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 about talk, the metacommunicative labors (Lemon 2002). The lawyer, the news editor, and the marriage counselor all master metacommunicative skills and specialize to different degrees in qualities of contact and conditions for communication, learning different skills to account for the most troubling gaps.
I came upon this category in the summer of 1997, when I began asking friends in Moscow, Perm’, and Jaroslavl’ what they made of the newly resonant term transparency, and in a more personal register, how they decided whom to trust. A banker acquaintance averred, “Who can tell?,” suggesting that I ask “the experts among theatre actors and KGB agents.”18 In Moscow as in Chicago, surveillance experts and detectives, therapeutic psychologists and linguistic anthropologists, drama teachers, business communication consultants, psychics and their skeptics work on ways to recognize, manipulate, and represent contacts and channels: Are they warm or cold, open or closed, working or broken, veiled or revealed, lacking or excessive? Some phatic experts—people like Dale Carnegie and Constantine Stanislavsky—even brand coherent systems of “contact qualia” (Lemon 2013) to pass on their expertise.
My banker acquaintance had a point: I had long found common ground in Russia among people trained in theatrical work, because they loved discussing the pragmatic semiotics of minute behaviors in real-time situations, not just onstage. Like me, they actually enjoy discussing the ways tiny gestures point to relationships, both those in the moment and those beyond. At that point I had already lived for some months Perm’ with people educated at the theatrical and musical academies in Moscow and Jaroslavl’; everyone was cash poor, some living rent free in the actors’ dorm even into their thirties. It was this phatic expertise that they could sell when paychecks from the theater were sparse: they gave acting lessons to businessmen, teaching vocal skills to managers to improve their intuition for market and social encounters (for self-preservation, for rapport) that still seemed new.
Phatic experts take an interest in similar forms and details, in the quality signs (or qualia) of human sign behavior (“a spark in the eye,” a “shift in tone”). They may do so to different ends. Some subsume phatic labor under other language functions; for example, police might take a flickering muscle around the eyes to indicate a blocked facial expression and deduce that the flicker indexes a lie. (Paul Ekman would caution that micro-expressions merely signify a shift among emotions.) Police need to monitor channels for signs of false reference; they use the phatic function to abduct the referential. Actors, by contrast, need to suspend reference to run multiple channels of contact in order to animate a “what if” inside a world of “not possible.” American radio psychologists do something similar when they mix layers of memory by mixing tenses (“Where were you when daddy goes away?”).19
Phatic experts often draw from other disciplines and places; doing so itself signals proficiency in crossing gaps. They are like brokers, accumulating value by working back and forth over the borders of nations, institutions, and disciplines. Their authority can accrue even in times of competition; some such work shades into the dark sides of contact, intercepting channels for intelligence or forcing words in interrogation. Phatic experts constantly engage with those who are not (or not yet) experts. Their expertise emerges historically, grounded not only in local organizations, but also in disciplines and institutions whose purposes entail crossing borders, both between states and within them.
REFRACTIONS OF EXPERTISE
When phatic experts judge whether contact has been made, channels have been broken, or communication is flowing, when they name good or bad acting, when they call out strong or weak psychics, they rarely work only with words, but also with materials, even with signs visceral to touch that are less than visible or audible to eye or ear. They also work with social divisions that channel who wields a stopwatch, who takes up a pencil, or who handles the X-ray or the energized gems.
Phatic experts are interested in similar forms and details of interaction and its conditions—but not always for similar reasons. Again, detectives succeed when they look for indications of truth or sincerity, but many actors cannot fret too much about verity (even offstage; as one student told me when the cohort was nearing graduation, “Our profession does not allow one to freeze out a person just because of mistrust”), as that would detract from collective labors