The Concept and Practice of Conversation
Stefan H. Uhlig’s chapter, “Improving Talk: The promises of
conversation”, begins by discussing the “conversational ideal” in the
humanities, posing a question that underpins all the work collected in this
volume: to what extent can we consider “conversation” to be a useful
methodological or theoretical framework for scholarly work in the arts,
social sciences and humanities? Through a probing discussion of
eighteenth-century theories and practices of conversation, he suggests that
a yearning for a more “conversational” intellectual framework in today’s
Academy might be characterised as a nostalgic yearning for a politer past.
The mannered politeness of eighteenth-century “conversational ideals”, he
argues provocatively, defines itself “against professionalism”, and can be
seen to work “against the formal purposes of research or debate”. Thus
conversation, he claims, has limited utility as a model for academic
discourse and scholarly interaction in the contemporary academy.
For Amanda Dickins, however, conversation remains a useful, if
contestable model, “a thread to guide the reader through the labyrinth” of
David Hume’s philosophy. She examines the role played by conversation
in Hume’s philosophical writings, arguing that attention to conversation in
Hume enriches our understanding of his philosophical work, and his moral
philosophy in particular. Firstly, she suggests that conversation is crucial
as “raw material” for philosophical reflection, which must be empirically
based and not pursued in isolation. Hence Hume’s well-known articulation
of the mutual dependence of the Learned and Conversible worlds in his
essay “Of Essay Writing”. The Learned reflect on, refine and distil the
empirical material of conversation to produce knowledge; the sociable
world must be raised from idleness and triviality by its interactions with
The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth
Century, 1688-1848
xix
the Learned. While Stefan H. Uhlig argues that Hume sees the separation
of the Learned and the Conversible worlds as productive in terms of
intellectual enquiry, Dickins suggests that in fact, in Hume’s thought,
“both suffer if they are isolated from each other.” The next section of the
chapter focuses on the role played by what Hume calls the “intercourse of
sentiments” in developing moral judgement. As Peter de Bolla also
suggests in Chapter Nine, in relation to the visual arts, Dickins argues that
this interplay of conflicting perspectives in conversation exposes us to the
perspectives of others, takes us beyond our own point of view and evokes
our capacity for sympathizing with other human beings. Dickins then
discusses the relationship between conversation and virtue in Hume’s
writings, emphasizing Hume’s belief in the connections between
conversation, benevolence and pleasure. Finally, she proposes what she
calls a “triptych of seduction” in Hume’s account of conversational virtue.
The central element in this triptych is our own seduction by virtue–the fact
that we are drawn into society by the attractiveness of its “natural” virtues.
The second side of the triptych is comprised of self-effacing women, who
facilitated, but did not participate in the conversation of Enlightenment
salons; its last side is shored up by the anxiety of the eighteenth-century
aspirant middle-class. Dickins ends her chapter by considering whether
Hume’s account of morals and conversation is irredeemably compromised
by its reliance on social anxiety and gender inequality.
Mary Jacobus uses the concept of conversation to construct a
theoretical framework for her reading of William Wordsworth. In her
chapter “‘Distressful Gift’: Conversations with the dead”, Jacobus
explores the conversational nature of elegy’s unheard address to the dead
by considering William Wordsworth’s writings to his dead sailor brother,
John, and Derrida’s collected memorials to his dead friends in The Work of
Mourning (2001). Derrida’s memorials to Levinas and Marin are
representative of his other tributes to the dead friends commemorated in
The Work of Mourning, which take the form of posthumous responses,
unfinished conversations, and personal re-readings—often continuing
dialogues that had previously been conducted in print and in person, over
many decades. In this moving essay, Jacobus shows us poetry as “a kind
of conversation that is constantly turned towards another: an averted
apostrophe”. Mourning is, in the formulation of Maurice Blanchot, a kind
of “infinite conversation”, characterised achingly by the fact that “here
there can be no direct communication, only a hiatus, or unknown mode of
being”. Conversations with the dead must always be one-sided; but, in line
with Peter de Bolla’s argument in Chapter Nine that conversation must
involve some element of “talking back”, they are not monologic. Talking
xx Introduction
to the dead can be understood, Jacobus argues, “as a form of
désoeuvrement, in Blanchot’s sense—a restless un-working that refuses
totalization and proceeds not by way of critique, but rather by
juxtaposition, divergence, and difference. This is a dialectic without
negation, yet capable of responding to disaster, broaching the unknown of
one’s own thought through repetition, return, and response.” Taking
conversation as a model for analysis, we see here, brings its own openended rewards to the scholar of literature.
