rounding out this trilogy of posts, i wanted to make a note of our discussion in the last class about how print served to codify the previously much more diverse and distributed spoken vernacular languages of Europe. Resulting from this codification, as Frank pointed out, we got the advent of industrial production (the printed book as 'the first' mass-produced -artificial- commodity), the necessity of systematic education (everyone had to learn to read and write in a common language), and of course the (corollary) emergence of the nationalisms identified by Anderson.
The bourgeoisie -the emergent mercantile middle class- comes into being as the product of at once capitalism (distributed mercantilism), education (centralized cultural reproduction), and nationalism (collectivized xenophobia). There is also, lurking behind these scenes, the extremely important matter of science, but we'll just have to leave it lurking for now...
It's amazing actually, how all of these changes seem to have occurred in such perfect synchrony; a pseudo-Hegelian ideality that we should perhaps attribute to the false clarity of hindsight... Certainly though, there is something to be said for the evidence of feedback-amplifications among some of these interlocking contingencies.
Take for example the matter of pedagogy's anamorphosis. We can see in the Enlightenment a kind of recapitulation of the Platonic moment, in which the techniques that Plato associates with the Sophists seem to reemerge as the set of instructional techniques that would be required to organize and govern the new (read: secular) systems of education. Kant's philosophy is often described as having emerged from his heroic attempt(s) to reconcile the instrumental (Sophistic) rationality of the pragmatic utilitarians with the (Platonic) idealism of Christianity and its church(es).
Developing on Frank's insight into the effects of vernacular codification, it seems evident that what we could call 'contemporary' pedagogy arises as the (Kantian) necessity of fixing the meanings of texts (i.e. by appealing to transcendental categoreality), overpowering the innate interpretive divergence that Derrida called dissemination. The emergent res publica (i.e. the republic) required a homogeneous (if not universally-extended, then at least internally-consistent!) medium. Enlightenment required the immediacy of print media. 'Public reason' requires immediacy generally; as the given a priori upon which successive rationalizations might be based in common...
Lastly, in response to David's pointed concerns about the difficulties of linking capitalism with these print-technologies, I would suggest that we might attempt an escape from a kind of historicism that is itself biased by its dependence on print. Instead we can perhaps make some headway describing the linkage between rationalization and commodification. This attempt is made by Stiegler in his Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, the TC Record's review of which I sent out to the class. Essentially Stiegler thinks this linkage by way his notion of grammatization.
more on this another time ; )
Monday, November 15, 2010
antinomies /&/ economies
If communities really are imagined, as Anderson imagined them to be, we still have to ask ourselves the questions: how are they imagined differently under different conditions -i.e. synchronically and diachronically; at different ecological scales, organismic and/or societal, and in different epochs- and how do these imaginaries interact with one another?
The question that seems, along these lines of thinking, to assert itself with regard to Kant, for example, is: to what extent did his evocation of the universality of 'public reason' -and of Enlightenment, thereby- depend on a blindness to the limitedness (pointed out by Cochran) of the new print medium to a literate, (and systemically-educated) bourgeoisie?
This seems to me to be an interesting question, given the radical nature of the cultural and sociopolitical changes we've been studying with regard to their historical linkages to technical advances in communications media. How much could Kant really have been aware of the socioeconomic limitations of the new print media? How does this probable oversight (or shall we say more specifically, lack of foresight -I'm recalling the words of Aeschylus' Prometheus here!) come to bear on his notion of a universal rationality; how dependent is his characterization of Enlightenment as maturity (see his late essay What is Enlightenment -and perhaps see also Foucault's late essay of the same title!) on what we can recognize, with the benefit of hindsight, as an error?
We might summarize: in the relatively massive expansions of the economies of communication that seem to accompany the advent and spread of new media (I'm thinking of Plato as Kant's inverted forebear), can we suggest the presence of a systematic tendency to overestimate the absoluteness of the transition? In other words, in the case of each emergence of a new medium, couldn't we demonstrate that while for those involved the transition seemed absolute, and was therefore theorized and described in absolute terms, in retrospect the transition was relative; the new economy never completely replaces its forebear, but rather includes and recontextualizes it. (McLuhan puts this as: "the content of a medium is another medium").
