Good evening and welcome to the Middle East Centre at St. Anthony's College at the University of Oxford.
My name is Michael Willis. I'm a fellow here at the Middle East centre.
It is my great pleasure to introduce you to the 6th in our weekly series of Friday seminars,
looking this term at the theme of dictatorship in the modern Middle East.
And I'm very pleased to welcome this evening.
One of my colleagues, one of the other fellows here at the Middle East centre, Professor Walter Armbrust.
Walter is a social anthropologist working particularly on Egypt.
And tonight he will be speaking on the theme of Egypt and he'll be building on his book that came out last year,
which entitled Martyrs and Trickster's An Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution.
This was a book that was built on two years living in Cairo directly after the Egyptian revolution, carrying out research on the revolution.
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
his observations and of the revolution to look at what has happened in Egypt since then.
And we're building on that and return to this theme with speaking under the title of Lip.
I knew I'm going to have trouble with this apocalyptic trickster politics in the age of pandemic.
Walter. OK. Thank you, Michael. It's a pleasure to be participating in our own seminar when the fellows of the
Middle East centre began discussing plans for our Friday seminar this term.
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.
And it seemed pretty obvious that we would still be in one in the fall. So crisis is our main theme seemed topical.
Unfortunately, I was misunderstood as having suggested that we do an entire term's worth of lectures on the Cauvin crisis.
That would indeed have been tedious and it wasn't what I had in mind.
Though I did think that it would have been a shame to work steadily through a pandemic and say nothing about it.
But while I think there certainly are many implications to this particular pandemic driven crisis,
the real point was that having just published the book on a revolution,
it's called Martyrs and Trickster's and Ethnography of the Egyptian Revolution. I was thinking about links between crisis and politics.
It's hopefully easy for listeners to see the point. A revolution is a form of political crisis,
and the coup that ended the revolution instituted a reconstituted authoritarianism or arguably a new form of authoritarianism.
There's quite a bit more that one could say about crisis and authoritarianism.
Some listeners may have read my abstract and noticed the quote from Milton Friedman.
Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.
The rest of Friedman's passage from a book titled Capitalism and Freedom extols the fluidity created
by crisis as an opportunity for the politically impossible to become politically inevitable.
For him, that meant the prioritisation of economic freedom above any other formulation of freedom in the actual world,
as opposed to Friedman's capitalist utopia. The elevation of economic freedom into a sacred principle made it possible for states to suppress
politics and the interests of allowing the supposedly superior logic of the market to work unimpeded.
There are other ways to formulate the relation of crisis to politics, such as the Italian philosopher Georgia again, Ben's state of Exception,
which focuses on the institution of a legal civil war that empowers states to make an unaccountable,
to make unaccountable decisions on which citizens should live and which ones are expendable.
Again, Ben is by no means the only scholar who pursues such ideas.
The political theorist Akua Member, for example, makes similar observations in work titled Niekro Politics.
Bombay finds the state of exception logic to be salient not just in the states we commonly recognise as dictatorships,
but also in states that are formerly liberal democracies such as the United States,
using the 9/11 attack to suspend the rule of law for certain categories of people,
categories that are inevitably as elastic as the state wants them to be.
Listeners who are familiar with Egypt will probably be thinking about the emergency law of 1958,
which set the legal parameters for a state of emergency which was declared during the June war with Israel in 1967.
Then it was lifted briefly in 1980, reimposed by Mubarak in 1981 and remained in force until the January 25th revolution in 2011,
only to be reimposed by the fact that Sisi in 2013. States of emergency have underpinned authoritarian rule also in Algeria for 19
years prior to 2011 and in Syria since the Baath Party came to power in 1963.
I note that in this seminar, our keynote lecture, as it were, is Aswang.
His book, The Dictatorship Syndrome. Aswani writes about the institutionalisation of dictatorship,
how citizens are habituated to it, and how they ultimately collude with it and consent to it.
For me, the dictatorship syndrome has a rather exceptional tone.
It's full of lines such as the discussion of dictatorship in the United States and Western Europe has
acquired an exotic dimension as Western Europe has rarely known dictatorship since the Second World War.
Or in another line, he says, citizens of Western democracies whose basic needs are satisfied and who enjoy the protection of the law,
look on with shock and confusion at the tens of thousands of illegal mind migrants who leave their homelands.
In other words, for Suadi, dictatorship is something that plagues the Middle East and other parts of the world.
Not an issue or at least no longer an issue for the West.
I understand that Sweida has written this book as a kind of auto critique, a criticism of his own society.
He prominently quotes from Delphia that comes out at the Y The Return of Consciousness,
a searing auto critique of Egyptian society during the Nasser era, published in the 1970s after announcing his death.
