Becoming mollusk

Jeremy Packer

There is a passage on the last page of Speaking into the Air which claims “no profession of love is as convincing as a lifetime of fidelity.” ¹ You also state that “touch is no cure for communication trouble: it is just more primal but equally intractable.” Both seem to imply a means of connecting, perhaps a material means, that may or may not imply communication. I’m unsure of how to read these last few pages. Does fidelity function as a statement and thus act as a more powerful form of proclamation or are touch and love potentially prediscursive, prelinguistic, or precommunicative? Fidelity would then not need to be a statement of love, but an act of love, which actually would be significantly different than a linguistic phrasing.

John Durham Peters

Fidelity is like a speech act. It’s a performative that is only refuted by infidelity. This means that such deeds, if sustained, remain true. The conclusion in Speaking into the Air is an endorsement of the wild act of faith that is to act as if. This is one reason why William James, the philosopher of acting as if, plays such an important role there. The book ends with a defense of keeping the act going and of the insuperability of touch. In terms of human evolutionary history, language is not very old, and those who study the rise of language suggest that it, along with so-called “behavioral modernity,” is about 50,000 years old. On the other hand, pair-bonding and the privatization of sex seem to be almost 2 million years old. This means that people have been cooperating intimately for most of their history without language, and that touch, among other nonverbal forms, has this deep, deep quality to it. The modern verbal layer sits on top of the ancient nonverbal layer. There is no community without touch; ultimately, everybody you really care about you will touch in one way or another.

Packer

I appreciate that clarification. This is to say that acts cannot merely or always be read as a sign of something else. There’s something significant about that distinction, right?

Peters

Yeah. Words and flesh are not the same thing. That’s why I’m so interested in witnessing because with witnessing you have a form of perception which is legally or ethically binding and it’s not merely representation. Both of us are interested in trying to think beyond the “mereness” of communication. Sometimes you have to be there. Bodies can touch but minds cannot and that’s the fundamental dilemma of communication. Crazy. You can hold an object but you can’t hold a subject.

Packer

Another consideration that comes out in Speaking into the Air, and to some extent in other work of yours, is the finitude of our materiality or our material existence. I don’t want to call it a fatalism, but there’s something about this finality that maybe makes life more precious. I wonder if this then becomes the grounding point for a materialist sensibility.

Peters

Yes, that we exist at all should give rise to endless wonderment. Friedrich Nietzsche loves to talk about amor fati or the “love of fate.” Harold Bloom somewhere notes that our love lives seem to start in contingency but take on the air of necessity. Looking backward small choices that led up to a meeting seem charged with destiny. The historian’s wisdom is also retroactive, showing how things went the way they did though they could have gone otherwise. But retrospective sensemaking is what we all do in terms of making sense of finitude.

Packer

Like what Heidegger means with “thrownness.”

Peters

Yes, we are ejected from the womb. We didn’t choose our condition, our names, our parents, our language, our mother tongue, our skin, and our gender. Anthony Giddens among others likes to celebrate the plasticity of sexuality, as he calls it, as part of the more general plasticity of supposed postmodern life. So you’re right to see Speaking into the Air as pretty old fashioned in a sort of way. When it was published it was the height of a certain kind of internet utopianism, the notion that we could leave our bodies behind and fly through cyberspace. Hans Moravec, for instance, wanted to upload his consciousness into the internet in the 1990s. And one of his fantasies was virtual reality, which would include so-called teledildonics – as he called it – essentially fully functional pornographic or sexual virtual reality. And I think Speaking into the Air is trying to defend the horizon of the other’s touch or perhaps even chastity. Obviously, the book praises polymorphous eroticism in terms of passion and attraction, but in terms of practice, in terms of what you do with your body, your finitude, it insists on intimacy or fragility, shared with none or few. In this it is rather Platonic in a couple senses of the term, giving a practical limit to the praise of dissemination that otherwise pervades the book. The ancient Greeks appear to have called the genitals “physis” which is of course the Greek word for nature, where we get the word physics from. What you do with your nature, with your genitals, is actually a very profound kind of thing. Touch is not something you can generalize in the way that you can reproduce speech or hearing or vision with audiovisual media. Someday someone will perhaps figure out how to record and transmit the flesh but for now it is a bulwark of singularity against easy dissemination.

Packer

Two things that you said may be directly related. We’re thrown into this world, but we often leave it kicking and screaming.

