Ashley 1990 Conclusion Reading Dissidence Writing the Discipline International Studies Quarterly343367-416

Conclusion: Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereigntyin International StudiesAuthor(s): Richard K. Ashley and R. B. J. WalkerSource: International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3, Special Issue: Speaking the Language ofExile: Dissidence in International Studies (Sep., 1990), pp. 367-416Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The International Studies AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2600576 .Accessed: 06/06/2011 09:03

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International Studies Quarterly (1990) 34, 367-416

CONCLUSION

Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline: Crisis and the Question of Sovereignty in

International Studies

RICHARD K. ASHLEY

Arizona State University

R. B. J. WALKER

University of Victoria

Introduction

The essays in this collection, like so many of the texts that sustain them, speak from the margins. They are instances of increasingly visible works of dissident thought proliferating in international studies today. Yet marginality and dissidence, upon being brought to the attention of a discipline, invite a tried and all-too-familiar mode of interrogation and interpretation. They invite a strategy of reading and response that would assign to these and other marginal works a location in a scholarly culture, a place and function in political life, a range of possibilities allowably explored, and a set of standards by which their merits and claims of seriousness must be proven or shown to be lacking.

This interpretive strategy deserves attention. For what is at stake is not just the way in which the discipline receives these dissident works of thought-or puts them in their place. Far beyond the matter of academic privilege, there is a question of considerable theoretical and practical import involved. It is a question that the present essays take very seriously. It is also a question that resonates in all the far reaches of global political life today, wherever and whenever time, space, and political identity are put in doubt and the territoriality of modern being is uncertain. And yet it is a question to which the discipline must turn a deaf ear-which it must presume to be already answered-so long as the interrogation of marginal and dissident events, including the present essays, is controlled by a certain strategy of reading and response. In a word, it is the question of sovereignty.

In offering an essay to close this issue, we do not try to bring the question of sovereignty to a close. We do not pretend to gather up and express an implicit consensus among contributors as to how the question of sovereignty might or should be answered. No such consensus exists. Indeed, if the present essays exhibit anything resembling agreement on the question of sovereignty, it is only that it must be regarded as just that, a question. In contrast to the vast preponderance of writings appearing in the Quarterly over the years, the essays in these pages share a suspicion

) 1990 International Studies Association

368 Reading DissidencelWriting the Discipline

of all assertions of sovereign privilege, and they assert none of their own. These essays do not presume to speak a sovereign voice, a voice beyond politics and beyond doubt, a voice of interpretation and judgment from which truth and power are thought to emanate as one. Instead, their marginality consists in their disposition to maintain their distance from all presumptively sovereign centers of interpretation and judgment. Their dissidence consists in their readiness to regard every historical figuration of sovereign presence-be it God, nature, dynasty, citizen, nation, history, modernity, the West, the market's impartial spectator, reason, science, paradigm, tradition, man of faith in the possibility of universal human community, common sense, or any other-as precisely a question, a problem, a contingent political effect whose production, variations, and possible undoing merit the most rigorous analysis.

In this concluding essay, we shall explore some of the implications of this dissident attitude, this insistence on regarding sovereignty as a question. These implications are far-reaching, connecting the immediate reality of disciplinary crisis not only to all the unsettled zones of global political life today but also to all those historical instances of cultural crisis to which the "great texts" of the discipline have replied. There is, though, another task. If we are to explore the implications of the present essays' attitudes toward the question of sovereignty, we need to address ourselves to the strategy of interpretation invited by dissident works of thought at the margins of the discipline. We need to understand how this strategy works and what it does. In particular, we need to understand that it labors to produce a silence on the question of sovereignty-a silence that always marks the time and place that sovereignty would be.

A Strategy of Reading: Some Preliminary Observations Let us begin by imagining some instances of this strategy of reading at work. In each instance, a reading involves an interrogation of marginal and dissident works with the help of some very common metaphors. In each case, too, the metaphors used and the questions posed are far from innocent. They work to frame possible responses, to impose parameters on what these works, if they are to be taken seriously, must be heard to say and mean. We offer eight examples, some quite succinct and others more elaborate. All are of our own construction, even when we borrow words signed by others' names. But all have been heard before-albeit sometimes with slightly different phrasings and inflections-on other occasions where dissident works of thought have come into view.

Example 1: I see in these marginal works a gathering on the borders of an established discipline, and I hear in their dissidence the rattling of preparations to storm the citadels of established disciplinary authority. If these works are to carry the day, they must put up a convincing display-of scholarship or power- in order to persuade the discipline to take them seriously. Reading these essays, I must say, that display is yet to come.

Example 2: These, clearly, are post-positivist works, and in contrast to positivism, they are to be applauded for their opening of the discipline of international relations to methodological pluralism and relativism. Yet these post-positivist works, unlike the positivists they challenge, do not "offer us any clear criteria for choosing among the multiple and competing explanations" they produce.I "How are we to choose from the abundance of alternative explanations? How are we to judge whether interpretation A is to be preferred over interpretation B in a post-positivist era? How are we to ensure that post-positivist pluralism, in the absence of any alternative criteria, will avoid legitimizing ignorance, intolerance, or worse?"

1 The quoted lines in this example are offered by Biersteker (1989) in his reply to Lapid's (1989) discussion of "postpositivist" developments in international theory. For a contrasting reply, see George (1989).

RICHARD K. ASHLEY AND R. B. J. WALKER 369

To their credit, positivists "did have a clear, if problematic, basis for evalua- tion"-a basis developed "in part in reaction against facism, militarism, and communism." These post-positivist works are "wanting" in just this respect. "As much as I welcome the openness and pluralism of post-positivism, I would like to see some explicit discussion of criteria for evaluating alternatives before I leap from the problematic terrain of positivism into what could turn out to be a post- positivist void."

Example 3: Once again, we witness youthful bravado contesting the authority of established elders. Once again, we hear youth proclaim, "The king has no clothes." It is ever thus. And as always, the naifs reveal their own lack of tailoring all too boldly.

Example 4: Like Jiirgen Habermas, I hear in these works the echoing of intense political commitments and normative claims. They are commitments and claims that would be familar, for example, to anyone who experienced the New Left rhetoric of the 1960s. Like many radicals of the 1960s-indeed, like eighteenth and ninetheenth century Romantic reactions to the alienating conditions of industrial capitalism-they "recapitulate the basic experience of aesthetic modernity."2 They exhibit outrage at the unconscious manipulations of instrumental reason. They belittle the progressive accomplishments of modern enlightenment and rationality-accomplishments like modern guarantees of liberty, the rule of law, and a protracted era of peace among liberal democratic states.

Yet there is something altogether more worrisome here. The authors of these works would seem to "claim as their own the revelations of a decentered subjectivity emancipated from the imperatives of work and usefulness, and with this experience, they step outside the modern world. On the basis of modernistic attitudes, they justify an irreconcilable antimodernism." And what is worse, in doing so, in taking what is indubitably a normative stand, they are completely arbitrary. For all their passion, they offer utterly no explicable ground for their positions and claims. They thereby expose political life to considerable dangers. They expose us to all the dangers that ensue when political communication and agreement is governed, not by rational argument which aspires to increase the explicitness of underlying assumptions, but by nothing other than the seductions of phronesis, art and literature.

Example 5: When I read these dissident works, I am troubled, and I am put in mind of something Robert Cox once wrote: "Theory is always for someone and for some purpose. All theories have a perspective. Perspectives derive from a position in time and space, specifically social and political time and space. The world is seen from a standpoint definable in terms of nation or social class, of dominance or subordination, of rising or declining power, of a sense of immobil- ity or of present crisis, of past experience, and of hopes and expectations for the future . . . There is, accordingly, no such thing as theory in itself, divorced from a standpoint in time and space. When any theory so represents itself, it is the more important to examine it as ideology, and to lay bare its concealed perspective" (Cox, 1986:207). This is what troubles me about these works: as works of theory, they profess to have no perspective, no identification with a class, a nation, a subject of history, a "someone" on behalf of whose purposes they theorize. They take up an attitude of estrangement, divorcing themselves from every standpoint in time and space and readily questioning every subjective standpoint from which theory might be written. Therefore, if I am to count

2 The quoted lines in this example are from Habermas (1987). In the same work, which specifically targets Foucault, Habermas labels Foucault a "cryptonormativist," and an "irrationalist" one at that. In this Habermas follows on the heels of Nancy Fraser (1981), who criticizes Foucault by asking, "Why is struggle preferable to submission? Why ought domination to be resisted?" For a wide-ranging discussion of these issues, see various contributions to Hoy (1986).


these works as theory, I must examine them as ideology. I must ask what perspective they conceal. Really now, just whose side are they on?

Example 6: If this be theory, it is theory of, by, and for a jet-set elite. Its language-so sophisticated, so "lit crit," so French-has the ring of so much alien and impenetrable jargon. I wait to hear it clarify our political situations; it confuses. I anticipate its precise answers to our problems; it celebrates ambiguity. I await its respectful treatment of our place in life; it seeks to displace. Who could relate to such theory, save those who can afford self-consciously to embrace a "postmodern style" and leap off in pursuit of the so-called "free-play of self-referential signifiers" in nonstop flight? I am thinking of the style of the yuppie who endlessly produces and circulates symbols of the symbol "success" so that he can afford to chase and consume other such symbols, perhaps, or the style of the person who, in Jean-Francois Lyotard's words, "listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald's food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, [and] wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and 'retro' clothes in Hong Kong" (Lyotard, 1984:12). As for those of us who must toil with the material hazards and difficulties of our places in life-this jargon-on-the-wing smugly leaves us behind.

Example 7: Skepticism about the hubris of hegemonic paradigms is all very well, but surely a celebration of marginality must signal a retreat from ethical and political commitment, a legitimation of quietism and navel-gazing in the face of the real perils of global political life. What do such forms of scholarship have to say about the great problems and dangers that confront us? Surely, in the field of international politics especially, we must aspire to the big picture, to the universal, even to the heroic. How else are we to respond to problems of war and poverty, environmental degradation or the internationalization of production?

Example 8: How avant garde, this imprecise language of literary allusion. How playful. How enticing. And how very conservative. All dressed up in a stylish garb, these works flirtatiously whisper the radical code of resistance, and they thereby seduce the revolutionary mind, but in the end, they induce an antipolitical slumber brought on by a diffuse, directionless, irrational, and ultimately paralyz- ing reflection on the question, who are we? Our commitment to a cause, our rational standards of choice and judgment, our prospects for concerted political strategy, our revolutionary energies, our ability to focus and mobilize our resources so that that which represses and endangers us may be defined and overthrown-all of this is relativized, scattered, and ultimately nullified by this insistent questioning. Peter Dews (1987) is right: what we have here is a "logic of disintegration." After reading these essays, I'm spent; all I want to do is roll over, smoke a cigarette, and catch a nap.

These fragments of critical readings provide but a few examples of increasingly familiar ways in which scholars of international relations and the social sciences in general often interpret, interrogate, and reply to works of dissidence that speak from disciplinary margins. No doubt other examples could be offered. We think these fragments suffice, however, to illustrate a considerable range of likely critical responses that spans from left to right. Five things about these snippets are notable.

First, such critical commentary is not typically offered or received as the normal, proper activity of a discipline or tradition, however that discipline or tradition be defined. Such commentary is typically encountered in a footnote, a review essay, a contribution to the occasional symposium on the discipline's future, a reading semi- nar, or the banter and sideplay of professional conferences. Rarely is it encountered as the main theme of a refereed journal article or a formal research presentation at a professional meeting. In brief, such commentary is offered as parenthesis. It is put forth as a pause that is occasioned by the passing encounter with the moment of dissidence and that is bracketed and set off from the real projects to which the commentators and their audiences are soon to return.


Second, when critical comments such as these are offered, they are typically pronounced in a cool, collected, self-assured voice of an "I" or "we" that neither stum- bles nor quavers with self-doubt. Sometimes, this posture of self-assurance takes the form of nonchalance, even indifference, as if the commentary were roughly comparable to a remark about the shrubbery overgrowing the side of a highway one travels. An air of nonchalance is difficult to sustain, however, when dissident events disturb a sense of direction or when marginal works of thought pose questions that are difficult to ignore. On such occasions, equanimity often gives way to exasperation tinged with embarrassment, a sense that it would be better if these things did not have to be said, a regret that voices of dissidence-though sometimes raising interesting questions-are somehow oblivious to the obvious things that truly refined scholars should already know. On still other occasions, such as conversations between teacher and student, when the addressee of these critical readings cannot yet be presumed to be a mature member of the profession, an air of cool detachment might be replaced by a tone of sobriety, even solemnity, that reminds the potentially wayward novice that the reading is a kind of vow that he, like all members, must earnestly recite.

Yet all these reading postures-nonchalance, exasperation, solemnity during the rite of passage-have something in common. As gestures in themselves, they at once presuppose and indicate the same location. These postures indicate that such critical remarks belong not at the center of the discipline where its serious and productive work is proudly presented and logically weighed, but at its boundaries, at its edges, at the thresholds or checkpoints of entry and exit. They indicate, in the same stroke, that the discipline's territorial boundaries are already marked, that the difference between outside and inside is already given, and that the discipline, the tradition, the "everybody who knows and agrees with this reading" is already assuredly there.

Third, it follows that these critical commentaries do not come to the relationship between reader and text and effect a posture befitting the situation of marginality presupposed by the texts themselves. They do not, for example, adopt a posture that is is sometimes called "female response criticism."3 They do not effect an attitude in which the reader regards her own identity and experience as a kind of text in the process of being written and, in view of this, is given to question her own political and theoretical position and assumptions even as she reads and criticizes a text. Instead of reading from a situation of marginality in which the reader's own position and identity are understood to be in process and in dotubt-instead of "reading as a woman -these critical fragments adopt the attitude of one who is called upon to speak on behalf of a fixed and proudly certain "we," a "community," a disciplinary center, a modern culture. They adopt the juridical posture of "male response criticism." Regarding the texts as objects ofjudgment, they approach them in a way that privileges the reader as one possessed of a certain identity bound up with an already- given experience and position that is outside the text and presumably shared with other members of a discipline, a tradition, a point of view. Not questioning this supposedly pre-given reader's experience, they invoke it as if it provided an authoritative ground and standard in terms of which the texts must either prove their merits or be shown to fall short.

3On the question of reading as a woman see, for example, Felman (1975), Irigaray (1985), Jardine (1985), Kristeva (1975, 1980, 1986ab), Showalter (1979), and Spivak (1980, 1983). An excellent collection relating the diversity and excitement of Anglo-American feminist replies to the question is Showalter (1985). For introductions of French Feminist thought to American audiences, see the volumes edited by Marks and Courtivron (1980) and by Eisenstein and Jardine (1980). Jardine (1985) offers a particularly astute interdisciplinary, intertextual, and inter- cultural analysis of the Franco-American debate in feminist literary theory. Moi (1986) offers a detailed, theoreti- cally sophisticated, and critical introduction to the problem of the literary text and its relations to the concerns and perspectives of feminist practice.

372 Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline

Fourth, in much the same vein, these fragments do not really deserve to be called arguments or interpretations-not, at least, in a scholarly sense. They do not pretend to the status of careful, nuanced readings of the texts to which they refer. They do not offer themselves as theoretical representations of a referent text, an offering that would immediately open up not only the question of the faithfulness of the representation to the text but also the epistemological question of the justification of the position from which representation proceeds. They do not put themselves forth as profound and thoughtful arguments or knowledge claims whose depths one is invited to mine, whose assumptions and definitions one is encouraged to examine, or whose logic one is urged critically to explore. Although those who claim authorship of such critical commentaries on works of dissidence might exhibit a keen concern for methodological transparency and operational reproducibility in their published research reports to the discipline, no such concerns are reflected in their critical readings of works at the margin. Simply stated, these critical readings put the question of their own truth in suspension, as a question that here and now need not be entertained.

Not raising this question, these critical commentaries instead offer themselves as performances to be appreciated entirely on the surface, in action, in the flow of conduct already underway, and as replies to challenges of dissidence immediately encountered. They offer themselves as intimately familiar instances of doing without reflecting on being, as postures of exemplary "men of action" who must pass judgment on the exigencies of the times. And like all such instances, these readings depend for their significance not on a reconstructable logic of argument recurring to authoritative first principles, but on the way in which they work as cultural practices, as mimesis, as active labors of art. Their practical significance depends, that is, upon the ways in which they draw upon a variety of metaphors and other cultural resources, evoke familiar orientations or dispositions, and thereby work to cultivate an exemplary and iterable attitude, posture, or style of interpretation and conduct that an audience will immediately and unquestioningly receive as right for the circumstances, as "what must be done," as what it, too, is already disposed to do in answer to the difficulties and dangers posed by dissidence at the margins.

Finally, these critical readings put their audience in the structural situation of a double bind: a situation in which an audience is given the freedom to choose and is called upon to make a choice even as it is deprived of any basis for doing so.4 In general, a text producing the structure of the double bind is not just ambiguous; beyond sheer ambiguity, the system of values in the text both compels a reader to choose and undermines the foundations of any choice the reader might make (see Culler, 1982:81). One especially familiar example is the situation of the child who hears her parent say, "Show some spunk! Don't obey me all the time." Hearing such words, the child knows that she is urged to make a choice between obedience and disobedience, but she also knows that she cannot choose because, owing to a paradox of the parental injunction, her obedience would be disobedience and her disobedience would be obedience.5 Other examples are to be found throughtout the texts of modern literature, such as Thoreau's Walden (see Michaels, 1977; Chaloupka and Cawley, 1988) or Rousseau's Profession de foi (see De Man, 1979). Rousseau's text urges the reader to choose assent to a theistic "inner voice" of Nature over a metaphorical and error-prone process of "judgment," but in the same text, assent to this theistic inner voice is defined as an act of judgm'ent. Urged to choose between judgment and theism, Rousseau's reader is put in an impossible position: if one refuses theism and chooses judgment, one is destined to be neither judicious nor

4On the logic of the double bind see De Man (1979) and especially De-rida (1978). 5This example is taken from Culler (1982:81).


just, since judgment is prone to error; if one chooses theism, one's choice is unwar- ranted, based as it is on judgment.

