Culture, Theory and Critique, 2012, 53(1), 83 98

The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity

Andrew Munro

Abstract In this paper, I examine the politics of performativity that Judith

Butler develops in Excitable Speech. In particular, I assess the usefulness of
Butlers talk of performativity for describing discursive events involving victi-
mised subjects. I propose that performativitys descriptive purchase is best
gauged by foregrounding its presuppositions, and that these last include a Peir-
cean conception of semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre.

I
In Excitable Speech (1997; hereafter ES), Judith Butler objects to how assaultive
speech is said to produce particular victimising effects. The elaboration of this
objection comprises her politics of performativity. Plainly, Butlers interest in
the abjecting consequences attributed to certain types of utterances fits with
her theorising of subject-formation for progressive political ends. So how
useful is this talk of performativity for describing discursive events involving
victimised subjects? How adequately does performativity account for events
of subversive speech?
These questions evidently concern Butler in ES: in chapter 4, for instance,
she concludes that we have yet to arrive at an account of the social iterability
of the utterance (1997: 150).1 In effect, to ask for such an account is to ask after
the descriptive purchase of performativity. In what follows, I show that this
purchase is best assessed by foregrounding the presuppositions of Butlers
account of performativity. I argue that in addition to her borrowings from
the philosophy of language, these presuppositions include something like a
Peircean conception of semiosis and a rhetorical postulate of genre.
Briefly, for Charles S. Peirce, semiosis is a dynamic, purposive process
whereby a sign, or representamen, represents an object to another sign, or
interpretant. This mediating, translative process is infinitely regressive and
progressive: the interpretant is in turn a sign, just as the represented object is

1
Butlers conclusion follows her critique of Bourdieu and Derrida. She argues that
Bourdieus discrete division of the linguistic and the social ignores the transformative
potential of performativity, and that a Derridean fixation on the graphematic structure
of the sign also fails to effect any real social analysis of forceful utterance. See also
Butler (2000b).

Culture, Theory and Critique

ISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis
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84 Andrew Munro

itself always already a representamen. A sign is thus something that addresses

someone: it stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity
(Peirce 193158: 2.228). However, in order to describe real chains of inter-
pretants in order adequately to account for discursive events these
semiotic descriptors require some rhetorical supplements. We must attend to
interpretants in relation to interpreters, and to situate these last, we need a
sense of rhetorical situation and a rhetorical postulate of genre. As a set of
differentiated, recurrent forms of practice with their own speaking positions
and objects of representation or inquiry, genres comprise provisional frames
for semiotic practices (Freadman 2002a: 394). I argue below that these
pre suppositions subtend Butlers politics of performativity, and that their
foregrounding will help us to gauge performativitys descriptive reach.

II
Butler maintains in ES that certain accounts of hate speech construe the
addressee as invariably silenced by the subjectivating and subjugating effects
of injurious speech. Where her earlier interventions theorise the subject as par-
tially installed by the repetitive workings of the discourses and institutions of
white heteronormativity, ES critiques the attribution to injurious speech of the
power to constitute subjects as unequivocally subordinated. In both her decen-
trings of gender and sex identities and her interventions in hate speech
debates, Butler locates the political potential of performative agency in the
tenuousness (1999b: 164) of discursive subject-formation, in the fact that
the dissimulated, repetitive subject-forming work of discursive interpellation
is always incomplete (1993a: 231, 1997: 143, 139). Interestingly, Butlers the-
orising of victimisation largely eschews the term victim and its cognates,
perhaps to avoid a type of sovereign humanist talk. However, although non-
sovereign, the speaking subjects of performative politics are importantly pur-
posive and desiring, as I argue below.
Butler repeatedly cautions against reducing performativity to perform-
ance. Countering overly voluntaristic readings of performativity in relation
to gender and sex identities, she notes that performance presumes a subject,
whereas performativity contests the very notion of this last (1994: 33). Perfor-
mative repetition implies that performance is not a singular act or event,
but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint
(1993a: 95). The sense in which there is no power, construed as a subject, that
acts, but only a reiterated acting that is power in its persistence and instability
(225) is maintained and problematised in ES. Therein, performativity comprises
a renewable action without origin or end (1997: 40), speech is construed as
finally constrained by neither its specific speaker nor its originating context
(40) and linguistic agency is identified as the locus of counter-speech (15).
But what does talk of the emergence of linguistic agency from a scene of
enabling vulnerability (2) presume? Is this field exhaustively described as
linguistic (16)? Elsewhere, Butler concedes that notions of performance, the
performative and performativity are chiasmically related (1999a: xxv). As I
will show, to understand this relation is to read performativity for its presuppo-
sitions: it is to attend to interpretants in relation to interpreters, and to situate
these last in respect of rhetorical situations and genres.
 The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity 85

