Abdalla Bayyari
The Cartography of Erasure: Archiving Sound and Mobility in Genocide
In the last ten months, two significant events have occurred in the Israeli war on Gaza. These events necessitate theoretical and analytical examination concerning grand narratives such as modernity and civilization. Firstly, there has been a growing recognition of the spatial aspects of this conflict, specifically with Israel's strategy of destruction and genocide. This has led to the emergence of terminologies that were exclusively used in describing eurocenteric and American events like urbicide, democide, spaciocide, and memoricide to describe these phenomena. Secondly, this emergence requires a new methodology of comprehension and analysis to empower the victims of such genocide and mobilize a kind of epistemic disobedience for indigenous groups such as Palestinians. Among such methodologies, there has been a growing emphasis on the importance of sound and mobility in monitoring the spatial policies of memory associated with this genocide. Both structures are inherently unique and separate from one another in terms of their composition, societal circumstances and structure, and intellectual/theoretical framework.
Sound and mobility share a common characteristic: they both happen in time and space, resulting in major alterations in spatial and temporal existence. Any modifications in sound and mobility impact the perception of time and the understanding of space, making the experience of sound and mobility geographical and historical, and those are the main domains of hegemony in colonial apparatuses. Fredric Jameson effectively characterized the connection between modernism and the notions of space and time by asserting that our current existence is primarily influenced by spatial concepts rather than temporal ones. He argues that our daily life, psychological experiences, and cultural language are predominantly shaped by spatial categories, contrasting with the previous era of high modernism (Jameson 1991).
The relationship between sound and space can be understood through its dual function: as a historical archive as both are experienced through time and as a tool for navigating and experiencing the world. Urban soundscapes, which include the sounds of daily life, transportation, markets, public gatherings, and architecture, not only document the history of a place but also influence how we move through and understand that space and its history.
We may here propose the concept of psychogeography, which can be explored through sound. Soundscapes shape how people perceive and interact with urban spaces, affecting their routes, moods, and social interactions, individually and collectively. Sound is also a tool for territoriality and Identity. Where certain spaces develop distinct sound identities, that structures interactions toward hegemony.
These structures serve as fundamental elements for comprehending the social organization of warfare and the potential for resistance that arises from it. This understanding surpasses mere political and ideological discourse and metaphors, encompassing spatial and bodily forms of resistance, as well as the politics of memory and oblivion in an anti-modern way, or as near as possible to what Svetlana Boym describes as “Off-Modern” (Boym, 2002), referring to the notion of a culture that is situated between the periphery and the center of a larger cultural system. This concept was developed in opposition to the traditional division of art and culture into categories of modern or postmodern. Instead, it is characterized by its hybridity and pluralism, acknowledging how different cultural elements and traditions can coexist and intersect.
Svetlana Boym's notion of the “Off-Modern” presents an alternate perspective on modernity that deviates from the conventional linear progression narrative. In her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Boym introduces the concept of “Off-Modern” as a way to explore the alternative possibilities and unconventional aspects of modernity, rather than adhering to the dominant mainstream. The statement recognizes the intricacies, inconsistencies, and disconnects of contemporary human encounters.
The Off-Modern explores the capacity for creativity and critical thinking by reflecting on modernity without completely rejecting or nostalgically idealizing it. Boym associates this approach with a form of nostalgia that she refers to as “reflective nostalgia,” which involves a thoughtful analysis of the past while acknowledging its conflicting and unresolved aspects. The concept of Off-Modern serves as a critical evaluation and homage to modernity, embracing several viewpoints instead of a singular, prevailing storyline that is usually embedded in modernity’s production of self and others.
Boym’s Off-Modernism aims to create a niche for individuals who feel disconnected from the current time and are inclined to reconsider the connection between the past and the future as an act of resisting the hegemony of now in space and time. This perspective encourages the exploration of alternative alternatives and the formation of identities. The notion also highlights the significance of diversions, uncertainty, and non-sequential encounters as valuable elements of existence.
The concept of Off-Modern revolves around embracing the remnants, dilapidated structures, and alternative routes of modernity. It involves a thoughtful and inventive approach to history, uncovering forgotten or marginalized aspects that are often overlooked in conventional narratives of modernity.
However, the relation between sound and time cannot be fully captured, as sound occurs at an exact moment and ends in it, without offering the chance to hold it and continues until the next moment, with further sounds following in a linear progression of time. The same principle applies to mobility: it is initiated at a specific moment in time and continues in a linear temporal way. In a nuanced study, Henry Bergson highlights the distinction between mobility and space, asserting that they are not intertwined. According to Bergson, space represents the past, while mobility embodies the present (Bergson, 1934). This concept can be abstractly applied to the notion of sound, yet it is not correct completely, yet short-handed in defining the plurality of sound and space in extreme circumstances such as genocide.