As texts in their own rights, critical readings of works of dissidence produce for their audience a similar double bind. On the one hand, they create for their audience a role of one who must make an either/or choice with respect to the critical readings themselves: for or against the position taken, belief or disbelief in the judgment cast. It is the role of one who understands that she has the freedom to make this choice, that it would be irresponsible not to choose, that she must take responsibility for the choice she makes, and that even a failure to choose counts as a choice in the demand- ing circumstances of the moment. Depending upon the specific example considered, the choice is presented as one of disciplinary authority versus a gathering of marginal challengers of unproven legitimacy; the maturity and wisdom of elders versus the bravado of tawdry youth; a commitment to a position or perspective in history versus a lack (or concealment) of a position or perspective; transparency of language versus impenetrable elitist jargon; the possession of firm evaluative standards versus the relativism of a postpositivist void; ethical commitment versus the radical abolition of all ethical codes; reason versus irrationality; the accomplishments of modernity versus a reckless repudiation of these accomplishments; a forthright facing up to global problems versus a diffuse and disabling skepticism; a dedication of energies to productive scholarly labors versus the spending of energies in fleeting pleasures; and so on. Considering such oppositions, the audience is supposed to understand that a critical reading of marginal and dissident works aligns with the first term in any such pair. The audience is also supposed to understand that it is called upon to choose this alignment, too. And the audience is supposed to understand that in taking up this position, it will be opposed to the difficulties, dangers, and illicit seductions connoted by the second term in each instance.

On the other hand, even as critical commentaries such as those considered here urge this choice, they deprive their audience of any basis for the choice it is called upon to make. In keeping with the fourth observation, they do so by effecting the postures of what De Man (1979:245) calls "exhortative performatives that require the passage from sheer enunciation to action"-postures that make it plain that just here and now in this active moment of judgment at the discipline's edges, the foundations of rational thought and argument supposedly prevailing at the center of the discipline simply do not and cannot apply. These commentaries invoke the idea of disciplinary standards at one with a perspective against the spectre of relativism, but they recur to no standard save the idea of standards, and they honor no perspective save one that knows it needs a perspective. They invoke the abstract image of analyti- cally detached and dedicated scholarship, but they ask to be received in an attitude of immediate and unquestioning familiarity, and they exhibit no dedicated scholarship. They invoke the ideals of truth and literal meaning, but they put the question of their own truth in abeyance as they engage in figural play.

What is the audience to make of this? If, in the exercise of its freedom, the audience chooses to question these critical readings and the supposed discipline or culture they defend, then it would seem to pass over to the side of the dissidents who are the objects of critical judgment. It at least potentially stands convicted of being dubious about rational standards, of lacking or concealing a perspective, of favoring relativism, and of being unconcerned about matters of truth. But if the audience chooses to embrace these critical readings and the judgments they make, then its choice can be based upon no rational standard; it can reflect no certain perspective; it must be a relativistic choice; and it must be a choice that defers all encounters with the question of truth.

Now one might object that these five observations belittle critical readings of works of dissidence by concentrating solely on their style, their posturing, their textual


structuring, their allusions and metaphorical play-their aesthetics-rather than upon their specific complaints. One might add that by making light of these readings in this way, we evade the real weight of the criticisms themselves. We take this objection seriously, and we think that a response is due. We believe that the concerns raised merit the most painstaking deliberation, and we do not want it to be thought that we are shrugging off the criticisms or gain saying the scholars who might be inclined to offer similar worries. We offer three lines of reply.

First, one can view a concentration on aesthetics as a belittling of these readings only if one belittles aesthetics. If, for instance, one regards "the aesthetic" as a subjective matter of imagination, beauty, and taste that is quite incidental to the real business at hand-in this case, the business of communicating a critic's intended complaints-then one might conclude that a focus upon aesthetics deflects attention away from what is really important in these criticisms. One might say that our focus upon aesthetics is roughly comparable to responding to an urgent memo by com- menting on the style of the script or the color of the ink. But what if one allows that there are, as Kant said, "considerable difficulties" involved in separating activities of art and aesthetic objects from their surroundings?6 What if one acknowledges that art is a productive labor and that meaning, attitudes of interpretation, and senses of objectivity are among this labor's products? What if one concedes that the meaning of an "U-R-G-E-N-T M-E-M-O" might differ from an "Urgent Memo" or that a memo slashingly handprinted in bold red ink might construct different reader and author roles than would a memo neatly typed in black? If one allows these things, then one cannot be quite so sanguine in holding aesthetics to be of peripheral concern. One simply cannot say with any certainty that attention to aesthetics misses the point.

Second, we have no choice but to concentrate upon aesthetics because, as noted, these critical readings deprive us of every other way of responding seriously and critically to them. Were we to disallow attention to the aesthetic practices of these readings, we would be left to relate to them within the confines of the double bind that the readings themselves work to produce. We could not seriously and critically engage the questions and concerns posed by these critical readings-questions such as legitimacy versus illegitimacy, maturity versus immaturity, the presence versus the absence of evaluative standards, seriousness versus play. Instead of questioning the dichotomies involved in these metaphors or analyzing the way in which they are used to produce the double bind, we would have to acquiesce to the double bind as we find it. We would have to choose between embrace or repudiation of the positions taken, belief or disbelief in the judgment proffered. And in making this choice, we would have to concede that these readings leave us with no basis for the choice we make- no basis save some supposedly uncanny, spontaneous, and inexplicable "intuition," "sense of commitment," or "leap of faith." How is this effect of the uncanniness of intuitive belief produced? How are we to account for the way in which one reading might elicit a spontaneous leap of faith and another might not? Were we to rule out attention to aesthetics, we simply could not say. Regarding any critical reading, we could only experience the effect and make our choices, never able to say why we make the choices we do.

A third reply is that given the circumstances of these critical readings, a focus on aesthetics brings us face to face with what is no doubt the principal question that these readings wrestle with and try to bring under control: the question of sovereignty. This third line of reply is surely controversial. After all, the critical readings at no point allude to the question of sovereignty, let alone pose it by name as a major stake in the game. If they take up the question at all, they do so performatively. They

6 On the problem of framing the aesthetic in Kant, see Derrida (1974, 1981).


do so by assuming the exemplary postures of ones who are summoned into action to speak true and powerful judgments on behalf of a discipline, a perspective, or a culture that is challenged or imperiled by dissident events.

That, though, is precisely our point-a point that we shall develop not only with respect to the sovereignty claims of a particular discipline, but also with respect to the sovereignty claims of modern territorial states. Developing this third line of reply at some length, we shall show that the question of sovereignty, viewed as a practical political problem, is an intrinsically paradoxical problem that can never be named, rationally deliberated, and solved. Whether one speaks of the sovereignty of a discipline or the sovereignty of a modern state, the question is one whose naming and explicit deliberation would preclude its practical resolution. It is a question whose tentative resolution, if resolution there be, can depend upon aesthetic practices alone.

As we shall suggest, the aesthetic practices of these and similar critical readings, including their construction of a double bind, labor to produce the effect of a sovereign center of judgment-in this case, the sovereignty of a "discipline" -in response to events that put an institutional order in crisis and in doubt. As we shall also want to suggest, the aesthetic practices at work in these critical readings are instructive in far wider scope. They offer helpful examples of a widely practiced strategic art by which the effect of sovereignty-be it the sovereignty of a territorial state or the sovereignty of a "state of the discipline"-is produced under conditions of crisis wherein notions of space, time, and political identity are shaken to the core. What occasions this strategic labor of art? What does it labor to do? How does it do it? What are the conditions of this art's effective performance? Can this strategic art any longer be effectively performed in a discipline or culture in which territorial boundaries are everywhere in question and a sense of crisis is acute? What are the implications for works of thought that would speak in reply to the opportunities and dangers of political life today? Developing this third line of reply, we shall explore these questions.

Dissident Thought and Disciplinary Crisis: The Circumstances of Critical Readings

Our first step is to attend to the circumstances in which these critical readings occur. What occasions these critical readings? What prompts into action the aesthetic labors they exemplify? Only by attending to this question can we render intelligible the problem of sovereignty to which these readings reply. Only thus can we understand their strategic situation and what, as strategies, their aesthetic practices labor to do.

At first the answer to these questions would seem to be obvious. What prompts these critical readings is dissident works of thought, like those reflected in the present essays, issuing from the margins of the discipline. This obvious answer, though, is insufficient. We need to know what it is about dissident works that prompts attention to them. Why, put simply, should critical readers even care? The answer cannot be that dissident works of thought promise to provide a better method, a superior framework, a more powerful way of producing more convincing answers and more certain solutions to questions and problems that a discipline readily poses. These works eschew heroic promises such as these, and as we have seen, their critics often indict them for the eschewal. There must be another answer.

Our answer can be baldly stated: dissident works of thought elicit attention and prompt critical readings because these works accentuate and make more evident a sense of crisis, what one might call a crisis of the discipline of international studies. They put the discipline's institutional boundaries in question and put its familiar modes of subjectivity, objectivity, and conduct in doubt; they render its once seemingly self-evident notions of space, time, and progress uncertain; and they thereby


make it possible to traverse institutional limitations, expose questions and difficulties, and explore political and theoretical possibilities hitherto forgotten or deferred. In short, dissident works of thought help to accentuate a disciplinary crisis whose single most pronounced symptom is that the very idea of "the discipline" enters thought as a question, a problem, a matter of uncertainty.

Such an answer is, of course, open to quarrel in at least two respects. The first is our interpretation of disciplinary crisis. In many eyes, our interpretation would seem to be an arbitrary representation that fails to do justice to the realities of the situation. The second is the role we assign to dissident and marginal works in accentuat- ing this crisis, however understood. We might seem to exaggerate the ability of dissident works of thought, as thought, to cultivate disciplinary crisis.

We shall attend at some length to each of these two concerns, taking each in turn. Along the way, we shall see that our understanding of disciplinary crisis does not require us to restrict our focus to any notion of a present state of the discipline of international studies. It is, rather, an understanding that invites us to explore connections between a contemporary disciplinary crisis, on the one hand, and the problem of sovereignty as it appears in a wider cultural arc and throughout modern history, on the other. Along the way, too, we shall see that dissident works of thought do not affront a homogeneous discipline of international studies in the manner of a rude band of dissenting intellects bearing only their deconstructive wits and strange words. Rather, they have been able to contribute to disciplinary crisis because, coming from the margins, they exhibit not only the analytical skills but also the ethical discipline that enables them creatively to respond to and exploit the paradoxical circumstances of a far-reaching cultural crisis-one that already resonates within the discipline's remembered cultural inheritance as well as beyond the discipline's imagined boundaries.

Disciplinary Crisis/Cultural Crisis

In response to the first concern, we must immediately concede what seems to us to be beyond dispute: our interpretation of the circumstances of disciplinary crisis prompting critical readings does not do justice to those circumstances. We must say, in fact, that no definitive representation of the circumstances seems possible. Any rendering of disciplinary crisis will immediately be seen by some or many not as a representation that is adequate to a referent reality but as an arbitrary contrivance, a groundless fiction, and perhaps even a work of rhetoric that does violence to con- tending interpretations in the service of a political will. The point can be put quite simply: in this situation, words fail.

If, however, one can agree that words somehow fail to dojustice to the disciplinary crisis occasioning critical readings of works of dissidence, then, ironically, one can also agree with our interpretation of that crisis. For at bottom we are saying no more than this: However one might interpret the role of dissident works of thought in the accentuation of disciplinary crisis, the crisis itself involves the discipline's opening out into a region of intrinsically ambiguous, intrinsically indeterminate activity that knows no necessary bounds and unsettles every attempt to produce an enclosing representation of what the discipline is and does. Whether one speaks of the "discipline of international studies," the "discipline of international relations," the "discipline of international politics," or the "discipline of world [or maybe 'global'] politics," the words manifestly fail, even as they promise, to discipline meaning. The words but broadly connote (they cannot denote) a boundless nontime and non- place-a deterritorialized, extraterritorial zone of discourse-where the work of producing the subjects, the objects, and the interpretations of an institutional order and its limits visibly eludes the certain control of that order's supposedly reigning categories.


Of course, understanding a disciplinary crisis in this way makes it hard to confine the notion of crisis to a discipline alone. One cannot say that it is just a crisis of the discipline of international studies, because the crisis, so understood, puts in doubt any imaginable boundaries that would separate the discipline of international studies from other disciplines and, indeed, from all other contested sites of modern global life. To think of disciplinary crisis in this way is thus to understand a crisis that folds out beyond a discipline's imagined boundaries, connecting to a crisis of the human sciences, a crisis of patriarchy, a crisis of governability, a crisis of late industrial society, a generalized crisis of modernity.

More specifically, to think of a disciplinary crisis in this way is to understand that the crisis-prompting effect of dissidence in the discipline of international studies resonates with the effects of marginal and dissident movements in all sorts of other localities. It resonates with the effects of feminist movements questioning the modes of social and political discipline engendered as "masculine," ecological movements questioning the disciplines of "industrial society," peace movements questioning the disciplines of "national security" estates, worker movements questioning the disciplines of "managerial order," and cultural movements questioning the disciplines of "information." "International studies," "masculinity," "industrial society," "national security," "managerial order," "information"-these and countless other words must now be written in quotation marks because the modes of disciplining domains of human conduct they would designate are now openly in question, in doubt, in crisis. The boundaries that would separate one domain from another and one dissident struggle from another are put, as it were, under erasure. The attempt to impose boundaries-to exclude the concerns of cultural and ecological movements from the political programs of worker movements, say, or to exclude feminist scholarship from international studies-becomes distinctly visible. It becomes immediately rec- ognizable as an attempt to impose exclusionary boundaries. And the attempt itself is thereby politicized, coming to be seen as an arbitrary act of power whose very undertaking incites resistance and the transgression of any boundaries that might be marked.

This, though, is not all there is to say about this crisis. If we are to prepare the way for an understanding of the practices of dissident movements-especially the role of dissident works of thought in the crisis of international studies-then we must care- fully examine several aspects of this crisis. We believe that at least eight points need to be made.

First, it would be wrong to say that the sort of crisis experienced by the discipline or by modern culture more generally is in any sense a contemporary or recent event. It is as old as modernity itself. As historians would remind us, the cultural crisis of modernity that today's dissidents take seriously has occurred not just recently but very often in the history that modern culture claims as its own. Examples would include the breakdown of the traditional virtues in Athens at the time of Socrates and Aristophanes, the decline of the Hellenistic world, and the recession of the Church as an effective center of temporal authority that marked the opening of the Renaissance. Other examples would be the end of metaphysics at the time of Kant and, much more recently, the de(Euro)centering of geopolitical thought occasioned by movements of decolonization.

Second, although crisis so understood cannot be traced to any any determinate origin or cause, one can, in a way reminiscent of Durkheim's (1964) notion of dynamic density, offer a very general proposition: the emergence of crisis can be attributed to an agitation and acceleration of social activity such that it strains, rup- tures, overflows, or otherwise transgresses the institutional limitations of a social order. Crisis can be attributed, in other words, to a proliferation of transgressions of the institutional boundaries that would differentiate, mark off, and fix time, space, and identity within a social order, including the identities of subjects as agents of


knowing and the objects that they would know. Such instances of transgression might of course occur in the small, as it were. They might occur, for instance, in the discordant moments of the plantation or factory as much as the conservatory or studio, in the dreams and unspeakable frustrations of the journeyman or clerk as much as the inspirations of the poet or scientific genius. They might also occur in wider scope, as when the overwhelming growth of demands upon the institution of the parish dole in the countryside of an England in the throes of feudal crisis contributed to the acceleration of people's movement from country to town. More contemporary examples of pervasive transgressions can be found in a variety of ambiguous happenings of interest to scholars of international relations, especially those often broadly alluded to (but not really designated) under the heading "inter- dependence." When transgressions are pervasive, highly visible, and not easily contained in specific institutional sites-when institutional boundaries blur into openly traversible margins and the margins widen relative to the institutional spaces the boundaries would supposedly contain-they produce a generalized social crisis of the sort we have in mind.

Third, the effect of such transgressions is not only to put institutional boundaries in doubt but also to deprive an institutional order of stable oppositions. In a crisis of this sort, there is no clear and indubitable sense of inside versus outside, domestic versus international, particular versus universal, developed versus underdeveloped, reality versus ideology, paradigm versus counterparadigm, fact versus fiction, political theory versus political practice, identity versus difference, progress versus re- gress, continuity versus change, father versus mother, rationality versus irrationality, system of communication and circulating exchange value versus nature, positivity versus negativity, maturity versus immaturity, seriousness versus play, sense versus nonsense. These and other oppositions are openly contested. Accordingly, any attempt to invoke some privileged interpretation of, say, reason in order to control events cast as irrational-or to invoke some privileged interpretation of domestic order to fend off the dangers of international anarchy-is immediately susceptible to question. The privileged notion of reason invoked can be shown to contain and depend upon traces of the irrationality it opposes. The privileged notion of domestic order can be shown to be grounded in nothing more than an anarchic struggle of contesting interpretations that traverses any imaginable domestic bounds. In sum, the discourse of an institutional order can no longer reliably respond to ambiguous and uncertain events by recurring to contradictions, to dialectic, to the promise of resolution through determinate negation.

Fourth, a crisis of this sort may be called a crisis of representation. Just "now," just "here," in the institutional order in crisis, there is no possibility of a well-delimited, identical presence of a subject whose interior meanings might be re-presented in words, for it is impossible to exclude the contesting interpretations of subjective being that must be absent if this presence is simply to be. There is, likewise, no fixed and indubitable presence of an external object to which words, as re-presentations, might be referred, because the active subjectivity that must be absent if an object is to be purely objective cannot be excluded. Without the absolute presence of an institutionalized subject whose meanings words might represent and without the absolute presence of an institutionalized object to which words, as representations, might refer, the word breaks off (Connolly, 1987; Heidegger, 1971). Words can no longer do justice because they no longer bear a promise of certain, literal judgment on behalf of a social order, a community, a discipline, a culture.

As a result, the very possibility of truth is put in doubt. Every representation appears not as a copy or recovery of something really present in some other time or place but as a representation of other representations-none original, each equally arbitrary, and none able to exclude other representations in order to be a pure presence, an absolute origin of truth and meaning in itself. On trial is the self-evident


reality of objects which might be unambiguously represented, assigned a definite social value, and entered into circulation in a system of communication or exchange. On trial, too, is the very life of the institutionalized subject of the social order. In crisis, subjects and objects appear not as sources of meanings that might be signified or represented in words but as open texts that are ever in the process of being inscribed through a hazardous contest of representations. The subject is deprived of a sense of self-evident identity. What does it mean for this subject to speak sincerely, truthfully, in a way that projects its inner being? What is the inner being of the subject that must be nurtured and protected in an order that would bejust or true to its subjects? In a crisis of representation, these questions become unanswerable. Every answer is immediately received as but one more groundless representation, no more and no less sincere or legitimate than any other.