Peters

We enter it kicking and screaming! (laughs)

Packer

This desire to upload into the virtual world, to gain infinitude, as with the notion of singularity, where all humans and machines will merge into one, makes sense from a secular humanist sensibility, less so from a Christian or any sort of sensibility that has an afterlife built into it. So I’m wondering if at some level we have competing afterlives. And I don’t want to situate them both as forms of kicking and screaming because it’s actually a way of going with much more grace and hope. Do you see some sort of relationship here between these two responses? The desire for singularity, the desire to upload, are a desire to overcome finitude. Where there’s a belief in the afterlife you can relax since you’ll get your infinitude elsewhere. Right?

Peters

Yes, but I’m not even sure that an afterlife necessarily has to be one of infinitude. What’s interesting about the sort of materialist streak within Mormon metaphysics is that God is finite also. One reason why William James is always so important for Mormon theologians is because at the end of his pragmatism lectures, he sees a god who is finite and therefore not able to fully master the chaos, trouble, or suffering of the universe either. A finitist conception of God provides an answer to the question of evil, the question of why doesn’t God intervene, why doesn’t God fix everything? Well, he’s limited. And he’s probably, in Mormon theology, limited by the autonomy of other intelligences, and subject (if you can say that) to many of the same communication issues any intelligent being faces. So I’m not sure that it’s a matter of criticizing cyber infinitude now because I’ll get mine later; rather, the singularity of every relation, choice, and action might be the eternal condition for intelligent beings.

Packer

I’m going to continue this line of questioning regarding Mormonism. I was looking at the article you wrote in 1993 titled “Reflections on Mormon Materialism.” ² In your description of materialism, you explain that for Mormons, and I would suggest Calvinists as well, financial and material success become a solid indicator that you are in fact righteous and vice versa. As you explain, materialism then primarily becomes an indicator of something else. Its function is to communicate…again, your righteousness, etc. Your response, which I’m afraid I’m oversimplifying, it is to take solace and joy in “a genuine appreciation, love, and gratitude for worldly goods, and to turn to finite material things rather than flee from them.” I see this as an attempt to move away from the communicative value of the material as again a sign for something else. What, again, is this “something else,” this non-signifying infrastructure of communication?

Peters

Walter Benjamin liked to quote the mystical text the Zohar that in the messianic world there would be no images. Translating that, I would say in a just society or a messianic society of equality, goods would not signify social difference. In the article, I argued that materialism has become essentially a class system in which people better one another by their goods. I built on Raymond Williams’s argument that advertising is not genuinely materialist because it’s based on fantasy and appeals to non-utilities. Consumption in our world is always inevitably infested by pride or social comparison. If you were able to banish that element of inequality from material goods, then you would have a genuine materialism, in which tomatoes and grass and flowers and rice, carpentry, and carpets, and pianos would be valued as things which bring beauty, joy, and use. Within Mormonism, there is a kind of social communalist, utopian longing for the ideal society called Zion. Zion is a society in which all goods would be held in common – not that everybody would be equally poor, but that everybody would be equally rich. And that wants, not just needs, would be fulfilled: if someone really wanted a piano, or a basketball court, or a swimming pool, these things would be things that everybody could have at their use. It is the infestation of social inequality that irks me in all of this. Consumerism is a kind of perverse immaterialism, because it’s all about signification.

Packer

Within this difference between use value and exchange value, exchange value is to some degree predicated upon a host of signifying systems, an advertising system and any number of culturally relevant forms of signifying differences used to establish value. The goods of which you speak must have a value that comes from somewhere. Where does it come from? Are these culturally specific? Are these universal? So in other words, without granting some transcendent value to music or swimming, etc., and extending beyond basic human material needs, which of these material goods are established as desirable?

