Articles

Recent works in media and communications studies have increasingly embedded the analysis of publicness within Science and Technology Studies (STS) and, interrelatedly, the new materialism. The result has emphasized the significant role that everyday objects play in engendering various publics. Yet, the uncritical incorporation of the new materialism and its bias toward present forms of materiality has led many scholars of the media to ignore the relationships between absent material objects and publicness. This is a key shortcoming since absent material realities are actively, and not so innocently, produced as non-thinkable alternatives to what exists, impeding externalized material worlds from becoming pronounceable as a need or an aspiration within the contexts of hegemonic globalization. In this essay, I draw on emerging works in media and communications studies, along with the social and political history of revolutionary Iran, as touchstones for a critical discussion on the linkages between publicness, materiality, and absence. I conclude with some observations and questions on publicness amid emergency climate change.

Departing from the canons of the cultural and material turns, this paper emphasizes the shortcomings that each body of work has shown in addressing political transformations. So doing, it argues that shifting relations between materiality and language harness different kinds of politics. Specifically, the paper provides a new interpretation of one of the most critical epochs in the political history of modern Iran, by illustrating that the confluence of the material and linguistic worlds in the Islamic Republic during the 1980s, brought about a distinct political field in which relations between words and their material referents became stable at the level of multitudes. This muffled public processes of performativity and resignification of signs in ways that might have threatened the centrality of revolutionary leader, Imam Khomeini. What developed was a social milieu in which Khomeini never seemed to face the possibility of defeat in politics.

In this article, I explore how a revolutionary subject was born at the intersection of materiality and language in the lead-up to the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Using life history as a vantage point, I focus on a young revolutionary named Reza and his immersion into Ali Shariati’s politico-religious discourse. In so doing, I pursue two parallel inquiries. First, I home in on the agency of things by focusing on what objects do as well as what they mean. I show that certain dazzling objects registered for Reza through his senses, complementing what can be communicated in language rather than duplicating what can be said in words. These objects ranged from the particularities of women’s bodies to the moon—things that brought a new subject, a different Reza, into being. Second, I illustrate that the same objects afforded distinct words and concepts. Iranian rosewater, posh attire, women’s bodies, and corpses mobilized Shariati’s key terms such as “Imperialism,” “oppressor,” and “oppressed” for Reza, such that Shariati’s words attained a certain revolutionary fervor through objects about which they spoke and by means of which they proliferated. Further, the paper illustrates that while the revolution was messy and the revolutionaries were never a homogeneous group, their differences were not simply rooted in their contrasting pre-imagined ideas about their present and their dreams of the future. Rather, the contingency of everyday objects, in part, generated this messiness, enabling many different transformations within the revolutionaries.

This paper reconceptualizes social and political transformations in post-war Tehran. 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. The paper argues that 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 also 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 openly and publicly about alternatives to, and within, the Islamic Republic. 

An essay on how dreams can be constructed and demolished at the merger of material inequalities and diasporic subjectivities.