TIEDE & EDISTYS 1/2004 SUMMARIES

Petri Ylikoski: Cultural Darwinism. The idea of applying Darwin's theory of natural selection to culture has recently been advocated by a number of authors. The most popular of these approaches has been memetics which builds on Richard Dawkins' ideas about evolution. This article argues that the ideas behind memetics do not work. Memetics, as it is currently developed, lacks the explanatory power characteristic of biological theory of evolution. It can only provide narratives that use evolutionary vocabulary. However, the failure of memetics should not be interpreted as a complete failure, there are some more fruitful alternatives to it.

Tomi Kokkonen: Evolutionary Explanation and Innate Characteristics. Evolutionary explanations of certain human behavioural characteristics, and the critics of such explanations, often highlight the characteristics' innateness as a test for the validity of such explanations. The concept of innateness has, however, not been clearly defined, and it has been merely an assumption that the concept has a valid biological basis. In this article I examine the concept of innateness as a biological concept, and discuss several biological phenomena that are often connected with innateness, as well as the relation of the idea of innateness to the evolutionary based way of thinking in biology and to evolutionary explanation. The everyday conception of the nature of innateness is shown to have a little connection with any biological notion or evolutionary
explanation, especially in human context.

Jakke Holvas: Metabolism, Life Process and Labour Force. Examining the concepts of metaphysical economy. The main argument of the article is that in modern times the radicalism of existence, its fatefulness and its magic, is destroyed when it is conceptualized as vitality. The following concepts belong to the sphere of vitality: production, labour force, living labour, life, Nature, metabolism and process. These with some genealogically related concepts constitute a system, a web of meanings, which produces merely economically understood reality. The reproducion of vital meanings is in this article defined as metaphysics of economy. According to Marx capital is a blood-sucking vampyre for living labour. This article does not discuss the strategies for the living labour to escape the vampyre, instead it claims that this folktale is insufficient. What still remains to be told, is a legend we really need, i.e. the story of the bloodless, lifeless and valueless entities immune to capital. The main sources of the article are Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, Michel Foucault's Les Mots et les choses, and Karl Marx's Grundrisse.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 2/2004 SUMMARIES

Ilpo Helén: The Politics of the Forgotten. Ian Hacking and the Intimate Truths. The paper is an overview of Ian Hacking’s Rewriting the soul. The central question is how Hacking deploys his ideas of historical ontology and making up people in an actual study on the role of psychiatric knowledge in politicization of personal experience and intimate life. The influence of Michel Foucault’s late philosophy on Hacking’s thinking is emphasized, yet the differences between them are also pointed out. Pre-eminently, Hacking sets aside the polititical and technological aspects of the modern "sciences of the soul" and focuses on historical epistemic conditions that made memory a scientific object. For Hacking, memoro-politics is essentially a politics of knowledge. In addition, it is also argued that Hacking’s idea of indeterminacy in the past implies a Kantian ethical criterion for truth-claims concerning the personal past and memory: such truths should help the individual to become an autonomous person and increase her self-determination through self-awareness.

Miika Luoto: The Beauty of an Image. Of Apollonian Appearing. The Finnish idiom "kuvan kaunis", roughly comparable to the English "pretty as a picture", relates beauty to image. The same connection can be found in Nietzsche’s concept of the Apollonian. Nietzsche, whose major philosophical task was the overturning of Platonism, confronts the Platonic tradition in the name of the life-illuminating force of images. Reflecting on this proto-artistic impulse, which is operative for example in dreams, he attends especially to the Schein of images, to their way of appearing as "shining", which betrays in a fleeting sensation that they are merely images. As John Sallis has shown, this peculiar imaginality of an image is to be analysed phenomenologically, not as its object-character, but as the way in which the image is, as its mode of being. Only then the power of images is disclosed as revelatory: an image does not call us back to an already existing original, but to the becoming present of the original.

Mika Elo: The Historical Index of Photography. In the thinking of Walter Benjamin, the notion of historical index, his philosophy of language and the dialectics of aura form a constellation, which can be used to formulate the idea of historical index of photography. This gives means to think the medium of photography in terms of virtuality – on a level prior to any technical apparatus. This view on indexicality of the photographic image is helpful when studying the digitalization of photography. It also shows the relevance of relating the theory of photography to the tradition of philosophy on one hand, and to media theoretical questions on the other hand.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 3/2004 SUMMARIES

Paul Rabinow: The Legitimacy of the Contemporary. The initial mapping of the human genome during the course of the 1990s was an event; in its wake almost everyone seems to agree that we are on the verge of something momentous and extravagant. In English, "verge" means the boundary beyond which something happens or changes. The map is only one in a broader series of recent bravura, techno-scientific accomplishments, which individually and in an accumulative fashion raise a host of other unsettling and unsettled issues ranging from the scientific, to the ontological, to the ethical, to the political. Today, there is ferocious contestation over whether these scientific achievements are: (a) transgressing a boundary whose integrity we must respect; or (b) crossing over a threshold leading to unforeseen encounters and challenges; or (c) simply moving from one farmer’s field to the next (the original meaning of verge) and thereby basically issues of private property and the commons. But how is one to decide where one is? And where one is going? To put the question another way: how is one to decide, what difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday? The article explores these issues through a critical dialogue which engages the work of Michel Foucault, Hans Blumenberg and Jürgen Habermas with contemporary developments in genomics and bioethics.

