Page 279 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere
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so central to Benjamin’s argument, requires some rethinking in relation to the
aura. By positing a “tradition” that is one with the contemporary global imagi-
nary, the value of “cultural heritage” is now reworked, and Hindu nationalism
can be seen as a globe-girdling movement that fragments the chronotopic focus
of Benjamin’s argument around the aura. In other words, precisely because of
the spatial separation of numerous audiences that constitute “India,” the use of
high technology and mediated communication, themselves signi¤ers of moder-
nity, and the past history of “suppressed consumption” and insularity of the
Indian nation-state can Hindu nationalism refashion a discourse of authenticity
and difference, of alterity and commonality. Within these de-territorialized di-
mensions of cultural nationalism as discourse and practice, national identity is
re-territorialized in hegemonic, hierarchical, and exclusionary terms. Further,
the homologous temporal structures of the “promises of globalization through
consumption” and the “promise of redemption through belief” enable a sac-
ralization of the profane and its obverse.
For our present discussion, it is readily apparent that the fragmentation of
audiences, programming, spatial dimensions of broadcasting, and the global
reach of technological innovations such as the Internet are precisely what have
made Hindu nationalism such a powerful force within and outside the country.
Part of the success of Hindu nationalism has been precisely to structure the
promises of religious chauvinism with those of globalization, marrying an em-
powered “Hindu” identity to that of consumerism. In this blurring of the sacred
and the profane, one encounters a paradoxical reactivation of the aura. Precisely
through its embeddedness in discourses of globalization and consumerism,
Hindu identity stakes a place in the contemporary world as a supremely modern
phenomenon. At the same time the earlier discourses of consumerism as West-
ern decadence are replaced by that of a nation freed from its past mistakes (an
insular, secular, and socialist burden) and fully engaged in the fruits of global-
ization without sacri¤cing its cultural identity, its “spirituality.”
Aura here also has a positive function, because the “appearance or sem-
blance” of the aura is linked to a compensatory mechanism whereby the con-
tingency of history is solidi¤ed into an apologia for the status quo. A “true”
aura is one that does not succumb to the ideologies of a triumphalist narrative
of history as progress, of modernity as modernization: “The peeling away of
the object’s shell, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception
whose sense for the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the
singular, the unique is divested of its uniqueness—by means of its reproduc-
tion” (Benjamin 1927–34, 519). Here, very clearly, technology is implicated in
the predominance of exchange value, in “the sameness of things” that marks
capitalist society, so that exhibition value linked to consumption becomes the
functional dimension of the image. It is precisely here that the earlier quote
around a “warped economy” slots into such a discourse of progress, thereby
conferring an auratic appeal on the images of consumption and the consump-
tion of images and products.
The “public” here is constituted just like those aspirational masses of the
268 Sudeep Dasgupta