Virtual Christianity in an age of nominalist anthropology

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2012 12: 295Anthropological Theory Jon Bialecki

Virtual Christianity in an age of nominalist anthropology

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Anthropological Theory

12(3) 295–319

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Article

Virtual Christianity

in an age of nominalistanthropology

Jon BialeckiUniversity of California, San Diego, USA

Abstract

This article claims that the collective object of an anthropology of Christianity should beChristianity as a virtual object, in the sense used by Gilles Deleuze: a field of multi-plicitous potential with effects on the formation of the actual. This position is necessi-tated by the recurrent inability/refusal/demurral of the anthropology of Christianity todefine what its exact object is. This inability/refusal/demurral is a symptom that can betraced back to a larger anthropological shift towards a nominalist ontology, a disciplin-ary tendency which is exemplified in the recent anthropological interest in Deleuzian-derived assemblage theory. After showing how current anthropological uses of Deleuzehave neglected his concept of the virtual due to the same nominalist tendency, this

article then argues that taking up Deleuze’s virtual realism would reconfigure assem-blage theory in such a way that it would make the project of an anthropology of Christianity substantially more intelligible, as well as undoing what appear to bepoints of contestation internal to the sub-field.

Keywords

Anthropology of Christianity, assemblage theory, Deleuze, ontology, the virtual

I find fascinating that many scholarly writers – those in the Nietzschean tradition, for

instance, like Deleuze and Guattari, or even Hardt and Negri – express faith in a certain

kind of vitalism that will animate history, that will escape logocentrism, that has the

power to give birth to redemptive action that will move beyond culture and tradition.

When one listens to many born-again Pentecostals, they’re saying a similar thing.

Jean Comaroff (2011: 169)

Corresponding author:

Jon Bialecki, Department of Anthropology, Social Sciences Building Rm. 210, 9500 Gilman Drive, University of

California, La Jolla, CA 92093–0532, USA.

Email: [email protected]








The things we can define best are the things least worth defining.

Roy Wagner (1981: 39)

An anthropology, but of what?

In what may be a small irony, the anthropology of Christianity can be seen as the

child of the anthropology of Islam. As originally put forward by Joel Robbins in

the first essay to call for an anthropology of Christianity, ‘What is a Christian?

Notes toward an Anthropology of Christianity’, the anthropology of Islam could

serve as an exemplar for what an anthropology of Christianity would look like. As

Robbins presents it, the anthropology of Islam is a metaphorical place where

‘people working in diff erent geographic areas publish in the same fora, read oneanother’s work, recognize the relevance of that work for their own projects, and

seek to develop a set of shared questions to be examined comparatively’ (Robbins

2003: 192); this is what Robbins himself wishes to midwife through his call for an

anthropology that would be centered on communities that understand themselves

as being Christian.

Now, Robbins does not spend too much time in his essay imagining what those

shared questions would be (though he does suggest that a few exemplars might be

found in the special issue that the essay was an introduction for), but he does make

an odd move in suggesting the one question that should not be given too muchattention: Robbins suggests that anthropologists of Christianity should not tarry

by spending too much time on the issue of what kind of object an ‘anthropology of

Christianity’ would be addressing in the first place. Such a move, he says, is

unnecessary to the venture.

While it may seem obvious that an anthropology of Christianity would be

focused on Christianity, Robbins notes that such a project is theoretically prob-

lematic, though he states that this should not delay us. Again referring to the

anthropology of Christianity’s Islamic sire, Robbins observes that the initial call

for an anthropology of Islam by Abdul Hamid el-Zein ended paradoxically with a

denial that ‘Islam’ was any one object; as El-Zein stated in closing his call for an

anthropology of Islam,

. . . neither Islam nor the notion of religion exists as a fixed and autonomous form

referring to positive content which can be reduced to universal and unchanging char-

acteristics. Religion becomes an arbitrary category which as a unified and bounded

form has no necessary existence. ‘Islam’ as an analytical category dissolves as well.

(El-Zein 1977: 252)

Despite this rather unpromising first moment, a call for a study of an object thatthe very instituting call for claims does not exist, Robbins observes that El-Zein’s

position has been ‘routinely rejected’, though none of the arguments against it

‘would count for much in a high level theoretical debate over whether or not it

296 Anthropological Theory 12(3)










I also argue that, oddly enough, it is the intellectual tools being turned to in con-

temporary nominalist anthropology that will get us back to a realism that can

allow us to talk meaningfully about the anthropology of Christianity as having a

single object, without doing violence to the wealth of ‘Christianities’ out there aswell. I argue that we should take the object of anthropology to be Christianity in its

virtual form, as a multiplicity which is predicated on and produces diff erence, even

as that diff erence is still comprehendible.

The best way to make this case, though, is to start by showing that Robbins’s

demurral is met by other instances of declining to give an object for the anthro-

pology of Christianity, or in some cases by an attempt that falls apart when looked

at in broad daylight. With that I’d like to turn to Fenalla Cannell’s introductory

essay to The Anthropology of Christianity (2006), the other candidate for an insti-

tuting call for an anthropology of Christianity. Like Robbins, Cannell too seesChristianity as suff ering under a kind of interdict: Christianity is ‘the repressed’ of

anthropology, where the religion acts as an ‘anxiety’-provoking object whose

potential ethnographers are stigmatized by a suspected belonging, or at least a

susceptibility to conversion (Cannell 2006: 4). The fraught relation ‘between

anthropology and Christianity’ is something that must be worked through, she

suggests, and in the introduction to the volume Cannell presents herself as engaging

in that very therapeutic work.

