[Linganth] CFP: Phatic Anxieties/Mass Sociality Panel @ AES Meetings (Washington DC, Mar 31-Apr 2)

[James Slotta]

Aaron Ansell, Shunsuke Nozawa, and I are looking for a couple more
participants for a panel we are putting together for the upcoming American
Ethnological Society Spring Conference in Washington DC (March 31-April 2).
The panel is provisionally titled "Phatic Anxieties and Mass Sociality" and
will look at the way communicative channels become a focus of attention and
action under conditions of mass sociality (see below for a preliminary
sketch of the panel abstract).

If you are interested in joining us, please email James Slotta:
jslotta at utexas.edu
Abstracts for the conference are due by January 31, so we would hope to
hear from those interested in participating by January 22.

Thanks,

James


Phatic Anxieties and Mass Sociality

As anthropological attention has shifted from its erstwhile focus on
small-scale societies operating largely through face-to-face interaction,
the very precarity of communicative contact between social actors that
underpins large-scale political regimes, economic markets, and other mass
social formations has come to the fore. Where Malinowski’s discussion of
“primitive speech” presents the exchange of words as a nearly effortless
and universal way to produce bonds of social union—what he terms “phatic
communion”—we find instead the formation of communicative channels to be a
constant focus of anxiety and effort. In social conditions that are
disorderly, messy, unstable, and transitional, attention turns from the
semantic coherence of semiotically and socially well-ordered communication
to the very possibility of establishing communicative contact in social
environments felt to be increasing in scale and aloofness.

In this panel, we ask how signs that reflexively focus on their own
communicative channel work to establish contact with immediate and
remediatized audiences; how they charge communicative channels themselves
with ideological and affective resonance; and how they construct the
experience and significance of social contact, of nearness and distance,
presence and absence in social life. We track how phatic signs are borrowed
and repurposed as they move across different scales of community even as
they play an important role in constituting the very experience of scale
and community.

To these ends, the papers in this panel explore how “phatic anxieties”
become key to remaking the materiality of human communication (the body,
the voice, communicative infrastructure, etc.), to reorganizing
institutionalized channels of communication, and to reimagining the
possibilities of communication.

(For more information on the American Ethnological Society Spring
Conference, go to http://aesonline.org/meetings/spring-conference/)
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