Willard Uncapher 
University of Texas at Austin 
2016 Northridge Dr., Austin, Tx 78723 
(512) 926-8588; paradox@actlab.rtf.utexas.edu
 
                Words of Modernity and Postmodern Differences: 
           Communication Theory in the Light of Revolutionary Iran 

[copyright 1994; while this essay may be circulated on the
Internet, no permission is granted to alter or to publish this
material offline without the express permission of the author,
and only then for the purposes specifically agreed upon.
Consider this a draft awaiting (material) publication.]


Abstract 
 
	The following paper examines the importance and nature of
'difference' in the process of interpersonal, intercultural, and
interdisciplinary 'dialogue' and 'collaboration,' and in the
description of 'reality.' Using the example of Revolutionary and
Pre-Revolutionary Iran, the paper assesses how traditional scholastic
debate might aid our understanding of Modernity and Post-modernity.
The paper suggests the importance of considering the impact of new
media and dialectic together, particularly so as to assess the
political and cultural consequences of relationships and differences
that end up being described in terms of identities.  Central to my
discussion is a criticism of the metaphor of the 'network' and a
paradoxical examination of possible practices of sharing 'beneath'
theories of difference.

				###

Introduction 

	Where can we find the grounds for our differences, in the terms
of our agreements?  This dense formulation seems counter to what we
might expect of most communication models where agreements are sought
out as a basis for collaboration.  However, in working to propose and
engage in models and practices of collaboration, the following paper
examines the importance and nature of difference in this process,
focusing on the logic of and calls for interpersonal, intercultural,
and interdisciplinary 'dialogue' and 'debate.'  Given the recent
ferocity of nationalism, fundamentalism, and idealisms of exclusionary
power, it seems timely to direct social science explorations not simply
to the reality of identity, and to 'reality' as an identity, but also
to 'difference' and to the worlds and 'realities' that difference
originates.  If the notion of 'reality' sums up a desire for a vision
of order then what is to become of the realities thereby
'backgrounded,' worlds of strategic leverage, displaced power, and
often cultural distrust.  Whose reality are we talking about?  To look
at 'reality,' the theme of this conference, as some kind of summary
whole, even if it is a whole that embraces diversity, can lead to
premature closure in the name of openness.  This situation is
paradoxical and difficult to grasp, yet we must do so if we are to
formulate strategies and understandings about 'Communication and
Reality.'
 
	One model for modeling the 'reality' of difference is the
dialectic, that presumed movement of opposed, yet connected viewpoints
which move towards shared, synthetic terms developed through closer and
closer 'alternation' with one another.  One of the virtues of such a
model is that not only can we ground it with such fundamental authors
as Plato, and thence to over two millennia of interpretation, but that
we can also use this model to unfold similarities and differences to
many other cultural traditions which likewise have organized their own
sophisticated methods of interpretive study.  Foremost among these
might be the different scholastic communities around the world,
including the Buddhist, Hindu, Judaic, Islamic, and Chinese influenced
worlds.  Should there not be more borrowing across these cultural
frontiers to open up a kind of cultural trade, invigorating the
analysis within each tradition?  That is the implicit claim of Michael
Fischer and Mehdi Abedi who in their recent work Debating Muslims:
Cultural Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition (1990) propose that
(1) traditional Islamic debate, (2) debate about Islamic tradition in
Iran, and (3) ongoing intercultural dialogues between tradition and
change can serve as a guide to postmodern political discourse in
general.  Surprisingly, we find that not only are there strong analogs
between European and Iran interpretive traditions, which would make
sense given that both medieval European and Iranian 'philosophy'
developed to a great extent in the context of Hellenism, but also that
some modern Iranian politicians and revolutionaries have read and
reflected upon the philosophical discourse on modernism and
postmodernism, perhaps during exile or study abroad.
 
	I will use Fischer and Abedi's important work as a point of
departure to explore not only how modernism and postmodernism might
figure in revolutionary discourse both in Iran and elsewhere, but also
how dialectical method might be involved in the growing fundamentalisms
and hysteria in the world.  I will argue that Fischer and Abedi's
version of dialectical, oppositional dis- course, even when taken to a
hyper-alternating, fractally asymptotic limit will not penetrate to the
deeper grounds of agreement potentially available with the practice of
a compassionate, unifying discourse that both Islam and the Western
scientism, however defined, can discover within and through themselves.
One problem I will locate is how to deal with the generation through
dialectic of a modernist exclusivity and its logic of homogeneity.
 
	A second, related problem is that the model of interpersonal
and intercultural dialectic too often  backgrounds the transactions of
power and trust hidden within the metaphors of 'networks' and 'fields,'
metaphors often found in poststructuralist (and postmodernist)
discourse. I will argue that an advanced, dialectically organized,
post-structuralist approach to cultural interconnection that sees
language and culture in terms of a field, a network of oppositional,
mutually defining elements cannot adequately engage in an institutional
critique of the power of subordination and the subordination of power
at work behind such a network, even as the content of such a discourse
attempts to 'reveal' the working of power.  Indeed, questions of the
interrelationship of power and knowledge have long been lacking in
scholastic discourses.  However, the problems of dialectic need not,
indeed should not be seen in such fearfully pessimistic or abstract
terms.  I will argue that shared practices of openness, explicitly
being worked out in Iran and elsewhere, especially as thought out in
terms of a politically aware postmodernism can begin to collaboratively
work to create and act out unifying discourses of modern identity.
 
