The production of a silence: memorialising Ashley

‘The history of thought’, observes Fredric Jameson, ‘is the history of its models’.Footnote ¹⁴ Metaphorically and substantively, post-structuralist thought takes language as its model of the social. In 1986 Stuart Hall argued that the linguistic metaphor ‘constitutes the theoretical revolution of our time […] It is not only the discovery of the importance of the discursive, and the utility of a certain kind of analysis; it is also the metaphorically generated capacity to re-conceptualise other kinds of practices as operating, in some important ways, like a language’.Footnote ¹⁵ The linguistic model opened the way for IR scholars to rethink what they did through borrowings from literary theory, as a form of textual analysis. If the world was a text, constituted through inter-textual relations, it should be analysed as such. Textualising the world led to repeated invocations of reading and writing as practices through which the world was interpreted and produced.Footnote ¹⁶ Metaphors of reading were put to work literally to demonstrate that ‘the “great texts” of IR can be read in ways entirely contrary to their ritualized disciplinary treatment […]’.Footnote ¹⁷ Different reading strategies led to different readings, putting in question disciplinary identity itself. Standard interpretations of canonical figures such as Thucydides or Thomas Hobbes were not simply reflections of their timeless wisdom or the unchanging nature of international politics but instead products of a specific and contestable reading regime. Analysis of the interpretive practices of reading and writing deployed by IR scholars and their effects led to greater reflexivity, a hallmark of dissident thought.Footnote ¹⁸ Whether analysing disciplinary texts or world politics, it was important to bear in mind the protocols of reading through which meaning was produced.

Weber's appreciation of Ashley offers a neat example of how reading strategies shape the meaning of texts.Footnote ¹⁹ In discussing his contribution to the emergence of a dissident thinking space Weber locates the meaning of Ashley's texts in his intentions, thus producing a memorialising reading. Such a reading stems from ‘a religious attitude of desire’: in taking a text seriously, the reader tries ‘to retrace, reaffirm and be at one with the workings of desire within it […]’.Footnote ²⁰ Rejecting interpretations of Ashley that demonise him as an alien figure, standing outside and in opposition to the discipline, Weber instead cites his oft-expressed desire to communicate with other IR scholars and to engage them in dialogue. In a memorialising reading, the author's intention and will is the interpretive principle or sovereign ground – the reading strategy, in other words – through which meaning is produced and stabilised. Characteristically a high degree of coherence is attributed to the text: Weber reads Ashley as engaged in a long-term strategy of intentional ‘interruptions’ of IR in its hegemonic North American form. She also traces Ashley's intentions in the style of his texts, claiming they performatively reproduce his theoretical interruptions. Ashley's texts and the discussion he wishes to provoke, Weber says, focus on three concepts central to traditional IR theory – sovereignty, anarchy and statecraft. His diverse interruptions are all intended to politicise realism in its various forms and the discipline as a whole by making IR aware of the unquestioned presuppositions on which it is based.

Although a common interpretive practice, Weber's memorialising reading of Ashley sits awkwardly with dissident thought, which typically shifts attention away from the authorial subject to focus on the text itself. Reflecting post-structuralist arguments about the inter-textual character of the social world, a counter-memorialising reading eschews appeals to sovereignty and gives attention to the ‘unfinalized celebration of freedom and paradox’ that goes on within a text: it ‘appreciates the intrinsic ambiguity, uncertainty, irony, and recombinatorial possibilities of its own textual inheritance’.Footnote ²¹ This kind of reading puts authorial mastery of a text's meaning in question: the author and their presumed authority is the product of a specific reading protocol rather than the true, natural or necessary arbiter of a text's meaning. Weber's memorialising reading also illustrates how the meaning of a text escapes its author's intentions. Her reading defers to Ashley's account of what he was trying to do in the 1980s – open up thinking space in IR. However, it also silences and smoothes over the play of difference in his texts, thus placing limits on the opening Ashley intended to produce, and Weber to celebrate.

First, Weber's reading re-centres realism as the core of international theory and the central target of dissident thought. She locates Ashley's context in the norms constitutive of a realist-dominated discipline. His texts are understood as conscious attempts to rework those norms, by recasting the realist community of statesmen as the source of a critical theory of international politics, for example.Footnote ²² Ashley emerges as a flexible and liberal subject, invested with a high degree of agency – repeatedly choosing to change his position, shift and rework his identity, or throw his voice – but with a persistent set of goals and intentions. Desire for dialogue with a discipline that claimed not to understand him forced Ashley onto a discursive terrain dominated by realism: Ashley's re-centering of the discipline around ‘realism's core concerns and heroic male writers’ is, says Weber, ‘the price of pursuing his particular strategy of interruption’.Footnote ²³ Realist hegemony organised Ashley onto its terrain, then demonised and ignored him, butchering his most famous text along the way. The process reached a predictable conclusion at the end of the 1980s when, in a move common among marginalised groups, post-structuralist scholars began to valorise their outsider status.Footnote ²⁴ Weber's reading tracks and mimics Ashley's desire, re-centring the discipline around realism as its hegemonic voice.

Second, Weber's memorialising reading silences theoretical and substantive difference in Ashley's texts; discordant notes are filtered out. A reading strategy produces coherence by focusing on elements within a text. As realism is brought to the fore, other elements in Ashley's texts recede, becoming marginal or invisible. Weber twice refers to Ashley warning his readers that structuralism in theory serves the ‘hegemonic state’.Footnote ²⁵ But that is not quite what Ashley said: in the texts to which Weber refers, ‘Three Modes of Economism’ and ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’, Ashley links structuralism in theory to a crisis in the capitalist world economy.Footnote ²⁶ He explained neo-realism's dominance within IR theory by reference to this context. Marxist references, to a ‘transnational capitalist class’ or ‘worldwide power bloc’ for example, persist in Ashley's texts throughout the 1980s.Footnote ²⁷ Despite Weber's observation, suggestive of a counter-memorialising reading, that ‘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’, in her reading some ‘early influences’ are read out.Footnote ²⁸ Questions about the relations between theory and the world, in particular about where dominant forms of theory come from, also recede in Weber's reading. Such concerns led Ashley to a position that sits oddly with Weber's account of his interruptions. Ashley is clear that neo-realism's power is structural: it stems from a crisis of the capitalist state and represents a moment in the economisation of world politics.Footnote ²⁹ Therefore, it cannot be overturned by logical argument – an insight Ashley then apparently forgot; he tried anyway, with results depressingly familiar.Footnote ³⁰ Yet in Weber's reading, Ashley is a relentlessly argumentative subject: all his texts are interruptions of the discipline. In seeing his texts as all of a piece, Weber reads out this and other moments of difference. The stability and coherence of Ashley's texts is an illusion, the result of Weber's reading practices.

Third, Weber's erasure of the difference in Ashley's texts mimics and is reinforced by his own self-positioning. She accepts Ashley's claim for the incoherence of his work, the lack of continuities both in particular instances and across the critical theory/post-structural divide. In this respect, Ashley effectively interrupts and then silences himself. We might term this Ashley's Captain Kirk moment. In response to the textual poaching engaged in by fans of the series Star Trek, William Shatner, who played the central role of Captain Kirk, complained that ‘people read into it things that were not intended’.Footnote ³¹ Falling into the intentionalist fallacy, Shatner asserted that fans could read Star Trek only in ways intended by the writers; other readings were by definition illegitimate or wrong. In the same way, Weber allows the self-consciously post-structuralist author after the fact – Ashley Now – to tell her what his texts mean. Weber takes Ashley's word now for what he was doing then, privileging the late, Post Ashley over the early, Critical Ashley, and reads all his texts from the former point of view: the continuities Weber finds in Ashley's works are all dissident ones. Things Critical Ashley thought were important – such as capital, class and Marx – are ignored and so located outside thinking space. The marginalisation or erasure of difference in Ashley's texts produced by Weber's reading strategy is reinforced by Ashley's post-structuralist desire, despite intention being only one way of framing questions about the meaning of a text.

In April 2007, at the Newcastle workshop devoted to him, Ashley forcefully reasserted the reality of the divide in his texts and rejected efforts (including mine) to find continuities across it. This was Ashley as Captain Kirk, engaged in a classic piece of boundary-work. When pressed about the absence of reference to Marx in his later, self-consciously post-structuralist writings, Ashley asked rhetorically if I thought Derrida hadn't read Marx. Obviously he had – how else to make sense of Derrida's sometime description of himself as a communist and a Marxist?Footnote ³² But that's the point: for a long time Derrida didn't talk about Marx or, if he did, this was somehow overlooked by those who appropriated him for IR.Footnote ³³ This is the kind of silence Foucault talked about, one constitutive of dissident thought itself. The same is true of Ashley: Marx is present on both sides of the alleged divide in his texts. But for a long time no one, including Ashley, talked about it, thus silently affirming dissident identity. Ashley's noisy response to me in Newcastle reflects this state of affairs: only when someone speaks out of turn is it necessary to say what everyone else knows – Derrida (and Ashley) read Marx, so dissident scholars don't have to. As a result of the failure to take Marxism seriously, in thinking space questions about how deconstruction and Marxism relate go unasked. Again, Foucault is relevant here: ‘There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses’.Footnote ³⁴ When read through the protocols of thinking space, recourse to Ashley's intentions as the principle of coherence in his texts generates a reading directly contrary to the intentions themselves, and to Weber's as well. In the process, Weber and Ashley together obscure the constitutive relations and productive tensions between Critical Ashley and Post Ashley, between Derrida Ashley and Ashley Now. Instead, we get Captain Kirk.

Protocols of reading: icons, origin stories and historicity

Weber's reading strategy is not an isolated one but reflects a set of protocols through which dissident thinking space is produced. Other figures central to the origin stories that dissident scholars tell themselves – about who they are, where they come from, and what they do – have been subjected to similar treatment. In suffering a retrospective textual dismembering – one in which he is complicit – Ashley is in good company. The marginalisation of capital and Marx effected by these protocols has negative consequences for the constitution of thinking space. This is most readily apparent in relation to the analysis of historicity.

Post-structuralist icon Michel Foucault offers perhaps the most telling example of how dissident reading protocols work to silence the play of textual difference. Celebratory reference to Foucault – as ushering in new methods, styles and loci of research and analysis – is a defining feature of dissident thought.Footnote ³⁵ Whether in terms of archeology, genealogy, biopolitics, governmentality or power/knowledge, Foucault is perhaps the most significant source of dissident thought in IR. Amongst other things, Foucault's texts are routinely cited as an authoritative refutation of Marxist analysis, which is alleged to reproduce the ‘reasoning man’ of the sovereignty problematic and to rely on an economistic conception of power.Footnote ³⁶ Here too, however, such a reading relies on suppressing or forgetting the play of difference in Foucault's texts, in particular his writings on power. Contrary to dissident readings, Foucault asserts a close relationship between the emergence of disciplinary power and the rise of the bourgeoisie: ‘this new type of power, which can no longer be formulated in terms of sovereignty, is, I believe, one of the great inventions of bourgeois society. It has been a fundamental instrument in the constitution of industrial capitalism and of the type of society that is its accomplishment’.Footnote ³⁷ This is not an isolated statement. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault offers a detailed account of the integral relations between the state, capitalist accumulation, a rising bourgeoisie and new forms of power.Footnote ³⁸ Andreas Kalyvas argues provocatively that a ‘Marxist approach is entirely consistent with Foucault's interpretation of the advent of new techniques of power’, as in his discussion of prostitution for instance.Footnote ³⁹

