TY - JOUR
AU1 - Hamner, M, Gail
AB - Abstract Religion scholars require a theory of public encounter that is evental, technological, and affective. Instead of a spatial public sphere, today’s encounters occur through technological mediations that are affective and image-laden. This essay examines the latter “publicness” and illustrates its roles as an affective technology of whiteness as that which frames and distributes the persevering powers of, and reluctantly tracks resistances to, white supremacy. Film is a fruitful cultural site for examining the whiteness of publicness. The essay turns to Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016) to demonstrate how film can resist and interrupt normative whiteness and to show how this transvaluative cultural labor can be seen as religious. The essay conceptualizes religion as a hinged form and function through which subjects and publics co-emerge and by which social and sedimented valuations are (re)bound. Grappling with religion as social forms and functions of valuation opens it to algorithmic variability that mandates attention to circulations of power as both capacity and intensity. “Instead of becoming a memorial to a past time (as many photographs tend to be), the image seized by the new media technologies serves rather as a way of enacting and performing the present precisely through the small act of capture.” —Rey Chow (2010, 74) “Institution [means] establishment in an experience (or in a constructed apparatus) of dimensions (in the general, Cartesian sense: system of references) in relation to which a whole series of other experiences will make sense and will make a sequel, a history.” —Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2010, 8–9) “And while the air of freedom might linger around the ship, it does not reach into the hold.” —Christina Sharpe (2016, 104) ON A VISIT to the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa some years ago, I found myself captivated by a three-paneled video installation. The panels are about six feet tall and hang on the wall in a single line, like three parallel windows (Figure 1). Each panel displays video footage of an orchestral conductor from a NAFTA nation sitting behind a score of their national anthem (Mexico, the United States, or Canada) and reading through it silently. The video is void of music, but does emit the conductors’ breath, body movements, and page turnings as they move through the score. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Antonia Hirsch, “Tacet.” Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Antonia Hirsch, “Tacet.” The effect is stunning. Antonia Hirsch’s installation, “Tacet,” at once presents and mutes the familiar affective channels of musical patriotism (Hirsch 2005).1 Where national anthems typically rely on the tones and rhythms of music to cue affective and corporeal responses of national belonging, Hirsch’s silent video redirects attention to the production of these embodied affects in a way that collapses the semantic distinction between affect and valuation. “Tacet” shows the effortful Gestalt of musically establishing the values of national cohabitation.2 Standing rapt before these panels, I could clearly sense a difference between them, but the difference remained elusive and asyntactical. The panels artfully image national difference and visualize the affective component of expressing patriotism through a visceral and virtual sensibility.3 Although Hirsch’s video installation does not form a representation with clear cognitive content, it does elicit the sensibilities of national belonging that have sedimented in citizen bodies, whether diffusely and lightly as through a lifetime of Superbowls and State of the Union addresses, or acutely and harshly as through a lurking threat of deportation or police violence. The elusiveness of viewer reception arises from a number of virtual presences and absences in these panels: the virtual presence/absence of music, orchestral instruments, choral accompaniment, and a body of citizens listening and perhaps even singing along with the performance to celebrate or memorialize a specific national moment; but also the virtual absence/presence of dissent, contestation, and linguistic or tonal difference (Spivak and Butler 2011). I walked away from “Tacet” convinced that an important dimension of nationality is its feeling and that the valuations of patriotism have sensory modalities and tonalities that escape rational capture. National belonging—and any sense of social belonging—is primarily sustained not by the stated lineaments of ideology but by the murky nodes and currents of affect. I draw attention to “Tacet” to frame an updated starting point for theorizing “religion in the public sphere,”4 an approach that is attentive to both affect and mediating form. More specifically, I posit a theory of public engagement that foregrounds affect as much as discourse (an orientation I have come to name affecognitive) and that attends to the networked and data-driven realities of our bodies, technologies, and social interactions. Habermas’s account of the open space of public encounter and debate (Habermas 1991; Calhoun 1992) and Benedict Anderson’s theory about the distributed but imaginary public generated through print media both addressed worlds that have clearly mutated into something else, something evental, technological, and affective. Religion scholars need theories to match this mutation of what public is. The so-called public sphere is not primarily spatial today but virtual. It is mediatized, rapidly formed and disseminated along increasingly siloed valuations, carried by images, and fueled by affect. For effective undergraduate and graduate teaching, if not for our own specialized areas of research, religion scholars of whatever subfield need better to understand the changing structures of publicness and indeed of the density and redistribution of “religion” in light of mutations wrought by our hypermediated and web-based lives. I offer this essay as a contribution to an ongoing task to shift scholarly thinking about subjectivity, mediation, location, and valuation in light of current and future technological intensities. The argument I will offer about affect, form, and publicness is closely linked to an incipient theory of religion anchored in questions of valuation and transvaluation. As suggested by Hirsch’s “Tacet,” questions of value are affective questions. What we value is what we hold dear, and this “holding dear” multiply affects and orients us as both individuals and communities. Religion as valuation is religion as affect. Or, religion as valuation is religion as the various embodied, relational, discursive, and institutional forms that shape, hold, and channel values as affects. Our daily lives are saturated with intentional or habitual feelings, intuitions, practices, and assertions of values, and these inevitably press up against different values, sometimes with curiosity or bafflement, sometimes with disgust or rage. Affective forms of valuation might emerge as levers of critique against other values, or they can suffer critique for what they exclude and how they wreak harm. Both valuation and critique of valuation (here transvaluation) can implicate religion as agent or object. In focusing on the broad terrain of religion in the public sphere, this essay highlights the fact that shared valuations—which are often poised to express themselves or be denominated as “religious”—are always transmitted and sustained by particular embodied, inter-relational, discursive, and technological forms. Values are mediated, and this mediation very quickly takes on public dimensions. In “Tacet,” for instance, muting the national anthems backgrounds their musical content and makes palpable the affective features of their conducted form. Affects flow through forms, then, and forms of valuation and transvaluation are taken up by bodies and groups that denominate them as religious or as cultural, as political or as personal. Just as “Tacet” hearkens to the presence/absence of loyal patriots and the absence/presence of dissent and contestation over who “belongs,” who can legitimately sing the song of the nation, so I find it imperative that religion scholars craft new theories of publicness that put such dissent and contestation at the center of our scholarship. As a white woman scholar benefiting from the sedimented white supremacy of US culture, I realize I am limited in my capacity for self-critique and in my phenomenological grasp of the historical and contemporary patterns of oppression that ensure the dominant US narratives and institutions. Yet such limitations only deepen the imperative for ongoing self and institutional critique. More white scholars in the majority of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) guild need to elucidate theoretically and pedagogically how the operations of contemporary publicness, secularity, and market freedoms stand on the bloody historical ground of the Atlantic slave trade, Native genocide, xenophobia toward immigrants, and pervasive white, male supremacy (Johnson 2015b; Wilderson, 2010; Tallbear 2013; Silva 2007).5 In short, and as anticipated by my experience with “Tacet,” this essay contends that contemporary valuations of belonging, participation, democratic debate, and citizenship are importantly emotional (affective), not merely conceptual (cognitive), that they arise ineluctably from modernity’s constituting grounds of white supremacy and patriarchy, and that they frequently bear the image and sanction of religion. The essay proceeds in four sections. The first section develops a theory of publicness as the “public sphere” of our digital, image-driven socius. The second section pushes the social frame to the center in arguing that the dominant form of publicness is Whiteness.6 The third section turns to film as an important mediating fold of global publicness to exemplify the imbrication of normative valuation and transvaluation through a reading of Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. The fourth section offers an incipient conceptualization of public religion as the affecognitive form and function of valuation, an ontological context or “historical a priori” (Foucault 1972, 126) within which subjects, objects, relationships, and particular values co-emerge. My conclusion draws the thematics of the essay together and unpacks the neologism affecognitive. This is a multi-layered argument for a complex and emerging contemporary situation. Overall, my goals are twofold: first, to re-conceive the public sphere as “publicness,” which I define as the globally dominant presence and locally partial use of a networked system of affective technologies of mediation; and second, to re-conceive religion as the conjoining of an affecognitive form and function that together evoke and mediate subjectivity and publicness in the service of particular social patterns, including the articulation, endurance, and interconnectivity of definite but internally capacious norms of valuation. Clearly, these terms and claims require delineation and substantiation. I intend the formal and theoretical delineation I offer here to create the leverage necessary to bring modernity’s founding gestures of subjectivity and cohabitation into a felt, peripheral conviction, even if the task of fully unveiling, much less dismantling, what has been occluded remains too daunting and too utopian.7 FROM PUBLIC SPHERE TO PUBLICNESS The public of “publicness” needs to be distinguished from general activity within civil society. When I walk outside to pick up the newspaper or hail a cab or feed the chickens, I materially enter into a “public” in the sense that I avail myself of and expose myself to visual and tangible interactions that I cannot fully anticipate or control. My neighbor catches me in a conversation about the kids’ baseball field, say, or a truck screams through a puddle and douses me with oily water, or the cow ambles over to the fence edge to watch the chickens scramble for food, and I smell her warm, grassy breath. Such public activity pivots toward publicness when a drone or security camera or cell phone records the whole affair. More than egress from an assumed privacy,8 more than a spatial transposition, publicness today demarcates an image-capture of life typically for the sake of (and always with the potential for) further dissemination, comment, or contestation. Image-capture is “still-life” but in a radically different form and sense than the usual connotation of oil paintings or art photography. In line with Habermas’s account of the public sphere that developed within urban coffeehouses of the late eighteenth century, today’s publicness does enact what is most democratic about any society, namely, the gathering of bodies, opinion, and argument in light of, and for the sake of, their rights and obligations as citizens. The difference of today’s publicness—though perhaps we can still imagine some exceptions—lies in the manner in which image-capture forms the stasis around and through which bodies gather and opinions and arguments form. This stasis is an odd sort of stasis, because it is no longer a place like a coffeehouse, and it is static only in the sense that its composition does not change as its reified index of a single moment surges through rapidly