Travel As Ethos: Spatial Exercises in the Work of Tony Chakar

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 Travel as Ethos: Spatial Exercises in the Work of Tony Chakar

BERNARDO ZACKA

A Balloon Ride In early 2005, shortly before the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, preparations for the installation of a giant tethered balloon in downtown Beirut were nearing completion. 1 The balloon, built by a French company that had completed similar projects in Berlin, Dubai, and Paris, was to be the largest of its kind in the world. The Lebanese operator, Round Concepts, had taken a temporary lease on a small and sloping gravel plot in the city’s hotel district. Hashim Sarkis, a Lebanese architect and Harvard Graduate School of Design professor, had been commissioned to design a landing park, com - plete with a waiting area, café, and ticket booth. At full capacity, the balloon was expected to take thirty passengers for a 15-minute vertical trip, 150–300 meters high. 2 By virtue of its location, the balloon ride was to offer a particularly good view of the colossal reconstruction effort underway in the city center. The multi-billion-dollar project had been launched in 1992 shortly after the end of the fifteen-year-long civil war (1975–1990) that had devastated the down - town area. The project was commissioned by the Lebanese state and orches - trated by Solidere, a private company headed by Hariri, an engineering tycoon who was also serving as prime minister. Solidere adopted a much criticized tabula rasa approach, flattening most of the buildings that had survived the war in order to build an exact replica of the district from scratch. According to Saree Makdisi, a literary critic of Lebanese and Palestinian descent who teaches at UCLA, “when the Lebanese war ended in 1990, approximately one third of the buildings in the traditional center of Beirut—the focal point of the conflict—had been damaged beyond repair.” “By the time Solidere ended its own preparatory demolitions and excavations and started actually build - ing,” however, “almost eighty percent of the buildings in downtown Beirut had been destroyed.” 3 The Solidere project was conceived as a tour-de-force of top-down urbanism freed from the constraints typically imposed by the preexisting urban tissue.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 Before the war, the “city center,” or bourj , was a deliberately vague label that referred to the area around Martyr’s Square. “[A]t no point,” Makdisi writes, “was there a sense that, moving out from the square, one crossed a certain specific line and was officially no longer ‘downtown.’” 4 Solidere put an end to this vagueness and instituted clear boundaries by creating a set of wide roads that effectively cut off the new downtown area from the rest of the city. The “Beirut City Center” became an architecturally and sociologically self- contained district. By 2005, a large portion of the reconstruction project had already been carried out, and a new batch of buildings was on the rise. Against the backdrop of a crane-filled skyline, the gigantic helium balloon was to offer a stunning panoramic view of Solidere’s master plan coming to life. A new city center was materializing—if not as it actually was before the war, at least as it ought to have been: idyllic and luxurious. 5 For the first time, the balloon would offer a bird’s-eye view of the city, allowing anyone to see like an urban plan - ner. This, a perceptive architecture student pointed out, was to seal Beirut’s reconciliation with verticality. 6 The capacity to view from above, a valuable military asset that had led to the transformation of the city’s high-rises into sniper outposts during the war, would now come to symbolize the city’s crowning achievement and the infinite possibilities opened up by the newly acquired sovereign’s gaze. Beirutis would finally be able to see their city like a state, from above, as an entity that could be subjected to management and planning. The bedazzlement they were bound to experience at the sheer size of the reconstruction project, and at the meticulousness with which it had been carried out, would be the ultimate vindication of Solidere’s vision for a new Beirut. If anything, surveying the new central district from a bird’s-eye perspective would be a sign that change was possible, that activities such as planning and execution could actually be carried out—a compelling promise in a country from which state institutions had been practically absent for more than fifteen years. In late January, Sarkis visited Beirut to check the final details of the landing park, and in early February a Parisian team was on site to train the local staff to operate the balloon. At 12:55 P.M. on February 14, when a massive explosion ripped through Hariri’s motorcade a few hundred meters away, killing him along with twenty-one others, the balloon was in the air for a test run. “Had it been docked on the ground,” Kaelen Wilson-Goldie wrote for Lebanon’s Daily Star , “the balloon, which is permanently inflated with 5,500 cubic meters of helium, would have burst from the force of the explosion.” 7 Still, according to Sarkis, the balloon was badly damaged by the blast and had to be repaired. 8 In the turmoil that followed the assassination, the symbolic significance

