Kudos to Argo!

I have to disagree with you on this one. As you say, it's good that the film depicts the coup in the prefatory scenes. But we should not forget that Argo engages in relentless Iran-bashing and stereotyping throughout. As one critic noted, the depiction of the coup "is effectively neutralized in the rest of movie's relentless Iran-bashing, voice-over narratives vilifying the post-revolutionary order, as well as even more (de-humanizing) cardboard images of angry Iranians, confronting the "good" and "innocent" Americans in the streets, bazaar, airport, and so on." If we're concerned with what Iranians themselves actually think about the film, then this critic, Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, is worth taking seriously.

[It's also worth taking seriously letters by prominent Iranians — who live in Iran — in support of the film. For critics, "relentless" may be a poor choice of words as the film does depict friendly Iranians. And don't forget: the Iranian Revolution consumed many of its own. President Abulhassan Banisadr, for example, the first President of revolutionary Iran, who I've interviewed for the EP podcast, just like the six had to flee for his life. He was exfiltrated by a friend in the Iranian Air Force and since then has lived in exile in Paris... g.]

"For critics, "relentless" may be a poor choice of words as the film does depict friendly Iranians."

Actually, the critic I'm referring to acknowledged precisely this point. As he said, Argo perpetuates "the negative stereotype of the Iranian "other," as basically overemotional, angry and diabolically anti-Western, save the westernized Iranians." So there's a real problem, in my mind, when the only Iranians that are portrayed as human beings are Westernized Iranians. I should probably have linked to that article, because I think it's well worth a read.

(http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/NJ25Ak03.html)

I also think that you may be engaging in a kind of self-selection bias, taking the opinions of a narrow subclass of westernized Iranians with whom you've come into contact with as a former US government official as representative of the entire class of Iranians. Or at least, perhaps you could provide a link to a story about those prominent Iranians.

Anyway, as the author of that article points out, there is a long, and very ugly, history of Orientalism when it comes to the portrayal of Middle Eastern Muslims in Hollywood movies, and Argo falls well within that pattern. Perhaps as a former US governmental official with many contacts who are westernized Iranians, it's a bit harder to see these stereotypes, but they are very real and obvious for more disinterested viewers of the film.

"And don't forget: the Iranian Revolution consumed many of its own."

This is indeed a sad truth. Had the CIA not deposed Mossadegh, a secular constitutional government that doesn't oppress its people would probably have remained in place in Iran. As with the current war in Afghanistan, the U.S. through its foreign policies created the very monsters that it later waged war on. Anyhow, back to Argo.

[It seems to me, to be honest, that you have not articulated a clear point of view. I understand the liberal jargon about stereotypes, etc., but I've never thought that political correctness could become an adequate substitute for a liberal ideology. Or any ideology. Is, for example, 'anti-Orientalism' a point of view? And who, exactly, are the 'westernized Iranians'? I'm just glad I don't have to be the arbiter of such things... g.]

"Is, for example, 'anti-Orientalism' a point of view?"

What a strange question. I was simply stating my opposition to a stereotypical portrayal of Iranians, not conveying an ideology. If you really must ascribe an ideology to me, it would be more accurate to call me anti-Manichean, because I feel that so many of our current problems arise from an overly strong commitment to Manicheanism (i.e., the division of the world into us, the good guys, and them, the horrible Other). American exceptionalism is a symptom of Manicheanism, as are many other political pathologies.

But still, keep in mind, this has nothing to do with political correctness, and nothing to do with political ideology in the conventional sense. I'm not, for instance, some Marxist who's saying that society is following some scientific principles which will inevitably result in a Communist society. Rather, I'm just making plain observations and building a critique of society based on those observations. My "ideology" is dictated by (what I take to be) the facts, and not vice-versa.

"And who, exactly, are the 'westernized Iranians'?"

Perhaps your question would be better addressed to the author of the article I linked to. But I presume he meant those Iranians who were working with the U.S. government. (Incidentally, a good example of westernized Iranians outside the context of Argo would be the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a group that has killed many Iranians officials in an effort to overthrow the regime, but, because they're friendly to U.S. interests and have lobbied hard, have recently been removed from the State Department's list of terrorist organizations. This is pure hypocrisy, best explained in terms of Manicheanism.)

