Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post–Civil War Lebanon 9780822371557

Citation preview

POSTHUMOUS IMAGES

POST

Chad Elias

HUMOUS IMAGES Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post–Civil War Lebanon

Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2018

© 2018 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Elias, Chad, author. Title: Posthumous images : contemporary art and memory politics in post–civil war Lebanon / Chad Elias. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2018. | Series: Art history publication initiative | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017048847 (print) lccn 2017056110 (ebook) isbn 9780822371557 (ebook) isbn 9780822347101 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 9780822347668 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Art—Political aspects—Lebanon. | Lebanon—History— Civil War, 1975–1990—Art and the war. | War in art. | Social conflict in mass media. | Social conflict in art. Classification: lcc p96.w352 (ebook) | lcc p96.w352 l44 2018 (print) | ddc 701.03095692—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048847 Cover art: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Dust in the Wind, 2013. Cedar no. 4 and Cedar no. 8, Part VI of the Lebanese Rocket Society project. C-prints with plexiglass sculpture, 100 × 72 × 6 cm. Courtesy of the artists. Frontispiece: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from A Perfect Day (Yawmon Akhar), 2005 (detail). 35 mm film, fiction, 88 minutes. (© Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, courtesy of the artists) Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Elizabeth and Todd Warnock Graduate Alumni Publication Grant at Northwestern University, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

TO CHRISTIE, FOR EVERYTHING (and so much more)

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

Captive Subjects: On the Geopolitics of Sex and Translation in Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes



T W O Resistance, Video Martyrdom, and the Afterlife of the Lebanese Left

55



T H R E E

93



O N E

27



Latent Images, Buried Bodies: Mourning Lebanon’s Disappeared F O U R 131 Suspended Spaces: The Void and the Monument in Post–­Civil War Beirut F I V E

159

Images of Futures Past: The Lebanese Rocket Society

CODA 177

Time Bomb

Notes 193 Bibliography 225 Index 239

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ILLUSTRATIONS

2–3 i.1 Akram Zaatari, Saida, June 6, 1982, 2009 3 i.2 Akram Zaatari, Untitled, 2007 9 i.3–i.4 Ayman Trawi, photographs taken during the civil war and during the reconstruction, Beirut’s Memory, 2004 12 i.5 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Wonder Beirut, 1997–2006 28 1.1 Walid Raad, still from Hostage: The Bachar Tapes_English version (2000) 39 1.2 Walid Raad, still from Hostage: The Bachar Tapes_English version (2000) 42 1.3 Walid Raad, still from Hostage: The Bachar Tapes_English version (2000) 52 1.4 Osama bin Laden appears on Al Jazeera Television 61 Map 2.1 The South Lebanon Border Zone 65 2.1–2.2 Akram Zaatari, stills from All Is Well on the Border, 1997 68 2.3 Akram Zaatari, still from All Is Well on the Border, 1997 70 2.4 Akram Zaatari, still from All Is Well on the Border, 1997 71 2.5 Akram Zaatari, still from All Is Well on the Border, 1997 73 2.6 Jean-­Luc Godard, Jean-­Pierre Gorin, and Anne-­Marie Miéville, still from Ici et ailleurs, 1976 76 2.7 Jamal al-­Sati, still from “Jamal Sati” 77 2.8 The front page of Al-­Nahar (Beirut, Lebanon), dated August 7, 1985

82 83 83 87 87 98 99 103 104 106 109 109 112 113 113 121 123 125 128 128

x 

2.9 Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury, Three Posters, Festival Ayloul Production, 2000 2.10 Lebanese National Resistance Front, Lebanese Communist Party, poster, 1985 2.11 Palestinian Organizations, plo, poster, 1987 2.12 Houssam Mchaiemch, photograph of Hezbollah posters, southern suburbs of Beirut, 2007 2.13 Lebanese Shiite Muslims take part in a self-­flagellation procession, Nabiteyah, October 24, 2015 3.1 Missing exhibition, poster, unesco Palace, Beirut, April 2008 3.2 Missing exhibition, installation photograph, unesco Palace, Beirut, April 2008 3.3 Poster showing portraits of missing Lebanese people, United Nations headquarters, Beirut, October 13, 2011 3.4 Ghassan Halwani, We’ve Got Visitors Coming Over img_0070, 2013 3.5 Ghassan Halwani, We’ve Got Visitors Coming Over img_0022, 2013 3.6 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from Lasting Images, 2003 3.7 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 180 Seconds of Lasting Images, 2006 3.8 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from A Perfect Day (Yawmon Akhar), 2005 3.9 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from A Perfect Day (Yawmon Akhar), 2005 3.10 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from A Perfect Day (Yawmon Akhar), 2005 3.11 Ali Hassan, photograph of militia guarding the Basta/Sodeco checkpoint, November 13, 1984 3.12 Lamia Joreige, still from Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, 2003 3.13 Lamia Joreige, still from Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, 2003 3.14 Abbas Salman, photograph of the Ring checkpoint, December 5, 1990 3.15 Abbas Salman, photograph of Mathaf-­Barbir passage point, July 4, 1989

ILLUSTRATIONS

134 4.1 The opening of the Green Line in downtown Beirut, Lebanon, December 23, 1990 135 4.2 Saree Makdisi, Martyrs’ Square, Beirut, facing north 140 4.3–4.4 Martyrs’ Monument in downtown Beirut, May 2013 143 4.5 Yacoubian Building in Caracas neighborhood of Ras Beirut, June 2016 143 4.6 Marwan Rechmaoui, Spectre, installation view, Beirut Exhibition Center, Heartlands, 2015 146 4.7 Burj el-­Murr in the Kantari District of downtown Beirut, June 2015 147 4.8 Burj el-­Murr in the Kantari District of downtown Beirut, May 2013 148 4.9 Marwan Rechmaoui, Monument for the Living, 2002/2008 148 4.10 Marwan Rechmaoui, Monument for the Living (detail), 2002/2008 149 4.11 Bernard Khoury, Yabani, 2002 151 4.12–4.14 Bernard Khoury, Evolving Scars, 1991 154 4.15 Bernard Khoury, b018, 1998 155 4.16 Bernard Khoury, b018, 1998 160 5.1 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from The Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of the Lebanese Space Race, 2012 161 5.2 Stamp issued by the Lebanese post office, 1964 164 5.3 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Wonder Beirut: The Story of a Pyromaniac Photographer, 1997–2006 169 5.4–5.5 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, stills from The Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of the Lebanese Space Race, 2012 170 5.6 Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from The Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of the Lebanese Space Race, 2012 173 5.7 vbb, Sune and Joe Lindström, Stig Egnell, and Björn & Björn Design (Malene Björn), Kuwait Water Towers, 1976 174 5.8 Assad Jradi, Launch of the Fourth Lebanese Rocket, Dbayeh, Lebanon, November 21, 1963 178 c.1 Walid Raad, Secrets in the Open Sea, plate 16, 1994/2004 178 c.2 Walid Raad, Secrets in the Open Sea, plate 16 (detail), 1994/2004

I L L U S T R A T I O N S  xi

181 c.3 Walid Raad, My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines, 2000–2003 182 c.4 Walid Raad, Let’s Be Honest, the Weather Helped (Egypt), 1998/2006–7 183 c.5 Walid Raad, We Are a Fair People. We Never Speak Well of One Another, plate 4, 2014 185 c.6 Akram Zaatari, Earth of Endless Secrets, 2007 185 c.7 Akram Zaatari, Letter for a Time of Peace, 2007 187 c.8 Akram Zaatari, Time Capsule, Kassel, Karlsaue Park, Kassel, 2012

xii 

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Nearly every page of this book is the product of countless dialogues with many interlocutors. I am profoundly honored to be able to thank publicly the people listed here. The research and writing of this book were made possible by an initial grant from the Social Science Research Council, which funded a one-­year International Dissertation Research Fellowship. A Walter and Constance Burke Research Initiation Award at Dartmouth College provided indispensable backing for the completion and publication of this book. I have also benefited from research funds provided by the Department of the History of Art at the University of York. This book would not exist without the supreme generosity of artists, curators, gallerists, and critics in Beirut. I am especially indebted to Tony Chakar, Joana Hadjithomas, Ghassan Halwani, Khalil Joreige, Lamia Joreige, Nadim Mishlawi, Rabih Mroué, Marwan Rechmaoui, and Jalal Toufic for illuminating exchanges over email, Skype, and in person. This book is a testimony not only to your own art practices but also to your intellectual liberality, good humor, and genuine kindness. Special thanks go to Walid Raad and Akram Zaatari, both of whom provided long-­term support for this project. I could not imagine writing this book without either of you: your work has changed the way I think about so many things, not least the critical possibilities open to art today, and I am continually enlivened by our conversations. I am also grateful to Reem Alk and the Arab Image Foundation, Monika Borgmann, Nohma Khayrallah at Al-­Nahar, Bernard Khoury, Zeina Maasri, Andree

Sfeir Semmler and the wonderful team at her gallery, and Christine Tohme and her colleagues at Ashkal Alwan for generous access to their archives and extensive research assistance. I cannot thank any of you enough for welcoming me into your intellectual and artistic community. You have all given me your time very freely without expecting anything in return. In New York, Anthony Allen and Laura Hunt at Paula Cooper Gallery have also been incredibly helpful. Conversations with many academics have enriched this project. Many special thanks are due to Ariella Azoulay, T. J. Demos, Tarek El-­Ariss, Boris Groys, Carrie Lambert-­Beatty, Pamela Lee, Nasser Rabbat, and Irit Rogoff, all of whom answered my questions and provided intellectual support during critical periods. Although I do not see them enough, I am thankful for the camaraderie of my mena peers Anneka Lenssen, Claire Davies, and Emma Chubb. Finally, sometimes wonderful friendships begin from chance encounters, and I will be forever grateful for the time I have spent with the luminous Sarah-­Neele Smith. Thank you for many rambling conversations and inappropriate hilarity at academic conferences. Although it has undoubtedly taken a circuitous path, this book began while I was a PhD candidate at Northwestern University. I warmly thank Brian Edwards, Sarah Fraser, Hamid Naficy, and Samuel Weber for equipping me with the critical vocabulary, art historical tools, and fortitude to finish this project. I have also gained much from the time I have spent in the company of Michael Rakowitz. I am genuinely grateful to Jesús Escobar for inviting me back to Northwestern to speak about this project. Special words of acknowledgment go to two members of my dissertation committee: Hollis Clayson and Huey Copeland. Their capacious thinking has done much to shape the arguments and ideas explored in these pages. I am also eternally thankful for the unfailing support and patience of my former PhD advisor Hannah Feldman. Her challenge to business-­as-­usual art history remains a source of continuing inspiration for me. After graduate school, I was extremely privileged to find an intellectual community in the UK. At the University of York, Michael White and Helen Hills have in different ways altered the way I think and served as very patient mentors. Thank you, Michael, for your kindness and wise council, and Helen, for your fierce intellect and goodwill. I am also extremely grateful to a number of people at Tate Modern, including Jennifer Morgan, Jennifer xiv 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Mundy, and Chris Griffin. I think of Morad Montazami as a much-­needed instigator for change in the field. I hope this book contributes to that work. Tate Research has been a wonderful supporter of new scholarship on contemporary art in the Middle East, and I am especially thankful to them for the early opportunity to write about Rabih Mroué’s work for their In Focus series. A revised version of that piece now makes up part of chapter 2. Many thanks as well to Kitty Anderson and The Common Guild in Glasgow for inviting me to speak on the work of Akram Zaatari, and to Sam Thorne for numerous enlightening conversations about contemporary art, art criticism, and arts education. I warmly thank my fantastic colleagues in the Department of Art History at Dartmouth College for welcoming me into their academic community. I am particularly grateful to Mary Coffey, Ada Cohen, and Allen Hockley for their intellectual dialogue and professional guidance. Katie Hornstein and Victor Witkowski deserve innumerable thanks for their openness and hospitality. Many memorable dinners with the ebullient Holly Shaffer have enriched my first two years at Dartmouth. Thank you all for making it fun to go to work. I also want to thank my colleagues Joy Kenseth, Sunglim Kim, Nicola Carmilenghi, Jane Carroll, Steve Kangas, Kristin O’Rourke, and Marlene Heck for taking the time to engage with my work. Since arriving at Dartmouth, I have also been fortunate to participate in intellectual projects across campus, especially with the Hood Museum of Art, the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies program, and the Humanities Center. Jonathan Smolin has offered an admirable model of how to get things done at a university. At the Hood, thanks go to Katherine Hart, Juliette Bianchi, John Stomberg, and in particular to Ugochukwu-­Smooth Nzewi for his brilliant provocations. I thank both Barbara Will and Graziella Parati for their ongoing support and encouragement. This book would not exist in printed form were it not for Ken Wissoker, my editor at Duke University Press, who has never wavered in his enthusiasm for this project. I thank him for his astute advice and patient guidance during the long development of this book. Thanks also to Jade Brooks and Olivia Polk for their diligent assistance with preparing the final manuscript, and to the three anonymous readers who provided genuinely exciting and challenging questions—each of which vastly improved the manuscript. A gift from Elizabeth and Todd Warnock to the Department of Art History A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S  xv

at Northwestern University and an Art History Publishing Initiative grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation have made it possible to include color images that are integral to this book. I am profoundly thankful to the friends and family who have lured me away from the computer screen. For their excellent Long Island humor and always thought-­provoking comments, I thank Ara Osterweil and David Baumflek. Emanuele Lugli and Michal Sokolowski have been peerless hosts and drinking partners during stays in London as well as wonderful travel companions. I feel very fortunate to count them as friends. I am also deeply appreciative of the good laughs I have had with Ben Tolliday. Lucinda Elliott and Paul Wilcock have both offered life-­affirming creative outlets outside of work. To Chris and Susan Harner, thank you for welcoming me into the family and for making me feel like one of you. That kind of love can never be underestimated. Finally, to my wife, Christie Harner, none of this would have been possible without you. Writing can sometimes feel like a very solitary experience with no real end in sight, but you have been with me at every stage of this journey. I could not imagine doing any of this without you.

xvi 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Akram Zaatari’s large-­scale photographic panorama June 6, 1982 (2006–9) is based on the artist’s experience of watching and recording the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon (figure i.1). Confined to the family apartment, the teenage Zaatari photographed the explosions caused by the aerial bombardment of the surrounding hills. Playing on the pictorial conventions of landscape and war photography, Zaatari’s image is as much an aestheticization of destruction as it is a critical deconstruction of the logic of spectacle. While June 6, 1982 seems to capture a single event in time, the various blasts are in fact discrete events that have been digitally sutured together to create a seamless photomontage. In his video essay This Day (2003), Zaatari overlays these photographs—which he flicks through in an album—with audio he recorded on the day of the invasion, as well as popular radio broadcasts from that period (war anthems, syrupy dialogue from advertisements, and militarized ballads) (figure i.2). As the camera mechanically tracks across the images, zooming in on each cloud of smoke with methodical precision, one hears a person gasping, the low rumble of a fighter jet plane, and distant machine gun fire. These sounds give way to the ominous hiss of approaching missiles that gradually overwhelms the microphone on Zaatari’s tape recorder, causing the audio to cut in and out. The sound of each explosion is counterposed with close-­up shots of each photograph, suggesting a synchronicity between what is seen and what is heard. In point of fact, the audio track captures a series of durations whereas the photograph is an assemblage of discontinuous instants of time. Zaatari’s overlaying of these different tem-

poralities is profoundly disjunctive. It serves to challenge both the fiction of filmic continuity and the decisive or singular moment privileged in photojournalism. June 6, 1982 is in many regards emblematic of the works that I analyze in this book. It combines habits of recording and collecting—the impulse to collect one’s own personal archive—with a lack of punctuality, a sense of delay or untimeliness between the taking of the image and its development. The individual images are true on a factual level, but their recombination produces a falsified event. It is the tension between photographic objectivity and filmic duration that upends the relationship between an event in the past and the present or future memory of that event. Like the other artists in this study, Zaatari troubles the idea that an event could be fully reconstituted. He questions photography’s role in shaping history, individual memory, and the larger dynamics that govern the state of image making in situations of war. Posthumous Images analyzes a constellation of contemporary visual artists 2 

INTRODUCTION

Figure I.1. Akram Zaatari, Saida, June 6, 1982, 2009. Blue print with camera movement and time code. Original photographs were taken on June 6, 1982. The first composite images were made 2006–9. (© Akram Zaatari, courtesy of the artist)

Figure I.2. Akram Zaatari, Untitled, 2007. Mini album, pp. 6–7. An explosion after an air raid targeted a Palestinian base in Mar Elias hill. Looking from the balcony to the south, June 6, 1982. (© Akram Zaatari, courtesy of the artist)

who have sought, in different ways, to enter into but also complicate Lebanese cultural discourses on memory and trauma. Working across the fields of architecture, photography, video, film, and live performance, Joana Hadjithomas, Ghassan Halwani, Khalil Joreige, Lamia Joreige, Bernard Khoury, Rabih Mroué, Walid Raad, Marwan Rechmaoui, and Akram Zaatari have produced a multidisciplinary body of work that interrogates the unresolved legacy of those decades of civil strife and sociopolitical upheaval.1 My analysis is centered on two overlapping aspects of image making in these artistic practices: first, the reappropriation of existing images as a means to challenge the authority of divisive and violent political discourses propagated in the political system; and second, the production of new images that aim to provide representation for individuals and communities excluded from the dominant sectarian articulations of subjecthood. Born between the mid-­1960s and the early 1970s, these artists belong to what is known in Lebanon as jeel al-­harb, or the war generation. This generation has a particularly close and complicated relationship to the war, having experienced much of it unfolding as adolescents. By recirculating archival documents, unearthing ephemeral artifacts, and collecting eyewitness testimonies that refer us back to that formative period, these artists create an alternative paradigm of representation in which a range of pressing issues— the traumatic aftereffects of civil war violence, the curtailment of civil liberties, continuing sectarian divisions, border hostilities, the social cost of reconstruction—can be publicly articulated and worked through. Indeed, I contend that these artists’ practices are critical to both the recollection of the past and to the reimagining of futures in a nation haunted by the specter of failed leftist political projects and the defeat of multicultural and secular forms of nationalism in the Arab world. For almost two decades, a period most often identified as the Lebanese Civil War of 1975–90, sectarian fighting, foreign invasions, and political meddling besieged the country.2 I argue throughout this book that these conflicts are resistant to summarization. Nevertheless, it is useful at the start to recall a few of the most salient facts—if only for the purposes of refocusing the lens through which we view the wars in question, the cycle of political crises and military conflicts that have marked the post–­civil war period, and the artistic responses to both of these intersecting eras. Popular historical accounts often pass over the fact that the estimated 150,000 casualties 4 

INTRODUCTION

in the civil wars resulted from intraconfessional hostilities as well as battles between religious sects.3 Moreover, far from being a purely Lebanese problem, the breakdown of the confessional system and the resulting descent into armed conflict was the result of overlapping geopolitical struggles involving local, regional, and international actors. Indeed, these wars, with their mutating alliances, constantly shifting roster of combatants, lack of any clear victors, and competing accounts, are not amenable to conventional modes of historical analysis. The outbreak of the civil wars is generally identified as the Ayn al-­Rumana massacre on April 13, 1975, when the Kata’ib militia (the Christian Phalangist Party) killed twenty-­seven Palestinian refugees. The principal issue precipitating the violence was the right of the Palestinian resistance to stage operations against Israel from Lebanese soil. While the reigning Christian-­ conservative government and its strategic allies firmly opposed any armed Palestinian presence in Lebanon, the left-­wing and Pan-­Arabist Lebanese National Movement (lnm), headed by Kamal Jumblatt, supported it. This disagreement over the Palestinian question was linked to and exacerbated by long-­standing tensions regarding the equity of the confessional system— the structure of government that uses a formula to allocate political and administrative roles to members of Lebanon’s various religious sects.4 Far from being rooted in primordial or atavistic bonds as it is often depicted, confessionalism in Lebanon is “as modern and authentic as the nation-­state.”5 As Ussama Makdisi has argued, the confessional system of government or, more precisely, the culture of sectarianism that subtends it dates “no further back than the beginnings of the modern era when European powers and local elites forged a politics of religion amid the emerging nation-­state system.”6 The lnm called for a radical overhaul of the sectarian quota system, which since Independence had given the Christians control of the presidency, command of the armed forces, and a parliamentary majority. The movement argued that a political reorganization would more accurately reflect Lebanon’s shifting demographics while also properly realigning it with other Arab regimes, including Syria, Libya, and Iraq. When open warfare broke out in 1975 between the lnm and the Christian Phalangists (Kata’ib), the balance of forces favored the former and their Palestinian allies. However, the entry of Syrian forces into the conflict in 1976—ostensibly to restore peace but also to curb the Palestinians, thousands of whom were killed in a siege of the Tel I N T R O D U C T I O N 5

al-­Zaatar camp by Syrian-­allied Christian militias in Beirut—would serve to complicate greatly the internal dynamics of the conflict. By the early 1980s, when Israeli, French, and U.S. forces were also embroiled in the conflict, the wars in Lebanon came to function increasingly as a proxy battleground involving foreign powers.7 Just as the civil war was a product of internal and external pressures, its deeply compromised settlement came at a specific historical juncture when gestures toward internal reconciliation coincided with favorable regional and international developments. The Ta’if Accord, which was ratified by the Lebanese Parliament in 1989, called for all militias to surrender their weapons to the Lebanese Army and for Syria to help the Lebanese state impose its authority over all of the Lebanese territory within a period of two years. While the agreement succeeded in providing a formal cessation to hostilities, it avoided implementing any firm resolutions for addressing the underlying social and political problems that led to the war in the first place. These included the unequal sectarian division of power, the fate of the Palestinian camps, the ongoing Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon, and Syrian tutelage of the Lebanese state. The signing of the Ta’if Accord was succeeded by a series of low-­intensity wars engaged within and over Lebanon’s contested territorial borders. These conflicts involved both two occupying forces (Israel and Syria) and Lebanese political parties and extant militias. The 1993 Operation Accountability, 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath, and 2006 July War, among others, were instigated by ongoing strikes between the Israeli Army and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. A second set of conflicts, marked by the car-­bombing assassination of Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri in February 2005 and the success of the Cedar Revolution in effecting the withdrawal of Syrian troops in April 2005, is limned by the continued presence of Syria in Lebanese politics— a presence that has surfaced again due to the influx of Syrian refugees into Lebanon and Hezbollah’s support for Bashar al-­Assad’s government in the wake of Arab Spring uprisings. If these conflicts seem at first precipitated by competing foreign influences, closer analysis reveals that they are equally determined by and determinative of domestic political strife. The 2006 July War with Israel—and its destruction of significant civilian infrastructure in Beirut—signaled the failure of the neoliberal project of reconstruction initiated by former prime minister Hariri after the implementation of the 6 

INTRODUCTION

Ta’if Accords.8 Indeed, the political standoff between Shi’a Muslim Hezbollah and the Sunni Muslim, pro-­Western government of Hariri’s political successor and son, Saad al-­Hariri, that followed the July War served to highlight the persistence of many of the underlying social and political problems that had plagued Lebanon’s dysfunctional confessional system of parliamentary representation. If the ongoing dispute regarding Hezbollah’s right to bear weapons threatens Lebanon’s continued existence as a viable nation—just as the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s armed presence had done in 1975—it also forces us to critically revise the now-­entrenched narratives heralding a post–­civil war period and, more to the point, the emergence of a Beirut-­based school of art simplistically miscast as postwar.9 I have foregrounded the multiple origins and inconclusive outcome of the Lebanese civil wars not because I want to suggest that they explain the artistic practices that I take up in this book. Rather, my interest lies in the unresolved nature of this history and the primary role that the cultural field has played in framing public debates over collective memory of recent wars in Lebanon. The struggle over collective memory has been emblematized in two highly contentious issues: the reconstruction of Beirut’s devastated central district and the state’s handling of crimes committed during the civil wars. Adopting the logic of la ghalib la maghlub (no victor, no vanquished), the Lebanese government passed an amnesty law in 1991 effectively granting any former members of militias exemption from criminal prosecution. The law applied to crimes committed before March 1991, including “crimes against humanity and those which seriously infringe human dignity.”10 Only crimes perpetrated against religious or political leaders were exempt from the amnesty provision. According to the official discourse of the newly reformed state, the legal measure was predicated on turning the page on the past and opening a new chapter in the name of national reconciliation. It was also prompted by the very real fear that any investigation of crimes perpetrated during the years of sectarian conflict would awaken grudges and undermine the peace process if they remained on the table for discussion and debate. Members of the political elite, most of whom had been involved in the militias during the war, no doubt had a vested interest in preventing any real reckoning with the past. However, many Lebanese also believed that to open a discussion about the civil wars would mean questioning the fragile ideological consensus upon which the whole program of reconstrucI N T R O D U C T I O N 7

tion depended. Ultimately, the imposition of the amnesty law led to the total absence of serious governmental or civil initiatives to deal with the past, whether in the form of a national dialogue or of a public inquiry into the fate of the estimated eighteen thousand Lebanese who went missing during the fifteen-­year period of war. As the novelist Elias Khoury would later observe in his trenchant assessment of the amnesty law: “The new post-­war political class—warlords and war criminals in alliance with oil-­enriched capital and military and security apparatuses—was able to impose an amnesia, a complete forgetting, in order to whitewash their innocence. Their victims were silenced.”11 This climate of state-­sanctioned amnesia was also naturalized in the reconstruction of the war-­torn center of Beirut. In line with its neoliberal ideology of laissez-­faire capitalism, Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri’s government (1992–98 and 2000–2004) assigned the entire task of rebuilding the downtown area to a private shareholding conglomerate, the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of Beirut, more commonly known by its French acronym, Solidere.12 In the space of a few weeks, the developers succeeded in erasing virtually all traces of the war as the buildings dating from the French colonial mandate period were systematically destroyed and then restored back to their prewar grandeur. This violent erasure of the traces of war, Saree Makdisi argues, was in fact part of an ongoing effort to purge the downtown area of its fraught symbolic weight as a former battleground: “From at least 1983, there has been a concerted effort to wipe the surface of central Beirut clean, to purify it of all historical associations in the form of its buildings, to render it pure space, pure commodity, pure real estate. The most obvious and striking potential war memorial (in a country that has all but forgotten its war), the shrapnel-­scarred statue in Martyrs’ Square, will be completely repaired—its bullet holes erased and covered over just as the historical referents in the city center (and history itself) are being erased in the reconstruction.”13 Severed from the historical and urban fabric of the city to which it had previously been linked, the reconstructed downtown now only references its past in the form of pastiche (figures i.3 and i.4). At the same time, popular memory of the civil wars was also recycled as a set of signifiers that could be nostalgically consumed. A popular nightspot called 1975, located on the former Green Line that was once the scene of intense battles, placed its clients in a retro-­styled interior 8 

INTRODUCTION

Figures I.3–­I.4. Ayman Trawi, photographs taken during the civil war and during the reconstruction. “Spreading until the sea and part of the Souks area, Allenby street was a dividing line between war factions.” Beirut’s Memory, 2004. (© Ayman Trawi, courtesy of the photographer)

decorated with mortar shells, camouflage netting, and bullet hole–­ridden walls. Within this space, middle-­class and affluent Beirutis could be heard listening to songs by Fairuz, Ziyad Rahbani, and other popular artists of the war period while reminiscing about those years. Even the intellectually informed movement to preserve the city’s war-­torn historic center could not escape the ambiguity of nostalgia.14 Proponents of the reconstruction plan were effective in portraying their opponents as melancholics who remained pathologically fixated on the traumas of the past. By contrast, in selectively drawing on Beirut’s pre–­civil war heritage, Solidere was able to pro­ject an image of the city that seemed to look backward and forward at the same time. Lebanese cultural debates over collective memory and reconstruction thus point to an important but still undertheorized problem: the difficulty of working through the past, not to recover some prewar ideal of the nation but precisely as a way of imagining a different future for it. In taking up this problem, this study contributes to an emerging body of research that examines the issue of post–­civil war memory in Lebanon through the lens of contemporary cultural production. Scholars such as Lara Deeb, Sune Haugbolle, Lina Khatib, and Lucia Volk have focused on the tension between the production and circulation of popular memory in specific social spaces and communities, and its critical appropriation in the overlapping fields of urbanism, film, and the visual arts.15 My approach to unpacking the workings of memory cultures, or what I alternatively call communities of witnessing, shares the multidisciplinary approach of these studies, but it differs in at least three important respects from existing contributions to this topic.16 First, I counter historians and sociologists such as Haugbolle, who perceives culture in epiphenomenal terms, as a mere reflection of underlying social and political forces, even as he points to “the persistence of sectarian memory cultures in Lebanese society.”17 Opposing this view, I analyze the realm of contemporary artistic production in Lebanon as an essential site of political contestation in which communal memory is both constituted and potentially redefined. Second, I challenge the idea that the cultural resistance to Lebanon’s state-­sponsored amnesia is composed mostly of “middle-­class, leftist artists and intellectuals [who have] privileged their own lived memories of prewar middle class and radical Beirut.”18 Such a reproach functions both to reinforce an all-­too-­rigid opposition between 10 

INTRODUCTION

popular and elite forms of cultural production and to confuse, once again, the critical redeployment of popular memory with mere nostalgia.19 Emphasizing instead the productive tension between these modalities, I highlight the important ways in which these artists articulate a memory politics outside the dominant institutions of the archive or the museum. Third, while I would agree that the artists in this book are collectively interrogating the idea that an empiricist history of the civil war period could exist, and that they are working to displace hegemonic voices through the recovering and reimagining of Lebanon’s polyvocal landscape, they do not succumb to what Rosalind Morris has called the “secret valorization and hypostatization of subalternity as an identity—to be recalled, renarrated, reclaimed, and revalidated.”20 Like Morris, the artists in this book challenge a politics that claims to “give a voice” to what Eric Wolf has called “people without history.”21 They are equally skeptical of the possibility of writing an alternative history of the civil war period from the point of view of its victims.

​— — — In his writings, the Lebanese artist and theorist Jalal Toufic formulates the concept of the “surpassing disaster” to refer to events whose effects are measured not only in the loss of lives and the manifest destruction of artworks, museums, libraries, and various other sorts of physical records, but also in what he terms the “immaterial withdrawal” of tradition.22 In the wake of catastrophic events such as the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, the Arab Naksa of 1967, the Israeli invasion of West Beirut in 1982, the Hama massacre in the same year, and the aerial bombing of Iraq during the Gulf War, Arab artists find themselves “unable to access” certain paintings, films, and novels, even though these works may continue to be physically extant. This withdrawal can also occur in the realm of architecture. Toufic gives the example of the Lebanese people’s general inability to perceive or re­cord the ravaged buildings that they inhabited at the conclusion of the civil wars. This obliviousness, which is manifested in the artistic “indifference to documenting the carnage through photographs, films, and videos,” cannot simply be explained by the fact that the war-­weary population had “grown habituated to the destruction around them.”23 Rather, this endemic overlooking is due to the fact that the buildings belong to a history whose thread has been broken. Before the referent (this is also what Toufic means by “tradition”) can be acI N T R O D U C T I O N 11

Figure I.5. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Wonder Beirut, 1997–2006. Diasec, photographic print aluminum, 100 × 70 cm, number 1. (© Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, courtesy of the artists)

cessed again, artists first need to make visible its withdrawal. In this stage, Toufic writes, “art acts like the mirror in vampire films: it reveals the withdrawal of what we think is still there.”24 In their exhibition Wonder Beirut: The Story of a Pyromaniac Photographer (1998), Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige describe a scenario in which a photographer named Abdallah Farrah was commissioned by the Lebanese tourist bureau in 1969 to make postcard images of Beirut’s attractions. We are told that following the outbreak of the civil war, Farrah began taking down all the postcards in his studio since what they depicted—Martyrs’ Square, the souks, the Lebanese Riviera and its luxury hotels—no longer existed or was in the process of being destroyed. Four years into the conflict, Farrah began systematically to burn the postcard negatives in accordance with the damage caused to the pictured sites by shelling and street battles (figure i.5). By the time that all the images had been burned, the war was over. The story ends with the following revelation: “Today, this photographer no longer develops his photographs. It is enough for him to take them. At the end of the

12 

INTRODUCTION

exhibition, hundreds of rolls of film, 6452 to be exact, were laid on the floor: rolls containing photos taken by the photographer but left undeveloped.”25 It is significant that the protagonist is not trying to photograph the war-­ ravaged city. Rather, read in relation to Toufic’s thesis, Farrah’s pyromania can be seen as an attempt to render visible the damage that the war inflicts on representation itself. The physical destruction of the photograph parallels what is happening in reality, or, better still, the distinction between two orders of reality—photograph and referent—is here called into question. Additionally, Farrah’s decision to leave the photographs taken after the war undeveloped points to “the withdrawal of what we still think is still there” following the surpassing disaster.26 Acknowledging Toufic’s crucial influence on his own practice, Raad— whose work is the focus of chapter 1—suggests that the “blurred, never-­on-­ time, always-­to-­the-­side images” that he produced under the banner of the Atlas Group were also “indicative of this withdrawal” of tradition.27 However, it is possible to see Raad’s subsequent work as signaling a different stage in artistic production, a stage after the rupture effected by the surpassing disaster has been revealed and countered. As Toufic explains, the act of revealing the withdrawal of tradition paves the way for its future resurrection: “There is going to be a time of development of the chemically developed photographs taken during the latter stages of the war [in Lebanon]. The documentation is for the future not only in the sense that it preserves the present referent for future generations, but also in that it can function as a preservation of the referent only in the future, only when the work of resurrection has countered the withdrawal.”28 Raad’s more recent photographs featuring the bodies of assassinated politicians situated in picturesque Lebanese landscapes might be seen to correspond to the delayed “time of development” that Toufic speaks of here. In contrast to the artist’s prior preoccupation with figures and states of absence, this return of the referent might also serve to complicate the claim that the image in Beirut-­based artistic practices serves to give form to a historical trauma that exceeds representation. In a programmatic text titled “Missing Lebanese Wars,” Raad asks what it means to document the destruction of historical memory brought about by successive wars in Lebanon: “How do we represent traumatic events of collective historical dimensions when the very notion of experience is itself in

I N T R O D U C T I O N 13

question? How do we approach the facts of war, not in their crude facticity, but ‘through the complicated mediations by which facts acquire their immediacy?’ How does one witness the passing of an extremely violent present?”29 Drawing on psychoanalytic theorizations of trauma, Raad posits war as an event that remains, in some deep structural sense, unavailable to the subjects who experience it. Rather, it is only after the fact, in the unconscious symptom formations of the survivor, that this event is experienced at all.30 Accordingly, the archival project that Raad undertakes in the name of the Atlas Group (1989–2004) seeks to bear witness not only to the physical violence of the civil war, but also to the mnemonic damage caused by it. Read in these terms, the documents gathered in the Atlas Group Archive are presented not as part of an alternative history of the events of the Lebanese wars, but as an “image of what can be imagined, what can be said, what can be taken for granted and what can appear as rational or not—as thinkable and sayable about the war and the possibilities and limits of writing its history.”31 The difficulty in representing the events of this history not only concerns the problem of determining what happened based on fragmentary and tendentious evidence. It has to do with the discrepancy between the immediate violence of war and the incapacity of subjects to narrate their experiences in larger collective terms. Most critics have followed Raad’s lead in pointing to the dynamics of traumatic memory at work within Beirut-­based practices. In a 2006 review of the Out of Beirut exhibition, the largest survey of contemporary art from Lebanon held to date, art historian T. J. Demos draws on this concern and asserts that artistic engagements with the archive are concerned less with documenting the immediate reality of the civil wars than they are with registering its disturbing aftereffects. Indeed, Demos sees the examination of photographic and videographic documentation undertaken by Raad and his compatriots as challenging “any notion that language, whether visual or textual, might be used to convey the experience of war with uninterrupted continuity, rendering the idea of direct expression impossible while overtly manifesting injuries to representation.”32 In similar terms, Carrie Lambert-­ Beatty aligns the documents in the Atlas Group Archive with an underlying set of epistemological concerns that include “the problems of history-­writing (the patchiness of documents, the ‘unreliability’ of even first-­hand accounts, the work of interpretation that goes into making sense of them); traumatic 14 

INTRODUCTION

experience and the ways it both compels and disallows speech; and the particular epistemic conditions of the Lebanese civil war, with its multiplicity of combatant groups, its unreliable sources of information.”33 This critical line rightly sees the problematization of representation in contemporary art as a necessary counter to the everyday reification of documentary practices, particularly when the latter serve as instruments of judicial evidence and journalistic truth. While Demos astutely calls attention to the limitations of the documentary image as an objective record of historical truth, there has been an increasing tendency on the part of critics and art historians to hypostasize the failures of representation. Indeed, the impulse to analyze these practices through the framework of trauma risks evacuating them of their potential as a site of political agency within communities of witnessing. For if, as Krauss suggests, trauma discourse assumes a kind of vacated subject, one that is “by definition not alert to the traumatic event,” to think of photography primarily in these terms carries the danger of voluntarily consigning the medium to a position of absent witness or witness of absence.34 Sensitive to these dangers, Demos would subsequently argue, in a revised and expanded analysis of Raad’s work, that far from signaling a “postmodern escapism or relativism” or a “disavowal of truth and referential meaning,” the artist’s coupling of invented personages and narratives with actual historical documents “temporarily confounds the relation between truth and fiction in order to foster critical doubt, one that ultimately presupposes the ability to separate the true and the false.”35 In an almost identical move, Lambert-­Beatty contends that while “epistemologically destabilizing” work such as Raad’s can often elicit a sense of confusion, disbelief, and suspicion, these attitudes can also potentially encourage a criticality “that does not give up on the idea of facts, but rethinks them as matters of investment, debate and desire.”36 While I agree with Lambert-­Beatty that it is important to hold on to a critical “realism” that also allows for “the possibility of play,” her interpretation of Hostage, like Demos’s later discussion of that work, precludes a more concrete engagement with the archives in question. What is missing in both accounts is any analysis of the primary documents that form the basis of Raad’s video. The focus on metahistorical questions ends up supplanting historical inquiry itself, which is to say, the task of “putting aside, gathering, thus transforming into ‘documents’ certain objects that have been distributed differently.”37 I N T R O D U C T I O N 15

Thus, for many viewers of Raad’s art and that of his compatriots, the insistent references to trauma have actually contributed to the mystification of these conflicts instead of bringing us closer to confronting them. Granted, these histories are deeply contested and resist any search for conclusive truths, but they are not, for all that, outside of representation. Nor does this art’s entanglement with the mythologies of the civil wars absolve us of the ethical task of asking what kind of documentary practice might serve as the basis for a politics of truth. In my account, war is not a mark of interpretive foreclosure or an unrepresentable trauma but rather an expansive field of representation marked by heterogeneous and overlapping media practices. What role do different forms of media (video, television, photography, and architecture) and formats of image production and display (newspapers, magazines, broadcast news, amateur snapshots, and political posters) play in shaping the lived experience of war and its memory? What kind of affective states and subject positions does the fractured audiovisual landscape of the Lebanese wars give rise to? In posing such questions, this book considers how in those decades of conflict Lebanese subjects both internalized images that surrounded them and were themselves made to inhabit images posthumously. This foregrounding of mediation serves as a reminder that the wars in Lebanon were not only strictly military affairs. They were also in a fundamental sense conflicts waged with and over images. The war fought on the streets was duplicated and intertwined with television footage, video testimonies broadcasting already-­completed missions, and martyr posters commemorating actions that few people actually witnessed in person. Technologies such as photography, video, and television were tools that political parties and militias could use to mobilize and recruit their constituencies. In this war, images served less to persuade, as earlier forms of propaganda had done, than to cast doubt on competing constructions of reality. As art critic Rasha Salti explains, in the Lebanese civil war, “every warring faction had its narrative, its ideological discourse and system of interpretation. There were at least two versions to every incident, scuffle, exchange of fire. Nonfiction was palpably constructed, its ‘fictional’ nature unmasked to the naked eye. I remember how during the civil war we had to listen to several radio stations to synthesize real news, extract real facts.”38 Although it could be argued that ambiguous and uneven media cover16 

INTRODUCTION

age is a common feature of warfare today, the Lebanese wars might be said to have prefigured the kind of representational instability that philosopher Thomas Keenan identified in the media coverage of the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War in the early 1990s.39 Taking up New York Times journalist Roger Cohen’s pronouncement that the conflict was a “postmodern war,” and distinguishing the conflicts in Bosnia from earlier televised wars like Vietnam, Keenan foregrounded “the apparent re- or dis-­location of the field of knowledge and action to the screen of a monitor and the entry of those representations into the field of the things and events they ought simply to represent.”40 In other words, in a confusing and oversaturated media environment, the direct experience of war can no longer be easily distinguished from its televisual representations. The wars in Lebanon also changed the way images were perceived and, more specifically, contributed to a growing sense of their unreality. In foregrounding the mediating effects of the lens-­ based technologies they work with and against, the post–­civil war generation of artists working in Beirut has sought to shift the focus away from an imagery that casts the Lebanese “as eternal victims of war.”41 Thus, rather than confine their gaze to images of war, these artists have produced works that examine “what the war did to the images.”42 Yet here these practices run up against a familiar postmodern bind: If the work is about representation, then what happens to the subjects of it? Indeed, each of the works examined in this book centers on individuals or groups, living through periods of conflict, who have been historically denied political representation and so effectively silenced or rendered invisible. In Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes, the occluded subject is the Arab hostage held with the Western captives in Beirut in the 1980s: a third term who has been left out of both the hostages’ written accounts of captivity and Arab media reportage of the Western Hostage Crisis. In Zaatari’s All Is Well on the Border, the subalterns are the South Lebanese civilians and resistance fighters who have been positioned as the mouthpieces of an ideology within the discourses and institutions of Islamic resistance. Lamia Joreige’s Here and Perhaps Elsewhere and Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s A Perfect Day revolve around literal “missing” subjects—the thousands of people who were kidnapped along the Green Line during the civil war—as well as the communities that were implicated in their disappearances. Mroué’s multimedia performances—Three Posters and The Inhabitants of Images—look at how I N T R O D U C T I O N 17

people who are missing or dead take on a strange afterlife in the mechanically and electronically produced image. Rather than focusing on the problematic of representation writ large, I ask how subjects such as these might speak back to the images that act in their place. In taking up this fraught question, I argue that Lebanese artists crucially avoid the trap of trying to speak for or give a voice to a silenced or disenfranchised subject.43 The problem is, I argue, not so much about how to give a voice to mute witnesses and traumatized survivors. Instead, it is about how in respeaking testimonies and reenacting events, artists in Lebanon can provide the grounds for the radical remembering of the past and the reimagining of futures in a present haunted by the specter of failed leftist political projects and the defeat of multicultural and secular forms of nationalisms in the region. Here, too, a further point of clarification is helpful, because this book does not set out to offer a survey of Lebanese art. Rather, it foregrounds the fundamental conflicts and contradictions within Lebanese society that continually undermine notions of citizenship, territorial sovereignty, and national culture. In this respect, Hezbollah’s ascendency is not only linked to an endemically weak Lebanese government but is also paradigmatic of a more widespread withering of the nation-­state amid the global return of religions: “The relation of [Hezbollah] to Lebanon—‘a non-­state within a non-­state,’ as its supporters are fond of saying—is to be generalised.”44 In the chapters that follow, I explore what it means to make images in a historically divided nation, where notions of collective memory are still bound to sectarian agendas. In unearthing the past, I consider the ways in which artists in Lebanon have opened up spaces for modalities of belonging and public remembrance that are otherwise foreclosed in the political sphere. Furthermore, this book does not aim to provide a survey of post–­civil war cultural production, writ large. Instead, it focuses primarily on the work of artists who exhibit videos and films in galleries. In Hanan al-­Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, Laura Marks argues that the demand for these “moving-­image artists” relies on a split between cinematic and artistic production that is as much commercial as it is discursive. This is manifested not only in the institutional division between film festivals and the gallery/ biennale circuits, but also in the “respective terms and historical references for film and for visual art.”45 Marks’s attention to the thematic, conceptual, 18 

INTRODUCTION

and formal links between experimental video, postconceptual photography, and a specifically cinematic mode of image making in Lebanon troubles the boundaries that have been erected around these disciplines, even as it also calls attention to them. Indeed, many of the artists that I discuss here could be seen as making work that is in close conversation with filmic or cinematic practices (a term we can use capaciously, as Marks has done, to include “all time-­based, recorded, audiovisual media” works).46 Such an expansive framework certainly accords with the propensity of the artists to employ a variety of media and analytical strategies in their work. As Zaatari notes, the initial lack of dedicated art institutions in Beirut forced artists to develop multiple competencies and roles.47 In this model, one can be “interested in histories without being a historian, collecting information without being a journalist.”48 All of the artists that I discuss employ photography and video in different formats (documentary, installation, lecture-­performance), but their work largely circulates in the art world. The one notable exception is the work of Khalil Joreige and Hadjithomas, which moves selectively between art and cinema without privileging one or the other. Although it remains beyond the scope of this book, one could certainly imagine a larger study that explores the overlap between these visual cultures. Yet I have chosen to focus on this particular set of artists because I want to foreground medium-­specific questions of memory that are crystallized in a particular body of work. A Perfect Day, Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, The Inhabitants of Images, and Three Posters deal directly with photographic images relating to the missing and/or dead. Here my interest is in the way in which these artists put the snapshot image into tension with the durational qualities of video and film. Often this serves to unsettle the relation between past and present. Raad’s Hostage and Zaatari’s All Is Well open up a similarly self-­reflexive dialogue between video and television, raising the question of how these media structure political subjectivity. In these works we are invited to consider how public testimony is produced in accordance with shifting categories of what is and is not permissible speech. The title of this book—Posthumous Images—refers to the ways in which certain images appear only after the presumed death of their referent. In resituating the performance of the martyr delivering his final address to the camera, Mroué’s Three Posters asks what it means to inhabit an image postI N T R O D U C T I O N 19

humously. Jamal al-­Sati’s death occurs after the video is made, but in the tape he makes before the operation, he addresses the living from the position of someone who is already dead. Taped before his suicide mission but viewed after the fact, this video looks both backward and forward at the same time, throwing into question its status as a documentary record of the past. Similarly, in my discussion of the photographs of the missing, what interests me is the ways in which these images trouble the distinction between states of presence and absence, past and present. Like the martyr, the photographs of the missing inhabit a space that unsettles the ontological boundary between life and death. In both cases, the viewer is confronted with images that activate a dormant and unprocessed period in Lebanese history. While my focus is on photography and video, I recognize that some of the broader concerns that I foreground—questions around the uncertain place of the civil wars in Lebanese collective memory—are also present in several films that are not addressed in this study. Here it is instructive to briefly single out two films that were released in the same year: Ziad Doueiri’s West Beirut (1998) and Ghassan Salhab’s Phantom Beirut (1998).49 Both of these films ask what it means to represent the dead, albeit in ways that are less extensive than in the works taken up in the subsequent chapters. The narrative of Salhab’s film centers on the unsettling return of Khalil to Beirut: white haired and blank faced, he is portrayed as a spectral figure in a landscape of ruins (the war is barely over, and a palpable sense of danger still pervades the city). After Fouad spots Khalil at the airport by chance, he enlists a group to track him down. Still convinced that their friend had been killed in a battle ten years earlier, they think that the man they are following is not really Khalil but a phantom. When one member of the party says that he wished he had brought his camera with him, he is reminded by another that “ghosts don’t appear in photographs.” When Khalil is eventually confronted by the group, he confesses that he had used the confusion of the war as an opportunity to stage his disappearance. His friends feel betrayed by this deception, but what perhaps troubles them more is the confusion caused by his unexpected and untimely reappearance. At the beginning of the film, a camera winds through downtown Beirut. The ruined shells of buildings overlap with signs of reconstruction. These images elicit a voice-­over commentary on the rebirth of the city and the suspended life of its inhabitants: “Perhaps this will deliver this damaged city to a true death, a genuine death. 20 

