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Between the Ordinary Individual and the Protesting Crowd: Notes on Mohamed Bouazizi Suman Gupta, The Open University UK (Suman.Gupta@open.ac.uk) September 2013

In 2010, between hours of working as a technician of practical knowledge, I happened to be reading and writing about crowds and political protest. The physical crowd that agglomerates in protest against a political and economic regime has generally been understood as a sort of organic collective with a distinctive psyche, in many ways the opposite of the ordinary individuals. The trend was set by the anti-revolutionary and antidemocratic Gustave Le Bon (1896), when he declared that the crowd is that which acquires a collective presence as opposed to an individual one and which forms a single being, and is subjected to the law of mental unity of crowds1. Those who have considered the protesting crowd since, even from ideological positions utterly contrary to Le Bons, have generally accepted the discontinuity between the ordinary individual and the protesting crowd. Where researchers have disaggregated the protesting crowd in terms of class interests and ideological alignments therein, the ordinary individual has nevertheless been kept at bay, particularly insofar as the politics of protest goes. If individuals are acknowledged in relation to protesting crowds, that is only as charismatic leaders or popular heroes and villains or World Historical figures (anything but ordinary). My thinking about the politics of protesting crowds in 2010 was accordingly in purely collectivized terms, composed of ordinary individuals but somehow in a discontinuous and even opposed relationship to ordinary individuality. The beginnings of the movement for change in Tunisia in December 2010, and its extraordinary momentum and spread across North Africa and the Middle East, called for pause. Momentarily, an opportunity seemed to be offered to reconsider the potency of protesting crowds via the act of an ordinary individual. It seemed possible to find a continuous conceptual line from the ordinary individual to the protesting crowd. This essay is about the possibility.

Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Kitchener: Batoshe Books, 2001, p.13.

However, three years have passed since and there has been no summer after the so-called Arab Spring, and it seems increasingly doubtful whether the so-called revolutions were revolutions at all. That too needs to be understood: perhaps the possibilities opened up after Bouazizis suicide came with automatic counter-revolutionary mechanisms. Leading up to Bouazizis Self-Immolation An ordinary individual can spur a protesting crowd into being, and the protesting crowd is composed of ordinary individuals. It has been widely reported than an ordinary individual sparked the waves of protest in North Africa and the Middle East since December 2010. The bare outline of the events in question can be gleaned from numerous newspaper reports which agree with each other to varying degrees. Heres the individual: Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26 year old vegetable vendor who plied his trade from a cart for seven years in the town of Sidi Bouzid (population around 40,000) in Tunisia, and was breadwinner for a family of eight. On 17 December 2010 he was accosted by a municipal official, Feyda Hamdi, accompanied by policemen, who demanded to see his trading permit (it is unclear whether a vendor with a cart needed one). Bouazizi didnt have one, but was well acquainted with police harassment and offered to pay a fine. However, Hamdi confiscated his scales and allegedly assaulted him according to some versions she slapped him, spat at him, and shouted abuse about his deceased father, in others it was her associates who beat him. Naturally aggrieved, Bouazizi went to the Governors office to complain. Here he was disregarded though he threatened to kill himself if he wasnt heard. Bouazizi left and returned before the Governors office within an hour with a can of gasoline, doused and set himself on fire. He was taken to hospital with third degree burns. Protesting crowds started gathering in Sidi Bouzid soon after the incident, and gatherings gradually spread across the country. Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, president since 1987, launched an investigation into these events and visited Bouazizi in hospital on 28 December 2010 amidst the growing and obdurate appearance of crowds demanding his immediate departure from office. Bouazizi died on 4 January 2011. Ben Ali was ousted by 14 January 2011 and had to take refuge in Saudi Arabia, while an interim caretaker government was formed with Fouad Mebazaa as acting president. A pattern of protesting crowds gathering and demanding regime change had evolved in the interim to that I return in due course.

