JDP Network 1999/2009/2019: A Living History of John Durham Peters’ Historiography
JEREMY PACKER
University of Toronto, CANADA
Abstract
This article provides an archaeology of John Durham Peters’ historiographic methods and strategies by comparing three distinct approaches that the author names JDP1999, JDP2009, and JDP2019. For each of these three JDPs, one key theoretical figure functions as a historiographical guide. Walter Benjamin leads the way for JDP1999. Friedrich Kittler guides JDP 2009. Harold Innis hovers, Google Earth-like, above JDP 2019. The dominant forms of historical evidence are also fundamentally different. JDP 1999 delves into the hidden philosophies and theologies of communication buried in canonical Western texts. JDP 2009 opens up the diagrams, patents, and formulas of scientists and engineers used in the creation of media. JDP 2019 examines the ‘natural world’ as the inscription of being that encodes and decodes itself into existence. A further distinction to be made between JDP 2009 and JDP 2019 regards tools and knowledge of the natural world, both of which figure prominently in the histories discussed. The natural world preexists tools and humans. Its history is deeply inhuman, whereas the history of ideas and of tools is clearly not.
Keywords
Media history, media theory, historiography, John Durham Peters
Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/144
“What got recorded is a minute fraction of what happened, and what got transmitted is a fraction of that, but the choices we make in interpretation may be the most selective of all” (Peters, 2008).
“All history of course is a commentary on its own age, even or especially that which makes a claim to be most true to the past. Benjamin simply makes the historian’s role in creating the alignments explicit” (Peters, 1999: 4).
The twentieth anniversary of the publication of John Durham Peters’ Speaking into the Air (1999) (SITA) was historic and subsequently historicized by the Into the Air Symposium[1] hosted by Carleton University in 2019 where I was asked to address the topic of ‘History’. The temporal telos guiding such historicizing was vicennial, though I’m more partial to the decade or even the millennium. Yet, 1999 is a hard year to forget. Clearly a millennialists’ wet dream and already immortalized for its ‘party-like’ appropriateness, it must have been tantalizing to John Durham Peters as well given that a vast computational incapacity to properly mark time, that is “logistical media’s” (Peters, 2013) failure to keep a calendar straight, led to the terror known as Y2K. More importantly for the present historical account, the year brought a text “guaranteed to alter your thinking about communication” from a “welcome voice” that it was assured “We will hear…again” (Peters 1999, fourth cover). My trick here is to make this voice speak to itself, again and again, never wearing out its welcome due to the originality of words. The first notes of this recursive ventriloquism will be lifted from Speaking into the Air which was a text that saw itself speaking from the past to provide a “history of the idea of communication”. How this text and this voice continues to speak from and for the past is the object of inquiry to be taken up in the pages that follow.
The theoretical heft of SITA rests upon a series of imaginary dialogues between Socrates and Jesus, Augustine and Locke, and Marx, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. While the text features a scathing critique of dialogue as the benchmark for judging communication, dialoguing with Peters and with his work has proven immensely valuable for me. I teach this and other texts in my courses. I cite his work often (though likely not as often as deserved). And once every so often I’m lucky enough to dialogue with him face to face at events such as Into the Air where “There is so much, primarily embarrassment, at stake when you meet another person” (Peters, 2015: 273). During one of those meetings, Peters invoked my history and acted surprised that I had been raised in a Dutch Reformed and Calvinist tradition, yet ended up, in his words, “a Foucauldian-Atheist”. Similarly, imagine my surprise when Peters divulged that he was a Boston Celtics fan. Peters wasn’t wrong, I am a Foucauldian and atheist, and a Los Angeles Lakers fan to boot. These three facts might suggest mutual enmity, but from my perspective nothing could be further from the truth.
However, as a good Foucauldian, it is necessary to cling to my commitments and perform a kind of archeology of Peters’ work as a means to address its different manifestations of history, as process and prognosis. As a post-structuralist, I will do as Peters says we do, and relish in creating the following three “preposterous categories” (2015: 33): JDP 1999/JDP 2009/JDP2019. Adhering to the tenets of the archaeologist, the categories refuse psyche-focused depth analysis and the desire to unify via proper names (such as Innis, Edison, Carey, Heidegger, James, Kierkegaard, Arendt, McLuhan, Kramer, Benjamin, Augustine, Dewey, Leroi-Gourhan, Haraway, Helmholtz, Marx, Plato, Kittler, and Jesus). JDP 1999/JDP 2009/JDP 2019 do not simply represent a unified person at three different moments in time, rather these categories index a thoroughly ruptured discourse of my own making. It is a discourse grounded in Peters’ own writing as I’ve allowed his CV the luxury of determining the data which comprises this trifurcation and for providing the nomenclature ‘JDP’ which appears therein. JDP on its face represents the most straightforward use of initials, a useful form of data compression and an old container technology for containing an even older technology (the name). 1999, 2009, and 2019 may seem to mark a decadal linearity, but the ‘/’ marks a cut, break, and rupture that refuses both direct temporal correspondence and linear progression. Instead, we shall treat these three categories as markers, as addresses, as discourses, as indices, as inscriptions, as networks, as indices of networks, as media, as logistical media, as containers, as containers of discourse networks. We shall not call them tombstones or graves, which are apparently “the prototype of all recording media since the pharaohs” (Peters, 2015: 83).