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 of the pierced balloon went unnoticed: the assassination of Hariri had nearly brought down the bird’s-eye view that he had done so much to instantiate. The unforgiving politics of the city had, so it seemed, caught up with the urbanist utopia. This was not new to Beirut. The city, marked by demo - graphic pressure, recurring waves of refugees, and weak state institutions, had proven notoriously hard to domesticate since the 1940s. As early as 1954, a Lebanese newspaper headlined, “What is Beirut today? A monstrous heap of ill-assorted architecture.” 9 Urban planners and architects had repeatedly attempted to contain this chaos by instituting stricter building guidelines and creating master plans for the development of the metropolitan area—to no avail. The plans of Michel Ecochard in 1943–1944 and 1963, Constantin Doxiadis in 1958, and the Mission franco-libanaise d’étude et d’aménage - ment in 1986 were unable to direct the uncontrolled growth of the city. Worse, some attempts at planning the city backfired. The state, for instance, had managed to keep the southern suburbs of the city relatively clear from con - struction and intended to transform the area into a model housing project. The unguarded empty space, however, ended up providing an ideal dwelling for waves of Shi’a and Palestinian refugees from the south, who gradually turned the state’s dream of a neatly organized suburb into a sprawling and unregulated concrete jungle. Solidere went much further than its predecessors toward implementing its vision for Beirut—a vision that was limited, in this case, to a single district of the city. The balloon started running shortly after Hariri’s assassi - nation and had to be relocated by the waterfront when Solidere sold the patch of land on which it had been operating. 10 Interestingly, though, it was not the balloon ride that reconciled Beirutis with their new city center, but the massive and largely spontaneous popular protests that followed Hariri’s assassination—the largest of which drew 1.4 million participants, a third of the country’s population, to the vacant lots surrounding Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut. The only place large enough to accommodate the turnout— the empty lots where planned development had not yet started—had been created by Solidere’s destruction of old buildings. Somewhat ironically, “the only image that managed to capture the scale of [the] event was taken by an adventurous photographer from a crane.” 11 As Rami Abou Khalil observes, “the image captured the spirit of the protest, but also pointed out the lack of accessible lookout points from which to observe it: no one had experienced the revolution from above.” 12 In this article I explore the disjunction between the bird’s-eye perspective of the urban planner and that of the everyday practitioner of space by look - ing at the work of Tony Chakar, a Lebanese architect and writer who teaches

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 at the Académie libanaise des beaux-arts . Chakar belongs to a prolific group of Lebanese artists—including, among others, Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Walid Sadek, Bilal Khbeiz, Rabih Mroue, Lina Saneh, Lamia Joreige, Joana Hadjithomas, and Khalil Joreige—who grew up during the Lebanese civil war and began to garner international attention in the late 1990s for their work on questions of violence, memory, and trauma in the contemporary history of Lebanon. Chakar’s work offers a valuable counterpoint to Solidere’s logic of top-down intervention and physical remodeling of space by shifting the focus to the Beiruti subject who inhabits the city and its architecture. Before turning to Chakar, however, I must say a few words on the debate that took place at the end of the war over the reconstruction of the Beirut city center. This debate largely set the terms of the public discourse over the management and usage of space in the city over the past twenty years. It is against this backdrop that we can appreciate most clearly the distinctive character of Chakar’s approach to the built environment.

Offensive Urbanism or Spatializing Performances For all the criticism that Solidere drew, there was much good sense in its aggressive approach to reconstructing the city center. With the paralysis of the district during the war and the stabilization of demarcation lines, func - tional equivalents to the downtown area had been re-created in both the pre - dominantly Christian East-Beirut and the predominantly Muslim West-Beirut. The reproduction, within each of the city’s two halves, of once-centralized institutions (government buildings, commercial centers, hospitals, universi - ties, recreational centers) rendered it nearly unnecessary to cross the bound - aries of one’s sectarian area. More than twenty years after the end of the war and the disarmament of the militias, demarcation lines still persist as symbolic and psychological barriers. In Ain-el-Remmaneh, a Christian suburb of the city, the walls are plastered with pictures of fallen Christian leaders, and large crosses are painted onto the walls with the statement, “We want our bells to keep ring - ing.” Over the past few years, associations have formed to protect the neigh - borhood at night from intrusions by Shi’a youth from the nearby area of Shia’h. Sectarian enclaves are still somewhat self-sufficient entities, delimited by a “geography of fear,” the boundaries surprisingly stable and ever reactualized by the political conflicts of the day. 13 The war had turned Beirut into a patchwork of internally homogenous sectarian neighborhoods engaged in constant symbolic or physical warfare against one another. Against such a backdrop, the Solidere project was conceived with the intent to carve out a space that would evade the logic of

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 intercommunal confrontation—a space that would be shared by all, that would obey different rules, and that would not bear the architectural traces of a divisive past. Unsurprisingly, given the larger-than-life resources that were mobilized, the project polarized public opinion and provided endless material for a passionate, if sometimes overly politicized, public debate. This debate, however, took place on a clearly demarcated terrain. Opinions differed, but the standpoint from which they were formulated—that of the urban planner—remained unquestioned. All sides agreed on the nature of the most pressing question (How should the space of the city be physically remod - eled?) and on what this implicitly entailed: a conception of the downtown area as a largely blank slate on which competing interpretations of the past, or visions for the future, could be written out large. Saree Makdisi sums up the stakes and delineates, in the same breath, the scope of the disagreement: For it is in this highly contested space that various competing visions of that [national] identity, as well as of Lebanon’s relationship to the region and to the rest of the Arab world, will be fought out. The battles this time will take the form of narratives written in space and time on the presently cleared-out blankness of the center of Beirut; indeed, they will determine the extent to which this space can be regarded as a blankness or, instead, as a haunted space: a place of memories, ghosts. 14 If proponents and critics of Solidere disagreed on the how , they broadly agreed on the what : large-scale, physical remodeling of the city, orchestrated in a state-like manner. Even Samir Khalaf, one of Lebanon’s foremost sociol - ogists and one of the most forceful critics of Solidere, called for his own brand of “offensive urbanism” to intervene in the space of the city. 15 The reconstruction debate took the bird’s-eye perspective for granted, and as a consequence the expectations of urban planning ran high. Amid these lofty hopes, Sarkis’s warning that it would be unrealistic, if not counterproductive, to overburden urban planners and architects with such a disproportionate share of the responsibility for social and political reconciliation seems to have gone largely unheard. 16 The widespread belief that urbanism had an important role to play in the reconstruction of Beirut is perfectly sensible. Henri Lefebvre, for one, writes that “architecture produces living bodies, each with its own distinctive traits. The animating principle of such a body, its presence, . . . reproduces itself within those who use the space in question, within their lived experience.” 17 Architectural space has the power to effect a change in the subjects that inhabit it. By molding the city center, Solidere would unquestionably have some impact on some aspect of the Lebanese postwar psyche—a sine qua