Are we not then tempted to correct Kant by asserting that his new realm of the text is not in fact a 'universal' res publica, as I think he claimed, in which the imagined community of the Enlightenment (and Platonic!) politeia could somehow assert itself directly, but is rather merely a new form of agora, in which the instrumental politics of 'private reason' -and the dynamics of Foucauldian parresia- have shifted the locus of their distributed operations to a new field; no longer performed verbally as in the Greek agora, but now performed textually in the new agora of the res publica?!
The question that seems, along these lines of thinking, to assert itself with regard to Kant, for example, is: to what extent did his evocation of the universality of 'public reason' -and of Enlightenment, thereby- depend on a blindness to the limitedness (pointed out by Cochran) of the new print medium to a literate, (and systemically-educated) bourgeoisie?
This seems to me to be an interesting question, given the radical nature of the cultural and sociopolitical changes we've been studying with regard to their historical linkages to technical advances in communications media. How much could Kant really have been aware of the socioeconomic limitations of the new print media? How does this probable oversight (or shall we say more specifically, lack of foresight -I'm recalling the words of Aeschylus' Prometheus here!) come to bear on his notion of a universal rationality; how dependent is his characterization of Enlightenment as maturity (see his late essay What is Enlightenment -and perhaps see also Foucault's late essay of the same title!) on what we can recognize, with the benefit of hindsight, as an error?
We might summarize: in the relatively massive expansions of the economies of communication that seem to accompany the advent and spread of new media (I'm thinking of Plato as Kant's inverted forebear), can we suggest the presence of a systematic tendency to overestimate the absoluteness of the transition? In other words, in the case of each emergence of a new medium, couldn't we demonstrate that while for those involved the transition seemed absolute, and was therefore theorized and described in absolute terms, in retrospect the transition was relative; the new economy never completely replaces its forebear, but rather includes and recontextualizes it. (McLuhan puts this as: "the content of a medium is another medium").
Are we not then tempted to correct Kant by asserting that his new realm of the text is not in fact a 'universal' res publica, as I think he claimed, in which the imagined community of the Enlightenment (and Platonic!) politeia could somehow assert itself directly, but is rather merely a new form of agora, in which the instrumental politics of 'private reason' -and the dynamics of Foucauldian parresia- have shifted the locus of their distributed operations to a new field; no longer performed verbally as in the Greek agora, but now performed textually in the new agora of the res publica?!
summa onto-theologica
We have traced a very interesting genealogy from the Greek conception of community, in what we could call its global form as the politeia, to its relatively local form in the agora. The agora is, as Foucault described in his most recently translated lectures The Government of Self and Others, the scene of the politeia's actualization, via the mechanism that centers these lectures: parresia ('free-spokenness'). This has been a very interesting text for me, reading concurrently with the course, since Foucault focuses on the comparison between the events at the end of the 5th century (bc), which form the subject of works by Thucidides and Euripides, and the events at the beginning of the 4th century, when Plato is writing about contemporary events...
Leaping forward to the Enlightenment and its Late Medieval and Renaissance preliminaries, we touched briefly on Kant's rather counter-intuitive distinction between public reason, accessible as a universal function of critical rationality (of the Kantian transcendental variety, we can be sure, and albeit, as Cochran pointed out, within the bounds of the newly literate bourgeoisie), and private reason, which would encompass the machinations of private interests along the lines of a pseudo-utilitarian 'hedonic calculus'.
Next, we shall continue our quick cruise through the advent of what McLuhan called 'the electronic age' of telegraphy, telephony, radio, television, and eventually (ultimately?) computation and the 'world wide web'.
In all these cases we have seen a set of similar occurrences accompanying what in each case we have identified as an instance of technical, or technological evolution: the advent of a new medium of communication -i.e. the 'scribal culture' that sprung up around the crystallization of the Greek alphabet (for Havelock, et al.), and the 'print culture' that emerged out of the invention of the printing press and its rapid fluorescence accompanying the Reformation and the advent of the European industrial economies (for Eisenstein and Cochran, etc.)- seems to have been accompanied by a massive shift in what we might call the 'subjectivity' of those affected by the novel conditions.
This hypothesis -that the media of communication shape and govern the subjectivities of the individuals and societies they serve- has massive implications for scholarly thought; we might divide these implications into synchronic (philosophical) -What effects do our current media exert on us?- and diachronic -How might we map these transformations historically? axes. But these axes also seem to fall together, and in a deeply troubling way- under lines of questioning like: "What implications might this have for our currently accepted notions of history and historical scholarship in general?!"
more on the way...
