Page 195 - Aesthetic Formations Media, religion, and the Sense

180 Maria José A. de Abreu

mode” (Hardt and Negri 2001, 293). Furthermore, one of the key features
of this type of economy via the affect is, according to these authors, its abil-
ity to capitalize on the compression between means and ends of production.
They also suggest that the reason why it works through the affect is because
(like in Canção Nova’s self-referential economy) the means of production
that mediate the act of manufacturing, have themselves been identified
with the ends, and the message with the means. As a result, the state of
global capitalism increasingly tends to perform the dispensation of means
of mediation involved in the act of production. Products are becoming (like
the body) ever more immaterial and lighter so that they can better interface
with an increasingly fluctuating relational market, and at the same time,
commoditize experience and events more than they accumulate (Massumi
2003). Such fluctuations hold up, thanks to a new exploration of affect
through internalized movement fostering transparency. So transparent, in
fact, that they stick, becoming adherent. Adherence, to be sure, is a good
term underpinning Canção Nova’s community—in devotion but also in
that of being greasy, like a glutinous substance, so that it sticks fast, or the
way lungs sometimes stick to the chest wall, during quiet breathing so that
chest movements become coupled with the movements of the lungs.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have addressed the question of community from a bodily,
material perspective. Rather than analyzing how a community uses media
in order to instrumentally imagine itself, I have tried to identify the very
“making of” mechanisms that allow the community to identify with the
very materiality of the machinic. In other words, I have chosen to think of
communication as a form of community processing. I have analyzed how
the Pentecostal/Pauline notion of embodied pneuma provide Canção Nova
with a kind of religious media theory, and explored how the latter becomes
articulated with an economic regime of immediate transparency that is
premised on the body’s aptitudes to perceive and regulate movement. Once

perceived through the mechanics of breathing and circulation, there is no
exterior position from which the community can be clearly defined. What
matters instead are the cycles and reciprocations between in and out and
the need to maintain the proprioceptive-like balance between them.
By focusing on the parable of Pentecost, Padre Jonas targeted different
things at the same time. On the one hand, he managed to go beyond
Liberation Theology’s militant ideology. On the other, he surpassed
Father Dougherty’s recalcitrance to apply marketing methods to Catholic