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Existential Media

Existential Media
A Media Theory of the Limit Situation

A M A N DA L AG E R K V I ST

1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
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© Oxford University Press 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction
rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022900028

ISBN 978–0–19–092556–7

DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925567.001.0001

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
In memory of Johannes
Philosophizing starts with our situation.
—Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 1 (1932/1969), 43
Contents

Preface ix
Note on Sources xv

Introduction: Media of Limits 1

I . E X I S T E N T IA L I Z I N G M E D IA

1. Limit Situations (of the Digital): Restoring Karl Jaspers for Media
Theory 19
2. Into the Slow Field: The What, the How, and the Why 48
3. Existential Media Studies: Lineages and Lines 64
4. Existential Media: Propositions and Properties 100

I I . D IG I TA L L I M I T SI T UAT IO N S

5. Metric Media: Numerical Being, Marginal Beings, and the

Limits of Measuring 119
6. Caring Media: Beings on the (Life)line 148
7. Transcendent Media: Caring for the Dead, Relating at
the Threshold 166
8. Anticipatory Media: Futurability on the Brinks of Time 197

Postscript—Going Dark: Refusals in Slowness, Silence, and Waiting 223

Huset (Association for Children in Bereavement), and Gergö Hadlaczky from

the Swedish National Centre for Suicide Research and Prevention at Karolinska
institutet. I would also like to thank Ingela Bendt of Spädbarnsfonden, whose
deep knowledge of and insight into the world of bereavement has been of great
importance.
Thanks, too, to my cronies in the Department of Computer and Systems
Sciences at Stockholm University: Petter Karlström, Barry Brown, Airi
Lampinen, and Uno Fors. A major thank you to the Humlab at Umeå University,
and especially Stefan Gelfgren, for offering me a week of writing in their friendly
vicinity. It’s such a treat to work with PhD students: Katya Linden, Evelina
Lundmark, Ragnhild Fjellro, Maria Rogg, and Emma Rönngren—thank you for
keeping me on my toes. Support from my mentors, furthermore, has been indis-
pensable: Birgitta Svensson of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History
and Antiquities (Vitterhetsakademien) and Kjell Svensson of the Royal Swedish
Academy of Engineering Sciences (Ingenjörsvetenskapsakademien). Whatever
else this extraordinary experience has taught me on so many levels, I will always
be able to look back and say, as the poet William Butler Yeats did when con-
templating where everything truly began and ended: “My glory was I had such
friends”!
In these exceptional times, supportive environments of professional pru-
dence are indispensable for intellectual work. I’m deeply grateful to the editors
at Oxford University Press, Norman Hirschy and Sarah Humphreville, for their
backing and excellent advice throughout the process. Last but not least, I must
thank the habitats and beings that have enabled everything. Originally con-
ceived as an idea following on from an evening course at Adolf Fredriks kyrka
on Kierkegaard taught by Ted Harris in 2010, the project and its vision gained
more distinct contours at the Sigtuna Foundation in 2011, in the deep silence
and serendipity that its vital milieu always offers. I have returned there innu-
merable times, for meetings, retreats, conferences, workshops. I can’t hug the
building itself, and in these times of COVID-19 I can’t even hug the people who
also animate its spirit, but I offer Alf Linderman and his crew my declaration of
love. I must thank the Harald and Louise Ekman Foundation for the stipend that
allowed one week of writing at Sigtuna, in the final stages of this book project.
I also want to thank the islands I call mine. I express gratitude to my parents,
Siw and Bo, for their monasterial regime on one of them, during the most cru-
cial of weeks in the isolation these times have demanded of us, and for their
sticking to it in both sickness and health. My beloved uncle and aunt, Börje and
Inga—you are my role models in life, and the likes of you are why this world is so
meaningful, capacious, wise, and friendly. My sister, Cajsa, and mother in-law,
Ingalill—thank you for always caring. I am grateful for sharing this life of writing
with my cats, Ossi and Cleo, especially the latter for her company at dawn and
Preface xiii

her unfailing loyalty. My sunshine boys, Johan, Vilmer, and Love: thank you for
being there through fire and water, and for your love, which always lights up the
shores of our shared existence.
Amanda Lagerkvist
Hide
August 8, 2021
Note on Sources

Parts of this book expand on portions of previously published materials and

earlier versions of essays, for which permissions to reprint have been obtained.
Excerpts from my article “Existential Media: Toward a Theorization of Digital
Thrownness,” New Media & Society, 19, no. 1 (2017): 96–110 are republished
here by permission of Sage. Permission to reprint excerpts has also been
obtained from Taylor and Francis for “Digital Existence: An Introduction,” in
Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture, ed.
Amanda Lagerkvist (London: Routledge, 2019). Reproduced with permis-
sion of The Licensor through PLSclear. Passages from these two texts appear
in revised form in different theory sections of Part I. A differently framed ver-
sion of c hapter 5 was published as “Numerical Being and Non-being: Probing
the Ethos of Quantification in Bereavement Online,” in A Networked Self and
Birth, Life, Death, ed. Zizi Papacharissi (New York: Routledge, 2018), and it
is reprinted here by permission of Taylor and Francis. Reproduced with per-
mission of The Licensor through PLSclear. A different and shorter rendition
of chapter 6 was published as Amanda Lagerkvist and Yvonne Andersson,
“The Grand Interruption: Death Online and Mediated Lifelines of Shared
Vulnerability,” Feminist Media Studies, 17, no. 4 (2017): 550–564, here reprinted
with authorization from Taylor and Francis. Permission has also been obtained
from Taylor and Francis to reprint parts of “The Media End: Digital Afterlife
Agencies and Techno-existential Closure,” in Digital Memory Studies: Media
Pasts in Transition, ed. Andrew Hoskins (New York: Routledge, 2017); the short
piece “The Digital Afterlife,” in Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice
in Digital Media, ed. Heidi Campbell and Ruth Tsuria (New York: Routledge,
2021); and excerpts from “The Internet Is Always Awake: Sensations, Sounds
and Silences of the Digital Grave,” in Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and
Transcendence in Digital Culture, ed. Amanda Lagerkvist (London: Routledge,
2019), which now appear in a new synthesis as chapter 7. All reproduced with
permission of The Licensor through PLSclear. Parts of chapter 8, finally, were
published via Open Access as “Digital Limit Situations: Anticipatory Media be-
yond ‘the New AI Era,’ ” Journal of Digital Social Research, 2, no. 3 (2020): 16–41.
Introduction
Media of Limits

This is the limit, tragedy, but also the great opportunity of our
times: when data +computation are not a merely technical deal
anymore, they assume an existential value for their characteristic of
being our only credible way to experience complex, global, intercon-
nected phenomena.
This requires an enormous transformation: to our values, to our
sense of solidarity, to how we perceive the ecosystem we live in. In
one word: to our culture.
—Salvatore Iaconesi, March 12, 20201

In a culture where the digital is embedded in everything, there seems on all counts
to be no limit to its thrust. Intuitively, this may feel absolutely true. Corroborated
by rhetorical claims by the digital corporations within today’s platform ecology,
and by the limitless capitalization of life, this truth also resonates most impor-
tantly with everyday lived experience in a culture where digital technologies are
imbricated in practically all spheres of the human lifeworld. Environmental,
but also wearable and incorporated, these digital media forms are interwoven
with our bodies, while our embodied selves and globally distributed traces are
entangled with the technologized everyday. Reflecting and shedding important
light on these developments, a recent tide of new materialist media philosophical
theorization has relentlessly stressed media’s vital role in sustaining life itself.2
In this perspective, often reliant on Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of originary
technicity and fundamental ontology, media are mundane and therefore deeply
existential, since humans are in fact co-conditioned recursively by technologies,

1 Salvatore Iaconesi, message posted to the AoIR List, March 12, 2020.
2 See, for example, Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life after New Media: Mediation as Vital
Process (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), which proposes a vitalist account positing mediation
as describing the hybrid process of the emergence of life itself, of becoming, in which human and
nonhuman entities are entangled. In John Durham Peters’s seminal media materialist, elemental
media philosophy, stress is placed on media’s role in sustaining life. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a
Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 28.

Existential Media. Amanda Lagerkvist, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925567.003.0001
2 Existential Media

tools, artifacts, and media of communication.3 While this approach provides

crucial pieces of the puzzle, its offerings also reach a saturation point. It simply
does not exhaust what is at stake.
This book will choose a riskier path. For Salvatore Iaconesi—an Italian robot
engineer, artist, and activist who initiated a global performance project enti-
tled La Cura after having been diagnosed with brain cancer in 2012—the global
pandemic provided an avid illustration of the continued importance of his mis-
sion to link his singular ordeal to planetary tribulations in the age of computa-
tion, via open-source sharing of his medical data. When the crisis erupted in
the early months of 2020 across Europe, his cancer had simultaneously decided
to come back.4 For Iaconesi, the current moment is in fact a situation of limit.
Reaching out to various communities, his posting linked his dire straits to the
broader tragedy and crisis into which the world was suddenly thrown. “This is
the limit,” he surmises, yet at once the opportunity for transformation: “Without
an Ecosystemic Culture we will not make it: now it’s cov19, then will be climate
change and others, and things will be the same or worse. We need to start de-
signing and building it together, now.” Such refigurations of media and computa-
tion as existential media, beyond the technical, will allow for appreciating those
global conditions that now affect humanity, their complexity as well as their in-
terdependence. Importantly, the predicaments conjoined in Iaconesi’s situation
constitute a limit in existential terms—a limit that may also entail a serendipitous
opening. Iaconesi’s words therefore express an ardent sense of exigency as well as
possibility.
Existential Media recognizes that classic existential questions about what it
means to be human and mortal are deeply enmeshed in our technological cul-
ture. As Iaconesi’s call importantly establishes, media are also existential due
to their significance during extraordinary, transformative, or traumatic events
and crises that transcend the everyday, remind us of mortality, and importantly

3 In the tradition of originary technicity, of which Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida are the

most prominent representatives, the long Western tradition of thinking about technologies as ex-
trinsic to being human is refuted. For an overview, see Arthur Bradley, Originary Technicity: The
Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). This position
has proponents across a wide array of different intellectual currents within posthumanism and the
new materialism. In media theory more specifically, see Friedrich Kittler, “Towards an Ontology of
Media,” Theory, Culture & Society, 26, nos. 2–3 (2009): 23–31, https://doi.org/10.1177/026327640
9103106. For recent examples of works that profess to the approach of originary technicity within
media studies, and that are drawn into the Heideggerian orbit in offering all-out media ontologies,
see Paddy Scannell, Television and the Meaning of Live: An Enquiry into the Human Situation
(Cambridge: Polity, 2014) and Tim Markham, Digital Life (Oxford: Polity, 2020). By contrast, J. D.
Peters offers a more ambivalent engagement with Heidegger’s ontology, and pursues its implications
within a metaphysical reappropriation in The Marvelous Clouds. I return to these new media
ontologies in c hapter 3.
4 In La Cura, Iaconesi used his own medical data to “propose a global repositioning of disease in

society,” with an eye to reclaiming “our bodies and identities by creating a participatory open source
cure for cancer.” https://www.artisopensource.net/projects/la-cura/, accessed October 7, 2021.
Introduction 3

traverse individual and global scales. In this book, I define existential media as
both the priors and the limits, the frame and the edge, the building blocks and
the brinks of being. They constitute the antinomies of the modern human sit-
uation, and they therefore require responsivity and responsibility. In our pre-
sent datafied world, it is thus a truism to say that media matter. Yet this fact is
now greatly magnified, as contemporary life finds itself perched on the limits.
The implications as well as discontents of our media situation are potentially also
changing.5 Taking these transformations seriously means recognizing that, in
the unbearable intimacy of emergency of the predicaments at hand—as religious
studies scholar Sam Mickey has put it6—alternate contours of what media can
mean are revealed. The crystallized challenges ultimately open out, I argue, to a
media theory of limit. This requires, as I aim to show in this book, a revisiting of
the tradition of existential philosophy, particularly through the writings of one
of its largely forgotten luminaries, Karl Jaspers, who offered a mediation between
the two main emphases of the tradition of existentialism: the instrumental/ma-
terial and the subjectivist/moral (to which I will return in c hapter 3). Here I will
be drawing on and expanding upon his concept of the limit situation, which he
defines as encounters with death, crisis, guilt, and conflict (as well as with birth
and love, we might add). These are moments in life that may be transformative if
we seize them as we face the limits of what we can control. In fact, limit situations
point to the basic existential condition of limit, and reveal our being to ourselves
“in a partial way by pointing to the presence of ‘gaps’ in the world and the failure
of all efforts to understand the world in terms of itself.”7 Jaspers’s philosophical
anthropology, with its insistence upon uncertainty and the humbling limits of
knowledge, and its reluctance to proclaim any ontological enclosures, is an ex-
ample of what artist and media scholar Joanna Zylinska calls a “post-masculinist
rationality.”8 This is a move that requires the courage to face the uncertainties of
that which cannot be controlled, and to allow something truly different and un-
predictable to emerge. Hence, this book proposes that returning to the insights
of Jaspers, and rehabilitating while reframing them, may offer such less likely
routes ahead for media theory.
Taking its cue from these interventions, this book argues that, even as media
are literally life-defining, they are not without limit, and they speak to and about
limits and limitations in a variety of ways. The limit situation is chosen as a

5 Friedrich Kittler famously defined media as determining our situation. See Friedrich A. Kittler,

Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), xxxix.
6 Sam Mickey, Coexistentialism and the Unbearable Intimacy of Ecological Emergency (Idaho Falls,

ID: Lexington Books, 2016).

7 David Stewart and Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology: A Guide to the Field and Its

Literature, 2nd ed. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990), 83.

8 Joanna Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press,

2014), 15.
4 Existential Media

privileged reality which allows for bringing limits, in all their shapes and forms,
onto the radar when interrogating digital existence. To enter into these terrains,
the book chooses one margin that has the peculiar characteristic of sooner or
later encompassing us all—the mourning and struggling of human beings at the
limit—as the privileged site for rethinking media. Placing those who are poised
on the edge—the mourners, the disabled, or those who are tarrying, waiting,
illness-stricken, bereft, stumbling, disenfranchised, meek, and marginalized—at
the center of media studies makes a difference. First of all, it brings to our atten-
tion the fact that ontologically we are not only technological; we are also finite
beings. Human existence itself, to state the obvious, is and has always been lim-
ited and precarious. Life is a life within limits. Our bodies are limited by their
boundaries. They age and they decay—reminding us of their mortality, of evap-
oration, vulnerability, and finitude. Or as critical disability scholar Tobin Siebers
puts it: “History reveals one unavoidable truth about human beings—whatever
our destiny as a species, we are as individuals feeble and finite.”9 Hence if tech-
nologies are us, as the posthumanist credo has it, mediation cannot merely be a
vital process; existential media are also media of and within limits.
In contemporary debates, stress is placed on the limitless enforcements and
extractions of surveillance capitalism.10 Datafication implies that our bodies and
inmost lives are mined; our existential needs are extracted, rendered as behav-
ioral data, without meaningful consent and without limit. And as digital tech-
nologies have achieved this intimate and arguably all-encompassing role within
the lifeworld—spanning everything between life and death—they have also be-
come increasingly autonomous. As life-giving, environmental forces, they con-
jure up more than inevitable developments or endless possibilities to transcend
obstacles. They even seem to offer up eternity, and the gift of being able to foresee
the future. As media theorist Wendy H. K. Chun has pointed out, their predic-
tive aspirations and anticipatory behavior make them into sorcerers of sorts, in
which humans are inclined to place limitless trust.11
While these profound implications of pervasive datafication are incontrovert-
ible, existentializing media, however, has the advantage of interrupting the most

9 Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 7.
10As a range of media critical commentary has pointed out of late, there is in fact no limit to the
appropriation of the human and social world by data, as humanity is precariously faced with all-per-
vasive forms of datafication. See, for example, Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism
and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology, 30, no. 1
(2015): 75–89, https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2015.5, and The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight
for a Human Future at the New Frontiers of Power (London: Profile Books, 2019); Nick Couldry and
Ulises A. Mejias, “Data Colonialism: Rethinking Big Data’s Relation to the Contemporary Subject,”
Television & New Media, 20, no. 4 (2019): 336–349, https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476418796632; and
Mark Andrejevic, Automated Media (London: Routledge, 2020).
11 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (Cambridge, MA: MIT

Press, 2011).
Introduction 5

common myth of all: the proclaimed unboundedness of digital media. In line

with my interests, media scholar Benjamin Peters has forcefully argued for a re-
buttal of the fantasies of complete digital convergence, or imminent singularity.
Moving beyond seeing the digital as simply counting, we must also understand
how it imperfectly indexes reality and manipulates the social imaginary—with
dire consequences for the disenfranchised—in the process.12 He furthermore
claims that “we foreclose against a fuller understanding of the limits of our dig-
ital condition (and what those limits make possible) when we understand digits
only computationally.”13 Toward a media theory of limit, we need to begin by
embracing the scarce and the scanty; the meager and limited resources of human
life, of the social world, and of every medium. The technologies themselves are
replete with glitches. Media are vulnerable and volatile. Connections fail and
break. Media will age and even die.14 They are thus media of limits in the shape

12 This is my key understanding, following Benjamin Peters, “Digital,” in Digital Keywords: A

Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture, ed. Benjamin Peters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2016), of the semiotics and implications of the digital. This conceptual triptych
prompted a realization which also became pivotal for how I weighed a postdigital subtitle for this book
against the digital option. Although there are distinct and irreducible dimensions of what I call the
digital limit situation, I found that signposting the digital for a formulation of this theory was never-
theless insufficient (a matter I return to in c hapter 4, where I offer a few definitions of keywords). The
implications of reconceiving media as existential media apply more broadly. In addition, all media are
digital media today, while arguably also offering many features that are very similar to analog media
forms, as Florian Cramer has recently discussed. In turn, this makes the concept of the postdigital in a
literal sense very useful. This is why I here propose moving toward a media theory of the limit situation.
For a much more tech-savvy and sophisticated discussion, see Cramer, for whom the postdigital is de-
fined “literally as a perspective that finds the distinction between digital and non-digital to be less clear
than it seems when it is rigorously inspected, and also less useful and relevant than it often seems.” For
Cramer, the postdigital perspective breaks with the new media paradigm. He argues that “most of the
principles of new media as defined by Manovich . . . are not specific to digital technology.” These five
principles, namely numerical presentation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding, were
commonly employed, as Cramer argues, “in experimental arts before the availability of computing,
and [they] continue to be employed in non-computational practices such as artists’ books and artist-
run handmade film labs. Conversely, one could even argue that the hegemony of smartphones, with
their closed operating systems and app ecosystems, have since the 2010s greatly constrained, if not
cancelled out, four of Manovich’s five principles of new media: modularity (the possibility of com-
bining digital information), variability (the possibility of making variations and versions), automa-
tion (the possibility of programming) and transcoding (the possibility of translating media into other
formats). For users, a vintage analog 16-or 35-mm film editing table or a reel-to-reel tape recorder
now meets those new media criteria better than does a social media app like TikTok.” Florian Cramer
and Petar Jandrić, “Interview: Postdigital: A Term That Sucks but Is Useful,” Postdigital Science and
Education, online first (March 31, 2021): n.p., https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-021-00225-9.
13 Benjamin Peters, “Digital,” 95, italics added.
14 John D. Peters, “Proliferation and Obsolescence of the Historical Record in the Digital Era,” in

Cultures of Obsolescence: History, Materiality, and the Digital Age, ed. Babette Bärbel Tischleder and
Sarah Wasserman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 79–96. The long-standing relationship
between death and communication itself will be discussed in chapters 3 and 7. Additionally, it should
be noted here that my project resonates with several attempts to bring finitude more broadly into
thinking about media. See, for example, Leah Lievrouw, who speaks of decaying and dead media,
pointing out that the limitations of the dream of digital eternity and limitless recording also stem
from the technologies themselves, as they are imperfect, ephemeral, and soon-to-be obsolete. She
stresses the impossibility of total recall, both in digital culture and outside it, and the inevitability
of loss: “However, the idea of total, loss-free digital capture of all knowledge and information, or
6 Existential Media

of disconnection, breakdown, and shortage (as will be further elaborated in

chapter 4). Endings and limits are existentially axiomatic, and, as such, a fact of
the life we know.15 This is echoed in Amina Gautier’s collection of short stories,
The Loss of All Lost Things, when two parents try to relate the aporia they have ex-
perienced in losing a child, to the broader experiential field of a bereft humanity:

They are not the first to suffer loss. They try to keep it all in perspective, to think
of the myriad things that have been lost. Such as: The Ark of the Covenant.
The city of Atlantis. The Dead Sea Scrolls. El Dorado. The Holy Grail. Amelia
Earhart somewhere over the Pacific. Pompeii buried beneath volcanic ash. The
RMS Titanic at the bottom of the sea.
Other lost things are lost slowly, over time, rather than in one fell swoop.
Such as: Loss of feeling, of life and limb. Loss of blood. Loss of memory. Loss
of looks, of faith and time. Loss of sanity. Teeth lost under the pillow. Long-lost
relatives—ignored, forgotten, pretended away.16

The story ultimately underscores that some types of loss, such as losing a child,
override all other lost things. But the quotation also points to the basic givens
of limit and loss in existence, which we can neither ignore nor readily resolve.
This fundamentally existential insight—that there is a limit to life, to energy,
to bodily and mental strength, to desire, to beauty, to youth, to intelligence, to
achievement, to movement, to success, to resilience, to clout, to power, to com-
munication, to media—also resonates, as already suggested, with thinking
within critical disability studies. For example, in interrogating the broad and
complex meanings and lived realities of fatigue, media scholar Jonathan Sterne

‘perfect remembering,’ should be viewed skeptically. In the first place, the total capture and recall
of a society’s (or even an individual’s) works and activities has never been, and is unlikely ever to
be, possible. All cultures forget; digital culture is no exception. Historically, the overwhelming ma-
jority of human knowledge has been lost, destroyed, sabotaged, pulled out of context, excluded from
the record, suppressed, or never recorded at all. Conclusions are inevitably drawn on the basis of
incomplete, contradictory, and divergent information. There is little about culture today to suggest
that these processes have changed in any fundamental way as a consequence of digital communica-
tion technologies.” “The Next Decade in Internet Time,” Information, Communication & Society, 15,
no. 5 (2012): 629, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.675691. See also Chun, who discusses the
undead of information in Programmed Visions, 133ff. See too Deborah Lupton, who reconceives of
data as lively and then worn out, dying, and dead in The Quantified Self: A Sociology of Self-Tracking
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 36–44, and Amanda Lagerkvist, “The Media End: Digital Afterlife
Agencies, and Techno-existential Closure,” in Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition, ed.
Andrew Hoskins (New York: Routledge, 2017), 48–84, where I discuss ending media—that is, dis-
connection—in the context of offering a typology for the digital afterlife.

15 Or as Kierkegaard muses: the sickness unto death—despair—can only be cured by an

ending: being able to die away from it. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death by Anti-Climacus,
trans. Alastair Hannay (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1849/1989).
16 Amina Gautier, The Loss of All Lost Things (Denver: Elixir Press, 2016), 23–24.
Introduction 7

echoes my concerns: “Activity—both the daily actions of a person living in the

world, and any intentionally additional options—politics, art, care for others,
and any number of other actions—occurs within limits.”17 Instead of theorizing
fatigue in relation to indexing its limits, Sterne proposes a nondepletionist po-
litical phenomenology of impairment that always requires “a response to others’
fatigue, as an unending obligation.” He critically champions a view of fatigue as a
part of human existence more fully, and as a legitimate way of being. This I read
as a normative theory of limit, and an ethics of responsiveness. He goes on:

No subject has unlimited energy or unlimited resources—and the same should be

said of the planet. The ideology of ability suggests that the concern with those
limits can be overridden, ignored. And they can be for a time—people can push
themselves beyond their limits, but always with the need for recovery time,
and only to a point. Here, a disability theory opens out to a general theory of
finitude.18

This approach may form a coalition here with existential media studies. As al-
ready noted, the theory of finitude par excellence is existential philosophy. As
much as its focus on death must be thoroughly qualified,19 this book argues there
is reason to keep finitude on the radar to highlight limit and vulnerability as a
corrective to figurations that invoke unbounded forces. Furthermore, it is pos-
sible to situate limit as the very site of birth and rebirth, which is the offering of
Karl Jaspers’s concept of the limit situation. Importantly, however, this is not to
rehearse the claim that death decisively overrides all other formative experiences.

17 Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 164.

18 Ibid., 168, italics added.
19 Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger famously placed death centrally in their analyses of human

existence. Critics have argued that the existentialists are simply wrong to emphasize death as the site
of authenticity and to portray being-toward-death as the resolute road to the truthful human life.
The critique rests on two grounds. First, as Ronald Kastenbaum concludes after reviewing the field of
terror management theory, which took Kierkegaard to heart in psychology (via the writings of Ernst
Becker), the alleged importance of death anxiety, and the proclaimed universal mortal terror among
human populations, could not be confirmed in empirical and clinical reality. In other words: “Death
makes us anxious. But so does life.” “Should We Manage Terror If We Could?,” Omega: Journal of
Death and Dying, 59, no. 4 (2009): 291, https://doi.org/10.2190/OM.59.4.a. Second, critics of exis-
tentialism deem the existentialists to be myopically obsessed with their own death, at the expense
of a more socially aware outlook on life in solidarity with others. They also argue that existential
philosophers lack a more broadly conceived view of the human condition, inclusive of natality, for ex-
ample. Today, phenomenologists themselves have also moved the epicenter of existentialist concerns
to questions about birth, life, and vulnerability. For a problematization and diversification of the focus
on mortality in existentialism, see Sara Heinämaa, “The Sexed Self and the Mortal Body,” in Birth,
Death and Femininity: Philosophies of Embodiment, ed. Robin May Schott (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2010), 73–97, and “The Many Senses of Death: Phenomenological Insights into
Human Mortality,” in Death and Mortality: From Individual to Communal Perspectives, ed. Outi
Hakola, Sara Heinämaa, and Sami Pihlström (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies,
2015), 100–117.
8 Existential Media

In addition, finitude must also be stretched beyond the individual level, as we

stand on the brink, as a species on a fatigued planet.20
In this vein, Existential Media will be asking: What if life, and therefore media
life, belongs to the limit from the outset, and not to endless energies and abili-
ties? Instead of seeing limit as an impairment and an absence, pitted against ide-
alized perfection and movement, what if we see it as a way of being and thus
a site of value? What if the margins of disability, grief, and illness constitute
privileged ways of seeing and knowing the world that may also bring alternate
and neglected contours of media into sight? Here I will be drawing inspiration
from the utter possibilities of limit to stir things up: that is, to resituate the so-
called normate through the fatigued, and to unsettle the nonafflicted through
the bereaved—to challenge a culture of speed simply by waiting. Importantly, it
should be noted from the outset that limits take on two main functions. On the
one hand, when encountered in one’s life, they call on us to slow down, to halt our
habituated need to proceed, and to overcome difficulties and stay, at least for a
while, with the troubling moment. Limits urge us to stop acting, or to stop acting
out. They enforce modes of waiting.21 On the other hand, as we will see in this
book, limits also provoke us to seek higher modes of existence and knowledge.
They challenge us and thus require some kind of agency and advancement, some
kind of movement. This may seem like a contradiction, an antinomy even, but
these two modes of processing one’s encounters with limit situations shape their
very dynamic, their irreducible reality.
Due to power asymmetries and injustices, existential media are always related
yet irreducible to the paradigms of the social, political, economic, and cultural.
Consequently, this means that neither classic forms of criticality and media so-
ciological models, nor emic media anthropologies and posthumanist critique,
will on their own be able to interrogate the stakes at hand. If we consider media
as, in effect, part of the existential terrains of connectivity, they should imply—as
all existential phenomena—limits, liminality, ambivalence, ambiguity, incom-
prehensibility, indeterminacy, and anxiety, but also, nota bene, ethical choice
and action within the confines of the human condition. In order to address these
matters, and instead of providing an ontological resolution that explains it all,
this book is written in the spirit of offering conversations by an open window. En
route to doing so, I combine media materialist insights with the wisdom of Karl
Jaspers’s existentialism, “upgraded” to our contemporary technologized culture,

20 In fact this can also be found, according to Christoph Mundt, in Jaspers’s thinking, which takes

the limit situation of death as referring to finality both in life and of life, broadening the implications
of finitude beyond the individual to mankind itself, and to the universe. “Jaspers’ Concept of ‘Limit
Situation’: Extensions and Therapeutic Applications,” in Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy and Psychopathology,
ed. Thomas Fuchs, Thiemo Breyer, and Christoph Mundt (Berlin: Springer, 2014), 170–171.
21 See Shahram Khosravi, ed., Waiting: A Project in Conversation (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2021).
Introduction 9

and in conversation with recent tides of theorization in, for example, media phi-
losophy, feminist new materialism, critical disability studies, the environmental
humanities, anticipation studies, and the field of metric cultures.
The limit situation of loss is today at play in cancer blogs and support groups
of virtual mourning, where people through social networking grieve as in pre-
modern societies—together. Empirically, therefore, this book attends to mourning,
commemorating, and speaking to the dead online as well as to the digital afterlife.
These are proliferating phenomena that have attracted growing attention in the
burgeoning interdisciplinary field of death online research, to which this work owes
a debt and hopes to contribute. Over the last ten years, scholars in this field have
been exploring how the very concepts of both death and mourning have changed, as
people live on socially online after biological death, for extended periods of time. In
addition, they have observed a sense of deprivatization of death and mourning, as
death has become desequestered and has returned to everyday life in the West. Social
media have thus ushered in a series of social, spatial, and temporal expansions of the
realms of death and mourning.22 The field has grown rich in empirical detail. My
hope is to begin to offer a theoretical framing and an anchoring of the discussions
in this field through existential conceptualization—that is, through a media theory
of the limit situation. Finally, due to the roles these practices and phenomena play
in the lifeworld in ultimate moments, media may also in themselves heighten both
vulnerability and uncertainty in the present age. This, too, compels us to study them
existentially.
A further aim here is to draw upon and critically engage some of the themes
within the new materialism. For example, I see its focus on more than human
webs of care or on distributed ethics and agency as productive diffractions and
openings, which nevertheless need to be pieced together through existential
media inquiry.23 Here I argue that Jaspers’s existentialism will make limits visible,

22 See, for example, Tony Walter, Rachid Hourizi, Wendy Moncur, and Stacey Pitsillides,

“Does the Internet Change How We Die and Mourn?,” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 64,
no. 4 (2011–12): 275–302, https://doi.org/10.2190/OM.64.4.a; Tony Walter, What Death Means Now
(Bristol: Policy Press Shorts Insights, 2017); and Jed R. Brubaker, Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish,
“Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning,” Information
Society, 29, no. 3 (2013): 152–163, https://doi.org/10.1080/01972243.2013.777300. Studies of such
phenomena in the burgeoning field of death online research show a desequestering as well as a de-
ferral of death in contemporary society: see Amanda Lagerkvist, “New Memory Cultures and
Death: Existential Security in the Digital Memory Ecology,” Thanatos, 2, no. 2 (December 2013),
https://thanatosjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/lagerkvist_newmemorycultures_than2220
131.pdf. See also Connor Graham, Wally Smith, Wendy Moncur, et al. “Introduction: Mortality in
Design,” Design Issues, 34, no. 1 (2018): 3–14, https://doi.org/10.1162/DESI_e_00472.
23 I am grateful to Benjamin Peters for suggesting that turning to the original metaphor of limits

in mathematics can be illuminating, since there is an analogy to my efforts to theorize the limit.
Limit does a kind of magic in mathematics. In Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the
Universe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), Steven Strogatz defines “the Infinity Principle”
as that which lets us divide a finite, dynamic situation into an infinite number of small pieces and
numbers, and then to sum these together to get a finite understanding. The paradox implies a
10 Existential Media

as well as help reintegrate the prismatic fragments into a different and produc-
tive figuration. This will amount to what feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti
calls a “politically charged practice of alternative representation. It is a way of
bringing into representation the unthinkable, in so far as it requires awareness
of the limitations as well as the specificity of one’s locations.”24 Hence, the fig-
uration makes it possible to envision an otherwise, and acts as a spotlight that
illuminates aspects of one’s practice that remained in obscurity, bringing to light
potentials therein. But existentializing media is also compelled by the need to
bring to the surface, in line with Jaspers, what was already known deep down.
Such a reawakening intuits and in effect requires a creative remapping of what
media may mean, and how we can approach them anew.
As I have argued at length elsewhere, the digital age is now revisited by classic
existential questions and themes, while also facing partially novel existential
challenges and opportunities.25 In the present day and age, the limit situation takes
on a particular meaning. Salvatore Iaconesi illuminates such particularities when he
vividly remarks: “A cancer and a global pandemic perfectly show the coexistence of
two dimensions: the individual and the ecosystem: and the problems that come with
it: which are complex and, thus, irreducible.”26 In line with Iaconesi, I retain a focus
on the individual as that hurting body, who is always already relational and inter-
subjective (as Jaspers would be the first to argue), and who is part of the biosphere.
Pushing toward a reconceiving of media, as they connect us, as we are hurting, to the
bigger picture—to the global agonies—he similarly draws attention to the fact that

in our world, this tragic dimension has a lot to do with data and computation.
The complex phenomena of our planet can be only experienced through enor-
mous quantities and qualities of data, and through the computation needed
to collect them, and to process and represent them. How can I experience cli-
mate change (as a global phenomenon, not just because it is hotter in my city)?
COV19? Poverty? Etc Data, data, data, and computation.27

condition in which we can only approach, but never reach, infinity. Infinite numbers also seem to dis-
solve every single number yet rely on them. The profound takeaway, I believe, is that simply remem-
bering this about numbers reveals that the finite and infinite belong to each other, constituting a basic
irresolvable paradox, an antinomy. But it also highlights the fact that thinking with limits means
allowing for dividing up something finite into fragments that may then be reintegrated, forming a
different figuration through which old truths can be as new.

24 Rosi Braidotti, “Teratologies,” in Deleuze and Feminist Theory, ed. Ian Buchanan and Claire

Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 170–171, italics added.

25 Amanda Lagerkvist, “Existential Media: Toward a Theorization of Digital Thrownness,” New

Media and Society, online first (June 7, 2016): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816649921.

26 Salvatore Iaconesi, message posted to the AoIR list, March 25, 2020, italics added. He goes on to

state that “complexity doesn’t have ‘solution.’ It has a life, a way to cope with it, but not a solution in the
sense of being able to reduce it to a point. There’s no App for it.”
27 Ibid.
Introduction 11

Existential Media offers a series of encounters with media technologies along

these untrodden paths, to arrive at, I hope, alternate and hopefully productive
intellectual coordinates for thinking about media as our situation: that is, as ex-
istential media. Existential media transversally span the scales of the individual
and the Ecosystem (as Iaconesi calls it); they illustrate the intense and all-per-
vasive embedding of media in the lifeworld on small as well as large scales.28
This book argues that these multiscalar entanglements have profound existen-
tial implications. Existential media both constitute and are constituted by what
I term the digital limit situation. The current moment of massive technological,
social, political, and ecological transformations is here conceived as an exis-
tential juncture.29 I therefore define the digital limit situation as a new life dif-
ference that cannot be minimized. As technologies mediate the universal limit
situations, they are in fact in that very act constituting themselves as new ones
that humans—in all our diversity—are not only forged by but also obliged to at-
tend to.
The theoretical, ethical, and historical chapters of Part I, “Existentializing
Media,” set the scene by first rehabilitating Jaspers’s philosophy, including his ap-
proach to technology, his perspective on being human, and his concept of the
limit situation, interspersed with thinking with limits in conversation with cur-
rent tides of theorization of the digital age and the present moment. The contours
of the digital limit situation are further elaborated here in light of how originary
technicity and originary vulnerability intersect (chapter 1). This section also
names and appreciates the “slow field” of mourning and illness, prompting and
provoking a particular ethos, ethics, and method (chapter 2). I further offer
an overview of the historical lineages of existential media studies, the existen-
tial deficit in the field, and a discussion of newer lines of scholarship on on-
tology and vulnerability pitted against an introduction of Jaspers’s philosophy

28 Here I am indebted to Jacek Smolicki, who has been developing the concept of the transversal

in the context of both artistic practice and media theorization. See Smolicki, “Minuting: Rethinking
the Ordinary Through the Ritual of Transversal Listening,” VIS—Nordic Journal for Artistic Research,
no. 5 (2021), https://www.en.visjournal.nu/minuting-rethinking-the-ordinary-through-the-ritual-
of-transversal-listening/. Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp analyze such scales in terms of “deep
mediatization,” which resonates with my transversal ambition here. The Mediated Construction of
Reality (Oxford: Polity, 2016).
29 Recently, this type of civilizational critique of technology has gained new proponents, and

strong voices have taken on the task of formulating what is at stake for today’s media situation. Nick
Couldry offers such crucial normative discussions on media ethics: that is, on what life is good to
lead and how media play into it. He asks, consequently, “Will we look back on the early twenty-first
century as the time when the practical necessity for an ethics of media and communication came to
be realized and a permanent new domain of ethics emerged?” Couldry, Media, Society, World: Social
Theory and Digital Media Practice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 181. According to Shannon
Vallor, this is a time faced with acute technomoral needs for humanity, Technology and the Virtues: A
Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). See also Zuboff,
Age of Surveillance Capitalism; and Brent Frischmann and Evan Selinger, Re-engineering Humanity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
12 Existential Media

of communication, which helps craft a crucial conceptualization of existential

vulnerability (chapter 3). In the final chapter of Part I, I offer an expanded discus-
sion of Jaspers’s ideas about existential communication and the role of discon-
nection and silence, while also launching a different subject for media studies.
Finally, I arrive at a definition of existential media. This definition recognizes
that all media, including digital technologies, can be seen as existential media.
I make this point by outlining their four key properties: they ground us, they
throw us, they speak to our vulnerability and relationality, and they require eth-
ical responsibility (chapter 4).
In Part II, “Digital Limit Situations,” I provide cases that center on voices from
the field of online bereavement, in a philosophically motivated and empirically
grounded endeavor to provide an arc of media instantiations of the digital limit
situation. The story begins with the bereft and hurting person in dire straits,
enmeshed in platform ecologies and the logics of quantification (chapter 5,
“Metric Media”). I then go deeper into the existential terrain to explore how she
is connecting to others online (chapter 6, “Caring Media”), and also to the dead
(chapter 7, “Transcendent Media”). I finally land ashore a networked medi-
ated planet in distress, where I envision, through hope, imagination, and cri-
tique, renewed mediated horizons of futurability—despite it all (chapter 8,
“Anticipatory Media”).
In a mood cognizant of finitude, I pay heed throughout to the needs of de-
liberate and serious existential disconnection, exemplified in online mourners
who respect the silence of the dead and whose entire existence signals a role
for both connection and reticence, for both acting and waiting. And along this
curvature of lived experiences, discursive frames, and material forms forged
and coconstituted by media, this book attends to singular bodies embedded
in technicity (including how bodies are mapped in aggregates of abstracted
correlations between algorithms and predicted behaviors in the future) as well as
to an elsewhere or an otherwise, as envisioned in methods of hope and anticipa-
tion that we can learn about, above all, from mourners. This span will also imme-
diately illustrate that there is something profound that connects the mortal coil
to the ever-perfected prediction imperatives of AI, autonomous systems, and the
logic of surveillance capitalism now penetrating life (I elaborate on this further
in c hapters 5 and 8). These pivotal extractions between the statistical attitude of
modern societies—which is the backdrop for our own society of big datafication
and absolute prediction—and the ignoring of the existential inevitabilities of
human limits have produced a culture dominated by an insensitive ontology of
numbers, which increasingly substitutes for a phenomenology of presence, em-
bodiment, and trust in human judgment.
In revolting against this, I am putting the circumnavigated and sidestepped
human and the vulnerable human body—existentialism’s concrete and relational
Introduction 13

individual, belonging to a concrete historical situation—in the spotlight anew.30

In this book I will name her the coexister. By making visible neglected aspects of
being human as a potential for becoming human, she will emerge as a deeply re-
lational being, who is stumbling and hurting, responsive and responsible, imbri-
cated in sociotechnological ensembles, and traversing these terrains more or less
successfully in search of, while never fully achieving, what might cautiously be
termed existential security.31 Additionally, providing in this manner a more so-
phisticated theory of the self seems both necessary and long overdue, in light

30 This I call the existential body. Importantly, in reintroducing the body into the digital,

N. Katherine Hayles distinguished between the hegemonic body as a cultural construct, and embod-
iment as that which captures an individual and experiential articulation of discourse. In this per-
spective there is no body, there are only bodies: “Embodiment is contextual, enmeshed within the
specificities of place, time, physiology and culture, which together compose enactment. Embodiment
never coincides exactly with the body. . . . Relative to the body, embodiment is elsewhere, at once
excessive and deficient in its infinite variations, particularities and abnormalities.” When We
Became Post-human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999), 196–197. Inspired by this insight, I propose that we consider a plurality
of embodied modes of being human in the digital limit situation: the notion of the existential
body is meant to capture being concrete singular beings in plurality. See also Amanda Lagerkvist,
“Embodiments of Memory: Toward and Existential Approach to the Culture of Connectivity,” in
Memory Unbound: Tracing the Dynamics of Memory Studies, ed. Stef Craps, Pieter Vermeulen, and
Lucy Bond (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). In feminist new materialist theories of embodiment,
there are no pure bodies. Bodies must be conceived as dynamic entities that exist in becoming, in a
yet-ness and thus in anticipation. For an overview, see Clara Fischer and Luna Dolezal, eds., New
Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). While this
is important, I am also hesitant about defining bodies in terms of limitless becoming, since I am not
primarily interested in nomadic and expansive bodies, which seem to rely on a template of able-
bodiedness and movement. Instead, I am loyal to bodies at the limit that recognize limits. Alison
Kafer reminds us, however, to avoid, on the other hand, seeing disability as a predetermined limit.
Refusing a fixed definition of disability, she allows the boundaries of the concept to be open. She
locates disability in a wide and complex net of features that do not pertain to any particular indi-
vidual, yet which pathologize and oppress them as they get associated with these particular features.
Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). Tobin Siebers, in Disability
Theory, critiques the contradictory ideology of ability in our culture, which sees bodies as irrelevant
and perfectible at the same time. The critique of able-bodiedness across these scholarships will it-
self, I suggest, accomplish precisely the needed balance between the processual and pluralistic view
of disability and embodiment, and the existential insights about the value of respecting limits and
embodied limit experiences.
31 Elsewhere I have explored how existential security is sought, achieved, or lost in our digital era,

with an eye to gaining detailed knowledge about how fundamental existential issues are pursued
when people’s lives and memories are increasingly shaped in, by, and through digital media forms.
See Lagerkvist, “New Memory Cultures.” The quest for existential security rhymes with what Jaspers
calls the living process as a quest for order, for individually and collectively creating and securing a
“shell” of belief systems, in the face of what he calls the antinomies of life; that is, basic irresolvable
paradoxes. These antinomies are especially activated in the limit situation. The shells of existence, for
Jaspers, are worldviews and patterns that are predictable and safe, that make it possible to navigate in
the world, and that enable pathfinding. Media, I submit, are also such shells, which may offer a sense
of existential security. Yet this concept is obviously an oxymoron and should never be taken too liter-
ally. Existential security can only be striven for; it can never be unconditionally reached. It can only
be temporarily achieved, since the shells always break and break anew. Cf. Christoph Mundt, “Impact
of Karl Jaspers’ General Psychopathology: The Range of Appraisal,” in One Century of Karl Jaspers’
General Psychopathology, ed. Giovanni Stanghellini and Thomas Fuchs (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 48.
14 Existential Media

of how media studies seems to have abandoned selfhood—becoming consumed

with sociality in the age of digital networks and social media—despite the key
parts played by subjectivity and personalization in the drama of the emergent
culture of connectivity.
Finally, Iaconesi’s remarks reflect an important observation made by Hannah
Arendt, whose intellectual resonances and friendship with Jaspers is well known.
Arendt argued that the massive prospects of infinite progress within the techno-
logical developments of our time recall us to our finitude. They make us aware
of our finite being and of the limitations of the human condition. Importantly,
however, they also engender a creativity that stems from that very frame. Since
what singular humans bring into being has objective boundaries, these limits
condition our existence as well as our subsequent creative activity. In fact, for
Arendt, limits set by human creation are what make something new possible.
The phenomenologist Edward S. Casey discusses this enabling potential of the
edge, and concludes in a similar vein that it acts “to frame, to shelter and support,
my earnest but flawed efforts. A frame is a provisional structure that makes some-
thing else possible.”32
Existential Media aims to offer an intellectual framing in the hope of setting
forth such a scene of creativity. It promises to stir things up and to wrest media,
media studies, and currents of media theory out of their default settings. It will
provide an alternative mapping for approaching digital cultures in contexts of
both the mundane and the extraordinary, and on scales traversing the individual
and the global. The field of existential media studies takes as its primary point
of departure the fact that, at any point in time when science, modern thought,
and culture succumb to reductionist modes of objectification, philosophy
must be existential philosophy. This implies, more specifically, a revisiting and
reappreciation of Jaspers’s project. It will in this moment seek to renew some
important themes and threads that too often, and especially now in the age of
dataism, are relegated to oblivion. Hence, in this way Existential Media will
bring out and accent aspects that might otherwise get lost or be forgotten. It aims
thereby to show that the field of existential media studies sits at the heart and soul
of media studies. This book will demonstrate the existence of a robust and lively
community of media scholars with an existential bent, while offering inspiration
and ideas for taking their concerns both further and deeper through an essential
mooring in the tradition of existential philosophy. This is also why I have already
suggested a series of essential coalitions between existential media studies and
other fields.