Leaping forward to the Enlightenment and its Late Medieval and Renaissance preliminaries, we touched briefly on Kant's rather counter-intuitive distinction between public reason, accessible as a universal function of critical rationality (of the Kantian transcendental variety, we can be sure, and albeit, as Cochran pointed out, within the bounds of the newly literate bourgeoisie), and private reason, which would encompass the machinations of private interests along the lines of a pseudo-utilitarian 'hedonic calculus'.
Next, we shall continue our quick cruise through the advent of what McLuhan called 'the electronic age' of telegraphy, telephony, radio, television, and eventually (ultimately?) computation and the 'world wide web'.
In all these cases we have seen a set of similar occurrences accompanying what in each case we have identified as an instance of technical, or technological evolution: the advent of a new medium of communication -i.e. the 'scribal culture' that sprung up around the crystallization of the Greek alphabet (for Havelock, et al.), and the 'print culture' that emerged out of the invention of the printing press and its rapid fluorescence accompanying the Reformation and the advent of the European industrial economies (for Eisenstein and Cochran, etc.)- seems to have been accompanied by a massive shift in what we might call the 'subjectivity' of those affected by the novel conditions.
This hypothesis -that the media of communication shape and govern the subjectivities of the individuals and societies they serve- has massive implications for scholarly thought; we might divide these implications into synchronic (philosophical) -What effects do our current media exert on us?- and diachronic -How might we map these transformations historically? axes. But these axes also seem to fall together, and in a deeply troubling way- under lines of questioning like: "What implications might this have for our currently accepted notions of history and historical scholarship in general?!"
more on the way...
Friday, November 5, 2010
my IGS paper, continued (last part)
Part 3: Korzybski's Style
So interdisciplinarity cannot, obviously,
be simply a matter of mastering, or overcoming discipline,
-which attempt would inevitably recapitulate
the auto-occlusive (and repressive) disciplinary gesture-
nor can it simply be a matter of simply rejecting discipline
-as if there were some procedure or method with which to replace it-
but must instead strive to find the balances between and among
the necessarily complimentary functions
of assuming, employing, and escaping disciplinary systems.
This must have been Korzybski's goal.
But the faith that he placed in symbolic logic and the mathematical sciences
is perhaps what seems most anachronistic about his work for a contemporary student.
The scientific optimism so common in Korzybski's day seems to have given way
to the widespread, if somewhat inchoate, realization that
the balance between assumption and escape -i.e. commitment and critique-
required of us in our encounters with disciplines
necessitate a fairly critical attitude
with regard our evaluation of the strong truth-claims made by scientific thinkers
throughout history.
Newton: "Hypotheses non fingo!"
The balances we seek -between contentment and freedom-
simply cannot be programmed, or preinscribed.
We can point to it, feel it, and even refer to it in conversation,
but we cannot definitively inscribe it in our languages.
Parts of its structure might emerge from analogical isomorphisms,
but it itself, since it describes their functioning, must remain, to some extent,
outside of the reach of disciplinary apparata.
I think we see this realization operating in Korzybski's work.
His famous Map/Territory distinction
is like a discipline against discipline;
it is like a metadiscipline,
which forces us, step by step, into giving up our truth fetishes,
positioning us, locating us, orienting us,
toward our individual and collective survival(s)...
Whitehead also says, in The Aims of Education, that
"Style is the ultimate morality of mind" (p.12).
I think that Korzybski's method, ultimately,
and with regard specifically to the technique that I've referred to as his
discipline against discipline,
comes down to its style.
He exhorts us both to study all that we can;
to learn all we can of the disciplines and languages that come to bear
on the problems that we find ourselves faced with,
both individually and collectively.
But he also cautions us against getting too 'caught up' in any of these pursuits;
again and again he reminds us that the map is not the territory; that we are dealing in abstractions,
and that the matters that we attempt to discuss are constantly changing,
necessitating our continual circumspection of the structures and functions of our languages,
the uses we put them to, and the world that they enter into as necessarily-imperfect descriptions.
And so this style, as Whitehead points out, is also a morality:
we must retain our autonomy as individual thinkers
without thereby losing touch with our basic continuity with the community of others
-scholars, artists, and thinkers, as well as laborers, children, spouses, parents, and neighbors-
whose ideas and actions we must, both; gratefully rely upon, and carefully scrutinize.
