The Deployment of Death as an Event

Abstract

The Tehran bazaar has been conceptualised as a linear-structured marketplace and as a united sociocultural entity consisting of several public buildings that vary in form, function and historical value. Built in the sixteenth century, it was affected by several urban plans in the twentieth century under Qajar, Pahlavi and the Islamic governments. Today it is known as a fixed, central, urban district demarcated by distinguishable linear north–south and east–west streets. The existing scholarship on the architectural history of the Tehran bazaar treats this Iranian marketplace as an immobile complex of static places. Such stability first ignores the constant transformation of the bazaar. Second, when architectural accounts tend to include the mobility of this urban environment, they borrow the grand sociopolitical narratives. The major problem, thus, remains the reduction of space to a backdrop of activities. By considering architecture as an active rather than a passive concept, this article aims to narrate a micro-analysis account, in order to consider architecture as an event.

Mapping the problems of the conventional historiography, a Foucauldian concept of event is introduced, through which the micro-analysis of a place can be explored. This text employs two concrete examples of “strike” and “decline” to ask: what if a strike was a singular eventual statement, rather than another similar demonstration? And what if the decline was an architectural concept, rather than an ideological notion?

To answer these two questions, the paper is divided into two major parts. The first part concerns the normalisation of various uprisings of the Tehran bazaar in the twentieth century and explores the micro performance of blind shutters during the strike. The second part interrogates the representation of the bazaar as an environment in crisis. Through Barthes' conception of punctum, the second part investigates how several framed photographs of the dead hung in various shops deploy death to prolong the life of the bazaar.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This paper, as a part of ongoing PhD research, has benefited from a range of comments and engagement. Here, I would like to thank Dr Chris L. Smith and Dr Glen Hill for their valuable and engaging comments on the issue as a whole; Eng. S. M. Beheshti and Dr E. Mokhtari for their generosity in sharing their personal engagement of several heritage conservation projects; and A. R. Shirazi, who is extending my photographic journey in the Tehran bazaar while I am in Australia.

Notes

^1. Zohreh Naghibi, “Gozaresh tafsili kalame az tatili emrooz bazaar tehran va rahpeiymaiee va naarami pas az aan,” kaleme.com (October 3, 2012), accessed January 31, 2014, http://www.kaleme.com/1391/07/12/klm-114722/.

^2. Zohreh Naghibi, “Gozaresh tafsili kalame az tatili emrooz bazaar Tehran varah peiymaiee va naarami pas az aan,” kaleme.com (October 2012), accessed January 31, 2014, http://www.kaleme.com/1391/07/12/klm-114722/.

^3. “Dar khiyabanhaye atraf bazaar Tehran che gozasht/ dastgiri chand ekhlal gar,” Mehrnews.com (October 2012), accessed January 31, 2014, http://www.mehrnews.com/detail/News/1711490.

^4. Saeed Kamali Dehghan, “Iran Currency Crisis Sparks Tehran Street Clashes,” The Guardian (October 2012), accessed January 31, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/03/iran-currency-crisis-tehran-clashes. Shirzad Bozorgmehr, Josh Levs and Joe Sterling, “Riot Police Swarm Anti-Ahmadinejad Protesters in Fury over Currency,” CNN Middle East (October 2012), accessed January 31, 2014, http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/03/world/meast/iran-sanctions-security. Thomas Erdbrik and Rick Gladstone, “Violence and Protest in Iran as Currency Drops in Value,” The New York Times Middle East (October 2012), accessed January 31, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/world/middleeast/clashes-reported-in-tehran-as-riot-police-target-money-changers.html?pagewanted = all&_r = 0. Jasmine A. Soren, “The Revolt of the Bazaar: Will Angry Merchants Change Iran?” The Time World (October 2012), accessed January 31, 2014, http://world.time.com/2012/10/04/the-revolt-of-the-bazaar-will-angry-merchants-change-iran/.

^5. Arang Keshavarzian, Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 180–82.

^6. Keshavarzian, Bazaar and State in Iran, 3.

^7. “Bazaar parche Tehran, dar sheshomin hafteet esab+ film va aks,” kaleme.com (September 2011), accessed January 31, 2014, http://www.kaleme.com/1390/06/15/klm-71888/.

^8. Arang Keshavarzian, “Regime Loyalty and Bazari, Representation under the Islamic Republic of Iran: Dilemmas of the Society of Islamic Coalition,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 41, no. 2 (2009): 242.

