Theorizing Religion and the Public Sphere: Affect, Technology, Valuation

Abstract

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.