Page 40 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Introduction 25

and ethnographic exploration in the framework of a comparative perspective.
For more information see www.pscw.uva.nl/media-religion. Next to a host of
articles authored by the program participants, the program also yielded five
dissertations: Guadeloupe 2006a, published in 2008; Oosterbaan 2006; de
Witte 2008; Hoek 2008; and de Abreu 2009, as well as four publications
derived from conferences we organized (Meyer and Moors 2006a; Hughes and
Meyer 2005; Meyer 2008b; Hirschkind and Larkin 2008).
2. In his groundbreaking book, Cohen pointed out that the recourse to fiction
and symbolism occurs when geographic, natural boundaries become insecure.
The perceived threat of the erosion of the local, be it via the homogenizing
force of states or the processes of deterritorialization associated with globaliza-
tion, means that community becomes increasingly a fiction existing primarily
in people’s minds. In this view, a social formation qualifies as a community if
people feel a strong emotional attachment to a shared set of forms and images
that do not necessarily derive from “natural,” spatial boundaries.
3. Anderson’s view, of course, resonates with modern theories of language and the
symbolic as systems or codes of representation. As many scholars have noted,
the modern attitude toward language and the world is based on a rift between
the sign or symbol and its referent in the world. Thinkers from de Saussure to
Lacan took as a point of departure this basic separation of language and reality,
symbols and experience, representation and the world, implying that the mod-
ern imagination hovers around the perception of a loss of reality that can never
be recaptured. An intriguing position that questions a view of language as
based on an arbitrary system of signs is offered by Peirce, who introduced a
differentiated array of signs, among them index and icon, which are under-
stood to render present what they represent, thus overcoming the rift between
sign and reality that goes with Saussurian approaches (Keane 2007).
4. Latour’s Reassembling the Social (2005) has been a major source of inspiration.
I agree with Latour that “it is not enough for sociologists to recognize that a
group is made, ‘reproduced,’ or ‘constructed’ through many means and through
many tools” (39). The Social is not constructed around a preexisting set of col-
lective representations (as an all too simple reading of Durkheim might sug-
gest—ibid., 38), but is being “reassembled” in a dynamic process of ongoing
mediation.
5. This question stands central in a new NWO-sponsored research program
directed by Mattijs van de Port, Herman Roodenburg, and myself, titled
Heritage Dynamics. Aesthetics of Persuasion and Politics of Authentication in

Brazil, Ghana, South Africa and the Netherlands.
6. The particular aesthetic through which the Nazi regime sought to draw citi-
zens into its vision of a Germanic superpower (see Benjamin 1999[1936]) is just
an extreme example of the use of aesthetic resources by nation-states to envelop
citizens in the imagined community of the nation. Scholars have been suspi-
cious about the political use of aesthetics, regarding it as a supreme demagogi-
cal tool. While it is of course important to be critical about the ways in which
states, and other power regimes, address and form people by appealing to their
senses and shaping the material environment, it is high time for social scientists