Beyond Words: Non-Dialogical Public Reason in (Post) Revolutionary Tunisia

The Takhayyul Project welcomes one of its scholars, Dr Charis Boutieri, for a special seminar at the IGP, exploring the imaginative forces at play in the politics of post-revolutionary Tunisia.

Abstract

In the widely demonized municipality of Ettadhamun, the heavy hand of Zin al Abidine Ben Ali’s police state was partly lifted in 2011 to be replaced by the softer touch of international democracy promotion aid. This aid architecture supported the burgeoning civil society to train Ettadhamun residents in the skill of ‘interpersonal communication’ (tawasul bayna al-afrad) for the purpose of managing social conflict. Yet the members of the only non-religious association in the neighbourhood of Nogra rebut the liberal recommendations of their trainers and carve out a tense neighbourhood co-presence without dialogue with their Salafist neighbours.

Counter-intuitively to deliberative theories of democracy, I suggest that in this non-dialogical co-presence inheres a public sphere with social and political possibilities. Neighbourhood residents trade liberal argumentation for dwelling together beyond words, which does not attempt to reform one another and engenders solidarity. The suspension of dialogue reflects a minoritarian articulation of the aftermath of the 2011 revolution as “the reconstitutive phase of the political” (Zemni 2015). This articulation refuses the curated narrative of the postcolonial Tunisian nation and pries open the teleology of liberal democratic transition.

About the speakers

Charis Boutieri is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at King’s College London. She is the author of Learning in Morocco: Language Politics and the Abandoned Educational Dream (Indiana Un Press, 2016) and associate editor of the Journal of North African Studies. Since 2013, Charis has been conducting ethnographic research in Tunisia, mapping out and interrogating the diverse and often contradictory experiences of democracy on the ground.