This history is similar to the one found in SITA in that I’m creating a set of imaginary dialogues that occur between JDP 1999, JDP 2009, and JDP 2019. Consider this an asynchronous-trialogue about the history of John Durham Peters’ ideas of history. And while that may seem straightforward enough, dyads, as Simmel explained, are rather simplistic compared to triads (1950). So, while John may appear to those who have seen him in the flesh as one person, I’m suggesting that he is in fact three (not due to his prolificacy, nor in reference to his invocations of the Trinity). Other famous trinities that manifest in a singular being might come to mind here and this is not entirely by chance. For in the Christian tradition God exists as three elements, a Trinity composed of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, each of which moves between the material and immaterial. In the Mormon tradition, God and Jesus are material beings, while the Holy Spirit is immaterial or ethereal, though importantly, it inhabits material things. In JDP 1999 we see the ethereal inhabiting the material, while in JDP 2009 and JDP 2019 we see only the material. The ethereal has mostly left the building. But as with Elvis, there may still be a rare, seemingly random, sighting.
For each of these three JDPs, one key theoretical figure functions as a historiographical guide. Walter Benjamin leads the way for JDP 1999. Friedrich Kittler guides JDP 2009. Harold Innis hovers, Google Earth-like, above JDP 2019. The dominant forms of historical evidence are also fundamentally different. JDP 1999 delves into the hidden philosophies and theologies of communication buried in canonical Western texts. JDP 2009 opens up the diagrams, patents, and formulas of scientists and engineers used in the creation of media. JDP 2019 examines the ‘natural world’ not as tea leaves for interpretation, but rather as the inscription of being that encodes and decodes itself into existence. A further distinction to be made between JDP 2009 and JDP 2019 regards tools and knowledge of the natural world, both of which figure prominently in the histories discussed. The natural world preexists tools and humans. Its history is deeply inhuman, whereas the history of ideas and of tools is clearly not.
If one were to create a categorical diagram it might look like this:
| Network | Histori-
ographer |
Archival Discourse | Trinity | Topic | Subject | Method |
| JDP1999 | Benjamin | Western
Thought |
Spirit | Ideas | Communication | Worm-
hole |
| JDP2009 | Kittler | Techno-
Scientific |
Creator | Inventions | Time axis manipulation | A priori/
technics |
| JDP2019 | Innis | Natural
World |
Embodied | Inscriptions | Being | Natural History |
JDP1999 or Benjamin/wormholes/ideas
JDP 1999 set out to invoke a history of ideas that correspond with the then contemporary considerations of the problems associated with communication. Or “Tell the story of how communication became such trouble for us” (Peters, 1999: 3) or to “trace the sources of modern ideas of communication and to understand why the modern experience of communication is so often marked by felt impasses” (1999: 1). Simply put, JDP 1999’s historical account suggested that contemporary problems are similar to, rooted in, and in part, were generated by past thought, though it would be far too simple to consider it an idealist account. Speaking into the Air stands as an historical account of figures who were already considered to be of historical importance (such as Socrates, Jesus, Marx, and Kierkegaard), but in JDP 1999’s account they were also communication theorists. In order to make these figures speak in the register of communication theory, he followed the historiographical method of Walter Benjamin and opened up a set of wormholes that drew the figures into alignment by locating a secret affinity with concerns of the present. By extension, these figures came to be speaking with each other. This is to say that in JDP 1999’s account, they are all made to be speaking from the past to the present. Their medium of choice for overcoming the vastness of time and space, the wormhole.
Peters draws forth the notion of a wormhole from Benjamin and more specifically he uses Benjamin to articulate a division within the philosophy of history between constructivist and historicist perspectives. I want to make note of this distinction as I will return to it later.
My strategy follows a distinction Walter Benjamin made between modes of historical narration. One mode he called historicism: it regarded history as reconstituted and given, a continuous chain of causes and effects existing in a homogeneous space-time continuum. The past waited demurely for the historian to conjure up […] The other mode–the one Benjamin preferred, as I do–saw in every act of historical narration a constructivist principle. The historian did not wait for the past to speak its fullness but was an activist who brought ages into alignment with each other (Peters, 1999: 3).
