Culture, Time and Publics in the Arab World

Media, Public Space and Temporality

Tarik Sabry, Joe F. Khalil

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786725424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunsttheorie & -kritik

In this revealing new study, Tarik Sabry and Joe Khalil preside over an original new exploration of Arab culture. They employ subjects as varied as anthropology, media studies, philosophy, political economy and cultural studies to illuminate the relationship between culture, time and publics in an Arab context, whilst also laying the foundations for a much more nuanced picture of Arab society. The diverse themes and locations explored include communities at borders, in rural and urban locations, Syrian drama audiences, Egyptian, Saudi and Tunisian artists and activists and historical and contemporary Arab intellectuals. This fresh empirical research and interdisciplinary analysis illuminate intricate experiences that transcend local, national and religious boundaries and expose how Arab publics combine the media and technology to create a rich experience that shapes their collective imagination and social structure. Providing a grounded orientation to key debates on time and what can be defined as public in modern Arab cultures, Sabry and Khalil address teachers, students and those concerned about the delicate structures that underpin the upheavals of the modern Arab world.

Chapter 1

DIS-FORMATIONS OF PALESTINE

Helga Tawil-Souri

We are weighed down, every moment,

by the conception and the sensation of Time

Charles Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes, 1930

Under siege, life is time

Between remembering its beginning

And forgetting its end

The siege is waiting

Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm

Mahmoud Darwish, State of Siege, 2002

Prologue, back in time: Spring forward, fall back¹

It was my one chance to meet Yasser Arafat when a friend who worked with Arafat called me out of the blue on a Friday morning in March 2003 and said to come by at 9 pm. It struck me as odd to be invited to the muqataʾa at night, but I figured that having been imprisoned in his compound for a year already, no doubt Arafat’s sense of time was different from that of those of us not locked up.

I planned to arrive in Ramallah by 7 pm. Travelling from ar-Ram to Ramallah – a distance of 5 kilometres – I did not expect delay going ‘in’ through the Qalandia checkpoint. I also planned to spend the night at a friend’s given it was not uncommon, especially at night, for the checkpoint to be closed on the way ‘out’.²

I made my way up to the soldier. ‘Checkpoint closed,’ he grumbled without lifting his eyes. ‘Closed? Why?’

To have the whole checkpoint closed, and especially on the way ‘in’ to Ramallah, would have been likely if it were a Jewish holiday, if there were a European diplomat visiting the Israeli prime minister, if the United States were increasing its bombing campaign in Iraq, or some other far-off event that the Israeli regime used as a pretext to encumber Palestinians – none of which was the case that day.

Seeing that I hadn’t moved, the soldier barked, ‘It’s seven o’clock.’

I was on my way to meet the president, so I had planned my travel time carefully. I looked at my watch. ‘It’s six,’ I said. ‘No. It’s seven.’ I looked at my watch again. As I looked back up at him, he grinned, ‘Daylight saving.’ Yes, that strange modern invention of setting the clock forward.

‘But daylight saving starts in two weeks,’ I responded. He quickly retorted, ‘It is already daylight saving in Israel. It is seven.’³

‘But we’re in the West Bank,’ I said – the Green Line was a few kilometres well to our west. The corner of his lips took a slant upwards, almost smiling, he matter-of-factly declared, ‘Checkpoints are in Israel.’

I was standing in no man’s land where it was 7 pm, while some short distance beyond it was 6 pm. I wondered where the line was on which I could have half my body in one time zone and the other half in another. However, I did not bother asking. By his logic, which had the backing of the Israeli regime, checkpoints were islands functioning on Israeli time, no matter where they territorially existed. The same was true of settlements.

That particular discrepancy of time only lasted a few weeks, until both Israel and the Palestinian Territories were back in the same time zone, but I walked away from the checkpoint that evening with a nagging thought: Israeli time had already ‘sprung forward’ yesterday, and the Palestinians were behind. It hinted at a larger metaphysical quandary: a complex imposition of ‘Israeli time’ onto Palestinian temporality.

A checkpoint world

Checkpoints have been a significant part of daily life in the Palestinian Territories since the 1990s ‘peace process’, when they first emerged in full force. However, checkpoints, in material form and as emblematic of processes such as border crossings and im/mobility, have been a significant part of Palestinian life for the past seven decades, both within and outside the Palestinian Territories. This chapter considers checkpoints as actual material spaces that are made up of specific technologies engendering particular embodied territorial and phenomenological experiences and as microcosms. They are sites from which to understand Palestinian temporality.

