Tahrir: Politics, Publics and Performances of Space

Abstract

One of the iconic sites of the Arab uprisings that started in December 2010 was (and remains) Tahrir Square in Cairo. This is also a site that makes it possible to trace the entanglements of a digital public sphere with a physical public space. Many commentators on events in Egypt have insisted on the power of digital social media, and especially Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to activate and co-ordinate political opposition to the Mubarak regime. But conventional means of communication also played a crucial role, and the presence of large crowds gathered together in public spaces was vital to the immediate gains made in by what was a remarkably heterogeneous revolution. Using the work of Judith Butler, it becomes possible to clarify the ways in which the animation of a diverse public was inseparable from its ability to appropriate and in some substantial sense ‘gather’—to re-claim and re-appropriate—a properly public space. In short, it was through both their digital platforms and their bodily presence that so many people collaborated in a series of political performances that were also performances of space.

Keywords::

• Arab uprisings
• Cairo
• social media
• space
• Tahrir Square

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Oliver Belcher and Craig Jones for comments on an early draft of this essay.

Notes

¹ S. Sassen (2011) The Global Street: Making the Political, Globalizations, 8, pp. 573–579, p. 574.

² H. Bhabha (1994) How Newness Enters the World, in: H. Bhabha The Location of Culture, pp. 212–235 (London: Routledge). The reference to Bhabha is not arbitrary; here he engages—critically—with Frederic Jameson's spatial thematics and in particular the difficulty Jameson registered in mapping/visualizing the new global space of decentered, networked communications that appeared to him as the leitmotif of late capitalism (F. Jameson (1991) Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso & Durham, NC: Duke University Press)). Jameson's original voyage of disorientation was published in 1984; thirty years later other generations of voyagers have devised new ways of navigating these currents, and—as the events in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere have shown—some of them have demonstrated a remarkable capacity to direct these decentered, networked systems against the colonizing, neoliberalizing logics of an even later capitalism and its authoritarian armatures. Significantly for my purposes, however, Jameson also uses a physical space—the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles—as a figure of this new ‘hyperspace.’

³ M. Foucault (1980) Questions on Geography, in: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, pp. 63–77, Gordon, C. (trans.) (New York: Pantheon), p. 70; the interview with Foucault was conducted by the editors of Hérodote in 1976.

⁴ A. Salvatore (2013) New Media, the ‘Arab Spring’ and the Metamorphosis of the Public Sphere: Beyond Western Assumptions on Collective Agency and Democratic Politics, Constellations, 20(2), pp. 1–12; and W. S. Fahmi (2009) Bloggers' Street Movement and the Right to the City: (Re)claiming Cairo's Real and Virtual ‘Spaces of Freedom,’ Environment and Urbanization, 21(1), pp. 89–107.

⁵ A barbed joke circulating in Cairo had Omar Suleiman, Mubarak's former intelligence chief and then a presidential candidate, adopting as his slogan ‘You are all Khaled Said.’

⁶ For detailed discussions, see G. Barrons (2012) ‘Suleiman: Mubarak Decided to Step Down #egypt #jan25 OH MY GOD:’ Examining the Use of Social Media in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, Contemporary Arab Affairs, 5, pp. 54–67; P. Howard & M. Hussain (2011) The Role of Digital Media, Journal of Democracy, 22(3), pp. 35–48; H. H. Khondker (2011) Role of the New Media in the Arab Spring, Globalizations, 8, pp. 675–679; and Z. Tufekci & C. Wilson (2012) Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations from Tahrir Square, Journal of Communication, 62, pp. 363–379.

⁷ For an extended and incisive discussion, see S. Joseph (2012) Social Media, Political Change and Human Rights, Boston College International and Comparative LawReview, 35(1), pp. 145–188.

⁸ I use the collective phrase as a short-hand; for a careful dissection of what he calls ‘the moving parts within the military and police institutions of Egypt's security state,’ see P. Amar (2013) Why Mubarak is Out, Jadaliyya, February 1. Available at http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/516/why-mubarak-is-out, accessed May 24, 2013.

