Page 135 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

120 Brian Larkin

key element in creating the preconditions for nationalism, Warner sees the
circulation of cultural forms as important in bringing strangers together
into a relationship whereby they interact through the consumption of those
forms. Moreover, Warner argues strongly for the “cultural mediation” of
technologies and how they are shaped by metalanguages of political and
religious ideology that frame their use. In distinction from McLuhan,
Walter Ong (1967), and Kittler, he argues against the idea of a medium
such as print having an inherent technological logic unmoored from cul-
tural and political philosophies—a “mere technology, a medium itself
unmediated” (1990, 5). The history of printing for Warner is not just one
of machines but of the public within which printing took place. Ideas of
democracy and rationalization, theologies of divine inspiration and mysti-
cal presence are thus seen to be as constitutive of “print” as the technolog-
ical features of mass-produced text. Following this theoretical paradigm,
the modernity of Gumi and the movement he spawned lies in their articu-
lation of religious renewal through the forms of a public. It involves ana-
lyzing changes in education and taking seriously the lineage of thought
and practice within Christian or Muslim tradition that produce new reli-
gious subjects and govern their interaction with technologies. This is some-
thing Charles Hirschkind (2006) explores in his study of the use of
cassettes within Egyptian piety movements (see also De Abreu and De
Witte in this volume) and indeed is a central problematic governing the
volume as a whole.
In this chapter I wish to draw these traditions together by using the fig-
ure of Gumi as an exemplar of both a new religious public in Nigeria but
also to interrogate how the shape of that public is formed by the materiality
of the communications technologies he used. Like McLuhan and Kittler I
want to insist on the organizing power of media, that they are not simply
“used” by people for certain purposes but have an intransitive nature that
organizes and uses people as much as vice versa. But like Warner and
Hirschkind I think that this can only be appreciated by comprehending
the wider cultural and religious logics that are also determinative in pro-
ducing religious subjects. To do this the chapter tacks between examining
media technologies and the wider educational and religious shifts of which

they were part.

Mediated Tafsir

In Kano, Nigeria, during Ramadan, radio and television switch from a
broad program of entertainment and news to a wholly religious one offering