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.
Industry Reviews
"Amanda Lagerkvist, an established scholar of media, memory and global urban landscapes, in this book breaks radical new ground, both for herself and for the whole field of media and communications research. Reflecting deeply not just on the inheritance of existentialist philosophy, but on the contemporary crises of climate change, datafication and the global pandemic, Lagerkvist's writing is fresh, precise and impassioned: this book urgently needs to be read."
-- Nick Couldry, London School of Economics and Political Science
"We live through media and always have. Yet rarely do scholars take the courageous and risky approach of Lagerkvist in explaining what media do to how we understand our own existence. If Sartre were to write about existentialism today, this is how he would write--or rather, he might wish HE had written this. A deep and original account of how we through media, come closer to and push away from the limits of human existence." -- Zizi Papacharissi, Professor
& Head, Communication; Professor, Political Science; University Scholar, University of Illinois at Chicago
"In a world obsessed with acceleration and optimisation, Existential Media arrives like a tremor beneath the surface, revealing how our technological lives are permeated with fragility, fracture and finitude. Amanda Lagerkvist's bold reorientation of media theory links our digital condition to bigger existential questions, offering a profoundly original framework for thinking about what it means to live - and die - with media." -- Joanna Zylinska,
Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice, King's College London
"Existential Media invites media theorists besotted with the posthuman to ponder the fundamental human condition: finitude. Lagerkvist writes about encounters at the limit-encounters with death and breakdown and crisis-as sources of unexpected insight, mostly untapped by media scholars. Existential Media is one of those rare works that leaves the reader disoriented into uncertainty. That is among this field-establishing book's major
achievements, to implore us to consider that our digital enclosures are also mortal, also marked by disconnection and decay." -- Jefferson Pooley, The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania
"Amanda Lagerkvist's Existential Media is both a stunning demonstration of the illuminative power of existential philosophy and a declaration of a new way forward for media studies. Drawing timeless lessons from the existentialist tradition (especially the work of Jaspers, but also Kierkegaard, Sartre, and many more), Lagerkvist draws attention to ways in which death, loss, disability and precarity figure in and challenge contemporary logics of speed
and control. In an era of totalising technological fatalism, Existential Media calls us back to the human, to the vulnerable and mortal - in short, to existence - and to a hope in the possibilities of care and
connection." -- Patrick Stokes , Deakin University
"Amanda Lagerkvist's Existential Media marks a watershed in our understanding of media. The conventional emphasis in communication research is on questions of power (who wields it, and over whom) and meaning (who makes it). Lagerkvist offers a critical reorientation by insisting that the key issue is human existence as such, and how media are among the fundamental conditions of our being as mortal and limited. Theoretically bold and philosophically
profound, Lagerkvist's writing is infused with a deep sense of care for the lives of those living with crisis (which, given that life is finite, ultimately includes everyone), of "gentle listening" to the distress
of others. Existential Media forces us to think in new ways about media, vulnerability, hope, and the very stakes of being alive." -- Paul Frosh, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
