Page 257 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

242 Rafael Sánchez

Under such a relentless exposition and exposure, politicians must put
their bodies—now increasingly rendered in all of their idiosyncrasies and
quirks as sites of government in their own right—on the line and govern
through constant polling, focus groups, plebiscites, and other such means
that make them directly answerable to the whims and desires of the public.
As celebrities and politicians are increasingly exchangeable, so too, the dis-
tinctions between “present” and “past,” “here” and “there,” or “private”
and “public” domains become increasingly blurred in a media-saturated
environment that renders the body into the tremulous site where, in all of
its passionate immediacy, the intimations of a ghostly elsewhere are imme-
diately registered and sensed. No longer protected by a series of representa-
tive instances that are either gone or currently undergoing a severe crisis,
such a sentient, haunted body is, in other words, returned to the center of
sociality and, much like that of the Pentecostals in the service that I briefly
evoked a few pages ago, is increasingly delivered to a battle against demons.
No wonder, then, if more and more around the globe, social life increas-
ingly dissolves into mortal bodily combat, with a series of antagonistic
interests and aspirations directly expressed and registered through the
medium of the human body.
As witnessed by President Clinton’s cigar, the Abu Ghraib photo-
graphs, the Mark Foley scandal, or, even more recently and ominously,
the digitally reproduced execution of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, which
bespeak the catastrophic intrusion of the “private” into the very heart of
quintessential “public” institutions, recently all over the world such a pro-
tected bourgeois sphere has been emitting signs of a severe malaise.
Occasioned by globalization and the proliferation of media of all kinds,
from small to mass, one may detect in such a malaise signs of a universal
withdrawal of the politico-theological, hounded by a bunch of dirty little
secrets digitally reproduced and nearly uncontrollably disseminated by
the media, a situation that, as with the Pentecostal squatters, does not
come without both the wholesale spectralization of sociality and wide-
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spread violence —this, along with the viscerality and bodiliness inherent
in a collective life increasingly reduced to a sweaty hand-to-hand combat
with politics dissolving into a series of discreet issues, all viscerally fought

out on behalf of one or another “mystical” instance or authority.
Dangerously bereft of those representational protective instances that in
the past introduced a postponement or delay between the immediate
expression of a series of conflicting passions and interests, focalized in the
body, and their properly political negotiation in a sphere away from such a
turbulent setting, such a collective life, in other words, increasingly looks
like a series of disjointed battlefields where bodies meet and clash with
one another.