Page 268 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Benjamin’s attack on historicism (the teleological and linear nature of which
was the target of our contemporary intellectual critique) must therefore be con-
joined to our investigation of visual culture’s auratic appeal, for it would be
nonsensical and ahistorical to make any historically blind claims for the onto-
logical status of the politics of the image. Often it is precisely this sort of ahis-
torical and historicizing move that has been exempli¤ed in cultural criticism
that takes the death of the aura as a sign for populist cultural studies. For any
claim for the death of the aura must be situated at a particular historically
speci¤c moment within a social formation whose con®ictual character requires
the legitimation of dominant social classes.
It is this question of domination and social power that inspired Jürgen
Habermas’s investigation into the bürgerliche Öffentlichkeit that emerged in the
eighteenth century with the rise of generalized commodity exchange, an edu-
cated reading public, and mass media.

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private
people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated
from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate
over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly
relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this
political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s
public use of their reason [öffentliches Räsonnement]. In our [German] usage this
term i.e., räsonnement unmistakably preserves the polemical nuances of both sides:
simultaneously the invocation of reason and its disdainful disparagement as merely
malcontent griping. (Habermas 1989, 27)
In the light of the preceding discussion, the link between the politics of repre-
sentation and the representation of political authority within the public sphere
becomes readily apparent. For our discussion, the “medium” in question is not
just Reason but its own remediation through technologically reproduced mass
media such as satellite TV. Further, Habermas’s own formulation is nuanced
enough to signal that Reason is not exercised at the expense of what we now call
“affect” but that the passions play an important role in this process. If this is a
generous reading of Habermas, it is worth recalling that, in his own attempts
to justify the moral bases for intersubjective communication, he is left with no
alternative but to defer to the ongoing process of the community in question’s
own consensual mechanisms that cannot be purely “rational” in dispassionate
fashion. While Habermas’s position cannot be cast as some kind of postmod-
ern, libidinal, and nonrational theory for intersubjective communication (and
his argument is all the stronger for that), neither can it be circumscribed as a
purely dispassionate attachment to the exercise of the cognitive capabilities of
participants in a conversation. Having framed the analysis that follows in terms
of the aura in Benjamin and the role of media in Habermas’s formulation of
the political character of the public sphere, here I brie®y lay out the historical
conjuncture within which Hindu nationalism articulates its claims to identity
and alterity within the complex narratives of globalization.

Gods in the Sacred Marketplace 257