[...]ic front

the self-other construct

***islamic revolutionary thought borrows heavily from Marxist theory (at the same time equating them with colonial mastery)
}==> forge a specific revolutionary mind-set out of its own historical realities/myths (=/= “ill-trafficked remedies of an outsider ideology”, a *second-hand personality* [<-- this is OK!])

cartographies of entrapment

Al Ahmad binary reasoning in his Westoxification
-the “eternal” struggle of east and west --> a rhetoric of transcendental struggle
-to perceive the “west” as merely an *epistemic fabrication* and not a civilizational reality <-- the enemy is authenticated
(-he makes a very bad move: relocate the structural site of resistance to somewhere outside the walls of the university)
*Al Ahmad's orchestration of degrees of cultural estrangement --into--> a tone of nationalist triumphalism ==> ***vanished premodern subjectivity to be restored*** (<-- i have to be careful with this)
-[that] the colonized intellectuals and political officials participate together in the eradication of third world heritage
-agents of foreign ministries: orientalists, ambassadors, advisors, who write hideous scrolls when they have finished their assignments that say “yes, you have the head of a lion and the tail of an elephant” (--> is this also close to my account of Olearius?!) ==> *devitalization* ==> *damaged subjectivity* + an *alternative historic consciousness* }==> hostile tenant of the before-this [=/= i work on an alternative queer]
(cyclopean view) Al Ahmad's dismissal of media: he is unable to see it as anything but a promoter of infinite pacification --> media =/= local
(a civilizational dichotomy ==>) portray media as abusive of islamic tradition
**rhetoric of endangered cultural subjectivity**
disappearance or extinction of one's own rightful place within the world (<--~~ will to hegemonic mastery)
*(Al Ahmad deduces Chomsky on a global-imperial scale -->) the operation of the media can not be divorced from objective systemic violence : media = instrument of bourgeois valuation

Shariati: existentialism + leftism + islamism
[islamic anticolonialism + neomarxist critical theory (of Frankfurt School)]
(presumed) deterioration of global consciousness + industrialization onto the stage of world history
-homogenized mass --> emergence of automation : an objectified and self-activating process wherein the subject becomes an instrument
“impersonation of the machine” <--Adorno--{totalitarian seizure of consciousness + devastating effects of instrumental reason}
Shariati's writing:
•the third world subject embraces the false consciousness
•self-inflicted cultural betrayal
•predatory-parasitic operation of the colonized imagination }-->
*defilement of the “what once was”
*the elevation of the indigenous as representative of an authentic return
==> ***past as antithesis to the present*** <-- transcendental signified of a precolonial subjectivity [<-- how not to do that while visiting heritage sites such as ajayeb?]
Shariati's defense of the non-western world --> manufacturing an exaggerated imagery of its *now lost grandeur* ==> (its former) essential identity-status
-->{what would Lacan's mirror stage say about this? [--> ‘sudden realization of a complete (specular) image of self =/= infant's primordial sense of her fragmented body’ before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other
[*]subjectivity: spatial relations (--> self-other construct)
[*]the imaginary: the space in which the relation between the ego and its images is developed]
(Mohaghegh:) [eastern] undo the moment of assimilation into a repressive [western] ‘symbolic order'[= the way the subject is organized & how the psyche becomes accessible]
[*]The Real: what cannot be symbolized – what loses it's “reality” once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language ==> the real is traumatic (& sublime?, =/=? media,,) @Hoda}

*cultural extinction*

urgency is (always?) neurotic

(?who and when sends) neurotic demand for an unmediated cognitive intimation


(Khomeini's) omat امت diesenfranchised populace

عناصر گول خورده perceptual perversion


•Khomeini <-- Marcuse (one-dimensional society, that promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood)
•Khomeini <-- Chomsky (how superficial happiness can function as a detraction from the adverse effects of an alienated condition) [<-- Marxist tradition of the “serious” (=/= unreflective state) @Foad, “let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems --> *consumption becomes ritualized*]
•Shariati <-- Jameson (theory of the “ever-new but always-the-same” within the theatrical operation of political economy)
•Al Ahmad <-- Adorno (skeptical prophecy)
•
}==> principle of utopian potentiality

centers of corruption
pleasure-houses
makeup
games
alcoholic beverages
luxury goods

