Phatic Workshop

In a paper attempting to outline the conceptual domain of comparative psychology , Herbert Spencer discusses the quality of impulsiveness in relation with human races (bearded and unbearded). Among his "sundry questions of interests" about the relationship between mental energy, evolution, complexity, etc. are the following notes: ( b ) What connection is there between this trait and the social state? Clearly a very explosive nature - such as that of the Bushman - is unfit for social; and, commonly, social union, when by any means established, checks impulsiveness. ( c ) What respective shares in checking impulsiveness are taken by the feelings which the social state fosters - such as the fear of surrounding individuals, the instinct of sociality , the desire to accumulate property, the sympathetic feelings , the sentiment of justice? These, which require a social environment for their development, all of them involve imaginations of consequences more or less distant; and th...

A few quotes from these slides by Gunter Senft. because yams and taro plants, especially seedlings rot away in a soil much too wet and now often even swampy. food shortage in 2008 ... made Trobrianders eat up many of their yams seedlings which in turn resulted in an even worse food shortage problem in 2009  “Population of PNG is more than 7 million“ ≈ threefold increase in 40 years!

The emerald bauble of the planet, nested on a sequin-dusted jeweller's cushion of black velvet, this is not the world.  The several billion apes with improved posture that cavort across the planet's surface, these are likewise not the world.  The world is no more than an aggregate of your ideas about the world, of your ideas about yourselves.  It is the vast mirage, baroque and intricate, that you are building as a shelter from the overwhelming fractal chaos of the universe.  It is composed from things of the imagination, from philosophies, economies and wavering faith, from your self-serving individual agendas and your colourful notions of destiny.  It is a flight of fancy spun to while away those empty-bellied Neolithic nights, a wishful fantasy of how mankind might one day live, a campfire tale you tell yourselves and then forget is just a tale you are telling; that you have made up and have mistaken for reality.  Civilisation is your earliest science-f...

What Orff can't seem to find are his old flame Luise, a woman who embodies the perpetual lostness of Eurydice; and his own lost inspiration, as Orpheus's tale and Orff's own gradually become intertwined in a heady and poetically potent blend of mythological riffing and daft comedy. -- from this summary of The Medusa Frequency by Russell Hoban ...a massive No. 1 single, inadvertently started the late '90s teen pop boom, and created a public persona for herself that was simultaneously kid-friendly and pure male fantasy... Perseus is holding Medusa's head like sort of sceptre, or proof of a mandate from heaven. Equally, in the sculpture-as-story Medusa has been "castrated" in a most extreme way -- ending her life, clearly, but not eliminating the magical power of her gaze. Perhaps the issue is that her head, back when it was attached to her body, was already a sort of sceptre; and she was so closely aligned with that power as to become, entirely...

There is no dark side of the moon. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun. The typical conception of a resource like "Arxiv" or "Wikipedia" is summed up in the name: it is an archive or an encyclopedia that anyone can edit .  "Stack Exchange" is somewhat less self-descriptive -- but nevertheless, the emphasis on "exchange" is apt, since this site is not quite a gift economy in Eric S. Raymond's sense, but rather a place where questions are exchanged for answers, and both are exchanged for reputation in the form of points and badges. Nevertheless, in broad brushstrokes all three resources have something much more essential as a common basis: they all grow in the course of use.  That said, they do not typically transform radically along the way.  Arxiv remains an archive; Wikipedia remains a wiki and encyclopedia; Stack Exchange is and always will be a Q&A site focused on questions wi...

Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea,  By James Leach, page 76 I remember recently having the eerie feeling when I sat down to drink a coffee on my doorstep that we are not so far away from myths and from history after all.  Wouldn't it be weird if "phatic" had yet another etymology -- namely that it was appropriated from the Papua New Guinneans?

