Response to Phatica3 (2)

As a foreword, let me say that your remarks on "story" were very insightful. I was very surprised at how much sense that version of the plan makes. It looks like a sizeable chunch of it, particularly in the beginning, we've already hashed out (beginning with that awesome paragraph that you intralingually translated into a very easily readable text) so that it would really be a matter of going over the already written material and shaping it into mutually agreeable form. I would still make a few revisions but mostly just elaborate the transformation from middle to end, particularly 8. B., which is something that requires some work - I'm thinking of some schematization of the relationships between various authorities on the subject. We've already attempted to systematize the field a bit by compiling that list of relevant authors, so we could report on the most relevant and promising contemporary trends.

But before getting into responding to your remarks I have to continue my response to Phatica3, moving on to the second chapter. I think we've already got enough material in Phatica3 to shape it into a publishable text. So I'd begin with that. But I think it pans out because #2 is "Questions and methods", and the point that needs elaboration - 8. B. - concerns methodological ideas referenced near the middle of Respose to Phatica3 (1), which is about a literal timeline graphic of how the people who cite each other fit together and how to delineate the domain of phatic studies without the outline getting too expansive or becoming blurry. The best guess for proceeding with this topic is a brief overview of Minor usages and Related concepts, and a description of the Cambrian explosion of "phatic ______" terminology and innovative theoretical applications, some of which may go a long way towards investigating the role of modern communication technologies in contemporary human relations, including the possible effects it may have on our modes of communication and new sociotechnological developments that require innovations and re-evaluations in the science and philosophy of human communication. By the way, I emphasize words and phrases that could become prime candidates for inclusion in our first proper draft.

The first quote under "Questions and methods" originates from Feenberg (1989: 33). I'm quite happy with including his reference because his paper was really good (we discussed him in our e-mail exchange). The key phrase I'd emphasize is getting phatic studies off the ground. As reviewers of relevant literature we have a kind of intellectual obligation to invite more interested parties to join the collaborative endeavour to elucidate the role of phaticity in human behavior. We should encourage promising lines of thought and compliment (or complement? - I mean not only approve but also improve) or comment their entries, pointing out aspects that they may be uniquely qualified to elaborate.

Our task is to provide an enticing-sounding initial agenda, in some sense making up the mind of a loose collection of researchers, based on what they've already published and how their research results integrate with other efforts made elsewhere, perhaps even in an unrelated fields. Not only do we have to summarize and clarify current trends but deliberately select satisfactory ideas for future efforts. The content of future research may very well depend upon the already established ideas set forth by current studies. It might be impossible to establish a consensus wherein all parties cast a formal vote but it is more than likely that a thorough review could achieve an inclusive, integrative perspective that closely approaches an ideal consensus, however arbitrary that may seem at the outset. In this paragraph I basically paraphrased Feenberg's quote (1989: 33) and my procedural note about contacting phatic researchers). The original note advised to write them a short summary of our meta-review of relevant literature, and asking their opinions, impressions, and observations.

I wholeheartedly agree with with your idea of interviewing and writing about phatic researchers, and that we should do so at a later date when we have something concrete to show for ourselves (i.e. a paper or two about the subject under our belts). We could attract the attention of those notable folks by tailoring a page or few about how our efforts and theirs are interrelated. Next I'll try to address the research questions you posed so as to clarify some ideas about theory, methodology, and application. This, I think, would lead us from 8. B. to 9. A|B., where we (according to the current plan) evaluate and compare the approaches and orientations surveyed in relevant literature as well as new directions for future work (10. A.) before the final re-evaluation where we evaluate and compare where we came from (textual foundations) and where we're going (new directions). The outcome should be pretty coherent and consistent.

1. Is it possible that the textual foundations of phatic studies - i.e. phatic communion, communication, and function - can be distinguished in three epistemological dimensions: a) the empirical study of phatic communion in human groups, social interactions, and public discourse; b) the theoretical study of phatic communication in mono- and multimodal mediums; and c) the meta-theoretical investigation into the phatic function of speech and writing, bodily behavior, social action, and objects or built and virtual environments (not excluding the bio-, eco-, and zoological). In other words, phatic studies can be divvied up between analysis, synthesis, and mathesis, or: a) Malinowski examined the function of speech in pure social intercourse; b) La Barre combined this new-fangled speech function with contemporary linguistics, anthropology, and primatology, and; c) Jakobson schematized phatic function and attributed it to a universal feature of any form of communication (contact), greatly aiding in establishing it as a (meta-)theoretical staple in the humanities and social sciences.

