Rethinking Crisis Narratives & Epistemes in Theorizing Crises & The Everyday in Lebanon

• In Event: 50664 - Theorizing Crisis (Co-sponsored by Theory Section)

Abstract

Situated in the aftermath of Lebanon’s devastating financial and economic collapse, my research traces an ethnography of everyday crisis attentive to the impacts of dramatic shifts in class formations on class subjectivities, attachments and identities. More specifically, I examine how Lebanon's middle class, both a product and a cornerstone of the now-defunct political economic model, renegotiate and reconstruct meaning, attachments and identities, and recover place amidst chronic dislocation and dramatic collapse. Lebanon’s post-war national mythology long promoted the illusion that the financial sector could continually fuel the economy and promote the living standards of Lebanon’s ballooning middle classes. The consequences of the collapse of this longstanding national myth are paramount. While the material implications of this collapse have gained increased attention, much less attention has been given to the impacts of this collapse on subjectivities, particularly the subjectivities of members of the middle classes, once a cornerstone of the model’s fraught (in)/stability. I analyze the constitution and expansion of Lebanon’s middle class in the past thirty years since the end of the civil war (1975-1990), a highly contradictory period in which an amplified consumeristic lifestyle was being promoted, even as the structural conditions undergirding the economic model were being eroded. Highlighting the interplay between discourse and materiality through which crises gain meaning and are lived, I ask the following questions: How have middle-class subjectivities and affective structures been shaped by Lebanon’s postwar economic and financial model, and its contrived last-ditch fervent attempt to rescue itself in the decade leading up to the collapse? What has become of the aspirations, yearnings and expectations of the Lebanese middle class, whose consumption habits, class anxieties and lifestyle have been promoted and fueled by the now imploded post-war economic model? What kinds of agentive tactics, adaptive strategies, and coping mechanisms emerge under conditions of class dislocation and dramatic collapse? How do these modalities ultimately affect political subjectivities, relationship to the state, and the capacity of political economic regimes to reproduce themselves—through the minutiae of everyday practices within which people maneuver and adapt?

Author

• Mona Khneisser, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign