 The next chapter
Atypical conversations with Daryush Shayegan on
the impact of ideology in contemporary Iranian history
By Simon F. O'Li (Oliai)
October 27, 2003
The Iranian
One should attemtp to elaborate the geneaology,
not so much of
the notion of modernity, but rather of modenity as a question for examination.
-- Michel Foucault, What is Revolution?
The setting was that of the
legendary Café de Flore in Paris. True,
the Flore is no longer what it used to be to (the now profoundly transformed)
French cultural and intellectual scene only twenty or thirty years ago.
Perhaps
one
should say, bearing in mind all the Paris-begot international publicity
created in the aftermath of the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's
famous
account of the "The Gulag Archipelago" in 1975, that it is is no
longer the hub of all the typically Parisian and supposedly chic intellectual
agitation of which the very concept of "revolutionary ideology" has been,
paradoxically enough, the principal beneficiary and the major victim
ever
since the events of May 1968 rocked the foundations of a very conservative
and conformist European society.
The Flore had
ironically
been a significant token in the imagination of many an intellectual in
the "periphery" during the ideologised and revolutionary era
that followed the
end of the Second World
War and reached its peak with the unfolding of politically decisive colonial
conflicts in Algeria and (what was then known as) Indochina. An era whose
political passage was perhaps most powerfully symbolised by the dramatic
images of the
retreat of the US forces from Vietnam.
In Paris, the end of the same era, at least in
intellectual terms, was marked by the politico-philosophical
debates and, at times, comically loud
exchange
of invectives among members of the local chattering classes which at
times involved more serious members of the French intelligenstia
such as
Michel Foucault. This was occasioned by the publication of a number of
essays by a group of ex-Maoists refered to as the "New Philosophers"
("Les Nouveaux Philsophes") by an indulgent and visibly amused
French
media.
These were, as André Malraux had jocosely
pointed out in 1974, former hot "café" ultrarevolutionaries
who had finally and, one should not omit to say, theatrically
awakened to the ugly truth
of Communist disregard for what Lenin once disdainfully dismissed as
"excellent and
yet politically irrelevant and harmful ethical considerations" in the
wake of the publication of Solzhenitsyn's revelations of the
horrors of forced
labour in Soviet internment camps.
For despite all its "progressive"
diatribes against the characteristically "capitalist" fetishisation
of labour,
every honest observer of contemporary history would readily concede
that the Soviet regime's maddeningly inefficient quantification
of human labour
did indeed set an unequaled record of brutal and inhumane consistency
only surpassed,
in strictly qualitative terms, by the destructive irrationality of
National Socialism.
A record whose making, contrary to what these
opportunistic seekers
of the eleventh
hour media celebrity in Paris simplistically claimed, was not so much
a natural consequence of Marxism, if by that one means a critical
attempt
at analysing the contradictions and the pretentions of a fragile and
finite present, as that of all ideology with its characteristic
distortion of the
culturally
complex symbolism that has invariably informed human social practice
throughout history. Not the least of which, of course, is the
possibility of reflection
on a world whose mystery Marx had never so much sought to unravel as
to render less pliably "mystified".
As the later political developments
of the last quarter century were to prove, both the New Philosophers
in the West and their erstwhile and lesser cultivated
"revolutionary" comrades in the periphery have been equally
and fatally blind to the crucial distinction between critical
thought and dogmatically reductive ideology.
Neither bloc could, owing
to the very character
of its reductively theatrical demonisation of the political adversary
and its ideas, free itself of the very ideological notion of the
"chief enemy". The only difference being that for the New Philosophers
a grossly simplified and distorted representation of yesterday's
oft bombastic
discourse on the need for revolution had come, no less ideologically
than
before their sudden convesion to the values of liberal modernity,
to assume the
theoretical mantle of the ultimate political nemesis.
It goes without
saying that the violence with which Marxism was attacked in Paris
in the
late seventies was of a verbal nature whereas at the same time
in the periphery and, more precisely, in revolutionary Iran
the
struggle
with the "enemy"
was
(and still remains) of a literally violent character.
