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Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.
The question I'm asking is where does history happen?
Esther Leslie:We mobilise that language and a bridging between location or place, education, technology, other types of bridging work.
Dominic Smith:Hi everyone. My name is Dominic Smith and I'm a senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Dundee in Scotland. We're here today on this University of Minnesota podcast to discuss my book Bridging A Philosophy of Technology, Place and Education, was published by the press in March 2026. Before we go any further, I'd like to thank my colleagues for doing this podcast with me. So Maggie Sattler from the press and Esther Leslie, an esteemed media theorist.
Dominic Smith:I'm very grateful to them both for helping with this podcast. So just a little bit of background. I should say that my work to date has been at the intersection of philosophy of technology and continental philosophy, continental European philosophy and my background is in French philosophy so specifically the work of Gilles de Luz. In 2018 I published a book called Continental Philosophy of Technology. In that book the thinker who's the focus of the book we're going to discuss today, namely the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, features precisely once in the previous book.
Dominic Smith:And as part of a footnote where I worry about thinkers who seem unplaceable in the history of philosophy of technology. So I think that the book we're going to discuss today addresses something that was lacking in my previous book. So whereas exceptional technologies provides a fairly survey like argument for a concept of technologies that subvert our preconceptions about technology, what I mean by exceptional technologies are impossible ones, merely imagined ones and failed ones for instance, I think that that book lacked the kind of propulsion and specificity of a story that we might be able to get our teeth into and I hope that I've addressed something of that in the book we're going to discuss today, Bridging Benamine. Just to give you a sense of where it came from, the book started out on a very dumb premise of taking up a completely sheer contingency as a guiding necessity and trying to generate philosophical possibilities out of it. So the contingency is that Walter Benjamin wrote a radio piece that Esther knows very well about a famous rail disaster that occurred in Dundee, the city where I live and work.
Dominic Smith:And I took this up as my inspiration to look at Walter Benjamin's radio work in the round more broadly. What I found is that there's a lot of potential and I've tried to channel that through the themes mentioned in the title to the book so technology, place and education. In the book there are two chapters devoted to each of those themes. So taking up that kind of dumb premise, I wanted to just push the sense of kind of stupefied wonder that I had in the face of this little fragment and turn it into something more philosophically accessible and not just kind of completely my own private concern alone. With that intro done, I'd just invite Esther to fire some questions at me.
Esther Leslie:Hi there. My name's Esther Leslie. I'm Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, the University of London. And I've written about Benjamin in the past. In fact, my PhD a million years ago was on Benjamin's renderings of technology, although less, I suppose, from a strictly philosophical point of view and more from a cultural and theoretical point of view.
Esther Leslie:So I was delighted and intrigued and challenged by this marvelous book when it landed with me. And I want to spend some time just picking up on some of the themes and probing Dominic's ideas. I mean, it's a very rich book which has so many different implications around ideas of media and technology and pedagogy and education, how we think about location, talks about contemporary technologies and older technologies. My first question though is just a little one which is, you know, within Dundee this rail disaster that happened, you
Narrator:know,
Esther Leslie:100x years ago is very well known and the children know about it and it's part of the mythos of the town. Had you thought about it philosophically before re encountering the story in Benjamin and setting yourself this challenge?
Dominic Smith:Well thanks so much Esther. And the short answer is no. For kind of institutional reasons and reasons to do that are to do with things that are kind of very ingrained in the history of the city. We're Scotland's fourth largest city so we're quite a minor point on the map globally speaking. And what really blew my mind about this piece was it offered something from the outside that it brought insight to this understanding that people share of this famous disaster.
Dominic Smith:So the disaster in question occurred in 1879 to a train coming from Edinburgh to Dundee in between Christmas and New Year and what happens is that the bridge collapsed and all the people on the train were lost. And what's quite interesting is that locally it's something that children encounter through as you say the mythos, that's the perfect word for it, through kind of a cultural osmosis on the one hand, through grandparents perhaps talking about the disaster, the replacement bridge that was built after the disaster and how they perhaps experienced that in the culture of Dundee. And it's also a very visible landmark. If you stand atop the hill in the centre of Dundee you can't avoid this bridge. So there's this sense of it being this kind of shared artefact.
Dominic Smith:And the way that that gets cashed out beyond mythos is in curriculum because what we find in the schools locally is that it's taught as an item of local history. So when the initial bridge fell and it was the longest bridge in the world it was quite strange to think that a town like Dundee at that point would have had the longest bridge in the world. But it says a lot about the industrial culture of the city and specifically about textiles and how they invested in infrastructure. It's often thought of as shared part of local culture but also part of the curriculum and I hadn't reflected on the fact that there was so much in the way of philosophical potential in precisely that awareness that people had. But on reflection and I think this is what Benjamin opened my eyes to, what he made me think is that you know people in Dundee know this story inside out.
