Page 194 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

Breath, Technology, Making of Community 179

of the rhythms of the ins and outs of money very much resembles the mer-
curial depictions of weather radars. As we move toward the last days of the
month the emotional investment rises like a temperature. The “generous
downpour” of money, especially toward the end of the month, is often
related to the highly concentrated cloud formed by intense collective
prayer. This idea stems from the perception that prayer is effected through
the breathing and that it affects the surrounding air.
The thing is, side by side with a continual work of mystification of media
(through the disavowal of mediation) there is also at work a logic of eco-
nomic transparency. Curiously, mediation can be best denied at the moment
of its exposure. Different from Father Dougherty who includes commer-
cials from other religious entities, Canção Nova is totally self-referential in
matters of publicity. Ingeniously, by overtly showing the very means of
mediation—by turning the camera onto itself—those means become them-
selves the mediated content; the medium quite literally becomes the mes-
sage. Mediation becomes so full of itself that it performs its own denial in
favor of affective directness (Morris 2000; Taussig 2003). Direct transpar-
ency is drawn out from kenotic mediation while absorbed by the rhetoric of
the “live transmission” that such mediation allows in the first place. In
other words, technique partakes in the work of its own denial. Furthermore,
this logic of transparency, which is the counterpart of giving “in charity” in
Canção Nova’s moral economic universe, is intrinsic to breathing itself. In
that sense, Canção Nova is not a mere product of Pentecost but rather its
perpetual remaking, renewal, rejuvenation. Simultaneously, Canção Nova
embraces the rules of the global market by operationalizing breath so as to
conflate the material dynamic life of the body with the immaterial and the
volatile aspects of the virtual. It does so by juxtaposing means as ends
through its “aesthetic economy of transparency” (Morris 2000) and through
its self-referential nature that allows it to have control over copyright prop-
erties, ownership of means of communication, people, sounds, and images,
to mention a few, while directing the flow of capital.
Padre Jonas’s relative lack of means in relation to Father Dougherty’s
abundant resources turned out to benefit Padre Jonas’s ability to exploit the
conditions or rules of the global economy. His reliance on the intangible

capital of charisma provided him with the ideal currency to keep the reli-
gious and the economic intertwined in the same healthy flow of things.
As Hardt and Negri have expressed, what is distinctive about contempo-
rary labor processes is that they signal a kind of “immateriality.” Labor itself
has become a service characterized by the central role of knowledge, infor-
mation, affect, and communication. In their model concept of “immaterial
labor” they make room for the aspect of “production and manipulation of
affect,” which “requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labor in a bodily