What Cannot Be Deferred
Ehsan Saboohi
Tehran, 2026
What Cannot Be Deferred
Introduction: Beginning from the Situation, Not from Theory
Every composition, before it becomes organized sound, is a position.
That position usually remains concealed: in opening sentences, in references, in methodological explanations. Yet no theory speaks from outside the situation. No composition stands without ground. Every form rests upon a material base, and every material base already distributes the possibilities of hearing, thinking, and living.
This collection begins precisely where discourse usually begins by erasing itself: with the situation.
With postwar Tehran in 2026; with the moment when the base—in the precise Marxian sense, as the material organization of the possibility of living—entered into collapse: severed communication, mass dismissals, bombardment, and the disintegration of minimal material security. These are not merely elements of personal background. Individual experience, in itself, is not an argument. Yet there are moments when a situation becomes so compressed that the existing form can no longer conceal its own internal tensions. At such moments, what ordinarily appears as order, necessity, or rationality rises to the surface as the base itself.
The problem of this collection is not epistemological inquiry. It calls for an ontological understanding.
The question is this: if language, understanding, and consciousness are themselves products of material conditions of distribution, then from where does the very possibility of language emerge? And if consciousness itself is produced within form, how is passage beyond that form possible?
It is here that the ontological problem begins.
I. The Problem of Knowledge
Kant showed that experience never grants direct access to the “thing-in-itself.” Whatever is understood passes through the a priori forms of perception and the cognitive apparatus of the subject. The noumenon—that which exists independently of this apparatus—remains fundamentally inaccessible to knowledge.
Marx transferred this logic into history. Social consciousness does not arise independently of the material conditions of production. The base is not economy in the narrow sense of the market; it is the material network of the possibility of living: who can sleep, receive treatment, work, think, or simply endure. Consciousness emerges from within these relations, not outside them.
If both positions are taken seriously, a fundamental dilemma appears:
If consciousness itself is a product of the existing material form, from where can it negate that very form?
The history of Marxism produced two common answers to this question, and both remain insufficient. The first answer is class consciousness. Yet this merely displaces the problem, since it remains unclear what guarantees that such consciousness is immune to ideology. The second answer is the science of history. But this response bypasses the Kantian question rather than resolving it: how do we know that we know? And it was precisely this crude passage from critique to certainty that repeatedly justified exclusion in the twentieth century in the name of necessity.
Thus the problem remains.
Not because it is unsolvable, but because the answer cannot be brought from outside the situation. The question must instead be posed from within form itself: does form contain something within itself that makes self-perception possible?
II. The Incompleteness of Form
No social form is ever complete.
Every order attempts to stabilize forces, tensions, and possibilities within lasting form; yet no stabilization is ever total. Every form leaves something outside itself, fails to contain something, fails to resolve something completely. This incompleteness is not the accidental defect of a particular system; it is the structural condition of form as such.
And it is precisely here that the possibility of passage emerges.
If passage is to be real, it cannot simply come from outside form. There is no absolute outside. What becomes visible is usually seen through the fissures of form itself: in tensions that remained concealed, in failures that were never named in time, in those moments when order involuntarily reveals itself.
Simondon clarifies this at the level of individuation. Every stable form is the temporary stabilization of a field of tensions; yet preindividual energy is never entirely absorbed into form. Something always remains, and it is this remainder that keeps form internally unstable. The same logic operates at the social level: orders do not produce stability alone; they also produce rupture. Crisis does not enter from outside. Crisis is the name for what form has failed to resolve within itself.
Badiou speaks of the event, yet in his system the event arrives from outside the situation: something with no place within the logic of the existing order, through fidelity to which the subject is constituted. Politically, this position always held a certain attraction for me; philosophically, however, it is dangerous. For if the event comes from outside, then whoever claims to recognize or carry it quickly acquires an exceptional position. And this exceptional position, in practice, becomes the ground of exclusion.
Who determines what fidelity to the event means, and what counts as betrayal? The history of Maoism—to which Badiou himself repeatedly refers—answered this question violently: those who claimed recognition of the event were precisely those who defined the boundary between fidelity and betrayal. The excluded teacher, artist, or scientist was eliminated not because they stood outside truth, but because no place for them remained within truth’s external logic.
Against this logic, if we accept that rupture emerges from within the incompleteness of form, then no one occupies an exceptional position. Passage becomes possible, but not from a superior standpoint. Understanding also becomes possible, but not as possession of truth. Understanding begins at the moment when form reveals itself through its own failure.
Yet this immediately raises another question: if passage is always internal, and no salvific external position exists, on what basis can one say that a given form is bad and must be transformed? From where does the normative ground emerge?
In other words, if form is incomplete, from where does passage derive the right to stand against it?
III. What Cannot Be Deferred
Suffering must not first be approached as a moral concept.
Before it becomes an object of judgment, suffering is a material reality. Prior to all interpretation, the body endures it: hunger, sleeplessness, insecurity, interruption of treatment, severed communication, exhaustion. These are not arguments; they are conditions. And precisely for that reason, they require no theoretical legitimacy in order to be real.
Suffering exists within form, yet it belongs to what form can never fully absorb.
