Page 182 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Breath, Technology, Making of Community 167

The Rapture saying, “we who are left alive will be carried off together with
them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air . . .” (Thess 4, 15–17). In the
words of Nelsinho, one of the early apostles of the community,

The history of Canção Nova has been made from body-to-body with the
people. We had no real place . . . Padre Jonas would walk around with a tape
recorder and a bag filled with tapes. He would put on classic music and
would ask: Who is God for You? Then, we would start crying, we were
touched by the words of the padre. That prepared the sermon. Then the
padre would make us travel, he had that kind of language. He worked with
our imagination. There and then, the padre was DAVI {audiovisual depart-
ment}, the Radio, the TV and Internet. (Nelsinho 2004) 1

Then, as now, his followers maintain, everything occurred as if time and
space were two units that existed alongside the dynamics of “breathing in
and through the spirit,” beyond which there was only “uncertainty.” Yet, by
perceiving time in line with each singular breath, that is, by living ever
more intensively in the here and now of the present, they opened up to the
universal. Each singular breath worked as an actualization of creative pos-
sibility. The more one inspired, the more one got inspired and thus the
higher one’s creative potential became.
In the Charismatic sense, to be virtuous (i.e., to be gifted) was and con-
tinues to be an opening up to virtuality. As argued, breath-induced virtue
stands for the ability to open up to relations with the outside. Insofar that
through the dynamic rhythms of breath, the outside is implicated in the
inside (and vice versa), any relation is always and necessarily a self-relation
(de Abreu 2008). What happens in this process is that the body alternates
its objective concreteness with the more abstract dynamism of passage and
flow. This alternation between concrete and abstract itself evinces the per-
formative nature of breathing in that, the actual physical activity involved
in “the contraction and expansion of breath,” also stands for the “least
material regime of corporeality” (Sobchack 2008, 202).
Thus, the more Padre Jonas became aware of the proprioceptive apti-
tudes and fluencies occurring within his body, the more virtuous and vir-

tual his body became. His body became distributed and coimplicated in
the physical, human, and technological landscapes. When transposed
into the relation between individual and the collective, there was no possi-
ble separation between one and the other. Rather these two were intercon-
nected. Just as the physical landscape permeated the body, and the latter
was recalibrated to suit the local environment, so too the collective, the
community, inhabited—and continues to inhabit—the individual. As
long as they breathe, the community and body overlap, expressing what