Contributed Essay
Seemingly, there is an unexpurgated dialogue carried out between Phenomenology and Prison (capital intended) in contemporary Iran; phenomenology, in its general definition is as such: “The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view. This field of philosophy is then to be distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), etc.” (Stanford Ency. Of Philosophy). This means that phenomenology is a form of reflection on that finds its way to the generic structures of experience, from beyond dispersed and individuated ones, and through meditation upon them; “Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed toward—represents or “intends”—things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean” (ibid.). Phenomenology categorizes more precisely the very act of experiencing itself, and its conditions of possibility, on the basis of this foundational insight that experience is structured in consciousness and is always about something, necessitating intentionality: “we find in reflection or analysis, involves further forms of experience. Thus, phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness (within the stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably in perception), attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or “horizonal” awareness), awareness of one’s own experience (self-consciousness, in one sense), self-awareness (awareness-of-oneself), the self in different roles (as thinking, acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of one’s movement), purpose or intention in action (more or less explicit), awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity, collectivity), linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication, understanding others), social interaction (including collective action), and everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in a particular culture)” (ibid.). And, finally, the method by which these experiences are brought into the focus of consciousness for meditative reflection and investigation: “Husserl’s transcendental turn also involved his discovery of the method of epoché (from the Greek skeptics’ notion of abstaining from belief). We are to practice phenomenology, Husserl proposed, by “bracketing” the question of the existence of the natural world around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to the structure of our own conscious experience. Our first key result is the observation that each act of consciousness is a consciousness of something, that is, intentional, or directed toward something” (ibid.).
In fact, the generic coordinates of phenomenology is reflection upon the experience of consciousness about something that consciousness intends; and this reflection becomes possible if the natural world, the world of habiti and doxae, pre-existing, pre-constituted assumptions, are suspended so that in the interlock of consciousness and the “phenomenon” appearing before it, nothing extrinsic to that experience stands in-between; and this very form of philosophizing, writing philosophically, within the context of highly intense experience, and the perpetuated search among those modes for a phenomenon to become experienceable, in the most precise manner, and in the most meditative tone and scrupulous description, and ever-focused on the internal intensity of that experience, persisting on its identity in the stream of consciousness, and enforces consciousness to intend its engaging presence, this is precisely what gives a phenomenological quality to the experience of prison, and, by all accounts, and makes this phenomenological form of expression inevitable beforehand; let’s go back to the disgraced 80’s, 1980, per se, when the infernal gates of this newly established system are swung open at the Truth, and political prisoners beyond count, get to bear witness the real visage of this blood-shedding and fear-bearing Leviathan: “1980 was the time of the Islamic regime’s mass incarcerations, and the boundlessly murderous conduct of its slayers in prisons. About the question of Evin Prison’s atmosphere, in Tehran, I’d better just say that after taking in the last bit of free air, when I entered a corridor-like passageway, blindfolded, where the odor of sweat, infection, and whimpers of tortured prisoners saturating the entire corridor attracted my attention. In such circumstances, the overpopulation of the detainees, how often, being blindfolded, not able to see you step over another prisoner’s tortured feet and body as you walked, you would hear that prisoner’s cry and then realize what had happened. In the meanwhile, the cry of the tortured was being persistently heard as the torturers went about their business. As I came into that environment, first they made me sit in front of a door next to the wall, so that they come to deal with me later; I raised my head, trying to look about from beneath the blindfold, when I started getting punched and kicked around by someone I didn’t know if an interrogator, janitor, or IRGC agent (no difference indeed; in there, regardless of how high or low the rank, each agent had an extremely violent conduct with the prisoner). I was beaten so hard that I fell on the ground, right at that moment, before getting beaten, while seeing