In the previous post on Extra channels I finished with a distinction between diachronic and synchronic metacommunication. In this post I'd like to respond to some comments by the co-author of this blog, Joe, in some of his previous posts, by invoking Jurgen Ruesch's concept of metacommunication.
For example, when a politician is giving a speech to an audience of potential voters, each of his or her verbal utterance acts as "a trial balloon" that instigates some feedback for the politician about what are the rules of the situation and "how far he can go" (Ruesch & Bateson 1951: 152). They affirm that in conventional (psychiatric) terms this is called "reality testing", but prefer to look at it pragmatically as "an implicit question" about the given verbal utterance itself and what effect it will have upon the relationship between the politician and his or her audience (ibid, 152). The verbal and nonverbal feedback that the politician receives in this context becomes a metacommunicative cue. Even in this illustration alone there are enough implicit questions about verbal context, social relationships and learning (of metacommunicative cues) to fill several chapters with rigorous theorizing.
In fact, much of that rigorous theorizing is evident in the separate works by both authors. Jurgen Ruesch developed the concept of metacommunication much further in his synopsis of the theory of human communication (Ruesch 1972[1953a]) while Gregory Bateson oriented towards zoosemiotic learning theory and developed this notion further to the concept of μ-function or "communication about relationship" (Bateson 2000[1966]). Both have a lot in common and overlap in some of their aspects and yet manifest wildly and creatively divirging theoretical application.
Metacommunicative cues manifest all three of these axioms in operation. As both channel and relationship are terms that signify some form of connection between people, be it physical (metachannel), psychological (parachannel) or both (objectchannel), we can take a modest example of the social roles factor as our illustration. Role, status, identity, position and group membership belong to the social class of questions about communication, specifically, who does or says what (cf. Ruesch 1972[1966]: 35-36). Ruesch describes the double function of roles: "they identify the participants; and they represent silent messages about communication which constitutes instructions of the receiver to the sender about the way he should be addressed and from the sender to the receiver about the way his message ought to be interpreted" (Ruesch 1972[1953a]: 61). Notice that the double function of roles consists of specifying the correct interpretation of messages (metacommunication in the sense of message about message) and simultaneously specify who the participants are, what should be the relationship between them, and how the receiver should be addressed (μ-function in the sense of message about relationship). The metacommunication of roles does not have to be explicit; it can also occur through implicit communication:
"[When] a person who enters a room and introduces himself as the telephone repair man instructs the other people about his forthcoming actions" he is giving explicit instructions about who he is and what he does (Ruesch 1972[1953a]: 76). Less explicit metacommunicative instructions are given through uniforms, for example, which help to identify the official's role or function and enables him or her to assume that whatever he says or does will be interpreted and responded to in the manner appropriate for communicating with officials. Metacommunicative cues may also be held back or hidden, as when police officers wear civilian clothes and ride an unmarked car on duty and only identify themselves as police officers when it becomes necessary in order to control the situation. Ruesch does neglect to add that assuming a role may force one "to adapt to others, to control others, to mediate between others, or to complement the function of others" (Ruesch 1972[1953a]: 61).
Some recent studies on the phatic function have pointed out similar concerns in textual forms of communication. Dipti Kulkarni included "contextual information like the relationship between the participants" (Kulkarni 2014: 121) in her study of instant message chats. She found, for example, that in the two extremes of what she calls the solidarity continuum, people who either share a very close relationship or a very formal relationship tend to omit the opening sequence of ritual greetings and other pleasantries (cf. Kulkarni 2014: 123). She finds that in an unequal status relationship between people who may not be on chatting terms due to circumstances, "a greeting may be construed as an invitation for a casual chat (and [is] therefore inappropriate)" (Kulkarni 2014: 124). In other words, the lower-status interlocutor opens the conversation by jumping right to the heart of the matter because there is no "assured knowledge of the recipient's interest" (ibid, 124). Although a generalization about Indian culture would be unfitting on the basis of a single study, it is remarkable how this contrasts with Christiane Nord's analysis metacommunication as a variety of the phatic function. Nord finds in her corpus of West-European textbooks that the relationship between people and metacommunication about their relationship is more important "in an asymmetrical relationship in which the sender tries to persuade the receiver to take an interest in an object the latter would not have chosen on his or her own accord" (Nord 2007: 174). Thus it would seem that Kulkarni favors only informative communication in very formal relationships wherein the other's level of interest is not known and Nord favors a more phatic approach in an asymmetric relationship exactly for the purpose of evaluating and influencing the other's level of interest. More data is needed on this subject to make such generalizations specific, but these studies do point out the importance of roles, status, position, identity, group membership, etc. in relation with phatics.