INTRODUCTION

This is after all our problem: we didn’t want to turn a new page because we weren’t really dead.” Salhab implies that the survivors of the civil war are as much undead as Khalil, but that they are ghosts who do not know yet their condition. In West Beirut, the first film about the civil war to gain a worldwide release, Doueiri looks back at the inception of violence in the mid-­1970s. Much of the story is told through the eyes of three adolescents who are coming of age at the same time as the city is plunged into war. Indeed, the central protagonists of the film belong to the same generation as the artists analyzed in this book. Tarek and his school friend, Omar, have fun making movies on a Super 8 camera, but the only store that develops this format is located on the other side of the newly imposed dividing line. While this adventure lands them in some dangerous situations, they treat the war-­torn city as an elaborate playground. By contrast, the scenes involving Tarek’s parents, Riad and Hala, encapsulate the tragic dimensions of the war. His mother wants to leave Beirut, but his father is determined to stay. The film finishes in an elliptical fashion. As Riad plays the oud, with his wife by his side, Salhab introduces archival footage from the civil war: politicians giving speeches, tanks going through the streets of Beirut, women mourning their dead. In the next scene, Tarek cries while his father sits alone in the background. The implication here is that Hala has been killed in the war. In the final scene, Tarek is on the beach, filming his mother on his Super 8 camera. The home movie shifts from color to black and white as it marks his mother’s passing. Like many of the other works examined in this book, West Beirut reflects on what it means to register a death that takes place at the level of the image. Chapter 1 examines Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (2001), a sixteen-­minute experimental documentary that retells the Western Hostage Crisis from the perspective of a fictional Arab captive held hostage with Western men in Beirut in 1985.50 Raad’s video probes the unresolved homosocial relations between Arab and Western men, particularly as they hinge on the simultaneous fear of and desire for sexual contact with the Lebanese detainee. Bachar’s account, although told in first person, is mediated by a female voice in English that mistranslates his words precisely at the point when he is talking about his alleged sexual relations with the other hostage. I argue that in response to the privileging of white male subjectivity in contemporary hostage narratives, Hostage offers more than a revision of I N T R O D U C T I O N 21

prevailing cultural scripts from a position of self-­defined alterity. Rather, by foregrounding moments of constitutive mistranslation, it questions the aim of giving a voice to muted subjects. While desirable, the task of recovering the speech of the subjugated subject cannot bypass the aporias posed by the mutual untranslatability of languages and discourses. Extending this notion of translation to the domain of media geopolitics, I examine the crucial role that video and television played in the hostage crisis. I show that with the availability of vhs cameras in the 1980s, the hostage video became a tool of political ventriloquism wherein Arabs used the immobilized and visibly subjugated bodies of Americans to speak back to the West. Within this framework, Bachar’s fictional video testimony, while appearing to grant agency to subjects denied representation in the official narratives of the hostage crisis, is in fact complicated by the ambiguities of translation, across both languages and media technologies. Indeed, if the television images of the Beirut hostages would seem to confirm the power of a system in which images as well as arms and people are all rendered exchangeable, Hostage’s incessant reference to the breakdowns in transmission and communication materializes a point of untranslatability, that is to say, a limit in Western control over images and the subjects they presume to represent. Like Hostage, Zaatari’s All Is Well on the Border (1997) and Mroué’s Three Posters (2000) problematize the representation of subjects whose stories have been written out of the official narratives of Lebanese history. Rather than claiming to speak for or give voice to the resistance fighters of the Lebanese left, both works challenge the possibility of representation in both the artistic and the political sense. In Three Posters, Mroué revisits a 1985 video testimony by a Lebanese communist resistance fighter delivered shortly before he carried out a suicide attack on the Israeli Army during its occupation of South Lebanon. On stage, the man’s testimony is preceded by another video, in which Mroué appears in the guise of a martyr, Khaled Rahhal, delivering his own posthumous message. When a door is opened on stage to reveal the artist seated in front of a camera, the audience realizes that what they witnessed on video was not a moment in the past but a live performance. In chapter 2, I argue that this uncanny doubling of the past not only casts doubt on the ontological weight accorded to the martyr video as an indubitable document of death, but also opens onto a more immediately pressing set of concerns regarding the use of media by militant forms of Islamic re22 

INTRODUCTION

sistance, specifically Hezbollah’s, and its cultivation of a theocratic politics of death by means of a sophisticated technics of digital representation. Here the main question is this: how does Hezbollah’s deployment of digital technology serve to alter the mediatic forms of martyrdom that they have co-­ opted from the Lebanese left? Zaatari’s video also takes up the fraught documentation of the leftist fighters who first made up the resistance to Israeli occupation in South Lebanon. Against the dominant myths of Islamic resistance, Zaatari’s work documents the strategies of everyday resistance that a cognate generation of men developed in the notorious prisons of the occupied border zone. Thus, chapter 2 further looks at how the unofficial archive of letters, home videos, and popular music that All Is Well juxtaposes with the uprooted testimonies of imprisoned fighters obstructs reified structures of identification. At the same time, I argue, this archive also gives form to affective dimensions of lived experience that counter the instrumentalized speech of party politics and the media propaganda of the Islamic resistance. Here I focus on the numerous ways in which All Is Well foregrounds the mediated condition of the prisoners’ stories and the communities that they claim to represent, producing a critical distancing or alienated empathy structured across and through personal and communal histories, the media propaganda of resistance movements, and the conventions of militant filmmaking. Yet the work also resists the impulse to heroicize the defeat of the leftist resistance in Lebanon. In this respect, Zaatari’s autocritical documentary can be distinguished from a left melancholy that remains attached to the failure of an ideal and ignores its still unrealized possibilities for the future. Chapter 3, “Latent Images, Buried Bodies: Mourning Lebanon’s Disappeared,” foregrounds four works that address the Lebanese cultural phenomenon of the missing—men and women who, like the martyr in Mroué’s Three Posters, are suspended between life and death. As I argue, all of the works in this chapter act as critiques of and alternatives to the state-­imposed amnesia around the status of the Lebanese missing. Rather than insisting on a politics of truth, however, the practices in this chapter foreground the roles played by the families and communities left behind and make evident the rituals of hearsay, gossip, and memory that mediate between the missing and their loved ones. Both Halwani and Joreige and Hadjithomas, in Lasting Images, ask how photographs of the missing, whether displayed in public or held in private collections, might be developed in a way that counI N T R O D U C T I O N 23

ters both the widespread amnesia and the institutionalized display practices that use such photographs to perpetuate sectarian divisions. In analyses of Joreige and Hadjithomas’s A Perfect Day and Lamia Joreige’s Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, I turn from photographs of the dead to the families and communities left behind as testators. A Perfect Day narrates legal and ethical quandaries of when and how a mother and son might have their husband/ father declared dead by the state. These questions become the grounds for a critical analysis of suspended states of existence, for the living as well as for those assumed to be dead. Here and Perhaps Elsewhere documents a journey through the neighborhoods adjoining the Green Line, the demarcation line that once separated East and West Beirut during the civil war period. Carrying a set of archival newspaper photographs depicting the militia-­controlled checkpoints where thousands of people went missing, Joreige traces these locations, approaches residents, and asks them the same question: “Do you know anyone who was kidnapped from here during the war?” While the photographs function more often than not to block memory, the intrusive presence of Joreige’s camera in the street has the effect of stimulating unrehearsed stories, testimonies, and questions regarding the fate of individuals kidnapped during the war. The film thus asks us to consider how the memories of Green Line abductions are transmitted across genders and generational lines, and so provides a postsectarian framework for examining how social categories of gender and age, rather than confessional identity, might serve to mediate individual and communal acts of witnessing in Beirut today. Chapter 4 further considers the location of postwar memory in the city and the layered histories that continue to haunt its seeming rise from the ashes. As noted earlier, in the 1990s the Lebanese government embarked on an ambitious reconstruction plan to both rehabilitate and physically rebuild the country. Much of this effort centered on the restoration of the heavily damaged historic center of Beirut: the scene of the first and most intense battles of the civil wars. Here the Lebanese state was confronted with a critical problem: how to give shape to a cohesive new national identity within a space overdetermined by a history of sectarian division and internecine conflict. As numerous architectural historians have noted, the rebuilding of the downtown area did not offer a redemption of conflicting urban narratives of collective memory or national identity in Lebanon. Rather, it attempted to elide the visible evidence of those divisions through an amnesiac urbanism. 24 

INTRODUCTION

Not surprisingly, much of what has been written on the reconstruction of the city center has foregrounded the state’s failed attempt to neutralize this territory through a violent process of land expropriation and eviction. While this critical literature has rightly interrogated an urbanism that simultaneously refutes the possibility of a mnemonic reflection on the past and knowledge of the political present, it has mostly ignored the ways in which architects and artists have both made visible and countered the erasure of urban memory in the Lebanese capital. The first part of chapter 4 examines two architectural projects by Bernard Khoury that foreground the conflict between official reconstruction and popular memory in contemporary Beirut. The first of these, Evolving Scars (1991), consists of a design to place a temporary transparent skin around the outer periphery of war-­damaged buildings in the central business district marked for demolition. Conceived as ephemeral architectural acts that end with the complete physical destruction of the ruin, these memory collectors do not pro­ject the city into a hypothetical future but rather self-­reflexively foreground its accelerated ruination in the post–­ civil war present. In a second project called b018 (1998), Khoury designed a nightclub on the site of a former refugee camp, where it has been long rumored that thousands were massacred in 1976 by a Lebanese Christian militia. Conceived in the form of an underground bunker, b018 obliquely references the traumatic history of its location. Here I draw on Eyal Weizman’s model of forensic aesthetics as a way of exploring how the suspected existence of mass graves in Lebanon implicates architecture, and those who inhabit it, as potential witnesses. I argue that in each case Khoury’s practice offers an alternative both to the state’s willful and hasty destruction of war-­ damaged sites and to the aggrandizing gestures of the traditional monument. Rather than seeking to resolve the contradictions of the reconstruction process, these counter-­monuments heighten them and thus implicate viewers in mnemonic practices that relate to the urban realities of Beirut. The practices of the artists examined in Posthumous Images reveal an engagement with history that has been deepened by a reflective-­performative problematization of the archival image. Yet in recent years, some of the artists of this generation have returned to the utopian projects of the pre–­civil war past as means to imagine an alternative vision of the future, one that is not dictated by the specters of the traumatic past. In their film The Lebanese Rocket Society (2012), the artist duo Hadjithomas and Joreige uncover the I N T R O D U C T I O N 25

largely forgotten history of Lebanon’s curtailed space program. From 1960 to 1966, several rockets, which became larger and more powerful with time, were launched from the hills surrounding Beirut by a group of scientists and university students led by mathematics professor Manoug Manougian. This project coincided not only with the Cold War space race, but also with the alternative modernity promised by the Pan-­Arabism of Egyptian president Abdel Nasser, ending with the Arab defeat in the 1967 war. However, the Lebanese Rocket Society has been largely erased from the national imaginary. There are no monuments or museums dedicated to chronicling this unlikely and remarkable juncture in Lebanese history. Any mention of “Lebanese rocket” brings to mind images of war, specifically Hezbollah missiles targeting Israel and Israeli missiles targeting Lebanon. How can this story be retold in a persistently war-­torn Middle East? What would it mean today to reconstitute the remnants of an aborted future in the postutopian present? In Chapter 5, I examine the multimedia installations that were circulated alongside The Lebanese Rocket Society, including the construction of a scaled reproduction of the cd4 rocket, which is photographed as it is transported through the streets of Beirut to Haigazian University. In giving a materiality to an absent imaginary, I argue that Hadjithomas and Joreige critically revise the withdrawal of the referent allegorized in their earlier projects (most notably the series Wonder Beirut, 1997–2006). If both Wonder Beirut and The Lebanese Rocket Society refuse the nostalgic image of pre–­civil war Lebanon, the latter differs in its attempt to reconfigure the broken link with the past.

26 

INTRODUCTION



C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S

ONE

On the Geopolitics of Sex and Translation in Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes

Walid Raad’s 1999 Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (#17 and #31) is ostensibly the result of a collaboration between Raad, a Lebanese American artist, Souheil Bachar, “the only Arab man to have been detained with the Western hostages kidnapped in Beirut,” and the Atlas Group, an organization established “to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon.”1 In the opening sequence, Bachar is shown seated with his back against a wall, looking directly out at the camera. Through the mediation of a voice-­over translation, Bachar reveals the intimate details of the time he spent in captivity with five American hostages held in Beirut during the 1980s (figure 1.1). His testimony initially focuses on the neurotic personal habits of the other men, resulting from their prolonged cohabitation in a small room. The hostages, it seems, were almost pathologically afraid of touching each other and had also convinced themselves that the Arab guards in the adjoining room were having sex. After a few weeks, the Americans grew accustomed to the physical contact, but they maintained a very different relationship to Bachar. He singles out one incident that exemplifies his anomalous position as an Arab hostage surrounded by white men: They were clearly disgusted with my body but they touched me all the time. I remember one night in particular, one very hot summer night when the room was filled with the stench of our sweat. As usual we were all on the floor sleeping or trying to sleep. I felt someone’s ass rubbing against my crotch. Someone was rubbing himself against me. I became

Figure 1.1. Walid Raad, still from Hostage: The Bachar Tapes_English version (2000). Single-­channel video and sound, 16 minutes, 20 seconds. (© Walid Raad, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

hard and I don’t know why, but I pressed myself up against his ass. It felt good. Seconds later, he punched me in the groin, as if my hard on had provoked him. I stayed quiet.2 Bachar’s revelation, however exemplary it may be in some ways, is complicated by the uncertainties of translation. One key aspect in this episode concerns the small but highly significant discrepancy between the Arabic and the English version of events. Although it is not clearly audible on the soundtrack, Bachar says in Arabic, “[I] felt someone pushing their penis into my ass,” while in the English voice-­over his words are misleadingly transcribed: “I pressed myself up against his ass.”3 Intentional or not, the translation inverts the order of subject and object. Instead of being the passive recipient of the other man’s sexual advances, Bachar is cast as an active participant. Far from clarifying matters, then, a more faithful translation of the Arabic serves only to complicate the power dynamics at work within this scene. This chapter argues that the meaning of Bachar’s actions, or more precisely the meaning his actions take on in relation to the other hostages, exists only in translation. That is to say, translation in Hostage does not serve simply to transpose a preconstituted set of meanings across heterogeneous media. Rather, translation is itself the medium by which the relations in captivity are constituted. In emphasizing the performative dimensions of translation, Hostage demonstrates how relations of force establish themselves first and foremost through symbolic practices, including how we as readers interpret 28 

CHAPTER ONE

the translations offered to us. This leads to a second claim that is central to the argument of this text: if translation describes processes of dislocation and displacement, both within and across the languages in question, then the subjects caught up in its terms cannot be said to stand outside of its unsettling effects. Translation is generally thought of as an instrument in the service of the communication of meaning or of a message. Taken in this sense, the aim of translation is to make a text written in one language understandable in another language. In a highly suggestive reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” Samuel Weber alternatively defines translation as a “tangential encounter of two different languages,” one that “involves the interplay of the different possible meanings of the original text and of the translation. That interplay results not in one single meaning but rather a difference of meanings of the original text and the translation which, like a difference of opinion, signifies precisely through its disunity.”4 This conception of translation is useful not only because it acknowledges the interplay of meanings within every act of translation, but also because it understands that interplay in agonistic terms. The present experience of translation, as Homi Bhabha has argued, is that which resists any “consensual continuity” between the languages involved.5 What is played out in Hostage is not just a difference of opinion over what happened in captivity, but a no less important dispute concerning the translatability of those experiences. To put this another way, what the translations in the video represent is not a neat equivalence between the two languages being translated, but the irreducible difference between what they mean and the ways in which they each make their meanings. That the key moment in the video in which translation becomes most decisively a problem is also a scene of interracial sexual contact is surely significant. In Hostage, both sex and the languages used to give meaning to it function as terms of difference and indeterminacy. As such, they signal the limit to and the enabling condition of translation. Walid Raad is part of a generation of Lebanese artists who grew up watching the civil wars as young adults and whose work remains inextricably tied to the memory of that formative experience.6 Between 1989 and 2004, Raad produced work under the banner of the Atlas Group, an “imaginary foundation” of historians, writers, and artists who assembled artifacts relating both

C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  29

to Lebanon’s recent past and to its political present.7 Reportedly based in Beirut and New York, the Atlas Group Archive included notebooks, videotapes, and photographs that Raad exhibits in mixed-­media installations, academic publications, public lectures, and online.8 Although many of the documents in the Atlas Group Archive were taken from genuine historical sources, they were often attributed to an imaginary author or linked to an event that never took place. Even when the accredited author was a real person, it may be that Raad had invented the document in question.9 As much as Raad’s project was a project of historical documentation and preservation, it was also an attempt to investigate the sorts of agencies and institutions that are charged with authorizing history. By conducting archival research, unearthing ephemeral artifacts, and collecting eyewitness testimonies, Raad asked his audiences to consider how and in whose interests historical memory is constituted. Like his Lebanese contemporaries, he has sought to resist an iconography that reduces the experience of war to the spectacle of violence.10 His work can also be seen as part of a shared critical inquiry into the evidentiary status of images in Lebanon, particularly those produced under the pressure of war. Hostage is in many respects typical of this body of work. It consists of three distinct but intersecting narrative lines that span the gap between the public and private dimensions of captivity: video testimonies made by the Western hostages while in captivity, the television coverage of the Iran-­Contra Affair, and the postcaptivity video testimonies made by Bachar. The retelling of the Western Hostage Crisis, alongside the apocryphal story told by Bachar, sets up a tension between the official representation of the hostage ordeal and the unauthorized experiences that have been censored from mass-­media images of captivity.11 As such, Hostage asks us to think of the Western Hostage Crisis not as a unified event that can be fully reconstituted but as a set of discourses that are unevenly distributed and subject to competing interpretations and ideological claims. In structural terms, Hostage is divided into several sections, each framed by cues or markers of pseudohistoriographic documentation. In the prologue, for example, text appears on screen listing the title, file type, document number, and production data, as well as a summary that offers some brief background information on Bachar, the extent of his collaboration with the Atlas Group, and the number of videos they have made available 30 

CHAPTER ONE

to audiences outside of Lebanon. Significantly, the tapes are categorized not as the actual hostage videos made during captivity, but as records of detention made several years after the fact. This is an important distinction that is often overlooked by audiences of Hostage, who mistakenly view the work as a direct transcription of a historical event rather than a secondary elaboration on its documentation. Live screenings of Hostage, like screenings of many of Raad’s works, are often followed by audience questions that evidence an unquestioned belief in the historical veracity of the information presented in the video. This reaction is surely proof of the power of video to compel conviction. The credulity inspired by Hostage is also linked to the aura of authenticity that surrounds Bachar in his triple role as native informant, witness, and survivor. As Elliott Grunner has noted, the ex-­hostage is, upon release, “elevated into a higher level of existence and power which affords him a privileged voice.”12 It is this voice that makes the ex-­hostage an object of popular fascination and awe. For all its apparent immediacy, then, Hostage is a video that insistently calls attention to the practices of signification—acts of selection and exclusion, the editing of accounts together, the building of an account into a story, the use of particular types of exposition—that are used to construct hostage testimonies. More specifically, Hostage approaches the Western Hostage Crisis in terms of the discursive structure of the captivity narrative: How does this genre make its meanings, and what kinds of speaking positions are made possible by it? At stake in this line of inquiry is a recognition that the images and stories of hostages in Beirut are fundamentally shaped not only by the technological parameters of video and the programming constraints of television, but also by the cultural codes of the captivity narrative, particularly as they relate to the power dynamics of prolonged interracial and homosocial confinement. Before I can begin to explore these questions, however, it is necessary to return to the limits of existing scholarship on Raad’s work, which I outlined in the introduction—specifically the critical writings that foreground questions of trauma and fiction, and the relation of both to the larger problematic of documentary representation in contemporary art coming out of Lebanon. In the same manner that the insistent reference to trauma functions to depoliticize the archival dimension of Raad’s practice, the almost C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  31

uniform alignment of his work with tendencies of documentary fiction in contemporary art avoids questions concerning its politics of truth. In his essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” Bruno Latour remarks on the increasing ways in which the theory of social construction—that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we always speak from a particular standpoint—has been co-­ opted by neoliberal conservatives “to destroy hard-­won evidence that could save our lives” so that, for example, arguments for global warming are today attacked for their lack of scientific certainty.13 For Latour, this realization necessitates that we fundamentally rethink the concept of critique: “The danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices?”14 This is not to argue for a return to the facts themselves, as if they could be neatly extracted from the political struggles that surround their interpretation. Rather, it is to insist that the recourse to strategies of fictionalization does not free us of the responsibility of attending to the effects of power at work in particular regimes of truth. This covers not only the types of discourse that a given social order accepts and makes function as true, but “the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”15 No doubt for Raad and other politically engaged artists of his generation, the use of fiction has an important critical dimension that cannot be overlooked. First, fiction serves to counter the reification of representation enacted in the corporate mass media. Second, fiction creates a space in which an audience is invited to enter into a performative relationship with the document. As Jacques Rancière has argued, fictualization enacts ways of thinking and ways of feeling that are otherwise foreclosed in traditional forms of documentary realism: “making ‘fictional archives’ of the war, fictionalizing the detournement of a surveillance camera to film a sunset, or playing with the sounds of mortar shells and fireworks, and so on. This very constructed, at times playful, relationship to their history addresses a spectator whose interpretive and emotional capacity is not only acknowledged but called upon. 32 

CHAPTER ONE

In other words, the work is constructed in such a way that it is up to the spectator to interpret it and to react to it affectively.”16 Following Rancière, it has become commonplace by now to say that the Atlas Group problematizes traditional methods of historical description and explanation. Indeed, much of what has been written about the Atlas Group outside of Lebanon has tended to focus narrowly on the problematic conjunction of fact and fiction in the work. Typical in this regard is Janet A. Kaplan, who, in reference to Documenta 11’s “flood of straightforward cultural documentation,” argues that “Raad’s inventions of characters to whom real photographs are attributed, of actors employed to perform historical fictions and of imaginary narratives that explain real events all served to quietly undermine uncritical belief in the veracity of historical presentations.”17 Similarly, Sarah Rogers puts forward the now-­standard claim that Raad’s mimicry of the archive “transforms fictional into historical narration, consequently dismantling the opposition often built between the two forms of telling and retelling.”18 Raad’s fabrication of history, together with his use of multiple and often contradictory authorial positions, undoubtedly serves to undermine the conventional binary of fiction and nonfiction, a distinction that he sees as both reductive and false. As he explains in a 2002 interview with Alan Gilbert: I say different things at different times and in different places according to personal, historical, cultural and political considerations with regard to the geographical location and my personal and professional relation with the audience and how much they know about the political, economic and cultural histories of Lebanon, the wars in Lebanon, the Middle East and contemporary art. I also always mention in exhibitions and lectures that the Atlas Group documents are ones that I produced and that I attribute to various imaginary individuals. But even this direct statement fails, in many instances, to make evident for readers or an audience the imaginary nature of the Atlas Group and its documents.19 The crucial point that needs to be made is that Raad is not simply exposing truth as an ideological fiction to do away with the concept of truth altogether. Instead, fiction becomes the basis for a new form of representation whose veracity consists not in any assumed relation to a prior reality, but in the production of a new political reality. That is to say, the people and events documented in the Atlas Group Archive may not be real, but they can still C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  33

have very real effects. Michel Foucault’s remarks on fiction are particularly suggestive in this regard: “I have never written anything other than fictions. For all that, I would not want to say that they are outside truth. It seems possible to me to make fiction work within truth, to induce truth-­effects within a fictional discourse, and in some way to make the discourse of truth arouse, ‘fabricate’ something which does not as yet exist, thus ‘fiction’ something. One ‘fictions’ history starting from a political reality that renders it true, one ‘fictions’ a politics that doesn’t as yet exist starting from an historical truth.”20 Hostage is undeniably relevant to these discussions of fiction and history. Which version of whose story is being told by whom and to what end is a central concern of the work, and Bachar’s account of the sexual politics of interracial captivity is, significantly, set against a third-­person account of the Western Hostage Crisis. Rather than treating the personal and the political as separate and parallel domains, however, or as competing realms of truth and fiction, as previous critics have noted, I would argue that Raad’s video seeks to account for the points where the private and public conditions of captivity most forcefully intersect with each other. Crucial in this regard are the unresolved homosocial relations between Arab and Western men, particularly as they hinge on the simultaneous fear of and desire for sexual contact with the Other. Bachar’s role as an intermediary figure between captor and captive also raises questions regarding the politics of representation. At stake in the discrepancy between the narratives told by the white male captives and Bachar’s retelling of those narratives is not the merely the truth (who told the most accurate story about the lived experience of captivity) or its relativization, but rather the power of discourse itself: whose account of captivity is granted cultural authority. In response to the privileging of white male subjectivity in contemporary hostage narratives, Hostage offers more than a revision of prevailing cultural scripts from a position of self-­defined alterity. Rather, it questions the very possibility of granting a voice to the Arab subject based on the recovery of subjugated knowledge or historically invalidated speaking positions. The prologue of Hostage establishes Bachar’s role as an intermediary figure between the interpersonal and geopolitical dimensions of captivity and seems initially to invite the possibility of granting a voice to a specifically Arab subject. It stands in apparent opposition to the hostage memoirs 34 

CHAPTER ONE

and their recurring confirmation of the irrational and religiously fanatical Arab: a stereotype Terry Anderson, the longest-­held American captive in Beirut, variously characterizes as “ignorant,” “incredibly lazy,” “unsophisticated,” “vicious,” and “simply evil.”21 For Anderson, the Arab is irredeemably Other: “It’s difficult to talk to these men, to bring myself to be polite, to act as if I care what they think. Their minds are alien to me. They seem to think that what they’re doing is some kind of small but necessary unpleasantness. Only the loneliness, the hours and days without speaking a word bring me to talk to them.”22 It is through Bachar, most immediately, that the abduction of the Western hostages in Beirut is first of all linked to the fate of populations in South Lebanon following successive Israeli invasions in 1978 and 1982. Following a practice standardized in interviews with former Lebanese detainees held in Israeli prisons, Bachar announces his full name (Souheil Bachar), his age (thirty-­five), the duration of his captivity (1983–93), and his village of origin (Houla). The name Souheil Bachar is a homonym of Souha Bechara, the Lebanese communist militant who shot Antoine Lahad, the general in charge of the South Lebanese Army, the pro-­Israeli, predominantly Christian militia that controlled southern Lebanon as a proxy for Israel for much of the 1980s and 1990s.23 While the allusion to Bechara would be lost on most audiences outside of Lebanon, within Lebanon her name has become a metonym for the struggle against Israeli occupation of the south. The town of Houla, a symbol of the conflicts waged along the Lebanese-­Israeli border, leading ultimately to the invasion of Beirut in 1982, is a further marker of Bachar’s territorial identity as a displaced southerner.24 Here, then, Bachar comes to stand for an underclass of dispossessed Lebanese who were forced to flee from their villages under the threat of military incursions, imprisonment, interrogation, and continual interruptions to daily life.25 However, the substitution of Bachar, an anonymous worker with unclear political affiliations, for Bechara, a lionized freedom fighter, serves to undercut the myth of heroic resistance associated with the south. Finally, the choice of the Lebanese actor Fadi Abi Samra to play Bachar bears some significance here too, since Raad wanted a “dark-­skinned” performer who could more emphatically signify as Arab for Western viewers.26 Thus, while Bachar is implicitly connected with a subaltern sector of Lebanese society through his accent and name, his appearance more clearly plays to Western visual codifications C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  35

of the Arab body. Indeed, Hostage foreshadows the images of sexually humiliated Iraqi male detainees that later emerged from the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. As an Arab hostage, Bachar could be seen as a mediating term between the captor culture and the position of captive. This would seem to make him the ideal candidate to translate the experience of captivity from the inside, providing a degree of cultural insight that is otherwise absent in the Western accounts produced by and about the other hostages held in Beirut. However, there are a number of small but telling discrepancies in Bachar’s account that serve not only to cast doubt on his reliability as a narrator but also to undermine the assumption that his retelling of the captivity narrative might provide privileged access to a specifically Lebanese point of view. On its website, the Atlas Group states that “Bachar is a Lebanese national who was kidnapped in Beirut and held hostage in Lebanon for ten years.”27 We are also informed that Bachar was held for three months in 1985 in the same cell as the five Western hostages. The prologue to Hostage alternatively describes Bachar as a low-­level employee of the Kuwaiti Embassy who spent twenty-­ seven weeks with the Americans. Of course, there is no mention of anyone called Souheil Bachar in the memoirs written by the Western hostages. In their memoirs, Anderson, Benjamin Weir, Thomas Sutherland, Martin Jenco, and David Jacobsen all make brief reference to an Arab hostage called Wajid Doumani or simply Wajd. Given that the references to him were brief, Raad became interested in the untold story of this man held in captivity with the Americans. After initial attempts to find this man proved fruitless, Raad decided “to imagine his testimony.”28 Bachar is therefore a fictional entity, albeit one that has a tenuous basis in historical fact. Furthermore, while the video assigns Bachar a specific geographic and linguistic identity early on, it subsequently undermines any notion of a single, unified subject who can claim to represent an Arab experience. The prologue of Hostage tell us that, to date, Bachar has publicly screened all of the videotapes he made about his captivity—but only in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Sudan, Palestine, and Morocco. Of the fifty-­three videotapes supposedly shown in those countries, he has allowed only two tapes, #17 and #31, to be screened in North America and western Europe. Thus, just as there are discrepancies in what we are told about Bachar, his testimony is presented as only a fragment of a larger archive that remains, in a funda36 

CHAPTER ONE

mental sense, inaccessible to Western audiences. In the two tapes shown outside the Middle East, Bachar tells not so much his story as his relation to the Americans. The assumption is that his individual experience of captivity would be disclosed in the other fifty-­one tapes. In underscoring the incompleteness of Bachar’s testimony, Hostage therefore questions the idea that Western audiences can have full and immediate cultural access to an Arab account of captivity. The limits of cross-­cultural communication are also foregrounded in Bachar’s stipulations regarding the dubbing of his testimony. Before he even appears on screen, we hear Bachar requesting that his account, delivered in colloquial Lebanese Arabic, be translated into the official language of the country in which each of the tapes are screened: “in English for America, in French for France, and in Arabic for the Arab world and so on.” In a further act of distancing, Bachar requests that his voice be dubbed into “a neutral-­ toned female voice.”29 The delay incurred by the process of dubbing has the effect of splitting Bachar’s words, preventing the speaker from assuming a position of immediate and transparent self-­identity with respect to his own utterances.30 When he speaks of the “Arab world,” furthermore, Bachar by no means assumes an immediate or natural relation to a native audience. In naming Arabic as just one of the three languages spoken in Lebanese public life, Hostage implicitly addresses a decentered and fragmented Lebanese polity as much as an outside audience. The polyglot character of Lebanon, an outcome of its colonial past and anomalous regional position, implies conceiving of translation as an act involving not just intercultural, but also intracultural differences.31 At various points, moreover, the voice-­over distorts the original meaning of Bachar’s testimony, making further evident the limits of cross-­cultural communication. In Atlas Group performances, Raad would make a point of telling audiences that the English voice-­over was not an accurate translation of what Bachar says in Arabic. Raad goes a step further in a mock interview with Bachar, stating, “At times, the voice-­over says the exact opposite of what you are saying in Arabic and at other times, it says something not related at all to what you are saying in Arabic.”32 Although this claim is an exaggeration (the discrepancies between the Arabic and English are far more subtle than Raad would have us believe), the emphasis on the failures of translation challenges the idea that there exists a single reality independent of language C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  37

and its heterogeneities. What is lost in translation is precisely those facets of speech in which accent, intonation, and idiomatic phrasing play a decisive role. In Hostage, the barriers to communication are not merely linguistic but also concern the cultural, political, and historical layers of meaning that elude translation across contexts. Furthermore, the problem of translation is not simply one of linguistics; it also underpins the repeated references that Raad makes to processes of technological mediation. In Hostage, translation at once refers to the activity of linguistic substitution and to the recursive movement of images from one technology to another: from video to television and back into video. The material presence of the video apparatus is seen first of all in the prologue, where Bachar asks to have what he says translated with the aid of subtitles against a blue screen. Read iconographically, the color blue has a double significance, explicitly referencing the Mediterranean Sea (a recurring image in the Atlas Group Archive) and, more obliquely, the state of Israel. However, in video production, the blue screen indicates a lost signal due to distortion or interference. It is by means of these breaks in transmission that Raad disrupts the flow of the narrative while also making visible the contingency and fallibility of the technological support. The transition from tape #17 to #31 is also punctuated by what looks like visual noise.33 This field of static is in actuality low-­resolution video footage of sunlight moving off the surface of the ocean (figure 1.2). Here, yet again, Raad plays on the distinction between the referential images produced by video and the abstract (and mostly invisible) technological order to which they owe their existence. Calling attention to itself as a historically contingent genre of video production, moreover, Hostage self-­consciously replicates many of the formal properties of the hostage tape; the tightly framed close-­ups, disjointed editing, and low-­grade footage characteristic of vhs simulates the look and feel of an authentic period artifact. The blurry quality of the video indicates that Bachar’s tape is actually a multigeneration copy. The technique of overdubbing was in fact a common practice among hostage takers, who used it to disguise the provenance of the tapes they released to the media.34 Thus, more than simply replicating the appearance of the hostage tape, the scrambling of the analog signal in Hostage refers back to the technological conditions under which images of captivity were produced and distributed. Indeed, in Hostage the degraded image also signifies as an illicit image. That is to say, 38 

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Figure 1.2. Walid Raad, still from Hostage: The Bachar Tapes_English version (2000). Single-­channel video and sound, 16 minutes, 20 seconds. (© Walid Raad, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

the lack of resolution testifies not only to the translation of images within and across media platforms but also to a violent process of image dislocation and expropriation. This is one of the conclusions that can be drawn from Hito Steyerl’s theorization of the poor image: “The poor image is an illicit fifth-­generation bastard of an original image. Its genealogy is dubious. Its filenames are deliberately misspelled. It often defies patrimony, national culture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self.”35 Further on in the same essay, Steyerl positions the poor image as the devalued term within unequal economies of global image exchange and information management. The degraded status of low-­resolution images, she suggests, is not simply an outcome of objective technological advances within audiovisual capitalism. Rather, it attests to invisible and illegal processes of image appropriation and displacement. Steyerl argues that it is precisely because these unauthorized reproductions defy technocratic standards of image quality and “fair use” that they hold out the promise of “new visual bonds” that exist both outside of the “protectionist arena of national culture” and the structures of globalization with which it is intertwined.36 From our perspective, the poor image prompts a consideration of the kinds of archival politics opened up by documentary practices in the field of contemporary art. In the late 1990s, when Raad was making Hostage, he could not easily reproduce archival footage of the hostage videos because C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  39

these tapes, which were broadcast on U.S. television, had become part of a privately owned archive that was tightly controlled and prohibitively expensive to use. Raad would get around the restrictions imposed by commercial copyright by dubbing the footage and then cropping it, so as to conceal the identifying visual markers that U.S. broadcast companies placed at the bottom corner of the frame in order to prevent unauthorized reproduction of their footage. Raad’s appropriation of the hostage tape is thus a kind of pirated reappropriation, restoring public visibility to images that have been privatized and thus extricated from U.S. collective memory. The already questionable reliability of Bachar’s narration is rendered further suspect when it is interrupted without warning or explanation as Hostage shifts from a first-­person account of captivity to a third-­person description of the major events surrounding the capture and release of the Western hostages in Lebanon. This shift in narrative perspective underscores not simply the variety of perspectives on the history of the Western Hostage Crisis but also, in effect, the deprivileging of each of them. The narrator, a deep-­voiced middle-­aged man with an English accent, recounts the (apparently objective) facts of the ordeal: “For a brief period in the summer of 1985, six men were held together in the same 10 by 12 foot room in the basement of a building somewhere in the southern suburbs of Beirut close to the airport. Five were Americans; one was Lebanese.” The generic shot of an airplane descending across the Beirut skyline is in keeping with the impersonal tone of the voice-­over. Bachar then says he remembers asking each of the Americans how they were kidnapped. Tellingly, they all begin their story by talking about the weather. In fixating on these seemingly insignificant details, the Americans pre­sent what happened to them as “something natural and unpredictable” (these are Bachar’s words), rather than as the outcome of politically motivated actions that implicate them as citizens of Western nation-­states with varying degrees of involvement in Lebanese and Middle Eastern political affairs. Indeed, in the written accounts of captivity, the Western hostages consistently pre­sent themselves as the innocent victims of a historical accident, seemingly powerless to alter the events that they find themselves unwittingly caught up in. This view was also reinforced in the U.S. media, which portrayed the abduction of the Westerners as a personal tragedy, thereby divorcing the collective fate of the hostages from the political factors leading to their kidnapping and exchange. While the media 40 

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networks spoke for these men, framing the stories to suit their own commercial interests, the captives found themselves spoken through by their Arab captors. That is to say, in these tapes the hostages become a kind of medium through which the hostage takers could speak back to the West, turning its very modes of televisual address and instrumentalized political speech against it. By contrast, Bachar’s recording of his own testimony would seem to suggest a capacity for self-­representation that was precisely denied to the Western hostages. And yet Bachar’s agency is undermined at various points in his story. The paradox is that while he is granted the power to represent his own experience of captivity, his story, in both its incomplete form and ambiguous content, leaves open the question of his own consent in the events that he recounts. In the ensuing segment, the male narrator lists the names and occupations of each of the six hostages as black-­and-­white photographs of the men flash up on screen. The hostages are disheveled and bearded, suggesting that the photographs most likely date back to their time in captivity. We learn that the six men were brought together just as the arms-­for-­hostages deal between the United States, Israel, and Iran became serious in early 1985. Further, it is explained that the arms sales to Iran resulted in the release of Weir, Jenco, and Jacobsen. It is also stated that Sutherland and Anderson were released in 1991. The supporting archival images consist of a montage of Ronald Reagan’s “Address to the Nation on the Iran Arms and Contra Aid Controversy,” delivered on November 13, 1986; Oliver North’s testimony before the congressional committees investigating the Iran-­Contra Affair; and footage of the hostages at press conferences following their release.37 The segment ends with a snowy noise pattern signaling another break in transmission. The television images of the Iran-­Contra Affair hearings form a counterpart to the archival footage of the hostage videos. A contrast is thereby established between parallel truth regimes represented, on the one hand, by an off-­screen narrator who reports on the facts at a distance and, on the other hand, by subjects who are caught up in the events they are recounting. While the high production value lends documentary authority to the former, the amateur video techniques bring the latter into association with forms of unsanctioned speech. What we see in Hostage is not the actual tapes but edited segments originally broadcast on U.S. television. In a further gesture of critical reflexiveness that refers us back to the physical reality of the videotape, C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  41

Figure 1.3. Walid Raad, still from Hostage: The Bachar Tapes_English version (2000). Single-­channel video and sound, 16 minutes, 20 seconds. (© Walid Raad, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

Raad has split the screen horizontally to show different parts of the same footage at alternating speeds. At one point, we can clearly hear the sound of the tape being rewound. Blurry and warped, the tightly framed close-­up of Anderson moves up and down the screen, never settling into a stable image (figure 1.3). The loud hiss of the tape further calls attention to the obdurate presence of the video apparatus. Only a few phrases can be distinguished amid the palimpsest of voices: “The conditions of our captivity are far worse now than when . . . that is how we have been living every day, minute by minute, for a year and half. . . . The pain is real.” The archival video footage of Anderson delivering a statement on behalf of his captors is replaced with a screenshot of a television test pattern. A high-­pitched electronic signal is heard, and a tag appears identifying the location of the preceding clip, its subject, date, and duration. The words “vhs quality as incoming” flash against a black screen for a few seconds. Here, once again, Raad renders visible the formal and technical attributes of the 42 

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archival images used in Hostage. In the mid-­1980s, Beta was the industry format of television news production. The vhs source therefore suggests that the footage was most probably amateur and of inferior quality. At this point Hostage briefly reverts back to the third-­person documentary mode. The male narrator picks up where he had left off: “On December the 4th, 1991, the last of the American hostages held in Lebanon, Terry Anderson, was released. The release was more than the end of a seven-­year ordeal for the longest-­held American hostage. It marked the end of a long and painful chapter known as the ‘Western Hostage Crisis.’” Less clear, but still audible in the background, is the voice of Terry Anderson. The audio track has been lifted off one of the videotapes he made in captivity. Anderson is heard commenting on a statement composed by his captors: “There are things in it that I do not agree with. I think it is important to understand what they think and believe. The language and expression [are] unfamiliar to many in the West, based on a different culture.” His unwilling participation in the videotapes is part of a structure of representation that positioned the hostages as a kind of medium through which the hostage takers could speak back to the West. In his memoir, Anderson says that while he remained fundamentally opposed to the politics endorsed by his captors, he believed his participation in the videotapes would not be perceived as an endorsement of the views he was being asked to express. (Indeed, all of the hostages seem only to harden the preconceptions they had about the causes and nature of “Arab extremism.”) Toward the end of his captivity, Anderson recalls getting involved in an argument with one of guards “about the same old subjects—the evil of the West, and how the Arabs, especially the Lebanese Shiites, had been oppressed.”38 Having refused to engage in debate with the man, Anderson is asked to make one last videotape setting out, yet again, the reasons behind the abduction of Westerners in Beirut. As he explains, “I agreed, provided that I was allowed to say directly that this was their statement, which I was only reading and did not agree with. I read the statement, then added at the end, bluntly, that it was my captors’ statement, not mine. But, I said, I thought it was important to hear what they had to say.”39 One of the major problems raised by the original hostage tapes, then, has to do with the difficulty of determining exactly whose views were being expressed at any given moment. Upon reviewing the Anderson-­Jacobsen video, a U.S. government intelligence report on the status of U.S. hostages C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  43

in Beirut concludes, “Although the statements by both hostages appear to be fairly well-­written, there is reason to believe that the basic substance of their statements was drafted or dictated by the captors. The statements, however, may not have been delivered unwillingly—Jacobsen and Anderson do not appear to be unduly under duress on the latest videotapes.”40 While this interpretation is hardly neutral, it does seem plausible to think that the hostages may have been given some leeway to extemporize on the scripts they were instructed to read. While the original hostage tapes certainly made evident the problem of differentiating between free and coercive speech, Hostage further complicates this distinction through the interpolation of Bachar’s ambivalent account of captivity. If Bachar’s affiliations and allegiances remain radically unclear, his presence functions as a type of interjection in the video that disrupts the stories told by the other hostages and by corollary questions the privileging of Western subjectivity within mass-­media representations of the Western Hostage Crisis. This is brought out in the section of the video that begins with a sound bite taken from one of the videotaped statements made by Jacobsen: “I am David Jacobsen, one of three American hostages in Lebanon,” he says, his voice quivering ever so slightly, “and I am appealing to you for help.” The heartfelt plea is rapidly followed by a frozen shot of Bachar’s face in extreme close-­up, set against a loud floral-­patterned background. His face is contorted into an expression of visible disgust, as if in response to the statements made by the American hostage. The implication is obvious enough: while the Americans made international news and were the subject of intense diplomatic negotiations, Bachar’s Lebanese citizenship consigned him to invisibility and anonymity. After a long pause, movement is restored to the image, and Bachar resumes the story of his captivity. The tone of Hostage shifts abruptly about halfway through the video as Bachar makes a stunning disclosure. He reveals that the American hostages had convinced themselves that the Arab guards were having sex in the next room, adding that in the beginning the Americans did not touch each other and were, in fact, quite phobic about the boundaries of their personal space: “They would come up with the strangest ideas to make sure that their bodies did not touch.” Indeed, as Bachar goes on to claim, the other hostages were aroused by him and by the men watching over them, but were also disturbed by the possibility of sexual contact: “I’m not sure how, and why, but the 44 

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Americans wanted me and our captors to fuck them and they feared that we would rape them [emphasis added].” Reversing the terms of this perverse rape fantasy, Bachar confesses his own desire to have the Americans “gang up” on him and fuck him. In each case, the desire for the other is based on the projection of an imagined threat of sexual violation. Bachar’s fictional story is given credence through its alignment with the real video footage of Anderson delivering a scripted address in captivity. This scene stands out for the fact that it makes explicit what is otherwise unnamed or only euphemistically described in the published hostage memoirs: the homoerotics of interracial captivity. In Hostage, the question of the sexual relations among the hostages is tied to the issue of authorial control and the means through which it is established. To the extent that he is drawing on a historical discourse of captivity, Raad asks us to think about how sexual power is inseparable from the narrative codes through which subject relations are emplotted. Far from being a foreign or recent invention, the captivity narrative is a literary form that dates back to the colonial period in North America.41 From Mary Rowlandson’s recollection of her ordeal at the hands of Narragansett and Nipmuc Indians in New England, to Gerald Coffee’s record of his time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, captivity narratives typically hinge on the encounter with a “barbaric” other. More recent studies of captivity literature have suggested that the drama of the genre tends to revolve around the fear and fantasy of a white woman being sexually assaulted by men of color.42 Christopher Castiglia has analyzed the captivity genre from a “contact perspective,” emphasizing how the accounts written by captives frequently signal an anxiety over the “shifting boundaries between culture and identity.”43 Castiglia argues that women held in captivity were very often forced to refute the suggestion of rape upon their release, despite the fact that Native Americans did not rape captives. The frequency of these salacious claims points to “an identification in the minds of their white audiences between captivity, race, and sexual vulnerability.”44 Starting with the accounts written by white women held captive by Native American men during the period of westward expansion, Castiglia also notes how many of these texts produce in moments of unsuccessful exchange hybrid subject positions that break with the dominant social codes and values of Anglo America. The Beirut captivity narratives exhibit a similar preoccupation with the C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  45

unspoken dread of sexual contact with a racial inferior, except here it is Western men who are forced to contend with their desire for, and deep aversion to, sexually ambiguous Arab men. The threat of this desire for Arab men emerges in the Western hostage memoirs through imagined scenarios of rape. Moreover, these contemporary captivity narratives further distinguish themselves from their historical precursors by virtue of the fact that, in these updated versions of the genre, the captive frequently displays a fundamental inability to communicate with his captors. That is to say, in Hostage and its textual sources, the sexual encounter between Western and Arab men is a subject of repeated mistranslation. In the memoirs written by the Western hostages upon their release, homoeroticism figures as a subtext of the interactions among the captives and as an explicit theme of the tense and sometimes violent exchanges between the hostages and the Arab guards. On one level, the relations formed between the hostages provided a substitute for forms of intimacy that the men were incapable of having in the West. On another level, it becomes apparent from reading the hostage memoirs that the constrictions of captivity necessitated a revision of heteronormative codes of acceptable male homosocial relations.45 The men were forced to a greater extent than ever before to rely on each other for physical and emotional companionship. Brian Keenan’s insights into what he calls his “enforced intimacy” are undoubtedly among the most powerful descriptions of the mental and physical deprivations endured by the Western hostages. As he recalls, prolonged captivity meant opening oneself up to another person to an extent that violated the sense of oneself as a sovereign subject in the world: There was no room in this place for any distance between us. We lay or sat side by side all day, every day. Like lovers in bed. There was little that could be withheld for long. Some days after our arrival John drew his finger along the line where our mattresses met. “There’s a dividing line here, that’s where your half and this is mine.” Only then did I begin to understand how stressful it was for John [McCarthy] to be so confined. What did he fear was hidden in himself and he did not want to be discovered? What had I revealed of myself that made him anxious about being with me in this small cell? Was I secretly just as afraid of the closeness with which we were confined?46 46 

