Key Words in Religion, Media and Culture

David Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134060658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

'From The Passion of the Christ to the presumed 'clash of civilizations', religion's role in culture is increasingly contested and mediated. Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture is a welcome and interdisciplinary contribution that maps the territory for those who aim to make sense of it all. Highlighting the important concepts guiding state-of-the-art research into religion, media, and culture, this book is bound to become an important and frequently consulted resource among scholars both seasoned and new to the field.' – Lynn Schofield Clark

'David Morgan has assembled here a fine team of scholars to prove beyond a doubt that the intersections of religion, media, and culture constitute one of the most stimulating fields of inquiry around today...This highly useful and theoretically sophisticated text will likely assume 'ritual' status in this emergent field.' – Rosalind I. J. Hackett, University of Tennessee, US

'This volume is a major intervention in the literature on religion, media and culture. Drawing together leading international scholars, it offers a conceptual map of the field to which students, teachers and researchers will refer for many years to come. The publication of Key Words in Religion, Media and Culture is a significant moment in the formation of this area of study, and sets a standard for cross-disciplinary collaboration and theoretical and methodological sophistication for future work in this area to follow.' – Gordon Lynch, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

'This book offers a range of refreshing essays on the relationships between media and religion. Its selected keywords open doors to understanding contemporary society. The cultural perspectives on mediation and religious practices give some illuminating and surprising analyses.' – Knut Lundby, University of Oslo, Norway

1 Aesthetics

Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips

From aisthesis to aesthetica
Kant’s legacy
Religion as mediation and the “aesthetic turn”
Religious aesthetics

Time and again, artists have presented work to the world that has been perceived by believers as shocking, insulting, and hurtful. A famous case in point is Piss Christ by Andres Serrano (first exhibited in 1989), which upset many Roman Catholics so much that they initiated lawsuits to have this “obscene” piece of art removed from exhibitions.¹ A few even went so far as to try to destroy it, such as the Melbourne teenager who attacked it with a hammer because his mother had wept on hearing that a judge had ruled it not “offensive per se.” According to Alison Young, who has dealt with this case in detail, the judge’s problem was

that the image can easily be described in aesthetically pleasing terms (the sunset hues), but it is the ordinary person’s imputed understanding of the title and knowledge of the manner of the image’s making that might evidence the offensiveness and the possible obscenity. The judge might wish to locate legal obscenity or indecency in the artwork, but is ultimately unable to do so, due to the conflict he finds between the aesthetics of the image (the “beauty of its appearance”) and the prepositional condition of the artwork (the “disgusting” nature of its creation confessed by the title). And it seems to be this surface “beauty” of the image that saves it from obscenity.

(2005: 32; italics added)

It may seem counterintuitive to some readers to find “aesthetics” included as a key word in the study of religion and media. If so, that could be owing to the limited sense that the word has acquired in its modern career. In the passage above, aesthetics occurs with the meaning it gained at the end of the eighteenth century and which it still has in both professional and popular circles, i.e., as referring to the “disinterested beauty” of a work of art. However, before it received this specific (Kantian) meaning, aesthetics encompassed much more, as will be shown here. At present, there is a tendency among scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds (cultural and visual studies, anthropology, cultural criminology, media studies, art history, and comparative religion), who share an interest in the nexus of religion and media, to revisit this broader conception of aesthetics. After a succinct presentation of the ancient genealogy of the term and the shifts in meaning it has undergone over time, we consider the question of how aesthetics is conceived and used in a sensitizing manner to develop deeper insights into the ways in which religious media—understood in a broad sense, encompassing icons, images, texts, films, radio, cassettes, and the like—affect religious practitioners and convey a sense of divine presence.

From aisthesis to aesthetica

In De Anima, Aristotle deals with the question of how the “psyche,” conceptualized by him as a nonmaterial entity with specific powers or a kind of life energy with certain potentialities, uses the material body of human beings and other animals to realize these potentialities or powers through and in their bodies. The psyche is the source of (1) our potentiality to feed ourselves, (2) our potentiality to perceive the world through our (five) senses (aisthetikon), (3) the powers to make representations of (phantastikon), (4) the power to think over (nous), and (5) the power to develop desires in (orektikon) this world—all on the basis of our sensations. Of all the senses, Aristotle considers touch to be the most fundamental because it forms the condition of our survival through reproduction (sex) and defense (violence). Though he did not see the other senses as variations of touch, as do some scholars today (see Chidester 2005; Verrips 2006), he understood our perception of the world through our five senses as an undivided whole. This is what he meant by aisthesis (directly related to aisthetikon): our corporeal capability on the basis of a power given in our psyche to perceive objects in the world via our five different sensorial modes, thus in a kind of analytical way, and at the same time as a specific constellation of sensations as a whole (e.g., an apple with a texture, a taste, a smell, a sound, and a visible shape and color). An apple makes an im-pression or has an im-pact (on us) as a whole and in different sensorial ways at exactly the same time.

