Cameron and Khamenei (and Obama and Jong Il)

Knowledge is normally so convenient. In its modern form, knowledge - at once appearing objective and empirical - is the tool, like a great telescope, that allows us to focus on and comprehend more and more of the seemingly distant and obscure objects before us. And as the universe of objects expands, it both widens and particularizes our view. In this sense, it allows us to simultaneously glimpse the entire universe and focus on the individual components within. In this sense too, it is ever progressing - expanding until that point in time where everyone can see everything.

Through what Georg Lukács describes as reification, throughout his History and Class Consciousness, 'the' world then becomes 'our' world and vice versa. In this way, a particular (ie scientific, national) understanding of knowledge shifts to encompass the general realm of experience. Strangely, it is this idea of subjective objectivity, what Lukács deems false consciousness, that is ever gaining strength alongside the supposed return of fundamentalisms. Yet at second glance this phenomenon is not so odd.

Take the recent case of British and French Conservatives attempting to restrict the accumulation of knowledge to hard sciences. Juxtapose that next to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s rejection of social sciences and more appropriately, liberal arts, as contributing to the ‘loss of belief in godly and Islamic knowledge.’ On the surface, both lay claim to objectivity, though they couch them in seemingly diametrically opposed terms. According to the British Conservatives, knowledge is becoming less convenient. That is, at least, if we, as tolerant liberals, continue to define knowlege in more and more of its manifestations, from liberal arts and media studies to vocations like bricklaying and vehicle repair. For the Tories, knowledge should be restricted to the capito-objective triumvirate of business, technology, innovation. For Khamenei, the liberal understanding of knowledge is equally inconvenient. Instead though, he identifies “godly and Islamic knowledge” as the only just and proper objectivity.

What the two camps share is the fear of a loss of belief in the Lacanian Real(s) of these clashing civilisations. For the Tories, this horizon or foundation, against which all other forms of knowledge are mere opinions, is Capitalism. For Khamenei, this horizon is Islam. Both Real(s) are the absolute truths, telescopes through which everything else can be understood.

Where they diverge though is in their definition of the liberal arts. For Britain, and the ‘developed’ world in general, liberal arts – political science, media studies, language – are not inconvenient at all. They are in fact supplements to the capito-objective worldview. The study of political science obscures the fact that both capitalism is axiomatic and political science is a particularist lens through which all other (non-democratic) politics are judged. The media too, most evident in its world news segments, under the guise of expansion and progression of knowledge, uses the madness of the universal world to reinforce the particularist position of the objective Real. Liberal arts in Iran act as subversion and in this, even liberal capitalism is perceived as a threat.

In the end, the two share a disdain for critique. For both, the subjective arts, as a proxy of subversion, are means through which politicisation occurs. Politics, in turn, are bad for productivity – GDP for one, the perpetuation of the hierarchical religious state for the other. And thus knowledge is more than inconvenient; it must be purged.