1 00:00:05,230 --> 00:00:14,200 Good evening and welcome to the Middle East Centre at St. Anthony's College at the University of Oxford. 2 00:00:14,200 --> 00:00:17,830 My name is Michael Willis. I'm a fellow here at the Middle East centre. 3 00:00:17,830 --> 00:00:25,060 It is my great pleasure to introduce you to the 6th in our weekly series of Friday seminars, 4 00:00:25,060 --> 00:00:32,200 looking this term at the theme of dictatorship in the modern Middle East. 5 00:00:32,200 --> 00:00:34,810 And I'm very pleased to welcome this evening. 6 00:00:34,810 --> 00:00:41,140 One of my colleagues, one of the other fellows here at the Middle East centre, Professor Walter Armbrust. 7 00:00:41,140 --> 00:00:48,580 Walter is a social anthropologist working particularly on Egypt. 8 00:00:48,580 --> 00:00:56,230 And tonight he will be speaking on the theme of Egypt and he'll be building on his book that came out last year, 9 00:00:56,230 --> 00:01:01,690 which entitled Martyrs and Trickster's An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution. 10 00:01:01,690 --> 00:01:15,160 This was a book that was built on two years living in Cairo directly after the Egyptian revolution, carrying out research on the revolution. 11 00:01:15,160 --> 00:01:22,210 And we're very, very lucky. I'm pleased that Walter is joining us tonight to build off of that and build in some of 12 00:01:22,210 --> 00:01:27,810 his observations and of the revolution to look at what has happened in Egypt since then. 13 00:01:27,810 --> 00:01:33,880 And we're building on that and return to this theme with speaking under the title of Lip. 14 00:01:33,880 --> 00:01:39,280 I knew I'm going to have trouble with this apocalyptic trickster politics in the age of pandemic. 15 00:01:39,280 --> 00:01:48,080 Walter. OK. Thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure to be participating in our own seminar when the fellows of the 16 00:01:48,080 --> 00:01:53,130 Middle East centre began discussing plans for our Friday seminar this term. 17 00:01:53,130 --> 00:02:00,590 It was back when we were still in lockdown. And my suggestion was that our theme should be crisis covered had plunged us into one. 18 00:02:00,590 --> 00:02:08,150 And it seemed pretty obvious that we would still be in one in the fall. So crisis is our main theme seemed topical. 19 00:02:08,150 --> 00:02:15,080 Unfortunately, I was misunderstood as having suggested that we do an entire term's worth of lectures on the Cauvin crisis. 20 00:02:15,080 --> 00:02:18,590 That would indeed have been tedious and it wasn't what I had in mind. 21 00:02:18,590 --> 00:02:24,720 Though I did think that it would have been a shame to work steadily through a pandemic and say nothing about it. 22 00:02:24,720 --> 00:02:30,530 But while I think there certainly are many implications to this particular pandemic driven crisis, 23 00:02:30,530 --> 00:02:34,190 the real point was that having just published the book on a revolution, 24 00:02:34,190 --> 00:02:42,050 it's called Martyrs and Trickster's and Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution. I was thinking about links between crisis and politics. 25 00:02:42,050 --> 00:02:47,570 It's hopefully easy for listeners to see the point. A revolution is a form of political crisis, 26 00:02:47,570 --> 00:02:57,500 and the coup that ended the revolution instituted a reconstituted authoritarianism or arguably a new form of authoritarianism. 27 00:02:57,500 --> 00:03:02,120 There's quite a bit more that one could say about crisis and authoritarianism. 28 00:03:02,120 --> 00:03:06,980 Some listeners may have read my abstract and noticed the quote from Milton Friedman. 29 00:03:06,980 --> 00:03:11,900 Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. 30 00:03:11,900 --> 00:03:18,050 The rest of Friedman's passage from a book titled Capitalism and Freedom extols the fluidity created 31 00:03:18,050 --> 00:03:24,110 by crisis as an opportunity for the politically impossible to become politically inevitable. 32 00:03:24,110 --> 00:03:31,850 For him, that meant the prioritisation of economic freedom above any other formulation of freedom in the actual world, 33 00:03:31,850 --> 00:03:40,190 as opposed to Friedman's capitalist utopia. The elevation of economic freedom into a sacred principle made it possible for states to suppress 34 00:03:40,190 --> 00:03:47,720 politics and the interests of allowing the supposedly superior logic of the market to work unimpeded. 35 00:03:47,720 --> 00:03:56,000 There are other ways to formulate the relation of crisis to politics, such as the Italian philosopher Georgia again, Ben's state of Exception, 36 00:03:56,000 --> 00:04:01,940 which focuses on the institution of a legal civil war that empowers states to make an unaccountable, 37 00:04:01,940 --> 00:04:08,420 to make unaccountable decisions on which citizens should live and which ones are expendable. 38 00:04:08,420 --> 00:04:12,590 Again, Ben is by no means the only scholar who pursues such ideas. 39 00:04:12,590 --> 00:04:19,770 The political theorist Akua Member, for example, makes similar observations in work titled Niekro Politics. 40 00:04:19,770 --> 00:04:27,770 Bombay finds the state of exception logic to be salient not just in the states we commonly recognise as dictatorships, 41 00:04:27,770 --> 00:04:32,180 but also in states that are formerly liberal democracies such as the United States, 42 00:04:32,180 --> 00:04:37,670 using the 9/11 attack to suspend the rule of law for certain categories of people, 43 00:04:37,670 --> 00:04:42,950 categories that are inevitably as elastic as the state wants them to be. 44 00:04:42,950 --> 00:04:48,530 Listeners who are familiar with Egypt will probably be thinking about the emergency law of 1958, 45 00:04:48,530 --> 00:04:56,060 which set the legal parameters for a state of emergency which was declared during the June war with Israel in 1967. 46 00:04:56,060 --> 00:05:05,300 Then it was lifted briefly in 1980, reimposed by Mubarak in 1981 and remained in force until the January 25th revolution in 2011, 47 00:05:05,300 --> 00:05:15,740 only to be reimposed by the fact that Sisi in 2013. States of emergency have underpinned authoritarian rule also in Algeria for 19 48 00:05:15,740 --> 00:05:23,510 years prior to 2011 and in Syria since the Baath Party came to power in 1963. 49 00:05:23,510 --> 00:05:28,480 I note that in this seminar, our keynote lecture, as it were, is Aswang. 50 00:05:28,480 --> 00:05:35,120 His book, The Dictatorship Syndrome. Aswani writes about the institutionalisation of dictatorship, 51 00:05:35,120 --> 00:05:41,720 how citizens are habituated to it, and how they ultimately collude with it and consent to it. 52 00:05:41,720 --> 00:05:46,700 For me, the dictatorship syndrome has a rather exceptional tone. 53 00:05:46,700 --> 00:05:52,310 It's full of lines such as the discussion of dictatorship in the United States and Western Europe has 54 00:05:52,310 --> 00:05:59,630 acquired an exotic dimension as Western Europe has rarely known dictatorship since the Second World War. 55 00:05:59,630 --> 00:06:07,940 Or in another line, he says, citizens of Western democracies whose basic needs are satisfied and who enjoy the protection of the law, 56 00:06:07,940 --> 00:06:15,640 look on with shock and confusion at the tens of thousands of illegal mind migrants who leave their homelands. 57 00:06:15,640 --> 00:06:21,430 In other words, for Suadi, dictatorship is something that plagues the Middle East and other parts of the world. 58 00:06:21,430 --> 00:06:26,020 Not an issue or at least no longer an issue for the West. 59 00:06:26,020 --> 00:06:32,620 I understand that Sweida has written this book as a kind of auto critique, a criticism of his own society. 60 00:06:32,620 --> 00:06:37,930 He prominently quotes from Delphia that comes out at the Y The Return of Consciousness, 61 00:06:37,930 --> 00:06:45,360 a searing auto critique of Egyptian society during the Nasser era, published in the 1970s after announcing his death. 62 00:06:45,360 --> 00:06:49,920 Auto critique is a good thing. And that's why it deserves credit for it. 63 00:06:49,920 --> 00:06:54,700 It does, however, have a different resonance when it's translated and presented in English. 64 00:06:54,700 --> 00:07:00,630 Contrasting Egypt and the Arab world with the West in favour of the latter is misleading at best. 65 00:07:00,630 --> 00:07:09,190 If it implies that European and American liberal democracies have to be a kind of gold standard to which the Arab world should aspire. 66 00:07:09,190 --> 00:07:17,230 So in the same spirit of auto critique, I want to suggest to modifications to Suan his vision of a dictatorship syndrome. 67 00:07:17,230 --> 00:07:24,730 The first is that dictatorship is one possible expression of a larger political formation, namely authoritarianism. 68 00:07:24,730 --> 00:07:32,860 Authoritarian regimes often have parliaments and elections that are essentially for show or are nullified by emergency laws. 69 00:07:32,860 --> 00:07:37,240 Egypt either repressive dictatorship is one such country. 