Existential Media

Tied to the profundity of life and death, media are and have always been existential. Situated both in the middle of our lives and at the limit, they are deeply embedded in the life-world on individual as well as global scales. As they currently capitalize on human existence seemingly without limit, they are also mythologized as boundless harbingers of the future and as solutions to the predicaments of a world now poised on the edge. We are at a loss for an existential media theory that takes us beyond either the habitual or the sublime to shed light on how media play out their multivalent and momentous roles within our technologized existence of limits. There is also an urgent need after posthumanism to reassess what it means to be human in all our diversity, and to rethink the responsibility we bear in the face of today's techno-existential situation. In order to address these issues, and to remedy the existential deficit in the field, in Existential Media Amanda Lagerkvist revisits existential philosophy through a reappreciation of Karl Jaspers' philosophy, focusing in particular on his seminal concept of the limit situation of death, crisis and guilt in which we are called on to seize. The book argues that the present age of deep techno-cultural saturation, and of escalating calamitous and interrelated crises, is a digital limit situation, in which there are both existential and ethico-political stakes of media. In conversation with disability studies, the new materialism and the environmental humanities, Lagerkvist introduces the field of existential media studies by offering a media theory of the limit situation which brings limits, in all their shapes and forms, onto the radar when we interrogate media. Existential media constitute both the building blocks and the brinks of being. Entering into the slow fields of mourning, commemorating and speaking to the dead in the online environment, she makes visible that they ambivalently offer metric parameters and caring and transcendent experiences, ultimately exemplifying post-interactive modes of being digital in slowness, silence and waiting, and spawning the recognition that existential vulnerability in loss is also a source of fecundity. Furthermore, placing the mournerthe coexisterat the center of media studies, calls forth a different ethos. Overturning rampant ideals, in both culture and scholarship, of limitlessness, able-bodiedness, quantification and speed, this book seeks out alternate intellectual and ethical coordinates for reclaiming, imagining and anticipating a responsible future with existential media.