TIEDE & EDISTYS 1/1996 SUMMARIES

GEORG LOHMANN: Communities and problems of social justice. The problem of social justice is one of the issues in the debate between liberals and communitarians. While liberals argue that social justice has to be an egalitarian and universal concept that is valid for all different kinds of societies, communitarians maintain that there is no unified or universal concept of social justice, but that social justice is relative to the community and even that there are not only individual but collective rights as well. The article asks, whether a normative priority could follow from the empirical necessity of the relation to community, and what the precise significance of this might be to the question of social justice. The article does not deal so much with the problem of universality and relativity, rather, it focuses on the demand for equality that seems to be implicit in the conception of social justice. As the debate between liberals and communitarians clearly shows that the main concepts are used in different and vague ways, the article starts by clarifying the concepts of "justice" and "social justice" and the conceptions and functions of communities.

SIRKKU HELLSTEN: Liberal social theory at a crossroads - metaphysics, rhetoric or politics? The article discusses why the very methodological premises that originally gave liberal theory its strength and adaptability now turn out to be the cause of its failure to cure prevalent social evils. When political liberalism (particularly as presented in John Rawls' Theory of Justice 1971 and Political Liberalism 1993) attempts to leave teleology and metaphysics aside, it invalidates the very foundations of the contractarian social theory. A political liberalism that combines a prescriptive and a descriptive theory of a just society without reference to any wider metaphysical background is a form of ideological Darwinism, which easily leads to ethical nihilism and circular reasoning. Instead of offering us a convincing normative model, political liberalism justifies current social and ideological development and thus legitimises the actual material and political inequality of human beings. To avoid this, the liberal contractarian tradition should make it explicit which of its implicit perfectionist assumptions of the good life and human potential are to be actualised in order to reach moral and political autonomy.

MARJAANA KOPPERI: Morality, metaphysics and the good life in modern ethics. Based on the theories of the Enlightenment, modern ethics aims at finding a universal basis for moral and political norms. This aim has been questioned in recent discussion. According to the critics, it should be emphasised that ethics is contextual, historical, and culturally bound, and should also include ideas concerning the meaning and goals of people's own life. John Rawls' and Thomas Bridge's theories of so-called political morality are examples of such a new approach to ethics. The approach, however, is not without problems. In their effort to justify moral and political norms on the basis of communal values, Rawls and Bridges, for example are forced to refer to some general assumptions which remain out of context and culture. It appears that ethics cannot but refer to some general statements concerning man or the world 'as such'; otherwise, it seems to remain unjustified. As a matter of fact, modern ethics - if properly understood - continues to offer the best approach to questions of morality.

SIMO KNUUTTILA: Emotional ambivalence, rationality and planning. It is argued that the thesis of emotional ambivalence as a characteristic feature of the modern society should be qualified. Socially relevant emotional patterns began to include contending values in late medieval and early modern times. This non-relativistic pluralism of values led to a new vectorial model of rational decision making, which was particularly developed by Leibniz. It differs from the traditional practical syllogism and from contemporary models of practical rationality based on the idea of maximising on value.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 2/1996 SUMMARIES

MARJA JÄRVELÄ: Changes in Lifestyle and the Environment. The relationship between man and environment in a modern society may be described as a change in lifestyle. In an urban society, nature appears to man as a resource for building new environments. Man's relation to nature becomes externalised - nature ought not to disturb environment. In a postmodern society, the influence of man's activity on nature is changing from local to global. As a result, the relationship between man, nature and environment becomes problematic in a new way. By way of example, changes in the physio-chemical composition of the atmosphere may lead to a warming of the global climate. In a large scale, man may have to adapt to nature rather than be able to dominate it in the future. Simultaneously, man's attempts to dominate nature in a small scale seem to be increasing. The control of one's personal lifestyle becomes part of people's relationship with the environment, making them look for new symbiotic values which protect nature and new contents of activity.

PANU MINKKINEN: The Juridical Form of Truth. The essay addresses the possibility of a philosophy of law within the theoretical presuppositions of Foucault's power-analytics. The central text of the essay is Foucault's lecture on truth and juridical forms from 1973 in which he analyzes in detail certain juridical practices that are later taken up as matrixes. Five individual matrixes are identified in Foucault's work of the 1970's: the trial, the measure, the investigation, the examination and the confession. Only the last two correspond with what Foucault called disciplinary power and its specific ways of manifesting truth. It is presumed, then, that the remaining matrixes correspond with modes of power-knowledge anterior to the disciplinary power that Foucault's power-analytics is usually associated with. From a succession of different modes of power-knowledge, Foucault seems to be writing a comprehensive history of systems of thought, an enterprise that he gave himself as he was appointed professor at the Collège de France in 1970 but which he, nevertheless, later abandoned. It is also noteworthy that, in the writing of such an history, juridical practices play a central role. A reconstruction of Foucault's abandoned project opens uncharted possibilities for a Foucaultian philosophy of law.