Strangely
enough, in both socio-cultural contexts the prospect of dispassionately
critical
reflection
on
the past and the present still remains the major victim of the
socio-cultural upheavals of that moment in contemporary history,
in addition to
being the sorely missing ingredient in the weaving of the fabric
of the cultural
life
of two otherwise
very dissimilar societies. Regardless of their respective pretentions
to an "exceptionally" elevated cultural or civilisational historical
status.
As far as
contemporary
Iranian history is concerned, it would then seem superfluous to
underscore the
importance of the fatal association established by the more aggressive
variety of blindness
to the value of critical thought (and the cheaply politicised understanding
of the "enemy" that such blindness invariably engenders) between
the notion of revolution and the violent elimination of the political
adversary.
So significant has in fact been the impact of the
said association
that even today, after twenty-five years of uninterrupted misery,
its costly distortion of the idea of radical social change continues
to influence
and sadly disempower
Iranian society. To the point that when, as is the case today,
there is an undeniably urgent need for an authentic revolution
in Iranian
affairs,
most of my self-serving
and, as Hegel would say, "slavish" compatriots sheepishly prefer
the narcotic and illusory comfort of fictive "reforms" to the masterfully
assumed perils of an honestly cathartic revolution.
Without stretching
the analogy too far, one could perhaps say that it is still the
workings of ideology and
its comforting elision of the intuition of the real's fragile complexity
which must still be held responsible for widespread allergry to
critical thought in Paris today (in the aftermath of "La Nouvelle
Philosophie")
as
well as the seemingly endless sway of shameful public apathy in
Iran after the "Islamic Revolution". For ideology is the stultifying
negation
of all
serious thinking on and, as Sartre would say, responsible involvement
in the
affairs
of this world. Be it in Paris or in Tehran. The question would
then seem simple to ask and, as the noted French Marxist theorist
Louis
Althusser would say,
historically vast but pratically difficult to theorise:
What is ideology and how has it influenced contemporary Iranian
history?
This I wanted to discuss with Daryush Shayegan
on that cold and rainy April day at the Flore, that is to say,
the most ideologically
de-ideologised Parisian cultural and, of late, touristic landmark.
I felt nervous and
angry
at myself for having failed to take the appropriate precautions
to ensure that I would arrive on time for my meeting with one of
the
contemporary
world's
most influential cultural theorists and comparative philosophers.
How fortunate, I thought all the same, that long after the exciting
and
Flore-dominated
era of such luminaries as Sartre, Camus, Mauriac, Breton, Genet,
Barthes and Lacan
had passed, one could still meet there an erudite observer of contemporary
civilisation whose work, despite what I have always considered
its overly positive evaluation
of the historic role of the West and its uncircumventable invention
of the political horizon of modernity, has earned him a unique
and truly universal intellectual reputation. For Dariuysh Shayegan's
intellectual reputation happily exceeds the perimeters of the cultural
ghetto which the
ill-conceived field of Middle Eastern studies, so Edward Said
very effectively argued in "Orientalism", has been become in the
West.
Fortuantely enough, my worries turned out to be
excessive for the traffic in Paris was not terribly unmanagable
on that particular
day and I
arrived just
in time
to be greeted by Shayegan's broad smile and warm handshake.
During our pleasant luncheon, the discussion, of which I shall
present a synopsis
nourished by references to Shayegan's various writings herein,
chiefly revolved around
his later thought as expounded in his latest and characteristically
controversial book, "La Lumière Vient de l'Occident"
published in Paris in 2001 and widely commented by the French media.
Wherein the question
of the role of ideology in the periphery and that of the negative
intellectual impact of Politically Correct in the multicultural
West (in particular the US) occupy, so to speak, the hermeneutic
centerstage.
Shayegan's thinking must be viewed as the intellectually
indispensable fruit of a remarkable transcultural quest whose
object is thinking
what the noted Iranian philosopher and cultural critic seductively
terms the
"multiple
layers of modern consciousness". It is cruical to remember that
whilst Shayegan's influential analyses of the essentially ideological
and
Westernised character
of contemporary Islamic fundamentalism (notably in its Shiite/Iranian
and intellectually more advanced variety) in such previous publications
as
"Qu'est-ce qu'une Révolution Religieuse" and "Le Regard
Mutilé",
have established him as an internationally recognised authority
on the contemporary intellectual transformations of traditional
societies, their successful reception has somewhat tended to eclipse
the resolutely comparative
character of his earlier as well as that of his later and more
substantially theoretical
writings such as, for example, his latest essay.