Fifth, several attitudes emerge in response to the unfolding of such a crisis, but two especially are worthy of note. With Anthony Giddens (1979), Yosef Lapid (1989), and Jim George and David Campbell (this issue), we might call one of these attitudes celebratory:

A celebratory attitude greets the event of crisis in a posture of joyous affirmation, a posture that privileges the estrangement, paradox, ambiguity, and opportunities for creativity, on the one hand, over the supposed need to cast every word and deed as a familiar representation of stable metaphysical certitudes, on the other. The celebratory attitude does not aspire to return to some comforting, securely bounded domicile of self-evident being. It instead exhibits a readiness to explore the new cultural connections and resulting new modes of thinking and doing that become possible when boundaries are traversed and hitherto separated cultural texts meet, contradict, combine in ambivalent relations, and relativize one another.

Another attitude, which would include Giddens's "despairing" and "dogmatic" responses as well as the posture of "systematic reconstruction" that Giddens and Lapid call for,7 might be called religious:

7 There can be no doubt that Gidden's call for a systemic reconstruction in reply to crisis, reiterated in the international relations field by Lapid, does differ in noteworthy respects from the despairing and dogmatic responses from which Giddens and Lapid take their distance. Let us quote Lapid (1989:236, emphasis added), who is faithful to Giddens in this respect: "Alarmed by the conspicuous absence of a single shared conviction about the nature and destination of social theory, the despairing response articulates an instinctive desire not to be disturbed by foundational, or 'meta'-scientific, problems . . . [and it] clings to pre-Kuhnian verities about objectivity, testability, and falsification and encourages social scientists to go on with some 'useful' or practical work." As for the dogmatic response, it it exhibits "a foundationalist craving to restore intellectual security" by appealing to "an 'authoritative' figure such as Karl Marx or Max Weber." In other words, both the despairing and the dogmatic responses (a) value crisis in a negative way, as something to fear and escape or transcend, (b) desire some absolute foundation as a way of escaping what they fear, and (c) reply by retreating to one or another historical rendition of a foundational authority, be it scientific rules (in the case of a despairing response) or a sanctified figure (in the case of a dogmatic response). Clearly, the posture of systematic reconstruction differs from these: forthrightly facing up to the event of crisis, it "cautiously approves" the celebratory response and the resulting awakening to new possibilities, and accordingly, it acknowledges the impossibility of a desperate retreat to one or another interpretation of "established foundations."

Yet in other respects, the posture of systematic reconstruction has much in common with the despairing and dogmatic responses to crisis. As words like "cautious approval" might suggest, the constructivist posture regards crisis not as something that might be valued in its own right, not as something to be lastingly celebrated, but as something to be faced up to, something to be exploited, and yet something problematical and even dangerous that must ultimately be transcended. Thus, Lapid (1989:336, emphasis added) recites Gidden's worries that the embrace of "theoretical pluralism may inadvertently aggravate the crisis," and he speaks of Giddens wanting to address "this problem by trying to order and transcend diversity without substituting a new orthodoxy for the old one." Thus, too, Lapid himself opposes a positively valued possibility of "Theoretical Restructuring" to a negatively valued "Disarray" in the titling of his first major section (1989:238). It is in just this impulse-to privilege an ideal of identity or unity over the realities of difference and diversity, holding tight to the former and regarding the


A religious attitude reverses the priorities of the celebratory. The proliferation of cultural possibilities is not welcomed but received as an irruption of unnameable dangers, and the event of crisis is greeted with a sadness, a sense of nostal- gia, a kind of homesickness for an institutional order that can impose stable boundaries and bring an ambiguous and indeterminate reality under control. As in the thought, writings, and practices of today's neoconservatives and other "liberals disillusioned by reality," the religious response casts the event negatively, in terms of the absence of a center, a collapse of foundations, a loss of a self-evident origin of meaning and authority, a destruction of a domicile of pure identity, a descent into an abyss of hopelessness. It sees in crisis a dangerous moment in which the institutionalized subject is made witness to the possibility of its own dissolution and death.

It should not be thought that these two attitudes amount to alternative positions, perspectives, or modes of subjective being that are or could be dialectically opposed, as if the religious attitude might repress the celebratory and the celebratory might seek emancipation from the religious. These are practical attitudes or postures working in time, and they are keenly sensitive to the temporality of their real situation and to the contingency of every imaginable position. They are not coherent and totalizing (mis)representations of reality offered as if projecting a fixed and timeless voice from which truth and power reliably originate as one. As attitudes, they share and mutually call forth a sense of the crisis to which they reply, a crisis in which a paradoxical reality seems to undo every position and resist enclosure in any totalizing representation. If the one relates to the crisis optimistically-joyfully affirming the unfolding of unnameable possibilities emerging with the transgression of limitations once taken for granted-and the other relates to it anxiously-lamenting the passing of a time in which identity was secured by limitations not doubted-both start from the recognition that in the crisis of the present all limitations are in fact in question and all positions or perspectives are undone. Both understand that here and now no stable position might be appealed to as a source of truth and power capable of fixing limitations anew. And both, therefore, are deprived of any timeless and universal basis for self-affirmation-for the proof of the rightness, truth, or ethical standing of the attitudes themselves.

Where the two attitudes differ-and it is surely a very important difference-is in their practical orientations connecting the immediacy of an uncertain location to the wider world and linking memories through the ambiguous present to imaginations of possible futures. They differ, in other words, in their dispositions to action amidst the undecidable ambiguities of space, time, and identity encountered here and now. It is a difference of register, if you will:

The celebratory reception to crisis proceeds in a register of freedom, a freedom that is prior to all abstract and universalizing notions of necessary limitations, of interior or exterior necessity, of need, even of intrinsically needful subjects whose needs might now be repressed or distorted in denial of their freedom. Affirming the reality of the crisis, a celebratory attitude does not deny that people live hazardous lives and confront serious perils. It does not deny that

latter as a fearsome fall from grace-that the posture of systematic reconstruction distinguishes itself from a celebratory attitude and reveals its religious affinities, so much in common with despairing and dogmatic responses. No, the posture of systematic reconstruction does not pretend, as despairing and dogmatic responses do, that one or another historical representation of the transcendental ideal of an authoritative foundation is now practically effective. But if it lets go of specific historical representations of this ideal-if it even joins in their questioning-it does not let go of the abstract zdeal itself. As is characteristic of religious postures in general, it orients its discourse around the problem of how to bring the privileged ideal to life in people's practices, not as an orthodoxy, not as a straightjacket, not as something that people think is imposed upon them, but in the form of a foundation that can be unquestioningly received as a matter of innocent faith. In the terminology we shall use, it speaks in a register of deszre.


people's labors, even their procreative and cognitive labors of self-making, are channeled and bent to tasks that they do not originate in the localities of their work. Yet a celebratory posture, in facing up to these conditions, also gives pride of place to the reality of a crisis in which there is no stable position or perspective that can determine for one and all what these local struggles mean, what their stakes must be, what universal needs are repressed or negated. It does not try to hold on to some imagined totalizing standpoint-in crisis but a rarefied ideal- that would regulate discourse regarding what must be done. Instead, as the name implies, it celebrates a space of freedom-freedom for thought, for political action in reply to hazards and dangers, for the exploration of new modes of ethical conduct detached from the presumption of a transcendental standpoint-that opens up when, in crisis, this ideal is deprived of practical force.

The religious reception, by contrast, proceeds in a register of desire. Even in crisis, it refuses to turn loose of the ideal, now grown abstract, of a self-identical institutional subject contentedly at home with an institutional order whose limitations are self-evidently given and at one with the word. It holds fast, that is, to the ideal of inhabiting a securely bounded territory of truth and literal meaning beyond doubt, a place given as if by some author beyond time, a place where the unruly can be reliably named and tamed and the man of unquestioning faith can be secure. Privileging this abstract ideal as a pure positivity, the religious posture then understands the crisis of the present not in a way open to its opportunities as well as its dangers, but as a pure negativity-a loss, a lack, a repression or corruption of something necessary and intrinsically valuable. It receives the present crisis, therefore, as something to fear. And it turns this fear into a desire, a desire to fill the void, to compensate for the lack, to impose a center of universal judgment capable of effecting limitations and fixing a space, a time, an identity beyond question.

Sixth, where thought and conversation are dominated by religious attitudes and animated by this desire, they take on the cast of what would be familiar to us as political discourse, for they are preoccupied with the paradoxical political problem of sovereignty. It is a problem posed amidst a crisis of representation: an unmappable region of ambiguity, uncertainty, indeterminacy, and multiplying cultural possibilities where time knows no certain measure, space knows no certain bounds, and human conduct reliably obeys no law-not laws of nature, not laws of language, and not laws of father, king, or state. It is a problem of enclosing this boundless region, defining what is alien to it, making it a territory in space and time, giving it a temporal metric, and imposing thereupon a center of judgment beyond doubt that can effectively police the boundaries, fend off the alien, preside over all questions of difference and change within, and decide for one and all what every disputed happening must mean. Four propositions regarding discourses of sovereignty merit notice:

1. Discourses of sovereignty cannot relate to their object, sovereignty, as other than a problem or question. This is so because sovereignty enters discourse not as a matter of describing something that is thought to be real, already present, and perhaps distinguishable from other equally real and present things, but precisely as a reflection on a lack, on a loss, on something that might have been but is no longer. In a crisis of representation where the word breaks off, there is no taken-for-granted understanding of reality that goes without saying and that reliably functions as a shared background in terms of which people can stabilize meanings and orient and justify what they say and do.

To speak of sovereignty, therefore, is never to name something that already is. It can never be to refer to some source of truth and power that is self-identical, that simply exists on its own, that goes without saying. "[S]over- eignty has no identity, is not self, for itself, toward itself, near itself" (Derrida,


1978:265). Even when one asserts, for example, that "God," "king," "man," "nation," or "social scientific discipline" is sovereign beyond doubt-even when one says that such a figure, to the exclusion of all others, can decide all questions of time, space, and identity within an institutional order-the very need to still doubts by pronouncing the assertion belies the assertion itself. Always a work of imagination, the assertion announces a question that is tinged with desire: How to fill the void. How to compensate for the lack.

2. The problem of sovereignty is profoundly paradoxical. Accenting the root, we may say that it is profound in the sense that it is preoccupied with the problem of foundation: a fundamental principle, a supporting structure, a base on which society rests, a fund of authority capable of endowing possibilities, accrediting action, and fixing limitations. Accenting the prefix, we may say that it is profound in the sense that that it proceeds from a situation ahead of all foundation, in favor or support of foundation, to produce or bring forth foundation, that will count as or substitute for the foundation now lacking. When one adds something about the nature of the desired foundation-that to be effective it must be regarded as infinitely deep, self-founding, dependent upon no activity that proceeds without foundations, and hence a foundation beyond doubt-one sees the paradox.

To come to terms with the problem, formalize it as a problem, affirm its centrality to a discourse, and deliberate it in the search for solutions is to guarantee that the problem cannot be solved. It is to announce to one and all that any "resolution" proffered in the circumstances of a crisis of representation is but one more groundless representation-no less legitimate than any other perhaps, but also no more. And it is thereby to insure that that which is offered as the foundation capable of imposing limitations and stilling all doubts will itself be received as an object of doubt.

3. It follows that texts or discourses that would produce a semblance of a resolution to the problem of sovereignty must engage in a kind of duplicity. While necessarily opening up and responding to the crisis of representation that occasions them, they must also move by various devices to accomplish two things. On the one hand, they must make it possible to stigmatize and exclude from the domain of serious discourse those happenings, postures, and interpretations whose serious consideration would put the proposed resolution in doubt. This, of course, is a work of stigmatization and exclusion that, in the absence of the sovereign foundation to be established by the resolution, can only be arbitrary and subject to dispute. On the other hand, and in the same stroke, they must make it possible to understand that this work of stigmatization and exclusion, far from groundless, is itself undertaken in the service of a sovereign foundation already beyond question, a resolution already finished and given.

Clearly, such moves are as paradoxical as the problem they undertake to resolve. Clearly, too, such moves cannot call attention to themselves, as if they deserve to be formalized and announced as central to the enterprise undertaken by a text or discourse. Such moves must be offered not as theory inviting critical deliberation but in the manner of performative postures emerging in reply to instantly apprehensible difficulties and dangers and prom- ising to show how these difficulties and dangers might be arrested or resolved. They must be offered not as part of the central and ostensibly timeless logic of resolution, but in an exigent mood belonging to the margins of the text or discourse and summoning the central logic of resolution into being.

4. The "resolutions" to the problem of sovereignty proffered by texts or discourses can only be unstable and tentative. They are unstable because the texts or discourses that would enact such "resolutions" cannot really be rid of the paradoxes of space, time, and identity that become visible in crisis and that the texts or discourses purport to solve. The margins of these texts or discourses always involve the arbitrary deployment of cultural resources in the


performance of the paradoxical moves just mentioned-moves which, were they taken seriously, would undo the supposedly central logic by which a "resolution" is made to seem certain and final.

Such "resolutions" are tentative because texts or discourses are able to post- pone serious and unsettling attention to their marginal performance of these moves only so long as the moves themselves are received in an attitude of immediate and unquestioning familiarity, as that which goes without saying. With the unfolding of a crisis of representation-with time, change, the acceleration of activity, and the transgression of institutional limitations hitherto unquestioned-the themes, postures, words, and images that might once have elicited such a spontaneous and unquestioning reception are no longer able to do so. No longer self-evident, they become strange, of dubious validity, and subject to dispute in terms of their pretensions to truth. As this is so, the arbitrary nmarginal moves that a text or discourse undertakes through the development of these cultural resources take on a certain transparency, becoming immediately visible as the paradoxical moves they are. And when this happens, the supposed "resolution" at the supposed center of a text- always dependent upon the paradoxical moves at its margins-comes to be seen as no resolution at all. Paradox displaces the paradigmatic "resolution." Crisis surfaces. And wherever religious desire moves, the paradoxical problem of sovereignty announces itself anew.

These four propositions, taken together, suggest another, more general than the rest. When spoken in a religious register of desire, the word "sovereignty" is often used ideologically, as if it represented some source of meaning, some effective orga- nizational principle, some mode of being already in place, some simply and self- evidently given resolution of paradoxes of space, time, and identity. Yet this word is only spoken amid and in reply to a crisis of representation where paradoxes of space, time, and identity displace all certain referents and put all origins of truth and meaning in doubt. As this is so, sovereignty cannot really represent any of these things. The word can but connote a boundless region of ambiguous activity that a vagabond desire-itself rootless, powerless, and empty of content save a rarefied ideal of an exclusionary order born of metaphysical grace-would mark off, fill, and claim as a territory of its own. It can but connote a boundless region of freedom that desire, ever in search of an elusive finality, might struggle to exclude and forget but can never finally erase from its memory.

Seventh, what we know to be the great texts of modern political discourse-among them the texts that the discipline of international studies memorializes as the cultural inheritance fixing its identity-are intimately engaged in a crisis of just the sort we have been discussing. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Bentham, Marx, Kant, We- ber-the texts signed by these and many other names emerge and work in specific sites and circumstances where transgressions of institutional limitations proliferate. They emerge and reply to historical circumstances where margins widen, ambiguity and chance seem to undermine every certain referent, temporality seems to displace every extratemporal standpoint, forgotten pasts and deferred futures intrude upon the present, words lose their capacity to still violence and come to seem violent themselves, the play of power eludes the controlling word of truth, the very idea of truth is shaken, what it means to speak meaningfully and seriously is in doubt, and a crisis of representation unfolds. In various ways, these texts engage that crisis. They affirm it. They celebrate and exploit the rich variety of cultural resources-the paradoxes, the ironies, the opportunities for parody and figurative play-that become possible precisely when institutional limitations on thought and discourse are put in question, forgotten texts can be reopened, and alien themes can be examined anew. Exploiting these resources, they provide exciting accounts of the crisis they engage-accounts that seem somehow to speak to other uncertain times, including our own. Yet these texts can also be read to do something else as well. They can be


read for the ways in which they seem to speak in answer to a religious desire or, more exactly, to provide a semblance of a resolution to a paradoxical problem of sovereignty to which, in crisis, this desire gives form. These are, then, highly ambiguous texts. They are paradoxically open to different ways of reading.

Eighth, with the emergence of the question of sovereignty in crisis, texts such as these become part of the openly contested cultural terrain. Contested themselves, they offer resources by which contest is waged. In general, these texts might be read and put to work in a crisis of representation in two ways, each projecting one of the two attitudes to which crisis gives rise. One is a way of reading undertaken in a religious register of desire. According to what it actively labors to do to a text, we might call it a memorializing reading. The other is a way of reading undertaken in a celebratory register of freedom. We might call it countermemorializing reading.8 Both take their texts quite seriously, although the two differ greatly in their understanding of seriousness.

For a memorializing reading, to take a text seriously is to try to retrace, reaffirm, and be at one with the workings of desire within it:

Coming to an ambiguous and paradoxical text, a memorializing reading posits and privileges the abstract ideal of a unique and unequivocal sovereign figure who would control the authentic meaning of the text, and it aspires to arrive at an interpretation that would be at one with the intentions and will of this figure. It therefore proceeds from that moment in a text when uncertainties and paradoxes of a crisis of representation are actively encountered as threats to this sovereign figure, and hence take on colorations of fear, to that moment when this posited sovereign is redeemed and secured through the text's production of an ostensibly coherent and final resolution to paradoxes of space, time, and identity. For a memorializing reading, this heroic resolution in the face of utter uncertainty is what the text must be remembered for all time and from all perspectives to mean.

One result is to attribute to a text a high degree of coherence. The text can be easily summed up and even shamelessly caricatured, often in a short list of supposedly basic assumptions or principles, because all the text's encounters with paradox, ambiguity, and indeterminacy are read over into the domain of difficulties and dangers that the text, in its culminating moment, shows us how to resolve. Paradox, ambiguity, and indeterminacy are not allowed to disturb the ostensibly central logic of resolution that redeems the sovereign presence posited at the start.