Not everyone agrees, of course, but the relationship is not one of simple rejection. In the 1970s Foucault's work was subjected to responsible criticism by Marxist critics, most notably Nicos Poulantzas who was one of the first to note Foucault's hypostatisation of power, as severed from its material and social bases in capitalist society. Poulantzas pointed out that all Foucault's examples of the sites of new power relations – prisons, national armies, public education and public health – were part of the strategic field of the liberal-capitalist state.Footnote ⁴⁰ In his later work, before his untimely death in October 1979, Poulantzas began to reinvigorate Marxist analysis through a critical and creative engagement with Foucault – much to the horror of more conventional historical materialists.Footnote ⁴¹ Foucault expressed a similarly open-minded view of his relations with Marxism: ‘I am neither an adversary nor a partisan of Marxism; I question it about what it has to say about experiences that ask questions of it.’Footnote ⁴² When asked if Marx was at work in his methodology, Foucault replied: ‘Yes, absolutely. You see, given the period in which I wrote these books, it was good form (in order to be viewed favourably by the institutional Left) to cite Marx in the footnotes. So I was careful to steer clear of that.’Footnote ⁴³ Both in substance and in its inter-textual relations, then, Foucault's work is neither sharply discrete from nor in simple contradiction with the plural subject of Marxism, prompting reconsideration of the role he plays in defining thinking space. For example, assertions of the difference between post-structuralist and Marxist thought that point to Foucault's problematising of man as the subject of reason in history are put in doubt, rendering a supposedly sharp boundary fuzzy and porous.Footnote ⁴⁴

None of this makes it into IR, dissident or otherwise. In thinking space the Marxist trace in the post-structuralist text is ignored: Foucault's view of power is ontologised and cited as an unanswerable critique of all other forms of power analysis.Footnote ⁴⁵ These contested readings of Foucault matter because, like Ashley, he is a central figure in the constitution of thinking space. Jan Selby attributes such partial and interested readings of Foucault to the difficulties of translating someone ‘primarily a historian/theorist of the domestic realm of liberal capitalist societies, into the international or global arena, into a realm which, while no doubt a social and historical construct, has certain quite specific, enduring and irreducible qualities’.Footnote ⁴⁶ A simpler explanation is to acknowledge the continuing antipathy towards Marx in the discipline, and the role it plays in the definition of serious scholarship. This antipathy also defines the limits of thinking space and what it means to be a dissident subject. The Marxist trace in Foucault destabilises and thus makes visible the interpretive practices through which Post Ashley and thinking space are produced.

One of the ways in which a community constitutes itself is through practices of collective recognition, by naming those who are members and those who, despite appearances to the contrary, are not. Here too the textual violence of boundary-work is evident.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such practices help communities to answer what Ashley calls the essential political question – who are we? The contents of thinking space are then defined primarily by the work of those scholars identified – by themselves and others – as part of the community. Weber's reading of Ashley contains a list of dissident scholars, a common practice in thinking space.Footnote ⁴⁸ Such lists are useful for what they reveal about the shared concerns – what is thought about, and how – that define post-structuralist thought in IR. Even casual perusal of the texts on Weber's list makes clear that the silences evident in dissident readings of Ashley and Foucault are reproduced in dissident scholarship more generally. As a result, for most of the first two decades of its existence post-structuralist thought in IR reproduced the broader discipline's disinterest in capitalism.Footnote ⁴⁹ In thinking space Marx goes unheard. For a community committed to an ‘open-ended, genuinely pluralistic, and contested approach to knowledge and society’, this is a telling silence.Footnote ⁵⁰

Similar patterns are evident in the intellectual histories and genealogies dissident scholars produce to narrate their origins. In a representative example, organised in terms of language and social meaning, Critical Theorist Jurgen Habermas is made to stand in – rather uncomfortably – for Marxist thought, which is subsumed into a concern with instrumental reason and alienation.Footnote ⁵¹ Reference to capitalism and its effects drops out, replaced by modernity, of which capitalism is the economic expression. In these and other ways thinking space reproduces the broader disciplinary silence on capitalism, linked by Critical Ashley to realism's status as the public sphere of a global capitalist system.Footnote ⁵²

