Keshavarzian 227through state institutions, while others have created new sets of commer-
cial and personal relations transcending the bazaar’s former boundaries.
Changes in the bazaar’s location in the political economy and in the use
of the space have caused the web of interpersonal relations to give way
to greater social distance, despite physical proximity. With the remak-
ing of the bazaar as a place and a network, its publicness—including the
penchant for engagement with other publics and social movements—has
atrophied, replaced with secrecy and withdrawal from politics. Place, net-
works, and publicity are necessarily related to each other; if they are sepa-
rated they are misunderstood.
e metaphor of the shadow is used in this chapter to imply dark-Th
ness, obscurity, invisibility, and even domination by the public authority.
But it is possible to imagine another interpretation of this metaphor, one
that reflects Arendt and Habermas’s normative theory of the public sphere
as a site of congregation and communication. That is, in order to arrive
at consensus via democratic participation, the shadow needs to be trans-
formed into “shade” which can provide protection from the “elements.”
This is the dilemma facing the bazaar and Iranian politics in general.
Many reformists and independent intellectual voices in Iran have begun
to call for constitutional and institutional reforms to create a state which
is accountable, in that it allows private citizens to access and participate in
deliberations over the common good, yet preserves a sphere for individual
privacy, even secrecy. Like many early twentieth century social thinkers,
Simmel believed that this process was the natural outgrowth of moder-
nity. “In the nineteenth century,” he writes,
publicity invaded the affairs of state to such an extent that
by now, governments officially publish facts without whose
secrecy, prior to the nineteenth century, no regime seemed
even possible. Politics, administration, and jurisdiction thus
have lost their secrecy and inaccessibility in the same measure
in which the individual has gained the possibility of ever more
complete withdrawal, and in the same measure in which mod-
ern life has developed, in the midst of metropolitan crowd-
edness, a technique for making and keeping private matters
secret, such as earlier could be attained only by means of spa-
tial isolation.^70