The concentration booth and the handshaking lane: ideologies of the phatic

Abstract

Abstract Scholars of language and culture have effectively used the language ideology concept to critique the referentialist assumption in the post-Enlightenment conceptualization of language and society. Continuing with this critical project, this article attempts a further reorientation of our analytic metalanguage to explore the ideology of the phatic, the way in which salient emphasis is placed on problems regarding communicative channels of contact. The article identifies this ideology in the increasingly visible role played by phatic labor and its concrete manifestations in scenes of service and affective labor in contemporary Japan. Two separate instances are analyzed to reveal their common engagement with channels of contact as a metapragmatic concern. First, I analyze one Japanese restaurant chain’s attempt to design and control the material zone of contact in dining experience, as indicative of the larger tendency in the contemporary economy to standardize consumer desire at the level of the phatic. Second, I look to the culture of celebrity, especially popular idols, and examine the institutionalization of fan-idol contact that has become a hegemonic marketing strategy. These cases witness rituals of public encounter that either work to hybridize human speech acts with nonhuman speech-actants inhabiting the material environment of contact, or to regulate forms of interaction deemed detrimental to the channel of affect through monitoring, interruption, and other forms of phatic policing. I use this analysis to draw attention to the necessity of taking the phatic function seriously in the scholarly exploration of language ideology. While scholars in various fields have frequently spoken of the centrality of communicative labor in postindustrial societies, the analytic focus on ideologization of the phatic offers a more precise theoretical and empirical framework for examining how communication is fetishized as the central site of political and economic intervention.