Page 231 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

216 Carly Machado

Celebrating Religiosity: Shows and Parties as
Religious Experiences

Understanding Raelian performances means understanding celebrities and
audiences. These elements represent two levels of reality: the here and now,
where the performances of celebrities unfold on the stage of Indalo Park
Hotel, and the future that these performances announce and prepare for: a
moment when “all of this will be true” and when what today takes place in
a hotel auditorium in front of an audience of 600 people will be realized on
an international scale with the entire planet as its audience.
The performative acts of Raelian religiosity infuse personal relations
with elements typical of the expressions of power inherent to the logic of
the spectacle, fame being the principal of these elements. This movement’s
strongly hierarchical institutional model separates celebrities from the gen-
eral public: the latter make up the numbers, but do not form the central
event in this “show.” The smaller the performance, the more prominence
each element receives and the more fame becomes diluted. The larger
the event, the more the division of these categories is accentuated, meaning
that the minority are responsible for the show, while the rest are left to play
the role of the audience.
Marshall (2001) stresses the power of the audience as the epicenter of the
celebrity’s power. Indeed, according to the author, the historical emergence
of the idea of celebrity coincides and is correlated with the emergence of the
audience as a social category. In his analysis, the author highlights the con-
cept of audience-subject: while the celebrity occupies the scene in a subjec-
tive position, on the opposite side, rather than a receptive and passive object
position as might be anticipated, we find another subject position: this gives
rise to an audience-subject, whose agency participated directly in the consti-
tution of the celebrity. “The celebrity’s strength or power as a discourse on
the individual is operationalized only in terms of the power and position of
the audience that has allowed it to circulate” (65).
The Raelian Seminar is the centre stage of the Raelian experience.
Everything that takes place there tends to be replicated in local meetings.
In the Seminar, performances are organized to start with the brain and end
with the body. In the morning, it’s time for meditations and talks: perfor-
mances of rationality executed on the main stage by the movement’s lead-
ers and mostly verbal and, in some cases, audiovisual. Raël is the main
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performer in these events. Alongside him, Daniel Chabot and Brigitte
Boisselier provide the setting of rationality: the former as the one who
reveals “the truth” about the brain and its functions through images, con-
firming the Raelian message; the latter, the spokeswoman for the sciences