⁹ This narrative is based on Howard & Husain, Role of Digital Media; A. Dunn (2011) Unplugging a Nation: State Media Strategy During Egypt's January 25 Uprising, Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, 35(2), pp. 15–24.

¹⁰ M. El-Ghobashy (2011) The Praxis of the Egyptian Revolution, Middle East Report, 258, pp. 2–13.

¹¹ H. Tawil-Souri (2012a) It's Still about the Power of Place, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 5, pp. 86–95, p. 92; and Tufekci & Wilson, Observations from Tahrir Square, pp. 363–379.

¹² This map is taken from a 26-page pamphlet, ‘How to Protest Intelligently’, which was distributed to protesters in Cairo in January 2011; the version shown here, in Arabic, is a public domain document available at http://info.publicintelligence.net/EgyptianRevolutionManual.pdf, accessed May 24, 2013.

¹³ N. Rabat (2012) The Arab Revolution Takes Back the Public Space,' Critical Inquiry, 39(1), pp. 198–208, p. 205; and H. H. Salama (2013) Tahrir Square: A Narrative of Public Space, Archnet-IJAR, 7(1), pp. 128–138, p. 128.

¹⁴ This was ‘Evacuation Day,’ whose counterpart was the ‘Day of Departure,’ called by demonstrators in the same square for February 3, 2011; Mubarak finally resigned eight days later.

¹⁵ M. Elshahed (2011a) Tahrir Square: Social Media, Public Space, February 27, 2011, p. 0. Available at http://places.designobserver.com/feature/tahrir-square-social-media-public-space/25108/, accessed May 24, 2013.

¹⁶ Tawil-Souri, Power of Place, p. 90. Rabat adds a rider: for him, the uprisings facilitated what he calls ‘a kind of dialogue between the spaces of tradition and the spaces of modernity’ (Rabat, Arab Revolution, p. 208). He had in mind a much older public space in cities under the sign of Islam—that of the mosque, where the adult male population met to pray, to learn but also to exercise their political rights—and suggests that its customary usages were re-enlisted to sustain the instantiation of a new, democratic and radically non-patriarchal form of politics in the square. Put more simply, mosques were relatively safe gathering grounds from which protesters could issue and converge upon the square. Sassen similarly argues that the mosques provided the ‘foundational communication network’ for the Friday mobilizations (Sassen, The Global Street, p. 578).

¹⁷ B. Edwards (2011) Tahrir: Ends of Circulation, Public Culture, 23(3), pp. 493–504, p. 498.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 495; see also Salvatore, who in ‘New Media’ (p. 9) suggests that this va-et-vient had been in place for five or six years, and that ‘since the mid-2000s virtual and public spaces came into a mutual synergy and produced a formidable potential for mobilizing a broad variety of actors.’ It was precisely that potential that was realized in the occupation of Tahrir in 2011.

¹⁹ Edwards, Tahrir, p. 499; here he is quoting Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar.

²⁰ This map comes from a series in 2011 and 2012 posted at http://web3lab.blogspot.ca. The real-time sequence of SMS mapped by the Digital Humanities Project at UCLA is even more effective, but the images are too large to be reproduced here: see http://egypt.hypercities.com.

²¹ J. Butler (2011) Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street (EIPCP, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies), p. 627. Available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en, accessed July 5, 2013. Much of Butler's work has involved the development of the concept of performativity to show how gender and other subject-ascriptions are inscribed on the body through performance, but this is the first essay (in fact the text of a lecture delivered in Venice in September 2011) in which she extends her formulations from the subject to the subject-in-space.

²² In relation to Tahrir, see C. Tripp (2013) Performing the Public: Theatres of Power in the Middle East, Constellations, DOI: 10.1111/cons.12030. Tripp does acknowledge Butler en passant, but his exposition of what he calls ‘the dramaturgy of performance’ renders the space of the Square more or less inert. For an altogether different reading of Tahrir as ‘empty space’, see W. J. T. Mitchell (2012) Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation, Critical Inquiry, 39, pp. 8–32, pp. 18–22.

