The Decline of Phatic Efficiency

June 27, 2023 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 32, Number 2, January 2022

Matthew J. Rigilano (bio)

Abstract

This article assesses phatic communication now, when symbolic efficiency is in decline. As a result of neoliberal capitalism and industrialized social media, small talk is both obligatory and suffused with anxiety. Under disciplinary society, chitchat has been a threat to biopolitical control. Today, small talk is a form of surplus value that enters directly into the market. No longer a ritual of social facilitation, phatic communication takes on a pathological character. This article relies on psychoanalytic theory to complicate Paolo Virno’s take on the contemporary position of phatic language. In so doing, it asks: what does small talk become once the symbolic pact that ensured its efficacy has been broken?

Over the last few years, a steady stream of articles has appeared arguing that, contrary to what you might think, small talk is an important mode of social interaction.1 The motives for such arguments are not wholly uniform, but many seek to encourage stronger social bonds in the workplace, which is virtually everywhere in our techno-neoliberal era. These articles are minor indications of a major shift in discursive norms. Whereas the factories of the industrial revolution discouraged small talk—“you don’t get paid to talk”—the offices and social media platforms of postindustrial capitalism actively solicit it, and not necessarily because managers or admins prefer a friendly or more mindful work/user environment. The compulsion to communicate is directly related to contemporary ways of generating profit (Berardi 78). For instance, as many office workers have remained remote since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of “team chat apps” like Microsoft Teams and Slack has grown massively. These platforms enable “team members” to stay in contact through messaging applications, video conferences, and so on. Donut, a popular app that integrates with Slack, promises to help workers “connect around the (virtual) watercooler” by staging introductions and conversations throughout the day (fig. 1).2

Fig. 1. Typical “watercooler” chitchat taken from a promotional video on Donut’s website.

In this example, the Donut chatbot initiates a conversation and those workers who have opted in can reply. The content of the discussion, of course, is not particularly important. What matters is the social connection that such small talk might build, which, in turn, can translate into greater efficiency and greater profits: chitchatting about hotdogs is not a way to avoid work, it is work. The data generated on the platform is also a vital source of profit. As Paolo Virno has been claiming for decades, it is not that worker-consumers must learn to play specific language games; rather, they must develop the capacity to communicate in general. Phatic communication, as a performative, low-content linguistic exchange, is no longer a phenomenon on the margins that happens in between more significant units of discourse, but an “immediate and quite considerable content of ordinary experience” (Virno, When 90).

The expansion of phatic communication is not just a byproduct of the turn to cognitive labor; the dominance of social media is a crucial factor. Small talk is thriving online.3 Roberto Simanowski claims that “communication on Facebook operates in the phatic mode; it flows past as the kind of pleasant, information-free white noise” (xiv–xv). Vincent Miller draws on “risk society” theories of modernity to explain the rise of phatic communication online (“New Media”): reliance on “phatic technologies,” he argues, is rooted in the social conditions of late modernity, where traditional forms of meaning, authority, and kinship have broken down, leading to an unprecedented growth in what Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim call “individualization.” Modern individuals are “disembedded” from traditional and immediate contexts—put at risk, that is—and thus seek to be socially “reembedded,” however superficially, through the phatic resources of virtual communication. In short, people use small talk online to create and maintain relationships in a world beset by contingency and instability. But if it is true that the demands of cognitive labor and the pressures of late modernity have produced a “hypertrophic development of the non-referential aspects of language” (Virno, Grammar 97), then why do those articles on the affordances of small talk continue to surface? Do they not presuppose a reluctance to communicate in this way? After all, while chitchat might constitute a large part of online interaction, face-to-face conversation—including small talk—is rapidly disappearing, as Sherry Turkle has argued. But how does this view account for the argument that we live in an increasingly data-driven society, one that has no use for social pleasantries, especially those defined by the absence of informational value (Han, Disappearance 60)?

