Revolution of Things: The Islamism and Post-Islamism of Objects in Tehran

By Kusha Sefat

An exploration of the ways that shifting relations between materiality and language bring about different forms of politics in Tehran

In Revolution of Things, Kusha Sefat traces a dynamism between materiality and language that sheds light on how the merger of the two permeates politics. To show how shifting relations between things and terms form the grounds for different modes of action, Sefat reconstructs the political history of postrevolutionary Iran at the intersection of everyday objects and words. Just as Islamism fashioned its own objects in Tehran during the 1980s, he explains, tyrannical objects generated a distinct form of Islamism by means of their material properties; everyday things from walls to shoes to foods were active political players that helped consolidate the Islamic Republic. Moreover, President Rafsanjani’s “liberalization” in the 1990s was based not merely on state policies and post-Islamist ideologies but also on the unlikely things—including consumer products from the West—that engendered and sustained “liberalism” in Tehran.

Sefat shows how provincial vocabularies transformed into Islamist and post-Islamist discourses through the circulation of international objects. The globalization of objects, he argues, was constitutive of the different forms that politics took in Tehran, with each constellation affording and foreclosing distinct modes of agency. Sefat’s intention is not to alter historical facts about the Islamic Republic but to show how we can rethink the matter of those facts. By bringing the recent “material turn” into conversation with the canons of structural analysis, poststructuralist theory, sociolinguistics, and Middle East studies, Sefat offers a unique perspective on Iran’s revolution and its aftermath.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9780691246369

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Revolution of Things by Kusha Sefat

REVOLUTION OF THINGS

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Revolution of Things

The Islamism and Post-Islamism of Objects in Tehran

Kusha Sefat

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2023 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Control Number 2022921606

ISBN 978-0-691-24633-8

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Editorial: Meagan Levinson and Erik Beranek

Production Editorial: Jill Harris

Cover Design: Katie Osborne

Production: Lauren Reese

Publicity: William Pagdatoon

In loving memory of Naser Babakhani

CONTENTS

List of Figures ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 Khomeini’s Things: A Revolutionary Discourse of Stuff 23

2 Domination: The Stability of Things and Terms 51

3 Rupture: The Substitution of Things and Terms 84

4 War: The Resignification of Things and Terms 110

Conclusion 140

Notes 151

References 155

Index 163

FIGURES

(Longitudinal Study of Popular Terms)

1. Martyr/Martyrdom (1980s)     61

2. Sacrifice (1980s)      61

3. Plurality (1980s)      66

4. Rights (1980s)      66

5. Free/Freedom (1980s)      67

6. Plurality (1980s–1990s)      96

7. Free/Freedom (1980s–1990s)      97

8. Rights (1980s–1990s)      98

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote this book thinking about revolution through Bruno Latour, bringing to light what I imagined he deems worth considering and slowing down where I thought he finds reason to pause. I asked myself how Latour would reconceptualize the Islamic Republic, what he would say about the culture of martyrdom, and how he would link the global flow of objects to post-Islamism in Tehran. The irony of directing these questions at a person who grew up in a wine-making family in Burgundy is not lost on me. Perhaps what brought me to him was the audacity and originality with which he politicized the most mundane things in life. I am heartbroken to have missed the chance to discuss my book with Bruno and for the lonelier world it will be without him.

There is much to be said about sharing authorship with our interlocutors. I discussed the idea with Reza and Mahdi, whose captivating life histories are touchstones for the book’s larger historical and analytical themes. Both preferred to remain anonymous and suggested that a simple thank you would suffice. So, to Reza and Mahdi: Thank you for crafting this book with me.

