Page 18 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Introduction 3

grasp how religion and media touch ground and yield tangible forms and
formations in social life. By virtue of being mediated via modern media
that offer unprecedented possibilities to reach out and articulate religion in
the public realm, religious modes of binding and making community
transform, and this implies new opportunities, paradoxes, and tensions
(Section IV).

I Imagined Communities:
Potential and Limitations

Emile Durkheim’s question “What are the bonds which unite men one
with another?” has not lost actuality since it was raised more than 110 years
ago (1984[1893]). While the ways in which communities are formed is sub-
ject to change, it is nonetheless clear that in our contemporary world com-
munity is much in demand—even the term itself, as Zygmunt Bauman
remarks, “feels good: whatever the word ‘community’ may mean, it is good
‘to have a community’ ” (2001, 1). Although it is debatable whether reli-
gion etymologically relates to religare (to bind again), it is clear that the
quest for—and question of—community plays out even more markedly in
the field of religion. Indeed, for Durkheim, social cohesion depended on
shared collective representations of a “sacred” and its communal ritual
worship.
Seeking to grasp the making of (religious) communities in the frame-
work of the research program on which this volume is based, it has been
impossible to neglect the pioneering proposition of Benedict Anderson to
view the nation as an imagined community, existing in the minds of its
members and called into existence via a new reading public generated by
the rise of “print capitalism.” As many scholars have noted, one of the
attractions of this proposition lies in the fact that it moves beyond earlier
understandings of communities as depending on face-to-face communica-
tion, which were contrasted with modernity’s prime social formation—
Gesellschaft—and expected to vanish eventually in the face of
individualization. In Anderson’s perspective, communities evolve around
mediated imaginations that are able to substitute the (spatial) distance
2
between members with a feeling of togetherness (see also Cohen 1985).
This view of communities as not given but imagined and, by implication,
mediated has been a major source of inspiration for our research program
and this volume. It suggests that a focus on media, and the new publics—
whether these may be readers, listeners, spectators, or other kinds of audi-
ences—generated by them is a suitable starting point for studying the