Translation as a Problem of Communication: Some Reflections on Translating Speaking into the Air

DENG JIANGUO

Fudan University, Shanghai, CHINA

 

Abstract

The 2017 Chinese translation of John Durham Peters’ (1999) Speaking into the Air challenged many of the typical ways that North American communication theory had shaped the historical development of communication studies in universities in China. It also challenged the dominant approaches to translating classic texts of English language communication theory, including a previous and seriously flawed 2003 translation of Peters’ 1999 book under the title, The Sorry State of Communication. In this article, the 2017 translator Professor Jianguo Deng discusses the history of communication studies in China, the usual approaches to translating English language scholarship in communication theory, the flawed 2003 text, his approach to re-translating Speaking into the Air, and the influential reception of the 2017 text among humanities scholars working in Chinese languages and cultures.  

Keywords

Chinese communication studies, communication history, communication theory, John Durham Peters, translation

 

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/145 

Translation is figured variously in Chinese scholarship. Three encounters with this long and variegated history helps set the stage for the uneven pathways by which North American communication studies and John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air made their way to China.

The first encounter is with verbatim translations of Buddhist scriptures. These influential practices suggest that Chinese language and culture transform and improve through an encounter with foreign languages, concepts, and grammars. An Shigao (安世高), a mid-1^st century Persian prince who gave up his crown for Buddhism, adopted this verbatim practice upon arriving in China in 148 and translated Buddhist scriptures. Another famous translator who upheld this ideal is Lu Xun (鲁迅, 1881-1936). Lu Xun once studied medicine in Japan, wanting to be a physician to heal the body. However, mortified by the apathy of the Chinese populace, he believed that curing the minds of the people was more important and changed track to become a translator. He translated more than 200 literary works from 14 foreign countries into Chinese, with more than 2.5 million published Chinese words. He despised Chinese heritage as toxic and believed reading foreign books was therapeutic and could jostle the Chinese awake, so Lu Xun prioritized ‘faithfulness’ (oftentimes verbatim translation) over ‘fluency’ and ‘elegance’ in his translations（宁信不顺). Importantly, he believed that translations not only introduced new ideas but also new (foreign) styles from the original languages into Chinese, regarding them as medicine to cure the illness of the Chinese. Sounding Darwinist, he said ‘Some of the translated texts, though may read awkward early on, when used often enough by the Chinese, will adapt to the Chinese language and be of the latter’s service; those that can’t, will be naturally eliminated’ and that ‘a translated work should not be like rice that you can wolf down with soup, but something chewy that needs your teeth to work hard on’ (谢晓芸, 2020). While verbatim translation might sound beholden to ideals of information transmission or fidelity to a source, the tension between assimilation and alterity is clearly present.

A second encounter is with the ‘imaginary translation’ of literary works. In late Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), the translation of foreign literary works became very popular. The translator who produced the most work was Lin Shu (林纾,1852-1924), a translator whose efficiency was not impeded by his ignorance of all foreign language! Lin Shu’s method was to have an interpreter speak aloud about the plots of the source texts; the translation was then jotted down effortlessly in beautiful classic Chinese. The translations won accolades from his fellow men of letters, remarking the original and his translation were like ‘two persons starting off on different paths but arriving at the same destinations.’

