2005 March archive at Illusive Mind

Archive for March, 2005

Union Bashing

Published at March 16, 2005 in politics. 0 Comments

Compulsory union fees scrapped

Students would still be able to pay university union fees if they wanted to despite new laws abolishing their compulsory collection, Education Minister Brendan Nelson said today.

The federal government today will introduce to parliament new laws to abolish compulsory university student union fees.

Universities face hefty fines if they ignore the new laws to make student union membership voluntary.

“The good news for the Labor Party and student activists is that they will continue to be able to pay their student union fees,” Dr Nelson told ABC radio.

“There is no law preventing people from paying student union fees.”

Dr Nelson said he believed there could be a market for small businesses providing services on campus instead of university unions.

“If students value the services which are sought to be offered, then presumably they will be prepared to pay something for them,” he said.

Dr Nelson said Australian university students forked out $155 million last year in union fees because they were compulsory.

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Advertisement”This is the 21st century and it’s an important principle that all Australians, whether they be students or people in workplaces, should be free to join a union or an association and be represented by it,” he said.

“But we strongly believe that students who enrol in university to get an education should not be forced to buy a product that they may not necessarily want and that it is to join a student guild, union or association.

“We think students should have the choice whether they want to be represented by some of these student representatives or not.”

Dr Nelson said if universities did not comply with the new laws, they would be ordered to refund the money they collected from students within 28 days.

If they fail to do so, the universities face fines of $100 per full time equivalent student enrolled in the university.

So Brendan Nelson thinks that students “should not be forced to buy a
product that they may not necessarily want.”

Well my taxes fund numerous products and services that I neither use
nor want, therefore it seems only fair that my tax is “voluntary” too.
After all shouldn’t I only be prepared to pay for those services I
utilise?

Often the services that the student body fund via union fees go to
help those students who would have no access to them otherwise. Can a
small group of student in dire need of counselling afford to pay for
the infrastructre to keep that service in place and available? If
everyone pays, everyone benefits, especially those in greatest need.

But perhaps Dr Nelson wouldn’t have a probem with ‘voluntary taxation’
as this legislation comes from a government intent on only providing
education, welfare and health to those who can afford it.

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The limits of my language are the limits of my world

Published at March 14, 2005 in art. 1 Comment

“Die grenzen meiner sprache sind die grenzen meiner welt”

“The limits of my language are the limits of my world”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

This concrete poem makes use of a number of iconic and conventional signs.
The two most apparent signs is the shape of the man and the shape of the thought bubble.

The shape of the man is iconic and conventional. It is iconic in that it bears a resemblance to the complex realty for which it stands. The head, shoulders, body, arms and legs are all representative of a person. It would be hard to interpret this sign as signifying a fish for example as it bears little resemblance.

However it is also conventional, there is nothing in the sign that suggests it is representing a male figure and yet it is agreed by social consensus that this sign denotes masculinity. It is helped in doing this when put in contrast to the female counterpart to this sign which uses the shape of a dress to denote femininity. Furthermore the context of the femininity and masculinity is in labelling male and female bathrooms. Furthermore, you could argue that this sign is in fact indexical, as it is not a complete replication of the male bathroom sign, it merely takes its shape. The fact that it is not opaque and black (regardless of the words that make up its shape) mean that it is ambiguous as to whether it is representing this particular sign or is merely the shape of a person.

The thought bubble is entirely arbitrary and conventional, for it bears no resemblance to the concept reality for which it stands. It is simply a symbol invented by graphic artists to depict the thoughts of an illustrated character. Someone from another culture or society who is unfamiliar with this convention might infer that the sign is representing clouds of some kind. A clear denotation is hindered by the absence of any text inside the bubble. The connotations that may arise is that the sign may merely depict the act of thinking, or perhaps signifies the act of thinking nothing.

Lastly we have the words the make up both of these shapes. They are arbitrary in that they bear no resemblance to the complex reality for which they stand. This may be further emphasised by the fact that they are German words and that readers who cannot read German will have to translate them to understand what they signify.

What is immediately striking about this poem is that the words have been used to shape the signs of the man and the thought bubble. It is an uncommon association and thereby draws attention to itself, perhaps signifying that there is a relationship between the content of the words and the signs.

The words when properly separated, as there are no periods, spell out the phrase: “Die grenzen meiner sprache sind die grenzen meiner welt”. This is a quote from the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein which translates into English, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world.”

I think that the shape of the words takes them from being having an arbitrary connection to the complex reality for which it stands to a slippery iconic one. Slippery because it is not easily understood what the sign of the poem as a whole may represent. It involves a high level of decoding.

To begin with the thought bubble is made from the quote repeating over and over again. The thought or the act of thinking is itself made out of language. This may infer that the reality, or the world to which language limits is one of thought. It may also infer that the limits of thought are the limits of language and that the person would be unable to think of anything outside of language.

It may be that the thought bubble is empty because it is irrelevant what we think given that it is constructed out of language. Or it may be that given this construction he is unable to think anything.

We also have the person created out of the repeating quote, out of language. This may infer that not only are his thoughts limited by or constructed from language but that he himself is a construction, as the iconic nature of the sign which represents him suggests. That the whole concept of identity is merely a stringing together of words.

With this in mind we may infer that the man is unable to think as he is unaware of the linguistic limits that are imposed on his reality. It is clear that these a very high levels of signification requiring an in depth comprehension of the quote and underlying philosophy.

It may be also significant that the two smaller thought bubbles, conventionally pointing upwards to the complete thought are illegible, that thoughts don’t originate as clearly defined concepts but vague compilations of ideas that are ineffable.

The multivalence of the poem is a result of shaping an ordinarily conventional quote into signs and thus complicating the interpretation. The poem demonstrates that what iconic signs may bear resemblance to, may depend completely on the context and connotations of the receiver. An interpretation of this may lead the reader to think that if reality is made from signs then for a sign to be iconic means only that it is highly motivated by another sign and one can never penetrate this language play to arrive at the pure signified.

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die grenzen meiner sprache sind die grenzen meiner welt

Published at March 13, 2005 in art. 1 Comment

die grenzen meiner sprache sind die grenzen meiner welt

Die Grenzen@DeviantArt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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Objectivty Requirement

Published at March 11, 2005 in philosophy. 0 Comments

I object to the objectivity requirement deemed necessary for a theory of ethics to be considered plausible.

For ethics to be objective it would mean that two fully rational persons, aware of all the relevant facts about the universe must come to the same conclusions about the ‘rightness’ and ‘wrongness’ of actions.

This means if a one-person values individual freedom over the good of the community and another values the good of the community over individual freedom, one must be right and the other wrong.

This to me seems to be an overly simplistic way of dealing with the complexity of ethics. If you suppose that there is no empirical basis for ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’, (“no ought from an is”) then you are left with two determining factors.

Rightness is determined as a rational outcome of an argument and/or it is determined as an outcome of social consensus and social norms.

I don’t think there is anything objective to be found in the conclusions of numerous arguments that seem to identify with different values and justify them after the fact.

Nor is there anything ‘objective’ about the norms and conventions happened to be agreed upon by particular societies that also identify with different values.

My understanding of the justification for the objectivity requirement is that it seems implicit in arguments about ethics, that someone must be right and someone must be wrong. Might not this be the arrogance of people? Equal conviction can be found in the arguments of art critics!

I think the sense of ‘rightness’ is stronger in ethical debates not because they point to moral facts but merely because the consequences of those debates are far more serious than debates about the aesthetic values. People live and die by the outcomes of ethical decisions, this is reason alone to “bother arguing about moral questions”, objectivity is not required.