In the ongoing Gaza conflict, which is marked by extensive destruction and killing, we can perceive the destruction/killing/urbicide of the city as a genocidal act based on two main factors: silence, defined as the absence of sound (which can be seen as a form of sound in its own), and the absence of mobility. These two expressions offer crucial visual proof of the widespread destruction and large-scale loss of life in Gaza as a city, space, and sound. This work investigates the use of sound and mobility as components of memory and strategies of resistance, as well as reversing the process of erasure. This concept stems from the notion that every act of writing/literary involves the act of erasure, and conversely, every act of erasure is a form of writing. Although memory and oblivion function similarly, what is silent has the potential to be remembered, while what is forgotten can assert itself loudly and vocally. From that juncture, the inquiry arises on how silence and mobility would be considered as the primary archiving and documenting material against the genocide in anti-colonial and decolonial archiving projects.
On Sound
Given the locations of sound within the historical social processes that produce and generate society, any society, we find that sound is scattered throughout the whole social structure, not confined to one location, and silence here is another kind of sound (the absence of sound as a sound in itself). Where the sound landscape of the day can be compared in the normal state (not war) against that sound at night, the usual sound of the day is characterized by a sort of accretional flow of events and vocal structures that do not necessarily have to declare this normality.
During times of genocide, the voice becomes a prime target for extermination, and the imposition of a voice is part of the genocide, and thus sound (and silence) becomes a tool of resistance, self-production, and counter-social production; in other words sound is the social event itself and not a mere medium (Austin, J. L, 1962). In his classic article, “Urbanism as a way of life”, Louis Weirth argues that the size, density, and heterogeneity of the urban population are the elements of “urbanity,” which is enshrined in a distinctive lifestyle, as heterogeneity is the main element of urbanization (Weirth, 1938), and is the central element of urban and collective annihilation - urbicide. The identification of urban heterogeneity is therefore an organic and fundamental factor, making the urban relationship structure ensure a constructive relationship to all of this heterogeneity, thus maintaining its continuity and self-expression. Thus, the eradication of cities is the destruction of heterogeneity as a result, and the elimination of its diversity, which goes beyond the genocide of the group to the eradication of its negotiating and dialogue possibilities, as in the urban fabric, the first of which is the sound. But in the case of sound in Gaza, it is a different tool to produce and document the self and the community during war, and our sound specimen is the sound of a surveillance unmanned aerial vehicle known as ZANANA الزنانة .
In Gaza, witnesses have described to the writer the voice of Al Zanana:
The differentiation between sounds based on their diversity, characterized as the sounds of ordinary existence, and those that are distinct, opposing, and lacking clear linkages, such as noise, is determined by the temporal framework through which information is disseminated. The auditory content presented here is a distinct manifestation of motion, as previously mentioned. The sound is thus a significant temporal element that reshapes and delineates territory and its social creation. The sound material is distinguished by temporal segmentation, as it is engaged in the examination of its archives and historical context. The fundamental question that arises is how to effectively archive and preserve the sound, specifically the voice of Al Zanana in this war, as a historical, temporal, and geographical/spatial resource, without succumbing to the limitations of existing Palestinian archive projects that are predominantly focused on physical political archives under political and ideological tags.
By witnessing sound/silence as a fundamental historical element for spatio-temporal memory, we simultaneously make it visible and invisible. Visibility encompasses more than what is obviously seen. Visibility serves as a fundamental psychological and emotional foundation for our integration into the world. Urbicidal silencing refers to the phenomenon where the urban environment is dominated by the contrasting presence of sound and quiet, representing the extreme and aggressive manifestations of the modern duality: war. Being visible in the (in)visibility of urbicidal sound/silence is positioned as being central to the sphere of the political, to “the space of the appearance”, as described by Hannah Arendt, or “to face each other” as underscores as the condition of an ethical imperative. Yet as both, Arendt and Butler, visibility should be understood more as a process of continual tension in which power, agency, collective will, and self-determination are constantly work. We may label this act of collective agency as: Resili[stan]ce, in which Gazans are of pure (in)visibility by saying: We are here!
An illustration of how a philosophical, phenomenological explanation of sound can approach the topic of memory as a matter of perception is demonstrated in Salomé Voegelin's concept of memory as a “pathetic trigger” (Voegelin, 2006). Voegelin asserts that memory serves as the substance for artistic and imaginative spatial and temporal creation, elucidating its role in the development of the present moment. Nevertheless, her notion of acoustic memory material continues to symbolize a reinvestment in the emotional and individual perception of the current moment, without addressing memory as a collective entity influenced by historical forces of colonialism or any social or ethical implications in the act of remembering.