^9. The history of the Tehran bazaar is highly intertwined with the European travellers' accounts of visiting the new capital of Iran, Tehran, during the late nineteenth century. The most cited observations are those by the Viceroy of India and the British Foreign Secretary, statesman, traveller and writer George Nathaniel Curzon (1859–1925). Curzon visited Persia from September 1899 to January 1910. David Blow, Persia: Through Writers' Eyes (London: Eland Publishing Ltd, 2007), 272. For Curzon, writing in 1892, the Tehran bazaar “will merely say that, in arrangement, width of passage, size of shops, and general structural convenience, they are in advance of almost any Oriental bazaar that I have elsewhere seen, though inferior to those which I afterwards saw at Isfahan and Shiraz, and which may also be seen at Tabriz; but that, as a field of exploration for the curio-hunter or stranger, they are the most disappointing in the East”. George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, 2nd edn, vol. 1 (London: Frank Cass, 1966), 330.

^10. The primary archives documenting the history of the Tehran bazaar since the initial encounters of Iran with modernity during the Qajar era include diverse mediums: from the strict political atmosphere of the late years of the Pahlavi regime to the periodical publications subject to censorship by the Islamic Government; from the orientalist representation to the documentary movie; from the paper space of urban planning reports to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) involvement in conservation projects.

^11. The Tehran bazaar has become a region of conflict between the ICHO (the Iranian Heritage Cultural Organization), the Tehran municipality and the bazaaris. The Tehran bazaar has been the subject of several urban planning reports. In 2008, Bavand Consultants conducted a comprehensive study and analysis of district twelve of the city of Tehran, which includes the Tehran bazaar. This study set the aim of its project to regenerate this old district. Developing Bavand's studies, Nagsh-e Piravash Consultants carried out a study on the old fabric of Tehran. The project aimed to restore the historical heart of the capital. In 2012, the Tehran municipality published the “Socio-Cultural Evaluation of the Tehran Bazaar”, in which the bazaar became the representation of the identity of people living in Tehran. The restoration project on the Tehran bazaar, started in 2005, is divided between three stakeholders: Tehran municipality, the consultant engineers and the general contractor. The bazaar district has been broken up between four consultant engineers (Tarh, tafakor, memari; Chehelsotoon; Mana; and Sharan are the architectural consultants involved in the Bazaar's restoration project) carrying out projects from façade restoration, arching passageways and squares, roofing, entrance construction and pavement renovation.

^12. The Farsi term for this newspaper column is: “roozhaye hafte: doshanbe ha, chehreye shar”, and the title of the report is: “bazaar tehran darad mimirad”.

^13. Parvin Merat Amini, “A Single Party State in Iran, 1975–78: The Rastakhiz Party: The Final Attempt by the Shah to Consolidate His Political Base,” Middle Eastern Studies 38, no. 1 (2002): 131–168.

^14. This article is originally published in the Pahlavi calendar on the 5th Day 2536.

^15. Foad Faroughi, “The Tehran Bazaar is Dying!” Rastakhiz, 5th Day 2536 (December 26, 1977): 18.

^16. This article is originally published in the Pahlavi calendar on the 16th Shahrivar 2536.

^17. Hamid Rahul, Freedom and its Discontents: An Interview with Asghar Farhadi (New York: Cineaste, 2011).

^18. Bagher Ayatollahzadeh Shirazi, “Samandehi Bazaar,” Asar 2,3,4 (1980): 11.

^19. Figure 2 shows the dominance of political activities associated with the bazaar. This information is based on my archival research in the Ettela'at newspaper archive in Tehran conducted during 2011. As is clear in the diagram, the information from the Ettela'at newspaper is dominant mainly because the archive covers its own publication more in detail.

^20. There are several other newspapers and concepts that are not archived in this archive. Being aware of these problems, the value of Figure 5 is limited to mapping the available information.

^21. Mina Marefat, “Building to Power: The Making of Modern Tehran1921–1941,” PhD thesis, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1988, 88.

^22. George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question, 2nd edn, vol. 1 (London: Frank Cass, 1966), 303.

^23. Ali Madanipour, Tehran: The Making of a Metropolis (New York: Wiley, 1998), 29–30.

^24. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was the President of Iran from 1989 to 1997. Gholamhossein Karbaschi was appointed as the Mayor of Tehran in 1990. Various scholars agree that Karbaschi physically reshaped postwar Tehran and provided a modern way of life for the emerging urban citizens in the capital. See Kaveh Ehsani, “Municipal Matters: The Urbanization of Consciousness and Political Change in Tehran,” Middle East Report, no. 212 (1999): 22–27. Pamela Z. Karimi, “Transitions in Domestic Architecture and Home Culture in Twentieth Century Iran,” PhD thesis, MIT, 2009. A. Madanipour, “City Profile: Tehran,” Cities 16, no. 1 (1999): 57–65. Patrick Smith, “The Indigenous and the Imported: Khatami's Iran,” Washington Quarterly 23, no. 2 (2000): 35–53.

^25. This survey is reported in the latest research on the Tehran bazaar. See Shahram Yousefi Far, Sargozasht-e Bazaar-e Bozorg-e Tehran, Bazaar Ha Va Bazaarche Hay-e Piramoni Ye an Dar Devist Sal-e Akhir, ed. Hassan Habibi (Tehran: Bonyad-e Iran Shenasi, 2010).