Another result is to turn the text into a uniquely interpretable paradigm in which a discipline, a tradition, a culture might anchor an identity. Memorialized as paradigm, the text is not principally remembered as a static representation of a referent reality (which might, after all, be quite unlike the reality of the present). It is remembered as an iterable exemplar of how men and women of religious desire might fear, think, act, and resolve paradoxes of space, time, and identity even in our own unrepresentable times. It is remembered as that most strange sort of foundation: an exemplary way in which a sovereign mode of being iterably founds itself in reply to chance events, uncertainties, and unsettling paradoxes of space and time.

For a countermemorializing reading, to take a text seriously is not to retrace and reaffirm the workings of desire. It is not to posit and give priority to a religious ideal of a sovereign center that supposedly rules a text and might show us how to rule ourselves and our own difficult times. It is decidedly not to try to enclose a disci-

8 On the notion of countermemory and its affinities to Nietzschean genealogy, see Foucault (1977, 1980, and especially 1984c). For early discussions and applications of genealogical analysis in international studies, see Der Derian (1987) and Ashley (1987).


pline's discourse within a heroic narrative of paradox resolved and paradigm redeemed-a narrative whose limitations we, in honoring the memory of the text, must endlessly recite in our own contemporary labors. On the contrary, for a countermemorializing reading, to take a text seriously is to give serious attention to the unfinalized celebration of freedom and paradox that goes on within it, a celebration that the text can never really still or exclude. It is therefore to refuse to forget what a memorializing reading must forget in order to claim to retrieve a unique meaning from a text: that these classical texts are already intimately and actively caught up in a crisis of representation, much like our own, in which any supposed sovereign resolution of paradoxes of space, time, and identity can never be more than a question, a problem, a paradox in its own right.

Refusing to repeat this willful amnesia, countermemorializing readings analyze afresh the ways in which classic texts contend with ambiguity, uncertainty, and resistant counterinterpretations of all sorts; avail themselves of all manner of disparate cultural resources; and struggle at the same time to impose a sovereign perspective capable of resolving paradoxes of space, time, and identity and to marginalize those paradoxes, already alive, that would unsettle any sovereign perspective they might try to impose. Affirming the very real crisis-emergent paradoxes that occasion a text and that the text would marginalize, a countermemorializing reading shows how they threaten to render radically unstable the pretenses of sovereign resolution dutifully recorded in memorializing readings.

The result on the whole is to enrich, not diminish, the cultural resources of a discipline, community, or culture. The discipline that pays its respects to a textual inheritance so read is not limited to the ritual rehearsal of the "resolutions" to the problem of sovereignty given pride of place in memorializing readings. Nor is it surprised to find that the "resolutions" promised by its texts prove to be unstable in the present time. It is drawn instead to appreciate the intrinsic ambiguity, uncertainty, irony, and recombinatorial possibilities of its own textual inheritance. It is able to see that contemporary encounters with paradoxes of time, space, and political identity do not mark the "end of the discipline" or "the end of modernity." They are already there in the discipline's and the culture's textual "beginnings."

It's not difficult to find instances of these two modes of reading in the literature of international relations. Consider, for example, contesting interpretations of Ma- chiavelli's The Prince. Waltz's (1979) reading memorializes The Prince. In it, Ma- chiavelli is cast as a paradigmatic figure-at once a foundation and origin-of the realist tradition in which Waltz would locate his own theorization of balance of power. In Waltz's reading, too, what is affirmed is the resolution to the paradoxical problem of sovereignty toward which The Prince, in projecting a religious desire, no doubt wants to move in its closing "Exhortation": the production of a state that is unitary, bounded and distinct from its external environment, and decisively controlled by a unique center of governance. Thus, for Waltz, Machiavelli exemplifies a kind of timeless raison d'e'tat among unitary territorial states wanting to survive and bending every means to this end. And Waltz himself, working from a "foundation" memorialized in this way, can then proceed to assume that the problem of sovereignty is always already solved. He can start from an assumption that permits him to theorize an "anarchic" domain of "international politics" among sovereign territorial states that is already differentiated from the "hierarchical orders" within sovereign territorial states.

As George and Campbell suggest in their contribution to this issue, Walker's (1989) reading of The Prince is a countermemorializing reading. Here it becomes clear that Machiavelli's text can hardly provide a foundation or origin of the sort of realist tradition Waltz would like to invoke. The most unsettling of paradoxical problems resides at the very center of Machiavelli's concerns: how to found a state. In


Walker's reading, precisely because The Prince is referring to the special problems of new states whose unity and boundaries certainly cannot be assumed under conditions of cultural crisis in which Machiavelli writes, the text that Waltz and so many others would treat "as the unproblematic origin of tradition is itself obsessed with the highly problematic nature of origins, of foundations, of the establishment and subsequent politics of traditions" (1989:33). Once Machiavelli is read this way, The Prince is no longer caricatured as a paradigm capable of founding and limiting the thought of a tradition or discipline that would religiously affirm the solution to the problem of sovereignty it so desparately desires to reiterate in its own uncertain times. The enclosure of Machiavelli-as-paradigm folds open, and the The Prince connects to The Discourses on Livy, The History of Florence, The Art of War, and beyond even these texts to the wide-ranging Renaissance struggles of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Savanarola, and others to make sense of paradoxical problems of time, space, and political community by calling upon, questioning, turning, and introducing once forgotten terms to the shaken categories of Christian universalist thought.

Crisis and the Role of Dissidence

We have come far enough in our consideration of crisis-a crisis of a discipline, a crisis of modernity-to enable us to take up the second of our two concerns. We can now see why it has been possible for dissident works of thought to activate a sense of disciplinary crisis. We can also understand how dissident works of thought, given this possibility, have proceeded to exploit it, thereby prompting critical readings of the sort that concern us here. Let us first take up the "why," the question of the conditions of possibility.

Why is disciplinary crisis possible? Dissident works of thought, we can say at the outset, have not incited a sense of crisis by approaching a naive and insular discipline, paradigm, or tradition from beyond its boundaries, as if bearing news from far-off lands or, as detractors might say, from the foreign capitols of contemporary fashion. Nor have they hurled their literary wits and intellectual devices at the ram- parts of a coherent tradition, thereby to puncture holes and let light in. And certainly they have not fomented crisis by laying seige to a discipline, tradition, or paradigm, hoping that the attrition of a discipline's intellectual resources will lead its adherants not only to give up faith in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Grotius, Bull, Deutsch, Hoffmann, Waltz, and others, but also to fling open gates to a parading army bearing the promised sustenance of Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Bakhtin, Todorov, Kristeva, Barthes, and more. All of these images involve imagining territories, borders, walls already in place. All thereby impose two limitations on the way in which we think about the condition of the discipline prior to the onset of crisis and about the location of dissidents in relation to the discipline:

1. On a spatial dimension, they require us to imagine an initial situation of dichotomously opposed positions for any work of thought: with regard to the discipline, the images suggest, one must be inside or outside, for or against. The images reserve the oppositional space of the outside as the dissidents' point d'appui.

2. On a temporal dimension, the images require us to understand crisis as a moment of discontinuity that opens up when the discipline's continuous time, homogeneous place, and coherent and well-bounded textual inheritance breaks up or gives way. The images imply that works of dissidence, beginning on the outside, must somehow disturb a prior stable continuity in order to produce the discontinuity of crisis.


In both of these respects, these images miscast the situation. This can be seen with the benefit of hindsight, that is to say, from the "point of view" of the crisis that we have come to sense so keenly today. Whether one speaks in a celebratory register of freedom or a religious register of desire, one cannot fail to notice that remembrances of a supposed "pre-crisis past" are very much a part of the disputed terrain in the crisis of today. If, in crisis, "we" must refer to "ourselves" in quotation marks-thus to signal doubts as to who, doing what kind of work and saying what kinds of things, really belongs in "our" conversation- "we" must also allow that this is in large measure due to emerging uncertainties and ambiguities regarding the inheritance to which "we" are indebted. Members of a discipline, a paradigm, or a tradition "we" might claim to be. But "we" cannot say for sure who "we" are because "we" cannot decide what must be the exclusionary boundaries of the remembered inheritance to which "we" in "our" work must pay respects. Every attempt to fix the territoriality of a discipline, paradigm, or tradition today by offering one or another memorializing reading of a supposedly pure and incontrovertible inheritance (for example, the attempts to fix the supposed continuity of "the tradition" in Keohane's [1983] and Gilpin's [1981, 1984] readings of Thucydides) is immediately exposed as an arbitrary construction in countermemorializing readings of the same cultural inheritance (as Alker [1989] and Garst [1989] show in their readings of Thucydides). What is the inheritance to which we owe a debt? What must it mean for us? What limitations inscribed in "our" textual history must be obeyed by those who would claim that their work honors and continues this history? In the crisis of today, these questions have become undecidable.

How could this have happened? Answering this question, we see the point: If, in crisis, we are today unable to decide how to limit, read, and remember the textual history in which to anchor a discipline or paradigm, this can only be because the textual history to which we refer has never been a territory of unequivocal and continuous meaning. It has never been fixed through time, well-bounded, and closed to contesting interpretations. The discipline's textual history has always been paradoxically open to a proliferation of mutually destabilizing readings. It has always contained tensions and paradoxes that not only threaten to undo the supposed certitude of any position from which interpretation proceeds but also threaten to make way for other readings that a supposedly correct reading, to be thought correct, must exclude.

One simply cannot say, then, that there once was a time prior to the present crisis in which the discipline proudly stood before dissident scholars as a continuous, well- bounded territory. No such territory ever existed. No exclusionary boundaries ever separated the discipline from other supposedly alien and incommensurable elements of a culture beyond- not in today's disciplinary crisis and not before. Even if it is possible to romanticize a past in which the discourse of international studies managed to sustain some semblance of an unequivocal voice at one with a continuous disciplinary heritage and occupying a definite territorial domain, this could not have been because this voice and the supposed boundaries demarcating its place really were fixed, sure, and undisputed. It could only have been because it was possible for a time (and by means analyzable) actively to marginalize, forget, and defer encounters with paradoxes, contesting themes, and resistant interpretations that are always part of the disciplinary inheritance, that transgress all imaginable boundaries, and that render radically unstable all renditions of an unequivocal voice. It could only have been because it was possible for a time to marginalize the very paradoxes, themes, and interpretations whose increasing visibility at the supposed core of the discipline have produced the sense of disciplinary crisis today.

To understand this is to see why dissident works of thought issuing from the margins have been able to incite a sense of crisis in international studies. In a disci-


pline or in modern culture more generally, we have suggested, a crisis of representation is occasioned by the proliferation of transgressions of institutional limitations, and if this is so, then a condition of crisis is that institutional boundaries be transgressable. This condition, we can now say, has always been satisfied by the discipline of international studies. The "boundaries" of the discipline, never more than contingent and ambiguous effects of active and arbitrary labors of marginalization, have always been susceptible to transgression.

How have dissident works of thought incited disciplinary crisis? In addressing this second question it makes sense to begin where dissident works of thought begin, with that most paradoxical of "beginnings": marginality. In contrast to scholarly works that would speak in unison with the supposed "core" of a discipline, tradition, or paradigm, works of thought that issue from the margins cannot seriously entertain a religious attitude. For them, the contingency, ambiguity, and transgressability of "boundaries" has always been the immediate reality of life to be celebrated. Why is this so? The answer lies in the visibility of paradox at the margins. How, given this celebratory attitude, are marginal works of thought oriented to conduct themselves? The answer lies in what we might call the ethics of marginal conduct.

Marginality: the visibility of paradox. What constitutes the so-called sovereign "core" of a discipline or paradigm is not, as we have seen, a territory, position, or homogeneous point of view anchored and defined by reference to a coherent, continuous, and well-bounded textual inheritance. What constitutes a "core" is the ability, in whatever location, actively to sustain for some time a semblance of a commanding sovereign presence by adopting a certain blindness to the paradoxical labors by which, even now, memorializing readings of a textual inheritance are undertaken and unsettling encounters with paradoxes of space, time, and identity are marginalized. Here, where the work of marginalization can be forgotten, it can make sense to speak in a religious register of desire and affirm memorialized foundations. Here, where it is possible to forget the dependence of a discipline or paradigm and its supposed foundations on this active and arbitrary labor of marginalization, one can profess a sovereign right to fill an exclusionary space and to speak and act in a way that represents and defends a coherent, well-bounded territory. One can speak in a register of desire, play the hero's part, and say, "This work speaks for the discipline, the tradition, the paradigm, and it speaks in answer to those alien happenings and difficulties that would pose a challenge, a puzzlement, or a danger." One can do this and get away with it, if only for a time.

What constitutes marginality is precisely the manifest inability to speak and labor in a register of desire and get away with it, even for a moment. Like the notion of a "core," the notion of a "margin" cannot really designate a time, a space, a code, a canon, a point of view, a future utopian order, an order nostalgically recalled, a personifiable state of mind, or a point d'appui of any sort. What distinguishes a "margin" of a discipline or paradigm from its so-called "core," accordingly, cannot be some real positions that might be marked on a social or intellectual map. What distinguishes the "margin" is that "here" and "now" it is impossible to do what must be done if, in answer to a religious desire, some semblance of a well-bounded and coherent territory is to be sustained: it is impossible to be blind to the active labor of marginalizing paradoxes of space, time, and identity that threaten to undo every pretense that one might speak a sovereign voice of a discipline, a paradigm, a community, or a culture.

Where are the "margins?" In the paradoxical instant when the peace researcher discovers that her dynamic arms race models in the Richardson tradition-her attempts to think us out of processes that occur when decision makers "don't stop to think"-impose fixed parameters that suppose and affirm the necessary stoppage of


thought. In the reading of Weber that takes seriously Weber's engagement with Nietzsche as well as Marx. In the moment where the analyst comes to see that representations of voluntaristic agency disrupt representations of the autonomous determinations of generative social structures and vice versa-and that "structura- tion" can mean for her no more than a desire to affirm and occupy some scientific standpoint prior to all representations that can surely resolve the paradoxes of agency and structure. In the instant when a theorization of an international anarchy/ domestic hierarchy dichotomy is disrupted by the dissolution of one of two poles of a supposedly bipolar world. In the work of a theorist who wants to make sense of Third World sovereignty, where anarchy seems to be on the "inside" and the center of authority seems to be on the "outside." In the work of positivistic regime theorists who discover, as Kratochwil and Ruggie (1986) show, that an objectivist epistemology cannot sustain a study of regimes when the ontology of regimes is subjective through and through. In the frustrations of feminist theorists whose efforts to gain a hearing for their insidious questions are greeted by a discipline's condescending guidance regarding the "influences" one must not fall prey to, the questions one must not ask. In the work of scholars studying social movements whose practices, strangely, seem little concerned with the problem of seizing, toppling, or controlling the "actor" that international theory declares to be central.

Where, again, are the margins? They are all those boundless, unnameable regions of activity where an itinerate religious desire immediately struggles to marginalize paradoxes of time, space, and identity; where this active and arbitrary work of marginalization is highly visible and cannot be forgotten; where, thanks to the visibility of the struggle, desire necessarily fails; and where, as a result, the sovereignty of a discipline or paradigm becomes a strange and rarefied ideal, a question never finally answerable, a paradoxical task that cannot be one's own. This is what "marginality" means. It can mean no more.

For works of thought that issue from the margins, therefore, only a celebratory posture can take seriously life's real possibilities and limitations. In the marginal site, only the register of freedom-a register that affirms and exploits ambiguity, uncertainty, and the transgressability of institutional boundaries-can effectively speak to the paradoxes, dangers, and opportunities immediately unfolding.

It is thus quite clear why works of thought issuing from the margins are disposed to celebrate and take advantage of the transgressability of boundaries, itself the condition of crisis. But if we are to answer the "how" question posed, we need to understand something about the practical orientation-one might say the diplomatic ethos- implicit in works of thought that would proceed in a celebratory register of freedom. Contra Giddens (1979) and Lapid (1989:237), we need to understand that the celebratory attitude of dissident scholars does not need "constructive critical delimitation in order to anticipate and preempt the dangers of indiscriminate theoretical elation." In terms of ethical discipline at least, dissident works of thought issuing from the margins are already doing very well on their own.

Marginality: the ethics of conduct. It is often noted, as we have noted, that speaking and acting in a celebratory register of freedom involves a readiness to question supposedly fixed standards of sovereign judgment and to transgress institutional limitations, and from this it is often inferred that conduct in this register amounts to a sort of licentious activity whose credo might be "Anything goes!" It is inferred that when words and deeds proceed in this register of freedom every notion of criticizing and disciplining conduct is out the window because, given the refusal to refer conduct to some presumably fixed and universal standard ofjudgment, every word and deed must be presumed to be as good, as ethical, or as effective as the next. This, for example, is the inference that Michael Walzer (1986) draws when he reads Michel Foucault's work, itself conducted in a register of freedom. Walzer describes


Foucault's work as a "radical abolitionism" that would look upon all moral and ethical systems and say, "Away with them all!" He concludes that Foucault's work is a sort of nihilism that would leave people in a moral and ethical void, open the way for the entry of "new codes and disciplines," deprive people of any way of knowing "that these will be any better than the ones we now live with," and even deny people "any way of knowing what 'better' might mean" (1986:6 1).

The inference, though, is not so binding as Walzer and others seem to think. It depends for its logical force on an equation of disciplined, ethical thought and conduct with the imposition and observance of limitations that can themselves be unambiguously defined and justified from the standpoint of a sovereign center of judgment that commands a space, authenticates what is valuable and good within, defines alien or dangerous modes of thought and conduct to be excluded, and is itself beyond question. In other words, the inference presupposes an understanding of disciplined, ethical conduct that is articulated with and that cannot be practically effective in the absence of a territorialization of social and political life in all its aspects.

This, surely, is an important understanding of ethical discipline. No doubt it has prevailed for some time in modern culture, spanning at least from Hobbes's moral philosophy through Kant's categorical imperative to Habermas's universal prag- matics of the ideal speech situation. And certainly a readiness positively to value this understanding articulates well with the workings of a nomadic and abstract desire, a religious desire to effect a territorial domicile where men of unquestioning faith can innocently and securely dwell. Even so, it is not the only understanding imaginable, and it is not immune to criticism. Consider just two criticisms.