Given their centrality across Palestinian space and time, checkpoints have been the subject of scholarship from different fields. For the benefit of organization, I categorize these into three points of analysis, although some touch on all of these. First, there is scholarship that situates checkpoints specifically in the occupied Palestinian Territories, largely in the post-Oslo period, as part of a larger matrix of (mostly territorial) control. This scholarship analyses the checkpoint within the process of territorial fragmentation, alongside settlement expansion, by-pass roads, the creation of fences and walls, and other territorial configurations (Hanafi 2009; Tawil-Souri 2010; Weizman 2012).

A second set of scholarship more implicitly touches on checkpoints as part of the bordering processes imposed on Palestinians, specific neither to the Palestinian Territories nor to the post-1990s’ time frame. The tensions of border crossings and territorial containment are experiences that have been shared by all Palestinians since the middle of the twentieth century – in diaspora, exile, statelessness or occupation (Said 1985; Khalidi 1997). Khalidi (1997: 1) states, for example:

[t]he quintessential Palestinian experience, which illustrates some of the most basic issues raised by Palestinian identity, takes place at a border, an airport, a checkpoint: in short, at any one of those many modern barriers where identities are checked and verified […] For Palestinians […] such barriers generate shared sources of profound anxiety.

This is a trope that emerges in Palestinian films and literature as well, and thus emerges in scholarship in cinema and literary studies (Yaqub 2012; Fieni 2014; Mattar 2014).

Finally, a third set of scholarship deals explicitly with the checkpoint itself. For example, some scholars deal specifically with ‘types’ of checkpoints and their political-geographic and economic implications for Palestinian society (Lagerquist 2002; Parizot 2009), while some critique them vis-à-vis their impact on Israeli hermeneutics (Naaman 2006; Kotef and Amir 2007). Others approach the checkpoint as an anthropological space from which to understand larger questions about Palestinian mobility, resistance and fragmentation (e.g. Bornstein 2002; Brown 2004; Hammami 2004, 2010; Handel 2009; Tawil-Souri 2009, 2011; Abourahme 2011). It is this last body of literature from which this chapter explicitly emerges – the checkpoint as an anthropologically meaningful site – while it is also in conversation with the second body of scholarship that is concerned with Palestinian experiences of space and time more broadly.

This chapter considers checkpoints as temporal objects. First, in the sense that they are pervasive. As Handel (2009: 191) declares of the West Bank, ‘everything, both space and time, is measured in terms of before or after the checkpoint, and there are no assurances that another checkpoint will not pop up around the bend’. The ubiquity of checkpoints, both in actual presence and as a possibility, is approached in this chapter as a given. Second, checkpoints are actors that mark and define Palestinian temporality. In the words of Abourahme (2011: 453):

The barrier – be it the checkpoint, ‘the wall’, the dug trench, the roving patrol […] modulates and defines Palestinian mobility and speed of movement, and in the process becomes constitutive of people’s experiences of space and time […] checkpoints can be thought of as a kind of built microcosm of wider reality: the physical-architectural mark of the lived political trauma. (Emphasis added)

Or, in the words of Fieni (2014: 8), ‘checkpoints […] demonstrate how the temporality of exception and the suspension of law operate as the internal clockwork of desecular sovereignty’. Both of these point to how checkpoints hold a particular power over time.

This chapter takes it as its point of departure that a core Palestinian experience constitutes a struggle over territoriality, and that the ‘problem’ of the conflict and Palestinians, more generally, is largely approached as one of geopolitical space (Gregory 2004; Hanafi 2009; Weizman 2012). The point is that Palestinian geography is wrenched. Palestinians, especially in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, are ripped apart by mechanisms imposed by Israel that are nothing short of what Hanafi (2009) has termed ‘spaciocide’: annihilating the space of Palestine and its everyday (temporal) experiences. However, as much as Zionism is manifested as a violent territorial process, it is also a temporal process. Space is not separate from time. In other words, my aim here is to approach spatial and territorial mechanisms as fundamentally temporal ones; I ask, in a sense, what kind of temporality is engendered in the wrenched space of Palestine. Hence, this chapter is in conversation with scholarship on Israel–Palestine that deals with the temporal, some of which has emanated from comparative and literary theory (Fieni 2014; Mattar 2014), from sociology and political science (Jamal 2010a, b; McMahon 2016) and from critical geography (Abourahme 2011, 2016).

Finally, checkpoints are emblematic because all Palestinians have in common a dislocation from a coherent sense of space and time. Palestinians inhabit different, discontiguous, disconnected, fragmented spaces – no matter where they might be – and this collectively defines Palestinian temporality (see Said 1985). The Palestinian experience of time and the power relations that determine their experiences of time are shackled and tortuous. Checkpoints define and reveal this distressed temporality.

Towards a public: Time and communication

The question addressed in this book is: what is happening to public time at this particular moment in the Arab world? This chapter analyses this question with an experiential understanding of time – embodied, lived, phenomenological, territorial. Similarly to the other contributions, this chapter argues against conceptions of time that distance the anthropological object. Here, that anthropological object is the material construct of a checkpoint. The question, then, is whether wrenched time and space – which a checkpoint exemplifies – makes a public possible. The answer is, simply, ‘no’; because without a shared space there is no shared time; and without both of these, there can be no public. This chapter elaborates on this equation.

