Everyday Talk

Everyday talk, as theorized in Samuel McCormick's conceptual history, designates a mode of discourse that is neither instrumentally purposive nor merely phatic. Drawing on a genealogy running from Kierkegaard's "chatter" through Heidegger's "idle talk" (Gerede) to Lacan's "empty speech," McCormick identifies a structural peculiarity shared by all three: everyday talk is a "means without end." Unlike phatic communion—where talk functions as a means that has become its own end (a means-turned-end, sustaining social bonds for their own sake)—and unlike political or strategic discourse—where talk is a means directed toward an external end—everyday talk is self-perpetuating without arriving anywhere. It circulates, returns, and insists without ever closing on a terminus. This structural feature aligns everyday talk with the Lacanian automaton: the mechanical insistence of the signifying chain that repeats independently of any subjective intention or Real encounter.

The theoretical move of the passage is genealogical and diagnostic. By locating Kierkegaard as the inaugural figure in a tradition that Lacan completes, McCormick argues that everyday talk names something qualitatively new in modernity—not just loose or lazy language, but a discourse whose very structure is that of runaway repetition. In Lacanian terms, this suggests that everyday talk operates precisely at the level of the signifier divorced from meaning: a chain that runs on, driven not by desire's forward movement toward any object but by its own mechanical momentum. The analogy to "machine automatism" indexes this: the discourse generates itself without a subject steering it, like the symbolic order's own compulsive return.

Within the source (samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive, p.17), the concept of everyday talk is introduced at the hinge between intellectual history and critical diagnosis. McCormick is constructing a usable genealogy—Kierkegaard → Heidegger → Lacan—to explain why digital-age communication feels pathological rather than merely noisy. Everyday talk is the master-concept under which chatter, idle talk, and empty speech are unified by their shared structural property: means-without-end-ness.

The concept is most directly anchored by the cross-referenced notions of Empty Speech, Automaton, and Metonymy. Empty speech in Lacan marks the pole of discourse in which the subject fails to find or produce meaning—where the signifying chain runs without the subject being able to assume or recognize themselves in it. The automaton supplies the mechanical register: like the symbolic network that insists and returns independently of the subject, everyday talk generates itself by the sheer momentum of the signifier. Metonymy deepens this: if desire is the endless sliding of signifier to signifier without rest at any object, everyday talk can be read as the surface manifestation of that slide—discourse that mimics metonymic drift but, crucially, without the lack-driven engine of desire properly orienting it. It is, in this sense, a degraded or unmoored form of the metonymic chain—repetition without the telos even of desire, hence a "means without end" rather than a means to the (always deferred, always receding) end that desire nominally pursues. The concept thus sits at the intersection of the symbolic's mechanical insistence (automaton) and the signifier's constitutive tendency to slide (metonymy), while pointing toward the failure of language to anchor a subject—its capacity to run on as structure without anyone being home.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.17)

chatter, idle talk, and empty speech were neither means-turned-ends like phatic communion nor means-to-ends like political talk but, instead, means without end like nothing they had seen before.

The phrase "means without end" is theoretically loaded because it carves out a third structural category that escapes both the instrumentalist and the self-referential accounts of language: it is neither purposive (means-to-ends) nor self-grounding (means-turned-ends), but rather a discourse that is constitutively without closure — formally analogous to the Lacanian automaton's endless signifying return and to metonymy's structural incapacity to arrest desire at any final object.