A riposte to Hamid Dabashi on Iran
It’s not altogether clear from this physical distance who’s been protesting this past month, nor can we know the protesters’ composition with any precision. But over 70 million people live in Iran, and 50 million went to the polls on June 12. Analytical attention has zeroed in on the protesting minority. We are instinctively attracted, like hunting beasts, to flashing movements, the brilliant spectacle of mobilization. One would hope, from certain quarters, for something slightly better
By Max Ajl on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 - 1,905 words.
Hamid Dabashi has had a remarkably consistent line about what’s going on in Iran. Consistency is an admirable trait, and the line is an attractive one. It goes something like this. Dabashi demurs from taking a stance on whether there was electoral fraud, calling it a “social fact,” e.g. widely believed in Iranian society. He deems the demonstrators part of a burgeoning “civil rights” movement. He calls Mousavi a nascent “Gandhi,” or “Mandela.” He says that the protesters are a rainbow-hued, heterogeneous lot: middle class, lower class, peasants, workers, plumbers, waiters, officers, bankers, students, professionals. And he doesn’t say much about those who voted for Ahmadinejad, or protested in favor of his victory, or stayed home.
A recent Al-Ahram essaycrystallizes this message in remarkably compressed form, although slightly adulterated by a bit of ideological obfuscation. The obfuscation comes when he lectures Palestinian intellectual Azmi Bishara, for having the temerity to note that there exists in Iran an “ideology that claims to have answers for everything and that seeks to permeate all aspects of life.” According to Bishara, that ideology “is a real religion embraced by the vast majority of the people…a religious doctrine is the state ideology, the clerical hierarchy defines and anchors the state hierarchy, and the lower echelons of the clergy are the intermediaries between the people and the ruling ideology.”
Dabashi will have none of that. Although he calls Bishara’s argument “by far the best in the literature so far,” he won’t accept Bishara’s precise formulation: that this ideology merely “seeks to permeate” [my emphasis] all aspects of life. Instead, we get the Foucaldian assertion that a “totalitarian ideology permeates all spheres of private and public life in Iran, not unlike the power of consumer ideologies doing pretty much the same in North American and Western European societies.” Ideology everywhere, like oxygen!
So, according to Dabashi, Iranian religiosity is a cousin to Western consumerism, a “totalitarian” ideology, threatening Wal-Mart shoppers with thunderous thwacking from a cudgel . One needn’t be inquisitorial to question the coherence of this formulation, even as it applies to Iran. What of the strikes at Khodro, the protesting university students? Surely such “spheres of life” as universities and industrial shops, some of which are in fact para-state institutions, aren’t “permeated” by totalitarian ideology, whether or not one wishes to note that an autocratic state is fiercely repressing them.
Perhaps this is crudely reductionist, but ideology is, at the simplest level , what people believe. The struggle between Iranian reformists and conservatives is over the meaning of the very ideology, the Islamic spiritualism, which anchors the institutional legitimacy of the Islamic Republic . But totalitarian ideologies are marked by their consistency, not the degree of disputation over them. Quirkily enough, Iran is plainly heterogenous ideologically, in the Western sense, insofar as some sectors want more political reform, and some want less. The reform movement was proof enough of that.
The clerical elite may seek to universalize their specific understanding of Islamic ideology, but that doesn’t equate to a “totalitarian ideology permeat[ing] all spheres of private and public life in Iran” [my emphasis], unless one should wish to make the case that ideology is definitionally totalitarian. A white sheet permeated by black ink turns black. A people permeated by a specific ideology believe in it. A mind permeated by ideology adheres to it unquestioningly. Ideology is decidedly different from the fierce physicality of state violence, pacepost-colonialism’s adherents’ hesitations about the physical world.
This both does and doesn’t matter. It does matter because different sectors of Iranian society doubtless believe different things—different sectors have different ideologies. Such ideologies could conceivably map over class lines. For materialist analysis, ideas matter.
So what’s further confusing is Dabashi’s claim that those protesting, particularly the young, are members of “a post-ideological generation.” Dabashi has made this claim elsewhere. It’s true that the protesters’ demands are in a sense non-ideological—“Where’s my vote?” “Recount!” etc. But although the demands are non-ideological, they express a desire for democratic norms. His larger point is that the protesters themselves are “post-ideological.” This maneuver disappears the background radiation of capitalism , and ignores various ideological currents within Iran and among the protesters.
Sure, the protests have taken on nothing remotely resembling a class character, but this doesn’t mean that Marxists, for example, aren’t self-consciously participating as Marxists. By calling Iranian society “post-ideological,” Dabashi can sidestep the political economy of Iran, voting patterns, class analysis, and refer instead to this wondrous abstraction—the protesters!—without situating them within their social context. That achieved with the off-hand gesture of calling a whole generation “post-ideological,” the poor who probably voted for Ahmadinejad thus disappear as a class bloc. And once the poor disappear as a class bloc, it becomes easier to avoid or reject class analysis while analyzing the protest movement.
This is what Dabashi does, while responding to Bishara’s apparently wrong-headed assertion that
“the criticisms levelled at the regime on the part of a broad swath of youth who have joined the reformists, especially those from middle class backgrounds who are more in contact with the rest of the world, are reminiscent of the grievances aired by the young in Eastern Europe, who held that their regimes deprived them of their individual and personal freedoms, the freedom to choose their way of life and the Western consumer lifestyle.”
