Page 280 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere
P. 280
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Fig. 12.3. Fortuitous (re-)union? Flute-player, mobile phone-wielding grandmum, and
traditional village damsel.
1931 World Exhibition in New York City’s Democricity (only now the “cultural
sensitivity” is glimpsed in General Electric advertising its lightbulbs on televi-
sion with little Indian girls trying on traditional saris). The authority of these
images, we are told, derives from “what people want” while, as Habermas (1989)
rightly points out, the public sphere under capitalism is increasingly subsumed
under the instrumental logic of exchange value. It is no accident that the neo-
Freudian deployment of psychoanalysis marketed by his daughter, Anna, and
nephew, Edward L. Bernays, in the 1940s is redeployed in the focus group ex-
periments and market research of TV organizations like Sony Entertainment
Television (SET) and ZEE. The transformation of the responsible citizen of the
public sphere into the “faithful” consumer of the free market mirrors the cod-
ing of economic and cultural value under transnational capitalism. For those of
us caught in the “postcolonial moment” in the academy, Gayatri Chakravarty
Spivak warns that “unwittingly commemorating a lost object can become an
alibi unless it is placed within a general frame” (1999, 1). For this very reason
religious nationalism cannot be a “lost object” scripted as a “return of the re-
pressed” in a simplistic form. Rather, by placing it in the “general frame” that
includes economic globalization and political change, I argue that the “aura”
which legitimates contemporary power relations accrues in even the most pro-
fane practices and discourses. Further, my argument evades a continuist argu-
ment that traces origins through a linear narrative back into the past, for to do
so would be to reproduce the progressivist narratives of both contemporary
globalization and religious nationalism.
Finally, this auratic dimension, as Benjamin insisted and Habermas explored,
Gods in the Sacred Marketplace 269