Page 16 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Introduction

From Imagined Communities to

Aesthetic Formations: Religious

Mediations, Sensational Forms,

and Styles of Binding

Birgit Meyer

Over the past decade, a host of studies probing into the relation between
religion and media emerged in the interface of anthropology, sociology,
media studies, religious studies, philosophy, and the arts. Moving beyond a
view of religion and media in terms of a puzzling antagonism, in which two
ontologically distinct spheres—the spiritual and the technological—collide,
scholars now develop new approaches that regard media as intrinsic to reli-
gion. Rather than interpreting the at times spectacular incorporations of
new media by religious groups as an entirely new phenomenon, the question
raised is that of how a new medium interferes with older media that have
long been part of religious practice. This understanding moves our inquiry
out of the limiting field of binary oppositions, in which religion features as

the Other of modernity and technology, whose eventual disappearance is
presumed. The shift toward a new postsecularist vantage point from which
to explore the rearticulation of religion in specific contemporary settings
(Asad 2003; Taylor 2007) proves to be far more productive than debates
about the decline of religion or its withdrawal from the public sphere under-
taken from the paradigm of secularization. It allows us to take a fresh look
at the salient appeal and public presence of diverse forms of contemporary
religious expressivity (De Vries 2008).