[...]icts, 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 of escape (from the profanity of history, a rare fleeting opportunity to reimagine existence as it potentially could have been but never will be (~=? fiction --> is that why science fiction for iranians does not have the same signification?) [=/= redemptive corrective to the barbarism of the will, =/= weapon by which one might attempt to overthrew the will]
•Hegel: (paradigm of a) complete collapse of subjectivity with history. reason is sovereign of the world
*Dasein: work within the preconceived framework (barriers) of historical consciousness in order to modify its stance within the world
•Marx: the intention of restoring humanity to its actual historicity, positivism + humanism, epochal advancement, *dialectical materialism*: placing subjectivity in a state of subservience to a larger “historical reality”
•Althusser --> *interpellation: power first manifactures a conception of the self that it can later subjugate through the surveillance techniques of the institution
*subjectivity exists solely within the revolutionary progression of the prevailing modes of production*
•Adorno: the discourse of individuality within modernity operates as an accomplice to techniques of reification and the overall obfuscation of the culture industry ~= *assimilation/execution of myth by instrumental reason* -->{ art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants ~ antinomy: art is defined by relation to what it is not (separating itself from what it has developed out of)
(Adorno + Frankfurt School:) **subjectivity thrives in the decisive act of interpretation, one through which the ideological saturation of society finds itself unmasked and history is restored to it[...]