Further, the relation between historicism, temporality, and even simultaneity, has mystical roots.
Time, for Benjamin, is not just a continuum; it is full of ruptures and shortcuts—“wormholes,” we might say. Benjamin is thinking of the medieval notion of time as nunc stans, an eternal present (Jetztzeit in his German), but as is always true in his work, the mystical sources are not wifty dreaming but have shrewd relevance to concrete concerns. The present becomes intelligible as it is aligned with a past moment with which it has a secret affinity. There is a simultaneity not only across space, but across time as well (ibid).
Two points will have to suffice for my depiction of JDP 1999. First, the constructivist historian performs a hermeneutics of unveiling the secret, of locating the hidden affinity in thought (or thought translated into writing) that doesn’t necessarily run linearly through time, but rather unites (brings together) moments and places across time and space. The resultant history is a kind of medium that establishes itself as the in-between. This is not a forensics dedicated to recreate (or even know) the past, but the production of new dialogues that may have never taken place before or since. It is the creation of the new, of now, via simultaneous comparative acts of ventriloquism. It is not a project aimed to discover intellectual causality, but rather to find other worlds, other times, in which consideration of the potential and problematics of communication as the capacity to bring others together, keep them apart, or estrange themselves to themselves is arranged. Affinity may acknowledge a sympathy or agreeableness, but it may also, following the meaning of the term in biochemistry, describe the degree to which two substances can be combined together. Such combinations adhere, but not necessarily by agreement. Enmity can lock two figures into engagement as forcefully as love.
The wormhole is then a kind of magical medium that ‘brings back to life’ or reanimates figures and ideas from the past in order to make them intelligible for this moment. It functions as a seance which guarantees none shall ‘rest in peace’. To the contrary, to write, to inscribe, to leave a trace of any kind, is to open oneself to the possibility that you will be forced to speak to and in the future. What you will say, who you will speak to, you will never know. Worse yet, those who hear may not know you are dead. “The two key existential facts about modern media are these: the ease with which the living may mingle with the communicable traces of the dead, and the difficulty of distinguishing communication at a distance from communication with the dead” (Peters, 1999: 149).
For this kind of history to work, it needs to address concerns close to one’s heart. Exhuming the dead demands that you honor them as well. “Doing violence against history is in some deep way also violence against human beings. As students of the past, we are dealing with the most essential and most delicate of all communicative relationships: that between the living and the dead” (Peters, 2008: 32). A ‘secret affinity’ connotes not only similarity, but also a commitment to a relationship that one has actively chosen. In this sense, JDP 1999’s historiography ultimately acts as an inventive ethics that comes into being via wormholes/affinities of one’s own making. Part of the story SITA tells is that ideas matter and ideas about communication are neither new, nor exactly old. They are always both at the same time. But how does the historian locate affinities across time? What makes one time similar to another? Do the affinities arise out of a similarity in thought, a similarity in problems faced, a similarity in changes brought by new technology, or a similar desire of enemies to dominate a space or sphere of thought?
A short answer might be that media have effects on ideas and new ideas often “arose from new technologies” (Peters, 1999: 5). Further, new media forms do not affect or alter already present forms of communication or “already constituted zone(s) of human activity”, but rather they made “‘communication’ possible as a concept in the first place” (1999: 6). While JDP 1999 was invested in a history of ideas, a latent media-determinism was already attempting to speak its own affinity into being. JDP 1999 was looking for a partner. It wanted to time travel with JDP 2009.
JDP 2009 or Kittler/a prioris/inventions
In 2006, JDP 2009 revisited James Carey’s classic 1980s essay, “Technology and Ideology”, partially as a means for suggesting a new orientation toward historical research on media. He suggests that Carey’s “essay is not deeply immersed in the technical discourses and practices of the age” (Peters, 2006: 139). JDP 2009 clarified, “There is more ‘ideology’ than ‘technology’ in Carey’s mix” (ibid). And in the related footnote explains that “this fault is even more extreme in my own brief, inadequate treatment of telegraphy in Speaking into the Air. The present essay is partial penance” (Peters, 2006: 153). The penance had in fact already begun in the 2002/2004 essay “Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History” which begins with an epigraph from Friedrich Kittler[2] and is followed up by these two sentences: “The Messiah, said Walter Benjamin, comes in inconspicuous ways. Thomas Alva Edison’s tinfoil phonograph, a rather unprepossessing instrument, divides history into two halves, a before and an after” (Peters, 2002: 177). Kittler, Benjamin, the Messiah’s arrival, and the technological bifurcation of all history. A mild riff on the adjacency of these four invocations might lead one to conject that Kittler arrives inconspicuously to divide JDP’s media historiography into two halves, BK (Before Kittler) and AK (After Kittler) or alternatively JDP 1999 and JDP 2009. By the end of the decade, JDP 2009 seems to have received full absolution as he will by that point have written “Friedrich Kittler’s Light Shows”, the introduction to Kittler’s Optical Media (2009), drawn out the “strange sympathies” that align North American and German media theory (2008), provided more than one defense of “technological determinism”, and delved deeply into the “technical discourses and practices” of the nineteenth century. Wormholes are not to be found, but thanks to Kittler, the brute facticity of techniques overrode the humanities’ “blindness to the history of being” (Peters, 2015: 27).
