Appropriation and Explosion in Reforming Language-Games: A Model for Discursive Change

Abstract

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.

—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

With the linguistic turn came an ever-increasing tendency to see language as the locus where truths are born, passed along, or modified. As such, postmodern theories have proved highly compatible with postcolonial studies, which have inspired studies of modern Iran as a country that was colonized, only not officially. However, the latter seem to have fallen for extreme abstraction where metaphysical claims abound: presuming constructivist views of language but failing to present a tangible framework, these studies discuss “discursive change” without giving a clue as to what either discourse or change is. Convinced as such, we have adopted Wittgenstein's idea of language-games to present a tangible model for discursive change.

Notes

¹Richard Rorty, “The Contingency of Language,” in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York, 1995), 3–22.

²The relation between postcolonial theories and the postmodern mode of thinking has itself been subject to much debate; however, it is safe to say that the two share a similar regime du savoir, to say the least. Ashcroft, for one, firmly states that “the problem with the relationship between post-colonialism and postmodernism lies in the fact that they are both, in their very different and culturally located ways, discursive elaborations of postmodernity.” Bill Ashcroft, Post-Colonial Transformation (London and New York, 2001), 7–13.

³For instances of the three types of studies mentioned see, respectively, Gauri Viswanathan, “The Beginnings of English Literary Study in British India,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987): 2–26; Franz Fanon, “The Negro and Language,” Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London, 2008), 8–27, and Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skins, White Masks(London and New York, 2011); and, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (London and New York, 1989). With regard to the last case, it might be worth noting that in our most recent correspondence Ashcroft stated that he no longer uses “writing back” and prefers “transformation” instead.

⁴We borrow the term appropriation from Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin. The influence of their The Empire Writes Back on our study is obvious; however, it is not appropriate to recurrently acknowledge such influence due to the different direction our “appropriation” takes from theirs.

⁵Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E. Anscombe (Oxford, 1963), §1.

⁶Rorty, “The Contingency of Language.”

⁷Ibid.

⁸Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§26–36 and §§243–75.

⁹Debate over what should be made out of Wittgenstein's discussions around private language was initiated by S.A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford, 1982). For a recent study that attempts to follow the genealogy of the argument see Keld Stehr Nielsen, The Evolution of the Private Language Argument (Burlington, 2008).

¹⁰Rorty, “Contingency of Language,” 5–7.

¹¹Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago and London, 1996), especially chapters V and X.

¹²For the three models see Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis, 1985) and Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. G.V.D. Abbeele (Minneapolis, 2002); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York, 1972); and Rorty, “Contingency of Language.”

¹³Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Oxford, 1990).

¹⁴Norman Fairclough, Discourse and Social Change (London, 1992), 3.

¹⁵Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (New York, 2001), 135.

¹⁶Kamran Scott Aghaie, ed., The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses in Modern Shi'i Islam (Austin, TX, 2005).

¹⁷Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§66–71.

¹⁸Friedrich Engels, “Letter to Franz Mehring,” Marx and Engels Correspondence, trans. Donna Torr (New York, 1968); Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1971), 127–93; Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London, 2001); Stuart Hall, “The Recovery of Ideology,” Culture, Society and the Media, ed. Michael Gurevitch et al. (London, 1982), 56–90.

¹⁹Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, ed. Andrew Skinner (London, 1982). It is by an evocation of the fallacy of ignoring the rule of grammar that the Mitt Romney campaign comically associated Obama with Marxism-Leninism merely based on the latter's use of the word “forward” (vorwärts) as his campaign slogan in the 2012 presidential elections.

²⁰Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §373.

²¹Marie McGinn, Wittgenstein and the “Philosophical Investigations” (New York and London, 2002), 67.

²²Smith, The Wealth of Nations, iii.

²³Ibid.

²⁴Ibid, 7.

²⁵Ibid, 3.

²⁶Karl Marx, Capital (Marxists.org, 1999), chapter 5. We use this source this one time to stress the translation of Marx's “Geldbesitzer” by a rather diminutive “moneybags” which might stand in contrast to Smith's “monied man.”

²⁷Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I (London, 1976), 228.

²⁸Ibid., 480.

²⁹Ibid., 482.

³⁰Ibid., 475.

³¹Ibid., 716.

³²Janet Afary, “Shi‘i Narratives of Karbala and Christian Rites of Penance: Michel Foucault and the Culture of the Iranian Revolution, 1978–1979,” Radical History Review 86 (2003): 7–35

³³For one instance see Ali Mirsepassi, “Islam as a Modernizing Ideology: Al-e Ahmad and Shari'ati,” in Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge and New York, 2004), 96–128.

³⁴Afary, “Shi‘i Narratives of Karbala and Christian Rites of Penance,” 23.

³⁵Afary, “Shi‘i Narratives of Karbala and Christian Rites of Penance,” 24–5.

³⁶Afary, “Shi‘i Narratives of Karbala and Christian Rites of Penance,” 27.

³⁷For two early reviews see Diane MacDonnell, Theories of Discourse (Oxford, 1986); and Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London, 1989).