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 non condition for state intervention, even though the precise nature of this causal link is conspicuously hard to pin down. If this account of the role of urban planning is partially true, it remains, however, largely incomplete. As any student of the situationists would point out, it fails to sufficiently acknowledge that the relationship between subjects and architectural space is bilateral. If architecture and urbanism can have an influence over those who use a space, these subjects can, in turn, renegotiate the space in which they evolve, reconstituting it through their everyday prac - tices. For Lefebvre, the use of space is not a passive act but one that is gener - ative—it is, among other things, productive of space. An analysis of the practices of everyday life must stress the work that these practices do; it must treat the built environment as a site that is largely spatialized through the reiterative gestures of the subjects that dwell in it. 18 Michel de Certeau says as much in the first volume of the Practice of Everyday Life . By drawing on an analogy from linguistics, he shows that the act of walking is akin to a speech act, an act of parole performed against the back - ground of a langue whose grammar consists of the urban map. 19 In the second volume of the work, Pierre Mayol operationalizes Certeau’s theoretical insight by conducting an ethnographic study of the Croix-Rousse neighborhood in Lyon. Mayol shows that “the neighborhood can be apprehended as that por - tion of the general public space (anonymous, belonging to all) within which a particularized private space slowly comes to life, by virtue of the everyday practical usage which is made of it.” 20 Within this space one can play with the rules of social conformity—and depart from them, if only slightly. Within this space preexisting norms can also be reappropriated through performances or spatial locutions, and users of space can renegotiate their mode of consumption. “The act of walking,” Certeau writes, “is a process of appropriation of the topographic system by the walker (as a speaker appropriates and takes up a langue ); it is a spatial realization of the place (as an act of parole is a sound realization of a langue ).” 21 Everyday practices take place within a tension field, a domain of the possible, caught in between the reiteration of established codes of proper conduct and the carnivalesque inversion of values. 22 This dynamic relationship to the urban environment, which happens through everyday practices of space, is hidden from the urban planner’s “solar eye.” 23 The parallelism between Beirut’s balloon ride and Certeau’s ruminations on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, at the beginning of the chapter on space in The Practice of Everyday Life , is not fortuitous. Much remains invisible to the sovereign’s gaze precisely because of its remove from the actions that are taken. Seen from above, the overall grammar or langue might be grasped, but the locutions can be seen only as distributions on a

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 statistical curve, and not as creative undertakings, as they are for the practi - tioners who engage in them. Everyday practices, that is, can be subjected to management in the aggregate—as emanating from what is called, in the language of probability theory, a population —but they cannot be understood as performances. What was missing from the postwar debate on Beirut was a reflection on the subject that would go along with the architecture. This chasm between the urban planner’s gaze and that of the practitioner of space is what Tony Chakar seeks to explore. Beyond the physical remodeling of space, Chakar’s work suggests that the reconstruction of the city as a holistic playing field calls for the adoption of a particular attitude toward fragmented space. Chakar’s walker takes cinematic promenades through the city as a form of training, to further his proclivity to perform operations of mental montage. His practice implicitly relies on the idea that subjects can gradually habitu - ate themselves to internalizing urban travel as a disposition of the self.

