K&P: Mõtlev pilliroog

Lotman, Juri 2001. Kultuur ja Plahvatus. Vene keelest tõlkinud Piret Lotman. Tallinn: Varrak.

Kultuuriprobleemi ei saa lahendada, määratlemata tema asukohta kultuurivälises ruumis. Selle küsimuse võib sõnastada nii: inimesekui kultuurilise olendi omapära nõuab tema vastandamist loodusmaailmale, mis on mõistetav kultuurivälise ruumina. Nende kahe maailma vaheline piir mitte ainult ei erista inimest teistest, kultuurivälistest olenditest, vaid läbib ka inimpsüühikat ja inimtegevust. Oma teatud külgedega kuulub inimene kulturi, teiste kaudu aga on seotud kultuurivälise maailmaga. Sama ettevaatamatu oleks loomariigi kategooriline välistamine kultuurisfäärist. Seega on piir laialivalgunud ning iga konkreetse fakti määratlemine kas kultuuri või kultuurivälisesse sfääri kuuluvaks on üsnagi suhteline. Kuid see, mis üksijuhtumi puhul on suhteline, on küllalt selgelt adutav abstraktse klassifikatsiooni kategooriates rääkides. Niisuguse mööndusega võime eristada kultuurimaailma kui oma edasiste arutluste objekti. (Lotman 2001: 38)

Kuna selliseid vastandusi on eelnevatest peatükkidest juba hulgaga läbi käinud, saab jälle moodustada tabeli:

kultuurimaailm	-	loodusmaailm
semioosisemaailm - sõnaline, loogiline	-	väline reaalsus - mittesõnaline, loogikaväline
keeleruum, süsteemi sisu-maailm (tema sisemine reaalsus)	-	keeleväline ruum, keele piiride tagune maailm/reaalsus
keele subjekt ("mina")	-	endast väljaspool asuv ruum, "teie"-maailm
tähendusruum, teadvuslikule mõtestatusele alluv maailm	-	keelevälised objektid, nt "helidemaailm"
psühholoogia ja kultuur	-	teadvustamata füsioloogia ruum

Esimene on huvitav selle poolest, et osutab ka "alateadvuse" kuulumisele loodusmaailma (mittesõnaline, loogikaväline). Teine on keeleruumi poolel keerulisem kui pealtnäha paistab, sest "Ruum, mis asub väljaspool keelt, teispool tema piire, muutub keele valdkonda sattudes "sisuks" ainult sisu-väljenduse dihhotoomia koostisosana" (Lotman 2001: 9), st keele topeltartikuleeritusega (double articulation) kaasneb omakordne akrobaatika. Kolmas põhineb Kanti filosoofiasse sisse viidud transformatsiooniga, kultuurimaailm kui kollektiivne isemus. Neljas on liiane (tähendusruum ja keeleruum on justkui samaväärsed). Viies on huvitav selle poolest, et psühholoogiline eristub füsioloogilisest justkui teadvustatavuse või teadvuslikule mõtestatusele allumise poolest. Nende piiride "laialivalgumine" on iseenesestmõistetav, sest isegi abstraktsioonis sõltub kõik määratlusest või eelistatavast keeleteooriast. Rääkimata siis veel "osaruumidest" (Lotman 2001: 37), mis meenutab kangesti Bergeri ja Luckmanni "tähendustaskuid" (pockets of meaning).

Luuletuses, mis algab epigraafiga, "est in arundineis modulatio musica ripis", on Tjuttšev filosoofilise täpsusega esitanud teda alati painanud küsimuse: küsimuse inimese kui loodusesse kuuluva, kuid sinna mitte ära mahtuva olendi kaksipidi loomusest:

On laulvust laine tõusu-, mõõnahoos,
kooskõlas iga stiihiline pahin: [|]
ja sulav musikaalne sahin
ilmaina voogab õõtsel pilliroos.

On kõiges häirimatu kokkumäng,
harmooniast on tulvil lahe loodus.
Vaid meie hääl on võõras keset loodust.
Meid vabaduses näivas närib äng.

Miks hing on kõigest lahku laulmas end?
Kust tuli ebakõla häiriv, mõrkjas,
et laulab hing meil teisiti kui kõrkjas
ja pole meri talle lauluvend?

Kauaaegse filosoofilis-poeetilise traditsiooniga "topeltkuristiku" teema, saab siin spetsiifilise tõlgenduse: Tjuttševi järgi on loodusele omane harmoonia. Selle vastandub inimhinge disharmoonia. Harmoonia filosoofiline tähendus peab silmas "ühtsust mitmekesisuses; muusikas tähendab see paljude toonide kooskõla ühes tervikus, sealt laenasid selle ka pütaagorlased, kes õpetasid sfääride harmooniat, st hektohordi moodustavate taevaste valguste korrapärast tiirlemist ümber keskse tule". Ja E. Radlov lisab oma määratlusele: "Swedenborg rääkis "väljakujunenud" (konstabileerunud) harmooniast, mis loob maailmakorra." Tjuttševile tähendab lõhe inimese ja maailma vahel vastuolu harmoonia ja disharmoonia vahel. Kuid samal ajal mõistab Tjuttšev harmooniat kui igavesti muutumatut või igavesti korduvat olemist. Inimene on aga haaratud disharmooniasse, s.o ebasümmeetriliselt kulgevasse liikumisse. Me läheneme oma põhiküsimusele: konfliktid suletud, s.o korrapäraselt korduva ja lineaarse liikumise vahel. (Lotman 2001: 38-39)

Inimene on siin nagu Valga, linn mis ei mahu ühte riiki. Üldjoontes meenutab see "kaksipidi loomus" dünaamilist dialoogi vaimse ja füüsilise, st loodusmaailma kuuluva keha ja kultuurimaailma kuuluva hinge lõikumisest: "The union of soul and body cannot be scientifically explained for man is, as it were, a third substance formed out of two heterogeneous substances" (Arnett 1904: 173).

Kolmekümne üheksandal leheküljel leiab õigustust minu "pütaagorlik" tõlgendus, mida olen siin üritanud teostada. "Ühtsus mitmekesisuses" olekski päris hea üldnimetaja, mille jaoks seni olen laenanud "dünaamilist dialoogi", aga mitmekesisuse ühtsus ei ole võib-olla palju parem paljususe ainulisusest. Võib-olla pean lõpuks ikkagi laenama Charles Fourierilt kas "põimingu" (interlace) või, muusikalist metafoorsust rõhutava "moduleerimise" (modulate), millele kahjuks ei ole head eestikeelset vastet.

Sisuliselt rõhutab siinne arutelu taaskord inimese unikaalsust, justkui me seisaksime loodusest lahus ja oleksime kas Jumala(te) või tulnukate loodud. Kas ikka on nii, et "meie hääl on võõras keset loodust"? Purjus peaga räuskavad inimesed kõlavad küll nagu teistest ahvlastest ainult kraadi võrra erinevad olendid. Kas artikuleeritud keel teeb meid niivõrd eriliseks? Või on asi selles, et inimene kasutab ja leiutab tööriistu, on endale ehitanud niivõrd keerulised tehislikud keskkonnad, et me ise tundume endale ka peegelduses mingil määral tehislikuna? Siin ujub teadvusesse nö "loodusega harmoonias" elavad rahvad (nt nomaadid, kes ei ehita püsiasulaid) ja tahaks küsida, kas nemad näevad ka ennast olevat looduse harmooniast "häälest väljas" (out of tune).

Jälle see Swedenborg. Vb Emersoni Representative Men oleks hea tutvustus. (Tsiviliseeritud?) inimese lineaarse liikumise vastandile, korrapäraselt korduvale ajale on mingis antropoloogia nurgas antud päris äge kirjeldus: "time is experienced as something discontinuous, a repetition of repeated reversal, a sequence of oscillations between polar opposites" (Leach in Burnyeat 1962: 249). Ei teagi, kas "kordunud ümberpöörete kordumine" on tautoloogiline või mitte, aga tal on sarnane sofistlik hõng nagu "tõlkimatu tõlkimisel".