The state of phatic communication in the twenty-first century is not at all clear, in part because the phatic, as a concept, ranges over several disciplines, from linguistics to sociology to philosophy. The purpose of this essay is to examine the role of small talk in postindustrial society from a primarily psychoanalytic viewpoint. Psychoanalytic theory often privileges the category of the speaking subject, and the social, political, and technological valances of contemporary phatic discourse could be best observed through the prism of the subject. My primary claim is that under neoliberal capitalism, phatic discourse is not just ubiquitous but obligatory, and this obligation puts an enormous psychic pressure on the subject, which in turn produces a range of symptomatic responses. Under disciplinary society, chitchat was seen as a threat, something that had to be submitted to biopolitical control. Today, small talk is understood as a form of surplus value that can be directly entered into the market. No longer marginal or exceptional, small talk has lost its apotropaic or therapeutic character, leaving the contemporary subject with fewer resources to navigate its increasingly turbulent social milieu and to ward off the threat of psychic destitution. Virno’s “hypertrophic development of the non-referential aspects of language” is not just a new social phenomenon but a new social pathology.

I

In 1924, Bronisław Malinowski coined the term “Phatic Communion” to describe behavior he observed amongst Trobriander islanders, namely the inclination to satisfy the “mere need of companionship” through low-information conversation:

Are words in Phatic Communion used primarily to convey meaning, the meaning which is Symbolically theirs? Certainly not! They fulfil a social function and that is their principal aim, but they are neither the result of intellectual reflection, nor do they necessary arouse reflection in the listener. Once again we may say that language does not function here as a means of transmission of thought. (315)

Malinowski recognizes immediately that this sort of activity is not unique to the peoples of Papua New Guinea but is a standard feature of linguistic activity. For Malinowski, “Phatic Communion” exemplifies a basic proposition: that all language is rooted in the “active modes of human behavior” (317). In this respect, it is on a continuum with ritual language and magical formulae, both instances where words are profoundly connected to the context of their use as opposed to supposedly reflecting matters of fact. Roman Jakobson understands the phatic as an essential linguistic function, that of “channel clearing” or verifying the communicative circuit, but he also recognized its ritual aspect (152–53).4 The phatic function can consist of monosyllabic greetings, and it can also “be displayed by a profuse exchange of ritualized formulas” (Jakobson 152).

Following Malinowski and Jakobson, Virno categorizes small talk as a species of performative language alongside ritual incantation, prayer, and other types of religious speech like glossolalia, and the external monologues of children (When 19–107). Performative language uses words to do things, not so much to mean things. In some traditional societies, for Virno, performative or ritual speech was invoked at times of crisis when cultural norms had broken down (When 60, 200–09). Performative speech like ritual incantation allows the subject to repeat the process of ontogenesis: the meaninglessness of the language first renders the individual indistinct, but foregrounding the function of the voice allows the self to renew the process of individuation, to reassert its visibility in the world, and thereby to re-establish the cultural grounds of existence. Virno does not dwell on the specificity of the phatic, but we can safely extrapolate to some degree. For one, chitchat has never had quite the apotropaic or therapeutic power of the language of sacred rites, but it is a form of ontological support. “Phatic Communion,” like other performatives, tends to manifest in two opposing but essentially linked valences. On the one hand, chitchat is often put to the service of social cohesion. In those situations, the cultural environment is uncertain or indeterminate, thereby requiring a repetition of anthropogenesis: the interlocutors reassert themselves as a community of speaking beings. On the other hand, we can understand chitchat as a type of inane chatter or even dissociative babbling. In those situations, the phatic provides relief from a symbolic universe that has become oppressive or rigidified. The first form of the phatic emphasizes cultural renewal, while the second emphasizes the pre-individual hiatus from discursive community. Both valences are only visible to the extent that they occur intermittently. Virno’s central insight is that the industrialization of communication media and the communicative imperative of global industry actively elicit the speech of the modern subject:

A certain number of standard utterances is not what is required of the worker; rather, an informal act of communication is required, one which is flexible. Capable of confronting the most diverse possibilities (along with a good dose of opportunism, however). Using terms from the philosophy of language, I would say it is not the parole but the langue which is mobilized, the very faculty of language, not any of its specific applications. (Grammar 91)

This demand for informal communication is not just a work requirement, of course, but a generalized demand in contemporary culture, especially given that consumption and labor are often integrated through online self-branding. If the performance of language is indeed ubiquitous, “we should recognize that the repetition of anthropogenesis is no longer an apotropaic resource to be used in times of crisis, but,” again, “an immediate and quite considerable content of ordinary experience” (Virno, When 90).

