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 attitude, etc.) to scale professional ladders? Debates over phatic 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