Phatic Workshop

«Now you and the author are in the same little boat cast away from the safety of finished things, and the way out is through the work itself. It belongs to each equally for that brief time, and as both of you focus on it sitting there in front of you, the "other" as critic -- the judging stranger -- is only in the periphery, comments about the piece are about the piece and not about either of you. This is the magic of the gift.» -- Writers Workshops & the Work of Making Things, p. 35 «Gifts are given without the expectation of direct gifts in return. By making your work a gift, you invite the reader into the circle of something akin to a family, and you can expect the spirit of xenia -- "a bond of solidarity manifesting itself in an exchange of goods and services" -- to take over interactions. A gift has both economic and spiritual content. It is personal. In giving a gift, the giver's goal is to become as empty as possible.» Cf. https://en.wikipedi

Although it is beyond the scope of the current work to trace these connections, we will remark that this view is connected with the Bergson's perspectives on creative evolution, and to the genre of philosophy that takes up these themes: running to Mead who offers a generalised view of the social, to Bakhtin who develops the notion of dialogue in a metalinguistic frame, and to Deleuze who develops an ontology based on the idea of difference. These perspectives are relevant to the interest we take here in emergence, polyvocality, and learning by specifying and engaging with novel problems.

[Aside: The one place that Bakhtin uses Jakobson is to bring in the idea of "the dominant" -- from "Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views" p. 82, "The dominant may be defined as the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components. It is the dominant which guarantees the integrity of the structure." Quoted in a translator footnote in the Dostoevsky book on page 13.]

«We have entitled our chapter "Discourse in Dostoyevsky," for we have in mind discourse, that is, language in its concrete living totality, and not language as the specific object of linguistics, something arrived at through a completely legitimate and necessary abstraction from various aspects of the concrete life of the word. But precisely those aspects in the life of the word that linguistics makes abstract are, for our purposes, of primary importance. Therefore the analyses that follow are not linguistic in the strict sense of the term. They belong rather to metalinguistics, if we understand by that term the study of those aspects in the life of the word, not yet shaped into separate and specific disciplines, that exceed -- and completely legitimately -- the boundaries of linguistics. Of course, metalinguistic research cannot ignore linguistics and must make use of its results. Lingustics and metalinguistics study one and the same concrete, highly compl