An Examination of the Cultural Politics of Education/Pedagogy in Iran Based on a Lacanian Analysis of Two Iranian Banned Novels

An examination of the cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran based on a Lacanian analysis of two Iranian banned novels

Sajad Kabgani

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

School of Education

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

April, 2019

Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Kabgani First name: Sajad Other name/s: N/A Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD School: Education Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences Title: An examination of the cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran based on a Lacanian analysis of two Iranian banned novels

Abstract The cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran after the 1979 revolution has been closely entangled with the state's post- revolution ideology. As a result of this intermingling, an exclusionary, hegemonic and homogenising approach has been developed by the dominant cultural/pedagogic institutions in Iran, leading to censoring and banning cultural products that do not comply with the state's revolutionary causes. The current thesis pursues two related purposes: to examine how the Iranian society after the revolution has been depicted in the works excluded from the state's cultural sphere, and to see how these works represent a conception of subjectivity. With these purposes in mind, Shahriar Mandanipour's (2009) novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, and Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's (2012) novel, The Colonel, as two examples of banned/excluded literary works have been selected. The notion of exclusion, which has been taken synonymous with censorship in this research, is examined from two perspectives: Rancière's aesthetic theory, and the Foucauldian notion of power-knowledge. This has been done in order to address the gap existing in the academic study of censorship in Iran after the revolution. While these two approaches have been used to explain the way through which censorship works in post-revolution Iran, the novels in question have been analysed through a Lacanian theory of subjectivity. A psychoanalytic transferential reading approach coupled with a close reading approach have been used as a method for reading and analysing the novels. Based on the analysis made, it was shown that in Mandanipour's novel the notion of love/sexuality, as an embodiment of lack in the Lacanian ontological argument, is set against the hegemonic positioning of the state, and in Dowlatabadi's novel the utopian, homogenising ideology of the state has been challenged through the depiction of the demise of a revolutionary family.

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Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 1 PREFACE ...... 1

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ...... 5

1.1 CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT AND CENSORSHIP ...... 9 1.2 PURPOSE OF THE RESEARCH ...... 12 1.3 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY ...... 14 1.4 AN EXPLORATION OF CENSORSHIP IN THE POST-REVOLUTION ERA: A POSSIBLE SCENARIO ...... 17 1.5 IRANIAN POST-REVOLUTION IDEOLOGY AND THE QUESTION OF CENSORSHIP: A PSYCHOANALYTIC EXPLANATION ...... 20 1.6 THEORETICAL APPROACH ...... 27 1.7 A METHODOLOGICAL POINT ABOUT TWO NOVELS ...... 30 1.8 A SYNOPSIS OF THE NOVELS ...... 31 1.9 RESEARCH QUESTIONS ...... 33 1.10 OVERVIEW AND STRUCTURE OF THE THESIS ...... 34 CHAPTER 2 A CRITICAL REVIEW OF POLICY/PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION/PEDAGOGY IN POST-REVOLUTION IRAN ...... 37

2.1 EDUCATION AND POLITICS IN IRAN ...... 39 2.2 PHILOSOPHY/POLICY OF EDUCATION IN IRAN AND ITS RELATION TO EDUCATIONAL SUBJECTIVITY ...... 40 2.3 LEARNING AND EDUCATION: ON POWER, IDENTITY AND KNOWLEDGE FROM A LACANIAN PERSPECTIVE ...... 52

CHAPTER 3 LITERATURE, EDUCATION AND THE QUESTION OF SUBJECTIVITY: RANCIERE, FOUCAULT AND LACAN ...... 56

3.1 WHY SUBJECTIVITY? ...... 58 3.2 AESTHETICS AND THE EMERGENCE, (TRANS)FORMATION OR REPRESSION OF SUBJECTIVITIES ...... 62 3.3 SUBJECTIVITY IN THE CONTEXT OF EDUCATION: PEDAGOGICAL MODES OF EXISTENCE ...... 66 3.4 KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND THE FORMATION OF SUBJECTIVITY ...... 68 3.5 FOUCAULT AND EDUCATION ...... 72 3.6 CONSTITUTIVE LACK AND THE NON-TOTALITY OF DISCURSIVE SYSTEMS ...... 75 3.7 THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY ...... 77

CHAPTER 4 LACANIAN THEORY OF SUBJECTIVITY...... 83

4.1 LACAN’S APPROACH TO THEORY ...... 84 4.2 THE IMAGINARY ...... 86 4.3 THE RELATION BETWEEN THE IMAGINARY AND THE SYMBOLIC...... 94 4.4 THE IMAGINARY AND THE REAL AND THE GENESIS OF JOUISSNACE ...... 97 4.5 LACK AT THE CENTRE OF THE SUBJECT ...... 100 4.6 LACK, DESIRE AND OBJET PETIT A ...... 104 4.7 THE ‘OTHER’/’OTHER’ AND THE OBJECT PETIT A ...... 108 4.8 CENTRALITY OF LANGUAGE IN LACAN ...... 111 I

CHAPTER 5 METHODOLOGICAL OBSERVATIONS ...... 116

5.1 DIALECTICAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THEORY AND DATA ...... 1189 5.2 METHOD OF ANALYSIS: CLOSE READING APPROACH AND TRANSFERENTIAL READING OF LITERATURE ..... 1211 5.3 CLOSE READING APPROACH: PROS AND CONS ...... 12125 5.4 THE NEED FOR A CRITICAL-COMPLEX ANALYTIC APPROACH ...... 127 5.5 RECONSIDERATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERARY CRITICISM ...... 1300 5.6 TRANSFERENTIAL READING: ATTENDING TO THE LITERARY DIALECTIC ...... 1355 CHAPTER 6 READING A LACANIAN LOVE STORY: LOVE/POLICTIS IN CENSORING AN IRANIAN LOVE STORY (BY SHARIAR MANDANIPOUR) ...... 144

6.1 LACAN ON LOVE ...... 145 6.2 LOVE, SEXUALITY AND POLITICS ...... 147 6.3 UNNAMEABLE AS LOVE: SARA AS THE EMBODIMENT OF LOVE/POLITICS ...... 153 6.4 LOVE/SEXUALITY AS A THREAT TO THE CENSOR'S IDENTITY ...... 156 CHAPTER 7 THIS ROTTEN FOETUS WAS ONCE A (FANTASISED) HERO: THE SATURATION OF THE SYMBOLIC IN THE COLONEL (BY MAHMOUD DOWLATABADI) ...... 165

7.1 THE SYMBOLIC: RESTRICTIVE/PRODUCTIVE OR RESTRICTIVE/ PROHIBITIVE? ...... 166 7.2 A SYNOPSIS OF THE COLONEL ...... 173 7.3 THE SATURATION OF THE SYMBOLIC ...... 175 7.4 DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEW: SCHIZOPHERNIC SUBJECT IN THE GUISE OF POST-REVOLUTION SUBJECT ...... 181

CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION ...... 194

8.1 SUBJECTIVITY IN THE IRANIAN POST-REVOLUTION IDEOLOGY ...... 197 The Colonel's de-voiced subject and and the state's (dys)topian ideology ...... 12198 The subject of non-relation: challenging the sensible through love/sex in Censoring and Iranian Love Story ...... 199 8.2 THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EDUCATION/PEDAGOGY IN POST-REVOLUTION IRAN ...... 201 8.3 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY ...... 204 8.4 SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER STUDIES ...... 205 8.5 PEDAGOGIC IMPLICATIONS ...... 207

REFERENCES ...... 208

Acknowledgments

Firstly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisors Dr. Richard Niesche, Dr. Kalervo Gulson and Dr. Matthew Clarke for the continuous support of my Ph.D study and related research, for their patience, motivation, and immense knowledge. Their guidance helped me in all the time of research and writing of this thesis.

Besides my advisor, I would like to thank the rest of my thesis committee Dr. Terry Cumming, Dr. Michael Michell, Dr. Gregory Vass, and Dr. Karen Maras, for their insightful comments and encouragement, but also for the hard questions which encouraged me to widen my research from various perspectives.

Last but not the least, I would like to thank my family: my parents for supporting me spiritually throughout writing this thesis and my life in general.

Preface

The experience of writing a thesis at the intersection of education, psychoanalysis, politics and literature can turn out to be a special, if not strange, one if you live in a world where media bombard you with saddening and horrible news every day. How can one envisage a notion of education considering this aggravating world with its alarming insecurity?

How can the modern human psyche, with all its complexity and the incessant twist and turn that it takes on, entangled in the political, economic and environmental instability, engage in educational activities that are part of a fragile futurity? Always sitting at the crossroad of academia and everyday life and never realising precisely to which of these two belong, there has been a recurrent scenario in my mind from the earliest days when I started thinking about the current thesis. Frequently, I have been telling myself:

“And now this is my thesis. I have to listen to my academic conscious ego so that I can stick to the academic jargon.” There has been a strong voice in my mind that reminds me of the strict requirements of thinking, reading and writing academically. But there is another voice inside me which shouts sometimes and tells me: “Translate your pains, let readers wonder if they are reading a piece of literary work, an autobiography of pain and seclusion, solitude,” while I am not sure if I have been the one who has experienced these things or I have been merely sympathising with other victims. I have been telling myself:

“Make them doubt if they are reading the memoir of a war veteran, the witness of piles of corpses, young men, their lovers waiting for them, or an academic piece of writing by someone who has no idea of the requirements for a scientific piece of writing”. My academic ego steps in and tells me: “Nooo, don’t be that silly boy, this is your thesis, have

you lost your wits? Do you want to mess up your future? People have not sat in their rooms, surrounded by thousands books to listen to your nagging. Come on! Stick to the rule; first introduction, then lit review and to end. That’s it, good boy. Your parents are waiting for you back in Iran to see their boy return with that amazing certificate showing that he has become a doctor.” But I cannot muffle that voice which says: “Education… thesis…doctor…what do these resonate with? How can you sit in the beautiful café in

Sydney, listening to Arvo Part, ordering neat and organised thoughts one after another, while your neighbours in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq are searching for a safe small ground to bury the corpse of a toddler? Did the toddler touch the world as you did? Her mother’s nipple is still wet, the milk is still coming, the toddler deep down there, in the cold dark soil of a deserted cemetery in Kabul, Mussel, Baghdad, dogs wandering there, searching for whatever edible. Go on! Shout buddy, louder than before, let the reader go down deep in his/her seat. Turn the small cosy room in their universities into a microcosm of pain and wretchedness.” And now here is my thesis. I do not know where the academic, goal-oriented voice writes and where the crazy, lunatic, unconscious buddy in my heart overlaps.

I love nights, those pure moments, dark and still; when you can stare into the heart of darkness. I see my unconscious buddy, his hands tight around the pedantic voluptuous conscious one. I tell him: “Kill that bastard, make him evaporate into nothingness.” After a while, the battle is over, I and my unconscious fellow say goodbye to each other. But when the sun rises, with the first beam of that big illuminating object, I see the conscious man, sharp and brisk; uprightly walks out, as if his stunt was being killed the night before.

He arrogantly takes steps on the firm ground, not aware of the shadowy man following

him, on the lookout for a single moment to encroach on him and tell him: “I am your pain, translate me.”

Chapter 1 Introduction

How a society selects, classifies, distributes, transmits and evaluates the educational knowledge it considers to be public, reflects both the distribution of power and the principles of social control.

Basil Bernstein (1971, p. 47), On Classification and framing of educational knowledge

When I was working on my doctoral thesis in 1993, I remember searching for an example to ground

the chapter I was writing on subjectivity. I can recall actually looking around the room, as if an

object, one that I might find lying around, could become my subject. At this moment of looking

around, I recalled an experience, one that I had ‘‘forgotten.’’ It came to me as if it were reaching

out from the past. The very reach of the past shows that it was not one I had left behind. It was a

memory of walking near my home in Adelaide and being stopped by two policemen in a car, one

of whom asked me, ‘‘Are you Aboriginal?’’ It turned out that there had been some burglaries in

the area. It was an extremely hostile address and an unsettling experience at the time. Having

recalled this experience, I wrote about it.

Sara Ahmed (2012, p. 2), On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life.

My own attempts to understand better the effect that censorship has had on writing in Iran

ironically betrayed the inadequacies of words and language. I encountered authors who were

enthusiastic about helping me but ultimately said nothing. They circled my questions without ever

answering them. There was mention of secret email addresses to ensure privacy, and my questions

were often too broad to capture the complexities of censorship, not only as a state apparatus but

also as a lived experience. It was nearly impossible to enter into this system and engage Iranian

writers in a discussion of censorship. Some of these challenges were logistical, but others were

reflective of the failure of words to communicate the kind of collective trauma that censorship has

inflicted on Iranian society. The frightening truth is that censorship, even when it is called

inspection, succeeds when language is no longer able to represent and resist the governmental

structures that control it.

Blake Atwood (2012, p. 41), Sense and Censorship in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Introduction

Education, both as a practice and a research field, in Iran after 1979 revolution has been used as a political tool aiming to develop and distribute ideological causes of the state

(Kalantari & Bahman, 2011; Pals, 2018). Education, in its broadest sense, in post- revolution Iran has been taking on an unprecedented role; criticising both the previous regime's ideas and the colonisation project inflicting the country from, at least, last century onwards (Shorish, 1988). This unmediated entanglement of education with politics has led to far-reaching and comprehensive consequences in the configuration of culture in the Iranian society (Malekzadeh, 2012; Paivandi, 2012). Probably the most tangible trace of this observation can be seen in the so-called Iranian 'Cultural Revolution' as implemented by the Iranian post-revolution officials in 1980, just one year after the occurrence of the Islamic revolution. According to Sobhe (1982):

Through what was called Revolution, the new Iranian regime closed all colleges and universities

in summer, 1980. The government claimed that the system of education should undergo

Islamisation. This meant that education must correspond to the Islamic ideology…Until the second

quarter of 1982, colleges and universities have remained closed in Iran. However,…it is certain

that after these schools re-open an individual's adherence to Islamic principles and his or her

'commitment' to Islam will count in securing admission to higher education institutes. (p. 271) 6

Attributing the title of 'revolution' to the act of closing educational institutions and equalising it with such a transformative event as revolution can be indicative of the depth and breadth of the impact of the said decision on the whole social and cultural structure of Iranian society (Godazgar, 2001; Sakurai, 2004; Levers, 2006; Razavi, 2009). Of course, what Sobhe observes dates back to the earlier years of the revolution, but after passing four decades from the revolution there are still clues confirming his observation.

The tangible evidence verifying the latter is the inclusion of religious courses in elementary, secondary, high school and higher education (undergraduate) textbooks.

As a result of the comprehensive changes implemented within the structure of educational/cultural institutes in post-revolution Iran, the new educational/pedagogic system has been characterised by two complementary elements: Islamic (Shia) principles and anti-imperialist politics (Dara, 2011; Mehrmohammadi, 2012). Mehrmohammadi

(2014), an Iranian educational scholar and curriculum theorist, has done a thorough analysis of curriculum development in the post-revolution Iran. According to him:

Islamization as a legitimizing language has been a recurrent postrevolutionary theme, traceable

in every attempt made at reforming the education system, specially the school curriculum during

the last three decades. The justification is that the education system is not informed by the belief

system that culminated in the Islamic Revolution, transposing the collective will of the people.

Alternatively, indigenization of the education system is another popular concept characterizing

this powerful component of the enunciated curriculum discourse. This discourse is thought to

embrace a decolonizing tone since Islamic doctrine was instrumental in turning the colonial

political system of the Pahlavi dynasty [the pre-revolution regime] upside down and introducing

conditions where exercising control over the cultural and economic destiny of the country based

on the interests of people was made possible. Islamization of life in every aspect, it was so argued,

would count as a safeguard for ideas known to be responsible for the revolutions’ accomplishments

and will, therefore, preserve the country’s religious and revolutionary identity. (p. 231, emphasis

in original)

In fact, it is in line with this project of the "Islamization of curriculum" that, as

Mehrmohammadi remarks, "Islamic views and values [are permeated] into school curriculum, thereby introducing a religious understanding of all subjects of study to students in concert with the state’s ideology" (p. 235).

Before elaborating on the above discussion, it is important to note that in the current thesis the notions of education and pedagogy in today's Iran have been used interchangeably. The rationale behind this is the more or less similar ideological foundation of both institutes in Iran, as both of these are built on Islamic/ideological principles of the post-revolution state (Arjmand, 2008, Fazeli, 2006, Nafisi, 1992).

Accordingly, in order to address the broader category of politics of thinking in the post- revolution Iran, I have not distinguished between education and pedagogy in the current thesis.

What, in general, connects the notions of politics, culture, religion and ideology to the notion of education in Iran and, in particular, to the purpose of the current thesis is that which can, ironically, be envisaged out of the ideological boundaries of the cultural politics of education in Iran. In a sense, while it is possible to acquire an understanding of cultural politics of education in Iran through studying what – the materials and practices – it selects in order to develop its ideologies, doing the latter will be consolidated and complemented by studying what it excludes from its curriculum. And it is exactly here that lies the significance and contribution of the current thesis. As such, in this research I explore a politico-cultural issue in the educational/pedagogic system of today's

Iran from a perspective according to which the focus of this thesis would be on what this 8

system excludes. With this aim in mind, I have selected The Colonel (2011) and

Censoring an Iranian Love Story (2009) as two works of banned literature written by

Mahmoud Dowlatabadi and Shahriar Mandanipour, respectively. Accordingly, the notion of exclusion, conjuring up the notion of banning and censorship, is of a central status in this research.

The arguments mentioned above make it, to some extent, clear how and why education and pedagogy in Iran is founded on an 'exclusive/inclusive' strategy. However, like many other forms of exclusion, the exclusionary approach adopted by the Iranian system of pedagogy is not necessarily a harsh one. Soft yet fundamental and deep-rooted, an exclusionary/ideological practice can be realised if the latter happens within an educational context (Apple, 2012). From a critical pedagogy perspective, any exclusionary approaches in the process of curriculum development is synonymous with censorship (Giroux & McLaren, 1989). Censorship can result in cutting a particular part of a cultural product or the total deletion of it. What is important to the argument of this thesis is the latter phenomenon; the production and dissemination of particular cultural products at the cost of eliminating some others. Censorship, seen through the lens of

Foucauldian notion of power/knowledge and Rancière's conception of aesthetics, in this thesis is thought of as an ideologically epistemological practice aiming to delimit the aesthetic experience of the Iranian society. This thesis, through analysing that which is excluded from the Iranian curriculum aims to show how these cultural products represent a depiction of the Iranian post-revolution society, and how a conception of subjectivity is represented in the works under analysis. Here I locate the definition of the Iranian curriculum in its broadest realm where it includes all materials produced by state- sponsored pedagogic, cultural and educational institutions (Mehrmohammadi, 2012).

While, on the surface of it, such an undertaking might seem irrelevant to the issue of education and pedagogy in Iran, it makes a quite explicit link with the latter when one notices how the realm of education in Iran is closely related to the socio-political configuration of the state. Put more clearly, I can argue that education and politics have never been separate from each other in the Iranian post-revolution society.

1.1 Curriculum development and censorship

In this thesis, following Alexander (2008), curriculum development is broadly thought of as a part of "the complex field of pedagogy" which "includes culture and classroom, policy and practice, teacher and learner, knowledge both public and personal" (p. 3).

Accordingly, the works under analysis in the thesis can be considered as potentially pedagogic materials that based on the decision of Iranian officials are banned to be published in the cultural sphere of the Iranian society.

In its broadest scope and in line with the above definition of curriculum, this thesis deals with what Eliot Eisner (2005) calls "the null curriculum" (p. 146). Elaborating on the notion of null curriculum, Eisner (2002) remarks:

What is not taught can be as important in someone’s life as what is taught, whether explicitly or

implicitly. The null curriculum constitutes what is absent from the school program, what students

in schools never have the opportunity to learn. When the arts are absent or taught so poorly that

they might as well be, students pay a price. Acts of omission can be as significant as acts of

commission. Thus, in thinking about curriculum development or curriculum reform we should

think about the explicit curriculum, the implicit curriculum, and also the null curriculum. (159)

In Eisner (2002), the explicit curriculum consists of "the formal program of the school, the program that is planned, taught, and graded", while the implicit curriculum includes

"classroom ambiance, school norms, modes of assessment, and the like" (p. 158). What can be deduced from such observation is that in an ideological society/state, such as Iran, explicit and implicit curricula are formed around a gap (the null curriculum), and this gap is that which is ought not to be thought of, imagined and lived. Accordingly, in this thesis the two works of banned literature are considered as elements of a null curriculum. In a sense, the aim of this research is to engage with that which is supposed to remain out of the subject's (the Iranian learner in its broadest sense which can include all the society) imagination.

What makes a strong link between this kind of literature and the pedagogic/educational system in Iran, particularly when it comes to the consideration of its null curriculum, are their fantasmatic potentials (Jackson, 2001). As will be discussed in the section on theoretical observations (chapter 5), fantasmatic nature of literature, as Jacqueline Rose in her seminal work, States of Fantasy (1996) shows, harbors profound critical/political potentials that can open up a new window on the formation of reality. It is possible to develop the same argument for potentials of null curriculum in the case of Iranian society.

As discussed comprehensively in the works of Lacanian political thinkers such as

Glynos (2001), MacGowan (2013) and Žižek (1989, 1991, 1997), fantasy acts as a constitutive – in both positive and negative sense of the term – element of reality. In particular, political ideologies have always resorted to fantasmatic ideas in order develop their worldviews. While it might seem unsubstantiated or even unrealistic to think of literature as a constitutive element of social realities, it seems fair to argue that literature's relation with social and political realities has always been controversial. If the latter observation was not true, we never heard of censorship. This observation seems simple; yet in its very simplicity it is indicative of critical moments in the history of modern 11

human. Just what Stalin and Eastern Block leaders, during the reign of Stalin, did with intellectuals clearly shows why literature and all forms of art are of such importance for ideological regimes. This feature of literature is highlighted here to show that if pedagogic/educational discourse in Iran, due to its ideological nature, is more restrictive than emancipatory, what is created out of its porous boundaries can challenge it.

Psychoanalytically speaking, the more pedagogy/education – in its different forms and as developed by different institutions in Iran – insists on excluding so-called unorthodox materials, the more these materials might acquire fantasmatic potentials in the minds of learners/students.

From a broader perspective, this thesis deals with the link between knowledge, politics and aesthetics (Ball, 2013; Barone, 2000; Muller, 2000; Youdell, 2011; Peters, 1996).

Knowledge as a political concept, in the Foucauldian sense of the term, has the potential to (de)limit the perceptual/aesthetic experience of the subject. In Rancière (2009, 2013), politics is the realm of senses and perception. From this perspective, when a given state decides to ban the distribution of a particular cultural product, it is, in fact, restricting the subject's perceptual experience. According to Rancière, literature, and art in general, is a political activity harbouring the potential to extent the sensory perception of the subject beyond the normalising and homogenising epistemo-political ideology of a given state.

The literature's means to realise the latter is its fantasmatic nature. The notion of knowledge and aesthetics as political concepts will be discussed in chapters 2 and 3, and the notion of fantasy will be discussed in chapter 4 and 5 from a Lacanian perspective.

1.2 Purpose of the research

In the current thesis my aim is to get a general understanding of the pedagogic philosophy and policy developed by post-revolution Iranian state through examining what it deems inappropriate to be used in cultural and educational contexts. With this purpose in mind,

I have purposefully selected materials in a literary genre: two novels. As a cultural creation, rooted in social, cultural and political events and experiences of a given society, works of literature inspire and are inspired by serious social, cultural and political events.

This claim can be supported by a simple, yet not simplistic, fact that if literature does not have such a potential, why, throughout the history, have many works been banned/censored by ruling states, and why have many writers been imprisoned, exiled, or in harsher cases, sentenced to death? In this regard, Green and Karolides's (2009)

Encyclopedia of Censorship, and Karolides's (2009) Literature Suppressed on Political

Grounds, are two highly important works worth mentioning.

From a theoretical perceptive, the purpose of analysing banned literary works is to see how a political regime through excluding particular kinds of cultural productions attempt to define and determine a particular perceptual experience in accordance with its governing ideology. In order to achieve the latter, the ruling institutes – in the case of this thesis, Iranian cultural and educational institutions such The Ministry of Culture and

Islamic Guidance, The Ministry of Education and The Ministry of Science Research and

Technology – design and develop a particular discursive structure being consistent with its definition of (ideological) perceptual experience. This issue will be discussed in detail in chapter 2 and 3 when Foucault's notion knowledge/power and Ranciere's notion of aesthetics and sense perception are elaborated.

It might seem necessary to emphasize that the purpose of this research is not to do a thorough analysis of the educational system in Iran and the political/cultural configuration 13

of the curriculum developed based on a particular ideology adopted by the Iranian state.

To achieve the latter, one needs to focus on the policy documents, educational materials and everyday activities done by people involved in educational practices. In the literature dedicated to the latter undertaking, one can refer to the valuable studies done by Arjmand

(2008), Tamer (2010), Malekzadeh (2011) and Mahdi Sajjadi (2015), among others.

While doing such a study is really worthwhile and also much needed in the current time, it might be negatively affected by a simple yet highly important problem. One might ask

'what a researcher might achieve by analysing the documents, activities and materials produced by the people who are directly linked to the dominant state?' In a sense, it is highly possible that such a study ends up concluding that such an educational system is inflicted by the ideology supported by Iranian post-revolution officials. And the content of this ideology, with all its complexity and twists and turns after the occurrence of the revolution, more or less converges around the same principles upon which

Mehrmohammadi (2012) remarks: Islamisation and indigenisation of the educational system. As will be discussed later in chapter 2, Bagheri Noparast (2016), an Iranian educational philosopher, in an important research article entitled 'Iran's Implicit

Philosophy of Education' arrived at a similar conclusion. What makes Bagheri Noparast's work important is that he has written this article while still affiliated with a state- sponsored university in Iran – Tehran University, the emblem of students' voice before and after the revolution. And such a thing is rarely observed among scholars who live within the country.

1.3 Significance of the study

The analysis of the materials in question can unravel an aspect of the censoring/banning mechanisms as applied to cultural products in post-revolution Iran. Such attempt is significant as it can show the aesthetic and epistemological configuration of the Iranian post-revolution state's ideology whose domain of effects includes pedagogic/educational realms. Here what I mean by aesthetics and epistemology should be understood from the perspectives of Rancière and Foucault. In a sense, an exploration of a discourse being formed outside the ideological discursive demarcations of the Iranian state can tell us what the latter wants its society not to hear, read, feel and live.

In spite of the significance attributed to the current research, I should say that I am well aware of the fact that it is neither practical nor logical to expect the findings of the current research find its way into and have direct implications in the pedagogic system of

Iran. In a sense, I do acknowledge that materials that are not accessible in such a society cannot play a role in the formation and transformation of the socio-cultural structure of that society. Given such a limitation, one might ask 'what is the use of such research?'

Taking into account the above discussion regarding the relation among aesthetics, epistemology and censorship, my answer to the above question is that: it is true that we, more or less, know what the Iranian post-revolutionary state tries to disseminate, but we are not still certain about what it does not want to disseminate in the society. This response can be supported by the fact that every year The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in Iran censors and bans the publication of many cultural works. If the people who sends their works to the institution in question clearly know what they should put in their works and what should be removed from them, and if the institution clearly announces its aims, then no single work will be rejected or censored by it. Put more obviously, what guarantees, justifies and consolidates the existence of such ideological institutions in Iran

is the very ambiguity and obscurity that exist in the fabric of such institutions. Despite all these observations, I refer to potential uses of doing the current research in the realm of pedagogy and education in the following paragraphs.

The study of banned literary works in order to see how they can be used for thinking critically about the pedagogic environment/issues of Iran can be significant for two reasons. The first reason relates to the potentials of literature as a genre harboring educative values. The works of Peter Roberts (2008, 2012, 2013 and 2014), albeit done in a different context from that of Iran, make a strong link between literature and education. Literature with its educative values can be used for thinking about issues that researchers in the field of education policy and philosophy deals with; issues such as hegemony, race and colonisation (Al‐Quaderi & Al Mahmud, 2010; Yenika-Agbaw,

2014) gender and teacher identity (Bach, 2016), power and discourse (Greig & Holloway,

2016) aesthetics and learning (Hellström, 2011) and being (Schwieler, E. (2013).

The second reason relates to the particular situation of Iran, where everything, particularly from the time the Pahlavi dynasty came to power till now, is entangled with politics. The history of modern Iran can be thought of as a battlefield where traditional

(Islamic) and modern (Western) values have been fighting against each other. This situation has played a major role in the ways through which socio-political macrostructures have been shaped and given rise to almost irresolvable conflicts and contractions in the socio-cultural structures of contemporary Iran. Maghsood Farasatkhah

(2015), an Iranian sociologist and a member of the Iranian Institute for Research and

Planning in Higher Education, has meticulously elaborated on this issue in his book entitled We Iranians. Accordingly, it is not a stretch to see how the cultural and educational institutions in today's Iran have to adopt an approach in relation to this 16

conflictual situation. In fact, it is in such a situation that an act of exclusion and inclusion of cultural products, or censoring/banning some works while giving permission to others, turns out to take on such an important role. If a way for examining the structure and ideology of a given state is to see what materials (educative and others) it produces and disseminates, another way is to see what it excludes.

Last but not the least, what makes study of censorship within the context of post- revolution Iran an important research is the role of censorship in modern Iran. As will be discussed below, social, cultural and political issues in Iran are closely entangled with censorship. This issue causes censorship to finds its way into the fabric of any cultural activities, including pedagogic ones. Accordingly, an investigation of censorship, both as a conceptual fact and as a practical activity, which has permeated into the political culture of Iranian society can help us understand why pedagogic institution decide to ban some works and allow the publication of others.

1.4 An exploration of censorship in the post-revolution era: A possible scenario

The decision to include or exclude pedagogic/educational materials in the cultural sphere of a society has always been considered a political activity (Apple, 20014; Peters, 2015).

As Michael Apple (1993a) remarks:

Education is deeply implicated in the politics of culture. The curriculum is never simply a neutral

assemblage of knowledge, somehow appearing in the texts and classrooms of a nation. It is always

part of a selective tradition, someone's selection, some group's vision of legitimate knowledge. It

is produced out of the cultural, political, and economic conflicts, tensions, and compromises that

organize and disorganize a people… [T]he decision to define some groups' knowledge as the most

legitimate, as official knowledge, while other groups' knowledge hardly sees the light of day, says

something extremely important about who has power in society. (Emphasis in original, p. 1)

The issue of inclusion or exclusion of pedagogic materials in Iran after 1979 revolution can be closely related to the issue of censorship. If in the so-called liberal West pedagogic materials are selected in a way to support neo-liberal agendas (Tesar, 2014), in the more traditional (or transitional?) and conservative context of Iran they are selected according to the religio-political ideology of the state. Needless to say, the issue of economy is also justified in that ideology (Bagheri Noparast, 2016). However, it is important to note that censorship in Iran cannot be simplistically attributed to political issues. In fact, in order to understand causes and functions of censorship, it might seem necessary to take a closer look into the socio-cultural politics of censorship in modern Iran.

Before elaborating on censorship as a phenomenon that has had all-embracing and consequential effects in the formation of Iranian cultural politics, it is necessary to clarify a point. This point concerns the issue of lack of considerable and rigorous studies on censorship in modern Iran. As far as my review of literature is concerned, this fact can be justified on two grounds: a) academicians within Iran have not been willing to do the latter as it can naturally endanger their positions; and, b) those Iranians who live outside of the country have taken this issue as a self-evident fact that does not need to be seriously studied. Of course, both within and outside of the country there are articles written on print and online media that have dealt with the issue. As such, it is not substantiated if one claim that even talking about censorship has been censored in Iran. The fact is that

even high officials in Iran have, at times, discussed this issue1. As such, for Iranian readers it is easy to find similar talks by Iranian officials on the internet. In addition to this, there are dissidents both within and outside of the country whose works have been published in Iran even after their leaving of the country. Akbar Ganji's The Dungeon of

Ghosts (1999a) and The Red Eminence and The Grey Eminences (1999b) are just two examples dealing with the murder of dissident authors – known as Chain Murders of Iran, being the most radical kind of censorship in the post-revolution Iran – after 1979 revolution. Ironically, what makes this event complicated is that even the Iranian state attributed the event to their so-called 'radical' officials of the intelligence service.

The issue of censorship in Iran after the 1979 revolution is so complicated that it is not easy to present an all-encompassing explanation of it. Music, theatre, literature, cinema, photography, media and even sports have been inflicted by its consequences. On the surface of it, this phenomenon can be attributed to the politico-religious (Islamic) ideology of the state. But from a more nuanced perspective, censorship can be examined within a historical framework. This history is concerned with the conflict between tradition and modernity which might be explained through the notion of 'theory of conspiracy'.

Ervand Abrahamian (1993), Homa Katouzain (2003) and Ahmad Ashraf (1997) – three historians who have done comprehensive studies concerning the political history of

Iran – have meticulously elaborated on the prevalence of conspiracy theory in the history of Iran, from the ancient time till the today. All these scholars observe that the political

1 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-telegram-rouhani/irans-rouhani-criticizes-ban-on-telegram- messaging-app-idUSKBN1I607A. This is just one example of talks by Iranian high officials (in this case President Rohani) concerning the issue of filtering and censorship.

history of Iran, particularly during the reign of the last two regimes, abounds with the cases that show how Iranian authorities have been trying to associate the occurrence of some events to a contrived enemy. In other words, there has always been an 'external other' or an 'insider traitor' who could be in charge of a political, cultural or economic anomaly. Accordingly, if we accept that conspiracy theory has permeated into the fabric of the political structure of today's Iran, then the prevalence of censorship can be, to some extent, justified. In other words, it is possible to argue that for the institutions in charge of monitoring cultural products any cultural event and product can harbor anti- revolutionary ideas if they do not explicitly support the state's ideology. While it is just a tentative hypothesis that can explain the pervasiveness of censorship in today's Iran, it can clearly lay bare the rationale behind the complicated and unpredictable strategies adopted by the state in relation to censorship. In a sense, while Iranian cultural activists may know what the state prefers to be produced, but they do not clearly know what it deems anti-revolutionary. As long as the state's ideology is affected by conspiracy theory, anyone can fill the ever-empty slot of insider or outsider enemy.

1.5 Iranian post-revolution ideology and the question of censorship: A psychoanalytic explanation

On the surface of it, the issue of censorship in Iran after the 1979 revolution can be evidently related to the revolutionary ideology adopted by the state. While this is not an inauthentic observation as one can refer to many cases of censorship in today's Iran that are directly related to the latter issue, it might seem more valid to see how the politico- cultural structure as developed by the state can give rise to censoring cultural products.

In order to see why the novels under analysis in this research are subject to censorship,

and locate this discussion within the broader framework of this research, I will mainly refer to a recent paper authored by an Iranian anthropologist, Mehrdad Arabestani, who has discussed the politico-cultural structure of the Iranian society from a psychoanalytic perspective. This discussion can be specifically helpful as it provides a link between the post-revolution Iranian ideology, Lacanian subjectivity and the novels under analysis.

A superficial observation in relation to the prevalence of censorship in today's Iran is that the state bans the production of any cultural products that are against its ideology.

However, when one considers the argument raised by Arabestani (2019), it can make a case for understanding the nuances of censorship in Iran after the revolution. Arabestani observes that the revolutionary state is constructed by "an uncanny combination of two contradictory governance strategies: so-called neoliberalism; and strict political and cultural conservatism" (p. 2). Affected by this dualism "political expressions [in Iran] swing from “revolutionary” radicalism to liberal globalization and nationalistic chauvinism" (p. 2). I, in a co-authored research article, (Kabgani & Clarke, 2017) have discussed this issue at length. Accordingly, we have argued that the ideological status of the revolutionary regime after the 1979 event is neither purely Islamic nor necessarily nationalistic, rather it is a combination of the two. Considering the arguments put forwards in these two works of research, it is possible to argue that the phenomenon of censorship in today's Iran cannot be merely explained through discussing the seemingly exclusive Islamic ideology of the state. Rather, what makes a stronger case for delineating this issue is the contradictory nature of the governance as adopted by the post-revolution state.

Here it is important to note that while today it is possible to see the ideological structure of the state as a mixture of Islamic ideology and neoliberal agenda, during the

early years after the revolution it was the former that pervaded the socio-cultural atmosphere of the Iranian society. In this regard, Arabestani (2019) observes:

After the 1979 Revolution, the new government set as its agenda the propagation and enforcement

of Islamic Sharia law. Wearing hijab for women became obligatory in public. Men also had to

follow Islamic codes of modesty in their dress and hairstyle. Luxury was strictly condemned as

non-Islamic and anti-revolutionary. Relationships between men and women were legally limited

to mahram relationships (the unmarriageable kin and married couples). Sharia police, using

different names in different periods, would patrol the cities and look for offenders, investigate

“suspicious” relationships, and arrest non-mahram culprits. A supremacist Islamic puritanism

pervaded society and extended into citizens’ private lives. Sharia law bans alcoholic drinks, music

(except revolutionary songs and marches), and dance. Activities such as watching Western movies

and mingling with the opposite sex came to be regarded as immoral and perverse behaviors

condemned as debauchery and “mundane” pleasures, and subject to prosecution. As the possession

of video players and videotapes of Western movies and music was forbidden, the video media of

Western and Iranian expatriate performers were produced on cassette tapes abroad, smuggled into

Iran, and distributed on the black market. The authorities began a strict examination of radio and

television programs, seeking to censor so-called immodest scenes and illegal music (pp. 6-7)

This observation makes a strong case for attributing the state's ideology to its Islamic orientation. In a sense, if one characterises the state based on its religious ideology, it would be easily, and simplicity, possible to attribute all its censoring behavior to its religious approach. I believe that this could turn out to be a misleading observation if one takes a closer look at the more recent reactions of the state in relation to the production of cultural products. Joan Copjec (2006), in a valuable research paper which is informed by a psychoanalytic approach, has discussed the way the Iranian censorship mechanism works and how Iranian artists have learnt to cleverly react to these mechanisms. In other 22

words, it is clearly obvious that the state shows more complicated and unpredictable reactions to the production and distribution of cultural products. As Arabestani (2019) truly argues, the state's ideology is no longer founded on a straightforward strategy.

Notwithstanding its seemingly comprehensive strategy to control the production of non-compliant cultural products, the post-revolution state has not been able to develop a comprehensive normative politico-cultural pattern. In other words, as Arabestani (2019) argues, the lack of such pattern has resulted in "a perceived sense of identity denial and of being unacknowledged and challenged that marks the Iranians’ specific subjective character" (p. 3). Using a Freudian/Lacanian approach to explaining the formation of subject, Arabestani argues that the lack of a normative socio-cultural pattern in a society that can play a constructive role in forming more or less normal subjectivities has led to the formation of a hysteric subjectivity in the Iranian society. Accordingly, he observes that the "ceaseless disputes in the sociocultural and political milieu of Iran" which is resulted from the contradictory system of governance is characterised by an "omnipresent, emotionally charged, belligerent, and uncompromising tenor, leading to a spirit of suppression and hostility that accounts for the widespread experience of anger" (p. 3).