On the contrary, audio or sonic memory plays a crucial part in the Palestinian anti-colonial and decolonial struggle to continuously advance the notion of existence. The act of remembering serves as a strategic means to critically analyze modernity. In this case, the Palestinian positionality contains a great possibility of epistemic disobedience to modernism and capitalism and their prejudiced methodologies, in which modern archive policies turn a blind eye to sound as a means of comprehending and conveying the social situation, particularly in relation to a war-related space and time. These policies effectively silence the impact of Al Zanana on children and the destruction of physical locations and spaces.
Within colonial apparatuses, such as the Israeli case, the war is an organic paradigm, in which signs of visual display are very prominent and overwhelming, especially in genocidal warfare such as thit in Gaza. Those visual display might be deflecting or masking other realities, particularly of those in resistance. In such conditions (in)visibility may carry collective and individual acts of agency in decolonizing and degenociding the urbicide.
Take the prominent photos of prayers in demolished and destructed mosques in Gaza, what kind of sonic memory and oblivion mobilized in modern colonial gaze, trying to comprehend such an act of being for the Gazans?
Destroying the mosques in Gaza did not un-write their sound by silencing them. For such an approach. We may recall what Maurice Blanchot, the French philosopher underlined saying that there is no negation in unwriting anything,
On Mobility
At the time of writing, 70% of Gaza’s residents have been forcefully displaced more than two times, yet we have to start with a fundamental indicator of mobility as follows:
This is the fundamental principle of mobility. In conventional migration theory, the decision to migrate is influenced by the pushing pressures of A and the pulling forces of B. The nature of the boundary between them remains unexplored. Recent social theories propose that migration can be classified as travel, nomadic life, routes, or airlines, and suggest that these movements have cumulative impacts. For an individual who lacks a specific geographic identity due to colonization and blockade, as in Gaza, these two dots, or at least one of them, exist in the emptiness as a result of the removal of geographic references from the colonized individual and their ability to move. This is because the concept of space and its perception is solely constructed by the modern state's spatial geography, known as Territory. In the context of colonial space, the trajectory connecting points A and B serves as a promising foundation for investigating the possibilities of anti-colonial geography and spatiality. This exploration focuses on the role of mobility and spatial production in challenging spatial colonialism and the oppressive practices of surveillance associated with colonial bodily politics in genocide. Mobility refers to the intentional movement of individuals within a certain context and environment, resulting in significant and dynamic relational effects. Consequently, we can propose three fundamental components of mobility that render it more complex than simply movement:
To understand Mobility as a historically liberating act of resistance, employing mobility as a spatio-temporal act, let’s consider the escape of the six Palestinian prisoners in 2021 from Galboa’a maximum security prison. In which the escape as an act of mobility, decoded Israeli colonial geography and spatialization politics, which reflect the collective colonial image of an aggressive community and the Othering process within. This othering process includes a geographical area that must always be under Israeli control, using cameras, satellites, air drones, armies, security forces, planes, frontiers, borders, checkpoints, plantations, and other militarized urban planning methods. The inmates neutralized and counteracted such measures for nearly two weeks, decoding colonial spatial powers and tackling anti-colonial social space.
Based on the given rationale, we can assert that mobility can be considered as being dynamically equal to location, whereas mobility can be considered as being dynamically equal to place. A place serves as a focal point of significance. We develop emotional connections to it, engage in conflicts over it, and have personal encounters with it. In contrast, the concept of location does not encompass these same dimensions. The term "place" is employed in various theoretical and practical contexts. In the fields of spatial theory, philosophy, literary studies, and urban design, the term today denotes a significant portion of territory that is imbued with deep significance and influence. Bergson defined “stasis” points A and B as the mind's passive and artificial reconstruction of mobility. The political theory of migration analyzes how social movements have been arranged into circulation between artificially static social sites. This theory advocates for the vast and intensive social movement of migrants, stemming from their involvement with space and time. Migrants continue to shape social divisions, organization, and circulation.
The political, social and physical fabric of Gaza in this genocidical war could be considere as an "assemblage" due to continuous changes and modifications in response to the war and, previously, the Israeli blockade.
Assemblage refers to the composition of diverse elements into emergent and provisional socio-spatial formations We borrow “assemblage” theory from Manuel Delanda following Deleuze’s theories of difference and repetition (what DeLanda calls “variable repetition”), in which heterogeneous populations must have assemblages. Assemblages are generated and modified by varied populations of lower-level assemblages, but they can also limit or adapt these components. He considers assemblages non-essentialist (they are historically contingent actual beings, not ideal forms) and non-totalizing (they are heterogeneous groupings of components that should be examined as such). Assemblage theory therefore invites a shift in focus from the study of reified entities in social and political life, to the ongoing socio-material processes that constitute, reproduce, or change those entities.
