Page 95 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

78 Angela Zito

Shall it be the moment of subjectification, when embodied persons are
disciplined, formed, and interpellated in their social locations? The moment
of agency, when people self-reflexively take initiative? The moment of
production, often contested, over what shall be the proper mode of creation
of material things, social relations, and the connections among them? The
moment of reification, of things themselves perceived as commodities or as
bearers of meaning in precious fullness in the eyes of their users? The moments
of language and gesture, which are the microbuilders—as practices—of these
other moments? How, especially at the level of everyday life, such practices
are unnoticed and naturalized and thus hide the production of social life
from its makers? That all of these moments are saturated with contestation,
conflict, hierarchy making, and the microfilaments of power? Finally, we
must ask how do these mediated moments of social life relate and intertwine?
The possibility for connections will vary depending on what one’s analytic
objective might be and how the social domains of the life-worlds at issue are
themselves arranged.
Each of these moments in cultural production that provide foci for
cultural analysis illustrate how viewing culture as the process of mediation
is vastly different from seeing culture as thing-like. Providing “culture” itself
with some intrinsic content—like meaning or practice—perpetuates a similar
reification of one of its mediating moments, a stoppage of the circulation of
its powerful force. Though this is precisely what we do unconsciously every
day, to live, it should not be the (unconscious) stuff of our analytics.
Social science categories such as “culture” are products of European
practices themselves, and so we must ask how it is that they are produced,
9
how mediated in material processes that mobilize things and people. The
concept of culture is most useful when we pay precise attention to its intricate
mediations as processes of achieving “truth effects”—the myriad practices
that generate a ground of commonsense and normal everydayness—and
how they are controlled and subverted. I would venture that this is a process
of gradual forgetting and reification. This “forgetting” is very important in
creating the “reifications” that we then live with as the real—because they
seem natural and, most important, beyond the reach of human agency.
To take any concept such as “body” or “religion” or “media” or “culture”
backward in time or abroad to another society not only risks naming
reality wrongly, it covers over the most important and interesting aspect of
studying society—this very process whereby the power of truth effects, good
descriptions, reifications and normativity are produced and felt. Religious
life plays a profoundly important role in social life in fixing these horizons
of agency, as does the production and circulation of mass media. However,
one never finds the productive, working reifications of others if one enters
armed with one’s own.