My book project, The End of Prophecy: Mediations of Political Myth in Contemporary Iran, examines the Iranian State’s failure to manufacture consent. In the early twentieth-century, Iranian Marxists who witnessed the rise of fascism in Germany began to consider “fascism” in Iran. They claimed that Reza Shah Pahlavi was widely unpopular. “Critical theorists” in Germany were asking how fascism was able to garner popular support. One of the more influential ideas from those debates is that media, and “the culture industry,” manufactured consent. In Iran, a traditional of critical theory emerged that focused on the endemic unpopularity of the state and how media became a place where people learned about and espoused their critical views about the state. Thereafter, the idea that Iran was a “short-term society”—where social crisis was the rule, not the exception—framed the terms of debate in intellectual culture, up to and after the 1979 Revolution of Iran. The End of Prophecy takes up how intellectuals framed media—as both a cause and a remedy for the short-term society—to demonstrate how media facilitated the emergence of collective opposition to the state. The book claims that Iranians experienced the breakdown of social order through media; and likewise, media became a place where they were able to imagine new social worlds and to begin forming critical political associations. The book’s title speaks to its central problematic. In the 1940s, intellectuals began reckoning with the catastrophic changes Iran had experienced in the last two to five decades of top-down modernization. The novelist Sadeq Hedayat popularized a narrative of decline where modernization severed Iran from the prophetic tradition. That narrative became a compelling way of conceptualizing the anarchy of political myth. The End of Prophecy takes that narrative of decline to conceptualize the “mediation” of political myth in Iran. In each chapter, I show how media became a place where Iranians could interface with different political myths—of the nation, the people, and the leader before ‘79, of responsibility, reform, and solidarity after.
Outline
Introduction: The End of Prophecy
Truth’s Mediums: The Chaos of Modernity and the Desire for Order, 1931-1941
Visions of Grandeur: Prophets, Propagandists, and the Utopian Horizon, 1941-1953
The Conspiracy of Revolution: Popular Silence and the Popular Voice, 1956-1971
An earlier version of this chapter is published as “Things Unheard: Popular Silence and the Popular Voice in Revolutionary Iran,” Theory & Event, 24, no. 2 (2021): 483-510.
A Mirror for the Crowds: Crowds, Leaders, and the Antinomy of Charismatic Rule, 1969-1985
An earlier version of this chapter is published as "A mirror for the crowds: the mediated terrain of political leadership in post-revolutionary Iran." Contemporary Political Theory (2023): 1-20.
Chronicles of Victory: The Life and Death of Political Responsibility, 1980-1989
To Learn How to Die: Reform and its Afterlives, 1997-2009
Conclusion: Intimacy, Natality, Solidarity, 2009-2022