32 Edward S. Casey, “Edges and the In-Between,” PhaenEx, 3, no. 2 (Fall–Winter 2008): 2, https://

doi.org/10.22329/p.v3i2.643. He argues similarly that “edges set forth the place of creation; they es-
tablish the scene of such creation, and thus determine where it is happening” (3, italics added).
Introduction 15

But there is another distinctive feature of the project. An allegory that may
seem overstated immediately comes to mind: tectonic collision. Rooted in ex-
istential philosophy, existential media studies collides head- on (simply by
moving so utterly slowly in a world on speed) with the tectonic plate of the ne-
oliberal platform economy33 and its hybrids of technocratic formalism and
instrumentarianism (increasingly also fixtures of academic life). Here we also
smash into the banishing of human-centric concerns by technoscientific bureau-
cracies, and the cult of objectivism and datafication. More carefully, and hopefully
in productive ways, we jam on another side into the plate of the posthumanist
vanguard that sets out to problematize and oust remaining forms of classic hu-
manism, while existential media studies seek to critically retool it. A fourth plate
will be willfully blindsided: it is the calcification of a broad range of long-term
approaches inside and outside of media theory that display a neglect of existen-
tial vulnerability—a term I will return to in the ensuing chapters, and theorize in
connection with media, embodiment, limit, and profound accountability.
According to geologists, tectonic collisions produce enormous amounts of en-
ergy through which something may emerge: “Sometimes an entire ocean closes
as tectonic plates converge, causing blocks of thick continental crust to collide.
A collisional mountain range forms as the crust is compressed, crumpled, and
thickened even more.”34 This comparison may strike one as contrived, but it does
set the imagination in motion. Could offering an existential conceptualization
of digital-human vulnerability at the limit, through a respectful appropriation of
Jaspers’s philosophy—in conversation and collision with theoretical currents—
bring about an alternate, thickened figuration? I am convinced that, at the limits
of named formations, and through their unexpected brush, something may
come into being through which key stakes and virtues at the heart of humanistic
media studies may reclaim their centrality. The goal of this book is nothing more
and nothing less than to take media studies to its limits, as it were, by daring to
linger, to stay with the moment, and to slow down in the face of the realities of the
digital limit situation.

33 See José van Dijck, Thomas Poell, and Martijn de Waal, The Platform Society: Public Values

in a Connective World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Paul Edwards, “A Platform Is
Infrastructure on Fire,” in Your Computer Is on Fire, ed. Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, and
Kavita Pjilip (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).
34 https://www.nps.gov/subjects/geology/plate-tectonics-collisional-mountain-ranges.htm.
PART I
EXI ST E N T IA L IZING M E DIA
1
Limit Situations (of the Digital)
Restoring Karl Jaspers for Media Theory

Existential Media brings existential philosophy, and its key concerns about what it
means to exist, into a serious conversation with media studies. In this pursuit, I am
guided by one of its least famous and most original voices: the German existentialist
philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). I thereby continue and carry the torch on-
ward, after momentary first contacts between media theory and Jaspers’s existential
philosophy.1 I have taken Jaspers’s ideas to heart, as he defines philosophizing as
belonging to all human beings. And as Jaspers puts it in his series of lectures at the
University of Gröningen in 1935: “Whoever even once thought he heard softly the
authentic philosophical note can never tire of trying to communicate it.”2
I envision restoring some of the wisdom of this scholarship for media theory,
by creatively reading Jaspers guided by leading experts and Jaspers scholars.3 The

1 See Ronald D. Gordon’s dialogic reading in “Karl Jaspers: Existential Philosopher of Dialogical

Communication,” Southern Communication Journal, 65, nos. 2–3 (2000): 105–118, https://doi.org/
10.1080/10417940009373161. Gordon’s point is that Jaspers is undervalued overall in communica-
tion studies, despite his important philosophizing about communication. Also see John D. Peters’s
“nondialogic,” impersonal, and pragmatist readings, which very briefly mention Jaspers, but which
seem to have taken stock of his thinking on communicative breakdown in theorizing interruption as
constitutive of communication itself. Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 16–17 and 276. The concept is furthermore employed
in Nick Couldry’s adoption of Paul Ricoeur’s reading of Jaspers, which focuses primarily on ethics.
Media, Society, World, 180–210.
2 Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz: Five Lectures, trans. William Earle (Milwaukee: Marquette

University Press, 1935/1997), 50.

3 Without the ambition to try to cover this rich and distinguished field of scholarship, I have

consulted some of the key works on Karl Jaspers’s philosophy, including, for example, Hannah
Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?” and “Concern with Politics in Recent European
Philosophical Thought,” in Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism
(New York: Schocken Books, 1946/1994), 163–187 and 428–447; Walter Kaufman, ed., Existentialism
from Dostoyevsky to Sartre (New York: Plume Books, 1956), 22–33; Paul Arthur Schlipp, ed., The
Philosophy of Karl Jaspers (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1957/1981); Charles Frederic Wallraff, Karl
Jaspers: An Introduction to His Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). A more
recent and very instructive work on Jaspers’s philosophy and politics is Chris Thornhill, Karl
Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2002). Peter-Paul Verbeek provides a sophisti-
cated appreciation of Jaspers’s philosophy of technology in What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections
on Technology, Agency and Design (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 15–46.
Filiz Peach offers a thoughtful discussion on several key concepts in Jaspers’s philosophy in Death,
“Deathlessness” and Existenz in Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2008). Other important sources are Helmut Wautischer, Alan M. Olson, and Gregory J. Walters, eds.,
Philosophical Faith and the Future of Humanity (New York: Springer, 2012); and Peter E. Gordon, who

Existential Media. Amanda Lagerkvist, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925567.003.0002
20 Existentializing Media

objective is to remedy what I see as an existential deficit in media theory (this will
be further explained in c hapter 3), by providing a focalization on his concept of
the limit situation as a heuristic framing device—a productive “concept-meta-
phor”—for beginning to reframe and refigure media existentiality.4 While the
limit situation is real, it is also a name given to that which cannot be objecti-
fied. Hence approaching it, following Jaspers, is only possible through a partial
unraveling of the ciphers of being, such as symbols and artistic works, as well as
through careful philosophical thinking.
This book argues that our era of massive technological transformations and of
calamitous global crises is a limit situation, both for individuals and for society.
The stakes are existential, political, and ethical. As I hope to show, the digital limit
situation profoundly coshapes the material and symbolic worlds we inhabit via
media. While existential media pertain to aspects of being human that have been
of concern for humans for centuries (as I will discuss further in chapters 3 and
4), the digital limit situation also encompasses new and binding realities. In ad-
dition, existential media mediate the universal limit situations, and when they do
so, they constitute themselves as new ones that human beings not only are condi-
tioned by but also are called upon to take responsibility for.
This chapter begins with a brief introduction to Jaspers’s philosophy and its
reception, as well as to the development of his philosophy of technology. I then
go into his ideas about the limit situation as formative for being human in the
world, while expanding on his thinking to begin to describe the key traits of the
digital limit situation. Existential media studies, as I then go on to show, seeks to
demonstrate how originary technicity relates to originary human vulnerability.
Having substantiated the definition of the digital limit situation in light of this
aim, I finally offer a theorization by thinking further with limits, which allows
me to introduce the essays at the heart of Part II of this book.

puts Jaspers’s work in cultural context in “German Existentialism and the Persistence of Metaphysics,”
in Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context, ed. Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). See also a brief discussion of Jaspers in relation to
Heidegger in Udo Thietz, “German Existence-Philosophy,” in A Companion to Phenomenology and
Existentialism, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall (Chichester: Blackwell, 2009).

4 Here I follow Sarah Pink et al., who describe thinking with concept-metaphors, which are “par-

tial and perspectival framing devices,” as offering “a means of describing . . . emergent qualities” of
the technological environment, both materially and symbolically. Sarah Pink, Minna Ruckenstein,
Robert Willim, and Melisa Duque, “Broken Data: Conceptualising Data in an Emerging World,” Big
Data & Society, January–June 2018, 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717753228. Concept-
metaphors, through their partial offerings, are similar to Jaspers’s ciphers of being (for example,
artworks, philosophical ideas, and poetic myths) that point toward the Encompassing that we are and
that is the World—that is, toward the nonobjectifiable dimensions of existence—without ever fully
capturing them.
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 21

Stumbling upon Karl Jaspers: Finding a Theory

of Technological Limit

As the intellectual historian Chris Thornhill has shown in Karl Jaspers: Politics
and Metaphysics, Jaspers’s philosophy presents an entire and unique branch of the
tradition of existential thinking, with important contributions to diverse fields
of philosophical inquiry—such as hermeneutics, anthropological perspectives
on religion, ethics, the critique of idealism, and the end of metaphysics—as well
as to political debate. His existentialism was extremely influential in the 1920s
and 1930s, and also and especially in the late 1940s and 1950s, leaving discern-
ible impressions on the works of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alexandre Kojève, and
Hannah Arendt. His work has, however, not been uncontroversial, as it became
associated with both the conservative intellectual culture of the late-Weimar
era and later with the postwar German administration, more specifically the
Adenauer era post-1949, and its liberal-conservative consensus. In his day,
Jaspers was quite famous as a public intellectual, but his philosophy has also ex-
perienced a relative marginality. In Thornhill’s account, this is due to how Georg
Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and subsequently associates of the Frankfurt school, such
as Theodor Adorno, categorized his thinking as an expression of political indif-
ferentism and acquiescence. They further deemed “its pathos of the suffering ex-
istential interior” to be veering “towards a heroic mythology of the self, which
deflects from consideration of the material conditions of genuinely redeemed
subjectivity.”5 On close inspection these readings are, according to Thornhill, in-
correct. Jaspers’s deep antitotalitarian convictions and commitment to questions
about German guilt, responsibility, and solidarity with the victims of the war,
for example, prove otherwise. He also shifted toward a critique of the Adenauer
administration. Inspired by Hannah Arendt, he argued for the necessity of a
liberal-republican public sphere, which he saw as the communicative foundation
for democracy; and he moved “towards a more radical theory of active democ-
racy which eventually influenced the writings of the early Habermas.”6
While his work did enjoy publicity, Jaspers’s name lacks the luster of fame that
once shone on, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and his
work has not been credited with the same glistening prestige as the oeuvre of
one of his colleagues: Martin Heidegger.7 Yet this is also precisely why it is such

5 Thornhill, Karl Jaspers, 1.

6 Ibid., 3.
7 According to Hannah Arendt, Jaspers would be—among the school’s many representatives—the

existentialist for the future, since there was a solidity and continued relevance in his work: “The con-
tinuity of Jaspers’ thought remains unbroken. He is an active participant in modern philosophy, and
he will continue to contribute to its development and speak with a decisive voice in it.” Arendt, “What
Is Existential Philosophy?,” 182. As he became the least famous of the existentialists, this may be ei-
ther a flaw of judgment or a prescient forecast for an even later age.
22 Existentializing Media

a treasure trove to be rediscovered. Coincidentally, media scholar John D. Peters

stumbled upon a find one day in the library that happens to illustrate my point:

I once found in the University of Iowa Library a book last borrowed, according
to the checkout stamps, in 1938 that was so alive and smart, so full of things
I absolutely had to know, and which spoke to me with the freshness of the
morning and no must or smell of the crypt about it. Where had it been all those
years? What had kept it alive? Its author, Karl Jaspers, was long dead and so his
brain was not the keeper of its flame.8

Indeed, Peters activated the book in a Kittlerian sense, since it had outlived
its author. And yet he was evidently activated by it: reawakened, as Jaspers no
doubt had hoped, to its flame of elucidation. Jaspers’s insistence upon truth and
its complex connections to communication and communicative breakdown,
his searching for the ultimately incomprehensible real (or what Jaspers calls the
Encompassing), and the irreducibility of that real to the absolutes of any system,
philosophical school, or conceptualization, also makes him highly relevant
for those who identify as pragmatists and neorealists or who are speculatively
inclined.9
Karl Jaspers was born in 1883 in Oldenburg, Germany, into a liberal Protestant
family. His mother was the descendant of generations of farmers in the re-
gion, and his father was a trained jurist who worked as the director of a bank.
Biographers describe Jaspers’s childhood by the North Sea as quiet and idyllic,
but also shadowed by an undiagnosed illness.10 In 1910 he married Gertrud
Mayer (1879–1974), who was of Jewish ancestry, and the sister of his close friend
and collaborator Ernst Mayer. Jaspers is considered an exponent of existen-
tialism, but one might describe him intellectually as a threshold creature or an
academic shape-shifter. He studied the humanities and law as a young man at the
University of Heidelberg, but then proceeded during his career first into medi-
cine, then through psychiatry and psychology, and finally into philosophy. His
work was original and unconventional. His interest in philosophy grew, but he

8 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 321.

9 In the words of Jaspers: “Reason refuses to take hold of any kind of unity but seeks real and only
unity. It knows that it is lost if it clutches prematurely at a part of truth and makes it the ultimate and
absolute truth. It wills the One which is All. It must not leave out anything, must not drop anything,
exclude anything. It is in itself a boundless openness.” Reason and Anti-reason in Our Time (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 39. The value of the un-understood for psychiatric practice was
highlighted by Jaspers: “All practice on the basis of knowledge must rely on the unseen Encompassing
(das Umgreifende): Medical treatment must rely on the un-understood life.” Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of
Existence, trans. Richard F. Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938/1971), 24,
italics added.
10 Suzanne Kirkbright, Karl Jaspers: A Biography— Navigations in Truth (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2004).
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 23

had been unsympathetic toward philosophy professors from a young age, since
he found them dogmatic and concerned with abstract value systems with no im-
port. Instead he pursued what he believed was the original method of philos-
ophy, inspired by Plato. When he was finally given a full professorship by the
appointment committee at Heidelberg in 1921, it was against the will of the phi-
losophy professors, who sought to block his advancement and who saw him as
an impostor.11
So, what was he up to that made the philosophers proper feel they needed to
hold their ground? Jaspers is not setting forth a new metaphysical theory or a new
hypothesis about the physical world or the nature of being human. He wishes in-
stead to reawaken us to our human situation. Limits, communication, plurality,
responsibility, and uncertainty are keywords that I identify with his philosophy,
and they are intimately related to his acknowledgment of human vulnerability.
Jaspers’s key influences include Søren Kierkegaard, Immanuel Kant, his mentor
Max Weber, and his friend Hannah Arendt. Stricken with illness from child-
hood, with a disease that was later fatal, he developed bronchiectasis (a chronic
dilation of the bronchial tubes) during adolescence, which led to lifelong illness
and disability due to cardiac decompensation. One may speculate whether these
facts were formative for the development of his thinking. It does not seem far-
fetched to trace the roots of much of his philosophizing to such biographical
circumstances, but Jaspers was also trained as a psychiatrist, and before moving
into philosophy he worked clinically and also made seminal contributions to the
field. For example, his well-known General Psychopathology introduced Edmund
Husserl and Wilhelm Dilthey into the psychiatric discipline. The psychiatric es-
tablishment in the United States and elsewhere is deeply, if remotely, in debt to
Jaspers. His main legacy in the Anglo-American world may in hindsight have
been through the massive influence of his colleague and student Kurt Schneider,
who developed his famous “Clinical Psychopathology” (which has been in-
strumental for the development of the criteria used in diagnosing depression)
proceeding from Jaspers’s fourth edition of the General Psychopathology from
1946. As opposed to other forms of psychiatry, which were bent on observing
behavior objectively, the aim of the Jaspersian-Schneiderian phenomenological
approach was to elucidate the patient’s own inner experiences. Hence, Jaspers’s
commitment to understanding mental illness as a kind of primordial limit situ-
ation—from the perspective of meaning, relations, and experience—must also
be recognized in the development of his philosophical thinking. At any rate,
according to Hannah Arendt, Jaspers properly picked up the torch from Søren
Kierkegaard in his insistence on the utter exposure and groundlessness in human
existence.12
11 See Charles Fredric Wallraff ’s introduction to Jaspers’s life and writings, in Karl Jaspers, 3–10.
12 Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?”
24 Existentializing Media

The anomies and alienations of the modern world of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries were, of course, not only the soil of Weberian sociology;
these many complex problems equally vexed the existentialists.13 Consequently,
and echoing Kierkegaard, Jaspers saw in his Man in the Modern Age, from 1931,
a problematic depletion of meaning and value, the result of modern technolog-
ical culture of quantification in which “essential humanity is reduced to the ge-
neral.”14 For Jaspers this had wide consequences for limiting humanity: “Limits
are imposed upon the life-order by a specifically modern conflict. The mass-
order brings into being a universal life-apparatus, which proves destructive to
the world of a truly human life.”15 In addition, he was concerned that “the uni-
versalization of the life-order threatens to reduce the life of the real man [sic] in a
real world to mere functioning.”16
The renewed relevance of Jaspers’s early systemic critique notwithstanding,
it will obviously need an updating today. For example, important debates in
critical data studies have problematized not only how technological systems
are exploiting our datafied lives; they have also shown how they are rehearsing
and amplifying, instead of checking, human prejudice, bias, and stereo-
typing.17 Media scholars furthermore argue that today the distinction between
the technological and the existential realm has dissolved.18 As I described in

13 F. H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper & Row, 1958).
14 Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (London: Routledge,
1931/2010), 49.
15 Ibid., 44.
16 Ibid., 45. In this vein, philosophers of technology as well as media critics of all shades have often

claimed that technology alienates us from ourselves as human beings, hollowing out both meaning
and value, and causing a crisis for agency, presence, and authenticity. Indeed, this type of framing has
a long history in the philosophy of technology and includes key contributions from the existentialists.
Heidegger famously argued that we are essentially “enframed” by technological systems: they re-
veal our world to us and conceal it from us; they dangerously call upon us to perceive it, and our
fellow human beings, in a particular way: as a “standing-reserve” for exploitation. Martin Heidegger,
The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1977). The way he apprehensively mused about the dangers of autonomous technology
echoes in recent philosophizing about the digital age of automated operations “lacking in tem-
poral or existential duration” as they replace spirit, agency, and thinking itself. Byung-Chul Han, I
Svärmen, trans. Ola Wallin (Stockholm: Ersatz, 2013), 66, my translation. Similar critiques have been
launched by the literary scholar Laurence Scott in The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in
the Digital World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016). Exploring the existential dimensions
of our contemporary era, he argues that it is the everywhereness of digital media, and their creation of
a fourth (i.e., virtual) dimension, that makes them all-encompassing and omniscient. In this fourth
dimension, we are facing pocket-size shipwrecks, craving instant validation that fails to arrive; we live
in a social media hive of buzz that is silent (lacking fullness) at heart, and we have come to accept a
reverse mass peephole onto other people’s intimate spheres and private lives.
17 In critical data studies, see seminal works by Safya U. Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How

Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: NYU Press, 2018); Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math
Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016).
18 According to Ganaele Langlois, social media have become “meaning machines” that, through

data mining, “orchestrate, and derive value from, one’s sense of being and existence,” establishing
the protocol for our very sense of “meaningfulness.” Ganaele Langlois, Meaning in the Age of Social
Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 106.
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 25

the introduction, the existential register has been colonized by software that
participates directly in our affective experiences. This has several implications.
First, these accounts upset the prevailing and seemingly harmonious forms of
“being in and becoming with the technological world,” in Sarah Kember and
Joanna Zylinska’s coinage,19 by disclosing important aspects of being human in
the digital age that relate to current forms of connective capitalism. At the same
time, we must not fail to appreciate the sense of consolation, meaning, and prac-
tical consummation that existential media also afford. It is also necessary here,
therefore, to incorporate contemporary empirical insights from media sociology
and anthropology that are inspired by (post)phenomenological and new mate-
rialist understandings of the onto-epistemological dimensions of human-data
assemblages. Big Data and biometric technologies, for example, are both part of
the body politic and meaningful, entangled, and habitual media, with varied and
contextually bound uses and meanings. Even if they exploit, surveil, and reduce
humans, as Jaspers would say, they are also productive, as they bring into being
new forms of knowledge and social relations, new assemblages and webs of eve-
ryday life-flow, and new data subjectivities and forms of embodiment.20
Acknowledging the weight of these observations, I, however, take my main
lead from Jaspers in this book in placing particular emphasis on limits—as well
as on how they relate to radical uncertainty, openness, idleness, and fecundity
in the present—to offer prompts for remapping and readdressing why media
matter. In The Origin and Goal of History, published in 1953, Jaspers developed
his understanding into a cautiously more optimistic conception of technology,
by offering a different theory of limit: “The appraisal of technology depends
upon what is expected of it. A clear appraisal presupposes clarity concerning
the limits of technology.”21 This means we must also take into account fallacious
prejudices against technology, as well as hyperbole and outrageous myths about
its capacities: “The limits of technology lie in those presuppositions of all tech-
nological realizations which can never be overcome.”22 There are several limits of
technology. The first is that technology is a means and requires direction:

The limitation of technology consists in the fact that it cannot exist out of itself,
but is always a means. This renders it equivocal. Because it does not set itself any

19 Kember and Zylinska, Life after New Media, xv.

20 For emic phenomenological approaches, see, for example, Lupton, The Quantified Self; Sarah
Pink and Vaike Fors, “Being in a Mediated World: Self-Tracking and the Mind-Body-Environment,”
Cultural Geographies, 24, no. 3 (2017): 375–388, https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474016684127; Helen
Kennedy, “Living with Data: Aligning Data Studies and Data Activism through a Focus on Everyday
Experiences of Datafication,” Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, 1 (2018): 18–30, http://
eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/129959/.
21 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge, 1953/2011), 118, italics added.
22 Ibid.
26 Existentializing Media

goals, it is beyond or before all good and evil. It can serve the purposes of salva-
tion or calamity. In itself it is neutral toward both of them. This is precisely why
it requires direction.23

With this claim, Jaspers distances himself from what he sees as two inadequate
positions on technology. The glorifying perspective sees technology as a liberation
from nature and a realization of man’s true environment; the despising perspec-
tive is equally problematic, and only captures a partial truth about technology.24
Both positions are, according to Jaspers, untenable, and he thereby nuances his
earlier position in Man in the Modern Age, where he saw technological develop-
ment as inherently destructive. However, he retains parts of his earlier critique
in emphasizing other limits of technology that have to do with the fact that tech-
nologies are restricted to the mechanical, to the lifeless, and to the universal.
They thus aim at types and at mass production; therefore, technologies are “in-
expressive, impersonal, inhuman.”25 Finally, he stresses limits in terms of limited
resources: “Technology is bound to substances and forces that are limited—the
quantity of raw materials and energy resources is finite—and bound as well to
human beings, whose labor keeps it going.”26
What is required is moving from intellect to existential reason, thereby recov-
ering “a sense of responsibility, for technology.”27 In fact, in Die Geistige Situation
der Zeit from 1955, Jaspers argues that technology can either “distance us from
nature, to make room for using it thoughtlessly and mechanically,” or “bring us in
a new proximity to the investigated nature.”28 On the positive side in Jaspers new
postwar relationship to technology, it must therefore be noted, we find his stress
on the possibility of a new closeness to nature, a beauty in constructs and an ex-
tension of perception. Importantly, Jaspers develops his understanding of tech-
nology further by asking himself how to understand the experience of beauty
of technological artifacts. As Ciano Aydin and Peter-Paul Verbeek argue: “He
claims these experiences are not found in the pure efficiency of technological
workings, nor in redundant ornamentations, but in ‘the solutions that lie in the
things themselves, as if they were found in a quest for eternal, pre-given forms.’ ”29
Hence, for Jaspers the power that humans exert upon reality also discloses its
transcendent character, here invoked by the Platonic image. Jaspers shows that
technologies function not only because of human intervention per se. Humans

23 Ibid.
24 Verbeek, What Things Do, 39.
25 Jaspers, Origin and Goal, 120.
26 Ibid., italics added.
27 Ibid., 42.
28 Cited in Ciano Aydin and Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Transcendence in Technology,” Techné: Research

in Philosophy and Technology, 19, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 308, https://doi.org/10.5840/techne2015121742.

29 Ibid., 307.
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 27

can only develop their technologies in alignment with an understanding of the

specific workings of the natural world. Jaspers thus sees technologies as always
doing more than exerting power over nature. In fact, in Jaspers’s terminology
technologies take on the role of ciphers: “They become ‘signs,’ ‘characters in
the language of being,’ pointing toward being, without ever being able to em-
body being itself.”30 There is a basis to the world that transcends human con-
trol, argues Jaspers, and technological power cannot exist without accepting this
transcendent order.31
In some respects anticipating the writings of Marshall McLuhan, Jaspers also
sees a new consciousness of the world, as well as extended perception emerging
through media, communication, and transportation networks. And in these
postwar formulations, instead of arguing for retrieving our authenticity in the
face of technology, he suggests we need to retrieve technology as a task; we need
to subject it to conscientious steering.32 This comes close to describing what is
at stake in the digital limit situation (which I will return to later). Precisely be-
cause the human condition and machines are co-implied and coconstituted re-
cursively, as the paradigm of originary human technicity purports, and because
in connective capitalist society, data are mundane and deeply enmeshed in our
lives, the question of how to realize existentially sustainable media is ever more
pertinent to raise. I thus agree with Jaspers’s conclusion: “The direction of tech-
nology cannot be looked for in technology itself, but must be sought in a con-
scious ethos.”33 Delving deeper into Jaspers’s writings on what makes us human,
and offering a more detailed definition of the limit situation, should be advanta-
geous in this endeavor.

The Realities of the Limit Situation

As already discussed, Karl Jaspers is not putting forth a grand hypothesis of

human existence and the world. Instead, he hopes for us to reawaken ourselves
to our human situation. In order to do so, we must understand that the world
is the origin of all reality. We are oriented toward, immersed in, and belong to
this real, concrete world. Yet the world is not all there is. Knowledge about this
concrete world is therefore not enough to account for being itself. In this re-
gard, the Encompassing is Jaspers’s most basic idea. It represents the absolute
foundation of the world. The Encompassing extends beyond all the particular
horizons that make up our relation to the world, and it also challenges some of

30 Ibid., 308.
31 I will return to this discussion about transcendence in technology in chapter 7.
32 Verbeek, What Things Do, 39.
33 Jaspers, Origin and Goal, 119.
28 Existentializing Media

our assumptions about it: “The Encompassing is not only that which embraces
and underlies everything empirically knowable and objectifiable in the world,
but is also that which transcends the subject/object dichotomy.”34 As Richard
F. Grabau, the translator of Jaspers’s Philosophy of Existence, puts it:

It is Jaspers’ name for the form of our awareness of being which underlies all our
scientific and common-sense knowledge and which is given expression in the
myths and rituals of religion. But it can never become an object. Awareness of
the encompassing is achieved by reflection upon our situation. As we reflect we
realize that all objects we are aware of, including religious ones, are determinate
beings situated in a larger, encompassing context or horizon. We can enlarge the
extent of our knowledge but we can never escape the fact that it is fragmentary
and only indefinitely extendable. It has limits. We are always within a horizon.35

Realizing the incompleteness of our knowledge of reality, of our limits, is what

makes possible an awareness of the Encompassing horizon, which is “the felt
quality of all our experience and thought.”36 Limit is thus constitutive of our re-
lation to existence. Jaspers further distinguishes between the Encompassing that
is being itself—the immanent or objective dimension of the world—and the
Encompassing that we are: the subjective dimension (in turn divided into several
forms, as will be discussed below).37 Furthermore, in Jaspers’s philosophy, human
beings always and inevitably find themselves in situations: “Existence means to be
in a situation.”38 This is directly related to the fact that, for Jaspers, there are sev-
eral modes and potentialities of being human—yet all of them belong within and
are enabled, forged, or constricted by particular situations. There are two types
of situations. The first is the immanent type of situations in existence. In general,
we are born into a particular time and space, in which we face and share certain
historical circumstances and conditions. Our being in situations in existence as
empirical existence is concrete, everyday, material. We are situated in a partic-
ular location with things and technologies. This applies to us all. Yet situations
in existence are socially diversified: “It is the concrete reality which means ad-
vantage or detriment, opportunity or obstacle, to my existence.”39 This type of

34 Peach, Death, 38.

35 Richard F. Grabau, “Introduction,” in Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, xv–xvi.

36 Ibid., xvi.
37 These are not exhaustive, and they have a counterpart in the transcendent mode that we are—

that is, Existenz—and the transcendent mode of being itself, of the world—that is, Transcendence.
Transcendence signifies a dimension of reality that is ultimately nonobjectifiable. Peach, Death, 37.
As Peach further points out: “Jaspers claims that human beings are able to transcend the empirical
world by means of philosophical thinking. But to achieve this one must have a clear understanding of
the immanent, which in turn may lead to awareness of Transcendence.” Ibid.
38 Karl Jaspers, Philosophy II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932/1970), 178, italics added.
39 Ibid., 177.
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 29

situatedness is “a reality for an existing subject who has a stake in it, a subject
either confined or given leeway by the situation in which other subjects, their
interests, their sociological power relations, and their combinations or chances
of the moment all play their parts.”40 Empirical existence belongs to a material
world of basic desires, and it can be captured by data: “At each moment I exist
by given data, and I face given data to which my will and my actions refer. This is
how I am for myself as empirical existence, and how the definite world to which
I have access exists for me as a datum I can mold. The real situation confines
me, by its resistance, limits my freedom and ties me to restricted possibilities.”41
In addition, we are consciousness in general, which pertains to the faculty of ab-
stract thinking, logos, and mathematics. Finally, human beings are spirit, which
encapsulates our attempts to create a whole, a worldview, out of fragments in, for
example, ideologies and religions.
But there is yet one form of potential being, as realized Existenz. This form
defies objectivity. It defines human beings in authenticity, singularity, and inward-
ness—but also through transcendence: that is, in truth in/as communication (as
I will expound further in chapters 3 and 4). Existenz is, for Jaspers, “the being of a
person at the limit.”42 Hence, beyond concrete human situatedness in an everyday
life of sociological power struggles,43 Jaspers also recognizes that there are those
moments in life when humans must awaken themselves to address what is at stake
in the present. These, the second type of situations, are what he terms the limit
situations of life: “Situations like the following: that I am always in situations; that
I cannot live without struggling and suffering; that I cannot avoid guilt; that I must
die—these are what I call limit situations.”44 The limit situation, Jaspers argues,
calls upon the individual human being to act or seize the moment, and it entails the
possibility of realizing one’s “Existenz”: “The limit situation of being definite calls
upon Existenz to decide its destiny.”45 He further maintains that “we become our-
selves by entering with open eyes into the limit situations.”46 Realized Existenz is a
potential for each of us, but also something we may fail to be.

40 Ibid.
41 Ibid., 185.
42 Thomas Fuchs, “Existential Vulnerability: Toward a Psychopathology of Limit Situations,”

Psychopathology, 46 (2013): 301, italics added https://doi.org/10.1159/000351838.

43 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 177.
44 Ibid., 178, translation modified. Jaspers introduced the concept of the limit situation

(Grenzsituationen) in Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Springer, 1919); and then de-
veloped it further in Philosophy II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932/1970,), and briefly
mentioned it in General Psychopathology, vols. 1 and 2, trans. J. Hoenig and Marian W. Hamilton
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1913/1959/1997). It has been variously translated in the
literature as “boundary situation,” “limit situation,” and “ultimate situation.” For an overview of the
different types of limit situations, see Alfons Grieder, “What Are Boundary Situations? A Jaspersian
Notion Reconsidered,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 40, no. 3 (2009): 330–336,
https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2009.11006692; and Mundt, “Jasper’s Concept.”
45 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 185.
46 Ibid., 179, translation modified.
30 Existentializing Media

Limit situations thus represent the pronounced possibility of becoming aware

of one’s Existenz. Hence, there is infinitely more to being human in our situa-
tion than our data (or as we could say today, our metadata) can ever reveal or
constitute. The fact that “I am always in situations” constitutes the first general
“limit situation of historically definite Existenz,”47 which underscores the sin-
gularity of our human lives. Here my body, my face, my name, and my time on
earth are not simply my data: they take on a singular and incomparable signifi-
cance and meaning. Death, finitude, crisis, and so on, are instead part of specific
limit situations. These never change, except for in appearance. Jaspers explains
the nuances: “While the first limit situation makes men aware of the historicity
in all existential existence, particular limit situations—death, suffering, struggle,
guilt—affect each individual as general ones within his specific historicity of the
moment.”48 The particular personal situation to which we belong thus interacts
with universal limit situations in particular ways. Importantly, we have the per-
sonal freedom to seize the limit situations or to ignore them.49
We must observe a distinction here between limit situations and limit
conditions. Mortality itself, as well as exposure to hazards, suffering, conflict,
or guilt, is a limit condition that is inseparable from human life. A limit situa-
tion, by contrast, is that personal situation in which several limit conditions are
acutely manifested. Hence, as limit conditions converge and amount to crises,
they throw us into limit situations. Humans cannot escape their impact.50 Even
as the limit situation can only be approximated through the ciphers of being, as
discussed already, it is simultaneously nothing less than a reality. The limit sit-
uation could perhaps be understood as an instance of the Lacanian “Real,” that
which cannot be reduced to meaning. Instead, it affects discourse, and it is, as
Slovenian continental philosopher Alenka Zupancic maintains,

something which appears only in the guise of the encounter, as something that
“happens to us,” surprises us, throws us “out of joint,” because it always inscribes
itself in a given continuity, as a rupture, a break, or an interruption. According
to Lacan the Real is impossible, and the fact “it happens to (us)” does not refute
its basic “impossibility”: the Real happens to us (we encounter it), as impossible,
as “the impossible thing” that turns our symbolic universe upside down and
leads to the reconfiguration of this universe.51

47 Ibid., 178, 184, translation modified.

48 Ibid., translation modified.
49 Jonna Bornemark, “Limit- Situation: Antinomies and Transcendence in Karl Jaspers’
Philosophy,” SATS, 7, no. 2 (2006): 63–85, https://doi.org/10.1515/SATS.2006.63.
50 Alfons Grieder, “Further Remarks on Boundary Conditions, Boundary Situations and

Jaspersian Grenzsituationen,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 41, no. 3 (2010): 319–
324, https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2010.11006722.
51 Alenka Zupancic quoted in Katerina Kolozova, Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststructuralist

Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 93–94, italics added.
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 31

For Jaspers the limit situation is precisely such an impossible possibility, a rup-
ture that makes a world of difference. Limit situations, I furthermore argue, are
irreducible to any postmetaphysical framing, since we cannot use reason to over-
come them. They are instead sites of profound antinomy. They bring into sharp
focus basic antinomical structures of existence and of being human. As Jaspers
argues, they are contradictions of life that we simply have to live with.52 They dis-
close and uncover the world, and they do not spare us: “In every limit situation,
the rug is so to speak yanked from under my feet.”53 In the limit situation some-
thing is thus broken; the protection from the limit inside the consolidated shells
(as Jaspers calls them), or shelters of the world as we once knew it, is gone.

The Digital Limit Situation: Technicity, Vulnerability,

and Accountability

Salvatore Iaconesi, whose message opened this book, conveys precisely such
a shipwreck of comfort and security. But this brokenness is also what goads
Iaconesi’s creativity. In the reality of the digital limit situation, important values
are thus at stake, for us both as individuals and as a society. Hence the limit situ-
ation refers, as Jaspers explains, to those “unconditioned moments of human ex-
istence, in which intense impulses expose us to the limits and motivate us to seek
higher or more reflected modes of knowledge.”54 Importantly, for Iaconesi, the
current limit situation is in all its complexity opening up to change, and to what
media scholar Paul Frosh calls a recognizing of the world.55 As Iaconesi puts it,
“With/after tragedy comes Agnition: the ability to understand, recognize and
transform/adapt.”56 Similarly, in Media, Society, World, Nick Couldry follows
Paul Ricoeur’s appropriation of Jaspers’s concept of the limit situation, drawing
upon the fact that the limit situation has something unruly about it, which forces
and enables us to rethink our moral choices and ethical perspectives. Couldry
alludes to a widely shared sense that “new ways of doing things with media must
be found,” and argues that “the multiple uncertainties associated with the era of
digital media may require us to think, in some respects for the first time, about

52 “The opposites belong to each other, so that I cannot get rid of the one side, which I fight and

would like to remove, without losing the whole polarity and, thus, that which I in reality want.”
Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Springer, 1925), 250, translated in Fuchs,
“Existential Vulnerability,” 302.
53 Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 249, translated in Fuchs, “Existential Vulnerability,”

302.
54 Jaspers, General Psychopathology, 326. See also S. Nassir Ghaemi, “Existence and Pluralism: The

Rediscovery of Karl Jaspers,” Psychopathology, 40, no. 2 (2007): 75–82, https://doi.org/10.1159/

000098487.
55 Paul Frosh, The Poetics of Digital Media (Oxford: Polity, 2019), x–xix.
56 Iaconesi, message posted to the AoIR list, March 25, 2020.
32 Existentializing Media

the normative implication of life with media.” Hence, “It is out of such limit situ-
ations that new domains of ethical thinking are born.”57
This is important, and it resonates with my aims. As I hope to show in what
follows, however, there is in fact even more to it. In that reflected mode, a deeper
sense of being human in togetherness also emerges, and along with it a deeper
sense of accountability. Jaspers holds that limit situations call upon human
beings—as echoed in Iaconesi’s plea to us—to collectively and individually act
in order to become ourselves. This means seizing the present moment, in both
abeyance and careful attendance. It compels a form of action that is, however
(and perhaps paradoxically), closer to the realm of nonaction than to resolutely
planned deeds, which further implies that “to boundary situations we react
meaningfully not with planning and calculation but with a totally different ac-
tivity: the bringing into being of one’s possible Existenz; we arrive at self-being by
entering open-eyed into boundary situations.”58
A Jaspersian focus on limit situations safeguards humans, as much as it
reinvents or rediscovers them. But to do so in any shape or form is somewhat con-
troversial in the currents of posthumanism and new materialism, which relent-
lessly call for decentering the Human: that is, the liberal humanist subject. This
rallying call—that we for empirical, philosophical, and political reasons must
open ourselves to the more than human in scholarship and life—also projects
that this issue of originary technicity is in fact unresolved, unrecognized, and
contentious. Adrian MacKenzie even argues that, entrenched within our very
understanding—or lack thereof—of our technical being, there is something not
yet finished or finally settled. Human collectives are exposed to an ongoing tech-
nological dynamism, an ontological reality that is both foundational and veiled
from them: “The concept of technicity refers to a side of collectives which is not
fully lived, represented or symbolized, yet which remains fundamental to their
grounding, their situation and the constitution of their limits.”59
This book proposes that what is in fact unsettled—and in effect unsettling—is
how our originary technicity interplays with our originary human vulnerability,
particularly but not exclusively in illness, disability, mourning, and mortal em-
bodiment. I suggest, without aspiring to any final resolution, that resetting the
parameters for this debate existentially will provide other possibilities for begin-
ning to fill this semantic void, for softly lifting the veil. In fact, via these lived and
diverse experiences without a name, one arrives in familiar existential terrains
where it is incumbent to query how humans make and do not make sense of the

57 Couldry, Media, Society, World, 181.

58 Karl Jaspers, Philosophie (Berlin, 1948), 469; cited in and translated by Grieder, “What Are
Boundary Situations?,” 330.
59 Adrian MacKenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (New York: Continuum,

2006), 7, italics added.

Limit Situations (of the Digital) 33

aporias of technologized existence. If they are instead reconceived and named

within the digital limit situation, they may consequently also be seen as what
the philosopher Alain Badiou calls “evental sites” that surprise and throw us out
of joint.
Here is a chance for this originary reliance on media to be articulated with
vulnerability. As I will discuss further in c hapters 3 and 4, in drawing inspira-
tion from Jaspers’s project that negotiates between different lines of existentialist
thinking (the subjectivist strand and the historicist and communitarian strand),60
I argue that an existential media analysis needs to account for—and reconcile
these ontological, infrastructural claims with—what I call the thrownness of the
digital limit situation.61 Human thrownness implies being faced with a world
where we are precariously situated in a particular place, at a particular historical
moment, and among a particular crowd—that is, within limits—with the ines-
capable task of tackling our given world around us to make it meaningful. Being
thrown into a limit situation means being projected in a certain direction yet
remaining in midair, of pending and waiting in uncertainty—in fear and trem-
bling, in pain and suffering, in hope and anticipation—while being pushed to
act responsibly. In her COVID-19 musings, the American author Rebecca Solnit
contemplates the profound uncertainty of the limit situation, as we hang in the
air, in the middle:

We are in the middle and the end is not in sight. We are waiting, which is among
most people’s least favorite thing to do, when it means noticing that you have
taken up residence in not knowing. We are in terra incognita, which is where

60 Thornhill, Karl Jaspers, 19.

61 Lagerkvist, “Existential Media.” I have borrowed the concept of “thrownness” from Martin
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper &
Row, 1927/1962), 174ff. There are clear affinities between Jaspers’s and Heidegger’s early thinking.
According to Peter E. Gordon, Heidegger’s concept of anxiety was thoroughly inspired by Jaspers’s
limit situation, which in turn echoed the thinking of Max Weber. Gordon maintains that “it was
Karl Jaspers who was most responsible for transforming this metaphor of the iron cage into a psy-
chological and existential theory. The theory of anxiety as revealing ‘pure’ existence was thus, I shall
argue, a radicalized and ontologized reworking of the psychological idea of the ‘limit-situation’ that
Heidegger borrowed from Jaspers.” Gordon, “German Existentialism,” 66–67. I see an even closer
connection between the scenarios invoked by Heidegger’s concept of human thrownness and the
limit situation itself: both contain radical openness and constraints, movement and obstacles to
movement at the same time; both invoke limits/finitude and incomprehensibility. In her analysis of
Heidegger’s concept of thrownness, Katherine Withy concludes similarly: “Human existence is fi-
nite—not only because we are each going to die, but also because there are limitations on what we can
know and control. We do not determine the shape of reality, but must respond to it and work with
it. We do not choose the time, place or culture into which we are born, but must start from this in
everything that we do. Most importantly, there are limitations on what we can know or understand—
as Kant knew well. I will suggest that there are limitations on our ability to understand ourselves,
that these are necessary for us to understand anything at all, and that this finitude is the cash value
of Heidegger’s talk of thrownness.” Withy, “Situation and Limitation: Making Sense of Heidegger
on Thrownness,” European Journal of Philosophy, 22, no. 1 (2011): 61, italics added, https://doi.org/
10.1111/j.1468-0378.2011.00471.x.
34 Existentializing Media

we always are anyway, but usually we have a milder case of it and can make our
pronouncements and stumble along.62

Importantly, Solnit recognizes that the limit situation is in fact perennial and
belongs to the human condition itself. Yet sometimes, as she ponders, we are
forced to fully realize this fact and to surrender to it. Our life is always a terra in-
cognita, but in certain historical moments, as well as during particular instances
in the individual life course, this is piercingly plain and our being vulnerable
becomes acutely felt.
To be thrown into the digital limit situation furthermore means, I hold, be-
coming in and with the rapidly changing technological world, in displacement.
This is because this given yet emergent connective world also implies both new
existential challenges and possibilities. To be thrown—at the edge—thus means
to be both cast in indeterminacy and situationally bound by limits and limita-
tions that are simultaneously technological and cultural. I thus conceive of being
thrown into the limit situation as thoroughly related to the concept of vulnera-
bility, which is both ontological and social at the same time.63 Acknowledging
this, and by also invoking the limit, feminist media theorist Margaret Schwartz
describes the connections between thrownness and vulnerability and historicizes
the limit situation at the same time:

Thrownness leads to vulnerability because it marks the limits of individual con-

trol: our situations shift without warning, and our footing is uncertain wherever
we land. While this vulnerability is arguably an irreducible part of the human
condition, our current political and historical moment puts precarity into sharp
relief.64

Hence broaching, in the spirit of Salvatore Iaconesi’s curatorial approach, the

idea that humanity is in fact in a civilizational limit situation also means recog-
nizing that our relationship to media technologies is both coconstitutive and
unsettled at once. This means that existential media play prominent, yet ulti-
mately still open-ended roles in the present moment of deep techno-existential

62 Rebecca Solnit, “On Letting Go of Certainty in a Story That Never Ends: Finding Communion

in the Fairy Tales We Tell,” Literary Hub, April 23, 2020, italics added, https://lithub.com/rebecca-sol
nit-life-inside-this-strange-new-fairytale-doesnt-have-to-be-lonely/.
63 Catriona MacKenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds, “Introduction: What Is Vulnerability

and Why Does It Matter for Moral Theory?,” in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist
Philosophy, ed. Catriona Mackenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014); Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
(London: Verso, 2004).
64 Margaret Schwartz, “Thrownness, Vulnerability, Care: A Feminist Ontology for the Digital Age,”

in Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture, ed. Amanda Lagerkvist
(London: Routledge, 2019), 84, italics added.
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 35

saturation. The towering prospects of AI, biometric futures, deep learning, and
autonomous media systems add to such complexities and bring about, I argue, a
heightened sense of uncertainty. Our thrownness entails a fragility (intrinsic also
to our originary human technicity), but this fragility is at the same time a source
of fecundity: it enables the opening of a space for productive action in relation
to the situation into which we are thrown. This book aims to show that our com-
munication culture offers both partially new and partially old existential burdens
and challenges and new spaces and possibilities for the exploration of existential
themes and the profundity of life. The examples that follow will showcase the
ambiguous conditioned potentiality, and radical and potentially intensified un-
certainty, of being and becoming human today, in and with technology.
The particulars of the current moment also show how different forms of
precarity clash. This is the irreducible aspect of the digital limit situation, which
moves the concept beyond its original formulation by Jaspers. For Iaconesi this
is precisely the case, and as he predicts a world of colliding vulnerabilities: “This
tragic character of the situation is exactly the condition which we’ll start to face
in the crises that are about to start coming up systematically: climate change,
migrations, poverty, health, access.”65 Furthermore, in the digital limit situation
old categories seem to be blending and getting mixed up; familiar dichotomies
are not holding.66 In the age of large-scale technical ensembles of information,

65 Iaconesi, message to the AoIR List, March 25, 2020.

66 Clearly, this conception of the limit situation also rhymes with the classic concept of liminality
as launched by Arnold van Gennep in his famous work Rites de Passage from 1908, and developed,
for example, by Victor Turner in The Ritual Process from 1969. In social anthropology, liminality
describes the characteristics of uncertain and ambiguous phases/stages within the ritual process, and
refers to emotional states of disorientation and ambiguity that result from the transitional and trans-
formative process of the ritual. In media studies, we find the fullest adoption of van Gennep’s no-
tion of liminality in the media-events tradition and the work of Daniel Dayan, Eliu Katz, and Tamer
Liebes. See Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Elihu Katz and Tamar Liebes, “‘No More Peace’: How
Disaster, Terror and War Have Upstaged Media Events,” International Journal of Communication, 1
(2007): 157–166, 1932-8036/20070157. The idea that journalism steps in and acts as a psychologist
or comourner and thereby creates ritual cohesion in the face of societal crisis has been purported in
the study of crisis journalism. See Kristina Riegert and Eva-Karin Olsson, “The Importance of Ritual
in Crisis Journalism,” Journalism Practice, 1, no. 2 (2007): 143–158, https://doi.org/10.1080/175127
80701275457. Before seminal works on media events and journalism in crises, Horace Newcomb and
Paul M. Hirsch took stock of Turner’s observation that “liminality is the domain of the ‘interesting’
or of ‘uncommon sense.’ ” Television, Newcomb and Hirsch argue, is a cultural forum, a very concrete
space set within the liminal realm. It occupies the place of ritual (also inherited by theater and high
culture) by offering prisms of cultural plurality through a metalanguage, thus fulfilling a bardic func-
tion in society. In addition, the medium offers “a way of understanding who and what we are, how
values and attitudes are adjusted, how meaning shifts.” “Television as a Cultural Forum: Implications
for Research,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 8, no. 3 (June 1983): 570, https://doi.org/10.1080/
10509208309361170. This conceptualization of media liminality is framed as the “ ‘in-between’ stage,
when one is neither totally in nor out of society. It is a stage of license, when rules may be broken
or bent, when roles may be reversed, when categories may be overturned” (Newcomb and Hirsch,
570). Some of these features are reflected in the limit situation, in which familiar categories are sus-
pended. One major difference, however, is the radical uncertainty of the limit situation: it is not an
existing stage recognized by the cultural order, or a space in between distinct spaces. It is an alien yet
36 Existentializing Media

communication and transportation, biotechnological interventions and genetic

modeling, what was long taken for granted may now be viewed in a new, estran-
ging light radiating throughout the media topography, evincing new things as
well as old truths, reawakening us to the questions of what it means to be human
and to become human with machines. In effect, the very meaning of being human
is changing.67 This also means an opportunity to reawaken ourselves to what it
means to exist in our situation, and what alternatives there may be, including
the potential for realizing our Existenz, as Jaspers calls it. As already stated, the
limit situation is real, but grasping its meanings, following Jaspers, is only pos-
sible by interpreting the ciphers of being: that is, symbols and indeed technologies
themselves through which we approximate reality. In effect, such ciphers and fig-
urative metaphors also help us describe or bring to the surface a whole associa-
tive array of possible ways of recognizing media in light of both long-term and
burgeoning existential concerns.
The world is thus at a limit. Or as Edward S. Casey has argued, the world is
“on edge.”68 What roles do media play more specifically in this wicked situation
of utter emergency and complexity? To answer this question, this book argues
that we need an existential approach to media technologies, sensitized to the
situation at hand, sharing affinities with other creative remappings of, for ex-
ample, anthropologies of emergent technologies, the sociology of expectations,
the environmental humanities, and other forms of postdisciplinarity. One such
creative approach is to be found in Peters’s elemental media philosophy, which
provides for a grand vista, a “between sea, earth and sky” approach to media
studies. Peters reorganizes media history and theory along two horizons.69 The

deeply ingrained ultimate human experience in the moment and at the limit, which defies our under-
standing, and thus has less to do in the first instance with offering a way to conceive of ourselves anew
as a collective, than with an unrelenting sense of dislocation—both individually and collectively. It is
thus a moment of unimaginable pain and rupture, where surrendering to “I don’t know what to do”
carries within it a potential for something unforeseen.

