Richard K. Ashley is an iconic figure to many in the discipline of International Relations (IR), and he hates this. Rightly so. As an icon – a dead, stable image used to signify the whole of post-modern or post-structural IR in a single swoop – Ashley is regarded as an object of uncritical devotion by some admirers and as a heretical iconoclast hell-bent on destroying traditional IR by some detractors.Footnote ¹ Both positions are absurd. That Ashley could be regarded in these ways could not be more ironic, for what his work does is critique claims to ‘the Word’ or ‘the Image’ as summary statements of anything.Footnote ² In this regard, Ashley and his work are not iconic. Nor are they iconoclastic, for while they take on established beliefs and institutions in IR, they never position themselves in opposition to IR, even if others attempt to position them there. Instead, Ashley and his work are interruptive.

Interrupt – ‘to stop or hinder by breaking in; to break the uniformity or continuity of x; to break in upon an action, esp. to break in with questions or remarks while another is speaking’.Footnote ³

One word Ashley interrupts is realism.Footnote ⁴ One image Ashley interrupts is realism's image of itself. As Ashley puts it, ‘I raise questions for which that discourse typically presupposes answers and, hence, I raise questions that that discourse characteristically finds no need to entertain’.Footnote ⁵ In so doing, Ashley politicises realism – particularly neo-realism and its contemporary structurationist variant – returning it to the realm of the political by insisting that realism critically reflect upon the inter-subjective meanings it relies upon to construct common-sense ideas about global political life. He describes his arguments as ‘like warning shots, meant to provoke a discussion, not to destroy an alleged enemy’.Footnote ⁶

A volley of warnings issue from Ashley's direction. He cautions IR theorists against modernist forms of reasoning that exclude critical self-reflection, whether these be technical rationality,Footnote ⁷ liberal positivism,Footnote ⁸ or economism.Footnote ⁹ He warns them about neo-realism which, in its structuralism, statism, utilitarianism, and one-dimensional positivism, serves the hegemonic state.Footnote ¹⁰ He advises discretion before embracing IR practices like the dichotomisation of domestic/international and community/anarchy that fail to describe global political life,Footnote ¹¹ that arbitrarily limit the exercise of reason,Footnote ¹² and that privilege ‘the sign of reasoning man’ over ‘the question of the historicity of man’.Footnote ¹³ And he expounds the price of dismissing IR theories and practices that infuse IR theory with critique.Footnote ¹⁴

The potency of Ashley's warnings comes not only from the force of his arguments but from the fact that he discharges them from a myriad of directions. This is because Ashley situates himself as a failed hermeneutic interpreter of realism,Footnote ¹⁵ a conversationalist with world modelling,Footnote ¹⁶ a peace researcher unravelling the taboo term ‘economism’,Footnote ¹⁷ a critical analyst,Footnote ¹⁸ a post-structuralist attempting to expand the agenda of social theory,Footnote ¹⁹ a dissent speaking the language of exile,Footnote ²⁰ and a critical spirit returned to IR debates after a nearly 10-years recess.Footnote ²¹

The plurality of Ashley's arguments and self-positionings make sense when one takes account of the array of critical theorists and philosophers who inform his work. Early appearances by Jurgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci, Paul Ricoeur and Ferdinand de Saussure give way in later work to a persistent return to figures like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Judith Butler. Yet early influences never seem to be abandoned by Ashley but instead are recast, complicated, followed less devoutly, appreciated for their limits as well as for their insights.

Utilising all of these arguments, self-positionings, and critical influences, Ashley cuts in on IR's cozy conversation insisting on dialogue – even heterologue – instead of traditional monologue.Footnote ²²

Two of Ashley's favourite monologists to interrupt are Kenneth Waltz and Alexander Wendt, for both are central to the construction of what currently passes in the discipline of IR as global social theory. Ashley engages with Waltz because ‘as Waltz's work so clearly illustrates, realists disallow critical interpretations of […] intersubjective processes even as they depend upon them’.Footnote ²³ And Ashley engages with Wendt because Wendt propagates a contemporary structurationism ‘that would pretend in all earnestness to gather and represent the critical historicizing forces of différance while in fact immunizing the ideal of the heroic scholar who will never fail to know how to determine difference from the standpoint of an identical agent or structure and who also, through a kind of intellectual hopscotch, can reassure himself and other would-be heroes that he will never be caught flatfooted on an ontological ground that, he acknowledges, is already quaking beneath his feet’.Footnote ²⁴ Ashley insists on reading these and other monological scholars not only through critical theorists but through all brands of IR theorists, including classical realists like Niccolo Machiavelli, Reinhold Neibuhr, Hans Morgenthau, and John Herz, idealists like Karl Deutsch, and English School theorists like Hedley Bull, Martin Wight, and E. H. Carr.