According to Dabashi, this is brazenly untrue: it’s a “false premise,” indeed, “The assumption that supporters of Mousavi and/or Karrubi, or indeed that masses of millions of people who have poured into the streets of Tehran and other cities, come from ‘the middle class’ is a common fallacy that Bishara shares with quite a number of others who are watching the Iranian scene from a theoretical distance that conceals more than it reveals.” As Dabashi continues, “the false premise of ‘middle class’ support for Mousavi, particularly by people I deeply admire, needs more urgent attention.”
Attention it gets. Dabashi writes that
“Of a total Iranian population of 72 million, upward of 70 per cent are under the age of 30. While the total rate of unemployment under Ahmadinejad, predicated on correspondingly high numbers under Khatami’s two-term presidency, is 30 per cent, this rate, according to Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, the most reliable Iranian economist around, for young people between the ages of 15 and 29 (some 35 per cent of the total population) is 70 per cent. So seven out of every 10 people in this age group can scarce find a job, let alone marry, let alone have children and form a family. In exactly what phantasmagoria [sic] definition of “the middle class” can they hope to be included?”
There are two major flaws in Dabashi’s treatment of the numbers.
The first is interpretive: Dabashi’s understanding of class and class-consciousness is in need of serious remediation. Unemployed Iranians below the age of 30 may not be able to “find a job” or “marry,” but this doesn’t mean they don’t have middle-class class consciousness. It’s not an unknown phenomenon that middle-class people—in Bishara’s more considered phrasing, those from “middle-class backgrounds”–be unemployed or underemployed . Nor should it shock if unemployed middle-class people identify with their middle-class origins as opposed to their employment status. Revealingly, Salehi-Isfahani writes, “The vast majority of unemployed youth are supported by their parents. More than 70 percent of youth in their twenties live with their parents.”
The second is epistemic—he uses a non-evidence-based argumentative strategy, with tenuous connections to numerical facts. Put simply, he makes a bunch of stuff up. Iran’s unemployment rates for people in their early twenties are 20 percent for men, 40 percent for women. Salehi-Isfahani wrote just days ago that “Nearly a quarter of people in their 20s are unemployed.” How did Dabashi miss this?
Clearly, his case needs reinforcements. This he knows, and so he writes,
“Consider another fact. If we were to believe the official tabulation of the presidential election, which I have no way of proving otherwise (though that they are rigged is now a “social fact”), twice as many of these young voters have voted for Ahmadinejad as they did for Mir- Hussein Mousavi, Mahdi Karrubi and Mohsen Rezai put together. In other words, the official results shoot the argument of a pro-Mousavi “middle class” in the foot, for we will end up either with the bizarre proposition that pro-Mousavi Iranians voted for Ahmadinejad, if the results are accurate, or else the perfectly plausible possibility that the unemployed — and thus by definition the poor — voted for Mousavi, if the results are rigged. Either way, the supporters of Mousavi are not the upper middle class bourgeois class that thinks its votes are worth more than others.”
Place on hold the aforementioned contention that the election being “rigged is now a ‘social fact,’” a formulation that begs precisely what it purports to explain. The “official tabulation” doesn’t break down election results by age or social class, nor does it correlate turnout with either of those two categories. Salehi-Isfahani elsewhere notes that the middle-class probably comprises 46 percent of the population, using a definition of “the middle class as being in a household with at least $10 per person per day expenditures (PPP dollars) and with at least a basic education (primary).” Such a definition is plainly extraordinarily capacious, perhaps to the point of being non-sensical as a unit of class analysis. But one could merely stipulate that three-quarters of this segment, trending along class lines, voted for Mousavi to see that Dabashi’s numbers prove nothing, and can easily be interpreted to strengthen Bishara’s case. I wrote earlier that consistency is an admirable trait. It’s true, it is. But for the scholar, accuracy would be slightly more valuable.
Meanwhile, Dabashi’s suggestion that pro-Mousavi voters voted for Ahmadinejad is sophistry, and his identification of “the unemployed” with “the poor” is a piece of class analysis that wouldn’t pass muster in a Marxist playlet.
So what’s the problem here? The problem is that while Bishara may well not have supplied much evidence for his assertion, Dabashi doesn’t provide any evidence for his either. His theoretical and physical distance conceals quite as much as it reveals too: in this case, profound lack of empathy for the choices of the Iranian lower-class, coming perilously close to Slavoj Žižek’s brusque dismissal of Ahmadinejad’s policies–which have reducedinequality, in 2006-2007, expenditures in the lower deciles increased sharply relative to those of the upper deciles–as the “demagogic distribution of crumbs to the poor.”
The fraud may be a “social fact,” but it is a “social fact” precisely for those who believe there was fraud. Idle tautology, sure, but the problem is that Dabashi’s formulation ignores the part of society for whom Ahmadinejad’s victory was a “social fact”—those who voted for him! The evidence of fraud may be overwhelming. But that doesn’t mean Ahmadinejad wouldn’t have won without fraud. That doesn’t mean people didn’t have real, valid, understandable reasons for voting the way they did. And that doesn’t mean that analyses that write the Iranian poor out of history and society do us any good as we try to understand the divisions, movements, and ruptures within the Islamic Republic.
It’s not altogether clear from this physical distance who’s been protesting this past month, nor can we know the protesters’ composition with any precision. But over 70 million people live in Iran, and 50 million went to the polls on June 12. Analytical attention has zeroed in on the protesting minority. We are instinctively attracted, like hunting beasts, to flashing movements, the brilliant spectacle of mobilization. One would hope, from certain quarters, for something slightly better.
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You're an anarchist and you block people from your website. You're against "rules" unless they are not your rules. You're a joke.
While I agree that it can be counterproductive to propagate unsubstantiated information, I find this Sarah Palin-like "gotcha" attempt here to miss some critical points–you are writing about Hamid Dabashi's Al-Ahram piece and cherry picking your assertions to slam him, privileging one set of unsubstantiated assertions about class and ideology over what you claim Hamid Dabashi “made up."
