这些是我在《犬儒理论》中所做的摘录，由于这本书涉及的内容很多，我将对它们进行分类呈现。在原文的下方是我的简要概括。
第一部分：”犬儒理论”对于科学和理性的敌视
1.后现代主义对知识的态度
For Foucault, a statement reveals not just information but also the rules and conditions of a discourse. These then determine the construction of truth claims and knowledge. Dominant discourses are extremely powerful because they determine what can be considered true, thus applicable, in a given time and place. Thus, sociopolitical power is the ultimate determiner of what is true in Foucault’s analysis, not correspondence with reality. Foucault was so interested in the concept of how power influences what is considered knowledge that in 1981 he coined the term “power-knowledge” to convey the inextricable link between powerful discourses and what is known. Foucault called a dominant set of ideas and values an episteme because it shapes how we identify and interact with knowledge.
In The Order of Things, Foucault argues against objective notions of truth and suggests we think instead in terms of “regimes of truth,” which change according to the specific episteme of each culture and time. As a result, Foucault adopted the position that there are no fundamental principles by which to discover truth and that all knowledge is “local” to the knower28—ideas which form the basis of the postmodern knowledge principle. Foucault didn’t deny that a reality exists, but he doubted the ability of humans to transcend our cultural biases enough to get at it.
The main takeaway from this is that postmodern skepticism is not garden-variety skepticism, which might also be called “reasonable doubt.” The kind of skepticism employed in the sciences and other rigorous means of producing knowledge asks, “How can I be sure this proposition is true?” and will only tentatively accept as a provisional truth that which survives repeated attempts to disprove it. These propositions are put forth in models, which are understood to be provisional conceptual constructs, which are used to explain and predict phenomena and are judged according to their ability to do so. The principle of skepticism common among postmodernists is frequently referred to as “radical skepticism.” It says, “All knowledge is constructed: what is interesting is theorizing about why knowledge got constructed this way.” Thus, radical skepticism is markedly different from the scientific skepticism that characterized the Enlightenment. The postmodern view wrongly insists that scientific thought is unable to distinguish itself as especially reliable and rigorous in determining what is and isn’t true.29 Scientific reasoning is construed as a metanarrative—a sweeping explanation of how things work—and postmodernism is radically skeptical of all such explanations. In postmodern thinking, that which is known is only known within the cultural paradigm that produced the knowledge and is therefore representative of its systems of power. As a result, postmodernism regards knowledge as provincial and intrinsically political.
This view is widely attributed to the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, who critiqued science, the Enlightenment, and Marxism. Each of these projects was, for Lyotard, a prime example of a modernist or Enlightenment metanarrative. Ultimately, Lyotard feared that science and technology were just one “language game”—one way of legitimating truth claims—and that they were taking over all other language games. He mourned the demise of small local “knowledges” passed on in narrative form and viewed the loss of meaning-making intrinsic to scientific detachment as a loss of valuable narratives. Lyotard’s famous characterization of postmodernism as a “skepticism towards metanarratives” has been extremely influential on the development of postmodernism as a school of thought, analytical tool, and worldview.30
This was the great postmodernist contribution to knowledge and knowledge production. It did not invent the skeptical reevaluation of well-established beliefs. It did, however, fail to appreciate that scientific and other forms of liberal reasoning (such as arguments in favor of democracy and capitalism) are not so much metanarratives (though they can adopt these) as imperfect but self-correcting processes that apply a productive and actionable form of skepticism to everything, including themselves. This mistake led them into their equally misguided political project.