I would say that it's certainly possible. I introduced the Leibniz-Deleuzean "mathesis" into this discussion because I believe we could find a way to bypass both Whiteley and Lévi-Strauss (who outlined the levels of investigation). I think it's doable because it has already been done. Juri Lotman was a postcard-buddy with Lévi-Strauss (French was Lotman's third language, if I'm not mistaken), and developed a theory of semiotic modeling systems that more-or-less correspond to Lévi-Strauss's levels of investigation, and follow the logic of meta-systems: roughly, the study of signs in natural language and everyday life; the study of technical metalanguage used to study signs in natural language and everyday life; and finally the meta-scientific study of how technical metalanguage is studied. I think I've treated this subject briefly before in this blog (I'm having a déjà vu), i.e. how a meta-reviewer is several times removed from real life because she does not try to make sense of reality as it is, unmediated, but of how reality is conceptualized by those who study how people make sense of reality. This runaway train can go on unimpeded and sometimes results in research which, while interesting to read, is so caught up in footnotes, marginalia, and details that it amounts to no imaginable practical importance. (I'm meandering, aren't I.)

2. The development of the field of phatic studies depends upon an autocommunicative process within the diffuse group of researchers investigating phaticity. More popular and comprehensive papers represent a form of meta-scientific communication that establishes coherence and consistency as well as some sort of self-description, self-orientation, and self-motivation for the phatic line of thinking. For more integrative research efforts someone needs to weave together the strands of phatic texture found in numerous sources. An enticing-sounding initial agenda, i.e. a self-description that orients present and future research efforts toward a common route based on past research, and would consequently motivate more coherent and consistent scientific correspondence.

As Feenberg (1989: 35) points out, the outcome of metaphatic weaving should be a unifying overview that can be relied upon in order to interpret phatic studies, i.e. integrating various viewpoints, approaches and findings so as to initiate a new round of debate, elaboration, and consolidation. Without this ever-growing work of definition and improvement we cannot hope to achieve a sense of accomplishment and direction. Phatic studies require a common code for framing its history and delineating its directions of promising progress.

3. There is a "we" when individual I's interact and collaborate, becoming constitutive participants in an emergent system simultaneously separate and indivisible. The key symbol of community belonging in phatic studies is of course the common usage of "phatic" as a relevant terminological feature but the essence of community-ness is not limited with a common stock of knowledge or mutual awareness and should ideally include mutual influence. In other words, actual communicative contact may differentiate a sense of community from the fact of community. While numerous researchers may have many identical views arrived at via different routes, without an evident relationship of give and take they can scarcely be called a community. This response is largely based on Adrian Peace's (2013: 109) discussion of the sense of community but it's far from only promising source.

Vincent Miller (2015: 2), for example, writes about the influence of recent developments in communication technologies, especially the novel affordances for the previously impossible amount and frequency of contact between alternative, minority, and dissenting accounts. Instead of academic circles and schools of thought we are positioned in an increasingly visible network of mutual awareness and influence. Easy access to stored and forgotten information or unpublished and unorthodox opinions makes the landscape we hope to navigate and supply with roadsigns increasingly vast and complex. It is nevertheless possible that converging research interests will lead to a reinvigoration of this nearly centennial conversation about purely social forms of communication.

4. Communication systems and networks can be viewed in terms of part-whole relations, growing hierarchically through the integration of levels from intrapersonal to societal processes, penetrating several interrelated layers of groups, organizations, and institutions. That a human person is inextricably a part of the social organization that provides it with signs, language, and texts - not to mention codes and representations in other sign systems - is undoubtable. People constitue and are constituted by their circle of society.