The third encounter is with attempts at faithful, comprehensible, and elegant translations of Western natural and social sciences, including astronomy, math, physics, military, mining, metallurgy, cartography, biology, anatomy, etc. The most well-known scholar-translator of social sciences was Yen Fu (严复, 1854-1927), who studied British navy technologies much desired by the then-dilapidated Qing Dynasty, and an honours graduate from the British Greenwich Navy Academy. Through translations, political treatises, and newspaper-making, he promoted Western progressive ideas. He focused in particular on the classical British liberalism of T.H. Huxley, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, Adam Smith, and others in an attempt to show that the secret to Western wealth and power did not lie in Western technological advances, such as gun manufacturing, but in the ideas and institutions that underlie these techniques. Yan Fu would append long essays to expound his translations of the original texts, with sometimes the former being even longer than the latter. About his method, he said: ‘My translation attempts to present the original’s profound thought. It does not follow the exact order of words and sentences of the original ideas but reorganizes them. It is more of an exposition than a translation as it seeks to elaborate—an unorthodox way of transmission.’ He cites Kumarajiva to say: ‘Whoever imitates me would fall’. In 1894, Yen Fu put forth his widely-cited three requirements of translation—‘xin’ (信，faithful to the original text), ‘da’ (达，smooth and comprehensible) and ‘ya’ (雅，refined and elegant)—and remarked that ‘faithfulness is difficult enough to attain, but a translation that is faithful yet incomprehensible is not translation at all. Comprehensibility is therefore of prime importance’ (王, 1988).

Through these three figures, we get a sense of the many conflicting goals, techniques, demands, and challenges associated with producing Chinese translations of foreign texts. The translator in each case encounters and mediates an otherness. Sometimes, as with Lu Xun, the goal of translation is to use this alterity to transform Chinese language and culture. In other cases, as with Lin Shu, otherness is the method of translation. With Yen Fu, otherness must be preserved by translation—textual and conceptual differences are smoothed over as a means by which to import Western ideas wholesale. While there are yet more approaches to translation, these episodes help to sketch the bumpy terrain upon which ideas from North American communication studies began to arrive in China throughout the 20^th century, and they demonstrate the unique role played by translators as relays in the global movement of ideas and texts.

 

Chinese scholarship encounters North American communication theory

Verbatim transmission, interpreted speech, and faithful exposition are three ways of encountering otherness through translation as they shaped the encounter of Chinese scholarship with US communication theory. Since the early 1980s, the development of communication as a discipline in China has been generally summarized by scholars in 16 widely cited Chinese characters (系统了解，分析研究，批判研究，自主创造) and imagined to roughly follow three steps: 1) To learn systematically through translated works from the West; 2) based on that learning, to contrast and compare China and the West; and 3) based on the first two stages, to conduct original research so as to produce local knowledge that’s globally meaningful (via translation into English). These learning, comparing, and self-creating processes were considered to happen linearly, but now they are overlapping each other.

It begins with Wilbur Schramm (1907-1987), whose central theme in later life was communication and development of the third world. In 1982, at 75, he visited China accompanied by one of his Chinese students Yu Yelu (余也鲁), who remarked Schramm’s trip was an ice-breaking one in (American) communication studies’ ‘coming to China’ (Sun, 2019). The trip included a visit to the School of Journalism at Fudan University where he gave a public lecture about television and newspapers and met with the faculty. The journalism school had taught some of Schramm’s work, but, after this trip, Fudan built ties with and sent faculty members for training to the Communication Institute of the East-West Center in Honolulu, which Schramm had joined in 1973 after his retirement from Stanford (Chaffee, 1988). Several Fudan students in Schramm’s lecture later came to the US for further communication studies and become professors and purveyors of the American influence (its foundations and ferments) into China, of whom the most prominent were Jonathan Zhu (Ph.D., Indiana University, 1990), now professor in Department of Media and Communication, City University of Hong Kong, and Ju Yan’an, professor of Communication at Central Connecticut State University. Through its own training programs taught by these US-educated professors and their Chinese students, Fudan School of Journalism, as ‘China’s cradle of journalists’, has become the boot camp of journalism and mass communication teachers and researchers in China, expanding Schramm’s influence across Chinese colleges and universities with journalism and communication programs.

