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Resisting Docility: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Performative Liturgical Theology

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Resisting Docility: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Performative Liturgical Theology Resisting Docility: Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Performative Liturgical Theology By Timothy Dwight Davis Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in Religion May 11, 2018 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Bruce T. Morrill, Ph.D Ellen A. Armour, Ph.D TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Chapter I. Introduction ....................................................................................................................1 II. Docile Bodies: Michel Foucault and Liturgical Discipline ...........................................3 Introduction ..............................................................................................................3 Foucault and the Carceral Body ...............................................................................5 James K.A. Smith and the Disciplining of Desire .................................................13 Docile Liturgical Bodies ........................................................................................16 Redemptive Hegemony and Ritualization .............................................................20 III. Resistant Bodies: Judith Butler and Performative Liturgical Theology ......................24 Introduction ............................................................................................................24 Defining Performative Bodies ...............................................................................24 Siobhán Garrigan, Louis-Marie Chauvet, and Social Liturgical Embodiment ......35 Bodies of Resistance: A Few (Modest) Proposals for a Performative Liturgical Theology ................................................................................................................43 IV. Conclusion ...................................................................................................................48 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..........................................................................................................................49 ii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The body is the site on which identity is written. It is the nexus of a multiplicity of discourses and exercises of power. The body receives its definition and its articulation by that which writes upon it.1 One of the primary ways that the body is inscribed with meaning or identity is through the power of the State. According to Michel de Certeau, the law says, “Give your body and I will give you a meaning, I will make you a name and a word in my discourse.”2 All one needs to do is become compliant, giving oneself over to the law in order to be formed and to be given meaning. Theologically, we could say that bodies often seek the same totalizing logic in ecclesial settings. Bodies do not seek their identities in themselves or in God through the person of Jesus Christ. Rather, Christian bodies have accepted the logic of the State that offers meaning through docility and submission. How did this come to be? This thesis seeks to interrogate theological embodiment through a liturgical lens. We seek to understand how the logic of the State — the logic of capitalism, precarity, and use — has insinuated itself into notions of liturgical embodiment. Through a close engagement with Michel Foucault’s work Discipline & Punish, we will explore how the disciplinary logic of the prison came to shape Western society’s understanding of embodiment. As will become clear, liturgical theology has not been innocent of co-opting the logic of power and domination through rendering bodies docile that the State perfected in eighteenth century prisons. Theologians have oftentimes made use of this logic in order to develop notions of embodiment to fit whatever program they happen to be pushing. Particularly guilty of this trend are theologians in the 1 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkley: University of California Press, 1984), 139. 2 Ibid., 149. 1 Radical Orthodoxy movement. Seeking to recover the ancient practices of the church, practices that they argue are better and purer than current ecclesial and theological practices, Radical Orthodoxy deploys liturgy as a sort of silver bullet against creeping notions of secularism. In this particular thesis, Radical Orthodoxy will be represented by perhaps its most popular and widely read theologian, James K.A. Smith.3 We will muster Foucault’s understandings of the carceral logic of the State to critique liturgical theologies that attempt to render bodies as docile. Rather than docile bodies, this thesis attempts to lay the foundations for a liturgical theology that shapes bodies of resistance to de-forming forces of culture such as colonialism, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. By engaging with Judith Butler’s understanding of performativity, this thesis attempts to sketch a broad understanding of how liturgy can function in a performative mode. The goal is to develop a liturgical theological anthropology that is non- hegemonic and that does not render bodies as homogenous. Rather, performative liturgical theology seeks to allow bodies to perform themselves in creative ways, resisting compulsory systems of obedience and imagining communal utopic futures. In so doing, performative liturgical theology is a theology of resistance, a theology that names docility and precarity and seeks to overcome individualizing and normalizing theological moves. We turn first to Michel Foucault and his notion of docility. 3 Smith was an early adopter of the moniker “Radical Orthodoxy,” publishing a book in the Radical Orthodoxy series and publishing a popular level introduction to the movement. Although he does not represent the most sophisticated strains of the movement, he has found a wide audience in certain strands of evangelicalism, especially with influential younger pastors, artists, and musicians. Thus, while Catherine Pickstock or John Milbank may better represent the intellectual prowess of the movement, it is Smith’s ideas about liturgy that are being implemented “on the ground,” so to speak, thus my decision to use him as the movement’s voice here. 2 CHAPTER 2 DOCILE BODIES: MICHEL FOUCAULT AND LITURGICAL DISCIPLINE Introduction Foucault’s preoccupation in much of his philosophical career was understanding the ways in which meaning was inscribed in subjects through social conditioning. Whether that took the form of an analysis of madness, sexuality, hospitals, or the prison, Foucault was concerned with how power shapes discourses and identities. In this chapter, we will focus on Foucault’s exploration of the penal system in Discipline & Punish. This chapter will attempt to draw parallels between Foucault’s articulation of docile bodies and James K.A. Smith’s understanding of liturgical bodies. The goal of this chapter is to trouble Smith’s assertions that liturgy qua liturgy produces “right desires” and shapes culture. Rather than Smith’s understanding of bodies as disciplined and shaped in conformity with an ethereal, undefined notion of liturgy, this thesis will go on to attempt to lay a groundwork for a performative liturgical theology — an understanding of liturgical theology that shapes bodies of resistance against the de-forming powers that seek to subjugate individuals into docility. Foucault offers both the lens through which one can critique liturgical projects that produce docile bodies while also offering constructive resources for further liturgical reflection. Foucault’s writings on power are helpful in that power is not only a negative force in his work. Foucault argues that understandings of power as purely negative constitute a narrow, “skeletal” understanding of how power works. He argues, If power were never anything but repressive…do you really think one would be brought to obey it? What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, forms discourse. It needs to be considered 3 as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.4 Here Foucault’s understanding of power offers two insights useful for liturgical theology: power that operates positively — shaping social bodies through pleasure, knowledge, and discourse — and an understanding of power that moves beyond repression. It is these two insights that we will take up in response to liturgical theologies aimed at producing repressed bodies and “right” desires. While this thesis will specifically focus on Foucault’s work in Discipline & Punish, his analysis of disciplined bodies in carceral institutions in the eighteenth century reflected an ongoing process in other areas of the political technology of the body as well. The body was constantly being mapped by what Foucault calls “micro-physics of power.” We see this in other areas of Foucault’s analysis, as in The Birth of the Clinic in which the body becomes “a concrete space of perception,” the subject of a medical gaze intent upon mapping bodies.5 Again, in the first volume of Foucault’s explorations of sexuality, the state is monitoring the sexual lives of its subjects, creating discourses, special knowledges, and analyses in the hopes of controlling the sex lives of citizens.6 Foucault’s analysis of bodies in the carceral system should be understood alongside his other analyses of power and bodies. It was not only through disciplinary
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