And it is here, at the very cusp of her working through the fraught relationship

between Christianity and anthropology, that something curious begins: an elisionas to what Christianity is, which seems to be fittingly the kind of symptomatic

omission that one might expect when attempting to articulate the repressed. It is

not that she does not try. ‘In considering this question’, Cannell tells us ‘it is

necessary to reach some provisional working definition of the term Christianity

itself. This is something more difficult than it might first appear’ (2006: 5). The

difficulty, Cannell tells us, lies is the multifold nature of Christianity that Robbins

also observed. Cannell notes that there are ‘diverse ways’ to ‘balance these models

of what Christianity does against the specificities of local interpretations’ (2006: 6),

as exhibited by the contributors to her volume; Cannell’s own approach is to deny

that Christianity is an ‘arbitrary construct’, but merely insist that it is a ‘historically

complex one’ (2006: 6). ‘It is not impossible to speak meaningfully about

Christianity, but it is important to be as specific as possible about what kind of

Christianity one means’ (2006: 6). This is because ‘Christianity is built on a para-

dox’ with a ‘central doctrine’ that is a vision of the incarnation and resurrection

that points simultaneously to both the spirit and flesh, leading to a core ambiva-

lence (2006: 7). Cannell suggests that ‘a recognition of the centrally paradoxical

nature of Christian teaching allows us to move some ways further in con-

ceptualizing. . . local encounters with missionary Christianities’, pointing to how

‘the unorthodox position remains hanging in air’ (2006: 7).Now, as we will see near the end of this essay, this observation that other

potential readings of Christian practice and thought tend to linger on, even in

the absence of institutional endorsement, has a great deal of merit, but it is not













object. While acknowledging the worth of the ethnography that has come out of it,

Chris Hann (2007) has questioned the value of an anthropology of Christianity as

an overarching project, saying that it obscures comparative thought, both within

various types of Christianity, but also between Christianity and other forms of religiosity. ‘Why’, Hann asks, ‘demarcate one world religion as a suitable

domain for comparison’ (2007: 46)? Hann also faults the anthropology of

Christianity for an idealist bent, though he does note that it cannot be described

as having a ‘crudely predictive idealism’ (2007: 405). Interestingly enough, he

echoes Scott in suggesting that rather than focus on Christianity, we focus instead

on problems as the ‘key entities’ (2007: 406), something that we will return to later;

but what we should focus on now is Hann’s rejection of tradition as a ‘suitable

domain’, indicating that in Hann’s eyes there is no integrity, no real object, no

phenomenon in itself that needs to be charted. More recently, John Comaroff hastaken Hann’s objections and repackaged them as an accusation that the anthro-

pology of Christianity is ‘reductionistic, incoherent in defining its subject matter,

contradictory in the claims it makes about that subject matter, and unreflective

in its idealism’ (2010: 529). For Comaroff , it is a retreat to the culture concept by

way of religion conceived of as ‘immaterial’ and ‘ahistorical’, and is part of habits

that ‘give anthropology a bad name’, a false solution to a larger disciplinary crisis

(2010: 529).

There have been other criticisms as well. From its first moments, there has been

a concern that the anthropology of Christianity has been too narrow in itspurview; Brian Howell worried that studies of Pentecostalism had overshadowed

other forms of Christianity (Howell 2003: 235), a complaint that Hann has

joined in his repeated observations that Orthodox Christianity has made scant

appearance in the literature (2007; Hann and Goltz 2010). Taken altogether, all

this forms quite a bill of particulars, and a dizzying one, if one includes the quali-

fications, hedging, and elisions made by some of the proponents of an anthropol-

ogy of Christianity themselves. The anthropology of Christianity takes as its object

something with no fixity and yet is in need of being rescued from essentialism. It

must be spoken about at once in careful historical terms and yet is ahistorical,

immaterial and suff used by idealism yet overrun by Foucauldian subjectification

and regimes of power; finally, it is too ethnographically diverse yet too centered on

a single exemplar.

This is traditionally the moment when we would start asking which of these

accounts and critiques have merit, and which do not; in short, separating goats

from sheep. I would like to ask a diff erent question, though. What if we were to

start out with the postulate that, law of the excluded middle be damned, everyone

was right, even when their descriptions of the still mysterious object of the anthro-

pology of Christianity seemingly contradict each other? I would like to do this by

taking what seems to be a sidestep into the question of anthropological ontology, asidestep that may seem unrelated but will in the end allow us to answer the question

that has stood at the center of our discussion so far: what is the object of the

anthropology of Christianity?

Bialecki 301










and categories that were previously taken to be the social science analog of natural

kinds were placed into question, now suspected of being artifacts of, if not the

discipline itself, then at least of broader social-science engineering (Rabinow 1988).

Finally, there is the narrative in which this shift is at least partially symptomatic of large-scale transformations in the political economy of the West (Kapferer 2005).

Either way, the result of this turn has been a suspicion of the totalities that com-

promised the units of comparative analysis, and indeed of recognizability, of an

earlier anthropology, including the social, the notion of the ethnographic site, and

even the idea of culture (though the latter concept often has some ideational vio-

lence visited upon it as part of the rejection process: see Brightman 1995). As put by

Matti Bunzl, contemporary anthropology is infused with ‘a desire to challenge all

essentialisms and question all generalizations; the ethnographies of today are often

simultaneous exercises in total deconstruction and absolute empirical specificity’(2008: 57). Back to (just and only) things in themselves, to misuse Husserl.

This shift has not been all at once, and one can intuit in the literature gaps between

the programmatic abandonment tout court of outward affiliation with larger classi-

ficatory totalities that run against a nominalist ontology, and the still under process

creation of new modes of forming ethnography that escape nominalism in practice as

well as in thought; this might account for the increasingly bricolage-like use of theory

in anthropology today as conceptual stop-gaps (Knauft 2006). However, despite the

lag between disaffiliation and actual transformations in practice, and the degrading

eff

ect that nominalism has on theory itself, one can see in anthropological theorysome eff ects of nominalism. One long-running sign is the growing interest, running

from the mid-80s to the present, in theoretical tools whose vigor is dependent on

their being deployed in localized, circumscribed manners; a leading indicator here

was the shift from modes such as Marxian analyses, predicated on large-scale

abstractions such as labor and ideology, to that of a Foucauldian interest in insti-

tutional and quasi-institutional arrays stabilized by tactical deployed practices of

knowledge and power (even if, in the hands of some of the less agile practitioners,

these analytic Foucauldian categories were unthinkingly endowed with near-meta-

physical significance and scope).2 The interest in ‘person-centered’ ethnographies in

psychological anthropology, and anthropological accounts of individual biogra-

phies in socio-cultural anthropology, is another nominalist tell. A more recent

index of the shift has been the adoption of Latour-derived actor-network theory

outside the confines of science-studies, where the analytic was originally crafted;

predicated on enchained and individual actants, it is a view of causality perfectly

suited for those skeptical of larger abstractions and universals.

