Phatic Agency

I've been organizing all the sources that Google Alert has sent my way, i.e. resources published in 2016 that say something citeable about phaticity, and I've almost reached 100 references. The idea is to organizing their content in terms of the topics already outlined in "metaphatics metaeverything" and start writing about them. This one came in just a few hours ago, and it's good enough to post here for further discussion.

Yet if objects and images can work in this way, not simply as vessels but as agents, so too, as Mitchell implied, can language. 'Communications about communication' is how Gregory Bateson explained his coinage metacommunication, those formalized, ritualized exchanges that are nevertheless highly meaningful. In Roman Jakobson's famous model of the six factors and functions of language, this phatic function of language is fulfilled by the contact factor, 'a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication'. It is the contact that bears the message that refers to a given context in a mutually intelligible code from the addresser to the addressee. Although Jakobson acknowledged that the predominant factor in many messages was the context, and the predominant function referential, he left significant space for messages that emphasized the phatic function of language. These messages are ones intended primarily 'to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works', indeed 'to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm his continued attention'. Furthermore, like objects, including diplomatic gifts, those communications in which the phatic function is especially prominent may be characterized by 'a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas' or by 'entire dialogues with the mere purport of prolonging communication'. This phatic function, therefore, is communication-as-agency, or, to put it in Gellian terms, message/contact-as-index. As we shall soon see, this function of communication was a significant factor in Kind René's cultural politics. (Margolis 2016: 12)

• The non-human semiotic agency of objects and images is an increasingly popular topic revolving around phatics. For example,
  
  • Benjamin Smith "develops an approach to semiotically mediated processes of socialization that can make sense of the agency that non-humans - especially material things - wield in socialization" and how "the agency of non-humans more generally - opens onto a new line of inquiry for scholars of language socialization (Smith 2016: 42-43).
  My argument here would be that non-human semiotic agents (i.e. artificial intelligence) could act in a way comparable to parents, peers, and siblings in the future, just as computer mediated communication acts more and more so today. Patricia Prieto Blanco's doctoral dissertation (Affect and Affordances, 2016) brings phaticity together with the concept of affordances, which could be read as a first approximation of the question of how human and non-human semiotic agencies themselves are established. On this note I'd rely on the ideas of Juri Lotman and by proxy the Russian Formalist ideas about the autonomy of literary works. Namely,
  
  • Lotman's (1988[1981]) cultural semiotic concept of text says that an artistic text, a work of art, "marks a qualitatively new stage in the growing complexity of the structure of a text" (Lotman 1988[1981]: 55). By complexity he means multilayeredness and semiotic heterogeneity, so that it can "entering into complex relations both with the surrounding cultural context and with its readers" (ibid, 55). Multilayeredness manifests itself in the text acquiring memory, and heterogeneity in its capacity to condense information. In other words, a complex semiotic system can function as an intellectual device or an artificial intelligence or a non-human agency because it transforms reality according to its own complex rules of organization, rather than reflecting reality mechanically. It can not only transmit information but transform it and develop new information.
  • In the same article, Lotman outlines his famous five-fold model of cultural interactions involved in communication via text. I'll illustrate these with our inter-cultural case, because it elucidates some interesting facets:
    
    1. Communication between addressant and addressee. A text carries information. I communicate with you. Simplex.
    2. Communication between the audience and the cultural tradition. Since a text can function as a carrier of collective cultural memory, it is capable of replenishing itself for you, meaning that you can retrieve some aspect of it at a later date that you didn't notice or understand earlier. Since a text has so much cultural memory condensed inside it, it is possible to read it repeatedly and arrive at novel interpretations. In this way You communicate with the memory of the Text. The text has become a transcommunicative partner (has as-if "shifted into" that position, meaning that code may be able to do the same - which it actually does, metalinguistically). This is so because text is fixed and can outlast uttered words. The same goes for all recorded and stored media.
    3. Communication of the reader with himself. This is just autocommunication or intrapersonal communication, i.e. You communicate with yourself while reading the text. Peirce describes this as giving signs to yourself, or that future self just coming into being in the flow of time. This topic can be very complex. I'm wondering why Lotman doesn't include the sender's autocommunication, i.e. the communicative processes going on while writing, composing, or constructing a text.
    4. Communication of the reader with the text. Lotman's theory here is that a highly organized text that manifests intellectual properties ceases to be a mere mediator in the act of communication and becomes a fully equal communication partner with a high degree of autonomy. This is how artwork takes on a life of its own. He invokes the profoundly meaningful ancient metaphor of conversing with a book. In other words, You communicate with the text.
    5. Communication between a text and the cultural context. This is where the text becomes a fully fledged artificial intelligence capable of communicating with and having a special effect on the reader apart from the intentions of the author. It becomes an autonomous source or receiver of information (ibid, 56). When such highly complex cultural texts enter different cultural chronotopes it can self-recode itself in accordance with the context of the situation, transforming itself in light of new codes. In this case, The text communicates with your culture.
    In this model, Lotman takes a sytemic viewpoint in which signs, codes, texts, and cultures are systems and metasystems. It is also one occasion where Lotman and Bakhtin (or at least Medvedev) disagree. William Marling says that "both men were in revolt against the autonomy that Russian Formalism granted texts" (1994: 278). Nevertheless, the concept of ideologeme, according to the logic Marling outlines, points to the way the social context is refracted in a text. It is possible that there is no actual disagreement, at least not with Lotman, if his later systemic thinking is taken into consideration. Texts are not indeed safe from ideologemes, since these are presumable a natural part of the sociocultural context.
    
