Chapter 1 of Book II of "Ten Books on Architecture", available from Project Gutenberg . Sections 1, 2, and 7 (from the Richard Schofield translation published by Penguin rather than the one here) are quoted on pp. 218-219 of Spheres II by Peter Sloterdijk. Pay particular attention to Section 2. 1. The men of old were born like the wild beasts, in woods, caves, and groves, and lived on savage fare. As time went on, the thickly crowded trees in a certain place, tossed by storms and winds, and rubbing their branches against one another, caught fire, and so the inhabitants of the place were put to flight, being terrified by the furious flame. After it subsided, they drew near, and observing that they were very comfortable standing before the warm fire, they put on logs and, while thus keeping it alive, brought up other people to it, showing them by signs how much comfort they got from it. In that gathering of men, at a time when utterance of sound was purely individual,...
Sorry, my mind didn't connect the expression "phatic-x layers" and this aspect at all. Now I get what you mean: it's like I'm multiplying the phatic function with all the other functions. I'm not sure if they're layers, but this is definitely something I'm going to write about (I already have scattered remarks here and there). The outcome would be a very Jakobsonian typology of phatic phenomena. It's an often ignored pivot of his scheme of language functions that few speech acts have a purely this or that function. In actual fact all components are present in any act of (verbal) communication and manifest a differential hierarchy of functions. A typology like that is a shot in the dark, with no guarantee that it would lead to anything, but it's something I have to do in order to demonstrate that "the purely phatic stratum" as Jakobson would put it, may indeed be about conventional politeness formulas, but that there's a whole world of phatic phenomena that are ignored because of this restrictive definition.
ReplyDeleteSince I'm planning to write about it anyway, maybe you can give your opinion of it. I'm quite interested in how framing these relations / multiplications / types of phenomena / whatever as layers could be useful for. I was confused about your reference because I ctrl+F'd my blog for both "phatic-x" and "layers" but didn't find anything. It is a cool label, though.
This piece of theory is important for my purposes because while phatic communion, metacommunication, communization, the μ-function, etc all have slightly different orientations towards any of the other components (sender, receiver, code, message, referent), I'd thought this typology or (what will in the end be a) table of communication phenomena with a dominant phatic function, could re-group some of those aspects in a sensible way, so as to paint a broad picture of where to look for phatics.