Looduses kohtame liikumist suletud ringis: nii kalendaarsed, vanuselised kui ka teised muutused on selles maailmas allutatud korduvuse seadusele. Selles mõttes on iseloomulik loomade (siin ja edaspidi peame loomadest rääkides silmas peamiselt kõrgemaid imetajaid) ja inimeste õpetamise erinevus, olgugi et teadlased on sageli täheldanud nende protsesside paralleelsust. Loomadel vastanduvad tähenduslikud [|] käitumisvormid - mis on õppimise eesmärk ja õpitav - mittetähenduslikele. Täenduslikul käitumisel on ritualiseeritud iseloom: jaht, isastevaheline võistlus, juhtlooma kindlakstegemine ja teised käitumise tähenduslikud küljed formeeruvad "õigete", s.o nii tegutseja kui ka tema partneri jaoks tähendust omavate pooside ja žestide süsteemina. Kõigil tähenduslikel käitumisviisidel on dialoogiline iseloom. Hoolimata inimese poolt loomade käitumise "organiseerimatuse" ja "korratuse" kohta loodud legendidest, kujuneb kahe võistleva kiskja kohtumine (üldjuhul on selline kohtumine võimalik juhul, kui üks neist mingite erakordsete asjaolude tõttu - kõige sagedamini inimsekkumise tagajärjel, kuid mõnikord ka nälja või looduskatastroofi tõttu - on sunnitud väljuma "oma" ruumist ning muutunud "hulkuriks") rangeks, keerulise žestikulaarsete rituaalide süšteemiga infovahetuseks. Žestisüsteemi abil informeerivad loomad üksteist oma "õigustest" mingile ruumile, oma jõust, näljast, kavatsusest otsustavalt võitlusse astuda jne. Küllalt sageli lõpeb nende dialoog sellega, et üks osapooltest loobub võitlusse astumast ja tunnistab end võidetuks, teatades sellest vastasele kindla žestiga, näiteks tõmmates saba jalge vahele. Konrad Lorenz on täheldanud, et kui ronk pakub duelli lõpus välja oma silma või kiskja oma kõri - need on alistumise märgid -, siis on võitlus lõppenud ning üldjuhul ei kasuta võitja võimalust vastase füüsiliseks hävitamiseks. Siin avalduvast erinevusest inimeste ja loomade võitluskäitumise vahel tuleneb vene vanasõna "ronk rongal silma peast ei noki" algtähendus. (Lotman 2001: 39-40)

Ülal viidatud katkendites on näited sarnased: öö ja päev, suvi ja talv, üleujutus ja põud, noorus ja vanadus, elu ja surm. Viimased, samas, ei tundu olevat vahelduvad (vana ei saa nooreks, surnu ei saa elavaks). Natuke raske on näha, kuidas loomade käitumise rituaalsus on seotud suletud (ajalises) ringis liikumisega - mis on territoriaalsel võitlusel pistmist ajaga. Veel enam, ka õpitava ja mitteõpitava käitumise teema ei ole siin justkui millegagi seotud - kirjeldatud käitumine on "nii tegutseja kui ja tema partneri jaoks tähendust omav", sest see on eeldatavasti kaasasündinud, instinktiivne. "Õigus" on siin might is right tähenduses.

Tsükliline kordumine on bioloogilise eksistentsi seadus, millele on allutatud loomariik ja ka inimene selle osana. Kuid see maailm ei hõlma inimest üleni, "mõtleva pilliroona" on inimene oma keskkonna ürgsete seadustega põliselt vastuolus. See ilmneb ka erinevustes, mis iseloomustavad õpetamise olemust. Loom, nagu märkasime, õpib rituaalse käitumise süsteemis. Üleolek saavutatakse jõuga, mingite žestide sooritamise kiirusega, kuid mitte kunagi uue, vastasele ootamatu žesti leiutamisega. Looma võib võrrelda tantsijaga, kes on võimeline tantsusamme täiustama, kuid ei suuda järsku ja ootamatult vahetada tantsu ennast välja millegi muu vastu. Looma käitumine on rituaalne, inimese käitumine üüab leiutada midagi uut, mis oleks tema vastastele ennustamatu. Inimese vaatepunktist on loomad rumalad, looma vaatenurgast on inimesed - ebaausad (ei allu reeglitele). Inimene näeb [|] loomas rumalat inimest, loom inimeses ebaausat looma. Inimkonna ajaloo arusaamatu mõistatus on juba üksi seegi tõsiasi, et tema eellane jäi püsima, ehkki oli ümbritsetud kiskjatest, kes olid temast jõu, hammaste ja küünte poolest mõõtmatult üle. Inimese elujõulisust pole võimalik seletada tema võimega kasutada tööriistu. Esialgsed relvad ei taganud otsustavat ülekaalu kiskjaküünte ja -kihvade ees, pealegi olid inimesel pojad, kes kirveste ja odadega relvastatud polnud. Muidugi on teada juhtumeid, kui nälginud hundid ründavad talvel inimesi, või ka teiste kiskjate samasuguseid rünnakuid. Ometi pole looma selline käitumine reegel, vaid äärmuslik vahejuhtum. Ei saa öelda, et hunt toitub inimestest, hunt toitub hiirtest, pisinärilistest, jänestest, üksikjuhtudel noortest pudulojustest. Nälja sunnil tuleb inimsöömise juhtumeid ette ka inimeste seas, ometi ei saa sellest teha järeldust, nagu inimesed toituksid inimestest (jätan siin vaatluse alt välja rituaalse kannibalismi, millel on maagilise tegevuse iseloom, ning inimsöömise juhtumid näiteks tiigritel, mille puhul on tegemist selgelt individuaalse väärastumusega). "Normaalses" situatsioonis ei püüa loomad üldse inimesega kontakteeruda, isegi mitte tema ärasöömise eesmärgil - nad hoiduvad temast eemale, samas kui inimene jahimehena ja loomapüüdjana on algusest peale sääraste kontaktide poole püüelnud. Loomade suhtumist inimesesse võibki iseloomustada eemalehoidmisena, püüdena vältida kontakti. Kui omistada loomadele inimpsüühika, võiks seda nimetada ka põlguseks. Pigem aga on see instinktiivne püüd vältida ettearvamatuid situatsioone, midagi sellesarnast tunneb inimene, kohtudes hulluga. (Lotman 2001: 41-42)

Järelmärkus paljastab, et "Mõtlevaks pillirooks nimetas inimest Pascal." Loodusmaailma ürgsete seaduste ranguse ja loomade käitumisele omistatud rituaalsuse suhtes tahaks siin kobiseda. Kas ikka on nii, et loomad (jutt käib ju ainult kõrgematest imetajatest) "mitte kunagi" ei leiuta midagi uut. Kas tasub inimesi ja loomi niimoodi "abstraktse klassifikatsiooni kategooriates" kohelda? Ka inimese käitumine ei ju ole alati leiutamisele orienteeritud. Sageli saavutati sõjas edu just selle tõttu, et vaenlane harrastas aegunud, läbinähtavaid taktikaid; aga samas ei ole "uus" alati võidu garantii, ka uus strateegia võib alt vedada. Üleüldse, osa inimese käitumisrepertuaarist on ikka väga ürgne, mida kultuurisfääris võib täheldada selles, et droonide ja biorelvade ajastul on superkangelaste filmides ikka veel põhilise tähtsusega rusikaga näkku löömine.

See peatükk tundus liiga lühike ja katkendlik - kulgevat ja korduvat oleks võinud lähemalt käsitleda, või näidete varal, mille üle ei saaks kobiseda. Platoni katkendi jätsin täitsa välja; vb ma lihtsalt ei salli Sokraatilist dialoogi, mis on nii tüütult ühepoolne (ainult kinnitab; siin ka Klinias: "Sel pole tõepoolest mingit mõtet. Kuidas siis nii?" - hea panus, Klinias), või ei näe ma kuidas see arutelule midagi juurde annab peale selle, et "iidsed pühad ringmängud" peaksid justkui näitlikustama suletud ringi (traditsionalismi) inimese kultuurimaailmas. Järjepidevate kunstide teemal leiaks paremaid näiteid. Üldse jäi mulje, et mõned näited, "ringmängud" ja territoriaalses kahevõitluses üksteisega vastastikku "ringi" tammuvad loomad toodi näiteks välise - ringikujundi - tõttu, mitte mingi sügavama iva tõttu.

The Phatic Animal

La Barre, Weston 1954. The Human Animal. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.

The gibbons are very interesting to students of man in another direction. Most of the mammals have highly developed listening, for protection from their enemies. Some of them, both preying and preyed upon, have occasional production of sound which serves one or another biological purpose of communication. But this inter-communication among individual animals is heightened to such an extent in gibbons that it can only be fairly characterized as vocalization. for the gregarious gibbons are, if anything, even noisier than bands of monkeys. The white-cheeked gibbon, for example, has a voice of great compass, and one type at least has a vocal sac which appears to have some functional connection with vocalization.
It is not only in volume and in incessant use that gibbon vocalization is remarkable. Boutan has observed give vocal expressions for states of satisfaction or well-being, four indicating states of illness or fear, four of an intermediate state, and one used when the animal is in a state of great excitement - a total of fourteen distinguishable vocalizations. These vocalizations, however, do not have the value of words. They are, rather, expressions of vague notions or awareness of agreeable, disagreeable, or dangerous situations and events. But it is at least a "pseudo-language," if we are careful to define what we mean by this. Perhaps it may best be characterized as "phatic" communication, that is, it succeeds in spreading information about an individual animal's state of mind, or it communicates a generalized emotional tone through the band so that all its members come to have the same attitude toward a situation. Sometimes it binds the group to biologically useful common action - as when one group of gibbons asserts a claim of territorialism and, by this kind of vocalized warning or bluff, substitutes for an otherwise necessary physical clash between groups in protecting its foodstuffs. (La Barre 1954: 57)

Thus, "phatic" communication is understood as vocalization that constitutes "pseudo-language". In effect this definition is more closer to Morris's communization, since the emphasis is on sharing "a generalized emotional tone" (mood?). The result of "the same attitude toward a situation" is a very useful conception, for it falls smack dab in the "definition of the situation" dimension but in a nonverbal way.