In this respect, China’s approach reproduced a ‘founding fathers’ type approach that John Durham Peters, among others, have criticized in the North American context. Spearheaded by Fudan, China started its import of American communication research literature, often focusing on textbooks including those by Schramm and Porter (1982), DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach (1975), Severin & Tankard (1992), and others. These efforts later expanded to include many classic scholars studied by media ecologists in North America, including Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Harold Innis, John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, Elihu Katz, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, E.M. Rogers, Michael Schudson, James Carey, and José van Dijck. Fudan would also become an important gateway for North American scholarship on the political economy of communication. According to a survey (周, 2019), from 2000-2018 there have been 351 translated works (in book form) in 109 series in communication studies. Keywords in these book series include ‘culture’, ‘society’, ‘journalism’, ‘communication’, ‘media’ and ‘technology,’ and translated authors include, among others, Klaus Brun Jensen, Nick Couldry, James Curran, Stig Hjarvard, Mark Hansen, David Crowley, Nicholas Gane, Robert Logan, Rich Ling, Robert Hassan, and Vincent Mosco.

Despite the rapid expansion and resulting variety in translated work in line with China’s technical and societal changes and thus communication issues, the centrality of the U.S. model of communication theory is obvious. Its theoretical discourse was severely skewed toward dominant elements of the Western tradition and often reproduced the myth of the four ‘founding fathers of communication studies’ (Rogers, 1994). As a result of importing a US conception of the discipline into a foreign language, Chinese communication students fumbled as to what to do. Their awkwardness was reflected at least in two aspects. Firstly, due to a lack of people steeped in both communication studies and the original language (usually English), the imported books were poorly translated, some of which were probably done by pooling student labor. This produced what’s called the Euro-lingo Chinese in some books—verbatim translated texts rigidly laid out in order of the original English, rendering them only faintly legible to readers who already know some English and thus negating the purpose of translation. Today, one may mistake the translator behind these works for Google Translate. Secondly, Chinese students of communication started their ‘original research’ by reproducing Western research findings, using China as an example that would verify or falsify them. This practice has caused a debate among Chinese scholars as to what was meant by ‘Chinese communication studies’: is it communication studies made in China, or Western communication studies studied in China? This debate lingers on today. Should the approach prioritize fidelity to the original texts and a recognition of their strange otherness to Chinese history and society? Should it assume that the assumptions, methods, and findings of U.S. social science will be reproduced in Chinese contexts? Or should students seek to assimilate and adapt its work into the existing knowledges and cultures of Chinese students? The answers to these questions shape the purposes and context of translation.

 

The Sorry State of Speaking into the Air

Among the many challenges of translating John Durham Peters’ (1999) Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication is its deep grounding in Western culture, its idiosyncratic style, its dismissive attitude to the Schramm-influenced models of disciplinary development that were imported to China, its lack of reference to Chinese civilization and its initial translation into Chinese through an error-filled, incomplete text titled, ‘The Sorry State of Communication’. How to translate a book that is so distinctive in style, so expansive in scope, and so keen to abandon the dominant forms and institutional boundaries of communication? Readers of Speaking into the Air are familiar with the challenges of an approach that grounds communication theory so deeply in the trials and tribulations of Western philosophy, literature, science, religion, and culture. The translator faces additional challenges when this account of the perennial problems of communication is considered within the much longer and more expansive history of Chinese civilization.

As an initial challenge, there is the disorderly and disseminative style that tends to illuminate as much as it argues. It is filled with parable, accepts contradiction, and is not very structured in its logical organization or argumentation. It draws upon a vast source material in unusual and inventive ways. It provokes thought and defies easy assimilation to what one already knows. As Gordon observes, ‘Most new discoveries are suddenly-seen things that were always there. A new idea is a light that illuminates presences which simply had no form before the light fell on them. We turn the light here, there, and everywhere, and the limits of thought recede before it. A new science, a new art, or a young and vigorous system of philosophy, is generated by such basic innovation’ (Gordon, 2008: 89). Speaking into the Air is a book that has made readers feel like many lights suddenly have been turned on. It’s full of theoretic speculations, stylistic experiments, and arguments that are continuous, repetitive, and sometimes inadvertent and confusing. It is not just different; it interrupted the usual way of thinking about communication as a scholarly field or as a scholarly exegesis in a book format. This raised a frustrating question for Chinese readers: ‘Shouldn’t communication studies itself be concise and communicable (understandable)?’  Rather than patience amid imperfections, these readers think of translation/communication as perfect contact (Peters, 1999: 61).

