Phatic Communion

Apart from the exchanging of information, an important role of conversation and communication is to promote social harmony through the maintenance of relationships. This is referred to as the ‘phatic’ function of communication. Indeed, digital communications technologies, and social media in particular, have been lauded for their potential to promote activism and social change through ‘raising awareness’ of injustices, their ability to motivate people into political action, and the facility to organise and co-ordinate that action for maximum effect.

In this paper, I build upon previous arguments which suggested that the rise of social networking demonstrated that online culture and communication had become increasingly ‘phatic’ and less dialogic. Here I use previous empirical work to challenge the above claims of digital politics enthusiasts. I then suggest an alternative theoretical account of the function of digital media activism which better suits these empirical findings. I suggest that digital politics demonstrates a rise of ‘phatic communion’ in social media. Incorporating Heidegger’s notion of ‘idle talk’, I further suggest that the rise of a phatic online culture in social media activism has atrophied the potential for digital communications technologies to help foster social change by creating a conversational environment based on limited forms of expressive solidarity as opposed to an engaged, content-driven, dialogic public sphere.

Keywords: Phatic, Heidegger, Clicktivism, Social Media, Online Politics, Multitude, Arab Spring, Occupy, Twitter, Facebook.

Please see the link below to access the paper. If you do not have access to Convergence, feel free to send me a message and i will e-mail you a copy.

This article considers the importance of phatic exchanges—a communication exchange that fulfils a social objective rather than imparting information—on social technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter. Social media and social networks have transformed the communication environment and the way organisations manage their stakeholder relationships. As new social technologies emerge so does the diversity of corresponding communication behaviours, and culture dimensions that underpin the connectivity and requirements for relationship building. Communication characteristics demonstrated by social media
users challenge existing notions of relationship management and two-way communication flow. This paper concludes that in order for communication professionals to communicate effectively, they first need to understand the composition and expectations of relationships in the online social sphere.

While the concept of communication has long been bound to a reductive model of the exchange of information, very few scholars of communication would argue that these assumptions are realistic, without a long list of qualifying caveats. But the concept of communication, built from the integration of semiotic signification with the idea of information as the 'carrier' of transmitted meaning, is so deeply ingrained and simple that even displacing it can seem futile, if not absurd. Nevertheless, these foundational assumptions tightly constrain the ways in which any interactional phenomena can be conceived--and constraints upon our ways of understanding communication drastically limit our capacity to understand our worlds and the social processes that generate them, at any scale or level of abstraction. 

Communication as Gesture traces the concept of communication from its roots in classical rhetoric to its integration in structural linguistics, semiotics, information theory, and cybernetics, integrating perspectives from contemporary rhetorical theory, relational psychology, interactional sociology, philosophy, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, multimodal semiotics, and more. Because so much of our contemporary world is lived with and through digital media technologies, the study of new media and social media provides a rich illustration of the constraints imposed by our reductive assumptions--and hints at the possibilities generated by rethinking them. The gesture theory of communication introduced presents a dimensional account of communication that is intuitively accessible and theoretically rich while overturning reductive assumptions of the linear character of interaction.

https://books.emeraldinsight.com/page/detail/Communication-as-Gesture/?k=9781787565166

Virality has lent itself to popular culture over the course of the 21st century with the continuous rise of digital and visual culture (Rushkoff, 1996). This dissertation mainly aims to investigate the concept of virality in relation to journalism in the context of news outlets in Malta by analysing the content they post on social media. The study will be reinforced by theories centred about virality, social networking sites and journalism. This dissertation focuses on a relatively new area of study centred about the intersection of virality and journalistic practices and considers virality as a potential factor in the emerging and changing practices of journalism in Malta.

The notion of the "phatic" is less a single empirical object than two tangled threads of inquiry, separable into communion phaticity and contact phaticity. The former sense is a shorthand for "small talk" aimed at building relations rather than imparting information. The latter sense captures the extent to which signs are oriented toward communicative contact. Recent work on the phatic demonstrates that people the world over have elaborate ideologies about the significance of contact. Reflecting on such ideologies helps explain why scholars so often entangle contact and communion phaticity and clarifies the big questions at phaticity’s core.

From the essay "The problem of meaning in primitive languages" supplement to 'The Meaning of Meaning' (Ogden & Richards 1923). This passage in the essay introduces the concept of phatic communion and was first republished by John Laver in 1972 under the title "Phatic communication" ('Communication in face to face interaction', pp. 146-152).