streamed, uploaded, shared, and other distributions across various media. Public action enacts publicness, I am arguing, when it is caught on camera and is or stands ready to be rescreened (uploaded, shared, looped) as part of ongoing discourse. Being “in public,” therefore, is to be always on the verge of, always vulnerable to, publicness. Importantly, this persistent and verging vulnerability signals that the lines between public action as a procedure of civil society and the surveilling presence and threat of state power are thin and crumbling. To think of publicness as that which takes shape and effect through rapid image capture, posting, and circulation yields important differences from Habermas’s account of (English) coffeehouse and (French) salon culture, and from Benedict Anderson’s well-known account of imagined communities. Habermas remains salient for the dynamics he theorized that allowed a physical and intimate staging of civil society. Intellectual and social equals met in designated sites to openly discuss and debate the contours of legal right and economic possibilities that could sustain civil society as separate from but in allegiance with state authorities. This staging of public power was not seizure. Though striated by differences in wealth and rank, the debates were diffuse, multivalent, and temporally extended. Today however, the public “sphere” is not primarily spatial but temporal and digital, constituted by evental structurations that emerge through ongoing digital capture, as Rey Chow (2010) puts it in this article’s epigraph. Publicness is generated through prompt reactions, wide disseminations, and rapid dissipations that occur at the intersections of enfleshed corporeality and algorithmic technicity.9 This mutation of the public sphere as a predominantly spatial conception into a (con)figured process that is more temporal is what I name publicness. Though this modality of public engagement is not equally available to everyone, that a significant swath of global humanity does experience the public as publicness is evidenced by the frequency and casualness with which the language of addiction is applied to online activity. Today, the human experience of being an embodied self, and even the collective (and infinitely varied) sense of being polis or demos, congeal in crucial ways by means of digital and social media, that is, by means of web-based and prosthetic (or cybernetic) technologies of communication, datafication, and orientation, the global systematics of which I summarize as “affective technologies of mediation.”10 Benedict Anderson’s notion of imagined communities, which is organized around distributed and relatively private consumption of print media (and to which I will return below), also does not sufficiently register the temporal, affective, and embodied qualities of today’s publicness (Anderson 1983). A diminishing number of us recall that staid activity of “reading the morning newspaper” with a cup of coffee at the breakfast table. Today, the news we consume is hypermediated, partial, frontloaded by headlines (“clickbait”), and much more likely to be received by smartphone alert, Twitter, or Facebook “share” than by deliberately sitting down to read the online (or paper) issue of a news corporation. The rapid temporal dynamics and global reach of the contemporary digital world require a theory of publicness that is tuned to the peculiar dominance of social and digital media in our lives and that attends to the exhausting temporality and profoundly affective nature of mediated exchange.11 I intend the phrase affective technologies of mediation to signal the fact that subjects use their bodies to engage with each other affectively in temporary, web-mediated connections on a minute-by-minute basis by computer use, or what we might think of as our omnipresent technical prostheses: smartphones, iPads, GPS systems, personal self-help or self-development applications such as Fitbit, and smart-home devices such Amazon Echo. Each discrete and fleeting interconnection with these prostheses is conjoined and sustained by web-based media platforms that compress global time and space more profoundly than do newspapers or television and put affects into circulation in ways that position embodied subjects less as knowers than as feelers, the clickers of click bait and posters of repostings. Responses flow (swipe, click, “like,” comment, emoticon, share . . .) until the feeler logs off or until the charged moment in question dissolves into other constellations of mediated interconnections.12 This relentless flow of mediated affects operates as a network in Bruno Latour’s double sense of the term: as the material infrastructure (servers, software, cell phones, apps) and as that which flows through the infrastructure (affects and information) (Latour 2013, 31). As Sara Ahmed argues, affects “stick” to and travel with images and words in “affective economies,” enabling both our sense of bodily engagement with nonproximate events and our sense that this bodily engagement conjoins a collective body of public response (Ahmed 2004). Ahmed writes that “emotions do things, and they align individuals with communities—or bodily space with social space—through the very intensity of their attachments” (Ahmed 2004, 17). Like electricity, which does not run in a wire but buzzes along its exterior, Ahmed notes that “affect does not reside in an object or sign, but is an affect of the circulation of objects and signs” (Ahmed 2004, 120), such that “the accumulation of affective value shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds” (Ahmed 2004, 121). Indeed, she concludes, “It is the very failure of affect to be located in a subject or object that allows it to generate the surfaces of collective bodies” (Ahmed 2004, 128). It might seem redundant to claim that “affect . . . is an affect of the circulation of objects and signs,” but redundancy is the work of positive feedback. Images and words circulate by felt reaction (affect), which generates more felt reaction (affect). This intensifying and reinforcing network of felt reaction is what Ahmed means by an affective economy. Her article delineates how the boundaries of differentiated communities of publicness are formed and sustained through these affective economies. As I will argue, individuals are not separate entities that plug into established communities; rather, subjects and communities co-emerge in and through ongoing and intensive affective circulation. The socio-political function of affective technologies of mediation extends Foucault’s sense of technologies as “matrices of practical reason” (Foucault 1988).13 Foucault uses the term technology to refer to historically and regionally particular material networks that generate, sustain, and suture the flows between bodies, discourses, and institutions.14 This scaffolding constitutes and supports the social frameworks and epistemological-practical programs by which assumed norms of action, discourse, and organization are solidified and sustained. Such imbricating systems of normalization are what Foucault means by the phrase, “matrices of practical reason.” It is these relatively stable normative channels that mold and govern persons, communities, and institutions such that they feel the ability to act “freely” toward self-determination. The norms of reason and right action reside not (vertically) in universal Vernunft, therefore, but (horizontally) in patterns of social discourse, institutions, and bodily practices. In the current hegemony of digital media, publicness refers to affectively mediated matrices of practical reason, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the local instances of which conglomerate into a global system of interconnection—affective because these patterns ooze out of and between bodies but never escape sedimented attitudes that channel specific histories and experiences. Quite contrary to the public sphere studied by Habermas and Anderson, today’s publicness is image-captured, screened, dispersed through multiple material networks, and structured temporally to maximize the capture, redeployment, and acceleration of embodied and socially circulating affects. As I stood before Hirsch’s “Tacet,” I was caught up in affective economies of musical patriotism. Even so, my felt reaction to her videos was slower and denser than the ways I am caught up in feelings and debates about nationality, democracy, or patriotism online. The difference here has everything to do with time and affect. Let me explicate this through a passage from Benedict Anderson. Anderson’s account of imagined national belonging in Imagined Communities stands on space (not time) and imagination (not affect). He writes, “It would, I think, make things easier if one treated it [nationalism] as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion’, rather than with ‘liberalism’ or ‘fascism’” (Anderson 1983, 5). This sentence is painful to hear today when President Trump’s declaration—“I am a nationalist”—seems to amplify fascistic elements of contemporary culture, but I want to sit with his association of nationalism with religion, in part because the connection seems to drop out of the critical reception of his text. Anderson seems to suggest that the imagined community of a nation is constituted, like religion or kinship, through a projected sense of belonging generated by events, affects, and habitual dispositions rather than through principled norms and actions. Nationalism and fascism, religion and liberalism, kinship and communism all aggregate strong affects and yield poignant stories, but the first of each pair inheres a blurry, aleatory quality that is missing from the second. We might say that whereas we align ourselves (or not) with fascism, we dispose ourselves (or not) to this motley group as “kin”; whereas we align ourselves (or not) with liberalism, we feel ourselves to be Buddhist or Jewish (or not). And finally, whereas we align ourselves (or not) with communism, we are interpellated by the acts and assumptions of national identity (or not). By suggesting such distinctions, Anderson grasps a significant problem, which is that nationalism both cues a phenomenological structure of being that uncoils a diffuse affective economy, binding us to one another through events, habits, dispositions, and (yes) the imagined communities disseminated by print media; but nationalism also glitters as ripe fodder for discursive ideological poaching on account of its broad diffusion and conceptual ambiguity. Kinship and religion, Anderson suggests, function in the same manner. Like Durkheim, then, Anderson positions nationalism, religion, and kinship on two levels: first as the social fact of collectivity, what I think of as the being of the feeling of the collective, and second, as the myriad expressions or emblems of that collectivity. With the shift from newsprint to digital media, and again with the shift from the meditative spaces of art museums to the frenetic pace of social media updates, the temporal dynamics that slowly generate the phenomenological structure of being and belonging give way to rapid demands on the collective social imaginary that no longer allow much breathing room between feelings and articulated responses. The being of the feeling of the collective is now nearly immediately striated by ideology and channeled into tightly siloed online communities that have little or no embodied or digital engagement with other silos.15 Again the difference here lies in time and affect. If publicness constitutes a sense of belonging today, it is only as that belonging shrinks to a constituency. Where newspapers expanded belonging to float from sea to shining sea, social media contracts belonging to smaller and smaller citizen-niches. But where newspapers afforded a vague and diffuse sense of common belonging (at least to those who could and would read them), social media affords siloed communities that generate smaller but affectively intense and acutely policed filaments of belonging. “Tacet” stands transversal to these options, speaking truths about our shared contemporary situation, but doing so through a form and within an institution that are spatially and economically restricted and that require a different—slower, denser—engagement of self and context. PUBLICNESS IS WHITENESS Habermas’s theorization of the bourgeois public sphere in Europe and England has long been the critical model for a certain kind of citizen-subject, and it is no surprise that the latter is presumptively male, Christian, property owning, and white. Although the premise of bourgeois democracy is equality before the law (what Marx terms “political emancipation” [Marx 1978, 28]) and the premise of Habermas’s public sphere is equality of access and voice in public debates about citizen rights vis-à-vis the state (Charles 2015, 1–2),16 such theoretical assumptions do nothing to counter actual and practical social inequalities. Denise Ferreira da Silva’s brilliant treatise, Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), takes up this contradiction between bourgeois theory and practice and argues against the familiar assumption that the active exclusion of non-whites from political rights, institutional access, and civil dignity can be countered effectively by including more non-white bodies and