Love and Communication: A Review Essay

Abstract

Speaking into the Air is, quite simply, the most original and thought provoking book on communication that I have read. It is dazzlingly and sometimes obscurely erudite yet with a clear and coherent argument that challenges our current commonsense views about communication. I am persuaded by this argument, though less so by the point at which John Durham Peters himself takes leave of it. That point seems to me to be oddly, uncomfortably, strange; something which, in itself, needs some explanation. It’s partly to do, I think, with the Americanness of the book and partly its religiousness. Neither of these two points, I hasten to add, are implied criticisms. But they might begin to account for its strangeness, for this is a weird and eccentric book, voyaging in strange seas of thought alone, far from the busy, crowded lanes down which the usual academic shipping travels.