Marxist tradition:
the underground aesthetic is quickly transfigured into a mainstream aesthetic --always--> in the hands of an authoritarian elite (<-- in apass with Leo we were talking about this)

جنبش mass aesthetic fears becoming official سازمانی

...based on exposing the damage of the global-becoming-local

Al Ahmad traces this “transnational hypnosis” to economic origin (<-- Ali )

(Mohaghegh's judgment on iranian anticolonial ideology:) its ineptitude Ungeeignetheit in realizing the myriad variances that render any medium riddled with paradoxes--derives itself from its concurrent inability to observe the possibility for different subject-positions within the third world

omnipresent deception of modernity

(aesthetic radicalism [ X ) political resistance]
“X” --> limited anticolonialism


(Mohaghegh on)
-Mehrjui's The Cow, offers a moving allegorical journey into the psychic turbulence of a peasant confronted with the obliteration of his premodern world (and thus becomes his lost animal)
-Naderi's Man with a Gun, depicts the material avarice that has overtaken local configurations in the wake of nascent capitalist formations to such a drastic extent that it gives rise to a well-digger's being cheated of his life savings
-Kimiai's The Deers, ...
}--> strong consonance with the anticolonial ideologues (examined thus far)


...caught up in your prose


on Sa'edi’ short story “Dandil” [--> grotesque cultural disaffection of the masses within Sa'edi's Dandil]
-depicting the horrors of daily life within a semicolonized atmosphere of a red-light district of a northern Iranian city
-there is an imagery of closure and suffocation
(Sa'edi revealing:) the material despair of a colonial condition leading (in high speed) to the entropy of cultural-individual ethics
under the overwhelming weight of tangible misery
--cognize--> the immediate material urgency of the third world subject
(Dandilian gathering around to watch the taking of the picture -->) the third world subject has assumed the schizophrenic role of a voyeur himself, spectating his own literal-symbolic rape but not fully understanding it as such, while the real agent of power remains camouflaged in semi-invisibility
(Mohaghegh:) the ideological content of Dandil stands the notion that the technological advancement of the western world has turned the peripheral individual into its unknowing accomplice همدست, a vital participant in the abuse and mutilation of his own locality
(a Dandilian policemen remarking:) “They [westerns] are not beggers like us. they all have private cars. their whores spend four or five hours a day just playing around in the beauty shops.” --> for Sa'edi that is the pathological fantasy endemic to the inner workings of a colonized mind. the third world subject perceiving itself as the negational instantiation of occidental greatness ==> swallowing down the civilizational hierarchies of its oppressor's self-projecting image

(preparing for the coming of rapist colonizer) the Dandilians rush to make the Madame's house clean and tidy: “[...]the curtains had been drawn aside. Pots of geranium had been placed on the wall and beside the steps[...]” ~-> Baudrillard's theory of simulation : the Dandilian presenting to the colonizer a Disneyland, *a play of illusions and phantasms* [~->? Dubai: self-affirmation via the domination of the constructed other]

(the american officer leaves the next morning with a mocking laughter and he refuses to play and the Dandilians can't do anything)--> the civilizational dichotomy remains intact in spite of the horrifying events that have transpired, with the trafficked deflowered child serving as a metaphor for the cultural-political mistreatment of the third world under colonial rule



on Akhavan's “Adamak” (“Stick-Figure”) [--> historical treachery committed within Akhavan's nostalgic Stick-Figure]
demonization of the television's arrival
-television as a “magical box” an artificial phenomenon that “entrances” its audience
again the idea of authenticity is largely emphasized here, as the television is perceived as a “foreign” entity and therefore an enemy to the millennial history of the province
new medium =/= indigenous modes of communication/expression (of which the roving storyteller is the ultimate instantiation)
(poignancy of the) poet's anthropomorphic profile of the new technologically oriented media
-Akhavan's representation symbolizes the storyteller himself, lamenting his own erasure from the moment of the now (or it is his prophecy for the imminent destruction of the new media in the coming islamic regime?)
--> aesthetic testament to the possibility for a third world revolutionary imagination to emerge from the ruins of the colonial era [, *from the ruins of the empire*]
--> representing the third world as in a state of complete existential-cultural atrophy (tahlil تحليل رفتن) @Hoda

**anticolonial literature reaffirms the all-encompassing grasp of modernity over peripheral subjectivity [--> marginal leader (Mamitua Saber's Marginal Leadership in a Culture Contact Situation)]

