Butlerian Hermeneutics & Injurious Speech: Combatting narrow instances of ‘hate speech’
Within her text, ‘Excitable Speech’, Butler addresses the connection between speech acts and injury, asking how is it that words have the potential to wound? By calling upon the theories of Althusser and Austin in order to answer such a complex question however, I believe Butler addresses an even larger, and more serious question of ‘how it is that language wounds?’ Consequently, I suggest Butler offers two notions of injurious speech: differing in scope of narrow and broad definitions of ‘injury,’ where the former is associated closely with acts of hate speech, and the later with the ontologically essential quality of interpellation. In the present essay I will argue such a distinction is necessary to understanding only narrow instances of injurious speech have potential for reestablishment. However, by introducing the notion of hermeneutical injustice, I will elucidate whether Butler is ever able to successfully establish a normative theory of how we ought to combat such utterances of hate speech.
Within the Introduction, On Linguistic Vulnerability, of which will be the main focus of this essay, in order to elucidate the relationship between speech act theory and injury, Butler heavily concentrates on how specifically hate speech has the potential to injure. When hate speech is uttered, and an ‘individual or group is disparaged against on account of a group characteristic or mere membership to such a group,’ Butler affirms we are not simply denoting or name calling in a Millian-esque tagging fashion, rendering one with a fixed reference, but additionally, we are causing this individual or group to feel “derogated and demeaned.”[1] How is this possible however, that a linguistic act can cause hurt in someone else? Were we not taught as children that ‘words can never hurt me?
Firstly, despite the mention of purely psychological hurt, as in the last passage, it is important to note that Butler believes that injury, especially in relation to the narrow definition thereof, is both ‘mental’ and ‘physical.’[2] Put another way, hate speech injury exceeds the linguistic domain, causing hurt felt also in the physical body of the interlocutor. Refencing the work of Shoshana Felman, Butler highlights that speech acts are themselves “a production of the speaking body,”[3] and therefore through the instrumentality of language and the bodily act of speech, have the power to potentially, but not always necessarily, cause a threat, and therefore an injury to the physical body.
Secondly, it would seem prima facie from such a suggestion Butler is advocating for a connotative theory of language, however, this would be an incorrect interpretation of how Butler believes injury is created. When an act of hate speech occurs, the speaker is utilising terms they are rarely the originator of.[4] They are in fact relying upon a history of repeated utterances, that not only pre-dates the particular moment of speech act, but potentially, pre-dates the speaker themselves. This is, accordingly, how hate speech terminology establishes force, through a “ritual chain of resignifications whore origin and end remain unfixed or unfixable.”[5] Whilst hate speech terminology does not carry a fixed meaning per se, it rather brings a historicity of citation and convention. Surely, it would follow that if there is no fixed meaning, or structure transferred to the interlocutor, then there is surely also no fixed effect (and as such, an injury may not be rendered). Rightly so, Butler would agree with such a notion, aligning with Austin in that speech acts are not always efficacious.[6] Just because a speaker intends to hurt someone with their words, does not necessarily follow that their interlocutor will be hurt. And yet, Butler proposes that hate speech, is always an illocutionary act; an act that in saying something is also at the very time also doing something.[7] Hate speech, in virtue of the political and social conventions linked to its historicity, always “constitutes its addressee”[8] and therefore renders the interlocutor, or more seriously, the subject, as socially subordinate. As such, we are to think of the act itself as the injury and not merely as a catalyst for the production of injury. Generally speaking, I believe that majority of people would assert that racial slurs are only inappropriate if in the company, or earshot of an individual who would identify as a subject of address. If Butler is correct however, that hate speech is always illocutionary, it would follow that it is also always an infelicitous act. However, in order to ascertain how this is possible without fixed meaning, I believe it necessary to define injurious speech broadly within Butler’s work.
To reiterate the question, how is it possible that only some words have the power to injure? Butler herself notes that there exists no fixed library of terms with their essential effect as injury. Yet surely, we want to try and avoid injury in our speech acts, or, at least some of us do. However, if we are unable to identify what words wound, how are we to proceed?
If a narrow injurious speech, akin to hate speech, is suggestive of the wounding force of words, a broad definition would suggest the wounding force of language itself. Inspired by the Lacanian theory of language, Butler’s broader, and ostensibly stronger thesis is in the suggestion that we are born into language. As stated earlier, when a speaker utilises hate speech, they are performing a repetition of speech that pre-dates the utterance. But Butler would expand upon this idea, stating that the speaker is also “formed in the language that he or she uses.”[9] Butler claims, as essentially linguistic beings, our access to the world, as well as ourselves, and our ‘identities’ becomes dependent upon us being born into a system of language that may not ever encapsulate our experience, and furthermore, that there exists no understanding of ‘I’ outside of language. Butler would suggest that positioned as a subject in the subject/predicate conventional structure of linguistics, we internalise the otherness of language, including the socially constructed conventions carried with it. In fact, this process, so called interpellation, is where Butler inspiration from Althussian theory enters. Stating in regard to interpellation, that it “is an address that regularly misses its mark”[10] and further that the “possibility of the subject’s autogenesis”[11] is erased by such an impure system, Butler claims “an injury is performed by the very act of interpellation.”[12] In other words, one is injured by being positioned within an incomplete language as a subject, forced to recognise themselves in subjection. Hence, not only can words, in a narrow instance, injure aspects of our Self, but language itself is an injury to the autogenesis of identity.
