TIEDE & EDISTYS 1/1995 SUMMARIES

MIKKO SALMELA: What is Spiritual Life? Spirituality is the most important normative concept in Eino Kaila's (1890-1958) philosophy. He claims that the pursuit of spiritual life is a need characteristic of the human species and it is man's ethical duty to realise the values it bears. Distinctive characteristics of spiritual life inlude perseverance, depth, a multitude of layers, and authenticity. An obstacle to authenticity is the fact that the realisation of spiritual needs is dependent on the driving force of animal needs. In his justification of spiritual values Kaila displays features of emotivist, evolutionist and traditionalist conceptions. He gives value judgements an emotivist interpretation as non-cognitive and non-representational suggestive signals which express needs and emotions. Differently from emotivism, Kaila regards spiritual values as intersubjectively valid, based on the status of spirituality as the highest stage of development in the biological evolution. The core content of spiritual morality outlined in Kaila's thinking is the value of love for one's neighbour. His metaethical conceptions of the general psychological impossibility of an authentically spiritual life and the mutually incompatible ideas of the justification of spiritual values remain the problems of his theory.

ARI HIRVONEN: Scenes of the Criminal Body. The body of the modern criminal was founded on the explanatory models of 19th century positivism. The scientific eye, speech and classification defined criminals as a deviant group of people. Criminality could be localised and then eliminated. The criminal, too, could be identified and isolated to serve as an object of continuous supervision and control. At the same time, the criminal also helped to define the law-abiding citizen by guaranteeing their normality. The criminal was useful for society, because their deviant otherness justified the development and use of severe and even cruel disciplinary mechanisms. Anti-criminality was part of social hygiene rather than a juridic manifestation of moral disapproval. And again are the medical science and genetics labeling signs of risk and danger in order to justify new forms of control. The body is still the object in the struggles waged over the definition of deviance.

SARA HEINÄMAA: Sex, Choice and Style. Remarks on the relations between Butler's and de Beauvoir's problem setting. The article studies the relationship between Judith Butler's genealogy and Simone de Beauvoir's phenomenology. Heinämaa argues that Butler's interpretation of de Beauvoir is misleading: Le deuxième sexe is not voluntarist in the sense meant by Butler. De Beauvoir's subject is not Descartes' cogito nor Sartre's being-for-itself: it is closer to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's body- subject. In it, the "choice" of sex does not mean an act of consciousness, but the body's way of entering a situation. Butler's interpretation is guided by a set of concepts which are alien to de Beauvoir's text. She reads de Beauvoir's text through the sex/gender division and finds in it the oppositions of body and mind as well as of nature and culture. She sets the breaking down of these distinctions as the goal of her own work, but ends up reading them into de Beauvoir's text. If we approach de Beauvoir's text from Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of the body, we can see that de Beauvoir's question is not, ultimately, very far from Butler's: their aim is to study the formation of the sexes as both a mental and a corporal - but always already significant - phenomenon.

PERTTI LAPPALAINEN: The Horizon of Power. Hannah Arendt's conception of power manages to problematise the idea of power as influence and as a timeless institutional construction. The article concentrates on the study of the vision of future related to Arendt's conception of power, with potentiality and dynamism as its essential features. Power as a potential means the very existence of a variety of different fronts, as well as a surprise or exception they "organise". The potentiality of power also means the formation of new coalitions of action, the possibility to act in a multitude of different and surprising ways, which also creates the possibility of power. Besides promises and forgiveness, even other ways of guaranteeing the surprise of the future can be construed from Arendt's texts. These include preparatory politics and the past as the authorisers of the future, and the types of power made possible by representativeness. As an application of Arendt's thinking, the possibility of producing expectations on the one hand and a strict regulation of these expectations on the other are central questions.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 2/1995 SUMMARIES

JUKKA MALLINEN: "... you do not rule here, Proserpina does." - An introduction to the theme of death. The article discusses the motif of death in the urban semantics of St Petersburg. In an artificial process of westernisation, the city did violence to the popular Russian psyche. Examples from the history, architecture and literature of the city show how the motifs of the absurd and grotesque, of alienation, death and destruction dominate the spiritual and historical reality of the city. Osip Mandelstam's poem from the year 1916 reveals the way in which the cultural nostalgia of St Petersburg as a bygone world, a paradise lost, is connected with the Greek myth of Persephone. Thanatology, the study of death in civilisation, is an original and novel philosophical movement in St Petersburg, with the macabre style of necrorealism as its youthful parallel. Aleksander Demitshev, a major thanatologist philosopher, discusses the aesthetics of the new St Petersburgian necro-films, where death as "the Other", an explosion in the proper Nietzschean spirit, undoes conventional logic and routine. In its furious dangerousness it, paradoxically, brings the weary and false civilisation back to life.

