Thinking authority democratically: Prophetic practices, white supremacy, and democratic politics

Political Theory

Volumn 36, Issue 5, 2008, Pages 708-734

  Shulman, George ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Authority; Democracy; Prophecy; White supremacy

Indexed keywords

EID: 51349161229     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591708321028     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. This example and my view of authority more broadly are indebted to Hanna Pitkin. My central claims about prophecy are indebted to Melissa Orlie's consistent provocation. For crucial comments on this essay, thanks especially to Linda Zerilli and to Lawrie Balfour, Mary Dietz, Peter Euben, and Joel Olsen.
2. How do prevailing genres of democratic theory think authority? In liberal varieties of political thought, authority typically appears as the tyrannical antithesis of autonomy, but autonomy rests on assumptions and practices whose authority is disclaimed. In contrast, "communitarian" theories avow the authority of what Michael Walzer calls "core values" but only on the condition of idealizing them (Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 89). In turn, deliberative democrats say that claims and values warrant authority only if redeemed by public reason, but again, deliberation rests on axioms and procedures whose authority they disclaim. For theorists around the sign of the postmodern, therefore, deliberation does not redeem authority but displays its deep tie to domination. They thus emphasize how people see only through perspectives, speak only by a grammar, or live always by faith. Authority is inescapable but as "contingent foundations," we must acknowledge rather than disclaim or seek to validate as universally true. An ethos emphasizing contingency and practices of contest among plural perspectives, then, seem mutually sustaining aspects of a politics that democratizes authority by pluralizing it and separating it from dogmatism. This approach is appealing because it acknowledges the dependence of politics on authority. But the visceral assumptions remain clear: claiming authority is assuming illegitimate power, and investing authority - in another, a community, or a conviction - is psychological regression. Critical practice in Foucaultdian modes thus identifies danger only in the pervasiveness of authority, not in the absence of "genuine" forms of authority, so that critics praise insurgency, not the reverence enabling it; we are empowered by deflating authority, not avowing it.
3. Norman O. Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 96.
4. John H. Schaar, Legitimacy in the Modern State (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Press, 1981), 25.
5. Also cf. Vicky Hearne, "How to Say 'Fetch,'" Raritan (Fall 1983): 1-33.
6. On the ambiguity of agency in authority as derivation, cf. Bonnie Honig, "Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic," APSR 85, no. 1(1991): 97-113.
7. John Winthrop, "Speech to the General Court," in The Puritans, vol. 1, ed. Perry Miller and Thomas H. Johnson (New York: Harper, 1963), 205-7.
8. This speech is quoted by Tocqueville in Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 42. Winthrop tries to cleanly separate true from false authority, while I see in all authority elements - of power and of the arbittary - that we cannot purify but must acknowledge.
9. Jesus thus said, "I come not destroy but to fulfill the law," because he also said, "Despite what you have heard, I say unto you." The book of Matthew 5:21 (King James Version).
10. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Vintage, 1990), vol. 1, 12; vol. 2, 22.
11. Friedrich Neitzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin).
12. My approach to "prophecy" mediates a tension between literal interpretations of prophecy as biblical and theist - prophets are called by god to address his chosen people - and secularizing "translations" that interpret prophecy as prediction, poetic vision, social criticism.. One approach reifies prophecy as a fixed substance, ignoring how the language has been taken up and revised even in nontheistic ways. The other approach is too elastic, making any poetic vision or social criticism a form of "prophecy." To interpret prophecy as an office and a genre is to see how modern Americans are gripped by inherited idioms they also rework for opposing political projects, as the examples of James Baldwin and Jerry Falwell suggest. Although a capacious genre, "prophecy" is not unbounded if we compare it to languages of atomized individualism, aggregated preferences, interest group liberalism, raison d'etat, or deliberative legitimation.
13. My account of prophecy is selective because I ignore the messianic dimensions in the Hebrew Bible and the scriptural "prophecy" of "end-times" in the book of Revelation, for the sake of drawing out why critics of white supremacy find political resources in it. The best accounts of biblical prophecy are Joseph Bleinkensopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1983);