Phatic communion is the use of language (speech) in free, aimless, social intercourse, such as chatting after work or gossiping during some simple social activity, but unconnected with whatever they're practically doing at the moment. Polite phrases and formulas for greeting or approach, asking about health, commenting on weather, saying something extremely obvious, etc. Like "How are you?",  "Nice day today!" and "Where are you from?" People approach strangers because they enjoy the company, reassurance and consent of other people, especially toward something alarming or dangerous. Being quiet can make you look unfriendly. Sometimes people talk away without listening due to the social pleasure of verbal self-enhancement. But when the roles of speakers are symmetrical they bond and form a certain union, an acquaintance or friendship, that creates a pleasurable atmosphere. Talking is a social activity, and not necessarily about informing someone of something or transmitting information. This is verbal sociability - when people come together just to talk because they like the company.

Before the total cutoff of a household for unpaid electrical bills, and in anticipation of the violence it might precipitate, national power utility inspectors in Dar es Salaam have recourse to a gradient of ‘soft’ disconnections designed to signal good faith and encourage repayment. Drawing on a mixture of semiotics and exchange theory, this article argues that such soft disconnections may be understood as moments when the shared grounds of the household-utility relation—both the physical power network and social commitments it embodies—become figured, modified, and ultimately preserved in the face of urban postcolonial strain. Whereas semiosis is often thought of as a kind of infrastructural bridge that links sign to interpretant (or object to sign), the inspectors’ reflexively phatic signaling of common grounds highlights the thoroughly semiotic nature of infrastructure itself. More generally, the very presumption and preservation of shared grounds is a salutary alternative to the anti-relational violence and extinction that characterizes much of the contemporary world.

Recent media studies research on 19th-century Spiritualism has foregrounded the technological metaphors that suffuse Spiritualist models of the seance. However, this article shows that the actual phatic channels proposed by Spiritualism consisted almost entirely of mediating chains of human spirits who stood between the bereaved seance guests and the spirits of the dear departed called “strangers.” While the “strangers” were, like the seance guests, departed white people, the authoritative “control spirits” were frequently exotic others such as “Indians” from the American imaginary of the Frontier. Beginning in 1875, the apparent transparency of the Spiritualist seance became the object of critique of an emerging occultist movement of Theosophy, which sought to undermine the authoritative human spirits of Spiritualism by turning the human spirits of the Spiritualist s_eance wholesale into disruptive non-human mediators called “Diakkas,” “Bhuts,” and “Elementals,” and replacing Spiritualism’s authoritative “Indian” control spirits drawn from the imaginary of the American frontier with Tibetan “Mahatmas” drawn from the orientalist imaginary of the Empire. These elementals initially represented noisy non-human “parasites” of Spiritualist channels, but later these parasites take over the channel and become the channel themselves in the form of what came to be called the “elemental essence.” [Spiritualism, Theosophy, Phaticity, Voice, Animation]

This chapter is the result of the analysis of some episodes of Black Mirror and shows interesting insights for linguistics in general, for the communicative interaction between man and machine, and for the aesthetic and spiritual aspects concerning the theme of losing and reconnecting with loved ones. The focus will be on the episode “Be Right Back,” as it is the most representative considering these premises. The ref lection begins by trying to define the type of technology represented in the story, continues with a description of the linguistic interaction between the protagonists, adds some thoughts on the concept of body and textuality, and ends with a thought on the immediate relevance of the theory about the state of contemporary humanity by Luigi Zoja: the ‘death of the neighbour’ (2019). Concluding remarks are made possible by a comparison with Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Comics offer distinctive approaches to representing experience, combining the modalities of the visual and the verbal in compatible ways. In his Carnet de Voyage – created during a trip publicising Blankets (2003) and researching for Habibi (2011), and later published as ‘a little snack’ to cover the long wait between these books – Craig Thompson uses a range of approaches to render his travel experience in words and pictures, ranging from the recognisably comics-like to more diaristic and sketchbook modes, similar to carnets published by l’Association. This article uses Thompson’s Carnet to illustrate a variety of ways in which human experience, internal and external, is construed in images as in language, and how those modes interact. I employ a framework for describing how experience can be rendered in graphic narrative, based on a Hallidayan functional model of language similar to that explored in Kress & van Leeuwen’s Reading Images and O’Toole’s The Language of Displayed Art.