Butler questions whether the performativity deployed in her decentrings of

gender and sex identities is equivalent to that used in her politics of performativ-
ity. Are these two different senses of performativity, she asks, or do they con-
verge as modes of citationality in which the compulsory character of certain social
imperatives becomes subject to a more promising deregulation? (1993a: 231).
Reading these senses as token instances from which to derive the type of perfor-
mativity, we would expect performativity in Butlers discussions of gender nor-
mativity to differ locally from, but relate substantively to its workings in her
discussions of injurious speech. Certainly, both Butlers earlier work and ES
locate contestatory possibilities for nonsovereign subjects in the very structures
of normative citation by means of which these subjects are partially formed. In
Bodies that Matter, the repetition of gender norms both stabilises gender effects
and constitutes the occasion for a critical reworking (1993a: x) of these last; in
ES, while subjects are partially constituted by reiterated interpellation, the struc-
tural vulnerability of this last enables a contestatory linguistic agency.
But can performative conceptions of a signs historicity, of discursive tem-
porality and of postsovereign subjectivity adequately account for events of
discursive linking? In Peircean terms, how does Butlers inquiry situate
interpreters in relation to interpretants, sign-users in relation to signs? Who
is the we whom Butler exhorts to practice a politics of performativity, and
how useful is the alternative notion of agency and, ultimately, of responsibil-
ity (1997: 15) derived from Butlers performative framing of speech as a doing
of things with words?
Butlers use of certain kinds of utterances (1997: 26) to refer to injurious
speech, invites us to construe the latter in terms of Peirces type/token distinction.
Where a type is a sign in posse, a token is a sign in actu, a single event significant
only as occurring just when and where it does (Peirce 193158: 4.537). A Token,
continues Peirce, is a sign of the Type (4.537). As Anne Freadman argues, to con-
strue a token as a sign of a type is to take tokens as interpreting or translating a type
(2004: 15159). This latter is thus an ideal object, the outcome of a translation that
yields types by abstraction from a series of particular occurrences (15758).
Since these occurrences share some formal properties but differ in their local par-
ticularities, the type/token distinction forces a pragmatic attention to rhetorical
conditions and situational specificities: a sign is subject to semiosic change as a
direct implication of its use on occasion (Freadman 2004: 154). Tokens are thus
contingent, and contingently motivated, translations of types.
Subtending Butlers study of hate speech is the question of how utterance
tokens might disturb the functioning of utterance types. Her answer to this ques-
tion is her politics of performativity: reiterations, after all, are never simply repli-
cas of the same (1993a: 226). But to what extent can performativity account for
cooptive discursive events? What are the rhetorical conditions of intelligibility
for the reverse citation of hate speech against itself (Butler 1997: 37)? For
Jacques Derrida, the logic of iterability demands an attention to how the
same is altered in the singularity of the event (1988: 119). Hence the need for
a pragrammatological analysis, which should always take the situation of
the marks into account; in particular that of utterances, the place of senders
and addressees, of framing and of the sociohistorical circumscription, and so
forth (Derrida 1984: 27). Pragrammatologically, injurious speech assumes its
specific proportion not only in time (Butler 1997: 2), but also in place.
86 Andrew Munro

To examine how utterance tokens relate to utterance types is to note how

particular utterances determine particular linkings on particular occasions.
The description of such occasions presupposes not only the precondition of
iterability, but also an attention to individual interpreters in relation to their
interpretants and a rhetorical postulate of typified social action (Miller 1994)
or genre. While an attention to interpreters considers their present purposes
and histories as embodied and embedded agents-in-the-world (Colapietro
1990, 1992), the concerns of genre range from taxic and thematic constraints
on topics to the positions and status of participants, protocols of engagement
and modes of address.

III
Butler concedes that her use of John L. Austin is not a loyal one (1999b:
164). Hers is not so much a disloyal use, however, as one that reads the illo-
cution/perlocution binary rhetorically. Butlers overarching rhetorical and
political concerns conflate speech acts with speech actions: uptake is read
in terms of perlocution, and Austin and John R. Searles communicative
conception of illocution is elided.2 For Butler, illocutionary acts are invested
with a perlocutionary pretension: they are characterised as acts that in
saying do what they say, and do it in the moment of that saying (1997: 3).
Concomitant with her inflection of illocution to denote a fantasy of unme-
diated, efficacious sovereign speech is Butlers use of perlocution. Perlocu-
tionary acts, she notes, are those utterances that initiate a set of
consequences [. . .] but the saying and the consequences produced are tem-
porally distinct (17). Perlocution is thus characterised in terms of an intro-
duction of temporality (the gap that separates the speech act from its
future effects 15), the non-identity of sign and interpretant (the perlocution-
ary [act] merely leads to certain effects that are not the same as the speech act
itself 3), and semiosic indeterminacy (assaultive speech works its injurious
effect only to the extent that it produces a set of non-necessary effects 39).
This counterposing of perlocution to illocution underpins Butlers politics
of performativity.
Despite stressing performativitys political potential, however, ES tends
not to get down to cases. Given our concern with performativitys descriptive
purchase, I examine below two descriptions that Butler does provide of real
performative practice. In the first, in which a victimising action is countered
discursively, Butler recalls her own practice of a performative politics
(2000a); in the second, in which a speech/conduct distinction is used to victi-
mising effect, she reads the performative practices of the Justices of the United
States Supreme Court in the R.A.V. v. St. Paul cross-burning case.3

2
Unlike Austin, Butler associates the felicitous performative with perlocutionary
effects (1997: 16 17), construes the problem of uptake as being one of perlocution-
ary performatives (113), and uses the term speech acts capaciously to describe the
graphic self-representation, explicit self-declaration, and explicit sexual education
of lesbian and gay politics (22).
3
R.A.V. v. St. Paul, 112 S. Ct. 2538, 120 L. Ed. 2d 305 (1992). For case summaries, see
Butler (1997: 52 53); Matsuda and Lawrence III (1993); Smith (2001).
 The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity 87

Butler offers the following anecdote to illustrate the rhetorical work

(2000a: 75960) of iterability theorised in ES. Turning on the use, ownership
and function of the term lesbian, this account raises questions about the
exemplarity of the example, about the we whom Butler exhorts to practice
a politics of performativity, and about the stress on speech acts open tempor-
ality (1997: 15) in descriptions of individuated discursive events. Butler recalls
walking on a street in Berkeley once when:

some kid leaned out of a window and asked, Are you a lesbian? Just
like that. I replied, Yes, I am a lesbian. I returned it in the affirmative.
It was a completely impulsive moment. It was an interpellation from
nowhere. Of course, what such a questioner is really asking is, Are
you this thing that I fear and loathe? Do you dare to say yes to this
thing that you apparently are, at least on the basis of what you look
like? And I have power over you to the extent that I am now
seeking to expose you through the question I pose to you. To the
extent that I was able very quickly to turn around and say, Yes, I
am a lesbian, the power of my interrogator was lost. My questioner
was then left in a kind of shock, having heard somebody gamely,
proudly take on the term somebody who spends most of her life
deconstructing the term in other contexts. It was a very powerful
thing to do. It wasnt that I authored the term: I received the term
and gave it back; I replayed it, reiterated it. Whose speech act was
that? Is it my speech act? Is it the other persons speech act? Did I
recite the other persons speech act in my own? Did I extend it?
Were we in an odd moment of community at that moment kind
of remaking language together? Its as if my interrogator were
saying, Hey, what do we do with the word lesbian? Shall we still
use it? And I said, Yeah, lets use it this way! Or its as if the inter-
rogator hanging out the window were saying, Hey, do you think
the word lesbian can only be used in a derogatory way on the
street? And I said, No, it can be claimed on the street! Come join
me! We were having a negotiation. And what have I given back to
that person? Well, I dont know. Will this person make the same
interrogation again? Maybe my questioner really wanted to know:
Hey, are you a lesbian? Will this person claim or not claim? That
was the question being posed to me: Are you gonna claim or are
you not gonna claim. Im gonna claim. Oh, youre gonna claim. It
can be claimed? Yeah, it can be claimed! Oh, look, it can be
claimed! It could be that this person then notes that this is not
going to work anymore. Or that it is possible to claim. Who knows,
maybe that person is claiming. Maybe that person needed a little
help to claim. We dont know. But its an interesting moment
because it brings into relief something about how the question will
function. Will this word serve injury, or will it serve another
purpose? There is a certain challenge that is delivered with something
like hate speech. Are you a lesbian? Is that hate speech? I dont
know. I think in fact that my interrogator was actually asking me
whether it was hate speech: Is this hate speech that I am delivering
88 Andrew Munro

to you right now? No, it doesnt have to be hate speech. So, when
were thinking about how iterability does its rhetorical work, we
probably make a mistake when we think that its the word that
causes the injury, when actually there is always a question of what
purpose that word will serve. We can re-link it to injury, we can de-
link it, we can try to interrogate how it is linked and de-linked, but
the whole purpose of reiterating injurious language is to show that
the relationship of the word itself to the injury that it performs is
finally arbitrary. (2000a: 75961)

Will this word serve injury, or will it serve another purpose? The issue of how a sign
functions is the semiotic question of second intentionality, where second inten-
tions are the objects of the understanding considered as representations, and
the first intentions to which they apply are the objects of those representations
(Peirce 193158: 1.559). What is the kids lesbian interrogation to represent?
As a reiterated token sign, Butlers reply takes a different object, thereby aspir-
ing to disturb the functioning of the type. This transformation is enabled and
constrained by both a performative temporality and the occasion of the discur-
sive event. Butlers radical act of public misappropriation (1997: 100) must
thus be read for its situational particularities. Such a reading finds the
option of cooption to be neither always nor equally available.
Are you a lesbian? Is that hate speech? Butler hears the kids interrogative as
an abjecting interpellation. Hence her reply, aimed at refuting the homopho-
bic deployment (1993a: 229) of the term lesbian. In Peircean terms, the kids
question represents its object (a vilifying, silencing intent) to a further sign
(Butlers interpretant response). In representing the kids question, however,
Butlers response creates this last as a different object (a remaking of language,
an invitation to talk). Appeals to the open temporality of performativity or to
the non-identity of the semiosic relata of sign, object, and interpretant alone
cannot account for this rerouting. To describe such contestatory linking is to
mobilise a postulate of genre and a conception of discursive semiosis as pur-
posive activity: with Butlers reply, a citational chain is rerouted, translated
from a genre of invective to one of dialogue. These rhetorical presuppositions
subtend Butlers performative politics, and their foregrounding enables a
better account of insurrectionary speech. To demonstrate this, I invoke Jean-
Francois Lyotards (1988) concept of the differend. But an excursus is in order
here: Lyotards useful notion is not unproblematic. To explain its bearing on
performativity, I temper the differend below with Wittgensteinian and Bakhti-
nian notions of semiosic activity.

IV
Lyotard classifies utterances in terms of a typology of phrase regimens cog-
nitive, descriptive, evaluative, and so forth. Utterances are always already
responsive, such that no utterance or phrase is the first phrase. Discursive con-
catenation or linking is necessary, but any particular linkage is not. What
inspire (1988: 128) particular modes of linking, however, are genres of dis-
course. These last are supraphrastic entities possessed of purposes and
ends. In Lyotardian terms, Butlers performative uptake is describable thus:
 The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity 89

the kids interpellative phrase is put into play within a conflict between genres
of discourse (136) between, say, the genre of invective and that of dialogue
where this putting into play is effected by Butlers affirmative response. The
kids phrase meets with an impertinent reply: some damage is inflicted,
perhaps, on the first phrase by the second (29).4 Butlers response comprises
a linking which attempts to inscribe the kids utterance in the pursuit of
another finality (29) in a different genre of discourse.
However, Lyotards antivoluntarist commitments mar the adequacy of
this account. Where Butler attributes to interlocutors a sense of intention,
albeit one which does not govern the entire scene and system of utterance
(Derrida in Butler 1997: 51), Lyotard locates purposivity solely in genres of
discourse:

Our intentions are tensions (to link in a certain way) exerted by

genres upon the addressors and addressees of phrases, upon their
referents, and upon their senses. We believe that we want to persuade,
to seduce, to convince, to be upright, to cause to believe, or to cause to
question, but this is because a genre of discourse, whether dialectical,
erotic, didactic, ethical, rhetorical, or ironic, imposes its mode of
linking onto our phrase and onto us. (1998: 136)

The incommensurability of genres of discourse enables the differend, which

arises when a phrastic linking is determined by a particular genre, such that
other potential linkings are repressed. Together, Lyotards antivoluntarist pos-
tulate of subjectivity and his construal of genres of discourse as untranslatable
frame utterances as unowned (1988: 11, 8182), reducing the utterer to per-
forming phrases whose concatenation is determined by a genre of discourse
of which she is an epiphenomenal effect. The differends descriptive utility is
enhanced, however, by considering utterers not as mere relays deprived of
all autonomy, but rather as purposive, intergenerically subsisting subjects
whose ends need not be commensurate with those of the genres in which
they find themselves. This emendation is consonant with Lyotards point of
departure, the later Ludwig Wittgensteins figure of language-games (2001:
7, 11, 33, 67, 75). Like genres, language-games exist on different levels of
abstraction and are of different degrees of complexity. Developing and disin-
tegrating, their rules can be made up or altered as play and players go along
(Wittgenstein 2001: 33). On occasion, players choose to play games other than
those in which they are ostensibly involved (Wittgenstein 1967: 59), just as they
choose to play these games well or to play them poorly (Wittgenstein 1965: 5).
Lyotards antihumanist agenda determines his ultimate rejection of Witt-
gensteinian language-games (Lyotard 1988: xiii, 55, 130, 13638). We can mark
this distance contrastively by noting Wittgensteins proximity to Mikhail
M. Bakhtin. While Lyotard relates phrase regimens to genres of discourse,

4
Damages sort with the plaintiff, whereas a wrong constitutes the victim: It
is in the nature of a victim not to be able to prove that one has been done a wrong. A
plaintiff is someone who has incurred damages and who disposes of the means to
prove it. One becomes a victim if one loses those means (Lyotard 1988: 8).
90 Andrew Munro

Bakhtins (1986) embedding of speech genres in spheres of communication or

human activity resonates strongest with Wittgensteins praxeological framing
of language-games as immanent to forms of life. Speech genres and language-
games are responsive to, implicated in, and reflective of changes in social
activity.
Restricting purposivity to genres of discourse precludes thinking discur-
sive interpretants in relation to situated and situating interpreters. Signs exist,
however, in relation to possible goals attributable to interpreters (Short 1981:
221, 1986: 106, 2007: 171). These goals are inferred in relation to, and inflected
by, their interpreters situations: their apperceptive backgrounds (Bakhtin
1986: 9598), desires, and experiential histories. Butlers rerouting thus
attempts to adapt the term lesbian to the accomplishment of a different
purpose: an original utterance is taken up in relation to protocols, practices
and ends other than those in respect to which it was intended to be read.
Put otherwise, the term is queered, deployed in a genre different from that
in which it had previously played, turned against its constitutive historicity
(Butler 1993a: 227). Events of discursive cooption are thus events of generic
translation, in which an utterance comes to function in contexts where it
has not belonged (Butler 1997: 161).
For Bakhtin, not only is a speakers utterance related to preceding links in
the chain of speech communion (1986: 94); it also elicits an interpretant, an
active responsive understanding (6869, 9697) from its addressee or addres-
sees. Indeed, from the very beginning, the utterance is constructed while taking
into account possible responsive reactions, for whose sake, in essence, it is actu-
ally created (94). Bakhtin associates this eliciting with the speakers rhetorical
purposefulness, her speech plan or speech will (69, 7678), which is manifested
in a constrained choice of speech genres.
Bakhtin helps us to frame Butlers reflections on the ownership of utter-
ances. Whose speech act was it? It wasnt, notes Butler, that I authored the
term: I received the term and gave it back [. . .] Is it my speech act? Is it the
other persons speech act? Did I recite the other persons speech act in my
own? Did I extend it? (2000a: 760). Butler is not questioning the phenomeno-
logical isolability of utterance acts. After all, she talks of [her] own and the other
persons speech acts in line with Bakhtins criterion: as a unit of speech com-
munication, the utterance is formally delimited by a change of speaking sub-
jects (1986: 7176). Rather, Butler interrogates the authorship and ownership
of a derogating utterance and its insurrectionary return, wherein an injurious
sign is given back to counter its abjecting legacies of usage (1997: 27). The
signs conflicted historicity is what Bakhtin calls the dialogic character of dis-
course: [e]ach word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its
socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions (1981:
293). Within these terms, insurrectionary speech is a revaluating utterance
action that is both situated and individually owned. The word, notes
Bakhtin, becomes ones own only when the speaker populates it with his
own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it
to his own semantic and expressive intention (293).
Ownership here pertains to a speakers responsibility for trying to secure
a determinate uptake. Just as Butler is responsible for the effects, that might
conceivably have practical bearings (Peirce 1931 58: 5.402) of her
 The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity 91

reappropriative response (the disempowering of the kid qua hate speaker, the
mutual remaking of language, the kids learning to claim), so too is the kid
responsible for intending to determine a subordinated subject. In both cases,
responsibility is linked with speech as repetition (Butler 1997: 39): by reiter-
ating the term, the kid becomes a joint tortfeasor (Delgado 1993: 105) in a
history of derogation through assaultive speech. By repeating the term affir-
matively, Butler would turn it against its constitutive history (Butler 1993a:
227). However, not all words for just anyone submit equally easily
(Bakhtin 1981: 294) to revaluation: the power of redirection is neither always
nor equally available, and the expropriation of language a difficult and com-
plicated process (294).
Has Butlers appropriation depleted the term lesbian of its degra-
dation? She suspends the question of the kids response, mentioning only
an emotional interpretant: her questioner was left in a kind of shock
(2000a: 769). Several responses are envisaged, however, suggesting that it is
possible retrospectively to determine that, on certain occasions, subversion
occurs. Were we apprised of the kids uptake, we could talk of a citational
chain as rerouted on this occasion (or not), translated on this occasion from a
genre of invective to one of dialogue (or not). Empirical tales could be told
of the kids desisting from hate speaking (or not), of language being mutually
remade (or not), of the kids starting to claim (or not). Responses are proximal
effects, constituents of discursive events that have as a precondition a postu-
late of performativity.

V
Like semiosis, whose infinite nature is assured by the signs mediating func-
tion (Freadman 2004: 171214), discursive performativity is a ritual chain of
resignifications whose origin and end remain unfixed and unfixable (Butler
1997: 14). Against this open temporality, however, singular performances
discrete performative events are discerned. A flux of continuous doing
simply comprises the background against which periodic deeds or bounded
acts become legible: signs are signs in relation to their interpretants, in time
and in contexts (Peirce 193158: 2.308, 5.569). The refusal to attribute injurious
speech to a singular subject and act (Butler 1997: 50) thus dispenses with
neither the notion of utterance ownership nor that of discursive responsibility:
efforts to make linguistic community with a history of [hate] speakers (52)
and to untether assaultive terms from their derogating histories alike are indi-
viduated attempts predicated of particular speakers, whose performative
responsibilities arise on particular occasions, as constituents of discernible rhe-
torical events. The potentially infinite revision (148) to which contexts are
subject thus does not entail any contextual illimitability. Rather, it implies
that descriptions are contested, contestatory activities. Faced with the neces-
sity and impossibility of describing particular utterances as singular events,
an account of the social iterability of the utterance assumes the politico-herme-
neutic responsibilities that the partisan, rhetorical work of representation
entrains. Like the discursive events it describes, such an account structures
its response toward future uptakes, contributing thereby to the continued
and contested practice of a politics of performativity.
92 Andrew Munro

Are you a lesbian? Is that hate speech? Butler variously attributes to her inter-
locutor a figure of abjection (this thing I fear and loathe), a query about second
intentions (what do we do with the word lesbian?) and a coming out ([m]aybe
that person needed a little help to claim) (2000a: 760). She is unequivocal,
however, about not translating this talk to a juridical domain to the genre of
the tribunal on the grounds that to litigate in such contexts is unduly to
empower the state (1997: 2224, 4647, 77, 96, 101). Hence her anecdote,
intended to demonstrate the finally arbitrary nature of the relationship of
the injurious word to injury (2000a: 761). This arbitrariness, however,
merits scrutiny: some terms are more susceptible of affirmative resignification
by some speakers at some times than others. This becomes apparent when
descriptions of performative practices sort the historicities of signs with those
of their users, constrained and enabled by their rhetorical situations, generic
locations, desires and histories. Our purposes are not isomorphic with those
of our genres: subjects exist, and responsibilities emerge, intra- and interge-
nerically, in generic translations reappropriative work.
Are you a lesbian? If the kids speech plan is unclear, the perlocutionary
effects of this utterance are less so: Butler responds affirmatively, reclaiming
the term. But beyond performativity, what are the rhetorical conditions of
possibility of Butlers uptake? In an echo of Louis Althussers (1971: 174)
scene, Butler is hailed on the street. Her particular circumstances, however,
bear recalling. Butler is on familiar ground, in Berkeley, the interpellation is
an interrogative, and it is issued not by a policemans voice, but rather by
some kid (Butler 2000a: 759). The scene is a fluid, underdetermined public
space, and the interpellator distanced, hanging out the window (760).
Although coming from nowhere, this interpellation does not instantaneously
injure, since Butler very quickly turns around (760) to reappropriate the term.
Whence Butlers facility for subversively intervening in the history of an
abjecting term? On this occasion, her reply is facilitated by the interactions
structure of address: she is asked a question by a nondescript kid. Although
some speech is unconducive to dialogue (Brison 1998; Lawrence III 1993:
68), this interpellation formally invites more speech. Butler suggests the inter-
action comprises a negotiation (2000a: 760), a conversation about second
intentions, perhaps an effort to come to terms (1997: 88). Moreover, her hor-
tatory talk (Yeah, lets use it this way! [. . .] Come join me! [2000a: 760]) indi-
cates that Butlers authority as speaker is undiminished. Although all subjects
exceed the interpellation by which they are animated (Butler 1997: 34), this is
particularly so here: Butler is far from instituted by this lesbian interpellation,
being rather inured to derogating speech. Knowing what it is to live in the
social world as what is impossible, illegible [. . .] and illegitimate (1999a:
viii), Butler well understands what Ian Hacking calls the rebellions of the
sorted (1999: 131). Having been the object of abjection, Butler has personally
participated in communities of resistance (Butler 1990: xvi xvii, xixxx)5

5
Pace McNay (1999); Schwartzman (2002); Smith (2001), Butler appreciates the
manifold sociodiscursive matrices enabling and constraining possibilities for action
in determinate contexts; this is demonstrated by my foregrounding of the presupposi-
tions of performativity.
 The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity 93

and spends most of her life deconstructing terms such as lesbian in aca-
demic contexts (2000a: 760). While these considerations do not render Butler
linguistically invulnerable (to gamely, proudly take on the term remains a
very powerful thing to do [760]), they do contribute to her not suffering a
radical loss of context (1997: 4). Performativity thus comprises a labor of
self-definition (163) in incommensurable ways for Butler and the kid, given
their divergent apperceptive backgrounds and experiential histories. To
describe when and how particular terms become subject to resignification
(Butler 1993a: 223), is thus thickly to describe particular rhetorical events: an
attention to performativity, purposive interpreters and a postulate of genre,
helps us to explain how some signs are more susceptible of progressive
resignification by some agents at some times than others.

VI
Different reroutings, interpretive dispositions and victimisations are pre-
sented in Butlers reading of R.A.V. v. St. Paul, in which a white teenager
was charged under the St. Paul City Council Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance
after burning a cross in a black familys yard. Dismissed by the lower court, the
charge was reinstated by the State of Minnesota Supreme Court. However, the
US Supreme Court subsequently struck down the Minnesota ordinance as
unconstitutional, in the process restricting the scope of application of the doc-
trine of fighting words.6 In this case, a petitioners appeal is upheld: an invo-
cation of the First Amendment free speech clause renders inadmissible a tale
of race-based hate.
This cross-burning case creates multiple victims. In the first instance, a
white teenager burns a cross in the predawn hours of 21 June 1990 in the
fenced front yard of Laura and Russ Jones and their five children. The only
African American family on the block, the Joneses are interpellated by an
index directing their attention to a history of abuse. Given its activation of
the historically established relation between cross-burning and torchings
of both persons and properties (Butler 1997: 57), given the natures and pos-
itions of its addressor and addressees, this cross-burning is compulsively
received as a threat. Whether an incipient moment of injurious action or a
statement of an intention to injure (57), it is not available to the Joneses, as
it subsequently is to the Supreme Court Justices, to be read as the expression
of a viewpoint (57) inviting debate.
In the second instance of victimisation, this initial wrong is litigated,
translated to the genre of the tribunal. Here, the family is further victimised:
deprived of the means by which to prove that it has been wronged, its story
goes unheard. Butler focuses on this unattested wrong, examining what pre-
vents a subjects claim of having been injured (59) from being heard. Once
constituted as a legal case, the cross-burnings purpose is reconstrued: to the
Supreme Court bench, it counts not as a wrong, but as the free expression

6
Developed in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568, 572 (1942), the fight-
ing words doctrine is used to construe particular instances of speech as action, thereby
exempting such speech from constitutional protection.
94 Andrew Munro

of a viewpoint within the marketplace of ideas (54). The story of how this
cross-burning takes a different object is the story of the juridical silencing of
the Joneses. To tell this tale, Butler reads the Supreme Court decision rhetori-
cally, focussing on the occasion of the judicial finding, its timing and
constituents.
Butlers reading implies that in this case, performativity is constrained
and a differend occasioned by generic translation, and that this translation is
a function of the situated and situating action of purposive interpreters.
Hence the question of reiterative responsibility: in this case, an institutionally
authoritative bench activates the protocols and procedures of the genre of the
tribunal conservatively. At the hands of these Justices, the modes of linking of
the juridical domain (Butler 1997: 47) are used to victimising effect: the judi-
cial opinions deploy the topos of the unregulated marketplace of ideas to
restage the cross-burning, thereby subjecting the Joneses to a differend.
Indeed, the Justices reappropriative interpretant secures further rhetorical
effects: beyond victimising this black family, the restriction of the fighting
words doctrine works to exempt from regulation future assaultive speech.
Butler charts the curtailment of fighting words by mapping the displace-
ments of the figure of fire in the judicial opinions in this case (1997: 54 59). In
so doing, she notes some of the generic devices to which the Justices have
recourse. Their appeal to the marketplace of ideas has particular decontex-
tualising consequences,7 as does Scalias remark about the reprehensibility
of burning a cross in someones front yard (in Butler 1997: 54 55). This
someone, notes Butler, strips blackness and family from the figure of the com-
plainant; it elides the dimension of social power structuring relations of
address in the speech act of cross-burning, delinking this last from its
history of racial abuse (55).
Performativity alone thus cannot describe the discursive event of
R.A.V. v. St. Paul: the formers presuppositions must be foregrounded. That
Butlers descriptive use of performativity presupposes an attention to
interpreters and genre is equally apparent in her reading of the rhetorical con-
ditions of possibility of another infamous uptake: the acquittal on most
charges of four policemen indicted for the 1991 beating of Rodney King. Not
only does Butler link this verdict and its initial interpretant effects (the Los
Angeles riots of April May 1992) to the R.A.V. v. St. Paul case; her readings
of both cases effectively ground an analysis of reiteration in an attention to
interpreters and the resources of genre. In the Rodney King case, Butler attri-
butes the acquittal to how the racially saturated ways of seeing (1993b: 15) of
the majority-white jury in the Simi Valley courtroom enabled the defence to
effect its recontextualising work. The defence counsel marshalled evidence
whose content, form and taxis were admissible within the genre of the tribu-
nal, and the jury, constrained and enabled by its paranoid ways of seeing and
by the protocols of the juridical genre, took this evidence up. Thus, George
Hollidays widely televised video was reconstrued. The policemens attor-
neys, notes Butler,

7
On this topos racist underpinnings, see Lawrence III (1993: 68, 77). On the dehis-
toricising of racist speech in American official discourse generally, see Williams (1991).
 The Descriptive Purchase of Performativity 95

broke the video down into stills, freezing the frame, so that the
gesture, the raised hand, is torn from its temporal place in the
visual narrative. The video is not only violently decontextualized,
but violently recontextualized; it is played without a simultaneous
soundtrack which, had it existed, would have been littered with
racial and sexual slurs against Rodney King. In the place of reading
that testimony alongside the video, the defense attorneys offered
the frozen frame, the magnification of the raised hand as the hyper-
bolic figure of a racial threat, interpreted again and again as a
gesture foreshadowing violence, a gesture about to be violent, the
first sign of violence, violence itself. Here the anticipatory seeing is
clearly a reading, one which reenacts the disavowal and paranoia
that enable and defend the brutality itself. (20)

Butler identifies the same interpretive dispositions at work in the

R.A.V. v. St. Paul case, in which the high Court might be understood [. . .] to
be taking its revenge on Rodney King (1997: 59). Therein, displacements of
the figure of fire read as a paranoid inversion of the original cross-burning
narrative (58). Plainly, sociodiscursive uptakes have long, ramified, intertex-
tual, and intergeneric memories (Freadman 2002b: 40). In the above cases,
certain of these memories are activated, and certain of them repressed; these
repressions occasion determinate victimising effects.
But is victimisation always already assured in juridical contexts? Does the
state inevitably misappropriate the progressive intentions of anti-hate speech
legislation, only and always resignifying its own law to extend its jurisdiction
and its discourse (Butler 1997: 101)? The sense in which juridical power inflicts
pain and enacts violence through language is structural: the genre of the tribu-
nal is so constituted that its interpretive work depends upon the social practice
of violence for its efficacy (Cover 1986: 1613). This practical dependency of the
court upon the sheriff, however, does not imply that law works univocally. The
equivocity of the utterance (Butler 1997: 87) extends to law, whose open
texture (Hart 1994) and undecidability (Derrida 1988: 148) make for contested
and contestatory applications of doctrinal tools. Butlers analyses thus concern
particular interpretations in which particular utterance actions are hung on the
speech and conduct pegs by interpreters whose purposes are constrained,
but not overdetermined, by the provisions of the First Amendment. Hence a
reactionary Supreme Court bench preserves constitutional protection in a
case of hate-speech, but withholds it where the graphic representation of sexu-
ality (Butler 1997: 39) is concerned.
A progressive use of the speech/conduct distinction would be no less of a
tactical manipulation (Butler 1997: 54) than the contradictory rhetorical
moves made by this conservative high court: the practice of law is performa-
tive and political, and its a good thing too (Fish 1994, 1997; Jenkins 2001;
Matsuda 1993; Passavant and Dean 2001). Not only is a Reagan-Bush
Supreme Court bench not an historical constant; the practices, procedures
and protocols of the genre of the tribunal accommodate opposing interpretive
dispositions and purposes. Consider the structural characteristics of the juridi-
cal domain, from the existence of appellate courts and the provision for dis-
senting opinions to the plurality of forms of law circulating within a
96 Andrew Munro

territory (Passavant and Dean 2001: 383), from the range of doctrines under
which plaintiffs may seek redress8 to the tensive relations between municipal
and international laws (Matsuda 1993: 26 34). Despite its wish for a formal
existence (Fish 1994: 152), the juridical domain cannot overdetermine the
play of performativity. What is elsewhere an illocutionary conceit does not
cease to be so in the genre of the tribunal, where the fantasy of self-present
sovereign power remains precisely that (Passavant and Dean 2001: 380).

VII
Butler does not urge that a politics of performativity completely supplant the
relentless search for legal remedy (1997: 15), conceding that there are occasions
when subjects should be prosecuted for injurious speech (50). In respect of the
cross-burning directed at the Joneses, for instance, Butler advocates that the
state intervene (2000a: 761). Here, then, in respect of this utterance uttered by
this person in this place at this time, the Joneses are perhaps not part of the we
exhorted by Butler to practice a particularly reclamative politics of performativ-
ity. Unlike the finally arbitrary relationship of word to injury in her lesbian
anecdote, Butler does not construe the massively injurious threat posed to the
Joneses as an arbitrary sign (761). However, as she shows, litigation in this
instance in fact compounded the Jones initial injury. Hence Butler frames her
performative politics in relation to the question of what to do when there are fun-
damentally conservative aims [. . .] coursing through the State (762). The big
problem, she notes, concerns what to give to the courts and what not to give
to [them] (762). This is the kairotic, translative problem of performativity:
what is to be given over to the courts, by whom, to what ends, when and
where? What is to be given over, and what withheld, to be taken up elsewhere?
Given the impossibility of not repeating, the politics of performativity concerns a
purposive choice of genre: the task is not whether to repeat, but when, where and
how [h]ow will that repetition occur, at what site, juridical or nonjuridical, and
with what pain and what promise? (Butler 1997: 102).
I take it that for Butler, these political questions are answered contin-
gently, in the retrospective description of real discursive events. To describe
such events is to inquire of their conditions of possibility, and to do this is to
account for an utterances social iterability: it is to read performativity in
relation to its rhetorical presuppositions of semiosis, occasion, interpreters
and genre.

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Andrew Munro is a Lecturer in Spanish Studies at Griffith University, Bris-

bane, Australia. His current research focuses on rhetorical genre theory and
Peircean semiotics.