Speaking the Language of Exile Dissident Thought in International Studies - Artigo

Introduction Speaking the Language of Exile Dissident Thought in International Studies Richard K Ashley R B J Walker International Studies Quarterly Vol 34 No 3 Special Issue Speaking the Language of Exile Dissidence in International Studies Sep 1990 pp 259268 Stable URL httplinksjstororgsicisici002088332819900929343A33C2593AISTLOE3E20CO3B2O International Studies Quarterly is currently published by The International Studies Association Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTORs Terms and Conditions of Use available at httpwwwjstororgabouttermshtml JSTORs Terms and Conditions of Use provides in part that unless you have obtained prior permission you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal noncommercial use Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work Publisher contact information may be obtained at httpwwwjstororgjournalsisahtml Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for longterm preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world The Archive is supported by libraries scholarly societies publishers and foundations It is an initiative of JSTOR a notforprofit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology For more information regarding JSTOR please contact supportjstororg httpwwwjstororg Fri Dec 7 052643 2007 International Studies Quarterly 1990 34 259268 INTRODUCTION Speaking the Language of Exile Dissident Thought in International Studies RICHARDK ASHLEY Arizona State University R B J WALKER University of Victoria You will have understood that I am speaking the language of exile This language of the exile muffles a cry it doesnt ever shout Our present age is one of exile How can we avoid sinking into the mire of common sense if not by becoming a stranger to ones own country language sex and identity Writing is impossible without some kind of exile Exile is already in itself a form of dissidence since it involves uprooting oneself from a family a country or a language More importantly it is an irreligious act that cuts all ties for religion is nothing more than membership of a real or symbolic community which may or may not be transcendental but which always constitutes a link a homology an understanding The exile cuts all links includ ing those that bind him to the belief that the thing called life has A Meaning guaranteed by the dead father For if meaning exists in a state of exile it nevertheless finds no incarnation and is ceaselessly produced and destroyed in geographical and discursive formations Exile is a way of surviving in the face of the dadfather of gambling with death which is the meaning of life of stub bornly refusing to give in to the law of death This ruthless and irreverent dismantling of the workings of discourse thought and existence is the work of a dissident Such dissidence requires ceaseless analysis vigilance and will to subversion and therefore necessarily enters into complicity with other dissident practices in the modern Western world For true dissidence today is perhaps simply what it has always been thought Julia Kristeva A New Type of Intellectual The Dissident It is no longer possible to think in our day other than in the void left by mans disappearance For this void does not create a deficiency it does not constitute a lacuna that must be filled It is nothing more and nothing less than the unfold ing of a space in which it is once more possible to think Michel Foucault The Order of Things Guest EditorsNote We owe an enormous debt to the skills and labors of Deborah Johnston who worked without compensation as editorial associate in the production of this special issue Her talentsespecially her insistent theoretically informed questioninghave proven invaluable throughout all aspects of this issue In addition we must express our gratitude to Hayward R Alker Jr and Craig Murphy who served as referees and commentators upon the articles collected here and whose painstaking critical and constructive comments have lent considerably to the project O 1990 International Studies Association 260 Speaking the Language of Exile Think if you will of all of those familiar times and places in modern life where genres blur narratives of knowing and doing intersect in mutually destabilizing ways contingency threatens to displace necessity the very identity of the subject is put in doubt and human beings live and toil as exiles deprived of any absolute territory of being to call home Think in particular of the marginal instances of the working mother who must daily pass back and forth across the mutually intrud ing never stable frontiers of careerlife and homelifeeach with its own distinc tive historically elaborated narratives of truth and meaning and each with its own gendermarked implications for what the normal subject will naturally do and therefore effortlessly be the draftage youth whosq identity is simultaneously claimed in national narratives of national security and the universalizing narratives of the rights of man the disemployed laborer whose place in life is potentially crossed by both the narra tives of class struggle which might inscribe for her an identity in opposition to an international bourgeoisie and the narratives of national competition which might inscribe for her an identity