Response to Phatica3

Hey!

So, when I received Phatica3 I began writing my response right away, essentially "writing out" ("ex-pressing") the points you had gathered under those sections, but I ran into difficulties and postponed finishing it. Well, first I renamed your sections to reflect my preliminary ideas of what I have to contribute to the discussion:

1. Textual foundations of phatic studies
2. Possible research questions or directions gathered from surveying available studies
Complementarity between primary lines of phatic studies
3. Phaticity as a constituent phenomenon in across various domains
4. Phaticity in social networks, relations, and relationships
5. Phatic techniques in light of the general notion of phaticity
6. Linguistic code selection between the individual and the situation
7. Phatic studies and context, the difference between explication and metamorphosis/catalysis
8. Togetherness in positive and negative phatics
9. Multi-media
10. Conclusion

And so goes my attempt to elaborate the first section:

1. Textual foundations of phatic studies

The background information necessary for any approach to phatic phenomena must include Malinowski and Jakobson, and can include La Barre. The works of these three authors give rise to three distinct varieties of phatic studies with their own central notions of phaticity. While Malinowski and Jakobson are widely recognized figures, and their ideas are frequently mixed and bounced off of each other, La Barre is almost a forgotten figure. This is paradoxical, since La Barre's treatment of phatic communication has a clearer sight and broader reach than the other two. For that reason, it can be surmised, La Barre's contributions should be treated with special care.

In broad strokes, Malinowski reacted to Ogden and Richards, and elucidated a new speech function, "the function of speech in mere sociabilities" which he considers to be "one of the bedrock aspects of man's nature in society" (Malinowski 1946[1923]: 314). The primary characteristics of phatic communion are its independence from anything happening at the moment (i.e. practical action), its aimlessness, obviousness, or meaninglessness (i.e. the topic spoken about does not matter much), and its enabling for people to congregate, be together, and enjoy each others company.

Malinowski thus outlined a type of speech that negates the three well-known functions of speech, formulated in various nomenclatures as expression, representation, and appeal (Bühler 2011[1934]), the emotive, referential, and conative functions (Ogden & Richards 1946[1923]; Jakobson 1981[1960d]), bost most likely adduced from the peripatetic triad of Feeling (emotion, passion, affection, sentiment), Volition (will), and Thought (cognition) (cf. Bain in Clay 1882: 15-16). Phatic communion, Malinowski says, does not serve the purpose of establishing a common sentiment, does not connect people in action, nor does it inform or express any thought.

It is easy enough to see that common greetings (Hi! How are you?), small talk (inquires about health, comments on weather, affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things), and gossip do not serve the classical speech functions but instead "serves to establish bonds of personal union between people brought together by the mere need of companionship" (Malinowski 1946[1923]: 315). This is the sense in which Roman Jakobson interpreted Malinowski's "phatic" when he introduced it into his own scheme of linguistic functions. Although Jakobson's phatic function is the most influential among the three, it is also the poorest.

In effect, Jakobson understands the phatic function of speech as a use of language focused on establishing, maintaining, or terminating contact. This concept is thoroughly pragmatic and technical, and unsurprisingly gave way to numerous hasty applications in conversation analysis and general linguistics (not to mention communication theory and semiotics). Nevertheless, from a historical perspective Jakobson misses the point of phatic communion almost completely, reducing it to greetings and formalities. Unsurprisingly, he himself does not elaborate the concept further and his whole corpus of writings contains just one (highly influential) paragraph on the matter.

Weston La Barre, on the other hand, does something completely different with the concept of phatic communion. Writing a few years before Jakobson, and with an anthropological focus rather than a linguistic (or semiotic), La Barre effectively "borrows" the term from Malinowski and completely reformulates it while still remaining more true to original intention than Jakobson. He regarded Malinowski's essay as evolutionally naïve, and derived his understanding of the matter from "putting the primatological facts adduced by Boutan and others side-by-side with the linguistic insights of Edward Sapir" (La Barre 1954: 349).

La Barre revives the ancient idea (from Democritus) that human speech arose from animal sounds of a merely emotional character, and does indeed supplement this insight with anthropological data, reformulating phatic communication as a type of emotional or nonverbal communication occurring through vocalization. This is much clearer than both Malinowski and Jakobson who interpellate the function but do not manage to confine it to a specific speech genre (greetings, small talk, and gossip may have phaticity in common, but surely do not exhaust the field). Instead of confining to a type of speech, La Barre attributes phaticity to vocalizations in general and holds that vocalizations communicates a generalized emotional tone throughout the group.

