The Conversational Salon
Some not so idle chitchat by Sophie Anne Edwards
Somewhere along the oral line, the act and locus of conversing has diminished along with the meaning of conversation itself.
While discussion and dialogue have been critical forms of exchange and idea development for centuries, we now are more familiar with e-mail and short forms. We email rather than call; when we must call, we hope for the answering machine so we can simply leave a message.
Perhaps the general dissolution of the art of conversation and the lack of the deliberate locus for it, has left us fearful of modern oral exchange – the idle chitchat, the gossip, the meaningless talk that form the bulk of our vocal exchanges.
The New Penguin Dictionary, 2001 (all definitions herein attributable to same) defines Converse: verb intrans. 1. to exchange thoughts and opinions in speech; to talk. 2. to carry on an exchange similar to a conversation; esp. to interact with a computer.
Interact with a computer? Even I was surprised at that. How did the art of conversation diminish to the point that it can now be defined as something that does not even entail an exchange between two living beings?
Where once conversation entailed a movement toward greater understanding or interaction, it now means little more than talk. Talk is just sound created by air passing over our vocal cords. Conversation once meant that intelligence and thought directed the sounds we created.
In the 1800s, the conversational salon, while in the private sphere of the woman’s space, was publicly influential; and was used as a tool for dialogue. Salons gathered people of all classes and both genders together to discuss and debate issues and ideas – adherents were intelligent, thoughtful, insightful and interested in change. The women ‘dirigentes’ of the salons invited literary figures, artists, politicians, philosophers, and writers. These women were influential, respected and often powerful.
The salon has been subverted over time, to the point that it now most commonly refers to: Salon: 1. a commercial establishment where hairdressers, beauticians, couturiers, etc. see their clients. 2. an elegant reception room or living room. This indeed reflects the reality that chitchat and gossip are now more associated with salon than true conversation.
A conversable person, is: 1. literary pleasant and easy to converse with: Mrs. Bardel let lodgings to many conversable single gentlemen – Dickens. 2. archaic. Relating to or suitable for conversation or social interaction.
Through salons, women were influencing society and politics; over time, adherance to societal norms subverted this act of conversation through salon. Women became good hostesses, rather than animators and activists – the host became the polite conversationalist, the one serving biscuits and tea, rather than the true conversationalist, asking pointed questions and creating discussion.
Elizabeth Fay, in a University of Massachusetts paper wrote:
“I would like to remark first on what I mean by "salon theory." The eighteenth-century salon, which was so crucial to the development and intellectual projects of the first generation Bluestockings, was more than anything a place where the mind could flourish through the exchange of ideas. If witticisms and literary flourishes despoiled some of this exchange, so much the better since this provided a socially acceptable cover for what could be talked about. To think that, like the earlier coterie gatherings, men and women could get together and talk about ideas. Talk, rather than writing and its exchange, fosters thought by association; ideas can spiral, vine about, bloom in odd ways when no one Socrates figure is directing the flow of things. Because salons encouraged people to cluster together in small groups, many conversations occurred simultaneously. Less than a room of one's own, more than a seat in a family parlor, the salon offered women in particular a place to be intellectual. Moreover, the role of conversation—the exchange of words and ideas, rather than a lecture; the equitable pitting of topics, the easy chance of digressions, the richness of associable ideas and inferences—is valued in Bluestocking salons. It should be valued today for its open-endedness, its plausible leads, its intellectual heritage. It is invaluable for women students who find the tension of seminar discussions a block to verbalizing their ideas, but it is equally helpful to men students by providing a platform for hashing out ideas before seminar meetings, while provoking them to examine their assumptions in light of their colleagues' reactions.
We are said to have lost the art of conversation in the present age, but that is a reference to parlor talk; we have indeed lost the tool of conversation, and that is something we could and should remedy, because students should not have to think in isolation, should not have wrestle with ideas on their own, should not come to erroneous versions of history or literature because they did not have to try out their version on someone else.”
And so, in that spirit - to embrace the art, and embody the act, i5 now launches it’s online salon – not as an electronic replacement for the exchange between people in person, but as an adjunct to our upcoming in situ Salon Series in Malta.
Perhaps the technology of our age can be used to support the intelligent practices of previous ones.