67 Nikolas Rose makes this point: “Indeed, the individualized humanism of bioethicists and med-

ical philosophers emerged alongside the 19th century individualization of the living body within
clinical medicine. But this humanism now encounters human life whose very meaning is being al-
tered by biology, biomedicine and biotechnology. ‘The philosophical status’—indeed the very on-
tology—of human beings is being reshaped through the decisions of entrepreneurs as to where to
invest their capital and which lines of biomedical research and development to pursue.” Nikolas Rose,
“The Politics of Life Itself,” Theory, Culture and Society, 18, no. 1 (2001), 20, https://doi.org/10.1177/
02632760122052020. For important overviews of these changing circumstances and material shifts,
as well as a retheorization of human nature, and the entanglement of humans in morethanhuman
contexts within posthumanist feminist and queer theory, see, for example, Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi
Braidotti, eds., A Feminist Companion to the Posthumanities (New York: Springer, 2020); Anneke
Smelik and Nina Lykke, eds., Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and
Technology (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).
68 Edward S. Casey, The World on Edge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017).
69 See Chris Russill and John D. Peters, “Looking for the Horizon: An Interview between John

Durham Peters and Chris Russill,” Canadian Journal of Communication, 42, no. 4 (2017): 683–699,
http://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2017v42n4a3276.
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 37

first is the proposition that media are of the first ontological order, as they ground
us in being. They are literally earthbound—geophysically defined and defining.
They are “our infrastructures of being.” The second destabilizes the first: it
gravitates toward a recognition of problems posed by dynamic objects, or un-
fixable processes that take fleeting form, the cloud being the chief metaphor and
mobilizer of this approach. Peters’s media theology embraces the strangeness of
the world: it tells a story of the impossible possibility of being both grounded
in media environments and conceiving of and being and becoming in and with
them as evanescent and nonrepresentable, dynamic, and unfixed objects.
Retaining this paradox, offsetting what seems fixed and unfixed, Existential
Media aims to propose how we may rethink media existentially as constituting
both the building blocks and the brinks of being. Existential media allow life to
thrive (a feature elaborated in c hapter 6 on lifeline communication). Yet they
may also allow for precisely the opposite: for life to ultimately dry out, for ex-
ample when humans become hemmed-in barrens of quantification in an all-
encompassing logic of metrics (as will be examined in c hapter 5 on grief and
numbers), or subjected to enforced norms of technological solutionism and
inevitabilism (as I will discuss in chapter 8 on AI imaginaries and the loss of a
phenomenological near future). I suggest that media are and always have been
existential, also due to their open-endedness, this ambiguity of their heteroge-
neous, multiple potential meanings and real-world implications. Media are anti-
nomies. They may shield and soothe, they may aggravate and diminish, they may
sustain life and demolish it—both prospects are in the balance. Or rather, these
prospects are two sides of the same coin. Reconceiving of digital media as exis-
tential media thus entails acknowledging that they contain both openings and
limitations, afford both safety and indeterminacy, and more profoundly, that
their very possibilities may also simultaneously constitute their vulnerabilities.
This is what Simone de Beauvoir called the ethics of ambiguity, which refers to
the ability to see two or more sides of a phenomenon at once; the virtue of being
able to harbor irreducibilities and paradoxes, remaining poised at the limit.70
This importantly embraces the role of tensions and irreducibilities as the starting
point. In the words of Sam Mickey: “Existentialist freestyle comes with a feeling
of the groundlessness of what many take to be grounds, and indeed, a feeling for
the untenability of any simple distinction between groundless and grounded, not
to mention any simple distinction between openness and closure.”71
In this vein, the book carefully situates the approach in the footsteps of
Jaspers’s philosophy, which “lives on the limits” and turns “both to what lies within

70 Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Paris: Gallimard, 1947/

1948).
71 Mickey, Coexistentialism, 32.
38 Existentializing Media

and to what lies without.”72 Existential Media will contribute a philosophy of limit
for media theory and push toward reconceiving of our media situation in light of
a multifocal sense of limits—in terms of brinks, thresholds, edges, ridges, limi-
nality, restrictions, interruptions, margins, fringes, peripheries, precincts, brims,
boundaries, horizons—rather than endless progress, a move that will afford
them multifaceted roles, toward which all the chapters in this book gravitate.73
In the next section, I will discuss the ways in which we may further think with
limits in media theory, beginning by sketching out some key contours of con-
temporary theorization that have a bearing on my aims. In this pursuit, I will also
briefly introduce the essays at the center of Part II of the book. Mobilizing limits
differently, the limit cases discussed in c hapters 5–8 shed light on core themes
in existential philosophy (materiality, thrownness, care, relationality, respon-
sibility, anxiety, freedom, and ethics) as they pervade particular instantiations
and dilemmas within the digital limit situation. They also elicit a series of provi-
sional namings of subforms of existential media, glossed earlier in the introduc-
tion: metric media, caring media, transcendent media, and anticipatory media.74

Thinking with Limits: Introducing the Essays

In contemporary cultural and critical theory, there is a noticeable turn away from
worn humanistic concerns and frayed human-centric concepts and framings.
For example, a wealth of discourse in the new materialism and posthumanism,
as already mentioned, dispenses with “the Human,” and thereby of anthropo-
centric obsessions with the limits of death and finitude. In fact, some forms of
posthumanism themselves conjure up the limitless in an ontology of the vital;
subjectivities and technologies alike are here processual, flowing, and vibrant.
The “I” within demarcations and limits is here replaced, importantly, by nonsub-
jective affective forces of flow, vibrancies of matter across both technologies and
bodies. Its conceived world does not halt such human-machine ensembles or
halt at them; beings are beings in relationality, and subjects are subject to inten-
sities of feeling.75
72 Earle in Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 10, italics added.
73 Jonna Bornemark’s suggestion for how to interpret Jaspers’s limit situation provides some cues.
She points out that Jaspers’s limit situation may be parsed in two different ways. We can conceive of
limits quite straightforwardly from the vantage point of the given limits of the situation, as already
hinted at from the outset (life as a “life within limits”). We can also conceive of situation as limit,
which widens the purview and opens up to thinking about the antinomy of radical freedom subject
to limitation. Bornemark, “Limit-Situation.”
74 Clearly these can and should be productively supplemented, and even conceptually confronted,

with other forms, such as biomedia, eco-media, haptic media, intensive media, and poetic media.
I will not be doing this enough, so the task still awaits us.
75 See Nigel Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect,” Geografiska

Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86, no. 1 (2004): 57–78, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3554460.

Limit Situations (of the Digital) 39

In speculative realism, by contrast, limits are reclaimed. The motivation be-

hind this debate is the need for highlighting limitations of poststructuralist
thinking. Scholars argue that limits in poststructuralism were effectively pro-
duced by discourse, while discourse seemed to be without limit itself, in endless
“chains of signification.” In neorealist forms of posthumanism, “cuts of the real,”
as Katerina Kolozova terms them, have thus traded with an overemphasis on dis-
cursive power. Thinking with limits is a pronounced feature of the approach:

The limit exposed through a deconstructive gesture is a certainty of an in-

stance that is both speechless and nameless. The acceptance of its status as ulti-
mately . . . evasive with respect to the acts of naming does not necessarily imply
that one should quit attempting to grasp it, which on the other hand can be
done only through naming. These grasps, these incomplete insights into the
workings of “the limit” will generate different and many names, among them
“the real” and “the one.”76

Today the limit to representationalism is also the authority of the real, which has
returned and speaks uninterruptedly, if sometimes mysteriously, through forms
of pre-or posthermeneutical metaphysics.77 As discussed earlier, J. D. Peters’s
contribution to this neorealist debate situates elements and environmental
media as a limit against “the corrosiveness of hermeneutics of suspicion,”78 and
retains the idea of an altogether mediated universe. Turning to infrastructure as
an inconspicuous place to reach out to this reality and to the modest things in
our hands—the stuff that shapes hands-on experience, marvelous in all its sim-
plicity—he argues that specimens of the real reveal themselves through irreduc-
ibly natural-cultural forms. Elemental media are such revelations.
In everyday life, infrastructures bring about worlds within which embodied
and situated humans are able to dwell: “Worlds possess a capaciousness that
enables a sense of dwelling within them,”79 writes Paul Frosh. Here we move
about and along the “lines,” that is, those habitual and taken- for-
granted
structures within the everyday lifeworld that Shaun Moores has emphasized.80

76 Kolozova, Cut of the Real, 100.

77 After finitude, argues Quentin Meillasoux—which is beyond the “correlationalist” proverb that
human categories and discourses always correlate with and thereby condition the world as we per-
ceive it in a kind of finality that paradoxically sets no limits to signification—there is the limit of the
absolute, which is the “out there” that invites us to react to it, yet which is chaotic and appears to us as
endlessly contingent. It can only be grasped as contingency. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity
of Contingency (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006/2016).
78 John D. Peters, “The Charge of a Light Barricade: Optics and Ballistics in the Ambiguous Being

of Screens,” in Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Medium, ed. Craig Buckley,
Rüdiger Campe, and Francesco Casetti (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), 216–217.
79 Frosh, The Poetics, xx.
80 Shaun Moores, Digital Orientations: Non- Media-Centric Media Studies and Non-representa-
tional Theories of Practice (New York: Peter Lang, 2018). For a critical evaluation of this approach
40 Existentializing Media

But infrastructures also delimit and even deny movement through their borders
and boundaries. Hence it is equally possible to conceive of these real and tangible
media—for example, the screen, the interface, and the biometric waist watch, the
algorithm, the search engine, the iPad, the social media group, the network, the
face-recognition technology—as limits. As conduits of meaning, information,
entertainment, and ideas, these are also evidently limiting. As infrastructures
that set the parameters of being, they fend off and filter out. They set precincts
that confine and constrain both discourse and bodies.
In this way, media also appear as literal barriers or borders: literal limits. For ex-
ample, as highlighted in “critical border studies,” the border is datafied, governed,
and disciplined by algorithms, producing a within and a without, a rigid limit that
restrains and allows. Smart borders with biometric passports, and risk-profiling
that segregates mobilities, constitute insurmountable mounds that also define
and regulate the movements of particular bodies: their (im)possible projections
in time and space.81 This is its very rationale: to both open and delimit possibility
and movement. In a world of quantification, these infrastructures of being are
of a numerical order—mundane data are made up of statistical calculations that
correlate individual bodies with large sets of data, while nailing them to their
data portraits. This is especially disquieting in cultures of bereavement, where
the ethos of quantification clashes head-on with fundamental phenomenological
and existential values, needs, and insights, as I will analyze in c hapter 5, “Metric
Media: Numerical Being, Marginal Beings, and the Limits of Measuring.” Here,
Jaspers’s and Husserl’s skepticism about numerical reduction will be brought
into conversation with Steven Connor’s provocative defense of numbers, as well
as the central debates on metric cultures and datafied lifeworlds.82
Media are in medias res, habitual media in the middle of our activities, ena-
bling our lives.83 Hanging in midair in the current moment therefore also means
to be in a world of ultimate media presence. Media are there for us, and their
infrastructural always-thereness, their around-the-clock divertissements, their

following Sarah Ahmed’s thinking, see Matilda Tudor: “Queering Digital Media Spatiality: A
Phenomenology of Bodies Being Stopped,” Feminist Media Studies, online first, September 28, 2021.

81 As Louise Amoore shows, biometric borders also extend into the governing of boundaries of

daily life, separating safe from dangerous, legitimate from illegitimate, etc. Louise Amoore, “Biometric
Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror,” Political Geography 25 (March 2006): 336–351,
https//:doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2006.02.001. A recent intervention that also discusses biometric
passports is Mahmoud Keshavarz, The Design Politics of the Passport (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
82 Btihaj Ajana, Governing through Biometrics: The Biopolitics of Identity (Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Ajana, ed., Metric Culture: Ontologies of Self-Tracking Practices
(London: Emerald, 2018).
83 They are both middle agents in the Latin etymological sense, implying a notion of causation as

that which comes between cause and effect (the means =the media) and situated in the middle as the
infrastructures of being, as foreground and background, as the materials that enable us and the ledges
we hang on to for dear life.
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 41

accessibility at our fingertips, produce both solace and, I suggest, an amplified

sense of watchfulness.84 Beyond the endless needs for validation, it is through
such prodding of vigilant attention that networks and social media bring about
and enforce sense of compulsory connectivity and accessibility for their implied
users. This situation is now heightened, I suggest, by a sense of digital annexation
of what matters the most. Imran Khan, a Qatar-based journalist who writes for
The Guardian and Al Jazeera, illustrates this mix of contradictory and hesitant
feelings when media just “happen” to us and offer to resolve us at the same time.
Khan lost his cousin Sajid and was forced to bury him from afar. In the limit situ-
ation of loss and displacement, the entanglement of technology and the profun-
dity of life became fused into one and the same befuddling experience:

On my phone I got a notification. I had been added to a WhatsApp instant mes-

saging group designed to keep us all updated on the funeral arrangements.
A WhatsApp group; a place normally reserved for the trivial, for the daily
flotsam of communication between family, friends and colleagues. A few hours
later, a Zoom link was posted in the group. Six weeks ago I had never even
heard of this app, and now it was embedding itself in this personal and intimate
moment of grief. This link, an impersonal piece of code made up of a seem-
ingly random list of numbers, is now the way we mourn. . . . I would never have
thought I would take part in a funeral for someone via an app.85

Khan’s story conjures up the sense in which existential media become lifelines
to latch onto, in order to keep carrying on, upholding the routines of life in the
shadow of finitude and under the threat of disintegration. Stressing that media
are “things in the middle,” J. D. Peters argues that their very nature is to “show
up wherever we humans face the unmanageable mortality of our material exist-
ence: the melancholy facts that memory cannot hold up and body cannot last,
that time is, at base, the merciless and generous habitat for humans and things.”86
This is particularly true in moments of utter significance, during crises and in
life-defining situations, when our vulnerability is principally felt and our security
is shaken. Media in the middle, I suggest, are thus also media at the limit. They

84 Peters ascribes this to the televisual, but it applies also to the habitual network: “Television, like

trauma, and like weather, is both hideously mundane and fatally disruptive. It is like a bomb, always
threatening to go off—we interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for this news bulletin—
but otherwise full of empty time.” Peters, “Like a Thief in the Night: Watching and Witnessing,” in
Testimony/Bearing Witness: Epistemology, Ethics, History and Culture, eds. Sybille Krämer and Sigrid
Weigel, Washington DC: Rowman and Littlefield (2017), p. 202.
85 Imran Khan, “Death at a Distance: Zoom Funerals in the Time of coronavirus,” Al Jazeera, April

30, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/4/30/death-at-a-distance-zoom-funerals-in-

the-time-of-coronavirus.
86 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 50.
42 Existentializing Media

are seemingly salvific and also deeply ambivalent as we—in all our asymmetrical
diversity—are poised on the rims of our individual and collective lives.87
When crisis is upon us already, media seem to be an even more deeply ambiv-
alent affair. In other words, we enter techno-existential
vulnerability. For Imran
Khan, there was also a strong sense of technological enforcement, embroiled
within the experience of loss itself: “Six weeks ago I had never even heard of this
app, and now it was embedding itself in this personal and intimate moment of
grief,” he stresses in bewilderment. Scholars have pointed to a kind of natural-
ization occurring through creep within the logic of surveillance capitalism.88
Through sneaky habituation, phenomena never craved or even imagined be-
come and feel rapidly indispensable and natural. But they may also appear as
surprise, accident, and shock—not simply in terms of a sensory overload to the
“synaesthetic system,” as Walter Benjamin argued, but actually also in techno-ex-
istential terms. The fact that technologies are both “poison and cure,” as Jacques
Derrida emphasized,89 thus receives a new meaning as human beings are thrown
into the digital limit situation. As Khan’s words are written in the middle of the
misadventure and pain of loss, and also in a major crisis for the world, his tes-
timony illustrates that media continuously offer themselves up and without
warning, also as technologies for mitigation, care, and relief.
Curing or caring dimensions pertain to them as they frame and enable us. In
this vein, as the pandemic was upon the world, Rebecca Solnit decided to turn
to fairy tales for comfort, and to read them aloud to others—families, children,
passers-by—online. Stories with beginnings, middles, and endings thus became
such “things to hold onto.” Evidently the internet itself was the infrastructural
enabler, the condition of possibility, the provisional frame for these mediations:

Sometimes I could see as I read the stories that a thousand people were on-
line with me and I would propose that if we were all inside the same story and
the story was being heard in a thousand rooms then we were somehow in a
thousand-room palace together, and I would find a spaciousness in the tale and
the connection to unseen others that felt a little like Prince Andrei’s sky and
hoped that others found it with me. . . . We were all in that moment in the unex-
pected together and it was a good place to be.90

87 Indeed, we are collectively and yet asymmetrically at the mercy of a capitalistic life form

draining itself along with the planet’s resources, in what seems to be the end times for our species.
See Claire Colebrook, “End-Times for Humanity,” Aeon, June 1, 2017, https://aeon.co/essays/the-

human-world-is-not-more-fragile-now-it-always-has-been.

88 Fischmann and Selinger, Re-engineering Humanity; Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

89 Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1968/1981), 63–171.

90 Solnit, “On Letting Go,” n.p., italics added.
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 43

Here, in transient yet significant moments of being there together online, in the
connective presence of thousands of unseen others, she experienced what I will
explore thoroughly in chapter 6, “Caring Media: Beings on the (Life)line,” where
I further engage voices in critical disability studies and feminist new materialism,
including recent debates on care. Here a strong sense of relationality emerges in
the shared vulnerabilities of grief and loss. Hence, media in the middle and at the
limit become handrails/balustrades, with which to steady ourselves as we move
about and along the lines, or as we are forced to establish new ones. Media are
lifelines, confirming such cohabitation of the existential trials at hand. As I will
discuss further in the above-mentioned chapter, they are importantly habitual,
haptic, processual, and deeply material. They make patterns predictable, enable
mundane routine, and facilitate a being there for one another online. There is
comfort—a sense of existential security—in these predictable existential media
that will afford some sense of control, even if limited and transient. In this em-
phasis on ordinariness, on the boring aspects of existence, is also reflected a
human tendency to long for routine, pedestrian environments, and foreseeable
situations in which to dwell. Solnit argues that this yearning is so strong that
humans are even prone to retroactively rewrite the hazards that befell them, as
something they had in fact predicted: “The unforeseen happens regularly, and
then not a few people forget that it does and look forward to a foreseeable future
all over again and pretend they foresaw what surprised them, flatten the bump
back into their smooth version of reality.”91
But in addition, at the limit, at the threshold, we also experience the limits of
what we can control. The very haphazard quality of the limit situation relates to
the profound fact that most of the time, we do not know. As Solnit also puts it, in
the limit situation “we have taken up residence in not knowing.”92 As we set out
from limit situations, it is clear that they may involve sense-making and authentic
encounters and practices of care. But since they are constituted by ambivalence
and recalcitrant, elusive meaning, they also entail inevitable limits in the shape of
tracings and suspensions. Hence, what the limit situation reveals is not only that
we are compelled to see and with open eyes resolutely appreciate what lies before
us in the present moment. Here we also face the limits of our aspiration to com-
prehensive knowledge, to certainty, and to a resolution. As Jaspers argues: “For
the most devastating threat to truth in the world is the overwhelming claim
to the absolutely true. In the certainty of the moment the humility of the en-
during question is indispensable.”93 We thus need to keep philosophizing, to en-
dure querying as we are thrown into not knowing. Summarizing a long career of

91 Ibid.
92 Ibid., n.p.
93 Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1951/1973), 99.

44 Existentializing Media

fieldwork in several parts of the world, the existential anthropologist Michael

D. Jackson suggestively asks:

Was it possible therefore to identify any existential givens, common to all

human beings, despite the different ways they represent reality to them-
selves, or the academic conventions that chopped this reality up into discrete
domains: the religious, the economic, the political, the psychological, the ra-
tional, the irrational and so forth? I begin with an assumption that’s been borne
out of my ethnographic experiences, namely that human beings everywhere are
perplexed and provoked by the mystery of how the human relates to the extra-
human, which is to say everything that lies beyond our immediate comprehen-
sion and control. Experiences that we call religious are therefore connected
with limits and limitations, with those critical junctures in life when we come up
against the limits of what we can say or do and what we can think or know.94

What may be called “religious experiences” may thus be reflecting crucial aspects
of the limit situation; they defy our imagination and our knowledge; they are
beyond our command. Jackson remains curious about the central place of that
extrahuman dimension in human life and culture. Existential Media is guided
by a similar conviction; it will thus further linger in shadows of the known and
the knowable, and on the edges of experience itself. This enables drawing us near
what can only be affectively felt, marveled at, or in effect believed. This moves us
both theoretically and empirically toward the antinomies of digital existence. In
chapter 7, “Transcendent Media: Caring for the Dead, Relating at the Threshold,”
I attend to particular forms of communication at the limits and persevere in
querying about these limit experiences.95 Here one finds a discernible yearning
for connection, for relating and thus communicating at the threshold, visible in
practices of speaking to the dead online—a feature of the digital afterlife under
investigation in the field of death online research. I contribute to this debate by
naming these existential strivings to transcend the chasms of being. This, I sug-
gest, includes a notion of the digital afterlife that reiterates fantasies about disem-
bodiment. But as I go on to suggest, with support from Thomas W. Laqueur, who
argues that what defines our humanity is to care for the dead in a material sense,
the body is in fact making a forceful return within this realm—setting limits and
thus offering a corrective. The chapter takes stock of the dynamic tension be-
tween disembodiment and re-embodiment in online cultures of bereavement

94 Michael D. Jackson, lecture “Studying Religion in the Post- 9/11 World: The Importance of
Taking Religion Seriously from a Humanities Perspective in Troubled Times,” Center for the Study
of World Religions Symposium, Harvard Divinity School, September 11, 2013, https://www.youtube.
com/watch?v=623Eovasu-U&t=5s.
95 This aspect of existential communication will be further elaborated in c
hapter 4.
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 45

and in after-death communication, and suggests that the latter in fact reveals
contours of a postinteractive mode of being human in the digital era.
Hence, to think with limits also means to think fundamentally beyond them,
as they are verging on something else. In this land of strangeness, however, one
also finds other invitations to cross the boundaries, in terms of transgressing,
altering, and making a difference at the frontiers.96 This leads to another way of
thinking of limit as edge. As Edward S. Casey reminds us in his important book,
The World on Edge, edges supply a porous boundary: “Although edges are effec-
tive as demarcating and delimiting . . . , they can also be quite porous and resil-
ient. Even edges that serve to contain may also, in certain other respects, serve to
open up.”97 He furthermore argues that the limits set by any form, such as media,
space, or other frames, do two things: “Edges, then, bear up and bear out that
which they edge.”98
In a similar vein, in reconceiving of Derrida’s deconstruction as a “philos-
ophy of the limit,” feminist critical law scholar Drucilla Cornell conceives of
the limit as threshold, which resonates in crucial ways with Jaspers’s thinking.
Importantly for my purposes here, the threshold is for Cornell both inside and
outside at the same time, while simultaneously opening the inside to what lies
beyond. According to Cornell: “This link, the ‘threshold,’ is both the invitation to
cross over, the call to interpretation, and yet a barrier to full accessibility.”99 The
threshold calls us beyond itself, while constituting itself as a fence to any full real-
ization of the human project, for instance in the realm of Cornell’s prime interest,
law: “This double-edged, contradictory threshold—at once a call to the ‘beyond’
of justice and a barrier to the realization of perfect justice—is what confronts the
judge.”100 Thresholds thus entail a possibility for movement and change, and a

96 Charles E. Scott puts the potential of the border like this: “I believe they are also sites that we

can be aware of, that we can feel them even when we cannot cognize them—sites where, on the very
borders of our identities and familiar worlds, we can experience the impact of what we do not know.
In such situations people can be attuned to what they do not understand, and some of these situations
can include sources of vitality for addressing and responding to the differences between us that en-
gage us.” “Cultural Borders,” Research in Phenomenology, 42, no. 2 (2012): 159.
97 Casey, “Edges and the In-Between,” 1.
98 According to Casey, edges thus bear up—the edges of instruments such as a computer offer

what Heidegger called “reliability.” Withdrawing from attention, the edges “act to situate it in the
midst of what we experience. They bear it up.” But importantly, they also bear out, moving laterally
through the edges: “As falling away from centrated perception, edges direct attention to whatever lies
outside them in the environing circumstance in which they, and that which they delineate, are set.”
Casey, The World on Edge, xv–xvi.
99 Drucilla Cornell, Philosophy of the Limit (New York: Routledge, 1992), 111.
100 Also see Elisabeth Weed, who argues that “the threshold is pivotal to Cornell’s project of

renaming deconstruction. To read deconstruction as an ethical project, or better, to read it as con-

gruent with the ethical project, Cornell sees the aporia not only as end but as possibility. The inability
of any system to be identical to itself is reconfigured in her texts as an ‘ethical self-transcendence’
(PoL [Philosophy of the Limit] p. 111), a deconstructive insight that produces the threshold of the
‘beyond’: Thus, the deconstructive emphasis on the opening of the ethical self-transcendence of any
system that exposes the threshold of the ‘beyond’ of the not yet.” Elisabeth Weed, “Reading at the
Limit,” Cardozo Law Review, 15, no. 5 (1993): 1672.
46 Existentializing Media

liminality of prospects: “The threshold is the opening up to the Other, the Other
without which there is no ethics.”101 The dead end of aporia is an opening that
offers a transformative potential. There is a way out.
To sum up: to articulate technology with limits, finitude, and vulnerability is
one way to approach the realities of the digital limit situation, and one way to
begin to name them. As Jaspers argues, this can never be achieved within any
complete understanding. Nevertheless, I suggest there is potential in thinking
with limits in a multivalent sense for further remappings in media theory.
Hannah Arendt summarizes the paths of Jaspers’s philosophy, pointing to this
merit of limits, as they in fact fragment:

Being as such is not knowable, it can be experienced only as something “all

encompassing.” This makes superfluous the ancient ontological search which,
so to speak, kept a look out in beings hoping to find Being, as if being were
a magical, omni-present substance that makes present everything that is, and
that is manifested linguistically in the little word “is.” Once the concrete world
was freed from this specter of Being, and from the illusion that we are capable
of knowing that specter, philosophy was likewise freed from the necessity of
having to explain everything monistically, on the basis of one principle, that is
of this one omnipresent substance. Instead we can accept the “fragmentation
of Being,” . . . and we can accommodate the modern sense of alienation in the
world, and the modern desire to create in a world that is no longer a home to us,
a human world that could become our world.102

Arendt’s final point is crucial. By bringing forth the heuristic of the digital
limit situation to describe this uncertain moment, before which we are called
to awaken ourselves collectively, we can underline the urgency and severity of
those cataclysmic and often contradictory forces of the present moment—the
new axial (or coaxial) age, as Sam Mickey terms it, following Jaspers.103 The dig-
ital limit situation compels thinking about the gravity of the situation and the re-
sponsibility we have for it. However, these conditions of uncertainty invite hope
and reopen the future horizon—a trait of the digital limit situation that I will
explore further in chapter 8, “Anticipatory Media: Futurability on the Brinks
of Time.”
I thus end this book by bringing home my basket full of “fragmentations of
Being”: that is, variations on limits reconfigured into a pattern with the help
of the existential framework. Here I conduct an analysis of discourses about

101 Ibid., 1680.

102 Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?,” 186, italics added.
103 Mickey, Coexistentialism, 211.
Limit Situations (of the Digital) 47

the future with media, pitting them against important debates in anticipation
studies. In conversation with a range of thinkers, I examine the inevitabilism
of AI imaginaries and ask: what could reawakening ourselves to our existential
selves and needs, as Jaspers endeavored for humans to do, mean for promoting
an inclusive and open future of techno-existential, ethical, and ecological sus-
tainability, care, and anticipation? This leads in this instance to how limits can
also be conceived of in terms of responsiveness and responsibility. Privileging the
mourner—the invisible singular coexister—as a site of access to indispensable
alternate knowledge, and to methods of hope, I argue that a human future—in
and with our technologies—needs to be reclaimed, since anticipation is an ex-
istential faculty that belongs to us, and caring for the future present is therefore
our utmost task (even when it may seem impossible, as mourners will teach us).
Care is importantly not a theoretical exercise, or something that pertains to the
practices or deficiencies of someone else; it is, as I will argue, the very task ahead
of the humanities and social sciences themselves if they move onto the front lines
of the limit situation. Indeed, as has been suggested in recent brave attempts to
fold the edge into media studies, this move will also make visible the disciplinary
regime itself.104 In other words, attending to limits may force us to scrutinize
our own practices and values—our axiology. In order to do so, we need to linger
at the edge, and at times to cross over it. In other words, we need the courage to
enter into the slow field. In the next chapter, I discuss the ethos and ethics fos-
tered in the existential terrains of connectivity, and the politics they require, by
also introducing methodological considerations and the materials studied.

104 As argued by Jeremy Moore and Nicole Strobel: “By folding the edge into media studies, we are

attending to the ways that these vital interests map onto considerations of media objects, practices,
and institutions. Doing so can help us better understand the ways boundaries are drawn through
technological, social, or environmental assemblages, the ways we ourselves draw boundaries and
distinctions around the things we study, and the potential costs or rewards of crossing these bound-
aries or going over the edge.” Moore and Strobel, “Introduction: At the Edge,” Media Fields Journal,
no. 14 (2019): 3, http://mediafieldsjournal.org/introduction-at-the-edge/.
2
Into the Slow Field
The What, the How, and the Why

Existential media studies is not a field defined by a single subject area—such as

a particular media form, institution, technology, genre, form of participation, or
user or audience segment. Nor does it involve concentrating on a particular bias
of communication in terms of, for example, focalizing media temporalities or ge-
ographical scales. It is a theoretical and ethical methodology, much in line with
the field of critical disability studies: it is empirically founded, yet philosophically
and politically motivated. As this chapter shows, death, mourning, commemo-
rating the dead, and so on, have a particular place here, but it must be noted that
the field has recently been taken into new domains through interventions from
queer theory on the concept of disorientation, and through empirical work on
involuntary childlessness.1 Even more recently, scholars in the field have turned
to the existential challenges and ethical imperatives of a future of biometrics and
autonomous systems.2 This budding field is now growing, and no doubt it will
come to include other experiences, as yet unforeseen, of the limit situation in the
future.
En route to existentializing media, I interlaced three voices at the limit into
my overture. Salvatore Iaconesi’s reflections illustrate the continued centrality
of mortality and morbidity for parsing existentially about technology and its
broad planetary implications. This was followed by Rebecca Solnit’s existen-
tialist ruminations on both the ineffable uncertainties of being and the passing
moorings of connective copresence, through the mediation of sharing of stories.
Finally, Imran Khan’s reflections on the estranging aspects of social distancing in
digital grief called attention to the ambivalent shock dimensions of the new sal-
vific lifeline. Salvatore Iaconesi, Rebecca Solnit, and Imran Khan represent three

1 See Matilda Tudor’s dissertation, “Desire Lines: Towards a Queer Digital Media Phenomenology”

(Huddinge: Södertörn University College, 2018) for a queer feminist, phenomenological, and exis-
tential approach to digital culture. For a recent contribution to existential media studies focusing
on involuntary childlessness on the internet, see Kristina Stenström, “Involuntary Childlessness
Online: Digital Lifelines through Blogs and Instagram,” New Media & Society, October 2020, 1–18,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820968907.
2 Cf. Amanda Lagerkvist, Matilda Tudor, Jacek Smolicki, Charles M. Ess, Jenny Eriksson

Lundström, and Maria Rogg, “Body Stakes: An Existential Ethics of Care in Living with Biometrics
and AI” (under review).

Existential Media. Amanda Lagerkvist, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925567.003.0003
Into the Slow Field 49

voices in three different national and cultural contexts—Italy, the United States,
and Qatar—that over a couple of months between March and April 2020 shared
their thoughts and concerns online. What they have in common is that they are
vocalizing in public, in full visibility in the midst of the ongoing pandemic mo-
ment, the techno-existential stakes of this limit situation. In the acts of speaking
and sharing stories from their individual lives, challenges, illnesses, and bereave-
ment—connected to the global crisis—their voices were digitally mediated in
various outlets, in turn shaping and reshaping the bigger picture: the digital limit
situation.
Yet the margins of loss and ailment are, of course, also inhabited by much less
public figures, with much less access to this type of visibility. Sometimes they
gather in NGOs for the bereaved with a strong internet presence, or set up a
blog in the online environment. Their voices, life stories, and media practices,
which I was privileged to take part in and to follow from 2015 to 2018, form the
foundations of both the ethics and the essays of this book. Empirically, this book
places a specific but not exclusive emphasis on death and bereavement in the
digital context, and thereby contributes, as discussed in the introduction, to the
burgeoning research field of death online research. This field has researched dif-
ferent phenomena of online grief and the digital afterlife. For example, it has fo-
cused on mourning communities online and on web memorials where you may
create a memory through posting images, texts, sounds, and so on, in order to
commemorate the deceased, or where you can light digital candles. It has also
attended to memorialized Facebook profiles where you can express grief through
status updates, wall posts, photographs, and condolences in the commentary
fields. Web memorials also appear in the shape of private home pages, in similar
spaces in the hands of the funerary sector; they can also be administrated by an
NGO or enabled by the key, giant players of the platform society.
As this book will explore, parents construct memorials online mainly to
preserve their dead children in an effort of trying to cope, of trying to rebuild
a world that has collapsed, and in affirming that they are indeed parents of
the dead child, laying claims to it having existed in the world.3 One mourning
mother of Spädbarnsfonden, Sofia, explains why she chose to express her grief
via Instagram and stresses this aspect of preservation:

I personally want to share our story. For me it’s a way to let my child continue
to live on despite the fact that she died, and I see the medial traces that I leave
as something beautiful that I hope will be preserved for all time. I have even

3 Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik, “Death Ends a Life, Not a Relationship: Objects

as Media on Children’s Graves,” in Mediating and Remediating Death, ed. Dorthe Refslund
Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).
50 Existentializing Media

started to write a book so as to ensure that Embla is really preserved even if I die
tomorrow.4

For another mourning parent and member of the NGO VSFB, Esbjörn, the point
of setting up a memorial Facebook group was similarly to preserve his daughter
(who drowned while diving) in memory but also to contribute in a concrete way
through material means to the community of divers, so that this tragedy does
not have to be repeated.5 As these two voices begin to illustrate, this research
concerns highly sensitive topics. My study places the mourners and their ways of
being (online) at the center of both media theory and methodology and fosters
an ethics at the same time.

Research Ethics and the Materials Studied

This book is a contribution to qualitative media studies and internet research.6

Using a multimethod research design, I combine theoretically and philosophi-
cally informed close readings of a range of materials with ethnographic methods
in the field of bereavement. I have termed this a slow field, which requires of the re-
searcher that she make a range of methodological choices that in turn rely on and
bring into being a practical ethics. In fact, the existential terrains of connectivity
force the researcher to slow down and thereby also to problematize the norms
of speed and quantity in data-gathering in nonafflicted contexts. Consequently,
I worked consciously to slowly, patiently, and with great sensitivity establish
contacts within the groups. After building trust, I was granted a very rare ac-
cess to the field, through individuals who one might label powerhouses within
their networks. These methodological choices were often imposed, and then
embraced willingly, due to the fact that my ethical imperative was the mourners’
well-being and wishes. This also means I have been working with individuals in
a longitudinal manner, meeting them several times over several years. I chose
strategically to interview people with very deep experience and a wide network
of contacts within the field, which means that each voice also conveys a much
broader register of experience than their single life story contains. This has also
resulted in an in-depth “social network analysis” of sorts.

4 Interview, November 2018.

5 Interview, December 2015.
6 I have been drawing inspiration from the recent methodological debates within the field of

qualitative internet research. See Christine Hine, Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied
and Everyday (London: Bloomsbury, 2015); and Annette Markham, “Ethnography in the Digital
Internet Era: From Fields to Flows, Descriptions to Interventions,” in Qualitative Research, ed. David
Silverman (Los Angeles: Sage, 2016).
Into the Slow Field 51

I have done five different studies in all. Among persons who identify as
mourners, I have conducted fieldwork and interviewed people who navigate
and inhabit the existential terrains of connectivity in dire times of loss. Three
studies were undertaken among online mourners: one was of parents who have
built online memorials for their dead children (and in two cases siblings for their
dead sister and brother). Another study was about an online support group for
mourners who had lost someone in the middle of life; the third was of a group of
parents who mourn their stillborn child. Interviews and fieldwork were carried
out between 2015 and 2018, and three groups were studied. All of them involve
members of NGOs with a strong online presence; the first two also belong to the
umbrella organization Samarbete för människor i sorg (SAMS) (Collaboration
for people in bereavement). SAMS is politically involved in a struggle to “make
grief a natural part of life,” by de-medicalizing mourning and by introducing a
reform for grief leave on a par with parental leave in Sweden.
Vi Som Förlorat Barn (VSFB) (We who lost a child: http://www.vsfb.se/) was
set up among a group of bereaved parents in 1993 in Gothenburg. It offers sup-
port meetings for parents and siblings in physical spaces all over Sweden, in-
cluding in summer camps, and it educates people who wish to support others
in their grief. Since 2011 it has had a Facebook group, now with over twenty-six
hundred members. This study started out in February 2015 with initial contacts.
I chose to conduct in-depth interviews with core individuals belonging to this
nonprofit association. I also conducted follow-up interviews, both in physical
space and via email. In the case of this group, I focused on their establishment
and maintenance of an online memorial, which meant that I sat next to the
parent or sibling in question as he or she showed me the memorial, talked about
it, and explained what it meant to him or her and how it came into being; as well
as how he or she uses it and the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of the commu-
nicative practices that have evolved in that space.
Vi som förlorat någon mitt i livet (VIMIL) (We who lost someone in the
middle of life: http://www.vimil.se/) has different local cells all over Sweden. It
was set up online by six afflicted women and one man in 1999. It has over one
thousand members. Approximately 85 percent of the members of VIMIL are fe-
male, and most of them have lost their partners. There has been a gradual in-
crease of male members in the past five years. Interviewees say the membership
is very broad, and that people from different social strata, cultural backgrounds,
and parts of the country meet there. VIMIL’s activities have both online and
offline dimensions: meetings in physical spaces, the chatroom, the guestbook,
the possibility to light a digital candle, the membership phone line, and the
Facebook group that started in 2010, and which for many constitutes the hub.
I studied communication in their open guestbook on their home page from a
focused period in 2014, as well as other PR materials from their website, and
52 Existentializing Media

newspaper articles devoted to the network. On two occasions I conducted field-

work in physical space. I chose to interview key expert informants who had been
very active in the group and on the board, and conducted in-depth interviews
and several follow-up interviews with them, the focus of which was mainly on
their closed Facebook group and its role in the mourning process.
Spädbarnsfonden (The fund for infants, http://www.spadbarnsfonden.se)
supports mourning parents of infants; it was set up by bereaved parents in 1986.
Today it has online support activities as well as meetings and camps in physical
space for the bereaved. My study of this group comprised several meetings with
an expert informant and initiator of the NGO, a couple of instances of fieldwork
in physical space where I also shared information about the study, and email
interviews in 2018 with members of the group about the role of the internet in
their mourning process.
Yet another study was a joint project with Yvonne Andersson in 2016 on
cancer blogs. I draw on and expand upon this study, in which we focused on pub-
licly published materials from private blogs and Instagram accounts by women
struck by a deadly disease in the middle of life.7 There were six case studies in all.
Two of the women are in their thirties; the rest are over forty years old. One died
after we began our research. All have children, and the two younger women were
pregnant or had recently given birth to a child when they were diagnosed. Only
one of the women had run a blog on a regular basis before her diagnosis; the rest
started blogging because of their diagnoses. They were all stricken by severe, life-
threatening forms of cancer, and they have gone through very tough treatments.
Finally, I have researched the market rhetoric of companies belonging to the
digital inheritance area and conducted interviews with people involved in the
funerary business who have insight into the new technological and digital serv-
ices for preservation and erasure. These interviews played a contextualizing role
in the study. I also analyze some of the recent services offered in this area, from
digital wills to memorials, legacy avatars, and automated farewell messaging in
an international perspective. Since many of the online services and corporate
initiatives may be quite transient, and their life span within the “eternity busi-
ness” is not seldom evanescent, they are chosen not because they themselves are
permanent and enduring, but because they reflect a broader cultural tendency
that is repeatedly given new renditions.
Apart from meeting the requirements of the Ethics Board,8 this project
has been greatly inspired by the virtue ethics approach of Charles M. Ess, the

7 Yvonne Andersson was responsible for gathering the materials for our study, but we worked on

the analysis together. See also Yvonne Andersson, “Blogs and the Art of Dying: Blogging with, and
about, Severe Cancer in Late Modern Swedish Society,” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, online
first (July 12, 2017): 394–413, https://doi.org/10.1177/0030222817719806.
8 The research has been approved by the Regional Ethics Board of Stockholm (dnr 2016:77–31).

