Page 134 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Islamic Renewal, Radio, and the Surface of Things 119

through access to a sheikh and his baraka (charisma). And the extension of
those texts over space and time, drawing followers into a religious commu-
nity based around access to mediated texts as well as communal practice is
part of what defines his movement as different, and modern.
A contrasting way of analyzing the distinction of religious movements
is also concerned with the operation of media but places their value differ-
ently. Michael Warner (2002) and Charles Taylor (2007) have argued that
the distinction of contemporary religious movements is that they are orga-
nized using forms and epistemological structures taken from the secular
public sphere. Media are central to this process, but Warner emphasizes
the articulation of technology with the wider political ideologies and cul-
tural structures of a public rather than the autonomy of technology itself.
To address or inhabit a public, Warner argues, is to be constituted in a cer-
tain sort of way, to imagine a particular type of collectivity. Unlike say,
clan membership, or inherited religious identities (such as Judaism) a pub-
lic is expansive, potentially open to anyone, whose ability to join depends
on individual choice. This voluntaristic association is a powerful part of
contemporary religious movements (certainly different from the closed ini-
tiation of Sufi orders) and reveals how far they have moved away from
exclusivist ideas of religious belonging. Similarly, these movements depend
upon the distanced, reflexive understanding of religion as a system, with
each religious tradition seen as one of a range of similar such traditions.
Religion is not automatically internalized as an unquestioned truth but is
reflexively questioned, as the availability of differing possibilities of belief
and practice places a burden on the adherent to choose her way from a
range of other competing possibilities. This is where Habermas’s (1989)
model of a public as a realm of open debate and choice that fragments
existing sacral authority comes into play. Secularism provides what Taylor
(2007) calls the “background” or “context of understanding” that reorders
the place of religion and restructures the way individuals imagine religious
belonging. Conceived of in this sense, the modernity of Gumi and Izala
can be found again, not in terms of religious beliefs per se, but in the form
of organization in which those beliefs are imagined. It is a form whose
organizational and epistemological structure is shaped by secularism as

much by religion itself.
Warner argues that because a public is constituted as a relation between
strangers the circulation of cultural forms—from pamphlets and cassettes
to radio shows and television programs—is central to providing a unified
cultural experience. Media are as central to this analysis as they are for
more technicist scholars, but their role is conceived differently. Like
McLuhan (1994[1964]) and Benedict Anderson (1991) who see the
standardization of print and particularly the circulation of newspapers as a