The Misseriya used the ABC and PCA to make a claim to Abyei that attempted to secure for themselves what are actually secondary rights to the territory; the NCP used border talk as a mask, to perpetuate a permanent precarity that allowed them to extract as much as they could from the territory. This is not to say, of course, that there are no rebound effects: as the Misseriya took up the maximal language of the state, they found their secondary claims (and the possibility of coexistence with the Ngok Dinka) eroded; by taking up the language of the state, they found their practical possibilities for action reduced to a binary between absolute ownership and absolute dispossession. The Sudanese state, on the other hand, continues to not require the demarcation of its own borders, and instead uses the discourse of state power as part of an apparatus that also sets up a structure of illegality: actors that the state can use, while disavowing their actions. Nomads acting like states. States acting like nomads."
You can order your copy of the book here
I have an essay in the new issue of Onsite Review. It is about witnessing, forensics, and the status of speech today. You can read it in Onsite, get an online subscription to the magazine, or read a version of the essay below the fold.
I.
In the spring of 1960, Mossad was in Buenos Aires planning the abduction of Adolf Eichmann, when it heard that Josef Mengele was in town. The agents running the operation didn’t want to jeopardise it by taking on another target: Eichmann was captured and Mengele slipped away; his remains were exhumed in 1985. In Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of a Forensic Aesthetics, Eyal Weizman and Thomas Keenan claim that Eichmann’s capture and subsequent trial inaugurates the ‘era of the witness’, in which giving testimony against the excesses of state power becomes a central feature of political life. In contrast, the analysis of Mengele’s skull, carried out in the 1980s, heralds the rise of a political emphasis on material objects and their forenisc analysis. As the figure of the witness loses authority in the 21st century, it is forensics—in architecture as much as in archaeology—that will increasingly take centre stage, legally and politically. It is not man that will testify, but his ruins.
II.
At Eichmann’s trial, the testimony of survivors was valourised not just as evidence, but for its own sake. In the aftermath of a Nazi regime that didn’t just attempt to destroy the Jewish people, but also to destroy any evidence of the destruction, the very existence of survivor’s testimonies was itself politically important.
With the beginning of the 1990s, however, human rights organisations began gaining visibility, as ‘the international community’—that motley crew—began to search for new justifications in which to house post cold war foreign policy. Witnesses began to testify at ad hoc international tribunals—for former Yugoslavia from 1993, for Rwanda from 1994—and their testimonies were recruited as justifications for military and humanitarian interventions. Witnessing was no longer an ethical end, but increasingly the prelude to political action.
III.
These days I spend hours going through the material coming out of Syria. Competing claims and endless YouTube videos. Everyone is a (potential) witness, even if what is witnessed is unclear. The witness of the second half of the 20th century was marked by a distance: someone survived, and brought back testimony. This distance is gone; the witness doesn’t live to tell the tale—he tweets it immediately.
The figure of the witness is now pluralised and immediate; its sanctity is eroded. The era in which the witness was valourised as a subject (for taking the risk; for surviving) has turned into an age in which the witness is nothing more than his subject position. The line between propaganda and witnessing is today incredibly hard to draw.
IV.
From December 2008 to January 2009, Operation Cast Lead destroyed around 15,000 buildings in Gaza, and killed approximately 1,400 Palestinians. The UN report on the Israeli assault, known as the Goldstone Report, is indicative of the decline of the witness. While the UN team carried out 188 interviews, much of the report is spent analysing the material traces of the war: the answer to the question of whether Israel’s attacks were proportional was sought in white phosphorous patches left on skin, and in the rubble of ruined buildings.
The speech of both Palestinians and Israelis was assumed—in the media if not in the report—to be biased and unreliable. Geospatial images of destroyed homes replaced Palestinian voices.