Freedom of thought, balanced by access to instructional resources,
represents a difficult -because dialectical; non-programmatic-
moral issue for us as teachers, scholars, students, parents,
-and generally as members of a species with cultural traditions.
Rather than thinking of our culture as a set of materials
to be passed along carefully, like so many baskets of eggs,
perhaps we can begin to think of it as what Hegel called Geist;
a spiritual essence, unbound by the specific laws of material objects;
a general semantics of partial exchanges and continual transformations.
I suspect that an educational system that was taking these notions into account
would be a much different, much more interesting one in which to live and work,
and I suspect that future generations will feel the same way...
Perhaps by recognizing that in an interdisciplinary methodology like Korzybski's,
style must play an indispensable role,
we can begin to correct the severe imbalances, not only in our systems of education,
but in our appreciation of the work of Korzybski as well.
I think that from this perspective, any function that we could recognize as the power of language
would have to lie in its ability to extract itself from the traditions that it nonetheless depends upon;
to start from scratch, again and again,
rather than always having to build on the same, insufficient foundations.
The ability to pour new foundations, to create new concepts with which to think our situations,
to devise new ways of reading the same texts, new ways of interpreting the old thinkers and ideas;
this must become an essential foundation of any system or method of education that we would be able to call moral,
and for which, geist willing, 'interdisciplinary' would become an unnecessary synonym.
Blake Victor Seidenshaw, October 31st, 2010.
Part 3: Korzybski's Style
So interdisciplinarity cannot, obviously,
be simply a matter of mastering, or overcoming discipline,
-which attempt would inevitably recapitulate
the auto-occlusive (and repressive) disciplinary gesture-
nor can it simply be a matter of simply rejecting discipline
-as if there were some procedure or method with which to replace it-
but must instead strive to find the balances between and among
the necessarily complimentary functions
of assuming, employing, and escaping disciplinary systems.
This must have been Korzybski's goal.
But the faith that he placed in symbolic logic and the mathematical sciences
is perhaps what seems most anachronistic about his work for a contemporary student.
The scientific optimism so common in Korzybski's day seems to have given way
to the widespread, if somewhat inchoate, realization that
the balance between assumption and escape -i.e. commitment and critique-
required of us in our encounters with disciplines
necessitate a fairly critical attitude
with regard our evaluation of the strong truth-claims made by scientific thinkers
throughout history.
Newton: "Hypotheses non fingo!"
The balances we seek -between contentment and freedom-
simply cannot be programmed, or preinscribed.
We can point to it, feel it, and even refer to it in conversation,
but we cannot definitively inscribe it in our languages.
Parts of its structure might emerge from analogical isomorphisms,
but it itself, since it describes their functioning, must remain, to some extent,
outside of the reach of disciplinary apparata.
I think we see this realization operating in Korzybski's work.
His famous Map/Territory distinction
is like a discipline against discipline;
it is like a metadiscipline,
which forces us, step by step, into giving up our truth fetishes,
positioning us, locating us, orienting us,
toward our individual and collective survival(s)...
Whitehead also says, in The Aims of Education, that
"Style is the ultimate morality of mind" (p.12).
I think that Korzybski's method, ultimately,
and with regard specifically to the technique that I've referred to as his
discipline against discipline,
comes down to its style.
He exhorts us both to study all that we can;
to learn all we can of the disciplines and languages that come to bear
on the problems that we find ourselves faced with,
both individually and collectively.
But he also cautions us against getting too 'caught up' in any of these pursuits;
again and again he reminds us that the map is not the territory; that we are dealing in abstractions,
and that the matters that we attempt to discuss are constantly changing,
necessitating our continual circumspection of the structures and functions of our languages,
the uses we put them to, and the world that they enter into as necessarily-imperfect descriptions.
And so this style, as Whitehead points out, is also a morality:
we must retain our autonomy as individual thinkers
without thereby losing touch with our basic continuity with the community of others
-scholars, artists, and thinkers, as well as laborers, children, spouses, parents, and neighbors-
whose ideas and actions we must, both; gratefully rely upon, and carefully scrutinize.
Freedom of thought, balanced by access to instructional resources,
represents a difficult -because dialectical; non-programmatic-
moral issue for us as teachers, scholars, students, parents,
-and generally as members of a species with cultural traditions.
Rather than thinking of our culture as a set of materials
to be passed along carefully, like so many baskets of eggs,
perhaps we can begin to think of it as what Hegel called Geist;
a spiritual essence, unbound by the specific laws of material objects;
a general semantics of partial exchanges and continual transformations.
