Iran vs. Us

From Conservation to Destruction:

The Dramaturgy of Participation in Iranian Politics in 2026

By Nassim Soleimanpour

Abstract

This essay examines the dynamics of political participation in Iran in 2026 through a dramaturgical lens, depicting civic life as a theatrical performance in which citizens’ actions are restricted and their agency curtailed. Individuals navigate a reality in which participation is often imposed as exposure rather than choice, subjected to repression, violence, and uncertainty. The essay contends that genuine engagement in participatory conservation necessitates the reclamation of communal agency, transcending the dichotomy between preserving and dismantling the current order.

Keywords: Participatory Conservation, Participatory Destruction, Theatre, Dramaturgy, Exposure, Endurance, Collective Agency

The phrase “participatory conservation,” at first glance, seems to be related to heritage studies and environmental politics. Communities are invited to help safeguard what they deem worthy of protection, such as traditions, places, infrastructure, or fragile memories of a society’s shared life. Like an invitation to watch a theatrical performance, this puts two natural forces against each other. On one side is the progressive urge to become an interactive audience, and on the other is the conservative compulsion to stay in the dark and evade oblivion by only expressing emotions through collective sighs and laughter. Being progressive but exposed, or being conservative but safe, this dilemma has been at the heart of most dramatic events in countries with internal colonization like Iran, and this new war is certainly no exception.

In principle, participatory conservation as an endeavor is meant to reconcile these two contradictory forces in an act of decolonial defiance against both internal and external violence. A people safeguard what matters to them by virtue of their own active will, not at the command of a distant state or an abstract ideology. Community theatres stage works that engage the lived realities of local populations, created with them and performed for them. But what happens when participation itself is transformed into exposure rather than choice, when those who are meant to shape the performance are instead subjected to it? Under these conditions, however forcefully I denounce war, such condemnations seem to have little practical effect in the current moment in the Middle East. We are witnessing an escalation of imposed wars, by their regimes and forging external forces, on communities whose lives are neither at the centre of these conflicts nor visible on the political stage, except as nameless extras cast as casualties. Giorgio Agamben argues, in Homo Sacer, that modern politics increasingly reduces individuals to “bare life,” a form of existence that “may be killed but not sacrificed”:

Life is sacred only insofar as it is taken into the sovereign exception, and to have exchanged a juridico-political phenomenon (homo sacer’s capacity to be killed but not sacrificed) for a genuinely religious phenomenon is the root of the equivocations that have marked studies both of the sacred and of sovereignty in our time. (85)

In this sense, life that falls under the sovereign exception is deprived of ethical singularity and becomes indistinguishable within regimes of mass violence—no longer a life to be mourned or preserved, but one that can be extinguished without purpose or recognition.

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, decades of systematic repression since the 1979 revolution have shaped a distinct, almost perverse normality: the normalization of suppression itself. The daily grammar of existence has been infiltrated by the expectation of being silenced, surveilled, fragmented, and chastised. This is not solely a political circumstance. It has infiltrated the personal temporality of daily life, influencing what one is willing to disclose to a taxi driver, the attire one dons in public, the volume of one’s laughter, and the decision to participate in protests or avert one’s gaze. The audience is permitted to participate in the performance solely by conforming to pre-scripted forms of emotional display. Any deviation from this script is seen as an interruption of the state’s canonical performance, and the stage owner quickly removes the person from the auditorium. As has been observed in analyses of post-revolutionary Iranian dramaturgy, the mechanisms of cultural production are subject to pervasive regulatory frameworks that filter not only thematic content but also gesture, language, spatial arrangements, and modes of representation, effectively conditioning the very terms under which performance can occur. These regulatory structures, grounded in both formal legislation and unwritten moral codes, operate through a logic of imprecision and subjective arbitration, ensuring that every stage of theatrical creation—from text selection to embodied performance—remains aligned with ideological imperatives rather than artistic autonomy (Moosavi 2015: 71). In that sense, the stage owner goes so far as to enlist the audience’s emotional responses as proof that the performance is unfolding exactly as intended.

This performative arrangement subtly discloses not merely a system of control but a more precarious and disconcerting state of being—one where the distinctions between participation and exposure, presence and vulnerability, are perpetually obscured. It is precisely at this threshold that Giorgio Agamben’s formulation in Homo Sacer becomes strikingly resonant:

It is not so much a war of all against all as, more precisely, a condition in which everyone is bare life and a homo sacer for everyone else, and in which everyone is thus war gus, gerit caput Lupinum (An outlaw, he carries a wolf’s head). And this lupinization of man and humanization of the wolf is at every moment possible in the dissolutio civitatis inaugurated by the state of exception. This threshold alone, which is neither simple natural life nor social life but rather bare life or sacred life, is the always present and always operative presupposition of sovereignty. (1998:106)

Read alongside this scene, the state’s stage appears merely as a space in which each participant is subtly displaced into this very threshold—neither fully within the protection of the social order nor entirely outside it. The audience’s compelled conformity, their measured gestures and regulated affects, begin to signify not simply obedience but a shared condition of exposure, where the risk of removal, silencing, or erasure is diffusely present. In this sense, the performance derives its force not only from the authority of the stage owner but from the quiet circulation of vulnerability among those who remain upon the stage.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was presented as an anti-imperialist uprising, a time when “the people” would take back control of Iran’s politics. But over time, the regime that emerged has slowly pushed the public off stage and into the dark of the auditorium. The concept of the “revolutionary subject” has become peculiar in that transition; like any classical play, what was once a designation for an active, perilous experiment has become a predominantly conservative, ritualized practice.