First, this territorializing understanding of ethics is intrinsically paradoxical. In the discipline of international studies and in general, to be practically effective any semblance of a sovereign center to which ethical discourse might be referred depends upon the forgetting of the ongoing labor of marginalizing those ambiguities, uncertainties, and contesting interpretations that would even now undo or disrupt the pretense of sovereign certitude. As this is so, any understanding of disciplined, ethical conduct that would aspire to cast all activities in the clarifying light of a sovereign center of universal judgment-in the light of some given consensus, for example, or some canon for the production of consensus-ironically depends upon the exemption of certain activities from the critical, juridical light to which it would refer. It depends upon the undertaking of an active labor of marginalization that must be forgotten, that must elude this light, that cannot be justified or licensed by reference to a center of critical judgment, and that cannot be disciplined in this way. A universalistic ethical system, so understood, always depends upon a reach of activity that exceeds the system's ethical grasp.

Second, as noted, to speak in a register of desire and value the abstract ideal of a territorial and sovereign-centered ethical discipline as a pure positivity-to value it as at once the necessary precondition and telos of human beings' ethical discourse- is also to value work conducted in a celebratory register as purely negative, as work that negates ethical considerations and leaves people unable to distinguish good conduct from bad or better events from worse. This valuation, though, is an instance of conduct in its own right, and so we might ask of it some ethical questions. Why is this valuation good, right, or better than others? Why should we embrace it to the exclusion of attempts to explore other ways of thinking questions of ethics, of social discipline, or self-discipline? Why, especially, if any attempt to intone a universal "we" today must include those multiplying marginal sites where religious desire is visibly untenable in the sense that it visibly fails to resolve paradoxes of space, time, and identity and to produce for people any secure and practicable territorial tenancy? In all the widening margins of a discipline and a culture, the question echoes: why?


If those who profess to be comfortably at home and at one with the ostensibly sovereign centers of a discipline or a culture feign deafness to the question, those who labor in the margins do not sit idly awaiting answers that can never come. There are more important things to do. After all, there are dangers to be avoided and dealt with. There are resources of life to be produced. There are conditions of scarcity- limitations on the social resources that one can access and put to use in the locality of one's labors. Encroaching from every direction there is a variety of disparate narratives, each projected as if from some sovereign center, but no one more true to one's paradoxical situation than the next. These narratives visibly vie to project themselves into one's uncertain location, to claim one's time, to control one's space, to impose representations of what one necessarily is and does, to summon justifications of oneself and one's conduct in terms of some distant norm against which one might always be seen to fail, and to impose some penalties of deprivation or exclusion in instances of failure. And yet there is no prospect that one can, with the resources locally available, resolve the paradoxes of one's immediate situation, exclude ambiguities and contesting interpretations, and make of oneself and one's locality an extension of any of the territories of sovereign being projected by these narratives. With none of these territories can one be innocently, contentedly, and safely at home.

It is easy to see how persons in such a situation would refuse a religious orientation whose ideal of sovereign being can be deployed to impose limitations and sanction punishments while speaking not at all to the practical hazards and difficulties of making life go on in these uncertain marginal circumstances. It is easy to see how persons would be given to speak and act in a register of freedom, to exploit the ambiguities before them, to question those limitations institutionalized as necessary, and to expand the resources available to them. But it is also easy to see something more. If conduct in the margins proceeds in a celebratory register of freedom, it certainly will not announce that "Anything goes!" Precisely because freedom is valued under circumstances like these, no maxim could be considered less efficacious. Here especially, one must always be prepared to understand that some ways of acting, speaking, and writing are better or worse, more or less effective, and more or less dangerous. Here especially, questions of ethical discipline, even diplomacy, are paramount.

It is true that we cannot represent, formalize, or maxim-ize deterritorialized modalities of ethical conduct. We cannot evoke a juridical model, define the good life, and lay down the code crucial to its fulfillment, as if bespeaking some universal consensus formed according to rules of discourse already given, without at the same time covertly imposing a principle of territoriality that these modalities refuse to entertain. But our inability to represent human beings does not prevent us from talking about it or from trying to understand how it might orient deterritorialized ethics in the valuation and disciplining of their activities.

Any attempt to understand such an ethical orientation must take very seriously the real and vital problem of the person in one or another specific marginal site, be it at the margins of the discipline of international studies or one of the countless other marginal sites of modern culture. For this person, the practical site is one where paradoxes of space, time, and identity disturb and undo any attempt to live and act according to some semblance of sovereign, territorial being. For this person, who must make her life but cannot make of it a triumph of religious desire, the problem might be posed thus: How might one proceed in a register of freedom to explore and test institutional limitations in a way that sustains and expands the cultural spaces and resources enabling one to conduct one's labors of self-making in just this register offreedom, further exploring and testing limitations? Several features of a problem so posed merit notice:


1. The problem has no determinate solution. No fixed goal or stable end-state is aspired to. As Foucault (1984a:375) might have put it, the problem is not "determined by a preestablished political outlook," and it does not "tend toward the realization of some definite political project." The problem is precisely one of how, here and now, in immediate and concrete circumstances, to engage in critical labors that not only work on institutional limitations but also further enable such critical labors. If anything permanent would or could come of this, it is only the permanence of this critical labor working on limits.

2. While this problem focuses on the person in the local site, it is not an individual who may be presumed to have any necessary, limiting, and transcenden- tally apprehensible natural identity, least of all some fixed and necessary essence of rationality. In any site, identity is in doubt, what counts as reason is visibly in question, and the reason that counts, practically speaking, is that which enables the testing of the institutional limits of the necessary.

3. It follows that this person cannot be engendered as "man," or even engendered at all; for this person all institutional differences, even gender differences, are potentially in doubt, in question, in process of being imposed and resisted all at once.

4. The problem is very practical, even a matter of life and death for those persons who must toil to sustain themselves and nurture their children in marginal sites. Life depends upon the ability to question and traverse cultural limitations, thus to expand the resources that might be put to work in the autonomous constitution of self and selves. Yet in any instant various sovereign authorities stand ready to harden institutional boundaries, pass judgment, reward what they regard as compliance, and inflict punishment upon those they regard as transgressors.

5. If it is a practical problem, it is also a political problem involving questions of power and resistance, strategy and counterstrategy. Yet precisely because the person's identity and defining limitations are in doubt and in process, one cannot cast the problem in terms of any atomistic model of politics, one cannot comprehend strategic action in terms of one or another rational model of choice and conduct, and one cannot comprehend power according any model of the repression of a true or sovereign identity already in place. At the same time, because the problem as posed from this local site involves a refusal to embrace any sovereign-centered transcendental narrative, it cannot be framed in terms of structural totalities that bear down upon, limit, or generate individual agents, their possibilities, and their internal constraints.

6. Since the person's identity is in process and in doubt to the very core, one cannot think of the problem of self-making on the model of a sovereign author who would write himself as text, and one cannot equate the problem of freedom with the problem of expanding the exclusionary arc of a social territory whose meanings can be uniquely and autonomously determined. Self-making is not a "private" matter; freedom cannot be reduced to a matter of expanding the domain of "private property" autonomously controlled; the expansion of freedom simply cannot be equated with the expansion of sovereign powers.

Appreciating these features of the problem, we can begin to glimpse why it is not only a practical and political problem but also a problem having a distinctly ethical cast. The person involved in this problem might be said to be preoccupied with "her" local task of self-making, and she might be said to be concerned above all with expanding "her" local space of freedom. But in saying this, one must take care to insert every use of the possessive case between quotation marks, for the person in question can least of all be said to be a possessive individual. The distinctions between "her" task of self-making and "our" task of self-making, between "her" space of


freedom and "our" space of freedom, or between "local" and "global" or "private" and "public" for that matter-all of these distinctions are already part of "her" problem. All are already among the institutional limitations that "she," in working on "her" limits, is given to question and possibly traverse in the expansion of "her" cultural spaces of freedom. "Her" problem of testing limits and expanding a cultural space of freedom in "her" immediate locality, therefore, is always already part of a problem of pushing "ourselves," in Foucault's words (1984b:43), to explore what limitations are not or are no longer "indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects." And it is atjust this point-where the differences between the "she" of a locality and the "ourselves" who span localities are tested-that ethical considerations, which are also practical, political, and diplomatic considerations, arise.

There are uncertainties and risks involved in any attempt to test institutional limitations and open up cultural possibilities in concrete historical situations. To question, test, and expose the arbitrariness of institutional limitations that traverse one s immediate locality is in principle to open up one's space of freedom by exposing cultural resources hitherto forgotten or closed off. Were it possible to treat one's immediate locality in isolation from others, one might say that that is all there is to it. Viewing the immediate site as an enclosed world unto itself, a paradigm in and for itself, one could make an unrestrained questioning of limitations one's principle of conduct. One could unhesitatingly judge good all conduct conforming to this principle. But it is plain that this notion of isolation itself involves a limitation, a boundary that separates the locality from sites beyond. And it is plain, too, that in questioning this limitation, one becomes sensitive to the possibility that there are other sites beyond one's own where one's questioning and testing of limitations might constitute a danger. There are, after all, other people who are trying to get on with their lives in ambiguous and hazardous circumstances, and these people might try to inscribe their identities and demarcate their ambiguous locations by appeal to institutional categories that at once presuppose and affirm the necessity and impermeability of the very limitations one might question in one's own local site. For them, the institutional categories might be practical resources of life-resources that empower. And for them, the questioning of limitations supposedly fixed in these categories might threaten to deprive them of these resources, depleting their power and leaving them in a highly vulnerable condition of scarcity.

True, one's questioning of these limitations presupposes the possibility that the institutional categories are contingent and in the process of being imposed, not necessary and already given; that the boundaries inscribed in these categories are transgressable in all directions; that, in fact, the people who would locate themselves in terms of these boundaries are not really other to oneself; and that the opening of these boundaries would expand spaces and cultural resources of freedom that are "theirs" as much as one's own. But to presuppose this is also to presuppose the possibility that the people who would locate themselves in terms of the boundaries one questions are in circumstances no less paradoxical, no less uncertain than one's own: they share one's own problem of freedom even if, in their specific concrete circumstances, they rely on different resources and contend with a different constellation of immediate limitations on what can be thought, said, and done. In other words, one must allow that "their" immediate and very real strategic situations in the struggle for freedom are not behind one's own or inferior to one's own but simply differing from one's own. That is why there are risks.

If, in the process of testing limitations, one assumes that one's local strategic situation is a paradigm for the struggle for freedom wherever it unfolds, then one is all too likely to be impatient with others' labors in others' strategic situations. In one's impatience, one is all too likely to be insensitive to the ways in which one's own conduct-one's way of questioning limitations-might ramify beyond one's locality


and threaten to deprive others of the cultural resources by which they reply to the problem of freedom in other equally difficult strategic settings. In turn, this threat, so real to others, is likely to generate most unfortunate results. Wanting to sustain the cultural resources that empower them in their own local strategic situations, those who are threatened are likely to participate in those arbitrary practices by which institutional boundaries are affirmed.

For them, the result is to consecrate some semblance of a sovereign territorial ground they might call their own, even at a cost of freedom. No longer are they so able as they might once have been to exploit those cultural resources that must be marginalized and forgotten if these boundaries, and just these, are to define the domain they defend as their own. For the one who would question these boundaries, the result is disastrous! With the hardening of boundaries, one's own domain of freedom is now more limited. What is worse, one must now contend with some semblance of a sovereign "they" who are likely to know one as an alien Other. Given what "they" know to be the scarcity of "their" resources, "they" might be given to claim one's own resources and practical space as "their" own and to judge one's conduct and find it wanting by "their" standards. Such an outcome is dangerous. It is bad, far worse than others that might have been produced.

And what of the impatient, insensitive conduct born of paradigmatic conceit that produces this result? It is strategically artless, practically ineffective, and ethically wrong. It would have been far better to have respected the paradoxical reality of one's local situation, a reality that radically subverts all pretenses that one's situation might be bounded, clearly represented, and re-presented as a paradigm for the strategic situations of others. Respecting this reality would not lead to any kind of introver- sion, imperial conceit, or smug indifference to others' circumstances. Least of all would it lead to passivity. It would instead encourage a patient labor of listening and questioning that seeks to explore possible connections between the strategic situations of others and one's own, always sensitive to the problem of expanding the space and resources by which the ongoing struggle for freedom may be undertaken there as well as here.

This, certainly, is not a sort of ethics that would lend itself to any kind of ahistorical monological account; that would discipline people by calling upon them to measure their conduct as better or worse representations of some universal norm, code, or perspective; or that could be called upon to summon, focus, and excuse "our" exercises of "our" means of violence to punish or exclude those people who would transgress the limitations that "we" take to be crucial to the sustaining or production of "our" good life. But a sort of ethics it surely is. If it refuses the discipline of some supposedly authoritative voice of a universal "we," it does discipline the active labor of self-making, orienting that labor not only to respect the uncertainties of every immediate locality but also to explore the connections across localities upon which the struggle for freedom depends. If it is not oriented to mobilize and concentrate social violence in the exclusion of transgressors, it does dispose persons insistently to question and resist, in their own conduct as well as that of others, every impulse to adopt the religious posture of one who heroically speaks and acts as the sovereign voice of an exclusionary domain. And if, in the struggle for freedom, it encourages transgressions that sovereign authorities might construe as local instances of violence against exclusionary rights of possession, it does orient persons to question and undo all institutions that would mobilize total violence in the name of a territory uniquely possessed. Of this ethics we might ask two questions.

First, it has been noted that a positive valuation of a sovereign-centered territorializing ethics entails a negative valuation and an exclusion of an ethics of the sort we have been discussing. Is the reverse also true? No. To value what, with Foucault (1988), we might call an ethics of freedom is not to negate or exclude those instances of ethical discourse that would affirm one or another sovereign center of judgment.


It is instead to be disposed to undertake a patient work of questioning and listening that makes it possible for discourse to cross the territorial boundaries that would enclose any such sovereign center's supposedly exclusionary domain. The problem is not one of how to impose this ethics from on high or how to make doubters believe in it-a problem whose very posing can only seem strange to people of marginal sites who would practice this ethics of freedom. It is a problem of how, working from local sites and according to this ethics of freedom, to enable the rigorous practice of this ethics in the widest possible compass.

Second, can this ethics, by virtue of encouraging a struggle for freedom, license activities that would quash democratic discourse and produce some form of totalitar- ianism? Absolutely not. Where this ethics is rigorously practiced, the democratic practices of listening, questioning, and speaking are encouraged to traverse the institutional limitations of private property, private voting booths, private interest group politics, and private paradigms; they are encouraged to traverse the institutional limitations that separate nations, classes, occupational categories, genders, and races; they are encouraged to traverse the institutional limitations that separate centers from peripheries, haves from have-nots, good citizens from aliens without and scape-goats within, and the uncertain realities of the present from nostalgically remembered golden ages or promised utopian futures. Where this ethics is rigorously practiced, no voice can effectively claim to stand heroically upon some exclusionary ground, offering this ground as a source of a necessary truth that human beings must violently project in the name of a citizenry, people, nation, class, gender, race, golden age, or historical cause of any sort. Where this ethics is rigorously practiced, no totalitarian order could ever be.

The practices of dissident works of thought. In their questioning of the institutional limitations of the discipline of international studies, dissident works of thought not only celebrate the possibility of transgressing boundaries but also, in doing so, put in to practice something like the ethics we have been discussing. This is not to say that these dissident works have exhibited a perfect command of a new ethical or diplomatic art of theoretical and political practice. In view of the uncertainties and ambiguities of marginal sites where these works move, it is not surprising to find that dissident scholars have made their fair share of clumsy steps and maladroit state- ments. With the benefit of hindsight, we must concede that some of our own contribution can be singled out as vivid evidence of how easy it is, despite one's best efforts, to misread a situation and misfire. We do want to suggest, however, that these mistakes have not been exempt from criticism-or from discipline, if you will-in terms of the strategic, practical, and ethical considerations we have been raising.

For dissident scholars, there may be no correct line. But there is a fairly well developed sense that it is incorrect to close one's ears to criticism in terms of ethical questions such as these: Might this or that move or posture be too impatient, too paradigmatically proud, too insensitive to the differences of circumstances-no less difficult and uncertain-in which others work? Might one's posture or way of writing thereby have the effects of closing off rather than opening up the possibilities of new connections and of limiting rather than expanding the spaces wherein the labor of testing limitations might go on? Might another way of speaking and conducting one's labors be better? We think that the work of dissident scholars in international studies, viewed over the past few years, has been responsive to criticism posed in these terms. This can be seen, we think, in a shift of emphasis that has occurred in dissident works of thought. We shall speak of two overlapping "phases," each containing traces of the other.

The first phase of dissident scholarship in international studies is predominantly concerned with the performance of what might be called a relay function. Listening to what is happening in the multiplying marginal sites of a culture-from the relations between the sexes in Beijing and relations between "East" and "West" in Europe,


through the activities of new social movements in various locales, to controversies in feminist, social, and literary theory-dissident works of thought bring to the attention of the discipline a sense of crisis that is already alive in these proliferating sites, that is already producing serious perils, and that, at the same time, is already gener- ating exciting explorations in the thinking and doing of politics. Taking these perils and explorations seriously, dissident scholars do not let the discipline turn a deaf ear to such events, their implications for global political life, or their implications for the study of power, agency, political practice, and so on. They seek to show how and why such far-flung cultural happenings, far from properly belonging to the shadowy periphery of disciplinary interest, raise questions that might prompt it to think anew its most central understandings of the world and of its place in it. And in this, dissident scholars can be heard to hold out a promise of freedom: if members of the discipline would only question those assumptions and commitments upon which disciplinary boundaries depend-commitments to statism, positivism, and male-engendered models of agency, to name a few-they would be able to listen to, learn from, and put into practice all the unfolding possibilities hitherto denied them. They could escape the limitations hitherto ensnaring them and enhance their capacities to understand, to speak in answer, and to think in serious ways about how people might respond to the perils and opportunities of modern global political life.

There is, though, something troubling, even self-defeating, about a promise so issued. First of all, while the performance of this relay function takes as its premise the transgressability of disciplinary boundaries-while it credits the discipline with the ability to comprehend what is relayed to it from beyond its boundaries-it nevertheless announces itself as a transgression of the discipline's boundaries from beyond those boundaries. In so doing, it implies that there is a discipline that is bounded, however arbitrary and porous its boundaries might be shown to be.