14. Martin Buber, Prophetic Faith (New York: Harper, 1949);
15. Abraham Heschel, The Prophets, vols. 1/2, (New York: Harper, 1958);
16. George Mendenhall, The Tenth Generation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973);
17. Herbert Schneidau, Sacred Discontent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976);
18. and Max Weber, Ancient Judaism (New York: Free Press, 1952).
19. Neitzsche, Zarathustra, 76-77.
20. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, 70; vol. 2, 419.
21. On passionate frames of reference, see Linda M. G. Zerilli, "Doing without Knowing: Feminism's Politics of the Ordinary," Political Theory' 26, no. 1 (August 1998): 435-58.
22. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1993).
23. Hannah Arendt, "Truth and Politics," Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 1993), 239-41. In ways that bear on prophecy, Arendt sees two ways to "assert validity" that do register a plurality of opinions: by advancing truth in an exemplary way and by storytelling.
24. The book of Jeremiah. 1:5-10, 17-19 (King James Version).
25. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961), 84.
26. "The ability to enlist the hope of redemption is the signature of the power that inspires voluntary submission." Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love (New York, Pantheon, 1988), 5.
27. The Book of Jeremiah 20:9 (King James Version).
28. For Blake, "the religions of all nations are derived from each nation's different receptions of the poetic genius, which is everywhere called the spirit of prophecy." See "All Religions are One," in Blake: Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 97. Abraham Heschel, a great scholar of prophecy, thus sees strong ties between prophetic and poetic authority: "What the poets know as poetic inspiration, the prophets call divine revelation." He quotes Eric Auerbach: "The inspiration of the artist is what is meant by 'the hand of the Lord rests upon the prophet.'" Heschel adds, "Like a poet, [the prophet] is endowed with sensitivity, enthusiasm, and tenderness, and above all, with a way of thinking imaginatively. Prophecy is the product of poetic imagination. Prophecy is poetry and in poetry everything is possible, e.g., for the trees to celebrate a birthday and for god to speak to man. The statement 'God's word came to me' was employed by the prophet as a figure of speech, a poetic image." But the source of poetic inspiration remains "unknown and impersonal," while "in prophetic inspiration, the knowledge and presence of Him who imparts the message is the central, staggering fact of awareness."
29. Heschel, The Prophets, vol. 2, 168-9.
30. Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," Blake: Complete Writings, 153. Heschel quotes Nietzsche on inspiration: "Can anyone at the end of this 19th century possibly have any distinct notion of what poets of a more vigorous period meant by inspiration? If not, I should like to describe it. Provided one has the slightest remnant of superstition left, one can hardly reject completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, mouthpiece or medium of some almighty power. The notion of revelation describes the condition quite simply . . . something profoundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes visible and audible with indestructible definiteness and exactness. One hears - one does not seek; one takes - one does not ask who gives; a thought flashes out like lightning, without hesitation - I never had any choice about it.. .. Everything occurs quite without volition, as if in an eruption of freedom, power, and divinity." At issue is not justifying a claim, by reason-giving but bearing witness by poetic expression.
31. Heschel, The Prophets, 163.
32. Buber, Prophetic Faith, 164.
33. For Spinoza, prophets declare "the moral law," and he thus puts Prophecy in the category of tutelage, not philosophy (see Brown, Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis).
34. In Michael Walzer's social democratic alternative, prophets invoke not transcendent law but the "core values" of a tradition. By transposing "god" into the authority of tradition, Walzer affirms a plurality of cultures, but he centers each, in a "core" he invests with hegemonic authority (see Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism).
35. Blake and Buber voice a third view: "the word" bespeaks a "primal religiosity" or "poetic genius" behind "religion" or "culture" as ossified form (see Blake: Complete Writings;
36. and Buber, Prophetic Faith).
37. For Herbert Schneidau, prophecy thus teaches "the contingency, arbitrariness, and metaphysical emptiness of any systematizing of human dispositions that we call culture." Yaliweh defeats attempts "to 'found' our existence in the nature of things ... to search for an unconditioned ground of Being on which we can rest." Schneidau, Sacred Discontent, 242.
38. Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," Blake: Complete Writings, 153.
39. The Book of Amos 5:24 (King James Version);
40. Weber, Ancient Judaism, 284.
41. Heschel, The Prophets, 60-61.
