Social Attitudes and Nonsymbolic Interaction

Blumer, Herbert 1936. Social Attitudes and Nonsymbolic Interaction. The Journal of Educational Sociology 9(9): 515-523.

My chief interest in this paper is to treat in a more conspicuous fashion one phase of social attitudes and of their development that is usually ignored or given but minor consideration. I refer to their affective nature as set apart from their ideational content or symbolic character. In the usual discussions where some attempt is made to analyze the nature and, so to speak, to describe the structure of social attitudes, attention is given primarily to the symbolic character. (Blumer 1936: 515)

The affective structure of social attitudes.

In regarding the attitude as an orientation on the part of the individual, as a "set" of his musculature, as a tendency to act in a given way, or as an incipient preparation to a scheme of conduct, there is usually an implied emphasis on the meaning of the object or situation to which the orientation is had. It does not matter where the "meaning" is lodged in the structure of nerve and muscle, as the physiologically minded incline to believe, or in a set of images or mental constructions, or in the object. The point is that the attitude as usually depicted represents a plan of action dependent upon the meaningful character of the object or situation toward which it is directed. (Blumer 1936: 515)

As in older rationalist psychology, the semiotic "disposition to respond" (with a sign, to a sign) is dependent on the nebulous "object", a part of the three-pronged Peircean sign.

As such the "symbolical" character of the object incorporated in the attitude as a plan of action receives the stress; the affective nature of the attitude is ignored or given minimal attention. (Blumer 1936: 515)

Replace "symbolical" with "semiotic" and you have a rather common statement about sign theory. "The affective nature of the attitude" on the other hand, seems as paradoxical as "the passionate nature of the desire", that is, two terms of Firstness are counterposed. From Day's (1876) definition of affection, it would seem that the affective nature of the attitude concerns the love/hate relationship towards the object of an attitude.

This point stands out more clearly in the treatment given to the way in which the social milieu enters into the formation of an attitude to give it its social character. This treatment usually is expressed in the declaration that the social milieu "defines" the relatively unformed activity of the individual. The responses of others to one's own activity are regarded as signifying the line along which that activity may go. Here the thought is that these responses of others give the individual primarily a "realization," "interpretation," or "meaning" which represents the way in which the object of his act is socially interpreted and the way in which that object is likely to be construed on subsequent occasions. Hence the individual's attitude or approach to that object becomes organized on the basis of the symbolic character of the object as that has been outlined by the acts of others. To view the formation of attitudes in this way is not, in my judgment, intrinsically wrong, but it does tend, as remarked above, to emphasize the symbolic feature and to minimize the element of feeling. (Blumer 1936: 515-516)

The social construction of attitudes. Basically this touches the way signs grow in the community - Peirce described it quite poetically. An example of "the way in which the object of [someone's] act is socially interpreted" is the way Aaron Swart's downloading of JSTOR's database content could be interpreted either as an act of felony (intellectual content theft), liberation (data belonging to the public domain should be publicly accessible), or research (the scientific data hosted by JSTOR could potentially illuminate the relations between corporations, scientific work, and global climate change). The critique here essentially pertains to viewing attitudinal semiosis either as a public or personal matter - when it is viewed in terms of how "the acts of others" organize the individual's attitude towards objects, or in terms of how intimate feelings, i.e. affect, contribute to the formation of attitudes. This distinction is quite relevant in discourse on racism, and whether it's a matter of sociocultural conditioning (mediated, discursive influence) or personal experience (unmediated, intuitive influence). (The distinction between intuitive and discursive is Peirce's.)

It is this feeling side of the attitude that I wish to single out for consideration. I regard feeling as being intrinsic to every social attitude, and, as such, as differentiating attitudes from other types of orientation which in terms of definition would be regarded as attitudes by many writers. Common usage seems to me to carry an implicit recognition of the affective element. Thus we speak of attitudes toward such objects as parents, country, races, group, and professions. Sentiments and feelings are involved in the relations to such objects. Contrariwise, we do not speak ordinarily of an attitude to such things as, let us say, pencils, chairs, or doorknobs. Certainly, to such objects people in our culture have defined ways of acting represented by tendencies, muscular sets, or orientations. But in common parlance such sets or tendencies are spoken of as attitudes only when they are marked by some feeling. Thus a person may dislike to use pencils, or an Oriental may have an aversion to chairs which he finds it torturesome to sit in. In these instances, one would, I think, immediately speak of attitudes. An affective element has entered in. It is the presence of this element which seems to justify one in speaking of a given orientation or activity tendency as an attitude. (Blumer 1936: 516)

In this, Blumer is extending the Humean (was it Hume?) connection between cognition of emotion (namely, that cognition is not free from emotion but always even in some minimal influencing it). The way he defines attitudes likens it to what we commonly qualify as "social attitudes". Gustav Jahoda's (2007) paper about the attitudes towards the New Guinea natives in the diaries of Malinowski and Thurnwald immediate comes to mind. A similarly minded study of social attitudes in scholars has been conducted by Wolfgang Drechsler (2009) on Cassirer, Jung, and Uexküll from the perspective of political semiotics. Much like Peirce's definition of the sign, Clay's definition of consciousness, and Day's definition of the affections, attitude is (here) defined as a type of relation to an object, characterized by a type of orientation towards, or element of, feeling. At the end of the day they're all constructing rational - in some loose sense, phenomenological - classifications of experience, and doing so in philosophical terms that have an extensive history (the "object" reaches back to Ancient Mediterranean philosophy, even - if I'm not mistaken - to very Ancient South- and East-Asian philosophy and theories of mind). "Dislike" and "aversion" are emphasized because they belong to the category of affect, that is, love and hate. In this particular example, when a peoples is forced to acculturate with unaccustomed cultural practices, they may come to resent these practices as a mediated feeling towards the "overlord". The resting practices are a limited case, but the illustration of sitting in chairs for early 20th Century Chinese, one could add the anthropological study of squatting, which is "un-learned" during growing up by nearly every cultural group except the Slavs and Sudanese. Due to sitting in chairs, the natural resting position of squatting is lost by way of muscle atrophy. The original author of that study (Hewes 1957) noted that it had a component of social attitudes: the squat was (and perhaps still is) viewed as "barbaric", common to "thugs", for example, at least in groups in cultural contact with Russians.

In the theoretical discussions of the nature of attitudes there is, of course, plenty of declaration that attitudes may be marked by strong feelings, and most of the testing devices, as I am familiar with them, proceed on the assumption of the presence of this character. Yet the general tendency is to think of feeling as an ex parte element which may be added to certain attitudes but which is absent from others; the essential part of the attitude is held to consist in its orientation, in the implied symbolic content determining its direction. Such a view I believe to be wrong. Feeling is intrinsic to every social attitude - it is not to be treated as an additional element fused into some symbolic structure which is to be regarded as central to, or as the corpus of, the attitude. (Blumer 1936: 517)

This is an alternative route to argument that feeling is First, along with sensations, emotions, affections, desires, sentiments, and passions (Day 1876: 55).

I am not concerned here with any serious effort to consider the peculiar role or function of the feeling or affective side of the attitude. I believe, however, that this role is quite important. It seems that it is the affective element which ensures the attitude of its vigor, sustains it in the face of attack, and preserves it from change. Common usage seems to have caught this recognition and given it expression in the popular realization that no change a person's attitudes one must change his feelings. (Blumer 1936: 517)

While Day finds the function of feeling important in general, or in relation to social attitudes and altering them, others found this function not only "peculiar" but particular, as in the sign-process (Peirce), or even more particularly in the functioning of the linguistic sign (Ogden & Richards, Bühler, Jakobson). The general idea expressed in this paragraph pertains to something germane to cognitive dissonance research, and its finding that rationalization impedes resolution of dissonance, as beliefs and conceptions have an emotional component, outside of the immediate control of the conscious mind.

My purpose, then, is to call attention to two phases of attitudes: (1) a symbolic aspect represented in the specific direction of the tendency, and (2) an affective aspect assuring the attitude its liveliness, its movement, its vigor, and its tenacity. (Blumer 1936: 517)

At this time it was common in America to consider the referential and emotive functions in tandem and with synonyms like symbolic representation and affective assurance. In some quarters (i.e. Susanne Langer, Charles Morris, etc.) this is embodied in the distinction between "signs" and "symbols".

This affective aspect of the attitude is not only slighted in definition - it has not been given due consideration in the discussions of the process of interaction out of which attitudes arise. Here again the treatment has been weighted heavily on the side of the symbolic content, stressing the formation of the attitude on the level of communication; i.e., in terms of definition or of the conveying of a meaning. Such treatment has not given proper recognition to the fullness and diversity of what takes place in interaction, and so has yielded, in my judgment, only a partial statement of what is involved in the formation of attitudes. (Blumer 1936: 517-518)

The interactionist of course stresses the interaction process. By the "nonsymbolic interaction" in the title of this paper, Blumer must mean the "insignificant" communication gestures that constitute the Conversation of Attitudes in Mead's parlance, and Communization in Morris's. In effect, the argument is one familiar from later contributions of the Chicago school in sociology, which culminated in the study of nonverbal communication.