Second, there is more than a hint of hubris involved in the performance of this relay function. The dissidents, it seems to suggest, are in a privileged position relative to the discipline. They might not claim to be the heroic champions of a counter- discipline, but their performance of the relay function by itself seems to assume that they have the discipline at something of a disadvantage: they know something or have access to a vocabulary or method that has hitherto been beyond the discipline's reach. At the very least, the performance seems to put the dissidents in a position of ones who give a gift of freedom to the discipline and to whom, accordingly, the discipline must be indebted.

Third, the promise of freedom, so issued, is hollow-a promise of a freedom so abstractly theoretical as to seem hopelessly out of touch with the difficult and de- manding practical situations in which scholars of international relations actually work. For this promise, issued in this way, does not empower scholars in the sites of their labors. On the contrary, this relay function, undertaken alone, exposes the arbitrariness of a discipline's boundaries and deprives its scholars of a place to call home; it embarrasses them for their ignorance of or indifference to what the privileged dissidents already know; it undermines assumptions and commitments that these scholars value, not as truth but as cultural resources that can be put to work in testing limitations and exploring possibilities; and, as if to compensate for all of this, it offers these scholars freedom to . . . To do what? To join the privileged ranks of the dissidents? To perform this relay function anew? To participate in the seemingly pointless exercise of liberating a disciplinary space that has been shown to be grounded in assumptions as impoverishing as they are false?

A good example of this first phase of dissidence is sections 1 and 2 of Ashley's "The Poverty of Neorealism" (1984). Although sections 3, 4, and 5 of that long piece perform another function that we shall discuss in a moment, sections 1 and 2 are largely preoccupied with the relay function. Moreover, it is these sections that are


most often remembered (they are the only sections, apart from the Introduction, fully reprinted in Neorealism and Its Critics [1986] edited by Robert Keohane). What do these two sections do?

1. They come to a highly ambiguous and difficult to demarcate set of texts and assert the possibility of enclosing and knowing them as a disciplined activity that might be named. The texts (but which texts exactly, and which parts of these texts?) are called neorealist.

2. They display a hauteur that surpasses even that of Waltz's Theory of Interna- tional Politics. This is not just because they strike a pose of one who has thoroughly mastered the neorealist texts, understanding them, their workings, and their textual inheritance even better than their authors do. It is also because this pose of mastery bespeaks an impatience with the neorealist texts, as if they at once lag behind and impede the progress of some paradigmatic way of thinking and speaking that we who read and understand "The Poverty of Neorealism" already share.

3. Sustaining this masterful and impatient tone, they concentrate on neorealism's positivist, structuralist, utilitarian, and statist commitments. They attend especially to the way in which these commitments, each dubious in itself, work together to fend off criticisms and enclose neorealist discourse in an "orrery of errors" that excludes attention to important aspects of practice, power, politics, and history as process.

4. In doing these things, these two sections would seem to leave readers with a choice: On the one hand, one may embrace these neorealist commitments, in which case one enters the enclosure and is deprived of the capacity to think and speak in answer to most of what is important in world politics today. On the other hand, one may repudiate these commitments, in which case one is free of the limitations on thought that the neorealist enclosure would impose.

In sum, these two sections of "The Poverty of Neorealism" come to a highly ambiguous situation that eludes all dialectic and, in a manner more Habermasian than Foucaultian, they impose and enact a dialectic of emancipation. They issue a promise of an abstract freedom that comes to those who repudiate neorealist commitments. But more than that, they enact a myth of one who, upon repudiating these commitments, will emerge to a higher state of being where he can be sure of himself, proud of what he does, and master of his fate. But if this be mastery, just what is mastered? If this be freedom, just what can one freely do?

It is not difficult to understand why scholars who know themselves to be at one with a discipline so challenged do not rush to embrace a promise of freedom issued in this fashion. Given what would seem to be a proffered choice between getting on with their work as they know it and embracing a promise of freedom that rings hollow, the choice is easy: get on with the work. To be sure, there is always the risk that the disciplinary resources recurred to-the assumptions and commitments invoked-can no longer go without saying. Time and effort will now have to be expended defending these resources. What is worse, the defenses now will seem embarrassingly arbitrary and thin, often reducible to mawkish confessions of personal belief or commitment. And in the face of this persistent embarrassment, scholars will remember the dissident performers of this relay function in a negative way, as thieves of the night who have stolen that most precious of things: the possibility of innocent faith. Yet the struggle to test limitations and open up possibilities for new ways of seeing and doing must go on, a discipline's scholars might say. There are real and pressing dangers that need to be addressed, and in answer to these it does precious little good simply to turn loose of time-honored commitments, embrace the abstract promise, and say, "We are free."

By and large, dissident scholars would agree with such complaints. Whatever one's


intentions might be, it is strategically, practically, and ethically wrong to engage in practices that leave the work of thought and the struggle for freedom in such a bind. Boundaries and dichotomous choices are imposed and reified, and unnecessarily so. Resources that might be put to work in the testing of limitations are unnecessarily diminished rather than expanded and again unnecessarily so. As Jim George and David Campbell note in their article, strategems of discourse asserting that one must proceed "by recourse to either one option or another" might have a "seductive appeal," but they cannot equip us "to deal with the enormous issues of praxis that we confront in global life."

Yet dissident scholars, in reflecting upon such considerations, have persistently refused to do what many insist they are obliged to do if they are to get the discipline out of the bind into which some think they have put it. They have not offered a new paradigm. Dissident scholars have not conducted their work in the manner of an "alternative paradigm" that has its own sovereign center, its own exemplary heroes, its own memorialized texts, and its own territorial ground. Indeed, to read almost any dissident text is to find not only a formal refusal or paradigmatic conceit but also a series of textual moves that function to disrupt any attempt to conduct a memorializing reading and turn a text into a paradigm of any sort.

Why do dissident works of thought refuse to provide an "alternative" paradigm or framework? One reason is practical. Amidst a global crisis of representation, paradigmatic conceits have become downright impracticable for any scholarly enterprise that would expect not only to speak to something called global politics but also to be taken seriously in anything approaching the global scope to which it speaks. Another reason is theoretical. If international theory is to speak at all to the paradoxical problems of sovereignty and resistance to sovereignty emerging everywhere today, then it cannot turn a blind eye to the paradoxes of space, time, and identity whose irruptions in site after site have given proof to the instability of onetime "resolutions." And if international theory is not to be blind to these paradoxes, then it cannot compose itself in the form of a paradigmatic voice whose own pretense of sovereign certitude depends upon a supposition that a "resolution" of just these paradoxes is already given beyond doubt. There is still another reason, an ethical reason. In terms of an ethics of freedom, an "alternative paradigm" is in fact no alternative at all. As much as the tradition or discipline that a performance of the relay function would open up, any effective attempt to errect a "new paradigm" would result in the imposition of unnecessary limitations upon the work of thought. It would impose limitations even-and perhaps especially-in those shrinking cir- cles where it is possible to get away with the attempt. This would be a strategic mistake: the space for patient labors in the struggle for freedom would be limited, not expanded. For this reason, it would also be ethically wrong.

If dissident scholars have refused to offer anything like a new paradigm, however, it should not be thought that they have left the discipline in the bind produced by the relay function in the first phase of their work. These scholars have criticized their own and one another's labors in the very terms we have been using. They have learned from the criticisms they hear. And they have long since moved on to a second phase in which the relay function is no longer given pride of place.

This second phase, exemplified in the articles of this issue, involves no repudiation of the relay function. This function is still performed, as these articles show. But now it is evident that humility replaces hubris. As in George and Campbell's contribution to this issue, there is no hint that the performance of this function bestows a special advantage upon those who perform it, giving them a right to be impatient with a discipline hitherto neglectful of what is relayed. Nor is there any sense that in performing this function dissidents impose upon the discipline a dialectic of emancipation in which scholars must choose between a defense of a disciplinary enclosure


whose resources are negated, on the one hand, and a promise of an abstract freedom that does not empower, on the other. This is so because dissident scholars, in this second phase, give special emphasis to another function that is consistent with an ethics of freedom. Listening patiently to the works of thought already underway within any imaginable disciplinary boundaries, they perform a function that enables scholars to do what they are already disposed to do in the sites of their labors: to expand the space and resources by which limitations might be tested in the struggle for freedom. We call this a countermemory function.

Performing this function involves a countermemorializing mode of reading and analysis of the sort contrasted earlier with the mode of memorializing reading. Dissident scholars' performances of this countermemory function, however, are not restricted in their focus to the textual inheritance that a discipline might claim as its own. As undertaken by dissident scholars in the second phase, this function can be performed with respect to (1) the domain of human conduct that the discipline has traditionally regarded as its referent reality or object of study, (2) the domain of contemporary theoretical discourse in the discipline itself, and/or (3) the domain of the classic texts that might be said to record and constitute the discipline's remembered history. But across all three domains, the attitude of a countermemorializing analysis is the same. Respecting the textuality of all three domains and the intertextuality of the several, it departs sharply from that of a memorializing reading, a mode of reading and analysis that scholars of international relations have long practiced.9

A memorializing reading, it will be recalled, adopts a religious attitude and is conducted in a register of desire. Responding to a crisis of representation wherein the problem of sovereignty emerges, it aspires to make a text, discourse, or domain of practice function as a foundational reality capable of justifying and limiting discourse here and now. It aspires thereby to "resolve" present paradoxes of space and time, to fix limitations on what can be validly said and done, and to constitute a self- identical perspective that is uniquely able to decide what ambiguous and uncertain events of the present must mean. For example, a memorializing reading might strive to constitute a discipline's "referent reality" as an objectively given external domain that is not only independent of "our" knowing but also capable of authorizing and limiting what "we" can validly think and say about "our" world. Likewise, a memorializing reading might seek to constitute contemporary theoretical discourse as an activity in which all contributions, to be heard and valued, must be grounded in certain foundational "conventions," consensually shared "norms," or "commonsense understandings." And a memorializing reading might try to constitute a discipline's textual inheritance as the "origins" of a tradition, the "sources" of the powers of "insight" to which those of the tradition owe a perhaps unrequitable debt, the "exem- plars" of the limitations on discourse that "we" who are indebted must honor.

Obviously, these three domains of memorializing readings are not really separate: what counts as the discipline's "origins of tradition" or its "external reality" depends upon its "conventions" of interpretation, for example, just as these "conventions" or "commonsense understandings" depend for their fixity on the ways in which an intrinsically ambiguous "external reality" or a historical "origin" might be actively read. Just as obviously, none of these domains can really provide anything like a pure, continuous, and uniquely interpretable foundation capable of finally limiting the discourse of a discipline. Yet a memorializing reading tries to separate these domains and make them function in just this way. And to do so, it must proceed in a

9A discussion of textuality and intertextuality that is especially sensitive to the political issues is Said (1983). With respect to international relations, see also the theoretical discussions by Shapiro (1988)and Ashley (1988) as well as the rich array of intertextual analyses in Der Derian and Shapiro (1988).


way that makes it possible to forget the paradoxes of space, time, and identity that appear in any domain; that would disrupt any notion that a domain could provide a foundational reality beyond doubt; that would put boundaries between the domains in question; and that would (if taken seriously) enable the exploration of all sorts of cultural resources that traverse these boundaries.

In contrast to this familiar mode of memorializing reading, a countermemorializing analysis proceeds in a celebratory register of freedom. It examines these domains as open, mutually interpenetrating texts that are always in the process of being written, and it seeks to enable encounters with the unsettling play of paradox that memorializing readings try to forget but can never really exclude. In this way, the performance of a countermemory function complements the performance of the relay function. For if a countermemorializing reading tests limitations on disciplinary discourse that memorializing readings would impose-thereby exposing the arbitrariness of these limitations and opening the discipline to the performance of the relay function-it also exposes cultural resources that have hitherto been forgotten within the discipline's own discourse. It exposes cultural resources that are in the ambiguous shadows of the "referent realities" of world politics that a discipline studies, that lurk in the peripheries of a discipline's "conventional" conversations, and that are buried in the footnotes, prefaces, and incidental remarks of the textual "origins" a discipline would honor.

Once again, the contributions to this special issue illustrate this second phase of dissident scholarship. The latter part of the article by George and Campbell might be said to concentrate primarily on the performance of a relay function; it offers a thoughtful review of dissident contributions to international theory over the last decade and considers the implications of these contributions for the discourse of the discipline. But in the earlier parts of the article, before the relay function is performed, George and Campbell conduct a countermemorializing analysis of the discipline's cultural inheritance. They note that the discipline's "great debates" over matters metatheoretical have functioned largely to erect a disciplinary sense of "tradition" that seals itself off from "a variety of dissident voices which . . . have called to account the given, axiomatic and taken-for-granted 'realities' of . . . dominant disciplinary discourses." Performing a counter-memory function, they reopen the conversations closed by these debates. More than that, they enable the discipline to reopen its own interrupted conversations with contributors to Western thought who have never really been alien to international studies: contributors so diverse as Des- cartes, Kant, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Wittgenstein, Winch, Kuhn, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas, Derrida, and Foucault.

In much the same way, one can note the performance of a relay function in the articles by James Der Derian, Bradley Klein, Michael Shapiro, William Chaloupka, and Cynthia Weber. For example, Chaloupka draws attention to the thinking of Baudrillard and Foucault; Der Derian additionally calls attention to Virilio's strangely neglected work on the question of speed and politics; and Cynthia Weber relays the implications of Nietzsche's and Samuel Weber's analyses of institutions. Even as they perform this function, however, all concentrate on the realities of international politics that the discipline traditionally studies. Der Derian examines "forces" of simulation, surveillance, and speed; Klein focuses on NATO and strategic practices; Shapiro concentrates on strategy, geopolitics, and the formation of security policy; Chaloupka takes up the question of local, personal, or "lifestyle" practices, especially as these might (or might not) prove to be effective strategies of intervention on the part of antinuclear and ecology movements; and Weber examines questions of international debt and the restructuring of debt in Peru. In the course of analyzing these realities, moreover, all the contributors are at pains to situate their analyses with respect to more familiar contributions. Chaloupka, for


instance, locates his analysis in relation to familiar elite foreign policy attitude studies. Klein begins his analysis by recollecting conventional accounts of NATO.

But what is especially noteworthy about these analyses is the countermemory function they perform. As is to be expected in any countermemorializing analysis, these studies refuse the expectation, characteristic of memorializing readings, that reality must present itself as a constellation of already given subjects and objects that might provide autonomous origins of meaning, that might be unambiguously named and represented in theory, and that might authorize and limit what can be said about the world or done in the world. The refusal is evident, for example, in Shapiro's interpretation of commodified weapons as texts that can be read not for their intrinsic value but for the paradoxical representational practices involved in processes of valuing them; in Der Derian's mentioning of an "array of new technological practices" that are elusive, resistant to analysis, and that poststructuralists might "grasp" but never "hold;" and in Klein's eschewal of the notion that one might capture the politics of NATO in a "single master narrative."

Yet this refusal, for these studies, is not a negative but an enabling act. In each, the refusal permits analysts to assume a distance from the supposition that they are at home and at one with some sovereign center of interpretation that functions to decide how paradoxes of space, time, and identity must be resolved, thus to fix for one and all the modes of subjectivity, objectivity, and conduct that must count as real or valid to the exclusion of other possibilities. It enables them to ask questions that echo in the margins of modern political life: How, by way of what practices, by appeal to what cultural resources, and in the face of various disconcerting happenings, are ambiguities tamed, paradoxes marginalized, and limitations effected so that a sovereign subjectivity and its corresponding objective territory of truth and meaning can be enacted and empowered on the historical scene? How, under what circumstances and by way of what practices, might ambiguity and paradox be exploited, limitations be tested, and a semblance of sovereign being be undone, thereby opening up possibilities excluded by it? As Chaloupka puts it in his article, to do this "is to take as crucial that which has been excluded by dominant discourses, to find in those exclusions hints or keys to the characteristics of power."

What is the result of analyses so conducted? It is distinctly not to speak in answer to a religious desire by holding out the promise of a determinate resolution to the problem of sovereignty emerging in a cultural crisis; such analyses persistently em- barrass all such promises by exposing their dependence on the arbitrary play of power. But neither is the result to disable a discipline by negating the cultural resources it claims as its own. Just the opposite, it is to disclose cultural resources already within the discipline's own ambit-resources that enable its participation in the struggle to expand the space of critical labor in reply to the perils and opportunities of a world in crisis. Complementing the relay function, a countermemorializing analysis makes it possible for a discipline to see that the paradoxes, uncertainties, and contesting interpretations emerging at the margins of modern global politics and the human sciences today are anything but alien to its experience. They are intimately familiar. They are already part of the space, the time, the identity it calls its own.

We thus have an explanation of the way in which works of dissidence, speaking from the margins, are able to accentuate a sense of crisis in the discipline. Our explanation starts with conditions of possibility, passes through the question of marginality and the disposition to celebrate the transgressability of disciplinary boundaries, and ends with an end-less ethics of freedom that disciplines the labor of dissidence, orienting it to expose and expand the resources by which a difficult work of thought may be conducted in international studies. The effect is disciplinary crisis, no doubt. Yet the sense of crisis produced by dissident works of thought is not one that deserves to be cast in a negative light. It cannot be understood in terms of


metaphors of "collapsed foundations," "disintegrating wholes," "dissolving paradigms," or the opening of a "void." For if it is no longer possible effectively to enact metaphors of "foundation," "disciplinary whole," and "coherent paradigm," it is now quite clear that these have never been more than metaphors enacted to the exclusion of other possibilities. And if, with the disabling of these metaphors, one can say that a space is now opening up in the discipline, one cannot say that that space is a void.

To read dissident works like those collected here is to understand that they have helped to open up a space now richer in cultural resources, a space where a critical labor of testing limitations can be undertaken, a space where it is possible to do the ethically disciplined work of listening, questioning, and expanding the cultural spaces of freedom where just this ethically disciplined work can go on. Can those who live and work in this space now opening conduct themselves on the model of a sovereign figure whose grounds are certain and whose gaze finally captures the truth of the world? No, and this is no cause for regret. Can those who live and work in this space rigorously analyze practices of power and speak in a serious, critical, and ethically disciplined way in reply to the problem of sovereignty and resistance to sovereignty as it emerges in a world deprived of certain territorial grounds? Yes, and this is an event to celebrate-an event too long postponed. For what has international politics ever been if not a marginal site of modern culture whose realities are paradoxical and recalcitrant in the face of all attempts to enclose and represent them from the totalizing standpoint of a single sovereign? What has international politics ever been if not a boundless, extraterritorial zone of modern political life where religious desire meets its limit, the play of power escapes a controlling word of truth, and conduct can proceed in a register of freedom?