³⁸Haggay Ram, “The Myth of Early Islamic Government: The Legitimization of the Islamic Regime,” Iranian Studies 24, no. 1 (1991): 37–54.

³⁹Ibid., 38. The necessity of this re-rendering of Shi'ism has to do with the rebellion that is inscribed in it. See Hamid Dabashi, Shi'ism: A Religion of Protest (London and Cambridge, MA, 2011); and Ali Mirsepassi, “The Crisis of Secularism and the Rise of Political Islam,” in Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization. Dabashi and Mirsepassi present a genealogy of Shi'ism, arguing that protest and rebellion are in the raison d'être of Shi'ism.

⁴⁰Haggay Ram, “The Myth of Early Islamic Government,” 43.

⁴¹Ibid.

⁴²Ibid., 49.

⁴³See Tavakoli-Targhi, “Contested Memories,” Refashioning Iran. The problems arose from the fact that “the androgynous identity of Kayumars and the perception of her/him as the progenitor of humankind was irreconcilable with the Biblico-Qur'anic view of Adam as the primal man.” What descended from this disparity was a number of replacements of various mythistorical figures (i.e. the vocabulary) as the progenitor of humankind (i.e. the grammar).

⁴⁴Georges Bataille, The Accursed Shared Vol. I (New York, 1988), 21–6. See also his Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr (Minneapolis, MN, 1985), 118.

⁴⁵Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York, 1977), and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN, 1978).

⁴⁶Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL, 1988), 7. See also Jacques Derrida, “Psyche: Inventions of the Other,” Psyche: Inventions of the Other (Stanford, CA, 2007).

⁴⁷See Jean Baudrillard, “The Implosion of Meaning in the Media,” Simulacra and Simulations, trans. Sheila F. Glaser (Ann Arbor, 1994).

⁴⁸Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies Vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ, 1966), chapter 14: The Autonomy of Sociology.

⁴⁹For two definitive treatments of the theme, see Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1996) and Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (Berkeley, CA, 2003).

⁵⁰Homa Katouzian, “Khalil Maleki: The Odd Intellectual Out,” Intellectual Trends in Twentieth-Century Iran: A Critical Survey, ed. Negin Nabavi (Gainesville, 2003), 34.

⁵¹Ibid., 35.

⁵²Hoseyn Makki, Tarikh-e bist-saleh-ye Iran (Tehran, 1979), 2.

⁵³Ibid., 18–175.

⁵⁴Iraj Pezeshkzad, Dai jan Napelon [My Uncle Napoleon], 176. The translations from the original Persian are ours.

⁵⁵Ibid., 185.

⁵⁶Ibid., 201.

⁵⁷Ibid., 226.

⁵⁸Ibid., 331, 342.

⁵⁹Ibid., 381.

⁶⁰Ibid., 382.

⁶¹Ibid., 267, 353.

⁶²Makki, Tarikh-e bist-saleh-ye Iran, 65.

⁶³Houchang E. Chehabi, “The Paranoid Style in Iranian Historiography,” Iran in the 20th Century: Historiography and Political Culture, ed. Touraj Atabaki (London, 2009), 155.

⁶⁴The title of an influential book by Ahmad Khan-Malik Sasani, qtd. in Chehabi, “The Paranoid Style in Iranian Historiography,” 158.

⁶⁵Makki, Tarikh-e bist-saleh-ye Iran, 65.

⁶⁶Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon, 178.

⁶⁷Ibid., 210.

⁶⁸Ibid., 226.

⁶⁹Ibid., 234.

⁷⁰Ibid., 370.

⁷¹Chehabi, “The Paranoid Style in Iranian Historiography,” 175.

⁷²Iraj Hesabi, Ostad-e eshq [The master of love] (Tehran, 2011).

⁷³For the sake of brevity, we shall only cite the page numbers relevant to the three categories. For the obstacles see Ibid., 1, 4, 42, 46, 49, 52, 56, 96, 100, 102, 147, 149, 162; for his knowledge, 15, 77–8, 83, 88, 94, 95, 98-9, 160, 184–6; for the list of achievements see 187–92.

⁷⁴Ibid., 122–3.

⁷⁵Reza Mansouri, “Shayyadi zir-e lava-ye nam-e marhum Hesabi” [Deceit under the protection of the late Hesabi's name], http://www.rmansouri.ir/userfiles/file/Articles/shayadi.pdf (accessed March 20, 2013).

⁷⁶http://www.parsine.com/fa/news/69526.

⁷⁷For this emerging more realistic mindset see Sina Mansouri-Zeyni and Sepideh Sami, “The History of Ressentiment and the Emerging Ressentiment-less Mindset,” Iranian Studies 47, no. 1 (forthcoming).

⁷⁸See Giorgio Agamben, “What is an Apparatus,” What is an Apparatus (Stanford, CA, 2009).

⁷⁹Facebook, www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=407547595974583&set=a.401012153294794.95996.322792814450062&type=1&relevant_count=1.

⁸⁰Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=405716699491006&set=a.401012153294794.95996.322792814450062&type=1&relevant_count=1.

⁸¹Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 65.