In the realm of cultural policy, Iranian society has consistently faced chronic challenges, strategic instability, and a gap between official norms and the sphere of everyday social life. Aiming to analyze the mechanisms of power that have shaped this cultural condition, the present study genealogically investigates the transformations of cultural discourses in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s theoretical and methodological framework, this article argues that cultural policy operates as a network of power apparatuses that, by shifting the objects of intervention, has sought to construct desired subjects. The present study traces the cycles of this discursive struggle: from the establishment of productive power in the discourse of revolutionary culture (the doctrinal subject) and the dominance of bureaucratic rationality in the discourse of cultural developmentalism (the consumer subject), to political heteronomy in the discourse of cultural democratization (the civic subject). This trajectory continued with a shift toward normative power in the discourse of cultural engineering (the resistance-oriented subject) and the delegation of the cultural sphere to cultural practitioners in the discourse of cultural non-interventionism (the deregulated subject). Ultimately, the discourse of cultural gardening sought to reconstruct the active subject through intervention in the Iranian-Islamic cultural ecosystem and the institution of the family. According to the research findings, the chronic cultural crisis in Iran is the product of a persistent misalignment between official technologies of subjectivation and the agency and plural subjectivities of the society.