The book is based on my dissertation, which was completed under the supervision of John B. Thompson at the University of Cambridge. While the book has undergone many transformations since then, those familiar with John’s scholarship will note its impact on my thinking. There were several times when John returned early drafts of up to three hundred pages in which very few sheets were left without a critical comment or a constructive suggestion. My debt to John, however, goes well beyond his careful attention to every detail in my drafts. From early on as a mentor, he abolished any distance I had imagined between my text and myself by showing me that the same voice pervaded both. I understood that to be reflective in my writing, to be critical and fair, I had to learn to be all of these in my daily life. As such, I underwent a fundamental personal transformation during my time as his student. Having grown up an immigrant who never fully worked out where he belonged, I will be forever indebted to John for helping me build a home in the human and social sciences. I consider it to be among the greatest gifts I have received.

I am also grateful to Henrietta L. Moore for changing my relationship with theory. Henrietta’s powerful lectures at Cambridge presented theory as a framework to think about our situation here at this moment. It was as though nothing was worth reading if it did not help construct a critical scheme with which to study the present. This enabled me to immerse myself in the works of social theorists with a sense of urgency I had not experienced before. Henrietta later engaged with my dissertation thoughtfully and patiently, providing me with the opportunity to learn more from her. I am indebted to her for this, and for her continued support.

Serida L. Catalano took great care when reading my many drafts. A brilliant economist and an equally brilliant scholar of classics, she asked for emphasis on the research design and sampling methods every time the book tilted heavily toward literary analysis and demanded thorough explanations of the particulars when the work became entrenched in social scientific inquiry. If the book manages to maintain any balance between storytelling and scientific analysis, it is in large measure the result of her incisive comments and mastery of a broad range of disciplines. I consider myself fortunate not only because a scholar of such caliber engaged with my work but also because her intellectual generosity lifted me up during the many revisions of the manuscript.

I must profusely thank Hazem Kandil and Arshin Adib-Moghaddam for all that they have taught me. From Hazem, I learned not only how to think at the intersection of global, historical, and cultural sociology but to do so comparatively. And from Arshin, I learned what a critical study of something as complex as Iranian politics entails. Both are major authorities on the Middle East, but they are also incredibly kindhearted people, always ready with their time and thoughtful suggestions. I feel fortunate to consider them dear friends.

Conversations with three brilliant minds have contributed immensely to the development of many of the ideas that inform this book. Brett Wilkinson, Mazdak Tamjidi, and Torsten Geelan are my friends of twenty-five years, fifteen years, and a decade, respectively. They have been key intellectual partners with whom I have even developed a distinct vocabulary. Sometimes I find it difficult to know where their ideas end and mine begin. I hope that our discussions will be as useful to their projects as they have been to my book.

I wish to thank friends and colleagues who read parts of my drafts and provided insightful feedback. These include Mahvish Ahmad, Richard Armstrong, James Caron, Jillian R. Cavanaugh, Matteo Corso, Marjan Ivkovic, Amir Khorasani, Thomas Jeffrey Miley, Arzoo Osanloo, Malihe Riazi, Nina Rismal, Ebrahim Tofigh, and Lisa Wedeen. I hope they can trace their intellectual companionship in the book.

I am truly humbled that Paul DiMaggio, Michèle Lamont, Robert Wuthnow, and Viviana A. Zelizer took my work seriously and recommended it to Princeton University Press for publication. I am absolutely delighted to be part of their incredible book series alongside some of my favorite contemporary sociologists. I am also grateful to my editor at Princeton University Press, Meagan Levinson, and her assistant, Erik Beranek, for the thoughtful way in which they guided my book through submission, review, and production. As for the anonymous reviewers, I am thankful to them for providing nuanced comments that have greatly improved my work.

I wish to express my special appreciation and thanks to my colleagues in Sociology at the University of Tehran for the various ways in which they have supported me during the latter stages of writing this book. Some of these colleagues are fighting for their very survival as academics in light of a new round of political expulsions from the university. I admire their grace and incredibly positive attitudes in the face of such challenges and hope that I can follow their lead when my time as an academic here is up. And of course, I cannot thank my students enough for inspiring me every day. Their bravery, the thoughtful way in which they contest the senseless limitations imposed on them, and their endless drive to fight for what they believe are the high points of my life in Tehran. They also provided the final bit of motivation I needed as the book entered the homestretch.