[This discussion is worth following for precisely the reason you give: "My "ideology" is dictated by (what I take to be) the facts, and not vice-versa." This is the essence of a Liberal approach and is, arguably, antithetical to any form of ideology. We have a problem, however, because the world is far too complex for us to decide all issues "dictated by the facts". In order to sort facts people develop ideologies and, it turns out, conservatives are much better at doing this than liberals. It's also one reason — perhaps the main reason — why liberals have so much trouble acquiring political power or wielding it. When average people hear a Liberal argument about facts their reaction often is to say 'sure, that seems to make sense but is really just nonsense.' It's why more thoughtful conservatives wonder whether liberals are indeed capable of understanding the world. It's also why, to take another example, the argument over guns isn't about facts but about belief systems. I'm no Wittgenstein and I can't prove the limits of taking the world on fact by fact, but I would urge you to consider the virtues of having a more general frame of reference. To return, then, to Argo. It's not a film about Iran. It's a caper flick in which six Americans get saved and nothing gets blown up and nobody gets killed. That's a good message and one, I believe, that was well intentioned. g.]

"We have a problem, however, because the world is far too complex for us to decide all issues "dictated by the facts"."

Nor did I claim it was. Normative, conceptual, and logical issues must be decided in large part by a priori reasoning, not facts. So you're arguing against a straw man argument. All I'm claiming is that it's very important to consider our actual political predicament, and the historical facts, when we're thinking about politics.

Further, I'm not a "liberal." Both "liberal" and "conservative" are fundamentally confused terms. The supposed "liberals" today are often in favor of Obama, who is doing a great deal to destroy individual liberty with his extrajudicial assassination, attacks on whistleblowers, endorsement of indefinite detention without charge, etc. Similarly, the "conservatives" are often in favor of an expansive police and national security state, which departs radically from our original government, in which centralized government was *much* more limited and there were real restraints on power. So the whole liberal/conservative distinction is, in my mind, something to be avoided by reflective people. Let's leave these vacuous terms to the talking heads on cable news networks.

I don´t know how much I can contribute to the discussion not having seen Argo. I have however recently read Ed Said´s Orientalism, and I can recommend it to you. It´s entertaining and informative. Your assertion that ¨It's not a film about Iran.¨ fits very nicely with his thesis. For centuries, Western depictions in literature and scholarship of the Orient tell us more about the West than they do the East.

Following Orientalism, I read and reviewed William Thackeray´s travelogue to Cairo here:

http://mtrueman.blogspot.mx/2013/01/irecently-finished-reading-orientalism.html

[Thanks, Martin! Travelogues — one of my favorite forms of writing... g.]

Said's thesis is correct to an extent but it is badly flawed to the point of being useless. There are four main problems with it:

1. It promotes the idea that Western scholarship of Asia effectively does not exist as scholarship. Rather, it is presented as primarily a system of ideological domination that can be traced from the Greco-Persian Wars to the present day. This over-reaches very badly. Any area of human inquiry is going to be conditioned by the presuppositions of the inquirer. However, the European Orientalists, especially those of the 18th and 19th centuries who first began to systematically study Asiatic cultures cannot be generalized as the handmaidens of their respective empires. There were many conflicts between Orientalist scholars and the various colonial lobbies of the day.

2. Said and his acolytes do not well define what 'West' they are talking about. From his thesis, one carries away the idea that European, and later Western, civilization as a whole carries with it some endemic need to justify to itself the subjugation of Asia. Hence he traces the discourse back to the Ancient Greeks. First of all, not all European scholarship of Asia approached the subject from the perspective of adversity. Russian and German Orientalism in particular often tended to have an empathetic approach to Asiatic cultures. Western aggression in Asia over the last 100 years has primarily come from the Anglo-Saxon powers. Yet it would also be inaccurate, as the Saidians do, to guilt-trip the entirety of these countries for that aggression. After all, primary responsibility for that aggression lies with specific oligarchies. The vast majority of Americans and Brits have little say in the policy that their governments follow. Yet the Saidian approach would have the reader believe that a great deal of responsibility lies with the American and British people as a whole because they entertain mistaken ideas about Asia. Of course they entertain mistaken ideas about Asia. Asia is foreign to them, just as they are foreign to the populations of Asia who themselves tend to have all sorts of mistaken notions about Americans and Brits. Like the majority everywhere, most Americans and British have little awareness of, much less weight, in the decision-making of the oligarchies that govern them. Insofar as the American and British people do bear some responsibility, it is because the depth of cultural barbarism and consumerist mania to which they have sunk has rendered them particularly easy to manipulate. Yet that has nothing to do with their ideas about what Asian people are like.

