Tarmo Malmberg
October 2007

A SHORT CURRICULUM VITÆ AND INTELLECTUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Some Basic Academic Facts

Born in Helsinki in 1946, I studied at the University of Helsinki, where I received a BA degree in 1971 (psychology, comparative literature and philosophy), and at the University of Tampere, where I graduated in 1974 (mass communication research, social policy and sociology). Unable to find an academic post in Helsinki, I moved to Tampere in 1976, and stayed at Tampere University as an assistant professor until 1993, earning my doctorate in media studies there in 1988. It was in 1994 that I a secured a full professorship in information studies at the University of Vaasa, which – approaching retirement – seems to remain my last regular job. I have acted as the President both of the Finnish Society for Mass Communication Research in 1977 and in 2000–01, and of the Finnish Society for Cinema Studies in 1988–90. I have also been a member of the editorial board of the Finnish media studies journal Tiedotustutkimus, both in 1989–91 and 1997–98. I am a member of Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (formerly Gesellschaft für Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft).

Intellectual Itinerary

I entered the world of ideas during the 1960s, which has had a lasting impact on the shape of my intellectual evolution. As a cinéphile with the background in film criticism and the film-society movement, I was fascinated by cinema and media studies at a time when the sound of structuralist semiotics and Marxist theory of ideology reverberated through Continental Western Europe. Against this backdrop, the itinerary of my intellectual journey can be signposted by differentiating maybe three theoretical ambitions corresponding roughly to my interests in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s–late 2000s, respectively.

(a) Film Theory. Reading Althusser, Barthes and Metz at the turn of the seventies propelled my interest in the semiotical media studies and film semiotics of the Western Marxist persuasion. This resulted in my licentiate thesis Johdatus elokuvan semiotiikkaan (Introduction to Film Semiotics, 1977) as well as in translating Peter Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) into Finnish (1977). Towards the end of the 1970s, the waning of my engagement with Marxism coincided with that of my cinéphilie. The projected doctoral thesis on the structure of film science was never completed, and film-theoretical concerns were relegated more and more to the margins of my academic priorities, to surface occassionally as part of my other commitments.

(b) Communication and Cultural Theory. In a not unusual manner, as evidenced by the evolution of my intellectual generation, I moved from Marxist semiotics to more hermeneutical thought in the late 1970s. The problem now was to provide a cultural alternative to the mainstream instrumentalist conception of communication prevailing both in the Marxist and non-Marxist mass media studies of the time. This paved way for a combination of communication theory and cultural theory, inspired by a host of variegated names (like Lukács, Bauman, Hegel, Ilyenkov, Georges Gurvitch, Habermas and Apel). The collections of articles Viestintä ja kulttuuri (Communication and Culture, 1981) and Viestinnän teoria ja tutkimus (Communication Theory and Studies, 1984) summarise my position at the time of the take off of the 'cultural turn'. Reading, around the mid-eighties, for a couple of years Hegel's Science of Logic was one of the most powerful momentums which characterised this period. A conspicuous conceptual formalism started to pervade my work, the culturological tenor of which diverted considerably from what was becoming the mainstream Cultural Studies.

(c) Theory of Modernity, Leading to Public-Sphere Theory. After 1985, I was struck for a while by a kind of intellectual paralysis, being unable to generate new ideas and put them on paper. In retrospect, the interlude seemed to prepare myself for a return to the preoccupations of my early career. In 1991 I started reading systematically some of the major works of – what I have termed – Critical Modernism which had allured to me already in the seventies: Marcuse, Lukács, Max Weber, Lefebvre, Charles Taylor, and especially Habermas. It came to me as a happy surprise to discover that the two theoretical and methodological avenues I had always found to be close to my heart – namely, the Geisteswissenschaft of Dilthey, Rothacker and Nicolai Hartmann, and the Hermeneutical or Phenomenological Marxism of Marcuse, Sartre and Lucien Goldmann – had similar points of contact in their continuity with Kant and Hegel, the two initiators of Critical Modernism. This opened up for me a new angle on mass communication and its cultural basis, now seen from the macro-perspective of modernity and the space culture and mass communication occupy in its structure. That is, mass communication had – in a way that was routine in the 1960s and 1970s – to be both historisised and totalised. Here Habermas has proved to be the most helpful companion, especially his first major early work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (published originally in 1962). A monograph aiming at a close reading of Habermas's incluences in this work, and the manner the book has been received in successive waves during the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and late 2000s, is what I been collecting material for during the past few years. In addition, my more ephemeral objects of interest during recent years have included modernity in cinema (Deleuze, Rancière, Aumont), critique of Cultural Studies, media philosophy, the defence of theoretical inquiry in media studies, and making the case for a historical sociology of the field, with an emphasis on the analysis of Anglo-American hegemony in academic geopolitics and of the role of European scholars in promoting – against the tide – cultural, linguistic and theoretical diversity.