Indeed, his awareness
and impressive knowledge of the diversity of the contemporary world's
sources of cultural
inspiration tend to confer upon Shayegan's work a uniquely edifying
and therapeutic quality that is not easily matched elsewhere in
the annals of recent
and (oft) conceptually naive musings on the cultural and the
political future of a multicultural, postmodern world.
When referring
to the "multiple
layers of modern consciousness", Shayegan means, obviously enough,
several things but the principal connotation of this conceptually
over-determined formula,
or so it appears at least to this reader, is the unmistakably modern
fragmentation of self-consciousness that, beginning in the début-du-siècle
Vienna, anticipated and eventually paved the way for the contemporary
"postmodern" subject's
radical break with the traditionally monolithic conceptions of
cultural identity that had been prevalent, equally that is, in
the East and in the West.
As Shayegan underscores in his reading of the writings
of the influential Italian philosopher, Gianni Vattimo, postmodernity
is nothing other
than the radicalised
expression of trends already at work within the cultural space
of modernity, a certain mode of its overcoming ("Verwindung")
and not, as many
of its anti-modernist and nativist adversaries or philosophically
mediocre, neo-liberal ideologues may pretend, politically desirable
or incorrect rejection
amounting
to no more than, in theoretical terms, its Hegelian and metaphysical
subsumption ("Aufhebung") in a new and "undemocratic" institutional
framework.
Breaking with conceptions that had underpinned
the "traditional" universe of a particular culture's historical
lifeworld, modernity
radically
transcends and relativises the merely biographical fact of its
subject's belonging
to a culture, race, religion of origin or even, as in the case
of the turbulent and Islamic East, deceptively loud professions
of
declared
and
official ideological hostility to the West.
But more significant
in Shayegan's perspective, as one might expect from this uniquely
lucid Iranian intellectual, is the fascinating and yet seldom commented
fact
that modernity has profoundly affected its subjects in ways that,
paradoxically enough, highlight
the decisive structural continuity between the West and its historically
constructed and culturally antagonistic "others". Notable
among the latter, as Shayegan memorably argued in his earlier writings,
are the hardline, theatrically religious and contemporary
enemies
of a certain ill-defined and yet intellectually no less than defining
"Satanic West".
So visibly decisive has been the unacknowledged
intellectual
debt of all fundamentalism to the West that, the
radical and constructive critique of his irritating overemphasis
on the supposed uniqueness of the West's discovery of modernity
notwithstanding, the culturally sensitive reader of Shayegan's
latest book should
easily fathom, at least in principle, why the light of intellectual
progress, that is to say, radical self-critique, can still shine
from the West (despite
all its undeniable historical shortcomings).
This one can do by
simply reflecting on the decisive impact that its crucial and misunderstood
intellectual history
has had on the self-understanding of its various supposedly radical
opponents; opponents who can henceforth, in the aftermath of
the
flight of the "God"
ensuring the "immutability" of the horizon of an irreversibly exceeded
Western ontology,
break the bonds of their ideological opposition, that is to say,
perpetual intellectual dependence on their former colonial tutors
in the West. For the West,
as Shayegan convincingly argues again in his latest essay, is not
simply a geographical or a mere historical reality. It is an uncircumventable
civilisational and ontological
horizon of thought and action which can neither be simply skewed
nor
gradually imported in the manner of cleverly dispersed components
of a costly nuclear
reactor.
One should remember that in his earlier readings
of the theoretical underpinnings
of the writings of Ali Shariati, the influential ideologue of an
increasingly militant political Islam in pre-revolutionary Iran
whose thought was
instrumental in furnishing the Revolution with its rigid ideological
orientation,
Shayegan had pertinently argued that Shariati's use of the equivalent
Persian term for the notion of worldview ("Jahanbini") in his attempt
to
underscore the supposed uniqueness of his brand of highly politicised
Shiite Islam, an Islam whose aim is not that of promoting the education
of a class
of traditional and cultured theologians and clergymen ("Ayatollahs")
but, rather, that of political activists and warriors ("Mojaheds")
equipped with the appropriate ideological outlook required for
the realisation of their revolutionary project, bespoke the decisive
omnipresence of the
eminently Western, pseudo-Hegelian and, above all, "instrumentalist"
conception of thought as ideology.