Peters

Granting that “human nature” is a very troubled concept, I do think that humans are conditioned by our organic infrastructure. I think that’s the point of Hannah Arendt, who could have called her book “the conditioned human” rather than “the human condition,” and I don’t mean this in the behaviorist sense of operant conditioning in terms of reward and punishment, but just that material constraints shape our bodies and forms and possibility of life. I just gave a lecture to the undergrads in which I spent about 5 minutes raving about chlorophyll and I think they all thought I was crazy, but 2.5 billion years ago the coolest thing ever took place: plants came along, figured out how to store energy so to take the sun’s fire and heat and convert it into chemical form that would last, producing oxygen along the way. And they produced the right amount of oxygen, now about 21%. Now if the atmospheric level, according to lab experiments, drops below 12% oxygen, you can’t start a fire, and if it goes above 25% you can’t stop a fire. So here’s a classic example of a condition. Oxygen allows speech, it allows metabolism, and it feeds our mitochondria. Our brains would be dead in 5 min without the stuff. Our brains are quite literally on fire. Everything’s burning, said Buddha. And he’s actually quite right from a biological perspective. Everything alive is burning, and it’s because of plants that produce oxygen. So there in the botanical infrastructure is a profound “ground” as Heidegger, perhaps too portentously, would say in our lives. I guess I’m sort of an Aristotelian in thinking that humans are zoa, living creatures that are born, die, metabolize, and reproduce, but whose lives are mixed with speech, poetics, politics, logic, ethics, and metaphysics and all those cool things that Aristotle studied.

Packer

Something I’m hearing here that I’m going to try to work in as a transition point between our discussions here on materiality and two thinkers whose work on communication can be thought about in terms of a materialist approach are James Carey and Friedrich Kittler. And the transitional crux here is Mathematics and Music, Kittler’s recent work that has yet to be translated into English. One of the last talks I think Carey gave pointed towards his growing interest in early forms of chant in the Christian tradition which were also tied to mathematics and memory. It was later published. ³

Peters

Yeah, you wouldn’t know from the title that it includes three brilliant pages on music.

Packer

It’s a little misleading, right? I think they were trying to shoot for the top with the title.

Peters

Imagine that!

Packer

We’ve never done that (laughs). You bring Carey and Kittler together in one of your essays, “Strange Sympathies: Horizons of Media Theory in American and Germany.” ⁴ The one statement you make about similarities between the two that stands out to me is that “both have a high tolerance for visions of technological determinism and put media in the history-moving role that Marxists used to assign to the means of production.” I’m wondering if you could talk about this a little and I’m thinking about your own leniency regarding technological determinism, if we can call it leniency.

Peters

To simplify it, I think the debate about technological determinism is caught on a false dichotomy. It’s either structure or agency. I’ve been doing some research on this and discovered that technological determinism as a term was created at Columbia University in the 1920s. It emerges within debates about the economic interpretation of history with figures such as Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner, earlier, who were arguing for economic forces as determining presidential decision-making, transformations in American history, or the frontier. And then, the person who seems to really launch it is Robert MacIver, a Scottish-American sociologist at Columbia who is more famous for having hired two other Roberts: Robert Lynd and Robert Merton, but was a famous sociological theorist of the day, and he uses the term technological determinism as a counterpart to economic determinism. In this story, Marx is the great economic determinist, and Thorstein Veblen is the great technological determinist which was as surprising to me as I see that it is to you. Veblen thinks of technology in terms of craft, habituation, workmanship – not machines driving history as later people see it, so obviously the term meant something a bit different at first. It seems to me, I haven’t really worked this out yet, but a lot of our current sense comes in the 1970s, in debates on the British left, Williams and E.P. Thompson, against more economist or structuralist interpretations of social change. Ever since, when we study technology, you either gotta have the people or structures. In a way, it all reproduces the late nineteenth-century debate of free will versus infinitely retraceable causation. And the problem is that later twentiethcentury debates around technological determinism didn’t absorb the scientific innovations that destroyed the nineteenth-century debate such as statistical analysis, quantum physics, understandings of path dependence in economics, and chaos theory. Though there are still some rhetorically opportunist debunkers out there such as Richard Dawkins, no one subscribes to the dream of total causal explanation that you can find in someone like Laplace, the French physicist, who says in 1814, “if you show me the location of every molecule in the universe and its velocity and direction, I can read everything that has happened and predict everything that will happen.” That’s the kind of universe people like William James struggled with because if that’s true where’s the room for moral ethical artistic political choice? But, his fellow pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce emphasized the “sporting” quality of evolution, a wonderful word that suggests that playfulness is part of how the cosmos works. Weather, as Louis Menand’s Metaphysical Club nicely shows, was one way that late nineteenth-century thinkers grappled with chance. We now know the importance of initial conditions – you know, the sneeze that occasionally causes the typhoon. Small causes, big effects. In twentiethcentury physics, there’s no perfect equality between cause and effect, though the quest for causality remains, as Max Planck said, a useful “heuristic.” For someone like Kant, failure of causal explanation was a huge crisis. If causation collapses, there’s no intelligible order in the universe, and science, philosophy, and moral choice are impossible. There’s been a lot of rethinking since about more interesting ways to think about chance, network effects, overdetermination, synergies, and positive feedback. Why let nineteenth-century worries prevent us from considering a central human concern, the meaning of techniques?