While we have only limited knowledge of what occurs in the interaction between human beings, I think one can recognize that the process has at least two levels, levels which perhaps represent extremes, with different admixtures of the two in between. I prefer to call the two levels the symbolic and the nonsymbolic. Little need be said here of symbolic interaction, since this is the one phase of interaction which has been given a great deal of treatment in the literature, although with results that are none too convincing. (Blumer 1936: 518)

This limited knowledge pertains to the "subliminal" in Wake's diagram. While Blumer distinguishes two levels, Bühler distnguishes three, Malinowski four, and Jakobson six. The symbolic and the non-symbolic roughly correspond to Langer's discursive and non-discursive, and Peirce's discursive and intuitive, though "intuition" he had to restore to an earlier meaning.

It is usually what is considered under the rubric of communication where that term is used carefully and with circumspection. Suffice it to say that on this level individuals respond to the meaning or significance of one another's actions. The gesture of the other is subject to interpretation which provides the basis for one's own response. We may say, roughly, that at this level of interaction the stimulus-response couplet has inserted a middle term in the form of interpretation which implies some checking of immediate reaction, and leads, as suggested, to directed response upon the basis of the meaning assigned to the gesture. (Blumer 1936: 518)

This is, indeed, early communication theory, though much from the 1930s has been largely forgotten. In essence, Blumer attempts here to slip "interpretation" into the stimulus-response sequence, much like Jakob von Uexküll, and "central processing" in cybernetic communication theory (Jurgen Ruesch). This is broadlly Peircean, as the interpretant, interpreter, or interpretation is placed between the subject and object.

Interaction on its nonsymbolic level operates, in my judgment, in an intrinsically different way. It is marked by spontaneous and direct response to the gestures and actions of the other individual, without the intermediation of any interpretation. That there is involved a lively process of interaction of this sort when people meet is, I think, undeniable, although it is difficult to detect. People are unaware of this kind of response just because it occurs spontaneously, without a conscious or reflective fixing of attention upon those gestures of the other to which one is responding. (Blumer 1936: 518)

By "spontaneous and direct" he comes close to intuitive. In essence, he is saying that nonverbal communication is unthinking action, where the conscious processing of signification is a secondary aspect, a parallel process on another level. As later researchers verified, not only is it difficult to detect, it is difficult to formalize, structure, and treat in a precise manner. The lack of conscious or reflective fixing of attention upon one's own responses to another's actions is treated by Clay in terms of "unconscious equivalents of interpretations" (1882: 311), and - especially with regard to conscious attention - by vice-judgments (1882: 47).

It is this nonsymbolic phase of interaction that should be considered with reference to the formation of the affective element of social attitudes. It is from this type of interaction chiefly that come the feelings that enter into social and collective attitudes. (Blumer 1936: 518-519)

Notice that now nonsymbolic interaction is a "phase", meaning a passing period of time. Before it was a level. It seems multidimensional. The "formation" here leads us to social constructivism, particularly the formation of social attitudes. In other words, communication reifies beliefs and gives them a shared emotional ground. We're dealing here with what Malinowski meant by "social sentiments". Henry Day is an invaluable resource in this regard, as he defines sentiments as "feelings which are characterized either by intelligence or endeavor" (1876: 94).

They arise from the unwitting, unconscious responses that one makes to the gestures of others. To state this point is one thing; to prove it, another. However, I believe a good case can be made for the assertion, and an appreciation of its validity can be given, by considering the phenomenon of impression, especially the formation of first impressions. It is a familiar experience in meeting people for the first time to discover in oneself immediate likes or dislikes, without any clear understanding of the basis of these feelings. Something in the form of a spontaneous and undirected response has taken place, establishing a feeling and providing a basis for one's judgment. (Blumer 1936: 519)

E. R. Clay treats this subject extensively, as it regards the vicarious nature of consciousness: that there are subliminal processes, especially in the species of experience he calls Emotive Perception and Latent Experience (Clay 1882: 188). His account is accusatory: there are mental representations that appear to be conscious, rational, argued, known, but in fact are counterfeits of attention (Clay 1882: 3) such as advertising and propaganda which stick to mind despite will to put it out of mind, counterfeits of remembrance (Clay 1882: 75) which are not true memories but inferences from retrospection, counterfeits of observation (Clay 1882: 135) borne from introspection, counterfeits of selective deliberation (Clay 1882: 207) pertaining to ideology, and counterfeits of purpose (Clay 1882: 214) that pretend to be true and deliberated intentions. counterfeits of charity (Clay 1882: 352) known in Christian "superior" morality despite mediocre altruistic behaviour, and finally counterfeits of argument (Clay 1882: 384) by which he means a logical fallacies and false equivalences in particular. While Blumer's point is that judgments have an unconscious component, a beginning in Firstness, he's merely emphasizing the role of feelings. Clay seems to go much further than that, actually devling on different aspects of how our judgments form, and whether they have an internal origin in feeling or if they're substitutes for feelings that have pervaded our becoming, infecting us from without and giving us the false impression that they're our own making.

Even when one can give some explanation of his feelings in terms of traits of the others, most frequently the designation of the traits follows the having of the feeling. Seldom, I think, in the give and take of social intercourse, is the having of impressions dependent upon a prior analysis of the symbolic value of the other's traits. An individual who approached all his social relations solely on the premise of such a preliminary analysis would, I think, be exceedingly awkward in making adjustments, assuming that he could get along at all. The very nature of the impressions seems to me to point to their immediacy. (Blumer 1936: 519)

First impressions are fast unconscious evaluations of the others' character, and they cannot be explained with great precision because this type of understanding requires prior intuitive experience. Some emotions (especially blended ones) cannot be described well, and if one tried to approach others with a descriptivist method it might - as many, from Sapir to the ethnomethodologists, have pointed out - exhaust conscious energy (Henry Spencer) and lead one to stumble. (Frequent and/or continuous object- and meta-level concurrence or intervention is consuming and fatigueing.) In terms of "adjustment", Blumer precedes the integrationists.

There is presupposed here a direct and spontaneous response to others which analysis can show more easily to be unwitting than to be conscious. Such impressions, it should be remarked, are not trivial. That they provide the immediate bases for the direction of conduct is clear; that they are less readily changed than formed I think will also be found to be true. Their consideration suggests that it is probably the organization set up by unwitting response which is the foundation of social attitudes; it is such organization that has to be changed if any significant alteration is to be made in these attitudes. (Blumer 1936: 519)

Impression formation is indeed a playground of immediate interpretants. Though the people who reviewed first impression literature in the 1970s found that first impressions are indeed readily changed with more communicative contact and more dynamic consequent impressions. The organization of immediate impressions is the foundation of social attitudes.

This suggested relation of the affective aspect of social attitudes to nonsymbolic interaction invites further analysis. On its stimulus side nonsymbolic interaction is constituted, I believe, by expressive behavior; i.e., a release of feeling and tension, to be distinguished as different from indication of intellectual intention, which properly comes on the symbolic level. Expressive behavior is presented through such features as quality of the voice - tone, pitch, volume - in facial set and movement, in the look of the eyes, in the rhythm, vigor, agitation of muscular movements, and in posture. These form the channels for the disclosure of feeling. It is through these that the individual, as we say, reveals himself as apart from what he says or does. Expressive behavior is primarily a form of release, implying a background of tension. It tends to be spontaneous and unwitting; as such, it usually appears as an accompaniment of intentional and consciously directed conduct. (Blumer 1936: 520)

This parallel occurred to me when thinking about placing "meaning" or "interpretation" between the stimulus and response in the functional cycle (Uexküll). Namely, that stimulus palallels expression because they're both on the level of Firstness, but in "indication of intellectual intention" Blumer seems to be writing lyric poetry and in the process conflating Secondness and Thirdness. This probably makes it one of Peirce's degenerate categories? Blumer uses "channel" in the very technical sense, in what today would probably amount to "modality", i.e. sensory channel distinguished via perception/input and action/output "organs" or "devices". With the "background of tension" he seems to be perpetuating the psychohydraulic model of emotions, mixing the energetic aspect of behavior with the internal tension (or intensity) of emotions.

There is, I think, common recognition that expressive gestures are especially effective in catching attention and creating impression. Stripped of expressive features, the act of the other person is not likely to incite or inspire, is missing in dramatic qualities, and requires some coercion of attention in order to be held before one. All of us have had experience with discourse whose symbolic content may have been of intrinsic merit but which failed to gain attention and failed to make an impression. Likewise, to take a contrary example, we are all familiar with the speaker, orator, or lecturer whose display of interest and enthusiasm, whose use of dramatic utterance, and whose lively play of expressive gesture all combine to overshadow a meager symbolic statement. It is the overtone of expressive gesture which makes the situation fascinating and effective. (Blumer 1936: 520)

An aspect of why the emotive and phatic functions are conflated as easily as the conative and referential functions. This is Wake's vortex (a watex?) in operation: consciousness is intentional, and emotions spring from and tend towards latent experiences. Blumer's "overtone" is comparable, compatible, and combinable with Richalds' "tone", resulting in the notion that what makes someone's expressions stimulating, fascinating ad effective is the relation we have with them. This could be further developed in the direction of generalized social attitude in regard to phaticity: there are those for whom greetings, small talk and gregariousness are perfunctory obligations, and those who delight in the ritual and enjoy the pullulation of behaviour patterns. The plus and minus poles in this instance varies with the nature of the interpersonal relation.

