Some quite illuminating quotes there.
Rather less believably:
Some quite illuminating quotes there.
Rather less believably:
In the previous post on Extra channels I finished with a distinction between diachronic and synchronic metacommunication. In this post I'd like to respond to some comments by the co-author of this blog, Joe, in some of his previous posts, by invoking Jurgen Ruesch's concept of metacommunication . Gregory Bateson was interested in thinking about cybernetics, but didn't seem to feel constrained to think about it using a strictly computational or information-theoretic paradigm, while still being informed by the ideas. This gave him the freedom to talk about ideas like "context", "relationship", "learning", and "communication" without needing to define them in precise computational terms. Nevertheless, he handles the ideas fairly rigorously. (Joe, Phatic Workshop: towards a μ-calculus ) Gregory Bateson and Jurgen Ruesch, among many other notable thinkers, were part of the Palo Alto Group of researchers tasked to apply new methods (a
Ooh, nice. I'm familiar with Dario Martinelli in relation with biomusicology and the concept of anthropophony (which I intend to discuss in relation with phaticity after Christopher Wagstaff's (1990) discussion of phatic discourse and effects in mass and popular culture). Phatic semiosis is a good addition to the set of phaticosemiotic terminology (Firth's phatic systems of signs, Barthes' phatic codes, etc.).
ReplyDeleteThe illustration of phatic semiosis among social insects makes a lot of sense to me. In a documentary about ants they demonstrated with food-coloured sugar water how the ants share undigested food from their "social stomach", and exchange other semiochemicals to direct other ants to better food sources. It's basically a biological equivalent of phatic infrastructure, although more motile.
That the whole organism can be considered a communication system, at least in terms of an intrapersonal communication network, is already familiar from Ruesch and Bateson (1951). But I wouldn't call an organism a "channel". At best I would do with a term like "conduit" or "node". On the matter of germs I know too little to understand the implications of this aspect. I know little of Dawkins's theory of the selfish gene, because biosemioticians around these parts don't like his sociobiological functionalism and take to epigenetics instead. (This one time our main biosemiotician even went on a long and angry tirade about Dawkins when a young woman used the word "meme" in the sense of funny pictures on the internet.)
W. T. Fitch, in "The biology and evolution of music: A comparative perspective":
ReplyDelete«so called ‘phatic’ communication such as greetings or farewells, are highly repeatable. However, such formulaic utterances have often been singled out by linguists as peculiar (Wray, 2002), and their very similarity to music seems to differentiate them from ordinary language.»
Maybe useful? Another reference I found when searching on biosemiotics talked about some early (16th/17th C.) music that brought in lots of "animal sounds", e.g. buzz, woof, etc. -- "Hearing History: A Reader", p. 101, «At one point is his "country cries" Dering gives up speech altogether for phatic cries and whistles.» -- Maybe useful for the anthropophony piece?
OK, I'm more convinced by the social insect stuff now that I know about the "social stomach." And yes just as you say this suggests a biophysical parallel to the idea of "phatic architecture" or "phatic infrastructure."
Finally, regarding the Dawkins-style stuff: to at least connect this with somewhat more mainstream ideas of phatics-as-speech, there's the Baldwin effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_effect) which suggests that learning can play a role in evolution.
James Baldwin has some relationship with George Mead, but I'm not sure what it is. Their wikipedia pages just have mutually-referring "see also" links; clarifying this would be a minor improvement for the wiki at least.
Incidentally, I feel that I finally understand the Deleuze and Guattari concept of the "body without organs."
ReplyDelete"A multiplicity of bees, soccer players, or Tuaregs.[fn1] A multiplicity of wolves or jackals. [...] A body without organs is not an empty body stripped of organs, but a body in which that which serves as organs [...] is distributed according to crowd phenomena, in Brownian motion."
"A Thousand Plateaus" quoted in "Prosthetic Architecture: an Environment for the Techno-body"
[fn1] JC: "The Tuareg are Berber people with a traditionally nomadic pastoralist lifestyle."
«This body is also described as "howling," speaking a "language without articulation" that has more to do with the primal act of making sound than it does with communicating specific words.» - The Logic of Sense, page 102, quoted/paraphrased at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_without_organs#Early_uses
ReplyDelete