Small talk in the TV series Black Mirror compellingly captures the current situation. In the episode “Nosedive” (2016), everyday life is dominated by the logic of social media, such that one’s social rating goes up or down with every social interaction. The main character, Lacie (a 4.2 rating), enters the office elevator with a former work acquaintance, Bets (4.6). Using her ocular implant to surreptitiously scan Bets’s recent social media activity, which features a cat named Pancakes, Lacie brightens her smile and strikes up a conversation: “How’s Pancakes?” To which Bets replies, “He’s hilarious. Such a funny cat. Just the best” (00:05:30-37). Firstly, this bit of chitchat does not revolve around shared cultural experience such as the weather or a popular sporting event; it concerns a specific social media post, which already indicates something about the contemporary field of available symbolic references (about which I will say more). Secondly, while the setting (an elevator) might suggest that this conversation is just a way of passing the time, something liminal or exceptional, the rating system that serves as the transcendental horizon for all social interaction necessitates that this speech, like all speech, is directly linked to individual social capital, which, in the universe of the episode, can have immediate financial consequences. While Virno is perhaps the first to register this sort of phenomenon philosophically, he does not elaborate fully on its consequences, especially for those subjects experiencing these novel pressures. My premise is that this transformation corresponds to a major shift that defines the contemporary moment: the decline of Symbolic efficiency under what Jodi Dean calls communicative capitalism.

Communicative capitalism, according to Dean, “designates that form of late capitalism in which values heralded as central to democracy take material form in networked communications technologies” (“Circulation” 104). The mediation of democracy through industrialized communication has radically diminished the political agency of the networked subject. Fundamental to Dean’s theory is Slavoj Žižek’s argument concerning the “decline of Symbolic efficiency.”5 This decline refers to “the loss of shared symbols, of general ideas and norms, of a sense that we know what another means when they appeal to home, the common good, citizenship, the university, etc.” (Dean, “Revolutionary” 332). This condition, which some have designated postmodern, is much like that described by the theorists of the “risk society” with whom we began. But Žižek argues that these thinkers “underestimate the impact of the emerging new societal logic on the very fundamental status of subjectivity” (341). They correctly describe the disruptive features of our unstable, risky world, but they do not, for the most part, recognize how the subject experiencing these disruptions has also changed in fundamental ways. The postmodern subject that emerges as traditional figures of the big Other disappear—those figures that seem to give authority and consistency to a particular social structure: God, patriarchy, nationalism, etc.—is not simply free to experiment with multiple modes of reflexive self-fashioning and new techniques of re-embedding. Rather, the very force responsible for this loss of reference and disorientation of meaning—communicative capitalism—provides its own solutions in the form of incessant circulation or investment in the emergent figure of the social media Other. The algorithm and the platform have replaced the narratives and institutions that have become obsolete.

Digital circulation (of affects, memes, headlines, “content”) has the effect of diminishing the capacity of language to mediate and therefore sustain the desire necessary for the constitution of the subject. Endless engagement robs us of the time and attention to creatively singularize our experience. As Dean aptly puts it, “I enter; I click; I link; I poke. Drive circulates, round and round, producing satisfaction even as it misses its aim, even as it emerges in the plastic network of the decline of Symbolic efficiency” (“Real” 15). Without a stable Symbolic field capable of providing the foothold of selfhood, we are left oscillating between the Real (inattentive enjoyment of the drive) and the imaginary (a paranoid and profoundly fragile sense of self reflected in the “likes”). The other possibility for the subject, described powerfully by Matthew Flisfeder, concerns how social media users will the big Other into existence through their engagement. He argues that “it is the agency of the Other for whom we perform our Symbolic identities in social media, which is increasingly connected to the world offline. I tweet, therefore I exist; and the compulsion to (re)tweet is the symptom of our need to feel affective recognition from the Other” (86). In contrast to the canalizing and circulation of the drive observed by Dean, Flisfeder argues that desire can only be sustained by a validating agency—and we will perversely produce that agency if it is found lacking.