voices in schools, politics, and businesses, so as to eventually overcome historical exclusion through increased representation. Silva calls this approach a “logic of exclusion.” This logic assumes, she says, that non-whites have been excluded from equal public participation on the dubious grounds of “cultural difference” and simply need to now be included. Silva counters that insisting on greater inclusion of difference will never be more than a limited tactic and will always ignore the exhausting constraints of structural racism (Silva 2007, 2). Silva develops what she calls an “analytics of raciality” to demonstrate the errors of the logic of exclusion. Far from a simple bias against cultural difference, social inequality is formed and sustained by what Silva terms the “transparent I” of modernity, a historical character more familiarly articulated as the white, property-owning men who easily accede to unmarked (transparent) subjectivity (Silva 2007; see also Goldberg 1993, 143).17 The unmarked or transparent place whites occupy in US public culture is, importantly, not a non-racial position but refers to norms and feelings that correlate white bodies with the real, the human, and the citizen-subject. As such, the racial character of the transparent I is erased as it congeals. All other body types and social positions, however, are marked. Their very accession to the status of “subject” is a path erased as it congeals, and so their reality and humanity are abandoned to a blurred blurring (Moten 2017). Non-white and non-male bodies are not transparent but fuzzy and opaque. Silva contends that they are dismissed as “affectable”: irrational, arational, emotional, or animalistic.18 How does this marking occur? By what technology, practice, or sociality? Contrary to the discursive habits of liberal individualism, racism is not simply about individual beliefs and actions but also tightly and implicitly limns social structures. This structural racism works through material conditions that supersede the consciousness and will of rational social actors. Structural racism sweeps me up and condemns my whiteness for benefiting from and sustaining racist patterns, whether I will this or not, and whether or not I am aware of my privilege. Although structures are difficult to contest, not least because resistance to structural oppression so often gets collapsed into an (unfortunate) anecdote of personal experience, or the perpetrations of “a few bad apples,” it is by attending to structural racism that scholars can better understand how and why the transparency of whiteness and the occlusion of blackness and all other nontransparencies cannot be produced or undone by simple word or gesture (Lowe 2015; Muñoz 1999; Winters 2016).19 Black Studies and Critical Race Studies have faced this intellectual and political problem head on and have steadily offered historical, existential, and phenomenological accounts of how race and racism are produced through public encounter, how race and racism result from the ways the dominant white gaze throws blackness up and onto a body (Fanon 2008; Hartman 1997; Lorde 2007; Mbembe 2017; Moten 2003 and 2017; Sharpe 2016; Spillers 2003; Williams 1992; Yancey 2005). Refusing the diremption of subject and object, or subject and subject, these scholars assert that distinctions between bodies emerge in the space and time of encounter.20 Space is ionized with meaning, I want to say, not only by encounters of bodies in time but also by how the space and time of publicness are framed, filmed, and distributed through media. To make a cinematic analogy: if the encounters that produce race and racism are the stuff of character interaction and mise-en-scène, I want also to know how screen and camera are abetting—structuring—the whiteness of publicness. Scholars have approached this question by grappling with the historical nature of the white gaze. In Black Skin, White Masks, for instance, Fanon develops his “historico-racial schema” to theorize the preformed channels of power that open onto and construct what Shannon Sullivan theorizes as “magnetized” space (Sullivan 2001; Fanon 2008; Whitney 2008). Similarly, David Marriott theorizes how past violence haunts the white gaze, forming racist projections that emerge not so much from myths or tales but from the “shadow or stain” of real violence against colonial subjects that forms the topography of shared history and unequal power (Marriot 2007, 2). From another angle, Toni Morrison, who successfully and laboriously developed a literary voice that did not write to the white gaze, is regularly criticized precisely for not taking that gaze into account and not making it central in her novels, a criticism that clearly demonstrates not only the dominance of the white gaze but its transparent structuring of social and cultural reception (Morrison 1998). I wish to grapple with how the white gaze has been hard-baked into the image-capturing and mediating structures of America’s dominant publicness in ways that rely on but also supersede the phenomenology of visuality. To do this, I turn to Silva’s analytics of raciality and her naming the transparent I as the founding modern onto-epistemology, and I link her argument to Michel Foucault’s notion of technologies as “matrices of practical reason.”21 Affective technologies of mediation depend on users directly seeing or sensing mediated content and accelerating its distribution by reacting to it. But these technologies also actively sustain anti-Black racism by re-occasioning the implicit structure of white supremacy.22 Cell phone pictures and videos, news cameras, and image repetition through internet, social media, and television form a matrix of practical reason by which the white gaze shifts from interpersonal ocular perceptions to historical, encoded, psychological, and architectural dimensions that slyly and rapidly (re)distribute the (affective and technological) production of social normativity. The framing and mechanics of affective technologies of mediation channel the imaged bodies and actions through the established norms of white supremacy. Certainly, this is the framing I absorbed with “Tacet.” Though, again, Hirsch’s video installation is a slower experience than what occurs minute-by-minute online, I initially absorbed the images of the three conductors as white. Only after reading the description of the artwork and contemplating the demographics of the three NAFTA nations did it occur to me that the repetition of background and podium in Hirsch’s three panels encourages this quick assumption of whiteness and occludes what may in fact inhere as racial or ethnic difference. The artwork’s framing suggests sameness through repetition, and the dominant sameness is—in Ottawa and in the historical formation of my own American body—whiteness. In pointing to the fact that image-capture promulgates the norms of whiteness, I do not intend to deny or downplay the ways in which non-white bodies sidestep, neutralize, resist, refuse, or otherwise negotiate white supremacy. As Fred Moten puts it, we know the objectification of non-white bodies is limited because “the history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist” (Moten 2003, 1). Moten’s new trilogy, consent not to be a single being, stands as an extended meditation on what he calls Black fugitivity or the non-white body’s ability to “refuse the refusal” of human rights and social recognition (Moten 2017, 2018a, 2018b). I study and teach this scholarship diligently, but I do not think these facets of race theory are the ones to which I can or should add. I see my task, rather, as bearing down relentlessly on the ways whiteness maintains its power and invisibility. Silva notes that to be designated as “racialized” is to be marked as “affectable,” as unable to be “a self-determining subject,” and hence, I would add, as other-than-white.23 Race as non-whiteness, in other words, has become a matrix of practical reason, supported by a full range of affective technologies of mediation. For Foucault, practical reason is not determined by the universal judgments of the categorical schema, as it was for Kant, but by the normative workings of social institutions, discourses, and bodily practices. Where Kant’s practical reason pursues universalizable actions that maximize freedom, Foucault remaps this schemata as a social matrix that funnels bodies into normative channels of action that seek to maximize personal freedom (self-determination) within normative constraint.24 Foucault thus uses the production of normativity as the ground on which he figures social and historical critique. His commitment to thinking the possibility of liberation from normativity is situated within the stress of constraint imposed by that normativity. Likewise it is crucial to see how the framing and mechanics of publicness, systematized by affective technologies of mediation, produce the normativity and freedom of Silva’s transparent I, that is, of unmarked whiteness, and to recognize this insight as a ground of critique against structural, structured, and structuring racism that prevents full life and being to Black and other non-white bodies. Calling out whiteness as the predominant and default structure of affective technologies of mediation can help explain why certain public events quickly become lethal and also how their mediatized framing and repetition will inevitably be used to victimize the victims. Because white supremacy has been baked into the frame and mechanics of these occluding affective technologies, blackness is occluded; it appears to normative culture as something like a smear of matter out of place and therefore as open to (free for) elimination. As the epigraph from Christina Sharpe suggests, blackness is positioned always already to appear this way. “In my text,” Sharpe writes, “the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is anti-Black. And while the air of freedom might linger around the ship, it does not reach into the hold, or attend the bodies in the hold” (2016, 104). The white masters of slave trade and European culture can parlay in gusts of freedom, but such air is not available to the marked bodies that were stolen and then enslaved. We see this dynamic in the societal reception of videos that clearly show illegal actions and abuse against Black bodies, but that repeatedly, despairingly, do not succeed in bringing legal redress against the perpetrators. The Rodney King video was an early and agonizing example of this truth; we have had many more since Trayvon Martin’s death.25 Because today’s publicness concerns image and event more than spatiality, scholars need to attend to the time-stamped visuality that triggers affective responses and thereby fuels the rapid uploading, sharing, and media repetition of images and videos, along with their almost simultaneous critique (reframing, commentary, parody, and meme production). Compared with the mediascapes (Appadurai 1996) in which I grew up, today’s publicness is terser and more rapid, more easily archived and (therefore) more easily manipulated. Scholars need constantly to tend to the affects of threat, anger, apathy, illness, and exhaustion caused by racist micro- and macro-aggressions against Black and other non-white bodies, and we also need to stress how whiteness is hard-baked into the framing and mechanics of publicness.26 Structural racism is built into the affective technologies of mediation that we take for granted today, both in the psychological and corporeal historico-sedimentations of the white gaze that shape and orient bodily interaction and also in the frames and mechanics of technological mediation that dictate social norms and tend to obstruct human freedom from any but the normalized body of the white transparent I. In making this argument, I follow the lead of the Black scholars and activists who now form the canon of Black critical studies.27 “What happens,” Sharpe writes, “when we proceed as if we know this, anti-blackness, to be the ground on which we stand, the ground from which we attempt to speak, for instance, an ‘I’ or a ‘we’ who care?” (Sharpe, 2016, 7). Since the outrage over Trayvon Martin’s murder and the exoneration of his murderer, movements such as Black Lives Matter continue to present and document the widespread and brutal precarity that condemns non-white bodies to be often-fatal objects of racism. These same movements galvanize a rising coalition against the white structure of publicness, particularly in its current cultural contestation against the affective doubling-down of white supremacy and white hate groups in the United States and globally. Predominantly and by default, affective technologies of mediation are white technologies; they are the shared technologies of sense-making that enact and pattern the strongest constellations of normativity in the United States. Publicness, as digital capture and redistribution, is the evental site where the normative and normalizing structural supremacy of whiteness in US culture is felt, imaged, distributed, and bolstered, and it is also the site where this structural supremacy must continue to be contested and, when possible, transvalued.28 FILM AS A FOLD OF GLOBAL PUBLICNESS Film is a particularly poignant and prevalent cultural site for promulgating and analyzing the structural supremacy and transvaluation of