Phatic interpretations are typically defined as those arising from an intention to create and maintain ties and social bonds, to exhibit desire of sociability towards others, rather than an intention to transfer substantive information. As such, they are not typical instances of communication in which the eventual relevance is centred upon the value of explicitly communicated content. This kind of phatic interpretation is important, since nowadays we are witnessing the so-called phatic Internet, in which the propositional content transferred to other users is increasingly irrelevant but the effects that this content generates (in terms of feelings of connection, of sociability, of group membership, of friends' acknowledgment and mutual awareness, etc.) are utterly relevant. In this chapter, it will be argued that it is mainly feelings and emotions that are generated from phatic interactions (and phatic implicatures may also be derived), which demands an extension of the scope of analysis and new terminology. Specifically, the term phatic effects will be proposed and applied to Internet-mediated communication. These effects are devoid of the qualities of intentionality and propositionality, but are nevertheless essential to our understanding of why many users spend hours exchanging (apparently) irrelevant content with one another through the Net.

The Plautine dialogues seem to be structured according to the conventions of naturally occurring conversation. This paper examines the transition devices from the (ritualistic) opening phase to the goal-oriented part, where the reason-for-the-talk is disclosed. Firstly, the difference between the phatic preliminary remarks (small talk) and the actual first topic is briefly discussed. Further on, the analysis of the Plautine corpus reveals various ways of making the transition to the medial phase: from multi-turn sequences to single-turn conversational moves. It is stated that the most complex negotiations over the first topic slot placement are a feature of symmetric interactions among high characters with friendly relations. Accordingly, more direct linguistic devices of introducing the reason-for-the-talk appear typically in slave-master dialogues or in aggressive or farcical exchanges between low characters. Some cases, moreover, show that also the wider context of interaction or the dramaturgical factors (depiction of a stock character, progression of the plot etc.) affects the election of the transition style. Finally, throughout the paper some tentative comments are made as well on the politeness issues strictly related to the selection of the linguistic tokens of introducing the first topic slot.

“Tempted,” as he put it, by the “demon of terminological invention,” Malinowski first coined the term “phatic” as one half of a two-word compound, “phatic communion.” Since Malinowski, “phatic” has often been used to imply a semiotic equation where mere communicative contact automatically produces positive social relations among those communicating. This article explores a genre of “trash talk” on the pétanque gambling courts of Luang Prabang, Laos to challenge this assumption and clarify multiple senses of “phaticity.” With close attention to talk used not for positive communion but for distraction, I argue that communicative contact as a technical phenomenon must be separated from communicative contact as a sign of other kinds of meaning.

The new narratological paradigm that is taken shape in the last years will be able to deal with the puzzles originating with the classical distinction histoire/discourse and with the circularity in the definitions of narrative and action, if it focuses on narration as an activity, rather than a product. The key concern for such activity is to engage and sustain the “phatic relation” between speaker and listeners. This point of view may accommodate the results of other lines of enquiry such as evolutionary biology and humanethology, the philosophy of play, hipertextuality, etc.

This is a printout of "Phatic Communion", or some three or four pages from Malinowski's essay "The problem of meaning in primitive languages", supplement to 'The Meaning of Meaning' (Ogden & Richards 1923) in A4 decorated with images from 'Argonauts of the Western Pacific' (Malinowski 1922). This passage in the essay first republished at this length as "Phatic communication" in 'Communication in face to face interaction' (John Laver ed., pp. 146-152). This portion of the essay coins the term phatic communion (speech in social intercourse) by viewing the primitive use of language as "a mode of action, rather than as a countersign of thought". It is a staple of structural-functional linguistic anthropology. Keywords: Conversation, communion, greetings, small talk, dialogue, gossip, sociability, gregariousness, social instinct, social sentiments, conviviality, social function (of speech).

Infrastructures’ political force is often attributed to their functioning as designed, while their political afterlives remain underexplored. Dwelling on a suspended railroad line in Romania that allows the isolation of infrastructure’s political and affective dimensions, I explore ethnographically the phatic force of ruins. The Giurgiu-Bucharest railroad met its demise in 2005 in the wake of heavy floods, producing an infrastructural gap that impacts local mobility, and challenges the sustainability of the postsocialist social contract. State authorities and citizens engage in phatic tactics of remediation that, while unsuccessful in resuming traffic, maintain a sense of connection and kindle anticipation and frustration for the future. These tactics make the railroad a medium for hope and at the same time a symbol for the absolute impossibility of hope.

