Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences

Alfred Korzybski and His Impact on Language, Communication and Cultural Studies

The Third National Workshop of Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences will be held during 25-27 October, 2010. The venue of the Workshop is The English and Foreign Languages University , Shillong and the theme is: “Alfred Korzybski and His Impact on Language, Communication and Cultural Studies.” The Workshop will be organized around readings from texts selected by faculty; public lectures by invited scholars and presentations by the participants. The maximum number of participants that the Workshop could accommodate is 40.

The Workshop would attempt to seek the conceptual, communicative and performative nuances of language in relation to culture, using general semantics as a theoretical tool. General semantics, a non-Aristotelian discipline propounded by Alfred Korzybski is not limited to a study of words and meaning; it is more concerned with “semantic reactions,” or reactions of the human being, an organism as a whole within a socio-cultural environment to events and cultural phenomena of diverse varieties. General Semantics studies the nature of meaning, cultural and neuro-linguistic implications of language use and cognition, and the relationship between language and reality. What speakers and listeners do with language in communication and how verbal and non-verbal communication is used socially also come under the disciplinary rubric of general semantics. Thinking about the pragmatic aspects of the discipline, the methods of General Semantics could be used as a tool which helps one avoid ideational traps built into language and thereby develop a “consciousness of abstracting,” or an understanding that “map is not the territory.” The awareness of how information gets erased or manipulated in the linguistic and other representations becomes handy as a defense kit against devious semantic misrepresentation persistently circulated by advertising, politics, and religion.

Korzybski’s idea was to make people aware of the process of abstraction that is often taken for granted so that they would be able to live a saner life. The linguistic relativity principle (also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) that implies that varying cultural concepts and categories innate in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that cultural and linguistic differences complement and explain each other has similarities with Korzybskian formulations. This would amount to saying that language is the very fabric of thought which is of course debatable. Partly in agreement with this view, Korzybski considered remedial measures like indexing, dating and the use of symbols such as hyphens instead of commas, inverted commas and etcetera (etc.) to protect oneself from misevaluations and to state things more clearly.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus deals with how to use language in an unambiguous way so that it would facilitate an accurate representation of the world. He clarifies this by suggesting that the meanings of words lie in their ordinary usage. The Tyranny of Words (1938) by Stuart Chase in its analysis of the powerful yet clandestine influence of language on our everyday lives and civilization at large echoed the concerns of Korzybski. Korzybski’s student S. I. Hayakawa further problematized this phenomenon in Language in Thought and Action (1941), which was in many respects a response to the dangers of propaganda and a warning about how people can be persuaded to share maniacal and destructive views through the sheer convincing power of language. Precisely for this reason, Hayakawa implored everyone through his work to develop a “habitually critical attitude towards language — one’s own as well as that of others.”

Marshall McLuhan, known for aphorisms and coinages like “the medium is the message” and “global village,” discussed technology and media in relation to language and culture in a globalized world. According to him, new technologies have a gravitational effect on cognition, which in turn impacts social organization. Our perceptual habits are changed due to print technology and as a result, there is a “visual homogenizing of experience,” which has a decisive role on social interactions. McLuhan’s theory was that medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered over the medium, but by the characteristics of the medium itself. Drawing on the ideas of McLuhan, Neil Postman argued that different media are suitable for different kinds of knowledge, and elaborated on how oral, literate, and tele-visual cultures treat and transfer information in different ways. He was concerned about the proliferation of information resulting from new means of communication. He recommends a calculated wariness and mental alertness on the part of the recipients of information through media. One way of interpreting it would be to say that television news or newspaper reports are just a representation of reality as event, and not the event itself. This is similar to the idea, “map is not the territory.”

Each participant is required to pay a registration fee of Rs. 1000/- (Rupees one thousand only) through a bank draft payable to Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences on a bank in Baroda. The fee will take care of the cost of reading material, lunch and tea during the Workshop. Accommodation in Shillong will be arranged by the EFLU on request. The participants have to make their own travel arrangements.

The last date for receiving application for participation along with the registration fee is: September 1, 2010. The application and the bank draft may be sent to the Director, Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences, Baroda . Course material will be mailed only after receiving the registration fee. The fee is non-refundable. The participants are required to make presentations based upon the workshop material.