It also follows the guidelines of the Swedish Research Council (CODEX, http://www.codex.vr.se/en/
Into the Slow Field 53

philosopher, ethicist, and media scholar.9 In particular, I have tried to apply what
he (following Judith Jarvis Thomson) calls the “Good Samaritan Approach,”10
which I have interpreted and applied as follows. Due to the highly sensitive na-
ture of the research topic, informants have been approached with a high degree
of ethical sensitivity and consideration. I have shared a “Letter of Introduction”
with them specifying the aims of the research and their right to withdraw, to
see transcriptions, and to comment upon and complement the interviews.
Before entering into a community, even when observing open forums that were
not password protected, I introduced myself in a letter to the administrators.
I thereby asked for permission to conduct the study and introduced the pur-
pose and objectives of my project. Voluntary informed consent was sought in all
the interviews I conducted. The informed-consent process was initiated at the
very first contact with potential informants, as well as in the letter of introduc-
tion, where the purpose and aims of the project were thoroughly described, the
role of informants within the project was explained, and my intention to pub-
lish the study was declared. All informants, furthermore, have been guaranteed
confidentiality and anonymity. Informants have been anonymized, and those
mourners who have mourned anonymously in an open group have been doubly
anonymized. I have considered the risks involved in using direct quotations
that can be accessed through full-text search, and by means of which individ-
uals might potentially be identified. Since I have translated all quotations from
Swedish, and since the open forums I examine were anonymized from the begin-
ning, I believe it will be nearly impossible to track down any mourner from the
quotations I provide. Finally, I have chosen not to conduct long-term (partici-
pant) observation in any closed support groups, out of respect for the mourners’
wishes. In a few cases, however, I was allowed into a memorial group or into
a memorialized profile by a bereaved parent. At the risk of losing some of the
embedded cultural meanings in the materials, I chose only to observe, not to
participate. Participating would have been interesting, but I felt it methodolog-
ically inconsistent and ethically problematic to interfere, to engage in support
conversations, or the like.

index.shtml) and of the Association of Internet Researchers: “Ethical Decision-Making and Internet
Research: Recommendations from the AoIR Ethics Working Committee (Version 2.0),” https://aoir.
org/reports/ethics2.pdf.

9 Charles M. Ess, Digital Media Ethics (Oxford: Polity Press, 2014/2020).

10Judith Jarvis Thomson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1, no. 1 (Fall
1971): 47–66.
54 Existentializing Media

The Ethics of Listening at the Margins

A margin occupied by a minority is replete with limit conditions.11 Some

margins, moreover, are margins within margins and retain a particular in/vis-
ibility within.12 The margins under consideration here are in a post-Christian,
secular culture such as Sweden’s, most of the time invisible, unwanted, unspeak-
able, and as mourners say, plagued by a normativity culture of noninfliction.
During modernity, and up until the time of the internet, mourners were expected
to mourn in privacy, as death became sequestered from everyday life. But the sit-
uation is evidently changing due to the digitalization of death and mourning,
which has desequestered death and turned mourning into a profoundly social
practice online. Mourning and commemoration of the dead in the contempo-
rary digital media landscape have some specific features. Facebook memorials
more specifically display the timeline of the deceased, which constitutes a narra-
tive of continuation that also reinforces continuing bonds with them. The time-
line entails an accrual of various memories of a person, time periods in their
life and emotions to be engaged with after their death. But memories are also
produced, in this age of mobile and ubiquitous media, within a socially extended
network, and they are retrieved and re-enacted in a temporally, spatially, and also
corporeally extended manner. Online memorialization enables an ongoing pro-
cessual project of active remembrance, through communication both with other
mourners and directly with the dead.
By providing crucial means in the important work of restoring the world and
recreating life after loss, and in allowing, through forms of connective presence,
for establishing both new connections with other mourners, continuing bonds
with the dead, and social and political action, social media environments and
online memorials afford a sense of “existential security” in the face of bottomless
grief and suffering. This has been studied across various cultural contexts.13 Yet
the particular context in question—which is replete with remnants of this cul-
tural order of severing death and grief from everyday life in modern Sweden—
clearly distinguishes the individuals and groups of this study from their
counterparts in many other parts of the world. But what also interests me here is
what we can learn from this place of finitude in light of how it also intersects with

11 Race can, according to Robert Bernasconi, in fact be defined as a border concept, and the pro-

cess through which we see race—that is, the racialization process—may be ultimately defined not
through its center, but through the fact that its core lies at its edges. Bernasconi, “Crossed Lines in the
Racialization Process: Race as a Border Concept,” Research in Phenomenology, 42, no. 2 (2012): 206–
228, https://doi.org/10.1163/156916412X651201.
12 Cf. Kate Caldwell, “We Exist: Intersectional In/Visibility in Bisexuality & Disability,” Disability

Studies Quarterly, 13, nos. 3–4 (2010), https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1273/1303.

13 See, for example, Katerina Linden, “Death Online in Contemporary Russia: Memory, Forgetting

and the Connective Presence of Mourning on the Internet,” PhD dissertation (Department of
Informatics and Media, Uppsala University, 2021).
Into the Slow Field 55

certain other margins, such as disability, which, as disability scholar Rosemarie

Garland-Thomson argues, is a unique “identity category,” because “anyone can
enter [it] at any time, and we will all join it if we live long enough.”14 The same
goes for the bereaved.
In Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge, feminist philos-
opher Cressida J. Heyes argues for bringing back in limit experiences of the edge,
which are excluded from life and too often from scholarly attention. She exem-
plifies her point with sexual violence, childbirth, and drug use.15 I suggest that
my mourning informants—especially bereaved parents—are a margin without
a name (in the sense of representing “the unspeakable”) who also belong to this
group. Not recognized as such, they have, I will venture to suggest, a privileged
access to a particular “Real,” as they are subject to conditions of limit. They are
in that particular space where they may seize the limit situation. This space is
what Alain Badiou calls the evental site. As summarized by feminist philosopher
Katerina Kolozova:

The evental site is a position held by social groups, or categories of subjectivity,

that are virtually non-existent for the “situation” . . . whose inhabitants they are.
They are on the edge of the void (the real) upon which the situation resides. And
for the language that the situation disposes with, they remain unrepresentable. In
fact, these groups hold the position of the void. They are the void for the situ-
ation they inhabit, but when they act and thereby create an entirely new truth,
they do it from the position of the evental site. The evental site is still part of “the
situation,” albeit on its edge and bordering on the void.16

The limit situation of loss can perhaps be understood as bordering on the void in
these terms. At least it constitutes a semantic void. Clearly such experiences, as
much as pain itself, often seem nonrepresentable. As Heyes argues:

14 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” NWSA

Journal, 14, no. 3 (2002): 20, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316922. In critical disability studies, nota
bene, there is a reluctance to define who counts as “disabled.” See, for example, Nirmala Erevelles,
who is not looking to describe anyone as disabled; instead, she prefers intersectional and histori-
cally embedded materialist accounts of disability. Nirmala Erevelles and Alison Kafer, “Committed
Critique: An Interview with Nirmala Erevelles,” in Deaf and Disability Studies, ed. Susan Burch and
Alison Kafer (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2010), 219.
15 Heyes argues that such edge experiences cannot even be called “experiences.” More precisely,

she distinguishes between three types of “edges” of experience: “asking how the interruptions of un-
consciousness can be thought for a politics of experience; revealing the normative constitution and
exclusions of experience as temporal; and asking after the possibilities of experience at the limit of
subjectivity.” Cressida J. Heyes, Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 24.
16 Kolozova, Cut of the Real, 88, italics added.
56 Existentializing Media

A “limit-experience” describes a unique, possibly entirely unexpected event that

puts the self ’s account of itself into radical question, and in doing so redraws the
bounds of its self-imagining. Because a limit-experience is embodied and extra-
linguistic, there is no method for approaching it, nor any after-the-fact description
that fully captures it. One can, however, describe the techniques that happen
around limit-experiences, or that generate their conditions of possibility.17

I hold, along with Jaspers, that while it is no doubt fruitless to aspire to any com-
prehensive representation of experience, the limit situation is nevertheless a de-
fining subjective reality. But rather than remaining hedged by the Foucauldian
axiom of discourse to define the conditions of possibility for our reality and for
experience, what is needed is a different methodology for approximating these
edge experiences through listening.18 Hearing out voices that have been unheard
is a key mission for all emancipatory projects. Some forms of marginalization
are less recognized; margins can be more or less acknowledged, more or less vis-
ible, more or less vociferous and palpable, as much as people can be more or less
on the line, due to pathogenic forms of oppression and discrimination. Some
margins, moreover, have a strong political voice; others have weaker ones that
require more attentive listening. The invisible unknown can in fact only be heard.
As Don Ihde therefore infers: “It is to the invisible that listening may attend.”19
This requires of the scholar the art and courage of listening and doing nothing.
It turns the evental site of loss into a privileged site for alternative knowledge
and for curation. Listening is conceptualized by Igor Klyukanov as “an encounter
with radical alterity.” He suggests, consequently,

Listening, therefore, is always listening to the Other; this view highlights the
ethical underpinnings of communication. . . . In this light, the so-called “active
listening” betrays somewhat oxymoronic overtones: it is “active” insofar as it is
(passively) positioned in relation to alterity: as mentioned above, one listens to
the Other.20

The approach thus implies active passivity. I have enacted this ethics as well, in
balancing closeness and respectful distance in my listening practices. This praxis
itself taught me new and profound things about life and research, highlighting the
combination of the meaning of phronēsis as the capacity and virtue of reflective

17 Heyes, Anaesthetics of Existence, 23, italics added.

18 Krystyna Górniak-Kocikowska, “The Factor of Listening in Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy of
Communication,” in Wautischer, Olson, and Walters, Philosophical Faith, 869–902.
19 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 14,

italics in original.
20 Igor Klyukanov, “Listening into the Air: Notes on the Sacred Nature of Communication,”

Listening: Journal of Communication, Ethics, Religion and Culture (Fall 2013): 205.
Into the Slow Field 57

ethical judgment, as well as practical wisdom per se. These voices humbled me
to open myself to alternate ways of thinking, being, and knowing. This led me
in turn to formulate different ways of figurating digital existence and media life
from the vantage point of being(s) in distress. Hence the registers of both af-
fective encounters and sound deliberation, and of both discursive and techno-
logical bounds (conditions of possibility) and embodied lived experiences (of
limit conditions as well as limit situations) in these unseen margins of loss and
bereavement helped me define existential media and their properties (to be elab-
orated in chapter 4) in full awareness of limits and limitations to the endeavor.
The upshot is now before the reader, and its broader bearings are for her to judge.
In any case, as already suggested, existential media studies calls for slowing
down, claiming there are innate, deep-seated qualities that can only be learned
and known through the pace and practices of careful listening and waiting in
respectful acknowledgment of others’ inviolability. Thinking with limits, as we
have seen, resonates with sensibilities toward full stop, silence, obscurity, forget-
ting, termination, end, puncture, finish, void, invisibility, pause, inexplicability,
interruption, enigma, and uncertainty. But it also resonates with a slow pace and
gentle listening. The project here relates to Heyes’s account of “the lived experi-
ence of anaesthetic time that serves as counterpoint to this contemporary existen-
tial situation.”21 This situation is pervaded by what Heyes terms postdisciplinary
time, which comprises reconflations of work and life (work every moment), mul-
titasking, and constant generalized anxiety about what may happen in the next
moment. She concludes by “suggesting that postdisciplinary time should recon-
figure how we think about agency, even further away from an individual account
that is premised on a temporally extended self, and toward a much more skep-
tical analysis that recognizes the value of not-doing.” Furthermore, “Anaesthetic
temporality . . . is a sensical response to postdisciplinary time, as a way of sur-
viving in an economy of temporality that is relentlessly depleting.”22
Resonating with this, I hold that mourners have a rhythm—a rhythm of life
in the shadow of the grand interruption—that needs to be respected and which is
contrary to internet time, and to the 24/7 rhythms of late-modernity capitalism.23
At the limit, hurting and responsible beings are indefinitely pendant. They are
also dependent upon each other as well as upon media; their mourning and sup-
port are forged and reforged by technologies. The wanderings and dwellings,
as well as blunderings and flounderings, of the coexisters (mourners and those
struck by illness) across these terrains divulge an utter alterity. Lingering in their
proximity, we may find new answers to old questions, or alternate questions

21 Heyes, Anaesthetics of Existence, 76.

22 Ibid., 22, italics added.
23 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2013).
58 Existentializing Media

to raise in media theory. In addition, how we compose ourselves in closeness

to the lives that have been violently thrown out of joint may set an example for
how to do research overall. If we place mourners centrally, the question of ethics
also shifts, from seeing to hearing, from principles to praxis, from solutionist,
instrumentarian ethics to ethics as a method of hope and the cultivation of self-
judgment. I suggest that existential media studies, steeped in Jaspersian wisdom,
will through the profound praxis of listening, and of identification without as-
similation as per Levinas, propel a series of self-reflexivities for the discipline and
its current practices.

An Act of Rebellion: Risking the Ridge and Reclaiming a

Cautious We

No one is immune from the power structures that have informed all knowledge
production, including our own disciplinary centers and peripheries, and which
keep reproducing rampant injustices and norms of exclusion and inclusion.24
Within such hierarchies some are allowed and entitled to speak for all, to explain
the world for all the rest. Disciplines discipline and produce borders and obe-
dient bodies that will uphold the structure, often in a culture of fear and under
a code of silence. Existential media studies will offer an alternative: it does not
pretend to speak from nowhere and for everybody. Evidently, even as the digital
limit situation applies to all, such a transcendental we is very hard for all to oc-
cupy. Clearly this we is easier to inhabit for certain privileged bodies who may
with much more ease and sense of entitlement lay claim to it. Any such univer-
salist and transcendental naivete will founder on several painful and acutely illus-
trated realties that sharply bring into focus profound asymmetries, differences,
and deep injustices between groups.25 It must also be noted that, as scholarship
in critical race theory has highlighted, the very definition of “being human” is
based on excluding certain groups of people, defined by their skin color, from its
constitution.26

24 Cf., for example, George J. Sefa Dei, Reframing Blackness and Black Solidarities through Anti-

colonial and Decolonial Prisms (Dordrecht: Springer, 2017), 177–203; Kimberlé Crenshaw, Seeing
Race Again: Countering Colourblindness across the Disciplines (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2019).
25 See Jonathan Corpus Ong and Diane Negra, “The Media (Studies) of the Pandemic

Moment: Introduction to the 20th Anniversary Issue,” Television and New Media, 21, no. 6
(2020): 555–561, https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476420934127.
26 As the novelist and philosopher Sylvia Wynter argues, “ ‘Race’ was therefore to be, in effect,

the non-supernatural but no less extrahuman ground (in the reoccupied place of the traditional
ancestors/gods, God, ground) of the answer that the secularizing West would now give to the
Heideggerian question as to the who, and the what we are.” Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality
of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation— an
Argument,” New Centennial Review, 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 264, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949
Into the Slow Field 59

And yet this pain must be carefully heeded. As Judith Butler has argued in
Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, mourning can actually
be understood as a site of a minimal and qualified we. Acknowledging vulner-
ability will furthermore change its meaning, she argues. I suggest that acknow-
ledging our own vulnerability is a good place to start in order to acknowledge the
hurt, distress, and injustices suffered by others. It will open up, as Butler further
argues, to a sense of shared vulnerability.27 Shared vulnerability, Suzanne Bost
maintains, makes it possible to parse “wounds as openings to become vulnerable
and available (present) to others.” Bost thus proposes an “ethics of care based on
crossing boundaries between individuals and recognizing dependence and vul-
nerability.”28 This is a leitmotif for existential media studies. With this in mind,
we may, along with Jean-Luc Nancy, call for a different we: “Let us say we for all
being, that is for every being, for all beings one by one, each time in the singular
of their essential plural.”29 But even more than that, I follow Joanna Zylinska,
who argues in Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene:

It needs to be signaled right from the start that the very “we” of the argument
that will ensue is also already posited as a problem, referring as it does to what
philosophy and common sense have designated as “humans” but also opening
onto a complex and dynamic network of relations in which “we humans” are
produced as humans and in which we remain entangled with nonhuman enti-
ties and processes.30

In this spirit, a “we” recurs in this book. In full yielding to the profound diversities
of the human situation, there are also circumstances of shared vulnerability that
will trouble clear-cut categories, offering a chance to overcome the insurmount-
able differences often assumed to exist between fixed groups. This existential re-
ality of a we will thus complicate matters further. In fact, there are sometimes less

874. Furthermore, “This construction [serves] as an indispensable function of the continued pro-
duction and reproduction of our still hegemonic biocentric and ethnoclass descriptive statement of
the human, Man, as the first represented to be a universally applicable ‘descriptive statement’ of the
human, because overrepresented as being isomorphic with the being of being human itself—and de-
pendent, for its enactment, on a new ‘space of Otherness’ principle of nonhomogeneity in the reoccu-
pied place of the earlier rational/irrational line. This principle would be embodied in the new line
that W. E. B. Dubois was to identify as the Color Line: that is, as a line drawn between the lighter and
the darker peoples of the earth, and enforced at the level of social reality by the law likely instituted
relation of socioeconomic dominance/subordination between them.” Ibid., 310.

27 Butler, Precarious Life, 142.

28 Gloria Anzaldúa, cited in Suzanne Bost, “From Race/Sex/Etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and
Mourning: The Shifting Matter of Chicana Feminism,” in Material Feminisms, ed. Stacey Alaimo and
Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 353.
29 Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular-Plural (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 3.
30 Zylinska, Minimal Ethics, 13.
60 Existentializing Media

sharp or straight lines in the existential terrain, and this applies broadly.31 For
example, Jaspers himself was a Northern European white man of privilege; yet
he suffered from chronic illness from birth, and as mentioned previously, he was
married to Gertrud Mayer (1879–1974), who was of Jewish descent. The couple
were destined for a concentration camp and would likely have been sent there
on April 15, 1945, if they had not been saved by the US Army during the libera-
tion of Heidelberg on April 1.32 German philosophy has an aura of prestige, yet
Jaspers is not the name you would invest in for a certain revenue. Instead, his
thinking has itself been marginalized in many quarters of philosophical debate.
It thematizes limits, and it offers no classic comprehensive philosophical system
to resort to—no fundamental ontology to systematically build on. Instead, it
offers a reawakening to some key aspects of existence that could help us formu-
late different points of departure for both thinking and being.
As Ronald D. Gordon, who seems to be brooding over the unbearable light-
ness of being in the field of communication studies, suggests:

It may be fitting as the spiral of history unfolds that our existential sensibilities
be reawakened by Jaspers’s works. In order to have a resurgence of “heart” and
“soul” in our scholarly studies, we first need to revive our own “soulful” engage-
ment with our subject matter, humans communicating. Jaspers at least offers a
beginning.33

I agree. Existential media studies, like Jaspers’s philosophy itself, inevitably

dwells on the edges. Straddling the thresholds, venturing the mountain ridges
of existence, as Jaspers once called them, sloping toward and balancing oppo-
site yet constitutive sides, is a risk project of sorts. It takes the position of one

31 In critical race theory, similarly, scholar of black literature and culture Alexander G. Weheliye

has argued for moving toward imagining what the human could mean, beyond the opposition be-
tween the universal and the particular, and by inviting the margins of the Other into his alternative
vision. Drawing on Wynter’s work, he claims that “black studies provides a conceptual precipice from
and through which to imagine new styles of humanity. This spot should be understood neither as an
identitarian land claim concerned with particular borders nor a universal terra nullius, but instead as
a ceaselessly shifting ground that voyages in and out of the human.” Weheliye, “After Man,” American
Literary History, 20, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Summer 2008): 322, italics added, https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/
ajm057. Furthermore, he raises questions about the specific racialized contours of suffering due to
political violence, and concludes: “Generally, this problematic is considered in either traditionally
humanist (suffering is human) or particularistic (suffering is experienced only by those groups upon
which it is inflicted) terms. Yet these stances rely on the same logic that deems one incompatible with
the other, since the humanist brand would erase particularities in favor of a universalist sweep and
the particularistic variant insists on its irreducibility by excluding all nonmembers from the group’s
affliction. What would it mean to place these two seemingly antithetical viewpoints in relation to each
other without comparing them?” Ibid., 325. Searching for the category of the human, Weheliye is
looking to define it through experiences at the margins that have been heretofore neglected. He thus
locates prospects for a new human in the domains of the experiences and styles of the black Other.
32 See Kirkbright, Karl Jaspers, 187ff.
33 Gordon, “Karl Jaspers,” 108.
Into the Slow Field 61

margin and revisits the concerns of existentialism, while also jeopardizing the
intellectual infrastructures of some quarters of media studies and their new
normalcies. This means it interrogates the ethos of the discipline in the process,
and challenges some of its norms and epistemic foundations. This requires of us
that we ask ourselves, as Sam Mickey puts the coexistentialist either-or: “Where
do you want to be? Do you want to be in a state of narcosis, deluded and passion-
less, anesthetisized by formulas and certainties, or would you rather be in a state
of emergency, vulnerable to the extreme urgency of passion, exposed to the un-
predictable exigencies of the world?”34
Permit me a provocation: So where do we as scholars of media want to be?
Do we want to participate in the mindless reinforcement of particular forms of
epistemic violence? Do we want to embrace the regimes of certainty and their
concomitant power structures and exclusions? Do we want to side with the
normativity of a masculinist, detached, autonomous, white, able-bodied sub-
ject of efficiency and invincibility? Do we thereby want the ideology of ability
to shape our values and interests? Do we want overworked superhumans to be
the norm?35 Do we thereby want to reproduce the normalization and idealiza-
tion of a nonafflicted, uninhibited, ever-resilient march toward entitlement? One
may legitimately ask what such limitless research subjects can in fact perceive
of the world. One also has reason to worry about what will escape them. Even
more alarmingly, one may wonder what kind of worldview and values will pre-
vail through them. This is a march with great costs, above all for finite embodied
and situated beings in the world, but also for our very knowledge about media
and our world, since it is bound to be seriously skewed when modeled upon
ideals of limitlessness. I argue in this book that, in order to keep or find its “heart
and soul,” media studies must overturn these ideals and face the unbearable in-
timacy of emergency of the digital limit situation, challenging its implications,
asymmetrical exigencies, and power relations. Otherwise, I contend, important
knowledge will be lost.36

34 Mickey, Coexistentialism, 7.
35 Humans have always worked hard, but in our society, as Cressida J. Heyes argues, norms of
“increasing productivity, managing challenges of focus and distraction, and iteratively postponing
adequate rest and leisure have a distinctive contemporary timbre.” Anaesthetics of Existence, 76.
36 Here I follow in the footsteps of James W. Carey, who argued for both historical consciousness

and heightened self-reflexivity in relation to the contemporary context that we are always part of
(and risk unconsciously reproducing) as scholars: “If we accept the contingency of starting points
(the time and place where we reside) ‘we accept our inheritance from and our conversation with
our fellow human beings as our only source of guidance’ (Rorty, 1979). To attempt to evade this con-
tingency is to hope to become a properly programmed machine, which is what graduate education is
so often.” Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1989), 75,
italics added.
62 Existentializing Media

Clearly, the world and the field are transforming and this legitimately requires
new methods and approaches.37 At the same time, however, there is an ever
greater need to step back and take some time to find our bearings, instead of
chasing targets in the wake of the all-pervasive datafication. Indeed, partici-
pating uncritically in the ideology of dataism and the logic of quantification—
thus trying to mimic the big in big data for the sake of legitimacy—will lead to
the reproduction of certain strong incentives for knowledge production that
only respect those truths that numbers will convey. To embrace alternative and
mixed methods for the purpose of plurality and new insight is not the problem;
on the contrary, they may indisputably render important outcomes. The point is
that we must not datafy at the expense of analytical depth and critical thinking.
Put differently, as the meanings of our dominant media technologies are both
transforming and remediating old dilemmas for modernity, we need to provide
perspective, rather than simply emulating their inner logic. Existential media
studies will thus abstain from the recent uncritical celebration of measuring,
for three reasons: first, since this is the very lifeblood of the economy and of the
world; second, because human life and being itself, following Jaspers, is in fact
nonobjectifiable; and, finally, because a credulous embrace risks resuscitating a
particular cult of objectivism at the expense of those singular-plural bodies on
the line in the world. Right now, and more than ever, we also need something else.
Hence, I submit that the phronēsis in slowing down is in itself an act of rebel-
lion and refusal: it is hammering as in Nietzsche and humbling as in Jaspers; but
in both senses it is an interception. Jonathan Judaken sums up the existential
tendency, which I follow, “to celebrate the rebel without a utopian belief in final
solutions, or the end of history and to waylay any politics of power that fails to
recognize human frailty.”38 Centering on mourners, while also relating the dis-
cussion to the illness-struck and the disabled, this book waylays any thinking
on media, and thus any politics of power, that fails to recognize perennial yet
socially and contextually dependent vulnerability, and its relationship to care,
responsibility, and the virtues of waiting and slowing down. As with “slow tech-
nology” or “slow food,” there is value and virtue in the inert, in dwelling and lin-
gering, in loitering and waiting, in acknowledging and respecting limits. In the
need to return to questions that nag us as researchers, to stories that compel us
to stay with them and that may keep us sleepless, another lesson can be learned.
Existential media studies appreciates that some forms of knowledge production
will not only benefit if we slow down; they also in fact require of us that we em-
brace the rhythms of life within limits and that we work and write, philosophize

37 Simon Lindgren, Data Theory: Interpretive Sociology and Computational Methods (Oxford:

Polity, 2020).
38 Judaken, “Introduction,” 8, italics added.
Into the Slow Field 63

and live, and act and be idle in full acknowledgment of our own limits and of our
responsibilities. Moving in this way across the edge of some of the ideals that cur-
rently shape disciplinary practice in parts of the field is an act in deep alignment
with the history of existentialist praxis. As Judaken puts it:

Best appreciated as a weed—a wild plant growing where it might not be wanted
and struggling for existence with what has been normatively sanctioned for
cultivation—existentialism has planted the seeds for ways of being human that
are nourished by a return to foundational issues. The fruits of its offspring are
forms of life worth living.39

Existential Media hopes to offer such fruits. It suggests it is time for media studies
to attune to the profundity of life, and to sound out and critically interrogate
the lived and often complexly ambiguous and diverse experiences of a digitally
enforced lifeworld. On my way to doing so—by proposing possible forms and
features of existential media—I will in the next chapter outline some of the basics
of the existential philosophical project, and how existential media studies draws
inspiration from different emphases within the tradition. This will be followed
by c hapter 4, where I sketch out possible definitions, with Jaspers’s philosophy as
my prime source of inspiration. Having received the flame from Jaspers, I make
no pledge to offer any completion of thought—merely a series of provisional
figurations and remappings. What I can promise, however, is that I will not re-
frain from planting existential seeds—even where they might not be wanted.

39 Ibid.
3
Existential Media Studies
Lineages and Lines

Since the basic philosophical questions grow, as practical activity,

from life, their forms are at any given moment in keeping with the
historical situation; but this situation is part of the continuity of tra-
dition. The questions put earlier in history are still ours; in part iden-
tical with present ones, word for word after thousands of years, in
part more distant and strange, so that we make them our own, only
by translation.
—Karl Jaspers, “On My Philosophy,” 19411

Existential media studies, as I have suggested, sits at the heart and soul of the
concerns of media studies. Our media have always been existential—a fact
that has not been sufficiently recognized in media research. As Paddy Scannell
reflects: “The question of existence—the meaning of ‘life’—is everywhere present
and nowhere considered in . . . media and communication studies.”2 Scannell
has a point. Up until this very quivering moment, when existential themes and
concepts and to some extent framings have gained traction, there has been with
important exceptions an existential deficit in media studies. There is credence
to his points when we remain in the past, which I demonstrate in this chapter.
Such claims could to some extent be repudiated, however, if we turn to debates of
late where existential themes and concepts—such as ontology, being, belonging,
anxiety and vulnerability—seem finally to have been brought to the table in
debates on digital media, both within but perhaps even more patently outside
of media and communication studies.3 Yet what these important currents still

1 Reprinted in Kaufman, Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, 166.

2 Scannell, Television, 9.
3 An interest in existential themes and concepts is visible in the work of Sarah Pink and her

colleagues, who have addressed lived experiences of datafication, algorithmic anxiety, and entangle-
ments of humans and mundane data in everyday life. See, for example, Sarah Pink, Debora
Lanzeni, and Heather Forst, “Data Anxieties: Finding Trust in Everyday Digital Mess,” Big Data
& Society, January 31, 2018, 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718756685; and Sarah Pink,
Shanti Sumartojo, Deborah Lupton, and Christine Heyes La Bond, “Mundane Data: The Routines,
Contingencies and Accomplishments of Digital Living,” Big Data & Society, June 27, 2017, https://doi.
org/10.1177/2053951717700924. One must also mention Zizi Papacharissi’s project The Networked

Existential Media. Amanda Lagerkvist, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925567.003.0004
Existential Media Studies 65

fail to display is a careful mooring in the tradition of existentialism.4 Hence, this

burgeoning interest of late in existential vocabulary often lacks a rigorous an-
chorage in the legacies of existentialism.5 Offering such an anchorage is precisely
the purpose of this chapter. It will attempt to situate existential media studies in
relation to the tradition and its key emphases, as well as heed to Scannell’s obser-
vation pitted against a field in transition.

Self, which illustrates the broadening of the purview of the field to include issues of, for example, birth,
life, and death: Zizi Papacharissi, ed., A Networked Self and Birth, Life, Death (New York: Routledge,
2018). A nascent interest in the themes championed within existential media studies can also be found
in media geography. See Paul Adam and André Jansson, eds., Disentanglements (New York: Oxford,
forthcoming). By contrast, we can observe this new interest also in recent doctoral theses that pursue
an existential approach precisely by giving due attention to the tradition, for example by drawing
on Kierkegaard and Arendt, respectively: Patricia de Vries, “Algorithmic Anxiety in Contemporary
Art: A Kierkegaardian Inquiry into the Imaginary of Possibility,” PhD dissertation (Erasmus School
of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2020); Timo P. Kylmälä, “Life of
Artifice,” PhD dissertation (Tampere University, 2019).

4 It should be noted that an explicitly existential approach to digital media is visible across other

fields. In the philosophy of technology, Hubert Dreyfus has been addressing digital developments
through the lens of Kierkegaardian philosophy, for example in the lecture “Kierkegaard & the
Information Highway,” UCB Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium, 1997; and in On the Internet
(London: Routledge, 2001/2008). Byung-Chul Han also addresses the culture of connectivity, from
an existentialist perspective, in I Svärmen. In the sister discipline of human-computer interaction
(HCI), an interest in existential philosophy can be traced back to the mid-2000s at least. See Petter
Karlström, “Existentialist HCI,” CHI 2006, Reflective HCI workshop, 2006, https://people.dsv.su.se/
~petter/Existential_HCI.pdf; and Ann Light, “Empirical Vernacular Philosophy, or towards an
Existential HCI,”BCS HCI’08, Workshop on Critical Issues on Interaction Design, 2008, oai:shura.
shu.ac.uk:3627. More recently, Victor Kaptelinin has developed the perspective in “Technology
and the Givens of Existence: Toward an Existential Inquiry Framework in HCI Research,” and
“Making the Case for an Existential Perspective in HCI Research on Mortality and Death,” CHI
EA ’16: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference, May 2016, 352–364. In the field of critical digital
humanities, Btihaj Ajana, in Governing through Biometrics, has presented a philosophically sophis-
ticated approach to ethics and embodiment in biometric cultures, which also focuses on biopolitics,
while relating it to existential phenomenology and in particular to Adriana Cavarero, Paul Ricoeur,
and Jean-Luc Nancy. In a contribution to game studies, intellectual historian Luis de Miranda
discusses how classic existential questions and limit situations can be addressed and simulated in
hybrid digital-human—that is, what he terms “anthrobotic”—environments: “Life Is Strange and
‘Games Are Made’: A Philosophical Interpretation of a Multiple-Choice Existential Simulator with
Copilot Sartre,” Games and Culture, 8, no. 1 (2018): 825–842, https://doi.org/10.1177/155541201
6678713.
5 The exception is the broad appropriation of Heideggerian philosophy and ontology. As already

shown in the introduction, media scholars with philosophical interests have frequently referred to, or
even adopted, a Heideggerian perspective on technology. An early example of a phenomenological
intervention into digital culture inspired by Heidegger is Joohan Kim, “Phenomenology of Digital-
Being,” Human Studies, 24 (2001): 87–111, https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010763028785. For scholar-
ship that draws on Heidegger’s insights without resorting to offer a fundamental ontology, see Sarah
Kember and Joanna Zylinska’s seminal work Life after New Media, which argues for a vitalist ap-
proach that does not fix media, but sees them as always part of mediation as a process through which
we become human in and with the technological world. Another example of a Heidegger-inspired
analysis of digital culture that draws on his enframing concept is that of Vince Miller, who shows
how social media have ushered in ethical havoc in digital culture through its de-severing from phys-
ical copresence as the key site of ethics and judgment. A Crisis for Presence (London: Sage, 2015).
David Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor conduct an interesting reading of Heidegger’s philosophy in light
of its offerings for understanding media, in Heidegger and the Media (New York: Polity, 2014). For
66 Existentializing Media

Via Karl Jaspers’s philosophy of communication, the ultimate goal is also to

provide the reframings needed to arrive at a multivalent understanding of exis-
tential media, in light also of a careful deliberation on existential vulnerability in
our time of connective capitalism, affective media landscapes, and datafication.
For Jaspers, as already noted, philosophy is alive and it belongs to everybody;
it is furthermore deeply historical and related both to long-standing questions
and to the issues at hand. Any philosophical ambition to address the tremors of
a given present moment must always be addressed with respect for the continu-
ities of philosophical tradition. I hope to demonstrate what turning to existen-
tial philosophy, beyond Heidegger, may mean in this moment for media theory.
With Jaspers as my guide, I will discuss how we may draw on the main emphases
within the tradition, and how to fuse them, in order to formulate a recognizing of
how we may problematize our contemporary technologized culture.
But what does the “existential” signify more specifically? And how do media
qualify as existential? In colloquial and generic terms, the existential often refers
to the big, classic, or “eternal” questions, or perhaps rather to those existentialist
concerns that pestered the moderns, such as: Who am I? What is my purpose?
What is the nature of human nature? Why must I die? Does God exist? In the
following section, I will show some of the more straightforward senses in which
these classic existential themes—reflected in staple notions of meaning, time,
subjectivity, and community—relate to media. Further on in this chapter I will
turn to how three other principal themes within the tradition of existential phi-
losophy—death, ontology, and responsibility6—have been addressed (or not) in
media theory, and I shall try to identify some of their distinctive features in the
digital era.7 Another aim will be thereby to suggest an “upgrading” of key existen-
tial concepts, to illuminate their relevance in our current technological culture.

other examples of Heidegger’s influence on particular concepts and framings, see furthermore Liam
Mitchell, “Life on Automatic: Facebook’s Archival Subject,” First Monday, 19, no. 2 (2014), http://firs
tmonday.org/article/view/4825/3823; and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); as well as Lagerkvist, “Existential Media.” For recent examples
of works attracted to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology that apply it painstakingly, albeit with very
different interpretations of its implications in terms of, for example, politics and metaphysics, see
Scannell Television; Peters, The Marvelous Clouds; Markham, Digital Life.

6 As Ulrika Björk discusses, the question of guilt and responsibility has, however, not been central

in the existential phenomenological tradition, with the exception of the works of Hannah Arendt and
Karl Jaspers, who also exchanged communications about the topic of responsibility and account-
ability after the end of the war. They both agreed and disagreed about how to ground concepts of
metaphysical guilt, political solidarity, and universal responsibility. See “Om skuld och universellt
ansvar,” Tidskrift för politisk filosofi, 3 (2013): 22–34, https://www.politiskfi losofi.se/fulltext/2013-3/
pdf/TPF_2013-3_022-034_bjork.pdf.
7 I have suggested elsewhere that classic themes in the philosophy of existence—such as death,

time, being there (absence and presence), and being-in-and-with (the self and community)—could
be harnessed and reworked, upgraded and mobilized, in order to unpack our digital existence.
Lagerkvist, “Existential Media.”
Existential Media Studies 67

Existential Staples and Mediation: Meaning, Time,

Subjectivity, and Community

Our media have always been existential to the extent that they are concerned
with trying to make sense of who we are and why we are here—particularly
in the modern age. And yet on a more perennial note, in the most ancient of
narratives, the epic of Gilgamesh, for example, similar issues of meaning and
how to live a virtuous life together are bountifully rehearsed.8 Hence the exis-
tential, in this sense, seems to refer to questions that have been with humanity
across the millennia, profiting and persecuting us throughout. This is evident
in the concerns of representational media across history (from, for example,
petroglyphs, cave paintings, and Greek tragedies) that enable sense-making in re-
lation to the precariousness of life and the basics of “why are we here”—a feature
later exercised in, for example, modern novels and fictional film, and in televi-
sion serials and more “transmedial” narrative forms of today.
But media can also be existential through their medium specificity. According
to Roland Barthes, photographs embody time itself. They are therefore pro-
foundly existential in their capacity as a punctum that moves and haunts us.
Photographs punctuate historical continuity and attest to both existence and
nonexistence (mortality): “The Photograph does not call up the past. . . . The
effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time,
by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed.”9 Photographs are
thus pure evidence that authenticate what has been. In that way they always re-
mind us of death. Digital media display other temporal complexities with exis-
tential repercussions. Some have conceived the digital itself as timeless, because
it never ages, thereby loosening the temporal anchoring of memory, placing us
in absolute presence or in a state of constant upgrading—an enduring ephem-
eral—based on the nonhuman clock of endless repetition of the new.10 As
Wendy Chun has explained: “If our machine’s memories are more permanent,
if they enable a permanence that we seem to lack, it is because they are con-
stantly refreshed so that their ephemerality endures.”11 On reflection, it seems
then that the absolute present is intriguingly at once infinite: the network con-
ceived as a stream of both—an eternal now, as it were. By contrast, in our age
of ecological crisis, another materialist form of digital temporality emerges as

8 Charles M. Ess, “Afterword,” in Lagerkvist, Digital Existence, 338.

9 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 82.
10 Wendy H.- K. Chun, “The Enduring Ephemeral or the Future Is a Memory,” in Media
Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 184–293. For similar observations, see also Andrew
Hoskins, “The End of Decay Time,” Memory Studies, 6, no. 4 (2013): 387–389, https://doi.org/
10.1177/1750698013496197; and Miller, A Crisis for Presence.
11 Chun, “Enduring Ephemeral,” 197.
68 Existentializing Media

media are also increasingly a seeming wasteland, an end station, a terminus, a

final depot, as in the Anthropocene we are faced with enormous amounts of elec-
tronic media waste, and with the environmental problems of the materiality of
media death.12 Hence our new media age is a life among the dying media, where
we wade through media junk and outmoded, obsolete, and aging apparatuses as
well as abandoned platforms and other atrophied forms of media life. As Leah
A. Lievrouw has argued, digital media can be conceived in their rapid obsoles-
cence as dead media. In effect, they carry their own medium end within them:

The fact of cultural forgetting, combined with rapidly accelerating cycles of

technological obsolescence and turnover, is the basis of what might be called
dead media—possibly the greatest barrier to the dream (or nightmare) of per-
fect remembering. The basic tools of the Internet (digital recording and trans-
mission technologies, formats, and storage systems) are notably short lived
and incompatible across platforms and standards, especially in comparison to
physical and analog formats. Digital files and databases are notoriously fugi-
tive and difficult to preserve in usable form for any extended period of time;
they are among the most profoundly fragmented, disorganized, incompatible,
and ephemeral forms of record-keeping ever devised. Formats, devices, and
architectures become obsolete and are abandoned in favor of the next new de-
sign with little or no consideration for retaining the records or functions of the
old systems.13

This illustrates that digital time has complex and contradictory existential
bearings. Turning to another chief theme within the tradition, the question of
the self, we will note how existentialism both famously and infamously sets out
from trying to establish the meanings of individual personal existence. As the
phenomenologist Jonathan Judaken argues:

It is often claimed that existentialists begin with individualism: the solitary

person living in the world. But this is untrue. Existentialism is plainly critical
of Leibniz’s monads or liberalism’s abstract individual defined by universals
(whether reason or rights) or romanticism’s solitary subject seeking connection
with a greater whole. It would be more accurate to say that existentialism starts
with the problem of subjectivity: the question of human nature and the critical
examination of how selfhood is constructed.14

12 Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
13 Lievrouw, “The Next Decade,” 629.
14 Judaken, “Introduction,” 6, italics added.
Existential Media Studies 69

Where then is selfhood in media theory? Long-standing debates in media and cul-
tural studies have shown in rich detail how media reflect and reinforce, compel and
construct certain identities, in both a collective and an individual sense.15 In a more
materialist vein, Brian Rotman has attended to how the self emerges as a ghost ef-
fect of dominant media, and thus processually as a subject of technology.16 This is
also currently reflected in the construction of the self in social media, which has
been highlighted in works by critics showing how social media forge networked in-
dividualism and neoliberal subjectivities, accumulating value online; or when selves
are performed within gestural economies of affection, as people are in the habit of
taking selfies.17 As we are swimming in oceans of selves and selfies, however, such
proclivities in fact invoke their other: community and communality.
This communal dimension of the existentiality of media is visible across his-
tory in the ritualistic events of particular media forms through which, as James
Carey famously put the point, “the maintenance of society in time” and “the
representation of shared beliefs” were made possible.18 This has been acknowl-
edged in analyses of television, or in the imagined communities of newspapers,
where media and popular culture seemingly fill the function of religions and
offer communion. Online sociality includes such communal rituals which have
many shades today, as well as numerous positive rewards. Scholars have also
highlighted how they foster a sense of compulsory connectivity and conformist
behavior, which as mentioned brings Jaspers’s concept of the shell—echoed in
Heidegger’s Das Man—to mind. In addition, online culture has been deemed to
make us, as Sherry Turkle argued more than a decade ago, alone together—that

15 See, for example, an overview in Gail Dines et al., Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Critical

Reader (Los Angeles: Sage, 2018).

16 Brian Rotman, “Ghost Effects,” Differences, 18, no. 1 (2007): 53–86, https://doi.org/10.1215/

10407391-2006-023.
17 As I argued in the introduction, media studies has focused more—despite the massive expo-

sure of the self in the age of social media—on the social, and it has largely forsaken a sophisticated
theory of selfhood. This is also, as I will expound further in the next chapter, why we need an exis-
tential approach to the self as coexister (see c hapter 4). There are, however, important exceptions.
The self has been discussed in the age of social media and datafication by, for example, Beverley
Skeggs and Simon Yuill, “Capital Experimentation with Person/a Formation: How Facebook’s
Monetization Refigures the Relationship between Property, Personhood and Protest,” Information,
Communication & Society, 19, no. 3 (2016): 1–17, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2015.1111403.
See also Zizi Papacharissi’s A Networked Self project: https://zizi.people.uic.edu/Site/Thoughts/Entr
ies/2010/12/10_A_Networked_Self.html. See too Ilana Gherson, “Selling Your Self in the United
States,” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 37, no. 2 (2014), 281–295, https://doi.org/
10.1111/plar.12075; Frosh, Poetics of Digital Media, 114–137. Recently, Jefferson Pooley has also
launched a series of online publications focusing on online performances of the self: Social Media
and the Self (Media Studies Press, Open Reader Series, 2021): https://www.mediastudies.press/sms.
18 For James Carey “Communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced,

maintained, repaired, and transformed.” Communication as Culture, 23.

70 Existentializing Media

is, as discussed, to drain our very notion of, capacity for, and lived experience of
being together.19
Hence, both selves and communities have in actuality played immensely
complex roles in the media history of modernity. Consequently, in the quest to
existentialize media, to remain too focused on selfhood and subjectivity (and in
turn on the classic relationship between individual freedom and anxiety) might
be lopsided. And yet existentialism does stay with the self, in terms of envisioning
an existential and more authentic self. This is illustrated in Hannah Arendt’s sem-
inal appreciation of the school of existential philosophy, in which she puts the
main emphasis on the human exception: that is, on Kierkegaard’s approach to
den enkelte—the singular human being, whose task involves “becoming sub-
jective.”20 As we shall see, Jaspers picks up from Kierkegaard but complicates
matters of individual subjectivity substantially: he pushes them off their edges
as he invites the Other into its very constitution. The self, as Jaspers argues, is al-
ways in relation. Or as Jean-Luc Nancy put it decades later: being is always being
singular-plural: “Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circu-
lating in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.”21 In order
to develop my conceptualization of existential media further, and to situate it
along the concerns of our wicked era, I now turn to existential philosophy, to
further map the lineages of my project. If we are to advance this approach, I hold,
we will need to define the existential by anchoring it further within the tradition.

