State Studies of Contemporary Iran

State Studies of Contemporary Iran

Politics, apparatuses of power; theoretical rereading of why and how the semantic reproduction of the discourse of the Islamic Revolution

Document Type : Political thought

Author
Assistance Professor. University of Guilan, Rasht, Iran.
Abstract
The aim of the present study is to present a precise and systematic analysis of why and how the Islamic Revolution occurred by understanding and explaining how the discourse, identity, and meaning of the Islamic Revolution of Iran became hegemonic through the confrontation and conflicts of value-making systems or power apparatuses to stabilize meaning, articulate, and reject and highlight their discursive identities. The main question of the following article is how the power apparatuses during the Pahlavi dynasty faced a semantic crisis and how the discourse of the Islamic Revolution, by reproducing its meanings, created a revolutionary subject and situation in Iran? In this article, an attempt has been made to address this question by applying the theoretical-methodological framework of discursive approaches and theories of power reproduction in contemporary political thought. The occurrence of revolutionary conditions in Iran can be explained through the nature of the political, the semantic-discursive conflicts of the power apparatuses, and the use of software technologies in the process of the Islamic Revolution, and the deconstruction of the semantic order of the official discourse of power. It seems that the value-making systems, object-making and meaning-making centers that emerged in the discourse of the Islamic Revolution, through disrupting the process of power reproduction and the functioning of the power apparatuses in the Pahlavi era and using techniques of highlighting accessibility and credibility, exclusion, othering, marginalization, and by deteriorating and wearing down the meaning-making systems and apparatuses of the Pahlavi regime, alongside the political language and subjectivity of Imam Khomeini (RA), created a new symbolic order that caused the previous symbolic order and the legitimacy foundations of the Pahlavi regime to face a crisis, causing the formation of a revolutionary situation and the consolidation of the meaning of the revolutionary discourse. This symbolic order was also able to combine revolutionary discourse with the accumulation of social capital, organize systematic criticisms of the political system, reproduce new values, symbolic order, and epist of Iranian society, and mobilize revolutionary subjects in the midst of the discursive restlessness of the 1950s in building a new socio-political order.
Keywords

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Volume 11, Issue 2
Summer2025
Summer 2025
Pages 11-33

  • Receive Date 04 December 2024
  • Revise Date 22 February 2025
  • Accept Date 13 May 2025
  • Publish Date 22 June 2025