Reporters tried at the time to get to the personal story behind this account, to tease out the personality of the ordinary individual who committed a most effective act of suicide. The personal story has had little purchase and Bouazizi eventually became the more or less faceless street vendor who sparked the so-called Arab Spring. But the attempt was initially made; homing in on personal stories in reporting large-scale conflict is a standard media frame it provokes sentimental readership and inflates and sells news, and tends to deflect critical attention from social contradictions. So, Mohamed Bouazizis mother and sister (photographed holding a picture of him) were quoted, and so were his acquaintances and neighbours, fairly prolifically. His educational qualifications were investigated, and his working circumstances and previous encounters with the police. The tragedy of the ordinary life cut short violently, the grief of his loved ones, his unrecorded suffering before the burning climax the possibilities of the life story, close up, individual, were exploited to some degree. And yet, the effort was half-hearted to begin with and swept to the margins by ever wider agglomerations of protesting crowds. Interestingly, the more one tries, in retrospect, to get close to the individual Mohamed Bouazizi as he drifted towards the scorching finale (or, perhaps more the fiery prologue) of suicide, the more his individual circumstances and agonies slip out of grasp. The reading of Bouazizis tipping point of choosing death by fire the moment when the desire to live amidst injustice imploded into a will to die in protest against injustice -- becomes disinvested of his unique life, and becomes invested with something other than his individual existence. Let us try, however, to read the individual impulse preceding the collective movement. There is apparently a clear series of causes and consequences which led Bouazizi from simmering discontent with his life and environment to an unbearable crisis to the precipitation of that crisis in suicide. Thats the tipping point, the moment when life became unbearable and seemed not worth living and social circumstances appeared insupportable to the point of enacting an ultimately defiant gesture. Perhaps the pressures of straitened circumstances, the responsibility that burdens a breadwinner whose earnings arent sufficient, the frustration of great effort expended for too little return had been accruing in Bouazizis sensibilities for a while. When he encountered Feyda Hamdi and her associates and suffered humiliation at their hands those dissatisfactions crystallised into a single point: he felt confronted by a visible agent that crushes all his efforts, the brutal agent of the state. It was the callousness of the police that concentrated the diffuseness of his unsatisfactory existence into a sharp painful point. Perhaps

Hamdi and associates ceased to be individuals in Bouazizis eyes; they embodied at that moment the oppression of the prevailing social order. Possibly they reoriented Bouazizis entire view of his surroundings. In the clear and cold day (it was around 11 degrees Celsius that morning), Bouazizis mind was overwhelmed with the apprehension of an injustice that was larger than the particular agents and event. The familiar streets and houses and buzzing markets and people lost their usual enveloping comfort and became strange, a landscape tinted by oppressions and humiliations. Thus, as Bouazizi hurried to the Governors office to seek redress through the estranged town, he already had the recourse of suicide in his mind. In his mind he was giving this abstract force, the brutal and indifferent state, and himself a last chance by appealing to another agent: the upper echelon of power, the bureaucrat. So when he approached the guards and petty officers at the portal of the Governors office he was close to a decision he issued an ultimatum (If you dont listen to me, Ill burn myself). Perhaps they sniggered as they turned away, or shrugged and told him to go about his business (Who do you think you are?). It was a moment of confirmation for Bouazizi, the confirmation of his individual nullity -- the tipping point. The remaining flickers of hope and the possibility of justice and satisfaction faded, and the alienated contours of his familiar environment settled into grey permanence. But it was more than that. It was also a moment in which his individual resistance was rendered utterly lonely. In being turned away brusquely, despite his ultimatum, he was not merely denigrated. It seemed as if he was de-recognised as a person, his very presence was annulled. It didnt seem possible to seek help from friends and supporters and organise some sort of protest, to press for justice. It seemed, rather, as if he had already ceased to exist and no one could see him or if he could be seen, it was only as belittled and insignificant. Injustice subsumed all around him. His sense of his life in Sidi Bouzid seemed to fall into the pattern of ongoing humiliations and impotency, with nothing redeeming to recall. And so, a final act of resistance which would also be a final assertion of his existence and at the selfsame moment a final withdrawal inevitably took shape. A gesture that, it seemed to Bouazizi, would confirm his integrity against the conspiracy to erase it. In feverish anticipation of this final gesture, Bouazizi ran to the nearby gas station to get hold of a can of gasoline. When he returned and doused himself and stood before the Governors office and shouted How do you expect me to make a living? and lighted the match he set fire to the order of things in Tunisia.