The usefulness of gibbon "phatic" communication should not be underestimated. Indeed, it is no easy cynicism but a sober statement of fact, that a quite surprising amount of human communication remains strictly phatic, for all its employment of articulate words. For example, the purpose of poetry, notoriously, is to communicate feeling - to make the hair stand up on the back of the neck or to stimulate fantasy so that we feel communication has taken place when it has not ("Life like a dome of many-colode glass stains the white radiance of eternity") - and not to make genuine or verifiable statements about the structure of the universe. But also much, if not most, of the language of lovers, advertising, political argument, philosophy, theology, and (as with the gibbons) the diplomatic démarche has no necessary relationship to objective realities outside the speakers but only to emotional states within them. Indeed, in each of these cases, objective statements of fact would not serve to secure the desired purpose! Thus even the most articulate of the primates, man, still often uses phatic communication. Gibbon talk is at least a kind of social hormone, to communicate emotion and to unify band action. Gibbons stamp with joy and displeasure; and so do we. For the rest, the gibbon seems to be a standard primate, since its adaptations of senses, physique, temperament, band organization, and vocalization alike are suited to quick flight rather than to aggression - or even to defense, though a band may attack in concert if one of its members is molested. (La Barre 1954: 58)

Here La Barre seems to conflate emotional and nonverbal communication in the sense of vocalizations. I think I've met the phrase, "a quite surprising amount of human communication remains strictly phatic", before somewhere.

This we say advisedly; for it is probably only the state of his mind about which even the most articulate gibbon is able to inform his public. Careful studies of the white-cheeked gibbon (Hylobates leucogenys) have disclosed a gamut of expressions which might roughly be translated into human speech. Five of them would correspond to "mmmmm" (meaning, roughly, "ti kai" or generally OK), four to "ow" (definitely "boohow," "kaccha," or "not up to snuff"), four to "hmmm" (non-committal attention), and one to "yippee" ("wow!"). But none of these, however, when closely examined, can be said to have the semantic status of true words. They are at best vague "phatic" communications, which convey no detailed information about the structure of the universe; they are actually no more than unclassified intelligence concerning the individual ape's physiological or emotional state. All that is conveyed, quite literalyl, is a "tone of voice." Even the "conversations" of the ape Senate or Union League club probably do no moret han set and maintain the relaxed emotional tone of the group, well-fed, free from danger, and uninterested either in sexuality or in fighting on a mild morning. (The conversation of human adolescents commenting on the infinitely varied passing world also consists, almost exclusively, in such group-conformity-making pejoratives, encomiastics, and intensificatives - though some hard-pressed parents have been known to state that the total number of expressions does not reach the white-cheeked gibbon's fourteen.) (La Barre 1954: 165)

This "non-committal attention" is also characteristic of phatic communion more broadly understood (e.g. channel maintenance or contact prolongation through head nods and other so-called "go-on" signals). La Barre's interpretation of the referential function is interesting: phatic utterances do not "have the semantic status as true words" and phatic speech "convey[s] no detailed information about the structure of the universe". I'll have to contend with these definitions in due time. The comment on "group-conformity-making pejoratives" is very much in line with the study of vocatives amongst various human adolescent groups, and there too we find an emphasis on "the atmosphere of sociability" or what La Barre seems to interpret as setting and maintaining "the relaxed emotional tone of the group".

In spite of their lavish use of vocalization, sight is nevertheless more important for communication among tree-living primates. As the Yerkes say, "Mutual understanding and transfer of experience among apes are dependent rather on vision than on hearing, for the animal reads the mind of its fellow, interprets attitude, and foresees action rather as does the human deaf-mute than as the normal person who listens and responds to linguistic vocalization." Apes don't tell each other much. Our great and largely unaware dependence upon speech-cues highlights this marked difference. A blind monkey would be much more out of things mentally (to say nothing of physically) than would a blind man - and all because of the existence of human speech. Likewise, a merely deaf monkey would be much less incapacitated socially than a deaf man is. Light thus remains the most important sense, even socially, in the infra-human primates. (La Barre 1954: 165-166)

This is probably true, but negates human nonverbal communication to a degree. This "Mutual understanding and transfer of experience" occurs among humans through visual means as well. Notice that when "the animal reads the mind of its fellows, interprets attitude, and foresees action" this is once again the classical triad: cognitive (reading minds), emotive (interpteting attitude), and conative (foreseeing action).

It is the sociability of animals that is behind the possibility of even phatic communication among them; and speech could never originate in a solitary animal. In fact, vocalization among primates roughly increases with their gregariousness. It is also much on a par with the vocalization of other herding animals; but since the primates need these danger-warning cues even more than do land animals (who have various other defenses and also a better sense of smell), this is doubtless the reason the primates have developed vocalization to such a great extent. But, even so, the best vocalizations of the most gregarious gibbons are not speech. (La Barre 1954: 166)

The consequent implication is that humans are very "sociable" animals for having such a great variety of phatics (or means of communion). The phrase "speech could novere originate in a solitary animal" again sounds like something I've read numerous times elsewhere.

What seems to be needed (when we make the proper biological comparisons) is not mere animal association as such, but specifically human social organization: nuclear families within a large society. Primate horde society is too diffuse in its relationships for incipient semantics to "jell." No doubt the speech of proto-humans was still largely phatic in nature. Indeed, a surprising amount of human speech - political, diplomatic, economic, social, theological, philosophical, aesthetic, and amatory - still remains largely phatic (communicating or seeking to induce merely an endocrine state, emotional state, or manipulable "state of mind"), for all its pretenses at semantic respectability. (La Barre 1954: 166)

The argument is that social organization is necessary for the development of semantic communication. The condition of a system of relationships for a semiotic system to develop probably "jells" well for sociosemiotics. But consider the definition of "phatic" in La Barre's exposition: "communicating or seeking to induce merely an endocrine state, emotional state, or manipulable "state of mind"". This definition takes the "atmosphere of sociability" aspect to the extreme. (It can be noted that perhaps a good idea for generalizing phatic approaches is to divide Malinowski's text into compartmentalized arguments and see how these are emphasized, developed and transformed by various authors.)

But what is needed for the growth of language is clear:

1. Commonly experienced contexts of meaning, the particularities of which are not too immediately destroyed in the diffuseness of a group.
2. Extremely close organic-phatic libidinal ties, to bring about the blandly accepted, the multiple taken-for-granted agreements which inhere in and make up all arbitrary semantic communication.
3. Long-continued, stable, and intense emotional ties for the repeated experience of contexts by the same particular individuals.
4. An infantilized animal whose exaggerated dependence on adults of the same species makes them his primary "environment" during the long time after birth when he is being shaped for essential membership in the species - that new generations may take on the "domesticated," non-real symbolic systems of the adults.
5. An animal with a large brain, and not merely large but "fetalized," i.e., uncommitted as yet to mechanical instincts (the bodily-inherited past experience of the species); a brain with "neurobiotactical" freedom to learn, to structure its growth on its experience, to built its nature out of its nurture - since no language and no symbol system that any human mind ever worked in is in its content "instinctual."

All these conditions are encountered only in Homo sapiens. Humans alone are fetalized, domesticated hyper-mammals with the necessary oral-dependent and intensified sexual traits; the human brain alone is huge precisely in those associated areas that show persistent coping with human symbol-synthesis; and humans alone have the necessary social organization of society inclosing the nuclear family. (La Barre 1954: 166-167)

What a meritorious list! "Commonly experienced contexts of meaning" by itself holds tremendous amounts of potential for theorizing the phatic-contextual dimension. "Long-continued, stable, and intense emotional ties" come up in relation with family and friend relationships. The bit about "non-real symbolic systems" seems value-laden but probably justified (i.e. political, diplomatic, economic, social, theological, philosophical and aesthetic symbol systems whose "unrealness" consists in "multiple taken-for-granted agreements"). The concept of "neurobiotactical" freedom would probably excite those who deal with "semiotic freedom" or the semiotics of learning in general. Hyper-mammals?

More than that, the phatic conditions are still visible in the human family. Many mere males have noted in bewilderment the acute phatic prescience of a mother when her child is concerned: she somehow knows when it is hungry and when it has had enough; when it is thirsty and when it is soiled; and when it is tired, ill, or merely in a bad temper. Close emotional concern, endlessly repeated contexts, the ifant's idiosyncracies of expression, and the mother's own organic reception all give her a large and continuing intelligence about the child. The phatic closeness of lovers also commonly reaches fantastic extremes of precision. And a wise husband in time learns he can hide nothing from the phatic prescience of "feminine intuition" of an experienced wife, who understands him all too well. (La Barre 1954: 167)

Despite shifting the meaning of "phatic" to vocila communication, this passage makes a lot of sense even when read in a Jakobsonian manner. The mother's "acute phatic prescience" with regard to her child could just as well be understood in the perticular sense of interpreting vocal cues as well as in the general sense of mother having a strong tie with her baby. Likewise, "the phatic closeness of lovers" can refer to both qualities of vocal cues as well as to the strong psychological connection between lovers (or even the physical channel, in which case phatic becomes "haptic").

