Page 23 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense
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8 Birgit Meyer
consumer culture. For instance, in his book Community. Seeking Safety in
an Insecure World (2001[1790]), Zygmunt Bauman claims that the aes-
thetic community is “brought forth and consumed in the ‘warm circle’ of
experience,” yet faces a problem of endurance and is doomed to disappoint
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because of its lack of “binding power” (65). This type of community is,
according to Bauman, closely linked with the entertainment industry that
seduces people through elaborate spectacles, featuring celebrities and short-
lived idols who “conjure up the ‘experience of community’ without real
community, the joy of belonging without the discomfort of being bound”
(69). He draws a sharp distinction between aesthetic communities that
produce “bonds without consequences,” and ethical communities that
entail, as conceptualized by Durkheim, “ethical responsibilities” and
“long-term commitment” (71ff.). In a similar manner, Veit Erlmann
describes aesthetic communities as grounded in an epistemology of appear-
ance (Erscheinung) rather than substance (Wesen), and as a “hallmark of a
worldview without synthesis, of an age of contingency and ambiguity,” to
be found in “societies without the security of tradition, but also without
the claims to universal truth of former eras” (1998, 12).
Here, aesthetic community is devoted to pleasure and beauty, and
smacks of postmodern superficiality and lack of substance. While it is
debatable as to how far these authors stay close to Kant’s original notion of
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sensus communis aestheticus, they do still carry the legacy of his narrowing
down of aesthetics to beauty and the arts, and a rather crude distinction
between concepts and feelings, mind and body, appearance and substance
(Meyer and Verrips 2008, 22ff.). While I appreciate the fluidity entailed in
the notion of aesthetic community, invoking a sense of being always in the
making, I have severe reservations about its equation with mere pleasure
and consumer culture, and the, albeit implicit, disdain with regard to
experience and emotions. The undeniable existence of the kind of instant,
easily dissolvable communities that Bauman and Erlmann have in mind
should not yield a generalized view of aesthetic communities as necessarily
superficial and short-lived, and opposed to a more genuine kind of com-
munity. In sum, against the backdrop of my plea for a broader understand-
ing of aesthetics in terms of aisthesis that is not predicated on a dualism of
body and mind and acknowledges the role of all senses in experiencing,
and making sense of, the world, it is clear that the notion of aesthetic com-
munity as it has so far been employed is of limited use for our purposes:
grasping the dynamics of the transformation and binding capacity of reli-
gion in our contemporary world.
My notion of aesthetic formation resonates well with Michael Maffesoli’s
proposition of a new understanding of community in our time (1996),
which takes seriously the importance of media (in particular images), their