A similar example is available in a study of yet another cultural area (Egypt). Julia Elyachar recounts how one anthropological informant, Um Hani, needed to get her family's apartment connected to the plumbing system and went about this by visiting her neighbours "until she found someone who knew someone in the right office to take care of this matter" (Elyachar 2010: 454). Although her rationale for doing so was that going straight to the municipal office without knowing anyone there would result in her being ignored and sent from one office to the next and that nobody helps you if you do not have connections (ibid, 454), a different reading would yield the following interpretation: her "back and forth visits with her neigbours [...] with no goal in mind" perhaps did indeed have a "disinterested nature" (Elyachar 2010: 455), but her goal on a broader scale was to find a connection exactly because mutual acquaintances are a means to incite interest and feelings of community in the official she ultimately ended up turning to with her plumbing troubles.
All these examples demonstrate the socially conditioned or learned character of communication and metacommunication. How one should address officials and other people of equal and unequal status is a matter of cultural norms of human relations. Since these examples are bound by the factor of interest or appeal to the addressee, they belong to the phatic-conative category of communicative phenomena (which will be explicated later on).
As a cursory note to a topic that may merit a discussion of its own, a few words can be said about the sources of learning metacommunicative instructions. It may be taken as a given that learning metacommunicative cues is situated in a communicative context, but the measure of sociality (specifically, it's orientation) can be differentiated on the basis of whether they were learned through self-action, inter-action or trans-action (e.g. Ruesch 1972[1953a]: 56). These terms were borrowed from Dewey and Bentley (1949), but here they can be complemented with somewhat clumsy terms like autodidactic, alterdidactic and codidactic.
Ruesch writes that "The experienced and mature person has a knowledge of all the implications and of all the metacommunicative shadings prevailing in a given culture and subculture" (Ruesch 1972[1953a]: 77). This kind of knowledge is of course learned through social interactions, but the modelling involved may take one of three paths: (1) learning metacommunicative cues through self-reflection, e.g. intrapersonal or "fantasy" communication with oneself, such as practicing certain vocal tones or facial expressions that cultural norms dictate should accompany certain types of statements; (2) learning through interaction with peers, e.g. interpersonal communication or social action, such as including the phatic utterances of another in one's own speech register; and (3) learning through cultural conditioning, e.g. sign systems such as literature, poetry, films, theater, etc. In the last case the model may not have to be a specific person but may be a generalized other or an anonymous mass of people.
There are a lot of problems with this division, though. For example, aside from being glossly inappropriate terms for the occasion, alter- and codidactic orientations overlap in some measure because peers are also others, but instead of authority figures who spew wool (receptive style) you have peers who spin yarn (reactive style). The distinction between "equal" others with whom one interacts and the "unequal" others, such as teachers and professors, with whom one transacts, introduces a somewhat arbitrary split between second persons (second persons who are equal to the first person) and third persons (who are on an unequal level). Thus, while this division does accord very generally to Bühler-Jakobsonian pronominal "verbal persons", it should be investigated whether these figurations (cf. Elias 1978[1970]) are universal across all relevant communication systems (and, in fact, what are the relevant communication systems in question). Lastly, the nature of "learning" in this context must be specified in terms of phatics, as learning metacommunicative cues is unlike learning math or philosophy, for example. There is no truth to metacommunicative clues, only suitability, just like with formulae of greeting or approach (cf. Ogden & Richards 1946[1923]: 234).
Gregory Bateson was interested in thinking about cybernetics, but didn't seem to feel constrained to think about it using a strictly computational or information-theoretic paradigm, while still being informed by the ideas. This gave him the freedom to talk about ideas like "context", "relationship", "learning", and "communication" without needing to define them in precise computational terms. Nevertheless, he handles the ideas fairly rigorously. (Joe, Phatic Workshop: towards a μ-calculus)Gregory Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch, among many other notable thinkers, were part of the Palo Alto Group of researchers tasked to apply new methods (anthropology, cybernetics and communication theory among them) on studying schizophrenia in the 1950s and 60s. Their brand of communication psychology looked at mental health and asked how instead of why. Among their many contributions to the study of human communication is the concept of metacommunication, or "communication about communication".