By contrast with apes (who, moreover, have no genuine semantic communication whatever), the great social burden that even phatic verbalization still bears in humans is quite enormous. Nothing is more infuriating to some people than a spouse who does not keep up even a reasonably intermittent flow of phatic reply, but holds to an unpermitted and thoroughly suspect emotional privacy. And at a really successful party, after the second drink any initial pretense at intellectual commerce begins to collapse into phatic nudges, pats, punches, pawing, and verbal face-making. Nor is anyone fooled into believing that an exchange of polite opinions about the weather between two thoroughly sober people has any real concern with or bearing upon current or proximate meteorological events: in this, people are taking the temperature and assessing the humidity of the inter-individual weather, not the earthly. (La Barre 1954: 167-168)

Hmm, "a reasonably intermittent flow of phatic reply" is a social demand. But "[holding] to an unpermitted and thoroughly suspect emotional privacy" is very much a characterization of the three-day silence between Pauline and Arthur after a row. La Barre is being ever so witty in the latter remark about "inter-individual weather". This is where the "atmosphere" of sociability takes on a deeper meaning.

Constant association alone, with the only feeble emotional ties, can commonly carry the burden of much new phatic context. Even with a constant companion like a college room-mate - who has attended the same classes, read the same books, seen the same entertainments, and knows the same people - one can convey incredible amounts of meaning and evoke large constellations of understanding merely by a breath noise, a certainly moret han "non-committal" grunt, a lifted eyebrow, a modulated cough, or a minimal body movement. Everyone also knows how often new sub-languages or argots arise among secretive ingroups like criminals, adolescents, and others with their own special libidinal ties. (La Barre 1954: 168)

And this is where he ventures into the topic of private signs. Although these remarks concern nonverbal communication and what Wescott terms strepital communication (sounds made by body movements), he is on to something very true (something a long inhabitant of dormitories can attest to).

In these ingroups the emphasis is on exclusiveness - the same which is provided in the family unit. But in all these ingroups, phatic communication is built on a semantic language already in existence and available; hence they are not quite appropriate examples. So far as the family, too, is concerned, communications might remain wholly phatic and nonce-events that happen only once - to disappear with contexts and to die with its members. What is needed for semantic speech is a de-emotionalizing of private phatic language to make it common coinage. To be sure, phatic communication of attitudes is necessary for the very existence of the family; but meanwhile, as the individual family continues to exist, these learned habitual and familiar situations become more and more burdened by common memory of specific contexts, more and more colored by individual personal idiosyncracy, and richer and richer in private emotional connotation. It is only the further necessities of inter-family communication - in the flux of cyclic break-up and re-formation of the family - that force the private and the ineffable to become the public means of common understanding. Once again, it is only the human kind of social organization, of the integrated, stable, close family within the framework of a larger non-familial society - both deriving from the oedipal situation and universal incest-taboos - that uniquely satisfies this precondition. (La Barre 1954: 168-169)

And here it gets weird, as La Barre reminds us that he is psychoanalytically inclined. But the point about exclusiveness is valid, and this is what Blanco emphasizes in her treatment of the phatic construction of community.

The late Edward Sapir, one of the greatest minds of our generation, has with characteristic insight described the pure linguistic aspects of this process:

It is likely that most referential symbols go back to unconsciously evolved symbolisms saturated with emotional quality, which gradually took on a purely referential character as the linked emotion dropped out of the behavior in question. Thus shaking the fist at an imaginary enemy becomes a dissociated and finally a referential symbol for anger when no enemy, real or imaginary, is actually intended. When this emotional denudation takes place, the symbol becomes a comment, as it were, on anger itself and a preparation for something like language. What is ordinarily called language may have had its ultimate root in just such dissociated and emotionally denuded cries, which originally released emotional tension.

Both the evolutionary and the individual life-history evidence fully support Sapir in the thesis that phatic communication precedes the semantic. (Something like this, in fact, seems already to have occurred in one of the vocalizations of gibbons studied in Siam: when one gibbon band meets another at the edge of their respective territories, both bands use this cry, which ranges from the pseudo-angry to the apparently murderous - but with no accompanying openly belligerent action. This mutual vocal abuse is a symbolic substitute for action, a statement in inter-band diplomacy which has much the same function as a politico-economic treatise establishing historic legal title to territories.) But always the nonce-communications of emotion must be transformed into a symbolic gesture of reference: the "m-m-m" of rich personal connotation must become the "good" of widen and more impersonal denotation. (La Barre 1954: 169)

He returns to his discussion of other primates, but not before quoting Edward Sapir on the "denudement" of phatic signs into semantic ones by means that closely resembles "cue reduction" from animal communication studies.

All human languages have sound, sense, and structure. In the last chapter we looked at the first two of these. We saw that, once people have phonemic systems, they do not even make the same kind of noises. And once they have vocabularies, they do not even make the same sense out of the same universe. That is to say, the speech sounds men make are no more similar in different societies than are the sound-improvisations of two individual babies. In fact, any baby makes more experimental noises by far than any language seems to need; all babies have to be caught young, so to speak, and taught to narrow down their alphabet to fit that of their own social group. And as far as sense goes, humans had already made the fatal step, once they had left purely phatic communication for articulate language. Phatic communication is fairly close to universal human biology; and so long as only phatic communication is attempted, even apes in different hordes can manage to understand each other. But once societies try to make semantic sense out of things, the confusion of Babel is upon us: we not only make different sets of sounds, but in our vocabularies we even refuse to look at the world in the same way. (La Barre 1954: 187)

I wonder if "sound, sense, and structure" accord to Wescott's phonic, phatic, and phemic; or with whatever categories Austin designated, for that matter. If so, then there is basis for viewing this as a continuous tradition, a "third" major sector in opposition to Malinowski's phatic communion and Jakobson's phatic function.

But primitive people (primarily for lack of writing) lack sufficient "communication" with their own intellectual history to have much perspective on or moral sophisticated about their problems - just as a child lacks the experience of a long life-history, which might help him to get bearings on himself and his predicaments. Psychotics in a sense are still imprisoned in their childhood: they are still using now-inadequate old ways of solving new problems, and they are relatively cut off from the other humans and a current clear experience of the real world, both of which might help them with their problems. Now "primitive" men (those who lack writing) are not children. Nor are they psychotics either. Each of these - primitive, child, and psychotic - is in a different human situation or predicament and may not immediately be compared with any other. But all of them share three things in their predicaments:

1. They do not have (or have not yet achieved) an adequate communication with their fellows - other tribes, intellectual predecessors, and contemporary age-mates, respectively.
2. They have too small a stock of technological solutions and ego-controls relative to their unresolved life-problems.
3. And they have insufficient critically-assessed large knowledge of the real world as it is, relative to the great amount of special edited "knowledge" of "reality" they have got from the few immediate humans who have shaped them.

This means that in each case, when feeble ego-controls fail, they must fall back on magical control of reality - the sacred cult, the day-dream, and the psychosis - though in other ways primitives, children, and psychotics are vastly different. In their relative inexperience of the variety of humans and of human beliefs, they all tend to turn inward upon their own limited resources: the primitive to his sacred tribalism, the child to his narcisisstic self and body, and the psychotic to the inward resources of his autistic thinking. Thus the primitive's culture, the child's unstable personality, and the psychotic's mental illness all partake of the nature of a defense-mechanism against anxiety in the face of unresolved problems - and in this there is danger of losing touch with reality. But also tribalism, narcissism, and psychosis all separate humans from their potential fellows. Nevertheless, even primitive tirbalism is the result of mutually threatened men's joining together, though their cultural "solution" may be partly or wholly magical; the child's emergent personality is an increasing awareness of the reality of other human personalities and of his increasing emotional integration with them; and even the symbolizing activity of the psychotic is something initially learned from his human fellows - and in all of these there is some good, becasue they contain some aspect of present or potential communication. All of us (did we but remember it) have passed through a peiod of magical thinking, when we hesitated between the gratification of the Pleasure Principle of the organism and a necessary allegiance to the Reality Principle of the environment - and we are all human together.
Every human growth is an integration. Thus culture is in part a means that people have of sharing one another's emotional burdens. A sound personality is an insistence upon the dignity of the self and its needs and an equal respect for the reality of other people and of the outside world. Only the psychotic is lost - unless through another person's love he can learn to respect both his human self and the real world of other people and of things. Each integration, whether in a culture or in a personality, is the result of a favorable balance between respect for the self (narcissism) and respect for the other (object-love) - and each is the result of largely inarticulate phatic communication with others. And each disintegration into a psychosis is the result of self-hatred and fear of the self, and hatred and fear of others and of reality. The worst illness that a human being can know is not to know that he belongs.
Anthropologists have a technical term for the successful culture-innovator, the "culture hero." It is he (often become mythical and often built up from a number of actual human beings) who is credited with having first invented all the tribe's useful arts and with having given them their economic, marital, and other social institutions. Now it is conceivable that the psychotic in many cases is a potential culture hero who has not succeeded in communicating with his fellows - an individual sorely pressed by current and common problems to make fantastic solutions for which his fellows have no appetite. And certainly, judged on their products, there are plenty of culture heroes (Hitler is an example) whom in other cultures find it hard to assess as other than plainly psychotic. For the distinction between the "culture hero" and the "psychotic" lies, in any absolute sense, not within themselves but only in their social context: Hitler might have been locked up permanently in England or America as a certified paranoiac - instead of only temporarily, as he was under the Weimar Republic, and as a political prisoner. Nor does the distinction lie qualitatively in their products: "paranoid" it may have been, but Naziism was a genuine culture - though hardly lasting the thousand years predicted of it. Qualitatively there is no discernable differente in content between a culture and a psychosis. The only objective or operational criterion is quantitative: the number of their respective communicants. This is no doubt an alarming statement, thus to equate cultures with psychoses. and do not all cultures allege their own categorical rightness - anyway ours must be right! But cultures and psychoses are identical in these ways: qualitativel, in being symbol-systems; functionally, in being anxiety-allaying; and also operationally, in being mere human hypotheses to be tested by reference to the real world. (La Barre 1954: 244-246)

I had to record this 2 and a half page passage because firstly there are a lot of points of convergence with Jurgen Ruesch and secondly if we are to analyze phatic communication in Rich & Morty (which is still just a thought), then this passage could serve as a guide towards analyzing Rick's personality as either psychopath or culture hero. The bit about integration in culture and in a personality through "largely inarticulate phatic communion with others" is of course invaluable.