Expressive gestures seem to enjoy a special uniqueness in gaining ready and immediate responsiveness. Speaking metaphorically, one might declare that human beings are delicately attuned to one another on the level of expressive behavior. They seem to be especially sensitive to such display on the part of others. Expressive behavior exerts a claim on one's attention; to ignore it usually requires some act of decision, some justification to oneself as to why one does not attend to it. (Blumer 1936: 520-521)

What is emotional communication or emotional contagion? What is empathy or sembling? Or communization, or a conversation of attitudes. It's where intuition connects Jakobson's emotive and phatic functions in non- and paralinguistic mediums.

The peculiarity of nonsymbolic interaction, then, is that on the side of both stimulus and response it is spontaneous, direct, and unwitting, and that it operates between the parties as a rapid and especially facile channel peculiarly congenial to human beings. Because it is expressive on one side, it is likely to impressive on the other. The disclosure of affective states on the one side seems to arouse and influence feelings on the other side. (Blumer 1936: 521)

We're dealing with hypersemiotic communication (Fiordo 1989). That it "arouses and influences" is congenial with Ruesch & Bateson's terminology, i.e. mutual awareness and influence.

It is my belief that it is just this nonsymbolic phase of interaction which has been ignored in the usual theoretical discussions of how attitudes are formed inside of a social milieu. The treatment, as suggested above, in so far as it has risen above the mere statement that there are action and reaction, has tended to treat this formation on the symbolic level in terms of the defining activities of others, or the conveying of a meaning to the individual, which gives direction to his act. And most sophisticated attempts to change or transform attitudes have followed this theoretical lead by placing reliance on a symbolic content which conceivably might yield the individual a new picture of the object in question. Yet it is my feeling that both this theoretical interpretation and the practical efforts based on it seriously ignore the affective aspects of attitudes. The feeling element is a basic part of the attitude and has to be changed in order to have guarantees of a genuine transformation. (Blumer 1936: 521)

The implication is that affect is a transformative, rather than stabilizing, force. Blumer feels that the affective aspect has been ignored, and proceeds with an attempt to direct or inspire the transformation of the situation. What are feelings without emotions? asks La Roux.

I think this change is likely to be made effectively on the nonsymbolic level and not merely seeking to convey a new interpretation of the object. We are familiar with the frequent futility of trying to change a person's attitude through some form of intellectual conversation. One may convince him in argument, yet his feelings remain untouched. He retains, even though in a pertubed form, his previous attitude, with the original orientation to action which it stood for. However, the disclosure of feeling through some form of expressive behavior readily touches affective states - awakening, setting, disturbing, or modifying them. (Blumer 1936: 521-522)

In cognitive dissonance theory terms, he is describing the phenomenon of trivialization. The term "modifying" should be doubly emphasized, because "modification" comes up in the discussion of feelings by Henry Day, and attitudes by Charles Morris.

These remarks concerning nonsymbolic interaction are tantamount to declaring that in group life there is a collective interplay of feeling which constitutes a milieu for the affective life of each one of us, and so for the development of our social attitudes. It is inside of such a texture of expressive behavior that our social feelings are nurtured - its absence leads to their impoverishment or decay. Our attitudes, or their affective side, are sustained through the reinforcement we receive from the disclosures of feeling in the expressive conduct of others. (Blumer 1936: 522)

Recent White House Office request for information on artificial intelligence contained the idea (from Respondent 31) that "Humans update their memory with every interaction" - thus highlighting the fact that "common memory" is an important (though frequently ignored) component of human communication, and that human-computer interactions are lacking common memory because our "conversations" with technology are not between mutually comprehending intelligences but that between a master and an unthinking slave. Respondent 31 is emphasizing the dynamic quality of human-computer relations, where much is to be wished for. Likewise, Blumer is here putting forth the idea that the affective side of our attitudes are socially updated through nonsymbolic interactions. There's clearly a pullulation of similar thinking here. But where the excrement figuratively contacts the ventilation is the "nonsymbolic" part of this formulation. While some emphasize the technology's ability to understand human motives, plans, and actions, others are working on deep learning application on multimodal media, which must - if mutually intelligible dialogues between us is to become natural - include our nonsymbolic interactions, bringing up the paradox of how to codify something so dynamic that uncodifyability is part of its logic. This would include not only human emotional communication, but also our aesthetic inclinations and semiotic creativity.

To refer to the expressive behavior of others as forming a collective texture is not to speak in idle metaphor. I should like to point out that expressive behavior is regularized by social codes much as is language or conduct. There seems to be as much justification and validity to speak of an affective structure or ritual in society as of a language structure or pattern of meanings. Almost every stabilized social situation in the life of a group imposes some scheme of affective conduct on individuals, whose conformity to it is expected. (Blumer 1936: 522)

Social Text is an actual journal title. The problem of codifying expressive behaviour is dynamic in this particular casue due to its multiple sources of influence: it can be regularized by linguistic traditions and innovations, everyday behaviour, cultural material, memes, and any of the thousands of channels through which "the objects of our minds" travel. The problem is partly social, in intergroup variety, but partly inexplicably reflexive and enigmatic.

At a funeral, in a church, in the convivial group, in the polite assemblage, in the doctor's office, in the theater, at the dinner table, to mention a few instances, narrow limits are set for the play of expressive conduct and affective norms are imposed. In large measure, living with others places a premium on skill in observing the affective demands of social relations; similarly, the socialization of the child and his incorporation into the group involves an education into the niceties of expressive conduct. These affective rules, demands, and expectations form a code, etiquette, or ritual which, as suggested above, is just as much a complex, interdependent structure as is the language of the group or its tradition. (Blumer 1936: 522-523)

Emotional expressions are regulated. Social relations impose affective demands. Socialization involves learning to express emotions in a socially regulated way.

The view which I am suggesting in this discussion is that social life in human groups can be viewed in one of its aspects as a network of affective relations, operating in the form of expressive stimulation and impressive response. It is this nonsymbolic interaction which seems to form the setting for the formation of the feelings which are intrinsic to and basic to social attitudes. My foregoing remarks are chiefly as a series of conjectures, but they will suffice, I think, to call attention to a primary phase of social attitudes which seems to be unduly ignored in current theoretical discussions. (Blumer 1936: 523)

Affective networks? This paper is 80 years removed from present, yet some parts of it read like something first published this year.

Phatic Gesture

Schandorf, Michael 2012. Mediated gesture: Paralinguistic communication and phatic text. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19(3): 319-344.

Digital and social media text is conversational text that fulfills the phatic needs of typical social interaction: 'keeping in touch" does not in any way constitute a cultural regression but represents the fundamental ground of human cognition, which is inescapably both social and technologically dependent. (Schandorf 2012: 319)

So this is written contra Vincent Miller? The part about social media text being conversational also makes sense in a manner this author probably didn't intend: in this blog I am quoting and commenting but the format is that of a conversation. The quotes enact the role of the communication partner, and I respond, although the author of the text cannot respond (it is up to the text to supply a tentative response - as when my comment contains an idea that the next paragraph in the text actually does discuss).

Despite early techno-utopian visions of virtually embodied interactions in virtual worlds, the wide accessibility of mobile phones and VoIP technologies, the popularization of video conferencing (e.g. Skype) and the most recent availability of mobile video communications (e.g. Apple's Facetime), most digital media communication remains firmly text-based. Computer-mediated communication began with text messaging and, as the recent spate of digital culture doomsayers are quick to remind us, it has not lost its roots. To take a recent example, Sherry Turkele's Alone Together (2011), the Lonely Crowd for the 21st century, points out, yet again, the growing propensity of text instead of talk, and the inherent inadequacy of rapid-fire, decontextualized messages compared with sustained, semantically and emotionally rich face-to-face interaction. (Schandorf 2012: 319-320)

B-but face-to-face interaction and even VoIP are more focused, time-consuming, and fatigueing than sending an e-mail or leaving a quick message in Facebook chat.

The performance of identity is, in fact, the primary affordance of social media, which allows participants to 'validate and engage with others' (boyd et al. 2010) generating a widely dispersed intersubjectivity (Crawford 2009) through active audience construction (Marwick and boyd 2011) to build a 'faceted identity' (boyd 2001). (Schandorf 2012: 320)

That is, you can select who receives your messages. which without phatic technologies would have been difficult if not impossible in present scale (in an actual crowd you can't control who hears your speech, and sending a written message on paper out to dozens of people is time-consuming and expensive).

The mediated/embodied binary underlying the worrying of 'shallow' new and social media is a false dichotomy. All communication is embodied as all cognition is embodied. (Schandorf 2012: 321)

I would still hold that the distinction is valid. Unlike oral and bodily communication, mediated communication can be intercepted, manipulated or transformed. No-one can pretend to be me in real life without extensive auditioning for body type, applying a lot of make-up and teaching my mannerisms, but it's not all that difficult to hijack my online accounts and take actions under my username. Embodied communication is always authentic or genuine in this minimal sense, but mediated communication is not.

