Mediating the New Human - Behold the Black Caiman - page 98

ayipiedie could intervene in the Christian metaphysical ecology that now
determined physical health, moral well-being, social status, and political
agency.
At the same time, Jochade and the others also stressed that these con-
crete effects were only possible when the ayipie that was sent resembled
the receiving ayipie . Ayipiedie were said to be supportive of one another
only when they were similar, and this power was cumulative. Thus,
groups of people who possessed “one ayipie ” were considered to be stron-
ger than individuals and more likely to achieve their goal. The process
of creating a single ayipie , yipejo yocayipie , was fundamental to any group
action. Weakness, paralysis, and vulnerability were caused by not being
able to locate or homogenize ayipie . In other words, the power of radio
sound also depended on and allowed a collective ayipie soul matter to
be standardized. It was premised on making explicit a shared consensus
about the nature of the new moral human. Indeed, this was the kind of
commons evoked and created by the metaphysics of radio sound.
Totobiegosode media practitioners did not locate the power of radio
technology in a potential for discursive resistance or the continuity of
form but in the potential to objectify and domesticate rupture itself
through the particular spiritual harmonics of electronic sound. This pro-
cess also reasserted the Ayoreo capacity to objectify the terms of their self-
transformation and figured the two-way radio as the crucial medium by
which a Christian Ayoreo mainstream predicated on the moral value of
rupture could be constituted. This metaphysics made radio sound a crucial
medium through which the wider Ayoreo project of self-transformation
could be evoked and objectified. In many ways, radio sound created this
project instead of vice versa. The image of the new moral human and the
circuits of aural media seemed inextricably entwined.
Remaking a world and transforming humanity through sound, however,
was a deeply fraught process, one subject to its own inversions in The-
Place-Where-the-Black-Caiman-Walks. Radio sound was wild and ungov-
ernable and ephemeral. It always exceeded the boundaries of any ideal
type or standardized project, no matter how closely guarded the script.
The schizoid qualities that imbued it with spiritual force also threatened
to evaporate at the very moment their power was materialized.
Jochade was never entirely comfortable with the unruly excess of
radio's sound. Instead, he told me he preferred cassette tapes. I learned
that a vibrant network of cassette exchanges had predated and prefigured
the use of twoway radio. Jochade had hundreds of these cassettes in his
house. The cassettes consisted of short greetings from many different