Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

80 Philosophical Frames


goals. Unfortunately the absence of a plan—particularly by the leftist-
student-intellectual coalition that led the early part of the revolution—
proved to be its undoing against Khomeini’s ruthlessly well thought-
out strategy.^54 By combining a simplistic view of the forces operating in
Iran with his longing for a “political spirituality” that he perceived to be
exhausted in the West, Foucault saw that the Iranian events represented
not just a rejection of the shah and his American backers, as well as
American interference and exploitation of Iran’s resources, but more pro-
foundly, a “cultural revolution”—at once a “more radical denial, a refusal
by a people, not simply of the foreigner, but of everything that it had con-
stituted, after years, centuries, his political destiny,” and a radical affirma-
tion of a new subjectivity.^55
hat this means for our discussion, as Georg Stauth argues, is that W
Foucault understood the situation as one in which the people on the street
had become increasingly conscious of the fact that the system had come
to depend on their own active ideas for its sustenance.^56 To use Gramsci’s
categories, they realized that they had to become their own “organic”
intellectuals, to forge the ideology for their own appropriation of the
Iranian state based on a hegemonic reformulation, or philosophization,
of religion from “common” to “good” sense. The organic quality of this
discourse would have to be tied specifically to the larger social class and
set of economic relations from which it emerged,^57 thereby articulating
and complexifying the notion of “common good.”
course, reading the Iranian Revolution backwards in combined Of
Foucauldian and Gramscian terms is highly problematic. There is, how-
ever, another layer in Foucault’s analysis which is part and parcel of his
larger approach. Though admittedly naïve, it is nonetheless particularly
interesting for our argument. It is the idea according to which the gene-
alogy of the popular Islamic insurrection cannot be explained through
motivational prisms based on Western notions of power. Most of all,
Foucault realized that motivating the revolution was a desire by the people
to “change themselves,” to affect a


radical change ... in their experience. Here is where I think
Islam plays a role ... Religion was the promise and guaran-
tee of finding a radical change in their subjectivity ... This
was compatible with traditional Islamic practice that already
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