70 00:07:37,240 --> 00:07:44,680 Political scientists have various terms for a range of phenomena connected to authoritarian strategies for regime survival, 71 00:07:44,680 --> 00:07:50,410 upgraded authoritarianism, for example, or durable authoritarianism. 72 00:07:50,410 --> 00:07:55,240 These terms tend to be used to explain how regimes in the Arab world have adapted to 73 00:07:55,240 --> 00:08:01,540 pressures of globalisation or to European and American pressures to democratise. 74 00:08:01,540 --> 00:08:08,020 But at the same time, not only have Europe and the United States frequently given material support and political cover 75 00:08:08,020 --> 00:08:14,560 for authoritarian regimes contrary to their own publicly professed democratisation agendas. 76 00:08:14,560 --> 00:08:22,360 But it would also be astonishingly shortsighted to ignore the growing strength of an authoritarian impulse everywhere in the world, 77 00:08:22,360 --> 00:08:29,590 very much including Europe and the United States. It would be folly to deny the authoritarian impulse in the Republican Party, 78 00:08:29,590 --> 00:08:39,580 in the United States or in the dominant far right politics of Poland or Hungary, or indeed the Brexit Eric Conservative Party in this country. 79 00:08:39,580 --> 00:08:46,990 The authoritarian impulse in these countries has not necessarily resulted in durable or irreversible authoritarianism. 80 00:08:46,990 --> 00:08:55,540 In all cases, but anyone who can't see the potential for it in all of these cases simply hasn't been paying attention. 81 00:08:55,540 --> 00:09:03,250 So in the interest of putting all of these emergent, if not necessarily consolidated, authoritarian isms on the same footing, 82 00:09:03,250 --> 00:09:09,910 the second modification I want to make to Alice is vision is to put crisis at the centre of the discussion 83 00:09:09,910 --> 00:09:17,050 and not the institutionalisation of a dictatorship habitus as is done in the dictatorships syndrome. 84 00:09:17,050 --> 00:09:26,560 There are two kinds of crisis. One is event driven at a variety of scales revolutions and civil wars, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, 85 00:09:26,560 --> 00:09:33,940 droughts, pandemics, economic collapse ranging from the level of the nation state to the entire globe. 86 00:09:33,940 --> 00:09:40,960 All of them can make sedimented social, political and economic arrangements suddenly become fluid. 87 00:09:40,960 --> 00:09:48,550 The other kind of crisis is structured, not necessarily structured deliberately, but nonetheless constant and durable. 88 00:09:48,550 --> 00:09:58,040 To talk about the structuring of crises may sound paradoxical, since the very word crisis tends to conjure a sense of suddenness and unexpectedness. 89 00:09:58,040 --> 00:10:06,130 I'll explain what I mean by this, surely. My approach to crisis stems from having written a book about the January 25th revolution in Egypt, 90 00:10:06,130 --> 00:10:09,730 Marder's and Trickster's, which I've already mentioned, and so is Michael. 91 00:10:09,730 --> 00:10:17,410 A revolution is a political crisis with social and economic implications, and it's also the starting point of a transition. 92 00:10:17,410 --> 00:10:26,440 The problem is that it usually turns out to be a transition to something other than what the people who initiated the revolutionary events envisioned. 93 00:10:26,440 --> 00:10:31,720 The study of transitions is a branch of political science, sometimes called Transit Ptolemy. 94 00:10:31,720 --> 00:10:36,400 It's concerned mainly with transitions from authoritarianism to democracy, 95 00:10:36,400 --> 00:10:42,610 sociology and political and policy studies write about transitions and a slightly more expansive framework, 96 00:10:42,610 --> 00:10:50,680 but they focus still largely on institutions. In my book, I draw inspiration from anthropological understandings and transitions, 97 00:10:50,680 --> 00:10:59,740 which are rather broader and more scalable than the narrowly political or institutional contexts of interest to our social science colleagues. 98 00:10:59,740 --> 00:11:02,200 One form of anthropological trans atolls gee, 99 00:11:02,200 --> 00:11:09,040 if one wanted to call it that derives from the study of ritual or the ritual process, as it's sometimes called. 100 00:11:09,040 --> 00:11:16,660 Anthropologists observe that all transitions followed a common form departure from a state of non activity into a state of 101 00:11:16,660 --> 00:11:25,720 indeterminacy within which those undergoing the transition can engage in behaviour considered aberrant and normal social circumstances. 102 00:11:25,720 --> 00:11:32,710 And finally, reintegration of the initiations. Who are those going through the transformation into social norm activity? 103 00:11:32,710 --> 00:11:41,130 But in a new social status, the most convenient way for most of us to grasp the ritual process is to think about a marriage ritual. 104 00:11:41,130 --> 00:11:44,950 The initiations the bride and the groom depart from the social condition of. 105 00:11:44,950 --> 00:11:50,560 Single people are brought together in a way that allows them to perform extraordinary acts, 106 00:11:50,560 --> 00:11:56,830 not normally sanctioned as single individuals, such as kissing in public in the euro, American tradition. 107 00:11:56,830 --> 00:12:01,960 And then they reintegrate into society as married individuals. 108 00:12:01,960 --> 00:12:08,920 The interesting part of the process is the middle phase after the initial hands in the ritual have left their state of normatively, 109 00:12:08,920 --> 00:12:15,790 but before they've reintegrated in their transformed status. Anthropologists call this the liminal phase. 110 00:12:15,790 --> 00:12:23,980 The importance of liminality outside of narrowly conceived rites of passage has been recognised at a number of observations have been made about it. 111 00:12:23,980 --> 00:12:29,350 One is that when a group of people first enter into Liminality, think of, for example, 112 00:12:29,350 --> 00:12:34,810 a university class going through matriculation or graduation, they bond together. 113 00:12:34,810 --> 00:12:46,810 Social differences dissolve. Class, gender or ethnic differences, for example, may cease to have the same meanings as they do in normative society. 114 00:12:46,810 --> 00:12:53,230 A term for this sense of bonding is community. Essentially just a slightly fancy way of saying community. 115 00:12:53,230 --> 00:12:57,910 But it's a special kind of community in which everyone becomes equal outside of 116 00:12:57,910 --> 00:13:03,040 normal social time and structure as they go through a passage that may be difficult, 117 00:13:03,040 --> 00:13:12,070 dramatic, or in some cases even a trial of endurance. Another observation about Liminality is that it's potentially dangerous. 118 00:13:12,070 --> 00:13:18,970 People released from their normal social obligations might do all sorts of alarming acts to put it in terms of marriage. 119 00:13:18,970 --> 00:13:23,770 If there was no carefully controlled transition from singlehood to married status, 120 00:13:23,770 --> 00:13:28,670 youth in the grip of uncontrollable hormones might just fornicate wildly. 121 00:13:28,670 --> 00:13:37,050 And all sorts of disasters would follow unplanned pregnancies or warfare between the Montagues and the Capulets or between Arab clans. 122 00:13:37,050 --> 00:13:45,730 If you want to think of it in those terms. That's why ritual exists to control the unpredictable contingencies of liminality. 123 00:13:45,730 --> 00:13:50,110 As I mentioned a moment ago, the ritual process is highly scalable. 124 00:13:50,110 --> 00:13:55,540 Think of the ritual process in terms of a transition, for example, from childhood to adulthood. 125 00:13:55,540 --> 00:14:02,770 We have an intermediate social category called adolescence. The state of being in between childhood and adulthood. 126 00:14:02,770 --> 00:14:07,180 The nature of adolescence varies tremendously from one society to another. 127 00:14:07,180 --> 00:14:11,770 For us, it's quite prolonged. Everyone knows that teenagers are crazy. 128 00:14:11,770 --> 00:14:20,500 Since we tend not to recognise them as adults until sometime in their late teens or early 20s, we have institutions to control their unpredictability. 129 00:14:20,500 --> 00:14:29,680 Organised sports. The Boy Scouts carefully chaperoned high school balls, debutantes and other coming of age rituals. 130 00:14:29,680 --> 00:14:33,580 So what does the ritual process have to do with politics? 131 00:14:33,580 --> 00:14:41,090 Well, if you had been in Tahrir Square in late January 2011, you wouldn't be asking that question. 132 00:14:41,090 --> 00:14:47,990 The momentum of the moment when the Mubarak era had been left behind and everyone was energised and thought they loved each other, 133 00:14:47,990 --> 00:14:55,670 despite their normal resentments of class, gender or sectarian affiliation, was community tasks on a massive scale. 134 00:14:55,670 --> 00:15:02,660 Further amplified by mass mediation. This is where the story becomes more complex and interesting. 