Papacharissi argues that 'Given the level of control over verbal and non-verbal cues in a variety of online conetxts, individuals may put together controlled performances that "give off" exactly the "face" that they intend' (2009: 210). (Schandorf 2012: 321)

Exactly what I mean. Reinventing one's offline self is a lot of work (i.e. joining a gym, eating healthy, going out and making new friends and acquaintances, etc.) but reinventing one's online self is a matter of creating a new account or updating one's profile.

for Carrie Noland (2009, relying on Massumi, 2003), what makes an act a 'gesture' is the involvement of the body in a double process of active (muscular) displacement and (sensory) information gathering: we send information as we receive information; we enact our spaces of communication (Lefebvre 1991), our cognitive and cultural environments. (Schandorf 2012: 322)

"Latin gestus, a masculine noun derived from the verb gerere (meaning to carry or to bear), refers to physical bearing or body movement."

The use of more conventionally paralinguistic forms in digital and social media communications have been previously addressed as mediated forms of 'emotional graaming' (Ling et al., 2005) that function as 'phatic fillers and backchanneling [...] employed in a similar way to FTF conversations' (Quan-Haase 2009: 39; citing Herring 1999b; see also Baron 2004; Schandorf 2011). (Schandorf 2012: 324)

Here "phatic" could very well be replaced with "meaningless" and the effect would be the same.

Retweets (RTs) point back to the original source of a message, while also (like all forms of indication) implicitly pointing to the person doing the RTing and making explicit a connection between two interactants, however loose. (Schandorf 2012: 325)

This reminds me of a passage from an article about the recent school shooting in Oregon: "Officials found a document written by the shooter that "tracked the often desperate and depressed writings from members of a loosely affiliated group ... members associated with the group share profound disappointment with their lots in life and the lack of meaningful relationships." What they mean is that the shooter visited 4chan, an anonymous image board, and the authors of that article consider it a loosely affiliated group. There's not much looser you can get when the group is constituted by visiting the same website.

More broadly, avatars (by, for example, drawing attention to specific phenomena, cultural references, or corporate/collective identities) and Facebook gestures (e.g. 'Like', 'Poke') can be understood as deictic gestures calling attention to the one doing the 'poking' as much as to what is 'liked'. (Schandorf 2012: 325)

The truly phatic aspect here is not drawing attention to the one doing the poking (emotive) nor to what is liked (referential) but the the act of poking itself. Essentially, it is drawing attention to the fact of drawing attention.

The basic format of a tweet is, arguably, a link and a brief contextualizing comment. The deictic aspects instantiate a set of relations between the 'tweeter', the 'tweeted', and the potential audience of followers. (Schandorf 2012: 325)

instantiate: represent as or by an instance - isn't this the same idea? By re-tweeting someone's tweet you're representing by an instance of retweeting that you re-tweet this particular tweeters' tweet? By "a set of relations" it points to the fact that there may be other, non-re-tweeting, forms of relationships between the tweeter and re-tweeter.

To date, only a few 'tweet typologies' have been published, and while those available (e.g. Honeycutt and Herring 2009; Mischaud 2007; Naaman et al. 2010; Oulasvirta et al. 2009) vary widely, they have several commonalities. Common categories include greetings, weather, small talk, emotion, and meta-commentary, among others. These are immediately recognizable as categories of phatic communication, and the phatic character of social media has been noted by others (Miller 2008; Parks 2010; Stankovic 2009; Stankovic et al. 2010). (Schandorf 2012: 334)

Emotios is emotive; meta-commentary is cognitive-referential. References:

• Parks, M. R. 2010. Social network sites as virtual communities. In: Papacharissi, Z. (ed.), A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites. London: Routledge, 105-123. [TÜR]
• Stankovic, M. 2009. Faceted online presence: A semantic web approach. Unpublished masters thesis, Universite Paris-Sud, Orsay, France.
• Stankovic, M.; A. Passant and P. Laublet 2009. Directing status messages to their audience in online communities. Pre-proceedings of Coordination, Organization, Institutions and Norms Workshop. Torino, Italy September 7-11.

Parks argues that 'For online settings such as social networking sites, the most relevant [...] requirements are engaging in shared rituals, social regulation, and collective action through patterned interaction and the creation of relational linkages among members that promote social bonds, a sense of belonging, and a sense of identification with the community' (Parks 2010: 111). (Schandorf 2012: 334)

It seems like Parks is dealing with the phatic community aspect Laver hints towards and Blanco treats lightly. Tartu University has the collection, A Networked Self, wherein Parker's paper is published, but it is lent out until mid-January.

The emphasis on what the Oxford English Dictionary describes as communication 'that serve[s] to establish or maintain social relationships rather than to impart information, communicate ideas, etc.' has led many scholars subject to the high-culture bias of writing (e.g. logocentrism) to understand phatic communication as trivial. Miller, for example, argues that 'in phatic media culture, content is not king, but "keeping in touch" is', and that this represents a worrying dilution of culture and society (2008: 395).
But there is a strong argument to be made that phatic functions influence all social interaction and are fundamental to human communication generally. As Zeyney Tufekci argues, 'that's what humans do' (Tufecki 2011). (Schandorf 2012: 334)

That's the Jakobsonian definition in the OED, and carries a pejorative connotation. The phatic necessity is more akin to La Barre's understanding, but he is usually not included in contemporary phatic studies (Wang et al. is an exception but even they probably stumbled upon him because the words "phatic" and "technology" appearod on the same page in La Barre's book).

But the importance of the emotional identification (or repulsion) enacted in phatic communication runs even deeper because the 'rational' thought and language production that defines human being is based on and grounded in emotion (Damasio 1994; 2003; Ramachandran 2011; Ramachandran & Blakeslee 1998). (Schandorf 2012: 335)

It's that word again (identification), but nothing significant is detailed here about it.

Gesture is the way we enact our identities, the way we think [of] our selves. It is the embodiment of our attitudes and our negotiated assumptions and expectations of our social environments. And if gesture is phatic communication, and new media communication is gestural, then the phatic communion of ambient co-presence is 'the way we interact, and the way we feel each other out there in the realm of the World Wide Web' (Stankovic 2009: 1). (Schandorf 2012: 336)

I'm not so sure about these propositions.

Where early electronic communication technologies such as the telephone and television, combined with transportation technologies such as automobiles and airplanes, centrifugally extended our communities and social networks while geographically dispersing them (Carey 1992; Innis 1950; 1951), new mobile internet communication technologies are generating a centripetal effect that is drawing us all closer together into a variety of overlapping digital 'spaces'. At the same time, 'augmented reality' technologies that combine digital imaging and motion capture with the search and database capabilities of the internet, are overlaying digital 'spaces' upon our physical environments. (Schandorf 2012: 336)

Neat contrast, though.

We currently inhabit an interesting transitional moment in the dynamic evolution of communication technologies, which continue to shape us, individually and socially, as we shape them, through both production and use. (Schandorf 2012: 336)

What is phatic technological habituation?

In his foreword to the book [Rotman, Brian 2008. Becoming Beside Ourselves], Timothy Lenoir writes, 'Not only is thinking always social, culturally situated, and technologically mediated, but individual cognition requires symbiosis with cognitive collectivities and external memory systems to happen in the first place' (Lenoir 2009: xxvii). (Schandorf 2012: 337)

Peirce (thought is social) + Lotman (culture is memory).

In the 'ambient co-presence' of networked digital communications technologies, the compressed, extensive, paralinguistic emotional connections of phatic gesture are embodied in new forms afforded by the new ways of 'keeping in touch' that are appropriate to the distributed, networked agency made possible by these environments. (Schandorf 2012: 338)

And the term "phatic text" doesn't appear anywhere in this article besides the title.

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.

Functions of phatic communion

Laver, John 1975. Communicative functions of phatic communion. In: Kendon, Adam; Richard M. Harris and Mary Ritchie Key (eds.), Organization of Behavior in Face-to-face Interaction. The Hague: Mouton, 215-238.

When Malinowski invented the term [phatic communion], he crystallized a conceptual area that had been previously amorphous, and the analysis of the different functions of language took a step further forward. (Laver 1975: 215)

I am not so sure he crystallized it because the conceptual area of phatics seems amorphous almost a century later still.

However, as often happens when a label and a definition are first supplied for a new conceptual area, the very act of identification has seemed to inhibit further enquiry. (Laver 1975: 215)

I would argue against this. Further enquiry was forthcoming, but it took Roman Jakobson to popularize it amongst linguists. That is, several decades passed before "phatic" overcame its status as an anthropological oddity (until the 1950s, anthropologists often merely remarked that "phatic" is a thing Malinowski coined) and captured the minds of communication theorists.

Malinowski's view on the function of phatic communion has been echoed by almost all writers who have touched on the subject since 1923. A typical formulation is that of Lyons, who says that phatic communion "serves to establish and maintain a feeling of social solidarity and well-being" (Lyons 1968: 417). (Laver 1975: 215)

Again, not so. Jakobson took over the term but gave it a much more technical definition in which social solidarity and well-being is almost not even a factor. Instead, he emphasizes the formulaic greeting aspect, which may in fact be taken as a misinterpretation of Malinowski (to be fair, Malinowski's original appendix is pretty fuzzy on the details of phatic communion). That is, Laver seems to neglect Jakobson's contribution or doesn't quite understand the difference between his phatic function and Malinowski's phatic communion.

