外语学科知识谱系学考辨

A Genealogy of Foreign Language as Disciplinary Knowledge

本文采用福柯谱系学的历史研究方法,考察在当今中国外语作为一种知识对象的产生过程。通过追寻晚清、民国到建国以来沉淀下来的各种话语碎片,即一系列偶发事件、变异、错误和不连贯的突变所形成的当下话语,文章展示一种知识空间、认识框架是如何被想象和构建出来,并产生了今天外语作为一门学科和一种认知对象。支配这一学科的共识是在过去一百多年里发生的三次话语突变中产生,即外语作为西学、文学和语言基本功。这些突变导致外语教育逐渐失去其中国文化身份,割断了语言与思想、价值判断和文化归属的联系,最终造成当今的外语教学不再是通过语言去认识世界,而是让语言成为一种证明自己存在的游戏。

This paper adopts a Foucauldian approach, a genealogy of documentary analysis, to investigate the emergence of foreign language as the object of disciplinary knowledge in modern China. By tracing the process of discourse fragmentations in forms of accidents, deviations, errors, and discontinuities during the period of the late Qing Dynasty （1644-1911） to the early 1990s, the paper elucidates how a space of knowing, a configuration of episteme was created and imagined that gave force to the discursive formation of foreign language as a school discipline and an object of knowing, which continues to dominate the present Chinese education. Three broad unities of discourse, namely foreign language as the western studies, as literature and as the basic language skills unfolded themselves in turn to strip the foreign language education off its Chinese cultural identity and thus broke bonds of language with thinking, value judgment and cultural attribution. As a result, Language learning is no longer to seek understanding about the world, but to prove its existence by playing the game with itself.