	Fisher and Abedi perform the valuable task of investing 'our'
understand of Iran with new differences, and it is in these differences
that they will make a dialog between the reified cultures possible.
Rather than promoting an understanding of 'Iranian reality' or
'Inter-national reality,' Fisher and Abedi provide an example of how
important the practice of difference might be in developing any kind of
reality of cooperation and coordination.  Rather than providing new
predicates for Iranians, that Iranians are one thing or another, the
hybridity makes it more difficult to generalize about Iranians, and in
that openness there are new paths through which to reach out and
communicate.  Together, Fischer and Abedi are an ideal team for their
undertaking.  Fisher is well known both for his recounting of
experiments in anthropological discourse to develop ways by which the
social science's Other can get a chance to speak, as well as his work
on cultures both in Iran and as part of an Iranian Diaspora.  Abedi's
writes with extensive knowledge and formal training in traditional
Iranian theological traditions and a knowledge of diasporic Iranian
communities.  This provides a strong background for their argument that
we revalorize traditional scholastic debate for post-structuralist and
post-modernist philosophies.  Their investigation is certainly much
valued as there have been all too few attempts to relate the social and
epistemological formulations of scholastic debate, whether Islamic,
Judaic, Buddhist, Christian, Sinic, etc., to more general questions of
intercultural understanding.
 
Modernity and Power 

	One of the current insights and interests of social science
theory has been the notion that debates and dialogues take place
within, and indeed serve to mediate a complex array of social and
cultural forces.  Words are not simply words, invitations to
hermeneutical devotion and analytical assays, but products of and
negotiations within networks of power and trust.  To paraphrase
Wittgenstein (1967), the shifting networks of meaning exist not simply
in the word per se, but in the social constructions of how we use the
words in our everyday tasks of reaching out and communicating and, as
Foucault (1980) would also submit, in how we structure the elegance of
power and subordination.
 
	If these notions of the power of language and the language of
power have saliency in our studies of the intimacy of close,
interpersonal relationships, as well as in how these relationships get
inflected back into local narratives and social arrangements, then they
should also be seen as part of the understanding and construction of
power at an international level, at the level where we learn to tell
stories about our neighbors, about nations and their peoples who
purportedly live separately from us, partaking in their own situated
histories and identities.  Perhaps the master collection of such
narratives and explanations of international others might be located
under the term of 'modernity.'  While the concept of modernity seems to
direct us to considering what it is to be modern, it tends to work most
effectively by setting out distinctions and subordinations against the
less modern, against those mired in imperiled traditions.
 
	The presumed logic at work in Modernist relationship is given
its most focused explication in the practices and explanations of
deconstruction where the Other is paradoxically included yet
subordinated (e.g. Derrida 1981).  The Other serves to define the
boundaries, indeed the very identity and essence of the Same by its
exclusion and dependence on the Same.  Deconstruction plays at the
'mystery' of this relationship, demonstrating a deep interdependence,
often inverting the subordinated category into a dominant position, and
often introducing a third, but implicated element which is repressed on
account of its revealing something of the common origin of the two
purportedly distinct concepts.  Once this interdependence is understood
then it is not difficult to translate mean by exclusion into the terms
of power and domination of the Other.
 
	Foucault in turn explored how domination could be worked out in
the name of help and service through the politics of caring for others
while excluding them.  In a well known example, he showed how during
the late European Medieval period, lepers were seen as both excluded
from the company of saved Christian, and yet marked for their grace.
In fact, they were allegedly present so that the good Christian could
take care of them.  Suddenly at the end of the Medieval period, and it
is the suddenness that is significant here, the leper disappears and
the social margin is soon populated by the mentally ill.  In the new
age of reason, the margins comes to be populated by those presumably
afflicted with derangements of their reason.  These marginals become
subjects of the new regimes of reason and care.  The argument is well
known by now, and I do damage to Foucault's complex and entertaining
narrative (1973) by glossing over his account of how this emotional and
reasonable subjugation takes place through the seemingly neutral
methods of confession and language.  Foucault shows something of the
almost palpable irrationality of the methods used at the time to induce
patients to become more normal and reasonable, and how these methods
might successfully structure how a 'subject' might feel.
 
	Taken together, the ideas and procedures of Deconstruction and
Foucault's exploration of systems of care have helped to yield many
insights into dyadic systems of domination, such as in Sexism (e.g.
Nicholson 1990) and Colonialism (e.g. Wolf 1982, Fabian 1983, Gellner
1983).  Whereas I do not have the space to fully repeat the argument
here, I have agreed that such structures of domination become fully
active with the rise of European Modernity (Anon., forthcoming).  And
following the arguments of Stephen Toulmin in Cosmopolis (1990), I have
found it useful to locate the irruption of the dominance of Modernity
with Francis Bacon's exclusionary scientism, with his system of
empirical research (which had preceded him) and publications authorized
by elite academies of science.  In my view, much of Bacon's
organization sought to domesticate the new flows and uncertainties of
ideas and social forces unleashed by the development of print
capitalism (Eisenstein 1979; Anderson 1991), although I have argued
that implicitly modernity begins earlier with the late medieval
emergence of new forms of 'spiritual elitism,' the development of a new
class structure and labor saving devices.
 
	The key for our discussion here is that Bacon's proposed
academy and its scientific, empirical discourses work to take a
four-fold command of history, society, knowledge, and the world.
Plagued by the disasters of the Reformation, and a world being rapidly
transformed by introduction of printing(1), the nascent scientific
academies saw themselves as bulwarks of reason and liberal interpretive
openness within the new regime of authenticated knowledge.  The process
of social and scientific enlightenment worked by means of a systematic
exclusion of 'others.' Despite Bacon's self-serving pronouncements on
the narrowness and sterility of the intellectual and scientific
investigations of the medieval world, the Afro-Eurasian medieval world
was actively engaged in mechanical, material, biological, and social
experimentation and change within the context of increasingly complex
global trading patterns, and progressivist thinking (cf. Ovitt 1987;
Saliba 1985).(2)  In the name of the pervasive ideology of social and
scientific progress, the past becomes defined in terms of the 'dark
ages,' society in terms of the uneducated, lower classes, knowledge in
terms of unscientific amateurism and superstition, and the rest of the
world in terms of its backwardness.
 