II

Before we return to the phatic to determine its function in relation to the decline or transformation of the big Other, we need to clarify the theoretical stakes of the problem. To begin, it is necessary to introduce an important psychoanalytic distinction between empty speech and full speech. Jacques Lacan employs these terms to designate different forms of speech encountered in the clinic (“Function”). Empty speech is language that sustains the narrative of the ego. Most of what the subject says aims to protect or bolster the ego and keep the unconscious at bay. The content of empty speech is secondary to the effect the speech has on the speaker. As Derek Hook puts it, summarizing Lacan’s position: “in sending a message the subject is typically more concerned with affirming an ideal image of its ego, with winning the gratifications of the recognition of others, than with what is being communicated per se” (54). Full speech, on the other hand, concerns language that has transformational Symbolic value, signifiers that produce a change in the subject by engaging the Symbolic fabric of language. While the two kinds of speech seem opposed, they are in fact intimately related. Empty speech, because it seems to wander aimlessly, is often the starting point for speech that has consequences for the unconscious. For the early Lacan, the “talking cure” involves the ambiguous movement from one mode of speech to the other. Hook makes the point nicely: “Just as the truth-potential of full speech is always at risk from the disruption of empty speech, so it is that in the midst of the babbling of empty speech a moment of full speech may erupt, a pulse from the Other might break through” (71).

At first blush, empty speech appears to be nothing other than phatic discourse. As a form of ego-led babbling, empty speech is very much like Kierkegaardian chatter or Heideggerian “idle talk”: talking for the sake of talking.6 Phatic discourse, like empty speech, seems to take place at the level of the Imaginary, where the ritual exchange of non-referential language is fundamentally about being seen by the other, seducing the other, performing for the other. The problem is that phatic communication also has much in common with full speech. Lacan insists that full speech often lacks in content or semiotic significance because it necessarily invokes the fact of Symbolic exchange, the pact that makes any particular meaning possible. As he puts it, “objects of Symbolic exchange . . . are destined to be useless” (“Function” 225). Speech, to the extent that it is transformative or full, operates (or acts) at the level of the Symbolic as a pact, as that shared but obscure backdrop of communication. When strangers engage in small talk, they leverage the pact: “we are speaking the same language.” Chitchat points to itself as language and thus announces the presence of a meta-social contract. In this scenario, the “I” is not primary. Rather, there is a focus on the potential for a “we,” those who share in the Symbolic universe. Phatic speech shares aspects of both empty and full speech, but it is not identical with either. It is not full because it rarely produces lasting social or subjective transformations. As a social ritual, it operates on the terrain of the Other, but, like empty speech, it frequently goes in circles. This is one way of understanding what Malinowski means when he connects phatic speech to ritual and magic speech on the basis of their shared connection to scenes of human action. We might think of small talk as a discourse that invokes ritual-as-pact but is only loosely tethered to any specific formulae. Phatic speech has been seen as a general linguistic phenomenon to which psychoanalytic discourses might be compared in various ways, but small talk today has a peculiarly pathological character, or is at least correlated to new forms of psychic suffering that emerge out of our hypermediated social world.