Paul Kerry sets out to offer an account of how conversation was
thematized in late eighteenth-century German texts, with particular
emphasis on a neglected essay by Heinrich von Kleist that, he suggests,
transforms the German discourse on conversation in this period. Kerry
begins with discussions of the relationship between conversation,
Enlightenment and the public sphere in Immanuel Kant’s well-known
essay “What is Enlightenment?” and the place of conversation in
eighteenth-century German theatre. He then provides an account of
Adolph Freiherr von Knigge’s The Art of Conversing with Men, the most
widely recognized work on conversation in eighteenth-century Germany,
drawing parallels between Knigge’s connections between conversation,
sociability and politeness and the civic vision of Anthony Ashley Cooper,
Third Earl of Shaftesbury. Heinrich von Kleist’s often-neglected essay,
“On the Gradual Production of Thoughts whilst Speaking”, utilizes a
conversational style to suggest that thoughts are best developed in the
process of conversation. Further, intellectual empathy is as crucial to the
process of thought creation as verbal exchange. Kerry also shows that
Kleist uses the metaphor of electricity to figure conversation as
unpredictable, in contrast to the tradition of advice literature that, as
Michèle Cohen also shows us, assumed conversation could be mapped and
planned. The implications of Kleist’s conceptualisation of conversation are
then examined within the context of the university, where Kleist argued
conversations should typically take place. Kerry concludes by drawing
parallels between Kleist’s notion of conversation and those of twentiethcentury thinkers, including Hans-Georg Gadamer and Sigmund Freud, and
arguing that Kleist’s essay marks a turning point in German Enlightenment
discourse on conversation.
Turning from Continental Europe to the new American republic of the
late eighteenth century, Jay Fliegelman begins his essay by focusing on the
discrepancy between the late eighteenth-century American political ideal
of conversation as a bulwark to democracy, aiding the circulation of
opinion and information, and the reality of American political
conversation as one-sided, performative and illusory. Fliegelman argues
The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth
Century, 1688-1848
xxi
that this discrepancy manifests itself widely across cultural forms in the
period. Thus Richard Caton Woodville’s painting Politics in the Oyster
House does not represent a democratic conversation, but a harangue. More
provocatively, the correspondence of Adams and Jefferson is
characterized, not as an ideal, but “perhaps the most manipulative of all
American political conversations”. If, as the essays in this volume have
established, authentic conversation must comprise a two-sided exchange,
then the solipsistic and one-sided Adams-Jefferson correspondence is not
truly conversational. Fliegelman then turns his attention to the revolution
in oratory and rhetoric of the 1760s and 1770s that stressed theatricality
and performance in speaking over conversation and exchange of views. He
focuses discussion on a text central to this rhetorical revolution, and
written and visual responses to it: James Burgh’s The Art of Speaking. The
essay ends with some reflections on Crevecoeur’s Letters from an
American Farmer (1782) and the observation that “productive horizontal
conversation”, fantasized as a foundational article of early democratic
faith, is rarely met with in reality.