As Heidegger would put it, it
was ideology, understood as a militant world-picture ("Weltanschauung")
and a means to the realisation
of a concrete politico-historical
project, that, once again, presided over the predictable material
and spiritual destruction that its unleashing of the fatally radicalised
tendency of
the "uprooted modern masses" to deadly self-alienation (through
identification with a "Charismatic
Great Leader") occasioned in the context of a deeply confused and
comically
self-deluding Iranian society in 1979.
The fact that this well-known
transhistorical drive chose the manifestly distortedly symbols
of Shiism (in the intellectually
impoverished Iranian context) to express itself could not (and
did not) shield its monstrous institutional offspring from the
prospect
of succumbing
to the
fate of all other rigidly officialised state religions famously
analysed by Hegel in his "Phenomenology of the Spirit", to wit,
the irreversible
loss
of their symbolic content as coupled with that of their socially
pervasive cultural influence.
Indeed, Shayegan is among those rare
analysts who
had predicted such
an outcome in the Iranian context and pointed out that the realisation
of a Shariati-style ideologico-revolutionary project would inevitably
cost the "revolutionized" Shiite
clergy its socially defining role as the custodian of the transhistorically
regulative and symbolic capital that Shiism had historically accumulated
ever since Islam
became the predominant religion of Persia.
More revelatory, however,
of the deep and yet unconscious conceptual "Weststruckness" bedeviling
the
ideologised
and fanatically "revolutionary" opponents of the "Satanic West"
(in Iran) was, according to Shayegan, nothing less than the very
political
self-understanding of the radical Islamists (inspired by Shariati)
who embarked on the ambiguous
project of creating an "Islamic Republic".
In so doing, Shayegan
ironically remarked, these latter day janissaries of a new brand
of
"World Islam", whose ideology bore the unmistakable imprint of
the conceptually impoverished variety of "Third Worldist" Marxism
("marxisme
vulgaire"), brilliantly examined in "Le Regard Mutilé",
did nothing other than illustrate (to the intellectually sensitive
observer of a self-defeatingly wishful Iranian society)
the salient
and characteristically
muted fact of their radical doctrinal break with the visions of
their uncompromisingly "traditionalist" forerunners. Among these
were, for
example, the infamous
Islamist extremist Navab Safavi and even
the young Khomeni himself, that is to say, the pugnacious and determined
author of "Kashf Al Asrar".
For whilst the preceding and notoriously violent
generation of Islamic "traditionalists" simply wished to protect
what they thought
of as
a time-honoured, traditional social
structure and ethos as well as, significantly enough, the political
hierarchy designed to preserve it (at whose apex, in Navab Safavi's
own view, one
would still have to place the monarch or the Shah conceived as
a good father of a large nation/family whose behaviour should be
modeled on that of Ali Ibn Abi Talib, the first Imam of Shiite
Islam) against
all attempts at
an European-inspired and impiously corrupting "modification", the
new, acutely power-conscious and "revolutionary" proprietors of
a rather cheaply acquired apparatus of state coercion felt the
need
for the establishment of the agency of a "revolutionary/republican"
state
to ensure
the
durably efficient imposition of their unbending and official political
ideology underlying their new brand of radical Islam. That
is to say, a political
system whose safeguarding would require the repression of all expression
of political
and doctrinal dissent even from prominent members of the traditionally
outspoken Shiite clergy.
The institutionalisation of the impact of this
Iranian variety of the internationally famous and rightly feared
virus of "ideological
intolerance"
of dissident
political thinking and praxis (so characteristic, by the way, of
the "traditional" Islamic Persia's creative history of thought),
Shayegan
persuasively argued,
meant
that the construction of an "Islamic Republic" in Iran could not
be considered, in the conceptual or the historical sense of the
term,
an attempt at resurrecting some native political and cultural "tradition"
whose
social pertinence could have been thought of as repressed by the
artificial imposition of "Western-invented modernity" on the fabric
of a traditional
Muslim society.
