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A Pioneer of Finnish Media Studies
Aivokuvia sounds much groovier in Finnish than in English; the translation to the word would be “Images of the Brain”. But it also resonates with the
idea of “brain scans”, making the term more interesting in English too; a nod to Deleuze’s film theory, but also to the fascination with the materiality of the corporeal brain, interconnected with possibilities of perception and sensation, but also with the cultural-technological framing of it.
Professor Jukka Sihvonen, whose 60th birthday is celebrated by a seminar as well as the launch of his new book Aivokuvia, has always been someone who in his writing incorporated a fantastic sense of the potentials in Finnish language and how to bend it as an active medium itself for the writing of media and film theory. Sihvonen is a major figure on the Finnish scene as well as for my personal development: he was the one who introduced so many of us at the University of Turku, 1990s and onwards, to the theoretical figures of Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Kittler and others. Besides proper names and theorists, he inspired us to engage in a certain mode of thinking: rigorous, but creative; refusing the most obvious questions and answers; a style of thinking in the Deleuze-Guattarian sense of the word. After his Deleuze-course, we spent several extremely long houred sessions with Teemu Taira and Pasi Valiaho excavating A Thousand Plateus in our reading group. Sihvonen spoke about Virilio and video games; he suggested to read Kittler, and made us ponder what this odd German theorist was trying to say in his Kittler-deutsch. Some of us went on to participate in Kittler’s seminars, some in Wolfgang Ernst’s, both at the same address of Sophienstrasse 22. I myself owe so many of my research ideas to his inspiration – insects, for instance. Sihvonen’s interest in Cronenberg was probably initially behind that route.
A bit in tongue in cheek (yes, do not take such branding exercises ever seriously)I have also called him one of the master minds behind a “Turku School of Media Studies“.
The new book Aivokuvia is exemplary of his interests over the years. It is more of a film theoretical book: Aivokuvia ties together the films of Tarkovsky, Bigelow and Cronenberg with the philosophical engines of Deleuze and others. Besides this new book, it is still Konelihan varina [The trembling of the machinic flesh] which is my favourite book of his, and which really as a student inspired me to dive in to theories of media and technology enmeshed in a cultural historical context.
University of Turku is organising the celebration seminar Video: media, taide, teknologia [Video: media, art, technology] as well as the launch of Aivokuvia, published by Eetos-association. I wish I could be there to celebrate. Warm congrats to Jukka. Looking forward already to the next book of his.
The Turku School of Media Theory?
Under the term of “a New Media Archaeology”, the inaugural issue of NECsus – European Journal of Media Studies has a review of Insect Media, Media Archaeology as well as Pasi Väliaho’s Mapping the Moving Image. Picking up on these three books out of four is not out of selfishness or wanting to dismiss the fourth book (Cinema beyond film: Media epistemology in the modern era ) touched upon in the review/report but to point to a funny detail or a coincidence. In the same review, all of us from me to Erkki Huhtamo (co-editor of Media Archaeology) to Väliaho studied at the University of Turku, even if Huhtamo already in the 1980s, and by the time me and Pasi came to the university, Huhtamo was on his gradual way to media archaeological fame.
Hence, the title of this posting, “The Turku School of Media Theory”, is very much tongue in cheek and not to be taken completely seriously, although one has to say there was a minor buzz back then. I briefly asked Huhtamo about his 1980s Turku-times and influences; for him, early 1980s literature studies lectures by Hannu Riikonen were the ones to introduce Ernst Robert Curtius. This also meant picking up the notion of “topos”, so important for Huhtamo, and gradually by late 1980s, starting to think media culture too through it. Indeed, like mine also Huhtamo’s roots are in cultural history. Huhtamo was for instance in the 1980s using the idea of recurring topoi to investigate late 16th century Italian travel narratives.