Then, he argues that "this can exactly be regarded as an example of what Freud refers to as the hysterical exaggerated conversion of the discharge of an emotionally or libidinally cathected process that appears as a “complex”" (p. 3). "The discourse of the hysteric",

Arabestani argues further, "emerged after Iran’s 1979 Revolution as a result of the response to the dominant political discourse: the discourse of the Master" (p. 3).

Now the question is 'how can the above discussion make a case for explaining the issue of censorship in Iran?' A possible psychoanalytically-informed answer to this

question is that while the post-revolution state is itself responsible for the production of the hysteric subject, the same state have to find a way to prevent this subject to convert the discharge of its complexes. And what strategy works better than censorship? In other words, the emergence and prevalence of censorship in the post-revolution Iranian society is infamously in tandem with the prevalence of the discourse the hysteric. The hysteric subject seeks to discharge the same complexes that the state has created in them, and the state censors the representation of the same complexes. This argument, as Arabestani

(2019) notes, can be consolidated by the fact that the post-revolution Iranian ideology is inherently founded on a discourse that presents "a signifying system and identification mechanism that, like any other such system, fails to include all desires in society, including the desire for personal freedom, worldly pleasure, and the pursuit of happiness"

(p. 8). Once analysed closely, the two novels in this research can in a sense be the embodiment of this failure. While Manadipour's work presents a society in which personal freedom and worldly pleasure is tabooed, Dowlatabadi's work depicts a society entangled in despair and disillusionment.

The Iranian subjectivity as represented in these two novels is grappling with the contradictory juxtaposition of the liberalism/utopianism that inspired the occurrence of the revolution and the conservatism that the dominant Islamic groups adopted. As will be discussed in the analysis chapters and in the conclusion chapter, both novels deal with the restrictive and ideological conservatism of the post-revolution state and the way the disillusioned Iranian subject struggle to face up with the reality of the society disturbed by this ideology. Considering the encounter of the Iranian subject inflicted by this restrictive ideology, I can argue that the reason behind banning of/censoring these two

works of literature is that the lay bare this contradiction. Mandanipour's novel shows how the most personal aspect of one's life, that is love/sex, turns out to gain a political significance for the state, hence the depiction of the unresolvable, contradictory juxtaposition of liberalism and conservatism in the post-revolution Iranian state ideology.

In this regard, as Arabestani (2019) truly observes:

…at the explicit level, the strict religious puritanism of the Islamic revolutionary discourse not only

restricted every path of pleasure, but also endeavored to extend its gaze into the private lives of

subjects. This last point is crucial because, by intruding into the private lives of subjects, these

discourses more or less prevented the covert obscene enjoyments that could have functioned as a

guarantee for the sustenance of the whole discourse. (p. 9)

In Dowlatabadi's novel the emphasis is on the contradictory juxtaposition of utopianism as offered by the revolutionary groups and conservatism of those dominant group who succeeded to take the control of the revolution after its occurrence. Commenting on this utopian promise, Arabestani believes that while "the Islamic puritanism of the revolutionary discourse was adopted in the hope that people would benefit from the utopian society of justice and affluence that was going to appear" (p. 9), in reality Iranian society was given a version of this utopia bereft of any emancipatory promises. I will return to this issue in the final phase of my analyses of the two novels and in the conclusion chapter was well.

The two novels under analysis and the issue of censorship

Considering the above discussion, now it is possible to find a tangible reason behind the state's decision to ban these two specific literary works. My argument here is founded on the link between the function of the state's ideology and the way through which these two novels challenge it. Three key notions that can explain the issue of banning of these works are 'transgression', permissiveness' and 'the repressed', all taken from Arabestani's (2019)

work, affected by his politico-psychoanalytic approach to analysing the social making of the Iranian society after the 1979 revolution. In this regard, Arabestani, referring Žižek's

(2000) approach to defining ideology, argues:

Transgression has always been a matter of permissiveness, provided that it is not publicly asserted

and does not challenge the nodal points of the discourse. Indeed, a political ideology precisely

persists as a dominant discourse because it allows subjects to maintain a distance from the nodal

points of the discourse. This permissive zone that Žižek (2000, p. 103) calls ideological

disidentification is the very conservative role of the permissive zone that lays the ground for its

relative stability and persistence. This ideology sends a particular message, as if to say: “Do it,

just not in front of my eyes. Do not disturb my fantasy. You are not allowed to do what you are

doing; however, I ignore it. Remember that I reserve the right to punish you.” This approach is

simultaneously a source of relief as well as insecurity felt by the subject, a sword of Damocles

over the “pervert’s” head. This situation eventually deepens discontent and leads to

institutionalized hypocrisy. However, where the repressed returns, it might be too much to be

integrated into the permissive zone. (p. 13)

Taking into account this discussion, I can argue that Mandanipour's novel tries to show how the return of the repressed can challenge the zone of ideological permissiveness. In

Dowlatabadi's work this zone is too tough to be challenged, hence the suppression of the repressed by the dominant ideological discourse. "Such a discourse", according to

Arabestani (2019), "clearly excludes certain parts of society. Therefore, the excluded subjects cannot identify themselves with the cluster of master signifiers offered by the dominant discourse and, as a result, struggle with a feeling of meaninglessness" (p. 14).

As will be discussed in the chapter dealing with the analysis of Dowlatabadi's work, the repressed subjects of the state's ideology are characterised by their feeling of meaninglessness and absurdity.

Accordingly, I can argue that the reason behind banning of these two novels can be explained by making clear their approaches to the way the dominant post-revolution ideology can or cannot be challenged. Whatever imaginary and fantasmatic, such works of art can lay bare the making of ideology, and in this way provide the reader with possible ways of challenging it.

1.6 Theoretical approach

A variety of theoretical/conceptual frameworks (within the post-structuralist tradition) are available that lend themselves well for an examination of the making of social, cultural and political structure of the Iranian society as represented in cultural products. From among them, I have selected Lacan's approach for the following reason. Lacan's tripartite scheme (The Imaginary, The Symbolic and The Real) provides a multilayered and profound framework for thinking about the formation of social structures. But more importantly, Lacan, particularly through his conception of The Real, demonstrates how the subject and the society are not fixed entities lacking the capability of change

(Zupančič, 2000). The Real, the unrepresentable, that which defies being symbolised and hegemonised, is the point at which social norms with their normalizing potentialities stops functioning. In Bruce Fink's (1999) words, it is The Real "as the residue of symbolization—[that which] remains, insists, and ex-ists after or despite symbolization— as the traumatic cause, and as that which interrupts the smooth functioning of law and the automatic unfolding of the signifying chain" that makes possible the occurrence of change in the fabric of The Symbolic (p. 83).

The above point is very important for the purpose of the current thesis. It is important not because the novels under analysis can embody or attempt to be the realisation of The

Real. In sense, one might assume that a reason for banning of these works of literature lies in the fact that they provide the reader with a way out of the restrictive ideological boundaries of the post-revolution state. In contrary, they, as my analysis shows, might be banned because they have depicted the deadlock. In other words, the novels' engagement with the closure inflicting The Symbolic might be a reason for banning. Of course, it should be mentioned that the two novels apply different approaches to depicting this closure.

Another reason for employing Lacan relates to the psycho-social and economic aspects of his theory. In other words, the Lacanian theory of subjectivity pays attention to psychic, social, cultural and economic aspects including in the constitution of human subjectivity

(Frosh, 2012; Parker, 2005). This aspect of Lacan's theory can resonate with the purpose of the current research when one notes that almost all post-structuralist approaches to analysing political issues occurring from the turn of the 20th century onwards have been affected by Marx and Freud (Tomšič, 2015). Considering the psycho-political nature of the 1979 revolution in Iran and its aftermath, I decided to choose a theory that provides spaces for a psycho-political analysis of the novels in question. Before closing this section, I try to explain why Rancière and Foucault have been referred to as complements to Lacan. This short section also makes clear the link between the notion of subjectivity and education in the context of the current thesis.

Teresa de Lauretis (1982) defines subjectivity as "patterns by which experiential and emotional contents, feelings, images, and memories are organized to form one's self- image, one's sense of self and others, and of our possibilities of existence" (P. 5). This simple yet profound and comprehensive definition encapsulates the complex nature of the notion of subjectivity. Inspired by this definition, Stephen Ball (2000, 2003) considers 28

education as a performative act playing a significant role in the formation of subjectivities

(see also Donald, 1992; McLeod and Yates, 2006; and Peters and Besley, 2007). From an

Althusserian perspective, education, paradoxically, as an institute and also as a micro- structure built within the bigger macro-structure (society), harbours ideological apparatus without which it would not possible to secure a particular form of subjectivity. This apparently paradoxical feature of education that helps the individual to constitute subjectivity yet at the same time restricts him/her to imagine other alternative forms of subjectivity makes it a complex field to be examined critically. In the present thesis, the notion of subjectivity is examined mainly from two theoretical perspectives. One the one hand, I have located this notion within the aesthetic framework as theorised by Rancière

(2009, 2013). According to Rancière (2013), politics is aesthetic in nature, where the latter is defined as:

… a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience … Politics revolves around

what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak,

around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (p. 8, emphasis in original)

As can be seen, what links politics and aesthetics is 'the sensible'. Rancière believes that it is the function of politics to determine how and what the subject is allowed to sense/perceive. It is the role of politics to determine what can be read, listened to, watched and sensed. In the current thesis, the act of excluding alternative materials from the curriculum, or devising a null curriculum, is regarded as an aesthetic act aiming to delimit the perceptual experience of the pedagogic/educational subject. Accordingly, the rationale for selecting two cases of banned literary works is based on their potentials for challenging the perceptually delimiting pedagogic discourse as developed by the Iranian state.

The notion and practice of banning the publication of cultural products can be considered as the maneuvre of power by a ruling state. This act can be thought of as the force of ideology for delimiting the society's epistemological boundaries. In this thesis the Foucauldian notion of power-knowledge has been referred to in order to provide a conceptual framework for thinking about the process of banning/censorship in today's

Iran.

1.7 A methodological point about two novels

As stated above, in this research two banned novels authored by two Iranian authors will be analysed in order to see how what is excluded/censored from the cultural sphere of

Iranian society can tell us about the ideological structure of the state. From a methodological perspective, the limited number of materials to be analysed for the said purpose can raise an important concern; the question of validity of this data. In order to address this issue, I would like refer to the main theoretical basis of this thesis; psychoanalysis. The significant methodological point about a psychoanalytic research method is that it is mainly concerned with 'concepts'. In this regard, Dreher (2000) argues that "conceptual investigations in psychoanalysis are just as important as are the various forms of empirical research, for what distinguishes psychoanalysis from other sciences is certainly its subject matter and methods but, above all, its very concepts" (p. 4). What is at stake here is the validity of the data being used in this thesis; that is the two novels. In terms of validity of such a limited number of materials, Dreher points out:

The potential validity claim of psychoanalytic theory is thus considerable: it aims to describe,

understand, and explain normal as well as pathological development in single individuals; the

understanding gained is then generalized and used in turn for specific therapeutic treatment of

development gone wrong; and, lastly, psychoanalytic concepts are said to have validity for the

understanding of social interaction in groups and cultural institutions. (p. 5)

Although here Dreher considers the clinical aspect of a psychoanalytic research method, what it implies is that the conceptual focus of psychoanalytic research demands it to rely on a more limited set of data in order to go through a more focused and profound analysis.

In other words, in a psychoanalytic research, and in general qualitative research, quantity, sampling, and being representative are not of importance (Bogdan & Biklen, 1997). In this thesis, both novels are analysed focusing on particular psychoanalytic concepts.

Ultimately, what can be gained from the conceptual analysis of the novels will contribute to an understanding of ideological structure of post-revolution Iranian state, particularly in terms of its cultural configuration.

1.8 A synopsis of the novels

Censoring an Iranian Love Story (2009): Shahriar Mandanipour

Censoring an Iranian Love Story is written by Shahriar Mandanipour. Mandanipour, an acclaimed contemporary Iranian author, after leaving Iran in 2008 to take up a fellowship at Harvard University, published his first novel in English. Applying a metafictional approach, he has created an image of contemporary Iran where the most private issues such as love is not supposed to be that private. In this way, what the reader encounters is not merely a portrayal of how people fall in love in contemporary Iran, but it is more about the complexity of living in a society in which politics is an inseparable part of one’s life. In this novel, two narratives, each standing alone for itself yet intricately related to the other, move in parallel lines. One narrative deals with the story of Dara and Sara who fall in love while meeting each other in Hafezieh’s library. Being forbidden by Iran’s

Campaign Against Social Corruption to openly express their emotions to each other, they exchange their messages using codes in the pages of the books they borrow from the library. This apparently love story takes on many twists and turns, particularly when it entwines with the other narrative.

In the other narrative, an Iranian literary writer named Shahriar, who seems to be the author’s alter ego, goes to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to take permission for publishing his novel, the novel dealing with a love story in today’s Iran.

A Key character in this narrative is Mr. Petrovic, a name that the author gives to the official working for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. Mr. Petrovic, who is in charge of reading manuscripts in order to confirm or reject their publication, while reading an apparently censored version of the love story written by the author, discusses some the content of the novel with the author. As the two narratives go on and become entangled with each other, the author shows how a piece of creative writing read and censored by authorities in Iran.

The Colonel (published in English in 2011): Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

One of the most important contemporary Iranian authors, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi is not only known for his literary activities, but is also recognised as a social critic who has been supporting freedom of speech in his prolific artistic life. A characteristic feature of

Dowlatabadi’s works as employed in his novels, short stories, plays and screenplays, is a tangible reference to the everyday language of the Iranian people. This technique has been used in Dowlatabadi’s works to show how the life of marginal(ised) people can be be a source of inspiration for high art, and also how art needs this language in order to resonate with realities of the society.

The Colonel narrates the aftermath of 1979 revolution in Iran and how the revolution turned out to did not realise its cause. The novel narrates the story of a retired colonel who has lost all his children during the upheavals before and after the revolution. In fact, this dark portrayal of the colonel’s family is reflective of the paradoxes existing at the heart of the revolution. In a sense, the story of each of the characters in this novel is indicative of different political ideologies that helped the revolution to happen, but after the occurrence of the latter majority of these political ideologies were considered misleading and corruptive by the dominant Islamic state.

1.9 Research questions

Based on what has been discussed above, this thesis ties together three main concepts: subjectivity, aesthetics and knowledge/power in Iran after 1979 revolution. The following research questions are designed in a way to both reflect the conceptual/theoretical nature of this research and the particular context in which the two novels have been authored.

The rationale behind putting emphasis on the conceptual nature of these research questions, as far as my review of literature with all of its limitation is concerned, is the lack of considerable research on the topic in question. It is my aim that this study provides a ground for more rigorous studies on the notion of banning/censorship in today's Iran.

Accordingly, the analysis of the novels has been conducted in order to find answer(s) for the following questions:

1. How do the representations of the Iranian post-revolution society as depicted in

the novels under analysis reflect conception(s) of subjectivity – the subjectivity as

developed through the state's ideology?

2. What do this/these conception(s) of subjectivity tell us about the aesthetic nature

of the post-revolution ideology?

3. Considering the ideological/exclusionary aspect of the Iranian post-revolution

state's cultural politics of education/pedagogy, how do the analyses of the novels

demonstrate the aforementioned aspect?

1.10 Overview and structure of the thesis

The thesis is divided into eight chapters including the introductory chapter. In the next chapter I have focused more closely on the issue of philosophy/policy of education in post-revolution Iran. In this chapter, I have tried to show how the founding principles of the Iranian system of education/pedagogy can lead to censorship and banning. In fact, I have argued that what makes this system susceptible to censorship and banning is its exclusionary approach as developed in Iran's constitution written by post-revolution authorities. This argument is linked to and discussed in relation to the Foucauldian notion of power/knowledge. Through the latter, I have explained that how the seemingly politico-ideological orientation of the post-revolution state is rooted in its economic structure. Accordingly, I have used the concept of power/knowledge as a theoretical lens for discussing the issue of censorship/banning practiced through the Iranian post- revolution pedagogic/educational system.

Focusing on Rancière's conception of aesthetics, (once again) Foucault's notion of power/knowledge and Lacanian conception of lack, chapter three presents a politico- philosophical discussion of censorship/banning, linking the latter to the notion of subjectivity. In order to present a more rigorous conceptualisation of censorship/banning,

I have referred to Rancière who argues that politics is the realm of (de)limiting subject's sense perception. As such, as Rancière remarks, in order to discuss the construction of 34

subjectivity, one needs to examine a political/ideological structure in terms of how it defines and determines a subject's sense experience. Foucault's notion of power/knowledge has complemented Rancière's conception of aesthetics as the former demonstrates how aesthetics and power/knowledge are two sides of the same coin, hence the configuration of censorship. In sum, chapter two and three have been written with the purpose of presenting a conceptual discussion of pedagogy/education, subjectivity and censorship/banning. In both of the said chapters, particularly chapter two, I have tried to make links to the educational/pedagogic structure of Iranian post-revolution state.

Chapters four and five are dedicated to the elaboration of Lacanian theory of subjectivity and psychoanalytic method of textual analysis, respectively. Chapter four presents a conceptual framework for analysing the novels. In this chapter, key concepts of the Lacanian theory of subjectivity are elaborated. In fact, while the issue of censorship/banning is discussed with reference to Rancière's conception of aesthetics and

Foucault's notion of power/knowledge, the Lacanian conceptualisation of subjectivity is used as the tool for analysing the novels.

What is foregrounded in chapter five is the relation between the analyst and the text.

Inspired by the psychoanalytic notion of 'transference', a psychoanalytic approach to textual analysis is founded on the idea of dialogic relation between the analyst and the text, thereby the text is believed to have its own agency. In this way, the analyst needs to search for signifiers that form the building blocks of the text. In other words, it is the text under analysis that gives direction to the act of analysis.

In chapters six and seven the two novels are analysed from the Lacanian perspective.

Focusing on the notion of love/sexuality, as an embodiment of 'non-relation' in the

Lacanian approach to ontology, chapter six examines Mandanipour's novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story. In this chapter, I try to show how the hegemonic ideology of the state relies on regulating personal relations, hence blurring the boundary between the social and the private as a homogenizing strategy. In chapter seven, Dowlatabadi's novel,

The Colonel, is examined in relation to its depiction of the post-revolution society of Iran where the fanatsmatic investment of the revolutionary ideologies for the realisation of the

(Islamic) utopia ends up reproducing the same hegemonic ideology as existed before the revolution. And finally, chapter eight, as the conclusion chapter, shows how the analysis of the novels sets a ground for thinking about censorship/banning in the context of Iranian post-revolution society. The attempt has also been made to present the pedagogic implications of the current research.

Chapter 2 A Critical Review of

Policy/Philosophy of Education/Pedagogy in Post-

revolution Iran

The literature dedicated to examining the cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran after the 1979 revolution is limited in number and inadequate in scope. To verify this observation, it suffices to search on the Internet and the relevant academic journals key terms such as 'politics', 'policy', 'philosophy', 'critical' and related terms in relation to the educational and pedagogic system of Iran. The acquired result of such a search would be a very limited number of research items. Of course, besides what referred to in the first chapter, there are instances of academic research worth mentioning. For example,

Rucker's (1991) review of the Islamic/ideological structure of education system in the post-revolution Iran, Razavi's (2009) work on the role of Iranian universities on the political movements in today's Iran, Rezai-Rashti's (2015) and Shavarini's (2006 and

2009) research papers on the politics of gender segregation in higher education and the status and role of educated women on the political and social conflicts in today's Iran, respectively, Golkar's (2012 and 2015) investigation of student activism in post- revolution Iran and Lutz, Cuaresma and Abbasi‐Shavazi's (2010) valuable research on the relation between education, demography and democracy in Iran after the 1979 revolution are important instances of academic studies on the issue of cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran. While there is no doubt in the quality and value of such 37

works, particularly when one notices the very tangible gap in the literature, all these works share a similar a point; none of the referred author lives and works in Iran. This matter can be indicative of a very important issue: that education scholars within the country for almost obvious reason tend not to get into such issues.

However, in relation to the aforementioned gap in the literature there is a very important point to take into account. During the time I started revising the current chapter,

I had the opportunity to have discussions with some education scholars working in Iranian universities over the issue of censorship in the educational/pedagogic environment of today's Iran. All these scholars are affiliated with national/public universities in Iran and had more than 10 years of experience working for educational institutes and centres.

When I talked about my project and asked them to share with me any relevant research, almost all of them said that no one within the country works on such areas of research.

The reason for the latter issue was almost obvious: job security. They just did not want to lose their jobs.

It is possible to come up with different reasons for the lack of enough and adequate works on the said areas of research. Of course, this issue is beyond the scope of the current research and needs a comprehensive analysis. But this very gap in the literature shows that the realm of cultural politics of education in Iran needs much more attention. Taking into account this gap, the current research, with all of its limitations and shortcomings, can be seen as an attempt at addressing the said gap. While I do acknowledge the importance and value of the works referred to above, almost none of them provides us with a rigorous philosophical explanation concerning the ideological foundation of cultural politics of education and pedagogy in Iran after the revolution. In a sense,

although each of these studies takes up an important topic or case study, none of them investigates the underlying reason explaining the prevalence of a particular phenomenon or trend in the cultural sphere of the society. In what follows, I refer to and get engaged with few instances of applying politico-philosophical approaches to examining the cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran. There are also references to the

Foucauldian notion of discourse. This has been done with the purpose of engaging more critically with the political/ideological configuration of education and pedagogy in Iran after the revolution. This discussion can set a ground for explaining why educational/pedagogic system of Iran is founded on an exclusionary approach, hence the notion of censorship and banning. In the last section of this chapter, I explore, from a

Lacanian perspective, how the act of excluding/including cultural materials (in this research, two novels in question) in the cultural/educational sphere of one's society is tangibly linked to the development of a particular form of knowledge that inevitably leads to the formation particular identity.

2.1 Education and politics in Iran

In order to examine the educational system of post-revolution Iran in terms of its ideological foundation I look into the dominant discursive structure adopted by the ruling state. In fact, the term discourse here is inspired by the Foucauldian (1977) approach to the term. Focusing on the relation between discourse and education, Kamberelis and

Dimitriadis (2005) define discourse from the Foucauldian perspective. They remark that discourses are not limited to:

…linguistic and textual [elements] alone but involve habituated and largely unconscious ways of

thinking, talking, feeling, acting, and being. Discourses are practical “grids of speciﬁcation”

(Foucault, 1977, 1996) for classifying, categorizing, and diagramming the human subject in

relation to the social. Discourses are forms of power that both literally and metaphorically

inscribe/produce the individual and the collective social body. (p. 48)

Here I am putting emphasis on the function of discursive structures in the process of educational subject formation as this issue has been extensively discussed within the realm of cultural politics of education (Besley, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2006; Leask 2012;

Niesche, 2011; Niesche and Haase, 2012; Olssen, 2006; Peters, 2004; Peters & Besley,

2008). In what follows, I elaborate on the building blocks of philosophy/policy of education in Iran, emphasising the link between discourse as a constellation of explicit and implicit subjectificational mechanisms and the construction of educational subjectivity.

2.2 Philosophy/policy of education in Iran and its relation to educational subjectivity

Closely examining the foundational principles of philosophy of education in Iran, Bagheri

Noparast (2016) argues that what, at the most fundamental level, determines the orientation of philosophy of education in Iran is Iran's Constitution authored after the revolution. Before elaborating on the details of this document, it is important to reiterate that education turned out to be a pivotal arena for post-revolution authorities even from the first days of the revolution. Accordingly, Iranian authorities, based on the order of

Ayatollah Khomeini, decided to close all universities immediately after the occurrence of the revolution. This event, known as the Cultural Revolution in Iran, lasted for three years

(1980-1983). The purpose of this action was to align educational institutions with Islamic principles. In fact, the idea of closing universities was of particular importance for the

new state as they were well aware of the role of universities in particular and cultural institutions in general on the political events leading to the revolution. During this time, the council of the Cultural Revolution set out to revise the curriculum of universities focusing on replacing the so-called Westernised materials with Islamic ones (Keddie,

2006). Delineating the impact of this decision, Mehran (1989) writes:

Changing the curricular content of the Iranian educational system has been among the major

innovations of the postrevolutionary period. In an effort to Islamize and politicize the content of

education, an ideologically approved curriculum was introduced emphasizing the Qur'an, Islamic

doctrines, and the Constitution. Most importantly, the Ministry of Education changed the

curricular content by rewriting the textbooks. The aim was stated as "purifying" textbooks by

"clearing them of the misguidance and decadence of the despotic former regime." (p. 36)

What, in particular, makes Mehran's observation authentic are the references she makes to an important document concerning the founding principles of new educational system.

In fact, those citations within Mehran’s quote have been taken from a document (1984, p. 23) written by Iran’s Ministry of Education. This document clearly indicates the ideological orientation of the Iranian post-revolution state in relation to mission of education/pedagogy in the Islamic state. To support this observation, Mehran (1989) remarks that due to the implementation of new goals for the educational system, educational materials, particularly those dealing with issues “in history, economics, sociology, psychology, religious studies, Persian literature, Arabic, art, and social studies” underwent fundamental changes (p. 37). Accordingly, it is obvious that the new state had profoundly realised the roles and functions of humanities and social sciences on the mentality of educated people. While it is not unexpected to observe the making of such decisions by the new-established Islamic state, it might raise serious questions when one notes that the Islamic authorities believed that the previous regime intentionally 41

aimed to distribute anti-Islamic ideas among students (p. 37). As Mehran remarks, the

Iranian authorities were so occupied by this belief that:

…on 20 February 1979, only nine days after the victory of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini

asked educational authorities to fundamentally change the primary, secondary, and higher level

education books, purifying them from all colonial and tyrannical topics and replacing them with

Islamic and revolutionary subjects that would awaken the children and render the youth free and

independent. The aim has been to "demonarchize" the curricular content and eradicate the pro-

Western and anti-Islamic messages of the pre-revolutionary books. (p. 37)

What can be drawn from such observations is that education for the post-revolution state has always been indivisible from politics. In order to politicise education/pedagogy, the

Islamic state implemented both discursive strategies and techniques at “linguistic and textual” level (Kamberelis and Dimitriadis, 2005, p. 48) and at a metalinguistic level through creating differentiating/ideological classifications. At the latter level, educational ideologies are extended beyond educational materials to which students are subject, and include more cultural yet inherently political issues. According to Farhadi, Sajadi

Hezaveh and Hedayati (2010), the reforms enacted by the post-revolution state aimed to remove any demarcations between inside and outside of educational context. It is in light of this reform that:

Some Islamic values related to the appearance of the students, textbooks, teachers, and the school

environment were implemented. These changes dealt with the Islamization of textbooks,

segregation of males and females, and observation of Islamic laws in and outside the school

environment. Religious ceremonies were mandated at the schools and students were required to

adjust to and abide by Islamic values. (pp. 2–3, cited in Mirzaee and Aliakbari, 2017, p. 4)

Implicit in such a decision is not only the act of lifting the dividing line between education and politics, but, more importantly, it testifies to the emphasis that the post-revolution 42

state puts on the exchange of ideas between the world in and outside of educational institutions. In other words, it can be argued that for such a governing system any cultural products, whether obviously produced with the purpose of being used in an educational context or not, can be considered potential material that can be used for educational purposes, hence the extension of educational geography to any social context. This observation is of critical importance in the current thesis as the materials that I am working on have not been written with the purpose of being used in the educational context of Iran. In a sense, they are just two cases of literary creation. However, given the pervasive scope that the post-revolution state determines as its realm of ideology, all cultural products can fall under its category. Accordingly, the novels under analysis can also be considered potential educational materials as far as the post-revolution state does not differentiate between the materials that are currently used in educational institutions and those not apparently used in the same context.

On a more ideological note, the above discussion can be linked to what Mehran’s refers to as (1989) “the ultimate aim of the socialization process in Iranian school…: the creation of model citizen eligible to live in the ideal Islamic society” (p. 49). Accordingly:

The New Islamic Person is religious, politically aware and involved, proud of his/her heritage,

ready for self-sacrifice for Islam and the revolution, respectful and obedient to his/her country's

religious and political leaders. He/she hates the prerevolutionary regime, rejects any form of

dependence on the West, mistrusts the non-Muslim world and is highly critical of Western ways,

and sympathizes with all oppressed peoples, especially Muslims. (p. 49)

What is important with regards to the definition of the post-revolution Islamic citizen as stated above is not just the detailed and specifically gridded and ideological categorisational attitude embedded within such a definition. The fact is that any new-

established political state needs a guiding framework so that it can implement its agenda.

However, the importance of this approach lies in its exclusionary undertone. It seems that this definition of Islamic citizen is obviously founded on a worldview barely leaving a space for its revisiting if needed. In other words, the issue is not whether this definition is right or wrong, rather it is problematic as it is fundamentally more static than dynamic.

Now, in order to see how the strategies adopted by the post-revolution Islamic state of

Iran have been reflected in its educational philosophy as practiced both implicitly and explicitly by official educational institutions in Iran, I refer to Bagheri Noparast (2016) examination of the issue at stake.

Closely examining the contents of constitutions in a number of countries (e.g. The US,

UK and Some African countries), Bagheri Noparast finds three common points shared among them: “Firstly, constitutions implicitly contain basic lines of a philosophy of education. Secondly, religious and traditional values are involved in the constitutions one way or another. Thirdly, constitutions are subject to interpretations2” (p. 4). Accordingly, he believes that to get a clue of how an educational system functions in a given country, it is helpful to examine how a conception of education has been developed in the leading document of that country. According to him, Iran’s Constitution, written in 1980, is

2 It is interesting to note that the same issue can be attributed to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in Iran which is in charge of giving/denying permits to the publication of literary products. According to Atwood (2012):

In order to appreciate the slipperiness of these terms [censorship and inspection], one must understand the legal basis for censorship in Iran today. Article 24 of the Iranian Constitution ensures freedom of expression in the country, with the exception of “when it is detrimental to the fundamental principles of Islam or the rights of the public. The details of this exception will be specified by law.” Yet no law has ever been drafted to define this exception or to create a process for regulating it. (p. 39)

mainly formulated around the notions of religion and democracy, while both notions are influenced by Islamic principles. He argues that the merging of religion and democracy is reflected in the new phrasing that the post-revolution authorities selected for the new state: Islamic Republic of Iran. Drawing on clear examples from the Constitution, Bagheri

Noparast shows how these two strands have been merged together, presenting a new version of religio-political statement that, notwithstanding the Iranian authorities’ belief, can be open to different interpretations. Here it is important to note that, as Bagheri

Noparast observes, although at the level of theory the Iranian Constitution has resolved the potential contractions, at a more practical level contradictions abound in that document. In spite of this, there are some Iranian scholars who, by referring to sociological and philosophical arguments, have argued that the problem has nothing to do with the trouble in linking the theory and practice. In a sense, these scholars believe that it is the very cat of conjoining an originally non-divine precept (democracy) with a clearly divine one (Islam) that causes the problem (see for example, Larijani, 1997;

Jahanbaglu, 2004). In other words, they believe that it is not possible to have a constitution devised based simultaneously on Shiite principles and democratic ones.

At a more practical yet implicit level of philosophy of education in Iran, Bagheri

Noparast (2016) points out to three main challenges: “the first one concerns indoctrination in religious education, the second one refers to the confrontation with minorities, and finally the third one addresses the trap of the so-called neoliberalism” (p. 7, emphasis added). Each of these challenges have been extensively elaborated in Bagheri Noparast’s work, depicting a complex web of an educational system in which the possibility of ignoring or even suppressing particular readings of education at the expense of accentuating others is high. Particularly in relation to the topic of this thesis, one can

notice how the three challenges discussed by Bagheri Noparast can affect the way a work of cultural production can turn out to be deemed as a schismatic, discordant and revisionist work in the Iranian authorities’ view. Put more clearly, when an educational system is theoretically founded on the juxtaposition of contradictory principles, and is practically influenced by religious indoctrination, the neglect of minorities and the economisation of knowledge, it is not improbable for such a system to see other cultural products as threatening rivals.

Here it might be necessary to pause and discuss the last issue in more detail. In order to get a better picture of the ideology of the governing system being responsible for censoring cultural products in Iran, it is highly important to unravel the complex relation existing among the guiding principles of educational/pedagogic philosophy in Iran.

The educational system that Bagheri Noparast has depicted revolves around a tripartite schema, namely religion, politics and economy. While in the Western world the last two factors have for a long time been linked to each other, resulting in capitalist ideology, in the Eastern world, particularly in those nations in which majority of population is Muslim, the presence of the first element, that is religion, adds to the complexity of the said schema. Taking into account this complexity, it is possible to get a clue to the issue of censorship in the countries, like Iran, in which religion is taken as a determinative factor.

It can be argued that this complexity is due to the fact that in such contexts those cultural products which are believed, in the view of authorities, to be in contrast with dominant religious and/or political ideas are not merely banned for the latter reason. What turns the issue of banning the publication of such products into a complicated one might be the economic aspect that is increasingly getting significance for leading educational and cultural organisations in Iran. In other words, an unorthodox works of art which breaks 46

the political and religious ‘norms’ can turn out to be a potential threat to a market-driven education founded originally on religious and political hegemonic ideologies. Here I intentionally choose the term norm as it makes a link between what has been discussed here and the Foucauldian notion of “power/knowledge”. In other words, this issue of allowing some works to be published and some other to be banned can be considered as an attempt aiming to normalise a particular educational ideology which supports and is supported by economic agendas. Here, once again, I refer to Kamberelis and Dimitriadis’s

(2005) words where they elaborate on the notion of “power/knowledge” in Foucault:

In addition to showing how power is relational and productive, Foucault was able to show how

power and knowledge are always intimately linked rather than inherently separate. Thus, he coined

the compound term “power/knowledge.” Within this framework, all knowledge claims index not

Truth with a capital T or even local truths but “truth effects,” which are produced, legitimated, and

“naturalized” within specific “regimes of truth” or “discourses.” Among other things, knowledge

produces normative categories, prescriptions for behavior, ways of seeing, and relations of power

such as those that obtain between women and men, patients and doctors, teachers and students,

citizens and the police. (p. 47)

To put the above discussion in the context of Iran’s educational/pedagogic policy/philosophy, it is possible to argue that the truth effects produced in such a system aims to naturalise/normalise a particular discourse at the expense of denaturalising/de- normalising other rival discourses. In this sense, pedagogy turns out to become a battlefield in which “hegemonic regimes rooted in and legitimated by technical- instrumental rationality” attempts to maintain the equilibrium which guarantees the stability of the dominant regime (p. 40). Here hegemony, as Kamberelis and Dimitriadis remark, is conceived of as “struggle, as a precarious “moving equilibrium” accomplished through the continual orchestration of conflicting and competing forces by more or less

unstable, more or less temporary, more or less contingent, alliances of class fractions (or other relevant social units)”(p. 123). Accordingly, the issue of (in)accessibility to cultural products that can take on educational values in such a complex context should be examined from a hegemonic perspective. It is only in this way that we can realise why education/pedagogy is no longer limited to purely educational issues, hence the intermingling of politics, economy and education. It is in light of such an approach to the issue of education that I have put the overall argument of this thesis within a critical pedagogy project. Such a project tries “to critique and transform those classroom [and any pedagogic] conditions tied to hegemonic processes that perpetuate the economic and cultural marginalization of subordinated groups” (Darder, Baltodano & Torres, 2003, p.

13). Here I would like to say that although transforming such conditions is an ideal goal to pursue, I would rather put emphasis more on critiquing the system as I think a meticulous examination of this issue, regardless of the probable result it may bear, sets a ground for future transformative endeavours.

While the above discussion can, to a considerable extent, show the mechanism in use in the Iranian government’s educational policy/philosophy, however, it is still necessary to elaborate more on the notion of hegemony in order to present a more precise image of the way a hegemonic educational system works. Hegemony, in the political sense of the term, evidently resonates with the notion of homogenisation. In other words, a hegemonic system resorts to homogenising strategies to supress ‘singular’ voices and instead engender collective and unified identities. In this sense, a hegemonic ideology is made and consolidated through promulgating a set of homogenous and unitary ideas at the expense of diminishing and, even in some instances devaluing, distinct voices. As a result, what are nullified in a hegemonic worldview are unorthodox alternatives being not

compatible with pre-determined tenets of the dominant worldview. Situating this argument within a critical pedagogy context, Cho (2010) remarks, “when the hegemonic power of the system presents and enforces its own worldview as the natural and the universal truth, where do we go to counteract the hegemonic claims and explore alternatives?” (p. 313). Cho believes that it is possible to counteract such hegemonic claims through valuing “experiences against the claims of hegemonic truth” (p. 313). In fact, as Cho points out, “claiming one’s own experience is regarded not only as a process of ideology critique, but also a way to ﬁnd alternatives” (p. 313). In this sense, valuing one’s idiosyncratic experiences turns out to function as a means through which one can find alternatives that are not reducible to homogenising ideas of a given hegemonic system.

At a more fundamental level, the issue of homogenisation of singular voices which is consolidated by the process of normalisation of a hegemonic discourse is linked to what

Gu-Ze'ev, Masschelein and Blake (2001) calls “reflection”. This argument finds a particular and defining educational resonance when one notes how education, in poststructuralist and postmodernist critical studies, aims to defamiliarise given facts in order to present new worldviews (Kamberelis and Dimitriadis, 2005). Delineating the importance of reflection as a means for defamiliarisation, Gu-Ze'ev, Masschelein and

Blake remark:

Reﬂection is immanently a process of active negation. It is a special kind of refusal of “the given

facts”. Within the Utopia of reﬂection, the ethical I questions the realm of self-evidence, cracks it

open and examines it very closely. It is never solely a positive element, or simply “functional” for

the stasis of a social system. This is why reﬂection is necessarily at odds with positivistic

orientations and hegemonic groups and tendencies in any society. It is a source of the dissenting

spirit and an arena for alternatives to self-evident, productive and controlled relationships.

Necessarily, it negates normalising practices and their ‘self-evident’ philosophical, ideological and

social foundations. (p. 97)

In Kamberelis and Dimitriadis (2005), the notion of reflectivity is associated with the notion of “self-reflexivity” (p. 54). In fact, reflection is induced by self-reflexivity where the latter is a form of defamiliarisation. A self-reflective act “encourages reflection on ethnography as the practice of both knowledge gathering and self-transformation through self-reflection and mutual reflection with the other” (p. 54).The importance of this defamiliarising act is in the way it “help[s] people recognize the fragmentary, historically situated, partial, and unfinished nature of their “selves” and promote processes of self- construction/reconstruction in relation to new discourses and others” (p. 54). In this sense, a true reflective act, through encouraging the educational subject to question given facts and defamiliarise the pre-determined and unquestionably accepted norms, helps him/her search for a non-reductive and non-totalisable singular voice and possibly counteract the homogenising mechanism of a hegemonic educational system.