Indeed, no more solid historical evidence to support
this
assertion
is needed than the indisputable fact that even after a quarter
century of its understandably prolonged existence, the said political
project -- the Islamic Republic -- has clearly amounted to no
more than the ever provisional installation of a self-contradictory
and impossibly
self-destabilising (in purely administrative terms) political structure
whose costly undertaking
has, as suggested above, only served to reflect the depth of what
Shayegan famously called the intellectual "schizophrenia" that
has consistently
beset
the cultural lifeworlds of traditional societies in their historical
encounter with the misappropriated exigencies of an ominously misunderstood
modern
world.
The schizophrenia in question constitutes
the core of an intellectual confusion
that has been invariably compounded by the politically fatal popular
ignorance of the complex history of a spiritually valuable (and
epistemologically obsolete) native "tradition" whose study can
no longer be left to
its intellectually
inadequate and fetishising Orientalist "specialists" for reasons
of sheer cultural and political urgency.
Such traditional societies, Shayegan brilliantly
argued, whether they regard themselves as "Islamic" or simply
"Asian" or "African",
can never recuperate the supposedly lost and fictive purity of
the lifeworld of their respective historical traditions and have
not
adequately
assimilated,
socio-politically speaking, the profoundly secularising and critical
implications of the authentic civilisational revolution that is
"modernity".
They tend to stagnate, as Shayegan memorably puts
it, in this in-between ("entre-deux") ontological region in which
only self-defeating
dependence on a curiously heterogeneous
cocktail of vague reminiscences of declining native/popular traditions
and superficially appropriated, "radical" ideas of indisputably
Western origin
seems to provide the elements of the sole recipe used in concocting
what is, invariably and as a matter of systemic necessity, nothing
other than
ethnocentric
ideologies of "resistance" to the "cultural onslaught" of
the West.
As contemporary Iranian history has so poignantly
illustrated, such self-deluding and simplistically "ideological"
rejections
of modernity, identified as a corrupting and exclusively Western
invention in
a manner that Lord Curzon, the legendary Viceroy of Colonial India
would certainly not have disavowed, has only increased the cultural
and the
economic dependence of
these traditional societies on the West whilst inflicting
great moral confusion and material suffering upon them.
Hence,
it
is unsurprising that, in the context of his laudably demystifying
critique
of Huntington's
simplistic notion of "civilisation", Shayegan should contend, again
with great irony, that the Islamic Republic will never be truly
"Islamic" and is not, politically speaking, yet a "Republic" in
the modern sense
of the term. Enough confusing juxtaposition and amalgamation of
heterogeneous and asymmetric concepts is just enough.
To those who thought (and still think, albeit
self-servingly) that the "worldview" of the Islamic Revolution's
major ideologue bespoke
a nativist
attempt aimed
at recapturing a sense of political and cultural autonomy from
the intrusive and imperialistic cultural presence of the West,
Shayegan
eloquently
retorted that what indeed distinguished Shariati's and, more generally,
the Iranian fundamentalists' ideological, narrow and impoverishing
use of the classical concepts of Islamic Persia's glorious tradition
of theosophical mysticism (a tradition whose most universally admired
and culturally influential representative is perhaps the fourteenth
century poet and mystic
Hafiz Shirazi) was nothing less than
the ideologised expression of the impact, unconsciously absorbed
and universally relevant, of the emergence of a historically unique
phenomenon
commonly
known as "modernity" discovered by the West.
Modernity is a cultural
earthquake, in Shayegan's view, whose intellectual shockwaves
have thus been incessantly felt and, as
with Islamic fundamentalism,
often unconsciously assimilated by its most dogmatic and unbending
adversaries in the form of "revolutionary ideology".
In this respect, as Shayegan has repeatedly pointed
out, the official and intellectually confusing grafting ("placage")
of an essentially Western-inspired assortment
of supposedly formative socio-political policy guidelines (often
tyrannically and disastrously imposed) or "ideology" on a meta-historical
("métahistorique"
in the vocabulary of Henry Corbin, Shayegan's close friend,
pioneer French translator of Heidegger as well as noted specialist
of traditional
Shiite
Iranian philosophy and mysticism,) content of traditional and socially
influential religious symbols has inexorably led to the ironic
and massive secularisation
of the cultural lifeworld of a superficially modernised society
such as that of pre-revolutionary Iran's. A society that has ever
since the Revolution, as Hegel would say, profoundly
privatised, personalised and modernised the multiple connotations
of the much abused, inherently non-ideological
and ever
self-redefining
cultural signifier that Islam will always have been.
