Page 71 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

54 Johanna Sumiala

Circulating ethics

My analysis suggests that circulation as a cultural logic (as described above) is
especially powerful because we live in a network society. The communicative
logic of the new media technology makes it possible for us to get invited to
such a media spectacle as the AG image scandal on a scale unlikely or even
unimaginable for earlier generations. In this process of circulation, we are
asked to establish relationships with the images disseminated and with the
ideas and beliefs attached to those images circulating around us.
I have argued here that to understand the logic of circulation, we need
to analyze the conditions of relationships established between different
actors, including relationships between images and new media technology,
images and other visual artefacts, and images and spectators. In my closer
analysis of the relationship between the AG images and the spectator, I have
explored the idea of visual practice: the act of gazing and its relation to
cultural imagination.
Religion as a source of cultural imagination is of great relevance when
the subjects of circulation are images of Muslim men tortured by soldiers
representing a culture of strong Christian heritage. In the eyes of the viewer,
religious aspirations can suggest the emphatic gaze: that is, identifying
emotionally with the suffering of the victim. Or it can stimulate the
sympathetic gaze, which reflects deep values of human life. However, it can
also call for the deconstructive gaze, urging iconoclastic action—a need to
defend one’s religious beliefs through destroying or trying to stop circulation
of the images.
In a Latourian perspective, all these relationships constructed in the
circulation of images are far from being totalizing, stabilizing, or symmetrical.
Instead, they change constantly and, at their best, they can be grasped only
for a very few scattered moments in time and space. In this sense, a Latourian
approach is a useful tool for thinking about new conditions for circulation
and asymmetries between different actors, shapers and consumers in
contemporary world (see e.g., Couldry 2008: 3–4).
Drawing on Zygmunt Bauman, this type of imaginal association can be
called “liquid.” Bauman describes the essence of liquidness in the following
manner:

Liquid… (the term I prefer, since it emphasizes the processuality of
relationships; it calls to mind patterning rather than patterns, structuring
rather than structures, something constantly in-the-state-of-becoming,
unfinished and revocable) manifests itself as much in the assembling of
relations as in keeping them eminently “dismantable.”
(Bauman 2004: 22)