Arabica Robusta's List: transformative space

• While popularly referred to as ‘the’ civil war, it is perhaps better understood historically as a plurality of overlapping and entangled wars between networks of diverse political groups.
• The cacophony of violence was in fact so intensely hostile to human life that the streets and alleyways that composed the division between East and West quickly began to erode and fall into disrepair, creating a space and time for new ecologies to proliferate within and throughout the urban geography. For these reasons, the border has historically come to be referred to as the ‘Green Line’, as a dense imbrication of plants, seed-carrying birds, and pollinating insects settled in the fissure between the East and West literally making the division ‘green’.
• Heterogeneous coalitions act together to give birth to these unities and also labor to reproduce them – to give these territories topologies and duration. These coalitions express themselves in resonant processes that over time condense into materialities such as the construction of walls, the appearance and circulation of certain styles of dress or music, or in the organization of events much as street festivals or markets which differentiate between often overlapping territorial strata.
• Territories are always defined by radical imbrications of unity and infinity. Any border that divides an interior from an exterior is also equally cut across by a multiplicity of other dissonant modalities of differentiation.
• Just like the Green Line, these modalities of differentiation are expressed in material difference, such as the way in which genderred divisions of labor are materially inscribed into men and women’s bone density.
• In Ziad Doueiri’s 1998 film “West Beirut”, sexual desire is figured as a force capable of unraveling the East-West divide. The young protagonist of the film, Tarek, traverses the streets of West Beirut and several times encounters the Green Line and its violent processes of differentiation. He inevitably finds himself in a brothel that exists in the ruins of the border territory, a kind of liberated space in which people from both sides of the Green Line dance and drink together.
• Boundaries of difference in this way are never infinitely thin lines that divide two topological territories, but rather are spaces and territories unto themselves, creating the conditions under which different material formations can take hold and engage in their own reproduction.
• In the contemporary moment, the Green Line is in fact no longer green; after the conflict ended large volumes of capital investment initiated an era of urban reconstruction in Beirut and the majority of plant life along the now defunct border was removed. The appearance of East and West Beirut in 1975 and their subsequent reunification in 1990 makes apparent the historically contingent nature of difference itself, and reminds of the possibilities embedded in the differential processes of birth, reproduction, and death. Power is ultimately enacted across ecologies of difference, and politics play out in the reproduction and disruption of those differentiations.

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• Arabs bore the stigma of being “backward”, Mahdi Amel wrote. It was as if they were not capable of anything but failure. But the ruin of Arabs was not because of their culture but because of what had befallen them. Colonial rule for a hundred years would alter the structure of politics and economics as well as society. Old Arab notables would be sidelined or absorbed into a new world where they were merely the representatives of forces that lived elsewhere.
• The Left in the Arab world suffered gravely over the past two decades. Communist parties had largely been destroyed by the Arab nationalist regimes. The room to grow seemed limited. Trade union activity was also not as easy as before, with the relocation of firms breaking links to older union traditions and the importation of migrant workers on restrictive visas making union activity virtually impossible. The rise of religious politics and the reinforcement of sectarianism made the severely rational world of Marxism seem alien to everyday life.