that environment from beneath the blindfold, I was faced with people, seated or laid-up, howling in pain. I saw women unconscious, wrapped in chador, with the only indicator that they were still alive, their occasional quiver out of pang;” this is part of prison memories recounted by Nasir Tabrizi, who was arrested at a friend’s place, on Nov. 81, for the charge of reading leftist magazines in Tehran, and directly sent to Evin Prison, where he himself calls the “torture chamber;” and this is just the fresh years of trial and error for the post-revolutionary regime; we are speaking of a period in which the largest administrated and systemic massacre of modern Iran came about, and the dispute is over how many thousands executed, not if, and “only between Jul-Nov. 1980, about 2260 political prisoners were executed in Iran’s prisons (Abrahamian, Summer 88); a period in which, according to the “List of the Names of a Number of Women Executed by the Islamic Republic,” collected initially by the Associagtion of Iranian Women of Köln, containing the information of 1533 executees, and completed with the help of former political prisoners, in which one can find a whole range of telling details, from torture of a pregnant young woman, to the execution of a ten year old schoolgirl, and this all would not amount to anything more than an intersection, since the main scene was played out in summer 88, by the decision of the former regime leader, to eradicate dissidents in a Final Solution fashion, overnight, with swift of a the supreme leader’s signing pen, in a way that, according to the testimony of then prisoner who survived, Mersedeh Ghaedi, who was charged for advocating a leftist organization, serving her sixth year of imprisonment in Evin Prison: “…it was a Wednesday, 10 at night, when IRCG agents called women who were MKO members out ten by ten! They would take those women out, but women did not take their stuff with them, everybody, MKO women themselves, thought they would come back! Sometimes, after they were taken out, prison guards would come back to collect their stuff after! Then, almost every night, at the same time, guards would come to the wards and call out a list of MKO members! Often ten at a time. They took about forty people just out of my ward! Everything happened so fast, suddenly all cells empty! Among 47 people they took out of our ward, only three survived; they did not bring the survivors back to our ward, we heard from women in other wards via Morse that only three had survived, also we heard from women at Jihad Sector, exclusive to the repentant prisoners, placed under our ward, MKO women belonging to that ward, too, had been taken to be executed! They had only taken the MKO members. By Aug. 23rd, all MKO members were out of the wards! It was then when guards started calling out leftist prisoners! As before, ten at a time! They would take the leftist women for a brief court hearing, to inquire about their religious beliefs, but unlike the question we had heard they asked from MKO women, they would mostly ask the leftist women if they believed in God or not, and if they did their prayers. After this brief interrogation, most women were taken to ward 209 at Evin Prison, there, they had to suffer flagellation at every single prayer time, so that they would come to consent to do prayers! Since we were transferred to a newer sector of the prison, where there were wider corridors, we could hear people being flagged screamingly! Some women went through over a thousand times of flagellation in that period! Many women tried to commit suicide since they could bear that pain and mental pressure no more!” (IranGlobal)
These experiences, nevertheless, come to pass by suspending the natural world; and that happens in favor of the manifestation of a world so tragic and evil that it breaks apart any previously given context, and in the same manner that the prison’s physical space, makes the ever-familiar social world out there unexperienceable, beyond the prisoner’s access, the natural world of habiti and doxae about the very existence of a world out there, too, is bracketed out of consciousness, and especially at desperate and intense times, it leaves consciousness alone with the profundity of its horrific experience; it is as if consciousness were condemned to mediate here; and that is why such narratives of chain and agony, at a time when there was almost no conversation about phenomenology, have taken on such a phenomenological quality, as if giving out a draft of expression of an experience bordering on the collapse of meaning in language itself; yet, in 2009, and in the course of the bloody crackdown of Green Movement, this phenomenological dialogue with prison becomes more self-aware and self-designated, when an unprecedented social quiver comes about, and the collective corpus of historical memory is faced with unknown tremors; millions go to demonstrations, and historically mark the main square of the capital; as always, the regime turns on its suppressive turbines; some reformist prominent figures, too, are tortured in the tsunami of case-fabrication and blind mass incarcerations, who then, with clear torture bruises on their body, are brought to a show trial, came to be called “the Court of Injustice,” so