A brief discussion of contemporary China highlights the negative consequences of rejecting Marx and capital for dissident thought, in particular analysis of historicity. The production of a post-colonial modernity in China deployed Marxist categories and discourses, with ‘Chinese characteristics’. As Lin Chun argues, the post-revolutionary Chinese search for ‘an alternative to the “master course” of teleological progress defies the dominant ideologies of modernity and modernization’.Footnote ⁵³ The refusal by the post-1949 Chinese state to participate in a capitalist world economy – reinforced by the opposition of the US – generated a self-consciously socialist modernity, defined against capitalism in both its developed (for example, the US) and dependent (for example, India) forms. Sharp criticism was directed also at the Soviet model.Footnote ⁵⁴ Following the post-1978 ‘opening up’ to the world economy China's post-colonial modernity has been reworked by capitalist practices and relations introduced by a communist party-state. Marxist scholars point out that China's ‘transition’ – with its illegal land grabs in which peasant land is forcibly transformed into private property and large, mostly illegal migrant population of former peasants, forced off the land and into the cities in pursuit of work – strongly resembles the enclosure movement central to the emergence of capitalism in England.Footnote ⁵⁵ This is statecraft as mancraft: the continuing assault on the social rights of peasants and other workers, as they are ‘freed’ to enter the labour market, is the deployment of state power in the service of producing capitalist subjects and social relations.Footnote ⁵⁶ The constitution and production of contemporary China thus implicates Marx in a dual sense: as an author of China's anti-capitalist modernity and as a critic of the bureaucratic capitalism seeking to replace it.

Analysis of China's historicity entails marking the distinctions and relations between capitalism, socialism and modernity, as these are refracted through the experience of post-revolutionary and post-colonial states and societies. It also entails thinking seriously about peasants, and in terms that go beyond the nation-state.Footnote ⁵⁷ In China the peasants are not just another problem within modernity, they are the problem of modernity itself.Footnote ⁵⁸ According to Sun Jin, ‘the peasant problem and the Chinese revolution, as well as the building of Chinese modernization, are the inside and outside of each other, and even the cause and the result of each other’.Footnote ⁵⁹ But in dissident thought, focused on advanced industrial societies, capitalism is conflated with modernity and peasants are invisible. This conflation is an old ideological trick of capitalism – it renders capitalism invisible, socialism deficient and peasants anachronistic. Dissident thought, obsessed with modernity but defined against Marx and uninterested in capitalism and class, makes the same equation and so cannot make sense of China's historicity.

The trace in the text: counter-memorialising Ashley

If there is a silence in thinking space where capital, class and Marx ought to be, how might we rework its boundaries? One way forward is through renewed engagement with Marxist thought. Marxist cultural theory, as developed in the work of scholars such as Fredric Jameson, Rosemary Hennessy, Michael Sprinker, Kathi Weeks and Harry Harootunian, is also concerned with the analysis of language, social meaning and power. Post-structuralist scholars are neither the first nor necessarily the most thoughtful analysts of textuality and historicity. Dissident thought is dismissive of Marxism, linking it to a well-worn set of clichés – economism, reductionism, base-and-superstructure models, teleological grand narratives – taken as the last word on Marxism's fatal flaws. The narrowness of thinking space is here much in evidence. Read through the protocols of dissident thought Marxist cultural theory is an oxymoron: once we've demonstrated the reflection of the base in the superstructure, what more is there to do? In the absence of serious engagement with Marxist scholarship, however, this amounts to name-calling and obscures the sophistication of Marxist thought.