in opposition to the workers of other nations the woman whose very womb is claimed by the irresolvably contesting narratives of church paternity economy and liberal polity the alien worker whose movement within a national territory is constrained by a national narrative of law but who at the same time is deprived of many of the powers and protections attending a narrative of citizenship the newspaper editor who must put himself in the place of the reader in order to decide what shall count as domestic news international news environmental news economics sports fashion or nonnews but who upon encountering an ambigu ous report finds that he cannot come to rest with a single category because he imagines multiple readers and multiple narratives in which the report finds mean ing the Chinese businessman in Malaysia who must bear witness to Malay narratives in which he and other Chinese are described as stingy and materialistic even as he must encourage his children to learn Bahasa Melayu officially Bahasa Ma laysia the language in which the business of the state is conducted and the insults are spoken the peace activist for whom a fearsome narrative of a future universal end of time calls into question nationalistic narratives of state survival but for whom also the latter narratives continue powerfully to displace a narrative of universal peace the Santiago or Los Angeles barriodweller who finds himself amidst the narratives of a market that fails to include him the narratives of honor within a culture now displaced the narratives of education that promise to rectify and uplift him and the narratives of law and order that threaten to render him a criminal object of police cudgels should education fail the participant in the environmental or cultural movement who subscribes to a narrative of the inescapable interconnectedness of dispersed locales but who at the same time would resist a narrative of rationalization that anticipates a neces sary progress toward a universal and uniform order and the contemporary Western statesman who upon witnessing all those events con noted by the collapse of the Berlin Wall greets this realization of his long ex pressed fondest dreams as a nightmare in which the Wests very identity and purpose is suddenly put in doubt and the Western state is at a loss to find any stable already domesticated source of authority to represent These marginal sites are no doubt very different but beyond noticing that they are proliferating in modern global life today we can say that they have at least four things in common First these sites are intrinsically ambiguous In none of these instances can one refer to a time and place sharply bounded a homogeneous terri tory in which categories are fixed values are stable and common sense meanings are sure In none of these sites is there a unique and ultimate sovereign identitybe it the identity of the individual or the institutional structures of a social whole or communityto which one can appeal in fixing meanings and interpreting conduct Here the words I and we have no certain referent Here exiled from the certain truths of every modern narrative of life one can never confidently invoke an every body who knows because one can never be sure just who this everybody is As a result one cannot speak as an economist might of rational individuals whose identi ties are given and who in order to find their way and give meaning to their lives need only deploy their available means to serve their selfgenerated interests under external constraints One cnnot speak as a moral philosopher might of the responsi ble human being who has a duty to ground his conduct in the transcendent princi ples of an ethical community And one cannot speak as a sociologist might of social actors who habitually replicate an eternal yesterday measure their practices by refer ence to a recognized norm or project social values already inscribed in a coherent order Second it follows that these marginal times and places are sites of struggle where power is conspicuously at work They are deterritorialized sites where people con front and must know how to resist a diversity of representational practices that would traverse them claim their time control their space and their bodies impose limitations on what can be said and done and decide their being This is not to say that people here oppose some personified actor who as external enemy number one administers power over them Since the differences between inside and outside are here uncertain none can be clearly defined This is also not to say that people here resist power in the name of the life and freedom of some sovereign identity some community of truth some absolute and identical source of meaning that is victimized and repressed by power In these sites again identity is never sure community is always uncertain meaning is always in doubt Instead people here confront arbitrary cultural practices that work to discipline ambiguity and impose effects of identity and meaning by erecting exclusionary boundaries that separate the natural and necessary domicile of certain being from the contingencies and chance events that the self must know as problems difficulties and dangers to be exteriorized and brought under control Here in other words power is not negative and repressive but positive and