You know: layered, couched in events, touched—soiled, perhaps, or perhaps sanctified—by hands, eyes. Sometimes briefly glimpsed. Sometimes lightly pondered. Occasionally, noted.

But we don’t usually have much access to all these layers. Usually, what we encounter—the pavement, elevator buttons, an ax handle, silverware in a restaurant, and on and on and on—comes to us as only what it is at the moment of the encounter, telling us nothing about what it’s been through.

But this brown, moderately tattered Modern Library edition of The Poems and Plays of Alfred Lord Tennyson is different—it tells, however obscurely, a little story about one reader’s affection for a few lines, for a couple of thoughts. Just that. No more.

Published in 1938, the book most likely became part of the ACS library not too long afterwards.

ACS: that’s the American Community School at Beirut. Beirut, Lebanon: 50 years ago, the Paris of the Middle East; 30 years ago, the poster child for unlivable cities. Now… now it’s hard to tell. One moment all seems well, gentle breezes pulling whitecaps from the surf that breaks against the rocks along the western edge of the city, where fishermen stand waiting as patiently as fishermen wait everywhere, just below the Corniche where lovers and families stroll in the evening.

The next moment—while the autocrats of the Middle East topple all around us like dominos, and Lebanon’s stuck in another political stalemate of its own making—everyone wonders just how close to the abyss the city stands.

This collection of Tennyson has been here through it all. It was purchased back when the school educated the children of Americans and Europeans, some stationed in Beirut, others—who sent their children to the boarding department—stationed in nearby countries that didn’t offer western-style schooling.

The book was still here when the school dwindled to almost nothing, holding on through the late ‘70s and ‘80s, all the ex-pats’ children long gone, and with them the international staff, a few dozen Lebanese students and teachers figuring keeping the school going was as reasonable a thing as there was to be done in a city that had lost its reason. The book was here when the school was hit by mortar fire. It was here when, in the early 1990s, the school began to come back to life. And here it remains, after the library was moved from the ground floor to the newly built fourth floor of the high school building, after the damaged books were weeded from the collection to make room for the new ones for the high-school student body of almost 400. The Tennyson anthology remained, along with a few other relics, like the geography book purchased during the late Ottoman era, when the stamp on the flyleaf read not “Beirut, Lebanon,” but “Beirut, Syria.”

—

It wasn’t the history of the school’s tribulations that got me started on this, though. This brief odyssey was only digression, a distraction that occurred to me as I pondered ways to unravel the book’s most important secret.

The secret: the glimpse this book gave me into a single, unknown reader’s mind.

Maybe the reader was Tania, the first person recorded as having checked the book out sometime between 1938 and 1955, before the check-out stamp included the year it was due, as well as the day and the month. Maybe it was someone before Tania, before the little pocket was glued onto the first page, the blue card inserted, a date stamp lying at the ready at the check-out desk. Maybe it was later, perhaps Claudia or B. Hume from the early ‘60’s, or Theodore Sets from December, ‘68. Maybe even Leigh Ann, who checked it out in 1998.

Perhaps it was some casual reader. A free period. Homework finished. Arbitrarily pulling the volume from the shelf, and settling onto a couch, or sitting at a carrel. No formal check-out required.

Sometime in the 72 years of this book’s existence, some reader left a mark.

Actually, four marks. Two sets of parentheses, little penciled windows into someone’s mind that I happened to encounter years or decades after the reader curled the pencil lines around two thoughts.

Having checked out The Poems and Plays of Alfred Lord Tennyson from the ACS library, and having made my way through the first third of the book, I decided to jump ahead to page 665, to “Enoch Arden,” a narrative poem I’d enjoyed reading several years before.

The poem is a pleasant little piece of Victorian melodrama. Enoch and Phillip and Annie were playmates in a seaside village. Grown-up, Phillip and Enoch both fell in love with Annie; fisherman Enoch won and wed her; he was injured at sea, couldn’t earn a living, set Annie up as a small shopkeeper and went to work on a merchant ship, promising to send back money; he was not heard from again; Phillip offered to help nearly destitute Annie, who only very reluctantly accepted his help; then—YEARS later—Phillip convinced her (lovingly) that Enoch was dead, and they wed; Enoch was not, of course, dead, having been shipwrecked on a desert isle and eventually rescued; he came home barely alive, found Annie and Phillip happy, died, leaving a note saying how happy he was that they were happy and that she and his children weren’t starving.

