Phatic Interference

Another idea I had while typing up Phatic Agency was the concept of phatic interference. I came to it while thinking about how in the autonomy of the artistic text the message function, which in Mukarovsky and Jakobson (as well as Lotman, who follows both) is the aesthetic or poetic (in Lotman, cultural) function, shifts from MESSAGE to CONTEXT. This makes total sense in terms of self-referentiality, i.e. autonomy or intraversive semiosis, so that in the aesthetic function the message is about the message. So, too, in the metalingual function, the message is about the code. In the end, when the channel becomes self-referential, i.e. when there are messages about contact, the channel becomes the CONTEXT (it shifts to it, just as code does in metalingual operations and message in artistic activity).

But now things get a bit more complex, because then I thought about the meta- and para-channel, i.e. receivers who are not part of the communication system in terms of mutual influence but are observing/listening/tapping-in, and senders who are not part of the communication system in terms of mutual awareness but are observed/talked-about/referenced. In the paradoxical para-channel the third person is referential, while in the meta-channel the third person is phatic. Weird, huh?

It gets even weirder, because the third and last idea in this series involves a turn-around of positions. Imagine that you are engaging in informative, practical, cognitive, ideational, referential communication and the meta-channel and para-channel overlap for you: You hear someone talking about you ("hear" could be replaced with "observe" or even "read"). In this odd "typomanic" situation you are simultaneously overhearing communication not meant for you as well as being part of the referential, contextual content of the communication.

Where things get interesting is when you understand this meta-para-channel overlap in terms of interference and mix it with John Austin's types of locutionary acts (phonetic, phatic, and rhetic). I've currently only read one paragraph of Austin's text (out of the 12 that centain the token "phatic"), but it's already enough to spark an interesting crossover. But first lets go over what these terms mean in the following excerpt:

[...] to say anything is
(A. a) always to perform the act of uttering certain noises (a 'phonetic' act), and the utterance is a phone;
(A. b) always to perform the act of uttering certain vocables or words, i.e. noises of certain types belonging to and as belonging to a certain vocabulary, in a certain construction, i.e. conforming to and as conforming to a certain grammar, with a certain intonation, &c. This act we may call a 'phatic' act, and the utterance which it is the act of uttering a 'pheme' (as distinct from the phoneme of linguistic theory); and
(A. c) generally to perform the act of using that pheme or its constituents with a certain more or less definite 'sense' and a more or less definite 'reference' (which together are equivalent to 'meaning'). This act we may call a 'rhetic' act, and the utterance which it is the act of uttering a 'rheme'. (Austin 1962[1955]: 92-93)

I'll rely on the understanding that "The locutionary act is the sum of the phonetic, the phatic and the rhetic acts" (Grünberg 2014: 175) to interpret Austin (1962[1955]: 92-93) saying that "to say anything" is to proceed through these incrementally (or hierarchically) ascending acts from

1. meaningless noises, i.e. certain utterances that are mere phones, i.e. sounds
2. to vocalizations (vocables or words) or noises that belong to a vocabulary, in a sentence with a grammar, and has an intonation, and
3. finally to actually saying something that makes sense of, refers to, and means something.

What I would do is make a leap of jump that when Austin delivered his William James lectures in 1955 he might have relied on Weston La Barre's The Human Animal (1954) published the previous year. If this hypothesis holds then what Austin actually means by a 'phatic' act is nonlinguistic vocalization. It might have been that "nonlinguistic" was too broad and ambiguous for Austin, since his locutionary acts are linguistic, after all. By the same logic I would protest against the phatic act, at least in this instance, because I'd like to view these acts as subtypes of phatic interference. For this reason I would rename the phatic act as the vocalic act.

By interference I mean the phenomenon studied by John Schopler and Janet E. Stockdale in "An interference analysis of crowding" (1977). At the outset I'd like to mention that crowding is inherent to the phatic communion discourse but almost completely neglected. Malinowski has a footnote to phatic communion about the herd instinct, and Jurgen Ruesch - when treating sociability, a synonym of phatic communion - uses the term herd instinct freely. And recently I saw (on reddit probably) an unrelated paper in social psychology about the herd instinct (or herd mentality) actually being a real thing.