Aisthesis then refers to our total sensorial experience of the world and to our sensuous knowledge of it.²

In the course of history, this type of knowledge has gradually been pushed to the background in the Western world. Emphasis has come to rest more and more on sensations received by the eye, representations based on the eye alone, and finally abstract thinking and reasoning based in their turn on these representations. Particularly after Descartes presented his cogito ergo sum, expressing his sharp division between body and mind (cf. Meyer 2003: 22), the aisthesis of Aristotle, the aisthetic way of knowing the world, the knowing through our body, rapidly lost ground in intellectual circles. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s introduction of the term aesthetica in the middle of the eighteenth century to designate the science of sensuous knowing (scientia cognitionis sensitivae) in the classical sense was a milestone, but it did not denote a return to or lasting reestablishment of more balanced relations between aisthetic and rational knowing of the world (Baumgarten 1936). It may be that his qualification of the aesthetica as a science that concentrates on the facultates cogniscitivae inferiores (inferior or lower cognitive faculties, i.e., the sensorial ones) of human beings, instead of on their facultates cogniscitivae superiores (higher or superior cognitive faculties: i.e., the rational or logical ones) contributed to this lopsided development. Whatever the case, it is a pity that Baumgarten’s touching plea to philosophers to pay serious attention to the importance of aisthetic knowing or sensorial impressions of the world did not get the response he expected (see Schweizer 1973: 108–9; cf. Plate 2005: 19–20). This was a pity, for after him a trajectory was set in which the Aristotelian heritage faded into the background in works on aesthetica, and movement was instigated in a very specific direction. Aesthetica gradually became a cerebral science of the beautiful and the philosophy of art.

Kant’s legacy

A major role in this one-sided and rather narrow-minded development was played by Immanuel Kant. Kant was familiar with Baumgarten’s seminal treatises on the relevance of taking into consideration ways of knowing through the senses or the body alongside those connected with the faculty of reason or the mind, and he deemed the aesthetic judgment of an object to be based on a subjective feeling of pleasure (Lust) or reluctance (Unlust), which was the result of an unintended confluence of imagination and reason. Nevertheless, he ventured toward a rather rational approach to this experience, as from his perspective the feeling of Lust or Unlust was based on a (pure) judgment of taste or on reflection by a subject that disposes of both Sinnlichkeit und Verstand (Vernunft) (sensuality and reason [common sense]). Characteristic for the feeling of aesthetic pleasure or displeasure (and the experience of beauty or ugliness) is (1) that it is not related to an interest or does not generate a specific desire, (2) that it pertains to a single object and never to a class of objects, (3) that it can be judged as having a “Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck” (appropriateness without purpose), and (4) that it (unreasonably) requests approval by others (see Kant 2001). In connection with beauty, Kant also dealt with the aesthetic category of the sublime (das Erhabene): something observable that generates amazement, anxiety, and awe and transcends the beautiful. It is these two categories that form the pillars of his philosophy on aesthetics.

Though a host of other great thinkers, including Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Marx, to mention but a few, also dealt with aesthetics, it was Kant’s approach that became the most influential for decades to come, especially among art historians and philosophers of art. In fact, it still informs, directly or indirectly, the work of many scholars studying beautiful objects and sublime phenomena. However, the acceptance of Kant’s cerebral and rational perspective on how experiences of the beautiful and the sublime could be understood implied a number of problematic divides through which aesthetics was framed as a rather limited field of inquiry.

