How power disappears from the sentence
The letter reads: “Your eligibility could not be established.”
The language is calm, procedural, and almost impersonal. It gives no sense that someone has exercised judgment over someone else. No official appears as the author of the exclusion. No criterion appears as a human construction open to dispute. The sentence leaves behind an applicant who seems to lack a quality the institution merely attempted to find.
This formula has a specific resonance in Iranian political and administrative life, where the failure to “establish” eligibility can prevent a person from standing as a candidate, entering a profession, or passing through a process of ideological selection. The wording converts an institutional decision into an apparent fact about the person. Authority withdraws into procedure. Deficiency remains attached to the applicant.
The effect comes from more than vocabulary. The arrangement of subject, action, and responsibility determines how the event becomes intelligible. “We excluded you under rules we designed and interpreted” would expose an agent, a decision, and a contestable standard. “Eligibility could not be established” resembles the report of a neutral measurement. The institution appears to have searched for a naturally existing property and returned empty-handed.
This is one form of the grammar of captivity. Grammar here means the social organization of agency inside language. It shapes who appears to act, who appears to cause trouble, which decisions arrive as necessities, and whose suffering returns as evidence of personal failure. Power operates at this level by arranging the terms through which an experience can be understood.
Antonio Gramsci’s account of hegemony helps explain why such language travels so easily. A ruling order persists through coercion and through the forms of common sense that make its arrangements seem realistic, mature, or inevitable. These forms circulate far beyond official propaganda. They appear in schools, families, workplaces, news reports, application forms, professional advice, and ordinary conversation. People may resent an institution while continuing to describe their experience in the institution’s language.
Captivity in this sense allows speech. A person can complain, explain, apologize, and ask for help. The available forms of speech repeatedly direct interpretation back toward individual weakness, unfortunate circumstances, or impersonal necessity. The speaker has words, yet the grammar of those words makes certain agents difficult to see.
Necessity is one of the most effective substitutes for agency. “Conditions required it.” “There was no alternative.” “Action became necessary.” “Everyone has to make sacrifices.” Each sentence presents a decision as the consequence of a force with no accountable author. Someone defined the conditions, rejected the alternatives, selected the action, and distributed the sacrifice. The sentence turns these acts into pressure exerted by reality itself.
The pronoun “we” can perform a related task. When an organization announces that “we all have to carry the cost,” executives and workers enter an imagined community of equal exposure. Their income, security, and authority differ sharply. One group decides how the cost will be distributed; another experiences that distribution as reduced hours, lost employment, or greater workload. The pronoun creates unity at the exact point where consequences divide.
Passive constructions provide another shelter. “Mistakes were made.” “Positions were eliminated.” “Force was used.” “Damage occurred.” The event enters the record while the actor recedes. This language may arise from routine more often than conscious deception. Its ordinary quality increases its political force. Repetition allows a human decision to acquire the appearance of a technical process.
Grammar also turns relations into personal traits. A workplace built around exhaustion describes an employee as lacking resilience. A school designed for one narrow form of attention records a child as disruptive. A family organized around obedience calls the dissenting member selfish. The institutional arrangement moves into the background, and the person returns carrying a new adjective.
The same movement appears when disclosure is treated as the source of conflict. A woman speaks about control or violence, and relatives say she has destroyed the family. The verb “destroyed” attaches itself to the act of speaking. Everything that preceded speech loses causal weight. The revelation becomes the injury, while the injury becomes context.
Political language often follows this pattern. A protester appears irrational, manipulated, or deficient in political insight. A migrant’s departure becomes a personal lifestyle choice. A candidate excluded from public life becomes unqualified. Conflict between a citizen and an institution is redescribed as a flaw in the citizen’s judgment, loyalty, temperament, or competence. A struggle over power takes the grammatical form of an assessment.
The endurance of this language cannot be explained through deception alone. People often recognize unfairness and still use its grammar against themselves. An employee may understand that promotion is arbitrary while experiencing failure as personal inadequacy. Someone living under control may see the restriction clearly and also call it care. A citizen may distrust official narratives and continue using official categories to interpret political events.
Everyday consciousness can hold these tensions without resolving them. Gramsci’s common sense is fragmented, layered, and historically assembled. Old moral judgments coexist with new experiences. Official explanations sit beside private doubt. A person may speak one grammar at work, another among friends, and a third when alone. Hegemony gains durability from this uneven coexistence.
Captive grammar can also provide protection. Calling abuse “a difficult period” delays decisions whose consequences may feel impossible. Treating dismissal as personal failure preserves a limited sense of control. If the problem lies within the self, improvement still appears available through effort. Recognizing the full dependence of one’s life on decisions made elsewhere may produce a more accurate account and a more frightening world.
This protective function gives the language emotional depth. People inherit phrases that help them preserve relationships, remain employable, avoid retaliation, and keep a coherent image of themselves. The grammar of power survives partly because it can make life more manageable for those living under it. Its practical usefulness and its political effects belong to the same sentence.
Changing vocabulary alone offers no secure exit. Structural terms can harden into formulas as easily as institutional ones. A person may learn to call everything oppression, discourse, or hegemony and lose sight of particular motives, differences, and responsibilities. Critical language develops its own habits of omission. It can enlarge certain agents until they explain everything and reduce other people to examples of a theory.
The more useful shift begins when a sentence recovers what it had excluded. “Who decided?” gives necessity a history. “Who paid the cost?” divides an abstract “we” into actual positions. “Why does the story begin with the disclosure?” restores the events that occurred before someone spoke. These questions change the field of explanation by returning agents, timelines, and unequal consequences to view.
Such questions leave the underlying relation of power intact at first. Their immediate work is grammatical. They make a procedure appear as a decision, a personal defect appear within a social arrangement, and an inevitable outcome appear as one path selected among others. The world has not yet changed, though its description has become harder for power to inhabit without showing itself.
Official grammar never achieves complete closure. Jokes, irony, private stories, slips of language, and shifts in pronoun can expose its contradictions. People may recognize the falseness of a public phrase long before they possess a stable political account of what is wrong with it. A sarcastic repetition can loosen a sentence by revealing the distance between its official meaning and lived experience.
Language therefore serves as a site of reproduction and friction. The same phrase can discipline one speaker and become mockery in the mouth of another. A bureaucratic category can organize exclusion and later supply evidence of how exclusion was administered. Grammar carries power, and its repeated use also creates opportunities for its structure to become visible.
Return to the letter: “Your eligibility could not be established.” The sentence presents itself as a result. A short pause brings back the questions it has removed. Who conducted the assessment? Which standard authorized it? How was the standard interpreted? What form of appeal exists? The applicant who had appeared only as the object of evaluation begins to examine the relation that produced the verdict.
Linguistic freedom sometimes begins with the return of a missing subject. Necessity acquires authors, failure acquires conditions, and personal traits recover their social histories. The first political question may therefore be grammatical: who acted, and how did the account of the action manage to proceed without them?