1

The Geopolitics of Concealment: Space, Sight and the

Screening of the Undesirable

Abstract

Physical structures have long been treated in the field of geopolitics as mechanisms of

military defence,1 boundaries of sovereign territorial borders

2 and as spatial demarcations of

various inclusionary and exclusionary zones.3 The critical examination of the performance of

physical structures as barriers of sight, however, remains underdeveloped within the

discipline. Their ability to hide certain spaces and practices from audiences and populations

appears to constitute a crucial instrument of contemporary geopolitical power. Addressing

the corresponding lacuna in geopolitical theory, this paper interrogates how architecture

operates - and in some cases is purposefully constructed – to perform as a visual screen.

Formulating a theoretical model of visual concealment permits us to explain empirical

examples where physical structures appear to deliberately obstruct sight of certain political

spaces and practices. Interrogating three specific cases, this paper examines how, from the

international to the street-level, governmental and private authorities have sought to

physically conceal perceivably problematic populations and spaces which are deemed

unsuitable for public view. A close analysis of these cases reveals that seemingly banal

architecture is in fact operating in a much more sinister - and acutely political - spatial

capacity.

(Chris Schofield, May 2015. This draft paper was submitted as an undergraduate final

dissertation at the University of Exeter).

1 See Geoffrey Parker, The Geopolitics of Domination (Routledge, 1988) and Christopher Fettweiss, ‘Sir

Halford Mackinder, Geopolitics and Policymaking in the 21st Century’, Parameters, vol.30, no.2, Summer 2000,

pp.58-71. 2 See Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books, 2010) and Peter Andreas, A Tale of Two

Borders: The US-Mexico and US-Canada Lines After 9/11 (The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies,

Working Paper No.77, May 2003). 3 Karen Till et al, ‘Interventions in the Political Geographies of Walls’, Political Geography, vol.30, 2013, pp.1-

11.

2

Contents

Abstract 4

Introduction 4

Chapter One: The Politics of Visibility 9

The Expansion of Sight and the Politics of Revealing: Panopticism and Surveillance 9

The Geopolitics of Sight and Site 13

Screening Slaughter: Timothy Pachirat’s ‘Politics of Sight’ 16

Chapter Two: Examining the Politics of Architecture 19

Painting Out the Palestinians: The case of settler wall murals 19

Screens and Slums in Manila 26

Hiding the Homeless 28

Chapter Three: Seeking an explanation: Out of sight, out of mind? 34

Resisting the geopolitics of concealment? 39

Conclusion 41

Appendix 43

Bibliography 45

Online Resources 50

3

The Geopolitics of Concealment: Space, Sight and the

Screening of the Undesirable

Introduction

Critical geopolitics has rightly continued to concern itself with the ways in which space and

politics remain deeply connected, despite having sought to actively disrupt the reductionist

and deterministic claims that classical, statist approaches to the discipline make in regards to

the relationship between physical geography and power.4 Rather than focus on the traditional,

‘grand strategies’ of territory and resource acquisition and the diplomatic speeches of

statesmen, critical geopolitics has followed the ‘aesthetic turn’ in political theory,5

problematising through an intersectional lens the more everyday production of geopolitical

knowledge in spaces like popular media, video games, and through physical spaces which act

to perform geopolitics, like international borders, airports and military bases.6 A vital project

for theorists of critical geopolitics thus remains, as Alison Williams contends in her

examination of international airspace, to “uncover the mundane, less obvious and everyday

practices of power projection”,7 practices which “run the risk of becoming routine and overly

familiar”, according to political geographers Sean Carter and Derek McCormack.8

4 Gearóid Ó Tuathail, ‘Thinking Critically About Geopolitics’, in Gearóid Ó Tuathail, Simon Dalby and Paul

Routledge (eds.), The Geopolitics Reader (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp.4-7. 5 Roland Bleiker, ‘The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory’, Millenium – Journal of International

Studies, vol.30, no.3, 2001, p.510. 6Rachel Hughes, ‘Through the Looking Blast: Geopolitics and Visual Culture’, Geography Compass, vol.1,

no.5, 2007, p.979. For a discussion of the intersectionality inherent to critical approaches to geopolitics, see

Deborah Dixon and Sally Marston, ‘Introduction: Feminist Engagements with Geopolitics’, Gender, Place and

Culture, vol.18, 2011, pp.445-53, Klaus Dodds, ‘Political Geography: Critical geopolitics after ten years’,

Progress in Human Geography, vol.25, no.3, 2001, p.473, and Klaus Dodds, ‘Shaking and Stirring James Bond:

Age, Gender and Resilience in Skyfall (2012)’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol.42, no.3, 2014,

pp.116-130. 7 Alison Williams, ‘Reconceptualising spaces of the air: performing the multiple spatialities of UK military

airspaces’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol.36, no.2, April 2011, p.264. 8 Sean Carter and Derek McCormack, ‘Affectivity and Geopolitical Images’, in Fraser MacDonald, Rachel

Hughes and Klaus Dodds (eds.), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp.113.

4

This paper interrogates three cases where political erasure is put into everyday operation by

physical architecture, demonstrating how visual concealment is a crucial, overlooked

instrument of contemporary geopolitical power: performing what Timothy Pachirat, in his

work on Nebraskan slaughterhouses, recognises as “mechanisms of distancing and

concealment that are inherent to our divisions of space”.9 Building upon Pachirat’s

conceptualisation, I scrutinize the ways in which other “morally repugnant” or perceivably

undesired political spaces are kept shielded from plain sight,10

depriving certain populations

from seeing that which would otherwise be visible. To demonstrate and underscore the

prevalence of visual concealment to our everyday lives, I have chosen to interrogate three

empirical cases in very different socio-political contexts.

The first case concerns the Israeli-built walls which run alongside and within Palestinian

territory in the West Bank, including segments of the ‘separation barrier’ and a ‘protective’

wall which was constructed in the Israeli settlement of Gilo in 2001. In addition to their

function of performing territorial boundary claims, and as exclusionary spatial barriers which

keep Palestinians (and bullets) from getting ‘inside’, the walls also operate as visual screens

which assist in erasing the colonised Palestinian communities from the sight and minds of

Israeli settlers. I problematise the murals which have been painted on the Israeli side of the

walls, which depict the rolling natural landscape behind, notably absent of any trace of the

Palestinian people and buildings which exist in actuality behind the screens. I examine how

the Israelis have succeeded in painting out both the Palestinian ‘other’ and the process of the

erasure itself, by decorating the wall in this manner. The second case concerns a wall which

also performs as a visual screen: a roadside barrier erected in Manila prior to a meeting of the

9 Timothy Pachirat, quoted in Avi Solomon, ‘Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse: an interview with

Timothy Pachirat’, boingboing.net, 08/03/12. Available online at: http://boingboing.net/2012/03/08/working-

undercover-in-a-slaugh.html (Accessed 31/03/15). 10

Timothy Pachirat, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialised Slaughter and the Politics of Sight (Yale University

Press, 2011), p.14.

5

Asian Development Bank in 2012. The wall occupied the space between the edge of the slum

neighbourhood of Pasay and a highway which connects the airport to the city centre. It was

specifically constructed by the city authorities to screen off the slum from the view of finance

ministers and business leaders who were travelling to the conference.11

The raison d’être of

the wall was to erase the sight of rampant economic inequality and Manila’s poorest people

by, in the words of one city official, “beautifying” the space.12

The final case examines the

bed of metal spikes which were installed outside private apartments in central London in

2014. These spikes were deliberately designed to prevent rough sleeping, and considered

alongside other ‘aggressive’ physical architecture in urban spaces, work to physically and

visually erase the urban homeless from public sight. All three cases provide examples from

the ‘international’ to the ‘street-level’ of the geopolitical performance of architecture in

visually concealing the problematic sights of the respective material consequences of settler-

colonialism, extreme economic inequality and urban homelessness.

In the final chapter I discuss possible explanations for the prevalence of the desire to conceal

problems instead of working to ameliorate them, drawing upon relevant visual, sociological

and psychological theory. I suggest that the concealment of certain spaces and practices

permits the viewer to mentally erase the problematic consequences of the various systems of

political oppression or inequity from which they actively participate in or benefit from.

