A01=Samuel McCormick
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Author_Samuel McCormick
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=CFA
Category=JHB
chatter
communication
conversation
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
digital culture
empty speech
eq_bestseller
eq_dictionaries-language-reference
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
everyday talk
idle talk
IL
Jacques Lacan
Language_English
Martin Heidegger
PA=Available
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
softlaunch
Soren Kierkegaard
Product details
- ISBN 9780226677774
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 07 Mar 2020
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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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 practiceswhich 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.
Samuel McCormick is associate professor of communication studies at San Francisco State University.
