Wyllie (on Han)

Chatter is language on autopilot, like Han’s “smooth communication” of digitally mediated sympathy, that encounters no negativity.[29] Nothing gets in the way of chatter. Peter Fenves puts it well: “chatter is the medium in which everything makes sense.”[30] Chatter is never stunned to silence. It does not stop to puzzle over contradictions. Chatter cannot hear the “still small voice,” because it turns even God—the Wholly Other—into “god-talk.” Not only does God disappear amidst chatter, but so do human beings. When language speaks itself, the human zoon logon echon is no longer differentiated from the other animals except as chatter.[31] As a result, nobody speaks when there is chatter. Kierkegaard warns, “eventually human speech will become just like the public: pure abstraction—there will no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective reflection will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere.”[32]

In addition to God and the human subject, Kierkegaard is lastly concerned—perhaps most surprisingly—that politics disappears in chatter. Han echoes Kierkegaard’s concerns but never cites him: “If everything becomes public right away, politics invariably grows short of breath; it becomes short term and thins out into mere chatter.”[33] When speech loses its power to reveal real differences between the advantageous and the harmful, and the just and the unjust, then the debates that animate politics fade away.

Character, culture, morality, and revolution: these require some passionate attachment to ideals. Kierkegaard thinks that the line between good and evil was still drawn in the “age of revolution,” while the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars still raged, but has disappeared in the age of newspapers. Chatter prevents all but short-lived “flaring” enthusiasms. 

Robert Wyllie