Page 27 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

12 Birgit Meyer

sense to claim that there is a religious essence that exists prior to, and inde-
pendent of, the medium through which this essence is subsequently
expressed (see also Mazzarella 2004). As content cannot exist without
form, a message is always mediated. It is formed by the technologies
through which it is expressed, yet—contra Marshall McLuhan’s “The
Medium Is the Message”—not to be reduced to these technologies.
Interestingly, in many of the religious settings we encountered in our
research, no clear separation is being drawn between medium and mes-
sage, form and content. What looks like media from an outsider’s perspec-
tive may be fully embedded in religious practice, such as, to name just a
few examples, icons in Byzantine Catholicism (James 2004), the Torah in
Judaism (Stolow 2007, forthcoming), photographs in spirit possession
(Behrend 2003; Morris 2000), audiocassettes and other audiovisual media
in new Islamic movements (Eisenlohr 2006; Hirschkind 2001, 2006;
Schulz 2003, 2006a, 2006b), photographs and lithographs in Hinduism
(Pinney 2004) or television and computers in Pentecostal Churches (de
Abreu, de Witte, and Sánchez in this volume). The media that are involved
in invoking and getting in touch with the transcendental and in binding
and bonding believers are usually rendered invisible through established
and authorized religious structures. By the same token the media intrinsic
to religious mediation are exempted from the sphere of “mere” technology.
In so doing, media are authenticated as being part and parcel of the very
transcendental that is the target of—and from a more skeptical perspec-
tive: invoked by—mediation. In other words, mediation itself is sacralized
(see also Chidester 2008) and attributed with a sense of immediacy through
which the distance between believers and the transcendental is transcended
(Mazzarella 2006; see also Eisenlohr n.d.; Engelke 2007). Paradoxically,
immediacy thus depends on mediation and its denial.
The conceptualization of religion as mediation was a major step in our
research program. Once media are understood as being intrinsic to reli-
gion, it becomes of central concern to explore the ways in which people
negotiate and possibly adopt new media. We found that media by and
large only become an issue when they are new and the possibility of using
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them is considered. This raises exciting empirical questions as to how

new media relate to—for example, fit in with, reinforce, challenge, affect,
transform—established practices of mediation. Instead of studying how
religious practitioners adopt modern media, and media broadcast religion,
as was the case with earlier approaches in the field of religion and media,
our program focused on shifts in religious mediation. We did so by explor-
ing how religious groups negotiate new (or at least newly accessible) media,
and the formats, styles, and possibilities for public exposure as well as the
modes of binding and bonding that go along with them.