For example, when a politician is giving a speech to an audience of potential voters, each of his or her verbal utterance acts as "a trial balloon" that instigates some feedback for the politician about what are the rules of the situation and "how far he can go" (Ruesch & Bateson 1951: 152). They affirm that in conventional (psychiatric) terms this is called "reality testing", but prefer to look at it pragmatically as "an implicit question" about the given verbal utterance itself and what effect it will have upon the relationship between the politician and his or her audience (ibid, 152). The verbal and nonverbal feedback that the politician receives in this context becomes a metacommunicative cue. Even in this illustration alone there are enough implicit questions about verbal context, social relationships and learning (of metacommunicative cues) to fill several chapters with rigorous theorizing.
In fact, much of that rigorous theorizing is evident in the separate works by both authors. Jurgen Ruesch developed the concept of metacommunication much further in his synopsis of the theory of human communication (Ruesch 1972[1953a]) while Gregory Bateson oriented towards zoosemiotic learning theory and developed this notion further to the concept of μ-function or "communication about relationship" (Bateson 2000[1966]). Both have a lot in common and overlap in some of their aspects and yet manifest wildly and creatively divirging theoretical application.
The first upshot of his analysis is that communication depends on learning. That is perhaps not so surprising, since it's basically an information-theoretic claim. The second key point, which I think makes his writing interesting, is that communication depends on a relationship. If were to read the word "channel" instead of "relationship", then there would be nothing new here either. But a relationship is not really the same as a channel. At the final point in this tower is "context" - that is, relationships exist within a context. Bateson says that means that there is no communication without a meta-communication that classifies the other communication. But I think the concepts of relationship and context are still richer. (Joe, Phatic Workshop: towards a μ-calculus)This is quite a concise statement on Bateson's thoughts on the nature of communication or Batesonian Epistemology, as it is sometimes called. I'll try to translate these connections into axioms. I don't think these are particularly novel ideas in themselves, but I believe that when given a phatic interpretation they can powerfully further our aims. Gregory Bateson's positions on these topics can be broadly generalized as the following axioms:
- Communication depends on learning;
- communication depends on relationship; and
- relationships exist within a context.
Metacommunicative cues manifest all three of these axioms in operation. As both channel and relationship are terms that signify some form of connection between people, be it physical (metachannel), psychological (parachannel) or both (objectchannel), we can take a modest example of the social roles factor as our illustration. Role, status, identity, position and group membership belong to the social class of questions about communication, specifically, who does or says what (cf. Ruesch 1972[1966]: 35-36). Ruesch describes the double function of roles: "they identify the participants; and they represent silent messages about communication which constitutes instructions of the receiver to the sender about the way he should be addressed and from the sender to the receiver about the way his message ought to be interpreted" (Ruesch 1972[1953a]: 61). Notice that the double function of roles consists of specifying the correct interpretation of messages (metacommunication in the sense of message about message) and simultaneously specify who the participants are, what should be the relationship between them, and how the receiver should be addressed (μ-function in the sense of message about relationship). The metacommunication of roles does not have to be explicit; it can also occur through implicit communication:
People identify status and roles in many ways. Uniforms, lapel buttons, and styles of dressing are external marks of identification; manners, gestures, and ways of talking are more intimate marks of identification; personal introductions - "I am so-and-so" - may overtly clarify a role. But regardless of what the criteria are, in practice almost all people use the sum total of cues and clues present, including the sensations which arise inside their own organism. (Ruesch 1972[1953a]: 60)Although the connection between metacommunication and μ-function on the one hand and phatic communion and phatic function on the other may appear tangential in this discussion, here the connection is strong and clear. These very same marks of identification can be the means of both differentiation, as when status and roles are emphasized or invoked in order to distinguish oneself from others, and communization, as when group membership or speech community are emphasized or invoked in order to create bonds of union between people. We will discuss communization (e.g. Morris 1949: 118-119) in due time, but for now let us look at one of Ruesch's own example and some others from more recent literature.