(Mohaghegh > Huyssen on Baudrillard:)
Baudrillard's notion of the *silent mass* of the spectators disables any analysis of *heterogeneous subject position in the act of reception* @Laura
any economic or institutional analysis of apparatuses of image production is rendered obsolete by Baudrillard's notion of an almost self-generating and monolithic machinary of image production [...] (<-- Laura should be very aware of this)
Baudrillard's society of simulation does not allow for such distinctions ... simulation, after all, may simply be the latest version of the ideology of the end of ideology
}--> part of the theoretical apparatus of *anticolonial ideology*
one immediate danger of this approach is that it recklessly dismisses anything associated with the other side of the binary (of West/East, self/other, first-world/third-world, modern/premodern, etc.) ==> overlook the subversive utility and democratic accessibility of certain technological innovation --> evident in Shariati's ultra-atavistic endorsement for an aesthetic tradition: “intrusion of the machine into the humna-half may go so far as to paralyze man; it destroys creativity. imagine a type-written page that can be imposed upon millions of people, while before the advent of the typewriter everyone was free to use his creativity to the utmost in calligraphy” --Mohaghegh--> it is not reflecting on the historical reality that the exercise of calligraphy was always linked to a feudalist class structure, and often exclusively to the confines of the palace court, whereas the printed word open to a more widespread audience independent of material status
--> anticolonial ideology ==>
•carries out the presupposed will of modernity by homogenizing its very own constituency, diminishing any possibility for individual initiative or insubordination
•precludes the advent of outsider radicalism independent of some religio-civilizational confrontation with modernity
--> “there can be only one diagnosis ==> only one elixir” ==> produce an antidote that is equally colossal in scope, shape, and execution

}==> ***the local is no longer accepted by anticolonial ideology as a worthwhile site of contestation***

}--> (Sa'edi + Akhavan + ...) ~=> *messianic defender* of the national history : the sole harbinger جلودار of a *return to the real* ☠ [=/= cheerleader]

            _,-+-._
         .-’       ‘’-._
        /               \
       ‘        ~.       \
      /    ~`’    ) .=” , )
     |           I (   ~ (
     \        ‘"”   `='  +
      `.,_   `”;:L0Ve’   *’
          `~'~.’  )_Y_0_U!\


*disease becomes temporary cure* (--> practiced by Al Ahmad, Shariati, artists [as irony and with the always problematic conception of the “masses” توده مردم mardom]:)
“[let's] re-employ the same reactionary elements in order to stir the masses, to restore awareness, and to fight superstition”
[still very common within critically-minded humanist social science schollar artists is the tendency to use critical theory (as diverse as it is) *to interrogate reality*
for us ([left inheritance] as postcolonialist, feminist, or biopolitician) the modus operandi of critical theory is to derealize, is to say: “this is an expression of paar.” “this is discursive formation.” “this is material assembly of objects.” ~= (an attempt to say) “this isn't real.” <-- this has been essentially a really powerful force and set of political strategies of the left @apass; this modus operandi is a killer blow for climate change from a leftist perspective (because the climate change is very real) (=/= speculative realism)]

Khomeini's cassette-tape revolution (radio medium infused with anticolonial propaganda) demonstrates the insufficiency of Benjamin's stance that “mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art...”
the symbolic fury of Khomeini's voice is only magnified in its cult-value through its transmission over the air waves, testifying more to MacLuhan's interpretation of the persuasive impact of radio
--> technological media in iranian anticolonialism does not elicit the democratizing effect anticipated by Benjamin


from--> metaphysical awe --to--> banalized horror

each year the islamic republic itself reenacts the arrival of the Khomeini in tehran airport through a procession of myriad cardboard interact and converse with these mock-images of the imam in a kind of makeshift, state-run passion play



post 1979 iranian cinematic renaissance
•medium of film achieved in the decolonized space
•hooked into the contemporaneity of the localized apocalyptic (infinitesimal becomings)
•present as close an interpretation of the unthinkable strangeness of reality as possible
•on an ongoing desertion of the real

