 Welcome everyone, good evening. Welcome to this very exciting, in my opinion research seminar, which is hosted by the so as Middle East Institute and the center of Palestine studies, and the center for Iranian studies at so as. And I'm the chair of the Center for Palestine studies my name is Nina mother and I also work in the Center for global media and communication school of though. So tonight it's a book launch, I think, or perhaps a reflection on a book where. Professor had heavy will be talking about his book visions of Beirut, I think it was published in in the summer. If I'm, if I'm wrong, have them all correct me. But basically this book explores how the creation and circulation of images has shaped urban spaces and cultural imaginaries of Beirut, drawing on field work and text ranging from maps, urban plans and aerial photographs to live television and drawn camera footage. And it embraces the histories of how the technologies and media infrastructure that visualize the city are used to consolidate or destabilize regimes of power. I'll let him explain what that means. But I think I would like to make an introduction to Professor Henry about the speaker here. He is assistant professor of film and media studies at George Mason University, where he's also affiliated with cultural studies and Middle Eastern Islamic studies. He earned his PhD in media culture and communication from a New York University, and previously was a faculty member at the media studies program at the American University of Beirut. His book visions of Beirut, the urban life of media infrastructures is published by Duke University Press. Now the format of the talk will be, Hatem will be speaking for, let us say, 35 to 40 minutes. He's got to share, he will be sharing a PowerPoint. And then I will take some questions in the chat. You could see the chat at the bottom of your zoom page. You could also for those people who are joining us on Facebook. You could also post your questions in the chat on the side. Without further ado, Hatem welcome. Thank you so much for agreeing to come and talk to us and so I was really excited. Particularly that I've read the book and reread the introduction recently, just for its intellectual and kind of critical conceptualization of infrastructures. I'm looking forward to what you have to say. Hello, Salah. Thank you so much for that kind introduction, Dina, and everyone at so as for organizing this talk. Can everybody see my screen now. Okay. So, I've been greatly looking forward for the chance to speak with this group in particular. My talk today will be in three parts, how I came to the idea for this book. So I hope that the historical and methodological framing evolved over time, and then for key takeaways organized around a discussion of four images. So I hope to convey doing this I hope to convey the questions and concerns that that have animated this project and then I'm really looking forward to the Q&A at the end. The word Beirut conjures images of the war and torn landscape city in the 1980s, or like other places in the Middle East, a place of danger and seemingly intractable conflict. That image, which defined mainstream US press coverage during the country's 15 years civil war from 1975 to 1990 is of course not the whole story. For others, Lebanon and Beirut were supposed to embody a different possibility, something more Western than Eastern sort of different from but so measured by problematic Orientalist cliches critiquing these binaries is an ongoing and essential task in the time of delayed revolutions the pandemic, the Beirut port blast and myriad forms of collapse. This project, however, emerged from a slightly different set of concerns. You know, events are funny things. By the time you're aware of them, they tend to already be in motion. In December of 2006, I'd gone back to Beirut to visit family. I had already heard on the news that Hasballah had organized a sit in demonstration and downtown Beirut. When people think of the cliche of war torn Beirut, they're often thinking of the condition of that specific part of the city, which was badly damaged and largely depopulated save for those displaced by the civil war from elsewhere in the 1990s. In the 1990s, it was turned over to the private real estate firm solely did closely tied to the billionaire who was prime minister for most of the first 15 years after the civil war. The entire area was transformed into a home for luxury boutiques banks government buildings and high end restaurants and unevenness that is defined the financialized and neoliberal urban planning approach to the city ever since. Martyr Square, located in the middle of the downtown district had long served as a center for protests dating back to the period. So, part of what was so different about Hasballah demonstration was that it shut down the district almost entirely and kept it shut down for what turned into 18 months in protest of a government headed by a ruling block that they accused of having betrayed the national interest because of its pro US orientation. Hasballah, the militia turned political party who had recently fought a war with Israel which had declared divine victory, I hope you can hear scare quotes in my voice. Typically build themselves as opposed to the other block in an elite political structure that it was an essential part of. So the curious grad student that I was, I had to go see for myself what was up. What I found was a totally transformed space, what was ordinarily the most heavily policed and manicured part of the city was like a nighttime street fair. stalls had been set up on sidewalks and in streets selling coffee cotton candy and kebabs party member Billy and flags. car traffic was diverted to go around the roads and parking lots that had been turned over to gathering spaces for people to smoke coca's talk politics and just hang out. Set up at T at two key locations at major squares. For those who know the city of the Sarah and say that the Shahada were stages and projection screens. When there wasn't a musical performer or speaker, the screens would show the live stream of almanar satellite news channel affiliated with the party. Pretty soon. I noticed that at certain moments what featured on the screens was live coverage of the protest on the screen at the protest. With a little bit of attention, I was able to figure out where the reporter and camera crew were by looking for the lights of the cameras. I was initially struck by the oddness of seeing them is on a being in situ and in person, but I also left me with questions that I've pursued ever since. Seeing that social and visual form on location suggested to me a direct relationship between the circulation of images media technology and mobility in the spaces of the city. The history of the relationship between those three elements might contextualize this media event and the political social and political fields that made it possible. How and why do images become important to regimes of power, but also to attend to attempts to contest the city. How might the conditions specific debate. Tell us something about media infrastructure and its relationship to urban space more generally. The contingencies of infrastructure enable a more precise understanding of the conditions of possibility of community practices. If the geopolitical landscape of Arab satellite television is produced by and through an increasingly multipolar world. How does the question of liveness intermingle the geopolitical and the everyday. Most importantly, what would it mean to give an account of our mediated condition that is adequate to the unevenness of the historical present. So, I had ready to hand some literatures that suggested part of the answers that I thought I was pursuing debates in global communication and television studies around the political economy of media and broadcasting. There was the emerging at the time emerging discussions of infrastructure understood from the perspectives of what sometimes is called the global south that had the comparative and critical approaches of visual cultural studies and media history. And of course I was very familiar with interdisciplinary explanations of Lebanon's geopolitical and domestic formations. But it soon became clear that to fit the approach to the problem and not the other way around met journeying further revealed from my home and media studies to urban studies. Giving so enabled me to reframe my perspective. How is it that the