Dominic Smith:What would it be like to give those people the voice of an outsider on this event and what could they make of it? And I think when you put it in those terms you start to see that all sorts of philosophical things come out of the little radio broadcast he gave about the Tabriz disaster. What he's asking in some ways is when do we most think about technology and his answer consistent with a great many philosophers of technology is that we do that when it breaks. But unlike Martin Heidegger who would talk about a broken hammer and always using the indefinite article, a broken hammer, what Benjamin does is he says let's talk about this bridge, this very specific bridge and the history that surrounds it and let's see how accessible that could be to people who know the story and who don't. So the short answer is I hadn't thought about it philosophically but having read the five pages of Benjamin's TypeScript I thought it saw it in you as something that was like this little material thought experiment which is beautiful.
Dominic Smith:If you think about how philosophy often gets taught in the curriculum it can be to do with the most abstract thought experiments, you know the grandfather paradox or paradoxes about twins. What you had here was just something much richer I felt.
Esther Leslie:Yeah I mean what you take from it, it is itself a marvellous text and what you take from it is so wonderful. Opens up in so many ways and you make bridges out of it. And your book is about much, much more than that single short text. But it does produce a vocabulary that goes into the title Bridging Benjamin. Benjamin, we never know how to say him when we're on English language podcast.
Esther Leslie:But also a kind of language of derailment and parallel tracks and so on. Could you talk about some of the ways in which you mobilize that language and the bridging, the bridges between location or place, education, technology, other types of bridging work that you're doing through the book?
Dominic Smith:Yeah absolutely. So in the introduction I talk about this and I make the claim that Benjamin's radio broadcasts of which we possess no recordings we should underline and we only have the typescript, so the written typescript. And my claim is that these are his bridges and what I mean by that is that what I took from the very close attention to the details of the Tehu Whale Bridge piece is that for Benjamin that any bridge or any act of mediation is always cracked. There's always something cracked or broken about it. Whether that's really the possibility of something breaking, that's nevertheless something that still haunts the artefact or phenomenon in question.
Dominic Smith:So what I found broken about these bridges is we've got these 93 instances of radio broadcasts. He duplicated some of the broadcasts so we've got a more limited set of typescripts but there's something fascinatingly broken about these bridges in the sense that we've only got the decks and not the audio pieces. I wanted to kind of think about the broadcast as bridges in their broken form and attending to that theme, the three themes of the title suggested themselves. I've cast these out in particular ways given the limitations of the size of the book. I suppose Benjamin as you've mentioned reference to your own work is known for his work on technology and his most famous essay on the work of art in the age of its mechanical reproducibility for instance or technological reproducibility is canonical across all sorts of areas of our academic endeavour you know critical theory, law, art and media, media studies.
Dominic Smith:What I find quite interesting is the disjunct between that fact and the fact that Benjamin features basically as not even a footnote in the emerging quite fashionable discipline of philosophy of technology. And I think this is attested to by the kind of paucity of references to Benjamin's work in the most high profile course books in that field. One way of tracking that in the book is to compare that to the situation of Martin Heidegger who was his contemporary and who he shared lecture theatres with in Freiburg very early in his academic career. In some of the big textbooks in philosophy of technology there are entire sections devoted to Heidegger but nothing to Benjamin. The first theme in the title of the book, the first thought was to try and derail our understanding of technology and our philosophy of technology in favour of introducing Benjamin into this field.
Dominic Smith:I suppose education would be another theme that features there in the title. What I wanted to do there was maybe shift the focus. In your own writings for instance you've engaged with Benjamin's work in education in the German student movement for instance and he's often associated with that in his kind of late 1910s to early 1920s work. And then there's also a lot of work on the critique of violence essay that he wrote in 1921 in connection with education. What I saw in those broken bridges of the radio pieces was both a type of pedagogy and almost a kind of programme, an educational programme.
Dominic Smith:I wouldn't go so far as to say curriculum because I think it's something other. So that's the sense in which I wanted to kind of distort or perturb that theme of education. And if you permit me, other theme of place I think is maybe the most interesting one in the title of the book or the least obvious one. The obvious theme if you were thinking about big themes surrounding Benjamin, to choose for the title would be history. So thinking about how Benjamin in the arcades project offers a particular view of the history of the nineteenth century through the Paris Arcades and then very famously you know his last written piece is on the concept of history and it starts with this famous image of the angel of history looking back over progress and just seeing it as a field of ruins.
