Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication

by John Durham Peters

Communication plays a vital and unique role in society-often blamed for problems when it breaks down and at the same time heralded as a panacea for human relations. A sweeping history of communication, Speaking Into the Air illuminates our expectations of communication as both historically specific and a fundamental knot in Western thought."This is a most interesting and thought-provoking book. . . . Peters maintains that communication is ultimately unthinkable apart from the task of establishing a kingdom in which people can live together peacefully. Given our condition as mortals, communication remains not primarily a problem of technology, but of power, ethics and art." —Antony Anderson, New Scientist"Guaranteed to alter your thinking about communication. . . . Original, erudite, and beautifully written, this book is a gem." —Kirkus Reviews"Peters writes to reclaim the notion of authenticity in a media-saturated world. It's this ultimate concern that renders his book a brave, colorful exploration of the hydra-headed problems presented by a rapid-fire popular culture." —Publishers WeeklyWhat we have here is a failure-to-communicate book. Funny thing is, it communicates beautifully. . . . Speaking Into the Air delivers what superb serious books always do-hours of intellectual challenge as one absorbs the gradually unfolding vision of an erudite, creative author." —Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Communication, Philosophy, Technology, Science, Academic

305 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

John Durham Peters is professor of English and film and media studies at Yale University. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Marvelous Clouds, Courting the Abyss, and Speaking into the Air, all published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

[Damon · Rating 5 out of 5]

From page one, this book blew my mind. Peters does a great job of stepping back and assessing how and why we communicate, beginning with the philosophical opposites of Jesus and Socrates (seriously), hitting the ideas of Renaissance idealists, and ending with our endless pursuit to communicate with animals, machines, and other things that can't directly talk back.

He covers an incredible amount of territory, but what makes the book work is Peters' pitch-perfect balance between academic thoroughness and narrative accessibility. The concepts are about as complex as any communication book I've read, sans Shannon's The Mathematical Theory of Communication, but the writing, examples, and insight make it both intense and readable.

Anyone with even a passing interest in how we communicate should have this book on the shelf.

[Filipa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Communication defines us. We need to communicate in order to survive, to fit in, to be understood by others and so that we can understand others. This is a subject which I am passionate about and that's why I decided to read this book - well, not only because of that but well, the other motives aren't relevant in this instance.
The author wrote an amazing overview of the history of this complex concept: how it came about, different uses of the concept and how it evolved through the centuries. He wrote things about communication I had never considered. Probably I had already thought of some of the issues communications raises but I hadn't exactly considered critically. This book made me stop and think about communication - I mean, really think: to what extent does communication defines our existence. Why are we the only species able to communicate through a complex system that combines words and sounds? What really fascinates us more: to be able to communicate or breakdowns in communication?
It raises lots of interesting questions about our biological need to reach others and create a connection, to communicate. I really liked to read this and it's a book I would like to come back to.

[Zachary · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the most part, this is a very lucid and fascinating history of the concept of communication, illustrating how such questions gave rise to the discipline that bears that name. Peters traces the development of a wide range of communication questions from the Old Testament to Plato to new media such as radio and television, with pit stops along the way in strange arenas such as spiritualism and psychical research. The book probes rather deeply into areas that may otherwise seem nonsensically related to the study of communicative practices and phenomena, but Peters deftly explores how fascinations with things like spirits and the melding of minds gave rise to the dominant perspectives on communication that exist today, as well as many of the questions that remain hotly debated in the field today.

The real audience for this book is fairly niche--namely those interested either directly or indirectly in communication as a phenomena and as an academic discipline. But for those who are wont to enjoy it, this book offers some phenomenal insights and even some great encouragement at the end.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? I worship John Peters.

[Chad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I stumbled on this book in a Goodreads book review. The book provides a fascinating study of communication, drawing on history, philosophy, religion, and science. The title, "Speaking into the Air" is a fitting title; Peters argues that our attempts at communication ultimately fail, but that this failure shouldn't stop us from loving and respecting each other. Communication is a necessity, but is also doomed to miscommunication.

Peters starts his book with two juxtaposed models of communication: Socrates' dialog and Jesus' dissemination. Socrates thought dialog was the only way of true communication with others, and was suspicious of the written word because of all the unnatural relationships it engendered (speaking from a distance, speaking without a bodily presence, interaction with the dead). Socrates' concerns about the written word are very relevant to concerns today regarding texting, social media, etc. Christ, on the other hand, not only approved of the dissemination model of communication, but actively promoted it; his parable of the sower illustrates the broadcasting of a generic answer to a wide audience. I never thought to tie Christ's parable to the mass media in this way, but it is fitting. Interesting thoughts.

