on practices from yoga to relax mind and body: “Did you know that Stanislavsky developed his famous acting methods through the study of yoga? He believed an actor must eliminate all muscular tensions before going onstage. Stanislavsky thought that tensions or ‘clamps’ on the nerves block real freedom of motion and expression” (Ostrander and Schroeder 1970, 23–25).
One of the resident experts on early seasons of Battle of the Psychics, psychologist and criminologist Mikhail Vinogradov, by his own account has lived across all these professional intersections. Over the years I had several opportunities to meet experts like Vinogradov, who repeats much of what he says on air in biographical publications.11 In the 1960s and 1970s he worked in government labs running experiments on thought transmission, hypnosis, and modes of extrasensory perception such as tactile vision (feeling color as heat) and other claims to synesthesia. He appears now on twenty-first-century television shows that repurpose the Soviet-era experiments, embedding in television performance both the experiments’ conventions and recollections of the personalities who undertook them. Vinogradov developed his specialty in detecting psychic channels when, as an intern in medical school, he was called upon to evaluate self-proclaimed hypnotists who showed up at the lab. He later discovered his own talent for clairvoyance and worked on a team of psychologists screening people who asserted that they could see U.S. submarines. His age, smooth gestures, measured tones, and credentials add gravity to the seasons in which he appeared, administering trials to hopeful contestants and sounding out final judgments. (“She is a strong ekstrasens”; “No extra-sensation was involved in this contact.”) He sometimes spoke against the other experts on the show, setting them straight about how probability works or about the physics of brain waves. Editors would intercut his face and words after tests to stress the historical connection to Soviet-era research: “We used to see this all the time in the lab.” After a few seasons on air, Vinogradov expanded to collaborate more with law enforcement, opening the Vinogradov Center, where past winners of the show work as associates, devoted to finding missing persons. At its sister center, Volshebnaja Sila (Enchanted Forces), other protégés focus on healing.
THE PHATIC FUNCTION
It is common for Americans to describe the Soviet Union in terms of failed contacts: diplomatic snafus, postal failures, radio interference, and media censorship. Less common is to attend to ways the Iron Curtain generated excess communications, contacts, and channels, even beyond the little openings created by official exchanges, shows of contact among heads of state.12
To work in a more robust way, we need the concept of the phatic. The Greek phatos simply means “spoken” or “that which is spoken.” English and other languages carry the root in words like aphasia (loss of speech) or apophasis (the device of feigning not to speak about a subject while doing so: “I hope no one brings up what happened last time.”). Scholars have used the term phatic to address conditions for communication, the channels, media, and practices that open contact or cut it off.
Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used the phrase “phatic communion” narrowly, to describe language that affirms or establishes social relations, “a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words” (1923, 315), such as weather talk and greetings and questions such as “What’s new?,” which are best answered not with information but with acknowledgment: “Nothing much. You?” (Those of us struggling with literal mindedness stutter, trying to recall what is truly new; others are smoother with phatic niceties.) Similar difficulties are matters not only of personal inclination, but also of rank or social distance, as they affect expectations about phaticity in specific contexts.
Russophone-Anglophone-polyglot13 linguist and formalist critic Roman Jakobson differentiated the phatic function from other speech functions, which he labeled referential, expressive, conative, metalinguistic, poetic. Linguistic anthropologists influenced by Jakobson have added more functions to the list and have demonstrated that when people speak, they usually activate more than one language function at a time.14 If the officer at passport control says, “Show me your passport,” the words both refer (to papers and to you), serving a referential function, and also prod a response, serving a conative function (in this case, as a directive). If the officer were to say, “Pass your passports, passengers!” the phrase would cover those same functions and might also activate the poetic function (with repetitions of sound drawing attention to form). Playing with tone and volume to hone and deliver attitude would add expressive function.
Words or gestures that establish, check, or close a channel or the media for transmission fulfill a phatic function. “Hello!? Hello? Do you read?” If you stand still and unresponsive in the passport line you may hear something sharper than a polite, “Are you listening?” If a colleague decides that this definition of the word phatic misses something and tells me so, then we are working through a metalinguistic function.15 While metalinguistic acts are peculiar to humans, other metacommunicative acts are not. Gregory Bateson saw practices of metacommunication among all sentient creatures: “If we were to translate the cat’s message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying ‘Milk!’ Rather, she is saying something like ‘Ma-ma!’ Or perhaps still more correctly, we should say that she is asserting: ‘Dependency! Dependency!’ ” (1972, 372).16 The cat is concerned not with naming milk (the referential function) but with drawing attention to the relationship here and now, with affecting the nature of contact.
Jakobson’s meta-functions—the poetic, the phatic, and the metalinguistic—are among the means by which people communicate the forms and conditions of communication and by which they address expectations about what language can do or how signs work; and about which means of communicating are moral, which are appropriate or inappropriate, and which ways of speaking, writing, signing, or being silent are thought to indicate what about people—or about certain people and not others.17 Matters of linguistic and semiotic ideology become political matters.
Perhaps because it is associated with certain forms of contact over others, the phatic is often neglected, its expressions downgraded as “mere” and “empty” words (see Nozawa 2015; cf. Elyachar 2010; Kockelman 2010; and Lemon 2013). Perhaps the phatic is neglected because attention to it is so telling: to speak about efforts to open or close communication can be discouraged as rude or awkward; like pointing out the emperor’s new clothes, questioning a greeting (or its lack) can draw attention to hierarchies or to rifts running through social encounters. It can be difficult enough to question the definition of a word without debate and insult; even more so, discussing phatic acts brings social and technical arrangements for communication into focus, potentially clarifying coercion and conflict that are usually left unexamined, are part of doxa or dogma, or are even taken as natural.
If acts that deny contact can seem injurious—even a brusque “Huh?” at least acknowledges what the blank stare disregards—too much checking in can intrude, grate, or be read as micromanagement, disrespect, and nagging: “You never write! You never call!” Richard Bauman (1998) addresses exactly this issue, relating struggles over phatic language to political struggles, showing phatic acts to be political acts, by documenting seventeenth-century Quakers’ refusal to utter greetings. They called them “idle words” that did not describe God-given reality, recoiling from “empty” formulae like “good day,” and repudiated vain titles of address and honorifics like “sir.” Their refusals to utter anything but words displaying pure referential functions irritated and enraged the non-Quakers around them, earning them hostility and beatings.
Attention to the phatic—especially to competing claims about contacts and channels for communication—sheds light on how some interactions become more visible and come to be regarded as more important than others, which are submerged or neglected as mundane or private. It also helps us to see which kinds of channels or contacts pose problems, for whom: Why does person A listen to person B only when person C is not present? How do outsiders learn the right small talk (the right topics with the right ironic