At its pinnacle, this “new” dramaturgy functions solely as an official conduit for a specific demographic to express emotions—predominantly anger, despair, animosity, and profound sorrow—without altering the state’s core narrative. For the last thirty years, it has always gone back and forth between conservative and progressive presidents. Like in Beckett’s absurdist dramas, this is how a sad scene can turn into a funny one, giving the audience a short break before the sad ending.

Iranian society has tried many times to break free from this forced normalcy and show a different way of life, but each time they have been pushed back, often violently and bloodily, into a familiar pattern of batons, arrests, and funerals. A history of uprisings and crackdowns has sedimented into a collective memory in which aspiration and fear are inextricably intertwined.

When outside forces attacked Iran, either directly, through proxy wars, or through larger geopolitical pressures, the society’s relationship with “participatory conservation” broke in a new and painful way. Some people, often in precarious and ambiguous ways, tried to protect what they could still see as their own. Their troubles came not only from the regime but also from everyday life, concern for their families’ safety, and the fragile infrastructure they relied on. Their efforts to preserve things did not mean they supported a theocratic state. They were trying to keep a thin layer of normal life—schools, hospitals, electricity, water, and a basic sense of stability in an already damaged situation.

Another part of society, which had been oppressed by the regime for a long time and was tired of the never-ending cycles of failed reforms and crushed uprisings, took a very different approach. For them, the identical condition of intrusion transformed participatory conservation into what could be termed participatory destruction. If life under the existing system has become fundamentally uninhabitable, then destruction may paradoxically serve as a form of care, facilitating the emergence of an alternative existence and a new normal that has yet to materialize. One can perceive a subtle resonance of Tzvetan Todorov’s ideas about violence and meaning:

The fear of barbarians is what risks making us barbarian. And we will commit a worse evil than that which we initially feared. History teaches us this lesson: the cure can be worse than the disease. (2010: 6)

This paradox of destruction as a form of care may be further illuminated through Todorov’s narratological model of equilibrium, where narrative itself unfolds as a movement not of static continuity but of rupture and reconfiguration. As he observes in The Poetics of Prose,

The minimal complete plot consists in the passage from one equilibrium to another. An ‘ideal’ narrative begins with a stable situation that is disturbed by some power or force. There results a state of disequilibrium; by the action of a force directed in the opposite direction, the equilibrium is re-established; the second equilibrium is similar to the first, but the two are never identical. (1977: 111)

Read against the political condition at hand, this formulation renders destruction not as mere negation but as the necessary disturbance through which a new configuration might emerge—an interruption that dislodges the apparent stability of the given order. Indeed, as Todorov insists elsewhere, “to destroy does not mean to ignore. The apparent order is not the only one, and our task will be to make evident all the orders of the text and to specify their interrelations” (1997:241). Destruction, therefore, functions as a critical operation: it reveals the instability of what presents itself as a unified order and opens the possibility for an alternative configuration.

However, this model still presupposes that disequilibrium ultimately leads to a re-established order, even if transformed. The situation described above calls this presupposition into question. What if the moment of disruption does not lead to a new equilibrium but instead exposes the very impossibility of a fully stabilized order? What emerges then is not simply a transition from disorder to order, but an exposure of order as something never fully closed. In this sense, the moment of disequilibrium does more than initiate transformation; it reveals the incompleteness and constitutive fragility of any given order.

Jean-Luc Nancy elucidates in The Inoperative Community that the concept of “unworking” (désoeuvrement) suggests that communities may arise not from the complete stabilization of an order but from the revelation of that order’s inherent sense of sharing (even through their limitations) and susceptibility to communication (1991:40-41). Judith Butler spins the notion of this insight into the realm of lived experience and political life. She observes in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence that “Some lives are grievable, and others are not” (2004:30). If Nancy reveals the sharing and communication through collective structures, Butler reveals how this, in reality, is unevenly experienced: the exposure of an order’s incompleteness does not affect all lives equally. Certain lives are recognized, mourned, and protected, while others are rendered invisible, their vulnerability socially and politically sanctioned. Within this framework, destruction assumes a complex and ambivalent role: it dismantles existing configurations, exposing the hidden hierarchies and exclusions embedded within them, and in doing so opens the possibility for rearticulating the terms of recognition and care.