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Yet later when the guards allude to the possibility that Keenan, McCarthy, and another hostage, Frank Reed, are having sex in their cell, the Irishman reacts allergically to what he characterizes as the perverted imagination of his captors: “The belief that we would be sexually involved if we could touch one another made me sick at the inadequacy of the people who chained us, at their small obsessive minds.”47 While they repeatedly make mention of the “primitive” psychology of their captors, the Western hostages also repeat the stereotype of the degenerate Arab who poses a threat to Western male heterosexuality and fraternity. The captors’ sexuality surfaces in almost all of the captivity memoirs. After one of the guards caresses his hair, Roger Auque remarks: “dans les pays Arabe, beacoup de gens sont bisexuelle.”48 Jacobsen describes the captors as being “enraptured with sleazy sex.”49 Keenan notes that the guards’ homophobia was directed against what they perceived to be the sexual debasement of the West: “For our captors homosexuality was a vice exclusive to the West and it was the wrath of Allah’s judgment that we should be poisoned with aids. ‘Woman is for man’ a guard would remonstrate.”50 The myth espoused here is that Muslim men are by nature virulently homophobic and therefore less enlightened than Westerners, who endorse open homosexuality. Ultimately, what the Beirut hostage narratives give the reader is not a display of Western mastery and control but a disorienting sense of uncertainty about the cultural parameters of sexual identity. In Hostage the uncertainty surrounding Bachar’s alleged sexual relations with the other hostages is bound up with the semantic instabilities of translation. In the English version of his testimony, Bachar claims he was not the one who initiated physical contact with the unnamed Western hostage, but the Arab hostage nonetheless admits to being sexually aroused by the sensation of having someone rub up against him. The voice-­over leads us to believe that Bachar reciprocates the sexual advances of the man (“I don’t know why, but I pressed myself up against his ass”), whereas in fact he is saying the opposite in Arabic: “He put his dick in my ass.” To further complicate matters, Bachar says that “it felt good,” but seconds later, the American hostage punched him in the groin, “as if [his] hard on had provoked him.” While we can say that a sexual exchange took place between the two captives, it is impossible to determine who is the penetrator and who is the one being penetrated. The intercession of a female voice-­over implies a feminiC A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  47

zation of Bachar that would seem to consign him to the position of passive recipient. “To be penetrated is to abdicate power,” writes Leo Bersani, citing a line of thought that he traces through post-­structuralist critiques of phallocentric sex, although he cautions against any simplistic equation between the act of penetration and the exercise or loss of power associated with it.51 The confusion and uncertainty that surround Bachar’s contact with the other hostages is also related to the perceived instability in the desires of Arab men that I described above.52 For even as Bachar’s testimony undermines the myth of Western sexual emancipation, his partial and incomplete account of captivity leaves open the question of what Arab men want. Not only is it extremely difficult to determine Bachar’s relation to the other hostages, but the infidelity of the translation problematizes assumptions about active and passive sexuality in the context of interracial captivity. More precisely, Hostage demands that we think of the sexual as a form of knowledge that is subject to translation and therefore prone to the possibility of mistranslation. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, noting how modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most cherished constructs of truth and knowledge, “the language of sexuality not only intersects with but transforms other languages and relations by which we know.”53 The uncertainties surrounding sexual discourse specifically, and language more generally, remain irresolvable in Hostage. To the extent that it resists translation in any simple sense, Bachar’s retelling of the captivity narrative works against the will to make desires, meanings, and persons all equally knowable. At the same time as Hostage denies outside access to Bachar, the splitting of the Arab’s voice through the imposition of the English voice-­ over serves to complicate assumptions about the unity of an inside speaking position. In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Gayatri Spivak famously criticizes the stance of First World intellectuals who, in claiming the privilege of assigning agency to the oppressed, effectively speak for them, unwittingly reinscribing the very forms of colonial dominance that they purport to dismantle.54 Although Spivak acknowledges the “epistemic violence” inflicted on postcolonial and Third World societies, she suggests that every attempt to represent these “subaltern classes” by granting them collective speech assumes cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people that not only essentializes them but prevents them from speaking for themselves. It follows that 48 

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for Spivak “the task of the first-­world subject of knowledge in our historical moment is to resist and critique ‘recognition’ of the Third World through ‘assimilation.’”55 Although it does not come out of a direct engagement with postcolonial theory, one finds a homologous critique of traditional models of identity politics in Vered Maimon’s assessment of Hostage. As opposed to an art that claims to speak with or on behalf of subjects excluded from the field of political representation, Maimon sees Raad’s use of fiction as problematizing precisely a conception of politics “based on identification of collective values that are shared by defined social groups.”56 Seen from this perspective, Bachar does not so much represent the insertion of an authentic “subaltern Arab voice” within the historical narrative of the hostage crisis, but rather a split subject whose very speaking position serves to disrupt the assignment of clearly marked social roles and political identities: On the one hand, Bachar and his story are excluded from the American master narrative of personal redemption, as he obviously has no part in the “Western Hostage Crisis.” On the other hand, his story is precisely about sharing the condition of captivity with the Americans for a specific time and place. Thus, Bachar does not so much represent an ethnically defined group, the Arab subaltern, as he exhibits the paradox of the subject of politics—what I call “The Third Citizen”—since he is both a (American) hostage and not an American hostage. What separates him from the Americans is also what links him to them since partitioning is also a mode of sharing. That is, Bachar’s narrative problematizes any simplified notion of “common experience,” while at the same time it points to the possibility, even inevitability, of communality. Bachar shares the experience of the Americans, but he is also addressed by them as one who has no part in it.57 While this interpretation is not in and of itself problematic, it relies on the questionable assumption that the Western hostages were granted a place on the political stage that was precisely denied to the Arab. In fact, the memoirs written by the Western hostages held in captivity show that the men were at once disowned by their governments (which publicly refused to negotiate with terrorists) and treated as animals by their Arab captors. The narrative of personal redemption that the men later use to reclaim their capC A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  49

tivity does not neutralize the double exclusion to which they were originally subject. To read Bachar’s story as the enactment of a part by one who has no part is therefore to presuppose an original division—between rational speaking beings and those deprived of speech—that is already undermined by the stories told by the Western hostages themselves. A further problem concerns the largely unspecified meaning of “communality” in the passage quoted above. Maimon’s use of the word relies on a particular reading of Jacques Rancière’s theorization of political disagreement and what he calls “non-­identary subjectivization.” For Rancière, disagreement is not a dispute between already constituted parties but an exceptional situation in which both the terms of the discussion and the status of the speakers themselves are under debate.58 Maimon is certainly right to see the Atlas Group’s use of fiction as a critical alternative to the essentializing effects of an identity politics that designates itself as the representative of a falsely unified collectivity. However, her claim that Bachar’s story “points to the possibility, even inevitability, of communality” passes over the more obviously coercive and divisive aspects of captivity. While Bachar’s narrative undoes any clear-­cut opposition between himself and the Western hostages (while also implicating a non-­Arab audience within its terms of address), what does it mean to suggest, as Maimon does, that the Arab hostage “shares the experience of the Americans,” when communication itself is so obviously a problem in Hostage? Indeed, we might ask to what extent a dysfunctional homosocial space, overdetermined by acts of miscommunication, racist projection, and sexual abjection, can provide the basis for a model of communality, even one that challenges the Western liberal democratic principle of a rational consensus based on a common language? The concept of communality that Maimon borrows from Rancière rests not on consensus but on its opposite. This form of dissensus must itself be distinguished from the conflicts that arise over communication. As Rancière himself points out, disagreement is not the result of a clash between heterogeneous languages or incompatible modes of discourse: “The problem is not for people speaking ‘different languages,’ literally or figuratively, to understand each other, anymore than it is for ‘linguistic breakdowns’ to be overcome by the invention of new languages. The problem is knowing whether the subjects who count in the interlocution ‘are’ or ‘are not,’ whether they 50 

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are speaking or just making a noise. It is knowing whether there is a case for seeing the object they designate as the visible object of the conflict.”59 To be sure, Western misrepresentations of the Arab world are not simply the product of a simple translation problem but point to a more profound conflict over who has the right to be recognized as a political subject endowed with the capacity for speech. Nonetheless, in Hostage, the activation of new forms of political subjectivization cannot be disassociated from the acts of translation to which they give rise and for which they subsequently call. Indeed, this might be one of the major lessons of Hostage: that while the video dismantles the assumption of a metalanguage that can permanently bridge the gap opened up by translation, it is paradoxically the very failures of translation that allow us to best grasp the crucial differences between and within languages. Moreover, if translation is always to some extent an act of epistemic violence, to forgo it altogether is to consign oneself to disabling assertions of irreducible difference. The videotapes made of the Western hostages in Beirut prefigure a paradigm of ideological representation that has since become generalized within the mass media: an informal diy aesthetic found in home videos and some reality television. In the months following the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a series of tapes featuring messages delivered by Osama bin Laden were released (reportedly by mail or personal courier) to the Arab-­language satellite television network Al Jazeera (figure 1.4). The attention given to these tapes prompted the media theorist Boris Groys to suggest that al-­Qaeda was more interested in “occupying” the media than in fighting a territorial war: We speak mostly about the occupation of geographical space, [like] the occupation of Iraq. Media space is also a strategic space, and the attackers [of September 11] occupied it—for months, only these images were to be seen. The question is: How do I bring myself into the media space, and how do I occupy it, how do I acquire and exercise media power? It’s a question that concerns all of us. It all begins with the videos from bin Laden. Bin Laden is basically a video artist who produces the videos and sells them through Al-­Jazeera and other media companies. It was the beginning of a new video and media art at the level of power and a strategic game.60 C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  51

Figure 1.4. Osama bin Laden appears on Al Jazeera Television praising the attacks of September 11 and defying the United States in its threats to attack Afghanistan’s Taliban government, which was playing host to him. Days later the United States overthrew the Taliban. (Photo by Maher Attar / Sygma via Getty Images)

Groys’s concluding remark is certainly glib, but his comments are nonetheless useful in underlining the aesthetics of the videotape as a medium for a new type of war. The videos attributed to al-­Qaeda differ in several important respects from the hostage videos that came out of Beirut in the 1980s. Whereas the gap between production and reception was once hours and days, it is now measured in minutes and seconds. Videotapes of kidnappings and executions—such as the beheading of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in 2002, and more recently the high-­production propaganda clips, drone feeds, and multilingual tweets by isis—are now distributed directly on the Internet, becoming viral in the space of a few hours. And instead of speaking through the bodies of hostages, the Arab “terrorist” now addresses the West directly. Or so it seems. Not only are jihadi videos heavily edited and subject to state-­imposed censorship, they are often misleadingly paraphrased, incorrectly translated, or left untranslated altogether.61 Writing in the Guardian, on September 12, 2001, Saskia Sassen interpreted 52 

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the events of the previous day as an unambiguous “message delivered from the global south” to the hegemonic centers of globalization. In her view, the strikes on New York and Washington were the result of a “translation problem.” Thus, she writes, “The attacks are a language of last resort: the oppressed and persecuted have used many languages to reach us so far, but we seem unable to translate the meaning. So a few have taken the personal responsibility to speak in a language that needs no translation.”62 There is, of course, no such thing as a language that does not require translation. Contrary to what Sassen suggests, the “translation problem” cannot be transcended by a metalanguage of pure violence. Indeed, as Rosalind Morris has subsequently argued, U.S. media representations of the Muslim and Arab world since September 11 suggest an even greater refusal to “learn how to listen in and to other tongues.”63 Morris connects the fetishistic investment in images, often in lieu of language, with the emergence of a “discourse of noise” that denies linguistic alterity and reduces the speech of others to the “signs of a meaninglessly violent intention.”64 This chapter has sought to argue for the significance of translation for comprehending the power relations configured within public and private representations of captivity of the Western Hostage Crisis. In Raad’s video, translation concerns not only the ways in which the hostage experience is narrativized through the discursive structures of captivity literature, but also their mediation through the semiotic and technological coding mechanisms of television and video. Raad’s emphasis on the contingency of languages, and on the bodies speaking them, is coupled with a foregrounding of the political struggles that are waged over representation. If the public representation of the Beirut hostages would seem to confirm the power of a system in which images as well as arms and people are all rendered exchangeable, Hostages’ incessant reference to the breakdowns in transmission and communication materializes a point of untranslatability. Indeed, Raad’s video points to an important limit in Western control over images and the subjects they presume to represent. For if we can say that television is a medium that claims to offer total coverage, noise represents a decisive interruption in its operating logic.65 It was noted earlier that Rancière’s notion of politics conjectures a radical incommensurability between subjects who are recognized as speaking beings and those who are just seen as making a meaningless noise. In this C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S  53

theory, politics occurs only when there is a disruption of the structure that determines whether utterances can be received as arguments on a common stage. Yet Rancière’s description of the performative event, whereby “those who have no right to count themselves as speaking beings make themselves of some account,” ignores the role of translation within such a speech act.66 To make audible as a discourse what was once only heard as noise surely necessitates feats of translation both literal and figurative. By translating Bachar’s words into English, Raad does much more than simply claim “a part for one who has no part.” Rather, the process of translation works both ways, displacing the self-­evident authenticity of the native language while also calling attention to the limits of the language doing the translating. The English dubbing separates Bachar from his own words, while the audible presence of the Arabic on the soundtrack denies the monolingual viewer any immediate access to his story. A recognition of the failures of translation is not an admission of its futility. Quite the opposite, it is precisely in the encounter with the untranslatable that we apprehend the differential specificity of languages.

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R E S I S T A N C E , VIDEO MARTYRDOM, AND T H E A F T E R L I F E O F T H E L E B A N E S E L E F T

TWO

Chapter 1 analyzed the role that audiovisual media, particularly video and television, plays in the construction of identity formations within sites marked by a history of territorial conflict and political volatility. Indeed, a major focus of this book concerns how politically loaded signs and symbols, circulated within the Lebanese public sphere, are part of a violent struggle over representation, one that I argue is waged with and over images as much as the constituencies that they are made to stand in for. Thus, my examination of Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes looked at how militant Islamic organizations in the 1980s pioneered the use of vhs video to re­cord and distribute their messages to the U.S. government. By having the American hostages read or memorize prescripted messages in front of the video camera, the captors used the abject bodies of the captives to speak back to the West, using its very modes of televisual address as ideological weapons against it. I argued that in response to the privileging of white male subjectivity in contemporary hostage narratives, Hostage offers more than a recovery of a subaltern voice. The differend of the untranslatable marks a space outside of representation. Bachar’s subjectivity cannot be fully recovered, but the untranslatability of his testimony also points to the limits of dominant languages and discourses. Foregrounding the issue of subaltern agency in Lebanese artistic practices, this chapter examines Rabih Mroué’s Three Posters (1999) and Akram Zaatari’s Al Shareet bi-­khayr (All Is Well on the Border) (1997). Three Posters is a multimedia performance based on a videotaped testimony made by Jamal

al-­Sati, a member of Lebanon’s National Resistance Front who killed himself in 1985 in one of the first suicide attacks on the Israeli occupiers of South Lebanon. Mroué’s chance discovery of the original video, in the archives of the Lebanese Communist Party (lcp), revealed that al-­Sati had made three takes of his martyr testimony rather than only the approved version that was aired on Lebanese television. In Three Posters, these unedited versions of al-­Sati’s testimony are used as the starting point for a media-­specific inquiry into the ontological status of martyr videos and their correlation both with leftist media politics and with the Islamic resistance propaganda that has supplanted it. Zaatari’s All Is Well, which forms the second focus of this chapter, similarly documents the actions and experiences of the leftist fighters who initially made up the resistance to Israeli occupation of South Lebanon but who have been marginalized within Lebanese society following the progressive Islamicization of the resistance. Zaatari’s use of actors to respeak testimonies, gathered from men jailed during the nearly ten years of conflict with Israel, becomes a way of questioning the assumption that a language of political identification—institutionalized in the television interview format—could be used to bridge the considerable psycho-­geographic distance that separated South Lebanon from the rest of the country. Indeed, as this chapter argues, All Is Well also challenges liberal-­humanist models of political identification, deeply rooted both in documentary film practices and models of postcolonial history, that seek to recover or articulate the voice of the oppressed. In this regard, my approach is informed by recent critical debates on the fraught question of subaltern agency. Of particular interest here is Rosalind Morris’s foregrounding of the impossibility of subaltern speech as audible and legible predication: “Subalternity is not that which could, if given a ventriloquist, speak the truth of its oppression or disclose the plenitude of its being. The hundreds of shelves of well-­intentioned books claiming to speak for or give a voice to the subaltern cannot escape the problem of translation in its full sense.”1 By translation, Morris alludes not simply to the linguistic challenge of rendering words across written or verbal idioms, but also to the cultural and epistemological differences that resist any simple exchange. Artworks that claim to speak for or give voice to the subaltern overlook the aporetic relation between subjects who have been granted a voice in history and those who have been denied 56 

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one. By contrast, All Is Well and Three Posters problematize representation both in the artistic and political sense. For Zaatari, the question is how to represent the experiences of disenfranchised former resistance fighters without valorizing or objectifying their suffering. Similarly, for Mroué, the exploration of the contradictions of the martyr video testimonies cannot be disentangled from the ethical quandaries raised by their appropriation within the context of an artistic performance. More broadly, what links Three Posters and All Is Well, I argue, is a shared autocritical inquiry into the defeat of the Lebanese left. In the early 1980s, when resistance to the Israeli occupation chiefly took the form of small-­scale martyrdom operations and skirmish attacks, it was motivated not by religion but rather by a sense of nationalism. The Lebanese National Resistance Front (lnr)—a secular, left-­wing, and Pan-­Arab opposition founded in 1982 by members of the lcp, the Arab Socialist Action Party, and the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party—had a fine-­grained composition that was more heterogeneous than the nominally leftist regimes in Sadat’s Egypt or Assad’s Syria.2 However, despite its diverse and seemingly progressive character, the lcp and its allies propagated obsolete concepts of citizenship, freedom, and revolution to recruit from impoverished communities. The party used people as mouthpieces of its ideology, effectively turning its members into living extensions of the electronic media that it used to transmit its messages.3 Standing before the camera, Jamal al-­Sati becomes an actor who struggles to embody the ideological image of heroic martyrdom advocated by the party. The fact that al-­Sati is reading from a script might suggest a canceling out of individual identity and free will. However, as my reading of this extraordinary video will show, al-­Sati’s imperfect performance complicates any simple distinction between the hero-­martyr and the fallible human being who serves as its medium or support. Both Three Posters and All Is Well look at how secular political parties and militias valorize notions of martyrdom and collective death in the name of “the homeland,” “liberation,” “Arab blood,” and other master signifiers. My analyses of these two works center on their strategies of staging and reenactment to unmake the language of resistance, denaturalizing its relationship to the bodies that serve to articulate its scripts, whether willingly or not. As opposed to a documentary method that seeks to reconstitute the past, Mroué’s and Zaatari’s strategies of reenactment explore provisional and inR E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 57

complete ontological-­temporal states—belatedness, disappearance, delay, repetition, and return—that bring the past into productive conflict with the amnesia of the postcommunist present. By privileging temporal gaps and discontinuities in their work, both artists lay claim to what Elizabeth Freeman refers to as “the mutually disruptive energy of moments that are not yet past [in the sense of having entered into historical consciousness] and yet are not entirely present either.”4 All Is Well and Three Posters both stage acts of surviving and returning. The former resistance fighters in All Is Well have survived imprisonment and the party’s defeat but remain politically dead in the eyes of the nation. Similarly haunted by the defeat of the left, in Three Posters Mroué asks what it means to inhabit an image posthumously. Al-­Sati’s martyrdom is an irreversible act, but he lives on in the video, addressing the living from the position of someone who is already dead. In the final part of this chapter, I also explore the digital afterlife inhabited by the martyrs of the Islamic resistance. In this postphotographic era, images of the dead are cloned ceaselessly and migrate seamlessly across media. This becomes especially problematic in Lebanon, where “dead people in photos move from one picture to another” and the living “insist on calling upon the dead to use them as weapons in their endless battles.”5 It is commonplace by now—perhaps even banal—to say that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. However, for artists who have inherited the legacies of the defeated Lebanese left, the reenactment of the past conjures up the possibility of breaking out of the temporal loop of a traumatic history. It also becomes a means of resisting a melancholic attachment to the past that might be identified with their parents’ generation. This nostalgia is an attitude that, as Wendy Brown has shown, is “attached more to a particular political analysis or ideal—even to the failure of that ideal—than to seizing possibilities for radical change in the present.”6 Moreover, in insisting on the possibility or indeed the necessity of forming links with foreclosed moments of revolutionary possibility (and with projects either prematurely judged as failed or preemptively dismissed as naively utopian), Mroué and Zaatari allow us to imagine a different future. This idea of a past to come, rather than merely a repeated or reiterated past, builds on Jacques Derrida’s “hauntological” reading of Marxist historiography.7 For Derrida, the responsibility to the dead or toward the specters of history is bound up with a call for an unrealized future, to which we can 58 

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only answer with delayed and incomplete reparations. All Is Well and Three Posters play on the ghostly presence of their central protagonists: Mohammad Assaf in All Is Well is missing, and Jamal al-­Sati is dead, but both live on through recorded testimonies that are themselves subject to imperfect repetitions. Zaatari shows his actors struggling to learn their lines, while Mroué calls attention to the hesitation and stuttering in al-­Sati’s rehearsals. In troubling the distinction between an event and its reenactment, spontaneous and staged actions, All Is Well and Three Posters also challenge video’s reputation as a medium for recording “a moment in the past, a dead moment.”8 At the same time, these works also question the comparative liveness of theater and television. In Three Posters, Mroué constructs a form of multimedia performance that functions systematically to undermine the ontological fixity given to notions of immediacy and presence, both in theater and in the image technologies that increasingly come to organize the appearance of the body in the political field. Here embodiment becomes important as a way of thinking about performance, not in spite of but because of its points of contact with electronic media. Similarly, in All Is Well, Zaatari captures bodies engaged in various modes of performance that are staged for the camera: reading words, singing songs, delivering testimonies, and rehearsing scripts. While Zaatari draws on the material traces of this history, his works also invite us to think of collective memory in terms of what the performance theorist Rebecca Schneider calls “body-­to-­body ­transmission.”9

Al Shareet bi-­khayr (All Is Well on the Border) The origins of All Is Well can be traced in part to the development of a fully fledged television industry in the first period of post–­civil war reconstruction.10 Stations such as al-­Mustabal (Future Television), established in 1993 by Rafik al-­Hariri, offered Mroué and Zaatari commercial work that they could use to subsidize their work as artists. This experience proved invaluable for Zaatari in particular, giving him much-­needed access to studio equipment and direct knowledge of the techniques used in professional television and video production. It was during this time that Zaatari was also exposed to the recurring sight of former leftist resistance fighters interviewed on talk shows shortly after their release from years of incarceration in Israeli prisons. As the artist recalls: R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 59

The mid-­nineties were years where everyone in the political scene in Lebanon talked about the cause of the detainees without touching on very essential issues. Former prisoners were on television, and in every newspaper, but all that they reproduced was an official version of their history, which served in the end someone’s political agenda, their party, the tv station, the political leader who supported them, etc. . . . But could these stories be told simply like this? It was obscene to ask someone who spent ten years in prison to sum up their experiences in fifteen or twenty minutes.11 Recognizing that there were virtually no public accounts of failed resistance attacks, Zaatari’s video attempts to chronicle the fate of men who had been captured by the Israeli military and its Lebanese allies during aborted operations and sent to prison. Detained in prisons in Israel or Israeli-­run prisons in the occupied zone, these resistance fighters belonged to leftist political parties affiliated with the National Resistance. While some of these men achieved minor celebrity through their escape and release from these prisons, they were, for the most part, abandoned by their political parties and by the Lebanese state. Telling their stories was, however, significantly complicated by the fact that most Lebanese citizens at the time could not access the occupied border zone, a region that Zaatari has referred to as a “mutilated organ,” cut off from the rest of Lebanon.12 It is impossible to understand the significance of Zaatari’s work without knowing something about the political factors resulting in the establishment of an occupied zone separating (but also linking) South Lebanon from Israel. Also known as the “security belt,” this territory came into being in the wake of the invasion of March 1978, when Israeli forces surged into Lebanon with the declared objective of occupying a ten-­kilometer-­wide belt north of the border—with an ostensible aim of preventing Palestinian attacks against Israel.13 Although Israeli forces partially withdrew under international pressure (un Security Council Resolutions 425 and 426), a remaining ten-­kilometer strip continued to be occupied by the Israeli Army (map 2.1), under the nominal control of the South Lebanese Army (a proxy militia for Israel, made up largely of Maronite Christians who were given special privileges for their loyalty). The security zone, crucially, was not a buffer zone insulating the Israeli 60 

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Lake Qaraoun

MEDITERRANEAN SEA Sidon Jezzine

LEBANON

Nabatieh

ARKUB

Marjayoun Al-Qlayaa Khiyam

Litani River Ghandurieh

Qantara

SYRIA Tyre

UNIFIL

Naquora Yarine Alma

Marwahin

Quozah

Dibil

Ain Ebel

Hanine

Bint Jbeil Maroun al-Ras

Lake Hula

Yarun

Rmeich

Security zone in 1979 Security zone in 1990

ISRAEL

Map 2.1. The South Lebanon Border Zone. (Map redrawn from Ahmad Beydoun, “The South Lebanon Border Zone: A Local Perspective,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 3 [spring 1992], courtesy the Journal of Palestine Studies)

border; instead, it allowed the Israelis to keep their artillery trained on the heart of the Bekaa, on part of Mount Lebanon (the predominantly Druze and Sunni part), and on the totality of the south, including Saida (Sidon), Nabatiyya, and Sour (Tyre). It also allowed the Israeli Army to target all of the Palestinian camps in the region. Moreover, the vital road skirting the coast toward Beirut and the north could be cut at any time, as could many axes of communication used by the Syrian troops stationed in Lebanon. In short, the new security zone took on an offensive (instead of a principally defensive) value for the Israelis. Just as importantly, the security zone created a deep-­seated sense of suspicion and isolation for the residents in the region—ostracized by Israel as well as by the rest of Lebanon. The south of Lebanon remained in near-­total isolation from the rest of the country, wedged, as Ahmad Beydoun writes, “between narrow and suffocating horizons,” between an enemy state and a homeland that rarely acknowledged its existence.14 Unlike more traditional barriers between nation-­states, as political scientist Wendy Brown notes in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, paralegal barriers such as the one between Israel and South Lebanon “target nonstate transnational actors—individuals, groups, movements, organizations, and industries.”15 Such barriers are maintained by what she terms “persistent, but often informal and subterranean powers” and in this way become what philosopher Étienne Balibar has called an “invisible border, situated everywhere and nowhere.”16 The multiple dislocations imposed on the residents of South Lebanon were, moreover, internalized until they became a condition, an essential reference of their collective, communal, and individual identities. Crucially, even once displaced from South Lebanon by the desolation and razing of their villages, the one-­time residents of the security zone resurrected their isolation in the southern suburbs of Beirut.17 As British Lebanese journalist Hala Jaber writes of the suburbs: These days the neighborhood is known as the “Belt of Misery”: 800,000 people, mainly poor Shiite peasants and farmers, are crammed into 28 square kilometers. They are refugees from South Lebanon who fled in the wake of Israel’s invasions and subsequent occupation. There are no road maps of the area and no visible street signs. The residents have named many of the streets themselves; some commemorate martyrs. . . . Murals and giant posters of Khomeini, Khameini, and Hezbollah’s mar62 

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tyrs adorn the neighborhood. Black flags of mourning and the green and yellow flags of Islam and Hezbollah flutter from almost every street corner and balcony. Banners denouncing Israel and pledging to reclaim al-­Quds, Jerusalem, are a common sight.18 Like the security zone that they reinstated, the southern suburbs were marked both by their persistent isolation from the rest of the nation and, as Jaber suggests, by the dominance of Hezbollah and the language of Islamic resistance. It is worth noting, in conclusion to this history, that the rise of Hezbollah in the region marked the defeat of any secular resistance forces. In the early 1980s, when resistance chiefly took the form of small-­scale protests, attacks on the homes of those Lebanese who collaborated with Israel, and the planting of homemade roadside bombs, it was motivated not by religion but rather by a sense of nationalism. Although the lnr continued to carry out operations until 1999, the rise of Hezbollah began in 1983, soon after the founding of the former.19 The anthropologist Lara Deeb has summarized the prehistory of Hezbollah: “In these years, a number of small, armed groups of young men organized under the banner of Islam emerged in the south, the Bekaa Valley, and the suburbs of Beirut. These groups were dedicated to fighting the Israeli occupation troops, and also participated in the Lebanese civil war, which by this time had engaged over fifteen militias and armies. Initial military training and equipment for the Shi’a militias was provided by Iran. Over time, these groups coalesced into Hezbollah.”20 Two years later, on February 16, 1985, in an “Open Letter to the Downtrodden in Lebanon and the World,” Hezbollah announced its existence and the formation of its military wing, al-­Muqawama al-­Islamiyah (the Islamic Resistance); around the same time, the party began a bloody and brutal campaign against the Communist Party members who formed the backbone of the lnr.21 Hezbollah almost immediately expanded its power in the region through the media, launching a weekly newspaper, Al-­Ahed (The pledge), on June 13, 1984; a radio station, Al Nour (The light), in 1988 (during the Amal-­ Hezbollah war); and a television station, Al-­Manar (The beacon), in 1989.22 The first television broadcast was of Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral. The dominant representations of the occupied zone continued to be those transmitted by Hezbollah. They centered exclusively on heroic depictions or R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 63

reenactments of their victorious military operations. Beginning in the late 1980s, as handheld video cameras became more readily available, Hezbollah started to re­cord their guerilla attacks on Israeli military targets in the south. These tapes were in turn distributed to national and international media outlets, and this is primarily how images of the occupied zone were made known to the Lebanese public.23 The recordings were offered as evidence that an attack had taken place, but they also aimed to embarrass and intimidate the Israeli Army by showing its weaknesses. With Hezbollah effectively controlling the media coverage of the resistance in the south, independent or nonaligned representations of the territory were largely absented from the public sphere. Documents relating to the secular resistance movements existed, but this archive was limited to small libraries housed in institutions such as the Communist Party and the Communist Organization of Labor.24 This resulted in a situation wherein the lived experience under occupation was confined largely to the unrecorded oral history of people who had fled and relocated to the southern suburbs of Beirut. These communities lived in urban settlements (such as Hay el-­ Sellom) that reproduced the geographical composition of their original villages.25 In All Is Well, the sense of displacement concerns not only the territorial dislocation of populations from South Lebanon but also an uprooting of the very field of representation through which memory and place are given form. This is expressed in one paradigmatic sequence in All Is Well where Zaatari juxtaposes his recording of a schoolboy lamenting the occupation of his parents’ village (figure 2.1)—which he has never visited and knows only through secondhand representations—with archival footage of a road leading into the occupied zone (figure 2.2). Both the boy’s words and the video images that serve to frame them summon up a time and place before and during occupation. By speeding up and rewinding the footage, Zaatari renders these images, and the technological apparatus producing them, emphatically material. Indeed, All Is Well insistently denies immediate access to a referent and brings us back to the fact of its technological mediation, but more critically, the video also asks us to think about the young boy and his testimony as equally manipulated, if all too human, forms of media. Zaatari’s concern with figures of mediation—a preoccupation that runs through his ongoing examination of images in conflict zones—is further 64 

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Figures 2.1–2.2. Akram Zaatari, stills from All Is Well on the Border, 1997. BetacamSP video, 44:​53. (© Akram Zaatari, courtesy of the artist)

signaled in the title of the video. In Arabic, “al Shareet” carries a double significance that is crucial to understanding the video as a self-­reflexive and multilayered analysis of the relation between geographies of conflict and the uprooted forms of images and narratives to which they give rise. In a literal sense, “al Shareet” means cordon or strip—in Lebanon it was common to speak of “al Shareet al muhtal” to refer to the occupied border strip. Yet in this context, “al Shareet” also means cassette tape, referring us back, although not in an exact parallel, to the material reality of the videotape we are watching. Thus, at the same time that the video’s opening sequences function to designate a geopolitical space of conflict, they also call attention to the constitutive role that media, and specifically video, plays in imaging and imagining conflict zones. In terms of its sources, All Is Well is structured around three sets of images and sequences put into an open-­ended dialogue with each other. First, there is the contemporary footage that Zaatari recorded in the Hayy el-­Sellom suburb of Beirut. This includes the sound of older residents singing and talking about folk songs that reference their native villages and images of primary school students reading essays about these same places in front of a classroom. Zaatari also assembles an archive of found images and documents, drawn from amateur and professional sources: home videos of wedding celebrations in the occupied zone, letters from resistance fighters, television footage of the Israeli Army’s invasion and bombardment of the south, and computer-­generated reenactments of commando operations by Hezbollah. Finally, the core of the video consists of staged interviews with three men who had been captured and imprisoned while carrying out resistance operations in the occupied zone. The thematic structure of All Is Well—loosely divided into sections titled “Heroism,” “Suffering,” and “Escape”—seems to promise a narrative that acts against Hezbollah’s total discursive control over the representation of armed resistance. Ultimately, however, the editing works against any chronological sequencing of the ex–­resistance fighters’ experiences. During the making of the video, Zaatari recorded more than twenty audio interviews with former inmates and edited them into three representative testimonies based loosely on the capture and escape of one prisoner, Mohammad Assaf. An underground hero in the eyes of many on the Lebanese left, Assaf was from the southern village of Hubbariyeh. Although he never 66 

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joined the Lebanese resistance officially and was never a registered member of the Communist Party, he was a sympathizer and had been given military training by the party. In September 1992, Assaf and another inmate, Daoud Faraj, achieved minor celebrity in Lebanon when they became the only men to successfully escape from the notorious Askalan prison.26 As an unnamed prisoner recounts in the video, Assaf had come up with the idea after seeing the John Sturges film The Great Escape (1963), starring Steve McQueen.27 The linking of Assaf ’s story to an already mythical narrative of prison flight is telling in this context because it speaks directly to the way that film fiction, even of the Hollywood sort, can be taken up as a model of agency and self-­invention for men who have been barred from lines of social mobility and political representation. Taken together, the three testimonies reconstruct a basic biography of a resistance fighter: the isolation and constant surveillance of the South Lebanon border zone (“One feels as if he were inside a very large prison,” the first man states), the decision “to do something on an individual level” as an act of resistance (a decision that again stands in contrast to Islamic or party-­oriented acts of resistance), the trials of life inside Israeli prisons, the escape, and the stories and rumors surrounding Assaf ’s present existence. By the time Zaatari began his research on the occupied border, however, Assaf had disappeared from the country, leaving no trace of his whereabouts. In the process, Assaf ’s story was transformed in the collective imagination of the people who knew him from a historical narrative into a mythical one: “there were no efforts to integrate him in society,” the first speaker admits. “Nobody received him. . . . He decided to emigrate and now we don’t know anything about him.” In this way, because All Is Well cannot actually reconstruct the truth of the event—its protagonist is absent, unable to testify, and any witnesses have already been influenced by the circulation of stories around the event—it is less concerned with any accurate reconstruction of the event than it is with analyzing the process of its reproduction as myth. The testimonies relating to Assaf are counterpoised with excerpts taken from letters written by Nabih Awada while he was in Askalan prison. Awada, who was affectionately given the name of Neruda by other prisoners in reference to his poetic inclinations, joined the lnr as a member of the Communist Party in 1986 and took part in several military operations against the Israeli Army in southern Lebanon before he was captured in September 1988, R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 67

Figure 2.3. Akram Zaatari, still from All Is Well on the Border, 1997. BetacamSP video, 44:​53. (© Akram Zaatari, courtesy of the artist)

six days before his eighteenth birthday.28 Awada was taken to Israel, where he was charged by a military court and sentenced to fifteen years in Askalan prison. He remained incarcerated there until 1998, when he was released as part of a political agreement with the Lebanese government. Neruda’s letters in Askalan, addressed to his mother and mostly optimistic in tone, are intercut with additional testimonies regarding Assaf, placed under the heading of “Suffering”: apparently factual accounts of prison that remind viewers that we are in theory gaining access to stories otherwise largely inaccessible because of existing media restrictions and biases.29 At this point, however, the camera zooms out to reveal that the man on screen is in fact reading the words directly from a teleprompter (figure 2.3). What we took to be a direct

68 

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testimony, albeit one staged for the camera, is shown to be a prescripted and delegated performance. As the escape narrative continues, we see another one of the former prisoners—seen previously in the video—reading and rehearsing the script while he is driving a car. The artist’s voice can be heard offscreen, directing his reading of the script. At this point, the video reiterates previous sections of the prison testimonies (Awada’s New Year’s letter to his mother and the story of Assaf ’s escape from prison), except this time the speakers are shown rehearsing their lines outside of the space of the television studio. What is made visible here are precisely the discursive and technological mechanisms that are concealed in television interviews. In this way, All Is Well suggests that an interrogation of the legacy of resistance must begin with a critical deconstruction of the medium of television, including the types of narrative production and audience address that it naturalizes. More than this, these scenes of rehearsal work to unmake Hezbollah’s high-­production image of resistance. However, even in this moment of deconstruction, we are still left with the question of whether there is an agency or subjectivity belonging to the resistance fighters that could be recovered in these rescripted histories. Although All Is Well is perhaps most directly interested in posing the question of how the testimonies of former resistance fighters might be documented in a way that does not objectify their suffering, is it also concerned with how those stories of the occupied zone are transmitted within and across generations of communities whose collective memory is shaped through the experience of territorial occupation and dislocation. In addition to the letters and oral testimonies of previously jailed leftists, the video also re­cords young pupils reading aloud essays in a school in the southern suburbs of Beirut. For this sequence the artist had asked the students to compose texts describing their parents’ villages in their own words. One girl describes in great detail the beauty of a village she has never seen: “In my village there are five ponds. The streets are clean. Some of the houses have red roofs. . . . Its lanes are narrow. There is a mosque in the middle of the village, a small square . . . two schools, and three cemeteries . . . surrounded by cypress and pine trees purifying its air and making it a healer for some respiratory diseases. O how much I love my village.” The girl has no direct experience of this place—she instead uses memories handed down by her parents—

R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 69

Figure 2.4. Akram Zaatari, still from All Is Well on the Border, 1997. BetacamSP video, 44:​53. (© Akram Zaatari, courtesy of the artist)

although she says she is eager to return to it. These memories are mediated not only through language but also through images in family photo albums. As one boy reads, “I’ll try to describe it through my mother’s eyes, full of tears each time I ask her about the village and my country. Her heart is full of grief, nostalgic about her childhood. She brings a photo album taken of her in the green valleys. Hills and old earth, built houses of her relatives. She says, ‘Look and get to know your village of which we were deprived by the occupation.’” Further, while the texts read by the children are directly shaped by their parents’ memories, they are also coded through repeated references to the master signifiers of the Islamic resistance. The young boy notes the “glorious history” of his village, “full of jihad and heroism and of massacres,” and notes the “ninety martyrs” after one particular massacre; the young girl talks about a “martyrs’ garden” in her parents’ home village. An early scene consists of a schoolyard full of children chanting a religious prayer, and the final scene of the video shows a six-­year-­old boy standing alone in a courtyard, on a chair, pointing his right finger toward the sky and proclaiming, “The enemy might slaughter us, but we follow the strong line of our imam Al Khomeini [of Iran]. We believe in the base [al-­Qaeda] he set us. Kill us, so our people will be more conscious” (figure 2.4). On one level, All Is Well positions these children as subjects of an ideology that they perhaps do not entirely understand. Yet, on another level, their totally earnest invocations of place take on a critical force when set 70 

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Figure 2.5. Akram Zaatari, still from All Is Well on the Border, 1997. BetacamSP video, 44:​53. (© Akram Zaatari, courtesy of the artist)

against the grim realities of the present. This is brought out in one sequence in which the sound of a young boy reciting an essay about al-­Hubbariyeh is overlaid with images of Hayy el-­Sellom, where the refugees from this village have resettled. As the young boy speaks of the natural beauty of his parents’ village, we see all the signs of urban poverty that belong to this misery belt, the popular name given to Beirut’s southern suburbs. The overt contrast between spoken ideology and imaged reality does not work to deflate the boy’s speech, or even to challenge his belief in it, but paradoxically lends it greater affective charge. The contradiction here is that the boy acquires his own voice even as he utters the words given to him. Zaatari similarly sets up a contrast between the accounts of former prisoners, the associated culture of popular resistance in the south (with a particular emphasis on song), and Hezbollah’s propaganda videos of successful military attacks on Israeli military units and installations (figure 2.5). The traditional folk songs that we hear in the amateur video footage of wedding celebrations in the occupied zone stand in opposition to Hezbollah’s highly scripted reenactments of victorious guerilla operations set to bombastic military anthems. While the former come out of a genuinely popular resistance movement, embedded in the practices of everyday life, the latter are increasingly removed from the realm of social existence. Again, in setting up a contrast between the mechanistic propaganda videos and the amateur footage, Zaatari asks what it might mean to recover a vernacular culture— and the voices embedded in it—that has now largely vanished. R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 71

One of the most important precedents for Zaatari’s examination of resistance movements and the subjects who serve to articulate its ideology is Jean-­Luc Godard and Anne-­Marie Miéville’s 1976 film/video essay, Ici et ailleurs (Here and elsewhere). Made as part of the Dziga Vertov Group, with Jean-­Pierre Gorin, this part film, part video essay was made at the invitation of al-­Fatah’s (Palestine National Liberation Movement) information department, with funding also provided by the Arab League.30 In June 1970, Godard, Gorin, and Miéville shot footage in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria with the initial idea of producing a documentary on the triumph of the Palestinian cause in the wake of an important victory against Israeli Defense Forces in Karameh.31 The project carried the original title of Jusqu’à la victoire (Until victory), in reference to the slogan widely popular among Palestinian fighters at that time, “Revolution until victory.” However, shortly after the filmmakers’ return to France in 1971, clashes broke out between combatants of the Palestine Liberation Organization (plo) and the Jordanian army, ending with a bloody massacre in the forests of ‘Ajloun. A significant number of Palestinians captured in the previously shot footage had been killed. Faced with this terrible “contradiction,” Godard and Miéville renamed the production Ici et ailleurs—a title that refers not just to the geographic gap between the “here” of France and the “elsewhere” of the Middle East but also to the heterogeneous political struggles waged in these two locations. Rather than simply reaffirming their obvious differ­ences— “too easy and too simple to simply divide the world in two”—the film asks that we rethink the relation between seemingly incompatible spaces and historical junctures. This is expressed in the repeated emphasis placed on the conjunction “and” in the dates cited by Godard and Miéville: “1948 and 1968,” “1970 and 1974.” What was originally conceived as an endorsement of Third World revolutionary action was, in the process of editing, transformed into an interrogation of the processes by which popular resistance movements use images and language to represent their cause. More specifically, Ici et ailleurs offers a trenchant auto-­critique of the revolutionary rhetoric espoused by the French and Arab left at the time. In the early scenes of the film, we see footage of Palestinian women and children fervently reciting revolutionary slogans and rehearsing combat maneuvers to the sound of jingoistic military anthems. The images, Godard’s voice-­over tells us, correspond to the filmmakers’ original 72 

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Figure 2.6. Jean-­Luc Godard, Jean-­Pierre Gorin, and Anne-­Marie Miéville, still from Ici et ailleurs, 1976. 53 minutes.

vision of a “popular war” that would result in the inevitable victory of the Palestinians. Their misguided optimism is summed up in a single formulaic catch-­cry: “The people’s will plus the armed struggle plus the political work equals the people’s education plus the people’s logic equals the popular war extended until the victory of the Palestinian people.” One of the main tasks of Ici et ailleurs is to critique this conception of militant revolutionary action, along with its promises of collective emancipation, through an analysis of its verbal and visual representations. This is expressed in the way that Godard and Miéville consistently decouple the link between the individual phrases that flash up on screen (many of them derived from the doctrinaire lexicon of the French and Palestinian left), repeating them in a way that empties them of any natural meaning. The ideological premises of loaded terms such as “the people’s war,” “the people’s army,” “political work,” and “revolution” are further questioned through their juxtaposition with the images of the dead fedayeen killed in the massacres of Black September. The footage described above, of schoolchildren in Hay el-­Sollom declaring their adherence to the Islamic resistance is, according Zaatari, inspired by a parallel scene in Ici et ailleurs in which we see a young girl reciting the poem “We Will Resist” by Mahmoud Darwish (figure 2.6). The girl is using a language and theatrical form that she cannot fully understand. “The girl is innocent,” Godard’s voice-­over notes, “but maybe not this form of theater.” This scene questions not only the content but also the form in which the discourse R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 73

of the Palestinian resistance presented itself: specifically, how it used people, including children and women, and made them bearers of its discourse. To their credit, Godard and Miéville do not claim a position of safe critical distance from the discourse of dogmatic resistance that they are questioning here. On the contrary, they admit that their desire “to make Revolution” for the Palestinians, and furthermore to do so “in their place,” was such that they were unable to see and hear what was in the images they had shot for their film: “We took images and put the sound too loud. Always the same sound, too loud. . . . The sound so loud that it almost drowned out the voice that it wanted to draw out of the image.” Godard and Miéville conclude at the end of their film that one needs to “reduce the volume” in order to see. In the case of the Palestinian resistance, reducing the volume might be taken to mean turning the sound down on the revolutionary anthems that mobilize and speak through the people. Like all songs, these anthems require subjects to sing in unison, with the result that the individual voice is made subordinate to a collective one. Godard and Miéville’s choice of metaphor here is hardly incidental. In referencing the register of sound, the filmmakers substitute shopworn questions of visibility in political image making for those of audibility. This shift is crucial since it inverts the emphasis that is customarily placed on investigating the conditions that distort or render mute the voice of the people. As Abdul JanMohamed has convincingly argued, postcolonial reflections on the question “Can the subaltern speak?” also call for an analysis of “the conditions of possibility that attend to the ‘audibility’ of that speech.”32 In other words, what kinds of audition can be learned such that we can hear and understand what the subaltern is saying? Such a question leads us to revise the notion that Zaatari’s documentary might be seen as a type of speech act uttered on behalf of subjects who have been denied a voice in the political sphere. This is a view put forward by the Lebanese art critic Rasha Salti, who asserts that All Is Well “defends a forgotten cause, speaks for the silenced, and exposes a reality occluded from representation.”33 Here Salti implicitly aligns Zaatari’s video with a liberal model of social activism espoused by political philosophers such as Richard Rorty, who writes, “Victims of cruelty, people who are suffering, do not have much in the way of language. That is why there is no such thing as the ‘voice of the oppressed’ or the ‘language of the victims.’ The language the victims once used is not working anymore, and they are suffering too much to put 74 

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new words together. So the job of putting their situation into language is going to have to be done for them by somebody else. The liberal novelist, poet, or journalist is good at that.”34 Yet in claiming the right to speak for the oppressed, for those people who do not have a language of their own, Rorty effectively reconsigns them to silence at the very moment in which he claims to give them a voice. Sensitive to the power dynamics of delegated speech, the critical miming of the interview format in All Is Well foregrounds the split between the narrators of suffering and the living victims of history. This internal fracturing of testimony calls into question the positivist-­essentialist assumption that these men can or indeed must speak the truth of their oppression. Such an approach also challenges the division between the freedom of fiction and the reality imperative of documentary, between “those who can and those who cannot afford the luxury of playing with words and images.”35 Earlier I noted that the footage of schoolchildren reading essays describing their parents’ abandoned homes in the south referenced a comparable scene of ideological speech in Ici et ailleurs. As in Godard’s film, such scenes demonstrate how the pompous language of resistance speaks through the bodies of subjects. Yet it would be a mistake to see the children in All Is Well as mere symbols of false consciousness. Whereas Ici et ailleurs negates the possibility of any direct emotional and political identification with its subjects, All Is Well is more ambivalent in its attention to the affective dimensions of political speech. “I like to allow myself to be moved, and then to take a distance from my emotions,” the artist says with reference to the sequence filmed in the classroom. “The children’s essays in All Is Well are moving because they communicate the feeling of loss despite the fact they are not speaking in their own words. Their recital of those texts is so movingly human.”36 A term such as “empathetic estrangement” might perhaps best encapsulate the tension between the necessities of political engagement and the risks of overidentification that run through Zaatari’s treatment of resistance and human suffering in All Is Well.

