From the Visibility of Action to the Visibility of Actors Shifts in Modes of Appearance in the Tunisian Revolution

Abstract

This article examines the Tunisian revolution through modes of appearance in protest practices, drawing on interviews with participants involved between December  7, 2010 and January 14, 2011. Modes of appearance are understood as the different forms through which protest becomes publicly visible. It argues that January 14 marks not only the collapse of the regime, but also a turning point in protest appearance. Under the authoritarian regime of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, protest tended to produce visibility through collective action, such as confrontations, gatherings, and hit-and-run dynamics, while the public visibility of identifiable individuals remained limited. Appearance was thus tied less to self-representation than to the capacity of action to render power and violence perceptible, in line with what Butler describes as a politically conditioned process. January 14 signals a shift. As repression receded, possibilities of appearance expanded, bringing faces, names, and trajectories to the fore. Appearance was no longer mediated through action, but increasingly linked to actors’ capacity to represent themselves. This transformation remained uneven. Interviews show that some participants struggled to position themselves within this emerging regime, where individual visibility became more central. The revolution can thus be read as a shift from a visibility grounded in actions to one that foregrounds actors. The article concludes that the revolution not only reconfigured the political field, but also reorganized the conditions of appearance, producing uneven forms of visibility, raising questions about how actors recognize themselves within them.