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
10
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).