Page 20 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Introduction 5

and below Latin) that yielded more or less fixed languages associated with
new national centers of power. He posited that this process was facilitated
by the “very arbitrariness of any system of signs for sounds” (43).
At this point our criticisms come in. If the language in which modern
imagined communities are expressed is basically arbitrary, the question
arises as to how these communities face the burden of featuring as in prin-
ciple “randomly fabricated representations” that are no longer rooted in a
“truth-language” and manage to be taken as real, rather than just imag-
3
ined, by their members. How, in other words, are the languages on which
modern imagined communities depend reinvested with a sense of truth
and reality? A theoretical focus that remains limited to the “imagination”
is unlikely to help us answer this question, the problem being that such a
focus calls for the theoretical exercise of (de)constructing imaginations by
revealing the mechanics of their construction. While the usefulness of
constructivist approaches is beyond doubt, certainly when it concerns the
unmasking of power claims that posit essentialized truths, in order to
understand how imaginations become real for people we must move a step
4
further (Latour 2005, 88ff.; Geschiere 2009). How can we grasp the rigor
with which members of imagined communities (long to) experience these
imagined bonds as authentic repositories of truth beyond questioning in
5
our time? Anderson himself asserted that the nation, despite being a fig-
ment of the imagination, has the power to invoke strong, emotional affects
in and bonds between people, preparing them to die—or kill—in its name.
The imagined community of the nation, thriving as it does on strong feel-
ings of attachment and commitment, strives to command citizens’ confi-
dence in the truthfulness of its fictionality.
Persuading people of the truthfulness of fictions is a process that we
also encountered in our research on the power and appeal of religious mes-
sages, even though they may well be characterized as simulacra that suc-
cessfully convey “reality-effects” (Schwartz 1995, 316; see especially van de
Port in this volume). Indeed, in order to achieve this and be experienced as
real, imaginations are required to become tangible outside the realm of the
mind, by creating a social environment that materializes through the struc-
turing of space, architecture, ritual performance, and by inducing bodily

sensations (see also Meyer 2008a). In brief, in order to become experienced
as real, imagined communities need to materialize in the concrete lived
environment and be felt in the bones. The point is that although Anderson
acknowledged the importance of emotional attachment and embodiment,
this is not fully accommodated by his theoretical notion of the modern
imagination. Stuck in asserting the essentially arbitrary character of all
signs, this notion is of limited use to show how imaginations become tan-
gible by materializing in spaces and objects, and by being embodied in