Historiological Notes

My saviour Wittgenstein

My oral exam went well, and I am relieved. I have no clue how I managed to draw lines from Merleau-Ponty to Wittgenstein and then stay there, but it saved me. The direction in which we were going, where Kristeva and Merleau-Ponty; both which belong the my lesser known subjects. Wittgenstein and language games, on the other hand, is one of my favourites.

And now it is back to learning the history of the palace. I am guiding my first tour tomorrow.

Textual world view

Reading for an exam always create a new world view. Being totally into a topic influences everything one encounter. Today I has these ideas come into my head.

Whilst sorting forms at work: "Is this form a text? How can it be said to be a text? Does it tell a story? Is it necessary with a certain linguistic competence to read the story of this form?"

Whilst typing a letter: "Is this a descriptive or narrative paragraph? What is the model reader of this letter? Do I have more than one model reader in mind?"

On my way home on the tram: "What on earth does Merleau-Ponty say? Body/text? Body/sign? Text/sign?" (Big sigh) "All these people create an image of themselves and are thus a sign. But what kind of sign? Have I understood anything of Merleau-Ponty?" (Even bigger sigh)

Walking to the shop, humming a mantra: "tunnel-circular-feedback-autopoiesis, tunnel-circular-feedback-autopoiesis, tunnel-circular-feedback-autopoiesis, tunnel-circular-feedback-autopoiesis, tunnel-circular-feedback-autopoiesis,..." (Four models of communication)

Whilst skimming today's paper: "Is there any texts with obvious polyphonic voice?" (Well, there should be, but I could not find any and that is a bad sign)

To Crocodile

Although Esperanto is an easy language to learn, my progress is rather slow. I am starting to have a grasp of the grammar - which mean I should know it all - I have not practiced it much and thus feel very uncomfortable about speaking and writing.

However, Esperanto still fascinates me, especially the fact that all Esperantists (not quite sure about the English spelling) love the language and are fascinated by words and making new words. Yesterday I came across a new verb krokodili (to crocodile). This means to speak in a language that not everybody present understand when all present know Esperanto; that is to exclude some one from the conversation. I have not yet been in such a position, but I have often been in a situation where English is the common language and people still are conversing in their native tongue.

If English is not already using the term to crocodile for another purpose, perhaps one should adopt it for "excluding others by not speaking the common language".

Saluto!

I have decided to learn esperanto. I have been interested in the concept of esperanto for a while and was pleased to find a poster for a course here at the campus in Oslo. I went to the introductory meeting today and we will start in two weeks time. I have got hold of two tiny grammar/dictionaries and feel I know quite alot already after an hour's reading.

The grace of graceful

I have just handed in an essay on Kierkegaard to my 19th century philosophy class. This migh have influnced this post as Kierkegaard believed a proper Christian should see the world from Gods point of view and not compare things by human standards.

The Norwegian word for 'graceful' is 'yndig'. 'Yndig' has nothing to do with grace; and a direct translation would have been 'nådefull', but that is not a word in use. Someone being graceful by English standards are blessed by the gift of being graceful, while the Norwegian standard is just a human standard. A British beauty are so by divine standards, while a Norwegian is a beauty by human standards.

'Nåde' (grace) is seldom used in Norwegian except for teological purposes. I wonder if this has something to do with secularisation in Norway or if there is other reasons for this.

Conceptualization

For the past weeks I have been thinking about what we – the academics – really mean when we use the word ‘conceptualization’. It seems to be in fashion at the moment. Is it a useful word or is it just a fad with an empty meaning?

I started to believe it was a rather silly word and thought it was over used. But this week I have come to realize the importance it has in historical understanding. Perhaps I should have understood this earlier.

Concepts seem to come from two directions: ideas with fixed meanings that we take for granted and vague notions that we think we understand. Ideas can go through a conceptualization process where we understand the linguistic ambiguity and we have a modern concept. Parallel to this, vague notions can go through a conceptualization process and become more precise, but still keep some of its vagueness in conceptual ambiguity.

