The+Ninth+Week

__Judith Butler: Excitable Speech__

Racist epithets not only relay a message of racial inferiority, but that “relaying” is the verbal institutionalization of that very subordination.

Hate speech is understood not only to communicate an offensive idea or set of ideas but also to enact the very message it communicates: the very communication is at once a form of conduct.

The act-like character of certain offensive utterances may be precisely what keeps them from saying what they mean to say or doing what it is they say.
 * The difference between saying what is meant and doing what is said is quite subtle.

Conceptualizing utterances as both “expressive” of ideas and as forms of “conduct” in themselves: racist speech in particular both proclaims the inferiority of the race to whom it is addressed, and effects the subordination of that race through the utterance itself.

The state allows for the injury of its citizens, and, she concludes, the “victim [of hate speech] becomes a stateless person.

The exercise of “freedom,” she argues, takes place at the expense of other citizens’ rights to equal participation and the equal exercise of fundamental rights and liberties.
 * Democracy and liberty as inherently conflicting.

Hate speech may undermine the social conditions for the exercise of fundamental rights and liberties on the part of those who are addressed through such speech.

Utterance itself is regarded in inflated and highly efficacious ways, no longer as a representation of power or its verbal epiphenomenon, but as the //modus vivendi// of power itself.
 * Utterance does not represent power but //is// power.

We might regard this overdetermination of the performative as the “linguistification” of the political field.

Various instances of “speech as conduct” are not at all commensurate with one another, and I do not propose to argue that they are.
 * Incommensuration is a part of phenomenon in the world which, while not logically consistent, happens non-the-less. Rather than try to fit description into a model where things are, in fact, commensurate but in these unusual ways, the author acknowledges and submits to the incommensurability.

To the extent that certain groups have been “historically subordinated,” hate speech directed towards such groups consists in a ratification and extension of that “structural subordination.”

Certain historical forms of subordination have assumed a “structural” status, so that this generalized history and structure constitutes “the context” in which hate speech proves to be efficacious.
 * Particular histories enable hate speech to be speech as doing.

Some public quarrel over the question of whether stating publicly that one is a homosexual is the same as stating an inention to perform the act, and it appears that if the inention is stated, then the statement itself is offensive.
 * This is the incommensurability of which she writes. Does stating a position equate to stating the intention of acting that position in certain ways?

The military found offensive not the intention to act, but //the statement of the intention//.
 * Does a statement of being determine a statement of doing? Is a statement of doing the same as the act of doing even though what is said might not be what is meant?

By disclaiming the action, the statement returns to a constative or merely descriptive claim, and we arrive at President Clinton’s distinction between a protected status – “I am” – and unprotected conduct – “I do” or “I will do.”
 * “I am” vs “I do” relative to the above comments. Also, is there not a distinction between “I do” and “I will do”?

//Discursive power// given over to the state through the process of legal redress.

//The state produces hate speech.//

The state actively produces the domain of publically acceptable speech, demarcating the line between the domains of the speakable and the unspeakable, and retaining the power to make and sustain that consequential line of demarcation.

Power of //legal// language.

Sovereign performative takes place against the background of a political situation in which power is no longer constrained within the sovereign form of the state.

Power cannot be easily or definitively traced to a single subject who is its “speaker,” to sovereign representative of the state.
 * Foucaultian conception of power.

The historical loss of sovereign organization of power appears to occasion the fantasy of its return – a return, I want to argue, that takes place in language, in the figure of the performative.

If power is no longer constrained by models of sovereignty, if it emanates from any number of “centers,” how are we to find the origin and cause of that act of power by which injury is done?

The law requires that we resituate power in the language of injury, that we accord injury the status of an act and trace that act to the specific conduct of a subject.
 * This legal requirement causes problems in institutional reorganization necessary to deal with the sorts of technological catastrophes that Perrow and Vaughan write about.