Packer

Okay.

Peters

We’re conditioned by oxygen, we’re conditioned by sexual pairbonding, we’re conditioned by digits. We’re conditioned by sounds and images and pictures, by the means of transportation, even by air conditioning. Our infrastructure is so rich in so many ways.

Packer

Yeah, and I wonder in some ways if the knee jerk response when you hear that “X” story of technology is just a technological determinist explanation is a way of not having to deal with the scariness that in fact much of human life is determined.

Peters

Yeah. I think that it’s a form of intellectual intimidation. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young makes the wisecrack that calling someone a technological determinist is like saying that they strangle puppies in their basement. Like positivism, it is a term only used as a form of abuse. Nobody claims to be a technological determinist. But 20 years ago in a department debate, Sam Becker, my dear mentor, impishly said, Well, someone’s gotta be a positivist to make it a real debate. In a similar spirit, I’ll be a technological determinist. Someone’s gotta do it. There are no dead puppies in my basement.

Packer

I want to go back now and ask what materialist preferences or descriptions of behaviors you see in Carey and Kittler, especially in Carey, since Kittler’s materialist leanings are more straightforward.

Peters

As you know very well, Jim was caught in these horrendous debates in the Institute ⁵ in which he was accused of being the leader of so-called idealist cultural studies. Here too is a kind of rhetorical blackmail in being more materialist than thou. Materialism has always had this reputation from Democritus on as being the “tough guy” philosophy. William James calls it “tough mindedness.” There’s always sort of one-upmanship to claim to be a materialist because idealists are soft or tender-minded as James called them, believing in these nonvisible entities. There is a kind of bullying that goes along with claiming to be a materialist. I love Lenin’s famous line that “intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than unintelligent materialism.” Jim’s idealism was intelligent, as in his essay on the telegraph ⁶ which you and I have both studied carefully. But so was his materialism, which always came out to me in his analysis of the university, with his brilliant point that political correctness was the triumph of the medical corps on campus. He was also always a really concrete demographer and sociologist, and once provided the best instant analysis of the Iowa City labor market I’ve ever heard.

Packer

Yeah, okay. It’s an interesting claim and not one that I would disagree with, but in some ways it may seem counterintuitive as Carey has often been seen as the champion of a ritual or cultural model of communications scholarship in contradistinction to a positivism which claims a unique access to our material world.

Peters

It is good to remember that his name was James William Carey; sometimes, I think he should have been named William James Carey, despite his professed love for Dewey. James, in his lectures on pragmatism, does a really nifty maneuver to wiggle out between idealism and materialism. Instead of choosing one or the other, he splits the difference. He says that idealism is loved because it seems to nurture everything that we really care about – hope, choice, ethics, beauty. Materialism seems pretty crass because it’s the so-called “mud philosophy.” But James then flips the two, saying it’s the idealists that are ghastly and gruesome because they end up justifying killing and suffering because their universe in the end is all one big happy whole in which a few dead people are just the price we pay for greater glory. Then follows a really moving passage in which he says something like “anyone who’s looked upon the body of a dead child or parent knows that this too is one of the forms that matter could take.” Anyone who’s loved someone else knows that the beloved is a material being with insistent material needs. We humans are also things. We have needs for contact, food, shelter; we have weight, gravity, get sick, all of this stuff. We are material beings. James’ argument is to be the genuine humanist you have to be a materialist and recognize that matter itself is wonderfully refined. Carey manages a similar balancing act.

Packer

This reminds me of something else Carey said in one of his interviews, ⁷ which was that one of the limits of the left was that while they could do a splendid job in imagining a world of social justice, they don’t do such a good job of telling us how to bury our dead and how to commemorate them. Something else needs to fill that need which had to come through ritual, for him religious ritual.

Peters

Religious ritual can be fiercely material! Many years ago at a conference in Boulder, Colorado in a response to a paper by Nicholas Garnham I praised his point that the human condition is tragic and Douglas Kellner, the Marxist theorist, countered with the standard line that tragedy is always a genre which is deployed in defense of things as they are because it takes suffering as a given rather than something that’s alterable. And I’m all for care and social justice and good social change (not social change as such) but I don’t think suffering as such can be fully eradicated. And if we could, would we want to? What would human beings be without suffering? How many joys would vanish if pain did? Augustine, the great theorist of pleasure and pain, like Freud later, makes the point that people like to eat really salty things to get thirsty to then go and drink. (Laughs)

Packer

Popcorn, then beer!

