The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media by John Durham Peters (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media by John Durham Peters
• Timothy H. B. Stoneman (bio)

The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media By John Durham Peters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. 416.

John Durham Peters's The Marvelous Clouds provides an entrée into media and an invaluable field guide for the contemporary state of media studies. Peters details a historical shift in the dominant conception of media. Traditionally, our idea of media was linked with the nineteenth-century telegraph and the human sending of signals/messages. In the twentieth century, the term became synonymous with mass media (TV, cinema, newspapers, magazines). Yet the advent of digital media in the early twenty-first century has marked a profound shift "from mass media to cultural techniques," while planetary-level climate change poses new questions and challenges about our relationship with the natural environment as an instrumentalized medium (p. 325).

In response to radical contemporary changes, Peters proposes revising our conception of media in two principal ways: by linking media studies with ontology and encompassing nonhuman species as well as nature itself in its most elemental forms. Media "was connected to nature long before it was connected to technology" (p. 46). For the author, "at the dawn of the Anthropocene we need an elemental philosophy of media," in large part because the "ship" of our natural environment is sinking (p. 104).

Peters organizes the six main chapters of his work to differentiate the main human and nonhuman protagonists in their elementary media domains. In chapter 2, he explores aquatic media, probing how the sea acts as a liquid environment that resists permanent shaping for cetaceans and that demands "radical dependence on technics" by humans (ships). In chapter 3, Peters addresses fire, "our most radical environmental shaper," which allows humans to dwell on land and provides the "precondition for almost all human-made media." The following two chapters focus on twin functions of sky media: timekeeping, or chronos (duration), through "punctual or fractal sky media" (towers, bells, weather, clouds) and cyclical and linear sky media (clocks and calendars), and kairos (opportunity), which entails the observation of weather and seasons. Chapter 6 addresses the earth and inscription media, which provide the "matrix of all other human media" and encompass bodily infrastructures (such as skulls, teeth, feet, and faces), as well as writing, the inscription media par excellence. Chapter 7 addresses dematerialized media, including cloud infrastructure and internet search; following other authors, Peters here links Google with God. Although he keys his analysis to elemental media, Peters concludes his study in "The Sabbath of Meaning" by making a case for the meaningfulness of nature, including the eponymous clouds, as the product of cosmic history and independent of human subjectivity. [End Page 735]

Historians of technology have much to gain from The Marvelous Clouds. Peters provides new insights into the operation of infrastructure and logistical media. He distinguishes cogently between the materiality and durability of media, intertwines human culture and nature organically through ecological media activity, and reorients stale debates over technological determinism. Peters articulates a view of media that travels well beyond the antiquated nineteenth-century view as human-centered information. The Marvelous Clouds provides welcome opportunity for historians of technology to rethink the identity and place of media in a digital world dominated by Big Tech and increasingly defined by global planetary environmental issues.

As an ambitious work, The Marvelous Clouds can be critiqued on several fronts. The book's sheer length and encyclopedic coverage can prove exhaustive for the reader. At times, the reach of the book certainly exceeds its grasp (p. 28). By the author's own confession, every major topic he covers warrants a lifetime's study (p. 280). Nor does a single, overarching argument or clear elaboration of elemental media tie the work together, helping the reader to navigate. Yet such critiques, appropriate for historical monographs, mistake the nature of the volume, which the author intends as a synthesis and work of reference—a magisterial summation of a life's work in media studies. And Peters, a natural prosaist, is delightful to read. His pages brim over with philosophical wisdom and...