[...] the human mind is dependent for its objects to a great degree upon channels or means that are not under its own control. It is thus dependent on the thousand channels and means by which objects are introduced to it. But we need here only instance that wonderful assemblage in the human body. These organs which we term the senses, one or the other of them, convey to the mind its first object and afterwards all the new objects about which it acts. ( Day 1876 : 15) Cognitive channels. Kroeber and some other anthropologists wrote about the cultural function of phatic communion, that it includes the aspect of relating to another person through your mutual relations to cultural events, signs, and texts. There are some quotes about how people used to read each other the news, and this made me think about Facebook feeds, and how social media is a sociocultural infrastructure of sorts, one that facilitates digital news sharing, for example, instead of face-to-face interaction. I wonder how...

I'm attending a morning workshop in Edinburgh on Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation.  My thoughts on the train ride up were pretty interesting.  I was reading the book Renku Reckoner  and spotted some pretty cool things in there.  I was particularly struck by some passages about "person and place" in the renga/renku form. One of the things that was really interesting here is the notion of different kinds of "linking" which I take to be a kind of contact function between verses in the poem .  Because of the specific formal constraints on renku, we get something with a Simondonian flavor: At its simplest Shofu renku can be seen as a strand of poetry which opens continuously outward. (p. 97) The constraint is that with a sequence of verses A , B , C , D , verse C should "link" to B , but "shift" away from A .  This link-shift frame moves one step to the right when we come to compose D . So we get a kind of continua...

“I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expression on their surface enigmatical.” -Geertz (Hm... perhaps Geertz is more exegetical than the social expressions themselves are enigmatical?) In the mean time I've been looking at a couple of papers on Nietzsche and the genetic method. D'Iorio, Paolo. "The Eternal Return: Genesis and Interpretation." Lexicon Philosophicum: International Journal for the History of Texts and Ideas 2 (2014). I find the argument here really convincing.  D'Iorio does some impressive sleuth work, heading from library to library to look at Nietzsche's notebooks and his hand-annotated texts: By contrast I'm somewhat less impressed with: Paul de Man, Genesis and Genealogy in Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy Diacritics Vol. 2, No. 4 (Winter, 197...

A "Top highlight" from an arbitrarily selected post on Medium. These top highlights can function as a crowdsourced "tl;dr" -- although not every post enables them. Highlights can also be discussed in comments following the post. Incidentally, here maybe the medium is the message -- one person's highlight becomes a possible occasion for further discussion.   And yet, the way comments work on Medium, there is no such thing as a discussion thread!  So there is only a collection of perspectives on the piece -- a sort of "functorial" utopia. (There are discussions on Medium, but they're just not very typical or obvious.)

[p. 7] Thus Individuation starts with a double critique: on the one hand of the Aristotelian hylomorphic dualism of matter and form, on the other of the monistic reduction of nature to a fundamental substance. The critique of hylomophism is reviewed by Tim Ingold in Making, following Deleuze and Guattari, who were probably following Simondon, who I'm thinking was probably following Bergson.  The basic critique is that 'form' is not, in general, imprinted on matter in the way that a brick is shaped in a mold. For the record, Aristotlelian forms and Platonic forms are a bit different, but even so the co-emergence of form and matter is "modern" (say, Bergsonian) idea.  I'm less clear on the difference between Simondon and Bergson here. But interesting to note that Simondon is firmly not a monist.  Given that some of our earliest posts here were written with The Monist in mind -- and that we continue to write with Pierce in mind -- it's worth rooting out ...

See Storify https://storify.com/DemFromCT/jason-p-steed-on-humor-and-humor Here's the info about the PhD thesis he was referring to. Title: Joke-making Jews/jokes making Jews: Essays on humor and identity in American Jewish fiction. Creator: Jason Paul. Steed Contributor: Joseph McCullough; University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Subjects: American literature -- 20th century; Anecdotes; Comedy; Comedians -- United States; Sociology; United States -- Study and teaching; Thesis (PhD) Is Part Of: 65-08A. Description: Beginning from the premise that humor plays a prominent role in the construction of group and individual identities, as a social phenomenon and a simultaneously alienating and assimilating force, these essays explore and examine humor and its construction of American Jewish identity within the context of various works of American Jewish fiction. Though organized as "chapters," the essays do not build upon one another progressively, nor do they center on...