This is where I realize that I don't know nearly enough about specific aspects of La Barre's treatment of phatic communication as I think I do, and decided to read up on the relevant quotes I had gathered from The Human Animal back in autumn, writing the following section:

Weston La Barre does something completely different with the concept of phatic communion. Writing a few years before Jakobson, and with an anthropological focus rather than a linguistic (or semiotic) one, La Barre effectively "borrows" the term phatic from Malinowski and completely reformulates it while still remaining more true to original intention than Jakobson. He regarded Malinowski's essay as evolutionally naïve, and derived his understanding of the matter from "putting the primatological facts adduced by Boutan and others side-by-side with the linguistic insights of Edward Sapir" (La Barre 1954: 349).

In general, La Barre revives the ancient idea (which he traces to Democritus) that human speech arose from animal sounds of a merely emotional character, and does indeed supplement this insight with anthropological data, reformulating phatic communication as a type of emotional or nonverbal communication occurring through vocalization (note that the concept of nonverbal communication was a few years away from popular inception). As mentioned above, La Barre's treatment of phatic communication has a clearer sight and a broader reach, meaning that his formulation is paradoxically at once more specific and general.

While both Malinowski and Jakobson who interpellate the phatic function, they do not manage to confine it to a specific speech genre. Greetings, small talk, and gossip may have phaticity as a characteristic in common, but surely do not exhaust the field the term applies to. This issue is readily apparent in recent linguistic studies that variously interpret "phatic" constituents of language as pertaining to linguistic formalities, pragmatic markers, or even speech pauses. There are even those like Katharina Reiss (1981) who find no phatic linguistic particulars.

Instead of confining phatic communication to a type of speech, La Barre attributes phaticity to vocalizations in general and holds that vocalizations communicates a generalized emotional tone throughout the group. Thus, while Malinowski holds that words uttered in phatic communion do not "serve the purpose of establishing a common sentiment, for this is usually absent from such current phrases of intercourse" (Malinowski 1946[1923]: 313), La Barre holds that some mild form of common sentiment, such as "the same attitude toward a situation" (La Barre 1954: 57), is exactly what phatic communication is about.

The distinction originates from differing objects of study. Malinowski intended to outline a form of speech he discovered in the "primitive" use of language but which he saw as equally present in Western societ. La Barre on the other hand went from "primitive" to "primatological", and elucidated the place of phatic communication in the evolution of the human species, finding phatic communication (in the sense of nonverbal vocalizations) in a long list of human social situations as well as in the vocalizations that serve social purposes among other anthropoid animals.

In an attempt to combat Malinowski's linguistic, psychological, psychiatric, and anthropological "nonsense", as La Barre saw it, he takes the matter far beyond human history, and relates it to the facts of physical anthropology. In doing so, he recounts the evolution of our species, at least according to the level of knowledge available in contemporary literature, and instead of "one of the bedrock aspects of man's nature in society" as Malinowski would put it, he finds that "man is libidinally a very mouthy mammal" (La Barre 1954: 163).

How human animal's mouthiness was already known by then via neurology: "the representation of lips in the cerebral cortex is quite enormous in comparison with other parts of the body" (La Barre 1954: 88), despite the fact that the newborn human baby is generally very undeveloped neurologically, and many of its nerves do not grow to make final connections with muscles until a couple of years after birth. With this fact in mind, he starts the chapter about talking with the admonition that "the human mouth is not only the means of eating it is in other animals; it is also, in the beginning, the organ of human inter-individuality" (La Barre 1954: 163).

Likewise, Malinowski treats the aspect of pleasure in phatic communion, but does so in a social dimension, noting that the bonds created in such communion are asymmetrical because the speaker gains more social pleasure and self-enhancement than the listener. While this is certainly true, there is a more primitive sense of pleasure involved in speaking. La Barre writes that "the endless echolalia of the somewhat older babbler - who has discovered some of the moist and noisy tricks which the mouth and tongue, lips, larynx, and lungs can do - is obviously playing with pleasure" (La Barre 1954: 164). Before pleasure of speaking with another person there is pleasure in speaking, period.

And that's when I moved on to synthesize the textual foundations in a presentation form, with Inkscape (so that I could draw/illustrate it and make it more fun for myself. Here's the presentation, which I hope to some day finish.

After that I started re-organizing my bibliography of papers published in 2016 that say something about phaticity or can be written about in relation with phaticity. I also wrote two blog-posts, which I did not completely finish but which may contain ideas and passages publishable in a later paper. I also wrote a few letters to some researchers to ask their opinion about Austin's phatic act and Halliday's interactional (phatic) function.