Understood in this sense, the walls, screens and spikes assist in erasing morally-questionable

spaces by acting as barriers of mental acknowledgment of their very existence. Rather than

address the political problems these spaces symbolise: settler-colonialism; abject inequality

and urban homelessness, concealment permits the viewer to simply screen such moral

dilemmas from sight and mind. Underscoring the significance of visual concealment in this

11

Metro Manila Chief Francis Tolentino, quoted in Associated Press, ‘Philippines erects wall to obscure view of

slums,’ CTV News, 03/05/12. Available online at: http://www.ctvnews.ca/philippines-erects-wall-to-obscure-

view-of-slums-1.804784 (Accessed 31/03/15). 12

Ibid.

6

way remains a critical task for anyone interested in understanding the politically-performative

role of architecture, not merely as a spatial barrier of mobility, but crucially as one of sight

and acknowledgment.

The next chapter discusses the existing scholarship surrounding the politics of visibility,

drawing upon the diverse research fields of visual studies, surveillance studies and critical

geopolitics. Such a discussion exposes a theoretical fissure in the current literature; that the

issue of concealment has not as of yet been addressed within the discipline of critical

geopolitics. Despite a wealth of research focussing on the way in which visual media like

photography and film constitute “important technologies in the visual production of

contemporary geopolitics”,13

political geographers have so far failed to investigate the way in

which viewing positions of the everyday citizen have been deliberately exploited through

physical structures. This paper calls for a much more nuanced approach to the studies of both

visibility and architecture, inviting more geopolitical scrutiny to be aimed at the powerful

relationship between the two. A more sophisticated analysis has to treat an interrogation of

visual concealment as part of the same theoretical apparatus which considers visual

surveillance a crucial mechanism of political power. It is precisely through interrogating such

- otherwise banal - architectures, that we can fully expose their political performance as not

simply coincidental, but rather as an integral aspect to their design and function.

13

David Campbell, ‘Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Conflict’, Political Geography, vol.26,

2007, p.358.

7

Chapter One: The Politics of Visibility

This chapter discusses the diverse theory surrounding the politics of visibility and locates the

current lacuna in critical geopolitics scholarship. The existing work on the politics of

visibility remains broad and spans multiple theoretical fields: visual studies, which concerns

art, photography and the practice(s) of ‘looking’; the more overtly political field of

surveillance studies, which incorporates Michel Foucault’s work on Panopticism; and the

work of critical geopolitics scholars on the popular consumption of visual media like

television, cinema, photojournalism and video games and the way in which the geopolitical

citizen interprets them. This paper highlights the porous borders between these research fields

and calls for theorists of critical geopolitics to engage with the wider disciplines to form a

more nuanced theoretical model with which to understand and explain cases of visual

concealment.

The Expansion of Sight and the Politics of Revealing: Panopticism and Surveillance

Much of the work on the politics of visibility remains principally concerned with how power

operates through the expansion of sight and the collapsing of visual distance through the

exposure of concealed spaces. Gillian Rose, in her monumental work on visual

methodologies, usefully distinguished between ‘vision’, or what the human eye is capable of

seeing physiologically, and the more politically-influenced ‘visuality’.14

Quoting art historian

Hal Foster, Rose defines the latter practice as “how we see, how we are able, allowed or

made to see, and how we see this seeing and the unseeing therein”.15

She rightly states that

we “render the world in visual terms”16

and thus need “to think carefully about just who is

14

Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (Sage

Publications, 2007), p.2. 15

Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality: Discussions in Contemporary Culture (Bay Press, 1988), p.ix, quoted

in Rose, p.2. 16

Rose, p.2.

8

able to see what and how, and with what effects”.17

Art critic John Berger concurs with Rose

that visibility remains integral to the production of power relations: as he notes, “seeing

comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it can speak”.18

The potential for

control over the human sense of sight is therefore acknowledged by those within visual

studies, though the political ramifications for such a potential are not fully explored.

The political exploitation of visibility and the power over viewing positions has been

explicated most overtly within the relatively new field of ‘surveillance studies’, which draws

heavily upon the poststructuralist work of French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault has

identified the ways in which power has increasingly sought to expand sight over physical

space and citizen bodies.19

As he states, the last domain of biopolitics remains the “control

over relations between the human race...and their environment, the milieu in which they

live”.20

For him, vision constitutes one of the principal biopolitical mediums through which

the life of a population can be managed.21

According to Foucault, such power manifests itself

most blatantly in the idealised design of the ‘Panopticon’, Jeremy Bentham’s “great new

instrument of government” conjured up in the late 18th

century.22

The Panopticon was a

design for a prison where the inmate is kept - or believed they are kept - under constant

watch, leading him to "assume responsibility for the constraints of power,” conveniently

becoming “the principle of his own subjection".23

The architectural arrangement of the

Panopticon and its realisation of the potential for the political exploitation of visibility as seen

by Foucault is worth repeating here in full:

17

Ibid, p.10. 18

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (BBC and Penguin Books, 1972), p.7. 19

Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison: (Penguin Books, 1977), pp.195-228. 20

Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-76 (Picador Books,

2003), p.24. 21

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979 (Picador, 2010). 22

John Bowring (ed.), The Works of Jeremy Bentham: Volume IV (William Tait, 1843), p.66. 23

Foucault, 1977, pp.202-203.

9

“The principle was this. A perimeter building in the form of a ring. At the center of this, a tower,

pierced by large windows opening onto the inner face of the ring. The outer building is divided into

cells each of which traverses the whole thickness of the building. These cells have two windows, one

opening onto the inside, facing the windows of the central tower, the other, outer one allowing

daylight to pass through the whole cell...The back lighting enables one to pick out from the central

tower the little captive silhouettes in the ring of cells. In short, the principle of the dungeon is

reversed; daylight and the overseer’s gaze capture the inmate more effectively than darkness, which

afforded after all a sort of protection.”24

Central to the architectural design of the Panopticon was the harnessing of light - and thus

sight - for political means: a “formula of ‘power through transparency’, subjection by

‘illumination’”.25

For Foucault, the most significant political effect of such a design is the

internalisation of behavioural discipline amongst the prisoner, for the arrangement of the

building “induce[s] in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the

automatic functioning of power...of which they are themselves the bearers”.26

Crucially, the

entire operation takes place “in the subtlest possible way”:27

“There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a

gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own

overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb

formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost”.28

Harnessing the potential of exposing physical space through the subtleties and efficiencies of

architectural design, this Benthamite concept of surveillance, when applied tactfully, became

“an efficient means of producing social order”: for Gillian Rose it has become the “dominant

form of visuality throughout modern capitalist societies”.29

Foucault himself claims that

visual surveillance has enabled states to seriously enhance control over their populations.30

For him, the mechanism of the all-seeing eye is what undergirds many applications of

governmental power, from the prison to the mental asylum, each where the capacity to

24

Michel Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power’, in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and

Other Writings 1972-1977 (Pantheon, 1980), p.147. 25

Foucault quoted in Gordon, 1980, p.154. 26

Foucault, 1977, p.201. 27

Foucault, 1977, p.208. 28

Foucault quoted in Gordon, 1980, p.155. 29

Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (Sage

Publications, 2007), p.174. 30

Foucault, 1977, pp.202-203

10

visually expose physical space becomes an architectural priority. By exploiting the

operationalisation of visuality in this manner, we are reminded of the political power inherent

to the careful management of human sight. Indeed, the idea of Panopticism has constituted

one of the predominant theoretical vehicles within surveillance studies: Roy Coleman and

others have used the concept of Bentham’s design and Foucault’s subsequent theorising as

the basis for which to understand and explain the effectiveness and trend of modern closed-

circuit television (CCTV) usage by government and corporate powers.31

Surveillance theorist

Hille Koskela has similarly written of the popular usage of interconnected CCTV systems as

fundamentally an electrification of the Panoptic concept.32

Elsewhere, Nicholas Mirzoeff has

reinforced the importance of visibility as a mechanism of power by tracing the relationship

between the historical surveillance of slave-plantations to a contemporary US counter-

insurgency doctrine that remains principally based on “the field commander’s visualisation of

the area of operations”.33

He concludes that “perspective is the line of power”,34

concurring

with Foucault that it is the exposure of physical space that remains the supreme political

priority when visibility is harnessed.

But whilst such work has rightly recognised the powerful potential of applying the expansion

of visibility in such a way, these theorists have somewhat overlooked the converse side to the

political exploitation of sight. What Foucault most notably underplays in his analysis of

Bentham’s design is the en-opticism inherent to the operation of the Panopticon: that it only

functions so effectively because the prisoners cannot see if someone is watching them. As he

rightly recognised, the prisoners internalise their own discipline even when a guard is absent

31

Roy Coleman, ‘Reclaiming the Streets: Closed Circuit Television, Neoliberalism and the Mystification of

Social Divisions in Liverpool, UK’, Surveillance & Society, vol.2, no.3, pp.293-309 and Steve Herbert, ‘The

geopolitics of the police: Foucault, disciplinary power and the tactics of the Los Angeles Police Department,

Political Geography, vol.15, p.49. 32

Hille Koskela, ‘”Cam-Era” – The Contemporary Urban Panopticon’, Surveillance & Society, vol.1, no.3,

2003, p.293. 33

Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘The Right to Look’, Critical Inquiry, vol.37, no.3, Spring 2011, pp.475, 485. 34

Ibid, p.493.