"[When] a person who enters a room and introduces himself as the telephone repair man instructs the other people about his forthcoming actions" he is giving explicit instructions about who he is and what he does (Ruesch 1972[1953a]: 76). Less explicit metacommunicative instructions are given through uniforms, for example, which help to identify the official's role or function and enables him or her to assume that whatever he says or does will be interpreted and responded to in the manner appropriate for communicating with officials. Metacommunicative cues may also be held back or hidden, as when police officers wear civilian clothes and ride an unmarked car on duty and only identify themselves as police officers when it becomes necessary in order to control the situation. Ruesch does neglect to add that assuming a role may force one "to adapt to others, to control others, to mediate between others, or to complement the function of others" (Ruesch 1972[1953a]: 61).
Some recent studies on the phatic function have pointed out similar concerns in textual forms of communication. Dipti Kulkarni included "contextual information like the relationship between the participants" (Kulkarni 2014: 121) in her study of instant message chats. She found, for example, that in the two extremes of what she calls the solidarity continuum, people who either share a very close relationship or a very formal relationship tend to omit the opening sequence of ritual greetings and other pleasantries (cf. Kulkarni 2014: 123). She finds that in an unequal status relationship between people who may not be on chatting terms due to circumstances, "a greeting may be construed as an invitation for a casual chat (and [is] therefore inappropriate)" (Kulkarni 2014: 124). In other words, the lower-status interlocutor opens the conversation by jumping right to the heart of the matter because there is no "assured knowledge of the recipient's interest" (ibid, 124). Although a generalization about Indian culture would be unfitting on the basis of a single study, it is remarkable how this contrasts with Christiane Nord's analysis metacommunication as a variety of the phatic function. Nord finds in her corpus of West-European textbooks that the relationship between people and metacommunication about their relationship is more important "in an asymmetrical relationship in which the sender tries to persuade the receiver to take an interest in an object the latter would not have chosen on his or her own accord" (Nord 2007: 174). Thus it would seem that Kulkarni favors only informative communication in very formal relationships wherein the other's level of interest is not known and Nord favors a more phatic approach in an asymmetric relationship exactly for the purpose of evaluating and influencing the other's level of interest. More data is needed on this subject to make such generalizations specific, but these studies do point out the importance of roles, status, position, identity, group membership, etc. in relation with phatics.
A similar example is available in a study of yet another cultural area (Egypt). Julia Elyachar recounts how one anthropological informant, Um Hani, needed to get her family's apartment connected to the plumbing system and went about this by visiting her neighbours "until she found someone who knew someone in the right office to take care of this matter" (Elyachar 2010: 454). Although her rationale for doing so was that going straight to the municipal office without knowing anyone there would result in her being ignored and sent from one office to the next and that nobody helps you if you do not have connections (ibid, 454), a different reading would yield the following interpretation: her "back and forth visits with her neigbours [...] with no goal in mind" perhaps did indeed have a "disinterested nature" (Elyachar 2010: 455), but her goal on a broader scale was to find a connection exactly because mutual acquaintances are a means to incite interest and feelings of community in the official she ultimately ended up turning to with her plumbing troubles.
All these examples demonstrate the socially conditioned or learned character of communication and metacommunication. How one should address officials and other people of equal and unequal status is a matter of cultural norms of human relations. Since these examples are bound by the factor of interest or appeal to the addressee, they belong to the phatic-conative category of communicative phenomena (which will be explicated later on).
As a cursory note to a topic that may merit a discussion of its own, a few words can be said about the sources of learning metacommunicative instructions. It may be taken as a given that learning metacommunicative cues is situated in a communicative context, but the measure of sociality (specifically, it's orientation) can be differentiated on the basis of whether they were learned through self-action, inter-action or trans-action (e.g. Ruesch 1972[1953a]: 56). These terms were borrowed from Dewey and Bentley (1949), but here they can be complemented with somewhat clumsy terms like autodidactic, alterdidactic and codidactic.
Ruesch writes that "The experienced and mature person has a knowledge of all the implications and of all the metacommunicative shadings prevailing in a given culture and subculture" (Ruesch 1972[1953a]: 77). This kind of knowledge is of course learned through social interactions, but the modelling involved may take one of three paths: (1) learning metacommunicative cues through self-reflection, e.g. intrapersonal or "fantasy" communication with oneself, such as practicing certain vocal tones or facial expressions that cultural norms dictate should accompany certain types of statements; (2) learning through interaction with peers, e.g. interpersonal communication or social action, such as including the phatic utterances of another in one's own speech register; and (3) learning through cultural conditioning, e.g. sign systems such as literature, poetry, films, theater, etc. In the last case the model may not have to be a specific person but may be a generalized other or an anonymous mass of people.
