The Power of Utility Poles

Abstract

Lebanon, a Mediterranean country of only 10,452 km2, is wildly diverse, both demographically and topographically. One constant, though, is the utility pole, whether in metallic steel, rusted yellow, or hearty wood, or as an improvised clothes hook, building edge, or tall rod. No matter where you go, from a small village atop Mount Lebanon to a large port city on the coast to the vast agricultural lands of the valley, there are utility poles stitching together people's access to electricity and powering their contemporary communication practices. This article shows how the study of the utility pole as a medium can provide new insights for media studies and the everyday mediation of politics in the Arab world.

The utility pole is defined by its heterogeneous presence as a site of practical realisations, as a concentrated result of flows of power coming together. This presents a challenge for studies of both media and Lebanon. Practices and objects have generally been relegated to symptomatic states, as reflections and mirrors, representations trapped in the referential logics of corruptions and weak states. Recognising agency differently in Lebanon, with emphasis on the role of everyday practices and configurations, I argue that Lebanon’s infrastructures work as sites of active political contestation and as mediums of power, with their constitutions reflective of both the collision and coexistence of forces in the country. The latter forms the basis for a second argument underlying this research, part of the move to expand the bounds of Arab media studies to recognise the role of material mediums and of a general intervention into the relationship of media with infrastructure. I also contend that Lebanon’s poles are important nodal sites for uncovering how mediums both limit and make possible politics that challenge, complement, or just coexist a country’s socio-political arrangements.

To uncover how these mediations operate, and the frictions that emerge between dominant images and practical arrangements in the country, I take three concrete case studies. (1) Political contestations on utility poles during a case of a campaign to formalise electricity in the popular neighbourhoods of Jnah and the local response to it. (2) The logics of light in both infrastructural imaginary and practice in Lebanon, and the material-discoursive qualities of campaigns to ‘bring light back’ to Beirut. (3) The contrast between mafiaso representations of Lebanon’s decentralised power configurations and how these configurations are hetregenously negotiated across the country.