productive Practices of power do not deny the autonomy of subjects already present so much as they work to impose and fix ways of knowing and doing that shall be recognized as natural and necessary to autonomous being They work to produce effects of presence of identity of a territorial ground and origin of meaning And they work by discriminantly reading and representing ambiguous circumstances to impose differences between that which may be counted as the certainty of presence and that which must be regarded as the absence beyond its bounds Third these marginal sites thus resist knowing in the sense celebrated in modern culture where to know is to construct a coherent representation that excludes contesting interpretations and controls meaning from the standpoint of a sovereign subject whose word is the origin of truth beyond doubt In modern culture it is the malemarked figure of mannreasoning man who is at home and at one with the public discourse of reasonable humanitynwho is understood to be the sovereign subject of knowledge It is the figure of man who is understood to be the origin of language the condition of all knowledge the maker of history and the source of truth and meaning in the world And although in modern discourse this figure of sovereign man is understood to exist in opposition to an ambiguous and indetermi nate history that here and now limits him escapes his mastery and eludes the 262 Speaking the Language of Exile penetration of his thought modern discourse nonetheless invests in this figure of man the promise of transcendence through reason man may subdue history quiet all uncertainty clarify all ambiguity and achieve total knowledge total auton omy and total power This is the promise implicit in every claim of modern knowl edgena claim always uttered as if by man and in the name of man This too is the promise that the disciplines of modern social science makea promise of knowl edge and power on behalf of a universal sovereign figure of man whose voice a discipline would speak And this as it happens is the same promise that legitimates the violence of the modern statethe promise inscribed in a compact with man to secure and defend the domesticated time and space of reasoning man in opposi tion to the recalcitrant and dangerous forces of history that resist the sway of mans reason Yet it is characteristic of the marginal sites just considered that they resist knowing in this sense and in doing so putjust this promise in doubt They resist this modern form of knowing because here in these local times and places the figure of man is anything but an indubitable presence whose voice can be simply spoken in the representation of peoples circumstances intentions and conduct Any figure of man whose sovereign right to speak truth might here be asserted is immediately recognized as one among many arbitrary interpretations it is seen as a knowledge able practice of power itself arbitrarily constructed that is put to work to tame ambiguities control meaning and impose limitations on what people can do and say Accordingly from the various central standpoints of modern culture that would speak the sovereign voice of man the various marginal zones of life can be cast only negatively as a fearsome moment of abjection To the extent that they resist the imposition of some coherent mancentered narrative these sites can be under stood only to signal an entropic moment a moment that escapes mans rational control a moment that spells the death of man They can be regarded only as moments that the modern person must endlessly defer or promise to master in the name of a life a truth an identity in itself Uncertainty indeterminancy darkness disorder turbulance irrationality ungovernability terror and anarchythese are words that modern discourse uses to mark off these marginal places and times These words demarcate marginal places and times as voids of truth and meaning that must be feared exiled and if they persist disciplined by the violent imposition of the certain voices of truth they lack Fourth while these various marginal times and places defy the control of modern forms of knowledgewhile they defy stable representation from the standpoint of one or another unique figuration of sovereign manit must not be thought that they can be known only thus as voids yet to be brought under control of mans reason When one allows that these deterritorialized zones are multiplying so that it can be said that our present age is one of exile it makes sense to listen to the exiles who live and move in these contested marginal zones respecting the dissident prac tices they undertake And when one listens in this way it becomes plain that these are proliferating times and places where exciting things of uncertain consequence are happening in global political life To be sure the exiles might speak in wavering timbre After all these are sites where the disciplining metaphysical faiths of modern culture are put in doubt constructs of sovereign man cannot be made practically effective and putatively objective boundaries of conduct authorized from sovereign perspectives are seen not only to be arbitrary but also to produce a scarcity of resources by which people might struggle to make life possible People here are disposed to question identity as much as they are inclined to be dubious of