偶拾

最近頹廢的時間比較多，但讀了一本書的一章，覺得幾好。是 Grahma Crow 的 The Art of Sociological Argument。介紹了不同的社會學家的研究方法或者是手法。當然我還是懶的，只讀完了傅柯的一章，當中有一段是這樣的：

"In pursuit of his dream of promoting 'a new age of curiosity' he sought to use evidence about bygone episodes so that we may 'find what surrounds us strange and odd'. This enables us to better answer they question 'what are we to-day?'. He did not intend this 'history of the present' to be a comfortable experience; rather his approach constitutes ;an affront to our habits of thought'. Foucault used the technique of juxtaposing the past and the present so that attention is drawn to the distinctiveness of the present, by revealing what we take for granted about current arrangements and by exposing historical discontinuities and unexpected parallels." (129)

傅柯的方法是利用從前發生的事，讓我們感受到現在身處的環境也是奇怪的。透過從前與現在的比較，讓我們自覺對「現在」太少反思，並且全然接受。我們同時也會覺得社會是一路進步的，但其實不然（這裡就有可能讓人把傅柯歸入「後現代」，但書中說傅柯拒絕這樣的分類）。

那麼傅柯要揭穿的範疇是：

"Foucault's approach was designed to contribute to the process of 'wearing away certain self-evidentness and commonplaces about madness, normality, illness, crime and punishment'" (129)

瘋癲、疾病及罪惡 ，都是與一種正常相對的。這都可以說成是社會上給每一個人的標準，達不成便要規訓。

Crow 又說：

"Foucault's sense of the open and contingent character of social change is also conveyed in his remark that 'the things which seem most evident to us are always formed in the confluence of encounters and chances, during the course of a precarious and fragile history'. This sense of history as an open process in which 'things can be changed' took the argument much further than Weber's critique of determinism did, even though there are important similarities between two thinkers." (144-145)

現在的制度看似不證自明，但其實是許多個可能性之一，而且都可以改變的。這是傅柯思想的積極作用，或者說是Crow 理解的傅柯中的積極作用。

剛巧在New Left Project 看到談及傅柯的訪問：

‘Things don’t have to be this way’ (Part 2)

"Can you clarify what you mean by the phrase ‘how we think collectively’?

For Foucault, we are thinking collectively all the time, producing ways of viewing the world and behaving in it. Because this thought is collective and impersonal, it is rarely interrogated: more often than not it goes unchallenged as ‘reality’, common sense, or generalised ‘progress’. One of Foucault’s key insights in this respect is to constantly remind us that our ways of behaving and thinking are radically historical. A rationale that was coherent and ‘reasonable’ for a society in the past will often now appear to us absurd and brutal: he incites us to look at current society with this in mind. As Foucault once put it, the act of doing criticism is about making ‘harder those acts which are now too easy’. "　（斜體自加）

這應該很清楚的讓人懂了吧，傅柯的手法。而其仔細的考掘 也總是讓人充滿好奇的，從前的刑罰方式，對待瘋癲之人的方法等。是比較有歷史支持的，也是很著重細節的。