Post-modernity's Invitations 

	As the hopes for a general science of the social and the
cultural are now being rethought (cf. Marcus & Fischer 1986), so many
of the past exclusions are being overturned, so there has been a new
effort to explore the phenomena of 'othering' and to give a voice to
the 'Other.'  Dennis Tedlock has pointed out that even in Clifford
Geertz' pursuit of a 'deep description' such as Geertz outlines in
'Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight, "we find once again that the
natives have little to say, and on the one occasion when they speak
their own tongue, they do so collectively." (1983a:325-326)  Michael
Fischer and Mehdi Abedi's recent work, Debating Muslims: Cultural
Dialogues in Postmodernity and Tradition, provides new insight into
this attempt at intercultural dialectic and dialogue.  They help to
explore how the discourse of power might be constructed at an
international level while at the same time suggesting new ways in which
debate and dialogue might be constructed.  In their introduction,
Fischer and Abedi propose several goals for their book.  Simplifying, I
will mention three.  First they wish to open a way to hear the voice of
the Islamic other, a voice that has been lost in the "numbing
opaqueness of news accounts of confron- tation, ideological war, and
endless killing; through the reifying opaqueness of histories of
political regimes, kings, dictators, coups, and revolutionary masses;
through the idealizing opaqueness of theologies of Islam or symbolic
analyses of ritual... lives that make sense in a narrative sense..."
Secondly, they propose to demonstrate that not only is traditional
Islam as open to dialectical movements and feints as any deconstructive
analysis, but that it provides a setting where such interpretive
openness has become part of a general culture.  Thirdly, they provide
background for examining the implicit power and ideological backgrounds
at work in the construction of local and international identities,
whether from the perspective of 'indigenous' or displaced, immigrant
communities.
 
	For Fischer and Abedi, the dialectical and dialogical
traditions of Islam provide an outline for an enhanced, open
interpretive system.  They suggest that in practice no one
interpretation has ultimate, dogmatic standing.  Both the language, if
we are to accept Timothy Mitchell's (1988) argument as well, and the
institutions of scholastic interpretation allow for slippages of
meaning and authority.  While the Qu'ran is meant to be the font of
true and universal authority, it is rarely studied directly, in part so
that the interpreter might not be accused of heresy over indiscreet
inferences.  Hence, despite the view of many non-Islamic observers that
the determinate authority of Qu'ran would stem alternate, disseminating
readings of the text, in fact just the opposite can occur (in practice,
but not necessarily in theory).  Interpretations simply assume the
deferred text, serving to generate a multiplicity in an oral
environment where difference can be argued and debated.  Different
communities of interpretation can be formed, with the largest being the
Muslim community as a whole. This greater community's terms for
agreement to ground their differences are the five basic principles of
Muslim faith.  Fischer and Abedi point out that Derrida himself,
originally a product of an Algerian Sephardic Jewish community, would
have presumably  been influenced by the interactive, oral environment
of that Jewish-Islamic world. And as Tedlock has pointed out, oral
story tellers are profoundly aware that the meanings in the stories
they tell are not implicit in any particular part of the story, but in
the interrelationships the story teller sets up with his or her
audience, a shifting arrangement that cannot be foretold ahead of time
(Tedlock 1983b).
 
	Fischer and Abedi do not dwell on the subtle institutional
arrangements established around these interpretive disputes.  In fact,
the different scholastics whom they cite, such as Mutahhari, and even
more modern theologians like Shari'ati do speak the language of
authority.  Most of these theologians are still dialectically trying to
get at a  universal position which they presume in theory, working out
plays of authority and authenticity in the terms of universality.
Traditionally, however, the existing means of communication did not
reflect or promote rigid, active ties of authority (except in the major
cities, and even these links were attenuated in practice).  The
traditional mullah, or teacher who was not officially  associated with
one of the major teaching colleges would have to make his or her living
by practicing some trade.  Unlike Christianity there was not central
church to assigned a priest to a particular parish backed up by a large
institutional structure.  In practice this meant a local teacher would
have to fit the community outlook or ethos, or else face the prospect
either of leaving town or of having no followers.  Traditional Islamic
folk tales are full of stories of ulamah (pl. of mullah) who could not
make a living because they were clumsy of tongue, unskilled in the ways
of the community, or who were run out of town for one reason or
another.  Having a second occupation could prove a real boon.
 
	At the same time the structure of the ulamah's discourse was to
be authoritative and universal, even as the Qu'ran was authoritative
and universal.  And here one of the links to the methods of
deconstruction becomes more apparent.  Textual deconstruction plays
with texts by making certain of their elements incredibly
authoritative, by engaging in a close reading which takes an
entwinement of inferred meanings to or beyond their logical extremes.
In the typical scholastic environment relatively scarce books are an
adjunct to oral performance, only one of whose elements is the
explanation of textual meanings.  What in fact is meant in theory as an
authoritative text turns out in practice to be the site of a dialogic
performance located between the speaker and his or her different
interpretive and local communities.
 
New Media in a Traditional World 

	All this begins to change, I would argue, with the introduction
of the telegraph throughout Iran and the Middle East during the 1860s.
At that point a prominent mullah in Iraq would be able to influence
political events being decided in Iran, carrying on the authority of
his position through the unbalanced mediation of the telegraph.  During
the Tobacco Concession crisis in the 1890's, Iranian ulamah sent timely
protests to Mirza Shirazi in Samara, Syria, then one of the most
prominent and influential Shi' mujtahids, or interpreters of religious
law.  Even at that distance, an exiled Shirazi was able to make
considerable impact on Iranian politics in Teheran, to the point of
having the law revoked. "Whatever their motives, by this period the
telegraph helped create a national market in mullah opinions as well as
in commodity prices." (Mottahedeh 1985:217).  However the premise of
the universality of true authority did not change, and that is the
point.  There was still the assumption of central and universal
authority, but now there were new means by which to compare one opinion
with another, new means by which to disseminate non-local but
apparently authoritative opinions, new means by which to oversee and
guide local viewpoints, new means by which to enforce sanctions against
apostasy without regard to local context.
 