It’s a good story, well told, a tear-jerker.

One morning in early January (JAN 2010) I chose it as the poem I’d read first thing in the morning before I packed up and headed out for my day’s work teaching English and history at ACS.

I reached the part where Annie’s world is really falling apart. It turns out she’s not a very good businesswoman, and her youngest child is getting sicker and sicker. I turned the page.

There, almost at the bottom of the second column on page 670, I noticed something I had not noticed anywhere else in this book. Some reader had set parentheses around a line and a half of text.

In pencil. Very faintly.

Annie is agreeing, finally, to accept some help from prosperous Phillip. The reader—B. Jones? Cleveland? Fitzhugh? Francis B.? Leigh Ann?—, coming upon her words, “When you came my sorrow broke me down;/And now I think your kindness breaks me down;/But Enoch lives; that is borne in on me;/He will repay you. Money can be repaid,/Not kindness such as yours.”

Something struck some reader about that last line and a half. He or she noted:

(Money can be repaid, not such kindness as yours.)

I continued reading.

Eight pages on, a sick, weakened Enoch has returned home, only to find out from innkeeper Miriam that Annie has married Phillip and that all is well with the family. He decides to go see for himself.

Now when the dead man come to life beheld

His wife his wife no more, and saw the babe

Hers, yet not his, upon the father’s knee,

And all the warmth, the peace, the happiness,

And his own children tall and beautiful,

And him, that other, reigning in his place,

Lord of his rights and of his children’s love—

Then he, tho’ Miriam Lane had told him all,

Because things seen are mightier than things heard,

Stagger’d and shook, holding the branch, and fear’d

To send abroad a shrill and terrible cry,

Which in one moment, like a blast of doom,

Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth.

Enoch does not utter that cry. He shuffles off stage, sad for his loss but satisfied that those he loves are well and happy, and dies.

It was not, however, the potential cry or Enoch’s selflessness or the fact that Phillip would pay—two pages later—for an elaborate funeral for his former friend, his wife’s former husband, that struck our pencil-wielding reader.

We note, again, faintly parenthesized:

(Because things seen are mightier than things heard).

Only twice in 1122 pages did any of at least 19 readers take special note of anything. And it wasn’t from “Ulysses,” those lines encouraging young romantics “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.” It wasn’t from the last, and probably best known, poem in the book, “Crossing the Bar.” It wasn’t to note that Tennyson’s play Becket thickly intertwined Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine’s plot against Henry’s lover Rosamund into the decision to assassinate the contrary archbishop.

Two statements, and two statements only, were found worthy of note—literally—by all these readers in all these pages over all these years:

Money can be repaid, not such kindness as yours

and

Because things seen are mightier than things heard

Taking note of the first I can easily understand. A life-lesson: The reader, drawn into the melodrama, has understood that the poet wants us to understand that what matters in life is not what we earn and have, but who we are. Character and all that.

Well and good.

But that same reader then went on to call his or her own attention (never considering that he or she might be calling someone else’s attention to the point years later) to what might best be called a neurophysiological insight. You know, how we’re a visual species, our binocular vision having evolved from the requirements of the savannah and blah-blah-blah.

You know, seeing is believing.

This poem struck some reader strongly enough to cause that person to pause, pick up a pencil, and enclose these two, very disparate, thoughts, in parentheses. It is, I think, safe to say “pick up a pencil” since nothing else was noted, indicating he or she probably did not read “Enoch Arden” with pencil poised in hand. It is, I think, safe to say that one of these readers was “strongly” struck by these lines, these thoughts—by their meanings or, perhaps, simply by the sound of the words—for the same reason.

Or perhaps not.

Perhaps it was just Storm/Stern, the teacher who put the book on reserve in 1961, choosing quotations he or she might use as possible starting points for the essay to be assigned on Tennyson. My instincts tell me not; they tell me no teacher worth his/her salt would have singled out either line for an essay prompt.

