Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication by John Durham Peters

Author:John Durham Peters [Peters, John Durham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-04-25T22:00:00+00:00

Dead Letters

Nautch joints are depressing, like all places for deposit, banks, mail boxes, tombs, vending machines.

NATHANAEL WEST, THE DAY OF THE LOCUST

Recorded sound suspends dialogue, as Bartleby is an allegory of the difficulty of arriving at a destination in writing. Strangely enough, little research in media history has been done on the original context of communication that is most explicitly hermeneutic: correspondence by letter. Media historians are beginning to take the post office seriously as a key site for understanding the development of communications.85 The cultural history of the mails is a remarkably rich source for philosophical visions of the varieties of communicative experience.

The notion that the mails involve delivery of a private, specifically addressed message was late in evolving. The current division of genres between personal and public correspondence did not exactly exist in the eighteenth-century newsletter in England and the colonies. The “familiar” letter was distinct from the newsletter, the forerunner of the modern newspaper, but both could be edited for and by the public. Newsletters had very high pass-along rates; they were meant quite literally to circulate among readers who would handwrite additional notices in blank spaces left for that purpose. In a similar way, personal letters in the United States at least could be raided for publication in the newspaper or at least for postmaster-led discussion. Some postmasters in the colonial period apparently freely quoted in their newspapers from love letters and personal correspondence.86 Not only was content open to stray eyes, but the receipt of mail was itself public because local post offices in the United States routinely kept logbooks on who purchased postage for what mail, since payment was typically made by the recipient rather than the sender before the 1850s. Hence not only were local postmasters well informed on local reading habits, they were privy to much of the news locally in circulation and often monitors, even censors, of what newspapers local postal patrons would read and what mail they would receive.87 The post was not a secure channel. Letters then were more like postcards today—both privately addressed and publicly accessible.

Jacques Derrida has famously argued that all mailed correspondence has the implicit structure of a postcard, that the attempt to restrict the reception of a message to one recipient is always undermined by the scatter of all textuality.88 His argument is historically possible, and striking, however, only under a certain postal system: the historically recent convention of mail as a secure private channel. Since the mid-nineteenth century, postal practices in North America and Western Europe quite explicitly sought to contain the potential for straying missives by giving senders private control over their letters and making the address circuitry much more focused. The key innovations that took place in the two middle decades of the century made the modern private letter possible. The first postage stamp appeared in 1840 in Great Britain, bearing a portrait of Queen Victoria. No longer did one need to see a postmaster to pay for carriage, marking a key step toward impersonality in access.

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