	Fischer and Abedi pay little attention to this ongoing
centralization, preferring to concentrate on the micro-politics of the
classic madrassah, elsewhere presented by Mottahedeh (1985), Fischer
himself (1980) and others.  Fischer and Abedi examine traditional
debate in the context of 'traditional' media of voice and book without
speculating on how the structure of scholastic debate might engender
dire consequences in an environment of altered and less local
intermediation.  Fischer and Abedi do examine new mass media, such as
in television, new genres or literature, and revolutionary posters, but
simply as a vehicle for traditional meanings.  Their comparative
hermeneutics neglects the social contexts derived from or promoting
systems of interpretation.  While Fischer and Abedi give us touching,
personal accounts of different people they knew in the Yazd Baha'i
community, many of whom were later murdered, they do little to examine
the mechanisms by which this tragedy occurred.  What is it, we want to
know, that interrupted the 'cultural dialogues' *within* Iran?  One
reason for the tragedies that overtake Yazd and its Baha'i community
during the Islamic Revolution ("Social Change and the Mirrors of
Tradition") was that the local, fundamentalist, essentializing,
exclusionary Ayatollah Saduqi could align himself with and assume a
central authority originating distantly from Qum and Teheran.
 
	Indeed, Fischer and Abedi do not look closely at these larger
communicative structures and the ways in which power might be
associated with them.  Nancy Hartsock's criticism of Foucault's vision
of a multiple, de-centered power issuing from micro-interactions at the
'bottom' of society is particularly applicable here:
 
	The image of the net ironically allows (even facilitates) his
ignoring of power relations while claiming to elucidate them.  Thus, he
argues that power is exercised generally through a 'net- like
organization' and that individuals 'circulate between its threads.'
Domination is not part of this image; rather, the image of a network in
which we all participate carries implications of equality and agency
rather than the systematic domination of the many by the few.
Moreover, at times, Foucault seems to suggest that not only are we
equals but that those of us who are at the bottom are in some sense
responsible for our situations: Power, he argues, comes from below.
(1990:169)
 
There is no question that the foundations of power will be worked out
at an everyday level in 'micro-interactions.'  The question is how are
we going to analyze and formulate what goes on there.  As Hartsock
concludes:
 
	It is certainly true that dominated groups participate in their
own domination.  But rather than stop with the fact of participation,
we would learn a great deal more by focusing on the means by which this
participation is exacted.  Foucault's argument for an 'ascending
analysis' of power could lead us to engage in a version of blaming the
victim. (1990:169)
 
Foucault's influential image of the Panopticon presents the surveillant
power so vertically removed from the interplay of meanings as to
subvert the image's own usefulness.  The Panopticon's iconic power
hides its limits in an ethnographic explanatory metaphor from those who
might seek to assess the more horizontal interplays of power and
access.  When different horizontal levels are introduced they appear to
be radically flattened into a 'network,' or a 'grid' such the one
George Marcus uses to describe a 'useful' ethnographic assessment of
identity: "Constructed and migrating through a grid of sites that
constitute fragments rather than a community of any sort, an identity
is a disseminating phenomenon that has a life of its own beyond the
simple literal sense of inhering in particular human agents at a
particular site and time." (Marcus 1992:326)  Leaving aside the
suspicious distinctions between community and fragment, and identity
and site, we must take note not only of the varying power differentials
along any pathway *in* the grid, but whether the connections of the
grid, of the network are organized into dimensionalities beyond a two
dimensional flatness.  Indeed, one of the major renovations currently
being explored in ecology theory is the modeling interdependence of
dynamic, 'living' systems into complex, hierarchically organized
'networks': how can hierarchy work in systems of interdependence? (cf.
Allen & Star 1982; O'Neill 1986 for more classic accounts of the
problem; also Appadurai 1988 for cultural implications).  The
polysemic, playfulness of scholastic 'dialogues' presented by Fischer
and Abedi as a kind of deconstructivist analog to classical scholastic
debate is strangely disconnected from the implementation and exercise
of localized terror (by such individuals as Ayatollah Saduqi).  How
then is 'local participation is exacted?'
 
	I would argue that similar to the consequences of the invention
of printing in Europe, the telegraph and radio, and later the
clandestine video and audio tapes, etc. served to centralize authority
without limiting classical claims of universality.  This residual
universality would come to plague the new 'states' as they tried to
organize the new central authority, but also how to imagine themselves
as one state among many, one state culturally interdependent with many
others, as heterogeneous information and power more explicitly flowed
in and out of the cultural region.  What would be lost of its presumed
uniqueness?  The classical medieval 'life world' can be described by a
paraphrase of Augustine's classical definition of God: its center is
everywhere (including in the village), but the circumference is
nowhere.  The daily prayers to Mecca served to reaffirm the unity of
the community in its submission to Allah.  I would argue using the
excellent analysis by B. Anderson (1991:170-178) that rather than
'borders' between medieval states one should, think of frontiers which
radiate out from dynastic/theocratic centers.  Civilization and life
lay at the center, radiating out to the unknown wasteland. Suddenly
things change and circumferences seemed to be turning up most
everywhere.
 
