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ABSTRACT
This essay critically examines Stanley Hauerwas’ ecclesial-based virtue ethics, arguing that his account of formation risks foreclosing differences that exist within Christian community. Placing Hauerwas’ virtue ethical framework in conversation with queer theoretical work on temporality, turning to Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chrononormativity and José Esteban Munoz’s critique of straight time, and with Kathryn Tanner’s theological work on culture, this essay demonstrates how Hauerwas’ account narrowly assumes what community and character does and should look like, and in doing so relies upon and reproduces a logic that undermines and ultimately oppresses difference – through assimilation, normalization, and exclusion. This essay also explores constructive resources queer temporality might offer for a virtue ethical framework that avoids difference-foreclosing normalization. Placing Muñoz in conversation with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, this essay proposes an apophatic anti-telos that shifts focus from a prescriptive telos seeking success and stability to a horizon of eros and encounter.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Brandy Daniels is a Ph.D. candidate in Theological Studies at Vanderbilt University. She is a fellow in the Program in Theology & Practice, and currently a visiting lecturer at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, IL, USA.
ORCID
Brandy Daniels http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8418-4235
Notes
1 The panel was held on 24 March 2011, in room 0016 in the Westbrook building of the Divinity School. The Women’s Center has a recording of the panel in their archives, and provided me with a copy of it that I consulted for this chapter.
2 The name of the student has been changed for privacy.
3 These are direct quotes – filler words (i.e. “like,” “um,” “y’know”) have been removed for clarity and ease of reading.
4 Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 2 (emphasis mine).
5 My brief introductory description of queer temporality draws heavily from, and is deeply indebted to, the description for the fourteenth transdisciplinary theological colloquium at Drew University on “Sexual Disorientations: Queer Temporalities, Affects, Theologies.” The description was written by Joseph Marchal, Kent Brintnall, and Stephen Moore. While there are a number of useful essays to which I could refer, Marchal, Brintnall, and Moore's definition and contextualization is amongst, if not, the most clear and succinct description of queer temporality I have yet encountered. For an additional, more lengthy introduction to the field, see the special volume, edited by Elizabeth Freeman, on “Queer Temporalities.” Freeman, “Introduction.” The volume also features a roundtable on queer temporality with Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, Carolyn Dinshaw, and others, and features essays from Kathryn Bond Stockton, José Esteban Muñoz, and more.
6 Explaining his turn to Ernest Bloch on hope, José Esteban Muñoz explains that this turn to hope “is a critical discourse – which is to say that it does not avert or turn away from the present. Rather,” he continues,
it critiques an autonaturalizing temporality that we might call straight time. Straight time tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life. The only futurity promised is that of reproductive majoritarian heterosexuality, the spectacle of the state refurbishing its ranks through overt and subsidized acts of reproduction. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 21–2.
7 Freeman, Time Binds, 3.
8 For more on Hauerwas’ “persona,” including but certainly not limited to his predilection to cursing, see Cavanaugh, “Stan the Man,” 17–36.
9 For one of his critiques of racism, for instance, see Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 248–79.
10 Ibid., 7.
11 Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 2.
12 Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 3.
13 Ibid., 36.
14 Annas, “Virtue Ethics,” 5. Annas locates any virtue ethical framework that “reject, or just ignore, the notion of flourishing and indeed of a final end altogether” as a “reduced” version of virtue ethical theory, the most significant reduction being “the rejection of a unified rationale” for the virtues. Ibid., 9. Similarly, in his text After Virtue – arguably one of the most influential contemporary texts on virtue ethics, not to mention a text that has been particularly formative for Hauerwas’ scholarship – Alasdair MacIntyre argues that moral frameworks from the Enlightenment onward have been insufficient. As he puts it,
ever since belief in Aristotelian teleology was discredited moral philosophers have attempted to provide some alternative rational secular account of the nature and status of morality, but that all these attempts, various and variously impressive as they have been, have in fact failed. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 256.
15 Kotva, The Christian Case for Virtue Ethics, 18.
16 Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 3.
17 Regarding Murdoch's influence on Hauerwas' work: in a volume on Murdoch's work, Hauerwas reflects upon her insight in The Sovereignty of Good that “I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort,” and muses that “I do not just love that sentence, I have made a career out of that sentence.” Hauerwas, “Murdochian Muddles,” 190.
