Phatic Workshop

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...

from A Critical Companion to Zoosemiotics: People, Paths, Ideas , by Dario Martinelli, p. 79 Some quite illuminating quotes there. Rather less believably: And mind-bendingly:

erroneous output of phatica4 I've finally gotten around to doing some tangible work with computer poetry.  Very preliminary stuff: for this round of experiments, my programming contributions are mostly just "glue code" .  (But isn't that concept itself at least mildly interesting?) I've put a preprint/draft online, " X575: a renga writing program in its infancy ". Here's an example poem.  As my coauthor pointed out, "It asks for a lot of interpolation from the reader." busied for pandas -- the maternity has born a knack of aircraft judges of today nothing but number to bus to his weatherman defacing passing -- I went to a crude bearing the nova of mobs that pause in the prayer -- this humanitarian -- from the spongy cruise  My only reason for selecting this particular example (which didn't make the cut for the paper) was that the reference to "the nova of mobs" is a completely inadvertent (well, everything here i...

As much as I enjoy older sources (1950-1960) in phatic studies, it turns out that later ones (1970-1980) are actually much more thorough and relevant for advancing phatic theories. Since you expressed interest in the topic of "social fields" (i.e. social systems in Ruesch, and "perspectives" in Morris, among several other equivalents), I thought I'd share this one individually, before sending you an updated version of "Not the current year in phatics". Hörmann, Hans 1979. Psycholinguistics: An Introduction to Research and Theory . New York, etc.: Springer-Verlag. Similar distinguishing characteristics can be noted in looking upon language as response . The speech event produced by an individual A is hardly ever the last link in a stimulus-response chain ; [1] it is generally a directed response transmitted from A to B. The linguistic response is produced by A with the intention of making B react. In other words, a verbal response can only be regarde...