The psychotic is the individual who makes up his own private "culture" to contain his personal anxieties. The culture hero is the individual who provides the most desirable and acceptable solution for a society of individuals under the pressure of much the same problems. His success in this is a function of successful phatic communication, not necessarily of semantically proper statements about reality. The psychotic, however, has somewhat atypical pressures; does not succeed in phatic communication; or does not succeed in making solutions that are consoling to others. Rather, he increases our anxiety. Therefore, whatever phatic communication does occur succeeds only in separating the psychotic from his fellows. He thus has a "culture" borne only by a "society" of one person - and neither is therefore truly a society or a culture. (La Barre 1954: 247)

Rick does not succeed in phatic communication. Nor does he succeed in making solutions that are consoling to others. Rather, he increases our anxiety. - Does that not just sound perfectly true?

Minorities may be right, and majorities wrong. The culture hero may be the psychotic who gets the cultural vote, and the "psychotic" may be the same man of the future, out-voted by his contemporaries and imprisoned (in his time at least) within his own private culture. Not cosmic but only cultural truth can change thus in so brief a time as human history! We are forced to the disenchanting conclusion that the only objective yardstick mere men have in measuring the difference between a culture and a psychosis is the quantitative one of counting noses. Not only is it the only one to use, it is also actually the only one we do use - unless we have the benefit of historical hindsight and can make inferences from this. Cultural truth can never be what "I" make it, but only what "we" make it. The quantitative difference between culture and psychosis in the number of their respective adherents is a matter of inter-individual or social communication, and arises almost entirely from the skill in phatic communication of the usual culture hero - versus the characteristic failure of most psychotics in achieving such phatic rapport with others. (La Barre 1954: 249-250)

Continuing with the interpretation of Rick as a culture hero: he is literally the "sane man of the future", since he's been to the future (being modelled after Emmett Brown). And on the other hand, consider his relationship with Unity, which is a veritable phatic feat (and concurrently most science-fiction-y).

For the schizophrenic, in any society, is feeble precisely in the phatic rapport that achieves such cultural consensuses; for good reasons he has not adequately taken on his society's symbolic systems, and for much the same reasons he is not able to induce the society to take on his. Schizophrenia is, literally, a social disease. (La Barre 1954: 252)

This sounds like something straight outta Palo Alto. It also seems to hold true, at least in the narrow sense that schizophrenia was ascribed to in Palo Alto.

Instead, the semantically rigid attitudes of aggressively sane people can punish the schizophrenic again, and we are surprised that the next time he has learned not to bother talking at all. Withdrawn? No, phatically he is only more equisitely sensitive to rejection than most people are. (La Barre 1954: 254)

Doesn't it make sense that people who are frequently rejected become sensitized to it?

Once again, as minorities, the schizophrenic and the poet and the intellectual are all in the same boat, culturally. The schizophrenic gains no consensus; the poet may similarly not communicate, or not be attended to; the intellectual may attain communication and the consensus of his coterie or "school," and yet fail of a wider communication and usefulness to the whole society. It is true that the intellectual, as in the case of Socrates, may on occasion be a sacrifice to his own society's tribalism (if by "tribalism" we may mean the culture of a society of individuals, of whatever technological advancement, who may intellectually know of alternatives to their own cultural dispensation, but who are not emotionally convinced that these can be morally respectable and genuine alternatives). However, the intellectual is in essence the critic of tribalism. If he is punished for over-stepping the bounds of his society's tolerance, then this is a failure in his phatic understanding of the society's problems and of the anxieties of its members. Or it is a failure in his phatic communication with the society, and he is then an "insane" or unclean reject, quite like the psychotic. In this case, the intellectual, too, has intensified rather than allayed anxieties: very possibly Freud, who repeated the injunction to "Know thyself," is another Socrates. (La Barre 1954: 164)

A worthy addition to what thus far has been a pretty minute topic in this blog, only other instance consisting of Ray Bradbury's quote on why we should fear the intellectual (you never know - he might critizise you next!), which perfectly matches the explanation given here: the listed minorities intensify rather than allay our anxieties. This is captured very eloquently a few pages before: He [the schizophrenic] ends in frightening us about ourselves, rather than successfully informing us about himself, which is his primary subject-matter." (La Barre 1954: 261)

Similarly, it is the emotional dependency of people on one another in the face of common unsolved problems and common anxieties, that makes for the intellectual infantilizations we call superstitions. Whole groups of people can retain a belief in animism, which represents a world-view archaic both in human history and in the individual life-history. A surprisingly large part of every culture is merely the phatic sharing of common emotional burdens, and has no relevance at all to the outside world. Thus societies themselves make up a mutually protective "environment" for the individuals constituting them. (La Barre 1954: 306)

Whoa, this hits hard. This is the passage that was quoted by Wang, Tucker & Rihll (2011: 48). Viewed ii relation with animism and neoteny, rather than on its own as Wang et al. did, it really makes sense. It can readily be seen in American culture in the form of gun rights, mass incarceration of black people, religious fundamentalism and banning of abortion. In Estonian culture it is manifest in our national plight of existence, an ever-constant anxiety about there being so few of us that some neighbouring nations may eradicate our unique language and way of viewing the world.

This of course could hardly be indefinitely the case, for societies can survive (at least for a time) only if the culture embodies in addition a sufficient number of real technological adaptations to the real world, in competition with other contemporary societies. We have mentioned the obvious social neoteny of the schizophrenic; it is perhaps not so obvious that all the real technological triumphs of scientists at large provide a wide social and economic margin for the moral and intellectual neoteny of perhaps the greater mass of other individuals within the society. For just as the body of an idiot girl, relying on the past genetic triumphs of the species, can with clever chemistry produce a normal baby - so, too, idiot boys, relying similarly on the technological achievements of the society, can and do drive intricate motorcars they have not and could not have made with their own minds and hands. (La Barre 1954: 306-307)

I have a feeling that Wang et al. just googled "phatic + technology" and got this page as a result. Although the argument is presented in morally outdated language (I'm referring to the word "idiot"), the point reminds me of my friend's futuristic conjecture that we should very much be afraid of the internet of the future, since more and more people who currently don't have the means to take part in the global communication sphere, will be able to join in and it is unpredictable what will come of it. I met something similar to this argumentation recently on youtube Dane Cook explained his early experience with the internet. Only a mere decade or so ago youtube comments, for example, were mostly pleasant, helpful, and congradulatory. His explanation was that at that time only geeks and generally well-educated and well-off people had access to these technologies. But as time went on and many millions of users joined in, youtube comments section tuned into an endless source of verbal abuse. It may very well be that we're currently living in the golden age of the internet and blissfully unaware of how horrible it will truly turn in the coming decades.

Probably most political communication is in purely phatic terms. But can we be sure that the phatic stance of most electors is emotionally sound and grown-up? This is the crisis of modern times. But all history is crisis, and all decision is made in uncertainty and anxiety. The problem we speak of is timeless. Shall we choose as leader the Great White Father, the "man on horseback," dripping with charisma, who promises all kinds of miracles in his person - and delivers perishingly few of them? Or can we appreciate the honest man who says in effect: "Look, fellows! Things are tough everywhere. I don't know all the answers - I put my pants on only one leg at a time - but we can't dodge this issue, and this one, and this. What are we going to do about them?" (La Barre 1954: 331)

Who is Bernie Sanders? The part about honesty and being issue-oriented is why he immediately comes to mind. The man on horseback? Is he talking about Vladimir Putin? Was La Barre prescient?

This chapter [#11, "And Gets All Balled Up In His Grammar"] owes much to B. L. Whorf's paper on "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language," in Leslie Spier, A. Irving Hallowell, and Stanley S. Newman (eds.), Language, Culture, and Personality: Essays in Memory of Edward Sapir (Mensha, Wis.: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund, 1941), pp. 75-93; also reprinted in Whorf's Four Articles on Metalinguistics. Another important paper is by Charles Hockett, "Biophysics, Linguistics, and the Unity of the Universe," American Scientist, XXXVI (1948), 558-72. Herskovits, in Man and His Works, p. 27, also has some interesting remarks, based on Cassirer.
The term "phatic" I borrow from Malinowski - his Supplement I to C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning (2d rev. ed.; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1927), pp. 296-336, esp. 315. I wish particularly to acknowledge the source of my term because I regard the evolutionist naïveté of the remainder of Malinowski's essay as mostly nonsense, linguistically, psychologically, psychiatrically, and anthropologically. My understanding of the matter derives from putting the primatological facts adduced by Boutan and others side-by-side with the linguistic insights of Edward Sapir. But beforet hese, both Rousseau and Vico had the concept of human speech as arising from animal sounds of a merely emotional character. These men, however, got the notion from Lucretius and Epicurus, and they in turn from Democritus. I do not know where Democritus got the idea. (La Barre 1954: 349)

And finally an explanation of why La Barre's interpretation of "phatic" is so different from Malinowski's. To be honest, having to contend so much with Malinowski's difficult style of writing, I cannot hold it against him. I'm not sure if I even noticed an evolutionist streak in his original appendix, but the impression of nonsense is surely not unique, as testified by so many different interpretatons of "phatic" currently available.