The most immediately obvious is the further delineation of the split between the realm of the senses or the body and that of reason or the mind, which Baumgarten so ardently wished to bridge. This implied that the senses and the body were of little or no relevance for the understanding of the sensorial and emotional impact of all kinds of imagery and objects, in the sphere of religion, for instance, on their beholders. We might call this process the de-sensualization or disembodiment of aesthetics (see Plate 2005). The eye became a mind’s eye and the ear a mind’s ear, whereas the rest of the senses were numbed or an-aesthetized (see Buck-Morss 1992). Only with the rise of phenomenology, particularly as it was developed by Merleau-Ponty in his work on perception (1945), aisthetic experiences and knowing reappeared once again on centre stage. Merleau-Ponty’s Causeries (2002 [1948]) explicitly dealt with such experiences in connection with the rise of modern art (see also Dufrenne 1973). Artists were aiming for representations of reality that were more in accordance with the fact that we do not perceive the world through our eyes alone but with all our senses: our entire body. It has been his work, among that of others, that has inspired many scholars from different disciplines in the second half of the twentieth century to design approaches that transcend the bodiless and dematerialized aesthetic theory in the philosophy of art.

The second divide relates to the fact that neo-Kantian aesthetic theory was almost exclusively applied to what became known as high or modern art (i.e., art stored and exhibited in special places and spaces) and not to what was degradingly labeled as low art or kitsch: mass-produced imagery and objects meant to be consumed by vast numbers of people. In this connection, it is important to realize that this distinction between high art and low ran more or less parallel with a third divide that came into existence with the Enlightenment: the separation of the artistic from the religious realm. According to this view, religion was supposed to gradually lose importance in the course of the modernization and rationalization of society, whereas high art would be the site par excellence for the generation of sublime experience. As a consequence, artworks made by religiously inspired people considering themselves to be serious artists were relegated to the realm of low art or kitsch and therefore deemed not worthy of study by art theorists (see Elkins and Morgan 2008).

As a consequence of these divides, neo-Kantian aesthetic discourse became confined to an exclusive field of study that became rather narrow, at least as seen from an aisthetic perspective in Aristotle’s sense. It was not only the body that was discounted but a wide range of imagery and objects that were rather arbitrarily disqualified as low-brow or religious(ly inspired)—or both—and therefore uninteresting. In addition, there is a tendency to disregard the social and cultural context in which aesthetic experiences are generated and theorized. All this yielded rather static and disembodied approaches to aesthetics. Taking for granted the gaze as the central sense through which beholders engage with images, these approaches fail to take into account the ways in which the tuning of the sensorium has undergone actual transformations under the influence of the invention of new technologies, especially in the sphere of the production and consumption of, for example, modernist imagery and texts (Danius 2002; see also Crary 2001). In other words, in their insensitivity toward the significance of social and cultural contexts and the sensorium as a whole, such approaches neglect the specific tuning of the senses in consonance with the rise of modern subjectivities.³

Religion as mediation and the “aesthetic turn”

Though these typically modern distinctions between mind and body, high and low art, and art and religion long informed approaches of aesthetics, there is currently a trend toward a broader understanding of the term. Recognizing the need to account for the affective power that images, sounds, texts, and other cultural forms wield over their beholders, scholars seek to develop more integrated understandings of sensing and knowing. Obviously, this inquiry no longer locates aesthetics in the domain of the high arts alone (as opposed to popular arts and religion) but rather in everyday life. This implies moving beyond the divides entailed by neo-Kantian aesthetic discourses toward a recognition of the more encompassing Aristotelian notion of aisthesis. The emerging field of religion and media is one of the sites where a turn is being made toward a broader understanding of aesthetics. This turn has been instigated by the spectacular rise and circulation of religious audiovisual cultural forms, from cassette sermons broadcasting Islamic preachers to radio programs advertising the Catholic Renewal, from religious sitcoms to charismatic televised preaching, from mass-produced lithographs and photographs that induce a sense of spiritual presence to the emergence of sacred sites in cyberspace.

At first sight, such media and religion may appear to belong to two different ontological realms: one of crude materiality and technology, the other a higher order of the divine or transcendental. Facing the adoption of new media into religious traditions, however, scholars have come to realize that this view itself is highly problematic. The very assumption of a divide between religion and media stems from a dematerialized and disembodied understanding of religion. Indeed, in consonance with the divides sketched above, in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, modern religion came to be regarded in terms of an opposition between spirit and matter, inner belief and outward behavior (Asad 1993; Keane 2007). For a long time, questions of representation and interpretation, geared toward understanding inner beliefs and underlying meanings, have held a privileged position. Pondering the nexus of religion and media has yielded an understanding of religion as a practice of mediation (De Vries 2001; Meyer 2006; Stolow 2005) to which media are intrinsic. In this understanding, media form the necessary condition for achieving a linkage between people and the realm of the invisible: that is, the province of the divine or transcendental. Taking mediation as a departure point also implies that media are taken seriously as material forms through which the senses and bodies of religious practitioners are tuned and addressed. In this way, in the field of religion and media, alternative approaches that have emerged transcend the disembodiment and dematerialization of modern religion and pay due attention to aesthetics, recapturing the broad Aristotelian sense.

