On the Confusion of the Present Moment

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Jul 16, 2013 Egypt
[5 February 2013, the Arabic reads: \"a second revolution\". graffiti in Post Said, Egypt. Image originally posted to Flickr by Hossam El-Hamlawy] [5 February 2013, the Arabic reads: \"a second revolution\". graffiti in Post Said, Egypt. Image originally posted to Flickr by Hossam El-Hamlawy]

On the Confusion of the Present Moment

By : Dina El khawaga دينا الخواجة

Now everyone is an expert on crowds. At times, we associate them with the revolution. At other times we connect them with fascist-inflected hysteria. Like the enraged mobs described by the nineteenth century sociologist Gabriel Tarde, we imagine crowds as little more than media-inflamed masses seeking to take revenge on the Muslim Brotherhood’s failed and exclusionary rule. Time and again we neglect them, only to contradict their demands. Drawing our maps for the future transition to democracy, we are content to interpret their presence as a sign of popularity, easily led to enable this or that political power, or to ward off the specter of civil strife between supporters and opponents of the Brotherhood.

This confusion undermines analysis that seeks to monitor the impact of street politics. There are entire schools of analysis that focus instead on the palace, regional, and international negotiations as the privileged site for understanding the meaning of political events. We can deconstruct these ambiguous interpretive frameworks. Just as we need to understand the army’s involvement since 30 June, we need to understand the diversity and significance of the mass protests. These crowds were the agent that carried out the will of the people. These crowds were what created the grounds for regional and international negotiations to give Egypt’s political arena a different shape from that of the past two years.

Contradictory Visions and Motivations of the Masses

We cannot ignore the growing crowds, nor the diversity of their visions, their demands, and their courage to remain in the street over the past ten days. In one instance, these crowds seek to express their support for the kind of legitimacy that elections offer. In another instance, they show their support for civilian rule in Egypt. They seek to remind us of the necessity of continuing the demands of the revolution, to widen the political arena and transform the mechanisms of authoritarian rule into something else. They remind us that the same authoritarianism characterized both SCAF rule and the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The importance of the numerical size of each camp is overshadowed by their organizational abilities as well as the degree to which they are determined to continue pressing their demands. Here, the confusion fades to some degree, and leaves us with a first, bitter conclusion: in contrast with the first two camps, the revolutionary crowds are weak. It is not just that the revolutionary moment has been coopted. There is also a political vacuum that is waiting to be crystallized by a discourse, waiting for its efforts to consolidate, and waiting for its potential to be achieved. This does not necessarily mean that the counter-revolution has triumphed so much as it reflects deep disappointment about the possibilities for change.

The term “disappointment” is central to understanding the psychology of the masses; far from Gabriel Tarde’s or Gustave Le Bon’s writings which characterized the crowd in terms of demagogy or emotionalism, these are crowds driven by the desire to translate their slogans into lived reality. These crowds are not in a rush. They did not rush to install the Brotherhood in power. They did not rush to drive the Brotherhood out of power despite the failure of its rule. It was a failed rule by all accounts as it attempted to rely on state institutions that were set in their ways for much longer than the Brotherhood’s brief moment. The crowds worked hard behind a barricade of twenty-two million signatures. Certainly, there were conflicting motivations among them, to break into the political arena and begin to negotiate on behalf of the revolution. And they have been locked out of a political arena monopolized by the military, the Islamists and figures of the old regime.

A Common Feature: No More “Living With It”

Here, we step beyond the task of observing the masses’ morphology to analyze how their political demands are translated by their representatives. There is a new common denominator, different to that which characterized the crowds in January 2011, or the waves of revolutionary youth, or the angry sectors of society during Mohamed Mahmoud, the Parliament, as well as student, professionals, and workers strikes. The crowds want firstly to suppress a contradictory public voice. They are not directing demands towards a state authority. Instead, they are begging their respective leaders to crush the rival side.

When we turn to public opinion on the killing of more than fifty-seven people in front of the Egyptian Republican Guard building, this divisiveness becomes more evident, whether in Brotherhood discourse or supporters of Egyptian state discourse against Islamism. It diminishes the power of the masses calling for democratic revolution. It chokes the discourse of democratic revolution until it loses its intensity and becomes a joke. Again, this does not necessarily mean that the counter-revolution has triumphed. It merely confirms the size of the political vacuum that has been growing in Egypt in recent months.

The Army: Between Representing the Institution and Embodying the Nationalist State

There are vast differences between the army’s position in February 2011 and in July 2013, despite similarities in the techniques of their intervention, both in procedure and official discourse, in which the army claims to represent the will of the people, and claims to work in the service of Egypt’s national interests.

There are two possible reasons for this difference. On the one hand, the army’s political rival of 2011 is now long gone by which I mean, the vision of Gamal Mubarak’s circle. Gone too is their neoliberal plan of authoritarian rule by law and security discourse rather than army prerogative. On the other hand, the army is no longer worried for its future as a political, economic, and governing force.

Today, the army remains in the back seat, sowing alliances and setting the rules of the game. Yet it now acts from within a more stable position than before. Put simply, it does not represent a sector or party in the game as much as it embodies “historicity.” By this, I mean the historicity of a state of national liberation, and everything that entails. As it turns out, wide swathes of Egyptian society demand this historicity for diverse reasons. Not only do the Nasserists, the nationalist Left, and pro-modernization middle classes support this historicity, but it also receives the support of political and economic liberals. Groups from the Left hope to see the crystallization of conflict against the army as the chief representative of the counter-revolution in order to turn the wheels of history and make the poles of revolution and counter-revolution clear.

Perhaps this fluid compatibility will last for but a few weeks, but it is also likely to last longer, as it is the only fixed narrative in a fluid political moment filled with differing interests and fragile alliances. It is the narrative of a country after independence. It is a narrative that, when faced with many challenges, does little but propose “unity” as a tool for action. It is a narrative that mobilizes nationalist sentiment against external enemies with clients hidden inside the country’s body politic. It invites the political regime to return its role of defending the nation against the outside, instead of demanding respect for the rules of accountability and transparency on the inside. It is a narrative mute on the subject of freedoms. It has nothing to say about law in the service of pluralism and governance.

In this sense, the last few weeks have been a return to the post-independence state, far more than they represent a military coup against civilians. The double nature of revolutionary struggle has been crystallized not against religious rule, but against an inherited delusion of national unity and cohesion; a hallucination of international plots against Egypt. Will this duality be the key to understanding the mobilization of democratic, revolutionary powers in the coming months?

[This piece originally appeared in Arabic on Jadaliyya on 10 July 2013. It was translated by Elisabeth Jaquette. Click here to read the Arabic version.]
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Jul 9, 2013 Lebanon
Zeynep Gambetti By :
Zeynep Gambetti

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]