Foucault in Tahrir Square: Discourse Analysis & The Social Construction of Crowd - Couverture souple
Synopsis
The way in which the crowd is constructed has been shown to be the site of power struggles between the status quo and political change. However, there is little qualitative research on how crowd members construct their experiences of participation in crowd activity. This study examines how the crowd in the Tahrir square sit-in during the 2011 Egyptian revolution was constructed by crowd members themselves. Based on semi-structured interviews with five Egyptian demonstrators regarding their experiences of this sit-in, a Foucauldian discourse analysis indicated that crowd members were subject to a set of discourses that served to normalise or problematise the crowd by constructing its processes as either compatible or problematic compared with the values of the neoliberal agenda respectively. Drawing on Foucault’s ideas on governmentality, the discursive repertoires available to crowd members were shown to regulate the ways in which they constructed their subjectivity and social action, governing their conduct in line with the neoliberal ideal of the autonomous, responsible individual. It was shown that in constructing crowd self-regulatory practices, crowd members legitimised or resisted techniques of social control internal to the crowd that limited their ability to bring about political change.
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