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Visible/Invisible: Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere
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Journal Article
Visible/Invisible: Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere
2015
Overview
At least so far as visual culture is concerned, we might well recall here how religious actors have long depended upon diverse material, technical, and bodily means of negotiating between \"the visible\" and \"the invisible\" in order to articulate versions of what David Morgan calls \"visual piety\" (Morgan, 1998; cf. [Karim], 2015, pp. 11-28). On the one hand, we can invoke the well-known (if greatly exaggerated) suspicion of \"idols\" and \"graven images\" in Jewish, Islamic, and Protestant Christian traditions that continues to inform modern-day anxieties about the power of images to seduce and to deceive, and that legitimize iconoclastic projects to sequester, censor, or destroy images in such diverse contexts as religious ritual, public art, or scientific laboratory life (Ellenbogen & Tugendhaft, 20ü; Latour & Weibel, 2002). On the other hand, we might invoke legacies of investment in the proliferation and adoration of images, such as in the rich visual economy of Catholic saint veneration, or in the reverential technique of \"seeing\" a divine power and thereby receiving its grace that is central to Hindu ritual practice as well as the effusion of Hindu religious iconography in public life, as taken up by [Mann]'s article in this issue (cf. Jain, 2007; Rajagopal, 2001). These and other examples alert us to the need, not only to document and understand the ways religion has become (newly) visible in public life, but also to identify the specific terms on which that visibility is imagined, negotiated, processed, and circulated by religious actors themselves. Yet the enduring story of religion's decline remains part of the background noise of any examination of public religion. Indeed, what underlies this persistent assumption that religion will become, should become, or already has become invisible in the modem public sphere? One possible genealogy can be traced back to Harbermas' Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989), which arguably minimized the role of religion in public life, positing it as a tool of the ruling class and as a remnant of pre-Enlightenment irrationality that would inevitably disappear with the adoption of \"communicative rationality\"-although, we hasten to add, Habermas himself has more recently acknowledged the limitations of his original account of the fate of religion in modernity (Habermas, 2011). However, at the root of both Habermas' original work and in his own addendum, one still finds an enduring attachment to a particular conception of the secular nation-state and its presumed role in fostering the conditions of possibility for a truly universal public sphere. While \"religion\" may make productive interventions in the public sphere, it can only do so if it adopts a universal language of the secular. Of course, scholars such as Nancy Fraser (1992) have challenged Habermas' notion of a universal public sphere, and work on counterpublics has likewise proposed that the Habermasian model needs to be replaced by one that makes room for a plurality of public spheres (Warner, 2002). Nonetheless, the status of \"the secular\" as a constitutional element for the creation and healthy survival of modem public spheres is not easily dismissed. As Craig Calhoun (2011) observes, the \"tacit understanding of citizenship in the modem West has been secular\" (p. 75), despite the long-standing ways religious actors, institutions, and patterns of adherence have made their presence felt in multiple layers of public discourse.
