Paper short abstract:

Exploring one moment of protest and its narrative recirculation amongst activists in Lebanon, this paper explores how exemplary moments can serve to radically transform temporal orientations to present practice and produce a plausible future imagined as realisable through present political agency.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I explore how Lebanese independent activists have come to temporally differentiate their practice from that of their potential social movement 'other', NGOs. Taking one moment of contestation, the protests opposing the Lebanese parliament's extension of its own mandate in order to postpone the general election of 2013, I show how activists have reoriented their senses of the present and future in its wake. In doing so, they perform a potentially transformative temporal orientation that offers optimism and future viability in the face of failure.

In the moment of protesting the parliamentary extension, the antithetical responses of two sets of participants to the violent policing of the protests were stark and startling: one set attempted to diffuse the situation; the other engaged the security forces. Afterwards, the example of that protest moment continued to circulate in the form of narratives, jokes, and asides amongst my interlocutors. This circulation served as a visceral index of the distance between two potential forms of agency and crystallised independent activist senses of themselves as 'politicals' in contradistinction to 'NGOs'. This indexing produced twin temporal orientations to the present: an openness to the transformative potential of any particular moment of protest, and an emphasis on attritional day-by-day work in mundane time to produce the material basis from which political moments might be rendered successful. Against abstract thoughts of revolution, 'politicals' came to perform a set of rhythms of present action within which inhered a future where radical change became eminently realisable.