Tied to the profundity of life and death, media are and have always
been existential. Yet, as they are deeply embedded in the lifeworld
on both individual and global scales, they currently capitalize on
human existence seemingly without limit, while being mythologized
as boundless harbingers of the future and as solutions to the
predicaments of a world now poised on the edge. In this situation
it is imperative to move beyond either the habitual or the sublime,
to recognize that media are in fact of limits—situated both in
the middle of our lives and at the limit they constitute the
building blocks and brinks of being. In order to remedy the
existential deficit in the field, in Existential Media Amanda
Lagerkvist revisits existential philosophy through a reappreciation
of Karl Jaspers philosophy, and of his concept of the limit
situation: those ultimate moments in life—of loss, crisis and
guilt—which we are called upon to seize. Introducing the field of
existential media studies in conversation with disability studies,
the new materialism and the environmental humanities, the book
offers a media theory of the limit situation which brings limits,
in all their shapes and forms, onto the radar when we interrogate
media. Lagerkvist 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 profound stakes which heighten existential uncertainty,
vulnerability as well as potential fecundity. Placing the
mourner—the coexister—at the center of media studies, by
entering into the slow fields of mourning, commemorating and
speaking to the dead in the online environment, she brings out that
existential media ambivalently offer metric parameters, caring
lifelines and transcendent experiences which ultimately display
post-interactive modes of being digital in slowness, silence and
waiting. The book ultimately calls forth a different ethos which
powerfully challenges ideals of limitlessness, quantification and
speed, and seeks out alternate intellectual and ethical coordinates
for reclaiming, imagining and anticipating a responsible future
with existential media.
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