Ashley's interruptions work not only by forcing a conversation among IR scholars, philosophers, and critical theorists, but they also function performatively. By employing endless verb clauses and digressions, by methodically pluralising every aspect of every argument, and by anticipating challenges and responses to his arguments before they have been voiced, Ashley's work stylistically mimes the theoretical interruption it offers. It makes one dwell on points that he, unlike ‘would-be mainstreamers’, refuses to stabilise.Footnote ²⁵ Ashley's interruptions make one think, and think again, and think yet again, and on and on, utilising a protracted Ashley sentence in an interminable Ashley text.

One of Ashley's most effective performative strategies is to ‘throw his voice’. In his early work, this occurs by having others speak for him. For example, isn't it Ashley alluding to an earlier incarnation of himself when he writes, ‘Herz understands that being a committed realist means being a critical nonrealist at the same time’?Footnote ²⁶ Or when Ashley writes of Hedley Bull's ‘sardonic grin, a grin expressing a hint of irony’ at North American IR theorists’ reliance upon the domestic analogy, surely it is Ashley who is smirking in the background.Footnote ²⁷

In his later work, Ashley ‘throws his voice’ not because he is using others to speak for him but because it seems he no longer feels comfortable making a claim to any stable speaking position. This leads him to an incessant repetition of ‘if I were to’, ‘I would want to’, and ‘I might say’ statements. He writes, ‘If I were to respond to Steve [Krasner]’, and ‘I would want to underscore three closely related points’, and ‘I might say that this question is the essentially political question […]’.Footnote ²⁸ In these statements, actions that would make a definite claim to authorship are always deferred. And this, of course, is among the points of Ashley's work – that claims to authorship must be studied by IR theorists, not merely repeated by them. Indeed, according to Ashley, it is because many IR theorists reproduce such instatements of authorship that they are so inept at understanding how international politics – and especially statecraft – works.Footnote ²⁹

This in part accounts for where Ashley chooses to locate his interruptions. Ashley's interruptions are generally situated at an ontological intersection of three concepts at the heart of traditional IR theory – sovereignty, anarchy, and statecraft. Sovereignty, ‘viewed as an unquestioned and unquestionable foundation of critical inquiry – to one or another arbitrary historical interpretation of rational being’ is ‘the regulative ideal’ of modern discourses of politics.Footnote ³⁰ Anarchy, ‘like terror, is one of those words that modern discourses use to mark off those critical practices that refuse to speak from a sovereign center and that are therefore to be feared, excluded from serious discourse, and disciplined if necessary’.Footnote ³¹

Regulating the tension between sovereignty and anarchy is not a pre-given state but the practice of statecraft. Statecraft is ‘the craft of founding, the craft of stating the name of a self-naming sovereign onotologized we and rendering it effective in history’.Footnote ³² ‘The primary problem of modern statecraft – a problem never finally resolved – is to stabilise the sovereign grounds of legitimate violence in modern politics by enframing and inscribing the domestic domain of “sovereign man” which the state can be understood to represent’.Footnote ³³ Or, put concisely, ‘Modern statecraft is modern mancraft’.Footnote ³⁴

As Ashley's reworking of the concepts sovereignty, anarchy, and statecraft makes clear, one cannot comprehend the meaning and function of these terms and their relationships to one another without grasping their ontological debt to an apparitional figure of ‘modern reasoning man’.Footnote ³⁵ Making sense of Ashley making sense of IR, then, makes no sense without a persistent – and insistent – questioning of ontology.

This is as true for the international politics IR theorists study as it is for their study of international politics. For Ashley, statecraft crafts not only the sovereign state but also the state of the discipline. ‘Would-be mainstreamers’ come to represent the collective voice of sovereign reasoning man while critical social theorists like post-structuralists are coded as anarchical, hazardous, and full of peril through disciplinary performances like Steve Krasner's quip, ‘I just have to say, poststructuralism is dangerous!’Footnote ³⁶ As Ashley points out, such disciplinary performances are not only possible because ‘would-be mainstreamers’ behave as though ‘reality’ were unmediated and non-performativeFootnote ³⁷ but also because they ‘never ask that most politicizing of questions: the impossible-to-answer question, who are we?’Footnote ³⁸ And so Ashley interrupts them, displacing the mainstream ‘question of what the foundations of modern life are with the question of how foundations [like sovereign reasoning man as the unquestioned ground of the state and the state of the discipline] might be imposed’.Footnote ³⁹ In so doing, he reminds theorists and practitioners of IR that a ‘global crisis of representation’ that denies them the last word about IR theory and about international politics is not as easily resolved as they might imagine.Footnote ⁴⁰

