TIEDE & EDISTYS 1/2001 SUMMARIES

RISTO HEISKALA: Informational Revolution, the Net, and Cultural Identity. A Conceptual Critique of Manuel Castells' The Information Age. The paper gives a brief summary of the argument of Castells' trilogy and then claims that The Information Age is not an empirical study or a theoretical account. It is rather a diagnosis of the era comparable to the work of e.g. Bell, Beck and Giddens in the 1990's. This is followed by a critical evaluation of Castells' three central concepts, the informational revolution, the net and cultural identity. In all three cases there are conceptual problems involved, and in all three cases these theoretical problems exhibit shortcomings on the level of empirical analysis of business networks, political networks and culture in general. With his informational and network oriented approach Castells opens a fruitful perspective for the study of the economy, social institutions and culture in the globalizing world but his trilogy is not a place to stop thinking and studying. It is, rather, a perspective which is in need of theoretical reformulation and further empirical study. In the process of such work, The Information Age gains its end as a diagnosis of the era because it provides a loose framework which redirects the aims and perspective of the community of social scientists.

SAKARI HÄNNINEN: The Political Ethos of Nordic Welfare States. Has the Nordic welfare regime been transformed in the 1990s? This question has been posed daily in public. It is claimed in this article that this is fundamentally a question concerning ethos even though it is also connected to the eidetic and technological aspects of government. This article attempts to elaborate why and how the Nordic ethos of welfare is specifically political and politically specific. It is claimed that equality, universality and public responsibility characterise this ethos. When these characteristics are juxtaposed with the moral sentiments of the mainstream modern matrix as originally outlined by Rousseau - identification, self-love and commerce - they can be reconceptualised as solidarity, equity and worldliness. This is a political reconceptualisation which points out how the Nordic ethos of welfare is conditioned and constructed by political practices which also seek to give a share to those who have no share to begin with. An effort is also made to analyse how this ethos contradicts the "folklore of capitalism".

TIEDE & EDISTYS 2/2001 SUMMARIES

NIKOLAS ROSE: The Politics of Life Itself. This paper considers the implications of recent developments in the life sciences, biomedicine and biotechnology for contemporary biopolitics. It makes three main points. First, it argues that we have seen a reshaping of logics of control - contemporary biopolitics is risk politics. Second, it argues that we have seen a reshaping of the regime of truth in the life sciences - for contemporary biopolitics is molecular politics. Third it argues that we have seen a mutation in technologies of the self - for contemporary biopolitics is ethopolitics. The paper argues that the predictions of reductionism, determinism and geneticism made by many critics have proved to be partial and misleading. The old critical oppositions between social explanations (good) and biological explanations (bad) need to be discarded. The new molecular politics of life re-writes nature as itself manipulable, open to technique, not merely to eliminate defects but to create improvements by intervening upon the genetic material. The distinctions between therapy, correction and enhancement become blurred and difficult to make. The distinction between vital norms and social norms has also been thrown into question. On the one hand we have become somatic individuals and new and direct relations are established between biology and conduct. On the other hand, somatic and corporeal individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation and so to a "vital" politics.

ILPO HELÉN: Life, Risk and Anxiety - Technics and the ethics of choice in foetal diagnosis. The subject of this essay is the problem of selective abortion brought about by the advanced techniques of foetal diagnosis. The abortion question is conceived of as an outcome and illustration of the emerging "vital" politics. The case- study focuses on the technicality of this new form of bio-power, as well as the ethical practice and subjectivity it imposes. The essay makes two main points. First, it argues that the implementation of state-of-the-art foetal diagnosis in clinical practice and maternity care is underlain by the rationales of control and experimentation. They, in turn, make equivocal ideas of risk and dividual epistemic cornerstones of this practice of high-tech reproductive medicine. Second, the essay points out that foetal diagnosis in antenatal care is essentially characterised by an ethical split. The latter comes into being when the machinery of reproductive health care withdraws into a position of purely technical responsibility and leaves the choice, i.e. ethical responsibility, concerning medical operations (selective abortion, in particular), to the pregnant woman. The split implies a tendency of high-tech biomedicine to individualise risks and impose a form of ethical individuality that is characterised by the demand for reflexivity through personal risk assessment and anxiety invoked by existential responsibility.

IINA HELLSTEN & ESA VÄLIVERRONEN: Metaphors and the Promise of Gene Talk. The paper discusses the role of metaphors in communicating technoscientific innovations. Advances in the mapping of the human genome have been constantly covered in terms of sensational "breakthroughs in the progress of science" aiming at revelation of "the secret texture of life". In public discourse this "great promise of science" is established on metaphors, as the analysis of the coverage of the Human Genome -Project in the newspapers shows. Metaphors are used to promote science and technology and to naturalise certain views on genetics in keeping up the promise. Ancient metaphors such as the "book of life", a medieval image of science as "mapping the terra incognita" and recent metaphors borrowed from information technologies are constantly repeated and circulated in the public discourse. However, these promotional metaphors are also challenged and redefined in order to undermine this "great promise". As communicative devices metaphors are open for constant negotiation over their meanings.

