‘Failure in the air’: activist narratives, in‐group story‐telling, and keeping political possibility alive in Lebanon

Abstract

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

Bala wāsṭa: aspirant professionals, class‐making, and moral narratives of social mobility in Lebanon

“…Aspirant professional subjectivity offers a useful analytical lens to observe everyday local contestations for symbolic capital, respectability, and class mobility more broadly. Even though, in line with civil society actors in some other ethnographies of Lebanon (Hermez 2011;Musallam 2020), many of my interlocutors criticized NGOs for being co-opted by the system and not bringing substantial change, they continued to rely on them to help navigate Lebanon's economic crisis. Aspirant professionals' lived experiences of protracted conflicts, unemployment, and 'weak' families were inextricable from their class-making practices.…”

Digital Failures in Abolitionist Ethnography

“…A sense of failure is not the end of the road for activism or digital ethnography, but rather a reason to create new strategies (Musallam 2020). My own fraught relationship with online abolitionists follows a broader anthropological search for social continuity.…”

Beyond Failure

“…In explaining this attitude to me, the county offi cials would underline that the free health-care scheme was a policy experiment, meant to generate 'lessons learned' (see Donovan 2018;Kelly and McGoey 2018;Rao, this issue). Failure was anticipated not as an end-point but a 'turning-point' (see Ssorin-Chaikov 2016;Musallam 2020;Miyazaki and Riles 2005). Th is perspective persisted, even though the process of generating, evaluating and looping back evidence as 'lessons learned' during the intervention never gathered momentum (unlike the Indian state's health insurance policy experiments examined by Rao in this issue).…”

“…Failures conceal partial successes. Instead of creating demotivation and disengagement, they may lead to renewed eff orts (Cowan 2007;Musallam 2020;see Cross and Street, Rao, Redfi eld, this issue).…”