idle chatter

In a local reading group this semester, we’ve been going through some of the key sections of Being and Time. Last weekend one of the sections we looked at was §35 on Gerede or “idle talk,” and I realized the extent to which I think that this section, as short as it is, is really one of the most crucial sections in Division One. At least, that is, insofar as the explication of Dasein in its average everydayness is supposed to be the starting point of the phenomenological project of Being and Time.

The reason for §35′s importance lies mainly in the way that it attempts to give an existential explanation of ordinary communication. Since the explosion of electronic media technologies (particularly, I would argue, first television and then the web), the kind of communication that Heidegger describes as idle talk has been given concrete form in increasingly ubiquitous structures. Not coincidentally, the couple of times I’ve taught Heidegger, I’ve found that this is perhaps the part that my students have had the easiest time understanding (is there a better example of “passing the word along” than the “Retweet” button?).

On the other hand, isn’t it the case that pointing to Twitter or Facebook or cable news (or respected newspapers, for that matter) as prime examples of forums for idle talk is also an example of idle talk? That is, Twitter is so trivial, cable news so superficial, that it practically announces its own inauthenticity. The interpretation of such media as only perpetuating idle talk is perhaps always already given along with the media themselves.

The question that arises for me, then, is this: can a deeper and more thorough critique of the ideology and structures of such media get past the level of idle talk, or does the anticipation by these media of kinds of critique that can be leveled against them preempt the efficacy of such critique? Is something other than critique required?

(He asks, on a blog…)

Related(?): thinking about this put me in mind of Paul Lansky’s More than Idle Chatter, which I haven’t heard in probably a decade. For your listening pleasure:

back

It has now been over a year since I’ve used this blog, but I’ve decided it’s time to give it another try. So here we are.

Among everything else taking up space on my desk right now are things that pertain to the syllabus I’m working on for next semester: Philosophy of Being. Almost the entire first half of the course will focus on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but the second half will move it around a little more – start off with a little Thomas Aquinas, move right on into Kant, and then finish up with a hearty dose of Heidegger. That’s the question I’m dealing with right now, though: exactly what Heidegger, and how much? I’m leaning toward the Intro to Being and Time, “What is Metaphysics?”, and “Time and Being”. But there’s so much other Heidegger I’d also like to do (not to mention adding on some Derrida and even Latour as a coda).

This is always my experience writing a new syllabus; I get to wishing that semesters were about one month longer. Of course, that’s not the feeling one usually has about the end of the current semester.

then again…

In some new comments to one of my older posts, David Roden has started a very interesting conversation about iterability, materiality, and even Twin Earth! (He posits that iterability may need some kind of minimal memory device to operate as such, one which can support a causal or informational chain.)

turning off

I’ll be making this blog temporarily private sometime soon, giving in to the creeping inducement of paranoia among young philosophers come October. In the meantime, I offer the following snippet of Nishitani Keiji, reading Meister Eckhardt:

To say that God is what God is in himself precisely in that absolute nothingness in which God is not God himself means nothing other than to consider ecstasy as applying to the existence of God as well as of man.

atheism

Graham Harman posted this snippet from Meillassoux’s L’inexistence divine, regarding atheism:

“Atheism is a strategy of the besieged. One begins by admitting that the territory of immanence is just as religion describes it, then one declares that this territory is the only one that exists, and finally one invents every possible way of rendering it livable despite that fact.”

I have nothing to say about this, really, other than that I find it to be probably the single best metaphor for atheism that I’ve ever encountered.