Page 21 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense
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6 Birgit Meyer
subjects. Anderson’s remark, made somewhat in passing, that communities
are to be distinguished “by the style in which they are imagined” (1991, 6,
my emphasis), hints at the importance of scrutinizing how the binding of
people into imagined communities actually occurs and is realized in a
material sense. More attention needs to be paid to the role played by things,
media, and the body in actual processes of community making. Indeed, in
order to grasp the particular modes through which imaginations material-
ize through media and become manifest in public space, generating senso-
rial sensibilities and aptitudes that vest these imaginations with a sense of
truth, we need to move into the broader sphere of what I call aesthetic
formations. 6
II Aesthetic Formations
As I have just explained, I launch the notion of “aesthetic formation” so
as to overcome the limitations of “imagined community,” while retain-
ing Anderson’s view that the making of bonds in modern times depends
on media and mediation. This raises the question as to what can be
gained by substituting “imagined” with “aesthetic,” and “community”
with “formation.”
Let me begin with the former. My understanding of aesthetics is not
confined to the now common meaning that it acquired at the end of the
eighteenth century (largely through Immanuel Kant), when it became lim-
ited to the beautiful in the sphere of the arts and its disinterested beholder.
Instead, I suggest returning to its roots in Aristotle’s much older and more
encompassing notion of aisthesis, which designates “our corporeal capabil-
ity on the basis of a power given in our psyche to perceive objects in the
world via our five different sensorial modes (. . .), and at the same time a
specific constellation of sensations as a whole” (Meyer and Verrips 2008,
21). Understood in this way, aisthesis refers to “our total sensory experience
of the world and our sensitive knowledge of it” (ibid.; see also Verrips 2006;
de Abreu, Hoek in this volume). This appreciation of a more encompass-
ing, embodied understanding of aesthetics as rooted in aisthesis is now
beginning to be more widely shared among scholars so as to better account
for the affective power of images, sounds, and texts over their beholders.
Especially in the study of the relation between religion and media, and in
the field of visual culture at large, scholars seek to move beyond a represen-
tational stance that privileges the symbolic above other modes of experi-
ence, and tends to neglect the reality effects of cultural forms. The coinage
of new terms such as “corpothetics” (Pinney 2004), “somaesthetics”