all universal narratives and transcendental ends If voices are here heard to flutter hesitate and show doubt however the wavering cannot be equated with an anxious quavering It cannot be equated with a fear of death that must be calmed by the imposition of a certain identity and a universal narrative in which an identity might secure an exclusionary territory to call home For the questioning of self does not here signal a deficiency a lacuna that must be filled Ambiguity and uncertainty are not here regarded as sources of fear in themselves Ambiguity uncertainty and the ceaseless questioning of identitythese are re sources of the exiles They are the resources of those who would live and move in these paradoxical marginal spaces and times and who in order to do so must struggle to resist knowledgeable practices of power that would impose upon them a certain identity a set of limitations on what can be done an order of truth They are resources that make possible what Julia Kristeva 1986 would call the work of dissidence the politicizing work of thought In Michel Foucaults phrasing 1973386 they are indicative 06 the opening of a space in which it is once more possible to think Here where identity is always in process and territorial bound aries of modern life are seen to be arbitrarily imposed the limits authored from one or another sovereign standpoint can be questioned and transgressed hitherto closed off cultural connections can be explored and new cultural resources can be culti vated thereby Here it becomes possible to explore generate and circulate new often distinctly joyful but always dissident ways of thinking doing and being politi cal We do not call attention to these proliferating marginal sites of modern politics in order to highlight lapses in contemporary global political theory some specific do mains of conduct that theorists have vet to take seriouslv enough We do so in order to suggest that these deterritorialized and decentered sites of political life already have their counterparts at the margins of modern international studies Kristeva 1986292 has suggested that A spectre haunts Europe the dissident We want to suggest that for some years now a spectre has haunted the European continent of international studies It is the spectre of a widely proliferating and distinctly dissident theoretical attitude spoken in uncertain voice by women and men who for various reasons know themseives as exiles from the territories of theory and theoriz ing solemnly affirmed at the supposedly sovereign centers of a discipline It is the spectre of a work of global political theory a dissident work of thought that happily finds its extraterritorial placeits politicized nonplaceflat the uncertain inter stices of international theory and practice These proliferating works of thought are not difficult to find In the published literature more so in the informal xerocircuits of the field and still more so in the seminar papers of graduate students one can detect an increasing volume and variety of work whose principal business is to interrogate limits to explore how they are imposed to demonstrate their arbitrariness and to think otherwise that is in a way that makes possible the testing of limitations and the exploration of excluded possibilities Some know their activity as reflection on ontology on epistemology on methodologyon what many call the unspoken presuppositions of a discipline Some know their activity as exploration into the possibility of a postpositivist inter national relations discourse a postempiricist science of international relations or a critical theory of global politics Others know their activity as a kind of history albeit one that does not aspire to remember an originary past but to expose and undo the arbitrary practices by which countermemories are forgotten in the construction of a necessary present Still others know their activity as attempts to set up a series of relays between international relations theory on the one hand and European social theory feminist theory andlor contemporary literary theory on the other And many more simply do their works of thought not pausing to give their works a name but simply proceeding straightaway to a ruthless and irreverent dismantling of the workings of discourse thought and existence in modern global life However they 264 Speaking the Language of Exile are known and presented moreover these works of thought are to be heard insis tently questioning the timehonored dualisms upon which modern theory and prac tice have long pivoted Identityidifference manihistory presentipast presentifu ture insideioutside domesticiinternational sovereigntyianarchy communityiwar maleifemale realismiidealism speechilanguage agentistructure particularuniver sal culturalimaterial theoryipractice centeriperiphery stateisociety politicsieco nomics revolutionreformthese and countless other dichotomies have been exam ined in their practical workings turned rethought and exposed as arbitrary cultural constructs by which in modern culture modes of subjectivity objectivity and con duct are imposed As seen from the standpoints that would claim to occupy the center of a discipline it is true these marginal works of thought are known primarily as indications of a negativity a crisis of confidence a loss of faith a degeneration of reigning