# Keanu M. Heydari > I am a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Michigan. I also help scholars and educators with their research and writing. Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts. Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`). ## Pages ### About me URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/about/ Last updated: 2026-08-27T13:30:20.000Z ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fb/72/fb7288f6-89a0-4a85-b24b-3aaf14003762/content/images/2026/08/profile-6-1.jpeg) Keanu M. Heydari **I am a historian and theologian. I hold a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan and am pursuing an M.Div. at Princeton Theological Seminary as a Francis Grimke Scholar. I am an Inquirer for ordination to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).** --- ### Research interests - Modern European history - Modern Iran and the Iranian diaspora - Migration, surveillance, and student activism - Print culture - Reformed dogmatics and Karl Barth - Apocalyptic readings of Paul --- My dissertation examines Iranian student activism in France between the end of the Second World War and the 1979 Iranian revolution. I draw on the surveillance files the French state kept on these students and on the periodicals they produced themselves, studying how they organized politically and how their activity came to be documented. I conduct research in French, Persian, and German. Alongside my historical work, I write on theology. At [*Life Under the Word*](https://lutw.ghost.io/?ref=keanuheydari.com), I work on Reformed and apocalyptic Pauline theology, drawing especially on Karl Barth and on the Pauline scholarship of J. Louis Martyn and Beverly Gaventa. I also keep a [blog](https://www.keanuheydari.com/blog/) on this site, where I write essays on intellectual history and critical theory. Recent subjects include Foucault's historicism, Sartre's late theory of subjectivity, the contrasting temporalities of E. P. Thompson and Reinhart Koselleck, and the work of nostalgia in exile and diaspora politics. The blog also carries reviews of new scholarship. Beyond my own writing, I consult with scholars and students on theirs, and I advise on course design. I also edit and translate for [*The New International*](https://www.newintermag.com/author/keanu-heydari/?ref=keanuheydari.com). To see my CV, [click here](https://www.keanuheydari.com/cv/). To discuss a project or to request my résumé, please [get in touch](https://www.keanuheydari.com/contact/). ### Contact URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/contact/ Last updated: 2026-08-27T13:05:41.000Z Your Name Your Email Your Message Send message ### Curriculum Vitae URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/cv/ Last updated: 2026-08-27T13:19:06.000Z ## Education - **Princeton Theological Seminary**, Princeton, NJ. M.Div., Francis Grimké Scholar, matriculating fall 2026 (2026–2029). - **University of Michigan, Ann Arbor**, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies. Ph.D. in History, degree expected December 2026\. Dissertation: “General Intelligence: Iranian Student Activism and the Documentary Politics of Sojourn in France, 1945–1979.” Committee: Profs. Joshua Cole (chair), Rita Chin, Adi Saleem, and Afshin Matin-Asgari. M.A. in History, June 2022 (2018–2026). - **University of Wisconsin–Madison**, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Language Institute (MEDLI). Intermediate Persian (summer 2022). - **University of California, Los Angeles**. B.A. in History, *cum laude* with College Honors; minor in French (2013–2017). ## Publications ### Book Chapters - Heydari, Keanu. “L’exil politique, les carrières migratoires et l’Union des étudiants iraniens en France : Une étude de cas” (“Political Exile, Migratory Careers, and the Union of Iranian Students in France: A Case Study”). In *L’exil iranien, la diversité d’un phénomène* (*Iranian Exile: The Diversity of a Phenomenon*), edited by Nader Vahabi. Errances. Orizons, 2023. ### Book Reviews - Heydari, Keanu. Review of *Apocalypses in Context: Apocalyptic Currents Through History*, 2nd ed., edited by Kelly J. Murphy and Justin Jeffcoat Schedtler. *H-Environment*, H-Net Reviews, forthcoming 2026. - Heydari, Keanu. Review of *Repeating Revolutions: The French Revolution and the Algerian War*, by Timothy Scott Johnson. [*Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture*](https://logosjournal.com/article/timothy-scott-johnsons-repeating-revolutions-the-french-revolution-and-the-algerian-war/?ref=keanuheydari.com) 25, no. 1 (2026). ### Translations - Heydari, Keanu, trans. [“Syria After Assad.”](https://www.newintermag.com/syria-after-assad/?ref=keanuheydari.com) By Azzam Amin. *New International*, January 19, 2026. - Heydari, Keanu, trans. [“Washington is no Ally.”](https://www.newintermag.com/washington-is-no-ally/?ref=keanuheydari.com) By Arnaud Le Gall. *New International*, December 19, 2025. - Heydari, Keanu, trans. [“The Global March to Gaza.”](https://www.newintermag.com/the-global-march-to-gaza/?ref=keanuheydari.com) By Meriem Hadjal. *New International*, July 6, 2025. - Heydari, Keanu, trans. [“Öcalan’s Last Call.”](https://www.newintermag.com/ocalans-last-call/?ref=keanuheydari.com) By Alice Celik. *New International*, May 23, 2025. - Heydari, Keanu, trans. [“Turkey’s Political Crisis & Democratic Movement.”](https://www.newintermag.com/turkeys-political-crisis-democratic-movement/?ref=keanuheydari.com) By Emre Öngün. *New International*, April 17, 2025. - Heydari, Keanu, trans. [“The Defeat of Biopolitics.”](https://www.newintermag.com/the-defeat-of-biopolitics/?ref=keanuheydari.com) By Pierre-Yves Cadalen. *New International*, April 7, 2025. - Heydari, Keanu, trans. “Underground Jansenist Journalism: The *Nouvelles ecclésiastiques*.” In *Jansenism: An International Anthology*, edited by Shaun Blanchard and Richard T. Yoder. Catholic University of America Press, 2024. ### Public-Facing Work - Heydari, Keanu. [“Casualty and Legitimacy: A Post-1979 Perspective on Iran’s 2026 Mass Violence.”](https://clioandthecontemporary.com/2026/03/06/casualty-and-legitimacy-a-post-1979-perspective-on-irans-2026-mass-violence/?ref=keanuheydari.com) *Clio and the Contemporary* (blog), March 6, 2026. - Heydari, Keanu. [“What We Lose When Confessions Are Treated as Optional.”](https://pres-outlook.org/2026/02/what-we-lose-when-confessions-are-treated-as-optional/?ref=keanuheydari.com) *The Presbyterian Outlook*, February 12, 2026. - Heydari, Keanu. [“What’s Really In Our ‘#1’ Plastics?”](https://www.ecocenter.org/whats-really-our-1-plastics?ref=keanuheydari.com) *Ecology Center* (blog), December 16, 2025. - Heydari, Keanu. [“When AI Comes to Town: The Ypsilanti Data Center and Environmental Responsibility.”](https://www.ecocenter.org/when-ai-comes-town-ypsilanti-data-center-and-environmental-responsibility?ref=keanuheydari.com) *Ecology Center* (blog), December 2, 2025. - Heydari, Keanu. [“The Ecology Center is Leading on Lead: From Crisis to Leadership.”](https://www.ecocenter.org/ecology-center-leading-lead-crisis-leadership?ref=keanuheydari.com) *Ecology Center* (blog), October 30, 2025. - Heydari, Keanu. [“Reading, Remembering, and Reorienting for Comprehensive Exams.”](https://clioandthecontemporary.com/2025/10/22/reading-remembering-and-reorienting-for-comprehensive-exams/?ref=keanuheydari.com) *Clio and the Contemporary* (blog), October 22, 2025. - Heydari, Keanu. [“Iran, Israel, & the Logic of Escalation.”](https://www.newintermag.com/iran-israel-the-logic-of-escalation/?ref=keanuheydari.com) *New International*, June 19, 2025. - Heydari, Keanu. [“Threads of Belonging, Echoes of Exile.”](https://www.newintermag.com/threads-of-belonging-echoes-of-exile/?ref=keanuheydari.com) *New International*, November 18, 2024. - Heydari, Keanu. [“Feature Archive: Iranian Student Activism and Social Movements in Paris.”](https://frenchhistorysociety.co.uk/3236/?ref=keanuheydari.com) *French History Network Blog* (blog), May 2, 2022. ## Honors and Awards - William Shorrock Travel Award, French Colonial Historical Society, 2024. - Classical Translations Contest (Middle East Studies), University of Michigan, 2023. - Rackham International Research Award, University of Michigan, 2023. - Rackham Language Training Grant, University of Michigan, 2020. - History Department Service Award, UCLA, 2017. ## Invited Lectures - [“Earth Day 2026: AI, Data Centers, and the Hidden Environmental Costs.”](https://www.mfcenter.org/event-details/earth-day-2026-ai-data-centers-and-the-hidden-environmental-costs?ref=keanuheydari.com) Michigan Friends Center, Chelsea, MI. April 25, 2026. - “The French Revolution: Human Rights and the Contradictions of Universalism.” Origins of the Modern World (Prof. Elena M. Rosario), Fairfield University \[Zoom\]. November 10, 2025. - “The European Union and Its Current Geopolitical Challenges.” History of European Integration (Prof. Dario Gaggio), University of Michigan. December 4, 2023. - “Religion, Collaboration, Resistance: Interpreting Religious Reactions to Nazism in Europe.” Europe in the Era of Total War (Prof. Kate Wroblewski), University of Michigan. December 6, 2022. ## Conference Papers and Workshops ### Papers Read at Academic Conferences and Symposia - “Making Barth Useful? American Reception and the Critique of Religion,” American Academy of Religion Annual Conference, Denver, CO. November 23, 2026. - “Testimony Against the Grain: Surveillance, Knowledge Production, and Iranian Student Politics in Postwar France,” University College Dublin, Migration Beyond Emergency: Tracing Testimony and Diaspora Symposium. May 28, 2026 \[Zoom\]. - “Licensing Dissent: Iranian Student Activism, Police Surveillance, and the Grammar of ‘Liberty’ in Postwar Paris, 1946–1979,” Society for French Historical Studies Annual Conference, Philadelphia, PA. March 7, 2026. - “Celibate Gay Christians, Tradwives, and Christian Nationalists: The Discursive Regime of Mandatory Heterosexuality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism,” American Academy of Religion Annual Conference, San Diego, CA. November 23, 2024. - “Constructing Diaspora Politics: The Case of Long-Distance Nationalism in Iranian Student Activism in France in the 1960s and 70s,” Social Science History Association Annual Conference, Toronto, Canada. November 2, 2024. - “A Secret Desire for Liberation: Iranian Student Radicals’ Imagination of France, National Liberation, and Artistic Development in the 1950s,” French Colonial Historical Society, Charlottesville, VA. May 23, 2024. - “Exit, Loyalty, Suffering: Iranian Student Political Activism and Masculinity in Postwar France,” Society for French Historical Studies Annual Conference, Hempstead, NY. March 15, 2024. - “Kharej az keshvar: The Psychic Afterlives of Diasporic Iranian Nostalgic Imaginaries in France,” Social Science History Association Annual Conference, Washington, D.C. November 18, 2023. - “Political Exile, Migratory Careers, and the Union of Iranian Students in France (U.E.I.F.) in the 1960s and 1970s,” Society for French Historical Studies and Western Society for French History Joint Annual Conference, Detroit, MI. March 18, 2023. - “Celibate Gay Christians: Vies singulières devenues d’étranges poèmes,” American Academy of Religion Annual Conference, Denver, CO. November 19, 2022. - “Persian Shah, Parisian Shah: Cultural Anxiety, Orientalism, and Militarization in Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar’s 1873 Visit to France,” Durham University Institute for Advanced Study, Modern Travel, Modern Landscapes: Connections and Exchanges in Europe, c. 1850–1950 Conference. July 6, 2022 \[Zoom\]. ### Workshops - “How Difference Becomes Political: Iranian Students in Postwar Paris and the Politics of Belonging,” University of Michigan History Inclusion Council event: Divergent Diversity: In Dialogue. March 13, 2026. - “Reimagining Exile: Decolonial Perspectives on Iranian Student Movements in France, 1945–1979,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop: Towards a Decolonial Methodology. April 4, 2025. - “Iranian Students in France in the Postwar Years,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop: The Consequences of Colonialism, Capitalism, and Empire: Looking Out from the Archive. November 17, 2023. - “Nostalgia, Diaspora, & Iranian Neo-Monarchists,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop: Violence, Witnessing, and Recovering the Archives. October 15, 2021. - “Persian Shah, Parisian Shah: Cultural Anxiety, Orientalism, and Militarization in Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar’s 1873 Visit to France,” University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies Workshop: Exploring Topographies: Real and Imaginary. April 2, 2021. ## Research Experience - **Graduate Student Researcher**, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (winter 2023). Curated bibliographic data under Prof. Yi-Li Wu’s supervision for the forthcoming *Cambridge History of Medicine* series (vol. 5, *Global Eighteenth-Century Medicine*). - **Graduate Student Researcher**, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (spring/summer 2020). Established a bibliography of contemporary writing on affect, speed, mobility, and slowness under Prof. Helmut Puff’s supervision for his 2023 publication, *The Antechamber: Toward a History of Waiting* (Stanford University Press). - **Graduate Student Researcher**, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (winter 2019). Researched and contextualized primary sources under Profs. Jeffrey Veidlinger and Rita Chin’s supervision for a collaborative public-history project with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the digital collection [“Everyday Encounters with Fascism.”](https://digitalscholarship.umich.edu/lsa-history/showcase/everyday-encounters-with-fascism/?ref=keanuheydari.com) ## Teaching Experience *All courses taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.* ### Instructor of Record - **History 195**, “The Writing of History: Student Activism & Resistance.” Fall 2024, Winter 2026. ### Graduate Student Instructor - **History 322**, “The Origins of Nazism” (Prof. Scott Spector). Winter 2024. - **History 312**, “History of European Integration” (Prof. Dario Gaggio). Fall 2023. - **History 443 / Islam 443 / Mideast 487**, “Modern Middle East History” (Prof. Juan Cole). Winter 2023. - **History 314**, “France and the World in the 20th Century” (Prof. Joshua Cole). Winter 2021. - **History 318**, “Europe in the Era of Total War” (Profs. Joshua Cole, Kate Wroblewski). Fall 2020, Fall 2022. - **History 313 / French 344**, “The Revolutionary Century” (Prof. Joshua Cole). Winter 2020. - **History 386 / Judaic 386 / Germanic 391**, “The Holocaust” (Prof. Jeffrey Veidlinger). Fall 2019. ### Grader - **History 240**, “The World Since 1492” (Prof. Douglas Northrop). Summer 2025, Summer 2026. - **History 340 / Mideast 340 / MENAS 340 / REES 340**, “From Genghis Khan to the Taliban: Modern Central Asia” (Prof. Douglas Northrop). Summer 2025, Summer 2026. ## Professional Development and Service - **Graduate Partner, Sidney Fine Teaching Partnership** (with Prof. Douglas Northrop), Department of History, University of Michigan (spring/summer 2026). Co-designed a new 300-level global history course, “Empire as a Modern System: Eurasia and the World in Comparative and Connective Perspective, 1750–Present,” drafting the syllabus, curating a primary-source packet, and designing a sequence of evidence-centered “sources labs.” Developed AI-aware assessment models and delivered a Canvas-ready course materials package for future offerings. - **Environmental Storytelling Intern**, The Ecology Center, Ann Arbor, Rackham Doctoral Intern Fellowship Program (winter 2025). Wrote public-facing feature stories, toolkits, and press materials; translated technical research into accessible language; contributed to digital communications planning and campaign strategy. - **Graduate Student Instructional Consultant**, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT), University of Michigan (2022–2026). Conducted 50+ teaching observations and prepared pedagogical reports; advised on syllabus design and teaching statements; integrated equity-informed approaches into instructional development. Designed and facilitated graduate-instructor workshops: “Designing for Access: Integrating Accessibility into Everyday GSI Teaching” (May 12, 2026); “Planting the SEED: Structuring Equity, Engagement, and Discourse” (May 15, 2025); and “Critical Dialogue in Community: Navigating Moments of Friction, Tension, and Conflict as GSIs” (May 16, 2024). - **Graduate Teacher Certificate (GTC)**, CRLT, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2026. - **Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) Seminar**, Rackham Graduate School and CRLT, University of Michigan, May–June 2026. - **Community Engaged Course Design Workshop (CECDW)**, Rackham Program in Public Scholarship and the Edward Ginsberg Center, winter 2026. ## Editorial and Public Engagement - ***The New International***. Editor and Translator. - **Life Under the Word**. Founder and author, theology blog. ## Podcast Appearances - [Forms Podcast](https://www.formspodcast.com/episode-xi-giorgio-agambens-the-church-and-the-kingdom?ref=keanuheydari.com), October 2021. - [Tears of Eden](https://www.tearsofeden.org/podcast/s3e9-was-jesus-sexually-abused-with-keanu-heydari?ref=keanuheydari.com), April 2022. - [Mammonburg Podcast](https://mammonburg.transistor.fm/episodes/phil-is-a-crypto-bro-w-keanu-heydari-5-14-2022?ref=keanuheydari.com), May 2022. - [Fruitless Podcast](https://fruitless.transistor.fm/episodes/sexuality-gender-and-christ-feat-keanu-heydari?ref=keanuheydari.com), May 2022. - [Forms Podcast](https://www.formspodcast.com/episode-xvi-deconstructing-american-evangelicalism?ref=keanuheydari.com), July 2022. - [Mammonburg Podcast](https://mammonburg.transistor.fm/episodes/iran-and-transnational-solidarity-w-keanu-heydari-10-2-2022?ref=keanuheydari.com), October 2022. - [Fruitless Podcast](https://fruitless.transistor.fm/episodes/israel-palestine?ref=keanuheydari.com), November 2023. - [Fruitless Podcast](https://fruitless.transistor.fm/episodes/unlocked-how-america-got-obsessed-with-israel-feat-keanu-heydari?ref=keanuheydari.com), January 2024. - [Fruitless Podcast](https://fruitless.transistor.fm/episodes/iran-the-logic-of-escalation-feat-keanu-heydari?ref=keanuheydari.com), June 2025. - [Varn Vlog](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LrxVVrjPqc&t=716s&ref=keanuheydari.com), October 2025. ## Professional Memberships American Historical Association · Society for French Historical Studies · Society for the Study of French History · Western Society for French History · Association for Iranian Studies · Middle East Studies Association · French Colonial Historical Society · American Academy of Religion ## Languages English (native) · Persian (advanced; ACTFL certified) · French (advanced) · German (advanced) · Spanish (basic) · Arabic (basic) ### Writings URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/writings/ Last updated: 2026-08-27T13:27:13.000Z _No content available._ ## Posts ### Resemblance Is Not Structure URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/blog/resemblance/ Last updated: 2026-08-26T11:35:47.000Z In René Magritte’s *La Condition Humaine* (1933), a canvas sits on an easel before an open window, its painted landscape continuing the one visible behind it so seamlessly that the boundary between representation and world dissolves. The painting poses a problem. Is what we see on the easel a resemblance of the world beyond the window, or is it structured by the same principle that organizes that world, so that the correspondence runs deeper than any surface similarity could account for? Magritte offers no resolution. The two landscapes are superimposed without being identical, related without the nature of their relation being declared. It is a painting about the difference between analogy and homology: between a resemblance that illuminates and a structural correspondence that generates. That distinction, apparently technical but in fact fundamental, is what this essay is about. Historians borrow concepts the way magpies collect objects: indiscriminately, attracted by shine. The discipline has no choice; it raids neighboring fields for instruments adequate to problems that resist homegrown solutions. The danger lies in borrowing without attending to what made the borrowed term precise. A concept evacuated of its technical meaning gives the impression of rigor while performing none of its work. Two such concepts, routinely flattened into near-synonymy, demand more careful handling than they typically receive: *analogy* and *homology*. What separates them is a matter of kind, and getting the distinction right changes what a historian can claim, what they must demonstrate, and how far their argument can travel beyond the case immediately before them. Analogy is the historian’s most natural rhetorical instrument, and perhaps for that reason the most liable to overextension. To argue by analogy is to say: these two things resemble each other in ways that illuminate both. When we observe that the internal organization of a clandestine radical press shares features with the juridical brief it attacks, or that the procedures of a colonial census echo those of the metropolitan police apparatus it partly draws from, we are staging a resemblance and inviting the reader to find it generative. This is legitimate and often indispensable work. Analogy is how historical writing makes the unfamiliar accessible, how it builds connective tissue across cultural and temporal distance, how it opens questions that more systematic inquiry can then pursue. Analogy also carries a structural limitation worth acknowledging honestly. It is silent on why the resemblance exists, whether it is necessary or contingent, whether it would survive changed conditions, whether it expresses a common generative logic or merely records a convergence of independent processes toward similar-looking outcomes. Analogies are content-dependent: they hold between specific features of specific phenomena at specific moments, and they require continuous renegotiation as those features change. The analogy that holds between the French prefectoral system and the Iranian SAVAK in 1970 may have dissolved entirely by 1979, and the analogical framework carries no leverage for explaining the transformation. The problem arises when the historian writes as though demonstrating a resemblance constitutes explaining a correspondence, as though the staging of similarity were itself an account of why the similarity exists. That conflation is precisely what the concept of homology exists to prevent. ## Bourdieu and the structural claim The word “homology” arrives in social theory from structural linguistics and anthropology, where it carried a precise technical meaning. In structural linguistics, two elements are homologous when they occupy equivalent relational positions within their respective systems, when the role each plays within its own structure corresponds to the role the other plays within its structure. What corresponds is the position and the network of relations it entails, apprehended at the level of structure rather than content. Lévi-Strauss extended this logic into anthropology, showing that myths and kinship systems across cultures could be homologous while sharing nothing on the surface, that what corresponded was the organizing grammar, the deep relational architecture, rather than any visible feature. Bourdieu inherits this usage and both refines and radicalizes it, making homology the hinge concept of field theory: the mechanism by which distinct social fields, each governed by its own specific logic and internal stakes, can be shown to be structurally correspondent while retaining their autonomy from each other and from any common external cause. His most sustained deployment of the concept appears in *Distinction* (1979), where he argues for a homology between the structure of social space, class positions distributed according to the overall volume and specific composition of economic, cultural, and social capital, and the structure of cultural space, the distribution of tastes, aesthetic dispositions, and cultural practices across the social field. A preliminary clearing of the ground is necessary here, because the reading of this argument that first presents itself misses almost everything theoretically important about it. The intuitive version runs like this: educated bourgeois consumers prefer Schoenberg and Godard; working-class consumers prefer variety television and football; Bourdieu is mapping that correlation and calling it a homology. On this reading, the term names an empirical regularity, sociologically interesting but theoretically inert. A correlation between two variables is silent on whether their co-occurrence is structurally necessary or historically accidental, and it offers nothing when the specific contents shift, as they invariably do. Bourdieu’s homology claim operates at the level of the relational principle that organizes both social space and cultural space as structured fields, the level at which the generative logic of each becomes visible. That principle works as follows. In social space, positions are