To identify the problem of pathological phaticity more precisely, it is necessary to interrogate Virno’s conceptual framework in relation to psychoanalytic theory. For Virno, everything hinges on the idea of the pre-individual, a concept he borrows from Gilbert Simondon. The pre-individual names those conditions that precede, enable, and limit the process of individuation. Natural-historical languages are pre-individual because they provide the conditions for linguistic significance that pre-exist the emergence of the speaker. When an individual declares “I speak,” they renew the process of ontogenesis by repeating the passage whereby the speaking self (engaging in generic, pure parole) emerges from the pre-individual language (or langue). The purpose of this renewal is to provide relief for the subject at a time of cultural or psychic instability. From a Lacanian perspective, the ability to appeal to the voice as a therapeutic or apotropaic instrument is complicated in several ways. To begin, the pre-individual natural-historical language is nothing other than the Symbolic, and the very fact of the psychoanalytic clinic attests to its intransigence. To accede to the Symbolic, the individual must give up certain desirous relations to the body and its capacities—thus the production of repressed part-objects, such as the gaze and voice. The voice is not something one can regain in a process of ontogenesis, because the bare voice (vocalization without meaning) is never really one’s own. Returning to the pre-individual voice would necessitate a passage through the unconscious.

We can also illustrate the rift between Virno’s philosophical anthropology and the Lacanian perspective by problematizing a particular metaphor Virno uses to describe pre-individual language: “amniotic fluid.” The process of individuation requires that the subject (the child) recognizes that the capacity to speak is independent of the natural-historical language, the “amniotic fluid,” in which they are immersed (Grammar 77). From a Lacanian perspective, things are quite the opposite: the child is first immersed in “lalangue maternelle,” that is, the sonic and bodily environment of the mother’s voice (Soler 110). The subject painfully emerges from this “amniotic fluid” through the process of castration, that is, the process of being alienated in the world of the signifier. As a result, the “pre-discursive voice” is saturated with jouissance and appears in the unmeaning signifiers of the body, or symptoms. Mladen Dolar refers to the idea that we can have access to the pre-individuated voice-as-such as a “structural illusion: the voice appears to be the locus of true expression, the place where what cannot be said can nevertheless be conveyed” (31). This distinction in conceptualizing the subject’s pre-individual or Symbolic conditions is crucial for our inquiry. According to Virno, the communicative function has been hijacked by the culture industry. We are no longer compelled to rehearse particular scripts, where our capacity to speak is silently assumed. Instead, that capacity is explicitly harnessed by the dictates of capital. This power over the potential of the body is biopolitical, though the object of the control is more the potential than the body itself (which is precisely the difference between disciplinary and neoliberal society). In psychoanalytic terms, we might say that the decline of the efficacy of the Symbolic corresponds to the direct capitalization of potential (Kordela 106). For Virno, this potential is a generic and shared human capacity, a form of “general intellect” that in the absence of biopolitical control could lead to the flourishing of communism. For Lacanians, this potential might be understood as objet a, the remainder of jouissance organized by fantasy. But as Heiko Feldner and Fabio Vighi make clear in their description of Lacan’s discourse of the capitalist, “the capitalist revolution proposes to valorise, produce and exchange this meaningless remainder, turning it into a universally achievable entity” (112). Even lalangue—the Real of speech subtracted from signification—is subject to this incessant process of seizure and exchange.7

The ability of the subject to recapture its potential is not just a political difficulty, however, but a psychic one: the speaking subject’s access to its own potential is already barred by the signifying chain that produces the split in the subject to begin with. Virno’s description of the subject’s return to the pre-individual in the course of executing various performative socio-linguistic operations is useful, but the dynamics of the Symbolic limit any direct return to the jouissance-laden “amniotic fluid” of one’s mother tongue. The decline or transformation of the big Other does not mean that the role of the signifier in the production of subjectivity is somehow diminished, but that the structural agency that organizes those signifiers is no longer hegemonic. The consequences of this condition are observable in contemporary phatic communication. In traditional communicative contexts, small talk functions at the intersection of the Symbolic and Imaginary, leveraging the power of the Other—the pact—to forge relations to others. Today, small talk functions at the intersection or conflation of the Imaginary and the Real, where the jouissance of de-ritualized speech takes shape as anxiety, shame, and despondency.