The point of departure for this article is the notion that phatic communion is not a simple phenomenon, and that its function of creating ties of union, if that is indeed its principal function, is achieved by subtle and intricate means whose complexity does not deserve to be minimized by the use of such phrases as "a mere exchange of words." (Laver 1975: 216)

This is a long-ass way to say that phatic communion is not purely verbal.

The specific questions addressed by the research reported here are: What are the actual phenomena of phatic communion? When do these phenomena occur within the span of a given interaction, and in what type of interaction? With what other types of behavioral phenomena is phatic communion associated? What are the social functions of phatic communion, and finally, what is the functional significance of a speaker's choice of indulging in one type of phatic communion rather than another? (Laver 1975: 216)

In other words: (1) What kinds of phemes are there? (2) What behaviours is phasis related with? (3) What does phasis actually achieve and why do people engage in it?

Phatic communion of course has a literal meaning of "communion achieved through speech." A pervasice attitude in recent research into face-to-face interaction has been that speech is only one among the many strands of communication, and that the communicative function of any one strand is better understood in the context of the operation of the other strands than in isolation. (Laver 1975: 216)

Again, a long-ass way to say that phasis also involves nonverbal communication.

The position I would like to reach at the end of the article is that the fundamental social function of the multistranded communicative behavior that accompanies and includes phatic communion is the detailed management of interpersonal relationships during the psychologically crucial margins of interaction. (Laver 1975: 217)

This is where it gets interesting and presents a possibility of conjunction with Bateson's "communication about relationship". That is, the phasis is involved not only in the management of the channel, the whole of the interaction, but indeed the management of the interpersonal relationship (or even a network of relationships). The "psychologically crucial margins of interaction" seems promising but more exposition is needed.

It is convenient to divide the temporal structure of interactions into three major phases, the opening phase, the medial phase, and the closing phase. As a preliminary comment, we might say that the function of the behavioral activity that characterizes the opening phase is to lubricate the transition from noninteraction to interaction, and to ease the potentially awkward tension of the early moments of the encounter, "breaking the ice," so to speak, before the main business of the encounter is embarked upon in the medial phase. The closing phase is once again a transitional phase, easing the transition from full interaction to departure.
Stricly, all three phases are normally characterized by phatic communion in the narrow sense of involving the participants interacting through speech. But phatic communion as normally understood, applying to choices from a limited set of stereotyped phrases of greeting, parting, commonplace remarks about the weather, and small talk, strongly characterizes the marginal phase of interaction only, and it is these marginal phases that will be the focus of attention here. (Laver 1975: 218)

Going by the temporal structure is what Jakobson does, and I've suspected that he does that because Bateson's original classification of metacommunicative signals follows this structure. But that's that. What irks me here is the "narrow sense" as opposed to a "wider sense" that we're not presented with. I don't think phatic communion in the narrow sense is the "degree zero" of verbal communication, the simple fact of verbal communication itself. Rather, the "narrow sense" should be exactly the position Laver himself takes - that it has to do with the temperal structure and lubrication of communication. This is the Jakobsonian view of it, i.e. channel maintenance. This is rather narrow as compared to the broader sense of communization that Charles Morris, Jurgen Ruesch as well as Julia Elyachar give us - that phatic communion has to do with sharing: be it sharing a feeling of oneness or unity, sharing of common experience and finding common ground, or sharing social contacts and infrastructure. That is, in my view, the "narrow sense" focuses on the formulaic/stereotypical aspects of (mostly verbal) communication, while the "wider sense" places emphases on the "communion" aspect of sharing, sociability, gregariousness, welcoming and friendly atmosphere, etc. In other words, one is more "phatic" and the other is more "communion".

Nevertheless there are some situations in our culture where we normally avoid phatic communion during the opening phase as being inappropriate to that particular type of situation. An obivous case is where the interactants have already met that day, or at least within the last six or sever hours, and have already indulged in extended phatic communion in their first meeting. Another case is where the roles of the interactants are already very clearly defined, as in situations such as a university lecture, buying a railway ticket, or talking to a telephone operator. In all these situations, the role structure of the encounter is known to the interactants in advance. (Laver 1975: 218)

There is a very big and important implication or assumption in this that must be spelled out. The best I can do is apply the enigmatic/paradigmatic distinction offered by Harré and Secord in The Explanation of Social Behaviour (1976):

Most episodes cannot be clearly classified: they are enigmatic, having neither an explicit set of rules, nor produced by well-established causal mechanisms. Enigmatic episodes are explained by applying to them concepts used in the explanation of those paradigmatic episodes which themselves have clear explanations, be they formal or causal. The structure of episodes has two levels: overt and covert. The former consists of the act-action sequence, contained in the episode; the latter, of the permanent and transitory powers and states of readiness and the flux of emotions that underlie the episode. (Harré & Secord 1976: 12)

Basically, Laver presumes that phatic communion is most necessary in enigmatic episodes, i.e. interactions where there are no explicit set of rules, nor well-established causal mechanism bringing it about. That is, in informal settings phatic communion is necessary by way of achieving a consensual view of what's happening. In formal settings, such as a university lecture, buying a railway ticket, or talking to a telephone operator, the roles and rules of the interaction are known beforehand (they are "paradigmatic") and so phatic communion is overtly unnecessary (you don't have to make small talk and define the situation with the university lecturer, ticket salesperson and telephone operator - tacit knowledge dictates the formulaic nature of these interactions). This is an important point because here the intercultural differences in phatic communion become most apparent. There are societies in which phatic communion is actually necessary in order to achieve aims that in other societies are pre-ordained. Elyachar's empirical example of Egyptian women wanting to get their plumbing done is a superb example. The distinction makes sense in other areas as well: traffic lights in Western world are "paradigmatic" in this sense - they do control the traffic in a rule-based way that leaves relationships with other drivers on the road un-enigmatic; In South-Africa, for example, as Trevor Noah reports, there are traffic lights but they are mostly useless gadgets imported for the mere sake of having them - actual road traffic is much more phatic: you have to keep an eye on other drivers and make sense of the situation yourself (whether it's time to cross or turn is not controlled so much by the traffic light but by the working consensus between the drivers themselves). This, again, is "phatic" in a broader sense than here intended - it involves channels and forms of contact much more complex and subtle than verbal communication and formulaic greetings.

The conclusion this leads to is that when the interactants DO indulge in phatic communion, they do not already know the precise details of the roles they are about to play in the oncoming interaction, and that the process of phatic communion allows them the opportunity to explore, in a tentative way, the social identity and momentary state of mind of the other participant, in order to be able to define and construct an appropriate role for themselves in the rest of the interaction. In other words, I am suggesting that an important function of phatic communion is to help the participants to reach what Goffman (1959) has called the "working consensus" of the interaction, about some aspects of their respective roles in those situations where the role structure is not previously obvious to the participants. (Laver 1975: 218-219)

This is exactly what I meant. It's the same stuff phrased in different terms. What I would add to exploring the other's identity is Ruesch's version of communization, i.e. exploring each other's common experience, so as to "establish a common, though incomplete, frame of reference under which premises interaction can proceed" (Ruesch & Prestwood 1972[1950a]: 327).

The first stage in any encounter, as many writers have pointed out, is for the participants to make mutual eye contact. We recognize the necessity of eye contact as the first stage, in ordinary language about encounters, when we speak of "trying to catch someone's eye" before being prepared to start talking - in a restaurant situation with a waiter, for example. To accept eye contact is the first signal of acknowledgement that one accepts the other participant's invitation to ingage in an encounter. (Laver 1975: 219)

Recall Jakobson's illustration from a short story by Dorothy Parker in which newlyweds sit down in a train and engage in a back-and-forth exchange of formalities in the style of "well, here we are" that conveniently left out the opening sequence of the newlyweds making eye contact before beginning the sequence of formulaic utterances.

Before coming on to the detailed analysis of the linguistic tokens used in phatic communion, I would like to offer some brief preliminary comments on posited functions of the use of phatic communion in the opening phase. Firstly, it would seem to have an important propitiatory function in defusing the potential hostility of silence in situations where speech is conventionally anticipated. [...] Hayakawa (1952: 70) says something similar "... it is possible to state, as a general principle, that the prevention of silence is itself an important function of speech, and that it is completely impossible for us is society to talk only when we 'have something to say'." (Laver 1975: 220)

Just like I had assumed, the propitiatory function is directly inspired by Malinowski's remark about "the breaking of silence" and "the strange and unpleasant tension which men feel when facing each other is silence". Here I would once again affirm that there are noticeable intercultural differences in this regard. An American psychologist has remarked about my culture: "Estonians are comfortable with silence. I have spent many hours in cafés and parks, watching people. I have often seen two people eat a meal together or walk together and barely speak. They are neither depressed nor angry. They simply have no need to fill empty space with words." This is an example. From my early readings in anthropology that I can't cite I know that there are/were Native American groups with similar attitude towards silence but even more pronounced: when meeting another person in the plains they would sit or lay down on the ground and be silent together until they felt comfortable with each other's presence.