There is a bounty of suggestions towards this conclusion, a great chunk of which employ the concept of phaticity in some form or other. For example, Algirdas Greimas (1982: 59) discusses the concept of contract and how it is necessary to recognize that any form of communication has a preliminary phatic undergirding that enables communicators to enter into a "contract", understood as an intersubjective relationship that effectively modifies the status of communicators in some way of other. According to his interpretation, the contract involves a tension and a relaxation, i.e. a well-disposed or mistrustful expectation and a response to the expectation. (I'll try to elaborate Greimas' interpretation below because his ideas are actually pretty fun to play around with.)

5. What are the preconditions for communion to become labor? This is a good question worthy of an article-length answer delving into the details of Julia Elyachar's perspective and how it has been applied and developed further in the half-decade since the inception of this term. Because phatic labor and infrastructure originate from the anthropological study of community infrastructure and economic transactions we would do well to consider the economic studies that subscribe to Elyachar (I've gathered a small handful of such studies but have yet to consult them, exactly because it might lead to novelties we're not ready to consider and place in our emerging phatic studies framework).

As far as I can currently tell, Elyachar's phatic labor raises a poignant question that should be taken into account before proceeding. Namely, the idea that phatic labor establishes economic relations becomes problematic when it is taken into account that one of the primary characteristics of phatic communion is that it is a social engagement motivated by social needs in a leisurely situation. While it is true that the women Elyachar reports on engage in casual conversation perhaps without the explicit goal of finding a path to a certain product or service, it is doubtful if phatic labor is devoid of the implicit aim of achieving something practical. This aspect could probably be analyzed quite succinctly with the aid of Henk Haverkate's (1988) concept of pseudophatic communion. (I looked into it and found that no-one has made any use of his insight in this regard. It'd be nice if we did.)

6. The origin of the social fabric, field, matrix, system, perspective, etc. is a question phatic studies is uniquely predisposed to untangle. It is likely that phaticity not only contributes to its existence but that the phylogenetically earliest means of communization, i.e. nonlinguistic vocalizations and body movements, are necessary preconditions for intersubjectively significant referential communication and the highly complex social fabric we are woven into. As far as generalities go this subject is extremely fertile. But when getting down to specifics there's a veritable Tohuwabohu of propositions.

Thus far my best guess as to how to treat this subject is to employ Ruesch's levels of abstraction and demonstrate the role various forms of phatic communi(cati)on play in the integration between different levels. Since it's pretty much the only systematic approach that can facilitate the multitude of domains the concept of phaticity has infiltrated and overtaken I think it's doable. But I'd set myself some time aside to go over Ruesch's writings and figuring out how to piece it together so that it would be equally elegant and explanatory. So at this point there's really more hope and fanfare than actual results, but the hope is great so there's that. (Sidenote: it might be a good idea to hash this out by playing around with common phatic metaphors, i.e. social lubricant, oil, gearl or glue, etc.).

7. In case of trolling or verbal harassment I think we could slightly subvert the discourse on phatic image and conceptualize the captivation of targeted messages. From the top of my head I'd call it aggressive addressivity. The latter term I picked up from a paper about Bakhtin and Peirce, so that addressivity designates the property of the message that makes the addressee an intended target receiver. According to this concept, every message - even those addressed explicitly to no-one - is implicitly addressed to someone, whether real or unreal. In the case of verbal harassment we could elucidate the ways a message (almost violently) captures the addressee's attention.

The selection of phatic themes available for dissecting this topic is quite broad. It actually poses an interesting problem: how would someone detach from and terminate contact with online bullies, especially if the latter are taking every possible step to attack your real-world occupation, relationships and prospects in life. It's a bit related to typomania (i.e. you cannot not read something written or said to or about you) but with the added tinge of aggression and abuse. It's a compelling subject but we'd need to familiarize ourselves with relevant literature for more poignant points of convergence.

8. The successful implementation of pre-fabricated signs, i.e. phatic politeness routines, is an interesting question. I actually thought long and hard about this very subject recently, particularly about what the "function" in phatic function really means. It's supposedly the role that a given code element plays in an utterance. But then again I subscribe to Katharina Reiss's (1982) critique that the phatic function is an inextricable function because all communication involves contact as a presupposition. Unlike the metalingual function, which is operative only when language is used to talk about language, the phatic function operates in all language use, basically, in some form or other.