Now it is possible to more accurately situate the above argument within the context of educational policy/philosophy of Iran and its relation to seemingly incompatible [with its hegemonic ideology] cultural products such as the novels under analysis. Taking into account the above argument, it is possible to argue that from the point of view of the homogenising educational system, any cultural product, regardless of its political and religious ordinations, which presents a different voice from that of the dominant educational discourse is considered as that which can disrupt the equilibrium guaranteeing the stability of that system. In other words, the struggle is not merely between two different worldviews, one being rooted in orthodox religious and political

ideas and the other in iconoclastic attitudes. But, more importantly, this struggle is between a reductionist and univocal ideology and a singular, mulitivocal attitude.

In sum, what can be deduced from the above discussion is that the educational/pedagogic discourse of the post-revolution state is inevitably founded on an exclusionary approach. Here once again I refer to Mehran's (1989) quote where she remarks:

The New Islamic Person is religious, politically aware and involved, proud of his/her heritage,

ready for self-sacrifice for Islam and the revolution, respectful and obedient to his/her country's

religious and political leaders. He/she hates the prerevolutionary regime, rejects any form of

dependence on the West, mistrusts the non-Muslim world and is highly critical of Western ways,

and sympathizes with all oppressed peoples, especially Muslims. (p. 49)

While, on the surface of it, the above definition of The New Islamic Person seems to have a descriptive facet, but it is inherently prescriptive. In other words, in process of socialisation of school in the post-revolution era, the new person ought to be religious, politically aware and so on so forth. This prescriptive definition clearly states what the new person (new learner/student/citizen) should be, but it does not explain what this person should not be. Such an approach to assigning a set of features for the new person, in Kamberelis and Dimitriadis's (2005) words can be used "for classifying, categorizing, and diagramming the human subject in relation to the social" (p. 48). Implied in this discursive strategy is the deletion of other possible alternatives of the new person. And this, I assume is the realisation of a seemingly less tangible yet more comprehensive form of censorship.

Taking into account the above discussion, now it is possible to locate the argument of this thesis within a framework of critical pedagogy which can be looked through a 51

Lacanian lens. What in particular converges a critical consideration of education and the

Lacanian theory of subjectivity, as De Klerk (2009) points out, is the emphasis that Lacan and Freire put on “the importance of socially transformative potential of the experience of subjectivity as well as the influential effect of established modes of social practice and representation of that experience” (p. 14). In this way, the context of education, following such critical educators/pedagogues as Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren, among others, is seen as a political arena in which a particular conception of subjectivity is developed based on the state-supported discursive structure as realised in ‘social practices and representations’ within the educational context of Iran. In this sense, any educational institution is fundamentally seen as a place for the dissemination or/and questioning of power relations. In the context of this thesis, the literary materials designed and taught at Iranian academic institutes, particularly the state-funded ones, are considered as the tools through which the hegemonic ideology of the state is developed and consolidated. What stand in opposition to these discourses are the literary works which are not, for obvious political and religious reasons, published in Iran. In fact, the purpose of this study is to look closely at the notion of subjectivity in the banned literary works of two Iranian writers and examine its importance in the way it can introduce a different conception of subjectivity from those of state-sponsored works.

3.3 Learning and education: on power, identity and knowledge from a

Lacanian perspective

In this section, I elaborate on how the act of excluding/including cultural materials (in this research, two novels) in the cultural/educational sphere of one's society is tangibly linked to the development of a particular form of knowledge that inevitably leads to the

formation particular identity. As will be discussed in the next chapter, this issue has an aesthetic aspect that through delimiting subject's sense perception determines subjective experience, hence constructing particular subjectivities. The significance of the examination of the novels under analysis, as banned cultural products in the post- revolution Iranian society, can reside in their anti-normative potential, where the norms are defined and determined through/by the state's ideological stance. Needless to say, these norms are defined based on the political and economic interests of the state. At a more fundamental level, the realm of politics and economy is strongly connected to

'knowledge and power'. And when the notions of knowledge and power are raised, one can readily expect to hear of 'subjectivity'. According to Clarke (2015), in today's world it is totally obvious to see how knowledge and power are interconnected. This interconnection, as Clarke remarks, harbors "a curious conflation of omniscience and omnipotence that feeds fantasmatic illusions of becoming masters of our own destiny through education, thus reproducing docile educational subjectivities" (p. 73). This notion of (Lacanian) fantasy will be discussed below in relation to the idea of 'binary logic' as developed by Cho (2009).

Looking from this perspective and taking into account the anti-normative nature of the novels under analysis in this research, it might seem tenable to conceive of these novels as that which have the potential to act as a threat to the knowledge economy developed by the ideological state. Elaborating on the notion of discourse, Clarke shows how

"Lacan’s discourse theory, which brings knowledge and power together in a complex and dynamic set of relations with fantasy/desire and the subject, can be regarded as a summary, or indeed the summit, of Lacanian theory " (p. 74). In a similar vein, and as an excellent example of scholarly work of research, Deborah Youdell's (2011) seminal work

entitled 'School trouble: Identity, Power and politics in education' clearly demonstrates how knowledge and power affect the formation of particular subjectivities in educational contexts. This discussion has been thoroughly developed in Michael Apple's (1993b) work 'Official knowledge', where he talks about 'politics of official knowledge'. Linking

Apple's argument to Lacan's notion of signifier, Cho (2009) demonstrate how official knowledge is grounded on the ideological act of 'exclusion'. In this regard, he points out:

If what we come to understand as academic only becomes so as a result of a

selective or exclusionary process—a process that is loaded with political,

ideological, and power implications and realities—then the silent unarticulated

concomitant is the active selection of those contents that will stand in as the

“unacademic,” the academic’s other. (pp. 152-3).

Cho observes that "the notion of the academic depends upon a binary logic: the academic is the positive term that relies on the presence of some negative term against which it can become meaningful" (p. 153). Based on this argument, I can say that the novels under analysis in this thesis embody the negative element against which the inclusion of state- sponsored materials can be justified. In a sense, the exclusion of such materials have the same importance as the inclusion of the materials developed by the state. The importance of this binary logic becomes obvious when one notes how "the state is able to disavow the reality of material inequality" through developing such logic (p. 153). The important point that Cho puts emphasis on is that "the oppositional relationship constituting this binary is not a natural but, rather, an imaginary [fantasmatic] relation" (p. 153).

Accordingly, one can argue that any educational practice is founded on a selective process. In order to make clear what this binary logic does in an educational context, Cho elaborates on Lacan's definition of signifier, where “a signifier is what represents the

subject to another subject”. Cho points out that through this Lacanian formula it is possible "to unravel the imaginary-based logic upon which binary constructions, such as the academic/other binary, are founded" (p. 153). Then he explains "what Lacan means by this definition of the signifier is that the negative term in the binary is never the “true” opposite of the positive term; rather, it only “stands in” for the true opposite" (p. 153).

Cho observes that a binary logic in an educational context inevitably leads to "an ideological battle…at the level of knowledge" (p. 155). "Through the rhetoric of the academic," he argues further, "a particular kind of knowledge…is being legitimatized and taught while others are being delegitimized in the classroom" (p. 155).

Taking into account the above discussion, now it is possible to clearly argue that what the Iranian state does through excluding some cultural products and including others, can be seen as an act of knowledge legitimisation being founded on the ideology of binary logic. In a sense, if the state aims to formulate a particular notion of Iranian identity, it needs to provide fantasmatic/imaginary-based oppostional relationship between what is excluded from the cultural sphere of the society and what is included in it. An ultimate and far-reaching consequence of this ideology is the obscurantism of the notion of 'truth', hence developing a notion of truth being in tandem with the state's ideology. The importance of the current thesis, in spite of all of its limitations, is that it can provide us with a lens through which it is possible to lay bare the configuration of the state's fantasmatic ideology realized in its exclusive/inclusive ideology.

Chapter 3 Literature, education and the

question of subjectivity: Rancière, Foucault and

Lacan

In its broadest scope, this research aims to analyse two examples of banned literary works authored by two Iranian novelists to find out how notions of subjectivity have been developed in the works under consideration. The purpose of such undertaking is to see how literature, as a fictional means and in its unorthodox form as considered by Iranian authorities, can set a ground for ‘thinking’ about social, cultural, political and, in particular in this research, educational/pedagogic issues. From an educational/pedagogic perspective, a corollary of such an examination can make a link to the kind of

‘knowledge’ or 'social understanding' that should not be accessible to the Iranian society.

As I elaborate more closely on it below, the restriction put on the distribution of apparently unconventional/anti-normative cultural products turns out to be a political practice because it aims to develop a particular ‘normative’ and 'hegemonic' discourse, hence a subjectificational act.

In this chapter the notion of censorship is discussed within the conceptual/theoretical framework that Rancière, Foucault and Lacan provide us with. As such, the three main themes or concepts to be discussed in the following section are knowledge, subjectivity and aesthetics. In what follows, first a reference is made to Rancière's aesthetic theory.

As will be discussed below, artistic practices, according to Rancière (2013), via challenging the realm of pre-ordained aesthetic field, attempt to disturb the established normative and normalising discourses which impose a particular pattern for the subject’s sense perception. In a similar line of thought, albeit from a different theoretical perspective, Foucault helps us see knowledge as an entity indivisible from power that plays a defining role in the process of subject formation (Foucault, 1980). What gives such a conspicuous role to knowledge is the way through which it consolidates, expands or challenges the subject’s sense perception (Rancière, 2009). While Rancière and

Foucault present rigorous argumentation regarding the role of ideology in forming particular subjectivities, the Lacanian conception of lack provides us with a possible way to challenge the hegemonic discursive structures. In order to see how knowledge within pedagogic context plays a role in the formation of subjectivity, the notion of 'modes of existence' has been discussed.

It is necessary to clarify that by engaging with Lacan and using his theory of subjectivity, I am not implying that the novels under analysis have the ability to create spaces for the emergence of new subjectivities. In a sense, although Lacanian theory of subjectivity can provide us with a way out of subjectifying ideological structures, but the rationale behind resorting to him is that he, while showing the emancipatory way, at the same time provides us with the reason why and how the latter does not happen. Both

Rancière and Foucault, due to their in-depth engagement with politics and its

subjectivsing apparatus, can depict a nuanced image of an ideological society. This can, particularly given the lack of enough and adequate studies on the notion of censorship in

Iran, contribute to an understating of censorship within the context of Iran. Lacan complements these two as he, particularly through his conceptualisation 'the chain of signification', intricately presents a psycho-political delineation of the latter.

Before elaborating on of the aforementioned concepts, it is helpful to make clear what

I mean by subject and subjectivity. My approach to this issue is fed, in general, by a psychoanalytic conception of the subject, and, in particular, by a Lacanian understanding of the term. In what follows, I briefly present a definition of subjectivity and will elaborate on it in the theoretical framework section in more depth. However, before elaborating on the notion of subjectivity, I explain why subjectivity and not other terms, such as identity, is the focus of this research. My explanation is influenced by ideas of scholars who are in a way affiliated with the tradition of critical pedagogy. This reference to such tradition is related to the critical nature of the current thesis.

3.1 Why subjectivity?

Giroux and McLaren (1992) explain why, in the context of critical pedagogy, subjectivity is preferred to other terms when leaners are at centre of attention. They believe that subjectivity:

…as a distinct form of identity…permits us to acknowledge and address the ways in which

individuals make sense of their experiences, including their conscious and unconscious

understandings, and the cultural forms available through which such understandings are either

constrained or enabled. The term “identity” on the other hand implies that there is a fixed essence

that exists independently of the range of discourses made available to individuals. That is, the term

identity suggests a unitary, self-constituting sovereign subject whose autonomous, primordial

characteristics are pre-discursive in nature, allegedly constituted outside of language, history, or

power. (p. 14, emphasis added)

Implied in the above quotation is that the term identity leaves no room for the role of

‘other’ or, in philosophical term, the ‘otherness’ that can affect the individual through different cultural, social and political factors. In Racevskis’s (1988) words, the fake autonomy that the term identity implies “cultivates” in the individual “an illusion of conscious control that only serves to occlude the aleatory and contingent nature of this imaginary essence” (p. 21, cited in Giroux and McLaren, 1992, p. 14). Such approach according to which the social, cultural and political status of the individual is discussed in terms of is coterminous with the status of the individual in what Lacan refers to as the imaginary, where that infant identifies with its own image as reflected in the mirror, hence a narcissistic relation with one’s own image (Lacan, 1968).

As Giroux and McLaren (1992) point out, in the definition of identity there is a kind of essentialism that leaves no room for “the contingency” of the individual. Putting contingency at the heart of the subject is indicative of “the fact that individuals consist of decentred flux of subject positions” and are hence “highly dependent upon discourse, social structure, repetition, memory, and affective investment to maintain a sense of coherence in a world of constant change” (p. 14-15). The important point to take into account with regards to the role and function of discourse, as a regulatory force explicit and implicit in institutional forms, in the Foucauldian sense, is that “discursive practices generate subject positions rather than fixed identities” (Donald, 1985, p. 344).

Stressing the function of discursive practices in generating subject positions which are

“multiple, not purely rational, and…potentially contradictory” would lead to forgoing

“the unitary rational subject” who “is itself a historical product” (Henriques, Hollway, 59

Urwin, Venn, & Walkerdine, 1984, p. 203). As Henriques et al. argue, the theorisation of subject who takes up different positions “within a particular discourse” is the result of the post-structuralist’s deconstruction of the subject-as-agent” (p. 203). In this way, the idea of the individual, as a unitary entity, is refuted due to the effect of “the power-knowledge” relations which can produce positions that “might themselves be contradictory” (p. 203).

In spite of the important contribution that post-structuralism, as Henriques et al. observe, has made by replacing the notion of (unitary and simple) individual with

(multiple and contradictory) subject, it leaves us with a kind of “determinism” which

“implies that people are mechanically positioned in discourses” (p. 204). This view

“leaves no room for explicating either the possibilities for change or individuals’ resistance to change, and which disregards the question of motivation altogether” (p.

204). Moreover, from such perspective, the question of “the specificity of the construction of the actual subjectivities in the domain of discursive practices” is elided (p. 204).

However, given the compelling arguments that thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze and

Derrida develop to show how subject can challenge hegemonic discursive structures, such claims cannot be readily generalised to all post-structuralist thinkers. What is at stake here is that, as Newman (2007) points out, the overemphasis that post-structuralism puts on the subjectificational force of discourse hardly allows the process of de-subjectification to get functional (pp. 68-9). To modify this problem, Henriques et al., in line with

Lacanian thinkers, have proposed a conception of subject which, according to Donald

(1985), “neither takes existing forms of individuality as given (as do most schools of psychology and sociology) nor slips into the determinism that haunts structuralism and its successors” (p. 344). In Newman’s (2007) words, discursive structures “partially constitute the [Lacanian] subject” (p. 87, emphasis in original).

In the Lacanian version of subjectivity, as Henriques et al. (1984) observe, the rational subject of psychology is replaced by an irrational subject of psychoanalysis, whose

“agency is constantly subverted to desire” (p. 205). Such a subject, in the course of following his/her desire behaves contradictorily. This contradictory behaviour of the subject is due to the influence of discursive practices which, instead of fixed identities, produce multiple subject positions. Lacan places particular emphasis on the role of unconscious processes. Theorising subject as an entity defined by his/her unconscious impulses, Lacan subverts the notion of unitary subject. In this way, the subjectivity theorised by Lacan is “a subjectivity whose machinery is not entirely accessible because of the subterfuges of the unconscious" (p. 225). The Lacanian subject is also a split subject, split not simply in terms of being decentred due to duality of its conscious and unconscious impulses. This splitness takes form under the effect of subject’s desire. In

Joan Copjec’s (1989) words:

The subject is thus split from its desire, and desire itself is conceived as something− precisely −

unrealized; it does not actualize what the law makes possible. Nor is desire committed to

realization, barring any external hinderance. For the internal dialectic which makes the being of

the subject dependent on the negation of its desire turns the construction of desire into a self-

hindering process. (p. 61)

The intertwining of the subject’s cognitive and affective dimensions is another feature of

Lacanian subjectivity (p. 205). Finally, the way Lacan presents a subject whose past is implicated in his/her present shows how “continuity” plays a role in the constitution of one’s subjectivity (p. 25).

A cursory look at the above discussion gives us a general framework in which concepts and notions are introduced in contrast to each other: rational subject versus irrational

subject, fixed identities versus multiple subject positions, determinism versus contingency, and so on. An understanding of these contrasting concepts, and the way in which they can provide us with a holistic picture of politics of subjectivity entail a consideration of the ground in which subjects make sense of their everyday experience.

As Giroux and McLaren (1992) point out in the quotation at the beginning of this section, these experiences include “conscious and unconscious understandings, and the cultural forms available through which such understandings are either constrained or enabled” (p.

14). This discussion, as is elaborated next, is of considerable aesthetic and political consequences affecting the constitution of particular subjectivities. This issue will be examined, in particular, from the point of view of Jacques Rancière who has extensively explicated the relationship between aesthetics and the political. In a sense, Rancière’s aesthetic argument makes a tangible link to the notion of the symbolic order in Lacan.

While Rancière puts emphasis on the ways through which political ideologies control subjects’ sense perception, Lacan’s symbolic order is the realm of control and enforcement of law.

3.2 Aesthetics and the emergence, (trans)formation or repression of subjectivities

What, in the current research, makes a link between aesthetics and subjectivity is the practice of censoring/banning of cultural products. As mentioned in chapter one of this thesis, censorship and banning can sometimes be exercised through the inclusion of some cultural products at the expense of excluding some others. This, in the aesthetic theory of

Rancière, is a political act leaving consequences in the construction of subjectivity within a society. In Rancière (2013), “those who have no name, who remain invisible and inaudible, can only penetrate the police order via a mode of subjectivization that

transforms the aesthetic coordinates of the community by implementing the universal presupposition of politics: we are all equal” (p. xiii). Implied in Rancière’s view is the fact that “the aesthetic coordinates” of a given community is susceptible to neglecting, removing or silencing some voices in order to bring up some other voices which help in maintaining the harmony of political order. In other words, the emergence of any mode of subjectivization which trespasses the pre-defined aesthetic coordinate is bound up with transforming that coordinate. According to Rancière, this act of trespassing is by nature a perceptual experience. In fact, it is through “aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that…new modes of sense perception” are created and “novel forms of political subjectivity” is induced (p. 3). To make clearer the link between aesthetics and subjectivity, it is necessary to see how Rancière define aesthetics:

…aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense – re-examined perhaps by Foucault – as the

system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation

of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously

determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around

what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak,

around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. (p. 8, emphasis in original)

In this definition there are some specific words pointing to how aesthetics is configured.

Rancière refers to aesthetics as “the system of a priori forms”. Somewhere else he uses the word “regime” to delineate the function of aesthetics (p. 4). This system or regime not only has a ‘determinative’ force, it also exerts its force in a doctrinaire and assertive way as the forms it induces and creates are enacted a priori. In this view, politics is the realm of sense and experience, hence specifying or “delimiting” what ought to be sensed by the subject.

Taking into account the features Rancière attributes to aesthetics in the current era, one can realise how censorship works in a society. This is particularly relevant to the topic of this thesis as it deals with the banned works of two Iranian novelists. According to what Rancière states, it is possible to argue that censorship has a perceptual dynamics which attempts to delimit the perceptual domain in a society. If aesthetics, as Rancière points out, “is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience” (p. 8), then what censorship does is re-defining a new boundary for the pre- ordained spatial and temporal geographies that a state determines through its ideological apparatuses. Rancière defines “artistic practices” as “‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility” (emphasis added, p. 8). Therefore, one can argue that any artistic practice, by challenging the present

“modes of being and forms of visibility”, moves beyond “the general” perceptual field that a given state determines and, consequently, “disturbs the clear partition of identities, activities, and spaces” (p. 8). In fact, in some cases, a work of the unpublishable kind, by

“redistribute[ing] the system of sensible coordinates”, has the potential to set a ground for “democratic emancipation… without being able to guarantee the absolute elimination of the social inequalities inherent in the police order” (emphasis in original, pp. xiii-xiv).

Rancière’s tack into the issue of writing is also of far-reaching relevance to the current research. As he argues, “by stealing away to wander aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to speak to, writing destroys every legitimate foundation for the circulation of words, for the relationship between the effects of language and the positions of bodies in shared space” (p. 8). Rancière observes that when it comes to “fiction”, this

potential of writing realises itself by creating fantasmatic spaces which can unsettle “the clear-cut rules of representative logic that establish a relationship of correspondence at a distance between the sayable and the visible” (p. 10).

In terms of the necessary relationship between political practices and aesthetics practices Rancière believes that the true political practices are those providing the subject with the opportunity to play in “the distribution of the sensible” (p. 7). To verify this observation, he refers to the Aristotelian definition of citizen: “a citizen is someone who has a part in the act of governing and being governed” (emphasis in original, p. 7). In spite of finding resonance with what he conceives of a political subject, Rancière believes that this definition does not exhaust the real contour of a political subject. Accordingly, he complements this definition by considering “another form of distribution [that] precedes this act of partaking in government: the distribution that determines those who have a part in the community of citizens” (p. 7). Therefore, for Rancière a subject can have true agency just by having a share in distributing the sensible, and not merely by having a part in what is considered as the sensible. From this perspective, the works deemed to be banned in a given society, particularly due to their political orientations, can be thought of as the works that, according to the censoring state, have claimed to play a role in the distribution of the sensible. Therefore, it can be argued that the act of censoring/banning is exercised with the aim of consolidating rigid epistemological boundaries.

The above discussion sets the ground for thinking about subjectivity within an educational/pedagogic context. Rancière’s aesthetic theory not only, through its unorthodox perspective, gives us a compelling delineation of the functioning of aesthetics in the political sphere, it also demonstrates how aesthetic practices speak to the 65

(re/trans)formation of particular subjectivity. In the following section I discuss how different pedagogical approaches lead to specific ‘modes of existence’.

3.3 Subjectivity in the context of education: Pedagogical modes of existence

The term subjectivity within the context of education, and generally across all scholarly areas concerning this notion, might implicitly herald the notion of modes of existence and action (Davies & Bansel, 2007; Peters, 2004a, 2004b; Read, 2009; Zahavi, 2008). Bruno

Latour, the French philosopher and anthropologist, has extensively discussed this idea.

Although I am not going to elaborate on Latour’s standpoint here, as it is both beyond the scope of this research and well beyond my knowledge of Latour’s discussion, it might be sufficient to say that for Latour positing any clear-cut boundary between the so-called subject/object or society/nature is doomed to be invalid. However, when it comes to the issue of critical pedagogy, pedagogical orientations are often divided into two more or less distinctive categories, namely: a) a pedagogic model in which subjects (learners and related educators) have pre-ordained duties; usually be prepared to pursue the goals of the market or defend the ideological cause of the state; b) a model according to which subjects are characterised by their progressive relation with a dynamic environment, hence conforming to a definition of “subjects-yet-to-come” (Atkinson, 2015, p. 44).

While the former pedagogic system is often known by its controlling apparatus, the latter is identified by its flexible structure. Although it might be difficult, if not impossible due to dominance of market-driven ideas as existing at every aspect of contemporary human’s life (Molesworth, Nixon, & Scullion, 2009; Ozga, 2007), to envisage a neat demarcation as explained above between pedagogic modes, it might be useful to look into, at a

conceptual level, the two modes to see the possibilities that an emancipatory pedagogic system can provide us with.

Within a pedagogical framework, as Atkinson (2015) states, two modes of existence can be envisaged. According to first mode, subjects are thought of as “specific preordained pedagogised” participants who are supposed to “meet the needs of economic competition and which is held in place by controlled curriculums, assessment and inspection programmes” (p. 43). Implied in this approach to the question of pedagogy are the notions of certainty and essentialism, on the one hand, and on the other, the dichotomisation of educational participants (both leaners and teachers) based on their failure and success. While the former (i.e. certainty and essentialism) are usually associated with political implications of such a pedagogic system, the latter generally corresponds with the marketisation of pedagogy3. The second mode of pedagogical existence, as Atkinson elaborates, “advocates a more uncertain pedagogical adventure characterised by novel modes of subjective engagement that emphasise a subject-yet-to- come and where the notion of the not-known is immanent to such adventures” (p. 43).

This approach embraces uncertainty, open-endedness, and de-familiarisation. From this perspective, the world (institutional and otherwise) is thought to be constantly, if not relentlessly, changing. Therefore, the pedagogic subjects should be treated in a way to be prepared to enter such an always-becoming environment.

To elaborate on the above discussion, Atkinson refers to Barad’s (2003, 2007) formulations of intra-cation and intra-relation. According to Barad (2007, p. 139) Intra-

3 . This is just a general categorisation done for the purpose of showing how generally such a pedagogic model can function at the two camps, i.e. politics and economy. In reality, in today’s world any separation of politics and economy will turn out be mistaken.

action and intra-relation differ from inter-action and inter-relating in that in the former no

“prior existence of independent entities or relata” is presumed (in Atkinson, 2015, p. 44).

As such, as Atkinson explains, “in the process of intra-action there are no proper entities but rather a series of relations out of which entities emerge” (p. 44). In this way, immanent to the notion of inter-action is “a metaphysics of individualism or identity” and inherent in an intra-actional approach is “a metaphysics of relation” (p. 44). Although at the surface of it, these formulations seem paradoxical and confusing as we are always being taught that the prefix “inter” is synonymous with between (too or more entities), Barad

(2007, p. ix) provides us with a more profound explanation according to which the prefix

“intra” connotes more relationality. In this way, she states “[e]xistence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interaction; rather individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating” (In Atkinson, p. 44). The life a foetus for

Barad is a pure example of the life of an entity which although seemingly lives a life of independence, in reality there are many different and at the same interrelated relations, including “a series of relations with the mother, sonar observations and the world of medical practice, social discourses relating to pregnancy, childbirth, mothering and social care” (p. 45). Therefore, it is naïve to think that individuals initially have their life of their own, separated from social relations, and then learn to connect their purely independent inner world to the external realities. For Barad (2003), “there are no independent relata, only relata-within-relations (p. 815, in Atkinson, p. 25).

A corollary of adopting the intra-relational conception of pedagogy would result in challenging the ‘pre-established’ “ontological, epistemological and ethical dimensions” within a given pedagogy. Accordingly, from an intra-relational perspective, pedagogic subjects are not treated as “known” entities who are supposed to receive a “package of

knowledge” and then employ it according to a “pre-ordained” curriculum (p. 45). In other words, pedagogic subjects, the knowledge and the way through which the achieved knowledge is employed do not take up an essentialist position; they are instead treated as

‘in-progress’ entities and phenomena which are in close interaction with the material

(changing) world. As Atkinson remarks, “[t]hese material engagements are not discrete entities but entangled processes” (p. 46). As such, from a pedagogical perspective, engaging directly with the material world is “conceived as adventures rather than prescribed routes” (p. 46).

In the above discussion I tried to demonstrate how modes of existence correspond to the different forms of pedagogic systems. What makes the issue of modes important is the way through which these modes assume specific understandings of knowledge as that which leads to the formation of subject. The important point to take into account in this regard is that knowledge, particularly from a pedagogic perspective, is a political entity playing a defining role in the way through which a given educational system aims to establish and consolidate a specific conception of subjectivity. What presented above makes clear how pedagogy, as Rancière remarks, is an aesthetic field capable of setting a ground for the formation of particular subjectivities. These subjectivities can be thought of, in Barad’s words, as modes of existence relying on the capacities and limitations of what the symbolic order, in its Lacanian sense, provides them with.

3.4 Knowledge acquisition and the formation of subjectivity

One way to approach the question of subjectivity is to consider how the subject is involved in the process of learning or knowledge acquisition (Clarke, 2014; Lambert,

2012). In fact, an investigation of the relation between the subject and knowledge has been the starting point through which, for the first time, the question of human identity 69

has come to the forefront. It was Descartes, who by devising the method of doubting, established the earliest steps in questioning and problematising the question of subjectivity. The subject conceived by Descartes, or what is known as Cartesian subject, is not bestowed a preordained and infallible truth, instead s/he sees themselves as the inheritor of myth (Cho, 2007). Although the conception of self as proposed by Descartes has been extensively criticised particularly for the dualism4 he puts at the heart of the

Cartesian subject, Descartes’s role in creating a method according to which the question of human identity can be thought of is irrefutable.

Assumed in the definition of human being as the creator of knowledge by, first of all, doubting the mythical knowledge s/he has received, and then by learning new knowledge as a result of that very doubt, is an understanding of learning which, according to Cho

“appears rather unproblematic for any conception of what it means to be a student [in general anyone who is engaged in the process of learning]—even coalescing with the latter” (p. 703). From this standard perspective, which can be observed in the context of education, what the subject learns is a neutral body of knowledge which does not put him/her at any risks. However, from a more critical (socio-political) point of view, “what makes learning critical usually turns on the registering of some social trauma or ill, that is, some upsetting knowledge” (p. 703). According to Cho “in the various critical theories

(feminism, Marxism, race, and the like), this traumatic knowledge has such names as ideology, subtext, infrastructure, and so on” (p. 703). This notion of knowledge

4 “The view that mind and body are two separate substances; the self is as it happens associated with a particular body, but is self-subsistent, and capable of independent existence…This is the pure self or ‘I’ that we are tempted to imagine as a simple unique thing that makes up our essential identity” (Blackburn, 2008, p. 54).

acquisition as a traumatic experience turns out to become more important when the very knowledge that the contemporary subject aims to acquire has become overwhelmingly entangled with the critical situation in which we have been involved. “[K]nowledge of social and political oppression, acts of genocide, economic exploitation” are the examples of traumatic knowledge (p. 703). Considering the issue of acquiring “knowledge of the disturbing kind” Cho asks, “can we continue to assume an unproblematic homology between learning and studenthood? In other words, do students easily or wilfully learn knowledge that is at best difficult to ingest?” (p. 703).

The purpose of raising the above discussion is to consider the possibility of the novels under analysis in creating “novel modes of subjective engagement” within the context of

Iran’s pedagogic system. However, it should be emphasised that by doing so I am not going to say that these novels have the ability to create the possibility for the emergence of new subjectivities. What is important in relation to such undertaking is the act of closely examining the novel's engagement with the question of subjectivity. In a sense, it is possible, after analysing the novels, to come up with the conclusion that the novels do not create spaces, however fictionally, for the emergence of new subjectivities. But if the analysis shows that the novels depict how the post-revolution state hinders de- sebjectificational practices, it might still help us see how the state closes the opportunity for emancipatory practices.

To understand how, in particular, the emergence of new subjectivity is related to the pedagogic modes of existence, it is helpful to consider how pedagogic systems treat the process and product of knowledge acquisition – knowledge as a tool for controlling or emancipating subjects. In this regard, Foucault (1982) presents us a profound conceptualisation of modes. He states: 71

My objective … has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human

beings are made subjects. My work has dealt with three modes of objectification which transform

human beings into subjects … The first is the modes of inquiry which try to give themselves the

status of the sciences … In the second part of my work, I have studied the objectivizating of the

subject in what I shall call ‘dividing practices’ … Finally, I have sought to study – it is my current

work – the way a human being turns him or herself into a subject. For example, I have chosen the

domain of sexuality … Thus it is not power, but the subject that is the general theme of my

research. (p. 209)

Foucaults’s intervention into modes of subjectivity is indivisible from his tack into the issue of knowledge. However, the important point regarding a Foucauldian approach to knowledge is that it is exquisitely associated with the notion of power. Therefore, for

Foucault power and knowledge (power/knowledge) are the two sides of the same coin which co-constitute each other, hence his formulation of power/knowledge as a compound noun. In fact, the emphasis on the juxtaposition of power and knowledge is the result of Foucault’s genealogical approach. In his genealogical project, Foucault

(1975, 1977, 1990) tries to demonstrate “how what is considered true or false is dependent on specific ‘games of truth’ or ‘regimes of power’ upon which possibilities of making any and all knowledge claims depend” (Kamberelis and Dimitriadis, 2005, p. 45). To see how in Foucault knowledge works in association with power, one must tease the notion of power out as presented by him.

3.5 Foucault and education

The importance of a Foucauldian definition of knowledge as that which is tied with the notion of power within relations of power is that it shows how “all knowledge claims index not Truth with a capital T or even local truths but ‘truth effects,’ which are produced, legitimated, and ‘naturalized’ within specific ‘regimes of truth’ or 72

‘discourses’” (Kamberelis and Dimitriadis, 2005, p. 47). It is important to note that the role of knowledge in claiming ‘truth effects’, rather than a monolithic version of truth which Kamberelis and Dimitriadis refer to as “Truth”, not only does not dilute the considerable role of knowledge as an undeniable and indivisible element constructing power, but it reinforces power by dispersing, instead of centralising, strategies through which a dominant discourse enacts its normalising force. It is due to such mechanism of knowledge that makes it a powerful tool in the hands of discourses in order to produce

“normative categories, prescriptions for behavior, ways of seeing, and relations of power”

(p. 47). In fact, according to Infinito (2003), behind any normalising project lays “the insistence that individuals must uncover the ‘truth’ about themselves” (p. 162). This process, leading to other consequences such as “internal scrutiny, soul-searching, and confession…[are] resulted from the exercise of certain modes of power” (p. 162). The discourse created as the effect of these forms of power induces a particular form of the self which causes the individual to turn “inward to ‘ferret out’ the deficiencies and evils in his or her own soul, as opposed to opening outward to social considerations and the illegitimate exercise of power in the world” (p. 162). Accordingly, the “modes of existence” evoked by the normalizing force of discursive systems inevitably obfuscate the illegitimate exercise of power (p. 163).

From a Foucauldian perspective, as far as the question of pedagogic subject is concerned, one can benefit from the way the functioning of a given discourse is explicated. In Foucault (1977, 1980), discourses are responsible for the normalisation of subjects. In fact, this normalising mechanism leads to the construction of particular subjectivity which “is produced in and through sedimented institutional discourses that provide both the possibilities for and limits of our lived experiences” (Kamberelis and

Dimitriadis, 2005, p. 49). This last quotation gives us a unique and distinctive dimension of a Foucauldian approach placing his theory within an emancipatory political project.

The simultaneous existence of limiting and liberating factors within a discursive system leads to the reconceptualization of “discursive practices as self-deconstructive rather than as self-expressive” (p. 50). Considering power not merely as a means of manipulating the inferior attests to the concomitant subsistence of “the many complex, conflicting, and contradictory discourses within which our subjectivities (and social worlds) are produced” (p. 50). In other words, we can get to realise that while the “discursively saturated, socially situated, materially saturated, and political” character of subjectivity limits it, on the other hand, this very imposing and pre-given feature of discourse provides the subject with some leeway in order to challenge that very discursive system (p. 50).

In spite of the seemingly deterministic character of discourse, due to its indivisibility from power, it cannot totally determine subject’s intentions. As elaborated earlier, power turns out to be a productive entity by redressing of the repressive aspect of the same discourse which it feeds. In this way, it provides the subject with strategies through which it is possible to question and challenge the totalitarianism ingrained in any discursive system. The Foucauldian notion of power, in its productive form, as Youdell (2006a) points out, “constitutes and constrains, but does not determine, the subjects with whom it is concerned” (p. 517). Judith Butler (2004) also has clearly elaborated on this issue:

It is important to remember at least two caveats on subjection and regulation derived from

Foucaultian scholarship: (1) regulatory power not only acts upon an preexisting subject but also

shapes and forms that subject; moreover, every juridical form of power has its productive effect;

and (2) to become subject to a regulation is also to be brought into being as a subject precisely

through being regulated. (p. 41)

In a Lacanian theory of subjectivity this becomes possible as the discursive field elaborated by Lacan is characterised by an inevitable lack or gap. In the next sections, I elaborate on how psychoanalysis through theorising a conception of subjectivity, formed around an ontological lack, attempts to register traumatic knowledge, the knowledge that is almost always neglected in mainstream education/pedagogy. However, before doing so, I would like to makes clear how this discussion contributes to the present thesis.

3.6 Constitutive lack and the non-totality of discursive systems

While in the standard model of studenthood, or generally any individual engaged in the process of learning, which is based on the conception of ego in the Cartesian form

(Andreotti, 2007; Andreotti, Ahenakew, & Cooper, 2011; Hansson, 2012), the individual is conceived of as an independent entity being unaffected by unconscious impulses, it is in Freud that this idea is turned on its head. As Cho explains:

Wo es war, soll ich werden—literally: ‘Where it was, there I shall become’. This famous line of

Freud’s is, of course, taken as his formula for the psychoanalytic subject. Where some alien

knowledge once stood, the subjective I will come into being. It is almost a complete reversal of

Descartes’ ‘Cogito ergo sum’. Whereas, in Descartes’ line, subjectivity emerges when

consciousness becomes emptied out of all content, leaving only the act of thought itself, in Freud’s,

subjectivity emerges once the I absorbs or assumes a foreign body of knowledge. Freud’s name

for this foreign body of knowledge is none other than the unconscious. (p. 706)

While critical pedagogy scholars have started to challenge the normative conception of knowledge, particularly in a way it has been manipulated under neoliberal educational systems (Clarke, 2015), there is still a need to delve deeper into this field in order to present a persuasive theory of knowledge acquisition in the context of contemporary

(political and economic) ideology-ridden educational systems. By knowledge here I do

not mean a body of educative materials through which the learner can answer a scientific problem. In fact, as Clarke (2015) remarks, conceiving of knowledge as a transferable entity which can be used in order to satisfy material needs of a given society aligns with

“neoliberalism’s obsession with knowledge as control and mastery” (p. 72). This knowledge that I am referring to is not, or at least, is not supposed to be to be usurped by today’s dominant capitalist governmentality (Peters & Bulut, 2011). Education within such a context, as Olssen and Peters (2005) point out, is rethought “as forms of knowledge capitalism, involving knowledge creation, acquisition, transmission, and organization”

(p. 331). From such perspective, knowledge is regarded as “capital” which, in Olssen and

Peters’ views is “[t]he most significant material change that underpins neoliberalism in the twenty-first century is the rise in the importance of knowledge as capital” (p. 330).

Knowledge here is rather approached from a critical perspective. The knowledge discussed here has a socially disruptive role through which it would be possible to challenge discursive structures which impose particular definition of subject/subjectivity.

