The Visibility of Social Systems
The Visibility of Social Systems
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社会系统的可见性
DOI：
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发表时间：
1998
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
R. Cooper
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
R. Cooper
感官在社会生活中的作用是社会分析中被忽视的主题。尽管哲学家怀特海（Whitehead，1938）很早就呼吁对人类交流中的“感觉器官的组织”进行系统研究，但直到最近，这才被人文科学视为一个严峻的挑战。这项工作的大部分内容都集中在视觉的主导地位，特别是在遭受“官僚化”和更普遍的正式组织过程的现代社会体系中。正如罗蒂（Rorty，1980）提醒我们的那样，现代思想赋予眼睛作为我们可以最有效地向自己呈现世界的感觉器官的特权。但情况并非总是如此。历史学家吕西安·费弗尔（Lucien Febvre，1982）在对16世纪社会生活的研究中评论了那个时期视觉的不发达：“就像他们敏锐的听觉和敏锐的嗅觉一样，那个时代的人们无疑也拥有敏锐的视觉。”但仅此而已。他们还没有将其与其他感官区分开来。他们还没有将其信息与他们的了解需求建立起必要的联系”（p.437）。因此，他们生活在一个流动的世界中，“没有什么是严格定义的，实体失去了边界，眨眼间，形状、外观、大小就改变了，没有引起太多抗议……”(p.438)。世界的稳定需要对视觉及其高于其他感官的专门训练。稳定的过程需要量化和计算，而这必然涉及到眼睛：“从定性到定量的转变本质上与视觉感知优势的进步有关”（Rey 引用于 Febvre，1982，p.432）。
The role of the senses in social life is a neglected theme in social analysis. Despite the philosopher Whitehead’s (1938) early call for systematic study of the ‘organization of the sensorium’ in human communication, it is only recently that this has been taken up as a serious challenge by the human sciences. Much of this work has focused on the dominance of vision, especially in modern social systems subjected to ‘bureaucratization’ and the processes of formal organization more generally. As Rorty (1980) has reminded us, modern thought has privileged the eye as the sense organ by which we may represent the world to ourselves most effectively. Yet it was not always like this. The historian Lucien Febvre (1982), in a study of sixteenth century social life, comments on the underdevelopment of sight in that period: ’Like their acute hearing and sharp sense of smell, the men of that time doubtless had keen sight. But that was just it. They had not yet set it apart from the other senses. They had not yet tied its information in particular in a necessary link with their need to know’ (p.437). Consequently, they lived in a fluid world ’where nothing was strictly defined, where entities lost their boundaries and, in the twinkling of an eye, without causing much protest, changed shape, appearance, size….’(p.438). The stabilization of the world required a specialized training of the visual sense and its elevation over the other senses. The process of stabilization called for quantification and calculation and this necessarily involved the eye: ‘The passage from the qualitative to the quantitative is essentially linked to advances in the predominance of visual perception’ (Rey quoted in Febvre, 1982, p.432).