135 00:15:02,660 --> 00:15:07,250 Understanding ritual through the ritual process is often seen within anthropology as a 136 00:15:07,250 --> 00:15:12,750 conservative approach to ritual because it tends to explain how things stay the same. 137 00:15:12,750 --> 00:15:21,470 The liminal phase of the process is full of contingency and possibility for change, but change is always rerouted back into normatively. 138 00:15:21,470 --> 00:15:27,260 But understanding a revolution through the ritual process compels a wider set of observations. 139 00:15:27,260 --> 00:15:36,410 Most importantly, ritual exists precisely for the purpose of controlling the dangers of liminality and transitions we know will happen. 140 00:15:36,410 --> 00:15:40,760 But are all transitions predictable? The answer is no. 141 00:15:40,760 --> 00:15:42,740 All sorts of events, large and small, 142 00:15:42,740 --> 00:15:49,340 compel transitions in which there is no conventionalised means for controlling what happens in the liminal phase. 143 00:15:49,340 --> 00:15:55,480 The period of fluidity between the collapse of one order and the reconstitution of a new order. 144 00:15:55,480 --> 00:16:03,260 In a revolution, there is no ritualised process to usher society back into the previous state of normatively. 145 00:16:03,260 --> 00:16:05,660 The Egyptian experience is instructive. 146 00:16:05,660 --> 00:16:12,860 After the initial burst of communities following the fall of the Mubarak regime, no power could fully govern the country. 147 00:16:12,860 --> 00:16:18,500 The liminal phase became protracted and as far as anyone could judge, open ended. 148 00:16:18,500 --> 00:16:24,080 As this happened, the effervescence community last of the first moments of the revolution subsided. 149 00:16:24,080 --> 00:16:31,700 Though all of the subsequent political mobilisations attempted to recreate it inevitably with diminishing success. 150 00:16:31,700 --> 00:16:38,120 In such circumstances, Liminality, intrinsically pregnant with possibilities, becomes limbo, 151 00:16:38,120 --> 00:16:44,760 an uncomfortable sensation of disorientation in which common points of political reference such as the state, 152 00:16:44,760 --> 00:16:51,050 the police or the government no longer have the apparent solidity of the previous era. 153 00:16:51,050 --> 00:16:57,110 Limbo family resembles an army Durkheim. In concept, that means norm wiseness. 154 00:16:57,110 --> 00:17:02,540 But in that case, the point was to explain such phenomena as suicide or social deviance. 155 00:17:02,540 --> 00:17:08,990 In the case of a transitional limbo, more common possibility is for people to take sides. 156 00:17:08,990 --> 00:17:15,860 Old certainties may have been smashed, but a yearning for order is a fairly consistent impulse in all societies. 157 00:17:15,860 --> 00:17:24,290 And so the joyous bonding of community has turned into a much more defensive gravitation toward allies and hopefully safety. 158 00:17:24,290 --> 00:17:31,700 And for those who initiated rebellions against the state, it was a chance to formulate a new kind of state and society. 159 00:17:31,700 --> 00:17:41,270 But in Egypt and in other Arab societies that experienced revolutionary upheaval starting in late 2010, the state of political limbo was protracted. 160 00:17:41,270 --> 00:17:48,050 The transitional process was certainly grinding along in forms that were intelligible to political scientists elections, 161 00:17:48,050 --> 00:17:54,770 formation of political parties, constitution draughting pressure to reform the police and the security forces. 162 00:17:54,770 --> 00:18:03,650 Judicial reform. In fact, pressure to reform all institutions from the Ministry of Culture to the Department of Traffic Violations. 163 00:18:03,650 --> 00:18:09,440 But in a state of revolutionary limbo, the more crucial transitions had to do with legitimacy, 164 00:18:09,440 --> 00:18:16,010 which was very hard to establish when the previous anchors at political normalcy had been compromised. 165 00:18:16,010 --> 00:18:25,760 This proved to be the perfect environment in which political Trickster's could flourish like the ritual process, Trickster's are a universal form. 166 00:18:25,760 --> 00:18:31,280 To be clear, the universality of the forum does not dictate what is expressed through it. 167 00:18:31,280 --> 00:18:37,010 Think of it this way. All languages have verbs and nouns as well as consonants and vowels. 168 00:18:37,010 --> 00:18:41,420 Those are universal, but obviously what's expressed through them is not. 169 00:18:41,420 --> 00:18:47,840 So to say that the ritual process and the figure of the trickster are universal is not to say that having 170 00:18:47,840 --> 00:18:54,050 recognised this fact indicates that we necessarily understand what is being expressed through them. 171 00:18:54,050 --> 00:19:01,070 But it does mean that we have some basic principles through which to begin recognising what is being expressed. 172 00:19:01,070 --> 00:19:08,530 A trickster is a figure at home in the margins. Or he could say in Liminality Trickster's existant folklore mythology. 173 00:19:08,530 --> 00:19:13,240 Modern literature in popular culture. Coyote and Native American culture. 174 00:19:13,240 --> 00:19:17,530 Loki in Scandinavian mythology. Talk. And Shakespeare. 175 00:19:17,530 --> 00:19:22,900 Tom Sawyer. Bart Simpson. They're all Trickster's as creatures of Liminality. 176 00:19:22,900 --> 00:19:32,110 They have no commitment to the existential certainties of normative culture, but they're skilled imitators who can make it up as they go. 177 00:19:32,110 --> 00:19:34,780 An anthropological and literary writing on Trickster's, 178 00:19:34,780 --> 00:19:41,410 they're seen as having tremendous capacity for both creativity and destruction, which may sound paradoxical, 179 00:19:41,410 --> 00:19:50,920 but of course, one way to conceptualise creativity is precisely as the person or act that transcends boundaries and therefore breaks the mould. 180 00:19:50,920 --> 00:19:55,960 Prometheus was a trickster. He ended up strapped to a mountain with an eagle eating his liver. 181 00:19:55,960 --> 00:19:59,830 But the fire that he gave to human beings was a pretty good tool. 182 00:19:59,830 --> 00:20:01,900 We'd be fools to complain. 183 00:20:01,900 --> 00:20:10,790 Trickster's are sometimes too clever by half and end up disastrously like Prometheus, and sometimes they're the ones who trick others. 184 00:20:10,790 --> 00:20:16,330 Tricksters and politics is a new idea about a phenomenon that has occurred throughout history. 185 00:20:16,330 --> 00:20:23,920 Yet you might say its time has come now more than ever, trickster politicians are continually in our midst. 186 00:20:23,920 --> 00:20:30,820 Some familiar examples are Nigel Farraj, Boris Johnson and very obviously Donald Trump. 187 00:20:30,820 --> 00:20:37,960 In a world dominated by a liberal internationalist order and underpinned by slavish adherence to free market ideology, 188 00:20:37,960 --> 00:20:43,960 political Trickster's in our age seem to be almost entirely far right populists. 189 00:20:43,960 --> 00:20:47,200 But if trickster politics is always a possibility, 190 00:20:47,200 --> 00:20:55,360 then the question arises as to why tricksters are sometimes listened to and become important and not at other times. 191 00:20:55,360 --> 00:20:59,650 Extreme crisis is an obvious factor. Consider Hitler, for example. 192 00:20:59,650 --> 00:21:08,680 His beer hall putsch in 1923 was derided as the work of a lunatic more suited to the comic opera than to serious politics. 193 00:21:08,680 --> 00:21:16,570 His demagogic skill and the violence of his ideas were recognised by some, but the initial response to him was often laughter. 194 00:21:16,570 --> 00:21:23,840 Without the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic and resentment at the harsh terms imposed on Germany after the First World War. 195 00:21:23,840 --> 00:21:27,400 He might well have remained a joke in Egypt. 196 00:21:27,400 --> 00:21:29,050 By the end of 2011, 197 00:21:29,050 --> 00:21:39,070 one of the harbingers of the coup that brought an Fatime Sisi to power was an obscure minor politician and television journalist named Delphia Okasha, 198 00:21:39,070 --> 00:21:46,900 whose television talk show provided a forum for spewing bizarre conspiracy theories and praise for the military and security forces, 199 00:21:46,900 --> 00:21:51,550 including the still disgraced police and caches world. 200 00:21:51,550 --> 00:22:00,160 Egypt was under threat by a coalition of Freemason's, Hezbollah, Hamas, Israel, the European Union and NATO. 201 00:22:00,160 --> 00:22:04,760 Why? Why do you need to ask, you know, caches lunatic TV show. 202 00:22:04,760 --> 00:22:11,230 It was self-evident that any foreign power would want to destroy Egypt just because it was Egypt or caches. 203 00:22:11,230 --> 00:22:16,510 Clownish monologues were mercilessly mocked in November and December 2011. 204 00:22:16,510 --> 00:22:23,590 But by the middle of 2012, he had become a symbolic lodestone for a growing backlash against the revolution, 205 00:22:23,590 --> 00:22:28,930 not just from shadowy dead enders from the Mubarak era who were said to be financing a wide 206 00:22:28,930 --> 00:22:35,890 range of provocateurs but from a broad swath of the middle and working class of Egyptians. 