It’s not that people have somehow got less trustworthy over the last two decades; it is the political fora that have changed. In American politics, just as in polarised discussions over the occupied territories, speech is assumed to be a question of opinion and personal interest, and its reception is to be determined not by its content, but simply by where you stand when you speak: not so much the personal is political, as the reduction of politics to the personal. We each produce our own truth, and rest adrift in our weary solipsism.
V.
As the figure of the witness loses its power, new ways of capturing the earth become possible. Satellite images and computer models are called to the stand. In the border areas of Sudan where I work, George Clooney’s satellites keep dubious watch, witnessing from afar. The images will be sent back to forensic analysts in America, who will spend their nights searching for the tell-tale shape of a tank, or a group of tents that they will conclude is probably a military encampment.
In early 2013, I was in Washington DC, speaking at the State Department about the situation on the border. During a break, standing around clustered suits pumped with the latest developments from Mali, I spoke to a weapons expert, his PowerPoint slides crammed with photographs of small arms. He could read a bullet like a hieroglyph: the year it was made, the country of origin; then he would offer his interpretation — he told the history of the Sudanese border conflict as a history of guns and shrapnel, the details lodged in the surface of the earth.
Why, I asked him, is there such an interest in material history at the moment? They love this stuff, he told me, his arm encompassing the canteen of the State Department. It’s objective. What someone says. Ok. People say all sorts of things. You can’t argue with a bullet.
VI.
Linguistically, Weizman tells us, forensics derives from a technique of Roman rhetoric. The form consists in using objects to make an argument before a forum: prosopopoeia. Quintilian, in his Institutes of Oratory, clearly has high hopes, claiming that the form could “bring down the gods from heaven, evoke the dead, and give rise to cities and states.”
Who speaks for the gods today? If the Chinese bullets presented to the state department are signs, they index an arcane world inaccessible to all but a select few. All too often, the expert interpreting the object replaces an audience’s understanding of it. The rise in forensics seems part of Weber’s sad modern world, full of specialists and knowledge we can’t grasp, and a public willing to entrust questions of political and moral judgement to the happy hands of waiting technocrats, who will make neutral decisions based on the available evidence.
VII.
Figure I
Figure I is a diagram of witnessing. The success of the witness is contingent upon his speech establishing a link between his presence and the event in question, to be evaluated by a forum (a courtroom, the fourth estate), in the face of an interrogation. Forensics (Figure II) works differently.
Figure II
The object of forensics doesn’t exist outside of a particular forum: dust is just dust until it is evidence of the blast pattern of an Israeli missile. The interpreter’s aim is to establish a link between the object and the event, and deliver a compelling interpretation, again to be evaluated by a forum, in the face of an interrogation. One can, in this diagram, either conclude that the object is fake, or the interpretation erroneous. Unlike the witness taking the stand, the object’s significance is already largely determined: the object-interpreter couplet can speak within a framework, but cannot challenge the very framework that creates the existence of the object.
VIII.
Forensics comes to prominence in international law and politics during investigations of the Argentinian dictatorship in the 1980s. Clyde Snow, who trained many of the people involved in these investigations, became a celebrity, identifying remains from Josef Mengele to Tutankhamen. He said: “bones make good witnesses…they never lie and they never forget.”
IX.
The rise of forensics is not limited to bone science. Forensic architecture, as Eyal Weizman defines it, “refers to the presentation of spatial analysis within contemporary legal and political forums.” Its capacity, as he sees it, is not to fetishise the object, but to demystify it.
Any building, Weizman says, “is an archive of power relations. In a sense the path of the [Israeli] wall is like a film strip exposed to politics…its message is its path, its materiality.” One of the stories he tells in his most recent book, The Least of All Possible Evils, is of the pyramids in Gaza. No, not those left by the ancient Egyptians, but those created through the encounter of a three-storey residential building and a D9 armoured bulldozer, which cannot reach the central pillars of the buildings, creating ruins that resemble pyramids. Weizman tracks, through the shapes made by the wreckage, the particular types of military decisions that leave such forms in the landscape. Forensic architecture, for Weizman, is a critical practice that exposes the constellation of political forces that construct (and destruct) the landscape.