It strikes me that this is related to our cause: It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead. The information is then turned into a new form available for the further stages of performance. In both the animal and the machine this performance is made to be effective on the outer world. In both of them, their performed action on the outer world, and not merely their intended action, ...

Here are a couple images from Modeling Narrative Discourse , a PhD thesis by David K. Elson.  I was looking at this because I thought it might have some clues about how to represent narratives, which is something I'm interested in vis à vis my computer programming work.  And it does seem to have some nice clues about that!  It also has some interesting results that I've skimmed about representing literary social networks, which seem at least a bit related to what we were talking about vis à vis scholarly social networks.  A few pictures and a short quote are probably worth just over 2000 words. The notion of extracting social networks from literary texts offers a wealth of possible collaborations between computer scientists and literary experts. Studies about the nineteenth-century British novel, for instance, are often concerned with the nature of the community that surrounds the protagonist. Some theorists have suggested a relationship between the si...

Here are a couple of figures from the introduction by Craig Ayrey to "Musical fact and the semiology of music" by Jean Molino: The footnote "6" (in "Fig 2 6 ") points to Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Musicologie générale et sémiologie , Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1987, page 38.  There's an English translation, Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music . Translated by Carolyn Abbate (1990). Princeton University Press.  Reversing the second arrow (in the move from Fig 1 to Fig 2) seems like an interesting move, insofar as it seems to make the musical "trace" into something like a shared space.  Maybe this Nattiez-ian way of thinking is something we can use for thinking about phatics?

It occurred to me when I was attending a talk by John Kay about "rents" in the creative sector that transaction costs are somewhat related to phatics.  Consider the traditional roles in publishing: there's the AUTHOR, there's the PUBLISHER, and the DISTRIBUTOR.  At each step, AUTHOR->PUBLISHER and PUBLISHER->DISTRIBUTOR, DISTRIBUTOR->READER there is some transaction cost, e.g. traditionally the author has to send out letters to lots of different publishers looking for someone who will take on the manuscript, and that's a lot of work.  So, we introduce some "optimizations" and further roles, e.g. the AUTHOR might hire an AGENT who will intermediate with publishers. Any one of these roles or connections might have some phatic dimension, but the AGENT in particular is someone who "speaks on behalf" of the author. Coase's theory of the firm is basically that corporate bodies come into existence in order to optimize, so that rat...

taste isn't just what you like (indie rock, H&M, PBR) but what you dislike (country music, Walmart, Budweiser). - from  https://np.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4oiqvw/dan_brown_donates_300000_euros_to_library_to/d4dczoy Some interesting comments here about affinity groups.

screencap from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeAKX_0wZWY In this new generation of films more and more the intertextual manifests itself as objects, people, or situations specifically meant to trigger an emotional response in the viewer ... I don’t think franchises and shared universes are bad by default quite the opposite at their best they build interpretive communities and foster social bonds in an increasingly alienated world the kind of intertextuality that we’re talking about can reflect these good qualities and when it’s done right when it’s not a substitute for strong characters and a good story it can be funny it can be amusingly subversive and of course it can add to the drama while still being exciting as hell.

I happened to just have re-typed a few pages from an old zoosemiotics issue of Semiotica when I read your latest comments. Both deal (in part) with bee dance, so I thought I'd share it here: Wilden, Anthony 1972. Analog and Digital Communication: On the Relationship between Negation, Signification, and the Emergence of the Discrete Element. Semiotica 6(1): 50-82. Distinctions in function . If we leave the computers from which the distinction was originally drawn and look at communication between organisms, it seems that man is the only organism to use both processes for communication with his peers. [Footnote 6: I would speak of analog thinking or knowing, for instance, as well as analog and digital communication. The analog would cover the emotive, the phatic, the conative, and the poetic; the digital, the cognitive and the metalingual. Phatic communion (Sebeok 1962) describes the main aspects of the symbolic function in Lévi-Strauss and Lacan (Wilden 1968) , [1] both of whi...