This realization has come because I have been working on gender. ‘Women’ used to be a fixed idea referring to biological women, but through the twentieth century ‘women’ has gone through a conceptualization process and are now an ambiguous gender concept. It is ambiguous because it now founded on linguistic agreement and identity, rather than taxonomy. Also within gender theory is ‘homosexual’, which was rather a vague notion because it was not, according to Foucault, used to classify until the eighteenth century. This concept seems to be still under much change.

There was a strong conceptualization of political concepts in the nineteenth century while ideologies were developing. From the mid-twentieth century, the conceptualization process seems to have hit identity and I believe this is still where it is.

‘Woman’ – concept or category?

For my work on conceptual history, I have started reading gender theory. This is a field quite new to me, but I am interested in the concept, category or identity connected to ‘woman’. I have started questioning if my search for a treatment of the concept ‘woman’ might be in vain. All the theorist (that is the two I have read so far to day; Denise Riley and Judith Butler), write on the category of ‘women’. I do not know it is possible to talk of ‘woman’ as a concept, perhaps they are right in using category, because ‘woman’, even though it has lots of connotations, refers to an object that gets classified and are not an abstract idea. These theories, however, seem to be able to handle the ambiguity that lingers in the word, just as well as some conceptual historiography.

Looking through history there has been different criteria used to classify in the ideal type ‘woman’, and this might be the reason for talking of gender as categories. However, I am not quite sure if the category of ‘women’ will require the same analysis as the concept of ‘women’. Foucault did conceptual analysis on the concept of ‘homosexuality’ and John Boswell wrote on the concept ‘gay’. These studies were based on the relationship between the concepts and self-identity. As Riley has pointed out, there has been criticism stating that ‘woman’ has to be treated somewhat different because neither identity nor self-identity is necessary for a classification of women. But this must be criticism that takes physical characteristics in account, not only gender divisions.

For the moment I am of the opinion that ‘women’ is not only a category, but also a concept. If gender is created linguistically and contextually, it should at least be possible to treat it as a concept even though it might not be the proper linguistic term for it. There might have been a debate in gender theory on the problem of ‘category’ and ‘concept’, but I have not found it yet.

Translation and Tradition

Koselleck’s Kritik und Krise (1959) was translated into English in 1988 as Critique and Crisis. In the preface to the English edition Koselleck writes that the book had earlier been translated into Spanish (1965), Italian (1972) and French (1979) and that he thought this might be because Spain, Italy and France all are Central European countries. Kritik und Krise is on the development from Absolutist rule into modern society. Enlightenment in Britain was not concerned with absolutism because it did not experience the same tension between state and society. The Scottish Enlightenment philosophers were instead rooted in social history. English translation was not needed because Anglophone readers would not be interested in this sort of theory.

I think this reasoning is interesting. It would mean that ideologies that marked the society more than 300 years ago have made such an impact that they are still here to guide our choice of reading. Traditions are powerful.

Koselleckian

Today, I came across for the first time the use of the word 'Koselleckian'. It was in Sandro Chignola's article 'History of Political Thought and the History of Political Concepts: Koselleck's proposal and Italian research'. Chignola was describing the research being done at the University of Padua to be Koselleckian Begriffsgeschichte.

Is it the highlight of theoretical achievement to get a 'x'-ianism named after you?

Snow

Yesterday evening it started snowing heavily and today the langscape is covered by this white "duvet". It is very pretty outside.

Last night, while out in the snow, I kept humming a childhood song "Det snør, det snør"This song is from the Norwegian translation of the Winnie-the-Pooh book The House at Pooh Corner. Norwegians have taken Winnie-the-Pooh, or Ole Brum as his Norwegian name is, to their harts. This has nothing to do with the Disney-fication of Winnie-the-Pooh, but to the marvelous translation made by Thorbjørn Egner several decades ago. Egner is a well known Norwegian childrens author and his voice is well known from radio where he read from his own books and sang. When translating Winnie-the-Pooh he also made tunes to the poems that Pooh is said to be singing in the book and these have become a part of Norwegian general knowledge.