issues bring ideals about social configurations into relief: imperatives to seek a “liberal democratic form of phatic communion involving citizens and state alike” on equal footings (Slotta 2015, 132) aim at different ideals than do exhortations to avoid “going over the boss’s head,” violating hierarchical report channels. When newcomers or former underlings have demanded honorifics or insisted on equal time at the microphone, others have dismissed such moves as “political correctness” or have even grabbed microphones, confiscated typewriters, or otherwise cut channels.
One question that arises when we leave face-to-face methods to communicate is: Are these functions relevant when words stretch across space and time, in print text or in film? I posit that they are, working by analogy from the observation that even nonworking channels thread through or cut across our lives and that even language functions that seem to fail make something happen. If I call soup “ice cream,” the referential function is still active even if its aim is off. Similarly, if I write, “Can you see this font?” you may never answer me—here too is an apparent failure, attributable to time and space conditions. That silence, however, negates neither the phatic attempt nor the material channel. In fact, the ways people attribute or deny channels or the possibilities for contact regardless of time and space limitations are matters of social and political contestation and control. Even when no contact is made, phatic attempts and judgments tell us something important about the shapes, materials, and experiences of social connections and rifts.
To prevent contact can intensify phatic communications, or multiply them across jammed channels and cut lines. “No one is home.” “Don’t bother talking to them.” “No one can hear you”: such statements are as often social judgments as they are descriptive meta-communicative statements. To better capture the meanings and effects surrounding and spun out by apparent failures or blockages, I turn to the category of interpretants, as formulated by pragmatic semiotic philosopher C.S. Peirce. An interpretant happens whenever a sentient being takes anything to be a sign. Peirce distinguished several kinds of interpretants, from ideational concepts and symbolic associations to responses: goose bumps and laughter can count as interpretants. Any interpretant can be taken up as a sign by still another (or even by the same) sentience. The initial sign-vehicle, be it a word, a gesture, a plume of smoke, can not fully determine possible interpretants. Peirce’s claims about intrepretants ring true across many interactions: outside rituals or stage plays people are less certain of how their own signs will be taken up. Your companion faces you with the “shadow of a quickly hidden smile,” and you are uncertain about whether to take that flicker as a sign, and of what. Your uncertainty may be expressed, say, in a pause, that pause interpreted in its own turn as a sign of mistrust.
Even the clearest of channels within the most regimented ritual settings can scatter diverse interpretants across many perspectives. The category of intuition is evoked and claimed not only in response to communication "gaps," but also in answer to multiplications of interpretants. Stray interpretants seem all the more troubling when they cross politicized borders; indeed, Cold War fear focused on ways that failure to read signals might lead to final nuclear destruction: intuition goes geopolitical.
The idea of contact itself often serves as a “trope for communication itself” (Kockelman 2010; see also Hoffmann-Dilloway 2011; Nozawa 2015, 386), but it does not always do so. Zuckerman (2016) shows how, during sports competition, hecklers aggressively make contact not to communicate, but to distract. Even as conflict during play can fold into the weave of friendship (rival friends becoming favorite friends), communication is may seem ancillary to the game. Indeed, an open channel never ensures all forms of communication: the fact that you answer the phone does not mean that your caller makes himself understood.
What about the term channel? A channel and a medium can align, but are they the same? A machine, such as a radio, can carry multiple channels, which can even interfere with each other. A theater hall, can activate multiple types of media, each materialized along channels laid in wire or cast by breath. Metaphorically, an “open channel” between diplomatic parties might be said to activate multiple media, such as telephone and memo text. I do not insist on a clean distinction, but try to use “channel” to address specific material conduits (this radio wave or that subway underpass) as well as social ones. Social and racial segregations of space also forward or prevent communication; they form channels for certain kinds of mediations and not others.
With divergent usages in mind, I avoid purifying definitions of contact, channel, or phatic. People define communications differently than scholars may, and their reflexive definitions reverberate through and even rearrange social worlds. I begin with a concept of the phatic, for instance, that is formal enough to set out across differently textured terrains but that remains vulnerable to adjustment. As I contrast situations, the reader will register contradictions among ways people understand communication, contact, media and channel, as well as disagreements about whether communication or contact occurs or not, and about what that entails. The goal is not to outline a taxonomy of kinds of phatic events, but rather through ethnographic and archival attention to arrive at a historico-semiotic theory of processes through which people manipulate and encounter phaticity.
PHATIC EXPERTISE
Failed communication structures the plots in works by Sophocles, William Shakespeare, and Alexander Pushkin, as it did earlier in myths and tales: kings are felled by semantic tricks, rivals plant seeds of suspicion, and dogs forget to pass on messages to divinities. Europe in the nineteenth century gave us the despairing heroes of Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, who seem always to speak past each other (Williams 1958, 1968; Levinas 1947; see Peters 1999). Postmodern characters curled even further from contact, as if language itself were insurmountably to blame. Modernists blamed a death of communion on the mechanical forces of industry and alienated exchange, on media reaching further than ever beyond face-to-face talk, perhaps even serving instead as technologies for surveillance or manipulation. Some linked postindustrial metaphysics of communication gaps to discoveries in physics: knowledge of circling atoms and subatomic particles, matter never touching across spaces between, scaled up as metaphors for awkward sociability across urban societies of strangers.
Disciplines separated, too. Before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientist-poets and inventor-artists (like Mikhail Lomonosov and Leonardo da Vinci) pursued rhyme and reason at the same time; as Luckhurst has argued, the invention of telepathy did more than modernize the occult, it also addressed the new separations among fields: “The conceptualization of telepathy [in 1882] in fact defines its own mode of discursive interconnection: it sparks across gaps, outside recognized channels, to find intimate affinities in apparently distant discourses” (2002, 60). For this reason, to discuss the invention of telepathy Luckhurst traces “sociological pathways” (51) through “energy physics to neurology, from anthropology to the ghost story, from wireless telegraphy to hypnotic rapport, from imperial federationalism to the peti mal of the hysteric” (3).
All the angst associated with modern communication gaps, separation from the divine, alienation from nature, divisions of knowledge, fraction of kinship, divisions of self, and so forth affords a compensating pleasure in demonstrating interpretative or descriptive command of these gaps. To work with communication gaps is to claim a critical vantage, the kind of encompassment equated with intelligence or power, the status of sage, theorist, or mage (see West 2007; Palmié 2002). To force a rupture and then visibly work to suture the gap has become a way to claim not only to be modern, but also to make modernity.
Theater and telepathy research are two sites at which people work with gaps, making them in order to bridge them (only sometimes to unmake them); the space between audience and actor and the metal wall between telepathic receiver and sender are made in order to then demonstrate contact or communication across them. To consider them together allows us to contrast not only their working schema for contact and gap but also the relations among people who make and judge contact and those whom they judge. I call the former phatic experts (Lemon 2013). Societies divide linguistic labors (Irvine 1989); they also divvy up the work of talking
