We were delighted to host a public lecture by Dr Dominic Smith (University of Dundee), where he explored the relevance of Walter Benjamin’s radio plays in terms of both the philosophy of technology and a contemporary philosophy of education.
The lecture took place on Wednesday, 4 December 2024, from 2:30 pm in the Kelvin Hall Lecture Theatre (G59). Following the lecture and the Q&A, the conversations continued at the drinks reception in the Kelvin Hall Foyer.
Dominic Smith is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Dundee, Scotland, where he researches philosophy of technology and media. Dominic’s latest books are Exceptional Technologies: A Continental Philosophy of Technology (2018) and Contingency and Plasticity in Everyday Technologies (2022, with Natasha Lushetich and Iain Campbell). Dominic’s current project involves thinking about how philosophy of technology can be broadened to speak to issues in philosophy of education, design, and creativity, with a focus on the work of Walter Benjamin.
Programme without Transmission: The Translatability of Benjamin’s Radio Work as a Philosophy of Technology, Place, and Education
This paper argues for the strong contemporary relevance of Walter Benjamin’s radio work (1927-1933), despite 1.) his low opinion of it as a means of subsistence (Rosenthal 2014: xvii), and 2.) the fact that auditory fragments of only one of his c.93 broadcasts exist (Baudouin 2022). This is because what calls out for translatability from Benjamin’s surviving radio typescripts is a ‘programme’, less in the sense of a particular radio transmission or show, and more in the sense of a thoroughgoing philosophy of technology, place and education.
Part one positions Benjamin’s radio work as relevant through how it challenges Heidegger’s historic (and vexed) influence for philosophy of technology. Part two charts an intensifying practice of place in Benjamin’s radio work, and argues for its contemporary relevance in the face of problems of technological displacement and replacement (for instance: ‘human computation’ in translation apps). Part three reads Benjamin’s radio work as an exemplary philosophy of education, with reference to three of his written ‘programmes’: ‘On the Programme of the Coming Philosophy’ (1918), ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923), and ‘Programme for Proletarian Children’s Theatre’ (1928/29). Whereas these texts offer isolated fragments of a Benjaminian theory of education, his radio work does something more: without the original radio transmissions, it constitutes a programme for a dynamic and timely philosophy of technology, place and education.
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