A word Bob keeps braided in two registers: McLuhan's "phatic" — the aside, the contact-keeping remark nobody notices making — and Bob's own Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs (1992), the book title he later reads as naming his chart's fifth and sixth levels, the "phatic quadrant" that becomes the Tech Body. New to it — start with dialogue 02 for the phatic aside.
Across the dialogues
Enters in McLuhan's sense — the medium as a "phatic aside," the contact-keeping remark nobody knows they are making
Bob takes McLuhan's own gloss on "the medium is the message" — a phatic aside, the parade-watcher's throwaway remark — as the concept's first register.
"kind of like an aside"
Grounded to that book — the chart "based on the content of my book, Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs"
Bob roots his chart in his own 1992 book — the title that gave the term its currency, later echoed for him in the subway slang "phat."
"based on the content of my book, Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs"
Identified with the Tech Body — the phatic quadrant "come alive"
Bob folds the phatic into his body-sequence — the sixth level above the Tetrad, the "phatic landscape" that mutates into the Tech Body.
"the phatic quadrant, the sixth level, which became the Tech Body"
Given an economic reading — the shrinking of speech to "what up" is treated as the minimum signal required to stay inside the merger, doing more with less
Phatic speech recast as membership maintenance — the content is irrelevant because the function is to register presence in the hive mind.
"you're saying a few words in English. And that's all you have to say to remind people that, yeah, I'm involved with the cloned ESP."
The term the series has been circling turns out to be the book's own title, and is finally given its scholarly pedigree — Malinowski's appendix to The Meaning of Meaning — so the show's subject and the show's name are shown to be one act of naming
The term arrives as an identification rather than a definition — Cameron's account of learning-by-immersion is met with a name, and the name is anthropological, not media-theoretical.
"Yeah, that would be, it just occurred to me, that would be Malinowski's Phatic Communion."
The pedigree is stated precisely for the first time in the series, which matters because it places the term inside the Ogden-and-Richards line McLuhan was trained in rather than inside McLuhan's own coinages.
"the word phatic comes from Malinowski and comes from the appendix that he did to meaning of meaning."
A three-name lineage is asserted that runs the term through modernism before it reaches media study, which is what licenses Bob to treat it as the successor concept rather than a borrowing.
"The term Phatic Communion was so important to James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, and then McLuhan when he read it."
The title is explained as a strategic move: not a summary of the contents but a claim to the one unoccupied position left after McLuhan, staked by naming.
"So I'm going to call my book Phatic Communion, which is redoing McLuhan, but with a little angle that hadn't been noticed before."
Connections
Bob's 1992 book Phatic Communion with Bob Dobbs brought the term into currency; he later reads it as naming the chart's fifth and sixth levels.
The other register — McLuhan's "phatic aside," the throwaway remark nobody knows they are making.
Bob folds the "phatic quadrant" into his body-sequence as the sixth level that mutates into the Tech Body.