There is a French phrase that has no anglophone equivalent: avoir de la conversation. To have conversation means something important in French culture – whether of the left or of the right. In the Anglophone world, in contrast, there is a blank here. A strange blank.
To my mind, education is all about having conversation. It is not just reading, it is not just acquiring the tools for a profession, it is not even producing in oneself an inner life – although of course these are all aspects and fields of education. It is having the spirit of conversation, the ability to both be interested in and interesting in the 'said' in all its splendour and sorrow. Yet, something in that facility iis counter to some prejudice in the English soul. Hence, the traditional suspicion of the Irish as fancy speakers, in love with the sound of their own voices, etc. The word blarney is a compound of this prejudice.
One hears, often enough in France, the criticism that this or that person “doesn’t have conversation.” I often think of this when I watch sitcoms with my boy – it is a nightly ritual. The characters in American sitcoms usually don’t have conversation. They have wisecracks. And nobody remarks about conversation.
This does not mean having a wide range of literary reference. It could be any kind of reference, pop cultural, or gossip, the news of the world or the news of the office. The spirit of conversation is not a matter of the matter, but a matter of enjoying the transformations of the matter. The storyteller, the joker, the sage, the gossiper – having conversation runs through these types. But the vividness that is essential to conversation is like the carbonation in soda, if it becomes flat it changes the whole taste of the experience. And often it runs flat because conversation is not considered a necessity – at best, it enters the American mindframe as a value added.
The lack of a consciousness of conversation enters into literature and the study of literature by way of the secondness, the subordination accorded to a kind of text: the letter, the personal essay, the tabletalk. The latter was, for a long time, one of the fruits of humanism – Martin Luther’s Table Talk, John Seldon’s, the dialogues of Erasmus or of Diderot, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Goethe’s Conversations with Eckerman – but, confronting the novel and the newspaper, this kind of thing disappeared. Or – and in this genres are like certain rivers – it went underground. In the twentieth century, it went into Musil’s essayism and Joyce’s enormous parody and reincarnation of every kind of literary device. It produced a strange, broken kind of fiction feuilleton. Ludwig Hohl’s Notizen, Calasso’s odd series of speculative essays, from the Ruin of Kasch, Gerald Mace’s Colportage works, and Pascal Quignard’s series Dernier Royaume. In this world I place, as well, Sebald’s “novels”, which have had a large impact in American contemporary writing, I think. It is a genre based on “having conversation”.
Even in the debased world brought to us by the neoliberal notion that the individual is just a transactor – whose endless endpoint we live through again and again in politics – having conversation has more salience than its neglect as a cultivatable virtue might imply.
1 comment:
The only medium in which we can develop alternatives is actually spoken language. We can speak about alternatives, because we do not pay for speaking. Because a conversation is still a communist activity. It is the only communist activity that exists. It is the activity that has, as its medium, air. At the moment, our economy is organised in such a way that we do not pay for breathing. Maybe it will change. When the air is free, we can breathe free, and conversation uses air as a medium, as a transmitter. Already, when you write something, you are getting into the economy, because you have to buy paper. It is not very expensive, but it is still something. Air is a non-monetised medium – I think it is the only non-monetised medium. That is why, within the conversation, people can imagine alternative activities. But, if you look at these alternative activities from the economic point of view, they do not use air, a common property, as a medium. They use electricity, they use machines, they use this and that. So, from the beginning, they are involved in this monetised capitalist economy. The cryptocurrency is all about business. Generally, if you live in New York, you understand that everything is about business. Only conversations are not necessarily about business, and that is why there are no conversations in America. In America, there is small talk, but no conversations. Conversations, as an archaic communist practice, exist only in certain areas of Europe. Maybe in China, in a very strange way, but not here. Not in the USA. (Boris Groys)
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