Benjamin’s bridges: philosophy, technology and a Dundee disaster

Dr Dominic Smith, a senior lecturer in Philosophy, discusses his recent book Bridging Benjamin on an episode of the University of Minnesota Press podcast (The Press Pod), where he and Professor Esther Leslie (Birkbeck) explore the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s forgotten radio broadcasts and connections to the Tay Rail Bridge disaster.

Smith’s previous book, Exceptional Technologies (2018), mentioned Benjamin exactly once, in a footnote about thinkers who seem unplaceable in the philosophy of technology. Bridging Benjamin grew out of a coincidence: between 1927 and 1933 Benjamin made some ninety-three radio broadcasts, and one of them was about the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879. The disaster is part of Dundee’s shared local memory, where Smith lives and teaches.

No recordings of Benjamin's broadcasts survive; only the typescripts. Smith makes that absence the point rather than the problem. Every bridge, every act of mediation, is, he argues, in some sense cracked, and Benjamin's broadcasts are bridges we possess only in their broken form.

On technology, Smith notes the oddity that Benjamin is canonical in critical theory, law, art and media studies while barely registering in philosophy of technology textbooks, where Heidegger, his Freiburg contemporary, gets whole sections. On place, he traces how Benjamin shifted from writing Frankfurt broadcasts for Frankfurt and Berlin broadcasts for Berlin to duplicating pieces across both cities, finding events that could bear an audience's reflection on an elsewhere - and Leslie and Smith dwell on what an unvisited small city on the Scottish coast might have meant to a Jewish academic in Germany in 1932, about to lose his income to the centralisation of radio.