Equally significant in the context of Shayegan's
analysis of fundamentalism's Iranian incarnation was the crucial
fact that the monolithic, confrontationally
upheld
and ideologically determined notion of a Revolutionary/Islamic
Identity, in as much as it was conceived as a supposedly distinct
identity
underpinned by the idea of its revolutionary and historical
distinctness, was shown to be nothing other than a derivative
variant of the pseudo-dialectical
and clearly Western fantasy of a unique cultural identity comfortingly
endowed with its allegedly unique history of irresistible conquest
of a spiritually inferior "other".
A morally "superior" history, that of Islam's
inevitable rise to global prominence, which, neither Marx nor
Kipling would have fundamentally
disagreed, is thought as "providentially" blessed with the force
of its "manifest destiny" in the linear course of its very worldly
and political unfolding.
Here, one need not be a specialist of the contemporary
history of the Middle East in order to fathom how Shayegan had indirectly
touched upon the destructive workings of a deceptively expansionist
and cheaply ideologising
political demagoguery that, in the context of the turmoil in post-revolutionary
Iran, pursued the realisation of its putatively international and ideological
ambitions with the sole aim of constructing and consolidating an Islamic
government in one leading Muslim country, whilst,
officially at least, it
awaited the dawn of the "World Revolution" represented by the return
of the hidden twelfth Imam of Shiite Islam.
Nor does one have to be thoroughly
familiar with Hannah Arendt's analysis of modern totalitarianism to concede
that a Stalin would have certainly understood and approved this very effective
use of the seductive and characteristically otherworldly promise of "The
Messiah" (cynically exploited in post-revolutionary Iran) to set up a formidably
effective and technologically Westernised system of constant surveillance
and ideological classification and vetting of the "other" devised
for the sole purpose of perpetuating the cultural and the political domination
of a ruthlessly self-interested and cunning oligarchy over an ethically deliquescent
and profoundly sick body politic.
The reference is, obviously enough, to the
state of post-revolutionary Iranian society whose general self-confidence
and expectations were programmatically lowered by means of a
"Cultural Revolution"
that aimed at facilitating its cost effective governance by the same diehard
clique
of "Guardians" of the sacrosanct "revolutionary ideals" and
their comically cocky, brutish and heavily armed offshoot, the Basij militia,
who, lest their dogmatically "culturalist" observers once again
fail
to notice the non-traditional character of their use of all available and
effective technology of coercion, have doggedly pursued the
refinement of their system
of fundamentalist surveillance
and repression of their cultural and political opponents by heavily drawing
upon the methodological aid furnished by the Soviet tyrant's "Godless",
contemporary political disciples in the far East.
As paradoxical or commendably penetrating as Shayegan's
emphasis on the unconsciously formative cultural impact of the
West on the self-conception
of its fundamentalist "others"( and in particular, in the Iranian
context) may indeed appear to the hopelessly small minority of conceptually
sophisticated analysts of socio-cultural phenomena in the East
and (in particular, in the Islamic world), one must never fail
to remind oneself of
the virtual impossibility of over-estimating its intellectual value.
For not only is it easy to forget that modern
history is irreversibly universal (in terms of its manifold cultural
and
socio-political implications) but that
a vast quantity of loud and stultifying nativist propaganda, coupled with the
West's own equally fundamentalist conception of the particularity
its historical destiny and cultural identity (exemplified by
Huntington's
muddled and sloppy notion of "The Clash of Civilisations"), has so
far tended to impede the dispassionate mapping of what Shayegan views as a
radically new and internationally formative space of cultural
transmutation ("espace
de transmutation") whose emergence characterises the modern world -- a new
chapter of universal history, that is to say, whose incomplete elaboration
presupposed the universally visible decline of monolithically-defined
and traditional conceptions
of cultural identity.
End of Part I
Author
Simon F. O'Li (Oliai) is an independent researcher in philosophy
and comparative history based in Paris. He is
associated with various institutions such as "L'Université Européenne
de la Recherche" and
UNESCO.
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