Making Conversation: Fiction, Philosophy and the Social Medium

Making Conversation: Fiction, Philosophy and the Social Medium By Erin Elizabeth Greer A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Elizabeth Abel, Chair Professor Anne-Lise François Professor Kent Puckett Professor Michael Lucey Spring 2018 Making Conversation: Fiction, Philosophy, and the Social Medium © 2018 By Erin Elizabeth Greer Abstract Making Conversation: Fiction, Philosophy, and the Social Medium by Erin Elizabeth Greer Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Elizabeth Abel, Chair Making Conversation: Fiction, Philosophy, and the Social Medium originates in the hazy self-awareness of the contemporary networked world, in which activities such as donating to political campaigns, posting on social media, and contributing to online scholarly reviews are frequently characterized as modes of participating in an ethereal and endless digital “conversation.” At the same time, works like Sherry Turkle’s recent Reclaiming Conversation express fears that the digital “conversation” is corroding our abilities to converse in person, thereby threatening our “capacity for empathy, friendship, and intimacy.” Moreover, recent political developments––the US’s 2016 election, the British “Brexit” referendum, and the increasing prominence of digitally organized hate groups––have stimulated fears that online “conversation” in its current form undermines democracy by precluding the development of a central public “conversation” based on agreed-upon facts, openness, and civility. Contemporary concerns about conversation in the digital age in fact extend a long philosophical tradition in which “conversation” has been made to index lofty aspirations for both public and intimate life. Derived from the Latin figures for turning, vertĕre, and togetherness, com, to converse originally meant “to turn oneself about, to move to and fro, pass one's life, dwell, abide, live somewhere, keep company with.” From John Milton’s claim that “a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and the noblest end of marriage,” to Jürgen Habermas’s conception of a public sphere in which talk among private citizens critiques and legitimizes the modern state’s authority, this less-instrumental cousin of discussion (from the Latin discutĕre, “to dash or shake asunder”) has frequently represented a playful, open, and aesthetic practice constitutive of both intimate relations and democratic politics. Making Conversation proposes the novel as a referent to ground and focus our talk of “conversation.” Adopting a method inspired by Ordinary Language Philosophy, I turn to novels that provide exemplary studies of conversation as a social medium. Each chapter moves through increasingly expansive contexts of conversation, beginning in the domestic realm with George Meredith’s The Egoist; moving next, via Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and The Waves, into the realm of intimate community; then to that of national “public” life as critiqued in Salman Rushdie’s Thatcher-era novel, The Satanic Verses; and finally into the global “conversation” of the Internet and social media, as refracted by Ali Smith’s There but for the: a novel. Reading scenes of conversation in these works alongside theoretical invocations of this social medium, I elucidate the discursive, collaborative, and aesthetic processes by which intimate and political communities form and transform across a period stretching from the Victorian novel through contemporary digital media. 1 CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS II INTRODUCTION: RETHINKING CONVERSATION 1 METHODOLOGY IN CONTEXT 4 STRUCTURE 10 CHAPTER ONE: MUST WE DO, WHEN WE SAY? THE PLIGHT OF MARRIAGE AND CONVERSATION IN THE EGOIST 18 MEETING, HAPPILY 20 CEREMONIES OF UNION: THE COMMISSIVE SPEECH ACT 23 DOUBTLESS WRONG, BUT NO MISSTATEMENT 27 PERFORMATIVE SUSPENSION 31 NOBLEST ENDS? SPEECH WITHOUT INTIMACY, INTIMACY WITHOUT SPEECH 36 CHAPTER TWO: ‘A MANY-SIDED SUBSTANCE’: VIRGINIA WOOLF’S AESTHETICS OF CONVERSATION AND CONVERSATIONAL AESTHETICS 40 CONVERSATIONAL AESTHETICS 43 THE AESTHETICS OF CONVERSATION 49 THE WAVES AND SILENT CONVERSATION 54 THE CONVERSATIONAL SENSUS COMMUNIS 59 THE WORLD, DISPLAYED 64 CHAPTER THREE: ‘ANOTHER COURT, SILENT AND BLACK’: THE SATANIC VERSES AND THE CONVERSATIONAL PUBLIC SPHERE 66 THE ENGLISH PUBLIC OF THE SATANIC VERSES 69 THE UNDERCITY 72 INVENTIONS OF COUNTERDISCOURSES 79 THE RIOT AS CONVERSATIONAL META-DISCOURSE 81 THE NOVEL AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE 93 CHAPTER FOUR: ‘WORLD-WIDE CONVERSATION’: DIGITAL SOCIAL MEDIA, DEMOCRATIC FANTASY, AND THE NOVEL 97 CONVERSATIONS AND PLATFORMS 98 A NEW ATHENS? 101 MEMETIC MEDIA, HASHTAG COUNTERPUBLICS, AND THE THREAT/PROMISE OF DEMOCRACY 105 CONVERSATIONAL MEDIA: NOVELS V. WEB 2.0 109 TOWARD AUGMENTED REALISM? 