Before going through a discussion of knowledge as a disruptive tool, it should be reminded that the question of knowledge as a means, within the context of education, for controlling individuals is a much debated issue (see, for example, Apple, 1993; Ball,

1990; Bernstein, 1996; Schieman and Plickert, 2008). This issue has specifically been researched from Marxist and post-structuralist lenses (Peters, 2003). However influential these studies are, they have remained at the level of explaining and critiquing the mechanisms of control within an educational context. What is not particularly discussed is the way through which knowledge can challenge this situation. In what follows, I will elaborate on how a particular conception of knowledge can turn out to harbor the potential to disrupt the context in which education plays a role in favour of ideological systems. In

this part, I will start by a critical overview of two theoretical approaches underpinning critical pedagogy and then will present an alternative approach mainly informed by

Lacanian concepts.

3.7 Theoretical underpinnings of critical pedagogy

Two theoretical approaches, among others, that inform the realm of critical pedagogy are social constructionism and constructivism (Breuing, 2011; McLaren, 2003; Windschitl,

2002). Both of these approaches insist upon the formation of knowledge as a result of subjective engagement with social reality, a reality that itself is resulted from subjective engagement with discursive structures. Implied in such a presentation of knowledge formation, as McMillan (2015) argues, is the idea of “student’s discursive attachments” as an “imminently malleable” act (p. 545). However, as McMillan observes, within a pedagogical context, “student’s radical openness to change” is not commonly observed, rather what often characterise such contexts are learners’ tendency “to perceive their world as objectively pre-given rather than arbitrarily constructed” and their “embodied desire for coherence of knowledge” (p. 545). It is due to such tendencies that creating and maintaining change within an educational context is usually reacted negatively on the side of learners.

To understand why these approaches are not capable of explaining this “fixity”, one should see how the question of learner’s identity or self –the terms commonly used in these approaches when discussing the learner – is treated in social constructionism and constructivism. As McMillan explains, from the social constructionist approach “the self is contingently positioned in discourse and thus subject to ideological shift, whereas constructivism tends to emphasize the ability of the self to critically engage with discourse” (p. 545). Implied in both approaches is an understanding of the learner as one 77

who is endowed with the capability of changing and accommodating the “impossible knowledge: that which cannot be readily integrated into existing discursive frameworks”

(p. 546). What can be questioned in such arguments regarding the capability of learner to modify the knowledge that cannot be easily accommodated is that even assuming that discursive structures are yielding enough to allow one to disrupt and/or modify them, it is the learner him/herself who is not ready or willing to do so. This drawback in these approaches largely derives from their understanding of learner’s subjectivity. And it is here that a Lacanian-inspired reading of subject can turn out to be helpful. Before presenting a Lacanian definition of subject, it should become clear that for what reason the learner is not amenable to undergo a transformative act.

From a Lacanian perspective, as McMillan points out, the above phenomenon can be explained through referring to what in psychoanalysis is called resistance. In the pedagogical context, resistance is the very unwillingness or defiance in relations to accommodating impossible knowledge. As McMillan observes, “from a Lacanian viewpoint, the psyche is compelled to resist those discursive moments that challenge its construction” (p. 546). Here what makes the learner not wilfully accept the revolutionary experience is not merely the unsettling of the discursive (linguistic) frameworks that have been constructive of the learner’s identity, but s/he defies such an act because these discursive frameworks are “infused by a bodily enjoyment he [Lacan] called jouissance that propels an embodied desire for coherence and control” (p. 546). There is no doubt that the meaning on which the learner bases his/her identity is immensely affected by discursive structures, but this relation has a material/bodily aspect which brings particular enjoyment/jouissance for the learner. In fact, it is the sedimentation of such knowledge and the concern for challenging it in the learner’s mind that demands one to reconsider

the mainstream definition of the learner. While critical pedagogy pays attention to this, it has not been successful in presenting a new way to deal with it. According to McMillan, a Lacanian-Žižekian conceptualisation of subject can largely ameliorate this problem.

What makes the Lacanian subject distinct from other conceptions of subject is the unfillable yet constitutive lack (Stavrakakis, 1999). This negativity at the centre of the

Lacanian subject, while causing anxiety in him/her, induces him/her not to stop at a specific point after achieving a goal. The reason for this slippery and everlasting yet necessary endeavour is not merely because of the lack afflicting the subject at his/her subjective level. As Verhaeghe (1998) remarks, “the attempt at solving this lack by using signifiers entails a confrontation with another lack, this time within the chain of signifiers” (p. 173). As will be discussed further in the theoretical discussion section, what

Lacan refers to as the chain of signifiers relates to his discussion of the symbolic order/register; the realm of meaning making and identification with discourses that surround us; hence the Lacanian conception of object. In other words, the lack that Lacan talks about is functional both at the subjective and objective levels simultaneously. In a sense, this can be considered as the ontological argumentation of Lacan based on which a particular conception of subjectivity can be developed (Zupančič, 2016). Lack at the objective level, as experienced within the chain of signifiers, informs “a Lacanian inspired ontology” according to which “reality is criss-crossed by a fundamental antagonism; reality is split, not-all” (Zupančič, & Terada, 2015, p. 198). Conceiving of both the subject and the object as lacking, puts Lacan in opposition to theorists of subjectivity who believe in a more positive, rather than negative, conception of the subject. According to Vighi

(2015), in Lacan “the standard notion of a fully constituted, ‘positive’ ontological reality is replaced by a dialectical one where the emergence of reality out of the mind’s

transcendentally synthetic activity can only be achieved by mobilising negativity qua inerasable antagonism constitutive of being” (p. 4) (see also Newman, 2007, pp. 84-7).

To see how an ontological argument drawn from Lacan’s theory of subjectivity contributes to the field of critical pedagogy, one needs to consider the way through which theoretical underpinnings of critical pedagogy deals with the issue of learner’s subjectivity. While in constructivism the focus is on the dormant yet plausible agency of the individual as one who can challenge and manipulate discursive structures, and thereby create meaning, in social constructivism the focus from the agency of the learner is shifted to discourse. In this way, learners are encouraged to take up new subject positions within surrounding discourses and thereby achieve renewed standpoint which are often repressed and marginalised within the same discourses (McMillan, 2015, p. 550). Davies and Harré

(1993), take this argument further by arguing that individuals assign who they are according to the position they take on within discursive structures and practices. The conception of Lacanian subjectivity challenges such arguments and instead presents a new view not reducible to either mentioned approaches. According to McMillan (2015):

Such a conception recasts the structure/agency dichotomy identified above between constructivism

and social constructionism. While the socially constructed self is able to shift with the structural

winds of discourse, this shift, according to Lacan, is not without an anchor. This anchor, however,

is not the agential entity of psychological constructivism, but the negativity of the subject. The

subject is unconsciously felt as the anxiety that drives identifications and thus acts as the catalyst

of belief and behavior through its absent presence. Therefore, although the self retains a flexibility

of identification, these identifications are ultimately a response to the anxiety of the incoherent

incompleteness of subjectivity. Consequently, new knowledge may be able to be integrated into

the self without the radical transformation of the learner: it is only engagement with the void of

subjectivity, or that which is impossible within a discursive position, that produces the possibility

of such a radical pedagogical act. (pp. 546-7)

What can be drawn from the above quotation is that a Lacanian-inspired pedagogy should invest in the dialectal negativity as affecting both subject (learner) and object (discursive field). What McMillan refers to as “that which is impossible within a discursive position” is what Cho (2007) refers to as “traumatic knowledge” (p. 704). In Lacan’s theory it the register of the Real that harbours such knowledge. Literature as a possible home to such traumatic encounters can adequately give us a sense of how talking about the unpresentable can help the subject think beyond the hegemonic character of discourses as we are surrounded by (Ellsworth, 1997; Hartman,1995; MacCannell, 1983). The

Lacanian real, beside the two others, i.e. the symbolic and the imaginary, will be explained further in the theoretical discussion section (chapter 4).

Overall, in this the chapter the notion of education was considered as an aesthetic field where the latter is defined, in Rancière’s sense of the term, as a realm of sense perception.

From a political perspective, as Rancière states, subjects undergo particular subjectification processes based on the ways through which hegemonic discursive structures control their sense perception. However, since such structures are inevitably founded on power, and since power, as Foucault remarks, is productive, there can be imagined ways through which it would be possible to challenge hegemonic structures.

Literature can be considered as one of the tools which has the capacity to create fantasmatic worlds through which it would possible to think beyond the restrictive boundaries as developed and consolidated by any discursive structures including educational ones. What gives us a powerful lens through which it would be possible to

unravel the capacities of literary works is the conceptual apparatus that Lacan provides us with.

Chapter 4 Lacanian theory of subjectivity

What is presented in this chapter is a somewhat comprehensive synopsis of those

Lacanian concepts that paly important role in developing a theory of subjectivity.

Confessing that what has been presented here hardly does justice to the highly complex concepts and ideas that Lacan has discussed, and more importantly, evolved in the course of his teachings, I seek to present the concepts in a way that they can act as a reference/departure point for critiquing the two novels under analysis. Although such a presentation of general concepts might imply that the chapter is more like a description of clear concepts than a critical engagement with them, it can be argued that, as far as

Lacanian concepts are concerned, even this apparently descriptive presentation can turn out to become critical. This claim can be justified if one notices how different scholars have adopted and interpreted Lacanian concepts and ideas differently. This idea will be discussed in the next chapter in detail.

The main concepts discussed in the analysis of chapters (chapters 6 and 7) are love/sexuality, fantasy, utopia, chain of signification, and schizophrenia. While these concepts are not comprehensively explained in the current chapter, the attempt is made to set a ground for their introduction in this chapter. This has been done with the assumption that concepts like the imaginary, the symbolic and the real (as discussed in the current chapter) are key and pre-requisite to an understanding of the concepts that are

(in the way through which the novels have been analysed) more relevant to the analysis of the novels. What, in particular, makes a link between these concepts and the overarching theme of the current thesis is the way through which each of the aforementioned concepts takes on cultural, political and literary aspects when examined 83

in the context of the novels. For example, the very act of censoring/banning of a cultural product can be related to the way a dominant discursive structure (the symbolic order) defines cultural and political values of a society. In a sense, the values that the subject is exposed to, both when s/he goes through an identificatory process in the imaginary and when s/he starts absorbing social conventions in the symbolic, are to a considerable extent controlled by the dominant discursive structure. While these observations can be clearly seen in any society, the ways through which a dominant normalising and hegemonising discourse is challenged can take on different forms depending upon the specific context.

Accordingly, in the current chapter I have gone through an explanation of the more general Lacanian terms/concepts and in the analysis chapters more specific concepts will be employed.

4.1 Lacan’s approach to theory

When one thinks of a theory, the first impression of the term would be a set of organised hypotheses coming consecutively and orderly one after another which at the end form a systematic whole through which it would be possible to deal with a range of questions.

Lacan’s theory of the subject defies such a neat and efficient approach. Lacanian thinkers have frequently remarked that weaving a wide of range of concepts and ideas that Lacan develops to introduce a new definition of the subject (among other concepts) is an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task. An important reason justifying this difficulty is that, as Bruce Fink (1995) observes, Lacan’s theory of the subject evolves throughout his work. According to Fink, the complexity of such a definition culminates when one notes how Lacan “unlike most of poststructuralists, who seek to deconstruct and dispel the very notion of human subject…finds the concept of subjectivity indispensable and

explores what it means to be subject” (p. xi). Nevertheless, what Lacan shares with poststructuralist approaches to the question of the subject is that he gives more weight to the external factors in playing role in the process of subject formation (Frosh, 2012, p.

174). This seemingly paradoxical position that Lacan takes up, as Frosh says, is resolved when he elaborates, particularly through his theorisation of the big Other, “on the way in which the subject might be the source of action and meaning, but is also subject to forces that operates upon it, notably in the form of unconscious impulses” (p. 175, emphasis in original). In fact, it is this very idiosyncratic approach of Lacan which renders his theory of the subject highly “unintuitive”. This unintuitiveness, as Fink (1995) notes, can find resonance in the way Lacan presents a definition of the subject: “the subject is that which one signifier represents to another signifier” (p. xi).

On a more radical, albeit realistic and well-observed, note, Fink (1995) states that any attempt to “demonstrate the existence of the Lacanian subject” is doomed to be impossible (p. 35, emphasis in original). This impossibility is due to the fact that for Lacan the subject is a mere supposition, or as Fink puts it is an “assumption” (p. 35). However, in the Lacanian frame of thought an assumption is of a particular and determining feature.

Within psychoanalytic arguments that Lacan developed in the course of his seminars, the supposed subject is an indispensable “construct without which psychoanalytic experience cannot be accounted for” (p. 35). In what follows, I will present a general framework within which Lacan has developed his whole theory of subjectivity. Keys to this general framing are the three registers of the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real.

Before elaborating on the Lacanian concepts, it is important to make my standpoint clear regarding the use of these concepts. Put another way, it should become clear that how an explanation of these concepts might contribute both to the topic of this thesis and 85

the Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as well. In this way, I should concede that the way I take up Lacanian concepts does not necessarily result in widening the boundaries of the concepts that Lacan developed in the course of his seminars. This approach might resonate with Lacan’s suspicion of writing on his theories, and his preference for the spoken seminar, reflecting a fear of fixing, reifying and confining his concepts. However, this research sets out to show how productive these concepts are, particularly in the context of modern Iranian literature. On the other hand, in the process of adopting the

Lacanian theory of subjectivity, I, following Lacanian scholars such as Joan Copjec and

Paul Verhaege, would treat the theory “as a ‘work in progress’ marked by an evolution consisting of drastic changes” (Verhaeghe, 2001, p. 65). Accordingly, what will be presented below as the theoretical discussion “is less concerned with a matter of defining deliberately elusive concepts like ‘the Other’ than of understanding their dynamic usage in several contexts” (Rabaté, 2003, p. xiv). I hope that through adopting such an approach, it becomes possible to show how the dynamism inherent in Lacan’s works sheds light on the (potential) dynamism inherent in the works of authors in question in this research study. In the same vein, any reference to the Lacanian concepts in this research will be made to affirm, as far as possible, that “if the unconscious exists, it is not simply located in our brains, in packs of neurons or chemical reactions triggered by hormones, but more fundamentally, because we are born into language and are therefore what Lacan called

‘parlêtres’–speaking, suffering, and desiring beings” (p. xv).

4.2 The Imaginary

As Laplanch and Pontalis (1973) put, the concept of the imaginary appeared in the

Lacan’s earliest intervention into his psychoanalytic studies, aiming to develop a

distinctive theoretical path from that of ego psychology or any psychoanalytic approach that sets the whole analytic process on the imaginary identification as being made between the analyst and the analysand. From the point of view of ego psychology, as MacCannell

(2016) remarks, “the ego is a positive force, a bulwark against the unconscious drives that threaten the personality’s integrity” (p. 72). The concept of ego in Lacan is treated totally differently. As Fink (1995) points out, in Lacan:

…the ego is an imaginary production, a crystallization or sedimentation of images of an

individual’s own body and of self-images reflected back to him or her by others. In

contradistinction to Freud, Lacan maintains that this crystallization does not constitute an agency,

but rather an object. That object is cathected or invested with libido like other objects, and thus

the infant's “own” ego is not necessarily cathected any more than other objects (or egos) in the

infant’s environment. The object, as understood at this imaginary level, is one towards which

libido is directed or withdrawn, as is the case with love objects as we find them in Freud’s work.

(p. 84)

As can be observed in Fink’s words, Lacan does not put the ego at the centre stage in his theory as he believes while focusing on ego and its function is of critical importance in psychoanalysis, investing on it, instead of the unconscious aspect of human psyche, cannot tell us how exactly we behave in different situations.

Lacan (1958) extensively elaborates on the status and function of the imaginary in

‘The direction of treatment and the principles of its power’, published in Écrits (2006).

As will be discussed later, the realm of the imaginary for Lacan is the realm of fixation and alienation, while it is the symbolic that has the capacity to help the subject dispense with those disabling fixations resulted from the imaginary identification. Accordingly,

“to cross the plane of identification”, Lacan (1977a) states in Seminar XI, the subject has no alternative but to symbolise, and hence decipher, the images that the infant faces and 87

identifies with in the imaginary register (p. 273). In the seminar on “The Mirror Stage as

Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”, Lacan

(1949/2006) states that the way through which psychoanalysis deals with the I as experienced in the analytic context, sets it apart from “any philosophy directly stemming from the cogito” (p. 73). In this way, he planted the seeds of his critique of the two psychological and philosophical approaches by elaborating on the earliest stages of human being’s identity formation.

The central theme in the discussion of the imaginary is the “mirror stage”. Lacan in the 1949 seminar defines the mirror stage and explains its subsequent consequences as follows:

…the mirror stage is a drama whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to

anticipation—and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies

that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an "orthopedic" form of its

totality—and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental

development with its rigid structure. (p. 78)

Lacan believes that the formation of ego is the result of the infant’s identification with the images that the surrounding environment, particularly parents, provides him/her with between his/her sixth and eighteenth month of life. In this way, the human infant, due to his/her “biological prematurity” needs something to help them deal with this prematurity

(p. 76). Indeed, when the infant sees him/herself in the mirror, s/he is still in a state of incoordination, not being able to take an upright position. What the mirror does is make him/her assume jubilantly that s/he has control over this primordially fragmented body engulfed by libidinal needs. It is through this (bodily) totality, as the effect of seeing him/herself in the mirror, that the subject ‘anticipates’ his/her maturation. According to

Lacan, this totality or wholeness “by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage, is given to him only as a gestalt” (p. 76). However, Lacan believes that while this gestalt, which is originally an exterior phenomenon, “symbolizes the I's mental permanence, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination” (p. 76). In a sense, the mastery, though merely a mirage, that the infant achieves in this phase is at the cost of being alienated by an external other, here incarnated in specular image. This jubilant feeling or assumption, as Gallop (1985) puts it, “is tied to the temporal dialectic by which she [the subject] appears already to be what she will only later become” (p. 78, emphasis in original). Moreover, as Lacan (1949/2006) states, this primordially precipitated I, which is “still trapped in his motor impotence and nursling dependence”, is formed “prior to being objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject” (p. 76).

Here it is important to note that, as Roudinesco (2003) remarks, “in the context of

Lacan’s thinking, the idea of the mirror stage no longer has anything to do with a real stage or phase in the Freudian sense, nor with a real mirror” (p. 29). This observation also resonates with Malcolm Bowie's (1993) remark, where he argues that stage in French

(stade) refers to both a developmental stage and to a stadium, or arena, of ongoing struggle

(p. 35). In fact, the stage that Lacan thinks of is “a psychic or ontological operation through which a human being is made by means of identification with his fellow-being”

(p. 29). In this sense, Lacan’s conceptualisation of the mirror stage is far from having anything to do with “natural dialectic”, which is an instinctive trait of animal (p. 29).

Lacan’s rejection of the idea of the natural dialectic can be observed in the way he envisages the role of the symbolic in the way the infant is drawn to the images in his/her environment, where the latter is all resources that the infant is exposed to even before

coming to the world. In fact, the notion of natural dialectic is refuted as far as the place where the infant enters upon his/her birth is immensely entangled with social rules and conventions. In fact, it is the presence of this relation, as Lacan (1988) explains in Seminar

II, that makes him not put the human infant and the immature animal on the same ontological structure. This issue will be elaborated further when the relation between the imaginary and the symbolic is discussed.

It is important to note that the notion of ‘identification’ in the discussion of the mirror stage has a particular status. Lacan, in the 1949 seminar, states that the mirror stage should be considered “as an identification” (p. 76, emphasis in original). Then he defines identification as “the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes

[assume] an image—an image that is seemingly predestined to have an effect at this phase, as witnessed by the use in analytic theory of antiquity's term, “imago”” (p. 76). In this quotation, as in the continuation of the seminar, Lacan puts a particular emphasis on the “assumptive” character of the identification process as reflected in the relation between the infant and the image with which s/he identifies. In this way, Lacan implies the illusion that harbors any identification process. Moreover, by conceiving the image as “imago”, he refers to the way through which these images enter into the world of the infant.

As Roudinesco (2003) observes, it is the “biological prematurity” as obvious in “the anatomical incompleteness” and “imperfect powers of physical coordination” of the infants during their early months of life that make the mirror take on such a significant role (p. 30). In fact, it is the visual system of the infant, due to its precocity, that comes to make up for the bodily fragmentation and incoordination as experienced by the infant.

The infant, in the mirror stage, “anticipates mastery of [her/] his bodily unity through 90

identification with the image of a fellow being and through perceiving his own image in a mirror” (p. 30). In this way, as far as the infant identifies with his/her own image as reflected and emphasised by his/her parents, s/he establishes a narcissistic relation with his/her own ego (Laplanch and Pontalis, 1973, p. 210). This explanation of the function of the mirror stage, as Roudinesco (2003) observes, is resonant with “the Freudian concept of primary narcissism” (p. 30). Primary narcissism, according to Freud (1914) is defined as the “libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation”

(p. 74). In other words, primary narcissism is the result of identification between the specular image and the ego. In a sense, the ego is what the infant extracts from the specular image. On the other hand, the formation of ego is not merely the result of an intrasubjective (narcissistic) relation. In fact, “from an intersubjective point of view”, as

Laplanch and Pontalis (1973) put it, or in a process of “socialization”, as Roudinesco

(2003) puts it, the infant identifies with a counterpart, a fellow-being. Here it is important to note that in Lacan’s view “a counterpart (i.e. another who is me) can only exist by virtue of the fact that the ego is originally another” (Laplanch and Pontalis, 1973, p. 210).

With regards to the role of image in the formation of ego, as Roudinesco (2003) points out, the image that the infant sees is not an unmediated image with which s/he identifies, but an “imago”, or imagoes – implying the multiplicity of different imagoes – with which s/he establishes an identificatory relation. Imago, originally a Jungian term according to

Laplanch and Pontalis (1973), “is often defined as an ‘unconscious representation’” which should be considered “as an acquired imaginary set rather than as an image” (p.

211). In fact, imagoes have “stereotypical” character being realised in the form of

“mental images” which act as a lens “through which, as it were, the subject views the other person” (p. 211). This use of past tense as is seen in the phrase “as it were” is

reflective of what Lacan (1949/2006) refers to as the “predestined” feature of imagoes (p.

76). In this sense, imagoes should be conceived of “as a reflection of the real world”, not the real world as being experienced immediately (p. 211, emphasis added).

Imagoes, in the way Lacan defines them, as Evans (1996) remarks, are “fundamentally deceptive and disruptive elements” (p. 86). Imagoes, in this sense, give an illusory unity to the fragmented body of the infant, but at the same time “introduce an underlying aggressivity” (p. 86). In fact, the mirror stage causes aggresivity because it gives a coordinated image to the infant, while in reality what the infant experience is a fragmented and uncoordinated body. It is the disparity between what the infant experiences in the real world and the specular image that the mirror gives him/her that causes rivalry and aggresivity. The illusion of wholeness, the fascination with the unity that the mirror gives to the infant conceals the structural reality underlying the infant’s being in the world.

More importantly, since the images that the infant sees in this stage are specifically images of other people (Jung mentions paternal, maternal and fraternal imagos)”, and hence “not the product of purely personal experience but universal prototypes”, they set a ground for the first alienation that the infant experiences (p. 85).

An important point to take into consideration regarding the characteristic of the mirror stage as that which deceives the infant is that this characteristic should not be treated as

“unnecessary and inconsequential”, and hence “simply synonymous with ‘the illusory’”

(Evans, 1996, p. 84). In this sense, although, as Lacan (1949/2006) puts it, what the infant achieves in the imaginary is an “ideal-I”, a false sense of being, ultimately, in Evans

(1996) words, “it has powerful effects in the real, and is not simply something that can be dispensed with or ‘overcome’” (p. 84). The ineluctable impact of the imaginary and what

comes after it (i.e., “ideal-I”) can be observed in the following quotation by Lacan

(1949/2006):

But the important point is that this form [ideal-I] situates the agency known as the ego, prior to its

social determination, in a fictional direction that will forever remain irreducible for any single

individual or, rather, that will only asymptotically approach the subject's becoming, no matter how

successful the dialectical syntheses by which he must resolve, as I, his discordance with his own

reality. (p. 76)

As can be inferred from this quotation, the agency, however fake, that subject attains in this period will put him/her forever “in a fictional direction”. This fictionality of the subject’s ego will be challenged by the reality that is resulted from the mechanism of the symbolic order. Moreover, for Lacan the imaginary is the realm in which one can see how

“libidinal dynamism” and the “ontological structure of the human world” affect the subject’s engagement with the dynamism of the symbolic order. The latter issue (i.e. ontological aspect of human world) is the basis of Lacan’s intervention into the issue of knowledge as a “paranoiac” phenomenon (p. 76). Clinically speaking, in neurosis the subject’s libidinal dynamism is disrupted due to the repression of the signifier; that is when infant’s parents do not, linguistically, support the internalisation of images (Fink,

1995). In psychosis, due to an absence of primordial signifier, or the Name-of-the-Father, the infant remains in the delusional state of the imaginary order, hence living in a fantasy

(delusion) of self-mastery, misunderstanding and unity. In other words, the subject as a result of the absence of the primordial signifier has no option but to rely on the imaginary knowledge, a knowledge that for Lacan (1949/2006) is considered as “paranoiac knowledge”, hence characterised by delusion and mastery and misrecognition (p. 76).

4.3 The relation between the Imaginary and the Symbolic

The important point to take into account regarding Lacan’s tripartite scheme is the way these three registers are linked to each other. As discussed above, the imaginary is mainly concerned with the visual system of human being, while the symbolic is the realm of language. However, none of these registers or orders are constituted in a vacuum immune to the effect of each other. Simply put, the imaginary is, indeed, affected by the symbolic.

This relation becomes obvious when one notices how parental Other plays a role in the assimilation of the (ideal) images that the infants sees. In fact, the infant is not only affected by the way the parental Other ‘sees’ him/her but also his/her identification with the received images is confirmed and sedimented by the parental Other’s linguistic response. In this way, as Fink (1995) remarks, “it is the symbolic order that brings about the internalization of mirror and other images (e.g., photographic images), for it is primarily due to the parents' reaction to such images that they become charged, in the child's eyes, with libidinal interest or value” (p. 36). What affirms this relation between the imaginary and the symbolic is the proximity of the time the infant starts being attracted to mirror images (i.e. when they are around six months old) and when language becomes functional in him or her (p. 37). In other words, any functioning of the mirror stage should be simultaneous with the time the infant is able to comprehend, however elementary, the language to which s/he is addressed. This discussion has been also elaborated on by

Richard Boothby (2001) in his book entitled Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after

Lacan.

The relation between the imaginary and the symbolic is of critical importance in Lacan as the subject’s transition from the former to the latter comes with determinative

consequences. Here it should be emphasised that this transition, as Stavrakakis (1999) remarks, should be considered as “theoretical abstraction” that is indicative of “a certain logical and not strictly speaking chronological order” (p. 19). What is specifically important about this transition is that the formation of the subject’s unconscious entirely relies on it. In this regard, Ruti (2006) remarks:

The transition from the imaginary to the symbolic – a transition that is mediated by the castration

complex and that gives rise to the unconscious – is marked by loss on two different levels in that

the signifier not only fractures the beauty and coherence of the emerging ego of the mirror stage,

but also demands a renunciation of those preverbal cathexes which, even if in their preoedipal

form they cannot yet be categorized as “love,” come – retroactively, as a result of their loss – to

be experienced as such. (p. 118)

To reformulate Ruti’s words, it can be argued that the occurrence of loss for Lacan is not only an important event, but, more importantly in the absence of this loss the infant is doomed to remain within the narcissistic cycle of the imaginary. In other words, without undergoing this loss the infant would never be allowed enter the symbolic order and, consequently, s/he would never be able to embody what is called the subject. In fact, what gives rise to the emergence of the unconscious in the subject is his/her submission to language, and submission to language is the determining prerequisite to experiencing subjectivity. The acquisition of language in the infant not only leads to the subject’s loss of the unity, and hence the loss of narcissistic relation that s/he enjoys as a result of identifying with the mirror image, but it also incites the subject to learn how to desire. In this sense, the loss of unity for the subject is prerequisite to the acquisition of language, an event that Ruti (2006) refers to as the inevitable sacrifice:

To the extent that the subject comes into being by submitting to the law of the signifier, what gets

sacrificed, what undergoes a repression, an existential elision, is the unnameable, unrepresentable,

and unsymbolizable “nonobject” of desire that Lacan (1986) calls das Ding, and that for the subject

commemorates the loss of imaginary wholeness (p. 118, emphasis in original).

It can be said that attaining the “gift of speech”, as Lacan (1953/2006) puts it, demands the subject to forgo what s/he enjoys most: the (delusional) wholeness (p. 240). In fact, the infant loses what s/he does not possess in order to get the permission to enter the symbolic order. Ironically, the unrepresentability and immateriality of what the subject seeks induces desire in him/her. In a sense, if the subject were able to symbolise, in a material form, what s/he yearned to achieve, s/he would lose his/her desiring capability after achieving what s/he wanted. While this can conjure up the idea of an incessant and probably futile human endeavour, for Lacan it is the only way through which one can explain the notion of desire (and drive) in human subject (Chiesa, 2007 and 2009; Coats,

2004; Glynos, 2000). As will be discussed later, the subject must inevitably undergo this loss if s/he wants to be able to communicate and make meaning. This idea will be discussed in more details under the section on lack.

A final point regarding the relation between the imaginary and the symbolic is that what has been referred to as transition for one to another should not be interpreted in a purely developmental sense. While at one particular point of time – that is when the infant starts to acquire language and hence becomes a subject – this transition appears to look as a developmental stage, in reality the subject would experience the sensation (i.e., wholeness and unity) that s/he felt in the preverbal (the Imaginary) phase. As Ruti (2006) points out, love is one of those phenomena in which the feeling of wholeness is repeated.

The same thing is true about the (re)emergence of the real in the subject’s life while s/he is predominantly engulfed by the symbolic.

4.4 The imaginary and the real and the genesis of jouissnace

Freud (1914) in On Narcissism: An Introduction explains about the genesis of the ‘ego ideal’. The formation of the ego ideal in the infant is closely related to the process of

‘repression’. In fact, according to Freud, the “libidinal instinctual impulses undergo the vicissitude of pathogenic repression if they come into conflict with the subject's cultural and ethical ideas” (p. 93). By recognizing these “cultural and ethical ideas”, which are first of all represented by the individual’s parents, the individual “submits to the claims they make on him” (p. 93). In this way, when these ideas are set as a “standard” for the infant, s/he “measures his [her] actual ego” based on that standard (p. 93). In fact, it is in this encounter that the infant undergoes repression. From this perspective, as Freud observes, the ego becomes the point from which repression proceeds. Encountering a situation in which the subject has to forgo the instinctual satisfaction s/he got in childhood, s/he represses what s/he enjoyed most. In Freud’s words, “the same impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or at least works over consciously will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or even stifled before they enter consciousness” (p. 93). By abandoning the narcissistic impulses, the infant, unintentionally, sets the ground for the occurrence of repression. In Freud, this phenomenon is used to explain the libido theory. Here it should be emphasised that undergoing repression and forgoing one’s narcissistic impulses is constructively inevitable for the infant. As a result of this process, the infant leaves the world of delusional self-mastery to find a position in the symbolic world, the world in which s/he

establishes a new relationship with the Other. As a result of repression, the ego ideal becomes, as Laplanch and Pontalis (1973) put, “a reference-point for the ego’s evaluation of its real achievements” (p. 144). As a corollary of conforming to an ego ideal, the subject’s lost narcissism is “displaced on to…the new form of an ego ideal” (p. 94).

As said above, the formation of ego gives rise to narcissism on the one hand and releases the infant from the disturbing feeling of being fragmented and disoriented, on the other. Prior to the formation of ego, the infant is in a state of disunity, and ego is formed so as to act against that state, hence acting as a defensive mechanism. However, disunity is not the only state that the infant experiences before encountering the mirror stage; auto- erotism is also what the infant experiences at that stage. Here it is important to take into consideration what happens to the disunity that the infant experiences before entering the mirror stage. The important point is that however successful the process of ego formation is, there is always a residue of the previous state. In other words, the subject cannot overcome altogether the previous state without bringing a residue of it to the new stage.

Lacan (1998) explains this issue in the Seminar XX when he elaborates on the concept of

Jouissance; one of the pivotal concepts in his theory. Although being translated as enjoyment in English, the meaning of jouissance is much more complicated than mere enjoyment or pleasure. While the pleasure principle, as theorised by Freud, is limited by the laws, as realised in the symbolic order and through language, jouissance is that which tends to transgress the law. Concerning the prohibition of jouissnace in the symbolic,

Lacan (1960/2006) states “we must keep in mind that jouissance is prohibited [interdite] to whoever speaks, as such—or, put differently, it can only be said \dite\ between the lines by whoever is a subject of the Law, since the Law is founded on that very prohibition”

(p. 696). In this way, jouissance goes beyond mere enjoyment and harbours a paradoxical

state. By transgressing the enjoyment that is permitted by the law, jouissance turns out to result in pain in the subject. In a sense, the subject wants, paradoxically, to trespass the restriction imposed on him/her by law to attain a particular kind of pleasure, a painful one. This concomitant existence of pain and pleasure is what Lacan calls jouissance. As implied in the above explanation, jouissance is that which does not originate in the symbolic, or put it more precisely, it is against any notion of law and principle. This realm in which all laws are suspended is the real. Accordingly, the real is home to jouissance.

An explanation of the real will be presented later in more details.

In fact, this is due to the inevitable passage from the disunity (the real) to the unity

(the imaginary) that the subject has to repress a part of its previously enjoyable property

(jouissance). The jouissance that is partially left behind in the said transition is of a material, or as Lacan puts it in the Seminar XX, a bodily characteristic. This fact is relevant to the notion of auto-erotism as referred to above. According to Samuels (2014), “on the first level of pure auto-erotism, the Subject (S) exists in the Real as a pure Being-in-itself.

With narcissism, the subject organizes his world and body into a unity…that can be considered a Being-for-itself” (p. 64). The prefix “auto” in the expression auto-erotism implies that the infant’s erotic satisfaction does not rely on the self – the self as a corollary of the imaginary – but rather it seeks this in the body, the body as that which functions according to the law of the real. In fact, this is the body that, according to Lacan (1977b), has not entered into “the social dialectic” (p. 94). Delineating the way the imaginary and the real in Lacan are developed, Klein (2012) points out:

The state of the subject’s body in auto-erotism is fragmented. Lacan calls it the corps morcelé, the

fragmented body. The nose is not yet in the centre of the face. It is a body based on turbulence of

movement. The body in the case of auto-erotism is neither a signifier nor an image. One supposes 99

that it’s real: unregulated, outside the law which gradually becomes a residue that makes no sense,

that is, an object (a). (p. 43)

The only way for the infant to get rid of this feeling of fragmentation is to resort to initially to the imaginary and then to the symbolic order. Entering into the social dialectic means conforming to the regulation that governs the symbolic, hence remaining within the sphere of the pleasure principle. In this process, it is, first of all, the mother (albeit not necessarily mother but anybody who represents the symbolic order) who, by supporting the infant to identify with the image in the mirror helps him/her follow the regulation as defined by the symbolic. Jouissance is fed by the deregulatory spirit (the death drive) of the real, and what the mOther does is adding signifiers to the world of the infant, and hence defend him/her against the death drive. In other words, by providing the infant with the regulatory signifiers form the symbolic, the mOther strives to symbolise the essentially non-symbolisable real. However persistent the mOther could be in her attempt to symbolise the real, there is always a non-symobolisable residue of the real that would resist being represented in any form. This unrepresentable leftover is that which sets the ground for the (re)emergence of the real.

4.5 Lack at the centre of the subject

What was discussed above in relation to the importance of the notion of loss in Lacan’s teachings can distinguish Lacan from other theorists of human subjectivity/identity. The notion of loss or lack in Lacan is of such a pivotal role that almost all of Lacanian political thinkers and scholars employ it to critique and explain different social, cultural, economic and political phenomena and events (McGowan, 2003, 2013, Newman, 2007;

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Stavrakakis, 1999, 2007). In what follows, I will elaborate on the formation of lack in the subject and its consequences on the formation of subjectivity.

If in Lacan there is a special emphasis on the role of the mOther, as an external force which determines the infant’s relation to the surrounding world, and if in this relation the infant comes up, in the Imaginary register, with a realisation of him/her self and achieves a delusional sense of self-awareness, it is just because behind these discussions lies one highly significant assumption: “it presupposes an inner emptiness, a lack, which can be filtered by something coming from outside” (Verhaeghe, 2001, p. 68, emphasis added).

As Verhaeghe observes, one of the most important concepts in Lacan’s theory which distinguishes his psychoanalytic approach from psychological theories of human psyche is the concept of lack (p. 68). While this lack is formed out of a delusion, or in Lacan’s words as a result of misrecognition (mêconnaissance), it plays a determinative role in the life of the subject.

But the critical question is ‘what does give rise to the emergence of lack in the subject?’ Although Lacan has presented different, albeit inherently related, ideas on the nature or essence of lack in the subject in the course of his teachings, what is obvious in this regard is that the existence of lack in the subject and also the world in which s/he lives is of a constitutive character. Moreover, in Lacan, any consideration of lack is explicitly and implicitly related to the notion of desire. In a sense, these two notions have a causal relation in a way that the emergence of desire is caused by the lack in the subject

(Lacan, 1960-1/2015).

From one perspective, lack can be related to the symbolic castration. As Feher-

Gurewich (1996) points out, “for Lacan the child’s submission to the prohibition of incest

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is linked to his or her entrance into the structure of language” (p. 31). In this sense, when the infant is forcibly inhibited to get too close to mother (in the case of girl it is father who plays this role), s/he undergoes castration. Castration in this sense does not have anything to do with the corporeality of human’s organ, but it is the “acceptance of a loss, the loss of an imaginary complementarity with the mother” (p. 31). In other words, when the infant accepts that s/he is not whatever that mother desires, and hence not acting as a complement to the mother’s desire, s/he undergoes a symbolic castration. This very symbolic castration sets the ground for the infant to be able to symbolise the signifiers that s/he is subject to. In other words, if the infant does not experience this loss, s/he would forever remain in the delusional world of the imaginary. As Feher-Gurewich observes, the infant, by accepting this loss, forgoes, albeit unwillingly, his/her “privileged position as the mother’s phallus in order to situate oneself in the social world as someone who ‘has the phallus’ or ‘does not have it’” (p. 31). According to Ruti (2006), through castration, the subject comes to this realisation that investing on the “sense of imaginary wholeness” is tantamount to depriving oneself of the capability of making meaning; a capability that the symbolic order harbours. Accordingly, the subject must ineluctably be

“traversed by the discourse of Other [the one who disrupt that wholeness]” to get involved in the process of meaning making (p. 119).