Secondly, as suggested earlier, phatic communion has an exploratory function, in that it allows the participants to feel their way towards the working consensus of their interaction. Their perception of such factors as their relative social status can be controlled by aspects of their linguistic behavior during phatic communion, and this will be discussed in more detail below; but the phonetic behavior of the participants is important also. When a person speaks, he reveals often very detailed indexical information about his personal characteristics of regional origin, social status, personality, age, sex, state of health, mood, and a good deal more. (Laver 1975: 220-221)

Once again, I like Ruesch's communization more because it goes a step further: of course you glean information about the other person from his or her appearance, mannerisms, speech accent, etc. but also just by engaging in small talk and exploring what that person's life experience is like, what s/he is interested in, etc. you also engage in what some (like Kenneth Burke) call "identification" or (like George Herbert Mead) "participation in the other" (see here). You establish rapport more easily with people you have something in common with, be it language, culture, hometown, going through military service or war, etc. Laver actually seems to understand this point:

Between participants who are already acquainted, the exploratory function mentioned here serves to reconfirm previous information, and between strangers serves as an initial identification. (Laver 1975: 221)

Even the word is the same, although "identification" has several meanings and I'm not exactly sure in which sense Laver means it.

Many writers have maintained that not only are the linguistic tokens selected from a finite, small set of possible utterances, but also that the referential content of the particular utterance is irrelevant to the nature of the interaction. Abercombie (1956: 3), for example, writes that: "The actual sense of the words used in phatic communion matters little," and goes on to recount the story of Dorothy Parker,

alone and rather bored at a party [who was] asked "How are you? What have you been doing?" by a succesion of distant acquaintances. To each she replied "I've just killed my husband with an axe, and I feel fine." Her intonation and expression were appropriate to party small-talk, and with a smile and a nod each acquaintance, unastonished, drifted on.

(Laver 1975: 221)

My first thought was that those phaticists sure do love Dorothy Parker but the date behind Abercrombie's reference makes me suspicious of Jakobson who could have "aped" David Abercrombie's 1956. Problems and Principles (London: Longmans.). In fact, from a review of the book it appears that Abercrombie had quite a lot in common with Jakobson, especially when it comes to language functions.

Nonetheless [contra the argument that, as Malinowski says, words used in phatic communion fulfill a social function instead of conveying meaning], I would wish to take the position that the semantic meaning of the tokens selected in phatic communion is indeed relevant to the nature of the interaction, firstly by constraining the semantic theme within which the participants must make their choices of tokens in a particular occasion of phatic communion, and secondly, and more importantly, by providing the participants with a subtle means of communicating to each other their views about such indexical aspects of their momentary relationship as their relative social status. (Laver 1975: 222)

Here Laver gets at the relevant point that phatic utterances are not completely "asemantic". Although their meaning may appear irrelevant they do structure the nature of the interaction and convey something about the relationship between the participants. Thus, it is doubly metacommunicative in the sense that it communicates both about the code (what speech register will be used) as well as about the relationship (how our social statuses will organize the interaction).

Thus part of any individual's expertise in the (often quite extended) interchanges of phatic communion is his ability to sustain a particular semantic theme, once one of the participants has embarked upon that theme. So the semantic sense of the linguistic tokens is not entirely irrelevant, in at least this limited aspect. (Laver 1975: 222)

I recall (I cannot remember from where, probably somewhere on the internet at large or reddit in particular) a U.S. translator in the Iraq war recounting his experience, after the war, of communicating with someone in his company, speaking over the telephone, noticing arabic accent and exchanging a profusion of arabic phatic utterances (i.e. the ones that praise Allah) which ultimately led him to get a job promotion because the arabic man he was talking with turned out to be a higher up, someone from the management.

Fourth, merely by speaking, and implicitly inviting the listener to participate in a linguistic interaction with him, the speaker asserts a claim to sociolinguistic solidarity with the listener. If the listener accepts the invitation to a spoken interaction, then by implication he gives the speaker a safe-conduct to enter his territory without making him suffer a counterdisplay of hostility. A suggestive analogue here would be the military control of territory, where passwords and countersigns are overt signals of mutual solidarity. (Laver 1975: 226)

Sociolinguistic solidarity is a term I could operate with. Still, it covers a broader area than, for example, the nefarious "language band" that I still haven't found the source for. That is, when you are speaking with another person you constitute a communication system bound by a tie that cannot be easily broken without offense. When someone is speaking with you you can't just disengage without the proper phatic utterances. There's a "language band" holding you together, like a wedge that stretches but doesn't break. (It stretches here in the sense that you can turn your body towards the exit and visibly demonstrate that you're about to leave, but the fact that the other person is speaking stops you from going through with it and just leaving.)

If one function of phatic communion in the parting phase is to contribute to a continuing consensus which can stand as a tentative pre-structuring of the relationship experienced in the current interaction. (Laver 1975: 227)

This sounds a bit like Bateson's "communication about relationship" but restricted to the closing phase of the interaction, which was only part of Bateson's point. This should be kept in mind when returning to Bateson.

The second type of consolidatory token makes explicit reference to the continuation of the relationship, as in phases like "See you next week," "Let's not leave it so long this time," "Be seeing you," "Let's meet again soon," "See you at the match on Saturday," and many similar phrases. It is interesting that the formulaic phrases of farewell in English, unlike those in many other European languages, contain no such promise of continuation of the relationship. The French au revoir, German auf Wiedersehen, Italian arrivederci and Spanish hasta la vista all literally anticipate a repeated encounter, but the English "good bye" contains no such implication. One has to go to less formulaic idioms in English to find the equivalent promise of continuation, such as "See you," and "Be seeing you." (Laver 1975: 230-231)

In Estonian, similarly, there is the archaic phrase jällenägemiseni ("Until we see again!") which has been shortened to simply nägemiseni ("See you!"). It irks Estonian language teachers (and myself as well) when this phrase is shortened even more and becomes nägemist, which now carries the impliciation of "See ya!" but literally means "see" in the sense of "have good visions".

It may have become clear from the discussion above of phatic communion and associated behavior in the two margins of interaction that two broad functions are being served. One is the establishment and consolidation of the interpersonal relationship between the two participants. The other is the comfortable management of the transition from noninteraction to full interaction, and the transition from interaction to noninteraction. General conclusions about the purpose of phatic communion can be focused on these two areas separately. (Laver 1975: 232)

This distinction is curiously strong. One is closer to Bateson's μ-function and the other is closer to Jakobson's phatic function.

The most important thing to be said about the establishment and consolidation of the interpersonal relationship between the two participants is that it is achieved by the speaker, and the conclusions being drawn by the listener, are all concerned with the communication of the identity and attributes of the interaction, and with their psychosocial relationship. (Laver 1975: 232)

This is where I see phatic communion in its relation with autocommunication. This is based on the assumption that identity comes about partly through autocommunicative processes (i.e. self-description, self-characterization, self-evaluation, self-interpretation, etc.), and the somewhat fuzzy idea that one's relationship to oneself is related to one's relationships to others. As to "psychosocial relationship", I think this should really be the proper object of phatics. The most operative term being not identity but relation.

As an overall comment, where the principal function of the opening phase seems to be the attempt to reach a working consensus for the remainder of the interaction, the chief function of the closing phase seems to be to announce a continuing provisional consensus for future interactions. If this is a valid comment, then it makes phatic communion and associated behavior a most important social and psychological instrument, in that the cumulative consensus about a relationship reached as the result of repeated encounters between the two participants constitutes the essence of that relationship. Skill in managing the behavioral resources of phatic communion thus becomes not the triviality dismissively referred to as small talk, but a very basic skill essential to a major part of the psychosocial transactions that make up daily life. (Laver 1975: 232-233)

Here Laver affirms the grander importance of phatics. This topic becomes much more pronounced when we reach modern society and social media: understanding the essence of relationship as cumulative consensus about it becomes very interesting when cumulative consensus takes the form of clicks on like, follow, share, etc. buttons and short (chat) messages.

In some aspects of the behavior characteristic of the marginal phases, there is a sense in which the two phases look in different directions, so to speak. To some degree, the opening phase looks inwards to the oncoming interaction, while the closing phase looks outwards, as it were, to the resumption of social life outside the momentary relationship of the encounter. (Laver 1975: 233)

If you're dealing with the temporal structure of the interaction then yes.

In a broad sense greeting and parting behaviour may be termed RITUAL since it follows PATTERNED ROUTINES; it is a system of SIGNS that convey other than overt messages; ... and it has ADAPTIVE VALUE in facilitating social relations (Firth 1972: 29-30).