For instance, in his analysis of the relation between images of Jesus and their beholders in the context of American popular Protestantism, David Morgan (1998) advocated a more contextualized, embodied understanding of religious aesthetics. Highlighting the affective power of images, Morgan stresses the corporeal immediacy through which Jesus pictures achieve a compelling presence, rather than featuring as mere depictions. Christopher Pinney’s (2004) exploration of the ways in which central Indian villagers relate to mass-produced lithographs of deities takes this alternative approach of aesthetics further still. Situating these “photos of the gods” in a bodily praxis of worship—“a poetry of the body”—through which images get “what they want” (Mitchell 2005a), Pinney shows how in Hindu image practices, the experience of the effect and efficacy of the image on the part of the worshipper accounts for its power. Stressing that a neo-Kantian aesthetic approach (as outlined above) is geared too much toward the disinterested bodiless beholder to grasp images’ appeal and perceived efficacy, Pinney coins the alternative term corpothetics. With this term, he seeks to recapture the ancient Greek meaning of aesthetics as “perception by feeling” grounded in the corporeal and material and as mobilizing the senses simultaneously (2004: 19). Corpothetics, to him, means “the sensory embrace of images, the bodily engagement that most people (except Kantians and modernists) have with artworks” (22). His book shows beautifully how this broader understanding of aesthetics opens up new possibilities of inquiry into mass-produced religious images that reveal not so much how images look but what they can do (8).

As a great deal of research on religion and media focuses on visual culture, it is not surprising that critiques of conventional aesthetic approaches emerged as a result of researchers’ dissatisfaction with the incapacity of these approaches to grasp the affective power of images and their capacity to trigger religious experience. However, a search for a broader understanding of aesthetics can also be found in work on nonvisual media, such as radio and cassettes. Of special importance here is Charles Hirschkind’s work on the ways in which mass-produced cassette sermons speak to embodied repertoires within their young Islamic listeners, who adopt these tales into an “ethic of listening” (2006). Stressing that people’s capacities for speaking and hearing are shaped in a shared disciplinary context that produces particular affective dispositions, Hirschkind shows how the realization of Islamic moral personhood is linked to the resonant body (102). Adopting a broad corporeal understanding of aesthetics that is inspired by Shusterman’s notion of “somaesthetics” (2002), Hirschkind is particularly concerned with highlighting how the interface of aesthetics and ethics is grounded in the body; hence his analysis of the “soma-ethical” grounding of religious experience.

It needs to be stressed that these new approaches, though emphasizing bodily sensations, are somewhat distanced from theories of the genesis of religious experience in private feelings, as developed following William James. The fact that he and those working in line with his ideas take the existence of a primary, authentic and, in this sense, seemingly unmediated religious experience at face value is problematic. This locates concepts such as will, emotion, and aesthetic judgment exclusively in the individual believer rather than taking into account how transmitted and shared social forms, such as language, contribute to shaping individual experience (Wittgenstein 1958; see also Shusterman 2002). In addition, James’s perspective fails to realize the extent to which structures of repetition, as they are safeguarded by religious organizations, play a central role in affirming specific religious subjectivities (Taylor 2002: 116). An understanding of religion as mediation regards such practices and structures as a conditio sine qua non for the genesis of religious experience (including a highly individualized spirituality). Rather than attributing primacy either to the individual or to social forms, the point is to understand the genesis of religious experiences and subjectivities as a process in which the personal and the social are inextricably bound up with each other.

Religious aesthetics

Religious aesthetics, in the current sense, refers to an embodied and embedded praxis through which subjects relate to other subjects and objects and which is grounded in and offers the ground for religious experience. To grasp the link between aesthetics and experience, we propose to take as a starting point those religious forms that organize e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction. Religion, media, culture: the shape of the field
• 1 Aesthetics
• 2 Audiences
• 3 Circulation
• 4 Community
• 5 Culture
• 6 Economy
• 7 Image
• 8 Media
• 9 Narrative
• 10 Practice
• 11 Public
• 12 Religion
• 13 Soundscape
• 14 Technology
• 15 Text
• Works cited