Dominic Smith:The reason that I haven't focused on history is I think the question I'm asking is where does history happen? So what's quite interesting in Benjamin's broadcast is that they bridge these themes of history and place and I don't think this has been kind of stressed enough. In his later broadcast specifically those are around, in and around the Taybridge piece, he's making reference to events but also to the places where they occur. So the eruption of Vesuvius or the Lisbon earthquake or a theater fire in Canton. In the reception of Benjamin there's been a big emphasis on this thought about catastrophe and specifically as we approach the catastrophe of Germany in the 1930s and Benjamin's life bears a tragic witness to that.
Dominic Smith:But what that underplays is this thought about these events occurring somewhere. And to get back to your original point about how I take up the metaphor of the bridge, well that's what a bridge does. It occurs somewhere and does a very specific type of mediation that's fraught with danger, the potential for catastrophe etc. So I suppose I summarise those three themes and the answer as to why the radio works are useful. I think they just allow these themes to be expressed in quite a powerful way.
Esther Leslie:I find that very illuminating what you said about the specificity of this bridge or this location compared to Heidegger's sort of gesturing towards a wooden bridge. But also even within the text though, it's not necessarily about intimacy because as you say, what fascinates you about Benjamin thinking about the Tay Bridge is that it's imagined or he encounters it in a poem. So it's a kind of imagined place and that's also a bridge between sort of the fantastic and the actual or I mean what would you say about that whether a place is concretely known to you or whether it's a place of imagination. How does that work?
Dominic Smith:Yeah absolutely and so in the kind of middle chapters of the book I try to draw this out and hopefully not in too artificial a way by thinking through these themes of actuality. When and why do specific places become problematic or philosophically engaging for us and then virtuality so this thought about merely imagined places or exercises in world building. What's fascinating is that you can see each of these dynamics in Benjamin's radio work. So you know I've mentioned what I call a kind of catastrophe constellation of works which occurs towards the second half of his radio work where he's curiously he's duplicating his broadcasts. He's doing these broadcasts between Frankfurt and Berlin.
Dominic Smith:In his early work he tends to separate the themes so he does Berlin themes for Berlin and Frankfurt themes for Frankfurt. But what's quite interesting in these catastrophe constellations is that he finds ways of duplicating these broadcasts. So the Tay Bridge piece for instance is a piece that he gave for both Frankfurt and Berlin. So there's something really delightful about this because I think he's speaking to the audiences of Berlin in a way that says what happens if you reflect on an elsewhere? And so you know this notion of an unvisited small city on the coast of Scotland you know and you get into poignant issues about what kind of an elsewhere that might have been for you know a suffering Jewish academic in the 1930s in Germany knowing that radio for instance is about to be reformed and centralised and that he's about to lose his stream of income for instance.
Dominic Smith:And so I think he does really powerful things with this exercise in engaging place as actual and also expanding a concept of it through the kind of haunting possibilities of both storytelling, I would speculate through the possibilities of audio and through the exercises in listening to build a sense of world phenomenologically. And then going even further you can see that he engages kind of exercises in creative writing. And so also in addition to these broadcasts about historical events he's creating little radio plays and so three specifically, two that were broadcast and one that was commissioned, written and not broadcast. And in these pieces he does the most fascinating things with our sense of place and how we access it. In one of them for instance there's basically a thought experiment in disembodiment and so he's asking us to think about can our sense of personhood go on without place.
Dominic Smith:And this is in play where he refers to voice land, this purely audible domain.
Esther Leslie:Yeah and also I mean one of the things you evoke I think in relation to this, is this sense of audience. So as, and this recognition of venue. So there's one point in the book where you're contrasting Martin delivering a lecture in a particular place with an audience in front of him and thinking about the differences between that mode of delivery and Benjamin going into a radio studio broadcasting to maybe no people, 10 people, hundreds, thousands, you know, this sort of imagined audience. So there s something that s recurrent throughout the book about this idea of sort of presence and absence, which also revolves around your speculations on what it would mean to have recordings of the voice of Benjamin. Would this give us more or different kind of access?
Esther Leslie:So, yeah, what would you say about that sort of sense of a presence, metaphysics of presence, imagined audiences, absent audiences? How does this work on to the reception and the production of what is delivered?
Dominic Smith:Yeah so in preparing the book for the press and one of the things I started to think about a lot and worry about was you know what if they discovered recordings of Benjamin's broadcasts would that completely scuttle this book? And aside from maybe one night of kind of sleepless worry about this issue I think I've kind of put it aside because I started to ask myself so we only have the typescripts and you know suppose one of the broadcasts were found tomorrow you know, suppose they were all found tomorrow, would this affect the claims in the book? I should also say as a footnote by the way that there are people who do claim there are instances of Benjamin's voice to be heard in one of his radio plays delivered from Cologne but there's a lot of contention as to whether that is the case and it's kind of unverifiable. What's interesting about it is that even in that case the voice takes on a very kind of performative and he's an actor in that context rather than an academic delivering to an audience so even in that context it would be strange even if we could identify that as Benjamin's voice.
