Fragments and Failures of Contentiousness: Rethinking the Politics of Mediated Public Spaces

Against the grain of recent theoretical interventions (e.g. Sassen, 2011) that describe a topology of ‘protest spaces’ and designate the practices emerging out of them as inherently contentious or agonistic, this paper argues that the key ingredient in understanding how contentiousness congeals in multiply-mediated contexts is time. Specifically, this means the extent to which any material or communicative space is able to sustain cultures of contentious practices amid the routines and rhythms of everyday life. The point then is not defining a kind of ideal political space – one which is the inverse of a Habermassian public sphere in that it engenders critical moments of contentiousness that rupture the fabric of political orthodoxy – but rather to conceive of contentiousness as something experienced in discrete and usually non-transcendent encounters that at first glance look anything but heroic. The paper draws on fieldwork conducted with media activists in Lebanon that investigates the phenomenological experience of their work, documenting practices recognisably from the iconography of protest as well as the more mundane aspects of their lives – everything from transport, technological infrastructure and workplace cultures to all of the affective work that goes into sustaining social relations. Drawing on de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), the paper argues that viewed at the level of quotidian experience most contentious actors fail to be contentious most of the time. However, those routine failures do not undermine resistance or solidarity but precisely enable them. It is by rethinking spaces of contentiousness not as self-contained and temporally continuous but disintegrative and discontinuous that we come to understand that political transformativity is not hindered by the messy affective distractions associated with the social experience of mediated and physical spaces alike, but is predicated upon them.