Page 19 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

4 Birgit Meyer

making of community, as is also suggested by Michael Warner (2002; see
also Hofmeyr 2006; Sumiala 2008). In this understanding, a community
is not a preexisting entity that expresses itself via a fixed set of symbols, but
a formation that comes into being through the circulation and use of
shared cultural forms and that is never complete (Latour 2005; see also de
Abreu and Guadeloupe in this volume).
While Anderson was interested in the implications of the shift from
premodern large-scale religious imagined communities to the rise of
nationalism and the nation-state as the prime module of the modern era,
this volume explores the rise and appeal of religious, mass mediated com-
munities at a time in which the nation-state is found to be somewhat in
disarray (partly because it faces the emergence of religious communities
that challenge the capacity of the secular state to maintain the primacy of
the nation over religious identities). Even though our research is located at
another historical moment, Anderson’s analysis of the rise of the modern
nation-state in the wake of the decline of large-scale religious communities
united by a sacred language is a productive starting point for further reflec-
tion about the potential and limitation of the notion of the modern imag-
ined community.
As is well known, Anderson attributed the possibility of imagining the
nation in the first place to the “half fortuitous, but explosive, interaction
between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a
technology of communication (print), and the fatality of human diversity”
(1991, 42). This interaction yielded an entirely new mode of experiencing
the world and imagining community. The decisive difference between the
imagination of community in premodern and modern times can be grasped
by focusing on the shifting status of language. In the past, the sacred lan-
guages of Latin, Arabic, Greek, and Chinese were “the media through
which the great global communities of the past were imagined.” What was
said in these sacred languages “were emanations of reality, not randomly
fabricated representations of it.” As ontological reality was apprehensible
only through the “truth-language of Church Latin, Quu’ranic Arabic, or
Examination Chinese” (14), the imaginations of community that were
conveyed by these languages could be experienced as true.

Modern imaginations of community, by contrast, are formed on the
basis of a modern understanding of language that rests on the idea of the
arbitrariness of the sign (43). From this perspective, language is a referen-
tial code that is separated from that which it bespeaks, and that has lost an
earlier ontology of truth inextricably bound up with the legitimacy of
divinity, and the worldly power backed by it. Anderson emphasized that in
Europe print capitalism lay the basis for a new modern national conscious-
ness by creating new spheres of communication (above the many vernaculars