It may have happened that way. But the doings of an ordinary individual are usually fuzzy around the borders. Perhaps other factors and motives played with that account of his movements that day, perhaps quite another account is possible. A little twitch here or there in that sequence of events might have made for a quite different account. Trying to edge closer to Mohamed Bouazizis last hours in the morning of 17 December 2010 entails asking questions. If he had been harassed similarly by officials earlier, obstructed from carrying on his trade similarly, why did he react thus on this particular occasion? Perhaps there was more than an apprehension of oppression by the state on his mind. Other frustrations and pressures may have been at work, perhaps personal or domestic ones, which rendered him particularly vulnerable that morning. Or, was this an especially humiliating instance of harassment? Why were Feyda Hamdi and her associates quite as brutal towards Bouazizi that morning as descriptions in the news suggested? Was that their usual behaviour against small tradesmen like Bouazizi? Was that symptomatic of the attitude of petty officials with a little official power to a class of people with none? Or perhaps it was motivated by something else an accrual also of little irritations, some unregistered insecurity about officialdom, some gesture of resistance already. What were others on the scene doing? Perhaps other vendors with their carts got a warning and quickly slipped into a side alley, grateful that they had managed to evade Hamdi and company. Shoppers and bystanders on the street may have looked on the spectacle of Bouazizi being humiliated in various ways, some with shock, some seething in silence, some with the relish that such spectacles can generate in certain hearts. To most, it was probably another momentarily eyecatching but ultimately unremarkable moment in the everyday life of the market. But in their own way they became complicit in Bouazizis humiliation then, and silent agents also of his alienation and loneliness. Possibly, Bouazizis gesture was addressed as much to the callous violence of the state as to the silent spectatorship of passersby and onlookers. If anyone has objected to the treatment meted out to Bouazizi would he have acted differently? What happened at the Governors office? If some officer had given him a sympathetic hearing without necessarily doing anything immediately (bureaucracies work slowly if at all), had recognised his claim to some degree, would Bouazizi have paused? Would that have made any difference to the nature of the regime that such bureaucracies work within? Did someone add insult to injury instead? If there happened to be a long queue at the gas station, if Bouazizi found that he didnt have enough money for the gasoline, if he encountered a relative or friend on the way would

any of that have made a difference or changed anything? Bouazizi was evidently a person who took his family responsibilities seriously. Why didnt his position as breadwinner, a thought of his dependents, give him pause? Perhaps it was all too quick, the access of mounting outrage, the determination to show them all. But who knows. Among Facebook users a Facebook note, written allegedly by Bouazizi to his mother hours before he committed suicide, was circulated for a while apparently a suicide note pleading not to be blamed. It sounds implausible (did Bouazizi ever communicate to his mother through Facebook?). But it is another insertion into the fuzzy outlines of Bouazizis last hours, another twist to how his suicide could be seen. Was Bouazizis political, religious, cultural awareness such that he could have apprehended his dramatic suicide as anything other than an egotistical drive? None of those questions can possibly be answered with any degree of certainty. More importantly, none of those questions need to be answered. That is why the individual Bouazizi slips away in looking back to the morning of 17 December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid and the consequences of his suicide. The hypothetical account given above of events and consequences leading to the suicidal tipping point is of the moment, not because it was what Bouazizi must have experienced but because it was some such account imagined or inferred -- that resonated with other ordinary individuals. Others were roused to protest because some such account of Bouazizis protest resonated with their individual lives. They understood Bouazizis tipping point as a plausible possibility within their own lives and as a synecdoche/ symbol/ trope/ symptom of malaise within their shared environment. Some recognized Bouazizis tipping point as a culmination of other tipping points the act that crystallizes the un-noted suicides, failed protests, unobserved gestures of having reached an unbearable impasse, enacted already by other individuals. That other such suicides have taken place was observed severally (with few details being given), and certainly Bouazizi-like suicides followed and were widely reported. Bouazizis suicide might have been conferred the superlatively magnified significance of those un-noted and unobserved other tipping points the latter became invested in the former, and Bouazizi the individual became, in the selfsame moment, an aggregate of all those other individuals. And as these perceptions took hold and became collectivised, another tipping point came to be enacted: a move from the implosive, where the ordinary individual tips over into self-destruction when faced by something unremittingly unbearable, to the explosive, where ordinary individuals are

tipped over into collective action to destroy that which is unbearable and thereby reach for something new.