207 00:22:35,890 --> 00:22:45,000 Okasha was widely and credibly said to be working as an agent of Egypt's military intelligence, which was run at the time by Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. 208 00:22:45,000 --> 00:22:53,590 And our cash is hyper nationalistic. Conspiracy mongering was consistent with Sisi and the elite military cadres that he represented. 209 00:22:53,590 --> 00:23:01,180 Sisi comes across much more queerly in Arabic than he does in the relatively bland foreign journalistic coverage of his regime. 210 00:23:01,180 --> 00:23:06,970 One doesn't need to scratch very far below the surface of Sisi to find his inner okasha. 211 00:23:06,970 --> 00:23:12,100 One recalls that Sisi was Donald Trump's favourite dictator. Perhaps one bullshitter, 212 00:23:12,100 --> 00:23:21,490 which is to say a trickster politician coming from outside the governing system and making it all up as he goes recognisers another. 213 00:23:21,490 --> 00:23:26,740 It may seem broadly plausible that a true crisis, a collapsed economy, for example, 214 00:23:26,740 --> 00:23:31,060 or a revolution can function as the midwife to forms of politics that might 215 00:23:31,060 --> 00:23:36,130 have been considered deviant in whatever past for normal prior to the crisis, 216 00:23:36,130 --> 00:23:37,420 or to put it differently, 217 00:23:37,420 --> 00:23:47,230 that a smashed political system creates a fluid situation that permits a point of entry for outsiders to enter and influence a reconstituted system. 218 00:23:47,230 --> 00:23:53,740 But this doesn't explain why our current moment in history is so replete with ascendant right wing politicians, 219 00:23:53,740 --> 00:23:59,470 some of whom are intelligible as Trickster's or possibly many of the Populists or Trickster's. 220 00:23:59,470 --> 00:24:06,970 If what we mean by populists is someone who reaches over or outside of a functioning political system to appeal 221 00:24:06,970 --> 00:24:14,230 directly to the masses in ways that would have previously been dismissed as impossible or illegitimate. 222 00:24:14,230 --> 00:24:17,680 After every lecture that I have given on trickster politics, 223 00:24:17,680 --> 00:24:26,920 people have come up to me afterwards and said things like this is a great way to think about Putin or now I understand Erdogan better. 224 00:24:26,920 --> 00:24:28,900 That might be pushing the point too far. 225 00:24:28,900 --> 00:24:37,150 One might instead focus on the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and ask, why do they have so much traction these days? 226 00:24:37,150 --> 00:24:42,850 Conspiracy theories are trickster tales that don't necessarily have an identifiable author. 227 00:24:42,850 --> 00:24:46,720 The point is that suddenly they're being taken seriously. 228 00:24:46,720 --> 00:24:54,070 More than a dozen Republican House and Senate candidates in the 2020 election espoused belief in something called KUIN on 229 00:24:54,070 --> 00:25:01,150 a collection of conspiracy theories claiming that the world is run by a global cabal of Satan worshipping paedophiles. 230 00:25:01,150 --> 00:25:09,520 Two of them won office. A recent poll indicated that 56 percent of the Republican Party in the United States believes in Q and on. 231 00:25:09,520 --> 00:25:15,940 But it would be a mistake to think that there's something new about these trickster tales that we call conspiracy theories. 232 00:25:15,940 --> 00:25:23,620 What is unusual is that they're being taken seriously and not in the context of an existential crisis like a revolution. 233 00:25:23,620 --> 00:25:27,690 Read Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics. 234 00:25:27,690 --> 00:25:34,270 It contextualises Barry Goldwater's nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964, 235 00:25:34,270 --> 00:25:45,040 first by tying him to the lunatic ravings of Joseph McCarthy, the tuffet okasha of American politics in the 1950s, and also to the John Birch Society. 236 00:25:45,040 --> 00:25:54,430 But then by tracing that line of paranoia all the way back to the anti Masonic and anti Jesuit movement in colonial America of the late 18th century, 237 00:25:54,430 --> 00:25:58,900 it was always there. But most of the time it didn't matter that much. 238 00:25:58,900 --> 00:26:03,310 Now it attracts attention and adherents in American presidential elections. 239 00:26:03,310 --> 00:26:13,780 But beyond the US, it's strongly tied to an authoritarian impulse that is global India, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Hungary, Italy, Poland, 240 00:26:13,780 --> 00:26:16,450 the United Kingdom and the United States, 241 00:26:16,450 --> 00:26:25,180 all nominally liberal electoral democracies that are either flirting with or plunging deeply into authoritarianism. 242 00:26:25,180 --> 00:26:31,900 Why? Why now? What I'm suggesting and I know this is shameless speculation, 243 00:26:31,900 --> 00:26:37,300 but I promised my colleagues that I would do this or that my lecture wouldn't be exclusively about Egypt. 244 00:26:37,300 --> 00:26:42,100 Why is it that much of the world lives in a state of structured liminality? 245 00:26:42,100 --> 00:26:52,240 Or more accurately, a form of un closeable liminality or limbo, an uncomfortable feeling of being stuck in a transition that never gets completed? 246 00:26:52,240 --> 00:26:59,560 One might also describe this as a structural crisis. Capitalism is the primary agent of the structured crisis. 247 00:26:59,560 --> 00:27:03,520 It always was predicated on economic expansion to function. 248 00:27:03,520 --> 00:27:11,890 It requires new resources, higher productivity, inevitably shifting requirements for labour and often pressure to reduce labour costs. 249 00:27:11,890 --> 00:27:18,370 New markets for surplus production. The effect of capitalism was always anti stability. 250 00:27:18,370 --> 00:27:23,440 As Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, all that is solid melts into air. 251 00:27:23,440 --> 00:27:30,220 In a capitalist order, this lack of solidity and the economic system was mitigated in two ways. 252 00:27:30,220 --> 00:27:35,260 First, through Germany, which is often understood in everyday language, is simply domination. 253 00:27:35,260 --> 00:27:43,390 But Marxists most most famously gramme. She linked it to value systems which produced domination by consent of the dominated. 254 00:27:43,390 --> 00:27:48,670 It works by linking together two things which are incommensurate with each other. 255 00:27:48,670 --> 00:27:56,170 In this case, the inherent instability of an expansionist economic system linked to the most conservative social values, 256 00:27:56,170 --> 00:27:59,830 patrimonial ism, patriotism, tradition and religion. 257 00:27:59,830 --> 00:28:09,160 For example, properly functioning Germany is actually characterised by relative absence of overt violence applied by the state. 258 00:28:09,160 --> 00:28:16,390 One might argue that the hegemonic ideologies that underpin capitalism have been steadily breaking down, always in localised ways. 259 00:28:16,390 --> 00:28:24,250 But the global trend toward greater use of violence by states is unmistakeable as hegemonic illusions break down populations 260 00:28:24,250 --> 00:28:32,890 that had seen themselves as protected from the instabilities that endless capitalist expansion experience increasing precarity. 261 00:28:32,890 --> 00:28:38,830 This has nothing to do with actual poverty, which varies tremendously from one country to another. 262 00:28:38,830 --> 00:28:46,060 Nobody can argue that rates of actual poverty in the US are comparable to poverty in Egypt or the Sudan or Morocco. 263 00:28:46,060 --> 00:28:52,630 The middle classes of all of these places may empirically be better off in some ways now than they were a generation ago. 264 00:28:52,630 --> 00:29:03,370 Yet all of them share the sense of precarity that comes with the implicit dealmaking of enduring values with an inherently unstable economic system. 265 00:29:03,370 --> 00:29:07,960 A second way of mitigating capitalism's inherent instabilities was through protection 266 00:29:07,960 --> 00:29:13,450 afforded by the state protections nominally given to all citizens of the nation state. 267 00:29:13,450 --> 00:29:18,490 But in practise, often given differentially to certain citizens and not to others. 268 00:29:18,490 --> 00:29:23,770 But since the 1970s, the protective umbrella of most states has steadily shrunk. 269 00:29:23,770 --> 00:29:32,000 Structural explanations of revolutions in. The Arab world almost always focus on neo liberalism, liberal in the sense of the liberalised, 270 00:29:32,000 --> 00:29:36,680 privatised economy, and Neo in the sense that prior to the 1970s, 271 00:29:36,680 --> 00:29:42,860 states were assumed to have a rightful role in organising economies for the benefit of all citizens 272 00:29:42,860 --> 00:29:48,770 rather than for the benefit of those who control the greatest proportion of capital and property. 