As a second and related challenge, the content of the book is filled with culturally grounded terms, scenes, allusions, and inside jokes from Western historical, mythological, religious, philosophical, literary and scientific contexts, including expositions and inversions of the Eros of Plato, parables of the prodigal son and of the sower, the Sermon on the Mount, Spiritualism, ham radio, the Turing Test, dolphin and SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers, and highly abstruse philosophical ideas such as those of Augustine, Locke, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. This hodgepodge of seemingly everything has puzzled Chinese readers acquainted with ‘core’ communication studies literature with a big question: ‘Is this communication studies?’  In a way, Peters communicates like Chinese sages such as Confucius or Zhuangzi, with allusions, metaphors, parables, anecdotes, synecdoche, yin and yang (binaries), but still confuses Chinese readers.

As a third challenge, there is the book’s double or doppelganger. Of course, a translation always involves a doubling of the text in some way, yet the 2003 translation of Speaking into the Air (SITA Chinese 1.0) by Professor He Daokuan (何道宽) introduced many problems that went unrecognized or unsolved until my subsequent translation of the text in 2017 (SITA Chinese 2.0), which has sold 18000 copies from January 2017 to January 2022. Professor He is renowned for his translation of McLuhan and many works associated with media ecology into Chinese. Some of his translations have been well-received. In one interview, he said he set himself a goal of producing two million Chinese words from English every year (Song (宋) & Lin (林), 2016). Speaking into the Air must have posed a severe challenge to maintaining such efficiency in translation around 2000 when the Internet was a rare source for Chinese people and references not easily available to him as a translator.

In He’s translation, the book acted a double drama in which performance and content coincide. The book title Speaking into the Air was rendered into Chinese as Jiaoliu de Wunai (交流的无奈), which, when translated back into English, is roughly, ‘The Sorry State of Communication.’ In addition, his translation of the book’s content was fragmented, self-conflicting, and in many places bluntly wrong. It is fraught with mistakes such as misreading Martin Heidegger’s ‘the splendid weirdness of being’ as ‘splendid wiredness of being’, misattributing quotes from Dewey and Hegel to Heidegger, reversing Martin Buber’s wish to replace I-It with I-Thou (worse, I-It was wrongly spelt as I-He in translation), and leaving out whole paragraphs and parts of sentences in many places of the book. These problems caused great frustration and desperation to readers of He’s translation. Many readers could not complete the first two chapters and formed an impression that Peters’ only point was that ‘broadcast’ is better than ‘dialogue’ (James Carey seemed to have the same fate among Chinese readers, being known only for his two models of communication—transmission and ritual—due to a less than satisfactory translation of his book Communication as Culture. Its translator has recently published her revised translation). The rest of the book enacted this double drama with the readers: as if writing the book was a performance to prove his point regarding ‘the sorry state of communication’. Readers never knew with whom the fault actually lay: the author, the translator, or themselves. Here, the question of the authenticity of the contact and the improbability of communication via He’s translation with Peters eventually killed rather than whetted readers’ appetite for the book (Peters, 1999: 96).

While the aforementioned deficiencies might well have derived from the philosophy of the translator and were enabled by an era of less accessibility to original texts and other reference sources, one systemic problem in He’s translation of the book is his handling of English. In English, it is very common to see a long sentence with long modifiers, but it is still clear enough to understand; whereas a long sentence in Chinese would be very complicated and extremely difficult to understand. Therefore, in Chinese, we find short sentences or long sentences divided into short phrases separated by commas. In order to overcome this difference, for long sentences in Speaking into the Air, He would chop their meanings into small units and reproduce them in short Chinese expressions separated by commas (some of these units were squeezed into existent Chinese idioms), so that the translated text would look, read and feel like Chinese. It was in this way that He’s translation lost the clear structure of the original English sentences and caused increasing information load and misunderstanding as readers read along. The capacity of Peters’ prose to hold open the interpretive structures that often foreclose difference to enable the quick extraction of meaning was lost. Ironically, by absorbing the style into common forms of Chinese expression, it became incomprehensible. The crucial task of communication theory in the Peters’ text – recognizing the alterity of self and other – was abandoned by the approach taken in its translation.