defined relationally: by how much capital an agent commands relative to all other agents, what composition of capital they hold, what trajectory they represent within the overall structure. The same logic governs cultural space. Opera occupies its position because of its location within a relational structure in which cultural goods are “hierarchized” by the same logic that “hierarchizes” social positions, differential access to capital and the perpetual imperative to distinguish oneself from those positioned below while orienting upward toward those above. The homology claim is then this: **the *principle of differentiation* organizing social space and the principle of differentiation organizing cultural space are the same principle**. High/low in culture and dominant/dominated in class are both generated by the same underlying logic of distinction and differential capital accumulation, and the correspondence is structural all the way down, anchored at the level of the generative principle rather than the specific contents that populate each space at any given historical moment. The stability of the homology across historical change follows from this. Photography migrated from low to high cultural status across the twentieth century. The specific goods attached to dominant-class taste shifted considerably. None of this disturbs the homology, because what anchors it is the structural equivalence of relational positions. The dominant fraction of the dominant class will be positioned in cultural space as it is positioned in social space, because the principle distributing positions in each space is the same principle. A historian invoking this argument owes the reader something correspondingly demanding: a demonstration that two fields are organized by **the same generative principle**, that the relational logic of each corresponds structurally to that of the other, and that this correspondence is produced by their mutual implication within a broader social field. That evidentiary standard is high. It is also what gives the argument its power: it generates predictions, constrains interpretation, and travels beyond the specific case in ways analogy cannot. ## Foucault’s challenge A Foucauldian would find several things to object to in everything above, and the objections sharpen rather than merely complicate the argument. The phrase that would arrest Foucault first is “the same principle.” His entire methodological stance, worked out most carefully in *The Archaeology of Knowledge* and the preface to *The Order of Things*, is organized against this move: the positing of a single underlying logic that secretly generates apparently distinct surface phenomena. Foucault calls this “total history” and opposes it to “general history,” which refuses to assume that the elements of a given historical formation breathe together, that they express a common essence or are animated by a master code. The homological argument, at its strongest, performs exactly the operation Foucault proscribes: it finds beneath two domains a shared generative principle and treats that finding as explanation. Foucault’s response would be that the naming does no explanatory work. You have redescribed a correspondence as a principle, but the redescription accounts for nothing about how the correspondence came to exist or why it takes the form it does. The deeper objection concerns power. Bourdieu’s framework operates within a fundamentally economic ontology: capital is the substance that flows and converts across fields, and positions in social space are positions of greater or lesser capital. Even when Bourdieu analyzes culture or symbolic goods, the underlying grammar is one of possession and differential distribution. Foucault’s methodological injunction to “cut off the king’s head” targets exactly this grammar, the model in which power is a quantity held by some and withheld from others, flowing downward from those who possess it to those who lack it. Modern power, Foucault argues, is productive; it calls into being the very subjects it subsequently appears to govern. A framework anchored in the distribution of capital forecloses this analysis at the level of its founding assumptions. The deepest objection is about time. The homological analysis is synchronic: it maps a structural correspondence at a given moment and explains it by reference to a shared principle. Foucault’s genealogical method is an inquiry into how things that present themselves as structural necessities came to be structured in that way, through accidents, struggles, reversals, and sedimentations that left no necessary trace in the current configuration. A genealogy of the taste/class homology would trace how specific historical practices, the spatial organization of schooling, the medical regulation of bodily comportment, the development of museum culture as a technology of hierarchical classification, gradually produced both a field of cultural goods ordered hierarchically and a population of subjects for whom those goods were legible as markers of distinction. The homology is the *explanandum*: the historical achievement whose production needs to be accounted for. One further objection, more specific but no less pointed, concerns the subject who inhabits Bourdieu’s social space. The habitus, that structured set of generative dispositions acquired through practice and operative below the level of explicit calculation, is Bourdieu’s attempt to escape both voluntarism and mechanical determinism, and within field theory it largely succeeds. But a subject with a habitus is still a subject who exists prior to the fields in which it acts; the habitus is something agents have, organizing their orientation within a social space they already, in some sense, occupy. Foucault’s question cuts at a different level: how the very form of “a subject with tastes who occupies a social position and can be classified accordingly” gets historically produced as a possible mode of being. That subject is a historical achievement, the product of specific power/knowledge regimes, of documentary practices, administrative categories, and classificatory systems that made certain forms of subjectivity thinkable. Bourdieu begins where Foucault wants to end. ## What survives, and why it matters The point of staging this confrontation is to clarify rather than adjudicate. Foucault’s objections are serious; they are also objections to what homological analysis alone can accomplish. The homological argument establishes the structural logic of a configuration at a given moment, demonstrating that two fields are organized by the same relational principle and can be analyzed as aspects of a single structured domain. The genealogical analysis asks how that configuration became historically possible, through what struggles and contingencies the current structure was produced, and what it systematically forecloses. These answer genuinely different questions, and the historically adequate account often requires both. For historians working on archives, documentation, and knowledge-production specifically, Foucault’s concept of the *dispositif*, the heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, institutions, spatial arrangements, regulations, and administrative procedures through which power/knowledge operates, opens territory that homology leaves unmapped. It is useful precisely for cases where two documentary practices are mutually constitutive, where each practice produces the categories the other operates with, where the correspondence is generative in both directions simultaneously. When a state surveillance apparatus and a political movement’s self-documentation are described as “co-produced” within the same field of political contestation, the claim reaches beyond structural correspondence. The police dossier and the activist bulletin participate in constituting the political subject each claims merely to record; each makes the other’s categories operative; neither can be read in isolation without falsifying what it actually does. That argument requires discourse analysis, attention to the materiality of documentary practice, and a theory of subject-constitution, the full Foucauldian apparatus. The two frameworks address different problems and produce different kinds of knowledge. Knowing which to deploy, and when to deploy both, is a matter of analytical precision rather than theoretical allegiance. ## A note on the word itself A practical caution to close. “Homologous” sometimes drifts in humanistic writing toward meaning something like “deeply analogous” or “structurally parallel,” similar in some important-seeming way, without the full theoretical weight that Bourdieu’s usage carries. The drift is understandable; the cost is real. If you intend the strong claim, shared generative principles and structural correspondence all the way down, it is worth signaling that you do, because readers trained in field theory will hear the strong claim by default and will hold you to its evidentiary demands. If you want to suggest a significant resemblance, “analogy” is the correct term for that argument, and there is no loss of precision or ambition in using it. The discipline does not suffer from insufficient theoretical vocabulary. It suffers from insufficient precision in the vocabulary it already has. The line between analogy and homology is one place where more careful habits would cost nothing and clarify a great deal. ## Further reading Pierre Bourdieu, *Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,* trans. Richard Nice (Harvard University Press, 1984); *The Logic of Practice*, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford University Press, 1990). Michel Foucault, *The Archaeology of Knowledge*, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (Pantheon, 1972); *The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences* (Vintage, 1970); “Truth and Power,” in *Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977*, ed. Colin Gordon (Pantheon, 1980). On the Bourdieu–Foucault relationship, see David Swartz, *Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu* (University of Chicago Press, 1997), ch. 3; and Didier Eribon, “Foucault et Bourdieu: Les malentendus d’une rencontre,” in *Réflexions sur la question gay* (Fayard, 1999). ### Learning to Think Slowly URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/blog/learning-to-think-slowly/ Last updated: 2026-08-27T12:52:07.000Z I arrived in graduate school with more hunger than discipline. The Archive (whatever that meant) looked endless. And Theory felt like a new language that might finally name the questions I had carried for years. Every seminar promised access to a wider world than the one I knew as an undergraduate. I wanted history to bear a great deal of weight: modern secularism, religion, exile, identity, the politics of subjectivity—I expected the field to hold all of this. My early work shows how I tried to make that expectation concrete. One term I pursued anticlericalism and secular faith in the French Third Republic. Another I tried to understand sonority in rural France through Foucault’s heterotopia. A third time I chased after temporality in Thompson and Koselleck, or digital subjectivity and surveillance. The pattern is easy to see now. I reached outward in many directions at once. I sensed that the questions were related, but I did not yet know how. The projects often ran ahead of my methodological training. I had enthusiasm for conceptual work and only a partial grasp of the craft of historical argument. This “memoir” is an attempt to reconstruct that period as a study of formation. I want to understand what I was asking, what I thought I was doing, and what those experiments made possible later. My first serious seminar papers moved at high speed. The piece on bells and heterotopia is a clear example. I treated Foucault’s category as though it could easily explain the politics of sound in nineteenth century France. I glossed his principles, sketched Corbin’s account of village bells, and then jumped to abstraction. The comments I received focused on pace and legibility. I had skated past the historical material. I had not explained why heterotopia mattered for this case, why bells required that frame, or how specific episodes supported the claims. I had written as if the conceptual apparatus were self-justifying. That feedback was uncomfortable. I had valued the ability to speak in theoretical registers. Now I had to accept a different expectation: description was not an optional prelude to argument; it formed the ground on which argument stood. Readers needed orientation before they could follow a claim into abstraction. In other words, the archive had to appear on the page before a concept could organize it. Over time I began to understand slowness as a discipline. For me, it had to mean something more than abandoning ambitious ideas. It had to mean earning them. A clear paragraph on how a village responded to the loss of a bell often did more intellectual work than an elaborate sentence about heterotopic “slices of time.” That recognition did not come easily. It has proved durable. My first large research project took shape around Paul Bert and the secularization of education in the Third Republic. On the surface this was a standard topic in French political history. For me it carried a deeper charge. I had long been fascinated by the relation between religious language and secular projects. I wanted to know how a republic could try to strip the Church of influence and still speak with a tone that sounded almost devotional. Working on Bert forced me to read political texts as moral and emotional artifacts. Anticlerical pamphlets, parliamentary speeches, and legislation on schooling staged dramas about purity, corruption, childhood, and the future of the nation. Rémond’s notion of *la foi laïque* helped me name this. The secular republic tried to cultivate its own “faith,” complete with rituals, martyrs, and enemies. In the paper, I pushed this pattern toward the language of “discursive formation.” I wanted to show that anticlericalism was a structured way of imagining the world. The ambition was reasonable; the execution, however, remained uneven. I often wrote as if saying “discursive formation” by itself were an explanation. Still, the project altered how I saw secularism in France. It no longer looked like the mere absence of religion but like a competing claim on the sacred. That insight would sit quietly in the background until my work on Iranian exiles. The early paper supplied a vocabulary and a set of examples to which I returned later, once I had a clearer sense of how to connect French *laïcité* to other histories. A different seminar directed my attention toward time. Reading E. P. Thompson on industrial capitalism and Reinhart Koselleck on historical temporality convinced me that time itself is a field of struggle and imagination. Thompson described the restructuring of work rhythms, the spread of clock time, and the gradual disciplining of labor. Koselleck traced changes in the relation between past and future, from eschatological horizons to modern expectations of open, indefinite progress. The contrast between them fascinated me. Thompson wrote from a social history of work. Koselleck reflected from a philosophical and linguistic angle. Both challenged intuitive notions of premodern “timelessness” and modern “time-consciousness.” In my essay, I tried to map their differences and overlaps. I wanted to know how each thinker imagined multiplicity, acceleration, and rupture. The questions were sound. My prose again drifted toward density. I relied heavily on abstract nouns and long subordinate clauses. The basic point, though, remained clear to me—temporality was not simply something people “had,” it was instead shaped by institutions, ideas, and practices. That realization changed how I later approached political movements that lived in multiple temporal registers, such as diasporic activism. Today, when I write about exile, I still hear echoes of that seminar. I ask what kind of time an exile inhabits. I ask how state violence and daily survival reconfigure past and future. Thompson and Koselleck supplied questions I did not yet know how to answer. The most significant redirection in my training occurred when I began to work on Iranian student activism in postwar France. At first, this looked like a sharp break from the Third Republic and the history of *laïcité*. It soon became obvious that it was a continuation. The Iranian students I encountered in the archives lived between Tehran and Paris. They wrote against the Shah, engaged French publics, learned the language of human rights, and navigated French leftist milieus. Their activism was at once national and transnational. It depended on the geography of French imperial and post-imperial networks. It also depended on an emotional economy shaped by exile and fear. Working on this material forced me to change habits. I had to read police reports carefully, knowing they encoded suspicion and distortion. I had to value minor references in student bulletins and peripheral remarks in French newspapers. The archive no longer presented itself as a set of clear statements. It appeared as fragments scattered across institutions in multiple countries. At the same time, the topic confronted me with my own family history. My parents had left Iran and I was a child of that departure. Iranian activists in Paris occupied a world that felt familiar and opaque at once. I needed to ask how my position might sharpen or distort my interpretation. This turn brought older concerns into a new frame. Secularism in France, once an internal national story, now intersected with Iranian debates about religion and modernity. Human rights discourse, once an abstract object of intellectual history, now appeared in flyers and petitions issued by exiled students. The concept of exile, which had been more metaphor than method, started to function as an analytic category. Throughout these early years I read theory with a mix of excitement and dependency. Foucault, Bhabha, Mbembe, Berlant, Preciado, and others offered powerful accounts of modernity. I often treated their texts as master keys: if a concept appeared to fit a case, I wanted to use it. The cost of that instinct became visible in my writing. Theoretical citations piled up and the primary sources sometimes receded. At several points, mentors encouraged me to reverse the order. They did not tell me to stop reading theory—they asked me to read it differently. That advice changed the atmosphere of my work. Theory gradually shifted from a controlling frame to a set of resources. Foucault’s notion of discipline, for instance, moved from center stage to a supporting role in thinking about student surveillance. Koselleck’s “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” became prompts rather than templates. The question became less “How does this material confirm the theorist?” and more “What does this material force the theory to notice or ignore?” And a skeptical posture helped. When a concept seemed to fit perfectly, I tried to ask what it concealed. When the language of an author tempted me into mimicry, I stopped and returned to the archive. This adjustment made it more demanding. It also made it more accountable to the evidence. If the first years taught me to slow my thinking, they also taught me to revise my prose. My early drafts contained long sentences, heavy nominalizations, and frequent shifts of register. I wanted the writing to sound “serious.” The effect was often confusing. Comments from faculty and peers repeatedly pointed back to structure. They asked for a clear line of argument, explicit transitions, and paragraphs that did not carry more claims than they could support. They also asked for a different sense of the reader. I had written as if the reader shared my background and my intuitions about what mattered. The reality was different. Slowly, I accepted that clarity is neither simple nor trivial. It requires control of pacing, a careful use of examples, and attention to repetition. It also requires decisions about what to omit as well as what to include. This forces the writer to choose one main point for a section and let other possible points wait. My new attention to craft altered how I experienced writing. It became less an exercise in display and more a form of work directed toward someone else. That framing has stayed with me in contexts outside the dissertation, too. In those areas, the questions are similar: What does this reader need in order to follow the claim? What can I reasonably ask them to carry? By the time I had defined my dissertation project, the theme of exile had moved to the center of my thinking. The Iranian students I studied lived outside their country of origin and often imagined return, yet they also built durable lives abroad. Their political activity depended on that double orientation. This raised questions that went beyond the specific case. How does exile reshape the sense of time? Does it compress past and future into a recurring narrative of loss and hope? Does it generate new political geographies, in which Paris, Tehran, and other cities form a circuit rather than a simple line? How do exiles relate to the legal and symbolic structures of the host state, particularly a state like France with a strong republican mythology? The more I read, the more exile looked like a set of practices and structures, not just a feeling. It organized student associations, influenced choices about language, and shaped decisions about which injustices to foreground. It also intersected with the racial and religious politics of France. Iranian students encountered orientalist stereotypes mediated through a kind of secularism that often struggled to understand non-European religious histories. Working through these issues required me to join empirical research with normative reflection. The archives documented how authorities described Iranian activists, how the students described themselves, and how both groups spoke about rights and violence. The question of how to narrate those materials involved judgments about harm, complicity, and responsibility. I could not avoid that dimension. Exile has become both an object of study and a vantage point. It allows me to see French political culture from an angle that national histories rarely adopt. It also forces me to think more carefully about my own location in the stories I tell. Looking back across these early projects, I do not see a neat progression. I see clusters of concern that reappear under different guises. The politics of secularism in the Third Republic, the temporalities of modernity, the pharmaco-pornographic analysis of subjectivity, the Franco-Iranian encounters in late nineteenth century travel, the activism of Iranian students in the 1960s and 1970s: each topic seemed distinct when I first approached it. Over time they began to converge. The convergence centers on a few persistent questions. How do people inhabit modern regimes of power without simply reproducing them? How do states claim moral authority, whether in religious or secular terms? How do exiles and migrants stretch and contest national narratives? How do experiences of displacement reshape both politics and theology? My early papers obviously did not answer these questions—they did something more modest and more important. They taught me which kinds of evidence these questions require. They taught me where my conceptual instincts were helpful and where they obscured more than they revealed. They also taught me how much I did not yet know. That recognition has had a stabilizing effect. It prevents me from treating any single framework as final. It also keeps a certain intellectual curiosity alive. If a new archive, or a new conversation partner, complicates my assumptions, that is not a threat to coherence. It is a sign that the project remains open. The years since those first seminars have involved more archival travel, more teaching, more writing, and more engagement with communities outside the university. Each activity feeds back into the others. Teaching undergraduates how to read a document trains me, again, to make my own claims transparent. Church work presses questions about moral responsibility that then reappear in how I write about political violence. Conversations with colleagues in other fields expose the limits of my habitual categories. I believe the fundamental orientation remains the same. I want to produce historical writing that is careful with evidence and honest about stakes. I want to think with, rather than over, the people whose lives I study. I want to retain a measure of skepticism toward my own interpretive habits. That orientation took shape in my early graduate years. It emerged in the friction between the resistant details of the archives themselves. This “memoir” of that period records how certain questions came to matter to me, and how I began to learn what it might take to answer them with integrity. ### The Politics of Sartre’s Grabuge URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/blog/the-politics-of-grabuge/ Last updated: 2026-07-04T13:55:26.000Z The brief anecdote about the rejected title *Le Grabuge* in Sartre’s 1961 Rome Lecture has long been treated as incidental, but it reveals a great