Abstract
The scope of this paper is to inquire into a moment of friction between reality and possibility; the present and the future; the actual and the fictional, in a context pertaining to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The point of departure is an artwork by the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar. My encounter with his work evoked an aesthetic experience of hesitant uncertainty parallel to particular encounters with a mechanism invoking such uncertainties in real life, namely the passport control.
Some years ago I was offered the chance to have a new stamp in my passport. Unlike the usual encounters with the same agenda, this did not take place while entering the border of a sovereign state, nor was it a clerk representative of the official border police that offered the stamp, and neither did the state depicted in the graphics of the stamp exist. The stamp’s imprint said ‘State of Palestine,’ together with the depiction of a hummingbird and an olive branch.
The situation triggered an instant hesitant uncertainty in my mind, almost perfectly mirroring the structure of feeling I had recently experienced in Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Here, I’m always anxious about being exhaustively questioned, and whether I will be allowed or denied entry. Today the stamping practice is replaced by a printed visa, but during my first visit to Ben Gurion in 2010, I was hesitant about requesting the needed stamp on a separate paper. Although this was in principle possible, from rumours I had heard it would raise suspicion about potential political affiliations and my agenda for entering Israel and thus possibly present an unnecessary obstacle. The ambivalence about ‘tarnishing’ my passport with an Israeli stamp was linked to a simple pragmatic evaluation of the fact that certain other countries I wished to visit don’t allow for visitors with Israeli visas in their passports.[1] At the same time I was afraid of being denied the very same stamp, which would be the ticket to pass the passport counter into Israel, and further to the West Bank, which was my destination.
When presented with the State of Palestine stamp, my anxiousness was rekindled in the opposite. Hesitant about ‘tarnishing’ my passport inversely, this time with a Palestinian stamp, I figured it wouldn’t go well together with my Israeli stamp on the next planned passing through the Israeli airport. It is not because the one necessarily rules out the other; rather, the potential denial of entry out of ‘security concerns’ occupied my mind. Thus, I had misgivings about the Palestinian stamp for practical and political reasons. I speculated whether perhaps I could have two passports or whether I could have the stamp on a separate paper, ridiculously symbolic as it would be. Moreover, I was stuck with the embarrassed feeling of being paranoid and a coward for even doubting.
The venue was Kunstwerke in Berlin, during the 7th Berlin Biennale in 2012, and the author of the stamp was the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar.[2] Jarrar’s stamping action was an offspring from his on-going project ‘Live and Work in Palestine,’ an artistic project that at the same time is a kind invitation and an ironical summons to live and work in Palestine. The project was initiated in 2011 by Jarrar stamping non-Palestinian people’s passports at the central bus station in Ramallah, thus simultaneously mimicking Israeli border control practices and installing himself as a representative of a fictional state on an alternative border. Jarrar has since repeated the action on a number of occasions in various locations, stamping hundreds of passports.[3]
Jarrar’s project highlights several emblematic conditions and mechanisms of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The apparent thematics evoked are, for example, those of the border regime and the checkpoints coupled with the lack of fixed borders; the correlation between identification, affiliation and rights through official documents; and the quasi-authority of the Palestinian administration. In other words, what the symbolic gesture elicits, is the lack of a sovereign state: an authoritative stamp from a Palestinian State is far at sight.
In this article, I will describe Khaled Jarrar’s fictional State of Palestine as a state ‘yet unborn’. By this, I want to stress that the state is unborn: it is evident that the fictional symbolic seal of sovereignty highlights the factual absence of a state. But I also want to stress that the state is yet unborn: it is also important that the stamp articulates a potential presence of a Palestinian State in the future. In the words of British art historian Simon Faulkner, commenting on Jarrar’s project, “The legend ‘State of Palestine’ exists in the passports stamped by Jarrar as a phantasmic premonition of what might” (Faulkner 2011). In Jarrar’s own words, he “hopes his stamp will remind people that [Palestine] is a nation waiting to be born” (Chayka 2011).
Sense of possibility
If a Palestinian State is waiting to be born, existing only as a premonition, what is its latency in the present? If a state is thought of in future tense, what is it then more than a mere expression of hope or wishful thinking? To me, Jarrar’s fictional passport stamp triggered rumination on the future state as a ‘yet unborn’ reality. I borrow this expression from the Austrian author Robert Musil’s giant novel The Man Without Qualities from 1932. In the chapter “If there is such a thing as a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility” (Musil 1965, 11), Musil writes about the Möglichkeitsmensch, the man of possibilities:
Since his ideas, in so far as they are not mere idle phantasmagoria, are nothing else than as yet unborn realities, he too of course has a sense of reality; but it is a sense of possible reality and moves towards its goal much more slowly than most people’s sense of their real possibilities.
