Abstract
A brief review of the Iranian modern history demonstrates that at least three strong events (the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, the Oil Nationalization Movement (henceforth, the ONM), the Islamic Revolution of 1979) shaped the trends and patterns of socio-economic development and were associated with large-scale confrontations between the forces inside and outside the country, creating a history of instability, upheaval, and socio-political violence alongside generating large-scale restructuring of socio-economic institutions and unstoppable waves of migration.
Many commentators and observers appear to be puzzled by the seemingly unending and unpredictable waves of incessant turbulence in the Iranian society, never settling down in the form of a steady social order based on the establishment of a set of stable institutional arrangements and steady and predictable positions in terms of internal socio-economic policies and external foreign policies. The Iranian society seems to be in a state of perpetual flux and permanent turmoil. The sense of despair, disillusionment, and bewilderment appears to be equally shared between the Iranians and non-Iranians alike.
“Are we [puppets] made of wax ([aya] ma ra az mum sakhta-and)?” he asked with a strain of self-contempt. “In this world there are no human beings like us”.
Nasir-al-Din Shah (Amanat 1997: 252)
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Notes
- 1.
The research is a journey, and the journey starts with a set of questions and then proceeds to questioning the questions. This work tries to avoid all forms of essentialization and attributes the roots of the socio-economic crisis to the intersection of the two Malinowskian notions of ‘context of culture’ and ‘context of situation’, which is captured through the compound notion of belated inbetweenness. As such this research is a work in the art and science of contextualization. The motto of this work is “never essentialize and always contextualize” (although Spivak believes in a form of “strategic essentialism”, see Nayar 2015: 141). The fact is that the main idea of this work revolves around establishing and applying the science of singularity, where we try to capture the singularity and uniqueness of social entities, events and experiences.
- 2.
See Bhabha (1990a, b, 1994) and Shayegan (1997)/(2007). See also Garner (2007) for the notion of ‘inbetween peoples’ in the context of race relations, Dovale (2013) on the notion of inbetweenness in the Japanese context and Ghorashi (2003) on the application of this notion to the exiled Iranians. The next chapters will delve into this notion more extensively.
- 3.
See Seeburger (2016) and the literature cited there on the notion of belatedness and the literature in development economics and development studies on catching-up ideologies and leapfrogging (see Szirmai 2015; Chang 1994; Easterly 2007; Pieterse 2010, Abramovitz 1986, for example). The notion of belatedness will be explored more thoroughly in the next chapters.
- 4.
See Rajaee (2006) on the notion of ‘one civilization, many cultures’.
- 5.
Modernity as a regime of truth has a local presence in various societies in the form of co-habiting with other regimes of truth such as Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Persianism, Confucianism, Shintoism, and so on. The two different types of presence of modernity (as a dominant civilization and as a specific regime of truth and its associated culture) should not be confused or conflated. We will see more on this later in the text.
- 6.
Based on the positions taken on ontological individualism and collectivism or methodological individualism and collectivism (Sawyer 2005), there is a long tradition of debates in the social sciences on whether the unit of analysis should be gene, meme, epigenetics, psyche, individual (such as homoeconomicus), group, network, variable, family, class, gender, race, ethnicity, community, village, society, generation, intersectionality, nation-state, empire, centre-periphery, world system, civilization, epoch, event, action, practice or experience (some of these units were deployed or discussed in the following studies: Sawyer 2005; Hegland 2013; Saleh 2013; Epstein 2015; Fathi 2017; Blau 2017, for instance). In this study we take the unit of analysis to be the Deleuzian notion of ‘social assemblage’ incorporating all of the above phenomena as its exemplars (see DeLanda 2006, 2016; Parr 2010).
- 7.
- 8.
For the notion of regime of truth, see Foucault (1984). We address this notion more thoroughly throughout this work.
- 9.
For the three forms of rationality, see Habermas (1971). Here we have modified Habermas’ emancipative rationality—what he dubs as “the emancipatory cognitive interest of rational reflection”—to incorporate the insights from the Terror Management Theory (Goldenberg et al. 2000; Burke et al. 2010) on the fear of death. See also Nusseibeh (2016), Azadpur (2011), and Walbridge (2010) for the story of reason in Islam.
- 10.
- 11.
For the notion of “happy slave”, see Herzog (1989), for example.
- 12.
Szirmai (2015: 104) reports on the potential advantages of technological backwardness in being able to copy the technical advances from the pioneering countries without bearing the costs. This second-mover advantage applies to the societies like Japan whose social cohesion was largely undisturbed through the traumatic encounter with modernity. Otherwise, copying, as an example of social engineering, may prove to be dysfunctional, reversible and counterproductive due to the emergence of irreconcilable differences and schism within belated societies owing to lack of incremental experiences associated with the vanishing mediators and their associated sense of ownership, tacit knowledge and skilful comportment.
- 13.
- 14.
See some of these generalizations, for example, in the following works and collections of essays on Iran: Vahabzadeh (2017), Chehabi et al. (2015), Mannani and Thompson (2015), Aghaie and Marashi (2014), Yaghoubian (2014), Stone (2014), Adib-Moghaddam (2013), Moazami (2013), Matin (2013), Saleh (2013), Elling (2013), Amanat and Vejdani (2012), Gheissari (2009), Atabaki (2012), Katouzian and Shahidi (2007), Jahanbegloo (2004, 2008), Keddie and Matthee (2002) and Foran (1994), among others. The deep and thorough engagement with the literature on Iran requires another independent space.
- 15.
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Gohardani, F., Tizro, Z. (2019). Introduction. In: The Political Economy of Iran. Political Economy of Islam. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10638-6_1
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