On Dialogue, Dissemination and Materialization: An Interview with John Durham Peters

Abstract

John Durham Peters, professor of English and of Film and Media Studies at Yale University, is known for his work on the history of media and communication. His first book, Speaking into the air: A history of the idea of communication, gained worldwide fame thanks to its transdisciplinary outlook on humanity’s thirst for communion, which it finds not in cables and signals, but in its very human condition. In The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, he invites readers to expand their understanding of media beyond mass media. François Cooren, professor at Université de Montréal’s Department of communication, invited John Durham Peters to give a presentation for the department’s 40th anniversary and took the occasion to discuss with him about his conception of communication. The two men exchange their views, among others, on the need to get past the separation between an apparently immaterial realm of communication and the material world it would merely represent. Benjamin Peters, assistant professor at the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, joins them and shares his interest in how digital media intersects with regimes of space, time, and power.