There are a lot of problems with this division, though. For example, aside from being glossly inappropriate terms for the occasion, alter- and codidactic orientations overlap in some measure because peers are also others, but instead of authority figures who spew wool (receptive style) you have peers who spin yarn (reactive style). The distinction between "equal" others with whom one interacts and the "unequal" others, such as teachers and professors, with whom one transacts, introduces a somewhat arbitrary split between second persons (second persons who are equal to the first person) and third persons (who are on an unequal level). Thus, while this division does accord very generally to Bühler-Jakobsonian pronominal "verbal persons", it should be investigated whether these figurations (cf. Elias 1978[1970]) are universal across all relevant communication systems (and, in fact, what are the relevant communication systems in question). Lastly, the nature of "learning" in this context must be specified in terms of phatics, as learning metacommunicative cues is unlike learning math or philosophy, for example. There is no truth to metacommunicative clues, only suitability, just like with formulae of greeting or approach (cf. Ogden & Richards 1946[1923]: 234).
References
- Bateson, Gregory 2000[1966]. Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication. In: Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 364-378.
- Dewey, John and Arthur F. Bentley 1949. Knowing and the Known. Boston: Beacon Press.
- Elias, Norbert 1978[1970]. What is Sociology?. New York: Columbia University Press.
- Elyachar, Julia 2010. Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo. American Ethnologist 37(3): 452-464.
- Kockelman, Paul 2011. Biosemiosis, Technocognition, and Sociogenesis: Selection and Significance in a Multiverse of Sieving and Serendipity. Current Anthropology 52(5): 711-739.
- Kulkarni, Dipti 2014. Exploring Jakobson's 'phatic function' in instant messaging interactions. Discourse & Communication 8(2): 117-136.
- Nord, Christiane 2007. The Phatic Function in Translation: Metacommunication as a Case in Point. Belgian Journal of Linguistics 21(1): 171-184.
- Ogden, Charles K. and Ivor A. Richards 1946[1923]. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. Eighth edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.
- Ruesch, Jurgen and Gregory Bateson 1951. Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. New York: Norton.
- Ruesch, Jurgen 1972[1953a]. Synopsis of the Theory of Human Communication. In: Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.), Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations. The Hague; Paris: Mouton, 47-94.
- Ruesch, Jurgen 1972[1966]. Social Process. In: Sebeok, Thomas A. (ed.), Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations. The Hague; Paris: Mouton, 21-46.
I like the idea of "implicit questions" which is new to me as a term of art. It reminds me of, and seems to generalize, the idea of "critical questions," introduced by Walton in the setting of argumentation theory. I've felt for a while that "critical questions" needed to be generalized and maybe "implicit questions" is the way.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with argumentation theory is that it's all about, well, defeasible argument. Whereas, even in a domain like mathematics that officially deals in proofs, there are lots of other important things going on, like "expository quality", "problem selection", "collaboration", etc.
Still, critical questions seem really powerful within their scope, which is why I was thinking they might be good to generalize. Here's a quick example I found by googling, from "The Nature and Status of Critical Questions in Argumentation Schemes".
The general setup:
(NI) My goal is to bring about A (Goal Premise).
(N2) I reasonably consider on the given information that bringing about at least one of [B0 ,B1 ,...,Bn ] is necessary to bring about A (Alternatives Premise).
(N3) I have selected one member Bi as an acceptable, or as the most acceptable necessary condition for A (Selection Premise).
(N4) Nothing unchangeable prevents me from bringing about Bi as far as I know (Practicality Premise).
(N5) Bringing about A is more acceptable to me than not bringing about Bi (Side Effects Premise).
Therefore, it is required that I bring about Bi (Conclusion).
Critical questions:
CQ 1 : Are there alternative means of realizing A, other than B? [Alternative means question]
CQ2: Is B an acceptable (or the best) alternative? [Acceptable/Best Option Possible Question]
CQ 3 : Is it possible for agent a to do B? [Possibility Question]
CQ 4 : Are there negative side effects of a’s bringing about B that ought to be considered?
