Irradiating Infrastructure: The Educative Energies of Walter Benjamin’s Radio Work.

Description

A standard image of Walter Benjamin frames him as a haunting thinker of intimacies. That is, as a thinker whose famous essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological (technischen) Reproducibility’ is worth reading for its concept of ‘aura’, but who is otherwise fragmented, esoteric, and himself forebodingly ‘auratic’ (Benjamin 2008). The argument of this paper is that we ought to irradiate this image. First, in the sense of critically burning or ‘x-raying’ through to its suppositions (Didi-Huberman 2005) to develop an image of Benjamin that places him less in terms of ‘aura’ than as a kind of ‘engineer’ (Adorno 1983); that is, to develop an image of Benjamin as a thinker whose multifaceted output was always in creative tension and negotiation with the kinds of infrastructural constraints that made it possible, and that, to cite the title of one of his most famous essays, made of Benjamin – whether as a broadcaster, thinker, or author - a self-conscious ‘producer’ (SW2.2: 768-782). Second, and consistent with the Latin sense of irradiare as ‘beaming forth’ (OED 2025; Pentcheva 2020), I want to explore how energies released by this alternative image might themselves be ‘beamed forth’ and made exoteric. I link and develop these two senses through a focus on Benjamin’s radio work of 1927 to 1933. In doing so, I place this work as the acme of a thoroughgoing educative practice that spans Benjamin’s career, and that connects up his other forms of work as, for instance, a storyteller, translator, essayist, and ‘critic’. Overall, the paper argues for a view of Benjamin as a kind of ‘radio engineer’, and in favour of distinctively Benjaminian conceptions of what it means for the infrastructures supporting our shared practices and ways of life to be ‘critical’ and ‘vital’.

Part one foregrounds ‘Moon’, the last story from Benjamin’s autobiographical collection A Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (2006). I argue that ‘Moon’ attests to a childhood (and childlike) demand for what Yuk Hui has called a ‘cosmotechnics’ that would be capable of connecting liminal everyday experiences with perennial philosophical questions. I argue that this demand ultimately goes unmet in ‘Moon’, but that, by virtue of being articulated in writing, it provokes us to consider important infrastructural constraints on communication per se.

Part two focuses on one of Benjamin’s radio plays as a way of foregrounding the stakes and implications of his wider radio practice. Called ‘Lichtenberg: A Cross Section’, the typescript of this play – which would have been Benjamin’s 94th broadcast, had his radio career not been cut short by the Nazis - tells of strange moon beings who use fantastical technologies to study terrestrial life (Benjamin 2014). The point here is that these moon beings possess fantastically complete technological infrastructures of vision and sound; Benjamin, unable to present ‘Lichtenberg’ as a radio play, lacked anything like the infrastructure his work had envisaged and required. Drawing on these contrasts, I connect ‘Lichtenberg’ with ‘Moon’. I argue that ‘Lichtenberg’, through its fantasy of lunar infrastructure, expresses a practice of localising philosophy that is complementary to the child’s unmet demand for a ‘cosmotechnics’ in ‘Moon’.

Part three argues that ‘Moon’ and ‘Lichtenberg’, when connected, express in microcosm the fate that our image of Benjamin should undergo: to exorcise the standard ‘auratic’ image of Benjamin, we should learn to be much more haunted by the energies that his educative practice – involving elements of, for instance, philosophy, storytelling, criticism and translation – irradiated through radio; namely, an intergenerational and untimely practice of future-oriented education that implicates a revolutionary understanding of radio itself as a form of critical and vital infrastructure.

To support this argument, part four concludes by confronting a social science-informed concept of ‘critical and vital infrastructure’ that is received today. This concept frames infrastructure reactively, in terms of a register of ‘assets’, ‘security’, ‘risk’, ‘sovereignty’, and the ‘nation state’. Drawing on Benjamin’s 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller’, I argue for a sense of education that, to precisely the degree that it is ‘critical’ and ‘vital’, can help challenge the entire tenor of this concept.

Period	13 Oct 2025
Held at	University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Degree of Recognition	International