Auto critique is a good thing. And that's why it deserves credit for it.
It does, however, have a different resonance when it's translated and presented in English.
Contrasting Egypt and the Arab world with the West in favour of the latter is misleading at best.
If it implies that European and American liberal democracies have to be a kind of gold standard to which the Arab world should aspire.
So in the same spirit of auto critique, I want to suggest to modifications to Suan his vision of a dictatorship syndrome.
The first is that dictatorship is one possible expression of a larger political formation, namely authoritarianism.
Authoritarian regimes often have parliaments and elections that are essentially for show or are nullified by emergency laws.
Egypt either repressive dictatorship is one such country.
Political scientists have various terms for a range of phenomena connected to authoritarian strategies for regime survival,
upgraded authoritarianism, for example, or durable authoritarianism.
These terms tend to be used to explain how regimes in the Arab world have adapted to
pressures of globalisation or to European and American pressures to democratise.
But at the same time, not only have Europe and the United States frequently given material support and political cover
for authoritarian regimes contrary to their own publicly professed democratisation agendas.
But it would also be astonishingly shortsighted to ignore the growing strength of an authoritarian impulse everywhere in the world,
very much including Europe and the United States. It would be folly to deny the authoritarian impulse in the Republican Party,
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.
The authoritarian impulse in these countries has not necessarily resulted in durable or irreversible authoritarianism.
In all cases, but anyone who can't see the potential for it in all of these cases simply hasn't been paying attention.
So in the interest of putting all of these emergent, if not necessarily consolidated, authoritarian isms on the same footing,
the second modification I want to make to Alice is vision is to put crisis at the centre of the discussion
and not the institutionalisation of a dictatorship habitus as is done in the dictatorships syndrome.
There are two kinds of crisis. One is event driven at a variety of scales revolutions and civil wars, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis,
droughts, pandemics, economic collapse ranging from the level of the nation state to the entire globe.
All of them can make sedimented social, political and economic arrangements suddenly become fluid.
The other kind of crisis is structured, not necessarily structured deliberately, but nonetheless constant and durable.
To talk about the structuring of crises may sound paradoxical, since the very word crisis tends to conjure a sense of suddenness and unexpectedness.
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,
Marder's and Trickster's, which I've already mentioned, and so is Michael.
A revolution is a political crisis with social and economic implications, and it's also the starting point of a transition.
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.
The study of transitions is a branch of political science, sometimes called Transit Ptolemy.
It's concerned mainly with transitions from authoritarianism to democracy,
sociology and political and policy studies write about transitions and a slightly more expansive framework,
but they focus still largely on institutions. In my book, I draw inspiration from anthropological understandings and transitions,
which are rather broader and more scalable than the narrowly political or institutional contexts of interest to our social science colleagues.
One form of anthropological trans atolls gee,
if one wanted to call it that derives from the study of ritual or the ritual process, as it's sometimes called.
Anthropologists observe that all transitions followed a common form departure from a state of non activity into a state of
indeterminacy within which those undergoing the transition can engage in behaviour considered aberrant and normal social circumstances.
And finally, reintegration of the initiations. Who are those going through the transformation into social norm activity?
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.
The initiations the bride and the groom depart from the social condition of.
Single people are brought together in a way that allows them to perform extraordinary acts,
not normally sanctioned as single individuals, such as kissing in public in the euro, American tradition.
And then they reintegrate into society as married individuals.
The interesting part of the process is the middle phase after the initial hands in the ritual have left their state of normatively,
but before they've reintegrated in their transformed status. Anthropologists call this the liminal phase.
The importance of liminality outside of narrowly conceived rites of passage has been recognised at a number of observations have been made about it.
One is that when a group of people first enter into Liminality, think of, for example,
a university class going through matriculation or graduation, they bond together.
Social differences dissolve. Class, gender or ethnic differences, for example, may cease to have the same meanings as they do in normative society.
A term for this sense of bonding is community. Essentially just a slightly fancy way of saying community.
But it's a special kind of community in which everyone becomes equal outside of
normal social time and structure as they go through a passage that may be difficult,
dramatic, or in some cases even a trial of endurance. Another observation about Liminality is that it's potentially dangerous.
People released from their normal social obligations might do all sorts of alarming acts to put it in terms of marriage.
If there was no carefully controlled transition from singlehood to married status,
youth in the grip of uncontrollable hormones might just fornicate wildly.
And all sorts of disasters would follow unplanned pregnancies or warfare between the Montagues and the Capulets or between Arab clans.
If you want to think of it in those terms. That's why ritual exists to control the unpredictable contingencies of liminality.
As I mentioned a moment ago, the ritual process is highly scalable.
Think of the ritual process in terms of a transition, for example, from childhood to adulthood.