But perhaps the most developed nominalist mode of organizing and accounting

for ethnographic data is the idea of the assemblage. Unlike actor-network theory,

‘a conceptual apparatus somewhat more domesticated to classical theory’, assem-

blage theory is predicated on material and temporal flux (Marcus and Saka 2006:102). The assemblage, we are told in the introduction to Ong and Collier’s sizable

and influential edited volume Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics

as Anthropological Problems, is characterized by the ‘heterogeneous, contingent,

Bialecki 303








unstable, partial, and situated’ (Collier and Ong 2004: 12). As observed by Marcus

and Saka, the allure of the term assemblage is the way in which it brings together

the heterogeneous and the ephemeral (Marcus and Saka 2006: 102). The appeal of

this to a nominalist anthropology is obvious. It is a denial of not just essentialismbut of even any kind of long enduring solidity. Everything must be taken as it is, a

chance and passing agglomeration, resistant to being captured by any of the uni-

versals or abstractions that is an anathema to contemporary anthropological

thought.

While the Ong and Collier piece might seem to be a natural place to look at

how the assemblage functions, I’d like to turn instead to the works of Jarrett

Zigon instead (2010, 2011a, 2011b). There are two reasons to look to Zigon.

First, as a theoretically accomplished anthropologist who has recently placed

the concept of the assemblage in the forefront of his thought, he shows uswhat assemblages look like in the era of nominalist anthropology. The second

reason is that, as opposed to other anthropologists of his generation who have

also invoked the assemblage in the study of religion (see e.g. Rudnyckyj 2010),

Zigon has relied upon assemblage theory in an ethnographic scenario where it

might make sense to describe oneself as, if not engaging in, then at least being in

dialogue with the anthropology of Christianity, and yet he has declined to do so;

this despite the fact that his citation pattern shows that he must have some

awareness of the sub-field (writing often on the subject of morality, he has

been deeply engaged, though not always uncritically, with the works of JoelRobbins [see Zigon 2009a, 2009b]). A discussion of Zigon’s use of assemblage

theory will show how a certain kind of anthropological nominalism is interfering

with a definition of Christianity necessary to make the project of an anthropology

of Christianity more cogent; I also claim that an analysis of what assemblage

theory is (and also is not) for Zigon will show us a way to work back to a

conception of Christianity.

In his work under consideration here, Zigon’s ethnographic object is Russian

Orthodox church-sponsored attempts to rehabilitate heroin addicts, primarily as

encountered at The Mill, a residency program situated in the rural periphery of

St Petersburg. Zigon’s project is not just how it is that these heroin users win a

coveted rare spot in the drug treatment facility, and then struggle to comply with

its disciplines, all in order to at least partially escape the pull of addiction and live

what they call a ‘normal life’; Zigon also wishes to make a contribution to the

theory of morality and ethics. To do this, in his ethnographic accounts he is

sensitive to the diverse sources of the discourses and practices that constitute

The Mill, which are taken not just from various historical strata of orthodoxy

but also from what Zigon portrays as more unlikely sources, such as the Soviet

language of the ‘new man’, neoliberalism, and secular western therapeutic tech-

niques. Zigon is also attentive to the sensibilities that the patients themselvesbring to the facility, as well as to their pre-existing senses of habitus, and to

the new bodily dispositions that disciplinary techniques are attempting to

inculcate.









Zigon attends to these diverse discourses, practices, and dispositions to make the

point that ethical and moral systems are not a totality; stitched together, they form

what he calls a moral and ethical assemblage, a nonce-structure that denies any

whole. Extrapolating globally from his findings, he claims that

the theory I outline here denies the common philosophical and social scientific

assumption that a moral totality – in either universalist or relativist terms – exists

anywhere in the world, and rather sees all particular social contexts defined not by one

morality and its ethics, but rather by a unique local moral and ethical assemblage

constituted by the various aspects. (Zigon 2010: 5)

Further, each of the discourses and practices that constitutes the assembly is

never encountered in complete form, even as a subsumed portion of the assem-blage. Only ‘various aspects’ of the constituting discourses and practices are

encountered as they are activated in moments of what Zigon has earlier called

‘moral breakdown and ethical demand’. Totality, if it is experienced at all, is an

illusion brought about as an aftereff ect of an enunciation or action that follows a

moment of breakdown, where it seems that these disparate strands have come

together to produce the emergent, and now self-definitional, act.

In this focus on foreshortened temporalities and distinct composite elements, we

can see how this is line with the idea of the assemblage as found in contemporary

anthropology. Further, we can see in the logic of the assemblage some of thereasons why Zigon would decline to see his project as part of an anthropology

of Christianity, even if his object of study was a Russian Orthodox religious

rehabilitation center. First, anything like Christianity is unlikely to be encountered

in a way where it is not stapled together with a host of other autonomous entities.

Therefore, why let only one component part play a determining role, or even an

autonomous one, in the conversation? And in fact, in a note that is only a slight

tangent from our point, Zigon argues that despite the Russian Orthodox intentions

and control over the treatment center, it is a neoliberal sensibility and telos that

ends up shaping the forms of subjectivity that the center inculcates; orthodoxy has

no force or directionality of its own that is orthogonal to the ‘stronger discourse’ of

neoliberalism.