For instance, in a discussion of Hegel's account of expressive causality – in thinking space routinely equated with Marxism – Jameson argues that it is important within Marxist thought to ‘explore the multiple paths that lead to the unmasking of cultural artifacts as socially symbolic acts’.Footnote ⁶⁰ With Louis Althusser he agrees that expressive causality represents a form of allegorical analysis that reduces one thing – a superstructure, say – to another – a base – and asserts their essential identity. But Jameson argues that this does not mean we can reject expressive causality altogether: however problematic, ‘if interpretation in terms of expressive causality or of allegorical master narratives remains a constant temptation, this is because such master narratives have inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them’.Footnote ⁶¹ To deny this inscription and its sources is to deny one of the ways in which cultural texts and the contexts that produce them are related. The upshot is to see expressive causality as a ‘local law within our historical reality’.Footnote ⁶² Against post-structuralist accounts that equate all causation with Humean models and then reject causal analysis altogether, Jameson argues that mechanistic causality also retains a local validity within what he terms cultural analysis. ‘It does little good’, he says, ‘to banish “extrinsic” categories from our thinking’ when they ‘continue to have a hold on the objective realities about which we plan to think’.Footnote ⁶³ Marxist analysis thus requires that we be attentive to the multiple ways in which cultural forms and social meanings relate to their manifold settings.

Read in light of Jameson's discussion of the diverse ways in which cultural texts relate to their surroundings and conditions of production, Ashley's analysis of the causal relations between a crisis of the world economy and neo-realism represents a form of ‘transcoding’ whereby the analyst invents ‘a set of terms […] a particular code or language, such that the same terminology can be used to analyze and articulate two quite distinct types of objects or “texts”’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Jameson is here updating the concept of mediations, which is how Marxism seeks to break out of the ‘specialized compartments of the (bourgeois) disciplines and to make connections among the seemingly disparate phenomena of social life generally’, an ambition shared by dissident thought.Footnote ⁶⁵ This is not a reductionist strategy – Jameson argues that expressive causality, which relates texts by pointing to similar processes in distinct regions of social life, is only one form mediation can take, contrasting it with Althusser's structural causality which relates texts by way of their structural difference and distance from one another. The analyst's aim, then, is to trace out the mediations – between a crisis of the world economy and the emergence of neo-realism, say – thus to overcome the seeming ‘fragmentation and autonomization’ of social life. As both Marxism and post-structuralist thought affirm, ‘there is no need to invent ways of linking language events and social upheavals or economic contradictions because on that level they were never separate from one another’.Footnote ⁶⁶ In thinking space, however, such questions are mostly ignored, usually by reference to the discursive character of the social. Again the narrowness of dissident thought comes into view: assumptions about social reality in general do not mean we can forego the hard work of tracing out connections in particular instances, reduce all mediations to a single form, or deny their existence altogether.

When read as serious reflection on a set of problems that dissident thought is also concerned with (or should be), Marxist cultural theory opens up significant possibilities for rethinking the limits of thinking space. Traces of such a space are also evident in Ashley's texts, pointing to the possibility of a different, counter-memorialising reading of his work. Ashley and Walker argue that memorialising and counter-memorialising readings, with their different implications for knowledge production, may be applied to any community, including scholarly ones. A memorialising reading, they say, ‘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”’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Such a reading might also try to constitute a scholarly community's ‘textual inheritance as the “origins” of a tradition, the “sources” of the powers of “insight” to which those of that tradition owe a perhaps unrequitable debt, the “exemplars” of the limitations on discourse that “we” who are indebted must honor’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Contrary to how they understand themselves, the community of dissident IR scholars displays many of these attributes. Thinking space is defined by a set of protocols – evident in Weber's reading of Ashley and in received views of Foucault – that constitute a set of conventions, norms and commonsense understandings through which dissident scholarship knows and reproduces itself. Dissident thought is defined by a set of textual inheritances and exemplars – including Ashley, Derrida and Foucault – to which are attributed its insights into the workings of global politics. Those protocols, inheritances and exemplars restrict what can be thought about and how.