that they deny their entire previous existence as if having lived their lives wrongfully and whatever they did, think, understood was nothing but sheer misconception. On Sept. 2009, a secularist intellectual, philosophical researcher, and the chief editor of Radio Zamaneh, formulates this situation in a now classical essay called “The Theology of Torture,” as such: “on Sat., Aug. 1, 2009, the first court hearing of the show trial of the arrestees protesting against election frauds was held. Following that, they held a press conference for two of the defendants. They conducted an exclusive televised interview with them as well; in these confession shows, they declared having come to the Truth in prison. One said: he would do some self-deconstruction, “to let another Truth be revived.” This is not the first time we hear such sayings in form of a confession, and as long as this regime prevails, such confessions will be drawn out;” and about this newly risen Truth, or, as it were, phenomenalized, upon which an individual entrapped in this theological dungeon can arrive, gives rise to the question: “Why the Truth of the Islamic State is always manifested in its prisons?” and then the essay tries to give a “phenomenological answer” to it and, thus, formulates the role phenomenology can play in understanding this problem as such: “the departure point of phenomenology is the thought that, in transition from speculation to true knowledge, we need to position ourselves into the experience, or, in more general terms, expose ourselves to the current of a test that enables us to approach to the subject (phenomenon);” and answering that question phenomenologically is the following: “the answer is that the regime’s Truth is its very prisons. If it were otherwise, they could raise lecture podiums for their miracle-working interrogators so that everyone is admonished. We know their interrogators, are also chief editors and orators. Their speech, yet, does not resonate with one’s heart, if delivered outside prisons. If Husserl were still alive, he would perhaps say: the authentic phenomenality takes place in prison. This master of observation and precision in observation and observing the observation has taught us anything authentically phenomenalized is of a subjective-relative nature, meaning its becoming phenomenal, its becoming manifested occurs on a subject (mind) occupying a particular position.” Torture chamber is where the Truth is intuited, the intuition-site of the Truth, “its manifestation-site…is prison;” And, of course, intuition here is intended equivocally, both as that internal apperception enforced by torture equipment and the very perception, the immediate sensory experience of torture, an intuition simultaneously internal and external of this interrogatively endowed Truth: “The Truth of the regime, made understood for the prisoner with the help of the interrogator, is that the system possess a certain right, and the right it possesses is a religious truth. Religious truth is not a discursive one, meaning that it cannot be appreciated through argumentation and reasoning, since while one’s heart, ears, and eyes are eternally veiled, i.e., one’s nature does not allow her to appreciate the Truth, she is doomed to always “go stray” and it makes no difference what edification and enlightenment she benefits from. The veil is torn aside, and intuition is made possible, and with no discussion at all, but a peculiar experience in a peculiar situation. This test can be called either a miracle or pseudo-miracle. In an Islamic state, it essentially takes place in prisons. The outer crust mentioned in Quran (Bagharah, verse 7), which is the one drawing a veil on one one’s eye, ear, and heart, blocking them away from the Truth, and torn aside in prison;” It is through torture and solitary confinement that the system’s Truth is made phenomenal, and leave us exposed to the current of an experience, face to face, and social science, as said Nikfar says, can only define the conditions of possibility of a theological regime, yet its bare reality, the very thing that it really is, can only reveal itself within the context of torture: “The conditions of possibility are not the possibility itself, and the possibility itself is not reality itself. Each of them contains certain things irreducible to the others. In reality, there is always something inaccessible through analyzing its conditions of possibility. That thing can only be explored in the phenomenality of the reality. That is why it remains alien in the view of standard social science if we say the very entity of the Islamic regime is what becomes manifest via torture;” this exclusive right to define reality, reminded by the courtesy of a torturing interrogator and solitary confinement, is what brings the Truth of the regime into revelation: “The Truth of the regime is the one that the torturer tries to make phenomenal before his victim. When going through the sum of the things quoted from the scenes of torture and interrogator’s statements, we find a point shared by them all: the Truth that the prisoner needs to understand is that the regime possesses an exclusive right, and that right authorizes the regime to determine what reality has been and what it should be.”