²³ For a fuller theoretical discussion, see G. Rose (1999) Performing Space, in: D. Massey, J. Allen & P. Sarre (eds), Human Geography Today, pp. 247–259 (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press). I have elaborated these ideas in my essay: D. Gregory (2005) Performing Cairo: Orientalism and the City of the Arabian Nights, in: N. Al-Sayyad, I. Bierman & N. Rabat (eds) Making Cairo Medieval, pp. 69–93 (Lanham MD: Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield).

²⁴ H. Lefebvre (1974; 1981) La production de l'espace (Paris: Anthropos). This was translated in 1991 as The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell); I have provided a detailed discussion in D. Gregory (1994) Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell). For other attempts to mobilize Lefebvre in Tahrir, see A. Kanna (2012) Urban Praxis and the Arab Spring, City, 16(3), pp. 360–368; and especially Salama, Tahrir Square (pp. 133ff.), who diagrams Tahrir through Lefebvre's tripartite schema of perceived, conceived and lived space.

²⁵ A. Ramadan (2013) From Tahrir to the World: The Camp as a Political Public Space, European Urban and Regional Studies, 20, pp. 145–149. Mitchell (in Image, Space, Revolution) makes a similar claim in a different register. He toys with the figure of encampment too, but ultimately prefers ‘occupation.’ It works in a similar way, I think, and both authors emphasize that these performances of space, as I'm calling them here, across the Middle East and North Africa, subverted an older, Western, and profoundly colonial sense of order and occupation that had been continued into the ‘post’-colonial.

²⁶ Butler, Bodies in Alliance, p. 0.

²⁷ M. Al-Ibrashy (2011) Days of the Midan, Magaz, 401. Available at http://www.magazmagazine.com/magaz2012/index.php?option = com_content&view = article&id = 700%3Adays-of-the-midan&catid = 157%3Aissue-401&Itemid = 123&task = view, accessed May 24, 2013, p. 627; and N. Abourahme & M. Jayyusi (2011) The Will to Revolt and the Spectre of the Real: Reflections on the Arab Moment, City, 15(6), pp. 625–630, p. 627.

²⁸ D. Massey (1994) A Global Sense of Place, in: D. Massey Space, Place and Gender, pp. 146–156 (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press & Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

²⁹ Butler, Bodies in Alliance, p. 0.

³⁰ J. Butler (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso); on the counter-revolution in Cairo, and the attempt to normalize urban violence, see M. Elshahed (2011b) Urbanizing the Counter-revolution, Jadaliyya, December 17. Available at www.syria.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/3581/urbanizing-the-counter-revolution, accessed May 24, 2013.

³¹ M. Abaza (2013) Walls. Segregating Cairo and the Mohammed Mahmud Street Graffiti, Theory, Culture and Society, 30, pp. 122–139, p. 126.

³² D. Gregory (2010) Seeing Red: Baghdad and the Event-ful City, Political Geography, 29, pp. 266–279; and H. Tawil-Souri (2012b) Digital Occupation: Gaza's High-tech Enclosure, Journal of Palestine Studies, 41(2), pp. 27–43.

³³ A. Kuntsman & R. Stein (2010) Another War Zone: Social Media in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict, Middle East Report Online, September. Available at http://www.merip.org/mero/nterventions/another-war-zone, accessed May 24, 2013; and R. Stein (2011) The Other Wall, London Review of Books, April 19. Available at http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/04/19/rebecca-l-stein/the-other-wall/, accessed May 24, 2013.

³⁴ Lt Col B. Pettit (2012) Social Media and U[nconventional] W[arfare], Special Warfare, 25(2), p. 0. Available at http://www.soc.mil/swcs/swmag/archive/SW2502/SW2502SocialMediaAndUW.html, accessed July 5, 2013. This is a vivid rebuttal of the ‘cyber-utopianism’ to which A. Kuntsman & R. Stein (2011) so forcefully and persuasively dissent: Digital Suspicion, Politics and the Middle East. Available at http://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/10161/6782/Digital_suspicion_Kuntsman_and_Stein.pdf?sequence = 1, accessed May 24, 2013.