Dominic Smith:So I suppose to respond to this thought experiment of finding the broadcasts, I think it would affect the claims but I don't think it would contradict them. I think it would actually corroborate them. I think it would make them virtually stronger in a certain sense because I think this cuts to the core of something important. So you could call this quite grandly something to do with let's call it the redemptive translatability of difference. And I mean that in contrast to imitation or copying that's premised on a kind of mourning.
Dominic Smith:So these are obviously kind of themes that touch on well worn issues in Derrida scholarship for instance and thinking about how Derrida interacts with the legacy of Benjamin. But I don't necessarily mean them in that sense. What I'm responding to I suppose you could say is that in a lot of scholarship on Benjamin's radio broadcasts I do think that there is a kind of mournful tendency to desire the lost presence of his voice. And on one level I absolutely get this you know. It's quite profound and understandable that you know what person who's been touched or moved by Benjamin's writings wouldn't want to hear the sound of his voice you know.
Dominic Smith:But on another level I think this desire is kind of limiting. What it does is it makes us engage these broadcasts as just or primarily auditory works even though that's the medium in which they're completely missing. I think and I explore this in the book I think these tendencies manifest in the work of some scholars who basically try to imitate concepts from Benjamin's wider corpus and transpose them over to the radio work. For instance Benjamin discusses the famous optical unconscious in the Little History of Photography Essay and the Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility Essay. His point there is that the camera very famously his point is that the camera captures things that the eye doesn't see.
Dominic Smith:And if you think about zoom for instance it allows us to explore what was unconscious and what we thought we were seeing. You know scholars rightly have taken that up and thought about an acoustic or acoustical unconscious. Audio recordings like this one contain things that we weren't conscious of and we can use the podcast or the recording to access that. Benjamin talks about that as a kind of psychoanalysis or analogous to psychoanalysis. So the claim that I'm trying to make in the book is that in addition to that, that kind of mournful tendency, I think we just need to be alive to the capacity to translate this work differently and to take up different things in it.
Dominic Smith:Inspirations, bizarre idiosyncratic contingencies like finding it's about the city you live in or how children interact with it in visual media for instance, drawing comic strips in response to it. Yeah I think that the more profound translatability concerns difference rather than just imitation. So it's about letting something that he didn't expect and that we didn't expect to find in these broadcasts to live on. Because we can do different things with them by taking them into schools or gyming with students or reading them to your children and take different inspirations from them in that sense.
Esther Leslie:You spoke about a lot of the scholarship on the radio work but it's the case that they were neglected for a long time and a lot of that work was impelled actually by English language scholarship which has often tended to take the radio plays more seriously than the German, Sabine Schillerlegg, maybe being the great exception. Could you say something about Benjamin's own attitude towards these shows and whether in you making so much of them you're doing that classic Benjaminian operation of rescuing stuff from oblivion picking up the scraps or is there a different dynamic at work?
Dominic Smith:Yeah, yeah. No brilliant. So I'm definitely doing that I'd say in the first instance. But on a personal note I'm kind of letting it be done to me as well. By which I mean Benjamin writes this work off so in a letter to Schollem he says you know this is just unscholarly and it's a job, know it pays better or it's a type of pay that I can take and it's available to me not being able to work in the academy because Frankfurt has refused to allow me to submit my thesis.
Dominic Smith:So you've got all these kind of contradictions. But yeah, on a personal note I suppose what's quite touching about all of that is thinking about the kind of constraints that I face. In academia there's this big split between the dream of research and doing teaching and you can get really messed up thinking about that division, which takes priority and which you most ethically can abound to. One way of dealing with it would be to say I'll just do the teaching as a job and I'll try and excel at the research. What I think Benjamin didn't see about his own radio work is that it was his teaching.
Dominic Smith:It was his school let's say. It's the type of school that someone without a school ends up in. In being in that type of virtual strange marginal school, the school is about what schooling involves. In my own work I was kind of feeling a lot of constraints to do with this division between teaching and research and I thought to myself well what if I just let the teaching inform the research rather than thinking about them being split or thinking about the research informing teaching? So I was kind of trying to take that example from Ben Yamin.
Dominic Smith:So in some I suppose what I'd say is absolutely it's about this redemptive exercise, this pedal fishing as Arendt famously puts it in her essay on Benjamin in Illuminations. It's about rescuing things and namely the radio scripts but it's also about seeing a practice in them that he didn't see I don't think and it has greater translatability than I think that literature on his radio work whether in English or German has typically tended to see.