Talking Birds

Mowrer, O. Hobart 1950. On the psychology of "talking birds": A contribution to language and personality theory. In: Learning theory and personality dynamics: Selected papers. New York: Ronald, 688-726.

The research here reported was made possible by a grant from the Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University. (Mowrer 1950: 688)

This tidbit may explain why Jakobson, who moved to Harvard University in 1949, only two years after Mowrer began working with talking birds, was familiar with this work. It may not be out of the question that the two had casual exchanges in that institution.

Later in the same article Lashley remarks: "There is no experimental evidence bearing upon the motive which impels parrots to imitate sounds foreign to their species. The bird described in this note was in a constant state of rage during the experiments. ... These facts suggest that reward is not an important factor in the parrot's reproduction of sounds. The whole attitude of the bird in reacting suggests the action of an instinct for competition. His movements during reaction frequently suggest the courting activities of other birds, and it seems not improbable that the principal motive for the parrot's reproduction of sounds is to be sought in a perverted form of sex rivalry. (Mowrer 1950: 689; footnote 1)

This is not far removed from the human speech phenomenon of talking just for the sake of talking, that is, for out-competing other talkers. At least in an academic context, in which talking is one of the prime modus operandi's, in would make sense in a competitive sense.

After a good deal of speculation and trial-and-error, we hit upon the following procedure. We made a practice of feeding and watering a new bird entirely by hand, thus facilitating its taming, and as we did so we said the word or phrase we wished to teach. For example, we might say, "How are you?" and then present a bit of food; again, "How are you?" and more food; and so on. This method worked well, and one can conjecture that the way it works goes something like this. Since the word or phrase that is being taught is connected with eating (and/or drinking), the word will become a "good sound," one the bird likes to hear; and we may suppose that when the bird is later alone and hungry (or thirsty), if it happens to make a noise something like the word previously heard, the bird will be rewarded and will be prompted to "practice" and perfect it.
Elsewhere (see Section II) I have described this method and the theory behind it in considerable detail; but the gist of the procedure is that you try to make the bird like to hear the sounds you make so that it will also like to hear itself make them. This is sometimes known as the process of "identification" and is importantly involved in the psychological development of small children. I believe - though much more evidence will be required to prove - that this is the way in which one gets both birds and babies to say their first words. (Mowrer 1950: 691)

For me, as a novice in behaviouristic theorizing, it sounds a lot like classical conditioning (e.g. Pavlovian conditioning). When "identification" was mentioned in the introduction I thought that maybe it has something to do with Mead's autonymous term. E.g. emotional identification or Einfühlung since Scheler (cf. Wispe 1991). But at this point it's difficult to tell; probably not, though.

In the early stages of training, I have found it useful to tie up the training procedure, as I have said, with the feeding and watering of the bird. But once a bird has learned a few words and has become gentle and attached to the trainer, a very different type of procedure may be followed. When this stage has been reached, one can feed and water the bird more or less routinely. Then the presence and attention of the trainer are important to the bird. When the bird is perfectly comfortable as far as its physical wants are concerned, it will now still make every effort to keep the trainer near at hand. (Mowrer 1950: 692)

This part makes Jakobson's phatic function somewhat problematic. Or, rather, it makes it dependent on the relationship between the speaker and hearer. In Dorothy Parker's example (which Jakobson quotes repeatedly) about a boy and a girl exchanging ritualized formulas to keep the channel open, they are presumably doing so because they do enjoy each other's presence and attention. Notice that at least the aspect of attention is present in Bühler's exposition of Appell.

But one must still keep in mind the fact that a bird talks because and only because such behavior is, in one way or another, rewarding. Initially it is rewarding to the bird to make and hear sounds which it has heard the trainer make in pleasant contexts. At this first level of performance, words may be said by the bird without much reference to the outward effects they produce. In this respect they may be compared to the "babbling" or "vocal play" of human infants. Only at the next stage - when the bird finds that by means of saying words it can get food or water from the trainer - does talking become useful in the practical sense; but at both of the stages so far mentioned, we can see the operation of the principle of reward. And finally the bird becomes so attached to the trainer that it is rewarding just to be with him or her. This may be shown in any of several ways. The bird may scold when the trainer starts to leave or may beg to be taken with the trainer. If the bird is encouraged to talk on these occasions, it will often do so with special enthusiasm and clarity. (Mowrer 1950: 693)

The "lapse" of reference may be why Jakobson associated this with Malinowski's phatic communion. The fact that talking can be useful in the practical sense concerns energetic interpretants in the model I'm trying to construct. And the last bit about communication being rewarding in and of itself can be linked with Ruesch's discussion of the same in psychiatric context.

Friends (Mr. and Mrs. A. T. Alper) have reported the following incident. Some years ago they were vacationing in Bermuda and were told to be sure to visit a certain park. They also learned that near one of the gates of the park was a parrot, famed for his remarkable fluency. But my friends were disappointed: they stood in front of this bird's cage for a long time and tried, all in vain, to get him to talk. However, the moment they started to leave, the bird opened up with the repertoire for which he was justly famous. In other words, as long as these persons were standing in front of this wise old fellow's cage, entertaining him, why should he exert himself? But as soon as they started to leave, then he went into action. (Mowrer 1950: 693)

This would explain Jakobson's emphasis on sustaining communication or, rather, avoiding the termination of contact.

Only by indeed letting the bird gain some control over the trainer by means of vocalization does it seem possible to bring the bird's powers as a talker to their fullest development. (Mowrer 1950: 694)

The power of phatics stems from the so-called "language band" - that while someone is talking it is difficult to disengage from them.

It was a cool day and the parrot was a bit on the grumpy side. As a result he would say not a word to the children, but as they started to walk away across the yard, he said very clearly, "Don't go." No attempt had ever been made to teach him this expression, and only once since has he been heard to utter it. (Mowrer 1950: 694)

The ultimate phatic utterance.

Someone has said that it is too bad that behavior, unlike bones, does not fossilize. (Mowrer 1950: 695)

That is indeed too bad.

We say, of course, that this accomplishment is "due to imitation," but to name a process is not to explain it. (Mowrer 1950: 698)

The same should go for concourse, which I have named but have yet to explain.

In suggesting that the utterance of word-like noises occurs first on a purely autistic basis, I mean, specifically, that when a child or a bird is lonely, frightened, hungry, cold, or merely bored, it can comfort and divert itself by making noises which have previously been associated with comfort and diversion. These sounds have become "sweet music"; and they are reproduced, not because of their social effectiveness, but because of the intrapsychic satisfaction they provude. Later, once particular sounds have been learned on this autistic basis, the stage is set for them to function instrumentally, in connection with the child's (or bird's) interactions with the external world; but this appears to be a second stage in language learning, not the first one. (Mowrer 1950: 700)

In other words, intrapersonal communication precedes interpersonal communication.

That the appearance of the trainer shall be rewarding event to the bird seems universally accepted as a condition of effective speech learning by the bird. And it is probably no accident that birds more readily learn to repeat their trainer's "Hello" than his "Good-bye." (Mowrer 1950: 700)

In a phatic context this sounds like an interesting tidbit.

All that this theory says, in essence, is simply that words, as a result of being combined with "loving care," take on alike for the bird and baby secondary reinforcing value and that they have this value when uttered, not only by others, but also by the bird or baby. This, it is believed, lays the basis for the "self-contained" or "autistic" trial-and-error learning which, in the favorable instance, eventuates in the bird's or baby's reproducing the word - but, in the beginning, more as a self-signal than as a signal to others. (Mowrer 1950: 708-709)

A self-signal is a private sign.

Langer astutely observes that "Gua was using the coveralls even in his [the 'foster-father's'] presence as a help to her imagination which kept him near whether he went out or not" (p. 92). On an earlier page we have posited that talking birds use their trainer's "noises" in precisely the same way: long before a word is used as a name for or means of calling the trainer, it appears to function precisely like a fetish, a little part of the beloved one which the bird can "have near" even though the real person is far away. It is therefore all the more astounding that Langer should take the position that these rudimentary symbols inspire "delight or comfort" by their sheer aesthetic quality and have "no biological sifgnificance." (Mowrer 1950: 711-712)

This passage may have implications for phatics that are difficult to elucidate at this point. Do humans take delight or comfort from the mere presence of other humans?

Perhaps a superficial distinction that is worth drawing between these two terms is this: When one individual serves as a model for the behavior of the other, with both individuals present, we may speak of imitation; but when one individual acts like, or copies, another individual in the latter's absence, we may speak of identification. (Mowrer 1950: 714)

A worthwhile distinction.

