Page 42 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Introduction 27

of the transcendental because I share Vivian Sobchack’s proposition that
human beings, as lived bodies, “have the capacity for transcendence: for a
unique exteriority of being—an ex-stasis—that locates us ‘elsewhere’ and ‘oth-
erwise’ even as it is grounded in and tethered to our lived body’s ‘here’ and
‘now’ ” (2008, italics in the original). While I acknowledge that defining reli-
gion is deeply problematic because definitions tend to freeze contingent his-
torical factors into universal features (Asad 1993), I deem it important that we
can still speak about religion and make comparisons. In my understanding,
the transcendental (in the sense of an “other” or “alter” that exceeds the ordi-
nary) is key to most understandings of religion, even if scholars do not spell
this out explicitly. Certainly at a time in which, against the expectations of
secularization theory, gods and spirits appear to have so much appeal, instead
of remaining stuck in asserting the impossibility of defining religion, we need
to explore what kinds of religion and religiosities emerge in our era of global-
ization and mediatization (see also Csordas 2007, 261). This is the prime con-
cern of the present volume.
14. Of course, this approach is not new per se. It resonates with a large body of
works by media historians, which moves beyond technological determinism
and grounds new technological inventions in the field of communication
(such as the bicycle, the train, the telegraph, radio, television, etc.) in specific
social fields, teasing out how at a given time new media relate to already exist-
ing “old” media. For a well-argued plea in favor of such historically grounded
understandings of media and technology that also take into account the
dimension of aesthetics, style and design see Verbeek 2005.
15. My notion of sensational form is indebted to David Morgan’s seminal work in
the field of religious visual culture, which can well be extended to the broader
field of religious mediations. As he put it, “images and how people look at
them are evidence for understanding belief, which should not be reduced to
doctrines or creeds of a propositional nature. Belief is embodied practice no
less than a cerebral one. Revelation is a constellation of seeing, speaking, and
writing (as well as other media) . . .” (2005, 21).
16. This may also entail a rejection of certain media as being unsuitable to be
incorporated. As argued by Michele Rosenthal (2007), many studies of reli-
gion and media have paid too little attention to the emergence of deliberate
critics and nonusers, for whom rejection of particular media becomes a dis-
tinctive marker. See also Matthew Engelke for a thoughtful analysis of how
the Zimbabwean Friday Apostolics’ rejection of media (such as books) that

render the Christian message tangible is part and parcel of a broader practice
of mediation that faces the Protestant problem of how God can be present and
yet unmediated (2007). Rejecting certain media is thus not a question of stay-
ing aloof, but needs to be analyzed as a negotiation of media in terms of their
negation.
17. The religion-technology nexus is explored in the Deus in Machina project
directed by Jeremy Stolow (http://www.ghostlymachine.com/~stolow.html,
Stolow 2008) and in the Religion and Technology project launched by the
Dutch Stichting Toekomstbeeld der Techniek (Foundation for the Future