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Existential Media

A Media Theory of the Limit Situation

Amanda Lagerkvist author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc

Published:16th Aug '22

Should be back in stock very soon

Existential Media cover

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.

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 *

ISBN: 9780190925567

Dimensions: 161mm x 242mm x 22mm

Weight: 517g

256 pages