Those purposeful assemblages of heterogeneous resources we witnessed in Gaza changed the face of the strip during the war relying on relationships, knowledge, and materials, framed through an emerging vision of ‘how to re-make the city’ (McFarlane, 2011a: 210) and give space for the mobility of the people to avoid the mass killing. By doing so, they are giving room for mobility in a closed urban terrain as an act of resistance to the urbicide that is forced upon the urban space to annihilate it. If seen from the perspective of the city as a whole, these assemblages may be seen as ‘small wins’ (Weick, 1984), but one can also understand these practices collectively as part of a broader ongoing struggle to demonstrate ‘how relations might be assembled otherwise’ to counteract relations forced upon the people. We specifically characterize this alternative assembling in four key ways: an emphasis on pre-figuration, nurturing and development of resources, fostering collective action and social solidarity in place, and a redistribution of resources and opportunities, that is one of the reasons why resistance managed to return to the North of the strip months after Israel declared if free from the Palestinian resistance. This we may consider a re-writing of the city, and un-writing of the vertically forced colonial and urbicidal geography.
The assemblage is built through the combination of separate, individual, and unique parts, such as urban, political, or social, and these unique parts can operate independently, or become part of the whole that in turn operates independently, can be removed from it, and then become part of the next “assemblage” that has not yet been assembled, and so on. Such synthesis theory draws our attention to how the relationships between these parts can be reformulated, not only through the internal components of the compilation but also through its external parts and their relationships.
As the mobility of refugees in Gaza is a reproduction of the sociality of space/geography and time/history, then it is an act of resistance against erasure as emptying space and time. The question now is how to archive mobility in war zones as an assemblage act of resistance and social engineering.
It requires a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach, combining historical research, geography, and data science. A comprehensive archive would include maps of routes taken, personal accounts, government documents, and photographs, all of which provide a multifaceted view of the migration experience. Advanced search features in digital archives can assist researchers in filtering information by various criteria such as refugee population characteristics, places of departure, destinations, routes, and metaphorical representations of it and current locations. This not only preserves the history of human displacement but also serves as a valuable resource for understanding the causes and effects of refugee crises, aiding in the development of policies and responses for future humanitarian challenges.
Initially, Palestinian archiving activities in Gaza focused on documenting the destruction of urban structures caused by Israeli assaults, but did not extensively cover the methods used or the resistance efforts made by the people. This principle applies to nearly every instance of collective Palestinian resistance throughout the history of Palestine.
The primary issue with these approaches is their failure to acknowledge the horizontal nature of societal structures, which is not necessarily and solely bonded to a political party, specifically the social spaces of Sound and Mobility as experienced and lived in daily life for the Palestinian people as a whole subjected to a modern colonial war machine.
The French Marxist spatial thinker and historian Henri Lefebvre outlines the notion of Social Space as follows:
Let us ask ourselves a question that we should have asked ourselves when the six Palestinian prisoners managed to escape Galboua’a Maximum Security Prison in 2021, considering this incident as an act of resistance and a site of epistemic disobedience: do we have a comprehensive and holistic archival record of it, and on how it is it made? Knowing that that both, the Prison and archiving are contexts of re-writing history, that need decolonization and anti-colonial approaches!
Sound and mobility share a common characteristic: they both happen in time and space, resulting in major alterations in spatial and temporal existence. Any modifications in sound and mobility impact the perception of time and the understanding of space, making the experience of sound and mobility geographical and historical, and those are the main domains of hegemony in colonial apparatuses. Fredric Jameson effectively characterized the connection between modernism and the notions of space and time by asserting that our current existence is primarily influenced by spatial concepts rather than temporal ones. He argues that our daily life, psychological experiences, and cultural language are predominantly shaped by spatial categories, contrasting with the previous era of high modernism (Jameson 1991).
The relationship between sound and space can be understood through its dual function: as a historical archive as both are experienced through time and as a tool for navigating and experiencing the world. Urban soundscapes, which include the sounds of daily life, transportation, markets, public gatherings, and architecture, not only document the history of a place but also influence how we move through and understand that space and its history.
We may here propose the concept of psychogeography, which can be explored through sound. Soundscapes shape how people perceive and interact with urban spaces, affecting their routes, moods, and social interactions, individually and collectively. Sound is also a tool for territoriality and Identity. Where certain spaces develop distinct sound identities, that structures interactions toward hegemony.
These structures serve as fundamental elements for comprehending the social organization of warfare and the potential for resistance that arises from it. This understanding surpasses mere political and ideological discourse and metaphors, encompassing spatial and bodily forms of resistance, as well as the politics of memory and oblivion in an anti-modern way, or as near as possible to what Svetlana Boym describes as “Off-Modern” (Boym, 2002), referring to the notion of a culture that is situated between the periphery and the center of a larger cultural system. This concept was developed in opposition to the traditional division of art and culture into categories of modern or postmodern. Instead, it is characterized by its hybridity and pluralism, acknowledging how different cultural elements and traditions can coexist and intersect.