Ashley's interruptions at the sovereignty/anarchy/statecraft axis of ontology not only change the relevant questions to be asked by and about IR theory and nullify any theory/practice divide.Footnote ⁴¹ They also affect a reinscription of the state, of international politics, and of the discipline of IR. ‘[T]he modern state comes to be seen, not as the central rational figure evolving in reflection of man, but as a construct without which it would be impossible to control ambiguity and differentiate and constitute the space, the time, the very figure of reasoning man as a rational identity’.Footnote ⁴² International politics becomes ‘a practice of the inscription of the dangerous, the externalization and totalization of dangers, and the mobilization of populations to control these always contained traces of the outside within, and that is never more than an effect of the practices by which total dangers are inscribed’.Footnote ⁴³ And the discipline of IR becomes a site from which ‘would-be mainstreamers’ 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’.Footnote ⁴⁴

In these ways and others, Ashley interferes with IR-as-usual, reintroducing into it terms it so long neglected or banished or glossed over. History returns to IR theory, not as ‘anti-historical closure’Footnote ⁴⁵ but as a concern with what North American IR discourse ‘does in history’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Among the things North American IR discourse does is remove ‘sovereign reasoning man’ from history. Ashley re-injects IR theory with history by insisting on theorising the figure of sovereign man in its historicity, as ‘the effect of presence [that] is attributable to never finished practices of differentiation and deferral without which it would be impossible to distinguish presence from absence, both spatially and temporally’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Practice returns to IR theory, but not as it does in some contemporary structurationisms in which practice and process in one aspect of international politics – sometimes the state, sometimes international anarchy – can be studied so long as another aspect is ‘bracketed’ and assumed just to ‘be’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Instead, historical practices are seen to affect all ontologies all at the same time.

Critical social theory returns to IR theory. Ashley insists that ‘the sphere of international politics is not necessarily beyond the reach of critical inquiry’.Footnote ⁴⁹ The sphere of international politics becomes a site where dissident practices – like the reading and writing of dissident IR scholarship – need to be exercised and appreciated. ‘To read dissident works […] 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’.Footnote ⁵⁰

To write dissident scholarship is to interrupt would-be mainstream IR. In and around Ashley's interruption, colleagues, students, conversants contribute their voices to the heterologue – Jacqueline Berman, Roland Bleiker, David Campbell, William Chaloupka, Costas Constantinou, Francois Debrix, James Der Derian, Richard Devetak, Michael Dillon, Roxanne Doty, Jim George, Siba Grovogui, Debbie Johnston, Brad Klein, Yosef Lapid, Tim Luke, Kate Manzo, Scott Nelson, Spike Peterson, Timothy J. Ruback, Michael Shapiro, Nevzat Soguk, Christine Sylvester, Halit Mustafa Tagma, Rob Walker, me, and many, many more.Footnote ⁵¹ Some of these ‘dissident’ disruptions run parallel to Ashley's, some are uttered with Ashley, and some are interruptive of Ashley. All result in an insistence on taking politics seriously, wherever and whenever it is found.

And this, of course, is Ashley's persistent preoccupation, for the theme of politics runs through every one of his works. Not surprisingly, Ashley's understanding of politics is as inconstant as the range and variety of his interruptions. Resisting the portrayal of politics as ‘mere technique’, Ashley's early work conceives of ‘politics as a creative self-reflective enterprise, an enterprise by which women and men might reflect on prevailing structures, strive to shape freely their collective will, and orient and organise their practices in the co-production and transformation of the structures of their lives.Footnote ⁵² Later work emphasises a post-structural rather than structural take on politics, where politics is ‘an attempt to impose exclusionary boundaries’.Footnote ⁵³ ‘It is a question of how, in history, meaning is imposed, put into question, reinterpreted, and fixed anew’.Footnote ⁵⁴ And in his latest essays, Ashley articulates what has long been emerging in his work – how the question of politics is a question of ontology. ‘Who are we? One might say that this question is the essential political question […] The question opens to the political because it opens to the inescapable reality of power in language, to the way in which every attempt to speak, to be heard, to participate in the signification of selves and things is implicated in […] the traumas of exclusion and abjection without which it would be impossible to effect what may be made to pass as language's prepolitical stabilizing ground’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Overall, Ashley's political questions of IR-as-usual have the effect of pointing ‘to dangers inherent in the displacement of political questions of modernity’.Footnote ⁵⁶

