The photograph on the left is one I took myself, from a wall somewhere at Dhaka University, most likely near TSC. Painted on it is an image of fish moving together, a visual representation of the collective resistance of students and ordinary citizens during Bangladesh’s July uprising.
The photograph on the right is the cover of one of my favorite books, Raimo Tuomela’s Social Ontology. There, too, are the fish. The juxtaposition is more meaningful than it might initially appear.
For scholars of collective intentionality — the study, broadly speaking, of how individual minds come to think and act as a “we” — schooling fish have long provided a perfect metaphor. A fish alone is small and vulnerable. A school of fish behaves differently. Individuals align their movements, respond to one another and begin to function as something larger than themselves.
In nature, this can become a defensive strategy…smaller animals acting collectively against a much larger predator, sometimes through what biologists describe as predator mobbing.
Whoever painted those fish on the Dhaka University wall may or may not have had social ontology in mind. Either way, the artist arrived at something close to the central political question raised by July: Who, exactly, made the uprising?
It is a question that has become more important as the uprising itself recedes into history and political actors compete to claim ownership of it.
There is a broader intellectual context for this argument. Recent writing on political movements, including Anton Jäger’s work on “hyperpolitics,” belongs to a growing effort to understand the strange political formations that have proliferated since the beginning of this century: the alter-globalization protests, experiments in direct democracy, Tahrir Square and other movements that have mobilized enormous numbers of people without resembling traditional political parties.
These movements can appear chaotic because, structurally, they often are. They may have recognizable faces without having a single command center. Different groups enter for different reasons. Leaders emerge at particular moments, only to be replaced or bypassed at others.
Ideas, slogans, images and instructions travel through networks rather than down conventional political hierarchies.The important question, then, is not simply who led them. It is how collective agency acquired causal power.
The economic and technological infrastructure of the network society has changed political mobilization. People can coordinate without belonging to the same organization. Separate groups can converge around a shared objective without surrendering their autonomy. Different leaders can be useful to different constituencies at different moments.
This gives such movements extraordinary flexibility. It also gives them an extraordinary vulnerability.
Their opponents can exploit their lack of structure. Governments can infiltrate, fragment or exhaust them. Better-organized political forces can wait for the crowds to create a vacuum and then step into it.
History offers sobering examples. Revolutions and mass mobilizations do not necessarily deliver power to the people who initiated them. Iran traveled from the Pahlavi monarchy to the Islamic Republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Egypt moved from Hosni Mubarak through Mohamed Morsi to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
The people who fill the squares are not always the people who determine what comes afterward. Many ostensibly leaderless movements consequently end with remarkably little to show for their spectacular beginnings…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Bangladesh’s July uprising is interesting precisely because it does not fit comfortably into that pattern.
It belongs, in important ways, to this global family of networked movements emerging in a late-capitalist world where seemingly monolithic structures of power can suddenly prove brittle. Yet Bangladesh is also an outlier.
Calling July “leaderless” does not mean that it had no leaders. Nor does it diminish the extraordinary courage of individuals who stepped forward, accepted responsibility and, in some cases, risked their lives.
The distinction is crucial. A movement can produce leaders without being produced by those leaders.
Individual courage existed within a much larger social praxis. Leadership was distributed across contexts, institutions, neighborhoods and moments. The uprising was not a machine switched on by a single hand. Its leaders mattered enormously, but they operated inside a collective political force that no individual had created and no individual fully controlled.
This may also explain one of July’s most consequential achievements.
The disorder that followed the collapse of an entrenched political order created precisely the kind of opening that highly organized regressive forces might have exploited. They tried. Yet they failed to capture the body politic. The conventional political system, however battered, survived.
The BNP eventually acquired power through that system. But even a party possessing the machinery of government has found that structural power is not unlimited. Pressure continues to come from below — from citizens and constituencies that discovered through July that political agency does not belong exclusively to political parties.
That lesson is easily forgotten because collective agency makes for terrible conventional storytelling. Individual heroes, meanwhile, make excellent stories.
Anyone who watches Japanese anime will recognize the instinct. In One Piece, Naruto, Bleach and Dragon Ball Z, the decisive confrontation often breaks into individual battles. Characters separate. Each hero gets an opponent. Each struggle acquires its own narrative arc.
There are cultural explanations for this, including the long shadow of samurai and Bushido traditions. But there is also a simpler explanation…individual agency is easier to narrate.
Some anime resist that instinct. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, for example, makes an unusually serious attempt to depict victory as the product of interdependent action. Attack on Titan sometimes reaches for something similar. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex goes further still, turning the relationship between individual and collective agency into part of its philosophical architecture.
Politics has the same narrative problem.
From childhood, we learn history through protagonists. A princess waits for a prince. A nation waits for its liberator. A leader announces seven points, or one point, and the masses rise. Applied to July, the temptation produces another version of the same mythology: somewhere there must have been an imam, a muezzin, a mastermind who meticulously arranged the pieces and summoned everyone into the streets.
This is comforting because it turns something enormously complicated into biography. It is also politically useful.
The Awami League's long rule left behind a deeply personalized political culture, one in which history, institutions and movements were repeatedly organized around singular personalities.
After July, politicians across the spectrum have inherited more of that political culture than many would care to admit. Everyone seems tempted to become the indispensable protagonist — the Kalimaddi Dafadar without whom, we are supposed to believe, history could not have moved.
And therein lies the danger.
To make yourself the sole author of a collective uprising, you must first diminish the collective. The struggle over who “made” July is therefore not merely an argument about the past. It is an argument about who possesses political agency in Bangladesh today.
The troubling failure to systematically document the uprising — its countless local actors, spontaneous formations, networks, neighborhood struggles and overlapping centers of initiative — cannot be separated from this contest over ownership.
James Baldwin once observed that history is not simply the past. “It is the present,” he said. “We carry our history with us. We are our history.” That is particularly true of revolutions. We reconstruct them according to the political needs of the world that follows.
If the politics of the present requires us to diminish the public’s collective intentionality, then the history we write about July will inevitably diminish it too. We will search for the man who gave the order, the leader who conceived the plan, the protagonist around whom the thousands of other lives can conveniently be arranged.
And in doing so, we may miss what was most radical — and perhaps most beautiful — about the uprising.
That brings me back to the wall at Dhaka University. There is no heroic fish at the center of the painting. There is no commander fish directing the others where to swim. The image derives its power from precisely the opposite idea that many small creatures moving together become capable of confronting something much larger than themselves.
To turn July into the story of one person, one organization or one meticulously conceived plan, you would first have to isolate one fish from the school. The mural offers a warning about that, too.
Look closely at what happens to the fish that finds itself alone.
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Mikail Hossain is a writer and analyst