What a Strategy of Reading Does

One likely criticism of our discussion of crisis is that we have belabored points that, for most people today, would not be at all surprising. After all, few people today have trouble with the idea that the Western mind will accept authority only by seeking to find the authority behind or underlying it, and then to find the authority behind that authority, and so on. Most can appreciate the idea, glimpsed in Weber's "disenchantment," that modern thought and conduct explodes or displaces all notions of tradition, cultural limits, religion, and conventional references-even, as Richard Rorty (1979) shows, every epistemological foundation upon which analytic philosophy might rely. Most have at least an inkling of what it means to say that a "deterritorialization" or "decentering" of modern life is occurring, or has occurred, and that it has undercut all notions of a certain source of truth and meaning that might be represented in institutions of theory or institutions of state. In sum, whether or not people are inclined to cite Nietzsche on a regular basis, few today miss the implications of his claim: in the modern world, God really does die.

Yet we hope that it will be understood that our discussion so far has not consisted of so many variations on the purely negative theme of destroyed foundations. It has not been our purpose to argue that in the modern world the grounds of authority have collapsed, that the career of sovereignty has consequently been having a tough time lately, and that dissident scholars have brought this to the attention of a discipline hitherto too much in the thrall of its impoverished practices and limiting traditional texts to notice, thereby prodding that discipline out of a metaphysical sleep.

In fact, we have at no point argued that foundations have collapsed or, as we would prefer to put it, that a crisis of representation is unfolding; for us, the material reality of this crisis is a premise in need of no argumentation, just as it is the premise of modern political discourse in general, including all those great texts to which


international theory would profess indebtedness. Similarly, we have at no point argued that the construct of sovereignty has become problematical as a result of a lack of secure foundations; as we have pointed out, sovereignty emerges as an intrinsically problematical construct precisely in response to a crisis of representation, and it emerges not as a concept representing some foundation already self-evident but as an active reply to a nomadic desire to fill a perceived void, compensate for a felt lack of foundations, mark off a territorial space, and effect an institutional order in which paradoxes of space, time, and identity can be resolved beyond doubt. Finally, we have at no point argued that the discipline of international studies has lacked the ability to respond seriously and critically to this crisis or its implications for the question of sovereignty; in our view, what above all is in question, what needs to be thought and argued about, is how those engaged in international studies have actively oriented and will orient themselves to exploit the resources of thought available to them in reply to the question of sovereignty and the associated paradoxes of space, time, and political identity.

Not the ability of the discipline but the will of the discipline-this is the issue. At issue is whether and to what extent those engaged in international studies will exercise their resources and their freedom to test limitations and open up possibilities, thereby both exploiting and expanding the spaces for thought and action in reply to the contemporary dangers and opportunities of global political life. This is the issue, we believe, because there is always the chance that scholars will not celebrate the space for critical labors opening up in crisis but will instead respond in a register of desire. There is always the chance that scholars, speaking and writing in this register, will effectively exercise anew those strategies by which, time and again, some semblance of a resolution to the paradoxical problem of sovereignty is imposed, a space for the disciplined labor of thought is closed off, and an opportunity to take seriously the deterritorialized realities of world politics is deferred.

And so we return to the strategies of reading dissident and marginal works of thought with which we began. We have explained how dissident labors have incited a sense of disciplinary crisis, prompting critical readings thereby. We have made plain the strategic situation of these readings: with the unfolding of disciplinary crisis amid cultural crisis, there emerges not only the paradoxical question of sovereignty per se but also the specific question of the sovereign territoriality of the discipline. Now it is time to ask what, strategically, the aesthetic practices at work in these critical readings do. What are they oriented to do? How do they do it? Can they do it in today's circumstances? Our answer is partly pessimistic-and partly much less so.

A Pessimistic Reply Any line of reply to these questions, whether pessimistic or optimistic, must begin by noting a crucial difference between the postures adopted by critical readings of dissident scholarship, on the one hand, and the situations and postures that these readings presuppose on the part of their imagined audience, on the other. Regard- ing the audience, we may note that critical readings of dissident texts are not addressed to scholars who are already inclined to produce the same readings. They are addressed instead to an audience of scholars whose situations, identities, and dispositions are rendered radically uncertain by the disciplinary and cultural crisis that dissident works of thought accentuate.

The members of this audience are no doubt highly varied in many respects, but given the circumstances of crisis in which these readings are offered, this much can be said of each member: "Her" situation is intrinsically ambiguous. "Her" position knows no necessary boundaries. "Her" self-understanding is very much in question and deeply involved in an indeterminate process of change. "Her" attitudes toward events of crisis and dissidence are ambivalent, conforming fully neither to a celebra-


tory register of freedom nor to a religious register of desire. These events are within "her" as much as they are external to "her." While "she" might actively and produc- tively engage these events, "she" does not compose "herself" as a speaking, writing subject who would claim to decide for the discipline what these events must mean. This is a posture that "she" has so far refused. Hence, any pronoun referring to this audience member as a subject must be put in quotation marks. Hence, too, any such pronoun might be gendered according to that gender which in patriarchal culture indicates an unrepresentable space of an other-an other who is both a boundless site of indeterminately proliferating possibilities (at once beauteous and dangerous) and a space that desire might mark off, fill, and domesticate as a sovereign's own. Of course, such an engendering of the audience is not correct in any necessary or biological sense. But it is a way of marking the audience presupposed and enacted by the posture of critical reading of interest to us here.

For what is especially noteworthy about critical readings of dissident scholarship is how very hard they work to effect postures that cannot be engendered "woman." As we noted earlier, they do not "read as a woman." Instead, they draw upon various cultural resources to effect the attitude of one who is sovereign: a speaking, writing subject who is called upon to represent a proudly certain identity-a paradigm, a discipline, a community, or a culture-that is threatened by exigencies of the moment. They adopt a juridicial posture, casting a sovereign glance toward dissident works of thought, regarding them as objects of judgment, and deciding what they must mean for a discipline or a culture. In doing so, these critical readings separate themselves from their uncertain audience, effecting a break from it. In doing so, also, they turn back upon and address their audience, relating to it in an ironic way.

For these readings, members of the audience are not alien objects, but neither are they speaking, writing subjects competent to decide for themselves what events of crisis and dissidence might mean. Paradoxically, these readings regard their audience much as Machiavelli regarded his feminized fortuna,10 in both a positive and a negative way:

On the one hand, the audience must function for these readings as a pure positivity, an origin of truth and power beyond doubt. It must constitute the vital material substance of the discipline, the tangible reality of the discipline's productive powers, the original and unquestioned presence of the discipline that the readings purport to represent in the course of passing judgment on dissident works. It is crucial to the sovereign posture of the critical readings that the audience function in this way, that is, as a representable presence whence power and truth originate. Having separated from the audience to become but a focus of decisive judgment, the posture of sovereign certitude effected by these readings cannot be claimed to embody any productive powers of its own, and it

10 Machiavelli begins Chapter 25 of The Prince, "How Much Fortune Can Do In Human Affairs and How It May Be Opposed," by noting that many hold the opinion that in a time of great change and chance, God and fortune might govern the events of men, depriving men of free will. Although conceding that he was "partly inclined to share this opinion," Machiavelli obviously wanted to encourage a more assertive posture. After all, the next chapter is Machiavelli's closing "Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians." He wrote (1940:91): "Nevertheless, that our free-will may not be altogether extinguished, I think it may be true that fortune is the ruler of half our actions, but that she allows the other half or thereabouts to be governed by us. I would compare her to an impetous river that, when turbulent, inundates the plains, casts down trees and buildings, removes earth from this side and places it on the other . . . [A]nd yet though it is of such a kind, still when it is quiet, men can make provision against it by dykes and banks, so that when it rises it will either go into a canal or its rush will not be so wild and dangerous. So it is with fortune, which shows her power where no measures have been taken to resist her, and directs her fury where she knows that no dykes or barriers have been made to hold her." Then, having given men some space for free will, Machiavelli concluded with a few remarks on how to use it (1940:94): "I certainly think that is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force; and it can be seen that she lets herself be overcome by the bold rather than by those who proceed coldly. And therefore, like a woman, she is always a friend to the young, because they are less cautious, fiercer, and master her with greater audacity." See especially Pitkin (1984).


cannot be claimed to be a source of truth in itself. If it is to project a truth and a power-if it is really to determine the significance of events-then this can be only because the word it speaks represents a prior wellspring of truth and power: the material substance of the discipline, the audience.

On the other hand, owing to the audience's ambivalence with respect to the circumstances of crisis, the audience immediately appears before critical readings as a negativity, a void. The uncertainty and doubt that runs through the audience under a condition of crisis makes it appear not as a self-evident and well-bounded presence, but as an indeterminate region of pulsing, intrinsically ambiguous activity that threatens to overflow every conceivable boundary and undo every attempt to fix what it means. The audience appears, in other words, as a reality that cannot be represented. For this reason, the audience threatens to deprive critical readings of the self-evident origin of truth and power they need to represent.

For critical readings, the paradox is unsettling: the unrepresentable reality of the audience does not conform to the positive ideal of a representable domicile of disciplinary being from which truth and power self-evidently emanate, and as this is so, the proudly certain posture of sovereign judgment which presupposes the ideal is threatened. To "resolve" this paradox in a way that affirms their sovereign pretensions, critical readings must relate to their unrepresentable audience, not just as a negativity, not just as a void, but as a void that must be filled, a void that summons forth a desire. They must relate to their unrepresentable audience as a void that summons the speaking, writing subject of the critical reading to move into the boundless space, impose boundaries, domesticate the audience's members, and make the audience function as a pure and indubitable presence that can be represented by a sovereign subject. Surely, if we need a pronoun to mark the sovereign voice simulated by this posture of reading, then we must erase any quotation marks that would indicate doubt, just as these critical readings labor to erase any hint of self-doubt. If we need to engender this voice, then we might again follow the conventions of patriarchal culture and call it His voice.

Can this male-marked voice prevail? Can critical readings of dissident works of thought domesticate the audience they address? Can they successfully impose upon their audience some sense that it occupies a definite territorial place-a discipline, a culture-that is now imperiled by "alien," "dangerous," and essentially "negative" events of dissidence emerging in its midst? Can these readings elicit in their audience a readiness to affirm and echo the sovereign voice of judgment they work to project-a voice that would stigmatize and exclude every impulse to take seriously these dissident works and to celebrate the cultural resources of thought and spaces of freedom they labor to open up? Can critical readings do all of this despite the fact that the crisis that occasions them deprives them of the ability to recur to some self- evident territorial identity, some foundation, some source of truth and power beyond doubt? Can they do all of this even though all they have at their disposal is an insubstantial, powerless, and itinerate desire to impose a male-marked sovereign presence?

There is cause for an affirmative answer, and it is here that pessimism creeps in. The cause for pessimism is to be found in a strategy of critical reading that works to impose upon an audience the structured situation of the double bind discussed earlier. In producing the double bind, we recall, critical readings of works of dissidence impose upon each member of their audience a definite role. They impose the role of one who understands that "she" has the freedom to make a choice, that here and now "she" must choose, and that even a failure to choose counts as a choice in the hazardous circumstances of the moment. Putting each audience member in the structured situation of the double bind, they also deprive "her" of every certain ground or standard of choice. They thereby leave "her" at once responsible for "her"


choice, exposed to judgment regarding the choice "she" makes, and quite uncertain as to how "she" and others might evaluate and judge the way in which "she" exercises "her" freedom to choose.

One immediate result is to produce for each audience member the role of one who experiences fear. Each member must choose, but "she" can never be certain that "her" choice is correct. "She" is therefore always injeopardy of being found guilty of error, a finding that would imply that in the exercise of "her" freedom "she" has slipped over to the side of the dissidents who are the objects of judgment in the critical reading before "her." There is, after all, a He who judges, a He who is certain of His being. There is a He whose certain presence is simulated by the juridical posture of the critical reading "she" reads.

A second result is that each member of the audience, upon experiencing this role, will be given to conduct "herself" in a register of desire. "She" will be given to know that "she" can begin to alleviate "her" anxieties only if "she" is endlessly and everywhere preoccupied with the question of what counts as truth, as effective standards, as workable foundations of judgment. This is not to say that "she" will take up the question of truth per se or embark on a search for absolute foundations. Such a course is cut off by the double bind. It is to say that the anxious occupant of this textually produced role will be especially sensitive to the artful ways in which the critical reading at hand and other similar texts assemble, disperse, and deploy disparate cultural resources to produce the verisimilar effect of a sovereign voice capable of authoritatively deciding what is properly of the discipline or tradition and what is external and opposed to it-His voice. It is to say that "she" will be given not to analyze these arbitrary cultural practices but to conform "her" own conduct to them. "She" will be disposed to make of "her" life a work of art in which "her" own voice and the sovereign voice of interpretation and judgment-the voice simulated by the critical reading at hand-are one and the same.

There is yet a third result. The member of the audience who reads the text of a critical reading, experiences the anxieties of the double bind, and resolves them in this way can no longer permit "herself" to be marked "she." Making "her" life a work of art conducted in a register of desire, "she" must now compose a voice that can never be heard to quaver in the self-doubts that resonate in "her" own uncertain situation and among the dissidents as well. "She" must compose a semblance of a self that is no longer perturbed by-that can indeed forget-the ambiguities, uncertainties, and contesting interpretations that traverse "her" precarious situation. "She" must conduct "herself" in the exemplary manner of the sovereign who judges, the one who seems to have successfully erased all marks of doubt so that He can claim to represent some paradigmatic place that He defends and on whose behalf He can judge. And in order to be Him, "she" must endlessly do what must be done if this male-marked semblance of sovereign certainty is to be sustained. "She" must endlessly regenerate this strategy of reading, making it "her" way of doing and being in reply to the ambiguous and uncertain circumstances "she" encounters. In "her" own work and in that of other members of the audience, "she" must greet each disturbing instance of paradox not as it is, not as an event that opens up a possibility for a labor of thought working on limitations, but as one more troubling circumstance to be grasped in terms of the double bind. "She" must thereby renew the moment of fear and desire that can be answered only by finding within the ambiguities of the present those resources that permit "her" once more to stifle doubts and make of "her" place and "her" self one more simulation of the pure, indubitable sovereign Him.

The singular instance of a critical reading therefore does not open up and then come to a close, finished and complete. Rather, it instantiates a mobile and iterable strategy of interpretation that works in any instance to generate and further circulate the strategic disposition instantiated. That is to say, it exemplifies and puts to work a


strategic disposition that can in principle be endlessly repeated, with each iteration producing dispositions to conduct still further iterations and with the several iterations chaining together in a kind of discursive political economy whose principal coin is fear and whose principal product is desire. Such a discursive political economy is productive, no doubt. If it works, it produces male-marked scholar-subjects, each of whom is disposed to reiterate the strategies of His production, to conduct and represent Himself as a sovereign being, to produce and valorize simulations of reality that function to displace ambiguity and paradox and give proof to the truth and power of the sovereign knower simulated, and to contribute in the process to the circulation of an abstract desire across whatever terrain these scholar-subjects happen to move. But if such a discursive political economy is productive in this sense, it also produces a scarcity of the paradoxical times, spaces, and cultural resources for the critical labor of thought in reply to the very real hazards and possibilities of a discipline and a culture in crisis.

Surely, then, there is cause for pessimism. The scholars of a discipline governed by iterations of this strategy might claim to be seriously engaged in the great social and political struggles bearing on questions of freedom, dignity, justice, welfare, ecology, and peace. But in fact they would be obsessed with the performance of an art of scholarly self-making that is conducted in a register of desire, that is radically detached from the material reality of a far-reaching crisis of representation, and that neither listens nor speaks to the real problems of people who must labor with scant resources to question limitations and generate possibilities in the paradoxical localities of life. Here would be a discipline: a discipline whose scholars are preoccupied with an aesthetics of sovereign self-making on an intellectual plane and who, so preoccupied, produce and circulate numerous paradigms, models, and other hyperreal simulations" that function primarily to substitute for the paradoxical, ambiguous, and uncertain realities that threaten to disconcert their semblances of sovereign certitude. Here would be the material reality of crisis that people confront: a reality of difficult labors to make life go on in uncertain localities where no semblance of sovereign being can be practically enacted and many claimants to the status of sovereign being compete to impose limitations on what one can say, think, write, and do. Here would be the way in which scholars of the discipline would judge the material reality of people's labors: as failures to live up to the aesthetic ideal of sovereign being exemplified in scholars' own arts of self-making. And here would be the way in which people caught up in the realities of crisis would return the favor: saddened by the withdrawal of intellect into self-enclosing and self-referential circuits of fears, desires, and simulations of pure sovereign being, they would also be grateful that so few people outside these circuits can take seriously what scholars of international relations have to say.

An Optimistic Reply

If there is some cause for pessimism, though, there is also considerable reason for optimism. There is reason to think that the strategy of the double bind exemplified by critical readings of dissident scholarship simply will not work any longer. Indeed, this strategy is already conspicuously failing to generate anything like a discursive political economy of fears and desires that is capable of enclosing the work of thought in international studies. In increasing numbers, scholars simply shrug off this strategy, as if the attempt at intimidation implicit in the pretense of sovereign judgment were just so much officious sound and fury issuing from a distant capitol

I On the notion of hyperreal simulation in international relations, see Der Derian's contribution to this issue and Luke (1988). The notion is introduced in Baudrillard (1983).


far removed from the immediate sites of their labors. Hints as to why this is so are to be found by looking at the critical readings themselves. Look, in particular, at the cultural resources they try to deploy, the metaphors they put into play, in their efforts to effect the posture of a sovereign voice capable of passing a judgment, eliciting a fear ofjudgment, and producing thereby a desire to be at home and at one with some semblance of a sovereign voice that is itself empowered to judge.