Tipping Point and Collectivization There is a conjunction of the various connotations of the phrase tipping point in idiomatic usage as in the precise register of physics, psychology, sociology -- which is apt here. First, there is arguably the tipping point that collapses the frame of Bouazizis tolerance, the frame of mind that absorbs pricks of humiliation till that final prick which tips it over into chaos and selfoblivion. Thats much like adding that final block to a pillar of blocks which makes the pillar collapse. Second, theres the perception of the potential replication of that breaking point in others who feel they share something of Bouazizis circumstances; others can feel the thrust of Bouazizis psychological collapse as possible within themselves, even if they arent yet pushed to act upon it. Third, theres the perception that Bouazizis act is not merely the culmination of the pressures his own psyche faces, it is a culmination of other such acts, other similar suicides and protests. There took place, in other words, a retrospective collectivization or deindividuation of Bouazizis suicide. It is read as the tipping point instanced not so much by his individual person but insofar as he acts as other persons have acted already; Bouazizi is representative of a process whereby other persons have been coerced by their circumstances into annihilation. Here the tipping point is of reaching a perceived social threshold, or reaching the point at which the singular motive suddenly becomes a plural motive. Fourth, theres the switch which decisively turns the mode of protest from real/potential enactment upon ones own body to enactment upon the state itself, the body of the prevailing social and political order. This is the dramatic tipping point from one sort of stable condition towards a different condition, from being individual subjects of oppression to becoming collective agents of justice and redress. Here the character of the people with regard to the prevailing social order undergoes a precipitous switching of personality. And fifth, there is the anticipation of holistic regime change which will also be a social transformation and a transformation of lives a sought-after tipping point from the present regime to a future one, or a demand, in brief, for revolution. I return below to the overwhelming ambition of this demand.

The more Bouazizis suicide is remarked as the spark that set the Tunisian and other protests off, the less purchase does his individual psyche and person and life have in our minds. The more the symbolic stakes of his suicide are upped, the less he matters and the more he sinks into the sea of the social. There comes about almost a current of embarrassment in making too much of the symbolic stakes of Bouazizis suicide, so that after a brief flare it is muted in commentaries and histories of the protests in Tunisia. After all, the ordinary individual is always too diminutive against the scale of large social protests and mobilization. And that is as it should be. The social movement is directed in principle towards erasing over-determined individuals and making an appeal for the totality of the protesting demos. Accounts of individual martyrdom and heroism may seem instrumental to that purpose for a while, but only finally in becoming subsumed into the totality of the demos. Perhaps this occurs most cogently in the rhetorical turn which announces Bouazizi as an ordinary person, the common Tunisian, the man on the street, the have-nots, the lower classes, the unemployed youth. There are, of course, no aggregates or averages which can be crystallised into the image of the ordinary individual; all aggregates or averages are arrived at by cancelling out particularities, by extrapolating common denominators from a complex of individual numerations. The image of the ordinary individual is no more than a metaphor this aggregative and averaged image can have no face. From a slightly different direction, the ordinary individual is often not thought of so much in terms of denominators and numerations, as in terms of the absence of these: the ordinary individual is simply not extraordinary. Where the extraordinary person the powerful, the famous, the rich can be imaged and recognised, the ordinary individual is unrecognised and uncharacterizable. The ordinary individual has only negative attributes; in contrast to the extraordinary person s/he is of modest means, subject to larger forces and programmes, indistinguishable within the majority. The ordinary individual is simply other than the extraordinary person, the insubstantial plethora which enables the substantial presence of the extraordinary person to stand out in sharp relief. The ordinary individual is therefore caught up in a contrastive chain of associations defined as opposite to extraordinariness: common, poor, humble, oppressed. From this perspective too, there is no image of the ordinary individual: it could only be a set of attributes that the gaze of a viewer thinks of as not-extraordinary. In other words, such an image evokes the extraordinary by its negation in the gaze the perception of ordinariness is not an image we can point to, it is perceived only as the flip side of what we agree on as extraordinariness. When