Peters examines the philosophy of communication in the works of Augustine, Locke, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Marx. Some of the biggest issues at stake are the embodiment of thought in the word (can message and messenger be separated? Does the physical embodiment of the message influence the message itself?), and.. well, that's the big one haha.

He also examines the "spiritualizaton" of communication, as physical presence is increasingly less important in communication-- letters, telegraph, phonograph, photography, radio, etc. He also examines forays into communication with the dead, with animals, machines, and aliens.



And, some quotes that stuck out in particular:


The key lies in Abraham's transcendence of the ethical. The universal (which guarantees right action) is both a comfort and a source of despair in its unrelenting command to cast off particularity. As in Adam Smith or Kant, universality is a disciplinary regime. Abraham acts without the comfort or the command of the universal: his is a completely private affair between him and God that cannot be mediated or converted into a spectacle of public heriocs. Unlike tragic heroes such as Agamemnon, whose sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia is recognized as just by his whole community, Abraham has no recourse to social recognition, no ultimate balm of ethics or metaphysics. All he has is faith. The tragic hero edits a public book; the knight of faith, a sealed book read only by God. (132)

"The moment a lover can answer that objection [why he fell in love with one person among countless possibilities] he is eo ipso not a lover; and if a believer can answer that objection, he is eo ipso not a believer." 134 Kierkegaard

The interpretive wavering before an enigmatic answer is a fundamental experience in the modern world: carrying on a fencing match either with a partner who seems to be responding but whose motives are inscrutable or with one whose responses can never be verified as responses. Modern men and women stand before bureaucracies and their representations or wait by telephones in the same way that sinners stood before the God who hides his face: anxiously sifting the chaos of events for signs and messages. The deus absconditus (hidden god) of theology no longer hides in the farthest corners of the universe; his successor has moved into the infernal machines of administration. (202)

Does nature speak, does God speak, does fate speak, do bureaucracies speak, or am I just making this all up? (204)

[Chelsea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to return this to the library before I could finish it, which was a bummer, because this was pretty interesting. It was in that academic style where chapters stand relatively well alone, so could read a few. I hadn't ever considered that communication, like any social element, is loaded with assumptions and layered with meaning built up through eras and eras of culture, technology, and thinking. It's always interesting to see that issues predominant in today's discussion of communication had their own analogues in the past (like the anxiety over mass media, played out with writing, radio, TV, and now the internet). Peters ultimate thesis is that communication is fundamentally always going to "fail" but that this failure is an opportunity to build a better collective world: "In renouncing the dream of 'communication' I am not saying that the urge to connect is bad; rather, I mean that the dream itself inhibits the hard work of connection...The ultimate futility of our attempts to 'communicate' are not lamentable, it is a handsome condition.... The task is to recognize the creature's otherness, not to make it over in one's own likeness and image."

[Jeremiah Scanlan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible. Illuminates many of the deepest questions I've carried with me, a skeleton key for philosophy, fiction, history, and all the rest. It was "communication" all along.

"That we are destined to interpret, and that interpretation will always involve our desires and their conflicts, does not signal a fall from the supposed grace of immediacy; it is a description of the very possibility of interaction. . . . The question should be not Can we communicate with each other? but Can we love one another or treat each other with justice and mercy?"

Can't wait to read his book on media.

[Michael Greer · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I learned from this book, a review of the history of "communication," is that we don't live so much after the models provided by Plato in the Phaedrus or Symposium as we do the Christian messaging where those who have ears to hear, hear and those without remain without. Dissemination is the current mode of "communication," not "dialogue."

[Jason Droboth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an essential read for anyone interested in anything even loosely connected to the concept of communication. Peters is one of the most gifted thinkers and writers of our day and this book truly changed me in many ways. Should be mandatory reading for any university courses in communication, especially at the graduate level.

[Eva Steepe · Rating 4 out of 5]

From a perspective of encouraging reflection about something that exists in all languages and experienced (communication), this book was incredibly engaging. Pulling in examples that span recorded history, Peters did a phenomenal job of creating a history and reflection on communication and what it means to be human.

