[Commlist] New Book - Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation

New Book

Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation

By Amanda Lagerkvist

Oxford University Press

Order online at www.oup.com/academic <http://www.oup.com/academic> with 
promo code AAFLYG6 to save 30%.

About the book

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 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 mourner—the coexister—at 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.

Endorsements

"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, University of Illinois-Chicago*

Table of Contents

Preface
Note on sources
Introduction: Media of Limits
PART I Existentializing Media
Chapter 1. Limit Situations (of the Digital): Restoring Karl Jaspers for 
Media Theory
Chapter 2. Into the Slow Field: The What, The How and the Why
Chapter 3. Existential Media Studies: Lineages and Lines
Chapter 4. Existential Media: Propositions and Properties
PART II Digital Limit Situations
Chapter 5. Metric Media: Numerical Being, Marginal Beings and the Limits 
of Measuring
Chapter 6. Caring Media: Beings on the (Life)line
Chapter 7. Transcendent Media: Caring for the Dead, Relating at the 
Threshold
Chapter 8. Anticipatory Media: Futurability on the Brinks of Time
Postscript. Going dark: Refusals in slowness, silence and waiting
Recommended Reading
Index

About the author

Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of Media and Communication Studies in the 
Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. She is 
principal investigator of the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for 
Digital Existence. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded 
the field of existential media studies. She heads the project: "BioMe: 
Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in 
Everyday Lifeworlds" funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg 
Foundation, in which her group studies the lived experiences of 
biometric AI, for example voice and face recognition technologies. She 
is the editor of Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence 
in Digital Culture (2019).

(amanda.lagerkvist /at/ im.uu.se)


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