A Map from Within Chakar became acutely aware of the limitations of the bird’s-eye perspective in his attempt to study a working-class suburb of Beirut, Rouwaysset. The neighborhood, which is located on a hill overlooking one of Lebanon’s oldest quarries, grew out of the temporary dwellings of migrant workers who were employed there. Over time, the workers’ tents turned into permanent con - crete habitations, and even though the work at the quarry stopped long ago, the population density in the area has continued to increase. 24 Chakar was asked to supervise a group of architecture students whose final-year project consisted in examining Rouwaysset’s architectural vernacular. Early on, Chakar realized that the students would not be able to describe the area through architectural plans but would have to accompany the drawings with lengthy verbal descriptions. He gives an example: When the students were taking approximate measurements needed to draw the Al-Salih family’s house plan, they discovered that the window in the reception room had been blocked up with concrete and that another window had been created higher up, which allowed light and air to enter but prevented anyone looking in. In architectural drawing, a “window blocked up with concrete” is not part of the vocabulary and it is difficult to draw as it has no symbol. The only option is to draw two parallel black lines, which indicate a wall with no openings. However, a piece of information like this is important in the context of the study, since it indicates that an alteration has been made to the exterior of the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 dwelling, in this case, the cutting of an improvised path which com - pelled the owners to modify their house. . . . In other places, a cloth curtain over the balcony becomes a basic element of the architecture of the building, preventing close observation by unwanted guests while allowing anyone on the balcony to watch the building’s entrance clearly and without being observed themselves. 25 According to this passage, the standard lexicon for architectural drawing is inadequate for two reasons: first, because it limits, a priori, the set of opera - tions that are “doable” to a building and hence that can be mapped ( formal rigidity ); and second, because it establishes an implicit hierarchy between those features of a building that are meant to be stable and unchanging (typically drawn in thick black lines), and those that are more malleable and subject to change (typically drawn in thin or dotted lines, if at all) ( formal hierarchy ). Because of formal rigidity, a blocked window can be represented only as a wall. What is lost in such a translation is the information that the blocked window conveys about the social history of the building and the adaptive responses its inhabitants have conjured over time. Because of formal hierarchy, a concrete wall and a cloth curtain must be represented differently, even though they may play an identical function. What is lost here is the possibility that the flimsy and transient additions that inhabitants make to a building can, over time, become as fundamental as its core struc - tural properties. If the problem with formal rigidity is that architectural drawings cannot always register important distinctions, the problem with formal hierarchy is that they often impose misleading distinctions between features that are, for all intents and purposes, similar. Architectural plans might be an exact rendition of a building at the moment at which it is constructed, but because they are limited lexicographically to a predetermined vocabulary and because they typically impose an implicit hierarchy between features of a building regardless of the use people make of them, they cannot—according to Chakar—do justice to the transformations that the space will withstand as it is used over time. By imposing restrictions a priori, architectural drawing renders itself blind to the everyday practices and interventions by which built space is reappropriated—because these manifest themselves against formal rigidity and tend to subvert any estab - lished formal hierarchy. “It is enough,” Chakar states, for the owner of a house to extend his property a few centimeters into the street for a street to become an alley; enough for him to put up a cur - tain, for the alley to become a space belonging to his house. Simply putting a chair in front of his house could make public space private. 26

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 In a city like Beirut, which is no less exhilarating than Walter Benjamin’s Naples, space is too actively inhabited to let itself be easily ossified in a bird’s-eye map. Chakar and his students had to develop a new architectural language, a new set of symbols, to bring out the fact that what was important, in the ver - nacular of Rouwaysset, was “what was constantly changing.” 27 But they were not altogether successful. Chakar ends his study of Rouwaysset with an observation on the newly developed lexicon: the further away the drawings moved from the “tendency to stabilize and embellish their subject,” he claims, the more they became “like writing, and less and less like drawing.” 28 Chakar decided to explore this idea further in a set of three beautifully written short stories, which he conceived as textual maps of Beirut drawn from the perspec - tive of an embodied agent—maps, he said when I first met him in December 2008—“from within and with no outside.” 29 For the rest of this article, I will be concerned with one of these stories, aptly titled “The Eyeless Map.” While strolling through the streets of Beirut, Chakar’s protagonist and narrator finds an abandoned notebook that seems to have belonged to an architect. The diary is filled from end to end with scattered notes and sketches with no apparent coherence or organizing principle. “An idea would start on page 6, for instance, and then would be continued on page 19, while the pages from 6 to 19 were permeated with other ideas that would start there and end a few pages later.” 30 “In fact,” we are told in a sentence that betrays Chakar’s own attempt to grasp the architectural language of Rouwaysset, “what started out as writing was ultimately transformed into unfathomable graffiti, which was made even more unintelligible by the fact that the draw - ings were entwined into what was written, to the point that both had become indistinguishable.” 31 Gradually, the narrator deciphers the key to the note - book: while each of the sections might produce its own meaning, “the gen - eral meaning of the whole thing would only unfold itself in relation not to the writer (as in, say, a diary), but to the city he was living in, experiencing with all his force.” 32 The notebook was not meant to be a stand-alone piece but one that should be read in conjunction with the city: it unfolds from page to page as an embodied, quasi-cinematic map of the architect’s walks through Beirut. Amid the hardly legible handwriting, the narrator recognizes a reference to Jean-Paul Sartre: “My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body, insofar as the house was already an indication of my body. This is why my body always extends across the tool which it utilizes . . . for it is my adaptation to these tools.” 33 This reference to a sprawl - ing body, deformed and torn apart in multiple directions, could be an allu - sion to Beirut. A fragmented city with ossified boundaries, it stands in stark