para digms an organic crisis in which as Gramscians would say the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born So cast they are known to mark an interregnum a time of delay between paradigms So cast also they are subject to the discipline implicit in questions that modern theorists who long for a center a secure source of meaning guaranteed by a dead father so readily ask Can they not prove their merits by configuring themselves as a new paradigm whose knowledge claims would bear a promise of control in the name of man If they aspire to be taken seriously can they not configure themselves as a theoretical counterhegemony that could speak a sovereign voice assume a name take a position command a space secure a home set down a law and lay claim to the center of a discipline The discipline is ready to hear affirmative answers to these questionsanswers that would affirm that the study of international politics is indeed a business of making heroic promises on behalf of a universal sovereign figure To those works of thought that answer no the discipline turns a deaf ear when it can It is characteristic of these exile works of thought though that they will answer no For these dissident works are like the marginal sites discussed earlier in that they resist assimilation to modern modes of knowing in the interest of the power of the modern figures of sovereign man and sovereign state They share the three other features of these marginal sites as well These dissident works of global political theory move in intrinsically ambiguous sites where respect for the play of difference and the undecidability of history displaces the assertion of identity including the assertion of one or another interpretation of a universal identity of sovereign man They move in politicized sites where power is conspicuously at work and subject to meticulous examination And they constitute exciting works of experimentation and exploration that would transgress arbitrary limits open up hitherto closed off con nections and enable the construction and circulation of new ways of knowing and doing politics Requiring ceaseless analysis vigilance and will to subversion these marginal works of thought necessarily enter into complicity with other dissident practices in the modern Western world The purpose of this special issue then is not to announce a new and powerful perspective on global politics for which a discipline must make way The contribu tions to this issue do not speak a sovereign voice or proclaim a credo They do not fabricate and ritualize a story of origins that would supply unity to these dissident works of thought They stake out no territory to be defended no boundaries that might separate citizens of a new discipline from those who are alien to it They neither write nor exemplify a manual of war by which soldiers of a new mode of global political theory might be taught to seize defend and extend a domain They issue no promises They bear no flag Our intention in these pages on the contrary is to provide an opportunity for a public celebration of what these dissident works of thought already celebrate in countless scattered locales of research labor difference not identity the questioning and transgression of limits not the assertion of boundaries and frameworks a readi ness to question how meaning and order are imposed not the search for a source of meaning and order already in place the unrelenting and meticulous analysis of the workings of power in modern global life not the longing for a sovereign figure be it man God nation state paradigm or research program that promises a deliverance from power the struggle for freedom not a religious desire to produce some territo rial domicile of selfevident being that men of innocent faith can call home Our intention too is to enable the further circulation of the new strategies of question ing analysis and resistance that these works of thought have found to be effective in one or another site and that might prove provocative and workable in other sites as well In short we do not yant to shout as if a voice raised in International Studies Quarterly might bespeak the arrival of a new movement that would storm and take the capitols of international studies We want instead to make it possible to listen attentively to the muffled cries of dissidence that are already everywhere to be heard The first contribution to this special issue Patterns of Dissent and the Celebration of Difference by Jim George and David Campbell reflects a patient labor of listen ing to the exiled voices of dissident scholarship speaking in a variety of widely dispersed sites over the last decade In spirit with the voices to which they listen George and Campbell resist the temptation to find in dissident scholarship the seeds of a new orthodoxy But they do highlight a variety of emergent questions that are repeatedly engaged by dissident scholarship whether it be a dissidence that one might associate with Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School and Habermas or the dissidence one might be inclined to label postmodern or poststructuralist These are questions bearing upon the Enlightenment constructs of history rationality objectiv ity truth human agency and social structure the relation between knowledge and power the relation between language and