We have an intermediate social category called adolescence. The state of being in between childhood and adulthood.
The nature of adolescence varies tremendously from one society to another.
For us, it's quite prolonged. Everyone knows that teenagers are crazy.
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.
Organised sports. The Boy Scouts carefully chaperoned high school balls, debutantes and other coming of age rituals.
So what does the ritual process have to do with politics?
Well, if you had been in Tahrir Square in late January 2011, you wouldn't be asking that question.
The momentum of the moment when the Mubarak era had been left behind and everyone was energised and thought they loved each other,
despite their normal resentments of class, gender or sectarian affiliation, was community tasks on a massive scale.
Further amplified by mass mediation. This is where the story becomes more complex and interesting.
Understanding ritual through the ritual process is often seen within anthropology as a
conservative approach to ritual because it tends to explain how things stay the same.
The liminal phase of the process is full of contingency and possibility for change, but change is always rerouted back into normatively.
But understanding a revolution through the ritual process compels a wider set of observations.
Most importantly, ritual exists precisely for the purpose of controlling the dangers of liminality and transitions we know will happen.
But are all transitions predictable? The answer is no.
All sorts of events, large and small,
compel transitions in which there is no conventionalised means for controlling what happens in the liminal phase.
The period of fluidity between the collapse of one order and the reconstitution of a new order.
In a revolution, there is no ritualised process to usher society back into the previous state of normatively.
The Egyptian experience is instructive.
After the initial burst of communities following the fall of the Mubarak regime, no power could fully govern the country.
The liminal phase became protracted and as far as anyone could judge, open ended.
As this happened, the effervescence community last of the first moments of the revolution subsided.
Though all of the subsequent political mobilisations attempted to recreate it inevitably with diminishing success.
In such circumstances, Liminality, intrinsically pregnant with possibilities, becomes limbo,
an uncomfortable sensation of disorientation in which common points of political reference such as the state,
the police or the government no longer have the apparent solidity of the previous era.
Limbo family resembles an army Durkheim. In concept, that means norm wiseness.
But in that case, the point was to explain such phenomena as suicide or social deviance.
In the case of a transitional limbo, more common possibility is for people to take sides.
Old certainties may have been smashed, but a yearning for order is a fairly consistent impulse in all societies.
And so the joyous bonding of community has turned into a much more defensive gravitation toward allies and hopefully safety.
And for those who initiated rebellions against the state, it was a chance to formulate a new kind of state and society.
But in Egypt and in other Arab societies that experienced revolutionary upheaval starting in late 2010, the state of political limbo was protracted.
The transitional process was certainly grinding along in forms that were intelligible to political scientists elections,
formation of political parties, constitution draughting pressure to reform the police and the security forces.
Judicial reform. In fact, pressure to reform all institutions from the Ministry of Culture to the Department of Traffic Violations.
But in a state of revolutionary limbo, the more crucial transitions had to do with legitimacy,
which was very hard to establish when the previous anchors at political normalcy had been compromised.
This proved to be the perfect environment in which political Trickster's could flourish like the ritual process, Trickster's are a universal form.
To be clear, the universality of the forum does not dictate what is expressed through it.
Think of it this way. All languages have verbs and nouns as well as consonants and vowels.
Those are universal, but obviously what's expressed through them is not.
So to say that the ritual process and the figure of the trickster are universal is not to say that having
recognised this fact indicates that we necessarily understand what is being expressed through them.
But it does mean that we have some basic principles through which to begin recognising what is being expressed.
A trickster is a figure at home in the margins. Or he could say in Liminality Trickster's existant folklore mythology.
Modern literature in popular culture. Coyote and Native American culture.
Loki in Scandinavian mythology. Talk. And Shakespeare.
Tom Sawyer. Bart Simpson. They're all Trickster's as creatures of Liminality.
They have no commitment to the existential certainties of normative culture, but they're skilled imitators who can make it up as they go.
An anthropological and literary writing on Trickster's,
they're seen as having tremendous capacity for both creativity and destruction, which may sound paradoxical,
but of course, one way to conceptualise creativity is precisely as the person or act that transcends boundaries and therefore breaks the mould.
Prometheus was a trickster. He ended up strapped to a mountain with an eagle eating his liver.
But the fire that he gave to human beings was a pretty good tool.
We'd be fools to complain.
Trickster's are sometimes too clever by half and end up disastrously like Prometheus, and sometimes they're the ones who trick others.
Tricksters and politics is a new idea about a phenomenon that has occurred throughout history.
Yet you might say its time has come now more than ever, trickster politicians are continually in our midst.
Some familiar examples are Nigel Farraj, Boris Johnson and very obviously Donald Trump.