3. For all their criticism of Western discourse about Asia, the Saidians are largely incapable of formulating a superior discourse to more accurately describe the geopolitics of the day. They cannot provide such a discourse because they refuse to assemble the essential facts so as to formulate it, for that would be 'essentializing' the Other. Rather, all they do is whine about how the reigning discourse is oppressive. However, nature abhors a vacuum. If there is nothing offered to replace the reigning discourse, no matter how crummy it is, it will remain in place. In the face of the dominant discourse, all the Saidians can offer is emotional outrage by positing the Asiatics (mostly Arabs in their case) as victims deserving of sympathy. Yet this approach is particularly futile because a significant part of the Western oligarchies is Jewish and they have emotional outrage themselves in spades based on the belief that they are the ultimate victims of history. To engage in such competitive victimhood is futile, and extremely emasculating.

4. Does the Saidian analysis propose anything positive? Only that one should move beyond parochial perspectives from which one might 'Otherize' other parts of the world. That implies some manner of global perspective. Unfortunately, such a perspective is impossible to attain and Said himself never got to it (since so much of what he wrote about European-East Asian cultural interactions in Orientalism was simply wrong). Humorously, it always eludes the Saidians within moments of being enunciated because some other leftist academic will criticize their global perspective for being insufficiently inclusive. But more seriously, in attempting such a perspective, they merely become the unwitting accomplices of the contemporary Western oligarchies who, because of the evolution of capitalism, have moved beyond national or even civilizational identity and characterize as an malignant Other much of their own populations as well as those of the Third World. Contemporary Western aggression in Asia is no longer justified in terms of Western imperial destiny, but rather in the name of so-called global humanitarian norms.

[Thanks, as always, Jonathan! g.]

"In the face of the dominant discourse, all the Saidians can offer is emotional outrage by positing the Asiatics (mostly Arabs in their case) as victims deserving of sympathy."

Just as the Orientalist scholars you refer to were not a unified bunch, neither are Said's acolytes. For example, Tarak Barkawi draws heavily on Said's theory of orientalism while also departing from Said's theory on precisely the point you mention. See his article, "Small wars, big consequences," which invokes the efforts of enemies of western imperialist campaigns to explain why little wars have big domestic consequences in Western polities.

Returning to Argo, for those interested in the film, I wanted to recommend an excellent article on Argo which shows how the film is factually mistaken in many respects and is in many respects a work of propaganda. The article is here:

http://www.wideasleepinamerica.com/2013/02/oscar-prints-the-legend-argo.html

Just to respond briefly to J's notes on Orientalism:

1. I'm not a scholar or familiar with scholarly debates. I've found Orientalism to be useful in dissecting accounts of the east and easterners in the press (and Hollywood). Orientalism as described by Said is very much alive there.

2. Said's looking through English/French lenses and I don't see that as a fault or rendering the book useless.

3/4. I wasn't reading Orientalism for an introduction to a superior discourse, or positive proposals. Other authors can write those books. I found Said's criticism of the prevailing discourse and 'othering' fun and persuasive. It was also new for me, never having come across such analysis before.

mtrueman,

One does not need to advance the philosophical approach that Said did to show that Hollywood is a powerful arm of propaganda. Said's theory disqualifies the possibility of discourse being anything besides an exercise in power. Consequently, it makes a more rational portrayal of the Other impossible because any such attempt will be denounced as denying the Other's humanity by forcing it into preconceived categories. Essentially, Said claimed that the Other is not really Other at all and the perception of Otherness is the result of imbalanced power relations. Problem is, if the Other is not Other, it is not a subject, and one cannot say anything about it which means that one ends up with a void of discourse. In a certain spiritual and religious sense, the void may lead to enlightenment, but not in terms of worldly knowledge. The practical result of Said's approach is that the dominant discourse continues unimpeded while its critics chase their own tails.

However, nature abhors a vacuum. If there is nothing offered to replace the reigning discourse, no matter how crummy it is, it will remain in place.
-------------------

By itself, this sort of objection is ridiculous and also detestable. If I tell you your house is burning down but I lack a firehose, is this "vacuum" worthless? Discerning a problem, supposing it is accurate is a great good. The proper diagnosis is half the cure, as the Chinese say.