	The political progression as retold by Fischer and Abedi gets
at something of the deeper political dimensions of a neo-scholastic
debate becoming a model for postmodernist dialogues.  With the media
tools of biased towards centralized control, and the help of the CIA
and others, a dynastic regime takes control in Iran in the name of a
more cosmopolitan society:
 
	Nineteen seventy-one was the year that the shah celebrated 2500
years of continuous monarchy, attempting to consolidate a national
identity that reached back to the ancient Zoroastrian empire and its
subsequent cultural lineages (in epic, poetry, music, carpets,
miniature painting, other visual, craft, and performance arts) for a
sense of world importance, for a heritage of tolerant cosmopolitanism
(multiethnic, multilinguistic, multi-religious) for emotional release
from an Islam grown puritanical, full of ressentiment, tied to closely
to the destinies of an Arab world seen by Iranians as less cultured,
less energetic, and less moored than itself."  (1990:155-156)
 
Rather than concentrating on the ressentiment of the displaced ulamah
and their values, we should look more closely at the reality of the
Shah's world.  Grace Goodell's excellent ethnography (1986) shows,
indeed as does Mike Fischer's earlier work (1980) that the Shah's
regime introduced great uncertainty on a local level.  Not long after
the Shah's 1964 White Revolution (cf. Lambton 1985; Keddie 1981) bought
out the landed gentry to explicitly return the ownership of the land to
the 'peasant,' the Shah reappropriated the land in the name of the
Iranian state and turned its management over to David Lilienthal who
had once headed the Tennessee Valley Authority and its rural
electrification projects in the United States.  Rural farmers who had
begun to buy new equipment suddenly found that they had lost control of
their fields yet again.  And not only had the land been reappropriated,
but now it had been reappropriated by a figure less bound by local
convention than ever before.  Goodell demonstrates how the new local
regime displaced long standing communal rights, practices, and
responsibilities.  As something of a material analog to this change,
many rural people were moved to more 'modern' concrete dwellings
strategically located at major thoroughfares.
 
An Iranian Modernism 

	The title of one of Richard Rorty's recent essays might sum the
situation up the Shah's pseudo-Zoroastrian political and cultural
transformation: 'cosmopolitanism without emancipation' (Rorty 1992).
We find that in an apparently open network interplay, the new 'reality'
occults (by whom or what?) a complex play of subordinations.  Fischer
and Abedi go on to assess two oppositional strands to the Shah's
regime: Khomeini and Mutahhari's universalist Islam on the one hand,
and Shari'ati's more synthetic, cosmopolitan, postmodernist vision on
the other.  Each of these perspectives develops a way of talking about
Iran, of making stories that might make sense of its world and its
changes. Grounded in traditional debate at least two distinct views of
time and how opposing perspectives develop and are resolved.
 
	Mutahhari speaks of an Islam which transcends Arab or Iran or
any nationalist affiliation while at the same time allowing himself to
assert a central historical and theological importance of Iran to this
universalizing vision.  Fischer and Abedi succinctly summarize his
position:
 
	It is a discursive system that makes Iran central to Islam,
transcending the sectarian claims of Shi'ism, while at the same time
supporting those claims, and displacing efforts to separate out an
Iranian historical identity apart from Islam.  It is a discursive
system that attempts to block the seduction of hegemonic ideologies of
the superpowers (American modernism, Soviet Marxism) that would devalue
Iran and Islam as backward, as needing tutelage (educational,
political, economic) in order to emerge as (perennially dependent)
actors in the modern world.  And it provides a context in which the
Pahlavi elites' Persian nationalist ideology seems not merely tawdry
and artificial, but coherent only as a form of yielding to the idea of
subaltern nations that need to be coordinated by the economy of the
West or the Marxist empire of the North.  (1990:201)
 
Indeed, Marxist and Capitalist discourses would benefit from some
Islamic tutelage.  What this passage begins to reveal, however, is
Islamic Fundamentalism as a covert form of Modernist discourse, one
which plays out a system of strategic exclusions in the name of a
unifying discourse about a proposed future.  And the dialectic,
transposed from daily debates in the madrassah to the level of abstract
global imaginings serves to help reify an us/them division.  This
division in turn serves to promotes a vision of an ideal homeland, an
'us-land,' a place where this displacement ends.  The proposed pure
ending is an in/version of a vision of a pure beginning, where
displacement is seen as having never begun. (cf. Hobsbaum & Ranger
1983)  Indeed, as Fischer and Abedi suggest in a chapter on the
international Islamic reception of Rushdie's Satanic Verses, the
densest reifications of the 'homeland' come from diasporic communities
that are in search of a stable, referential identities, a pure
'reality,' to protect or inoculate them from a world that appears
either to ignore or debase them, a reality that can incorporate them
without ever noticing them.  Arjun Appadurai has likewise pointed out
that much of the economic, military, and ideological support for
secessionist homelands comes from diasporic communities and displaced
individuals (Appadurai 1990; cf. Gupta & Ferguson 1992).
 
Iranian Post-modernisms developing 

	The more moderate wing within the Shi' leadership found its
interpretations best formulated by Ali Shari'ati.  Shari'ati's position
is at once quite different from that of both the radical
fundamentalists like Mutahhari in Iran and the 'scientific
rationalists' found in such countries as Pakistan (e.g. Hoodbhoy
1991:118-133).  The fundamentalists and the scientific rationalists
understand each other's positions, each being 'dialectically' opposed
or 'other' to one another.  These 'scientific rationalists' have been
equally quick to dualize, only this time using a dialectical method to
posit a difference between 'science' and 'tradition,' favoring science,
and down-playing tradition.  Shari'ati, however, is not interested in
making such simplistic distinctions, nor in avoiding issues of power
interweaving these various denominations of fields of knowledge.
Rather he is interested in practices and outlooks that might transcend
these differences even as each position makes a starting point for
creative explorations of identity. Shari'ati would include an
evaluation and restructuring of the implicit power subordinations
sedimented in local or global discourse and practice.  As Fischer and
Abedi point out:
 
	Shari'ati dismisses Mutahhari's understanding of the threats of
imperialism as archaic.  The challenges of modern global technologies
and information-based society, powered by a market capitalism that uses
advertising and manipulation of psychological desire, are on a scale
and subtlety that require a major rethinking of Iranian cultural
resources so as to respond creatively to the new civilization and
become an active participant and not a self-isolating enclave...
(1990:203)
 
Shari'ati was also quite concerned to provide a critique and a
situatedness vis-a-vis international structures of subordination:
 
	Shari'ati was tremendously impressed with the Algerian
revolution and with the degree to which Islam generally has provided
the cultural resources for relative protection against the kind of
colonial penetration that the Africa south of the Sahel had suffered.
(1990:203)
 
I gloss too quickly his analysis, but it should be stressed that
Shari'ati's Islam is more cognizant of the formulations of power and
access within Muslim society, and he is often outspoken against its
abuses.  He examines, for example, how "Sufism was the vehicle for the
elite, intellectual, and urban resistance; [popular] Shi'ism became a
vehicle for peasant resistance." (1990:209).
 
