Page 255 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

240 Rafael Sánchez

that the squatters attend every Sunday. To give a sense of the televisually
inflected character of the public sphere that is so sensationally brought
about through the intimations of Spirit, it suffices to cast a brief glance at
any of these Sunday services in downtown Caracas’ Monarchical Church.
Attended by crowds of believers, these services are part of the “Prosperity
Gospel” that, more and more throughout Venezuela, places spirituality
and material gain in a strict means-end relationship, so much so that,
among the squatters, the question “how are you?” is often answered with a
resounding “blessed, prosperous, and victorious,” a set phrase that poi-
gnantly conveys the acquisitive and belligerent overtones of their brand of
Christianity.
Something noticeable about the services is how little they respect the
separation between audience and stage that authors like Lyotard and oth-
ers regard as requisite to the constitution of representation or the represen-
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tative relation. In the Monarchical Church, no one really represents
anything; there is seemingly no gap or temporal delay separating the rep-
resentative from the represented, safely kept at a distance in their place,
patiently waiting for the proceedings to end. Instead, in this televisual con-
text everyone is bent on directly presenting live the power of Spirit burst-
ing among those present through their talking, singing, laughing,
trembling, jumping, or uncontrollable sobbing. It begins with the audi-
ence on their feet, their arms raised high like a forest of swaying, vibrating
antennas, thus ready to receive the gift of the Holy Ghost descending
among them right from the stage where, clad in black, the pastor thunder-
ously preaches. From that moment on, all precarious distinctions start to
break down. As a large part of the “audience” moves onto the stage, a ritual
battle unfolds there in which, from demons to deity, everything that once
was either distant or hidden is instantaneously revealed. In principle invis-
ible, such hitherto unavailable dimensions break into the open through
forms of disclosure or revelation that unceremoniously break down any
separations between “private” and “public” domains or the “represented”
and the “representative” that formerly were more or less precariously in
place.
“Everything that is hidden must be revealed;” this is how Hermana

Juana responded this past June to my horrified reaction to the Venezuelan
attorney general’s words on national television concerning a prominent
priest found killed in his hotel room in Caracas. Insisting that the priest
had “participated in his own death,” the government official publicly
disclosed the state of the priest’s most intimate viscera, revealing to a
national audience that his “rectum had been mistreated” and that a “con-
dom was found stuck in his anus.” These horrific homophobic words are
part of the Chávez regime’s attempt to discredit one of its most staunch