Svetlana Boym's notion of the “Off-Modern” presents an alternate perspective on modernity that deviates from the conventional linear progression narrative. In her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Boym introduces the concept of “Off-Modern” as a way to explore the alternative possibilities and unconventional aspects of modernity, rather than adhering to the dominant mainstream. The statement recognizes the intricacies, inconsistencies, and disconnects of contemporary human encounters.
The Off-Modern explores the capacity for creativity and critical thinking by reflecting on modernity without completely rejecting or nostalgically idealizing it. Boym associates this approach with a form of nostalgia that she refers to as “reflective nostalgia,” which involves a thoughtful analysis of the past while acknowledging its conflicting and unresolved aspects. The concept of Off-Modern serves as a critical evaluation and homage to modernity, embracing several viewpoints instead of a singular, prevailing storyline that is usually embedded in modernity’s production of self and others.
Boym’s Off-Modernism aims to create a niche for individuals who feel disconnected from the current time and are inclined to reconsider the connection between the past and the future as an act of resisting the hegemony of now in space and time. This perspective encourages the exploration of alternative alternatives and the formation of identities. The notion also highlights the significance of diversions, uncertainty, and non-sequential encounters as valuable elements of existence.
The concept of Off-Modern revolves around embracing the remnants, dilapidated structures, and alternative routes of modernity. It involves a thoughtful and inventive approach to history, uncovering forgotten or marginalized aspects that are often overlooked in conventional narratives of modernity.
However, the relation between sound and time cannot be fully captured, as sound occurs at an exact moment and ends in it, without offering the chance to hold it and continues until the next moment, with further sounds following in a linear progression of time. The same principle applies to mobility: it is initiated at a specific moment in time and continues in a linear temporal way. In a nuanced study, Henry Bergson highlights the distinction between mobility and space, asserting that they are not intertwined. According to Bergson, space represents the past, while mobility embodies the present (Bergson, 1934). This concept can be abstractly applied to the notion of sound, yet it is not correct completely, yet short-handed in defining the plurality of sound and space in extreme circumstances such as genocide.
In the ongoing Gaza conflict, which is marked by extensive destruction and killing, we can perceive the destruction/killing/urbicide of the city as a genocidal act based on two main factors: silence, defined as the absence of sound (which can be seen as a form of sound in its own), and the absence of mobility. These two expressions offer crucial visual proof of the widespread destruction and large-scale loss of life in Gaza as a city, space, and sound. This work investigates the use of sound and mobility as components of memory and strategies of resistance, as well as reversing the process of erasure. This concept stems from the notion that every act of writing/literary involves the act of erasure, and conversely, every act of erasure is a form of writing. Although memory and oblivion function similarly, what is silent has the potential to be remembered, while what is forgotten can assert itself loudly and vocally. From that juncture, the inquiry arises on how silence and mobility would be considered as the primary archiving and documenting material against the genocide in anti-colonial and decolonial archiving projects.
On Sound
Given the locations of sound within the historical social processes that produce and generate society, any society, we find that sound is scattered throughout the whole social structure, not confined to one location, and silence here is another kind of sound (the absence of sound as a sound in itself). Where the sound landscape of the day can be compared in the normal state (not war) against that sound at night, the usual sound of the day is characterized by a sort of accretional flow of events and vocal structures that do not necessarily have to declare this normality.
During times of genocide, the voice becomes a prime target for extermination, and the imposition of a voice is part of the genocide, and thus sound (and silence) becomes a tool of resistance, self-production, and counter-social production; in other words sound is the social event itself and not a mere medium (Austin, J. L, 1962). In his classic article, “Urbanism as a way of life”, Louis Weirth argues that the size, density, and heterogeneity of the urban population are the elements of “urbanity,” which is enshrined in a distinctive lifestyle, as heterogeneity is the main element of urbanization (Weirth, 1938), and is the central element of urban and collective annihilation - urbicide. The identification of urban heterogeneity is therefore an organic and fundamental factor, making the urban relationship structure ensure a constructive relationship to all of this heterogeneity, thus maintaining its continuity and self-expression. Thus, the eradication of cities is the destruction of heterogeneity as a result, and the elimination of its diversity, which goes beyond the genocide of the group to the eradication of its negotiating and dialogue possibilities, as in the urban fabric, the first of which is the sound. But in the case of sound in Gaza, it is a different tool to produce and document the self and the community during war, and our sound specimen is the sound of a surveillance unmanned aerial vehicle known as ZANANA الزنانة .