Esa Kirkkopelto: Athena’s suffrage. Tragedy, democracy, deconstruction. The article is searching the link between the ideas presented recently by J. Derrida, Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.-L. Nancy concerning the technical and mimetic conditions of democratic community. My argument is based on a reading concerning the mythical voting scene of Eumenides, that is, the tragedy of Aeschylus. What does voting as a democratic ritual and practice tell about the ultimate conditions of social existence? In which ways can these conditions be presented in a theatrical representation, on stage? Hegel’ well-known interpretation of the Oresteia’s ending scene assumes its denouement to be a result of a dialectical and reciprocal recognition between the apollonian and the chthonian powers, between agora and oikos. However, the turning point Hegel sees simultaneously as both cathartic and speculative is based on a simple technical innovation; the living will and voice of every participant (gods included) is presented by mute "ballot stones" (psèphoi). This way the cycle of revenge can be broken and the innocence of community re-established by the anonymity and neutrality of the stones. In addition this moment of extreme alienation means also the rediscovery and reaffirmation of an irreducible singular level. The idea of democracy does not only refer to the means of political decision, it is not necessarily based on the representation of different parties and interests, it does not expect any level of higher self-consciousness. The mise-en-scene of Aeschylus’ tragedy demonstrates how the democratic and legal community draws its sovereingty from the shared state of singularity.

Sanna Nyqvist: Tracing Imitation: A History of the Concept Pastiche. One of the key terms of postmodernism, pastiche has its roots in the new aesthetics of the late 18th century. In literature the term became to mean the imitation of the style of an author or a literary period. The history of the concept pastiche is fragmentary and heterogeneous, but two overarching notions can be distinguished: pastiche has been deemed parasitic or undesirable, and it has been seen as a means for literary or cultural critique. In the 20th century these apparently contradictory features were understood to constitute the essential doubleness of pastiche, which can be both derivative and innovative. In recent pastiche criticism theoretical issues dominate, while analyses of actual literary works could help to understand the phenomenon better.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 4/2004 SUMMARIES

Françoise Dastur: What does it mean to be a "good European"? By way of following Nietzsche’s figure of the "good European", Françoise Dastur discusses conceptions of Europe in Nietzsche, Husserl and Heidegger. For Nietzsche himself, a "good European" is the one who affirms life in its becoming and difference and who is ready to live without belonging to any particular people or culture. Here the name "Europe" implies the deconstruction of the ideas of nation and of a homogeneous culture. Husserl too demanded the overcoming of national traditionality, but towards a universal humanity open to everyone without restriction, which is made possible through the infinite traditionality of science. For him the only remedy for the crisis of Europe is the revival of its "spiritual shape", the originally Greek tradition of rationality. For Heidegger Europe is just the name of what the West has become after its great beginning in Greece, that is, the extreme absence of thought and the oblivion of Being become real in its technological order. But this has to be understood as the fate of the Occident and as the metaphysical presupposition of its global domination. Through a dialogue with Hölderlin and his idea that one becomes what one properly is only through the other Heidegger learnt that Europe can no longer remain only European, that it can not be satisfied with the Europeanization of the world, but it has to open itself to other cultures.

Anne Haila: The European City. Urban studies has since the rise of the Chicago school been dominated by an American paradigm that defined the city as segregated and led urban scholars to analyse spatial differentiation in cities. In recent years, however, European urban scholars have challenged the American City model and begun talking about the European City. They apply Max Weber’s ideas to analyze modern cities. Weber compared cities in Europe and Asia; modern European urban scholars compare European and American cities. Whereas American cities are segregated and market-oriented, European cities are less unequal, and town planning and regulation still play a crucial role in them. Instead of anti-urban sentiments people in European cities still believe that cities and their city centres are good.

Harri Veivo: Prayerhouses in Disneyland. Suburbs and society in France. Since the 1980’s, suburbs – banlieues, faubourgs, cités, grands ensembles – have become an important topic in political and social discussions in France. They seem to localize and epitomize several problems belonging to different categories, like unemployment, drugs, delinquency, crime, and insecurity. The suburbanites belonging mostly to working-class and having often immigrant background, this problematic situation can also be seen as reflecting the new global organization of economy and the country’s colonial history. The article presents and analyses major theories and explanations set forth by French researchers working in the field of urban studies.

Sampo Villanen: Timespace on the Steps to the Parliament House. The question of space has been undertheorised in social theory. Doreen Massey argues that society is spatially constructed as much as space is socially constructed. This is supported by empirical evidence from public protest events on the steps to the Finnish Parliament House. There a juridically and practically uncrossable border between civil society and the state becomes materialised and located in various ways in different demonstrations. This has evident and partly independent effects on social interaction. Thus questions of space need to be considered in social theorising, for example in line with the research programme of Henri Lefebvre.