Creative land: patuki

Creative Land: Place and Procreation on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea, By James Leach, page 76

I remember recently having the eerie feeling when I sat down to drink a coffee on my doorstep that we are not so far away from myths and from history after all. Wouldn't it be weird if "phatic" had yet another etymology -- namely that it was appropriated from the Papua New Guinneans?

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Metacommunicative cues

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

new shit has come to light

I'm in Thessaloniki and I've taken the opportunity to query one of my Greek colleagues about the root words of "phatic". She takes it beyond "tell" and "show" to "light". So the phenomenon is somehow a "coming to light."

Extra channels

In the following, I would like to clarify the connection between channel and context and concomitantly the difference between metachannel and parachannel . Paul Kockelman urges us "to notice the fundamental similarity between codes and channels" (2011: 725) but instead of that purported fundamental similarity points out the contrast between them. I argue that context , or objects and states of affairs (Bühler 2011[1934]: 35), demonstrate a closer relationship to channel than to code. This is largely because the first three fundamental relations, sender or subject , context or object , and receiver or addressee , belong to Bühler's original organon model while code , contact and message , which were previously implicit in the organon model, are made explicit as additions to the model by Jakobson (1985[1976c]). Thus the most productive approach would be to pair a component from the original organon model with an additional component in the language functions model.

Phatic Workshop

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