So much we cannot know. We cannot know if the reader then went on to remember, as my wife remembers, 40-some years after reading “Ulysses,” “To strive, to seek” and all the rest, or as I vaguely recall being vaguely intrigued by “The Lady of Shalott.” We cannot know if the reader’s attitude to accumulating riches was affected by the first statement, or if the second provoked the reader to go on to study psychology or cultural anthropology. We cannot know how these lines connected with the reader’s life—with the Beirut the reader read them in, or simply with the unfolding of his or her adolescence. Were they noted to serve as rebuttal for parental admonitions made over the dinner table? Were they selected as quotations to be entered into a 1,000-word essay, due Thursday?

Would the reader—no, of course not—remember having noted these lines? Having read the poem? Having read Tennyson?

Is the reader still living?

How many of this book’s other readers were struck here and there, but simply didn’t have a pencil handy, or didn’t want to mar a library book, or…?

The questions mount, diverging.

Who first cracked the spine of this book which at this moment lies atop a stack of papers on my writing desk, just to the left of this computer? Who else has sat at this desk before workmen from the school set it in this little spare bedroom in this little apartment? Who else has slept in this room in this 60-plus-year-old apartment building, closed the door, looked out the window, walked along the street below, stood watching Beirut’s recent wars, or the wars that were fought on this promontory into the Mediterranean 150 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 800 years before that, and on and on and on.

Everything, of course—as I began this essay by suggesting—, is like this little volume, fraught with history and with personal significance.

Not much, though, gives us such glimmers as does this blue card with its fading dates, as those parentheses.

Little of what we encounter, moment by moment, hints at once so clearly and so vaguely at quite so much story.

Related Posts:

• GENERATION GAP #2: Artistic Research in Contemporary Beirut
• Aural Fixations, The Rumpus Mixtape #7: Revelry
• Christmas in Beirut
• The Tiki King
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Every year I try to convince my sister not to celebrate Christmas. I tell her we’re not Christians. She says I’m wrapping the children’s presents wrong. I tell her the kids will tear the paper anyway. She tells me to please be quiet and keep working.

My family has always had a love/hate relationship with Christmas. My sisters love it, I hate it.

My family is Druze, not Christian. We were raised in a tradition that is not supposed to have silly manifestations of faith. The only feast we celebrate is Adha, Abraham’s sacrifice. We don’t have a food orgy at the end of Ramadan, we don’t flagellate ourselves during Ashura, and for Christmas, we certainly don’t shower our children in gold, frankincense, and Dolce & Gabbana.

My father never wanted to celebrate Christmas. My mother did. She still does. Every year she decorates her tree with only red ornaments. As she puts up the tree, she tells me that she feels terribly guilty now that my father has passed away since he disliked Christmas so much.

Though she’s a Lebanese Druze from the mountain, just like my father, she was born in Jerusalem where my grandparents were living. Her mother placed my mother and her sisters in a Catholic school. She didn’t want her daughters to grow up to be Lebanese Druze from the mountain, but wanted them to become sophisticated and debonair. When the nuns asked my grandmother if her family was Christian, she said, “Mais, bien sûr.”

My father may have loved his French wine, his single-malt scotch; he may have adored his four-ply cashmere sweater, his Lanvin tie; he may have enjoyed his foray to Paris, and the memorable dinner at a small bistro in Geneva. But in his heart of hearts, he really and truly wanted to remain a Lebanese Druze from the mountain, just like his father.

For the children, my mother would say. She put up a Christmas tree, with presents underneath for the children, every year for the forty-five years they were together. The compromise was that the tree would be simple and classy, not ostentatious, not decadent, only red ornaments. My father would curse when we sang Christmas carols. He would grumble as he helped open the presents he bought us.

My family now puts up more than one Christmas tree. My two sisters each decorate a tree—for the children, of course—and my mother has one, for when the grandchildren come to visit. Every year.

My mother’s tree has remained simple, but not my sister’s. My sister always wants to have the best tree in all of Beirut. Sometime in late November, my sister’s home is transformed into a holiday monster. She has a collection of at least two-dozen Santa Claus dolls. She has a life-size red reindeer. She puts lights on not just the tree, but on every plant in the apartment—including the cacti. She covers every object in sight with a bowed red ribbon so that it looks like a present, and she buys a present for every child she’s ever met.

