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.

List of Abbreviations in Text Citations

Introduction

Part One: Chatter

1 Barbers and Philosophers
2 Fuzzy Math
3 Preacher-Prattle

Part Two: Idle Talk

4 Beginning More than Halfway There
5 Ancient Figures of Speech
6 The World Persuaded

Part Three: Empty Speech

7 The Writing on the Wall
8 First and Final Words
9 A Play of Props

Conclusion

Acknowledgments
Notes
Index