It is the remainder that order cannot entirely explain or justify. Form may conceal it, defer it, or rewrite it in the language of necessity; but it cannot eliminate it. In this sense, suffering is the index of form’s failure: the sign of what the existing distribution has produced while remaining incapable of assuming responsibility for it.
From this it becomes clear that suffering cannot be deferred into the future.
Every politics that justifies present suffering in the name of the future rests upon a violent displacement: the present must be endured so that something better may perhaps arrive later. But the body does not live in the future. The body deteriorates in the present, is excluded in the present, disappears in the present. Passage, therefore, cannot remain indifferent to present suffering in the name of a distant horizon.
It is here that the normative ground of passage emerges.
Not from a position outside history, not from a metaphysical conscience, not from a transcendental command, but from the material reality of suffering produced by form and incapable of being justified by it. This suffering is the point of departure for ethics—not an abstract ethics of good and evil, but an ethics of the possibility of living.
The opposite of suffering should not be sought in abstract concepts.
The opposite of suffering is the expansion of the capacity to live: security, sleep, treatment, communication, the possibility of thinking, the possibility of creating. If ethics has any meaning, it begins here—not from theology, not from metaphysical conscience, not from the absolute imperative, but from the material conditions of human living.
From this emerges the fundamental principle of this collection: either ethics and human dignity are universal, or no ethics exists at all.
This principle must be set against the logic of exception.
Wherever the suffering of certain human beings is deemed less important because of geography, power, or interests, ethics has been transformed into privilege rather than principle. An ethics that applies only to some is not ethics; it is a mechanism of distinction. A dignity founded upon exception is internally contradictory. Dignity is either universal, or it is not dignity at all.
IV. Why Marx, and Which Marx
Despite all the historical failures of Marxism, a return to Marx remains necessary.
But this return is meaningful only if one clarifies: which Marx?
Marx still provides a tool for which no adequate replacement has been found: the critique of form.
He shows how social relations become concealed within things, how domination appears in the guise of necessity, how regimes of distribution present themselves as natural and self-evident. In this sense, commodity fetishism is not merely an economic concept; it is the description of a world in which human beings become alienated from the products of their own relations.
Yet Marx encounters a decisive difficulty at one critical point.
He understands history as possessing direction. Direction generates necessity. And necessity, in the hands of those who claim knowledge of it, rapidly becomes justification for exclusion. The chain is clear: history has a direction; we know that direction; therefore whatever obstructs its realization must be removed.
This logic did not merely justify Stalinism; it nourished every vanguardist form of politics. The problem lies precisely here: if forms are incomplete, no one can claim possession of the full direction of history.
One must therefore distance oneself from historical Marxism in order to reclaim Marx.
Not the Marx who writes the final law of history, but the Marx who makes critique of political economy possible. Not the Marx who announces the end, but the Marx who exposes the form of domination. In this reading, Marx is an instrument of understanding, not a machine of certainty. He is a method of critique, not a license for necessity.
It is from this point that this collection arrives at a definite position:
neither anti-Marx nor faithful to official Marxism, but grounded in Marx as the possibility of a critique of form while freed from Marx as the ideology of history.
V. Structure
This collection is built upon three questions, though these questions are ultimately three levels of a single problem: how can one think within a situation that itself conditions thought?
First, the base must be separated from its conventional economic definitions. Here, the base is not the name of the market, not the name of money, nor even simply the name of production. The base is the material network of the possibility of living: the field within which security, time, the body, sleep, treatment, and endurance are distributed.
What makes an order a base is not merely the production of commodities, but the production of conditions in which some are able to live while others are driven below the threshold of livability. In this sense, the base is existential-material before it is economic.
Second, the superstructure is not merely the passive reflection of this field. Language, ethics, politics, and art do not function as lifeless mirrors; they are sites of struggle. It is within the superstructure that the existing order presents itself as rational, natural, and self-evident. It is there as well that suffering is named, limited, deferred, or translated into the language of necessity. Yet this apparently secondary level is precisely where form most clearly reveals its own failure.
From this perspective, art is neither decoration nor escape. It is one of the few places where the unresolved tensions of the base can become sound, time, and form without immediately entering the service of justification.
Third comes the question of critique. If consciousness itself is a product of the very order that must be criticized, how is critique possible? The answer proposed here is that critique emerges not from a position outside history, but from within the incompleteness of form itself. Every order contains a fissure within itself; every stabilized structure leaves something outside itself; every system conceals as much as it produces.
Critique, therefore, is not the art of discovering an outside. It is the labor of hearing that which within form remains unresolved, unsilenced, and unabsorbed.
It is from here that the relation between this collection and composition becomes clear.
Composition here is not merely the organization of sounds; it is the shaping of tension. If music is to be taken seriously, it is neither the direct representation of crisis nor the aestheticization of suffering. Music can become the moment in which the incompleteness of the situation, instead of remaining concealed, becomes audible.
Silence, rupture, density, suspension, rhythmic fracture, and temporal disturbance in these works are not merely formal decisions. They are sonic forms of the same question: how can one create sound in a world where the very possibility of sound is unequally distributed?
What cannot be deferred is not the future.
It is the body.
It is suffering.
It is the possibility of living.
And perhaps it is from here that another possibility of thinking and hearing begins.
Ehsan Saboohi
Composer, Music Theorist
Tehran, 2026
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