But I also think that it might be possible to construct a model of effective phatic communion by first abstracting the qualities that characterize it, and then hypothesizing the conditions for successful phatic communion, prime among them being the so-called relationship goals. In other words, whether the phatic communion has a positive outcome or not could probably be measured or qualified by the aspects Malinowski pointed out, i.e. social pleasure and self-enhancement. But it could also include La Barre's generalized emotional tone and unified group action, or Jakobson's prolongation of communicative contact. The best contribution in this regard is quite accidental: some authors add "developing" in between Jakobson's three phases, "establishing", "maintaining", and "discontinuing". I'm not sure if developing follows maintaining or if they're competing, but the sense of relationship development could be one way to approach successful phatic functioning.

9. Apophatic and kataphatic are perhaps too theological for our purposes. The best we could do, I think, is to treat these cognates - along with lymphatic and emphatic - when we finally take on etymology and the clues you gathered from that Greek colleague. At some point we might have to actually address the paradox of "the speech function of speech" and how the broader significance of phaticity is oftentimes in painful contrast with the strict meaning of the original root.

In truth I just don't know where the kinship between "phatic" and words like "fame" and "phenomenon" would lead us. When I throw φατικός into Google Translate what I get is "affirmative" (same in Estonian). This might not be accidental because Malinowski's supplement does indeed contain the phrases "affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things" and "Always the same emphasis of affirmation and consent". It seems probable that we would need to ask a Greek or go roundabout and see if any Greek authors have written something about phaticity that would allow more insight into the semantics of it.

Now, since you posed these research questions in order to elucidate possible research methods. As I understand it, posed these questions by searching for question marks in the meta-phatic posts. But I didn't track down what inspired them, so these answers were improvisations. It's basically a form of cross-talk, the kind some semioticians say is a source of creativity and new information. Nevertheless, they felt like valid questions and I gave near-adequate suggestions towards approaching them. It was a lot of text so I'll try to summarize:

1. There are several ways to divvy up the field or domain. We could go with Lévi-Strauss's levels of investigation, Lotman's modeling systems theory, or something like analysis-synthesis-mathesis.
2. Our task is to weave together various strains of phaticity, engage in some work of definition, and present an enticing-sounding initial agenda for phatic studies.
3. We can tie phatic studies with various socioanthropological theories of social organization and emphasize the role of phatic communication in the process of social formation.
4. There is a long history of mereological (part-whole) thinking in phatic studies, most notably perhaps Jakobson and Ruesch, who treated the subject explicitly.
5. Elyachar's phatic labor and infrastructure should be re-evaluated in light of recent studies on the subject, and other theoretical concerns in the field.
6. Ruesch's levels of abstraction could be used to present a systematic account of how phaticity influences the integration of an individual into social communication systems.
7. Trolling and verbal harassment is an interesting topic that can be approached from the phatic perspective, but it would require some extra work.
8. It might be possible to abstract the characteristics of successful phatic communion by looking intended and achieved relationship goals.
9. Cognates of "phatic" could lay the groundwork for a more philosophical follow-up paper.

References

• Feenberg, Andrew 1989. The Writter World: On the theory and practice of computer conferencing. In: Masor, Robin and Anthony Kaye (eds.), Mindweave: Communication, Computers, and Distance Education. Oxford: Pergamon Press, 22-39.
• Greimas, Algirdas Julien 1982. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary. Translated by J. Courtés. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Haverkate, Henk 1988. Politeness strategies in verbal interaction: An analysis of directness and indirectness in speech acts. Semiotica 71(1): 59-71.
• Miller, Vincent 2015. Phatic culture and the status quo: Reconsidering the purpose of social media activism. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 1354856515592512.
• Peace, Adrian 2013. The phatic finger: Public gesture and shared meaning on the highways of the Australian Outback. The Australian Journal of Anthropology 24(1): 99-114.
• Reiss, Katharina 1981. Type, Kind and Individuality of Text: Decision Making in Translation. Poetics Today 2(4): 121-131.