Peters

In terms of the positivist social science that Jim was always fighting, I think you can make an argument that that is profoundly idealist. If you look at something like attitudes which were long at the core of quantitative social research, what the heck is an attitude? It’s not a material thing.

Packer

The first moment is to conceptualize.

Peters

Exactly. It’s the same displacing of the real with the ideal on the other flank Jim fought. The left has a grand vision of human equality and justice but does that mean you’re gonna behave in faculty meetings and treat people right? And I’m not saying that bad behavior is a monopoly of the left. It certainly isn’t by any means – just look around our political environment at the moment.

Packer

Sure. I have another question regarding Kittler and I’d sort of hinted at this earlier. I’m much attracted to Kittler’s Foucauldian take on communication technologies and media as producing the brute facticity of discourse. Particular media or discourse networks allow certain statements, whether they be data, sounds, images, language, etc., to literally be made or not made. I think that’s probably the most profound extension of Foucauldian thought that I’ve seen in terms of communication and media scholarship. I’m also quite happy with his McLuhanism, with his uptake of media as extensions of man where the real force is in how media alter the pace and scale of society. That also seems to be a very materialist sort of concern. But when it comes to Kittler’s Lacanianism I start to have some trouble. I don’t see why he is necessary. I’m wondering if you can give me a defense of why Lacan is necessary for Kittler. I don’t want to presume you’re in favor of a Kittlerian media studies. But if you were to defend it, is Lacan necessary or not?

Peters

Kittler seems to have abandoned Lacan in the structuring role that he played in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Certainly in the music and mathematics stuff Lacan shows up in footnotes but Kittler now talks about Lacan’s three-fold system of real-imaginary-symbolic as essentially a methodological distinction. More than Lacan, Kittler is loudly in debt to Heidegger, and Kittler uses media as a way to get at the infrastructure of being. Kittler and Foucault are both battling for the legacy of Heidegger – indeed a lot of people are so battling – but they both make very different kinds of inquiries into the fundamental constituents of being. To really simplify for Foucault, it is discourse and for Kittler, it’s media. The Lacanian triad is just a kind of an updated trinity that we can exploit for thinking.

Packer

Fair enough. And I appreciate that, because I really don’t want to spend any more time on Lacan than necessary (laughs). So, in another recent essay, “Calendar, Clock, Tower,” ⁸ you use the term logistical media that I believe comes from Virilio. I’m wondering what more you can tell us about this term and why it’s useful for media scholars. What does it do for us that other terms don’t do? It reminds me in a way, of Raymond Williams’ insight in Television, ⁹ that all media begin to some degree as a means for solving an immediate problem. I’m wondering if that’s the direction of your recent work.

Peters

It is. I think I might have stolen the term “logistical media” from Paul Virilio or from a friend of mine who worked in logistics at Sainsbury’s grocery store in London. And it also could have been invented by Judd Case, my former doctoral student, who wrote his dissertation on radar which is the first systematic study of a logistical medium, so as usual it’s sort of hard to nail down intellectual origins. But this concept stresses the infrastructural role of media. The concept puts storage, time and space, and processing front and center. Obviously in your own work media play an infrastructural role (such as screens). A second point is that the notion of logistical media allows us to rewrite the history of media in such a way that we can see the audiovisual innovations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a historical deviation. Media as large entertainment machines, providing drama for a dramatized society as Raymond Williams would say, are relatively unusual in history. The norm is media as data-processing devices. This notion is not unique to Kittler. It’s kind of the starting point in German media theory to take writing as the archetype of a processing medium, to see media as paper machines. Thus we can rewrite history and civilization as the history of media. There are many primordial logistical media – writing obviously, archives, maps, roads, points, indexes. Names too – to be a human you have to have a name. But names, like persons, are addresses, in one of the great, slightly cold-blooded points of Niklas Luhmann. You locate people on grids with names. Money is probably of course the greatest of all logistical media. Also key are units for organizing time, space, authority: stamps, weights and measures, calendars, clocks. You could sort of write a history of the world in terms of calendars and clocks because those who control the clock and calendar have the real power. It’s the state or military or church or the scientists who control time, and they’ve always used media to do it. My late Iowa colleague Carl Couch liked to say that market, temple, and palace were the three fundamental societal forms, and all three are always haggling over control of time and space. The Mayans consolidated their authority with time-keeping. So did the Aztecs, the Chinese, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Jews, the Romans, you name it. NASA and the Navy now keep time for us. Apparently the tsunami in 2005 altered the earth’s rotation slightly so they had to readjust the earth’s coordination with the stars, changing the setting some slight sliver of a second.