While JDP 1999 accounts for the longevity and applicability of historical ideas about communication, JDP 2009 explained the ongoing technical dimensions of media and the degree to which these media have been central to historical change. Models and modes of communication (broadcast, face to face dialogue, literacy) are replaced by technological capacities to measure space and time, and thus control it, especially by logistical media. These media are long-standing social means for organizing and controlling populations through the administration of space and time. Notably in JDP 2009’s account, inventions such as the calendar, the clock, or the tower function to “arrange people and property into time and space” (2013: 40). Further, JDP 2009 suggests that in such historicizing, for instance as with the telegraph (Peters, 2006), the real historical story isn’t a singular machine or apparatus, but rather with “the common use behind technical diversity” (139). The telegraph is better understood as “telegraphy”, the “practice of distance writing” (2006: 138) which comprises a host of wildly diverse devices, bodies, and approaches, for accomplishing often, though not only, logistical goals. It was also one of many “graphing machines that sketched hitherto unrepresentable physiological and temporal processes” (ibid). In summary, JDP 2009 changes emphasis from “the outer world of culture” to “the inner engineering of media themselves” (ibid). Such an approach is similar to Kittler’s Optical Media, which eschews a focus upon cinema or television per se and such an approach corresponds to JDP 2009’s suggestion that Kittler is “foremost a philosopher of media history rather than a media historian” (2010: 12). The same might be said of JDP 2009 and this is especially apparent in “History as a Communication Problem” where it is suggested that “Our knowledge of the past is a question of media” (2008: 20). And as such, “Historical research is always a matter of triangulating record, transmission, and interpretation” (ibid). The historical record is not only deeply technological, but at least in part technologically determined. Understanding the technical capacities of the “recordable and the transmittable” (Peters, 2006: 138) becomes central to this media history.[3]
The “a priori” is of course suggestive of the Kittlerian sense that media “determine our situation” even to the degree that there is a “media a priori” to Einstein’s theory of relativity as JDP 2009, following Peter Galison (2004), points out. Thus, media are not only generative of how space and time arrange property and people, but media account for the epistemological conditions by which space and time are understood in the first place. We see the centrality of these interrelated concerns in several essays that appear between 2003 and 2010 which feature Helmholtz, Edison, Einstein, and other scientists and engineers. They all worked in the overlapping nexus between temporal and spatial measurement and manipulation and media’s capacity to learn from and overcome human bodily limitations as they relate to extending, enveloping, managing, capturing, and reconfiguring space and time. In Kittlerian terms, these technologies reworked “the time axis”. JDP 2009’s historiography then at its most concise, attends to the historicity of “time axis manipulation” and the historian’s reliance upon media to do their own manipulating of time.
Lastly, in his disavowal of the simplistic critique of “technological determinism” (2011), JDP 2009 bristles at what he calls “compulsory populism” which demands that historical accounts always acknowledge the “social factors and people involved at every turn” (113). When the “patently obvious” must always be invoked, in this case to appease the anthropocentric remnants of British Liberalism, “thinking has stopped” (113). While McLuhan’s technological determinism is critiqued by JDP 2009 for its “loose account of causation” (2011: 112), Kitter’s supposed technological determinist accounts are shown to in fact be full of “institutions, practices, and subjects” (112). Finally, and boldly, JDP 2009 explains that “Things have lives. People can be machines” (2011: 113). “In a moment when the meaning of technics is indisputably the most important question facing our species, do we really want to make it an intellectual misdemeanor to think big thoughts about technology?” (113). Further, to give life to grand ideas about technology, demands more than grandiose language. “McLuhan was right to link media and physiology, but he settled too quickly for poetic montage instead of historical research (Peters, 2004: 179). In this renouncement of McLuhan’s lack of considered historical investigation we get only part of the story. For it is not only a question of historical research, but more substantially a question of what kind of historical research. For, “The burning questions about telegraphy and modern electric media in general cannot be answered by social and economic history alone: we need some mathematics, medicine, physics, and engineering to grasp what happens to the body, the soul, and the cosmos” (Peters, 2006: 153). A fuller account might even demand more.
