Distinctions in function

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 which involve what I call analog exchange (Wilden 1970b).] He is moreover capable of using one mode in place of the other, for natural langugae and human communication are both digital and analog in both form and function. Formally, the poet may employ devices such as alliteration or onomatopoeia or association to make the digital elements on the page or in his reading into analogs or in order to evake analog sensations. Functionally, the politician can employ the analog context of his digital text to obscure or replace the text, as we have just seen in the television campaign for the 1970 elections. He may in other words be apparently conveying denotative information about issues and events when in fact he is actually talking about his relationship to his audience and their audience to the image and images he projects.^[2] This is in essence the prime distinction between the function of the digital and that of the analog. The digital mode of language is denotative: it may talk about anything and does so in the language of objects, facts, events, and the like.^[3] Its linguistic function is primarily the sharing of nameable information (in the non-technical sense); its overall function is the sharing or reproduction of patterns and structures (information in the technical sense). The analog on the other hand talks only about relationship.^[4] In human communication there are often serious problems of translation between thet wo.
Analog communication thus accurately describes all that we know about animal communication, for we know of little, if anything, approaching denotation in the animal world. What rudimentary systems of food calls, danger calls, and so forth that do exist do not seem to involve anything beyond the level of the signal or the rudimentary sign, and it would be unnecessarily anthropomorphic to suggest that such and such a noise 'signifies' something when it is clear that it only signals something about the relationship of the animal calling to his environment and thence about his relationship to the receivers of his message.
The concept of the analog as communication about relationship is equivalent to Malinowski's phatic communion:^[5] "a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange" (quoted in Sebeok 1962: 434). Jakobson has suggested that the phatic function of language is the only one other species share with human beings^[6] and that it is the first "verbal function" acquired by infants (ibid.). In the terminology of this essay, one would say that the phatic function long antedated verbal communication in ontogeny, and is more accurately to be described as analog. Verbalization and symbolization involve the digitalization of the analog, for the infant knows how to communicate with his sphincters and other orifices (Wilden 1968: 24) long before he comes to emit anything more than analog sounds.
No known animal communication is digital, although the complexity of dolphin communication and the whale's song offer intriguing possibilities for research into an area where the methodological assumption of a discontinuity between animal and man is necessarily contradicted by the continuum of reality. [Footnote 7: The epistemological necessity of mapping discontinuity onto continuity must be emphasized. Epistemology is a matter of where you draw the line; every logos deals with boundaries.^[7] The same is true of any conceptual distinction: metaphor and metonymy, closed and open system, energy and information - and, of course, of the analog/digital line itself.] For example of the 'language' of the bees is instructive. (Von Frisch's discoveries have very recently been confirmed once more by American researchers.) No bee constructs a message out of or about another message (there is no metacommunication as is possible in digital communication), and the 'gestural language' involved requires vision (visual representations are analogs of what they represent). Moreover, no bee who has not flown the course to find the nectar can send the message 'about' where it is, no bee can tell where the nectar or the pollen will be, no bee can say where the nectar is not. It is significant that there are two sorts of dance and that the sense of smell (which is analog - cf. Sebeok 1967) is also involved. There are auditory elements also. The circular dance has the specific quality of analog communication: it simply says something about the dancing bees' relationship to the food near the hive,^[8] but it cannot say there is no food there. The wagging dance uses a code as signals to point; it is a more complex analog message. In neither case is there a possibility of a methodological analysis into discrete elements similar to morphemes or phonemes, for the indications of distance in the wagging dance are frequencies, and relatively imprecise (cf. Sebeok 1962: 435).
Only if we anthropomorphize the bee can we be deluded into thinking that the report aspect of the dance (all messages being simultaneously reports on situations and commands to do something about them - McCulloch) is a statement, for the bees, of where the nectar is. The dance is a report about the dancing bee's relationship to the hive and to its needs, and a command to the other bees to put themselves into the same relationship.^[9] The bees obtain the food, but nobody 'knows' where it is. Similarly, the cat who rubs against our leg when we open the refrigerator door is probably not saying anything like "I want some milk" or "Give me some milk", but something like a question or a proposition about a relation: "Will you put yourself into a mother relationship to me"? or better: "How about a mother trip together"? (Wilden 1972: 58-60)

1. I have no idea what these main aspects of the symbolic function are, but it sounds like an interesting connection. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan are rarely mentioned in phatic studies.
2. Ruesch similarly describes the metacommunication between a politician holding a stump speech and the audience, so that each utterance is a "test bubble" sent out to see how the audience responds.
3. Lately I've been frilting with the idea that informative communication is denotative and speech in phatic communion is primarily connotative, but this connection has its hangups. Namely, speech in phatic communion can also denote. There is no real reason why it can't, e.g. when anthropologists talk about their research (Dell Hymes' illustration) or when colleagues in adjacent cubicles engage in informal chatter (Reder & Schwab's illustration). Moreover, Malinowski's own illustrations involve talking about something perfectly obvious - i.e. objects, facts, and events in the immediate vicinity. In short, the digital-analog distinction is not ideal.
4. If the poetic function is an analog function then how does it talk only about relationship?
5. Analog communication comparable to phatic communion only in a rather limited sense but more so with La Barre's phatic communication.
6. Thanks to background-knowledge about Mowrer's work with talking birds, the claim that "the phatic function of language is the only one other species share with human beings" is incorrect both factually (humans and other animals can express emotions, direct the actions of others, etc.), and even according to Jakobson himself, whose phrasing says that it's the only function humans share with talking birds (not mammals), and only when the parrots speak with humans. Our phatic relations with other species are much more complex (even among other pets).
7. I have a feeling that these pages consist of a paraphrase of that article by Gregory Bateson (1972[1966]) where he discusses communication about relationship (the mu-function).
8. "Every logos deals with boundaries" is an awesome phrase, but aside from very complex semantic topics, I wouldn't know what to do with it.
9. This is probably similar with humans and their institutions and organizations, even informal groupings ("Come join our book club."). That is, recommendations, suggestions, and advice contain a phatic component when it is related to the social field.