Bishara's argument that the "official ideology that permeates…is a real religion embraced by the vast majority of the people" is a weak claim because it neglects the everyday practices of state power and enforcement in Iran. Ideology (in your own words, what people believe) and what people do with it (their beliefs) are not stagnant or fixed. Authority over the very symbols of the regime and revolution are at stake, as evidenced by the opposition’s disciplined and tactical use of the phrase “Allahoakbar” as a rallying cry—people are getting attacked and arrested by paramilitary forces for saying God is great?!? For asking their votes to be counted, essentially begging to uphold the tenets of the political system? To parrot the secularist “regime change” slogans of certain segments of the diaspora and neocon elements in western states is suicidal and that is why no one is running around saying that, because they wish to remain within the field of legitimate political discourse to avoid being labeled as collaborators, spies, foreign agents, etc. Which Khamenei and his backers went on to do anyway…
Moreover, Bishara makes his case by neglecting the practices of moral/ideological enforcement, policing, and surveillance in Iran, which compel much dissimulation of loyalty and support for the status quo. In doing so, Bishara and others can make the claim that the majority of Iranian people embrace the official ideology of the state (which is what, precisely?), across classes. Bishara's implication that the protests in Iran amount to a middle class uprising presumes that the "poor" and "middle class" (certainly relative terms here that are not well defined by your piece either) have certain stations in life, and their socioeconomic levels are the primary informants of their political outlooks. He reifies class differences as a political contest between a minority of Western-inspired reform-seeking bourgeois and the overlooked downtrodden defenders of the status quo. This understanding of class politics is so oversimplified, and yet you take this point and run with it, citing a blog entry and some analysis by Jhavad Salehi-Isfahani. You say Dabashi's interpretation of the numbers is flawed, but yet Salehi-Isfahani’s analyses that you linked here hardly amount to an authoritative rebuttal of Dabashi’s class analysis. In fact, Salehi-Isfahani and Dabashi are pretty much in agreement about the conspicuous lack of educational and economic opportunity for the young people of Iran, something you overlook.
He reifies class differences as a political contest between a minority of Western-inspired reform-seeking bourgeois and the overlooked downtrodden defenders of the status quo. This understanding of class politics is so oversimplified, and yet you take this point and run with it, citing a blog entry and some analysis by Jhavad Salehi-Isfahani.
This is not remotely what I wrote, which is why you're not quoting anything that I wrote to back it up.
You say Dabashi's interpretation of the numbers is flawed, but yet Salehi-Isfahani’s analyses that you linked here hardly amount to an authoritative rebuttal of Dabashi’s class analysis. In fact, Salehi-Isfahani and Dabashi are pretty much in agreement about the conspicuous lack of educational and economic opportunity for the young people of Iran, something you overlook.
Again I understand that your criticism amounts to more than simply a rebuttal of my piece–you're saying I overlook things (of course I do!)–but this isn't an accurate claim. Dabashi and not I am making all-encompassing claims about the class make-up of the demonstrators. again if you look at Salehi-Isfahani's numbers and Dabashi's treatment of them you'll see that he is really either mis-reading them or being dishonest. Dabashi's class-analysis isn't a class analysis, anyway; it's an anti-class analysis. Class analysis is materialistic; Dabashi can't even get the numbers right, and doesn't understand class-consciousness (to personalize, not a shock for an upper-middle class post-colonialist academic, for whom mis-understanding class is practically a job qualification).
While I agree that it can be counterproductive to propagate unsubstantiated information, I find this Sarah Palin-like "gotcha" attempt here to miss some critical points–you are writing about Hamid Dabashi's Al-Ahram piece and cherry picking your assertions to slam him, privileging one set of unsubstantiated assertions about class and ideology over what you claim Hamid Dabashi “made up."
First of all, Dabashi did "make stuff up." That doesn't belong in quotation marks–it's sourced. Secondly, I am "cherry-picking" assertions, I suppose, but this is a riposte, not an analysis. The analysis–the real analysis–is hard; it may be impossible from outside Iran, right now. That doesn't make my skepticism worthless; Dabashi has been working over-time on this issue, and what he's peddling is not of very high quality. On to your specific points:
Bishara's argument that the "official ideology that permeates…is a real religion embraced by the vast majority of the people" is a weak claim because it neglects the everyday practices of state power and enforcement in Iran. Ideology (in your own words, what people believe) and what people do with it (their beliefs) are not stagnant or fixed. Authority over the very symbols of the regime and revolution are at stake, as evidenced by the opposition’s disciplined and tactical use of the phrase “Allahoakbar” as a rallying cry—people are getting attacked and arrested by paramilitary forces for saying God is great?!? For asking their votes to be counted, essentially begging to uphold the tenets of the political system? To parrot the secularist “regime change” slogans of certain segments of the diaspora and neocon elements in western states is suicidal and that is why no one is running around saying that, because they wish to remain within the field of legitimate political discourse to avoid being labeled as collaborators, spies, foreign agents, etc. Which Khamenei and his backers went on to do anyway…
Well, first of all my impression from corresponding with some Iranian leftists is that it's somewhat less tactical than you say it is (of course on the part of the Marxists themselves it's totally tactical, practically by definition; but my impression is that many believe the gains of the revolution is worth preserving). This is speculation, though. Some of what you're saying is certainly true–but again speaks to the issue of a "totalitarian ideology," one of Dabashi's claims. If it's an all-permeating totalitarian ideology why are people disputing it?