11

from the central all-seeing tower, because they are unable to see if it remains occupied or not:

that fact remains “unverifiable” to the inmate and it is critical that it remains so.35

The same

applies for the effectiveness of CCTV: because the citizen cannot see the watcher behind the

remote camera - who always remains invisible - they assume that they are constantly being

monitored and so adjust their behaviour accordingly. What is crucially left unexamined

within visual and surveillance studies, then, is the concealment inherent to the politics of

visibility.

The Geopolitics of Sight and Site

The field of critical geopolitics has similarly addressed the ways in which visibility is

harnessed politically, but this analysis has again largely remained confined to an examination

of visual exposure through popular news media, film and photojournalism, despite the

intrinsic link between the visual concealment of physical space and the explicit theoretical

remit of ‘geo’-‘politics’: how exactly politics remains spatialised.36

Political geographer Jason Dittmer has rightly stressed in relation to popular video games that

“viewing positions that enable us to see things in the way that we do,” and the ability to

control “what is seen, and by whom, is critical to anyone engaged in international

relations.”37

The same remains pertinent to architectural barriers which perform as visual

screens, concealing certain spaces and practices which are deemed politically unsuitable for

public view. Sean Carter and Derek McCormack, in their work on the geopolitical

implications of popular cinema, agree with Dittmer, asserting that “geopolitical cultures

operate through and are sustained via processes that are always more than discursive”,

suggesting that the viewing of images remains critical to the (re)production of geopolitical

35

Foucault, 1977, p.201. 36

Klaus Dodds, Merje Kuus and Joanne Sharp, ‘Introduction: Geopolitics and its Critics’, in Dodds, Kuus and

Sharp (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics (Ashgate, 2013), p.2. 37

Jason Dittmer, Popular Culture, Geopolitics and Identity (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2010), p.105.

12

knowledge.38

Matthew Kearnes goes further by warning about the potential for political

exploitation of what citizens are allowed to see: “one does not simply see, but rather objects

and phenomena are ‘seeable’ or ‘visible’ in specific contexts”.39

However, the work of

critical geopolitical theorists here remains principally confined to the visual exposure, rather

than concealment, of physical space. David Campbell has combined his expertise as both a

photojournalist and political geographer by examining the exploitation of visibility inherent

to the use of photographs in news media. He has explored the political performance of images

in representing the 2003 Darfur conflict in Sudan, rightly insisting that we should be

concerned with “the way in which sites (and people in those sites) are enacted through

sight.”40

He emphasises the role the exploitation of certain photographs has in the production

of popular geopolitics, quoting a United Nations commander in Rwanda during the 1994

genocide, who stated that “a journalistic line to Western audiences was worth more than a

battalion on the ground”.41

Rune Andersen and Frank Muller extend Campbell’s focus on the

power of images and the expansion of sight, in their examination of the work of

photographers Trevor Paglan and Simon Norfolk.42

They demonstrate how (otherwise secret)

physical architectures of US surveillance and military hardware can be exposed by long-

range telephotography.43

Such work “makes visible what is normally invisible”,44

drawing

38

Sean Carter and Derek McCormack, ‘Affectivity and Geopolitical Images’, in Fraser MacDonald, Rachel

Hughes and Klaus Dodds (eds.), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp.105.

See also Laura Shepherd, ‘Visualising violence: Legitimacy and authority in the “war on terror”’, Critical

Studies on Terrorism, vol.1, no.2, 2008, p.215. 39

Matthew Kearnes, ‘Seeing is Believing is Knowing: Towards A Critique of Pure Vision’, Australian

Geographical Studies, vol.38, no.3, November 2000, p.335, quoted in Fraser MacDonald, ‘Geopolitics and “the

vision thing”: regarding Britain and America’s first nuclear missile’, Transactions of the Institute of British

Geographers, vol.31, no.1, March 2006, p.55. 40

David Campbell, ‘Geopolitics and Visuality: Sighting the Darfur Conflict’, Political Geography, vol.26,

2007, p.380. 41

Quoted in Campbell, 2007, p.358. 42

Rune Andersen and Frank Moller, ‘Engaging the Limits of Visibility: Photography, Security and

Surveillance’, Security Dialogue, vol.44, no.3, pp.203-221. 43

Ibid. See Paglen’s work on ‘limit telephotography’ at: http://www.paglen.com/?l=work&s=limit (Accessed

31/03/15) and Norfolk’s on secret surveillance architecture at: http://www.simonnorfolk.com/pop.html

(Accessed 31/03/15). 44

Andersen and Muller, p.217.

13

public attention to government facilities deliberately hidden many miles away from civilian

activity.

Political geographer Fraser MacDonald, in his analysis of the spectacle of the public display

of nuclear weapons, similarly emphasises the “ocular-centrism” inherent to popular

geopolitics, and, like Mirzoeff in his study of surveillance, points to the visual character of

contemporary military doctrine: the Pentagon’s desire for ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ being

a case in point.45

The political power of expanding sight has also been explored by urban

geographer Stephen Graham, who concurs that the trend of new military technologies shows

a demand for the uninterrupted surveillance of battlefields.46

He notes how contemporary

micro-drone technology seeks to ‘make visible’ otherwise concealed spaces of urban war

zones, like the interiors of buildings and subterranean tunnels and sewers.47

He interestingly

labels this network of military surveillance the ‘oligopticon’, taking the concept of the

Benthamite prison to its logical extreme.48

Indeed, the closest geopolitical scholarship seems to come to interrogating a politics of

concealment remains a brief reference made by David Campbell in his 2008 work on the

geopolitics of the public spectacle.49

He rightly notes that the Department of Defense ban on

photographs of returning military coffins from the Gulf War is an example of the exploitation

of political (in)visibility, yet he fails to elucidate on the significant implications such

concealment has for the interrogation of everyday power relations.

45

Fraser MacDonald, ‘Geopolitics and “the vision thing”: regarding Britain and America’s first nuclear missile’,

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol.31, no.1, March 2006, p.59. 46

Stephen Graham, ‘Combat zones that see: Urban warfare and US military technology’, in Fraser MacDonald,

Rachel Hughes and Klaus Dodds (eds.), Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (I.B. Tauris, 2010),

pp.196-224. 47

Ibid. 48

Ibid, p.219. 49

David Campbell, ‘Beyond Image and Reality: Critique and Resistance in the Age of Spectacle’, Public

Culture, vol.20, no.3, 2008, pp.539-549.

14

Screening Slaughter: Timothy Pachirat’s ‘Politics of Sight’

Timothy Pachirat, however, remains one of the first scholars to emphasize how sight and

space are used to conceal certain political-economic practices from particular audiences. His

work documenting the industrial killing of cows in Nebraska reveals the strict state laws

which criminalise the public filming and photographing of the interior of slaughterhouses, as

well as the internal screens on the ‘kill-floors’ of such factories which protect the workers

from witnessing the animals in their respective ‘stages’ of dying.50

Although he does not

articulate it as such, the act of visually screening such processes remains a precisely geo-

political act, since it concerns the exploitation of physical space for political means.51

Pachirat decisively draws upon German sociologist Norbert Elias’ conception of the

‘civilizing process’. Elias traces the history of (predominantly white-Western) behaviours and

customs, insisting that it has been the "concealment" and "displacement" of perceived violent

and repugnant practices that has been associated with the “civilisation” of Western

societies.52

Examining the historical development of etiquette over practices like table

manners, urination, sexual intercourse and the treatment of animals, Elias notes that such

activities have been gradually sequestered from public sight due to their moral repugnance:

“the characteristic of the whole process that we call civilization is this movement of

segregation, this hiding ‘behind the scenes’ of what has become distasteful”.53

Pachirat uses

Elias’ theory to explain the attempts by governments and corporations to conceal what goes

on inside slaughterhouses. Crucially, it remains “a labor [sic] considered morally and

physically repellent by the vast majority of society that is sequestered from view rather than

50

Pachirat, p.160. 51

Klaus Dodds, Merje Kuus and Joanne Sharp, ‘Introduction: Geopolitics and its Critics’, in Dodds, Kuus and

Sharp (eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Critical Geopolitics (Ashgate, 2013), p.2. 52

Quoted in Pachirat, 2011, pp.10-11. 53

Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Blackwell, 2000), p.103.

