Tehran Report / a collective will.

by F.Zahir Mibineh

June 14th, 2009

8:45 PM
....It‟s still less than ten days before the official beginning of summer.
Although the weather may be warm and the blossoms are gone, it is, according
to the position of the Earth in relation to the Sun, spring. Tehran Spring.

A period of political liberalization under a Reformist government, backed by
popular approval against the Soviet-backed Socialist system in Czechoslovakia
in 1968 has come to be known as the Prague Spring. Infamous for the brutality
of the Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolling into the city of Prague eight
months after President Alexander Dubcek loosened restrictions on speech, the
media and travel, millions of demonstrators were crushed within seconds,
although they remained peaceful the entire time. Czechoslovakia remained
occupied by Soviet military forces until 1990, when the Socialist system
collapsed. The Prague Spring may have not been successful from a populist,
anti-authoritarian perspective, but it indicated a trend, rising in Europe
and the world at the time, that unrest existed on many levels: cultural,
economic, social, and, most importantly, ideological. The demonstrations in
Prague temporarily shadowed the International Marxist movement, popular
amongst intellectuals in Western Europe, as the USSR proved once again that
the utopian yearning for revolution had seceded to authority hungry for
control. During the early months of the Prague Spring, inspired by the
Socialist reformist experiment in Czechoslovakia, students in Paris and other
Western European cities set the university ablaze, workers went on strike,
and the bureaucracy collapsed. A glimmer of hope, only temporary, until the
moment of the Grand Compromise between the „68ers and De Gaulle‟s government
occurred one month later, effectively paralyzing Leftism in the West until
even today. This paralysis was confirmed by the multilateral Soviet crushing
of the reformist movement later that summer.
Foucault‟s take on the Iranian Revolution has always been controversial. His
articles in France were read with disdain, as Foucault effectively stepped
outside of his typically meticulous mode of analysis to embrace a Hegelian
“Spirit” embedded deep within his psyche. He praised the “collective will of
the Iranian people” as an undeniable, inspirational force to be reckoned with
and to learn from. He was, per chance, nostalgic for “true”, “authentic”
revolutionary movement, a nostalgia whose origins lay potentially in the
dashed hopes of May 1968. Yet, in an interview between Foucault and
journalists Claire Briere and Pierre Blanchet (“Iran: The Spirit of a World
Without Spirit”), Foucault exhibits moments in which his analytical clarity
shines: “It is true that Iranian society is shot through with contradictions
that cannot in any way be denied, but it is certain that the revolutionary
event that has been taking place for a year now, and which is at the same
time an inner experience, a sort of constantly recommenced liturgy, a
community experience, and so on, all that is certainly articulated onto the
class struggle: but that doesn‟t find expression in an immediate, transparent
way..."