JUSSI SIMPURA: Poverty in Russia: an official problem and part of everyday life. The article studies the differences between official statements of poverty, reports made by experts and descriptions given by people of their own everyday life. Although the conditions in Russia continued to deteriorate up to 1992, "poverty" was never named as a problem in the studies that were made. Poverty has not received very much attention in the media either, as criminality and general economic difficulties have dominated the news. The studies seem to indicate that "poverty" is not understood as a separate problem in the everyday speech of modern Russia, but is rather hidden beneath other expressions or remains undistinguished on the basis that "we are all poor." What also partly lies in the background are the various forms of survival that the Russians have adopted in order to secure their existence. In Russia, as elsewhere, the discussion on poverty may be considered a process, where different parties compete over the right to define the problem: politicians are only too eager to use poverty as a weapon in their internal power struggles, while in external relationships, it may help obtain financial aid. The interests of the mass media, again, are related to the news value of phenomena (it is easy to find more dramatic news items in Russia than "everyday poverty".)

ANNA ROTKIRCH: The second wave of psychoanalysis and the new feminine ideal in Russia. Since the beginning of the 1990s, Russian psychoanalysis has been revived after decades of prohibition. This article is based on interviews with nine women and one man, who are either practising psychoanalysis or studying in order to do so. It first traces the gradual institutionalization of this culturally new profession. Psychoanalysis is then approached as one of the many techniques of the self now spreading in Russian society. These techniques include other forms of psychotherapy, sports, and religious movements. What is common for their reception in Russia is a general emphasis on the liberation of the individual, combined with a traditional perception of femininity as biologically defined and confined to the domestic sphere. This feminine ideal provides an ideological support of the changed family dynamics in the new Russian upper classes. But in the stories of female psychoanalysts, even other developments can be heard. The feminine ideal is e.g. used as a first means to articulate and criticize the relationship between Soviet mothers and their daughters. As one of the interviewees says, "only now do our women have the possibility to learn to be autonomous".

TUOMAS M.S. LEHTONEN, TAPANI HIETANIEMI: Matti Viikari. The present issue contains two memorial articles on the Finnish historian, Matti Viikari (1943-1994). The articles deal with his teaching and written production, which concerned such themes as the birth of historical thinking, questions of feodalism and the crisis of historism, and the position of alcohol in social history.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 3/1995 SUMMARIES

YRJÖ HAILA: Ways of knowing nature. The article discusses the use of generalisations in statements about nature. The use of generalisations is universal. Mathematics can, in a sense, be held as "pure generalisation" - as a system of generalisations about mathematical ideas and their interrelationships, which have no specific content. However, it is impossible to prove that generalisations are true because it is impossible to compare them with the material world "from the outside". As a justification, we have to refer to the continuous and successful use of generalisations by humans. But then, generalisations have also a cultural role, as means for interpreting and explicating the significance and value of facts and issues relevant for human existence. This builds a bridge between science and the arts. They are different ways of making statements about the world and the human condition, that is, different ways of "knowing nature".

RISTO HEISKALA: Modern, postmodern and posttraditional society. Sociological reaction to the postmodernity debate. To sociologists, modernisation means differentiation, where we may either emphasise fragmentation, where we may either emphasise fragmentation (Weber, Luhmann) or the need for integration (Durkheim, Parsons, Habermas). The debate on postmodernism which began with Lyotard's pamphlet, La condition postmoderne, was a challenge to sociology, because Lyotard put forth an opposite thesis - in the field of culture - of the modern as a world that closes under the terror of the enlightenment and can only open again in the state of the postmodern. Later sociological theories of modernisation (Beck, Giddens) have reacted to the challenge by producing the "hypothesis of two stages". According to this hypothesis, the first stage of modernisation means the institutional differentiation of society and a simultaneous closing of culture. The second stage means an increasing institutional differentiation combined with a cultural opening. In spite of its advantages, the new distinction is problematic in at least two ways. Firstly, the nature of the transfer into the different stages can be specified in several mutually conflicting ways. Secondly, there is the danger that it will become one evolutionary narrative among other meta-narratives of the enlightenment. As such, instead of contextualising and fertilising empirical research, it would only replace it as a new canon.

JUKKA GRONOW: The Beauty of Social Forms. It is generally known that Georg Simmel's sociology was aesthetic in the Kantian sense of the word. The sociological observer himself has an aesthetic relation to his study object and the participators receive from social interaction a pleasure which is essentially aesthetic by nature. Play, even more than art, acted for Simmel as the model in his analyses of the pure forms - or play-forms - of sociation. In these play-forms of sociation, the conceptually unsolvable kantian antinomy of taste is solved in practice. It is as if Simmel had reminded Immanuel Kant that the sought-after 'community of taste' is being continuously born and, hence, the gap separating the individual from the social is overcome in the numerous forms of social interaction characterising our daily life. There is no need for the kind of aesthetic education of man presumed by Friedrich Schiller. One could even claim that social forms - and only social forms - are beautiful.

