Page 30 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Introduction 15

volume), and whether and how these remediations are authenticated as
acceptable and suitable harbingers of religious experience.
Other contributions to this volume spotlight how new audiovisual
media are being incorporated into religious mediation practices, generat-
ing new sensational forms. Maria José de Abreu (Chapter 7) shows that for
the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR), television is regarded as a mod-
ern technology that is suitable to render present the Holy Spirit. Analyzing
Charismatics’ richly somatic experiences of contact with the Spirit, she
discerns a telling homology between the Holy Spirit and an “electricity
generator” that “infuses energies,” and the association of the bodies of
believers with “antennas of retransmission.” Therefore, television is not
considered as a Fremdkörper, but as exceptionally suitable to screen the
message of the CCR to a mass public. A similar idea of direct transmission
underpins Rafael Sánchez’ analysis of Pentecostal squatters in Caracas
(Chapter 10), who have their bodies seized by the Holy Spirit as Its prime
medium and, in turn, seize whatever houses or goods the Spirit tells them
to take. Sánchez analyzes Pentecostal church services in the Monarchical
Church in Caracas as a “televisual context” in which participants raise
their arms, not unlike a “forest of antennas,” eager to transmit “live” the
power of the Holy Spirit. In the Ghanaian ICGC, pastor Mensa Otabil has
his image, and the footage of his recorded service, carefully edited so as to
appear as a charismatic icon to his nationwide and international audiences
(Chapter 8), eager to touch them even by transmitting the Holy Spirit via
the television screen. Indeed, as also Carly Machado (Chapter 9) shows,
cameras and screens are indispensable for the creation of fame and cha-
risma, as in the case of the prophet Raël, who appears as most powerful
and present not by being actually there, but via his screened “live” image.
All these examples suggest remarkable elective affinities between religious
modes of representation and new audiovisual technologies (see also Pinney
17
2004; Stolow 2008). At stake is, in other words, a confluence of media
technologies, on the one hand, and the transcendental that they claim to
make accessible and the modes through which they address and mold sub-
jects via sensational forms, on the other. In this sense, spiritual power
materializes in the medium, and is predicated to touch people in an

immediate manner.
This entanglement of media and gods and spirits in religious sensa-
tional forms is not limited to religious groups per se, but also occurs in
broader realms, such as entertainment (e.g., Hoover 2006). My own
research on “pentecostalite” video-films in Ghana (Meyer 2003a, 2004a,
2005a, 2005b), for example, investigates the intersection of these films
with the tremendous popularity of Pentecostal-Charismatic churches.
Intriguingly, audiences understand technology as acting in the service of