city, how is the city defined by history of instrumentalized governmental deployments of images of violences whose traces are everywhere in the shape of the archive. I wanted to understand images and visuality, not only in terms of light and enlightenment, those always on systems of illumination, but in terms of flickering street lamps and screens, and what and who hides the ambiguities of the dark. By building from at least a parks and Nicole Sarosielski call an infrastructural disposition. It becomes possible to grasp visual relations in the social world and new. The live broadcast of the protest on the screen in the city at the protest becomes part of a history of ways of seeing a value extracted from the commodification of space and public attention in mundane and geopolitical partisan bickering. There's an incompleteness intrinsic to infrastructure, the space of temporality that requires ongoing maintenance and repair, sometimes starting before construction is even completed. To investigating mediation that verb form of media, the spatial and temporal processes that media enable investigating them in Beirut brings this incompleteness of infrastructure to the foreground. The contradictions of incompleteness appear in Beirut in ways that can be traumatic mundane or mundane in their drama. This incompleteness can be mobilized towards ends that are sometimes less obvious and more politically ambiguous. We often understand infrastructure as that which defines the duration of everyday life, durability and need of repair. But what if we instead tried to grapple with infrastructure as an event whose contradictory temporalities and spatialities people inhabit a live relationship to. I propose that we take an infrastructural approach to media and its relationship to the city, meaning I want to show how technological and institutional forms that condition the production and circulation of images express the social and political as much as the social and political wind up built into the urban and media landscape. This book gives an account of how a city and its infrastructure are bound up with the logics of media, including communicative practices which attempt to remain hidden. In turn prompts additional questions. How do gendered and racializing systems for the ground form the ground on which urban mobility and infrastructure infrastructural operation emerge. What if we pursued the question of how public spaces and cultures are produced as intrinsically bound up with the infrastructures that they are a part of and refuse to take the projects of the powerful as miscapable totalities. What mutualities and solidaries might be fine by turning critique to the question of what else might be possible. These are some of the heady questions that I carried with me into initial field work and archival visits, and then evolved over the course of dissertation. And then the subsequent years that followed, including the three years that I spent at the American University of Beirut. So part of the methodological choice in this book is a situated approach to these questions to think from the ground up from the city outwards. Doing so has allowed me to see how the particularities that I found illuminate regional and global phenomena, even as doing so dispelled any simple notion I had of cities as self contained entities. Research is only ever as good as our research design and method. Then it's also true that few things are as humbling as encountering complexities of the field, the desert or the dizzying proliferations of the archive. So I adopted a mixed method historically grounded approach spent a lot of time in archives in the city, but also interviewing urban planners, architects, GIS engineers, newspaper editors and TV newsroom directors, journalists and PR and finance professionals. I'm at the Leeds and Museum of the Resistance, which I'll talk about in a minute. I analyzed aerial photographs, maps, TV broadcasts, public debates, drone cam footage, war memorials, financial reports, political posters and corporate film. I also spent a lot of time walking in the city. In both a pointed and aimless manner, seeking to find traces of the urban past and its current services, but also perhaps more importantly, to destabilize my own situations. I thought I had a book in three research chapters which grew to five before settling on the four that you see here. The first two center around the use of images in the production and management of urban space. The first chapter examines mapping aerial photography and urban plans as media forms and governmental techniques and regimes of power from the French colonial period through the era of state led development and post independence to the damage assessment exercises that took place during the Civil War. The second chapter examines the proliferation and deployment of what I call images of before after and the work that they do that they did in the financialization of post war construction. A before after image is one that contrasts shot of damaged buildings with a prompt with a promised or actual construction. The third chapter is the most directly focused on the materiality of media infrastructure itself centered on as well as satellite TV signal in the swirl of visual vectors that were the 2006 war. To use a lot of politically tenuous place on the ground, and in the sphere of domestic and transnational broadcasting to develop a media theory of concealment. More on that in a minute. The last chapter moves outside the geographic municipality of Beirut, and to the husband lead the museum of resistance to examine the space within the political orbit of, but outside sphere of the city, where concealment becomes a tourist attraction. The first chapter was an arc from a focus on cartographic to tell the visual imaging, although the cinematic and social media are also never far behind, as are the digital technologies that came to underpin them. The first chapter on the social life of maps became more tightly defined as I worked on it in its selection of archives, even as what I found in the archive proliferated the type of media objects, the locations they refer to and how I understood the relationship between them. They were also shifted in focus. More time I spent with the quarterly reports and the press coverage of the most notorious of post war construction projects, slowly dares. The more I came to see that the privatization of downtown came to depend, I came to really appreciate the extent to which financialization depended at every step on remaking social relationships to the space through visual and affective forms. This is a law also transformed as I was unable to make sense of the war and subsequent protests using the usual critical grammars of spectacle and surveillance or visibility and visibility alone. Those registers were important, but left just outside of their purview or what are now called concealment. I also ended up with a fourth chapter on the on the elites museum, a bafflingly problematic space that also demanded a critical perspective on the categories of the religious and the safe and the secular, the sacred and the profane, as they came to define the visual formations outside the city. So, let me give you four key top line takeaways and then show you how I got to them by discussing for key images. One, they do demonstrates how archival research into the history of the production space can profitably limit itself to the archives that are in some sense of the space by considering maps aerial photographs and planning documents. And as part of the process of successive governmental regimes, we arrive at a sense of just how partial such attempts actually are. It allows us to see a recursivity in the relationship between images and the production of infrastructure, but also how such images are in turn active on by the spaces that they presumably depict to the public. The relationship becomes central to post conflict to science, particularly images of before after the key temporality is one of before construction after construction, which is not a question of public forgetting is one of relentless affirmation of the status quo, and the loss of an ability to imagine the city beyond the needs of financialization and ruinations that it implies three to make sense of the full range of what infrastructure makes possible. The history of concealment and of infrastructure as an event, rather than thinking of infrastructure as a totality that is one with political