In a world dominated by a liberal internationalist order and underpinned by slavish adherence to free market ideology,
political Trickster's in our age seem to be almost entirely far right populists.
But if trickster politics is always a possibility,
then the question arises as to why tricksters are sometimes listened to and become important and not at other times.
Extreme crisis is an obvious factor. Consider Hitler, for example.
His beer hall putsch in 1923 was derided as the work of a lunatic more suited to the comic opera than to serious politics.
His demagogic skill and the violence of his ideas were recognised by some, but the initial response to him was often laughter.
Without the economic collapse of the Weimar Republic and resentment at the harsh terms imposed on Germany after the First World War.
He might well have remained a joke in Egypt.
By the end of 2011,
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,
whose television talk show provided a forum for spewing bizarre conspiracy theories and praise for the military and security forces,
including the still disgraced police and caches world.
Egypt was under threat by a coalition of Freemason's, Hezbollah, Hamas, Israel, the European Union and NATO.
Why? Why do you need to ask, you know, caches lunatic TV show.
It was self-evident that any foreign power would want to destroy Egypt just because it was Egypt or caches.
Clownish monologues were mercilessly mocked in November and December 2011.
But by the middle of 2012, he had become a symbolic lodestone for a growing backlash against the revolution,
not just from shadowy dead enders from the Mubarak era who were said to be financing a wide
range of provocateurs but from a broad swath of the middle and working class of Egyptians.
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.
And our cash is hyper nationalistic. Conspiracy mongering was consistent with Sisi and the elite military cadres that he represented.
Sisi comes across much more queerly in Arabic than he does in the relatively bland foreign journalistic coverage of his regime.
One doesn't need to scratch very far below the surface of Sisi to find his inner okasha.
One recalls that Sisi was Donald Trump's favourite dictator. Perhaps one bullshitter,
which is to say a trickster politician coming from outside the governing system and making it all up as he goes recognisers another.
It may seem broadly plausible that a true crisis, a collapsed economy, for example,
or a revolution can function as the midwife to forms of politics that might
have been considered deviant in whatever past for normal prior to the crisis,
or to put it differently,
that a smashed political system creates a fluid situation that permits a point of entry for outsiders to enter and influence a reconstituted system.
But this doesn't explain why our current moment in history is so replete with ascendant right wing politicians,
some of whom are intelligible as Trickster's or possibly many of the Populists or Trickster's.
If what we mean by populists is someone who reaches over or outside of a functioning political system to appeal
directly to the masses in ways that would have previously been dismissed as impossible or illegitimate.
After every lecture that I have given on trickster politics,
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.
That might be pushing the point too far.
One might instead focus on the phenomenon of conspiracy theories and ask, why do they have so much traction these days?
Conspiracy theories are trickster tales that don't necessarily have an identifiable author.
The point is that suddenly they're being taken seriously.
More than a dozen Republican House and Senate candidates in the 2020 election espoused belief in something called KUIN on
a collection of conspiracy theories claiming that the world is run by a global cabal of Satan worshipping paedophiles.
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.
But it would be a mistake to think that there's something new about these trickster tales that we call conspiracy theories.
What is unusual is that they're being taken seriously and not in the context of an existential crisis like a revolution.
Read Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style in American Politics.
It contextualises Barry Goldwater's nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 1964,
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.
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,
it was always there. But most of the time it didn't matter that much.
Now it attracts attention and adherents in American presidential elections.
But beyond the US, it's strongly tied to an authoritarian impulse that is global India, Turkey, Russia, Egypt, Hungary, Italy, Poland,
the United Kingdom and the United States,
all nominally liberal electoral democracies that are either flirting with or plunging deeply into authoritarianism.
Why? Why now? What I'm suggesting and I know this is shameless speculation,
but I promised my colleagues that I would do this or that my lecture wouldn't be exclusively about Egypt.
Why is it that much of the world lives in a state of structured liminality?
Or more accurately, a form of un closeable liminality or limbo, an uncomfortable feeling of being stuck in a transition that never gets completed?
One might also describe this as a structural crisis. Capitalism is the primary agent of the structured crisis.
It always was predicated on economic expansion to function.
It requires new resources, higher productivity, inevitably shifting requirements for labour and often pressure to reduce labour costs.
New markets for surplus production. The effect of capitalism was always anti stability.
As Marx said in the Communist Manifesto, all that is solid melts into air.
In a capitalist order, this lack of solidity and the economic system was mitigated in two ways.
First, through Germany, which is often understood in everyday language, is simply domination.
But Marxists most most famously gramme. She linked it to value systems which produced domination by consent of the dominated.
It works by linking together two things which are incommensurate with each other.
In this case, the inherent instability of an expansionist economic system linked to the most conservative social values,
patrimonial ism, patriotism, tradition and religion.
