Conversation

This page requires fuller treatment: currently sourced almost entirely from John C Turpin's "Domestic Doyennes" (Intimus, 2006). Broader treatment — de Certeau's speech acts, Goffman's interaction order, Habermas's salon public sphere — awaits further sources.

Definition

Conversation, in John C Turpin's account, is not a medium through which pre-existing selves communicate but a ritual that manufactures social reality — and, crucially, a spatial practice: talk makes space. The essay opens from Peter Quennell's epigraph — "Between conversation and civilization, the art of talking and the art of living, there has always been a vital link" — and grounds both arts in "the need for expression: whether verbal or physical, humankind has continually devoted significant time and energy to the process of self-expression." John Kasson's ritual thesis supplies the mechanism: "the protocols of conversation is one example of a ritual that establishes the structures by which individuals define one another and interact, defining social identities, social relationships, and an individual's perception of their social reality." Conversation is thus the interior's aural twin: the editors' headnote names "the aural spatial affect of conversations that are driven and influenced by the presence and interaction of company in such interior settings," and the essay's founding theoretical ancestor is J.B. Priestley's 1926 insight that certain dialogues are "atmosphere creating" — verbal exchanges that "create an implied space."

The concept has a historical structure and a design consequence. Historically, conversation has regimes: the salon's ideal conversation ("possible only if all participants were confident of their equal standing within the group. Domination, dispute, interruptions and inattentiveness were not permitted") against the drawing room's degraded one ("anomalous conversation with the sole intent of social and political advancement"; "Staccato conversations permitted all present to participate in the creation of an atmosphere characterized by a 'false view of life'"). As design, conversation sets the interior's brief: Count D'Orsay's rules (the avoidance of long stories, rapid movement from one speaker to another) are "supported by the stage set" of the Victorian interior — "In similar style, the Victorian interior is riddled with objects, each so spectacular in form and ornamentation that the eye of the guest is never permitted to rest" — while de Wolfe's 55th Street drawing room is a "room made for conversation," arranged as "numerous conversation centers, intimate in spirit, such that no one chair is isolated." The relation runs both ways: Priestley's words "shall be but extra shutters and curtains and blazing coals and cushions" — speech as the interior's additional envelope — and the room's arrangement as the seating-plan of talk.

Key Thinkers

John C Turpin — the concept's historian: conversation and decoration as the two channels of the need for expression; the aural spatial affect; the salon–drawing-room regimes of talk; the conversation/decoration rhyme (D'Orsay's rules and the roving eye as one design) (2003/2006).
J.B. Priestley (cited figure — PAGE NEEDED, see log) — the concept's neglected theorist: Talking (1926) categorizes "atmosphere creating" dialogue, derives the "implied space" of intimate exchange, and equates words with the interior's furniture — the passage Turpin's essay exists to revive.
John F Kasson (cited figure — PAGE NEEDED, see log) — the ritual thesis: conversation's protocols as the apparatus that "defin[es] social identities, social relationships, and an individual's perception of their social reality" (1990).
Elizabeth Goldsmith (cited figure — see log) — the salon conversation's structural historian: Exclusive Conversations (1988), source of the analogy between the Hôtel de Rambouillet's unified circulation and conversation's "smooth pattern of movement" and "broad view."
Elsie de Wolfe — the conversation-oriented decorator: the salon "devised for and consecrated to conversation, a new form of privilege"; the room judged by how its "disposition of your best things… in your elimination of your worst ones" expresses "the pleasure and meaning of human intercourse"; the 55th Street "room made for conversation" (1913).
Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the editors who frame the selection with the concept's four terms: "the social challenge, the demand for mental acuity and the game-like aspects of conversation" (headnote, p. 368).