publicness. Because film is both a persistent cultural production and also a widely accessible cultural practice of viewing and interpretation, it operates as a material fold of global and national publicness. This filmic fold of publicness regularly engages religion through dimensions I will call affecognitive, and it does so strikingly when it suggests ethical and pedagogical levers of social change by transvaluing familiar valuations, some of which are religious. The following section will conceptualize religion as a particular affecognitive form and function that mediates the emergence of subjectivity and publicness for particular ends, namely, the articulation, endurance, and interconnectivity of specific yet always multiple norms. As a lead-in to that conceptualization, I wish to show here how film can use religion, as a particular valuated dynamic of the form and function of subjective-public relationality, to signal transvaluative hopes or capacities in and for non-white and other non-normative characters. One scene from Moonlight (Jenkins 2016) serves as an example. With its brief 111 minutes, Moonlight lures viewers into a palpable sense of life in a small section of Miami inhabited mostly by African Americans. The film uses camerawork, light, montage, soundtrack, and visual and aural repetition not to convey knowledge of Miami but rather a felt sense of this place as the default home of its characters. Miami is not a place of abode and comfort, then, but an unchosen place thick with poverty, racism, gang violence, and homophobia. The cumulative force and miasma of these dynamics torque “Miami” into something like an unremitting element—on par with the nearby ocean or the weather—that enables and disables the particular development of the boy Little (Alex R. Hibbert), teenager Chiron (Ashton Sanders), and man Black (Trevante Rhodes). This textured sense of place seeps and stews across the screen and out into viewers, yet, like ocean currents that confusedly flux backwards and sideways at the shoreline, the shots do not follow an additive logic but rather branch and recoil in a logic of expansion and intensification. At the end of the film, viewers cannot say they know more about Miami than at the start of the film, but they will feel intensely and truly the brutal ways in which this place holds young African American (or African Cuban) men in a vise grip. As we saw with Hirsch’s “Tacet,” sometimes what is not heard or seen but only implied can powerfully demonstrate the contours and conditions of society’s dominant structures of valuation. In Moonlight, the emplaced context of Miami exemplifies this power of the indirect by luring viewers to feel (but not know) the violent effects on non-white bodies living in, enduring, and barely surviving a white supremacist culture. The film sidesteps familiarly filmic representations of America’s white (dominant) culture yet clearly implies “publicness as whiteness” by showing the marginalizing and incarcerating effects of white supremacy, that is, how the whiteness of publicness chokes off educational, occupational, and creative options for Miami’s Black population. Just as “Tacet,” evokes for me the presence and absence of a host of “others” with and against whom my sense of national belonging takes shape and consistency, so I find in Moonlight an approach to selfhood that is not about identity but about relationships that co-emerge with and against axes of affect and valuation. Thus, although many film reviews of Moonlight praise its treatment of identity, I would say that the film is more precisely about the processes of social, material, and affective emergence that institute, establish, and shape the sense, limits, and horizons of “selfhood.” The affecognitive dimensions of this process, and the ways in which these dimensions are densely wrapped up in social and phenomenological processes of valuation, are indicated by the ways in which the film’s title seeps into its story. Like the film’s place (Miami), moonlight is both unchosen and liminal; it affords vision but only partially and unreliably. The film’s story and social argument (i.e., its function as publicness) can be seen to explore just this optical unreliability, suggesting that what a person sees depends on the existing and unchosen (normative) quality and quantity of light, even though that person’s judgments do not usually take this unreliability into account. My experience with “Tacet” suggests that questions of value are always affective questions. Because valuations of nation and patriotism are so often, easily, and quickly sanctified as religion or as akin to religion, “Tacet” helps us consider how and why combinations of affect and valuation so often get read and felt as religion. We see this progression also in Moonlight. Consider the film’s most iconic and exceptional scene, when Juan (Mahershala Ali) teaches Little how to swim in the ocean. Though it is shot in medium and close frame, the scene exudes capaciousness. Daylight, not moonlight, floods the screen, and the ocean appears to go on endlessly around them. Unlike the partiality of moonlight, which narrows perspective and constrains judgments, the flush of daylight lifts constraint and seems to allow for plural judgments. The cinematographic openness of this scene comments on the achieved tenderness between the man and boy. Here are two male bodies that do not seem lost or precarious but buoyed and steady. Their intimacy is palpable, drawn out in their ability to be close and trusting and held. Like a baptismal ceremony, the play of horizon, water, and light evoke a ritual-like, special quality that sets it apart from the rest of the film. Filmmakers regularly use light to signal religion, transcendence, or even just ordinary, fingers-crossed hope, and the presentation and sensorial dynamics of light in this scene exemplify this trope. The scene signals religion (or an evoked religiosity) as a transvaluative force of transcendence; it breaks the frame and distribution of white supremacy that typically dictates publicness and that has persisted as the background condition determining the film’s characters and their lives, and it audaciously posits a life outside—or to the side—of that death-dealing context. By flipping the film’s blue tints from moonlight to the sea and by flooding the scene with sunlight, the film here and only here shows blackness held by the blueness of water and canopied—flooded, vaulted, haloed—by the bright light of day. The religious quality of the scene lies in the affects and valuation it elicits and circulates: Juan touches and encourages Little and viewers feel the ordinariness and the audacity of his touch. The scene registers something affectively foundational about the boy’s time with Juan, suggesting that this friendship, or mentorship, will establish and orient the indefinite emergence of Little’s life, protecting him somehow, from something. The film’s next scene brings us back to the circulations of power that lurk beneath and amid the co-emergence of Little’s Black and gay subjectivity with his homophobic Black peers. Juan and Little sit on a bench near the beach in a shot more typical for this film, captured with tight spatial dynamics that keep a chokehold on the landscape and its inhabitants. The ocean’s openness is here off-screen and barely heard, as it is for most of the film. Juan tells Little that he is Cuban and relates the memory of an old lady telling him that “in moonlight, Black boys look blue. You’re blue. That’s what I’m going to call you: Blue.” When Little asks with the straight deductive logic of children, “Is your name Blue?” Juan answers in a way that boomerangs out to the film’s title and reframes its events and trajectories: “Nah,” he replies, “At some point you have to decide for yourself who you’re going to be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you.” Misread by moonlight, Juan claims the power to read and narrate himself. It is a claim that might seem to reaffirm a liberal sense of core identity and the individual’s ability—even obligation—to decide who and what to be in the world. But here the film foregrounds the affective interplay of valuation and transvaluation and introduces a fundamental ambivalence within this ideology of American individualism, because even if Juan decides not to be Blue, he still is seen and judged as Blue by the people around him. Whatever identity Blue or Little forms, it emerges out of the conflicted and violent miasmas of white supremacy. The forcefulness of their conversation lies in palpably conveying the exertion and persistence required of transvaluative cultural and personal labor. The stunning affective intimacy of the “baptism” scene retroactively affirms and supports this labor and demonstrates the need for a sense of self and a sense of public with different (non-dominant, non-white) capacities and intensities, because whatever Little “decides to be” as the teenager Chiron and the man Black, his decisions will emerge out of brutal, anti-Black conditions, perspectives, and responses—the places and their histories—that he did not choose. The oscillation—or seepage—between the layered material affectivity of established and emerging places and the layered affective materiality of the established and emerging self is as endless as the grains of sand, as diffuse as moonlight. Despite Juan’s admonition to decide for oneself, the accumulated effect for all the Black bodies in this film might seem to be nothing more than entrapment. The adult man, Black, who looks so much like Juan, answers his lover’s, Kevin’s (Jharrel Jerome), question about who he is, about what his life is with this very word: “Straight up? Trapping.” The word simply means drug dealing, but with Juan as his model, we can see that the control that Juan-Black has over his business is a distortion, a trick of the light. He is trapped by trapping. The film’s dynamics of place and its minimalist dialogue perfectly situate and enact the entrapments of Juan, Black, and Kevin. If this were a film about finding one’s true self, this inner truth would need to find expression in words and actions. But that is not this film. The silences between the characters, their stuttered, torn, and inept linguistic exchanges, leave viewers grasping to fill in the gaps. Our eyes rove from these characters to the neighborhoods, streets, buildings, rooms, walls, and furniture that institute the symbolic matrix of their lives, the material and affective emplacements and contexts by which they are seen and which trap them as surely as does any “chosen” course of action. Even though Black remakes himself from the ground up after his incarceration in Atlanta, the blocks of that refashioning seem only to rearrange the bars of a social prison buoyed by poverty, racism, neglect, and homophobia. The visual logic of the film—the film’s technics that establish the marginalized places instituted for Little/Chiron/Black by dominant, white society—refuses the lived intimacy and capaciousness of that one scene with Juan. Yet. As with the presences and absences haunting “Tacet,” the indirect cinematography of Moonlight fuels an undecidability. This is not a film of accomplished hope, but it also is not a film that glorifies despair. The film’s undecidable visual logic interrupts the dominant valuations that equate publicness with whiteness to powerful effect (and affect). The title cards hold the three names of the one boy-body in a kind of developmental security, buoying him up in hard-won quasi-stability. Equally, the film’s title, Moonlight, canopies the one holding those three names with constraint but also possibility. Juan’s anecdote resonates terribly through the film, but also salves, heals, in that way that etymologically binds to Christianity’s salvation. Juan’s story warns Little that gazes are not neutral, that he will be gawked at, named, and labeled; but it also graces him with the knowledge that although Little cannot prevent the way gaze and word will pin him to certain identities, Little/Chiron/Black need not abandon himself to the assumed passivity of these visual logics. He can live in the exacting trench of transvaluative labor. He can resist. The film’s light, both moonlight and sunlight, signal the possibilities of Black’s exceeding the strictures of place and finding small steps into a different future, with different intimacies, intensities, and capacities than what Little’s mother predicted for him. The religious semiosis of moonlight is initiated textually (in the title) and then verbally (through Juan’s anecdote), and also shows itself as a single image three times in the film, all three moments of resistance: first, during his one sexual encounter with Kevin; second, in a memory from childhood that visually overlays Black’s car ride from Atlanta back to Miami; and third, in the haunting last shot of the film, which cuts irrationally from a two-shot of Kevin cradling Black’s head and shoulders—holding him as Juan held Little in the ocean but in a dark, shadowed room—to an image of Little with his back to us, looking out at a luminescent, moonlit ocean. Quickly, Little turns his head back over his shoulder to look at us, the audience. The film ends with that look. Light in darkness, light cascading and holding dark bodies in a dark world: the film’s moonlight absorbs that