Page 43 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

26 Birgit Meyer and Jojada Verrips

the ancient Greek meaning of aesthetics as “perception by feeling” grounded
in the corporeal and material and as mobilizing the senses simultaneously
(2004: 19). Corpothetics, to him, means “the sensory embrace of images,
the bodily engagement that most people (except Kantians and modernists)
have with artworks” (22). His book shows beautifully how this broader
understanding of aesthetics opens up new possibilities of inquiry into mass-
produced religious images that reveal not so much how images look but
what they can do (8).
As a great deal of research on religion and media focuses on visual culture,
it is not surprising that critiques of conventional aesthetic approaches
emerged as a result of researchers’ dissatisfaction with the incapacity of
these approaches to grasp the affective power of images and their capacity to
trigger religious experience. However, a search for a broader understanding
of aesthetics can also be found in work on nonvisual media, such as radio
and cassettes. Of special importance here is Charles Hirschkind’s work
on the ways in which mass-produced cassette sermons speak to embodied
repertoires within their young Islamic listeners, who adopt these tales into
an “ethic of listening” (2006). Stressing that people’s capacities for speaking
and hearing are shaped in a shared disciplinary context that produces
particular affective dispositions, Hirschkind shows how the realization of
Islamic moral personhood is linked to the resonant body (102). Adopting a
broad corporeal understanding of aesthetics that is inspired by Shusterman’s
notion of “somaesthetics” (2002), Hirschkind is particularly concerned
with highlighting how the interface of aesthetics and ethics is grounded in
the body; hence his analysis of the “soma-ethical” grounding of religious
experience.
It needs to be stressed that these new approaches, though emphasizing
bodily sensations, are somewhat distanced from theories of the genesis of
religious experience in private feelings, as developed following William
James. The fact that he and those working in line with his ideas take the
existence of a primary, authentic and, in this sense, seemingly unmediated
religious experience at face value is problematic. This locates concepts such
as will, emotion, and aesthetic judgment exclusively in the individual believer
rather than taking into account how transmitted and shared social forms,
such as language, contribute to shaping individual experience (Wittgenstein
1958; see also Shusterman 2002). In addition, James’s perspective fails to
realize the extent to which structures of repetition, as they are safeguarded
by religious organizations, play a central role in affirming specific religious
subjectivities (Taylor 2002: 116). An understanding of religion as mediation
regards such practices and structures as a conditio sine qua non for the genesis
of religious experience (including a highly individualized spirituality). Rather
than attributing primacy either to the individual or to social forms, the point