Aesthetics and ethics of the square: street, media and sharing

Abstract

This paper, which focuses on the city of Cairo and the forms of sectarian coexistence, seeks to understand the Arab Spring based on the reading of an ethics and an aesthetics constructed and constituted in the very course of the revolutionary process. Its purpose, rather than just explaining the events which had recently unfolded in some of the countries of the so-called “Middle East,” is to reflect on the meanings and disputes, the desires and demands evoked there. In this context, spatiality is an element of fundamental importance. The assumption underlying this paper is that spaces of sharing, in which conflicts and contracts merge, make up an aesthetics/ethics that is the sum of a desire and a need. The theoretical approach, based on aspects underscored by post-colonialist reflections and by the so-called “Cultural Arab Studies,” leads us to the idea that the street, a space of sharing in the Arab context, can be a theoretical operator that contributes to the understanding of a political practice whose logic does not exclude conflict and does not deny the need to find ways of coexistence. This is the practice that is seen both in a symbol-image, broadcast by Al Jazeera, and in the very occupation of Tahrir Square.