Terrorism has long been theorized as a communicative act. Absent in the array of theories is an adequate consideration of violence committed by third parties (e.g., lone wolves), individuals with no clear link to any group. Often, this complex mediated phenomenon is reduced to the "inspired" reproduction/transmission of a message. For a more nuanced understanding, I develop a theory of phatic violence centered on rela-tion/mediation rather than information/intentionality. The violence of the ambiguous third party, in the first instance, produces a phatic exigency through which bonds might be created or sustained. Any subsequent communion (or its denial) with a group is the result of a mediated ritual process, one that is structured by and regenerates the bonds of antipathy that define the war on terror. Forefronting antipathy in phatic communication enables new understandings of dispersed violence and the horror of the war on terror.

The aim of the paper is to analyze the conversation openings in Plautine comedies highlighting the tokens of phatic communication. The symmetric and friendly dialogic exchanges are contrasted with cases of linguistic aggression in its institutionalized (flagitatio) and comic (verbivelitatio) form. A special attention is paid to the farsical ‘small talk’ scenes between two low characters that both present a range of impolite behavior and phaticity. In conclusion it is stated that those instances of friendly insulting and aggressive humour are in keeping with the modern theories about ritual hostility among marginalized groups. That special way of creating and reaffirming social bonds between Plautine slaves is tentatively defined as ‘dysphemic communion’.

'The West' is an imagined community par excellence with a plethora of connotations that often contradict each other. Although it is often not at all certain exactly what the West or things Western refer to, the concepts are used as if there was some distinct cultural reality corresponding to them. Like any other ethnic group, tribe, nation state, or even village, the West is both fantasy and real, a social construction and, to some extent, an observable social formation. The Western world exists because people believe in its unity and share the connotations but also for a more mundane—or banal— reason: because these are constantly expressed in text and speech. This article examines the news texts of Helsingin Sanomat, the leading Finnish daily newspaper, and focuses on what I call banal Occidentalism, the way the West is evoked and reproduced by virtue of repetition of its name and its derivatives. According to the data I have analyzed it seems that the usual building blocks of a community–symbolism, ethnicity, myths, and memories–are not the only way to strengthen a sense of the West's unity. Like any collective rituals, the product of journalism is partly a communal ceremony with a phatic function in the Malinowskian sense.

Phatic interpretations are typically defined as those arising from an intention to create and maintain ties and social bonds, to exhibit desire of sociability towards others, rather than an intention to transfer substantive information. As such, they are not typical instances of communication in which the eventual relevance is centred upon the value of explicitly communicated content. This kind of phatic interpretation is important, since nowadays we are witnessing the so-called phatic Internet, in which the propositional content transferred to other users is increasingly irrelevant but the effects that this content generates (in terms of feelings of connection, of sociability, of group membership, of friends' acknowledgment and mutual awareness, etc.) are utterly relevant. In this chapter, it will be argued that it is mainly feelings and emotions that are generated from phatic interactions (and phatic implicatures may also be derived), which demands an extension of the scope of analysis and new terminology. Specifically, the term phatic effects will be proposed and applied to Internet-mediated communication. These effects are devoid of the qualities of intentionality and propositionality, but are nevertheless essential to our understanding of why many users spend hours exchanging (apparently) irrelevant content with one another through the Net.

This chapter uses methods of Conversation Analysis to revisit the greeting function of question formulae (quid agis/ agitur?, quid fit?) in Roman comedy. By identifying the basic organizational structure of dialogue opening, it stresses the functional and sequential closeness of greetings and small- talk tokens. !e analysis of the data from Plautus and Terence suggests that the question- based expression may have a varied status, ranging from a genuine inquiry to a routine greeting and a dialogue- opener.

