For example, a lot of the stuff I’ve found by Lebanese bloggers during the 2006 war is counterintuitively ambivalent, often challenging attempts at “proper” moral positioning (e.g. the easy cultivation of spectatorial disgust and outrage at a situation), and also defying the stereotype of being “stalwart, heroic survivors who just get on with it”. Instead, plenty of Lebanese blogging during the war performed a dangerous fascination with living amidst ruins and death. These dangerous liaisons shouldn’t be written off as mere post-traumatic “shock” (i.e. a lapse of one’s sensibilities), rather, they’re people’s engagement with the cultural-political fabric of their everyday lives. In Lebanon, dwellings are violently ripped apart by Israeli bombs, and people’s “private” belongings, life trappings and body-parts spill out into some kind of “public” amongst the ruins, and yet people still negotiate this most appallingly violent and oppressive “blurring” of public and private by folding it into the more generalised public/private negotiation that a lot of blogs perform as a matter of course in their daily practise. Of course, we shouldn’t smooth over the complexities that are dangerously leapt over by this observation, but I’d also like to suggest that this kind of leap — a dodgy “totalisation”, if you like — is precisely what these bloggers are performing. Elegiac/utopian totalisation “from below”, or a rogue version of the World Wide Web’s foundational archive fever, or will-to-map. Nothing is being offered as some kind of “solution” (”war zones are the future!” is hardly convincing, and that’s not the kind of utopianism I’m identifying here anyway), but there’s definitely a weird productivity going on.

Given the way blogs from Lebanon might be both problematically and productively situated in a global economy of representation, this “playing with violent publicity” obviously plays out in multivalent ways. Consider the crudest exmaple: the popularly circulated photos of Lebanese survivors cheerfully smoking the arghile amongst the ruins of their houses (or more famously, in swimsuits by the pool of a bombed hotel), usually annotated by Lebanese bloggers with wry captions like “Only in Lebanon!”. The everyday circulation of these images by Lebanese bloggers can generate a very different kind of affect — something that mixes mourning and defiant pleasure — from the way they might be used in an advertising campaign for a western newspaper. (This is a real example — the national daily newspaper here in Australia is using the image of the smoking swimsuit girl, where she definitely becomes a freaky instance of the anomalous and prodigal Orient.) And to a western, nominally progressive blog-readership that’s hungry for “authentic” news of suffering in the Middle East, another problematic relationship awaits…

So, I’m basically arguing for a sensitivity to vernacular *breadth* when approaching the ambivalent representation of spaces of trauma. There’s a *lot* that can be going on, and while I agree that the position of the reader should be thoroughly interrogated, I don’t think people’s attunement to ambivalence should be reduced to a case of privileged wish fulfilment. Otherwise we relegate people living in such fucked up spaces to playing “morally appropriate” roles of worthy, indignant and noble sufferers, incapable of productively synthesising alternative responses to their environments.

Sorry, thinking aloud. :)