273 00:29:48,770 --> 00:29:55,790 The withdrawal of protection to an increasing proportion of citizens within a given nation state feeds into the erosion of the 274 00:29:55,790 --> 00:30:04,490 hegemony that long made capitalism seem like a thing of solidity rather than a continual melting of material certainties into the air. 275 00:30:04,490 --> 00:30:11,810 Hence, we may feel plunged into revolutionary limbo even when no revolution has taken place. 276 00:30:11,810 --> 00:30:18,830 I won't elaborate at greater length. My goal is more to provoke questions than to give answers in such a brief presentation. 277 00:30:18,830 --> 00:30:24,080 But I do want to return to the Arab world to crisis as a driver of authoritarianism that 278 00:30:24,080 --> 00:30:29,210 extends far beyond the region and which helps to do exceptional ize the dictatorship 279 00:30:29,210 --> 00:30:34,610 syndrome that allow a swinish proposes and to the pandemic that I see as a kind of 280 00:30:34,610 --> 00:30:40,550 half crisis which deepens the limbo in which we've all been living for some time. 281 00:30:40,550 --> 00:30:47,660 Our initial passage into lockdown last March was, for me, a transition accompanied at first by a sense of community tasks. 282 00:30:47,660 --> 00:30:52,940 I can only speak for myself. I know that for others, the experience was simply one of dread. 283 00:30:52,940 --> 00:30:59,960 For me, it was dreadful. And yet it wasn't. My neighbourhood swiftly set up support networks for those who had to self isolate. 284 00:30:59,960 --> 00:31:03,920 There was a sense of camaraderie of we're all in this together, even though, 285 00:31:03,920 --> 00:31:09,590 of course the actual experience was utterly different for those who could seamlessly move work online 286 00:31:09,590 --> 00:31:15,800 and others who had to continue staffing stores and other essential services or making deliveries, 287 00:31:15,800 --> 00:31:22,700 all sorts of people stayed in touch to see how it was doing. I did the same friends sent me clever jokes, Meems, 288 00:31:22,700 --> 00:31:29,960 and videos of ballet dancers performing magical feats in their apartments or at least in someone's palatial apartments. 289 00:31:29,960 --> 00:31:33,980 I baked banana bread and discovered that half the world was doing the same. 290 00:31:33,980 --> 00:31:38,420 Friends in Egypt sent me similar reports and lots more funny lockdown jokes. 291 00:31:38,420 --> 00:31:45,230 And Meems. I've heard that there were suspicions that Egypt's coded statistics were artificially suppressed and 292 00:31:45,230 --> 00:31:51,680 that there may have been and may still be lots more infections than the official statistics suggest. 293 00:31:51,680 --> 00:31:57,260 But other friends had friends who were doctors, and they reported that indeed there didn't seem to be that much. 294 00:31:57,260 --> 00:32:01,310 Koven There was no crisis in Egypt because of Cauvin. 295 00:32:01,310 --> 00:32:09,800 Still other friends, however, indicated that Kofod lockdown's were exacerbating economic woes for unskilled workers who had no access to inflation, 296 00:32:09,800 --> 00:32:12,410 resistent hard currency, 297 00:32:12,410 --> 00:32:21,050 the government and prison doctors who questioned official statistics and continued imprisoning anyone else suspected of anti-government thoughts. 298 00:32:21,050 --> 00:32:28,310 But there was nothing startlingly new in any of this. The same thing seemed to be happening approximately throughout the region. 299 00:32:28,310 --> 00:32:33,650 Iran has a KOVA disaster to the east, to the north. Italy has a COVA disaster. 300 00:32:33,650 --> 00:32:43,100 But thus far, the Arab world has either dodged the Koven bullet or denied reality at an official level and done it collectively. 301 00:32:43,100 --> 00:32:50,450 Possibly the Kovik crisis was too small to make much of a dent in a region that has been in far worse crises for years. 302 00:32:50,450 --> 00:32:55,070 These crises continue to sustain authoritarians in both illiberal democracies 303 00:32:55,070 --> 00:33:00,000 and in states that barely pretended that elections in parliaments mattered. 304 00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:05,220 And Europe and the U.S., the pattern was more reminiscent of Egypt's revolutionary experience. 305 00:33:05,220 --> 00:33:07,740 First came the exuberance of communities. 306 00:33:07,740 --> 00:33:15,630 As I've already mentioned, along with the communities, I encountered many speculative thoughts about how to benefit from the crisis, 307 00:33:15,630 --> 00:33:23,700 with the streets suddenly devoid of traffic and the smog clearing. It was said to be an ideal time to reboot environmental initiatives. 308 00:33:23,700 --> 00:33:33,170 The pandemic would compel a fairer society like the Black Death had in the 14th century, killing so many people that Labour became more valuable. 309 00:33:33,170 --> 00:33:37,350 Koven would increase the legitimacy of investments in public health care and 310 00:33:37,350 --> 00:33:43,650 tipped society towards a form of participatory socialism or for easy jack. 311 00:33:43,650 --> 00:33:47,130 It would give humanity the beneficial effect of communism. 312 00:33:47,130 --> 00:33:55,620 The pandemic would be Europe's Chernobyl disaster that revealed the decadence of the system, thereby hastening its downfall. 313 00:33:55,620 --> 00:34:01,080 All such speculation was in the mould of. We can never go back to the way it was before. 314 00:34:01,080 --> 00:34:08,660 A phrase I heard often in Egypt in 2012 when the revolution was suffering one setback after another. 315 00:34:08,660 --> 00:34:11,150 The postrevolutionary future. 316 00:34:11,150 --> 00:34:21,050 That was far worse than the pre revolution status quo had been, the effects of the pandemic in the U.K. and in Europe are still unfolding. 317 00:34:21,050 --> 00:34:26,390 But one thing is very clear. The beautiful bond of community task is long gone. 318 00:34:26,390 --> 00:34:30,500 We entered into Corona virus limbo some time ago. 319 00:34:30,500 --> 00:34:36,080 Only a crisis. Actual, actual or perceived produces real change. 320 00:34:36,080 --> 00:34:44,840 It remains to be seen whether the magnitude of the crisis is sufficient for anyone to introduce a new reality that had been previously unthinkable. 321 00:34:44,840 --> 00:34:47,330 Way back in 2019, 322 00:34:47,330 --> 00:34:56,470 when we were in the throes of a structured limbo that was already fertile ground for all manner of populists and their trickster tales. 323 00:34:56,470 --> 00:35:00,670 That's it. That's my presentation. Thank you very much indeed, Walter. 324 00:35:00,670 --> 00:35:10,690 And thank you very much for. In less than half an hour linking in what's been going on in Egypt with a much not only political structures, 325 00:35:10,690 --> 00:35:16,450 but actually the current Koven situation. We're a. That made me begin to think in different ways. 326 00:35:16,450 --> 00:35:23,380 But it came at Liminality. I'm also struck our member you talking to me 15 years ago about this figure called Healthy Okasha. 327 00:35:23,380 --> 00:35:25,240 And I thought he was quite a colourful, 328 00:35:25,240 --> 00:35:34,210 quite quirky figure and imagined he was just some sort of product of the sort of the peripheries of Egyptian politics. 329 00:35:34,210 --> 00:35:42,270 But as you said, suddenly Tawfiq Okasha seems much more familiar 15 years on in all sorts of alarming ways. 330 00:35:42,270 --> 00:35:47,290 But then you got tenure. So I've been 10 years, Michael. Oh, you talked about him before the revolution. 331 00:35:47,290 --> 00:35:51,660 I remember you telling me. Well, you know, I only discovered him in late 2001. 332 00:35:51,660 --> 00:35:58,210 Right. I thought it was done. They were back when they all covered him and he was a nobody before them. 333 00:35:58,210 --> 00:36:02,520 Well, thank you. My memory suddenly it based on me very early on before he became known. 334 00:36:02,520 --> 00:36:10,780 But thank you. We have some time for questions. You have the opportunity to ask questions if you notice in your. 335 00:36:10,780 --> 00:36:17,350 If you look on Zoom, there's a Q and A button on your bazooms screen. 336 00:36:17,350 --> 00:36:22,960 If you have a question for Wolter, please press that button and type it in. 337 00:36:22,960 --> 00:36:30,600 And my colleague Eugene Rogan is there collating those questions. And I see what we've got already have a number coming in. 338 00:36:30,600 --> 00:36:39,010 So we have about just over 20 minutes for questions before we have to finish at six o'clock sharp. 339 00:36:39,010 --> 00:36:43,420 So I'm going to hand over to to Eugene for some questions for Walter. 340 00:36:43,420 --> 00:36:51,670 Eugene. Thank you very much, Michael. And it's kind of fun watching on Zoome as the crowd comes in to catch up with the middle, etc. 341 00:36:51,670 --> 00:36:55,990 It's fun to see some of our alumni. I'd like to reach out. Say hi to Leonard Wood and Martin Buntin. 342 00:36:55,990 --> 00:37:00,700 I notice you guys have been regulars. It's good to have you back along with all of our other alumni. 