Foucault argues that “sovereignty,” as a dominant mode for thinking power, restricts our view of power to prevailing conceptions of the subject, making us unable to think about the problem of domination.
 * I appreciate any time that an author can help me think through Foucault.

“The analysis [of power] should not attempt to consider power from its internal point of view” – Foucault
 * Seems to relate to standpoint epistemology.

“Instead, it is a case of studying power at the point where its intention, if it has one, is completely invested in its read and effective practices.” – Foucault
 * As opposed to the question “who has power?”

Shift from the subject of power to a set of practices in which power is actualized.
 * Another way of phrasing Foucaults arguments above.

“//Grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects//” – Foucault

The elaborate institutional structures of racism as well as sexism are suddenly reduced to the scene of utterance, and utterance, no longer the sedimentation of prior institution and sue, is invested with the power to establish and maintain the subordination of the group addressed.

By locating the cause of our injury in a speaking subject and the power that injury in the power of speech, we set ourselves free, as it were, to seek recourse to the law – now set against power and imagined as neutral.

The phantasmatic production of the culpable speaking subject, spawned from the constraints of legal language, casts subjects as the only agents of power.

Racist speech could not act as racist speech if it were not //a citation of itself//.
 * Citation like Derrida uses citation?

As a performative, hate speech also deprives the one addressed of precisely //this// performative power, a performative power that some see as a linguistic condition of citizenship. The ability to use words efficaciously in this way is considered to be the necessary condition for the normative operation of the speaker and the political actor in the public domain.
 * Performative power of speech constitutive of democratic citizenry.

How are both the proper speech of citizens and the improper hate speech of citizens to be distinguished from yet a third level of performative power, that which belongs to the state.
 * The million dollar question, as it were.

Figuring hate speech as an exercise of sovereign power implicitly performs a catachresis by which the on who is charged with breaking the law (the one who utters hate speech) is nevertheless invested with the sovereign power of law.

Does the one who “utters” hate speech act like the law in the sense that one has the power to make happen what one says (as a judge backed by law in a relatively stable political order has the power to do); and do we attribute to the illocutionary force of that utterance imaginary state power, backed by the police?
 * This isn’t writing anything she hasn’t already written, but damn is this a powerful way to hit the message home.

It is as if the proper power of the state has been expropriated, delegated to its citizens, and the state then reemerges as a neutral instrument to which we seek recourse to protect us from other citizens, who have become revived emblems of a (lost) sovereign power.

The very act by which Anita Hill gave testimony, one intended to establish that an injury was done to her, was taken up by the Senate hearing – itself a pornographic scene – as a confession of her shame and, hence, her guilt.

The pornographic is marked precisely by this power of sexual appropriation.

African-American status permits for a spectacularization of sexuality and recasting of whites as outside the fray, witnesses and watchers who have circuited their own sexual anxieties through the publicized bodies of blacks.
 * Modest witnesses?

Precisely through this display of linguistic agency, her meaning becomes reversed and discounted. The more she speaks, the less she is believed, the less her meaning is taken to be the one she intends.

She presupposes that one ought to be in a position to utter words in such a way that the meaning of those words coincides with the intention with which they are uttered, and that the performative dimension of that uttering works to support and further that intended meaning.

The effect of that degradation is to cast doubt on whether the speech uttered by those depicted can ever be taken to mean what it says.

It is speech as display, confession, and evidence, but not as communicative vehicle, having been deprived of its capacity to make truthful claims.

Although this attribution of a reversed intention effectively violates the sovereignty of the speaking subject, it seems equally true that this account of pornography also exploits a certain notion of liberal sovereignty to further its own aims, insisting that consent always and only constitutes the subject.

The ideal of consent, however, makes sense only to the degree that the terms in question submit to a consensually established meaning. Terms that mean in equivocal ways thus a threat to the ideal of consensus.

Anita Hill’s speech must recite the words spoken to her in order to display their injurious power.

The citationality of the performative produces that possibility for agency and expropriation at the same time.