Things and Terms: Relations Between Materiality, Language, and Politics in Post-revolutionary Iran

Departing from the canons of the cultural and material turns, this paper emphasizes the shortcomings that each body of work has shown in addressing political transformations. So doing, it argues that shifting relations between materiality and language occasion different kinds of politics. Specifically, the paper offers a new interpretation of one of the most critical epochs in the political history of modern Iran, by illustrating that the confluence of the material and linguistic worlds in the Islamic Republic during the 1980s, brought about a distinct political field in which relations between words and their material referents became fixed at the level of multitudes. This blocked public processes of performativity and resignification of signs in ways that might have threatened the centrality of the revolutionary leader, Imam Khomeini. What developed was a social milieu in which Khomeini never faced the possibility of defeat in politics.