Blow-up, a meandering soliloquy on media and violence for the time when pagers are exploding
When I first read that pagers were exploding all over Lebanon I assumed the headline was meant figuratively. Before Tuesday, the expression “my phone is blowing up” had never struck me as particularly arch, but now the association with munitions is unavoidable. In Lebanon, while I lived there, phones were always blowing up, as it were, and often blowing up in unison, as news of some political crisis or minor event circulated through the digital bloodstream. In class, students’ phones would all start chirping, an exuberant chorus, as parents and friends, brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, girlfriends and boyfriends, passed along news of some incidental catastrophe, few of which, invariably, would linger overlong in memory. While most of us linger overlong on our phones, scanning social media, tumbling down ever more obscure rabbit holes toward peak information saturation and despair, in Lebanon, one cannot underestimate the extent to which a phone is a lifeline, an antidote against the generalized sense of doom that stalks the horizon of social experience as remorselessly as the shock troops of the late colonial excrescence that presses upon the southern border. It is one thing to say that the nation and the state or the family are effects of the media and media infrastructures; it is another to understand what this means when the war is always about to break out, when one is always about to run out of minutes on their data plan, when the infrastructures that support the mediation of social experience are always about to break down, when the line is broken and you cannot get through to the person you so desperately need to find. It is another thing entirely to understand what this means, the generalized, ambient trauma entailed, when it comes to pass that your phone, your device, any device, your means of being in relation to those others who hold you against the hostility of the world, may well be rigged so that it might literally blow up, and that it might literally blow up at any moment.
Among certain expatriates in Beirut, there was a saying, a slightly cynical declamation of the privilege we somewhat desperately claimed against the backdrop of the ever impending crisis with which everyone lived. “If you get killed in Lebanon you probably deserved it.” This, of course, is patently untrue. People in Lebanon are subject, all the time, to different degrees of violence and different expressions of murderous intent, whether manifest in state and parastate violence, or the everyday intimate violences of the street, the workplace, or the household. Racialized and gendered violence against domestic and foreign workers is so routine as to go largely overlooked, in most quarters, as are the gendered and sexualized violences that are the common weal of everyday life. Moreover, bombs and guns, no matter how well calibrated, always inflict collateral damage, and while that damage might be statistically identifiable, beforehand and after the event of its unfolding, trauma is a wound that is inflicted outside all considerations of time and space.
Those who uttered this statement would not have denied any of these things, nor would they have thought themselves crass in the utterance, or necessarily dismissive (although we were). The statement was meant as a mantra, a refrain, a rubric for the liturgical setting through which certain acts of violence were sanctified and ordained. It was, in short, an explanation, an invocation, of certain incontrovertible truths: that behind the very obvious, spectacular acts of aggressive violence by which Lebanon is known to the world, by which Lebanon, in many ways, is known to itself, there is generally a measure of intent, if not purpose, rationale, if not reason. This statement was in service of a comparison. In the United States, violence is random and unpredictable; in Lebanon, it is targeted, and expected, if not announced. One could rest assured in the knowledge that, given the proper disposition to the political situation, one would never find oneself in the crosshairs. One could remain safely blase about violence because violence was, if not elsewhere, at least generally knowable.
This is a fantasy, but one that is common and useful: it allows everyday life to continue, for the party to go on—the party being paramount, in Lebanon—even under the most considerable forms of socially corrosive anxiety, the combined, amalgamated affective waste of a thousand million attachments that have been severed and undone, as well as the ever present threat of the imminence of loss. There are questions without answers, here, and they proliferate. It is never just that I may die, or suffer great physical pain. These are things that I could deal with. It is that someone I love may die and die horribly and unexpectedly and who would I be then without them? What part of their horrible death must I assume for myself, absorb into myself? What am I, if you are not out there waiting for me?