The importance of a translation being faithful to its original is beyond doubt, but incommensurability exists between languages, cultures, and even verbal or nonverbal signs in the same culture. ‘[Even] The so-called nonverbal cannot survive translation into words without loss. A handshake says “This is not a fist,” but also much more’ (Peters, 2015: 70). But just as Levinas said, ‘If communication bears the mark of failure or in authenticity in this way, it is because it is sought as a fusion’ (Peters, 1999: vii).

However, instead of lamenting the impossibility of translating Speaking into the Air properly, I saw potential in these limitations as a ‘handsome condition’ and developed a pragmatic approach that remained attuned to problems of assimilating difference. It is often overlooked that of the five visions that animate the introduction to the book, it is both philosophies of difference and pragmatism (of attuning to alterity and action coordination) that shape the task of communication theory. I embraced this in the translation. To ease the barrier of understanding for Speaking into the Air’s Chinese readers, I did the following:

1. Retranslated the book’s title Speaking into the Air to Dui Kong Yanshuo (对空言说), which means, well, ‘Speaking into the Air’. The new title has been well-received by attentive readers, who recognize the three layers of meaning of the original title in the four concise Chinese characters: the parable of Jesus’ sermon, communication as broadcast (on air) rather than dialogue, and communication without asking for reciprocity. This is not to say that the title of SITA Chinese 1.0 is all wrong but, though sounding sadly beautiful and resonating with a lot of people who lament ‘the sorry state of communication’ in this media-saturated world, it only captures one aspect of the polysemy of the original title. A ‘precise’ conveying of an ambiguous message is an imposition on, and a distortion of, the message.
2. Respected the Otherness of Peters’ English prose, including the length and structure of sentences and the holistic thread of thought in the book, by avoiding producing Euro-lingo Chinese or absorbing English completely into Chinese. As a medium between English and Chinese, I added aids of understanding or reduced repetitions where it is warranted. For example, given that Peters writes not with a Chinese readership on mind, I referenced widely other literatures and compiled footnotes of hundreds of words for cultural specific terms and for ideas alluded to but not fully elaborated upon in the book, such as ‘the great chain of being’, ‘Oversoul’, ‘ham radio’, ‘burned-over district’, ‘antinomy’ and ‘categorical imperative’, which seem redundant to a Western audience. Peters also writes somewhat repetitively, so, where appropriate, I condensed his second or third references of a point into pithier words.  Where needed, I added ‘signposts’ such as ‘besides…’, ‘as mentioned earlier…’ and ‘My point is…’ and filled in with some synoptic words to reduce readers’ information processing load along the way. For example, I added the words ‘Two Visions of Communication’ before ‘Dialogue and Dissemination’ in chapter two’s title to help bring readers quickly to the scene Peters sets. These little crutches help make Peters’ diffusive texts more structured and easier to follow. For places where adequate translation is impossible, I added comments, explanations and paraphrases either in the translated texts or in footnotes. The meaning contained in one language cannot be fully transported into another—its ‘spills-over’ always require additional approximation and explication (Pinchevski, 2005: 128); it is, after all, one of the lessons of the text that hermeneutic and semiotic processes are unceasing.
3. Composed a 20,000-word Translator’s Note expounding Peters’ biography, Speaking into the Air’s intellectual genesis, main ideas and prose styles. This note puts the book into a historical and disciplinary context. It has been acclaimed by many readers and encouraged other translators to follow suit in their own translations.

With these measures taken, SITA Chinese 2.0 was more faithful and comprehensible than 1.0. Admittedly, the aforementioned three criteria of good translation proposed by Yan Fu—faithfulness, comprehensibility and elegance—can never be met to their fullest, but it is an aim worth pursuing for translators. Paul Ricœur said rightly “(We need) to forgo the lure of omnipotence: the illusion of a total translation which would provide a perfect replica of the original,” but there are good and bad translations.