18 Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 31, 3.
19 Ibid., 30.
20 Ibid., 2.
21 Ibid., 30.
22 Ibid., 30–1.
23 Ibid., 3.
24 Hauerwas, “Murdochian Muddles,” 205. Hauerwas explains how, for Murdoch, “One becomes good by learning to live with the idea that the Good is not given or unified but comes, rather, from facing reality in its variety,” and that to then “try to encapsulate the Good is to ignore the inexhaustible randomness and unsystematic variety in the world.” Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 38.
25 As Hauerwas puts it,
Christians have also maintained that the gospel reveals the truth of our existence; but, contrary to Miss Murdoch, they have felt that such a truth would be destructive if it were not that we are sustained by a being beyond ourself. This is just the good news of the gospel: we are told the truth about ourselves in such a way that the destructiveness heals rather than obliterates. Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 47.
26 Ibid., 6.
27 Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 1.
28 Hauerwas, “Murdochian Muddles,” 207.
29 Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 45; see also 68–92, especially 71–6.
30 See, for instance, Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist; Milbank, Theology and Social Theory; Claiborne and Wallis, The Irresistible Revolution.
31 See, for instance, Healy, Hauerwas; Albrecht, The Character of Our Communities; Tanner, Theories of Culture.
32 Tanner, Theories of Culture, 104.
33 Ibid., 105 (emphasis mine).
34 One might say that what Tanner seeks to do with space, I hope to build off of and do with time.
35 Tanner, Theories of Culture, 104.
36 Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 2.
37 Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, 192.
38 Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 3.
39 See especially Foucault, The History of Sexuality; Foucault, Discipline & Punish; Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
40 As Lynne Huffer succinctly puts it, “The differences between the intersectional and antisocial strands of queer theory revolve … around differing investments in subjectivity. ” Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?, 17n47. The antisocial turn/thesis drew attention and claim to the fact that such a turn to the subject functioned to delimit freedom and difference of expression by forming people as subjects, placing bodies into discrete categorical boxes of different types and manifestations of “identity.” This strand of queer theory builds on what Foucault, following Deleuze, refers to as assujettissement: “a subject-producing subjection that simultaneously creates and subjugates sexual subjects within an increasingly differentiated grid of deviance and normalization.” See ibid., 31.
41 Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”
42 See for instance, Dinshaw, Getting Medieval; Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern. Dinshaw and Freccero, amongst others, speak to the queerness of and within time and how that queerness manifests in various histories, logics, and discourses.
43 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 153 (quoting Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” 553).
Similarly, Dustin Bradley Goltz describes straight time as that “which adopts a linear – and so literally ‘straight’ approach to time … a temporal trajectory through heteronormative progression that relies upon the assumed naturalness, correctness, and inevitability of heteronormative time orientation.” See Goltz, Queer Temporalities in Gay Male Representation, 117. In In a Queer Time and Space, Halberstam defines queer time and space, and her call for it, as follows:
A ‘queer’ adjustment in the way in which we think about time, [which] in fact, requires and produces new conceptions of space. And in fact, much of the contemporary theory seeking to disconnect queerness from an essential definition of homosexual embodiment has focused on queer space and queer practices. By articulating and elaborating a concept of queer time, I suggest new ways of understanding the nonnormative behaviors that have clear but not essential relations to gay and lesbian subjects. … ‘queer’ refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time. ‘Queer time’ is a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance. ‘Queer space’ refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage and it also describes the new understandings of space enabled by the production of queer counterpublics. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 135–6.
44 Freeman, Time Binds, 3. Power, within Freeman's analysis – as is the case with queer theory more broadly, is not necessarily negative or entirely “bad,” but it often is turned to as a normativizing and regulative force. For more on this theme, see Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 777–95.
45 Freeman, Time Binds, 3.
46 Freeman, “Introduction,” 160. Freeman explains that things like “Schedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches are ways to inculcate what the sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel calls ‘hidden rhythms,’ forms of temporal experience that seem natural to those whom they privilege,” and offers a number of examples, such as the shift from an18-hour to an 8-hour workday and the term ‘premature ejaculation.’” Ibid.
47 Swinton, “The Gesture of a Truthful Story,” 74.
48 Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 2.