Among those of us who lived through the events of August 4, 2020, it was often difficult to accept that there was nothing more behind the explosion than the weight of statistical inevitability, of negligence, of corruption, that is, the spectral inverse of purpose or plan. I know people who, to this day, insist they say Israeli bombers in the sky; that it must have been Israel, that it must have been Hezbollah, that it must have been someone doing something for some reason that could be inferred, if not tested or proven. As a Beiruti–albeit one of dubious provenance, one in exile, one who knows all too well that there was no reason, as such, behind the port blast–none of these ascriptions of intent seems at all far-fetched, and they swim around the perimeter of my awareness, those of my friends and my comrades. The utter randomness of such tremendous violence could barely be thought, can barely be thought: it does not serve the purposes of ego, which needs above all for Lebanon to be special, of only to explain why it has been subject, over centuries and millennia, to conquest and occupation, to violence from the outside (but never from within). Violence descends upon Lebanon for a reason, like the wrath of God, which is just, if inscrutable, cruel, but fair.
Violence again descends upon Lebanon and it has a purpose, many purposes, even as it strikes out at the very fantasy of purpose and intent by which many people have come to organize their thin sense of security, as well as the infrastructure of that security, that sociality, the fantasy of that infrastructure as being itself, however fragile, still readily legible in its conveyances. In Lebanon, we are highly protective of that infrastructure, that fantasy, even if Lebanon itself, whatever that may be, is not. The whiff, the rumor of a plan to tax Whatsapp transmissions sent the country into open revolution: one does not trifle with the phones. Israel has struck out at the communications network by which Hezbollah maintains itself as a party, a cadre, the very banal mechanisms by which party discipline, rank, authority, hierarchy, action are organized and enforced. There is of course an immediate strategic purpose behind what they have done: to scramble the communications of their enemy, to inhibit the effectiveness of military action. Yet the strategic purpose bleeds out into a myriad of ancillary effects, some of them foreseeable, many unpredictable and as yet to unfold. A large portion of Hezbollah’s effectiveness as an organization, politically and militarily, has been its media apparatus–a statement which holds true for probably every effective military force since Napoleon–but a large part of the effectiveness of that apparatus is the widespread faith in the effectiveness of the apparatus, itself. It works because it works, because we know that it will work. Undermining the apparatus, one undermines the message, and faith in the message, if only the faith that, in receiving the message, one might adopt the proper disposition toward violence, to make oneself an instrument of it, or to find oneself on a path beyond it. The apparatus of the resistance, in this moment, has become a weapon for the enemy, in ways which are difficult to discern or know. Infrastructure is under threat; infrastructure is the threat; the threat is our loss of faith in the infrastructure by which we maintain our faith in the whole. The phone becomes uncanny, the computer, unreal. The tools by which we have exorcized the specters of violence are now become mechanisms of the demonic and its manifestation.
In Lebanon, most ghosts are bound. They do not wander. This can no longer be said with any degree of accuracy.
Still, it is worth considering: For all the spectacular technology at their disposal, for all the magnificent weapons given them by the United States and other western governments, for all the nuclear warheads they have been stockpiling, Israel’s best “defense” is a guerilla assault. The Zionist state and its military, quixotic arbiter of its own morality, claims for itself the prerogative of the oppressed and lays claim to the weapons of the weak. Israel claims to be a state among states and to observe the laws by which states relate to each other as states and asks to be treated as a state like any other state, except when it claims for itself the prerogative of being unlike any other state, an exception to all exceptions, a point of distinction by which it affords itself the capacity to act exceptionally, both erratically and purposefully, in light of a purpose that has no purpose, no direction other than the purpose itself, no claim upon ethics or truth or reason except that of the purpose, a message now shorn of all meaning. It lays claim to the weapons of the weak as it lays claim to that purpose, that meaning, the ethical imperative that guides those who inveigh against tyranny, those for whom anger has become objective and encompassing; yet their blade is not so well honed. Even as they reach into our hearts and our homes, they reveal themselves. They are desperate. They are not as strong as they pretend. And they know this. They do not know that they know but they know it. They are haunted by the very shadow of themselves and the malignancy of their purpose. While claiming a home, they are lost. They know they are lost, but they do not know it. The task of the resistance is to deliver the message.
Addendum: 19 September, 11:20 AM: A headline in the US media: “More explosions in Lebanon as Israel prepares for war.” Apparently, Israel—like the United States—never provokes wars or causes wars. It merely “prepares” for war, which is its sad dispensation, its special burden among the otherwise desultory community of nations.
11:45 AM, well after Nasrallah’s speech promising retribution, another US headline: “Former CIA director warns of escalation in Israel-Hezbollah conflict.” What was your first clue, Chief Intelligence Operative?