JDP 2019 or Innis/natural history/elements
What is accomplished by publicizing a secret? Does it negate previous accounts concerning matters associated with what had heretofore been unknown? What if the job of the historian is not to locate ‘secret affinities’, but to make known what has long been hidden in the universe’s secret material record as with the scientific investigation of ice core samples? Do secrets and science make the previously unknown true? These are firmly media historical questions that JDP 2019 provides answers for. Where JDP 1999 addressed the history of ideas and JDP 2009 the history of inventions that manipulate time and space, JDP 2019 addresses “a marvelous zone for enquiry”, not only that of clouds, but of “the natural history of our talkative species” (1999: 9). The secret history of JDP 2019 was to be found in the opening pages of SITA and it would appear, eternal return style, over and over again until it was no longer a secret, but a matter of fact: “natural history is the open book of media theory” (2015: 269).
When asked in a 2012 interview if he would like to indulge his propensity for list creation, he unveiled a secret that created a new history of JDP and seemed to bring into being his own future. He said,
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 (Peters, 2012: 53).
Quite obviously, this secret was to become The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (2015). Yet the secret unveiled demanded a reworking of JDP 2009 who had claimed in 2003, while in Canada fittingly, that
Communication theory has most typically drawn upon the humanities and the social sciences, with occasional forays into the natural sciences (mostly in the hunt for metaphors), but the natural sciences, medicine, and engineering are full of considerations of time, space, signals, distance, contact—central concerns and topics of communication theory. This lecture is nothing but a sighting of distant possibilities along the horizon; lifetimes of work (fortunately) remain (Peters, 2003: 398-99).
And who gets to provide the epigraph and the leading role in the published version of the talk? Harold Innis. If Benjamin was the historiographer of choice for JDP 1999 and Kittler for 2009, for JDP 2019, Innis shines in the starring role. Yet, the vast temporal and spatial span of Empire and Communications, pales in comparison to that of A Marvelous Clouds. Drawing the natural sciences into a media philosophical account of the history of the world demands an account of far more than the prioritizing of technological practices and discourses.
JDP 2019 suggested that “Innis saw media as spinners of time and space, and the whole expanse of human history as their stage. Innis’s practice of media history as a mastery of detail is inspirational for this work” (2015: 19). But the details necessary to enlarge the scope of inquiry to include an account of the ‘big bang’ and the evolutionary forces that account for the communicative practices of dolphins can’t simply be found in human ideas or technological invention. Rather, JDP 2019 explains that there are “many other examples of storehouses of the fullness of times. The lithosphere, our DNA, and our language preserve bits of the past scrambled that allow random access” (2015: 96). JDP 2019 further explains that “Nature turns out to be profoundly historical” (2015: 27). In fact, “The true humanist would also be a naturalist, one who produces knowledge about things that are, were, and are to come” (2015: 28). A philosophy of elemental media is deeply rooted in natural history and natural history is deeply rooted in the media tools that make understanding of the natural world possible. In JDP 2019, ideas and inventions are not the motor of history, but elements. “Fire is the most important agent of change on earth” (2015: 120). In JDP 2019, tools and technologies are not merely the product of humans. Rather, “biology is a technology” (2015: 157) and more specifically, “sense organs are media made flesh” (2015: 180).
In order to attend to the epic scope of JDP 2019’s history, he must account for the all-too-human recursive relation to nature and media’s recursive relation to nature. As such, the nature/media couplet elaborate and confound human history. As he explains, “Discovery makes ontological ripples in history itself” (2015: 41). All discoveries in the natural sciences implicitly alter the history of the world. Each discovery alters past and future. Peters provides a foundational and telling example. “After Pasteur discovered microbes, we forgot that they didn’t exist before. Pasteur’s feat was not only epistemological but historical: the past suddenly had to accommodate microbes where none were before” (ibid).
History is still of course a communication problem, but not one that only attends to that which has been written, archived, and interpreted. Rather, an elemental philosophy of media draws from a vast archive produced and maintained by all the scientific tools of locating, measuring, and recording the forces existent in the universe. Everything becomes a reservoir of historical enquiry, even that which apparently leaves no trace accountable to current human media such as ‘dark matter’ or those which humans can postulate mathematically but have yet to locate such as wormholes. And as more media scoop up data and archive it, more is inevitably known about the past. Conversely, greater aporias are revealed regarding all that remains unknown. In simple terms, the proliferation of technical media, often at the behest of science, capital, or warfare, means that more of natural history is unknown rather than more of history being known. The more we know that needs to be known, the smaller the ratio of known to unknown. Joshua Reeves and I address the military tributary of this epistemological torrent in what we refer to as the media escalation of enemy epistemology. We suggest that:
New media, then, were developed to identify and analyze this new enemy; and as this enemy’s movements and ambitions were identified, new unknowns emerged. What are the signs that it is preparing for attack? […] These new questions, which were not even askable without the prior generation of media technologies, thus spurred the development of additional media […] (and) the expanded realm of the intelligible introduced by those new technologies inserts new unanswered questions (Packer and Reeves, 2020: 6).