Salon — the institution conversation built: "conversation created its own social space with carefully marked boundaries"; the salon as the room-type where talk is the organizing practice.
Etiquette — conversation's ritual apparatus: the protocols (Kasson) and their political restructuring (Faret's exclusion of the military; the salon's equality rule).
Atmosphere — the concept's output: dialogue "atmosphere creating"; the salonnière's atmospheres "both spoken and visual"; the staccato conversation's "false view of life."
Interiority — the aural register: the "implied space" of talk as an interior produced by disclosure — the speaker "projects an aura of security onto the event."
The Decorative — the stage for conversation's performance: decoration as the visual language paired with etiquette's verbal one (Grier); de Wolfe's harmony-of-purpose formula.
The Drawing Room — conversation's degraded venue: anomalous, staccato talk whose goal "was neither to offend nor inform."
Practiced Place — de Certeau's formula turned social: "in relation to place, space is like the word when it is spoken" — conversation as the practicing that spaces a room.
Scenography — the stage-metaphor's home: conversation as performance, decoration as its set, the drawing room as "the grandest of stages."
Domestic Interior — the double manufacture: "Both their interiors and manners were highly manufactured."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

Domestic Doyennes: Purveyors of Atmospheres Spoken and Visual (Turpin 2003/2006) — the concept's founding source: Quennell's vital link between the art of talking and the art of living; Kasson's ritual thesis; Grier's etiquette-and-decoration language-thesis ("both [are] … a way of choosing language"); Priestley's "atmosphere creating" dialogue and words-as-furniture ("extra shutters and curtains and blazing coals and cushions," p. 14); the salon's ideal conversation (equality, no domination/interruption; "a smooth pattern of movement between the participants and a broad view of the world outside," p. 370); the drawing room's anomalous and staccato conversation ("a false view of life," p. 372); D'Orsay's rules and the roving eye ("the interior's demand for a roving eye may have lubricated the ritual of being seen," p. 372); de Wolfe's "room made for conversation" and "numerous conversation centers… no one chair is isolated" (p. 373). See salon, etiquette, atmosphere.
Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the visited interior's social code as conversation's backdrop: "We may talk of the weather, but we are looking at the furniture" (p. 83) — the visit's talking and looking divided, the furniture receiving the attention the small talk cannot; the decorator's client-study as role-taking ("as thoroughly as I studied my parts"). Where Turpin makes the room conversation's stage, de Wolfe makes the weather-talk the room's alibi.
From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — the salon's Viennese definition: "The interior also is a private, domestic, feminine space – a space for intimate conversation, sexual relations, and reproduction" (p. 159) — conversation as one of the interior's three founding functions, the room-type's semi-public hinge (see separate-spheres).

Open Questions

Is the implied space designable? Priestley's confider "projects an aura of security onto the event" — the intimate space exists only when talk achieves it. Can a designer plan for that achievement (seating, scale, light — de Wolfe's conversation centres), or only for its possibility? Is "harmony of purpose and therefore harmony of effect" a design formula or a description of a successful evening?
The two regimes: what historical mechanism converts a conversation-culture (the salon's equality, mental acuity, breadth) into a talk-degraded spectacle-culture (the drawing room's staccato, pretentiousness and vacuity)? Turpin names affordability ("The drawing room was a more affordable choice") and patriarchal role-assignment — but is the loss of the equality-precondition ("all participants… confident of their equal standing") the deeper cause?
The D'Orsay rhyme: conversation's anti-focus rule (no long stories) and the interior's anti-rest rule (the roving eye) are the same design in two media. Is this rhyme general — does every talk-format imply a decor-format (the dinner table's sequential talk, the cocktail party's circulating talk) — and can the rhyme be run in reverse, reading a room's decor as a transcript of the conversations it hosted?
The game: the editors name "the game-like aspects of conversation" (headnote). Are conversation's rules (no long stories, rapid turn-taking, no interruptions) then literally game-rules — and does the wiki's play cluster (Huizinga, the Situationists) offer the frame the concept lacks?
The digital salon: if the suburb's dispersal broke "ceremonious intercourse" and the decorator filled the void, what fills the vacuum now — and is the digital salon (group chat, livestream) conversation's implied space finally detached from any room, or the drawing room's staccato perfected?

Notes

Created from Turpin's essay as the interior cluster's missing social-concept: the wiki had the stage (scenography, drawing-room) but not the performance it stages. Related future work: Habermas's salon in the public-sphere genealogy; de Certeau's speech-act spatiality (practiced-place).