In the terms of this article, the "signs" involve both linguistic and non-linguistic acts, and the "other than overt" messages carried by the signs are the indexical messages which manage and control the interpersonal relationship between the participants. (Laver 1975: 234-235)

Firth's "adaptive value" could benefit the concept of "phatic labor". Source: Firth, R. 1972. Verbal and bodily rituals of greeting and parting. In: La Fontaine, J. S. (ed.), The interpretation of ritual. London: Travistock Publications, 1-38. (Google Books)

Review

John Laver's "Communicative functions of phatic communion" (1975) was published in an early and influential collection of articles dealing with nonverbal communication, Organization of Behavior in Face-to-face Interaction, edited by then current experts of the field (most notably, Adam Kendon was a linguist who pioneered gesture studies, and Mary R. Key was a linguist who did much to popularize nonverbal communication as a field). This might explain the tremendous influence Laver's paper has had (Google Scholar lists 297 citations to it).

Laver's approach to phatic communion is thus primed by emphasis on the nonverbal aspects, or what he calls "All the different communicative strands" and successively lists "speech, gesture, body movements, orientation, proximity, eye contact and facial expressions" (Laver 1975: 216-217). At various points throughout the paper he goes to say that "phatic communion is not a simple phenomenon" and that if it's function is to create ties of union then this "is achieved by subtle and intricate means whose complexity does not deserve to be minimized" to what Malinowski describes as "a mere exchange of words" (Laver 1975: 216).

His emphasis on subtlety, complexity and intricacy in this regard is best illustrated by his avoidance of Roman Jakobson's phatic function. Instead, he prefers to agree with linguists and semanticists who place emphasis on the feeling of social solidarity and well-being (John Lyons) and disagree with those who argue that the actual sense of the words used in phatic communion matters little (David Abercrombie) (cf. Laver 1975: 215; 221). These agreements and disagreements underlie his interpretation of the phenomenon of phatic communion.

This is nowhere more prevalent than in the bulk of his analysis which, despite being explicitly oriented towards nonverbal aspects, deals more heavily and thoroughly with the variety of social functions carried out phatic communion in the temporal structure of the interaction, and with the wealth of meaning actually present in those phatic utterances which some view as lacking or at least having an irrelevant meaning. In his view, these utterances do have a meaningful role to play in the interaction.

Based on these assumptions, in the concluding section of the paper he differentiates two broad functions that phatic communion serves: "One is the establishment and consolidation of the interpersonal relationship between the two participants" and "The other is the comfortable management of the transition from noninteraction to full interaction, and the transition from interaction to noninteraction" (Laver 1975: 232).

Instead of Roman Jakobson's interpretation, which certainly has a lot to do with the "channel management" aspect (i.e. the transition between interaction and non-interaction), or even Gregory Bateson's μ-function which has to do with establishing and consolidating interpersonal relationships, Laver turns to Goffman and the aspect of "working consensus" in the latter's The presentation of self in everyday life (1959), which involves maintaining "a reciprocal show of affection, respect, and concern for the the other" (Goffman 1959: 4).

It is especially characteristic of his whole endeavor to pay attention to the types of consolidation that phatic communion manifests. Tentatively following Charles Peirce's distinction between icon, index, and symbol he differentiates different types of phatic communion tokens (Laver 1975: 230-231):

1. Consolidatory tokens that comment on the quality of the current encounter, now drawing to a close, such as" It was nice seeing you," "I do enjoy our little chats," and "Talking with you always cheers me up."
2. Consolidatory tokens that make explicit reference to the continuation of the relationship, such as "See you next week," "Let's meet again soon," and "See you at the match on Saturday."
3. Consolidatory tokens that remind the listener that he is bound in a web of social solidarity with the speaker by the ties of common acquaintance, such as "Remember me to Tom," "Say hello to Jeanie for me," and "Tell Jeanie I was asking after her."

The characteristic feature of Laver's thinking here is attention to the temporal structure of the interaction. Curiously, despite lacking a reference to Jakobson, this is exactly the connection that Jakobson popularized with regard to Peirce's categories: "An icon has such being as belongs to PAST experience. An index has the being of PRESENT experience" and "The being of a symbol consists in [...] a potentiality; and its mode of being is esse in futuro [...] The FUTURE is potential and not actual" (Jakobson 1985[1975]: 253).

Laver takes this connection very seriously, even when dealing with the emotionally neutral tokens about weather and differentiates past reference like "Terrible night last night," present reference like "Nice day today," and future reference like "Snow's coming," (Laver 1975: 223). It is worthwhile to make the Peircean semio-temporal aspect here more explicit: Iconic/Quality tokens refer to past experience, which in this case is the interaction that is coming to an end but could just as well be reference to past interactions (this Laver himself does not consider); Indexical/Energy tokens refer in this case to the present interaction (in a sense evaluate it) but also leads to a "Second" (in Peirce's terms), i.e. the next interaction, it being understood that if present interaction was pleasurable, the next one might also be so; Symbol/Relation tokens take this last aspect - potential future interactions - and tie it together with the fact that due to common acquaintances a future interaction is quite likely, for these people move in the same circles and are in this sense socially/symbolically (sociosemiotically?) bound together (this aspect, I think, could be much elaborated).

I'm sure that this kind of analysis could be taken even further and applied on other areas of small talk. For example, taking a more spacial, instead of temporal, approach, one could differentiate social relations in the following manner:

1. Where we were. When people ask each other about they come from (Woher kommen Sie?, or even Malinowski's example of the Melanesian phrase, "Whence comest thou?") they implicitly attempt to gauge whether they come from the same place or at least one not too distant. People who grow up in the same town or city or even in the same area have a lot of qualities (in Peircean sense) in common, which makes it easier to associate.
2. Where we are. Even the mere fact of being at in the same place at the same time is sometimes awfully meaningful, for example, when attending events, especially ones that might become historically important, such as protests and rallies (i.e. Martin Luther's March on Washington in 1963). Sometimes the fact of sharing a common time-space becomes important on its own, even in the self-same time-space.
3. Where we are going. This aspect draws attention to common life-histories and life-goals. When people discuss travel they say stuff like "I'm definitely going to visit X someday" and if they both agree to this, even if they visit X at different times or not at all, the fact of sharing a common aspiration contributes to a feeling of bonding. A good example would be strangers at a summer festival discussing where they're going to school in the fall and discovering that they're going to the same school (I've had that experience).

I'm sure many other such typologies could be made by simply by juxtaposing any of Peirce's three categories with some type of phatic utterances (to be sure, Peirce offers many categories that allow for such juxtapositions). Laver holds that such intricate and complex aspects could shed light to the ways that "the speaker asserts a claim to sociolinguistic solidarity with the listener" (Laver 1975: 226).

The discussion about the temporal structure of the interaction comes to a close with a stunning point with reference to "Verbal and bodily rituals of greeting and parting" (1972) by the distinguished anthropologist Raymond Firth. Namely, the latter views phatic communion as a kind of interaction ritual and coined the term teletic rites "from the Greek concept of putting off the old and putting on the new, for such behaviour for greeting and parting, where the major stimulation is provided by the arrival or departure of a person from the social scene" (1972: 3).

Laver takes this term a step further by contrasting "the broader social macrocosm" to "the momentary microcosm of the encounter" (Laver 1975: 235). Namely, when dealing with "the comfortable management of the transition from noninteraction to full interaction, and the transition from interaction to noninteraction", interaction is the microcosm and noninteraction the macrocosm, so that the transitional ceremonies in the opening phase (from noninteraction to interaction) could be called proleptic rites and in the closing phase (from interaction to noninteraction) conversely analeptic rites.

The point of these distinctions cannot escape anyone familiar with Goffman's work on The presentation of the self and the ways in which people put on "faces" when interacting with other people. The core of his argument is that face-to-face interaction is in a sense a theatrical performance in which people attempt to control or guide the impressions that others may form of them. A very vivid illustration of a proleptic rite is given by Goffman when he noticed that people on the Scottish island he was studying were casual on their own but as soon as they noticed a stronger coming from the distance they put their faces in order, i.e. raised their eyebrows, put on a smile, etc. Goffman's writings are full of such illustrations and consequent analysis.

Laver captures the temporal aspect of these transitions in the following way: "To some degree, the opening phase looks inwards to the oncoming interaction, while the closing phase looks outwards, as it were, to the resumption of social life outside the momentary relationship of the encounter" (Laver 1975: 233). Here it is important to emphasize that, just like with Bateson's "communication about relationship", we are dealing with "the momentary relationship of the encounter" not the broader sense in which we understand "relationships" today.

But Laver has his own way of reaching from momentary communicative relationships to the understanding of relationships. (It may be noted that the transition is in some ways analogous to that between tokens and types.) Namely, he writes that the establishment of a working consensus is the principal function of proleptic rites and announcing "a continuing provisional consensus for future interactions" the principal function of analeptic rites.

"If this is a valid comment," he writes, "then it makes phatic communion and associated behavior a most important social and psychological instrument, in that the cumulative consensus about a relationship reached as the result of repeated encounters between the two participants constitutes the essence of that relationship" (Laver 1975: 232-233). The import of this suggestion cannot be understated. From the "working consensus" of token relationships (communicative encounters) we reach the "cumulative consensus" of relationship as a type.