This is a problem military strategists are provided trillions of dollars annually to solve and hire scientists, strategists, and engineers to do their heavy lifting. Media historians on the other hand are unlikely to even find the proper category for which their research proposal can be entered into grant-generating proposal forms.
JDP ∞ or The Media Escalation of History
Kittler proposed that history was driven by some mix of media and martial escalation.[4] JDP 2019 might be faced by another media-induced escalation. When media are both the object and subject of their own historical making and telling (in their capacity to select, store, process, and transmit data), are we not facing a different kind of media historical escalation? This is an escalation that JDP 2009 clearly foresaw when they suggested that “To understand the ways that media inscribe themselves on our bodies, we need a philosophy of history that recognizes the production of a ‘new already.’ New emergences reveal what was always there—but was never there before” (2004: 193). Is this an escalation that historians cannot match? Or, if not an escalation, maybe we’ve entered a hermeneutic spiral which inevitably drags historians further into the snail shell until they are lost in those invisible spaces said by physicists to exist between quarks. What are the paradigmatic limits of JDP’s openness to ‘new discoveries’ producing new histories? Does such an openness confirm a belief in constructivism or align with a kind of scientism which relies on a building-block model for producing progressively better forms of truth? Does this mean humanists are merely waiting for science to give us better tools to do our secondary-level histories? Or is the job of ‘natural history’ to alter the frameworks, to provide guidance, to point out ethical pitfalls for scientists (and others?). What, if anything, limits the scope, scale, and pace demanded of a medialogical natural history?
In the technical realm, when machine intelligence, not human ideas are at stake, the problem can also be seen. Imagine writing the history of the logic and processing path of a machine learning algorithm’s capacity to answer the question of whether a nuclear-armed aircraft is a friend or foe. Hundreds or thousands of pages might be written about a few seconds of ‘human time’. Would a history of the birth of super intelligence take up all the server space necessary to create super intelligence? But before heading down such a wormhole, let’s return to the notion that the true humanist produces knowledge about “things that are, were, and are to come” (2015: 28). Or better yet, let’s go down a wormhole about wormholes.
Scholarship on wormholes leads to the unlikely suggestion that they may be able to create portals that could bring discreet times and places together. They might usefully be made to create not only time machines, but space machines, that can mediate space time barriers. So, let us imagine that we follow the natural philosopher into a real wormhole that doesn’t merely bring two seemingly similar times into conversational alignment, but rather bridges the gap between New Haven and Iowa City as well as 2019 and 1999. JDP 2019 and JDP 1999 can take note of each other in-the-flesh. Such a meeting would undoubtedly be ‘slightly weird’. As JDP 2009 suggests, “Time travel is always matter replication, as all readers of science fiction or Stephen Hawking know, and the new bodies made are always slightly weird” (2004: 189). One weirdness might arise if they decided to discuss the distinction between constructivist history and historicism first outlined in the opening pages of Speaking into the Air. Historicism, the path not chosen by JDP 1999, assumed that “The past waited demurely for the (natural) historian to conjure it up” (1999: 3, “natural” added). Does the suggestion to be a ‘naturalist’ push the historian down a path toward historicism? JDP 2009’s suggestion that “it is the geological record that is jagged, not the real (but inaccessible) history of life itself. If we had a full archive of life’s history, we would readily find all the intermediate links” (2003: 401), implies the latter. The post-structuralist might suggest that scientific agreement upon what constitutes legitimate ‘intermediate links’ would determine what is considered a ‘full archive’. In other words, the act of creating an account is as dependent upon the rules which govern truth as the quantity of data present. Any archive or dataset is considered complete if you are satisfied with the answer.
On some level, JDP 2019 is clearly a constructivist (and an astonishingly original and creative one at that), but I’m wondering whether a bit of historicism ruptured media philosophy sometime in the preceding years. And I ask this, neither as an automatic provocation nor a ‘gotcha’. Rather, I’m curious about how the integration of the sciences into the humanities affects a commitment to constructivist historiography in at least two ways. While historians, and humanists more generally, are open to multiple co-existent forms of causality and explanation, science at its heart attempts to find the fixed causes or the exact measure and ratio of coalescing forces at play to explain the laws existent for any given phenomena.
