Irradiating the Intimate: The Storytelling of Walter Benjamin’s Technological Revolution of the Intimate.

Description

•1932-1934: Walter Benjamin writes, collects and rearranges a set of stories on his Berlin childhood. The story he settles on for last, ‘Moon’, relates a childhood night terror and shifts from the unnerving effects of moonlight on everyday objects to a reflection on the ontological question: Why is there something rather than nothing?

•29 January 1933: Benjamin delivers what would be the last of 93 broadcasts he gave for German regional radio, 1927-1933. The broadcast comprises readings from his story set. Hitler becomes German chancellor the next day, and his torchlight procession becomes the first nationwide broadcast on German radio (Rosenthal 2014: xx-xxi). Benjamin, a left-wing Jewish intellectual, is forced into exile in France in March 1933.

•1987: A ‘final version’ of Benjamin’s story set is discovered and posthumously published as a new edition of Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Benjamin 2006). The original ending of ‘Moon’ is cut, and ‘Moon’ shifts from the end of the text to the main body.

The technologies with which Walter Benjamin is best associated, thanks to his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility’, are photography and film. As I argue in my book Bridging Benjamin (Minnesota University Press, forthcoming), however, and as the above-assembled events show, there are timely stories to be told about another medium in which Benjamin was not merely a critic, but a practitioner and educator: radio.

Part one places the first event in terms of recent work on Benjamin’s cosmology (Neyrat 2022). It argues that ‘Moon’ expresses, for the space of childhood, what Hui has theorised as a ‘cosmotechnics’ (Hui 2019, 2021). Part two relates a hidden story of the second event: the Nazi ascendency meant Benjamin was unable to broadcast a scheduled radio play he had written for children, ‘Lichtenberg: A Cross Section’, the transcript of which tells of strange moon beings who use fantastical technologies to study terrestrial life (Benjamin 2014). I here read ‘Lichtenberg’ as an obverse of ‘Moon’, and argue that it exhibits a practice of localising philosophy through story. Part three focuses on the third event. I argue that the posthumous rearrangement of ‘Moon’ is consistent with a storytelling practice the story already expresses: against reifying the intimate as a sentimental possession, ‘Moon’ shows that to tell the story of something intimate is already to irradiate it and render it a kind of ghost, in the manner of the bright flash of photography filling up a room. Against a recent reading of ‘Lichtenberg’ by Peter E Gordon (2023), I conclude that all three of the events about storytelling discussed in this paper have something much more important to tell us when connected up: a story not merely about radio as an audio medium, but as an intimate and haunting form of irradiation that has become a necessary infrastructural condition for our contemporary networked age.

References

Benjamin, W. 2014. ‘Lichtenberg: A Cross Section’. In Radio Benjamin, L. Rosenthal (ed.), 336-359. London: Verso.

Benjamin, W. 2006. Berlin Childhood around 1900. Translated by H Eiland. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Gordon, P. E. 2023. ‘President of the Moon Committee: Walter Benjamin’s Radio Years’, The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/walter-benjamin-radio-years/ (accessed 14 December 2024).

Hui, Y. 2016. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Hui, Y. 2021. Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.

Neyrat, F. 2022. Le cosmos de Walter Benjamin: un communisme du lointain. Paris: Éditions Kimé.

Rosenthal, L. 2014. ‘Walter Benjamin on the Radio: An Introduction’. In Radio Benjamin, L.Rosenthal (ed.), ix-xxix. London: Verso.

Period	28 Jun 2025
Event title	Society for Philosophy and Technology. : 24th biennial international conference for SPT. Conference theme: “The Intimate Technological Revolution”.
Event type	Conference
Location	Eindhoven, NetherlandsShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International