Politics of Words and Images

Abstract

The history of the Iranian political language is the history of the Iranian experiment with intellectual, political, and aesthetic emancipation since the late nineteenth century. It is a history of intellectual emancipation from the inherited perceptions of social reality, and from political and social domination. Public education has always been seen as a precondition for the realization of these different expressions of emancipation. Public education and constitutional government as means of intellectual and political emancipation were the main promises of the constitutional revolution. The constitutionalists saw a popularly elected constitutional government as a guarantee of public education because, as they argued, an educated people who are aware of their constitutional rights support their government more efficiently than ill-informed people. After seizing political power in the early 1920s, Reza Shah used education as a means of public indoctrination to guarantee people’s obedience to his authoritarian rule. The dissented Iranian intellectuals continued the ideal of public education as a means of emancipation. The Iranian intellectuals have educated the people about both the causes of their impoverished and repressed situation, and about the possibilities for gradual or revolutionary changes to that situation. It seems that the formation and expansion of the public sphere have been the condition of possibility of new political and aesthetic experiences and emancipations. Whereas the Green Movement was the expression of the political experience of the Iranian people in 2009, the film A Separation (2011) was the expression of the aesthetic experience of the people who participated in or were affected by the green movement. 1