Page 24 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense
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Introduction                      9

       bodily impact, and the forming power of a shared “aesthetic style” (31ff.).
       Taking as a point of departure a post-structuralist understanding of images
       as hyperreal simulacra that create a reality of their own rather than refer-
       ring to a world out there (see also Baudrillard 2001), Maffesoli is in favor
       of what he calls a “figurative sociology” (not to be confounded with the
       figuration sociology instigated by Norbert Elias), which explores the nexus
       of images and society in our contemporary “imaginal world.” The central
       feature of this imaginal world concerns the role of shared images in forging
       links between individuals, organizing them into communities. While this
       echoes Anderson’s notion of imagined community, Maffesoli pays far more
       attention than Anderson to the ways in which shared images mobilize and
       thrive upon shared sentiments, inducing modes, and moods, of feeling
       together.
         Writing in the late twentieth century, Maffesoli notes an increasing
       reenchantment that occurs around televised, mass-produced images that
       gain the status of icons and idols around which new, cultic communities
       are formed. No longer confined to a separate sphere, religiosity is spreading
       out, “contaminating, step by step, all of social life” (88). His thinking is
       clearly indebted to Durkheim’s notion of collective consciousness as con-
       stituted by “the idea that [society] has of itself” (89). As is well known, for
       Durkheim this collective consciousness was a cause and effect of efferves-
       cence, in that it offers a synthesis sui generis, “giving rise to sentiments,
       ideas and images that ‘once born, obey the laws proper to them’ ” (89).
       Maffesoli posits that the mass-produced images around which people con-
       gregate in our time have gained a quasi-religious status, in that they gener-
       ate the effervescent sentiment of sharing and taking part in a larger social
       ensemble. As this sentiment is induced via a common aesthetic, the Homo
       religious and the Homo aestheticus converge: “the sharing of the image, the
       aesthetic that this gives rise to, generates relations, engenders linkages and,
       in short, favors religion” (92).
         This aesthetic (which Maffesoli also grounds in the broad understand-
       ing of aisthesis advocated here) induces a shared sensory mode of perceiving
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       and experiencing the world that produces community.  Community thus
       evolves around shared images and other mediated cultural forms (see also

       Morgan 2007, 165ff.). This sharing, it needs to be stressed, does not merely
       depend on a common interpretation of these forms and an agreement
       about their meaning (as asserted by interpretative or symbolic anthropol-
       ogy), but on the capacity of these forms to induce in those engaging with
       them a particular common aesthetic and style. Understood as “the essen-
       tial characteristic of a collective sentiment,” style operates as a “ ‘forming
       form’ that gives birth to whole manners of being, to customs, representa-
       tions, and the various fashions by which life in society is expressed” (5).
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