on the 'evaluation grid' for our literature review, or, a sketch of the simondonian approach

Our current plan for the survey paper revolves around the idea of a "meta-analysis".  There are 35 pages of abstracts -- about 100 abstracts in total ("all papers related to phatics available through EBSCO" - email, 26 Oct 2015).

Part of the plan would be to locate them according to their place in the Malinowski, Jakobson, and La Barre legacies, perhaps developing a "phylogeny" rather than a "taxonomy".  This would show something about how the term evolved.  (Note, the EBSCO papers seem to mostly be recent ones, and we may need to enlarge the corpus to be more accurate as regards earlier dates, but there is certainly plenty there to give us a start.)

The issue on my mind comes from our own latest paper draft (edited 29 October 2015): "Once we acknowledge the immense role of phatic communion [and phatic communication, and other phatic behavior] we are faced with the difficult question of how to study it."  ​ Sorting papers out based on who cites who is a viable basic approach for the literature review, but by itself it isn't telling us much about the future of phatic studies.  One additional question to ask in the literature review is therefor: what methods do the papers we're looking at use to address the questions they are asking?  Perhaps these questions and methods can be asked, and applied, again; with appropriate variations.

But what's "appropriate" for this research area is a higher-level question that we'll have to resolve.  From the draft:

Should we code additional dialogues or stories, using our collection of phatic functions (emotional, conative, cognitive, etc.)? Should we make use of other theories about emergent order?  How ​ would we go about understanding and answering these “should” questions?  Can ​ phatics itself help answer these questions?

Personally I do think that the collection of "phatic functions" will be useful as a set of tags that can code the usages of the "phatic" concept in previous papers, as well as other data later on.  To my mind it makes sense to code the literature in this way (if we have some clear standards about how the various functions should be applied) along with the basic goal of sorting the papers by legacy.  The previous research papers could help to "validate" the set of tags: is it complete, accurate, and so on?  I propose that we pick one or two papers from the list and try this out as a "pilot" to see how it goes.

Even before we get to that, I think that an underlying theoretical framework will be needed, both to have some clear criteria about which of the functions apply, and also to draw any conclusions from that.

This is where I thought Simondon's writing about "individuation" could be useful for us.  More or less, what I'm thinking is that what phatics does is individuate.  For example, it carves out a new communication channel where there wasn't one before.  Or it maintains a community that has been in existence for a while.  Importantly, it also applies in the case of "negative phatics", where it severs a previous tie that existed within a community, in order to further individuate the members of that community. 

To simplify my life today, I'm not going to justify this claim with lots of quotes from Simondon (and the secondary literature about him) right now.  Instead, I'll just include ONE quote from "Fifty Key Terms in the Works of Gilbert Simondon" by Jean-Hugues Barthélémy.

Phases and phase-shift

First of all, the term ‘phases’ is always plural, because phases only exist in relation to each other. Thus, they are marked by their relativity. Second, the term also refers to something other than a moment within a temporal succession (see MEOT 159). Simondon highlights the physical origin of this term, which, together with the terms ‘relation’ (see Realism of relations) and ‘orders of magnitude’, lays down a new and difficult logic; if one does not want to misinterpret Simondon’s discussion of a particular regime, one must always keep this in mind when the ontology of ‘regimes of individuation’ – physical, vital and psycho-social – is being constructed. This new logic is made explicit in a foundational passage of ILFI, the one that starts off the conclusion of this work:

"Here, the idea of a discontinuity [discontinu] becomes that of a discontinuity [discontinuité] of phases, which is linked to the hypothesis of the compatibility of successive phases of being: a being, considered as individuated, can in fact exist according to several phases that are present at the same time, and it can change phases in itself; there is a plurality in being that is not the plurality of parts (the plurality of parts would be below the level of the unity of being), but a plurality that is above this unity, because it is that of being as phase, in the relation of one phase of being to another phase of being." (ILFI 317).

The notion of ‘phase-shift’ refers to this process through which the phases are constituted. One finds its most extensive illustration in the ‘phases of culture’ in the third part of MEOT. See Art, Religion and Primitive magical unity.

(Considering Simondon's Nietszchean inspirations, an example of "being as a phase" would be: "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman.")

With this in mind, I think we are potentially set to create a fourth "legacy" -- possibly unifying the previous ones.  Phatic studies as a study of phase shifts in culture, community, communication, and even being.

(Incidentally, in this way, "phatic speech" would not be "speaking speech" but would be "phasing speech".)

From the point of view of the literature review, the question that we would ask prior to choosing which of the "phatic functions" is being employed is: is a new phase brought into being?  Or is the communication effecting a transition from one phase to another?  Or possibly merging two existing phases?

For example, a classic example of phatic-conative might be "Can you hear me now?" - and the new network that results is what is "individuated".

Since analysing 100 or more papers in detail is going to be a lot of work, I wonder if for our 8-page "warm up" paper we shouldn't just pick a few that we know are really important, in order to demonstrate the approach.  The larger scale analysis of all-existing-papers-that-mention-phatics reminds me of the book-length study The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science, which took a long time to write and an even longer time to publish, but which was extremely thorough.  Picking a handful of the most important papers from our corpus could just be done through citation counts.

To sum up, I propose the following as the "evaluation grid" to use when reviewing earlier papers:

1. Which legacy does this belong to?  (Which terms are used, who is cited?)
2. When they say "phatic", which "phatic function" is applied?
3. What individuation is described?  (What phase shift/creation/merge does the phatic function that is employed bring about?)