Many friends deserve to be acknowledged as they provided me with love, good advice, or simply a workable space during the course of writing this book. They include Maryam Ansari, Hesamodin Ashna, Hassan Beheshtipour, Shima Bolkhari, Tiago Carvalho, Saleh Dameshghi, Lori Debin, Milad Dokhanchi, Alireza Doostdar, Mehdi Etemadifard, Raheleh and Roya Fotouhi, Katie Gaddini, Rahman Ghahremanpour, Vincent Hardy, Marcos Hernando, Majid Hosseinie, Darja Irdam, Iwona Janicka, Mohammad Javad Gholamreza Kashi, Tene Kelly, Atefeh Mehraein, Lara Monticelli, Iris Pissaride, Johanna Riha, Cyrus Schayegh, Navid Vezvaei, Alex Wood, and Olga Zeveleva. I am also grateful to Brian Spooner, Robert Vitalis, and John L. Jackson for training me in anthropology and political science during my time at the University of Pennsylvania. All three provided mentorship during a tumultuous period in my life.

The University of Cambridge Trust Foundation, the Queens’ College Walker Fellowship at Cambridge, the Cambridge Political Economy Society, and the Iran Heritage Foundation have all provided financial support. I gratefully acknowledge their generous assistance. Parts of this book have previously appeared in print: a significant section of chapter 2 was published in International Political Sociology as Things and Terms (Sefat 2020), and sections of chapters 1 and 3 have appeared in Persian in Faslnameh Motaleaat-e Farhangi va Ertebataat as Goftoman Enghelabi-e Ashya (2021) and in Faslnameh Motaleaat va Tahghighat-e Ejtemaee dar Iran as Siasat-e Ashya-e Jahani dar Iran-e Pasa Jang (2022).

Finally, I wish to thank my mother, Roshan Nikou, for being the bravest and most sincere woman I have known, and whose voice I have sought to take up and appropriate as my own. I am also grateful for the support of my loving family in the United States and in Iran who must be pleased that this is finally over. I wish to name them all here so that we can flip to this page someday and have ourselves a ball. Here they are in no particular order whatsoever: Parvaneh, Parvin, Farzaneh, Parviz, Shokuh, Morteza, Abteen, Shirin, Farhad, Akhtar, Mohammad, Shideh, Reza, Pooya, Dana, Amir, and the soon-to-be the newest member of our family, Fateme. Inshallahin it.

REVOLUTION OF THINGS

Introduction

This book rethinks the place of language and materiality in politics by bringing the cultural and material turns into conversation. To be sure, a curious gap permeates cultural and material understandings of political transformations. The cultural turn in the human sciences in the 1980s and 1990s put language at the center of our understanding of social relations. Language, whether backed by power (Bourdieu 1991) or as a form that power takes (Foucault 1972, 1990, 1995), was seen to occasion matter so that materiality came to be understood, in part, as an effect of language (Butler 1993:63). The theoretical canon that emerged in the fields of sociology and anthropology, however, fell short of offering an analysis of the reciprocal role of the properties of material objects in the formation of language.

Conversely, the interdisciplinary material turn (the new materialism) has sought to illustrate that materiality is just as integral as language to social life (see Latour 2005; Keane 2006; Alexander 2008; Mitchell 2011; Mukerji 2012; Braidotti 2013; Kohn 2013). Yet by seeking to release matter from its subordination to language, many scholars of the material turn largely ignore language. Rather, they turn to studies of the political impact of materiality by focusing on the senses: taste, sight, sound, smell, touch, and the intersection of these sensory perceptions (see Pinney 2006; Farquhar 2006; Biddle and Knights 2007; DeSoucey 2010; Levitt 2015; Sherman 2009; Surak 2017; Zubrzycki 2011, 2017a; Benzecry 2017). Thus mutual relations between language and material objects as social phenomena remain largely unexamined in the canons of both the cultural and material turns, leading to the failure of the human and social sciences to properly tackle this question: What are the political implications of the different ways in which things and terms are interwoven?