ARI HIRVONEN: The Fragments of Law - the Blow of Justice. What do the legal theories of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin have in common? The legal criticism of both reflects the crisis of the years between the two wars in European parliamentary democracy and the concept of justice related directly to it. The crisis raises the question, who ultimately decides on law and legal force, who decides on exceptions and the foundation of law. Schmitt's sovereign decision and Benjamin's sovereign power/violence lead us to the fundamental problem: we are unable to decide in a binding and anticipatory way between law and justice, or to decide on the contents of justice. The sovereign decision can only open towards the invitation of impossible justice, with no certain knowledge of what may come. By referring to the ideas of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, the article purposes to reflect on the question of the possibility or impossibility of making decisions concerning justice, which opens through Schmitt and Benjamin.

GILLES DELEUZE: Let us Talk no More of Judgment / Desire and Pleasure. Gilles Deleuze is a French philosopher who committed suicide in 1995. Let us talk no more of judgment is a translation into Finnish of an article published in Critique et clinique in 1993, where Deleuze takes a strong stand against judgment and judging, identifying their history with the history of Western thought. Deleuze also introduces five thinkers who differed from this tradition: Spinoza, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Kafka and Artaud, who never ceased to fight against judgment. According to Deleuze, it is fight that presents us a way of getting rid of judgment. To fight is to create, to judge is to repress creation. Consequently, the doctrine of judgment must be replaced by a new doctrine of sensualism, where beings are not judged but touched, with the purpose of determining whether they suit us or not, whether they will bring us strength or plunge us into the misery of war. Desire and pleasure is not an article, but Deleuze's letter to his friend, Michel Foucault. In it, Deleuze sets to clarify the differences and similarities of opinion between Foucault and himself, particularly as concerned the latter's book, La Volonté de Savoir and his concept of the dispositif of power as a positive constituent of truth. Deleuze sets against this concept his own idea of "the compositions of desire". He also claims to be amazed by the positive value given to pleasure by Foucault. For Deleuze, pleasure interrupts the process of the immanence of desire. Pleasure seems to take the side of "judgment". These two very different types of texts seem to contain the same message.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 3/1996 SUMMARIES

KIMMO SARJE: The concept of modernity in the early writings of Sigurd Frosterus. The research of modernity in Finland has focused on the time between the wars, with rather less attention paid to the beginning of the century. This has resulted in a partial optical illusion, because many central modernist ideas were formulated before the First World War. The work of Sigurd Frosterus (1876-1956), a Finnish-Swedish architect, critic and essayist, is a crystallisation of early rationalist modernism. In his polemic texts, he criticised the late and national romanticism, symbolism, and decadence of the nineteenth century, emphasising - in the spirit of vitalism - the values of the industrialist society. To him, the aesthetics of machines ranging from railway engines to battle ships provided the starting point of new architectonic forms. Frosterus contribution to Finnish intellectual tradition may be compared to Adolf Loos critique of decadence in Austria.

ANTU SORAINEN: Women as sodomites? Female sodomy in the Finnish legal system. Female sodomy and fornication were recognised by European legislation and legal praxis as early as in the Middle Ages. Although it was implanted in western Christianity in St. Paul s letter to the Romans, very few sentences were actually passed for these crimes. In Finnish criminal law, female sodomy was included in 1894. As far as is known, there were altogether 51 women convicted, with the peak occurring in the 1950s. The practice was decriminalised in 1971. Elsewhere in Europe, only male sodomy was generally punishable. Apparently, the reason why the autonomous sexual subjectivity of a woman came to be entered in the criminal law was partly the personal influence of Jaakko Forsman and partly the changes in women s legal status towards the end of the nineteenth century. Later, legal scholars defined the concept of indecency in different ways. 'Homosexuality' was increasingly seen as an illness, something that had to do with the entire personality. In legal processes, however, acts between women were still conceptualised as individual acts of sodomy, whose models were searched in customary heterosexuality.