15

eliminated or transformed”.54

Pachirat’s final point here is critical, suggesting that

concealment is not only put into practice because the sight of the physical space of the killing

is repugnant: the concealment also erases the moral dilemma over what to do about the ethics

of the killing itself.

Pachirat rightly draws attention to what he labels the enaction of a ‘politics of sight’, but fails

to articulate his theory in explicitly geopolitical terms. Considering the practice of

concealment is inherently concerned with the ways in which politics is spatialised (and in

turn the ways in which spaces are politicised), the task of formulating a theoretical model of

concealment remains necessary. By interrogating contemporary cases where perceivably

‘repugnant’ practices such as settler-colonialism and abject inequality appear to be visually

hidden by physical screens, I seek to expose the crucial workings of a ‘geopolitics of

concealment’. Such a model can assist political geographers in explaining apparent attempts

to distance political spaces and processes from the sight and mind of certain populations.

Lacking such an appropriate theoretical apparatus, the discipline remains ill-equipped for

recognising and interrogating physical spaces and architectures as objects integral to the

production of geopolitics.

Both theoretical concepts examined in this chapter - that political power operates by exposing

concealed spaces and also by screening them off - appear somewhat contradictory when read

together. However, these mechanisms of power are by no means totalising. The purpose of

this paper is not to claim that concealment is fundamental to the operation of power, but

rather that the screening of spaces should not be overlooked as a potential powerful

mechanism. As Pachirat so successfully demonstrated, both surveillance of employees and

54

Pachirat, p.11.

16

the concealment of the killing of the cows worked seamlessly together within the space of the

slaughterhouse.55

55

Pachirat, p.255.

17

Chapter Two: Examining the Politics of Architecture

This chapter examines three different cases where visual concealment is enacted through

physical architecture. Though it is possible to scrutinize an array of empirical examples of

such structures, I have selected these specific cases because they seek to conceal very

different political spaces. The first two both concern erasures which can be seen to take place

on the ‘international’ level of politics, since they respectively represent a cross-border

occupation and a regional diplomatic conference. They also represent the concealment of

static populations, as opposed to the final case, which concerns the erasure of the urban

homeless, a mobile population that can be considered at the ‘street-level’ of politics. In

drawing attention to these different cases, I hope to reinforce the pervasiveness of visual

concealment and its multiple applications as a powerful geopolitical mechanism.

Painting out the Palestinians: The case of settler wall murals

Tracking east of the pre-1967 international Green Line border, the Israeli-built ‘separation

barrier’56

stretches for over seven hundred kilometres, frequently intruding into occupied

Palestinian territory and completely sealing off significant areas of land from the rest of

Palestine.57

Under international law the barrier is deemed illegal,58

and critics have labelled it

the ‘Apartheid Wall’ for its instrumental neo-colonial role in annexing almost a tenth of

56

Officially labelled a ‘security fence’ by the State of Israel and a ‘wall’ by others, I refer to the structure as

both a ‘separation barrier’ which represents the more objective, official wording used by the United Nations (see

Figure 1 in the appendix), and a ‘wall’, for ease of reference to its physical structure. For a discussion of the

barrier’s multiple performativities, see Merav Amir, ‘On the Border of Indeterminacy: The Separation Wall in

East Jerusalem’, Geopolitics, vol.16, no.4, 2011, pp.768-792. 57

See Figure 1 in the appendix. 58

See UN Security Council Resolution 465 (1980), which states that “all measures taken by Israel to change the

physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab

territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof have no legal validity and that Israel’s

policy and practices of settling parts of its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a

flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War and

also constitute a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East.”

Available at:

http://www.un.int/wcm/content/site/palestine/cache/offonce/pid/11884;jsessionid=CAB091749758D1068B23D

0D49AE3F080 (Accessed: 31/03/15). See also International Court of Justice, Legal Consequences of the

Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (Request for Advisory Opinion) (ICJ, July 2004).

18

Palestinian land.59

The wall can be seen in the classical geopolitical sense as one of physical

exclusion.60

Its Israeli proponents purport that it remains wholly defensive, constructed

following the Second Intifada as a ‘temporary’ “Security Fence” which prevents potential

suicide bombers and ‘terrorists’ from accessing Israeli citizens.61

Indeed, an examination of

the wall will reveal that it is clearly designed to keep people out: the Israeli Border Police

meticulously rake the fine-sand paths running parallel to the three-metre high slabs of

concrete, in an attempt to expose the footprints of anyone who attempts to jump over.62

The

guards similarly boast of their ability to respond to a breach of any part of the wall within

eight minutes, assisted by a network of watchtowers, motion sensors and CCTV cameras.63

The wall can also been seen as an attempt to demarcate sovereign Israeli territory, intruding

where necessary onto Palestinian land in order to secure space for further Israeli

settlements.64

Indeed, critics have disputed its solely protective role by pointing to obvious

security weaknesses and its specific route which cuts much further eastwards of the Green

Line.65

Wendy Brown points to the wall’s more theatrical, symbolic performance as a

provider of mental security: an imaginative device for Israeli citizens that succeeds in

creating a “visual scenography of a state of emergency” and thus works to reassure those

facing the alleged security threat posed by the Palestinian population.66

These multiple

functions of the wall indicate performances in both the classical and critical geopolitical

senses: protecting the State of Israel from intruders and attempting to demarcate and

59

Marcello Di Cintio, Walls: Travels Along the Barricades (Soft Skull Press, 2013), p.103. 60

See Geoffrey Parker, The Geopolitics of Domination (Routledge, 1988). 61

See Government of Israel: Ministry of Defence, ‘Israel’s Security Fence: Questions & Answers.’ Available

online at: http://www.securityfence.mod.gov.il/Pages/ENG/questions.htm (Accessed 31/03/15). 62

Di Cintio, p.102. 63

Roger Cohen, ‘The World: Israel’s Wall, Building for Calm by Giving Up on Peace’, The New York Times,

18/07/04. 64

See for example B’Tselem – the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories,

Under the Guise of Security: Routing the Separation Barrier to Enable the Expansion of Israeli Settlements in

the West Bank (B’Tselem, December 2005). 65

Ibid. 66

Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books, 2010), pp.26, 30, 40, 77.

19

legitimise its borders which encroach upon occupied Palestinian land, whilst ritualistically

performing a symbol of security for Israeli citizens.

The wall can also, however, be seen to perform a further political function by obstructing the

sight of Palestinian communities which lie directly behind it. Critics like Terry Meade have

observed the way in which the separation barrier assists in “domesticating the enclosed

territory,” whilst simultaneously “cleansing it of signs of the Other outside”.67

The sheer

height and stark concrete opaqueness of the wall arguably enables those on the Israeli side to

forget about the Palestinians who subsist on the other, by erasing them from sight and mind.

By living so close to, yet remaining hidden from the victims of their land annexation, Israeli

citizens are arguably distanced both visually and morally from the practice of occupation in

which they actively participate in and directly benefit from. The ways in which the Israeli

authorities have attempted to disguise the wall from the inside furthermore exposes their

efforts to deny citizens evidence of the wall’s existence and, in doing so, distance themselves

from not only the Palestinians, but the process of erasing the Palestinians. As Saree Makdisi,

a writer on Arab politics, perceptively explains:

“Seen from the Palestinian side, the wall is, unmistakably, a wall. Its brutalist design communicates

unequivocally to the Palestinians what Israel thinks of them. Seen from the Israeli side, however, the

wall is often not really a wall; in many sections, it is smoothed into the landscape, and its scale is

disguised by shrubs, trees and landscaping that gradually rises and falls, offsetting the severity that is

so brutally - and expressively - naked on the Palestinian side. From the Israeli point of view, the effect

is not only to render the Palestinians on the other side invisible but...to render the process of rendering

them invisible itself invisible”.68

Here we can detect the workings of a double erasure, accomplished through sequestering the

sight of Palestinians using the separation barrier, and again by camouflaging the wall itself,

attempting to blend it into the natural landscape. Elsewhere, where the barrier tracks

alongside Route 443 from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, the former’s municipal government has

67

Terry Meade, ‘Destruction of Homes, Erasure of History,’ in Chiara Certoma, Nicola Clewer and Doug Elsey

(eds.), The Politics of Space and Place (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), p.47. 68

Saree Makdisi, ‘The Architecture of Erasure’, Critical Inquiry, vol.36, Spring 2010, p.535.