deal about how he understood the relation between subjectivity and history. The story concerns a moment in 1945 when Sartre and his collaborators sought a name for their new review. *Grabuge*—“anarchic violence,” a term evoking “violence, blood and scandal”—surfaced as a title proposal; everyone in the room immediately recognized what it revealed about its proposer’s style of being (Sartre 2014, 103). In that response Sartre located the process through which individual history, temperament, and class position take on institutional form. The passage dramatizes what he elsewhere called “retotalization”: the continual reorganization of a subject’s past into present praxis under conditions of partial self-knowledge. It also marks a point where Sartre’s late existential Marxism distinguished itself from structural and deterministic readings of class consciousness. Sartre first framed the problem through a biological and phenomenological image. In the same lecture he described a hemianopic patient who could not see one half of a visual field but nonetheless navigated space as if the whole were present. The patient’s conduct remained coherent because the deficit had been integrated into practice without reflection. For Sartre, this case showed that unity in action depends not on transparent knowledge but on a dynamic synthesis of what is known and unknown (Sartre 2014, 99–102). The subject “has to be its being,” which means that coherence exists only as an activity of continual reconstruction. He then asked whether such retotalization operates not only in the individual organism but also in collective and institutional life. The subsequent episode of *grabuge* became his test case. The meeting took place in late 1944 or early 1945, as a group of about ten writers gathered to found a journal that would speak to the new political and moral moment of liberation. Michel Leiris, the ethnographer and former surrealist, proposed the title *Le Grabuge*. Simone de Beauvoir later recalled this scene in *La Force des choses*, noting that Leiris’s suggestion was true to his youthful taste for scandal but that the group sought a title that could unsettle while also construct. They chose *Les Temps modernes* instead, a name that invoked Chaplin’s 1936 film and suggested a sober engagement with the contemporary (Beauvoir 1963, 24–25). Sartre’s later retelling in the Rome Lecture condenses that deliberation into a philosophical allegory. The single word *grabuge* appears as the crystallization of a life. Leiris’s surrealist past, his bourgeois background, and his habitual provocations all surface in one act of naming. The proposal thus externalized a long pattern of conduct without conscious design. Sartre compared it to an earlier incident at the Closerie des Lilas in the early 1920s, when Leiris shouted “Long live Germany, down with France” and was beaten for it. The pattern of transgression followed by punishment repeated across decades. The naming episode extended it into a collective setting, turning private disposition into institutional possibility (Sartre 2014, 102–104). The choice of title had political consequences. To adopt *Grabuge* would have “signified that we did indeed want to perpetrate grabuge,” binding the review to scandal as method. Under such a name, Sartre notes, “it would be impossible… to publish… stories about torture in Algeria,” because they “would seem… to scandalize” rather than to inform and end the war. The refusal therefore preserved the review’s moral posture and defined its editorial task (Sartre 2014, 104–5). The group’s decision became an act of collective retotalization. It transformed an inherited tendency toward provocation into a disciplined project of engagement. The subsequent history of *Les Temps modernes* vindicated that choice. From its first issue in October 1945, the journal cultivated a tone of uncompromising seriousness. Its early manifesto declared an intention to “influence society” and to take sides in public life. The style was polemical, but the purpose was clarity rather than noise. Contemporary readers described it as rigorous and free of euphemism. Retrospective accounts identify it as the intellectual left’s principal review of the postwar decades (Poirier 2019). Its coverage of colonial wars, and particularly of torture in Algeria, confirmed its commitment to documentation over scandal. Sartre himself noted that the same exposés would have seemed sensational under a different title. In this sense, the politics of naming shaped the reception of its content. The refusal of *Grabuge* functioned as an editorial ethics. This ethical dimension drew from the group’s understanding of its own position within French society. Leiris, as Sartre noted, came from a wealthy family and remained bound to bourgeois forms he condemned. His title proposal condensed that ambivalence. Sartre’s interpretation of the moment was structural. The act of naming brought into view how class being must be enacted rather than possessed. One must “be” one’s class in practice, through acts that repeat and modify a history. The *grabuge* scene thus illustrated the intertwining of repetition and invention. Each subject reproduces past patterns in new forms without full awareness. In that repetition lies the mediation between history and freedom. Sartre’s contemporaries recognized that a name could consolidate a political identity. The Resistance newspaper *Combat*, edited by Albert Camus from 1944 to 1947, exemplified this logic. Its title declared struggle as its mission and gathered a community of writers who saw themselves as engaged in moral warfare through the press. A name in this sense created a subject-position for both contributors and readers. The founding of *Les Temps modernes* followed the same pattern, but with a different affect. Its name promised lucidity rather than confrontation. Other mid-century naming acts confirm Sartre’s intuition that language can anchor collective subjectivity. Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s coinage of *Négritude* in the 1930s performed an inversion of colonial discourse. By reclaiming a racial term as a site of pride, they transformed a condition of subjection into a project of self-definition. Sartre recognized this power in his 1948 preface “Orphée noir,” calling *Négritude* an “anti-racist racism” that turned the tools of ideology into means of liberation (Sartre 1948). Naming created a movement that soon acquired journals, conferences, and political institutions (Ferguson 2008). Sartre himself would later return to this pattern in the founding of the daily *Libération* in 1973\. The name revived a title from the wartime press and aligned the new venture with the memory of resistance. Sartre described it as a democratic experiment in which the people would speak for themselves (see press histories cited in Poirier 2019). As with *Les Temps modernes*, the title served as a moral orientation. It defined the paper’s audience before the first issue appeared. These examples clarify the stakes of Sartre’s philosophical use of the *grabuge* story. For him, subjectivity appears not in introspection but in action, particularly in actions that leave durable traces in institutions, texts, and names. He drew this lesson against the background of his debate with Georg Lukács. In the same Rome Lecture Sartre rejected what he called “pan-objectivism”: the tendency to treat class consciousness as a reflection of position within production. He argued instead that consciousness is a mediation that must be enacted. The *grabuge* episode functioned as a small-scale demonstration of that claim. It revealed how a social being projects itself into the world through speech and how others recognize that projection as continuous with a life. Sartre’s analysis anticipates the question that Louis Althusser would later describe through the concept of interpellation. From an Althusserian perspective, the friend’s proposal can be seen as an effect of ideology, a moment in which language reproduces social position. Sartre approaches the same situation through a different lens. He understands the act of naming as a moment of creative retotalization, in which the subject reshapes its past within the limits of what it knows. The group’s decision to reject the proposal becomes a second movement of mediation, turning an individual gesture into a shared act of self-definition. The process unites two dimensions of historical life: the shaping of subjects through history and the making of history through their actions. Both motions belong to the same field of praxis. Sartre’s later reflections on group formation in *Critique of Dialectical Reason* confirm this reading. There he described how a collective becomes a subject when it names itself. The Tennis Court Oath of 1789 served as his model: the deputies of the Third Estate transformed a gathering into the National Assembly by declaring the name (Sartre 1960). The founding of *Les Temps modernes* replayed that structure on a smaller scale. The participants became a collective not only through agreement but through the word that bound them. The proposed title *Grabuge* would have fixed them within the logic of scandal; the chosen title positioned them within the field of political responsibility. The history of *Les Temps modernes* demonstrates that Sartre’s notion of retotalization found expression in lived practice as much as in theoretical reflection. The journal moved through successive political moments while preserving a recognizable coherence. Its editors reinterpreted engagement as circumstances shifted, sustaining continuity through the discipline of self-redefinition. In that movement, the review itself became a kind of subject in Sartre’s sense—an ongoing synthesis that held together through the labor of integrating tension and partial knowledge. The episode of *Le Grabuge* illuminates this dynamic at its most concrete. A fleeting exchange over a title became a study in how words crystallize experience and redirect collective purpose. In that moment, history entered language, a name gathered the contradictions of a person and a class, and the refusal of that name set in motion an institution that would shape French intellectual life for decades. The politics of naming thus exposes the politics of subjectivity that Sartre sought to describe, that of the ceaseless work through which human beings and their associations become historical agents. ### Bibliography Beauvoir, Simone de. 1963\. *La Force des choses*, vol. 1\. Paris: Gallimard. Ferguson, James. 2008\. “Aimé Césaire.” *The Guardian*, April 20. Poirier, Agnès. 2019\. “Les Temps Modernes: Paris mourns passing of the intellectual left’s bible.” *The Guardian*, May 25. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948\. “Orphée noir.” Preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor, *Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française*. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. ———. 1960\. *Critique de la raison dialectique*. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2014\. “Marxism and Subjectivity.” *New Left Review* 88: 99–110. ### Foucault’s Radical Historicism URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/blog/foucaults-radical-historicism-limits-tensions-and-the-specter-of-the-transcendental/ Last updated: 2026-07-04T13:57:42.000Z In his article, “[The Limits of Radical Historicism: The Methodological Significance of Foucault’s Relationship to Transcendental Philosophy](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0969725X.2024.2430899?ref=keanuheydari.com),” Leonard D’Cruz critically examines Michel Foucault’s attempt to historicize epistemological conditions while avoiding the pitfalls of transcendental philosophy. At the core of this inquiry is the tension between Foucault’s commitment to radical historicism—the view that knowledge, power, and subjectivity are entirely contingent on historical circumstances—and the possibility that his methodology inadvertently reintroduces quasi-transcendental structures. “The Limits of Radical Historicism” raises a fundamental question for scholars invested in historicist critique: Can Foucault successfully extricate his framework from transcendental categories, or do aspects of his thought implicitly depend on the very structures he seeks to reject? In exploring this issue, D’Cruz’s analysis serves as a crucial intervention in debates on the limits of radical historicism, offering insights that extend beyond Foucault’s work to broader methodological concerns in historiography and critical theory. D’Cruz begins by situating Foucault within the larger philosophical tradition of transcendental inquiry, tracing his intellectual departure from Kantian and phenomenological approaches. While Kant sought to establish universal conditions of possibility for knowledge and experience, Foucault rejects this framework, replacing it with historically specific conditions—what he terms the historical *a priori*. Unlike transcendental structures, which are fixed and universal, Foucault argues that epistemic conditions emerge through contingent discursive formations that shift over time. However, as D’Cruz highlights, this move raises a pressing question: Does Foucault’s method genuinely avoid transcendental presuppositions, or does it merely replace one form of necessity with another under the guise of historicism? The article carefully unpacks this dilemma, demonstrating that while Foucault’s approach represents a significant departure from transcendental philosophy, it remains haunted by certain structural commitments that complicate his radical historicist aspirations. A crucial element of D’Cruz’s critique involves a detailed analysis of how Foucault positions himself against traditional transcendental philosophy. Transcendental inquiry, as developed by Kant and later refined by phenomenologists such as Husserl, aims to uncover the necessary and universal structures that underlie human cognition and knowledge production. Foucault, by contrast, insists that these conditions are historically contingent and subject to transformation. His archaeological and genealogical methods seek to reveal how epistemic frameworks emerge, solidify, and dissolve within specific historical periods, challenging the notion of immutable cognitive structures. Nevertheless, D’Cruz argues that Foucault’s concept of the historical *a priori* introduces a paradox: although it is meant to denote historically variable conditions, it still functions as a structuring principle that shapes discourses within a given epoch. This raises an important theoretical concern—if the historical *a priori* conditions knowledge within a particular era, does it not, in some sense, fulfill a role similar to that of Kant’s transcendental categories? One of the strengths of D’Cruz’s analysis is his careful engagement with the concept of the historical *a priori*, a term that Foucault borrows and reconfigures from Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Traditionally, the *a priori* refers to necessary preconditions for experience and knowledge, existing outside of time and historical contingency. Foucault, however, reinterprets it as something entirely immanent to history, emerging through discursive practices rather than existing independently of them. This innovation allows Foucault to advance a historicist critique of epistemology, but critics have pointed out that his use of the term still implies a kind of structuring force that resembles the very transcendental categories he seeks to avoid. Béatrice Han-Pile, for example, argues that Foucault’s historical *a priori* risks blurring the boundary between the empirical and the transcendental, raising questions about whether his framework can sustain a purely historicist methodology. D’Cruz addresses this critique by invoking the notion of historical sedimentation, suggesting that epistemic structures accumulate stability over time without achieving universal status. This idea strengthens Foucault’s historicist position by emphasizing that discursive formations, though contingent, can acquire a temporary fixity that gives them the appearance of necessity. However, D’Cruz also acknowledges that this argument does not fully resolve the tension between Foucault’s radical historicism and the quasi-transcendental implications of his theoretical framework. The article thus positions Foucault’s work as a provocative but ultimately ambivalent effort to escape the grip of transcendental philosophy, illuminating the methodological complexities inherent in his approach. D’Cruz engages with Merleau-Ponty’s notion of sedimentation, emphasizing its utility in elaborating Foucault’s treatment of the body, power, and resistance. However, one notable omission in this discussion is Reinhart Koselleck’s analogous concept of sedimentation, as explored in *Sediments of Time*. While it is possible that this omission was due to the article’s specific scope, a broader engagement with Koselleck’s insights could have enriched the analysis by situating Foucault’s historical *a priori* within a more expansive framework of temporality and historical structuring. Bringing Koselleck into dialogue with Foucault and Merleau-Ponty would allow for a more nuanced understanding of how historical conditions sediment over time, shaping both meaning and embodied practices while resisting static universalization. This potential cross-pollination between phenomenology, poststructuralism, and conceptual history could offer a richer perspective on the methodological tensions at play in Foucault’s work. Another central issue explored in the article is the role of power in Foucault’s thought. A long-standing debate among scholars concerns whether Foucault’s concept of power—ubiquitous, relational, and constitutive of knowledge—functions as a universal explanatory principle, thereby undermining his historicist commitments. D’Cruz acknowledges this critique but argues that Foucault’s approach remains fundamentally historicist. In Foucault’s framework, power is not an external force imposed from above but an emergent property of specific historical formations. By tracing how power-knowledge relations evolve, Foucault avoids reintroducing a fixed transcendental structure while still accounting for the systemic nature of domination and resistance. Nevertheless, D’Cruz suggests that this balancing act is precarious, as the omnipresence of power in Foucault’s analysis risks granting it a kind of structural permanence that stands in tension with his emphasis on historical contingency. In his later work, Foucault shifts focus to ethics and self-formation, leading some scholars to argue that he reintroduces a constitutive subject—precisely what his earlier work sought to dismantle. This development raises the question: Does Foucault’s concept of subjectivation betray his historicist project? D’Cruz contends that Foucault’s later writings do not contradict his methodological premises but rather refine them. The subject, in Foucault’s account, is not a stable, transcendental agent but a historically constituted formation. His exploration of ethical self-fashioning aligns with his broader effort to historicize identity, power, and resistance, demonstrating that subjectivity itself is embedded within historically contingent structures of knowledge and discipline. D’Cruz’s article makes a significant contribution to debates on radical historicism, offering a nuanced assessment of the methodological tensions in Foucault’s thought. While Foucault successfully challenges the universality of transcendental conditions, his work repeatedly grapples with the difficulty of articulating a critique that avoids invoking stabilizing structures. The historical *a priori*, power-knowledge relations, and subjectivation all highlight the challenges inherent in sustaining a purely historicist methodology. Rather than undermining radical historicism, however, D’Cruz’s analysis strengthens it by clarifying its internal tensions. His argument serves as a crucial reminder that even historicist critique must remain vigilant about the conceptual frameworks it employs, ensuring that it does not inadvertently reproduce the very structures it seeks to dismantle. Extending this discussion beyond Foucault, D’Cruz’s insights have broader implications for scholars working in fields such as historiography, critical theory, and intellectual history. A prime example of this challenge arises in the study of human rights discourse, where historians seek to historicize human rights rather than treat them as timeless moral imperatives. Figures such as Samuel Moyn have critiqued the tendency to project contemporary human rights frameworks onto the past, arguing that the modern human rights movement is a relatively recent phenomenon with distinct ideological and political underpinnings. Yet even within such historicist critiques, there is a risk of reintroducing universalist assumptions, as scholars may implicitly rely on normative claims about justice and dignity that function as stabilizing structures akin to the transcendental categories they critique. This tension illustrates why radical historicism must remain self-reflexive, constantly interrogating its own methodological assumptions to avoid replicating the very epistemic structures it seeks to challenge. ### Power and the Limits of Critique: Engaging Cronin on Foucault and Bourdieu URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/blog/power-and-the-limits-of-critique/ Last updated: 2026-07-26T02:12:11.000Z ### Introduction: The Stakes of the Debate Few debates in modern social theory are as consequential as the discussion surrounding power, agency, and resistance. Theories of power not only shape how we understand domination but also influence how we imagine resistance and the possibilities of political transformation. Two of the most influential thinkers on this subject, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, have offered distinct yet overlapping accounts of power, both of which continue to shape academic and political discourse. Foucault’s work, particularly in *Discipline and Punish* and *The History of Sexuality*, revolutionized our understanding of power by moving away from the traditional juridical model, which views power as something wielded by individuals or institutions, toward a relational and decentralized conception of power. For Foucault, modern power does not simply operate through law or coercion but is embedded in social practices, disciplinary institutions, and discourses that shape the very way people think, behave, and even experience themselves. Bourdieu, by contrast, develops a theory of symbolic power that is grounded in his broader sociological framework of social fields and *habitus*. While he, like Foucault, moves away from a purely top-down model of power, he emphasizes the role of institutions and class hierarchies in reproducing domination. Ciaran Cronin, in his article, “[Bourdieu and Foucault on Power and Modernity](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/019145379602200603?ref=keanuheydari.com),” argues that Bourdieu’s framework offers a more empirically grounded and politically actionable account of power than Foucault’s. He critiques Foucault’s notion of power as overly diffuse and totalizing, suggesting that it leaves little room for agency or resistance. Conversely, he finds Bourdieu’s theory to be more concrete, particularly in how it links power to the state. Cronin’s argument is not without merit; however, his critique is ultimately too narrow and prescriptive, as it imposes a normative framework on these theories that neither thinker claims to provide. Moreover, his reading of both Foucault and Bourdieu oversimplifies their theories, reducing Foucault’s work to an all-encompassing model of domination and Bourdieu’s theory to a purely strategic struggle for power. In this post, I argue that while Cronin raises important concerns about the political implications of both thinkers’ work, his critique fails to fully engage with the nuances of their theories. Instead of setting up an opposition between Foucault and Bourdieu, we should consider how their insights can be productively combined to develop a more dynamic understanding of modern power structures. ### The Demand for a Normative Framework: Is It Justified? One of Cronin’s central criticisms is that both Foucault and Bourdieu fail to provide a normative foundation for resistance. Without a clear ethical or political framework, he argues, their theories leave us without the tools to distinguish between just and unjust uses of power or to develop an effective emancipatory politics. At first glance, this concern seems reasonable. If power is everywhere, as Foucault argues, or if domination is deeply internalized through *habitus*, as Bourdieu suggests, how do we locate meaningful resistance? How do we determine which struggles are legitimate or which forms of power are unjust? The problem with this critique is that it assumes that a normative framework is necessary for effective resistance, when in fact both Foucault and Bourdieu offer powerful insights into domination without relying on universal moral principles. Foucault’s entire intellectual project is, in part, a rejection of normative foundations, particularly those that claim to be universal. He sees such