Yet, if speaker and subject alike are similarly born into a system yielding injurious speech, how are we to ever combat such a phenomena? Especially when considering narrow instances of hate speech, this question becomes extremely pertinent. Whilst a convert to the aforementioned descriptive thesis of injurious speech, I find myself quite critical of Butler’s positive normative thesis of excitable agency. Borrowing terminology from the legal realm in which “'excitable' utterances are those made under duress,”[13] Butler suggests that in speech we are always under ‘force’. Considering we are born into a system of language and meaning, without self-creation, we are continuously struggling with the relationship between the Self and the Other. This much I tend to agree with. However, Butler would suggest, that considering such, we ought to afford speakers in speech acts an excitable agency, an affordance that they, themselves are born into convention, and may as such be ignorant to the norms and injury carried with the speech act. As such, culpability of injurious speech, according to Butler is not in the content of the speech act but “for the manner in which such speech is repeated, for reinvigorating such speech, for re-establishing contexts of hate and injury.”[14] In returning to my earlier suggestion that injurious speech must be broadly defined in order to grasp Butler’s hypothesis, ‘hate speech is in every instance infelicitous,’ we are now able to see the speaker, responsible for the repetition and reestablishment of the racial slur, and not the racial slur itself, in uttering such even outside of earshot of a concerned subject, still acts infelicitously.
Surely however, we are unable to combat the broad understanding of injurious speech. Afterall, Butler herself resigns that we are fundamentally interpellation beings; it is our very nature. Language based upon a grammatical structure of subject/predicate is surely bound to injure in virtue of maintain such composition. As such, a reversal of ‘injury’ potentially is only possible at the level of narrow definition, in words that wound. Therefore, the question becomes, how are we to combat hate speech?
In answering this question, I believe Butler’s theory becomes open to objection. According to Butler, the interlocutor as being addressed as a subject is given the possibility of retort, and therefore ‘recognises’ themselves within language, even if not exactly or in toto within the speech act. Ipso facto, the subject then becomes agent. Butler states, “I propose that agency begins where sovereignty wanes.”[15] If my understanding is correct, such a statement suggests we are able to conjure agency through an erasure of the sovereign subject. To utilise an example within Butler’s writing, there is no ‘gendered being’ that exists behind the culturally constructed expression of gender. And, it is in this acknowledgement that we are able to apparently find agency.
In this process, language becomes a living thing, constantly reaching towards fully explaining the ineffable. Whilst this may descriptively account for how language works, surely Butler does not advocate for a theory of language that autocorrects mistakes through injurious instances of hate speech, or, a guess-and-check approach? Potentially this would not be a very favourable account of Butler. She herself may rather just suggest that as we progress farther away from our Cartesian dualistic heritage, and subjects are able to recognise themselves within a larger spectrum of terminology, words may have higher potential to be “recontextualised in more affirmative modes.”[16] However, this ‘recontextualisation’ is surely dependent upon the subject of the speech act, and for that matter, dependent upon the ability of that subject to ‘talk-back’ to the speaker. Considering we noted earlier Butler claims within every instance of hate speech the subject is positioned as subordinate, the question for Butler becomes, how can one talk back to Power?
I have two major (and, interrelated) issues with Butler’s normative hypothesis that a ‘talking-back’ and “recontextualised in more affirmative modes.”[17] ought to be the answer in combatting hate speech. Firstly, this suggestion insinuates the onus is upon those injured by injurious speech to progress our social conventions of identity and language. Secondly, it assumes that the interlocutor, (once subject, now agent) has the societal power to talk back. On this issue, I believe Butler is a bit confused. She states that it is necessary to “speak in ways that have never been legitimated” and further that “hate speech does not destroy the agency required for a critical response.”[18] However, these statements seem to run counter to one another. How is it that a subject, subordinated to hate speech, and what Butler calls a redoubling[19] of injury and trauma, is ever able to establish a confidence and assertiveness to ‘talk back?’ Furthermore, how would it ever be possible for them to speak in ways never legitimated before? On this point, Miranda Fricker, a more recent feminist scholar tends to agree with me. She would suggest that the subject in subordination experiences a marginalisation in society, and a hermeneutical injustice, an inability and prevention from creating the concepts and terms within cultural normativity, in virtue of exclusion from a ‘majority.’[20] Whether it is a matter of if the subject has the ability to create conceptual linguistic resources themselves or just lack “the power to introduce these meanings into the collective understanding”[21] is still debated. If for the sake of argument, we assume a subject can overcome such obstacles and recontextualise hate speech in new legitimate ways, we must also note that this re-establishment is also done by an agent constituted in language and convention. Surely, this term also is liable to be injurious in the future?
In conclusion, by delineating between narrow and broad definitions of injurious speech evident in the work of Butler, I have displayed how not only do words wound, but so too, does language itself. Yet, I remain unconvinced that any sort of agency afforded to the subject subjected within hate speech would be able to speak back to such power. By referencing the work of more recent scholars, such as Fricker and Mason, and the notion of hermeneutical injustice, the Butlerian method on injury-combat seems to never truly resolve the issue, creating instead, latent injury to future subjects.
[1] Judith Butler, "On Linguistic Vulnerability," In Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2.
[2] Ibid., 5.
[3] Ibid., 11.
[4] Ibid., 13-15, 39.
[5] Ibid., 14.
[6] Ibid., 11.
[7] Ibid., 18.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., 33.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., 27.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 15.
[14] Ibid., 19, 39.
[15] Ibid., 16.
[16] Ibid., 15.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ibid., 41.
[19] The trauma from the act alone as well as the past historicity of acts.
[20] See: Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
[21] Rebecca Mason, “Two Kinds of Unknowing,” Hypatia, 26, no. 2 (2011): 294–307; Jennifer Saul and Esa Diaz-Leon, "Feminist Philosophy of Language", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), eds. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/feminism-language/.