Page 133 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

118 Brian Larkin

Norbert Weiner (1961) and cybernetic theory through to Friedrich Kittler
(1990). Following this logic, as media systems change so too does the sen-
sorial, psychological, and social fabric of individual and society. When
public recitation became privatized reading, for instance, the change in the
medium of religious communication entailed changes in sociability, in
ideas of presence and reference, in experiences of exteriority and interiority.
Kittler refers to this as a shift from the signifier to the signified, the
“medium of print [making] it possible to bypass signs for sense” (1990,
230) helping language “become precise and thoroughly transparent”
(Funkenstein 1989, 10). When the Bible, Qur’an, or Torah are electrified,
no longer trapped inside the borders of a book but exploded over space by
loudspeakers, radio transmitters, and televisions, the ways in which reli-
gious communities gather, how they experience their own collectivity and
their engagement with the divine changes too. In this epistemic history of
media, society, community, or religion are second order realities that
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emerge out of the technics of media. Media are not “used” by religion;
they are the conditions of existence that make the expression of religion
possible. Heidegger (1982) referred to this as technology calling forth the
human. To be transmitted to subjects, religious ideas and philosophies
must be encoded in material signs and when they do so they become hos-
tage to materiality of those signs. For, as Kittler has it, “once the soul
speaks it is no longer the soul that speaks” (1990, 238) as its voice is suf-
fused with the noise of its transmission.
Following this argument, to understand the modernity of a figure like
Gumi we should look not at his theological beliefs, but at the shift in com-
munications systems that took place during his life—a shift of which he is
less the author than the expression. It means to understand the vernacular
press, the rise of radio networks, and the building of television systems as
much as his biography and theology. Gumi wrote a regular religious col-
umn for the secular Hausa language paper Gasikya Ta Fi Kwabo. He was
most famously identified (by both supporters and detractors) with his
radio and television broadcasts and the cassette reproductions of them that
form a unique part of his and Izala’s organizational structure. But as he
used these media he subjected his teachings to their centrifugal dispersal,

the refiguring of their content as they are swept up in the logic of com-
munications media with their particular conditions of storage, transmis-
sion, and retrieval. The possibility of his critique of Sufi Islam, of his
rejection of the magical power of Sufi saints, of their claim to a mastery of
the hidden meanings underlying everyday life, is tied to these media. Gumi
and Izala advocated for a religion based on surfaces, not depths, where
each Muslim had access to religious knowledge through reading and com-
prehension of the holy texts of Islam, the Qur’an, and Hadith rather than