(Musil 1965, 13)
The ‘yet unborn’ Palestinian State was conceived decades ago but is still pending, punctuated by moments of imagined birth. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation declared the de jure State of Palestine from its government in exile in Algiers in 1988, and in 1993 the signing of the Oslo Accords was meant to inaugurate the process of establishing a Palestinian State alongside Israel. Even though it was granted non-membership observer status in 2012 in the UN, a status strongly disapproved by Israel, the de facto Palestinian State is still, or is yet, unborn. However, to recognise a state’s condition as a ‘yet unborn’ reality – even if its birth is long time coming or never coming at all – implies that a sort of possible reality exists, to reuse Musil’s phrase, and not just the empty negative denoting that something is absent. Precisely this sense of a possible reality is set in motion in Jarrar’s work when enacting a gesture normally reserved to the official representatives of a state.
Palestinian curator Reem Fadda contemplates the temporal dimension of the Palestinian situation in a similar way in the essay Not-yet-ness (Fadda 2009). In a time saturated by uncertainty towards the future, in a time and state of stagnation, Fadda calls for existential thinking about how to deal with the future. In the Palestinian context, not-yet-ness is a temporal term for something that is actively absent but also existing in its potential of becoming present. Fadda writes:
[…] not-yet-ness refers to the state of not being a state, or a sovereignty in the traditional sense that is not fully reinstated or wants to create its own permutations and understandings of what constitutes a sovereign project. [Not-yet-ness is] that which is, and which is not. Or that with the potential to be, but is not (Fadda 2009, 227).
Reading this with the words of Musil, the not-yet-ness consists of possibilities that are not pure illusions or phantasms but ideas produced in the vein of a sense of a possible reality. To act within the parameters of not-yet-ness, according to Fadda, is to claim agency and liberty to create one’s own definitions and permutations – it is to act on one’s potentiality. This is the strategy adopted by Jarrar when he stamped passports during the Biennale in Berlin. Without being prescriptive for how this state could come about, or normative for its constituency, Jarrar evoked agency in the seemingly stagnated state of Israel-Palestine.
State of Palestine passport stamps. Image courtesy of the artist Khaled Jarrar.
Stagnation, together with similar words like impasse, standstill, and deadlock, circumscribe general conceptions and political management of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The temporal oxymoron permanent temporariness is often used to describe certain aspects of the indefinite occupation (a juridical oxymoron) and repeatedly failed negotiations function as reminders of a blocked horizon. Underneath this standstill, however, the daily practices and decisions on the ground are reconfiguring the landscape of the conflict in different ways. The expanding settlements eat their way into the West Bank, creating new territories, and the segregated infrastructure produces new routines and space/time relations in the occupied areas. The sense of something becoming too late or irreversible is prominent when looking at how the Palestinian space is shrinking and Israeli space is growing. How can one awake the sense of the possible in this situation? Is it possible to claim agency for provoking change or seeing other possibilities for the future than those outlined by the political gridlock of impossibilities?
Jarrar’s strategy for provoking change works as an opening of the future through directing our attention to the imaginary State of what might be. The important thing is, I contend, that the opening of the future is also an opening of the present, insofar as we are prompted to consider its current configurations, provisions and practices.
The stamping of the passports raises questions about how to expand the imagination – not only the imagination of what will be possible in the future, of what the future could possibly look like, but also the imagination and understanding of what is at present. The speculation into the future, into what is not present in our time, elucidates what is actual, here, and now: what is possible at present? Articulating the question with Musil’s words, this is not a question about the yet unborn realities in the future, but, rather, a question of the yet unborn realities of the present.
Speculation
In conventional terms, speculation is a name for calculated high-risk investments that promise great financial returns often at the detriment of the end user. As such, the word is well-known and often negatively connoted, not at least in the building or art sector. In the framework of science, to speculate is to engage with the unknown by calculations. Through formal practices of calibration and measuring, uncertainties and contingencies can be converted into risks or possibilities to be managed. This kind of speculation is a contingent calculation, probing the real – or realistic – possibilities rather than the possible realities.
By contrast, I suggest using the term speculation as a label for an act of imagination that elucidates that which we are not able to calculate or predict. In this sense of the word, speculation evades or circumvents a present situation and its rules of conduct and directs the vision towards what is fundamentally uncertain. To speculate is to observe or to spy on, from the Latin root of specere and speculari. Speculating, in the sense of the concept I am developing here, is to be spying on something that is obscure and not evident, thereby addressing the potential without actually calculating all the steps to get there. It is at the same time a sense of possible reality and a non-contingent guesswork into the yet unborn realities of the present.