frameworks as historically contingent constructions that are themselves products of power. Concepts like justice, freedom, and human rights, which are often assumed to be neutral and universal, have historically been used as mechanisms of exclusion and domination. For example, the discourse of human rights has been mobilized to justify colonial interventions, neoliberal governance, and carceral expansion—all in the name of protecting human dignity. Foucault’s point is not that justice or resistance are meaningless but that we must be critical of the historical conditions that produce our moral categories rather than assume them to be self-evident truths. Similarly, Bourdieu is skeptical of normative claims because they are often deeply tied to existing social structures. His work shows how dominant social groups define what counts as legitimate knowledge in ways that reinforce their own position of power. Calls for justice and emancipation, if not critically examined, can become tools of domination themselves. For instance, elite educational institutions claim to reward merit, yet their very structure systematically favors those with inherited cultural and social capital. Bourdieu does not reject the possibility of social transformation but insists that it must begin with an understanding of how symbolic power operates rather than with an abstract normative framework. By insisting that Foucault and Bourdieu should provide a moral blueprint for emancipation, Cronin risks misrepresenting the purpose of their theories. Instead of demanding a universal standard of justice, we might ask: How can Foucault’s analysis of power help us identify new sites of resistance? How can Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic power illuminate the hidden mechanisms that sustain domination? These questions allow for a more dynamic and historically grounded approach to resistance, rather than imposing an external ethical framework onto theories that do not claim to offer one. ### Misreading Foucault on Agency and Resistance Another key component of Cronin’s critique is his claim that Foucault’s concept of power is so pervasive that it leaves little room for agency or resistance. According to Cronin, if power is everywhere and operates through discourse, disciplinary institutions, and self-regulation, then where can resistance take place? This critique echoes earlier criticisms of Foucault, particularly from theorists like Jürgen Habermas, who argued that Foucault’s work ultimately leads to a kind of nihilism—a vision of social life in which power is all-encompassing and resistance is impossible. However, this critique fundamentally misreads Foucault’s position. Foucault explicitly states that power always produces resistance. In *The History of Sexuality*, he argues that wherever there is power, there is also the possibility of subversion. The fact that power operates through disciplinary mechanisms and social norms does not mean that individuals are wholly determined by them. Rather, power is a field of struggle, where new forms of subjectivity, counter-discourses, and oppositional practices constantly emerge. Resistance, for Foucault, does not necessarily take the form of large-scale revolutionary movements but can emerge in subtle, everyday acts of refusal and transgression. This might include queer activists challenging normative conceptions of gender and sexuality, prison abolitionists contesting carceral logics, or grassroots movements creating alternative knowledge systems outside state and corporate institutions. Foucault’s late work on ethics and governmentality further refines this perspective by exploring how individuals can reshape their own subjectivity through practices of self-care and alternative ways of living. Cronin’s portrayal of Foucault as deterministic and totalizing is thus deeply misleading. Rather than foreclosing the possibility of resistance, Foucault’s work reorients our understanding of what resistance can look like—not as an external force that stands outside power, but as something that arises from within power relations themselves. ### Conclusion: Moving Beyond a False Opposition Cronin’s critique ultimately falls into a binary opposition—privileging Bourdieu’s structured model of power over Foucault’s decentralized one. However, instead of choosing one over the other, we should recognize that both thinkers offer valuable tools for understanding and resisting domination. Foucault’s work helps us analyze how power operates at the micro-level of discourse, subjectivity, and disciplinary institutions, while Bourdieu provides insight into how class structures, symbolic power, and state institutions reproduce social hierarchies. Rather than setting them against each other, we should explore how their insights can be used together to develop a more nuanced and comprehensive theory of power. ### Iranian Neo-Monarchism and the Politics of Diasporic Longing URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/blog/iranian-neo-monarchism/ Last updated: 2026-08-08T11:40:59.000Z ## Introduction Royalist nostalgia within the Iranian diaspora and hawkish U.S. policy toward the Islamic Republic operate as mutually reinforcing formations. The affective attachment to a lost Pahlavi Iran supplies a moral warrant for punitive measures against Tehran, and the political infrastructure of those measures lends durability and institutional traction to an otherwise dispersed sentiment. This essay examines the emergence and operation of this assemblage through a genealogical method drawn from Michel Foucault and elaborated by David Garland.[\[1\]](#fn1) The goal is to render visible the contingent historical paths by which a particular configuration of longing has come to function as political capital. Genealogy, for Garland, charts the irregular routes through which the past arrives in the present.[\[2\]](#fn2) Memory travels along paths shaped by power relations and by the shifting pressures of geopolitics. For diasporic communities, the framework exposes the instability of stories about the homeland. Such narratives evolve through reaction and repetition, and their renewed salience tracks cycles of tension between Iran and the United States. Kathleen Stewart theorizes nostalgia as both cultural practice and representational form.[\[3\]](#fn3) Within the Iranian diaspora, remembering operates as an act of social positioning. Among neo-monarchist circles composed largely of families whose prosperity peaked under Pahlavi rule, nostalgia functions as a claim to refinement and cosmopolitan modernity. The same affect registers differently for those who lived through the regime’s censorship apparatus or who bore the weight of SAVAK’s repression. Its meaning shifts with the storyteller. Hamid Naficy observes that exile produces longing for a homeland that no longer exists in its remembered form.[\[4\]](#fn4) The impossible return operates as a structural feature of exilic consciousness. Among those who left Iran after 1979, this structural impossibility fuels attachment to an image of a lost Iran whose perfection grows with distance. The remembered country becomes a horizon that recedes as one approaches it. The surplus of longing generated by this condition becomes available for political capture, and restoration movements compete to convert it into a program. ## Historicizing the Royalist Diaspora The royalist diasporic formation emerged through specific historical conjunctures that a genealogical account must trace. The 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh cast a long shadow over what followed. In the decades after, the Pahlavi state’s legitimacy came to rest on two interdependent pillars. U.S. military patronage supplied external underwriting, and oil rents financed a domestic security apparatus anchored by SAVAK.[\[5\]](#fn5) The families who prospered under this arrangement cultivated ties to Western capital and Western institutions, a pattern that conditioned their flight after the Revolution. The 1979 Revolution produced a heterogeneous diasporic formation composed of several overlapping waves. The first wave, departing between 1978 and 1981, included senior officials of the Pahlavi regime, military officers, and members of the economic elite whose resources enabled rapid relocation to Los Angeles and Paris. Subsequent waves included political dissidents from across the ideological spectrum and religious minorities facing persecution. Further migrants left during the Iran-Iraq War as wartime privation compounded political pressure.[\[6\]](#fn6) The ideological heterogeneity of these waves is substantial. The public voice of the diaspora, however, has been disproportionately shaped by the first wave and by its capacity to capitalize on existing Cold War networks. The Reagan administration’s early approach to Iran included a covert regime-change track that cultivated Iranian royalist exiles as instruments. In spring 1981, a CIA program authorized by presidential finding distributed aid to a royalist group headed by Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, the Shah’s twin sister, along with paramilitary organizations led by former Iranian military commanders. The program collapsed quickly, and by 1982 the Senior Interagency Group had concluded that exile groups were too divided and too compromised in Iranian eyes to serve as a credible vehicle for regime change. The logic of exile cultivation recurred across the first Reagan term, with senior National Security Council staff continuing to explore contacts with Iranian exiles who sought to install a pro-Western government.[\[7\]](#fn7) The later arms-for-hostages initiative that became the Iran-Contra scandal ran on a different track. Its intermediaries claimed access to factions inside the Islamic Republic, and the initiative aimed at a covert opening toward Tehran, distinct in both means and objective from the earlier regime-change program. The episode normalized covert dealings with Iranian interlocutors within Reagan-era foreign policy culture. The contemporary royalist diaspora is therefore the sedimented product of specific alignments. Cold War ties between the Pahlavi elite and the U.S. security establishment provided the initial infrastructure. The economic and social capital that enabled elite flight after 1979 translated that infrastructure into a durable diasporic formation, which later diasporic political organizing would take up in varying forms. Reading these alignments through a genealogical lens renders their contingency visible. What operates today as a (seemingly) unified royalist position is a sedimented achievement produced through decades of institutional work. ## A Walk Through “Tehrangeles”: Spatializing Nostalgia ![img_6809-jpeg-format-original.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fb/72/fb7288f6-89a0-4a85-b24b-3aaf14003762/content/images/2026/06/img_6809-jpeg-format-original-1.jpg) *Photograph of Pars Books & Publishing storefront in Westwood, Los Angeles.* The Tehrangeles neighborhood illustrates how nostalgia takes spatial form. Along Westwood Boulevard, traces of a once-vivid cultural corridor persist in faded storefronts and weathered signage. In 2017, Ketab Corporation, the largest Persian bookstore in the area, closed after thirty-six years of operation. Its replacement by a marijuana dispensary registered more than commercial succession. The transition indexed a shifting terrain of diasporic life. Public infrastructure for Persian-language cultural reproduction has contracted, and other commercial logics have expanded into the spaces it once occupied. Across the street, Pars Books and Publishing persists. The window displays the pre-Revolution Lion and Sun flag. Shelves inside offer glowing accounts of the Shah’s rule alongside volumes lamenting 1979 as national catastrophe. The shop functions as archive and shrine at once, preserving a royalist vision of Iran through its curated stock and symbolic apparatus. Spaces of this kind act as repositories of collective memory. Their books and memorabilia promise continuity to readers who fear cultural disappearance. Titles such as Andrew Scott Cooper’s The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran circulate among patrons as confirmation that an authentic Iran survives in exile.[\[8\]](#fn8) The display of the Lion and Sun flag signals allegiance to an imagined political order in which monarchy stands for civilization itself. ## Digital Circulation and the Fractures Within Royalist Memory Donya Alinejad’s *The Internet and Formations of Iranian American-ness* provides a framework for analyzing how neo-monarchist rhetoric proliferates across social media.[\[9\]](#fn9) ![screen-shot-2021-10-11-at-12-45-14-pm-format-original.png](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fb/72/fb7288f6-89a0-4a85-b24b-3aaf14003762/content/images/2026/06/screen-shot-2021-10-11-at-12-45-14-pm-format-original-1.png) *Screenshot of “Supporters of Prince Reza Pahlavi” Facebook group.* Facebook groups like “Supporters of Prince Reza Pahlavi” in Farsi, with membership exceeding 60,000, circulate images and superimposed text valorizing the Shah’s rule. The platform amplifies nostalgia’s reach and produces a digital archive of curated history whose repetition across posts yields the effect of a unified narrative. The resulting discourse converges on two recurring themes. The monarchy appears as the engine of modernization, and the Shah appears as the benevolent architect of an Iran that commanded global respect. The appearance of unity bears closer scrutiny. The royalist milieu harbors substantial internal fractures that the standardized affect of Facebook imagery works to smooth over. One axis of division runs between constitutionalists who envision a restored monarchy under parliamentary constraint and those who hold out for a more absolutist conception of royal authority. Another axis distinguishes secular royalists who emphasize Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage from those who combine royalism with Shia religious nationalism. A further axis of disagreement concerns the person of Reza Pahlavi himself. Some factions treat him as the legitimate heir and rallying point. Others view him with skepticism or indifference, and still others contest the dynastic framing altogether.[\[10\]](#fn10) The digital archive flattens these differences into a composite image of royalist purity. Social media’s tendency to reward affective intensity and symbolic economy privileges the most easily circulable images at the expense of internal debate. The unity that the Facebook feed performs is therefore itself an effect of the medium, one that conceals the contested terrain on which royalist memory actually unfolds. ## Exemplary Neo-Monarchist Imagery **1\. Map of Iran with Poetic Plea** ![nationalism-format-original.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fb/72/fb7288f6-89a0-4a85-b24b-3aaf14003762/content/images/2026/06/nationalism-format-original-1.jpg) A graphic pairs Iran’s map with the verse “Dearer to me than life and religion / You are my dearest, O’ land of Iran.” The text reworks an older slogan, “God, the Shah, and the Country,” into a new formulation that places Iranian nationalism above religious or other affiliations. In this reimagined hierarchy, national identity supersedes everything else and distances the image from the Islamic Republic’s theocratic framework. **2\. Comparative Meme of Bows** ![bowing-format-original.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fb/72/fb7288f6-89a0-4a85-b24b-3aaf14003762/content/images/2026/06/bowing-format-original-1.jpg) A meme juxtaposes a photograph of President Obama bowing to Emperor Akihito in 2009 with an earlier photograph of Emperor Hirohito bowing to the Shah in 1969\. Through the juxtaposition, a single decontextualized pairing generates a sense of aggrieved nostalgia for “lost greatness.” The meme reinforces the narrative that Iran under the Shah once occupied a more prestigious position in global affairs. **3\. Skiing Shah and Queen Farah** ![democracy-format-original.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fb/72/fb7288f6-89a0-4a85-b24b-3aaf14003762/content/images/2026/06/democracy-format-original-1.jpg) A photograph of the Shah and Queen Farah on holiday in the Swiss Alps appears superimposed with text describing the monarchy as poised for “rapid progress” and imminent democratic reform. The glamorous scene omits the experiences of ordinary Iranians under authoritarian rule. It thereby betrays the selective character of neo-monarchist memory. ## Institutional Operationalization and the Co-Production of Policy ![screen-shot-2021-10-11-at-12-48-38-pm-format-original.png](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fb/72/fb7288f6-89a0-4a85-b24b-3aaf14003762/content/images/2026/06/screen-shot-2021-10-11-at-12-48-38-pm-format-original-1.png) *Screen capture from the IAL’s website.* Organizations like Iranian Americans for Liberty (IAL), founded in 2020, translate digital affective energy into institutional form. Through affiliated political committees, IAL organizes media campaigns calling for maximum pressure on Tehran. Its policy proposals mirror the priorities of U.S. neoconservative networks and envision the eventual reestablishment of a constitutional monarchy. Farashgard (“Iran Revival”) and the Constitutionalist Party of Iran, both based in Southern California, maintain close ties to IAL and to Republican politicians in Washington. Together these organizations sustain a transnational infrastructure that projects royalist nostalgia into mainstream U.S. policy debates. The thesis developed in this essay’s opening finds its clearest expression in these institutional arrangements. Royalist nostalgia supplies an affective warrant for hawkish Iran policy by furnishing its advocates with moral testimony about the regime the Islamic Republic replaced. Hawkish Iran policy in turn lends political traction to royalist nostalgia by providing venues where diasporic affect translates into legislative influence and media visibility. The alliance functions as a transnational infrastructure of mutual legitimation that outlasts particular administrations and political cycles. The dynamics became starkly visible on January 6, 2021. ![monarchists-jpeg-format-original.jpg](https://storage.ghost.io/c/fb/72/fb7288f6-89a0-4a85-b24b-3aaf14003762/content/images/2026/06/monarchists-jpeg-format-original-1.jpg) *Photograph of Iranian Americans during the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection.* Amid the chaos at the U.S. Capitol, a group of Iranian monarchists brandished the Lion and Sun flag, signaling alignment with far-right populist formations in the United States. Several prominent neo-monarchists had already declared support for Donald Trump, drawn by his posture toward the Islamic Republic and by the “America First” framing that resonated with their anti-regime commitments. The image of royalist flags on the Capitol grounds captured the convergence that the institutional architecture had been producing for years. ## Conclusion: The Regressive Pull of Co-Produced Nostalgia Naficy observes that nostalgic longing tends to produce division within diasporic communities. His warning resonates here. The dream of a benevolent monarchy obscures the authoritarianism that defined the Pahlavi state. It recasts inequality as a prelude to modernization. A genealogical approach exposes the silences that sustain the dream. The glorification of the Shah erases those who bore the costs of his rule. Agricultural workers displaced by land reform drop out of the royalist imagination. The dissidents imprisoned by SAVAK likewise appear nowhere in its image of progress. By substituting myth for history, neo-monarchist nostalgia risks reproducing the exclusions that contributed to the 1979 Revolution in the first place. The diaspora contains many trajectories that the royalist public voice tends to obscure. Many Iranians abroad reject the Islamic Republic and the call for royal restoration alike. Others channel their energies into artistic production and humanitarian work and maintain a careful distance from restoration politics. Royalist activists frequently claim to speak for the diaspora as a whole, producing an illusion of unanimity that the actual heterogeneity of diasporic politics belies. The persistence of nostalgia raises urgent questions about the relationship between diasporic politics and global power. When longing for an imperial past becomes a guide for political action, democratic possibilities recede. The entangling of royalist nostalgia and hawkish U.S. policy creates feedback loops that amplify the affective and the strategic dimensions of anti-regime politics simultaneously. Genealogy insists that history remains open. The path from memory to future takes shape through the stories people choose to tell and through the silences they accept. Understanding how neo-monarchist nostalgia operates clarifies the stakes of building political identity upon an imagined past. --- 1. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64\. [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. David Garland, “What Is a ‘History of the Present’? On Foucault’s Genealogies and Their Critical Preconditions,” Punishment & Society 16, no. 4 (2014): 365–84\. [↩︎](#fnref2) 3. Kathleen Stewart, “Nostalgia—A Polemic,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 3 (1988): 227–41\. [↩︎](#fnref3) 4. Hamid Naficy, The Making of Exile Cultures: Iranian Television in Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). [↩︎](#fnref4) 5. Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (New York: New Press, 2013); Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, eds., Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2004). [↩︎](#fnref5) 6. On the waves and ideological heterogeneity of the post-1979 Iranian diaspora, see Mohsen M. Mobasher, ed., The Iranian Diaspora: Challenges, Negotiations, and Transformations (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018); and Naficy, Making of Exile Cultures. [↩︎](#fnref6) 7. Malcolm Byrne, Iran-Contra: Reagan's Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2014), 29–30\. On the distinction between the regime-change track and the arms-for-hostages initiative, see Byrne, Iran-Contra, 28–31\. [↩︎](#fnref7) 8. Andrew Scott Cooper, The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran (New York: Henry Holt, 2016). [↩︎](#fnref8) 9. Donya Alinejad, The Internet and Formations of Iranian American-ness: Next Generation Diaspora (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). [↩︎](#fnref9) 10. On internal heterogeneity within Iranian American political identifications, see Alinejad, Internet and Formations. On the longer history of constitutionalist currents in Iranian political thought, see Ali M. Ansari, The Politics of Nationalism in Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Afshin Matin-Asgari, Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). [↩︎](#fnref10) ### Temporal Multiplicity in E. P. Thompson and Reinhart Koselleck URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/blog/temporal-multiplicity-in-e-p-thompson-and-reinhart-koselleck/ Last updated: 2026-07-26T02:08:44.000Z This essay places E. P. Thompson’s “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967) alongside Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1979; English trans. 1985) to examine how two paradigmatic historians characterize temporal change and multiplicity. Both texts explore how the experience of time was transformed at the threshold of modernity, and both reach for a process-oriented vocabulary of gradual, sedimented change. Yet their accounts diverge in consequential ways. Thompson narrates a compression: plural, heterogeneous premodern temporalities are progressively subjected to the disciplinary regime of capitalist clock time, and the range of temporal experience contracts. Koselleck narrates a proliferation: a nearly homogeneous premodern temporality, structured above all by eschatological expectation, dissolves into a distinctly modern condition in which possible futures multiply and the past recedes into irretrievable distance. The difference between these two accounts is not merely empirical but methodological. It reflects the kinds of historical work that Thompson and Koselleck conceive themselves to be doing, and the philosophical commitments that underwrite their respective projects. ## Thompson: Temporal Discipline and the Logic of Capital In 1967, Past & Present published Thompson’s landmark essay on time and labor. Thompson concedes at the outset that “important changes in the apprehension of time” occurred in the “intellectual culture” of Western Europe between roughly 1300 and 1650, but his interest lies less in intellectual history than in what he calls the “shift in time-sense”—the “inward apprehension of time” among working people.[\[1\]](#fn1) The framing is characteristic. It weds an analysis of lived temporal experience to his broader social-historical Marxist project. As a member of the postwar British Marxist historians’ group, Thompson was committed to recovering the agency and creative capacities of laboring people, and the essay extends that commitment into the domain of temporal consciousness.