I bring this question to bear on the social and political history of postrevolutionary Iran. Influenced, in part, by the logocentric tradition in Western human sciences, the canon of revolutionary Iran tends to ignore everyday objects as key political drivers in the Islamic Republic. As Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionist theory has demonstrated, pairs of opposites such as nature/culture, body/soul, matter/mind, and form/content play a fundamental role in ordering discourses in Western cultures (1977). This is a hierarchy of value in which one side is given priority over the other. Another opposition of subordination that is less talked about is language over things, which renders material objects marginal and derivative. This hierarchy of value may be seen as related to the human exceptionalism that permeates the field of Iranian studies whereby attributes that are distinctive to humans—discourse, culture, religion, economy, ideology, and propaganda—are fashioned as tools to understand both humans and politics. This approach tends to generate, to use Eduardo Kohn’s terminology, a circular closure that confines us to understand the distinctively human by means of that which is distinctive to humans, conflating analytical objects with analytics in the process (2013:6). As a result, scholars of Iran have overlooked the myriad ways in which people and politics are connected to a broader world of things, or how this fundamental connection changes what it might mean to conceive of agency, resistance, and the political.

This is not to say that the canon of revolutionary Iran completely ignores the object world (see Bayat 2007; Sohrabi 2016; Sadeghi-Boroujerdi 2019). Rather, discussions of Iran tend to treat materiality insofar as objects are seen as extensions. Influenced by historical materialism, some scholars of Iran highlight the importance of material things to the extent that they plug into the production process. Others view objects as having agency with which they are endowed by means of some form of extensionality, whereby things either reflect already existing norms and values, as in Jean Baudrillard’s sense of consumer society/culture (1970), or are inscribed with meaning and value by the political field, as in Arjun Appadurai’s sense of the social life of things (1986). And yet, others view the efficacy of objects through the prism of Foucault’s dispositive (1977), where material objects are endowed with utility at the juncture of a heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, regulatory laws, administrative measures, and so on. As anthropologist Webb Keane explains, these approaches invite us to dematerialize materiality once again by finding the ultimate locus, the source of that agency in some kind of will, or some kind of agentive project for which itself there is no material account (Keane and Silverstein 2017:33). This book seeks to move beyond such logocentric and human-centric approaches to materiality and politics in the Islamic Republic.

In doing so, the ensuing chapters also take issue with recent phenomenological studies of materiality that strive to illuminate the agency of objects by showing how things affect persons through their senses (see Pinney 2006; Farquhar 2006; Biddle and Knights 2007; DeSoucey 2010; Levitt 2015; Sherman 2009; Surak 2017; Zubrzycki 2011, 2017a; Benzecry 2017). This literature has made a tremendous contribution to our understanding of objects not as mere facilitators of action that point the source of agency back to humans but as things that expand, or bring into existence, the subject. And yet these works have unnecessarily ignored language. There is no way of speaking about materiality, says Judith Butler, that is outside of language (1993:36). And since language is not simply a tool of power but a form that power takes, the more we speak of an object, the more that object comes into formation. Thus, while it is true that the sheer materiality of things provides openings to new systems of meaning and languages that traverse processes of subject formation (Keane 2006), we must also remember the organizing structural role that language plays in forming our material world. As such, it is important to establish a dynamism between materiality and language that enables us to better understand how their merger permeates subject formation, political action, and resistance.

Revolution of Things addresses these problems by telling the story of political transformations in Iran from the vantage point of the relationships between everyday objects and words. Drawing on twenty years of involvement with Iran and twenty-five months of fieldwork in Tehran, this book explores politics in terms of the discursive possibilities that the presence and absence of material things generate. It shows that material objects from the moon to corpses to walls can reveal the ontological indiscernibility of medium and world for many Iranians, affording distinct sets of signifiers that are part of the provincial historical text, even if those signifiers have not been extensively used before. In the process, the book illustrates how everyday objects act, by means of their very materiality, as political players that mobilize Islamist and post-Islamist discourses in revolutionary Iran, with wide-ranging consequences.