And while scientists would certainly tell you all hypotheses are open to further testing, new hypothesizing and the acknowledgement of new data may in fact inspire all-together new paradigms. Yet, scientific practice conforms to different modes of truth-telling that many historians and humanists are not only a bit leery about, but which may not be appropriate to the work of history. In particular (as noted earlier) most humanists and historians are especially leery of any kind of certainty equivalent to something along the lines of, say, gravity. And while JDP 2009 is certainly open to a good share of technological determinism, JDP 2019 might be said to be open to a kind of elemental determinism, a fixed mix of biological, geological, chemical, and physical impingements. I want to repeat, I don’t take this possibility as a foregone misstep. I share with JDP 2009 certain technological deterministic tendencies. I am by nature, natural history-curious.
Second, while we media philosophers and historians might claim mastery of media theory, communication history, or even produce some polyhistoric credentials when interrogated, we are unlikely in the end to be experts with the contemporary media apparatus that will capture and model the eruption of data necessary to produce a new representation of the universe’s material history. We are almost exclusively masters (and slaves) to the written word. We rarely peer through an electron microscope, let alone the James Webb Telescope. We are more likely to be plotted somewhere along the hermeneutic circle than to be cavorting with chemists at the periodic table.
While JDP 2019’s media philosophy seems intrinsically correct to me, is it also deflating? Media historians will almost always be non-expert outsiders when it comes to the very media used to create the kind of new knowledge which opens up the past. Peters has actively been engaged in expanding the notion of what constitutes a medium beyond even the boundaries of Kittler or McLuhan and scientific instruments populate this expanding domain for both JDP 2009 and JDP 2019. As both a historian of scientific practice and instruments, as well as a physicist, Peter Galison’s participation in the Event Horizon Telescope’s production of an image of the supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy M87 is a telling counterexample (Galison, 2021). Media historians are not central to determining the validity of the methods, data, or findings upon which our historicizing depends (unlike the hermeneutic historian residing in JDP 1999). Further, will we media historians be forced to emulate ambulance chasers, angling to be first on the scene of some “happy accident” (McLean, 1941: 61) of science that allows us insight into “the most fascinating of all natural phenomena […] creation” (ibid)? Parasitic ventriloquism, is this the media historian’s fate? Not only can humans not create perfect communication, they are also inexplicably stuck with their infernal machines that multiply their communicative tasks exponentially. And finally, media historians can’t even work the media tools necessary to their own history? If anyone can convince me that this apparent lack is in fact a blessing, it’s likely JDP 2029.
History is not simply the study of the past, but the acknowledgement of the past in the present, the present in the future, the past in the future, and the future in the present and the past. As JDP 1999 made clear, when humans interpret signals from outer space as ‘present’ we are looking into their past, but ‘they’ are both speaking into the airless vacuum of outer space and speaking to the future (1999). The cosmic scale of outer space makes this patently clear. Yet, JDP 2019 brings a far more robust set of local speakers and inscribers to our cosmic polylogue. Not only are there multiple beings attempting to communicate with each other and inadvertently speaking through random as well as fully intentioned forms of biological, chemical, and physical inscription, but this takes place across infinite temporalities. Our world, detected, known and acted upon through a series of material inscriptions and signs, is a literal cacophony of voices speaking across time, always present, but rarely heard. “What got recorded is a minute fraction of what happened, and what got transmitted is a fraction of that, but the choices we make in interpretation may be the most selective of all” (Peters, 2008: 29). Most is ignored, left unexamined, or purposely erased. These voices and signals come to life (are given life?) when viewed as a problem or mystery to be solved. Blood racing through veins and arteries all-day, all-night, year after year, constantly sounds out the relative health of your cardiovascular system, at least to the medical establishment. It also delivers chemical messages, leaving uncountable inscriptions throughout the body every second. Biology, physics, geology, meteorology, astronomy, theology, futurology, (and media science) are merely a few of the guilds whose sleuths are trying to crack the codes of time.
As code breakers, one code remains unbroken, yet central to our cause. The historians of media historians may be asked to what degree “media determine our situation” (Kittler, 1999)? They would reply “very much so”. But would they do so recursively? Was JDP 1999 determined by textuality, discursivity, and literacy more so than JDP 2009 or JDP 2019? It is clear that Kittler became Kittler as opposed to rebecoming Foucault, because he had headphones, a turntable, and a stereophonic (possibly even quadraphonic) copy of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.[5] For Kittler, technical media produced a clear break with textuality and the play of signifiers central to literacy and writing. Are the medial conditions of JDP 2019 significantly different from those of JDP 1999 or is writing still the ur-medium as The Marvelous Clouds seems to suggest? If the avalanche of digital data produced by technical media has fundamentally unmoored science from its discursive epistemology and replaced it with media escalation, then media historians are in a tricky bind if they are committed to natural history. Our histories still answer to the epistemological dictates of the monograph, not machine processing. The codes historians break are deposited in language, not bottomless repositories of 1s and 0s that inevitably produce “mere eyewash” (Kittler, 1999). Is writing an adequate solution to the problematizations created by technical media and the science it affords?