[Kensey Dressler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic primer on what it could mean to communicate when we expand our definition of who communicates to the more-than-human realm. Peters describes communicating with nonhuman animals, the dead, robots, and much more.

[Elis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geriausia ir aiškiausiai supažindinanti su komunikacijos procesais knyga. Pagarba prancūzų autoriui. Rekomenduoju visiems, kurie nori susipažinti su komunikacijos ir jos veikimu visuomenėje fenomenais

[Jose · Rating 3 out of 5]

The best (and, perhaps, only actually good) part was the conclusion.

[Emily Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this for school. Really brilliant, one of my favourite non-fiction books of all time

[Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone with a great respect for the historicist tradition, I thought I would hate this book. But I didn't. I actually loved it. Here Durham Peters (DP) employs a genealogical method to cut through the common elements surrounding notions of "communication" in Western thought. For DP, communication is ultimately about overcoming the bounds of our subjectivity to connect with an other. This framing allows him to extract some plausible sense of continuity between historical figures dealing with issues of connecting at a distance from Ancient Greece to today. DP structures much if his book around two contrasting modes of communication exemplified by Socrates' Phaedrus and Jesus. The Socratic model of communication entails dialogue, the mutual understanding of souls requiring question and response, while the Biblical model of communication entails dissemination of a message (broadcasting) with the hope that the seed of the message will find fertile grounds in the minds of the receivers.

Ultimately, DP's story becomes one about communication breakdown (or perhaps the inaccessibility of other souls) and what that can tell us about the goals means of various communication projects. DP discusses radio, telegraphy, spiritualism, SETI, animal studies, Turing tests, and much more within this framework. I found the elements of DP's view of communication extremely helpful for thinking about a variety of communication situations. For example, how can one be assured that a message has been received? What is the nature of a message (versus noise)? How can we verify the authenticity of a message (from the spirit world)? Are messages always intentional (animals, nature)? These conceptual elements are pervasive in histories of communication.

One of the most fascinating parts of the story suggests that the historical question of communication at a distance, brought about by various inscription technologies like writing or radio, becomes a problem for unmediated communication. The problems of communication at a distance gives birth to the late romantic/ early modern period fear of solipsism, or the total inaccessibility of the thoughts of others- this is to say all thought becomes mediated. In this way, problems previously considered specific to a certain technology become general problems for human communication. DP says, "The intellectual history of “communication” is a record of the erotic complications of modern life. The sense that we cannot touch other minds (communication breakdown) was inspired by settings in which people could not touch other bodies (distant communication). If communication was once the problem of distant minds, by the late nineteenth century it was the problem of proximate bodies.”

DP has an absolutely wonderful metaphor for the ideal democratic communication as simultaneous dialogue and broadcasting- all voices simultaneously speaking and listening (a patently impossible situation). DP ends by proposing some ways that we can cope with the intrinsic imperfection of "communication" or as he says it "the holiness and wretchedness of our finitude." One of these involves recognizing the special resistance that touch has with respect to inscription and mediation- we long to be in the physical presence of loved ones just as their physical presence reminds us of our infinite remoteness. In this way, our inability to communicate with aliens, animals, or machines represent only the extremes of our inability to communicate with one another when this gets defined as a communion of souls/doubling of the self- we need different criteria and a different set of goals.

There's a ton of great food for thought here. Don't come away expecting a thorough understanding of any of the texts or historical developments DP discusses- that's just not the purpose of his book. Rather, look forward to DPs erudite and thoroughly engaging take on how we can think about our communicative past with respect to the communicative present.

[Jack Markman · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only real thrust of the book seems to historically justify the claim that communication, or at least soul to soul dialogue, is impossible. Barring Socrates, Peters doesn't seem to provide much in the way of alternate theses on the question, just a list of the most prominent philosophers of the last 200 years who appear to generally agree with him or support his claim. Well and good, but then I thought this was supposed to be an argumentative piece, not a survey.