	Indeed, Shari'ati is interested in discovering the terms and
practices of creativity within the limits of the existing power
relationships. His proposed examination of power relationships within
the traditional Shi' hierarchy was not bound to endear him to that
hierarchy, especially since he was not afraid to be critical of the way
power seemed to be accreting to and being abused by the emerging
centralizing Iranian ulamic hierarchy: "Shari'ati repeatedly attacked
the traditionalist clergy and called upon the young generation, a new
literate generation that could read the old texts for themselves and
think for themselves, to help him reconstruct Shi'ism." (1990:203)  His
position is similar to that of earlier Christian Protestants who sought
to use the invention of the printing press to relocate the power of
reading and meanings closer to the reader and away from an apparently
corrupt, power hoarding bureaucracy. However, unlike Christian
Protestantism, Shari'ati's Shi'ism is seen as working out the terms of
an integrative dialogue with it's neighbors:
 
	What is needed is a return, on the one hand, to religion, not a
la Mutahhari, to the old, but to a new, metascientific vision that
builds upon and provides transcendent speculative and moral grounds for
scientific knowledge.  In the same way, what is need, on the other
hand, is a return to authentic nationalism, not a la Mutahhari in the
sense of racial or ethnocentric chauvinism, but in the sense of an
evolving, synthesizing, integrative culture.  (1990:206)
 
Shari'ati is interested in foregrounding the realization that Iran has
lain at the crossroads of many cultures, and that while incorporating
elements of Buddhism, Hellenism, Zoroastrian, Arabic culture, etc., its
distinctive ethos has worked out its creativity in terms of the
differences among them.  His is a profoundly different approach than
more modernist, exclusionary approaches to identity of the
fundamentalists (whether traditional or scientific), an approach which
might be associated with the term postmodernity.  In modernity the
local dialectic of self and other, which Fischer and Abedi celebrate in
Debating Muslims gets translated from the level of textual inter-
pretations (between words) to externally oriented debates (between us
and them) about nationality, culture, reality, etc. taken as integral
wholes.  Rather than questioning anthropology's and social science's
concept of integral culture (cf. Barth 1969; Wagner 1975, discussed
below), Fischer and Abedi's ecumenical position is to open a reifying
debate with all of its disempowering conse- quences, to peoples seen as
traditional 'others.' This strategy permits polemical denunciations of
the old 'us,' the old same in the name of a new other that now is to be
seen as empowered (cf. Fabian 1983, Said 1983 and de Certeau 1986).  By
the logic of dialect and debate nations should become purely the same,
purely modern.  Shari'ati, however, is looking at Shi' practices not in
terms of the distillation of their pure Shi' 'identity' but in terms of
the development of sustainable and politically just relationships.
 
	The repetition of the modernist question 'who is the other'
serves to blind us to deeper questions of interdependence and
collaboration flowing beneath the dyadic, identity creating exclusions
of modernist discourse. even as we seek to fractally and progressively
re-appropriate and 'transcend' differences through a dialectic of
alternating identification.  Take Fischer and Abedi's discussion of the
influence of Islam on Dante.  They remind us that not only should we
remember how influential Islam was on Dante, but that Dante might have
acted defensively against the influence of Islam (shades of Harold
Bloom's Anxiety of Influence!).  Yet why must we construct this
interplay between cultures simply in terms of defensiveness, as a
*story* of defensiveness?  Indeed, the interrelation of Dante and the
Islamic world has been already amply documented by such well known
occidental Islamicists as Asin Palacios (1943), Henry Corbin (1958) and
the theme has in turn been taken up by newer Dante and European
medieval scholars such as William Anderson (1979).  What Corbin,
Anderson, and others have revealed are the deep interconnections at
work between these cultures, interconnections which in the case of
'Europe' and 'Islam' could be amply explored in terms of Hellenism,
common mythic quest conventions, troubadour conventions, and so on.
Not only are the Iranians also Indo-European, as were the ancient
Greeks, but there are more fundamental intellectual links. We can
discover explicit borrowing in writings of Aristotle of Zoroastrian
philosophy and texts, such as in the Asha gatha (cf. Russell 1986)  In
turn, examining a Turkic-Persian poet such as Rumi, also an influence
on Dante, would lead to Rumi's own complex origins as an exile from a
Quarazmian hybrid of Irano- Turkic-Buddhist-Shamanic-Sinic cultures
north of Afghanistan. Indeed, what do these Fischer and Abedi
understand of these purportedly dyadic cultural relationships, 'Moslem'
and 'west' for example, and how are they to construct the differences?
Having set out the terms of a debate, will readers ever be able to
bring the two parties, with their respective identities becoming ever
clearer and clearer through contradistinctions and contradictions back
together again as collaborators and creative friends?
 