Esther Leslie:Yeah when a year ago or so I published with Sam Dahlberg a book, even more about the margins of the margins, about his friend Ernst Schoen and the whole milieu and it really made me balk against Benjamin's dismissiveness of his own work as a kind of hack work. Because, you know, the position that radio had, the possibilities, particularly in Frankfurt where Ernst Schoen was programming and getting jobs for his childhood friend, Walter Benjamin, you know, they were able to embrace the possibilities of a new medium and push it through things like the listening model and the sort of youth programming that's really, as you show in the cited examples within your text, so self reflexive and expansive and opening students up or listeners up to imagining their futures, imagining other futures, imagining other places. You know, there's something immense at work there. And Benjamin's self criticism in a letter to Sholem is very frustrating and annoying. So, you know, any kind of pushback against that and revealing what I think in a sense he also knew, that these were sometimes versions.
Esther Leslie:I mean, you criticize this notion in the book, but there are sort of microcosmic versions of the more macrocosmic ideas in the real published spaces, you know, included within the work. But, you know, at some level he is working through and working out questions of place and logics of technology and what do we think of literature in an age of mass reproduction. I mean these things are at work. There isn't that great separation. I mean do you have sort of favourite lectures where you wanted to go back to again and again to sort of dig out some of those ideas.
Dominic Smith:Yeah, yeah absolutely. I've got a little shortlist of it on my favorites but just before I do that, can I just your point about Sholem is interesting there because it's making me reflect that part of that dismissiveness probably it has to do with the addressee? He's speaking to an elsewhere that he can't occupy which is to say that the place held by Sholam both in Benjamin's estimation of him and academically, he was more academically successful. And it makes me think you know so Susan Buck Morris has that quite useful little schema for understanding Benjamin when you think about how he compartmentalised his friends and three big ones in particular. So you've got Scholam who's writing that letter dismissing his radio works to.
Dominic Smith:Then you've got Adorno who he definitely would have dismissed the radio works to as well for different reasons to do with culture industry etc or what Adorno and Hocken would go on to call the culture industry. But then there's another friend which is Brecht and he definitely wouldn't have been decrying them I don't think in his letters to Brecht because these are kind of instantiations of quite a Brechtian way of teaching. And it should be said absolutely that there's a fourth figure there, perhaps the most important of all of them which is Assyria Lasich who's informing Benjamin's idea on proletarian pedagogy. And then there's a fifth friend which is shown as well. So there's this maybe little cluster of friends in the radio corner that's maybe overshadowed by Cholin and Adorno?
Esther Leslie:It is very insightful and also makes me think though you know later after the war Adorno's on German, West German radio every single week giving his address for a kind of remoral, post Nazi, de Nazified public sphere. So these things move in and out of accept ability I think and including for a figure such as Adorno.
Dominic Smith:No absolutely that's an entirely fair point. Yeah, yeah. He was probably hitting every minute of it. Not in terms of the message but in terms of the medium I'd imagine. In terms of the okay so a shortlist, this is kind of implicit and stitched through the book but there are maybe four that I could really focus on and just very briefly mention.
Dominic Smith:In the kind of middle chapters of the book I kind of periodise Benjamin's radio work. I say that in the work that he's doing early around from 1927 when he does one broadcast then he's doing work in 1929 and 1930, I would I talk about this as a kind of evolving practice of place. So he's doing Frankfurt things for Frankfurt and Berlin things for Berlin. The things that he's doing in Berlin I think are completely beautiful and they're definitely informed by his friend Franz Hessel's text Walking in Berlin which was published around that time. But two instances of it that are just complete tour de forces are there's one that is listed in the 2014 Versal collection Radio Benium which is just a beautiful collection and a really well put together book I think.
Dominic Smith:That's called Berlin Gutter Snipe and that's from March 1930 and in that he has this incredibly beautiful reflection on labyrinths and how displacing they are and he does extraordinary things there, kind of these really beautiful and complex literary images of labyrinths that are themselves labyrinthine and you know he's speaking this out to an audience that can't rewind as we can or that can't edit. So these are all just completely lost. There's this kind of like excessive literary performativity that's so rich in that text. Another text from again March 1930 is called Berlin Toy Tour and what I found fascinating about this, I comment on it in the book, is basically at the end of this broadcast he asks children to do something impossible. So in the book I make this point Benjamin is philosophical in the sense that he's coming out of the post Kantian tradition in German philosophy.
Dominic Smith:He's hugely influenced by Kant and never gives up that avowed influence. And basically at the end of this broadcast he asks children to tell adults the meaning of beauty which is in Kant's philosophical system something you cannot do. And so he sets this impossible puzzle at the end of this broadcast and then you can just imagine it being silence. And I just love the thought that he kind of stack it with this depth of philosophical tension and then just you know dissolve into the next program. And then if I made two others, one that occurs just at the hinge into his later work and I described this in the book in terms of an intensified practice of place.
