Peters, John Durham. Speaking into the Air.
Peters could have alternatively subtitled this monograph as a “history of the problem of communication. His narrative of communication rests on a critique of the “dream” of communication as a mutual communion of souls. He, then, defines communication by the very impossibility of its perfection. For Peters, communication is a “project of reconciling the self and the other” (9), and the term’s history consists mainly of people trying to deny the inevitability of its gaps and impasses. He insists that his definition is not supposed to be defeatist or depressing, as it may seem. Instead, the problem of communication is a “blessed” problem; like Levinas, Peters argues that the problem of communication allows us to access “the splendid otherness of all creatures that share our world without bemoaning our impotence to tap their interiority” (31). The themes of his history are selected based on what he sees as their relevance to 21st-century understandings of communication; Peters tries “to illuminate the present by excavating several past moments with which…it has an affinity” (3). These “moments” include, for example, dissemination in the Synoptic Gospels, the nineteenth-century Spiritualist tradition, late Victorian death culture, the early twentieth-century radio boom, and instances of attempted alien communication in the 1950s.
Most generative for me (as evidenced by my article on disconnection in Woolf’s The Waves) is Peters’s claim that electronic media facilitating long-distance communication “have taught us the chasms in all conversation” (264). Face-to-face talk, Peters argues, is just “as laced with gaps as distant communication.” The faulty connections experienced with technologies like the telephone, radio, etc. teach us new ways of recognizing and describing the miscommunication inherent in all human interaction. In a dissertation on listening, this insight will prove invaluable. I am interested to see if depictions of bad listening, inattention, and misunderstanding reflect contemporaneous developments in sound and communications media.