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 contrast to the organic city-body metaphor. But the narrator reads the sen - tence differently, as a call for action, for perpetual movement, for being every - where —“‘My body is everywhere’ is no longer a metaphor for the body in fragments, but a real possibility for the body in perpetual motion.” 34 It is through this perpetual motion that the fragmented city can be reconstituted as a holistic field. Boundaries have to be rendered porous by cinematic motion, by the crisscrossing of borders, by the linkage, through a form of mental mon - tage, of disparate elements. The fragmented city can become integrated only if pedestrians stitch it together by opening up new trajectories through space, like drips of paint on a white canvas. Jackson Pollock’s paintings, we read, “are really city plans.” 35 They are maps that avoid the “eye-in-infinity-looking- below,” maps that are based on the movements of walkers who “write an urban text that they cannot read.” 36 The notebook’s promise to reconcile Beirut through movement draws, in part, on a playful reappropriation of the city’s architecture. The steep stair - cases that cut through Beirut’s two major hills, Ashrafiyeh and Mussaitbeh, become “gateways to other worlds.” 37 They act as hyperlinks, as vortices, enabling one to travel seamlessly from one neighborhood, or unité d’am - biance , to another. They offer an architectural equivalent to the arrows that designate possible transitions between discontiguous areas of a situationist psychogeographical map, or to an operation of cinematic montage, thanks to which one can juxtapose, next to one another, sights and sounds that are geo - graphically removed. In the architect’s notebook, the narrator reads, These staircases that lie in front of me, are gateways to other worlds. . . . I am standing on top of one of the staircases that link the top of the Mar Mitr hill to the region of Geitawi; the staircase is steep and I can clearly see beneath me the hustle and bustle of that densely populated region. I can see its electric lights, its people coming and going, gesturing, I can hear their shouts mixed with the car horns. . . . All of these sights and sounds contrast sharply with the limbo I’m in now; everything here is quiet, and no car seems to pass on this narrow, ill-lit, unpaved road. . . . Not a sound, not even the familiar sound of television sets broadcasting the evening news. 38 In an interview with Kristin Ross on his brief involvement with the situa - tionists, Lefebvre recalled that the small groups involved in the dérive would communicate with one another through walkie-talkies to attain a certain simultaneity of experience. 39 The situationists aimed to slice through the san - itized urban tissue of Paris, reconstructing a “unitary urbanism” in the face of Le Corbusier’s attempt to “eradicate the street” and to “break up life into

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 gated communities, into societies under surveillance.” 40 The situationist response, Lefebvre said, “is to make of the city a whole, but a whole in move - ment, a whole in transformation,” by recomposing the urban layout and cre - ating links between areas that have been torn apart. This project is strikingly similar to that of Chakar—and the staircases perform the same function as the walkie-talkies. As relics from a past when Beirutis used to walk, rather than drive, through their city, they provide anachronistic links between spaces that are, for all other purposes, no longer connected to one another. They become tools at the disposal of the pedestrian, holes through the functionalist garb of the city that enable everyday operations of montage. By way of these, the city can be recomposed as a unitary field in and through movement.

Reconstituting Beirut: Adopting Travel as a Personal Ethos Solidere, Khalaf, and Chakar start with a roughly similar diagnosis of the challenges facing postwar Beirut. All three depict a fragmented city divided into psychologically and sociologically self-contained units. But unlike Solidere, which strives to create a representation of reconciliation, to the Lebanese and the world alike, through the construction of a world-class city center, or Khalaf, who stresses the need for public spaces that can stimulate transformative encounters among people from different communities, Chakar proposes the adoption of an everyday practice of space. This return to the subject, who inhabits and enlivens architecture, is the missing term in a debate that has focused almost exclusively on the physical, monumental transformation of space. In “The Eyeless Map,” Chakar pointedly does not mention Solidere. He replaces the balloon ride with the daily promenade of those who inhabit the city. His work is antispectacular: it tries to defetishize a city that has, all too often, made the headlines as a symbol of ghastly violence. In the aftermath of the 2006 war with Israel, for instance, Chakar refused to give in to the voyeuristic impulse that drew so many other Lebanese artists to the spectac - ular, if chilling, scenes of destruction in Beirut’s southern suburbs. “Most of the city’s landmarks are places and buildings that refer to war and destruc - tion,” a website curating his work said. “The spectacular is the obvious, but there is much more to the city.” 41 In a Beirut that seems to be caught between the memory of a photoshopped prewar past and the failures of a nostalgic restorative future, Chakar’s focus on the embodied practice of space opens up the possibility for a fleeting but critical and playful present. Because of the unresolved tensions such a pre - sent still harbors, projects like Solidere desperately seek to circumvent it in favor of a more harmonious restorative vision. Svetlana Boym, in a passage