In Gaza, witnesses have described to the writer the voice of Al Zanana:
M.A: “As heavy as the sound of explosions, bullets, and tanks is, the sound of Al Zanana is the sound of occupation, and it may penetrate your body's pores rapidly”. (April, 2024)
B.N: “Who will take away the children's terror, hopelessness, and the sound of death and loss from their memories? It will also affect their relationships with their bodies in sleep, the house, their space, and the people who are supposed to protect them”. (February, 2024)
M.Z: “It is the neighborhood's voice, which is about to explode, telling us that there is no place for us here and that our bodies do not belong to us”. (March, 2024)
The differentiation between sounds based on their diversity, characterized as the sounds of ordinary existence, and those that are distinct, opposing, and lacking clear linkages, such as noise, is determined by the temporal framework through which information is disseminated. The auditory content presented here is a distinct manifestation of motion, as previously mentioned. The sound is thus a significant temporal element that reshapes and delineates territory and its social creation. The sound material is distinguished by temporal segmentation, as it is engaged in the examination of its archives and historical context. The fundamental question that arises is how to effectively archive and preserve the sound, specifically the voice of Al Zanana in this war, as a historical, temporal, and geographical/spatial resource, without succumbing to the limitations of existing Palestinian archive projects that are predominantly focused on physical political archives under political and ideological tags.
By witnessing sound/silence as a fundamental historical element for spatio-temporal memory, we simultaneously make it visible and invisible. Visibility encompasses more than what is obviously seen. Visibility serves as a fundamental psychological and emotional foundation for our integration into the world. Urbicidal silencing refers to the phenomenon where the urban environment is dominated by the contrasting presence of sound and quiet, representing the extreme and aggressive manifestations of the modern duality: war. Being visible in the (in)visibility of urbicidal sound/silence is positioned as being central to the sphere of the political, to “the space of the appearance”, as described by Hannah Arendt, or “to face each other” as underscores as the condition of an ethical imperative. Yet as both, Arendt and Butler, visibility should be understood more as a process of continual tension in which power, agency, collective will, and self-determination are constantly work. We may label this act of collective agency as: Resili[stan]ce, in which Gazans are of pure (in)visibility by saying: We are here!
An illustration of how a philosophical, phenomenological explanation of sound can approach the topic of memory as a matter of perception is demonstrated in Salomé Voegelin's concept of memory as a “pathetic trigger” (Voegelin, 2006). Voegelin asserts that memory serves as the substance for artistic and imaginative spatial and temporal creation, elucidating its role in the development of the present moment. Nevertheless, her notion of acoustic memory material continues to symbolize a reinvestment in the emotional and individual perception of the current moment, without addressing memory as a collective entity influenced by historical forces of colonialism or any social or ethical implications in the act of remembering.
On the contrary, audio or sonic memory plays a crucial part in the Palestinian anti-colonial and decolonial struggle to continuously advance the notion of existence. The act of remembering serves as a strategic means to critically analyze modernity. In this case, the Palestinian positionality contains a great possibility of epistemic disobedience to modernism and capitalism and their prejudiced methodologies, in which modern archive policies turn a blind eye to sound as a means of comprehending and conveying the social situation, particularly in relation to a war-related space and time. These policies effectively silence the impact of Al Zanana on children and the destruction of physical locations and spaces.
“If we are committed to anticolonial thought, our starting point must be one of disobedient relationality that always questions, and thus is not beholden to, normative academic logics.” (McKittrick, 2021)
Within colonial apparatuses, such as the Israeli case, the war is an organic paradigm, in which signs of visual display are very prominent and overwhelming, especially in genocidal warfare such as thit in Gaza. Those visual display might be deflecting or masking other realities, particularly of those in resistance. In such conditions (in)visibility may carry collective and individual acts of agency in decolonizing and degenociding the urbicide.
Take the prominent photos of prayers in demolished and destructed mosques in Gaza, what kind of sonic memory and oblivion mobilized in modern colonial gaze, trying to comprehend such an act of being for the Gazans?
