24/10/2017
About 40 years ago, when Iranians revolted and brought down the Shah, the prevailing perception of time was different. At that time, Iranian revolutionaries saw themselves as the first car on the train of world history.
The revolution in Iran took place in 1979, when the age of revolutions (the age of extremes, according to Eric Hobsbawm) seemed to be over. The Iranians experienced their greatest historical event, on the eve of the so-called “end of history”. From another point of view and with a different vocabulary, one could say that state capitalism experienced significant growth in Iran (from the early 1970s to the early 1990s), even as state-centered capitalism had already declined in the rest of the world.
These non-synchronisms with the “world” correspond to non-synchronicities, and to the collision of temporalities and temporal heterogeneities within Iranian society itself.
Iran is only partly, relative to what this implies in terms of synchronism, globalized.
Globalization, or globalized capitalism (and the abstraction that is imposed on social reality – its actual abstraction), is the very context or condition of the experience of non-synchronism. One cannot conceptually understand heterochronicities, without referring to a process of synchronization – which one could name, depending on the context and theoretical approach, modernity, capitalism or globalization.
October 24, 2017
15:00-18:00 | Room A444
Paris 8 University
2, Rue de la Liberté – 93526 Saint-Denis
“Non-synchronism as a mode of subjectivation”
Research presentation by Amir Kianpour (LLCP-Paris 8)
Open seminar for political studies of the young researchers at LLCP-Paris 8
Contact: contact.seminaire.pogmail.com