III

As both Malinowski and Virno suggest, small talk is linked to ritual. In the past, the “ritualized formulas” of small talk worked to ease social interactions, but what becomes of the phatic when the Other begins to fade? As Byung-Chul Han has argued, ritual activity is markedly diminished in our postdisciplinary society: “The culture of information has lost the magic that comes from the empty signifier” (Disappearance 62). To a large extent, this is because ritual appeals to nonegoic aspects of cultural life, the shared experience of the Other. Today, permissive, achievement-oriented society cannot tolerate ritual precisely because it conflicts with our narcissistic demand for transparency. Without the agency of the traditional Other, small talk falls into disrepute. The rituals for chitchatting with a stranger now seem antiquated and pointless. Instead of assuming that “we are speaking the same language, we share a pact,” today we acknowledge that “we are speaking the same language, but we don’t believe anything binds us together.” Without the big Other to censure or acknowledge the collectivity of individual others, cynicism prevails. People don’t want to chitchat. Instead, they want to know what you want from them. The discomfort with small talk is often a cynical response of the narcissist who knows that the pact of language does not match the transactional value associated with the maintenance of the ego.

Surveys have consistently suggested that young people today dread speaking on the phone (Meek), in part because of the prospect of making small talk. Some of this anxiety is undoubtedly linked to the narcissistic tendencies noted above, but I would argue that there is also another dimension of angoisse at work here. To speak on the phone is to encounter the voice in concentrated form. The mediated speaking voice can be tolerated if one can presuppose the existence of a stable Symbolic field into which it can be integrated. But without the authority of the Other, voices appear to be, on the one hand, omnipresent to the point of dullness (the white noise of our phatic technologies), and on the other, all too Real, too close for comfort. This includes the voice of the Other just as much one’s “own” voice, to which the uncanny experience of hearing one’s recorded voice attests. Indeed, for some, small talk is not just uncomfortable but the cause of extreme embarrassment or even shame. As Joan Copjec writes,

Shame is awakened . . . when one suddenly perceives a lack in the Other. At this moment the subject no longer experiences herself as a fulfillment of the Other’s desire, as the center of the world, which now shifts away from her slightly, causing a distance to open within the subject herself. (127)

As the agency of the Other declines, the rituals that once depended on its efficacy become the means of a painful exposure. The problem with small talk today is not that it lacks content— which has always been the case—but that it announces a compact that is no longer assured, thus exposing the subject as unstitched from the Symbolic fabric in which it is nevertheless enveloped.

We are often able to avoid the Real of the voice online, but social media small talk is fraught in its own way. The increase of phatic exchanges online corresponds to Dean’s concept of communicative capitalism, wherein the repetition of the drive is directly routinized by the algorithm. Here, chitchat is nothing other than the acephalous twittering of the machine. Without an Other to recognize one’s phatic announcement to another (“can you hear me?”) we speak simply because Jack from Twitter has asked us “What’s Happening?” It goes without saying that this sort of small talk does not have the performative value it might have in an earlier historical moment. The phatic no longer provides the basis for discursive or cultural binding, nor does it provide an outlet for those seeking community outside such binding. Put differently: we can neither heal minor rifts in the Other through gregarious small talk, nor can we subvert the authority of the Other through impudent chattering. Instead, the now-empty ritual of small talk becomes the means for even more effective—because meaningless—forms of repetition. To chatter is to simply circle the void.

And yet, returning to Flisfeder’s argument, perhaps our social media communication habits are, in fact, formed by the desire for an Other. Perhaps our only mode of sustaining desire is to post the Other into existence. Indeed, the decline of Symbolic efficiency does not always result in the subjective disposition illustrated above as social media users seem to succumb to the short-circuit of endless enjoyment. For some, social media has itself come to occupy the Symbolic space vacated by traditional incarnations of the Other. Where this mode of virtual experience prevails, it seems as if the consequences for the phatic would be minimal. After all, the Other has been made to return. Small talk, we can imagine, resumes its traditional role of facilitating social collaboration and so on. Yet social media as Other, while effective at producing new and rapidly transforming patterns of desire, nevertheless directly objectifies people by rendering every utterance into extractable value, as Flisfeder points out: “the subject of neoliberalism produces, but does not produce the subject as subject; instead, users further objectify the entirety of life as a condition of aggregate exploitation in neoliberal capitalism” (160). This is precisely what is at stake in “Nosedive” for Lacie, who, in aspiring to accrue subjective value through better ratings, ends up having her identity hollowed out as her ratings drop.8

