Assemblage Theory and the Virus

A few weeks ago, I had a bit of a meltdown (I am rather administratively and managerially challenged), as I was trying to work out our Church’s risk assessment, with a view to possibly returning to our church building in July, the date our government had declared safe for churches to reopen. Discovering the amount of detail needed to ensure safety for everyone made us delay any reoccupation until September. Reading the (justifiably) complex Baptist union Guidelines this month caused us to establish a task group to plan restarting services in the building, perhaps not until October.

Coping with the pandemic has been like being a quick-change artist. No sooner have we become used to one way of running things, than we have to adapt to a wholly fresh set of circumstances. Quite a shock for churches where nothing much changes. The swiftly-altering responses plunge us into the flux of “liquid church”. Like the government, but at a lower level, we face the challenge of how to relax the restrictions, while still keeping people safe.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari developed their concept of the “assemblage”: a bits-and-pieces combination of social arrangements, which together make an improvised kind-of-system. Lockdown, with its various provisos, is one such assemblage. To prevent closure, however, they posited “lines of flight”: a flexible mobile responsiveness, based on the example of nomad armies on the steppes of central Asia. This notion encourages us to look for lines of development and creativity; possibility, projection, from the confines of what is. We can, moreover, search not only for what will be, but also what may be.

Initially, I misunderstood this term to mean ‘flight’ as in ‘flying’. But they, being atheists, conceived their philosophy wholly on the “plane of immanence”: ‘flight’ as in ‘fleeing’. But my misunderstanding seems, to me, to hold out more potential for true break-out from closure. I’d imagined “lines of flight” as ‘lift off’, the vertical not the horizontal, the transcendental in place of the immanent - a philosophy of ‘Ascension’. In addition, this dimensionality could incorporate a metaphysics of ‘arrival’, that is the introduction of the genuinely new, from the beyond, the other: a beginning not just an ending.

Church will not, should not, be the same after lockdown. God has gifted us with an opportunity to escape the limitations of our previous ways of ‘doing church’. A completely unknown, unheralded, future opens up before us. Along lines of vertical flight, this enables us to enter new realms, which are not merely extrapolations, extensions, on the flat plane of what already exists. God is sovereign: omnipotent and omniscient. The dual-directionality within ‘lines of flight’, ‘departure’ and ‘arrival’ (like a pre-Covid airport terminal), provides us with an open future, susceptible to both human initiative, and Divine intervention.

The gains of online presence will not lost, but will be supplemented by in-your-face physicality: evangelism in internet discussion rooms, and confrontational street evangelism. Any future church will therefore necessarily be a hybrid church, physical and virtual.