[\[2\]](#fn2) Thompson begins by marshaling anthropological and sociological evidence to establish a baseline of temporal plurality. He notes the “occupational definition of time” among the Nuer and Nandi peoples and describes what he terms a “task-orientation” notation of time, as opposed to measured, clock-regulated time.[\[3\]](#fn3) He characterizes this task-oriented rhythm in terms of its humanistic legibility: it reflects “the least demarcation between ‘work’ and ‘life,’” expanding or contracting according to the internal logic of the task rather than any external metric.[\[4\]](#fn4) On the Aran Islands, he observes a “disregard for clock time” made possible by a subsistence economy with minimal market integration.[\[5\]](#fn5) What matters analytically is that Thompson treats these temporalities not as survivals of an archaic mentality but as fully coherent systems whose logic is internal to particular modes of production and social organization. The essay’s central narrative concerns the dissolution of this plurality. Thompson locates the decisive transformation in the eighteenth century, when the relation between labor and time is restructured by the commodification of time itself. Time, he writes, “is now currency: it is not passed but spent.”[\[6\]](#fn6) The semantic shift from passing to spending encodes a broader Marxist argument about reification: time becomes an abstract, quantifiable commodity subject to the logic of exchange. Thompson traces this process through its material agents—the sundial, the pendulum clock, the pocket watch—arguing that “a general diffusion of clocks and watches is occurring…at the exact moment when the industrial revolution demanded a greater synchronization of labour.”[\[7\]](#fn7) The clock, in his telling, is both instrument and symptom: “The small instrument which regulated the new rhythms of industrial life was at the same time one of the more urgent of the new needs which industrial capitalism called forth to energize its advance.”[\[8\]](#fn8) What Thompson describes, then, is a progressive narrowing. The “characteristic irregularity of labour patterns before the coming of large-scale machine powered industry” gives way to synchronized, measured, externally imposed time-discipline.[\[9\]](#fn9) Premodern temporal plurality—the coexistence of task-oriented, seasonal, liturgical, and other rhythms—is compressed into a single dominant register. Thompson is careful to note that this is not a purely technological transformation; it is “lived through in the society of nascent industrial capitalism,” shaped by cultural factors, class conflict, and the disciplinary ambitions of mercantile and industrial elites.[\[10\]](#fn10) His account amounts to a modified modernization theory, one inflected by Marxist teleology but attentive to the unevenness and contestation that attend any transition. ## Koselleck: Temporal Proliferation and the Dissolution of Eschatology If Thompson’s essay is difficult to detach from its Marxist commitments, Koselleck’s Futures Past is difficult to detach from the conceptual apparatus of Begriffsgeschichte. Peter Burke acknowledged as much in a 1987 review, noting that the essays “do not make easy reading,” in part because their “conceptual universe”—terms like “planes of historicity” and “space of experience”—resists easy naturalization in English.[\[11\]](#fn11) Helge Jordheim has gone further, arguing that Anglo-American scholarship long misread Koselleck as offering primarily a theory of periodization, when his work is better understood as a “radically different theory of overlapping temporal structures and layers, synchronicities and nonsynchronicities that defy periodization.”[\[12\]](#fn12) Still, Koselleck does offer temporal landmarks. In his preface, he writes that the essays “will constantly ask: how, in a given present, are the temporal dimensions of past and future related?”[\[13\]](#fn13) The central problematic is the emergence of what he terms “historical time”—a distinctly modern temporal consciousness in which the past becomes an object of contemplation at a distance, no longer continuous with the observer’s own present. His paradigmatic illustration is the experience of viewing a painting: in modernity, the observer perceives the work as a product of a bygone era, aesthetically and historically remote, rather than as a living element of a shared temporal horizon.[\[14\]](#fn14) This is what Koselleck means by the increasing asymmetry between the “space of experience” (Erfahrungsraum) and the “horizon of expectation” (Erwartungshorizont). Accumulated experience can no longer reliably ground prediction; the future becomes genuinely open.[\[15\]](#fn15) Where Thompson frames temporal change within the periodization of roughly 1300–1650, Koselleck asks, “What new quality had historical time gained that occupies this period from about 1500 to 1800?”[\[16\]](#fn16) His answer is Verzeitlichung—a “temporalization of history” that culminates in “the peculiar form of acceleration which characterizes modernity.”[\[17\]](#fn17) But the most striking feature of Koselleck’s account may be his characterization of what precedes this transformation. Where Thompson sees plural premodern temporalities organized around task, need, and the rhythms of subsistence, Koselleck sees something closer to a singular temporal structure, one dominated by eschatological expectation. Prior to the Reformation, he argues, “the future of the world and its end were made part of the history of the Church.”[\[18\]](#fn18) A temporal equilibrium obtained between the imminence of the Last Judgment and its institutional deferral: the Church “fended off the End of the World” by interpreting contemporary events through an apocalyptic hermeneutic, and in doing so kept the history of the Church coextensive with the history of salvation.[\[19\]](#fn19) The Reformation shattered this equilibrium. “The most basic assumptions of this tradition were destroyed,” Koselleck writes; “Neither Church nor worldly powers were capable of containing the energies which Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin unleashed upon the European world.”[\[20\]](#fn20) But the dissolution of eschatological time did not produce temporal homogeneity. It produced its opposite: a proliferation of temporal horizons. Statecraft, rational prognosis, and political calculation replaced prophetic expectation. Possible futures multiplied, and the past was progressively compressed and distanced. The cyclical temporality of astronomical revolution was refurnished in the cultural lexicon as an empty form, filled in modernity not with providential certainty but with anxiety and contingency. ## Compression and Proliferation: A Methodological Divergence Read side by side, Thompson and Koselleck offer something like mirror-image narratives of temporal modernity. Thompson begins with plurality and ends with compression: the diverse, humanly legible temporalities of premodern labor are disciplined into the uniform metric of clock time. Koselleck begins with a kind of unity—the encompassing horizon of eschatological expectation—and ends with proliferation, the dissolution of that horizon generating a plurality of possible temporal orientations. Modernity, in Thompson’s account, constrains temporal experience. In Koselleck’s, it opens it up. The divergence follows from the different objects and methods each historian brings to the problem. Thompson’s Marxist social history privileges the experience of laboring people, and his narrative is organized accordingly around the coercive logic of capital accumulation. The disciplining of time is a disciplining of bodies and habits; its agent is the employer, its instrument the clock, its logic the extraction of surplus value. Koselleck’s conceptual history privileges something else entirely: the transformation of elite philosophical and cultural production. His landmarks are the Reformation and the French Revolution; his actors are Luther, Robespierre, and the unnamed observers of Renaissance paintings. The temporalities he tracks are not those of labor but of expectation, experience, and historical consciousness. But the difference in vantage point produces more than different periodizations. It also produces different accounts of what temporal multiplicity means. For Thompson, the multiplicity of premodern temporalities is a sign of the relative autonomy of laboring communities—their capacity to organize time according to the rhythms of need rather than the imperatives of accumulation. Its loss is a loss of agency, a form of dispossession. Koselleck’s modern multiplicity is something else: a consequence of the collapse of a totalizing framework that had organized experience into a single, legible pattern. The result is not freedom in any straightforward sense but a condition of radical openness, in which the future becomes the object of planning, speculation, and dread. Koselleck’s own formulation captures the contrast precisely. For Luther, “the compression of time is a visible sign that…the Final Judgment is imminent”; for Robespierre, “the acceleration of time is a human task, presaging an epoch of freedom and happiness.”[\[21\]](#fn21) Between these two figures, Koselleck locates the entire arc of his narrative—one that moves not from plurality to uniformity, as Thompson’s does, but from prophetic certainty to secular contingency. To read these two thinkers together is to recognize that the question of temporal multiplicity cannot be separated from the question of whose temporality is under examination, or from what disciplinary and philosophical vantage it is observed. Thompson’s compression and Koselleck’s proliferation are not contradictory accounts of the same phenomenon. They are accounts of different phenomena, differently conceived. The value of the comparison lies not in adjudicating between them but in making visible the methodological choices that produce such divergent characterizations of what it means to experience time at the threshold of modernity. --- 1. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present, no. 38 (1967): 56–57, [http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749](http://www.jstor.org/stable/649749?ref=keanuheydari.com). [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. On the postwar British Marxist historians, see Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Cambridge: Polity, 1984). [↩︎](#fnref2) 3. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 58, 60\. [↩︎](#fnref3) 4. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 60\. [↩︎](#fnref4) 5. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 59\. [↩︎](#fnref5) 6. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 61\. [↩︎](#fnref6) 7. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 69\. [↩︎](#fnref7) 8. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 69\. [↩︎](#fnref8) 9. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 71\. [↩︎](#fnref9) 10. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” 80\. [↩︎](#fnref10) 11. Peter Burke, “Review: ‘Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time,’” History of European Ideas 8, no. 6 (January 1987): 744–45\. [↩︎](#fnref11) 12. Helge Jordheim, “Against Periodization: Koselleck’s Theory of Multiple Temporalities,” History and Theory 51, no. 2 (2012): 157, [http://www.jstor.org/stable/23277637](http://www.jstor.org/stable/23277637?ref=keanuheydari.com). [↩︎](#fnref12) 13. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004 \[1985\]), 3\. [↩︎](#fnref13) 14. See Koselleck’s discussion of the Alexanderschlacht painting in the first chapter of Futures Past. [↩︎](#fnref14) 15. Jordheim, “Against Periodization,” 153\. [↩︎](#fnref15) 16. Koselleck, Futures Past, 10\. [↩︎](#fnref16) 17. Koselleck, Futures Past, 11\. [↩︎](#fnref17) 18. Koselleck, Futures Past, 13\. [↩︎](#fnref18) 19. Koselleck, Futures Past, 13\. [↩︎](#fnref19) 20. Koselleck, Futures Past, 13\. [↩︎](#fnref20) 21. Koselleck, Futures Past, 12–13\. [↩︎](#fnref21) ### Recent Work on Colonial Violence in French Algeria URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/blog/recent-work-on-colonial-violence-in-french-algeria/ Last updated: 2026-08-08T11:41:11.000Z ## Introduction Hannah Arendt’s 1969 observation that violence, despite its ubiquity in human history, had been “singled out so seldom for special consideration” was only partly accurate.[\[1\]](#fn1) War and warfare had generated abundant scholarship, but such work dealt, as she put it, with “the implements of violence, not with violence as such.”[\[2\]](#fn2) The half-century since the publication of On Violence has produced a substantial corrective, particularly within the discipline of history. French history has been no exception, shaped in part by what has become a contested but durable “colonial turn” in the scholarship.[\[3\]](#fn3) This paper surveys recent historical work on colonial violence in French Algeria, concentrating on monographs published since 2007\. I begin with the intellectual trajectories that brought scholars, from the mid-twentieth century onward, to treat French imperial violence—especially in the Maghreb—with the kind of sustained empirical attention it demands. I then turn to four monographs that collectively deepen our understanding of colonial violence from the initial conquest in 1830 through the formal end of the Algerian War in 1962\. The selection is representative rather than exhaustive. Benjamin Claude Brower’s A Desert Named Peace (2009) opens the Algerian Sahara—long neglected in French imperial historiography—to sustained analysis of physical and structural violence. Jennifer E. Sessions’s By Sword and Plow (2011) reconstructs the ideological infrastructure that made conquest legible, and eventually necessary, to metropolitan audiences. Judith Surkis’s Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria (2019) traces the juridico-discursive regimes through which colonial sovereignty alternately asserted itself and undermined its own coherence. Joshua Cole’s Lethal Provocation (2019) reconstructs the 1934 Constantine massacres as an event generated by deliberate provocation rather than atavistic communal hatred. What these four texts share is a methodological premise—that colonial violence resists reduction to a single logic, a single set of actors, or a stable hierarchy of perpetrators and victims—and in demonstrating this, each shows what remains possible when historical scholarship takes seriously both the specificity of the archive and the weight of structural analysis. ## Intellectual Trajectories of French Colonial Studies Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper’s 1997 introduction to Tensions of Empire, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” remains an indispensable orientation to the problems this historiography addresses.[\[4\]](#fn4) In fifty-six pages, Stoler and Cooper subjected what had been a dominant tendency in colonial historiography—the tendency, through various methods, to reinscribe the very colonizer/colonized dichotomy scholars were ostensibly analyzing—to sustained critical examination. That dichotomy, they argued, neither reflected the complexity of the lived colonial experience nor was it consistently borne out in the colonial archive, even in cases of extreme subjugation. What scholarship needed was “to attend more directly to the tendency of colonial regimes to draw a stark dichotomy of colonizer and colonized without themselves falling into such a Manichean conception.”[\[5\]](#fn5) The essay called for attentiveness to what Stoler and Cooper described as a fundamental “tension of empire”: that historians should examine “how a grammar of difference was continuously and vigilantly crafted as people in colonies refashioned and contested European claims to superiority.”[\[6\]](#fn6) Scholarship in the 1990s had begun to surface the fact that “the tensions between the exclusionary practices and universalizing claims of bourgeois culture were crucial to shaping the age of empire.”[\[7\]](#fn7) Stoler and Cooper identified four methodological orientations that had governed colonial scholarship up to their writing. Work in the mid-1970s was largely committed to an economistic or Marxian political economy. Scholarship of the late 1980s and 1990s theorized what they called a “repressive model of history,” in which European colonizers treated non-European landscapes as a colonial playground for Orientalist projection.[\[8\]](#fn8) A third tendency, associated especially with Paul Rabinow (1989) and Gwendolyn Wright (1991), understood the colony as a “laboratory of modernity” for social engineering.[\[9\]](#fn9) A fourth, drawn from cultural and literary studies, emphasized that colonies furnished “the Other against whom the very idea of Europeanness was expressed,” an orientation most closely linked to Edward Said (1978).[\[10\]](#fn10) Each of these tendencies, taken alone, risked overstatement. Stoler and Cooper called instead for an approach that combined newer attentiveness to cultural and discursive analysis with a renewed commitment to the less glamorous work of political economy and archival research. The colonizer/colonized binary was, after all, itself a historical artifact: when historians “engage colonial archives further,” they discover “how much protracted debate, how much political and cultural energy went into defining dichotomies and distinctions that did not have the predicted effects.”[\[11\]](#fn11) Colonial states, they concluded, “were often in the business of defining an order of things according to untenable principles that themselves undermined their ability to rule.”[\[12\]](#fn12) The emergence of this critical scholarship was probably connected, they suggested, to a “growing disillusionment with the entire range of progressivist ideologies.”[\[13\]](#fn13) A critical reading of colonial texts had “gradually become a way of showing that cultural domination, racist exclusivity, and violence were written into modernizing, nationalist, and socialist projects.”[\[14\]](#fn14) But even before the theoretical turns of the 1980s and 1990s, some scholars had been working toward new analytic fields in the turbulent climate of the Cold War—in the shadow of modernization theory’s failures and the institutional enclave of “area studies.”[\[15\]](#fn15) George Balandier’s seminal 1951 essay “La situation coloniale” is the crucial case. Balandier argued that the colonial situation had to be understood in its own right, as the cultural and political construction of a particular historical moment, and that colonizers were part of that story rather than merely its background.[\[16\]](#fn16) His agenda went largely unheeded at the time. As Frederick Cooper documents in “The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Colonial Studies, 1951–2001,” the Cold War’s psychologizing of the colonial situation effectively silenced Balandier’s critique; it was not until the anthropological work of the 1980s that one can see “a return to the agenda that Balandier left on the table thirty years previously.”[\[17\]](#fn17) The state of French colonial history received periodic synthetic treatment across the following decade. Robert Aldrich and Daniel J. Sherman published review articles on the renewal of scholarly interest in French colonialism in 2002 and 2000, respectively.[\[18\]](#fn18) Alice Conklin updated those syntheses in a 2007 review article surveying French colonial scholarship produced in the first decade of the 2000s.[\[19\]](#fn19) Conklin drew an important distinction between research conducted by colonial historians, those, like Elizabeth Thompson, Peter Zinoman, and Gregory Mann, who worked primarily from non-European archives and fieldwork, and French historians interested in colonial questions, such as Eric Jennings, J. P. Daughton, and Emmanuelle Sibeud, whose “discrete groups of French colonizers” constituted the primary research focus.[\[20\]](#fn20) The present historiography falls largely into the second category, though it acknowledges the debt it owes to the first. Conklin opened her article by invoking Stephen Howe’s observation that there is not one new imperial history of Britain but several, a remark that applied with equal force to the French case.[\[21\]](#fn21) The diversity Howe identified in sources, methods, interdisciplinary approaches, and linguistic competencies was real, but it had also generated problems. Writing in the wake of Paul Gilroy’s 2004 After Empire, which argued that British national culture had been dominated since the end of World War II by an inability to confront, let alone mourn, the violence of empire,[\[22\]](#fn22) Howe reviewed scholarship asking how “claims about colonial massacre, atrocity and genocide have been made, used and contested” in both the public sphere and in historical writing.[\[23\]](#fn23) His conclusion was that “recent and present British contestations over colonial pasts significantly parallel the concurrent French ones,” even if the specific politics of memory differed.[\[24\]](#fn24) In the French case, scholarship centered on colonial history was “sometimes seen as a direct and powerful challenge to central national ideas, especially republican universalism”[\[25\]](#fn25)—a charge leveled, not always fairly, at historians who had fought back against what Gilroy would call postimperial melancholia.[\[26\]](#fn26) Conklin’s own argument concurred with Howe’s earlier observation that scholarship of the 1990s and 2000s had moved away from the abstraction of postcolonial theory, which had made “far less use of archival sources than previous work.”[\[27\]](#fn27) Agreeing with Cooper’s criticism that certain key concepts—“globalization,” “identity,” “modernity”—had lost their analytical force through “excessive and often imprecise use,” she welcomed the empirical turn in French colonial scholarship while acknowledging what had been gained in the theoretical moment.[\[28\]](#fn28) To Cooper’s trio, one might add “hybridity” (from Homi Bhabha), “culture” in its most generalized anthropological usage, and “power” in the sense that Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood have each subjected to critique.[\[29\]](#fn29) Cooper’s own formulation of the underlying problem was precise: “discussion at the general level of the colonial does not tell us enough about the ways in which conflict and interaction have reconfigured imaginative and political possibilities.”[\[30\]](#fn30) His “family description of empire,” an empire as “a political unit that is large, expansionist (or with memories of an expansionist past), and which reproduces differentiation and inequality among people it incorporates,” was an attempt to facilitate locally situated research without yielding to teleological narratives, whether Orientalist or nationalist.[\[31\]](#fn31) What historians needed, Cooper argued, was a “critical and sensitive historical practice” capable of keeping “our focus on the possibilities of political imagination and the importance of accountability for the consequences of our actions.”[\[32\]](#fn32) Conklin’s response to Cooper’s critique was measured: by 2006, she suggested, his concerns were somewhat exaggerated in the French case, given the abundance of rigorously historical scholarship.[\[33\]](#fn33) On this point, Stoler staked out a more combative position. Writing in 2006, she argued that “colonial studies” had “subscribed to a myopic view of empire that sidelines a wide range of imperial forms as anomalous,” thereby casting their political and territorial ambiguities as idiosyncratic.[\[34\]](#fn34) Her corrective was to insist that “imperial formations” be understood as “macropolities whose technologies of rule thrive on the production of exceptions and their uneven and changing proliferation.”[\[35\]](#fn35) Despite their divergent emphases, Cooper and Stoler arrived at compatible definitions of empire, and the scholarship surveyed here has largely held both commitments simultaneously; it attends to the local without losing sight of the structural, and engaging the archive without capitulating to its categories.[\[36\]](#fn36) ## Physical Violence Benjamin Claude Brower’s A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 is in many respects a companion to Julia Clancy-Smith’s 1994 Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904).[\[37\]](#fn37) Both texts push back against the colonizer/colonized dichotomy, the reinscription of which (in Stoler and Cooper’s analysis) historians risk producing in the very practice of scholarship if they are insufficiently vigilant. Brower’s introduction offers a précis of the French invasion and conquest of the Algerian Tell, traces the political motivations behind the 1830 conquest,[\[38\]](#fn38) charts the flash points of extreme violence between 1830–38 and 1839–47, and sets out the theoretical and methodological orientation for his study of the Algerian Sahara, the desert region lying to the south. The book’s structure borrows from William Faulkner: Brower describes it as “a single story, several times told.”[\[39\]](#fn39) This formulation is somewhat misleading, since the most consequential contribution of A Desert Named Peace is its introduction of the Sahara, long overlooked in French imperial historiography, as a site of colonial domination in its own right. In a review, Emmanuelle Saada argued that the book’s greatest merit was its “polyphonic description of the violence committed by different populations, without presupposing a ‘colonial action’ followed by ‘indigenous reactions.’”