In simpler words, what we believe about our relationship when we communicate ultimately forms the basis for what we believe about our relationship in general. Pleasant encounters lead to good relationships, uninteresting encounters to neutral relationships, and offensive encounters to hostile relationships. Laver then stresses the importance of communication skills is this regard: "Skill in managing the behavioral resources of phatic communion thus becomes not the triviality dismissively referred to as small talk, but a very basic skill essential to a major part of the psychosocial transactions that make up daily life" (ibid, 232-233).

To bring the point home again, Laver quotes Firth's statement about phatic communion being ritualistic because it follows patterned routines, and that it is a system of signs that convey not only overt messages but also covert ones, and, which is here most important, that greeting and parting behaviour "has adaptive value in facilitating social relations" (Firth 1972: 29-30; in Laver 1975: 234-235). "Adaptive value" is a workable term, but I'll let it be for the moment. For now I'll draw attention to Laver's interpretation of signs "other than overt" (i.e. covert) being "indexical messages which manage and control the interpersonal relationship between the participants" (ibid, 234-235).

Laver attributes the gleaning of indexical messages to the "exploratory function" of phatic communion. This exploration is necessary for participants "to feel their way towards the working consensus of their interaction" (Laver 1975: 220-221). The indexical factors involved include "personal characteristics of regional origin, social status, personality, age, sex, state of health, mood, and a good deal more" (ibid, 220-221). Further, Laver writes that "Between participants who are already acquainted, the exploratory function mentioned here serves to reconfirm previous information, and between strangers serves as an initial identification" (Laver 1975: 221).

While this basically goes to say that strangers need to evaluate and judge each other in various dimensions to identify the other person, "to explore, in a tentative way, the social identity and momentary state of mind of the other participant, in order to be able to define and construct an appropriate role for themselves in the rest of the interaction" and to reach what Goffman has called the "working consensus" (Laver 1975: 218-219), but between participants who are already acquainted there is already a cumulative consensus about their relationship.

I would stress here the concept of identification which is not without precedent in social psychology. Namely, this is exactly Kenneth Burke's term for what George Herbert Mead calls "participation in the other", that is, "the relativity of ordinary human experience in people's ability to correlate their experiences with those of others" (Burke & Zappen 2006: 338; note 10); or in Mead's own words, "the appearance of the other in the self, the identification of the other with the self, the reaching of self-consciousness through the other" (Mead 1934: 253; in Burke & Zappen 2006: 338; note 10).

Thus, identification can serve as a point of contact between Laver's understanding of the exploratory function of phatic communion and what Jurgen Ruesch terms communization after Charles Morris (who coincidentally edited most of Mead's works for publishing). The aim of communization in this exploratory sense is to "establish a common, though incomplete, frame of reference under which premises interaction can proceed" (Ruesch & Prestwood 1972[1950a]: 327).

In Laver's terms, the establishment and consolidation of the interpersonal relationship is "concerned with the communication of the identity and attributes of the interaction, and with their psychosocial relationship" (Laver 1975: 232). These aspects can once again be broken down with Peirce's categories: communication of identity has to do with qualities (in this case not of the interaction but of self); communication about attributes of the interaction has to do with the energy of the interaction (where is it leading, or, philosophically put, what resistance it offers); and communication about the participant's psychosocial relationship is readily comparable to Bateson's "communication about relationship" (i.e. Laver's own examples of communicating about past encounters, about the present encounter and about future encounters due to mutual acquaintances tentatively fall into this category).

Last, but not least, Laver also frames the relationship in terms of the definition of the situation (another one of Goffman's terms). He distinguishes interactions where the participants already know each well from utilitarian encounters "such as a university lecture, buying a railway ticket, or talking to a telephone operator" on the basis of whether "the role structure of the encounter is known to the interactants in advance" (Laver 1975: 219).

In my view this is a distinction handled well elsewhere in social psychology in terms of enigmatic and paradigmatic episodes (read: encounters). Namely, enigmatic episodes, such as hanging around with a friend, have neither an explicit set of rules, nor are they produced by well-established causal mechanism; as opposed to paradigmatic episodes, such as the university lecture and various bureaucratic interactions, which have explicit set of rules, are produced by well-established causal mechanisms, and have clear explanations (cf. Harré & Secord 1976: 12).

The relevant connection with Laver's ideas here is the admonishment that one of the functions of phatic communion is "to contribute to a continuing consensus which can stand as a tentative pre-structuring of the relationship experienced in the current interaction" (Laver 1975: 227). What this implies is that, simply put, past encounters structure present and future encounters. This is not all that revolutionary an idea, but this detail can become relevant to distinguish interactions which are pre-structured according to the roles and rules introduced from the broader social macrocosm, as opposed to those in which the roles and rules are as-if self-made in the microcosm of the interaction.

Phatic communion contributes mostly to the latter, as Laver argues that it is almost needless for those utilitarian interactions: your interaction with the lecturer or clerk is so routine and predictable that engaging in introduction and small talk can be disruptive (this may contribute to viewing service people like cashiers, waiters, taxi-drivers, etc. as almost "non-persons"); as opposed to your encounters with friends and acquaintances which depend on getting to know each other, forming a working consensus on your own terms and by way of cumulative consensus achieving a personal relationship.

And lastly, Laver should be commended for his attention to the semantic dimension of phatic communion, which is all too often almost completely neglected on the assumption that the referential content of particular utterances are irrelevant. Laver argues that the semantic meaning of the tokens is indeed relevant to the nature of the interaction in at least two ways, "firstly by constraining the semantic theme within which the participants must make their choices of tokens in a particular occasion of phatic communion, and secondly, and more importantly, by providing the participants with a subtle means of communicating to each other their views about such indexical aspects of their momentary relationship as their relative social status" (Laver 1975: 222).

I would argue that these two aspects cover, in terms of Ruesch and Bateson, both "communication about communication" (metacommunication proper) and "communication about relationship" (the μ-function). Thus, on the one hand the specific utterances used in phatic communion condition or restrain the semantic field of said communion by implicitly communicating the topic of communication. That is, it helps the participants to select the code or the relevant speech register as well as the subject of discussion. Thus, when a phatic communion in the smoking room opens with one person asking another for light they may very likely begin to dwell on the merits and demerits of smoking. Likewise, when opening with a comment about the weather the discussion may concentrate on the climate, the geography of region, what kinds of clouds there are, etc.

And on the other hand, phatic communion has a semantic dimension related to relationships in the sense that the specific utterances used communicate about identity and social status, even on the phonetic level: "When a person speaks, he reveals often very detailed indexical information about his personal characteristics" (Laver 1975: 221). Here it is wise to emphasize in Laver's phrasing, the aspect of "communicating to each other their views about such indexical aspects". That is, how we speak about something often says a lot about how we feel about it. This, in turn, plays a role in whether a working consensus will be achieved or not.

Further, "part of any individual's expertise in the (often quite extended) interchanges of phatic communion is his ability to sustain a particular semantic theme, once one of the participants has embarked upon that theme" (Laver 1975: 222). This is where the phatic function meets the properly semantic, referential function: knowledge about common topics of discussion contributes to effective phatic communion. If someone strikes up a casual conversation about smoking or the weather it can be useful to have extensive knowledge on the subject, just to keep phatic communion going. "So the semantic sense of the linguistic tokens is not entirely irrelevant, in at least this limited aspect" (Laver 1975: 222).

In conclusion I would like to quibble a little about Laver's understanding of phatic communion in general. He begins the paper by writing that "When Malinowski invented the term [phatic communion], he crystallized a conceptual area that had been previously amorphous, and the analysis of the different functions of language took a step further forward" (Laver 1975: 215). While it is true that the analysis of the different functions of language was greatly advanced by the introduction of the phatic function, it is not true that he crystallized this conceptual area. Or if he did crystallize the phenomenon, in the sense of giving it a label, he did not crystallize the conceptual area, as modern notions like phatic image, phatic labor, and phatic technology testify.

I am especially unsatisfied with Laver's distinction between phatic communion in the narrow sense and phatic communion as normally understood. He considers of phatic communion in the narrow sense as simply "the participants interacting through speech" and of the normal understanding as "applying to choices from a limited set of stereotyped phrases of greeting, parting, commonplace remarks about the weather, and small talk, strongly characterizes the marginal phase of interaction only" (Laver 1975: 218).

The distinction he draws is between keeping interaction going by "a mere exchange of words" only, and phatic communion understood as the exchange of words involved mainly in the opening and closing the interaction. That is, the "narrow" sense is oriented towards the "medial" phase of maintaining interaction, and the "broad" sense is oriented towards the "marginal" phases. This distinction may have been useful at the time, as phatic communion was often, and very popularly, devalued as "talking for the sake of talking" (cf. Hymes 1971: 43-44), but now that we have overcome this simplification a different outlook is in order.

I put forward that this distinction cannot hold water anymore. Phatic communion and phatic function have long surpassed the bounds of speech as well as interaction. Partly due to Jakobson's somewhat ambiguous definition of phatic function, "phatic" has become synonymous with "the channel function" and become the study of communication in its "contact" aspect. That is why I suggest that Phatics narrowly understood deals with the linguistic aspects of phatic communion while Phatics broadly understood deals with phatic forms and functions that surpass language and even conventional understanding of interaction. For a phatic study of modern means of communication a much broader framework is necessary than is offered here, as helpful as it is.