Page 162 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Practice 145

oracular. Twisted around, [for spiritualists] mechanical mediation became
instead a vehicle of presences, a salvific force alive with vibrational and
telegraphic connections” (Schmidt 2000: 239). Schmidt’s careful attention
to a wide variety of listening practices—those of both religion’s detractors
and its enthusiasts—challenged the premise that mediated religion equals
manipulation and the equally problematic view that mediated religion offers
the possibility of a transparent devotional practice. Religion, he argued,
is mediated both as spectacular entertainment and contemplative exercise
(Schmidt 2000: 245).
Another example of mediation via sensational forms is Lisa Gitelman’s
discussion of the ways that nineteenth-century American spiritualist practices
of “automatic writing” were imagined through the new media of telegraphy—
the disembodied communication of words across great distances. Gitelman
gives detailed attention to the laws, technologies, and gendered divisions
of labor that arose with the development of “writing machines,” arguing
that technological innovations of the late nineteenth century made possible
new practices of textuality and inscription that had not only communicative
but cultural and religious effects (Gitelman 1999; see also Mràzek 1997).
Arguing for an expansive approach to the “data of culture” provided by the
study of media, Gitelman insists that studying the effect of “new” media
on religious imaginations and practices requires close attention to historical
context (Gitelman 2006; 2003). Scholars must imagine social worlds without
the telephone, for example, while also acknowledging the possibilities that
were afforded by now obsolete technologies, whether the speaking trumpet
or the telegraph.
Just as Gitelman calls scholars to re-imagine what counts as “new
media,” so too does John Durham Peters ask for a reconsideration of a
concept at the heart of media studies: “communication.” In a lyrical book
that finds its sources everywhere from New Testament scriptures to recent
attempts to contact extraterrestrials, Peters traces “the history of the idea of
communication” by way of early Christian theologians, angelology, Enlighten-
ment philosophers, and later theorists including Hegel, Marx, Durkheim,
and Adorno. Peters argues against a narrative of communication that depicts
technological innovation as necessarily leading to better forms of interaction
(1999: 10). As does Meyer, Peters places the body at the center of practices
of communication, considering it neither a barrier to true, “unmediated”
contact nor somehow expendable in the midst of new techniques of drawing
together human messages across distance: “If success in communication was
once the art of reaching across the intervening bodies to touch another’s
spirit, in the age of electronic media it has become the art of reaching across
the intervening spirits to touch another’s body” (Peters 1999: 224–5).
Focused not so much on “lived religion” as on the communicative practices