And so I return to Phatica3 for a more free-form discussion, having now a more extensive bibliography and some new stuff to write about.

[...]

"Phaticity" is easy. I'm on board with calling the primary texts about phaticity by Malinowski, La Barre, and Jakobson foundational. That, I think, they certainly are. But instead of page-long quotations I could synthesize (already hav, I think) telescoped them into short, readable form. For example,

• By phatic communion Bronislaw Malinowski (1946[1923]) means speech and verbal exchange like greetings and chit-chat at a time of leisure in a social setting (such as campfire, living-room, cocktail party, etc. conversation) whereby people do not (a) transmit thoughts and ideas (b) nor emotions and sentiments and (c) definitely not for the aim of unified social action but only to reduce the tension of silence and establish bonds of fellowship through talking.
• By phatic communication Weston La Barre (1954) means nonverbal vocalizations and facial expressions between mother and child, lovers, college room-mates and other ingroups, which do not (a) make semantic statements about the world but does (b) communicate feeling or a generalized emotional tone througout the group, so that all members come to have the same attitude towards the situation and can (c) foresee the actions of its fellows by interpreting their attitudes.
• By phatic function Roman Jakobson (1981[1960d]) means the function of messages that establish, prolong or discontinue communication, perform metacommunicative operations such as checking the channel, attracting and confirming continued attention, etc. displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas or entire dialogues meant to prolong or delay parting or termination of contact by sustaining the physical channel and the psychological connection between addresser and addressee.

I could go on with their similarities, differences, immediate influences, etc.

Including the quotes would make our paper something of a one-stop-shop, perhaps the last one for hundreds of miles; that is, it would be self-contained and thereby more citeable.

I've recently become more hopeful in this regard. While organizing my corpus of papers about phaticity in recent years I've taken note of how many tokens of the word "phatic" a given paper contains. It's a pretty arbitrary metric, but it is somewhat useful. For example, Phatica3 contains 150 tokens (excluding page headers). The only other resource that contains as many tokens is Patricia Prieto Blanco's doctoral thesis. Next is Maciej Witek's (2015) paper about Austin's phatic act with 110 tokens, and Richard Davies' (2016) paper about technobiophilia with 50 tokens. What this means to me is that there's hope for some sort of a tipping point in the near future.

Indeed, a literal timeline graphic might be useful, to show how the people we cite fit together.

I've started building something like that but it's somewhat difficult to keep it all together without getting too expansive. Ideally it could look like the schemes of Danish library/terminology researchers, Thellefsen and Jantzen (2003):

But I'm not sure yet how to make it happen so that it would at least include the textual foundations and immediate influences (e.g. Firth, Laver, Austin, Coupland, etc.).

Among the preliminary Minor usages and Related concepts, I'm on already board with these:

• Robertson & Horace - phatic fountain; very minute and irrelevant, but neat illustration of the absurdity of the phatic function in other systems of signs.
• Virilio - phatic image; this I think needs to be included anyway because Virilio, de Certeau, Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and possibly many other French thinkers have at some point or another made some use of Jakobson's scheme of language functions but to my knowledge no-one has yet taken it upon themselves to bring these interesting interpretatinos together in any way.
• Wang et al. - phatic technology; definite must-have because this topic has blown up this year; same with Miller's phatic media culture, which has really caught on.
• Bateson - μ-function; also a must-have, at least among the influences for the textual foundations; I'm still sticking to my guns that Jakobson was inspired by Ruesch & Bateson's concept of metacommunication.
• Jakobson - metalingual function; Jakobson is among the textual foundations already, but the relation between metalingual and phatic function could be elaborated in light on Ruesch & Bateson, not to mention some of his own writings (especially parts that involve code-switching, reflexivity, duplex structures, and the radius of communication).

These are unproblematic. There's enough to say about them with sufficient clarity. They tie in with other areas nicely, and the list could grow significantly if we include phatic infrastructure and labor, Austin's phatic act, not to mention all the related concepts like communization, sociability, conviviality, gregariousness, politeness, etc. But with the following ones I would need to do more research and deep thinking about how they would fit in smoothly.