Adorno: “works that make socially univocal discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as themselves” @Laura's judgment on the fascist body (--> can consumption be resistance? @Laura: becoming fascist body ==> ? )

the medium of film-making in present-day iran attempts solely to bring the crypto-vantage of the everyday into obscurity-ridden view (to leave less clear --> my pre-2012 videos ‘Vagabond,’ ‘Constant Prince,’ and ‘city of domes’), allowing for a critical distance on the part of the spectator to examine one's own being-in-the-world in raw, blurred form (the truth is haze itself --> Hoda)

exoticization of the local --> reduce it to a nativist enterprise

(Mohaghegh > Tomlinson:) the everyday culture has ingested foreign elements from exogenous sources, with the various elementss gradually brcoming “naturalized” within it =/= image of pure, internally homogenous, authentic, indigenous culture


Sharjah art foundation of the Emirate's *postcultural imagination*


literary front
Hedayat, Yushij, Shamlu, Forough

Hedayat's The Blind Owl variants of a “will to chaos”

middle eastern avant-garde's vision of the writing-act --sketching--> a fugitive postmodern map of escape from its grasp

[in] moments of great social disorder
==> secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, a type of consciousness that perceives the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn

(how an eastern or third world vanguard characterize itself in the heart of major historical tremors:) [listen to their *tone of aggression*:]
Nima: “with my poetry i have driven people into a great conflict; good or bad, they have fallen in confusion; i myself am sitting in a corner, watching them: i have flooded the nest of ants”
Forough: “all those who are involved in creative work have as their motive ... a sort of need to confront and struggle with annihilation”
Shamlu: “the children of the depths,” “the children of the storm,” “the horsemen,” “the bold ones,”

--> definition of the poetic world as a protosectarian space
رابطه مریدی مرادی
دار و دسته
قبيله

(Ali, to a subculture of) persecuted and endangered

==> peripheral narative (marginal leadership) become a force of intrigue and seduction (among iranian youth)

-how did poetry respond to historical events of atrocity and transition
-did the poets understand themselves as resembling a mystical, criminal, mercenary, or revolutionary edifice?

amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinkers and writers launching an intellectual-existential offensive against the disenchantment of the modern age)
along archetypes:
•power
•hostility
•banishment
•solitude
•desire
•sacrifice


contradictory experiences of the modern cityscape of the middle east --> at once a site of:
•autocracy and insurgency
•concealment and detection
•connectivity and alienation
•integration and crumbling
•gesticulation and idleness


Setareh's topics:
experiences of upheaval, hysteria, sabotage, collective suffering
--> Sana's topics:
existential-spatial understanding of questions of cruelty, betrayal, torment, annihilation


(poets finding themselves consumed with) the distinctive emergence of “the martyr”:

[-]Akhavan writing/witnessing at the time of reterritorialization of urban space during Mossadegh era: the subdivision of streets, districts, and neighborhoods into dueling sectors of power and resistance.
Akhavan's lament in “Winter”
disenchantment, bitterness, semiotic disorientation
touch = final sensory prism
Akhavan's task: to protect the domain of radical individuality (==> Ali's subjectivity)
(Mohaghegh asking:) *is the artist charge a mere diguise of influence and supermacy?* or **is the firmness of its articulation sanctioned by some dominant elsewhere or otherworldliness?**
*does the poetic consciousness believe itself of an elite unknown rank (against the monolith)?
sociopolitical discourses either bore or aggravate Akhavan --only--> (transient historical specificity of) *turmoil demands poet's greater urgency*
(the poet has earned the station to say) “no more of this” (“it's enough”) ~ an *order*  [=/= wisdom, sage, diplomatic response of an interlocutor, truth-telling, equal dialogue, negotiation]
poet's expertise and sensitivity: the storyteller's intimate relation to impermanence and destruction (--> Ali, Sana, Hoda, Setareh)

[-]Baraheni's depiction of the spatial domination of the city by Pahlavi regime from 1952 to 1979 --> SAVAK responded to and fueled a striking development in the political consciousness of the urban centers ==> labyrinthine evolution of the rebel form
hie poem “An Epic in Reverse” (Akhavanian reversal) neighborhoods of stigma, filth, and backwardness --> hybrid of animality and criminality
(Mohaghegh asking:) what is the author's recourse once stranded behind those iron bars, and now acquainted with the gleaming tools and instruments of the guards and royal executioners? for Baraheni, the answer seems to rest within a literary turn toward the arsenal of vulgarity, where language is forced to howl and curse again, to match the shock treatment and flagellation (شلاق shalagh) ==>
1. to unveil the degradation and depravity of power, to show it as unbeautiful and disgusting in its most bude form
2. to wage some reciprocal hate against power, to maximize the rawness of what is happening