Packer

I had no idea that things internal to the planet’s mechanism could alter the orbit. I would have thought the earth has to be affected by some external force to create such a pronounced change.

Peters

Well the earth apparently used to spin faster. According to fossil records, there were once perhaps more days in the year. And apparently the moon used to be faster too so that there used to be a 28-day month and you can tell this by looking at mollusks which had a monthly sedimentation in synch with the phases of the moon.

Packer

And this actually gets me to my last point; using mollusks as a media for reading history. I quite like your essay “History as a communication problem.” ¹⁰ There are a couple points I want to pursue. One is that new media discoveries will produce whole new histories and give us a new sense of our history. Things of which humans had no previous understanding can, in a sense, radically alter how we understand ourselves and our past.

Peters

The emergence of the past.

Packer

Yes. We ultimately have no sense of what in the world might become a carrier or a medium of historical information. Who would have thought that fossilized mollusks would teach us that the moon once spun around the earth at a faster pace? Something else that becomes apparent in the final passage of “History as a Communication Problem” is that you seem fond of lists.

Peters

Ah, very good.

Packer

I have two questions about lists. One regards the set of lists you’ve provided of possible communication topics or projects. What’s frustrating for others of us in the field is we have no novel object left to study. You’ve used all of them, you colonized all of them by making the list, the master list. Second, every list breaks down at some point. The logic of the list when taken to its extreme undoes the list. So I’m wondering are these lists a call to the field? Are they a challenge? Or are they a way of saying “look, it should be obvious to you if you look through this list that there is a new way of thinking about media. If you think about these objects as media, it forces you to have a new kind of imaginary for what the field might accomplish.”

Peters

My lists are first and foremost a battle against my own finitude because I want to write all these books and I can’t do them all so I’m throwing ideas out there. Some species multiply like frogs by reproducing in bulk and then abandoning the spawn and others like humans and elephants reproduce in small numbers but invest enormous time and attention for years and years and years in their cultivation. And my lists are sort of a frog-like, disseminative moment, hoping that a few of them will spread somewhere.

Packer

It will bear fruit elsewhere.

Peters

Yeah. Paddy Scannell and Pete Simonson have both pointed out my love of lists. I am actually working on an essay on lists and of course was disturbed to see that I was trumped by Umberto Eco, who has a book on lists. There’s something comic about each list’s attempt to be infinite since each list also displays the impossibility of infinitude. Also comic is the inevitable juxtaposition of items that don’t seem to belong together. Foucault of course starts out The Order of Things with Borges’s list from a supposed Chinese encyclopedia. There’s something surreal about the internal order of a list because you can never get these things to line up. The surreal quality of every list reveals that all classifications are preposterous on some level. Lists are a check on the hubris that concepts can manage the world.

Packer

They never hold, but they’re also shows of mastery, right?

Peters

Maybe I should stop trying to catch the cosmos in a list?

Packer

No, no, don’t. I’m not being critical of the propensity to list. There’s a great moment in Don Dellilo’s Underworld where one of the characters talks about each and every part that comprise a shoe. And he knows the name of every single one of them. And his point in listing all the parts is to point out how much knowledge of the quotidian world is lost to all of us who don’t know the names of everything right in front of us. Yet his listing of the parts of the shoe is also proof of his mastery of a given area of knowledge. ¹¹

Peters

I think it’s more like an impossible grasping, like Moses atop of the mountain looking at the promised land saying “I’m never going to be able to go in there, please go in there and settle it for me.”

Packer

So it’s neither a to-do list nor a wish list. It’s something.

Peters

To-do for someone else. I hope it seems generous, like you know, look at all of this unclaimed land out there. But I see how it can also be seen as paternal.

Packer

I have to admit, my half-hearted complaint comes from trying to help graduate students generate new topics for their research. You want them to be creative progeny. And your lists coincide, not necessarily with my lists, but with my way of thinking about how you might generate a new list. And that I quite like.