	And how are we to locate the interpretive and institutional
power at work in the construction of a work like Debating Muslims,
powers implicitly unleashed by formulations of dialectic?  And just as
Fischer and Abedi are making statements authoritative pronouncements
about Dante, so I am making statements about Fischer and Abedi, and my
readers about me.  We are engaged in the construction of identities,
which is a construction of power.  In so far as *I* am in fact working
out terms of identity, I would admit, even assert that my discourse is
modernist in its search for (identifying) terms and for potentially
empowering language and practice.  It is not surprising that the social
sciences which are themselves involved in the play of making identities
are likewise bound to find the idea of the demise of modernity as
overstated (cf. Lash & Friedman 1992).  At some point they are bound to
assume perfectible objectivities even as they progress in elaborating
new forms of inter-subjective, hermeneutically complex dialogue.
Shari'ati appears to be directing us to something else, to assessing
the nature of 'evolving, synthesizing, and integrative' relationships.
 
Rethinking the practices of integrative exclusion The idea that culture
evolves out of relationships but ends up being described in terms of
identities for various strategic purposes is not new to the social
sciences.  Fredrik Barth, for example, drawing upon theoretical ecology
pointed out that "the analysis of interactional and organizational
features of inter-ethnic relations has suffered from a lack of
attention to problems of boundary maintenance.... To visualize the
basic requirements for the coexistence of ethnic diversity, I would
suggest that we rather ask ourselves what is needed to make ethnic
distinctions emerge in an area." (Barth 1969:17)  Nor is the idea new
that culture emerges out of the creativity seeking to mediate
differences, whether the differences, such as differences between age
groups or ethnic groups.  Rather than simply looking to Derrida, we can
look to such anthropologists as Robert Murphy and Roy Wagner who have
examined how culture evolves out a need to hide the systemic
contradictions at work within culture itself.  As Wagner explains in a
chapter entitled 'Culture as creativity,' "The result has been an
overburdening of the generalized concept of culture, cramming it full
of explanatory logics, levels, and heuristic enforcement systems until
it appears as the very metaphor of 'order.' Such a 'culture' is totally
predicated, it is rule, grammar, lexicon, or necessity..."
(1983(1975):29)  The explanation of culture and its practice are
supposed to be different things, however, as I have been arguing here,
the arrangements of power become embedded within the differences of
description and practice.  Wagner points out:
 
	The study of culture is culture, and an anthropology that
wishes to be aware, and to develop its sense of objectivity, must come
to terms with this fact... And every anthropological undertaking
therefore stands at a cross-roads: it can choose between an open-ended
experience of mutual creativity, in which 'culture' in general is
created through the 'cultures' that we use this concept to create...
The crucial step- which is simultaneously ethical and theoretical- is
that of remaining true to the implications of our assumption of
culture.  If our culture is creative then the 'cultures' which we
study, as other examples of this phenomenon, must also be. (1981:16)
 
With Shari'ati we get another cultural theoretician from presumably
another culture trying to move beyond the dialectics of identification
to the practices of commonality which acknowledge and work to undermine
the implicit subordinations of local and international power.
 
	Such a criticism of modernity and identity serves to situate
postmodernity and practice in 'paradoxical' locations.  Postmodernity
as an opening to relationship, whether historical or cultural, does not
come 'after' modernity, defined by its afterness.  What comes after
modernity, and here I would agree with writers such as George Marcus
(1992), Anthony Giddens (1991), and Frederic Jameson (1991) can only be
Hyper-modernism, another version of 'modernity.'  Hypermodernism uses
the theoretical language of Post-modernism but can easily be identified
by the ways it identifies itself as some kind of theoretical
avant-garde, as 'the best and greatest,' as the latest innovation since
modernism, by the way it disparages Modernism (consider Baudrillard,
Deleuze and Guattari as easily identified hypermodernists).
Postmodernism appeals to simultaneity and spatiality without final
appeal to a final authority (cf. Lyotard 1984, Soja 1989), existing
temporally as the co-operative practice of continuing invention.  In
this way, postmodernism can become a particularly crucial concept with
the invention and use of new forms of communication, particularly those
using intelligent, automatic networks based on digital fusion of older
media, networks which are helping to undermine the hegemony of
exclusionary dialectics with its notions of pure identity to issues of
relationship and relatedness.
 
	I would argue that the founding paradigms of modernity, such as
worked out in the scientizing and institutionally professionalizing
discourse and practices of Frances Bacon, were themselves a response to
an 'external' threat to identity coming from the reality of a complex,
non- European, non-upper class world.  Beginning with the irruption of
new knowledges and complex organizations associated with the Crusades
during the 12th century to the integration of knowledge among the
laboring, peasant class, and other 'non-traditional' sources gaining
force and coherence with the invention of moveable type printing in the
15th century, the 'Modernity' of 16th century Europe develops by
defining itself against a 'post-modern' or non-modern, a world of
implicit interrelationships.  And within the world of power or
difference which undergirds it, Modernity, conceived as an organizing,
progressive, and liberating force has sought to institute investigative
and institutional exclusions.
 
	Fischer and Abedi write that "In Iran the polarities and
juxtapositions of East and West, past and future, Iran and Islam,
nationalism and cosmopolitanism generate one sort of cultural and
socio-political space, area or interweaving; and in Europe and America,
there is, in addition, a psycho-cultural space generated by the
co-present, yet opposed, attitude of exile and immigration." (1990:254)
This kind of dyadic 'structuration' (to uses Gidden's term) saturates
their whole book and its implicit approach to meaning.  It is the
dialectic of identification now 'rediscovered' in Islam, and meant to
make Islam more like us as we learn more about them.  In so far as its
logic is that of the individuals and groups described, however
(self-)defined, then such a logic if followed to any final conclusion
will lead to excesses of fundamentalism, whether scientific-modernist
or Muslim.
 