 

The impact of SITA Chinese 2.0 on Chinese communication research

SITA Chinese 2.0 has made several key contributions among scholars, students and publishing house editors associated with communication studies in China. For instance, the pain of missing the book for 20 years due to a poor earlier translation was shocking to many. With the new translation, new pasts emerge. ‘Old’ insights were excavated from Speaking into the Air and are employed for present and future research in China. For example, these are illuminating insights that not only describe what communication was but also prescribe how it should be looked upon and researched.  ‘It (communication) is a sink into which most of our hopes and fears seem to be poured’ (Peters, 1999: 2); ‘Only moderns could be facing each other and be worried about “communicating” as if they were thousands of miles apart’ (Peters, 1999: 2); ‘Communication as a person-to-person activity became thinkable only in the shadow of mediated communication’ (Peters, 1999: 6). Peters turns his eyes to history but speaks to the future, exposing humans’ perennial desires for a communion of minds, constantly stoked by ever-newer media including today’s VR (Virtual Reality) and machine-brain interfaces.

Readers of the new translation were surprised to know that Speaking into the Air had been such a treasure chest, that many ideas Peters talked about 20 years ago had lay buried and unrecognizable in its first translation. When these ideas were revealed in my translation, they were found relevant to today’s digital world of VR, mind uploading, and human brain-machine interfaces, if not more than yesteryears—the unquenchable yearn for Eros in communication in ancient Greek, for example. A search of ‘Duikong Yanshuo (对空言说)’ and the name Deng Jianguo (邓建国) in the CNKI (China National Knowledge Infrastructure) database resulted in 215 entries of academic journal articles, conference papers and graduate theses/dissertations that cited SITA Chinese 2.0 in the last four years (2017-2021). A search with SITA Chinese 1.0 (Jiaoliu de Wunai, 交流的无奈) and the previous translator (He Daokuan, 何道宽) returned 815 entries in 19 years (2002-2021). This indicates a revived interest in Speaking into the Air due to the new and more accessible translation.

The biggest gain for Chinese communication and media studies is that SITA China 2.0 has provided a common text for Chinese scholars to reference, discuss, and debate with each other and their international counterparts: an exemplary embodiment of a historical and philosophical approach to communication studies. SITA Chinese 2.0 acted as a mirror, a stimulus and a launch pad for Chinese communication studies to revisit and rediscover Chinese heritage. Working under the strand of Huaxia (ancient China) Communication Research (华夏传播研究), three prolific professors remarked on Speaking into the Air’s influence on their research. Pan Xianghui (潘祥辉), professor of Nanjing University in China, who is known for attempting to conceptualize communication practices in ancient China via drawing upon social science theories, said that thanks to its second (2017) Chinese translation, Speaking into the Air has provided research topics, inspiration and legitimacy for Chinese scholars like him. ‘Spiritualism, for example, which is about humans’ desire to communicate with gods or the deceased, teems in ancient China, but it has rarely been researched from the perspective of communication by Chinese. Speaking into the Air brings it in and has provided an exemplar. Pan said he has since been researching some human-gods communication in ancient China and the book saved him the trouble of having to educate the audience about the validity of the topic as a communication problem (Pan, 2021, in-person communication). Professor Xie Qingguo (谢青果) of Xiamen University has published profusely on Chinese ideas of communication, especially those of Taoism (Laozi and Zhuangzi) with Speaking into the Air as a comparison (Xie & Wang, 2020). Professor Yao Jinyun（姚锦云）of Jinan University in Guangzhou, China, used it as a source of inspiration for a bonanza of scholarly literature and reference points for his comparative research on Western and Chinese gift-giving and communication (Yao and Shao, 2021).