one, sun-drenched “baptismal” scene into something like hope, something that affectively aligns with religion as the felt binding and rebinding that hold together the co-emerging senses of self and public. Moonlight is atypical for the way its story about Black subjectivity is presented through film. Resonant with the artfulness of “Tacet” that presents difference and belonging affectively and bodily, Moonlight beautifully demonstrates a transvaluating intervention in the equation of publicness and Whiteness. What is most striking about Moonlight is not the story that is told but how it is told. The interruption of the dominant equation of publicness and Whiteness occurs at the level of filmic structure—title cards, color, light, and montage—and less at the level of the phenomenological gazes between characters. (As a contrast, consider how Spike Lee’s 2018 BlacKkKlansman remains frustratingly within the expected bounds of Hollywood storytelling, a fact that incited Boots Riley’s critique of Lee’s film (Shoard 2018).) Barry Jenkins senses how to attack the hardwiring of white supremacy through film language and narrative expectations. To me, it is not surprising but a further exemplification of the connections I am trying to draw between valuation, white normativity, affect, and religion and the case that the most powerful scene of Moonlight is its most religious scene. But such a claim raises more directly the question of what I mean by religion. PUBLIC RELIGION: THE FORM AND FUNCTION OF VALUATION It is cliché for scholars of religion to note that their focus of study cannot be pinned down to any essential set of elements. David Chidester, for instance, has noted that religion is not an object of analysis but rather an occasion for analysis (Chidester 1996, 260). But what incites this occasion? And what distinguishes religion from any other descriptor? Thomas Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling compellingly shifts scholarly attention to gerunds of social process by forwarding the importance of place, migration, and exile to the study of religion. Other scholars have given brilliant attention to human (and animal) beliefs, practices, and orientations. Let a thousand approaches to religion bloom. I only wish to add that what distinguishes each approach particularly as religion (and not not religion) has to do with modalities of valuation, that is, with how persons demarcate (acceptingly or not) an element of life as part of a larger structure of valuation and against other, competing valuations.29 The theory of publicness I forward in this essay does not argue for a new or unique understanding of religion, but it does underscore the tight connection between religion and valuation and asserts the affective valence of this connection. Not everything humans value gets marked or described as religion, yet whatever is claimed for religion is always marked or described in terms of values and in terms of the lived structures within which these values are embraced or rejected. Values thus refract larger social valuations, the sense, orientation, and depth of which are infinitely variable. Religion marks, for example, what someone values or is told to value or thinks they ought to value in a book, practice, tradition, or institution. Religion marks something a person values in the doing of it even if they care little about (value less) its “meaning” or “history.” Religion marks the supremely valued narratives that address the “why” questions of existence or form the ground for cherished systems or orientations of moral action. Religion marks the value of certain memories or songs or manners of being, even if the connection of these latter do not engage or conceptualize that value or valuation very deeply. The term “value” here indicates regard, importance, worth, or usefulness, whereas the term “valuation” indicates a process of assessment of value. Following Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, and Durkheim, I posit that social structures of valuation precede any one person’s acclamation of a value or set of values. Even so, transvaluation, in the sense of resistance to structures of valuation and the production of counter-values or new values, is also an ongoing and important social process. All of this may sound somewhat vague to those who prefer empirically verifiable definitional precision, but really it is not vague at all, only infinitely variable.30 This demarcation of religion as modalities of valuation should sound familiar, perhaps even mundane, to scholars of religion. For the classical theorists, religion so completely indexes social and personal valuation that it is compared to a drug (Marx), credited with shaping European capitalism (Weber), and equated with the collective power of sociality itself (Durkheim). Durkheim notes that even acts and attitudes of ordinary, everyday religion ballast a quiet, low-stake separation between the sacred and profane. On the other side of the spectrum of modalities of valuation, Marx argues (in tribute to Feuerbach) that we honor ordinary human qualities and relationships by intensifying and abstracting them into religious values that hold the aura of indisputable truth. Indeed, in calling religion “the opium of the people,” Marx pathologizes religion as a way of resisting religion’s profoundly effective rituals and tenets that distract the attention of participants (particularly economically precarious participants) away from society’s affectively intractable inequalities and miseries. Religion—in Marx’s case, Prussian Christianity—functions like a drug because it works on bodies to develop habits of feeling and orientation, and these habits really do give some individuals and groups palpable affective comfort for life’s vale of tears. Marx’s criticism of religion, which he denominates as the beginning of all criticism (Tucker 1978, 53), is less that it is doctrinally false and more that it is massively successful in funneling attention away from the difficult labor of constructing equitable ways of living together. He views religion as a modality of valuation that keeps persons (especially disempowered persons) addicted to bad abstractions. In his youthful writings, Marx counters the tremendous power of bad abstraction with a ploy for good abstractions. “Species being” operates as good abstraction because it is based on empirical reality, on something like what Marx terms the material “ensemble of social relations” (Tucker 1978, 145). The Christianity that Marx compares to opium gives cheap comfort to the powerless for what Marx deems the expensive cost of maintaining a status quo of vast disparity. Marx offers a different religion, an alternative valuated praxis for repeatedly binding people together, and he calls this communism. In The Protestant Ethic, Max Weber posits that the anxious question of salvation becomes a central structure of valuation in certain sixteenth-century Protestant communities. The “unprecedented inner loneliness” (Weber 1992, 104) generated by this anxious question incites development of an externalized (rationalized) ethic that, when systematized through groups and institutions (the rationalization of a rationalized practice), becomes the galvanizing force of Europe’s early capitalism. Weber’s attempt to credit human thought and feeling with the power to enact historical change (over against Marx’s focus on material forces and relations) is at base a story about transvaluation. Feudal and premodern assumptions about labor, subjectivity, and Christian salvation are here overturned when enough individuals break the practical and ethical pattern that links these assumptions together. Because he needs to pinpoint a change in the patterning of social practice, Weber studies people not as individuals but as Ideal Types or social carriers who come to feel, think, and act out different assumptions about and connections among labor, subjectivity, and Christian salvation. According to Weber, modernity signals the sturdy chassis of that Puritan patterning in which we still live, though its modality of valuation—its particular set of feelings and assumptions—is largely extinct.31 In the Elementary Forms, Durkheim argues that totems, the social symbols that signal our belonging in certain social groups, are religious abstractions. Totems represent and channel the binding power of society, and Durkheim equates this power and function to religion. His famous concept of collective effervescence is often upheld as a paragon of religion, but Durkheim points also to the cognitive categories of space, time, quality, and quantity as fundamentally religious because they are social and sociality is religious, he argues, because sociality is the core human structure of valuation. Durkheim’s equation of religion and society positions religion as the most profound structure of valuation, that is, an ontological matrix within which human individuals and groups develop. Religion as society also indicates phenomenologically the ways in which humans know, perceive, locate ourselves in space and time, relate to others, and identify ourselves and our families. The equation of religion and society underscores the affective valuation of all the persistent and multiple processes that, through circulating and binding, make humans who we are. With a cagey wink to William James, Durkheim notes that the function of religion “is to make us act and help us live. The believer who has communed with his god is not simply a man who sees new truths that the unbeliever knows not; he is a man who is capable of more (qui peut davantage).” A religious person attains this increased capacity not because religion validates her self but because, as the socialists say, selves are stronger together (Durkheim 1995, 419).32 In finding the suture of religion and valuation in the classical theorists of religion, I am conceptualizing a linkage and patterning that should ring familiar. The ascription of religion is linked to, patterned with, valuations. All sorts of things are linked to valuations yet are not necessarily marked as religion. I value reading, for instance, and my husband values gardening. The conjoining of religion with valuation is for me a claim about affective intensity and about relationality. Valuations marked as “religion” are intensely affective forms and functions that are carried out, conjointly, by persons and collectives. To say this differently, the affective valuation that saturates publicness as religion involves a co-emergence of affectively bound subjects and publics, and this co-emergence takes time, which means it requires repetition. This repetition enacts a kind of border maintenance of the emerging selves and publics. My conceptualization differs from ritual theory in that the senses of self and public that co-emerge are temporal, fragmented, and can be rapidly dispersed: what repeats is the structure of valuation and the values asserted within that structure, and not a liturgy, set practice, or the practitioners formed by them.33 Contrary to J. Z. Smith’s too-dominant quip, then, religion is not merely a scholar’s concept (Smith 1988). As Kathryn Lofton notes in her opening to Consuming Religion, religion scholars may battle unendingly about what religion is, does, and signifies, but people outside the academy have no problem denominating, claiming, and defining it (Lofton 2017, 3). Not only is religion not merely a scholar’s concept, then, religion is ordinary; it is everywhere, even if it is not everything.34 In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James writes that a religious emotion is simply a regular emotion (joy) oriented to a religious object (joy of God’s creation) (James 1982, 27–28). James is right, not because religion consists of a known set of objects but because religion is a concept or designation that emerges quite mundanely in the valuated conjunction of subjective-social forms and subjective-social functions.35 Putting it this way is quite a mouthful for something putatively so ordinary. I find the phrasing useful, because it reminds me that religion does not correlate with any one thing or factor but with conceptualization and designations of many and variable things and factors. These things and factors might be ideological or scholarly tools, but they also are real things and tangible factors that people cherish and that do significant cultural and political labor in our world. To get at this flux that nonetheless does take on stable forms, I have crafted something more like a mathematical formula than a humanistic definition. I have sought to articulate a diffuse delimitation or runaway variability that does settle at times into sturdy but not static patterns and that leads to the fact that religion is everywhere, even though it is not everything. Religion is a word we use to designate a particular dynamic of culture, and because culture is made up of but is not reducible to individual persons, this dynamic entails the identity and emerging of both personal subjectivity (forces of subjectivation) and collective inter-relationality (sociality). This dynamic often has to do with expressed norms (expressed values) and normalization (assumed and sedimented practices of valorization) but also with counter-norms (counter-values) and counter-normalization (resistance, protest). As I stood before “Tacet,” I felt both the high-stakes lure of the norms of national belonging and also the way in which any collective, musical performance of social belonging implies a host of “others” against whom my sense of national belonging takes shape and consistency. The binding power of social norms feels electric and magnetic. Its press on our habits, orientations, and dispositions makes laborious the crucial task of resisting and protesting dominant norms—much less the practice of refusing to engage them altogether. This labor is transvaluation, that is, a paradigm shift in the entire matrix of dominant values. I set out to conceptualize religion as affective valuation through the paired process of form and function. Religion can be seen as a means of denominating particular social forms that congeal (or are sustained) precisely because they enable particular social functions of structured valuations. By this formulation I refer to social forms in and through which persons, practices, histories, and lived orientations are connected and established. These forms are not solid but porous, yet they hold together enough to congeal, sustain, and generate affects of comfort and familiarity that feed into articulations of identity and belonging, even if only partially or ambivalently. This articulation of social form is a familiar fact of sociology. Humans gather and divide into groups. Sometimes these groups are isolated, sometimes they are overlapping, but in all cases groups are the social form by which histories, practices, and lived orientations coalesce, sustain, and oversee (supersede) subjectivities. One might think that feelings of identity and belonging that arise from participation in social forms should really slot into the function of these forms. It is possible to argue this. With my focus on publicness in our digital age, however, I would argue that feelings of identity and belonging are recursive affective impulses that hold a form’s shape, however porously and mutably. The function of these forms, when they take on the denomination of religion, lies in articulating, sustaining, and (re)binding valuations over and again with the affect and effect of binding self to neighbor and world in particular (but interpretable and fungible) ways and with the reflected affects and effects of generating bound policies and practices. Religion is thus not a thing (an essence) but a concept or process of conceptualization that comes into self-understanding and social density with and through the conjunction of at least one subjective-public form and subjective-public function. The forms and functions that converge as religion can be described and theorized infinitely because this is a process of “indefinite generalization” that does not result in reified, general entities.36 Form, here, designates any set of lived orientations (virtual or habitualized valuations), while function operates around any repeatedly enacted set of valuations (as they actualize). These orientations and valuations can be almost anything. They might be a personal set of dispositions that gets enacted in relatively (but not absolutely) predictable ways; or an institutional catalog of policies, principles, and procedures that, again, get taken up into discourse and practice in various ways; or a hegemonic set of assumptions or proprieties that function as a collective matrix of practical reason. The form of religion takes shape as lived orientations or bearings that channel delimited but vague claims; the function of religion is to articulate, sustain, and (re)bind valuations over and again in ways that bind self to neighbor and world and in ways that are bound into group policies and practices.37 The subjective-social functions designated as “religion” thus congeal or sediment as lived orientations, but not for everyone, or not always, or not in the same ways. The vagueness and multivalency of religion’s conceptualization is why people “know it when they see it” (Lofton 2017) and why scholars have an impossible time pinning it down as a stable object of study. I find the concept of lived and performed valuation useful for generalizing the difference, or act of setting apart, that folds into or forms the surface boundary of the conceptualization of religion, whether in a thick sense indicated by Durkheim’s separation of sacred and profane (persons, texts, objects, places, events, or memories) or the thinner sense that you realize other persons, places, objects, or acts refer to or embody religion(s) that are not available to you. This claim about valuation and religion can be turned around: the concept of religion is useful for generalizing the social expression and attestation of value, whether in a relatively thick sense, such as debates in France over wearing markers of religious belonging, or in a relatively thin sense, such as when we say that bowling is someone’s religion. Thick and thin, here, index affective and temporal investment as much as if not more than cognitive assent.38 In the circulations of affects generated by today’s publicness, the lived bearings and valuations that emerge as religion often boomerang back to familiar institutional affiliations, as in live-streaming of sermons, Muslim youth group Facebook pages, or Hindu Twitter feeds, but they also can dart across the social plane to generate unexpected connections and affective channels, such as fanship associations, groups that share hobbies, tenuous connections around a single political issue, consumer practices such as cooking, or coalitions built around shared ethical principles, such as a love of nature. Not all of these established groups or “trending” coalitions that take solid or evanescent shape through affective technologies of mediation necessarily understand themselves as “religion.” But because they conjoin orientation and valuation, they might understand themselves as “religion,” or be characterized (or caricatured) as such, and the scholar of religion might pursue these subjective-social designations.39 In the United States, it is crucial to foreground how whiteness is baked into the frame and mechanics of the technological mediations that form these groups. We see this in the starkly different media presentations of Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Parkland High School, both of which organize protests over the lack of gun regulation in the United States. BLM participants are often presented as a mob of angry youth harping on a topic of self-interest and always about to tip into violence; Parkland HS students are often presented as heroic, nonviolent youth compassionately forwarding a topic of national interest. Religion, as I am proposing it, is a subjective-social form and function in which subjects and publics emerge with porous but definable orientations and valuations that assert and sustain a variegated topography of commitment, antagonism, normativity, and counter-normativity. Put inversely, when valuation and orientation are conjointly shared, the result is often described or derided as “religious.” As I walked away from Antonia Hirsch’s “Tacet,” I was struck by how her videos of nearly silent bodily comportment and gestures conveyed something palpable but difficult to verbalize about national belonging and national difference. I am trying to understand this reaction in light of quite ordinary processes of valuation that structure the co-emergence of subjectivity and sociality. CONCLUSION: MUSINGS ON THE AFFECOGNITIVE Demarcating religion as social valuation and social valuation as religion can be specified by what I term affecognitive (affective + cognitive) forms and functions that mediate publicness, subjectivity, and our shared subjection to a mammalian response system for particular ends, namely, the specific and yet always multiple and multiplying valuations in their articulation, endurance, and interconnectivity—including, foundationally, the American valuation of whiteness. I wish to draw this essay to a close by reflecting on the usefulness of this neologism, affecognitive. In its simplest rendition, this term affecognitive posits that all cognition embeds affect.40 At the level of consciousness (however one defines it), all affect arises out of a streambed of existing and sedimented thoughts and feelings. Affecognitive is a phenomenological vector; it does not engage cognitive science debates about the origins and causes of cognition (thoughts) or feelings (named affects).41 I developed the term as a response to the familiar twentieth-century analyses of hegemony, commonsense, and ideology in which I was first trained. These cultural and economic critiques succeed in part through their agile attention to the ways in which ordinary and everyday powers thread together the habits of thought and feeling that structure, police, and sustain communities, societies, and nations. Hegemony, common sense, and ideologies are thus particular social fabrics that constitute the comfortable vestments of quotidian social interaction, and critiques of them are critiques of those patterns of comfort and those vestments of power. Increasingly I found these critiques still too oriented toward reason and discourse. I became frustrated by their failure to attend to feeling and to the bodies that generate and distribute feelings. It seemed to me that theories such as Rancière’s analyses of “the distribution of the sensible” (Rancière 2015, 44) and Foucault’s theorization of social “technologies” as “matrices of practical reason” (Foucault 1988, 18) improve on ideology critique by successfully extending sensation and understanding (sens) to the social plane, thereby evincing the fact that a person’s sensory habits and willed actions are not simply their own but are formed, triggered, channeled, and sustained through various social venues. The fluid machinations of these models are reminiscent of Raymond Williams’s earlier notion of “structures of feeling” (Williams, 1978: 128–35; see also Williams 1989), but Rancière and Foucault go beyond Williams in theorizing specific bodily arrangements and their particular capacities to sustain and interrupt the social status quo. By coining affecognitive as the phenomenology of publicness, I attempt to encompass the social nexus of sensation and understanding, like Rancière and Foucault, but in ways that can also stress the biological channeling of this nexus through the impulses and intensities of affect (e.g., chemicals, electricity, pheromones, subconscious awareness). Affecognitive refers to the social distribution of human sensation and practical reason, and also the condensation and flashpoint of the social in biological nodes that are not conscious but affective, even though these affective responses necessarily draw upon earlier cognitive patterns, including language. Affecognitive refers to the ways in which the social circulation of affect (re)settles in a body and weaves into that body’s extant physical and psychological makeup, and about how this (re)settling and (re)weaving orients that body to react to and redeploy social affects.42 My premise is this: In today’s publicness, constituted by intensifying social media and media prosthetics (the affective technologies of mediation), social and biological bodies encounter each other through visual and sound images, and through their affecognitive co-emergence, the fabric of social life—biological, technological, institutional, and temporal—is generated, sustained, and (also potentially) interrupted. Increasingly over the past century, these circuits include images and nonproximate information—cinema, magazine and newspaper advertisements, television, billboards, encircling advertisements in sporting venues and on corporate skyscrapers, footage from drones, the hyperlinking internet and its social media, and now smartphones and smart (prosthetic) devices for home and body. Each technology registers an intensification and proliferation of our image and information culture. The conceptualizations I have begun here of publicness as whiteness, of film as a fold of global publicness, and of religion as social forms and functions of valuation need to be seen as affecognitive processes in order to foreground the inseparability and co-emergence of subjects and social forms. Thus, subjective and public discourses, habits, practices, and memories that stitch together the form and function of religion are affecognitive and nonstatic imbrications. Put the other way around, affecognitive and nonstatic imbrications conjoin and stably tether what registers both as subjective and as public. In short, the form and function of subjectivity and publicness are always threaded through with affects, the circulation of which manages social boundaries, and this form and function can always be parsed for their religious dimensions, because religion is nothing in and of itself but emerges as a concept that signals a particular, valuated dynamic of the affecognitive form and function of subjective-public relationality. This working conceptualization of religion does not devolve to a flat nominalism because the threading of affect through subjective and public modalities of life is always plural, that is, always emerging in friction and flow with current norms, counter-norms, and fading norms that antagonistically function to articulate, sustain, and (re)bind valuations. By this rubric, the (infinite) varieties of religious experience are not fundamentally personal and are not society’s valuation of itself channeled through signifying or significant totems, because religion is nothing; religion does. Religion is not the separation of the sacred from the profane, it is not the feeling of ultimate dependence, it is not a system of symbols, it is not ritual acts of devotion, and it is not belief in a god or Gods or the valorization of specific texts. The concept of religion emerges to signal certain modalities of relationship, that is, certain kinds of subjective-public form and subjective-public function. The affecognitive conceptual orientation to religion I have presented here posits religion as a cultural dynamic of particular but always multiply articulated subjective-public forms and subjective-public functions co-emerging with and against unchosen axes of valuation. It seems a long road from “Tacet” to this pithy phrasing. As I have returned over and again to my first encounter with “Tacet,” I am struck by the fact that it was such a solitary and singular experience when it also was the initial inspiration for an article (and future book) that grapples with our supersaturated and hyperconnected media world, which has wrought such substantial changes on subjectivity, relationality, and valuation. But though I stood solitary before Hirsch’s three panels and struggled mightily to find words for how her work was affecting me bodily and cognitively, “Tacet” has remained important to me precisely because it is crammed full—silently and hauntingly—with a multitude of people and sounds, citizens and noncitizens, performers and singers and instruments, and football players down on one knee. This multitude, and the contestation of values, senses of belonging, and intensely affective orientations is replicated, I think, every time we sit, solitary, before our computer screens and swipe, click, like, and share our way into an image-laden publicness that, in this country, persistently dominates as whiteness. The rapid flows of this publicness hook mere filaments of who we are and spool them out, multiply, into hotly contested seas of valuation, many of which bobble up as values that are named religion, not only because we “know it when we see it,” but also because we know it when we feel it. Footnotes 1 Hirsch frames “Tacet” as representing the member states of NAFTA, Canada, the United States, and Mexico. 2 French philosopher Étienne Souriau uses the technical term instauration instead of establishment. Luce Vitry Maubrey defines instauration as the “ensemble of processes which lead to the moment wherein the presence, assurance and autonomy of existence conferred upon a certain being are incontestable” (see Maubrey 1974, 219). In other unpublished work, I attempt to draw a connection between Souriau’s instauration and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of institution. Here I devolve to “establish” in lieu of both technical terms. 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty uses the term “aesthesiology” to refer to an enfleshed structuration of sensibility (2003, 209, 277–78; 1968, 256). Randall Johnson offers a philosophical genealogy of aesthesiology and defines it as operating “at the interface of the body’s material bio-logics and the immaterial auto-affectivity of its to live” (2001, 4; see also Johnson 2015a). 4 My argument will focus on the United States, a polity that does at times assume global stature in terms of its assumed whiteness and its imperial/colonial practices. “Tacet” is a wonderful site to begin thinking about the racial and national overlaps and differences between Canada, the United States, and Mexico, but I will keep to my scholarly training and focus on US culture and politics. 5 Johnson 2015b is exemplary in demonstrating the political, economic, and social links between European democracy, notions of citizen “freedom,” and colonialism, particularly the slave trade. Silva 2007 provides a brilliant philosophical account of how the European white man, or what she terms the “transparent I,” produces raciality by encompassing “others” (women, immigrants, slaves, colonial subjects) in “affectability” so that these others can never accede to the universal nomos (scientific status) or poesis (moral representation) attained by the transparent I. 6 I may overstate my case a bit in this section, but I am writing as a hegemonic white voice lobbying for change within a hegemonic and predominantly white guild. I am aware that counterhegemonic voices, strategies, and platforms exist, but similar to Hirsch’s perspective in “Tacet,” my primary concern is to make palpable the affective forms of dominant publicness as dominant. I wish to thank Biko Gray for pushing me on this point and for speaking to me of his own work on Black Twitter. 7 Ann Laura Stoler develops a useful discussion of conceptual “occlusion” (2016, 10–14). She writes, “To occlude is an act that hides and conceals, creates blockage, and closes off. Underlying these chapters is an effort to treat occlusions as subjects of inquiry in their own right, not as obstacles on a predetermined track. That which occludes and that which is occluded have different sources, sites of intractability, forms of appearance, and temporal effects. They derive from geopolitical locations as much as they do from conceptual grammars that render different objects observable, that shape how we observers observe our chosen objects (as Niklas Luhmann might put it), and thereby construe the proper ‘lessons of empire’ and what count as the salient ‘historical facts’” (Stoler 2016, 10). 8 Clearly, interior building spaces and domestic spaces are not strictly “private” because computers and other security and information “devices” ensure portals for visual and informational connection to known and unknown others (see Yadron 2016). Further work can be done demarcating publicness, as I am theorizing it here, for example, publicity as that particular publicness concerning celebrities, politicians, and other persons of note. 9 These intersections are blurred or at least ambivalent, and seem to be diminishing. Even so, there is lived difference between my organic body—a skin- and chemical-based entity—and my as yet inorganic smart phone, even as the tethers between the two continue to intensify. 10 Access is still a substantial, material problem, but I would suggest that web-based communication is so globally dominant that those without it are not rendered “different” but “lacking,” to the point that some have raised the question of whether internet access is a basic human right (see U.N. General Assembly 2011). For a critique of this view, see Skepys 2012. These technologies include Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, YouTube, live-streaming events, easily accessible clips of video news on webpages, alert notifications that send updates from various news and activist organizations directly to one’s smart phone or watch, and the prevalence on all these platforms of a public comment function. For a mapping of twenty-first-century media changes and the effects (and affects) on subjectivity, culture, and thought, see Clough 2007 and 2018; Clough and Willse 2011; Galloway 2012; Hansen 2015; Papacharissi 2014; Shaviro 2003 and 2016; Terranova 2004. 11 Ariella Azoulay correlates the circulations of photography in the latter half of the nineteenth century with “a space of political relations that are not mediated exclusively by the ruling power of the state and . . . not completely subject to the national logic that still overshadows the political arena” (Azoulay 2008, 12). Azoulay’s argument resonates with Habermas’s depiction of the space of civil discourse in that photography stands outside of private domestic spaces but also stands apart from the power of the state—but importantly, this public space of photography is constructed through images, not discourse or association. Today, this imagistic “public sphere” is a virtual space, mediated through various “screen cultures,” and this virtual space is felt as temporal—it flows so quickly as to compress asymptotically toward instantaneity. As such publicness today seems less a place than a temporal function. How does the function of publicness work through circulation, particularly the circulation of images? Does it still create and protect a space of political relations in the interstice between private and state discourse—or does the very notion of the public as a function of circulating images de-form or distort our senses of private and state spaces? The shift from citizens participating in situated discourse to consuming print media relatively privately to subsisting in a global miasma of image-driven “news” raises salient questions about the scale and intensity of publicness and the ways in which citizens construe and feel out their citizenry within them (see Terranova 2004; Clough 2018; Galloway 2012). 12 This transitory quality of our media worlds does not mean that real cuts and capture do not occur. In fact, though it is not what I focus on here, rapid dissemination sustains scandals that really do quickly encircle the miniscule contours of a single body, with outsized consequences for its life; think of the rapid and intense hurricanes of affect unleashed around and on Stephen Salaita and Rachel Dolezal, or more recently, Rachel Tuvell’s Hypatia article. 13 “We must understand that there are four major types of these ‘technologies,’ each a matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (Foucault 1988, 18; see also Behrent 2013). 14 Foucault gives persistently careful attention to the interplay of discourse, institutionality, and bodies (the latter as both forces of subjectivation and habituated practice)—this triad functioning as a “rubric” that I use to think through the ways in which Foucault’s analyses circulate in structurally homogenous historical differentiation. The patterns and habits of discourse, institutions, and bodies are forms of power (pouvoir) that channel the flowing power (puissance) of affects, significations, and practices. The innumerable variations in how pouvoir-savoir (power-knowledge) is constructed, sustained, compromised, and undone both by the very problematic of pouvoir-savoir (i.e., its structurations) and by the impulses of puissance (i.e., its flows) are why Foucault threw up his hands in frustration with the charge that he reified power or reduced knowledge to power, as in this passage from a 1984 interview with F. Ewald: “If I have said, or meant to say, that knowledge is power, I would have said it and having said it, having identified them, I would have nothing further to say; I do not see why I would bother myself to demonstrate different relations. …Those who say that, for me, knowledge is the mask of power appear to me not to have the ability to understand. There is little to say to them in response.” (Foucault 2001: 1495. This is my translation of the following passage: “Si j’avais dit, ou voulu dire, que le savoir c’était le pouvoir, je l’aurais dit et l’ayant dit, je n’aurais plus rien eu à dire puisque les identifiant, je ne vois pas pourquoi je me serais acharné à en montrer les différents rapports. …Ceux qui disent que, pour moi, le savoir est le masque du pouvoir ne me paraissent pas avoir la capacité de comprendre. Il n’y a guère à leur répondre.”). 15 Newspapers and magazines did appeal to social niches and help sustain subcultures across distances. Online communities are at once more discursive and participatory and more anonymous than print-based communities. 16 Charles 2015 cites Michael Warner’s helpful article, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in Calhoun 1992. See also Page 1999, 111–28 and Warner 2005. 17 Matthew Wilson writes: “Discourse produced in the public sphere by those nonwhite, non-rational racial others can only be seen, by whites, as ersatz, as a poor imitation of a genetically misunderstood essence” (1999, 23). See also the scholars of Afro-Pessimism, particularly Patterson 1982 and Wilderson 2010. Even scholars who temper Afro-Pessimism with Black Optimism now link modernity to the production of race, specifically the production of Blackness or what Mbembe theorizes as le Nègre in Critique de la Raison Nègre, translated aptly but still with a loss as Critique of Black Reason. See Mbembe 2013 (Mbembe 2017); Moten 2003; and Hartman 1997. 18 On the subject as transparency and the inability of non-white bodies to attain subject status, Silva explains: “The socio-historical logic of exclusion—and the transparency thesis it presupposes—conjures up the subject when critical texts (re)produce the racial others as already differentially constituted historical beings before their entrance into the modern political spaces where they become subaltern subjects. My point is that, without addressing the regimen of production of such subaltern subjects, the subjects of cultural difference, one ends up attributing to them a self-defeating kind of transparency” (2007, 5). On affectability: “What [early twentieth-century race theorist, [Robert E.] Park’s account of black consciousness indicates is the most powerful effect of the sociologic of exclusion. Because it assumes and rewrites the black subject as intrinsically affectable, it renders subalternity the proper social position of the other of Europe. How else to explain why Park read [sic] the modernized Negro as inauthentic and slave songs as authentic signifiers of black consciousness if not as statements of blacks’ ‘unnatural’ presence in a social configuration governed by transparency, one to which only the consciousness that houses universality and self-determination is indigenous” (Silva 2007, 161–62). 