[\[40\]](#fn40) That archival polyphony, what Saada called, suggestively, a kind of heteroglossia, is central to Brower’s method. He acknowledges the national and linguistic constraints of the French colonial archive while insisting on the “infinitely complex” diversity it nevertheless contains, a multilayered assembly of voices and contexts deserving examination on their own terms.[\[41\]](#fn41) The analytical center of A Desert Named Peace is the argument that “violence is not a singular phenomenon” and that it “assumes many forms.”[\[42\]](#fn42) Colonial space in Algeria never produced a single logic governing how, when, or why violence was inflicted, and French imperial domination was never projected uniformly across the colonial field. This multiplicity of logics requires a multi-regional approach, justified partly by Algeria’s unusual status as a “Mediterranean borderland.”[\[43\]](#fn43) State power in the Algerian Sahara never formed what Brower calls a “seamless institution,”[\[44\]](#fn44) and never achieved the “robust disciplinary grid” that French politicians and bureaucrats sometimes claimed. This finding amounts to a pointed rejection of any Foucauldian model of colonial biopower in this period.[\[45\]](#fn45) The modes of violence Brower documents “eluded the logic of colonial oppression and anticolonial resistance” and expressed a range of political strategies, anxieties, and hopes rather than anything reducible to a single structural logic.[\[46\]](#fn46) Rather than Foucault, Brower’s theoretical touchstone is Étienne Balibar, specifically the claim that “\[there\] are layers of violence which do not gravitate around the alternative of power versus counter-power, although they inevitably return to them—infect them, so to speak.”[\[47\]](#fn47) Working toward a provisional rather than definitive understanding of colonial violence, Brower argues that such an understanding must “unfold in several stages”:[\[48\]](#fn48) the historian must think about violence as a series of processes and as a “phenomenon with effects.”[\[49\]](#fn49) He defines actors as “those who perpetrated and suffered the effects of violence, that is, its victims,”[\[50\]](#fn50) and attends throughout to the relationship between physical force, political power, and the symbolic and structural violence analyzed by Pierre Bourdieu—himself an anthropologist who had done fieldwork in Algeria.[\[51\]](#fn51) The four parts of A Desert Named Peace trace the history of the Saharan lands that became part of France’s Algerian colony in the second half of the nineteenth century.[\[52\]](#fn52) The first examines the conquest and the gap between the rhetoric of “pénétration pacifique” and the violence actually deployed on the ground, including the failure of Governor General Bugeaud to win the allegiance of Algerians opposed to him. After the mutiny at Biskra, the Chamber of Deputies registered its impatience: France, it wrote, “bears with reluctant patriotism the burdens of this conquest,” and ought to proceed through “negotiations and by the intermediary of indigenous leaders” rather than arms.[\[53\]](#fn53) But the Chamber’s posture of “restricted occupation,” endorsed by Louis-Philippe, was no longer operative by the end of the 1830s, as “ambitious military leaders chafed under the limitations placed upon them.”[\[54\]](#fn54) The Saint-Simonian Père Enfantin and others helped manufacture a vision of the Algerian Sahara consonant with “pénétration pacifique,” but the rhetorical work of imagining the desert as a fertile oasis did not translate into actual French knowledge of or access to it.[\[55\]](#fn55) Bugeaud’s resignation in 1847, coinciding with the surrender of Abdelkader, briefly suggested the possibility of “a new chapter marked by peace and prosperity.”[\[56\]](#fn56) The campaigns in Ksour (1847), Zaatcha (1849), and Laghouat (1852) swiftly dispelled that hope. The second part centers on the 1861 uprising at Djelfa, led by the Sufi mystic Si Tayeb ben Bou Chandougha, which Brower uses to “rethink the national-resistance model of popular movements in the Middle East and to seek new ways to explain the dynamics of their violence.”[\[57\]](#fn57) French imperialism in the trans-Saharan region was economically and socially destabilizing: the conquest of the Ouled Naïl disrupted the balance between nomadic and settled populations, and the appointment of exogenous leaders generated political disorder—“in the short term, the policy left local society without effective voices of direction and authority.”[\[58\]](#fn58) The administration’s violence could be startlingly direct. At Djelfa, a caïd of the Ouled Naïl bore his subordination visibly: he was missing both ears, cut off by French troops in 1852, who collected them for the bounty the army paid on Algerian ears.[\[59\]](#fn59) Brower is careful not to let Si Tayeb’s revolt collapse into familiar interpretive categories. The attack, he writes, “neither fits neatly into a story of Islamic revolt nor one of colonial accommodation, and it does not match the paradigm presented in studies of national resistance.”[\[60\]](#fn60) Si Tayeb’s motivations were at once socio-political and religious, driven by the need to demonstrate continued divine favor to his followers.[\[61\]](#fn61) Ultimately, “economic insecurity unleashed a host of social tensions and crises that created conditions for conflict rather than assuring a Pax Francus. With daily existence having become precarious, and the fabric of the social order having frayed, the people of Algeria sought solutions by following increasingly dangerous paths.”[\[62\]](#fn62) The third and fourth parts extend this analysis into the domain of indigenous slavery—where French abolition rhetoric coexisted with, and in practice sustained, the institution it claimed to oppose—and into the metropolitan cultural fantasies bound up with what Brower calls a “fascination with the extreme and the archaic”:[\[63\]](#fn63) Trumelet’s apocalyptic “Sahara sublime” and Duveyrier’s romantic idealization of the Tuareg as desert medievalists, literary tropes whose limits became visible in the 1881 Flatters massacre.[\[64\]](#fn64) ## Ideological Violence Jennifer E. Sessions’s By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (2011) belongs to the rigorously historical, methodologically pluralist tradition Conklin celebrated in her 2007 review.[\[65\]](#fn65) Sessions understands the history of France’s colonies as integral rather than peripheral to metropolitan identity, and she is committed, like Cooper, to recovering causality rather than resting on description of abstract power relations: purely discursive approaches, she argues, vitiate “the explanatory force required to answer historical questions about empire’s origins.”[\[66\]](#fn66) The book’s title borrows a phrase from Bugeaud; its argument engages the question of why French imperialists did what they did—and why metropolitan audiences accepted, even celebrated, what was done in their name. Sessions enters this question by surveying the limits of established explanatory frameworks. Henri Brunschwig had argued in 1960 that French imperialism, unlike its British counterpart, was driven not by economic incentives but by “a passion for national honour and cultural extraversion,” expressed through the activities of “ambitious colonels and admirals conquering vast tracts of commercially insignificant territory.”[\[67\]](#fn67) Sessions confirms Brunschwig’s negative conclusion: historians found that “the colonies offered little, if any net economic benefit and that empire impeded rather than promoted the development of capitalism,” and that decolonization “met with little opposition from business circles and caused no crisis of French capitalism.”[\[68\]](#fn68) Conklin had urged scholars to attend more carefully to how evolving forms of capitalism shaped colonial and postcolonial conflicts,[\[69\]](#fn69) but Sessions found that analysis of the colonial lobby shed little light on how empire’s image had developed through cultural fields—travel literature, advertising, film—that lay beyond political-institutional explanation.[\[70\]](#fn70) Sessions turns instead to “political culture,” deploying the concept in ways that echo Keith M. Baker’s usage in Inventing the French Revolution (1990): the “set of discourses or symbolic practices by which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement and enforce the competing claims they make on one another and upon the whole.”[\[71\]](#fn71) Political culture, in Sessions’s analysis, “provided the map by which nineteenth-century Frenchmen made sense of the colonial conquest unfolding on their public squares, stages, canvases, and print stalls.”[\[72\]](#fn72) What this approach opens up is a way of thinking about causality that economic and political-institutional frameworks could not provide. The received view held that the Algerian conquest was, in Ageron’s phrase, “a makeshift expedient for internal political consumption, carried out by a government in difficulty seeking the prestige of a military victory.”[\[73\]](#fn73) Sessions does not dispute that the regimes of both the Bourbon Restoration and the Orléanist July Monarchy were in difficulty; she shows, however, that the invasion was far from makeshift. It stood, she argues, “at a critical crossroads both between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ French empires, and between continental and overseas empire.”[\[74\]](#fn74) Both regimes sought “to reconcile the revolutionary principles of popular sovereignty and participation with prerevolutionary ideals of kingship and royal authority,” turning to “aggressive warfare and overseas expansion” as a mechanism of legitimation.[\[75\]](#fn75) Conquest was, in other words, a political technology—the means through which constitutional monarchy attempted to shore up its authority against competing claims. The analysis of gender and sexuality is central to Sessions’s argument. Liberal critics of Charles X traversed the rhetoric of “Oriental despotism” to accuse the king of hypocrisy in his campaign against the dey of Algiers; for Louis-Philippe, legitimation required a more intricate balancing of meritocratic soldiering and monarchical authority. Sessions’s examination of Louis-Philippe’s five soldier-sons and the Musée Historique de Versailles brings Horace Vernet—an understudied painter commissioned to legitimize the July Monarchy—into view, revealing how artistic mentalities ultimately complicated rather than confirmed the political message they were meant to deliver. The atrocities committed by Bugeaud did not shake the legislature’s commitment to the Armée d’Afrique: French lawmakers “proved unwilling to refuse the budgetary requests of the Armée d’Afrique’s commanders or to reject plans for colonization.”[\[76\]](#fn76) Instead, they endorsed “a colonization policy that enlisted thousands more French men to take up the struggle for domination in Algeria by the plow, rather than the sword.”[\[77\]](#fn77) Sessions’s conclusion draws the ideological circuit closed: “If the Bonapartist vision of masculine citizenship helped to undermine the Orléans royal family’s claims to power, it also provided the legitimizing foundation for a large-scale project of settler colonialism in Algeria. Settlers and soldiers would become partners in making Algeria the jewel in the French imperial crown.”[\[78\]](#fn78) The book’s second part shifts from cultural history to social history, examining the movement of French settlers into Algeria under government-sponsored migration schemes and finding that most were urban and north of the Massif Central—a demographic profile that complicates the agrarian mythology Bugeaud’s phrasing invoked. ## Juridico-Discursive Violence Judith Surkis’s Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930 is a colonial legal genealogy asking how the Franco-Algerian “Muslim question” became, in sustained and consequential ways, a sexual question.[\[79\]](#fn79) The book works against “the work of historical forgetting in order to reveal the neglected memory of Muslim law in French law”[\[80\]](#fn80)—in Howe’s terms, a contribution to anti-forgetting scholarship.[\[81\]](#fn81) More precisely, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a cultural history of imperial legality, tracing “how contests over the legal status of Algerian men and women were implicated in wider conflicts over French efforts to assert colonial sovereignty.”[\[82\]](#fn82) Surkis’s source base is broad—French state archives, journalism, professional ethnographic writing, novels—and her argument extends the project begun in Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920, which traced how women’s freedoms contracted in the shadow of the 1804 Napoleonic Civil Code.[\[83\]](#fn83) In Sex, Law, and Sovereignty, French sexual fantasies about Algerian men and women do not remain confined to culture and art; they bleed “into the writing and practice of law.”[\[84\]](#fn84) Where the mature Foucault located power in forms diffuse enough to escape state capture, Surkis re-centers sovereignty—examining how legal writing and practice made “sovereignty’s contingency” visible by “highlighting legal indecision over the organization and regulation of sexual and familial order.”[\[85\]](#fn85) The mechanisms were concrete. Algerian real estate considered desirable by colonizers was classified as le statut réel (real property law), subject to supposedly universal French civil law and thus more easily expropriated; the signification of Muslim difference through “masculine privilege” and ethnographic constructions of Algerian gender relations produced le statut personnel (personal status law), which effectively preserved an imagined sphere of Muslim private life even as it served the purposes of colonial land seizure.[\[86\]](#fn86) The legacy of these “sexualized conceptions of Muslim legal difference” was durable.[\[87\]](#fn87) Economic and political motivations alone cannot explain it; the legal formations Surkis analyzes were also “imbued with powerful affective investments.”[\[88\]](#fn88) Working out the significance of that affective dimension requires Surkis to think carefully about how colonial law actually functioned as a cultural and political formation. She argues that she must attend to “texts and trials” as documents that “refracted and ramified concerns that extended beyond the confines of technical legal argumentation on the one hand, and the interests of jurists and litigants in the colonial legal field on the other”[\[89\]](#fn89)—precisely “to illustrate how contests over the legal status of Algerian men and women were implicated in wider conflicts over French efforts to assert colonial sovereignty.”[\[90\]](#fn90) What she calls the “cultural life” of Algerian colonial law—“the material, political, and affective resources and resonances on which its elaboration and its powerful effects depended”[\[91\]](#fn91)—shares significant features with Baker’s and Sessions’s “political culture.” The colonial legal field, like the metropolitan political one, was a site of continuous negotiation, projection, and displacement. French journalists and jurists, Surkis argues, regularly acted on “unrecognized desires and fantasies that were regularly displaced or projected onto Algerian men and women.”[\[92\]](#fn92) Colonial law, she writes, “always relies on a compensatory fantasy, which is to say a denial of the inevitable gaps and uncertainties of knowledge entailed by rule over a distant and often defiant population.”[\[93\]](#fn93) In analyzing these affective dynamics, Surkis follows Stoler in arguing that libidinal investments in the colonial project were not merely incidental or metaphorical—not simply par for the course of colonial ideology—but were rather “at the heart of colonial governmentality.”[\[94\]](#fn94) Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, she introduces the concept of the “extimate”—a “fascination with and jealousy of the Other’s excessive sexual pleasure that reveals deep-seated but unrecognizable desires within the self”[\[95\]](#fn95)—to describe how French jurists and journalists projected desires they could not avow onto Algerian men and women. The “unacknowledged desire represents an intimate foreignness that is actually created, by the structure of social and psychic rules, as an integral excess”:[\[96\]](#fn96) to acknowledge it would “rupture, to use the terminology of the Civil Code, both ‘public order’ and the subject of the law.”[\[97\]](#fn97) A “totalizing and gendered fantasy of the Civil Code,” Surkis argues, “prompted such extimate projections.”[\[98\]](#fn98) The instabilities generated by this structure run through all eight chapters of the book. The opening chapter, “Bodies of French Algerian Law,” begins with the Colombon Affair of early 1832 and ends with the case of Aïcha, an Algerian Muslim woman who sought to convert to Catholicism. It establishes what will become the book’s central finding at the level of state policy: “the French colonial state consistently sought the assimilation not of Algerian people, but of Algerian land.”[\[99\]](#fn99) The case of Aïcha shows that “contingency and uncertainty, as much as strategic planning, shaped Algeria’s legal order”[\[100\]](#fn100) and that “gendered fantasies about women’s place in Muslim law and religion came to ground a regime of colonial law that was eventually adopted in 1834.”[\[101\]](#fn101) The “period of uncertainty” was, in other words, “fantasmatically staged and provisionally resolved in law.”[\[102\]](#fn102) Chapter two traces the construction of “Muslim legal, religious, and sexual difference” through the specter of polygamy;[\[103\]](#fn103) chapter three examines the fabrication of the distinction between statut réel and statut personnel through “disingenuous rhetoric”;[\[104\]](#fn104) and chapter four analyzes the weaponization of child marriage as a means of establishing French legal and civilizational supremacy.[\[105\]](#fn105) Chapters five through eight track the accumulated instabilities of this legal architecture. Chapter five examines how sex, gender, and civilizational difference inflected jurisdictional conflict between military and civilian authorities;[\[106\]](#fn106) an 1891 case involving a military doctor’s charges against a fellow officer in the native cavalry shows that “the fantasmatic integrity of colonial legality, masculinity, and racial dignity remained precarious, vulnerable to charges of perversion and corruption, even as French domination appeared to be reaching its height.”[\[107\]](#fn107) Chapter six analyzes the rare but deeply anxious cases of mixed marriage between European women and Algerian men.[\[108\]](#fn108) Chapter seven surveys debates over colonial reform at the Algerian centenary, where the legislature’s refusal to extend political rights to Algerian Muslims illustrated how memory was weaponized for colonial ends.[\[109\]](#fn109) Chapter eight turns to indigenous intellectual production—particularly in La Voix des humbles—contesting French romantic mythologies of Algerian womanhood.[\[110\]](#fn110) Across all four chapters, a legal system premised on fantasmatic coherence was continuously destabilized by the encounters it was designed to manage. In this way, Surkis’s argument about the contingency of French imperial sovereignty shares significant parallels with Sessions’s analysis of the post-Revolutionary quest for political legitimation—both scholars showing that the colonial project was not merely constrained by metropolitan politics but constituted by its failures. ## Inter-Communal Violence Joshua Cole’s Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (2019) provides a forensic reconstruction of the most lethal episode of antisemitic violence on French soil in peacetime: twenty-eight deaths occurring over three days in Constantine in August 1934\. The book operates on two levels: as a “murder mystery” uncovering a hidden dimension of calculated provocation, and as a “social history of political violence” that situated these events within the broader colonial field.[\[111\]](#fn111) Cole’s core intervention is a sustained critique of essentialist accounts that frame inter-communal violence in the Maghreb as a resurgence of “precolonial atavistic hatreds.”[\[112\]](#fn112) He argues instead that the 1934 massacres were generated by specific actors with identifiable political motives, operating within the unique pressures of the interwar colonial state. While the riots began with a localized dispute at a mosque on Friday, August 3, Cole demonstrates that the systematic murders of Sunday, August 5, were exacerbated by purposeful agitation designed to escalate the horror of the event.[\[113\]](#fn113) The book presents compelling evidence that as many as twenty out of the twenty-five Jewish deaths that day were likely the work of a relatively small, organized group—or, limiting the count to those killed in home and business invasions within a single neighborhood, at least eighteen.[\[114\]](#fn114) At the center of this conspiracy was Mohamed El Maadi, an adjutant in the French army’s Third Zouaves Regiment.[\[115\]](#fn115) Cole’s research into police archives uncovered a January 1938 inspector’s note explicitly naming El Maadi as “one of the agitators who provoked the ‘pogroms’ of Constantine.”[\[116\]](#fn116) El Maadi’s presence at the site of the Attali family murders is documented by military records and his own later testimony, yet his actual role remained hidden from the public for decades.[\[117\]](#fn117) The significance of El Maadi’s involvement lies in his political trajectory, which Cole traces from extreme French nationalism in the 1930s to enthusiastic fascism during the Second World War. El Maadi was recruited into the Cagoule, a right-wing terrorist network, by its organizer Jean Filiol, and eventually served as a captain in the German SS, commanding a North African Brigade that fought against the French Resistance.[\[118\]](#fn118) His participation in the 1934 murders was not an expression of “Muslim” antisemitism but an attempt to forge a bond between Algerian Muslims and French extremists through a shared hatred of Jews—a “Eurafrican” fascist alliance that he would go on to theorize explicitly under the Vichy regime.[\[119\]](#fn119) Cole meticulously details the cover-up that followed the massacres, involving the military, the police, the local political establishment in Constantine, and the governor-general’s office in Algiers.[\[120\]](#fn120) When the local Police Mobile initially leaked a “gang of throat slitters” theory to the press, the administration intervened to replace it with a narrative of spontaneous religious fanaticism. The subsequent trials in 1935 and 1936 were theatrical performances that successfully reduced the conflict to two incompatible communal narratives—the “Jewish thesis” and the “Muslim thesis”—while suppressing evidence of coordinated provocation and the presence of suspects at multiple murder sites.[\[121\]](#fn121) By showing how colonial authorities managed the perception of violence, Cole illustrates how “France was still absent” from the official story, preserving the colonial order at the expense of historical truth.[\[122\]](#fn122) ## Conclusion Research on violence in French Algeria shows no signs of slowing. The 2020 publication of the four-volume Cambridge World History of Violence signals the deepening institutionalization of interdisciplinary approaches to the history of violence, continuing the reversal of the trend Arendt observed in 1969.[\[123\]](#fn123) The scholarship surveyed here has been animated throughout by a double commitment: to the rigorous empirical analysis of what actually happened in specific places and times, and to an understanding of French colonialism as a structural formation whose logics extended across regions, archives, and the metropole-colony axis alike. The common thread through Brower, Sessions, Surkis, and Cole is not simply methodological pluralism. It is the recognition that the colonizer/colonized binary, whatever its political utility, was never an accurate description of the colonial field. Cooper and Stoler’s foundational argument, that “social transformations are a product of both global patterns and local struggles” and that metropole and colony must be treated in “a single analytic field,” has been vindicated rather than superseded by the work examined here.[\[124\]](#fn124) None of these books is “so nationally bound” that it remains blind to “those circuits of knowledge and communication that took other routes than those shaped by the metropole-colony axis alone.”[\[125\]](#fn125) And all of them enact Cooper and Stoler’s reminder that the stakes of this analytic work are not merely professional: “Social taxonomies allowed for specific forms of violence at specific times. How a person was labeled could determine that a certain category of persons could be killed or raped with impunity, but not others.”[\[126\]](#fn126) The memory of French-Algerian relations remains contested in the metropole itself. Article 4 of Law No. 2005-158 of 23 February 2005 “regarding recognition of the Nation and national contribution in favor of the French repatriates,” defended under the Chirac administration by Michèle Alliot-Marie, required a pedagogical emphasis on the “positive role” of French imperial activities overseas.