Blog: December

Law vs. Right

It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. [...] Law never made a whit more just, and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made the agents on injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for the law is that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, power-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills; ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all, or small movable forts and magazines at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts--a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniment [...].

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. [...] In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment of of the moral sense, but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones, and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others--as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders--serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God.

Civil Disobedience (1849)
Henry Thoreau

Posted on:
2009.12.20 -0600

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Fonoptera instrument

Dot matrix printer heads are very soft sounding. They are not powerful at all. The loud irritating noise we hear when they print away is mainly due to the printer enclosure, which serves as a resonator. The fact that the printhead actually hits the paper is another important factor in the amplification of the sound. Once the printhead is removed from the printer enclosure, the loudness is gone. Since I was not interested at all in keeping the enclosure of the printer, I needed to find an elegant way to recover the amplification provided by the enclosure. After trying a couple different things I ended up with the design in the image. It is essentially a double resonator: the first and most important is the plastic membrane/cone. The prinhead hits the membrane projecting the sound forward, exactly like a drum. The other part is the wooden base to which the printhead is attached.

Fonoptera instrument

Posted on:
2009.12.13 -0600

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Fonoptera , music , Tepozchiquilichtli

How the real world became a fable

Arguments such as those of Baudrillard or Lyotard would scarcely have achieved such prominence - or be taken seriously by so many commentators - had they not coincided with the widespread drift toward varieties of ultra-relativist thinking in matters of historical, political and ethical judgment. Postmodernism is merely the most extreme [...] version of this desire to have done with all truth-claims beyond what is presently and contingently 'good in the way of belief'. It goes along with the current new-pragmatist line, as argued by thinkers like Rorty and Fish, that the only kind of truth that counts is the power to persuade members of one's own interest-group 'interpretive community', or professional guild.

In which case clearly the Gulf War issue must resolve into a matter of consensus opinion among those - chiefly the US and 'Alied' communities - whose understanding of events will dominate discussion and determine how the story gets told over the next few months, years or decades. It would then serve no purpose to resist or contest that account on factual, historical, political or ethical grounds, since such arguments could only prevail to the extent that there already existed a more or less receptive climate of opinion, a communal readiness to grant them a hearing and view them as somehow fitting in with a sense of what the war was really about. [p.63]

Uncritical Theory: postmodernism, intellectuals, and the Gulf War (1992)
Christopher Norris

Posted on:
2009.12.08 -0600

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