I suspect that an educational system that was taking these notions into account
would be a much different, much more interesting one in which to live and work,
and I suspect that future generations will feel the same way...
Perhaps by recognizing that in an interdisciplinary methodology like Korzybski's,
style must play an indispensable role,
we can begin to correct the severe imbalances, not only in our systems of education,
but in our appreciation of the work of Korzybski as well.
I think that from this perspective, any function that we could recognize as the power of language
would have to lie in its ability to extract itself from the traditions that it nonetheless depends upon;
to start from scratch, again and again,
rather than always having to build on the same, insufficient foundations.
The ability to pour new foundations, to create new concepts with which to think our situations,
to devise new ways of reading the same texts, new ways of interpreting the old thinkers and ideas;
this must become an essential foundation of any system or method of education that we would be able to call moral,
and for which, geist willing, 'interdisciplinary' would become an unnecessary synonym.
Blake Victor Seidenshaw, October 31st, 2010.
Monday, November 1, 2010
General Semantics
Also this weekend, while I'm getting caught up, or at least attempting to explain this need to, I gave a paper at the Institute of General Semantics' annual symposium, called "New Languages, New Realities", and hosted by Fordham University. I was unfortunately unable to attend much of the conference, and I'm sorry I didn't give you all a heads-up about it. My head has been seriously down for the past little bit. But I did manage to get a talk together about Korzybski (The founder and Guru of the IGS) -'s method of interdisciplinary scholarship, which I'm going to reproduce for interest's sake here. You can check out the Institute of General Semantics here; they have lots of good stuff on the site... Basically Korzybski was concerned with the role played by language in human collective organization, communication, and thought. Have any of y'all heard of this guy? I read about him a lot as a young'n, in books by my favorite sci-fi authors, like Philip K. Dick and A. E. Van Vogt, William S. Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson. Also some really genius scientists, like R. Buckminster Fuller and Gregory Bateson; all really inspired and influenced by Korzybski's work. I have been reading a lot of Korzybski himself since getting involved with the General Semantics organization here in New York. They have been quite generous, inviting me to lecture frequently, and they run a really nice little quarterly journal called ETC. which is very amenable to publishing the work of students, artists, and 'non-specialists', and some neat out-of-the-ordinary kinda stuff. So it was pretty good fun, and here's my paper. Note that I didn't write the last section; I improvised that part live, lol! Which turned out well. I plan to write it up and submit it with the following for publication in ETC. I think it touches on themes we've been exploring in class too. I opened with this joke: "Happy Halloween everyone; I hope you all like my Justin Bieber costume."
Language Power: Korzybski's Interdisciplinary Methodology
Intro:
My name is Blake Seidenshaw. I'm a doctoral student at Columbia University Teachers College, where I'm working in Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies in Education.
I'm coming to this presentation with two essentially convergent concerns.
The first is the current national -if not worldwide- crisis in education. This problem is not new, but it has recently begun to get some more attention in the media. Its roots, however, are the same ones that scientists and philosophers have been attempting to excavate for centuries.
A. N. Whitehead identified the problem as a kind 'mental dry-rot': a "paralysis of thought induced in pupils by the aimless accumulation of precise knowledge, inert and unutilized." (The Aims of Education, 1929: p.1 & 37.)
We know that Korzybski, along very similar lines, attempted to identify the stultifying effects of what he called 'semantic environments' on human thought and behavior.
But my second problem is a kind of microcosm of the first, and follows from opinions that I've recently heard expressed in the General Semantics community: GS is having its own crisis, it seems to be following closely the same pattern of manifestation.
I want to propose a way to tackle both of these problems in one go:
By focusing on education, and specifically by clarifying Korzybski's contribution to what I propose we can identify as an interdisciplinary methodology, General Semantics can at once both revitalize itself through renewed application, and contribute to the more general, and much more pressing, overall revitalization of our system of education as a whole.
Part 1: What is Interdisciplinarity?
To answer this we need to first ask: What is discipline?
On one hand, the word 'discipline' refers to a set of practices. Disciplines are comprised of things that we actually do: they are arts, techne.
But on the other hand, practices are always inscribed in registers of meaning practices are always interpretable; they are directed towards preconceivable aims.
As such, the disciplinary forms
are created as syntheses between:
systems of practice,
and systems of interpretation.