sovereignty and noble from its diagrams and schematics, you should instead attend to its concrete operation. Doing so allows us to consider not simply how we forget infrastructures smooth functioning, but that in the meeting point of embodied mobility and media circulation, there is much that can remain intentionally overlooked and unseen. The analysis of as well as use of concealment shows this visual and informatic modality is already a part of state power for capitalist realism has two faces, one secular and one religious that share more than they admit. Now, looking at the experiential design of has been the museum of the resistance demonstrates how the multifolder future is being foreclosed, not because of inherent antagonisms of religious or populist affect with their liberal others, but because of an inter compatibility of both with neoliberal authoritarianism. Now, while I would gladly spend as much of your time itself already, as I've already taken being into each of these chapters, and the interest of having a better Q&A, what I'll do instead is take you through some key moments in the books argument by discussing four images in particular. The first is a cadastral map from 1931. In this case, showing the area near the modernized port that we now call downtown. These cadastral maps are the ones used to designate the ownership plan for purposes of land and taxation. The level of detail required for generating cadastral maps requires the combination of aerial photography, the view from above, but also survey engineers to determine various measurements and delineations. They indicate how the shaping of the city, followed from the colonial government's objectives of introducing systematic organization of private property of reorganizing circulation in the city in ways that included the purposes of military control and troop movement, but also the support of a centralized planning apparatus. Maps like this take a view from above, one that has played an underappreciated role in social scientific thought in the 20th century, including shaping people like, say, only the fifth. The implications of maps like this are just as contingent as is their production. And their application is usually, at least in the case in the history that I'm looking at, much less totalizing than the all at once impression that it gives. This map, not because it shows the site of the blast to come almost 90 years earlier, but because it allows me to tell you about three things. First, it shows the location of the Yugoslav embassy. This is significant because the Russian survey engineers who were hired to carry out parts of the cadastral survey, which was never completed outside key areas of the youth. This team had previously been hired to do work supporting the formation of this and other states after World War One. Specifically states meant to contain the conflicts of ethno-religistic mixed societies. As many scholars have shown, these conflicts are better understood to be imminent to the modern systems power sharing in some other more durable or inevitable mentality. This team was hired by way of personal connection to Camille Durafour, the French officer hired to manage the implementation of the cadastral system. His wife, who made the couple a tidy sum, on the real estate market, was herself Russian. Their house, a very nice fellow overlooking the sea on Beirut's northern coast, was torn down in 21 to make way for the high-rise, luxury apartment buildings that emerged in that phase of overdevelopment. Durafour is one of the characters I encountered repeatedly in the archive, alongside other officers who had spent time in North Africa, such as Mishal Bikrushal, one of the key figures in post-independence urban planning. The key story is that even at the high point of empire and state-led development in the 1960s, maps and urban plans were often left half unimplemented or ignored, with large sections of the country left unmapped entirely. At the same time that social processes were brought into governmental purview and rendered with increased precision on paper, the resulting political formation would double back onto the planning efforts themselves. Image two. The 1990s didn't just bring the fall of the Berlin Wall, satellite broadcasting and the commercial internet. In Lebanon, the post-war political consensus created a power-sharing agreement between warlords turned political leaders, divvying up broadcast rights along sectarian lines and elite-aligned commercial interests, granting a renewed importance to a secretive banking sector, and new avenues for external influence. The arrival of neoliberal urbanism took the shape of private real estate ventures, authorized by the state to declare eminent domain, dictate urban form, and generate revenue tax-free. The largest of these was the Soleil Air project, and what we now call downtown Beirut, created by Rafiq Haridi, who of course was allied with Saudi and U.S. interests, who had made billions as a contractor in Saudi Arabia. Soleil Air does not really build many buildings itself, even though it did damage and demolish far more buildings than all 15 years of the Civil War did. Rather, Soleil Air is better understood as a system for making land and rubble legible to company ledgers, and then amenable to investment. This second step was particularly reliant on visualization, originally showing images of the space as is alongside images of the space to come, most often in architectural renderings and sketches. The before-after image represents a sense of the past as a fixed entity and promises historical progress without contingency. These images of before-after would eventually wash over the country, but as members of the press who worked at the time would really impress on me, the public contestation of the project was far more trenchant in its early years than we now think. Images of before-after were primarily useful in corporate boardrooms in the investment PR literature, but also came to embody a whole way of seeing the space that I term a citizen investor. This way of seeing the space eventually became quite diffuse in a common sense way of feeling the city. The citizen investor sees and feels the spaces of the city for the potential they have for capital investment, which is itself equated with public interest. When it doesn't have to be a wealthy Lebanese man to see the city as a citizen investor, but while the invitation to see and feel the city in this manner eventually did circulate quite broadly, the interest that it accrues became an important part of a domestic economy premised on the reassertion of patriarchal sectarian structures of citizenship and the kafala system that it depends on. This image in particular is a lenticular print, meaning that as you passed it, the initial image melts away into a second image and after achieved the photographic index. It goes from a scene of ruined buildings to warmly lit street cafes. But when one walks past it in the other direction, the image reverts to a previous ruination. This unresolvable quality lends the before-after image to a dystopic and morbid reading. That the war will not remain just a memory or in the past, that the erasure of rubble leads to its ultimate return, and that a return to the wartime cityscape is inevitable. Destruction becomes the ultimate center of gravity for before-after images, emphasizing incompleteness to urban space and infrastructure. But the before-after shot also ultimately and unwittingly signals the malleability of space, demonstrating over and over and over again that there have always been other possibilities for what has become of the city since post-war construction began. In the chapter this images from, I discuss how can similar can be folded into you or enable infrastructural function. This image is from a clip that aired on Hezbollah's Omanar TV. It dramatizes the temporary disconnection of the satellite feed following the bombing of the station by the IDF, switching a concealed backup transponder during the 2006 war with Israel. We see here the climax of the clip where a communications engineer restores the connection, rewarding faithful audiences for not switching the channel. Hezbollah are useful to understand concealment and understanding Hezbollah is essential to any critical left politics opposed to militarist intensification, regional power interests and interested in meaningful transnational solidarity. Concealment is a heterogeneous set of practices and