[Reader-list] Withdrawing consent

[Swadhin Sen]

Uprising in Egypt:
			
			Withdrawing consent
posted by 
Stathis Gourgouris



			
				For
the last month, we have been witnessing, in Tunisia and Egypt, the
first revolution of the twenty-first century. We are indeed fortunate
to live in the presence of such a world-making event, even if we are
not in the streets together with those who are making it a reality in
daily life. Hastening to provide analyses of ongoing social and
political alterations of such magnitude is always ill-advised, because
world-historical events also alter the known modes and means of
analysis, especially those crafted by pundits and academics.
Nonetheless, in an attempt to respond to the sublime sentiment of
watching an entire people erupt in a collective desire for
self-determination, which is, moreover, actualized in the very means of
conducting and realizing this desire, I feel a personal exigency to
articulate certain elementary observations on what I perceive to be the
worldwide consequences of these alterations. I do so in the spirit, not
of analysis, but of speculation, and with the self-conscious risk of
being an amateur observer.
My overall sense is that this is a revolution that has already
transformed the terms with which, up to now, we have conceptualized
revolution. Even if, as has been said repeatedly, one can connect the
manner of the Egyptian revolution to what led to the collapse of the
Berlin Wall, and thereby the Soviet world, the present event – which, I
repeat, is still taking place – transcends the events of 1989. And
this, because it does not remain tied merely to the demand for
political freedom, but demands in addition the full reconfiguration of
society, the creation of new institutions (political and social), and
the actualization of social justice and isonomy. Whether these will be
achieved is unclear. But the demand for them and the self-authorized
way in which this demand was articulated is revolutionary in itself and
cannot be effaced.
Moreover, since this revolution is taking place in the Arab world,
and in a primarily Muslim society, the range of its consequences
overcomes its strict geographical boundaries, which are, in any case,
plural and overlapping (Middle East, North Africa, Southeastern
Mediterranean), broaching, indeed, worldwide dimensions, all the more
because simultaneously it deauthorizes the previous model of Islamic
revolution in Iran.
Two things to be said here:
First: It is impossible at this moment to judge the magnitude of
significance these events will have for the self-determination of every
single Arab person, wherever s/he happens to reside on the planet. The
revolution in Egypt and Tunisia means the reawakening of the Arab world
in general and against an increasingly powerless (in world terms) Arab
elite. Whatever the outcome, the rupture with the past century that saw
the shift from colonization to national independence—indeed, a century
of continuous dependence—is unbridgeable and irreversible. All Arabs
now know—and those who still govern them know it too, but with
fear—what autonomy really means: what it means to demand, unhesitant
and unafraid, and to achieve, as a society en masse, the right to
decide your own present and your own future. For the Arab world—and
hence for all its enemies—these events testify to a foundational
reconfiguration of the geopolitical dynamic, whose consequences may
still be indeterminate but are most definitely subversive. The
re-awakening of the sense of Arab self-determination and the demands
that it poses cannot be blanketed in the language of ethno-nationalism,
because it is a political action that cuts to the core of the most existential demand.
The celebration with which ordinary Arabs, in the streets and in
their homes all over the world, welcomed the announcement of Mubarak’s
political demise on February 11, 2011, is an indelible indication of a
personalized, existential sense of awakening. But the regional
reconfiguration reaches beyond the Arab world as such. One might say
that, in a Mediterranean context, the catalytic event took place in
December 2008, when Greek youth, responding to a case of public police
brutality, and using exactly the same technological modes of
communication and organization, rebelled against the state with
unprecedented rage, even if this action, as radical as it was, remained
inadequate in its constituent dimensions. I note that, in those days,
Arab youth hailed the Greek rebellion in various blogs as an example to
be followed. On the other side, temporally speaking, the recent mass
protest action in Italy, spearheaded by women, against the Berlusconi
government cannot possibly be disconnected from the impact that images
from Egyptian streets had on the imagination of the protesters, even if
this would be difficult to quantify. That these actions remain
incomplete (and perhaps inadequate) speaks more to the disempowerment
of European societies (even the two most politicized ones) versus Arab
ones than an entrenchment of unalterable institutions.
Second: Historical coincidence is always ironic, because it can
never be deliberately produced, and because, when one event shadows
another, all precedent meaning is thrown off kilter. This is especially
the case here, where the collapse of the Mubarak regime happens to
coincide to the day with the thirty-second anniversary of the collapse
of the Pahlavi regime, as a result of a revolution that led to the
founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Feb. 11, 1979). This
coincidence signifies in essence the historically actualized
disengagement of two otherwise incompatible names, because the
revolutionary movement for democracy in both Egypt and Tunisia never
gestured toward any religious authorization. Even the instances of
collective prayer in Tahrir Square before projected mass actions
remained in the realm of a social, not political, practice. Sublime
remains, above all, the image of Egyptian Christians forming a human
chain of protection around Muslims in prayer against possible attacks
by thugs of the secret police. (The gesture, I was told, was reversed
when Muslims stood guard outside a Coptic church during mass.) Against
all talk by fear-mongering pundits from quarters that wish to denigrate