From another perspective, lack is related to alienation. Alienation is another ineluctable consequence of the infant’s experience of the imaginary identification with the mirror image. In this way, the wholeness that the infant is seeking is disrupted exactly through identifying with the counterpart. While s/he is seeking unity with the image in the mirror, in return s/he becomes alienated by it. While the infant has not finished his/her celebration due to finding a coordinated image of him/her self, s/he realises that what is

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in the mirror is not him/herself, but an external Other. Accordingly, the infant comes to the understanding that what has given him unity is not his/her own reflection in the mirror, but an external entity which is perplexingly out of reach yet enigmatically close. This experience of division and alienation is neither accidental nor detrimental; it is, rather, essential and constitutive (Lacan, 1955-6/1993). As Lacan explains in his seminar The

Psychoses, psychosis occurs when the subject does not undergo alienation (p. 146). More precisely, psychosis is the result of subject’s not being divided (split) by the Other who emerges both visually and linguistically. As such, the splitting of the subject which occurs as a result of alienation pushes him/her to find a place within the symbolic order, where s/he has access to the signifiers as the main vehicle of meaning making.

As noted earlier, there is a direct relation between lack and desire in Lacan. But how do these two affect each other? To answer this question, one has to look more closely at the function of alienation. As Fink (1995) notes, “alienation is essentially characterized by a ‘forced’ choice which rules out being for the subject, instituting instead the symbolic order and relegating the subject to mere existence as a place-holder therein” (p. 53, emphasis in original). In other words, the alienated subject, if s/he wants to be entitled as such, has no way but to reject being. Being is a consequence of the earliest moment in the imaginary identification. In this way, when the infant is encountered by the Other and hence alienated by it, s/he forgoes the momentary being bestowed by the delusional mirror image. In fact, as Fink puts it, “prior to the onset of alienation there was not the slightest question of being” (p. 52). In other words, in reality, the subject before being alienated does not have any perception of his/her being. This perception is a retroactive one; that is the subject after being alienated assumes having a being. In Fink’s words’:

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Alienation gives rise to a pure possibility of being, a place where one might expect to find a

subject, but which nevertheless remains empty. Alienation engenders, in a sense, a place in which

it is clear that there is, as of yet, no subject: a place where something is conspicuously lacking.

The subject's first guise is this very lack. (p. 52, emphasis in original)

As can be inferred from Fink’s words, the very lack that emerges as a result of alienation, and is apparently supposed to connote a “nothingness” at the heart of the subject, turns out to make him/her take “the first step beyond” it (p. 52). This created lack induces the subject to search for something to fill it, while in reality this search would not lead to the realisation, in the material sense of the words. In this way, the more the subject attempts to fill the lack, the more the goal eludes him/her. Desire in Lacan is induced and fed by the subject’s delusion of filling the lack.

4.6 Lack, desire and objet petit a

As noted above, the subject’s realisation, or assumption, of his/her being is necessarily bound to the lack as s/he experiences as a result of being alienated. Although in reality there has not been any unmediated being, since being is sacrificed for meaning, the very illusion of having it makes the subject seek to regain it. But since the attempt to regain being would not result in the wanted goal, the subject futilely, if irresistibly, goes on with the hope of achieving the goal. This very inaccessibility of being sets the ground for the emergence of desire in the subject. As Lacan (1988) states, “desire is a relation of being to lack. This lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but the lack of being whereby being exists” (p. 225). He further elaborates on the relation between desire and lack by claiming that it is “in the experience of desire” that “[b]eing attains a sense of self in relation to being as a function of this lack” (p. 225). In the same vein, Lacan (1958/2006) in “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its 104

Power" (Écrits) states that “desire is the metonymy of the want-to-be [lack]” (p. 520). In this way, desire takes on a sliding character as it never allows the subject to fill the lack

(of being).

The critical question to ask here is ‘how can one get a clue of lack in the subject?’ In other words, ‘what does stand for the lack in the subject?’ According to Neill (2011), what indicates lack in the subject is object petit a. object petit a, as Evans (1996) puts it,

“is any object which sets desire in motion”, hence it is “the cause of desire rather than that towards which desire tends” (p. 128). Attaining a gesture, or as Lacan (1972-3/1998) puts it, the “semblance of being”, object petit a makes the subject to not lose hope in regaining being (p. 87). In fact, ascribing the notion of semblance of being to object petit a, implies that object petit a is not the real object that can satisfy the subject, but is rather that which merely takes on the appearance of that wanted object, hence the deceptive nature of object petit a. In this way, the subject incessantly pursues object petit a, while in reality this pursuit would not end up in the idealised being imagined by the subject. In this way, object petit a turns out to be not only a sign of the lack in the subject, but, at the same time, indicates the lack at the heart of the Other (i.e. the symbolic order). Without object petit a the lack, both at the level of subject and the Other, would threaten the subject to be suffered by “the traumatic effects of this lackingness” (Neill, 2011, p. 60).

An important point to consider in relation to the nature of object petit a is the locus of it. Without locating the place and the realm of functioning of object petit a, one would not be able to get a correct understanding of the nature of this entity. Although apparently it seems that because of its nature as the semblance of being it would be situated in the imaginary, confining it to a specific register would not do justice to explaining the complex nature of this entity. The only way to gain a better understanding of object petit 105

a is to think of, as Neill (2011) remarks, as being located “at the conjunction of the three

Lacanian realms – the symbolic, the imaginary and the Real – without properly speaking being situated in any one of them” (p. 60). Elaborating on the situation of object petit a at the intersection of the three registers, Neill clarifies that, it “is the symbolic representative of the lack experienced by the subject (the subject’s lack, the Other’s lack), it is the imaginary thing which would rectify the lack and it is the kernel of the Real which cannot be gathered into the symbolic world”.

From what has been discussed above, one particular proposition can be drawn; the subjectivity of Lacan’s subject is constituted around an irreparable lack which also inflicts on the Symbolic order in which the subject pursues his/her desire. But ‘how does this lack play a role in the life of the subject?’ In this way, according to Ruti (2006), if “at the core of human subjectivity there is no enduring substance, but rather a lack or nothingness”, then can one, forever, forgo “to revert to a reassuring notion of inner totality”? (p. 115).

A Lacanian-inspired answer would be: this inner totality is merely a myth. In spite of the potentially negative implications that the conception of lack as a deterministic entity might have, Lacanian scholars takes it as constitutive fact. As Ruti remarks, an affirmative reading of lack not only makes us see how “a certain kind of profundity” is posited “at the very inception of psychic life” (p. 115), but it also implies that “it is only as a creature of lack that the subject possesses the power to generate meaning” (p. 116).

In fact, the generation of meaning, as the main thing for which the subject strives in the symbolic order, is induced by the alienation of the subject through the act of signifier, and is supported by the lack created as a result of alienation and/or symbolic castration. In other words, if the subject wants to be able to be granted the ability of making meaning, s/he has to sacrifice the “fantasies of omnipotence and ontological wholeness” (p. 116).

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In this way, what lack does for the subject is helping him/her to constitute his/her subjectivity “around an existential abyss that separates desire from fulfilment in ways that perpetuate the subject’s inexhaustible pursuit of what it perceives as lost”, while in reality the fact is that no such a loss had happened (pp. 118-9).

The Lacanian conception of lack finds more significance when it is discussed from a critical perspective to comment on different political, social, cultural, and economic events and phenomena. In a sense, a reference to the Lacanian conception of lack can shed a light on our deep-rooted challenges with everyday problems and issues.

Elaborating on the notion of lack, Glynos and Stavrakakis (2008) explain how lack plays a determinative role in the way we fail or succeed in our social interactions. Accordingly, they remark:

The idea of the subject as lack cannot be separated from the subject’s attempts to cover over this

constitutive lack at the level of representation by affirming its positive (symbolic-imaginary)

identity or, when this fails, through continuous identificatory acts aiming to re-institute an identity.

This lack necessitates the constitution of every identity through processes of identification with

socially available traits of identification found, for example, in political ideologies, practices of

consumption, and a whole range of social roles; and vice versa: the inability of identificatory acts

to produce a full identity by subsuming subjective division (re)produces the radical ex-centricity

of the subject and, along with it, a whole negative dialectics of partial fixation. Subjectivity in

Lacan’s work, then, is linked not only to lack but also our attempts to eliminate this lack that,

however, does not stop re-emerging. (pp. 260-1)

Glynos and Stavrakakis’s observation of constitutive lack can resonate with the aim of this thesis in a particular way. Assuming that what an author does is creating a world, however fictional, that can be taken by readers as a potential resource of identification, then one can raise this hypothesis that banning such works does not merely end up in 107

banning a political idea. Rather, the act of banning a creative work can be read as banning

“socially available traits of identification” (p. 261) and thus limiting in an arbitrary, authoritarian and illegitimate manner “the human imperative to engage in ceaseless signification” (Silverman, 2000, p. 146). In this way, lack is no longer considered as a psychic state which remains at a purely theoretical level, it is rather a functionally determining concept playing roles in every aspects of human’s life.

4.7 The ‘other’/’Other’ and the object petit a

Before going through the detailed explanation of the ‘Other’, it should be noted that this term, like many Lacanian concepts, takes up different meaning in different times. As

Evans (1996) explains, Lacan’s reference to the other in the early stages of developing his theory (i.e., 1930s) simply equates with ‘other people’. It was during 1950s, and particularly from 1955 onwards, that he gives two distinct meanings to the term: the other

(‘the little other’ designated as a in Lacanian algebra) and the Other (‘the big Other’ designated as A in Lacanian algebra) (p. 135). The origin and locus of the little other is the imaginary order. Accordingly, this other is that which the ego (consciously and intentionally) projects, hence a reflection of child’s image of itself prior to entering into the realm of the symbolic (i.e., language). While the little other is not really other, the big

Other designates “an other-ness which transcends the illusory otherness of the imaginary because it cannot be assimilated through identification” (p. 136). An important point about the Other is that it is a “intersubjective structure that cannot be phenomenologically grasped” (Feher-Gurewich, 1996, p. 6). The location of the big Other is the symbolic order, the realm of language and law in Lacan’s theory. Lacan complicates the meaning of the Other when he refers to the Other as the symbolic order and simultaneously another

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subject. The Other equates the symbolic order if it is individuated and distinguished for each subject. In this sense, the Other acts as a mediator which sets up a context for communication. The idea of the Other as another subject is conceived when we consider another subject “in his radical alterity and symbolic uniqueness” (p. 136). An important point to take into account, as Evans states, is that in Lacan’s theory the meaning of the

Other as the locus of language, and hence the position of the symbolic order, predominantly overshadows the other meaning (i.e. the other as another subject).

Accordingly, the equation of the Other with a subject is only possible if that subject

“occupies” this position (of the symbolic order) and “embodies” it for another subject (p.

136).

In Écrits (1966/2006) Lacan states his well know formulation, “the unconscious is the

Other's discourse” (p. 16). It is through this formulation that he shows that the origin of speech and language is neither the ego nor the subject. In fact, in Lacan’s theory the

‘place’ from which language originates is not accessible to the subject’s consciousness.

Here the Other, which is home to the unconscious, to the place where the primordial repressive practices originate in, imposes its laws on the subject while the subject now has no other option if it wants to take up a position in the symbolic order, and turn to a speaking subject. In this way, the Other takes up a seemingly paradoxical aspect. It, according to Fink (1995) “can be seen as an insidious, uninvited intruder that unceremoniously and unpropitiously transforms our wishes; it is, however, at the same time that which enables us to clue each other in to our desires and ‘communicate’” (p. 6).

It is in the light of this aspect of language that Lacan explains the idea of human’s alienation in language, a phenomenon that emerges immediately when one learns mother tongue.

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Perhaps the most and also first tangible occasion in which another subject occupies the position of the Other is formed in the early encounter of the child with its mother. In fact, it is parents and particularly mother who receives child’s apparently meaningless messages (mostly in the form of cries) and retroactively injects meanings into them. From this perspective, the child not only has the adequate means through which s/he expresses what s/he means, but also s/he even does not know what s/he wants. It is the mother who retroactively determines what the child wants, and the comfort of the child after mother’s response verifies mother’s understanding of the child’s cries. However, in this scenario, mother, who occupies the position of the big Other, turns out to seem incomplete as she is not able to respond to all of the child’s wants and desires. This realisation of the Other as a fundamentally ‘lacking’ entity is the stimuli for the occurrence of the inevitable and necessary castration complex. It is in such a situation that acquiring language becomes the only possible way through which the child attempts to overcome and redress the castration, and find a complete Other, although s/he never achieve this goal. However, the human’s attempt to find a complete Other is doomed to failure as such a complete

Other is a “mythical” entity that “does not exist” (Evans, 1996, p. 136). In fact, it is because of this incompleteness of the Other that Lacan uses the graphical sign of Ⱥ

(barred Other) for the big Other. In this way, not only is the subject castrated, but the object or the place where it seeks to redress its castration is castrated, missing the signifier which is supposed to fill the subject’s gap. This characteristic of lacking m/other, which takes up a defining role in Lacan’s theory and also is of particular significance for politically-oriented Lacanian researchers, is related to the way Lacan thinks of language and unconscious and finds a particular relation between them (‘the unconscious is structured like language’). This discussion leads us to Lacan’s adaptation of structural

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linguistic notions (i.e. signifier/signified). In the following section I will, first, present an explanation of Lacan’s structuralist adaptation and, then will delineate how a linguistic theory comes to help Lacan to develop his psychoanalytic theory of subject.

4.8 Centrality of language in Lacan

Structuralism in general, and its linguistic manifestation in particular, has a defining status within the whole theory of Lacan. The importance of language for Lacan (2006) is such that he believes the only way to “return to a notion of true science whose credentials are already inscribed in a tradition that begins with Plato's Theaetetus” would be possible through “delving deeper into” (p. 284) the realm of the symbolic (the signifier), a realm in which language plays its most determining function: constituting the subject and allowing it come to being (1954-5, p. 29). Lacan believes that the place of language, and the essential role that it can play by unravelling the most essential and defining nature of human being, has been ‘degenerated’ by positivists who “by making the human sciences the crowning glory of the experimental sciences, in fact subordinates them to the latter”

(2006, p. 284). Such an erroneous conception, Lacan argues, is affected by the historically-rooted views instilled in an understanding of science according to which it can only flourish if it is “founded on the prestige of a specialized development of experimentation” (p. 284). It is in light of such a critical positioning towards experimental sciences, that Lacan resorts to structuralism which paid considerable attention to the role of language in demonstrating how human beings get involved in communication and exchange ideas.

However, it should be noted that Lacan’s reference to linguistics is not meant to reduce psychoanalysis to the latter. As Stavrakakis (1999) notes, Lacan refers to “modern

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linguistics in order to ‘recover’ the truth of the Freudian enterprise, a truth long lost for analytic theory” (p. 22). Lacan’s project of ‘return to Freud’ is informed by the fact that

Freud’s discovery, or better to say explaining, of the unconscious, would not be possible without taking into consideration the function of language. This Lacanian idea that

Freud’s theorisation of the unconscious is closely linked to the role he assigned to language in affecting and shaping human’s psyche can be obviously observed in the way

Lacan reads Freud’s The interpretation of Dreams (1900/1991). Lacan believes that

Freud’s purpose to study dream is not aimed “to articulate a psychology of dreams but to explore their elaboration, that is to say their linguistic structure”, hence “what Freud presents as formations of the unconscious -- jokes, dreams, symptoms-- are nothing but the result of his ability to discern the primary status of language” (Stavrakakis, 1999, p.

22). That’s why Lacan states that when it comes to interpreting a dream the psychoanalyst’s tasks is not to “decode” it but to ‘decipher” it, (2006, p. 510). In line with this discussion, Lacan, aiming to ‘reconstruct’ Freudian approach and restore the lost or misunderstood meanings attributed to him, by referring to modern linguistics accentuates the linguistic aspects of Freud’s works and reformulates the two mechanisms that Freud found effective in the way unconscious fantasies are formed: condensation and displacement. These mechanisms, which are “designed to disguise unconscious thoughts”, are replaced by Lacan --under the influence of structural linguistics-- with metaphor and metonymy, respectively (Fink, 2004, p. 72).

Among those structuralists whose works inspired Lacan, Ferdinand de Saussure has a more important role. Saussure, who aimed to propose a more tenable and innovative conception of language, develops a theory of language according to which language is considered “as a socially regulated, universal human faculty rather than a culturally

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diverse and historically evolving collection of words” (Nobus, 2003, p. 50). In this way, language is viewed “as a complex system of relationships between a basic repertory of sounds instead of the sum total of all elements employed for conveying a message” (p.

50). To substantiate his theory of language, Saussure proposes a definition of word according to which each word (in Saussure's terminology a linguistic sign) is composed of a signifier (“the speech sounds or written marks composing the sign” and a signified

(the conceptual meaning of the sign”) (Abrams & Harpham, 2015, p. 196). Nobus (2003) has encapsulated Saussure’s theory of language as follows:

Against the realist perspective on language, according to which all words are but names

corresponding to prefabricated things in the outside world, Saussure argued that within any

language system the linguistic signs connect sound-images to concepts, instead of names to things.

The sound-image, or signifier, coincides with the vocal production and sensory perception

associated with a verbal utterance. It therefore possesses acoustic and material (physical) qualities,

the phonic aspects of which could, in principle, be registered and measured. The concept, or

signified, coincides with the idea in the individual’s mind, a thought-process occuring as a result

of a particular sensory impression, or seeking to express itself through a verbal utterance. Unlike

the signifier, the signified possesses mental and semantic (meaningful) qualities, the psychological

and social aspects of which could, in principle, be referred to the individual’s family background,

education, social identity and nationality (p. 51).

In Saussure’s view the relationship between the signifier and the signified is of an arbitrary nature, although this arbitrariness dose not contradict the interdependence of the two elements. As can be observed in the above quotation, for Saussure, it is the signified which possesses the more defining role and the signifier is treated as the secondary element.

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In Écrits (2006) Lacan proposes his own version of the relationship between signifier and signified according to which meaning is ‘insisted’ “in the chain of the signifier” (p.

502). Interestingly in this reading “none of the chain's elements consists in the signification it can provide at that very moment” (p. 502). In other words, according to

Lacan, it would not be possible to pin the achieved meaning or message (signified) of a sentence down to a particular word (signifier); the resulted message is the effect of the whole chain of signifiers, hence “the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier” (p. 502). However, the idea according to which the meaning attributed to a signifier is affected by the psychological and social aspects of the environment

(education, family, and whatever available discourses at the human’s disposal) finds an important place in Lacan’s theory, in particular in his theorisation of the symbolic order and the big Other. The child is exposed to the signifier “much before the time she can impute her own subjective meaning to them” and in this way signifiers “become the landmark of the child’s existence” (Feher-Gurewich, 1996, p. 8). These signifiers whose meanings are imposed on the subject are governed by the Other, the Other which constructs the subject’s unconscious, hence the “intersubjective structure of the unconscious” (Feher-Gurewich, 1996, p. 8).

What was presented above was a synopsis of the main concepts of Lacanian theory of subjectivity. In order to set a ground for analysing the two novels at stake, it was attempted to engage with those concepts, such as lack and desire, which have been used in critical studies. In the next two chapters, where the two novels are analysed, notions of lack (in chapter six) and fantasy and utopia (in chapter seven) are the guiding concepts in analysing the novels. Assuming that without elaborating on the imaginary and the symbolic orders it would not be possible to grasp how lack, fantasy, desire and language

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(in the Lacanian sense of the terms) work in the construction of subjectivity, I dedicated most of the space of the current chapter to the delineation of the former concepts (i.e. the imaginary and the symbolic). In the next chapter, I will demonstrate how the theoretical concepts as discussed in this chapter form the basis of a methodology for analysing literary texts.

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Chapter 5 Methodological observations

The introduction that David Pavón-Cuéllar and Ian Parker (2014), two scholars with extensive background in psychoanalytic studies, have written on their edited book entitled

Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy is the most comprehensive review of the literature on the theoretical-methodological observations on Lacanian discourse analysis. They argue that "the guiding thread of the reflections and examples of application" in Lacanian discourse analysis "is the concept of

‘event’; i.e. act, surprise or rupture in relation to discourse, structure and determination"

(p.1). Event, in Badiou's system of philosophy or act, in Žižek's systems of philosophy, refer to the capacity of the real to interrupt/disrupt the apparently logical and hegemonic current of the symbolic, with the purpose of providing spaces for creating new subjectivities (McGowan, 2010).Taking into account this observation, one can realise that what is pivotal in adopting a Lacanian approach to textual analysis – text as an embodiment of discourse – as far as a political/literary issue is at stake, is not the application of a methodology in the classical sense of the term. Rather what is important in this regard is the particular ways that the researcher employs Lacanian concepts and puts them into conversation with the text under analysis in order to see how and why the

'eventful' occasion is or is not realised. Taking this point into account, in the current research the attempt has been made to see how in the novels under analysis Iranian society is represented in the post-evental (post-revolution) era. However, the emphasis on the novels' engagement with representations of subjectivity does not necessarily mean that they can, due to their critical undertone, provide us with new conceptions of subjectivity.

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Rather, this emphasis is made with the purpose of exploring how the post-revolution state exerts its subjectificational mechanisms, and how the novels react to these mechanisms.

With the above introduction in mind, now it is possible to argue that a Lacanian discourse analysis methodology needs to explain and justify the particular ways in which concepts will be employed. In this way, these are the concepts, rather than a pre-defined method of analysis, that direct the analysis. In this regard, as Pavón-Cuéllar and Parker

(2014) remark, "there are…logically, significant differences among the strategies adopted by different [Lacanian-inspired] authors to analyse the question of event" (p. 1). What is done in this thesis is not also different. If the methodology, which is not separate from the theory in Lacanian analysis, adopted here does not fall under and accord to the dominant category/definition of the methodology in the classical sense of the term, this is not because I assume the latter to be inadequate or deficient in any way. Rather the approach adopted here for analysing the selected texts aligns with one of the radical Lacanian interventions into the field of analysis according to which both the analyst and the analysand (here the researcher and the phenomena under analysis) have significant shares in the analysis process. Accordingly, what is highlighted in this chapter is not an explanation of methodology in the common sense of the term; rather the focus is on the relation between the text and the analyst. In a sense, what is discussed below is the delineation of the approach that the analyst is supposed to take up while reading a work of literature. This approach, founded on the centrality of the notion of the event, allows the emergence of that which is not achievable via a classical methodology which is characterised by systematicity and heterogeneity. Elaborating on the notion of the event/act, Pavón-Cuéllar and Parker state that if the event/act is:

…conceptualised as the problem of irregularity and indetermination, of the unforeseen and the

unforeseeable, of the eventually subversive and the disruptive; all of which are problematic for a 117

discourse analysis that has traditionally analysed the regular relations and mutual determinations

among the elements of discourse and, therefore, seems to leave no place for the unforeseen and

the unforeseeable, or for the eventually subversive and the disruptive…The event itself, in what it

represents in each case quite apart from its irregularity and indetermination, would become

essentially impossible and could only pass by unobserved by a discourse analysis that does not

concern itself even with the possible, but only with the real possibilities already realised in the

current reality of a concrete discourse. (p. 6)

Here it is important to note that while a Lacanian discourse analysis can be, in terms of methodology, fundamentally different from systematic study of language/discourse, it has yet its own logic and systematicity. As will be shown in the continuation of this chapter and also practically in analysis chapters (6 and 7), in order for the concepts to play a guiding thread they need to be engaged in dialogue with concrete examples of the text.

This necessarily dialogic entanglement with the text allows concepts to be expanded and acquire new dimensions. In fact, this is precisely a Lacanian approach to reading literature or any works of art according to which it is the psychoanalysis which needs to engage with literature to extend its frontier. This issue will be discussed below through referring to Felman's (1982) critique of the relation between literature and psychoanalysis. With regards to the dialogic/dialectical engagement with the text, I will explain how a 'close reading' approach can help the analyst, instead of prescribing a pre-determined, biased interpretation, delve into the fabric of the text and allow it to be heard as much as possible.

5.1 Dialectical relationship between theory and data

According to Terry Eagleton (2008), what distinguishes a psychoanalytic literary criticism is the way through which it goes through “constructing what may be called a

‘sub-text’ for the work — a text which runs within it, visible at certain ‘symptomatic’

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points of ambiguity, evasion or overemphasis, and which we as readers are able to ‘write’ even if the novel itself does not” (p. 155). In fact, what is at stake in such an approach is coterminous with a Lacanian definition of subject according to which what characterises the subject is not the visible features as attributed to the subject of consciousness, rather it is the undetectable, elusive yet highly determinative unconscious drives. Accordingly, a literary text, not dissimilar to a subject of unconscious, should be viewed as harbouring an unconscious aspect that is not evident even for the author him/herself. It is in light of this approach to reading literature that Eagleton points out sub-texts can be conceived of as “the unconscious of the work itself”, where the latter is defined as:

The work's insights, as with all writing, are deeply related to its blindness: what it does not say,

and how it does not say it, may be as important as what it articulates; what seems absent, marginal

or ambivalent about it may provide a central clue to its meanings. (p. 155)

In line with this discussion, in the theoretical discussion chapter (chapter 4) I explained how the Lacanian subject is an unconscious subject. In fact, the focus on the notion of the unconscious, both as the central concept in defining the psychoanalytic subject and as a central notion in psychoanalytic literary criticism, is meant to set a ground for the emergence of an analytic approach according to which it would be possible to keep a distance from an ideology of finding “absolute truth” in a work of literature (Eagleton,

2008, p. 148). In other words, a psychoanalytic literary criticism, ironically, resists presenting a neat explanation of the work under analysis and, instead, invests in what

Eagleton calls a “hermeneutic of suspicion”, where the latter is applied not “just to ‘read the text’ of the unconscious, but to uncover the processes, the dream-work, by which that text was produced” (p. 158). In what follows I explain how it is possible to adopt a reading approach that can help us realise, as far as possible, a psychoanalytic literary criticism. I

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start with the most general issue and then narrow down the discussion, focusing on the particular psychoanalytic reading approach.

Generally the approach adopted to the application of psychoanalytic concepts in this research can be called dancing with the data, with the data here being novels under analysis. Dancing, at least in its modern, sophisticated and sublime form, is a mutually co-operative act. In dance a pair of dancing partners perform delicate motions that demand harmony and coordination – kinesthetic, cognitive and affective – from both sides. However, the pair need to be careful to perform the act in a way that the audience do not drown in the mechanics and instead enjoy the delicacy of movements. An important point in dance partnering is that usually one dancer ‘guides’ and ‘supports’ the other dancer. And what makes such a performance appealing are adagios (slow and at ease motions) and allegros (brisk and lively motions).

A Lacanian textual analysis is not dissimilar to dance partnering. In this approach while theory seems to be guiding the data, nevertheless this guidance does not necessarily lead to imposition of particular readings on the data. Data here moves for itself and even demands the theory to show some ‘flexibility’. At other times, when the data moves briskly, the theory arrives at the scene and does not allow those fast moves to go too far, and when the theory moves heavily the data gives it some tenderness so that the act does not turn out to be boring. But a crucial point in this research study is concerned with the relation of theory and data. I will treat my data in a way that it can challenge, question and even if necessary, oppose the theory. As such, I can say that the majority of concepts that are being referred to throughout this thesis might intersect between the theories and the data rather than running parallel to the line of theories. This strategy has been employed and explained well by Kocela (2010). According to Kocela, “theory‒even 120

poststructuralist theory‒has a difficult time letting go of its commitment to logical continuity, coherence, and the terms of philosophical possibility”, as a result, “its most radical propositions need to be supplemented by experimental fiction” (p. 54). As will be discussed below, psychoanalysis, particularly its Lacanian branch, proposes a method of working with literary genres according to which it would be possible to avoid what

Kocela refers to as restrictive logical continuity. This method is called transferential reading is discussed in detail below.

5.2 Method of analysis: close reading approach and transferential reading of literature

In order to realise what was mentioned above regarding the relation between theory/concepts and the data (novels under analysis), a 'close reading' approach coupled with transferential reading of text will be applied. Both of these methods/approaches have been used in studies founded on psychoanalytic theories – Lacanian and others (Rabaté,

2003). Adopting, simultaneously, these methods of reading is informed by two different yet relevant rationales. While employing these methods for reading literary works, which have palpable political undertones, can be justified in their own right, their grounding in a psychoanalytic framework consolidates their capacity as appropriate methods for reading political literary works. In psychoanalysis, as Terry Eagleton (2008) states, various forms of “crisis of human relationships” both in its general form as realised in

“the ideological and political turmoil” and in its more personal ways as realised in

“anxiety, fear of persecution and the fragmentation of the self…become constituted in a new way as a systematic field of knowledge” (p. 131).

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To examine human crisis as represented in different cultural products, a theory needs to look closely at the relation between a created work (textual, visual and etc.) and the contexts (social, historical and political) in which that work is produced. This is precisely what Rashkin (2008) remarks when she observes that a psychoanalytic close reading approach “illuminates obscured ideology and exposes cultural connections that would otherwise remain unseen” (pp. 1-2).To illuminate ideological orientations that are formed by “unconscious political motives and dynamics”, a psychoanalytic close reading approach takes its object of analysis “societal practices and discourses, that resist detection by materialist cultural analysis” (p. 5). However, an important point to consider is that a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach to unravelling unconscious motives and dynamics does not trust interpretations that are based on the analyst’s hypotheses. As

Lacan (2006) asserts in Écrits “if symptoms can be read, it is because they themselves are already inscribed in a writing process. As particular unconscious formations, symptoms are not significations, but their relation to a signifying structure that determines them” (p.

445). In other words, what makes symptom recognisable in a text is its status as that which disturbs the text's signifying structure. This observation, albeit implicitly, resonates with the link between a psychoanalytic transferential reading approach and the 'evental' character of imaginative/literary texts dealing with socio-political crises. As will be discussed in section 5.6 of this chapter, transference, in the psychoanalytic-literary sense of the term, deals with the instability of a chain of signification, and the way through which a signified is temporarily formed via the unstable, transient relations that each signifier develops with another signifier in a chain of signification. When it comes to a literary text, like works of Joyce or Becket that are of particular interest to Lacanian literary critics, it is the existence of symptomatic moments in the text that unravel the

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eventual feature of the text. Considering this understating of signification process, a transferential reading approach attempts to make a sense of the relation developed between the text's symptomatic moments and its signifying structure. It can be a possible way to understand how a text reacts to an event.

Accordingly, Rashkin’s (2008) critique of Lacanian approach as a method of analysing textual and visual products on the basis that it “tends to yield readings that are too often predetermined or predictable because it relies so heavily on the oedipally organized paradigms of the imaginary and the symbolic, or on the investable links connecting trauma, fantasy, jouissance, and the real” (p. 15) can be refuted on the following ground.

The very presence of symptoms as unsignifying yet existent elements of the text makes it almost impossible for the analyst to predict the direction of the analysand's discourse.

Accordingly, if the analyst wants to understand the analysand's discourse, s/he needs to rely on both signifying and non-signifying elements of its discourse. Rashkin also criticises a Lacanian approach because she believes that “it also assumes as ontological truth that subjectivity is marked by castration and the irremediable lack at the core of being, and that meaning is always inaccessible and constituted by the infinite slippage of material signifiers over irretrievable signifieds” (p. 15).

Rashkin’s critique of the Lacanian subject as a castrated entity can be countered with reference to works of Lacanian scholars such as Ruti (2006), McNulty (2014), Newman

(2007) and McGowan (2013), among others, who have elaborated on the lack as the constitutive aspect of human subjectivity. As discussed before in the thesis, in particular in chapter 4, the gist of what these scholars argue is that the Lacanian conception of lack sets a ground for explaining and critiquing social, cultural, political and economic events and phenomena. In fact, they argue that if the subject was not inflicted by lack, it would 123

not be possible to talk about the effect of discursive structures on the (trans)formation of the subject. Discourse are able to exert their hegemonic force because the subject they are affecting is not an ontologically totalised entity. But, simultaneously, discourses can be challenged as they are, albeit in a different way, inflicted by lack. In a sense, lack, in the Lacanian sense of the term, can both explain the way through which the subject is affected by social, cultural, political and economic events and phenomena, and also provide us with a way to counter, however hypothetically, hegemonic discourses.

Here I am purposefully referring to Rashkin’s (2008) work because my approach to analysing texts in question is actually quite similar to hers. Although Rashkin apparently eschews a Lacanian approach, in practice it is very Lacanian as it “is attentive to the complex networks and intertwining of various linguistic and rhetorical forms, from metaphor and metonymy (pp. 16-17, emphasis added). Rashkin pays considerable attention to ways through which meanings of a text is overdetermined in the very fabric of its language. In fact, in Rashkin’s view, it is the language in its overdetermined form that has the ability to “locate dramas too distressing or disruptive to be put into words”

(p. 17). Accordingly, from such a perspective, “silenced dramas” and traumatic events can be constructed through the apparatus that language provides us with, and, as a result,

“latent connections” that texts have “with sociocultural, historical, and/or political contexts” can be revealed (p. 17). This view is consistent with Caruth’s (1995) argument according to which speech (language) is “not simply the vehicle of understanding, but also the locus of what cannot yet be understood” (p. 155). I believe this approach to analysing literary texts resonates with the Lacanian understanding of literary texts as the locus of symptom, where the latter is conceptualised as a non-significatory, evental

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element in the text that leaves a trace in the text precisely because it disturbs the current of signification.

5.3 Close reading approach: pros and cons

Before entering into a discussion of the (Lacanian) psychoanalytic study of literary works, it is worth pausing here to make it clear whether it is necessary to employ a close reading approach accompanied by a complex theory like that of Lacan. In other words, is it legitimate to delve deeply into literary texts and bring to the surface their political undertone while, as Vendler (1988) argues, there is always a risk to “bracket the question of aesthetic success”, particularly when “no other category (‘the rhetorically complex,’

‘the philosophically interesting,’ ‘the overdetermined,’ ‘the well-structured’ and so on) can be usefully substituted for the category ‘the aesthetic’” (pp. 1-2)? Vendler’s main argument is that revealing “the meaning of an art work” or disclosing their “ideological values” is not “the aim of a properly aesthetic criticism”; as a result, an aesthetic criticism should be confined to merely “describing” the work in question (p. 2, emphases in original). A critical question to be asked here is ‘is it possible to separate the aesthetic from the political in the literary works which, above all, have strong critical undertone?’

This question finds more resonance when one considers how political and social crises have not only (literary writers, photographers, films makers, painters, sculptors…) inspired artists, but have also induced new and influential artistic waves that otherwise were impossible. From among the main masterpieces of literary works, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dostayovsky’s Crime and Punishment, Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, and Orwell’s Animal Farm are just a few titles to mention. These works are mainly concerned with the political and social realities of their societies. If we treat them as works

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of art, which they indeed are, any purely aesthetic criticisms of such works would obviously present a defective picture of them, if we neglect their political and social polemic. This argument has been reflected by Lesser (1993) who points out, “criticism is not an airlessly secluded, primly aesthetic task; it is a part of daily life, and making such distinctions is an important aspect of that life” (p. 10).

The negative critique of literary studies which pay close attention to the political interpretations is not confined to the arguments as referred to above. Rabinowitz (1988) argues that applying a close reading model would nurture the “dominance” of “the aristocracy of critical activity”, which consequently “can skew evaluation, distort interpretation, discourage breadth of vision, and separate scholars and other ordinary readers” (p. 9). Furthermore, he contends a close reading approach to literary texts makes us “implicitly favour figurative writing over realistic writing, indirect expression over direct expression, deep meaning over surface meaning, form over content, and the elite over the popular” (p. 9). These cautions as stated by Rabinowitz acquire more significance if the purpose of doing literary analysis is to elucidate political undertones of the texts under analysis. Rabinowitz elsewhere (1987), brings onto focus the presuppositions that accompany readers while reading literary works. Dismissing multiplicity of readers’ presuppositions can be a consequence of an unscrupulous application of a close reading model.

While these critical observations are defensible as far as literary criticism inadvertently intends to obfuscate the nature of literary works and, consequently opt for a barren and ineffectual obscurantism, they can be questioned when one notes how, under the pressure of ideological regimes and their more intangible yet highly powerful censoring mechanisms, artists are left with no alternative but to purposefully replace the literal with 126

the figurative, to employ interwoven, convoluted and even sometimes recondite forms, and, as a result, beat around the bush of content to be able to circumference the censoring blade. Moreover, a close reading approach, as Gallop (2007) observes, is a prime practice of Paulo Freire’s “anti-elitist pedagogy” according to which the “the banking model” is criticised (p. 184). As Gallop notes, a close reading approach, by jettisoning an elitist model of teaching in favour of a more independent yet personalised and rigorous mode of learning, develops a mode of reading based on which readers are able to develop their own idiosyncratic knowledge entwined with their understanding of the world and its events. As such, Gallop argues, “close reading poses an ongoing threat to easy, reductive generalization…it is a method for resisting and calling into question our inevitable tendency to bring things together in smug, overarching conclusions” (p. 185).

Furthermore, the interpretive validity of a close reading approach can be invigorated when, in the context of literary criticism, it is merged with the transferential aspects of psychoanalysis. In fact, such a mode of reading in which the transferential aspect of psychoanalysis is used along with a close reading approach corresponds to and is harmonious with the pedagogical strategy which opposes the idea of ‘importing’ knowledge from one source, be it teacher or theory, to another one. This idea is discussed in more details below.

5.4 The need for a critical-complex analytic approach

The pessimism towards the theoretically-oriented literary criticism which aims to analyse literary works with the purpose of elucidating their political ends reaches its zenith in the writings of Fromm. Fromm, in his book entitled Academic capitalism and literary value

(1991), attacks critic-theorists academics for resorting to “the self-protective critical

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monopoly that functions at the vanguard of ‘academic capitalism’” (p. ix). Fromm believes that academics, by applying and referring to grand theories and school of thoughts such as feminism, deconstruction, Marxism and so on, pretend to react to the so-called superficiality of ordinary people and the way they treat the high art, while beneath this misleading gesture lies a “pseudorevolutionary virtue” which has no concern for the ethical issues of society (p. ix). For Fromm, academic criticism as conducted by different schools of thought should be blamed for “their gratingly entrepreneurial commitment to professionalization that excludes any concern for nonspecialist ‘general’ readers” (p. 237). He even goes further to claim “deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, black studies…operate in accordance with their own aggressive, sometimes covert agendas” and hence under their methodological hegemony “we tend to know in advance what everything will turn out to mean anyhow, since the method determines the meaning”

(p. 4). Although such critical observations directed towards methodological approaches to reading literary works have some resonance in some radical cases, there are many examples which counter Fromm's argumentation. There are numerous examples of academic works whose point of departure in conducting research is a tangible and real problem, rather than the so-called gap that is often proclaimed by researchers in their research statement. Moreover, plausible solutions can be found to, at least some of the problems that scholars such as Fromm observe. As will be discussed in coming sections, some problems are raised when a research project is overshadowed by the approaches tending to apply a particular theory and/or methodology to a particular topic. This issue has been discussed in detail by scholars who use psychoanalytic theories to study literary works (Felman, 1982). Of course, it should be emphasised that this problem is not unique

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to psychoanalytic approaches, and other fields of studies in humanities and social sciences might be affected by the same problem.