Situating Existentialism: The Legacies

of Existential Philosophy

Yet we must pause before we even begin. The fact is that it is always too late—
and never too late—for existential philosophy. The reason behind this par-
adox is that existential philosophy raises questions about what it means to be
human, in a modern world, after the fact. In the nineteenth-century writings
of Søren Kierkegaard (1813– 1855), Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821– 1881), and
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), as well as in the writings of the existentialists
of the twentieth century, the mainspring was the modern world itself, with all its
offerings and anomies; its technological and scientific developments, its voids
and displacements, its wartime moral collapses and atrocities. Born out of facing
loss (of civilization and of cosmology), searching for human value and dignity,
for a justification for the singular unique human being, and for the integrity of

19 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

20 Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?”
21 Nancy, Being Singular-Plural, 3.
Existential Media Studies 71

humanity after the death of God, the tradition searched for new ways of legiti-
mizing and grounding human existence.
The outlook may seem dismal, even to the point of forlorn, but the main point
is that existentialism is always situated, and always thoroughly related to a con-
crete world situation in which questions about the meaning of existence are ac-
tivated anew.22 Existential phenomenology was also the product of a particular
historical, cultural, and religious context. In a productive way, the philosopher
Charles E. Scott both acknowledges this fact and describes Continental thought
as inherently mutational:

“Continental philosophy” names a transformational and highly diversified lin-

eage and not an authoritative core of truth or a definitive method for thought
and discovery. When thought in this lineage engages non-European traditions
in their own contexts, the specific, different sites of vitality, conceptualiza-
tion, and articulation play major roles in what that thought means and says.
This statement, of course, raises issues of translation and truth. . . . Although
“continental” in the term, “Continental Philosophy,” cannot be understood in
strictly geographical terms to refer only to Western Europe, we cannot reason-
ably ignore the emergence of this lineage of thought in Western Europe or the race,
gender, and privileges of its influential founders.23

Scott argues that the tradition has a strong regional quality in its emergence,
which makes visible the boundaries and power structures of race and gender
within. But he also traces “definitive mutations” that he feels are “bound
to occur in the dynamic and variegated interactions that take place as the
Continental tradition crosses borders and undergoes linguistic, cultural, and
political translations.”24 With this in mind, we may also note that calls for
existentialism seem to be continually strewn across modern life, especially
during peaks of technological development, social upheaval, and great uncer-
tainty. And it seems equally true, as the phenomenologist Steven Crowell has
shown, that Existenz-philosophie has qualities that make it discoverable and
useful for each new generation. Its legacies and influences can be felt across
many fields.25
However, existentialism will always rebuff being forced into straitjackets
of categorization and systematization. Specialists also agree there is not one
agreed-upon definition, and that existentialism is about refusing to confine

22 See Judaken and Bernasconi, Situating Existentialism.

23 Scott, “Cultural Borders,” 160, italics added.
24 Ibid.
25 Steven Crowell, “Existentialism and Its Legacy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism,

ed. Steven Crowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3–24.

72 Existentializing Media

existence to any system or “ism.” Or in the words of Kierkegaard: “A logical

system can be given, an existential system is impossible.”26 In his classic entry
in the Encyclopédie Française, from 1957, Paul Ricoeur described the tradition
of “existential phenomenology” as the product of a confluence of two streams
of thinking. The first is the later works of Husserl, which emphasized the life-
world (Lebenswelt); the second is the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche
in the nineteenth century, which revolted against systems.27 Existential phenom-
enology shifted from seeing the lived world as an object of knowledge to a sense
in which subject and object collapse—that is, we can never be detached obser-
vers of the world. The focus is thence on our being-in-the-world. Common to the
existentialists is their insistence that human reality is situated in a concrete world
context. Ricoeur summarized their main concerns in the keywords the body,
choice, and intersubjectivity.
At the time of Ricoeur’s writing, debates were running high on how to dis-
tinguish phenomenology and existential philosophy. Hubert Dreyfus and
Mark B. Wrathall observe that this debate seems antiquated today, since fruitful
hybrids between the schools are visible across many relevant new fields of re-
search.28 Yet, to develop her juxtaposition between Foucauldian genealogy and
phenomenology, Cressida J. Heyes sticks to contrasting a more classic phenom-
enological approach—defined as searching for universals through subjective ex-
perience—with her definition of the existential approach, which she chisels out
as more sensitive to plurality of experience:

I wanted to learn to describe lived experience in ways that perhaps rested in

moments on the essentials of embodied cognition, but that was consistently
alive to the diverse realities of culture and history—and in particular the
cultures and histories of gender, race, disability, and sexuality—as they are felt
in our bodies. I wanted to describe lived experience in a thoroughly political
vein. I was uninterested in a transcendental phenomenology, in other words,
but urgently needed an existential one.29

26 Søren Kierkegaard, “Concluding Unscientific Postscript,” in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed.

Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 109.
27 For an overview of Ricoeur’s discussion, see Stewart and Mickunas, Exploring

Phenomenology, 64–65.
28 Meanwhile, and symptomatically, few of the existentialists called themselves precisely that.

According to Hubert Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall, both Sartre and Heidegger can be claimed by
both phenomenology and existentialism. Heidegger defined himself primarily as a phenomenol-
ogist, despite distancing himself from Husserlian phenomenology. He can be called an existential
phenomenologist, despite claiming that existentialism was a flawed continuation of the modernist
project. Due to his reliance upon Kierkegaard and his focus on Dasein’s authenticity, Dreyfus and
Wrathall place him firmly in this camp. “A Brief Introduction to Phenomenology and Existentialism,”
in Dreyfus and Wrathall, Companion.
29 Heyes, Anaesthetics of Existence, 18, italics added.
Existential Media Studies 73

Feeling a need for existentialism, as already suggested, has been a recurring trope
across the past century. For example, existential phenomenology became broadly
fashionable in the United States in the 1950s, particularly in the field of psychology.
Rollo May’s work on anxiety, inspired by Kierkegaard, opened “the anxiety closet,”
according to Robert Kastenbaum, and began churning a culture in which death had
previously been tabooed:

Death had been writ large by World War II, and its casualties included confi-
dence and belief. The intensified quest for meaning took several forms, notably
the amorphous movement that became known as existentialism. We started to
hear more of “the human condition,” and we ventured into the “theater of the ab-
surd” to encounter characters searching for an author while waiting for Godot.
Seers opined that we had entered “the age of anxiety,” and Bernstein wrote a piano-
drenched symphony to prove it. Anxiety and self-reflection were in; mortality
could not be that far behind. Although mum was still the word, mortal fear/anx-
iety was starting to leak into a never-say-die culture. A signal development was the
publication of a doctoral dissertation under the title, The Meaning of Anxiety. Rollo
May’s book (1950) and lectures were for many their first persuasive encounters
with existentialism.30

This was followed by the cultural anthropologist Ernst Becker’s The Denial of Death
from 1973; a complete diagnosis of Western culture from the vantage point of
Kierkegaard’s verdict on the fate of unique personal existence in a society of mass
industrialization and conformity. In the 1980s, Becker’s work engendered new fields
of psychological scholarship, empirical work, and arenas for debate and subse-
quent controversy. An existentialist “turn,” in the guise of the new science of “than-
atology”—which had edged away from theological and religious hegemony—was
thus in place. In addition, beyond the academic world, the profound societal trans-
formations and turbulences of the Cold War, the development of a consumerist
society, and the emergence in turn of a counterculture (including the civil rights
movement as well as the women’s, environmental, and peace movements) carried
values, aspirations, and themes cognate with the messages of existentialism about
human freedom, dignity, accountability, and choice. Existential philosophy was in
affinity with changes in the air.
And yet existentialism has also had a checkered repute, particularly due to
the politically controversial choices of path by two of its most famous represent-
atives: Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.31 Apart from such moral lapses,

30 Kastenbaum, “Should We Manage Terror,” 273. Kastenbaum evaluates the emergence and devel-

opment of terror management theory, which was a combination of social science and existentialism.
31 On May 1, 1933, ten days after being elected and taking up the position as vice-chancellor of

the University of Freiburg, Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. Jean-Paul Sartre never joined
74 Existentializing Media

the scandalous reputation of the movement also pertained to a lifestyle some

deemed nihilistic. Paradoxically, ensuing critiques of existential philosophy
attacked its purported elitism: that is, its allegedly von oven and/or moralistic
approach. Another thing that vexed critics was that the existentialists were often
judged to be solipsistic and too individualistic. Within the Frankfurt school and
social theory not least, it was also deemed idealist and bourgeois, and falsely rad-
ical, thereby lacking the essential explanatory and revolutionary frameworks of
historical materialism. Herbert Marcuse criticized Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and
Nothingness for projecting anxiety and meaninglessness onto the nature of ex-
istence itself: “Insofar as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains
an idealistic doctrine: it hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human ex-
istence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus
becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illu-
sory.”32 According to Steven Crowell, it was the overexposure of Sartre’s philos-
ophy—which had a grip on both academia and the popular imagination for at
least two decades after the Second World War, on both sides of the Atlantic—that
was the reason behind the fact that both Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida
turned away from their training in existential phenomenology, and founded
their projects on structuralism instead.33 There is thus also an expressed defiance
of the tradition within poststructuralism.
It seems then that many thinkers sought to recover from these legacies,
turning their back on them, except in regard to Heidegger, who has been selec-
tively reappropriated, for example, in deconstruction, in pragmatist thinking,
and broadly in posthumanist philosophical thinking of late (as we will discuss
further subsequently). If we turn to media studies in particular, we must take
note of the fact that Jürgen Habermas, in his ethical approach to communi-
cation as action, defined his work in clear opposition to Heidegger’s.34 In any
case, it seems few have been untouched by the stirrings of this movement, while
many have made efforts to circumvent its lineages or to tone down its continued
reverberations and hauntings.

the French Communist Party, but he was a communist. He visited the USSR in 1954, and he has been
charged with a serious lack of judgment with regard to political developments in the Soviet Union.

32 Herbert Marcuse, “Sartre’s Existentialism,” Studies in Critical Philosophy (London: NLB,

1972), 161.
33 Along this path, numerous scholars have questioned whether it is possible to talk about human

existence at all. This is a key instinct in several forms of posthumanism, a reason why the tradition of
existential philosophy seems to have fallen under their radar or is often discarded altogether.
34 See an overview in Martin Woessner, “Habermas: Up from Heidegger,” Los Angeles Review of

Books, August 11, 2019, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/habermas-up-from-heidegger/#_ftn14.

Existential Media Studies 75

Existential Deficit and Hauntings

While I believe all these dimensions play into why there seems to be, with im-
portant exceptions, an existential deficit in media theory, the impetus for me to
pursue this approach has also been more specific discoveries closer to home. The
existential deficit seems to be in plain sight, when we turn to the intellectual his-
tory of media studies—that is, to “communication theory” itself. Historiographies
of the hybrid field of media and communication studies reveal that the field
displays a neglect of existential perspectives, themes, and keywords.35 A lack of
serious engagement with the classic texts and key authors has also been salient
(again there are important exceptions). Fiercely forged in the formworks of mo-
dernity and modernist thinking, the earliest doctrines have been critiqued for
their conceptualization of the powerful effects of media (through ascribing to
the early studies ideas about the hypodermic needle or the magic bullet model),
but they have also been redeemed in different ways. Revolting against an alleged
regime of certainty, through invoking more “critical” perspectives, has been
a key strategy for those who sought to oppose the dominance of the legacy of
Lazarsfeld and his collaborators at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at
Columbia University, which had downplayed the claims of powerful media
effects.36 Beyond the opposition between administrative and critical research,

35 For example, this is clear in Jefferson D. Pooley’s “Communication Theory and the Disciplines,”

in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, ed. Klaus Bruhn Jensen
and Robert T. Craig (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2016). The lack of engagement with existentialist
thought in the conception of the field is evident as Pooley overviews its earliest forms, tracing its
birthright to media-related research in the social sciences and rhetoric, and to public opinion re-
search conducted among self-identified communication researchers in psychology, political science,
and anthropology. Another overview of key stakes for media theory that displays its lack of interest
in existential concepts can be found in Toby Miller’s overview of the incarnations of Media Studies
1.0 and 2.0. Miller nevertheless offers visions for Media Studies 3.0 along some of the lines I picture
for existential media studies, stressing the need for a plurality of methodological approaches in a
postdisciplinary sense, and centering on diversity and sustainability. See “A Future for Media Studies,”
in How Canadians Communicate III: Contexts of Canadian Popular Culture, ed. Bart Beatly, Derek
Briton, et al. (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2010), 43. The lack of existential approaches
is also plain if we turn to key inventories of the field and readers in media studies over the past
decades. See, for example, Oliver Boyd Barrett and Chris Newbold, Approaches to Media: A Reader
(London: Arnold, 1995); Paddy Scannell, Media and Communication (London: Sage, 2007); Sue
Thornham, Caroline Bassett, and Paul Marris, eds., Media Studies: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2009); Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner, Media and Cultural
Studies: Keyworks (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). One seeming exception is Robert T. Craig
who argued for the need for a dialogical-dialectical argumentation across the existing rhetorical, se-
miotic, phenomenological, cybernetic, sociopsychological, sociocultural, and critical approaches within
the emergent field. The existential phenomenology he includes in his mapping, however, is limited to
its dialogic forms and centers on otherness and non-mediated authenticity. Craig, “Communication
Theory as a Field,” Communication Theory, 2, no. 9 (May 1999): 119–161.
36 The regime of certainty corresponds to what Todd Gitlin famously called the “dominant para-

digm” when, back in 1978, he described and criticized the scientific ideals of quantification in admin-
istrative media sociology and communications studies in the social sciences. “Media Sociology: The
Dominant Paradigm,” Theory and Society, 6, no. 2 (1978): 205–253.
76 Existentializing Media

however, my argument is that we can still put queries about the place, or dis-
placement, of originary existential vulnerability within these traditions—for in-
stance, in the classic schools of media sociology concerned with media effects,
or uses and gratifications, which centered on relationships between media use,
human behavior, opinion, sociality, and well-being. Indisputably, classic worries
about “the masses” were formulated in certain nativist contexts and from high
ground, where the lonely or chaotic masses are always somewhere else than the
detached sociologist himself. And yet the critics of the dominant paradigm do
not fare much better. Unsurprisingly, as we have seen, the radar was set on other
matters in the schools of critical theory and political economy, as if there were no
existential or spiritual dimensions in life worth attending to.
I believe this is one piece of the puzzle. One could argue that this birthright
reproduced up until recently a tendency to overlook frailty—including mortal
embodiment, human anxiety, and existential hurt and travail—in general in-
tellectual frameworks lacking in their formation and development a concept of
tragedy, a ripe notion of vulnerability (in both diversity and in our common hu-
manity), a sense of limit and endings, and a serious engagement with suffering
and trauma.37 This seems evident when we look, for example, at cultural studies,
in its earlier predominant forms as exemplified in the works of Meaghan Morris
or Stuart Hall. Here we will find that meaning, identity, and culture as well as
power and resistance were similarly conceived of within a taken-for-granted sec-
ular framework of the everyday.38 Likewise, if we turn to the debates on culture
and globalization, we find a plain denouncement of existentialism. In a book
from 1999, for instance, John Tomlinson explicitly disregarded the connection
between the realm of “existentially significant meaning” and the problem of ex-
istence as “formulated either in the ontological anxieties of existentialist philos-
ophy, or in the range of formal religious responses to the human condition.”39
Tomlinson provided a reading of what the existential meant for people in moder-
nity, by choosing to reduce such existential meanings to the mundane activities,
narratives, and expressive forms through which individuals make sense of their
personal lives, and through which the everyday takes shape (such as going to the
mall and listening to pop music). Apart from providing a very limited framing
for conceiving of media life, this reproduced a cheerful understanding of human

37 Clearly, the works of Lilie Chouliaraki on the spectatorship of suffering in the media age,

and more recently of Amit Pinchevski on media and trauma, contradict any sweeping general-
ization. Lilie Chouliaraki, The Spectatorship of Suffering (London: Sage, 2006) and “Mediating
Vulnerability: Cosmopolitanism and the Public Sphere,” Media, Culture & Society, 13,
no. 1 (2012): 105–112; Amit Pinchevski, Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
38 See an overview in, for example, Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader (London:

Routledge, 2007).
39 John Tomlinson, Culture and Globalization (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), 20.
Existential Media Studies 77

existence, in which vulnerability seems entirely absent. Similarly, while exis-

tential questions of community, meaning, and ways of being were key in early
ethnographies of networked cultures, it must be noted that such analyses also
primarily stressed the many positive affordances of technological life within a
taken-for-granted secular framework.40
This neglect of religion and spirituality within these approaches, but also more
broadly within media studies, came under attack within the interdisciplinary
field of media, religion, and culture, which stresses the need for a broader un-
derstanding of the meaning-making and mediated qualities of religion, and of
the religious qualities of the media.41 As was originally pointed out and critiqued
within this field, in the hard core of the discipline of media and communication
studies—that is, political communication and journalism—and within the long-
term debates about public opinion, the public sphere is seen as rightly being neu-
tral and purged of anything existential or religious. But it is noteworthy that this
subfield of media, religion, and culture has similarly not attended to the classic
existentialist concerns in their own right. While being interested in the mediated
aspects of how humans relate to the transcendent, and to how newer media forms
influence the shape that existential needs take in our modern mediatized era,
this field has not primarily been influenced by existential philosophy—or other
forms of media philosophy—but has instead been animated mainly by epistemo-
logical and theoretical frameworks within the sociology of religion and cultural
studies, where the keywords remain “culture” or “the social.” In fact, existential
media studies here suggests a reframing that allows for envisioning an existential
approach that is not exclusively (or primarily) concerned with “religion.” Rather
than beginning with beliefs or practices and their fate or transformations in the
age of media, I proceed on the assumption that existence precedes religion. This
means concretely trying to assess how people who do not necessarily confess
a particular creed nonetheless explore or struggle with existential issues in the
media environment, as well as, and importantly, how the media environment in

40 See Annette Markham’s pioneering work Life Online: Researching Real Experiences in Virtual

Space (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1998).

41 The classic volume that inaugurated the field of media, religion, and culture is Stewart Hoover

and Knut Lundby, Rethinking Media, Religion and Culture (London: Sage, 1997). Its subfield, dig-
ital religion, has been providing productive new analytical foci on people’s changing relationship to
transcendent and existential dimensions in life. It has focused on uncharted and vernacular forms
of existential meaning-making in the realm of digital media in ways that resonate with existential
media studies. See an overview in Mia Lövheim and Heidi Campbell, “Considering Critical Methods
and Theoretical Lenses in Digital Religion Studies,” New Media & Society, 19, no. 1 (2017): 5–14,
https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816649911; and Heidi Campbell, “Religious Communication and
Technology,” Annals of the International Communication Association, 41, nos. 3–4 (2017): 228–234,
https://doi.org/10.1080/23808985.2017.1374200. For a recent example, see also Heidi Campbell
and Ruth Tsuria, eds., Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in Digital Media
(New York: Routledge, 2021). For an overview of this field’s relationship to existential media studies,
see Lagerkvist, Digital Existence.
78 Existentializing Media

turn gives rise to and responds to existential questions. As this book will show,
this is particularly the case in the context of crisis, as we face death and loss, when
we reach the limits of what we can comprehend and thus communicate.

What Then of Human Finitude?

It has sometimes been argued that death has been overlooked in media theory—
a position I consciously reproduced in my earlier rhetorical gesturing. To main-
tain that death is denied in media studies is, however, a somewhat tenuous
position. For instance, as we have already seen, death plays a central role in
key works in media and photography theory.42 Acknowledging death in media
theory has actually been trending in the past decades, and more and more at-
tention has been paid to media and mortality in various works, for example by
Charles McIlwain, Barbie Zelizer, Johanna Sumiala, and Margaret Schwartz.43
This is not least the case in the young interdisciplinary field of death online, to
which media and communication scholars have been and are making impor-
tant, seminal contributions at the time of writing.44 There has also been a broad
debate in media, cultural, and cinema studies about spectral media, exploring
the liminal position of technologies in between life and death—that is, the ways
in which media seem to conjure up the dead and bring them into connective
reach. This is exemplified in the works of media scholars such as Jonathan Sterne

42 As already discussed, Barthes sees photographs as existential media, since they are time itself.

For Susan Sontag, photography has a dual function of making the known unknown and the fan-
tastic commonplace; in fetishizing mortality by claiming to constitute the immortal, photographs
turn, in a commodifying way, both people into icons and the world into a department store or mu-
seum without walls. Furthermore: “Photography also converts the whole world into a cemetery.
Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also—wittingly or unwittingly—the recording-angels
of death. The photograph-as-photograph shows death. More than that, it shows the sex-appeal of
death.” Susan Sontag, “Introduction,” in Portraits in Life and Death, ed. Peter Hujar (1976).
43 See, for example, Charlton D. McIlwain, When Death Goes Pop: Death, Media and the Remaking

of Community (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move
the Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Johanna Sumiala, Media and Ritual: Death,
Community and Everyday Life (London: Routledge, 2013); Margaret Schwartz, Dead Matter: The
Meaning of Iconic Corpses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
44 See, for example, Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil Sandvik, “Sharing Death: Conceptions

of Time at a Danish Online Memorial Site,” in Taming Time, Timing Death: Social Technologies and
Ritual, ed. Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Rane Willerslev (London: Routledge, 2013); Dorthe
Refslund Christensen, and Stine Gotved, “Online Memorial Culture: An Introduction,” New Review
of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 21, nos. 1–2 (2015): 1–9, https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2015.988
455; Anu Harju, “Imagined Community and Affective Alignment in Steve Jobs Memorial Tributes on
YouTube,” in Systemic Functional Linguistics in the Digital Age, ed. Sheena Gardner and Slân Alsop
(Sheffield: Equinox, 2016), 62–80; Tamara Kneese, “Mourning the Commons: Circulating Affect in
Crowdfunded Funeral Campaigns,” Social Media +Society, January–March 2018, 1–12, https://doi.
org/10.1177/2056305117743350; Tama Leaver, “Co-creating Birth and Death on Social Media,” in
Papacharissi, A Networked Self; Linden, “Death Online.”
Existential Media Studies 79

on phonography and Tom Gunning on (spirit) photography.45 Jeffrey Sconce

and Jeremy Stolow have addressed the whole tradition of haunted and uncanny
media, ghosts in the machine, and the sense of the divine existing in and through
technological realities: deus in machina.46 Modern technologies have been
bestowed with transcendent and uncanny features, argues Stolow, animated by
their “imponderable complexities, their autonomous networked agency, their
capacities to compress time, erase distance, and reproduce sameness.”47 The
conjuring up of the other side, or the extrahuman, and thus the enabling of a
sense of transcendence, is visible across media history in recording media, such
as photographs that summon those absent and/or the dead, in writing through
which the dead could speak to the living, and in the spiritualist associations of
the telegraph as well as the uncanny or promising forces of electronic presence.
This discoursing about death, however, would probably look very different
had it not been for one particular book, the omission of which makes any map-
ping of existential deficiencies and possibilities in media theory curbed and
incomplete. Peters’s seminal intellectual history of the concept of communica-
tion, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, offered an
impetus for launching this very project. I read it as setting out to criticize the
previously sketched tendencies already twenty years ago. Here is where we find
a recognition of human frailty, as Peters retunes the questions of communica-
tion theory from the vantage point of texts and voices that spring from the ear-
liest moments of our calendar. Through emblematic figures such as Jesus, whose
communicative style is described as disseminative, and Socrates, who is the dia-
logist, we learn about cutting into the deeper histories along other parameters.
Beginning here founds existential media studies in the context of media history
and its anchorings in a premodern world. Peters stresses communicative break-
down as constitutive of communication in a manner that, as we will see, reminds
us of Jaspers. This key trajectory relates communication to the grand reality of
finite human existence, as Peters establishes that death and media are conjoined

45 Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2003); Simone Natale, Supernatural Entertainments (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2016); Tom Gunning, “To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision,”
Grey Room, 26 (Winter 2007): 94–127. For important works on relationships between tech-
nology and transcendence, occultism and science, and media development and philosophical
idealism, see also Eric Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information
(Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1998/2015); Joe Milutis, Ether: The Nothing That Connects
Everything (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly
Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013).
Also see an overview in María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Pereen, eds., The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts
and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 199–206.
46 Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Jeremy Stolow, ed., Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology and the
Things In-Between (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
47 Stolow, Deus in Machina, 5.
80 Existentializing Media

in Western intellectual history (as will be further discussed in chapter 7). Death
and the dead are key vectors in his analysis of how communication itself has been
conceived, as an idea.48 He suggests that modern media are existential precisely
because they enable the dead to be smoothly re-presenced all over, and because
they destabilize our certainty about whether we are in congress with people afar,
or with the ultimate others—those on “the other side”: “The two key existential
facts about modern media are these: the ease with which the living may mingle
with the communicable traces of the dead, and the difficulty of distinguishing
communication at a distance from communication with the dead.”49 Speaking
into the Air thus puts a great emphasis on limit, finitude, gaps, and interruptions,
while underlining the value and the potentials of reconceiving of communication
for world disclosure and for the heeding of otherness. It underscores this mes-
sage as it devotes itself to alien forms of communication, with extraterrestrials,
machines, and animals to open up “horizons of incommunicability.”50 Speaking
into the Air also pursues a pragmatist and communitarian mission, stressing the
prospects of communication for forging communities and ways of life. Taking
my cue from this approach, I reconceive of communication itself in the fol-
lowing. I explain the way in which I do so later, in relation to Jaspers’s philosophy
of communication. Drawing on Jaspers allows me to “invert” communication,
thereby emphasizing that, in the limit situation, the inability to communicate
is the very moment of capability. Limit is a source of fecundity. Before I do so,
however, we will need a foundation to help us assess, paraphrasing Peters, the key
existential facts about digital media culture. We need to turn to ontology.

Moral and Material Emphases: Media Ontologies

and Beyond

In a volume from 1994, Defining Media Studies: Reflections on the Future of the
Field, which collected essays discussing the future of media and communication
studies in the new millennium, Gregory J. Shepherd suggested a sense of onto-
logical deficit in media studies.51 He maintained that something foundational
was missing in the discipline. It lacked and failed to produce what each discipline
promotes, which was a unique ontological view of existence and its material and
symbolic artifacts. Hence, he argued, we have fallen short in communication

48 Peters, Speaking into the Air, 149.

49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 227ff. It understands, furthermore, that the self is equally exotic and alien: “I am the thing

from outer space . . . I am the UFO haunting everything.” Ibid., 260.

51 See Gregory J. Shepherd, “Building a Discipline of Communication,” in Defining Media

Studies: Reflections on the Future of the Field, ed. Mark Levy and Michael Gurevitch (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 91–99.
Existential Media Studies 81

studies of offering a communication-based view of existence or Being. The

lack of a unique ontology explains the lack of academic legitimacy, he argued.
Without an “eye on existence,” we have “not shown that communication is mate-
rially essential to Being.”52 Recently, a small but significant upsurge of existential
media ontologies has begun to remedy this lack.
Before I discuss these media ontologies, I will outline what I see as two key,
yet often overlapping, emphases in existential philosophy. Both are impor-
tant for defining what the existential can mean and how it relates to media and
digital media in particular. I then discuss their impact on media ontology, fi-
nally explaining how to draw on both—with the guidance of Jaspers—through
a media-saturated understanding of coexistential corporeal vulnerability. The
first I call the moral emphasis. This involves a focus on subjectivity, individu-
ality, passion, fervent will and choice, authenticity, ambiguity, absurdity, and
ethics. It furthermore entails becoming subjective. This tradition stems from
Søren Kierkegaard’s main stress on the necessity of realizing one’s selfhood by
living passionately in the “ethical stage,” and thereby acknowledging one’s indi-
vidual responsibility for one’s life and existence. It is also heavily influenced by
Nietzsche’s outlook on human life, as a task and a commitment to live passion-
ately here and now. Hence the “moral” equals Kierkegaard’s notion of the ethical/
existential—a legacy visible in Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Levinas. In
addition, Merleau-Ponty defended his existential phenomenology of embodied
perception as a theory of the subject. Chris Thornhill calls this emphasis “the
subjectivist or exceptionalist” tradition and shows that Jaspers shares with it
“the argument that legitimacy for human actions can only be developed on the
basis of an internal experience of uniquely personal possibilities.”53 The moral
emphasis also includes an intersubjective dimension. This is reflected, for ex-
ample, in Jaspers’s focus on communicative being, as I shall discuss at length
subsequently. Importantly, it also includes Levinas’s deep respect for the “face of
the other,” and more recently also Jean-Luc Nancy’s and Judith Butler’s work on
communal aspects of being, ethics, politics, and precarity.
The second is what I call the material emphasis. Here philosophers embrace
an antisubjectivist, instrumental, and praxical view of existence. In general it
takes the lifeworld, redefined existentially as being-in-the-world, as an issue of
ontology. Famously we find this emphasis in Martin Heidegger’s perspective on
tools (technē) as coconstitutive of human existence. Here we may also place his
systemic analysis of the essence of technology (technics) as an “enframing”—an
exploitative relationship to nature.54 This approach thus puts a great stress on

52 Shepherd is also cited in Gordon, who builds on his argument. See “Karl Jaspers,” 110.
53 Thornill, Karl Jaspers, 19.
54 Heidegger, Being and Time and Question Concerning Technology.
82 Existentializing Media

thingness and materiality, on the instrumentality of being and on practice and

embodiment. Technologies are tools and equipment, and humans are thrown
into a material world with the task of concretely handling the world, individu-
ally and communally. The legacies and importance of this approach in media
philosophy have already been credited. As referred to previously, this is the tra-
dition of originary technicity, which relies heavily on Heidegger in conceiving of
media as grounding phenomena, and of humans as coevolving with them. Chris
Thornhill calls this tradition “objectivist, historicist and communitarian” and
argues that Jaspers shares

certain common arguments with the alternative, more historicist line of exis-
tential theory, centered around Heidegger and Rosenzweig. This line of thought
argues that the specificity of human life is only meaningfully expressed in a
historically formed worldly community and that existence discloses its fun-
damental resources only through processes of practical self-interpretation in
common life.

These authors saw the truth of human existence as a quality “commonly elab-
orated in and by the people (Volk), and which presents itself to its members as
truthful participation and belonging.” Jaspers’s mediation between exception
and authority, argues Thornhill, “is thus clearly an attempt to bring together
these two contrary lines of reflection in the existential tradition.”55 He concludes:

He follows Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in arguing that an intensely partic-

ular experience of existence must provide the basis for true thinking, yet he
follows Heidegger and Rosenzweig in arguing that existence itself is always
engendered and processed within structures of historically mediated common-
ality: Rejecting in this way both radical-subjectivist and radical communitarian
existential perspectives, Jaspers claims that existence is meaningful only if it can
explain and clarify itself as a reflexive agency which is both other than an iso-
lated experience of pure contingency and different from the objective sharedness of
common history. The two poles of exception (subjectivism) and authority (his-
toricism) should, therefore, always be reflected to a higher unit. On this basis,
Jaspers’ existentialism is strikingly distinct from any other existential philos-
ophy as it attempts both to mediate between, and offer a corrective to, the dis-
tinct foundations of the two parallel lines of existential thought.56

55 Thornhill, Karl Jaspers, 19.

56 Ibid., italics added.
Existential Media Studies 83

Existential media studies seeks to continue this mediating approach. Before

doing so, however, we need to spend some time on the historicist and communi-
tarian ground—in the recent ontologies of media.
As already noted, current contributions to media philosophy primarily
focus on the second—material, historicist, and communitarian—dimension,
thoroughly inspired by Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. For Paddy
Scannell, in Television and the Meaning of Live, the existential lack in the field has
to do with both ontology and epistemology—with the lack of realization that our
media of communication both embed us in everyday life and reveal to us what
we are about. Scannell signals a convergence of questions about meaning and
conditions of materiality, in his Heideggerian understanding wherein the human
sphere of lived experience is entangled and coconditioned by the technologies
we build and use. Scannell’s Heideggerian reading of television in everyday life
reconceives of television as ready-to-hand in the way that all technologies and
equipment are world-disclosing. Pursuing a hermeneutics of trust, Scannell is
inclined to argue for seeing the goodness in postmodern technology (including
the digital), and holds there is a care structure built into them—they are literally
user-friendly; they “reconcile us to our worldly selves.”57 This way, they answer
age-old existential questions, telling us something important about who and
what we are. Television reveals through liveness the meaning of life.
While entertaining much less optimism about the digital age than Scannell,
Peters nonetheless plows on in similar Heideggerian furrows, providing a
material account of both being itself and media theory. His media ontology
emphasizes that media ground us in Being: “Media are our infrastructures of
being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are. This gives them
ecological, ethical, and existential import,”58 he argues in The Marvelous Clouds.
Peters here decisively hoists media theory far beyond its most common concerns.
To the textual, social, and institutional forms of media studies, he has added the
material/technological/civilizational form,59 which he ultimately develops into a
philosophy of elemental media. Offering a realist and materialist posthuman po-
sition, his approach underlines—with a deep debt to Heidegger’s instrumental
approach—that technologies and humans are mutually coconstituted: “A theory
of human technicity should humble us by showing our radical groundedness,
not encourage us to vaunt our distinctive powers: the question concerning tech-
nology should radically examine what we humans are.”60

57 Scannell, Television, 86.

58 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 15.
59 John D. Peters, “Strange Sympathies: Horizons of German and American Media Theory,”

in American Studies as Media Studies, ed. Frank Kelleter and Daniel Stein (Heidelberg: Winter,
2008), 3–23.
60 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 89.
84 Existentializing Media

This examination puts a primary stress on the materiality and mundane-

ness of media, and centers on the tools we use to craft and manage our exist-
ence. In this perspective, digital media disclose us to ourselves, and our world
to us, as they equip us with tools to navigate it. By problematizing the subject-
object distinction in Western philosophy, he aims furthermore to bring media
studies into conversation with the natural sciences, theology, and philosophy.
His analysis settles, as discussed previously, on the boring and logistical in-
frastructural preconditions of being, and asserts the primacy of habitat and
embodiment to communication. Peters argues for seeing the continuities
between, for example, mind and matter, human and thing, animal and ma-
chine. He thereby criticizes the position we saw in Jaspers’s early philosophy
of technology:

By isolating the acute parts of our world that we should control, it effaces the
existential fact that we live environmentally, dependently, in apparatuses not of
our own making, starting with the womb itself. The fear that technology could
impose itself externally on humans is a form of denial that humans are already
beings made by art, although I would be the last to deny that some forms of
technology need vigorous criticism.61

Critique is thus crucial still. The material/technological tradition, he argues,

“is of course empirical and critical in its way, though it is much more liberal in
what it admits into the object domain of media studies.”62 Fire, clouds, and sea
are media. Peters develops elemental media philosophy into a branch of meta-
physics: media are “modes of being”—that is, they are “vessels and environments,
containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing
possible.” In other words, media are “the historical constituents of civilization
or even of being itself.”63 Peters thus offers a postsecular redefinition of media
studies, by turning attention to what is rather than what must mean. He turns
to nature, in all its meaningful and meaningless other-than-humanness, as the
blueprint for a kind of alien epistemology, through which we can marvel at the
cosmos without understanding its messages or meaning. The purpose is thence,
in the spirit of pragmatism, to provide a media philosophy that preserves and
cherishes the marvelous mystery that our technologized natural-cultural being

61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., 17.
63 Ibid., 2. He therefore suggests that media studies has the grandiose ambition of being “a suc-
cessor discipline to metaphysics, as the field which accounts for the constitution of all that is.”
Ibid., 320.
Existential Media Studies 85

is a part of.64 Peters’s project is thus ultimately its own version of, and vision for,
media theology.
In the Poetics of Digital Media, Paul Frosh develops Peters’s ontology by
emphasizing that media are poetic infrastructures, with world-making and
world-disclosing capacities. Media are poetic forces that conjure up the unreal,
the unknown, and the illusory, through which a manifold of enfoldings of worlds
(real and fictional) within worlds, and the manifestation of those multiple worlds,
are brought into being. Frosh argues for recognizing media as adjacent forms.

The premise, in a nutshell, is that media are systems for the production and
disclosure of worlds. Media are poetic infrastructures: they are generators and
conduits of poeisis as an existential power. The commonplace ideas that media
create overtly fictional worlds, while at the same time constructing our sense of
the real world, society, community and the body politic, are rooted in the poetic
capacities of media.65

Accompanying this are two assumptions thoroughly aligned with the mission
of existential media studies. The first sees media as having profound existential
significance: Frosh describes them as a “means for living, reflecting upon and de-
fining our lives within shared human conditions and limitations.”66 The second
assumption puts the stress on the present moment and the thoroughly technolo-
gized culture in which we live, in ways that resonate deeply with a media theory
of the digital limit situation.
New approaches in contemporary debates on media and communication,
such as nonrepresentational and non-media-centric media studies, have sought
to go beyond a narrow focus on media as determinants of the social, cultural, or
political developments studied. Scholars have been drawing upon the phenom-
enological triad of space, time, and embodiment, thus aiming to dislodge the
media from the center of attention, seeking out, for example, codependencies
with other aspects of everyday life. These approaches have made important
contributions that render media life, and our life in and with media, more

64 As discussed earlier, for Peters—who draws on the instrumentality of both Heidegger and prag-

matism—the focus is on everyday things, on mundane practices, on the infrastructural and instru-
mental. He sides with the pragmatists and their cousins across the Atlantic, not only because of this
human inclination toward the routine and humdrum, but because these thinkers have in common
the capacity to marvel: they “know that any effort to fathom the fathomless will only measure our
bottomless capacity for wonder.” As Peters explains: “They welcomed a fruitful instrumentality as the
key to what makes us humans. The pragmatist lineage shares with Heidegger the intuition that being
is found in everyday practices, algorithms and programs. Both Heidegger and the New Englanders
turn to the basic and show what is locked up in a meadow, ship or pair of shoes. Both share the infra-
structural intuition that what is generally taken as obvious is not obvious at all.” Ibid., 45.
65 Frosh, Poetics of Digital Media, xiii.
66 Ibid., 3.
86 Existentializing Media

complex, since they fully integrate the ontological preconditions for being and
becoming with technology in relationality and diversity. This is common coin
today, visible across influential posthumanist or (post)phenomenological works
in media theory.67 On reflection, however, they often conjure up a form of seam-
less, even harmonious, cohabitation and coevolution with technologies. One
might still ask, I suggest: where in this continuum of bodies, environments, tech-
nologies, and affects is originary suffering, death, trauma? Where is existential
vulnerability?
Addressing suffering from the vantage point of fundamental ontology, Tim
Markham has offered a forceful case in Digital Life for yet another Heideggerian
approach to media theory. By rehearsing the perspective of originary technicity,
he portrays solidarity and ethics as phenomena emerging out of preconscious
(antisubjectivist à la Heidegger) forms of communitarian practice in an unre-
flective drive-by mode of online movement through media environments. In the
vein of Paddy Scannell, whose existential phenomenology adamantly identifies
as noncritical, Markham paints an adversary that sees digital culture as inau-
thentic, and which therefore seeks to disconnect from “all of this meaningless
digital stuff ” that impedes true human enlightenment about who we are and why
we are here. The approach reflects a full appreciation of how digital culture is
deeply enmeshed in the lifeworld. This is also a methodological condition, which
is why he critiques any abstracting from the digital in terms of stepping back, to
gain perspective on its world disclosure; from its habitual webs of meaning and
praxis, and most importantly from its ontology of flow and movement. We have
to dive in—there is no other option: “The originary technicity of being means
that only that which appears as ready-to-hand can appear at all; there is nothing
outside of graspability as a resource in an environment whose affordances are
given by the history of technology.”68 Furthermore, understanding is “a ready-
to-hand facility, something we just do as we go about our everyday lives,” which
implies that it is that “going-about that instantiates our grasp of our mutual
complicity and interdependency with sufferers one and all.”69 Again, the con-
clusion is that the mundane world “is every bit as ontologically generative as
any ‘deep’ apprehension of the human condition.” Self-being is thus propelled
through locomotions of “transient buzz of recognition,” rather than through
“realizing some final moment of subjectification.”70 In contrast with Peters and

67 See, for example, Mark Deuze, “Media Life,” Media, Culture and Society, 33, no. 1

(2011): 137–148, https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443710386518; Kember and Zylinska, Life after New

Media; Moores, Digital Orientations; Susanna Paasonen, Dependent, Distracted, Bored: Affective
Formations in Networked Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).
68 Markham, Digital Life, 5.
69 Ibid., 49.
70 Ibid., 23.
Existential Media Studies 87

Frosh—who remain on the same material-praxical grounds—he is in full fidelity

with Heidegger’s postmetaphysical project, arguing for

bracketing out such metaphysical concerns altogether. Thus, any serious con-
sideration of what a digital ethics might look like should start from the ubiqui-
tous distractions of our cluttered lives rather than seeking to take an abstracted
position outside of this endless noise and light. Starting in media res, it soon
becomes apparent that the low-level anxieties of digital life—not intimations
of the abyss but generalized feelings of listlessness and dissatisfaction—are not
problems to be tackled but that which keeps us in motion.71

Media are essentially about the life flow. Nothing can be learned from the abysmal
rifts that shatter the webs of meaningful and meaningless mediated distractions,
and open up craters in our world that will obstruct keeping us in movement.
Evental sites, which also belong to life, are deemed irrelevant for approaching our
world of media. This is an approach that precludes edge experiences à la Cressida
J. Heyes, experiences that cannot be named, that defy the habitual webs of eve-
ryday existence of dwelling and moving about. The approach effectively places
such experiences at the limit under the radar, but as this book will demonstrate,
these have digital instantiations, implications, and resonances. The tendency
that I have traced to the early schools, which has remained a fixture in the tradi-
tion since—the existential deficit within media and communication studies—is
replayed: the “we” in this story is re-established as that collective body which is
not itself living with any disability or hindrances. The we is thus normate, unin-
hibited, and always in movement. The preponderant tendency in media studies
to unawaringly privilege privileged parts of our populations, or as my mourners
call them—“those who remain nonafflicted”—is here reiterated in the overem-
phasis on movement: “And it is above all motion that comes to establish every-
thing that a digital ethics should promote and protect—commonality, difference,
complicity and responsibility in the here and now.”72 We are simply propelled
to be ethical as we move restlessly from one thing to another in practical en-
gagement, since it is “through that impatient, skeptical gaze, always darting from
one thing to another, that we understand the actuality of our being-in-the-world
with others. Understanding is a thoroughly practical act, constituted in motion,
not something achieved by stopping and staring into the eyes of the suffering
other.”73

71 Ibid., italics added.

72 Ibid., italics added.
73 Ibid.
88 Existentializing Media

Despite the care with which a reinvention of ethics as praxis is undertaken,

and the sincere will to address issues of vulnerability, the obvious risk here is
of reproducing a taken-for-granted success story of dwelling in and skillfully
moving about the media world in terms of harmonious navigation by managing,
maneuvering, and perhaps even mastering digital life. At any rate, this ontology
conjures up an everyday of smoothness, mobility, and savviness in which only
low-level anxieties and dissatisfactions are displayed. This of course reflects
a kind of arithmetic average of lives normately blessed. Can this be seen as an
example of a masculinist rationality of detachment, in which media ontology
offers a safe space, a shelter from any excessively sticky or outright demanding
apprehensions of embodied vulnerability, deep obligation, action, reflexivity,
and mutual rapport? Effortlessly moving along the lines of digital life, as critical
intuition and listening to others at the limit will quickly make clear, is a utopian
scenario, and a very different affair, for differently situated beings. The mourners
and the illness-stricken will be the first to tell you a different story, from a po-
sition of embodiment that transcends ideology.74 And they will also produce a
different ontology: for example, a being-toward-slowing-down.75 For those whose
lives are not always as easily accommodated to everything that is going on within
the vital buzz of media, there are also friction, apprehension, and opposition, as
well as a need for spaces of existential stillness, silence, and nontransparency.
There is thus limit.
I fully appreciate that existential media studies may seem a party pooper. It
comes with bad news, not only about being embodied mortal beings-with, but
also fundamentally about being bereft beings who struggle from the onset. But it
takes that position of hurt and lack as the starting point and as a site of value. It is
moreover not something that belongs to the Other, but to that site where we know
in the body. As stated earlier, existential media are grounded and grounding phe-
nomena—we are stuck with them and they sustain us; we dwell in that world
with them more or less successfully. In addition, however, and as I discuss fur-
ther below and in the next chapter, they also throw us not just into the mundane
flows of practical existence, but also up into the air: we are (digitally) thrown,
into the general and specific limit situations of life. Enter precariousness and
accountability. In fact, as I hope to show, by recognizing this, existential media
studies also offers up something worthwhile for the stakes of elemental media
philosophy, retaining with Jaspers the idea that we have a role to play, since “the
world attracts Existenz as the medium of its realization.”76

74 Cf. Siebers, Disability Theory, 8.

75 Hence, we might argue that any declared ontology furthermore relies upon those situated,
embodied, and irrefutably limited experiences, through which it is forged in the first place.
76 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 5.
Existential Media Studies 89

This also has, as was noted in the introduction, a planetary dimension. We may
here trace another proverbial understanding of the existential, which invokes the
existential risks to our species. These pertain to our utter and sheer existence, our
survival. Hence existential media are here seen as world-makers and potential
world-destroyers—often in deep ambiguity (this I will discuss thoroughly in the
concluding chapter). This puts media ontology in a different light: it is more than
intriguing food for sophisticated thought, since it makes media momentous and
critical for our situation. Hence, this definition takes us right back to the brinks
of existence, discussed in the introduction, as well as to the building blocks of the
elemental approach: to those infrastructures that set the parameters of our very
existence. Existential media studies thus carves out an overlapping yet also dis-
tinct space that transcends some of the concerns of media phenomenology and
also of ontology. Moreover, it edges away from any crude or too one-dimensional
focus on cheerfully living with our data, or moving about our world equipped
with media in quite harmonious ways.
In order to capture the interplay of lifeworld, experience, and technological
conditions along several scales, I suggest a transversal approach that elucidates
other dimensions of the techno-existential register, from the vantage point of
beings on the line. We are at a point in time when no one can deny that life entails
crises that are both formative and generative, and that in navigating terrains of
shared techno-existential and environmental vulnerability, human beings are
positioned between earth, sea, and sky, amid a multiplicity of planetary beings
and imperiled nonhumans. Life, I suggest, is therefore a precarious media life—
that is, a digital limit situation—through the combination of rapid technological
shifts, emergent social norms in digital cultures, the elusive workings of pow-
erful algorithms, and the harvesting of individual life data within surveillance
capitalism. Moreover, such contingencies are now occurrent alongside unprece-
dented ecological emergency.
Here I take my cue from Joanna Zylinska, who always presciently rattles
discourses in media theory and critical debate more broadly. In Minimal Ethics
for the Anthropocene, she argues for moving beyond ontology and into a more
speculative and open realm of feminist critique and artistic imaginary. She
stresses the importance of telling ourselves stories, and of finding ways to live
a good life with respect for singular beings in distress across the human and
nonhuman domains and entanglements, despite the fact that the world stands
at the brink. She is in search of what constitutes goodness in this precarious
geohistorical moment and identifies possibilities in artistic sensibilities that pro-
duce ideas with things and events. This is a call for new forms of fragmented
philosophical intervention beyond masculinist searching for systems or forging
whole ontologies and worlds:
90 Existentializing Media

A post-masculinist rationality is by no means non-or anti-rationalist; it

just calls for a different modulation of rationality, one that remains more
attuned to its own modes of production. It is always already embodied and
immersed, responding to the call of matter and to its various materializations—
materializations such as humans, animals, plants, inanimate objects, as well as
the relations between them. Such post-masculinist rationality remains suspi-
cious towards any current attempts to (re)turn to ontology, in both its idealist
and materialist guises, as a predominant mode of philosophizing. It sees any
such attempts for what they are: ways of producing and hence also mastering
“the world” and then passing it on (as fact) to others—even if such ontological
production is to be dressed in the language of immanence and autopoiesis.77

This resonates with the Jaspersian, low-profiled, Other-oriented, and communi-

cative approach to being human, and with his denouncement of the big claims of
Ontology, and with the nonnegotiable need for a renewed ethical debate based
on existential reason and on acknowledging existential vulnerability. This is
what is needed on a radically imperiled planet, inhabited by radically imperiled
beings in a radically new and challenging condition of limit. I suggest in this in-
stance that we delve into Jaspers’s philosophy of communication and linger there
for a moment, before turning to the issue of existential vulnerability in our age
of media.