[Negative Side Effects Question]
CQ 5 : Does a have the goals other than A, which have the potential to conflict with a’s realizing
A? [Conflicting Goals Question]
The ideas of a "burden of proof" and "burden of questioning" that these folks talk about seems like it might have, or take place within, a phatic dimension.
I'd definitely like to read the Ruesch & Bateson stuff, which I noticed is available on archive.org; maybe the authors never renewed their copyright? Interesting.
I had no idea that "implicit question" is a thing. I use this expression for several purposes. Here I mean "implicit questions" in the sense that the statement has a hidden inquisitive aspect to it, it's questionable and questioning. The illustration of political speechmaking uses the expression "an implicit question" to describe the pragmatics of reality testing, or what Ruesch separately called reality scanning: testing the premises of another person's subjective understanding of social reality. I wrote my sentence on the metalevel, discussing the illustration as an object, implying that questions about context, relationshiy, learning and communication can be raised against this illustration and several chapters of theorizing is probably needed in order to lay out the rigorous theory that would follow. This has actually been done by various scholars in the past. Bronislaw Malinowski deals with similar issues but in anthropological and early 20th Century semiotic lingo. Charles Morris dealt with sign-situations, society, conditioning and communication. Juri Lotman dealt with culture, tradition, learning and communication. The examples could go on to George H. Mead, Mikhail Bakhtin, Roman Jakobson, of course, etc. It short, these "big questions" are not only well known and often written about, but they are also implicit in a lot of stuff that isn't humanistic or social science stuff. Like culture, art, films, perhaps even mathemathics. Definitely mathematics. A lot of semiotic methods have to do with early and historical formal logic through the scholastics.
ReplyDeleteJust for the fun of it, I tried to translate model (Cultural) Semiotic questions after the "critical questions". These weren't that difficult to write up, but they would make for a near-pointless, totally theoretical, analysis.
(Cultural) Semiotic questions:
SQ 1 - Are there other sign systems that can be, in some measure, untranslatable to A {systemic heterogeneity question}
SQ 2 - Is code/language B preferred to code/language A? {code selection question}
SQ 3 - Is sign system A adequate for the purpose? {adequality question}
SQ 4 - Is code switching useful for transmission or semiotic creativity? {utility question}
SQ 5 - What is the permanent-dynamic synchronic state of the hierarchy of sign systems in a culture? {dominant
Then I read your comment that maybe these questions could be translated into phatic terms. The only aspect that comes to mind at the moment is the overly strategic and perhaps self-conscious question of "Which channel to use?" I'm not capable of modelling that without the results looking even more nearer to utter pointlessness. You could probably do it better. Care to give it a shot?
Ruesch & Bateson (1951, Communication...) is indeed available on archive.org - I haven't read it yet in full. Usually mere parts of it are enough to set me down deep into thought. This is especially so with Ruesch's collection of articles (1972, Semiotic Approaches to Human Relations), but that 800-page monster is somewhat rare, because it was an early Mouton Gruyter book. The city has just named it's name from s-Gravenhage and probably confuzed a lot of people with that...? I really don't know why it is, but there are few traces of this book on the internet; even Google Books doesn't have a preview, only search function - maybe because it's categorized under "Family & Relationships"? That's a weird field of research, right? Well, some articles are indeed about family psychiatry, psychosomatic diseases, communication disturbances, mental health, mental health project team management and other extremely weird stuff mixed into brilliant gems of communication theory or the Palo Alto Group style communication psychology or social psychiatry.
