Abstract
Keywords
The moments at which we … grasp ourselves are rare, and that is why we are rarely free. The greater part of the time we live outside ourselves, hardly perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost, a colourless shadow, which pure duration projects into homogenous space.
[To] be futural means to be temporal. Here temporal does not mean ‘in time’ but time itself. But past and present lie ‘all at once’ in temporality. By contrast, what lies ‘in’ the future is not yet ‘in’ the present, let alone ‘in’ the past. However, as a being that exists as its ultimate possibility, which is in other words ‘futural’, Dasein is its own past and present. Only in this way is this being time itself.
Who really makes history? How do we make sense of revolutions for modernity in postmodern times and through postmodern, ‘globalized’ media? What is the relationship between the ‘revolutions’ as a global event and thought? What kind of ethical revolutionary subjects are we dealing with – and where do their demands reside at the temporal level? What qualitative temporal multiplicity emerges out of doing revolution in the era of globalization? Now, I am fully aware that the questions I am asking are preposterously ambitious – but I still insist on asking them, not so that I can answer them here, but as part of a stammering strategy and a longer and open intellectual task. The telos of this intervention is to rehearse ways of unpacking the ‘within-time-ness’ of the ongoing Arab revolutions by highlighting their temporal-heterogeneity. In so doing, I want to make the point that for globalization theory to come out of its impasse, a diversion by way of philosophy is fundamental. Before I start rehearsing the questions raised above, I’d like, by way of a mock taxonomy, to articulate responses that we have had so far to the Arab revolutions. I can think of five key responses/positions: muteness as intellectual impotence – here I refer to a whole generation of Arab intellectuals who have by now, one hopes, realized that the game is over not only for the ancien regimes, but also for them – for they too are victims of a theory/practice paradigmatic shift. I have argued elsewhere (Sabry, 2010) that Arab philosophical and political reasoning have, since the occupation of Palestine, been polarized by two schools of thought that have achieved a status of immanence: (a) an historical materialist, pan-Arabist discourse that saw Marxism’s western historical materialism as the only way out of Arab failures; and (b) what I call the ‘cultural salafist’ discourse, which saw and still sees in a mental emigration to an illusive glorious past socio-cultural temporality the only means to establish an authentic and historical Arab identity. I think these two positions have become redundant – dead illusions – the kinds of ‘words men write and die for’, words that, as Rancière put it ‘never entirely keep their promise’ (in Bowman and Stamp, 2011: 248). All this said, muteness is not such a bad thing as it allows for a self-reflexive process which, one hopes, will help rethink/re-order intellectual/political thought in the Arab region so that it is not completely out of sync with the new and lived historical times. The second response involves a position that I call ‘stammering’. Those who adhere to this position are overwhelmed by the complexity of the chronometric unfolding of mediated histories/historicity as events. They are uncertain of anything and can predict nothing. They stammer in a new language, or at least try to, which they think will help them to assess the new situation. Here, ‘stammering’, to borrow a Deuleuzian term, is a way to find a new language and a new way to deal with a paradigmatic shift, which, I insist, is both theoretical and practical. The third response embodies a prophetic voice, maybe a premature one, which makes a causal link between the Arab revolutions and the end not only of the West, but of a whole regime de savoir. Hamid Dabashi has just published a book entitled The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism in which he states: ‘we are at the inaugural moment of the suspension of all regimes du savoir … our interlocutor is no longer “the West”, for the West is dead’ (Dabashi, 2012: 251). And then towards the end of the book Dabashi makes the following statement: that the Arab revolutions are changing our imaginative geography is already evident … these revolutions are not driven by the politics of replicating the West – rather, they are transcending it, and thus are as conceptually disturbing to the existing political order as to the regime du savoir around the globe. The ground is shifting under the feet of what self-proclaimed superpowers thought was their globe. (Dabashi, 2012: x)
Dabashi insists that the regime of knowing we have inherited from the colonial world and the postcolonial interlude must be dismantled with the same self-determination that has ensured that the political regimes are overthrown (Dabashi, 2012: 235). I am in agreement with the act of dismantling, but Dabashi does not provide an alternative regime de savoir or the new kind of alternative language necessary for us to begin the intellectual task of stammering and dismantling. The fourth response is led by what I like to call the 24-hour-news-expert/fortune-tellers or chronometric analysis – analysis à la McDonald’s, whose appearances, a mix of ‘tele-techno-scientific-reasoning’ and epiphenomenal foam, must in all fairness also be put down to the ruthless political economy structures of 24-hour news broadcasting. The fifth and final response is that of the activists, the subaltern: an old woman standing up to the police; marching young women and men, their chests inviting bullets, their dignity worth dying for. How noble are the young poets of the revolution, busking in markets, mobilizing the crowds. It is they who make history – they who speak.