The paper investigates the ‘small talk’ routine in the dialogues by the Roman comedy playwright Plautus. Since the theoretical framework of the analysis is based on the dynamic concept of ‘phatic interpretation’, the main stress is put on the way the interlocutors are negotiating the degrees of phaticity and commitment. Firstly, the opening sequence of Plautine dialogue is explained in order to indicate the position of the ‘small talk’ routine in the global structure of conversation. Then the most conventional Latin phatic tokens (e.g. quid agis? quid fit?) are mentioned as a common device of introducing the preliminary topic (e.g. state of health, general state of affairs). In the main part of the paper, different dialogue openings are analyzed in order to localize the interlocutors’ strategies either of extending or abbreviating the phatic (uncommitted) exchange. As a result, some apparently universal (e.g. Sacks “everyone has to lie” rule) and culture-specific (e.g. Roman superstition, symmetry in amicitia) phenomena are pointed out. In conclusion, it is stated that the Plautine dialogue, even in its initial, ritual phase, contains instances of naturalistic real-time negotiations that seem to both dynamize the interaction and fulfill the artistic agenda of the author

How are comics organised semantically? What is the nature of the relationship between one enclosure and another -- word balloon, caption or panel? In this paper I will explore the logical metafunction of comics: the relationships and dependencies between 'panels' and other enclosures in comics discourse. This function takes its place alongside the experiential metafunction of comics in a tripartite Hallidayan description of graphic narrative as a form of meaning-making, wherein comics construe the experience of the creator(s), as well as engaging interpersonally with the reader and constructing a coherent text.

In discussion of this part of the theory, I will comment on the levels of reality that may be represented in comics discourse, the nesting of narratives and discourses, and I will recruit Paul Werth's Text World Theory to assist in describing this. I will briefly consider the idea of a rank structure in comics, and will propose the possibility of 'rankshifting' of panels and enclosures, pointing out how levels of discourse may 'pop' up or 'push' down as the creator promotes each level to prominence or demotes it by nesting it in a hypotactic relationship to other panel-level enclosures.

I will argue that this hypotaxis , a nested, dependent relationship between enclosures in graphic narrative, warrants more priority and attention than it has traditionally been given, over against the paratactic structures that have been emphasised in characterising comics as 'sequential art'. I will illustrate with a range of examples.

Comics offer distinctive approaches to representing experience, combining the modalities of the visual and the verbal in compatible ways. In his Carnet de Voyage – created during a trip publicising Blankets (2003) and researching for Habibi (2011), and later published as ‘a little snack’ to cover the long wait between these books – Craig Thompson uses a range of approaches to render his travel experience in words and pictures, ranging from the recognisably comics-like to more diaristic and sketchbook modes, similar to carnets published by l’Association. This article uses Thompson’s Carnet to illustrate a variety of ways in which human experience, internal and external, is construed in images as in language, and how those modes interact. I employ a framework for describing how experience can be rendered in graphic narrative, based on a Hallidayan functional model of language similar to that explored in Kress & van Leeuwen’s Reading Images and O’Toole’s The Language of Displayed Art.

This article considers the importance of phatic exchanges—a communication exchange that fulfils a social objective rather than imparting information—on social technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter. Social media and social networks have transformed the communication environment and the way organisations manage their stakeholder relationships. As new social technologies emerge so does the diversity of corresponding communication behaviours, and culture dimensions that underpin the connectivity and requirements for relationship building. Communication characteristics demonstrated by social media users challenge existing notions of relationship management and two-way communication flow. This paper concludes that in order for communication professionals to communicate effectively, they first need to understand the composition and expectations of relationships in the online social sphere.

On the night he was betrayed...

So what really happens when those called Christian repeat the event called communion, the Lord's supper, Last Supper, the breaking of the bread, the remembrance (and so many other obscure ways to say the same thing)?

This outline of options (historical and contemporary) is a sort of taxonomy... a 'Where's Waldo' for you to find yourself or your tradition. So, can you?

In this article, I offer an account of the “linguistic landscapes” associated with the commodification and purchase of internet services in southern Peru. Through an account of public signage deployed by internet lounges in this area as well as the ideologies that make sense of it, the analysis reveals one of the ways in which moral panic over digital gaming gets semiotically mediated. To do this, the article develops a theoretical machinery that makes sense of the ways in which public signs—relative to their infrastructural contexts—come to project channels for their uptake. When these relationships are considered relative to the ideologies that target them, what gets revealed are the moral contours of Southern Peruvian public life. The analysis ultimately shows how the concept “linguistic landscape” can be useful for the semiotic study of infrastructure as well as the forms of the public life that it helps to mediate.