Page 305 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

have become increasingly popular in the course of the last decade and which
deliberately tie into Christian views (Meyer 2004). The painting is not a ¤nished
piece of popular art by and for itself but leads the viewer outside its own frame
2
right into what may aptly be called Ghana’s new image economy, characterized
by new infrastructures of exchange and exhibition of audiovisual products
evoking contest and con®ict, speaking to and feeding on people’s imaginations,
and highly dependent on apprehensive audiences. A key feature of this image
economy is that much attention is paid to visualizing the divine and its negative,
the demonic, leading to the articulation of a new public Pentecostalism in which
the camera challenges existing forms of religious authority and gives rise to new
forms of spectatorship.
The main theme of this essay, then, concerns the ways in which Pentecostal-
ism, with its distinct practices of mediation, features in this new image economy.
This image economy, I contend, plays a crucial role in designing a new public
sphere replete with Pentecostal Christianity. My understanding of the pub-
lic sphere is inspired by Negt and Kluge’s (1974) critical formulation of an al-
ternative to Habermas’s all too narrow, elitist, and normative understanding
(1990 [1962]; see the introduction to this volume). While Negt and Kluge (like
Habermas) developed their theory with regard to Western societies, character-
ized by a high level of industrialization and, as a result, the penetration of the
forces of production into the public sphere, their plea for a broader understand-
ing of the public sphere, in terms of a “social horizon of experience” (1974, 18),
is well taken and enables us to go further than a rather narrow focus on the
political public sphere and to include the realm of the imagination or popu-
lar culture (cf. Bolin n.d.). Importantly Negt and Kluge insisted that, in order
to grasp “what is of concern to everybody and only realizes itself in people’s
minds” (ibid., 18), it is necessary to pay attention to fantasy. Fantasy, in their
view, is all too easily dismissed as “the gypsy, the jobless among the intellectual
capacities” (1974, 73; my translation), especially by intellectuals who tend to
emphasize rationalism.
This chapter pinpoints how, as a result of changes in state-society relations
in Ghana, a new public sphere emerges that is not dominated by the state but
rather critical about state politics of representation. Assigning a key role to Pen-
tecostal religion, this new public sphere encompasses people irrespective of
3
ethnic and denominational af¤liations and gives rise to new forms of con-
sciousness and participation. Focusing on the nexus of Pentecostalism and new
audiovisual media, this chapter addresses two interrelated issues. First, I show
how changes on the level of media policy, incited by the turn to a democratic
constitution, have facilitated the public articulation of Pentecostalism, while at
the same time turning it into a lucrative resource for popular entertainment,
such as the popular video-¤lm industry. Second, I focus on this video-¤lm in-
dustry and the changes stemming from the adoption of new audiovisual media,
especially video, on Pentecostal practices of mediation. This chapter seeks to
show that in the era of electronic/digital reproducibility, facilitated through
video, Christianity is recon¤gured. Its marked public appearance goes hand in

294 Birgit Meyer