For example, properly functioning Germany is actually characterised by relative absence of overt violence applied by the state.
One might argue that the hegemonic ideologies that underpin capitalism have been steadily breaking down, always in localised ways.
But the global trend toward greater use of violence by states is unmistakeable as hegemonic illusions break down populations
that had seen themselves as protected from the instabilities that endless capitalist expansion experience increasing precarity.
This has nothing to do with actual poverty, which varies tremendously from one country to another.
Nobody can argue that rates of actual poverty in the US are comparable to poverty in Egypt or the Sudan or Morocco.
The middle classes of all of these places may empirically be better off in some ways now than they were a generation ago.
Yet all of them share the sense of precarity that comes with the implicit dealmaking of enduring values with an inherently unstable economic system.
A second way of mitigating capitalism's inherent instabilities was through protection
afforded by the state protections nominally given to all citizens of the nation state.
But in practise, often given differentially to certain citizens and not to others.
But since the 1970s, the protective umbrella of most states has steadily shrunk.
Structural explanations of revolutions in. The Arab world almost always focus on neo liberalism, liberal in the sense of the liberalised,
privatised economy, and Neo in the sense that prior to the 1970s,
states were assumed to have a rightful role in organising economies for the benefit of all citizens
rather than for the benefit of those who control the greatest proportion of capital and property.
The withdrawal of protection to an increasing proportion of citizens within a given nation state feeds into the erosion of the
hegemony that long made capitalism seem like a thing of solidity rather than a continual melting of material certainties into the air.
Hence, we may feel plunged into revolutionary limbo even when no revolution has taken place.
I won't elaborate at greater length. My goal is more to provoke questions than to give answers in such a brief presentation.
But I do want to return to the Arab world to crisis as a driver of authoritarianism that
extends far beyond the region and which helps to do exceptional ize the dictatorship
syndrome that allow a swinish proposes and to the pandemic that I see as a kind of
half crisis which deepens the limbo in which we've all been living for some time.
Our initial passage into lockdown last March was, for me, a transition accompanied at first by a sense of community tasks.
I can only speak for myself. I know that for others, the experience was simply one of dread.
For me, it was dreadful. And yet it wasn't. My neighbourhood swiftly set up support networks for those who had to self isolate.
There was a sense of camaraderie of we're all in this together, even though,
of course the actual experience was utterly different for those who could seamlessly move work online
and others who had to continue staffing stores and other essential services or making deliveries,
all sorts of people stayed in touch to see how it was doing. I did the same friends sent me clever jokes, Meems,
and videos of ballet dancers performing magical feats in their apartments or at least in someone's palatial apartments.
I baked banana bread and discovered that half the world was doing the same.
Friends in Egypt sent me similar reports and lots more funny lockdown jokes.
And Meems. I've heard that there were suspicions that Egypt's coded statistics were artificially suppressed and
that there may have been and may still be lots more infections than the official statistics suggest.
But other friends had friends who were doctors, and they reported that indeed there didn't seem to be that much.
Koven There was no crisis in Egypt because of Cauvin.
Still other friends, however, indicated that Kofod lockdown's were exacerbating economic woes for unskilled workers who had no access to inflation,
resistent hard currency,
the government and prison doctors who questioned official statistics and continued imprisoning anyone else suspected of anti-government thoughts.
But there was nothing startlingly new in any of this. The same thing seemed to be happening approximately throughout the region.
Iran has a KOVA disaster to the east, to the north. Italy has a COVA disaster.
But thus far, the Arab world has either dodged the Koven bullet or denied reality at an official level and done it collectively.
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.
These crises continue to sustain authoritarians in both illiberal democracies
and in states that barely pretended that elections in parliaments mattered.
And Europe and the U.S., the pattern was more reminiscent of Egypt's revolutionary experience.
First came the exuberance of communities.
As I've already mentioned, along with the communities, I encountered many speculative thoughts about how to benefit from the crisis,
with the streets suddenly devoid of traffic and the smog clearing. It was said to be an ideal time to reboot environmental initiatives.
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.
Koven would increase the legitimacy of investments in public health care and
tipped society towards a form of participatory socialism or for easy jack.
It would give humanity the beneficial effect of communism.
The pandemic would be Europe's Chernobyl disaster that revealed the decadence of the system, thereby hastening its downfall.
All such speculation was in the mould of. We can never go back to the way it was before.
A phrase I heard often in Egypt in 2012 when the revolution was suffering one setback after another.
The postrevolutionary future.
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.
But one thing is very clear. The beautiful bond of community task is long gone.
We entered into Corona virus limbo some time ago.
Only a crisis. Actual, actual or perceived produces real change.
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.