Bouazizis image became, albeit only for a while, the image of the ordinary individual distinct, recognizable, agreed for a while as such it was already a paradox and a sign of resistance to the image of whats extraordinary now. It suggested the paradoxical rendering of the ordinary as extraordinary. In Bouazizis image, for some time the ordinary individual assumed a definite face and person without becoming a leader, an icon, a hero, a martyr; Bouazizi became the face of the ordinary for the moment. Of course that couldnt last. The protesting crowd which threw up this image to profile and stake its claim on behalf of and as embodiment of ordinary people, gradually also subsumed that image and asserted its multiplicity and forceful collectiveness. Amidst these moves, the manner in which Bouazizi became a statistically neutral referent for common humanity, and his suicide a matter of statistical social relevance, is worth pausing on. A curious resonance with Emile Durkheims pioneering study of suicide (first published in 1897)2 comes to mind. There is a broad direction that Durkheims enquiry took in the book: to begin with the closer he looked at the available psychological studies and typologies of individual cases the more their individuality seemed to slip away into the void of the social a void because it was unrecognized in those extant studies. There was a powerful presumption in the latter that suicide is an individual act, expressive of the individual psyche, manifest in the ceasing of the suicides person. And yet, the closer the act is examined the more it is captured by a language and apprehension which actually elides the individual and gestures towards something greater. To reach from the act of suicide to the void of social that is implicit, Durkheim pushed aside the presumption of individual salience picked a direction away from individual-centred thinking and focused instead on collective trends across groups and categories of people (by religion, generation, region, etc.). Durkheim focused, in other words, on suicide rates rather than the visceral reality and locus of the particular suicide. Thats a way of filling the void of the social in relation to contemplating suicide, to confer dimensions and patterns on the social in relation to suicide. Inevitably, after going through his analysis of suicide rates, when Durkheim returned to contemplating individual cases these now seemed to be filled in -- imbued -- with their social significance. The individual tragedy or drama of each suicide appeared to be placed within and emanate from a social field, and confirm the grounding of the field. The perception of Bouazizis suicide seems far in the anterior of some such process, so far ahead that this process becomes redundant. From the moment of the enactment of his suicide, it was
2

Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952.

perceived among the denizens ( the newspapers, the political commentators, the social actors) of Sidi Bouzid Tunisia the world, as greater than the person who died; as a symptom, a marker of a trend, a crystallization of the social moment. The weight of social reality weighed in to erase the individual suffering and will of Bouazizi, and fill in the space immediately; almost as if the social was waiting to fill that emptied space of the individual in with a greater consequence, prepared in advance for precisely this sort of emptying out and filling in (which is the tipping point). Mohamed Bouazizi was cleared of unique attributes so that his act could assume neutral social proportions. He became, immediately, a concrete designation with statistical magnitudes behind him: the figure of unemployed youth in Tunisia. The proportion of those unemployed in Tunisia in 2010 was 14%, but among the youth it was in the region of 30% -- and therein was Bouazizi. The literacy rate for male youth (15-24) in 20042008 was 98%, with a high proportion holding high school or university degrees and therein was Bouazizi (strenuous efforts were made in the media to establish his level of education). Bouazizis act became their expression, a fire lit by the faceless population that fleshes the neutral statistical figure. Like such statistical figures, Bouazizi was perceived neutrally. The statistical reckoning in such demographics is indifferent to the ideological attitudes of those it applies to. Their cultural allegiances and social choices are put aside. So no one enquired into Bouazizis allegiances: how strong were his religious convictions and what were they, what sort of ideological convictions did he hold, what were his attitudes towards anything. None of that mattered, because Bouazizi ceased to be a person when he committed suicide; he became in the selfsame moment an almost memorable name to embody the otherwise bland statistical reckoning of the Tunisian socio-economic condition. Bouazizis act could be used to unify all divisions and creases in the social fabric, just as the statistical measure can. Of course, the statistical measure can also work the other way: like Durkheims suicide rates, they can be correlated to religion, ideology, and so on. But in the shaping of Bouazizis social relevance, they didnt they worked towards the neutral ground, not the divisive. There was almost a design to the instrumentalization of Bouazizi towards social meaning and mobilization: a sort of design of the moment, rather than of an alignment. It certainly wasnt Bouazizis design; he lost possession of his act the moment he set himself alight. Bouazizis act itself stands at the thin line which is the tipping point towards the collective protest, between the ordinary individual making a stand and the emptying of the

