Modernity and the Discursive Formation of Cultural Policy:Discourse Analysis of the State and Cultural policy in Iran (From 1907 to the Present)

The purpose of this article is to investigate the discourse of cultural policy in Iran. Confronting modernity and the process of governmentalizing of the state in contemporary Iran was companioned by many transformations, events, and changes. Iran's military confrontation with modernity and the recognition of political, economic, and cultural backwardness in comparison with Europe has led to a variety of discourses in response to this question: “why are we lagging behind?” In order to change in governmental rationality and transition from the pastoral model to the modern political order, some attempts were begun. Ideal of these discourses that each of them sought to the stabilization of new meaning and transition from the old pattern was Nation-State Building. The rule of culture in the re-engineering of the spirit of the society and nation-building was very important. Mashrooteh, Pahlavi, and Islamic Republic of Iran, as three leftover states (in the Foucauldian sense) from the state-nation-building legacy in contemporary Iran, employed common cultural-rational and different cultural-technological policies to reflect on national identity. The cultural policy discourse of state, which was emerged as the unrivaled discourse and supported by economic and political structures, endeavored to impose cultural regularity in order to accelerate and facilitate the reflexive process of national identity. This discourse form the cultural component of Iranian identity. In this study, Jim McGuigan's classification of cultural policy, which is based on three stating, market, and civil-communicational policies, has been used. Here, the stating cultural policy discourse is applied as research direction.  

 In this article, we have attempted to analyze this discursive order through the method of Laclau and Moffa's Discourse Analysis. Therefore, through the laws and state statutes since the establishment of the Legislative Assembly (1285) to the present, we have analyzed the abovementioned discourse. 

The results of the paper indicated that in all three periods, the government has been the central and the defining part of cultural policy. The discourse of the state and cultural policy in Iran was articulated in the Mashrooteh, re-established with emphasis on exhibitive and cultural policies in the Pahlavi government, and the same trend continued with the emphasis on cultural engineering in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The stating cultural policy discourse in the Mashrooteh was articulated with the signifiers of "compulsory education", "public schools", "legal press", "cultural freedom", "history of Iran" and "Persian language" around the central signifier of "culture development". Therefore, this period have been called as the emergence of cultural political discourse. This discourse was rearticulated in the Pahlavi government with emphasis on exhibitive cultural policy. In this period the central signifier of "unified national culture" determined signifiers such as "nationalism", "anti-Arabism", "archaism", "linguistic assimilation", "westernization and modernity" and "uniform costume". Therefore, we have called this period as a discourse of stating cultural policy with emphasis on exhibitive cultural policy. The same procedure has continued with emphasis on cultural engineering in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the latter, the discourse of exhibitive cultural policy has continued by articulating the signifiers of "revolutionary spirit", "multicultural identity", "scientific and cultural development", "Persian language", "promotion of virtue and prevention of vice", "spirituality," and "family" around the central signifier of Islamic-Iranian culture. What is important in this articulation and re-articulation process is that the culture has been the unifying signifier for all the negative and positive programs of the stating cultural policy discourse. For this reason, the culture has not only considered as an instrument, but also it has intrinsic and immanent relation to the practices of the government. Thus, the emergence of cultural policy discourse was a rational product of confrontation with modernity in Iran.