tactics that aim to keep people, places and things out of sight, undetected, unnoticed. If visualization brings people in spaces into the light, acts of concealment in the socio-technical systems that enable them to keep them in the dark. Concealment is formed in relation to media infrastructures and systems of surveillance, to the extent that infrastructure creates conditions of possibility for mobility and circulation. Concealment becomes a visual modality that remains undetected while in motion. I first picked up on concealment when I started trying to make sense of the visual culture of the 2006 war systematically. There are simply too many conditions that are unsatisfyingly explained through the critical vocabularies that explain spectacle or surveillance. The temporal nature of concealment is often defined by the unstable dynamic between spectacle and surveillance. Being the inverse of either is better understood to be in it to at least potentially in an open relationship with them. For example, a sensor or camera can be placed so as to remain concealed and optimally capture sound or images for broadcast audiences. The modality of concealment can fold into itself or be folded into media forms like live broadcasts enabling their continued function. Concealment is a modality of being overlooked, misrecognized or unseen entirely. It's often quite antagonistic to a politics of recognition. The type of concealment that I'm examining here is only secondarily a thematic feature of an image or a text or say of an intracemjective style such as queer passing. The primary aim of concealment is to avoid detection, not the production of subjectivities. If concealment is a visual modality, it is one that is not the exclusive result of so-called visual relations. My focus here on visuality is admittedly a key analytical limitation. In practical terms, concealment often means masking the heat signatures generated passively by human bodies and equipment, or more suddenly by say like the launch of rockets, clarifying that the visual dimension is decisively intermingled with non visual elements. Techniques such as sonic masking and soundproofing, while clearly important for a full elaboration of concealment, are not given in full treatment in my book. My discussion of concealment only gives limited treatment to digital and informatic strategies of anonymity encryption, as used say to secure electronic signal transmission to shield digital activism, enable the dark web which evade capture by algorithmic data mining operations. I understand concealment to be the live relation of uncommunicative hiddenness to data development processes, a time sensitive event specific way of not being caught in the act. The concern with naming these practices for me is always twofold. Are we exposing the survival tactics of the precarious and vulnerable? Are we fully grasping the extent to which regimes of power already include these tactics in their arsenal? I should note that as well as imprecise weaponry and this war turned the sky northern Israel into a uncertain hazard, even while Israel presumed the right to bomb anything in any one in Lebanon. While a bunch of these conflicts is always primarily borne by civilians, in this case this particularly meant people in South Lebanon. Much like the kinds of anonymity that a range of social theorists have found to be endemic to modern urban experience, digital anonymity is also a relative matter and as located mobile media demonstrate. It's best considered as part of live place in space. Like anonymity, often a matter of protecting identities, chief virtue of journalism, concealment is socially productive, precisely in the manner in which it delimits the spatiotemporal to map dynamics of observability. So anonymity typically refers to the prevention of identification or the refusal of identity, but a state of concealment is about prevention of detection in a more immediate sense. Hiding and remaining unidentified are both the question of how a range of tactics come together and managing or limiting social relations. As location and movement became increasingly noble and trackable in real time, movement and hiding move below the surface of the earth. And concealment isn't the tactics but their outcome. It isn't the masked is it isn't the mask, it is the mask condition. Displaced persons or the undocumented may seek concealment, but some might the militias or state agents hunting and disappearing them. Last image. This is a photograph of the underground communications room that has in the bunker in Hezbollah's moving to museum. The museum sits on a mountain top in the south of the country, on the site of this bunker which was used in the fight with Israel. So what do concealment and then we can museum have to do with each other. We can raises two points for media theory. First, the museum's architecture embodies and anticipates critical strategies of suspicion that seek to go below the surface. Some forms of critique can miss the mark when only directed at official ideology is proudly stated wet in situations when presence and gesture are of equal importance to the content of the statement. As Mleta is designed to foster an appreciation for the experience of consumer from the aerial gaze. It is crucial to intend to the embodied and sensory pedagogy of the site. The museum stages a series of inversions of the surveillance aerial gaze, inviting visitors into secret underground spaces and gorilla camouflage. This necessitates an analytical shift that can grapple with the pairing of consumer with commodified spectacle. Mleta demonstrates how Hezbollah is best understood, not as an alternative or radical other to, but a different geopolitical camp within contemporary capitalism. Perhaps because of their self stylization as the Islamic resistance and their involvement in geopolitical conflict against Israel. There's a temptation to consider Hezbollah in the museum as being somehow inherently opposed to, say, neoliberal economic policy or even inimical to its cultural forms. However, Mleta shows how it's possible for a political party to make claims and military decisions on the African country, opposed to Israel and Western interests, but also be crucial to the maintenance of a status quo. I think in this case, they're better understood as the mechanism by which South Lebanon becomes more deeply integrated into contemporary capitalist tourist economies. You walk past the gift shop when entering and exiting the museum, the professional and friendly tour guides actively encourage visitors to challenge them, and they will do so in at least six or seven languages that I've heard on site. So, taken all together, these images demonstrate how the incompleteness of infrastructure, but always unfinished nature of urban space define our media landscape, constituting the condition of possibility for communicative practices. As I was finishing revisions for this book in the fall of 2019. The country erupted into mass demonstrations that spoke in the language of revolution. I hadn't dared to hope for 2011 and Lebanon and watched as that spark of October 17 came to mark the gap between what could be and what the statement it's bare knuckle enforcers would do, which is maintaining the status quo at any expense. As I was checking final proofs for the manuscript I watched an unprecedented collapse of the entire banking system, the global pandemic, and then a devastating blast at the port, turn the country into a poster child, perhaps for the meaning of a zone of abandoned series of compounding collapses and crises. If my, if this book now seems like a document of the previous moment, the before times, another periodization becomes sense, it comes to make sense after the fact. I hope that it also perhaps shows things can and always could be otherwise. That was very interesting and challenging at the same time. I invite people to send their questions and to kind of discuss with her time. What, what, you know, what is this theory of concealment which I'm going to ask him about now in relation particularly to the image of from Almanar. You know, that's still image so can you talk about where did you take, where is that image taken from, is it a television program, is it a one of the advertising videos, is it one, is it a film, and how. Why did you choose it in a sense you know can you can you explain the story behind it because it kind of intrigued me in a bit particularly seeing Almanar signature logo