The result of this situation is that small talk can never yield anything but a transient moment of sociality that is always suspect and suffused with anxiety. While the Other exists insofar as it is perversely propped up, it is only weakly attended by ritual, and so the laws that it sanctions are subject to instant modification. In postindustrial capitalism, norms don’t simply disappear, but as Virno puts it, we see “the inflation of fleeting but ironclad rules,” rules that multiply to account for the infinite indeterminacy of our labor (When 207). A coherent and robust cultural system would provide ritualized norms to which subjects may or may not adhere, but a worldless existence is rigidly determined by ever-shifting and single-use rules, often produced, according to Han, by moral zealots, as narcissistic moralism proliferates in the vacuum left by the disappearance of ritual (Disappearance 68). As a result, contemporary small talk, particularly online, sometimes appears rigid and stereotyped, sometimes incoherent and profligate. We chatter anxiously, and rarely move on from small talk to something more substantial, because the norms or “forms of closure” that would provide subjective consistency have been largely evacuated, and because we can no longer recognize what “substantial” communication might look like (Han, Burnout 40).

We can see a more concrete example of this sort of interaction through the lens of a contemporary novel about how the internet captures our attention, Patricia Lockwood’s No One is Talking About This (2021). In describing the general effects of being extremely online, Lockwood writes,

It was in this place where we were on the verge of losing our bodies that bodies became the most important, it was in this place of the great melting that it became important whether you called it pop or soda growing up, or whether your mother cooks with garlic salt or the real chopped cloves, or whether you had actual art on your walls or posed pictures of your family sitting on logs in front of fake backdrops, or whether you had that one Tupperware stained completely orange. You zoomed in on the grain, you were out in space, in was the brotherhood of man, and in some ways you had never been flung further from each other. (12–13)

Lockwood has a knack for identifying those ephemeral conversations that transpire mostly online, those taking up minor differences in regional dialect or the discovery of some new “relatable” phenomenon. These modes of chitchat burst into existence, promising a moment of recognition by the Other, the possibility of a social bond: “the brotherhood of man.” But of course the responses immediately become redundant and stale, and so the discourse marches swiftly on, and a new thing that previously no one was talking about will rise to the surface. In between, there is the brief sensation of a radical dislocation, the feeling that we have “never been flung further from each other” (Lockwood 13).

Finally, to engage in phatic communication online is simultaneously to promote one’s brand and to be the plug that will make whole the social media Other. These are not contradictory positions. As Feldner and Vighi argue, “The various displays of hyper-narcissistic exhibitionism flooding our everyday life are intrinsically perverse insofar as they betray the unconscious desire to surrender oneself to the gaze of the Other . . . (they look at me, therefore I exist)” (110). Is this relentless self-exposure not phatic in essence? That is, does it not have the structure of the “I am speaking, therefore I am recognized by the pact of the Other”? Moreover, the desire to satisfy the Other in the hope gaining a foothold for one’s own desire is extremely precarious. Where anxiety doesn’t prevail, depression often does. For example, there are 391 million Twitter users with no followers (Aslam). In registering an account, these users bring the social media Other into being, but their every tweet (“Can you hear me?”) remains without engagement. When one’s narcissistic phatic announcements fail to be recognized by the Other, the only alternative is to repeat the gesture desperately. According to Han, depression occurs not due to an excess of the negative, as in melancholia, but through the excess of positivity and the compulsion to achieve. The social media Other never prohibits or censures—no “we don’t pay you to talk!” Indeed, we pay, with our personal data, for the privilege to talk. And when we fail to be heard, it is no one’s fault but our own.