Three Posters In his multimedia performance Three Posters, Mroué examines a 1985 video testimony made by Jamal al-­Sati, a combatant for the leftist lnr.37 By his R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 75

Figure 2.7. Jamal al-­Sati, still from “Jamal Sati,” video. (Posted by Johny Nacouzi, May 29, 2009, YouTube, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v =mlsynVNS1uk)

own account, Mroué came across the video more than ten years later, via a friend who had found the tape “neglected, resting on a shelf in the offices belonging to the Lebanese Communist Party.” In the video, al-Sati re­cords himself delivering his final testimony a few hours before carrying out a suicide operation against the Israeli Army, which was, at the time, occupying southern Lebanon (figure 2.7). On August 7, 1985, one day after the operation was carried out, the Beirut daily newspaper Al-­Nahar published the following report (figure 2.8): The Resistance has issued a statement saying that the National Leba­ nese Resistance Party has promised our people from the first day of its launching to continue the fight until the land is completely free, without any conditions from the Israeli conquest and its traitor agents. . . . To achieve this liberation the hero-­martyr Jamal al-­Sati performed a suicidal attack against one of the enemy’s strongholds, the building of the Military Governor in Hasbiyya (Zaghlé centre) before noon on 6 August, where General Fardi, five intelligence officers, more than 15 Israeli soldier guards, 10 soldiers for communication and management, and about 40 soldiers of the agent [Antoine] Lahad [head of the pro-­ Israeli South Lebanese Army]. We were unable to destroy this location using regular methods, so the hero-­martyr Jamal al-­Sati performed this huge operation. Based on our investigations, the location was destroyed by a tnt payload weighing 400 kg loaded on a mule, near the wall of the building which was scattered in all directions and killed all who were in it.38 76 

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Figure 2.8. The front page of Al-­Nahar (Beirut, Lebanon), dated August 7, 1985. (© Al-­Nahar, courtesy Al-­Nahar)

Al-­Nahar does not name its sources, so we cannot be sure of the veracity of this information. The report does, however, give the reader a sense of how such operations were represented in the Lebanese print media at this time. The newspaper article not only provides the supposedly factual details of the operation but also employs the ideological phrase book of the resistance: it proclaims al-­Sati as a “hero-­martyr,” a stock phrase that continues to permeate the language of Lebanese politics to this day.39 Al-­Sati himself is not quoted in this article, and beyond the generic passport-­style photograph of him (which was also used as the source of a martyr poster distributed by the lnr), there is not anything here that might serve to mark him as an individual in any sense. News of this operation was also delivered in the form of the aforementioned videotaped testimony made by al-­Sati just prior to his death. While the newspaper report functions to efface subjectivity in favor of an anonymous voice, the video is built around a tension between the so-­called hero-­ martyr and the (empirical) individual who struggles to inhabit that role or image. As I will suggest, the shift from print to electronic communication systems—and, along with this, a concomitant move from professional to amateur techniques of media production—signals a new form of audiovisual address that served to reframe the practice of martyrdom and the forms of political subjectivity associated with it. Starting in the mid-­1980s, video testimonies were customarily recorded a day before martyrs executed their missions. Immediately after the mission was carried out, these tapes would be sent to the government-­owned station Télé Liban, which aired the videos during the evening news broadcast.40 Television audiences neither witnessed Jamal al-­Sati’s act of martyrdom nor received concrete evidence that his death did in fact take place. Indeed, for many martyrs whose bodies were never recovered after their deaths, the tapes they made were the only surviving remnants of their actions.41 In an unreleased version of his final videotaped testimony (one of the versions on the tape recovered by Mroué), al-­Sati explains how he became radicalized after experiencing firsthand the indignities of occupation in his home village of Kamed el-­Lawz: I, the martyr comrade Jamal Sati, was born in 1962, in the small village of Kamed el-­Lawz, in Western Bekaa, into a poor hardworking family. 78 

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I became a member of the Lebanese Communist Party in 1978. After the aggressive occupation of the Israeli Armed Forces in 1982, my village, like the other villages and towns in South Lebanon and Western Bekaa and Rashayyah, suffered a great deal from the aggressive and terrifying treatment. When that great and mighty creature named the Lebanese National Resistance Front appeared on the battlefield, the lost hope for a free land and national dignity again nourished our desperate souls. Then I found myself among the legions of this Front, for it was my sacred duty toward my party as a communist and my country to become a member of this Front. And that’s how I joined this Front early 1983. With modesty, I announce that I have participated in many successful operations in my village, Kamed el-­Lawz and other neighboring villages. I am not boasting when I am saying this as everyone knows that we work silently, but for martyrdom, I see that it is my duty to say that for all new generations and heroes. Al-­Sati signs off by greeting all the martyrs of the Communist Party and the resistance, before paying tribute to Farajallah el-­Helou, one of the founding fathers of the lcp, and then Syrian president Hafez al-­Assad.42 Viewed within the context of a Lebanese society that had long grown accustomed to seeing martyrdom testimonies aired on television, al-­Sati’s speech was not particularly original or even remarkable. If anything, his testimony repeated the formulaic language of heroic resistance that had become commonplace throughout the Arab world. Yet this video was different from others in one significant respect: what it showed was not the final take broadcast on Lebanese television—a single unequivocal statement that would leave nothing to doubt—but three versions of the same testimony, repeated one after the other, which, until then, had never been made public.43 In viewing these three versions, Mroué was struck not by the differences between each testimony—“they were minimal, even unimportant”—but by the unintended effect that this repetition had in destabilizing a certain mode of address: “up until then all we had ever seen on television were the final cuts: clear statements made without any hesitations, errors or stuttering.”44 By contrast, in the video al-­Sati could be seen stammering at times as he read from his script. For Mroué, what these fallible moments revealed were the signs of individuality that were censored from the depersonalized speech of R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 79

martyrdom: “The instant we saw the ‘stuttering’ of the martyr, we realized something simple, so simple that it was obvious—the martyr is not a hero but a human being.”45 Conceived in collaboration with Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, Three Posters takes al-­Sati’s uncut rushes as the starting point for a critical investigation of the media practices of the secular resistance, particularly video’s correlation with the then emerging phenomenon of televised martyrdom. In the hands of the Lebanese left, video served not only as a recording device but also as a kind of conceptual medium through which martyrdom was enacted in the fullest sense. In their commentary on Three Posters, Khoury and Mroué invert the relation between physical and symbolic actions, suggesting that al-­Sati’s “video was of more importance than his actual mission.” Implicit here is the recognition that the act of martyrdom begins before al-­Sati completes his suicide operation, that is, at the moment when he faces the camera and declares, “I am the martyr.” Taped before the suicide mission itself but aired after the fact, his posthumous statement looks both backward and forward at the same time, throwing into question the status of video as a documentary trace of the past anchored in a linear history. Originally, Khoury and Mroué had planned to simply screen al-­Sati’s video by itself, without modification or commentary. However, realizing that this gesture would not in itself be enough to call into question the ideological and technological mechanisms of the martyr video, the pair devised a theatrical framework through which to rethink the relation between document and event, between existential (alive) and televisual states (live) and between performer and script. The resulting three-­part performance resituates al-­Sati’s video as one of three interrelated roles or speaking positions: an actor (Mroué), the resistance fighter (Jamal al-­Sati), and a politician (Elias Atallah). Khoury and Mroué’s appropriation of al-­Sati’s tape raises a difficult ethical question: What rights do the living have over images of the dead? Embedded in this question are a number of overlapping concerns about the ambivalent relation between artistic and political images in Three Posters and whether the restaging of al-­Sati’s video might be consistent with the original intention or spirit that animates his testimony: “Should we allow a public ‘foreign to the party and to the family’ to witness a martyr’s emotions before his death? Could we pre­sent a tape that did not belong to us? Would he have wanted this video to be seen with all its rehearsals? Were we exploiting this 80 

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tape to make an ‘art-­work’ from which we would draw both moral and financial profit? Were we, in a sense, violating the sacred space of the martyr?”46 In fact, the orientation of these questions might be reversed so that one asks: What claims do the dead make over the living? For here we are dealing with images that do not simply capture a fully resolved moment in the past but rather resurrect a dormant and unprocessed period in Lebanese history. Like the figure of the missing person who haunts the living with the specter of his or her possible return, the subject who speaks from the impossible, posthumous perspective of the martyr is similarly caught in limbo. At the moment that he re­cords his martyr testimony, al-­Sati has withdrawn from life but is not yet dead—at least not until the operation is carried out and the tape is aired on television. In the first chapter of Three Posters, the audience enters a darkened room in which only a television monitor is visible on stage. After a few moments, Mroué (as the actor) appears on the screen wearing military fatigues, a beret with a five-­pointed red star, and a red ribbon on his left arm; he then begins to deliver a martyr testimony in the first person (figure 2.9): “I am the martyr comrade Khaled Rahhal. I was born in 1964 into a hardworking family that taught me the principles of freedom and justice. I enrolled in the Communist Party in 1982 and joined the heroes of the National Resistance Front, who sacrifice their blood to free our occupied lands in the South and the West Bekaa. My name is Khaled Rahhal, and I am now here to declare my last call before committing, tomorrow morning, a suicide mission on which the Front Command has agreed.”47 The language used by Mroué follows the standard protocols of the martyr testimony. As if to lend further authenticity to this performance, the actor placed posters of actual martyrs from the lcp in prominent positions on the wall behind him. The inclusion of a poster of al-­Sati himself (figure 2.10) creates a mise en abyme of representation wherein the fictional performance intermingles with reality, rendering the line between them unstable. Indeed, a reproduction of the poster (figure 2.11) of the artist’s martyred grandfather, Hussein, can be found in the top left-­hand side of the image. A prominent intellectual figure in the lcp, the elder Mroué published two substantial volumes on materialistic tendencies in Islam, both of which were considered groundbreaking and highly controversial at the time. On February 17, 1987, while working on the third volume of this project, Hussein was assassinated R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 81

Figure 2.9. Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury, Three Posters, Festival Ayloul Production, 2000. (© Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury, courtesy Sfeir-­Semler Gallery)

in his home by two masked gunmen. This history forms part of a biographical subtext that is not explicitly addressed in Three Posters. In a sense, Mroué’s performance played on the audience’s belief that what they were watching belonged not to the present but to the just-­lived past. As opposed to the this-­is-­happening of theater and live television, Mroué’s prerecorded testimony affirms the past tense of video. Read in these terms, the paradoxical statement “I am the martyr,” which Mroué uses to begin each of the three recorded versions of his testimony, serves to testify to the fact that he is already dead. Accordingly, he likens the temporality of video to the that-­has-­been of photography: “Because we have been conditioned to believe that a video is a recording of a moment in the past, a dead moment, the medium represents the recovery of such moments—moments that by 82 

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Figure 2.10. Lebanese National Resistance Front, Lebanese Communist Party, poster, 1985. It reads, “The martyr of the Lebanese National Resistance Front comrade Jamal Sati. The hero of the operation of the detonation of the headquarters of the Israeli military commander in Hasbaya.” (Courtesy www.signsofconflict.org)

Figure 2.11. Palestinian Organizations, PLO, poster, 1987. It reads, “Hussein Mroué, the martyr of Lebanon and Palestine and the Arab liberation movement.” (Courtesy www.signsofconflict.org)

definition have already passed. This is exactly what used to happen: one day, suddenly, we would see the poster of a friend hung on the walls of Beirut, or a photograph or video on the tv announcing his or her death. The redundancy, created in the performance, helped the audience accept this idea.”48 The posters of actual martyrs pinned to the wall behind Mroué lent authenticity to the artist’s performance to the extent that an unsuspecting audience member might have taken the video to have been a prerecorded testimony of a genuine martyr. However, as soon as the artist finished three different takes of his statement, he abandoned the role of the actor and spoke “as himself,” Rabih Mroué, reading out his own name, his date and place of birth, and a (partly fictional) history of his participation in the lcp. At that moment, Khoury came onto the stage and opened a door to reveal Mroué standing in front of a camera. The audience then realized that what they had just witnessed on the video monitor was not a moment fixed securely in the past but a live performance, one that rendered the line between fiction and reality unstable, if only momentarily. “At that instant, the fabrication of the false moment was made apparent,” writes Mroué in his essay on Three Posters.49 The implications of this act of apparent unmasking of the video setup are taken over into the second part of the performance, in which the original footage of al-­Sati rehearsing his testimony is screened on the same television monitor as Mroué’s. When seen in light of Mroué’s staged reenactment, it becomes possible to think of al-­Sati’s testimony as a highly scripted performance of martyrdom that is no less theatrical than the actor’s simulated testimony. As the artist would later recall, “There were actually some people who came up to me [after the premiere performance] and said that I was much more convincing than the real martyr [tape]. And I believed this, because when you watch Jamal al-­Sati you see that he is making an effort, as though he is acting.”50 Viewing the tape closely, one can see that al-­Sati is clearly not comfortable delivering his lines in front of the camera. Mroué’s remarks suggest that this discomfort is the product of al-­Sati’s self-­consciousness as an actor. That is to say, at the moment that he presses re­cord and starts to deliver his lines, al-­Sati becomes acutely aware of the fact that he cannot be himself, that he cannot help but act—as though he realizes at that moment that the words he is uttering belong to a script which he had no role in writing. One could say, then, that the presence of a video camera produces a doubling of speech, the 84 

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effect of which is akin to the disturbing experience of the person who, upon hearing his or her own speech replayed back, finds it impossible to match the recorded sound with the voice in his or her head. However, al-­Sati’s halting delivery is not simply the product of an amateur struggling to play a role that exceeds his capabilities as an actor. For Mroué, these involuntary hesitations signal the presence of death as a real, irreversible event. More precisely, his mistakes in speech mark an unstated desire to defer death even after he has withdrawn from life. In the third part of Three Posters, Mroué showed brief excerpts from a taped interview with Elias Atallah, a leading figure in the lcp and the person responsible for overseeing al-­Sati’s operation. Atallah is shown in a close-­up, but his features are underexposed, preserving his anonymity. The explicit purpose of the third chapter, as the artist has explained, was “to see what the Communist Party would say about this operation, since we were criticizing and questioning how the Party authorized these suicide missions.”51 On one level, the interview with a party representative implicitly raises questions of political agency that parallel those raised in All Is Well: Whose decision was it to launch suicide operations and what role did individuals have in that process? How free was al-­Sati to choose this particular course of action? On another level, there is the question of the lcp’s “justification and endorsement” of these operations. In the interview with Mroué, Atallah admits that while “there was no objection to the suicide-­operations scheme” within the Politburo (the chief political and executive committee of the party), there was some discussion about “its deep[er] meaning.”52 Indeed, the question remains how the practice of martyrdom, which has long been associated with religious rituals of sacrifice, can be put into the service of an armed resistance movement founded on Leninist organizational principles.53 This issue is itself bound up with the larger question of Syria’s influence on the military operations mounted by the lcp in the early 1980s. Atallah’s remarks in the interview suggest that the party’s inability to confront publicly the pressures “that were being applied directly by the Syrians and sometimes through their [Lebanese] proxies” was one of the main reasons for the demise of the communist resistance. In the second half of the 1980s, the Syrian regime of Hafez al-­Assad and the Islamic militias who served as its agents carried out a series of assassinations aimed at decimating the leading members and thinkers of the progressive Lebanese left. These included R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 85

Khalil Naous, Suhayl Tawila, Mouhdi Amel, Labib Abed Assamad, Michel Waked, Deeb al-­Jasir, and Hussein Mroué.54 Another factor for the dissolution of the Lebanese left can be traced to its populist politics. Parties such as the lcp, the Organization of Communist Action, and the Socialist Action Party drew most of their numbers from the historically underprivileged Shi’a communities in the south. In their drive to recruit members to their ranks, these parties neglected the more difficult task of instituting a longer-­term program of education. Rather than developing a critical relation to Marxist philosophy, the members of the resistance were encouraged to recite its empty slogans. Moreover, the lcp was not able to provide a framework through which to dismantle the dominant ideology of confessionalism within Lebanese society. Thus, when sectarian hostilities intensified during the civil war, many communists reverted to their religious origins. Mroué returned to the conflation of religious and political ideology in his 2009 lecture-­performance The Inhabitants of Images, analyzing the digital alteration of the body in banners of martyrs produced by Hezbollah following the July War with Israel in 2006 (figure 2.12). Noting that the head of each martyr has been cut and pasted onto a generic body with the aid of Photoshop, Mroué draws a highly suggestive link between the digital decapitation of these men’s heads in the posters and a foundational event in Shi’a collective memory: the original martyrdom of the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Hussein Ibn Ali in the battle of Karbala. Shi’a rituals of remembrance, developed around the annual Day of Ashura, focus on the violent nature of his death (figure 2.13). The primary observances on Ashura consist of public expressions of mourning and self-­mutilation that symbolically emulate and internalize Hussein’s beheading. In these rituals, Hussein’s suffering is taken to be a source of both deeply rooted guilt and salvation. In The Inhabitants of Images, Mroué points to the same structure of reverse identification in the Hezbollah martyr posters.55 However, whereas the rituals reenact the violence inflicted on the martyr in order to atone for it, in these contemporary images the violence of martyrdom is both exacerbated and effaced through its digital reproduction: “I perceive it as a very violent, sadistic act, the fact that someone would willingly cut and mutilate the picture of a dead person, even with good intentions. There is a halo around pictures of the dead. And I don’t really believe that the designers of Hezbollah 86 

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Figure 2.12. Houssam Mchaiemch, photograph of Hezbollah posters taken in the southern suburbs of Beirut, 2007. (© Houssam Mchaiemch, courtesy of the photographer)

Figure 2.13. Lebanese Shiite Muslims take part in a self-­flagellation procession on the tenth day of the mourning period of Muharram, which marks the day of Ashura, in the southern city of Nabiteyah on October 24, 2015. The Ashura rituals commemorate the killing of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, by armies of the Sunni caliph Yazid in 680. (Photo by Mahmoud Zayyat / AFP / Getty Images)

are art critics, because the posters do not reveal the manipulation. In fact they have tried their best to hide the tricks they’ve used, in order to make us believe that these are original pictures.” For Mroué, then, the Hezbollah banners subject the body of the martyr to a double violence: the brutality of the mujahid’s physical death is reinscribed in the symbolic violence of the cropped image. In contrast to photomontage, which frequently calls attention to the material conditions of its production, these digital composites remove the violent traces of the cut. The cult value attached to images of martyrdom in Lebanon across confessional lines is such that it cannot simply be dismissed as a mode of propaganda that glorifies death in the name of religion. In his essay “Image, Body, Medium,” the German art historian Hans Belting notes how in archaic societies, the image was linked to rituals through which the dead were reintegrated into the community of the living: Images, on behalf of the missing body, occupied the place deserted by the person who had died. A given community felt threatened by the gap caused by the death of one of its members. The dead, as a result, were kept as present and visible in the ranks of the living via their images. But images did not exist by themselves. They, in turn, were in need of an embodiment, which means in need of an agent or a medium resembling a body. This need was met by the invention of visual media, which not only embodied images but resembled living bodies in their own ways.56 Thus, in a Neolithic skull cult, the living secured a means of interacting with their ancestors and of preserving their presence. Through the transformation of the skull into a person—a “symbolic exchange of signs”—the deceased returns to a community that is subsequently able to interact with him or her. When the body of the deceased is transformed into an image, it undergoes what Louis Marin has called an “ontological transfer” and is given the power to act in the name and place of the subject whose absence it stands in for. This is the kind of transfer of power that normally takes place between living bodies, and it effectively endows the stand-­in with a new kind of authority or agency. Here, then, the representation of the deceased not only makes present what is absent but takes on a life of its own, serving to structure the beliefs and actions of the living. The relation between medium and body, then, was once intimately bound 88 

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up with the iconography of death. In so-­called primitive societies, bodily remnants such as skulls are painted and transformed into objects imbued with magical powers. Animated through cult rituals, these artifacts become the means through which the living interact with their ancestors in what the philosopher Jean Baudrillard has called a “symbolic exchange of signs.”57 Here, then, the representation of the deceased not only makes present what is absent but takes on a life of its own, serving to structure the beliefs and actions of the living. In contrast, modern societies governed by rational-­ materialist values treat images not as living entities but as inert objects in the world, in other words, things. Thus while the development of technologies of mechanical and electronic reproduction have created ever more images of death, these images have been stripped of the symbolic value they once possessed. The result is a media culture in which the religious or spiritual recognition of death is replaced by the deadening effects of images that attempt to disavow or repress mortality. This is one of the principal insights made by the German critic Siegfried Kracauer in his renowned 1927 essay on photography: “What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory image. In the illustrated magazines the world has become a photographable present and the photographed present has been entirely eternalised. Seemingly ripped from the clutch of death, in reality it has succumbed to it.”58 In technologically advanced societies, image consumption has increased to the point at which pictures of the dead have lost the cultic significance that they were once accorded. The result is a media culture in which the experience of death is largely assimilated to the language of advertising and spectacle. Yet if images of death have been progressively emptied of their ontological weight in the West—a claim that is already complicated by the global return of religions—in Lebanon the convergence of traditional religious practices and digital technology is perhaps more visibly fraught with contradiction. Belting asserts that “the politics of images relies on their mediality,” since it is the reproduction and circulation of images, more than specific content, that serves the interests of political power even or especially when the image takes the form of a seemingly immediate address. This can be seen in the ways in which Hezbollah uses the bodies of its martyrs to address its constituency. In speaking through the body of the mujahid, the party disguises its own presence in or behind the image.59 R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 89

Unlike the person who dies and leaves this world forever, these men give up their lives in order to come back to the world of the living, to fight, and to become fallen martyrs again. Mroué quotes the alleged words of the Prophet Muhammad as evidence of this belief: “No one enters Paradise and likes to come back to the world of the Living, except for the Martyr. For he wishes to return, and be killed ten times more.”60 What is critical here is precisely the way in which this interpretation of martyrdom exploits the inherent properties of digital media. The critic and theorist Boris Groys argues that one reason fundamentalist religious movements have become so successful over recent years is that they are able to combine archaic ritual with the most advanced technologies of image reproduction and distribution. Groys draws a very suggestive link between the fundamentalist adherence to literal or empty ritual devoid of spiritual meaning, and video technology, which, in its literal repetition of the past, offers the promise of immortality “after the death of spirit.”61 Three Posters looks back at a very specific moment in video history when the technology was being first used by the Lebanese left as a tool of ideological resistance.62 Rather than wait for a television crew to arrive, al-­Sati used a readily available video camera to re­cord his own message to the viewing public. Yet this address was not in itself self-­sufficient; it was then mediated by the dominant mass-­cultural discourse of broadcast television news. When videos like al-­Sati’s were aired on television, they were inevitably edited and attached to a voice-­over commentary that influenced or directed the tape’s interpretation. It should also be remembered that al-­Sati’s video appeared on television for only a very brief period and then disappeared from public view for over a decade. Mroué’s discovery of the uncut rushes years later in the offices of the lcp occurred at a moment when analog videotape-­based formats such as Betamax and vhs were being rapidly replaced with digital cameras. This development also coincided with the rise of new online viewing platforms, signaling a shift from the centralized one-­way communication of broadcast television to a decentralized, multidirectional model. One of the tragedies of the Lebanese left is that it was defeated twice, first by Israel and second by the Islamic parties within Lebanon who eliminated its popular base. Yet in contrast to other Arab nations in which the language of anticolonial struggle has been violently co-­opted by a corrupt state and used to justify dictatorships, in Lebanon the left has been spared this indig90 

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nity, if only at the cost of its near total withdrawal from public life.63 As much as it casts a critical eye on the Islamicization of resistance and the growing power of Hezbollah, All Is Well also resists the impulse to heroicize the defeat of the left. This is brought out in Zaatari’s sampling of resistance songs popularized by artists such as Julie Boutrous, Marcel Khalifeh, and Khaled el Habr and made accessible to prisoners through radio stations such as Sawt al-­Sha’ab (Voice of the people). The song “Ghabet Shams el Haq” (The sun of justice has set), which is singled out by Awada in his letters as a personal favorite, acquires significance in All Is Well as a form of media in opposition to that proliferated by Hezbollah. Yet rather than simply treating the song as a period document by situating it in its original historical context, Zaatari recycles footage from a later performance of the song at the popular Beiteddine Festival. What was once considered a progressive chant of the left had in the passage of time been transformed into an object of nostalgia. Continuing to sing these songs in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the leftist resistance movements, had become tantamount to celebrating a past that no longer existed (or that, perhaps, had never existed in the way it was remembered). Similarly, in Three Posters reenactment becomes a productive model through which to probe the violent elimination of the Lebanese left and its largely unacknowledged relation to the Islamic resistance movements that have co-­opted aspects of its media and propaganda strategy. The amateur videos produced by al-­Sati and his comrades would seem to be a far cry from the highly produced images of (digital) martyrdom disseminated by Hezbollah’s media department during the 2006 conflict with Israel, just as the Leninist principles espoused by the lnr would also appear to be incompatible with the idea of an Islamic resistance. However, closer consideration reveals that despite their outward ideological differences, the relationship between these two paradigms of resistance is considerably more ambiguous and complicated than political histories tend to suggest. Today al-­Sati’s video can be viewed potentially endlessly on YouTube. There, the video lives on not as a physical tape but as a digital file in a virtual archive that can be downloaded and recirculated by anyone with a computer. As I noted earlier, these digital platforms are now being used by newly radicalized Islamic groups to distribute martyrdom videos and other forms of religious propaganda. This embrace of digital technology reveals something deeply paradoxical about the nature of image reproduction and the R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M 91

fate of religion in our age. As Groys suggests, the message of contemporary religious movements that operate primarily through the Internet is intrinsic to a digital code that “substitutes the guarantees of spiritual immortality allegedly waiting for us beyond this world with the technical guarantees of potentially eternal repetition inside this world.”64 Three Posters might be seen as similarly exploiting video’s capacity to forestall or immortalize death by placing human actions in a temporal loop. Yet if every martyr video is in part motivated by the technical guarantees of potentially eternal repetition, Mroué’s reiterative gesture registers the defeat of the Lebanese left and its absence from the political arena. I suggest that such a recognition of loss goes against a left melancholy that remains attached to preserving a certain image of its own dead past and therefore is unable to imagine a future. A digital image can be reproduced without loss of quality. However, the same cannot be said for a photographic negative or a vhs tape, which degrades with each subsequent copy or generation. The ephemeral image of martyrdom produced by Jamal al-­Sati and the lcp therefore stands in contrast to the digital logic of perfect and infinite reproduction. While Hezbollah’s digital martyrs are superior on a technical level, they lack the sense of fallibility that gives al-­Sati’s video its humanity. This is not to suggest that al-­Sati’s inner emotions or real intentions can be known. After all, his was a scripted performance staged for the camera. Psychoanalytic theory proposes that there is no real self behind the various roles a person adopts in public. Yet there is something in al-­Sati’s halting delivery that makes it possible to glimpse, if only momentarily, the split between the image of the martyr and the flesh-­and-­blood person who comes to inhabit that image. It is this ghostly presence of the human that haunts the digital martyrs that we watch on our screens.

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L A T E N T I M A G E S , T H R E E B U R I E D B O D I E S Mourning Lebanon’s Disappeared The survival of the photographed is . . . never only the survival of its life, but also of its death. —Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light (1997) Let the dead be dead. —anonymous Lebanese politician

In chapter 2, I considered how Zaatari’s All Is Well and Mroué’s Three Posters both use strategies of reenactment as a way of putting the past into productive conflict with the political present. Particular attention was given to the ways in which the violent elimination of the Lebanese left haunts the images of heroic martyrdom that are now mobilized in the name of an Islamic resistance. The digitally manipulated photographs of martyrs circulated by Hezbollah in recent years enlist the dead as weapons within a war that is increasingly waged with and over images. Hezbollah’s martyr posters exploit the fact that “digital images have the propensity to generate, to multiply, and to distribute themselves almost anonymously through the seemingly open fields of contemporary communication.”1 I argued that this form of propaganda builds on the pioneering media strategies of the Lebanese Communist Party, particularly the party’s use of video technology as an integral component of its martyrdom operations. The physical death of Jamal al-­Sati is permanent and irreversible, but on a symbolic level, his videotaped testimony, with its propensity for unlimited replay, places human actions in a loop. As Boris Groys suggests, the linking of religious ritual and the electronically reproduced image opens up the possibility of a “technically guaranteed immortality” that interrupts the linear flow of biological-­historical time.2 Following Groys, I suggested that al-­Sati’s posthumous address haunts the living precisely in its unnatural merging of life and death. The confluence of life and death takes on a different valence in the case of Lebanon’s disappeared: the thousands of men and women whose where-

abouts or deaths have never been verified in the wake of the civil wars. Unlike al-­Sati’s video, which I have suggested allows for a kind of live-­action immortality, what remains of the missing largely consists of snapshots and memories frozen in the minds of those left behind. While the video martyr survives his death, photographs of the missing suggest an even more indeterminate ontological state because they point to the possibility, at least for a certain amount of time, of the return of the referent. This is what makes the disappeared different from both the living and the dead martyr. As Mroué brilliantly observes, “He is absent, but liable to come back. I mean, he is here, and he’s not. Present, but invisible. Not dead, but not quite alive. Time stands still. He catches the tears in our eyes, but does not allow them to run. Everything is on hold, in a state of waiting.”3 Ghassan Halwani, in his street drawings over the past decade, and Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas, in Lasting Images (2003), ask how images of the missing can be used to elicit acts of public witnessing and commemoration that bridge the disciplinary boundaries between aesthetic inquiry, political activism, and forensic investigation. As I argue, these works resist the “confiscation of identity” enacted in the photo id cards—images that were used to identify and kidnap Lebanese citizens during the civil war—and the doubly deindividualized photo collages of the missing circulated by international human rights organizations. Here the artists engage in autocritical practices that question photography’s ability to resurrect the dead or to evidence the details of their disappearances. Yet rather than simply affirming photography’s limitations, their works ask how latent images—undeveloped or literally buried on the walls of the post–­civil war city—might be excavated or made manifest in a way that counters the widespread amnesia over the Lebanese wars and the fate of the missing. In analyses of Joreige and Hadjithomas’s A Perfect Day (2005) and Lamia Joreige’s Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (2003), I then turn the focus of this chapter from the photographs of the dead to the communities of witnessing that are formed by family members of the disappeared. A Perfect Day takes up the moral and legal issue of when and in what way a family can make the decision to have a missing loved one declared officially dead. In the film, this question is taken as a starting point for an inquiry into the suspended existence of a mother and son as they move (unsuccessfully) between an arrested present and a continually deferred future. Here and Perhaps Elsewhere uses 94 

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images not of the missing persons but of a largely erased urban landscape as the artist walks through Beirut and asks people if they knew anyone who was abducted at one of the city’s former wartime checkpoints. What emerges from the various responses of bystanders is not merely the impossibility of determining what happened in any conclusive way. The presence of the video camera also gives rise to acts of testimony and truth telling that surface paradoxically from dialogues in which language seems to break down and photographic evidence comes up short. Instead of foregrounding the unknowable status of the missing, in gesturing toward the evidence of things not photographed, Joreige’s video foregrounds the ways in which generational groups and gendered communities give voice to otherwise repressed histories. What Halwani, Hadjithomas, and the Joreiges share is a commitment to critiquing and countering the legally imposed amnesia around the status of the Lebanese missing. Rather than denying the fallibility of photographic images, however, or insisting on a politics of truth, the artistic practices in this chapter invite speculation as to the potency of hearsay, gossip, and family and community memory. These works ask how the families and communities left behind might act as forms of media in themselves, channels through which the long-­latent histories of the thousands of missing might— to borrow the words of Jalal Toufic—achieve a “time of development” that counters nearly two decades of suspension. It is estimated that as many as eighteen thousand Lebanese civilians were kidnapped and murdered during the wars of 1975–90.4 In particular, disappearances were one of the most dominant features of the civil war in its first two years, when kidnappings were practiced by all armed groups (militias and armies) and often in coordination between groups (when, for instance, Lebanese militias or members of the Lebanese Army would hand victims over to Syrian or Israeli forces). The victims, many of whom were civilians, were abducted at checkpoints, as well as from their homes or on the streets. They were kidnapped for a variety of reasons: to be exchanged for other prisoners, for money or revenge, or for underscoring sectarian divisions. In the majority of cases, the whereabouts of the missing remain unknown to their families, despite persistent rumors of the existence of mass graves in several prominent locations.5 The controversial Amnesty Law passed by the Lebanese government in March 1991 functioned to prevent any investigation or prosecution of crimes committed during the previous L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 95

fifteen years of war, including “crimes against humanity and those which seriously infringe human dignity.”6 This highly problematic act of legal absolution was based on the argument that the unification of the country under a new government could be achieved only through a policy of strategic and conscious forgetting.7 Indeed, it was argued that any unearthing of the past would only serve to reignite the underlying sectarian hostilities that had led to the war in the first place. Thus, the formula of la ghalib la maghlub (no victor, no vanquished) became the justification for closing the chapter on a violent and unresolved conflict. Tragically, the implementation of the Amnesty Law has meant that the fate of the missing remains (quite literally) buried in the past.8 There is still no official list of missing persons, and no ministry or government office is charged with handling these cases in a systematic way. In 2000, the Lebanese government, headed by Prime Minister Selim el-­ Hoss, formed an Official Commission of Inquiry to investigate the fate of the kidnapped and missing persons, composed of representatives from the police and security services. After several months, the commission issued a two-­page report stating that the thousands of individuals who went missing during the civil war were unlikely to be found alive. Law 43, also known as the law of the absences, gave the families the right to declare their kin legally dead in absentia. Although Law 43 was presented by lawmakers as a way of addressing pending problems of inheritance, (re)marriage, and other civil rights, most families refused to comply without absolute proof of death.9 This blanket ruling was rightly seen as an inadequate response to the issue, since it failed to provide any legal or political framework for investigating individual disappearances or uncovering the sites of suspected mass graves. Yet if the Lebanese government findings offered an inadequate response to an unresolvable question, the official position also pointed to a larger contradiction. In late 1999, the community-­based Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared in Lebanon had sought to persuade the state to declare all of the missing people dead. As Michael Young notes, this demand was the result of a tactical shift that was deeply paradoxical in nature: “Although most members assumed the disappeared were alive, the committee sought to persuade the state to pronounce them all dead, if a commission of inquiry so determined.”10 On one level, this demand was driven by practical imperatives: many families, especially the poorest among them, wanted 96 

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to bypass the expensive and complex procedures necessary for a legal confirmation of death. The state’s blanket declaration would have facilitated inheritance procedures, property transfers, and compensation for families of former government employees—as indeed it did after the ruling. However, for some families, this demand was driven by a decidedly more ambivalent desire: to shift complete responsibility for pronouncing death to the state, a burden the state has so far refused. A landmark ruling, issued in March 2014 by the State Shura Council, one of the highest-­ranking judicial authorities in Lebanon, ratified the rights of the relatives of those who went missing during the wars to access the results of official investigations conducted by the Official Commission of Inquiry nearly fifteen years earlier—including transcripts of interviews with the militias involved in the disappearances. Even after this latest ruling, the responsibility for investigating the missing rests predominantly with the families, who must declare their kin officially deceased and petition for access to the relevant records. The families of the disappeared have since called for the establishment of an Independent National Commission for Missing Persons to prepare a comprehensive list of all missing persons, and for the commission to be granted the necessary resources and powers to be able to coordinate the search for missing persons. This ruling, while a positive step forward, points to a number of larger questions about the uncertain status of the missing in Lebanon. For one, the state and the families of the disappeared have repeatedly disavowed their respective responsibilities to the missing—creating a situation in which multiple people and institutions have evaded a topic that has remained embedded in Lebanese consciousness. Moreover, investigations into the fate of the missing have now been relegated to an archival exercise managed by individual families, just as discussion of the disappeared has been confined to the realm of hearsay or co-­opted by sectarian narratives that today claim ownership of the collective memory. The projects undertaken by nongovernmental organizations (ngos) in Lebanon could be seen as an attempt to open up a third space for memory work that breaks with the silence of the state and the prevailing language of communitarianism. One of the more notable efforts to counteract the culture of enforced collective amnesia can be found in the public activities undertaken by the umam organization over the past decade under the heading of “What Is to Be Done? Lebanon’s War-­Loaded Memory.” In arguing that the L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 97

Figure 3.1. Missing exhibition, poster, UNESCO Palace, Beirut, April 2008. (© UMAM-­ DR, courtesy Monika Borgmann)

Figure 3.2. Missing exhibition, installation photograph, UNESCO Palace, Beirut, April 2008. (© UMAM-­DR, courtesy Monika Borgmann)

“Lebanese choice” after the civil wars—“opting for amnesty and turning the page of the past”—has “been a fiasco,” the organization has offered “truth-­ seeking and memory-­management” as an alternative.11 One example of this is the exhibit Missing, opened on April 10, 2008, at the unesco Palace in Beirut after the inaugural ceremony of What Is to Be Done? (figure 3.1).12 Members of the public were asked to submit images of loved ones who had disappeared during the civil war. Reproductions of hundreds of photographs, many of which were drawn from the personal collections of the participating individuals and families, were enlarged and arranged in a grid (figure 3.2). Each portrait carried the name of the missing person, his or her place and date of birth, and the date of disappearance. An ongoing project, Missing has been set up to take the form of an expanding archive that, over time, will incorporate additions made by representatives of the missing. (The umam website claims that ten additional photographs were contributed by friends and family of the missing after the publicity that the opening exhibition received.) In the introduction to the exhibit, the organizers spoke of their desire “to picture the disappeared, to tie them to all that is real, both as individuals and L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 99

as a part of the population of Lebanon that is missing—a part that, until now, has almost ceased to be visible, but has by no means ceased to exist.”13 The by-­now standardized use of photographs to represent the missing seemed to rely on a still perceptible intimacy between the photographic signifier and its absent referent: as Marianne Hirsch explains, it is the photograph’s “status as relic, or trace, or fetish—its ‘direct’ connection with the material presence of the photographed person—that at once intensifies its status as harbinger of death and, at the same time . . . its capacity to signify life.”14 For many of the families of the missing, especially those from the working classes that had no material legacy attached to the person, a photograph was all that remained of their loved ones. At the same time, photographs are also perceived as a form of evidence—proof not only of the possible existence of the missing person but also seemingly of his or her absence; the closer the time stamp of the photograph to the date and time of abduction, the more it (falsely) seems to offer evidence of the facts of disappearance.15 Despite this desire to “picture the disappeared,” what Missing lacked was a framework for circulating the images of the missing into contexts where repression, paranoia, and censorship could be most forcefully confronted. As it stood, the exhibit suffered from at least three shortcomings. It privileged the displayed archival images as truth and relied on the flawed assumption that images of the missing persons could speak for themselves and tell a “story about a kidnapping” that might fulfill the organization’s stated objective of initiating “collective reflection on the many different types of violence that plagued Lebanon’s past.”16 In actuality, the photographs of the missing became signs of an absent referent. Rather than promoting a discussion about the fate of the missing, the images could only mutely point to the fact of their disappearance. As I suggest further below, these images call not simply for exhibition, but for a reflective-­performative problematization of the evidentiary capacities of photography specifically as they relate to the precarity of popular memory and public speech in urban Beirut. Here I will argue that the unearthing of the photographic document in Lebanon might involve something like what Eyal Weizman calls a critical forensic practice that includes both the production of evidence and the querying of the practices of evidence making. For Weizman, the “hard evidence” produced by exhumations does not eliminate human uncertainties and ambiguities: “On the contrary, the aesthetic, political, and ethical complications that emerge with this 100 

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turn establish the dead body not as an alternative to testimonial practices, but rather their continuation.”17 Moreover, Missing was a highly prescripted event: it occupied the largely neutralized space of the unesco building, one already assigned to it by the state, usually empty (when not being used for exhibitions), and safely removed from the sectarian language of the street or the neighborhood, and it dictated similar roles to those who attended the event. English, French, and Arabic translations clearly delineated attendees into three groups—­ governmental representatives, artists and cultural elites, and the predominantly working-­class families who came in support of their missing loved ones. No possibility existed for stepping outside of these prescribed roles or for rupturing the framework that had been preestablished for attendees. Instead of interrogating political figures or inviting individualized speech acts, the event repeated the standard discourse of human rights: on the opening night, the German ambassador spoke about the concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and Dr. Alex Boraine talked about his role in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. None of the designated speakers (including Lockman Slim, the organizer of the exhibition) addressed the specifics of the situation in Lebanon. The fact that most of the speeches were in English had the effect of excluding many of the families in attendance. In this sense, it would be too simple to say that war memory is censored in Lebanon. It would be closer to the truth to say that it is contained and managed through institutionalized practices of self-­censorship that bracket questions concerning the fate of the missing. Finally, there was nothing in the exhibition that could serve to draw a link between the images on display and the physical and discursive spaces in which memory cultures are constituted. Specifically, the exhibition evaded the question of how photography circulates in spaces such as the family home or the communitarian zone of the street or neighborhood (al hay). Indeed, the organizers of Missing overlooked the fact that many of the photographs used in the exhibition were originally used for identity cards and were thus implicated in the very structures of sectarian profiling used to carry out kidnappings and murders during the war. As the cultural theorist Nelly Richard writes in reference to the desaparecidos of Pinochet’s Chile, “id photographs guaranteed the reproducibility of the order, regulating the pose . . . identity based on a portrait-­type as the model of disciplinary inteL A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 101

gration.”18 During the war, even civilians were required to list their religious affiliation on their id cards. In pointing to this contradiction, I do not mean to discount the possibility of a critical repurposing of those images.19 Rather, I want to underline umam’s failure to attend to questions of circulation, not only those pertaining to photographic images but also to its own contentious role in rechanneling a discourse about “truth seeking” and “national memory.”20 The grids of photographs utilized by umam replicate the display structures used by other ngos such as Amnesty International and the Red Cross (figure 3.3). Thus, Missing points to a larger problem concerning the institutionalization of local memory cultures. When images of the missing enter into the legal framework of international human rights, more often than not they are submitted to forms of schematization that strip the photographed subjects of their individuality. As Paolo Yacoub has observed of organizations such as Amnesty International: “They have a global view; a legal discourse and can build larger synoptic tables. Everything happens as if, more or less implicitly, international conventions of display were gradually imposed. Thumbnail views are an agreed on device. . . . It is not quite the same as the portraits carried out by parents. Something changes with the thumbnail views. Portraits are reduced to a smaller size and faces end up losing their name and become anonymous. But with anonymity we lose our own history.”21 The urban interventions of Halwani offer one countermodel to the instrumentalization of the image described by Yacoub. Around the time of the 2008 umam opening, Halwani walked past one of the exhibition posters in Beirut and noticed that a photograph of his father had been included. The image was small to begin with, and it had been torn so that parts of his face were missing. The public degradation of his father’s image had rendered an intimate family memory strangely precarious. Moreover, the size reduction and repetition of faces arranged in a grid produced a total collapse of individual identity. For Halwani, this loss of specificity was like “witnessing a new disappearance of the missing.”22 Thus, against its own better intentions, umam’s reproduction and circulation of these images had unwittingly reinscribed the very forms of absence that they sought to counter. Halwani admits to having an “unhealthy” relation to images of the missing, having spent much of his childhood surrounded by the photographic archive of abducted persons that his mother, Wadad, had amassed since estab102 

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Figure 3.3. A poster showing portraits of missing Lebanese people hangs in front of a tent erected by their relatives at the entrance of the United Nations headquarters in downtown Beirut on October 13, 2011. The seven-­month-­old revolt in neighboring Syria had given hope to Lebanese families trying to find out what happened to thousands of loved ones who disappeared during their country’s civil war, who are believed dead or held in Syrian jails. (Photo by Joseph Eid / AFP / Getty Images)

lishing the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared in 1982: “There are very few days when something relating to the missing does not show up in my life. It’s a constant presence: the archive [of photographs of the disappeared] was built in our house, and we had to live with this material for years. My mother used to ask us to sort the photographs into alphabetical order. It was quite awkward to have this material in the family home. It was like having a piece of furniture that didn’t belong in the house.”23 When he initially confronted the umam poster in 2008, Halwani took his pencil and tried to heal the missing parts of the image, tracing within the damaged image what he remembered of his father’s appearance. Realizing that he could not correct all of the posters in the street, he walked away. However, seven years later, he resolved to find the photograph of his father again, even though now the original poster lay concealed under a thick layer L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 103

of images that had been plastered on top of it in the intervening period. The artist describes the slow and careful labor of unearthing the poster as a form of urban excavation. As the first faces on the poster began to appear, they were unrecognizable after seven years of weathering, completely decomposed. Here on the walls, then, was a visual echo of the probable mass graves that lay beneath the streets: commingled bones that are unrecognizable and indistinguishable from one another. Halwani worked to find isolated distinguishing traits, and when he was able to determine fully the identity of a particular subject, he drew in the person’s features and listed his date of birth and date and place of disappearance (figure 3.4). The choice of an archaeological metaphor is far from accidental. During the same period, Halwani was involved in a series of workshops with forensic experts from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The workshops were designed to explore the existing capacity for forensic investigations in Lebanon, including the creation of a follow-­up committee to raise social awareness and political lobbying for forensic investigations

Figure 3.4. Ghassan Halwani, We’ve Got Visitors Coming Over IMG_0070, 2013. (© Ghassan Halwani, courtesy of the artist)

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of disappearances from the civil wars, establishing technical procedures for building dna and antemortem/postmortem databases, and the potential for a multidisciplinary approach to locating and excavating suspected mass grave sites. For Halwani, the exposure to methods of forensic investigation necessitated a decisive shift in perspective, as he realized he was no longer searching for a missing person (a family member who was recognizable) but for bodies or human remains. However, this forensic turn was not entirely free of the contradictions and doubts that form the focus of this chapter: the intangible terrain of human testimony. On the one hand, the prospect of political activism committed to technological and scientific investigation would seem to offer a material practice for extracting individuals from the messy physical or political ground in which they were embedded. Individual testimonies, recorded not in speech but in the material residue of bone, were indeed useful in bringing histories of violence to the surface and establishing a concrete link between the sign (the missing) and the referent (bodies in the ground)—links that would seem to offer closure for the families of the missing. Indeed, the forensic identification of individuals was premised on a certain detachment from a direct and intensely personal experience of loss. On the other hand, while exhibitions like umam’s Missing worked to personify and humanize the victims of violence, this work was often framed by ngos as external to the actual investigative work of human rights researchers. What was missing was precisely a framework for connecting aesthetic practices, political activism, and the scientific-­legal field of forensics. In Lebanon, as noted above, there are still no official legal mechanisms in place for investigating suspected mass grave sites. Successive governments have resisted all attempts to identify or exhume possible burial sites across the Lebanese territory. The growth of unregulated construction sites has given unscrupulous developers license to cover up evidence of the hidden mass graves scattered across the city. The head of act for the Disappeared, a Beirut-­based agency set up to help learn the fate of the missing, postulates that “remains are being reburied under new buildings or even thrown into the sea.”24 If this burial of the past serves to protect former warlords who now form the core of the Lebanese political establishment, it also has the effect of inciting speculation around suspected mass graves. Faced with the interment of history, Halwani set about applying the techniques of forensic L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 105

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analysis not on the bodies of the missing (as he was trained to do in the workshops), but on the decayGot Visitors Coming Over ing images that had come to stand in for them in IMG_0022, 2013. their absence. Working as a type of urban archae(© Ghassan Halwani, ologist, the artist unearthed the identity photocourtesy of the artist) graphs that lay buried in damaged posters of the disappeared. In carefully peeling back each stratum, Halwani works against the additive tendencies of affichage—where, as posters are plastered on top of one another, the previous layers are covered, never to be seen again. Reversing this process, Halwani reveals the time-­ravaged images of the missing who lay buried just beneath the surface of the city’s walls.25 In a sense, this gesture accords with the imperatives of forensic investigations: to produce figurations by extracting an individual from the messy physical ground in which he or she is embedded (figure 3.5). However, while forensics strives to draw absolute boundaries around its objects of inquiry, Halwani’s drawings operate precisely at the threshold of visibility. These works thus configure the mediated bodies of the missing (both above and below the ground) not as an alternative to the layers of obfuscating messages and attempts at denial but as part of the same ground. This issue of the absent referent—and of bodies mediated through images—becomes doubly significant in Hadjithomas and Joreige’s Lasting Images (2003), a work that deals with the disappearance of people in a literal sense and their vestigial presence in images that are themselves on the verge of vanishing. In March 2001, Hadjithomas and Joreige discovered a reel of Super 8 film stock that belonged to the latter’s kidnapped uncle, Alfred Junior Kattenah. The home movie was discovered by the artists packed in a padded yellow Kodak envelope, waiting to be sent to the laboratory for development. For more than a year, the artists considered whether or not to take the risk of developing the film, fearing perhaps that the images might reveal nothing or perhaps too much, potentially forcing Joreige to confront a past that been put in brackets since his uncle’s disappearance. Once developed, however, the washed-­out footage offered only the faint traces of a few figures. After altering the tonal values, a few fleeting images also became visible: “A shadow, a hand can be seen, a boat, the port of Beirut, the roof of a house, a group of three persons, soon joined by a fourth.”26 Shot at the outset of the war, the subjects appear carefree, seemingly opposite | Figure 3.5.