Even if we took this book as the latter, I find the historical survey of the incommensurability of language tiresome when formatted as such. The book is firmly communicating in the realm of standard academic texts, approaching the historical citations of experts in a scientific modernist interpretive mode. Again, well and good, but when your text is arguing that all communication is done by way of mediation and "sowing," then there will be a chasm between your reader audience, and your work, and this divide should inform the method of argumentation. Paraphrasing Peters' sloppy conclusion, true authenticity/ethically mandated communication should mean one communicates with the audience in mind, not the self. And the tragedy of this nihilist text is that it does not present itself as a parable, but as an attempt at one-way dialogue, the very thing the text claims is impossible. It can't possibly be correct that this standard "here's quotes about language difficulties and how I'm right" was the best approach for mediating this topic to those unfamiliar, or was written with the audience in mind.

This text had absolutely zero self-awareness that it is itself an artifact mediating communication to a mass audience, and that radical claims should be reflected in the mode of presentation. It just has all the hallmarks of the modernist academy, which means the arguments are even more diluted, undermined, and uninspired. It's the sort of thing one writes to get a cushy Ivy-league position, then fade into the historical mist of obscurity. No classics here, only citations from his betters.

[Jon Torn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the books that really inspired me to see the BIG picture in my chosen field. Really digs into some interesting stuff over two and a half millennia. Some of the coolest sections cover the influence of religion and spirituality on the way we try to connect. I enjoyed reading about Jesus as a communication theorist, angelic communication in the medieval era, and especially all the stuff on Mesmerism and spirit mediums in the 19th century. Full of ideas but not too jargony, very accessible to readers with a basic knowledge and/or curiosity about history, ideas, and the phenomenon of communication in a philosophical sense.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't 100% sold on this until I got halfway through. From there, what begins as lucid (though somewhat dull) academic synthesis becomes something much more argumentative and -- as a result -- much more interesting to read. Throughout, Peters essentially argues that communication is best understood as something that fundamentally tears us apart. His elucidation of the power of that loss, however, and its capacity to enable us to better understand why we seek to communicate at all is wholly convincing. I literally found myself tearing up whilst reading his conclusion -- hardly something that the VAST majority of academic books achieve.

[Michael Meeuwis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very rich, and interesting book, poised intriguingly between a general-market book and an academic one. I find its description of communication--always necessarily incomplete, problematic, based on impossibilities, but so what?--to be thought-provoking and potentially fruitful. The author speaks from deep theoretical knowledge of both contemporary and historical theory; I realized, among other things, that I really want to read Peirce and re-read the Phaedrus. (Or have I read the Phaedrus? I forgot, but one sort of gets it in through osmosis in grad school.) Anyway, like the book on orality that I read a while ago, highly recommended.

[Baris · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hate to troll about the book, which everyone else seem to liked. However, I think author seems to hide his clichés behind pretentious writing and apart from summarizing the views of big and fancy names as Jesus, Locke, Hegel etc. he does not offer anything original else than the banal, cliché, third way between communication as “therapy” and “total impossibility.” Although I find the discussion on communication as dissemination (rather than interaction) interesting, his lack of attention to historical nuisances leads the writer into an empty discourse with full of figurative writings with no real convincing argumentation. (Perhaps the only exception to this is chapter 4.)

[Eleanor · Rating 5 out of 5]

This history and formulation of theory relating to communication was on my bookshelf as I started my research. I owned this book before I realised that I was going to write about communication theory, and I only noticed that it was there when it was cited in another source I had found. I don't know when I bought this book, and I don't know why, but it is an excellent history of communication ideas. It also provides its own useful conception of a way in which communication can be understood (although, I have some misgivings about this).

[Kara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Such a fascinating historiography of the idea of communication. It is incredibly dense in its references, and covers so many areas that have influenced what we think of when we say communication, and how that affects the way we study it and the impact it has on society. I don't really even know how to fully explain the depth of this book, but would strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the study of communication.

[Aarika · Rating 5 out of 5]

After coming to terms with the almost-archaic writing style, I really enjoyed the book. Peters successfully takes the idea of communication to new, philosophical depths. This is a book that would have been received with open arms during the Renaissance and will be received with open arms one hundred years from now.

[Adna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Speaking Into the Air is one of those books you have to read and re-read in order to fully grasp the content. It compacts the history of communication and various philosophical ideas concerning communication.

[Chris Condie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult read, especially if you have not had a lot of experience in philosophy classics; but very thought provoking with a wonderful, inspiring conclusion. I recommend it.

[Yuri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has such a strong closing chapter I straight up got chills down my spine getting to it a second time.

[Narges · Rating 5 out of 5]

He is the one who is specialist (in communication studies stuff) and at the same time generalist.