49 Hauerwas, “Murdochian Muddles,” 207.
50 Ibid., 206.
51 Thompson, The Ecclesiology of Stanley Hauerwas, 212.
52 Freeman, Time Binds, 3, 4.
53 Ibid., 4 (emphasis mine).
54 Albrecht, The Character of Our Communities, 50.
55 Larsen, “How I Think Hauerwas Thinks About Theology,” 37.
56 Freeman, Time Binds, 3.
57 Larsen, “How I Think Hauerwas Thinks About Theology,” 35. He continues, explaining how it is
a form of life in community always remains a gift. Attempting to ‘grasp’ that gift by sociological assessment of one particular community, then, confuses the embodied middle where we access grace with the logic of grace embodied in communal practices. Ibid.
58 Freeman, Time Binds, 4 (emphasis mine).
59 These schemes/practices are either seen as belonging to the church and having been abdicated to or taken over and deformed by the state (i.e. marriage), as subverted/understood and practiced distinctively differently (in terms of both practices and justifications undergirding them) by the church (i.e. child-rearing, health), and/or as particular to the church as a counter to the logics of the state/capitalism (i.e. Sabbath).
60 Hauerwas, Christian Existence Today, 107.
61 Hauerwas, A Better Hope, 19.
62 Hauerwas and Wells, The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, 9.
63 In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre defines “practice” as
any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 175.
64 Freeman, “Introduction,” 160.
65 For Freeman, queerness is a social/political “class” where queers are marked by “failures or refusals to inhabit middle and upper middleclass habitus [which] appear as, precisely, asynchrony, or time out of joint.” Freeman, Time Binds, 19.
66 Bretherton, “Sharing Peace,” 331.
67 Ibid., 335, 336.
68 Ibid., 337.
69 Ibid. That being said, Bretherton from there suggests quickly that the sign of piece is a liturgical practice that moves beyond this class difference.
70 Matzo McCarthy, “Becoming One Flesh,” 317.
71 Freeman, Time Binds, 5. Freeman continues, explaining that,
In describing the narrative texture of modern nationality, Homi Bhabha too refines the distinction between linear-historical time and the more static times of cyclic and monumental time: he describes the dialectic between a ‘pedagogical’ time in which historical events seem to accrete toward a given destiny, and a ‘performative’ time in which a people recreates itself as such through taking up a given activity simultaneously … . Freeman, Time Binds, 6.
72 Edelman in Caserio et al., “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” 821.
73 See Caserio et al., “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory”; Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities,” 177–95.
74 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 25.
75 Ibid., 31.
76 Ibid., 22–3.
77 Ibid., 92, 185.
78 Edelman in Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing Queer Temporalities,” 181.
79 Edelman, No Future, 3.
80 Ibid.
81 Ibid., 29. Edelman's call is even more powerful in its full context, and bears citing more fully here. He writes:
Queers must respond to the violent force of such constant provocations not only by insisting on our equal right to the social order's prerogatives … but also by saying explicitly what Law and the Pope and the whole of the Symbolic order for which they stand hear anyway in each and every expression or manifestation of queer sexuality: Fuck the social order and the Child in whose name we’re collectively terrorized; fuck Annie; fuck the waif from Les Mis; fuck the poor, innocent kid on the New; fuck Laws both with capital ls and with small; fuck the whole network of Symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop. Ibid.
82 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 182.
83 Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, 224.
84 Ibid., 225.
85 Ibid., 201 (emphasis mine).
86 Ibid., 202.
87 Hauerwas also assumes that we are capable of such enactment. As Nicholas Healy puts it, Hauerwas' account
relies too heavily upon the assumption that the practices of the church are at least for the most part performed according to their abstract and ideal descriptions. Ordinary concrete mis-performance or non-performance and its effect upon character formation and church witness is left out of the picture.
88 Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, 183 (emphasis mine).
89 Ibid., 194, 205.
90 Hauerwas, Approaching the End, xi.
91 Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 207.