A final point to mention in support of applying a close reading approach which can be coupled with transferential reading concerns the whole atmosphere of humanities and social sciences. As Rashkin (2008) contends, today’s world, affected by the economic malaise and a decline of interest in thinking critically, does not embrace “a demanding and painstaking mode of analysis” (p. 12). As such, those studies which do not demand profound understanding are preferred to “intensively focused studies” (p. 12). In such a context, if one intends to conduct research projects which critically examine the relations between the use of language, and the social, cultural and political issues within that context, it is essential to turn to a profound and meticulous methodological/conceptual apparatus. Accordingly, following Rashkin, I will employ a politics of close reading that conceives of the text as “a product of culture” which “is inseparable from the historical and material contexts from which it emerges and in which it continues to exist” (p. 17).

This approach takes text as the point of departure, believing that a “move from text to culture” can hopefully unfold “what might be related to the text that is not readily visible from its context, or what encrypted links might exist between text and culture that would enable us to understand better the text’s environmental resonances” (p. 17, emphasis in original). Such an approach finds significance as it takes into account the intricate and mostly hidden connections “between aesthetic production and material conditions, between the workings of the unconscious and the textual inscription of ideology” (p. 19).

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5.5 Reconsideration of the relationship between psychoanalysis and literary criticism

This section, while addressing the critique that was elaborated above with regards to hegemonic approach of academic studies of literature, presents a reconsideration of the issue of psychoanalytic literary criticism. As such, I start with responding to the mentioned critique and then will elaborate on the contested area of psychoanalytic literary criticism.

Probably more radical than scholars like Fromm, who disparages the way academic theory-oriented discourses have adopted a hegemonic approach to study of literary issues, is Lacan himself, who not only takes similar position, but even goes further and censures the platform (i.e. the university as a neoliberal/capitalist institution) on which these discourses are consolidated. Lacan in Écrits (1966/2006) writes:

Their radical vice can be seen in [their approach to] the transmission of knowledge. At best this

transmission could be defended by comparing psychoanalysis to those trades in which, for

centuries, transmission occurred only in a veiled manner, maintained by the institution of

apprenticeship and guild [compagnonnage]. A master's in the art and different ranks protect

therein the secret of a substantial knowledge. (p. 76)

This issue of the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature has always been an arena of discussion. Many scholars have questioned the idea of the application of psychoanalytic theories to other fields of study including literary criticism. According to

Felman (1982), the problems lies in the very ‘and’ that is located between psychoanalysis and literature. This ‘and’, according to Felman, “in the context of the relationship between

“literature and psychoanalysis”…is usually interpreted, paradoxically enough as

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implying not so much a relation of coordination as one of subordination” (p. 5, emphasis in original). Accordingly, when the two words, literature and psychoanalysis, are juxtaposed the immediate impression would be a relation of master and slave, in a sense that psychoanalysis as being the source of knowledge occupies the status of master/subject and literature as the object of analysis/interpretation occupies the place of slave. Critiquing such a relationship, Felman proposes another view according to which it would be possible to bring the two fields in a much fruitful and rigorous dialogue. In such a dialogic relationship the two fields are considered as “two different bodies of language” and “two different modes of knowledge” (p. 6). However, as Felman argues, to “disrupt” the often-implied impression according to which psychoanalysis occupies the upper hand and imposes a particular reading of literary texts, we should “consider the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature from the literary point of view” (p. 6, emphasis in original). The important point to take into account with regards to this shift of perspective is that this change is not done with an aim to simply change the place of the two fields in the so-called master-slave scenario, but “to deconstruct the very structure of the opposition, mastery/slavery” and instead allow the two fields contribute to and possibly challenge each other (p. 7).

The reconsideration, or better to say the reconfiguration, of the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis can radically change both the status of literary critic and that of literature itself. In other words, by envisioning the new relationship, we have to redefine both the literary work and the person who analyses it. This act demands us to initially take a seemingly paradoxical position which at the end would be resolved by a rigours argument. In the process of redefining the said terms, psychoanalytic concepts can be highly facilitative. With regards to the status of the literary critic/analyst, Felman

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(1982) states, it is suggested that what the analyst does should become similar to the work of the psychoanalyst. The paradoxical point exactly arises here when the work of the literary critic is said to be similar to that of the psychoanalyst. In this way, the first impression would be that the status of the literary work is that of the patient. This apparently paradoxical scenario is resolved by conceiving of the text (what is analysed) not as a patient but as a “master”: “we say of the author that he is a master; the text has for us authority—the very type of authority by which Jacques Lacan indeed defines the role of the psychoanalyst in the structure transference” (p. 7). In this way, the literary critic, in relation to the text he/she analyses, sees itself like a patient, a patient who thinks of its psychoanalyst (in our case a text) as a source of knowledge. In Fleman’s words:

Like the psychoanalyst viewed by the patient, the text is viewed by us as "a subject presumed to

know"-as the very place where meaning, and knowledge of meaning, reside. With respect to the

text, the literary critic occupies thus at once the place of the psychoanalyst (in the relation of

interpretation) and the place of the patient (in the relation of transference). Therefore, submitting

psychoanalysis to the literary perspective would necessarily have a subversive effect on the clear-

cut polarity through which psychoanalysis handles literature as its other, as the mere object of

interpretation. (pp. 7-8)

Although the above argument can, to a considerable extent, help to disrupt the previous monolithic and one-way pattern of psychoanalytic literary criticism, a stronger argument in defence of the aforementioned shift of perspective comes with a focusing on a crucial and unique feature of literature, a feature “which is constitutive of literature but is essentially lacking in psychoanalytic theory, and indeed in theory as such: irony” (p. 8, emphasis added). Elaborating on this feature of literature, Felman writes:

Since irony precisely consists in dragging authority as such into a scene which it cannot master,

of which it is not aware and which, for that very reason, is the scene of its own self-destruction, 132

literature, by virtue of its ironic force, fundamentally deconstructs the fantasy of authority in the

same way, and for the same reasons, that psychoanalysis deconstructs the authority of the fantasy-

its claim to belief and to power as the sole window through which we behold and perceive reality,

as the sole window through which reality can indeed reach our grasp, enter into our consciousness.

Psychoanalysis tells us that the fantasy is a fiction, and that consciousness is itself, in a sense, a

fantasy-effect. In the same way, literature tells us that authority is a language effect, the product

or the creation of its own rhetorical power: that authority is the power of fiction; that authority,

therefore, is likewise a fiction. (p. 8, emphasis in original)

In fact, it is this vey deconstructive power of literature as a unique lens through which it would possible to explore the fictional character of authority that gives it a perspectival aspect. In Felman’s view, the ironic aspect of literature is one of the most important evidence, if not the sole important one, that convince us to rely on literature as a means through which it would be possible to realise the true nature of authority: “a language effect”. Authority as a linguistic mechanism exerts its power through rhetorical tools. In this view, authority is no longer considered as a pre-given reality, but it is a fiction, a fiction which introduces itself as an unquestionably primordial reality. Psychoanalysis here is particularly helpful as it never thinks of fantasy as a body of ineffective hallucinatory ideas which has nothing to do with everyday realities. Fantasy in psychoanalysis, as Felman puts it, is the very foundation of reality, as it is “the sole window through which reality can indeed reach our grasp, enter into our consciousness”.

In this sense, both fantasy and authority are of the same nature: fictional. Accordingly, a psychoanalytic literary criticism can demonstrate how authority is the effect of fantasies that are (un)intentionally imposed on us, in the same way that our everyday reality is closely linked to fantasy as the building block of consciousness.

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Taking into consideration the above argument, what would be the consequence of granting a perspectival, of course not authorial and superior, dimension to literature? The most important (methodological) consequence of looking at literature in this way is that it is no longer a field of study which needs to rely on other theories in an applicatory relationship. In other words, when literature is considered as an area which can uniquely contribute to our worldview, it no longer takes up a passive status in relation to other scholarly disciplines. Accordingly, when it comes to referring to psychoanalytic concepts in the study of a literary work, it is no longer authentic to call such a study as the application of psychoanalysis to literature. What replaces the notion of application in the context of the relationship between the two fields is “the radically different notion of implication” (p. 8, emphasis in original). The consequence of applying such a shift of emphasis from the notion of application to the notion of implication is radical, as it demands the psychoanalytic literary critic “to explore, bring to light and articulate the various (indirect) ways in which the two domains do indeed implicate each other, each one finding itself enlightened, informed, but also affected, displaced, by the other” (p. 9, emphasis in original). An implicational approach, as Gallop (1984) puts it, “would necessitate a ‘psychoanalytic’ mode of reading that attends to the specific dynamic of the literary relation, rather than merely ‘importing’ knowledge from another field” (p. 301).

However, such a shift of emphasis, which brings the psychoanalytic literary critic into new light, requires the inclusion of a particular mode of reading which is informed by the psychoanalytic notion of transference. The following section will deal with this issue.

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5.6 Transferential reading: attending to the literary dialectic

In this section I will elaborate on how literature and psychoanalysis can intersect in a manner that none overshadows the other. This particular kind of reading literary works is informed by the psychoanalytic concepts of transference. But what is transference from a psychoanalytic perspective? And how does this concept can be referred to in the context of literary criticism? To answer these questions, I first present a definition of the term as developed in psychoanalysis, particularly in its Lacanian approach, and then will focus on its use in the field of literary analysis.

Theoretically speaking, transference, from a psychoanalytic perspective, is “a process of actualisation of unconscious wishes” which “uses specific objects and operates in the framework of a specific relationship established with objects” (Laplanche & Pontalis,

1973, p. 455). Freud assigns two meanings to the term. Accordingly, transference, in its first meaning, simply is “just a particular instance of displacement of affect from one idea to another” (p. 455), while in Freud’s later works it came to account for “the patient’s relationship to the analysts as it develops in the treatment” (Evans, 1996, p. 213). Today, it is the second meaning of the term which is often referred to in psychoanalytic circles.

In Lacan’s works both of the above definitions can be observed and it is important to note that both of them are useful for our current discussion. In its first meaning, transference, in Lacan’s theory of meaning, comes to account for the definition of signified. As Stavrakakis (1999) puts it, in Lacan’s view signified is “an effect of transference” (p. 25). In this sense, the signified has no existence in and by itself, but it takes its meaning (effect), as an external reality, as a result of “the play of signifiers” (p.

27). In the process of signification, i.e. “the process by which the effect of meaning is

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produced” (Evans, 1999, p. 188), it is “the signifier” which “is capable of producing meaning due to the fact that it does not refer to any ‘signified’ object” (Stavrakakis, 1999, p. 26). Due to this very characteristic of the signifier according to which there is no definite meaning to which the signifier can be attributed to, a metonymic process becomes active, as a result of which the signified gets lost in the signifying chain (p. 26). In this process, known as signification, the signified, realised in the form of an illusory stable meaning, is attained. In Stavrakakis’s words:

The illusion of a stable meaning is an effect of the play of signifiers; Lacan’s theory of meaning

is thus situated beyond any representationalist problematic. What he means by this is that if there

is a signified it can only be a signifier to which we attribute a transferential signified function. The

signified is a linguistic ‘subject supposed to know’, or rather ‘object supposed to know’ what a

signifier signifies for a subject. (p. 26)

The importance of the application of a transferential reading approach– with a focus on the illusory nature of signification – in psychoanalytic literary criticism has been discussed by Gallop (1984). Whether resorting to this meaning of signification or to what follows, in the transferential approach to reading literary works, the analyst (critic) refrains from attributing stable and certain meaning to the text under analysis.

The idea of signified as “a linguistic ‘subject supposed to know’ or rather ‘object supposed to know’” links us to the second meaning of transference according to which transference comes to refer to the relationship between the two sides of analysis, resulting in the creation of particular affects. However, this affect is not of a particular character as it is produced as a result of the interaction between analyst and patient (analysand in

Lacan). Therefore, Lacan (2006) emphasises that “transference does not fall under any mysterious property of affectivity and, even when it reveals itself in an emotional [e'moi]

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guise, this guise has a meaning only as a function of the dialectical moment at which it occurs” (p. 225). This second theorisation of transference turns out to take up a central position in Lacan’s theory and is also closely connected to his idea of subject supposed to know. “According to this view”, as Evans (1999, p. 214) elaborates, “transference is the attribution of knowledge to the Other, the supposition that the Other is a subject who knows” about patient’s unconscious desire. It should be noted that the Other is an exhaustive concept in Lacan’s theory and it can be incarnated in such various entities as

“language, knowledge, law, career, academia, authority, morality, ideals, and so on”

(Fink, 1995, p. 87). Accordingly, the analyst in the analytic setting turns out to be the

“avatar or representative of the Other” (p. 87). In the context of psychoanalysis, the patient treats his/her analyst as a person who already knows problems that have affected his/her life, and it is precisely based on this understanding of the analyst as the ‘subject supposed to know’ that the therapeutic session goes on. In this view, the analyst turns out to occupy the status of the superior or the powerful (the Other). In Lacan’s (2006) words:

It is only owing to the place of the Other that the analyst can receive the investiture of the

transference that qualifies him to play his legitimate role in the subject's unconscious and to speak

up there in interventions that are suited to a dialectic whose essential particularity is defined by

the private realm. (p. 454)

As Sechaud (2008) points out, this aspect of transference is related to Lacan’s notion of desire of the analyst. According to the view, as Sechaud puts it, transference is conceived of “as the effect of the subject’s desire towards the desire-of-the-analyst occupying the vacant place of the desire of the Other” (p. 1013). However, Lacan maintains that subject’s act of situating the analyst in the position of the one who knows his/her unconscious desire is fed by subject’s illusion.

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The important point to take into account is that although occupying the status of the subject supposed to know is inevitable for the analyst, he/she is not allowed to use the power as a result of bestowing such a position by the patient. As Fink (1995) states, analyst should beware not to fall “into the trap of believing he or she does know that which can never be known in advance” (p. 88). Slipping “into a false sense of mastery…in the God-like position of the all-knowing Other” has lots of negative impacts on patient, including making him/her dependant on the analyst and providing patient with misguided interpretations and advice (p. 88). Lacan’s suggestion in this regard is a radical one. As such, in Fink’s words, the analyst by thwarting the position of the subject supposed to know must completely reverse the situation, and consequently, “must take the analysand’s unconscious as the representative of knowledge” or as “the ultimate authority, the Other, the subject supposed to know” (p. 89).

But what is problematic about analyst’s taking position of the one who knows analysand’s unconscious desires? The problem with this issue, according to Evans (1996), is concerned with the act of crediting analyst with the ability of knowing patient’s problem “because he was supposed to be better ‘adapted to reality’ than the patient” (p.

215). Lacan incisively criticises those analysts who thinks their adaptation to reality is more authentic than that of patient as he believes such analysts “appeal to an unproblematic notion of ‘reality’ as an objective and self-evident given” (p. 215). For

Lacan, reality is constructed “by ego on the basis of its own méconnaissance

[misrecognition or misunderstanding]” (p. 215). It should be recalled that in Lacan’s theory the formation of ego is a result of “the mirror stage” which is “a narcissistic process in which human beings construct a misrecognized image of self-unity” (Elliot, 2015, p.

104). In other words, the nature of being which is stimulated and created through a

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construction of ego is the resul of the child’s earliest encounter with his/her own image in the mirror, an encounter which falsely bestows “a sense of self-unity” to the child whose initial understanding or image of him/herself was a fragmented one (p. 104).

Elaborating on Lacan’s critique of the analyst’s resorting to ‘reality’ as an authentic strategy for interpreting patient’s unconscious, Evans (1996) states in this process the analyst, situating him/herself in the position of the superior—as they believe have access to a more authentic reality, merely imposes his own distorted notion of reality on the patient (p. 215). Now we have arrived at the point that links the above argument to a discussion of literary criticism based the concept of transference as elaborated above.

The above section sets the ground for intervening into the question of the psychoanalytic literary criticism through referencing to the notion of transference. This discussion calls on an elaboration of the relation of transference and interpretation, two concepts which “are inextricably bound up” in Lacan’s later theory (Guéguen, 2007, p.

19). But the significant question to ask here is how these two psychoanalytic concepts can inform and contribute to analysing a literary work from a methodological point of view? I should reiterate that this discussion is going to suggest an alternative to the colonising approach according to which psychoanalytic knowledge is applied to literature. However, before elaborating on how the inclusion of the concept of transference in reading a literary work can disrupt the aforementioned colonising approach, it should be emphasised that a Lacanian reading opts for the foregrounding of the apparently observable features of a text, including the symptomatic ones that may not be easily observable as they are distinct from what we observe in a chain of signification.

In Lacan’s view, psychoanalysis takes ‘style’ as it object of study. This is precisely what

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Lacan (2006) means by stating "the style is the man himself5" (p. 9). Elaborating on this point, Gallop (1984) writes “psychoanalysis, post-Lacan, is the science, not of the psyche

(object of the Humanities) but …of the letter” (p. 304). Gallop observes that a Lacanian literary analysis pays particular attention to ‘style’, form’, and ‘textual characteristics’ of a given work, rather than its content and various meanings it harbours. This approach can be evidently referred to Lacan’s method of analysis when one notes how he relies on structural linguistics, philosophy and literature to develop his own theory of psychoanalysis.

A discussion of the Lacanian approach which emphasises the textual apparatus of literary works, rather than their intended meanings, finds relevance to Lacan’s theorisation of transference in the way Felman (1982) makes a distinction between interpretation and transference. When the analyst or literary critic takes up an interpretational approach, he/she puts him/herself in the position of ‘subject supposed to know’. In this way, the analyst applies his/her knowledge of psychoanalysis to interpret the text. The result of adopting such an approach would be treating the object of analysis as an entity formed based on some latent content, and what the analyst does is unfold it

(i.e. the unconscious structure of the text). This is an applicational approach which results in injecting some predefined theoretical concepts into the content of the text under analysis. In other words, the analyst who believes in such an approach is predominantly concerned with searching (often excruciatingly) for concepts that he/she has in mind in the text under analysis. To put it succinctly, what an applicational/interpretational

5 . For a comprehensive elaboration of this proposition refer to Judith Miler’s (1991) article entitled “Style is the man himself”.

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approach does is preserving and consolidating the authority of theory they apply, hence ignoring the self-sufficiency of the text.

But what distinguishes an interpretational (application approach) analysis of a literary work from a transferential one? And how does a transferential approach to analysing a literary work can resolve the problems inherent to an interpretational approach?

According to Gallop (1984), “interpretation is always the exercise of power, while transference is the structuration of that authority. To analyze transference is to unmask that structuration, interrupt its efficient operation” (p. 305). What a transferential approach does is reversing the position that the analyst takes up in the process of analysis.

In this way, the analyst (both as clinician and literary critic) does not use his/her authority as the one who knows everything about the object of analysis. To put it more radically, the transferential approach essentially challenges the dichotomy of subject/object

(analyst/patient or literary critic/literary text), and instead thinks of both sides of analytic situation as subjects. Accordingly, what is analysed is not the analysand/patient (text in the context of literary criticism), but the dialectic aspect of analysis. In this way, it is not the analyst who occupies the position of “a subject supposed to know—as the very place where meaning and knowledge of meaning, reside” (Felman, 1982, p. 7), but the text

(patient in the clinical context) that is believed to be harbouring such a capacity. In

Gallop’s (1984) words:

In the relation of transference, the critic is no longer analyst but patient. The position of patient

can be terrifying in that it represents, to the critic who in her transference believes in the analyst’s

mastery, a position of non-mastery. The critic escapes that terror by importing psychoanalytic

‘wisdom’ into the reading dialectic so as to protect herself from what psychoanalysis is really

about, the unconscious, which is to say, from what literature is really about, the letter. The

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psychoanalytic critic in her refusal to confront literature is like the patient who, in her resistance

to her analysis, intelligently discusses psychoanalytic theory on the couch. (p. 307)

In fact, an analysis of transference diverts the locus of power from the critic to the dialectic of what he/she reads, to the relation which is at work between reader (critic) and text as a result of a ‘transference’ that this relation produces. To reiterate, the dialectic of a work of literature is not its latent content (i.e. its unconscious), but it is in the very language of the literary work, its style, form and textual features. In fact, as Gallop points out, this is the radical aspect of Lacanian psychoanalysis that by deconstructing “the fantasy of authority” makes the analyst aware of the fact that the theory he/she is referring to is not supposed to be “the sole window through which reality can indeed reach our grasp” (p. 8). As mentioned earlier, literature, due to its ironic capacity, in the same way challenges the fantasy of authority, and as a result introduces a new notion of reality which challenges –particularly in ideological context—the reality as constructed and invigorated by the dominant discourse within a given society.

What was discussed above was a manifestation of the approach that a Lacanian researcher is expected to adopt while reading/analysing a work of literature. In sum, what is important in adopting such an approach is the attention that the researcher should pay to the status of the text in the process of analysis. Text, particularly its literary version, has its own unconscious. Here it might be useful to reiterate Hemingway's (1932) theory of iceberg, where in Death in the Afternoon he writes:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows

and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly

as if the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth

of it being above water. (p. 192)

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As "Hemingway’s iceberg metaphor exposes the illusory nature of widely accepted commonsensical notions about meaning" (Ibáñez, 2004, p. 157), a transferential reading approach, while affirming the formal features of a work of literature, draws attention to the status of what is not said, or not clearly said, in the text. This is also consistent with the central status of concepts in a psychoanalytic methodology – in particular the concept of 'event' in Lacanian discourse analysis – where the analysis is done with the purpose of bringing the unforeseen and the unforeseeable to the fore.

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Chapter 6 Reading a Lacanian Love Story:

Love/Politics in Censoring an Iranian Love Story

(by Shahriar Mandanipour)

"No culture can survive if it attempts to be exclusive." Mahatma Gandhi

Introduction

When in 2011 Iran's Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance, "the governmental agency charged with overseeing and regulating literature in Iran, had denied a permit for the republication of the twelfth-century epic poem Khosrow and Shirin, by Nezami Ganjavi",

Blake Atwood (2012) in his article entitled 'Sense and Censorship in the Islamic Republic of Iran' wrote that this decision could be associated with "the Islamic Republic's anxiety about love" (p. 38). This apparently non-political decision made by the state can lay bare a foundational principle of its ideology. When the state's ideology, and ideology in general, targets the society as a whole, in order to do the latter it needs to, first, intervene in the most private issues. In other words, by regulating a definable and pre-determined path for someone's most private experience, the state implies that without getting into the private realm its hegemonic and homogenising ideology loses its grip. In a sense, in such society no boundary should exist between the private and the social. The private becomes the social and the social becomes the private. What is sacrificed in the act of removing the boundary between the two is the singularity of the subject.

In the same article as referred to above, Atwood refers to Mandanipour's "Censoring an Iranian Love Story", and argues that how the author's reference to Khosrow and Shirin

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verifies the above observation6. Atwood remarks that Mandanipour's clever reference to the epic poem at the beginning of the novel was like an augury for the looming emergence of a new wave of censorship in Iran. Using the Lacanian conceptualisation of love/sexuality, in this chapter I examine the link between love and politics in the novel under analysis.

6.1 Lacan on love

It might not be unsubstantiated if one claims that the most radical thesis of a Lacanian- inspired political project is bringing the notion of 'non-relation', as an ontological concept, to the fore (Cerda-Rueda, 2016). Creating a political imaginary supported by the imposition of "a fantasmatic ethics of harmony" (Stavrakakis, 1991, p. 9), dominant political ideologies, incarnated in different guises, are trying to inculcate in us the idea that we need them in order to survive in the current crisis. In fact, fabricated crises, as

Mari Ruti (2010b) remarks, are the result of these ideologies' neglecting "ontological

[constitutive] forms of lack", at the cost of investing in "the kind of ‘lack’ that ensues from oppressive socio-cultural or economic conditions that erode the subject’s psychic resources for the simple reason that they oblige it to focus on survival" (p. 6).

Commenting on the notion of fantasmatic harmony, Alenka Zupančič (2016), remarks,

"if we look at the history of political (and class) oppression we can also see how the enforced idea of a ‘harmonious’ system has always been accompanied by the most brutal

6 On pages 20-27 of the novel, the author presents a lengthy analysis of Khosrow and Shirin focusing on the particular linguistic devices of the poet (Nezami Ganjavi) which were used as a way for circumscribing censorship. At the end of this section he writes: "I hope that after this rather lengthy example, you have come to understand why censorship is so complicated in Iran and why Iranian literature, which is quite rich, is so difficult to translate and to read". (p. 27)

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forms of exclusion and oppression" (p. 90). In order to sustain or retrieve this imaginary harmony, ideological/repressive systems ignore the fundamental ontological truth of our being; the negativity at the core of our subjectivity, or lack in Lacanian theory of the subject. In fact, it is due to the existence of this negativity causing, as Zupančič puts, "the inexistence of the relation" that the issue of non-relation turns out to take on political significance (p. 89). But how does the notion of non-relation take on such a status within a psycho-political investigation? Elaborating on the notion of non-relation, Zupančič writes:

What the (Lacanian) non-relation means is precisely that there is no neutrality of (social) being.

The non-relation is not a simple absence of the relation, but refers to a constitutive curving of the

discursive space – the latter is ‘curved’ by the missing element of the relation. In this sense, to

conceive democracy, for example, as a more or less successful negotiation between elements of a

fundamentally neutral social being is to overlook – indeed, to repress – this consequential

negativity, operative at the very core of social order. (p. 91, emphasis in original)

Zupančič argues further, "for Lacan the non-relation is a priori in the precise sense that it appears with every empirical relation as its inherent condition of possibility, and not as its Other" (p. 91). Accordingly, it is only through acknowledging this primordial non- relation, rather than ignoring it, that "political invention and intervention" becomes possible (p. 91).

In this chapter, the notion of non-relation in Shahriar Mandanipour's novel, Censoring an Iranian Love Story (2009), will be discussed through the concept of love/sexuality in the Lacanian sense of the word. Here the slash between love and sexuality does not mean that they are conceptualised in the same way by Lacan. However, whenever Lacan has discussed one, the other has also come with it. What, in particular in relation to the novel under analysis in this chapter, justifies the juxtaposition of the two terms is the way their

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intermingling can be used for critiquing political issuess. Accordingly, first, I will elaborate on how, from a Lacanian perspective, love and sexuality make links with politics.

6.2 Love, sexuality and politics

In relation to the status of sexuality within a psychoanalytic political project, Zupančič

(2016) states, "it is my strongest conviction that it is precisely here, with the question of sexuality and what it does with it (conceptually), that one has to situate the properly political dimension of the Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis" (p. 86). In the same line,

Šumič (2017) remarks, the ultimate aim of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis is to reveal "the coming into being of the subject, beyond its identifications, as a response of the real, ultimately, as a response to the impossibility of the sexual relationship" (p. 24). By encouraging the subject to identify with his/her symptom (that is that which, as

Stavrakakis (1999) points out, "interrupts the consistency of the field of our constructions of reality…by embodying the repressed jouissance" (Šumič, 2017, p. 64)), "Lacan signifies that psychoanalysis targets what, in the speaking being, is most singular: a mode of jouissance that would make up for the absence of the sexual relationship" (p. 27). In fact, one way to explain the impossibility/absence of the sexual relationship is to refer to the common ontological feature of the subject and the object according to which both are inflicted by lack. In this sense, as Vighi (2015) remarks, "the Lacanian subject is this

'concrete presence of absence', which correspond to the ontological crack within objective reality" (p. 11). Since this issue has been delineated in the theoretical discussion chapter,

I do not get into it more here and, instead, show how love and sexuality turn out to acquire such a political role in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

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Fabio Vighi (2017) in his article entitled 'L-D-L’, or: Lacan’s dialectics of love (in loveless times)' has presented a comprehensive and meticulous reading of love as a political notion in Lacan. Discussing from a 'dialectical' perspective, Vighi points out,

"Lacan’s ruminations on love follow a pattern that we could describe, half-jokingly, as

L-D-L’, where L’ stands for the production of love out of desire’s (D) mediation of the initial understanding of love (L)" (p. 67). Elucidating this schema of love, Vighi observes:

…what should be highlighted is the significance of the link between the first sequence (L-D),

where Lacan’s theory of desire, in connection with objet a, the phallus and jouissance, provides a

way out of the deadlock of the first definition of love, and the second sequence (D-L’), where

desire, in connection with the Real of sexual difference, produces the new conceptualization of

love in Seminar XX. (p. 67)

According to Vighi, it is through an elaboration of love within the realm of the real that

Lacan comes up with the idea of the occurrence of "an enigmatic exchange of lacks" in love; hence Lacan's famous claim: "'Love is to give what one does not have, to someone who does not want it'" (p. 67). This definition of love turns out to take on a political function by founding the human relation fundamentally and primordially on the basis of non-relation instead of harmony and symmetry. Taking into account this ontological fact,

Stavrakakis (1999) refers to "the fantasmatic promise" of political ideologies which by referring to a fabricated and fictional "lost state of harmony, unity and fullness…to a pre- symbolic real" aim to propagate their ideologies (p. 52). What political ideologies do in practice is sustain "this fantasmatic harmony…by the neutralisation of the symptom and of the real, by a negation of the generalized lack that crosses the field of the social" (p.

65). In fact, this is the founding principle of an ideology without which it loses its functionality. In this way, it can be argued that the life of an ideology necessarily depends on ignoring the fundamental ontological truth of our being; the fact that we are created 148

by an essentially unfillable lack which in its negative appearance guarantees our being in the world. Probably no notion in Lacan like love/sexuality can explain this observation.

As Vighi (2017) remarks, "love [in Lacan] entails embracing the inherently traumatic deadlock of sexual difference as the elementary fabric of the human condition", hence

"acknowledge[ing] the lack of foundation of the socio-symbolic order" (p. 68).

Taking the above discussion into account, in the following section I will analyse

Mandanipour's novel based on a Lacanian reading of love/politics.

The convoluted synthesis of love/sexuality and politics in Censoring an Iranian Love

Story starts from its title, where censoring and love are juxtaposed. Far from this judicious selection of title, the story follows a meta-fictional genre according to which two parallel stories while being narrated separately, at the end, are mixed and form another story which can stand alone. Although dividing the novel into three stories might not do justice to what Mandanipour has done, it just helps us see in any case – either as a single story within which other stories are born or as two stories which give birth to a third one – love/sexuality and politics collude in the cultural politics of the Iranian society after the

1979 revolution. The seemingly love story is about two young boy and girl called Dara and Sara. This story is written in bold font and some of its words, phrases and sentences are crossed out, indicating that these are candidates to censorship in case the book was to be published in Iran. The novel opens with Dara and Sara story:

In the air of Tehran, the scent of spring blossoms, carbon monoxide, and the

perfumes and poisons of the tales of One Thousand and One Nights sway on

top of each other, they whisper together. The city drifts in time. (p. 1)

Another story deals with the author's commenting on Dara and Sara's story, and his discussion with Mr. Pterovich who is introduced as follows:

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In a particular department at this ministry [the Ministry of Cultural and Islamic Guidance], a man

with the alias Porfiry Petrovich (yes, the detective in charge of solving Raskolnikov’s murders) is

responsible for carefully reading books, in particular novels and short story collections, and

especially love stories. He underlines every word, every sentence, every paragraph, or even every

page that is indecent and that endangers public morality and the time-honored values of society.

If there are too many such underlines, the book will likely be considered unworthy of print; if there

are not that many, the publisher and the writer will be informed that they must simply revise certain

words or sentences. For Mr. Petrovich this job is not just a vocation; it is a moral and religious

responsibility. In other words, a holy profession. He must not allow immoral and corruptive words

and phrases to appear before the eyes of simple and innocent people, especially the youth, and

pollute their pure minds". (p. 7)

In fact, the author has submitted the love story of Dara and Sara to the Iranian Ministry of Cultural and Islamic Guidance and, as a result, is called up by Mr. Petrovich to explain about some issues in the story. As the story goes on the third story forms: Mr. Petrovich's obsession with Sara and his attempt to remove Dara from his way.

While the first story is supposed to be about love and its aftermath, from the very start of the novel political issues are intermingled with the destiny of the two main characters:

In front of the main entrance of Tehran University, on Liberty Street, a crowd of students is

gathered in political protest. With their fists raised they shout, “Death to captivity!” Across

the street, members of the Party of God, with clenched fists and perhaps chains and brass

knuckles in their pockets, shout “Death to the Liberal …”

A short distance away, on the sidewalk, with her back to the steel fence lodged in the three-

foot-tall tone wall surrounding Tehran University, stands a girl [Sara] who, unlike most girls

in the world but like most girls in Iran, is wearing a black headscarf and a long black coat

as a coverall. (p. 1)

While the above quotation prepares the reader to get a picture of the context in which the story of Dara and Sara is narrated, what tangibly gives political undertone to this love

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story is the way through which the two characters start their first communication. Both

Sara and Dara have membership at a public library and it is at this library that Dara sees

Sara and falls in love with her. Sara studies Iranian literature at Tehran University and

Dara, previously a student of filmmaking at the same university, has been expelled from there because of his political ideas. He spends most of his time at that library, staying on the look-out for times when Sara comes to borrow books. In one of those occasions when

Sara comes to the library to borrow The Blind Owl, the banned novel authored by Sadegh

Hedaiat, the most acclaimed contemporary Iranian author, Dara eavesdrops Sara's conversation with the librarian:

Sara asked the librarian:

“Do you have The Blind Owl?”

The librarian firmly replied:

“No, miss. We don’t have The Blind Owl at this library.”

Sara did not give up.

“Of course I know you don’t have The Blind Owl on the shelves. I meant if it is among the books

you have removed from the shelves, could you make an exception and lend it to me for a few

days … I study literature and I have to read The Blind Owl for an important project.”

The librarian, this time more sternly, said:

“Miss! I told you we don’t have these banned books; and by the way, you’re the idiot, not me. I know there is no way they would give you a project on The Blind Owl at the university.” (p. 14)

After listening to this conversation, Dara decides to sell all of his books, including The

Blind Owl, on the pavement near Sara's house. And he waits for the day when Sara, by any chance, stops in front of his books spread on some sheets of newspaper and asks for the book. Finally, after seven days, Sara stops there and asks Dara if he sells The Blind

Owl:

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She asked its price. Contrary to the general practice of selling rare or banned books at a much

higher price than the list price on the back cover, the young man asked for very little money. And

in a trembling voice he added:

“… The price of one Winston cigarette, miss. On the condition that you read it carefully. Please

cherish this book … Read it very carefully, much more carefully than you would other books …

Carefully, accurately …”. (p. 15)

And it is from here that the first communication between Dara and Sara, via the 'codes' that Dara has left for Sara in The Blind Owl, get started. For a long time, before they meet in person a couple of months after their first communication, they exchange many letters through the coded books that Dara asks Sara to borrow from the library, though the other books are not banned as they are among the books that the library lends to its members.

But what is, both literally and figuratively, important here is the first book (that is The

Blind Owl) which helps Dara to send his first message to Sara. Ironically, a banned book, a book removed from the cultural sphere of the society which is also incidentally about love, turns out to play a determining role in the way the two characters become familiar with each other and then fall in love. But how does this incident take on a political function?

The above reading resonates with the argument discussed at the beginning of the chapter on the following ground. The very element that acts like a trigger for the love story and consequences thereof has been banned by the state. In a sense, the state has attempted to remove, through censorship, a cultural product (here The Blind Owl) from the society as it deems the latter to be threatening to the homogeneity developed by/through the state's ideology. Dara uses that very opportunity to start a relationship considered illegal/immoral according to the state. Here Dara's act can be seen as that which disturbs the ideological elimination of the demarcation between the private and the

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social. If the state's decision to deny a permit to a cultural product is deemed as a homogenising act – homogenising in the sense that that cultural product can challenge the homogeneity advertised by the state – then Dara's resorting to the same eliminated element to start a private journey can be considered a political act. Put another way, here love as that which belongs to the private realm uses an element from the social realm, hence the politicization of an inherently non-political notion – love.

6. 3 Unnameable as love: Sara as the embodiment of love/politics

The entanglement of love with politics in the novel under analysis can also be associated with Sara's character. In a sense, love, embodied in Sara's character, is associated with uncertainty, complexity and unpredictability. Sara who later sits at the centre of the conflict between Dara and Mr. Petrovic can be called the unnamable subject who resists undergoing a neat and well-defined categorisation. While, in general, in Mandanipour’s novel the notion of uncertainty is at play in different aspects of the story, including the points of view of narrator, narrative structure, and characters, it is in the last of these elements (i.e. the character) that uncertainty, love and politics are intertwined.

Mandanipour in the opening pages of his novel reveals it. The story opens with the description of students' demonstration around the Revolution Square, the centre of political demonstrations and gatherings in Tehran. In the chaotic atmosphere resulted by the demonstration, Mandanipour draws our attention to Sara who is ostensibly distinct from her fellows. While the two sides of the demonstration, i.e. the dissidents and the state’s supporters, are identifiable with the political slogans written on their demonstration banners, Sara carries a banner which reads:

DEATH TO FREEDOM, DEATH TO CAPITIVITY (p. 2, capitalised in the original)

Commenting on this slogan, Mandanipour writes: 153

It is a strange slogan that I don’t believe has ever been seen or heard under the rule of any

dictatorial, Communist, populist, or even so-called liberal regime. And I don’t believe it will ever

be heard under the rule of any future regimes that for now remain nameless. (p. 2, emphasis added)

Such a mysterious depiction of Sara has been repeated in different parts of the novel. In explaining the literary interest of Sara, Mandanipour writes:

In fact, when Sara reads a contemporary story, she reads the white between the lines, and wherever

a sentence is left incomplete and ends with three dots like this “…”, her mind grows very active

and begins to imagine what the eliminated words may be. (p. 12)

As the story goes on, Sara betrays more complexity, so much so that the author writes:

“The truth is that I too am surprised that Sara, this character that I created, has suddenly become so complicated” (p. 147). And somewhere else he writes: “As far as I can remember, I have from the start written the Sara of my story with a sad and sober personality. I cannot figure out at what point in the story she developed such a sense of humour” (p. 147).

All in all, Sara has been depicted as an ephemeral entity, a subject who resists being categorised by a pre-determined (ideological) label. This observation resonates with what

Terry Eagleton (2008) associates with female character as depicted in some works of arts, including literature:

The woman is both 'inside' and 'outside' male society, both a romantically idealized member of it

and a victimized outcast. She is sometimes what stands between man and chaos, and sometimes

the embodiment of chaos itself. This is why she troubles the neat categories of such a regime,

blurring its well-defined boundaries. Women are represented within male-governed society, fixed

by sign, image, meaning, yet because they are also the 'negative' of that social order there is always

in them something which is left over, superfluous, unrepresentable, which refuses to be figured

there. (p. 165, emphasis added) 154

The pivotal role and status of Sara as the embodiment of love – love as that which embodies idiosyncrasy and singularity of the subject, rather than as a homogenising element– can also be examined in relation to Mr. Petrovic's reaction to Sara's behavior.

