Page 37 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

22 Birgit Meyer

politics, entertainment, and the public realm at large, raises critical ques-
tions. Reflecting on the lure of the body in contemporary politics and
religion, Rafael Sánchez (Chapter 10) situates Venezuelan Pentecostals in a
broader development of the political order toward an erosion of the demar-
cation between private and public and the concomitant “return of bodili-
ness, viscerality, and the senses to center stage.” The practice of politics, he
observes, becomes more and more analogous to the mode of operation of
the Holy Ghost, who sensuously grips believers in his crusade to possess
the world. Not unlike Pentecostal church services, the Venezuelan public
sphere has become a site in which a politics of representation, with its own
registers of critical reflection predicated on distance, is being replaced by a
striving for the immediate “live” presence of political power, which, in
turn, is heavily indebted to registers from televisual entertainment (Sánchez
2001). Discerning throughout the world similar processes of collapsing the
political into a spiritual struggle between God and the Devil, Sánchez
closes his chapter wondering whether “something good is ever to come out
from such an unsettling state of affairs, so redolent with viscerality.”
Despite being difficult to answer, the question itself is immediately rel-
evant to the central proposition made in this introduction: the need for a
conceptual shift from the notion of imagined communities to aesthetic
formations. As I pointed out in Section I, in earlier work on the making of
communities, the bodily dimension has been quite neglected. Of course,
this neglect did by no means imply that this dimension did not actually
matter in social life: the point is that it did not capture much scholarly
attention. However, the strong interest in the body, the senses, experience
and aesthetics in the social and cultural sciences today signals an increas-
ing awareness that the emergence and sustenance of social formations
depends on styles that form and bind subjects not only through cognitive
imaginations, but also through molding the senses and building bodies. It
is no wonder that this interest comes up at a time in which many religions
move toward a strong, deliberate emphasis on spectacular sensuous experi-
ences, the public realm becomes a stage for self presentation and display of
identity (as signaled by Warner [1992] in his critique of Habermas’s disem-
bodied view of the public sphere as constituted by talking heads), and

politicians ever more frequently play the personal card and are pushed to
prove their authenticity. In the Erlebnisgesellschaft (Schulze 1993), the body
and the senses that are stimulated so as to provoke grand sensations, cer-
tainly demand reflection and research.
Scholarly attention paid to the body and the senses, however, should
not yield a straightforward celebration of embodiment and an uncritical
adoption of the body as the real ground of experience. This point is made
perceptively by Lotte Hoek (Chapter 3) who explicitly looks not only at