On ‘history’ and the role of global communication
When we think of historical materialism and who it is that makes history, it is important not to fall into the trap of technological determinism or the kind of presentisms that come with it. We have to understand the recent Arab revolutions through wider conjunctures driven, in the main, by material production and social conditions. Even technological inventions are not accidental; they are, rather, driven by social and economic needs. The social and material conditions for the Arab revolutions have already been there, simmering, for decades and, without them, social media would have been redundant. Debate and discussions on history (and historical materialism) in Arab intellectual discourse have reached immanence as a concept and an idea – which unwittingly made ‘history’ alien to the materialist conception formulated by Marx and Engels: history is made by the masses, ordinary people, not by individuals towering above the crowd, and certainly not by technology alone. What the unfolding Arab revolutions have done is, among other things, expose the impotence of Arab intellectuals and their redundant intoxicated, teleological theorizations of becoming – the unfolding Arab revolutions have refocused the nature of history, bringing it down from the towers of intellectualism, res cogitans, to res extensa: the corporeal, which forms its real agents and movers – the vox populi. However, it makes sense to highlight or even privilege the role of ‘global’ media technology, social media included, and their role in the Arab revolutions, but only if and when we deal with the mediation of the unfolding ‘global event’ through the ‘imagistic’, or what Benjamin also calls the ‘dialectical image’ (1999: 462–3), and the kind of intentional converging aesthetics and poetics that go into such a process; those that turn happenings into memorable events. A more useful way of looking at the role of global media in the Arab revolutions is to explore not just the role of social media, but also the symbiotic relationship between traditional and new media. Al Jazeera Arabic was extremely influential in mediating the Arab revolutions because its journalists understood both the ‘affective’ and ‘effective’ potential of such a combination.
The Arab revolutions are marked, in their mediation and substance, by a globalized, trans-temporal worldliness: a complex overlap in socio-cultural and political temporality. What we are, I think, dealing with in the case of the Arab revolutions is complex interwoven layers of overlaps/intersections in cultural and political temporality, and in the kind of social contracts, demands and forms of citizenships that are being negotiated and fought for. To this we need to add an overlap between sacred time, cosmopolitan time, profane time, linear time, non-linear time, unfulfilled historical time, the past, the present and the future, added to which I need to mention real space, virtual space, augmented space, constructed space and so on. What we are witnessing/have witnessed is the unfolding struggle for an ethical and dignified modernity (a struggle for freedom, democracy, individualism, to which we need to add, if we are frank, the kind of choice, illusive or otherwise, that the culture of capitalism and postmodernity promises) that is both trans-temporal and trans-subjective: trans-subjective in the sense that ethical subjects do not occupy similar socio-cultural and political temporalities. In the case of Morocco, there is an interesting yet still very much a 17th-century, Hobbesian debate about the role of the monarchy as arbiter and judge. Do we keep the social contract between la volonté générale and, therefore, move outside the monarchy, or should monarchy play a role in it. If so, what is that role? In the Arab revolutions, one can easily find traces of Hobbes, Rousseau and Mill and their social contracts. But one can also find in the unfolding revolutions both ‘subjective/objective’ demands for a transition from the Cartesian to politics of the body – even the nude body. Where does this demand reside temporally? I am referring to the now famous/infamous Egyptian student and her boyfriend – who while the Egyptian revolution was still unfolding decided to post nude images of themselves on their blog: an example of trans-subjectivity and trans-ethicality of revolutionary demands (this is a struggle about different freedoms). To really get to grips with what is meant by an Arab postmodern revolution, we have to look at how such a revolution has been mediated as a global event. As an example we can look at how interplay between aesthetics/poetics in literal space and in augmented space creates a kind of ‘double-poetics’. An old man kisses a young Egyptian soldier and hands him a rose – one text. If you add the voice of Um Kalthum or Sheikh Imam to the image, you have created an ‘aesthetic image’ comprising a portmanteau situation combining contradictory signs: creating a confusion between an old nationalist, Nasserist, euphoric sentiment and a post-ideological event that has nothing to do with Nasserism or Pan-Arabism: an event where ethical subjects are clearly demanding a horizontal rather than a vertical form of political organization and governance. In terms of how the revolutions have been mediated, it is also useful to assess how the interface between literal space and augmented space was used to create the illusion of a linear narrative. The Egyptian revolution, especially the last 18 days, was depicted by Al Jazeera as one continuous and coherent event/drama. Focus on Tahrir Square as a revolutionary space gave coherence not only to the demands of the Egyptian people but also to the broadcasting of the event as a coherent televisual whole. The discursive techniques that have enabled the construction of such narrativity are postmodern par excellence. Their ‘postmodernness’ is not merely technically discursive, for Tahrir Square was also the embodiment of a different type of discursivity, a human one, a plural, cosmopolitan, Levinas-ian world. A world that championed alterity as a form of radical exteriority: where atheists, Muslims, Copts, feminists, the gay and the heterosexual spoke with one voice: the people want to bring down the system.