The way that Mr. Petrovic sees Sara is not dissimilar to the way he reads and decodes literary works. While Sara’s first intervention into the story is coupled with her more or less undefinable, mysterious character, her next noticeable intervention is closely linked with another controversial phenomenon in Iran: contemporary literature, the literature being often silenced or ignored by the state. In this sense, one can argue that Sara embodies the works of those dissent artists who, with the aim of circumscribing the censorship, intentionally produce their works with higher ambiguity. This observation also resonates with the way Dara and Sara start and continue their communications. The context (the public library) in which Dara sees Sara for the first time and the books, particularly the first one (The Blind Owl) in which they encodes their messages indicate that Sara belongs to a world in which literary devices are tangibly at play. In order to enter this world, one needs to treat it like a piece of imaginative work. And this is the way Mr.

Petrovic treats Sara.

This depiction of mysteriousness demonstrated in the female character of the novel can also be discussed in relation to – or maybe in contrast to – the homogenising ideology of the state. Sara, the undefinable, unpredictable and unpresentable subject, stands in stark contrast to the definable subject of ideology whose singularity is dissolved in the unifying principles of post-revolution state. While the state demands its subject to show conformity to the pre-ordained and apparently unambiguous path of the revolution, Sara embodies ambiguity and unpredictability. If the ambiguity of the literary works submitted to the

Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (which is represented by Mr. Petrovic

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described by the author as “part detective, part criminal court judge and quite imposing”

(p. 33)) causes the latter to be suspicious of the intention behind any imaginative works of art, the elusive and enigmatic character of Sara can give rise to similar reaction.

6.4 Love/sexuality as a threat to the censor's identity

At the beginning of this chapter the notion of 'non-relation' – as an ontological concept in the Lacanian political critique – was discussed in relation to love/sexuality. In fact, in

Lacan both love and sexuality are inherently founded on a non-relational ground. But it is the existence of this apparently paradoxical presence of absence – the non-relation – that induces the subject not to cede desiring. In other words, if the subject wants to keep on desiring, s/he should accept the constitutive non-fillable gap. It is in light of this ontological reality that Šumič (2017) points out, the ultimate aim of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis is to reveal "the coming into being of the subject, beyond its identifications, as a response of the real, ultimately, as a response to the impossibility of the sexual relationship" (p. 24). And in the same line of thought Vighi (2017) observes that "love [in Lacan] entails embracing the inherently traumatic deadlock of sexual difference as the elementary fabric of the human condition", hence "acknowledge[ing] the lack of foundation of the socio-symbolic order" (p. 68). This observation can be examined in relation to the particular reaction of Mr. Petrovic to the issue of love and sexuality.

Entangled in a complicated love/sex story, Mr. Petrovic, here as the representative of the state and its censoring mechanisms, shows why and how the censoring state falls in a paradoxical situation that can causes self-damage – to the ideological state. Mr. Petrovic, on the one hand, has problems with those stories, including that of Dara and Sara, in which a sexual/sensual act, whatever indirectly depicted, occur. But, on the other hand, it

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is the existence of the same so-called obscene scenes that makes Mr. Petrovic decide to remove Dara. The decision to remove Dara, as his rival, can indicate that he has fallen love in Sara. Although the context in which these issues are discussed is a fictional one, but they can, albeit in its limited scope, lay bare the worldview existing behind the censorship mechanism. This entanglement of love/sexuality with politics, on the side of

Mr. Petrovic, can be examined from a Lacanian approach to critiquing ideology. But how does this issue acquire political significance? In order to answer this question, once again

I elaborate on the Lacanian critique of ideology.

When the issue of ideology is discussed within a Lacanian framework, the notion of fantasy plays a pivotal role. According to Lacanian scholars, all ideological structures are fundamentally founded on fantasmatic scenarios. Adopting a Lacanian perspective, Mari

Ruti (2010b) presents a succinct account of the way fantasies work. She remarks:

Lacan’s most familiar account of fantasy formations, from the early years of his work, targets the

imaginary (narcissistic) fantasies that delude the subject into thinking that it is more agentic,

coherent, and self-identical than it actually is. Such fantasies falsely promise the end of alienation

by suturing the subject’s lack or self-division. For instance, the fantasy of a unique or rounded

personality obscures the subject’s ontological void, offering the comforting illusion of a full and

steady interiority; it turns the subject into a person, into an individual who possesses an intrinsic

worth and significance, as well as an inviolable psychic life. (p. 2)

While Ruti's remark on fantasy is more concerned with the formation of fantasy before the subject's entering into the realm of the symbolic, it can be argued that all ideological structures apply the same strategy to grip their subjects. Crucial to this strategy is the notion of lack. In a sense, what links fantasy with the critique of ideology is the notion of lack, lack as the ontological pre-condition for the subject's entering into the symbolic.

Fantasies, as Ruti pointed out above, are made to 'suture' the subject's lack. Jason Glynos

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(2001), from an explicitly political perspective, has elaborated on the relation between fantasy, lack and the symbolic:

Lacan’s formula for fantasy is $◊a, where the lozenge can be taken to denote a relation of

impossibility. It tells us that fantasy stages the impossible relation between subject as lack, as

desiring, on the one hand, and fantasmatic object of desire on the other. We know that there is no

subject without the empty master signifier, without the symbolic order…This means that if fantasy

is disturbed or radically put into question, this will have repercussions for the consistency of our

symbolic reality; at the extreme, this means that the disintegration of one’s fantasmatic frame will

coincide with the feeling of a ‘loss of reality’. In short, we have the idea that fantasy supports our

symbolically-constituted reality. (p. 201)

Implied in the above quote is that our social reality has been intricately tied to fantasies, and if this tie, for any reasons, is disturbed, then no clear boundary between reality and fantasy can be imagined, hence the disintegration of reality. However, while sustaining fantasy is of crucial importance for the social reality to work properly, getting too close to our fantasies can be quite dangerous. Accordingly, there has to be always a distance between what we desire and what we achieve. In this Regard, Glynos (2001) remarks

"The more distant the object of desire, the more enticing; the more accessible it becomes, the more it turns into something horrible. Qua function, the fantasy conceals–evokes the ultimate horror of the real deadlock characterizing the constitutive incompleteness of the symbolic order" (p. 202). In order to strike a balance, Glynos observes, "the fantasmatic object must remain hidden so that the symbolic order can retain its consistency and hegemonic hold" (p. 208).

The current of events in Mandanipour's novels shows that the aforementioned balance undergoes a sort of disturbance. In a sense, Mandanipour in his novel attempts to show what happens when the censor, the agent of the ideology, gets too close to the fantasmatic object. If the ideology that Mr. Petrovic believes in gets, at least part of, its authenticity 158

from tabooing any reference to sexual issues, then any reference to the latter can be thought of a threat to the coherence and integration of the hegemonic ideology. In order for this (Islamic) ideology to work smoothly, it needs to keep its subjects away from any issues that can endanger the fantasamtic structure on which that ideology is founded. But what the author of Mandanipour's novel does is making the censor too close the fantasmatic object. When in the last part of the story we realise that Mr. Petrovic has been engaged in the love story of Dara and Sara, we can see that he is no longer able to distinguish between reality and fiction. He was just responsible for reading the story, but because of getting too close to what he was supposed to keep away, he ended up being engaged in the doomed story. If according to the Islamic principle the curb on love/sexual issues is put with the purpose of implying that under this curb there are things that should not be disclosed if the subject wants to enjoy, the author of Mandanipour's novel picks this curb up and shows that there is nothing special under it. This practice reminds us of the famous quip by Lacan: there is no sexual relationship. But it is exactly that which Mr.

Petrovic and his fellows do not want to know. In Žižek, this reaction is tantamount to the

"fetishist disavowal: ‘I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know’"

(pp. 45–6). In other words, it seems that Mr. Petrovic (and the ideology he is affiliated with) does know that there is nothing behind a sexual act, but he disavows it, because any attempts at unveiling the object of fantasy can put him it the dangerous situation where he has to face what Glynos (2001) calls "the ultimate horror of the real deadlock characterizing the constitutive incompleteness of the symbolic order [or the lack of complete enjoyment in a love/sexual event]" (p. 202). In a sense, the censor's problem with the sensual sections of the story narrated by the author of Dara and Sara is not related to their anti-religious nature. Rather his sensitivity to such scenes is because they lay bare

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the mechanism of enjoyment and then clearly show the nuances of those moments. And it is that which Mr. Petrovic is afraid of. As far as there is veil over the object of fantasy, the subject can make his/her own object without any limitations. As such, unveiling the incompleteness of the object of fantasy restricts the fantasmatic world of the censor.

Taking into account the above analysis, I can argue that there is an important point behind choosing a metafictional genre for writing a story dealing with censorship. It seems that by adopting such genre, Mandanipour wants to show that in the censor's world fiction and reality convolutedly overlap. In other words, how a censor can read and reject a work of art if s/he does not mix the world of fiction and reality to a non-demarcated state? This argument resonates with the distinction Glynos (2001) makes between ideology and non-ideology:

In effect, Žižek's Lacanian approach tries to effect a displacement from the epistemological

opposition illusion/reality to an ontological opposition symbolic Other/lack in the symbolic Other,

between fantasmatically-structured reality on the one hand, and the impossibility of a fully

consistent reality on the other. In this view, fantasy and reality are on the side of ideology; whereas

the lack in the Other, which appears in the form of its opposite (the fantasmatic side of the objet

petit a), is on the side of non-ideology. (p. 210)

As the agent of the post-revolution ideology, Mr. Petrovic is entangled with

"fantasmatically-structured reality", the reality founded on the disavowal of "the lack in the Other". In fact, the combination of the two stories in the novels (the love story of Dara and Sara, and the story formed between the author of the love story and Mr. Petrovic) which forms a third story can verify the above observation. While the story of Dara and

Sara follows the characteristics of a fictional work, what goes on between the author of the love story and Mr. Petrovic is rooted in the realities of Iranian cultural politics. But

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the boundary between these two stories is removed when at the end of novel the author

(Shahriar), Mr. Petrovic, Dara and Sara are seen in the same location:

He [Mr. Petrovic] says:

“I think it has turned out to be a nice educational story! Now put your creativity to work so that Sara ends up loathing Dara.”

His eyes have regained their frightening glint of shrewdness.

“Don’t force me to take action myself. Get Sara out of that house of sin.”

[…]

I say:

“Sir, don’t kid yourself! It’s too late. In the process of writing this story, I have again come to the conclusion that writing a love story with a happy ending is not in the destiny of writers of my generation

… and my work on this story is done. I no longer have any control over it or its characters.”

“What do you mean? Why are you talking nonsense? Start writing.”

“Your Excellency, I can’t! I have been completely scissored out of this story. I’m done …”

Ask me:

How?

So that to you and to Mr. Petrovich I say:

“Listen! Sara wants to speak for herself.”

Sara tells Dara:

“In that flower patch in your front yard … That jasmine bush …”

“Yes, I have been meaning to prune it, but I haven’t had the time.”

“No, don’t… To allow a plant the freedom to spread throughout the garden is beautiful.”

Dara and I, and Mr. Petrovich, look at Sara’s beautiful sentence in awe. Sara stares at the two violet veins on her ankle. She strokes them with her fingertip and rubs her tired ankle.

Then, as though she has suddenly remembered something, her eyes widen; she freezes. 161

“What’s wrong, Sara? What happened?”

“When I walked into the yard, the first thing I saw was that jasmine bush … To be honest, it frightened me. Now I realize that it seemed as if a pair of terrifying eyes were looking at me from inside the bush.”

“That’s impossible … There is no one in the house except you and me.”

“But I am sure I saw it. Maybe when you left the front door open someone came in and hid in the bush.”

Dara, with his heart beating out of his chest, from the corner of his bedroom curtain looks at the jasmine bush. His eyes are wide with fear. It seems there is something in its branches.

Later, when terrified he runs to the yard, there he will see the corpse of a hunchback midget staring at the front door of the house …

And all I know is that before it is too late, as fast as possible, even if with a flying carpet, I must get to my house and lock the door from the inside …(pp. 292-3)

This intertwining of fiction and reality – reality as depicted in this fictional work dealing with what often goes on between the censor and the work under examination by him/her – can have political implication from a Lacanian approach to critiquing ideology.

Mr. Petrovic's, and by generalisation all agents of post-revolution ideology, authority relies on the fantasamtic configuration of the reality. In the reality constructed by/through

Islamic ideology any explicit mentioning of love/sexuality is forbidden. In a sense, the fabric of this reality is constructed based on its exclusion of some political and socio- cultural ideas, including talking and writing publicly about the materiality of sexual matters. Love/sexuality in the ideological state works properly as far as its 'real' nature – real in the Lacanian sense of the term – that is the subject's ever failing attempt to completely fulfill its desire is not disclosed. This function of ideology is disturbed as soon as the 'reality' of love/sex is unveiled. Laying bare the naked reality behind the sensuality

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of the love story, the author of Mandanipour's love story makes Mr. Petrovic face the incompleteness of the symbolic. In a sense, he encounters the 'meta-fantastic reality', the lack in the Other, of the symbolic. And what literary device can demonstrate this transformation of reality better than metafiction?

There is a point in the above discussion that needs to be elaborated on. Here this important question might be raised: If Mr. Petrovic's confrontation with the incompleteness of the symbolic helps him traverse the illusive fantasy of wholeness, then what is the problem with such confrontation? In other words, if, according to Ruti (2010b, p. 9), "the subject’s confrontation with its lack in the long run creates an opening for more agile and openended psychic scenarios than what fantasies (which, as we have learned, cover over lack) can offer", then Mr. Petrovic's confrontation with the lack underlying the symbolic can also help him traverse his illusive fantasies. This could be an authentic observation if we disregard the ideological standpoint of Mr. Petrovic. Ideological fantasies on which Mr. Petrovic and his institution rely are made, as Ruti points out, to keep "us captive to uncreative social arrangements and attachments" (p. 2). As such, if these attachments and arrangements are disturbed as a result of the subject's traversal of fantasies, then the whole existence of that ideology will be questioned. That's why if for the non-ideological subject (if such a subject can be envisaged), traversing his/her fantasies "creates an opening for more agile and openended psychic scenarios", for an ideological subject such as Mr. Petrovic this will result in the annihilation of the foundation that justifies his existence.

Conclusion

When we think of homogenising strategies within a hegemonic system, we might not notice that this collectivist ideology must necessarily silence every single distinct voice

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in order to converge all voices around a unitary one. In a sense, a hegemonic ideology fails to actualise its causes if a singular voice emerges within its scope. It is in such situation that seemingly non-political events and phenomena, due to their singular nature, take on political function. Love/sexuality in Censoring an Iranian Love Story plays such role. However, what gives such status to love/sexuality is not its particular content.

Rather, it is its apparently paradoxical yet inherently constitutive non-relational nature of love that turns it to a political, anti-hegemonic entity. Love/sexuality in Censoring an

Iranian Love Story embodies the complex, non-linear, paradoxical and unpredictable reality of human being's life. And it's due to harboring such features that it is censored in the ideological society of post-revolution Iran.

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Chapter 7 This rotten foetus was once a

(fantasised) hero: The saturation of the symbolic

in The Colonel (by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi)

Introduction

In one of his most famous and albeit controversial quips, Lacan (2007 [1991) in an answer to revolutionary students (of May 1968) remarks, "The revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome – of ending up as the master's discourse. This is what experience has proved. What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one" (p. 239, emphasis added). In Boucher's (2006) words, revolution for Lacan is "a mere rotation of discursive positions rather than the elimination of mastery" (p. 276).

What is obvious today is that the seemingly dictator-like masters of 20th century have been replaced by less tangible yet more gripping "invisible hand of market" (Zupančič,

2016, p. 91). But to what extent this observation is tenable in relation to 1979 Iranian revolution? Is there any evidence affirming the 'rotational' (vicious) cycle of revolutionary discourse of the 1979 event?

The notion of revolution, in the political sense of the term, has appeared in the works of thinkers who are, to different degrees, inspired by Lacan. Alain Badiou, Slovoj Žižek,

Todd McGowan, Yannis Stavrakakis and Alenka Zupančič are just some examples among others. The central theme in the analysis of the novel under analysis (The Colonel) is revolution as well. From a politico-psychoanalytic (Lacanian) perspective, the notion of revolution lends itself well to the delineation of the Lacanian tripartite schema (i.e. the

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imaginary, the symbolic and the real). In fact, from this view, a revolution needs a fantasmatic investment (the imaginary) in "revolutionary projects [which] involve attempts to transform the prevailing status of signification [the symbolic]" (McGowan,

2013, p. 237). And the energy that the revolution needs in order to realise its transformative potential is supplied by the real. In The Colonel this reading is challenged through a particular manifestation of the Iranian society before and after the 1979 revolution. In fact, in this novel one can see how the revolution loses its transformative potential and, instead, turns into a signifier bereft of any transformative potentials.

In order to show how the above argument is tenable, I will refer to notions such as fantasy and utopia. However, before doing the latter, I will compare different perceptions of the symbolic as the aforementioned terms are discussed based on a particular reading of the symbolic. Doing the latter is of particular importance to any literary analysis because, as Parkin-Gounelas (2001) remarks:

According to a Lacanian reading, to write or to read is to enter a Symbolic order where meaning

and desire are mediated through trans-individual structures of otherness which both possess and

dispossess us at the same time. Language … institutes a relation of being to loss, loss of meaning

(the noncoincidence of the signifier with the signified), which symbolizes a loss of primary unity

with the first 'other', the mother, in the Oedipus." (p. xii)

In what follows major readings of the notion of the symbolic as adopted by Lacanian thinkers are discussed.

7.1 The symbolic: restrictive/productive or restrictive/prohibitive?

The symbolic order which turns out to find an essential status in Lacan’s theory is closely linked to the anthropological studies of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1949). By introducing the 166

notion of “symbolic function”, as Evans (1996) writes, Lévi-Strauss demonstrates how

“the social world is structured by certain laws which regulate kinship relations and the exchange of gifts” (p. 203). In the structuralist approach of Lévi-Strauss “objects or their elements are related according to systems that are not immediately apparent”, hence it is neither their “nature” nor “their specific properties” that assign particular meanings to them, but rather there is underlying hidden relations or ‘laws’ that determine their social status (Feher-Gurewich, 1996, p. 6). It is precisely through this notion of law – which operate beyond human beings’ instinctive apparatus and determine how people exchange their ideas and things – that Lacan attributes a specific dimension to ‘language’. For

Lacan, communication as achieved through exchanging of ideas obeys particular laws which are determined within a particular ‘structure’ and exchanged through language.

Accordingly, there is an inevitably symbiotic relation among law, structure and language through which language is able to perform specific ‘functions’. The important point to note is that while “the symbolic is essentially a linguistic dimension”, it does not exhaust the realm of language. Language has some function in the two other registers, i.e. the imaginary and the real. What differentiates the linguistic dimension of the symbolic from the other two registers is the defining role that ‘signifier’ plays in the symbolic. As such, the symbolic is characterised by “a dimension in which elements have no positive existence but which are constituted purely by virtue of their mutual differences” (Evans,

1996, p. 203).

Generally, what has been presented in relation to the notion of the symbolic is probably more indicative of a restrictive conception of the term. The concept of the symbolic, based on particular perspectives that different Lacanian thinkers adopt, can acquire different

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connotations. In general, Lacanian political thinkers can be divided into two camps based on their approaches to conceptualising the symbolic.

Tracy McNulty (2014) believes that, generally, the concept of the symbolic, from a restrictive/prohibitive perspective, has been discussed from two perspectives which almost leave no room for subjective creativity. She argues that these two conceptions of the symbolic are more prohibitive than productive. The first, of the two, account conceives of the symbolic “as a normative order, assimilated to cultural values and ideals and the primarily patriarchal institutions and practices that sustain them: religious law, the institutions of marriage and inheritance, the mechanisms of kinship exchange, the nuclear family” (pp. 7-8). This conception of the symbolic is adopted both by conservative social critics who believe that the stability of a society is guaranteed by resorting to the aforementioned institutions, and at the same time by those critics who seek to question traditional and conservative cultural values to "enlarge, or dismantle them in the name of newer, generally more progressive configurations" (p. 8). McNulty believes that although both of these readings are grounded on some real and authentic observations, the first account (i.e. the normative) "falsely reduces the symbolic to specific contents" aiming to supress any unorthodox voices (p. 8). The second group, she argues, through conceiving of the subject as a "predicate-driven" entity "(in terms of gender, class, or ethnicity, for example) forecloses any real understanding of the subject

(of language, of the unconscious, of desire) as distinct from the ego or social actor" (p.

8). While the latter group aims to dismantle the restrictive field of normative/normalising values and ideals and, as a result, create more possibilities for the emergence of non- normative values, it ultimately just "leaves the contents model unquestioned" (p. 8).

While apparently struggling for two different causes, these two approaches take up similar

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conceptions of the symbolic which "consign the social to the field of the imaginary" (p.

9), hence the domain of ego ideals as theorised by Freud.

Here it is worth elaborating further upon the antinormative approach to the notion of the symbolic as the current thesis, more or less, identifies with this approach. Probably the best representatives of this approach, as McNulty (2014) observes, are Žižek and

Badiou. The symbolic as defined by these thinkers is “a blind, mechanistic automatism” which is realised in the form of “an impersonal and ignorant bureaucracy, incapable of acknowledging the subject who appeals to it for recognition or recompense” (p. 9). For

Žižek, the symbolic is the locus of the Other, where it imposes its authoritative force and, as a result, alienates and dehumanises the subject. The mathematical formulation of the symbolic as offered up by Badiou, illuminating though, unloads the social relations inherent within the fabric of the symbolic. McNulty believes these “ultrastructural definitions” of the symbolic are particularly important for their emphasis on the ideological apparatus infiltrated into the fabric of the symbolic. The symbolic in this view tends to evacuate the subject from any revolutionary motives. However, she argues, this conception of the symbolic tends to “lose something essential, namely, the idea that the symbolic sustains life in common by supporting the conditions of credibility of social coexistence and constraining our subjective desires to find a public expression” (p. 9). All in all, what these antinormative accounts present is a negative picture of the symbolic and the constraints it harbours.

Focusing on and acknowledging the constraints within the symbolic order, McNulty argues that these very constraints can be the locus of potential social change. She affirms this positive aspect of the constraints within the symbolic by arguing that what Badiou and Žižek offer as a solution to the problems that contemporary subject grapples with 169

have their roots in the imaginary or the real, hence excluding the symbolic and everything it connotes. Therefore, she critiques antinormative approach for excluding one of the sources from which it would be possible to extract emancipatory possibilities. In this regard, she contends, this approach tends:

…to contribute to an understanding of the real as what is excluded from the social, and thus to

collapse the symbolic with the hegemonic representations. The antinormative approach tends to

eschew limits and constraints altogether, aligning them with exclusionary norms and traditions.

To the limits implied in a symbolic logic of difference, it opposes a logic of diversity: against the

finitude of a lacking field, it affirms a potentially infinite number of possible sites and positions.

(p. 10)

For Žižek, the real, excluded from the symbolic, must be reclaimed so that it can contribute to the creation of new identities (Dean, 2004). McNulty (2014) argues behind such a reified conceptualisation of the real, which can lead to new forms of identity, is a material “existing order” persistently infiltrated in the symbolic and resistant to undergoing transformation. From this perspective, “only through the eruption of an

“event”, an explosive encounter with an inassimilable real” it would be possible to provide space for the emergence of the new (p. 10). In this view, the order in the symbolic is equivalent to limits and constraints, hence leaving no way out to the new without disintegrating these constraints.

McNulty argues that a common mistake shared by aforementioned approaches is that they disregard or do not pay adequate attention to Lacan’s argument regarding the historicisation of the symbolic. In other words, the symbolic does not consist of a set of unchangeable and stable norms and values following a deterministic route and being inattentive to the particularities and idiosyncrasies of a given era. Rather, she remarks,

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the symbolic, particularly with regards to the experience of the modern era, is susceptible to undergoing more or less fundamental changes. As a consequence, what is valued today for any number of (un)predictable reasons can turn out to be devalued in future. It is in light of this argument that Lacan, instead of opting for the burial of the symbolic – a belief particularly adopted by some of Lacan’s contemporaries who saw the symbolic as the locus of patriarchal fictions responsible for the majority of suppressive and oppressive acts – Lacan believes in a different solution: “a renewal of the symbolic” (emphasis in original, p. 11). It is only in light of such a scenario that, as MacCannell (2002) notes, it would be possible to embrace and sustain “the most contradictory and conflicting of dreams and desires” (p. 71, cited in McNulty, 2014, p. 11). Form such a perspective, as

McNulty comments, “the structural function of the limits and constraints” embedded in the fabric of the symbolic, while taking on an affirmative status, are no longer reduced to prohibitive rules preventing the emergence of any creative or productive acts (p. 11). But the essential question that might be raised here is ‘how do such constraints bring about opportunities for creativity or productivity?’

McNulty believes that by examining carefully the “most elementary and structural form” of the symbolic and its relation to “the function of constraints and limits”, it would be possible to answer this question (p. 13). As such, she argues that the symbolic is not only the realm of constraints and limits, but it also harbors the seeds of desire. In fact, as

Lacan posits, the relationship between desire and constraint is based on an interdependence which constitutes the essence of the symbolic. Accordingly, examining one without considering the other not only presents a defective understanding of the symbolic but also distorts the meaning and inevitable functions of both notions.

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In the same line as McNulty takes up, Fink (1995) remarks that the very constraints ingrained in the symbolic turn out to play an essential role when they serve “to cancel out the real, to transform it into a social, if not socially acceptable, reality” (p. 56). The symbolic plays such a protective role from its early advent. As Fink points out:

It bars the child's easy access to pleasurable contact with its mother, requiring it to pursue pleasure

through avenues more acceptable to the father figure and/or mOther (insofar as it is only by her

granting of importance to the father that the father can serve that paternal function). In Freudian

terms, it is correlated with the reality principle, which does not so much negate the aims of the

pleasure principle as channel them into socially designated pathways. (p. 56)

As can be seen, the symbolic must inevitably harbour those restrictive tools/mechanisms in order to protect human being both against the narcissistic trap of the imaginary and also against the relentless atrocity of the real. However, it is important to note that confirming the protective and positive function of the symbolic does not mean that these restrictions always function positively. In this thesis, both aspects of the symbolic (i.e. restrictive as protective and restrictive as prohibiting) are taken into account.

What can be drawn from the above discussion is that Lacanian thinkers, while unanimously agree on the restrictive feature of the symbolic, take up different positions with regards to the nature of this restriction. While thinkers such as Žižek and Badiou believe that the symbolic must be stricken by a rupture (that is the real) in order to leave a space for the subject (Eisenstein and McGowan, 2012), a thinker like McNulty argues that the symbolic itself has the potential to undergo changes without experiencing a shock from the real. While both of these approaches can be tenable in their own place, in the analysis of The Colonel another dimension of the symbolic can be observed. Below, I will argue that the symbolic can become so immune to any irruptive (the real) activities that

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it loses all of its emancipatory potentials. In what follows, first, a synopsis of the novel is presented and, then, it will be shown how a particular notion of the symbolic is presented in the novel.

7.2 A synopsis of The Colonel

The plot of The Colonel revolves around the days following the 1979 revolution in Iran, when the Islamisits leading by Ayatollah Khomeini has taken power to rule the country.

The colonel who served for the military in the Shah's regime and now is retired, has lost all his children in one way or another. Amir, the eldest son, as a communist took part in the movement that resulted in the overthrowing of the Shah’s regime. Immediately after the revolution, the new state ignored the role of this influential group and made them as secluded as possible. Amir, like all of his fellows who are being overlooked and, in cases, suppressed by the new regime, not only imagines a dark vista for himself, but even casts deep-rooted doubt over his previous political ideas which help the revolution to happen.

Amir in this story, along with Farzaneh, the colonel’s elder daughter, is the only son of the colonel who is alive, but his presence in the story is the strongest element implying death and desperation. Farzaneh is also alive, but the fact that she is married to Qorbani

Hajjaj, turns her life to a complete misery. As Tom Patterdale, the translator of this novel, comments in the afterward, “Qorbani Hajjaj, who encapsulates the world of deceit and specious dogma…is one of those people who always manage to come out on top, whichever way the wind is bellowing” (p. 231). Marrying such a person in the eyes of the colonel and Amir is tantamount to a gradual death, much more painful than a sudden death.

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Parvaneh, the youngest daughter of the colonel and the one whose execution by the revolutionary government stands at the heart of the story, is also affiliated with another leftist-Islamist party (People’s Mujahedin) who played a highly influential role in toppling the Shah’s regime. Parvaneh, like many of her fellows, is deemed to be dissident of the new state and is executed by the Islamic state. The novel opens with the scene in which two young Islamist revolutionary guards come to the colonel to take him to where

Parvaneh’s corpse is kept. They wanted him to identify the corpse and bury her in an unnamed grave before the sunrise.

Mohammad-Taqi, the colonel’s second son, like Parvaneh, is also a part of a communist party, albeit a different branch from that of Amir. He, unlike Parvaneh, is not killed by the revolutionary regime which deemed any communist-leaning party a potential threat to its stability. Mohammad-Taqi is killed by the Shah’s regime which, like the revolutionary state, saw communists as the main threat.

Masoud, the youngest son of the colonel, chooses a totally different path from the other members of his family; he remains loyal to the Islamic state and even voluntarily attends the Iran-Iraq (1980-88) war and is killed in the war. There is another pivotal character in the story who, in different ways, plays a role in the events of the story: Khezr

Javid. Khezr like Qorbani knows how to find his way into the two regimes. In the Shah’s regime, he was a member of the secret police and in this position interrogated and tortured people like Amir. After the revolution, Khezr finds his way into the new regime and, this time in the form of an Islamic clergy man does the same thing as he did in the Shah’s regime.

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7.3 The saturation of the symbolic

In the following section I will focus on techniques and elements, at the level of narrative structure, that have been applied in the novel to present a depiction of the symbolic register of post-revolution Iran in which no rupture can be thought of. These elements and techniques include 'the juxtaposition of the same signifiers which, chronologically speaking, belong to different points of time', and 'the simultaneous use of different narrators/points of view'. Through the former I will show how the post-revolution Iranian society is afflicted by the fixation of signifiers within a close chain of signification leading to the saturation of meaning within the symbolic register, hence the creation a deadlock within the symbolic. The use of different points of view can also, ironically, show how within a saturated symbolic register seemingly different perspectives arrive at the same conclusion: the decadence of utopian fantasies.

Examining the novel from a narratological point of view, it would be possible to see how the society as depicted by Dowlatabadi is afflicted by a fixity leading to all- encompassing despair and meaninglessness. I am intentionally referring to narratology as it is indivisible from formal properties of a given work of fiction. In other words, a consideration of formal properties of a literary work from the lens of narratology shares a common parlance with a Lacanian approach to text analysis in which language is considered the most important means of conveying the world of the subject of unconscious (Olivier, 2005). A second point in relation to the application of a narratological approach is that it, albeit in the more or less contemporary definition of the term, puts emphasis on the notion of change within a piece of literary work (Davis, 2002).

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Before going through a discussion of narratology, I should make it clear that I am referring to the definition of the term as adopted by Schmid (2010). Schmid presents a hybrid (at the intersection of classical and structuralist approaches) definition of the term in which the presence of a mediator/narrator (in the classical approach) and a temporal sequence which leads to a change of state (in the structuralist approach) are essential. In

Schmid, the same definition is divided into other two categories, namely the broad concept of narrative and the narrow one. The main difference between these two approaches is in the way they treat the occurrence of “change of state” (p. 2). While broad concept of narratology, as the term broad conveys, implies the occurrence of a tangible change within the current of the story, the narrow definition is not necessarily as much concerned with the notion of change as adopted in the broad definition. Either broad or narrow, however, the pivotal point shared between these approaches is that the occurrence of a change of state is inevitable as far as a story is developed within a temporal continuum. Accordingly, as Schmid (2010) remarks, any change of state within a narrative structure needs to accord with the following features:

(1) A temporal structure with at least two states, the initial situation and the final situation (the

king alive and the king dead).

(2) The equivalence of the initial and final situations, that is, the presence of a similarity and a

contrast between the states, or, more precisely, the identity and difference of the properties of those

states (being alive and being dead form a classical equivalence).

(3) Both states, and the change that takes place between them, must concern one and the same acting

or suffering subject. (p. 3)

Although sticking to such a definition of narrative is somewhat risky, particularly when one notes how postmodernist works of art challenge the classical well-established notions

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such as time, plot and etc. (e.g. see Heise, 1997; McHale, 1987; White, 2010), it is still worth considering the above features as in any sociocultural worldview the notion of change does not completely lose its status. This point acquires more significance when one notes how The Colonel is, after all, a novel concerned with the change in the precise sense of the word: the so-called radical transformation following a political revolution.

From a Lacanian perspective, the above discussion can be translated into the mechanism of the symbolic register in which the play of signifiers, albeit momentarily, leads to the construction of meaning. Inevitable in this process is a change of state which relies on the temporal sequentially. In other words, the symbolic register due to being inflicted by an inevitable and yet constitutive lack is capable of undergoing a change; a process being necessarily bound up with the passage of time. However, my argument in the analysis of The Colonel is that although it has – in line with both the concept of narrative as stated above and the non-totalisable symbolic in Lacan – depicted a world in which change is unavoidable, this change does not help the symbolic to undergo a meaningful transformation. In other words, although the post-revolution society as depicted in The Colonel sees the traces of change of state, the effect of this change does not go further than reproducing the same ideas in new forms. As will be discussed below, through juxtaposing similar words in the story but contextualising them in different temporal/historical points of time, Dowlatabadi shows how the same signifiers are reflective of the same states both before and after the revolution.

In The Colonel the reader can get a sense of what was discussed above in the earlier chapters of the book. Ironically, the signifier ‘revolution’ is among those signifiers that sooner than others turns out to harbor the idea that within a society like Iran temporal/historical changes do not necessarily prompt a change of state. In the earlier 177

chapters of the book, the narrator7 is referring to the days when revolution was imminent.

It is in these days that Amir gave a provocative revolutionary speech in front of a large group of people, hence taking up the status of a charismatic leader. Returning to home, he expects to be warmly appreciated by the colonel:

Back in the house, the colonel opened his cigarette case, lit one and stared silently at his son…Amir

hoped for at least a brief look of approval from his father, albeit mixed with the customary measure

of mistrust. He wanted to know that he had impressed the colonel and had finally persuaded him

to believe in his son. Perhaps it was this burning, yet unspoken, urge that prompted him to ask:

“What did you think, Colonel?” But the colonel did not give him the answer he wanted. He just

closed his cigarette case and tried to suppress the faint smile that played across his lips, a smile

that made Amir blurt out, “It’s the revolution – we’ve got a revolution!” (p. 44)

Chronologically speaking, the above quotation refers back to the days of revolution.

Immediately after this paragraph the narrator, this time the colonel himself, uses the same signifier to tell the other members of family (Farzaneh and Amir) about Parvaneh’s death:

It was the revolution, yes it was. And now I’m sorry that I didn’t say anything about Parvaneh’s

execution to her sister. If I’d told her, I’d then have had to ask her to come and wash the body and

lay her out. It was just as well I didn’t have to tell her and ask her to do such a thing. I’m not just

sorry. I’m quite glad about it now. I’m bloody sure that if I‘d said anything, Qorbani would not

have let her go. It would have been a bloody disaster…So now… (p. 44, italics in original)

The revolution, as appeared in the second paragraph is the same revolution that resulted in overthrowing the Shah’s regime; the very event that put Amir in the spotlight for his provocative, acclaimed speech. However, the same provocative event, on the other hand,

7 . It should be noted that in The Colonel the story is narrated via different points of view, but one voice (the omniscient narrator) is heard more than others.

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leads to the execution of the colonel’s daughter. It seems that it, retroactively, is invested with death and exclusion. In this sense, revolution, upon its occurrence, is doomed to be exclusionary in essence. No matter whether the revolution prompts change of state or not, it is fundamentally and inevitably founded on an eliminating and exclusionary principle.

Another signifier that plays the same role is ‘shock’ as appeared in page 50:

So why should he now be shocked to see his son reduced to this state – his eldest son, who had

witnessed his mother’s murder so manfully that he had become almost an accomplice in the deed?

Struggling with himself to come to terms with the shock that he experiences when he sees

Amir's lack of reaction to his mother’s death, the colonel decides to shock him by the news of Paravenhe’s execution and her strange burial ceremony:

He decided to tell Amir the news that his sister had been hanged, thinking that the shock might

shake him free him his nightmares. After all, you were supposed to be able to snap people out of

shock by giving them another one. (p. 50)

When finally, after contemplating over his decision to tell the news of Parvaneh’s execution to Amir, the colonel tells the news, Amir’s reaction comes first with a single- word question “Really?”, and then, “as if totally unaffected by the news, as if struggling with a geometry problem” he says: “wasn’t she too young to be hanged?” (p. 51).

In this case, like the previous one, the same signifier is used to convey how the passage of time, with its supposedly transformative force, does not lead to a change of state within a society that has apparently undergone fully-fledged metamorphosis.

Ironically, the next signifier that seems to be saturated with one and the same meaning, and hence not capable of adapting itself with a change of context (the seemingly different contexts before and after the revolution) is ‘soldier’. Thinking about his neglecting of 179

Amir’s mental health after suffering so much from the time he witnessed his mother’s murder and till the day he knows about Paravaneh’s execution, the colonel suddenly realises that how his behaviour towards his son has been callous and inconsiderate. Upon this realisation, he decides to step forward and be more caring with his only remaining son:

I’m capable of anything when the world treats me as nothing. I’ll become like the ant which fell

in the water and, thrashing about wildly, shouted: “The whole world has been washed away!”

And, insofar as I have become nothing, all things are therefore permitted unto me, even unto

strangling my son and running about naked in the street all the way to the madhouse…No, I’ll

never, ever lose my nerve. I’ll stand by my children through thick and thin. I’ll keep a stiff upper

lip and never forget that I am a soldier. (pp. 61-2, italics in original)

As can be seen in this quotation, the colonel seems to be trying to retrieve his resoluteness through reducing himself to a nothingness in the eyes the world. It is this nothingness, in the colonel’s view, that gives birth to something, here incarnated both figuratively and literally (given the fact that he was once a member of Shah’s army) in the form of a soldier. In spite of the fact that he sees the situation overwhelmingly exhaustive, it seems that here the colonel is trying to retrieve his agency. However, immediately after attaining a sense of agency, he remembers a conversation that he had long time ago with his commander when he had asked the colonel to attend the war in Oman. Attempting to persuade the commander to make him exempt from the war, the colonel says: “But, Sir,

I am just a simple soldier…”, implying that a simple soldier cannot be tangibly effective.