Jaspers’s Philosophy of Communication

For Jaspers, communication is our human destiny, but it is always at heart a lack
and an unfulfillment, which may in turn spawn something unexpected. As we
saw previously, in theorizing selfhood Jaspers retains a focus on inwardness, yet
he resolves Kierkegaard’s apparent attachment problem as he interrupts the very
idea of a self-sufficient self. As the psychiatrist Nassir Ghaemi has shown, “By
acknowledging human identity as limit, that is through what it is lacking he finds
a source of human possibility in the plural and these plural possibilities define
our freedom.”78 Jaspers argues accordingly that “to come to myself as I perish
is the phenomenon of self-being.”79 And: “Aberrant from the self, being is the
sea of light in which every part of the ego has been submerged and dissolved; as
self-being, it is the mutual illumination of souls revealed to one another in pre-
sent eternity.”80 Jaspers thus brings forth the idea that we are not isolated beings,

77 Zylinska, Minimal Ethics, 15.

78 Ghaemi, “Existence and Pluralism,” 78, italics added.
79 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 44, italics added.
80 Ibid., 45.
Existential Media Studies 91

and this is an originary feature of being human: it is its authentic possibility.

As Jaspers puts it: “We represent this original phenomenon of our humanity
thus: we are what we are only through the community of mutually conscious
understandings. There can be no man who is a man for himself alone, as a mere
individual.”81 Jaspers thus troubles a self for-itself, as Sartre put it. In fact, ac-
cording to Hannah Arendt, he was the first philosopher who radically broke with
the whole Western philosophical tradition of focusing on singular subjectivity:

Jaspers, as far as I know, is the only philosopher who ever protested against
solitude, to whom solitude appears “pernicious” and who even wants to ex-
amine every thought, every experience, every subject as to what they signify
for communication. Are they of a kind that will help or are they of a kind that
will prevent communication? Do they seduce one to solitude or do they excite
communication?82

Hence: “With self-being thus a product of communication, neither I nor the

other have a solid substance of being previous to our communication.”83 For
Heidegger, famously, being-toward-death—in a kind of isolated inwardness that
turns away from the connections of the ordinary world of Das Man—is the route
to true authenticity. Jaspers, by contrast, finds authenticity in communication.
Communication is our destiny: humans are in essence communicating beings.
For Jaspers, humans are relational beings, whose existence, identity, and hu-
manity depend on intersubjective communication: each human being is brought
into being through communication with others.84 It is thus through communica-
tion that we constitute ourselves in relation. Yet, in everyday life, there are forms
of communication that Jaspers finds to be utterly lacking: “In naïve existence I do
what everyone else does, I believe what everyone else believes”; and “Living in
the medium of this community, I am not yet in communication because I am not
yet aware of myself.”85 To be human through self-realization is thus bound up
with being in authentic communication:

It is so much his comprehensive essence that both what man is and what is for
him are in some sense bound up with communication. The Encompassing
which we are is, in every form, communication; the Encompassing which is
Being itself exists for us only insofar as it achieves communicability by be-
coming speech or becoming utterable.86

81 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 77.

82 Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?,” 442.
83 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 64.
84 Gordon, “Karl Jaspers,” 111.
85 Jaspers Philosophy II, 48, italics added.
86 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 79.
92 Existentializing Media

Here we may note that Jaspers exemplifies, perhaps more than anyone else, the
fact that existential philosophy (as Arendt argued) both pinpoints and brings us
back from our human individual isolation, in its emphasis on openness, incom-
pleteness, dependency, and communication as inevitable parts of life.87 Being is

thus conceived as already being-with, and existence as always already coexistence
with others.88 We are singular-plural. Relationality is key. Here Jaspers’s thinking
resonates with Jean-Luc Nancy’s “coexistentialist” works, which “articulate a
sense of withness (the ‘co’-), of coexistence such that we can affirm the struggle to
say we for all being that is, for every being, for all beings one by one, each time in
the singular of their essential plural.”89
Jaspers further conceives of self-being in relation to communication and/as
truth. For Jaspers, communication and truth go together. This is because, as he
puts it, “To be genuinely true, truth must be communicable.”90 Moreover, what is
true only becomes true when we communicate together:

Truth therefore cannot be separated from communicability. It only appears in

time as a reality-through-communication. Abstracted from communication,
truth hardens into an unreality. The movement of communication is at one and
the same time the preservation of and the search for the truth. In general then,
it applies to my being, my authenticity, and my grasp of the truth that, not only
factually am I not for myself alone, but I can not even become myself alone
without emerging out of my being with others.91

Reason itself is thus communicable, and communicating is in turn “reasonable.”

In contrast to conceptions of philosophical reason that set up axiomatic truths to
be weighed against different realities or scenarios, reason, for Jaspers,

has no assured stability: it is constantly on the move. Once it has gained a posi-
tion it presses on to criticize it and is therefore opposed to the tendency to free
oneself from the necessity of all further thought by once and for all accepting
irrevocably fixed ideas. It demands a careful thoughtfulness—it is therefore
the opposite of mere capriciousness. It leads to self-knowledge and knowledge
of limits, and therefore to humility—and it is opposed to intellectual arrogance. It
demands a constant listening and it is able to wait—it is therefore opposed to the
narrowing furies of passion.92

87 Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?”; cf. Bornemark, “Limit-Situation.”

88
Nancy, Being Singular-Plural.
89 Nancy in Mickey, Coexistentialism, 16.
90 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 77.
91
Ibid., 79–80.
92
Jaspers, Reason and Anti-reason, 42, italics added.
Existential Media Studies 93

Philosophical truth is furthermore dependent upon relations. The truth for

Jaspers is never a possession; it is an activity. Dialogue, in turn, is never accom-
plished; it is a truth-loving activity.93 In order for such truths to really emerge,
they have to build on authentic existential communication, wherein individuals
show—through a loving struggle—their sincere attempts and will to understand
both their own lives and the life of the other. As we communicate, we are in fact
listening for an echo:

Truth is bound up with communication. Truth that cannot be communicated

becomes identical with untruth. Truth that binds itself to communication is not
complete; it listens for an echo as it communicates itself, testing itself and the
other. It is distinct from all one-sided proclamation. It is not I who bring the
truth by myself: I can only seek for truth, along with the other who meets me, by
listening, asking and testing.94

And yet communication of what is most important to us is always an impossi-

bility. We are fated to fail. But we must take the risk, or risk everything, in com-
munication: “With imperturbable confidence in the boundless possibilities of the
whole of Being, reason demands that the risk of communication should be taken
again and again. To deny communication is tantamount to denying reason it-
self.”95 Hence, we become ourselves ultimately in the limit situations constituted
by risk-taking, through our existential strivings and failures to communicate:

The sense of shortcoming in communication is thus an origin of the break-

through to Existenz, and of a philosophizing that tends to elucidate the break-
through. As all philosophizing starts with wonder, and as mundane knowledge
starts with doubt, the elucidation of Existenz starts with the experience of
shortcoming in communication.96

At the limits of communication, a deeper sense of being human emerges. But in

everyday routine, too, communication is, as Jaspers says, “a process, not some-
thing complete, its reality is a sense of being deficient.”97 This resonates closely, as
I have already suggested, with J. D. Peters’s approach, which offers a perspective
on communication that is less about clarity of signal than about embracing lack
and limits. This is what I cautiously term the “inversion model,” that makes a

93 See a discussion in Wendy Farley, Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World

(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 190.

94 Jaspers, Reason and Anti-reason, 42.
95 Ibid.
96 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 51.
97 Ibid., 66, italics added.
94 Existentializing Media

case for other forsaken aspects and forms of communication. Respecting limits
and laying claims to gaps and interruptions as constitutive of communication,
we find that communication becomes more about “making do with fragments”
and about “patience amid imperfections.”98 Here, at “the bounds of observable
communication,”99 the prospects for existential communication are enacted.

Existential Vulnerability in the Digital Limit Situation

To sum up the deliberations this far, I argue that rather than staying within the
comfort zone of ontology as that sanguine “going about in worldliness,” our task
is to begin to define vulnerability existentially with deepest respect for diversity,
in order to describe, too, how it relates to limits, as well as to media and to the
technological transformations of the digital limit situation. The digital limit situ-
ation cannot be subjected to objective knowledge, nor can it be minimized. It will
inevitably draw us nearer the “sufferers”—some of them are already us, all of us
are potentially them. Here at the limit, as Iaconesi’s words make clear, there is an
overbearing necessity to respond, through ethical action and nonaction (slowing
down, as the ill must often do). Jaspers’s philosophy of communication offers a
chance to step back in order to step in. Poked by the need for both silence and
connection and permeated by both strivings and nonstrivings, it enables both
affective and informed decisions. It also offers ways to forge a pragmatic, tem-
porary, yet ever so essential connective “we,” as discussed in chapter 2. Jaspers
shows, through a focus upon existential communication, that we are imperfect
beings in utter dependence and in utter precariousness. How then does human
vulnerability further relate to the digital limit situation?
Media are, as already established, existential media in the ontological
sense—coconstituting what it means be human and the worlds we inhabit. But
this entangles them with lived experience, and with experiences of suffering.
Reliant upon devices that enable our lives, digital media are therefore existential
media also in an anthropological sense—that is, as we share and explore exis-
tential issues in connection with loss and trauma online, for example on digital
memorials, in rituals of lighting digital candles, in blogging about terminal ill-
ness, and on suicide sites. As already discussed, existential media studies aims
to follow Jaspers’s project of offering also through his philosophy of communi-
cation, a mediating bridge between ontology of the historicist and infrastruc-
tural strand, and lived experiences of vulnerability of the (inter)subjectivist and
exceptionalist strand. But the plot thickens, since vulnerability has today become

98 Peters, Speaking into the Air, 60–61.

99 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 47–48.
Existential Media Studies 95

a battleground as well as a selling point.100 It is stained and controlled by intru-

sive and enormously powerful economic forces that claim this originary human
limit condition for their own benefit.
Hence, support groups for the bereaved, as well as blogs about terminal ill-
ness or other communities where people share experiences of pain and suffering,
illness, disability, and disenfranchisement, are currently part of the emergence
of intimate publics in which vulnerability is a trademark.101 In this context,
the deprivatization of death and illness finds today increased predilections
and cultural allowances to showcase, talk about, and share one’s vulnera-
bility, an aspect of which is the tendency to speak about difficult matters such
as mental illness in public, in the connective presence of others. This penchant
is both aided and forged by the dominant media forms of the day across the
media manifold. Vulnerability is thus today disturbingly appropriated in the
hypercommercialized and hyperindividualized affective landscapes of media,
and in connective capitalism’s economies of attention. Tantrums of “vulner-
able publicness” saturate the media landscape, for example in television docu-
drama, reality shows, cancer blogs, video blogs, and podcasting.102 The increased
tendency to profess one’s own vulnerability, to share intimate stories of such
registers in public, is trending among the privileged at large. According to Lilie
Chouliaraki, claiming to be a victim is today even a “new normal,” which impels

100 Vulnerability today both obscures power asymmetries between groups and portrays, through

social policy interventions, certain groups as precarious in highly problematic and paternalistic ways.
See Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyrölä, and Ingrid Rydberg, eds., The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilising
Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-racist Media Cultures (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2018).
101 In the last few decades vulnerability has been a brand, uniting beings within what Laurent

Berlant calls “intimate publics.” Through an exaggerated focus on victimhood, sex, and identity,
she argues, a form of utterly privatized citizenship has emerged (in the United States), which has
redirected political and critical energies into a formless opinion culture of sentimentalism and con-
sumerist subjectivity. Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex
and Citizenship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 3. These intimate publics are often
occupied by women or disenfranchised groups, who in these spaces of recognition, reflection, and
belonging see their personal needs refracted through the general, and who find ways to live their
lives or manage their ordeals. Their members are thus consumers with a shared worldview, and with
shared emotional knowledge. Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of
Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
102 See Carsten Stage, Networked Cancer: Affect, Narrative and Measurement (Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2017). Vulnerability has also emerged as an attractive subject position with a disposition
of earnestness, whether we are talking about politicians, corporate leaders, public figures of fame,
university professors, etc. Testimonies of personal vulnerability are enormously valuable—a cur-
rency for neoliberal self-constitution in the competition for attention on the global arena. One could
see the recent upsurge in respecting vulnerability in scholarship as to a certain degree part of this
trend. Critics trace a reluctance among a group of self-professedly vulnerable to self-reflexively dis-
cuss issues of privilege, power, and power abuse, whether in terms of gender, race, or sexuality, for
example. Scholars point to how this even amounts to a new form of fragility—the sense of misunder-
stood righteousness. Ylva Habel, “Little Pink: White Fragility and Black Social Death,” in Koivunen,
Kyrölä, and Rydberg, The Power of Vulnerability.
96 Existentializing Media

her to distinguish between forms of “tactical vulnerability” and the “systemic

vulnerability” of oppressed groups.103
This makes it all the more important to carefully define vulnerability existen-
tially, in full awareness of asymmetries of power and privilege. When defining ex-
istential vulnerability, we may follow in the footsteps of Judith Butler, who argues
in Precarious Life for seeing vulnerability as both irreducibly ontological (given,
shared) and social (unevenly distributed).104 Butler stresses that “common
corporeal vulnerability”105 is an ontological condition of all humans, but with
asymmetric implications in both socially afforded dispositions and occurrences.
Seeing attachment as exposure, Butler furthermore argues that “loss and vul-
nerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to
others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence
by virtue of that exposure.”106 Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas, Butler argues that
we are bound to each other and therefore exposed. It is our “primary sociality”
that makes us vulnerable, and vulnerability is a shared existential condition of all
humans. Echoing Jaspers’s Other-directed conceptualization of the self, the ap-
proach stresses that “no human being is simply autonomous, but each is always
dependent on the care, support and recognition of others. And in this sense, the
self is always somehow situated outside itself due to its primary sociality.”107
But how can such a concept be further chiseled out in relation to existential
media? This boundedness as well as exposure is today a fact of media life in all
its varied forms and complex relationalities. In fact, seeing dependence and
sociality as the source of our corporeal vulnerability opens out to articulating
media technologies of connection and connectivity with vulnerability. Brita
Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage undertake an interesting appropriation of
Butler’s concept of vulnerability in the context of global media: “We thus claim
that the act of mediation, be it visual, audiovisual or written, tries to enable the
experience of a ‘common’ corporeal vulnerability between the mediated/medi-
ating body and the receiving body.”108 This is also why, despite being precari-
ously colonized by commercial forces and entrepreneurial tactics, as discussed
already, vulnerability is not only an ontological condition; it is also an ideal that
can be used for criticizing the sense in which some lives are seen as more valuable

103 Lilie Chouliaraki, “Victimhood: The Affective Politics of Vulnerability,” European Journal of

Communication, online first (2020), https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420979316.

104 She has this in common with Catriona Mackenzie et al., who offer a very useful taxonomy

of vulnerability. They identify three main sources of vulnerability: inherent (ontological), con-
textual (social), and pathogenic (oppressive due to discriminatory systemic violence). To this
they add two states of vulnerability: dispositional and occurrent. Mackenzie, Rogers, and Dodds,
“Introduction: What Is Vulnerability?”
105 Butler, Precarious Life, 41.
106 Ibid.
107 Timm Knudsen and Stage, Global Media, 3.
108 Ibid.
Existential Media Studies 97

and therefore more grievable than others.109 There is, however, a profound open-
endedness to the upshots of mediated vulnerability. Hence, mediation can curb,
impede, or support the acknowledgment of vulnerability. There are clear asym-
metries in terms of how vulnerability is ascribed to different cultural groups
on the margins. In sum, vulnerability, according to Timm Knudsen and Stage,
functions as an energizer directing attention toward certain bodies, and stim-
ulating an urge to respond and a motivation to imagine a world that handles
vulnerabilities differently and much more constructively. Vulnerability can thus
also be a social force containing agential potentialities.110 This event nature of
mediated vulnerability reflects on Iaconesi’s project, harking back to those
irreducibilities I seek to capture through the notion of the digital limit situation.
In addition (and the existentialist would say that this cannot be stressed
enough), vulnerability is not a word to be thrown around lightly. Here we need
a different framework: we need a sophisticated and self-reflexive understanding
of vulnerability. According to Judith Butler, acknowledging and articulating
vulnerability changes its meaning. Inspired by this, infusing my reading with
Jaspers’s imperative to take responsibility, I submit that simply saying vulnera-
bility implies accountability. Simply articulating or laying claims to vulnerability
(our own and others’) is a moment of self-disclosure and of deep obligation, as
Jonathan Sterne also maintains. Hence, an existential concept of vulnerability
will help us realize that we are obliged to carefully take note of others in their al-
terity, pain, and dependence upon us, and responsibly check our own actions and
their consequences. If we do not act, in the knowledge of how others suffer from
our inaction, we have what Jaspers calls metaphysical guilt, the basis of which
is simply a lack of the solidarity between humans that stems from the simple
fact that they are humans.111 This imperative will save the concept from tactical
poachers. Yet, without downplaying the above-mentioned problematic political
and material realities of tactical vulnerability, I find that an existential defini-
tion will complicate matters even further since, as I discussed in chapter 2, it will
simultaneously shunt aside any excessively static or one-dimensional notions
of vulnerability. As Carsten Stage, for example, reminds us via his studies on
cancer narratives online, this form of vulnerability among entrepreneurial
cancer bloggers quite often combines the needs of entrepreneurial and sincere

109 Ibid., italics added.

110 Ibid. Here they are in accord with a number of scholars who have developed this of
late, yet without primarily focusing on digital media cultures. In Bodies, Boundaries and
Vulnerabilities: Interrogating Social, Cultural and Political Aspects of Embodiment (New York: Springer,
2015), Lisa Folkmarson Käll et al. show the importance of the relationship between the bounded
body and vulnerability, theorizing its role for identity formation and politics. See also Koivunen,
Kyrölä, and Rydberg, The Power of Vulnerability; Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay,
eds., Vulnerability in Resistance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
111 Björk, “Om skuld,” 28.
98 Existentializing Media

existential selfhood. This points toward the possibilities of digital mediation in

the limit situation of illness to offer lifelines and frames of both meaning and
transcendence, despite the commercial incentives. In spite of all the evidence to
the contrary, these may also afford breakthroughs to what Jaspers calls—as we
will discuss at length in what follows—existential communication within the
limit situation.
From the preceding we can conclude that the digital mediation of suffering
and vulnerability has a profoundly ambiguous character, with multiple poten-
tial meanings and aftereffects. What I wish to finally emphasize in relation to
these discussions of mediated affect, suffering, and political agency is a crit-
ical awareness of how media may also in themselves heighten both vulnera-
bility and uncertainty, due to the roles they play in the lifeworld in ultimate
moments. Philosopher of technology Mark Coeckelbergh suggests a relational
anthropology of existential vulnerability, stressing the dual role of technology
as shielding us from vulnerability while also creating new vulnerable dependen-
cies at the very same time.112 This involves something close to the reality of the
digital limit situation. Such an account pushes toward an elucidation of how our
originary technicity is an aspect of our originary vulnerability and vice versa.
I therefore suggest that, in the present moment, our precarious media life has
multilayered and mutually reinforcing enunciations. For example, as human
beings are asymmetrically yet irreducibly exposed to life itself, they are vulner-
able to the convulsions of limit conditions and are subject to limit situations—
tout court. They also cocreate vulnerability as they expose their suffering in a
medium often thought of as the ultimate access machine, but which seems in
fact to be meant to expose: the internet.113 This occurs in a black-boxed reality
where humans have very little understanding and control over media that mean
the world to them, due to increased automation, autonomous systems, and al-
gorithmic cultures.114 And, finally, vulnerability is heightened due to the pace
of technological transformation that rapidly and sometimes violently alters the
coordinates of the lifeworld and throw us into the digital limit situation.

112 Mark Coeckelbergh, Human Being @ Risk: Enhancement, Technology, and the Evaluation of

Vulnerability Transformations (New York: Springer, 2013). Samuel Weber argues that media provide
such protections from vulnerability, while often failing to accomplish their goal of shielding us from
our precariousness: “Like all technology, the development of electronic media follows the ambivalent
law, or graphics, of prosthetic supplementarity: an extension of human capacities it simultaneously
distances and undermines what it extends, exacerbating the vulnerabilities of the finitude it seeks to
alleviate and protect.” Samuel Weber, “Religion, Repetition, Media,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hente
De Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 52.
113 Daphna Yeshua-Katz and Ylva Hård af Segerstad, “Catch 22: The Paradox of Social Media

Affordances and Stigmatized Online Support Groups,” Social Media +Society, 6, no. 4 (2020): 1–12.
114 Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and

Information (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

Existential Media Studies 99

This is played out in multifarious, tangled, and conflicting ways. Hence, an

existential definition of vulnerability should also put an emphasis on the frailties
that the intimacies that digital media, as existential media, enable, obstruct, or
impose. These techno-existential challenges and possibilities imply that we are
becoming human with machines—as we are, for example, relaying suffering
and loss online—also through experiences of being disjointed. This displace-
ment is because this given yet emergent connective world (with all of its possi-
bilities) implies resurgent existential challenges, and to some extent new ethical
predicaments.
In recognizing that this is in fact an ethical space, existential media studies
sees digital existence as a project: it is both an instrumental/material matter and
a moral task. As Jaspers argues, stressing the importance of communication for
morality:

Morality is no longer adequately founded on generally valid laws. The laws

themselves are in need of a deeper foundation. The Kantian question “What
shall I do?” is no longer sufficiently answered by the categorical imperative
(though this imperative remains inevitably true), but has to be complemented
by a foundation of every ethical act and knowledge in communication. For the
truth of generally valid laws for my actions is conditioned by the kind of com-
munication in which I act. “What shall I do?” presupposes “how is communica-
tion possible? How can I reach the depth of possible communication?”115

I argue that, to address these matters, attention to communication at the limit,

and at its limits, will be key. What might a return to Jaspers’s philosophy of com-
munication further imply in an age of hyperconnectivity? How can his insistence
upon limits help us redefine media as existential and communication as exis-
tential communication? In order to further elucidate the meanings of existential
vulnerability and identify the chances for taking responsibility in the digital limit
situation, how can we, after posthumanism, redefine humans as responsible, eth-
ical beings? I try in the next chapter to answer these questions, as well as to syn-
thesize many of the themes covered in the opening chapters of this book. Finally,
I provide a definition of existential media and their key properties.

115 Jaspers, “On My Philosophy,” in Kaufman, Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, 167, italics

added.
4
Existential Media
Propositions and Properties

This book argues that today, more than ever, media are tied to ultimate aspects
of life and being itself. The phenomenologist Don Ihde reminded us in the 1970s
that all “human-machine relations are existential relations in which our fate and
destiny are implicated, but which are subject to the very ambiguity found in all
existential relations.”1 Today we may suggest that the machines to which Ihde
referred still have this ambiguous quality and that they have simultaneously ex-
panded and evolved: they have become environmental, embedded, embodied,
and emplaced in the lifeworld. But even more profoundly, they seem to be our
“tools of existence,” and thereby to constitute the very ground on which we stand,
including our ways of making sense of it—our “shell” or our “ciphers” of being, as
Jaspers calls them—while at the same time bringing about the contingencies of a
life lived in utter thrownness within the technologically mediated limit situation.
The upshot is that existence is now explored through, experienced in relation
to, and defined by these tools in a dynamic relationship of mutuality, tension,
ambivalence, and change.2 Following Jaspers, I wish to stress their antinomical
structure. To encircle such ambiguities, the sense of both fate and fortune, of
both hope and hazard in the digital limit situation, is one of the objectives of
this book.
Drawing inspiration from the existentialist tradition, existential media
studies offers ways to retool media theory. But its wider aim is also to represent
a retooled form of humanities research. It is in this sense a call to protect the
imperiled practice of humanistic scholarship, while developing its potential in
a postdisciplinary manner. Existential media studies is thus an exercise in what
I see as the main mission of the humanities. It is in depth a philosophically and
ethically motivated project, challenging the omission of our shared existen-
tial vulnerability, in media theory and beyond. It is thus also, as we have seen,
a political and critical project. Empirically grounded in contemporary existen-
tial terrains of connectivity, it also provides perspective on being human, in our

1 Don Ihde, Technics and Praxis (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979), 4.

2 See W. J. T. Mitchell and Mark B. Hansen, Critical Terms for Media Studies (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2010).

Existential Media. Amanda Lagerkvist, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925567.003.0005
Existential Media 101

case of being human in and with media. The goal of this final chapter of Part I is
to synthesize some of the key discussions in the opening parts of the book into
some hopefully handy definitions of central keywords (media, digital, and com-
munication), followed by a rigorous conceptualization of a different subject for
media theory, the coexister, in light of the role existential media studies assigns to
existential vulnerability, care, and responsibility. The ultimate aim, finally, is also
to define the key stakes and properties of existential media.
As for keywords, a few clarifications are in order. First, this book puts an em-
phasis on limits, but this should not be understood as conceptualizing media as
objects that have clear-cut edges: clearly any media form is the result of practices
and processes, of beliefs and ideologies embedded in material and historical
contexts, with open-ended, transitional, and importantly manifold implications.3
Consequently, Existential Media sees media multifocally. This approach requires
a broad media concept that allows us to conceive of media as representation and
signification, interrelatedly. Furthermore, and by moving beyond their well-
known representational dimensions, we can see media as sites (where some-
thing happens), containers (where something is stored), environments (which
set the scenes and provide support through infrastructure), conduits and objects
(instruments and stuff that sustain/convey the meaning and produce the action),
and vessels of transmission and movement (means that take us and our messages
somewhere). Allowing for media to emerge in all their productive ambiguity
also implies approaching them in an about-face manner. This follows from J. D.
Peters’s philosophy of elemental media, which posits media as environments and
environments as media. Media are here defined as “strategies and tactics of cul-
ture and society, as the devices and crafts by which humans and things, animals
and data, hold together in time and space.”4 Conceived as tools of existence, ex-
istential media also evoke the skills of craftsmanship—the creative promise that
media may set worlds and futures into motion through our careful crafting. As
we have seen, moreover, existential media offer moorings, and they are indeed
mundane. But they are also momentous and therefore morally demanding. They
are both the building blocks and the brinks of being.
Second, as has been laid out, developing an approach to media as existential
media in our present age inevitably implies focusing on digital media forms, par-
ticularly forms of grief communication and commemoration on social media,
online memorials, blogs about terminal illness, and the transcendence industry;
legacy avatars and digital wills. But this book also sees more recent forms of dig-
ital media in the shape of anticipatory systems, AI, and biometrics as existen-
tial media. Following Benjamin Peters’s discussion of the digital, it is useful to

3 Cf. Frosh, Poetics of Digital Media, 22–23.

4 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 18.
102 Existentializing Media

define its specific characteristics as counting the symbolic (like fingers: digitals)
and indexing the real (the indexical, which has a direct relationship to reality,
without becoming submerged in it). This in turn allows for manipulating so-
cial imaginaries (that is, iconically resembling or imitating and influencing
perceptions of the world).5 And yet, as the observant reader has already noted,
I have taken the postdigital framework quite literally here. As already explained
in the introduction, I choose in this book to talk about a media theory of limit
and of the limit situation, rather than signposting the digital—even as digital
limit situations nevertheless stand at the heart of my discussion. This means
my definition of existential media will attend to some of the distinctive features
of those digital media forms under investigation, as well as the ways in which
they inform and coconstitute the digital limit situation. But it will also point be-
yond the currents of dominant media and will aspire to say something broader
about how we can reconceive media through existential sensibilities and possible
refigurations. Finally, via Jaspers the concept of communication itself, as already
hinted at in the previous chapter, is inverted through a focus on silence and dis-
connection. This requires its own section and context.

Bedrocks of Being: Silence, Disconnection, and the Virtues

of Existential Communication

For Imran Khan, the journalist and mourner whom we met in c hapter 1, the
experience—as he is hurled, chased, and enabled by tech along the rim—of en-
forced “salvific” and pragmatically endorsed “new media” is puzzling, and even
a bit frightening:

It is the kind of thing you would expect to read about in a dystopian novel far
removed from your own reality. But perhaps we are all living a dystopian reality.
One that stops us from having the one thing that technology will never replace: the
embrace of family in a time of grief; the ability to sit and share memories together
in person.6

Something is profoundly wanting in the digitally mediated funeral. Khan

expresses the desire for embodied copresence as the very foundation of our hu-
manity—as that limit which our bodies and relational selves are—which makes
the digital substitution of his cousin’s funeral lacking in essence: “Human contact
is the one thing that will always define our humanity,” he concludes.

5 Peters, “Digital.”
6 Imran Khan, “Death at a Distance,” italics added.
Existential Media 103

In this way, a sense of a bedrock of being human is often invoked to counter a

world of default connectivity and data imperialism. In the spirit of respecting the
role of interruptions and silences that we have already explored within Jaspers’s
philosophy of communication, finding refuge beyond the all-pervasiveness of net-
work buzz is also a key existential practice. Phenomenological and existential in-
tuition puts the human body in that place of defiance to begin with: it constitutes
the limit of the scope of technological mediation. As Jaspers puts it: “The unavoid-
ability of the life-order finds its limit in the human being who refuses to be wholly
absorbed into a function; and further in this, that no unique and perfected and def-
inite life-order is possible.”7 Here mediation and datafication thus run into a barrier,
a limit. For Jaspers, the human is that limit. Imran Khan resorts to human contact.
For Peters, touch stands against the tyrannies of communication, and the elements,
as mentioned already, are posited as incontrovertible and powerful limits against
hermeneutic overstretch. For Albert Borgmann, focal activities that connect us with
our physical surroundings and build our identity and integrity (such as preparing a
meal and dining together, or praying) may resist endless information-processing as
they bring us back, imposing an attentive attitude.8 And for Cressida J. Heyes, one
such activity is an utter nonactivity—it is the void of sleep:

Sleep is the limit case for anaesthetic time. We must sleep to live, but it’s hard
to grasp whether (or how) sleep is part of “lived experience.” It represents an
immediate and involuntary suspension of existence and a total respite from
postdisciplinary time. This sensory void represents a limit, an encounter (for
better or worse) with complete withdrawal from temporal experience, in-
cluding from the exhaustion of contemporary fantasies of autonomy.9

Other feminist philosophers, such as Linda Alcoff and Rosi Braidotti, have
declared the vulnerable female body as that substratum which is off the grids of
intelligibility, and as a limit to logocentrism. For posthumanists, the body is also
that entity which evades representation because of its connection to lack, to ex-
cess, and to the monstrous. It is a site of privileged connection to limits, resist-
ance, hope, and escape.10 And as we have already seen, disability theory offers a
trenchant and dynamic setting of limits. According to Tobin Siebers, the disabled

7 Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, 85.

8 Peters, Speaking into the Air; Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality: The Nature of Information
at the Turn of the Millennium (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
9 Heyes, Anaesthetics of Existence, 23.
10 See, for example, Linda Alcoff ’s work, as referenced by Cressida J. Heyes: “For Alcoff, there is a

form of experience that stands outside discourse and the constitution of the subject; the bracketing
of ‘cultural differences’ enables us to identify the essence of embodied experience in the context of
sexual abuse, in a way that sidesteps the constructions of cultural misogyny.” Heyes, Anaesthetics of
Existence, 36. Rosi Braidotti argues that philosophizing through the body will lead to confronting
boundaries and limits. “Teratologies,” 160. For Adrian MacKenzie, similarly, “Body and time mark
104 Existentializing Media

will incontrovertibly offer a boundary to any discursive overreach: “Disabled

bodies provide a particularly strong example of embodiment as mimesis because
they resist standard ideas about the body and push back when confronted by lan-
guage that would try to misrepresent their realism.”11
I suggest that the mourner herself can be that limit. Imran Khan’s confessions
show why. Along with a longing for contact—and in his expressed anticipation
and eagerness to be there in embodiment together in physical space—comes
a desire for disconnection.12 In the limit situation, the estranging locations of
grief or loss, when ultimate disruption has struck, people are facing the abyss
and that very exposure entails a possible way of being-in-the-world—being as
realized Existenz—that is in itself a differentiation from habituation, requiring
an alternate form of action. Hence, I cautiously contend that it is not only the
ragged edges of technohuman experience (such as far-reaching automation,
panopticism, trolling, and the eeriness and obscurity of big data), but also the
actualities of digitalization across the board in ultimate moments, that may boost
an agency to regain some kind of techno-existential “control” and sometimes
even to attain closure.
As suggested at the onset of this book, I propose that to think with limits in
this moment, as prompted by Jaspers’s philosophy, also means to think media of
the limit. This book takes gaps as the very foundation both of technologies that

limits for thought. To think the ‘body’ or to think ‘time’ is to run up against the limits of thinking. Body
and time challenge the prerogatives of thought.” Transductions, 1, italics added.

11 Siebers, Disability Theory, 2, italics added.

12 This theme of disconnection has been relentlessly exercised in contemporary critical debate.
I have elsewhere argued that disconnection seems both repressed and incited somehow by the
challenges entailed by the automations of the forever of data, and by the emergence of the digital
afterlife. I have argued that a theory of enmeshed human technicity also needs to account for those
instances where digital humans manifestly leap, in making the admittedly painful and socially costly
choice to refrain from, or even to terminate, connectivity. Lagerkvist, “The Media End.” Willful
disconnection has also been explored by, for example, Jarice Hanson, “The New Minority: The
Willfully Unconnected,” in The Unconnected: Social Justice, Participation, and Engagement in the
Information Society, ed. Paul M. A. Baker, Jarice Hanson, and Jeremy Hunsinger (New York: Peter
Lang, 2013), 223–240. See Tero Karppi’s doctoral dissertation “Disconnect.Me: User Engagement
and Facebook” (University of Turku, 2014) and his monograph Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective
Bonds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). For an exploration of forced discon-
nection beyond the digital divide, see Anne Kaun and Christian Schwarzenegger, “No Media, Less
Life? Online Disconnection in Mediatized Worlds,” First Monday, 19, no. 11 (November 3, 2014),
https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/5497/4158, http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/
fm.v19i11.5497; Jenny Sundén ponders the limits and continuations of technologies—their inherent
glitches and failures coupled with their constant expected connectivity—as analogies for queer and
straight relationships. “Queer Disconnections: Affect, Break, and Delay in Digital Connectivity,”
Transformations, no. 3 (2017): 63– 78, http://www.transformationsjournal.org/wp-content/uplo
ads/2018/06/Trans31_04_sunden.pdf. For a discussion on the ambiguities of disconnection, see
Claes Thorén, Mats Edenius, Jenny Eriksson Lundström, and Andreas Kitzmann, “The Hipster’s
Dilemma: What Is Analogue or Digital in the Post-digital Society?,” Convergence. The International
Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 25, no. 2 (2019): 324–339, https://doi.org/10.1177/
1354856517713139.
Existential Media 105

sustain human interaction and of communicative practice itself.13 Media are also
media of limits in the shape of disconnection, break(down), shortage, interrup-
tion, and finitude, and as such also of fecundity.14 My focus invokes a veneration
of closure, since it is linked to the inexorable aspects of human existence: to those
undervalued qualities of hiding, waiting, and lingering within our technocratic
societies of surveillance, transparency, and quantification, and within the new
orthodoxies of connectivity. This approach sees disconnection and finitude as
an inevitable and valued aspect of existence. As Jaspers argues, embracing finite
ends is necessary for human flourishing, and clinging to the dream of the en-
during is a waste of time and effort:

I lose myself in appearance when I cling to duration as such, to particulars as

lasting endlessly, as if they were absolutes. I do the same when I am ruled by
fear, when I worry about finite ends instead of merely regarding them as the
necessary media for uplifting myself in existence.15

Since our digital existence is an irreducible tension field and a striving, it also
includes the act of opting out, signing off, or erasing the trace; a choice between
either staying within the confines or transcending them—either remaining
within or detaching from connectivity through techno-existential closure. This
applies to our digital lives while we are still here, as well as to the management
of the digital afterlife (as I will discuss in chapter 7). As argued in this vein by
Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger: “We defend the idea that one of the most
important constitutional questions of the twenty-first century is how to sustain
the freedom to be off, to be free from techno-social engineering, to live and de-
velop within undetermined techno-social environments.”16 Many have similarly
stressed the right to be forgotten and the right to regain control, as well as the
need for a responsible approach to development in this area, echoing Jaspers’s
insistence in The Origin and Goal of History on the need to steer technology in a
beneficial direction.
Disconnection can also be theorized as an impending prospect within con-
nectivity itself. Media scholar Tero Karppi theorizes disconnection as innate in

13 John D. Peters, “The Gaps of Which Communication Is Made,” Critical Studies in Mass

Communication, 11, no. 2 (June 1994): 117–140, https://doi.org/10.1080/15295039409366891.

14 These penetrating insights are echoed in recent contributions to critical data studies,

postphenomenology, and the anthropology of emergent design that reconceive of data in terms of
breakage, repair, and ultimately growth. See, for example, Pink et al., “Broken Data.”
15 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 196.
16 Frischmann and Selinger, Re-engineering Humanity, 269. Frischmann and Selinger furthermore

offer a call to freedom: “(1) Freedom from programming, conditioning, and control engineered by
others. In our modern technosocial world. We call this the freedom to be off. (2) Freedom of will and
practical agency. In our modern techno-social world, we call this the freedom from engineered deter-
minism.” Ibid., 270.
106 Existentializing Media

connectivity and as necessary for social media, since it operates as a potential

threat—a looming accident—which is a virtuality that sets off a number of actu-
alities.17 He argues that connections are constantly established in order to ward
off the occurrence of a disconnection. In fact, their very ubiquity also bespeaks
the threat and/or promise of their imminent failure. Disconnection—that is,
limit—exists as a form of peril, a silenced yet ominous potentiality, with real
effects. Social media are therefore media of that limit. But the disconnect can also
offer an opening.18 Linking disconnection to opening limits are familiar terrains
for any committed existentialist who inquires about silence, or rather about the
confounding sounds of silence revisiting the philosopher. Kierkegaard stressed
the role of nonmediation as a fact of life and a trait of death: in his oeuvre, “The
mortal individual,” like mortality itself, “obstructs the system’s attempt to totalize
the world as image.”19 In the words of Jaspers:

Silence is a form of inaction, the suspension of communication in mere exist-

ence. But it is not always inaction. There is something peculiarly active about
silence, and as such it becomes a function of communication itself. The faculty
of silence expresses a strong self-being’s readiness to communicate.20

Hence, as the existentialists knew, when everything goes silent and there is no
signal, or when we break away from connections, or fail to communicate, some-
thing profound also comes to life. As both Jaspers and Emmanuel Levinas
stressed, limit as much as vulnerability can be such resources of fecundity.21 For
example, in full recognition of both suffering and exposure in the limit situation,
Jaspers furthermore argued that “[it] is possible for a more profound serenity to
rest on grounds of inextinguishable pain.”22
This focus on finitude and failure, on breakdown and hence on limits,
prompted Paul Ricoeur to critique Jaspers’s philosophy as a philosophy of mis-
carrying—of pessimistically seeing guilt as invincible past pardon or redemp-
tion. Ricoeur’s reading also saw guilt in Jaspers’s thinking as something both
metaphysical and moral, since it was part of the constitution of existence, yet

17 Karppi, Disconnect.
18 Likening constant connectivity to norms of straight lines of connection, Sundén sees technolog-
ical decay and “disconnect” as queer capacities. Relational technologies are fractured and unreliable.
The break, she argues—that is, disconnection—can be a metaphor for alternative ways of being and
staying together. Sundén, “Queer Disconnections.”
19 J. D. Peters, “Beauty’s Veils: The Ambivalent Iconoclasm of Kierkegaard and Benjamin,” in The

Image in Dispute: Visual Cultures in Modernity, ed. Dudley Andrew (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1997), 13.
20 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 67.
21 See Amit Pinchevski, By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication

(Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2005).

22 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 195, italics added.
Existential Media 107

activated and deepened through action. For Ricoeur, this makes understandable
“the whole orientation of the philosophy of Jaspers toward foundering rather
than toward ‘rebirth.’ ”23 Jaspers’s stress on existence as a mode of reflexive ex-
perience also triggered critique. Lukács’s allegation that Jaspers’s “thinking is
held together by an ‘irrationalist pessimism,’ ” according to Chris Thornhill, “was
chiefly responsible for the reception his work received.”24 I read Jaspers quite
differently. I see his thinking as prompting an “inversion model” of communi-
cation, which implies that the shortcoming is the very moment of possibility.
Hence, in that communicative breakdown which is another instantiation of the
limit situation, something more profound may occur: the communal realization
of our being as Existenz with other Existenzen. And thus: “The unfulfillment of
communication and the difficulty of bearing its shipwreck become the revelation
of a depth which nothing other than Transcendence can fill. If God is eternal,
still for man truth is a developing truth, indeed a truth developing in commu-
nication.”25 This is the breakthrough to existential communication, possible for
all beings. Jaspers defines existential communication as a form that can never
be copied or modeled: “Each time it is flatly singular” before the other who is
“this one only.”26 This is the moment of mutual cocreation of selfhood and of
togetherness.
In light of Jaspers’s radical quest for reawakening us to these potentialities of
being human, the mission for existential media studies implies envisioning beings
who display intersubjective responsiveness and responsibility. Articulating vul-
nerability is in fact an act of obligation toward the other. For as Jaspers puts it: “I
cannot be myself unless the other wants to be himself [sic]. I cannot be free un-
less he is free; I cannot be sure of myself, unless I am sure of him. In communica-
tion I feel responsible not only for myself but for the other, as if he were I and I were
he; I do not feel it set in until he meets me half-way.”27 This is where an alternate
subject emerges for media theory.

