作为社会共同体建构技术的法律修辞

法律不是一种纯粹客观的物质性力量,其对社会治理的参与,需要借助于社会共同体所分享的共识发挥作用。就此而言,法律可被理解为一种想象的力量。法律作为社会共同体的想象而获得力量,同时也通过生产想象而作用于社会共同体的建构,在实践中表现出建构社会共同体的技术。法律修辞通过将话语组织起来的方式,在社会中生产关于法律的想象共识,从而成为一种社会共同体的建构技术。法律修辞既能通过叙事来指引关于共同生活经验的想象,以历史和现实中所分享的共同经验形成认同,从而建构社会共同体;又能通过论证来指引关于共同价值观念的想象,使彼此激烈冲突的不同价值观借助修辞的软化而达成某种程度的共识,并通过关于价值判断的认同建构社会共同体。法律修辞的这些特点,使之在形成共识时所达成的更多是相对共识而非绝对共识,表现出模糊的特征,从而达成不完全理论化合意来回应现代社会中价值判断的多元分歧,更有利于社会共同体的建构。

Legal Rhetoric as a Technology to Construct the Social Community

The law is not a pure objective material force. The governance of law in the society,with the help of the consensus by the community,can be understood as an imaginary force. The law gains the strength from the imagination of the community,and at the same time it also produces the imagination of the community,which helps the construction of the community. There are some technologies of community construction in the legal practice. Legal rhetoric creates the imaginary consensus on the law in the society,becoming a technology to construct the social community. Legal rhetoric guides the imagination of the common life experience by the narratives,thus constructing the community through the common experience share by the history and reality. Legal rhetoric guides the imagination of the common values by the argumentation,so that the conflict values in the diverse society reach a certain degree of consensus,to construct the community through the identification of common values. As a construction technology of social community,legal rhetoric produces the more ambiguous rather than absolute consensus,which achieves the incompletely theorized agreements to respond to the divergence of value judgement in the modern society,and is more conductive to the construction of community.