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individual to be filled with over-determined social significance/signification. The image of the burning human is redolent with affective and metaphysical meaning. In numerous cultures and mythologies the image has evoked sacrifice, martyrdom, purification, annihilation and renewal. Self-immolation is held as a relatively recent gesture of protest, usually dated to the Buddhist monk Thich Quang Ducs suicide on 11 June 1963 in Saigon. Reflecting on a database of 533 acts of self-immolation between 1963 and 2002, sociologist Michael Biggs (2005)3 observed that there were no reported cases from the Middle East or Africa. Biggs also provided various analytical perspectives on the patterns, distributions, motivations and responses for such acts observations which seem prescient with Bouazizis suicide and its aftermath in view: Self-immolation provides two stirring images: the victim who is innocent and the hero who braves death. A protester killed by police is a victim, but has not willed the ultimate sacrifice. A suicide bomber may be seen as a hero, but hardly as a victim. Self-immolation carries such emotional power because it inspires sacrifice and also provokes outrage. And further, in relation to social and collective causes: Self-immolation can spur sympathizers to greater effort on behalf of the cause, and it can even convert people to the cause. And it often inspires others to repeat the sacrifice. The effect of self-immolation is potentially far greater than any other individual contribution to a social movement. Beyond these most pertinent observations, there is little to say except that self-immolation has a particular symbolic resonance with a call for revolution a complete regime change which is relevant here. It is the symbolic resonance of opposites and continuities: the ordinary individual erasing himself and the collective erasing of the given order; the ultimate individual-suffering and the push to overcome collective-suffering; the continuity of the resolve and determination which makes self-immolation possible and that goes into the collective demand for revolution. There is an aptness in this resonance, and it seems fitting that burning should characterise the tipping point from despairing suicide to determined demand for revolution. And yet, despite the evidence of strength of individual contribution that Biggs speaks of, there have been no significant revolutionary movement impelled by such an image, no noteworthy revolutionary demands aroused by such a gesture. There are numerous revolutions spurred, at least in revolutionary mythology, by innocent victimhood or death-defying heroism to look back to;
3

Michael Biggs, Dying Without Killing: Self-Immolations 1963-2002, in Making Sense of Suicide Missions, ed. Diego Gambetta, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.173-208.

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none, however, that recall such a curious balance (as Biggs has it) of the combination of heroism and victimhood. Quite possibly, the fact that it was in this instance has something to do with how revolution is conceived and perceived these days. There is some kind of emptiness in the current signification of revolution, an ideologically ambiguous zone where the agent of oppression and the oppressed subject are not easily characterised. There is a prevailing vagueness in collectivised terms which enable an ideological assertion of heroism or an ideological reading of victimization. The gathering of both heroism and victimization in an individual act of suicide by burning becomes the sharper as a prod in contrast to the present emptiness in signifying revolution, in the vagueness of collectivised terms for revolution. The self-immolation that is on the line of the tipping point here is also, in a curious way, a gesture towards the floundering of the very apprehension of revolution a floundering between not being able to comprehend revolution and desiring revolution. So that revolution itself is something that needs to be imagined anew, away from and yet in relation to received articulations of revolution. Towards Martyrdom As the Ennahda Party-led government settled in following the October 2011 Constituent Assembly elections in Tunisia, within a year after his death by self-immolation Mohamed Bouazizi was turned into a revolutionary martyr a publicly embraced shahid. I mean, he was incorporated into formal discourses and markers of martyrdom: postage stamps were issued featuring him as such, statues erected, squares and streets named after him, posthumous honours awarded, songs and poems about him circulated, films of his life planned, and so on. The conjunction at which the ordinary individuals gesture tipped into the appearance of protesting crowds was wiped away in the process, and the extraordinary ordinariness of Bouazizi lost to history. The image and name of Bouazizi became formally sanctified, and he was regarded as a revolutionary witness (al-shahad) in a way that couldnt be neatly reconciled with either the act (self-immolation) or its connection to the consequences (the appearance of protesting crowds). Of course, the drift in that direction began in a muted way soon after his suicide and as soon as the news media got wind of its significance. News-reports and websites featuring images of Bouazizis mother holding his photograph as a kind of reliquary and the appearance of his image on banners amidst the protesting crowds were already public moves toward revolutionary martyr-making. But the eventual formalization of martyrdom in public iconography and

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hagiography blanked out what was most significant about Bouazizis death -- that it enabled a conceptual line from the ordinary individual to the protesting crowd.

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