She drives me crazy. I tell her we’re not Christians. She says Christmas has nothing to do with Christianity. I tell her Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Christ. She asks, “Who?”

She doesn’t stop at Christmas. Of course, she cooks lamb for Adha. She hides painted eggs for the children on Easter. She has an orgiastic dinner for all her friends at the end of Ramadan. This year, she cooked a giant turkey for American Thanksgiving—except she did it on a Friday. She couldn’t have a big dinner in the middle of the week, she said. It’s impractical.

I told her she’s not American. She told me to stop being a Lebanese peasant from the mountain.

Every year, I complain and try to convince her not to celebrate Christmas. She tells me I am wrapping the children’s presents all wrong. I tell her that it’s pointless since the kids will tear through the paper anyway. She tells me to please be quiet and keep working.

I grumble and mumble—sometimes to myself, sometimes loudly—whenever I come across a delightfully decorated tree.

Every year, I try to be at each of my sisters’ homes when the children open their presents. I grumble and curse as the children squeal in delight.

Every year, as I gingerly try to remove my father’s noose from around my neck, it is with my own hands that I nearly strangle myself.

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In her debut story collection, The Tiki King, Stacey Tintocalis has crafted a book whose quirks beautifully dovetail with its deep, dark undertones. Tintocalis’s characters and neighborhoods, ostensibly shiny, are disguised by veneers that are beginning to peel and crack after years of stress and strain. With ten stories that run the gamut from the emotional musings of a man watching a female stranger iron his shirt (“Iron”), to the existential plumbing of an abandoned woman adrift in lust for her husband’s brother (“Geishas”), The Tiki King is as varied as it is pleasurable

At its best, Tintocalis’s prose is crisp and fluid, each sentence seemingly jumping off the back of the last and creating a cascade of paragraphs down through these declining relationships and environments. Such is the case with the title story—a meandering tale told through the eyes of a charming eleven-year-old boy who, simply through his narration, allows a reader to peer into the inner sanctum of his parents’ lost “Apple Pie America.” Their fantasy of permanence and happiness is as naïve as it is fickle; these wounded adults cling to it for psychic survival, but the dream has no resonance for our sardonic, pre-pubescent narrator:

I know what it [Apple Pie America] means but can’t bring myself to respond. All I want to say is “I know all about Apple Pie America, dad. I know it’s Joe DiMaggio and Superman comics and backyard barbecues and the American flag on the moon. In other words, it’s a lot of stuff I don’t really care about.

Stacy Tintocalis

Each of Tintocalis’s stories, in their own way, is informed by this twinge of nostalgia, though it is never twee, clichéd, or overly rose colored. Instead, the desires that afflict her characters function as weights they wish to cast off so the characters might, like Old Alexander Valinchuk of “Another Kind of Sleep,” live in the present more fully, with whatever remnants of themselves they’ve managed to hold onto. For Tintocalis perfection, even happiness, is a myth, and the ideal is ostensibly a statue which gleams of gold from afar but, up close, proves to be made of tin. This is true for Zahlah, a Lebanese immigrant living with her sexually repressed husband in Southern California. Zahlah wants to be reveling in the glitz and glam of her environment, but instead becomes more trapped than she ever would have been in Beirut. After yet another botched attempt at lovemaking, this time with Zahlah playing the part of lusty seductress,

Zahlah quit the bed and saw her dark reflection in the full length mirror, her body hard and ugly, her nipples righteously erect. An American woman. That’s what she saw. Liberated and humiliated. She grabbed a dirty robe from the hamper and left the room to sleep by the empty pool.

The moment, like many in The Tiki King, shows the character’s need for release without offering any easy solutions beyond a grin-and-bear-it approach and another go-round in the cycle of unhappiness.

The Tiki King is not without its slower, less emotive moments. The opening story, “Too Bad about Howie,” feels meandering and immature in contrast to the stories that follow. Its denouement, based upon a rather coy reveal, misdirects the trajectory of a collection that otherwise continually impresses with its pith and urgency. All in all, The Tiki King is an eclectic, ambitious effort, united by its fundamental theme—that life is the quirk, the laugh, the strange moment that vanishes before we can fully register it, but of whose memory we are never really free.

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• Annotating Tennyson
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How can these new narratives and art practices participate in the production of knowledge about the history of contemporary Lebanon?