at the top of the page. So if you could explain that and explain how do you how did you figure out the concealment by looking at that image in particular. So, I came to understand the importance of concealment, not by looking at Almanar's material related to the 2006 war I came to understand it by looking at ballistics reports. But first let me tell you what this video is about. Almanar got bombed was bombed repeatedly during 2006 as remember particularly that first week of the conflict in July. And the 16th of July of July, I'm going to get the date wrong, the signal, they bombed the main station, and it signal temporarily went off the air. Two minutes later, they turn that it comes back on, and they continue to broadcast uninterrupted from backup satellite transponder, which had been concealed and never discovered by the idea. So that image comes from like a short like add or clip, which dramatizes that process. You have audiences sitting at home watching Almanar news reports about ongoing battles and Israeli bombardment, and then we see a fighter jet fly over bomb and knocks it off air. That image in particular is a still taken from the turning point in this melodramatic arc, where after the signal is disconnected, and everybody's watching static at home on TV. We then see the communications and engineer does the rock and satellite turns on and communications is restored concealment is about hiding in landscape, hiding people, hiding infrastructure, hiding guerrilla fighters. Hiding underground hiding under tree cover. It's a visual modality that wants to be overlooked. It's potentially not something that is primarily the feature of like a TV text. It's not primarily an ideological frame. It's a live relationship with mode modalities of seeing enabled by surveillance enabled by a military targeting in particular is that attempt to remain hidden from the surveillance drone. Now, that doesn't mean though that we don't have material to talk about it in a habit set of cultural imaginaries as in this clip. It enables certain kinds of live broadcasting during wartime in the chapter that this talk in the chapter itself. I talk about the live, the strike of the INS honey to the Israeli worship off the coast of Beirut on live TV, which has a series of multiple concealments of Nasrallah of the camera team of the rocket brigade. It's enabling a kind of hidden this while on air. The reason why concealment comes to be, I can't I first kind of really grasp what it was about by looking at ballistics reports from the 2006 war is that although Israel bombs, you know, entire neighborhoods in south Beirut levels, a number of towns, the road infrastructure and power grid. This majority of what they bomb is actually out like in fields on mountain sides and in landscape far from inhabited areas. And this is because they're trying to bomb either suspected military installations, or they were trying to bomb fighters doing gorilla actions. Right. So who it turns out we're doing most of their stuff far away from inhabited areas, not hidden amongst civilians. So concealment comes to the tail that is the tail that these books report tell is that concealment makes it so it's difficult to locate so called targets of opportunity, except after the fact. Okay. And so another related question. Thank you very much for explaining that. Another related question is the idea of concealment. You said it's not ideology, but is it a, you know, is it an intention, intentional political practice. How have you looked at that. And, and I kind of I invite, I invite people to put in their questions. Yeah. Yeah, I think concealment is best understood as a practice. It's one which requires quite elaborate planning that requires this social systems of secrecy. It requires material conditions for it to continue to, to, to operate. It might not always be successful, but it aims to remain undetected and unseen. But a concealment is less a set of ideas or a set of subjective styles, although it might delve into that arena, it's primarily about remaining hidden. Although of course it then also comes to occupy a very important place in the cultural imaginary, both in places like the Middle East Museum, but also like it comes to play an outsized role for people who aim to do what they call what is called counterinsurgency. Again, it was in a very advised way. Think of imaginaries of that come to circulate in the American imaginary about Viet Cong fighters. Similar things. This isn't just Lebanon, right. I can imagine you got a flight elsewhere. I've got a very interesting question from Bruce Stanley in the audience. Might you comment on the life of books like Zabain Kiovician's shot wise and the one you mentioned with the before and after pictures. They circulated widely to those of us who love Beirut and sit on our shelves. How does the shape our imaginaries of Beirut are teaching and our teaching and how might the conflict imaginary of Beirut, Aleppo, Gaza, Mosul, etc be used for increasing voice in global discourse. Thank you Bruce. That was, that's a brilliant question. So, I really appreciate that question. That's, that's really great. The before after image that I'm talking about differs from certain kinds of before after images. There's a very common one which, which has a different temporal relationship to destruction. There's ones which are say, see, this is what it used to be before the war, and now look at it after destruction. This is so it's some kind of point for the destruction, maybe an idealized version or however you might want to consider it, it captures something which is long gone. And now you have destruction before and after which is the destroyed city landscape and here's what it will be. What I can utilize in this, in this context that I'm talking about in Beirut is basically to end dissensus to end discourse about what type of future, the city might take, how it might arrive there, what kinds of socialities, what kinds of live relationships might take place. The before after image in this case is really tied to, let's turn the city into like a global investment opportunity, which in this case, implied a very particular type of urban recovery, one which was suitable to like the volumes and velocities of global investment, right, this precluded, well it precluded many other potential uses of the city. People who lived there and had a lived remembrance of the city before post-war construction recall it as like a very vibrant place and crossroads of the city, one which had working class and middle class elements, not simply the luxury outdoor shopping mall that it is now. The work of the before after image is precisely at the level of love for Beirut, at a affection for space. It directs and channels it into a distinct way of seeing and feeling the space. The pleasure of the before-after image isn't just a projected future to come, it's a photograph of work actually completed. And eventually the before-after image, which takes many permutations, comes to, it also can take the shape of just an after image which heavily contextually refers to a before, right, an after image next to some other place which has not been constructed. The before-after image embeds the violences of the civil war into the urban economy. It presumes erasure and remaking of the city in line with global investment. It is the problematic ideology which I fear will spread to places like Aleppo and colleagues who work on Aleppo who I've been in conversation with have said there are some instances of this starting to crop up. It can take the shape of a backwards glance. Let's make Beirut the glory of the so-called golden era of the 1960s, in which case the move to the future becomes a return to an idealized past. The before-after image is the ideology that I'm trying to critique. It is an example of the problem. It increases a certain kind of voice and stratifies certain kinds of lived relationships to the city, which are awful and in need of remaking. Thank you. That's really a brilliant response and I hope Bruce is appreciating it. I wanted to ask a question in relation to, first of all, the picture from downtown Beirut and the map, but also in a sense, and the notion of concealment and whether you could talk about concealment in relation to that photograph. Much more kind of, if I could use the word, much more simply for us to understand. But also as you were speaking, I was wondering about the ways that these images and productions of these images, they