Way back in 2019,
when we were in the throes of a structured limbo that was already fertile ground for all manner of populists and their trickster tales.
That's it. That's my presentation. Thank you very much indeed, Walter.
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,
but actually the current Koven situation. We're a. That made me begin to think in different ways.
But it came at Liminality. I'm also struck our member you talking to me 15 years ago about this figure called Healthy Okasha.
And I thought he was quite a colourful,
quite quirky figure and imagined he was just some sort of product of the sort of the peripheries of Egyptian politics.
But as you said, suddenly Tawfiq Okasha seems much more familiar 15 years on in all sorts of alarming ways.
But then you got tenure. So I've been 10 years, Michael. Oh, you talked about him before the revolution.
I remember you telling me. Well, you know, I only discovered him in late 2001.
Right. I thought it was done. They were back when they all covered him and he was a nobody before them.
Well, thank you. My memory suddenly it based on me very early on before he became known.
But thank you. We have some time for questions. You have the opportunity to ask questions if you notice in your.
If you look on Zoom, there's a Q and A button on your bazooms screen.
If you have a question for Wolter, please press that button and type it in.
And my colleague Eugene Rogan is there collating those questions. And I see what we've got already have a number coming in.
So we have about just over 20 minutes for questions before we have to finish at six o'clock sharp.
So I'm going to hand over to to Eugene for some questions for Walter.
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.
It's fun to see some of our alumni. I'd like to reach out. Say hi to Leonard Wood and Martin Buntin.
I notice you guys have been regulars. It's good to have you back along with all of our other alumni.
And the questions are pouring in fast and furiously.
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.
Walter, a sama's question is, does the view that figures like Trump RACC are Trickster's risk is writing off the significant
sectors of society that actually support these figures as naive or unintelligent?
Can we think of our fellow citizens in more respectable terms?
Or is there actually something to be said about the ancient Greek antipathy for democracy as ruled by the mob?
Yet democratic accountability seems to be so obviously more desirable than the forms of dictatorship down in the Middle East at the moment.
How might we aspire to a level headed assessment of democracy while engendering
for it the sort of enthusiasm necessary to help unseat dictatorship in the region?
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?
So a whole host of issues around the trickster and the citizen trying to pick that force?
Walter. I'll try. There's a very long question. First one.
I certainly don't mean to write off. Audiences or people who follow Trickster's or to suggest that they're stupid,
what I'm trying to ask is why people pay attention to them sometimes and other times they're always there.
But people don't necessarily care about them. So I don't think it's a matter of the audience somehow being gullible.
I do think that social media plays a role in amplifying trickster politics.
But I think that the kind of structured insecurity that so many people feel is is more important than
they than the the technical aspects of the way social media kind of reproduce these trickster tales,
which which are conspiracy theories. And it's not just.
Politicians who are playing the role of tricksters in this case,
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.
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.
I don't see the problem is necessarily that people are being duped.
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.
And so if you want to bring back democratic norms,
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.
Thanks, Walter. Another attendee puts the question,
how do you see the ambivalent group who neither opposes the regime nor supports
it during the revolution and their attitudes towards political tricksters?
Maybe from the perspective of Liminality.
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.
At first. Grudgingly.
In favour of the revolution, or at least not openly against it.
But as the period of instability went on and the feeling of insecurity grew.
Eventually that solidified very much against it and ended up being, in many cases,
actually active supporters of the coup, not just passive supporters, but at least passive supporters.
But yes, of course, there are people who who just sit and watch.
And in any case, in any in any revolution and in any political system,
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.
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.
Who are somewhere in the middle waiting to see which way to go.
Our student, Frederica Brocco, then obviously inspired by you talking about baking bread out of bread during lockdown.
Wanted to know whether you'd identified any Trickster's during the pandemic in the Middle East to
North Africa during the past few months as the pandemic given rise to a new trickster phenomenon.
Not now, as far as I can tell. I mean, the effect of the pandemic.
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.
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.
And so, you know, the answer is, is no.
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.
You know,
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,
because I keep hearing from people saying that, you know,
I have a friend who's a doctor and they say, no, in fact, the hospitals are not being overwhelmed.
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.
So, you know, there may be something going on somewhere else that I am unaware of.
But in Egypt, I mean, you know, the problem is in Egypt was already in a state of crisis.
And as I was trying to hint at the end of my lecture.
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.
Another attendee clearly latching on to your and wait for Michael, I'm going to pronounce this correctly titled Apocalypso.
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.
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?
Well, I think it's possible for limbo to become durable and, you know, I guess if it becomes durable,
then people have to cope with it, which is what people have been doing. I mean, you know, in my view, the you know,
the reason the trickster politicians have become so successful and that conspiracy
theories are threading is precisely that people are already living in a durable,
structured sense of limbo. And, you know, for it to be limbo, I think.
