Page 178 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Breath, Technology, Making of Community 163

While the analogy between body and community is not new, I will exam-
ine it through the distinctively sensory modality of proprioception. Akin
to kinaesthesia, proprioception is the sense responsible for the perception
of motion. Sometimes addressed as a sixth sense, it refers to the internal
mechanism that enables a body in motion to maintain equilibrium through
awareness of the relation of the joints and of body parts to each other. In
the same way that proprioceptive awareness keeps track and controls the
circulation between different parts of the body, this chapter shows how
Canção Nova evolves and maintains itself as a whole community through
a circuitry and transmissibility that it manages to establish between differ-
ent community stations. As we will see, nature, body, architecture, media
technology, and economics all enter into a relational field of inter- and
intrareferentiality in ways that engage with, and actively configure elec-
tronic technology. The goal is to create a structural analogy between the
influx of sensory information within the body, and the regime of circular-
ity that connects the important “joints” of the community.
In sum, the purpose of this chapter is threefold: first, to foreground
Canção Nova Media Community as a sensuous community in motion or
community-in-the-making; second, to reflect on how such a community-
in-the-making instantiates the very mechanics of communication; and
third, to disclose the constitutive relation between an aesthetic economic
regime of transparency and Pentecostal practices of embodied charisma. In
line with recent scholarly interest on the relation between the aesthetic and
the political, the notion of aesthetics applied here rescues the political
power of the sensorial as implied in the Aristotelian concept of aesthesis (see
also Meyer in this volume). The latter has been defined as a form of orga-
nizing experience and knowledge of the senses (Buck-Morss 1992; Verrips
2006; Hirschkind 2006). In order to grasp the making of community in
our time we are well advised to take seriously the very discursive practices
through which communities produce themselves, and in the case of Canção
Nova this inevitably leads us to the sensing body.

The Paths of the CCR

In 1969 two American Jesuit priests arrived in São Paulo State. Their
mission was to introduce the CCR movement in Brazil. One was called
Father Haroldo Rahm, and the other Father Eduardo Dougherty.
Although both priests identified with the ideals of the CCR movement,
namely its emphasis on the narrative of Pentecost, once in Brazil, each
took very different paths. Whereas Father Rahm opted to live in a farm