Peters

I’m not sure if I believe in new ideas. Mark Twain said the great thing about being Adam or Eve was when they said a good thing they knew they were the first to say it. “History as a Communication Problem” draws on the line from Arendt that “the past appears under the guise of necessity.” She meant guise because the past is the most dynamic thing there is. And so, when we have a new medium, a new mollusk, that reveals something; is that something new or is that something old? In a funny way the past is the most renewable thing we have. Hans-Georg Gadamer famously argued that tradition is the condition of possibility for innovation such that embedment in the past is the only way you can rethink something. The past is not past, it is this archive that is ever-accessible in different forms or different moments for play, for reading, and some of it is unreadable or difficult. Packer: And some of it’s lost.

Peters

Yeah. Absolutely.

Packer

It’s not that some, but most of it’s lost.

Peters

In different ways in different times.

Packer

Yet, it’s somewhat related to the issue of being creative in our historical work. I think the newness and creativeness that Foucault tries to get at is the notion that histories are fictions. We kind of know they’re fictions but, there’s a demand for fidelity to the archives, to the medium, to the mollusks. On the other hand, it’s a matter of figuring out what this mollusk or archive is telling us that nothing else could, or has not yet been able to tell us. That’s the creative endeavor; how to make these things speak something that can’t be spoken otherwise.

Peters

The amazing thing about language, for instance, is that it allows us every day on a routine basis to generate sentences that have never, ever, been uttered before in the history of the human species, and yet are instantly intelligible. How do we do that? How do we have this constant production of emergence?

Packer

That is profound, but it makes me wonder to what degree we are communicating even in these moments. You draw on this notion of incommunicability quite a bit. I want to move to one of my favorite lists of yours, and it’s connected to lost communication. It’s from Speaking into the Air in the section on the dead letter office. You wrote, “the dead letter office deals with the materiality of communication, not its supposed spirituality. The need for it to exist at all is an everlasting monument to the fact that communication cannot escape embodiment and there are no such things as pure signs on the model of angels.” Two pages later you provide a sublime list of various sorts of dead letters: conversations that children have with their imaginary air-friends when others are not around, the smell of mammoth meat frozen a mile deep within a glacier, the letters in the pockets of kamikaze pilots, what the jawbone felt under the dentist drill while the nerve was numb from Novocaine. And you end by asking “what is the meaning of the letter burned in the dead letter office whose writer does not know if it is lost and whose recipient does not know it was ever sent.” And I’m wondering if you could answer your own question. What is the meaning of the letter that is never known whether it is received?

Peters

That question comes back to biology at some level. What happened if there was this horrible thing, the neutron bomb of the 1980s or 1990s, that would wipe out all living creatures but not touch any material objects? So, what would the accumulations in museums and libraries and record collections and files mean? Would they be a “message” without living creatures to interpret them? But here it gets really messy: this is our situation. We have cultural contexts that exceed any possibility of mastery, even the slightest acquaintance of any living creature. Most of the universe has no cognitive guardian, and most of it lies untouched by any intelligence, at least mortal intelligence. The vastness of the cosmos and the limits of our knowledge make up the archive problem. We’re always keeping all those papers and video films alive by oxygen-saturated blood-soaked brains. When the blood-soaked brains go, is there still signification? Did the Egyptian hieroglyphs on the Rosetta stone signify for centuries before Champollion deciphered them? The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century claimed to pull full sentences out of particular hieroglyphs. He had no idea that there was a phonetic structure. He thought Egyptian some mystic, symbolic thing, and just made it up. And so from a happy cultural studies point of view, we can praise him for being an active audience, but of course he got it wrong: that is not what the hieroglyphs said. There’s got to be the rigor of material otherness in the original if we take historical truth seriously. You have to learn the language by its rules, not yours. This is one thing that Kittler is always insisting on. He is excessively against sociology and cultural studies because he thinks they give too much weight to the subject. But math is cruel. It is unkind to your will and sentiments. You can easily be wrong. It is a tough master. But math is also music (another tough master). The inhumanity of math and music makes Kittler wild about both. Both belong to the gods. Both are an interesting mix of material and immaterial. Most mathematicians are closet Platonists because they believe in the reality of numbers, but math, as many such as Sybille Krämer have argued, is impossible without the flat laboratory of paper and related visual and graphic writing practices. Where was I going?

Packer

The meaning of the dead letter. In part you’re suggesting that of course there’s the demand for interpretation, for meaning, for something to be there to make sense of it. Probably ideally that should come from the context of its creation, the context of its expected reception. So that’s part “a”. Part “b” seems to be what mathematics might suggest – sending messages out to the cosmos hoping that there is a universal language that transcends the immediacy of human intelligence, maybe transcending the specificity of any potential form of intelligence that it will reach. When humans pass, we won’t be around to know what things we’ve left behind. We’ll become the mollusk.

