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Breath, Technology, Making of Community 181

televangelism against all odds. As a native, Padre Jonas was very mindful
of how demonized mass media had been by the internal critical opinion.
He knew that before he could start using mass media in order to convert
people, mass media had itself to be converted, its demons expelled, the air
recycled. And for that he had to start with his most unassailably intimate
being: his own wavering body. Instead of joining the forces operating in
the polarized political context of Brazilian society, he focused on the
motor qualities of the body itself, and from there, in dialogue with his
immediate surroundings, he began to open the way toward a balanced
expanded middle. While “allowing” Father Dougherty the honor of being
a pioneer, Padre Jonas used him as a windbreaker vis-à-vis the local criti-
cal mindset. At the same time, in the context of an appealing Pentecostal
televangelism, many churchmen knew, if reservedly, that something had
to be done to stop the exodus of Catholics to the Protestant and Pentecostal
churches. So, the strategic question was how to use mass media and at the
same time circumvent the local demonological rhetoric on televangelism?
How to use media and disavow mediation? How to go beyond right and
left? And the answer to this dilemma came in the form of a community,
not in name of an ideology, not another ideology at all, but a community
whose power relies on its capacity to perform its own making, ever in
motion, ever incomplete: the-community-that-exists-in-the process-of-
being-made. Having little means with which to predict successful out-
comes in strictly economic terms, Padre Jonas offered instead a well-staged
prophetic return of the apostolic community. Rather than offering a set of
palpable instruments, or a well-defined scheme, he incorporated a sort of
productive precariousness that allowed him to coalesce mediation within
the technological while redirecting his own marketing procedures to an
open relational field of flows according to the logic of a breathing body.
As an engine of circulation and self regeneration, Canção Nova both
structures and builds upon the imaginary associated with breathing
dynamics. In that sense, it is not a “power-sphere” whereupon discursive
meanings are inbuilt as defined by Jürgen Habermas but an atmosphere
the volatility of which preempts any attempt to clearly define the bound-
aries of a community-in-the-making. As the saying goes, breathing con-

tinuous until it stops.

Notes

This chapter is dedicated to Bonno Thoden van Velzen. I thank Birgit Meyer for
inviting me to join the research program on which this volume is based, and all