Hadj-Moussa 291of ‘urban.’”^60 Satellite television favors the production of knowledge other
than the hegemonic distillations offered by national television. It also plays
a fundamental role in the emergence of subject positions and individual-
ity, if only by the choices it encourages. Of course, satellite television does
not represent the totality of public space; its “relay components” rely on
various modes of expression, such as the press, which despite all its short-
comings plays an essential role in the opening of public space in Algeria.^61
The press is one of “those rare successes derived from the democratiza-
tion of the regime.”^62 It too is grounded in civil society^63 and in the mul-
tiple transformations of the family: the renewed relations between men
and women, or the redefinition of common spaces such as the household
and spaces previously marked as male domains (the street, the hūmma).
Fundamental questions remain, however, with the emergence of satellite
television: is it fruitful to think in the case of a constrained political space
such as Algeria’s that any instance where there is an attempt at singular
and novel expression is either insignificant or a mark of political disorder
because this novel expression is not formally mediated through a classical
mode of political representation?