Moreover, Bishara makes his case by neglecting the practices of moral/ideological enforcement, policing, and surveillance in Iran, which compel much dissimulation of loyalty and support for the status quo. In doing so, Bishara and others can make the claim that the majority of Iranian people embrace the official ideology of the state (which is what, precisely?), across classes.
That the state qua state/regime is legitimate, I suppose, although I'm not defending Bishara; I use him as a foil. I think his argument is more nuanced than you're suggesting here. So what if a majority believe the state legitimate? Do you think the opposite? The claim of millions in the street has been seriously questioned.
Bishara's implication that the protests in Iran amount to a middle class uprising presumes that the "poor" and "middle class" (certainly relative terms here that are not well defined by your piece either) have certain stations in life, and their socioeconomic levels are the primary informants of their political outlooks.
No, I haven't seen any good analysis of the class breakdowns; my piece is not "notes toward a class analysis of contemporary Iran"; it's a "riposte to hamid dabashi." You want it to be something that it was not. That socioeconomic outlooks help to determine outlook or consciousness seems pretty obvious.
Focusing instead on delivering the riposte, you harp on about the correct interpretation of the numbers, and imply that non-quantitative analysis is somehow less accurate than deriving a set of conclusions from some random set of statistics. Are the numbers truly more accurate? Whose numbers? Unemployment is underreported in Iran, inflation is underreported, and Ahmadinejad out and out lied about the rates of economic growth during his tenure at the presidential debate. Precisely because there is such a debate or difficulty in ascertaining what comprises the "poor" or "middle class" in Iran, because of the uselessness of categorizing class in Iran based on some arbitrary international indicators of poverty/prosperity, I’d venture that the hitherto mentioned accounts of “class” diminish its usefulness as an analytical framework to understand what has happened in Iran since the election. I am not dismissing it in its entirety, just noting the slipperiness of the concept.
Let’s think about “class” differently for a second—in a highly centralized state such as Iran, economic opportunity (and thus social mobility) is very much tied to the relationships and access people have to state arbiters of opportunity–something that is well known in Iran, mentioned by the commentators you cite, and not mentioned once in your analysis. Moreover, Iran's social welfare programs and one’s being able to study at one of the prestigious public universities, is often tied to an individual’s explicit performing/demonstrating certain ideological commitments over and beyond excelling on an absurdly difficult standardized test.
What you also overlook in Dabashi's piece is his discussion of educational opportunity, and the need to do something with the 80% or so of youth who cannot study at university for not scoring high enough on the Concour college entrance exam to go to a public (cheap) school, or have the money to go to a Open university (private and expensive). The state absorbs as many of its young as possible to serve in the security apparatuses, gives rations and subsidies to their families, etc. Its not a hard argument to make that the overriding motivation for the young people to join then, since they are excluded from the “typical” or more prestigious routes of socioeconomic advancement, is primarily personal and economic, rather than ideological.
So what is this all about? Without having really resolved or improved upon the notion of class you critique in Dabashi’s work, you want to refute his arguments. You say that “the evidence of fraud may be overwhelming. But that doesn’t mean Ahmadinejad wouldn’t have won without fraud. That doesn’t mean people didn’t have real, valid, understandable reasons for voting the way they did. And that doesn’t mean that analyses that write the Iranian poor out of history and society do us any good as we try to understand the divisions, movements, and ruptures within the Islamic Republic.”
What it comes down to is what we WANT to believe often guides our reading of the events in the end. The debate on what has been happening in Iran, what information is credible, shows that quite vividly.
No one is denying that Ahmadinejad won votes. But to suggest that Ahmadinejad would have won the election without the fraud is not only fruitless speculation, but is a claim not borne out by any evidence prior to the election. To argue that the focus on the protests now is somehow to neglect the actual currents of Iranian politics is a mystifying claim to me; its what is happening in Iran now and matters enough that the issue isn’t going away within Iran. Just as I am not willing to swallow everything I see and hear about what “the people want”, I am skeptical about matter-of-factly dismissing the swell of dissent in Iran right now as a political paroxysm of the boutique-chic North Tehran counterculture. I refuse to minimize the brutality with which the regime has resorted to imposing its desired political outcomes, the truncheon blows my cousin suffered in Tehran, the arrest of another friend for being in the vicinity of a protest, the detention of journalists, and the forced public confessions.
I’m sure we are on the same page as far as being immensely frustrated by the suffocation of information, the 24/7 news cycle that splices and edits images to suit its own programming, and having to rely upon sloppy journalism written outside of Iran with no clear way to fact check the stories. I’m sure you wrote your piece in the spirit of provoking and furthering debate. It would be helpful if those who aspire to drop a more seasoned commentary would refrain from engaging in these same counterproductive practices and be more humble in their writing.
I’m sure we are on the same page as far as being immensely frustrated by the suffocation of information, the 24/7 news cycle that splices and edits images to suit its own programming, and having to rely upon sloppy journalism written outside of Iran with no clear way to fact check the stories. I’m sure you wrote your piece in the spirit of provoking and furthering debate. It would be helpful if those who aspire to drop a more seasoned commentary would refrain from engaging in these same counterproductive practices and be more humble in their writing.
I agree with most of this, except for the last line. You suggest humility in engaging with a more "seasoned" commentator. Respect is earned, and not assumed, in my book. Dabashi himself claims to have disassociated himself from Iranian politics for over a decade; then he wrote a book about modern Iran that got panned, and now he offers very shoddy analysis, which I assess on its merits. I see nothing indefensible about my approach; I accept that it overlooks or devotes insufficient attention to aspects of what's going on, as it must–my information sources are extremely limited. I don't understand why the call for being "humble" should go out to me and not Dabashi–I'm not the one making stuff up or misinterpreting in.
