Lisa Wedeen - Authoritarian Apprehensions (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning)

CHICAGO STUDIES IN PRACTICES OF MEANING

A series edited by Andreas Glaeser, William Mazzarella, William H. Sewell Jr., Kaushik Sunder Rajan, and Lisa Wedeen

Published in collaboration with the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory

http://ccct.uchicago.edu

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Lisa Wedeen

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

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The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

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2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65057-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65060-9 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-65074-6 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226650746.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wedeen, Lisa, author.

Title: Authoritarian apprehensions : ideology, judgment, and mourning in Syria / Lisa Wedeen.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Series: Chicago studies in practices of meaning | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019006643 | ISBN 9780226650579 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226650609 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226650746 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: SyriaHistoryCivil War, 2011

Classification: LCC DS98.6 .W43 2019 | DDC 956.9104/23dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006643

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Sofia Fenner

When I returned to Syria in 2010 after an absence of over a decade, I was surprised to see how much had changedand how much remained familiar. I intended to write a book that grappled with the seeming emergence of a kinder, gentler version of autocracy under president Bashar al-Asad (2000). Among the issues I envisaged exploring were the forms of generational change that were both a product and a driver of market openings; the new aesthetic imaginaries of everyday life accompanying the marked embrace of consumption and departure from Soviet-era styles of insularity and asceticism; and the palpable support Bashar seemed to be garnering from communities that had hitherto withheld it from the regime, including former dissidents, artists, urban professionals, and members of the clergy. Then came the uprising in Tunisia, registering grievances and animating hopes for the end of tyrannies throughout the Arab world, inspiring subsequent large-scale protests in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Bahrainand Syria. I was still in Damascus when the uprising began in March 2011, leaving only toward the end of May, by which time indications of the regimes intransigence and the troubles besetting multiple oppositions had already become too glaring to ignore.

Authoritarian Apprehensions is the book that resulted. It remains keyed to my initial interests in authoritarian resilience and political change, abiding concerns to political scientists, while also exploring important issues currently under debate in political theory and anthropology. Focused from the outset on the complexities of ideological uptake and the processes of recruitment into what I had decided (pre-uprising) to call Syrias neoliberal autocracy, the book became increasingly inflected by the extraordinary rush of eventsfirst by the revolutionary exhilaration of the initial days of unrest and then by the devastating violence that with terrible speed shattered hopes of any quick undoing of dictatorship.

The books ideas thus speak to my decades-long engagement with Syria and Syrians, even as my expectations were also being transformed by unanticipated circumstances on the ground. Among the eye-opening aspects of doing fieldwork in such tumultuous times was the remarkable divergence in political views I encountered about what should/could be done. From friends, acquaintances, family members, colleagues, and interviewees, I heard people speaking out in favor of the immediate toppling of the regime, and others declaring persisting love for the leader. In between I found a range of opinion and emotion, experienced by people in moments of intensified excitement, anxiety, humor, anger, fear, and euphoria. The book registers my admiration for those who dared from the start to envision alternatives to the status quo and act in that spirit. As a social scientist attempting to understand what was quickly becoming a tragedy, I also benefited from interactions with Syrians who did not boldly take to the streets: the so-called gray people (al-ramadiyyin), the many who spent the heady early days of the uprising shifting between their desires for reform and their attachment to order. We will see in how the presence of this ambivalent middle proved critical at key moments to regime survival, affording the regime the latitude needed to recalibrate its relationship to rule.

As some readers know, my first book, Ambiguities of Domination (1999 [2015]), explored the transparently bogus rituals of obeisance characterizing the autocracy under Bashar al-Asads father, Hafiz (19702000). My argument in that book was that the blatantly fictitious official rhetoric of the time operated as a means not of cultivating belief or emotional commitment but of specifying the form and content of civic obedience. Beyond the barrel of the gun and the confines of the torture chamber, as I put it then, Asads personality cult served as a disciplinary device, generating a politics of public dissimulation in which citizens acted as if they revered their leader. By inundating daily life with instructive symbolism, the regime exercised a subtle yet effective form of power. The cult worked to enforce obedience, induce complicity, atomize Syrians from one another, and establish the guidelines for public speech and action. Even when citizens kept their ironical distance, even when they demonstrated that they

Evidence of the distanced, irreverent attitude adopted by most Syrians toward regime rhetoric was everywhere to be seen under the elder Asad. Satirical cartoons, underground (and permitted) comedy skits, and discreetly shared jokes constantly poked fun at the regimes official claims to omnipotence in ways that laid bare the ambiguities of political domination and the incomplete but nevertheless potent effects of autocratic social control. Ambiguities remain under the son, of course, but this book focuses not on the chinks in domination but on the complexities of political attachment. As the ruling Bath Party relinquished its monopoly over the form, content, and dissemination of public discourse during the first decade under Bashar al-Asad, it became newly difficult in Syria to know for certain what even counted officially as support. Gone were the excessively clear guidelines for acceptable civic conduct. In their place stood an invitation to a different kind of attachment where the tether was not so much political prudence as commodified desire.