PhD Abstract

Road No. 90 is 478 kilometers long, running from Metula to Eilat. It is the longest road in the country and is aligned with its eastern border, which lies between Israel and Jordan. The road connects the Israeli-Lebanese border in the north to the Israeli-Egyptian border in the south. One-quarter of the road (118km) extends along the disputed territories of the West Bank. This dissertation explores the landscape of Road No.90. Given the road’s proximity to the border and the affinities between them, I argue that they co-create a hybrid, liminal space, forming a landscape with particular characteristics. My main assertion in the dissertation is that the border’s absent presence constitutes a borderoad space by means of landscape performances, mechanisms, and practices that ultimately create the borderoadscape. 

The dissertation Critical Aspects in Borderoad Landscape: Road No.90 as a Case Study is an interdisciplinary, theoretical and critical inquiry. It aims to provide an ontological discussion, in which observations and insights about landscape are relative and conceptual. This study builds significantly on critical landscape studies, as well as on theoretical discourses concerned with roads, and on critical border studies.

In doing so, it relies on the current discourse on landscape, which does not view it as synonymous with “nature,” but rather as an agent of culture and power. This approach was pioneered by W.J.T. Mitchell (2002), whose work explores landscape as an agent of power and performative practice. Drawing on Mitchell’s perception of landscape as a dynamic medium of amnesia and concealment, the current study sees the borderoad landscape as a space of cultural-ideological practices. My discussion also benefits from garden and landscape theories (Hunt 1991, 2012), theories of roads and landscape (Jackson 1980, 1994), critical theories of space (Althusser 1969; Virilio 1984, 2006, 2009; Foucault 1984, 1991), and Lacanian psychoanalytic discourse (Lacan 2004), as well as cultural and political geography and art criticism. These contexts enrich the landscape discourse and facilitate new conceptualizations of landscape.

The main aim of this study is to explore the various aspects of the border's presence in the landscape, while elaborating on the hybrid concepts of the borderoad and the borderoadscape. The concept of borderoadscape neither represents nor symbolizes the landscape, offering instead a way of contemplating it. It echoes Mitchell's statement ". . .   ask not just what landscape ‘is’ or ‘means’ but what it does, how it works as a cultural practice” (2002, 1). In characterizing and identifying aspects of the landscape that constitute performances and practices in the borderoad space, this study raises additional questions about how, within this space, the border is constituted as present-absent.

This inquiry's interpretative and critical strategy derives from a non-hierarchical, non-linear perception of reality, which addresses its geopolitical, historical, cultural and ideological strata. Typical of critical studies, the methodological process used in this study applies critical theory to a concept or idea relating to a particular case. Significantly, it builds on the methods used by cultural geographers, who have grounded their work in phenomenological perceptions and in the critical analysis of space.

The dissertation opens with a comprehensive literature review of the three main discourses addressed in this study, followed by a presentation of the geographical space and historiography of Road No.90. The central part of this study consists of a critical and conceptual discussion based on three themes. The first theme is titled “The Gaze as a Practice in the Borderoad Scape.” The gaze, in this context, is perceived as a penetrating and transgressive element, which partakes of a scopic regime shaped by practices of observation. The discussion points to the dialectic of concealment and blurring that enables the repression and denial of the border's presence, while stimulating the pleasure of gazing at it. As I argue, it is the outcome of practices of gazing and perceptions of landscape that constitute the border as present-absent.

The second theme, titled “Landscape Performances: Ruins and Follies in the Borderoad Space,” derives from garden theories, in which ruins and follies are key concepts. This theme centers on landscape as a sociocultural construct that expresses political and ideological processes. As this study demonstrates, landscape performances, ruins, and follies in the borderoad space are central practices attesting to landscape’s elusive and deceptive character, and pointing to the mechanisms of interpellation embedded within it.

The third theme, titled “Movement and Velocity in the Borderoad Landscape,” relies on Virilio's notion of speed as both an aesthetic and a political practice, and thus as an interpellative mechanism of landscape perception. In the context of the scopic regime, velocity is employed to blur and obscure the border. Additionally, landscape simulacra and the apocalyptic sublime produced by the relationship between landscape and velocity, reinforce the present-absent border dialectics, and are linked to the liminal characteristics of the borderoad. Movement and speed thus contribute to the formation of a national identity, to demonstrations of sovereignty, and to conceptual territorialization.

The discussion of these three themes concludes with affinities between the borderoad landscape and the concept of the parkway, while taking the present-absent character of the border as its meta-theme – thus integrating the critical discourse on landscape with theories of landscape architecture.

The conclusion of the dissertation, which centers on landscape in the borderoad space, indicates that the border is the spatial element which unifies, affects and generates the borderoad landscape, while all other landscape performances, practices and mechanisms are subordinate to it. As this discussion demonstrates, the six characteristics and principles which shape perceptions of the landscape are all subservient to the present-absent performance of the border. These include liminality and hybridity; the civilian-military dialectic of landscape; the appropriation of landscape and its subjection to the idea of sovereignty; collective memory and the formation of national identity; the principle of place and the unity of the borderoad space; and the parkway principle. Associating the meta-theme of the present-absent border with the principle of Lacanian désir, I argue that the border acts as an object of desire whose absence from the landscape constitutes that very landscape. The present-absent performance of the border and its alternate manifestations exist simultaneously in various forms: ruins and follies; phantasmagoric and agricultural landscape performances; signboards and road-signs; systems that conduct the gaze and movement; static and dynamic practices of observation; landscape simulacra; and perspectives.                

The critical terms coined throughout this study aim to bridge conceptual gaps in contemporary literature, theory, and discourse, which enable a discussion of the borderoad landscape. Borderoad, borderoadscape and borderoadspace are offered as three key concepts. Additional concepts – borderoad landscape performance, borderoad ruins, borderoad anamorphosis, the vanitas of the borderoad, landscape syncope, and the borderoad landscape uncanny reflect the meta-theme of the border landscape as a present-absent performance. These concepts might support a possible future discourse that structures an interdisciplinary examination of borderoad landscapes.

The thesis for the degree of
"DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY"
By Landscape Architect Efrat Hildesheim was carried out under the supervision of
Prof. Architect Eran Neuman, PhD

SUBMITTED TO THE SENATE OF TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY
April 2019