92 Ibid., 207–8 (emphasis mine).
93 See, for instance, Kerr, Christ, History and Apocalyptic. See also note 29 above.
94 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 175. This is also a point made by postcolonial analyses within the study of religion. See also, for instance, Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions. Masuzawa tracks the ways that comparative religion has actually operated, through its various systems of classification, “to distinguish the West from the rest,” to ultimately reclaim a hegemonic European universalist destiny.” Ibid., 5. The discourse on religion, which in actuality maps “the relation between Christianity and all other known forms of religious belief and practice,” operates as a discourse of othering. Ibid., 14. Masuzawa exposes how religious discourse itself has operated to preserve European and Christian supremacy and domination. Moreover, Masuzawa points out that it is through theology itself that this comparative gesture first operates (see especially Chapter 2, “The Legacy of Comparative Theology”). See also Jennings, The Christian Imagination for an explicit examination of the colonialist operations and ramifications of this othering and its undergirding theology.
95 Tanner, Theories of Culture, 105.
96 As Tanner explains it, a
Christian outlook is a comprehensive one and therefore has its own drive to incorporate or assimilate the cultural practices of others. Other cultures provide the materials to be viewed through a Christian lens or cultural framework. What Christians see through that lens or in terms of that framework is therefore a composite … . Ibid (emphasis mine).
97 Ibid. Recall her point that
while a Christian way may not be self-contained and self-originating, Christian identity still is; though Christian practices are mixed up, for example, with wider cultural spheres, the Christian identity of those practices – what makes them Christian – has nothing to do with such mixing. Ibid (emphasis mine).
98 Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 100.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid., 101.
101 Hauerwas, Character and the Christian Life, 215.
102 See Wilson-Hartgrove, Free to Be Bound.
103 As the section on queer futurity makes clear, Muñoz's approach to futurity is not the only approach – a turn to Edelman in this section would offer a totally different set of possibilities – as, for that matter, a turn to Leo Bersani's approach or Jack Halberstam's approach. Given my limited time and space (pun somewhat intended?), I turn here to Muñoz as just one possibility, and even my engagement on this front is limited, only a precursory exploration.
104 Hauerwas, The Work of Theology, 24. Hauerwas makes this point as justification for why he does not write systematic theology or reflect more explicitly on method. Hauerwas suggests that the work of theology has no end as “there is no method that can free theology of the necessity to respond to the challenges of trying to discern what being a Christian entails in this place and time,” yet in many ways this is counter to the logic of his own framework, especially as it is evidenced in texts like Approaching the Ends.
105 Larsen, “How I Think Hauerwas Thinks about Theology,” 26–7. Where Larsen goes from here is particularly interesting. Larsen argues from this point about the middle that
Here, Hauerwas shares a basic starting point with “subversive” Christian ethics. Feminist, womanist, queer, black or postcolonial ethics begins epistemically by refusing deference to the dominant subject of universal rationality (white, heterosexual, male), just as Hauerwas refuses a politics that presumes a stable, universal subject of knowledge. Ibid., 26.
106 Hauerwas, Approaching the End, 12.
107 Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 9.
108 Ibid., 62.
109 Ibid., 22.
110 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
111 Ibid., 11.
112 Ibid., 49.
113 Ibid., 28.
114 Ibid., 7, 6.
115 Ibid., 25, 49, 31.
116 Ibid., 20.
117 Bonhoeffer, Ethics. It is especially interesting to note the placement of this manuscript in the various compilations and translations of Ethics. Whereas previous compilations of the manuscript placed this manuscript as the fifth chapter, Clifford Green, the English editor of the more recent exhaustive series of Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works instead arranged the unfinished manuscript of Ethics in chronological order, thus placing “Christ, Reality, and Good,” at the very beginning of the text. It strikes me as significant that the concrete ethical claims Bonhoeffer makes on family, work, and government all proceed from his rejection of the division of the church from the world. For more on this, see Green's notes on “Manuscripts in a Reconstructed Writing Sequence,” in Bonhoeffer, Ethics, 45–6.
118 Ibid., 58.
119 Ibid (emphasis mine).
120 Ibid., 59.
121 Ibid., 61.
122 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 22–3.
123 Ibid., 49 (emphasis mine).
124 Muñoz is building on Husserl here, responding to his “invitation to look to horizons of being.” See ibid., 22, n9.
125 Freeman, Time Binds, 173.
126 Ibid., 13–14.
127 Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 36; Hauerwas and Wells, The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, 5.
128 Freeman, Time Binds, 173; Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 32.
129 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 121.
130 Ibid., 9.
131 Ibid., 5.
132 Ibid.
133 Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue, 32.
134 Hauerwas, “Murdochian Muddles,” 206.