X.
Weizman writes that much of the Goldstone Report was indebted to precise forensic work done by a Human Rights Watch analyst, Marc Garlasco. In one Human Rights Watch report, Precisely Wrong: Gaza Civilians Killed by Israeli Drone-Launched Missiles, the language is militaristic:
“The drone-launched missiles detonate above the ground, which creates a narrow, relatively shallow crater from missile parts not involved in fragmentation hitting the ground.”
This technical analysis is accompanied by an assessment of whether—given the precision of Israeli weapons systems—a forensic architectural analysis of the ruins of Gaza is commensurate with a proportional use of force by the Israeli armed forces.
While Garlasco was eventually forced to resign from Human Rights Watch following a furore over his collections of Nazi memorabilia, another aspect of Garlasco’s history drew less controversy.
Prior to joining Human Rights Watch he worked for the Defence Intelligence Agency in the Pentagon, and was in charge of High-Value targeting during the second Iraq war. The American military wanted to ensure that its airstrikes would be judged proportional. Because proportionality in international law is contextual, the magic number arrived at by the Pentagon was 30. If it were probable that more than 29 civilians would be killed by an airstrike, the final decision over the attack would have to be made by Rumsfeld or Bush.
Little comfort for the civilians.
Garlasco’s job was to ensure that the strikes killed less than that. Using software similar to that used by architects, he analysed the probable effects of bombs on concrete and steel, and estimated population densities in the areas about to be struck. By altering the angle a bomb would hit a building, the time of day the strike occurred, and hundreds of other variables, he attempted to ensure that the strikes were ‘proportional’. Bombing becomes, in Weizman’s words, ‘the design of ruins.’
Increasingly unhappy with the way the war was being run, and facing controversy after a strike intended for ‘Chemical Ali’ — Saddam Hussein’s cousin — didn’t hit its target and left 17 people dead, Garlasco resigned, and soon after joined Human Rights Watch. His first assignment?
An analysis of the conduct of the Iraq war.
The report that came out was generally critical of the American campaign, though it did note that attempts to reduce civilian casualties in air strikes had generally been successful.
XI.
Garlasco’s story indicates some of the limits of forensics, architectural and otherwise. He employed the same forensic methods to assess American proportionality at the Pentagon (before the strikes) and with Human Rights Watch (after the strikes), and could see his mission equally fulfilled: both organisations wanted to ensure that American military strikes killed no more than 29 people. In an interview with Weizman, Garlasco says: “I can no longer say if this destruction was wrong or right. I can only say whether it was legal or illegal.” A question for the expert.
The legal and the technical supplant the ethical and the political. The risk for a critical forensic architecture is that just as the forensic analysis of Human Rights Watch is the post-facto double of the Pentagon’s analysis (checking results, improving design), so Weizman’s analysis of forensics threatens to enshrine the importance of the technocrats, even as it unveils the power structures sedimented in buildings.
A building is not a witness. A building allows for an analysis within a framework. The freedom of the witness is not just to call into question the very framework in which he speaks, but to speak of two things little mentioned in contemporary forensics. He can speak of truth, and he can speak of justice.
I have a new essay in the Fall issue of Fourth Genre. You can read a version of the essay here. Here is a snippet:
3.
Haider's encounter with the Dinka man reminds me of a photograph by Robert Capa, titled Near Namdinh. It is 1954. We are in Indochina, and it is war. In the background of the photograph, a French military convoy roars along a narrow road amid rice paddies, urgently trying to get through to Doia Tan. Even when frozen in a photograph, the convoy looks impatient. It certainly has a sense of time: orders to be received, places to get to, missions to be accomplished, battles to be won, and lovers to return to in France. In the foreground of the photograph, a man is plowing a field. His time is dictated by the seasonal rains, the demands of the rice, and his absorption in the rhythm of his plow; the way the strokes seem to flow so easily, if only he would allow the tool's weight to dictate the movements of his body.