Second, we can see that since the whole is an illusion and is never encountered, it

appears that the constituent part of the assemblage, the part that we are tempted to

call ‘Christian’, is itself an assemblage, historically formed, heterogeneous and

unstable. If this is the judgment of nominalism, and if nominalism is the sensibility

of the age, we can see why the inhibition to invoke universals or abstractions can

stand as a block to giving Christianity a form wide enough to encompass all the

divergent manifestations that comprise it. We are left in a position very close to

Michael Scott’s, as discussed in the section on clamant conceptions of an anthro-pology of Christianity: bits of Christian material shorn off , repurposed and

denuded of whatever energies or directionality they might (theoretically) have

had before their disaggregation.

Bialecki 305








Virtual realism

I want to be careful about stating what I’m claiming here, of course. I am not

stating that everyone writing on the anthropology of Christianity is animated by anominalist instinct, nor that what they have put forward is not a useful contribu-

tion to the field; rather, I’m merely stating that a general tendency to be skeptical

regarding abstractions and universals, along with the multifarious nature of

Christianity itself, is working in such a way to inhibit articulating what it is that

the putative object of an anthropology of Christianity could be. To substantiate

this, I’ve used the anthropological apparatus of ‘the assemblage’ as an exemplar of

the kind of reasoning that this tendency to be skeptical of abstract and universals

engenders, and shown in Zigon’s work how the logic of the assemblage, as it is used

in contemporary anthropology, mitigates against giving Christianity any coherenceas an object. What is not being claimed is that either the anthropology of

Christianity on one hand, or nominalist anthropology or the assemblage on the

other, is intellectually deficient or ethnographically manque ´ , merely that they are

both, vis-a ` -vis each other, inimical concepts. They both seem to have value, at least

in the eyes of contemporary anthropology, in as much as they are ‘growth stocks’,

recent anthropological developments that show continued thriving – only not

together (as it may seem at this point in the discussion), at least not if one

wishes to think rigorously.

However, I think that there is an element in the assemblage that itself formsassemblage theory that can allow us to think through this impasse. Let me illustrate

this by returning to Zigon. As Zigon notes (2011a: 16), the concept of assemblage

has a history that transcends that of Ong and Collier; the assemblage was crafted

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1987).

However, that reference to the idea’s native space is the only moment that Deleuze

and Guattari, singularly or together, appear in Zigon’s book. Zigon’s assemblage is

what Ong and Collier have made of it, heterogeneous and ephemeral, but not

necessarily what Deleuze has made of it. Working back to Ong and Collier them-

selves, we see that in the introduction they refer us to the same work, supplement-

ing it with a reference to Deleuze’s Foucault (1988); and yet Deleuze appears as

more of a name invoked than as a metonymic indication of the specifics of a

technical means of thinking something through. Indeed, this is part of a larger

pattern with discussions of the assemblage; as Marcus and Saka have noted,

‘none of the derivations of assemblage from Deleuze and Guattari of which we

are aware of is based on. . . a technical and formal analysis of how this concept

functions in their writing’ (2006: 103). It is evocative power of the assemblage, and

of Deleuze and Guattari’s writing in general, which seems to be appealing, rather

than any formal engagement with the specificities of their thought.

Of course, I hesitate a bit to bring up Deleuze. While, as we have seen, Deleuzehas been granted space in anthropology for a while now, his recent enumeration as

one of the ‘four main themes of particular significance’ in the American

Anthropologist sociocultural anthropology year in review list (Hamilton and









Placas 2011; see also Biehl and Locke 2010) makes the coin embossed with the

name ‘Deleuze’ seem so common that one cannot but help suspect that its metal is

being adulterated. But then this is the point. The solution to this is not to shy away,

but to take up Deleuze in the ‘technical and formal’ manner that Marcus and Sakasuggest. When one does this, what is striking is that despite Deleuze’s interest in the

heterogeniety, ephemerality, and becoming that has made him such an object of

interest to contemporary nominalist anthropology, Deleuze himself is not a

nominalist.

First, as Manuel DeLanda has observed, Deleuze is comfortable talking about

kinds of totalities in a way that nominalist anthropology would balk at; there are

moments in Deleuze’s works where he talks about ‘‘‘society as a whole’’ and spe-

cifically, of a virtual multiplicity of society’ (DeLanda 2002: 195; see also Deleuze

1994: 186, Deleuze and Guattari 1977, 1987). This is of course the kind of over-arching entity that nominalism is trying to escape from. But this use of the word

‘virtual’ brings us to an important qualifier. Because if we want to say that Deleuze

is a realist instead of a nominalist, we have to grant that he is not a realist in the

same way that, say, Plato or the mythical mid-20th-century cultural anthropologist

might be thought of as a realist. As John Rajchman has said, ‘[w]e might call

Deleuze a ‘‘realist’’ of a peculiar sort – a realist about virtualities that can’t be

forecast or foreseen, that have another relation to thought’ (2000: 62).

It appears, then, that we have to have an understanding of what the virtual is if

we are to grasp what might be the gap between Deleuze and nominalist anthro-pology, and what diff erence a more technically informed reading of Deleuze might

bring to the problem of an anthropology of Christianity. Like a single thread, the

idea of the virtual runs either explicitly or implicitly through most of his authored

or co-authored works, an outstanding consistency for an author who was more

than willing to use diff erent language in diff erent works to do what appears to be

the same conceptual labor. The concept of the virtual was originally taken from

Bergson, where it stood as a sort of metaphysical memory, an immaterial, con-

densed compendium of the past that existed coeval with the present (and in some

ways encompassed it). As reworked by Deleuze, the concept of the virtual contin-

ued to have an air of this (Deleuze and Parnet 2007: 148–52), but it serves more as a

way of speaking about an unquantifiable field of generative potential in being and

thought, a potential intelligible yet specifically undeterminable in advance of devel-

opment, a potential that is always threatening to run off at times in diff erent and

disparate directions, a potential which serves to constantly bring new ‘actual’

entities into being. Described by Deleuze as ‘real without being actual, ideal with-

out being abstract’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1996: 156), it is a means of granting a

sort of ontological status of real to both the this potentia and the objects they

engender, and to demarcate this potentia as having its own characteristic apart

from those of the ‘actual’ world.While the virtual has been taken up as a way of speaking about material and

ideational processes in general, based on Deleuze’s endorsement of a univocal

ontology of pure diff erence it is clear that, however else the Deleuzian virtual