Dominic Smith:So that's where he's giving the same broadcast for both Frankfurt and Berlin and what he's doing, to hark back to your point earlier on, is he's finding places and events that are capable of doing that. And what's interesting is you can trace the genesis of it I think to one particular broadcast which is called A Visit to the Brass Works from July 1930. And what he does there is he basically takes young people around this, you know as the narrator he takes them around the factory and describes this massive you know gargantuan factory that's producing all sorts of equipment for the German economy. At the end of that he describes how that economy is linked to the world through the canals and it's very poignant because he invites his listeners to think about their futures as potential workers or consumers with reference to this factory and of course history shows that everyone who held that had a different future than the one he was envisaging. So that's a very poignant one.
Dominic Smith:Perhaps even more poignant there's a play which I must say it doesn't feature in my book. So it's called Lichtenberger cross section. The reason it doesn't feature is because it's out of scope and because what I was interested in in the book, know as we've talked about, was instances where we've got the typescript but not the broadcast. What Lichtenberg, what we've got there is a typescript that didn't have a broadcast because it was commissioned, it was written, it's perhaps his most finely wrought radio play but he didn't get to broadcast it at all because of the Nazi ascent in Germany in 1933. So I'd suggest those four, they provide the coordinates for something kind of interesting in terms of the argument of the book.
Dominic Smith:And if someone wants like a readable playlist that they can have alongside the book then those four are the four.
Esther Leslie:Yeah, remember there's something on Liechtenberg where he doodles or scribbles something as if he, like he hears the news of the takeover of the radio station and its curtains. It's up. So it sort of makes it a very poignant lack of transmission. Maybe sort of picking up in a sense on that darker side. We've talked a little bit about Heidegger as a philosopher of technology.
Esther Leslie:Another interlocutor within the book is Karl Schmidt and ideas of sovereignty and exception, which is another context that Benjamin has been read in relation to. Could you say something about why it was important to engage Schmidt in this discussion?
Dominic Smith:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In Chapter one that's where I engage Schmidt and Heidegger. And what I'm trying to do there is kind of settle the debts of post cantian philosophy in Germany. And so this notion of the exception, on the one hand it kind of harks back to my previous book and what I was thinking about there wasn't the state of exception as know theorised by Schmidt very famously. I was thinking about kind of epistemological exceptions so things that are technologies but we don't typically think of them as being technology.
Dominic Smith:So it was that kind of exception. And you know in thinking about moving towards this book I realised yeah I'm going to have to kind of settle my own debts with this term exception. You know it's something that Giorgio Gambin for instance takes up in his engagement with both Benjamin and Carol Schmidt. And so kind of schematically the way that I put it in chapter one is that there's a violence in Schmitt's notion of the state of exception. Famously his statement is sovereign is he who decides the state of exception.
Dominic Smith:And so in drawing a limit who's in and who's out, who's enemy and who's friend and we demonstrate our sovereignty. Schmidt thinks this is completely vital to political sovereignty and liberal politics completely obfuscates it. It attempts to deny this. It attempts to say we can all be friends and loses sight of this enemy friend distinction or sovereign subject distinction. Metaphysically so there's a lot of discussion about Schmidt in terms law and jurisprudence of course and there's a lot of discussion in terms of political theory as well.
Dominic Smith:If you cash that out though in terms of the history of philosophy, he's making a move that you could say involves making exceptions. So like metaphysically making them. So through the naming of something as enemy you create the enemy. That seems to be the kind of type of sovereignty that's at the basis of Schmitt's approach in texts like political theology. In chapter one what I do is and it might seem a little clumsy I say that whereas Schmitz is trying to make exceptions literally make them, ex nihil what we've got with Heidegger is a situation where there are no exceptions.
Dominic Smith:So everything we experience is simply a sign of being and so this holistic interconnectedness of other things. And what I see Benjamin doing is he's not making exceptions, he's not making no exceptions. What he's doing is he's taking up exceptions. So he's taking up the stories, he's dwelling with them. This is something that scholars like Sam Weber discuss a lot.
Dominic Smith:Benjamin is willing to dwell with an indeterminacy or lack of certainty and that's not something that Schmitt will allow for. It's arguably something that Heidegger avoids through a kind of rhapsody on being. What I was trying to do with those three thinkers is kind of triangulate post Kantian heritage and also say a little bit more about this kind of pressing concept of the exception.
Esther Leslie:One of my questions being I guess a non philosopher, not entirely sure what I am, what does it mean to read Benjamin as a philosopher? I mean we've got and you pointed out to me on a previous occasion, Jameson in the Benjamin Files talking, underscoring the dominant interpretation of Benjamin as an anti philosopher. And then recent work by Peter Gordon talking, as you mentioned before, about pearl fishers and a kind of eclecticism. You know, the way I've sort of used him has been to legitimate my own dilettantish interdisciplinarity. But I mean, you bring to us very precisely, carefully read Benjamin as coherently philosophical in some sense.