20

painted the interior of the walls with “green meadows and blue skies framed by murals of

viaducts”,69

and alongside Highway 6 around the Palestinian cities of Tulkarm and Qalqilya,

“heaps of soil, planted trees, bushes and plants cover the mass of concrete behind”.70

Makdisi

has commented on the perverse nature of disguising the wall as a viaduct: something that

“connects rather than separates”,71

as well as the misleading nature of the deliberate,

‘decorative’ landscaping, which leads a viewer on the Israeli side to “render [the wall] as pure

background”.72

What we witness alongside the West Bank, then, is precisely the operation of a ‘politics of

sight’ that Pachirat references to in regards to industrial slaughterhouses. Both the victims

and practice of a perceivably problematic process - the colonisation of the Occupied

Palestinian Territories - are rendered invisible through the use of visual screens. The

performative repertoire of the separation wall can thus be seen to include that of a barrier of

sight; a powerful mechanism of concealment which the colonist depends upon for distancing

both the ‘problem’ of the Palestinian and of the repressive practice of colonialism itself. In

Makdisi’s words: “on the one hand, there is a desire to do away with or deny the Palestinian

other - to retroactively fulfill the Zionist dream that Palestine is a land without a people for a

people without a land - while also denying that such a denial is taking place (by disguising its

traces)”.73

Elsewhere in the occupied West Bank, we witness a further performance of architecture as

that which enacts visual concealment. In 2001, in the Israeli town of Gilo to the east of

Jerusalem, Israeli security forces built a concrete wall to protect its residents from Palestinian

69

Christine Leuenberger, ‘The West Bank Wall as Canvass: Art and Graffiti in Palestine/Israel’, Palestine-

Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and Culture, vol.17, no.12, 2011. Available online at:

http://www.pij.org/details.php?id=1350 (Accessed 31/03/15). 70

Ibid. 71

Makdisi p.535. 72

Ibid. 73

Ibid, p.537.

21

sniper fire.74

Indeed, the citizens of Gilo, which is built on land annexed by Israel in 1967 and

is considered an illegal settlement under international law,75

had come under substantial

threat from indiscriminate mortar attacks and targeted shootings from the Palestinian

community of Beit Jala across the valley.76

This wall also served a significant protective

function for its builders and again can be seen principally as a defensive structure when one

adopts a classical geopolitical lens. Within months of its construction, however, the

municipal Israeli authorities decided to “soften” the concrete for local citizens by having an

“artistic replica of the disappearing view” painted on the interior side.77

The thick grey slabs

which comprised the wall were then decorated with murals depicting the sweeping

landscapes of the hills of Beit Jala.78

Figure 2: Ground-view of the Israeli wall murals in Gilo. Source: Negotiations Affairs Department – Palestine

Liberation Organization, 2004. Available online at: http://w3.osaarchivum.org/galeria/the_divide/chapter02.html

(Accessed 31/03/15).

74

Tracy Wilkinson, ‘It’s Back-to-School Day for Israeli Children on Gilo’s Front Line,’ Los Angeles Times,

03/09/01. 75

BBC News, ‘Israel approves 942 Jewish homes in Gilo settlement’, 05/04/11. Available at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12969424 (Accessed 31/03/15). 76

Clyde Haberman, ‘Gilo Waits for Deliverance as Mideast Violence Goes On,’ The New York Times,

30/08/01. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/30/world/gilo-waits-for-deliverance-as-mideast-

violence-goes-on.html?pagewanted=1 (Accessed 31/03/15). 77

W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Christo’s Gates and Gilo’s Wall’, Critical Inquiry, vol.32, no.4, Summer 2006, p.588. 78

See Figures 2 and 3.

22

What remains striking about these colourful murals, however, is the complete absence of the

Palestinian community which exists in reality across the hill-scape behind the wall. One only

has to see the wall from an elevated vantage point, to appreciate the remarkable disparity in

the images of the hills which the Israeli settlers see every day (Figure 2), and the actual

landscape which remains behind the wall, populated by Palestinian buildings and people

(Figure 3).

Figure 3: Murals on the Israeli wall in Gilo. The Palestinian town of Beit Jala can be seen on the right side of the

image. Credit: Simon Norfolk, 2007. Available online at:

https://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/182899/Israeli_Sniper_Wall (Accessed 31/03/15).

We can interpret such an attempt to distance the Palestinian ‘problem’ from Israeli sight and

mind as a visual concealment of a political space that is deemed too morally repugnant to

look at. By painting the wall with an idealised, non-existent landscape, the Israelis ultimately

23

responsible for the ongoing, illegal settlement of Palestinian territory thus work to cleanse

themselves from any acknowledgement of the colonised population. In Pachirat’s words,

“rather than transformed, the repugnant activity is sequestered from view”.79

At Gilo, we not

only witness the practice of making the Palestinians invisible (by building the wall), nor do

we only witness the erasure of this practice (by painting the wall); we furthermore witness the

complete erasure of the Palestinians as a people in entirety (by erasing the Palestinians from

the depicted mural landscape). The Israelis deny to themselves not only the possibility that

Palestinians could be living behind the wall, but also the reality of the existence of

Palestinians at all. To consider the wall at Gilo as merely a defensive structure is therefore to

Figure 3: Wall mural in Gilo depicting a topography of Jewish sites including Tel Aviv and the Knesset, notably

absent of the Palestinian ‘other’ which lives behind the wall. Source: Christine Leuenberger, ‘The West Bank

Wall as Canvass: Art and Graffiti in Palestine/Israel, The Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics and

Culture, vol.17, no.12, 2011. Available online at: http://www.pij.org/details.php?id=1350 (Accessed 31/03/15).

limit the understanding of its imperative, (geo)political functions, specifically as a visual

screen of the neocolonial operation taking place in the West Bank. In this sense, a

geopolitical model of visual exclusion helps us to explain why Israelis have painted such

79

Pachirat, 2011, p.11.

24

murals and made discernible attempts to conceal both the Palestinian communities and the

wall itself: in Makdisi’s words, a “repression of repression”.80

Screens and Slums in Manila

The geopolitical performance of walls as visual screens is furthermore apparent where

governments have attempted to conceal problems which are deemed too unsuitable for public

view. This was evident when the city authorities of Manila erected walls around a slum

neighbourhood prior to its hosting of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) conference in May

2012.81

The confessed, official function of the walls differs to that in the West Bank,

however, as presidential spokesman Ricky Carandang informed the press following its

construction: "any country will do a little fixing up before a guest comes."82

City official

Francis Tolentino gave further insight into the political reasoning behind the construction of

the screens: “we need to show our visitors that Metro Manila is orderly... I see nothing wrong

with beautifying our surroundings”.83

The very sight of the slum, then, was seen by the state

as a political problem which needed ‘fixing’, a detrimental scar which impairs the “beauty”

and “order” of the urban landscape of Manila: the sole purpose of the walls was to visually

screen this space off.

The walls, which flanked a highway connecting downtown Manila to its international airport,

were specifically built for the expressed purpose of concealing the view of the slums and

their inhabitants from the view of ADB officials, who were driven through the area on their

route to the conference. The slum neighbourhood of Pasay was seen by city officials to

80

Makdisi, p.558. 81

See Figure 4 in appendix. 82

Associated Press, ‘Philippines erects wall to obscure view of slums,’ CTV News, 03/05/12. Available online

at: http://www.ctvnews.ca/philippines-erects-wall-to-obscure-view-of-slums-1.804784 (Accessed 31/03/15). 83

Associated Press, 03/05/12.

25

repulse even those whose very job it is to deal with extreme poverty on an everyday basis.

Whilst the ADB’s mission statement is to “alleviate poverty and help create a world in which

everyone can share in the benefits of sustained and inclusive growth”,84

the city officials

evidently believed that the sight of the physical space displaying extreme poverty (and thus

economic inequality) was too morally repugnant for Manila’s temporary audience of

international delegates. Indeed, a third of Manila’s twelve million residents currently live in

slums,85

whilst a third of the Filipino population lives below the poverty line of $1.25 a day.86

By the ADB’s own figures, the Philippines had one of the worst inequality rates for South

East Asia from 2000-2010.87

Yet it was felt necessary that the material consequences of this

poverty were kept hidden from view during the ADB conference.

Figure 4: An elevated view of the screens obstructing the sight of slums in Manila, 2012. Source: Associated

Press.

