Page 281 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

constructs a certain delimited space of public engagement, with the public un-
derstood as empowered consumers (or Gods in the sacred marketplace) while
those who are merely supplying them with what they want police the bound-
aries of what is admissible within visual culture. For if globalization and reli-
gious nationalism are indeed so all-embracing, why do those on the receiving
end not see themselves re®ected in the small screen? Clearly they count very
little within a de¤nition of the “public sphere” coded in terms of economic
value. It is precisely here in the coding of alterity within a narrative of globaliza-
tion and progress that the aura can be understood as reactivated within a visual
culture that fractures the unique space-time nexus that Benjamin understood as
its de¤ning mode of being. The epigraph from Max Horkheimer which opened
this chapter assumes its importance precisely at this point. For if religion is
“lost” to mankind with time it does not disappear in the grand récit of mod-
ernization, but instead its mark, still retained in the present, survives. Its coded
reemergence within the ®ickering light of the screens of global visuality casts a
shadow on our desire for hybridity. The value of culture might reside less in the
auratic appeal of profane images and more in the destruction of their tenuous
solidity. If “history hurts,” then rescuing forgotten histories locked in the images
of the past might be one way of resuscitating life into the future that is past.

Notes

I use the term “religious” rather than “religion” in the title to underline that although
the focus of this essay is on Hindu Nationalism, the analysis below is less interested in
examining “religion” as an object-like thing than in exploring the transnational and his-
torically speci¤c dimensions of the discourse and practice of the “religious.” The cen-
trality of faith, futurity, and the quasi-transcendental is thus analyzed here in its concrete
speci¤city. (For a nuanced philosophical discussion of the “religious,” see de Vries 2001,
3–42.)

1. Translated by Harry Zohn as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc-
tion, the subtlety of Benjamin’s formulation, and the substance of his argument, has
been seriously degraded, particularly within contemporary cultural studies. While exi-
gencies of space preclude me from engaging with the details lost in the English transla-
tion, it is worth signaling here that Reproduzierbarkeit should be understood in English
as “Reproducibility,” not “Reproduction.” The sloppy translation has resulted in celebra-
tory accounts in contemporary cultural criticism of the popular and populist possibili-
ties of mass media, without recognizing that the protensive potentiality with which the
word “Reproducibility” is marked implies, for Benjamin, the two-edged sword of either
fascism or revolution. When this potential of the mass media to be turned either way is
ignored, and democratic and political liberation announced as the necessary effect of
technological innovation, Benjamin’s subtle dialectical argument is lost. For both ver-
sions of the original essay in German, written in 1935 and revised in 1939, see Gesam-
melte Schriften 1 (2): 431–469, 219–253. See Walter Benjamin 1968, 211, 217–252.

270 Sudeep Dasgupta