Biopolitical and Geopolitical Governance in Contemporary Iran

Since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 the rhetoric of engineering and architecture have become increasingly pervasive in the conceptualization, description, explanation and prospection of religion and political culture in Iran. Whereas the pre-1979 revolutionary discourses were informed by medical diagnoses and prognoses of the “body-politic” and “body-social,” a cluster of spatial, architectural and engineering concepts have refashioned the analytics of governance and dissidence in the post-revolutionary period. Largely confined to urban planning and rural reconstruction circles in the prerevolutionary period, the ascend of engineering logic in the post-revolutionary period involved the discursive fusion of Islamic terms with the analytics of system engineering. This paper explores how the security concerns of the postrevolutioanry state have transformed Islam from a biopolitical discourse of dissidence to spatial practice of governance. It further demonstrates a paradigmatic shift from an organic and curative to a synthetic and constructional social imaginary and political logic.