conceal, for me that's really important, they conceal the camps in Beirut, like the refugee camps. And whether you touched on that in your book at all, you seem to have focused on particular, you know, the map and the Hezbollah and so on, and the Mleta Museum, but I just wondered whether you could talk a little bit more around whether we can use concealment as a concept to talk about concealment in much more precise ways of actually, you know, kind of concealing something from the view. Because it contradicts the image of Beirut as moving into a, you know, into a global capitalized society with, you know, wonderful people and beautiful streets and shops and so on. I think at that point, if we were to extend concealment to include like the symbolic erasure of the multiple camps within Beirut. I think that moves things into a different terrain. Concealment would be would be better applied to for that Ian fighters back in the day, running cross border raids, then to attempts to like reengineer the city so as that you have highways which stream right from the right to downtown Beirut overlooking places that are some of the most marginalized in the country. We can then later add in a way that how these spaces become very like made are very erased in certain discourses but then made hyper visible to other political regimes. Think of how and where, for example now Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon are both made very very visible within a very specific framing, but really overlooked and erased in others. I think concealment is best understood. When and where, say, Palestinian laborers run and hide from from the Lebanese police and security forces, when working jobs that they could be arrested for, because they don't have rights and in another sense. Then the camps themselves being concealed, and at least in the sense that I'm that I'm trying to use the term. I should also stress it could also be the it could also be the hidden surveillance camera, which is concealed, not seen by people trying to slip past it unawares that the state uses to monitor and police people's movements through the city. I think that's an interesting way of thinking about it as well, which is the surveillance cameras, but if we go back to the choice of the material, you know, why has the law why leader, why downtown Beirut, why the maps. The process of thinking through these, how you came to put, you talked about it at the beginning of your talk, but how you kind of focus on particular things, and not others. The, so the, the question around why focus on Almanar in particular. Well, it, I end up there, not simply because of the anecdote that I opened the talk with and that also appears an introduction to the book. I'm aware of the need to try to understand these forms of media circulation and their politics as a kind of political event with its own logic and its own materiality, which I wanted to try to understand this as closely as possible. I also wanted to understand it in terms of a deeper urban history, a deeper, deeper, a deeper, a set of ways in which the spaces of the city become mediated for different purposes at different points in time. This is why I have this, this whole long chapter about like the history of mapping and planning and so on. And that sets up a kind of a historical backdrop to make sense of the remaking of the city in the post war period. Right, like, no political regime has cleared as much space and exerted as much control over part of Beirut as solid air has the French mandate barely has the same kind of track record in that in that area. So this then sort of sets up the, the last two chapters. The reason that I focus on has a lot is precisely because of their very vexed position vis-à-vis Western interests. They take the stakes of infrastructural operation, and it dramatizes it. And it appears in exaggerated form, because of, I mean, you, they put this, the things that I'm talking about, about live broadcast media and concealment and infrastructure are potentially an operation around BBC four, for example, because that BBC four doesn't get bombed off the air. And so the stakes of concealment becomes dramatized around a monod in this moment in a way that helps illuminate this broader question. Right. Right. Very, very interesting. You kind of understand the, you know, you try and think beyond what you see as well. And, and the process of concealment as a process of trying to understand what is the word I wanted to use or trying to preserve yourself. If that's the right, right way of putting it. I also, the other motivation is kind of a desire for a radical left alternative to the status quo, which, in which case we have to understand, as well as part of an elite system, which maintains a certain kind of political order Yeah, because you mentioned in your talk the kind of the situatedness of his ball in in the global political economy and in capitalist systems, which is quite understandable. I'm trying to get some more questions from the audience. So just to explain how them that sometimes the audience that comes to these events are not from the general public so they, you know, they might not want to ask, they might be, they might not want to ask too many questions around the theoretical approach. But I think it's really important and thinking about the before and after and thinking about issues of concealment in relation to media theory are pretty pretty. And also locating those in infrastructures and in the global political economy are pretty, pretty important. Would you, would you think you were saying that you have some friends who are talking about Aleppo or thinking about Aleppo and maybe thinking about it. I mean, can you do you do you see that you're. This is a theory that you are giving us. Do you see that this type of theory this theorization can be applied to other situations where you had a very long period of conflict and where you might want to bring in the question of who is trying to conceal what from whom. And, and how does that, how does that present itself in the individuality, rather than in visual cultures. I hope if what I'm describing is useful for people elsewhere. I would admit that would make me very happy. I've heard, I've had, I've had heard from some colleagues who work on Aleppo saying yeah hot and before after I miss stuff is starting to crop up as business groups start to pitch hey remake Aleppo and make a lot of money from a bombed out city. The ideology also comes to inform like has a lot as a wild project in in South Beirut after and in the after the 2006 war. So now the job has some mechanics, we shall make it better than it was before. Right. You remind me of America is great Trump's famous statement. The one difference that I would say between the wild project and solid air is that with has a lot of this was very much about maintaining a social fabric. So, this became built into the process. Yeah, and I think that's really an important point that hopefully people have have kind of figured that out. And from Francisco how do strategic concealment efforts to prevent external attacks affect the development of impoverished territories in Lebanon today hinder the contemporary production of accurate maps and the collection of reliable information for the state. Well, it's thanks for that question. The next piece of concealment that I'm talking about is say, let's say we're talking about the south of Lebanon, much of south Lebanon has topo maps the kind that say the army has, but much of it has never had like like a map being done. You have a situation where even up to pretty recently, somebody will inherit a piece of land, and then wants to sell it. But in order to sell it, you have to bring in an official surveyor to do to draw up a more concrete map. So as to say this is exactly the parcel of land, which is being sold. And so you have like this real unevenness, which defines cadastre mapping but not say military token mapping. So you have the historic neglect of the south of Lebanon in economic terms, which has a much deeper history and there are there are great books which which will help explain that. And which of which we could, I could refer you to. But in this case we're talking about like, like the open secret of his gorilla infrastructure in the south of the country, systems of tunnels underground weapons caches, and so on and so forth, in which case, they're very well might be very accurate maps of the area, but because concealment