	Unfortunately, the recognition of the system of mutual
identification and interdependence is not enough to deconstruct their
'play' of subordination.  Discourses about networks and
interconnectedness are flourishing, whether in the evolving literature
of postmodernism, newer hybrid approaches to Buddhist conceptions of
interdependence (i.e., pratyasamutpada, cf. Varela et alia 1991; Coward
1990; Chandrakirti 1979), and in the elaboration of traditional
ecological systems theory.  However, much as socio-ecological theory is
finally moving beyond more simplistic theories and metaphors of
'interconnected networks' towards extending these concepts and their
implicit practices of interpretation to include new theories and
metaphors of hierarchy and self-organization within interdependence
(Geyer & van der Zouan 1986; van de Vijver 1992) so it is time to
recognize these issues with communication theory and practice, and in
our constructions of reality..  The impetus for much of Frederic Barth
investigation of the construction of ethnicity and boundaries came from
the influence theoretical ecology and systems theory, especially in his
discussions of the 'complementarity of groups' and their
'interdependence or symbiosis' (Barth 1967:18-19).  So a newer
synthesis working to deconstruct power within ecologically conceived
frameworks is becoming possible.  Such an approach, however, must work
as much at the level of working with the power which makes any
discourse possible, working out a practice which renegotiates the
micro-politics of power as it describes relationships.  Patricia Mann
presents this point well:
 
	Yet neither the German Ideologists [i.e. Hegel to Habermas] nor
Richard Rorty are wrong in believing in the significance of discourse
for creating new grounds for community.  Their error is to assume that
community can be constructed out of an abstract, psychological sense of
identification between people.  On the contrary, meaningful
'we-intentions' must be institu- tionally encouraged and embedded
within a concrete set of shared activities and goals. (Mann 1990:101)
 
A unifying discourse is not a discourse 'about' but a discourse 'in'
and 'with.'  If dialectic is a version of what Mann calls 'oppositional
discourse' and which given my situation, I am somewhat engaged in here,
then dialogue and 'unifying discourse' is a form of sharing which is
constantly undermining even post-structuralist hyper-modernistic
representationism.  One of the examples of this sharing, of this
development of a 'unifying discourse' might be seen in Debating
Muslims, not in terms of its alleged alternation of perspectives, but
in terms of its practice of presenting discourses with their own
integrative weavings, and with the possibilities for strengthened
'identities.'  For Shari'ati, such a practice of openness would
maintain the viability and creative presence of the individual
cultures, so long as it was practiced with an ongoing deconstruction of
power, even the power of discourse, of who gets to publish books such
as Debating Muslims.
 
	Shari'ati does not write his works in simple opposition to
fundamentalist theorists like Mutahhari, but in the form and margins of
their own work:
 
	His [Shari'ati's] Return to Self begins with almost identical
sentences as Mutahhari's Mutual Services, and follows the argument of
the latter closely, as if presenting a corrected version, taking
Mutahhari' sentences, theses, and examples, and rewriting them...
placing the arguments in a new light, so that the names and stories
from the part are reinforced but their meanings are differently
inflected. (Fischer and Abedi 1990:203)
 
That is, Shari'ati writes within tradition, working to transform its
interconnectedness rather than adding a new 'end,' a new, modernist
telos.  Yet in keeping with Hartsock's admonition against the creation
of a simple network of meaningful alternations, Shari'ati consciously
works in relation to the terms and practices of subordination,
identifying how the creation of the unifying stories of a culture,
whether local or global, serves to establish not just horizontal
continuities but vertical discontinuities.
 
	The kinds of reality thus foregrounded are paradoxical indeed.
Language articulates and produces difference, but the way that these
differences are re-inscribed into the telos of intellectual life and
rhetorical persuasion can vary greatly.  Some would use language of
difference to get at the essence of a thing, the essence of a people, a
time, or a place.  Dialectic foregrounds a boundary to present a
descriptive identity. And yet at its core, the everyday lives of people
thus described are worked out in hybridity, in the creativity of
juxtapositions, even as their language and the institutions of
knowledge appear to prioritize identity.  Consider the tulip, a flower
that originates in Iranian regions but is likewise the object of much
care in the Netherlands, to the point of serving as a national symbol.
Should we take away the flowers from the Dutch if we are to really find
out what it is to be 'Dutch,' what Dutch reality is?  Should we take
away pants from the European fashions because they were developed among
riding cultures on the Central Asian Steppes?  To expand our examples,
should we take away musical instruments, and foods from different
peoples around the world to find out what they are in their essence,
the tomato from the Italians, the Central-European accordion from
Tex-Mex Cajunto music?  Is it not out of these new mixtures of cultures
that individuality is created?  That is the greatest paradox:  In
opening ourselves to others, rather than simply using 'others' to
define ourselves we encourage new individuality.  Fisher and Abedi's
book then serve us by creating new differences in our view of Iranians,
and it is out of all these differences that difference can express and
free itself.  Is our neighbor a terrorist?  Perhaps, but we would be
well not to simply describe that person with one predicate but allow
differences to free themselves so that we can see what of that person
we want to acknowledge, encourage, respect, and collaborate with.  Some
of these predicates and practices will never be part of our world or
even tolerated; others will.  Such is the shared practice of openness
with which we might begin to constructively ground our differences.


 
Footnotes 
 
 1. One should not draw any strictly deterministic conclusions about
the invention and spread of printing. The identity and meaning of new
technologies, including communications technologies varies depending on
who uses them and why. Indeed, I would argue that the definition of new
technologies including the stories that are to be told about them, are
precisely one of the important ways by which structures of power get
argued out.  Still, I would agree with Eisenstein that the invention of
printing did more than provide new things to talk about: it transformed
and accelerated the flows of knowledge into a permanent renaissance'
leading to new structures of knowledge and of control.
 
 2. The term 'Afro-Eurasian medieval period' is of my own coining.  In
my other writings on the beginnings of Modernity, I have tried to
combine such works as Janet Abu-Lughod (1989), K.N.  Chaudhuri (1990),
and J. Needham (1954- ) to explore the interrelations of these
scholastic, and complexly interrelated societies.  I have added the
prefix Afro to explicitly include Islamic cultural regions extending
deep into the south-western side of the Sahara, for example, such as
are described by the classical Islamic historian, Ibn Khaldun.


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