social meaning the role and function of the social sciences in modern social and political life and the prospects for emancipa tory politics in the late twentieth century Also in keeping with the voices to which they listen George and Campbell resist the temptation to memorialize a founda tional prehistory of contemporary dissident scholarship Yet they do briefly review a variety of contributions to contemporary social theoretical debates bearing on the questions just mentioneda variety that spans from Wittgenstein Winch and Kuhn through the Frankfurt School Habermas Ricoeur and Gadamer to Derrida and Foucault They do so not to gesture toward a coherent and consensual position but to accentuate the lively and enlivening tensions that deprive the discipline of the presupposition of an objectively given territorial ground on the one hand and enable the opening up of spaces for thought on the other As George and Campbell show in the latter part of their essay these tensions have been productively exploited in the variety of dissident works in international studies since the early 1980s The papers by James Der Derian Bradley Klein Michael Shapiro William Cha loupka and Cynthia Weber take advantage of the emergent thinking space to which George and Campbell allude These papers range across a variety of topics that are no doubt familiar to readers of the Quarterly surveillance simulation and computer assisted war gaming the acceleration of weapons delivery alliance politics arms transfers the local politics of ecological and antinuclear movements the politics of international debt and the production and transformation of political institutions to name a few Yet any attempt to introduce these papers and say what they must mean would be to do violence to them For while these papers range across topics with familiar names they do not approach them from the standpoint of some sovereign subject some center of interpretation with which authors and readers are one They do not pretend to project an originary word of truth and power beyond doubt a 266 Speaking the Language of Exile voice of man that promises to settle the ambiguities of life once and for all These papers instead approach these topics in a manner that is respectful of the uncertain ties of life at the margins where meaning is in doubt the play of power is visible and the fixing of meaning is what practices of power visibly labor to do They thereby sensitize us to the politics involved in asserting a sovereign presence giving names supplying representations and saying what things meaneven in saying what these papers mean More than that they sensitize us to the paradoxes involved in any attempt to assert a sovereign voice in a world where the acceleration and agitation of social activity gives rise to a proliferation of transgressions of institutional boundaries and where as a result marginal zones of human labor expand relative to the suppos edly homogeneous territories that institutional boundaries would demarcate and contain Engaging the pqlitics of such a world these papers show that the refusal to embrace one or another sovereign standpoint and its pretenses of territorial being does not entail either a flight to a kind of idealism or a retreat to political passivity It instead enables a disciplined critical labor of thought that takes seriously those unfinalized power political struggles in which the question is no longer which sover eign shall win and which shall lose but how if at all a sovereigncentered territorial ization of political life can be made to prevail In offering this small collection of dissident analyses in the pages of The Official Journal of the International Studies Association we are of course sensitive to two problems One problem is that this collection being small inevitably excludesor at least fails to includemany many voices of dissidence in international studies that deserve equally to be heard and celebrated Facing up to this problem all we can say is that we hope that the conduct of scholarship in the pages of this issue renders somewhat less effective another widely replicated and far more worrisome form of exclusion based not on physical limitations but on the supposed necessity of preserv ing institutional boundaries in the territorialization of political and scholarly life The second problem is that dissident scholarship as Donna U Gregory 1988xiii has noted is more often attacked than read For example one especially well known line of attack issued by Robert Keohane 1988392 is that socalled reflec tivists while skilled in critical arguments lack a clear reflective research pro gram that could be employed by students of world politics As Keohane goes on to say Until the reflective scholars or others sympathetic to their arguments have delineated such a research program and shown in particular studies that it can illuminate important issues in world politics they will remain on the margins of the field largely invisible to the preponderance of empirical researchers This is a fine admonishment It is as direct as it is succinct It is delivered without the slightest concealment of the privilege being arbitrarily accorded to a certain interpretation of empirical research of the policing function being performed or of the punish ment that will come to those who fail to heed the