84

Asian Development Bank, Overview. Available online at: http://www.adb.org/about/overview (Accessed

31/03/15). 85

James Hookway, ‘Manila Tried to Fence Off Slum Ahead of ADB Meeting’, TheWall Street Journal,

04/05/12. Available online at: http://blogs.wsj.com/indonesiarealtime/2012/05/04/manila-tries-to-fence-off-

slum-ahead-of-adb-meeting/?mg=blogs-

wsj&url=http%253A%252F%252Fblogs.wsj.com%252Fsearealtime%252F2012%252F05%252F04%252Fmani

la-tries-to-fence-off-slum-ahead-of-adb-meeting%252F (Accessed 31/03/15). 86

Ibid. 87

Asian Development Bank, Asian Development Outlook 2012: Confronting Rising Inequality in Asia (ADB,

2012), p.47. Available online at: http://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/29704/ado2012.pdf

(Accessed 31/03/15).

26

What is this if not the most blatant workings of a geopolitical visual concealment? By

exploiting the space between the highway and the slum, the Philippine government

successfully sequesters the undesirable view of the slum from plain sight, effectively

distancing the ADB attendees from the problematic space of extreme inequality. Examining

the posters attached to the wall itself (Figure 4), one observes enlarged colour photographs

which depict a placid coastal stretch elsewhere in the Philippines, alongside the slogan:

“Exhibiting resilience, warmth and people”.88

The photograph plays a role in taking its

viewers’ imaginations geographically elsewhere, assisting in exactly the sort of political

management of “just who is able to see what and how, and with what effects” that visuality

theorist Gillian Rose has spoken of.89

Without any sense of irony, the slogan describes the

visual exhibition of a people that the very wall the text is printed on works to conceal. Rather

than deal with the immediate needs of the people inhabiting the slum, then, the entire

physical space is ignored and the existence of such poverty is erased, much like the

Palestinian community of Beit Jala. The ADB delegates who came to Manila to deal with

extreme poverty would end up shielded from the sight of the very conditions they allegedly

came to ameliorate.90

Hiding the Homeless

So far this chapter has examined two cases operating on the ‘international’ level of politics:

one concerning the illegal occupation of Palestine and an attempted visual concealment of the

colonised population on behalf of the coloniser, and one concerning extreme economic

inequality and an attempt to visually conceal the poorest from the sight of international

diplomats and delegates of the ADB. These cases both also concern the shielding of the

88

See Figure 4. 89

Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (Sage

Publications, 2007), p.10. 90

Associated Press, ‘Philippines erects wall to obscure view of slums,’ CTV News, 03/05/12. Available online

at: http://www.ctvnews.ca/philippines-erects-wall-to-obscure-view-of-slums-1.804784 (Accessed 31/03/15).

27

relatively static populations of Beit Jala and slum neighbourhood of Pasay. Visually

concealing a static physical space remains relatively simple: in these two cases the authorities

simply erected walls and ‘decorated’ them with paintings and photographs. However, the

next case examined here concerns the visual concealment of another population deemed

politically ‘problematic’, but one that does not concentrate itself in one single physical space:

the urban homeless. The concealment of this mobile population, which by its very nature does

not have a fixed, static home, remains a more challenging operation for those seeking to

visually erase them from sight.

Urban geographers have explored the ways in which certain behaviours and mobile

populations can be excluded through particular types of architecture. Political geographer Jeff

Ferrell has looked at how the architectural practice of ‘Crime Prevention Through

Environmental Design’ works by “building social control into the spatial environment”.91

He

has focussed specifically on anti-skateboarding abutments which physically but subtly

exclude those individuals in a shared space wanting to perform certain behaviours deemed

unacceptable by the architect.92

When examined alongside similar structures, such

architecture accumulates “into a spatial environment saturated with a contemporary ideology

of containment and exclusion”, one notably obvious to those which it is designed against, yet

subtle to the rest of the population.93

Marginal populations are all but banished from public

life, for there remain few suitable public spaces in the city for those wanting to act in a

certain way, such as skateboarding or finding a spot to sleep rough. The starkly (bio)political

nature of architecture here is evident, reminding us of Foucault’s interpretation of the way

91

Jeff Ferrell, ‘Anarchy, Geography and Drift’, Antipode, vol.44, no.5, 2012, pp.1687-1704. 92

Ibid. 93

Ibid, p.1688.

28

power operates efficiently through the “calculated management of life”.94

Indeed, behaviours

such as skateboarding and rough sleeping could be outlawed by governments and enforced by

the police, but as the public uproar over the legal ‘ban’ on homelessness in Norway recently

proved, it remains far easier and more efficient to let subtle physical architectures perform the

work of concealment instead.95

In the central London borough of Southwark, the existence of rows of miniature metal spikes

embedded in the ground of a relatively sheltered space outside private apartments came to

public attention in 2014. They were rightly identified as ‘anti-homeless’ measures taken to

prevent rough sleepers from resting in the dry space offered by the sheltered alcove (see

Figure 5). The spikes were highlighted in press reports as a distasteful and immoral instance

of design, yet the overtly political nature and prevalence of such architecture across the city

remained largely overlooked, bar a handful of exceptions.96

Figure 5: ‘Anti-homeless’ spikes installed outside private flats in Southwark, London. Source: The Times

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4113532.ece (Accessed 31/03/15).

94

Michel Foucault, ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, in Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume

I (Vintage Books 1990), pp.139-140. 95

Harald Rostvik, ‘A ban on beggars in Norwegian cities is not the answer to homelessness’, The Guardian,

12/02/15. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/feb/12/ban-beggars-norwegian-cities-

homeless?CMP=share_btn_tw (Accessed 31/03/15). 96

See Maryam Omidi, ‘Anti-homeless spikes are just the latest in “defensive architecture”’, The Guardian,

12/06/14. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jun/12/anti-homeless-spikes-latest-defensive-

urban-architecture (Accessed 31/03/15).

29

What Slavoj Zizek labels as architectural “spandrels”97

  - those spaces of a building left over

as a result of adjoining parts but not necessarily performing a usable function, have now

become fortified and aggressive. The empty sheltered space created by the pillars of a bridge,

for example, remain a desirable space for rough sleeping, as do doorways, archways and

window ledges. The trend of making such spaces uncomfortable and uninhabitable marks a

wider architectural strategy of erasing the problem of homelessness from sight.98

Rather than

an isolated instance, the spikes represent part of a much more systematic attempt to cleanse

urban spaces of rough-sleepers. Indeed, when one walks around a city with a critical eye for

such architecture, its (geo)political performance becomes increasingly obvious, from ‘anti-

sit’ spikes on fire-hydrants,99

to public benches which are deliberately slanted in a manner

which makes sleeping on them impossible,100

to its most extreme manifestation in showers

which dump water on entrance alcoves, sporadically drenching rough sleepers who settled

down for a night’s rest.101

One could argue that the spikes’ purpose quite clearly remains physical exclusion in the

classical geopolitical sense. Whilst it is undeniably the case that such stark architecture is

designed to physically prevent the homeless from getting comfortable, the accumulation of

the prevalence of such designs only leads to the overall exclusion and thus erasure of

homeless bodies. Indeed, research on ‘solutions’ to homelessness in Los Angeles has found

that governmental efforts largely deal initially with those homeless groups most visible to

other citizens, suggesting an underlying priority to rid sight of the homeless and not just the

97

Slavoj Zizek, ‘The Architectural Parallax’, in Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (Verso, 2011), pp.275. 98

See Alex Andreou, ‘Anti-homeless spikes: Sleeping rough opened my eyes to the city’s barbed cruelty’, The

Guardian, 18/02/15/. Available online at: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-

architecture-keeps-poverty-undeen-and-makes-us-more-hostile (Accessed 31/03/15). 99

‘The Anti-Sit gallery’, Available online at: http://citynoise.org/article/1837 (Accessed 31/03/15). 100

Guardian Witness, ‘Share your examples of defensive urban architecture’, The Guardian, Available online

at: https://witness.theguardian.com/assignment/53985e5be4b0bd395f66c659 (Accessed 31/03/15). 101

See Abby Ohlheiser, ‘San Francsico cathedral will stop dousing sleeping homeless people with water’, The

Washington Post, 18/03/15. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-

faith/wp/2015/03/18/san-francisco-cathedral-douses-homeless/ (Accessed 31/03/15).