Between the French convoy and the farmer, there is certainly interaction. Farms will be burned, and the farmer may soon join attacks on other convoys. The French and the Vietnamese are fighting for the same land. Yet between them, there is no conversation, no sense of values that might be commensurable. It is not just the absence of a shared language, but also the absence of shared sense of time in which an encounter might unfold. The French fought, and asked – why don't they play by our rules? Like all games, war has a beginning, and an end, and to play the game, one must agree on the rules--the strategic objectives, the play of forces--and on the sense of time inherent in the game. There was no start to this war, which knows both rice and commands, even if, for the French, there will definitely be an end.
Today, where there was once empire, there is now the UN. In an essay he wrote in 1994, the novelist Amitav Ghosh noted that while the UN represents the totality of the world's nation-states, and seeks to recreate the image of its membership wherever it goes, in the contemporary world, sovereignty resides precisely where the peace-keepers do not.
Sudan is full of peace-keepers.
Coming soon to a bookshop--or more realistically a university library--near you, and containing an essay by yours truly. I wrote chapter three, 'Unclear Lines: State and Non-State Actors in Abyei.'
Here is the concluding paragraph:
"In Abyei, border talk became a frame in which claims about the sovereignty and area of the territory were made visible. None of the actors, however, actually inhabited the frame. The Misseriya used the ABC and PCA to make a claim to Abyei that attempted to secure for themselves what are actually secondary rights to the territory; the NCP used border talk as a mask, to perpetuate a permanent precarity that allowed them to extract as much as they could from the territory. This is not to say, of course, that there are no rebound effects: as the Misseriya took up the maximal language of the state, they found their secondary claims (and the possibility of coexistence with the Ngok Dinka) eroded; by taking up the language of the state, they found their practical possibilities for action reduced to a binary between absolute ownership and absolute dispossession. The Sudanese state, on the other hand, continues to not require the demarcation of its own borders, and instead uses the discourse of state power as part of an apparatus that also sets up a structure of illegality: actors that the state can use, while disavowing their actions. Nomads acting like states. States acting like nomads."
It should be out in December 2013. You can order your copy here
In June 2012, I saw resplendent herds of cattle along the Sudan-South Sudan border. We toiled together along muddy roads as cloudbursts announced the definitive end of the dry season. The rain seemed to erupt from the very air around me, as if it had grown tired of its liquid burden. It was difficult to see more than five metres ahead.
What I could see were those cows. In Pariang County, on the southern side of the border, one particularly proud herder drove his cows ahead of him, as we slipped and stumbled in the mud. The small brown cows of the Baggara Arabs, out of place in South Sudan and struggling in the rain, mixed with the large black bulls of the Mbororo, their skin slick and glistening, and jostled with the prized cattle of the Nuer, their horns decorated with tassels, and with whom the young cattle-guards stole whispered conversations, as if with illicit lovers...
(c) Giulio PetroccoBack in April 2012, the photographer Giulio Petrocco and I took a walk around Paris. He took pictures, and I thought about silence. The kind folks at Onsite Review have now published the result in Onsite 28: Sound. You can read the finished text in the magazine. You can also read a PDF of an earlier version of the article here.
This text was originally published in Onsite 28: Sound (Fall 2012), as a response to Shannon Wiley's article Vanishing Lands: Shishmaref, Alaska, which was published in Onsite 27: Rural Urbanism. It can be read as a stand-alone text. The tear-sheet is available here as a PDF, or you can read it below the fold.
I have an essay in the new edition of the wonderful Canadian architecture magazine, Onsite Review. The essay is on Libyan history, the nomadism at the heart of Qadhafi's dreams of direct democracy, and different ways of thinking about the relationship between the urban the rural. There is a small taster just below the fold, and you can read the whole article here.