这里，作者举的是福柯和利奥塔的例子。福柯认为，”话语” 拥有巨大的权力，它建构了知识，决定了何为真假，因此，在福柯的分析中，决定事物真伪的不是它与现实的契合度，而且政治(和社会)权力。他为此特地发明了一个词叫”权力知识”，来体现强势话语与知识之间的联系。在《词与物》中，他反对真理的客观性，并主张把真理视为一种随着文化和时间改变的”体制”。福柯认为，不存在什么发现知识的基本原则，任何知识都局限于其拥有者。
作者认为，后现代主义的怀疑是极端怀疑，而不是合理怀疑。什么是合理怀疑？合理怀疑指的是，在下结论之前先问自己：”我怎么知道这个假设是正确的？”而且只有在假设经过多次实际的检验之后，才将其视为临时真理，科学研究采用的方法就是合理怀疑。后现代主义采用的极端怀疑则把一切知识都视为构建，只对构建的方式感兴趣。后现代主义错误地认为，科学并不比其它判断真伪的方式更可靠，更严谨，并且错误地把科学包装成了”元叙事”。对后现代主义而言，知识局限于文化的圈子，体现的是该文化圈子的权力体系。正因如此，后现代主义者认为知识是区域化的和政治化的。
这类思想很大程度上也受到了利奥塔的影响，利奥塔同时批判了科学、启蒙运动和马克思主义，在他看来，这些都是现代主义的”元叙事”。他把科学当作一种”文字游戏”，并且害怕它会取代其它的”文字游戏”，利奥塔认为，知识有很多种，科学只是其中的一种，科学的统治地位挤占了其它”知识”们的生存空间，后现代主义就是要怀疑”元叙事”。
作者总结到，对现有信念的怀疑并不是什么新鲜事物，不同的是，后现代主义并没有意识到，科学和归纳推理并不是元叙事(虽然采用了元叙事)，它们虽不完美，却有着自我纠正的机制，它们怀疑世界万物(包括它们自已)，然而这种怀疑(合理怀疑)是有益的，有可操作性的。
2.后现代主义对事实和逻辑的态度
Put more simply, one central belief in postmodern political thought is that powerful forces in society essentially order society into categories and hierarchies that are organized to serve their own interests. They effect this by dictating how society and its features can be spoken about and what can be accepted as true. For example, a demand that someone provide evidence and reasoning for their claims will be seen through a postmodernist Theoretical lens as a request to participate within a system of discourses and knowledge production that was built by powerful people who valued these approaches and designed them to exclude alternative means of communicating and producing “knowledge.” In other words, Theory views science as having been organized in a way that serves the interests of the powerful people who established it—white Western men—while setting up barriers against the participation of others. Thus, the cynicism at the heart of Theory is evident.
这里，作者认为，后现代主义的核心思想之一就是，权力通过话语控制社会，以谋取利益。假如一个人要求他人在提出观点时摆事实，讲逻辑，那么在后现代理论看来，这就是在参与那些注重事实和逻辑的人的话语系统，而创造这些话语系统(比如科学)的人就是西方的白人男性，因此，摆事实，讲逻辑就是在助长西方白人男性的权力。后现代主义的犬儒本质在此一览无遗。
3.立场认识论
This is a form of standpoint theory—the belief that knowledge comes from the lived experience of different identity groups, who are differently positioned in society and thus see different aspects of it.26 For decolonial scholars, both “Eurocentric forms of knowledge” and “the epistemological authority assigned uniquely to the Western university as the privileged site of knowledge production”27 are problems, and “the point is not simply to deconstruct such understandings, but to transform them.”28 In other words, by using activism to achieve a symbolic “textual” aim, affecting the statuary on campus, decolonization activists also attempted to bolster their ranks, while “reforming” education to rely more explicitly on their applications of Theory.
作者在这里初步介绍了在后现代主义中十分流行的”立场认识论”，这种理论认为，基于群体身份的生活经验是知识的来源，由于不同的群体在社会中处在不同的位置，于是他们便能看到社会的不同方面，对于主张”去殖民’‘的学者而言，”欧洲主心主义”的知识(科学)就是他们的敌人。
4.”学术正义”
Research justice acts upon a belief that science, reason, empiricism, objectivity, universality, and subjectivity have been overvalued as ways of obtaining knowledge while emotion, experience, traditional narratives and customs, and spiritual beliefs have been undervalued. Therefore, a more complete and just system of knowledge production would value the latter at least as much as the former—in fact, more, because of the long reign of science and reason in the West. The 2015 book, Research Justice: Methodologies for Social Change, edited by Andrew Jolivette, is a key text here. Jolivette, professor and former department chair of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University, defines the aims of this method in his introduction:
“[R]esearch justice” is a strategic framework and methodological intervention that aims to transform structural inequalities in research…. It is built around a vision of equal political power and legitimacy for different forms of knowledge, including the cultural, spiritual, and experiential, with the goal of greater equality in public policies and laws that rely on data and research to produce social change.38
This is activism. It seeks not only to revolutionize understandings of knowledge and rigor in university curricula—not necessarily to improve them—but also to influence public policies away from evidenced and reasoned work and towards the emotional, religious, cultural, and traditional, with an emphasis on lived experience. It seeks to challenge the core understanding of “scholarly research” as the gathering of empirical data for analysis, in order to better understand social issues. This theme comes across most strongly in the 2004 book, Decolonizing Research in Cross-Cultural Contexts: Critical Personal Narratives,39 which focuses on indigenous studies and is edited by Kagendo Mutua, professor of special education at the University of Alabama, and Beth Blue Swadener, Professor of Culture, Society and Education / Justice and Social Inquiry at the University of Arizona. Citing Homi Bhabha, the editors introduce the essays by claiming,
These works stand at the center of the “beginning of the presencing” of a disharmonious, restive, unharnessable (hence unessentializable) knowledge that is produced at the ex-centric site of neo/post/colonial resistance, “which can never allow the national (read: colonial/western) history to look itself narcissistically in the eye.”40 (emphasis in original)
This means that the authors of the essays within this volume are not obliged to make sense, produce reasoned arguments, avoid logical contradiction, or provide any evidence for their claims. The normal expectations of scholarly “research” do not apply when pursuing research justice. This is alarming, and it is justified Theoretically.