30

problem of rough sleeping in general.102

As Dennis Culhane has noted, anti-homeless

measures “[are] not designed to address the root problems of homelessness, but only the

(alleged) problem of ‘spatial concentration’ among the homeless”,103

suggesting that it is the

observable problematic population of rough-sleepers that is the catalyst for ‘anti-homeless’

architecture. Kate Swanson, in her work on the erasure of homelessness in Ecuadorian cities,

agrees that the policing of rough sleeping is less to do with law enforcement and more to do

with the “cover[ing]-up of unsightly visual blemishes” and convalescing the aesthetics of

public space.104

Journalist Alex Andreou, who spent months homeless following the global

financial crisis of 2008, concurs that architecture such as the beds of spikes principally work

to visually exclude the homeless, suggesting that:

“poverty exists as a parallel, but separate, reality. City planners work very hard to keep it outside our

field of vision. It is too miserable, too dispiriting, too painful to look at someone defecating in a park

or sleeping in a doorway and think of him as ‘someone’s son’”.105

What we witness in these arguments is reminiscent of Elias’ theory of the ‘civilizing

process’, where practices deemed ‘morally repugnant’ are simply banished from sight .106

Rather than ameliorated, the undesirable existence of rough sleepers on our streets is simply

concealed, in much the same way that the slum of Pasay was screened off when authorities

wished to hide evidence of rampant inequality and the segregated Palestinian community of

Beit Jala was painted out of the minds of Israeli settlers via murals on concrete walls. The

urban homeless equally constitute a politically problematic population, where erasing them

from sight remains a far easier solution than working to resolve the chronic socio-political

predicament they represent. As the political performance of architectural design is

102

Alex Vitale, ‘The Safer Cities Initiative and the removal of the homeless’, Criminology and Public Policy,

vol.9, no.4, 2010, p.870. 103

Dennis Culhane, ‘Tackling Homelessness in Los Angeles’ Skid Row’, Criminology and Public Policy, vol.9,

no.4, 2010, p.853. 104

Kate Swanson, ‘Revanchist Urbanism Heads South: The Regulation of Indigenous Beggars and Street

Vendors in Ecuador’, Antipode, vol.39, no.4, pp.723. 105

Alex Andreou, ‘Anti-homeless spikes: Sleeping rough opened my eyes to the city’s barbed cruelty’, The

Guardian, 18/02/15/. Available online at: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/feb/18/defensive-

architecture-keeps-poverty-undeen-and-makes-us-more-hostile (Accessed 31/03/15). 106

Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (Blackwell, 2000), p.103.

31

increasingly realised across urban spaces, the types of people and behaviours permitted in

our cities becomes gradually streamlined to the point where “the poor, if visible at all, have

become irresponsibilised eyesores”, according to Roy Coleman.107

Rough sleepers have

grown so problematic that they are actively designed against through the subtle yet effective

application of physical architecture, much like the metal spikes which keep unwanted pigeons

physically - and visually - at bay.

107

Roy Coleman, ‘Reclaiming the Streets: Closed Circuit Television, Neoliberalism and the Mystification of

Social Divisions in Liverpool, UK’, Surveillance & Society, vol.2, no.3, p.306.

32

Chapter Three: Seeking an Explanation: Out of Sight, Out of Mind?

The three cases examined in this paper demonstrate a trend of exploiting sight for political

ends. This final chapter discusses the possible explanations for such a prevalent desire to

visually conceal problematic political spaces and populations from view. Drawing upon

visual, sociological and psychological theory, I suggest that the concealment of certain spaces

and practices enables the viewer to mentally erase the problematic consequences of the

various systems of political oppression or inequity from which they actively participate in or

benefit from. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the opportunities available to resist

the workings of such power, stressing the influential transformative capacities of recognising

and countering visual concealment where it politically operates.

We can understand visual screens as barriers which prevent one from mentally

acknowledging the existence of systemic consequences, potentially deemed morally

problematic by the viewer. Visual theorist Chris Jenks rightly insists that “modern forms of

understanding the world depend on a scopic regime that equates seeing with knowledge”,108

suggesting that the desire to conceal remains a simple case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

Such an argument concurs with Saree Makdisi’s opinion of the political performance of the

Israeli separation barrier, which works to create a landscape “so cleansed of the traces of

otherness that the particular comes to think of itself as universal”.109

Equipped with such an

understanding, we can critique visual screens as literal barriers of acknowledgment, which

enable the population benefitting from a system of political oppression to simply forget about

its material, spatial - and thus visual - consequences. Reinforcing this idea, James Tracy,

108

Chris Jenks, ‘The Centrality of the Eye in Western Culture – An Introduction’, in Chris Jenks (ed.), Visual

Culture (Routledge, 1995), pp.1-2. 109

Saree Makdisi, ‘The Architecture of Erasure,’ Critical Inquiry, Vol.36 (University of Chicago, Spring 2010),

p.550.

33

writing in relation to news media images, claims that “once made aware, [viewers] are

rendered complicit in acts and events, because if one is granted knowledge about an event,

that knowledge involves a certain degree of consent”.110

This suggests that the concealment

of a space from a population works to distance the viewer’s culpability in whatever moral

predicament the space or people behind the screen represent, be it extreme economic

inequality or the tragedy of rough sleeping. Absent of such sights, the viewer can participate

in the systemic causes of such problematic spaces without acknowledging the very existence

of their consequences. Political geographer Don Mitchell theorises the erasure of the

homeless as an attempt at “redefining the public space of a city as a landscape, as a privatized

view suitable only for the passive gaze of the privileged as they go about the work of

convincing themselves that what they see is simply natural”.111

Visual concealment thus

remains principally about “restor[ing] the pretty picture”: for the Israeli settler in Gilo

walking past the concrete wall, there exists no problematic Palestinian village across the

valley, just the virgin landscape of depopulated hills as depicted by the murals.112

Such an

explanation is also reinforced by the official reasoning given for the construction of the

screens in Manila, purported to “beautify” and “fix” the morally repugnant view of the Pasay

slums so that those travelling to the conference do not have to acknowledge their existence.

One of the clearest arguments eroding the political significance of visual concealment,

however, is somewhat unwittingly offered by media theorist W.J.T. Mitchell when he writes

about the horror genre in popular film. He insists that our fear of what cannot be seen remains

much more powerful than that which sits in plain sight: “the invisible and the unseen has,

110

James Tracy, ‘Bearing witness to the unspeakable: 9/11 and America’s new global imperialism’, Journal of

American Culture, vol.28, no.1, p.87, quoted in Laura Shepherd, ‘Visualising violence: Legitimacy and

authority in the “war on terror”’, Critical Studies on Terrorism, vol.1, no.2, 2008, p.222. 111

Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and Public Space (Guildford Press, 2003), p.190. 112

Ibid, p.185.

34

paradoxically, a greater ability to activate the power of imagination than a visible image”.113

Here Mitchell is implying that the superiority of our imagination over our actual vision

renders concealment a somewhat pointless task: making something invisible by screening it

off from a population only intensifies their imagination over what lies behind the screen. This

suggests that concealing as a political mechanism may therefore remain counter-productive,

since the viewer may well fear that what stays unseeable is actually much worse than it really

is. But, as Andersen and Muller contend in relation to the telephotography of Simon Norfolk

and Trevor Paglen: “if the unseen is more powerful than a visible image, then the extent to

which contemporary practices of security are hidden from public view would not seem to be

a problem”.114

Yet quite evidently, the secret military facilities which those photographers

seek to visually expose remain well out of the public’s mind. Underlying Mitchell’s argument

here is the assumption that the population know that something subsists behind the screen in

the first place. An unsuspecting passer-by of an Israeli wall mural may not know that it is

screening off a segregated Palestinian village, in the same way that delegates being whisked

from the airport to the ADB conference probably have no idea that behind that wall at the

side of the road lies a sprawling slum exhibiting some of the worst living conditions in the

Philippines. In the absence of that knowledge, what is unseeable remains just that: invisible

and unconsidered by the average viewer.

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in his pioneering intervention into the study of the Holocaust,

perhaps provides the most useful theoretical apparatus with which we can understand and

explain the desire to conceal that which is deemed too unsuitable to acknowledge. He argues

that the mobilisation and participation of hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats, transport

workers and guards which the industrial scale of killing that the ‘Final Solution’ demanded,

113

W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press,

2011), p.84. 114

Andersen and Muller, p.206.

