Page 41 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

26 Birgit Meyer

to pay more attention to political aesthetics—understood in the broad sense
advocated in Section II—so as to better understand how power works (see
also Rancière 2006).
7. Taking inspiration from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler (1999) on the
process of subjectivation through which modern subjects are formed,
Mahmood closely examines the formative power of the Islamic piety move-
ment in the making of embodied female religious subjectivities. In so doing,
she moves beyond a dualistic understanding of religious regimes and individ-
ual persons, and calls attention to the importance of formation in the double
sense advocated here.
8. He states: “As long as it stays alive (that is, as long as it is being experienced),
aesthetic community is shot through with a paradox: since it would betray or
refute freedom of its members were it to claim non-negotiable credentials, it
has to keep its entrances and exits wide open. But were it to advertise the
resulting lack of binding power, it would fail to perform the reassuring role
which for the faithful was their prime motive in joining in” (2001: 65).
9. “Aesthetic community” is the—rather misleading—English translation of
Kant’s (2001 [1790]) notion of sensus communis aestheticus (aesthetischer Gemein-
sinn in the German original). Kant presupposed the subjective universality of
aesthetic experience and judgments of taste as solely based on feelings, not con-
cepts. The sensus communis aestheticus does not refer to an actual community,
but to a universal faculty to judge taste and experience beauty, the main point
being that this faculty can be assumed to exist. Not only is this understanding
grounded in the problematic limitation of aesthetics to beauty, it also separates
concepts and feelings and locates the faculty of experiencing pleasure in a disin-
terested beholder.
10. Perception, it needs to be noted, always involves a kind of concentration, fil-
tering out what disturbs the intensity of a particular experience. Indeed, as
Jojada Verrips argues (2006), aisthesis always implies some kind of anaesthesia.
See also Crary (2001).
11. Obviously, this resonates with Bourdieu’s work on habitus, as an embodied
disposition, and taste and style as modes of distinction.
12. Until recently, the study of visual culture was highly ocular-centric. However,
in the past decade, even in the study of media that are closely associated with
the eye—such as pictures, photographs, and films—scholars have been con-
cerned with taking into account the interplay of the senses, and the visceral,
affective dimension of visual culture (Sobchack 2004; Pinney 2004; Morgan

1998, 2005, 2007; Mitchell 2005; Freedberg 1989; Howes 2003; Verrips
2002).
13. I use “transcendental” with some hesitation and for lack of a better term, in
the sense of a power that is framed to be beyond the ordinary and in this sense
“other” or “alter” (see also Csordas 2004). I explain at some length in another
publication that my understanding of the transcendental does not postulate
the existence of a Numinous Power out there, but is grounded in the here and
now, in that my interest lies in how religions induce experiences of the tran-
scendental in the here and now (Meyer 2006a). I also opt for using the notion