Hirschkind, in distinguishing the notion and subsequent
effect of fear as constructed in Islamic discourse compared to that of mass
entertainment, writes: “In short…the emotions induced by reflection on the
grave presuppose and are integral to a structure moral action, one presupposing
a particular kind of motivation. Note also the different loci of the
contrasting types of fear, one literally in the brain, the other in the heart,
the organ of moral knowledge and practice.” (p.97) Here, Hirschkind, intentionally
or unintentionally, conceives of the heart and the body holistically in terms
of a repository of “moral knowledge and practice.” Hirschkind does not consider
the source of such moral knowledge (it is incidental in the scope of the
entirety of his work): whether it is possible to consider the knowledge as
a-priori, as only formed and accentuated through the affective orientation
sourced in Islamic discourse, or alternatively, this moral knowledge is sourced
from (as opposed to in), extracted from Islamic discourse in the form of
pedagogy. The former notion is (in my opinion) more provocative philosophically
and engenders two correlating questions: whether God can be conceived as an
immanent being through the cassette sermons and their affective orientation of
ethical feeling//how would God be perceived as immaterial through a form of
media? And further, a more general question, when one interacts with religious
media, how is that media imbued with affective force; that is, does it
inherently have any capacity to evoke an affective response, or rather that
affective meaning applied to it by recipients?
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