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.