Michèle Cohen shows how Hume’s beliefs about the interdependence
of the Learned and Conversible worlds were put into practice in educating
eighteenth-century children, particularly girls. She argues, in response to
Stefan H. Uhlig’s essay, for the benefits of considering conversation
seriously, claiming that the centrality of “conversation” to social and
cultural life in eighteenth-century England and France is now
incontestable, having been firmly established in both nations in the last
decades of the twentieth century. She raises a number of important
questions: given the essential orality and evanescence of conversation, is its
study not an impossible project? How does conversation differ from other
forms of verbal exchange such as the dialogue? And to what kind of
conversations are we referring? Since Lawrence Klein’s remark that in the
eighteenth century, conversation was the “master metaphor” of politeness,
what scholars have increasingly confronted is both the polysemic range of
“conversation” and its elusiveness and irreducibility. Cohen chooses not to
investigate the nature of conversation, but to explore the role it played in a
specific aspect of the culture of sociability and politeness, as a mode of
informal instruction. In her chapter, Cohen argues that many eighteenthcentury authors chose the “familiar format” (i.e. the forms of conversation)
for instructional works. While modern historians represent didactic
dialogues as structurally different from familiar conversations, Cohen
believes that a number of eighteenth-century writers intended to minimize
this difference, claiming that their dialogues were not only based on actual
conversations, but also resorted to a variety of techniques such as digressions
xxii Introduction
or using the language of “ordinary” conversation to simulate conversational
authenticity more effectively. In eighteenth-century English and French
societies, social conversations became an archetype of an art of living and
thinking, linked to morality. Morality required, as we have seen in the works
of Jane Austen, that social conversation should be improving. Within the
culture of politeness, the social or familiar conversation, at once an art of
pleasing and a discipline, was expected to be not just entertaining but
instructive. This is why it is plausible, Cohen suggests, to consider that social
conversations were instructive. Conversations may be oral, but they are not
just a “shallow stream” of words at the “tongue’s end”, as Wollstonecraft
would have it. They involve the mind and the judgement. Using letters,
diaries, memoirs and biographies as well as texts that used conversation to
instruct, Cohen argues that social conversations in domestic settings played
a key role in the development of critical thinking in both adults and, crucially,
in children. She raises questions not just about the meaning of “didactic” in
conversations and dialogues, but also about informal domestic instruction,
generally ignored in the historiography of education.
Moving from texts of educational literature to those of the law, Jean
Meiring argues that the concept of conversation is a useful way of
understanding Sir William Jones’s arguments for the integration of Roman
and Common law ideas in his 1781 An Essay on the Law of Bailments, as
well as the distance between this text and earlier eighteenth-century
dialogues between Roman and Common law. Meiring begins by charting
the dissemination of continental Natural Law ideas, often associated with
Roman law, in eighteenth-century England, and sketching the seventeenthcentury background to Jones’s text. Before turning to discuss William
Jones in detail, this chapter considers dialogues between Roman and
Common law in a number of eighteenth-century legal treatises, including
those of Thomas Wood, Henry Ballow, Robert Eden and William
Blackstone. Emphasis is placed both on the difficulties of establishing
dialogues between the systems and the impetus to impose intellectual
coherence on the Common law and equity in the eighteenth century. After
a brief biography of Sir William Jones, focusing on the broad range of his
intellectual interests and his involvement with the polite, conversational
culture of his age, Meiring goes on to offer a close reading of An Essay on
the Law of Bailments. He comments in some detail on the structure of the
text, as well as its indebtedness to the various legal systems under
consideration in this essay. Meiring concludes that Jones’s treatise brings
together and reconciles Common law and, through the medium of Roman
law, Natural reason. Crucially, the most fitting concept for understanding
this accord is conversation.
The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth
Century, 1688-1848
xxiii
Ludmilla Jordanova’s chapter sets out the case for a special
relationship between portraiture and conversation, and then examines that
relationship in the early nineteenth century–arguably the last part of a long
eighteenth century. She does so through the examination of one
remarkable yet little-studied man, a painter, biographer and
conversationalist, James Northcote (1746-1831). As Uhlig notes in the
first essay in this volume, for many scholars of the long eighteenth
century, there are profound links between conversation and politeness. By
contrast, Northcote’s published conversations were notably rude, difficult,
abrasive, critical, gossipy and judgemental. Far from being a convivial
form of urbane exchange, Northcote’s conversations were concerned with
the harsh evaluation of people and their works. Drawing upon Northcote’s
art works, his own writings and comments by others about him, Jordanova
explores the role of conversation at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, its peculiar pertinence for portraiture in particular and for the
visual arts in general. One late work by Northcote, his portrait of Sir
Walter Scott (1828), which includes a self-portrait, is examined in more
depth. The artist is shown as Titian-like; Northcote produced a biography
of Titian not long before his death. Jordanova discusses the ways in which