These authors find various definitions for crowding (i.e. perceived inadequacy of space, restrictions in behavioral choices, excessive stimulation from social sources, especially from familiar or inappropriate contacts, unwanted social interactions, interference and blocking, or inability to attain desired levels of privacy (Schopler & Stockdale 1977: 82). They have a whole theory about how crowding interferes with goal attainment because it raises the costs of enacting behaviors (ibid, 82), and increases scarcity of fixed resources like space and time, and unfixed resources like the soundscape (bio- and antropohony), especially strepital (nonvocal sounds) and phatic (nonlinguistic vocal).

In fact, at this point I'd make another terminological correction. Instead of phonetic interference I would go by Roger Wescott's types of biosocial communication (1966: 350), so that the first type of distal auditory interference is strepital, strepitus meaning "communicative body noise" like hand-clapping, foot-stamping, face-slapping, tooth-gnashing, whistling, spitting, coughing, and snoring (ibid, 351). The second type of distar auditory unterference is phatic, which is (semantically) nonproductive, nonlinguistic vocal communication (after La Barre).

Such terminological equivalences are confirmed by tertiary sources. Grünberg (2014: 192) references Alexander Bird (2002) treating "groans" as a speech act, and adds that "Arguably such cases do not even cross the phatic act treshold." In effect, groans are communicative body noise or strepitus, meaning that they are certain noises coming out of the body, in this case a deep inarticulate sound in response to pain or despair. This is why I think "strepital" is a good replacement for "phonetic". It emphasizes inarticulate sounds. When the inarticulate sounds become more articulate and begins to sound like language, with all its unique qualities, it becomes phatic.

And lastly, when the quasi-linguistic vocalizations become more articulate due to their sense and reference coming together to form meaning, it becomes rhetic. The last type is linguistic according to Wescott, and could succumb to further terminological replacement if something more suitable appears. All-in-all, what we end up with is something like this:

Table 1: A terminological comparison between constituents of a locutionary act (Austin 1962) and types of distal auditory biosocial communication (Wescott 1966).

	Austin	Wescott
	a phonetic act / verbal	strepital / communicative body noise
	a phatic act / syntactic	phatic / nonlinguistic vocalization
	a rhetic act / semantic	linguistic

A more suitable replacement for rhetic could possibly derived from the works of William James (e.g. 1904) or Charles Peirce. The latter was the first to my knowledge to use the term rhematic, which may or may not be related to rhetic. Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen (2004) writes about "Austin's dichotomy" and how he was a proponent of ordinary language philosophy. Pietarinen (2004: 297) quotes Austin saying that he does not believe Peirce distinguishes between a sentence and a statement, and that Austin means utterance as a sentence and assertion as a statement. So at least so much is clear that Austin did indeed read and revise Peirce.

It may very well be that Peirce has better terminology for a lot of half-baked conceptions in phatic studies. There are some studies in that approach phaticity via some Peircean conception or model or other, but no straightforward examination. Come to think of it, it's funny how Austin's philosophy leads him to construct such a complicated system of linguistics, just like E. R. Clay's (1882) common sense realism led him to a work of definition so productive that it still hasn't been cracked. He, too, prefigured other semioticians with an intricate and consistent theory of signs and communication.). A significant phatic reading of Peirce and Clay are yet to be seen, but hopefull my current efforts will lead to a neophatic interpretation of Austin's speech act theory.

References

• Austin, John L. 1962[1955]. How to do things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Bird, Alexander 2002. Illocutionary Silencing. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83(1): 1-15.
• Clay, Edmund R. 1882. The Alternative: A Study in Psychology. London: MacMillan and Co.
• Grünberg, Angela 2014. Saying and Doing: Speech Actions, Speech Acts and Related Events. European Journal of Philosophy 22(2): 173-199.
• James, William 1904. The Pragmatic Method. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 1(25): 673-687.
• La Barre, Weston 1954. The Human Animal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Pietarinen, Ahti-Veikko 2004. Grice in the wake of Peirce. Pragmatics & Cognition 12(2): 295-315.
• Schopler, John and Janet E. Stockdale 1977. An interference analysis of crowding. Journal of Environmental Psychology and Nonverbal Behavior 1(2): 81-88.
• Wescott, Roger W. 1966. Introducing Coenetics: A Biosocial Analysis of Communication. The American Scholar 35(2): 342-354.