Page 177 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

162 Maria José A. de Abreu

Benedict Anderson’s (1991) notion of “imagined communities” in turn
offers us a much more flexible model for grasping the complex dynamics
of community-making. Still, imagination remains dependent on a point of
origin or foundation, upon which the community imagines itself. We do
not get to know how the real or origin against which imagination evolves
is itself already constituted by those imaginations. Alternatively, in what
follows, I propose to develop a more circular and interactive approach to
community by looking at the material, bodily, and processual mechanisms
that signal community are always brought about and implicated through
its own making of. Thus, instead of defining a community as an entity
bounded to a particular core from which it “constructs” or “imagines”
itself, the goal is to expose the very material mechanics or technological
existence of the community as communication. Rather than conceiving it
as a containable entity awaiting signification or as an assemblage of dis-
crete bodies that instrumentally communicate, the aim of the present exer-
cise will be to examine the communal as intrinsic to communication.
Shortly put, this chapter argues that communities do not only communi-
cate but that they are communication.
More specifically, relying upon the Christian notion of pneuma, the
Greek word for spirit, breath, or air, we will be invited to ponder the con-
cept of community through the breathing body. Based on the narrative of
Pentecost that tells how the Holy Spirit came down upon the apostolic com-
munity “in the form of a rushing mighty wind,” I will move on to explore
how inspirited breath sets the force or mechanism through which the com-
munity as communication unfolds. I will then consider the material and
motile expressions of breath. That is, by referring to the aspect of reciproca-
tion between inside and outside that is inherent to breathing, I will question
the modern separation between inner life and outer expression as we
acknowledge that the cycle of breathing in-and-out disallows any prolonged
closure as well as any external point whereupon the boundaries of the com-
munity could be drawn. What becomes relevant, instead, are the processes
and dynamics by which the body is implicated and distributed in the entire
natural, human, and technological landscape by means of circulation and a
self-regulated balance between inputs and outputs.

I owe my understanding of a breathing body in this discussion to the
efforts of media savvy Brazilian Catholic Charismatic Padre Jonas Abib to
promote an expanded middle in an era of strong polarization between
right and left ideologies. While the 1970s were rich in calls for social mobi-
lization in Brazil and around the world, Padre Jonas’s engagement with
movement was primarily kinetic. He chose not to be part of a social reli-
gious movement but to be movement. This meant a leap over the walls of
ideological positioning, and landing in a space of sensory modalities.