Finally, what JDP 2019 provides is an enactment of what JDP 2009 laid out in “History as a Communication Problem”. Elemental reality is treated as a problem of history and all of history as a communication problem. More profoundly, by implication, living one’s life is a history problem. But not a problem experienced in real time or at the same time. Einstein (and the nuclear clock) taught us that simultaneity, even amongst bodies within earshot, rarely exist in the same time. Most of what we do day in and day out, year after year, is try to figure out what already happened and use that fleeting insight to intervene in what might come. In a time of catastrophe, which JDP 2019 is clearly driven to address, such intervention has immediate and far-reaching consequences. Our media systems, especially language, are designed to make history actionable. They allow us to “live in the future and the past” (Peters: 2015: 261). They bend the time-axis in our favour by capturing, extending, deepening, broadening, shrinking, hiding, merging, teleporting, and decrypting inscriptions and signals. The present is unique in that it marks the point of intersection between past and future signaling and inscribing. It always remains ground zero for this collision of forces. Even in face-to-face dialogue we are already signaling from someone else’s past, fragments of what will become their future. Speaking into the air as a daily practice makes the past present for others, and may weigh heavily upon their future. These are some of the lessons I take from three JDPs.
References
Foucault, M. (1969) The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith). London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
Galison, P. (2004) Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time. New York: Norton.
Galison, P. (2021) ‘Material Models of Immaterial Things: In the Service of Understanding’, in: M. Bruecknerm S, Isenstadt, and S. Wasserman, eds., Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Innis, H. (1950) Empire and Communications. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kittler, F. (1999) Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz). Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
McLean, F.C. (1941) ‘The Happy Accident’, The Scientific Monthly 53(1): 61-70.
Packer, J. and J. Reeves. (2020) Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine. Durham: Duke University Press.
Peters, J. D. (1999) Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Peters, J. D. (2003) ‘Space, Time, and Communication Theory’, Canadian Journal of Communication 28: 397-411.
Peters, J.D. (2004) ‘Helmholtz, Edison, and Sound History’, in: L. Rabinovitz and A. Geil, eds., Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, pp.177-198.
Peters, J.D. (2006) ‘Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph Revisited’, in: J. Packer and C. Robertson, eds., Thinking with James Carey: Essays on Communications, Transportation, History. New York: Peter Lang, pp.137-155.
Peters, J.D. (2008) ‘Strange Sympathies: Horizons of German and American Media Theory’, in: F. Kelleter and D. Stein, eds., American Studies as Media Studies. Heidelberg: Winter, pp.3-23.
Peters, J.D. (2008) ‘History as a Communication Problem’ in: B. Zelizer, ed., Explorations in Communication and History. London: Sage, pp.19-34.
Peters, J.D. (2010) ‘Friedrich Kittler’s Light Shows: Introduction to Friedrich Kittler’, in: F. Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures, 1999. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, pp.1-17.
Peters, J.D. (2011) ‘Why We Use Pencils and Other Thoughts on the Archive (An Afterword)’, in: C. Robertson, ed., Media History and the Archive. London: Routledge, pp.108-120.
Peters, J.D. (2012) ‘Becoming Mollusk’, in: J. Packer and S.B. Crofts Wiley, eds., Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks. New York: Routledge, pp.35-53.
Peters, J.D. (2013) ‘Calendar, Clock, Tower.’ In: J. Solow, ed., Deus in Machina: Religion and Technology in Historical Perspective. New York: Fordham University Press, pp.25-42.
Peters, J.D. (2015) The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Simmel, G. (1950) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Young, G.W. (2011) Kittler and the Media. London: Polity.
Notes
[1] I want to thank the organizers of the Into the Air Symposium, Hannah Dick, Chris Russill and Alyssa Tremblay, and Liam Young, for inviting me to take part in such a wonderful event. I also want to thank the two reviewers who provided valuable and insightful suggestions.
[2] “To know what eyes see today and ears hear today one would have to explain what brought Helmholtz to Chicago to shake Edison’s hand before all his other colleagues”—Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (p 177).
[3] One can’t help but think that this is a medial a priori for Foucault’s notion (1969) of the “visible and the sayable.”
[4] G.W. Young (2011) Kittler and the Media.
[5] See G.W. Young (2011) for an explanation of the importance of Kittler’s insight derived from the song ‘Brain Damage’.
Jeremy Packer is a Professor in the Institute for Communication Culture Information and Technology at the University of Toronto. His most recent books are Killer Apps: War, Media, Machine (Duke 2020) co-authored with Joshua Reeves and the forthcoming Prison House of the Circuit, a multi-authored monograph (Minnesota).
Email: jeremy.packer@utoronto.ca
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