• Peirce - thirdness, phaneron; I still hold that phaneron and phatics are false friends, and an etymological story would require much more investigation into "phenomenon" and phenomenology; Thirdnes on the other hand is interesting. Right now, having just become a bit more acquainted with Austin's phatic act, I think Austin essentially interpreted Peirce when constructing the typology of locutionary acts (phonetic, phatic, and rhetic). Sadly their frames are pretty different, and even the distinction between Austin's rhetic and Peirce's rhematic is not very clear. I'm working on this line a bit.
• Simondon - concretisation; as easy as this looks, it currently only hooks up with the topic of phatic technology (and phatic technological habituation). I'd like to take more ideas from Simondon. Your contribution in this regard would be very welcome. Let's elaborate this one soon.
• Burke - identification; very complicated. I've tried to clarify the Mead-Morris-Burke line (Richard Fiordo was enlightening about Morris and Burke) but their jargon is complex and would require consulting Burke's books, which I haven't done yet.
• Nisbett - sociocultural context; I'm not even familiar with this one but the concept itself is frequent enough in relevant literature. Drazdauskienė, for example, proposes a pretty neat functional approach to levels of contexts.

I've tried organizing my own Minor usages and Related concepts data but the work is currently still ongoing. There are just so many usages and concepts. For example, some of the newest "minor" uses include: phatic object (Fisher 2014), phatic value (Gorlée 2008), phatic activity (Jørgensen 2016), phatic one-liners (Rains, Brunner & Oman 2016), phatic language teaching (Helm 2016), phatic familiarity (Wilkinson 2016), phatic space (Yaqub 2016), etc. Some Related concepts, or even Related themes are: "People as Infrastructure" (Simone 2004) important for Elyachar (2010; 2012), Xiang & Lindquist (2014), and Seale (2016); and "Objects of Affect" (Edwards 2012) important for Blanco (2010; 2016).

I imagine a sort of "Cambrian explosion" of "phatic _______" terms and usages over the 1990s-2010s as people attempt to theorize the internet.

Well worded. I imagine that to be the case since there are more sources each year, and there's a definite growing trend from decade to decade, but I'm not sure when the explosion exactly occurs or how to represent data (even what qualifies as data is malleable). Some sort of graph could probably be composed based on compound variations (i.e. phatic speech, phatic talk, phatic conversation, phatic exchange, phatic communication, etc.) and when they chronologically appear, so that the graph actually compares the rate of terminological invention and variation, possibly from decade to decade from 1920-1970, by half-decades from 1970-1995, and finally by year up to the current one.

Now that I think about it these could be three different small graphs next to each other illustrating the trend, followed by a large table with terminological variations (with references) are distributed according to decades, half-decades, and then years. The problem here is that even if we amass this data it would blow up our bibliography unneedlessly. The good way to go about this would be not only to present these references as anonymous data-points but to say something about their use, what research domain they belong to, etc. This brings me to networks.

Back in December when I picked up the SIGCOM 2015 Proceedings I've thought about taking a network approach to phatic studies, i.e. to represent and explore the connections between dominant types and emergent trends of phatic thinking in terms of scientific communication networks, i.e. mutual awareness and influence between researchers, research groups, and research trends. Thus far I've managed to find two emulable examples of this kind of (meta-systemic) thinking (aside from, you know, Jurgen Ruesch who did this as well in the 1950s).

The first is "Social Network Approaches to Leadership: An Integrative Conceptual Review" by Carter, DeChurch, Braun & Contractor (2015), which attempts an integrative conceptual review of "the wide variety of relational perspectives implied by contemporary leadership theories". Notice the hedge: instead of contemporary leadership theories themselves they are reviewing the relational perspectives implied by such theories. This way, they have something of their own to set up as a standard for comparison. In our meta-analysis the textual foundations could serve as such a standard, at least up to a certain point.

Likewise, they say that they "We organize this prior research to facilitate understanding and integration across subdomains of this work, opening up fruitful new avenues for leadership inquiry" (ibid, 598). My argument is that integration across subdomains is an especially prevalent issue for phatic studies because phaticity is approached very differently in various disciplines. Not only is it necessary to consider the idiosyncracies of each individual approach but we must also find the significant points of conduct that would enable us to open up new and fruitful avenues of inquiry by pointing to researsch and conceptual work already conducted elsewhere, perhaps even in superficially unrelated areas of academic thought.

The second emulable example is "The extraction of community structures from publication networks to support ethnographic observations of field differences in scientific communication" by Velden & Lagoze (2013), which is a mouthful but puts forward a network approach to scientific communication and the scientific community of researchers in a research specialty. Ours is pretty specific, but would benefit from some "concretization". These authors point out the challenges involved in attempting to capture, compare, and analyse such communities because "they overlap, have fuzzy boundaries, and evolve over time". Now isn't that a truism manifest in phatic studies!

Some of the related concepts are probably cognates, some correlates. The lists above don’t get into all of the keywords (like attention, contact) which probably need at least paragraph-length explanations. Perhaps we should put these in a table too, though, partly just so that we can keep track of them.