Even though phenomenology, in that essay, is applied as a method of analysis, and about the meaning of the experience of those who have not expressed, analyzed, and looked upon their experience themselves, later, this rupture between such experience and its expression is mended, when another political prison of 2009, Green Movement, Ziya Nabavi, a “starred” [politically barred from education] and student activist in the 2000’s, and the spokesperson of the Advocacy Council for the Right to Education, who got arrested on May of the same year, and was eventually sentenced to ten years of prison in exile at the Court of Appeal, after 120 days of consistent mental and physical pressure, eight years of which he had to serve before release, and in the course of his imprisonment was, first, transferred to the notorious Ahwaz Karoon Prison and to Semnan Prison afterwards; he possesses a number of qualities the summed up into a hardly matched dimension to this phenomenological approach to prison experience, a sort of relentless and persistent oscillation between perception and its subject, knowledge and its subject, to put it phenomenologically, between noema and noesis, a move back and forth that continuously portrays in writing the intentionality of consciousness towards its subject, here the prison, making it clear that there is no abstract, free-standing, and all-independent consciousness, and that its only works when being intentional to something else, objective or not, a particular experience; and the other quality is being textual, text-oriented, and Ziya Nabavi might be the most voracious prisoner-writer of our generation; while in exile prison for eight years, he writes an open letter to Larijani, the then chief of staff of Judiciary Human Rights, in which he reveals pressures and infringements he had go through, and then calls for justice; in another letter from the same series, he artfully details the inhumane and horrific conditions of his penal colony-style exile prison, Karoon Prison; there, he even questions the assumptions involved in the very act of writing that letter by putting them in brackets: “Personally, it has been a while that whenever I hold a pen and write something critically, I am faced with many challenges and questions within myself which makes the act of writing quite a burden. Questions like what you intend by writing this letter, is there a better situation possible? What is your role in all this? And are you yourself criticism-free? Can you convey what you intend to say? And if what you say would amount to any impact or not?” One tends to forget what one reads is in an open letter to one of the authorities of the same regime that has doomed his life to wither away through and through by the swift of a signing pen, and this is while the self-examining prose echoes a writing greatly personal and immersed in inner meditation; he also possesses another quality, being a good writer; in the same letter, he continues with a series of unforgettable descriptions: “…the airing space of ward 6 is very small measuring 8 in 15, which, considering the population of the ward, and with a simple counting one can figure out that for each three prisoners there 1 sq m for airing. This is to say nothing of the fact that the same space, as said earlier, is carpeted and basically lived on by the prisoners thanks to the sparse space and population density. Pehaps only one who has experienced prison can know what profound torture it is to lack airing and a few meters of space for a walk, that aside, the airing ceiling, too, is covered with girders and rebars reticularly welded. Even though its purpose is to prevent prisoners’ escape, its direct result is limiting the air exchange with the surrounding environment and the excessive air heat in the hellish summer of Ahwaz, in a way that the prison yard feels as heated as in a brickwork, and what matters most is that many prisoners live their lives day in and day out in this very yard and even are deprived of shade. On the one hand, this netted ceiling deprives the prisoner of the joy of looking at the sky, one of the rare joys available to him, and makes the prisoner feel like a wild animal kept in a cage;” horrific meditations indeed, and then the successive images of a prison abandoned to itself in the most squalid and wretched possible conditions; at the end of the letter it reads: “what goes here is “beyond the limits of composition” and no representable!” the exact boundary after which experiences sheds all its meaning, itself bordering on inexpressiblity; and tracing what consciousness intends: “…in the recent months that I have been imprisoned here, sometimes when I go through my thoughts and deeds during the day, I come to strange conclusions; I feel like my life gradually shrinks away from its human content and I return to a bestial mode! What I mean is that the self-preservation instinct and desire to survive, is gradually becoming my most principal trigger and concern, as if there is no important question other than staying alive!” He also has manuscripts critically sharp and intellectually adventurous, written during this period of prison in exile, published in full by Human Right Reporters’ Committee; perhaps one the strangest moments exemplifying this very intimate bond between the suspension of the pre-given world and the ever-more deepening in the experience of consciousness, can be found in them: “…In all honesty, before solitary confinement, being in the presence of others all the time was such a grievance, and solitary confinement had solved this problem to some extent. When I got settled in solitary confinement, I realized that my mental state was quite changed. I felt being unchained from the shackles my thinking and imagination had to carry from behind in the general ward and now my imagination can wildly move through my living experience and addresses things that I had not thought about for such a long time.”