THE PROTAGONISTS

I see Marwa almost every day. She is an artist, my cousin and work partner in the 98weeks research project. Together, we organize workshops, reading groups, talks and exhibitions on specific topics, mainly investigating the “urban problematic” in Beirut. Vartan Avakian has long and thin blond hair and was named after the great Armenian hero Vartan Mamigonian.¹ At a certain point, he started to stutter. ²

Both artists live in Beirut and have palpable residues of adolescent passions that continue to inspire their lives as artists. The works discussed in the coming points relate the past to the present (Vartan did not have his 80s hairstyle before the end of the 90s), and make stories out of historical material. Both protagonists easily take on different roles. Vartan can be a researcher, academic, mechanic, or warrior. Marwa often takes the role of a detective. She plays herself, she plays a pole dancer. “But,” she tells me, “I don’t want to play the role of an anthropologist.”³

THE PLOT

Vartan is now making a document, a piece of “serious” research, a thesis that sprang from his adolescent fascination with action films shot in Lebanon during the 80s; a period, later coined Lebanese New Wave, that was particularly prolific for the film industry.

About two years ago, Marwa discovered the remains of a former modernist beach house, Chalet Raja Saab, built 1950-1952 by Ferdinand Dagher, on what use to be one of the most beautiful sand beaches in Beirut’s southern suburb. The chalet was part of a larger beach resort project called the Acapulco, which was comprised of approximately 140 cabins.

The massive immigration of Palestinian refuges fleeing the attacks by the Christian Lebanese militias on the Palestinian camps in Quarantina (Beirut), in the early 80s, radically transformed the area. The Chalet, once a bizarre UFO-like construction standing on a quasi-deserted beach, was entirely submersed by the transformation of the area and its expansion into a shantytown. The building now hosts four Palestinian families who constructed additional surrounding walls to close the lower part of the structure in order to create more living space. Some of the original columns upholding the former construction are still visible.

“It started by an attraction to an object that was very particular. I can mention one thing that is quite important: the guy who did this, who designed the structure, was an engineer. In other words, he was not an architect. He had more confidence in the material and how to play with concrete, because at that time they were still experimenting with material. He really played with the form; this is why it led to something quite particular. It doesn’t have a specific influence, of course it has many influences, but beyond this, he is experimenting with form. All these details, made something very ‘bastard,’ attractive and ambiguous, parachuted on this beach.”⁴

THE EVENT

Something happened and had a major impact. Before the outbreak of the war, in the heyday of the Acapulco beach resort, the always already-bored bourgeoisie, the night-life elite, its actresses, misses and singers used to dance on its sand till the early morning. The arrival of the refugees marked another time, a seizure that produced traces of a previous time.

Similar to an investigator, Marwa collects and organizes the material she gathers from her search, out of which she has produced a video, I Have Heard 3 Stories, on the architectural and social transformation of the Acapulco site, particularly the Raja Saab Chalet.

In the video, Marwa interviews the family living in the resort today, recomposing with Samia the different stages of the place’s transformations since the family’s arrival. Trough the collected accounts, Marwa discovers that the Chalet Raja Saab use to be the Acapulco, a hip beach resort. This leads her to interview the former owners of the Acapulco and discover stories about what the place used to be before the arrival of the Palestinian refugees.

She methodically superposes the different accounts with the present architecture of the site in an act of re-composition that unleashes other stories, less concrete, such as the story of Nora the Crazy Horse dancer, who ran down the stairs and disappeared from the Acapulco (“why were they chasing her?”).⁵

In order to map the area and the politics of its spatial morphing, Marwa translates the space’s architecture in different mediums and scales; a mockup of the original structure, archival images of the Chalet, the place as it is today, and animated drawings, all superimposed. The video is a non-linear narrative, which not only juggles between the present and the past, but between the past and the past through its different accounts and their present enunciation.

THE CITY AS SET

The setting for both Marwa and Vartan’s practices is the city, Beirut, with its innumerable images, incessantly produced. Beirut and its wars, Beirut as pearl of the Middle East, Beirut at the crossroads of civilization, between East and West… Among this avalanche of imagery, finding an entry point into the city in order to anchor an experience, a childhood memory, a personal narrative is generally what motivates the work.

