ABSTRACT
In Speaking into the Air, the historian of the ‘idea’ of communication, John Durham Peters (1999: 1), remarks on an interesting paradox: it is only because the ‘modern experience of communication is so often marked by felt impasses’ that communication became ‘one of the characteristic concepts of the twentieth century.’ The notion that the human is the ‘speaking animal’ has been around since Aristotle but it is ‘only since the late nineteenth century’ that humans have defined themselves primarily in terms of their ‘ability to communicate with one another’ (Peters, 1999: 1). Reflections on topics as varied as love, democracy, the ‘changing times,’ anxieties regarding power and runaway technology, have all to one extent or another been seen as a question of communication. Peters (1999: 2) remarks on the irony that it was only after mass communication became more central to social life that sociologists, philosophers, psychologists and various other communication ‘experts’ turned communication into the ‘apparent answer’ for problems as diverse as ‘the painful divisions between self and other, private and public, and inner thought and outer word.’ It was only after communication technologies – such as the telegraph, telephone, phonogram, radio and cinema – had allowed humans to experience communication events ‘at a distance,’ had severed social relations from time and place, that ‘moderns could be facing each other and be worried about “communicating”’ (Peters, 1999: 2). His contention is that communication became the central question for much of modern social thought and the modern arts. Peters (1999: 2) contends that much of what we regard as examples of modern culture focus on the ‘vexing question’ of communication and the possibility of its ‘failure’:
[M]uch twentieth century drama, art, cinema, and literature examines the impossibility of communication between people … Intellectuals of all kinds have likewise found in communication a topic with which to explore the outer limits of human connection and to weigh the demands we place on one another.
