Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (review)

490 Rhetoric & Public Affairs Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. By John Durham Peters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999; pp. 1 + 293. $26.00. At the University of Iowa, many of the graduate seminars in communication studies are held in a building a block away from the offices housing the faculty in communication studies. To get between the buildings, one must choose to walk under a set of railroad tracks on either side of the buildings or, if in a hurry, one can improvise a path through a few trees, up a small hill, and over the tracks. In my first week at Iowa as a graduate student, I recall being surprised to see a young Professor John Peters taking the pedestrian short cut, and I commented that he must be in a hurry. "Not really," he told me, "I like to approach the building from different directions —you always arrive at a different destination that way." Peters's enigmatic response, which amused me at the time, was illumined and transformed as I read his brilliant Speaking into the Air. Working through a variety of "communication theories and theorists" (and Peters finds communication theories in a wide variety of places)—from Jesus and The Phaedrus, to Marx and Hegel, to spiritualists who call upon angels and the dead, to vernacular and critical descriptions of the Internet—Peters argues that we have in effect talked ourselves into viewing "communication" as both bridge and chasm (5) (i.e., as both a potential route to true "understanding" and as a problem to be solved so that we can bring humans together) rather than as an ongoing transformative performance; moreover, and more importantly, Peters observes that we have not yet traced out the intellectual, ethical, and political implications of this change (1). It is precisely these implications that are the focus of Peters's project. Peters begins by making the case that the primary problem with attempts to understand "communication" as a means to pure communion between individuals is that such an understanding "invites us into a world of unions without politics, understanding without language, and souls without bodies, only to make politics, language and bodies reappear as obstacles rather than blessings" (30-31). In short, the current equation of communication with communion posits communication as the cure for misunderstanding, but given that differences in understanding are inevitable, we expend wasted energy attempting to rid ourselves of what are necessary (and potentially productive) differences. In effect, by assuming that communication is the substance of human identity and meaning, Peters argues that attempts to evade misunderstanding ultimately draw us away "from the task of building worlds together" (30-31). One finishes Speaking into the Air in a state of awe, not only repeatedly facing the problematic way that we have thought about communication but also overwhelmed by the mastery with which Peters draws together centuries of critical, spiritual, and vernacular theory into a coherent understanding of the ways new technologies and their spiritualist reception have reemphasized this theory of communication as Book Reviews 491 problem (5). By beginning with, and persistently reflecting back on, Socrates as the champion of one-on-one "perfect" spoken communication (common carriers) and Jesus as the "communication theorist" of broadcasting (that is, indiscriminate love works to cultivate believers among some of those who listen), Peters helps us make sense of an array of the massive body of "communication" discourse and provides a history that persistently reminds us that any search for pure communication comes at a cost: because we forget "that communication in the sense of shared minds is impossible," we also forget to celebrate the fact that we can still "cooperate splendidly " (21). While one can't go home again, one can certainly walk side by side with others to any number of destinations. While Peters's discussion of the ways communication constitutes the world of potential meanings and alliances could comfortably be placed in conversation with any number of movements within contemporary theory, especially in critical/cultural studies, there is a certain sense in which Peters appears to want to distance himself from much contemporary "poststructural" literary/cultural theory. Peters implicitly hints...