is an operation, you don't know that what is actually there is something else. So you'll find out that it's there if you walk over and start walk around with a camera, and then somebody will come up and say hey, what are you taking pictures of, what are you doing here. Well, that that is interesting and you could, you know, you could perhaps talk about concealment in Gaza as well. You know, you know, you're thinking about the tunnels, and so on. So, but I think you are talking about something much more deeper, which is the concealment as as a necessity. And correct me if I'm wrong as a necessity for survival. And for, you know, kind of continuing to have your, you know, followers continuing to have people who want to, to follow you or whatever so. But but I think you know the idea of survival might be a way of thinking about it but I'm sort of thinking as well. I mentioned the BBC. And the idea of what can be concealed in other contexts, you know where you do not have conflict where you do not have war where you have, you know, perhaps, you know, different different ways of doing things and different entities out there. So you could, if you could reflect on that a bit and then we've got another question come up which is great. Sure. Yeah, I mean, so concealment is the strategy of the roots of deliberately not appearing or or being deliberately overlooked to surveillance systems evading recognition of evading being seen. And sometimes develops in relation to, well there's power is looking in a certain way. And so to have to remain hidden from power means to hide in a very particular way. There's historical precedence to the kinds of consumer that I'm describing specifically in the 2006 war in even in Lebanese history, when you look to the advent of aerial surveillance aerial photography, say during the era of revolt of 25 to 27 1925 to 1927. As cameras were put on planes to try to see where our rebel encampments placed, you start to have an awareness of Oh the view is from above. So we have to hide from a camera that's up above. If we are, if we think we've been detected, we have to run and hide and move to a new location before they relay information back to an artillery position which will then strike our location on the basis of a topo map which that same plane helps generate. So there are so there so there's, there's ever since surveillance has happened from above there have been attempts to hide below the surface of the earth, the surface of the earth itself becomes porous. This is Gaza tunnels. Now, I'm trying to describe this tactic or this practice without awarding a particular moral or political balance to it. It's potentially ambiguous. This is also undercover cops. This is who are arresting people for any number of transgressions. This is also IDF forces potentially trying to hide. There are mutual antagonisms that become bound up in the operation of infrastructure which require concealment for the infrastructure to continue to operate. So we can certainly find concealment in other situations, but I would as I always urge sort of very context sensitive treatment of this of this idea, and even to be a conjunctually specific conception, like what is it in this particular moment that makes the such as they are. But also, you know, I'd also see that I draw inspiration from a range of thought, indigenous thought, queer thought which is overly tired with a politics of recognition which says the key political moment is when we stand and are counted and our voices are or say certain kinds of liberal political imaginaries which imagine the most important part of her protest is the part where people stand in the square and get beaten by the cops for the live for the live camera. So it's also equally important to run and hide at certain times to fade. So it's not about the gear to know when and how to run down which alleyway, so as to not be. So as to live to protest another day. We've got a few more questions coming up. Maravati is asking and the reason that I read them in for the for the audience, in terms of concealment as a strategy to contest power dynamics, why the choice of visual texts such as images or maps as opposed to other forms of representation. Very good question I think. You know, concealment itself is primarily non communicative. And if it works, it gives it leaves nothing in evidence, potentially, the things that are left behind are secondary to concealment itself. Right. The outcome of concealment is that something is misrecognized or not seen the examples that I draw. I draw to explain how this operates around a particular media infrastructure broadcast TV, and it's relationship to a range of military technologies, both of Hasbala's militia wing and the IDF. But you are absolutely right. People in sound studies would immediately say well, there are types of concealment which leaves somebody undetected, but it's about sonic masking, disguising the voice. It's or it's about remaining not detected by the sound sensor, not the visual sensor. Concealment need not be primarily visual, even if certain ideas about surveillance lead to the placement of cameras rather than say motion sensors. The choice of the visual in this case is the bent of my book, which is primarily based in visual culture studies, but a more thorough going treatment of concealment would look at things like sound would look at other types of technologies other types of systems. I really hope somebody says like publishes an article saying Hatem got it only like one third right here's here's what sound studies has to say like I would make me so happy. Yeah, I think I think that's a good point as well. I have a question from Bruce my social media feed is currently full from friends in Lebanon of post pictures of 1920s 30s 50s Bay Road remembering a particular past because more political nature of the city. How does this remembering relate to the current political crisis and nostalgia. And is that infrastructure live over generations. You know there's there's compounding nostalgis here right this, the nostalgia for old Beirut. Right, particularly and usually this this is particularly I say the old part of the city, which is the part which existed in the 20s and 30s, or it's Beirut of glamorous 60s. Right. And of the glamorous 1960s which this, there's a there's a way that this formed during the Lebanese Civil War, particularly for people in diaspora. Right. Which, which wanted to remember a past state. Of course that that golden era was primarily golden for people of a certain class position. Not just people of a certain class position, but also of a particular relationship to the spaces of the city, people who could and did move through the city as a space of leisure. I want to be very careful here though right because the investments in, like the remember, like the remembrance of a past sociality where life was possible. And this is like in the face of like catastrophic levels of destruction during the Civil War, the rending of the social fabric, the erasure of older modes of cohabitation, which did not reduce to the specific sectarian calculus of guerrilla combat, or militia combat of the Civil War. Now it's some of those stakes get reactivated around something which. When I when I speak to people who have some memory before World War two, when I speak to people of say you were 80 or 90 years old. They will say what's happening, or what's happened now in Lebanon is unlike anything they've ever seen people who say the Civil War was was fine we could we could still get our money from the bank. It was bad, but you know you had periods of calm, and you could travel overseas. Say now is something totally else. Yeah, there's there's a there's a kind of intolerability or unlivability of the present, which is complicated by the fact that you have to still try to find a way to survive. Is there, is there infrastructural life over generations. You have infrastructural decay or generations. You have infrastructural legacies in the shape of, say, how and where road and water and power circulate, and the kinds of political and economic relationalities that they create or recreate to have access to the conditions of that requires either independent wealth or connections of some kind. And so there's a way that life becomes constituted in and through infrastructure. And one of the things that of course anybody who's spent time and they will tell you is that the idea that infrastructure is on until some kind of binary