A brief detour is necessary first. The notions of time and temporality used here are drawn primarily from Heidegger (1962) and Bergson (2001) – philosophers who deal with a phenomenological understanding and a theorization of time, insisting that time is a lived experience. Bourdieu (2000) also analyses time’s relationship to being, while considering it as part of a power dynamic. Time is a form of power. Hardt (1997: 65), drawing on both Agamben and Foucault, suggests that ‘[t]ime is the measure of power, and once a sovereign power has our time it is loath to let it go’. In other words, biopolitics is a question of temporality, as control over time leaves individuals more vulnerable to control (see Mbembe 2008; on Palestine, see Gordon 2008; Ophir and Azoulay 2009).

Scholars theorizing temporal inequalities and speed – Virilio (1986) being chief among them – argue that geopolitics (a politics based in space) has been supplanted by chronopolitics (a politics based in time). Virilio’s work demonstrates that speed privileges certain populations and restrains others. In other words, the experience of time is relative, and the sharing of space does not guarantee the sharing of time. A relevant example is how checkpoints subject different populations to distinct time regimes. In analysing the time it takes to travel through a checkpoint, Handel (2009) argues that space–time relationships and the practices between Palestinians and Israelis are radically asymmetric: Palestinians face difficulty, slowness and unpredictability, while Israelis are faced with a predictable, fluid and ultimately ‘modern’ experience of time and space.⁴ Parizot (2009) complicates this by recognizing that there are different speeds depending on who is attempting to cross a checkpoint: an Arab-Israeli, a Palestinian Jerusalemite, a Jewish Israeli, a West Banker, etc. The speed of one person versus another can be very different (slow versus fast) and variable (whether it is always the same), and, in some instances, mutually exclusive (one can pass only if another is stopped). Checkpoints demonstrate how different temporal structures disavow Palestinians: they are part of the political power dynamic of Israel–Palestine. As Bourdieu (2000: 225) suggests:

When powers are unequally distributed, the economic and social world presents itself not as a universe of possibles equally accessible to every possible subject […] but rather as a signposted universe, full of injunctions and prohibitions, signs of appropriation and exclusion, obligatory routes or impassable barriers, and, in a word, profoundly differentiated.

The work of Handel, Parizot and Collins helps to situate Palestinian’s position in a larger economy of temporal worth; but Palestinian and Israeli time are not altogether separated. First, multiple temporalities can be inter-dependent, relational, entangled (or also separate). Second, the structures that make time’s passing different for one or another group demonstrate the presence and diffused violence of the Israeli regime everywhere across Israel and Palestine. In other words, ‘Israeli time’ determines the relationship wherein experiences of time are relative to one another. Time is a site of material struggle, creating social differences and inequalities; temporality is the experience of that time structured in specific political and economic contexts.

To sum up, time is lived. Time is power. Time is relative. Time is a material struggle. Finally, time is not simply a measure or a vector, but is a constituent of culture. Time contributes to culture because it is one of the most important means of communication. Media and communication theorists have analysed the role of time and temporality, contending with questions of synchronicity, simultaneity and feedback, for example, by positing what kind of temporal and geographic distances or proximities are made possible by different technologies of mediation, that is, the extent to which media technologies are often attempts to ‘shrink’ distances between people in search of ‘true’ or profound communication, or what constitutes ‘liveness’ in a media-saturated environment (deSola Pool 1983; Thompson 1995; Peters 2012). An analysis of this work falls beyond my purview. The crucial point, however, is summarized best by Fabian (1983: 30–31): ‘for human communication to occur, coevalness has to be created. Communication is, ultimately, about creating shared Time’.⁵ The sharing of time is a condition for communication. Fabian’s concept of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Culture, Time and Publics in a Changing Arab Context
• Chapter 1. Dis-formations of Palestine
• Chapter 2. ‘Our Children Are a Threat’: Publics and the Policing of Cultural Temporality in Egypt
• Chapter 3. Cultural Time and Everyday Life in the Middle Atlas Mountain Village of Ait Nuh
• Chapter 4. Consuming the Past in Contemporary Beirut: The Case of Café Rawda during RAmadan
• Chapter 5. Neo-Tajdeed? Rap in Saudi Arabia and Tunisia
• Chapter 6. Reflections on Time in Arabic Poetry
• Chapter 7. Keywords in Arab Political Memory: Mahdi Amil’s Vocabulary Revisited in 2017
• Chapter 8. Rethinking Arab Philosophical Experience in the Time of Revolution
• Index
• Imprint