“学术正义”是另一个来自于后现代衍生理论的概念，”学术正义”认为传统的学术界过于注重科学、理性和经验主义的作用，而忽视了主观情绪、个人经历、传统习俗、巫术和玄学的作用，为了实现”学术正义”，就应该把情绪，感觉和经历置于科学和理性之上。换句话说，根据”学术正义”的标准，做学术不需要搜集客观的数据，不需要做实证研究，只需要依照个人的主观情感，主观好恶就可以了。学术研究可以自相矛盾，可以毫无根据，不需要遵照什么客观标准。这是一种十分危险的做法，而且这种做法被理论化了。
《犬儒理论》摘录
第二部分：权力政治
1.权力万能论
Postmodernism is characterized politically by its intense focus on power as the guiding and structuring force of society, a focus which is codependent on the denial of objective knowledge. Power and knowledge are seen as inextricably entwined—most explicitly in Foucault’s work, which refers to knowledge as “power-knowledge.” Lyotard also describes a “strict interlinkage”31 between the language of science and that of politics and ethics, and Derrida was profoundly interested in the power dynamics embedded in hierarchical binaries of superiority and subordination that he believed exist within language. Similarly, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari saw humans as coded within various systems of power and constraint and free to operate only within capitalism and the flow of money. In this sense, for postmodern Theory, power decides not only what is factually correct but also what is morally good—power implies domination, which is bad, whereas subjugation implies oppression, the disruption of which is good. These attitudes were the prevailing mood at the Sorbonne in Paris through the 1960s, where many of the early Theorists were strongly intellectually influenced.
Because of their focus on power dynamics, these thinkers argued that the powerful have, both intentionally and inadvertently, organized society to benefit them and perpetuate their power. They have done so by legitimating certain ways of talking about things as true, which then spread throughout society, creating societal rules that are viewed as common sense and perpetuated on all levels. Power is thus constantly reinforced through discourses legitimized or mandated within society, including expectations of civility and reasoned discourse, appeals to objective evidence, and even rules of grammar and syntax. As a result, the postmodernist view is difficult to fully appreciate from the outside because it looks very much like a conspiracy theory. In fact, the conspiracies it alludes to are subtle and, in a way, not conspiracies at all, since there are no coordinated actors pulling the strings; instead, we’re all participants. Theory, then, is a conspiracy theory with no conspirators in particular. In postmodern Theory, power is not exercised straightforwardly and visibly from above, as in the Marxist framework, but permeates all levels of society and is enforced by everyone, through routine interactions, expectations, social conditioning, and culturally constructed discourses that express a particular understanding of the world. This controls which hierarchies are preserved—through, say, due process of law or the legitimizing mechanism of scientific publishing—and the systems within which people are positioned or coded. In each of these examples, note that it is the social system and its inherent power dynamics that are seen as the causes of oppression, not necessarily willful individual agents. Thus, a society, social system, or institution can be seen as in some way oppressive without any individual involved with it needing to be shown to hold even a single oppressive view.
The postmodernists do not necessarily see the system of oppression as the result of a consciously coordinated, patriarchal, white supremacist, heteronormative conspiracy. Instead, they regard it as the inevitable result of self-perpetuating systems that privilege some groups over others, which constitute an unconscious, uncoordinated conspiracy inherent to systems involving power. They believe, however, that those systems are patriarchal, white supremacist, and heteronormative, and therefore necessarily grant unfair access to straight, white Western men and work to maintain that status quo by excluding the perspectives of women and of racial and sexual minorities.
