Page 159 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

142 Pamela E. Klassen

about the possibilities of tactics in the face of strategies. This was clear in
his discussion of the continuum of religious belief and media manipulation.
Arguing that “advertising has become evangelical,” de Certeau went further
to say that media had assumed the place of religion in organizing the
everyday:

Captured by the radio (the voice is the law) as soon as he awakens,
the listener walks all day long through the forest of narrativities from
journalism, advertising, and television, narrativities that still find time, as
he is getting ready for bed, to slip a few final messages under the portals
of sleep. Even more than the God told about by the theologians of earlier
days, these stories have a providential and predestining function: they
organize in advance our work, our celebrations, and even our dreams.
(de Certeau 1984: 186)

According to de Certeau, scholars themselves are both agents and subjects
of this all-encompassing narrativity, as they engage in the “modern mythical
practice” of creating theories and writing texts to explain their world (de
Certeau 1984).
Despite this bleak view of media manipulation, de Certeau’s notion of
tactics left some room for the possibility of what historian Henri Lefebvre
called “inventive praxis.” For Lefebvre, Marx’s notion of praxis was based
both in the material conditions of human existence and the (sometimes)
metaphysical speculation that humans engaged in to think of their worlds:
“praxis encompasses both material production and ‘spiritual’ production”
(Lefebvre 1966: 25; 2002: 237). Inventive praxis, according to Lefebvre,
was based on the repetitive, habitual kinds of practice (akin to Bourdieu’s
notion) but led to creative transformations of “human relations (including
their ethical dimensions)” (Lefebvre 2002: 242). Despite his attention to
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inventive praxis, Lefebvre’s analysis of media fell largely within the “mass
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media as propaganda” approach of many twentieth-century critics. Similarly
to de Certeau, Lefebvre saw mass media as taking over the propagandizing role
previously performed by religious institutions (namely churches; Lefebvre
2002: 84). In their fatalistic critiques of the overweening power of mass
media (which for them was constituted largely of the press, television, films,
and radio), these master theoreticians of practice seemed to have closed their
eyes to the wedge that practice could open for understanding how women
and men reading, seeing, or hearing media images and narratives might have
creatively reinterpreted or even resisted them.
Practice, then, is a concept with much invested in it. Scholars and
critics have turned to it as a category that can house the reflective and the
habituated body, the strategic powerful and the tactical weak. It has played