The following format should be used for sending applications for participation in the Workshop.
Name
Address (including telephone number and email ID)

25 October 2010

10-11 am Inauguration (Venue: EFLU, Shillong)

Chair: K.C. Baral, Director, EFLU, Shillong

10-10.10 am Felicitation of Guests & Invocation:

Students of the EFLU

10.10-10.20 am Welcome Speech:

A. K. Mishra (Professor of Linguistics, EFLU)

10.20-10.40 am Introduction: Prafulla C. Kar, Director of Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences

10.40- 10.55 am Inaugural Address: Chief Guest

Professor Temsula Ao

(A Padmasree Awadee and Director of Northeast Cultural Zone for two terms, Professor Ao has written extensively on Naga folk culture. Her latest collection of stories, These Hills Called Home, published by Penguin India has received wide critical claim.)

Lighting the Lamp

10.55-11 am Vote of Thanks: Tarun Kumari Bamon, Associate Professor of English Language Education at EFLU

11-11.15 am Tea

11.15 Onwards Workshop Sessions (Venue: ICSSR Building)

11.15 am-12.30 pm Workshop I, Pravesh Jung Golay:

“Korzybski in Plato’s Cave: Authority and Truth in Korzybski”

12.30-1.45 pm Workshop II, Pramod K. Pandey:

“The Emancipatory Role of General Semantics through Language Awareness”

1.45-2.45 pm Lunch

2.45-4.15pm Lecture, G.K. Das

Chair: K. Kanungo

“The Tortoise and the Hare Paradigm: Looking at the Interdependence of Language and Culture through the Korzybski Lens”

4.15-4.30 pm Tea

4.30-6.00 pm Workshop III, Devkumar Trivedi:

“Window-View”

26 October 2010

10-11.15 am Workshop IV, Pramod K. Pandey:

“On Modes of Reasoning”

11.15-11.30 am Tea

11.30am-12.45 pm Workshop V, Pravesh Jung Golay:

“This is not a Pipe: Aligning Foucault’s Analysis with Korzybski”

12.45-1.45 pm Presentations by Participants

1.45-2.45 pm Lunch

2.45-4.15 pm Presentations by Participants

4.15-4.30 pm Tea

4.30-6.00 pm Workshop VI, Bini B.S.:

“Time-Binding: Cartography of Knowledge and Information”

6.15-8.30 pm Ulysses: A Tale of Journeys

(A Devised Performance Piece by Arka Mukhopadhyay)

27 October 2010 One Day Seminar

Session I Chair: Sujata Miri

10 – 10.25 am Prasenjit Biswas: “Time, Language and Being”

10.25 – 10.50 am Bijay Danta: “Revisiting Non-Linearity: Language and Logic in Korzybski”

10.50 - 11.15 am Arindam Chatterjee: “A Psychoanalytic Study:

A Winnicottian Epistemological Access to Korzybski’s General Semantics”

11.15- 11.30 am Tea

Session II Chair: G.K Das

11.30 -11.55am J. P. Dimri: “Patanjali and Bhartrihari on Word-Meaning”

12.00 -12.25 pm A. K. Mishra: “Meaning, Understanding and Reading Comprehension: Teaching English and Hindi at Elementary Level in the North Eastern Region”

12.30 – 12.55pm Chitra Harshvardhan: “Seeing the World through the Prism of Translation”

12.55-1.55pm Lunch

Session III Chair : J. P. Dimri

2.00 – 2.25pm Parag Moni Sarma: “The Territory is Definitely in the Map:

Regressive Utopias, Captive Citizenry and Homelessness in the North East”

2.25 – 2.50pm Sukalpa Bhattacharjee: “ The Possibilities of Language: The ‘Forked’ Paths of Meaning”

2.50 – 3.15pm K. C. Baral: “The Spectacle of the Other: Revisiting Colonial/Postcolonial Spaces in the North East”

3.15 - 4.30 pm Open Session and Valedictory

Chair: Prafulla C. Kar

Chief Guest: Sujata Miri

3.15-4.00 pm Remarks by the Participants

4- 4.10 pm Concluding Remarks: K. C .Baral

4.10-4.25 pm Distribution of Certificates: Sujata Miri

4.25-4.30 pm Vote of Thanks: Rebekah Tham, Local Coordinator & Assistant Professor, Department of German, EFLU

4.30-4.45 pm Tea

List of Participants

Department of Journalism &Mass Communication, The English and Foreign Languages University , Shillong, Meghalaya

Member, Board of Trust, Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences, Baroda , Gujarat

Department of Journalism &Mass Communication, The English and Foreign Languages University , Shillong, Meghalaya

Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences, Baroda , Gujarat

Centre for Linguistics, School of Language , Literature and Culture Studies, JNU

Department of Journalism &Mass Communication, The English and Foreign Languages University , Shillong, Meghalaya