The Chattering Mind : A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk / Samuel McCormick.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

McCormick, Samuel, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Kierkegaard, Søren, 1813-1855.

Kierkegaard, Søren.

Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976.

Heidegger, Martin.

Lacan, Jacques, 1901-1981.

Lacan, Jacques.

Conversation--Philosophy.

Conversation.

Conversation--Philosophy--History.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (339 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Abbreviations in Text Citations

Introduction

PART ONE. Chatter

PART TWO. Idle Talk

PART THREE. Empty Speech

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2020)

ISBN:

9780226677804

022667780X

OCLC:

1144764068