What's weird is that I actually think Jurgen Ruesch was a genius. He was a Swiss psychiatrist who emigrated to the US in the wake of WWII and quickly established himself in American psychiatry by studying psychosomatic illnesses (when your mental health is disturbed because of a physical distortion or sickness) in US marines and cultural assimilation to American society in emigrants. He met and collaborated with the great linguists, anthropologists, cyberneticists and communication engineers of his time:
ReplyDelete[quote]"In 1946, the Veterans Administration hospital in Palo Alto, California, hired Bateson to apply insights from his anthropological work in New Guinea and (with Mead) in Bali on the analysis of family dynamics, then thought to play a part in causing mental illness. [George L.] Trager [coined "paralanguage"], [Edward T.] Hall [established "proxemics"], and, in the summer of 1952, also [Ray L.] Birdwhistell [established "kinesics"], worked as applied anthropologists at the Foreign Services Institute (founded in 1946) in Washington, D. C., training thousands future diplomats in anthropology and non-verbal communication. Hall’s best-selling book The Silent Language (1956) grew out of this work: it concluded “Culture is communication and communication is culture” (p. 186). The anthropologists were fired from the FSI in 1955 due to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’s dislike of anthropology, which he believed promoted relativism." (ACE: Ray Birdwhistell)[/quote]
* ""Culture," incidentally, is seen by Hall as "basically a communicative process." (Birdwhistell 1968: 96)
* And: "Larger acquaintance with Hall's writings leaves the reader with the feeling that [Edward T.] Hall's view of communication lies somewhere within a field demarcated by Harry Stack Sullivan's transactionalism, certain aspects of information theory, and George L. Trager's global incorporation of all culture as communication." (Birdwhistell 1968: 96)
In short, there was a wonderful world of elegant inter- and transdiscipline theorizing going on at Palo Alto in the 1950s and 60s, before anthropology was discarded by the authorities in the 1970s. You can find something like metacommunication, autocommunication and nonverbal communication in nearly every one of those great pioneers of cybernetics, semiotics and communicology. Including Erving Goffman, Kenneth Pike, and a lot of other notable scientific writers with whom I'm not even remotely familiar with yet (like the future star pragmatist Paul Watzlawick). I'm into these guys because they had a 'broader than merely verbal language' view of communication and made great contributions to the early study of nonverbal communication.
I don't know that "implicit question" is a thing anywhere other than this post & comment thread!
ReplyDeleteBut "reality testing" certainly is well-known. It occurs to me that in mathematical physics, there's a whole field called scattering theory, which I studied a bit... and which I've gotten a lot of mileage out of as a metaphor. There are two basic setups, but they always look like this:
input -> S -> output
The question is, which parts are known. If you know the input and the scatterer, S, then this is the case of "forward scattering". If you know the input and the output, then this is "inverse scattering." Inverse scattering, in particular, is pretty much a mathematization of the experimental method or of "reality testing."
I was thinking we could draw some very general inspiration from the Walton's "critical questions" and think about what is left open/implicit (maybe "tacit" would even be an OK word to use).
A standard sort of argumentation example might be:
"He's totally going to fail." (assertion)
How do you know? (critical question - authority)
"Well, he's tried similar things many times and always failed." (abductive reasoning)
Yes but maybe he learned from the experience? (critical question - soundness)
«to the reader: fill in the next step»
This could go on and on, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern playing tennis. But if we shift it a phatic register instead of a reasoning register, I think it might progress a bit differently:
"He's totally going to fail." (assertion)
Why do you say that? (implicit question - you're trying to tell me something aren't you...)
"Well, he's tried similar things many times and always failed." (abductive reasoning)
Do you think I don't know that? (implicit question - personal history)
«to the reader: fill in the next step»
On a whole I think the phatic version is more "empathetic" -- although it could also certainly feature "neg-empathy" (i.e. intentional hurting the discussant's feelings).
Maybe -- just maybe! -- phatics is to "inverse scattering" as argumentation is to "forward scattering." Hm...
I hadn't heard of Ruesch until we started talking here actually. So I'll look forward to learning about that.
ReplyDeleteThe mental health connections remind me of Daniel D. Hutto's "radical enactivism" -- maybe he cites Ruesch (it seems like he should) and I just didn't notice it. I've drawn some inspiration from Hutto's writing, but so far I think it all ended up in out-takes. Maybe I'll make a post about that in a bit.
The "input -> S -> output" formula is familiar to me through Ruesch. Instead of the "scatterer" he says something to the effect that computers have input, central processing and output just like humans have perception, evaluation and expression.
ReplyDeleteI don't know where "empathetic" and "negempathy" come from, but they do have something in common with Charles Morris's communization (sharing, sociality) and differentiation (not sharing, individuality). In affective terms these would amount to something like whether you identify emotionally with another or choose to stay disconnected for whatever reason.
Actually, I just thought of a possible interpretation that would justify (for me) the phrase "phatic-x layers" as the title of that table. It involves the well known onion metaphor. Just like phatic utterances are merely predominantly phatic and contain all the other functions as subordinate, the phatic "onions" (phenomena) have a phatic peel (outer covering or skin) hiding away the second dominant function and all the other functions in decreasing order to the core of least dominant function. In short, we're looking for the onions that are more phatic than some other onions.
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