Vartan saw Beirut’s central district for the first time in an action film. Because, during the Lebanese civil war, the city center was deserted and acted as the buffer zone between the divided Christian East and Muslim West of the city, Vartan’s first experience of Beirut’s infamous central district was through Samir Ghoussaini’s The Return of the Hero (1983), which chronicles the life of Samy, a boxing champion who, after beating to death his adversary during a championship in Italy, is brought back to Lebanon by the Interpol to serve the remainder of his sentence in Roumyeh prison. With the police struggling to regain control of the city from rival gangs that have reduced it to a lawless battlefield, Samy’s fate and that of law and order become intertwined.

In the film, the war-ravaged and destroyed city center acts as low production set designs for annihilating attacks, but the civil war is never mentioned as such. At the time, Beirut’s central district was a deserted no man’s land part of the green line that divided the city between East and West. Militiamen and snipers, hidden in fortified buildings invaded by rampant green vegetation, were on the watch for any daring shadows attempting to cross the line.

According to Vartan’s current research, action films were diffused and circulated equally in both sides of the city, and the population, beyond confessional divisions, was subject to the same adrenaline, in a transaction substituting real violence with special effects.

Today, Vartan resorts to theories of simulacra and the way they mediate our experience of the real to explain his research: “In the ‘contemporary media-saturated society, [where] the representation substitutes for the real,’ the simulacrum is confused for the real. My research investigates the mediated image of Beirut in the pop action films of the Lebanese New Wave.”

The work of re-composition is indeed difficult. Following the war, Beirut was subject to another major change: its city center was sold to the private company Solidere.⁶ All traces of destruction were rapidly erased–together with the former symbolic public sphere and commercial life–and converted into luxury stores and restaurants.

HISTORICAL EVIDENCE

To obtain information and access an erased and often non-documented chapter of a yet unwritten Lebanese history, research is essential. In this research, interviews, stories and archives all come together to form an understanding of what was before. This reading is inevitably conditioned by the present and raises questions of transmission, historical accuracy and the role of art practices in their relation to historical narratives. What distinguishes the later from more conventional forms of historiography?

A generation of artists working in post-war Lebanon critically questioned the very nature of the document and the partition it imposed upon reality and fiction. Their practices attempted to unmask the workings of the document and questioned it as a stable index to read the past; how is the boundary between the real and the fictional, true and false, constituted? The production of fictional archives from the Lebanese civil war became a shared method of addressing this historical and artistic problem.

Walid Raad, for example, with his Atlas Group project (1999 – 2004), collected, archived and produced documents that would mimic the aesthetic of “real” documents. ⁷ With the Atlas Group, Raad created a system of classification (files are divided between Type A, Type FD, Type AGP) where each type corresponded to a particular attribution. For instance, Type FD files “contain documents that were produced and that we attribute to anonymous individuals or organizations.”⁸ One such file was produced by “Operator 17”, a secret agent whose mission was to videotape Beirut’s main seaside promenade, the Corniche. Everyday day, before sunset, Operator 17 would redirect his camera on the setting sun–scenery he was deprived from while growing up in East Beirut, the Corniche being located in West Beirut. When dismissed, he was allowed to keep his video footage, now archived by the Atlas Group. This document, might not be “true”, but it has the ability to touch upon and awaken repressed memories, never articulated but undoubtedly real.⁹ By awakening these buried feeling and provoking “hysterical symptoms,” fictional archives might therapeutically unfold them.

Our two protagonists belong to a generation that grew up during the Lebanese Civil War, and whose work and concerns is not directly comparable to the post-war art practices (although Marwa and Vartan obliquely refer in their practice to the Lebanese Civil War). In their work, fiction and reality are not apprehended through deconstructive critique but are already taken in through the way they actually work; “hysterical symptoms” (adolescent affects and obsessions in this case), more than a desired outcome, are starting points for the works and are staged as such, particularly in Vartan’s research. This shift is a shift in distance. The critical distance between the author and the work, the author and the audience, the audience and the work, gradually collapses by weight of more personal implications and identifications.

Moreover, their material, although translated and interpreted, does refer to an actual site, or event, something that actually happened and whose material traces, in some instances, as with Marwa’s Acapulco project, are still visible. The trace is then fictionalized and interpreted trough a negotiation that brings together historical traces and personal projections. The tension between what remains and how it is transformed often guides the work, in a process that involves the artist and sometimes subjects him/her.