This approach and line of thinking is pursued in the writings of the years to come, yet, more aphoristically, richer in reflection and pondering, more idiosyncratic, more meditative; in the manuscripts of the final year of that eight year long prison in exile, Nov. 2016, and with the same themes and tones of “Karoon Prison Manuscripts,” but with a more condensed resonation, and different, repeated again: “…for a prisoner to whom having a corner to retreat and solitary have been a matter of necessity, there is almost no way out but to avoid communicating with other prisoners and show less of a welcoming gesture to those he’s familiar with. Understanding the necessity of such a decision can only be fully grasped when you imagine yourself in the crowded prison airing while you’re insatiably yearning for some lonely corner to think, but are encircled with a crowd who have known you for months or maybe even for years…;” And it is precisely here that this meditation and contemplation on the “current of the experiences” and the struggle to understand the relation between consciousness and these prison-crated experiences, that is, the analysis and description of consciousness’ intentionality to these experiences, goes deeper down: time, but a lived and internalized time, conscious time and not that of the calendar; for instance, the same section reads: “the question of what part of your sentence you’re serving in temporal terms is almost of no significance in comparison with the question of in which place you reside geographically. There are prisons in which you can carry along for weeks and months, without even remembering that you are in a prison, and there are other prisons in which every morning, you wake up being aware that you need to waste all the time you’re awake over struggling with the prison agents, prison environment, and prison guards. A sort of ceaseless spiritual struggle to keep your psyche balanced and clear, and, eventually, investing hopes in vain in the nocturnal calm in a bed where bedbugs expect your presence! Such a bliss that the prison called “Karron” is no more in Ahwaz!” The relativity of time in the depths of the temporal experience, prison time, and the form of the intentionality of consciousness to this other-worldly time, the sheer indolent routine and dissection of the slow-paced time with its particular and seemingly trivial details that scan this time within the context the lived experience of consciousness. Thus, no wonder recently, Ziya Nabavi announced his dissertation defense with the title “Phenomenology of the Experience of Being in Prison;” when you read these manuscripts in reverse, you arrive nowhere but this very dialogue of consciousness, a prisoner’s consciousness, with itself over the day-to-day lived experiences in confinement, a dialogue that today has come to its inevitable synthesis and tries to adopt a particular language, that of phenomenology, to express the particular experience of consciousness of a particular time, the time lived in confinement, with an ongoing commuting between the subject or content of experience itself along with its structure, as quoted earlier in the opening part of this essay; “to tell you the truth, it wasn’t necessary to read Merleau-Ponty for me to understand that consciousness is embodied and our self-understanding and the world around us is influenced by pre-reflective affairs related to our body’s “leaping” toward the world. The truth of the matter is I was aware of the relationship between my body and consciousness of the world…; he himself explains, in a recent post. But discovering Merleau-Ponty endows a conceptual expression to this already lived and thought experience: “…A few months back, when I was writing my dissertation on prison, I came across the topic of body-and-prison relationship and from there I became familiar with Merleau-Ponty and such concepts as the “lived body” and “the intentional-kinetic,” a familiarity that eventually lets the phenomenology of a life-long imprisonment, finds its own conceptual form of expression, and the form of the phenomenological expression, too, can adopt a repository of prison-made experiences as its historical content; and its outcome a series of aphoristic reflections on the internalized experience of prison, such as “Briefly on Prison,” written “on the occasion of Bahareh Hedayat” [a frequently imprisoned political prisoner], which begins in this way: “Prison is not a place within this world, a place that one can point at and speak about from where we are, no! It amounts to no exaggeration to say prison is another world! Of the rarest things that I am certain about in this world is that the image that the (so-called) free world has of prison, is an image generally (re)produced in media, is not even one close to prison experience…”