Umwelt and animal communication

Maran, Timo 2014. Zoosemiotics: Umwelt and animal communication. Course powerpoint slides.

[...] focusing on relationships that combine cultural symbolic information, communication between humans and animals as well as biological facts and regularities.

The order here goes from strictly human (culture) to communi(cati)on between humans and animals and finally to the strictly animalistic realm (biology).

Probably in every case of animal depiction two aspects are present - some characteristic features derived from the animal as biological entity and some ascribed from human culture.

Compare this to Peirce's understanding of how "symbols grow" - on icons (here some characterist features derived from the animal as biological entity) and other symbols (here some characteristic features ascribed from human culture). That is to say, probably in every animal representation, there is something iconic as well as symbolic. In human representations, the actual characteristics of animals and their behaviour are mixed with our cultural knowledge, contingent representations and aspects of human behaviour (e.g. anthropomorphization).

Focusing on animal's semiotic engagement in environment may be relevant in cases where some subjective factor, such as a lack of tradition in animal inhibits it from using a resource or adapting with the changing environment.

Engagement is a good word here. I also like that animals' traditions are recognized here. Similar problems are of course present in human society as well: our semiotic engagement with our environment will also have to adapt with global warming and the weather getting increasingly bizarre and unpredictable.

Zoosemiotics deals with appearances (characteristics of biological forms), signification (semiotic relations of animals with their environments), communication (within and between animal species), and representation depictions in literature, art, film and other media of human culture) of animals.

The order reaches from appearances of biological forms for other biological forms to representations of humans that rely on the appearances, significations and communications. I wonder if this series can be viewed as a concatenating list: representations of inter- and intraspecific communication includes relationships of signification with environment that in turn rely on appearances.

Semiotic approach can focus of description and study of sense organs, comunication channels, signals and messages. Relevant questions are relations between the message, its meaning and context. Favorable methods for semiotics are observation and speculative description, comparative and participatory research techniques, modeling and communicatio nanalysis.

Speculative description and modeling stand out as something that semiotic approaches in my view engage in most often. A casual example of these approaches is the construction of typologies. Even in communication analysis semioticians seem to be engaging in these latter approaches.

[Zoosemiotics] is especially suitable for studying objects that are in-between - phenomena that connect humans to the animal world.

I like that Sebeok classified the study of human nonverbal communication under zoosemiotics. And it is indeed the case that the study of human territorial (proxemic, spatial) behaviour has based it's assumptions on Heini Hediger's work.

Animal classification in Navaho Indians:

• Speaking creatures (humans)
• Nonspeaking creatures
  • non-moving creatures (plants)
  • moving creatures (animals)
    • runners
    • fliers
    • crawlers

I like that the broadest level of distinction is between verbal (humans) and nonverbal (all other creatures), though it does feel like you could find moving and non-moving humans and further distinguish humans that run, walk, crawl, etc. The source: Levi-Strauss's The Savage Mind, pp. 39.

"[...] but all animals without exception exercise their power of singing or chattering chiefly in connection with the intercourse of the sexes." (Aristotle, Historia Animalium)

Humans are also animals. So...

Only meaningful use of language and thinking cannot be explained mechanically;

I think this is where one of the major flaws of Descartes's argumentation lies. Meaningful use of language and thinking is far from the only phenomena that cannot be explained mechanically. Also, how sure are we that the meaningful use of language and thinking cannot be explained "mechanically"? What if neuro- and cognitive sciences develop far enough to explain every cognition and affection "mechanically" in terms of physiochemical mechanisms?

Umwelt is the subjective world of animal that corresponds to its body plan, perceptual and effectual organs, and that is the only existing reality for the animal. Umwelt is organized by meanings.

Umwelt seems to be organized according to the physiological body plan (organs and organelles) as well as the perceptual world that these give rise to. This is a concise statement on the Umwelt, but as always something about it remains ungraspable (I recall that the body plan had something to do with teleology). I will surely have to read Uexküll in original German when I begin learning German.

[...] every organism reacts to the environment selectively as a subject, by ignoring certain influences and reacting to others in its specific way. The core of Uexküll's functional cycle is selective perception, interpretation and reaction or feedback.

Just this morning I thought of a neat metaphor to demonstrate selective perception and perceptual organization. When you hold an open book in in your hands backwards, all the letters turn into a jumble of lines, unrecognizable and complex. But once you turn the book teh right side up, words just jump out at you. I'd like to use this metaphor to explain the skills involved in "reading" nonverbal behaviour. But it works equally well here. The behaviour of an animal of another species may appear as a jumbled mess of complex signals, while the behaviour of a conspecific simply jumps at you as meaningful.

What is the function of the behavior, how it helps animal to survive? - functional explanation;

Ah. So that's what is meant by functional in this context. Here "functional" is almost synonymous with "adaptive".

Zoosemiotics ([Sebeok] 1963) - a discipline "within which the science of signs intersects with ethology devoted to the scientific study of signaling behavior in and across animal species".

Since humans are also animals and also have signaling behavior, the so-called "human ethology" does relegate human nonverbal communication, if not the totality of anthroposemiotics, under zoosemiotics. In this sense there would be a concatenating order: biosemiotics - zoosemiotics - anthroposemiotics.

First zoosemiotic source: Peter Marler's paper "Logical analysis of animal communication" (Journal of Theoretical Biology, 1961).

Oh wow, this is even available online. AND it uses "the methods developed by C. W. Morris (1946) for the logical analysis of human language" that distinguistes identifiors, designators, appraisors and prescriptors. This means that I will have to read it. That is, I need to read it.

Animals do not have language and human language should stay outside of the scope of zosemiotics.

I concur with this statement. It is also the reason why I didn't enjoy the seminars as much as I could have. Usually three male students started exchanging laborious ideas about the nature of human language while everyone else just listened on. If it were up to me I would have moderated the seminars to avoid spending too much time on language and focus on animal communication, the actual topic of the course.

Animal communication should be interpreted in the context of the animal Umwelts.

Also very agreeable. The Umwelt model is readily applicable to most everything involving animals and signs, so viewing animal communication in Uexküll's terms should be natural and easy. For some reason it's not though. I have yet to see an approach to animal communication that relies on the Umwelt theory to a satisfactory degree. (I have to specify that to me "satisfactory" here implies that the approach could equally well be used to view human nonverbal communication.)

Sebeok's research program of six questions:

1. How an animal formulates and codes its message?
2. How will messages be transferred, through what channel and under what circumstances?
3. How animal who acts as a receiver in the communicative situation decodes and interprets message?
4. What is the possible repertoire of the specific species?
5. What are the properties of code, used by the specific species?
6. What role has the contextual information for the communication?

Since this is one of my favorite topics (communication models), I'll compare these six questions to Ruesch's (1953) seven questions and modify them to suit animal communication.

1. How does the communicative behaviour signify or what is the so-called meaning of the given signal?
2. What media, channels and symbolization systems of communication are used? This involves both the perception and transmission channels employed. Input (Merkwelt) and output (Wilkwelt) should be distinguished.
3. With whom is being communicated and how do the receivers (animals of different species) perceive, evaluate and respond to the communication?
4. Who is communicating and what are the "effector organs" of the sender? What is this species' Umwelt like and what are the levels and functions of its communication?
5. What is communicated and how does the intent of the sender differ from the interpretation of the receiver?
6. What are the limitations and the context of communication, what is the type of situation in which it occurs, what rules are observed and what roles are assumed?
7. What is the result of the communication and how does it effect the behaviour or actions of communicators as well as other species involved?

The questions don't match exactly, but very similar or at least complementary answers could be yielded if both were asked.

What role does the contextual information have for the communication? The meaning of the perceived messages can differ depending on:

• does the territory, wheret communication takes place, belong to the sender or to the receiver,
• does communication take place in the open environment or in the close and secure surrounding,
• do participants stay in the same distance during communication or change position regarding to each other.

Also, every received message becomes the contextual information for following messages (cf. works of W. John Smith).

Oh wow. This is strongest alternative to Jakobson's weak context component. In human terms these would be: where is communication situated (public area, a special-function room, someone's place, semiprivate or private area, etc)? Is the environment, to use terms advanced by Hall, sociofugal or sociopedal? Does the communication occur "in situ" (e.g. fixed place) or during movement, e.g. walk, a car or bus ride, etc? The latter aspect of previous messages becoming the context for following messages is what should be accounted for by the contextual function (at least in the synfunctional dimension).

Conspecific spheres around the animal body [according to Heini Hediger]:

• social distance (kept normally by conspecifics),
• personal distance (kept normally in pair relations),
• flight distance (where animal tries to escape),
• critical distance (where animal attacks).

Typology was used later by Edward T. Hall in sociology.

This was one part of Hall's final product (proxemic zones). The other part came from the German-American linguist Martin Joos, whose then-popular book on speech styles, The Five Clocks, gave the impetus to apply Hediger's spheres on human spatial communication.

Post-linguistic era of zoosemiotics: criticism over the suitability of the transmissional communication approach for zoosemiotics and search for alternatives.