I've tried to elucidate the keywords in the textual foundations, which go as follows:

• Malinowski focuses on the ties of the moment or communion. It's role is to facilitate pure social interaction. It emphasizes propitiation which reduces tensions and elicits consent. It involves affirmation or casual agreement.
• La Barre focuses on attitude or emotion. It's role is to reify intense emotional ties in relationships in order to accept interpersonal agreements about experiences. It emphasizes idiosyncracies of expression anh close emotional concern in repeated interpersonal contexts. It involves social organization and human sociability.
• Jakobson fosuses on the means of communication or channel. It's role is to prolong communication and manage its course. It emphasizes the subcodes or speech patterns referring to and operating on communicative contact. It involves attention and mutual awareness.

Or, in telescoped phraseology:

• Malinowski's phatic communion raises the question: Are we talking to each other? because if we are then we establish a linguistic bond, a verbal togetherness in social interaction which reduces attention by affirming that the Other is not dangerous.
• La Barre's phatic communication raises the question: Do we understand each other? because understanding is deeper than mutual intelligibilty, it involves tuning in to the generalized emotional tone of the relationship, with consideration of its history and integration into the larger social order.
• Jakobson's phatic function raises the question: Are we listening to each other? because his approach is quite more technical and focuses on the physical-mechanical operation of the communication channel, if psychological contact is continuing and facilitating mutual awareness and influence, i.e. feedback.

From here I would even go further and argue that these three can form a complete sentence:

• It's not about meaning, because according to Malinowski the meaning of words in phatic communion cannot be connected with ongoing action, in fact words in phatic commuino do not convey meaning, the meaning of word in phatic communion are almost completely irrelevant;
• it's about understanding because according to La Barre phatic communication does not have the semantic status of true words or statements but can nevertheless convey incredible amounts of meaning and evoke large constellations of understanding merely through communicative body noise and nonproductive, nonlinguistic vocal communication;
• and attraction. - Which is my own conjecture because according to Jakobson the phatic function of communication serves to start and sustain communication before and during, above and beyond informative communication. I think that catching and holding people's attention is related to attraction, and can be related to both intimacy/affect as well as power/leadership with and within relationships and communities.

There are numerous noteworthy attempts to synthesize Malinowski and Jakobson, but something like this would probably the first to synthesize all three textual foundations. And it's just one way to go about it, there are quite a few alternative ways to do it even in relevant literature.

We might also want a table of Distant cousins, analogues, and possible parallels, which would be more speculative and tenuous, full of “What if...?” scenarios that probably shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but which are still evocative, and so should not be entirely ignored either:

This is a good idea, but again the list could become endless, and span several papers worth of discussion of why and how each cousin, analogue, and possible parallel is important or promising. I'll try to go over the ones in Phatica3:

