I took a General Semantics course in college, precisely because I didn’t know the difference between it and semiotics. It was miles away from the language science that was then taking over academia, not to mention Artforum, and I considered the class a mistake. I gained some respect for GS years later when I learned that Robert Anton Wilson was a fan. I haven’t even read that much RAW, but he’s a pretty interesting character. Some of us saw him talk at a GS sponsored dinner at the Harvard Club or some such august place a few years back (we couldn’t actually go to the dinner; we just waited around till after to hear him talk, sort of like standing-room tickets…) Anyway, I can’t claim to have actually gotten very far with GS. Interesting you found a Dianetics connection; GS is not really a cult (let alone a self-proclaimed “religion”) but it is a “brand” in a way that “semiotics” is not, and GS is trying to wake you up in the way that a religious conversion would. The class I had came on with all sorts of very basic methods of proving that language and reality are not exactly the same thing (duh,) like the teacher going around the room asking each person if they could come up with a sentence that would always be true, which he would then shoot down. On a more sophisticated level, RAW was into E-Prime, an approach to the English language that came out of GS which disallows the use of any form of the verb “to be” (being being too much of an assertion for us to make, so to speak.) RAW said he could write E-Prime, but it was damned hard to speak it. And you probably wouldn’t want to listen anyway. I certainly didn’t when I was in school; it all seemed rather flat-footed and obvious to me. Clearly GS is deeper than I realized, but it wasn’t sexy the way the nexus of semiotics, formalism, structuralism and post structuralism was in those days. The names could get confusing, and I couldn’t always sort out the interrelationships between the disciplines, but as I studied the stuff that gave me the most help understanding art, language, the mystery of being, what have you, General Semantics did not come up very often.
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- alex 8-12-2005 4:52 am