35

was in part enabled through the purposeful concealment of the “moral character” of their

actions.115

Quoting philosopher John Lachs, the distancing of the actual killing from most of

those people involved in its arrangement represents that which “stand[s] between me and my

action, making it impossible for me to experience it directly”.116

Effectively, “the middle

man shields off the outcomes of action from the actors’ sight”,117

in much the same way that

the murals in the West Bank hide the colonised from the coloniser. For Bauman,

“The increase in the physical and/or psychic distance between the act and its consequences achieves

more than the suspension of moral inhibition; it quashes the moral significance of the act...moral

dilemmas recede from sight”.118

Rendering the victims and material consequences of a systemic form of oppression

“psychologically invisible”119

thus permits the ease of getting on with everyday life for the

viewer, removing the “moral dilemmas” from sight and mind. Bauman draws upon the results

of psychologist Stanley Milgram’s infamous experimental investigation into obedience to

figures of authority. What is often overlooked from the experiment, Bauman contends, is that,

crucially, “the greater the physical and psychical distance from the victim, the easier it was to

be cruel”.120

The results showed that, when asked to continue to electrify a visible victim with

steadily increasing voltages, the proportion of subjects who continued to obey - thus

administering shocks up to the highest voltages - was 40%.121

However, when the victim

being electrocuted was concealed behind a screen (but still audible to the subject), the

proportion of subjects continuing to administer the highest voltage shocks rose to 62.5%.122

Milgram’s study suggests that it remains far easier to participate in an otherwise morally

115

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Polity Press, 1989), p.24. 116

John Lachs, The Responsibility of the Individual in Modern Society (Harvester, 1981), pp.12-13, quoted in

Bauman, p.24. 117

Bauman, p.25. 118

Ibid. 119

Ibid, p.26. 120

Ibid, p.155. 121

Ibid. 122

Ibid, p.155.

36

problematic practice when one does not see its visible, potentially repugnant effects. Here we

are reminded of Pachirat’s hypothesis on the visual concealment surrounding

slaughterhouses. For Pachirat, the entire process serves “a modern economy that requires

meat without emotional responsibility for the killing of the animal”,123

thus enabling “those

who consume the products of this violence to remain blind to it”.124

The ubiquitous desire for

visual screens can therefore be explained as a means to achieve blindness to the morally

repugnant consequences and dilemmas of one’s actions.

The purpose of this paper’s theoretical intervention is not to make totalising claims about the

primary way in which power operates geopolitically. One could rightly point to the many

empirical cases where the practise of visual concealment remains absent, as evidence that

erasure remains far from ubiquitous. Indeed, some might argue that the need for shielding or

concealment remains redundant, because people justify visible political inequalities or moral

dilemmas anyway. Research from psychological theorists John Jost and Orsolya Hunyady has

shown that people engage in ‘system justification’ “in order to cope with and adapt to unjust

or unpleasant realities that appear to be inevitable”.125

Such a finding suggests that visual

concealment remains somewhat unnecessary, considering that, nevertheless, we mentally

work to overcome moral dilemmas and perceived injustices. But if this remains the case, why

did the city authorities of Manila decide to obscure sight of the slum? Why did the municipal

government decide to paint over the wall in Gilo with a landscape devoid of Palestinians?

Why do there remain state laws in Nebraska against photographing the interiors of

slaughterhouses? A more nuanced understanding of these actions suggests that, whilst we

may engage in system justification when we see visible moral dilemmas or structural political

123

Pachirat, p.84. 124

Pachirat, p.146. 125

John Jost and Orsolya Hunyady, ‘The psychology of system justification and the palliative function of

ideology’ European Review of Social Psychology, vol.13, 2002, p.146.

37

inequalities, the outright screening of spaces which represent these problems prevents the

need for such system justification in the first place. Physical concealment of such sights thus

renders the need for the acknowledgement and mental process of justification to some extent

avoidable.

Resisting the geopolitics of concealment?

If, as this paper claims, visual concealment represents an important mechanism in the

contemporary operation of political power, the ability to resist or undo such erasure must

surely constitute a useful form of political resistance. Do there exist, then, revolutionary

capacities in recognising a ‘geopolitics of concealment’? As Pachirat proposes, “the act of

making the hidden visible could generate political and social transformation”, suggesting that

if meat-consumers witnessed the slaughter of animals on a daily basis, they would be

repulsed at the visual and moral consequences of what they choose to eat.126

What if, for

example, the Israeli walls and Philippine screens were replaced with transparent glass?

How might the political practices and spaces they obscure sight of be interpreted by the

viewer who otherwise remains blind to them? Already, we can discern attempts to reverse

the geopolitical operation of invisibility: a desire to harness the power of Panopticism, but

on behalf of the resisters or politically oppressed. In Palestine, for example, ‘Artists without

Walls’, a campaign group of creative activists, have projected real-time video footage on both

sides of the Israeli separation barrier, where “each side of the wall had the view on the other

side projected onto it”.127

The effect of such an intervention is to puncture a window into the

life behind the screens erected by the coloniser. Similarly, the concept of aggressive

architectural design against the urban homeless has been harnessed and reversed by

campaigners such as grassroots housing group RainCity, who installed public park benches in

126

Pachirat, p.247. 127

W.J.T. Mitchell, Christo’s Gates and Gilo’s Wall’, Critical Inquiry, vol.32, no.4, Summer 2006, p.588.

38

Vancouver which deliberately fold into sheltered beds at night for rough sleepers.128

The

transformative potential of such actions underscores the significance of recognising and

countering the exploitation of architecture and sight that geopolitical concealment represents.

But, as Andersen and Muller rightly state, “contesting structures of domination within the

visual domain requires that viewers be (re)socialised to look beyond the immediately

visible”.129

This not only involves physical interventions of resistance such as video

projections or homeless-friendly benches, but demands a whole new way of viewing our

cities. It is only when one examines architecture with a critical geopolitical eye that it is

possible to see how aggressively (yet subtly) certain populations or spaces are designed

against. As Foucault elaborates on the disciplinary effects of the Panopticon: “In appearance,

it is merely a solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type of society

emerges”.130

Through an interrogation of the geopolitical performativities of architecture,

we can begin to understand the ways in which otherwise banal structures play a crucial role

in hiding spaces and populations deemed too morally challenging to acknowledge.

128

See Figure 2 in Appendix, and Rachel Jones, ‘Antidote to Anti-homeless spikes – instant bench shelters’, The

Telegraph, 26/06/14. 129

Rune Andersen and Frank Moller, ‘Engaging the Limits of Visibility: Photography, Security and

Surveillance’, Security Dialogue, vol.44, no.3, p.207. 130

Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison: (Penguin Books, 1977), p.211.

39

Conclusion

In conclusion, this paper has interrogated three specific cases where physical structures

appear to perform as visual screens. Examining the geopolitics of concealment critical to each

of these cases has illustrated the often overlooked yet recurrent performance of walls, screens

and spikes as spatial barriers of sight. Formulating a theoretical model of visual exclusion in

such a way should assist the discipline of critical geopolitics in understanding and explaining

cases where architecture operates not only as a barrier of mobility, but crucially as one of

sight and acknowledgment of that which is deemed visually repugnant and which represents

challenging moral dilemmas. In the same way that the Palestinians of Beit Jala remain

problematic for the illegal Israeli settlers in Gilo, the slum-dwellers of Manila constitute a

morally repugnant scar for the city’s officials - both in need of visual erasure. Similarly, the

mobile population of rough sleepers in doorways, alcoves and on park benches represents the

challenging socioeconomic dilemma of urban homelessness, which is simply physically

removed from view through the subtle power of architectural design. Instead of attempting

to ameliorate these political problems, their very existence is denied through the exploitation

of walls, screens and spikes. By problematising such architecture as inherently geopolitical,

and by interrogating the critical exploitation of sight in this manner, we can formulate a

model of visual concealment which plugs the theoretical lacuna currently unaddressed in the

field of critical geopolitics.

This paper also calls for a wider engagement within the discipline to the fields of visual

studies, surveillance studies and the geographies of urban architecture, in order to fully

comprehend and interrogate the political exploitation of sight through physical structures.

Equipped with such an understanding, a wealth of potential further research is opened up for

political geographers, in much the same way that the examination of the expansion of sight

has led to a whole host of work on the politics of surveillance and visual media. Absent of

40

such a theoretical apparatus, we risk neglecting the wider, performative functions of

architecture in hiding politically problematic spaces and practices. It is only by

interrogating such an everyday geopolitics of concealment that we can begin to challenge

the problems it attempts to conceal.

41

Appendix

Figure 1: Map of the West Bank, depicting the route of the Israeli-built ‘separation barrier.’ Source:

UNOCHA, June 2010.

42

Figure 2: A bench in Vancouver designed by RainCity to accommodate the homeless.

Source: Rachel Jones, ‘Antidote to Anti-homeless – instant bench shelters’, The Telegraph,

26/06/14.

43

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