[\[127\]](#fn127) After substantial public outcry in France and in its overseas territories, Article 4 was partially repealed. It continues to be criticized by historians and left-wing activists for promoting reactionary revisionism. The memory of colonial violence—its uses, abuses, instrumentalizations, and suppressions—remains an open historical problem, and the scholarship examined here suggests that the discipline is better equipped to address it than it has ever been. --- 1. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970), 8. Parenthetically, Arendt adds, “In the last edition of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences ‘violence’ does not even rate an entry” (8). Explaining the significance of this observation, she suggests that “\[this\] shows to what an extent violence and its arbitrariness were taken for granted and therefore neglected; no one questions or examines what is obvious to all.” [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. Arendt, 8, fn. 6\. [↩︎](#fnref2) 3. Broadly, the colonial turn refers to the effort to reframe France’s role in the world by emphasizing the centrality of its imperial activities. [↩︎](#fnref3) 4. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 1997), 1–56\. [↩︎](#fnref4) 5. Cooper and Stoler, 3\. [↩︎](#fnref5) 6. Cooper and Stoler, 3–4\. [↩︎](#fnref6) 7. Cooper and Stoler, 37\. [↩︎](#fnref7) 8. Cooper and Stoler, 6\. [↩︎](#fnref8) 9. Cooper and Stoler, 6\. [↩︎](#fnref9) 10. Cooper and Stoler, 6\. [↩︎](#fnref10) 11. Cooper and Stoler, 8\. [↩︎](#fnref11) 12. Cooper and Stoler, 8\. [↩︎](#fnref12) 13. Cooper and Stoler, 16\. [↩︎](#fnref13) 14. Cooper and Stoler, 16–17\. [↩︎](#fnref14) 15. Cooper and Stoler, 15\. [↩︎](#fnref15) 16. Cooper and Stoler, 15\. [↩︎](#fnref16) 17. Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley, Los Angeles, & London: University of California Press, 2005), 34, 47\. [↩︎](#fnref17) 18. Robert Aldrich, “Imperial Mise En Valeur and Mise En Scène: Recent Works on French Colonialism,” The Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (2002): 917–36; Daniel J. Sherman, “The Arts and Sciences of Colonialism,” French Historical Studies 23, no. 4 (October 1, 2000): 707–29\. [↩︎](#fnref18) 19. Alice L. Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism: Recent Studies of the Modern French Empire,” French Historical Studies 30, no. 2 (April 1, 2007): 305–32\. [↩︎](#fnref19) 20. Conklin, 315\. [↩︎](#fnref20) 21. Conklin, 305–6\. See also Stephen Howe, ed., The New Imperial Histories Reader, Routledge Readers in History (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). [↩︎](#fnref21) 22. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture?, Reprinted (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 98\. [↩︎](#fnref22) 23. Stephen Howe, “Colonising and Exterminating? Memories of Imperial Violence in Britain and France,” Histoire@Politique 11, no. 2 (2010): 2\. [↩︎](#fnref23) 24. Howe, 3\. [↩︎](#fnref24) 25. Howe, 5\. [↩︎](#fnref25) 26. Howe cites, for example, Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison’s book Coloniser, exterminer. Sur la guerre et l’État colonial, published in 2005\. Le Cour Grandmaison received substantial criticism for his “selective use of sources, alleged neglect of internal debates and complexities among colonialists, his focusing on only the most spectacular incidents of colonial violence (‘une anthologie des horreurs coloniales,’ say Gilbert Meynier et Pierre Vidal-Naquet), and his frequently white-hot rhetorical language, are said by critics to contribute to an over-polarised debate” (1). [↩︎](#fnref26) 27. Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism,” 307\. [↩︎](#fnref27) 28. Conklin, 307\. [↩︎](#fnref28) 29. For a stinging critique of Bhabha (among others’) theorization of hybridity, see Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Hybridity, So What?: The Anti-Hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition,” in Recognition and Difference, ed. Scott Lash and Mike Featherstone (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2002), 219–46\. For a more moderate critique, see Dominique Schirmer, Gernot Saalmann, and Christi Kessler, eds., Hybridising East and West: Tales Beyond Westernisation. Empirical Contributions to the Debates on Hybridity, Southeast Asian Modernities 2 (Berlin: Lit, 2006). Schirmer et al. suggest that the move toward hybridity carries little to no conceptual weight and results in a flattening synecdoche for transnational encounters. For a review of the debate, see Amar Acheraïou, “Critical Perspectives on Hybridity and the Third Space,” in Questioning Hybridity, Postcolonialism and Globalization (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 105–20\. For critiques of culture and power in general, see Talal Asad, “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz,” Man 18, no. 2 (1983): 237–59; Saba Mahmood, “Islam and Gender in Muslim Societies,” in Observing the Observer: The State of Islamic Studies in American Universities, ed. Mumtaz Ahmad, Zahid Bukhari, and Sulayman Nyang (International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2012), 70–87. Regarding the tendency in cultural studies scholarship and research informed by postcolonial theory to examine the Foucauldian analytic of “power” differentials in general, at the expense of precise, local empirical analysis, Frederick Cooper argues that “if every form of asymmetrical power is termed empire, we are left without ways of distinguishing among the actual options \[for analysis\] we might have.” Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 29\. [↩︎](#fnref29) 30. Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History, 31\. [↩︎](#fnref30) 31. Cooper, 26–27, emphasis in original. [↩︎](#fnref31) 32. Cooper, 32\. [↩︎](#fnref32) 33. Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism,” 331\. [↩︎](#fnref33) 34. Ann Laura Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (January 1, 2006): 127\. [↩︎](#fnref34) 35. Stoler, 127–28. Stoler’s essay focuses on the place of the United States as an empire or colonial power. Fn. 29 above condenses her first two points of departure to introduce the field of scholarship on which this paper reflects. Elaborating on the phrase “imperial formations,” she adds that one of its “critical features…include\[s\] harboring and building on territorial ambiguity, redefining legal categories of belonging and quasi-membership, and shifting the geographic and demographic zones of partially suspended rights” (128, emphasis in original). Stoler’s third point of departure concerns the topographic representation of empire, arguing against the idea of geographic boundedness. She suggests that these “imperial formations” are better seen as “scaled genres of rule that produce and count on different degrees of sovereignty and gradations of rights” (128). These formations “thrive on turbid taxonomies that produce shadow populations and ever-improved coercive measures to protect the common good against those deemed threats to it” (128). Stoler adds a final observation highlighting both the constricting and generative effect of “imperial formations” on populations: they “give rise both to new zones of exclusion and new sites of—and social groups with—privileged exemption” (128, emphasis in original). [↩︎](#fnref35) 36. One important issue that this historiography will not treat is the question of imperial circulation, that is, what was the nature of the movement of ideas about imperial practices of domination and the movement of these practices themselves. Did they circulate from Europe to the colonies and then back again in every case? See Cooper and Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” 24. Cooper and Stoler argue, in summary, that “\[metropolitan\] states with extensive colonial ‘holdings’ shrank back before the implications of extending their universalistic social engineering theories overseas, but that very process unsettled the security of colonial rule itself. The problem came home to the metropole: former colonial subjects, now the citizens of sovereign countries within francophone or anglophone communities, migrated to their former metropoles-where they had for some time been an unsettling presence-rekindling forms of exclusion and racism and setting off political pressures for the narrowing of citizenship within Great Britain and France.” [↩︎](#fnref36) 37. See Julia Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800–1904) (Berkeley, CA.: University of California Press, 1997). [↩︎](#fnref37) 38. The subject of Jennifer E. Sessions’ 2011 book—see below. [↩︎](#fnref38) 39. Benjamin Claude Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902, History and Society of the Modern Middle East (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), 5\. [↩︎](#fnref39) 40. Emmanuelle Saada, review of A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902, by Benjamin Claude Brower, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle 41, no. 2 (2010): 171–72. “\[Le\] plus grand mérite de cet ouvrage est d’offrir une description polyphonique des violences commises par les différentes populations, sans présupposer une « action coloniale » suivie de « réactions indigènes ».” [↩︎](#fnref40) 41. Brower, A Desert Named Peace, 5\. [↩︎](#fnref41) 42. Brower, 6\. [↩︎](#fnref42) 43. Brower, 6\. [↩︎](#fnref43) 44. Brower, 6\. [↩︎](#fnref44) 45. Brower, 6\. [↩︎](#fnref45) 46. Brower, 7\. [↩︎](#fnref46) 47. As quoted in Brower, 7\. [↩︎](#fnref47) 48. Brower, 7\. [↩︎](#fnref48) 49. Brower, 7\. [↩︎](#fnref49) 50. Brower, 7\. [↩︎](#fnref50) 51. Brower, 8\. [↩︎](#fnref51) 52. Brower, 6\. [↩︎](#fnref52) 53. Brower, 46\. [↩︎](#fnref53) 54. Brower, 32\. [↩︎](#fnref54) 55. Brower, 74\. [↩︎](#fnref55) 56. Brower, 75\. [↩︎](#fnref56) 57. Brower, 93\. [↩︎](#fnref57) 58. Brower, 116\. [↩︎](#fnref58) 59. Brower, 116\. [↩︎](#fnref59) 60. Brower, 135\. [↩︎](#fnref60) 61. Brower, 136\. [↩︎](#fnref61) 62. Brower, 137\. [↩︎](#fnref62) 63. Brower, 6\. [↩︎](#fnref63) 64. Brower, 200\. [↩︎](#fnref64) 65. Jennifer E. Sessions, By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014). [↩︎](#fnref65) 66. Sessions, 11\. [↩︎](#fnref66) 67. Ronald E. Robinson, “Introduction,” in French Colonialism 1871–1914: Myths and Realities, by Henri Brunschwig, trans. William Glanville Brown (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966), ix. [↩︎](#fnref67) 68. Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 10\. [↩︎](#fnref68) 69. Conklin, “Histories of Colonialism,” 332\. [↩︎](#fnref69) 70. Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 11\. [↩︎](#fnref70) 71. Baker, Inventing the French Revolution; as quoted in Sessions, By Sword and Plow, 14–15\. [↩︎](#fnref71) 72. Sessions, 15\. [↩︎](#fnref72) 73. As quoted in Sessions, 1\. [↩︎](#fnref73) 74. Sessions, 3\. [↩︎](#fnref74) 75. Sessions, 2\. [↩︎](#fnref75) 76. Sessions, 173\. [↩︎](#fnref76) 77. Sessions, 173\. [↩︎](#fnref77) 78. Sessions, 173\. [↩︎](#fnref78) 79. Judith Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, Corpus Juris (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 6\. [↩︎](#fnref79) 80. Surkis, 18\. [↩︎](#fnref80) 81. Howe, “Colonising and Exterminating?” [↩︎](#fnref81) 82. Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, 8\. [↩︎](#fnref82) 83. See Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006). [↩︎](#fnref83) 84. Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, 4\. Surkis’s book shares many similarities with Todd Shepard’s Sex, France, and Arab Men, 1962–1979 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). Shepard’s work, while less explicitly focused on the fantasmatic extimacies of legal texts, can be seen as a chronological extension into the twentieth century of Surkis’s analysis of French imperialism and gender in the nineteenth century. [↩︎](#fnref84) 85. Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, 9\. See also the introduction to Jakob Nilsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, eds., Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality, Södertörn Philosophical Studies 14 (Huddinge: Södertörn Univ, 2013). [↩︎](#fnref85) 86. Surkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830–1930, 4\. [↩︎](#fnref86) 87. Surkis, 5\. [↩︎](#fnref87) 88. Surkis, 5\. [↩︎](#fnref88) 89. Surkis, 8\. [↩︎](#fnref89) 90. Surkis, 8\. [↩︎](#fnref90) 91. Surkis, 8\. [↩︎](#fnref91) 92. Surkis, 15\. [↩︎](#fnref92) 93. Surkis, 14\. [↩︎](#fnref93) 94. Surkis, 15; Stoler’s phrase as cited therein. [↩︎](#fnref94) 95. Surkis, 15\. [↩︎](#fnref95) 96. Surkis, 15\. [↩︎](#fnref96) 97. Surkis, 16\. [↩︎](#fnref97) 98. Surkis, 17\. [↩︎](#fnref98) 99. Surkis, 19\. [↩︎](#fnref99) 100. Surkis, 49\. [↩︎](#fnref100) 101. Surkis, 31\. [↩︎](#fnref101) 102. Surkis, 31\. [↩︎](#fnref102) 103. Surkis, 21\. [↩︎](#fnref103) 104. Surkis, 21\. [↩︎](#fnref104) 105. Surkis, 22\. [↩︎](#fnref105) 106. Surkis, 23\. [↩︎](#fnref106) 107. Surkis, 23\. [↩︎](#fnref107) 108. Surkis, 24\. [↩︎](#fnref108) 109. Surkis, 24–25\. [↩︎](#fnref109) 110. Surkis, 25\. [↩︎](#fnref110) 111. Joshua Cole, Lethal Provocation: The Constantine Murders and the Politics of French Algeria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019), 7\. [↩︎](#fnref111) 112. Cole, 8\. [↩︎](#fnref112) 113. Cole, 5\. [↩︎](#fnref113) 114. Cole, 246\. [↩︎](#fnref114) 115. Cole, 204\. [↩︎](#fnref115) 116. Cole, 221\. [↩︎](#fnref116) 117. Cole, 205\. [↩︎](#fnref117) 118. Cole, 203–4\. [↩︎](#fnref118) 119. Cole, 226–27\. [↩︎](#fnref119) 120. Cole, 247\. [↩︎](#fnref120) 121. Cole, 247\. [↩︎](#fnref121) 122. Cole, 242\. [↩︎](#fnref122) 123. See especially Ussama Samir Makdisi, Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (Oakland, CA.: University of California Press, 2019); Hafid Gafaïti, Patricia M. E. Lorcin, and David G. Troyansky, eds., Transnational Spaces and Identities in the Francophone World, France Overseas (Lincoln, NE.: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); Julia Clancy-Smith, ed., North Africa, Islam, and the Mediterranean World: From the Almoravids to the Algerian War, History and Society in the Islamic World (London and Portland, OR.: Frank Cass, 2001); Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800–1900, The California World History Library 15 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). [↩︎](#fnref123) 124. See for example Howard G. Brown, Mass Violence and the Self: From the French Wars of Religion to the Paris Commune (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019). Also see Benjamin Claude Brower, “Chapter 12: Genealogies of Modern Violence: Arendt and Imperialism in Africa, 1830–1914,” in The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, vol. 4, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 246–62; James P. Daughton, “Chapter 23: Quotidian Violence in the French Empire, 1890–1940,” in The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, vol. 4, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 468–89; Jeremy Teow and Peter McPhee, “Chapter 17: Change and Continuity in Collective Violence in France, 1780–1880,” in The Cambridge World History of Violence, ed. Louise Edwards, Nigel Penn, and Jay Winter, vol. 4, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 347–66\. [↩︎](#fnref124) 125. Cooper and Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” 4\. [↩︎](#fnref125) 126. Cooper and Stoler, 28\. [↩︎](#fnref126) 127. Loi № 2005-158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés. [↩︎](#fnref127) ### Exteriorizing Subjectivity: Snapchat and Pharmacopornographic Biocapitalism URL: https://www.keanuheydari.com/blog/exteriorizing-subjectivity/ Last updated: 2026-07-26T02:11:03.000Z ## Introduction > “There is nothing to discover in sex or in sexual identity; there is no inside. The truth about sex is not a disclosure; it is sex-design. Pharmacopornographic biocapitalism does not produce things, but mobile ideas, living organs, symbols, desires, chemical reactions, and conditions of the soul.”[\[1\]](#fn1) > —Paul B. Preciado Welcome to the pharmacopornographic regime. Digital screens, monitors, and interfaces of every size buzz, pulsate, and project wave-particles of light into the air, all around us, twenty-four hours a day. For those born after the advent of Web 2.0 (at the new millennium), there has never been a period of non-digitally mediated subjectivity.[\[2\]](#fn2) The entanglements of technology, late-modern capitalism, and our use of technology in the context of late-modern capitalism raise questions of baffling complexity and of intense urgency.[\[3\]](#fn3) Both popular authors and scholars have observed that many new forms of technology function (and have been functioning) as prostheses of the self and reflexively create and delimit new opportunities for articulating subjectivities.[\[4\]](#fn4) Theorists have observed the linkage between new media and capturing technologies (e.g., photography) for articulating new forms of digitally mediated selfhood—these technologies thicken the layers of significance (and erasure) that are entailed by virtualizing and exteriorizing the performance of selfhood.[\[5\]](#fn5) This paper seeks to understand some of the implications of digitally mediated selfhood for questions of gender and sexuality by thinking through the use of social media platforms on mobile devices, particularly Snapchat. ## Historical and Theoretical Framework Since the “discursive explosion” of the Classical Age, our sense of self is materialized and brought into discourse by the disciplinary mechanisms of sexuality.[\[6\]](#fn6) While Foucault’s work stopped short of examining the postwar implications of sexuality and its relation to subjectivity, other scholars have worked towards bringing his analysis closer to the present. Many American histories of sexuality have highlighted the extraordinary importance of the introduction of oral contraceptives in 1960.[\[7\]](#fn7) Beginning in the 1950s, however, the United States witnessed a radical transformation of its sexual architecture that would later converge with increasing adoption of the pill by women. Recent work has shed light on the critical role of the late media mogul Hugh Hefner (1926–2017) and the Playboy franchise in restructuring postwar landscapes of sexuality, gender relations, and subjectivity. For example, trans-feminist theorist Paul B. Preciado’s sophisticated treatment of Playboy magazine sets the stage for understanding contemporary American milieux of sexuality and gender through what they term the “pharmaco-pornographic” regime.[\[8\]](#fn8) This “post-industrial, global and mediatic regime” describes “a bio-molecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity – of which ‘the pill’ and Playboy are two paradigmatic offspring.”[\[9\]](#fn9) If Preciado’s research on the Playboy franchise in Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics very concretely narrates the cultural history of postwar sexuality, then their work of auto-theory, Testo Junkie (which builds on the work of theorists Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, among other trans and queer theorists), proposes that “it is philosophically relevant today to undertake a somato-political analysis of ‘world-economy’” using the global regime of pharmacopornographic capitalism as a category of analysis.[\[10\]](#fn10) Preciado poses the question, “How did sex and sexuality become the main objects of political and economic activity?”[\[11\]](#fn11) Testo Junkie offers a tentative proposal; elaborating the myriad structural, economic, social, and cultural shifts that began during the Cold War.[\[12\]](#fn12) > “The changes in capitalism that we are witnessing are characterized not only by the transformation of “gender,” “sex,” “sexuality,” “sexual identity,” and “pleasure” into objects of the political management of living (just as Foucault had suspected in his biopolitical description of new systems of social control), but also by the fact that this management itself is carried out through the new dynamics of advanced technocapitalism, global media, and bio-technologies.”[\[13\]](#fn13) Preciado argues that the world has entered a new stage of late-modern capitalism: “a new kind of hot, psychotropic, punk capitalism.”[\[14\]](#fn14) They tightly characterize the precarious and dizzyingly complex web of processes to which this punk capitalism is heir. > “Such recent transformations are imposing an ensemble of new microprosthetic mechanisms of control of subjectivity by means of biomolecular and multimedia technical protocols. Our world economy is dependent on the production and circulation of hundreds of tons of synthetic steroids and technically transformed organs, fluids, cells (techno-blood, techno-sperm, techno-ovum, etc.), on the global diffusion of a flood of pornographic images, on the elaboration and distribution of new varieties of legal and illegal synthetic psychotropic drugs (e.g., bromazepam, Special K, Viagra, speed, crystal, Prozac, ecstasy, poppers, heroin), on the flood of signs and circuits of the digital transmission of information, on the extension of a form of diffuse urban architecture to the entire planet in which megacities of misery are knotted into high concentrations of sex-capital.”[\[15\]](#fn15) With the 1998 introduction of Viagra (sildenafil) into the market, phallic signification was reinscribed within the scheme of punk capitalism as “a pharmacological, theatrical fiction of virility.”[\[16\]](#fn16) The midcentury was punctuated by Playboy, its dusk by birth control, and its explosive end by sildenafil. Less obvious for an analysis of modern digital subjectivity is the role of architecture and visual arts for helping to decode the material-cultural legacies of vision and seeing for questions of selfhood.[\[17\]](#fn17) Critic, visual artist, and filmmaker Hito Steyerl has narrated the “downfall of linear perspective” and the introduction of new models of spatiality and temporality, especially 3-D schemata.[\[18\]](#fn18) In a central essay, she relates how late-modernity has produced subjective and epistemic “free fall” through the destabilization and unmooring of the objective, masculinist panoptic vision (linear perspective). Whereas in the past, the white male observer under modernism evaluated and categorized the world around him, the situation today is more complex. For her, this abstract (and ultimately fictional) modernist regime has been supplanted, or perhaps accelerated, by humans’ inhabiting of technology. Here, Steyerl notes her reliance on the work of (as of 2019, the late) German historian and film critic, Thomas Elsaesser.[\[19\]](#fn19) On linear perspective, Elsaesser suggests that “this means of seeing…gave rise to a wide range of innovations like panel painting, colonial seafaring, and Cartesian philosophy, as well as the whole concept of projecting ideas, risks, chances and courses of action into the future.”[\[20\]](#fn20) The new biopolitical regime that Preciado invokes, one that controls “subjectivity by means of biomolecular and multimedia technical protocols,” is characterized by “stereoscopic images and the 3-D movie,” both of which are, according to Elsaesser, “part of \[a\] new paradigm, which is turning our information society into a control society and our visual culture into a surveillance culture.”[\[21\]](#fn21) Steyerl asks how we can “link…obsessive policing, division, and representation of ground to the philosophical assumption that in contemporary societies there is no ground to speak of?”[\[22\]](#fn22) She suggests that “many of the aerial views, 3-D nose dives, Google Maps, and surveillance panoramas do not actually portray a stable ground.”[\[23\]](#fn23) Rather, these new technologies “create a supposition that it exists in the first place.”[\[24\]](#fn24) In the spirit of linear perspective, these new technologies “help to establish an imaginary floating observer and an imaginary stable ground.”[\[25\]](#fn25) While Preciado self-consciously synthesizes the theoretical paradigms offered by Foucault and Deleuze, Steyerl implicitly invokes similar thematic concerns about the diffuse and omnipresent relation of technology to the mediation of subjectivity. > “\[The\] displacement of perspective creates a disembodied and remote-controlled gaze, outsourced to machines and other objects. Gazes already became decisively mobile and mechanized with the invention of photography, but new technologies have enabled the detached observant gaze to become ever more inclusive and all-knowing to the point of becoming massively intrusive—as militaristic as it is pornographic, as intense as extensive, both micro- and macroscopic.”[\[26\]](#fn26) With these new technologies, “\[time\] and space are reimagined through quantum physics and the theory of relativity, while perception is reorganized by warfare, advertisement, and the conveyor belt.”[\[27\]](#fn27) Steyerl productively engages the work of Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe and British Israeli intellectual and architect Eyal Weizman to highlight some of the biopolitical implications of this epistemic shift; in particular, Mbembe’s concept of “necropolitics” and Weizman’s framework of “the politics of verticality.”