Jundi, Mustapha. 2024. The Visceral Underground: Knowledge Gaps and Paranoia across the Blue Line. Other thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

This thesis explores the underground border geography between Lebanon and Israel as a site of conflict. It departs from the Blue Line border between the two states—not an actual international border, but rather the line delineating the withdrawal of the Israeli troops from Lebanon after a twenty-two-year occupation—to examine how the underground expands volumetric territorial delineations. Using primary materials, I interrogate a series of controversial claims that emerged among scientific communities and in the public discourse in the 1980s and 1990s in both Lebanon and Israel regarding cross-border subterranean water resources in the Upper Jordan River basin: the Litani/Hasbani hydrogeological groundwater basin connection and the Litani river diversion plan during the Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon. By analyzing these claims, I explore how conflicting territorial imaginaries mobilized by different actors are projected and resisted through different forms of knowledge gaps that produce and get produced through a state of paranoia: it is in the co-constitutive relationship between knowledge gaps and paranoia, I argue, that these imaginaries need to be conceptualized. Moreover, as I navigate the complexity of researching in such a context with a violent history of occupation that leaks into the present, I examine how this relationship gets materialized across territorial and individual scales, drawing parallels between the affective dimension of border geographies and the research methodology I develop. As such, I take the co-constitutive relationship between knowledge gaps and paranoia not as a limitation, but rather as a space of imagination that creates different forms of territorial imaginaries, political engagements, and research methodologies.

In my analysis, I highlight three primary configurations of knowledge gaps: the complexity of knowing subterranean environments through mediated sensing practices; practices of non-cooperation and data obfuscation between Lebanon and Israel; and the complex relationship between researcher and field in this context and the resulting spatial gap. These gaps produce a fertile ground where paranoia, which I examine as a mode of being in the world that builds connections between seemingly unrelated events and objects, can thrive. In the specific cases analyzed here, this stems from a public discourse that draws connections between water and territory on the one hand, and water security and subjects on the other, imagined through invisibility and inaccessibility. In doing this, I draw on feminist research methodologies to expand conceptualizations of underground territory and of the sensing practices that these territories adhere to, focusing on their volumetric and inter-material dimensions.

As practice-based research, I employ interviews as key texts through which the researcher’s presence in the field gets substituted and primary material gets structured. In addition, I establish a critical visual practice that operates through paranoic mapping and text-based interventions with archival documents acting as a materialization of the border conditions explored. Through this mapping, I explore a practice of persistent imagining of connections through an unknowability; knowledge gaps and paranoia thus become a speculative knowing conjured by different forms of unknowability.

Item Type:	Thesis (Other)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00037217
Keywords:	Underground. Subterranean Territory. Border Geographies. Volumetric Sovereignty. Sensing Practices. Psychoanalysis. Psychosocial Methodologies. Knowledge Gaps. Paranoia. Paranoic Mapping.
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Visual Cultures
Date:	31 May 2024
Item ID:	37217
Date Deposited:	04 Jul 2024 16:20
Last Modified:	04 Jul 2024 16:23
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/37217

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