Matti Itkonen

Background

About Matti Itkonen

My knowledge of the media is quite extensive: I have, as a teacher and researcher, discussed literature, film, newspapers and periodicals, the nature of criticism, lived images (photographs and moving images), the concept of presence in different media and so on. My methodological and discipline-specific expertise is similarly many-sided: I can look at the different media and teacher education from the perspectives of linguistics, art and cultural studies, moral and social philosophy, philosophy of education, and didactics (and of education in general). Thus, I am both theoretically and practically familiar with media education, philosophy of education, philosophy of culture, social philosophy and teacher education. The world’s trace in the self – or a trace of the self in the world? The phenomenology of writing takes one on a journey into one’s own self; to the very source of aesthetic experience. Something uniquely new is born, a sheer identity which exists in the shared being of the world and the creating self. Poetry, after all, is the reader’s lived life; his own tracks on the face of the earth. The text brings to life in the reader something that was dormant – lived poetry finds its intentioning in the experiencing subject, and the veiled meanings of the object are made manifest. For a moment at least the border between visible and invisible vanishes – the world lies open in every direction. I carry out my task of naming in a world which by nature precedes all naming. It is before language, some kind of Ur-mother-tongue. I transfer this ancient trace to my own register, my own idiolect. I awaken this slumbering power – or at least so I imagine – and take it to my own name. And now I have my own way of appraising this shared world.