One of the results of the Tunisian/Egyptian revolution and the boiling in other societies in the Middle East and in North Africa is that the world is forced to look in a different way to these populations and to rethink the global order. Perhaps !... This seems to be possible now because thanks to this eruption, the image of this region and the way it was represented is turned upside down. What changed really is that these societies stepped over two disabilities: the fear from the bloody repression of the dictatorship and the inability to represent itself. For a longtime populations in the region were represented; they were never given the possibility to represent themselves.
The World is “surprised” by the events in Tunisia and in Egypt. Few weeks ago, Tunisia was an example of political and social stability. The stability of the Egyptian society was guaranteed by the regime Mubarak. Although the rulers of the world already knew how things were going wrong. The main issue is then not information. Everything was already well known. Wikileaks revealed enough about this.
The two counties were very often reduced to holiday destinations. As a tourist one could not see or feel this deep suffocation. Obviously, the sunny beaches of the tourist zones and the circuits of souvenir shops in the narrow streets of the medina of Tunis or the old Cairo were far away from the poor and neglected small villages and cities of the countryside and the neighborhoods surrounding the big cities. There were the rumbling volcano’s that were about to erupt.
This is a very important moment in History. It doesn’t concern the region only. The whole world system is based on the way one part of it looks at the other. There was a moment when some people were considered like beasts. The civilized world used them as slaves. Then came another moment when they were seen as human beings but still not civilized enough. They needed to be protected, colonized. After what was called “de-colonization”, they needed to be helped via a world process of development. All this was nothing else but different forms of perverse and vicious tutorship. There was always a connection between the image one makes of the other, and the way it despoils it. The system consists of reducing the other to the situation of subaltern in order to control it: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented”, dixit Karl Marx talking about the labor class in the 19th century.
What is happening now is that the snake is biting its tail. The western world provides internet and all kinds of technologies to its accomplices regimes. It provides them also with the necessary programs to control their populations and to spy at users. The same technology which was sophistically developed in order to control the subaltern is used by this one to put the system upside down. And this worked well mainly because it gave the populations the possibility to make its own image and not let it made by others anymore as was the case for a long time. The Tunisian/Egyptian revolution is made possible thanks to the democratization of the image.
First, there was the failure of a policy based on an absolute priority given to security. Look at the debate in the French parliament about the suggestion, made by the foreign affairs minister, of helping the Tunisian police, the 1.5 Millard of US Dollar supplied to the Egyptian army by the USA on a yearly basis, the new Dutch mission in Afghanistan (Kunduz)… It is all about direct security measures.
The most important victory of the Tunisians and the Egyptians is that they could make their own image, they could represent themselves. Images exchanged on Facebook and other virtual social networks are important not only because they inform, they are important because they show Tunisian and Egyptian youth like they want to be seen. They could do it outside of the traditional circuit of imaginary: televisions, official discourses, Medias…
Clips on Facebook and YouTube representing the revolution are like reports from Vietnam in the sixties going beyond the official propaganda of the media or the US army at that time. They have the same effect like the images of Abu Ghraib after the war in Iraq. The importance of these images is that they serve as reverse shot or low-angle shot to official versions. By doing so, they put the Humanity in front of its ethic evidence .
The same thing can be sad about the work of Tunisian and Egyptian artists during these long years of oppression. Braving censorship, economic pressure, lack of freedom,… they have to fight from inside of a draconian bureaucratic system for any possibility to make their work feasible. Most of the time they have to make concessions, they have to face censorship commissions. Even though, talented artists could find their way through the very tight margins left by the monster.
While political analysts and medias present numbers and statistics to find arguments to describe what is happening, while journalist and columnists look for the right formulas to depict what was unimaginable few weeks ago, we look back and we find that some people were aware of the process that lead to this. Tunisian and Egyptian filmmakers, theater directors, musicians etc… were listening to the youth in their countries for years already, and trying to give them the voice they were denied.
The young people we see in the streets and the central squares of Tunis, Cairo and Alexandria are those you could see in the recent year’s cinema. Films by Nouri Bouzid, Fadhel Jaibi, Ahamad Abdalla, Ahamad Rashwan… witnessed the grumbling of the volcano before it erupted. Their films are a barometer of the pressure and the breathless atmosphere growing in their societies. Mostly it is about independent productions focusing on the suffocating atmosphere, the youth’s frustrating daily life due to the power of the police. Young people were prevented not only from their political and civil rights but also even from any possibility of entertainment and artistic creativity.
These artists were able to see what the World didn’t dare to see. It didn’t look, or didn’t want to look, at the suffering of these young people standing between the hammer of poverty and unemployment on the one hand and the anvil of the oppression and dictatorship that the western world validates and even supports. It didn’t want to see that the terrorism it is fighting is the product of its policy in the region and not the other way round. Poverty, frustration and marginalization of young people push them into the spiral of fundamentalism. The World created a monster in order to justify the policy of security.
The pragmatic status quo on the name of whatever works/as far as it works could not stand for ever. There is a simple reason for that: all pressure must lead to an explosion. What happened in these two countries (until now) was a result of a time bomb produced by the global policy based on security. The most sophisticated technology of surveillance and the biggest investment in security measures were not and will never be able to hold a population under eternal control.
The reaction of the Tunisian and Egyptian populations is not only against their political leaders, but also against a global postcolonial mechanism. It was boiling since years, artists witnessed this, and social networks accelerated it.
What happened in short is that Tunisian and Egyptian youngsters by making themselves seen, they jumped from being nothing, when nobody looked at them really, to stand as an All, because they challenged the whole global system and not only their rulers, to finally accept to be Something, because things are still going on and we know that they will not really have what they want.
Let me Remember the three words of Abbé Seyès at the beginning of the French Revolution concerning the Tiers Etat (one of the three components of the French parliament at that time in addition to the aristocracy and the Church): All, Nothing, Something. In a democracy what is the People? All, what was it until now in Tunisia and Egypt? Nothing. What will it be from now on? Something.
Meanwhile, everybody knows that many agencies are already working for a future in the region and a new way of dealing with these societies. The call for quick elections and peaceful transition as soon as possible is not in favor of a real change. This is not for tomorrow. Most likely we will have a new status quo for another cycle of twenty/ thirty years.
For the time being let’s keep an Eye on artists whose work will perhaps be more than useful at a long term.
Notes :
Karl Marx,
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Nathalie ROELENS, « L'évidence des photos aériennes d'Auschwitz »,
Nouveaux Actes SémiotiquesAbbé Seyès In his famous pamphlet :
Qu’est-ce que le tiers état, january 1789
