Butler variously describes the process by which the subject comes into being as a matter of performative constitution or of interpellation. Whatever the differences between these conceptions of the process of
subjectivation—and it is unclear how Butler understands them to differ at all— both figure this process as primarily discursive or linguistic. In other words, the power that produces subjects is cast as a question of the efficacy of speech to call the subject into being, or alternatively, of the subject’s identification with and reiteration of the terms and names given by a discourse which both precedes and exceeds it. Hence the descriptive reference points for an explication of the productive operation of power shifts from social practices and technologies to speech and language. The medium of the production and social existence of subjects is ‘‘linguistic practice’’, where ‘‘linguistic practice’’ encompasses the activities of speaking and writing, both in their immediate forms of intersubjective address and in discourses, utterances and signs that have no obvious subjective origin.
Thus the subject is condemned to ‘‘seek recognition of its own existence . . . in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent’’.24 Hence, these social categories through which the subject comes to exist signify subordination and existence simultaneously, such that ‘‘within subjection, the price of existence is subordination’’.25 The disturbing consequence of this primary submission to power in order to exist is that the subject comes to desire the conditions of its own subordination in order to persist as a social being since one would rather exist in subordination than not exist at all (259).
Furthermore, in order to maintain one’s existence as a subject, one is forced to continually re-enact the conditions of existence given by the operation of power. This re-enactment takes the form of citationality or the continuous reiteration of the norms and conditions of power. The status of being a subject is only assured through the repetition of the conditions of power that inaugurate that status, such that these conditions themselves are re-enacted or reproduced through their continued citation (259).
Hence the performativity of sexual identity should be ‘‘understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects it names’’. Or in other words, performativity is ‘‘always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition’’. This means that the site of the subject—which Butler sees primarily as a ‘‘linguistic category, a place holder, a structure in formation’’—is not only the occasion by which the individual comes to acquire a level of social intelligibility without which they cannot survive, but is also the occasion for the reproduction of conditions of power. As Butler states ‘‘if conditions of power are to persist, they must be reiterated; the subject is precisely the site of such reiteration’’ (259).
In Excitable Speech, Butler argues that resistance is made possible by the inevitably polysemic nature of language and the inability of the speaker to irrevocably fix the meaning and efficacy of their speech acts.35 In her discussion of hate speech she claims that while language has the power to constitute subjects as certain recognizable social beings, through the interpellative effects of naming, the names one is called always carry with them a certain ‘‘vulnerability’’ to reappropriation and resignification.
The efficacy of injurious speech acts is destabilised by both the contextual dependence of the meaning of the accusatory term and the lack of power that the speaker’s intentions or original deployments have to determine the way in which the name will be heard and appropriated by those it names. For example, while the term ‘‘queer’’ may be used with an intent to injure and derogate, its reappropriation and revaluation by gays suggest that terms may be ‘‘returned’’ to
the speaker in a transmogrified form.
Thus, the term ‘‘queer’’ no longer interpellates an abject social other, but indicates a positive identification and recognition of oneself that undercuts and transforms the power relations that marginalize and derogate homosexuals. This view of reiteration as resistance is essentially the same as that offered in Bodies that Matter, although it could be
said that in some sense the political scope and field of operation of Excitable Speech is much more specifically linguistic.
Hence, while Butler explicitly calls upon Foucault’s recognition that resistance is not simply opposed to power, but instead derives from it and reinstates its conditions in the very moment of subversion, her account of resistance is limited to the linguistic field, since for her that [the linguistic field] is coextensive with the operations of power. Foucault on the other hand maintains a deliberate focus on the specificity or heterogeneity of technologies of power and thereby maintains a much wider scope for possible modes of resistance to them (261).
FOUCALUT: What is required to understand the operation of such technologies, then, is not a counter-theory of the subject, but rather, local analyses of the operation of the concrete assemblages of power. Such analyses are directed toward the fabrication of opportunities for resistance, insofar as they have as their aim the identification of points of weakness in these assemblages, and the possibilities of using force against force in order to change them.
This is perhaps one of the reasons why Foucault maintained a political interest in those modes of resistance aimed at material technologies of power such as the prison, of which he claims that ‘‘all these movements . . . have been about the body and material things . . . they were revolts, at the level of the body, against the very body of the prison. What was at issue was not whether the prison environment was too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient, but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power’’ (262-263).