Phatic Workshop

I found this footnote about Shakespeare's character Falstaff in Burke's "Four Master Tropes". I would consider Falstaff a gloriously ironic conception because we are so at one with him in his vices, while he himself embodies his vices in a mode of identification or brotherhood that is all but religious.  Falstaff would not simply rob a man, from without.  He identifies himself with the victim of a theft; he represents the victim.  He would not crudely steal a purse; rather, he joins forces with the owner of the purse -- and it is only when the harsh realities of this imperfect world have imposed a brutally divisive clarity upon the situation, that Falstaff is left holding the purse.  He produces a new quality, a state of synthesis or merger -- and it so happens that, when this synthesis is finally dissociated again into its analytic components (the crudities of the realm of practical property relationships having reduced this state of qualitative merger to a sta...

One of my coauthors described his participation in a psychology experiment where he was supposed to navigate a maze of some kind. But, as with most psychology experiments, the question wasn't whether he would make it through the maze, but something else. Namely, the experimenter wanted to see how many times, as well as, presumably, when, and where, the research subject said "um" and "ah" when tracing through the maze. The only problem was that my coauthor was very slow and deliberate in his tracing, so he never said "um" or "ah" and had to be ruled out from the dataset as an "outlier." It occurs to me that "um" and "ah" ("filler" words in linguistics terms) might be usable examples of phatics, a bit similar to the example of applause that we talked about recently. I suspect that - outliers like my colleague notwithstanding - some interesting psycholinguistics work has been done to describe the func...

This short historical anecdote -- from an introduction to the Open Dialogue approach to psychotherapy , seems relevant to our interests here: Developmental psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Colwyn Trevarthen describe a process by which the caregiver and baby enter a dialogue straight after birth. Communicating through verbalizations, facial expressions, movements, and mutual attention to the world of objects, they begin to influence each other’s emotional states and behaviours.  There is a gradual maturation of this dialogue, from the use of objects, to signs, and then to language. The mother’s voice is gradually internalized by the child, forming an inner speech through which it regulates its own emotions and behaviour.  Throughout this process, words become building blocks for complex, higher mental functions. From words come our thoughts.  The words that form our thoughts are not static symbols. For Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, words carry only fragments ...

There he goes, one of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die. - Hunter S. Thompson, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Now this, from "Experiments on the role of deleterious mutations as stepping stones in adaptive evolution" (PNAS, 2013): Provided that a deleterious mutation is not lethal, the genome carrying it has some expected “half life” and a corresponding chance of reproducing one or more times before going extinct. Occasionally, the mutant subpopulation might acquire a second, hypercompensatory mutation that provides a net advantage. Although such mutations are expected to be rare, new detrimental mutations are constantly generated, thus providing a multitude of potential stepping stones. If the second mutation would also have been deleterious had it appeared without the preceding mutation, then the beneficial combination is said to have a “sign-epistatic” interactio...

There is a lot of recycled material in this book and a lot that is off the point altogether. So a typical Zizek book. The one idea I found interesting is his explanation of street protests that turn violent, as well as the kind of thing that went on in Paris in 2005, as 'phatic' violence. That is to say, it serves the sole purpose of saying 'I'm here' and 'we're talking'. But Zizek doesn't take it far enough because in fact the phatic requires two interlocutors and its purpose is to keep open the lines of communication. So the obvious point he missed is that the police response is also phatic. By brutalising the protestors, they too are saying 'I'm here' and 'we're talking'. Moreover, if this in fact the case, then this type of protest action will not bring change because it is a routine exchange. -- from a three-star  review  of  Violence , 2009 This is (perhaps) similar to what's going on in Netherlands recently . ...

via https://donegaldollop.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/badger.jpg Bullock, S, 2016, ‘"Shit Happens": The Spontaneous Self-Organisation of Communal Boundary Latrines via Stigmergy in a Null Model of the European Badger, Meles meles’. in: Tom Froese (eds) Artificial Life XV: Proceedings of The Fifteenth International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems. MIT Press This reminds me of a display I saw in the Archaeology museum in Dublin when I first arrived in the British Isles in 2010. The old Irish fiefdoms would often have burial sites at their boundaries, and especially at their corners. In particular, corners where several of these territories met each other would often be places where executions, and, according to the theory, ritual regicides, might be staged. Badgers are incredibly clean and will not defecate in their sett – they have special latrines (communal toilets) comprising of shallow pits placed away from the setts on the edge of the...

This image from my PhD thesis uses a minimal stereotyped image of a college campus as a visual metaphor to describe a space of emergent learning.  This idea is expanded upon in the "Patterns of Peeragogy" paper, which uses a similar metaphor: This image is of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I've been several times.  It still looks somewhat similar to the picture, though a bit more built up! The concept here is that the common-place architectural structures that have emerged at the university represent meaningful "patterns" that apply in more general learning-and-production settings. Collegial and convivial peer support via remote collaboration or short-term meet-ups may fill some of the requirements of “student life”. Peeragogy can also happen in neighborhoods, and among persons sharing long-term co-habitation. While a traditional Dormitory may not be necessary, a shared rented or cooperatively-owned living/working environment could be ...

"Il retourne chez ses Egaux" (pt. 1) In a recent post here I mentioned that I need to read Rousseau's Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind (1755[1761]) sooner rather than later. Since I've been handing out lately with a young lady who studied French at some point, I took this up sooner than I anticipated. I regularly abstain from reading translations but consider this one's age and availability (particularly during the 19th Century) a personal justification. The thing is, I'm not sure if I can make reading it a jeesusjalutasallveelaeval post since my recent readings have taken a looser form. I've become somewhat disillusioned with my habitual style of blogging. Blockquotes and comments don't do my memory and comprehension as many favours as I would like them to. Presently, I see little point in lining up quotes by themselves. Instead, I'd go over some verbiage from the book here, essentially listing the stuff ...

Broadly speaking, there are two ways of reading Roman Jakobson's scheme of the linguistic functions of speech. In its linguistic interpretation, the functions pertain to the production of linguistic utterances. This is how linguists most commonly have come to employ the scheme. With regard to the phatic function, speakers produce phatic utterances. The second can loosely be designated as the metalinguistic interpretation, which looks at utterances from the perspective of their reception, and not by their intended addressee, but by the linguistic observer. In either case, the hierarchy of language functions as put forth by Jakobson is a toolkit, but varies in its usage by the speaker and the scientist. Let us not forget at this point that the ideal goal of linguistic analysis in this perspective would be for the linguist to correctly interpret the coding mechanisms of the sender as well as the putative decoding mechanisms of the actual or ideal receiver. From the metalinguistic pe...

Used to be a cop but I got to be too jumpy  I used to like to party 'til I coughed up half a lung  But sometimes late at night I hear the beat a-bumping  I reach for my holster and I wake up all alone I used to have a wife but she told me I was crazy  Said she couldn't stand the way I fidget all the time  Sometimes late at night I circle around the house  I look through the windows and I dream that she's still mine     - Drive By Truckers - Used To Be A Cop I wanted to catch up on pop culture so I watched "Mad Max: Fury Road".  Then I had to remind myself where Max comes from, so I watched the first movie in the series, "Mad Max", which I'm pretty sure I saw 20 years ago or thereabouts.  The two films are interesting partly because they couldn't feel much more unrelated.  I love that.  It leads me to ask: how do they fit together, actually?  Others have debated the chronology of the films.  I'm going to pursue a...

This essay appeared on Reddit recently: Derrida vs. the rationalists: Derrida’s famously difficult thought is often dismissed as “post-modern” nonsense. Is there more to it than might first appear? https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5143/derrida-vs-the-rationalists There are some interesting things in there, useful for our purposes.  Some discussion of the foundation of post-structuralism (as a discourse critical of foundations), some discussion of Searle vs Derrida.  All presented in a reasonably "cool" language.  And this tricky little quote from Derrida himself: Perhaps because I was beginning to know all too well not indeed where I was going, but where I had not so much arrived as simply stopped. My sense is that whereas post-structuralist deconstruction often ends up asking "where is this all headed?" -- invoking an eschatological mode  -- on the other hand phatic studies seems to work in a protological mode : not insisting that meanings come fro...

Cmap software is a result of research conducted at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC). It empowers users to construct, navigate, share and criticize knowledge models represented as concept maps. -- http://cmap.ihmc.us/ Here's one I made for the Peeragogy project.  Maybe useful?  It's perhaps a bit quicker than Inkscape for some things, but I realise that it could also just be a "cool tool" and a distraction from getting on with work. My testimonial is that I did find this schematic quite useful for thinking through the first edition of the Peeragogy Handbook.  It looks like I had maps for each of the chapters, too.  Ah, here's a clickable version of the image below:  http://cmapspublic3.ihmc.us/rid=1K81VLSK7-1RL0RQ4-WZK/Peeragogy%20Cmap.cmap  -- and yes, the little icons at the bottom of some of the notes are indeed clickable in that version and lead to other maps, though those ones are less developed. Online collaboration ...