Ghassan Halwani, We’ve

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oblivious to the catastrophe that would beset the nation in the ensuing years (figure 3.6). Indeed, the only possible evidence of the war in the photographs is their obvious age: the cracks and absences in the developed images speak both to the passing of time and to the irrevocable fissures between a pre- and postwar Beirut. On one level, the vanishing images of Uncle Junior in the photographs signify metonymically for the thousands of other men of his generation who were kidnapped during the civil war. Yet Lasting Images suggests that these fleeting images remain entangled or indeed enclosed within a family archive that resists reinscription into a larger collective narrative. Moreover, the images of Uncle Junior—the back of his head, his face in profile—are distinct from the full frontal photographs that stand in for missing people in an exhibition like that at umam. Full frontal photographs act as official identificatory documents: the legacy of a photographic history in which records of criminals’ faces aided in legal conviction or forensic identification. In this way, a full frontal photograph comes to stand in for a missing person. Yet far from offering a realization of loss, these images also function to deny the subject’s absence. In fixing an image of the past, these photographs operate as a kind of fetish image, pointing to the very lack that they seek to disavow.27 While they register loss, the photographs of Uncle Junior do not signify a definitive absence. Rather, the production and display of this work suggests something more undecidable than what Roland Barthes describes as a “flat death,” a condition that, as Liz Wells notes, “both exposes that which has been and precedes [the] actual death” of the photographed subject.28 Arranged in a grid of 4,500 stills taken from the Super 8 stock, 180 Seconds of Lasting Images (2006) corresponds instead to what Georges Didi-­Huberman calls the “disappearance-­image.” Here Didi-­Huberman has in mind those images that “bear witness to a disappearance while simultaneously resisting it.”29 Such an image is “neither full presence, nor absolute absence” but opens up something between these two states. Many of the images in 180 Seconds are almost entirely blank, with only the hint of a body at their center (figure 3.7). Reading across the top line, figures slowly come into greater definition. In this way, the work provides not so much a fully realized image as the process of chemical development itself, the suspended state in which we are left waiting for the images to surface. The images of Uncle Junior that are visible further emphasize this state of suspension. In approximately half 108 

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Figure 3.6. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from Lasting Images, 2003. Video installation, variable dimensions, 3 minutes. (© Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, courtesy of the artists)

Figure 3.7. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, 180 Seconds of Lasting Images, 2006. Lambda photo print on paper, wood, Velcro strip, 408 × 268 cm, 4,500 photograms, 4 × 6 cm each. (© Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, courtesy of the artists)

of the legible stills, he stands with his back to the viewer, either embracing or standing very near a female friend or relative; in the other half, we see him in profile, moving away from the woman (whose face we see much more clearly). While these images did not in their original form have anything to do with Uncle Junior’s disappearance, they seem here to foreshadow it. Uncle Junior is permanently moving away from the center and away from his loved one, who is then perpetually looking in his direction: a structure that seems replicated in the suspended ontological state of the missing. Just as the images seem never quite developed, Uncle Junior has never quite disappeared. Under Lebanese law, as noted above, a person “whose whereabouts are unknown and of whom no one knows whether he is dead or alive” can be declared deceased four years after his or her disappearance.30 The law places the burden on the family of the missing since it is they, rather than the state, who must request a hearing on the matter. Yet in the absence of any evidence, can such a ruling provide real closure for the relatives of the missing? By the same token, do the kin of the missing have an obligation to wait for the return of someone who will most likely never come back? In the absence of truth or justice, those who are left behind are also locked into a purgatory of endless waiting—waiting for some closure on the fate of their missing loved one.

A Perfect Day This ethical-­legal dilemma lies at the heart of Joreige and Hadjithomas’s film A Perfect Day (2005).31 The narrative of the film centers on the strained relationship between a mother, Claudia, and her son Malek. Both are haunted by the unexplained disappearance of Malek’s father fifteen years earlier. At the beginning of the film, Claudia appears to rush Malek into signing papers that would declare her husband legally dead. However, before the declaration is finalized, the two must provide their lawyer with newspaper announcements attesting to the man’s disappearance. As the day pro­gresses, it becomes apparent that Claudia is not ready to close this chapter even if it means putting her own life perpetually on hold. This is expressed in an anxious monologue that she delivers next to the sleeping Malek at the beginning of the film: “Let’s not go, OK? I’ve thought about it all night. It doesn’t feel right. . . . If he 110 

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comes back tomorrow, what would he say? Tomorrow or the day after. If he ever came back and asked us, ‘Why didn’t you wait longer for me? Why did you stop waiting?,’ what could we say?” In the monologue to her sleeping son, it is the mother who wants to postpone the appointment with the lawyer and thus defer the moment when she must declare her husband dead, legally if not symbolically (if indeed such a distinction can be made in this case). However, when Malek wakes up, it is Claudia who insists that they should go and sign the papers. There is a split then between her outward insistence on closing the chapter on the past and her inner desire to hold on to the hope that her missing husband might still return. Over the course of the film, we find out that this is not the first time Claudia and Malek have decided to make the appointment before changing their minds. On this occasion, however, they go through with the meeting. Before he asks them to sign, the lawyer reads out the document: “I, Claudia Abou Nassif, wife of the missing person, and Malek Hanna Abou Nassif, the only son of the missing person, ask the court, in the absence of a corpse, to declare by judgment the death of the missing kin, Riyad Hanna Abou Nassif, kidnapped on April 22, 1988, and considered to be missing ever since.” While the wording of the agreement suggests a final reckoning with the past, it nonetheless contains a provision stating that if Riyad returns within five years of the declaration of his death, he is entitled to recover his entire estate from his heirs. When the lawyer asks that they pre­sent articles in local newspapers as proof of Riyad’s disappearance, we find out that Claudia has forgotten the papers, thus again forestalling the legal ratification of her husband’s death. In an ensuing scene, Malek goes to retrieve the newspaper articles that his mother had collected after his father’s disappearance. These notices, which are typical of their time, show a picture of the missing person and basic details such as the date and time of his disappearance and the place where he was last seen (figure 3.8). There is an important twist here, however, since the newspapers are kept in a safe located within his father’s old office. The office itself has been left untouched since Riyad’s disappearance, suggesting once again a hypostasized past that threatens to absorb the present in the world inhabited by Malek and Claudia. As the camera slowly pans through the space, we can see the accumulation of dust on Riyad’s desk, a few items placed on the desk (an ashtray, a 1980s-­style rotary phone, and a stapler), L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 111

Figure 3.8. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from A Perfect Day (Yawmon Akhar), 2005. 35 mm film, fiction, 88 minutes. (© Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, courtesy of the artists)

and a corkboard with family photographs, including some of Malek as a child (figure 3.9). The objects on the desk seem as much preserved as they are neglected, transforming this room into something close to an abandoned museum. The photographs also preserve what is otherwise a lost historical present, containing as they do not only family celebrations but also a scene from the port of Beirut, a distinct space of the cosmopolitan city that disappeared during the war and the ensuing reconstruction. Similarly, the teeming greenery outside Riyad’s office alludes to the strange sight that would greet many Beirutis when they rediscovered the devastated downtown area again (figure 3.10). Hadjithomas and Joreige recall visiting the city center just after the war ended: “Things had been frozen in time like statues or strange monuments, and the only sign of life was the vegetation that had sprung up around the abandoned buildings. You would see trees growing out of the third floors of some buildings.”32 Yet unlike the reconstructed downtown area, Riyad’s office does not offer a comfortably nostalgic return to the past. 112 

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Figure 3.9. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from A Perfect Day (Yawmon Akhar), 2005. 35 mm film, fiction, 88 minutes. (© Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, courtesy of the artists)

Figure 3.10. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from A Perfect Day (Yawmon Akhar), 2005. 35 mm film, fiction, 88 minutes. (© Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, courtesy of the artists)

Rather, standing in this room, Malek finds himself inhabiting a suffocating and immobilized present that can never really become past. This office might also be likened to the scene of a crime, suggesting a space where things are kept untouched until the investigation has been completed. This allusion is supported by the sight of the pistol that Malek pulls out of the safe along with the newspaper articles. In narrative cinema, the appearance of a gun most often points toward its eventual violent use, but here the weapon indexes a drama that has more to do with the influx of arms into the domestic sphere during the Lebanese wars: “A lot of people had guns during the civil war. We can say that almost all our fathers had guns. So it’s not something totally abnormal or exceptional, but at the same time, it is totally exceptional. This is a latent threat that we wanted to register. If you decide to buy a weapon, that means you have taken into consideration the possibility of using it. Imagine if you discover that I have a weapon in my house: you will look at me in a different way.”33 On one level, Malek’s receipt of the gun casts further uncertainty on Riyad’s disappearance. At the very least, the appearance of the weapon leads viewers to ask whether the father was in danger or was himself a threat. On another level, the gun might be seen as symbolizing a legacy of inherited violence that is linked to the absence of paternal figures and the anomie of the post–­civil war generation. As Malek locks up the safe, having tucked the gun underneath his shirt, he looks out to see his uncle watering the garden. For a second, the two exchange gazes but nothing is said between them. This is a highly ambiguous moment, leaving us with the suspicion that Malek’s uncle may have had something to do with Riyad’s death. Indeed, Claudia’s decision to stay in the car while Malek retrieves the articles leads us to speculate on the possibility that Malek’s uncle may have even been having an affair with Claudia and that this secret may be linked to the mystery of Riyad’s disappearance. The strained relation between Claudia and Malek is thus bound up with an underlying Oedipal drama relating to the possible murder of the patriarch. In the car on the way back to the apartment, Claudia anxiously asks her son, “Do we have to tell people? Do we have to accept condolences?” “He disappeared fifteen years ago,” Malek replies, suggesting that the time has long since passed for a meaningful grieving process. “What does it matter?” Claudia insists. “We should be in mourning. . . . I don’t know. I don’t know 114 

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if we should mourn him.” From this tense exchange, it becomes clear that the legal declaration of Riyad’s death cannot provide the kind of immediate closure that it might seem to offer on paper. On the contrary, it brings with it an uncertain set of social expectations about how to publicly acknowledge and mourn a death in the absence of a body. While Malek seems to want to kill off the father and forget the past, Claudia obsessively fixates on his ghostly presence in her life: “Sometimes I see him. Sometimes I feel him. You don’t. You don’t see him. You don’t see him. I’m afraid if he ever comes back and he doesn’t find me here, he’ll be mad at me, avenge himself and ask for an explanation. ‘How can I come back if you stopped waiting for me?’” This monologue captures the overwhelming sense of guilt that is felt by the women—and it is most often women who are assigned this role of guardian of memory in the symbolic order—who wait for their missing husbands, brothers, or children.34 One of the most complex issues that arose during the shooting of A Perfect Day had to do with the tenuous relation between the film’s putatively fictional scenario and the real events and locations on which its story is premised. Working with only a modest budget at their disposal, Hadjithomas and Joreige were obliged to adopt a quasi-­documentary strategy of filming in public spaces without the use of any extras. Thus, rather than constructing a self-­contained diegetic reality, the couple sought to create a film that would surreptitiously insert itself into the actually existing spaces inhabited by Beirutis. As the directors explain, some of the shots that appear in the film were “stolen or provoked” without the conscious awareness of the actors themselves.35 This strategy of inserting fiction into reality would have unintended consequences. Following the Lebanese premiere of A Perfect Day, Hadjithomas and Joreige were contacted by a distressed woman named Aida H. Over the phone, the woman accused them of having used the image of her dead husband, Antoine, without her consent. During the making of the film, Hadjithomas and Joreige had intended to use a photograph of an actor to represent the missing father. However, finding a person willing to have his portrait taken for this purpose proved to be a virtually impossible task in a society that, in their words, exhibits “a great deal of superstition about death.”36 After a long and fruitless search, the filmmakers were aided by a member of their production team, who agreed to provide a head shot of a deceased L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 115

relative, Antoine, as a stand-­in for their character. What the assistant had not told them was that before his death, Antoine had divorced her aunt and married Aida H. The second widow’s objection not only had to do with the unauthorized use of the photograph but also with her absolute conviction that her dead husband’s spirit or ghost was now awakened and speaking to her: “Antoine was looking at me and saying: ‘Aida, save me. I don’t know what I’m doing in this film, save me!’”37 In a further twist, the directors found out that Antoine had in fact been murdered and that the case surrounding his death remained unsolved. When the case appeared in the Lebanese courts, the judge wanted to know why the directors had chosen to use Antoine’s photograph and considered adding their film to the file as a piece of evidence in a reopened murder investigation. In an improbable turn of events, the film— conceived as a work of fiction made in response to real history—had been transformed into a legal document. The dispute prompted by the unauthorized reproduction of Antoine’s photograph opens up an important question: What rights do the living have over images of the departed, and how are those rights negotiated among or between survivors? In fact, the question might also be reversed so that we can ask: What claims do the dead make on the survivors? For here we are dealing with images that do not simply capture a fully resolved moment in the past but rather resurrect a dormant history. Hadjithomas and Joreige link this oscillating and ambiguous relation to images that have emerged or resurfaced in the post–­civil war period to the concept of latency. As they understand it: “Latency is the state of what exists in a non-­apparent manner, but which can manifest itself at any given moment. It is the time elapsed between the stimuli and the corresponding response. The latent image is the invisible, yet-­to-­be-­developed image on an impressed surface. The idea is that of the ‘dormant’—slumber, slumbering— like something asleep, which might awake at any moment.”38 Although it does not explicitly draw on a psychoanalytic framework, Hadjithomas and Joreige’s theorization of the latent image evokes Freud’s discussion of latency to describe the belatedness of post-­traumatic experience. Indeed, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud likens the retroactive effect of trauma to a “photographic exposure which can be developed at any interval of time and transformed into a picture.”39 The delay here is crucial, yet it raises the question: At what time and under what conditions can the latent image become manifest within a society traumatized by war? Such a ques116 

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tion might well be asked of the many thousands of images that were taken before or during the Lebanese wars but which remain unprocessed both chemically and psychically. The reappearance of these images could be seen to follow what Jalal Toufic calls the “time of development,” in which the immaterial withdrawal of the photographic referent past the surpassing disaster of the civil war is first registered and then countered.

Here and Perhaps Elsewhere Lamia Joreige’s documentary Here and Perhaps Elsewhere (2003) is also concerned with the problem of giving form to the traces of the missing in the physically and socially fractured urban landscape of post–­civil war Beirut. Yet whereas Halwani sets up a dialogue between the mass-­produced image and the hand-­drawn portrait, and Hadjithomas and Joreige give form to the suspended status of the missing, Lamia Joreige explores the complex interplay between verbal testimony, archival photography, and documentary video. Crucially, the subjects of her video are the communities left behind to testify to the absence (and indeed presence) of the missing. Here and Perhaps Elsewhere documents a journey through the neighborhoods adjoining the Green Line, the demarcation line that once separated East and West Beirut during the civil war period.40 Joreige walks through neighborhoods that were once located on either side of the city, approaches residents, and asks them each the same question: “Do you know anyone who was kidnapped from here during the war?” When Joreige asks the residents if they know anyone who was kidnapped, she is merging two forms of knowledge into the one question: her inquiry is simultaneously one of social familiarity—do you know these people; are you intimate with them?—and epistemological—do you know this story; can you tell me some truth of what happened? It is also, because of its present-­tense verb, a question that brings to the surface the (dis)continuities between an event in the past and the divergent ways in which it might be remembered and told today. One of the strengths of Joreige’s video lies in the fact that it refrains from simply producing a moral judgment of human actions. The artist’s line of questioning is deliberately open ended, leaving addressees free to talk without the threat of having their words used against them. As opposed to the courtroom witness who is compelled to speak the truth, Joreige’s responL A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 117

dents are invited to volunteer their stories or information about the missing. Like the emerging institutions that are engaged with documenting Lebanon’s violent past and opening up a critical debate around its war-­loaded memory, Here and Perhaps Elsewhere might be seen as similarly creating a framework in which processes of truth seeking and mnemonic reflection can be enacted at a local level through site-­specific interventions into urban communities. However, Joreige’s problematization of documentary evidence crucially differs from the campaigns waged by nongovernmental and human rights organizations in Lebanon. Whereas umam’s Missing exhibition focused on portrait snapshots of the disappeared, Joreige draws on photographs of former checkpoints along the Green Line, where some of these individuals and many thousands of others were abducted. The photographs, which are drawn from local newspaper archives, inspire debate among the residents about what the image might be supposed to represent and about whether or not those places have survived into the present. Indeed, many residents struggle to make any connection between their immediate surroundings and the corresponding photographs of those sites taken some two decades earlier. Similarly, Joreige’s question about the fate of the missing invites no clear-­cut answers, eliciting reactions that range from vociferous denial and calculated indifference to boastful admissions by residents who claim to have seen many things but are not prepared to offer specifics. While the uneven and contradictory responses to the artist’s inquiry foreground the uncertain truth status of verbal testimony, the locals’ mostly confused reactions to the archival photographs also serve to unhinge the evidentiary claims of lens-­based media. Although exhibitions such as Missing offer a framework for bridging past and present, for bringing survivors together, and for reinvigorating the kinds of memory cultures that the reconstruction has destroyed, its more or less conventional use of photography to convey loss does not acknowledge the complexity and evidentiary uncertainty that attends to visual documents in the fragmented urban spaces of Beirut. By contrast, Here and Perhaps Elsewhere asks how stories of the missing might be told in a public space, who might tell them, whether or not archival images (such as the photographs the artist shows) might bring them to mind, and, moreover, how a video might be used to create an alternative image of the city that counters the violent

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erasure of memory carried out in the name of reconstruction. Last, Here and Perhaps Elsewhere raises the question of whether the work succeeds not only in rendering visible the lingering sectarian divisions that continue to divide Beirut politically and psycho-­geographically, but also whether this type of urban intervention has the capacity to construct communities of witnessing that cut across these fissures. Known in Lebanon by the less euphemistic term al khutut al tamass, which translates quite literally to mean “lines of confrontation,” the Green Line was a no-­man’s-­land established in 1975, in the first weeks of the war, that followed an essentially north–south trajectory through the city and along the Damascus Road. In the early 1970s, Beirut was already roughly divided into two sectors, each one more or less homogeneous in religious affiliation: Christians on the east side and Muslims on the west. These divisions, however, were far from straightforward. East Beirut housed numerous Christian sects (including Maronite, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Latin, Protestant, Coptic, Assyrian, etc.) as well as enclaves of Muslims. West Beirut was constituted by areas that could be principally considered Sunni, Druze, and Shi’a. Divisions were, moreover, not simply religious; neighborhoods could be classified by their socioeconomic lines, their age or length of establishment, and the political affiliations of their inhabitants. Importantly, while the criteria of spatial differentiation were numerous and varied, they “did not hamper movement between the various areas, and no physical ‘boundary’ existed.”41 This situation changed considerably following the events of December 6, 1975, known as Black Saturday, when Phalangists set up roadblocks on city streets, seized an estimated 350 Muslim civilians, and murdered them, prompting a vicious cycle of retaliation along the city checkpoints. Kidnappings and civilian violence then became an incessant fixture of the war. Indeed, in Joreige’s video, one man instantly connects her question about kidnappings not to more local events, which he evades and does not want to discuss, but to Black Saturday, “remembered as one of the first major events of the Lebanese war.” “Those who didn’t see Black Saturday here,” another man later insists, “haven’t seen a thing. . . . The way they pulled them out from the windows. I swear to God. Through the windows they used to pull them. It was a Saturday. Close to noon, around 10:​30, 11:​00. That’s when

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things went nuts. Hits. Killings. You should have seen how we got away. Thank God!” The man’s staccato phrases speak both to the chaotic sequence of those events and his imperfect recollection in the present. Given its strategic position as a point of containment and circulation between different communities, each with its own sectarian identity and territorial claims, the demarcation line served as a site for many of the kidnappings that took place during the Lebanese civil war. Depending on the nature and intensity of battles occurring elsewhere in the city, commuters of a particular religion or suspected political affiliation were sometimes killed on the spot or kidnapped to be used later as bargaining chips in prisoner swaps between warring militias. The vast majority of those kidnapped were civilians trying to cross from one side to another to accomplish everyday tasks like running errands, buying bread, or visiting family and friends (figure 3.11). Cathy Sultan, an American who moved with her Lebanese husband to the city in 1969, describes it as “a virtual no-­man’s land where identity papers and Fate determined life and death.”42 While most of the physical and military barriers of the Green Line were dismantled in the first few years of reconstruction, the city remains divided in the minds of many of its inhabitants. Many Beirutis, especially those who grew up during the war, still refuse to cross over to the other side. As the geographer Michael F. Davie notes in his analysis of the persistence of geosectarian territories in the Lebanese capital, “Post-­war mental geography still integrates the division of the city, even though the official distinction does not exist. A very clear association is still made between East Beirut, Achrafiyyé and the ‘Christian enclave’; West Beirut is still felt as having a Muslim, Arab and strong ideological identity. Inhabitants from one side still feel apprehensive at crossing to the other side.”43 If, during the civil war, the Green Line was a visible space that violently segmented a city and its economic and social links, since the formal conclusion of that conflict it has been internalized as a space of loss, a void in which civilians disappeared, and about which both militias and the bereaved alike remain conspicuously silent.44 While much critical attention has been given to analyzing the sectarian dimensions of urban narratives in post–­civil war Beirut, I would argue that the focus on religious-­communitarian territorial boundaries overlooks the important ways in which gender and generational relations continue to structure acts of memory transmission in the city.45 The literary theorist Mari120 

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Figure 3.11. Ali Hassan, photograph of militia guarding the Basta/Sodeco checkpoint taken November 13, 1984. (© Ali Hassan, courtesy As-­Safir Archive and Lamia Joreige)

anne Hirsch has proposed the term “postmemory” as a way to account for the tenuous “relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences” that they themselves did not witness or were too young to have understood, but which they nonetheless “remember” by means of the “stories, images, and behaviors” passed down to them.46 The connection of postmemory to the past is thus not actually grounded in firsthand experience but in processes of “imaginative investment, projection, and creation.” Hirsch’s discussion of belated or inherited memory offers a useful framework for thinking about the linkages and discontinuities between generations in Lebanese society today. The notion of the secondary witness complicates the evidential certainties of direct witnessing that are embedded in the legal discourse on missing people. It also invites us to think of positions such as victim, perpetrator, and bystander as shifting and overlapping categories rather than as fixed designations. This becomes particularly important in L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 121

Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, where the precise status of the witness becomes an ongoing and open question. In Joreige’s video, the social dynamics of intergenerational memory are, moreover, enmeshed with questions regarding the gendering of urban and discursive space in post–­civil war Beirut. One of the most pressing questions that runs through the video has to do with Joreige’s alterity, both as a woman and as a nonlocal within the urban communities that she engages on the street. Speaking colloquial Lebanese Arabic in a faintly foreign accent, she is treated by many of the video’s subjects as an outsider.47 Joreige’s presence is at various times read as an intrusion, and her questions are sometimes met with hesitancy and suspicion. One man compares her to the foreign journalists who would come during the war and film on the front line. His memory of those mostly Western journalists—and his recollection that the local men used to “play it up [and] pretend to shoot [so that] they’d take pictures and it would look like it’s real”— leaves open the possibility that the interviewed subjects (or at least some of them) are also staging their stories for Joreige. The artist is, moreover, a young woman who speaks, predominantly, to older male residents of the city. While her gender is never explicitly an issue—only one man refers to her as a young woman, calling her “mademoiselle”—Joreige’s position does parallel the circumstantial mobility that women enjoyed during the war, due both to their lack of direct affiliation with any militia and to the assumption that they needed to continue domestic duties around the city. In her study Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City, the anthropologist Aseel Sawalha offers the not untypical example of a middle-­aged Christian woman, living and working in wartime West Beirut but regularly crossing the demarcation line in order to keep social contact with friends and relatives who had moved to the other side. “‘Whenever I was asked to stop by a militia fighter,’ she recalls, ‘I would look him in the eye and say: Look at my white hair; I am older than your mother!’”48 As Sawalha notes further on, “women became invisible to the militiamen, since they were not viewed as combatants or a potential danger. Thus, women became the protectors of men when they escorted them across militia-­controlled borders. In my own field interviews, the women recalled this phase as empowering, even though their invisibility reminded them yet again of their absence from the political arena.”49 In other words, during the Lebanese wars women enjoyed a certain mobility not available to men, but 122 

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Figure 3.12. Lamia Joreige, still from Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, 2003. Documentary film, 54 minutes. (© Lamia Joreige, courtesy of the artist)

that freedom was itself predicated on their relative exclusion from the public space of appearance. This contradiction is still very much present in Beirut more than a decade after the formal conclusion of the war, except now it is less a question of women’s urban mobility than of asking how and under what conditions their speech might give form to a new politics of communal memory. While Joreige’s own ability to traverse territorial and sectarian boundaries, if in a tenuous way, mirrors the comparative freedom of women to cross the Green Line during the war, her interviews with women also reveal a continued tension between the precarious existence of feminine communities of witnessing and the prevailing presence of patriarchal authority in a city that is never exactly postwar. Indeed, the appearances by women seem to counter the silences of the men, introducing lingering questions about women’s potential roles in communicating buried histories in post–­civil war Lebanon. In the only two moments in Here and Perhaps Elsewhere when women are prominent, they occupy distinct subject positions. In one scene, filmed in a shop, a young woman functions as a guardian of local information. After an elderly man refuses to talk, saying vaguely that “there were so many victims, so many victims,” she interjects to provide concrete information. She offers the name of a young man who was kidnapped and points in the direction of the family home: “[He] was from here,” she insists (figure 3.12). She seems L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 123

to speak freely, unrestrained by the conventions of silence that prevent the elderly man from giving any information to the artist. If this woman offers herself as someone who can act as a custodian of local history, countering the silence and evasions of the men, a second woman suggests that female testimony must remain confined to the private sphere. She will not talk to Joreige until the two women are alone in the former’s upstairs apartment, and even then she puts on her hijāb before beginning her testimony and refuses to disclose the date of her cousin’s abduction out of fear. This second woman seems nearly invisible from the street level, a reiteration of the female silent witnesses we can only just see on an apartment balcony in an earlier scene, observing the conversations on the street below but in no way taking part in them. What does it mean for women to speak only by virtue of their silencing and invisibility? More precisely, Joreige’s video asks us to consider whether the two women in Here and Perhaps Elsewhere mark two mutually reinforcing positions such that the vocal woman is given the power to speak by virtue of the same system that precludes the second woman from doing so.50 What would it mean, the video asks, for the tensions over female presences during the war to persist into the post–­civil war period, and how does that tension necessarily impact on the politics of public memory in Lebanon today? Here and Perhaps Elsewhere poses a similar question in regard to the varying ages of the people interviewed by Joreige. The subjects who respond to her question seem to fall into one of three generational categories. The most elderly men in the video, those who may have lost children during the war, are understandably the most unwilling to speak (figure 3.13). While some refuse point-­blank to provide any information—one man vigorously shakes his head and repeatedly says, “I don’t know”—others provide vague and unassertive responses. “I don’t remember,” one very aged man tells Joreige. “I don’t remember. I forget a lot.” Those subjects most likely to speak, on the other hand, are primarily middle-­aged men, some of whom we suspect may well have been participants in the militias during the war; they provide the artist with specific details, including names and locations, of people who went missing during the war. One man even relates his own kidnapping: “In fact, it happened to me once,” he tells Joreige. “I got to the checkpoint. He said, ‘The papers for the pick-­up [truck].’ So, I gave him the papers. This other guy jumps out and 124 

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Figure 3.13. Lamia Joreige, still from Here and Perhaps Elsewhere, 2003. Documentary film, 54 minutes. (© Lamia Joreige, courtesy of the artist)

says, ‘Welcome!’ And I say, ‘What [do you mean] welcome?’ He took the papers from me and the phone calls started.” These men seem, in a crucial sense, to relive the events of the war in their retellings of it. The final category of subjects are those who are too young to remember the war; they laugh at the artist, treat her questions as a game, and play no serious part in the questioning. If the older generation seems emotionally scarred and physically ravaged by the war, and if the younger generation remains willfully oblivious to its living history, Here and Perhaps Elsewhere asks us to consider how the artist’s middle generation might serve as a crucial link between these two positions. The gender and generational lines in Joreige’s film pose questions, then, about the circulation and perpetuation of memory and dialogue around the topic of the missing. In his essay “A Matter of Words,” the Lebanese artist and writer Walid Sadek argues that critical art practices in Beirut must in fact contend with the circuitous complexity of a city where intention is preceded and overlapped by the “murderous roaming” of political speech and rumor: “Living in Beirut seems to place, increasingly, certain demands on artists to acknowledge first the inevitability of the floating sign both as a condition and as a prerequisite for any consequent critical activity. Such demands invite art to flirt with a certain understanding of rumors and thus to reconsider the conditions which govern and even promote an art practice based on the politics of protest. And if this reconsideration runs the risk of betraying L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 125

some of the assumptions of such an art, it does so in order to re-­assess the challenges of language use in an urban environment.”51 Significantly for our purposes here, Sadek connects rumor to the urban environment of Beirut, a city in which different social groups rub up against each other and where “friction is always explosively at hand,” even in times of declared peace. Here, rumor severely complicates a socially engaged aesthetics or politics, such as that of umam, that is based on the authorization of focused statements made in a preconceived mode of address—targeting specific groups and individuals. Rather than positing rumor as a simple corruption of truth, Sadek calls for art that is willing to embrace the diversions and deviations of language. The issue at stake here is whether such a demand risks also stripping art of its ability to counter the politically disabling effects of rumor. Certainly, Here and Perhaps Elsewhere draws attention to the ways in which language roams, existing not as predictable responses to preconceived questions, as we have seen, but as digressive stories that are engendered and conditioned by their circulation within the urban milieus of post–­civil war Beirut. Joreige’s video is undeniably composed of numerous unsubstantiated claims—no material evidence is offered to verify any of the stories, and no one claims to have witnessed a kidnapping firsthand (aside from the man who claims to have been kidnapped himself)—that lead the artist’s investigations astray and frustrate any search for final answers or conclusive evidence. In one extended scene, for instance, a middle-­aged resident tells the story of a man named Arzouni who “disappeared at Sabra and Shatila. Bad luck, he happened to be in that area, and disappeared. They never found out. Dead, alive, no one knows.” After concluding his version of the story for the artist, he yells out to a group of men standing on a balcony across the street, urging them to “come down and get interviewed.” The man encourages the group repeatedly, suggesting that the stories they tell will have a life beyond their immediate telling in the neighborhood: “This is a documentary film. They’ll show it abroad and in cinemas outside Lebanon. After a while, it will be brought back here, like they did with the ‘Lebanese War’ series.” The man invites the circulation of rumor, beginning with his own acknowledgment that “no one knows” the real story before he persuades other men to share their (equally unverified) versions of the unknown and unwitnessed event. The scene in which he appears seems to suggest that the histories of the kid126 

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napped, and the ways in which they are remembered, are nothing more than empty, endlessly fluctuating rumors. Yet, in the next scene, another seemingly older man refutes the premise of this rumor. In response to Joreige’s questions about the story of Arzouni, he replies, “Arzouni? No, he wasn’t kidnapped. Who told you this? They just want to talk for the sake of talking.” It would seem, then, that testimonies gathered in Here and Perhaps Elsewhere can offer no final or conclusive truths: as one man asserts in response to the artist’s question, “There’s no reason to re­cord them, because they may be true; they may not. And they won’t give you the answer you’re looking for.” Pointing to these instances of denial and indeterminacy, T. J. Demos draws the following conclusion: “A nagging paradox, however, follows from Joreige’s contention that comprehension depends on the awareness that our relationship to the past—or to historical ‘facts’—is uncertain at best. And, in fact, her video’s testimonials belie the transparency of documentary evidence.”52 In similar terms, Sarah Rogers suggests that we can see Joreige’s video as a type of “ghost hunt” in which “neither concrete details nor the responses provide a conclusion, despite the persistent desire of those filmed to name the missing and locate the photographic past.”53 This uncertainty over the reliability of verbal testimony is doubled in the repeated undermining of photographic evidence that we see in the video. Joreige asks residents to draw a connection between the ghostly city pictured in the black-­and-­white archival photographs that she has sourced from newspapers and the location in which they are presently standing (figures 3.14 and 3.15). In this respect, Joreige’s video seems to build on the supposition that photography can serve in the recovery of memory and stimulate acts of spatial recollection. In actuality, the exercise only serves to foreground the collective amnesia and disorientation produced by postwar urban reconstruction. As the critic Kaelen Wilson-­Goldie points out, “Time and time again, the interview subjects in Here and Perhaps Elsewhere look down at the checkpoint photographs and up at the surrounding city with expressions of confusion.”54 However, this conclusion ends by reaffirming the erasure of memory and the seeming lack of historical evidence threading these eyewitnesses to the absent or missing bodies mentioned in the video. In the process, this line of analysis highlights the repressive power of state-­ sponsored amnesia and the inability of documentary evidence to counter it, at the expense, perhaps, of the still-­missing bodies. Indeed, the photographs L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 127

Figure 3.14. Abbas Salman, photograph of the Ring checkpoint taken December 5, 1990. (© Abbas Salman, courtesy As-­Safir Archive and Lamia Joreige)

Figure 3.15. Abbas Salman, photograph of Mathaf-­Barbir passage point, July 4, 1989. (© Abbas Salman, courtesy As-­Safir Archive and Lamia Joreige)

of a desolate city seemingly abandoned by its inhabitants risk reinscribing the absence they mean to counter. The problem, then, lies not simply in the residents’ failure to recognize the city but in the very choice of photographs used to locate the checkpoints. Joreige’s impulse to question photography’s capacity to testify or bear witness to the real certainly accords with the “mistrust of the images as a reliable document of history” more generally associated with Beirut-­based artistic practices of the post–­civil war era.55 This troubling of documentary certainty serves as an important counter to the reification of the photographic portrait in the arena of human rights. At the same time, such a view deprives us of an opportunity to examine how an image of absence can be challenged through the efforts to narrate the past within the arena configured by the overlap of archival photography, documentary video, and urban space. Such acts are not capable of fully reconstituting the past, but they may allow us to grasp the outlines of a political agency that is otherwise foreclosed in the fixation on images of absence. Certainly, I would agree that Here and Perhaps Elsewhere repeatedly calls into question conventional models of documentary truth, but its significance as a work of art does not simply consist of its dramatization of the impossibility of firmly establishing the facts of the past, as this line of investigation suggests. What is continually registered in the video is not merely the inevitable failure of any search for final truth, but also the instances of truth that emerge paradoxically in the very moments when language’s referential capacities seem to break down. If an excess of language carries with it the danger of documentary uncertainty, then it also shapes the potential to think more deeply about what divisions, particularly those of gender and age, exceed the visual markers of geography that have so long dominated any discussion of wartime Beirut and social movements around and across the Green Line. What Here and Perhaps Elsewhere ultimately asks, I would argue, is that we consider how and through what media both women and distinct generations of individuals will gain the power to speak about a disavowed past and, just as importantly, what forms that speech will come to take. Seen through the lens of recent theoretical debates about the cultural politics of memory in postconflict settings, Here and Perhaps Elsewhere raises questions about the artists’ undeclared role in unearthing and retelling traumatic histories that they themselves did not directly experience but which L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S 129

nonetheless shape their psychic formation as subjects. For comparative literary critic Andreas Huyssen, this is the “secondary trauma” of a second generation who grow up in the immediate aftermath of a historical catastrophe. Their memory is “always already mediated through literature, images and representations,” producing not testimony but “a reinscription of the [inherited] trauma by means of quotation.”56 Indeed, all of the artists discussed in this book have a personal attachment to the histories that they creatively probe, which complicates their status as critically detached witnesses or documentarians. In Joreige’s case, the thread that ties her to the past is only made partially clear toward the end of the video, when an elderly couple in a store relate the story of an acquaintance’s disappearance from the neighborhood nearly two decades earlier. In the moments that follow, it is revealed that this man, Alfred Junior Kattaneh, who was kidnapped during the war, is the artist’s missing uncle—and the same man featured in Hadjithomas and Joreige’s works above. This startling revelation is made all the more unsettling precisely by the seemingly casual and incidental manner in which it is relayed. It is only in retrospect that we realize that Alfred Junior’s disappearance is the object-­cause that sets in motion the artist’s search for stories of the disappeared.

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S U S P E N D E D S P A C E S

FOUR

The Void and the Monument in Post–­Civil War Beirut

In chapter 3, I examined how the government’s inhibitive response to the fate of the missing points to the persistence of a state-­sponsored culture of amnesia in post–­civil war Lebanon. This whitewashing of the past has also been reinforced on an urban level through the systematic destruction of the traces of war during the controversial reconstruction of the Beirut city center in the 1990s. While transitional governments in Argentina, Chile, and South Africa have constructed sites in which citizens are invited to recollect and collectively work through a recent history of violence, the Lebanese capital is notable for its total absence of any monuments or memorials dedicated to the victims of the civil wars. Artists have sought to counter the erasure of memory spaces by taking images of the missing out of family archives and ngo lobbies and putting them into direct dialogue with communities of witnessing embedded within the post–­civil war city. Here, the documentary snapshot is seen as belonging to a network of social relations that are mediated by the palimpsest of urban space in which the present experience of the city “merge[s] in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses and heterotopias.”1 Both Lamia Joreige and Halwani use images in city space to invoke the memory of subjects who have been largely effaced from the public sphere. Their work calls for a civic engagement with images that counters both the violent erasure of urban memory in post–­civil war Beirut and its confinement to spaces that are circumscribed by communitarian loyalties. There is an autocritical dimension to this reinscription of photography: while they

do not believe that documentary images can in and of themselves produce political visibility for the missing or bring back the dead, they share Ariella Azoulay’s belief that photography creates communities of witnessing situated against and in response to the violence of the state.2 In this chapter, I want to more fully consider how geography, architecture, and popular memory intersect today in the Lebanese capital. This entails moving from an analysis of images in the city to a consideration of the city itself as a set of images that are internalized by subjects in acts of psychogeographical mapping.3 While most discussions of contemporary Beirut focus on the dynamics of spatial disorientation and amnesia in the post–­civil war period, I want to shift the focus to consider how architecture and urbanism in Beirut might be read as material witnesses to the traumatic past. The buildings and spaces that I analyze in this chapter do not show obvious signs of destruction and war. Indeed, they appear largely undamaged or, in some cases, fully restored. Yet there is a strange and unsettling vacancy to these sites that resists reintegration into the city’s social fabric. In these unfinished, deserted, and ruined parts of the city, architecture takes on ghostly qualities wherein the specter of death and disappearance is translated into spatial indeterminacy. Accordingly, this chapter draws a link between three seemingly different spaces in postwar Beirut: the abandoned high-­rise buildings (symbols of Lebanon’s prewar status as the banking and touristic center for the region), which have remained untouched since the conclusion of the civil war; the reconstructed city center, which is based on a pastiche of the colonial architecture of the French Mandate period (1923–46); and b018, a subterranean nightclub located in the Karantina, the scene of an infamous massacre carried out by a Lebanese Christian militia in 1976. Hollowed out and abandoned or, in the case of the downtown, rebuilt on posthistorical grounds, these sites remain spatially and temporally disconnected from their urban environment. In these sites, violence is not registered in the physical traces of war but in the (largely symbolic) voiding of the spaces that occurs in the aftermath of a conflict. As Gary McDonogh has argued, “empty spaces suggest conflict,” even though they may appear vacant or neutralized.4 Far from offering a tabula rasa, I argue that emptiness in Beirut marks a determinate absence in the urban landscape that resists rehabilitation. Here the concept of post-­traumatic urbanism offers a productive framework to think not only about the physical destruction of a city but also about the less visible disrup132 

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tion of the spatial practices embedded within it.5 Implicit in this is the claim that damage inflicted on the built environment and infrastructure of a city can exercise devastating effects well beyond the time and place of immediate impact. Accordingly, I look to theories of architecture that question the presuppositions underpinning practices of restoration and reconstruction. Recognizing that architecture does not heal trauma but is often complicit with its production, this chapter asks how we might rethink conventional discourses on “wounded cities” and urban recovery.6 In this chapter, I interpret Beirut’s voided spaces as revenant sites. More than simply evidencing a failure in planning or design, I argue that these spaces might be read as loci suspecti, places haunted by the specter of the dead bodies entombed in them. In these sites, the will of the political establishment to bury or erase a history of violence under the guise of urban redevelopment finds its limit in the architectural unconscious of the post–­civil war metropolis.7 In Beirut, then, lived memory of traumatic events is embodied not in official landmarks and monuments but in the voids that signal their very absence. Indeed, I argue that if buildings like Burj el-­Murr or b018 can be reappropriated as memory spaces, it is precisely because they do not conform to the traditional protocols of the monument, namely, to produce symbols that serve either to console viewers or redeem tragic events.8 As opposed to the unifying gestures of official memorial sites, these alter-­ monuments materialize a rupture in history, embodying the nation’s conflicting conceptions of itself and its unfinished past. If these projects suggest that Beirut’s dormant spaces and buried memories can be reactivated, that ambition is complicated by their implicit recognition that “the construction of a contemporary architecture has to remain distinct from the history that it shelters.”9 It is difficult to imagine today what it would have felt like for Beirut’s residents to reenter the destroyed center of their city after fifteen years of war. For most of this period, the central district was taken over by rival militias who sought to gain control of the financial, commercial, and administrative hub of the country. What had once served as a site of interconfessional exchange and coexistence over time became a symbol of the breakdown of that social structure. Many of the photographs of the downtown area taken in the immediate aftermath of the signing of the Ta’if Accord on October 22, 1989, the treaty signaling the official end of the Lebanese civil war, capture a S U S P E N D E D S P A C E S 133

Figure 4.1. The opening of the Green Line in downtown Beirut, Lebanon, December 23, 1990. (Photo by Marc Deville / Gammo-­Rapho via Getty Images)

ruinous space that bears little resemblance to the city that remained frozen in the minds of its residents. Figure 4.1 is an image by Marc Deville taken on December 23, 1990, in the first days of the opening of the so-­called Green Line, the three-­mile battle zone cutting through the center of the city, dividing predominantly Muslim West Beirut from Christian East Beirut. The cars and people that had once populated these streets have been replaced by vegetation. Scarred with innumerable bullet holes and disfigured by years of shelling, the buildings that remain standing now appear as grotesque ruins. This disconnection between past and present would become even starker with the official advent of the reconstruction. Beginning in the summer of 1994, Lebanon embarked on the largest privately financed postwar urban reconstruction project in recorded history. Carried out under the aegis of Solidere, this rebuilding was premised on the demolition of large sections of the old city—including some of the area’s most significant surviving buildings and souks—to make way for new construction modeled on the architecture of the prewar Mandate period.10 134 

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Figure 4.2. Saree Makdisi, Martyrs’ Square, Beirut, facing north. The Solidere poster in the background presents an image of what this space is supposed to look like after reconstruction. (© Saree Makdisi, courtesy of the photographer)

“There is nothing but emptiness, punctuated by sparse islands,” writes Jad Tabet, one of the leading architectural critics of the reconstruction period. “It is a desert, where a few preserved monuments float.”11 Saree Makdisi offers an equally stark description of this space: “The very center of Beirut is today a wasteland. For thousands of square meters extending from Martyrs’ Square little remains of the heart of this ancient city. Several adjoining areas are made up of a patchwork of buildings slated for recuperation and of naked sites where buildings or souks—long since bulldozed or demolished—once stood.”12 This unsettling image of the city center as a void is echoed by the novelist Elias Khoury, who describes the area as “an empty space, a placeless space, and a hole in the memory.”13 It is not the civil war that is primarily responsible for the large-­scale destruction of Beirut’s heritage and memory but the “huge machine that is reconstructing and regenerating the city,” razing old neighborhoods and “tossing the rubble of the old city into the sea” (figure 4.2).14 Khoury again ruminates on the destruction of the downtown in his novel Broken Mirrors / Sinalcol (2012). In one of its most memorable scenes, an arS U S P E N D E D S P A C E S 135

chitect named Ahmad Dakiz, who heads the demolition unit of Solidere, is playing with a computer program that allows him to demolish large sections of the city center with the press of a button on his keyboard. With great pleasure, the architect blows up historic cafés, squares, and cinemas. One of the onlookers, Karim, a doctor who has returned to Lebanon after a long period of exile in France, watches in horror: “This is insane! What kind of person demolishes his memory?” he asks as Dakiz brings down another building.15 But the architect is unmoved: “This is a country without a memory,” he says. “Everything today is an optical illusion,” including “the whole of Lebanon.”16 This scene plays into the myth of digital technology as a mode of dematerialization. As the demolitions were taking place, Solidere was using computer-­ generated images to visualize the completed reconstruction in its promotional literature. Ayman Trawi’s Beirut’s Memory, a publication composed largely of glossy photographs of the city before and after reconstruction, features a hologram on its cover.17 In one image, we see the bombed-­out Place d’Etoile, with snipers’ barricades, piles of rubble in the corner, and windows missing from the buildings. The city is an empty shell, a ghostly apparition without people. Tilt the book slightly and a new image silently appears: the reconstructed square now includes landscaping, young people with cameras, tourist maps, and fashionable shop fronts. The hologram effaces, of course, the violence of reconstruction and, much like Solidere’s use of photography, conceives of the city as a simulacral space that is organized, above all, according to the logic of spectacle. This is not to say that these images are false, but rather that they play a fundamental role in shaping how the reconstructed city is to be experienced at the most immediate level. However, while the photographs on the book cover invite us to think of the reconstruction as a completed (and irreversible) event, in the hologram the image of destroyed city lingers on as a ghostly apparition. If images are the means through which urban erasure is effected, they are also the prism through which the traces of a ghostly architecture might be found. The critical interventions into urban space that I focus on in this chapter exploit this fundamental instability of representation. The rebuilding of the historical city center was intended to be a showcase of the physical and symbolic recovery of the nation. Here, the state faced three major problems. The first had to do with the difficulty of reclaiming 136 