collapse that happens at some point in the future where why we become aware of infrastructural functioning. And that is the on off continuous oscillation between partial functioning and partial collapse that is, that is the everyday. That's a really interesting point. We've got a good question from Reem Zakro. The before and after scenario brings to my mind the situation and muslim and the redesign of new remorse which had so many objections to his futuristic rendered visions. After the future project wanted to consider the before as the past pre-destruction, was there any objection to Solidair's vision with a vision that looked more into the pre-war? Yeah, you know, after a certain point, say around 96-97, when parts of the Solidair project start to be delivered into completion. There's a kind of like a dying down of what used to be a very raucous, very contentious public debate about Solidair. From its earliest days, people were really upset with it from a variety of corners and different political persuasions, not just like, say, equality minded urban planners, right? Although they of course were important architects also hated the Solidair project particularly in its early days. And who owned land in the area also hated what was being done with it. The parts of the city that Solidair themselves actually do work on take the form of architectural preservation. Part of the city that they won't that they kept exactly as is only restored are areas built and that resemble the architectural style of the French colonial period. This is timeless Beirut, which was restored with the kinds of preservation techniques that you typically would use on architectural ruins, right? If there's like an architectural ruin, a Roman bath that needs to be preserved, there's a kind of attention to detail which goes into it. Similar things happened in parts of Beirut. And before after which I want to stress is, it becomes useful to a particular like financialization scheme. Right. They become useful to an attempt to turn post war construction into like a real estate scam. Right. So there were, there were many objections, including to divisions which looked at to pre-war Beirut as the template. When he comes back again. This is not a question but a tangential thought it strikes me that images conceal as well as reveal in that they are selective and constructive. So in a sense, they mirror that sense of complete visibility and thank you for a great talk. And we've got another one so maybe if you could comment on that and perhaps I'll take the other one coming in. Oh yeah and thank you that's from your answer to the previous question around. So yeah, so our images selective and constructive. Certainly, right. It's the simple act of a photograph framing itself in this direction, and not here implies an entire making of the world or remaking of the world. Right. But concealment is not the pointing of the camera. The concealment is when the camera takes the picture, and you can't tell what's there, or who is where who is hiding in it. Concealment is not what is what falls out of awareness, the falling out of awareness is a when it is a deliberate strategy of being overlooked, that is concealment. That's very interesting. But in relation to the question about about the question of deliberate framing and construction. So there must be some element of human agency that or no, or. Certainly, absolutely. Concealment is not primarily about ideological framing, or a news frame, or a camera frame. All of these things do a great deal of work to present a particular view of the world to assign agency in the world who is it who did what and how can we understand this event. All of that is crucially important. Concealment becomes a vector along which newsframes travel. Yeah, so it's infrastructure. The concealment is what allows the hidden embedded camera person with the gorilla unit to not be struck by the airstrike. Right. So the camera might then be shooting and be filming something from a particular viewpoint which is then narrated to say see this is why our side or our version of these events is the true one and they're hiding things from you we have like the real truth on the ground, but concealment itself, at least how I'm trying to use it is just trying to describe this, this different dimension. So with this in mind, thank you, you're putting reminders, several reminders to buy per purchase. And it might be, it might be, you know, for those audiences who asked the questions and others that this might be a very good way to understand the logic behind this and the immense scholarship. And, you know, rather original frame that have them has put in the book. It's, it's actually a very enjoyable week. So, I think you should, you know, if people are interested, please go and read it. I mean, I've got a final thing. Thanks for an insightful and insightful analysis of the before and after image as restricting possibilities of imagination outside destruction. I'm thinking about the circulation of images following the Beirut explosion for different purposes. Do you think there could be power in the recirculation of images of destruction. Power in the recirculation of images of destruction and then port explosion. You know, be one of the dominant visual tropes that I've noticed around the port explosion is not so much the before after image, although I do think it has that has started to circulate in certain urban planning and architectural circles. Here's the current port. Here's what we will turn it into. I think that what we see instead and after the pope, the port explosion is this temporality of rewinding to either just before the moment of the explosion, or to the moment of explosion and playing it on repeat. We rewind to the moment just before the explosion. And there's the explosion. And this happens, you'll there's these videos which you will find online that people have like, edited together footage from like dozens of different angles and surveillance cameras and people who are filming for their pre wedding photos. And all these things were widening to the moment of explosion over and over and over again. The time 607 predominates. There's a temporal fixation of rewind to the exact moment of the traumatic occurrence. And that's probably the structure of traumatic memory and inability to stop remembering. Right. There is a potential limitation in that, and that it could potentially limit our understanding of what might come after when we become so defined by the devastating the devastating moment that happens then. And we're in recirculating these images though it to the extent that they allow for a political imaginary that can see alternatives and ways past the current crisis. Right. When and where it can be used to put people in jail, for example, or to mobilize sentiment for putting people in jail. And the first role is like the limit of my political aspirations, but you kind of, there's a there's a lot of need for accountability for many Lebanese these days, a lot of people want somebody to pay. Very, very interesting and a very interesting thought to end on. I think I think we'll send the recording to you. And thank you everyone for for your questions. I really enjoyed this, and it kind of set me thinking about different ways of actually understanding what is happening and thinking of concealment as a way of, you know, understanding different issues that we cannot explain them. But this is this is a great way off of explaining it. So, again, thanks a lot. Thanks. And good luck for your talk tomorrow at the UB that must be very sentimental talking about Lebanon to a Lebanese audience. But thanks everyone look forward to seeing you in two weeks time with the next lecture seminar series. And especially to have them and please read the book. It'll be it'll be good. I think I have a final comment from someone I'll just no question but I want to thank you for a great talk. A lot of food for thought, especially for my own research on the loose waste and electricity infrastructures and racialization. Oh thank you Alice for that that is brilliant. And that's exactly what we hope, having such challenging discussions and insightful comments. That doesn't come out of the blue but really incredible research. So thanks a lot have them. Thank you so much for inviting me Dina and to everyone who came, either old friends or new acquaintances. Okay, take care and good evening. I don't know it's a stain your end. Thank you. Okay bye bye.