Toward Coexisters

When we place the mourning human being centrally, the need for a different
form of subjectivity emerges—one that may shed new light on and complement

23 See Paul Ricoeur, “The Relation of Jaspers’ Philosophy to Religion,” in Schlipp, Philosophy of

Karl Jaspers, 633. See a discussion in Charles Courtney, “Reading Ciphers with Jaspers and Ricoeur,”
Existenz: An International Journal in Philosophy, Religion, Politics and the Arts, 1, nos. 1–2 (Fall
2006): 9–15, https://www.existenz.us/volumes/Vol.1Courtney.pdf.
24 Thornhill, Karl Jaspers, 222 n. 14.
25 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 104.
26 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 54.
27 Ibid., 52–53, italics added.
108 Existentializing Media

the more usual suspects (the audiences, the media citizens, media consumers, en-
trepreneurial selves, savvy users, early adopters, or dividuals) of various factions
of theorization.28 This approach both reclaims and resituates subjectivity as it
at once centers on and destabilizes “the Human.” Hence, existentializing media
requires a paradigmatic change of casting.
I posit the coexister as the key subject in the dawning project of existential
media studies. Drawing inspiration from, yet expanding on, Jaspers’s thinking,
I keep humans in the loop in a multivalent sense: hence they are differently sit-
uated yet sharing in the conditions of deep relationality, as embodied, mortal,
technological, bereft, and ethically responsible beings.29 This means the prin-
cipal inhabitant of the digital ecology, our principal subject in media studies,
is not a being in full control. She sometimes stumbles, falls, misunderstands,
struggles, is vulnerable, hurting, speechless, and with no solution. The coexister
is at a loss, bewildered, and in search of meaning before the abyss. But she may
also experience moments of ultimate meaning, community, support, and full-
ness, as she navigates through the torrents of our digital existence. As suggested
earlier, being singular-plural implies, importantly, “a nuanced and diversified re-
lationship with others regarded as unique singularities who co-inhabit a world
together.”30 Such coexistentialist insight is also the road ahead in further tackling
that tricky issue of a “we” in existential media studies (as suggested in c hapter 2).
Coexisters are communicative yet often silent, self-aware yet clueless, singular
yet plural beings—navigating the limit situations of life in the digital age. As is
clear by now, the coexister is therefore not the discrete rational and moral sub-
ject of old-school humanism, who is certain, independent, and disembodied.
Beyond myths of a sovereign and all-knowing subjectivity, the coexister is nei-
ther omniscient nor “the measure of all things.” Nor does the coexister coincide

28 It must here be noted that there exist approaches that seek out more problematic and existen-

tially riskier dimensions of media users and of digital existence. The traditional user has also been
thoroughly compromised already, in light of, for example, an affective media landscape in which
pain, disaster, and torture are increasingly mediated, which triggers intensities of feeling, aversion,
and repulsion among users, as Anthony McCosker has shown in Intensive Media: Aversive Affect
and Visual Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Vince Miller illustrates how mundane
media use can be a site where we are exposed to a series of shocks, due to an ambiguous sense of
(in)vulnerability online. “The Ethics of Digital Being: Vulnerability, Invulnerability, and ‘Dangerous
Surprises,’ ” in Lagerkvist, Digital Existence. Such media realities trigger a range of negotiations and
responses, bringing into view the need for different conceptions of being a human in digital existence
that complicate any straight-cut “user.”
29 Similarly, Kelly Oliver has famously suggested a different subject, and a different form of what

she calls “respons(e)ability,” from the vantage point of doing away with antagonism as a default set-
ting for thinking about the other, and of seeking recognition, which belongs to that Hegelian logic.
She argues for a concept of a witnessing subjectivity that is called and normatively obliged to act
ethically. The process of witnessing is here defined as the possibility of address and response. This puts
ethical obligation at center. Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001), 191, italics added.
30 Casey “Edges and the In-Between,” 7.
Existential Media 109

with the affective forces replacing the liberal subject in the new materialism. The
coexister exists in responsive openness to the present and the future. In conse-
quence, existentiality in the age of media includes and retains an idea about self-
hood, yet very clearly reclaims being human beyond any fantasy of the liberal
humanist subject of certainty and autonomy.
We must remember that the coexister is a shaken being, and is there-
fore also watchful and often sleepless with machines as company. Here, it
seems the coexister will be invoked as a witnessing subject who is responsibly
awake, elicited, and reawakened. Yet we must recognize that the coexister is in
mourning, fatigued or otherwise marred. The limit situation calls her beyond
herself—and often also, importantly, beyond her habitual media situation. In
order to cope, there is the act of both connecting and silently disengaging media,
for the sake of sanity and existential health. In any case, coexisters are witnessing
subjects attentive to what’s online—to the world—but also to limits. The internet
never sleeps, but the coexister is embodied and must do so.
Related to yet extending beyond Heidegger’s Mitsein, the coexister is not only
being-with-others—that is, other people—but also a being within the biosphere.
Contingent upon limits of both knowledge and self-awareness, she exists to-
gether with other humans, machines, and more than humans. As we have seen,
Jaspers argues that this form of self-being is actually lacking at core and can only
be realized through other beings. This means the coexister is that being who
strives and hopes: that realizable Existenz, who possesses the human potential for
flourishing, which we always do in deep relationality both with fellow humans
and with animals, tools, machines, and networks. Indeed, one can find an em-
bryo here in Jaspers of what we would today call a posthumanist ontology, since
for him, as Jaspers expert Helmut Wautischer points out, “This ability to pattern
oneself transcends human existence into a domain of Being where self-realiza-
tion takes place in the context of communication with others. Such an Other can
be any entity ranging from the mineral-, plant-, or animal kingdoms to humans,
transcendence, and god.”31
In this urgent context of deep techno-existential saturation and ecological
emergency, upholding that frail being and crafting the conditions for her flour-
ishing is the key issue facing us still. Yet, it must be noted, stressing experiences
of exposure should not be conflated with reiterating perspectives on users and
audiences as fragile and lonely crowds duped by media. Existential media studies
is not detached social science, so it will stubbornly break it to you: we are all
coexisters! And since vulnerability can, as Karl Jaspers argued, be a position of
fecundity, the coexister is not simply prey to the forces of modernity.

31 Helmut Wautischer, “Introduction,” in Wautischer, Olson, and Walters, Philosophical Faith,

3. See also Jaspers, “On My Philosophy,” 168.

110 Existentializing Media

Rethinking Responsibility and Ethics

Coexisters are the forgotten ones, for example by positivism and its descendant
modernist disciplining of subjects (and of death itself); by contractualism in
moral philosophy, which posited humans as independent, rational agents; by so-
cial constructivism, which saw vulnerability as merely linguistically constituted;
and by posthumanism, which in its overemphasis on decentering the human
sometimes inadvertently forgets the meek and the mourners, the terminally ill,
the illness-stricken or idle, the disabled or disenfranchised—that is, those who
are bullied and disregarded and oppressed, who have already been abandoned by
an entire age of doctrinal “progress,” speed, and systemic and epistemic violence.
Hence, in light of the fact that the technoscientific bureaucracies, the authori-
tarian logic and ideology of neoliberal economies, the computer engineers, the
cadres of the neurosciences, and even increasingly humanities scholars them-
selves seem to have evacuated their equations of the human, I wish instead to
reinvent and rediscover her. This means in the first instance safeguarding human
subjectivity, sociality, relationality, situatedness, corporeality, agency, spirit-
uality, suffering, failing, brokenness, the search for meaning—and ultimately
the responsibility that springs from both embeddedness in technologies and
thrownness into the digital limit situation.
As discussed in the previous chapters, this book argues that the deep entangle-
ments of digital technologies in our lifeworld are both unsettling and as of yet un-
settled. Accordingly, living in an open-ended technological era requires us to take
responsible action, to reclaim agency through crafting the future in the present.
Complexities abound. Philosophers speak of “distributed responsibility,” interro-
gating the potential for machines to be ethical.32 Other forms of posthumanism
typically do away with subjective choice or deliberation as what mobilizes ethical
judgment, arguing for locating ethics and transformative potential in incarnate
relationality or cognitive assemblages.33 As N. Katherine Hayles argues, tech-
nical beings and living beings are involved in a “continuous reciprocal causation,
in which both groups change together, in coordinated and indeed synergistic
ways.”34 Hayles stresses that change is always shot through with the materiality of
32 Peter-Paul Verbeek, Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of

Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Luciano Floridi, “Faultless Responsibility: On
the Nature and Allocation of Moral Responsibility for Distributed Moral Actions,” Philosophical
Transactions: Series A, Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences, 374, no. 2083 (2016),
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2016.0112.
33 Karen Barad argues that “responsibility is not an obligation that the subject chooses but rather

an incarnate relation that precedes the intentionality of consciousness.” “Quantum Entanglements

and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-
to-Come,” Derrida Today, 3, no. 2 (2010): 265, https://doi.org/10.3366/E1754850010000813, https://
feministstudies.ucsc.edu/faculty/publications/pdfs/barad-derrida-today.pdf.
34 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 104.

Existential Media 111

agency, which in a dynamic sense brings about transformation: “Instead of con-

trol, effective modes of intervention seek for inflection points at which systemic
dynamics can be decisively transformed to send the cognitive assemblage in a
different direction.”35 But how then further to reconceive responsibility and the
possibilities for recrafting our world? On what type of human—with what type
of agency within the assemblage—can we count for taking on the tasks ahead?
While keeping the spotlight on humans, leading experts on AI and ethics today,
such as Mark Coeckelbergh and Virginia Dignum, argue for a broad sense of re-
sponsibility. Dignum thus places humans centrally, yet within the environment:

We are ultimately responsible. As researchers and developers, we must make fun-

damental human values the basis of our design and implementation decisions.
And as users and owners of AI systems, we must uphold a continuous chain of
responsibility and trust for the actions and decisions of AI systems as they act in
our society. Responsibility rests not only with those who develop, manufacture
or deploy AI systems, but also with the governments that legislate about their
introduction in different areas, educators, the social organisations providing
awareness and critical assessment in their specific fields and all of us specifically
to be aware of our rights and duties when interacting with these systems.
The ultimate aim of AI is not about the creation of superhuman machines
or other sci-fi scenarios but about developing technology that supports and
enhances human well-being in a sustainable environment for all.36

Offering a perspective on existential vulnerability that includes a normative di-

mension, Coeckelbergh similarly stresses ethical responsibility for the technolo-
gies we build and embrace, since they also coshape our vulnerable being:37

First, we cannot escape the vulnerability of our existence by making risk sub-
jective or objective. This means we have to face vulnerability Angst as opposed
to fear for particular risks: we have to realize that we are existentially vulner-
able and that we are naked. Therefore, it is a kind of bad faith to locate risk
exclusively in the outside world . . . or in our own mind. We have to face our
being-vulnerable. Second, since we co-shape our vulnerability, we must also
take responsibility for the design of vulnerability.38

35 N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2017), 203.

36 Virginia Dignum, Responsible AI (New York: Springer, 2019), 5, italics added.
37 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, in Updating to Remain, has also argued for the right to be vulnerable

within a digital ecology, thereby articulating frailty with technicity.

38 Coeckelbergh, Human Being @ Risk, 43, italics added.
112 Existentializing Media

Existentialism gives humans an important role in the history of the planet: it is

not that of being masters of the universe, but that of being responsive and re-
sponsible for what they set in motion, and for the design of vulnerability. This
resonates with how J. D. Peters places weight on the possibility for change
through the materialities that forge and reforge the human condition. In a pas-
sage closely resonating with Hannah Arendt’s thinking on human artifice, he
states:

I do think there is such a thing as the human condition, and that it involves
earth, world, other people, labor, work, time, speech, action, birth and death,
promise and forgiveness. But the human condition is recursive; it is a condi-
tional condition: our actions change the conditions they act in, especially since
they change us; we speak and act, and as we do we change the conditions in
which we speak and act.39

Indeed, a circular understanding of the human condition as coconditioned by

tools and things emerges here. As discussed in the introduction, this also sets
scenes for creativity. This is important, since it ultimately offers a materialist
perspective on transformation and responsibility, and the needed braiding of
the ontological and the anthropological. On reflection, Peters’s form of philo-
sophical anthropology is in essence a material-moral
metaphysics, which places
notable stress on how we speak and act within the assemblage of things and elem-
ents: that is, on the care involved and needed, even as we make pragmatic and
flawed efforts to communicate. As our actions, communicative practices, and
tool use recondition the world and reshape the environments in which we act,
they also set new parameters for ethics: new limits and new possibilities.
In other words, existential media make a difference as they change the
conditions for acting—the conditions for being human. This furthermore
resembles a coexistentialist approach, which sees ethical responsibility trans-
versally. One productive route in this debate sees ethics as something emerging
within what Maria Puig de la Bellacasa calls “the more than human web.” Caring
here is about circulation through doing things practically:

The circulation of care as everyday maintenance of the more than human web
of life, conceived as a decentered form of vibrant ethicality, as an ethos rooted
in obligations made necessary to specific relations, offers cues to that imagina-
tion. A notion of care as a doing rather than a moral intention is the entry point
here . . .40

39 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 51.

40 María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 219.
Existential Media 113

And yet, in the limit situation of interrelated calamitous crises, with severe
consequences for our survival—when the world and the planet are screaming
at us to take responsibility—it is pivotal to analyze ethics, care, and responsibility
transversally through ciphers of roundness and circulation that wrap around, in
a manner inclusive of both human deliberation and nonhuman entanglements.
Following Puig de la Bellacasa, media scholar Margaret Gibson and colleagues
observe that the pandemic moment has created a situation of collapse between
mourner and witness and between the giver and the receiver of care. In other
words, and as I have emphasized, we are all coexisters. In the present moment:

We are asked to take seriously the role and reciprocity of care ethically, concep-
tually, and in practice. . . . The textures of grief and loss engulfing the world as it
struggles with the pandemic—and more generally climate disaster—require a
more complex, comprehensive, and nuanced model for care as a crucial part of
not only contemporary but also future-making practice.41

Hence our care work, as I discuss further in chapter 8, is a practice of creating the
future itself in the present moment of the digital limit situation. Joanna Zylinska
suggests “an ethics that makes sense—and that senses its own making.” This
accentuates the “ethical call of the universe, in its temporary stabilizations”42—
a statement with which Jaspers would thoroughly agree. Hence it is possible to
argue, without downplaying the materialist insights, that hearing this call and
taking responsible action for these developments constitutes our utmost task. In
fact, responsibility is the cornerstone of Jaspers’s political philosophy and ethical
theory, “which sees human life as self-creating, autonomous and plural, but also
supremely, if not universally, accountable.”43 I hold that we need the coexister,
who remolds existence in humble self-realization and in care for the world,
practically and ethically. As I have argued, coexisters are thrown into, while also
being cocreators of, the contemporary digital limit situation: a whirlpool of dig-
italization, datafication, and increased automation. Deeply entangled, they still
possess the capacity to act and choose and respond—and anticipate—yet within
limits and never in isolation. In that way, as I discuss further toward the end of
this book, coexisters are in fact competent to collaboratively chart a future in
carefully attending to the present.
This coexister will emerge throughout the book in different guises across the
various chapters. The coexister seeks connection in pain. But she is to an equal

41 Margaret Gibson, Larissa Hjorth, and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, “Introduction: Caring Media

Futures,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, 24, no. 4 (2021): 563, https://doi.org/10.1177/
13678779211015252.

42 Zylinska, Minimal Ethics,16.
43 Thornhill, Karl Jaspers, 6.
114 Existentializing Media

degree encumbered and anxious, weighed down by loss; she may seek company
in silence. She can also be vigilant and watchful, sometimes trying to discon-
nect from ubiquitous technologies by disengaging from literally disengaging
media: media that have lost their grip on her or made her feel existentially
ungratified. With this alternative subject, different ways of conceiving and of
recognizing media come into view. Subjugated by the quantification of loss and
bereavement, she comes into sight as a numerical being reduced and enabled
by infrastructures of data and numbers, while simultaneously facing a celebra-
tory common culture of metric media (chapter 5). She appears both as the bereft
mourner and as the relational and courageous wobbler on the brink of the abyss,
who darts herself out there to grab the lifelines of caring media (chapter 6). She is
the striver and searcher who remembers the departed, and relays messages to the
dead online, thus relating at the thresholds of transcendent media (chapter 7).
The coexister is therefore also called upon to reopen the future horizon, and thus
to reclaim existential media as anticipatory media (chapter 8).

Existential Media: Four Key Properties

In sum, this book combines a materialist understanding of media with

Jaspersian wisdom. I submit that existential media—which both condition and
are recursively co-and reconditioned today by the digital limit situation—span
four interrelated properties of the techno-existential register. They are, first,
our infrastructures of being, which means they ground us materially in exist-
ence; they are tools for navigating in and crafting the lifeworld. They also set the
precincts and thus the limits of both bodies and discourse. Existential media are
world-makers that coconstitute the human condition across all its parameters—
selves, bodies, desires, movements, culture, imaginaries, politics, ideology,
ethics, things, environments, and so on. They span both the mundane and the
extraordinary, and they reactivate the most classic existential issues (death,
time, embodiment, being there, presence and absence, being-in-and-with), while
pertaining to materiality and infrastructure, to information and distraction, to
ciphers of being and figments of the imagination.
Apart from producing, mediating, disclosing, and hiding worlds, however,
they also, second, throw us up into the air. This means not only that they ex-
pose us to technological, systemic, ideological, imaginary, and symbolic power,
thereby heightening our uncertainty or forging inequalities, as media critics have
revealed, and as sociologists of modernity have claimed. It also implies that they
embody, through their profound yet utterly uncertain implications, the very un-
certainty of being as becoming human with machines and within limits. I argue
that existential media in fact ambivalently limit us and offer openness at the same
Existential Media 115

time. As they throw us, they further call on us to actualize ourselves through them
(the moral task of “becoming subjective,” as Kierkegaard called it). They involve
indeterminacy, uncertainty, anticipation, ambiguity, and ambivalence—that is,
opening limits that may in turn be productive.
Third, existential media thereby speak to and about originary human (yet une-
venly distributed) embodied vulnerability and deep relationality. This is the very
source of what Jaspers calls our communicative destiny when we fail to reach out
yet strive to do so. Existential media thus play pivotal roles in the mundane quest
for meaning or in the struggle with nonmeaning, in our attempts and failures to
forge a common world. They transcend limits, overcoming and shielding us from
our vulnerability while also creating new vulnerabilities, setting other limits that
both enable and impede. They are coconstituted by our will and need both to be
with others and to remain in solitude; to both connect and disconnect, as a result
of our being in dependency and in unbearable intimacy. They thereby activate
the tension in existence between silence and communication.
Finally, existential media demand responsivity— and thereby self- aware
singular-plural beings, the coexisters, who individually and collectively take
responsibility, transcend the givens, or remain waiting—also and importantly
by setting limits. Existential media are thereby imperative and urgent; they de-
mand responsible action, critique, ethical choice, and an ethics of care. Even an
either-or. They also activate the dynamic intertwinement between not acting (as
in rejecting business as usual) and responsive action (as in taking responsibility)
through the virtues of slowing down before the face of the other, before the Earth
and before Being itself.
As I have argued already, inspired by Jaspers’s mediating philosophy, exis-
tential media studies endeavors to bridge the technological and the experien-
tial by bringing them into concert. The chapters that follow attempt to do so.
Spanning the registers of the techno-existential, they all pertain to the discussed
dimensions and properties, although some of these will be more distinctly ar-
ticulated through the particular limit cases that appear across this arc. Metric
media illustrate key aspects of our material infrastructures of being, of our un-
certainty, and of our thrownness. Caring media also throw and ground us; and,
as in the case of transcendent media, they speak to and about shared vulnera-
bility and communicative and connective relationality. In perpetuating openness
before the contingencies of life in the digital limit situation, however, existen-
tial media practices also value the silence of the disconnect, spurring a sense of
heightened responsibility before the Other and the situation at hand. This is in
fact a condition of possibility for anticipatory media, which demands respon-
sive action and ethical judgment. Moreover, these forms of existential media all
call us back to our embodiment. This also means attending to our sense of con-
creteness, our historicity in our present moment, our capabilities for projecting
116 Existentializing Media

ourselves, and our limits for doing so, which compel us to be still—to remain
idle, silent, and waiting. This means this book is written in a deep awareness of
diversity. In addition, such a perspective both firmly acknowledges vulnerability
as a given of human existence across time—stressing both the hardship and the
struggle in any human life whether in scarcity or postscarcity cultures, and the
diverse expressions of suffering and injustice—and simultaneously accentuates
what distinguishes the current predicaments of the digital age.
As we have seen, contemporary scholarship has moved in the direction of
the banal, habitual, taken-for-granted, and mundane, positing them as prime
movers in the analysis of digital media culture. This book shares that intuition.
Yet there is equal perspicacity in the Jaspersian conviction that the limit situa-
tion is of utmost importance. Existential Media will therefore choose the rare
view that it is possible—and in effect essential—to fuse such inclinations toward
the banal with Jaspers’s emphasis on the exceptional moment. I cannot but sur-
render to Jaspers’s mediation between the two lineages of the existentialist tradi-
tion, most vigorously expressed in his claim that limit situations are constitutive
for realizing important aspects of human existence, within the plural registers
of being that he envisions. Complementing scholarship that posits existential
meaning-making as primarily an everyday activity, I will propose a figuration
that recognizes how the mundane and the extraordinary cofound (while often re-
maining separate fields of experience in secular cultures) the existential terrains
of connectedness and connectivity.
Hence, existential media studies is prepared to look for alternative frameworks,
to search for alternate ciphers of being that bring a variegated array of limits into
view. What is needed is a multifocality of vision, an insistence upon the ever so
important role of nuanced parole beyond the impoverished languages of politics,
media discourse, and academic jargon. This is where I turn next: to designations
and destitutions of language, data, and numbers, enmeshed in the lines of be-
reavement online, along which the coexisters are ambivalently strung.
PART II
DIG ITA L L IMIT SI T UAT IONS
5
Metric Media
Numerical Being, Marginal Beings, and the
Limits of Measuring

Don’t get me wrong.

But if you think about Maria, please just go into the page and make
a or something. No one needs to write anything. That someone
thinks about her means so much to me.
If a person sees my posting, and then “just” leaves the page without
even “reacting,” “liking.” How I am supposed to interpret that?
To me it feels just like no one cares. But maybe I have to re-
think this.
Not everyone is like me
Do you understand how I feel/think?
—Birgitta, mourning mother, Facebook posting, 2016

Numbers can hurt, because they really count. Birgitta, age fifty-two, lost her
teenage daughter Maria in a car accident. The family decided to shut down Maria’s
Facebook profile, but they opened a memorial page for her on the same plat-
form themselves later on in the grief process. When I meet Birgitta (a committed
member and support person of the NGO VSFB) at the train station in her home-
town, she explains in the car as we ride to her house that one of the most trou-
bling aspects of this age of mourning online has to do with numbers. For Birgitta,
there is traffic on the page, but a lack of human signs of tender care. The equation
“viewed by 75, one comment,” she says, “hurts.”1 It’s as if the number reveals that
people do not care, and the numbers of people who pass by feels to her like indif-
ference and cruelty. A few months after one of these painful experiences, she was
desperately calling out to the memorial group (where she posts a lot of images of
Maria’s grave) to show signs of validation for her dead daughter. She asked the
group members to show a minimal sign—a heart or a like, for instance. And she
tried to be self-reflexive about her own needs. Birgitta’s posting stirred up a lot
of emotions in the group. One of Maria’s friends even suggested she had hit her

1 Interview, spring 2016.

Existential Media. Amanda Lagerkvist, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925567.003.0006
120 Digital Limit Situations

head on something. Some members tried to explain their choices, both in the
open thread and in private messages to Birgitta, and that consoled her. Birgitta’s
other daughter, Annika, was their interlocutor. She felt her mother was getting
too obsessed by “this thing about how many likes and how many comments and
who is commenting.” “I told my mother,” she says, “I’m also one of those people
who do not like or comment, so you are attacking me too.’ ” She does not herself
have notifications on, which makes her miss a lot. Annika further tried to explain
that “they are also mourning still and having a hard time . . . but they don’t feel
that you need to like all the time.” Annika says, “We are so many who do not post
anything. But it does not mean we have forgotten her or moved on; it is just many
of us do not feel the need to go in and comment and like and upload all the time.
But we mourn in our own way. . . . We feel life has to continue outside of this,
you know.” But she could understand her mother as well: “I mean, it’s not hard
to push the like button.” When Annika ends our interview, she displays a natural
attitude of tallying. She continues: “At the same time, it’s better if it’s been viewed
by ninety than viewed by two or that no one enters the page at all. So if people are
entering and just watching, there’s at least movement, you know.”
In this case, grief crashes head-on not just with the browsing subjectivities that
Birgitta took offense at—of those who do not linger, post, or engage, instead just
browsing through the feeds2—but also with an entire ethos of quantification: a
particular ideology that has fast emerged where numbers are taken to reveal the
hidden truths of being and of value, of selfhood and of the body. I take this ide-
ology to reflect an ontology of numbers that I see as the characteristic essence of
our global networked era and culture, as manifested in its attitudes, aspirations,
and material affordances. This chapter seeks to disclose the workings of this on-
tology in the reality of the limit situation. “Ontology, whatever else it is, is usu-
ally just forgotten infrastructure,” argues John D. Peters.3 In line with the concern
in media theory to make environments visible by bringing them back from ob-
livion, I will attempt to shed light on this ontology to disclose its naked truths in
full visibility at the evental site of suffering and loss. More specifically, I aim to
reveal its workings in realities that are unnamable and unspeakable, to analyze
the role of numbers and numbering in grounding us in existence when that exist-
ence has been completely shattered. I thus take numbers as the starting point of
an investigation into how originary technicity and originary suffering are visibly
and tangibly entwined. In relation to online condolences—that is, of liking (or
neglecting to like) an expression of utter exposure and bottomless grief—this
means examining ontology in terms of what it feels like in the body to grieve
in a doctrinal context of quantification. How do we understand the expressed

2 Mitchell, “Life on Automatic.”

3 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 38, 119, italics added.
Metric Media 121

hurt that some bereaved people feel when not receiving enough likes or visitors
at the site of their commemoration? What type of security or consolation lies in
a number?
To begin to address these questions, I zoom in on the ethos of taking notice
of numbers as affirming, consoling, or discomforting in the coping process. The
chapter shares research on a group of bereaved parents who have built memorials
to their dead children, and on two siblings who commemorate their dead brother
and sister. As will be evident, mourners are not just enabled by the practices they
participate in and co-forge. They do this ambivalently in a sociotechnological
context veering forcefully toward ideals of absolute certainty that fix embodied
beings to certain “truths” beyond their phenomenologically perceivable reality
and that distribute value and opportunity unevenly.4 Throughout I will argue
that Jaspers’s existential philosophy, and Edmund Husserl’s approach to metrics
as well, will be useful and instructive in order to both phenomenologically per-
ceive and to critically interrogate the turn to numbers. But first, we need to take
a closer look at the ideology-cum-ontology of numbers and the consequences of
inscription—and thereby inscription of value—in the age of computation.

Infrastructures of Metrics: Living in Number in a Literal

Age of Data Truths

The sense in which digital media are indeed our infrastructures of being is per-
haps felt most intensely today in the realms of the data-driven life of biometric
technologies, which have brought the ethos of quantification into the most in-
timate spaces and onto the material body itself.5 In metric culture, Btihaj Ajana
notes, we can observe “at once a growing cultural interest in numbers, as well as
a culture that is increasingly shaped and populated with numbers.”6 She stresses
their enforcements on us:

Being awash with such amounts of data has made our own existence increas-
ingly shaped, defined and even ruled by data and numbers. Identities and so-
cial interactions are becoming more and more perceived in quantitative terms,
framed and ranked within a reputation economy (e.g. Facebook likes). Health,
well-being and happiness are now being measured and assessed through a

4 See Sun-ha Hong, “Surveillance, Sensors and Knowledge through the Machine,” in Lagerkvist,

Digital Existence; Sun-ha Hong, Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-
Driven Society (New York: NYU Press, 2020).
5 José van Dijck, “Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance: Big Data between Scientific Paradigm

and Ideology,” Surveillance and Society, 12, no. 2 (2014): 197–208; Bthaj Ajana, Governing through
Biometrics, and “Introduction: Metric Culture and the Over-examined life,” in Ajana, Metric Culture.
6 Ajana, “Introduction,” 2–3.
122 Digital Limit Situations

plethora of quantifying tools. . . . Performance and productivity at the work-

place are also being measured and monitored through various software and
tracking devices . . . in fact, even the spheres of play and intimacy have been
penetrated by this mentality of measurement and quantification.7

Clearly, biometric technologies, such as health apps, are tools of existence with
the help of which we navigate and make sense of, locate, and orient ourselves;
they bear up and bear out, as Edward Casey would say. For Ajana, who reminds
us that “biometrics” literally means the measurement of life, they also allow for
us to accrue a sense of value. Furthermore, as millions of people routinely re-
cord themselves and their physical activities, calorie intake, sleep, and other
behavioral patterns, in order to improve themselves and their lives, she argues
that their “bodies and minds are turning into measurable machines and informa-
tion dispensers, in the quest for personal development, productivity, health and
better performance.”8 As citizens and inhabitants of the digital ecology self-track
and self-quantify, and consent to being surveilled through biometric sensory
data capture, our existential media are thus for good or ill metric media. This
ethos invests numbers and data with an almost religious and revelational po-
tential (as will be explored further in c hapter 8). The predictive process seeks
to fix and demarcate users in a set of correlations amounting to a kind of meta-
physics of seeing into the likely future. But user adaption and tracking also boils
us down in the process, with purported precision, to a number, a human type,
a user category—for example, the “high net worth individual”—which thereby
returns the “truth” about us, to us. In addition, machine-learning algorithms op-
erate through a combination of various calculative practices, producing subjects
in relation to what the machine can predict about our desires and opinions.
They order and (re)produce our world, shaping how we see, think, and behave
at the same time.9 Importantly, we must note here that the links between the
mourning and mortal body, on the one hand, and prediction and quantification,
on the other, run deep in our culture. In “The Politics of Life Itself,” Nikolas Rose

7 Ibid., 2.
8 Ibid, italics added. Ajana here expands on Eugene Thacker’s concept of biomedia, which in his
work describes the confluence of molecular biology and computer science—that is, the field of bio-
informatics—but which she takes to signify the growing presence of biometrics in human existence.
Following Thacker, she uses the term to refer to media that transform “the body into machine-read-
able codes while also encouraging the biological-as-biological.” The biological and the technolog-
ical are seen as mediating each other through the process. Biomedia, she argues, are more than a
concept and a technology; they are, rather, the conditions in which both the concept and the tech-
nology are “tightly interwoven into a situation, an instance, a ‘corporealisation.’ ” Governing through
Biometrics, 21–22.
9 Geoff Cox, “Ways of Machine Seeing: An Introduction,” Aprja, 6, no. 1 (2017), https://doi.org/

10.7146/aprja.v6i1.116007.
Metric Media 123

discusses Ian Hacking’s seminal analysis of risk-thinking in modernity, which

provides the following clue:

Risk here denotes a family of ways of thinking and acting, involving calculations
about probable futures in the present followed by interventions into the present
in order to control that potential future. Mortality and morbidity were key sites
for the development of conceptions of the future as calculable, predictable, and as
dependent upon identifiable factors some of which were manageable.10

Modernity typically deals with existential uncertainty as comprising risks to be

defined, calculated, predicted, managed, and ultimately mitigated. Rose notes
that “such ideas about the regularity and predictability of illness, accidents and
other misfortunes within a population were central to the birth of the very idea
of society.”11 Singular beings in modernity were subject to probabilistic science—
each life was bound to the destiny of all—but later, in the biopolitical age, indi-
viduals became responsible for the management of their own well-being. Society
receded and was transformed into an economic apparatus for facilitating the
management of risk. In both senses of the word “biopolitical,” the frailty of the
existential body is utterly dismissed: an ideology of ability pertains to both. Today,
in addition, with big data in the safe hands neither of states nor of individual life
loggers, the disregard for finitude is replayed and echoed in the capitalistic fan-
tasies of those AI imaginaries that promise to solve our many problems. These
corporate prospects operate, often contrary to their explicit rhetoric, within
a reproduction of this very insensitivity to the frailty of life, to our existential
embodied and differently lived vulnerability—and to our limits.
This is the age of what Steven Connor calls quantality. According to Connor,
“We live in an era in which a series of linked, and reciprocally-reinforcing
developments, theoretical and practical, have accelerated,” producing a situation
in which the world has been made

more and more quantifiable and open to mathesis. The world has become
more and more a field of numerical operations. Theoretically, forms of math-
ematics have been developed, from probability to calculus to fluid dynamics
and beyond, which enable mathematical account to be taken of natural pro-
cesses. Practically, a vast array of instruments has been developed which allow
for quantitative accounts of processes, including psychological processes, to
be developed, augmented by computing machineries that are able to calculate
ratios and relations far faster and more accurately than we can. There are many

10 Rose, “Politics of Life Itself,” 7, italics added.

11 Ibid.
124 Digital Limit Situations

who view this with a kind of angry panic, and do everything they can to de-
fine and defend the dwindling realm of the nonnumerable from the action of
numbering.12

As humanities scholars, he argues, we need to embrace the fact that we actually

live in number. We need to assess the “quality of quantity,” the feel of number
(what he coins quantality), and to attend to its philosophical and political
imaginaries. Connor surrenders to this inevitable new situation of living in and
by and through numbers, arguing that we must realize that all forms of culture—
including art, music, and literature—are “indispensable agents” in “the ‘existing’
of number, to borrow a term from Jean-Paul Sartre, the embedding of numerical
awareness and sensitivity into more and more areas of social and personal life.”13
This is a playful, deft, and exciting, if somewhat intellectualist, approach to the
issue. But when Connor feels that we need not worry about reductionism, since
numbers do not have to be understood in such a static way, a chasm opens up
once more between normate and marginalized beings living in this numerical,
datafied world. If we ignore lived experience, this remains unproblematic. But
again, as we take the margin as our privileged shore of the gulf, reduction is a
very real problem.
Stepping back in time to a pre-web era, and bringing in strong voices that
have shed light on the deep inequalities of modern Western societies, may pro-
vide some perspective on these powerful instantiations of human inscription
of value, which we now see full-blown in the digital age. In her Nobel Prize
Lecture in Stockholm on December 7, 1993, Toni Morrison held that language
in our time has been pillaged and robbed of nuance, with very real and material
consequences for disenfranchised and marginalized groups:

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its

users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and sub-
jugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence;
does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether
it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether
it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven
language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or
language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder
in its literary cheek—it must be rejected, altered and exposed.14

12 Steven Connor, “Quantality: The Mathematical Futures of the Humanities” (2015): 8, http://

stevenconnor.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/quantality.pdf.
13 Steven Connor, Living by Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 128.
14 Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture, December 7, 1993, italics added, https://www.nobelprize.org/pri

zes/literature/1993/morrison/lecture/.
Metric Media 125

Morrison pinpointed that when nuances are lost, exposed groups are subject to
violent reduction, simplification, and increased oppression. How we speak and
how we act, and with which media inscriptions and through what channels, are
intimately linked, and have powerful consequences for the world we bring into
being. This limitation of knowledge due to deprived discourse—when the tech-
nology of language is ransacked, affecting the real world of the subjugated in the
process—is undoubtedly magnified in political discourse and public conversa-
tion today. Undergirded by platform sociality and their logic of quantification
and exploitation, within the economies of action and attention, as professor of
economy Shoshana Zuboff calls them, autocratic forces have kidnapped lan-
guage, impoverishing and hijacking the very meaning of discoursing in public.
As Benjamin Peters reminds us in Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of
Information Society and Culture, language for Raymond Williams was not a
transparent window to the world, but a key technique through which worlds
are brought into being. He therefore points to the ways in which keywords work
today, making the media technologies of the information age into “terminolog-
ical technologies—media from dictionaries to train stations, to computers, to
Siri interfaces, all terminals that function in the language of the user; without
specific keywords, terminological technologies don’t work.”15 He shows as well
that, for Raymond Williams, who defined the keywords of another age—such
as culture, class, industry, and democracy—these were colored by the industrial
era itself. Datafication currently colors those keywords that make our world real
and reflected back to us in particular ways. Now, as in the past, there is power in
words and in the techniques for inscribing language. Information technologies
“shape our current cultural, social and political lives” as they “inscribe, circulate
and pulse” through society.16
Hence, how we think and speak about the datafied world influences the world
deeply. The material agencies and specificities of digital media are thus insep-
arable from the forceful sociotechnological imaginaries of the networked age.
We think with media metaphors that have the power to set a world in motion,
to create new actualities. One may therefore propose that, if we think of our uni-
verse as a numerical universe, this does not simply depict the fact that computers
carry out tedious calculations in order to create those simulations we call dig-
ital life, as N. K. Hayles has discussed.17 They will also, I wish to add, shape how
we envision our place in it—physically, morally, and emotionally. From this per-
spective, they may also inform, and craft in the process, a culture and even an on-
tology of calculus and quantification: that is, material realities that feed back into

15 Benjamin Peters, “Introduction,” in Peters, Digital Keywords.

16 Ibid., xix.
17 Hayles, How We Think.
126 Digital Limit Situations

our imaginaries, defining and delimiting being itself.18 According to Ajana, this
is precisely the case when, through self-tracking data, both new ontologies and
new metaphors are emerging, as well as new ways of seeing the body and the self.
Hence, in the present day and age, as Zuboff and others have shown, data
shape our realities in a literal sense. Data as language and operation nail us to
very specific sets of knowledge about us. The Truth thus resides within the dig-
ital envelope, and within the numerical and quantitative logic through which it
operates, since there is seemingly more knowledge about us to be gained from
mining our online traces or quantifying ourselves digitally than through pure
phenomenal experience and perception, whether of ourselves or of the world.19
Boosted by what José van Dijck calls dataism—that is, newfound beliefs in data—
these truths have resurrected an “unproblematic” form of objectivism.20 Forged
and reinforced by the juggernaut machineries of big data, the ethos of quantifi-
cation seems to have accomplished a rewiring of human sensory experience and
sensibilities to privilege the numerical, the discrete, and the ranked. Increasingly,
moreover, we are at the same time nailed in this literal age to a name (on “the
real-name internet”), a letter combination, a pronounced pronoun tagged to
our correspondences, a diagnosis, a status, a worth and value, a personality type,
and a predicted future of individual prospects, behavior, and action.21 But even
more importantly, the looting of language also has the consequence, as Morrison
observed, of estranging minorities. For example, this is evident in the racist and

18 The media-theoretical question at stake “as number, quantity and calculation are entering into

more and more of what we are and do,” as Steven Connor argues (2015, n.p.), has in fact to do with
the nonneutrality of technology. A solid lineup of media philosophers and media archeologists
across various camps of the new materialism emphasize, along with, for example, Martin Heidegger,
Marshall McLuhan, and Friedrich Kittler, the molding forces of media in their materiality. See
Kember and Zylinska, Life after New Media; Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Peters, The Marvelous Clouds; Mitchell and
Hansen, Critical Terms.
19 See a discussion in Grant Bollmer, Inhuman Networks: Social Media and the Archeology of

Connection (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016); and Hong, Technologies of Speculation.
20 There are several intertwined sources of explanation for this cult of data. It originates foremost

in a renewed form of “formal rationality,” including a logic of technical efficiency that has under-
pinned bureaucracies throughout modernity, as Max Weber argued. Max Weber, Theory of Social and
Economic Organization (New York: Free Press, 1964), 184–212. Apart from the increasing efficiency
of the machines themselves, this assemblage is constituted by, first, economic austerity models that
have held sway since a couple of decades back in Western liberal democracies, engendering an un-
critical devotion to instrumentarian fact and formalism. Paved more recently with good intentions to
counteract the spasms of neoauthoritarian, autocratic, post-truth spectacles of alternative “facts”—
bred by the viralities of the affective internet—a series of analyses along this hellish road have attrib-
uted the above-mentioned problems to the “vices” of postmodern relativism and its “mess” of plural
voices and identities. The unmistakable need to save science from conspiracy theorists (and the am-
bition to reafford science a place where it can efficiently and authoritatively solve the crises that it has
coproduced) has also created this overemphasis on data and numbers, allowing them to invade all
parts of human life and activity, offering urgent promises and sought-after prospects that currently
overshadow the risks of reductionism within the human lifeworld.
21 O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction.
Metric Media 127

sexist norms embedded in the search engines and the algorithms. Datafication
sets discriminating limits. It in-fences and operates through oppressive and re-
ductionist and asymmetrical procedures, which are currently fortified by the
subtending datafication of the lifeworld, which re-engenders a numerical under-
standing of humans, their bodies, lives, and environment—their habitat as well
as their social world. They lay claims on being itself. As Morrison knew, this has
very real effects, especially for those already on the line. For people whose lives
are taking place on the margins, reductionism is more than inconvenient and
a little disturbing, causing minor grievances and light anxieties. It is a foe that
threatens their existence.
The chosen margin in this book is mourning communities in post-Christian
Sweden. In a cultural order that privileges STEM orientations to reality and
practices utilitarianism, and in which humans are seen as reducible, some beings
(more than others) are consequently effectively reduced. But equally important
is the fact that, as already discussed, an ethos of numbering spawned by techno-
logical processes of all-pervasive datafication is now infesting this realm. Before
I turn my attention to the mourners, I will revisit the heated question of num-
bers and the lifeworld—which was an important impetus behind the emergence
of the tradition of existential phenomenology—and then rehearse some of the
debates that have flanked the developments of metric media.

Numbers and the Lifeworld: “Angry Panics” and Beyond

The question remains today: are numbers and computation innate to what makes
us human—or increasingly innate to human existence today—or in effect alien
to it? Intuitively, there is a qualitative and insurmountable difference between
the realm of measurement, algebra, computation, and calculus and the realm of
those profound—whether abysmal, mundane, or dazzling—human experiences,
their moral imperatives and indeterminate open- endedness22— that is, be-
tween numbers and the lifeworld. The lifeworld, the world of living experience
(Lebenswelt), is in fact for Edmund Husserl a world of human cultural interpene-
tration. It is both support and counterpoint to the world of science. The lifeworld
is “the world of the pre-given, familiar, present, available, surrounding world, in-
cluding both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (however they may be defined), that envelops

22 N. Katherine Hayles, whose work always straddles the humanities and the natural sciences, calls

old-school notions about “the human” into question, but still maintains that there are in fact dynamic
tensions and qualitative divergences between “the human lifeworld and the (relatively) inhuman
world of massive numerical calculation.” Hence between human and computer, between human
narratives and virtual simulations. See How We Think, 6.
128 Digital Limit Situations

us and is always there as taken for granted.”23 The lifeworld also provides “a set
of horizons for all human activity.” It constitutes the “ ‘fundament’ for all human
meaning and purposive activity.”24 The lifeworld is thus inhabited by us through
the natural attitude.
As already noted, in classic existential philosophy and phenomenology, being
human in itself defies numbers and measurement. The threat to human existence
of being engulfed by numbers, and reduced by scientific thought, was one key
imperative for the emergence of the philosophical traditions of existential philos-
ophy and transcendental phenomenology.25 This is also the case for Karl Jaspers,
who reacted fiercely against a modern age of reductionist quantification.26 As
humans are always more than they can know, and more than we can know about
them, they are not reducible to calculus. And as we saw in the previous chapter,
entering into what Jaspers calls existential communication demands our whole
being, which is singular and thus irreducible to numbers, quantification, and
data: “Instead of its actions being governed by objective rules derived from the
entirety, the boundary situation of being definite calls upon Existenz to decide
its destiny.”27 Human beings are nonobjectifiable, argued Jaspers. Opposition to
objectification prompted him to declare that being human is always more than
knowledge can capture, because we are a work in progress. But in addition, and
even more profoundly, the human is always more than we can measure.
Hannah Arendt formulated this register in her reading of Kierkegaard’s key
tenets for a new concrete contents of philosophy, in which chance was, along
with death and guilt, an overriding dimension. Chance implied “the guarantor
of a reality that is given and that, precisely because of its incalculability and the im-
possibility of reducing it to thought, overwhelms me.”28 The stress in this tradition
is thus on the irreducibility of existentiality to both numbers and reason, and on
the unpredictable as key in human existence. Husserl devoted his life’s work to
the problems of scientific thinking and the question of the mathematization of
nature. He faults modern science as an intellectual edifice for substituting the
“mathematically substructed world of idealities for the only real world.”29 For
Husserl, the reductions of scientific conventions of knowledge production miss
what being human is essentially about. This obscuring also takes place in the

23 Dermot Moran, Husserl’s “Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental

Phenomenology”: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 6, italics added.

