Failure is often taken as an endpoint: anathema to political organizing and the death knell of social movements. To the degree that radical movements themselves dwell on failure, participants often consider the focus pathological. This article explores how, in the aftermath of the falling apart of long-term initiatives, Lebanese political activists were able to maintain their capacity to engage in transformative action. At a time when activists felt 'failure in the air', narrating prior political experiences communally, in formal and informal contexts, became crucial to (re)imagining one another as activists. Such stories narrated failure to compel collective action in the future, making failure itself a political resource; not the end, but a beginning. Throughout, this article engages in an affirmative anthropology that keeps alive the costs of failure even as it shows how radical political actors generate their capacity to act and their potential to imagine otherwise.'Our protests don't really matter to those in charge -the police just leave us to it' . It was December 2013, and I was sitting with David 1 in the run-down garden behind Captain's Cabin, a cheaper bar in the west Beirut neighbourhood of Hamra where we both lived, and an area that acted as a home space in the city for left-wing and independent activism. It had been a quiet few months for my interlocutors. I asked David whether the recent spate of car bombs, one of the many ways that the conflict in Syria had made itself felt in neighbouring Lebanon, had deterred public protest. Though the bombings had mostly been concentrated in Beirut's southern suburbs, a car bomb had recently exploded in Downtown, and there had been police controls of suspicious parked cars in Hamra itself for the last few weeks. 'Of course not' , David replied. 'That's not why. We would never be the targets, because those who do the bombings don't see us as a threat' . I nursed my beer as he lit up another cigarette. 'Protesters blocking the roads are like vegetable sellers. People walk around' .In this article, I explore how political activists maintain the capacity to engage in transformative action in a context where the potential for demobilization and despair engendered by failure is pervasive. The opening dialogue offers a sense of the 'failure' through which activists in Lebanon persevered. The past ten years have seen an uneven
In discussing how people make political use of public space from below, recent writings either emphasize the repurposing of monumental spaces, like Tahrir Square, or else look to how the poor and marginal produce facts on the ground through their everyday interactions without explicit political intentions. In the Hamra neighborhood of Lebanon's capital, Beirut, the daily life of politicized youth was, in the years following the Arab Spring uprisings, something more than passivity and something less than constant avowed resistance. Through their dissensual everyday inhabitation they made Hamra a compelling political site that was good to fight for and in which it was good to fight. Building on attempts to affirm possibility in anthropological engagements with urban life and political activism, I suggest that such spaces, containing an experiential, embodied, and enspaced memory of radical engagements, can maintain political actors in the face of defeat and setback, and provide encouragement for future political action.
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