Techniques of Self-Cultivation

Techniques of self-cultivation is a concept introduced in McCormick's conceptual history to name the paradoxical individuating function that seemingly de-individuating forms of talk — Kierkegaard's "chatter," Heidegger's "idle talk" (Gerede), and Lacan's "empty speech" — can perform for the modern subject. Rather than treating everyday, non-serious, or formulaic speech purely as a register of inauthenticity or social conformity (as Tarde does by instrumentalizing it for collective opinion-formation), McCormick's conclusion recuperates these same modes as practices through which the subject navigates mass society's perpetual signifying churn. The subject loses itself in the anonymous circulation of signs — a movement structurally consonant with Lacanian alienation, the forced entry into a pre-existing signifying chain that constitutes subjectivity at the cost of being — yet paradoxically can refind itself through that very movement. The chatter and empty speech that erode individual contour are simultaneously the medium through which a subject re-emerges, however provisionally, from the undifferentiated flow of discourse.

The "technique" framing is significant: it imports a quasi-Foucauldian register of care-of-the-self, suggesting that the subject does not merely suffer or enjoy these communicative forms passively but actively, if not always consciously, deploys them as modes of self-work. In the Lacanian frame, this points to the relationship between empty speech and full speech: empty speech is not simply opposed to full speech as its degenerate other, but may function as a necessary passage through the Other's signifying field — a passage without which the more revelatory movement toward full speech (toward the subject's desire and truth) could not occur. Techniques of self-cultivation thus names the productive, if ambiguous, underside of alienation in language.

The concept appears in the conclusion of samuel-mccormick-the-chattering-mind-a-conceptual-history-of-everyday-talk-unive (p.305), functioning as the book's synthetic payoff. McCormick positions three thinkers — Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Lacan — against Tarde's sociological-instrumentalist view of talk, and the concept of "techniques of self-cultivation" names what distinguishes their accounts: where Tarde sees talk as raw material for collective opinion, these thinkers see it as a site of individual subject-formation. The concept thus operates as a culminating re-description of the corpus's central object (everyday talk) from the angle of the individual subject rather than the social aggregate.

Among the cross-referenced canonical concepts, Alienation is the most direct anchor: McCormick's "losing oneself in mass society" precisely mirrors the Lacanian vel of alienation — the forced choice by which entry into the signifying chain costs the subject its being, yet is the only route to (split) subjectivity. Empty Speech and Full Speech structure the internal dialectic: techniques of self-cultivation imply a movement through empty speech (loss in the Other's chain) that may, under certain conditions, open toward full speech (recovery of the subject's desire and truth). Automaton is also implicated: the mechanical, repetitive dimension of chatter — signifiers circling on their own — is the very surface across which this self-cultivating movement travels. Networked Individualism updates the argument for digital-era conditions, suggesting that the amplification of communicative channels intensifies rather than dissolves this paradox. Finally, the trace of Hysteria is audible in the idea that the subject perpetually questions its identity within and against the Other's interpellating discourse — the hysterical "Why am I what you say I am?" is one structural form that self-cultivation through talk can take.

The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday TalkSamuel McCormick · 2020 (p.305)

They were also techniques of self-cultivation modes of communication in and by which modern individuals could not only lose themselves in mass society but also find themselves anew in its perpetual churn.

The phrase "lose themselves … and find themselves anew" encodes a dialectical structure inside the very same communicative act — the same "modes of communication" perform both alienation and individuation — while "perpetual churn" signals that this is not a once-and-for-all resolution but an ongoing, structurally open process, aligning with the Lacanian view of subjectivity as never finally secured against the signifying chain.