Excellent! "Revolution is an ideology rather than an event. And like all ideologies it comes with its edifice of narratives, interpretive strategies indispensable to which are two premises: the totality of the people and the articulation of an incontrovertible antagonist. It is hard to think of a revolution that did not invoke both. Yet, if the antagonist is always incontrovertibly articulated and identified (be it Mubarak, Morsi or the Tzar), the “people” is a much looser notion. People is not a population, the latter is the statistical count. Instead, people is a semiotic function, a signifier that is always less than the sum of the parts. There is always a portion of the population that will not be counted into the totality of the people. It is a counting strategy, but not the actual numbers. The difference between the overwhelming sway of a population and the substantial portion, between people and faction is not analytical but discursive. Did the army’s intervention come as a response of popular demand or was it merely favourable to the majority of the population? The difference is that the former situates the people as the subject of statistics while the latter endows the people with the agency of a cohesive solid entity. Stress the latter and it becomes a revolution. The former articulation renders it a coup. Much of the current political conflict in Egypt nowadays involves a battle over the right to these two notions: people and revolution. What happened on the June 30 was a revolution in the second sense of the word; it was a revolution not in terms of its mobilization force but in terms of its appropriation of the idea of the revolution and the invocation of the idea of people as a unity." opendemocracy.net/ahmad-hosni/revolution-and-limits-of-populism?fb_action_ids=10151756958145412&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_ref=.UfJa_kAdRi0.like&fb_source=timeline_og&action_object_map=%7B%2210151756958145412%22%3A609931545705431%7D&action_type_map=%7B%2210151756958145412%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map=%7B%2210151756958145412%22%3A%22.UfJa_kAdRi0.like%22%7D
Posted on: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 19:16:24 +0000
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