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a space that had been marked and divided by a violent sectarian conflict. In this regard, some saw this territory as a permanent wound or scar in the city’s heart that could not be healed. The second problem concerned the legal wrangles over the ownership of property in this area.18 In many cases, there were multiple listed owners for each plot. Some owners had emigrated during the war, while others remained missing. This would have made it virtually impossible for Solidere—the joint-­stock company in charge of redeveloping the central business district—to implement a coherent plan. The solution was to expropriate the properties through a decree that erased the plot divisions in the city center. The property owners in the old downtown were given shares in the company rather than financial compensation when their land was essentially seized through eminent domain. In effect, this measure erased the dna of the city center.19 It also placed the downtown district in a state of quasi ­ex-­territoriality, beyond the jurisdiction of the municipality.20 This process overlapped with the mass eviction of families who had been squatting in the war-­damaged buildings in the peripheral zones of the city center, most particularly the former Jewish quarter of the city known as Wadi Abu Jamil.21 The third problem had to with the preservation of buildings in the area. In an effort to quell the public outcry over the destruction of the city’s architectural heritage, Solidere created a committee charged with designating historically valuable buildings in the downtown. Accordingly, plans to preserve 265 buildings and monuments were incorporated into the reconstruction in an effort to “imbue the new city center with symbolic and aesthetic references to the past.”22 Yet here Solidere was faced with yet another dilemma: Which of the city’s multiple and discontinuous pasts would it choose to rebuild? Many of the buildings singled out for restoration dated back to the French Mandate (1923–46). However, as Hashim Sarkis points out, these buildings were of questionable architectural value, particularly when viewed in relation to the city’s precolonial layers (Phoenician, Roman, Mameluk, and Ottoman). Moreover, the colonial-­era buildings had also been significantly altered over time. Solidere’s response was to produce a pastiche of historical styles that merged both real and invented pasts together: “The restored buildings and streets turned out to be over-­decorated with references to a variety of pasts—and sometimes to pasts they never had. Interestingly, the few buildings constructed during this first phase also bore the impact of S U S P E N D E D S P A C E S 137

this historicism and were forced to mimic the preserved buildings, however false.”23 Thus, in the reconstruction of Beirut, urban amnesia did not simply involve the erasure of the traces of war. It was also carried out through a selective cannibalization of the city’s prewar heritage. Solidere exploited the fact that there was no clear consensus about which layers of the past should be preserved. Its strategy of destroying and reconstructing buildings—­ retroactively made to look like they were patiently restored—expressed a nostalgia for a prewar city that never existed. Moreover, the reconstruction of the downtown was premised on the fiction of historical continuity rather than on the radical rupture with the past proposed by the original plan for the downtown. Instead of preserving the traces of war or granting them a symbolic place within the urban imaginary, Solidere and its proponents insisted that the resurrection of the downtown necessitated the death of the old city.24 The hollowing out of this space was thus figured as a kind of autodefense mechanism that would protect the postwar city against the old demons that had earlier provoked its destruction. In actuality, the hasty erasure of the war’s architectural traces would leave the city haunted by the specter of a violent and unprocessed chapter in its history. Ultimately, the reconstruction of the downtown has precluded the more difficult task of transforming the damaged city center into a living memory space that could be reclaimed by different segments of Lebanese society over time. The Lebanese artist and theorist Jalal Toufic describes the preemptive demolition of many of the damaged buildings in the downtown as “a war on the traces of war.”25 For Toufic, this is proof that “the war is continuing” by other means. Yet how might this violent erasure of the war be countered? What would it mean to preserve the traces of war in a nation caught between the understandable desire to forget a divisive and unresolved conflict and the equal need to mourn its victims? Traditionally, a monument “emplots the story of ennobling events, of triumphs over barbarism, and recalls the martyrdom of those who gave their lives in the struggle for national existence.”26 Yet this idea of the monument as a redemptive symbol for national memory becomes problematic when applied to past events that are less than glorious and whose memory induces division instead of consensus. The civil wars in Lebanon formally ended in 1989, but the lack of any clear victor meant that many of the issues underlying the conflict remain unre138 

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solved. “The problem with the civil war was that nobody won,” notes Melhem Chaoul, a professor of sociology at Lebanese University, “and you still can’t write its history because we are still not at peace.”27 Just as reference to the civil war is pointedly absent in high school history curricula, the Lebanese capital is totally lacking in monuments commemorating the darkest chapter in its recent history. The controversial restoration of the shrapnel-­scarred statue in Martyrs’ Square in downtown Beirut (the most obvious location for a civil war memorial) is also evidence of the steps the state has taken to neutralize existing spaces and symbols that could potentially serve as loci for unsanctioned forms of popular memory.28 Created by Italian artist Marino Mazzacurati, and inaugurated by President Fouad Chehab in 1960, this statue was erected in honor of Arab and Leba­ nese nationalists executed on Martyrs’ Square in 1916, at the orders of Ottoman military ruler Jamal Pasha. Throughout the civil wars, the statue became a target of rival militias who fought for control of the surrounding territory. During intermittent periods of peace, the monument was appropriated by Lebanese civilians as a second-­order signifier of the prewar city. In 1996, Prime Minister Rafik al-­Hariri gave orders to have the monument dismantled and repaired. Yet rather than restoring it to its original state, which would have entailed recasting the male figure’s left arm, which had been ripped off in an explosion during the civil war, the decision was made to preserve the bullet holes and shrapnel wounds (figures 4.3 and 4.4). Noting this, the anthropologist Lucia Volk suggests that the restored Martyrs’ Memorial “retained the evidence of civil war violence” while also symbolizing the recovery of the “wounded nation.”29 Yet Volk ignores the fact that the space around the statue has been given over to private interests and, in the process, purged of any associations that could link it to the collective memory of civil war Beirut. Moreover, as Christine Boyer has argued, when juxtaposed against “contemporary contexts controlled by vastly changed circumstances and desires,” the will to restore fragments from the past can often “appear denigrated by nostalgic sentiments that fuel their preservation or reconstruction.”30 Volk also sidesteps the problem of commemorating an event that remains a source of social division and potential conflict. In their analysis of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Robin Wagner-­Pacifici and Barry Schwartz contend that the effort to memorialize a divisive event calls into question the expectation that S U S P E N D E D S P A C E S 139

Figures 4.3–4.4. Martyrs’ Monument in downtown Beirut, May 2013. (© Christie Harner, courtesy of the photographer)

a war memorial can help restore a sense of national unity.31 A war memorial may work to fix a recent event in the past, but it does not always serve to create a unified view of that event. The architecture that I analyze in this chapter resists this static temporality of the traditional monument. In his sculptures, Marwan Rechmaoui uses industrial materials such as concrete, rubber, steel, and glass to create small-­scale replicas of urban landmarks in Beirut. For his work Spectre (2006), Rechmaoui reconstructed a model of the Yacoubian Building, a modern residential complex located in the Caracas neighborhood of Ras Beirut. Like Martyrs’ Square, this building is a relic of a previous age. Built in 1960, it took inspiration from the unfinished concrete aesthetic, hard geometric forms, and repeated modular units associated with brutalist architecture (figure 4.5). In 1955, Lebanon adopted a Swiss-­style banking system as a way of attracting foreign investment. The massive infusion of oil capital into the economy served, among other things, to fuel intensive urban development. In just two decades, during the 1950s and 1960s, the proportion of city residents increased from just over 27 percent to close to 60 percent of the Lebanese population.32 At the same time, the government department in charge of urban planning, known in Lebanon as Tanzim Madiniyeh, introduced a law allowing property holders to claim ownership of individual sections of a building. Before 1959, ownership had been confined to entire land plots. This shift in the conception of property rights entailed the destruction of the petite ville and the dissolution of communal structures based on the inherited primordial loyalties of the mountain and the hinterland. What increasingly came to take its place was a city organized around the anonymity of urban life and accelerated patterns of consumption and entertainment. During the first phase of its existence, the Yacoubian Building was inhabited by an urbanized bourgeois elite that had profited from Lebanon’s burgeoning finance and tourism-­based economy. However, following the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1978, many of the apartments were taken over by refugees fleeing rural poverty and military occupation. Many of these new residents squatted in apartments left vacant by wealthy inhabitants who had chosen to leave the country following the onset of the civil war. Over time, the squatters began to modify the building’s façade and interior, adding colored curtains and gates to signal the boundaries of their property. If these additions violated the modernist principle of formal purity and the elimiS U S P E N D E D S P A C E S 141

nation of unnecessary details, the tenants’ habit of littering common spaces also mocked the technocratic desire for a rational and perfectly ordered city. More than just signaling a clash in cultures, the fate of the Yacoubian Building is symptomatic of widening economic disparities brought about by the massive influx of Arab oil capital into the Lebanese banking system. Seen from this standpoint, the corruption of midcentury modern architecture becomes a critical index through which to analyze the breakdown of the social order in postcolonial Lebanon and the attendant dissolution of civic life. Attentive viewers will no doubt notice that Spectre is not an exact reproduction of the building (figure 4.6). Rechmaoui has emptied out the Yacoubian Building of its interior content. As the artist explains, “In my project I decided to focus on the changes that were made manifest in the exterior of the building. The curtains, air conditioning units, the transformation of the corridors and staircases. I don’t delve into interior spaces or interview the inhabitants. Instead, I read the public behavior of residents as it intersects with the architecture.”33 In a certain sense, this sculpture returns architecture to its prior condition as model. Yet this gesture is not premised on the restitution of a lost or perverted ideal. Rather, the work points to the hollowing out of modernist architecture, both literally and symbolically, as Beirut was progressively transformed into a living laboratory for new forms of urban conflict. The civil war transformed spatial practices, upending the conventional distinction between public and private zones. The layout of apartments in the Yacoubian Building was originally designed to facilitate flow and visual communication between residents. With the prolongation of the war, inhabitants started to fortify their apartments, thus subverting the concept of transparency as a fundamental principle of modern architecture and life. Balconies, doorways, and windows—thresholds for vital interactions with the outside world—became strategic weak points that needed to be bolted and shielded. At the same time, everyday routines were relocated from the living room, balcony, and street to the safest corner of each apartment or home. In many cases, it was a bathroom, corridor, or some other auxiliary space that became the most important point of congregation. The contingency of battles themselves, based on the shifting political landscape, started to reorganize these spaces in unpredictable ways.34 In Monument for the Living (2001), Rechmaoui takes up a related question: 142 

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Figure 4.5. Yacoubian Building in Caracas neighborhood of Ras Beirut, June 2016. (© Christie Harner, courtesy of the photographer)

Figure 4.6. Marwan Rechmaoui, Spectre, installation view, Beirut Exhibition Center, Heartlands, 2015. (© Marwan Rechmaoui, courtesy Sfeir-­Semler Gallery, Beirut)

What happens to modern architecture when it is stripped of its intended function and transformed into a weapon of urban warfare? This work consists of a model replica of the infamous Burj el-­Murr, an unfinished high-­ rise building that stands at the western edge of downtown Beirut between the hotel district and the area known as Hamra (figures 4.7 and 4.8). The building is named after its owner, Michel el-­Murr, a prominent politician and businessman who was aligned with the Phalange militia and Lebanese Forces at various points in the war. Construction on this forty-­story tower commenced in 1974 but was permanently halted following the outbreak of hostilities in the Lebanese capital, when only twenty-­six of its stories had been completed. During the first stages of the civil war, the Murr Tower became a highly coveted site of strategic importance for rival militias. Beginning in 1975–76, gunfights between armed militants spread through Beirut’s once-­famous hotel district, located in the northwest corner of the city center. There, tower blocks, built in the international style, played host to visiting businesspeople, bankers, and tourists. As Sarah Fregonese notes, the new neighborhood was an “emblem of architectural modernism in Beirut” during the postindependence era, symbolizing “Lebanon’s financial growth and Beirut’s transformation from a small coastal town into a Mediterranean metropolis.”35 For Arab leftist militias, the Holiday Inn, the St. George Hotel, and the Phoenicia Hotel were signs of Christian political and economic hegemony, seen as allied with U.S. imperial interests in the region. However, I would argue that these buildings were less important for what they represented at the symbolic level than for their practical importance, as both the terrain and the tools through which war was waged. The fierce battles that took place in this district were fought with heavy exchanges of rocket and artillery fire from various rooftops and rooms. In the space of a few weeks, these hotels were repurposed into concrete fortresses. The Murr Tower was prized not only for its strategic position adjacent to the city center, but also for its height. As the tallest building in Beirut, it offered its occupants a clear vantage point on targets in the hotel district, the downtown, and Achrafieh in the eastern sector of the city. This vertical architecture was particularly receptive to snipers who could gain an aerial position above surrounding streets and buildings while also remaining concealed from enemy forces. During the Hotel Wars, the Murr Tower was occupied by the plo. Later, with the splintering of the pro-­Palestinian Lebanese 144 

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National Movement and the rise of other militias such as Amal and the Progressive Socialist Party, different groups vied for control of it. While many of Beirut’s war-­damaged buildings have been demolished or made to look like they had been left untouched, the Murr Tower remains one of the most visible reminders of a conflict that has never really been resolved or adequately commemorated. Originally intended for both residential and commercial spaces, the tower is unusable today, both because structural defects have been found and because its ceiling heights are too low for municipal codes (el-­Murr had reduced ceiling heights to allow for an additional floor to be built).36 Too tall to knock down and too dense to implode, the unfinished building stands both as a by-­product of the war and as an unintentional monument to it. Although the tower is now ostensibly a civil structure (purchased by Solidere at one point with intentions to develop it), it has been easily remilitarized at intervals after the war: the day after Hariri was assassinated, the Lebanese Army reoccupied the tower. Rechmaoui’s Monument for the Living (2002/2008) is a scaled-­down model of the Murr Tower, made from a single concrete cast: a sculptural technique that borrows from one of the distinguishing features of the building (figures 4.9 and 4.10). In 1974, the tower was constructed using giant concrete molds that cast each level in a single pour. The model is not completely hollow, as vertical slabs can be seen inside, supporting each level. At just over seven and a half feet tall, moreover, Rechmaoui’s work puts the tower into human scale. The effect of the smaller scale is to invite viewers to walk around the sculpture and peer through it—both actions that would be impossible to do with the Murr Tower itself, which remains barricaded and inaccessible to the public. Monument for the Living also plays on the seeming emptiness of the structure. Like the tower, this model is stripped of all ornament, color, and interior detail. It is precisely these reductive qualities that in Anthony Vidler’s assessment bring modernist architecture closer to the condition of the photographed model.37 By employing the same materials as the tower, Rechmaoui’s sculpture further undermines this distinction between referent and sign, which has the effect of foregrounding the uncanny qualities of the abandoned building. The overt sparseness of the sculpture also registers a refusal of the figurative forms favored in the traditional monument. Yet what appears blank and empty is actually weighted with memories of the wartime city. Just as Rechmaoui refuses the redemptive gestures of S U S P E N D E D S P A C E S 145

opposite | Figure 4.7. Burj el-­Murr in the Kantari District of downtown Beirut, June 2015. (© Christie Harner, courtesy of the photographer)

Figure 4.8. Burj el-­Murr in the Kantari District of downtown Beirut, May 2013. (© Christie Harner, courtesy of the photographer)

official monuments, he also eschews the direct representation of violence in favor of an unadorned form that conjures death through absence. Rechmaoui’s sculptures invite us to view buildings such as the Murr Tower as forms of ghostly architecture, monuments to a past that continue to haunt the present and indeed the future of the city. In these works, the gallery or the museum offers some element of protection from a city that is characterized by rampant real estate speculation, the privatization of public spaces, and a volatile political landscape. By contrast, Bernard Khoury’s practice as an architect is premised on a direct confrontation with these urban realities. A vocal critic of the reconstruction of the city center, Khoury is best known in Beirut for buildings—the Yabani restaurant on the former demarcation line, the b018 nightclub in the Karantina, and the Centrale restaurant at the edge of the downtown—that are best described as entertainment projects, pushing the contradictions of Beirut’s urban dynamics, its unique reputation as S U S P E N D E D S P A C E S 147

Figure 4.10. Marwan Rechmaoui, Monument for the Living (detail), 2002/2008. Nonshrinking grout, cast, 230 × 60 × 40 cm, Ed. 5 + 1 ap. (© Marwan Rechmaoui, courtesy Sfeir-­Semler Gallery, Beirut)

Figure 4.9. Marwan Rechmaoui, Monument for the Living, 2002/2008. Nonshrinking grout, cast, 230 × 60 × 40 cm, Ed. 5 + 1 ap. (© Marwan Rechmaoui, courtesy Sfeir-­Semler Gallery, Beirut)

Figure 4.11. Bernard Khoury, Yabani, 2002. (© Bernard Khoury / DW5, courtesy DW5)

hedonistic playground and violent battleground, to its absurd limits (figure 4.11).38 These projects engage with the city’s loaded memory, but they are very different from the commemorative sites that have been constructed in other postconflict cities such as Berlin, Buenos Aires, or Sarajevo. To begin with, they are aimed at pleasure-­seeking consumers who live in the moment rather than an enlightened public that reverentially contemplates the past. Indeed, Khoury’s merging of architecture, entertainment, and traumatic memory challenges models of solemn reflection that are privileged both by traditional monuments and the “counter-­monuments” that forcefully challenge their premises.39 S U S P E N D E D S P A C E S 149

While remaining critical of the “naïve amnesia” that governs the post–­ civil war reconstruction efforts, Khoury says his architecture is designed for a “fraction of a society living in marvelous denial.”40 What could be taken as an inconsistent and cynical position might be better viewed as an attempt to confront difficult social and economic realities without subjecting them to normalizing judgments. As Khoury explains in reference to his decision to work in the private sector, “Beirut is a city that evolved without master planning and in the absence of coherent urban regulation. This tableau confirms the bankruptcy of public institutions, the collapse of the state and the total exhaustion of the national ­project.”41 What meaning or value does the concept of preservation have in a city that willfully obliterates or cannibalizes its past through rampant development? This is the question that underpins Khoury’s earliest experiments in postwar architecture. Evolving Scars, a study in demolition that Khoury put together as an assignment for a studio class with Lebbeus Wood at Harvard, dates from 1991, when the downtown area was still a no-­man’s-­land, and plans for its reconstruction had not yet been settled (figures 4.12–4.14).42 As previously noted, Solidere’s initial proposals were widely opposed by architects who rightly saw them as an attack on the city’s heritage. While some efforts were made to restore historic buildings previously earmarked for demolition, the reconstruction of the city center created the illusion that the war did not take place. As Ghenwa Hayek points out, the reconstruction was premised not only on the physical destruction of the civil war city but also on “the denial that the erasure has even happened.”43 Evolving Scars turns the systematic demolition of war-­torn architecture into “a collective architectural experiment.”44 At the same time, it asks what critical role the discipline of architecture can play within an urbanism defined by rapid and unregulated development. The project calls for a set of temporary transparent skins to be fitted around the outer shell of severely damaged buildings (figure 4.12). As each building is demolished, the remains of the ruin are collected and contained within this membrane or “memory collector,” as Khoury calls it (figure 4.13). The work is completed with the total demolition of the edifice and the corresponding saturation of the memory collector (figure 4.14). Evolving Scars makes visible the largely concealed violence of reconstruction, foregrounding its destructive effects. The

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Figures 4.12–4.14. Bernard Khoury, Evolving Scars, 1991. Installation. (© Bernard Khoury, courtesy DW5)

proposal did not involve projecting the city into a hypothetical future, nor did it propose the erection of lasting physical structures in the city. Evolving Scars was instead an attempt to translate the demolition of buildings into an “ephemeral architectural act” that questioned the precepts of architectural construction, urban reconstruction, and preservation alike.45 b018, an after-­hours nightclub built on the site of a former Palestinian refugee camp and massacre, asks a somewhat different question about what it means to construct (or reconstruct) architectural spaces in the postwar period. Designed by Bernard Khoury Architects, b018 was built in the Karantina district, a site located on the edge of the official boundary of the city of Beirut, near the port, that was originally a place of quarantine for arriving immigrants and crews. In the nineteenth century, newly arrived foreigners were kept in isolation for forty days before being allowed to enter the city. What now largely appears to be a semiderelict space, characterized by its perceptible desolation and depopulation, markedly different from the densely populated neighborhoods that it borders, in fact has a layered history. After its use as a quarantine space for newly arriving immigrants, the area would later house a camp for Armenian refugees following the 1915 genocide. After 1948, the Karantina attracted a second wave of refugees consisting of Palestinians, Kurds, and Syrians. By 1975 it was home to a reported twenty thousand inhabitants living in what are widely regarded as slum conditions. Khoury connects the history of the area to the growing contradictions of Beirut’s development during Lebanon’s so-­called golden period. “As the capital flourished during the 1950s and 60s, the Quarantine [sic] housed this very miserable camp. We tend to neglect the other facets of Beirut when we mention this ‘glorious’ era, perhaps in a will to reinvent our past.”46 In January 1976, Christian militias attacked the area, obliterating the camp, massacring its residents, and demolishing the slums and bordering wall. After the massacre, the refugee camp was razed, leaving only a layer of rubble several meters high. Although the Karantina existed outside the municipal boundaries of Beirut, and outside the realm of citizenship, it in fact embodies the internal fragmentation of the Lebanese polity, which has always been split from within. The significance of the Karantina in the history of Beirut and modern Lebanon therefore has to do with its double identity as a space of refuge and rejection. If the Karantina sheltered the outsider, mirroring the larger historical tendency of Lebanon to take in refugees 152 

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from the wider region, its fate also exemplifies the eventual fragmentation of Lebanese society. As Hazim Saghieh, a journalist interviewed in the film Sector Zero, suggests, “The outsider will first settle in a marginal area and with time certain individuals will gradually join mainstream society. Unfortunately our society does not create a structure for people to blend together. The fragmentation of our society is maintained by disallowing individuals from the margins of society to become part of the mainstream.”47 Crucially, I would argue then that the massacring of the residents in the Karantina— and the subsequent leveling of the camp itself—can be viewed as an attempt to purge the city of an imagined external threat. Because the outside and the inside were so closely linked, the attack on the periphery constituted both an insistence on redrawing those boundaries and another impossible attempt to cleanse the space and quarantine the zone. Today, a highway marks the former site, tracing the line of walls around the refugee camp. Seen from aerial photographs of Beirut, the Karantina appears as a striking void. While the inland part of the city is densely developed, the littoral strip remains sparsely populated and largely industrial in nature (there is a tannery, a defunct slaughterhouse, a garbage-­processing plant, army barracks, and a few other factories). This is a striking reversal of the typical pattern of development that is seen in many other coastal areas of Beirut given over to residential housing. One of the only signal landmarks, the Sleep Comfort furniture plant, was reportedly used during the war as a torture center by the Lebanese Forces Christian militia. Khoury’s commission to design the nightclub in this area, for Nagi Gebran, his cousin and childhood friend who was a club owner and musician, was thus a complicated architectural intervention in a site marked by latent traumas—a site that urban rumors suggested could contain mass graves. Unable to afford to buy a piece of land, Khoury and his backer negotiated lease terms for the plot through a broker for the Maronite Church, which is the largest landowner in Lebanon. As Khoury explains, “Our broker turned out to be someone who was implicated in military operations during the early years of the civil war. In my initial contact with him, he told me: ‘I know the Quarantine like the palm of my hand; I cleaned it up in 1976.’”48 What the story reveals is that the area remains legally and economically entangled with its civil war past. The name b018 itself came from the address of a former music studio in East Beirut. According to Thomas Fitzel, the studio would play loud music during S U S P E N D E D S P A C E S 153

Figure 4.15. Bernard Khoury, B018, 1998. (© Bernard Khoury / DW5, courtesy DW5)

shelling episodes, obscuring the sounds of war in what people called “music therapy sessions.”49 b018 is built belowground, embedded in a circular concrete disc (figure 4.15). Its structure is pressed into the ground so as to avoid any vertical construction that could be read as a rhetorical monument. When the nightclub is not open, the building is almost invisible. Its metal and glass roof opens hydraulically, exposing the club goers to a view of Beirut, five miles away. The interior of the club is sunk into the ground like a bunker or communal grave. A stairway leads to a cavernous space lined by dark-­stained mahogany and blood-­red curtains. The funereal feel of this décor is reinforced by the dark-­stained mahogany tables and marble plinths that are arranged across the room. The wooden tables are in fact seats which, when folded over, transform into dancing platforms that resemble coffins. While the use of an industrial aesthetic serves a functional purpose, it also plays on the patrons’ morbid fascination with the gruesome history of the site (figure 4.16). The construction of a nightclub on this site could seem frivolous or cynical, as though the young Beirut urbanites are escaping from a history that they know only from stories that they have overheard their parents telling.

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Figure 4.16. Bernard Khoury, B018, 1998. (© Bernard Khoury / DW5, courtesy DW5)

Yet b018 is, first of all, a reaction to the difficult and explosive conditions that are inherent to the history of this location and to the contradictions that are implied by the construction of a nightclub on this site. The ostensible covering up of the atrocity has the paradoxical effect of referring us back to it. Whereas a monument built on this site might succumb to invisibility or irrelevance, the construction of a nightclub implicates the individual bodies of the dancers and partygoers. This is not a rational or cognitive recognition of a history of violence but a visceral or affective mode of experience—a gestural engagement with a site and a history that had been otherwise vacated. Built into the ground, the nightclub rejects the vertical associations of the traditional monument. Seen from street level, the only thing visible is a large metallic lid of several steel plates. A circular rim of concrete encloses the black structure (figure 4.15). While the roof can be opened up to reveal the crypt-­like space underneath, the only entry point into the nightclub is a dimly lit, narrow, and steep stairway that is flanked by steel walls. On the one hand, the space exploits the claustrophobic nature of a bunker, which older Lebanese would associate with time spent huddled in basements and under stairwells during periods of intense shelling. On the other hand, the

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mirror-­lined roof, which retracts to reveal the surrounding cityscape, sets up a visual dialogue between the revelers inside the space and the city that encloses them. b018 has received widespread attention in the international media. Many of the articles published in architectural journals and lifestyle magazines celebrate its provocative qualities. One journalist’s suggestion that Lebanese jet-­setters were dancing on the graves of refugees has been repeated numerous times and emphasizes Khoury’s reputation as a provocateur and Beirut bad boy.50 Suzanne Cotter describes the nightclub as a “Dantesque underworld, in which dancing bodies find escape in the delirious present.”51 In this reading, the club goer is outside of time; the revelry becomes a way of avoiding the past history of the site rather than confronting it. A quite different reading is suggested by the Lebanese gallerist Andree Sfeir-­Semler, who argues that no one at the club can forget, “even if they drink and dance”; “many people deliberately seek out this spot because their relatives were slaughtered by the militia here.”52 In its merging of hedonism and inherited trauma, b018 unsettles the idea of the monument as a space of mnemonic reflection that privileges a conscious recognition of suffering and a moral indictment of crimes against humanity. This is not in any way to deny the importance of these ideals. In the absence of grave sites, the monument can often function as an important substitute for mourning and remembrance. Yet in the Karantina, those forms of recollection are also mixed up with fantasies that trouble the pious protocols of state-­sponsored memorial sites. The success of b018 might lie in its ability to open up a space of negotiation between commercial interests and protocols of public commemoration. Working in the absence of a state-­managed and publicly financed reconstruction, Khoury was, in his own words, “forced to find compensation in private commissions and . . . the entertainment industry.”53 While the lack of public accountability would seem to be a violation of the ethical mandate of the monument, Khoury’s work in the entertainment industry allows him to more directly engage with Lebanese living memory and the layered history of the city. As opposed to the permanency of the monument, Khoury constructs “ephemeral spaces that can only exist temporarily in problematic zones that are in convalescence.”54 In this chapter, I have explored how histories buried for the last quar156 

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ter of a century are resurfacing in contemporary Beirut, giving rise to new spatial practices and memory cultures. Conditions of reconstruction in the Lebanese capital have largely foreclosed the construction of state-­sponsored memory spaces and practices. Space has been given over to private interests. While I acknowledge the amnesia imposed by reconstruction, my analysis attempts to go beyond the critiques of Solidere, which leave no room for a discussion of artists, architects, and residents of the city who have resisted the eradication of urban memory. The focus on haunted spaces and dormant histories suggests that it is in the uneasy coexistence of past and present that memory work might be enacted. In their engagement with histories of violence, the work of Rechmaoui and Khoury can be seen as posthumanist, in that they call into question notions of empathy and cathartic closure, both in architecture and in the monument. I have argued that these projects not only challenge the precepts of the traditional monument as a self-­aggrandizing and socially reparative gesture, but also call into question the counter-­monuments that have emerged in dialogue with postmodern culture. Summarizing this trend, Andreas Huyssen argues that “far from suffering from amnesia, it seems, we suffer from an overload of memories and have too many museums.”55 Huyssen aligns postmodernism with a “veritable obsession with the past” that, in his assessment, occupies an “ever larger part of everyday culture and experience” and acquires global dimensions in the struggles faced by postsocialist and postcolonial nations to deal with their difficult pasts. While it seems to take into account less prominent geographies and histories, this interpretation of the contemporary monument still privileges models of public memorialization that are institutionalized in Europe and the United States. In Lebanon, many of the most crucial decisions about the rebuilding of the city have been ceded to private developers. Faced with these conditions, artists and architects in Beirut have been compelled to situate their work in territories of intervention outside the logic that governs state-­sponsored reconstruction efforts and conventional models of public space. Khoury’s work for private patrons in the entertainment industry challenges contemplative models of mnemonic reflection that are still prioritized in parks, museums, and public monuments commemorating atrocities. The critical efficacy of b018 as a living memory space lies in its ability to heighten the tensions between willful amnesia and the obsession with the past, urban deS U S P E N D E D S P A C E S 157

velopment and derelict spaces. While the absence of public planning and debate places architecture at the mercy of private interests, it also liberates it from the political constraints and compromises that are common to state-­led reconstruction programs and memorial sites. The result is what Khoury calls a nonconsensual architecture where entertainment and gentrification rub up against Beirut’s volatile and haunted urban geography.56

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I M A G E S O F F U T U R E S P A S T

FIVE

The Lebanese Rocket Society

In the early 1960s, as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for supremacy in the space race, a group of Lebanese Armenian students from Haigazian University in Beirut, led by a twenty-­five-­year-­old mathematics and physics instructor, Manoug Manougian, began research into producing the first rocket in the Middle East. Working only with an initial budget of 750 Lebanese pounds (lbp) donated by Emile Bustani, the Lebanese entrepreneur, philanthropist, and politician, the Haigazian College Rocket Society, as the group was initially known, designed and tested a series of rockets that would be capable of reaching beyond the earth’s atmosphere (figure 5.1).1 In April 1961, a single-­stage solid propellant rocket was launched and reached an altitude of about one kilometer. A second rocket was launched soon after, reaching a distance of two thousand meters. Word of this success spread quickly, leading to a meeting with the Leba­ nese president, Fouad Chehab, who granted the nascent space project a limited budget dispensed by the Ministry of Education over the next two years (ten thousand lbp for 1961 and fifteen thousand lbp for 1962). Using these funds, the society worked on developing two-­stage rockets, with further enhancements to the separation system, solid fuel boosters, and vehicle design. A rocket launched on May 25, 1962, recorded a distance of 11,500 meters. By this stage, the Haigazian College Rocket Society had become a source of national attention, and the project was renamed the Lebanese Rocket Society (lrs). An insignia of the cedar of Lebanon, the national emblem of the

Figure 5.1. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from The Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of the Lebanese Space Race, 2012. Documentary film, 95 minutes. (© Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, courtesy of the artists)

fledgling republic, appeared on the body of each rocket. In the summer of 1962, two more rockets, Cedar II B and Cedar II C, were launched to a distance of twenty kilometers. The Cedar IV, launched in 1963, was even more successful, reaching a height of 145 kilometers, putting it above the Kármán line marking the boundary between the Earth’s atmosphere and outer space, and close to the altitude of satellites in low orbit. This achievement was commemorated on a stamp issued by the Lebanese Post Office on Independence Day in 1964 (figure 5.2). Yet as the space program was developing momentum, it was also becoming increasingly entangled in the combustible geopolitics of the region. For Manougian, the lrs was intended to serve as a platform for scientific experimentation and education. Yet from the early stages, the Lebanese Army was involved in assisting the project, providing the rocket society with a permanent launching base in the town of Dbayeh, just north of the Leba­nese capital. Manougian and his colleagues also received crucial support from Lt. Youssef Wehbe, a ballistics expert in the army. Wehbe was able to source components from France and the United States that would otherwise have remained off-­limits to civilians. He also commandeered a military

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Figure 5.2. Stamp issued by the Lebanese Post Office, 1964. (Courtesy Arab Image Foundation)

factory to allow the construction of more complex rockets on Lebanese soil. The decision to involve the Lebanese Army in the project was motivated first of all by lingering security concerns. By 1962, the lrs was launching three-­ stage rockets. As Manougian recalls, “They were no longer toys and could go way beyond the borders. We could reach the thermosphere.”2 When a subsequent rocket launch went off course and almost hit a British naval vessel stationed off the Cypriot coast, the lrs threatened to cause a diplomatic crisis at the United Nations. With an Arab-­Israeli war looming on the horizon, and tensions growing over the Palestinian presence in Lebanon, Manougian made the decision to leave the country. In 1967, a final rocket was launched from the town of Dbayeh, but by this point the Lebanese Army had taken over the project. What started out as a scientific endeavor had become in the end a military weapon linked to regional hostilities and the divisive politics of the Cold War. Although the lrs made front-­page headlines in Lebanese newspapers, its accomplishments were quickly forgotten soon after its conclusion. Tellingly, no traces of the society’s existence can be found in written histories of modern Lebanon. It is as though the project never took place. Indeed, the very idea of a Lebanese space program seems inconceivable today, as if it were derived from a plotline in a postcolonial science fiction novel. In their film The Lebanese Rocket Society (2013), Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige ex-

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plore why this history seems to have been absented from Lebanon’s collective consciousness. The documentary begins with the filmmakers’ seemingly chance discovery of the stamp bearing an illustration of a Lebanese rocket flying over the moon (figure 5.2). They are genuinely puzzled by this image: “What does it show—a weapon, a missile, a rocket for space exploration? Is it serious or just a fantasy? Did the Lebanese really dream of participating in the conquest of space? It’s hard to believe and rather surreal. We ask our parents, our friends. . . . No one remembers anything, no one knows what we’re talking about.”3 Faced with an image they neither recognize nor understand, Hadjithomas and Joreige come to the realization that the lrs “does not belong to our imaginary.”4 Here, “imaginary” could be taken to refer to the set of representations through which the nation is internalized on an individual and collective level. Thus, in the case of the stamp, we see a projected future through which the Lebanese constitute themselves as an imagined community. National identity in this sense is an anticipatory project that looks forward toward a modernity to come. Here, as I will suggest, history and science fiction overlap in productive ways. In the first part of their film, Hadjithomas and Joreige explore why the Lebanese rocket program was halted and then banished from collective consciousness. A major factor that led to the premature closure of the project had to do with the political pressure placed on Lebanon by the Western powers. Evidence suggests that the governments of Britain, France, and the United States believed that the Lebanese rockets were becoming too powerful and asked President Fouad Chehab to end the launches. This, however, does not explain why the project seems to have no place in Lebanon’s collective consciousness today. Part of the problem has to do with the loss of images belonging to this history. An initial search for other photographs of the lrs yields only limited results. In Beirut, Hadjithomas and Joreige discover an album of photos by Edouard Tamérian that the members of the society offered to President Chehab. They also locate a handful of photographs in the collections of the Arab Image Foundation and Haigazian University. These photographs, taken by Assad Jradi and Harry Koundakjian, represent only a fraction of the images taken by the photographers. Koundakjian lost his negatives when a bomb fell on the Associated Press offices during the Lebanese civil war. Most of 162 

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the photographs taken by Jradi were destroyed by his brothers during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Fearing that the images would be misinterpreted as records of their involvement in a missile project, they preemptively burned the negatives. “The archive,” writes Georges Didi-­Huberman, emphasizing the lacunary nature of images, “is by no means the pure and simple ‘reflection’ of the event, nor its pure and simple ‘evidence.’”5 It is rather a “fragment of the real,” a “scrap” that “opens onto an unknown world.”6 In The Lebanese Rocket Society, the lack or absence of images gives rise to a second-­order reflection on the production of historical knowledge in the wake of a catastrophe. For Hadjithomas and Joreige, it is not simply a question of recovering lost or missing documents. Instead of trying to reconstitute a lost past, their film asks what meaning these images can have when the thread of history connecting them to the present has been broken. Here the artists were faced with a problem that they had taken up in previous works. In their project Wonder Beirut (1997–2006), Hadjithomas and Joreige produce what they refer to as “postcards of war” (figure 5.3). The images in the series are based on picture postcards of tourist attractions taken by a fictional photographer, Abdallah Farah, in 1968–69, a turning point that marks the tail end of Lebanon’s so-­called golden age.7 At the outset of the civil wars, Farah started systematically burning the negatives of his photos. In the process, the photographer “imitated the destruction of buildings he saw gradually disappearing because of bombings and street battles.”8 The postcards exhibited by Hadjithomas and Joreige are emblematic of the nostalgic image of 1960s Lebanon that gained popularity in the immediate post–­civil war period. Even before the reconstruction had begun, vendors could be found selling pictures of a prewar city amid the ruins of the downtown. Lavishly illustrated books carrying titles like Pure Nostalgia also point to a widespread phantasmatic investment in the image of midcentury Beirut as a prosperous and cosmopolitan playground. In Wonder Beirut, Farah’s act of pyromania indexes not only the physical destruction of the city but also the damage that the civil war inflicted on the Lebanese imaginary. The blistered and warped surfaces of the photographs thus make visible a violent modernity that has been disavowed in the nation’s idealized view of its own past. Just as they rejected a falsified image of Lebanon’s prewar era, HadjiI M A G E S O F F U T U R E S P A S T 163

Figure 5.3. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Wonder Beirut: The Story of a Pyromaniac Photographer, 1997–2006. Photographic prints on aluminum, Diasec, 100 × 70 cm, number 12. (© Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, courtesy of the artists)

thomas and Joreige also refused to subscribe to the dominant vision of the future that was promoted by Solidere during the reconstruction of Beirut’s city center. As they put it, “We felt stuck between the weight of a difficult past and a future that we did not recognize and had difficulty believing in.”9 In the film, this gives rise to an autocritical assessment of their relation to the crises of Arab modernity. Hadjithomas and Joreige point out that the emergence of the lrs coincides with the apogee of Arab nationalism in the region. In the Pan-­Arab discourse cultivated by Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, modernity was configured as “a narrative of the future.” The resounding Arab defeat in the 1967 war against Israel thus signaled not only the massive loss of land but also the end of a certain ideal of Arab modernity. As Tarek El-­Ariss has argued, the Naksa (setback), as this defeat is euphemistically called, “brought about the collapse of the Nasserist narrative of the future that engendered the Arab subject in the 1950s and 1960s.”10 In 164 

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this analysis, 1967 comes to mark the collapse of a utopian fiction associated with Nasser’s “fantastic politics.” Acknowledging the impact of this rupture, Hadjithomas and Joreige draw a suggestive link between the premature halting of the space program in Lebanon and the wider sense of disenchantment associated with the interruption of Arab modernity: “When the space program was halted definitively and suddenly sometime after the 1967 war, it was the end of a certain idea of the Pan-­Arab project that was supposed to unite the region and inspire people to shape their own destiny. The end of this project shattered an alternative vision, a progressive and modernist utopia that promised to transform our region and the world. Such is the phantasm that we have inherited from the ’60s, and even if we refuse any kind of nostalgia or idealized link to it, it keeps haunting us.”11 Hadjithomas and Joreige position themselves here as children of the “generation of defeat” that is formed in the immediate wake of the Naksa.12 This is a generation from whom “dreaming was confiscated.” If the Lebanese space project seems inconceivable today, it is because people of their age can no longer, in their words, “envisage the future.” Yet as much as Hadjithomas and Joreige recognize what has been lost, they also refuse a melancholic attachment to the past. Rather than fixating on the unrealized dreams of an aborted modernity, The Lebanese Rocket Society asks what futures might emerge if history is emancipated from a progressive narrative. Thus, in asking what was lost after 1967, Hadjithomas and Joreige also kindle possibility from what those losses may enable us to imagine. Halfway through, the film takes a performative turn when Hadjithomas and Joreige set about building a scale reproduction of the Cedar IV rocket. Moving from Manougian’s displaced archive in Tampa back to the original site of the rocket launches in Dbayeh, the artists reflect on the fact that there are no stones or monuments dedicated to the project. Accordingly, their replica of Cedar IV is not only intended as “a tribute to dreamers” but also as a way of giving a materiality to an “absent imaginary.”13 The monument, which is eight meters long and weighs a ton, is designed and constructed to look like the actual rocket on which it is based. Upon completion, it is installed on the campus of Haigazian University where the project was born. Yet this plan involves transporting the rocket on a flatbed truck through the streets of Beirut, which is where things get complicated (figure 5.4). The owner of the factory charged with fabricating the sculpture becomes nervous that the I M A G E S O F F U T U R E S P A S T 165

replica risks being mistaken for a missile. This very real possibility points not only to internal tensions between Lebanon’s rival sectarian communities but also to the ever-­present threat of war with Israel. Moreover, Lebanon’s political and military ties with Syria also raise questions about the nation’s tenuous position as a client state for regional powers. “The problem is with our neighbors,” the factory owner tells Joreige, adopting the localized language of coded speech. In response, the artist suggests they have to make it clear that the rocket is a work of art and not a missile. His collaborator is not convinced that this solves the problem: to declare that the rocket is a sculpture could still give rise to the suspicion that the label of art serves only to conceal a weapon. To prevent any misunderstanding, Hadjithomas and Joreige are asked to seek government authorization to transport the rocket. In the ensuing scenes, we watch as Joreige explains the project to Ziyad Baroud, the minister of interior and municipalities. Baroud reminds him that “rockets are not a simple thing in Lebanon” but understands that “this is another kind of rocket.” Joreige is told that while he won’t need government approval to transport the rocket, it will be necessary to inform the ministries of defense and foreign affairs, as well as the municipal authorities and the army, who will provide logistical support for the journey. As an additional precaution, Hadjithomas and Joreige set up a meeting with Tarek Mitri, the minister of information. Assuring them that “everything that is made public becomes immediately less dangerous,” the minister suggests that they should publicize the event through media channels so that people are prepared for the rocket’s movement through the city. Hadjithomas and Joreige’s monument to the Lebanese space program is not intended simply to commemorate an unheralded history. Rather, it is an attempt to put the aspirations of the past, as flawed as they might be, into productive conflict with the imperatives of the postutopian present. At the start of the film, we see the artists do a Google search for “Leba­ nese rocket” that yields only images of missiles belonging to Hezbollah and Israel. In producing a replica of the Cedar IV, Hadjithomas and Joreige aim to counter this narrowing of signification. Their monument plays on their belief that even overdetermined symbols can be détourned and given new or unexpected meanings. When it enters public space, the rocket sculpture carries the real risk of being mistaken for a missile. Yet this very possibility 166 

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is also critical to the performative power of their project. Here, the work of art ceases to merely represent an existing state of affairs but enters into what Hadjithomas and Joreige call a “negotiation with reality” whose outcome is never known in advance.14 What does it mean to restage the forgotten history of the lrs today? At face value, the reconstruction of the Cedar IV and its delayed return to Haigazian University might be taken as an idealistic effort to redeem a failed modernity. But in this instance, the repetition of the past is not a matter of making good on unfulfilled dreams and promises. The remaking of the rocket is an anachronic gesture that unsettles the fiction of a time fully present to itself and firmly fixed in the past. In this repetition of history, the past is not synchronized with the present. On the contrary, the untimely relaunching of the rocket foregrounds the fissures of history, suggesting that the original event is itself proleptic. “My vision was to explore space—Lebanon could have done that.”15 Manougian’s claim might seem far-­fetched, but there is evidence to suggest that his dream was a very real possibility. As Robert Massey of the Royal Astronomical Society in London suggests, “Lebanese scientists saw their rockets cross the internationally agreed space boundary, so it might only have been a matter of time before they placed a satellite in orbit.”16 This would have been an incredible achievement for a developing nation that lacked the military and scientific capacities of world superpowers. Questions still linger as to what other accomplishments might have been possible had history taken another course. Asking these questions means not simply to imagine a realization of the space program’s immediate goals but also to envision a potential Lebanese society that might exist had its modernity not been interrupted both in 1967 and in 1975. The film ends with a short animated sequence by Ghassan Halwani that visualizes one possible future for the nation. This uchronia, set in Beirut in 2025, starts with the supposition that the space program did not stop in 1967 but continued up to the imagined present, a world in which Lebanon has secure borders and oil money (both explained as a result of satellite technology). Far from offering an unimaginable future, this animation appears to give us a world that is both immediately recognizable and yet also unactualized. It mixes present realities with hypothetical and yet impossible alternatives. This most clearly comes across in the sequences that feature Beirut’s I M A G E S O F F U T U R E S P A S T 167

urban landscape, in which many of the city’s most identifiable landmarks are given visual prominence in panned shots. The first animated shot of the city is of Beirut’s skyline. The architecture is not radically futuristic, and many of the skyscrapers could be found in any number of megacities like Shanghai or New York. However, what is unsettling is the presence of familiar buildings that are associated with Lebanon’s postwar cityscape. Most notably, the Holiday Inn is the first identifiable building in the animated sequence, pictured not as a bombed-­out ruin but as part of a thriving postmodern city. In an ensuing shot, the camera pans along the Fouad Chehab Bridge, replicating the earlier footage of the rocket being driven through Beirut on its way to Haigazian University (figures 5.4 and 5.5). The St. Elias Armenian church, which functions both as a marker of the nineteenth-­century city and as a relic of the civil war, since it was severely damaged due to its position along the Green Line, appears in the center of the frame. What is missing, however, is the Mohammed al-­Amin Mosque, one of the largest buildings in the reconstructed downtown, financed by Prime Minister Rafik al-­Hariri. The most pressing question, then, although it is never explicitly posed, is this: Did the civil war take place? Yet another familiar building that appears in the animated sequence is based on the unrealized construction plans for Beirut’s city center by architect Joseph Philippe Karam. The only finished part of this project is a bulbous, brutalist concrete structure that was abandoned and left to decay during the fighting in the city center. Popularly known as the Egg, this relic points to a future that never took place and yet was on the verge of completion. In the postwar, the building acquired another layer of significance; it became a symbol of Beirut’s modernist prewar past and, once again, an accidental monument to that period. Today the building appears cut off from the newly built skyscrapers that dwarf it and turn it into a relic of the detached past; the ruptures of the civil wars have turned the symbols of modernity into the remnants of an ossified past. In the animation, where the building now houses a museum for the lrs, there is a synthesis between architectural modernism and space travel that makes the conceptual link between them physical. One of the most strikingly familiar landmarks in the sequence is the monument in Martyrs’ Square, which in the animation is given particular emphasis: in one shot the statue is spinning as if it’s been put onto a motor168 

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Figures 5.4–5.5. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, stills from The Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of the Lebanese Space Race, 2012. Documentary film, 95 minutes. (© Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, courtesy of the artists)

Figure 5.6. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, still from The Lebanese Rocket Society: The Strange Tale of the Lebanese Space Race, 2012. Documentary film, 95 minutes. (© Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, courtesy of the artists)

ized pedestal (figure 5.6). At first, the literal uprooting of the symbol—it is no longer fixed to a pediment—suggests a metaphoric displacement of the sign value of the monument. The sign can now move across time and place, and it becomes in this moment only one part of the motile future (a time and place that is characterized in the animation by street crossing signs, motorcycles, and a high-­speed public transportation system). This dislocation of the monument might be read as an anachronism, but I would like to suggest that it would be better understood as anachronic. Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel introduce the term “anachronic” as an alternative to “anachronistic,” a pejorative word that they suggest “carries with it the historicist assumption that every event and every object has its proper location within objective and linear time. From a historicist point of view, an artifact that has been unmoored from its secure anchorage in linear time and has drifted into an alien historical context is an ‘anachronism.’”17 By contrast, the anachronic artifact “moves freely in time, but unlike the anachronistic artifact it does not depend for its effect on a stable conception of the historicity of form.”18 What matters most for Nagel and Wood is the work of art’s ability to “hold incompatible models in suspension without deciding” between them, “its ability, really, to ‘fetch’ a past, create a past, perhaps even fetch the future.”19 The chronological inconsistencies in 170 

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the animated sequence—most obviously, the question of whether or not the civil war happened—show a hesitation not only between alternative futures but also between competing versions of how the past is implicated in that future. On the one hand, the statue refers back to a chain of events: created and inaugurated in 1960, it also honors the martyrs slain in that square by the Ottoman military ruler Jamal Pasha in 1916. This referencing of a colonial past was a way in which Lebanon signaled its modernity. Yet interestingly, the image of the monument used in the animation also exploits its association with the civil war, when it became an icon of the damaged city: during that period, the statue was damaged in an explosion and one of the figures lost its arm. Rather than use an image of the undamaged statue, restoring it to its prewar condition, Halwani incorporates the mutilated monument that is visible in Beirut today into the speculative future (figures 4.3 and 4.4). This seemingly minor detail leaves open the possibility that perhaps the war did happen after all. One working definition of science fiction is a “mode of fiction centrally investigating possible worlds, interrogating present conditions and exploring possible futures.”20 The Lebanese Rocket Society would seem to fit this imperative to imagine “alternative realities, for exploring possible new worlds, for considering how things might be different.”21 Here science fiction’s mandate would be its ability to both predict and prognosticate a set of possibilities that are otherwise unknown to us or foreclosed by existing conditions. In a published interview, Hadjithomas and Joreige point to the relative lack of science fiction in the Arab world. In an implicit reference to the persistence of autocratic regimes in the region, they postulate that the underdevelopment of the genre might in fact be read as a by-­product of systems of political repression that function “to prevent the development of excessive imagination, of dreams that could eventually reveal themselves to be subversive.”22 In similar terms, Nesrine Malik connects the apparent “dearth of truly science fiction works rooted in Arab or Muslim culture” to decades of social and political stagnation in the region.23 For Malik, the fixation on the glories of the past is symptomatic of the Arab world’s “suspended imagination” and its diminished sense of futurity: “It is understandable that in the absence of an Arab equivalent of a Neil Armstrong or Yuri Gagarin we must look for inspiring figures from the past, but this is part of a general malaise in a culture that harks back to the Golden Age when Arabs and Muslims I M A G E S O F F U T U R E S P A S T 171

were in the ascendancy, commanding an empire that stretched from India to Spain. The focus is on recapturing that, and not looking forward to a new modern incarnation.”24 There is no doubt some truth in Malik’s assessment of an Arab malaise, but her analysis overlooks a longer history of future-­ oriented novels, films, and television series in the region.25 Indeed, in recent years, science fiction has become an object of considerable critical reflection and political investment for a new generation of Arab artists, writers, graphic novelists, and filmmakers. A notable example is Gulf Futurism, a term formulated by the Kuwaiti artist Fatima Al Qadiri and the Qatari writer and filmmaker Sophia Al Maria to explore the contradictions of accelerated development in the Arabian Peninsula. In this aesthetic, desert city planning, hypermodern infrastructure, environmental collapse, premodern tribalism, and globalized cultural kitsch combine to form “a projection of conditions the rest of the world is moving towards.”26 This vision of a “dystopian future-­turned-­reality” is far from optimistic, but it uses elements of science fiction to playfully unsettle neoliberal dictates of progress.27 While present construction in cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi suggests a tabula rasa in which Gulf society moves from desert-­dwelling nomadism to urban excess, what gets left out in this narrative are the relics of modern development—fueled by the 1950s and ’60s oil boom—that express their own historically specific vision of the future. Al Maria gives the example of the Kuwait Water Towers, designed by Swedish architect Sune Lindström and completed in 1976 (figure 5.7). The buildings incongruously reference medieval Islamic architecture (through their intricate tile work) and modern engineering that itself was prefigured by the former hydraulic systems of Al-­Andalus.28 Yet, seen through the lens of her childhood memories, these buildings appeared to her like a landing space for alien spaceships. Her retrospective view is also colored by the sense that these buildings have since become symbols of a future that was never realized and has now become itself historical. Although they remain very much situated in the present, contemporary engagements with the genre such as this look to the past and the future as fictional tropes that can be put into dialogue with present-­day realities. There is a jadedness as well as humor here, so that Gulf Futurism avoids the extremes of idealism and the profound disillusionment that had characterized the work of an earlier generation of Arab modernists.29 I think The Lebanese 172 

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Figure 5.7. VBB, Sune and Joe Lindström, Stig Egnell, and Björn & Björn Design (Malene Björn), Kuwait Water Towers, 1976. (Photograph by noble mm, 2008, courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

Rocket Society also uses science fiction as a way to reactivate the past in creative and unexpected ways, making equal use of the methods of historical research and the poetics of contemporary art. Earlier I offered a definition of science fiction as a genre premised on imagining futures that have not yet arrived and that may in fact seem unimaginable for us today. Complicating this view, Fredric Jameson suggests that what matters most in science fiction is not its ability to make the future real or give it positive form. Rather, “its deepest vocation is over and over again to demonstrate and to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future.”30 Yet to the extent that this failure points to the current atrophy of the utopian imagination, it also gestures toward a radical break with the present. It is this paradox that I think lurks behind every image of the future in The Lebanese Rocket Society. The uchronia that concludes the film could be seen as an attempt to imagine a real future, but that would be to miss a I M A G E S O F F U T U R E S P A S T 173

Figure 5.8. Assad Jradi, Launch of the Fourth Lebanese Rocket, Dbayeh, Lebanon, November 21, 1963. (© Assad Jradi, courtesy Arab Image Foundation)

crucial point. Here the function of science fiction is to free, retrospectively, certain possibilities—a different future for the nation—that remain buried or trapped in the past. This alternative history, like the actual past on which it builds, turns out to be stranger and more utopian than any pure fiction that might be offered in its place. If the film seems incapable of changing the syntax of the contemporary Middle East—the space program and its satellites in Lebanon have been used to locate offshore oil, funding the nation’s economy, and to provide security from its neighbors—then I would argue that that failure is essential. The seeming incapacity of imagination points to the fact that there are multiple potential presents and futures that cannot be crystallized: presents in which the lingering ghosts of the civil wars fade in and out, futures that depend on an unrepresentable present and past. This

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speculation is stranger than any pure fiction, as it relies simultaneously on what cannot be forgotten and what cannot be expressed. In a recent interview, Joreige and Hadjithomas discuss a photograph of one of the 1960s rocket launches, taken by Assad Jradi (figure 5.8).31 Although plumes of smoke are visible, the rocket itself is not. While the photographer chastised himself for his inability to capture the essential object of the image, the filmmakers saw the photograph as a “trace, the trace of a trace.” The rocket moved too quickly for the camera, but it left its mark. The specter of radical utopia is not sustained in The Lebanese Rocket Society, but it also leaves its mark: it is the trace of a trace of an alternative future that relies on an engagement with Lebanon’s equally contested past.