^26. I have investigated the distinction between the architectural and sociopolitical history of the bazaar elsewhere. See Farzaneh Haghighi, “Architectural Theory and the Politics of Architecture: The Tehran Bazaar in the 1920s and the 1990s,” in Theory for the Sake of Theory: Proceedings of the 1^stInternational Conference, ARCHTHEO, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, eds. Efe Duyan and Ceren Öztürkcan (Istanbul: Dakam Publishing, 2011), 334–44.

^27. Mike Smith, “Changing Sociological Perspectives on Chance,” Sociology 27, no. 3 (1993): 520–21. The chance event as a sociological concept was reinforced by the structural fragmentation and cultural flexibility of late modernity; it does not deny the structure or agency, but rather it makes the models of social development flexible.

^28. Clark, Elizabeth A. History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 75–76.

^29. Nikki R. Keddie, “Material Culture and Geography: Toward a Holistic Comparative History of the Middle East,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 4 (1984): 709–35. In this paper, to penetrate the domain of the majority of society, Keddies explores the development of textile manufacture. Because this minor event, she suggests, is essential for understanding the difference between east and west. Keddie attempts to find out why the development of textile techniques resulted in the production of complex artefacts in the east, whereas the development of textile techniques in the west gave rise to mass production.

^30. Nancy Stieber, “Microhistory of the Modern City: Urban Space, Its Use and Representation,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 58, no. 3 (1999): 382–91.

^31. For instance, Steve Basson, in his essay “Temporal Flows”, addresses the flaws of the traditional Western architectural historiography in conceptualising architecture as a continuous and accessible subject of historical knowledge trapped in a linear, chronological order and organisation of forms. He invites architects to let the multiplicity of time spans and disparate discourses come into play. Steve Basson, “Temporal Flows,” in Architecture in the Space of Flows, eds. Andrew Ballantyne and Chris L. Smith (New York: Routledge, 2012), 161–78. Andrew Ballantyne supports the same critique and in the article “Architecture as Evidence” treats architecture as an “index of the value-system of the society” and invites the architects to study the neglected dimension of traditional historiography that undermines the performance of power relations in architectural analysis by underpinning the aesthetic effects. Andrew Ballantyne, “Architecture as Evidence,” in Rethinking Architectural Historiography, eds. Dana Arnold, Elvan Altan Ergut and Belgin Turan Özkaya (New York: Routledge, 2006), 36–49. For Dana Arnold, the problem of Western historiography includes the oppression of the “Other” narration and the dominance of the white, Western, male subject who reinforces the masculine methodology. Dana Arnold, “Beyond a Boundary: Towards an Architectural History of the Non-East,” in Rethinking Architectural Historiography, eds. Dana Arnold, Elvan Altan Ergut and Belgin Turan Özkaya (New York: Routledge, 2006), 229–45.

^32. Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power: A Conversation with Jean-Pierre Barou and Michelle Perrot,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980), 161.

^33. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality trans. Robert Hurley, vol. I (Penguin Books, 1978), 92.

^34. Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, 78.

^35. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in The Foucault Reader, eds. F. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).

^36. Yeoryia Manolopoulou, “The Active Voice of Architecture: An Introduction to the Idea of Chance,” Field: A Free Journal for Architecture 1, no. 1 (2007): 66.

^37. Mani Haghighi, “Neo-Archaism,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (New York: Routledge, 2002), 145.

^38. Andrew Daly and Chris. L. Smith, “Architecture, Cigarettes and the Dispositif,” Architectural Theory Review 16, no. 1 (2011): 35.

^39. Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 231.

^40. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 127.

^41. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 129.

^42. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 117–18.

^43. Karl K. Turekian and Karl Hans Wedepohl, “Distribution of the Elements in Some Major Units of the Earth's Crust,” GSA Bulletin 72, no. 2 (1961): 175.

^44. For the various influences on Foucault's development of the concept of limit-experience, see James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 105.

^45. Michel Foucault, “Social Security,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 176–77.

^46. Georges Bataille, “Slaughterhouse,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach (New York: Routledge, 2005), 20–21.

^47. The chief minister to Naser al-Din Shah for four years; he is known as the progenitor of several socio-economic and political reforms in Iran of the Qajar era.

^48. Georges Bataille, “The Solar Anus,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 5–9.

^49. Bataille, “The Solar Anus”.

^50. Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power Over Life,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 268.

^51. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 13.

^52. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 15.

^53. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 76.

^54. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 14.

^55. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 13.

^56. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 91.

^57. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 53.

^58. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80–81.

^59. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 115–18.

^60. I am borrowing the term “thanatology” from Bernard Stiegler's reading of Barthes' wresting the ipseity fixed within identity-based and egological domains. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins, vol. 1 (Standford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), 265–66.

^61. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 89.

^62. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 92.

^63. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 85.