Destroying the mosques in Gaza did not un-write their sound by silencing them. For such an approach. We may recall what Maurice Blanchot, the French philosopher underlined saying that there is no negation in unwriting anything,
On Mobility
At the time of writing, 70% of Gaza’s residents have been forcefully displaced more than two times, yet we have to start with a fundamental indicator of mobility as follows:
A--------------------------->B
This is the fundamental principle of mobility. In conventional migration theory, the decision to migrate is influenced by the pushing pressures of A and the pulling forces of B. The nature of the boundary between them remains unexplored. Recent social theories propose that migration can be classified as travel, nomadic life, routes, or airlines, and suggest that these movements have cumulative impacts. For an individual who lacks a specific geographic identity due to colonization and blockade, as in Gaza, these two dots, or at least one of them, exist in the emptiness as a result of the removal of geographic references from the colonized individual and their ability to move. This is because the concept of space and its perception is solely constructed by the modern state's spatial geography, known as Territory. In the context of colonial space, the trajectory connecting points A and B serves as a promising foundation for investigating the possibilities of anti-colonial geography and spatiality. This exploration focuses on the role of mobility and spatial production in challenging spatial colonialism and the oppressive practices of surveillance associated with colonial bodily politics in genocide. Mobility refers to the intentional movement of individuals within a certain context and environment, resulting in significant and dynamic relational effects. Consequently, we can propose three fundamental components of mobility that render it more complex than simply movement:
- Mobility is a tangible and perceptible phenomenon. Mobility is assessed and examined through the use of measurement, planning, and theory.
- Expressions of mobility encompass and comprehend movement by constructing significances that frequently possess an ideological character. Thus, geography has consistently served as a tool for exerting control and establishing dominance.
-
Mobility is actively engaged in, personally encountered, and physically manifested. Mobility is a fundamental state of existence.
To understand Mobility as a historically liberating act of resistance, employing mobility as a spatio-temporal act, let’s consider the escape of the six Palestinian prisoners in 2021 from Galboa’a maximum security prison. In which the escape as an act of mobility, decoded Israeli colonial geography and spatialization politics, which reflect the collective colonial image of an aggressive community and the Othering process within. This othering process includes a geographical area that must always be under Israeli control, using cameras, satellites, air drones, armies, security forces, planes, frontiers, borders, checkpoints, plantations, and other militarized urban planning methods. The inmates neutralized and counteracted such measures for nearly two weeks, decoding colonial spatial powers and tackling anti-colonial social space.
Based on the given rationale, we can assert that mobility can be considered as being dynamically equal to location, whereas mobility can be considered as being dynamically equal to place. A place serves as a focal point of significance. We develop emotional connections to it, engage in conflicts over it, and have personal encounters with it. In contrast, the concept of location does not encompass these same dimensions. The term "place" is employed in various theoretical and practical contexts. In the fields of spatial theory, philosophy, literary studies, and urban design, the term today denotes a significant portion of territory that is imbued with deep significance and influence. Bergson defined “stasis” points A and B as the mind's passive and artificial reconstruction of mobility. The political theory of migration analyzes how social movements have been arranged into circulation between artificially static social sites. This theory advocates for the vast and intensive social movement of migrants, stemming from their involvement with space and time. Migrants continue to shape social divisions, organization, and circulation.
The political, social and physical fabric of Gaza in this genocidical war could be considere as an "assemblage" due to continuous changes and modifications in response to the war and, previously, the Israeli blockade.
Assemblage refers to the composition of diverse elements into emergent and provisional socio-spatial formations We borrow “assemblage” theory from Manuel Delanda following Deleuze’s theories of difference and repetition (what DeLanda calls “variable repetition”), in which heterogeneous populations must have assemblages. Assemblages are generated and modified by varied populations of lower-level assemblages, but they can also limit or adapt these components. He considers assemblages non-essentialist (they are historically contingent actual beings, not ideal forms) and non-totalizing (they are heterogeneous groupings of components that should be examined as such). Assemblage theory therefore invites a shift in focus from the study of reified entities in social and political life, to the ongoing socio-material processes that constitute, reproduce, or change those entities.
Those purposeful assemblages of heterogeneous resources we witnessed in Gaza changed the face of the strip during the war relying on relationships, knowledge, and materials, framed through an emerging vision of ‘how to re-make the city’ (McFarlane, 2011a: 210) and give space for the mobility of the people to avoid the mass killing. By doing so, they are giving room for mobility in a closed urban terrain as an act of resistance to the urbicide that is forced upon the urban space to annihilate it. If seen from the perspective of the city as a whole, these assemblages may be seen as ‘small wins’ (Weick, 1984), but one can also understand these practices collectively as part of a broader ongoing struggle to demonstrate ‘how relations might be assembled otherwise’ to counteract relations forced upon the people. We specifically characterize this alternative assembling in four key ways: an emphasis on pre-figuration, nurturing and development of resources, fostering collective action and social solidarity in place, and a redistribution of resources and opportunities, that is one of the reasons why resistance managed to return to the North of the strip months after Israel declared if free from the Palestinian resistance. This we may consider a re-writing of the city, and un-writing of the vertically forced colonial and urbicidal geography.
The assemblage is built through the combination of separate, individual, and unique parts, such as urban, political, or social, and these unique parts can operate independently, or become part of the whole that in turn operates independently, can be removed from it, and then become part of the next “assemblage” that has not yet been assembled, and so on. Such synthesis theory draws our attention to how the relationships between these parts can be reformulated, not only through the internal components of the compilation but also through its external parts and their relationships.
