Speaking at Iowa: A Personal Essay

MARGARET SCHWARTZ

Fordham University, USA

Abstract

This essay describes the social and intellectual environment at the University of Iowa in the years immediately following the publication of Speaking into the Air, exploring notions of literary and academic celebrity, power in the classroom, and intellectual lineage. 

Keywords

John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/146 

I started graduate work at the University of Iowa in the year 2000. I had no idea that Communication Studies existed as a field. I was there to do an MFA in creative nonfiction writing. But I found the lack of structure that characterizes the Iowa Writer’s Workshop model—where one only attends peer workshops—made me anxious and bored. When I asked around about a good academic class to take, John was recommended to me precisely because of the fame that Speaking into the Air had brought him. He was someone even the academic dabbler couldn’t miss, a star whose tenure at Iowa might indeed be brief as juicier offers presented themselves (and indeed they did, if they hadn’t already, but John’s time at Iowa lasted longer than those predictors might have indicated, attesting to his character as well as his stubbornness).

I was at Iowa for writing, so I had ample experience with the kind of academic fame that is closest to actual celebrity. In fact, this culture shock was part of why I was looking to retreat back inside the ivory tower. For the most part, Workshop teachers and students alike spoke of the art market as if it were just that—nothing problematic or contradictory, but as an arena that could be conquered by those with the right mixture of connections and talent. The Iowa Writer’s Workshop offered a leg up in both departments: their selectivity assuring the inherent (and, again, unproblematized) talent of the pool, and their fame ensuring that this tiny pool was carefully seeded with only the most desirable fish from the wider literary ocean. Once again, the ethics of this were not discussed, nor was it up for consideration what constituted a desirable fish.

Iowa City itself was the pond—more of a town than a city, its population doubled when the twenty thousand undergraduates were in session. But even within that collegiate bubble, the Workshop had its own enclave. Of the dozens of bars in town, there was only one bar where the poets went, one bar where the fiction writers went, and one bookstore where writers of either ilk would read. There were never any double bookings; there was never any question about where the obligatory wine and cheese after party would happen (more often than not at the house of David Hamilton, who edited The Iowa Review). So it was that we jostled inside our little tank to get close to whatever luminary was in town that week, measuring ourselves against the hierarchy that arranged itself according to that luminary’s fickle attentions.

It might be useful to know here that I was not technically a student in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I was getting an MFA in Creative Nonfiction, which was indeed a writing degree, but it was newer, and less storied. Creative Nonfiction’s administrative offices were housed in the deeply prosaic, cinder-block rectangle of the English Philosophy Building instead of the restored arts-and-crafts style Dey House cottage up the hill. To go up the hill—where in addition to the clapboard Dey House sat the golden domed administration building and the Prairie Lights bookstore—I crossed a treeless parking lot and under a set of railroad tracks. The concrete underpass opened on to a brick-paved courtyard, flanked on one side by the riot proof slab façade of the main library and on the other, the prefab brick and glass of the Communication Studies Building. Beyond, the steep hill of Washington Street rose sharply away from the river, towards the classic college town main street. This spatial separation marked my secondary status in Iowa’s flagship artistic mill. I had some reason to value this separation, not least of which the fact that it optioned me out of certain kinds of competition and afforded me the critical distance to maintain a recovering hipster’s aloofness about the scummy business of getting discovered and getting paid.

Which is how I found John Peters, who was at that moment not a little bit famous for writing a book about the history of communication.

Academic fame is a funny thing.  A poor cousin to literary fame, academic fame traffics in a punk ethos of the underground, valuing the undiscovered, the iconoclast, and the martyred. On the other hand, John’s academic fame had nothing to do with his obscurity or his martyrdom. John’s class was recommended to me because in that moment John was a star, and that stardom came from the reception of Speaking into the Air. The concept outlined in “The Gaps of Which Communication Is Made”—that symmetry and reciprocity were only half the story of the communicative circuit, that broken connections and dead letters limned the desire that animated the project of modern communication—appeared in Speaking fully historically and theoretically elaborated. The pleasure of the text is, in part, watching the deft work of a mind uniquely able to knit secret affinities into startling insights.

The class I took wasn’t about the gaps of which communication is made, or about seeds and circuits, or dead letters or pearlescent ectoplasms. John himself had already moved on intellectually from Speaking into the Air and was deep into his next project, the examination of free speech and civility that would become Courting the Abyss. In his “Public Sphere” class we read Milton’s Areopagitica and Habermas; instead of the air or the clouds, we trafficked in the mess of public life, politics, deliberation and consensus. John as a teacher was fond of Benjaminian aphorisms, laced with his peculiar brand of dry wit: Habermas’ public sphere was a “check your body at the door” sort of club, he cracked. He was also in that class (and any other I took with him) deeply invested in the classroom itself as a public sphere. He knew the power his attention, approval and engagement wielded in that setting. Instead of denying this with false humbleness, he confronted it head-on. He made certain that the same person was never called on first, that he never lingered longer over any particular student’s contribution. Even as he knew it was a Sisyphean task, he labored to give everyone equal airtime. A sure way to be certain you’d be shut down for the rest of the class was to make a long, attention-grabbing comment early on. In this way he used the power he knew he couldn’t abdicate (even if, I suspect, he may have wanted to) to discipline us into civility.

