The Chattering Mind

A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk

Samuel McCormick

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780226677774, 9780226677637
• eBook ISBN: 9780226677804
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Rhetorik

From Plato's contempt for "the madness of the multitude" to Kant's lament for "the great unthinking mass," the history of Western thought is riddled with disdain for ordinary collective life. But it was not until Kierkegaard developed the term chatter that this disdain began to focus on the ordinary communicative practices that sustain this form of human togetherness. 

The Chattering Mind explores the intellectual tradition inaugurated by Kierkegaard's work, tracing the conceptual history of everyday talk from his formative account of chatter to Heidegger's recuperative discussion of "idle talk" to Lacan's culminating treatment of "empty speech"—and ultimately into our digital present, where small talk on various social media platforms now yields big data for tech-savvy entrepreneurs.

In this sense, The Chattering Mind is less a history of ideas than a book in search of a usable past. It is a study of how the modern world became anxious about everyday talk, figured in terms of the intellectual elites who piqued this anxiety, and written with an eye toward recent dilemmas of digital communication and culture. By explaining how a quintessentially unproblematic form of human communication became a communication problem in itself, McCormick shows how its conceptual history is essential to our understanding of media and communication today.

PART ONE

Chatter

ONE

Barbers and Philosophers

Public Debuts

It is hard to say when Kierkegaard’s authorship began. He often dated his emergence as an author to the 1843 publication of Either/Or, leaving commentators to ponder the import of two earlier works: a literary review, From the Papers of One Still Living (1838), and his master’s thesis, The Concept of Irony (1841). By way of an introduction to his myriad reflections on chatter (snak), I would like to suggest that Kierkegaard’s authorship began years prior to any of these works, in the midst of an 1836 newspaper polemic on freedom of the press in Denmark’s fledgling democracy. It was here, in the conservative political pages of Copenhagen’s Flying Post, that Kierkegaard made his debut as an author. And it was here, at the start of his blisteringly productive career, that he began to explore the role of “chatter” in the modern world.

In the early months of 1836, Denmark’s first liberal newspaper, The Copenhagen Post, published a series of articles on freedom of the press. Among them was an anonymous defense of the free press written by one of the country’s leading liberal reformers, Orla Lehmann. Freedom of the press is essential to freedom of the people, he argued, and among the basic freedoms enjoyed by the press is the freedom to make stylistic errors, especially when these errors occur in service to breaking news. Much to Lehmann’s frustration, Danish readers disagreed. Their demand for timely news coverage was matched only by their distaste for hastily chosen words and expressions. “If anything of common interest occurs without being mentioned by journalism—then that is wrong,” Lehmann groaned. “If it is certainly mentioned but not exactly in the way in which each had thought it should be mentioned, then that is wrong, too.” The best way forward, he surmised, is for journalists to prioritize up-to-the-minute news coverage over stylistic quibbling about “every single little word.” In short, “What [Johannes] Hage recommends: [do] not bother too apprehensively about the tiresome qu’en dira-t-on [what will people say about it], but trustfully follow the path dictated by honor and conscience.”1

Kierkegaard’s reply to Lehmann, published under the pseudonym “B,” appeared a few days later. It was everything the liberal reformer loathed: witty, precious, comically wrought, and scrupulous in its mockery of specific words and phrases. Before Lehmann could respond to B, however, another pioneering figure in Denmark’s liberal movement rushed to the former’s aid—the same outspoken political author mentioned in his article’s conclusion: Johannes Hage. Like Lehmann, Hage had little patience for wordy critiques of the free press, and B’s attack on Lehmann was a case in point: heavy on “mockery and witticisms” but light on “discussions about reality”—so much so, Hage complained, that the basis for B’s critique remains completely obscure. Is it that Lehmann writes about “the press in general,” instead of limiting his remarks to The Copenhagen Post? Or that, “against unjust critics, [he] recommends what we once said—not anxiously to pay attention to gossip [Folkesnak]?” Or could it be something else entirely? Perhaps, Hage speculates, B’s critique is driven by a “petty, egotistical motivation . . . to glorify one’s own little self” (EPW, 142–44).