19 According to Silva, “When taken not as a category but as a referent of another mode of existing in the world, blackness returns The Thing at the limits of modern thought. Or, put differently, when deployed as method, blackness fractures the glassy walls of universality understood as formal determination” (2017, 1–2). Writing against Bacon, Descartes, and Kant, Silva uses this essay “to implode the basis of the ethical grammar that cannot but provide a negative answer for the never-asked question for which Black Lives Matter demands a different answer” (2017, 4). 20 Shannon Sullivan, for instance, draws on the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to argue that, “because of the co-constitutive relationship between space and bodies, the situatedness of human bodily life means that space is not primarily experienced as neutral, but as ‘magnetized’ with particular meanings” (2001, 88). Similarly, in an article on faciality in digital art, Jennifer Gonzalez defines race as “a relation of public encounter,” indicating its material anchoring in the particular spatial and temporal coordinates of publicness (2009, 56). 21 Silva pursues a careful and nuanced discussion of Foucault’s œuvre, arguing with his critical accounts of representation, subjectivation, and biopolitics (particularly the scientization of knowledges in the nineteenth century) but also against the persistent failure of his accounts to perforate his European and Eurocentric assumptions. 22 Safiya Umoja Noble writes about this practice as “technological redlining”: “On the Internet and in our everyday uses of technology, discrimination is embedded in computer code, and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not” (2018, 1). Anne Cheng, writing similarly about the early twentieth century, “when techniques of seeing were so rapidly changing,” notes that “not only do new visual technologies affect how we see racial difference, but racial difference itself [and the racism that sustains it] influences how these technologies are conceived, practiced, and perceived” (Cheng 2011, 6). 23 This assumption further exemplifies Silva’s argument that the foundational ontoepistemology of modernity is the unmarked body, the “transparent I.” Dyer also points to the “invisibility” of whiteness (1997, 3), and Goldberg refers to whites as “racially invisible—the ghosts of modernity” (1997, 93). As another example, when Eden Osucha concludes her compelling essay “The Whiteness of Privacy: Race, Media, Law” with the claim that “to be subject to media publicity is to be racialized,” I wish to call out this racialization as a tactic of whiteness to invisibilize itself and to render non-whiteness other (2009, 73). 24 Silva correlates Kant’s determinism with white supremacy (2017, 6), and I see resonance between her account and my argument that the affective technologies of mediation are yet another iteration of the global dispersal of white supremacy. She writes, “In sum, determinacy as deployed in Kant’s knowledge (scientific) program remains the core of modern thought: it is presupposed in accounts of the juridical and ethical field of statements (such as the human-rights framework) which (a) presume a universal that operates as an a priori (formal) determining force (effectivity), and which (b) produce objects for which ‘Truth’ refers to how they relate to something else—relationships mediated by abstract determinants (laws and rules) that can only be captured by the rational things’ (including the human mind/soul) ‘principles of disposition.’” 25 Judith Butler analyzes how media images necessarily stage a normative scene. The framing of any scene is not a natural “given,” she argues, but a channel for historically and socially stratified norms. She notes, for instance, that our human, ontological capacity for general apprehension becomes historically and culturally molded into norms of intelligibility and recognizability, both of which mold the production of an image’s angle and framing. The rapidly distributed images that stream through our daily lives work to constellate and animate society’s shared and contested sets of ontological, epistemological, and political norms. Butler notes how the enactment of these norms through media-frames stabilizes hegemonic norms, especially with regard to what she sees as the asymmetric distribution of vital resources that she terms “precarity.” But she also notes how certain movements and distributions of images can break a frame’s smooth surface, thereby bringing these embedded norms into visibility and potential contestation (2009, 46–51). I am drawn to Butler’s insight that the movement of affect through the images of digital media—a process she calls the “transitive” quality of images—can incite or foreclose resistance to expected norms. For further discussions of the Rodney King video in particular, see Butler 1993; Weiss 2008; and Salamon 2018. 26 Substantial social change will not occur without cracking open structural racism, but attending to embodied, discursive, and institutionalized structures does not excuse turning away from the intimacy of micro-encounters that constitute public life, even if such structural attention does manage to avoid the mechanical reproduction of publicness. On the violence wrought by micro-aggressions, read and re-read Rankine 2014. 27 The founding work of nineteenth-century Black critics such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and W.E.B. DuBois set the stage for twentieth-century scholarship that deepens and intensifies with each passing decade. In lieu of an insufficient list of this critical scholarship and in addition to the texts I cite elsewhere in this essay, let me refer to the following excellent texts from scholars of religion, all of which draw on, expand, reconsider, and demonstrate the continual relevance of these historical voices: Crawley 2016; Glaude 2016; Harding 2015; Johnson 2015b; Manigault-Bryant 2014; Sorett 2016; and Winters 2016. 28 In referring over and again to the structures of affective technologies, I realize the referent to “structure” is vague. I am theoretically oriented within Marxian theory, but the sense of structure I intend is not only Marx’s “forces and relations of production” but also Weber’s rationalized systems of comportment and Merleau-Ponty’s carefully nuanced account of how personal identity and social context are “instituted” (established) not “constituted” through material and psychological interactions that mark both body-minds and physical and social spaces (Merleau-Ponty 2010). Merleau-Ponty’s student Gilbert Simondon theorizes a similar process as “individuation” ([2005, 2013] 2017). More recently, in her conversations with Lee Edelman in Sex or the Unbearable, Lauren Berlant writes pithily, “Structure is a process, not an imprint, of the reproduction of life” (Berlant and Edelman 2013, 12). My thanks to an anonymous reader for pressing this question. 29 Lurking behind this claim is another tangled line of thought about value in Marx and in capitalism, and how value and valuation shape and are shaped by stated and occluded idealizations of “the human” (see Marx 1978; Barrett 1999; Massumi 2018). 30 My thanks to Randall Johnson for this phrasing. 31 Living in the wake of Weber, I would suggest that the Puritan modality of valuation indexed by the loneliness produced by anxiety over the question of salvation has morphed into and remains the underlying values of presumably secular, neoliberal, niche-consumer capitalism. These values are captured by the 1980s quip, “the one who dies with the most toys, wins” and lived (but rarely avowed) as the salvation wrought through consumer branding. 32 Karen E. Fields’s translation reads, “He is a man who is stronger,” and she provides the French original and its translation in the asterisked note at the bottom of the page (Durkheim 1995, 419). I could extend this discussion of the classical theorists with accounts of Nietzsche and Freud, but it would belabor the point. We know Nietzsche’s theory that social valuation is social power and Freud’s Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents, which examine the high psychological cost (to our id) of our (egoic and superegoic) civilizational values. 33 An anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this essay suggested I draw more thoroughly from established ritual theory. It is clear to me why such a suggestion makes sense, yet I want to underscore how the flows and bindings of valuation might produce only part-subjectivities and part-belongings. In other words, ritual theory assumes a coherence in subjectivity and social process that is fragmented in our hypermediated, digital age. 34 Here I am echoing Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault. Williams asserts that “culture is ordinary” in opposition to scholars and literati such as T. S. Eliot and Matthew Arnold who embrace and defend an elitist understanding of culture (see Williams 1989, 3–14). Foucault notes repeatedly that power is everywhere even if it is not everything (see, for example, Foucault 1980, 93). 35 In geometry, to describe is to mark out or draw a figure. I am trying to conjoin this sense of “describing” religion—that is, marking it out in a figure, putting boundaries around it—with the discursive sense of “describe” that connotes providing a detailed narrative. 36 Foucault states, “Le christianisme, surtout dans ses exigences morales quotidiennes, n’est pas devenu, au début du vesiècle, une régle de vie reconnue et pratiquée par tous; il ne l’a d’ailleurs jamais été tout au long de son histoire. Mais il portait une exigence d’universalité, et celle-ci était appuyée sur un support institutionnel qui en faisait autre chose qu’un principe géneral (comme pouvait l’être l’éthique stoïcienne par exemple): une possibilité effectivement mise en œuvre de généralisation indéfinie.” (“Christianity, especially in its daily moral requirements, did not become, at the beginning of the fifth century, a rule of life recognized and practiced by turns; it has never been so throughout its history. But it carried a requirement of universality, and it was supported by an institutional support, which made it something other than a general principle (as could be the Stoic ethics, for example): an actually implemented possibility of indefinite generalization” (2018, 253; my translation). 37 Ahmed (2004) uses the language of “orientation” to encapsulate how an action or habit or action has a particular history that becomes increasingly occluded as the orientation becomes increasingly naturalized (or transparent) to the subject. An orientation is also a bearing, as on a compass; it indicates the directions a subject tends to take physically or affectively or discursively. An orientation or bearing is also a trend; this word, used to such powerful and annoying effect by social media, signals how certain social orientations can form quickly and function starkly and successfully (“go viral”) before dissolving away or becoming archived (habituated, sedimented, perhaps even reified) by hashtags or by the institution(alization) of social movements. 38 This language of thick and thin is inspired from a footnote in Stoler 2016, 215. Stoler cites Akeel Bilgrami’s rubric of “thick” and “thin” senses of rationality, which differ according to the universality and specificity of different claims (see Bilgrami 2006; see also Geertz’s use of thick description in Geertz 1973). 39 It is interesting to consider whether the rise of “spiritual but not religious” correlates with the rise of affective technologies of mediation such as web-based chatrooms, new media, and social media. 40 As C. S. Peirce would say, all Thirdness includes Firstness, that is, all concept, generality, or law embeds quality, intensity, and possibility (see Peirce 1966). 41 I first used affecognitive in Hamner 2008, which expressed my excitement about new developments in epigenetics. That paper is rather more situated in the discourses of biological sciences than I am right now (I used to be a biochemist, and genetics was always a path-not-taken career for me), but the term has stuck as I have continued to think through affective economies. 42 In referring to the biological, I do not claim it as a dimension of life cleanly separable from the social (recently, epigenetics clarifies this imbrication), but neither is the biological simply reducible to the social. Acknowledgements I wish to thank the JAAR editor, Andrea Jain, and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and criticisms. 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TI - Theorizing Religion and the Public Sphere: Affect, Technology, Valuation
JF - Journal of the American Academy of Religion
DO - 10.1093/jaarel/lfz065
DA - 2019-12-12
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/theorizing-religion-and-the-public-sphere-affect-technology-valuation-VRKj05TNk3
SP - 1008
VL - 87
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -