Over the years there have been many different approaches, with the most prominent being concatenation synthesis and parametric synthesis. A Text To Speech (TTS) system aims to convert natural language into speech. In most applications, text is chosen as the preliminary form because of the rapid advance of natural language systems. Military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy pathologized speech as “contagious.Speech synthesis is the task of generating speech from some other modality like text, lip movements, etc. Chapter 3 draws on Freudian views of conscience, manhood and paranoia to examine the ways that the U.S. Matsuda and Richard Delgado and of pornography by Catharine MacKinnon. Chapter 2 draws on Foucaultian power and Habermasian consensus models to examine the analyses of hate speech by Mari J. Paul, a 1992 Supreme Court case overturning a Minnesota ordinance which made it illegal to burn a cross as symbolic speech targeting minority-race individuals. Chapter 1 draws on Austin’s speech act theory to examine R.A.V. Given these difficulties, even provisional success conditions may not just be elusive and paradoxical, but might obtain rarely or perhaps not at all.īutler provides three main case studies for examining this ephemeral yet omnipresent performative speech politics. First, on what rhetorical grounds might these affirmative modes of discourse be negotiated and produced? Second, how would one be able to recognize when the resignification has been successful-that is, what is the locus of judgment for deciding under which circumstances the affirmative mode has materialized? Implicit here is the problematic of asymmetrical power relations as they impinge upon the speaker/audience relation: inequality, abjection, simple lack of ethos will influence and perhaps overdetermine a speaker’s ability to resist/renegotiate originary meaning. At least two critical questions follow from this claim. The text itself begins with the observation that “resignification” of utterances is possible-indeed, Butler emphasizes how “words might, through time, become disjoined from their power to injure and recontextualized in more affirmative modes” (15). Moreover, the efficacy of such change is tempered by hegemonic and reified language-use practices. Apparently progressive change is tempered by anxiety about current institutions-yet not without some hope for partial future success (161). Echoing Foucault and Derrida, Butler makes clear that this rearticulation of hateful and oppressive speech-“mentioning” but not “using” it-still restages such speech and so does not completely overcome its oppressive force. As a response to such oppressive speech she holds out the possibility of some non-governmental, subversive yet democratic rearticulation of discourse, such as the reappropriation of racial epithets by rapper Ice T (100). In fact, she is concerned that any such regulation would refocus state power against society’s already marginalized members, as debate over Mapplethorpe’s photography in Congress indicated (22). As a result, Butler concludes that speech is too “slippery” for any state speech-regulation to be highly effective. The auditor (who may thus become a speaker) may find a way, in part, to reevaluate and reinscribe the speech “against its originary purposes,” thereby reconfiguring the “chain of resignification whose origin and end remain unfixed and unfixable” (14). Here Butler focuses specifically on how language “interpellates” subjects in discourse, and in so doing delineates the main features of the “performativity of political discourse” (40). In this complex formation, speakers can never determine with certainty the audiences’ interpretation of the speaker’s utterance.Įxcitable Speech thus continues Judith Butler’s analyses of the ways in which subjectivity is constituted and regulated rhetorically, historically, psychologically, philosophically and politically. Speech-acts are thus constrained within and by a larger set of discursive rules or regulations, but those rules are tenuous and to some degree negotiable. The provisionality of the performative is, paradoxically, also the source of its strength, both in the domain of law and in more ordinary contexts. The speaker always-already exists within a web of historicities and discursive formations that encourage her/him to attach already-taken-for-granted meanings to words as s/he articulates them in the public sphere. The speaker cannot exercise complete control over an auditor’s interpretation, because the speaker, the auditor, the occasion for speaking and listening, and, indeed, the words themselves are sutured into larger cultural relations. Excitable Speech is a rich, provocative and challenging book which argues that linguistic meaning is fluid and provisional, not fixed or rigid.
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