Bialecki 307








can be discussed, Deleuze himself also intended it to be a means of discussing

thought; this can be seen most clearly in Di ff erence and Repetition (1994), which

contains Deleuze’s most detailed working through of what the virtual is, and

the relation that it has with the actuality that the virtual engenders. A review of this gives us ways to think about kind, nature, and degrees of potentiality inherent

in the concept of the virtual, yet without thereby framing it in a deterministic

manner.

The virtual in Deleuze is not fixed; as he puts it, ‘[i]deas are by no means

essences’ (1994: 187). This is important because essentializing the idea would

mean thinking in terms of the virtual as a model for the actual, privileging repre-

sentation and typological thought in a way that would undermine his insistence on

the ontological primacy of diff erence. What Deleuze is trying to get away from is

any moment where the virtual idea, historically produced and mutable, might bemistaken for the Platonic idea (or the caricature of the idea of culture), transcend-

ent and ahistorical. Deleuze escapes this in four diff erent ways.

First, for Deleuze, the virtual idea is not unitary; as he expressed it, ‘[a]n Idea is

an n-dimensional, continuous, defined multiplicity’ (1994: 182), meaning that it is

composed of multiple elements which diff er qualitatively as opposed to quantita-

tively, with elements of the idea having their own separate axis on which they can

act even as they tend to fuse into concepts that are contiguous in intellectual space.

In short, aspects of the idea, even while conjoined, are independent of each other,

and the diff

erence between elements must be thought of qualitatively. This sense of play and fusion suggests some kind of transformation within the virtual, which

brings us to the second way in which the idea escapes fixture. For Deleuze, the

virtual is a process, or at the very least always in motion, meaning that the virtual

idea is purposefully unfixed while at the same time not indeterminate as it brings

the actual into being. This can be seen in a competing definition of the idea

(Deleuze, whatever else he was, was not uncharitable in producing definitions,

often giving multiple ones for the same concept). In this second definition, he

painted the idea as ‘a multiplicity constituted of diff erential elements, diff erential

relations between those elements, and singularities corresponding to those rela-

tions’ (Deleuze 1994: 278). In this sequence we can sketch out the processual

unfolding of the idea, the series through which open aspects of the idea are

assembled, through which these aspects are put in diff erential relation to each

other, and finally through which they produce singularities that can be seen as

being an expression of those diff erential relations. Aspects are initially empty;

purely virtual, indeterminate, they are given determination by their relation to

other equally ‘empty’ aspects. For Deleuze, these relations are diff erential relation,

diff erential in the sense of the term as it existed in infinitesimal calculus. The term

diff erential is important here, as it points to the variable yet reciprocal relations

that aspects of the virtual idea have with one another and through which they aregiven determination, allowing for at times incremental variance in play in the

relations that constitute an idea, while at other times also allowing for vast diff er-

ence. In other words, the diff erence between aspects of the idea need not be utter









diff erence of negation found in either Hegel or structuralism. Rather, there can be

gradations of diff erence between aspects of the idea. This concept of gradations of

diff erence means that the virtual idea is in a sense topological, capable of undergo-

ing a great deal of torsion while still expressing the same set of relations, much theway that a coff ee cup and a donut are topologically the same shape despite obvious

extensive diff erences between them.

The way in which the concept of ideas undergoing a degree of torsion, of a

mutability of the idea as it simultaneously corresponds to what seems to be diff er-

ent forms, allows us to understand a third manner in which the idea is not an

essence. As progressive determinations of these diff erential relations occur, they

indicate the singularities which will correspond to them, in the same way that an

equation corresponds to its solution. It is for this reason that Deleuze refers to the

virtual as problem, in that the various indeterminate virtual aspects are given aspecific determinate content as they are individualized from the ephemeral virtual

to the actual, the realm where objects are capable of being thought of as discrete,

extensive, and quantifiable. It is because of this transition from the virtual to the

actual, which with each repetition produces something new due to the diff erent

circumstances that the operation is carried out in, that Deleuze says that virtual

ideas as problems ‘belong on the side of events, aff ections, or accidents rather than

on that of theorematic essences’ (1994: 187).

Finally, there is another way in which the virtual idea diff ers from the Platonic

idea. Much like the actual has its history, virtual ideas have history as well, beingboth ‘made and unmade’ and capable of being put in diff erent relations with

other virtual ideas over time (1994: 187). To be more exact, though, rather than

having a history, the virtual, in that it points to the creation of something new, is

a break from history, and rather than saying that it is in time, the virtual occurs

in the ‘dead time’ that belongs neither to eternity nor to time. This temporal

oddness does not mean that the virtual is not informed in a way by the actual

that it forms. Much as the actual is the result of an individualization over time,

the virtual is itself attached to, addressing, and predicated upon actual entities,

creating a resonance between the actual and virtual as they go through their

vicissitudes. It is aff ects and percepts, intensities that are nothing more than

actuality experienced not as extensivities but as force (see Deleuze 1988b: 91–

2), that trigger the further actualizations of the virtual, which along with memory

aff ect the mode through which a narrow swath of the virtual idea will be actua-

lized yet again. Viewed synoptically, then, the actual and the virtual run alongside

each other as a double series that is separate and yet resonant, ‘echoing each

other without resembling each other’ (1994: 189). The actual, however, constantly

obscures the virtual, with the extensive produce of virtual processes in eff ect

covering up the other divergent lines inherent in the virtual that happened not

to be actualized; and while there is always a way to ‘ascend’ back to the virtualfrom the actual, a process that Deleuze calls counter-eff ectuating (Deleuze and

Guattari 1996: 157, 159), Deleuze speaks of seeing the trace of the virtual in what

has been actualized as if it were no easy task.