admonishment delivered But it could not be offered or plausibly entertained by anyone who has actually read and taken seriously the works of the reflectivists admonished1 as George and Campbell and Der Derian make clear Or for that matter by anyone who has actually read and taken seriously Imre Lakatoss 1970 most famous article on scientific research programmes To read Lakatoss article through to the end is to see that it actually develops as an elaborate sequence of deconstructions that proceeds from naive justificationist positions through a variety of other positions to finally arrive at a position that Popperians find disconcerting because as Lakatos allows it is grounded in nothing other than the arbitrary play of aesthetic practices This last position for all its potential to disconcert the malemarked Popperian figure of the sovereign scientist is one that many dissident scholars would happily take seriously as a starting point for their research programmes One might say in fact that many already do and that to this extent they are far more faithful to Lakatoss own argument than are Keohane and many others who evoke the first few pages of Lakatoss article and are amnesiac regarding the rest There are though other critical readings of dissident scholarship that do deserve a painstaking reply In the essay concluding this issue we shall consider a variety of such critical readings and offer a response to them Our intention as will be seen is not to preempt or stifle criticism of dissident scholarship Since dissident scholars labor to expand the space and resources of thought they would be the last to gainsay any criticism of their work that would point out limitations to which they have acquiesced or which they have covertly inscribed As evidenced by the essays col lected here in fact dissident scholars exhibit a critical ethos an ethics of freedom disciplining their work that encourages and welcomes criticism such as this Our purpose instead is to expose analyze and display the poverty of a widely replicated strategy of reading dissident scholarship that functions to impose limitations on the work of thought in replyto the hazards and opportunities encountered in all the intrinsically paradoxical and ambiguous sites of contemporary global life This strategy of reading is diversionary in Keohanes 1988382 sense It func tions in his words to take us away from the study of our subject matter world politics What is at stake is not just a matter of academic privilege It is not a question of whether dissident scholars shall be given their due or alternatively marginalized and rendered invisible What is at stake is nothing less than the question of sover eignty whether or not this most paradoxical question alive in all the widening margins of a culture can be taken seriously in international studies today More pointedly the issue is whether and to what extent the discipline of international studies will be able to exercise its critical resources to engage and analyze the prob lem of sovereignty and resistance to sovereignty as it unfolds in all the multiplying deterritorialized zones of a culture in crisisincluding that extraterritorial zone that eludes sovereign representation called international politics It would be a mistake however to accentuate our critical analysis of a strategy of reading dissident scholarship As we argue in the concluding essay this strategy is in complicity with all those practices that work on the world scene to read ambiguous circumstances impose boundaries and exclude paradoxes of space and time thus to domesticate territories of social and political life that malemarked figures of sover eign authority can be claimed to represent As we also argue though this strategy of reading is fast approaching exhaustion in international studies today just as the cultural resources that can be called upon to effect the territorialization of social and political life are growing thin more abstractly philosophical less able to speak in reply to the unsettled circumstances in which women and men actively undertake their labors of selfmaking In an important sense the scholars contributing to this special issue presume the weakening of this strategy of reading and disciplining ambiguous happenings both in international studies and in the world of politics studied They like marginalized peoples everywhere exploit the openings made possible by this weakening Thus while the contributors to this issue might occasionally cast a sideways glance at instances of this strategy of reading they refuse to be delayed or diverted by it They refuse to be seduced by a strategy of reading that would draw them into abstractly theoretical discussions or selfenclosing simulations of idealized realities that function only to redeem some notion of sovereign scholarly being Instead these scholars do what we suspect scholars of international studies in general are inclined to do They get on with their work They engage the intrinsically problemat ical realities of a world that affords few people today anything resembling a domestic haven of selfevident being exempt from the play of power Like all exiles from the supposed sovereign territories of modern culture these scholars undertake a critical task a task of dissidence to which Foucault 198450 has gestured It is a task of 268 