You want respect for a "respected" scholar of Iran. I want respect for accuracy. The two seem to be at odds here.
Focusing instead on delivering the riposte, you harp on about the correct interpretation of the numbers, and imply that non-quantitative analysis is somehow less accurate than deriving a set of conclusions from some random set of statistics. Are the numbers truly more accurate? Whose numbers? Unemployment is underreported in Iran, inflation is underreported, and Ahmadinejad out and out lied about the rates of economic growth during his tenure at the presidential debate. Precisely because there is such a debate or difficulty in ascertaining what comprises the "poor" or "middle class" in Iran, because of the uselessness of categorizing class in Iran based on some arbitrary international indicators of poverty/prosperity, I’d venture that the hitherto mentioned accounts of “class” diminish its usefulness as an analytical framework to understand what has happened in Iran since the election. I am not dismissing it in its entirety, just noting the slipperiness of the concept.
It's clearly slippery, which again is something I noted in my piece (the "middle-class" as used by Salehi-Isfahani is too large; I'm sure it breaks down internally, and I'm not sure if he's simply saying everyone who makes more than that is middle-class). I tried to be careful and nuanced–which Dabashi doesn't–which doesn't make me "harping," which is just hostility. Are inflation and unemployment under-reported? Where have you seen this claim? By how much? (Inflation, by the way, is quite mis-understood; development economists don't think inflation below 20 % annually is bad for economic development; S. Korea was at 15 per annum during its boom years).
Let’s think about “class” differently for a second—in a highly centralized state such as Iran, economic opportunity (and thus social mobility) is very much tied to the relationships and access people have to state arbiters of opportunity–something that is well known in Iran, mentioned by the commentators you cite, and not mentioned once in your analysis. Moreover, Iran's social welfare programs and one’s being able to study at one of the prestigious public universities, is often tied to an individual’s explicit performing/demonstrating certain ideological commitments over and beyond excelling on an absurdly difficult standardized test.
Actually, it's totally implicit in my claim of trying to understand why people voted for Ahmadinejad; the next piece of writing I'm working on.
So what is this all about? Without having really resolved or improved upon the notion of class you critique in Dabashi’s work, you want to refute his arguments.
…
What it comes down to is what we WANT to believe often guides our reading of the events in the end. The debate on what has been happening in Iran, what information is credible, shows that quite vividly.
Yes. And I refute them quite well. I do improve upon his notions of class and class-consciousness, too–by definition, since he makes up numbers and I don't.
No one is denying that Ahmadinejad won votes. But to suggest that Ahmadinejad would have won the election without the fraud is not only fruitless speculation, but is a claim not borne out by any evidence prior to the election. To argue that the focus on the protests now is somehow to neglect the actual currents of Iranian politics is a mystifying claim to me; its what is happening in Iran now and matters enough that the issue isn’t going away within Iran. Just as I am not willing to swallow everything I see and hear about what “the people want”, I am skeptical about matter-of-factly dismissing the swell of dissent in Iran right now as a political paroxysm of the boutique-chic North Tehran counterculture. I refuse to minimize the brutality with which the regime has resorted to imposing its desired political outcomes, the truncheon blows my cousin suffered in Tehran, the arrest of another friend for being in the vicinity of a protest, the detention of journalists, and the forced public confessions.
I do not think I minimize it. I think in a news-cycle that talks about the brutality and only the brutality of an enemy regime suggesting that I downplay it by not focusing on it at all evinces a touch of a police mentality–as though I need to clear my throat with a denunciation before getting down to business.
now, many, many, many analyses are down–playing social support for Ahmadinejad, manifested in votes. Is it speculation that he would've won? Yes. Is it speculation that he would've lost? Even more overtly so. You're stipulating agnosticism about whether 11 million votes were stolen or not. I'm willing to be a little more assertive than that.
The protests are what is moving; quiescence or passive support for the state merits attention, too. That doesn't seem "mystifying." I have emphatically not dismissed it as a north-Tehrani phenomenon; I specifically wrote that Marxists are involved.
Uhh, Max? I'm afraid you're in a bit over your head with this commentary. Your definition of ideology is, indeed, "crudely reductionist" as you say. That kind of ruins your entire piece I'm afraid (incidentally I know it's fashionable these days to use the word "riposte" not in its original meaning but rather in the sense of being a simple "reply," but generally folks who do that are trying to make themselves appear to have a large vocabulary when in fact they do not). You say in a reply comment above that "class analysis is materialistic," but I'm afraid that kind of wildly oversimplified, vulgar-Marxist (and, again, reductionist) notion lost purchase among left intellectuals some time ago. Not sure why you have a problem with the word "phantasmagoria" as used by Dabashi, but I'm guessing you've never read Walter Benjamin, because otherwise you would not have dropped that pretentious "[sic]" afterward. There are other problems – really everything! – with what you've written but it's not worth my time to get into them.
Most of what you have here is incoherent, and you really need to read a lot more books before you attempt something like this again. "Eyeranian" already explained some of the main issues above, but you seem content to deflect those and continue on in your assumption that Dabashi (and I take no position on what he wrote – in an odd way neither do you) has no idea what he's talking about and that you, a 25 year old "raconteur" (are your stories as boring and hard to follow as this piece?) totally has his number. It's difficult to exaggerate how ridiculous that makes you look, but best of luck with your inane and pompous ballyhoo in the future!
I'm sure you'll tell me that I did not engage with the "substance" of your arguments, but I assure that was quite intentional. It's Sunday and I don't care to soil my best rhetorical suit.