Disciplines, like signs, basically dyadic.
And we can reframe them accordingly, as consisting of:
a syntactic component;
-of dynamic, functional practices, techniques, and vehicles-
and a semantic dimension;
-of meanings and purposes; the 'feel' and style of the technical functions.
Which brings us to the reciprocal analogy:
discipline is linguistic,
and language is disciplinary.
And these reciprocal elements resonate;
The integral form of the discipline 'sets-up' like a standing wave,
balancing syntactic and semantic registers.
In other words,
sets of practices and sets of meanings
achieve
structural isomorphism
Korzybski: "[General Semantics] establishes structure
as the only possible content of of knowledge."
(p.9 in Science and Sanity, 5th ed.)
This interreciprocal structure,
-whereby sets of practices retain stable structures
by appealing to similarly stable sets of meanings-
is what allows these interdependent, 'doubled' sets of practices and meanings
to reproduce themselves,
creating what we refer to colloquially as intellectual 'disciplines', but the same principles underly the reproduction of cultural forms in general, as traditions, lineages, identities, and I would argue also, biological organisms, ecological 'scapes, etc.
Part 2: Language Power
Now,
as language-users,
or what Korzybski called 'time-binders',
we human beings tend to assume and inhabit these
disciplinary and linguistic apparatuses;
as what Korzybski called semantic environments.
disciplines are thus both:
our tools; syntactical, functional objects
that we can observe and utilize rationally and consciously,
and,
our selves; the semantic structures that unconsciously support our operations,
and enable us to cooperate with other, complimentarily-structured entities.
Thus,
when we talk about the 'power' of disciplinary entities,
we need to recognize again that
this power is essentially dual:
On the one hand, for the reasons already outlined,
disciplinary networks tend toward a kind of closure;
they occlude themselves from their larger contexts,
the more inclusive spectra of practices and meanings,
thereby inherently dissimulating events whose structures
fail to correspond with their own.
On the other hand,
language allows us to build our own semantic structures,
by assembling sets of practices, syntactic techniques,
which we can then inhabit provisionally and temporarily
(via awareness of abstraction),
in order to purposively navigate what we might call the ecosemantic spaces
of our immense, complex, and dangerous world.
Furthermore, our disciplines allow us to perform this task cooperatively with other humans, other language-using time-binders.
So interdisciplinarity cannot, obviously,
be simply a matter of mastering, or overcoming discipline,
but must instead
find the balances between what we might call
the necessarily complimentary functions of
assuming and escaping
disciplinary and linguistic systems.
Part 3: Korzybski's Style
~to be continued!
Language Power: Korzybski's Interdisciplinary Methodology
Intro:
My name is Blake Seidenshaw. I'm a doctoral student at Columbia University Teachers College, where I'm working in Interdisciplinary and Cultural Studies in Education.
I'm coming to this presentation with two essentially convergent concerns.
The first is the current national -if not worldwide- crisis in education. This problem is not new, but it has recently begun to get some more attention in the media. Its roots, however, are the same ones that scientists and philosophers have been attempting to excavate for centuries.
A. N. Whitehead identified the problem as a kind 'mental dry-rot': a "paralysis of thought induced in pupils by the aimless accumulation of precise knowledge, inert and unutilized." (The Aims of Education, 1929: p.1 & 37.)
We know that Korzybski, along very similar lines, attempted to identify the stultifying effects of what he called 'semantic environments' on human thought and behavior.
But my second problem is a kind of microcosm of the first, and follows from opinions that I've recently heard expressed in the General Semantics community: GS is having its own crisis, it seems to be following closely the same pattern of manifestation.
I want to propose a way to tackle both of these problems in one go:
By focusing on education, and specifically by clarifying Korzybski's contribution to what I propose we can identify as an interdisciplinary methodology, General Semantics can at once both revitalize itself through renewed application, and contribute to the more general, and much more pressing, overall revitalization of our system of education as a whole.
Part 1: What is Interdisciplinarity?
To answer this we need to first ask: What is discipline?
On one hand, the word 'discipline' refers to a set of practices. Disciplines are comprised of things that we actually do: they are arts, techne.
But on the other hand, practices are always inscribed in registers of meaning practices are always interpretable; they are directed towards preconceivable aims.
As such, the disciplinary forms
are created as syntheses between:
systems of practice,
and systems of interpretation.