People can never become fully comfortable in it, but they can become habituated to it,
that they can be living in a state in which they have no choice but to deal with it to to substantially extent.
People all over the world have been doing just that.
Your reform reflection on conspiracy theories is Segway is very nice to Richard make pieces question.
He writes of his own recollections of Egypt in the nineteen nineties that there was always a deep attachment to conspiracy theories.
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.
It seemed practically to a fixed characteristic of Egyptian society, along with political jokes and mistrust of LRM the newspaper.
So how is that to be explained?
I mean, it doesn't seem like it's necessarily a little bit of a phenomenon that can actually happen in times of fixity.
Well, then there is a small literature on conspiracy theories in the Middle East.
And one way that conspiracy theories that the prevalence of conspiracy theories in the Arab world has been explained is that
people who who lack access to information are more likely to ask those kinds of questions of who benefits from something.
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,
an anthropologist at Catholic University in Washington, who wrote quite interesting article about conspiracy theory.
And he said he was interested in social media and in his view of social media, suddenly made access to.
To real information. More possible for the Middle East than had been during the 1970s, 1980s.
Of course, now we look at social media quite differently now.
I mean, when when the revolution happened in Egypt, social media was supposed to be a mighty engine of truth.
And the lies of the regime could no longer be successful because people to get access to other information from outside.
And so we had all of this nonsense about Facebook and Twitter revolutions.
Of course, now it's it's turned 180 degrees the other way. You know, it's all fake news.
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.
And, you know, say again, I think people are susceptible precisely because they don't feel they feel in some way precarious,
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
think we should exoticism them as being strictly a feature of the Middle East.
And I was trying to make this point by bringing up Richard Hofstadter's book and is kind of tour back in American
history all the way to the 18th century suggests that conspiracy theories were a consistent part of American culture.
But again, the question is, why are they important sometimes and not important?
At other times? And they are more important now than there have been at any other time in history.
And so, you know, that's what we need to be looking at. Happy enough.
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
phenomenon as those who might have said this was a feature of Middle Eastern politics,
a little humbled now and aware that our own societies are all too susceptible to that easier way of of being manipulated.
But let me go back to the questions, Walter. I'm an audience.
Do you recall if you didn't if you don't wish to add your name, said that just Mark Anonymous.
And I've got a number of people who mark this is anonymous. If I see your name next, your question and I will.
I will mention you by name. So one of our other attendees has said one quality of trickster politicians would seem to be,
please correct me if I'm wrong to at least appear to be the underdog.
An element of rebelliousness and a position ality, regardless of how tightly connected to demonic power they really are.
Do you think being in power as opposed to being part of the opposition affects the way trickster politicians operate?
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.
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.
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,
which then becomes consolidated and turns into something else, essentially becomes institutionalised.
It's difficult for Trickster's to institutionalise their politics.
Well, because they're making it up as they go there, they're outsiders, a trickster is an outsider.
Somebody comes into the system who, you know, is not necessarily a creature of the system.
But of course, it's entirely possible the trickster could, you know, could become would become the system, become institutionalised.
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,
introduces a kind of sea change in the nature of a political system that then becomes durable.
And I'll just call this schism agenesis, as you know,
since the introduction of a new cultural form that had been considered monstrous before, which then becomes a permanent part of culture.
We have a question now from Hannah s.E.C and Hannah, it's wonderful to see you.
She starts the questions tonight so I could read the whole thing. Walter. Walter, that was brilliant.
Thank you, Eugene. It's absolutely wonderful to see you. Great to see you, too, Hannah.
And by the way, congratulations on the Malcolm Kurr. You've done us all proud.
My question says, Hannah, how do you understand the relationship between Liminality Alec Goffman or Van
Ganna grinding down initiations to naked newborn or even a kind of ground zero?
You describe to Graham she's inventory of traces and essentially the idea that our personality and experience are always historical,
always socially and historically constituted. Well, my question.
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,
the sort of the you know, the cultural archives, the political archives that people have, you know, isn't necessarily going to disappear.
It's at the point of entry into Liminality that that the kind of level process happens.
And if there isn't a conventionalised way of getting out of it and the and the condition of liminality becomes protracted,
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.
But it doesn't. Of course, it doesn't disappear.
And and what happens when people get, you know, sort of in this extended period of liminality, which I referred to is as limbo.
Limbo is different than the initial entry into Liminality as they start to take sides.
That's what happened in the revolution. You take you take sides by reaching back into stuff that you already know and the stuff
that you already knew might be presented to you in a different form than it was before.
But you still have a degree of familiarity with it and the ability to, you know,
to act in ways that can hopefully bring about an end to this intolerable state of limbo.
