Page 44 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Aesthetics 27

is to understand the genesis of religious experiences and subjectivities as a
process in which the personal and the social are inextricably bound up with
each other.

Religious aesthetics

Religious aesthetics, in the current sense, refers to an embodied and
embedded praxis through which subjects relate to other subjects and objects
and which is grounded in and offers the ground for religious experience.
To grasp the link between aesthetics and experience, we propose to take
as a starting point those religious forms that organize encounters between
human beings and the divine, as well as with each other, and make individual
religious experience intersect with transmitted, shared forms. To get at
this process of intersection, through which the personal and the social are
aligned, we introduce the notion of sensational form. We understand these
forms as relatively fixed, authorized modes of invoking and organizing
access to the transcendental, thereby creating and sustaining links between
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believers in the context of particular religious regimes. Sensational forms
are transmitted and shared; they involve religious practitioners in particular
practices of worship and play a central role in forming religious subjects.
We outline here a number of key dimensions of sensational forms so as to
highlight our understanding of aesthetics as an embodied and embedded
praxis.
First, sensational forms organize encounters with an invisible beyond,
the realm of spirits or the transcendental. By authorizing certain practices
of mediation as truthful and valid, religious traditions endorse specific
modalities through which this realm can be accessed (and, from a more
distant perspective, produced), entailing certain restrictions and suggesting
appropriate modes of getting in touch that involve the senses in various
ways. In the example of Hindu image practices given above, worshippers
attribute a certain spiritual power to the photographs of the gods. The gods
are not only rendered present via mass-produced representations but are
held to engage with worshippers via a mutual process of seeing and being
seen, or darshan. Though there is a lot of work on images and icons as
particular sensational forms that render present a divine force (Meyer 2005,
Morgan 2005), it is important to look further than the nexus of pictures and
vision, as pinpointed by current work on matters such as spirit possession
wherein a person embodies a spirit (e.g., Morris 2000; Sanchez 2001; Van
de Port 2005, 2006) or the linkage between voice and charismatic power
in Christian (De Abreu 2005; De Witte 2005; Wiegele 2005) and Islamic
settings (Schulz 2003). The point is to establish how certain material forms
are vested with the capacity to render present divine power. The aesthetic