Uhh, Max? I'm afraid you're in a bit over your head with this commentary. Your definition of ideology is, indeed, "crudely reductionist" as you say. That kind of ruins your entire piece I'm afraid (incidentally I know it's fashionable these days to use the word "riposte" not in its original meaning but rather in the sense of being a simple "reply," but generally folks who do that are trying to make themselves appear to have a large vocabulary when in fact they do not). You say in a reply comment above that "class analysis is materialistic," but I'm afraid that kind of wildly oversimplified, vulgar-Marxist (and, again, reductionist) notion lost purchase among left intellectuals some time ago. Not sure why you have a problem with the word "phantasmagoria" as used by Dabashi, but I'm guessing you've never read Walter Benjamin, because otherwise you would not have dropped that pretentious "[sic]" afterward. There are other problems – really everything! – with what you've written but it's not worth my time to get into them.
Uhh, Dandyfop? I didn’t “define” ideology and if you anyway read Dabashi’s piece, you’d know that his main issue is trying to lecture Azmi Bishara from a (totally unwarranted) position of intellectual superiority, using the discussion of “ideology” as a segue-way to “discuss” the numbers, on the assumption that if Bishara can’t even get ideology right, whatever he has to say about class must be a joke. Sad. I’ll spend more time with my flashcards, though, that is a good piece of advice. That you are seizing upon “reply comments” to make your case proves the bankruptcy of it. But then, you have no case, right? One simply can’t be bothered, when there’re reams of output from the Frankfurt School left to pore over. That Dabashi used “phantasmagoria” as an adjective is why there’s a [sic] after it; but then, if you’ve read anything that Dabashi has written, you’d know that style is not his strong point. The personal attacks—haven’t read Walter Benjamin, vulgar-Marxist, read more books, “make themselves appear to have a large vocabulary when in fact they do not,” etc. etc. etc. are just that—evincing (is that pompous? Is there a place I can check up on such things before posting them online?) a gatekeeper mentality. You basically seem upset that I don’t know my place. Sad, like I said.
Most of what you have here is incoherent, and you really need to read a lot more books before you attempt something like this again. "Eyeranian" already explained some of the main issues above, but you seem content to deflect those and continue on in your assumption that Dabashi (and I take no position on what he wrote – in an odd way neither do you) has no idea what he's talking about and that you, a 25 year old "raconteur" (are your stories as boring and hard to follow as this piece?) totally has his number. It's difficult to exaggerate how ridiculous that makes you look, but best of luck with your inane and pompous ballyhoo in the future!
“Incoherent” yet perfectly coherent to the other responder; I need to “read more books”; can you tell me howmanyplease? You correctly pick up my disdain for Dabashi but if I “in an odd way” take no position on what he wrote—yet simultaneously think I “have his number”—how then did you discern this if what I wrote is “incoherent”? As for the rest, well, you already know. Next time, arguments; failing that, a suggestion on how old I need to be before using certain words or writing about certain topics. And failing that, you could simply try to read what’s on the screen in front of you.
Yeah, to be honest, its not quite perfectly coherent. I too think Max is a bit out of his depth here, and I found his 7 comments to my first reply substantively underwhelming and not worth the time to sift through to point out his weaknesses (especially when he doesn't bother to do that or engage accurately with my own text). Suffice to say I won't be buying what you’re selling, because apart from your definitional vagaries, it’s more polemical than empirical, and that detracts from the valid points you do make. It’s your prerogative to write and think whatever you want, but I think you need to work a bit more on your definitions (e.g. CLASS & IDEOLOGY) before slamming other folks for the same reasons in a public forum with a strawman piece (or riposte, or whatever you want to call it—we both agree it is not “analysis,” which begs the question why this piece is an editor’s pick). And insisting that you have when someone calls you out on it doesn't count, nor does it to hide those inconsistencies behind a cursory analysis of some numbers.
I find your stake in this topic to be curious; Iranology has made quick money for some as of late. It’s clear you have an ax to grind against Dabashi that goes beyond his (oft compelling) Iran analysis, and that is the case with many folks who cannot stomach postcolonial Middle Eastern scholarship or critique. I am not asking you to respect him nor was I referring to him as a seasoned commentator (he is certainly an abrasive one when he wants to be), but I would suggest spending a little bit more time exploring the obvious lacuna in your own work before blazing on ahead to toss out the next zinger. That is if indeed you want to distinguish yourself from the feckless punditry, which I imagine you do. That's what I mean about writing with a bit more humility.
Eyeranian, to be honest: "substantively underwhelming," "not worth the time," "out of his depth," "definitional vagaries," "strawman piece," "inconsistencies," "curious," writer of "zingers." And in all that no substantive engagement with what I wrote as opposed to what I didn't write.
Again, there's an issue here: the issue is that I didn't undertake a full-scale class analysis of the Iranian uprising, situating it within domestic social reproduction, secularism, Islamism, etc. That's what your comments amount to. Guilty. I write a polemic and agree that it's a polemic and get pilloried because presumably I should have written something else although it's roundly agreed–except by the multiple editors who have run the piece–that I don't know what I'm talking about. Bizarre. As for Dabashi: I'm looking for his "compelling" analysis. If you have a specific suggestion, let me know. "Iranology has made quick money for some as of late"–funny, I seem to have missed it.
Do you understand that I agree that the issue of the Iranian state using resources to mobilize (possibly or plausibly) clientelistic electoral support is both interesting and relevant, but that is a hard analysis to write?