Egypt’s achievement, the Muslim Brotherhood explicitly articulated its
support from the outset for a real—therefore, secular—democracy.
Let us not mince words in the face of sublime events. The Tunisian
and Egyptian popular uprisings are the epitome of secular action—which
is not to say, secularist. Whatever will be the ultimate
expression of the movement’s constituent power—and, at present, this is
still profoundly unknown, and all bets are off—the constitution of the
action itself, in terms of both the intention and the execution of the
actors day after day, unfolded with a univocal concentration on
self-determination extraneous to any external, transcendental,
authorization. Moreover, the fact that a world-historical secular event
is taking place in Muslim society—and especially insofar as it goes
against the legacy of the Iranian Revolution—registers as a powerful
indication of how inadequate has been the haste among pundits and
academics to proclaim the advent of a post-secular age. Although this
is a broader issue pertaining to the general politics of the
“post-”—which testifies ultimately to a generally inadequate
intellectual response to the emergent—it deserves to be underlined as a
point of departure for some urgent reconsiderations.
Finally: The dominant Orientalism that wants every resistance to
power in Muslim societies to be an expression of religious fanaticism
and terrorism was dealt a brutal blow in just eighteen days. We are
speaking of eighteen days of explosive popular action that interwove a
technologically ingenious urban youth; a deeply entrenched workers’
syndicalist movement; the initiative of independent women in and out of
the family structure; the liberal bourgeoisie of the main Egyptian
cities; the well-trained organization of the Muslim Brotherhood among
key professions (especially doctors); the explicit participation of
people working in the judicial system (including judges wearing, as
signs, their court regalia); and, above all, the spontaneously and
autonomously enraged association of tens of thousands of the poorest of
the poor. Let us not forget that the spark for this revolutionary rage
was struck by a food-vendor’s act of self-immolation on a Tunis street.
In Egypt and Tunisia, we see the very idea of revolution being
transformed before our eyes, yet simultaneously connecting itself with
its elemental and integral significance. Revolution no longer means the
violent overthrow of a political regime in an orchestrated (or
hijacked) action, under the command of a revolutionary vanguard,
secular or religious—an action that inevitably leads to a civil war
that never ends for the generations who experience it and indelibly
marks the generations that follow it. Revolution now means what it has
always meant in essence: the people’s removal of their consent to power.
For, in the last instance, no regime can continue to exist without
the consent of the society it reigns over, whether this consent is
conscious or unconscious, willful or coerced, driven by interest or
driven by fear. The great Etienne de La Boétie first spoke of voluntary
servitude in 1549, simultaneously directing our attention to the fact
that it only takes the many to realize they hold more power than the
One who nominally controls them. La Boétie’s calling continues to be
utterly apt to the contemporary situation, where the world’s ubiquitous
oligarchies, which trade in the name of democracy, sustain themselves
with the profound collaboration of a demos that disavows its responsibility for self-determination and self-governance.
I understand that many would say that it’s much too early to tell.
And, even more, mere withdrawal of consent is inadequate without the
move to constituent power. Strictly speaking, this is true: withdrawal
of consent to heteronomous power (a negative action) must be followed
by constituent action of autonomous power (a positive action) for
democracy to be fully enacted as a regime (kratos). However,
without the first, nothing happens at all. And, indeed, the first
moment—withdrawal of consent to power—is, in itself (in its
negativity), autonomous action.
Much has been written, from within the Arab world, about the
complexity of alliances and intersections that played a role in the
process of this spontaneous revolution. I isolate especially two
articles by Paul Amar in Jadaliyya: “Why Mubarak is Out,” on February 1, and “Why Egypt’s Progressives Win,” on February 8. I also note Mona El-Ghobashy’s account of Egyptian political structure in the panel “Egypt Arising”
that took place at Columbia University on February 9. Every
presentation on this panel (El-Ghobashy, Juan Cole, Jean-Pierre Filiu,
Rashid Khalidi) was right on the mark, but Filiu’s focus on the new
political culture of avowed ex-jihadists in Egypt deserves further
exploration and discussion.
There is a last instance, of course, in hard social-historical terms. No
doubt, capitalism’s worldwide economic crisis and the wound it
inflicted on the poorest strata of Egyptian and Tunisian society drew
the bottom line of forbearance and was the catalyst that dissolved and
streamlined the sedimented desperation of generations. And this too was
conducted and guided through a well honed and organized workers’
movement with a profound history of strike action behind it, whose
articulated (and utterly realizable) threat of a general strike that
would include Suez Canal workers—in what, we must admit, was an uncanny
historical realization of the Sorelian myth—was what ultimately
precipitated Mubarak’s final demise. Beyond all this, however, let us
remember that one of the demands that became a chant on the lips of the
multitude was karama: dignity. This demand has already been
met, no matter what may ensue, by the revolution itself, by the dignity
of this revolution.

								Tags: consent, Egypt, Orientalism, revolution, Tunisia

Swadhin Sen Archaeologist - Assistant Professor   Dept.of Archaeology            Tel:       +88 02 779 10 45-51 Ext. 1326 Jahangirnagar University      Mobile:  +88 0172 019 61 76   Savar,Dhaka. Bangladesh    Fax:      +88 02 779 10 52    swadhin_sen at yahoo.com; swadhinsen at hotmail.com www.juniv.edu



 
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