在危機年代思索知識生產的政治與位置

Reflections on the Politics and Location of Knowledge Making in a Time of Crisis

1960 年代的社會、政治及文化運動，對西方人文與社會科學領域的知識生產政治，留下了深遠的影響：從學科形塑的基礎、知識生成的主體、知識研究的對象、到知識發生的所在，無一不受到挑戰、撼動；「西方」所據佔的霸權位置不斷遭到質疑；而新興學科、次學科則漸次崛起（例如文化研究、女性主義、及各樣「身份」研究），並在各地以不同的體制形貌出現。例證之一，是美國加州大學聖塔克魯茲分校於1980 年代末成立的「世界文學與文化研究」學程，其目的不僅是要促成學科分類的重組，更在於嘗試新穎的教學方法，反思智識權威的課題。然美國大學教育面臨的財務危機，囿限了這些嘗試的發展；過去這二十年來，許多學校被迫調整定位，越發往經濟邏輯靠攏，也因此大大壓縮了稍早年代的創意與自由空間。不過，這幾年經過大規模學生抗議活動之後，另類的教學方法再度受到矚目。而更多人對這些議題施以關注、積極參與，或許正可有效回應此刻的高等教育危機。

The politics of knowledge making in the humanities and humanistic social sciences were profoundly impacted by the social, political, and cultural movements of the 1960s. Disciplinary foundations, including the subjects and objects of knowledge, as well as the locations of knowledge, were questioned and shaken. The hegemony of “the West” was subject to sustained critique. New disciplinary and sub-disciplinary formations arose, including cultural studies, feminist studies, and various “identity”-based studies, and these were institutionalized in various ways in various locations. One such project that arose in the late 1980s, the World Literature and Cultural Studies program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, not only sought to intervene in disciplinary character, but also experimented with new approaches to pedagogy and intellectual authority. The fiscal crisis in US universities tempered many of these experiments, and over the course of those two decades universities increasingly adapted themselves to a more purely economic logic, greatly narrowing the imaginative and liberatory field of possibility that the earlier trajectory had unleashed. In the wake of massive student protests in recent years, however, new pedagogical practices are once more on the agenda. Greater attention to and participation in these developments might prove to be a useful response to the current crisis.