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 . 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 (a
Is there any way you can coax her to write down (or better yet send you online) examples of uses in sentences, parallel in Greek and English?
ReplyDeleteShe's quite happy to help out and I will share the request. She already cautioned that she's not an expert in ancient greek, but I countered that she's much more of an expert than me. Progress likely.
ReplyDeleteOn a related note, her talk, and one other one, looked at some interesting examples of "generation" (1) of a shared musico-aesthetic space in a performance-audience interaction; and (2) film music. I'll try to pin down the references since these examples might help me formulate the case for "generative phatics" that I've been circling.
On a much more tangential note, I noticed that Derrida's PhD thesis was about genesis in Husserl. I didn't have a chance to look in much detail.
Parallel Greek/English statements each demonstrating "tell", "show", and "light" could help us get at the speech/phenomenon nexus. It is quite possible that Malinowski chose this particular term not indeed because it's Greek for "speech" but because, well, wow, there are wholly two possible interpretations of "coming to light". The very literal one would imply that when he discusses phatic communion as a group of tribesmen sitting around fire and engaging in idle chatter, they are quite literally "coming to light" in the sense of being near fire. The less literal, and more probable, phenomenon-oriented one would be that when we meet a stranger, then we engage in small talk in order for the character of the stranger to "come to light", so that we could get to know who that person is (i.e. there's an imperative to say something, anything really, in order to even find out what language the stranger speaks). I'm expecting the illustrations to not conform exactly to neither of these, but these kinds of speculations could really be narrowed down if we had more context into how "phatic" is used in native Greek.
DeleteWe did some further looking around, the results to my mind still seem inconclusive. There's a strong chance that my initial assertions were just wrong. However, I did learn some interesting things.
ReplyDeleteThe first is that the word "emphasis" is indeed related to "phenomenon". Both of them connect with the root for "light" -- in the case of "emphasis" the idea is very similar to the English word "highlight". [The derivation of emphasis is from ἔν (én, “in”) + φαίνω (phaínō, “I show”). ] Another similar-sounding English word in this family is "phase".
Phatic, on the other hand comes from φατός (phatós, “spoken”), from φημί (phēmí, “I say”). A more common English word that retains the same sound is "fame", from φήμη. And another related is φωνή, the root for "phoneme", "telephone", and other similar things.
One word I'm finding that seems to bridge between the two is φάναι, which is the present active infinitive form of φημί, and which on the one hand seems to be connected to meanings like "to bring to light, make to appear" and on the other to meanings like "to declare, make known". I'll continue to questions (if I can do that with being too annoying).
Nevertheless at the moment these things should (perhaps) be taken as only metaphorically linked.
Looking at the etymology so far gives me some further comprehension of Malinowski, anyway. "Phatic communion" makes sense as a communion through speaking. On the other hand "phatic speech" is a bit odd, because it means "speaking speech" or something similar. One could compare "haptic touch".
An interesting poetic image near the middle of bringing-to-light and making-known is a procession with torches, "such as took place in the cult of Dionysus." So there may be a mystery play somewhere in this mystery.
Good job! Connecting these with modern understanding of the phatic function would be an innovation, but an innovation we could indeed some day undertake.
DeleteFurther comments from another Greek colleague, Asteris:
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I've done some research of my own in the internet and I think I found what you're looking for. All the sources I could find are in Greek so I'll translate the important bits.
It seems like both φημί (I say) and φάος/φώς (light) may indeed originate from the same sanskrit root: *bheә2-/*bhә2-
Some offered explanations for this relationship are given through semantic evolution: "I glow, I lit up, I bring to light" therefore "I state, I present, I expose".
One other similar explanation is that when humans invented fire (φωτιά) they had the chance to start talking around it and their voices (φωνές) were heard to describe the incidents of the previous day. This possibility was not there when, without fire, people should just go to sleep when it became dark. So, around the fire people started to φάσκω = "I claim, I pretend" as due to their poor vocabulary they had to represent some incidents by pretending/acting. So the root φα- where φημί comes from, means "to bring to light, to reveal, to reveal through speech, to make something known". This explains why φάναι is a common type in both φημί and φαίνω.
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And one further comment from me: in Latin, "fire" is _focus_; for mythological significance compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesta_(mythology). There If I remember there are some interesting comments about this in Sloterdijk's "Spheres II", but I don't have a copy around at the moment to extract a quote.
Very thorough.
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