343 00:37:00,700 --> 00:37:04,510 And the questions are pouring in fast and furiously. 344 00:37:04,510 --> 00:37:14,020 I'm going to start with our colleague Osama al-Hasani and Frank Domani both converge around the relationship between Trickster's and their audience. 345 00:37:14,020 --> 00:37:22,960 Walter, a sama's question is, does the view that figures like Trump RACC are Trickster's risk is writing off the significant 346 00:37:22,960 --> 00:37:29,140 sectors of society that actually support these figures as naive or unintelligent? 347 00:37:29,140 --> 00:37:32,980 Can we think of our fellow citizens in more respectable terms? 348 00:37:32,980 --> 00:37:40,090 Or is there actually something to be said about the ancient Greek antipathy for democracy as ruled by the mob? 349 00:37:40,090 --> 00:37:46,870 Yet democratic accountability seems to be so obviously more desirable than the forms of dictatorship down in the Middle East at the moment. 350 00:37:46,870 --> 00:37:52,270 How might we aspire to a level headed assessment of democracy while engendering 351 00:37:52,270 --> 00:37:58,240 for it the sort of enthusiasm necessary to help unseat dictatorship in the region? 352 00:37:58,240 --> 00:38:09,570 So Bery not a mind just to bring Frankin A asks does the anarchic assess access to gullible audiences via social media enable trickster politicians? 353 00:38:09,570 --> 00:38:14,980 So a whole host of issues around the trickster and the citizen trying to pick that force? 354 00:38:14,980 --> 00:38:20,830 Walter. I'll try. There's a very long question. First one. 355 00:38:20,830 --> 00:38:29,130 I certainly don't mean to write off. Audiences or people who follow Trickster's or to suggest that they're stupid, 356 00:38:29,130 --> 00:38:36,020 what I'm trying to ask is why people pay attention to them sometimes and other times they're always there. 357 00:38:36,020 --> 00:38:43,970 But people don't necessarily care about them. So I don't think it's a matter of the audience somehow being gullible. 358 00:38:43,970 --> 00:38:49,280 I do think that social media plays a role in amplifying trickster politics. 359 00:38:49,280 --> 00:38:58,190 But I think that the kind of structured insecurity that so many people feel is is more important than 360 00:38:58,190 --> 00:39:05,600 they than the the technical aspects of the way social media kind of reproduce these trickster tales, 361 00:39:05,600 --> 00:39:11,990 which which are conspiracy theories. And it's not just. 362 00:39:11,990 --> 00:39:16,430 Politicians who are playing the role of tricksters in this case, 363 00:39:16,430 --> 00:39:25,600 I think that the conspiracy theory itself also should be looked at as as a kind of product of it, of a kind of trickster environment. 364 00:39:25,600 --> 00:39:35,390 And I want to. What I want to do is talk about a trickster environment and not talk about any sort of evil clowns who are duping people. 365 00:39:35,390 --> 00:39:39,650 I don't see the problem is necessarily that people are being duped. 366 00:39:39,650 --> 00:39:52,040 And yet it's clear that people are more susceptible to listening to these kinds of narratives at certain times than they are at others. 367 00:39:52,040 --> 00:39:54,560 And so if you want to bring back democratic norms, 368 00:39:54,560 --> 00:40:02,960 then perhaps one of the things that has to happen is to stabilise the sense of limbo that people feel that they're living in. 369 00:40:02,960 --> 00:40:07,190 Thanks, Walter. Another attendee puts the question, 370 00:40:07,190 --> 00:40:12,320 how do you see the ambivalent group who neither opposes the regime nor supports 371 00:40:12,320 --> 00:40:16,460 it during the revolution and their attitudes towards political tricksters? 372 00:40:16,460 --> 00:40:20,280 Maybe from the perspective of Liminality. 373 00:40:20,280 --> 00:40:28,220 Well, in Egypt, they used to refer it to the Hezbollah kind of bomb and sort of the, you know, the broad middle class, which was. 374 00:40:28,220 --> 00:40:33,850 At first. Grudgingly. 375 00:40:33,850 --> 00:40:37,750 In favour of the revolution, or at least not openly against it. 376 00:40:37,750 --> 00:40:44,020 But as the period of instability went on and the feeling of insecurity grew. 377 00:40:44,020 --> 00:40:52,270 Eventually that solidified very much against it and ended up being, in many cases, 378 00:40:52,270 --> 00:41:02,130 actually active supporters of the coup, not just passive supporters, but at least passive supporters. 379 00:41:02,130 --> 00:41:06,400 But yes, of course, there are people who who just sit and watch. 380 00:41:06,400 --> 00:41:10,000 And in any case, in any in any revolution and in any political system, 381 00:41:10,000 --> 00:41:18,930 it's always a minority of people who are activists who are actually out there in the streets or are actively participating in political parties. 382 00:41:18,930 --> 00:41:28,070 You know, I don't think there's any such thing as a fully mobilised society. So, of course, there are always there are always people. 383 00:41:28,070 --> 00:41:31,880 Who are somewhere in the middle waiting to see which way to go. 384 00:41:31,880 --> 00:41:38,470 Our student, Frederica Brocco, then obviously inspired by you talking about baking bread out of bread during lockdown. 385 00:41:38,470 --> 00:41:42,820 Wanted to know whether you'd identified any Trickster's during the pandemic in the Middle East to 386 00:41:42,820 --> 00:41:48,910 North Africa during the past few months as the pandemic given rise to a new trickster phenomenon. 387 00:41:48,910 --> 00:41:54,390 Not now, as far as I can tell. I mean, the effect of the pandemic. 388 00:41:54,390 --> 00:42:03,390 Two to the to the best of my knowledge, and it's not as if I spent an extensive amount of time travelling in the region during the pandemic. 389 00:42:03,390 --> 00:42:14,240 In fact, travel is quite difficult. And, you know, all I know is what friends are telling me via social media or e-mail messages. 390 00:42:14,240 --> 00:42:16,580 And so, you know, the answer is, is no. 391 00:42:16,580 --> 00:42:26,430 I mean, the in Egypt, which is the place that I follow more than other places, the effect of the pandemic seems to be quite small. 392 00:42:26,430 --> 00:42:26,780 You know, 393 00:42:26,780 --> 00:42:40,310 the notion that Egypt doesn't actually seem to be suffering a kind of hidden or unacknowledged covered crisis seems to me to be fairly credible, 394 00:42:40,310 --> 00:42:43,400 because I keep hearing from people saying that, you know, 395 00:42:43,400 --> 00:42:47,930 I have a friend who's a doctor and they say, no, in fact, the hospitals are not being overwhelmed. 396 00:42:47,930 --> 00:42:56,600 And, you know, there aren't all sorts of people who are getting sick and dying from it that the state is trying to somehow cover up. 397 00:42:56,600 --> 00:43:02,110 So, you know, there may be something going on somewhere else that I am unaware of. 398 00:43:02,110 --> 00:43:07,700 But in Egypt, I mean, you know, the problem is in Egypt was already in a state of crisis. 399 00:43:07,700 --> 00:43:14,840 And as I was trying to hint at the end of my lecture. 400 00:43:14,840 --> 00:43:28,990 It may be that Kovar is. It is not a larger crisis than places that were already happening in places like Syria and Lebanon and Iraq, Sudan, Algeria. 401 00:43:28,990 --> 00:43:37,350 Another attendee clearly latching on to your and wait for Michael, I'm going to pronounce this correctly titled Apocalypso. 402 00:43:37,350 --> 00:43:46,090 I just wanted to know whether it's possible for citizens, particularly in countries in the Middle East, to become used to a state of limbo. 403 00:43:46,090 --> 00:43:55,590 If it's a new normal emerging in this convenient interim or what is stopping it from becoming a new normal and this convenient interim? 404 00:43:55,590 --> 00:44:01,290 Well, I think it's possible for limbo to become durable and, you know, I guess if it becomes durable, 405 00:44:01,290 --> 00:44:07,590 then people have to cope with it, which is what people have been doing. I mean, you know, in my view, the you know, 406 00:44:07,590 --> 00:44:12,150 the reason the trickster politicians have become so successful and that conspiracy 407 00:44:12,150 --> 00:44:17,010 theories are threading is precisely that people are already living in a durable, 408 00:44:17,010 --> 00:44:25,710 structured sense of limbo. And, you know, for it to be limbo, I think. 409 00:44:25,710 --> 00:44:31,690 People can never become fully comfortable in it, but they can become habituated to it, 410 00:44:31,690 --> 00:44:38,910 that they can be living in a state in which they have no choice but to deal with it to to substantially extent. 411 00:44:38,910 --> 00:44:44,020 People all over the world have been doing just that. 412 00:44:44,020 --> 00:44:50,430 Your reform reflection on conspiracy theories is Segway is very nice to Richard make pieces question. 413 00:44:50,430 --> 00:44:57,760 He writes of his own recollections of Egypt in the nineteen nineties that there was always a deep attachment to conspiracy theories. 