This teaching philosophy would be tested on September 11, 2001. In my memory, John held class that day, but possibly it was the day afterwards. It was early enough that we all still held out hope that there were survivors under the rubble that could be found and saved. I remember a heated discussion among the students about calling New York to check on loved ones—some people felt that it was selfish to tie up the lines (again, still a semi-viable concept in 2001) trying to contact a loved one when survivors might be trying to call out from under the collapsed building. I took offense to this, because all my extended family lived in New York and my cousin had a job near the World Trade Center. Of course, as adult and reasonable and ethical and polemical as we all thought we were, we were still a group of very young people jostling to show our outrage, our virtue, and process our pain. In the meantime, we were also using the pain of others to validate our own intellectual positions. John watched and listened to us without intervening. And then when we were finished, he soberly took up the work again, showing rather than telling us that it mattered more than ever. I remember a crack so dry it betrayed more emotion than humor—when he said the attacks were a “made-for-TV event”. No one person’s pain or outrage would win the day, but neither would anyone be denied a chance to express their feelings.

I entered the PhD program in communication studies, with an emphasis in media, because of John’s mentorship. It is a decision I have never, ever regretted. At the same time, communication studies as such had little to do with it. In John I found someone who understood and valued what I wanted to do with my scholarly life, even if it wasn’t the exact roadmap of, well, academic fame. It was for him, then as now, always more than a mere intellectual project. For John scholarly life is soul work, and he gave all of his students permission to view it as such. John spent part of every seminar I took with him talking about the various forms of nonfiction writing—the treatise, the manifesto, the monograph, the case study, and so on. He stressed to each of us that we were writers first, not mere transmitters of the arguments or trained knowledge-producers. Of course, this view is intrinsic to John’s conception of communication: there is no seamless download of fact, but only the gaffes and hitches of a writer in her body, wrestling thought into writing. Why not think carefully, then, about that process? As someone who was at that time getting an actual degree in “Creative Nonfiction”, I found John’s comments on academic writing—and our office hours conversations about it—far more resonant than anything I had heard at the Workshop.

Being John’s PhD student also meant not just permission but enthusiastic encouragement to read widely and eclectically. Here one might think of his paper “Institutional Sources of Intellectual Poverty in Communication Research”. John was determined to neither sell the field short nor fail to hold it to its highest potential. His infectious enthusiasm for Helmholtz’s The Sensations of Tone, for example, opened our eyes to the productive friction between our contemporary soundscape and the haptic affinities between air and membrane explored by the nineteenth century physicist. Like Benjamin, John is a mosaic artist, building arguments out of impressions, juxtapositions, and witticisms. And like Benjamin, John’s sense of history is a mystical text whose aphoristic utterances sing only when gently struck against the prosody of the present. This made John not so much iconoclastic as idiosyncratic. Speaking into the Air is often framed as a revolutionizing text, a book after which media studies was never the same. That may be so, but my feeling from knowing John in those years is that its innovation was incidental, an unintended index of the broadly eclectic sources he alone was able to bring to bear on the project.

My favorite part of Speaking into the Air, rereading it now, is the chapter on Hegel. I believe John mentioned during our time in Ottawa that this chapter was very difficult to write. It remains one of the clearest and most loving treatments of Hegel I’ve ever read. It also reminds me that in the time I was a graduate student we had an ongoing reading group on the Phenomenology of Spirit, in which John participated only occasionally. But part of being John’s student in a communication studies program at that time was taking very seriously Hegel’s aphorism that “spirit is a bone”. I’m not sure I know what Hegel meant by that, but I do know that I spent an enormous amount of time ruminating on the relationship between body, spirit, soul and object in those epic reading group sessions. I’m married to the person I met while studying communication studies at Iowa, and for years we each kept our individual, identical copies of Phenomenology of Spirit because we each so valued the notes we’d kept in them. In this way, John’s influence on my time at Iowa extended well beyond the classroom. With the brilliant David Depew at the helm, and spurred on by Mark Andrejevic’s obsessive drive, we hammered out our own individual convictions about what it meant to be a body in sporadic, non-reciprocal commune with images, objects, code and weather. Anything we may have written or taught or read in the years since is indelibly etched with that experience.

Academic fame also creates lineages and having John as my advisor has certainly opened many doors for me professionally. It’s unlikely I’ll have an opportunity to apply the lessons I learned watching him wrestle with the attention that Speaking into the Air brought him—it was a singular moment. In my teaching, however, I apply every day the lessons learned watching John wrestle with the power dynamic of the classroom. And in my writing, I’m always heartened by John’s permission to juxtapose with abandon and strike out for secret affinities. The stakes, after all, could not be any more absurd: my everlasting soul, and the ins and outs of all my earthly days.

Margaret Schwartz is associate professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University where she teaches classes on embodiment, disability, modernity and misogyny. She is the author of the monograph Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses (Minnesota, 2015) and numerous book chapters exploring existential media studies in the context of care, embodiment, and motherhood. Her current project is a book about technology at the limits of embodied care titled Surface Tension.

Email: bmaschwartz@fordham.edu