Educator without a School: How Walter Benjamin's Radio Work Amplifies Education

Description

A standard image of Walter Benjamin frames him as hauntingly ‘auratic’. That is, as a thinker whose famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ is worth reading for its concept of ‘aura’, but who is otherwise fragmented and esoteric (Benjamin 2008). The argument of my recently published book, Bridging Benjamin: A Philosophy of Technology, Place, and Education, is that we ought to irradiate this image. First, by critically burning through to its suppositions (Didi-Huberman 2005). Second, and consistent with the Latin sense of irradiare as ‘beaming forth’ (OED 2025; Pentcheva 2020), by considering how energies released by this alternative image might themselves be amplified, ‘beamed forth’, and made exoteric.

Part one draws on references that Benjamin makes to auditory experience to argue that to apprehend radio as a purely auditory medium of a dated modernity is to fail to understand what was truly innovative about his practice in the medium. Part two then amplifies this point by placing Benjamin’s radio work in connection with arguments made across his wider work, and by bringing what results to bear on received contemporary conceptions of so-called ‘critical and vital infrastructures’. Storytelling and education are usually omitted from even the most extensive lists of such infrastructures; my concluding argument is that a thoroughgoing Benjaminian hearing of what it means to be ‘critical’ and ‘vital’ ought to give us cause not merely to add storytelling and education to such lists, but to critically revitalise how we understand the lists themselves, as constellations of necessary but insufficiently understood conditions for how shared worlds might thrive.

Period	28 May 2026
Event title	Science, Critique and Opinion: Challenges for Consensus
Event type	Conference
Location	Oxford, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International