EEVA KURKI: Is it - or just a delusion? Towards a Heideggerian ontology of film. The article looks at the film art from the standpoints of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. Could film art disclose Being or is it the greatest untruth as a threefold illusion: 1) its movement is a delusion of motion, 2) its time-space continuity is a fragmentary reconstruction, and 3) its light is no more than a reflection of projected illumination. Heidegger condemned film and radio in his essays on technology but the writer claims that his understanding of modern technology was inadequate. The article shows how close filmic representation is to Heidegger's conceptions of disclosing Being as an event, and how a film is a true work of art in the fullest sense of The Origin of the Work of Art.

TIMO LYYRA & LEONARDO AVRITZER: New Cultures, Social Movements, and the Role of Knowledge: An Interview with Alberto Melucci. In his latest books, Alberto Melucci, best known for his original work on social movements, has expanded his previous analyses around the key concept of identity to yield a systematic presentation of both the changing environment of all action in contemporary society and the individual and collective dimensions involved in the formation of agency. Against the background of his general theory of complex systems predicated on information as their crucial resource, Melucci integrates the analysis of the psychic facets of personal life in the age of uncertainty and global interdependence into a comprehensive framework for the study of collective action and social movements that focuses on the creative and constructed character of the 'postindustrial' social condition. An analytical awareness of the heterogenous and multiple nature of today s collective phenomena casts new light on the emergent dilemmas that touch upon the everyday experience of individuals, and allows a fresh examination of the processes that can contribute to the practice of freedom in public life. Amidst theoretical issues internal to the study of social movements, themes as diverse as contemporary forms of power, the ambiguity of knowledge, present transformations affecting nature, culture, and the body, the career of new movements, and the role of the analyst are addressed in the discussion.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 4/1996 SUMMARIES

MARKKU WILENIUS: The crystal ball and the Earth. Global environmental change and environmental sociology. Environmental issues have grown to be a major theme within sociological inquiry. The purpose of this paper is to examine certain areas which have stimulated intense discussion within the emerging epistemic community in environmental sociology. I begin with a brief review of the controversy between realism and constructionism in the field of the social scientific study of the environment. Next, an assessment of the relation between environmental sociology and global environmental change is presented. My aim at discussing these debetes is to make some general points about the problems which social scientific research faces today when studying the relationship between society and environment, and, eventually, to suggest some topics yet uncovered within the research field.

KIRSI SAARIKANGAS: Looks, encounters, touches. In constructed spaces, both spaces and those that use them are important. The meanings of space are not given without users however trivial this might sound but, on the other hand, meanings are not formed independently of the spaces. Buildings always have both a concrete aspect, the construction itself, as well as an aspect of the making of the space, its cultivation, i.e., a cultural aspect. The relationship between the builders, the buildings and their users is mutual: constructed space shapes our living at the sme time as we create and re-create it with our movements and doings. Space is not immediately gi1ven to us. It is rather that our use of space and our perceptions of it are shaped by common, historical contracts and practices.

ANNA-MARIA TAPANINEN: The Routes of Everyday Life and the Landscapes of the Past in a South Italian Suburb. In Pozzuoli, a town bordering Naples in southern Italy, suburbs are inhabited by people evacuated from the historical centre because of seismic dangers. For these people there is an intertwining of connections woven in time (between the past and the present) and in space (the old town and the suburb). In the article, the themes of multilocality and place-making are looked at from two perspectives. First, the practices of everyday life, especially the movement of women, are seen as contested ways of inhabiting the peripheral suburb and making history. The point at issue is the relation between the inside and the outside, which can be differently constructed, interpreted and evaluated. Second, it is argued that spatial idioms abound in social memory. Through spatial images, social differences are petrified in urban space. The past milieux of social marginality then become landmarks of the present situation. Simultaneously, social divisions are defied through the complexity of significant places in the old town. Thus, social marginality can be differently contextualized or even denied. Practiced space and spatialized history are embedded in moral landscapes that are made of connections.

TAINA RAJANTI: City is the place of man. The city is is the place of man, firstly, by being the place where man is at home, where he dwells. Secondly, the city is the place of man by being the place of man s ontological origins, the place where he comes from. The city is not the place where man dwells in the sense that there are people who live in villages and others who live in cities. The city is not just one possible residence, a chance address. Rather, the fact that man dwells always involves the city and creates or produces such a material, spatial and social relationship that is the ground of the Dasein of the city.