[It takes a theory to beat a theory. g.]

Randall,

Your analogy is inapt. Said never shows that the "house" of the dominant Western discourse is burning down, only that he finds it disagreeable. His book never compares the discourse that he criticizes with competing accounts to show how those competing accounts are more accurate. The whole book is text talking about text without any reference to physical reality. All the intertextual lineage of Western discourse does nothing to discredit it if its conclusions are nonetheless accurate, and they must have been somewhat accurate for small numbers of Westerners to dominate vast numbers of Asiatics, especially in the 18th and early 19th century, when the military technology gap was not so large between, say, British armies in India and their Sikh opponents. If one was not already convinced, no doubt through some other (as Said's analysis would posit) morally dubious essentializing discourse, that the dominant Western discourse was wrong before reading the book, one will not be convinced of its error after having completed it.

Hi, J.

Thanks for responding to me so thoroughly. If I understand you correctly, you are taking Said to task for not fleshing out an alternative discourse that would subsume Orientals under a subjectivity. I question the usefulness of such a move, and in any case it goes against the grain of followers of Foucault and post structuralists in general.

If Said had written that Orientals are not in fact the embodiment of the female principle, but are actually the embodiment of the male principle, I don't think we're any further ahead or achieved anything positive. I find the resistance to essentialism quite attractive, and that usually arguments that hinge on some transcendental quality of an arbitrary group of people, are mischievous and up to no good.

Hi mtrueman,

I do not think much of post-structuralism. It seems to repeat Nietzschean philosophy but without any of the élan. If you have no path to follow after the old cultural hegemonies are dissolved, then you have not gained any real freedom.

About essentialism:

Despite their internal diversity, every people does have certain predominant traits, mostly forged through geography and history, that differentiate them from others. These traits are not necessarily transcendental in origin, but they may as well be much of the time because they do not change except either very slowly or under the pressure of major shocks.

As for the whole Orient = female thing, that is not entirely false. It revolves around the association of passivity with femininity. This theme mostly appears in two forms.

Before the dominance of Enlightenment thinking, peoples that lived in harsher conditions with less access to foreign trade viewed their neighbours who lived with greater luxuries as being more feminine. Romans thought this way about Greeks, Greeks thought this way about Persians, Arabs thought this way about Persians, Turks thought this way about Arabs, etc, etc. Generally speaking, for most of recorded history, the societies from the Levant to China were wealthier, with more complicated social structures than those along their margins. More complicated social structures create a larger number of people who are passive, more subject to orders from above and more dependent on complex logistical systems in which they have little part. The peoples on the margins were bound to see those societies as being more effeminate than they are. Such a prejudice is simplistic, but it does reflect actual differences in deeply-rooted ethnic, cultural and civilizational characteristics.

The second form that this Oriental-female trope appears is when modern Western civilization confronted the other civilizations. Modern Western civilization is, to follow Oswald Spengler's analysis, Faustian in that it is driven by a humanism that puts no limits on the human ability to master nature. When such a civilization confronts its Semitic cousin (Islam) which, like medieval Christianity, saw humans at center of the universe but still under an active divine agency which limited human mastery, or that of the Sinic world which is technically humanistic but has traditionally considered human beings as being a rather small part of the cosmos, it is bound to see them as more passive and therefore feminine.

I thought the movie was pretty good. Well-acted and with plenty of dramatic tension. As for being unfavorable towards Iran, that depends on the perspective. The movie made it clear that the Western powers unjustly deprived the Iranians of their elected president and installed a tyrant. After the Shah, however the country fell into the claws of the fundamentalists. Khomeini set-up a pseudo-theocracy — pseudo, because his Islam is properly an ugly and brutal perversion of the tradition. As for the hostage situation, the Iranian gov't should have respected the international convention that an Embassy is national territory. As for the West, the brutal fact is that it demands the energy resources of the Middle East, and is willing to pay any price. The cost in human suffering and cultural destruction to the native populations has been immense, just as it has cost the lives of thousands of Brits and Americans "fighting for freedom" or "doing God's work".

Incidentally, for an excellent biography of an authentic Muslim of the traditional type, read "Emir Abd el-Kader, Hero and Saint of Islam," by Ahmed Bouyerdene.