The commander’s trenchant response comes this way: “We are all soldiers, colonel.

Haven’t I made myself clear?” (p. 62).

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The commander’s authoritarian response in this conversation clearly shows that the colonel is not only “just a simple soldier”, but within this apparently meagre position he has no right to challenge anything. Here, once again, Dowlatabadi shows that the seemingly transformed state, as the Iranian society experienced it during the revolution, does not necessarily make a change in the determinative fundamental structures, the structures that are expected to harbour emancipatory potentials.

7.4 Different points of view: schizophrenic subject in the guise of post- revolution subject

To enter into a discussion of points of view, I will start this section by elaborating on what

I assume to be the main theme of the novel; the vacuity of any utopian project. This issue has been profoundly discussed by Lacanian thinkers such as Stavrakakis (1999), Glynos

(2001), Glynos and Stavrakakis (2001) and McGowan (2013). The core argument of these scholars is that political ideologies are founded on a set of utopian projects that are essentaily (non)realisable through investing in fantasmatic idealisations. In fact, as

Stavrakakis (1999) points out, “the need for utopian meaning arises in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and conflict, when the element of the political subverts the fantasmatic stability of our political reality” (p. 100). Accordingly, “utopias are generated by the surfacing of grave antagonisms and dislocations in the social field”

(p. 100). Utopian projects are founded, above all, on a belief according to which all antagonisms can be resolved and consequently a harmonious future can be realised, while in reality, as Stavrakakis notes, human existence without this antagonism is totally meaningless. In other words, human being’s subjectivity is ontologically constructed around a constitutive and “ever-present negativity” whose elimination can evidently

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induce catastrophic consequences (p. 100). Here the notion of harmonious society acquires particular significance as it is founded on an image of lost golden past time and a future immune to the current dislocations. As such “the essence of the utopian promise…is a simulacrum of synthesis which dissimulates social antagonism by projecting it onto a screen representing a harmonious and immobile equilibrium” (p. 100).

Insisting on such utopian idealisations, which are mainly born out of an insistence on the lost (non-existent) good old days, can give rise to the emergence of self-alienated subjects, who no longer invest in any future emancipatory projects. In fact, it is not merely this assertion on utopia that alienates the subject, but the fact that those idealisations are inherently non-realisable makes the subject alienated. In other words, when the utopian subject realises that his/her ideals are not realisable, s/he first casts doubt on his/her own ideas and then do the same in the face of any project that promises to make a change of state in that society. As such, if one assumes that the central point around which The

Colonel is narrated is the revolution, then they can also say that it is constructed in what

Stavrakakis calls “periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and conflict”. In is it in such an atmosphere that Amir in a conversation with Farzaneh talks about how he lost hope with any emancipatory cause:

Those who try to find their true role in life are always hit the hardest…I’m in a bad way, little

sister. I’m a stranger in my own home! The tragedy of our whole country is the same: we are all

alienated, strangers in our own land. It’s tragic. The odd thing is that we have never get used to

it…I have not been true to myself, my sister, so I am corrupted. (pp. 90-1)

When Amir says “we have never get used to it”, it conjures up that the Iranian society is doomed to live in a vicious cycle which may harbour emancipatory potentials at the

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surface of it, but in the end there is no way out of this cycle. The colonel explicitly refers to this self-annihilating habit when he says:

We’re obliged to dig our own children’s graves, but what’s even more shocking is that these crimes

are creating a future in which there is no place for truth and human decency. Nobody dares to

speak the truth any more. Oh, my poor children…we’re burying you, but you should realise that

we are also digging a grave for our future. Can you hear me? (p. 99, italics in original)

As mentioned earlier, this notion of the vacuity of utopian promises that the colonel and

Amir insist on is not in itself an issue that can necessarily determine the narrative structure of the novel. However, this very theme can adequately set the ground for the emergence of a particular textual form. In The Colonel this effect has been realised in the way the story is narrated via different points of view.

The reason for the inclusion of different narrators/points of view can be related to the inherently paradoxical fantasmatic investment of the people who take part in a revolution.

While all people involving in a revolution more or less unanimously insist on a single cause, the very nature of fantasy that nourishes their belief allows them to develop their own specific causes that may, in cases, turn out to be totally at odds with each other.

Accordingly, it is not accidental that each of the colonel’s children has adopted a different path. To put this discussion within a broader political context, it can be argued that a revolution that does not live up to its promises can turn a single unified cause, around which different political groups come together, into different and, in cases, antagonistic causes. To put it in a Deleuzian term, a revolution in such a state gives rise to the emergence of schizophrenic subjects (here the people who supports revolution) whose signifiers can no longer revolve around a master signifier (here the leading cause of revolution) (Smith, 2004). Dowlatabadi shows this antagonism when he writes: 183

So it was when one of our boys was killed in battle; soul-destroying painful as it was for us, we

were given no chance to grieve. After all, you told yourself, there was a revolution going on, and

our country was on the threshold of momentous historic change, and this change could only come

about through the sacrifice of the blood of the people, of which we were a part…But, in the

upheavals of the revolution, families who had sacrificed their children were caught in the grip of

conflicting feelings. On the one hand were internal and personal feelings, which overcame you in

quiet corners at home, while on the other hand you were required to put on a public face and show

other feelings, feelings for which you had to search deep inside yourself to give them legitimacy.

(p. 122)

Although in this quotation there is no reference to antagonistic ideas that can emerge after the occurrence of a revolution, it clearly shows that for Dowlatabadi the revolution itself inevitably gives rise to the advent of such a conflicting state. In other words, in

Dowlatabadi’s fictional world, revolution, contrary to its seemingly transformative gesture which can set a ground for the renascence of the symbolic register, would turn out, due to its destabilising character, to put a restriction on truly effective transformations. As such, if the revolution was supposed to set up an emancipatory foundation on which the emergence of new subjectivities was possible, it had turned out to block the ways to the realisation of the latter.

As mentioned above, while in any revolution a single unified cause turns out to orient different ideas towards a specific destination, and since the formation of that cause relies highly on fantasmatic mechanisms, the existence of this very generative force (i.e. fantasy) gives rise to the emergence of different and sometimes antagonistic revolutionary causes. In cases where the most wanted cause for which people, albeit temporarily, forgo their idiosyncratic ideals tends to appear unwelcoming to other causes and ideals, that single cause, after the occurrence of the revolution, takes on a hegemonic normative

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status. It is in such a situation that, as McGowan (2013) remarks, “the coherence of the ego that normal subjectivity stabilizes” is dissolved by the schizophrenic subject (p. 127).

In order to see how the concept of schizophrenia can shed light on the political aspect of the novel and also on its narrative structure, I will elaborate on the Lacanian conception of schizophrenia.

According to Fink (1995), the notion of schizophrenia in Lacan is considered as a psychotic disorder8 in which the function of The-Name-of-the-Father is disrupted.

Elaborating on the notion of psychosis, Fink writes:

In psychosis, the barrier between mother and child offered by that name [The-Name-of-the-Father]

is not erected in a solid enough fashion. The father figure does not succeed in limiting the child's

access to the mother; the signifier is not able to neutralize the child's jouissancc, and that jouissance

irrupts into his or her life, overwhelming and invading him or her. Different forms of psychosis

are related to the different ways in which jouissance breaks in on the patient: jouissance invades

the body in schizophrenia, and the locus of the Other as such in paranoia. (p. 74-75)

In Lacan, the schizophrenic subject is inflicted by the lack of the signifier being responsible for controlling the subject’s jouissance. A consequence of the irruption of jouissance in the schizophrenic subject is his/her losing tie with the apparently logical configuration of spatial and temporal world. Delineating the functioning of time in a schizophrenic subject, Dickens and Fontana (2002) point out:

Accompanying the destruction of historical time on the collective level is the equally deleterious

effect of the effacement of temporality on the individual, which Jameson describes in terms of

8 It is important to take into account the point that for Lacan psychosis is thought more as a structure than a disorder. Lacan, as Fink (1995) remarks, believed that human beings are inevitably categorised into one of the three psychic structures; namely, psychosis, neurosis and perversion.

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Jacques Lacan’s theory of schizophrenia... The schizophrenic, unable to link signifiers together

meaningfully, lacks a sense of temporal continuity and thus is condemned to experience the world

as a series of unrelated presents in time. (p. 393)

This observation can be evidently associated with the way the story is narrated in The

Colonel. A clear example of this phenomenon was shown when the colonel, in the face of Amir’s wretched state, tried to regain his agency by calling himself a ‘soldier’. While the colonel was persuading himself that he can make a change in the way life was going on for Amir, he remembered a conversation that he had long ago with his commander:

“But, Sir, I am just a simple soldier…”

“We are all soldiers, colonel. Haven’t I made myself clear?” (p. 62)

In this way, it seems that the colonel, losing the linear unfolding of time, is doomed to bring past into present and reflect present into future; a circular pattern of time in which signifiers replicate each other due to losing tie with a stable master signifier. In fact, what

I mean here by the unstable master signifier is the inherently delusional singular and unifying revolutionary cause that unites different political groups, but, immediately after the occurrence of the revolution, is usurped by one of the political ideologies that takes the control of the revolutionary state.

In spite of the explicit relevance of the above discussion to the core argument of this chapter, what this discussion in particular does is set the ground for elaborating the way through which it would be possible to enter into a discussion of multi-vocality in this novel. As said earlier in this chapter, it seems that the central theme running through the novel is that the symbolic register of the post-revolution society as depicted by

Dowlatabadi in The Colonel is so exhausted by hegemonic ideology of a single political

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party that no rupture can be made within this structure. While in the first section of the analysis I tried to show how signifiers in the passage of time are bound to replicate themselves without undergoing meaningful transformations, in the second section of the analysis I am trying to show how the existence of different narrators complements the function that the former performs. To elaborate on this issue, I will refer to another characteristic of the schizophrenic subject.

Equalising the post-revolution subject with the schizophrenic subject who loses the logical configuration of time can contradict the Deleuze and Guattari's tack on the schizophrenic subject as a paragon for the real revolutionary. The Deleuze and Guattari's

'Anti-Oedipus', as Smith (2004) remarks, strives to delineate "the Real in all its positivity: differential partial objects or intensities that enter into indirect syntheses; pure positive multiplicities where everything is possible (transverse connections, polyvocal conjunctions, included disjunctions); signs of desire that compose a signifying chain, but which are themselves non-signifying, and so on"(p. 644). While the concept of the Real and its manifestation in the schizophrenic subject acquires positive meaning in Deleuze and Gauttari, the polyvocality of post-revolution subject in The Colonel can attest to the disintegration of the subject who is totalised by the irruptive power of the Real. In a sense, if the Anti-Oedipus's polyvocality aims at dismantling the unifying/homogenising/normalising discourse of the master, the different subjects/narrators of The Colonel loses their (fantasmtic) singularities to be the narrator of a single issue: the deadlock afflicting the symbolic.

Polyvocality or using different points of view in order to narrate a single story in The

Colonel can be attributed to the disruption of the unifying revolutionary cause that loses its main function upon the occurrence of the revolution. In The Colonel, on the one hand, 187

we have an omniscient third person narrator whose voice is heard more than others and, on the other hand, other characters sometimes take up this position, too. Among these narrators, the colonel’s point of view (first person) has been presented differently through italicising his words. The important point to take into account in this regard is that although different narrators do not necessarily complement each other in the way they depict the society they live in, in one way or another each of them confirms the vacuity of the revolutionary ideal that they pursued. A particular case in which different points of view unanimously converge on a unified point in order to show the disappointment overshadowing the society in the years following the revolution is when the omniscient narrator, the colonel and Amir in the same page and consecutively say the same thing yet in different ways:

The two generations were going to over the most important points of a debate about the period of

“decay” without there being any differences between them. What was left out of the debate

however, was the matter of how each one faced up to this rottenness, for there was no argument

between them as to the existence or not of this rottenness, or of its massive scale. The only question

now was how each of them would deal with it.

What I see with my own eyes, Amir sees just as clearly in his worst nightmares, even though he

can’t express it out loud.

“I’m afraid the old man might not find the strength to kill himself. It is the one act that requires

careful planning. He’s falling apart, you can see it in his face. I think I am only now beginning to

realize how much I loved my father…” (p. 182)

These three paragraphs come consecutively one after another without any mediating sentence, as if they belong to a single voice. While the first paragraph is narrated by the omniscient narrator, the second and the third one are narrated by the colonel and Amir

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respectively. In the first paragraph the omniscient narrator shows how different generations ended up having experienced the same thing: rottenness. In the next paragraph, the colonel, belonging to the previous generation, explicitly confirms the omniscient narrator’s view, and lastly Amir as the representative of new generation, the generation whose youth was entangled with the revolution, says of the misery that he felt both in his father’s life and in his own destiny. It seems that these paragraphs are written by the same mind yet manifested in different bodies.

The simultaneous use of different points of view to narrate the same issue – the political deadlock that Iranian society has been grappling with both before and after the revolution – is in line with the argument that was mentioned at the beginning of the chapter: the saturation of the symbolic order with the signifiers that are doomed to remain within the same chain. Within this chain of signification, as the omniscient narrator says in the above quotation, each generation is destined to repeat the same thing but in different ways. In order to depict a society in which no change of state is heralded, it seems that

Dowlatabadi has resorted to as many different and in case even antagonistic voices as possible to show a saturated symbolic realm.

At the end of the novel, even the colonel, the one who has appeared to be critical towards both regimes and has also apparently resisted being surrendered by despair, is depicted as the one who has fallen in the same loop where there is no way but to give up hope. The reason for losing hope is not merely the disappointment that inflicts the society, but it is the colonel’s act when during Masoud’s (the one who attended Iran-Iraq war to support the new state’s agenda) funeral he speaks out in front of mourners in order to say that his daughter, Parvaneh, deserved to be executed by the revolutionary state. Mixing

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the omniscient narrator’s and the colonel’s voice in the same paragraph, Dowlatabadi writes:

He also wanted to say that, if he decided to cut out his tongue before he died, nobody should be

surprised, or think that he had gone mad. No, I shall be punishing myself for what I was made to

say over the loudspeakers at the cemetery, things which I could hear with my own ears. (p. 192)

It is almost from this point of the novel on that both the colonel and Amir, instead of speaking, write to each other, and this act in the view of the omniscient narrator is tantamount to death; death of the characters whose presence no longer attests their being alive.

This very last point can set the ground for concluding this chapter. In fact, as Fink

(1995) remarks, psychoanalysis in general, and its Lacanian branch in particular, puts particular emphasis on the subject’s ability to channel his/her traumatic experience into a dialogic or speech-oriented practice in order for him/her to come to terms with the fixation in the chain of signification. “Fixation”, in Fink’s words, “always involves something which is not symbolizable”; a process which prevents language from fulfilling its main functions: substituting and displacing signifiers (p. 27). In such cases, the analysand is incited to “dialectise” the fixated signifier. By being dailectised the fixated signifier would be “drawn into the dialectic or movement of the analysand’s discourse” and allows him/her to, even partially, symbolise what resists symbolisation.

To link the above discussion to the colonel and Amir’s act of writing, instead of speaking, to each other, it can be argued that although these two characters, who play the main role in the way the novel is come to an end, may still see language as the means through which it would be possible to symbolise the seemingly traumatic event, their

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forgoing to speak is a sign of losing tie with the symbolic realm. Resorting to silence and communicating though written words can be read as a protest to the realm in which signifiers explicitly need the audience’s signifiers in order to be considered as genuine means of communication. The method that the colonel and Amir apply in order to say their last words verify their mistrust of any reciprocal communication; words are written on a paper without waiting for a reader to challenge them on the spot. Even if the words that appear on a page are still subject to different meanings and interpretations, the very act of the colonel and Amir to keep silent for the rest of their life shows that they no longer feel the need to get in touch with others in order to make clear what they write.

Psychoanalytically speaking, the colonel and Amir do not invest in the symbolic register as it just replicates the same totalised signifiers without replacing them with new, more floating ones.

Overall, what can be drawn from the analysis of The Colonel is that sometimes, particularly in cases like revolution in which high amount of energy is invested in fulfilling a grand cause, the attempt to create a utopian society gives rise to reversed consequences. Lacanian political scholars have discussed this issue referring to fantasmatic investments that ideologically progressive and, ironically, seemingly liberal movements cling to (see for example, Glynos, 2001, 2008; Glynos & Stavrakakis, 2008,

Mcgowan, 2013 and 2016; Newman, 2004; Stavrakakis, 1999). In fact, revolutions or any other project aiming to generate fundamental changes in the fabric of a given society almost always anticipate the creation of a utopian world which is far beyond the capacities of the symbolic register by which they are surrounded. Accordingly, when a given progressive project attempts to realise those fantasmatic promises, there is no way but to impose drastic metamorphic changes on the fabric of the symbolic register. Afflicted by

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the shock due to receiving metamorphic blows, the symbolic register can react variably based on the particularities of cultural and social background of that society. Given that, what happens to the Iranian post-revolution society as depicted in The Colonel is twofold: one the one hand, the chain of signification is disrupted in a way that it resulted in a schizophrenic multivocality, albeit contrary to what Deleuze conceive of it. The multivocality that is depicted here is a doomed one which is ultimately converged around a single message: the decadence of emancipatory ideas. On the other hand, the shattered chain reproduces the same signifying chain as existed before the revolution, hence the saturation of the symbolic register even if it has undergone a seemingly drastic change.

As an explicitly political work of literature, The Colonel appears to narrate the dystopian destiny of political projects that aims to attain a fantasised utopia. The post- revolution society that is depicted here is bereft of any hope or bright perspective, conjuring up a politically repressive structure that does not undergo any decadence. In the past, present and future of this society as narrated by Dowlatabadi, no seed of hope can grow. A revolution has happened in Iran, the result of which is no more than the transformation of the same political ideas into a new form.

The Colonel is a nightmarish depiction of a society in which if there is any reference to hope it is to its lack. Psychoanalytically speaking, the symbolic order as represented here is so enmeshed with the imaginary (the utopian wholeness for which the Shah’s regime was toppled) and the real (the unpresentable and thoroughly dark world of the colonel) that leaves no way out of the dark destiny looming in front of the Iranian society.

The insistence of the revolutionary guard on burying Parvaneh’s corpse before the sunrise and their coming to the colonel’s house at the heart of a rainy night and also putting her in a grave, that is not supposed to leave any trace of the name of the dead, are explicit 192

indicators of the fact that unrepresentability of anything related to its dissidents is the main concern of this ruling state.

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Chapter 8 Conclusion

Before presenting a concluding remark on the whole thesis, I would like to once again return to the main purpose of undertaking this research. In the introductory chapter I wrote that the purpose of the current thesis is to get a general understanding of the pedagogic philosophy and policy developed by the post-revolution Iranian state through examining what it deems inappropriate to be used in the cultural and educational environment of the society. In order to achieve this, I selected two examples of excluded materials from the

Iranian curriculum. Then, I located the definition of the Iranian curriculum in its broadest realm where it includes all materials produced by state-sponsored pedagogic, cultural and educational institutions. The more specific aim of choosing the excluded materials was to see how they represent a depiction of the Iranian post-revolution society, and how a conception of subjectivity is represented in the works under analysis.

There is a phrase in the above summary that, I believe, has left a far-reaching influence on the way the thesis has taken the current form: getting a general understanding of the pedagogic philosophy and policy developed by the post-revolution Iranian state. Here I would like to pause and elaborate on the rationale behind locating the main purpose of the thesis within such broad category. The main reason for making this decision is related to the very tangible gap in the literature on critical studies of cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran after the 1979 revolution. The discussions presented in chapters one and two in relation to the ideological aspect of education and pedagogy in

Iran dealt with the gap in the literature on these areas of research. In order to address this gap, I had to take into account a wide range of factors influencing the development of cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran. However, there existed a number of

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problems on the way to do the latter, the most important of which was the lack of enough academic research on the link between politics and education/pedagogy in Iran.

Accordingly, this difficult situation made me write, albeit at times not in depth, about different yet inherently interrelated issues. This was done while each of the selected issues was significant enough to be the focus of a separate study. These research areas, all related to Iran's post-revolution context, include critical study of curriculum development, the philosophy/policy underlying the educational/pedagogic system, censorship and pedagogy, literature as a pedagogic device in the post-revolution society. Given the broad range of issues influencing the question of cultural politics of education in Iran, choosing a research problem that aims to make a link between these issues could make the thesis hardly move on a well-defined, smooth ground, hence the problem of presenting a clear, accessible and applicable piece of research. Although brining these issues together around a more or less specific research problem might result in disorienting the research, I tried, as much as possible, to resolve this problem by locating the issue of excluding cultural products at the centre stage of the thesis. In other words, I decided to focus on a notion that underlies all these apparently discrete, yet inherently interrelated, areas of research.

Here I would like to refer to an issue that, I think, plays a consequential role in the way an Iranian researcher working on the problem of education in today's Iran selects a research problem. This issue is concerned with the ambiguous positioning of the researcher (Mukherejee, 2017). In fact, I assume that what makes this positioning shaky and equivocal is the general condition of humanities and social sciences in Iran after the revolution, where the latter has become a maneuvering field for the implementation of the revolutionary ideology of the state. While this situation itself could make a ground for conducting critically interdisciplinary studies, the risk of delving into the

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exclusionary/exclusive education/pedagogic system of the post-revolution state, particularly for Iranian scholars working within the country, has caused the literature on the structure of cultural politics of education/pedagogy in the post-revolution Iran to be limited. As presented in chapter one and two of this thesis, the complex intermingling of education/pedagogy and politics in the post-revolution society of Iran hardly allows a researcher to focus on a well-defined, neat research problem. This issue becomes more tangible when one compares the depth and breadth of research dedicated to each of the aforementioned areas in the Western academic tradition with its Iranian counterpart.

In fact, it was due to the aforementioned gap that I decided to dedicate a large part of the thesis to the theoretical discussions as presented in chapter two, three and four.

Locating the notion of exclusion at centre of the research problem, I referred to Rancière and Foucault to explain how the Iranian system of pedagogy is constructed around the subjectificational forces of politics, perception and power. Then, Lacan was used as a complement to the other two thinkers as his theory of subjectivity presents the nuances at play in the construction of the subject. More specifically, the Lacanian analysis of the novels showed how, as depicted in The Colonel, the subject's language in a hegemonic system, even when used by people who oppose that system, is drained of any emancipatory potentials, hence reproducing the same subjectificational elements. In a more or less similar vein, as demonstrated in the analysis of Censoring an Iranian Love

Story, the Lacanian conception of love/sex helps us see how the state's hegemonic ideology relies on depriving the subject of its privacy, hence the construction of the social/ideological at the cost of eliminating the personal.

As a result of taking into account all of the above observations, it was decided to frame research questions around the three notions of subjectivity, aesthetics and knowledge 196

production in the ideological context of Iran's post-revolution era. Accordingly, the following research questions were designed:

1. How do the representations of the Iranian post-revolution society as depicted in

the novels under analysis reflect conception(s) of subjectivity – the subjectivity as

developed through the state's ideology?

2. What do this/these conception(s) of subjectivity tell us about the aesthetic nature

of the post-revolution ideology?

3. Considering the ideological/exclusionary aspect of the Iranian post-revolution

state's cultural politics of education/pedagogy, how do the analyses of the novels

demonstrate the aforementioned aspect?

Having in mind the research questions, in what follows, my answers to these questions

are presented under two main themes: subjectivity in the Iranian post-revolution

ideology; and the cultural politics of education/pedagogy in post-revolution Iran.

8.1 Subjectivity in the Iranian post-revolution ideology

In order to present a frame for discussing the issue of subjectivity in the Iranian post- revolution ideology, I will briefly discuss the issue from a more holistic historic-political perspective, taking into account the making of today's Iranian society. Maghsood

Farasatkhah, the Iranian sociologist whose seminal work, We Iranians (2015), was referred to in the first chapter, remarks that in societies like Iran in which social classes, in the classical sense of the term, do not exist, elites do not play a role in the formation of political structure (p. 135). Then, he argues that in such societies political power is not, based on a negotiated and negotiable agreement, transferred from one group or party to another. Rather it becomes a bone of contention, and only those groups can take it which

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propose 'messianic' solutions to the existing problems. As such, in these societies, a sort of Messianism, as an element of the state's ideology, pervades.

In a similar vein, albeit from a different perspective, John Foran, the historian who is known for his extensive and comprehensive research on revolutions and social movements around the world, presents a compelling argument concerning the failure of social movements in Iran. Foran (1994), in his book entitled A century of revolution:

Social movements in Iran remarks that social movements in Iran have been unstable and short-lived because they have not been directed by a particular social class. In other words, he states that due to the existence of inherently incompatible, and at times antagonistic, voices behind a social movement, the Iranian society has not been able to establish a long-lasting, stable social structure after they succeeded to overthrow their preceding regimes. These tow observations make a suitable ground based on which I can discuss the issue of subjectivity and the Iranian ideology.

The Colonel's de-voiced subject and the state's (dys)topian ideology

The Colonel narrates the fate of the revolutionary subject whose fantasmatic investment in the utopia as promised by the revolution has turned out to be a dystopia. The colonel and his children each has fantasmatically created their own post-revolution era. But the problem is precisely with this fantasmatic investment. The revolution in its dormant state allows them to envisage a world in which all voices have a say. But when the event is realized, the subject of the revolution faces the vacuity of their fantasies. The apparent diversity of voices is dissolved in a hegemonic voice, leaving no space for other voices to be heard. Figuratively speaking, when in the opening pages of the novel, in the darkness of an early morning, the colonel is asked to identify the corpse of his dissident daughter

(Parvaneh – meaning, ironically, butterfly in English), and bury her in an a grave that 198

must remain anonymous, he is not merely asked to bury a body, rather it is a voice that he has to muffle. The subject of The Colonel is a seemingly multi-vocal subject (as embodied by the colonel's childern) who by the end of the novel turns out to become voiceless. In the Lacanian term, this subject is living in a symbolic order saturated with a hegemonic voice which leaves no space for other voices to be heard. This observation is verified at the end of the novel when the colonel no longer speaks with his son and instead communicates through letter, while both are living in the same home.

Based on the above discussion, it can be argued that the post-revolution subject is perceptively, in aesthetic term, saturated. The subject of The Colonel, in Rancière’s term, is a subject whose sense perception is heavily inflicted by the dominative post-revolution ideology. This subject, before the occurrence of the revolution, envisages, fantasmatically, the various opportunities that s/he can achieve upon the success of the revolution. However, what s/he faces in reality, after the occurrence of the revolution, is a society inflicted by univocality. In this society, the subject's aesthetic experience is determined based on the state's discretion. S/he should feel, hear and speak in the way that the state wants. It is under this restrictive condition that all of the colonel's children, each in a different way, lose their voices. The aesthetic structure of the post-revolution society in The Colonel is founded on the ideology of the homogeneity of senses, while this homogeneity, in practice, leads to the suppression of any perceptive experience that does not fall under the aesthetic categorisation of the state.

The subject of non-relation: challenging the sensible through love/sex in

Censoring an Iranian Love Story

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The post-revolution subject as represented in Censoring an Iranian Love Story is a subject of non-relation. While in both of the novels under analysis the construction of subjectivity is heavily influenced by the homogenising force of a dominant voice (that of the post- revolution ideology), in Mandanipour's novel this subject tries to challenge the latter through investment in that which leaves less, if not no, space for the maneuvering of the homogenising ideology. It is love/sexuality, as an embodiment of non-relation in the

Lacanian ontology, to which the subject of Mandanipour's novel resorts to withstand the hegemonic force of the state. In fact, what complements this aspect of love/sexuality is the complexity of the (female) subject of the novel whose character hardly falls under a definable category. In a sense, I can argue that for Mandanipour love/sexuality, in the ideological context of the post-revolution society, is not merely a personal issue dealing with sensation and emotion, rather it is a political means through which the subject can challenge the dominant social order. Insisting on the non-relational nature of love/sex accompanied by a non-linear and unpredictable path that two people can engage in a love affair, Mandanipour seems to be showing that what can challenge a hegemonic state is this very unpredictability of such relations. If the subject of ideology is characterised by obvious ideological causes in which s/he believes, the subject of love/sex hardly falls under any nameable categorisation. It is in this way that love/sex takes on a political function in this novel.

Mandanipour, like Dowlatabadi, portrays a society inflicted by the homogenising ideology of the state. The very insistence on the prevalence of censorship and associating it with love/sex can be indicative of the fact that no personal issue in the post-revolution society is immune from the homogenising ideology of the state. In a sense, in order to unite people around the pivotal cause of the revolution, the state needs to make sure no

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factor can jeopardize its homogenisation project. This is what, based on the analysis made in this research, can be drawn from Mandanipour's novel. However, Mandanipour's approach to the latter issue is different from that of Dowlatabadi as far as one considers the authors' particular application of the notion of love/sex. Mandanipour sees love/sex as a complicated, non-linear and erratic act and sets it against the regulative ideology working behind censorship; the ideology that demands clarity and certainty, hence the development of a hegemonic homogeneity. The dissident subject of Mandanipour's novel challenges the latter through insistence on love, where love, in the Lacanian sense of the term, is formed around 'non-relation', hence acknowledging the inherently non-fillable lack in the fiber of any social relations. From an aesthetic perspective, love/sex, in the way adopted in this novel, turns out to challenge the delimiting perceptual experience as determined by the ideological mechanism of the state. Love/sex with its constitutive non- relational nature helps the subject no to be reduced to a neutral element within the state's totalising and homogenising ideology. If the state aims to delimit the perceptual experience of the subject through denouncing singular experiences, the subject of

Mandanipour's novel, albeit at a fictional level, defies the latter through insisting on the non-definable, unpresentable experience of love/sex. The void, intrinsic to and immanent in the experience of love/sex, allows the subject to envisage a perceptual state, whatever transient and ephemeral, free from constraints of the symbolic. As such, although

Mandanipour depicts a society in which the subject's experience ought to accord with the pre-determined definition of sense perception, he shows how the subject's resort to love/sex allows him/her, however fantasmatically, to step beyond the restrictive definition of sense perception.

8.2 The cultural politics of education/pedagogy in post-revolution Iran 201

Before commenting on the cultural politics of education/pedagogy in post-revolution

Iran, I want to emphasise that it is neither possible nor authentic to present a comprehensive analysis of the latter issue merely based on the analysis of the two banned novels. Doing the latter demands the consideration of many different factors as I referred to in the first chapter. However, given the status of the novels as excluded cultural materials, hence the null curriculum, these novels, however partially, can tell us why the cultural politics of education/pedagogy in post-revolution Iran is founded on an exclusionary approach. In a sense, these novels can set a ground for a discussion of exclusion as an ideological exercise employed by authorities in charge of developing the cultural politics of education/pedagogy in the Iranian post-revolution society.

What, in general, can be drawn from these novels is an image of the Iranian society entangled in conflicts resulting from the ideological orientation rooted in the revolution.

Both novels represent a society in which a tangible gap can be felt between the wants of the state and those of people. This very point can set a ground for a pedagogic discussion.

The pedagogic subject as defined by the post-revolution state (see chapter one) is supposed to contribute to the realisation of the ideal Islamic society. In other words, in order for this (utopian) society to form, all elements, including educational/pedagogic ones, should be united. This observation – that is the importance of education for the post- revolution state – can be verified when one notices the post-revolution state's decision to close educational institutes after the revolution. As discussed in chapter one, this action was done as a result of the so-called Islamic Cultural Revolution aiming to Islamicise educational institutes. In fact, this decision was in line with the idea of developing a united nation and diminishing the inconsistency of ideas and attitudes with that of the state.

While the unification of different and disparate ideas has been considered by the state as

202

a prerequisite for the realisation of the ideal Islamic society, what the two novels under analysis show is not compatible with the latter project. In other words, in the society depicted by the two authors people not only are not able to converge on a pivotal revolutionary idea but they are obviously against it. However, this incompatibility is not represented in the form of obvious political disagreement in the novels under analysis. In

The Colonel, this has been shown through portraying the disintegration of a family, and in Censoring an Iranian Love Story the latter has been represented through an engagement of the two main characters of the novel (Dara and Sara) with Love/sex.

Taking into account the above discussion, I can argue that the exclusion of the two novels from the cultural sphere of the Iranian society can be related to their anti-utopian representation of the Iranian society. This is obviously in contrast with the utopianism immanent in the ideological cultural politics of the post-revolution state. This observation finds more importance when one notices that while the revolutionary subject, according to the state's ideology, is expected to contribute to the realisation of a unified, homogeneous Islamic society, the two authors show that the Iranian society is inflicted by an inherently unresolvable antagonism resulted from the utopianism developed by the revolutionary ideology. In fact, the exclusion of these two novels, which lay bare the violence inherent in the utopian ideology of having a homogenous society, indicates that the desired subject of the post-revolution state must comply with the fantasmatic causes of the revolution, even if doing so comes at the cost of losing one's voice. This subject, unlike the colonel and his children, is expected to remain hopeful even after seeing the doomed destiny of the revolutionary promises, and, unlike Dara and Sara, not to portray complicated and unpredictable reactions in the face of a totalising ideology. Accordingly,

203

now I can argue that the cultural politics of the post-revolution state demands subjects to show the highest level of compatibility and the lowest level of complexity.

8.3 Limitations of the study

Perhaps the major and most serious limitation that affected this research is lack of having a more or less clear definition of the notion of censorship. In particular, the gap in the literature on the notion of censorship and banning in both pedagogic (educational) and cultural (literary) context of post-revolution Iran is clearly tangible. Before conducting this research, given the prevalence of censorship in the context of Iran, I assumed that this notion has been studied adequately. But when I started searching for relevant studies focusing on notions such as censorship, banning and exclusion of cultural products, I realised that this issue has been considered as a self-evident problem that does not need to be studied on its own. This problem concerned me during thinking about the topic at stake and writing the thesis. As this notion was almost the pivotal notion in the thesis around which other concepts and arguments revolved, lack of having a strong and persuasive conceptual/contextual ground on which it would be possible explain censorship could disorient the thesis both in terms of content and structure. In order to overcome this problem, I dedicated almost three chapters to the issue in question. In chapter one, the notion of 'null curriculum' was suggested as a possible way to explain the issue of censorship in the pedagogical/educational context of post-revolution Iran.

Chapters two and three also dealt with the same issue, albeit from different theoretical perspectives. Rancière’s theory of 'aesthetics' and Foucault's notion of 'power-knowledge' were elaborated with the purpose of finding a rigorous explanation for the prevalence of censorship in the Iranian context. In spite of all these attempts, I still think the thesis might

204

have turned out to be different both in terms of content and structure, if I had had access to an authentic, substantiated discussion on the notion of censorship from a pedagogic perspective.

The other issue that affected this research is related to the limited literature on the study of cultural politics of education/pedagogy in today's Iran. While a cursory look at scholarly journals can show the depth and breadth of studies dedicated to the issues related to cultural politics of Western countries, searching for similar studies focusing on the Iranian context provides us with few studies. When, during reviewing the literature, I was searching for relevant studies using key terms and phrases like 'power and education in Iran', 'philosophy and policy of education in Iran', 'censorship and cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran' and 'subjectivity and education/pedagogy in Iran', I was surprised to see that none of these areas has been adequately studied before. Put more radically, I can say that there is almost no comprehensive studies on philosophical and political principles of cultural politics of education/pedagogy in post-revolution Iran. In fact, the rationale behind adopting a dominantly theoretical approach to exploring the topic at stake is this very gap in the literature.

8.4 Suggestions for further studies

When we hear the word censorship, we may instantly think of hegemonic regimes with rigid ideological demarcations. In fact, it is the existence of such demarcations that justifies the exercise of censorship. However, censorship, at least in societies such as Iran in which tradition is still at work, can have a socio-cultural aspect as well. Sometimes people, regardless of the state's decisions and sensitivities to particular issues, might tend not to read, hear and watch a work which apparently deviates their traditional norms.

205

Conducting a research focusing on censorship as a socio-cultural phenomenon as practiced by people and not the state would give us a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon in question. With taking both socio-cultural and political aspects of censorship into account, it would be possible to come up with a comprehensive and in- depth analysis of censorship and relevant phenomena.

Another area of research that can complement the current research is the study of the banned works created by Iranian female authors. The fact is that censorship in Iran after the revolution ha explicitly targeted Iranian women and issues related to them. A well- known example of the latter is the prohibition of female singers to sing. Accordingly, it is obviously substantiated to argue that an examination of the notion of censorship in the context of Iran without considering female authors might not do justice to the study of the issue at stake. I believe this study could have resulted in a more comprehensive analysis of the notion of censorship and exclusion, if I had analysed banned works of

Iranian female authors. Doing the latter could have also set a ground for comparing the works of Iranian male and female authors, focusing on their approaches to representing the Iranian society after the revolution.

The current research focused on the banned works of two Iranian literary authors in order to see how they represent an image of the post-revolution society and how conception(s) subjectivity has been represented in their works. This approach to exploring the issues at stake can be consolidated if these authors are interviewed. This approach can be generalised to any research projects focusing on the notion of censorship. Iranian cultural activists in different areas of artistic productions, in particular those who have, in one way or another, experienced censorship, are a great resource to be consulted. This group includes both creators of works of arts and publishers, producers and sponsors. 206

8.5 Pedagogic implications

Before discussing the possible pedagogic implications of the current research, I would like to say that, for almost obvious reasons, the results of such study, at least in near future, would not finds its way in the pedagogic environment of Iran. In fact, this observation can be simply, yet not simplistically, verified on the ground that it is not sensible and realistic to expect the findings of such study to have implications within the society inflicted by censorship. In a sense, the issue here is that when a society suffers from censorship, a discussion over censorship would be censored in that society, too. That being said, however, there is an aspect of the current research that might be (I hope to be) of use for researchers interested in the study of Iran's cultural politics of education/pedagogy. And this is related to the notion of exclusion as an ideological strategy for developing curriculum for the Iranian society.

As discussed in various sections of the current thesis, the cultural politics of education/pedagogy in Iran is fundamentally founded on ideological values typically leading to exclusionary approaches to developing curriculum, in the broadest sense of the term. Accordingly, the findings of this study and the adopted approach to understanding notions of censorship and exclusion, within the context of Iran, can be used by researchers and educational practitioners who are interested in examining the making of cultural products from a critical perspective. Researchers interested in examining issues related to the development of curriculum, instead of focusing on what a curriculum includes, can turn their attention to what it (un)intentionally excludes. This approach, as elaborated on in the first three chapters, acquire more significance when the considered curriculum is developed in an ideological context like that of Iran.

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