Riddle me this: are you impressed with Dabashi's output? Do you think it's important or relevant that he's flitting about speaking of 70 percent youth unemployment? That he's basing a class analysis and a projection of voting patterns and positing fraud based on that? If it is important and relevant–which I assume it is–then why is it invalid to write a piece criticizing his output? Because that's what this amounts to, really, and your cavalier statement about a "couple of blog entries" (actually I spent some time reviewing everything Salehi-Isfehani has placed online about the Iranian economy before writing this piece) basically says, well, forget the lying high-profile academic–some kid from Brooklyn is a little out of his depth. Priorities are priorities.
With these comments you "intellectuals" prove just how much out of touch you are with any working class. Give me a break! You people are so full of shit its oozing out of your ears.
Now THAT was a riposte Max, or at least an attempt at one.
When you said what ideology "is" at its "simplest level" I assumed there was some sort of definitional thingy going on there. Apparently you were just typing at random, so my apologies for misconstruing your intent (this is clearly a case where simply reading what's on the screen in front of me is not sufficient!).
Good job looking up Walter Benjamin on Wikipedia and learning he is from the Frankfurt School (he's the only really interesting one, so you can skip the rest of 'em – check out his "Arcades Project").
Nouns can actually function as adjectives at times, but regardless it's nice to know you feel free to nitpick another writer's style but take great umbrage when someone making a comment here does the same to you. As some bloviator once said, "Consistency is an admirable trait!"
You seem to be a logical enough person to understand that having an incoherent, empty position with respect to the Dabashi piece AND thinking you "have his number" are not remotely mutually exclusive, and that it's easy for me to gauge the latter as being your true mindset based on your cocky diction while still viewing your overall argument as udder poppycock (moo!). As such I won't bother explaining that point in detail, however I will mention that you are not going to wow me into interweb submission with trite semantics.
I strongly advise you NOT to use flashcards under ANY circumstances.
From what I can gather, you need to read roughly 17 more books before you can continue writing these sort of think pieces online.
Or you need to turn 42 years of age – whichever comes first.
Incidentally I actually AM a web gatekeeper, hired by an obscure Trotskyite group, and I'll admit it's rather subtle of you to have divined so quickly my real reason for being here.
I'm still interested as to whether or not the stories of a raconteur such as yourself are boring in real life or just on the internet. Toodulls!
This is getting cute, but not yet funny. That, I'm still waiting for; plainly, it'll be a while. When one prefaces a statement by "at the simplest level" and "perhaps this is crudely reductionist," it's clear enough that one is not defining but simply suggesting a reasonable short-hand understanding for the purposes of argument. I'm well aware of the problems of "defining" ideology. I even read Terry Eagleton in college! And Bloch! And Adorno and Horkheimer! And found the latter to be logorrheic shit!
"Nouns can actually function as adjectives at times, but regardless it's nice to know you feel free to nitpick another writer's style…blah blah"
Right, but not in that case (unless you like? I'm looking for style cues from you, too.)
"You seem to be a logical enough person to understand that having an incoherent, empty position with respect to the Dabashi piece AND thinking you "have his number" are not remotely mutually exclusive, and that it's easy for me to gauge the latter as being your true mindset based on your cocky diction while still viewing your overall argument as udder poppycock (moo!). "
When one tears something down, one needn't build something in its place. I'm appreciative that you have now moved from my incoherence to my "having an incoherent, empty position with respect to the Dabashi piece." Here it is in plain words, since polysyllables trouble you: it was pure shit. He makes stuff up! He dresses it up in verbiage that veers off the deep end from pomposity to self-regarding obscurantism! Here is a major scholar of Iran fabricating numbers in a widely-circulated piece and somehow an unknown writer is the locus of your attention. Bizarre.
The rest again is personal invective; inoffensive, unless someone were to form an opinion of you from reading it, in which case you'd be kind of fucked.
Dear Jewbonic,
Since you're looking for style points, a better way to write your original posting would have been to link to the Dabashi piece and then say "It was pure shit. He makes stuff up! He dresses it up in verbiage that veers off the deep end from pomposity to self-regarding obscurantism! Here is a major scholar of Iran fabricating numbers in a widely-circulated piece!" Much more succinct, and without the accompanying pseudo-intellectual dross (though you promised no polysyllables, so I was dismayed to read the word "obscurantism").
It's interesting how easy it was to get you to reduce your supposedly complex argument to "it was pure shit." Would you say that to Dabashi's face? Of course not. Would you even debate him about Iran, matters theoretical, or indeed anything else in real life? No, I don't think so. It's easy on a random website to take pot shots at folks and get away with it, and I don't even care about that, really (well, obviously, I guess, since I did it to you). But here you're not just objecting to Dabashi (about whom I have no particular opinion), you're basically calling him a liar and suggesting that he does not know his stuff and cannot write, whilst positing yourself as a very smart fellow. Yet instead you come off as a rather pompous knows-very-little who himself pumps out mediocre prose. Sorry but I just hate that kind of thing, particularly when it comes from someone on the left, which is very much where my politics are.
In case you could not tell, from the beginning (including the name "Dandyfop" – hopefully no one will "form an opinion" of me, "Mr. Dandyfop," in the real world based on these comments!) I was trying to wind you up by acting like a pompous assclown myself. Obviously that worked. What was supposed to be a super-sharp critique of an article by someone who is obviously smarter than you has now been reduced, by you, to "it was pure shit." Hopefully no one will form an opinion of you from reading what you've written here.
Though I doubt you'll take this final sentence seriously (and I can't blame you), that is very much the spirit in which it is intended: best of luck with your future writing and activism.
