'Review Article: Not in Their Minds', Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 145/1 (2020), 251-57 (original) (raw)

IN the epilogue to Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, John Durham Peters sketches a picture of human interactions at once reassuring and ethically exacting. While a number of the once habitual media practices that he describes are swiftly becoming anachronistic (such as 'twist[ing] a radio dial or rustl[ing] a newspaper'), his overarching argument continues to hold significance. 1 Peters's 1999 volume examines shifting understandings of communication at the intersection of social thought, philosophy, science, religion and psychoanalysis in the so-called West, particularly during the modern age. In the final chapter, he argues that the central problem with the process of communication, both face to face and over long distances, lies not so much in the interferences that media might cause to message delivery. Rather, the infinite gaps and malfunctions and short circuits in human interactions should be blamed on our inability to acknowledge our irreducible alterity. 'The problem of communication is not language's slipperiness, it is the unfixable difference between the self and the other,' as Peters puts it. 2 In other words, successful exchange requires constant coordination, the subtle readjustment of one's strategy and position to the necessities of the other. One needs to give up fidelity to his or her 'truth' for co-creation of 'a dance in which we sometimes touch'. 3 To approach communication from this angle is to downplay its modern, transmissionorientated understandingthe idea of media as 'message-bearing institutions'and to return to an older understanding of the term: communication as what begets belonging, what enables community and communion. 4 In his latest book, Peters eschews what he describes as a relatively recent, predominantly twentieth-century understanding of media as distributors of content and information, in favour of a more basic understanding of media as environments and infrastructures that sustain life. On the various meanings of 'communication', see Peters, Speaking into the Air, 6-10.