414 00:44:57,760 --> 00:45:06,880 The question who was was always who benefits? And it led to bizarre answers, including at a time when the Mubarak regime was entirely secure. 415 00:45:06,880 --> 00:45:15,730 It seemed practically to a fixed characteristic of Egyptian society, along with political jokes and mistrust of LRM the newspaper. 416 00:45:15,730 --> 00:45:17,410 So how is that to be explained? 417 00:45:17,410 --> 00:45:24,420 I mean, it doesn't seem like it's necessarily a little bit of a phenomenon that can actually happen in times of fixity. 418 00:45:24,420 --> 00:45:30,150 Well, then there is a small literature on conspiracy theories in the Middle East. 419 00:45:30,150 --> 00:45:39,750 And one way that conspiracy theories that the prevalence of conspiracy theories in the Arab world has been explained is that 420 00:45:39,750 --> 00:45:48,870 people who who lack access to information are more likely to ask those kinds of questions of who benefits from something. 421 00:45:48,870 --> 00:45:56,880 And, you know, that was the kind of argument that was being made in the early 1990s by there's an article by John Anderson, 422 00:45:56,880 --> 00:46:04,740 an anthropologist at Catholic University in Washington, who wrote quite interesting article about conspiracy theory. 423 00:46:04,740 --> 00:46:17,550 And he said he was interested in social media and in his view of social media, suddenly made access to. 424 00:46:17,550 --> 00:46:26,380 To real information. More possible for the Middle East than had been during the 1970s, 1980s. 425 00:46:26,380 --> 00:46:28,930 Of course, now we look at social media quite differently now. 426 00:46:28,930 --> 00:46:35,800 I mean, when when the revolution happened in Egypt, social media was supposed to be a mighty engine of truth. 427 00:46:35,800 --> 00:46:42,490 And the lies of the regime could no longer be successful because people to get access to other information from outside. 428 00:46:42,490 --> 00:46:46,900 And so we had all of this nonsense about Facebook and Twitter revolutions. 429 00:46:46,900 --> 00:46:53,340 Of course, now it's it's turned 180 degrees the other way. You know, it's all fake news. 430 00:46:53,340 --> 00:47:03,470 But again, I don't think people are as as likely to believe an outlandish fake news when they feel that they're living in a solid, predictable world. 431 00:47:03,470 --> 00:47:12,790 And, you know, say again, I think people are susceptible precisely because they don't feel they feel in some way precarious, 432 00:47:12,790 --> 00:47:18,490 not necessarily always in ways that they can express. The other thing I want to say about conspiracy theories in the Middle East is I don't 433 00:47:18,490 --> 00:47:26,020 think we should exoticism them as being strictly a feature of the Middle East. 434 00:47:26,020 --> 00:47:35,260 And I was trying to make this point by bringing up Richard Hofstadter's book and is kind of tour back in American 435 00:47:35,260 --> 00:47:41,590 history all the way to the 18th century suggests that conspiracy theories were a consistent part of American culture. 436 00:47:41,590 --> 00:47:45,220 But again, the question is, why are they important sometimes and not important? 437 00:47:45,220 --> 00:47:51,520 At other times? And they are more important now than there have been at any other time in history. 438 00:47:51,520 --> 00:47:57,640 And so, you know, that's what we need to be looking at. Happy enough. 439 00:47:57,640 --> 00:48:04,780 Yeah, I know. And as you invoke Q and on, you know, I think the relevance and the pertinence of conspiracy theory as a more generalised 440 00:48:04,780 --> 00:48:09,190 phenomenon as those who might have said this was a feature of Middle Eastern politics, 441 00:48:09,190 --> 00:48:17,950 a little humbled now and aware that our own societies are all too susceptible to that easier way of of being manipulated. 442 00:48:17,950 --> 00:48:22,450 But let me go back to the questions, Walter. I'm an audience. 443 00:48:22,450 --> 00:48:27,640 Do you recall if you didn't if you don't wish to add your name, said that just Mark Anonymous. 444 00:48:27,640 --> 00:48:32,110 And I've got a number of people who mark this is anonymous. If I see your name next, your question and I will. 445 00:48:32,110 --> 00:48:39,310 I will mention you by name. So one of our other attendees has said one quality of trickster politicians would seem to be, 446 00:48:39,310 --> 00:48:43,920 please correct me if I'm wrong to at least appear to be the underdog. 447 00:48:43,920 --> 00:48:51,900 An element of rebelliousness and a position ality, regardless of how tightly connected to demonic power they really are. 448 00:48:51,900 --> 00:48:59,640 Do you think being in power as opposed to being part of the opposition affects the way trickster politicians operate? 449 00:48:59,640 --> 00:49:12,060 That's a good question. And as I said, really, I suspect that the phenomenon of Trickster's in politics is actually older than we think. 450 00:49:12,060 --> 00:49:22,530 And and I've said it in other forms of this lecture that we should look at trickster politics as as one form of authoritarianism, but not, of course. 451 00:49:22,530 --> 00:49:35,040 The point is not that all authoritarians need to be looked at as Trickster's, but it may be a point of entry into political power, 452 00:49:35,040 --> 00:49:40,650 which then becomes consolidated and turns into something else, essentially becomes institutionalised. 453 00:49:40,650 --> 00:49:48,050 It's difficult for Trickster's to institutionalise their politics. 454 00:49:48,050 --> 00:49:52,000 Well, because they're making it up as they go there, they're outsiders, a trickster is an outsider. 455 00:49:52,000 --> 00:49:56,980 Somebody comes into the system who, you know, is not necessarily a creature of the system. 456 00:49:56,980 --> 00:50:06,580 But of course, it's entirely possible the trickster could, you know, could become would become the system, become institutionalised. 457 00:50:06,580 --> 00:50:13,540 And so, yes, I I think that that's a that's a good question. There could be an evolution of a person who begins as a trickster, 458 00:50:13,540 --> 00:50:21,660 introduces a kind of sea change in the nature of a political system that then becomes durable. 459 00:50:21,660 --> 00:50:24,320 And I'll just call this schism agenesis, as you know, 460 00:50:24,320 --> 00:50:34,570 since the introduction of a new cultural form that had been considered monstrous before, which then becomes a permanent part of culture. 461 00:50:34,570 --> 00:50:37,900 We have a question now from Hannah s.E.C and Hannah, it's wonderful to see you. 462 00:50:37,900 --> 00:50:42,130 She starts the questions tonight so I could read the whole thing. Walter. Walter, that was brilliant. 463 00:50:42,130 --> 00:50:46,270 Thank you, Eugene. It's absolutely wonderful to see you. Great to see you, too, Hannah. 464 00:50:46,270 --> 00:50:50,290 And by the way, congratulations on the Malcolm Kurr. You've done us all proud. 465 00:50:50,290 --> 00:50:56,060 My question says, Hannah, how do you understand the relationship between Liminality Alec Goffman or Van 466 00:50:56,060 --> 00:51:02,410 Ganna grinding down initiations to naked newborn or even a kind of ground zero? 467 00:51:02,410 --> 00:51:12,040 You describe to Graham she's inventory of traces and essentially the idea that our personality and experience are always historical, 468 00:51:12,040 --> 00:51:16,300 always socially and historically constituted. Well, my question. 469 00:51:16,300 --> 00:51:26,280 Yeah, no, that's a great question. Although I don't know very much about the Grandpre inside of it, but I but I understand the point about, you know, 470 00:51:26,280 --> 00:51:35,540 the sort of the you know, the cultural archives, the political archives that people have, you know, isn't necessarily going to disappear. 471 00:51:35,540 --> 00:51:43,250 It's at the point of entry into Liminality that that the kind of level process happens. 472 00:51:43,250 --> 00:51:52,280 And if there isn't a conventionalised way of getting out of it and the and the condition of liminality becomes protracted, 473 00:51:52,280 --> 00:52:03,890 that's when people rediscover their archive. It may be an archive that is smashed to bits and, you know, sort of lying around in unfamiliar locations. 474 00:52:03,890 --> 00:52:08,270 But it doesn't. Of course, it doesn't disappear. 475 00:52:08,270 --> 00:52:18,800 And and what happens when people get, you know, sort of in this extended period of liminality, which I referred to is as limbo. 476 00:52:18,800 --> 00:52:23,810 Limbo is different than the initial entry into Liminality as they start to take sides. 477 00:52:23,810 --> 00:52:31,580 That's what happened in the revolution. You take you take sides by reaching back into stuff that you already know and the stuff 478 00:52:31,580 --> 00:52:35,870 that you already knew might be presented to you in a different form than it was before. 479 00:52:35,870 --> 00:52:44,060 But you still have a degree of familiarity with it and the ability to, you know, 480 00:52:44,060 --> 00:52:54,980 to act in ways that can hopefully bring about an end to this intolerable state of limbo. 