Sincerely,
D. Fop
PS–Another style tip. If you want to pick an intellectual fight with someone in the real world, you could do much worse than to follow Dabashi's example in the piece which you liken to excrement, wherein he begins, "In his astute take on the current electoral crisis in Iran ('An alternative reading', Al-Ahram Weekly, 25 June-1 July 2009), by far the best in the literature so far, Azmi Bishara lays out a very concise premise for our reading of the unfolding event but, alas, reaches a hasty and flawed conclusion. What I respectfully submit bellow is in a spirit of utter solidarity with the leading Palestinian intellectual whom I admire as a guiding light in our critical assessment of where we stand in our contemporary world."
See that? It's a tone of respectful disagreement which he maintains throughout, rather than one of sarcasm and condescension, capped with accusations that the other person is "making stuff up," which is what I found and reacted to so strongly to when I showed up here.
I wouldn't dare to debate such stuff in real life with him except–Gasp!–when I did precisely this at Alwan for the Arts, and he was evasive on every substantive point, which the people in the room who agreed with him acknowledged, and which he (tacitly) acknowledged by directly inviting a second follow-up when he saw that it was clear that his evasions were, well, evasions, and were being recognized as evasions. This dishonesty overlaid with orotundity was well kind of what prompted this piece! But over in fantasy-land, "No, I don't think so." It's a good thing the real world doesn't sit around awaiting your assessments on whether it's real or not; life would be kind of strange, no?
As for the rest? A really cute and sweet pat on the back, some tips from whothefucknows on "respectful disagreement," known in other circles as liberal blackmail, some self-psychoanalysis on why you "reacted…so strongly," a pretty clear statement on what your priorities are–my supposed pomposity vs. Dabashi's misrepresentations–and then this: "pseudo-intellectual dross," I'm a wanna-be "very smart fellow. Yet instead you come off as a rather pompous knows-very-little who himself pumps out mediocre prose," drafter of a "supposedly complex argument," reacting to "someone who is obviously smarter" than I. With that, I'll cry myself to sleep.
Did you call him dishonest at Alwan for the Arts? Did you tell him his arguments were shit? How did you determine that him allowing you multiple followup questions was a (tacit) acknowledgment that he was being "evasive on every substantive point?" Sorry if I question your interpretation of how that particular encounter unfolded, but quite frankly I have a feeling Dabashi and others in the room had a different feeling about your questions.
And you're right, suggesting that one employ a friendly tone of discourse is "liberal blackmail," obviously. In order to be a true leftist one must be unaccountably rude. You forgot to add that being friendly to strangers = fascism, and that people who love their mothers are capitalist stooges. Otherwise, good job copying and pasting my remarks and pretending to cry about them, and best of luck getting everyone else in the world over to your way of thinking about things. With such "measured polemics" as the above you are no doubt bound to succeed in short order.
I agree with Mike.
yeah Mike, intellectuals are stupid! let's show 'em how the working class wipes shit out your earholes.
love the cynicism.
We can learn a lot from Orwell
Orwell stomped on a lot of toes: Of course, he disliked bureaucratese. But, especially during the "Popular Front" years of the 1930s, Orwell frequently directed his ire at the intelligentsia. He accused intellectuals of power worship, hostility towards ordinary social mores, and a penchant for ostracizing critics who rejected their ovine orthodoxies with sneers and boycotts. Much of this criticism was inspired by the intellectuals' lockstep support for Stalin even to the extent of temporizing about the Bukharin trials and the murder of Trotsky. But much of Orwell's anger was directed more generally at the intellectuals' desperate desire to distinguish themselves from the middle class — a desire, Orwell believed, that led them to abandon common decency and common language.
Has anything really changed? It's the group with a different cause.
Looks like you're the one misreading.
Salehi-Isfahani: Young people ages 15-29 make up 35 percent of the population but account for 70 percent of the unemployed.
http://www.shababinclusion.org/content/blog/detai...
"While the total rate of unemployment under Ahmadinejad, predicated on correspondingly high numbers under Khatami’s two-term presidency, is 30 per cent, this rate, according to Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, the most reliable Iranian economist around, for young people between the ages of 15 and 29 (some 35 per cent of the total population) is 70 per cent. So seven out of every 10 people in this age group can scarce find a job, let alone marry, let alone have children and form a family."
There's a difference between 70 percent unemployment and 70 percent of the unemployed.
This douche monitors and deletes comments on his blog. Not spam, but comments that don't fit his world view. What kind of Anarchist is unaccepting of other views?
The Answer: An Anarchist that is not in any way for functional anarchy but is a true despot that despises any form of authority.
I assume I'm the douche you are talking about, I havent ever censored a comment except if its racist or calling for jihad or something like that… If you wrote something and it didn't come up, it's more likely it's a technical problem, we have had some trouble with Intense Debate, please let me know what you posted that didn't appear and I'll try to retrieve it… Matt
Matt,
He means me, because I banned him from my blog for calling me a bigot [once] and another time for bizarre speculations:
"When i brought this point up earlier, that your life is harder because you are jewish, that Israel makes your life harder in your leftist circles, you attacked me for "trying to make claims about you psychological state". Here you make the case for me. Some people call you "Self Hating". I don't think there is anything "Self Hating" about you. On the contrary in your little circle you are revered like finklestein (who would have been a nobody anywhere else). In turn you get more women and such. Plus as an added bonus everyone knows radical leftist chicks are easy."
Of course, no comments were "deleted."
Cheers for the heads up Max, I'll let this guy blather on by himself next time…
Bizarre speculations? Half you're articles are speculations about the motives of political players and pundits. Still, that's not the point.
The point: How the Hell are you an anarchist but you run you're blog like a dictator?
It's a joke, and you're are a joke, Non of your "insights" stand up in reality. Go back to living in LaLa land.