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 on Berlin that applies equally well to Beirut, writes, “Perhaps the reason why the present is so much wished away in all the official presentations of the city is that the present is about inconvenient tensions between East and West, between different, not yet unified ideas of national and urban identity.” 42 Practitioners of space, as envisioned by Chakar, do not shy away from these inconvenient tensions. They embrace the city as it is, divided and torn apart, and treat this configuration as an opportunity to build a new rapport to space. They seek out the creative potential that fragmentation can open. In this regard, Chakar unwittingly revives the classical Arabic tradition of the rihla , the initiatory journey to distant lands, and transposes it to the urban context. 43 The rihla , Stefania Pandolfo writes in a study of the meta - physical sensibility that imbues everyday life in Morocco, is a “departure from one’s place and oneself,” but it is a departure into the world .44 In this journey, which is “made by walking,” “partiality and incompleteness are both a structural posture and an ethical and aesthetic choice.” 45 The discov - ery of the self is mediated by a physical journey, by a series of encounters with unfamiliar peoples and places. One surrenders the position of the self- contained viewer and embraces that of the marcheur , who must, somewhat paradoxically, move away from his or her own self in order to find it. 46 The contradiction is specious, however, because the self does not predate the departure; it is constituted by it. The self emerges out of the dialogical encounter between one’s own subjectivity and the world. Both terms come into being together—the walker becomes a self in contact with the city, and the urban space becomes a holistic playing field, a city , when it is brought together by the movements and representations of the walker. But if Chakar’s call for cinematic movement is a practice of space , can it also be a rihla ? In the language of sociology, “practices are actions or deeds that are repeated over time; they are learned, reproduced, and subjected to risk through social interaction.” 47 As everyday gestures, they are so well inter - nalized that “they may be self-consciously executed, but they need not be .” 48 Certeau starts The Practice of Everyday Life by emphasizing that his work does not imply a return to individuality: “The social atomism which over the past three centuries has served as the historical axiom of social analysis posits an elementary unit—the individual. . . . This axiom, which has been challenged by more than a century of sociological, economic, anthropological, and psychoanalytic research, . . . plays no part in this study.” 49 The rihla , how - ever, seems to presuppose a subject that has more agency and self-awareness— enough, at least, to decide to embark on a journey, to launch him- or herself headfirst into the world. The rihla and the practice of space rest on two somewhat different conceptions of subjectivity—of the extent, that is, to

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 which agency and intentionality can feature in accounts of human behavior. Chakar moves back and forth between the two, at times contenting himself with everyday reiterative practices, while at other times hinting that a more militant recomposition of the city, in the spirit of flânerie or the dérive , is possible. Every so often, Chakar seems to be talking, like Certeau, about the way in which Beirutis do use space and simply highlighting the richness and complexity of that act of “usage”—his point, then, would be ontological (con - cerned with what is ) and largely descriptive. In other passages, however, he seems to be voicing an injunction to travel, extolling the merits and promises of an initiatory journey through Beirut—the point, if this were the case, would be normative (concerned with what one ought to do and thus assum - ing that individuals can have intentional control over their deeds). I have reproduced this hesitation intentionally, by using, throughout the article, two lexica that are somewhat ill at ease together: that of a self-reflective and expressive subjectivity, and that of everyday practices of space. I now want to sketch how these two threads can be reconciled and show, in the process, how Chakar’s stance differs from Certeau’s. What Chakar describes in “The Eyeless Map” is, strictly speaking, less a recipe or a set of instructions than a way of being in space, a posture , a “plan for [perpetual] action.” 50 The architect advocates the adoption of a critical, experimental, and playful attitude that can radically alter one’s relationship with the city. The notebook comes as a case in point, as an illustration of the transformative potential that lies in store, but also as an example of the strug - gle to instantiate such a personal disposition—a way of relating to space that is conducive to recombining different fragments of the city. Walking, as Chakar presents it, is both an everyday activity and a theoretical posture— a posture that is actualized and perpetuated by everyday gestures. This is why ethos strikes me as the most appropriate term. The notebook calls for the adoption of the rihla , of the dérive , as an everyday ethos , as a disposition of the self. The tension between an agentive subjectivity and everyday practices of space is structurally fundamental to such a project. “The importance of every - day practices,” political anthropologist Lisa Wedeen writes, “does not reside simply in the meanings they signify to their practitioners, but also in the ways in which they constitute the self through his or her performance.” 51 Everyday practices of space, of the sort that Certeau describes, leave their imprint on the subject that enacts them. But this habituation does not happen only through unconscious processes. In the Aristotelian tradition, habituation plays a key role in an intentional, self-conscious process of moral cultivation. In her ethnography of the everyday practices of Islam, Saba

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 Mahmood describes the process of habituation as follows: “What is note - worthy is that habitus in this tradition of moral cultivation implies a quality that is acquired through human industry, assiduous practice, and discipline, such that it becomes a permanent feature of a person’s character.” 52 One can intentionally and proactively work toward attaining a certain ethos or dispo - sition of the self. Everyday practices, then, are not just manifestations of an ethos but the means of acquiring it. They are what Pierre Hadot, in his studies of Hellenistic philosophy, repeatedly calls “spiritual exercises”—everyday practices (such as ascesis , self-purification, self-appraisal, renunciation of desires, and filtering of perceptions) by which a subject can generate a dis - position of the self. 53 These exercises are meant to equip one with a readiness to translate thought into action, or as Michel Foucault would say, drawing on the work of Hadot, to transform logos into ethos .54 Cinematic promenades through the city are exercises that are meant to inscribe a theoretical convic - tion (the need for a playful reappropriation of space) into the subject’s body (so that this conviction can spring into action, much like a reflex, and per - meate all that the subject does). This is why Chakar, who calls for the proactive and intentional adoption of an ethical disposition, of a way of relating to the city, is often led to use the same language as Certeau—and why it is sensible for him to do so. From the standpoint of a sociologist, Chakar’s practitioners engage in recurring, every - day practices of space. From the standpoint of the practitioners, however, these practices are exercises aimed at shaping a particular kind of subjectiv - ity—one that constantly resignifies and reshuffles its surroundings. Once we accept that there is nothing paradoxical in the concept of a voluntaristic process of subjectivation, the apparent contradiction between practices and exercises vanishes. Travel becomes an ethos manifested in and constituted by everyday performances.