Put more simply, one central belief in postmodern political thought is that powerful forces in society essentially order society into categories and hierarchies that are organized to serve their own interests. They effect this by dictating how society and its features can be spoken about and what can be accepted as true. For example, a demand that someone provide evidence and reasoning for their claims will be seen through a postmodernist Theoretical lens as a request to participate within a system of discourses and knowledge production that was built by powerful people who valued these approaches and designed them to exclude alternative means of communicating and producing “knowledge.” In other words, Theory views science as having been organized in a way that serves the interests of the powerful people who established it—white Western men—while setting up barriers against the participation of others. Thus, the cynicism at the heart of Theory is evident.
在后现代主义主义看来，权力像上帝一样，无所不在，无所不能，权力塑造了知识和语言，决定了是非与善恶。有权者凭借权力控制着整个社会，以及维护自己的利益，不仅如此，权力还控制了人们的语言，规训了人们的行为。这种控制和规训无所不包，包括那些最基本的文明礼貌，最基本的生活常识，和最基本的做人道理。比方说，如果人们认为在谈话时要讲文明，有条理，注重证据，这在后现代主义看来就体现了西方白人男性的权力规训(科学和理性的推行者是白人男性)。
这几乎就和阴谋论一样了，事实上，在外人的眼里看来就是如此。只有理解后现代主义者的思维，才能理解这些人为什么会有这种病态的想法：在后现代理论中，权力不是一种明确的自上而下的强制力量，而是一种微妙的，无形的势力，每个人都参与其中，权力影响着人们的说话方式，制造着特定的社会期待，渗透着所有人的日常生活，并且借助科学和法律维持着特定的社会体制。后现代主义认为，个体的行为是不重要的，社会体制和其内在的动态权力才是压迫的根源，换句话说，在一个社会中，即便没有人从事任何压迫的行为，也没有人持有任何压迫的观点，这个社会依然可以被视为充满压迫的社会。这是一种没有阴谋者的阴谋论。
2.视个体为权力的载体
In particular, criticism from any position deemed powerful tends to be dismissed because it is assumed either to be ignorant (or dismissive) of the realities of oppression, by definition, or a cynical attempt to serve the critic’s own interests. The postmodern belief that individuals are vehicles of discourses of power, depending on where they stand in relation to power, makes cultural critique completely hopeless except as a weapon in the hands of those Theorized to be marginalized or oppressed.
后现代理论倾向于否认针何对自身的批评，如果批评来自于弱势的一方，批评者就会被认为是蠢货，因为他”看不清压迫的本质”，如果如果批评来自于强势的一方，批评者就会被认为是坏人，因为他”想维护自己的特权)。这是因为后现代主义认为个体是没有什么能动性的，无非只是权力话语的载体。这使得后现代主义能够无视一切批评。
3.”权力无所不在”
Power is everywhere,” Foucault writes, “not because it embraced everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”17 For Foucault, power is present on all levels of society because certain knowledges have been legitimized and accepted as true. This leads people to learn to speak in these discourses, which further reinforces them. Power works like this, for Foucault, “not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.”18 This view has gone on to become one of the core beliefs of applied postmodernism and Social Justice activism today: unjust power is everywhere, always, and it manifests in biases that are largely invisible because they have been internalized as “normal.”19 Consequently, speech is to be closely scrutinized to discover which discourses it is perpetuating, under the presumption that racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or other latent prejudices must be present in the discourses and thus endemic to the society that produces them. (This is circular reasoning.) These “problematics” need to be identified and exposed, whether they manifest in a president’s address or in the decade-old adolescent tweet history of a relative nobody. The widespread slang term “woke” describes having become aware of and more able to see these problematics.
这是另一个来自福柯的思想，福柯认为，权力存在于社会的方方面面，权力正当化了特定的知识体系，使得人们开始使用特定的话语，这些话语反过来又强化了权力本身。对于福柯而言，这并不是因为掌权者控制了一切，而是因为权力存在于每一时刻，每一交互。这一思想后来被实用后现代主义者和”社会正义”(Social Justice)活动人土继承了下来，他们认为不正义的权力无所不在，无形无状，之所以无形无状，是因为它们被”内化”了。这些人先是预设种族主义，性别主义，恐同主义无所不在，然后又根据这种预设刻意地寻找种族主义，性别主义，恐同主义，然后再宣称这是不正义社会的产物。
