Nousland

”Global Justice and Dialogue between Civilizations” Anne Granberg

Small talk - informal conversation, trust, and cross-cultural understanding

We often think of “dialogue between civilisations” in terms of grand conversations and debates. In this paper I shall argue that “small conversations” may also play a positive role in such a dialogue. Philosophy has often been sceptical towards mere conversation while exalting the virtues of serious debate. Heidegger’s acerbic descriptions of  “idle talk” or Gerede is a well known point in case: Idle talk and pointless chatter are from the philosopher’s point of view a kind of degeneration of real or authentic communication; instead of a common exploration of the truth, we engage in a repetitive exchange of commonsensical trivialities.

Discourse ethics also takes its point of departure in communicative action as serious discussion - a type of activity where the goal is an agreement on some matter of importance. I would in this paper like to focus on a very different kind of communicative activity altogether, namely the less serious everyday conversation in its most bland and unassuming aspect - what we call “small talk”. Small talk in its purest form, as it were, typically takes place between complete strangers and is about “all and nothing”. It is a type of interaction which is pretty much universally known to all, but it is still hard to pinpoint exactly what we do when we engage in it. It is neither strategic, nor (strictly speaking) communicative action in Habermas’ sense; the point is neither self-expression, nor to reach consensus on any matter (be it truth, justice, or aesthetic judgements). Small talk could perhaps be seen as a separate type of action directed towards establishing what we can call a “minimal community” between speakers.

If we change our focus from the content of small talk  – what is said – to how this type of conversation functions and the constitutive features that make this kind of interaction possible, some philosophically relevant points can be made. It is my hypothesis that a "praxeological" analysis of small talk (by using "arguments from absurdity") can enable us to highlight some pragmatic conditions for communication in general; conditions which often remain unnoticed, and moreover carry an ethical import. Drawing on Steven Hendley's effort to combine the insights of thinkers as different as Habermas and Levinas, I will suggest that Levinas’ distinction between the “saying” and “the said”, and his notion of “proximity” is a way of articulating this ethical import.

There is a difference in talking to someone and talking at someone, and a feature of all successful dialogue is that it presupposes a specific attitude – "conversational deference" – to one’s interlocutor. Since the lack of  this "deference" leads to absurdities and communicative breakdown, we are not only obliged to be rational when entering into conversation, but we must also retain this attitude. I will suggest that "conversational deference" implies a "contrafactual ideal" of respect and care, which opens up the question of what role “small talk” can have in the process of mutual understanding between civilisations.