Page 94 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

Culture 77

historically controlled them. Media studies has benefited from a turning away
from reified ideas of “the” media toward understanding it as a particularly
volatile and reflexively powerful product of cultural practices. I press this
trend farther: The particular nexus of religion and media can especially
benefit from a deepening and widening of the notion of practice as occurring
as part of the mediation of social life.
Here I use mediation not in the sense of reconciling two conflicting things
because that would return us willy-nilly to the dualisms that the turn to
practice, rooted in the production of self and social world in simultaneity,
supposedly delivered us from. It would take us right back to media and
religion as conflicting forces that needed somehow to be bridged. That
is not the sense in which I propose to use mediation. Theodore Schatzki
emphasizes the push to overcome such dualisms in his introduction to The
Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. He offers this useful formulation
of “practices as embodied materially mediated arrays of human activity
centrally organized around shared practical understanding” (Schatzki et al.
2001: 2; italics added). Practice theory delivers us to the doorstep, and we
arrive, arms full of a grab-bag of concepts: agency, subjectivity, personhood,
material things and, most important for me, process. If we take seriously the
notion that culture is not a thing but a process—even though it may seem
like a congeries of things, and even though we can analyze only through the
materiality of things—we must get it in analytic motion. Much in human
life—including “the social”—remains empirically directly unavailable. Yet
we know it is “there”—in fact, a good deal of human life is about making the
invisible visible, that is, mediating it.
I have discussed mediation elsewhere as

the construction of social reality where people are constantly engaged
in producing the material world around them, even as they are, in turn,
produced by it. Every social practice moves through and is carried upon a
material framework or vehicle.
(Zito 2007: 726)

Marx’s own dialectical vocabulary consistently “views things as moments
in their own development in, with and through other things” (Ollman
1976: 52), leading to the Frankfort School’s view of culture as that which
“mediates the interaction between the material and the mental, the economic
and the socio-political” (Mendieta 2006: 5). By emphasizing the marvelous
slippage between “media” and “mediation,” I want to focus our attention
upon the paradox of materializing process (Zito 2008). For analysis, this
comes down to grasping the importance of the choices we make of which
moments we focus on in the general dialectical construction of social reality.