481 00:52:54,980 --> 00:53:00,140 One from our student future sulcus who asks who's more important or powerful, 482 00:53:00,140 --> 00:53:06,830 the government or the Trickster's keeping the insanity or dysfunction of the government palatable to the population? 483 00:53:06,830 --> 00:53:11,540 Who needs who in this case? Yeah. That's also a good question. 484 00:53:11,540 --> 00:53:17,690 And the Trickster's don't act on their own. I mean, they may act as kind of loose cannons. 485 00:53:17,690 --> 00:53:22,250 Duffy Okasha was a loose cannon. I mean, he was working for military intelligence, 486 00:53:22,250 --> 00:53:34,850 but I think he was he was the they probably regarded him with some wariness because because he was so obviously in it for himself as well. 487 00:53:34,850 --> 00:53:43,300 And then, you know, this is the case with Donald Trump as well. But, of course, they're coming into and are sometimes used by. 488 00:53:43,300 --> 00:53:54,970 People in the background, institutions, wealthy, powerful forces that are trying to ride the wave of trickster ism for their own ends. 489 00:53:54,970 --> 00:53:59,560 I mean, in the case of the United States, look at the Republican Party. You don't have to look any further. 490 00:53:59,560 --> 00:54:04,360 I mean, you know, this is a longstanding institution that initially said, you know, 491 00:54:04,360 --> 00:54:08,900 all of the things you would expect about Donald Trump is a oh, my God, he's vulgar. 492 00:54:08,900 --> 00:54:13,990 You know, he's horrible. Know, we can't possibly allow this man to become president. 493 00:54:13,990 --> 00:54:17,440 And yet, you know, they ended up using each other. 494 00:54:17,440 --> 00:54:21,940 Of course, most of the stuff that Donald Trump did when he was president, he could never possibly have dreamed up himself. 495 00:54:21,940 --> 00:54:26,920 It was the Republican Party. It was, you know, a very solid institution, you know, 496 00:54:26,920 --> 00:54:31,790 with people who understood the way the government worked in ways that Donald Trump never could have. 497 00:54:31,790 --> 00:54:36,140 They took advantage of him. The trickster doesn't make you know. 498 00:54:36,140 --> 00:54:43,730 It doesn't make institutions go away. That's for sure. But that leads to Delila Hood, Ben's question concerning Egypt. 499 00:54:43,730 --> 00:54:50,770 How do you interpret the later dismissal of Towfiq Akasha? Well, good to hear from you, Julio. 500 00:54:50,770 --> 00:54:55,360 It's been a while, but, well, it's because I mean, 501 00:54:55,360 --> 00:55:04,090 my view is because this is a trickster and he couldn't have another trickster around on the scene making trouble for him. 502 00:55:04,090 --> 00:55:09,520 My my understanding of C.C. is that he also is a kind of trickster politician and 503 00:55:09,520 --> 00:55:16,230 he may be a good example of a trickster politician who manages to become durable. 504 00:55:16,230 --> 00:55:21,760 You know, he's still there and perhaps developing, you know, 505 00:55:21,760 --> 00:55:28,310 alliances and birder's to actually want the government in ways that haven't been running before. 506 00:55:28,310 --> 00:55:35,090 But that would be my answer to your question, is that Sisi was a bigger trickster than our Cashen. 507 00:55:35,090 --> 00:55:39,150 And when the time came, they threw him overboard. 508 00:55:39,150 --> 00:55:44,160 Some are current show. He is weighing in with a couple of questions with regards to alternatives. 509 00:55:44,160 --> 00:55:50,380 Well, I'm weary of the very broad sweep of the comparison of different waves of populist tricksters. 510 00:55:50,380 --> 00:55:59,970 Doesn't a history of authoritarianism make a difference? Think of Egypt and Turkey and also of Russia. 511 00:55:59,970 --> 00:56:04,160 OK, I'm not sure I understand the question. Good to hear from you, Sam. 512 00:56:04,160 --> 00:56:16,110 So does a history of authoritarianism make a difference in the ways in which populist or Trickster's emerge onto the historical stage? 513 00:56:16,110 --> 00:56:21,590 Well. I mean, authoritarianism is one kind of government. 514 00:56:21,590 --> 00:56:27,770 As I said earlier, it you know, you can't say that every authoritarian is a trickster. 515 00:56:27,770 --> 00:56:37,330 And so you could very easily have an authoritarian system, which, of course, Egypt had throughout its. 516 00:56:37,330 --> 00:56:51,890 Post-colonial history. Which could be taken over and brought in, taken in different directions by a trickster politician. 517 00:56:51,890 --> 00:56:58,770 Coming into coming into an already existing authoritarian. 518 00:56:58,770 --> 00:57:02,320 System. And and, you know, introducing what? 519 00:57:02,320 --> 00:57:07,810 Introducing ways of operating that would have been considered Devean before. 520 00:57:07,810 --> 00:57:13,690 But possibly those becoming variables when we have time for one last question, 521 00:57:13,690 --> 00:57:18,640 if I can get a brief answer from you and then we'll hand over to Michael to bring the evening to a close. 522 00:57:18,640 --> 00:57:22,940 But the last question goes to Nate George, who thanks you for a great talk. 523 00:57:22,940 --> 00:57:30,080 It says, Walter, you make clear the relationship between structural crises and strictures, which is very helpful. 524 00:57:30,080 --> 00:57:37,360 But do you have any thoughts about the relationship between Trickster's and counter-revolutionary politics? 525 00:57:37,360 --> 00:57:45,700 One thing that's clear about those you mentioned is that all these figures explicitly advocated against are perhaps more rational, 526 00:57:45,700 --> 00:57:53,820 revolutionary alternative. So is there a link to be drawn between Trickster's and counter-revolutionary politics? 527 00:57:53,820 --> 00:58:00,060 Well, I would say it's a link between Trickster's and the far right. 528 00:58:00,060 --> 00:58:05,280 I mean, I've given lectures on this in the past. Many people say, what could you have a left wing trickster? 529 00:58:05,280 --> 00:58:15,870 And my answer is, in theory, yes. But in the current world that we live in, no, there's no such thing as a trickster of the left that I know of, 530 00:58:15,870 --> 00:58:24,330 which doesn't mean that there never has been or that they never could be. But, you know, if if a revolution begins, I mean, 531 00:58:24,330 --> 00:58:33,870 if what you mean by revolution is is revolution that begins with progressive and tense coming from the left, basically. 532 00:58:33,870 --> 00:58:41,890 Which I think most revolutions. More or less arm. 533 00:58:41,890 --> 00:58:48,200 Then naturally, the opposition to him, the kind of revolution is going to be a backlash from the right. 534 00:58:48,200 --> 00:58:56,300 But I think that looking over at the larger and the longer trickster scape, these are. 535 00:58:56,300 --> 00:59:04,130 Creatures of the right. At this particular moment in history, I think it's entirely possible that they're learning from each other. 536 00:59:04,130 --> 00:59:10,070 And of course, they add they know all the authoritarian potential tricksters in the world had Donald Trump for four years 537 00:59:10,070 --> 00:59:21,530 to to look at and get inspiration and perhaps learn some new ways to operate in their own political terrain. 538 00:59:21,530 --> 00:59:25,610 Revolutionary do the same thing. You know, they they learn from each other. 539 00:59:25,610 --> 00:59:30,680 You know, from what I've heard about the situation in Algeria from Michael. 540 00:59:30,680 --> 00:59:37,790 They had their eye on Egypt and were determined to not make the same kinds of mistakes that had been made in the Egyptian revolution. 541 00:59:37,790 --> 00:59:42,590 I think I'd better the same things about the Sudan. I don't know. It's been quite successful. 542 00:59:42,590 --> 00:59:50,160 So, you know, everybody who's involved in politics. Naturally always has their eyes on. 543 00:59:50,160 --> 00:59:56,010 Other people's political experiences and are trying to learn from them. Thank you, Walter. 544 00:59:56,010 --> 01:00:01,740 Unfortunately, our hour is now up and I apologise to those people who still wanted to ask questions. 545 01:00:01,740 --> 01:00:11,100 There was a lot of interest in this topic. But before I send you out to the liminality, that is the coveted weekend in lockdown. 546 01:00:11,100 --> 01:00:15,590 I just want to ask you to thank Walter again for a wonderful lecture. 547 01:00:15,590 --> 01:00:20,460 It's taken this from Egypt to Trump to Kove, it to banana bread. 548 01:00:20,460 --> 01:00:24,150 In less than an hour. Thank you very much for some fascinating observations. 549 01:00:24,150 --> 01:00:28,140 It's made me think about a lot of different things in a connected way. 550 01:00:28,140 --> 01:00:32,020 So thank you very much, Walter. Thank you very much to all of you attended. 551 01:00:32,020 --> 01:00:37,710 And I invite you to join us all next weekend at 5:00 o'clock on Friday for the next in the series of our lecture. 552 01:00:37,710 --> 01:00:48,574 Thank you very much. And good night and have a lovely weekend. Thanks to everyone.