Esther Leslie:So what does it mean to do that?
Dominic Smith:Yeah, thank you for the question. So I should say that I think the power of Benjamin resides in that eclecticism. So I think it resides in not being reducible to being a philosopher. Nevertheless, I think that that eclecticism has power for philosophy, that philosophy if it weren't so conservative would begin to see and unpick and work through in quite important and powerful ways. So what I'm trying to do is take that eclecticism and argue that what we've got with Benjamin isn't an example of an anti philosophical thinker, let's say in the sense of simply a journalist or a literary thinker.
Dominic Smith:What we've got is someone who's deeply informed by the history of philosophy, you know in ways that extremely heady. I mean in his early essay on the language of man and language as such, there are all sorts of extremely detailed metaphysical distinctions and theological ones that are in the mixing pot there. Then you've got a kind of phenomenological influence, you've got post Kantian influence as well. So he's steeped in philosophy but he's also eclectic. What you've got I think is you've got an example of someone who's an extremely demanding philosopher and he's demanding more of philosophy if I could put it that way.
Dominic Smith:And you know in the first two chapters if you take their titles one is called Mythological Extremism, that's where I focus on Heidegger and Schmidt and the post Kantian legacy and the other is called delicate empiricism. So what you've got there seems completely kind of antonymic. You've got this notion of someone who's completely attentive to issues in history, philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology etc. But you've also got someone who's extremely attentive to the details of things and I think that's an example of what philosophy ought to be. And if the thing that I'm willing to say if the thing that involves turns out not to be philosophy then fair enough.
Dominic Smith:Kind of disciplinarily I just love the thought of someone being that demanding and that eclectic in that, willing to perturb our preconceptions about fields, their limits, the policing of their borders.
Esther Leslie:I suppose part of this goes also back to his thematic valorisation of the fragment and you know, mean like Adorno there's a kind of anti systematic sort of sense of things while, as you say and as you brilliantly express in the book, is also that methodological understanding and pushing it to its limits and critique within it, but also a commitment to experience, the ephemerality of experience. And you have this line that comes up again and again about a kind of integrity of the ephemeral. But, So I suppose can one be a philosopher then and yeah I suppose be anti systematic
Dominic Smith:No, in a no that great, thank you for that because what strikes me there is if you think about system building philosophers, if we looked on Google the philosopher who would pop up immediately is Hegel. But you know as I discussed with colleagues here at Dundee, Hegel's much less systematic than Kant is, right? So Kant's the system builder. He's the one that wants to build this, he calls it, architectonic. And I think what Benjamin understood so Benjamin makes that point about the integrity of an experience that's ephemeral in an essay on Kant and on the coming philosophies is what it's translated into in English.
Dominic Smith:And what he's claiming there is that Kant in trying to be a system builder is a kind of extremist. He extremely wants the system but he can't have it because experience is this ephemeral historical thing and so Kant's caught in this tension and so I think that Benjamin recognises that and that in and of itself is a philosophical recognition and then he cashes that out in his work in all sorts of complex ways. If you look at Kant's philosophy you find lots of examples, find lots of thought experiments, you find lots of analogies, similes. You don't find stories, you don't find world building. And I think that those things gesture towards this kind of bridging these two extremes I suppose you could say.
Dominic Smith:Mythological extremism, delicate empiricism. That's quite a problem to set yourself.
Esther Leslie:What I really like in the book is that you take philosophy out into the world. So it's not, do you know your transcendentalism from your induction, etcetera. You take it through a project called Localizing Benjamin into Schools. So could you say something about how that works, how that came about?
Dominic Smith:Yeah yeah. So the first is called Localising Philosophy and the final chapter of the book is simply called Localising Philosophy. Yet so what I should say right at the start is I don't mean provincialising philosophy and I don't mean making it exclusive and so it's not a Schmidtian exercise in and out. What I mean instead is kind of finding ways to allow philosophy in this kind of eclectic, indeterminate sense that we've been discussing to become less uncanny, to use its uncanniness, to hit home, to take the concept of home, what does it mean, how can we interrogate it. One of the kind of initial inspirations for this whole book was that we did a workshop with a group of children in 2018 and I must confess that as I said at the start my background's in French philosophy and so encountering this text by Benjamin literally did derail me because I thought right now there's a whole other canon that I need to start interrogating.
