No Jasmine Tea for the Square

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Jul 14, 2013 Egypt
[31 August 2012, anti-Morsi protest in down town Cairo, Egypt. Image originally posted to Flickr by Gigi Ibrahim] [31 August 2012, anti-Morsi protest in down town Cairo, Egypt. Image originally posted to Flickr by Gigi Ibrahim]

No Jasmine Tea for the Square

By : Wael Gamal وائل جمال

Who exactly is making politics in Egypt these days? There are so many possible answers to the question. One perspective, which is both new and not so new, views politics as the purview of only the very highest circles of power. It only hears politics in the opinions of political elites and the embassies of major foreign states. It only sees politics in the backrooms of the state.

But this perspective is more than analytical. Framing politics in this way marks a distinct political position, situated alongside those “registered” political actors who are allowed to play on the Egyptian official field.  

Those who follow this line of thinking tell us that the 30 June upheaval was nothing but a plot. This scheme was worked out in advance by the army and the National Salvation Front and engineered by a veteran statesman of the old guard to mobilize funds and media coverage.

Salvation Front politicians, as well as those who regularly attended meetings at which this political plot was devised, are not speaking openly about the plan at present. Maybe they are trying to be sensitive towards the American position, which does not call what happened a “coup.” But they are making their next bets based on this perspective. We thus find ourselves drowning in roadmaps, negotiations about ministerial portfolios, and details of the transitional stage. And, of course, all the negotiations are taking place behind closed doors. 

•••

The Muslim Brotherhood proceeds on the same premises. For them the June upheaval was purely a military coup manufactured with support from Saudi Arabia and the Untied Arab Emirates. (Notice the similarity to Omar Suleiman’s view that the January 25 Revolution was a foreign and domestic conspiracy involving an alliance between Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.) This gave way to policies such as leaking information about Tamarod to the army, focusing all criticism on General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi for betraying the administration, and shamelessly encouraging America to get involved and defend the regime of the “elected president.”

The controversy about whether 30 June was a military coup shows how those who undertook the initiative, those who supported it, and those who opposed it all had the same perceptions. Not one of them took seriously the political force that has now taken control in Egypt, namely, the public square. Detailed debates about the definition of the word “coup” in the global coverage of the event only bolster this insistent and narrow focus on small circles of power.

Despite all their differences, proponents of this view all insist that they are the ones who represent the will of the people or that they are the ones who are seeking it out by procedural means.  But none of them see the crowds who came out into the streets of Tahrir Square area, Etihadeya, Rabi‘a al-Adaweya Mosque, and al-Nahda Square as anything but an instrument to use. For them, mass protest has no autonomy. More importantly, for them, the public square means nothing when it comes to making and guiding politics. And politics, after all, belongs to Washington.

Who designed the June upheaval?

There is no doubt that behind 30 June there was a plan. And there were architects. There were men secretly engineering preexisting agreements, much the way the Brotherhood did when it met with Omar Suleiman and his associates during the eighteen days of 2011. However the present picture is much broader than this, and to understand what is happening, we must analyze all of the symptoms of the revolutionary situation in which we find ourselves.

The first symptom is a grave crisis of governance. In a recent article Asef Bayat classified the uprisings in Egypt, Yemen, and Tunisia and what followed as neither revolutions nor reforms. Rather, they were “refolutions” driven by a need to reform the institutions of the existing regime. This motivation, Bayat adds, created a set of contradictory circumstances. On the one hand, it ensured an orderly transfer of power that avoided revolutionary excesses (i.e., violence and executions). However, it also brought with it the constant and immediate threat of a counter-revolution that would restore the former regime precisely because the revolution failed to breach state institutions.

What coalition government do we find in Egypt now? Part of the reason for the June upheaval is that the previous coalition government – the Brotherhood, the military, the bureaucracy, the feloul – had failed to ascertain what would allow them to achieve stable power. After 30 June  the situation remains the same, if not worse.

The new coalition government is shaky and overshadowed by conflict among its various constituents: the army, the National Salvation Front and its assorted constituents (Liberals, Nasserists, revolutionaries, and the like), and members of the NDP trying to reassert themselves. They have yet to settle the matter with the former ally, the Muslim Brothers.

The new government is still searching for stable ground.

The dispute between the army and the Brotherhood is a sign of weakness in a coalition government that is trying to represent the interests of a former regime, which was itself unable to run the country and pacify the angry street. Thus this crisis of governance will remain with us. However one condition of any revolution is that the ruling class not be allowed to continue along its former path. We are accustomed to thinking, as they would like us to, that this as a sign of strength that determines all else. But it is not. On the contrary, it is a sign of weakness.

•••

The second symptom of the revolutionary situation is the further exacerbation of living conditions that are already bad. There is a shortage of gas, bread, and electricity. Price inflation is beyond belief. Unemployment is on the rise and public services are deteriorating. These were all key factors in the lead-up to 30 June.

This leads to the third symptom of the revolutionary situation: a significant increase in energy and activity among previously apolitical masses who were driven by a crisis in governance and poor living conditions to independent political action. In his article Bayat refers to the continual pressure coming from the squares, strikes, protests, and civil society at large as a “refo-lution”, that is, a reformist revolution. He considers this to be the only way to achieve genuine change via reforms to the regime or to social conditions and class.

Revolutionary zeal has not ceased since the January revolution. The people did not take to streets on 30 June because the media incited them to or because of deals made with recently rediscovered veteran politicians of former regimes. They had already been in the streets for more than five thousand demonstrations and 7,700 social protests. These protests were widespread and significant — Mohamed Morsi considered them to be a direct challenge to the office of the president.

The agreement tried to forestall the coming popular movement at every turn in order to weaken it and frame it, not the other way around. How the new government responds to the protests will expose how it works on the inside.  (One of the Mubarak-era broadcasters lost his cool on his own program and demanded that Morsi put an end to the strikes and social protests because “the nation cannot take it anymore.”) This will be true for everyone, whether the old or new coalition governments, the Brotherhood, the military, Mubarak’s feloul, and even most of the National Salvation Front.

•••

No one commands the millions who came out into the streets on 30 June and who ended their call to go out again yesterday. That being said, while these millions did welcome the intervention of forces from on high, they did so only because they helped to oust Morsi, and they will not now accept a dictatorial regime. Indeed their first demand was for early elections, and more importantly, that these be run under the principle of direct interests. With regard to these two matters, it appears the new coalition government, once it has settled its affairs, will be unable to satisfy the expectations of the large, popular bloc that is increasingly active and politicized.

Take, for example, the incredible confusion surrounding the selection process for the new prime minister. This revealed the extent of the general confusion within the new coalition, the lack of clear leadership in any one of its constituent parts, and the fragility of its delicate balances. In addition we have the ever-present American condition that we must move forward with the International Monetary Fund talks in order to receive American political support and economic support from the Gulf. To do so means continuing with the same austerity policies of imposing taxes on the poor and devaluing the Egyptian pound, which will only lead to inflation.

These are the same measures the Brotherhood tried, though without success. And they are the same measures that drove people out into the streets to begin with. Just as the former regime was tied to security institutions so too is the new coalition government too weak to rule the defiant streets with an iron fist.

•••

The revolutionary situation continues, as does the street’s insistence upon having the final word. So, have we learned now who really makes politics in Egypt today?

[This article originally appeared in Arabic in El-Sherouk on 8 July 2013. It was translated by Nancy Linthicum.]
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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.]