Kierkegaard welcomed the opportunity to clarify his position. A week later, again under the pseudonym B, he explained that the problem with Lehmann article is also the problem with The Copenhagen Post: both display “a certain gadding about in ideas, a certain, if I may say so, intellectual vagrancy.” If the clumsy prose of these liberal elites was now under attack, it was precisely for this reason, for “the unclearly expressed is also the unclearly thought” (EPW, 15). Thankfully, Kierkegaard goes on to tease, there is an utterly unambiguous word for confusion of this sort: “nonsense [Sniksnak]” (EPW, 17). And it is akin, not opposed, to the “gossip [Folkesnak]” bemoaned by Lehmann and Hage. To illustrate this kinship between the nonsensical form and gossipy function of their work, Kierkegaard then unleashes an ironic series of references, quoting Hage paraphrasing Lehmann paraphrasing Hage’s advice that fellow journalists ignore “gossip [Folkesnak]” (EPW, 15). Lehmann and Hage are not just clumsy writers and vagrant thinkers trafficking in nonsense (Sniksnak), Kierkegaard suggests. They are also fundamentally confused about the nature of their work, which more closely resembles gossip (Folkesnak) than journalism, especially when it claims otherwise—and all the more so when it does so with pompous French expressions like “qu’en dira-t-on.”

When Lehmann finally managed to post a reply, it was only to admit that, like Hage, he was still struggling to grasp the substance of B’s critique. “I have tried to the best of my understanding to find out what Mr. B’s opposition to the attacked article actually consists of in reality, but I am, of course, far from being sure that I have seen the point,” he confessed. “On the whole the attack seems chiefly to be only the vehicle for a number of more or less suitable jokes,” and thus little more than “a stylistic exercise in the humoristic manner.” More than a clever example of “journalistic literature,” B’s critique was a trifling break with the genre: “The author’s intention is not to give information about anything but only to amuse” (EPW, 158).

Kierkegaard was hardly surprised by Lehmann reply, especially given Hage’s earlier confusion. And he was eager to say as much in his final counterattack:

It has not surprised me at all that both Mr. Hage and Mr. Lehmann have assumed that my articles were merely to amuse, for the form certainly clashes with the solemn, funereal style one generally finds in The Copenhagen Post. This [paper] can therefore say with Gert Westphaler, “I do not believe that any person, not even my enemies, will say that I at any time have engaged in chatter [Snak] . . . I carry on purely political and foreign discourse not to be found in many books and worth its weight in pure gold.”—And regarding its dispute with me, this paper can add, “Is it not incomprehensible that such a scoundrel as Jørgen Glovemaker dares to despise my speech [Tale] and turn up his nose at it.” (EPW, 34; trans. modified)

With this final rhetorical flourish, Kierkegaard underscored his central argument against Lehmann and Hage: Only by dismissing B’s critique as a pretentious exercise in idle amusement can these writers maintain the basic pretense of their own work, namely, the delusion that their “journalistic literature” is somehow more serious and significant.

In so doing, however, Kierkegaard also accomplished something else—something crucial to the conceptual history of everyday talk. By ending on the topic of Gert Westphaler’s dispute with Jørgen Glovemaker, he referred Danish readers to the modern literary origin of snak—a point of origin to which Kierkegaard would return, again and again, in later critiques of this ordinary communicative practice. Like Gert Westphaler, the talkative barber in Ludvig Holberg’s popular 1722 comedy, Lehmann and Hage sorely underestimated their opponent’s discourse and grossly overvalued their own. If they were nettled by Kierkegaard, much as Gert Westphaler was nettled by the silence of Jørgen Glovemaker, it was not because he turned up his nose at their work, heedless of its journalistic excellence, but because he continued to look down his nose at it, accurately perceiving their work for what it was: chatter (snak).

With this allusive mashup of literary past and political present, Kierkegaard introduced readers to the communicative practice that would concern him for years to come—a way of speaking whose subsequent theorization, as we shall see in this chapter, frequently occurred with reference to Holberg’s talkative barber. With Gert Westphaler as his guide, Kierkegaard ranged across the history of Greek, German, English, and Danish literature and philosophy, recovering analogous modes of speaking, thinking, and being with others in the works of Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Hegel, the Brothers Grimm, and a host of lesser-known but particularly nettlesome Danish contemporaries—all of whom, and with just as rangy an approach, receive attention in this chapter. Many of the themes in his 1836 newspaper polemic also recurred along the way, allowing him to further characterize chatter as nonsense, gossip, cliché, confusion, delusion, bombast, self-indulgence, and the like. But many more characterizations sprang up in turn, allowing Kierkegaard to associate chatter with noise, wind, sewage, babble, birdsong, wordplay, witticism, gimcrack, compulsion, automation, mechanicity, repetition, distraction, deception, abstraction, antiphony, derangement, logorrhea—indeed, the list goes on, further expanding the range of this chapter.

It was also here, at the bitter end of this public debate with two of Denmark’s most outspoken reformers, that Kierkegaard finally introduced himself to Danish readers. Beneath his reference to Holberg’s well-known play, where readers expected to find another “B,” he printed his name instead: “S. Kierkegaard.” It was the first signed text in one of the nineteenth century’s most prolific intellectual careers. Years before publishing any of the anti-philosophical tomes that would eventually bring him fame, Kierkegaard’s work as an author was underway—and with it his work on chatter.