I'd like to discuss, in a very roundabout way, Gerald Aiken's statement that "An interest in phatic communion has enjoyed something of a renaissance recently", in "Polysemic, Polyvalent and Phatic: A Rough Evolution of Community With Reference to Low Carbon Transitions" (2016). I've yet to make a jeesusjalutasallveelaeval post about it because there's simply too much goodness there (I would like to take my time in internalizing Aiken's very well made points - same with Charles Zuckerman). This revolution I think he may have noticed from the sheer amount of literature currently employing the term "phatic". We can't be the only ones who have noticed it. With reference to Jakobson's view of these related disciplines, phaticity seems to encompass communication sciences, which include (in concentric order) anthropology, semiotics, linguistics, and poetics. Phatic Communion had its origins in anthropology so that's insured -...

I schematized Roman Jakobson's definition of the phatic function, and upon looking at it for a while thought that I either drew a fish or a side-view of Jakobson's face, the left column being either a back-fin or Einsteinian scientist-hair, and the upper triangle in both cases serving as an eye. I'm slowly making progress with the paper on RJ's phatic function.

In the article whose conceit I borrow, Edward Sapir argues that we use labels, which he characterizes as "empty thrones," in a necessary attempt for ontological and epistemological reasons-to encompass and objectify intrinsically ambiguous and contradictory concepts. Our ability to analyze, or even conduct sociocultural life, is facilitated by a willful finding of commonality among these concepts and by choosing particular labels that help us fix the meaning of concepts ... Sapir's metaphor of enthroning and dethroning through the contextual choice and deployment of contending labels implicates political contingency as well as a struggle over the significance, value, and consequence of particular labels. Insofar as an ethno-racial terrain is involved, labels become polysemic sites in which difference, rather than homogeneity, is made tangible, represented, and foregrounded, as well as challenged and re-construed. (p. 81) Quoted from Vilma Santiago-Irizarry, "Labels, ...

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-a-process-philosophy-of-signs.html What is a sign? We usually think that it is a fixed relation: a red light signifies ‘Stop’. In his bold new book, James Williams now argues that signs are varying processes: seeing the red light triggers a creative response to the question, Should I stop? This looks pretty interesting! - I don't have much longer comments on it right now.  I found it b/c the author reviewed a book by Simon Duffy, who came to mind in the workshop I'm sitting in today. "What is a sign?" is indeed long-standing, reaching to antiquity, but I doubt if the process philosophy approach is as novel as the author makes it out to seem. In the abstract of the book offered by the publisher (Edinburg University Press), this process approach is set "in contrast to earlier structuralist definitions" of the sign. But here the time-line seems odd, since structuralist definitions might have been popular some time ago...

I noticed this: In 1878, Bergson became a French citizen, although he could have chosen English citizenship. He was accepted at the École Normale along with Jean Jaurès and Émile Durkheim. He discovered Herbert Spencer with enthusiasm, and studied under Félix Ravaisson and Jules Lachelier. - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/ Bergson is kind of the great-grandpappy of Simondon-style thinking, it would be interesting to use Spencer as a common source (or at least reference point) with Malinowski, per the analysis at The plot thickens (with Herbert Spencer) . The SEP page above also makes this point: Many philosophers today think that [Bergson's] concept of multiplicity, despite its difficulty, is revolutionary. It is revolutionary because it opens the way to a reconception of community.  Is it possible that Bergson's idea of multiplicity is a cousin of Malinowski's idea of phatic communion?  Something to follow up on at some point.

It occurred to me that these two images make an interesting pair. The first one is from the 2015 paper about "Patterns of Peeragogy" and gives a map of ways around creating-the-social. Briefly, the spirit of the map above is to say that we should look for the foundations of social creativity by a regression to the creation of the social. It gives some hints about what we expect to find constituting this Ur-Creative / Ur-Social level. The second map is from our joint "Afterword" draft, with the core image itself extracted from an earlier slide deck " A Schematization of Phaticity ". In terms of theoretical levels, the second map is still one level deeper than the one above.   As used here, it suggests that each pre-social attitude, factor, or dimension is rooted in feelings or sentiments.  Thus, for example, we might describe the feelings of a newcomer (nervousness, self-doubt, curiosity, and so forth) as well as feelings towards a newcomer ...

«The most profitable trajectory for a successful science fiction novel in those days was for an sf book to start life as a magazine serial, move on to hardcover publication, and finally be reprinted as a mass market paperback. If you were writing a novel a year (or, say, three novels every two years, which was then almost what I was averaging), that was the only way to push your annual income up, at the time, from four to five figures—and the low five figures at that.» - Samuel Delany, in " Racism and Science Fiction ", 1998. I think this might be the piece of advice on publication strategies that I mis-remembered as "write the book before you seek an advance."  The above plan is reasonably consistent with that strategy however! Another more contemporary take -- coming from a quite different perspective : If you want to understand how to get a 7-figure advance in just a few lines, try this: understand how to explain your uniqueness; develop a compelling pit...