113 “THE FACT IS, IMAGINE.” 115 POSTSCRIPT: INVITATIONS SERIOUS AND PLAYFUL 119 BIBLIOGRAPHY 124 i Acknowledgments This project has been immensely enriched by my communities––in California, Indiana, England, North Carolina, and elsewhere. I wish to thank all who have encouraged, challenged, taught and inspired me, beginning particularly with my dissertation advisor, Elizabeth Abel, who is a model of the scholar, teacher, and mentor that I seek to be. I am also very grateful to my other committee members, Anne-Lise François, Kent Puckett, and Michael Lucey, who have offered invaluable insights and support. My undergraduate mentor, Toril Moi, also provided crucial feedback on early drafts, and she continues to be a role model and inspiration. To my parents, Meg Gaffney and Charlie Greer, my step-parents, Kathy Greer and Matt Galvin, and to my aunt Carol Gaffney: thank you for decades of love and friendship––I couldn’t dream up a better family. Finally, to all the friends, union siblings, Starry Plough dancing buddies, hiking companions, pen pals, and political comrades who've taught, inspired, and supported me throughout this process, and especially to Dan Scott: thank you. I’ve learned and enjoyed so much through our shared adventures. I love you, and I hope to be forever in conversation with you. ii Introduction: Rethinking Conversation Since at least the writings of Plato, whenever new media for human communication develop, concerns about the fate of ordinary conversation are raised.1 Digital new media have recently stimulated the latest round of eulogies of the art of conversation. In her 2015 work Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, media scholar Sherry Turkle warns that, as face-to-face conversation is replaced by digital surrogates, we risk losing our “capacity for empathy, friendship, and intimacy,” as well as self-esteem and social trust.2 The stakes of conversation, it seems, include love, friendship, social relations broadly, and––in a more figurative sense––our political system of democratic liberalism. In The Audacity of Hope, then-Senator Barack Obama described his vision of “our democracy not as a house to be built, but as a conversation to be had” (92). These words signal the significance of his observation in late 2016 that the transposition of political discourse to social media has made it “very difficult to have a common conversation” (qtd. in Remnick). Both statements invoke the liberal ideal of deliberative democracy, in which a vibrant “public sphere” hosts a conversation among citizens that shapes the course of history. But what is a conversation? What is entailed in having a “common conversation”? The practice is at once very ordinary and extremely ideologically laden, a concrete activity engaged in constantly, and also a hazy but stirring metaphor embedded in our daily lives, representative of elusive ideals in intimate relationships, culture and politics. An early enthusiast of conversation, John Milton, argued in the 17th century that a “meet and happy conversation” is the divine foundation and index of a true marriage (Milton 27). For Jürgen Habermas, conversations among merchants meeting in coffee shops in Early Modern England and Europe played a crucial role in the development of liberalism, laying the blueprint for the “public sphere” that, he argues, checks and influences the power of the government. Yet, is there more to conversation beyond platitudes about listening, patience, openness, thoughtful consideration, honesty, etc.? This project is a literary-philosophical investigation of such (and other) questions. It will not decisively define “conversation,” but I hope that it will clarify the nature and possibilities of this essential social medium. The chapters that follow place works of literature into dialogue with works of philosophy, drawing from ordinary language philosophy, aesthetics, epistemology, and political theory. My investigation travels from the private to the public sphere, tracing a literary-philosophical account of the role of conversation in constituting social relations in both spheres, and culminating in a new formulation of the “conversational” aspects of public life in times of riots and social media. The novelists at the center of this project––George Meredith, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie, and Ali Smith––test the material conditions as well as ethical and political possibilities of “conversation,” driving an appreciation of conversation that is at once more expansive and more concrete than is offered by the familiar tributes and lamentations. Imaginative fiction drives this project of theorizing “conversation”

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