[-]Shamlu's (dead-end) sightings of public execution and secret police night-raids of 1979-81
(Mohaghegh describing islamic state of iran through Shamlu:) a new iteration of revolutionary terror, millenarian clerical establishment that foresees self-congrave a feverish certainty across every corridor of urban reality (=/= conservative disposition of an ordained Shah seeking to keep his domination,) the vengefull return of a long-suppressed counterabsolutism that has been waiting anxiously for its chance to unleash and envelop a national identity in its now-seething ideology
-bringing the celestial abstractions of a faith crashing down into tangible existence --> they must ***sew, lash, and brand their righteous-ecstatic modalities into awesome materiality***
the vocabulary of: the prophetic, the messianic, the inspired, the sacred
}--> *Shamlu's avant-gardism had always led him to experiment with rotating styles of folkloric ballads, rebel anthems, existential meditations, doomsday rants, elegiac oration, children's lullabies --into--> (a singular blast of an) account of a devastated urban space that moves somewhere between legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, and war cry [--> Shamlu responding to an islamic revolutionary ideology that had enlisted its own alchemy of proclamation, lethal consortiums of drives that fuse the most savage, the most medieval, the most modern, and the most postmodern]
•being coming completely seized beneath the density of revelatory vision
•the ultra-alertness and insomnia of pure anticipation : a calculus of assurance that ‘they are coming’ --> omen


Pasdaran: the unpredictable and insatiate arc of extremity of a paramilitart coalition
=/=
SAVAK: formulaic technocracy of a scientific approach to persecution, extraction, and confession

Pahlavi monarchy: the administrator of urban violence was part amateur, part pseudo-scholar, part civil servant, part serial killer
=/=
Ayatollah theodracy: the administrator of urban violence was part vigilante, part crusader, part cult member, part thug

--> poet must epitomize the last unequivocal administrator of urban violence


does writing have a redemptive (=/=? reparative) function?

the author would necessarily venture to rescue something profound (from the state of dejection)

poet's keyword: *conflagration* حريق, fire --> a middle eastern aesthetics

most iranian writers of the new poetry movement have eviscerated, melted, flooded, iced over, or burned down a city at some point in their artistic career (--> Shamlu's Yal-o Ejdeha یل و اژدها)

cumulative angers

towards a harmful eloquence شيوايى --> Shamlu


pay attention to the hyper-subjective positioning (=/= hospitality, cosmopolitanism, transindivualism) of the “I” of the iranian poet:

*Akhavan: “It is I, your nightly guest, a forlorn gypsy. It is I, an afflicted stone that has been kicked around. It is I, the lowly insult of creation, an untuned melody.”
منم من، میهمان هر شبت، لولی وش مغموم /  منم من، سنگ تیپاخورده ی رنجور /  منم، دشنام پست آفرینش، نغمه ی ناجور

*Baraheni: “I am the rotten well of history ... Throw your matches down so that I can set the whole world aflame. I am an underground man. My fire alone shall appear on the face of the earth.”

*Shamlu: “It is time that I spit out the entirety of my damnation in an endless uproar / I am the first and last dawn / I am Abel standing on the platform of contempt / I am the honor of the universe, having lashed myself and endured it / Such that the black fire of my agony / shames even Hell for its insignificant holdings.”


--> with the maladjusted eyes if the iranian poet... we are at a far distance from western thought, one that seeks a renovated cosmopolitanism as remedy to the injustices of the cityscape in modernity


Mohaghegh's style of writing [when he talks about Hedayat and iranian avant-garde chaotic atmosphere --> (at once) binds and separates the East-West axis] --he--> abandoning transcendent abstractions and restoring it to the language of annihilative venture

*chaos as mask*
chaos = (one of many) eastern poetic mask

chaotic experience (in the service of a lasting nonstate) =/= essence, Being, structure, historical definitions, temporal-spatial specificity

Mohaghegh puts Hedayat's inventiveness in traction with continental philosophy:
•Schopenhauer: existence = reckless collision of transience and nonsensibility <== *dramatic dissociation of the aesthetic from the historical* (<-- Sana's current stance, for Sana the world is will and representation):
history: will's vicious reign over existence
art: space[...]