• economics - arbitrage; I have no idea what this means.
• anthropology - reciprocity; Yes! Hymes' reciprocal expressive function; Mauss's study of economic reciprocity and its relation to phatic communion in "From Homo Economicus to Homo dialogicus" (Kent & Taylor 2016); phatic infrastructure, "a condition of connectivity, through which economies of care eventuate" (Nozawa 2016: 320); phatic qualia (Lemon 2013); etc. Since phatic communion is an anthropological concept the possibilities are virtually endless here.
• media studies - mediation; Yes! Miller's (2008) phatic media culture and social media studies inspired by it (Romele & Severo 2016; Yunya, Dai & Wang 2016); co-presence through polymedia (Baldassar 2016) and Ambient co‐presence (Madianou 2016); the social sharing of location information in mobile social media (Bertel 2016); the incorporating mediated music into the relationship’s meaning system (Drew 2016); the assessments of affective valence of social media content (Gaspar et al. 2016); common affordances of social media (Hayes, Carr & Wohn 2016); etc.
• modern geometry - optimal transport; No idea.
• microbiology - quorum sensing; Possible lead to phaticity in biosemiotics, which the biosemioticians themselves have probable already conceptualized in some form or another. Should look into it. For example, Katya Mandoki (2014: 68) writes about the phatic function of fitness signals, cues or indicators that establish contact with another specimen by their salience, such as colour or brightness; Ponzio (2004: 42) writes about how many nonfunctional, dysfunctional, and ambivalent vital signs of the body or seemingly futile signs of phatic communication are insensible to humanity in today's world where the logic of production and the rules that govern the market allows everything to be exchanged and commodified; Cowley (2012: 285) writes about how some cultural groups favour phatic communion over direct experience; Lestel (2002: 41) says that animal metacommunications are not necessarily phatic, and outlines some animal vocalizations that constitute comments on the social relations they are engaged in; and Haładewicz-Grzelak (2014: 306-307) investigates phatic communion and exhortation in a semiotic ethnography of the Licheń pilgrimage center, and how future-tense imperative texts contain irrealized, non-factive (or non-certive) propositions. It looks like the phatic function is pretty popular in biosemiotic literature, but it might take some digging to reach some actual microbiological examples. Maybe consulting some actual biosemioticians would come in handy.
• chemistry - morphodynamics; Something about ergodic processes, way beyond my comprehension.
• effector systems - entrainment; Also beyond me, probably.
• psychoanalysis - transitional objects; I don't know about transitional objects, but Glassgold (2011: 785) writes about positioning the subject within a symbolic order of brother and father, which is the phatic effect Jacques André aimed for to find a playful relation to his work; Hook (2013: 44-45) finds analogies between Lacan and Austin, and says that empty speech purified of imaginary trapping resonates with Jakobson's phatic function; Ferro & Foresti (2008: 75-76) underline the theoretical novelty implicit in the psychological conception of the object with the admonishion that the other functions subordinated to the referential function (including phatic) should be viewed as dependent on them since, for example, even the contact is referential and a structural component essential to decoding reference; Dow & Wright (2010: 313) review how Scott Krzych addresses the claim that new technologies mark a decisive break with "human" ways of knowing and elaborates Virilio's phatic image by arguing that such technologically-generated images - with their own agency and command over the viewer's attention dissolves all notion of context and the historical contingency of its own production - give consistency to the subject's dependency upon the signifier and the singularity of subjective desire; Arbiser (2014: 731) discusses David Liberman's Dramatic style that "searches for the unknown and creates suspense", and how the phatic function "alludes to the capacity of the ego to obtain contact with the object with a minimum of information transmission and maximum security in the connection".
• urban planning - third spaces; de Certeau is attributed with drawing a correlation between the phatic function and territoriality, but this identification can be found in numerous theoretical pieces about urban planning and research.
• immunology - boundaries; Out of my reach.
• macrobiology - envorganism; Same.
• game theory - cooperation; Cooperation figures in to Ruesch's social techniques, but other than that I don't know what to do with it.

After searching EBSCO for biosemiotics or psychoanalysis + phatic and finding numerous publications, I'm pretty sure that both could hold more such interesting instances. The problem here is that they're very specific ideas expressed in quite illustrious language. It feels like there are ideas there that need some rumination and rephrasing but could lead to completely new avenues.

The crux of the issue here is that many of these single-token sources contain a golden nugget of an idea about phaticity, but it requires some further interpretive chains to translate the idea into more classically phatic terminology and see if and how it fits into the overall groundwork we're constructing. I imagine this could be achieved by taking up the single-token source quotes I've gathered and mixing ideas and expressions creatively without a second thought about proper citations and jargon.

As to attested application domains, we could probably make the list pretty concrete by considering the domains with most papers and tokens. Back when I tried writing "Phatics, phaticity, and phatic studies", I also attempted an outline and systematization of relevant research domains by creating a tentative list of some of the more prevalent ones, categorized according to Ruesch's levels of abstraction:

1. Intrapersonal

• Phatic literary studies that focus on the phatic function of language in literature or phatic communi(cati)on between characters in the literary world.
• Phatic qualia studies that focus on the subjective first-hand experiential impressions of communicative contacts and interpersonal relationships.
• Phatic philosophy studies that interpret or reframe phaticity according to some philosophical authority or system.

1-2.Integration between intrapersonal and interpersonal

• Functionalist phatic studies that continue the Jakobsonian lineage most distinctly by focusing on linguistic analysis of speech phenomena that could be said to carry the role of the phatic function.
• Phatic speech act studies that consider the role of phatic acts in Austinian speech act theory.
• Cognitive phatic studies that apply the pragmatic Relevance Theory approach by suggesting a phatic interpretation of willingness, intention, and semantic effort in the sociocognitive environment of the individual.

2. Interpersonal

• Phatic language studies are the most common type of phatic research, focusing on the social functioning of language or verbal communication.
• Phatic gesture studies which elucidate the nonverbal, paralinguistic, and embodied aspects of digital media communication and conversational texts in social interaction.
• Phatic politeness studies typically involve both linguistic and nonlinguistic phatic expressions and how they relate to culturally conditioned tacit knowledge of polite interaction.
• Phatic healthcare studies take up language, gesture, and politeness in healthcare situations such as medical consultations and patient-nurse/doctor interactions.