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TIME BOMB CODA

In the introduction to this book, I asked what it means to make images in the wake of an event such as the Lebanese wars. The artworks foregrounded in this study do not picture the immediate effects of these devastating conflicts. Rather, they are concerned with figuring the damage that war inflicts on representation itself. Critical in this regard is the concept of the surpassing disaster, a term Jalal Toufic uses to designate the “immaterial withdrawal” of things that might otherwise appear to be outwardly unaffected. To exemplify his concept, Toufic tells the story of a Lebanese photographer who had become used to viewing his surroundings at the speed of war. After the civil war concluded, the photographer “learned to look again at a leisurely pace.”1 However, while his perception adjusted to the rhythms of the postwar city, the photographer found that his images were still blurred and looked like they were taken by someone who was in imminent danger. Toufic insists that the out-­of-­focus images are not the result of a technical deficiency or a deliberate formal strategy on the photographer’s part. These “hit-­or-­miss” compositions point instead to the withdrawal, past the surpassing disaster, of “something in the referent that cannot be localized exactly, whether with regards to framing or focus or both.”2 The notion that what is physically extant may be immaterially withdrawn from representation is also thematized in Walid Raad’s Secrets in the Open Sea (1994/2004). Credited to the Atlas Group, this work consists of what appears to be a series of abstract prints of varying shades of blue (figures c.1 and c.2). We are told that the images were found in 1992 under the rubble

Figure C.1. Walid Raad, Secrets in the Open Sea, plate 16, 1994/2004. One of a series of six digital prints, 43.7 × 68.1 in. (111 × 173 cm). (© Walid Raad, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

Figure C.2. Walid Raad, Secrets in the Open Sea, plate 16 (detail), 1994/2004. One of a series of six digital prints, 43.7 × 68.1 in. (111 × 173 cm). (© Walid Raad, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

of demolished buildings in the Souks area of Beirut and sent to laboratories in France and the United States. Scientific analysis revealed that each of the prints contained latent images hidden beneath the surface. These ghostly images (small black-­and-­white group portraits of men and women) were identified as individuals who “drowned, or were found dead in the Mediterranean between 1975–1991.”3 Here again we are faced with the withdrawal of the referent. The blank prints lead us to question photography’s capacity to convey death in any direct or unmediated way. Indeed, Secrets in the Open Sea raises questions about how images that have retreated from view, taking refuge in other images, might be made visible again. Yet if this work calls into question the evidentiary power we attach to photography, it does not confine the events of the civil war to a space outside of representation. The surpassing disaster threatens the link between a photograph and its referent, yet it is precisely in the occluded and the impaired image that we can begin to grasp its effects. It is possible to see Raad’s subsequent work as signaling a different stage in representation, a stage after the rupture effected by the surpassing disaster has been revealed and countered. As Toufic explains, the act of showing the withdrawal of the referent paves the way for its future resurrection: “There is going to be a time of development of the chemically developed photographs taken during the latter stages of the war [in Lebanon]. The documentation is for the future not only in the sense that it preserves the present referent for future generations, but also in that it can function as a preservation of the referent only in the future, only when the work of resurrection has countered the withdrawal.”4 Raad’s more recent photographs featuring the bodies of assassinated politicians situated in picturesque Lebanese landscapes and ancient ruins might be seen to correspond to the delayed “time of development” that Toufic speaks of here. The nine-­print series We Are a Fair People. We Never Speak Well of One Another (2014), attributed to the now-­disbanded Atlas Group, brings together two sets of images: color slides taken in the 1950s and 1960s by a family member who traveled throughout Lebanon and Syria, and black-­and-­white photographs of the bodies of Lebanese political figures who have been murdered over the past forty years. The former seem to capture a mythic version of a country that Raad would have experienced only

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through picture postcards: “the Lebanon that I was told was the Switzerland of the Middle East.”5 In this respect, the work asks us to consider what role images of this type have played within the construction of a national imaginary. In these works, the myth of an organic national identity firmly rooted in the landscape is unhinged through its association with the violence of the postcolonial state. The photographs of bullet-­scarred buildings or exploded car bomb engines that are most commonly associated with Raad’s Atlas Group archival projects were of course notably devoid of any dead or injured bodies. In My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines (2000–2003), the artist groups together newspaper photographs of the material remains of car bombs detonated during the Lebanese civil war (figure c.3). The military personnel who pose next to the mangled steel observe the carnage with a sense of emotional detachment. This forensic gaze is rendered absurd in Let’s Be Honest, the Weather Helped (1998/2006–7), a series of black-­and-­ white photographs of bullet-­scarred buildings that are overlaid with brightly colored circles that purportedly correspond to different bullet types and their country of origin (figure c.4). Here, too, death is conspicuously out of frame. This leaves viewers unprepared for what they will encounter in the disquieting landscapes of We Are a Fair People. In those images, Photoshopped corpses blend into their new surroundings; once discovered, they stick out as uncanny objects within the visual fields. Raad conjectures that these bodies have always been present in this landscape, awaiting discovery. Thus, what is invoked in these settings is not the past perfect but the future anterior of the nation: “By the time the civil war erupted in 1975 it was almost anticipated. The traces of future conflicts were always there to be seen. It’s as if the landscape had always been populated with future assassinations, future wars that were forthcoming.”6 In one image from the series, Raad has planted a cut-­ out photograph of a black dog (killed in the infamous massacre of the Frangieh family by the Phalangists in 1978) amid the ancient ruins of Baʿalbek in Lebanon’s Bekka Valley (figure c.5).7 The slain animal could just as easily go unnoticed by the casual viewer, but its appearance in this landscape touches on lingering anxieties—central to the artistic practices considered in this book—about buried histories and the unexpected resurfacing of images in times of crisis and impending war (a seemingly permanent state in the Lebanese political landscape). In recent years, there has been a growing preoccupation with archaeologi180 

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Figure C.3. Walid Raad, My Neck Is Thinner Than a Hair: Engines, 2000–2003. Archival inkjet print. (© Walid Raad, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

cal methods and tropes in contemporary art.8 This impulse involves more than simply an effort to study the past through its material traces; it entails a reconsideration of the epistemological status of the archaeological object in the construction of history. In his video In This House (2005) and his Time Capsule (2012) project, Akram Zaatari asks what forms of knowledge can be accessed only through things. Through alternating acts of excavation and internment, these two works unsettle the demonstrative logic of positivistic archaeology. In this way, Zaatari’s work corresponds to what Ingrid Schaffner calls “deep storage,” which is to say, “work which both anticipates its own C O D A 181

Figure C.4. Walid Raad, Let’s Be Honest, the Weather Helped (Egypt), 1998/2006–7. Archival color inkjet print, one of a series of seventeen prints, 181/4 × 281/4 in. (46.4 × 71.8 cm). (© Walid Raad, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

future condition and reflects on past, often accumulative, aspects of the artist’s visual practice.”9 Moreover, Zaatari’s engagement with archaeological processes challenges how we think about documentation, preservation, and the circulation of historical artifacts (including photography), questioning both the exhibitionary complex and the custodial claims of the museum. Zaatari has suggested the paleographic concept of the fossil as a theoretical lens through which to view the documents he unearths in his archival research and fieldwork.10 In its original usage, a fossil referred to anything dug up from the earth, but the term now more precisely designates the remains or impression of a prehistoric organism preserved in rock formations. While this might call to mind an inert object, frozen in time, Gilles Deleuze speaks of certain images as “strangely active fossils, radioactive, inexplicable in the present where they surface.”11 Here Deleuze alludes to the radioactive elements in rocks that are used to date fossils. In this formulation, the petrified image is assigned a dangerous power or unstable charge that resists assimila182 

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Figure C.5. Walid Raad, We Are a Fair People. We Never Speak Well of One Another, plate 4, 2014. Archival inkjet print mounted on aluminum dibond, each 34 × 44 in. (© Walid Raad, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York)

tion to the present. Similarly, for Zaatari, the unearthed artifact offers access to a dense archive of energies or experiences that await reactivation. In his video In This House (2005), Zaatari uses excavation, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, to cast light on what he calls the “dynamics that govern the state of the image in situations of war.” The work owes its origins to an encounter with Ali Hashisho, a photojournalist and former member of the secular Lebanese resistance. During the Israeli occupation of South Lebanon, Hashisho and several members of the militia aligned with the Popular Democratic Party occupied an abandoned two-­story house in Ain el-­Mir, a village located on the front lines of the war. Although he does not know the owners, Hashisho writes a letter to them explaining why he had taken up residence in the house and welcoming them back. He then encloses a note inside the empty case of a b-­10 mortar and buries it in the backyard, two steps away from one corner of the house. When Zaatari finds out about this story, he heads to Ain el-­Mir to meet the family and see if he can recover C O D A 183

the letter. The patriarch of the household, Charbel Dagher, turns out to be extremely suspicious of the outsider’s motives and at first refuses to believe that he is a filmmaker. The situation is complicated by the fact that Zaatari does not want to disclose what is buried in the garden because he wants the owner to make the discovery himself so that Zaatari can re­cord Charbel’s reaction. At the same time, Zaatari cannot be completely sure that they will find the letter once they start digging. The rising suspense attached to the excavation, then, has to do with both the anticipation of a discovery and the fear of the unknown. A palpable sense of paranoia also pervades the video. This insecurity is tied to the fact that the family is Christian and living in an area where there is no dominant leader from their sect in power. The family members categorically refuse to be filmed and only agree to let the dig go ahead after local security officials get involved. Charbel’s compliance is motivated both by a sense of wanting to show that he is a good citizen but also by the prospect of a treasure hunt. On his instigation, rumors start to circulate about what might be buried in the garden, fueling speculations about stolen loot or explosives left by the Lebanese resistance. When the diggers come up empty, Zaatari confers again with Hashisho about the precise location of the container. Even though Hashisho lives quite close to the house, he is eager to avoid any contact with the owners. By the same token, the Dagher family remain resolutely opposed to meeting the former resistance fighter or letting him enter the premises. As Zaatari would come to realize, the search for the concealed letter brought together “people with incompatible political ideologies, different sensitivities and ways of thinking, so there could not be any real room for dialogue even though they came from the same area and shared a history of displacement and occupation.”12 It also produced a collision of past and present, revealing the persistence of conflicts that were regarded as already past. When they eventually retrieve the container from the ground, Zaatari opens it up and finds that Hashisho’s note has been immaculately preserved (figures c.6 and c.7). In the voice-­over we hear Zaatari read the letter: We are the Popular Democratic Party in Lebanon, a Communist Party that believes in the eventual triumph of the poor, and the abolition of man’s exploitation of man. June 30, 1991. The war was imposed on us and we were in this position to protect our land from the Israeli plans in 184 

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Figure C.6. Akram Zaatari, Earth of Endless Secrets, 2007. Ali Hashisho. B-­10 82 mm mortar case that held his letter for eleven years. Buried in 1991 and excavated in 2002. (© Akram Zaatari, courtesy of the artist)

Figure C.7. Akram Zaatari, Letter for a Time of Peace, 2007. Ali Hashisho. Letter that was buried eleven years inside a mortar case, p. 1. Written in 1991. (© Akram Zaatari, courtesy of the artist)

Lebanon. We used to be, and still are, against violating people’s dignities. Welcome, this is your land, your property, and your right. We did our best to protect the olive trees, but as you see, stupidity prevails. However we protected the houses, and what remained of the property. We will long for Ain el Mir, which sheltered us for six years. Thank you to Ain el Mir. Thank you to its beloved people.13 While the family cannot live with the knowledge that Hashisho’s letter lies buried in their garden, when they read his message to them, they are compelled to confront their own prejudices about the resistance fighter. Indeed, one of the representatives of the Lebanese Army who supervised the excavation tells Zaatari that the Daghers would have preferred not to find the letter since its existence lends material weight to Hashisho’s presence in the home and symbolic weight to his principles. Perhaps more significant than the content of the letter is the circumstantial route by which it arrives at its destination. Hashisho’s letter bears witness to a specific moment in the past, but it is addressed to an indefinite moment in the future. If Zaatari had not met Hashisho the letter might well have remained in the ground, still awaiting discovery. “Ali wanted to keep the letter preserved for an indefinite time, but time ended up being me.”14 When the letter is found, its original meaning is retroactively altered by the present in which it resurfaces. In this sense, Hannah Feldman sees the excavation as effecting a “redirection of meaning” that paradoxically “depends on the very fact of the object’s dormancy.”15 In his Time Capsule, Kassel project (2012), commissioned for Documenta 13, Zaatari again mines the poetics and pragmatics of excavation. For this work, the artist buried sixteen wooden boxes—each containing small monochromatic paintings that were inspired by photographic film formats—in a public park with the help of a team of assistants (figure c.8). Also encased in this submerged rebar-­and-­concrete structure is a set of unpublished scripts that explore possible ways of preserving the Arab Image Foundation (aif) photographic collection in Beirut. Mirroring Hashisho’s gesture, Zaatari’s time capsule links the material residues of the past with an indeterminate future. Yet whereas In This House centers on an excavation, Time Capsule reverses the archaeological imperative to unearth objects. In withdrawing objects from the world, Zaatari’s work in Kassel extends the artist’s interest in informal economies of preservation that challenge the protocols of state-­ 186 

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Figure C.8. Akram Zaatari, Time Capsule, Kassel, Karlsaue Park, Kassel, 2012. Documenta 13. (© Akram Zaatari, courtesy of the artist)

sponsored archives and museums. More specifically, the project references the embattled and multilayered history of Lebanon’s National Museum. First opened in 1942, the origins of this institution can be traced back to the beginning of the French Mandate, when Lebanon was annexed as a national territory separate from Greater Syria. Established under the purview of the Directorate General of Antiquities, the museum served as the chief repository of ancient archaeological artifacts dating from the Phoenician period. In contrast to the Archaeological Museum at the American University of Beirut, which houses artifacts excavated by European archaeologists in the biblical Holy Land, the National Museum was set up with the specific mission of displaying antiquities sourced from within the national boundaries of postindependence Lebanon. As with other postcolonial states in the region, the construction of a modern national identity was therefore premised on its tendentious claims to a heritage that stretched back to the ancient past. Indeed, the nearby Palais des Pins had served as the location where the announcement of “Grand Liban” or Greater Lebanon was first made in 1920. C O D A 187

Over the ensuing decades, the collection of the museum would grow considerably in line with the growing interest in the archaeological prehistory of the nation. Phoenicianism, a central strain within Lebanese nationalist ideologies, used archaeological finds to legitimize its contentious claims to a specific Lebanese identity that was separate from the Arab ethnicities and Islamic cultures of the region.16 If the museum served as an emblem for a fragile but unified national identity during the Lebanese wars waged between 1975 and 1990, the area adjoining the Mathaf became one of the major crossing points along the so-­called Green Line—a demarcation boundary controlled by rival militias vying for control of different parts of the city. Given their strategic position as points of containment and circulation between different communities, each with its own sectarian identity and territorial claims, checkpoints along the Green Line became crucial nodes within civil war Beirut. Stripped of its social character, the militarized museum crossing functioned, in the words of Amin Maalouf, as “a void between two sides,” “a kind of no-­man’s-­land, constantly threatened by snipers.”17 When the fighting in the area intensified, the authorities were forced to close the museum to the public. The museum’s director at the time, Emir Maurice Chehab, and his wife, Olga Chaiban, devised a series of ingenious measures to protect the collection from looting, material damage, and vandalism. In the first stage, vulnerable small artifacts were removed from display cases and hidden in storerooms in the basement, which was then walled up, barring any access to the lower floors. On the ground floor, mosaics that had been installed in the floor were covered with a layer of concrete that concealed them from sight. When the situation further deteriorated, the couple took the extraordinary step of placing its prized sarcophagus collection—including that of King Ahiram of Byblos (1000 bce), which carries the oldest inscription of the Phoenician alphabet—into wooden frames that were then filled with concrete. During the worst periods of fighting, the central galleries of the museum were turned into the makeshift barracks and bunkers of fighters, and rooms were used by a sniper to target individuals on the street. None of them thought to realize that the concrete blocks might have contained valuable artifacts. For more than fifteen years, the secret remained confined to a small circle of people who had worked with Chehab in entombing the collection. In the mean-

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time, rumors spread that the museum’s holdings had been smuggled out of Lebanon.18 Chehab’s unconventional efforts to safeguard the museum’s collection under the pressure of war stand in sharp contrast to the standardization of conservation practices within the heritage industry. One could no doubt point to the relative inefficacy of international measures for safeguarding cultural heritage. This issue has become a source of global debate following the Islamic State’s attack on archaeological artifacts and sites. Analyzing the Taliban’s destruction of the Bamiyan statues in Afghanistan, the art historian Dario Gamboni argues that the defense of world heritage is most often not premised on preventing or ending contemporary military conflicts.19 On the contrary, it is in his view “an ambulance that follows an army and tries to precede it.”20 To the extent that it falls outside of unesco guidelines and principles, Chehab’s creative act of preservation might be seen as an important exception to the hegemonic concept of heritage described by Gamboni. In Zaatari’s Time Capsule, it forms the basis of a radical critique of museological and archaeological imperatives: “I’d certainly join the director of the National Museum in Beirut in protecting cultural heritage from theft and vandalism, but I also believe the museum as we know it, is not and should not be, the terminal habitat for archeological artifacts. My Time Capsule project was inspired by what Chehab did to protect the National Museum’s collection which I do not only find necessary against the threats posed by war, but against an institutionalized system of excavation, conservation, and display. We need to bury things from archaeology and the museum.”21 While Zaatari recognizes the importance of preserving collections from looting and physical destruction, his expressed desire to return artifacts to the earth calls into question the most fundamental precept of archaeological inquiry. This also links up with the artist’s ongoing critical inquiry into the collection and preservation of photography. In 2011, Zaatari resigned from the board of the aif after he became dissatisfied with the institution’s unwillingness to question its own custodial claims and enter into a wider critical debate about the archive, not only as a repository of historical knowledge but also as a “promise” that is bound by a sense of “responsibility for to­morrow.”22 Founded in 1997, by photographers Fouad Elkoury, Samer Mohdad, and

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Zaatari, the aif aims “to collect, preserve and study photographs from the Middle East, North Africa and the Arab diaspora.”23 In amassing images from family albums and photographic studios, the foundation functions as an archive for vernacular photography in the Middle East. For Zaatari, photography’s intimate relation to individual experience and the everyday offers an alternative to the grand narratives of history. At the same time, the focus on amateur and studio photography also serves to counter the privileging of a fine art tradition by historians of the medium. More importantly for this consideration of the archive, Zaatari conceived the aif not as a static collection held in humidity-­controlled cold storage units but as a set of documents that could be activated through artist-­led exhibitions and publications. However, this performative conception of photographic history stands in increasing tension with “a narrow understanding of photograph preservation, which considers photographs as objects isolated from social and emotional ties.”24 Against the idea of the collection as an asset that is measured in primarily economic terms, Zaatari proposed that the aif should return the original photographs in its possession to their owners: “I don’t see the preservation of photographs as preservation of material only. It would be interesting to determine what exactly is essential to preserve. If emotions can be preserved with pictures, then maybe returning a picture to the album from which it was taken, to the bedroom where it was found, to the configuration it once belonged to, would constitute an act of preservation in its most radical form.”25 Traditionally, the archive aims to protect documents, but it can do this only by sealing them off from the world. Similarly, in the museum, photographs exist in a state of temporal remission, cut off from the contingencies that once shaped (and threatened) their existence. Outside of the museum or the storeroom, there is a greater possibility that a photograph or a letter might be damaged, lost, or destroyed, but these objects acquire new layers of meaning as they pass through different hands. In a sense, Zaatari’s desire to liberate photography from the archive parallels an already established critique of the museum as a site of reification and institutional containment. Yet I would argue that the Time Capsule project does not aim to do away with the idea of preservation altogether. Rather, it asks us to consider what conflict does to transform its protocols. In this regard, Raad notes how during war “looted treasures or politically compromised artworks remain physically intact but are removed from view, possibly 190 

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never to be seen again.”26 More radically, he posits a scenario in which artworks themselves, “sensing the forthcoming danger” of war, “deploy defensive measures: they hide, camouflage, or dissimulate.”27 While Zaatari does not assign this sense of agency to things, his Time Capsule is similarly premised on a preemptive withdrawal of images from the world. During the Lebanese wars, archives, libraries, and museums were frequently targeted for destruction and were thus stripped of their protective status. Chehab’s creative and informal methods of cultural preservation were born out of desperation, but their consequences extend beyond the circumstances in which they were devised. For Zaatari, these actions give rise to an urgent rethinking of preservation amid “the ecumenical expansion of heritage practices.”28 Like the images that go into hiding during periods of crisis and unrest, the burial of the capsule removes its contents from sight. Yet Time Capsule’s anticipatory mode of address also signals the reappearance of the enclosed images. The work thus opens up a future that is uncertain but, to the extent that it remains unknown, might still offer a space of continuing possibility.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Commenting on the closely knit Beirut art scene, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige note, “Between 2000 and 2004, in Beirut we got together with a group of artists every Tuesday (such as Walid Sadek, Bilal Khbeiz, Tony Chakar, Marouan Rechmaoui [sic], Lina Saneh, Walid Raad, Fadi El Abdallah [sic], and others. Rabih was also closely involved. It was a place for exchanging, for sharing, for discussions, for study.” Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, “I Am Salah el Dine,” in Rabih Mroué: A bak Critical Reader in Artists’ Practice, ed. Maria Hlavajova and Jill Winder (Utrecht: Post Editions, 2012), 85. 2. At various points in this book, I refer to the Lebanese wars, a term I borrow from Walid Raad to designate the series of intermittent and unresolved conflicts waged in Lebanon between 1975 and 1990. 3. This is the most commonly cited figure. See, for example, John Wood, “After 2 Decades, Scars of Lebanon’s Civil War Block Path to Dialogue,” New York Times, July 11, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/world/middleeast/after-­2-­decades -­scars-­of-­lebanons-­civil-­war-­block-­path-­to-­dialogue.html. 4. The terms “confessionalism” and “sectarianism” are often used interchangeably and confused. I use “confessionalism” to refer to a system of government that involves distributing political and institutional power proportionally among religious communities or sects. This term should be distinguished from “sectarianism,” which I use more broadly to designate an adherence or excessive attachment to a particular sect or religious denomination. Since the emergence of the post-­1943 state in Lebanon, the distribution of political power in the country has been determined by the National Pact, an unwritten agreement that established a formula for allocating political and administrative functions to the major sects. Following Independence,

seats in Parliament had been divided on a six-­to-­five ratio of Christians to Muslims until 1990, when the ratio changed to half and half. Positions in the government bureaucracy are allocated on a similar basis. The pact also allocated public offices along religious lines, with the top three positions in the ruling troika distributed as follows: the president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the Parliament a Shi’a Muslim. Efforts to alter or abolish the confessional system of allocating power have been at the center of Lebanese politics for decades. See M. Khalil, Al-­Ta’ifiah wal-­Nizam al-­Dustoury Fi Lubnan [Confessionalism and the constitutional system in Lebanon] (Beirut: al-­Dar al-­jami’iyya, 1992); Farid el-­Khazen, The Communal Pact of National Identities: The Making and Polities of the 1943 National Pact, Papers on Lebanon 12 (Oxford: Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1991). 5. Ussama Makdisi, “Reconstructing the Nation-­State: The Modernity of Sectarianism in Lebanon,” Middle East Report, no. 200 (July–­September 1996): 23. 6. Makdisi, “Reconstructing the Nation-­State,” 26. 7. The interplay between internal hostilities and external pressures has long been noted as an important feature of the unfolding pattern of political violence and civil strife in Lebanon. Indeed, this line of explanation is popular among broad sectors in Lebanese society, having given rise to the idiomatic expression “al harb al-­akhirin ‘ala ‘ardina” or “the war of others on our soil.” Not surprisingly, this view has been questioned by scholars such as Haugbolle, who has argued that its widespread adoption allowed the war generation to effectively absolve themselves of responsibility for the war: “The idiom partly owes its popularity to a need to externalize a common sense of guilt or shame over the war. By stating that outsiders plotted the war, the catchphrase sums up an otherwise complicated, even incomprehensible, conflict with unresolved repercussions in a couple of words.” Sune Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 14. 8. Analyzing the privatization of public space and services in Lebanon as enacted by the neoliberal economic policies of the Hariri government of the 1990s, Saree Makdisi writes, “Because of the situation that Lebanon found itself in after the war (the near-­total deterioration of public order, of state apparatuses of civic organizations, of the national infrastructure) the process of privatization is already at a more advanced stage in Lebanon than it is elsewhere in the world, where the forces of privatization (such as Berlusconi in Italy) have had to face the opposition put up precisely by those forms of public and civic and national organization which in Lebanon had already been destroyed by the war. In this sense, Lebanon may be seen as a kind of laboratory for the most extreme form of laissez-­faire economics that the world has ever known.” Saree Makdisi, “Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (spring 1997): 695. 9. This is not a radical claim by any means, but rather one that the artists in this 194 

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book have long been making. T. J. Demos also references continued Lebanese conflicts in The Migrant Image, as does Elias Khoury in his forceful critique of the “post–­ civil war” political landscape in “The Novel, the Novelist, and the Lebanese Civil War.” T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); Elias Khoury, “The Novel, the Novelist, and the Lebanese Civil War,” Fourth Farhat J. Ziadeh Distinguished Lecture in Arab and Islamic Studies, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization, University of Washington, Seattle, 2006, http://depts.washington.edu /nelc/pdf/event_files/ziadeh_series/2006lebanon-­eliaskhoury.pdf. 10. Nizar Saghieh, “Dhakirat al-­harb fil-­nizam al-­qanuni al-­lubnani” [Memory of the war in the Lebanese legal system], in Memoire pour l’avenir, ed. Amal Makarem (Beirut: Éditions Dar An-­Nahar, 2002), 255. 11. Khoury, “The Novel, the Novelist, and the Lebanese Civil War,” 4. 12. Solidere stands for Société libanaise pour le développement et la reconstruction de Beyrouth. 13. Makdisi, “Laying Claim to Beirut,” 692. 14. Spearheaded by architects Jad Tabet, Nabil Beyhum, and Assem Salam, this cultural campaign was aided by a loose coalition of writers, critics, and artists. See Nabil Byehum Tabet and Assem Salam, Beyrouth: Construire l’avenir, reconstruire le passe? (Beirut: Dossiers de l’Urban Research Institute, 1995). 15. See Lina Khatib, Lebanese Cinema: Imagining the Civil War and Beyond (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008); Lara Deeb, “Exhibiting the ‘Just-­Lived Past’: Hizbullah’s Nationalist Narratives in Transnational Political Context,” Contemporary Studies in Society and History 50, no. 2 (2008): 369–99; Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon; Lucia Volk, Martyrs and Memorials in Modern Lebanon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 16. Haugbolle uses the term “memory cultures” to describe “the production of historical memory [which] denotes a plurality that fits the Lebanese context better than, for example, the more commonly used, and more monolithic-­sounding, ‘collective memory.’” My phrase “communities of witnessing” places more emphasis on the active role that denizens play in evidencing history. Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon, 8. 17. Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon, 79. 18. Haugbolle, War and Memory in Lebanon, 129. 19. Here I am pointing to the consumer-­driven nostalgia for the civil war that is symbolized by nightclubs such as 1975 (decorated with sandbags and bullet holes, playing popular music from the late 1970s and 1980s) and illustrated books such as Imed Kozam’s Pure Nostalgia and Ayman Trawi’s Beirut Memory. I am arguing that Haugbolle’s focus on popular music and literature overlooks the ways in which visual artists have critically engaged with popular memory. Hadjithomas and Joreige’s N O T E S T O I N T R O D U C T I O N  195

appropriation of postcards of prewar Beirut and the Lebanese coastline is a good example of the latter impulse. 20. Rosalind C. Morris, “Introduction,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 8. 21. Eric Wolf notes that the phrase dates to the nineteenth century, when Marx and Engels used it to “signal their lack of sympathy with some national separatist movements in eastern Europe” (xx). Wolf states that his intent “was to challenge those who think that Europeans were the only ones who made history” (xx). Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 22. Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Beirut: Forthcoming Books, 2009), 11, http://www.jalaltoufic.com/downloads/Jalal_Toufic, _The_Withdrawal_of_Tradition_Past_a_Surpassing_Disaster.pdf. 23. Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition, 58. 24. Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition, 57. 25. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, “Tayyib rah farjik shighli” [OK, I’ll show you my work], Al-­Adab, January–­February 2001. 26. Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition, 57. 27. Alan Gilbert, “Walid Ra’ad,” bomb—Artists in Conversation, no. 81 (fall 2002), http://bombmagazine.org/article/2504/walid-­ra-­ad. 28. Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition, 58. 29. Ziad Abdallah and Farah Awada [Walid Raad], “Missing Lebanese Wars,” Public Culture 11, no. 2 (1999): ii. 30. This is the definition of trauma most famously put forward by Sigmund Freud. Following Freud, Cathy Caruth, emphasizing the belatedness of trauma, has suggested that “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.” See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4. 31. Abdallah and Awada, “Missing Lebanese Wars,” 3. 32. T. J. Demos, “Living Contradictions,” Artforum 45, no. 2 (October 2006): 227. A further developed account of this essay can be found in chapter 7 of Demos’s The Migrant Image, discussed below. 33. Carrie Lambert-­Beatty, “Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility,” October, no. 129 (summer 2009): 75. 34. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-­Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh, Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2012), 779. 196 

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35. Demos, The Migrant Image, 191. 36. Lambert-­Beatty, “Make Believe,” 82. 37. Michel de Certeau, quoted in Georges Didi-­Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 97. 38. Sandra Dagher, Catherine David, Rasha Salti, Christine Tohmé, and T. J. Demos, “Curating Beirut: A Conversation on the Politics of Representation,” Art Journal 66, no. 2 (summer 2007): 116. 39. See Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 40. Thomas Keenan, “Publicity and Indifference (Sarajevo on Television),” pmla 117, no. 1 (January 2002): 110. 41. Jacques Rancière, “Entretien avec Jacques Rancière,” Les Inrockuptibles, no. 679 (December 2, 2008). 42. “Lebanese artists like Joana Hadjithomas and Joreige also displace the representation of the Lebanese as eternal victims of war. They are interested not in images of the war, but in what the war did to the images, not in victims or the missing but in disappearance.” Rancière, “Entretien avec Jacques Rancière.” 43. Taking up Foucault’s remarks concerning “the indignity of speaking for others,” the art historian Craig Owens defines postmodern art as a refusal of the mastery implicit in victim photography: “Despite his or her benevolence in representing those who have been denied access to the means of representation, the photographer inevitably functions as an agent of the system of power that silenced these people in the first place. Thus, they are twice victimized: first by society, and then by the photographer who presumes the right to speak on their behalf. In fact, in such photography it is the photographer rather than the ‘subject’ who poses as the subject’s consciousness, indeed, as conscience itself.” Owens’s counterexample is Martha Rosler’s artwork The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems (1974–75). Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture, ed. Scott Bryson, Barbara Kruger, Lynne Tillman, and Jane Weinstock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 178. 44. T. J. Clark, “In a Pomegranate Chandelier,” London Review of Books 28, no. 18 (2006): 5. 45. Laura Marks, Hanan al-­Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2015), 15. 46. Marks, Hanan al-­Cinema, 14. 47. Noting the rise of a new generation of independent video production in Lebanon in the 1990s, Zaatari states, “Norms in those disciplines [photography and video] do not exist in this country. It’s up to us to invent them. The idea that video was not just a substitute for film or television didn’t exist in Lebanon before the creN O T E S T O I N T R O D U C T I O N  197

ation of the Ayloul festival in 1997. There was no forum where you could show video work as such rather than as film.” Mahmoud Hojeij, Mohamed Soueid, and Akram Zaatari, “Disciplined Spontaneity: A Conversation on Video Production in Beirut,” Parachute, no. 108 (October 2002): 83. 48. Akram Zaatari, “Terms Falling: Between Artist, Curator, and Entrepreneur,” Bidoun, no. 6 (winter 2006): 16. 49. Salhab and Doueiri’s films might also be viewed in relation to wartime cinematic production in Lebanon. This includes films such as Borhan Alaoui’s Beyroyth la recontre (1982), Maroun Baghdadi’s Little Wars (1982), Jennifer Fox’s Beirut: The Last Home Movie (1987), and Jocelyn Saab’s Letter from Beirut (1979). For a useful analysis of civil war–­era filmmaking in Lebanon, see Khatib, Lebanese Cinema. 50. Over a hundred people, mostly American and Western European, were taken hostage in Lebanon between 1982 and 1992. Most of the hostages were chosen not for their personal political activity but because of their nationality. Some of the best-­ known hostages, several of whom I discuss at further length in chapter 1, include David Dodge (president of the American University of Beirut), Benjamin Weir (Presbyterian minister), Terry Anderson (Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, and the longest-­held hostage), and Terry Waite (Anglican church envoy).

O N E  C A P T I V E S U B J E C T S 1. See the Atlas Group website home page, http://www.theatlasgroup.org, and “About the Bachar File,” http://www.theatlasgroup.org/data/TypeA.html. 2. Walid Raad, Souheil Bachar, and the Atlas Group, Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (#17 and #31) English Version (Chicago: The School, Art Institute of Chicago, Video Data Bank, 2001). 3. In Arabic, Bachar’s exact words are ‫ ّعم و بطيظي أيرو حط‬:ّ‫بشد‬. 4. Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -­Abilities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 93, emphasis added. 5. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 324. 6. Raad left Lebanon in 1983 at the age of sixteen, first on a boat to Cyprus and then to join his brother in the United States. Upon completing high school, he gained a bfa at the Rochester Institute of Technology and an ma and PhD at the University of Rochester. 7. The Atlas Group Archive, http://www.theatlasgroup.org/aga.html. 8. Raad, a Lebanese-­born U.S. citizen, currently divides his time between Beirut and New York, where he teaches film, video, and photography at Cooper Union. 9. The Atlas Group Archive is organized into three categories of files, each of which corresponds to a different model of authorship. Type A files are identified as

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files that the Atlas Group has produced and attributed to imaginary individuals or organizations; Type fd refers to those files produced by the Atlas Group and attributed to anonymous individuals or organizations, making them found files; Type agp is defined as files that are both produced by and attributed to the Atlas Group. This information is publicized by Raad in his lectures and on the Atlas Group website. 10. I refer here primarily to filmic representations of the Lebanese civil wars, such as Maroun Bagdadi’s Les petites guerres (1982), Samir Habchi’s The Tornado (1992), and Ziad Doueiri’s West Beirut (1999). These films draw heavily on the codes of live-­ action narrative cinema and psychological drama but fail to problematize their relation to these genres. The archival and metadocumentary practices associated with Raad’s generation also differ sharply from the modernist-­influenced figurative art produced by Lebanese artists during the war. The most notable examples from this period include the expressive and stylized paintings of Abdel Hamid Baalbaki and Aref Rayess depicting scenes of massacre; Fouad Elkoury’s intimate black-­and-­white photographs documenting the daily struggles of civilians caught up in the war; and the harrowing drawings of torture scenes produced by Jamil Molaeb for the book Civil War. On the work of this older generation, see Saleh Barakat, Kristine Khouri, and Walid Sadek, The Road to Peace: Painting in Times of War: 1975–1990 (Beirut: Alarm Editions, 2009). 11. “Western Hostage Crisis” refers to the systematic kidnapping in Lebanon of ninety-­six foreign nationals—mostly American and Western European—between 1982 and 1992. The hostages were held by a group calling itself Islamic Jihad, believed by many to be a pseudonym for Hezbollah, although no conclusive link has ever been established. The kidnapping of the Westerners was part of an effort to obtain the release of four Lebanese members of the Iraqi-­based and Shiite-­aligned al-­Da’wa al-­Islamiyya Party imprisoned in Kuwait for orchestrating a series of attacks on key foreign and Kuwaiti installations. For an analysis of the politics of the Western Hostage Crisis, see Hala Jaber, Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 12. Elliott Gruner, Prisoners of Culture: Representing the Vietnam pow (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993), 24. 13. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (winter 2004): 227. 14. Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?,” 227. 15. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 73. 16. Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, “Art of the Possible: Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Rancière,” Artforum 45, no. 7 (March 2007): 263.

N O T E S T O C H A P T E R O N E 199

17. Janet A. Kaplan. “Flirtations with Evidence,” Art in America 92 (2004): 138. 18. Sarah Rogers, “Forging History, Performing Memory,” Parachute, no. 108 (October 2002): 77–78. 19. Alan Gilbert, “Walid Ra’ad,” bomb—Artists in Conversation, no. 81 (fall 2002): 40. 20. Michel Foucault, “Interview with Lucette Finas,” in Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy, ed. Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton (Sydney: Feral, 1979), 74–75. 21. See Terry Anderson, Den of Lions: Memoirs of Seven Years (New York: Crown, 1993), 387, 205, 192, 122. 22. Anderson, Den of Lions, 45. 23. I confirmed this with Raad in an interview I conducted with him in December 2008. On Souha Bechara, see her memoir, Resistance: My Life in Lebanon (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2003). 24. In 1948, Houla was the scene of a massacre of villagers carried out by the Carmeli Brigade of the Israeli Army. Between thirty-­five and fifty-­eight captured men were reportedly shot down in a house that was later blown up on top of them. Located only three kilometers west of the border, Houla subsequently became one of the focal points of armed resistance against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. 25. See Ahmad Beydoun, “The South Lebanon Border Zone: A Local Perspective,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 3 (1992): 35–53. 26. Walid Raad in discussion with the author, New York, December 2008. 27. “Files Type A,” Atlas Group Archive, http://www.theatlasgroup.org/data /TypeA.html. 28. Walid Raad and Souheil Bachar, “Civilizationally, We Do Not Dig Holes to Bury Ourselves,” in Tamáss 1: Contemporary Arab Representations—Beirut/Lebanon, ed. Catherine David (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002), 125. 29. It’s also worth noting that this is the only part of the video where subtitles are used. In the prologue section, Bachar instructs that his testimony (including his introductory remarks) should be subtitled in the language of the target audience. This self-­reflexivity contrasts with conventional modes of filmic subtitling that, as Abé Mark Nornes has shown, are complicit with “a practice of translation that smoothes over its textual violence and domesticates all otherness while it pretends to bring the audience to an experience of the foreign.” See Abé Mark Nornes, Cinema Babel: Translating Global Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 155. 30. My approach to the problematic of self-­translation is informed less by a postcolonial critique of traditional margins and centers than by a theorization of lost origins within the globalized afterlife of the nation-­state. For an excellent account of translation as a relation occurring between and within cultures, see the chapter 200 

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

“Writing, Exchange, Translation: A Poetics of the Modern,” in Rosalind C. Morris, In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 13–54. 31. Natalie Michaylova Khazaal has analyzed linguistic practices in Lebanon in terms of their multiglossia, defined as the capacity to communicate in multiple languages and with overlapping purposes. Lebanon’s languages are variations of Leba­ nese dialect, Modern Standard Arabic fuṣḥā, Classical Arabic, Armenian, French, and English. According to Khazaal, “Most Lebanese are adamant about using foreign languages in addition to varieties of Arabic. Lebanese schools teach French and English and its use within the home is encouraged by petit bourgeois and upwardly mobile sectors of society. As a result, and in distinction to other Arab nations, many Lebanese speak one or both foreign languages. Among Christians French is the favored second language whereas English is more often favored by Muslim Leba­ nese.” Natalie Michaylova Khazaal, “Sectarianism, Language, and Language Education in Lebanese Theater, Television and Film,” PhD diss. (University of California, Los Angeles, 2007), 31. 32. Raad and Bachar, “Civilizationally,” 126. 33. In scientific theory and electronics, “noise” refers to random or irregular fluctuations or disturbances that are not part of a signal (whether the result is audible or not), or which interfere with or obscure a signal. Noise manifests as snow on a television or video image. See “Noise,” def. 11a, Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 34. Analyzing media practices in postcolonial Nigeria, Brian Larkin argues that pirated videos and audiotapes create a particular “sensorial experience” marked by poor transmission, blurred images, and distorted sound. For Larkin, the aesthetic and material qualities associated with technological breakdown and interference (noise) opens up a space where the relations between particular media infrastructures and modes of rule (signals) are potentially destabilized: “If infrastructures represent attempts to order, regulate, and rationalize society, then break-­downs in their operation, or the rise of provisional and informal infrastructures, highlighted the failure of that ordering and the recoding that takes its place.” See Brian Larkin, Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 219. 35. Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image,” e-­flux journal, no. 10 (November 2009), http://www.e-­flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-­defense-­of-­the-­poor-­image/. 36. Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image.” 37. The Iran-­Contra Affair involved, on the one hand, the covert trading of arms to Iran for the release of the hostages held by Iran’s proxy militias in Lebanon, and, on the other hand, the diversion of funds from the Iranian arms sales used to arm Nicaragua’s right-­wing Contras in their guerilla war against the leftist Sandinista regime. N O T E S T O C H A P T E R O N E 201

This initiative contradicted the publicly stated U.S. policy never to negotiate with states that sponsor terrorism; Iran had been officially designated a sponsor of terrorism in January 1984. For a historical overview of the Iran-­Contra Affair, see Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line: The Iran Contra Affairs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991); Peter Kornbluh and Malcolm Byrne, The Iran-­Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (New York: New Press, 1993). 38. Anderson, Den of Lions, 532. 39. Anderson, Den of Lions, 532. 40. Charles E. Allen, “dci Hostage Location Task Force Report,” National Intelligence Council, October 3, 1986, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs /DOC_0000258611.pdf. 41. Susan Howe, among others, claims that captivity narratives are “the only literary-­mythological form indigenous to North America.” I thank Walid Raad for drawing my attention to this claim. Susan Howe, The Birth-­Mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 89. 42. On this subject, see also Rebecca Blevens Faery, Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). 43. Christopher Castiglia, Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-­Crossing, and White Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 193. 44. Castiglia, Bound and Determined, 122. 45. Here I follow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who formulated the phrase “male homosocial desire” to refer to a “whole spectrum of bonds between men,” including friendship, mentorship, rivalry, and hetero- and homosexuality. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1. 46. Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling (London: Vintage, 1993), 124. 47. Keenan, An Evil Cradling, 286. 48. Roger Auque, Un otage à Beyrouth (Paris: Filapacci, 1989), 57. 49. David Jacobsen, My Life as a Hostage (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1991), 103. 50. Anderson, Den of Lions, 23. 51. Foucault, most notably, has argued that the modern taboo on anal sex in the West goes back as far as ancient Greece. For the Athenians, the only “honorable” sexual behavior consisted in “being active, in dominating, in penetrating, and in thereby exercising one’s authority.” See Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 215. Similarly, John Boswell notes that even in non-­Western societies that do not regard sexual relations between men as unnatural or sinful (he gives the example of medieval Islam), “the position of the 202 

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

‘insertee’ is regarded as bizarre or even pathological.” John Boswell, “Revolutions, Universals and Sexual Categories,” Salmagundi, no. 58–59 (fall 1982–­winter 1983): 107. See also Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” October, no. 43 (1987): 197–222. 52. Most recently, Joseph Massad has been critical of the efforts of Western scholars and queer advocacy groups to transform Arab practitioners of same-­sex contact into subjects who identify as homosexual and gay. Massad points out that the production of a discourse of a liberatory and open sexuality very often involves the imposition of a Western binary: “Men who are considered the passive or receptive parties in male-­male sexual contacts are forced to have one object choice and identify as homosexual or gay, just as men who are the ‘active’ partners are also forced to limit their sexual aim to one object choice, women or men.” See Joseph Massad, “Re-­orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,” Public Culture 14, no. 2 (spring 2002): 361–85. What this obligatory choice overlooks are the different workings of sexual desire within the Arab world. For its part, Hostage reveals the means through which Western inhibitions to masculine intimacy are projected onto the Arab male body. 53. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 3. 54. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 283. In an abbreviated version of the same essay, Spivak defines the subaltern as “a person without lines of social mobility.” See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Post-­colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 2006), 28. 55. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Nelson and Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 292. 56. Vered Maimon, “The Third Citizen: On Models of Criticality in Contemporary Artistic Practices,” October, no. 129 (2009): 101. 57. Maimon, “The Third Citizen,” 103. 58. For this reason, Rancière carefully distinguishes his notion of disagreement from the model of “argumentative exchange” proposed by theorists of communicative action: “The Habermasian schema presupposes, in the very logic of argumentative exchange, the existence of a priori pragmatic constraints that compel interlocutors to enter into a relation of intercomprehension, if they wish to be self-­coherent. This presupposes further that both the interlocutors and the objects about which they speak are preconstituted; whereas, from my perspective, there can be political exchange only when there isn’t such a preestablished agreement—not only, that is, regarding the objects of debate but also regarding the status of the speakers themselves. It is this phenomenon that I call disagreement.” See Davide Panagia, “Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière,” Diacritics 30, no. 2 (2001): 113–26. N O T E S T O C H A P T E R O N E 203

59. Jacques Rancière, Dis-­agreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 50. 60. Michèle Binswanger, “Bin Laden ist im Grunde Videokünstler; Der Kulturwissenschaftler Boris Groys im Gespräch über die Bilder des Terrors und des Krieges und ihre Beziehung zur Kunst,” Frankfurter Rundschau, April 25, 2005. 61. Regarding the Bush government’s attempt to censor the broadcasting of footage from the bin Laden videos in the United States, Andrew Hill writes, “In the wake of the first new footage that appeared of Bin Laden after the September 11th attacks—that broadcast on 7 October 2001—the administration asked broadcasters to avoid showing this footage of Bin Laden for fear it would serve to promote his cause, as well as providing a possible conduit for coded messages to his supporters.” See Andrew Hill, “The bin Laden Tapes,” Journal for Cultural Research 10, no. 1 (January 2006): 35–46. 62. Saskia Sassen, “A Message from the Global South,” Guardian, September 12, 2001, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2001/sep/12/september11.uksecurity. 63. Rosalind C. Morris, “Images of Untranslatability in the US War on Terror,” Interventions 6, no. 3 (2004): 416. 64. Morris, “Images of Untranslatability.” Umberto Eco argues that the signal/ noise distinction is underwritten by global imbalances in communication systems: “When the addressee does not succeed in isolating the sender’s codes or in substituting his own idiosyncratic or group subcodes for them, the message is received as pure noise. Which is what frequently happens with the circulation of messages from the centers of communicational power to the extreme subproletarian peripheries of the world.” While Eco does well to highlight the inequalities of communication, he fails to consider the greater extent to which the signs and messages of the periphery are relegated to the status of noise by the center. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 142. 65. Analyzing the English-­language media coverage of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Emily Apter argues that “nontranslation, mistranslation, and the disputed translation of evidentiary visual information, have figured center stage throughout the Iraq War and its aftermath.” What Apter suggests, however, is that mistranslation becomes a method through which the U.S. State Department was able to turn the limitations of a “monolingual complacency” into a strategic advantage. Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 15. 66. Rancière, Dis-­agreement, 27.