42. Baldwin distinguishes the indignation that bespeaks opposition to injustice and the bitterness or rage that turns against life because of (its) injustice. On kinds of anger, also see Susan Griffin, "The Way of All Ideology," Signs 7, no. 3. (1982): 641-60.
43. Buber, Prophetic Faith, 103-4.
44. Buber parallels Winthrop's distinction of true and false authority: do prophets exercise authority on behalf of freedom? Correspondingly, Stanley Fish in his Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) distinguishes "rhetorical" and "dialectical" speech. Speech "is rhetorical if it satisfies... the opinions its readers may already hold," while a "dialectical presentation" is "disturbing, for it requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in. and live by. It.. . asks that its readers discover the truth for themselves, and this discovery is often made at the expense not only of a reader's opinions and values but of his self-esteem." One is thus "flattering," the other "humiliating"(pp. 1-2). But as Buber and Fish unequivocally distinguish true and false prophecy or dialectic and rhetoric as if the difference is self-evident, they elide how such distinctions are contingent and uncertain political judgments audiences must make.
45. The term social death is from Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, vol. 1 (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 9-11.
46. See especially the chapter "Knowing and Acknowledging" in Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 238-66.
47. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 275.
48. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 5-8.
49. In The Evidence of Things Not Said (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), Lawrie Balfour brilliantly develops from. Baldwin an argument about willful "racial innocence." While for Cavell, disavowal is the all-too-human drive in skepticism, then, Douglass and Baldwin depict disavowal as whiteness: Cavell turns us from metaphysics to the ordinary, while their ordinary is ongoing racial domination and its disavowal.
50. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 105. The futural dimension in prophecy appears in warning of a future that is contingent if we amend our conduct, in declaring that we cannot avoid the consequences of prior conduct, and in asserting that we can act otherwise and will begin anew.
51. Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 89;
52. and Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1963).
53. Hebrew prophecy prefigures Machiavelli's claim that those who "return to first principles" also "return to themselves" and re(dis)cover their generative energy (Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses [New York: Modern Library, 1984], 397-9). By remembering origins in covenant, citizens make bonds anew, partly by reinterpreting their past and their principles and partly by renewing capacities to act. But biblical prophets idealize origins they depict as sacred, while he depicts Roman origins as violent, incomplete, and all too human.
54. Frederick Douglass, "What is the Meaning of July 4th to the Negro?" in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 2, ed. Phillip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1952), 181-204.
55. He narrates a jeremiad about whites betraying their professed principles and origins, but he also depicts blacks as Hebrews exiled in Babylon. By making "America" an empire not a republic, he tells a diasporic narrative and situates a counternational black politics between exile and empire. On Frederick Douglass's speech, see especially James A. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the 4th of July (New York: Palgrove, 2006).
56. On the biblical idiom of African American critics, see Theosophus Smith, Conjuring Culture: The_Biblical Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994);
57. and Cornel West, "Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization," Cornell West Reader (New York, Basic Books, 1999).
58. Douglass, "What is the Meaning of July 4th to the Negro?" 186.
59. Norman Mailer, Presidential Papers (New York: Berkeley Medallion, 1963), 26.
60. Likewise, Douglass does not "return" to the "original" or "true" meaning of the Constitution but avowedly reinterprets it as a radical document that authorizes Congress to abolish slavery.
61. Douglass, "What is the Meaning of July 4th to the Negro?" 190.
62. Ibid., 190-2.
63. Ibid., 192.
64. See Wendy Brown, "Moralism as Anti-Politics," in Politics Out of History, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 18-44.
65. Hannah Arendt, "Peace or Armistice in the Near East," January 1950, in The Jew as Pariah, ed. Ron Feldman (New YoA: Grove, 1978), 217.
66. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 514.
67. The Book of Matthew 10:35 (King James Version).
68. James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket (New York: St. Martin's, 1985), 533.
69. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 26-27
70. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York, Vintage, 1995), 581.