les voix: For/Getting｜Re/Membering

When people need ‘identity’, it means they are fed up with anymore oppression and ready to fight. To me, the concept of ‘identity’ is very identical to ‘sovereignty’. Not simply a metaphor, it is the fundamental rationale for a subjective to position itself in a society, whether a State or a person. Within the socially constructed world, an identity may operationalise one’s uniqueness, but sometimes also undermine one’s chance to be normalised.

On one hand, both concepts give people power to feel stronger, solid and united in a community of the sameness, or at least similitude, along with its territorial borders against all the intrusions. On the other hand, they also make people identify, and even differentiate, self from others, so that the ‘self’ becomes a weapon to defy the ‘others’, with a symbol, an ideology, or a shared imagination.

Is it really good? I can simply say it is ‘practical’, in terms of instrumentality, collectivism, self-safeguarding, and -manifestation. However, it would always remind us we are ‘still’ different and separate. If there were nothing to do with ‘superior’ versus ‘subordinate’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or ‘morally correct’ or ‘incorrect’, why would people need ‘identity’, as a nation of ‘sovereignty’? Stemming from the sense of ‘equality’, and ‘distinction’ is just the threshold of achieving it.

學弟在FB上寫著：某名師在班上跟同學說國際公法沒用。
「國際法！原來有這種東西？」（國際社會到底有沒有法秩序？）
「國際法又沒用。」（國際法到底是不是法律啊？）
每一個問題都涉及了最艱澀的法學理論

分到的時間越來越少，幾秒　卻是對付寂寞唯一解藥
你的生活那麼精采熱鬧，傻傻等　我只能盡量不打擾
一句想你，就可以讓我安心睡著　可是你好像不知道

你不明白　那對我來說有多重要，所以我也不敢多要

Turn to 1976, Foucault sort of changed his focus from purely medicine, biology, and psychoanalysis to discipline, and political economics. But, what had never been changed was his purpose to revealing a real history of knowledge by conducting an archaeological research and endeavouring to found the genealogical relationships that modernity might build upon. That is why he has often been classified as a post-modernist as being critical, or sometimes sceptical.

As Foucault asserted, being criticism it should be identified to be local. Namely, in reality it is an autonomous, non-centralized kind of theoretical production, one that is to say whose validity is not dependent on the approval of the established regimes of thought. This local criticism would have proceeded by means of ‘a return of knowledge’. In this regard, Foucault pointed out the marginality of the buried knowledges of erudition and those disqualified popular knowledges as defined by him that it should be different from being general common-sense knowledge. Then he went further onto a historical knowledge of struggles, with what in fact were these buried, subjugated knowledges really concerned. Hence, he refine the term of ‘genealogy’ as the union of erudite knowledge and local memories which allows us to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.

That is to say, genealogy is a historical technique in which one questions the commonly understood emergence of various philosophical and social beliefs by attempting to account for the scope, breadth or totality of ideology within the time period in question, as opposed to focusing on a singular or dominant ideology. Moreover, a genealogy often attempts to look beyond the ideologies in question, for the conditions of their possibility. It has been developed as a continuation of the works of Nietzsche.

With regard to Foucault’s idea, I found that it was pretty difficult to grasp his whole idea by simply looking at these 2 articles, that are, the excerptions from The Order of Things of 1966 and Power/Knowledge of 1976, but from observing the ideas across within these 10 years, it became clear to see what Foucault was trying to establish, namely the genealogies of knowledges by conducting an archaeological methods in order to elaborate upon the relationship between power and knowledge.

Speaking of the human sciences which Foucault tried to analyse in The Order of Things, we can see Foucault’s interest in observing how episteme, the way he defines for knowledges of sciences, being the strategic apparatus permitting which are acceptable within a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. According to him, the episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of ‘what may’ from ‘what may not’ be characterised as scientific. In The Order of Things he describes episteme as: in any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice. This will be further elaborated from the aspect of the relationship between power and knowledge.

Prior to going through The Order of Things, which was attempting to conduct an archaeological research upon the human sciences, I’d like to briefly introduce what the human sciences are. Human science is the study and interpretation of the experiences, activities, constructions, and artefacts associated with human beings. In short, the study of the human sciences is to expand and enlighten the human being’s knowledge of their existence, and its interrelationship with other species and systems. It is the study of human phenomena. The study of the human experience is historical and current in nature. It requires the evaluation and interpretation of the historic human experience and the analysis of current human activity to gain an understanding of human phenomena and to project the outlines of human evolution. Thus, it refers to the investigation of human life and activities via a phenomenological methodology that acknowledges the validity of both sensory and psychological experience.

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.” - by Stephen Hawking

之前看了三部紀錄片，參加了兩場講座：

一部是Centre for Global Health Policy推薦的【MICROBIRTH (2014)】，嘗試說明越來越流行的剖腹生產（Caesarean section）與新生兒抵抗力下降之間的關係，進而使新一代的人類更容易得到非傳染疾病（NCDs）並掏空各國衛生體系（health system）等問題。

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It?
(Paul Collier, 2007)

After the party, I came back to my sweet narrow desk corner under such a dim light finishing the rest of [The Bottom Billion] (a piece of reading material required for the discussion on development and global health), a book with fascinating ideas talking about "why the poorest countries are failing and what can be done about it.”

I just had my first meeting with my supervisor team. I think there’s gonna be a very intensive and challenging process for years. 得到很多忠告和建議 [think big, but do small], 他們對我的研究很有想法跟規劃, 讓我突然感受到the game is on now! 話說剛裝潢好的法學院還真是漂亮。

一身休閒, 抓住夏天的尾巴, 決定再去海邊裸曬一次。Happy last piece of summer.

雖然technically來說，我其實可以每天都過得很閒，但因為Sussex實在是有太多有趣的事可以做了，接踵而至的speeches、workshops、films-screening、events，還有好多我感興趣的課程或社團可以旁聽或參加，不只是human rights跟global health，更有許多關於sex、development、poverty、migration、corruption、governance等專門的主題，目不暇給的讓人好雀躍，好容易使人分心喔～能隨時隨地自由自在地being nerdy的感覺真好，但一直心有旁鶩的該怎麼辦才好呢?

如題。

0.0=.=0.0-.-0.0=.=0.0-.-0.0=.=0.0

真的是太早來到英國，frankly speaking

在出國之前，為了生病的事其實作了很多功課
包括心之谷、露德、權促，都曾是我諮詢的對象
我的醫生跟個管師都不太確定英國的狀況，所以很擔憂
對於已經開始固定吃藥的我來說，缺藥比時差更麻煩