the tactile and the digital

From Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976), pp. 61, 63, 64-65, 67-68.

I was reminded of this passage by something Rasmus wrote: "I'd like to convey that one of the prime characterstics of Phatica is that s/he is dedicated to taking over the field of communication. Most everything phatics has to do with can be, and is, elsewhere discussed with different terms. Phatica is constantly conquering foreign territory."

I replied: "I could also mention a critique from Baudrillard, who talked about how modern communication has become entirely tactical -- similar root word to tactile -- and he would say that 'staying in touch' has morphed into a more sinister control mechanism. Not sure if we want to bring in this sort of philosophical polemic but if we do, I can dig it up."

Dig Up Her Bones by MoonsScythe

It was a really tangential riff, but I'm glad that I brought it up now that I've read Rasmus's Review of John Laver's "Communicative Functions of Phatic Communion" (1975). Not only are the works under discussion situated near each other in time...

Here we start to see some of the "dark side" of nonverbal communication. The function of control or regulation is what Baudrillard focuses on in these essays. Although Laver talked about micro-social (presumed to be basically benign) control or mutual regulation between individuals, the quotes here look at the idea of micro-regulation that is "postsocial".

Digitality is among us. It haunts all the messages and signs of our society, and we can clearly locate its most concrete form in the test, the question/answer, the stimulus/response. All content is neutralised by a continuous process of orchestrated interrogations, verdicts and ultimatums to be decoded, which this time no longer come from the depths of the genetic code but still possess the same tactical indeterminacy - the cycles of meaning become infinitely shorter in the cycles of the question/answer, the bit or the return of a minuscule quantity of energy/information to its point of departure. This cycle merely describes the perpetual reactualisation of the same models. The equivalent of the total neutralisation of signifieds by the code is the instantaneous verdict of fashion or of every billboard or TV advertising message. Everywhere supply devours demand, the question devours the answer, either absorbing and regurgitating it in a decodable form, or inventing it and anticipating its predictable corroboration. Everywhere the same 'scenario' of 'trials and errors' (the burden of which, in laboratory tests, is borne by guinea-pigs), the scenario of the spectrum of choices on offer or the multiple choice ('test your personality'). The test is everywhere the fundamental social form of control, which works by infinitely dividing practices and responses.

This is reminiscent of Rasmus's comments on "Make it Stick" - insofar as the multiple choice question is not a good way to learn.  But of course if the issue is regulation, then learning isn't a top priority.

The following also reminds me of also of our discussion of the "phatic image":

Contemplation is impossible, images fragment perception into success­ive sequences and stimuli to which the only response is an instantaneous yes or no - reaction time is maximally reduced. The film no longer allows you to contemplate it, it interrogates you directly. According to McLuhan, it is in this sense that the modern media demand greater immediate participation, incessant response and total plasticity (Benjamin compares the camera-man's operation to the surgeon's: tactility and manipulation). Messages no longer have an informational role, they test and take polls, ultimately so as to control ('contra-role' in the sense that all your responses are already inscribed in the 'role', on the anticipated register of the code). Editing [montage] and encoding in fact demand that the recipient disman­tle [demonte] and decode in accordance with the same process. Every reading of a message is thus nothing more than a perpetual test of the code.

As with Laver, there is an emphasis on roles, but now the macro-social infiltrates micro-social relations.  To introduce an anacronism: "the audience is essentially a render farm."

Apparently McLuhan is the one responsible for the emphasis on tactility, with statements like this (quoted in an endnote): "The TV image obliges us to always be filling in the blanks on the screen in a convulsive, kinetic and tactile sensory participation."

No more true and false since we can no longer find any gap between question and answer. In the light of these tests, intelligence, like opinion and more generally every process of signification, is reduced to the 'capacity to produce contrasting reactions to an increasing range of appropriate stimuli’. This whole analysis directly reflects McLuhan's formula 'The Medium is the Message'. It is in fact the medium, the very mode of editing, cutting, questioning, enticement, and demand by the medium that rules the process of signification. So we can understand why McLuhan saw an era of tactile communication in the era of electronic mass-media. In this we are closer in effect to the tactile than we are to the visual universe, where there is greater distance, and reflection is always possible. At the moment that touching loses its sensory, sensual value for us ('touching is an interaction of the senses rather than a simple contact between a skin and an object'), it is possible that it might once more become the schema of a universe of communication - but this time as a field of tactile and tactical simulation where the message becomes a 'message', a tentacular enticement, a test. In every field we are tested, probed and sampled; the method is 'tactical' and the sphere of communication 'tactile'. Not to mention the ideology of 'contact', which in all of its forms, seeks to replace the idea of social relations. A whole strategic configuration revolves around the test (the question/answer cell) as it does around a molecular command-code.

Finally, the section ends up with a discussion of the binary form per se:

The systems of the 'advanced democracies' become stable through the formula of the two-party system. The de facto monopoly remains in the hands of a homogeneous political class, from the left to the right, but must not be exercised in this way. This is because single party rule, totalitarianism, is an unstable form which drains the political stage and can no longer ensure the feedback of public opinion, the minimal current in the integrated circuit that constitutes the transistorised political machine.