Page 156 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

argument. They are informed by a neoliberal economist ideology of consumer
choice and its progressive, liberating potential. In this process, religious ethics
and knowledge materialize in the form of media products to be purchased by
enlightened and critical consumers.
This ¤nding sheds light on two points that are critical to current discussions
of the interplay between new, religiously inspired movements and the growing
mediatization of everyday experience in the postcolonial world. First, it would
be misleading to focus the analysis on technological innovation while neglecting
the effects of commercialization and the speci¤cs of the current mode of po-
litical liberalization. Religious teachings form part of a range of media products
that, once they are disseminated on small media, turn into commodities that
compete with other forms of entertainment culture. Habermas drew attention
to this development when he identi¤ed commercial mass media culture as play-
ing a crucial role in the emptying of the bourgeois public of its critical potential.
Warner (1992) has rightly pointed out that the potential for this transformation
was already inherent in the paradoxical normative foundations of the bourgeois
critical public: the claim to disembodied equality was always neutralized by the
implicit privileging of the unmarked category of the normal, male, middle-class
citizen. The dynamics of Malian public debate suggest that the commodi¤ca-
tion of media culture and particular power relations provide the context for this
critical potential to be realized. In spite of the introduction of multiparty de-
mocracy and freedom of opinion, participation in public debate (via national
media) and civil society still depends on individuals’ access to representatives
and resources of the state. That in®uential Muslim ¤gures successfully capital-
ized on their position in the national Muslim organization AMUPI to prevent
Haidara from accessing national media illustrates the persistent logic of politi-
cal clientelism in public debate.
This brings me to the second critical point. Small media, rather than un-
equivocally broadening access to public debate, exacerbate con®icts over par-
ticipation and often feed into already existing strategies of exclusion engrained
(and silenced) in de¤nitions of community membership. In Mali state of¤cials
and NGO activists combine their declarations on civil society and democracy
with practices that deny broad strata of the population political participation.
Strategies of exclusion, presented as matters of doctrinal deviation, are also op-
erative within the public constituted by competing Muslim factions. Haidara’s
sermons illustrate that Muslim activists currently engage in public debate to
assert and contest identities based on claims to moral superiority. They invoke
a moral imaginary that simultaneously creates and encompasses difference.
Similar to of¤cial, ambiguous constructions of Malian citizenship, Haidara’s
move between different criteria for exclusion and inclusion leaves room for the
public negotiation of Muslim identity. In this sense, current public controver-
sies over the de¤nition of the common good (of which Haidara’s attacks on
the Malian Muslim establishment is only one example) illustrate how religious
identities are as much the result of public controversy and not simply the pre-
condition for it. This ¤nding helps to qualify Habermas’s contention that the

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