  • Blanco's (2016) thesis advocates a view of photography that emphasizes the phatic dimension of communication. Her critical reading of phatic communication as an emotion-based process and it's significance in modern digital image sharing practices leads her to question the affordances for connection between human users and non-human agencies (online services, platforms, and spaces). Keep in mind that online polymedia environments are some of the most massive and complex cultural sign systems currently in existence. Not only are they multilayered and heterogeneous, they are increasingly veering towards artificial intelligence (Google's DeepMind, Facebook's A.I., Omegle, Twitterbots, etc.).
• What really caught my attention in this quote from Oren Margolis is his invocation of Gregory Bateson's metacommunication, or communication about communication. It is kinda odd to see him describe metacommunicative messages as "'Communications about communication' is how Gregory Bateson explained his coinage metacommunication, those formalized, ritualized exchanges that are nevertheless highly meaningful" (Margolis 2016: 12). It is most definitely an apt description, but it is also a common phaticism, e.g. Jakobson's "profuse exchange of ritualized formulas" (1981[1960d]: 24) and further down the line Malinowski's "formulae of greeting or approach" (1946[1923]: 314).
  
  • In Blanco's thesis (2016) she writes that the intermittent but ongoing digital encounters generate ontological security for transnational families. This, she says, challenges the notion of digital ephemerality. It is certainly somewhat difficult to penetrate this nomenclature, but the relevant concepts mirror more common terms like ambient copresence, and illustrations to this effect are abound in relevant research. For example, when you enable geolocation on your smartdevice and attach your location to every status update, you're providing further information or cues through which the update can be interpreted (e.g. Madianou 2016: 11). In other words, locative media or geolocation messages act as metacommunication.
  • The first known explicit appearance of metacommunication is fact political: the leader of an American party has to maintain integration in a group with diverse opinions about matters about which he must make decisions. Metacommunication is here framed in terms of nonverbal feedback to a verbal utterance: "Whenever he speaks, each utterance is a trial balloon, and he continually watches those behind him to see how far he can go". They affirm that in conventional (psychiatric) terms this is called "reality testing" but propound a viewpoint that this is more like "asking an implicit question about his own statements" or asking "What effect will my utterance have upon relations between my supporters and myself?" (Ruesch & Bateson 1951a: 152).

This list could be fruitfully continued to connect a series of otherwise disparate ideas, but not right now.

References

• Blanco, Patricia Prieto 2016. Affect and Affordances: case studies of transnational digital family photography. Unpublished PhD thesis supervised by Tony Tracy and Anne Byrne. National University of Ireland, Galway.
• Jakobson, Roman 1981[1960d]. Linguistics and poetics. In: Rudy, Stephen (ed.), Selected Writings III: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry. The Hague (etc.): Mouton de Gruyter, 18-51.
• Lotman, Juri M. 1988[1981]. The Semiotics of Culture and the Concept of a Text. Soviet Psychology 26: 52-58.
• Malinowski, Bronislaw 1946[1923]. The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages. In: Ogden, C. K. & I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. Eighth edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 296-336.
• Margolis, Oren 2016. The Politics of Culture in Quattrocento Europe: René of Anjou in Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Marling, William 1994. The formal ideologeme. Semiotica 98(3/4): 277-299.
• Ruesch, Jurgen and Gregory Bateson 1951a. Communication and The System of Checks and Balances: An Anthropological Approach. In: Ruesch, Jurgen and Gregory Bateson, Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 150-167.
• Smith, Benjamin 2016. Turning language socialization ontological: Material things and the semiotics of scaling time in Peruvian Aymara boyhood. Language and Communication 46: 42-50.