In 2011, revolutions across North Africa, especially in Tunisia and Egypt, transformed the situation in the region but also, I would argue, worldwide. For the long-standing autocracies in those countries had been supported by the West, especially the United States, because of their presumed strategic value, first, in the Cold War, and then in the global counterinsurgency post-2001. The revolutions not only broke this forty-year-old stasis; they showed how one might create a new countervisuality by blending old and new tactics into a new network. If Algeria's own situation remains less changed, one can nonetheless see an end to the 19- year state of emergency. In short, just as visuality was a technique of colonization, best studied in the plantation or the (neo)colony, so countervisuality has been and continues to be shaped and reconfigured there.

In Egypt, in particular, the demonstration, the long-standing expression of the right to be seen and the expression of the people as a political subject, was reconfigured into a new form of public expression. Given that its best-known form was in Tahrir Square, I want to call this modality of countervisuality "Tahrir," which means "liberation" in Arabic. "Tahrir" is both a physical occupation of space and its transformation from public patriarchy to collective care. For after a series of mass demonstrations beginning January 25, 2011,  from the dictatorship after a pitched battle in the streets on January 29.


This symbolic takeover became permanent as they decided to occupy the square as the means of amplifying pressure on Hosni Mubarak, the autocratic President of Egypt for over thirty years. Aware that a critical test of the locus of authority was underway, the Egyptian Army, mainstay of Mubarak's regime for so many years, abstained. Mubarak's security police attempted to regain the square with a bizarre charge of camels and horses. Each attempt failed and Mubarak was forced to resign, leading to his appearance in court, on corruption charges, in August 2011. In the space of weeks, autocracies in Tunisia and Egypt of decades standing were brought down. In Algeria, the fear of the Islamic groups led the middle-classes to continue to side with the Army, but the 19-year-old state of emergency was ended.

This was no "velvet" revolution: over 840 people were killed and many more were wounded, often seriously. In proportion to population, this is a similar death toll to that of 9-11 in the United States. What made Tahrir different was certainly not, then, this test of strength. Rather, it was the insistence that, despite these provocations, the revolution would remain "peaceful." The square became a space of care: centering on the long-forbidden public debates and discussions, the care of others ranged from health care for the wounded, to cooking, and even cleaning of the public space. Mubarak had claimed to be the "father" of Egypt and repeated this claim in his TV broadcasts during the emergency, to be met with jeers and sarcasm. The "children," meaning the anonymous mass population of Egypt, had grown up: not by biological maturation but by a self-emancipation from tutelage. There was a widespread sense that the people had first set aside fear and next taken responsibility. This responsibility included such duties as not jumping queues, not taking or offering bribes, not harassing women and not littering. It even was suggested that drivers might obey the traffic regulations, unheard of in Cairo.

In On Heroes, Carlyle claimed that the "Tradition" of heroic visuality enlarged and clarified the authority of the hero or autocrat. My suggestion is that the "square" became a similar mode of projection for the countervisuality embodied by the revolutionary crowd.

Whereas Carlyle's enlarger drew on the past, however, this form takes the present and projects into a different future than that currently envisaged, and makes it seem real and realistic. The revolutionary awareness of the power of this form has been shown both in the popular slogan "We know the way to Tahrir" and in the determination of the Egyptian Army to drive out all forms of protest, most recently on August 1, 2011. The "square" was adopted as a form across the region from Bahrain to Tel-Aviv and has been imitated in Madrid, London and Madison, Wisconsin, to name just a few places.

Regardless of how events transpire in Egypt, the emergence of "Tahrir" as a form of countervisuality has established three critical precepts:

• the binary established by "Algeria" in 1991 and now axiomatic in counterinsurgency that the only choice is between autocracy and radical Islam is false.
• the long-standing Orientalist cliché that "they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented" is equally false.
  
• the neo-colony has formulated the democratic response to counterinsurgency.

The last transformation removed the authority from autocracy and has plunged global counterinsurgency into crisis. Indeed, at the time of writing, politics in the developed nations appears entirely unable to contain or even limit finance capital, despite the crash of 2008. Visuality matters. Power that has no authority finds itself on trial (Egypt), or dealing with popular disorder in the streets (London), or having its sovereign debt downgraded by a palpably incompetent ratings agency (US). More than this, even, visuality is now visible as such. What "Tahrir" tells is that the militarized authority of the post-war period that continues to assert "move on, there's nothing to see here," is set against that right to look which not only invents the other (and is invented by that other) but cares for them. In developed nations, this has become palpable as "austerity" versus "entitlement," or, to put it more precisely, the market versus the social.

Choose carefully.

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