Page 28 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Introduction 13

In order to better grasp the ways in which religious mediations address
and mobilize people and form them aesthetically—the main concern of
our research and this volume, as explained in the previous section—I have
coined the notion of “sensational form” (Meyer 2006a).
These are relatively fixed, authorized modes of invoking and organizing
access to the transcendental, thereby creating and sustaining links between
believers in the context of particular religious power structures. Sensational
forms shape both religious content (beliefs, doctrines, sets of symbols) and
norms. Including all the media that act as intermediaries in religious medi-
ation practices, the notion of sensational form is meant to explore how
exactly mediations bind and bond believers with each other, and with the
transcendental. These forms are transmitted and shared; they involve reli-
gious practitioners in particular practices of worship, and play a central
role in modulating them as religious moral subjects. It needs to be stressed
again that I do not use form in opposition to content and meaning, or eth-
ical norms and values, but as a necessary condition without which the lat-
ter cannot be conveyed. Sensational forms can best be understood as a
condensation of practices, attitudes, and ideas that structure religious
15
experiences and hence “ask” to be approached in a particular manner.
Religious sensational forms work in the context of particular traditions of
usage, which invoke sensations by inducing particular dispositions and
practices toward these forms. In other words, such forms are part and par-
cel of a particular religious aesthetics, which governs a sensory engagement
of humans with the divine and each other and generates particular sensi-
bilities that “are not something purely cognitive but are rooted in the expe-
rience of the body in its entirety, as a complex of culturally and historically
honed sensory modalities” (Hirschkind 2006, 101).
Exploring the implications that the availability of new media has for
religious groups, the question is how these new media impact on estab-
lished sensational forms, and hence the aesthetic styles that form subjects
and communities. We found that the question of the adequacy of old and
new media to mediate the transcendental may give rise to vehement dis-
agreements, as for instance in the case of Candomblé in Salvador de
Bahia, where priestesses such as the renowned Mae Stella have taken up

an “iconophobic” position, insisting that the secret truth-knowledge at
the heart of Candomblé does not lend itself to any other form of media-
tion than the body of the spirit medium. In other words, religious knowl-
edge can only be acquired through the experience of the “real time” of the
lengthy initiation process. However, at the same time television formats
enter into the terreiros—for example, when initiates demand a video-
recording of their initiation ceremony, preferably in the telenovela style
(van de Port 2006), and priestesses engage in asserting their presence and