Revolution of Things by Kusha Sefat;

Author:Kusha Sefat;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

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Rupture

THE SUBSTITUTION OF THINGS AND TERMS

The world of the objects of old seems like a theatre of cruelty and instinctual drives in comparison with the formal neutrality and prophylactic “whiteness” of our perfect functional objects.

—JEAN BAUDRILLARD, THE SYSTEM OF OBJECTS

In his Friday Prayer sermon in the spring of 1993, President Hashemi Rafsanjani proclaimed, “The conflict [with Iraq] had many costs, of which our martyrs were one.”1 With that declaration, Rafsanjani did what would have been somewhat unthinkable a decade earlier. He detached martyrdom from its transcendental connotations and released it into a general economy of cost and benefit. This slide pointed to a fundamental political shift in Iran. It was as though the immobility and reassuring certitude of the seemingly transcendental culture of martyrdom, with Khomeini as its epicenter, had begun to be questioned openly. From then on, it became not only possible but necessary for the multitudes to think the Islamic Republic as a decentered phenomenon. But how did this decentering take place? And what role did global objects play here?

This chapter reconceptualizes social and political transformations in Tehran during the 1990s. In doing so, it critically engages with culturalist explanations of this era that are centered on powerful men/authors (and their deaths), ideological doctrines (and their dissolution), and the kind of economic history that wipes its slate clean of the very material things of which it is largely made. These analytical and historiographical forms fail to incorporate material things in Iran without reducing them to mere liaisons ready to be appropriated by more “important” ideational projects. The result ignores how the globalization of objects during the 1990s afforded new political vocabularies and backgrounds of shared meaning that enabled many Iranians to rethink the Islamic Republic.

This chapter, therefore, illustrates how the physicality of Tehran was interwoven with what became politically thinkable there. It demonstrates that the “post-Islamist” liberal discourse of the reforms was partially created in relation to the newly imported things to which it referred and by means of which it spread. Conversely, the “Islamist” vocabulary of the second-generation Hezbollahies was reconfigured in relation to the same imported asymmetrical objects to which key segments of the impoverished population had no access. Thus, reformist and Hezbollahie discourses, along with the material things that afforded them, occasioned the rise of two unique modes of life that were not simply distinguished by different ideas but were also distinguished by asymmetrical global objects. What ensued was a profound rupture with the past, such that the rapid multiplication of international things destabilized the prior relations between words and their material referents. The result was twofold: the disintegration of “martyrdom” as the dominant referential system and the possibility of thinking alternatives to, and within, the Islamic Republic.

The chapter, then, brings the insights it provides on the instability of relations between materiality and language in Tehran to bear on the question of rupture. The theoretical discussion on rupture tends to conceptualize the phenomenon as a sudden and dramatic passage from one structure to another (see Machiavelli 2014; Althusser 2006).

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