Bialecki 309








Diagramming the assemblage

Although this presentation has to, by necessity, boil it off to the point of being

flavorless, this is a functioning enough presentation of Deleuze’s virtual to meet ourproximate needs: an understanding of the diff erence between anthropological

assemblage theory and Deleuzian assemblage theory. This, though, is itself just a

way-station to grasping what might be the object of an anthropology of

Christianity. Let us start then with a first question: What does the virtual mean

for those who would be using the assemblage as an analytic tool in the anthropol-

ogy of religion? It does nothing to impeach their ethnographic description of the

state of aff airs on the ground, but it suggests that they have not given Christianity

the autonomy it deserves.

In his book-length exploration of Deleuzian assemblage theory, DeLandamakes two observations that are relevant for our discussion here. The first

is that assemblages can be, and often are, component parts in other assem-

blages (DeLanda 2006: 21), meaning that, like a matryoshka doll, there can be

endless encompassing assemblages, each predicated on the smaller constitute

assemblages that they subsume. This is interesting in light of the second aspect

of assemblage theory that I wish to foreground: assemblages are characterized

by more than their heterogeneous mixture but come in what we might call

‘phylums’. DeLanda has observed that while the assemblage is in a way nom-

inalist in that we cannot speak about ‘species’ of assemblages but only indi-vidual assemblages, that does not mean that there is not a certain anatomy to

assemblages writ large; assemblages are marked by certain ‘topological invari-

ants’, spaces of possibility that limit, but do not exhaust, the potentiality of

assemblages:

The notion of the structure of a space of possibilities is crucial in assemblage

theory given that, unlike properties, the capacities of an assemblage are not

given, that is, they are merely possible when not exercised. But the set of possible

capacities of an assemblage is not amorphous, however open-ended it may

be, since diff erent assemblages exhibit diff erent sets of capacities. (DeLanda

2006: 29)

DeLanda compares these to phylum in the animal world, which he presents as

‘abstract body plans’ which ‘cannot be specified using metric notions such as

lengths, area, or volumes, since each realization of the body-plan will exhibit a

completely diff erent set of metric relations’. Because of this non-quantifiable

nature, ‘only non-metric or topological notions. . . can be used to specify it’

(DeLanda 2006: 29).

DeLanda’s name for this topology that ‘structures the space of possibilitiesassociated with the assemblage’ is the diagram (DeLanda 2006: 30), a name that

he takes from Deleuze’s short book on Foucault (Deleuze 1988a), the same book

that inspired Collier and Ong. DeLanda wishes to underscore the fact that each









assemblage, while individual, is associated with a diagram that is by no means

necessarily unique to it:

Thus, while persons, communities, organizations, cities and nation-states are all indi-

vidual singularities, each of these entities would also be associated with a space of

possibilities characterized by its dimensions, representing its degrees of freedom . . . [i]n

other words, each of these social assemblages would possess its own diagram.

(DeLanda 2006: 30)

Since each of these diagrams allows for a space of play, and also because each of

these diagrams is historically constituted, DeLanda tells us, they are without

essence, even if they characterize the manner of an assemblage’s composition

and transformation.It should be no surprise to hear that the diagram is another way to speak about

the virtual , having an autonomy from the actual (or as DeLanda calls it, the dia-

gram is ‘mechanistic-independent’; DeLanda 2006: 31). This, combined with the

earlier observation that assemblages can have other assemblages as constituent

parts, has eff ects for how assemblages operate – and specifically for how we

must think about assemblages that constitute Christian material. If it holds that

the assemblage has a virtual image in the sense of the diagram of a virtual idea, then

it holds too that the constituent parts of the assemblage, as potential assemblages in

their own right, have their own autonomous virtuality as well , and that whateverwork the larger subsuming assemblage’s virtuality or diagram does, the virtual

image of the subsumed assemblages does the same for the constituent assemblages

that comprise its parts.

What does this mean for our discussion of Zigon? Not to put too fine a point on

it, if Christianity is a thing of shreds and patches, then at least in the eyes of a

reading of assemblage theory that takes the conception of the virtual seriously, then

it is an assemblage, and if it is an assemblage it is not just a thing of shreds and

patches but itself a recursively embedded entity formed by a virtual image that is a

manifold, an abstract topology, with various axes granting it various degrees of

freedom and certain capacities – axes that are independent of each other even as it

is that conjunction of various singular axes that gives the specific characteristics of

various Christianities as they are actualized. In short, if one wishes to include

Christian elements in an assemblage, it seems that rather than allowing for an

escape from a realist account of Christianity, it demands it; and that rather than

having Christianity vanish in the expression of an assemblage, Christianity rather

insists on the level of the virtual, and therefore as a virtuality it has the capacity to

always have the larger assemblage actualize its diagram in a new way in which the

Christian element of the admixture might spin the assemblage’s expression in new

directions. And since the ‘event’ of the virtual is always occurring, this Christiantorque is always in potential ready to leave its mark. This means that Zigon is right

to focus on the nonce aspect of the assemblage as he does in his description of how

it eff ects moral and ethical action, but wrong to see it as by force always allowing

Bialecki 311








the dead hand of neoliberalism to win every throw of the dice. Like all virtualities,

Christianity insists, and insists in determined, but undeterminable, ways.

Virtual Christianity in the age of nominal anthropology

The idea of a virtual Christianity has an importance beyond our discussion of

Zigon, though; in fact, it brings us back to the issue that started this article. I

would like to suggest that this acknowledgment of a virtual aspect of various

actualized Christianities gives us a task for those interested in an anthropology

of Christianity, and it does so in a way that not only aff ects those interested in

assemblage theory with religious elements, but also those who have struggled with

what the object, goal, or warrant of the anthropology of Christianity might be.