[\[28\]](#fn28) However, the ramifications of the pharmacopornographic regime on the politics of sovereignty and acts of physical violence against marginalized populations are out of the scope of this investigation. Preciado notes that “\[the\] factory has become sexual; industrial work has turned into biopolitical labor; and what is being produced is gender, sexual desire, and subjectivity as multimedia commodities.”[\[29\]](#fn29) Elsaesser adds a penetrating observation about the new technologies attendant to Preciado’s pharmacopornographic biocapitalist regime (their reformulation of Deleuze’s addenda to Foucault’s disciplinary society, what the former called the society of control): These new technologies are part of “an entire catalog of movements and behaviors, all of which are intrinsically connected to the monitoring, steering, and observation of ongoing processes, and which delegate or outsource what was once referred to as introspection, self-awareness, and personal responsibility.”[\[30\]](#fn30) Aspects of the pharmacopornographic framework can be refracted through analytics offered by thinking through the affordances of the militaristic and pornographic gaze made possible by new technologies. That, as Preciado argues, “there is no inside,” is uncontroversial for critical theory and feminism today. That a fabulation of inside-ness is articulated and inscribed by a military-surveillance-entertainment industrial complex through the quotidian use of smartphones, and especially through the use of Snapchat by young adults, would perhaps raise some eyebrows. The digital mediation of sexuality plays an important role in the commodification of, not only human desire and relationships, but also human subjectivity itself. Preciado’s analysis of Playboy in Pornotopia called for reading the magazine against the grain and offering thick description “outside of legal and moral considerations,” and also “outside of the sex wars and the endless traps of the feminist pornography debates.”[\[31\]](#fn31) With Preciado, I do not believe in the fruitfulness of engaging these debates for the purposes of an imminent critique of biopower. ## Snapchat and Biopower Snapchat is a multimedia mobile messaging application used on smartphones. It was first released in 2011\. Today, it is available on both Apple and Android platforms. According to the German statistics firm Statista, there were 210 million active daily users of Snapchat in the third quarter of 2019.[\[32\]](#fn32) Most of its user base is composed of people born between 1981 to 1996, the cohort designated as Millennials or Generation Y; research suggests that its users are becoming younger and younger as time goes on.[\[33\]](#fn33) A notable feature of the application is the (user-perceived) ephemerality of content shared between people. Messages, videos, and photographs will either disappear after a certain number of seconds, or after 24 hours, depending on chosen settings. Social scientists have commented on the psychological and sociological effects of this ephemerality as far as questions of perception, memory, and consciousness are concerned.[\[34\]](#fn34) Susan Sontag argued that “\[our\] very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions.”[\[35\]](#fn35) When users exchange ephemeral photographs and videos with one another—content the company calls “snaps”—it can be argued that they are being articulated by the architecture of the digital platform itself. The intervention of the device and its rhizomatic linkages to our own sense of awareness takes on a certain kind of agency, if not, an authorship. I argue that, even at this seemingly innocuous level, Snapchat functions as part of a larger dispositif of biocapitalist biopower. Preciado offers a helpful summary of biopower by thinking through its effects rather than its nature: it “overflows the legal and punitive spheres to become a force that penetrates and constitutes the body of the modern individual.”[\[36\]](#fn36) In contrast to the sovereign power of the king, “\[it\] no longer behaves as a coercive law or negative mandate, but becomes versatile and response. It is a friendly power that takes the form of an art for governing life.”[\[37\]](#fn37) The friendliness of biopower, of biopolitical dispositifs, in the context of neoliberalism and biocapitalism means that there will be an element of relationality between the instruments of subjectivation and normalization, on the one hand, and the subjects who are being normalized, on the other. Snapchat-as-platform is an extension of the phone-as-prosthesis. Its architecture, the way the application is formed, itself forms its users. It is a friendly platform that allows “friends” to “communicate” with one another, forming a sense of disembodied and virtual communication that is mediated by a profit-seeking corporation with well-paid engineers, marketers, and user-interface experts. We begin to see the texture of this relationality in the very practices of visual culture and the mediation of information, what John Berger termed the culturally specific ways of seeing.[\[38\]](#fn38) The urgency of this textural shift is not lost on Preciado: “We are witnessing today a mutation in the biopolitical devices for the production and control of the body, sex, race, and sexuality….”[\[39\]](#fn39) It is true, Snapchat is not a chemical substance in the sense that Preciado imagines testosterone functions in the context of pharmacopornographic biocapitalism. Research has indicated, however, the dopamine-inducing effects of mobile phone use and the haptic/kinesthetic materiality of device notifications.[\[40\]](#fn40) Moreover, these digital platforms are quickly evolving beyond what German social scientists have studied as Alltagsgegenstände, everyday objects that are ready-to-hand for human use. These platforms and the materiality of their own embodiment, particularly mobile phones, reterritorialize the domains of human subjectivity by mediating, facilitating, and accomplishing human communication through a commercially interested apparatus that harvests data and informatics unconsciously yet (supposedly) consensually supplied by the user. They realign the very texture of identity by virtue of normalizing individuals and cultivating a new erotic subjectivity and sensibility. Recall that Elsaesser noted the exteriorizing of interiority in the new society of control. Preciado, in a similar vein, observes the accelerated character of this process and the way it is facilitated by objects—agents of technological biocapital. > In the body’s architectural techno-management, the pharmacopornographic industry synthesizes and defines a specific mode of production and consumption, a masturbatory temporization of life, a virtual and hallucinogenic aesthetic of the body, a particular way of transforming the inner in outer space, and the city in private junkspace by means of self-surveillance devices and ultra-fast information distribution, resulting in continuous and uninterrupted loops of desires and resistance, consumption and destruction, evolution and extinction.[\[41\]](#fn41) Snapchat has become just such a self-surveillance device. Beyond a helpful rhetorical heuristic, the application actually does tie pharmacopornographic biocapitalism, surveillance, the society of control, sexuality, and digital subjectification and normalization together. Nicholas Carah has argued that “\[social\] media platforms…continuously assemble identities, cultural practices and social spaces in relation to one another. In addition to targeted advertising, value is created by leveraging a continuous circulation of meaning and attention.”[\[42\]](#fn42) This circuitous meaning-making apparatus is linked to Steyerl’s notion of epistemic “free fall.” The modernist and masculinist horizon is discursively reintegrated into virtual masculinity. Meaning is now interpellated as a virtual communication of identity; commoditized, serial, and encoded through practices of data management. This line of argumentation does not posit that Snapchat (and applications like it) are creating new cultures of subjectivity in a vacuum. Rather, like a cancer, they present new opportunities to mutate and infiltrate existing configurations of discourse, power/knowledge schemata, and dispositifs. But the evolutive function ultimately does, in the final instance, produce new modes of cultural production. Preciado provocatively flattens the supposed differences between the variegated modalities of erotic and pornographic representation across media spectra. They argue that “\[identical\] codes of pornographic representation function in the images of the prisoners of Abu Ghraib, the eroticized images of Thai adolescents, advertisements for L’Oréal and McDonald’s, and the pages of Hot magazine.” Indeed, “All these bodies are already functioning, in an inexhaustible manner, as carnal and digital sources of ejaculatory capital.”[\[43\]](#fn43) If this is true, then what of self-produced pornography shared between users on Snapchat? The “architectural” dimension of Preciado’s Pornotopia invests architecture with far more agency than it has traditionally been accorded. The semiotic infrastructure of Snapchat becomes our (internal, subjective) infrastructure just as it (dialectically) adopts and incorporates the discursive regimes of heteronormativity by which we unconsciously abide. The pornography that users generate and send to one another furthers the discursive domains of capitalist accelerationism. Users respond to a message quickly: they see a notification, respond to a dopamine “hit,” and enthusiastically participate in the visual codification and commodification of their own bodies. The platform encourages this modality of subjectification by various haptic feedback loops: buzzing, bright colors, and noises. Bianca Klettke et al. have defined sexting as “the sending, receiving, or forwarding of sexually explicit messages, images, or photos to others through electronic means, primarily between cellular phones.”[\[44\]](#fn44) Self-generated sexting through Snapchat has raised a variety of legal questions, much as mass-production of conventional pornography in the mid-twentieth century did. Beyond the questions of legality (especially pertaining to questions of “revenge porn,” age of consent laws, and sexting between minors, or between minors and adults), it behooves the theorist interested in questions of feminism and feminist theorizing to ask why the digital mediation of sexuality, and the subsequent reframing of subjectivity through the digital, is a “problem” that warrants theorizing in the first place. Researchers have pointed out that, “\[while\] there are many social, cultural, and other instigators of change in pornography, technology is arguably the most significant contemporary influence.”[\[45\]](#fn45) Ashton et al., in an important synthetic piece, would deny that self-produced sexual content on an application like Snapchat is pornography proper. They argue that “while the visual representation of these experiences could be described as ‘pornographic’, when technology facilitates interactions between two people using virtual space, it is not pornography but is better described as a sexual encounter or, if money is exchanged, sex work.”[\[46\]](#fn46) Yet this dancing between pornography, the pornographic, or sexual encounters misses the point. As Audre Lorde highlighted, “The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women.” Indeed, for Lorde, \[pornography\] is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”[\[47\]](#fn47) Whatever Lorde signifies by “true feeling,” the power/knowledge that is embedded in the data machinery inherent in self-produced pornography and transmitted through Snapchat’s servers, mediated by mobile phones, is unlikely to qualify as such in the context of her essay. The “sharing” function of eroticism, as Lorde intimates, is elided in pornography as imagery functions as a stand-in for true feeling.[\[48\]](#fn48) Preciado and Lorde would provide various strategies for resistance against the backdrop of a schema that obviates and elides true feeling. While I have argued that Snapchat and digital social media platforms have brought into focus new forms of digital subjectivity that problematize modernist epistemologies of linear perspective and disciplinarity, the larger structural forces of gender inequality, heteronormativity, and racism are only elongated and retextured through the fabulations of digital discourse. Charteris and Gregory posit that “\[the\] systemic, or ‘structural’ level issues…are the entrenched gender inequalities that are inherent in wider cultural systems and are manifest through sexist and misogynistic digital practices. The coupled mobile technology and social media application are politically agential matter…that produces ruptures in normalized…discourses and surface social justice related issues associated with gender and race.”[\[49\]](#fn49) The new frontiers that digital ways of seeing open should cultivate deep and abiding suspicion from feminist theorists as being sites of reproduction and redeployment of modes of aggression against women, people of color, and queer people. ## Conclusion This investigation has called to mind the various theoretical developments in light of contributions made by Foucault and Deleuze. From the disciplinary society to the society of control, Preciado has narrated the digital and subjective architecture of life under pharmacopornographic biocapitalism. Steyerl’s epistemological critique provided some ways of seeing, ways of conceptualizing a ground for critique of the discursive strategies employed by Snapchat to engage in interpellating (post)modern subjects into the pharmacopornographic regime. Snapchat’s haptic architecture was seen to participate in reconfiguring the subjectivity of its users by molding their cognitive maps after its own image. Preciado’s strong architectural determinism was utilized to frame some of the social and cultural consequences of transferring cultural regimes of heteronormativity into the realm of digital production, especially as this production enters realms of explicitly sexual content. A further concretizing of this initial study would engage in digital ethnography, anthropology, and sociology to examine how users articulate their experience of Snapchat, the ways they use these digital social media platforms, to express what Lorde understands as “sensation.” Of further interest would be a critical interrogation and evaluation of the strategies of resistance that Precaido (among others) offers in light to the pharmacopornographic regime. --- 1. Paul B. Preciado, “Architecture as a Practice of Biopolitical Disobedience,” Log, no. 25 (2012): 126\. [↩︎](#fnref1) 2. On “Web 2.0” and “Web 3.0,” see John Markoff, “Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense,” The New York Times, November 12, 2006, Business Day, [https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/12web.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/business/12web.html?ref=keanuheydari.com). On cohorts of digital subjectivity, see Olga Goriunova, “Digital Subjects: An Introduction,” Subjectivity 12, no. 1 (2019). [↩︎](#fnref2) 3. See temporal compression and the entanglements between technology and late-capitalism, see Judy Wajcman, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). [↩︎](#fnref3) 4. See the work of sociologist Ben Agger, The Virtual Self: A Contemporary Sociology, 21st-Century Sociology, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004), 114-15\. See also Joshua Rothman, “As Real as It Gets,” New Yorker, April 2, 2018\. [↩︎](#fnref4) 5. See Susan Sontag’s explication of the mediatory effects of photography and the act of picture-taking in Susan Sontag, On Photography, Penguin Modern Classics, (London: Penguin Classics, 2008 \[1977\]), 11. “A photograph is not just the result of an encounter between an event and a photographer; picture-taking is an event in itself, and one with ever more peremptory rights—to interfere with, to invade, or to ignore whatever is going on. Our very sense of situation is now articulated by the camera’s interventions. The omnipresence of cameras persuasively suggests that time consists of interesting events, events worth photographing. This, in turn, makes it easy to feel that any event, once underway, and whatever its moral character, should be allowed to complete itself—so that something else can be brought into the world, the photograph. After the event has ended, the picture will still exist, conferring on the event a kind of immortality (and importance) it would never otherwise have enjoyed. While real people are out there killing themselves or other real people, the photographer stays behind his or her camera, creating a tiny element of another world: the image-world that bids to outlast us all.” [↩︎](#fnref5) 6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). [↩︎](#fnref6) 7. See, for example, Elizabeth Reis, American Sexual Histories, 2nd ed., Blackwell Readers in American Social and Cultural History, (Chichester, West Sussex and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). [↩︎](#fnref7) 8. Paul B. Preciado, Pornotopia: An Essay on Playboy’s Architecture and Biopolitics (New York: Zone Books, 2014). [↩︎](#fnref8) 9. Paul B. Preciado, “Pharmaco‐pornographic Politics: Towards a New Gender Ecology,” Parallax 14, no. 1 (2008): 107-08\. [↩︎](#fnref9) 10. Paul B. Preciado, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (New York, NY: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 2013), 25\. [↩︎](#fnref10) 11. Preciado, Testo Junkie, 25\. [↩︎](#fnref11) 12. It should be mentioned that Preciado establishes a new concept that operates throughout the text of Testo Junkie. This concept is supposed to be an “equivalent to the force of work in the domain of classical economics” (41). This concept is one they call “potentia gaudendi,” a sort of extra- and intra-discursive “orgasmic force” (41). They briefly gloss this highly inventive term as “the (real or virtual) strength of a body’s (total) excitation” (41). Upon reflection, my own read of this concept is that it is a more vitalist and Bataille-inspired version of Foucault’s “power/knowledge,” the dynamic between puissance and pouvoir. I am not especially persuaded by this necessity of this post-Spinozist pre-discursive field/force/effect. Along with Franco Palazzi, I share some reservations about the extent to which Preciado’s articulation of potentia gaudendi interfaces with more substantial groundings of the role of pharmacopornographic biocapitalism in the midst of neoliberal economics and the politics of immiseration, indebtedness, and austerity, as articulated by Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, or Michael Hardt. As will be evident below, I attempt to retool aspects of Preciado’s framework (sans the philosophical concept of potentia gaudendi) and integrate them into a broader critique of neoliberal modes of digital subjectivation along the axis of what Thomas Elsaesser called the “military-surveillance-entertainment complex.” See Preciado, Testo Junkie, 41; Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan, Semiotext(e)/Intervention, (Los Angeles: Semiotex(e)); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004); Franco Palazzi, “Choose Your Pill: Operations of Capital, Psychiatry, and the Construction of Gender,” (Essay), Public Seminar Publishing Initiative at The New School, June 27, 2018, [https://publicseminar.org/2018/06/choose-your-pill/](https://publicseminar.org/2018/06/choose-your-pill/?ref=keanuheydari.com); Elsaesser as quoted in Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, ed. Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle, e-flux journal Series, (Berlin and Cambridge, MA Sternberg Press/e-flux journal and the MIT Press, 2013 \[2012\]), 29\. [↩︎](#fnref12) 13. Preciado, Testo Junkie, 25\. [↩︎](#fnref13) 14. Preciado, Testo Junkie, 33\. [↩︎](#fnref14) 15. Preciado, Testo Junkie, 33\. [↩︎](#fnref15) 16. Paul B. Preciado, “Pharmacopornography: An Interview with Beatriz Preciado,” interview by Ricky Tucker, The Paris Review, Blog, 2013, [https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/12/04/pharmacopornography-an-interview-with-beatriz-preciado/](https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/12/04/pharmacopornography-an-interview-with-beatriz-preciado/?ref=keanuheydari.com). [↩︎](#fnref16) 17. See for example Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, 2nd ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988 \[1972\]), 45-56\. [↩︎](#fnref17) 18. Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 20\. [↩︎](#fnref18) 19. Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 23\. [↩︎](#fnref19) 20. As quoted in Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 29\. After considerable effort, it was not possible to locate Elsaesser’s original essay as cited in Steyerl’s bibliography. Elsaesser’s essay was cited as “The Dimension of Depth and Objects Rushing Towards Us. Or: The Tail that Wags the Dog. A Discourse on Digital 3-D Cinema,” with two different links, both broken as of 17 December 2019\. The problem is the same with the digital version of this (first) chapter, available online at e-flux at [https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/](https://www.e-flux.com/journal/24/67860/in-free-fall-a-thought-experiment-on-vertical-perspective/?ref=keanuheydari.com). [↩︎](#fnref20) 21. As quoted in Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 29\. [↩︎](#fnref21) 22. Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 24\. [↩︎](#fnref22) 23. Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 24\. [↩︎](#fnref23) 24. Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 24\. [↩︎](#fnref24) 25. Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 24\. [↩︎](#fnref25) 26. Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 24\. [↩︎](#fnref26) 27. Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 22\. [↩︎](#fnref27) 28. See Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Steve Corcoran, Theory in Forms, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019); Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003); Eyal Weizman, “The Politics of Verticality: The West Bank as an Architectural Construction,” Mute, Online Winter/Spring 2004, [https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/politics-verticality](https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/politics-verticality?ref=keanuheydari.com). [↩︎](#fnref28) 29. Preciado, Pornotopia, 10-11\. [↩︎](#fnref29) 30. As quoted in Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 29\. [↩︎](#fnref30) 31. Preciado, Pornotopia, 10\. [↩︎](#fnref31) 32. “Number of daily active Snapchat users from 1st quarter 2014 to 3rd quarter 2019 (in millions),” (Statistia). [https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/545967/snapchat-app-dau/?ref=keanuheydari.com). [↩︎](#fnref32) 33. Franziska Roesner, Brian T. Gill, and Tadayoshi Kohno, “Sex, Lies, or Kittens? Investigating the Use of Snapchat’s Self-Destructing Messages” (Berlin and Heidelberg, 2014). [↩︎](#fnref33) 34. See, for example, Jessica Bushey, “Convergence, Connectivity, Ephemeral and Performed: New Characteristics of Digital Photographs,” Archives and Manuscripts 42, no. 1 (2014/01/02 2014). See especially Joseph B. Bayer et al., “Sharing the Small Moments: Ephemeral Social Interaction on Snapchat,” Information, Communication & Society 19, no. 7 (2016/07/02 2016). [↩︎](#fnref34) 35. Sontag, On Photography, 11\. [↩︎](#fnref35) 36. Preciado, “Architecture as a Practice of Biopolitical Disobedience,” 122\. [↩︎](#fnref36) 37. Preciado, “Architecture as a Practice of Biopolitical Disobedience,” 122\. [↩︎](#fnref37) 38. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1977 \[1972\]). [↩︎](#fnref38) 39. Preciado, “Architecture as a Practice of Biopolitical Disobedience,” 124\. [↩︎](#fnref39) 40. Sören Krach et al., “The Rewarding Nature of Social Interactions,” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 4 (2010). [↩︎](#fnref40) 41. Preciado, “Architecture as a Practice of Biopolitical Disobedience,” 127\. [↩︎](#fnref41) 42. Nicholas Carah, “Curators of Databases: Circulating Images, Managing Attention and Making Value on Social Media,” Media International Australia 150, no. 1 (2014): 137\. [↩︎](#fnref42) 43. Preciado, Testo Junkie, 49-50\. [↩︎](#fnref43) 44. Bianca Klettke, David J. Hallford, and David J. Mellor, “Sexting Prevalence and Correlates: A Systematic Literature Review,” Clinical Psychology Review 34, no. 1 (2014): 45\. [↩︎](#fnref44) 45. Sarah Ashton, Karalyn McDonald, and Maggie Kirkman, “What Does ‘Pornography’ Mean in the Digital Age? Revisiting a Definition for Social Science Researchers,” Porn Studies 6, no. 2 (2019): 145\. [↩︎](#fnref45) 46. Ashton, McDonald, and Kirkman, “What Does ‘Pornography’ Mean in the Digital Age? Revisiting a Definition for Social Science Researchers,” 159\. [↩︎](#fnref46) 47. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press Feminist Series (New York: Crossing Press, 2007 \[1984\]), 54\. [↩︎](#fnref47) 48. Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” 57\. [↩︎](#fnref48) 49. Jennifer Charteris and Sue Gregory, “Snapchat and Digitally Mediated Sexualised Communication: Ruptures in the School Home Nexus,” Gender and Education (2018): 13\. [↩︎](#fnref49)