The aporia of time created by the Arab revolutions, as a global event, does not end here, especially if we frame it within its global context. Interplay and overlap in cultural/political/social temporalities is so complex that, given events such as ‘Occupy Wall Street’ in the USA and the occupation of St Paul’s Cathedral in London by ‘anti-capitalist’ activists, time and its movement is also non-linear (a postmodern trait) as it moves from a fight for modernity in the Arab world, mediated by postmodern techniques to become a fight in the postmodern capitalist world, perhaps for a post-postmodern world. What converges here are not only different media uses (mobile, video, internet, satellite, YouTube, Facebook, television), but also, and interestingly, different cultural and political times and different ethical subjectivities, where the modern and the postmodern converge – even collapse – into a kind of a tense-less time.
Attempting to give temporal-heterogeneity fixed terms such as pre-modern, modern and postmodern would be, to be candid, a simplification of what is a far more intricate and contested phenomenon, for temporalities – cultural/political temporalities – do things to each other, so complex, the outcome may well be beyond analysis. In the case of the revolutions and the ethical demands that are being made (different freedoms, religious, dignity, democracy, nakedness) time, historical time and Dasein as time/history reveals itself in its Pastness, Presentness and Futuralness. The past 30 years or so of autocratic, repressive rule in the Arab region are so ingrained in the consciousness of the ethical subject that Pastness exists in that which is feared. Pastness exists as the fear of a return to a repressive past. Equally, Pastness is also fought for, ferociously so, as a type of Futuralness by anti-revolutionary agents. Also, Futuralness, the running ahead towards the demands of the revolutions, may ironically mean a running towards Pastness – where solutions for the present are sought in a golden theocratic or ideological Pastness. These different modes of ‘temporalness’ reveal the ontological possibilities of the revolutions as facts and as facticity that is being-in the present. I need to remind the reader of my position – that of stammering – a position, which denies me and my discourse coherence and finality – in fact, to feign coherence here is to be doubly incoherent. What I can say with certainty, however, is that the relationship between ‘global event’ and thought is one of reciprocal violence: thought does violence to ‘event’ by imposing on it a kind of language/hermeneutics – mine included – a language that can only feign coherence and understanding – coherence here for me is an impossible intellectual task – and, equally, the ‘global event’ does violence to ‘thought’ when it makes it redundant, when it exposes its incoherence, the incoherence of its hermeneutics. Event, when analysed through the lenses of aporetic-temporal-heterogeneity exposes our explanatory limits – tears us all apart – demands a new kind of language of us.
To sum up, I suggest that the unfolding Arab revolutions reside in different, fluid and complex political/cultural temporalities. What we are dealing with is a trans-temporal and trans-subjective global event. What the Arab revolutions have succeeded in bringing down is not just corrupt regimes but also the redundant theorizations of Arab historicism/becoming. History is not a theory. It is not a Cartesian thing, but the product of an ethical event made by ethical subjects. What has also fallen, it is important to add, is the kind of Orientalist representation that only understood (or perhaps pretended to only understand) Middle Eastern politics and peoples through rigid and facile intellectual binarisms. What we are witnessing is an historical paradigmatic shift at the level of both theory and practice. Intellectuals have to start stammering in a new language – they need to theorize the new kinds of possibilities that have opened up and the kinds of freedoms they promise.