A counter-memorialising reading of Ashley's texts draws out hints and possibilities hidden in plain view by dissident protocols. Post Ashley – or Ashley Now, if they are the same – wants to deny his Marxist roots. Yet traces remain, opening up space for a different engagement with capital and class. In contrast to a memorialising reading, which sets limits on what can be thought about and how, a counter-memorialising reading aspires to open up the possibilities present in a text, ‘to enrich, not diminish, the cultural resources of a discipline, community, or culture’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Substituting ‘community’ for ‘discipline’ in the following passage makes clearer the implications of such a reading for how we approach Ashley's texts, and for dissident thought more generally: ‘It exposes cultural resources that are in the ambiguous shadows of the “referent realities” of world politics that a [community] studies, that lurk in the peripheries of a [community's] “conventional” conversations, and that are buried in the footnotes, prefaces, and incidental remarks of the textual “origins” a [community] would honor’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Here is a footnote from the misty origins – the prehistory or preface, if you like – of post-structuralist thought in IR, produced by a subject whose subsequent trajectory away from modernist protocols is regarded as exemplary amongst like-minded scholars: ‘It is perhaps instructive to consult Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology as an example of a theoretical statement struggling mightily to escape the logocentric tendencies of written communications’.Footnote ⁷¹ Ashley's generous reading of a canonical work of Marxist thought ought to give dissident scholars pause. Marx and Engels are read sympathetically, as beset by the limits of language – limits we all face – and yet at the same time struggling to communicate ideas that are in certain respects at odds with the means – written speech – at their disposal. Here is a textual opening in which another Ashley – Derrida Ashley – might ponder (perhaps he did) and pursue further the questions raised by a critical articulation of Marxist and deconstructive thought.Footnote ⁷² He might consider also the extrinsic causal relations between a text and its production – as article and book lengths shorten, driven by the demands of profit-seeking publishers, the space for such footnotes, trailing their untidy inter-textual relations, disappears. Here then is one possible opening to another view of thinking space.

Here is another, from the other end of the 1980s. Labour is a central category for Marxism but it is mostly absent in post-structuralist thought. Yet ‘Reading Dissidence/Writing the Discipline’, regarded as a canonical text in the production of thinking space, contains numerous references to labour, work and production, including the labour of self-making and earning a living.Footnote ⁷³ Dissident subjects labour, producing works of dissident thought: art too, as Ashley and Walker remind us, is productive labour.Footnote ⁷⁴ In labouring to produce these works of thought, dissident subjects like other workers also make themselves and their localities, albeit within unspecified and unexplained limitations on the social resources to which they have access.Footnote ⁷⁵ Also in common with other workers, dissident subjects have to earn a living – although this crude reference to the cash nexus is marginalised in the text.Footnote ⁷⁶ Reflecting the protocols of reading through which thinking space is produced, there is no attempt to theorise the political economy of higher education in which almost all post-structuralist scholars work, or its implications for the kind of works produced and how they might be read.Footnote ⁷⁷ Here too, the inter-textual relations in the text open up a different ordering of thinking space.

Similar traces are evident elsewhere in the text. Ashley and Walker locate the context of dissident thought in a crisis of modernity. Another Ashley – one I have called, misleadingly, Critical Ashley – once linked that crisis to the internationalisation of capital. Over time, however, two shifts take place in this initial formulation. First, the crisis is no longer linked to a particular source but instead traced to an unidentified but suspiciously familiar set of ‘transgressions’ of institutional orders – factories and plantations, conservatories and studios, states and their borders – and subjectivities – journeymen and clerks, poets and scientific geniuses – associated with ‘interdependence’ and compared to the pressure on the parish dole in the English countryside during the crisis of the feudal order.Footnote ⁷⁸ Second, the crisis is relocated from a capitalist world economy to modernity, and asserted to have lasted for centuries. For Post Ashley – a subject no more stable than Critical Ashley – the crisis is coextensive with and constitutive of modernity itself.Footnote ⁷⁹ Ashley and Walker do not mention the many ways in which their argument echoes with historical materialist themes. Perhaps we should read them, rather like Marx and Engels, as struggling mightily to escape the Marxist trace in the post-structuralist text. It is there all the same, troubling the protocols through which dissident thought seeks to secure itself against those who would challenge the silences in thinking space, and order it anew.