PAULIINA REMES: Socratic Philosophy of the Self. The acknowledged purpose of Socratic elenchus is to create coherence to the set of beliefs one person holds. The demand for inner coherence is connected to Platonic philosophy of the self. In the Socratic dialogues, the ideal is a fully coherent set of beliefs and a person in full command of them. This applies especially to one's moral values and principles. If attained, coherence would create a unitary, whole self whose action would be based on a considered set of beliefs, without conflicts or inner tensions. In practise, selfhood is a normative process towards this end. Even though the theory may overlook the complex psychological structure of human beings, its merit is the way in which it draws attention to introspection of one's beliefs and values as significant to the self and action.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 3/2001 SUMMARIES

SUSANNA LINDBERG: The confrontation of Hegel and Heidegger. How to read Heidegger with Hegel? How to approach their "loving conflict" as a dialogue between subjects, instead of making just another comparison of two objects of research? The question is studied by an analysis of the three words that Heidegger uses in order to describe his relation to Hegel: Gespräch, abhebende Verdeutlichung, and Auseinandersetzung. The analysis of these terms implies a re-evaluation of Hegel's and Heidegger's ways of understanding Being, the Subject, and the Community. Finally the relation between Hegel and Heidegger is defined as their confrontation (Auseinandersetzung), which is characterised by conflict instead of difference, by kinship instead of closeness, and by translation instead of a founding Word or Proposition.

ANTOINE HENNION: Music Lovers. Taste as Performance. This article presents the implications, objectives and initial results of an ethnographic research underway on music lovers today. It looks at problems of theory and method posed by such research if it is not conceived as the only explanation of external determinisms, relating taste to the social origins of the amateur or to the aesthetic properties of the works. Our aim is, on the contrary, from long interviews and observations undertaken with music lovers, mostly in the classical field, to concentrate on gestures, objects, mediums, devices and relations engaged in a form of playing or listening, which amounts to more than the actualization of a taste "already there", for they are redefined during the action, with a result that is partly uncertain. This is why amateurs' attachments and ways of doing things can both engage and form subjectivities, rather than merely ecording social labels, and have a history, irreducible to that of the taste for works.

TIMO KAITARO: Surrealism and music. According to the definition of surrealism in André Breton's Surrealist manifesto surrealism can express itself verbally or in any other manner. Thus we have, in addition to surrealist writing, surrealist painting, theatre and cinema. The apparent absence of music among the surrealist arts may seem surprising and require explanation. André Breton's lack of musical ear has been offered as one explanation. However, there are more theoretical reasons, too. In so far as surrealism wanted to avoid the complete absence of reference to reality characteristic of abstractionism, the abstractness of music poses a problem. Attempts have, however, been made to find or to compose music that corresponds to surrealist aesthetics. Sometimes parallels have been drawn between surrealist automatism and improvised music, especially jazz. More serious and consistent attempts, however, involve incorporating
reality and referentiality into music. This strategy has been used by the Belgian composer and surrealist André Souris and by the composer François-Bernard Mâche. Breton has also written an article in which he proposes collaboration between poets and musicians based on the inherent musical qualities of spoken language. As a conclusion one can observe that the encounter of music and surrealism necessarily involves an attempt to overcome one of the characteristic features of modern music, that is, the autonomy and abstractness of music.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 4/2001 SUMMARIES

PAULI KETTUNEN: What does society do in the Nordic countries? 'Society' has been a popular concept in the Nordic countries. The article focuses on the history of the Nordic notion of society as an agent. Society has seldom represented a sphere for articulating particular and private interests. Instead, society has been supposed to put limits on them in the name of general or public interest. The historical features of Nordic 'society' are discussed by relating them to arguments concerning the modern concept of society. It has been argued that this concept with its tight anchorage to the nation-state is too strong and too limited to sustain. However, within the very debate on globalization, reflections on different "models" which refer to national institutions are vivid and popular. In the concluding remarks, tensions between the Nordic concept of society and the reproduction of national "imagined communities" through the imperatives of global economic competition are discussed.

MIKA OJAKANGAS: Towards a non-exclusive political community. The case of St. Paul. This article analyses St. Paul's letters in the context of political philosophy. These letters are conceived as opening up a wholly new horizon for the tradition of the political in the West. Politics was introduced in classical Greece both in thought and practice, and without Plato and Aristotle we would not have politics as we now understand it . However, because of his conviction that Jesus is the Messiah, St. Paul is the first to take seriously the task of going beyond exclusive national identities, especially those of Jews and non-Jews, in order to save all human beings. For sure, Hellenistic philosophers already tried to surpass the eternal war between different peoples and different identities with the help of the universal nomos of reason. Nevertheless, Paul's thinking radically differs from Hellenistic philosophy to the extent that whereas in Hellenism - and in Stoicism especially - indisputable differences are merely denied (universal identity of cosmopolites of true reason), the operation (katargeo: I inactivate) that Paul's Jesus the Messiah performs does not destroy differences (difference between different religious-national identities) but rather makes them inoperative. Different identities are not denied, they are just left in abeyance: a Jew as though not (hos me).

RITVA PÀLMEN: Imagining Hell and Paradise. Imagination in the Middle Ages. The idea of the imaginative faculty as a source of the human being's creative power is accepted and used these days without any further qualification. However, the general assessment of the idea of human imagination in the Middle Ages was something else than in our time and the suggestion of a particular human creative faculty rooted in human imagination would have counted almost as a contradiction in terms. Therefore, some scholars have argued that the basic antipathy towards imagination was the official verdict of medieval philosophy. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that it is still possible to trace a many-sided and original approach towards imagination as well among the medieval writers. Consequently, the concept of imagination will be examined in Richard of St.Victor's (d. 1173) and Avicenna's (d. 1037) theories of imagining heaven and hell.

LAURA WERNER: Love, life, spirit: On the genealogy of Hegel's concept of the spirit. The article examines the meaning and place of the concept "love" in Hegel's system, focusing especially on his early work. Hegel's early concept of love is analysed in the 1797 fragment "...welchem Zwekke denn". Its connection to the concept of "life" in Hegel's Frankfurt writings and the concept of "spirit" in Hegel's later system philosophy is also investigated. The paper backs up Dieter Henrich's claim that love, life and spirit form a conceptual continuum in Hegel's work, and maintains that understanding and remembering this helps us to understand better the difficult concept of absolute spirit.