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T W O  R E S I S T A N C E , V I D E O M A R T Y R D O M An earlier version of the section on Mroué’s Three Posters appeared as a Tate In Focus publication: Chad Elias, On Three Posters 2004 by Rabih Mroué (Tate Research Publication, February 2014), http://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-­publications/rabih -­mroue-­on-­three-­posters. 1. Rosalind C. Morris, “Introduction,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 7. 2. Throughout the 1960s, Nasserist ideology promoted an expanded public sector as a strategy for empowering those excluded from what Nasser termed the “half percent society.” This populist policy was nonetheless characterized, according to Elie Podeh and Onn Winckler, by “the central role of the charismatic leader and the special bond with the masses; the authoritarian nature of the regime, with its various techniques of mobilization among broad stratums; and the regime’s eclectic use of ideology.” Podeh and Winckler also note that Ba‘thism puts a similar emphasis on a “powerful, interventionist state apparatus” as a necessary device for achieving popular prosperity. See Elie Podeh and Onn Winckler, “Introduction: Nasserism as a Form of Populism,” in Rethinking Nasserism: Revolution and Historical Memory in Modern Egypt, ed. Elie Podeh and Onn Winckler (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), 28. 3. See Chad Elias, “The Libidinal Archive: A Conversation with Akram Zaatari,” Tate Papers, no. 19 (spring 2013), http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate -­papers/libidinal-­archive-­conversation-­akram-­zaatari. 4. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 84. 5. Rabih Mroué, Inhabitants of Images (2009). Screening copy courtesy of the ­artist. 6. Wendy Brown, “Resisting Left Melancholy,” boundary 2 26, no. 3 (autumn 1999): 20. 7. See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge, 2006). 8. Rabih Mroué and Elias Khoury, “Three Posters: Reflections on a Video/Performance,” tdr: The Drama Review 50, no. 3 (fall 2006): 184. 9. See Rebecca Schneider, Reenactment: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment (New York: Routledge, 2011). 10. On the history of the emergent television industry in Lebanon, see Zahera Harb, Channels of Resistance in Lebanon: Liberation Propaganda, Hezbollah and the Media (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011). 11. Akram Zaatari, interview with Chad Elias, e-­mail, April 8, 2008. N O T E S T O C H A P T E R T W O  205

12. Elias, “The Libidinal Archive.” 13. After the 1948 establishment of Israel, tens of thousands of Palestinians fled over the border into South Lebanon, a region that had traditionally had close economic and social ties with northern Palestine. By the end of the 1960s, many of the onetime refugees were armed members of military organizations, and throughout the 1970s, the Israeli Army led a series of incursions against Palestinians and those Lebanese reputed to be working alongside them. In March 1978, instead of simply preventing Palestinian attacks on Israel or continuing to make incursions against them, the Israeli forces pushed nearly thirty kilometers farther, all the way to the Litani River, occupying more than a tenth of Lebanese territory. See Ahmad Beydoun, “The South Lebanon Border Zone: A Local Perspective,” Journal of Palestine Studies 21, no. 3 (1992): 35–53. For a more extensive history of the occupied zone, see Mundhir Mahmud Jabir, Al-­Sharīṭ al-­Lubnānī al-­muḥtall: Masālik al-­iḥtilāl, masārāt al-­muwājahah, maṣāʼir al-­ahālī [The occupied Lebanese border zone: The paths of occupation, the lines of confrontation, and the fate of the people] (Beirut: Institute for Palestinian Studies, 1999). 14. Beydoun, “The South Lebanon Border Zone,” 49. 15. Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone, 2010), 21. 16. Brown, Walled States; Etienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002), 78. 17. For more information on the recent history of urban development in the southern suburbs of Beirut, see Mona Harb el-­Kak, Politiques urbaines dans la banlieue-­ sud de Beyrouth (Beirut: Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Moyen-­Orient Contemporain, 1996). 18. Hala Jaber, Hezbollah: Born with a Vengeance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 1–2. 19. On October 16, 1983, an Israeli military convoy drove into the middle of an Ashura commemoration in the south attended by over fifty thousand Lebanese Shiites; the celebrants saw the act as a violation of their holy day. Driven by religious hatred after this event, despite the fact that they still remained under the secular umbrella of the lnr, southern resistance fighters began to radicalize. As Hassan Nasrallah, the current leader of Hezbollah, said in a March 11, 1986, interview with the Emirati newspaper Al-­Khaleej, “the faithful were [then] of the opinion that a revolutionary and Islamist current should be established to adequately confront the new challenge facing Lebanon. This current was to have a clear Islamist political vision, and operate through a consistent ideology based on the principles and political line of Imam al-­Khomeini.” This interview is quoted in Nicholas Noe, ed., Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, trans. Ellen Khouri (London: Verso, 2007), 26. Nasrallah marks the origin of Islamic resistance precisely at the

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Israeli invasion of 1982, one year earlier. To account for a more objective assessment of the lnr and its demise, I have used Jaber’s historical summary instead. 20. Lara Deeb, “Hizballah: A Primer,” Middle East Report Online, July 31, 2006, http://www.merip.org/mero/mero073106. 21. For more information on the rise of Hezbollah and the party’s opposition to the lnr, see Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 22. For a more extensive analysis of the rise of Hezbollah’s media outlets, see Olfa Lamloun, “Hezbollah’s Media: A Political History in Outline,” Global Media and Communication 5 (2009): 353–67. I return to the party’s post-­2006 media tactics in the postscript to this chapter. 23. According to Hassan Fadlallah, the head of news for Hezbollah’s Al-­Manar television station, the first resistance videotape was broadcast on Télé Liban in 1986. However, as soon as Al-­Manar was launched in 1991, the tapes were sent to the newly established channel. From then on, Al-­Manar gained its reputation as the resistance channel. See Harb, Channels of Resistance in Lebanon. 24. The Communist Party, the Communist Organization of Labor, and the Syrian National Progressive Party were the three main political parties forming the lnr. The Communist Organization of Labor became defunct by the postwar period and certainly by 1997. Of the three, the Communist Party has the best-­organized archive. 25. Jabir, Al-­Sharīṭ al-­Lubnānī al-­muḥtall. 26. During their occupation of South Lebanon, the Israelis instituted a three-­level system of prisons to use as a weapon against the Lebanese population and its leadership. On the first level there were the interrogation centers installed at Sour, Nabatiyya, Saida, and Mar Elias; the second level consisted of detention centers such as those found at Ansar and Bir Sabeh; on the third level were the longer-­term prisons inside Israel such as Askalan, Atlit, and Meggido. The majority of detainees were captured in large sweeps of towns, streets, and refugee camps in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion in 1978. Thousands of males between the ages of sixteen and sixty were herded onto Saida’s beaches and picked out by hooded informers for their alleged participation in Palestinian guerilla groups. Members of the professional classes were also rounded up and arrested as part of an attempt to paralyze economic activity and encourage an exodus of other skilled workers from the south. See Jabir, Al-­Sharīṭ al-­Lubnānī al-­muḥtall. 27. The film, which is itself based on a book by Paul Brickhill, recounts a mass escape from a German pow camp (Stalag Luft III in Poland) during World War II. 28. Akram Zaatari, interview with Chad Elias, e-­mail, March 2008. 29. The testimonies in this portion of the video, in particular, center on the violent

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suppression of a revolt in Khiam and the strategies that the men employed to resist the monotony of prison life. 30. The Dziga Vertov Group was founded in 1968 by a group of politically active filmmakers that included Godard and Gorin; it dissolved in 1972. The original project—which later became Ici et ailleurs—could not be finished, and the footage from it was taken to shape, in part, the later film. 31. On March 21, 1968, the Israeli Defense Forces entered the village of Karameh, aiming to destroy Fatah in their assault, but were unsuccessful and were forced to withdraw. Arafat managed to leave Karameh at night after being informed of the impending attack. King Hussein gave orders to the Jordanian forces not to intervene, but Jordanian general Mash’hor Haditha and several Jordanian officers ignored their king’s orders and engaged in battle. The arrival of Jordanian troops in full force shifted the tide of the battle and managed to inflict serious damage on the Israeli force. According to the Jordanian reports, 250 Israeli soldiers were killed and a further fifty were wounded. Although the Jordanian army had been decisive, the incident was a public relations coup for the plo and Arafat, boosting Palestinian morale and giving the plo additional prestige within the Arab community. Arafat claimed this as a victory and quickly became a national hero, portrayed as one who dared to confront Israel. Following this success, masses of young Arabs joined the ranks of Fatah. 32. Abdul JanMohamed, “Between Speaking and Dying: Some Imperatives in the Emergence of the Subaltern in the Context of US Slavery,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 33. These claims are, however, complicated by Salti when she contends, later in her essay, that Zaatari’s intermingling [use] of fictional and nonfictional elements aims to “interrogate the predicates of documentary film when it is animated by a political imperative, and the assumption that representing a particular cause, on film, is enough to ‘bridge’ a distance, transmit information and inspire political awareness.” Rasha Salti, “The Unbearable Weightlessness of Indifference,” in Akram Zaatari: The Earth of Endless Secrets (Frankfurt: Portikus, 2009), 19–20. 34. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 94. 35. Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, “Art of the Possible: Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Rancière,” Artforum 45, no. 7 (2007): 256–69. 36. Elias, “The Libidinal Archive.” 37. Unless otherwise noted, I am referring primarily to the stage performance of Three Posters, which premiered at the Ayloul Festival in Beirut in 2000. This should

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not be confused with Mroué’s subsequent video On Three Posters (2004), which critically reflects on that original performance. 38. “Three Rebels Were Killed Near Al Nabatiyya: An Innovative Suicide Attack Whose Hero Is Baqāee [from Albaqaa region] Targeted the Building of the Israeli Governor in Hasbiyya,” Al-­Nahar, August 8, 1985, 6. 39. While the honorific title “martyr” is conventionally used to designate individuals who suffer persecution and death for a religious cause, in Lebanon, “almost anyone who is killed, anyone who dies an unnatural death, is called a martyr.” Jessica Morgan, “Rabih Mroué: 1000 Words,” Artforum 48, no. 4 (November 2009): 194. The Arabic noun for martyr is shahīd. The word is often used to describe a witness and “one killed in battle with the infidels.” See Hans Wehr, Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic: Arabic-­English, 4th rev. ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 489. Similarly, the English word “martyr,” which comes from late Greek martur, meaning witness, also refers to “one who chooses to suffer death rather than renounce religious principles.” For a fuller discussion of this shared etymology, see Ignaz Goldziher, Muslim Studies, vol. 2, ed. S. M. Stern, trans. C. R. Barber and S. M. Stern (New York: Transaction, 1971), 250–54. 40. Mroué and Khoury, “Three Posters,” 183n1. 41. In some instances there was no evidence that the resistance fighter had in fact carried out the operation. In a 2013 lecture at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Mroué shared an anecdote about the testimony of a martyr broadcast on television in 1986. The day after the martyr’s video was broadcast, a rumor circulated that the operation had not taken place and that the fighter was still alive; the fighter subsequently disappeared, and to this day there is no record of his whereabouts. For Mroué, “It’s not important to know whether this story is true or not but rather the matter it points to. Like Jamal al-­Sati’s video, what is at issue is the mediation of truth or more exactly, how truth and fiction intermingle with each other.” Rabih Mroué, “Artist’s Talk,” Whitechapel Gallery, London, July 19, 2013. 42. It is not entirely clear why al-­Sati would acknowledge al-­Assad, but the most likely reason is that the lcp and other parties were coming under increasing military and political pressure from Syria, which since the late 1970s had had a growing influence in Lebanon. The Syrians entered the Lebanese conflict in 1976 as part of an Arab League–­sanctioned peacekeeping force but then transformed into a military occupation that only ended with their withdrawal in 2005. 43. This version of the video can be viewed on YouTube: “Jamal Sati,” posted by Johny Nacouzi, YouTube, May 29, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlsyn VNS1uk. 44. See Rabih Mroué, On Three Posters, 2004, Tate Modern, 2:00 and 2:14. 45. Mroué, On Three Posters, 2:30.

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46. Mroué and Khoury, “Three Posters,” 184. 47. Mroué and Khoury, “Three Posters,” 185. 48. Mroué and Khoury, “Three Posters,” 184. 49. Mroué and Khoury, “Three Posters,” 184. 50. Chad Elias, “Interview with Rabih Mroué,” in On Three Posters 2004 by Rabih Mroué (In Focus, Tate Research Publication, February 2014), http://www.tate.org .uk/art/research-­publications/rabih-­mroue-­on-­three-­posters/interview-­with-­rabih -­mroue-­r1144506. 51. Elias, “Interview with Rabih Mroué.” 52. Mroué and Khoury, “Three Posters,” 190. 53. Under Islamic theology, people who sacrifice their lives in the service of the religion are accorded a special status. The word for a martyr, shahīd, most commonly means “I witnessed” or “witnessed” in a legal sense (see also note 39, above). Although there is only one reference to shahīd in the martyrological sense in the Koran, more frequent references of this type are found in the hadith and auxiliary sources (sīrah, maghāzī, ‘ilm al-­rijāl, tafsīr) in support of this belief. According to widespread Islamic belief, those killed in jihad (struggle) are cleansed of their sins and go directly to paradise. However, this is a contested belief that has become a source of religious and political debate among countless Islamic clerics. These debates have intensified with media coverage of contemporary suicide attacks. For more on the concept of martyrdom, see Todd Lawson, “Martyrdom,” in Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, vol. 3, 54–59 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 54. There is a biographical subtext here that is not explicitly addressed in Three Posters. On February 17, 1987, while working on the third volume of this project, Hussein was assassinated in his home by two masked gunmen. With no governing authority in place to investigate such crimes or enforce the rule of law, Hussein Mroué’s murder, like countless other cases of its kind, was treated as an unsolved mystery and swept under the carpet. A poster produced by the plo reproduces a photograph of the writer in his library. The caption reads, “Hussein Mroué the martyr of Lebanon and Palestine and the Arab liberation movement.” Hussein’s death was involuntary, yet in these tributes his death is equated with the suicides of martyrs who willingly gave up their lives in defense of their political beliefs. 55. Sigmund Freud defined “identification” not simply as imitation of an Other but as a process of what he calls “assimilation” derived from an unconscious wish. Psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-­Bertrand Pontalis give the example of the agoraphobic who identifies unconsciously with a streetwalker. In this case, the patient’s “symptom [agoraphobia] is a defence against this identification and against the sexual wish that it presupposes.” See Jean Laplanche and Jean-­Bertrand Pontalis, “Identification,” in The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1973), 205.

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56. Hans Belting, “Image, Medium, Body: A New Approach to Iconology,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 2 (winter 2005): 307. 57. See Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London: Sage, 1993). 58. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” [1927], Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (spring 1993): 433. 59. Belting, “Image, Medium, Body,” 304. 60. Rabih Mroué, The Inhabitants of Images, unpublished script, 2009. The work was coproduced by Tanzquartier-­Wien, Bidoun magazine, and Ashkal Alwan, Beirut. 61. Boris Groys, “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” e-­flux, no. 4 (March 2009), http://www.e-­flux.com/journal/religion-­in-­the-­age-­of-­digital-­reproduction/. 62. This tactical media practice parallels artists’ own radical aspirations to use video as a means to address new audiences. As the art historian Benjamin Buchloh argues, primarily in reference to video art of the 1970s and 1980s, the use of the technology was linked to a desire “to produce a language of critique and resistance, to represent the interests of audiences subjected to the totalitarianism of the television industry, and to interfere within the elusive isolationism of high-­cultural privileges.” Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Gadget Video to Agit Video: Some Notes on Four Recent Video Works,” Art Journal 45, no. 3 (fall 1985): 217–27. 63. I am thinking here of governments in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, and Syria. 64. Groys, “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction.”

T H R E E  L A T E N T I M A G E S , B U R I E D B O D I E S The second epigraph to this chapter is quoted by Maha Yahya, “Let the Dead Be Dead: Memory, Urban Narratives and the Post–­Civil War Reconstitution of Beirut” (Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, 2004). 1. Boris Groys, “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” e-­flux, no. 4 (March 2009), http://www.e-­flux.com/journal/religion-­in-­the-­age-­of-­digital-­reproduction/. 2. Groys, “Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction.” 3. Rabih Mroué, Looking for a Missing Employee (2003). Video courtesy of the artist. 4. According to a report published in 1991, 17,415 Lebanese disappeared between 1975 and 1990. Though this figure has been the most often cited since, there are strong reasons to believe that a thorough documentation effort would see it reduced, since it is based on the relatives’ reports to the police without any investigative follow-­up. 5. A report published in July 2000 by the Official Commission of Inquiry states that “bodies were discarded in different places in Beirut, Mount Lebanon, the North, the Bekaa and the South; and some were buried in mass graves.” The commission mentioned specifically three burial sites: the St. Demetrious Cemetery in Achrafieh,

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the Martyrs’ Cemetery in Horsh Beirut, and the English Cemetery in Tahwita, and it reported that some bodies were thrown into the sea. Although the Lebanese state has acknowledged the existence of these graves, it has not taken any steps to protect and guard these sites or exhume the remains of the missing people believed to be buried there. “Lebanon: Ruling Aids Families of ‘Disappeared,’” Human Rights Watch, November 4, 2009, https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/11/04/lebanon-­ruling-­aids -­families-­disappeared. 6. Nizar Saghieh, “Dhakirat al-­harb fil-­nizam al-­qanuni al-­lubani” [Memory of the war in the Lebanese legal system], in Memoire pour l’avenir, ed. Amal Makarem (Beirut: Éditions Dar An-­Nahar, 2002), 205–26. It is important to note that one clause in the law renders judicial procedures possible if “these crimes are repeated or uninterrupted.” Amnesty Law 1991, Article 2.3.f. Indeed, one of the most important aspects of disappearances is that many consider them to be continuous crimes. 7. See Elizabeth Picard, The Demobilization of the Lebanese Militias (Oxford: Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1999). 8. See Bassam Alkantar, “Lebanese Government Ordered to Publicize Investigations on Missing Persons,” Al Akhbar, March 13, 2014. 9. According to a study prepared by the icrc, 77 percent of the families of the disappeared believe that their loved ones are still alive, or at least they are not sure about their fate. Although they realize that the odds of them having been killed are high, nevertheless, they have not stopped hoping to see them alive. See icrc, “The Families of People Missing in Connection with the Armed Conflicts That Have Occurred in Lebanon since 1975: An Assessment of Their Needs” (Beirut: International Committee of the Red Cross, 2013), 12. 10. Michael Young, “The Sneer of Memory: Lebanon’s Disappeared and Postwar Culture,” Middle East Report 217 (2000): 44. 11. umam, “Project Info: What Is to Be Done?,” April 2008, http://www.umam-­dr .org. 12. The inaugural ceremony included speeches by His Excellency Hansjorg Haber, ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany in Lebanon, and Dr. Alex Boraine, who described the postapartheid transition in South Africa as one approach to dealing with the effects of a violent past. I was in attendance at this event. 13. Quoted from the introduction to Missing on the umam website, http://www .umam-­dr.org/index.php/project/missing-­the-­exhibition/. 14. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (N.p.: CreateSpace, 2012), 19–20. 15. Ghassan Halwani tells an anecdote wherein a Red Cross photograph, published in 1999, showed some fifty people behind barbed wire in the port of Beirut. According to the Red Cross, the people were kidnapped by Lebanese Forces and were about to be deported to northern Lebanon; this was the last time they were seen. As Hal212 

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wani explains, families of the missing “went into a frenzy” trying to identify people in the photograph, so much so that different women were claiming the same man as their husband. “You see this problematic where everyone is appropriating the photograph. They want to use the image as a form of evidence.” Ghassan Halwani, interview with Chad Elias, December 2014. 16. See umam’s mission statement, http://www.umam-­dr.org/index.php/mission -­statement/. 17. Eyal Weizman, Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Berlin: Sternberg, 2014), 24. 18. Nelly Richard, The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transformation, and the Poetics of the Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 8. 19. Rabih Mroué’s video installation Noiseless (2008), for example, repurposes newspaper photographs of missing persons to ask questions about the potential for individuality in the Lebanese state. “It seems to me,” he says of the project, “that in order to achieve our individuality as Lebanese citizens, there is a heavy price to pay. Such as, being kidnapped, disappearing, getting murdered, or becoming a martyr. And frankly, I’m not sure that all of these are nearly enough.” Quoted in Aurora F. Polanco, “Fabrications, Image(s), mon amour,” in Rabih Mroué: Image(s), mon amour: Fabrications, exhibition catalogue, trans. David Sanchez (Madrid: ca2m ­Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, 2013), 48. 20. See again umam’s mission statement, http://www.umam-­dr.org/index.php /mission-­statement/. 21. Paola Yacoub, “Under This Trail Are Corpses,” unpublished transcript of a lecture-­performance, Homeworks 6, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, May 18, 2013. 22. Ghassan Halwani, interview with Chad Elias via Skype, December 2014. 23. Halwani, interview. Ghassan Halwani’s father was abducted from his home, in front of his wife and two sons, in 1982. Wadad Halwani founded the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared later that same year. The committee’s stated aim is to offer mutual support and to pressure the government to investigate the fates of citizens who disappeared. 24. Quoted in John Owens, “Push to Find Lebanon’s ‘Disappeared’ Grows,” voa News, November 28, 2014, https://www.voanews.com/a/push-­to-­find-­the-­dis appeared-­is-­growing-­in-­lebanon/2538387.html. 25. Halwani likely removed a mixture of commercial and political posters. The current gentrification of these spaces is erasing an older political iconography. The posters that I found a common feature of Beirut in the mid-­2000s have now largely disappeared. Adding to this was a decision made by the Lebanese government to ban all political posters and party flags from the walls of Lebanon’s major cities in an attempt to ease sectarian tensions. Rana Harbi, Nasser Elamine, and Jinan Mantash, “Too Far or Not Enough? Lebanese React to Political Propaganda Removal CamN O T E S T O C H A P T E R T H R E E  213

paign,” Al Akhbar, February 12, 2015, http://english.al-­akhbar.com/node/23747. The ban on an earlier system of images, a hangover of the war, opens up the further spectacularization of public space by advertising images. 26. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, interview by Chad Elias via Skype, November 2014. 27. The fetishistic nature of photography, as an illusory substitute for death, is explored by Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography” [1927], Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (spring 1993): 421–43. See my longer discussion on photography and mortality in chapter 2. 28. Liz Wells and Derrick Price, “Thinking about Photography: Debates, Historically and Now,” in Photography: A Critical Introduction, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2004), 29. 29. Georges Didi-­Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 167. 30. See Article 33 of the 1995 Lebanese “Provisions Relating to Missing Persons.” For a list of amendments to this law, see Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, “Latency,” in Home Works: A Forum on Cultural Practices in the Region, ed. Ghenwa Hayek, Bilal Khbeiz, and Samer Abu Hawache (Beirut: Ashkal Alwan [Lebanese Association for the Plastic Arts], 2003), 49. 31. The Arabic title of the film (Yawm Akhar) expresses the idea of “a final day” but also carries with it the suggestion of the same day repeating itself: another day. A Perfect Day is an approximate translation that highlights, through a strategy of ironic inversion, the flawed or thwarted desire for resolution. 32. Hadjithomas and Joreige, interview. 33. Hadjithomas and Joreige, interview. 34. Like Wadad Halwani, Claudia is similar to hundreds of thousands of women across the world, locked in a dead zone—she lives de facto like a widow, but is not legally recognized as such, and therefore is unable to assume any caretaker role of her children, benefit from inheritances, or even remarry. Additionally, these women generally have to take on financial support of their families overnight without any recompense from the state. 35. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, “A Perfect Day Pressbook,” http://cdn .hadjithomasjoreige.com/wp-­content/uploads/2013/08/perfectdaypresskitenglish .pdf. 36. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, “Aida, Save Me,” transcript of lecture-­ performance (London: Gasworks, 2010), 4. 37. Hadjithomas and Joreige, “Aida, Save Me.” 38. Hadjithomas and Joreige, “Latency,” 41. 39. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23 (New York: Vintage, 1975), 126. 214 

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40. See Ole Møystad, “Morphogenesis of the Beirut Green-­Line: Theoretical Approaches between Architecture and Geography,” Cahiers de Geographie du Quebec 42, no. 117 (December 1998): 421–35, as well as Ole Møystad’s essay “Rapid Change and Cultural Vacuum,” Architecture Norway, June 5, 2015, http://www.architecture norway.no/questions/identity/moystad-­rapid-­change/. 41. Michael F. Davie, “Demarcation Lines in Contemporary Beirut,” in The Middle East and North Africa: World Boundaries, vol. 2, ed. Clive H. Schofield and Richard N. Schofield (London: Routledge, 1994), 43. 42. Cathy Sultan, A Beirut Heart: One Woman’s War (Minneapolis: Scarletta Press, 2005), 87. 43. Michael F. Davie, “A Post-­war Urban Geography of Beirut,” paper presented at eurames Conference, Warwick, July 1993. 44. A relatively recent bbc Radio 4 clip reiterates the continued problem of these “missing.” See Dalila Mahdawi, “Lebanon’s Amnesia for Those Missing since the Civil War,” From Our Own Correspondent, bbc Radio 4, May 1, 2010. 45. On the persistence and reinscription of sectarian boundaries in post–­civil war Beirut, see Maha Yahya, “Forbidden Spaces Invisible Barriers: Housing in Beirut” (PhD diss., Architectural Association, London, 1994). See also Hashim Sarkis, “Beirut: A Vital Void,” in Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Postwar Reconstruction, ed. Samir Khalaf and Philip S. Khoury (Leiden: Brill, 1993). 46. Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (spring 2008): 103. 47. Joreige spent a significant portion of her childhood in France during the height of the conflict. 48. Aseel Sawalha, Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 98. 49. Sawalha, Reconstructing Beirut. 50. For an analysis of gender in line with sectarianism, see Victoria Firmo-­Fontan, “Power, ngos and Lebanese Television: A Case Study of Al-­Manar’s tv and the Hezbollah Women’s Association,” in Women and Media in the Middle East, ed. Naomi Sakr (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004). 51. Walid Sadek, “A Matter of Words,” Parachute, no. 108 (October 2002): 34. 52. T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 184. Demos does go on to complicate this point, suggesting that “for [Joreige], the documentary mode remains one viable tool to contest forgetting and to challenge the hysterical and psychosomatic effects of suppressing memory when trauma goes unacknowledged. In this regard, Joreige’s practice of witnessing—putting individuals in front of the camera and asking them to talk—joins a long tradition of documentary practice following in the wake of wars, conflicts, and experiences of abuse and violence, a practice used as N O T E S T O C H A P T E R T H R E E  215

a tool of remembrance, therapeutic working-­through, and collective memory production” (182). 53. Sarah Rogers, “The Politics of Display: Lebanon’s Postwar Art,” Lamia Joreige, 2006, http://www.lamiajoreige.com/publications/othertexts_rogers_2006.pdf. 54. Kaelen Wilson-­Goldie, “Contemporary Art Practices in Post-­war Lebanon: An Introduction,” in Out of Beirut, ed. Suzanne Cotter (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006), 84. 55. Suzanne Cotter, “Beirut Unbound,” in Out of Beirut, ed. Suzanne Cotter (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006), 30. 56. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 156.

F O U R  S U S P E N D E D S P A C E S 1. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 7. 2. See Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2008). 3. Here I follow Kevin Lynch’s influential conception of the city as both a mental and a physical construct. Although his focus is on cognitive mapping, I draw on his foregrounding of the “mental image” of the city “held by its citizens.” Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1960), 2. 4. Gary McDonogh, “The Geography of Emptiness,” in The Cultural Meaning of Urban Space, ed. Robert Rotenberg and Gary McDonogh (Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, 1993), 4. 5. On this idea, see Adrian Lahoud, Charles Rice, and Anthony Burke, eds., “Post-­ traumatic Urbanism,” special issue, Architectural Design 80, no. 5 (September/October 2010). 6. See, for example, Jane Schneider and Ida Susser, eds., Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World (London: Bloomsbury, 2003). 7. See Glen Seator, James Casebere, Mark Wigley, and Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Unconscious: James Casebere + Glen Seator (Philadelphia: Addison Gallery of American Art, 2000). 8. This idea of memory spaces draws on Pierre Nora’s notion of lieux de memoire, generally translated as “realms of memory.” Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). My description of the traditional monument builds on James E. Young, “The Counter-­Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” Critical Inquiry 18, no. 2 (winter 1992): 267–96, expanded further in his book

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The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). 9. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1992). 10. The clearing of the city center marks the culmination of a process that goes back to the civil war. As the artist Paola Yacoub has perceptively noted, large-­scale demolitions in the city center were carried out systematically in the interstices between battles. During two periods of relative peace in 1983 and 1986, a substantial number of buildings in the area were dynamited under the false pretext that they were damaged beyond repair. For Yacoub, the reconstruction of Beirut is one that “actually overlaps with the war, rather than following it as is normally the case.” What this brings into view is the fact that, in Lebanon, war and urban reconstruction have been deeply intertwined. Indeed, what Yacoub makes us realize is that the demolitions that took place during the 1980s were in fact rehearsals for the demolitions that would be systematized—or we could say, perfected—a decade later. Paola Yacoub and Michel Lasserre, Beirut Is a Magnificent City. Synoptic Pictures (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2003), 78. 11. Jad Tabet, “La memoire des pierres” [The memory of stones], in Memory for the Future, ed. Jad Tabet (Beirut: Éditions Dar An-­Nahar, 2002), 239. 12. Saree Makdisi, “Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (spring 1997): 662. 13. Elias Khoury, “The Memory of the City,” Grand Street, no. 54 (autumn 1995): 139. 14. Khoury, “The Memory of the City,” 139. 15. Elias Khoury, Broken Mirrors / Sinalcol, trans. Humphrey Davies (London: Maclehose Press, 2015), 305. 16. Khoury, Broken Mirrors / Sinalcol, 306. 17. Ayman Trawi, Beirut’s Memory / La memoire de Beyrouth (Beirut: Banque de la Mediterranee, 2004). 18. For a useful discussion of the question of property rights, see Maha Yahya, “Let the Dead Be Dead: Memory, Architecture, Urban Narratives and Post–­Civil War Nation Building in Beirut,” in Urban Imaginaries: Locating the Modern City, ed. Thomas Bender and Alve Cinar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 236–66. 19. Bernard Khoury employs this metaphor in the film Sector Zero, discussed below. 20. See Samir Kassir, Beirut, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 533. 21. According to Reinoud Leenders, most of the families living in the downtown

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had been displaced from the Shiite populations located in South Lebanon and the suburb of Al Dahyeh in southeastern Beirut. These families were given monetary compensation and asked to leave. In 1992, a report issued by the General Security Forces estimated the number of families living in the area at around 2,200. See Reinoud Leenders, Spoils of Truce: Corruption and State-­Building in Postwar Lebanon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012). 22. Charles Percy, “United States Participation in the Economic Recovery of Lebanon,” Mediterranean Quarterly 6, no. 2 (1995), quoted in Aseel Sawalha, Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 36. 23. Hashim Sarkis, “Territorial Claims: Architecture and Post-­war Attitudes to the Built Environment,” in Recovering Beirut: Urban Design and Post-­war Reconstruction, ed. Samir Halaf and Philip S. Khoury (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 285. 24. Jad Tabet, “Des pierres dans la mémoire,” in La brûlure des rêves, ed. Jad Tabet (Paris: Autrement, 2003), 68. 25. Jalal Toufic, “Ruins,” in Tamass: Contemporary Arab Representations, Contemporary Arab Representations: Beirut/Lebanon 1 (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002), 22. 26. Young, The Texture of Memory, 270. 27. Quoted in Hassan M. Fattah, “Lebanon’s History Textbooks Sidestep Its Civil War,” New York Times International Herald Tribune, January 10, 2007, http://www .nytimes.com/2007/01/10/world/africa/10iht-­beirut.4163377.html?pagewanted=all. 28. Foucault defines popular memory as “a way of recording history, or remembering it, of keeping it fresh and of using it,” for those people “who are barred from writing, from producing their books themselves, from drawing up their own historical accounts.” This definition was given in a 1974 interview that originally appeared in Cahiers du Cinema and was translated and published in Radical Philosophy: Michel Foucault, “Film in Popular Memory: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in The Collective Memory Reader, ed. Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-­Seroussi, and Daniel Levy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 252–53. 29. Lucia Volk, Martyrs and Memorials in Modern Lebanon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 114. 30. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 1994), 1. 31. Robin Wagner-­Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past,” American Journal of Sociology 97, no. 2 (September 1991): 376. 32. Samir Khalaf, Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 169. 33. Marwan Rechmaoui, interview with Chad Elias, June 11, 2015. 218 

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

34. For a discussion of civil war spatial practices, see Khalaf, Civil and Uncivil Violence, 248–49. 35. Sara Fregonese, “The Urbicide of Beirut? Geopolitics and the Built Environment in the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1976),” Political Geography 28, no. 5 (2009): 314. 36. Rasha Abu Zaki, “The Robert Ghanem Floor above the Michel el-­Murr Floor,” Al-­Akhbar, October 19, 2011, http://www.al-­akhbar.com/node/23945. 37. Seator et al., The Architectural Unconscious. 38. The project, which was built to house a Japanese restaurant and bar, is located on the edge of the Damascus Road (the former Green Line). Evidence of shelling is visible in figure 4.11 on adjacent buildings, still used by squatters in the early 1990s. Bernard Khoury’s website describes Yabani as “the product of a scenario that attempts to describe a fraction of a society living in marvelous denial. Leftovers of war and spectacles of desolation become a backdrop to the more impressive spectacle of a society being entertained. Yabani wants to be a monument for the entertainment industry, a building that claims a landmark status it cannot possibly assume.” Bernard Khoury, “Yabani (r2),” 2002, http://www.bernardkhoury.com/project.php ?id=153. 39. James Young has formulated this term to refer to monuments that upend many of the conventions of the traditional memorial: “Its aim is not to console but to provoke; not to remain fixed but to change; not to be everlasting but to disappear; not to be ignored by passersby but to demand interaction; not to remain pristine but to invite its own violation and desanctification.” Young, The Texture of Memory, 30. 40. Bernard Khoury, “Waking Reality,” Artforum 45, no. 2 (October 2006): 239–40. 41. Bernard Khoury, “N.B.K. Residence,” Domus, no. 985 (November 2014): 96. 42. Bernard Khoury, “Evolving Scars,” 1991, http://www.bernardkhoury.com /project.php?id=244. 43. Ghenwa Hayek, Beirut, Imagining the City: Space and Place in Lebanese Literature (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 158. 44. Khoury, “Evolving Scars.” 45. Khoury, “Evolving Scars.” 46. Bernard Khoury, Local Heroes (New York: Skira, 2015), 23. 47. Nadim Mishlawi, dir., Sector Zero (Beirut: mc Distribution, 2011), dvd. 48. Khoury, Local Heroes, 21. 49. Thomas Fitzel, “Raving and Remembrance,” Die Tageszeitung, June 24, 2003, reprinted in World Press Review 50, no. 9 (September 2003). 50. See, for example, Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Middle-­East Pieces,” New York Times, May 21, 2006; Johnny Alam, “Real Archive, Contested Memory, Fake History: Transnational Representations of Trauma by Lebanese War Generation Artists,” in History, N O T E S T O C H A P T E R F O U R  219

Memory, Performance, ed. David Dean, Yana Meerzon, and Kathryn Prince (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 183. 51. Suzanne Cotter, “Beirut Unbound,” in Out of Beirut, ed. Suzanne Cotter (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006), 29. 52. Fitzel, “Raving and Remembrance.” 53. Khoury, Local Heroes, 19. 54. Khoury, Local Heroes, 32. 55. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 11. 56. Khoury, Local Heroes, 27.

F I V E  I M A G E S O F F U T U R E S P A S T 1. The members of the society included Simon Aprahamian, Garabed Basmadjian, Hampartsum Karageuzian, Hrair Kelechain, Michael Ladah, and John Tilkian. 2. Richard Hopper, “Lebanon’s Forgotten Space Programme,” bbc World Service, November 14, 2013, http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-­24735423. 3. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, “On the Lebanese Rocket Society,” e-­flux, no. 43 (2013), http://www.e-­flux.com/journal/on-­the-­lebanese-­rocket-­society-­2/. 4. Hadjithomas and Joreige, “On the Lebanese Rocket Society.” 5. Georges Didi-­Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 99. 6. Didi-­Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 81, 99. The second quotation is taken from Arlette Farge, Le gout de l’archive. 7. On the mythology surrounding this period in Lebanese history, see Samir Khalaf, “Lebanon’s Golden/Gilded Age: 1943–1975,” in Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 151–204. 8. Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, “Wonder Beirut,” in Out of Beirut, ed. Suzanne Cotter (Oxford: Modern Art Oxford, 2006), 77. 9. Nora Razian, with Tarek El-­Ariss (moderator), Yazan L. Al Saadi, Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige, and Sophia Al Maria, “How to Be in the Future,” panel discussion, Homeworks 6, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, May 21, 2013. 10. Tarek El-­Ariss, “Future Fiction: In the Shadow of Nasser,” Ibraaz, no. 007 (June 26, 2014), http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/95. 11. Hadjithomas and Joreige, “On the Lebanese Rocket Society.” 12. On this generation of defeat, see Tarek El-­Ariss, Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 13. Hadjithomas and Joreige, “On the Lebanese Rocket Society.” 14. Chantal Pontbriand, “Artists at Work: Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige,”

220 

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

Afterall, September 9, 2013, https://www.afterall.org/online/artists-­at-­work_joana -­hadjithomas-­and-­khalil-­joreige#.WLsqWhiZO_s. 15. Hopper, “Lebanon’s Forgotten Space Programme.” 16. Hopper, “Lebanon’s Forgotten Space Programme.” 17. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York: Zone, 2010), 13. 18. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 14. 19. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 18. 20. Caroline Bassett, Ed Steinmueller, and George Voss, Better Made Up: The Mutual Influence of Science Fiction and Innovation (Nesta Working Paper, March 2013), 1. 21. Bassett, Steinmueller, and Voss, Better Made Up, 12. 22. Claire Vasse, “In Conversation with Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige,” in The Lebanese Rocket Society (2013), http://hadjithomasjoreige.com/wp-­content /uploads/2013/02/lrs_press_book-­v2-­copie.pdf. 23. Nesrine Malik, “What Happened to Arab Science Fiction?,” Guardian, July 30, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jul/30/arab-­world-­science -­fiction. 24. Malik, “What Happened to Arab Science Fiction?” 25. In fact, science fiction in the Arab world can be traced as far back as the thirteenth century, when Ibn Al-­Nafis wrote Theologus Autodidactus, believed to be one of the first theological sci-­fi texts, putting forth concepts such as spontaneous generation and the apocalypse through a child living alone on a deserted island. Considered proto–­science fiction, One Thousand and One Nights introduced fantasy narratives of robots, underwater adventures, and journeys through the cosmos. 26. Contributor’s bio for Sophia Al Maria, in Anthony Downey, ed., Uncommon Grounds: New Media and Critical Practices in North Africa and the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 344. 27. Karen Orten, “The Desert of the Unreal,” Dazed, 2013, http://www.dazeddigital .com/artsandculture/article/15040/1/the-­desert-­of-­the-­unreal. 28. Orten, “The Desert of the Unreal.” 29. Here I am thinking primarily of writers and intellectual figures who came to prominence in the immediate wake of 1967. This generation usually includes novelists such as Ghassan Kanafani (1936–1972) and Halim Barakat (1936–­) and playwrights like Saadallah Wannous but might be expanded to include painters such as Dia Azzawi and the New Vision group formed in Baghdad in 1969. For a discussion of the post-­1967 “generation of defeat” and its critical revision by new Arabic writing’s stylistic and technological transformations, see Tarek El-­Ariss, “Hacking the Modern,” in Trials of Arab Modernity.

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30. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005), 288–89. 31. Hadjithomas and Joreige, “On the Lebanese Rocket Society.”

CODA 1. Jalal Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster (Beirut: Forthcoming Books), 64. 2. Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition, 66. 3. See “Secrets in the Open Sea,” Atlas Group Archive, accessed November 23, 2013, www.theatlasgroup.org/data/TypeFD.html. 4. Toufic, The Withdrawal of Tradition, 58. 5. Walid Raad, We Are a Fair People. We Never Speak Well of One Another, MoMA Audio, 1994/2013, http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/audios/411/7313. Note that Paula Cooper Gallery, which has given permission for me to use the image, gives a different date for the work (2014). I have chosen to the use the latter in the main text. 6. Raad, We Are a Fair People. 7. Long regarded as one of the most impressive and enigmatic ruins of the Roman Empire, archaeological research in sites around Ba‘albek has in recent years been halted by various forms of unrest and violence that have spilled over from neighboring Syria. It is estimated that upward of twenty thousand Syrian refugees live in makeshift shacks on the outskirts of the town. The surrounding area has also been transformed into a crucial front in the Syrian war as clashes have erupted between Hezbollah, an ally of the al-­Assad regime, and members of the Sunni radical group Jabhat al-­Nusra. 8. This trend was the subject of the 2014 exhibition The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. 9. Ingrid Schaffner, “Digging Back into ‘Deep Storage’ and Deep Storage,” in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, ed. Ingrid Schaffner, Matthias Winzen, Geoffrey Batchen, and Hubertus Gassner (Munich: Prestel-­Verlag, 1998), 11. 10. Analyzing the importance of this term in Zaatari’s practice, Hannah Feldman argues that “fossil” is useful because “it imputes to the object a sense of its being discovered and unearthed while also maintaining a sense of both its original integrity and its transformation over time.” Hannah Feldman and Akram Zaatari, “Mining War: Fragments from a Conversation Already Passed,” Art Journal 66, no. 2 (2007): 51. 11. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema: The Time-­Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 113. 12. Chad Elias, “The Libidinal Archive: A Conversation with Akram Zaatari,” Tate 222 

NOTES TO CHAPTER FIVE

Papers, no. 19 (spring 2013), http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate -­papers/19/the-­libidinal-­archive-­a-­conversation-­with-­akram-­zaatari. 13. Akram Zaatari, In This House (2005; Chicago: Video Data Bank), dvd. 14. Elias, “The Libidinal Archive.” 15. Hannah Feldman, “Excavating Images on the Border,” Third Text 23, no. 3 (2009): 317. 16. Neil Asher Silberman, “Postcolonial, Neo-­imperial, or a Little Bit of Both? Reflections on Museums in Lebanon,” Near Eastern Archaeology 73, no. 2/3 (June–­ September 2010): 199. 17. Amin Maalouf, “‘Les figures de l’absence’: Entretien avec Amin Maalouf,” in Beyrouth: La brûleurs des rêves, ed. Jad Tabet (Paris: Editions Autrement, 2009), 21. 18. For more on these events, see Nina Jedijian, “Saving the Beirut National Museum,” Daily Star, April 20, 2008, http://www.lebanonwire.com/0308/03080516 DS.asp. 19. Dario Gamboni, “World Heritage: Shield or Target?,” Conservation: The Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter 16, no. 2 (2001), http://www.getty.edu/conservation /publications_resources/newsletters/16_2/feature.html. 20. Gamboni, “World Heritage.” 21. Akram Zaatari, e-­mail to the author, February 28, 2015. 22. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36. 23. Arab Image Foundation, “Mission Statement,” accessed June 7, 2016, http:// www.fai.org.lb/Template.aspx?id=1. 24. Anthony Downey, “Photography as Apparatus: Akram Zaatari in Conversation with Anthony Downey,” Ibraaz, no. 6 (January 28, 2014), http://www.ibraaz.org /interviews/113. 25. Eva Respini and Ana Janevski, “Interview with the Artist,” MoMA Projects 100: Akram Zaatari, April 2013, https://www.vdb.org/sites/default/files/Interview -­Akram-­Zaatari.pdf. 26. Walid Raad, “Appendix XVIII: Plates 88–107,” Art Journal 69, no. 3 (fall 2010): 7. 27. Raad, “Appendix XVIII.” 28. Françoise Choay, quoted in Gamboni, “World Heritage.”

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