In his proposal for the American NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) grant for Speaking into the Air, Peters wrote: ‘This is troubling in an age in which so many public and private dilemmas turn on questions of ‘communication’… The book I will complete will present a rich philosophical and historical grounding for public and academic debates about communication in years to come’ (Eadie, 1995). The impact of Speaking into the Air has surely fulfilled Peters’ wish in the US. As shown above, SITA Chinese 2.0 has also caused a prolonged academic stimulation and debate about communication here in China.

 

Calling for a SITA-like book from Chinese communication academia

Chinese academia still needs to learn from the West via good-quality translations. History shows such learning is a perennial endeavor that should be carried on by generations of academic translators. Meanwhile, the need is acute to upgrade the scope and depth of the selected books for translation, and the generative, relevant, inspiring, and forward-looking works of international scholars will be favored.

On the other hand, I hope the learning process happens two ways. Communication studies as a field/perspective needs to do so. In Speaking into the Air, Peters mentioned China (Chinese) only once, ‘but it was in where there is a climax’—‘How much intelligence and wisdom are found in Chinese civilization, for instance, and how ignorant the West continues to be of it!’ he exclaimed (Peters, 1999: 256). But he also mentioned David Thoreau was one of the earlier American scholars to realize the value of Eastern thoughts, who influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson via the translations of Chinese classics by European Enlightenment scholars (Ch’ien, 1992). In Marvelous Clouds, Peters’ other magnum opus, Heidegger was such a strong presence that Peters had to confess that he ‘finds himself reluctantly drawn into his orbit’ (Peters, 2015: 38). Heidegger had been influenced by Taoism too (May, 2005). In Marvelous Clouds, he called China a ‘media kingdom’ and mentioned ‘China’ 34 times and ‘Chinese’ 49 times. He acknowledged his trip to Beijing and multiple visits to museums there inspired the book idea (Peters, 2015: Preface to Chinese edition).

A classic Chinese history book from the 4^th century had a story: One aspiring young scholar rejected his father’s request to clean his own room. ‘I am meant to clean the whole world, not for this trivial chore of cleaning my own room,’ he contested. The father said: ‘If you can’t even clean your own room, how can you expect to be able to clean the whole world?’ The moral of this story is relevant to today’s communication studies. While we rush to scientize/disenchant/digitalize all human communication, is there also a need to reenchant it, to respect and restore the extraordinary of the ordinary, to wonder the most wonderful? What else is ‘human communication’ than what it has been said to be (and by Westerners)? Why do we seek distant alien or artificial intelligence when we hardly know what to do with our own? Why do we not look to our neighbors first before we look into the sky? An international, multicultural, multi-perspectival scholarly dialogue needs to flourish in the 21^st century to move toward ‘human’ communication discourses that can sustain humanity (Gordon, 2008). By drawing on resources in China and other parts of the world, Western scholarship on communication will be enormously enriched. This will of course need Chinese scholars of communication to work hard to produce books that compare to Speaking into the Air and have Western scholars of communication translate them.

 

Acknowledgment

The author is grateful for the generosity of time and precious insights of Chris Russill and Liam Young in their editing of this article.

 

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Deng Jianguo is Professor and Director of the Department of Communication Studies at the School of Journalism, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.  He researches histories, philosophies, ideas and theories of media and communication, cross-cultural communication, social media uses, and Chinese journalism and politics. He is the author of The Strength of Weak Ties: Examining the Relation of Web 2.0 and Its Users’ Social Capital (Fudan UP, 2011) and Media Convergence: Fundamental Theories and Frontline Practices (Fudan UP, 2017). He has translated, among others, John Durham Peters’ two magnum opuses Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Shanghai Translation Press, 2017) and Marvelous Clouds: Toward A Philosophy of Elemental Media (Fudan UP, 2020), both having been acclaimed in Chinese communication studies. He has a BA in English, MA in American Studies, and PhD in Communication Studies (Fudan, 2007) and was a visiting scholar at the School of Journalism, Columbia University (2013-2014).

Email: dengjianguo@fudan.edu.cn