Dominic Smith:And what was so what kind of gave me an impetus to do this was the fact that these children, the reason we'd given them this broadcast about the Tay Bridge disaster to look at is because we knew that they knew about the disaster. But of course they didn't know anything about Benjamin and in working through the broadcast what they allowed me to see is that what I thought I knew about Benjamin was wrong. I thought it was this kind of remote, austere, untranslatable, irreducibly fragmented thinker. And there was a lot of kind of work on that. So it just seemed very erratic as I put it in the intro to the book.
Dominic Smith:So we did this workshop and what struck me based on that is that there was much more potential in what had happened there than could be resolved through one broadcast. So what we decided to do is we decided to kind of take it up, I say we, myself and colleagues in philosophy and education at Dundee, we decided to take it out to local schools, so precisely those local schools where historically they'd know about this event and we'd have an opportunity to kind of open up some of the speculative or philosophical or eclectic issues there. So yeah, every year since 2020 we've been trying to go out to schools and do work with them on this issue. And what we try and do is we don't try and kind of make this part of the curriculum and we don't try and talk about the curriculum either so we don't talk about Rene Descartes and David Chewe parts of the philosophy curriculum in schools. Instead what we try to do is we try and figuratively build a bridge between elementary school and high school for these pupils.
Dominic Smith:So we work with these pupils at a moment when they're making that transition between those two stages of learning and where they're often excited or apprehensive and we try and ask them to think about what kind of bridge is that, What's involved in a bridge? How do we connect to other people today? We do it through bridges but we also do it through phones and the internet. How has that changed the way that we see the world? What happens if we think of a phone as less a phone than a radio?
Dominic Smith:You know so all these kind of strange ways of thinking about the technologies that surround children in their world. Yeah so we take up the Benjamin inspired work. Basically I mean if I could put it like this, what's come through to me based on that work is that these radio broadcasts, I describe them as Beniamese bridges, basically come to the conclusion that they're not broadcasts. We shouldn't think more of them as things that are lost, as audible broadcasts and we shouldn't just fixate on them as text either. I actually think that there is instances of listening.
Dominic Smith:So in the way that they can be explored in classroom settings, what they allow for, what they facilitate is listening rather than anything else, listening to what questions these young people at a particular stage in their lives have. So yeah that's perhaps a long winded answer but that's what we've tried to do. We've worked with 2,000 pupils across Scotland to date and in actual fact tomorrow we're going to go out and do some more work with them there as well. You know 2,000 pupils on one hand it sounds a lot if you're local but it sounds small if you're thinking in terms of government and education as something that is institutional. My response to that in the book is that this is an exercise in translatability, it's not an exercise in scalability.
Dominic Smith:So we're not trying to take a model that then can scale up and everyone in the world suddenly learning about the Tabrijh disaster. No, the point is what does your city have that it could reflect on in a similar way? And I think that's Benjamin's provocation.
Esther Leslie:I love that the radio lectures have afterlives, afterlife Nach Leben being something that Benjamin thinks about and it relates to all of that translatability through history and becoming different and new specificities. So your books in the world and now will have its afterlife and I hope it touches many but what comes next for you?
Dominic Smith:Well thanks so much. Yeah I'm writing a book manuscript with my colleague Philippe Lyons who's a Derrida scholar and his work is in Eco Deconstruction, the Posthumanities and the title we have for the book is After the University and so Teaching in the Ruins of Technology and Nature. And my half draws on Walter Benjamin and what I've done in bridging Benjamin as well in two respects. So first off it takes inspiration from Benjamin's statement in his famous Trauerspiel piece which he was going to submit to Frankfurt for his Abilatazione and he wasn't allowed to and he has this very famous statement and so allegories are in the realm of thinking what ruins are in the realm of things. I was just kind of really perplexed by the statement you know what kind of weird teaching is going on there.
Dominic Smith:What I'm going to do in my half of the book is kind of take up an attempt, an updating of the author as producer essay. So I'm basically departing from the premise that in the face of say generative AI and what it does to the figures of both the author and the producer there's an even more important third figure in that essay which is the teacher. So basically the question is when authors have been liquidated and when producers have been turned into content producers and data providers by algorithms what could teachers and teachers be? So what kind of responsibility or social purpose is to be found in a new vision of what teachers do? I think the bridge builders would be the link back to bridging Benjamin.
Esther Leslie:So you're continuing with bridging metaphors. They've embedded themselves in your philosophical vocabulary now. Yeah. I encourage everyone to read your book. I think it has made a big contribution to Benjamin scholarship.
Esther Leslie:And I mean, one thing we didn't touch on is just the very act of adding to what is an immense pile of work and ongoing work that's coming out. But you genuinely found an original, different and importantly productive, really productive way to re encounter Benjamin. So well done with that.
Dominic Smith:Thanks so much. Thank you very much. Thank you.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book A Philosophy of Technology, Place and Education by Dominic Smith is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.