Rothenberg speaks:
… speech acts exceed the intentions of the speaker because other people interpret them according to their own lights in ways that are not predictable or governable in advance (106).
Now here R. tells us that because Butler does not understand the concept of “excess” she doesn’t have in her theory of meaning, space for discussion of the social dimension. Here is how R. explains it:
In essence, by failing to recognize the true status of the “excess” in signification, Butler elides the very dimension of meaning which any theory with political ambitions must engage —the social dimension. That is, in her efforts to eliminate excess, Butler throws out any conception of the social field as a product of signification and responsiveness to the Möbius condition of the subject. In effect, she leaves herself with no theory of the social whatsoever (106).
Butler employs iterability to acknowledge the limits to intentionality, but she mislocates these limits, finding them not in the audience’s reception but rather in the body, which she misdescribes as being capable of its own sovereign speech … In this way, she can use iterability to argue for the re-appropriation of a speech act, as we have seen, in a “repetition that forces change,” as though the person appropriating the speech —thanks to iterability— has the capacity to close off her auditor’s ability to make that speech meaningful according to his own lights and as though the audience can somehow be prevented from making use of iterability …
In order for the repetition to force change, that is, in order for iterability to cease to operate, speaker and auditor must either have the same mind already, or the one must be capable of dominanting the other’s mental processes in some mysterious way. (Butler) covertly relies on this invariance between the speaker’s intentions and the audience’s construals for the performative force she needs in her account of political agency. The perfect match between intender and auditor disposes of any excess and with it the social dimension of language.