Speaking the Language of Exile working on our limits that is a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty References FOUCAULT M 1973 The Order of Things An Archaeology of the Human Sciences New York Random House FOUCAULT M 1984 What is Enlightenment In The Foucault Reader edited by P Rabinow New York Pantheon GREGORYD U 1988 Foreword InternationallIntertextualRelations Postmodern Readings of World Politics edited by J Der Derian and M Shapiro Lexington MA Lexington Books KEOHANE R 0 1988 International Institutions Two Approaches International Studies Quarterly 32437996 KRISTEVA J 1986 A New Type of Intellectual The Dissident In The Kristeva Reader edited by T Moi New York Columbia University Press LAKATOSI 1970 Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes In Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge edited by I Lakatos and A Musgrave Cambridge Cambridge University Press ASHLEY Richard K WALKER R B J Introduction Speaking the Language of Exile Dissident Thought in International Studies International Studies Quarterly Vol 34 No 3 Special Issue Speaking the Language of Exile Dissidence in International Studies Sep 1990 pp 259268 Ao pensar sobre sobre os locais marginais na vida moderna podese observar que eles são bem diferentes mas segundo os autores possuem ao menos quatro pontos comuns O primeiro é que esses lugares apresentam uma ambiguidade particular Assim nesses lugares não há tempo ou lugar delimitado e tampouco um território homogêneo onde encontrase categorias e valores estáveis Aqui não existiria uma identidade soberana única e as palavras eu e nós não têm nenhum referente certo O segundo ponto é que tais tempos e lugares marginais são locais de luta onde as pessoas se confrontam e devem saber resistir a uma diversidade de práticas representacionais que possam atravessarlhes O terceiro é que esses lugares marginais resistem a saber nos termos da cultura moderna em que saber significa construir uma representação coerente que controla o significado do ponto de vista de um sujeito soberano que é baseado na figura masculina Na cultura moderna o conhecimento é do homem e em nome do homem Contudo nesses locais há uma resistência em relação a essa perspectiva uma vez que aqui a figura do homem é tudo menos uma presença indubitável cuja voz pode ser simplesmente falada na representação das circunstâncias intenções e conduta das pessoas Já o quarto ponto defende que por mais que esses lugares desafiem o controle das maneiras de conhecimento não devem ser considerados vazios De acordo com os autores quando se permite que essas zonas territorializadas se multipliquem para que se possa dizer que nossa idade atual é de exílio faz sentido ouvir os exilados que vivem e se deslocam nestas zonas marginais contestadas respeitando as práticas dissidentes que empreendem Nesse sentido tornase claro que estes são tempos e lugares em que as coisas instigantes com consequências incertas estão acontecendo na vida política global Para os autores os principais recursos dos exilados seriam a ambiguidade incerteza e o incessante questionamento da identidade Nesse cenário aqueles que habitam esses lugares devem lutar para resistir a práticas conhecedoras de poder que lhes imponham uma certa identidade um conjunto de limitações sobre o que pode ser feito uma ordem de verdade Destacar esses locais marginais proliferantes da política moderna tem o intuito de sugerir que esses locais de vida política destituídos e descentralizados já têm seus homólogos à margem dos estudos internacionais modernos Ademais os autores defendem que seria o espectro de um trabalho de teoria política global um trabalho dissidente do pensamento que felizmente encontra o seu lugar extraterritorial e o seu lugar político nos intervalos indefinidos da teoria e da prática internacionais Sob a perspectiva daqueles que visam ocupar o centro de uma disciplinas estas obras marginais de pensamento são conhecidas sobretudo como indicações de negatividade uma crise de confiança uma perda de fé uma degeneração de paradigmas dominantes Por essa razão os autores questionam se esses indivíduos buscam serem levados à sério eles não podem aparecer como uma contrahegemonia teórica que poderia ter uma voz soberana tomar uma posição comandar um espaço e reivindicar o centro de uma disciplina Segundo eles tais obras deveriam aliarse a outras práticas dissidentes no mundo ocidental moderno Assim eles apontam que este trabalho visa proporcionar uma oportunidade para uma celebração pública do que essas obras dissidentes do pensamento já celebram em inúmeros locais dispersos de trabalho de pesquisa Embora esses indivíduos abarquem vários tópicos com nomes familiares eles não os abordam do ponto de vista de algum assunto soberano Além disso os autores apontam que existem outras leituras críticas de erudição dissidente que merecem serem analisadas No ponto de vista deles tais leituras estariam atreladas àquelas práticas que trabalham no cenário mundial para ler circunstâncias ambíguas impor limites e excluir paradoxos de espaço e tempo além de domesticar territórios da vida social e política que as figuras masculinas da autoridade soberana podem ser reivindicadas Assim como todos os exilados dos supostos territórios soberanos da cultura moderna esses estudiosos empreendem uma tarefa crítica de dissidência