2-3. Integration between interpersonal and group

• Anthropological phatic studies that continue the Malinowskian lineage by investigating the communal role of speech and language in maintaining affinity, solidarity, and a sense of community.
• Phatic labor studies view communication as effort aimed at achieving economic exchange through microlevel interactions.
• Phatic visual media studies that investigate social upkeep of close interpersonal relations in terms of phatic or networked photography and phatic photo sharing in contemporary highly mediatized societies.
• Phatic pedagogical studies mostly focus on second language acquisition and how verbal politeness figures in becoming a competent communicator.

3. Group

• Phatic technology studies that investigate the role of phatic technologies, which are used to strengthen social bonds and to establish and maintain the possibility of communication with others via computer-mediated communication technologies.

3-4. Integration between group and society

• Phatic polity studies which employ the concept of voice and how the voice of a specific group is represented in the broader communicative context of the polity.

4. Society

• Phatic media culture studies that focus on the role of modern technological affordances by defining phaticity as a sociol-cultural trend in the contexts of network sociality and the rise of database culture.
• Phatic social media studies are very similar to phatic media culture studies but focus instead on how technological affordances influence social relations instead of cultural norms.
• Phatic translation studies are an offshoot of phatic language studies but imply a form of communication between linguistically distinct cultures.

But this is extremely arbitrary, especially because I haven't yet an idea how to justify each type of study belonging to a certain (inter-)level. If the grounds for this division be spelled out, it could undergo radical alterations. And at the end of the day this is a heuristic of doubtful value. At best it would enable us to divide a good portion of published studies into more-or-less coherent topical headings according to these quasi-domains.

This discussion pretty much exhausts the topic of "Textual foundations of phatic studies" for now. There is a lot left to be said, but for now it'll do. I'll try to respond to other sections in Phatica3 soon. Let me know if you have any ideas about any of this.