One from our student future sulcus who asks who's more important or powerful,
the government or the Trickster's keeping the insanity or dysfunction of the government palatable to the population?
Who needs who in this case? Yeah. That's also a good question.
And the Trickster's don't act on their own. I mean, they may act as kind of loose cannons.
Duffy Okasha was a loose cannon. I mean, he was working for military intelligence,
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.
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.
People in the background, institutions, wealthy, powerful forces that are trying to ride the wave of trickster ism for their own ends.
I mean, in the case of the United States, look at the Republican Party. You don't have to look any further.
I mean, you know, this is a longstanding institution that initially said, you know,
all of the things you would expect about Donald Trump is a oh, my God, he's vulgar.
You know, he's horrible. Know, we can't possibly allow this man to become president.
And yet, you know, they ended up using each other.
Of course, most of the stuff that Donald Trump did when he was president, he could never possibly have dreamed up himself.
It was the Republican Party. It was, you know, a very solid institution, you know,
with people who understood the way the government worked in ways that Donald Trump never could have.
They took advantage of him. The trickster doesn't make you know.
It doesn't make institutions go away. That's for sure. But that leads to Delila Hood, Ben's question concerning Egypt.
How do you interpret the later dismissal of Towfiq Akasha? Well, good to hear from you, Julio.
It's been a while, but, well, it's because I mean,
my view is because this is a trickster and he couldn't have another trickster around on the scene making trouble for him.
My my understanding of C.C. is that he also is a kind of trickster politician and
he may be a good example of a trickster politician who manages to become durable.
You know, he's still there and perhaps developing, you know,
alliances and birder's to actually want the government in ways that haven't been running before.
But that would be my answer to your question, is that Sisi was a bigger trickster than our Cashen.
And when the time came, they threw him overboard.
Some are current show. He is weighing in with a couple of questions with regards to alternatives.
Well, I'm weary of the very broad sweep of the comparison of different waves of populist tricksters.
Doesn't a history of authoritarianism make a difference? Think of Egypt and Turkey and also of Russia.
OK, I'm not sure I understand the question. Good to hear from you, Sam.
So does a history of authoritarianism make a difference in the ways in which populist or Trickster's emerge onto the historical stage?
Well. I mean, authoritarianism is one kind of government.
As I said earlier, it you know, you can't say that every authoritarian is a trickster.
And so you could very easily have an authoritarian system, which, of course, Egypt had throughout its.
Post-colonial history. Which could be taken over and brought in, taken in different directions by a trickster politician.
Coming into coming into an already existing authoritarian.
System. And and, you know, introducing what?
Introducing ways of operating that would have been considered Devean before.
But possibly those becoming variables when we have time for one last question,
if I can get a brief answer from you and then we'll hand over to Michael to bring the evening to a close.
But the last question goes to Nate George, who thanks you for a great talk.
It says, Walter, you make clear the relationship between structural crises and strictures, which is very helpful.
But do you have any thoughts about the relationship between Trickster's and counter-revolutionary politics?
One thing that's clear about those you mentioned is that all these figures explicitly advocated against are perhaps more rational,
revolutionary alternative. So is there a link to be drawn between Trickster's and counter-revolutionary politics?
Well, I would say it's a link between Trickster's and the far right.
I mean, I've given lectures on this in the past. Many people say, what could you have a left wing trickster?
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,
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,
if what you mean by revolution is is revolution that begins with progressive and tense coming from the left, basically.
Which I think most revolutions. More or less arm.
Then naturally, the opposition to him, the kind of revolution is going to be a backlash from the right.
But I think that looking over at the larger and the longer trickster scape, these are.
Creatures of the right. At this particular moment in history, I think it's entirely possible that they're learning from each other.
And of course, they add they know all the authoritarian potential tricksters in the world had Donald Trump for four years
to to look at and get inspiration and perhaps learn some new ways to operate in their own political terrain.
Revolutionary do the same thing. You know, they they learn from each other.
You know, from what I've heard about the situation in Algeria from Michael.
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.
I think I'd better the same things about the Sudan. I don't know. It's been quite successful.
So, you know, everybody who's involved in politics. Naturally always has their eyes on.
Other people's political experiences and are trying to learn from them. Thank you, Walter.
Unfortunately, our hour is now up and I apologise to those people who still wanted to ask questions.
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.
I just want to ask you to thank Walter again for a wonderful lecture.
It's taken this from Egypt to Trump to Kove, it to banana bread.
In less than an hour. Thank you very much for some fascinating observations.
It's made me think about a lot of different things in a connected way.
So thank you very much, Walter. Thank you very much to all of you attended.
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.
Thank you very much. And good night and have a lovely weekend. Thanks to everyone.