Taking things and terms as generative actors, the book then explores how shifting relations between the two occasion different kinds of politics. Specifically, it shows that the different confluences of the material and linguistic worlds have brought about qualitatively distinct social fields, with each affording unique possibilities for subjectivity, resistance, and thought in Tehran. So doing, the book seeks to contribute to: first, posthuman critiques of the ways in which we have treated humans as the primary source of agency (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Mukerji 1994; Miller 1998; Latour 1991, 2005; Gell 1992, 1998; Keane 2006, 2017; Tilley 2006a; Mitchell 2011; Braidotti 2013; Kohn 2013; Peters 2015; Molnár 2016, 2017; Zubrzycki 2017a); second, the material turn critique of post-structuralist models of resistance, which are linked to the internal dynamics of referential systems, and not the relations between those systems and the object world (see Giddens 1979; Spivak 1985b; Latour 1991; Mahmood 2005; Oslen 2006; van Dommelen 2006; Kohn 2013); and finally, our understanding of how shifting relations between things and terms have brought about structural political transformations in postrevolutionary Iran. In the process, the book provides what is, to my knowledge, one of the most sustained empirical and analytical studies of how the confluence of materiality and language shapes our social and political world.

These arguments are cultivated in four chapters. The rest of the introduction develops a theoretical and historical framework drawing on the concepts of affordance, disaffordance, resistance/resignification, and form/social structure. These concepts are situated within the relevant literature in the fields of sociology, anthropology, political science, and literary studies, and posited against the backdrop of revolutionary politics, the rise of political Islam, and international conflict. The introduction provides a synthesis of these concepts in order to fashion an analytics that explores the fundamental ways in which things and terms have brought about different forms that the social takes in Tehran.¹ By social I mean relations not just between humans but also between humans and things. This is followed by a brief discussion of how empirical sources are used in relation to the examination and theorization of the relations between materiality, language, and politics.

The introduction then provides an overview of the book’s empirical chapters, each of which focuses on the political implications of the distinct ways in which things and terms became intertwined. Chapters 1–4 provide an empirical and analytical account of the specificity of the relations between things, terms, and politics that progresses chronologically from the dawn of the 1979 Revolution to the Green Movement uprising in 2009. The book concludes by providing an alternative schema for conceptualizing the political transformations that have occurred in revolutionary Iran.

Material Affordances and Disaffordances of Language

In thinking about the revolution of things, we need to reflect on how everyday objects act. Bruno Latour’s contention in this regard is that if action is limited a priori to what intentional meaningful humans do, it is hard to see how a hammer or a table or human hair could act (2005). By contrast, if we take agencies as anything that does make a difference, we have an additional set of actors to consider. As Shalini Shankar and Jillian Cavanaugh (2017) have shown, everyday objects can authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, and block political words and concepts. In other words, material things are complicit in the formation, efficacy, and lived experience of our political vocabularies, alternative languages, and revolutionary discourses.

The first step in fashioning an analytics that addresses the relations between materiality, language, and politics, therefore, is to consider a conception of language that is not restricted to the internal dynamics of the signifying chain in the way that the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure has formulated it (1960). As Anthony Giddens rightly points out, the French school of structural analysis pays little attention to, or finds no way of coping with, the object world (1979). Even Derrida’s radical critique of the sign, which reworks the relations between signifier and signified, fails to consider the materiality of the latter (1967, 1972). Thus, a more suitable starting point might be a conception of language that is not about the object world but part of it (see Wittgenstein 1998; Austin 1962; Cavell 1996; Peirce 1931). Semiotics, that is, the study of sign processes, takes on added significance here.

Material objects play a key role in Charles Peirce’s remarkable semiotic schemata (1931, 1992, 1998). Smoke, says Peirce, comes to represent fire, but only because of the causal relationship between the sign (smoke) and its referent (fire). Which is to say that if not directly generating its sign, fire places