As the mobility of refugees in Gaza is a reproduction of the sociality of space/geography and time/history, then it is an act of resistance against erasure as emptying space and time. The question now is how to archive mobility in war zones as an assemblage act of resistance and social engineering.
It requires a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach, combining historical research, geography, and data science. A comprehensive archive would include maps of routes taken, personal accounts, government documents, and photographs, all of which provide a multifaceted view of the migration experience. Advanced search features in digital archives can assist researchers in filtering information by various criteria such as refugee population characteristics, places of departure, destinations, routes, and metaphorical representations of it and current locations. This not only preserves the history of human displacement but also serves as a valuable resource for understanding the causes and effects of refugee crises, aiding in the development of policies and responses for future humanitarian challenges.
Initially, Palestinian archiving activities in Gaza focused on documenting the destruction of urban structures caused by Israeli assaults, but did not extensively cover the methods used or the resistance efforts made by the people. This principle applies to nearly every instance of collective Palestinian resistance throughout the history of Palestine.
The primary issue with these approaches is their failure to acknowledge the horizontal nature of societal structures, which is not necessarily and solely bonded to a political party, specifically the social spaces of Sound and Mobility as experienced and lived in daily life for the Palestinian people as a whole subjected to a modern colonial war machine.
The French Marxist spatial thinker and historian Henri Lefebvre outlines the notion of Social Space as follows:
“Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this had been a political process. Space is political and ideological. It is a product literally filled with ideologies. There is an ideology of space. Why? Because space, which seems homogenous, which seems to be completely objective in its pure form is a social product. The Production of space can be linked to the production of any given type of merchandise.”
Let us ask ourselves a question that we should have asked ourselves when the six Palestinian prisoners managed to escape Galboua’a Maximum Security Prison in 2021, considering this incident as an act of resistance and a site of epistemic disobedience: do we have a comprehensive and holistic archival record of it, and on how it is it made? Knowing that that both, the Prison and archiving are contexts of re-writing history, that need decolonization and anti-colonial approaches!
“The philosophy of motion is the analysis of phenomena across social, aesthetic, scientific, and ontological domains from the perspective of motion. As such, the ontology of motion is only one part of the philosophy of motion. Most important, and quite simply, the philosophy of motion is defined by the methodological primacy of motion with respect to the domain of study. Therefore the difference between simply describing the motion of things, which almost every philosopher and even layperson has done, and the philosophy of mobility is the degree to which mobility plays an analytically primary role in the description.” (Thomas Nail, 2018)
Abdalla Bayyari
A researcher, writer, and curator. Was a senior researcher at The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies: Palestine Memory Project (2017 - 2022). He is a researcher at the Institute for Palestine Studies and a member of the editorial board for Palestine Studies Journal (USA, Lebanon). His areas of inquiry are human, cultural, and critical geography. His current research projects focus on critical geography, mobility, spatial and urban studies. He is a visiting lecturer at the Built-Environment Institute for Applied Studies – Middle East and North Africa (Egypt) and Bir Zeit University (Palestine), among other academic platforms.
The book "City Re-construction and Urban Policy Innovation Towards Sustainable Cities in the MENA Region" will be published by Routledge in 2025, and Bayyari is one of the authors examining the role of Emptiness and Ruins in the Israeli colonization of Palestinian urban and rural geography. He is a member of the Arab Council for Social Sciences (Lebanon), the Geographical Association (UK), and the Urban Affairs Association (USA). His most recent publication, "Conceptualizing the Urbicide in Gaza as an Israeli Colonial Apparatus," was published this year in the Idafat Journal for Social Sciences (Oct. 2024).
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A researcher, writer, and curator. Was a senior researcher at The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies: Palestine Memory Project (2017 - 2022). He is a researcher at the Institute for Palestine Studies and a member of the editorial board for Palestine Studies Journal (USA, Lebanon). His areas of inquiry are human, cultural, and critical geography. His current research projects focus on critical geography, mobility, spatial and urban studies. He is a visiting lecturer at the Built-Environment Institute for Applied Studies – Middle East and North Africa (Egypt) and Bir Zeit University (Palestine), among other academic platforms.
The book "City Re-construction and Urban Policy Innovation Towards Sustainable Cities in the MENA Region" will be published by Routledge in 2025, and Bayyari is one of the authors examining the role of Emptiness and Ruins in the Israeli colonization of Palestinian urban and rural geography. He is a member of the Arab Council for Social Sciences (Lebanon), the Geographical Association (UK), and the Urban Affairs Association (USA). His most recent publication, "Conceptualizing the Urbicide in Gaza as an Israeli Colonial Apparatus," was published this year in the Idafat Journal for Social Sciences (Oct. 2024).
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