Consider, as a final example, the spectacle that transpired on October 4, 2021, when several major social media platforms, including Facebook, went dark for a few hours (Jiménez and Patel). Twitter, which was unaffected by the glitch, saw a massive uptick in activity. In response, the Twitter account posted this message: “hello literally everyone.” The post went viral immediately, with hundreds of major accounts, from Facebook to McDonald’s to Adele, taking the opportunity to reply or retweet in recognition of the joke (fig. 2). With this post, Twitter acknowledged the new traffic generated by users hungry for social media interaction in the absence of their preferred platforms. At 10/4/21, the post was the eighth most liked tweet ever, with 3.2 million likes and more than half a million retweets (“List”).

Fig. 2. Twitter’s initial post, followed by various replies, including Adele’s.

What is interesting, or perhaps typical, about this tweet is the fact that no information was transmitted, no meaningful dialogue initiated. Instead, we have a cheeky salutation delivered by a tech corporation, followed by further ironic banter from other corporate or celebrity brands. Of course, most of the likes and retweets were provided by regular users, whose accounts are followed by none or very few, who perhaps sought some recognition from the act, some sense of belonging to a community through the exchange of low-info language (fig. 3). Predictably, the whole affair simply revealed how easily these gestures ensnare users’ attention and turn it towards advertising in the guise of chitchat, demonstrating again how our quest for subjectivity is converted into further objectification.

Fig. 3. A selection of replies to Adele’s tweet, some registering their fandom by echoing Adele’s popular hit 2016 hit, “Hello.”

IV

This essay began by noting the high number of news stories dedicated to praising the value of small talk in workplace environments. As the COVID-19 pandemic started to wane in the US during the spring and summer of 2021, the cycle began again with renewed energy. Articles circulated that purported to help an isolated and quarantined population reengage socially with small talk.9 I suspect that readers are drawn to these pieces not because they want more chitchat, but because they want what the pact of small talk used to make visible: Symbolic efficiency. Be that as it may, in a world of declining rates of profit, of proliferating bullshit jobs, of stagnant wages, of mass depoliticization, of algorithmic dominance, and above all of compulsive communication, any call for more phatic exchange can only be understood as a desperate attempt to wring the last drop of jouissance from a depleted and depressed population. Today, small talk either works—weakly and fleetingly—to prop up the social media Other, or it doesn’t work, which is still a win, as the chatter feeds the algorithm regardless of what it means or fails to mean. Worse yet, it is unlikely that this chatter will open up the space for full speech. Like the analyst, the algorithm insists: “Away you go, say whatever, it will be marvelous” (Seminar 52). But where the analyst cuts short the analysand’s speech to make the signifier resonate, the algorithm, which knows everything and nothing, always asks for more.

Matthew J. Rigilano is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State Abington, where he teaches writing and English. His research ranges across 18th century British literature and culture, the theory of the novel, psychoanalysis, and philosophies of the subject.

Footnotes

1. For a representative selection, see Wuench; Morris; and Mannering.

2. “Watercooler,” https://www.donut.com/watercooler. The example is taken from a promotional video on the Donut website, https://www.donut.com.

3. See Miller, “New Media,” and “Phatic”; Wang, et al.; and Kulkarni.

4. For an overview of the concept in the linguistic literature, see Coupland, et al.

5. Žižek works on this issue in many of his texts. For what might be his most extensive treatment, see The Ticklish Subject.

6. For a penetrating analysis of the links between Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan on the question of everyday speech, see McCormick.

7. See Lewis for a consideration of lalangue as the late Lacan’s revision of full speech.

8. It is worth noting that when Lacie is arrested for dropping below a 1, she has a conversation with another prisoner that consists entirely of profane insults. Interestingly, both participants clearly enjoy the freedom of this exchange. It is as if small talk has been so degraded by the rating system that the only authentic form of social intercourse that remains is one marked by a kind of joyful hostility. The suggestion is that this shared sense of counting as nothing might be the foundation of renewed social life.

9. See Thorpe; Abad-Santos; and Sale.

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