Peters

Absolutely. It’s again the dilemma of the witness. You don’t know what little bit of trivial experience will blossom into something able to free someone from a death sentence. Key questions of justice turn on bits of evidentiary flotsam that you miss if you weren’t attentive at the moment, just like key questions of history. There is a similar problem about how language ties to the world. In Speaking into the Air I briefly played with the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, because that really is a question of where signification and matter come together. The medieval answer is an infinite number because angels have no material element. And I of course would want to insist that there’d have to be a finite number.

Packer

It depends how big the pin is.

Peters

Yeah, exactly (laughs). Or how good the angels’ inner ear system is. One of the funny things about being a metaphysical materialist, as I am, is that when you argue for continuity between matter and meaning, you can end up not being able to tell the materialist and the spiritualist apart. That’s one thing that gives Speaking into the Air a particularly odd flavor: you know, it’s a materialist argument but it’s a religious argument. Since the Enlightenment materialism was the enemy of religion but here you’ve got both at the same time. Part of that is my own religious tradition which is materialist in terms of how the universe is put together. A canonical line from Joseph Smith in Mormon scripture states: “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure.”

Packer

This is nicely related with the last question I have. One recurring theme that runs through the history of communication is the desire to give a physical manifestation to what are seemingly immaterial if not outright non-existent entities. You discuss several including ectoplasm, teleplasm, the unconscious, the actor, and the soul. During a discussion of teleplasm, though seemingly not exclusively referring to it, you state “materialization is quite literally the attempt to recreate the flesh in telecommunication.” I kept wanting to flirt with the notion of this as a “will to materiality” in which we feel that we must give material form to all communicative practices. So we hang the meat of the argument on the fact that there’s some material that we can grab on to. I think that ectoplasm or teleplasm may be the ultimate expressions of this. Where does this will to materialize come from?

Peters

Let me give two different responses to your wonderfully apt phrase about hanging the meat of the argument, which summarizes the problem perfectly. The first is that our sense organs are limited. Bandwidth is limited for eyes and ears and everything else. And so this is a classic kind of Kittler point, to look at the senses as processing devices whose powers of discernment turn on “just noticeable differences” or bigger. For there to be any kind of signification, it has to be material, registered. So in this sense, all communication necessarily involves a will to material manifestation. Second, and more broadly, perhaps my critique of the teleplasm and ectoplasm people goes back to your point about an essential rivalry in visions of afterlife. I think I’m defending birth and finitude, the materiality of being born and I’m not the first one to point out that material has the word “mater” in it, mother. Aristotle’s word for matter was “hyle” which meant, more or less, wood in Greek, a link preserved in the modern Spanish cognate madera, which also means wood. Aristotle was notoriously sexist in his vision of reproduction, seeing the raw messy “matter-mother” of menstrual fluid being shaped by paternal sperm’s noble form or morphē. Though we can’t blame the whole desire to fly away from matter that is such a part of western culture on Aristotle, there is obviously a deep sense that matter is inferior to form. (One reason why materialists can wear a chip on their shoulders.) Matter – mother earth or actual mothers – is the ultimate horizon of our condition, and there is, I think, an ethical demand to respect its limits and preciousness. The ectoplasmists, in contrast, seem to dream of an endless supply of matter-on-demand and thus fail to get the lesson of nonrenewable resources. It’s as if they want to outdo the womb, make flesh with machines and transport it beyond the supposed bondage of gravity. But gravity is actually a handsome condition. I like jumping and running; therefore, I like gravity.

Packer

I’m going to end by giving you a chance to give us one final list; it may be a list for new materialist media projects.

Peters

This is a sort of secret project that I had of writing the communication or media history of the world. And so, a list would go something like big bang, gravity, chlorophyll, oxygen, fire, sexual reproduction, mammals, upright posture, pair-bonding, clothing, continuous hair growth, jewelry and language, container technologies like Mumford’s own list of baskets, preservatives, family, language, ritual, cities, and reservoirs, and then calendars, money, names, maps.

Packer

That’s a pretty all-encompassing list, lots of time and space covered, with themes running across both frontiers. So, great, I really appreciate it.

Peters

It’s been really fun.

Packer

It has been a lot of fun. Thanks!