Huhtamo had in the late 1980s picked up on various media theoretical strands for instance through the cultural semiotics of Eco as well as Barthes. Siegfried Zielinski visited Turku back then (probably early 1990s?) and Zielinski’s Audiovisionen was one of the books that was read in Turku by Huhtamo and for instance Jukka Sihvonen — currently professor of Media Studies. Sihvonen was the one who acted as the catalyzer for my and Väliaho’s (among other folks’) inaugural interest in such media theoretical oddities as Kittler and German media theory in general. In addition, Sihvonen’s seminar on Deleuze in the late 1990s was really one of the key elements which kick-started a lot of the interest in material media theory. (I will leave it to someone else to provide fullfledged and accurate histories of Finnish and Turku academia of the 1990s). One needs such minor exits, escape routes, and suddenly academic classes can shift into exciting eye-openers and turning points.
Similarly one could say that a lot of the stuff happening in Turku in media theory – not only in Film and TV studies (later Media Studies) but also Cultural History – was despite the seemingly internationally peripheral location great quality (lots of other things were happening then and still, including Women’s Studies, which for instance has produced lots of very interesting feminist art theory). Oh and it has not disappeared anywhere – Media Studies is doing excellent, Art Studies has taken a new materialist turn in Turku, and in addition, for years the University has had its own folks in Digital Culture (where I am affiliated Faculty member as an Adjunct Professor, Docent) too!
>Recent books by friends
Some recent books by friends:
Michael G
oddard: Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism, and the Subversion of Form (Purdue University Press, 2010)
Gombrowicz, Polish Modernism, and the Subversion of Form provides a new and comprehensive account of the writing and thought of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz. While Gombrowicz is probably the key Polish modernist writer, with a stature in his native Poland equivalent to that of Joyce or Beckett in the English language, he remains little known in English. As well as providing a commentary on his novels, plays, and short stories, this book sets Gombrowicz’s writing in the context of contemporary cultural theory. The author performs a detailed examination of Gombrowicz’s major literary and theatrical work, showing how his conception of form is highly resonant with contemporary, postmodern theories of identity. This book is the essential companion to one of Eastern Europe’s most important literary figures whose work, banned by the Nazis and suppressed by Poland’s Communist government, has only recently become well known in the West.
About the Author(s): Michael Goddard After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Sydney, Michael Goddard was employed as Visiting Professor of Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Lodz in Poland, and as Professor of Cultural Studies at Mikolai Kopernikus University, Torun. Since September 2007, he has been lecturer in media studies at the University of Salford in the United Kingdom. He is an active member of the European Network for Film and Media Studies (NECS) and participates actively in a range of international conferences and other academic and cultural events.
Pasi Väliaho: Mapping the Moving Image. Gesture, Thought and Cinema circa 1900
(Amsterdam University Press 2010)
In Mapping the Moving Image, Pasi Väliaho offers a compelling study of how the medium of film came to shape our experience and thinking of the world and ourselves. By locating the moving image in new ways of seeing and saying as manifest in the arts, science and philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century, the book redefines the cinema as one of the most important anthropological processes of modernity. Moving beyond the typical understanding of cinema based on optical and linguistic models, Mapping the Moving Image takes the notion of rhythm as its cue in conceptualizing the medium’s morphogenetic potentialities to generate affectivity, behaviour, and logics of sense. It provides a clear picture of how the forms of early film, while mobilizing bodily gestures and demanding intimate, affective engagement from the viewer, emerged in relation to bio-political investments in the body. The book also charts from a fresh perspective how the new gestural dynamics and visuality of the moving image fed into our thinking of time, memory and the unconscious.
Pasi Väliaho is lecturer in film and screen studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Reviews
A commanding and consummate study of art, philosophy, the human sciences, physics and biology in the matrix of cinema at the turn of the twentieth century. Blending contemporary theory with close readings of the foundational writings of modernity—Freud, Bergson, Nietzsche—Väliaho shows how the autonomy of the movie-machine shapes the ways we believe we think and live today. A broad and compassionate study, Mapping the Moving Image stands high and strong in an impressive body of scholarship on early cinema. It will be a point of reference for every student of cinema, consciousness and perception.
– Professor Tom Conley, Harvard University
Machinology 