Page 183 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

168 Maria José A. de Abreu

Brian Massumi when referring to the work of Pierre Levy calls a “collective
individuation” (Massumi 2002, 71). As we will see momentarily, technol-
ogy too enters this process of codependency and mutual modulation
between body and space, individual and collective.

The Media Acts of the Apostles

“The Acts of the Apostles,” Padre Jonas frequently exhorts, “is the Acts of
2
the Apostles.” Often used as a statement of prepositional logic or, alterna-
tively, as a rhetorical strategy, the redundant and symmetrical nature of
tautology, literally makes it good to breathe: one inhales while thinking the
“Acts of the Apostles” and exhales while thinking “The Acts of the
Apostles.” Word-bearing symmetries such as this help structure breath,
that “art of mechanical reproduction” that for the past three decades has
been organizing the life of Canção Nova. Such practice comes after the
reformations of Catholic prayer techniques introduced by the CCR, which
characteristically uses words and rhythm to structure breath. Bearing in
mind media’s contemporary efforts to convey a sense of live transmission
and directness, Canção Nova’s adoption of breath as a dynamic principle
allows it to instantiate liveliness at the core of the technological, one mod-
ulating the other.
The idea, however, is to act according to the teachings of St. Paul to
whom communication is inalienably associated with the living body,
that is, a body that communicates. As Manfred Schneider notes, St. Paul
was “the media specialist of the Apostle’s,” who “radicalized the differ-
ence inaugurated by Jesus and his reporters: namely, that God’s power,
and the medium of his revelation consisted in spirit” (Schneider 2001,
202–203; see also Sanchez in this volume). Being one of the main pro-
tagonists of “The Acts,” St. Paul expressed and lived according to the
ideal that the body is at once the medium and the message, the singular
and the universal. In other words, the body is not an instrument of com-
munication but is itself embodied communication. The breathing body

always implicates the world in its inside, just as the latter is distributed in
the world.
Essentially, the components of St. Paul’s “media theory” comprise the
gamut of charismas, gifts, or virtues, which according to the story of
Pentecost fell upon the community in the “form of a rushing wind.” His
well-known dictum, “the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit,” is regarded
by Catholic Charismatics as an abridgment of the parable of Pentecost as
described in Acts 2:4. The parable tells how the Holy Spirit descended upon