References

• Arbiser, Samuel 2014. David Liberman's legacy. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 95(4): 719-738.
• Baldassar, Loretta 2016. De-demonizing distance in mobile family lives: co-presence, care circulation and polymedia as vibrant matter. Global Networks 16(2): 145-163.
• Bertel, Troels Fibæk 2016. 'Why would you want to know?': The Reluctant use of location sharing via check-ins on Facebook among Danish youth. Convergence: The Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 22(2): 162-176.
• Blanco, Patricia Prieto 2010. Family Photography as a phatic construction. Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 3(2).
• 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.
• Bühler, Karl 2011[1934]. Theory of Language: The representational function of language. Translated by Donald Fraser Goodwin in collaboration with Achim Eschbach. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
• Carter, Dorothy R.; Leslie A. DeChurch, Michael T. Braun and Noshir S. Contractor 2015. Social Network Approaches to Leadership: An Integrative Conceptual Review. Journal of Applied Psychology 100(3): 597-622.
• Clay, Edmund R. 1882. The Alternative: A Study in Psychology. London: MacMillan and Co.
• Cowley, Stephen J. 2012. Linguistic fire and human cognitive powers. Pragmatics & Cognition 20(2): 275-294.
• Davies, Richard 2016. Ceaselessly Exploring, Arriving Where We Started and Knowing It for the First Time. Studies in Philosophy and Education 35(3): 293-303.
• Dow, Suzanne and Colin Wright 2010. Introduction: Towards a Psychoanalytic Reading of the Posthuman. Paragraph 33(3): 299-317.
• Drew, Rob 2016. The space between: Mix taping as a ritual of distance. Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2015.1084627
• Edwards, Elizabeth 2012. Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image. Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 221-234.
• Elyachar, Julia 2010. Phatic labor, infrastructure, and the question of empowerment in Cairo. American Ethnologist 37(3): 452-464.
• Elyachar, Julia 2012. Next Practices: Knowledge, Infrastructure, and Public Goods at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Public Culture 24(1): 109-129.
• Ferro, Antonino and Giovanni Foresti 2008. "Objects" and "characters" in psychoanalytical texts/dialogues. International Forum of Psychoanalysis 17(2): 71-81.
• Fisher, Roger C. 2014. How Ancient Europeans Saw the World. Visual Anthropology 27(5): 465-467.
• Gaspar, Rui; Cláudia Pedro, Panos Panagiotopoulos and Beate Seibt 2016. Beyond positive or negative: Qualitative sentiment analysis of social media reactions to unexpected stressful events. Computers in Human Behavior 56: 179-191.
• Glassgold, Eric 2011. 'Laura' falling down: Comments and fantasies about Jacques André's essay. International Journal of Psychoanalysis 92(4): 783-789.
• Gorlée, Dinda L. 2008. Jakobson and Peirce: Translational intersemiosis and symbiosis in opera. Sign Systems Studies 36(2): 342-374.
• Haładewicz-Grzelak, Małgorzata 2014. The segmentation of phenomenological space in Licheń as an example of double binds. Semiotica 200(2): 275-312.
• Hayes, Rebecca A.; Caleb T. Carr and Donghee Yvette Wohn 2016. One Click, Many Meanings: Interpreting Paralinguistic Digital Affordances in Social Media. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 60(1): 171-187.
• Helm, Francesa 2016. Facilitated Dialogue in Online Intercultural Exchange. In: O'Dowd, Robert and Tim Lewis (eds.), Online Intercultural Exchange: Policy, Pedagogy, Practice. Clevedon; Buffalo; Toronto: Multilingual Matters LTD., Ch. 8.
• Hook, Derek 2013. Nixon's 'full-speech': Imaginary and symbolic registers of communication. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 33(1): 32-50.
• 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.
• Jørgensen, Annette Myre 2016. Emotions and Vocatives in Spanish Teenage Talk: Emotions Expressed through the Vocative Discourse Marker tio/a in Madrid Teenage Talk. In: González, Ana Marta (ed.), The Emotions and Cultural Analysis. New York: Routledge, 145-162.
• Kent, Michael L. and Maureen Taylor 2016. From Homo Economicus to Homo dialogicus: Rethinking social media use in CSR communication. Public Relations Review 42(1): 60-67.
• La Barre, Weston 1954. The Human Animal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Lemon, Alaina 2013. Touching the gap: Social qualia and Cold War contact. Anthropological Theory 13(1-2): 67-88.
• Lestel, Dominique 2002. The biosemiotics and phylogenesis of culture. Social Science Information 41(1): 35-68.
• Madianou, Mirca 2016. Ambient co‐presence: transnational family practices in polymedia environments. Global Networks, glob.12105.
• 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.
• Mandoki, Katya 2014. Zoo-aesthetics: A natural step after Darwin. Semiotica 198(1): 61-91.
• Miller, Vincent 2008. New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 14(4): 387-400.
• Nozawa, Shunsuke 2016. Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Contemporary Japan by Jason Danely (review). Anthropological Quarterly 89(1): 319-324.
• Ogden, C. Kay and Ivor A. Richards 1946[1923]. 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.
• Ponzio, Augusto 2004. Dialogism and biosemiotics. Semiotica 150(1): 39-60.
• Rains, Stephen A.; Steven R. Brunner and Kyle Oman 2016. Self-disclosure and new communication technologies. Journal of Social & Personal Relationships 33(1): 42-61.
• Reiss, Katharina 1981. Type, Kind and Individuality of Text: Decision Making in Translation. Poetics Today 2(4): 121-131.
• Romele, Alberto and Marta Severo 2016. The Economy of the Digital Gift: From Socialism to Sociality Online. Theory, Culture & Society, DOI: 10.1177/0263276415619474
• Seale, Kristen 2016. Markets, Places, Cities. New York: Routledge.
• Simone, AbdouMaliq 2004. People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg. Public Culture 16(3): 407-429.
• Thellefsen, Torkild and Christian Jantzen 2003. What relations are: A case study of conceptual relations, displacement of meaning and knowledge profiling. Sign Systems Studies 31(1): 109-132.
• Velden, Theresa and Carl Lagoze 2013. The extraction of community structures from publication networks to support ethnographic observations of field differences in scientific communication. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 64(12): 2405-2427.
• Wilkinson, Tom 2016. Art History on the Radio: Walter Benjamin and Wilhelm Pinder, 1930/1940. Oxford Art Journal 39(1): 49-66.
• Witek, Maciej 2015. Linguistic underdeterminacy: A view from speech act theory. Journal of Pragmatics 76: 15-29.
• Xiang, Biao and Johan Lindquist 2014. Migration Infrastructure. International Migration Review 48(1): 122-148.
• Yaqub, Nadia 2016. Working with Grassroots Digital Humanities Projects: The Case of the Tall al-Za'tar Facebook Groups. In: Muhanna, Elias (ed.), The Digital Humanities and Islamic & Middle East Studies. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 103-116.
• Yunya, Song; Xin-Yu Dai and Jia Wang 2016. Not All Emotions are Created Equal: Expressive Behavior of the Networked Public on China's Social Media Site. Computers in Human Behavior 60: 525-533.