ILONA REINERS: Shoah - a history of losers. The article discusses Claude Lanzman's documentary film, Shoah, which is about the persecution of the Jews by the National Socialists. Shoah is approached from the point of view of Theodor W. Adorno's philosophy and the aesthetics of negativity. Lanzman's decision not to use black-and-white documentary material is discussed and it is shown that, in doing this, he vents the symbolic remembering of the Holocaust. Lanzman's way of describing the Holocaust from the point of vie of the present moment has an important effect on the way its historical remembering takes form. Shoah is interpreted as a document, which in its laconic expression, its treatment of the theme based on differences, and its angle of the present moment, manages to avoid the stereotypical treatment of the Holocaust, which strengthens racist thinking. The article analyses the differences between the points of view of different witnesses (the Poles, the village people, the SS men, ex-prisoners of the concentration camps) and the forms taken by "truth" from these different angles. The main idea is that, by means of the different points of view expressed by the witnesses, Shoah searches for the history of the Jews who died in the concentration camps, the history of the losers.

TIEDE & EDISTYS 4/1995 SUMMARIES

MARKKU KOIVUSALO: Bodies of Power. The article starts from Foucault's idea that taking care of the social body replaces the old rituals of the king's body and power. It then goes on to explore the different common bodies, especially with the help of Ernst Kantorowitz`s writings (which had influenced Foucault) on the king's body. A typology of common bodies is constructed: mythical, mimetical, hierarchical, united, analogical, national, individuated, artificial, living and, finally, the anti-utopia of the ethical body. The typology travels in history (from the body of the Homeric king to the living body of modern society), but the bodies are treated as conceptual figures rather than historical reductions.

RITVA RUOTSALAINEN: The lost gender. How to define an individual's sex? Traditionally, sex has been defined on the basis of certain physical signs, such as body parts or organs. With the progress of medical science, hormones and genes have appeared as explanatory factors. Yet there have always been individuals who cannot have been put into either sex in an unambiguous way. Money, Hampson and Hampson studied these so-called hermaphrodites in the United States in the 1950s and came to the conclusion that the strictly polarised division into two sexes was not based on biology, but culture. They also took into use the term 'gender role' to describe these other than biological signs of sex. The new concept of sexual identity made it possible to combine both physical and psychic manifestations of the sexes more accurately than biological sex. This, however, changed the metaphysics of the sexes: the sex was no longer an inescapable fact, but the product of everyday practices which could even be modified.

TIMO SIIVONEN: Cyborgs and generic oxymorons. The essay discusses the relationship between body and machine in William Gibson's cyberspace trilogy. The merging of the discourses deriving from the organic and technological worlds in Gibson's texts creates a discursive tension that can be characterised as oxymoronic undecidability. On the level of genre, these tensions are articulated between two world views, essentialism and culturalism. The central argument of the essay is that Gibson's texts cannot resolve the tensions articulated by his texts but, by forming generic hybrids, they problematise the Nature-Culture conflict traditional in the West and seek to find new signification practices to conceptualise the new social and cultural space in modernity.

MARTTI NYMAN: Saussure's langue as structured heterogeneity. The publication of Rudolf Engler's synoptic edition (CLG/E, 1968-74) actualised the need to distinguish between the authentic Ferdinand de Saussure and the virtual person Ferdinand de Cours, embodying the tradition based on a selective reading of the 'vulgate' Cours compiled by Bally and Sechehaye (CLG, 1916). A telling case is the concept of langue. While F. de Cours - though not necessarily the Cours itself! - presents langue as a closed system (schema), F. de Saussure appears to use the term to refer both to language (as explanandum) and to its theoretical description (explanans). The methodological aspect of langue can be traced to Mémoir (1878). In fact, A. Meillet's characterisation of langue as a whole où tout se tient refers to the Indo-European proto-language as reconstructed by de Saussure. The structuralist view of language as a closed, quasi-mathematical system stems from attributing methodological properties of the descriptive tool to the object of description. It is argued that Saussure left open the ontological aspect of langue. As a (Durkheimian) social fact, langue must include areal, social, and stylistic variation in it, because all the different registers are conventional. We must not forget that, for Saussure, the ultimate object (explanandum) of linguistics was langage, the complex, heterogeneous, and chaotic aspect of langue. Given this, langue can scarcely be construed as a homogeneous entity, either.