To speculate is to act as if something has been transcended, exceeded, cut across; as if something has actually taken place, for instance the premature inauguration of the Palestinian State. This ‘transcendence’ is what makes the speculation effective. But perhaps more than anything else, it reflects what is here and now, and what is yet unborn. Consequently, speculation becomes an instrument of reflection by which the present becomes visible. Speculation thus appears as a kind of mirroring of present realities, expressed in imaginaries that find their time and place in multiple temporalities. It is a reflection that might find its ‘place’ in the future, or simply ‘out of time’, but always – I would contend – as a reflection of what is here and now. It is an operative device that reflects something potential.
An understanding of speculation as reflection is offered by German philosopher and art critic Boris Groys in his essay “Visible and Invisible Sides of Reproduction”. As Groys points out, in addition to the meaning of observing and spying, speculation – from Latin speculum – also means mirroring. Groys writes,
Speculation is both a true reflection of reality as it presents itself as an empirical fact, as well as a reflection on reality that may be hidden behind its empirical image. In other words, speculation is a reflection on the mirror and not merely the reflection in the mirror.
(Groys 2015, 33)
To Groys, speculation is not just a reflection of something (a reflection in the mirror) but also a reflection of the very medium of reflection (a reflection on the mirror). In the same vein, American philosopher Fredric Jameson writes in his essay ‘Utopia as Method’:
The utopia, I argue, is not a representation but an operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do not seem able to go in imagining changes in our own society and world (except in the direction of dystopia and catastrophe).
(Jameson 2010, 23)
Utopia and speculation are usually seen as incompatible – but I think the methodologies of the two operations in themselves are very much alike insofar as they deploy an imaginary future that has the capacity to disclose boundaries in our own time. In line with Jameson, it is the operation itself – that of crossing boundaries of our imaginations of change – that interests me. Speculation becomes productive in its capacity to kindle the sense of the possible, not only the real, to phrase Musil again.
Thus, speculation is not merely about the ‘real’ possibilities of the future, but simultaneously about the actualities and potentials in our own time, without succumbing to its present restrictions. Jarrar is highlighting what is at stake in the present through reflecting it in the symbolic gesture of passport-stamping. And in order to do so, one has to (if only imaginatively) act outside of the space of power and create a wiggle room like the room Jarrar creates when he claims agency and power to issue a stamp in the passport.
Jarrar is not alone in this operation. Other artists are also making use of this kind of strategy when dealing with the Israel-Palestine conflict, especially when it comes to its spatial aspects, by projecting a reality into the future or by deploying subversive strategies that intervene in the present. The Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour, to mention one, makes use of a projective strategy when exploring the spatial confinements and shrinking of Palestinian territories in the dystopian science fiction short film Nation Estate: Living the High Life (2012). Sansour creates a vertical answer to how a two-state solution can come about: in Nation Estate, the Palestinian State exists in the form of a solitary high-rise. Distributing the Palestinian territories, its institutions and population on floors in a high-rise alludes to the contraction, densification and displacement of Palestinian space by reflecting the present situation in a vertical absurdity where the State becomes an Estate of symbolical replacements of land and identity.
Other artists make use of speculative strategies in similar but less dystopian ways. The central concern of the West Bank-based studio Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency, for example, is to explore how the spatial remains of the occupation can be dealt with in a decolonized future. Architect Yazid Anani and artist Emily Jacir, both Palestinians, critically display the prospects of the future of the Palestinian collective project in their public intervention Al-Riyadh (2010), placing billboards of fictional building projects in Ramallah. Others again make use of speculative strategies that situate the intervention in the present as subversions by which mechanisms of the occupation come on display, like when Italian artist Luca Vanello in the video Deflect (2014) smuggles pulverised building material from a demolished Palestinian house in East Jerusalem into bags of cement in a construction site in Tel Aviv.
Jameson’s concept of Utopia, functioning to disclose the limits to our imagination of the future, is directed at transgressing the boundaries of ideology and stifled imagination. In Jarrar’s work there’s another operation at play as well, which has to do with how things are done in practice, not only how they are thought of, as it is also a question of transgressing boundaries of agency. For Jarrar, speculation has a pragmatic dimension as well as a cognitive dimension. His choice of medium and method for articulating problems and questions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict reflects the pragmatism of the everyday questions of identity, permits, and crossing borders. Thus, it is a kind of speculation into a future Palestinian State that snaps back and highlights how this place functions on the level of the everyday practice. The state is not there (yet) – but even articulating a sign (the emblem, the stamp) has already political consequences. It induces pragmatic mechanisms of the conflict that are operating here and now.