Runaway Jaw

Ludvig Holberg was best known for the one-act comedies he wrote in the early 1720s, all of which, much to the delight of Danish audiences, were written and performed in the national tongue. Among these comedies was Master Gert Westphaler; or, The Talkative Barber—the same popular comedy that Kierkegaard cleverly cited at the end of his 1836 newspaper polemic. As we shall see, this was more than a passing reference to one of Denmark’s most well-known literary works. Over the next decade, Holberg’s talkative barber would become a familiar touchstone in Kierkegaard’s emerging theory of snak and, in many ways, a key figure—second only to Socrates—in his outspoken critique of speculative idealist thought. Tracing these connections through Kierkegaard’s work and drawing out their hidden conceptual structures are the primary tasks of this chapter.

That the passage Kierkegaard quotes in his final critique of Lehmann and Hage shows Gert Westphaler refusing to classify his discourse as snak—a move which recurs in other Holberg comedies, as we shall see in chapter 3—would have brought a smile to the lips of many Danish readers. For if there was one thing they knew about Master Gert, it was his proclivity for snak. Variations on this term appear on every page of Holberg’s play, and almost always in reference to Gert’s rambling discourse. Of central concern to everyone in the play, including Gert, is his inability to hold a conversation with anyone at all, including himself, without diverting from the topic at hand, distracting all involved with tedious, long-winded, and hilariously tangential monologues—and always on the same few subjects, as Holberg demonstrates in the play’s opening scene:

PERNILLE [the maid]. Everybody has a weak point, and Master Gert’s weakness is to bore good people to death with useless chatter [Snak].

HENRICH [a visiting servant]. What can he chatter about so much [snakke saa meget om]? Does he know a lot?

PERNILLE. He has three or four subjects to chatter about [at snakke om]. The first is an old bishop in Jutland, called Arius, who was persecuted because of a book he had published. The second is the counts palatine in Germany, the third is the Turk, and the fourth a trip he made from Harslev to Kiel. So that whatever you begin to talk about with him [at tale med ham om], in a jiffy he’s up to his ears in the middle of Turkey or Germany.

HENRICH. That’s a strange weakness.

PERNILLE. Suppose somebody says “It’s nice weather today,” he will answer: “I had this kind of weather once when I left Harslev.” And then he’ll jabber away about the whole journey till he’s hoarse, so that if you dragged him from the house by the hair he wouldn’t stop holding forth about his trip till he had got to Kiel. That’s how he falls into chatter [Snak] every time . . .2

Most of the key themes in Holberg’s comedy, especially those on which Kierkegaard would later dwell, are readily apparent in this opening dialogue. As Pernille claims and Henrich confirms, Gert’s talent for chatter is a weakness of sorts. Later in the play, Gert attempts to explain: “We who have been abroad often have a kind of disease or obsession [Syge eller Orm], or whatever you like to call it, and we must tell everyone what we’ve heard and seen in foreign countries, so as to show we haven’t always stayed home” (MGW, 36). More than a communicative disorder, Gert suffers from a “chatter disease [Snakke-Syge]” (MGW, 25; trans. modified). The clinical structure of this curious disease is an uncontrollable and strangely obsessive urge to transmit information to others. Uncontrollable because it typically overwhelms Gert’s own intentions: “I often get chatting like that against my will [saadan Snak mod min Villie]” (MGW, 41; trans. modified). And obsessive because, once the urge to inform has overpowered his will to converse, Gert is unable to stop talking until each and every detail has been aired: “When I begin a speech I must finish it. That’s my nature. Nothing annoys me more than when someone hears the beginning of my speech and won’t stay till the end” (MGW, 30–31). So compulsive is Gert’s urge to chatter that, as Pernille later quips, “I believe if you sewed up his mouth, he’d learn to talk through his nose” (MGW, 25).

Kierkegaard was fascinated by this characterization. Consider, for instance, his July 1848 exchange of letters with a friend:

I am sure you will easily remember that excellent passage in Holberg in which Pernille says of Gert W. that if one sewed his mouth shut, he would teach himself to speak with his nostrils. How splendid! It is so descriptive, so graphic, for when a person closes his mouth and tries to speak anyway, then his cheeks become inflated, and one cannot help but get the impression that words will have to escape through his nostrils. Furthermore, there is infinite vis comica [comic strength] in this “to teach himself how to” with his nostrils. . . . And suppose he succeeded, succeeded...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations in Text Citations
• Introduction
• part one  Chatter
• part two  Idle Talk
• part three  Empty Speech
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index