This is very much to my liking because it reflects the problems I'm having in studying nonverbal communication. The transmissional model just doesn't work well when there is barely an explicit and intentional message. In my own search for alternatives I've replaced "nonverbal communication" with discussion of "nonverbal behaviour" and instead of messages or cues prefer to think of the "regulative" function of social behaviour. That is, the behaviour of one organism influences, modifies, controls, guides, conducts, and generally effects the behaviour of others around it in a variety of ways greatly outside the scope of a simple exchange of messages. At the moment I think that the alternative may be viewing it from a more general or broader level: not on the level of single messages, but on the level of clusters and complexes of messages and non-messages - but here I lack the terminology to phrase it correctly.

[...] things of animate or living nature (body forms, colors and patterns of skin, sounds that animals make, physical signs that tehy leave behind, etc.).

A reference to Adolf Portmann's 1967. Animal Forms and Patterns: A Study of the Appearance of Animals. All of his papers available online are in German, but there is a paper on him by Karel Kleisner in the journal Biosemiotics, volume 1 issue 2, pp. 207-219 (2008).

Communication - semiotic interaction between two participants (differs from semiosis in that communication includes a sender and code repertoire).

Definining communication as semiotic interaction does make sense from Tartu semiotics persepctive: in autocommunication the two participants are one person interacting through or across (space and) time. Such a broad definition also allows for Lotman's five textual communication forms: e.g. semiotic interaction between the text and the reader, between the reader and the cultural background of the text, etc.

Representations are means of culture for organizing its relations with other living organisms; representations can also have various roles in culture (memorizing places, times or events; charterizing cultural objects and building personal or social identities).

All of these are interesting. Representations that characterize cultural objects seems to be something I haven't thought of before but should. Memorizing places, times or events is also neat. A specific instance that comes to mind in terms of relations between animals and human culture is the imagery of Russia as a bear and how at the eve of WWII, "We called the bear for help (against the nazis) but then the bear didn't leave."

In birds, but also in many mammals mating rituals have elements of young-adult relationships.

This reminds me of the poetic notion that love is a space two people create for themselves to be children again. This is exemplified of how lovers treat each other like babies, caress and care for each other. There is also the example of the actor-pair Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally communicating at home almost completely in baby-talk (which may have been a joke, though).

An ability to make associations is the basis for semiosis; the ability to establish links between perception and suitable action is the basis for Uexküllian functional cycle.

I still wonder how this could be applied on humans. Other than etiquette and "proper behaviour" nothing comes to mind.

In communication theory / semiotics, common possibilities to define communication are:

1. transmissional - to focus on the transmission of message;
2. semiotic / semantic - to focus on the meanings in communication;
3. pragmatic / social - to focus on the creation of common understandings by communication;

The third one seems most interesting, though I would distance myself from "common understandings" and focus on the aspect of organizing behaviour or action. Another slide tells that this view of communication as "a process in which participants create and share information with one another to reach mutual understanding" is authored by Rogers and Kincaid in their 1981. Communication Networks. They use this paradigm to approach family planning in Korea, for example. Reviewer Rolf T. Wigand wrote: "at hand of the Korean data, the authors illustrate effectively the usefulness of network concepts in describing, explaining, and predicting individual, dyadic, group and system behavior." (Social Networks 5(1): 89-91) It appears that they were influenced by Ruesch's paradigm ("individual" here most likely refers to Ruesch's "intrapersonal network"). In any case I cannot find the book itself but there are reviews out there, which may be helpful for rethinking Ruesch.

OR even better, "communication is the transmission of any sign-mediated influence from one part of a living system to another part" (T. Maran).

This actually is better, because "sign-mediated influence" leaves it open for a variety of semiosic processes (not just "exchange of messages"), both direct and indirect, and "a living system" is equally broad and can be understood as a single organism as well as a group of organism (as a system) or the ecosystem at large. Even culture can be understood as a living system - Lotman often uses the notion "organic system".

In autocommunication an organism sends out some signal to the environment and gets some information about itself or about the surrounding environment by receiving the same signal.

I wrote a paper on semiotic approaches to autocommunication, but it was a failure, because I ran out of space with just a cursory overview of what semiotic thinkers such as Peirce, Mead, Morris, Ruesch, Jakobson and Lotman thought about self-communication, intrapersonal communication or autocommunication. I may have to write another paper dealing with interesting questions such as how exactly is echolocation a form of autocommunication and whether there are analogues to this in the human realm. I believe there are countless instances of humans and animals engaging in semiotic relations with their environment in order to deduce information about themselves, others around them or the environment itself - it is only a matter of building a solid theoretical framework and elucidating illustrative examples.

Distinction between propriocetive (inside body) and exteroceptive (through the environment) feedback / autocommunication.

I don't actually fully "get" proprioception. I'll have to read Sherrington again when I know more of physiological research at that time, but I'm really confused about where interoceptive falls in this scheme. It would appear that interoceptive is actually inside the body and proprioceptive is something like "perception of your own body through it's outer surface". Oliver Sacks wrote that before Sherrington, proprioception was known simply as "muscle sense" (cf. Th.v. Uexküll 1992: 463-465). More confusion stems from the Latin proprius which meant: (1) own, individual; and (2) special, particular, characteristic (e.g. the English "proper"). In this etymological sense, proprioception would be simply self-perception.

Animal body plans or body forms determine the location of perceptual and communicatory organs, and accordingly what and from where it is possible to perceive.

Communicatory organs are here probably synonymous with Uexküll's effector organs.

Communication by vibrations. Tactile communication can be divided between:

• Mediated tactile communication (e.g. elephants communicating by trampling the ground)
• Immediate tactile communication (grooming behvaior in primates and in other herd animals).

For creating sound signals and other vibrations animals use the most diverse methods - vocal cords, syrinx, vibrating the whole body or some part of it, rubbing different parts of the body, using special membranes and airbags, creating sound by making contact with the environment.

I have begun turning attention to "mediated tactile communication" but call is strepitation after Roger W. Wescott's paper Introducing Coenetics: A Biosocial Analysis of Communication". Strepitus or "communicative body noise" includes "foot-stamping, which involves contact with the ground". We're dealing with vibrations, but the classification depends on how vibrations are received: by tactile sense, by listening or, as in some marginal cases vibrations can even be seen, by visual sense.

Shared activities of single individuals may result in rather sophisticated behavioral regulation (e.g. building of the anthill).

I find this most interesting, as my own ventures into the "power" aspects of nonverbal communication have led me to prefer the term "social regulation of behaviour". This is something that we have in common with other social species.

[Mechanisms that birds use for orinetation:] low-frequency infra-sound (indicating the position of oceans and other large water-bodies) [...]

Hmm. So infrasound does have some positive uses as well. A quick search does tell that there are "Infrasound sensitive neurones in the pigeon cochlear ganglion" and there occurs "Communication by infrasound in a non-stridulating cricket".

In ritual fights such body postures and gestures are used that allow opponents to make predictions about each other's body size and fighting capability. For instance, bears stand up in the conflict situation, showing to competitors their actual body size.

How nice of them.

Signs are often related to the physiological processs of animals, such as metabolism. All animals need to excrete residues of their metabolic processes. Every such excrement is a natural sign about the animal, showing that it has been in the environment.

For humans, the natural excretions are complemented with garbology.

An interesting group of signs, related to the physical reality and animal physiology, are the motivational signs or motivational signals, i.e. movements that indicate motivation or intention. Motivational signs are for instance stretching head, neck and wings before flying in birds. In this case also the direction of the head has a sign value, as it indicates the intended direction of the take off.

In humans this is discussed under the heading of "action potentials". A common example involves the student who starts packing his things, sits on the edge of the chair, trebles his legs rhythmically and glances yearnfully towards the exit before the class has officially ended.

Semiotic selection (T. Maran, K. Kleisner) - a process in which some image in the selector's Umwelt is imprinted into the perceptible features of another organism. Semiotic selection creates linkage between animal's inner perceptual sphere and physical forms in nature and between different species.

This sounds a lot like the recognition concept of species that K. Kull has talked about. The Phylloscopus trochiloides example on the next slide, wherein the same species of birds with different songs around the Himalayas don't recognize each other when they meet in Siberia.

This approach emphasizes the role of organism's own semiotic and behavioral activity as relevant factors for directing the course of evolutionary processes. Evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo - emphasizing the role of the ontogenetic development in forming a phenotype (that may have evolutionary consequences).

This seems to be the core of the matter of the epigenetic view. (As little as I understand it...)

British entomologist Richard I. Vane-Wright defines mimicry: "Mimicry occurs when an organism or group of organisms (the mimic) simulates signal properties of a second living organism (the model), such that the mimic is able to take some advantage of the regular response of a sensitive signal-receiver (the operator) towards the model, through mistaken identity of the mimic for the model" (Vane-Wright 1976: 50).

In grifting terms, the con (the mimic) simulates some properties of the "real thing" (the model) so as to fool the mark (the operator).

Alexei A. Sharov has explicated mimicry with the term 'inverse sign', where sign has a positive value for the sender ('transmitter' in his terminology), but negative for the receiver. Sharow specifies that 'an inverse sign is always an imitation of some other sign with positive value for the receiver' (Sharov 1992: 365).

In case of the mimic octopus, it takes on the shape and behaviour of other poisonous creatures in its environment.