Following the logic of the discussion above, it seems to me that the proximate goal of an anthropology of Christianity is to engage in the work of counter-e ff ectuating

virtual Christianity, with the further goal of grasping how virtual Christianity’s nature

as a virtual multiplicity allows it to be actualized in di ff ering manners at di ff ering

moments, becoming part of larger social assemblages in diverse ways.

This act of counter-eff ectuating means working back from various actualized

Christianities and, with an eye towards the specific local aff ects and precepts that

ran through the virtual to create those actualizations, attempting to intuit the

virtual multiplicity that engendered that actuality. This can be done through work-

ing back from ‘solution’ to ‘problem’, to see how various forms of Christian prac-tice are the ‘result’ of multiple problems. Under this approach, each problem could

be thought of as axes or elements of the virtual multiplicity, whose diff ering solu-

tions account for the shifts in the topology of the virtual. This is not surprising. Not

only have we seen again and again a call for the anthropology of Christianity to

work at the level of problems, from people such as Chris Hann and Michael Scott,

but in point of fact the anthropology of Christianity has been from its very incep-

tion dominated by various ‘problems’. Examples of these problems are the tension

between the fact of mediation and the desire for immediacy and presence in

Christian-inflected forms of communication (Keane 2007; Engelke 2007); there is

also the problem of collective as opposed to individual accountability that runs

through Joel Robbins’s works; we must also remember the issues of Christian

‘territorialization’, of who even ‘counts’ as a Christian in any local instantiation

(Garriott and O’Neill 2008), and of how indigenous entities (Meyer 1999) or folk-

ontologies (Scott 2007; Mayblin 2012) with a history apart from Christianity will

be threaded into new Christian assemblages. This list of problems is not exhaustive

by any means, but it shows how the contours of this field can be seen as being

shaped by actualizations of virtual problematics.

What has not been thought through is to ask how each of these problems

sketches out various continuums of potential, and how selection of a tranchefrom this continuum resonates with other tranches selected from other problems/

continuums without limiting the formal independence of all these axes/continuums

from each other at the level of the virtual. In short, because we have thought of









Christianity in a nominalist way, rather than as a real, though virtual, object, we

have not charted what we might call the mutagenic capacity in its diagram, the way

in which Christianity may be many things – an unlimited number of things – but not

everything or anything, and how shifts and transformations in one axis of the vir-tual anatomy, the diagram of the assemblage, interact with other axes. In short,

these problems are perhaps found in every instance of Christianity, but the solu-

tions vary, and the privileging of one solution over another may vary not only from

region to region but between various moments as each Christianity is always in a

state of becoming.

It is for this reason that we should be wary of Hann’s suggestion that anthro-

pologists of Christian populations should not privilege intra-Christian comparisons

but ground themselves solely in larger comparative endeavors instead. While such

extra-Christian comparative eff orts should be encouraged, privileging them overintra-Christian comparisons only makes sense if Christianity is not a domain where

comparative work would yield particularly productive results, which is what one

would expect if Christianity in eff ect did not exist, if Christianity had no onto-

logical basis. Here, we have argued that it does. As we’ve seen, Christianity takes

the appearance of diff ering actualized Christianities because it exceeds any particu-

lar actualized instance of it. It is a multiplicity, subject to play at the joints, that is

brought into being in diff erent circumstances. It is that continual possibility to have

some other tranche of the virtual actualized that gives it what Cannell called its

paradoxical nature, this sense of potentia that is never seemingly exhausted orconquered, popping up again and again like Marx’s revolutionary mole.

I would further argue that it is the play of divergence that, in a way not yet

consciously articulated, has foregrounded the virtual aspect of Christianity; this is

why, despite the recurrent Foucauldian refrain in the anthropology of Christianity,

the charge of idealism recurs with both Hann and Comaroff , and this also is why

John Comaroff is in an odd way right to describe the putative object as ‘timeless’.

To the degree that we are touching on the virtual, we are touching on the aspect of

Christianity that is ‘real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’, and on

the aspect of Christianity as a virtual object that is situated not in moments but

always between them; potential subsists even when not actualized, floating on

between times, but not within them. Of course, we slip out of time to the virtual,

located neither in eternity nor in the moment, only so that we can throw ourselves

back into the swim of social processes at the level of the sensible; the goal is not to

merely sketch out Christianity in a virtual state but to have a sense for the range

and complexity of actualized elements from it, so that we can grasp how these

actualized elements themselves can be folded into larger assemblages. This again is

something that has been already occurring in the anthropology of Christianity,

perhaps most explicitly in Simon Coleman’s thinking through Pentecostal and

Charismatic Christianity as a ‘part culture. . .

worldviews meant for export butoften in tension with the values of any given host society’ (2006: 3; see also

Coleman 2010: 800). Whatever else these actualizations are, they are rarely, if

ever, total systems, and must entwine themselves, sometimes agonistically, with

Bialecki 313








other elements to make larger assemblages; it is this latter phenomenon that is the

true object of concern, but can only be addressed if we can grasp the pluriform

variety of insistent Christian becomings first.

