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!