Characteristic for life under occupation is a lack of stable frames for decision making. In this situation, coping with the most quotidian pursuits becomes obstacles. According to Israeli cultural theorist Ariella Azoulay and philosopher Adi Ophir, Palestinians “try to survive through improvisation and manipulation, looking for ways out, smuggling, calculating the costs of daily activity” (Ophir/Azoulay 2009, 120). Tactical manoeuvres and calculations for navigating uncertainty are everyday realities in the West Bank. Moving around, crossing borders, building houses, working the land – these are normal activities that are saturated with potential obstacles, and it requires a certain kind of tactical, speculative reason in order to bypass these restrictions.
In the film Infiltrators (2012), also by Khaled Jarrar, the artist focus on one specific everyday tactic, namely the crossing of the separation barrier that runs through the West Bank, separating Palestinian areas not only from Israel, but also from Palestinian localities. In the film, the crossings depicted are not those taking place at the regulated checkpoints but rather the irregular crossings of individuals that for various reasons cannot get or wait for a permit from the Israeli administration. Searching for ways to pass the barrier, a catalogue of ways to smuggle oneself and others is presented: climbing over, sneaking under, jumping off, crawling, finding secret passages, or just finding a place to talk through a door in the wall and pass old photographs under it.
In contrast to imaginary artistic speculation that operates outside of the space of power, the speculative tactics of the everyday create a situated agency that is attached to the space of power, insofar as one acts in relation to a power one attempts to escape. To act tactically is an attempt to create a room for manoeuvre inside the space striated by sovereign power.
Fiction/Friction
Speculation is accentuating the improbable or inconceivable, while everyday tactics are accentuating the reality as it is, trying to escape the habitual practices and traps of usual ways of conduct. Speculation resides outside of power, while tactics reacts inside of existing power structures, trying to find and exploit gaps in the structural logic.
The participant’s aesthetic experience of Jarrar’s ‘State of Palestine’ prompts a political reflexion with possible implications. Jarrar states that his project deploys art as an “open confrontation with reality”. The open confrontation with reality elicits the participant’s reflection both through the fiction of the future and the friction with reality. The aspect of invoking the State of Palestine which is a confrontation of reality through fiction, asks the participant to reflect and speculate upon the fact that there is no such authoritative state. Additionally, as the fiction of what is not (yet) a reality, speculation is pointing ‘backwards’ to the present, it displays the current reality of the occupation. Speculation is an imaginary agency (or agency of the imagination) that thinks itself independent of the actual space of power, it disconnects itself from actual power. This is what Jarrar is doing when he is evoking the State of Palestine through the stamp, embossing a part of political reality via the means of imagination and ink stamped on official documents, and highlighting something which is yet unborn. To speculate is an attempt to create the room for manoeuvre outside the space of power.
The fictional stamp of a possible or impossible future State thus turns one’s attention to particular practices and mechanisms of today. It activates what is present through speculation about the future. The participant’s aesthetic experience of the artwork mirrors experiences of a political reality. It evokes or produces a ‘friction’ between aesthetic experience and pragmatic reason; an “open confrontation with reality” that occurs through creating friction with the current state of affairs.
There are practical implications to sealing the passport with a politically charged stamp. For instance, in case one is planning to visit Israel and/or the Occupied Palestinian Territories, there is a pragmatic calculation and assessment of one’s willingness to take a risk of being denied entry into Israel and the Palestinian areas, like my reaction described above. Some of those who had their passports sealed with Jarrar’s stamp got in trouble when trying to enter Israel afterwards, and at least one Israeli passport was cancelled at Ben Gurion airport as a result of the stamp. Although the implications of the stamp for a foreign visitor (like me) are a very faint shadow of everyday realities of having to deal with the various obstructions posed by the occupation, I would argue that there is a moment or flash of recognition – or friction – in experiencing vulnerability, uncertainty or perhaps powerlessness. The recognition experienced through the encounter with the artwork is a recognition of the fundamental condition of having to assess tactical manoeuvres within a politically charged field for the purpose of movement.
There is a kinship between the kind of speculation seen in art works and architectural imaginaries and the tactics of the everyday. The absurdities, uncertainties, potential violence, obstacles, and constant frictions produced by the current state of affairs are dealt with on a day to day basis through navigating with the help of cunning, smuggling, hiding, etc., and attempts to subvert and bypass the changing obstacles. The fiction of speculative artistic projects is thus perhaps not so far from the tactical manoeuvres at present.
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