What makes Ashley's arguments about politics so compelling is not only their weight but their timeliness. Ashley is astutely attuned to history, grasping the connections between historical moments and intellectual histories as they occur. These include the rise of positivist structuralism in the US in the service of the hegemonic state at just the moment when structuralism's influence was waning in Europe and when theorists as diverse as E. P. Thomson, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault could be called upon to explore the dangers of neo-realism.Footnote ⁵⁷ Ashley recognises that ‘two decades after Bull offered his assessment [of anarchy as “the central fact of international life and the starting-point of theorizing about it”] nearly every theorist addressing problems of global collaboration and international order would seem to agree’, even though these theorists then go on to reproduce the very problem Bull was pointing to.Footnote ⁵⁸ Ashley observes a global crisis of representation that leads to sometimes hysterical invocations of a sovereign center of judgment, not only in the practice of international politics but also in the discipline of IR.Footnote ⁵⁹ And in a move that underscores the continued timeliness of his interruption for the globalised, visualised era, Ashley's current work grapples with the implications of how what he sees as globalisations pressing question of ‘who are we?’ is endlessly – and visibly – posed by scholars, universities, national communities, and states.Footnote ⁶⁰

Along the way, Ashley's work introduces social constructivism (albeit in a different form than it was later elaborated by Nick Onuf and Alex Wendt)Footnote ⁶¹ and performativity (again, differently than Judith Butler)Footnote ⁶² into IR debates, while, like the work by other attentive readers of international politics, anticipates and participates in debates about globalisation, the ‘end of history’, the current ‘War on Terror’, and the on-going crisis over the role of the university.Footnote ⁶³ As such, Ashley's work stands the test of time. For better or worse, Ashley's insights about sovereignty, anarchy/terror, and the crafting of political ontologies are as fresh and pertinent today as they were when he first introduced them into the discipline of IR some 20 years ago. Indeed, Ashley's work has had such an impact on IR theory and the discipline of IR that current generations of students and scholars might be forgiven for thinking that Ashley's work often states the obvious. It is worth reminding them that there was nothing obvious about Ashley's insights when he introduced them into North American IR in the early 1980s.

This doesn't mean that Ashley gets everything right. Far from it. Ashley's contextual focus on traditional IR concepts like the state, sovereignty, and anarchy and his persistent invocation of traditional IR theorists in most of his work does as much to centre the discipline around realism's core concerns and heroic male writers as it does to decentre these ideas and authors. I suspect that this is a shortcoming Ashley accepts as the price of pursuing his particular strategy of interruption, for how can one interrupt the ‘we’ of rational sovereign man as a figure in international politics or in the discipline of IR if one is not incessantly questioning each of rational sovereign man's hegemonic representations?

There are also problems with style. While Ashley's style necessarily mimes his theoretical argument, sometimes he is just too annoying to read. I often find myself wishing he would stop interrupting and repeating himself at least, stop closing down the opposition before they've had a chance to speak, and just get on with his point.Footnote ⁶⁴ I get impatient with the disingenuous moments that pepper his writing, even when I find myself laughing out loud at his sometimes biting sense of humor. For example, in ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’, Ashley concludes with a ‘self-critique’, mentioning that he has ‘nagging doubts about tone’.Footnote ⁶⁵ And then he concludes the essay with this final passage – ‘Let us play havoc with neorealist concepts and claims. Let us neither admire nor ignore the orrery of errors, but let us instead fracture the orbs, crack them open, shake them, and see what possibilities they have enclosed. And then, when we are done, let us not cast away the residue. Let us instead sweep it into a jar, shine up the glass, and place it high on the bookshelf with other specimens of past mistakes’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Ouch.

