Samuel McCormick

In "The Chattering Mind", I explore a largely forgotten tradition of philosophical commentary on the communicative practices of mass society, especially insofar as this intellectual tradition can be shown to inform ongoing discussions of collective life in the digital age. In particular, I trace the conceptual history of ordinary conversation as it stretches from Søren Kierkegaard’s innaugural theory of "chatter" (snak) to Martin Heidegger’s resurgent account of "idle talk" (Gerede) to Jacques Lacan’s culminating treatment of "empty speech" (parole vide)—and ultimately into our digital present, where "small talk" has become the basis for "big data".

From Plato’s struggle to elude "the madness of the multitude" to Kant’s lament for “the great unthinking mass,” the history of Western thought is riddled with tagline derisions of ordinary civic life. But it was not until Kierkegaard coined the term "chatter" (snak) that this ridicule began to center on the communicative practices of ordinary citizens. The intellectual tradition inaugurated by this coinage has been insufficiently traced. In "The Chattering Mind", I attempt to provide such a tracing. It is at once a genealogy of elite theoretical discourse on the communicative practices of mass society, and, at its furthest reaches, an effort to reclaim this genealogy as the proper conceptual foundation for ongoing discussions of collective life in the digital age, when the originary logic of "the chat room" continues to evolve in an ever-expanding landscape of new social media.

More than a history of ideas, "The Chattering Mind" is a book in search of a usable past. It is a study of how the modern world became anxious about ordinary conversation, figured in terms of the intellectual elites who peaked this anxiety, and written with an eye toward recent dilemmas of digital communication. It is the first book-length study to explain how a quintessentially unproblematic form of human communication—casual conversation—became a communication problem in itself, notably one in need of philosophical commentary and now, in the digital age, ongoing technological support.