Toward the Constitution of a New Political Subject? By beginning this essay with a balloon ride over Beirut and closing it with an interpretation of Chakar’s work as a call for the adoption of a personal ethic of travel, I seek to underscore the political possibilities that are opened up by such a repositioning. The switch from the perspective of the urban planner to that of the practitioner of space opens a wide terrain for sociological inquiry—as Certeau pointed out years ago in response to Foucault. But the emphasis on the idea of spatial exercises, as opposed to mere practices of space, ensures that the gap that is thus opened is conducive to political action. Chakar’s work reminds us that we can do politics—that is, we can strive to shape our own self and our surroundings—even in the absence of formal

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 political institutions or of the most basic preconditions for a Habermasian public sphere. In a generalized climate of citizen powerlessness, his empha - sis on posture and ethic opens up a terrain for action that is within many people’s reach. There are limits, of course, to how encompassing this approach can be. Engaging in spatial exercises, as opposed to merely inhabiting space, requires a reflexive and leisurely distance from one’s everyday environment—a luxury that may only be open to certain socioeconomic classes. That Chakar’s pro - tagonist is a male architect is not a coincidence either. The gendered streets of Beirut are more porous for him than they would be for his female counter - parts. It is telling, finally, that Chakar’s story takes place primarily in Ashrafiyeh, a relatively well-off, cosmopolitan neighborhood that is more open to wandering passersby than are other quarters of the city. Despite these limitations, Chakar’s stress on everyday exercises is strate - gic for those who can engage in them, because it leverages an aspect of life that typically eludes the control of political authorities, lest they become totalitarian. In 2008 Chakar told me that he is reluctant to use the term resis - tance because it connotes a reactive attitude, but what he proposes often amounts to just that: the creation of subjects who cannot easily be governed because they constantly reappropriate and recompose their surroundings. Politics takes the form of self-fashioning. I have, accordingly, tried to situate Chakar’s work—and by extension, the situationist dérive —in the context of a nascent effort, in the social sciences and political theory, to rethink the place of the rapport à soi in politics. Drawing on the later work of Foucault, anthropologists have started to examine the extent to which the constitution of the self through the adoption of an ethic—the process of subjectivation—is of political relevance. By emphasiz - ing the constitutive power of everyday practices and their capacity to gener - ate long-lasting dispositions of the self, Mahmood, for instance, shows that they can often have more radical consequences than carnivalesque acts of resignification. 55 It is perhaps not a coincidence that the situationists, who were forced to go beyond the traditional Marxist repertoire of contention in order to fight the all-pervasive phenomenon of reification, called for the instantiation of a critical and experimental ethos and for the adoption of urban practices such as the dérive . Such everyday practices, constitutive of the self and of the city, were the only tools at their disposal to repossess a world that had been estranged from them. In the “User’s Guide to Détournement,” the situationists took great care to distinguish their practice from that of their forerunner, Marcel Duchamp. The “drawing of a mustache on the Mona Lisa ,” they wrote, alluding to Duchamp’s

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 L.H.O.O.Q. , “is no more interesting than the original version of that painting. We must now push this process to the point of negating the negation.” 56 The simple act of negation, that is, had itself become commodified: Duchamp’s work had been co-opted by the society of the spectacle and now figured prominently in museums, alongside Leonardo da Vinci’s original. But if the act of subversion or resignification was unstable and always recuperated by the society of the spectacle, how could one negate the negation without run - ning into the same problem? The reading I offer in this article suggests that one possibility consists in turning the emphasis away from the execution of subversive acts and toward the constitution of the political subject. Situationist practices such as the dérive or détournement , much like Chakar’s urban travels, are ultimately exercises partaking in a process of self-cultivation and self-transformation. These practices should be seen as setting the stage for the emergence of a new modality of political action—one that is less concerned with performing acts of resignification per se than with cultivating a disposition of the self that is inclined to engage in such acts. “The fragmentation of the social fabric today,” Certeau wrote more than thirty years ago, “lends a political dimension to the problem of the subject.” 57 These words still ring true in Beirut and, I would hazard to guess, far beyond. The disposition of the self is, now as ever, a heavily contested political terrain.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 Notes I thank the members of the Harvard Political Ecology Working Group, and the participants in the conference Travel, Boundaries, and Sojourns through the Unfamiliar held at Columbia University.

1. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, “A Unique View of Beirut from 300 Meters Up,” Daily Star , 23 June 2005. 2. Wilson-Goldie, “A Unique View.” 3. Saree Makdisi, “Beirut/Beirut,” in Tamáss , ed. Catherine David (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2002), 31. 4. Makdisi, “Beirut/Beirut,” 32. 5. Makdisi, “Beirut/Beirut,” 27–28. 6. Rami Abou Khalil, “We Can Go East, but Not Too Far: A New Ruin, and Its Festival, for Beirut” (Final thesis description, McGill University Department of Architecture, 2007), 14, http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/davies/arch671/winter2007/students/abou/RamiAbouKhalil _ThesisDescription.pdf. 7. Wilson-Goldie, “A Unique View.” 8. Hashim Sarkis, “Current Work in the Mideast and US” (Lecture, MIT Aga Khan Program in Islamic Architecture, Cambridge, MA, 20 October 2008). 9. L’Orient , 24 October 1954, quoted in Samir Kassir, Histoire de Beyrouth (Paris: Fayard, 2003), 495. All translations from French and Arabic are mine unless otherwise noted. 10. Jerome Mayer-Cantu, “Political Winds Hamper Rise of Round Concepts’ Balloon,” Daily Star , 17 May 2006. 11. Abou Khalil, 14. 12. Abou Khalil, 14. 13. Samir Khalaf, “On Roots and Routes: The Reassertion of Primordial Loyalties,” in Lebanon in Limbo: Postwar Society and State in an Uncertain Regional Environment , ed. Theodor Hanf and Nawaf Salam (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2003), 135. 14. Saree Makdisi, “Laying Claim to Beirut: Urban Narrative and Spatial Identity in the Age of Solidere,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (2007): 664. 15. Samir Khalaf, “Contested Space and the Forging of New Cultural Identities,” in Projecting Beirut: Episodes in the Construction and Reconstruction of a Modern City , ed. Peter Rowe and Hashim Sarkis (New York: Prestel, 1998), 140–164. 16. Hashim Sarkis, “Dancing with Margaret Mead: Planning Beirut since 1958,” in Tamáss , 187–201. 17. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space , trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 137. 18. For recent examples of this approach in the social sciences, and particularly in anthro - pology, see Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); and Lisa Wedeen, Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 19. Michel de Certeau, Arts de faire , vol. 1 of L’invention du quotidien (Paris: Folio/ Gallimard, 1990), 148. 20. Pierre Mayol, “Habiter,” in Habiter, Cuisiner , vol. 2 of L’invention du quotidien (Paris:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 Folio/Gallimard, 1994), 18. 21. Certeau, Arts de faire , 148. 22. Mayol, “Habiter,” 52. 23. Certeau, Arts de faire , 140. 24. Tony Chakar, “The Suburbs and the Vocabulary of Urbanisation: Violence as an Architectural Language,” in Tamáss , 40–55. 25. Chakar, “The Suburbs and the Vocabulary of Urbanisation,” 53. 26. Chakar, “The Suburbs and the Vocabulary of Urbanisation,” 45. 27. Chakar, “The Suburbs and the Vocabulary of Urbanisation,” 55. 28. Chakar, “The Suburbs and the Vocabulary of Urbanisation,” 55. 29. Chakar’s three stories are collected in a single volume under the title The Eyeless Map (Beirut: Ashkal Alwan, 2003). 30. Tony Chakar, “The Eyeless Map,” in The Eyeless Map , 33. 31. Chakar, “The Eyeless Map,” 32. 32. Chakar, “The Eyeless Map,” 33. 33. Chakar, “The Eyeless Map,” 38. 34. Chakar, “The Eyeless Map,” 39. 35. Chakar, “The Eyeless Map,” 40. 36. Chakar, “The Eyeless Map,” 40; and Certeau, Arts de faire , 141. 37. Chakar, “The Eyeless Map,” 33. 38. Chakar, “The Eyeless Map,” 33–34. 39. Kristin Ross and Henri Lefebvre, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview,” October 79 (Winter 1997): 80. 40. Internationale Lettriste , Potlatch 5 (20 July 1954), reproduced in Guy Debord: Oeuvres , ed. Jean-Louis Rançon (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 2006), 143–145. 41. PartizanPublik, “Catastrophic Space: An Audio Tour through East Beirut by Tony Chakar,” http://www.partizanpublik.nl/catastrophicspace/site.html. 42. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 179. 43. Rihla means journey in Arabic. The term is often used to refer to a genre of travel liter - ature, of which Ibn Battuta’s Rihla is the best-known example. 44. Stefania Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 6. 45. Pandolfo, 6. 46. Pandolfo, 21. 47. Wedeen, 15. 48. Wedeen, 15; emphasis added. 49. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life , trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), xi. 50. Chakar writes that the architect’s notebook looked “more like a plan for action than a real theoretical answer.” This plan for action, he goes on to say, involves “the body in perpetual motion.” Chakar, “The Eyeless Map,” 39. 51. Wedeen, 15. 52. Mahmood, 136.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00098 by guest on 25 September 2021 53. See, for instance, Pierre Hadot, Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique (Paris: Gallimard, 1995). 54. Michel Foucault, L’herméneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France, 1981–1982 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil Hautes Études, 2001), 312. 55. Mahmood, 153. 56. Guy Debord and Gil Wolman, “ Mode d’emploi du détournement ,” in Guy Debord: Oeuvres , ed. Rançon , 221–222. The French reads: “ Les moustaches de la Joconde ne présentent aucun caractère plus intéressant que la première version de cette peinture. Il faut maintenant suivre ce processus jusqu’à la négation de la négation. ” 57. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life , xxiv.

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