The same note continues with the fundamental experience of prison and non-prison (whatever that is not that horrifying chamber of entrapment, the “natural” or “exterior” world, precisely encircled by those reductive quotation marks, i.e., any world not governed by prison logic), this subtraction of the entire prison world from the entirety of the world exterior to it is phrased in the time-honored allegory of theatrical stage, the same stage that we know, in Western poetic tradition, has long been an allegory of life itself, from Shakespeare: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! / Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, / That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more. It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” (Macbeth) to Eliot: “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; / Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two, / Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, / Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous; / Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; / At times, indeed, almost ridiculous — / Almost, at times, the Fool.” (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock); here, it is the life itself whose its naked structure, current of experience, and thematization are revealed; here, it is the prison theatre, the enchaining playhouse: “Prison is another world, as much as a play on theatrical stage manifests itself as another world. When lights go off in the theatre hall, the curtains are raised and strangers begin their play;” witnessing a play is a kind of experience in which the reality out there is suspended, leaving aside and suspending belief in anything exterior to acting stage; a look at the experience of prison; to behold prison experience in a manner one would behold an act being played before one’s eyes, yet, here, the talk is about a sort of play in which the audience has no right to choose between stay to watch and leave not to; and still, in the depth of this meditation, it is the experience of the time lived that reveals the most fundamental difference between the prison and non-prison worlds: “…prison even has got its own time; the time of indifference to the calendar of the free world. For a prisoner, the time of the free world is put to halt right at the moment she enters prison. Even if she stays there for years, still whenever pointing at an incident occurred in the free world, what she means by last year is the year before entrance to the prison! In fact, it is of no surprise at all that whenever pointing at an arrestee or prisoner, we use past tense. The truth of the matter is that for prisoners, too, it is the same. When someone gets released and leave them, then use past tense to refer to the former prisoner from the time of her release on, they know all too well that she has entered another world. It is the same way we feel that a prisoner has gone to another world [upon entering the prison];” to retrieve the difference between the time lived within and without the prison, two life-worlds, as it were, separated by their time; and the meditative pursuit of this difference in the most detailed linguistic usages, the intentionality of consciousness to this fundamentally different time, the time of the prison world.
In the end, in the same “Karoon Prison Manuscripts,” Ziya Nabavi once summed up his fate with the self-interrogating and outspoken tone as such: “Some people suffer from a misunderstanding right from the outset, thinking that they are unique and different beings, and this gradually results in peculiar incidents happening to them or in them giving a peculiar interpretation of what happens to them. In any case, I suppose I myself might be among such deluded people. From early childhood, when my pee group would discuss their future wishes, I was certain to myself (please notice, it wasn’t a question of a wish for me, but a matter of certainty!) that I would go places that no one had ever been to, and, in best case scenario, one or two people would share that experience with me! Unfortunately, and with sincere apologies, I should say that such delusions have not still abandoned me entirely;” yet this fate, also has got a textual visage, a written character; the continuation of the same unexpurgated dialogue between prison and phenomenology, and this intersection of character studies, ethics, psychoanalysis, and sociology is run on a bedrock of phenomenological approach and under the shadow of a fastidious and self-questioning tone, and that lifetime merge with the prison world, don’t they all constitute that unique and matchless fate? Such authors whose unique writings’ fate is known to be intertwined with prison in one way or another, Marquis de Sade, Feodor Dostoyevsky, Antonio Gramsci, Kurt Vonnegut, Emanuel Levinas, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi and the like? The matchless fate of being a prison writer, writing of the horrific prisons of Iran?
Anonymous
3/10/2023