Disciplines, like signs, basically dyadic.
And we can reframe them accordingly, as consisting of:
a syntactic component;
-of dynamic, functional practices, techniques, and vehicles-
and a semantic dimension;
-of meanings and purposes; the 'feel' and style of the technical functions.
Which brings us to the reciprocal analogy:
discipline is linguistic,
and language is disciplinary.
And these reciprocal elements resonate;
The integral form of the discipline 'sets-up' like a standing wave,
balancing syntactic and semantic registers.
In other words,
sets of practices and sets of meanings
achieve
structural isomorphism
Korzybski: "[General Semantics] establishes structure
as the only possible content of of knowledge."
(p.9 in Science and Sanity, 5th ed.)
This interreciprocal structure,
-whereby sets of practices retain stable structures
by appealing to similarly stable sets of meanings-
is what allows these interdependent, 'doubled' sets of practices and meanings
to reproduce themselves,
creating what we refer to colloquially as intellectual 'disciplines', but the same principles underly the reproduction of cultural forms in general, as traditions, lineages, identities, and I would argue also, biological organisms, ecological 'scapes, etc.
Part 2: Language Power
Now,
as language-users,
or what Korzybski called 'time-binders',
we human beings tend to assume and inhabit these
disciplinary and linguistic apparatuses;
as what Korzybski called semantic environments.
disciplines are thus both:
our tools; syntactical, functional objects
that we can observe and utilize rationally and consciously,
and,
our selves; the semantic structures that unconsciously support our operations,
and enable us to cooperate with other, complimentarily-structured entities.
Thus,
when we talk about the 'power' of disciplinary entities,
we need to recognize again that
this power is essentially dual:
On the one hand, for the reasons already outlined,
disciplinary networks tend toward a kind of closure;
they occlude themselves from their larger contexts,
the more inclusive spectra of practices and meanings,
thereby inherently dissimulating events whose structures
fail to correspond with their own.
On the other hand,
language allows us to build our own semantic structures,
by assembling sets of practices, syntactic techniques,
which we can then inhabit provisionally and temporarily
(via awareness of abstraction),
in order to purposively navigate what we might call the ecosemantic spaces
of our immense, complex, and dangerous world.
Furthermore, our disciplines allow us to perform this task cooperatively with other humans, other language-using time-binders.
So interdisciplinarity cannot, obviously,
be simply a matter of mastering, or overcoming discipline,
but must instead
find the balances between what we might call
the necessarily complimentary functions of
assuming and escaping
disciplinary and linguistic systems.
Part 3: Korzybski's Style
~to be continued!
ecogradiant
hello all.
i've been sadly remiss in keeping this up.
the past couple weeks have been so busy that i haven't had time to transfer and edit my notebook scribblings into proper blog posts...
but I have a few things to share:
first, I should plug the brand new website that I have cocreated on behalf of the student organization "teachers and writers for a public voice"; the site is http://ecogradients.com and we've posted the first in what will be a series of, probably quarterly issues, thematically organized, in which we, the ecogradiant editors, will assemble and publish works in multiple media, submitted by none other than you: our diverse and enterprising readership.
seriously!
check it out: the first issue is called "ghostlines", for a seasonal vibe.
we got some really nice submissions for it.
I do really hope that some of you might like to participate by submitting work for consideration for the next issue, to be called "musicalities"; we are TC based and oriented, so we'll definitely try to reach out to and include lots TC peoples.
Its been pretty fun getting it together, and it's exciting to imagine where it will go!
=b
i've been sadly remiss in keeping this up.
the past couple weeks have been so busy that i haven't had time to transfer and edit my notebook scribblings into proper blog posts...
but I have a few things to share:
first, I should plug the brand new website that I have cocreated on behalf of the student organization "teachers and writers for a public voice"; the site is http://ecogradients.com and we've posted the first in what will be a series of, probably quarterly issues, thematically organized, in which we, the ecogradiant editors, will assemble and publish works in multiple media, submitted by none other than you: our diverse and enterprising readership.
seriously!
check it out: the first issue is called "ghostlines", for a seasonal vibe.
we got some really nice submissions for it.
I do really hope that some of you might like to participate by submitting work for consideration for the next issue, to be called "musicalities"; we are TC based and oriented, so we'll definitely try to reach out to and include lots TC peoples.
Its been pretty fun getting it together, and it's exciting to imagine where it will go!
=b
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