Butler illustrates this through the example of obituaries for war casualties:

There are no obituaries for the war casualties that the United States inflicts, and there cannot be. If there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifies for recognition…we have to ask, again and again, how the obituary functions as the instrument by which grievability is publicly distributed. (34).

As Creon declares in Antigone “There will be no public act of grieving,” which is a dramatic reminder that the denial of recognition is not merely symbolic but actively shapes who counts as fully human. Here, the condition Butler describes is concretely realized: societal norms decide which lives are acknowledged and which remain exposed, unprotected, and effectively erased. The Islamic Republic, as a dominant example of such case, has actively regulated funerals, particularly those of protestors, in some cases preventing them entirely, thereby controlling public acts of mourning and further circumscribing whose lives are considered grievable and worthy of communal recognition.

The sad irony is that both participatory conservation and participatory destruction are now mostly on hold in Iran, where everyone is passive. People who want to keep their fragile daily lives and people who are willing to watch the current order burn so that something new can grow from the ashes have one thing in common: they are both very sad. The main way they “participate” now is by being patient in a way that makes them feel like an object. They wait for outside forces to decide whether to stop the attacks or make them worse to bring down the regime. They do this while bombs or sanctions are falling, threats are being made, and slogans are being shouted. So, participation is only about enduring, and politics is moved to the unclear math of somewhere else. 

This is the most painful wound: the Iranian people have lost the right to participate. People now participate in them rather than through them, whether they are framed as conservation or deconstruction. The Iranians are no longer participants in this spectacle; they are now a captive audience compelled to observe a performance of their own demolition and dissection. Their participatory right? They can clap or cry for bombs as the background scenery or collateral damage in a show co-commissioned by the Iranian government and outside interested forces. Their involvement is reduced to mere endurance, akin to a torturous Beckettian performance for entertainment. Yet, it converts the participants’ bodies into a battleground through the absurdity of disconnection from external life. In that sense, the audience’s suffering and, more disturbingly, at times, boredom are integral to the formal dramaturgy of their involvement in the play of their lives.

This statement does not idealize pure, unconditional agency. No individual possesses complete sovereignty, and no political system is devoid of limitations. There is a distinction between constrained agency and the systematic denial of the collective experience of action. In that lack, the idea of participatory conservation falls apart. It is impossible to conserve what one is prohibited from shaping. Participatory destruction also loses its promise of freedom when it is planned and directed from somewhere else. In this case, the desire to break down an oppressive normality is just another instance of being acted upon. 

A haunting paradox comes to light. A society that has recurrently risked its blood in the streets is now forced to participate only through suffering. Iran’s people are forced to participate in a way that is more akin to exposure than choice. They become bodies exposed to repression, to bombs, to poverty, and to uncertainty. The task, then, is not merely to choose between conservation and destruction. The primary aim is to reinstate participation and affirm that no new normal, despite its enticing assurances, can be considered legitimate if it arises from a history in which individuals have merely served as tools of external agendas. In other words, echoing Audre Lorde’s book title, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”

In this context, the authentic scope of participatory conservation as a decolonial endeavor in Iran should not be the maintenance of a fractured present nor the indiscriminate destruction of existing elements. It would entail the arduous, challenging, and deeply human endeavor of rediscovering the process of collective decision-making. Only then can a people conserve what deserves to live, dismantle what must end, and do so not as spectators of fate but as co-authors of a shared future.

We reside in times where politicians are more entertainers than politicians. Politics is generally performed rather than executed. Attention has become more critical than information or even argumentation. Domestic and international audiences are captivated by empty declarations, irrational threats, and melodramatic gestures of peace. Nonetheless, the promise and the question of theatre and dramaturgical thinking are present here. Could it reimagine itself as a meeting place for opposing ideas so that they are not just preserved but also endured? Or the world may have turned upside down, and politics just became a giant theatre lab. Before the lights go out in the theatre, there is always a brief, breathless hush when the impossible slips within reach of everyone in the room. If we cannot share consistent opinions, we can at least inhabit the same silences. This is how any performance—whether good or bad—always begins.

Reference

Agamben, Giorgio (1998), Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Meridian. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Butler, Judith (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, New York: Verso.

Lorde, Audre (2018), The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, London, England: Penguin Classics. 

Moosavi, Marjan (2015), “Dramaturgy in Post Revolution Iran: Problems and Prospects,” in The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy, edited by Magda Romanska, London, England: Routledge, 68–72

Nancy, Jean-Luc (1991), The Inoperative Community. Edited and translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney. Foreword by Christopher Fynsk. Theory and History of Literature, vol. 76, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sophocles (1984), Antigone, translated by Robert Fagles, in The Three Theban Plays, London, England: Penguin Classics.

Todorov, Tzvetan (2010), The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations. Translated by Andrew Brown, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Todorov, Tzvetan (1977), The Poetics of Prose. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. Foreword by Jonathan Culler, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.