I also find myself surprised that, even in his latest published work, Ashley's writing exhibits a tension between his performative style and his lingering economistic logic that always threatens to close – and too often does close – the performative openings he has worked so hard to create. This might explain Ashley's very different responses to the very different sorts of interruptions he experiences to his interruption. Ashley recognises and theorises Steve Krasner's pre-emptive interruption ‘poststructuralism is dangerous’ and is clearly stung by Robert Keohane's interruption of ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’ which works by including only the first two sections of that essay in the edited Neorealism and its Critiques.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet Ashley leaves other interruptions only partially processed. The most glaring example is in his essay ‘The Achievements of Poststructuralism’. Ashley writes,

Ashley's analysis of this interruption first acknowledges his complicity in this macho, loner posturing – he is, after all, one of the boys and often one of these boys. But then it quickly deflects attention away from Ashley and his undisclosed statement as examples of this hyper-heroic man on horseback posturing his colleague is referring to toward a more generalised discussion and critique of the boys in IR, thereby missing an opportunity to further dwell on and destabilise the masculine position from which Ashley himself so often speaks and writes.Footnote ⁶⁹ What this passage marks is how Ashley – like so many (mostly male) IR theorists, alternative and otherwise – struggles with his engagements with feminism, gender, and sexuality. He knows he is positioned to ‘speak with the force of the Word’ when it comes to his sex, his gender, his sexuality, his class, and his race, and he does so consistently and comfortably in his conversations with other similarly positioned figures in the discipline of IR.Footnote ⁷⁰ Occasionally, Ashley's self-consciousness about his positioning results in explicit gendered critiquesFootnote ⁷¹ or in his insistent use of gender-aware phrases – his old favorite being ‘women and men’ and his new favorite being ‘women, men, and children’. Yet all too frequently, Ashley's struggle with especially feminism, gender, and sexuality results in a deafening public silence on these issues, leaving Ashley's choked-back words uncomfortably echoing in some feminist and queer ears while Ashley as one heroic masculine voice singularly wages battle with a masculine chorus of mainstream IR.

Ashley recognises this, writing of his appreciation for the harm that a ‘male-marked voice’ of interruption and judgment does in IR specifically and in modernism generally.Footnote ⁷² This is one of those conundrums Ashley shares with so many others whose embodiment of master signifiers (whether they be white or male or straight) enables them to occupy and enjoy certain forms of hegemonic power, even when their impulses are to critique them.

My own critique of Ashley's often echoing silence on such issues is tempered by two sets of experiences – one involving what Ashley does and one involving what Ashley refuses to do. What Ashley does is the work of ‘listening, questioning, and expanding the cultural spaces of freedom where […] ethically disciplined work can go on’, and this includes the work of feminist and queer scholars.Footnote ⁷³ Take a case in point. Just after the publication of my queer, feminist book Faking It, Rick was asked by countless leading, straight IR scholars what he thought of my book. Rick's consistent reply was that it was important and necessary and that he loved it. He then turned to me and explained, ‘What they were inviting me to do was to disown you intellectually. Now I know just how intellectually and ethically limited each and every one of them is’. This is what Ashley does. What Ashley refuses to do is just as important. He refuses to speak for feminist and queer students and scholars or to advise them on what to say or what to be. This is in stark contrast to some other IR scholars like Robert Keohane (1989) and more recently Adam Jones (1996), whose interventions into the IR feminist/gender debates have been less than welcomed by most feminists (Weber, 1991).Footnote ⁷⁴

All this results in the figuration of Ashley as a scholar who is utterly partial. He is partial to his project of interrupting traditional North American IR but also partial in the breath and depth of how he pursues this project. Ashley knows all this. He thinks about it, and then he thinks about it some more. He struggles with it. He acknowledges it in oblique confessions. He writes, ‘I, too, have wanted there to be a mirror’ to reflect a stable, speaking subject, but am ‘coming to terms with this grief for all that is lost when one tries to impose upon oneself and others some Cartesian ideal of prepolitical sovereign being’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Resisting the force of the Word and the Image, Ashley allies himself with other critical and ‘alternative’ theorists as just one more scholar ‘who speak[s] in the knowledge that speaking is always political, always dangerous, always conducted without security’, always ridden with failure.Footnote ⁷⁶ In this way, he acknowledges what his speaking – and occasional lack of speaking – does, in contrast to ‘would-be mainstreamers’ who relish in a ‘self-indulgent refusal of responsibility’ even though they ‘have every opportunity to think’.Footnote ⁷⁷

And that, really, is what Ashley's interruption is about – thinking. It ‘is nothing more, and nothing less, than the unfolding of a space in which it is once more possible to think’ – about international politics, about international theory, about what Ashley's interruption itself permits and limits, how it unfolds and sometimes folds back on itself.Footnote ⁷⁸ There is nothing iconic or dead about thinking, and thinking again.