Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative

Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York:  Routledge, 1997.

Starts by examining the [Althusserian] act of hailing (interpellating) by invoking J.L. Austin’s theory: “The illocutionary speech act performs its deeds at the moment of the utterance, and yet to the extent that the moment is ritualized, it is never merely a single moment. The ‘moment’ in ritual is a condensed historicity: it exceeds itself in past and future directions, an effect of prior and future invocations that constitute and escape the instance of utterance.” (3) This is the ‘total situation’ of a speech act, without which the understanding of its illocutionary force is impossible.

“to be injured by speech is to suffer a loss of context, that is, not to know where you are” (4) – doesn’t follow from her argument; Althusser’s counterargument is that it is to know too well who you are, to be reminded of you relationship to the social reality and social relations.

She addresses the problem that theorists of hate speech focus too much on comparison with physical pain – her counterargument is that language is responsible for the social being of the body. (It looks like she takes seriously that advocates of ‘hate speech’ study is epistemologically – for them it is obviously a political act, and it is much easier to convince audience and justice that ‘hate speech’ shouldn’t be by a comparison with what is explicitly illegal). Altuhusserian reference: “the address constitutes a being within the possible circuit of recognition” (5).

She then argues that the (speech) address can be a threat, because it invokes the moment of social formation of a person (his/her past), because the very social being of a person is dependent on the address of the Other. Here where threats to social existence lurk. Butler discusses the agency of language, where she identifies her political agenda:

Language remains alive when it refuses to ‘encapsulate’ or ‘capture’ the events and lives it describes. But when it seeks to effect that capture, language not only loses its vitality, but acquires its own violent force, one that Morrison [a Nobel Prize laureate Butler discusses] throughout the lecture associates with statist language and censorship. (9)

She moves on to examine the relationship between speech and body that speaks; referring to Shoshana Felman, she argues that “the act of speaking body… is always to some extent unknowing about what it performs… A speaking body signifies in ways that are not reducible to what such a body ‘says’… The utterance performs meanings that are not precisely the ones that are stated or, indeed, capable of being stated at all.” (10) “The speech act is a bodily act.” (11) That is why language threats are dangerous: they prefigure or promise a bodily act, and yet by the virtue of promising it they are bodily acts themselves:

The threat begins a temporal horizon within which the organizing aim is the act that is threatened; the threat begins the action by which the fulfillment of the threatened act might be achieved. (11)

And yet the fact there is an interval between the promise of a threat and the threatening act might be exploited to counter the threat.

She uses her previous discussion then to argue that an identification of whether a certain utterance is threatening or not requires much more than just addressing its context. She notes that even legal and critical discourse about hate speech can restage its performance. Aims to study the link between the subject and his/her speech act, arguing that “untethering the speech act from the sovereign subject founds an alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of responsibility, one that more fully acknowledges the ways in which the subject is constituted in language, how what it creates is also what it derives from elsewhere.” (15-16) “The one who acts (who is not the same as the sovereign subject) acts precisely to the extent that he or she is constituted as an actor and, hence, operating within a linguistic field of enabling constraints from the outset.” (16)

Butler argues that ‘hate speech’ not only ‘injures’ as a perlocutionary act, but it also constructs one’s social position, being part of the process of social interpellation. The consequence of an address is, therefore, that the addressee occupies that  social/cultural position which is implied by this speech act. Speech enacts domination. Butler then brings a presumption that to hurt, ‘hate speech’ must imply that the addressee accepts its power. “What kind of power is attributed to speech such that speech is figured as having the power to constitute the subject with such success.” (19) She argues that this is the power is (implied) repetition, of previous acts that were threatening; and her question is what can disjoin a speech act from previous ones and, thus, make it lose its power.

Explores the relation between speech and conduct. Argues that careless advocacy of, say, that pornography is performative speech and, therefore, the injurious conduct of representation collapses the distinction between representation and conduct “in order to enhance the power of state intervention over graphic sexual representation.” (22) She argues that this is dangerous because important representations can be interpreted as injurious conduct by right-wing groups (explicit self-declaration, as in case of gays, for a public homosexual act). Representation can be performative, but it is not necessarily causative, as when the legislative assembly of St.Petersburg banned any public declaration/performance of sexuality as ‘propaganda of homosexualism’.

She then combines Althusser and Austin, arguing that “if hate speech acts in an illocutionary way, injuring in and through the moment of speech, and constituting the subject through that injury, then the hate speech exercises an interpellative function.” (24) “Austin’s view that the illocutionary speech act is conditioned by its conventional, that is, ‘ritual’ or ‘ceremonial’ dimensions, finds a counterpart in Althusser’s insistence that ideology has a ‘ritual’ form, and that ritual constitutes ‘the material existence of ideological apparatus’.” (25)

Butler goes even further and argues that discourse constitutes the subject even when the subject is unaware of it and thus has a seeming possibility to resist socializations that his/her naming implies. Any naming (which is effective, in terms of happy/unhappy speech acts of Austin) causes “a chain of signification that exceeds the circuit of self-knowledge. The time of discourse is not the time of the subject” (31) She then suggests that Althusserian ‘interpellationary’ model should be revised: “The subject need not always turn around in order to be constructed as a subject, and the discourse that inaugurates the subject need not take the form of a voice at all.” (31)

She keeps on discussing the power of interpellation: “its purpose is to indicate and establish a subject in subjection, to produce its social contours in space and time.” (34) Also, interpellation doesn’t necessarily require a voice: bureaucratic procedures or censuses work pretty much in the same way, they produce interpellation even though the sovereign power that enables them to do so is diffused. And she takes Foucault’s ideas about diffuse power to the extreme by arguing that power is diffused also in language which constitutes power and in all of us as subject who constitute power. “Power works through dissimulation: it comes to appear as something other than itself, indeed, it comes to appear as a name.” (36) Hence the danger of critical discourse about hate language: it, in a way, reproduces or at least invokes (in a classroom) “the sensibility of racism, the trauma and, for some, the excitement [of having power].” (37)