How does this shift of method and perspective affect the nature of artistic research and knowledge? I would like to think of this production of knowledge as a detective story, engaging the authors as protagonists. In the only two pages I have read of Difference & Repetition, Deleuze writes: “ A book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel in part a kind of science fiction. By detective novel we mean that concepts, with their zones of presence, should intervene to resolve local situation…They have spheres of influence where, as we shall see they operate in relation to “dramas” and by means of a certain cruelty.” ¹⁰

The knowledge we are looking for is the not the resolution of a problem, or  conceptual understanding but rather the drama, tragedies and actions that are involved the very process of searching. With its characters, scripts and dramatic turns. To produce the knowledge we are looking for, the research must equate a quest, and its articulation remain tuned to the contingency of the working process.

The methodology used here does not consist in collecting evidence to prove a case, neither to produce fictional evidence, but to write the case as evidence is found (As Marwa’s research on the Acapulco beach resorts evolve, her artistic project changes) The geometric figure of the quest could be compared to parallel lines, which, occasionally meet to form a point in time where the material, the narrative and spaces of projections are negotiated through the art work.

The research process undoes all-encompassing forms of theoretical articulation, which, more often than not, reduce the practice to a description and a proof of what it wants to say. It produces new uncertainties, which can eventually lead to new questions; what can we learn from a history grounded in affects, through affects? (How can Vartan’s love for heroes produce collective knowledge on a particular historical period? Why is a material trace important?)

THE ENCOUNTER

The previous considerations lead us to the following and final questions of our investigation: how does the knowledge produced through the quest differ from more conventional forms of historiography? Can artistic practices through their subjective approach of historical traces, say something collective about their objects?

What collective or “public” value can be conferred upon the archive when treated artistically? In Archive Fever, Derrida reminds us “there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution and interpretation.” If archive as treated in artistic practices, could be precisely considered as an interpretation and active participation in the reading of historical traces and material, could it also be reduce to its singular interpretation and participation?

This last point is not a solution, but a situation that comes close to an encounter, a space were the private and the public meet, history and affects.

The Arab Image Foundation, an institution whose mission is to document, collect and preserve photographic material related to the Arab World, is funding and producing Marwa’s research on Acapulco. In this case, the research occupies a space between the private and the public, which generates a paradoxical position; its outcome is “personal” and linked to its producer, the artist, while the material accumulated also pertains to a more “public” domain, a shared space and history.

The paradox offers itself as a space for the encounter, where, through very specific example such as the history of the Acapulco, Beirut’s modern trajectories, its disruptions and transformations become visible through the story of a beach resort. In this encounter, the material speaks because the artist activates it. The artists and the material have a date with History, which, customarily, might be late.

Notes:

1 see Vartan’s piece on Vartan Mamigonian, Bleeding Pink.

2How i started to stutter I; action(in)jection, singularities, probabilities, common denominators, differential equations and other equally mathematical sounding relations among  Lebanese pop-action films of the eighties, is a lecture performance by Vartan Avakian on his research on Lebanese action films, which he links with stuttering, a personal physical feature.

3 Interview with Marwa Arsanios, 8 of August 2009.

4 Interview with Marwa Arsanios, 8 of August 2009.

5 Expert from Marwa Arsanios’ video, I Have Hear 3 Stories, 2009

6 For more information of the controversies around the reconstruction of Beirut central district and its privatization, see Privatized urbanity or a politicized Society: Reconstruction in Beirut after the Civil War, 2006. (Publishing in European Planing Studies, Vol. 14. Issue 3).

7 For more information on the Atlas Group Archive, http://www.theatlasgroup.org/

8 http://www.theatlasgroup.org/

9 “In this regard, and as has been argued, it is clear that that what we hold true is not necessarily consistent with what is true at the level of the senses, reason, consciousness and discourse but also holds to be true at the level of the unconscious. Hence we would urge you to approach these documents we present as we do, as “hysterical symptoms” based on any one person’s actual memories, but on cultural fantasies erected from the material of collective memories.”

10 Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, London and New York: Continuum, 2001

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