I would also say that while this does not excuse it by any means, this task of counter-eff ectuating back to the virtual explains how it is that the ethnographic

interest in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is due to more than its global

exponential growth. Remember that the virtual does not thunder directly into the

actual, but that various intensities, which Deleuze in his work with Guattari (1996)

calls aff ects and percepts, are threaded through the virtual after they are condi-

tioned by habit and memory (Deleuze 1994: 70–128); after actualization both the

intensities and virtualities are covered up by the actualities that follow. Deleuze

does suggest that there are moments where aff ects and percepts can be ‘monumen-

talized’, where they can be caught up in an aesthetic mode of expression in a waythat does not obscure them, but rather displays them. This opens up a whole new

line of argument that cannot be done justice here, but it should be noted that the

importance of the aesthetic to Pentecostalism has already been observed by Birgit

Meyer (2010, 2011). While all forms of religiosity (and, indeed, all forms of human

life) are conditioned by the aff ective and the perceptual, there does seem to be a

recurrent thematic in Pentecostalism to foreground the production of, and to lux-

uriate within, heightened aff ective states that suggests that Pentecostalism is ripe

for counter-eff ectuating. Under this line of thought, Pentecostalism and

Charismatic Christianity, while in no way exhausting a Christian virtual, are thesort of low-hanging-fruit of the anthropology of Christianity when it comes to

ways to see at least from one position the Christian virtual in sensible form.

Now, caveats: three about the theory used to inform the anthropology of

Christianity in this article, and one about the anthropology of Christianity itself.

First, the conception of a Christian virtual should not be taken to mean that

Christian material cannot escape Christian virtual fields of belonging; as the long

anthropological history of religion has shown, syncretisms happen, and Christian

material can be deterritorialized and reterritorialized in the same way that ‘a club is

a deterritorialized [tree] branch’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 172). Wrenched away

from context and placed as an element in another virtual multiplicity, it would be

doing entirely diff erent work, and we should be alert for that, but only if we can see

that there has been a break with the Christian virtual. Repurposing occurs, but so

do diff erent actualizations of the virtual Christian form, and we should only

assume that we are not dealing with the latter when the Christian topology

cannot be found, despite the presence of some Christian elements (an excellent

example of this might be secularism, which could be considered a radical reterri-

torialized form of certain self-erasing features of Christianity).

But we still do not have a grasp yet of when that happens, because the work of

identifying a Christian virtual has only begun, and much of what passes as debatesabout what might as well be the ‘essence’ of Christianity in the anthropology of

Christianity literature has only been charting the range of variability in both within

and between Christianities, often cast in a polemical tone that has done little to









further debate but instead has been more orientated towards policing what can and

cannot be thought by social scientists. Thinking about the full play of possible

Christianities within and between ethnographic scenes is something that has not yet

really occurred, and we cannot be sure we are dealing with deterritorialization andnot diff erentiation until we have imagined a virtual Christianity adequate enough

to think through the range of Christian actualities, including historical actualities,

such as the odd early burgess-shale type efflorescence of Christian forms like

Docetism, Patripassianism, and Marcionism. It is because of this that I have to

off er the second caveat: this article no more off ers a firm definition of what the

object of an anthropology of Christianity is then did Robbins, Cannell, Scott,

Engelke-Tomlinson, or even Andijar. What this article does do is to enlist

Deleuze in the eff ort to scrape together an ontology that would make something

similar to a definition possible. Here we come to the third caveat. We should beclear that it is in this definitional work that the idea of the virtual serves us.

Christianity is no more, or no less, ‘virtual’ than any other entity; it is just that

due to nominalist anthropological presumptions, we need the virtual to see various

Christianities as in some way products of a single diff erentiating field.

Which brings us to the final caveat. There will most likely be those who will be

unhappy with the way that Deleuze was used here; there will be complaints that

Christians are not proper Deleuzian nomadic subjects, that Christianity is too

molar, too Oedipal, too much locked into the logic of transcendence to be thought

through in this fashion, too part of an older order to participate in the question of how the new is created (see Bialecki 2010: 710); Deleuze’s long-standing antipathy

to religion, and particularly to Christianity, proves this, they will say. There are two

answers I have to those complaints. First, to the degree that it is true, and there are

certainly forms of Christianity that Deleuze would find politically and aesthetically

objectionable, it should be remembered that Deleuze spent as much time and

energy on that which hinders a certain kind of freedom as he did on that which

participates in freedom. However, we can think of his obvious fondness for

Kierkegaard, or his paean to belief in Cinema 2 (Deleuze 1989: 172–3) to see

that there were moments where a certain kind of Christian ethos was not automat-

ically inimical to him. And that brings us to the second point, that just as we don’t

know what a virtual Christianity might be, we don’t have a full inventory of what

actual Christianities are; to say that this long-standing yet rapidly mutating field all

falls under a single ban, it being too molar or too monological, without attending

to its variations and transformations, is in a sense to let one’s Deleuze get in the

way of one’s Deleuze, and to forget that in the last moment, at least in anthropol-

ogy, it is theory which must be adequate to reality – and not reality which must be

adequate to theory – as we encounter the real.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following for discussions (or, at times, debates) that were helpful in

formulating this argument: Waqas Butts, John Dulin, Jonathon Friedman, Rebecca

Gordon, Naomi Haynes, Jordan Haug, Ian Lowrie, David Pedersen, and Joel Robbins.

Bialecki 315








I would also like to acknowledge the comments of two anonymous reviewers, whose insight-

ful comments were greatly appreciated. All infelicities are mine alone.

Notes1. For a very different articulation of, and solution to, this problem see Garriott and O’Neill

(2008); as we shall see later on in this essay, though their understanding of the problem

differs from the one presented here, their answer to the problem has a great deal of value.

2. The history of kinship as an anthropological concept is also another relevant example of

this phenomenon, a point for which I would like to credit to one of the peer reviewers of

this article.

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Jon Bialecki is a lecturer in anthropology at the University of California, San

Diego. He writes on North American neo-charismatic Christianity, on global

Christianities, and on the anthropology of Christianity, and he is currently com-

pleting a manuscript on the implicit logic of self in the charismatic practices of

Southern Californian members of the Vineyard church-planting movement and the

eff ects that these constructions of personhood have had on these believers’ political

and economic practices. His work has been published in several edited volumes, as

well as in academic journals such as the South Atlantic Quarterly, AmericanEthnologist and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; he was also

recently a co-editor of a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly that focused

on Christian language ideology.

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Documents

Virtual Christianity in an age of nominalist anthropology