Even at a glance, what is remarkable is how very thin these resources are. Consider again some of the metaphors deployed: Firm evaluative standards versus relativism. Ethical conduct versus the abolition of ethical codes. Commitment to a position or perspective versus a lack or concealment of a position

or perspective. Political engagement versus a disintegration of political will. Reason versus irrationality. Lucidity of language and argument versus ambiguous, impenetrable speech. Modernity's accomplishments versus a reckless repudiation of these accomplish-

ments. Disciplinary authority versus marginal challengers of dubious legitimacy. Serious scholarly labor versus intellectual playfulness. Maturity and wisdom versus the intellectual bravado of youth.

These metaphors are thin in at least three senses. They are thin, first of all, in the sense of thin air. They call attention to themselves as words that refer not to the familiar if highly ambiguous realities engaged by scholars in their concrete intellectual efforts, but to a circuit of abstractions removed from and transcending these varied sites. They thereby suppose that speaker and hearer already have or should have effected a break from a situation of intimate and immediate engagement in specific scholarly labors and that they already aspire or should aspire to gather them all within the span of some singular optic. These metaphors are thin, secondly, in the sense of depleted resources. Signifying only a will to convene discourse on an abstract plane that would reflect upon a discipline or culture, these metaphors do not exemplify ways in which scholars, working in their specific settings and on their specific problems, might explore paradoxes, test limitations, expose ironies, generate the possibility of new meanings, and expand the resources of thought. They do not empower. And finally, these metaphors are thin in the sense of failing to conceal the strategic situation. Right there on the surface they announce the desperate strategic gambit being undertaken. They signal to the audience that the critical reading that mobilizes these metaphors is nothing less, but also nothing more, than a labor of desire that would impose upon an audience the structure of the double bind.

To the anonymous members of their audience, critical readings deploying these metaphors can be heard to say no more than this: You have a dichotomous choice to make between sovereignty and its absence. On the one hand, you may choose to ratify the ideal of sovereignty, that most paternally proper of paternally proper names. Should you choose sovereignty, it shall be possible to establish authority in a discipline or culture, to be on the side of reason, to have ethical and evaluative standards, to take a stand and concert a political will, to exercise mature judgment, to engage in serious, productive work that both preserves and advances modernity's accomplishments, and to speak and understand one another clearly, calling things by their unambiguous proper names. All of this is possible because sovereignty signifies the certainty of all these things. It guarantees that within some space and some time the proper meanings of truth, authority, reason, standards, political will, modernity, and so on-indeed, all words of any importance-will be fixed to the exclusion of all ambiguity, doubt, and contesting interpretations. On the other hand, you may


choose the absence of sovereignty, in which case . . . well, it is perhaps best to quote from the "original":

In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported. . .; no commodious Building; no In- struments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual feare.

And your life as a knowing, speaking subject of a discipline or a culture-it will be "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short" (Hobbes, 1968:186).

Unmistakably, a threat is being issued, but does it intimidate? Is it, more specifically, a threat that will touch a member of the audience in the sites of paradox and ambiguity where "she" undertakes "her" research and theoretical labors? Can it in any way affect what "she" actively does, the way "she" thinks in response to the questions of political agency, dignity, scarcity, peace, democracy, personal and cultural autonomy, and so on, emerging in the specific localities of "her" research? Slightly, yes, but only slightly and only on certain occasions. And it is easy to see why: The threat lacks substance. The resources deployed in critical readings of dissident scholarship are, again, as thin as can be.

Not exemplifying ways in which scholars might test limitations, expand resources, and take seriously the events unfolding in the localities of their work, the sovereign voices of judgment simulated in these critical readings cannot be regarded by scholars as representations of the productive powers that they enjoy and value, and upon which their abilities to think and question depend. For that reason, the sovereign voice simulated by critical readings cannot be offered and received as a focus of a discipline's powers. It cannot be offered and received as a center of judgment that might mobilize and concentrate the resources of a discipline, bringing these powers to bear upon activities that might be said to transgress necessary institutional limitations and endanger the productive life of a discipline. It cannot even be offered and received as a voice really capable, in itself, of deciding what counts as a necessary institutional limitation to be defended or as an instance of transgression to be excluded. Rather, the simulation of a sovereign voice appears before its audience as that most abstractly limiting of ahistorical abstractions: an ideal of sovereign, territorial being. And this ideal, in itself, is practically devoid of determinate content. It is indifferent to the specific historical forms sovereignty might take and to the specific boundaries that might be imposed so long as some sovereign center (any center) and some exclusionary boundaries (any boundaries) are imposed. The ideal is indeed forgiving of almost any kind of conduct that will pause now and then to gesture favorably to it, allowing as how an attempt is being made to honor it.

What the critical readings project, then, is nothing more than a desire to bring this ideal to historical life and make it work. They project a desire that awaits the practices that would give it substance and meaning and make it effective on the historical scene of a discipline or culture in crisis. They project a desire that lacks effective force-that awaits empowerment. And as if to compensate for this lack of power, these readings try to project a proudly certain voice that will not only elicit in their audience a fear of judgment but also, in so doing, inseminate among the audience's members a reciprocal desire to mirror and enact the sovereign voice of judgment in all the uncertain localities of their labors. Yet this desperate attempt to impose the double bind fails to touch each member of the audience where "she" actively works. For the voice that would judge, it is plain to see, is but a parody of its own ideal. It is a voice of would-be sovereign power that quakes in the knowledge that it lacks the power it desires to project into the paradoxical sites of research endeavor. There it is,


this semblance of a cocksure voice of sovereign judgment all full of itself and issuing the empty threat, There it is, the voice that trembles in self-doubt, trailing off into a barely audible plea, "Oh please, desire me."

This is an optimistic reply. It indicates why scholars are able to respond to attempts to impose the double bind upon their research endeavors not by making a baseless choice for sovereignty or against but by respecting the real and paradoxical problems of sovereignty and resistance to sovereignty unfolding in the specific regions of human conduct they study. They can refuse the dichotomy and, with it, the presumed necessity of choice. They can refuse to make a choice that is never already made in the indeterminate regions of paradox that they analyze, and with this refusal, they can get on with the disciplined work of thought. They can take seriously the ways in which an itinerate desire to impose a sovereign presence elicits a struggle for freedom that it can never finally subdue.

This optimistic reply is in need of qualification, to be sure. There are, after all, those highly ritualized occasions of scholarly discourse that specifically evoke some imaginary "state of the discipline," calling upon all parties to speak and conduct themselves as the discipline's citizens. Qualifying examinations, the submission of journal articles for anonymous review, the spectacular summitry of "great debates"-these are the official occasions of international studies. These are occasions where the thin metaphors we have been discussing are accorded a distinctive weight, each regarded as but one more gesture to the religious ideal of a well-bounded discipline anchored in a sovereign presence whence authority, reason, standards, and so on originate as one. These are occasions where one is expected to prove the merits of one's every contribution by showing how it promises to redeem this ideal, to bring it to life, and to give it determinate content and power, if only in the form of one or another hyperreal simulation of pure sovereign being. These, in sum, are occasions where one is compelled to speak, where speaking in the celebratory register of freedom is banned and speaking in a register of desire is required, and where, accordingly, the condition of entry is submission to the structure of the double bind.

Obviously, were scholars to privilege such official occasions as the loci classici of discourse in international studies-were they to regard such occasions as the uniquely authoritative moments to which all questions of truth and meaning in international studies must be referred-there would be several sorry consequences. Submitting always to the structure of the double bind, the critical labor of thought in international studies would be fragmented, short-circuited, and professionally de- meaned. Retreating into its own hyperreal simulations of pure knowing and being, the discipline's discourse could not seriously and critically engage the realities of an unfolding crisis of space, time, and political identity. This engagement would be indefinitely delayed.

But we need to ask if scholars really do privilege these official occasions as exciting, exemplary moments of scholarly productivity that anchor their identities, motivate their work, and establish their horizons of thought. Do they relate to official occasions as the radiant, universal norm of scholarship, nowhere to be questioned and everywhere to be honored and enacted in the labors of international studies? We suspect that for an increasing number of scholars of international relations the answer would be an emphatic no. We suspect, in fact, that for most scholars today the problem is no longer one of how to make their work live up to the ideals heralded on these official occasions. Just the reverse, the problem has become one of how to keep these occasions-with their thin resources, their recitations of the strategy of the double bind, and their hyperreal simulations of paradox-free worlds-from disrupt- ing and limiting scholars' attempts to listen, speak, and be heard as they engage in their disciplined efforts to exploit paradoxical spaces of freedom and push forward the critical labor of thought.


As evidence, we would point to three happenings in the conversations of international studies over the past several years:

1. Alternative channels of "unofficial communication"-edited volumes, xero- circuits, faxed communications, computer mail networks, and so on-are proliferating, and the volume of communications through these channels is rapidly increasing. Scholars now eagerly partake of these "unofficial communications," devoting an increasing proportion of their energies to them. They do so even though such participation can function primarily to enable and disseminate the critical labors of thought, not to ratify professional ac- complishment in the official public eye of the discipline.

2. Scholars increasingly acknowledge that they approach the question of publishing their work in official channels not as a problem of translating their work into the public language of the discipline, but as a problem of parody- ing, ironizing, and even subverting the self-enclosing circuit of platitudes that passes for the official code, thus to expose paradoxes and open up spaces for thought.

3. With greater and greater frequency, scholars of international studies try to create and exploit networks of communication that reach beyond the traditional limits of disciplinary affinity, which at one time might have emphasized disciplines and journals of political science, economics, sociology, psychology, mathematics, statistics, and so on. Today scholars of international studies as eagerly converse with and through the disciplines and journals of literature, literary theory, social theory, linguistics, aesthetics, philosophy, and more.

Put positively, these happenings indicate the opening up of international studies into a boundless space of freedom where disciplined labors of thought can proceed in reply to the hazards and opportunities of a world in crisis. In international studies, ironically, marginality is fast becoming the "norm." Put negatively, these happenings indicate the failure of the strategy of the double bind to command the scene and, as a result, the withdrawal of disciplinary sovereignty from the far-flung regions where the productive work of international studies really goes on. No longer can the official occasion be understood to constitute a sovereign "state of the discipline" that power- fully controls and limits discourse, thereby giving scholars good reason to worry about how to advance within, seize, or topple the "state."

This is not to deny that there are some scholars of international studies who continue to privilege official occasions as the proper affairs of a state of the discipline-call them the profession's uniformed and uni-forming officials. It is not to deny that these officials administer powers of exclusion by virtue of structural affinities between their own highly formalized functions in the discipline, on the one hand, and the functions of officials in other cultural institutions, such as universities and governments, on the other. And it is not to deny that there are many scholars who can be compelled to submit to the structure of the double bind imposed on such occasions under the threat of professional exclusion-call them marginal. We simply must not diminish the extreme importance of these official occasions for the lives and careers of students, junior faculty, scholars of color, feminists, and other disciplinary marginals who can be coerced into submission under the threat of some de- prival of status, tenancy, or right to speak, be heard, and earn a living among the ranks of the profession. Professional licenses must be stamped. Citizenship papers must be certified. Officials who stamp and certify must be satisfied. "Power," "threat," "coerce," "compel," "impose," "deprive," "exclude," and the imperative, "must," five times recited in a single paragraph-these words shout a violence that is openly displayed and very real to those who are made to endure such occasions.

Yet to note the resort to conspicuous displays of violence on such occasions is not to stand in awe of a sovereign state of the discipline. On the contrary, when the defense of disciplinary sovereignty is reduced to this, the game is pretty much up.


For the readiness to resort to threats and coercion embarrasses and undoes all claims of sovereign certitude by making all too visible the paradox of sovereignty. The sovereign state of the discipline, officials might pretend, projects a truth without dissent and beyond doubt. But in acknowledging the need to resort to violence in order to quiet dissent and dispel doubt, the officials bely the pretense. The "truth" of the sovereign state of the discipline, they concede, is not really prior to and capable of justifying the display of power on official occasions. The real priority is power. And of course the importance of this concession is not lost on those scholars who are compelled to endure such official occasions. In their eyes, the state officials they confront, having conceded their dependence on violence, can now only bespeak a desire grown frail. The officials can but voice a desire that has exhausted the resources by which to constitute anything resembling a livable territory of truth in which scholars could be at home and at one and in defense of which scholars in general might want to align their powers. And as this is so, the officials who project this desire will soon be deprived even of the power upon which they now so visibly rely.

We return once more, then, to an optimistic line of reply. For most scholars of international studies today, the sovereign "state of the discipline" is something whose imagined center is remote, other-worldly, insular, and powerless-nothing but a site of density in the circuits of desire-and which intrudes upon the productive life of scholarship only in the manner of so many flag-draped check-points thinly scattered across a boundless disciplinary landscape. Upon reaching any such check-point, one nods to the flag, acknowledges the uniformed official's stern judgmental gaze, ex- changes a few pleasantries, and waits for the gate to open. If, before opening the gate, the official inquires as to one's identity, point of origin, or destination, one takes note of the double bind, exploits the ambiguities of the situation, and gives a token answer that will elicit an approving smile. But upon heading off across an unmappable, ambiguous terrain, one does not feel bound by the answer one gives. The image of the uniformed figure, so stiffly proud of his supposed power, quickly recedes into a tiny speck over one's shoulder. And one knows that where one will really go and what one will really do are beyond the control of the sovereign state of the discipline represented by the lonely outpost of officialdom left behind. This, one knows, can only be determined through patient, disciplined, and never finished involvements in the testing of limitations to expand the spaces and resources of thought in reply to the paradoxical happenings of the world.

Conclusion Just consider a smattering of the happenings of interest to students of international relations today and touched upon in the contributions to this issue: surveillance satellites; internationalized production; computer-integrated capital markets; Star Wars; migrating workers; states as loci of simulated contingencies; transnational human rights and ecology movements; privatized public wars; publicized private enterprise; silent majorities; twilight zones of "public secrete private knowledge" in terrorist regimes; drug wars; accelerating communications, accelerating weapons delivery, and diminishing response time; penetrating media; video and cinematic representations; docudrama; spin-doctors; "anti-capitalist" and "anti-democratic" forces who find inspiration in Hayek, von Mises, and the Federalist Papers while "pro- capitalist," "pro-democratic" forces worry about how to outlaw the desecration of flags; and NSC documents that "locate" the chief threat to American interests not in some definite territory but in the nameless terrors of a transient "uncertainty" against which flag-bearing forces must always be ready rapidly to deploy.


To say the least, happenings like these threaten to disconcert any attempt to descend from the heights of abstract metaphor, engage the material circumstances of human labor, and all the while sustain a conceit of sovereign certitude on the part of a discipline. On the one hand, any attempt to invoke some figure of a speaking, writing sovereign subject must stake its claim to truth and power on its ability to represent the objective reality of a homogeneous territory of vital and productive human labors. On the other hand, when happenings like these are the realities of global political life, the boundaries that would mark off and fix the exclusionary territories to be represented by any sovereign subject are never simply and self- evidently given. Whether one speaks of the "objective reality" of a domestic society that a "sovereign state" might represent or the "objective reality" of a human nature that a "sovereign man" might represent, the boundaries that would differentiate and fix these supposedly objective realities are already visibly transgressed in the labors of women and men today. These boundaries are already visibly in the process of being imposed and resisted all at once. As a result, the pretense of representation, so crucial to the empowerment of any sovereign voice, simply cannot be sustained. Every imagined territory that a sovereign subject might be claimed to represent is already an open region of paradox, uncertainty, and contesting interpretations that renders radically unstable the attempt to enclose and represent it from any would-be sovereign perspective. And every semblance of sovereign subjectivity is exposed as but a projection of desire, groundless and powerless in itself.

This explains what we would call the rarefaction of the strategy of the double bind in international studies-the resort to cultural resources that are so thin, so insubstantial, so lacking in productive potentials. Amid an unfolding crisis of representation where events like those just mentioned dominate the scene, these thin resources may be all that desire has left. Importantly, it is not just in the academic discipline of international studies that this is so.

The retreat of discourses of sovereignty to a plane of abstract metaphors that speak but little to the ambiguities and hazards of people's labors. The emergence and proliferation of marginal movements that do not try to seize a state or advance within it but instead regard every male-marked semblance of sovereign being as a paradoxical problem that cannot be their own. The transgression of institutional limitations and the transformations of onetime domains of sovereign being into deterritorialized, decentered spaces where critical labors of thought can go on, new modes of ethical conduct can be explored, limitations can be tested, and the resources of the struggle for freedom can be enriched. And, in reaction to these unsettling developments, the proliferation of desperate attempts to mobilize, concentrate, and conspicuously disperse and display means of violence, to compel people to submit to the structure of the double bind, and to instill a fear of sovereign judgment-all in the name of a desire that lacks a place to call home. These are themes that have emerged in our analysis of the rarefaction and failure of the strategy of the double bind in critical readings of dissident scholarship in international studies. They are themes that take on colorations of peril as well as opportunity, even as they are without necessary origin, direction, or end. Yet it is abundantly clear that these themes cannot be confined within an academic discipline today, just as the crisis of international studies cannot be separated from a crisis of patriarchy, a crisis of governability, a generalized crisis of representation in modern culture. These themes, paradoxical in themselves, depict the paradoxical realities of global life today.

That is why we have thought it important to respond painstakingly and critically to critical readings of dissident scholarship and the strategy of the double bind they try to deploy. If this strategy has any effect at all, it cannot be to fix a position, exemplify mature and serious scholarship, constitute a perspective, consecrate authority, clarify meanings, supply standards, produce ethics, concert and mobilize human will, en-


gage and solve social problems, and guarantee and advance modernity's accomplishments. The strategy can do none of these things-not one. At most, it can do what it has always done: impede, disrupt, and delay efforts to take seriously the paradoxical problems of sovereignty and resistance to sovereignty as they are encountered in all the widening margins of a culture in crisis.

What, then, is the appropriate reply to attempts to impose this strategy? Part of a reply, as here, is to note the structure of the double bind, observe its poverty, and consider the exhaustion of the cultural resources upon which it can rely. A second and more important part, exemplified by the contributions to this issue, is simply to decline the strategy's petty seductions, refuse enlistment in self-absorbed circuits of desire, and get on with the difficult and disciplined labors of thought in the struggle for freedom. And what of those who would insistently repeat the strategy of the double bind? As individuals, they are harmless enough. They can safely be left to sit alone wondering where to plant sovereignty's flag.

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Documents

Ashley 1990 Conclusion Reading Dissidence Writing the Discipline International Studies Quarterly343367-416