Chapter Four: An Aesthetic Reason

Abstract

Our understanding of the Green Movement as the simulacrum of a metamorphic movement changing shape and form but not purpose and direction points to the unfolding of an “aesthetic reason” that I wish to explore in some detail in this chapter. Here I wish to propose that the articulation of this “aesthetic reason” is a key theoretical momentum finally formed to overcome the paradox of colonial modernity, through which the world at large was told to be free to think critically precisely at the moment when a colonial bayonet was put to its head and subjugated to European capitalist modernity at gunpoint. The Green Movement, I have proposed, was the most cogent mobilization of civic forces to articulate and defend civil liberties in terms beyond the limited ideological means and political imagination of the ruling Islamic Republic and even (or particularly) its manufactured loyal opposition (the so-called Reformists), and a fortiori the categorically discredited “expat opposition” that its only difference with the ruling regime is that it covets a power it lacks. In its political potency, the movement (however short-lived in its most public phase) was and will remain post-ideological, and as such declared an effective end not just to the limited legitimacy of the ruling regime but far more potently the end of “the West” as an absolute metaphor of our time.