## 《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.*
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*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.*
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*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.*
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*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.*
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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)。
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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。
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## 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.*
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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。
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## 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.*
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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。