24 Ibid.
25 See, for instance, Søren Kierkegaard, Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age—

a Literary Review, March 30, 1846; Jaspers, Philosophy II; Edmund Husserl, Crisis of the European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1954/1970);
Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).
26 Cf. Wallraff, Karl Jaspers, 114ff.
27 Jaspers, Philosophy II, xx.
28 Arendt, Essays, 175, italics added.
29 Husserl, The Crisis, 48–49.
Metric Media 129

embrace of objectivism in philosophy itself, and comes with a price: “The move
towards naturalism in modern philosophy mirrors the scientific embrace of nat-
uralism and objectivism, with a consequent loss of a way of understanding values
and indeed a complete misunderstanding of the ‘enigma of subjectivity.’ ”30
A human being, Husserl thus argued, is a mystery.31 David Carr, a translator of
Husserl’s work, also summarized this perspective in a succinct manner: “Having
forgotten the abstractive and idealizing role of scientific thought, the philosoph-
ical interpretation comes up with an ontological claim: to be is to be measurable in
ideal terms as a geometrically determined configuration.”32 The consequence is
that “we take for true being what is actually a method.”33 In other words, science’s
bestowal of sense—its worldview—confuses a method for trying to gain know-
ledge about the world with the Truth about the world. In Husserl’s critique, both
rationalism and empiricism confuse the map with the terrain.34 Scientific reduc-
tionism is thus the target of these classic schools of thought.35
Such concerns from the existentialists of the previous century seem pro-
phetic for our era also. Ironically, a work that was among the first to “panic” at
the dawn of what has become our media age, and to echo the concerns of the
existentialists, was produced by a computer scientist from MIT who had devel-
oped a chatbot in 1964–66. In his famous book from 1976, Computer Power and
Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Joseph Weizenbaum worried
about the “ever more mechanistic image” of humanity and about the sad fate of
human judgment that he forecast as the unwanted consequences of a limitless
belief in computers and robots.36 He had developed Eliza, a chatbot and plausible
question-answering system that impersonated a psychotherapist. Weizenbaum
was staggered to realize that some people, including clinical psychologists
themselves, actually thought that his creation should be employed as a working

30 Moran, Husserl’s Crisis, 6.

31 Husserl, The Crisis, 5.
32 David Carr, “Husserl’s Problematic Concept of the Life- World,” American Philosophical
Quarterly, 7, no. 4 (October 1970): 333–334, italics added, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20009365.
33 Husserl, The Crisis, 52, italics added.
34 Ibid., 32.
35 Heidegger also underscored this difference between calculative thinking and meditative

thinking, in a late publication: “Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more
promising and, at the same time, more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one
prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not
meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates meaning which reigns in everything that is.”
Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, 46. The ethos of counting, as Heidegger suggests here, is connected
to the logic of capitalism and its ever-expanding goals. Calculative thinking is part of the essence of
technology, which further “enframes” nature for the purpose of turning it into a standing reserve
for exploitation, and by turning humans into beings that order and relate to the world in precisely
this way.
36 Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation (San

Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1976). See a discussion also in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort,
The New Media Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 367–368.
130 Digital Limit Situations

psychotherapist and thereby replace humans. He therefore worried that, if we see

computers as able to assume the intimate human role of the psychotherapist, we
will not be able to draw crucial boundaries between, on the one hand, the proper
use of computer technology and, on the other hand, “computer applications that
either ought not to be undertaken at all, or, if they are contemplated, should be
approached with the utmost caution.”37 In his critique of calculus in decision-
making processes, he also cited Hannah Arendt’s verdict on those calling the
shots in the United States: “[They—US policymakers, the military, etc.] did not
judge; they calculated. . . . An utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of
reality [became] the leitmotif of the decision making.”38 A range of tech-savvy in-
sider voices, as well as humanities scholars, have sounded similar alerts over the
past decades.39
Importantly, in the digital limit situation today, we find that, as professor of
political geography Louise Amoore stresses, prediction technologies reduce us to
our data and exploit our banal traces, while forgetting about us—the coexisters—
as necessarily contradictory and relational beings. In her description of humans
as “data derivates” reduced to quantified risk subjects by biometric technologies,
she states: “The derivative risk form acts through us and the prosaic, intimate,
banal traces of our lives, but yet it forgets us. As necessarily incomplete, com-
plex, undecided people, it forgets us. The very potentiality of life presupposes
something of an unknown future.”40 Amoore further stresses that “to live in as-
sociation with others, to have relations, to be a life, . . . a life indefinite, with po-
tentiality,” is actually part of “the promise of what is livable and never amenable
to calculation.”41
The prediction imperative, as Shoshana Zuboff calls it, has become even more
urgent in light of surveillance capitalism and the ways in which it enframes us.
In her work on biometrics, Ajana, however, argues for a more complicated ap-
proach. She recognizes valid concerns in critical assessments of biometrics
about the fate of human dignity and self-respect, in light of the developments of

37 Ibid., 268.
38 Arendt in Weizenbaum, Computer Power, 13–14.
39 In 2009, for example, the designer Johanna Drucker warned the humanities against becoming

too engrossed in computational methodologies and their premises and promises of objectivity. She
saw a risk the humanities would become infatuated with computation and thereby invoke its intellec-
tual assumptions of British analytical philosophy and the Vienna Circle, as well as structural linguis-
tics. According to Drucker, these all share in the tradition of mathesis universalis, which if embraced
threatens to cause instrumentalizing effects across many disciplinary fields. Instead, she holds out a form
of “ ‘speculative computing,” as a way to push back against objectivism and the cultural authority of num-
bers. Drucker, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2009). See also Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Vintage, 2011).
40 Louise Amoore, “Data Derivatives: On the Emergence of Security Risk Calculus for Our Times,”

Theory, Culture & Society, 28, no. 6 (2011): 20 and 39, italics added, https://doi.org/10.1177/02632
76411417430.
41 Ibid.
Metric Media 131

biocentric data that use human bodies as means to an end. But she also seeks to
nuance this, holding that we must not reduce what biometric data mean to objec-
tification and the isolation of the physical element from the person: “While this
argument is valid to some extent,” she argues, it does not “account for the myriad
dynamics entailed within the interface between technology and the experi-
ence of embodiment.”42 It attributes too much agency to technology. Even more
problematically, however, it falls into the trap of technological determinism,
where technology is perceived too one-dimensionally as having stable, inherent
features that subsequently exert direct and nonambiguous influence on the ex-
ternal world. Hence, if we isolate technology from its contingencies, its diverse
and unforeseen uses or uncertain implications, which may generate a plurality
of courses of action, we wind up exposing what characterizes its technological
specificity but not its multivalent meanings.
In a similar spirit, Benjamin Peters problematizes the direct, mimetic relation-
ship between metric media and the world. He shows that the digital in fact does
more than counting—it also actually points to the world, without ever becoming
the world. And yet the literal ambition to define and dictate is there: digital
media manipulate social imaginaries, with real-world consequences.43 But there
is also friction in this understanding of world-making. As critical data studies
scholar Safya Noble has shown, black girls, for example, are mercifully so much
more than, and altogether different from, what we can learn about them from
searching on their designation in the digital domain of search engines.44 Hence
there is limit to digital rendition, while its numerical operations through oppres-
sive algorithms is a powerful force with impacts on the world, especially on the
disenfranchised and those on the line. I propose that this very complexity and
open-endedness accounts for the existentially and ethically challenging realities
of the interrelatedness of numbers and the lifeworld, in the digital limit situation.
By contrast, Steven Connor argues self-assuredly and cunningly for an unper-
turbed position: for finding enjoyable ways of becoming interested in how num-
bers are now inevitably and irrepressibly entering into—or revealing their innate
role within—the human lifeworld, across all boards:

We need not here be delayed by the question of the truth, or to put it a touch
more numerically, the adequacy, of the claim that there are qualitative truths
that are under no circumstances renderable as quantities. It is rather with the
experience of having to see, or what may be the same thing, being increasingly
able to likely to see, the natural and human world under the aspect of number,

42 Ajana, Governing through Biometrics, 9.

43 Peters, “Digital.”
44 Noble, Algorithms of Oppression.
132 Digital Limit Situations

the experience of the dwindling (a dwindling that might itself be quantified) of

the set of things that it is any more in principle impossible to count, or render as
number. My concern is with the kinds of adjustment that we, by which I mean
primarily non-mathematical persons, are having to make to the world of meas-
urable quantities and calculable ratios. For this reason, my concern is not to
quarantine quality form quantity, but rather to articulate some of the specific
qualities of the quantitative, some of the many and changeable ways in which
quantity comes to exercise its purchase upon us, and we our prehensions of
quantity. For this, I propose the term quantality, with, as though that were not
yet bad enough, the quantical, as its adjectival complement.45

For Connor, there is an inevitability to the dwindling of the nonnumerical, to the

adjustments enforced upon us, and to a quantified existence. He stresses a numer-
ical consciousness of quantitative affect, where numbers have entered into quality.46
Connor is excited by “the prospect of giving an account of the quantical imagina-
tion, that is, the vernacular life or being-in-the-world of number, as it compounds its
forms with signs and codes, and ways in general of being and doing.”47 He maintains
this is neither about a “numerological delirium” of speculative realism, nor an ob-
session with big data as method; rather, it is about the much bigger task that he sees
as the very future of the humanities. Connor furthermore claims, “Undoubtedly we
live in number and also between the implicit and explicit conditions of number. If
they are to be good for anything, the humanities must shape up to what I have called
quantality—the quality of quantity, the feel of number—the agitated, affective, phil-
osophical and political imaginary of number.”48
In Connor’s view, numbers are in fact part of the pregivenness of the lifeworld.
Numbers, he reflects, are essentially about matching things, which brings them
into being.49 They are part of emergence itself: “Rather than being written in
the language of number, nature allows, implies and undergoes translation into
number.”50 Numbers furthermore perform actions, and this has the result of
making things actual. Connor disclaims, importantly, that numbers are eternal
and Platonic; instead, “number is emergent rather than merely existent, event
rather than object.”51 It is part of “the process of making the implicit explicit, it

45 Connor, “Quantality,” 9.
46 Connor, Living by Numbers, 12.
47 Connor, “Quantality,” 24.
48 Ibid.
49 As Connor argues, “We create inherence, the way in which things seem to hold together,

through making things coherent, matching them up with other things. If we want to understand the
nature of war, or love, or intelligence or a zebra, I put a bookmark in the place where it is, until I have
completed a series of operations that will fix it in its place relative to all other kinds of thing that it
might be, so that it then seems to function as its own bookmark.” Ibid., 6–7.
50 Ibid., 5.
51 Ibid., 23.
Metric Media 133

is therefore production, not reduction.” It is thus “a liability or a tendency, not a

final condition.”52
Let’s give it a try, while, however, moving Connor’s imperative into one of
the least upbeat of places: the dire existential terrain of loss—where we cannot
shy away from old humanistic obsessions with aporia, pain, and despair—and
its online vernaculars, norms, and formats. Here we will be bringing phenom-
enally felt entanglements of grief and numbers into view. In order to do so, we
need neither complacently accept the role, authority, and clout of number, nor
indulge in an “angry panic” about them. Instead, we need simply to revisit phe-
nomenology, including its profound engagement with numbering, as well as
with the shortcomings of numbering in the realm of human existence. This is
a move needed in order both to phenomenologically perceive and to critically
interrogate the world as it spins off from and is brought into being through num-
bers. I will argue that now more than ever, the key worry of classical phenome-
nology must remain a key priority of our time of all-embracing and all-pervasive
networks of quantification and computation. Here it will soon be evident that the
digital limit situation implies more than exciting and endless opportunities (à la
Silicon Valley); it also imposes pressures, strictures, and affordances that all seem
to relate to number, in the shape of datafication and ideals of endless recording
and ubiquitous quantification.

Numbers and Grief

How do numbers—as liability, event, and emergence—figure among those who

lost everything—their child, their precious sister or brother? How is being in and
through and with—and toward—number a reality for online mourners?
Sara lost her younger brother Niklas in an accident in 2005, and she set up a
home page in his memory the year after. Managing the memorial page is a huge
part of her coping. She is very keen on the imprint of her brother, and how to
preserve him:

AL: What was the most important reason for choosing to create a memorial, and
what has it meant to you—if you try to summarize it in a few sentences?
Sara: The most important reason was to have a place where Niklas’s imprint can
be found, a proof of him having lived and that he is highly loved and deeply
missed. A place where I, Niklas’s friends, and others we know can collect their
thoughts and memories of him, and a place where I (and others who want to)
can express their love, grief, and loss.

52 Ibid., 8.
134 Digital Limit Situations

The essential role of the Facebook memorial for preservation is also clear for
Rickard, a banker and father aged fifty, who lost his son Emil in a sporting ac-
cident three years ago, and who memorialized his profile. The Facebook group
meant a great deal to him, especially in the beginning, as a communal space; and
it continues to do so now on anniversaries and birthdays. These web memorials
offer mourners a means to “narrate” the death, braiding mourning and meaning-
making in intricate and thorny ways.53 This is also an inherently social practice.
Participation in different kinds of digital grief forums, such as memorial groups,
thus brings the bereaved together in their grief work, to form a shared com-
munity of memory. Mourning in social media thereby adopts the premodern
form of grieving together—communally.54 These memorial spaces also increase
opportunities to maintain and enhance the relationships and bonds with the de-
ceased. They enable what mourners themselves often describe as healthy contin-
uing bonds with their loved ones who have passed (a phenomenon I will return
to in chapter 7).55 As I will suggest in the following, numbers also play a powerful
role here.
I ask informants to reflect upon the role of numbers in the grief process.
Rickard says the big numbers of active people in the beginning were really im-
portant to him. In the end, the really tight friends are the ones who remained on
the memorial page, and they continued to write fairly regularly.

AL: Does it hurt that it peters out?

Rickard: Um, no. Or I try to be very rational about it, so that . . . that . . . no, you
know, it’s pretty natural.
AL: People have to move on?

53 Dennis Klass and Michael Robert, “A Social Constructionist Account of Grief: Loss and the

Narration of Meaning,” Death Studies, 38, no. 8 (2014): 485–498, https://doi.org/10.1080/07481

187.2014.913454.
54 Walter et al., “Does the Internet Change.”
55 Older models argued that grief takes the form of stages, tasks, or processes in a linear manner,

with the aim of reaching an endpoint. These theories often described closure as detachment from loss.
See, for example, the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, On Grief and Grieving: Finding
the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss (New York: Scribner, 2005). The continuing-bonds
approach criticized the paradigm of “stages of grief ” and vehemently abandoned the notion of letting
go as the sign of wellness. Within the new paradigm, scholars posit grief as something that does not
resolve itself through detachment from the deceased. Healthy grief, they argue, is rather experienced
through creating a new relationship with the dead. See Dennis Klass and Tony Walter, “Processes
of Grieving: How Bonds Are Continued,” in Handbook of Bereavement Research: Consequences,
Coping, and Care, ed. Margaret Stroebe, Robert O. Hansson, Wolfgang Stroebe, and Henk Schut
(Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2001), 431–448; Dennis Klass, “Continuing
Conversations about Continuing Bonds,” Death Studies, 30, no. 9 (2006): 843–858, https://doi.org/
10.1080/07481180600886959. The technological developments of today interestingly mirror, and
possibly reinforce, the continuing-bonds theory in bereavement discourse, which seems to have been
given its perfect technological match through the development of the internet.
Metric Media 135

Rickard: Yes, yeah, so . . . in some sense life has to move on, you know. But ab-
solutely it was a major. . . it was a very major support initially . . . as a security
blanket. You go in there and check . . . and the fact that you can return to the
time when he was alive and look at those conversations then . . . There are
many photos, films, and stuff that he uploaded there and so . . . you can go in
and have a peep at them.

Numbers did count: they were helpful initially in the coping process—they were
even a security blanket—but Rickard is trying to be pragmatic about the fact that
the numbers do go down.
With the help of a tech-savvy friend, Olle, age fifty-eight, built a memorial
home page in loving memory of his teenage daughter Elsa, an aspirational artist
and poet, who committed suicide after many long years of depression. Preserving
Elsa is key to Olle. He has had large numbers of visitors, and he anticipates large
numbers in the future as well—a fact in which he takes pleasure: “So it pleases
me, you know, because that way Elsa’s work is being seen or read . . . or what-
ever. . . . But she’s alive somehow in . . . on the page.”56 Before meeting Olle for a
second interview, I sent him new questions, including one about numbers, and
I return to them in the interview:

AL: This bullet point about numbers, what did you think of that? This bit about
the importance of many likes, many visitors, and many hearts?
Olle: You know, we don’t get that many. . . . Likes or hearts we don’t get here, but
we get, just . . . I can see afterward what the statistics look like. . . . And yes,
it’s true, it pleases me that many people are there, that totally speaking there
are very great numbers. And it continues to be like that, despite the fact that
nothing has really happened there for a very long time . . .
AL: How would you feel about a drop? To see markedly that there are fewer and
fewer visitors? Now you know how many there are per day, but if it went down,
how would you feel then? Would you feel anything at all? Would you care
about that . . . number?
Olle: No, it leads its own life . . . you can’t do much about it. I wouldn’t be able to
do much.57

Olle, like Rickard, is pragmatic about a drop in numbers. But in response to the
question about how he would feel if the memorial shut down, Olle says he al-
ready has plans to upgrade it in order to save it into the future. So he has a friend
working on it to make it compatible with mobiles, Androids, iPhones, and iOS,

56 Interview, December 2015.

57 Interview, December 2016.
136 Digital Limit Situations

because right now it’s difficult to read on these. It needs a new life in “this world of
media,” and “it’s of course in order to make it visible to even more people, since it is
likely that more and more people will sit there with their iPads or phones . . . rather
than big computers. This is a way to meet new needs, because I was clueless about
this, but her friend let me know that . . . they could not open the page.”58
So the page is about to be updated and made more accessible to more people.
The idea is that a greater number of people would soon be able to access Elsa’s
artwork and poems, as well as the memorial video that was uploaded to the home
page by relatives. Although it feels natural for Olle to take these steps, he also
emphasizes that there has already been a massive audience on the home page,
and he stresses the medium’s potential for reaching big numbers:

Olle: You have to consider that today it’s been visited by approximately three hun-
dred thousand people. . . . These visitors are not unique, of course, but there are
still so many clicks, if you think that way. . . . So if we published a book (and had
an edition of five hundred or a thousand books), I mean we would have shared
it among those close, but most people would have placed them on a shelf and
never touched them. So it’s a great difference.

For some of the bereaved, there is also stress on the number of caring messages,
emoji, and comments, as numbers are significant for the experienced sense of
support. But one may wonder in this context about the role played by numbers
for bereaved persons in pre-web societies. According to Ian Hacking, quanti-
fication was in fact part and parcel of the very start of death’s modernization.
He argues that, through the rationalization of death, which began in the 1680s
with statistical evidence, one could make visible how death rates were higher, for
example, in certain urban areas than in the countryside.59 Statistics thus disen-
chanted death and enabled a new way of thinking about death as neither random
nor an act of God, but as something statistically though not individually predi-
cable. This is the basis on which the life insurance industry now depends. There
were certainly predigital precedents and cultural norms for quantifying grief.
There have, for instance, been, and still are, general cultural expectations about
who should be mourned and for how long in different societies. In some socie-
ties, these expectations were actually quantified. In upper-class Victorian society
in Britain, for example, a particular number of months in mourning for each
kind of relationship was specified.60

58 Ibid.
59 Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
60 Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983);
Patricia Robson and Tony Walter, “Hierarchies of Loss: A Critique of Disenfranchised Grief,”
Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 66, no. 2 (2012–13): 97–119, https://doi.org/10.2190/om.66.2.a.
Metric Media 137

But counting likes, as a measurement of the value of the person lost, and
indirectly of the weight of the loss, also amounts to a quantification of sup-
port. How does this work in the offline world of bereavement? In a study of
the congregation of mourners at funerals in a British context, Tara Bailey and
Tony Walter focused on the whole group who attended the funeral in ques-
tion—beyond the principal mourners and family. A good funeral was thus one
where many people attended, confirming that the deceased had lived a rich
and varied life; poor attendance signified a “bad funeral.” Attendance was thus
taken to signify the value of the person who had died. The number of attendees
was experienced as a “tribute,” and it was also important who attended. Bailey
and Walter conclude that

for mourners, a meaningful assembly was one which, in their perception, stood
testament to the value of the deceased person’s life. This value was viewed by
mourners to be evident both quantitatively (how many were there) and qualita-
tively (who was there). Furthermore, a meaningful assembly meant collectively
supporting both the deceased person’s family and other mourners. In these
ways, we see the extra contribution to mourners’ experience made by “people
against death.”61

According to Bailey and Walter, then, attendance thus constitutes a eulogy in

itself. Their analysis of the pre-web context shows that, while relationships are
critical, the number of attendees who “stand against death” is deeply important,
too. It seems then that counting numbers (of people attending, of condolences,
of tributes paid) is part of bereavement culture, at least in relation to funerals. In
the online context of support and commemoration, numbers do seem to console
and to confirm value. But they can also be worrying.

Vulnerabilities and Risks of a Numerical World:

Selfhood and Value in Grief

If we reason in line with Connor, the numbers of visitors and comments ap-
peal in themselves to quantitative susceptibilities, and to what we may describe
as a “being-toward-validation”—which seems to be part of the human situa-
tion overall, but which gains a new, strong presence in the digital limit situa-
tion. General aspects of “the Facebook phenomenon,” as Esbjörn (a mourning
father who lost his eighteen-year-old daughter in an accident whom we met

61 Tara Bailey and Tony Walter, “Funerals against Death,” Mortality, October 11, 2015, 163, http://

dx.doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2015.1071344.
138 Digital Limit Situations

in chapter 2) calls it, thus feed into the vulnerabilities of bereavement online.
But the numerical mode of being—or ethos of quantification—also produces
ensuing vulnerabilities. It can become “too much” for some parents and siblings
to be preoccupied with volume and scale. Annika, age twenty-two (whom we
met in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, and who lost her sister in a car
accident a few years back) stresses that there is a big risk for some people to get
“stuck” in this space of mourning both literally and figuratively, in “the likes
and hearts and comments” because that is “when she feels alive somehow, when
people upload stuff and talk about her and so on.”62 For Rickard, too, it is crucial
not to get obsessed with numbers or to become bitter. One must make a choice,
as he saw it, “between the bright side or the dark side” in life after loss.63
As scholars have discussed, these new patterns of mourning and remem-
bering online also raise concerns. There have been studies showing that digital
resources may increase and amplify negative ruminations, a sense of getting
stuck in grief.64 Technologies of the digital limit situation enact a perpetuation
of the dead person’s presence, enabling continuity in relating to the dead. Or as
some researchers stress, these digital technologies of memory and preservation
offer means for coping. But the deep-felt attachments to the technology are also
deeply ambivalent. As Esbjörn who built a Facebook memorial in memory of his
dead daughter states when asked why he did so: “The point of it all? A way to pre-
serve her. But for some bereaved parents who post many images and emotions,
it can become too much.” This is not exclusively a problem for digital commem-
oration. Esbjörn recounts a story about a mother who lost her son, and who cre-
ated a gigantic altar in her home for him, “like a super home page” in physical
space. Esbjörn was in touch with the mother for a while, but he felt she was too
absorbed by these strung-out expressions of grief, which made her unable to
relate and reach out: “She was just too much!” For Esbjörn himself, the idea of
constructing a vital memorial place on Facebook prompted strong feelings of

62 Interview, December 2016.

63 Follow-up interview, November 2017.
64 Such risks have been observed in several studies on online mourning. Memorial websites

seem to produce a process of negative thinking, as technologies enable an indefinite extension of

mourning. See Lisa M. Mitchell, Peter H. Stephenson, Susan Cadell, and Mary Ellen Macdonald,
“Death and Grief On-line: Virtual Memorialization and Changing Concepts of Childhood Death
and Parental Bereavement on the Internet,” Health Sociology Review, 21 (2012): 413–431, https://
doi.org/10.5172/hesr.2012.21.4.413; Margaret S. Stroebe, Karolijne van der Houven, and Henk
Schut, “Bereavement Support, Intervention, and Research on the Internet: A Critical Review,” in
Stroebe et al., Handbook of Bereavement Research, 551–554. See also Michael Westerlund, “The
Usage of Digital Resources by Swedish Suicide Bereaved in Their Grief Work: A Survey Study,”
Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 81, no. 2 (2018): 272–297, https://doi.org/10.1177/003022281
8765807 and Dorthe Refslund Christensen, Ylva Hård af Segerstad, Dick Kasperowski, and Kjetil
Sandvik, “Bereaved Parents’ Online Grief Communities: De-tabooing Practices or Relation-Building
Grief Ghettos,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 61, no. 1 (2017): 58–72, https://doi.org/
10.1080/08838151.2016.1273929.
Metric Media 139

ambivalence. Reflecting further on what he calls “the Facebook phenomenon”

and corroborating the stickiness of social media,65 he says, “You can’t escape it.
You force yourself and you are forced by it. . . . They have hijacked our lives. . . .
Facebook does not feel OK at all.”66
Online (and offline) memorials mean the whole world to the bereaved. Were
they suddenly to disappear (e.g., if the web domain goes out of business, the
group closes, or there are glitches in a ramshackle system), the people in question
would be emotionally crushed. As Olle explains: “This is a part of me!” Asked
how he would react if someone shut down these places, Esbjörn answers without
hesitation that the gravity of his loss would be felt anew: “It would feel like killing
her once more. If they disappeared, that would not be good.” Judging what
Facebook cannot offer and reflecting on its new orthodoxies of both sociality and
mourning, Esbjörn firmly endorses the value of restraint and limit: “You need
some air in your grief, to push things away. It’s important that it be OK to do that!
If you are in that emotional state, in that mood of despair, it’s easier to go astray if
you have bought into this Facebook thing!”
Tallying can in some cases be part of what goes awry. In the face of the death
of a spouse or child, the lived experience of loss and support in online environ-
ments is also an experience of counting visitors, likes, or hearts: of quantification.
Existentially speaking, social media seem here to have yoked themselves to our
very being and sense of meaning in times of utter exposure. Hence the strong
attachments to the technology are as ambivalent as they are factual. Being in the
numerical world also means concretely that what we would describe as imma-
terial forms of capitalism play a part in the ways in which grief is expressed. But
how and to what extent? Beverley Skeggs and Simon Yuill show that Facebook
operates financially as a powerful advertising oligopoly that lubricates the cir-
culation of capital, rather than just as a social network.67 In order to maximize
profit, Facebook’s tracking practices are also forging contemporary forms of self-
hood, but in contradictory ways. Skeggs and Yuill have mapped three interrelated
forms of subjectivity that appear in the networked age. First, remaining from
high modernity is the “liberal possessive individual”: a singular individual who
can add value to herself through the conversion of her culture and experience
into property. Second is the neoliberal “subject of value,” who is central to the

65 Jennifer Pybus, “Accumulating Affect: Social Networks and Their Archives of Feelings,”

in Networked Affect, ed. Ken Hillis, Susanna Paasonen, and Michael Petit (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2015).
66 And it seems social media can become particularly sticky for those in an exposed situation, as

exemplified in Esbjörn’s utterance. The stickiness may have to do with what Edmund Husserl calls
“protention”: the sense in which we are always set in motion to anticipate the next moment and the
new (I will return to this in chapter 8). Our screen culture has colonized that very sensibility, entailing
strong forces that drag us back in all the time.
67 Skeggs and Yuill, “Capital Experimentation,” 380.
140 Digital Limit Situations

enterprise of contemporary social media and performs her value. Finally there
is the “dividual” in operation, as they explain: “Facebook projects singularity as
a responsibility of the user so as to claim integrity of its data sources, whilst si-
multaneously ‘dividuating’ that data into multiple aggregate representations to
be monetized as targeted ad space.”68 Facebook is involved in monetizing eve-
rything, including protest. Skeggs and Yuill conclude that “the protesting self is
conditioned under similar strategies as the enterprising self, indeed the protester
becomes a kind of self-enterprise, or re-shaped as such.”69
What about the mourning self? In mourning contexts, authenticity and ide-
alism are taken for granted. What distinguishes mourners from the subjects of
value is that beyond the neoliberal underlying goal for the self of multiplying
skills and alliances online,70 support takes place without ulterior motives and in
an idealistic manner. When mourners and their supportive memory practices
online are placed center stage, a different way of being digital becomes visible.
The value accumulation of the neoliberal subject will not accurately describe
what these practices are about. A numerical mode of being is in this context be-
yond a calculative subject amassing immaterial property. Instead, what emerges
is a relational and suffering being who is defined by lacking, wanting, being be-
reft. It is in this mode of being that numbers enter into the picture for conso-
lation. Rickard, for instance, stresses the role of confirmation through numbers,
especially in the initial phase of mourning, but also later:

AL: If you wrote something back then, was it important that many people
answered? That you got many likes?
Rickard: Yeah, that’s the case and it’s still the case. . . . It’s, you know, when you
write something there . . . now it does not become a self-confirmation, so it’s
not in the same way. But, again, it’s like this. . . . More people than myself are
still thinking about this.

Hence, Rickard distinguishes the need for confirmation by many from the role
of numbers for self-promotion or self-validation, as among the subjects of value
in the nonafflicted world. As Rickard says, these validations are not about self-af-
firmation, but instead about comfort or about the sheer confirmation that he is
not alone—that there are others who think of Emil, and that makes him still exist
somehow. The mourning subject online is thus a profoundly relational being.
Similarly, Sara confirms that these spaces are a vaccine against the loneliness that

68 Ibid., 384.
69 Ibid., 392–393.
70 For a discussion of the neoliberal self online, see Ilana Gershon and Allison Alexy,
“Introduction,” in Anthropological Quarterly, special collection: “The Ethics of Disconnection in a
Neoliberal Age,” 84, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 799–808, https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2011.0056.
Metric Media 141

is innate to loss and mourning, and underscores the relational role of these sup-
port spaces:

AL: Can you develop what you mean by becoming dismayed if the domain were
to shut down? Or if some technical failure occurred that erased the memorial
page? How do you think other relatives would react if these spaces for com-
memoration and support disappeared? How important have they become for
mourners?
Sara: It’s really beyond my control. It can happen, and I would be very sad and
angry if it happened without my deciding it. Like I said earlier, it is proof that
he existed. But if it were to happen, I would probably create a new memorial.
If these spaces of loss and bereavement disappeared, I think people would feel
very lonely. Just knowing there are other siblings in the sibling group makes
me feel less alone.

Here, as I will show in more detail in the next chapter, the sheer knowledge
of the fact that the group exists, as a lifeline, is essential for the mourner.
Communication in these contexts often bears the marks of simplicity, with stan-
dardized forms of acknowledgment such as hearts and likes. Support need not
be lengthy or effusive: one small heart may suffice in response to one’s having
discharged oneself of so many feelings. Hence lifeline communication is both
instrumental and emotional, both phatic and emphatic. For some mourners, one
small heart is actually enough. For others it is sometimes insufficient. The dif-
ferent needs clearly depend on the context. Sara explains:

AL: How important do you think it is for mourners today to receive many likes in
the support group or in a memorial space online? Can you reflect on that a bit?
Sara: It’s probably more important than you want to admit. . . . In the support
group it is “enough” for me with hearts and likes not to feel alone, since I know
that those who write there know what it’s like to have lost a sibling. But on my
own Facebook page or blog, I’m much happier if someone takes the time to
write a sentence about my brother, to share a memory or something else they
have thought about or felt. It’s too simple to just press “like” or send a heart.

For other mourners, likes and hearts are important—precisely what they long
for—and there is real dismay when numbers go down. What makes Birgitta’s case
stand out is the honesty with which she addressed the mourning community
about her pain in the face of the lack of numerical validation. The ontology of
numbers is rarely stripped of its aura like this, and its workings through the lived
ethos of quantification are seldom laid bare. Yet the issue clearly resonates across
mourners’ stories. It is not hard to grasp what Birgitta is going through, while, as
142 Digital Limit Situations

Sara says, these norms make you both comply and feel reluctant to admit having
done so.

To Be (or Not to Be) Is to Be Measurable?

The dead leave an immeasurable void behind, and yet no sphere in digital ex-
istence escapes measurement. In this chapter, I have discussed the most diffi-
cult experience a human being can have—losing a child (or sibling)—and how it
relates to the ethos of quantification of our time. I have related a numerical sense
of being in the world and its monetizing features to the way that technology
forcefully molds how people see and value themselves. And I have discussed
how those who have departed are experienced as valued through the numbers
of attendees at the memorial site online. In these mourning practices, value and
the sense of comfort and support (as well as nonsupport) are translatable into a
measurable number. I have disclosed the vulnerabilities involved in a numer-
ical being-toward-validation, and the sense in which making the most impor-
tant things in life depend on numbers, data, and computation increases human
precariousness.
According to Steven Connor, whom I’ve been both drawing on and engaging
with in this chapter, the humanities like to think they have special expertise
precisely in the field of value. In a grotesque manner, however, they affirm only
one principle of value: the invaluable and “whatever goes beyond any kind of
measure or commensurability.”71 Connor mocks the humanities for their insist-
ence on not counting: “I would be interested to know how many pounds have
been poured over the years into keeping persons and institutions alive who are
earnestly dedicated to demonstrating variations of the proposition that all art
is quite useless or its value entirely immeasurable in terms of anything else.”72
Connor goes on to suggest, moreover, that “the important questions in art
and experience have in fact always vibrated with number.”73 He is correct that
humanists, like authors, poets, and artists, are often interested in the “invalu-
able.” To clarify and specify, this means a solid interest in the indeterminate, the
open-ended, and the paradoxical. Our interest revolves around what lies in the
shadows, at the limits of our understanding: the role of the ambiguous, the am-
bivalent, the absurd, what does not measure up or correspond. Hence, humanists
stress the value of what can’t be fixed in place, squarely nailed or boiled down,
what can’t be solved through equations or valued in points or credits. This stress

71 Connor, “Quantality,” n.p.

72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
Metric Media 143

reverberates with a wisdom akin to and probably indebted to Husserl’s plea. I will
venture to concede with Connor, therefore, that not just the vibrancy of numbers
but also the serious, critical, or indeed playful engagement with a purportedly
quantifiable world itself—its imaginaries, vernaculars, and material effects—has
always been a key concern for humanists and artists. That measurement is in-
deed part of our being, needing no further substantiation. Grief is therefore not
immune to numbers. But perhaps more than anything else in this world, loss is
the very bedrock of being human, beyond reductive numbering and measuring.
Hence, while it may be accurate that “there can be nothing that is entirely re-
sistant to being numbered,”74 there is still resistance contained within the most
profound experiences of being human. To be human is not only to be practically
involved and embedded, or ethically implicated and prodded; it is also to resist
in existentialist terms, to make a leap or to simply defy the pressures of falling
into line.
For mourners the dead are somehow still existent—in being valued and hon-
ored through the numbers of visitors on the online memorial site. But the inept-
itude and inevitable failure of any project that resorts to measuring techniques
to account for the lived experience of the endless voids of loss speaks its own
volumes. The predilection to and futility of our numerical mode of being, and
how it effectuates itself in relation to nonbeing, is precisely the theme of the poem
“Loss” by the Swedish poet Ingrid Arvidsson, which is used in numerous eulo-
gies on memorial pages in Sweden. The poem thematizes the chasm between
quantity and the lifeworld:

How small a space a human being takes up on earth.

Less than a tree in the forest.
How immense the void she leaves behind.
An entire world cannot fill it.
How tiny a human heart is.
Not bigger than a bird.
Still it contains the whole world.
And empty spaces bigger than the whole world.
Endless hollow spaces of woodlands of silence song.75

Anyone who has suffered loss will recognize that in so many ways it is, as
Arvidsson captures beautifully, immeasurable. For skeptics, quantified loss
attests to the exploitative character of the digitally enforced lifeworld. Predictive
machines create “value” for us and set standards for valuation that enter into the

74 Ibid.
75 “Saknad,” Ingrid Arvidsson, Livstecken: Dikter (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1964), my translation, p. 29.
144 Digital Limit Situations

very heart of being. The problematization of a world in which more and more
is becoming enclosed and even entrapped by numbers amounts to a very legit-
imate, albeit old, concern about the factuality and actuality of oppressive reduc-
tive numbers.
Rather than being lazy, silly, and ignorant in a zone of amenity—in which the
pastime is devaluing numbers as intrinsically meaningless or bereft of any value
for humanists, as Steven Connor caricatures—such humanistic probing stems
from the insight that reality is irreducible, and the ontology of numbers and the
ethos of quantification are precisely attempting to reduce it. Moreover, they are
accomplishing reduction, in ways that are powerful, diminishing, and some-
times painful for very real human beings—both mourners and others. Connor
theorizes reduction as inherent in numbering, but he holds that “we do not any
more have to regard numbering as final or definitive, a putting-to-death through
exactness. Number is no longer the end of any story.”76 He further argues re-
garding digital reduction that “translating things into numbers, or giving them
number-like qualities and relations, which essentially means dividing wholes
up into smaller parts, hugely multiplies the possibilities of what may be done
with these wholes.”77 That may be true, theoretically. But it seems such lofty the-
orizing has completely and mercifully escaped the power apparatuses of the
technoscientific bureaucracies and their cadres of assuming technocrats, for
whom numbers and digits have become our binding reality, and quite tangibly
so: end of story! We need to acknowledge that we are differently situated in the
technologically and numerically enforced lifeworld. We need to ask how it affects
those who do not straightforwardly gain from the current marriage between
the never-ending calculus of monetizing software and the enterprising selves.
We also need to address the fact that the winners of this world, the comfortably
networked who seem to be in control, are also those whom the tech giants in turn
monetize most effectively.78 Such persons, too, are vulnerable to forces beyond
their reach. Furthermore, of course, low-net-worth individuals remain solidly
affected and discriminated against by a world of numbering in their day-to-day
practices. The tedious task will therefore still remain for humanists (because who
else would undertake it?) to keep on critically reflecting upon anything presented
to us as the destiny of humanity. Simply proclaiming and embracing this idea of
a destining of our numerical being in the world may actually in itself attest to a
prospective digital destitution looming on the horizon. Numbers are part of our
being, but they are not innocent or without clout; they are powerful, since they

76 Connor, Living by Number, 32–33.

77 Ibid.
78 Skeggs and Yuill, “Capital Experimentation.”
Metric Media 145

really count. Numbers are today informing our techno-existential actualities—

their possibilities as well as their predicaments.

Closing In—Slowing Down—Wrapping Up and Around

In this chapter, I hope I have offered an alternative without resorting to panic

in critiquing the sense in which the contemporary world has succumbed to a
regime of counting. Existential media studies draws on existential philosophy,
yet it also brings it into conversation with our technological culture, in order to
address those old and resurgent existential issues facing digital humans in the
face of the ontology of numbers. This is also an ethical and political project that
moves us closer and slows us down, sanding down the sharp surfaces and thus
making the edges more open, rounded, and porous.
In sharing research on a group of bereaved parents who built memorials to
their dead children, as well as on two people who belong to a Facebook group of
bereaved who mourn their siblings, I have also been closing in on and listening
with care to their stories about their phenomenally felt entanglements of grief
and numbers. For some bereaved persons who mourn online, the ethos of quan-
tification has rapidly become part of their natural attitude. After having faced the
death of their spouse, child, or sibling, the lived experience of loss in online envir-
onments is also an experience of counting likes or hearts. In the digital limit sit-
uation, online mourners express existential needs of authenticity and care about
their singular loss, both through the consolation of the plurality of the crowd and
through the individual mark they wish visitors to leave. This chapter has brought
about a figuration of the digital limit situation in which the coexister balances on
a rim between digital capitalism and idealism. Closing in on that balancing act
will teach us something partially different about the digital ecology. Following
Ajana, I hold that existential media as metric media must be approached from
various angles. We must bear in mind the complexities of living with contingent
numbers and enumerations. I have therefore also intentionally hovered between
defining online mourning as expressions of being coconstituted by technē—the
way we craft and recraft our world with and within media—and by technics: the
way technology may also be an agent of systemic objectification and cynical cal-
culus. Hence, I have discussed the sense of thrownness within limits that defines
our metric media as existential media. I have shown that what we would describe
as immaterial forms of capitalism bleed into the vulnerabilities of bereavement
online. Yet these do not exhaust the matter. Our media are existential media,
which is why they call for an ethics of ambiguity: we have to be able to see the two
sides of the phenomenon at once.
146 Digital Limit Situations

As I have discussed, the ethos of quantification is part of bereavement on-

line: numbers enter into the bereavement process, and mourners negotiate them.
When numbers count, we may discern both consolation and support, and a trou-
bling depletion of the field of mourning online at the same time. Hence, when
embracing numbers as inevitably human, we must never forget the fierce risk
that, as they stick to our being through technological measurement and tagging,
they create an impasse and fix us categorically in place, with very real, material,
and hurtful consequences for those already on the line. While numbers are no
doubt of the human lifeworld, this is not to say we must release or embrace every
form of reckoning and datafication. Not every aspect of human experience and
existence is fit for a digital, computational, or numerical instantiation. And living
by numbers today is, as Jaspers would affirm, as antinomical as everything else: it
is not a pure space of complete and utter resolution, of belonging or homecoming
in the universe.
Furthermore, in the existential terrains of digital media and computation, our
concerns will slow us down and, contra Connor, delay us inevitably, as we side
with and remain in circles with the quiet and the unassuming, the suffering and
the mourning. This is in fact a value. In addition, while the ethos of quantification
and the ideology of dataism and numbers may leave us hard-pressed to adapt
to living by numbers, there is no natural law that compels us to jump into any
fated future of comprehensive, all-out numbering. The brave new world of data
is not inevitable. In this context, we need a language that retains rich nuances,
as Toni Morrison reminded us so lucidly, and which not only leaves space for
but also privileges limits—hence, a language that will make it possible to ex-
press aspects of being that relate to failure, interruption, paradox, openness, si-
lence, indeterminacy, ambivalence, imagination, uncertainty, contingency, deep
relationality, incalculability, and dependency. This is a language keenly needed in
our time of automated Data Truths, in which aspirations to perfection predom-
inate as machines are imagined to know more about us than we do ourselves.
Importantly, Jaspers’s philosophy is uniquely situated to allow for such nuances
and to oppose objectification.
I would like in closing once more to underline the important role of listening
and paying attention to mourners in the spaces of grief. This resonates particu-
larly well here with Sam Mickey’s discussion of Gaston Bachelard’s phenome-
nology of roundness, and with an insistence upon that which defies reductionist
numbers: “The curvature is about intimacy, bringing close as including—closing
in, wrapping around. . . . The whole point of roundness is to attune to coexistential
spatiality and avoid reducing space to geometric literalism or mathematicism.”79
Thinking of being as rounded both places the mourners centrally (allowing for

79 Mickey, Coexistentialism, 96–97.

Metric Media 147

proximity and proper distance) and makes their practices of sharing their vul-
nerability understandable in precisely this rounded and inclusive form: “Each
being is the center around which a horizon opens and makes room for others to
become close.”80 Here, as we will see, humans as coexisters also have the poten-
tial to realize themselves in what Jaspers calls existential communication on the
lifelines of the internet. This aspect of the digital limit situation is the topic of the
next chapter.

80 Ibid.
6
Caring Media
Beings on the (Life)line

But the internet, for me, the internet . . . mobile phones and the in-
ternet, that’s the most important thing that has happened in my life
since the accident.
—Lotta, bereaved parent and wife, VSFB, interview in 2017

Lotta lost her entire family—her husband and two young kids—in a plane crash
many years ago. At that time, no one in her immediate lifeworld could relate to
the specific nature of her loss. This was during the early days of the global in-
ternet, and she found out about a chatroom for bereaved people in the United
States—one precisely devoted to bereavement arising from this type of catas-
trophe. She found others who knew in their bodies what she was going through.
This space became her lifeline, and in hindsight proved to be the most impor-
tant thing in her world for coping and getting through this unspeakable hard-
ship. From day one she was also part of a grief counseling program, which was
new in Sweden and which focused a lot on re-enacting, going near the site of
trauma, seeing the wreckage in material terms. In the limit situation, she recalls,
both the internet and this profoundly material practice were what saved her. And
yet she singles out the lifeline of the internet as the most momentous of these
experiences.
It is in this context, when meaningless reigns in the face of an expunged fu-
ture, that people turn to the internet as a literal lifeline, which provides a medium
for what I call lifeline communication. In this chapter I conceive of existential
media as such lifelines of care, closing in on coexisters in their utter diversity.
Some coexisters are passively part of communities; others actively forge them.
Some blog about their ordeals in illness; others act politically through NGOs or
work as volunteers in support networks. There are also those who just grab the
lifeline in a less active and more introverted way, seeking consolation in silence
and in waiting. As leading scholars in the field of death studies have argued, the
relatively new practices of virtual mourning and blogging about terminal illness
imply major shifts and challenges to the classic thesis of the denial and seques-
tration of death in Western culture: with social media, death has returned to

Existential Media. Amanda Lagerkvist, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925567.003.0007
Caring Media 149

everyday life.1 But more than this, I argue, online practices centered on death
may also interrupt a type of masculinist tenancy of the existential. These online
environments are dominated by women from various cultural backgrounds,
walks of life, and levels of education. They come from both urban centers and
rural areas. They are a group of women who have chosen to express themselves—
and to live through cataclysmic times—in, on, and through social media sites.
As they bemoan severe illnesses or lament loved ones who have died, they are
partaking in a form of existential communication that can in some respects be
likened to what Jaspers called “existential elucidation” in the limit situation. This
takes place through both words and deeds, and also importantly through affec-
tive and emotional encounters online—when caring media connect the bereaved
and the dying as they choose to share their embodied vulnerabilities online.
Hence, I’m interested in what we may learn about death practices in the dig-
ital age, by inviting the voices of women who, in the wake of suffering loss and/
or encountering terminal illness, turn to the internet for support and relief. This
chapter thus sheds light on two contemporary online phenomena—blogs about
terminal illness and online support groups for bereaved persons—and it explores
what these mean for those acutely affected by suffering and loss. It will show that,
in the shadow of the grand interruption—the moment when the life narrative
itself is cut off due to imminent death or sudden loss—the online activities of
mourners and those struck by illness, and more profoundly the internet itself,
become literal lifelines, both individual and collective. But even as this medium
offers a number of positive allowances for those affected (at least during a cer-
tain period in mourning, for instance) this does not preclude parallel emotional
ambivalences in digital existence. As I hope to show in this chapter, existential
media as caring media fully embody this complexity.

Caring Media and/as Connections of Pain and Consolation

Following Heidegger’s concept of Sorge, Paddy Scannell conceives of all media as

caring media. We craft tools of existence with care, but we also imbue them, he
argues, with caring aspects that have the potential to bolster and steady us, reflect
the human condition back to us, and give us a benevolent sense of direction in
existence. For Scannell, humans navigate with these tools of existence, and such
navigations reveal the human, meaningful, and phenomenal now, since humans
have instilled these technologies with what matters to them. Here I will expand
on this materialist understanding to argue also that these media open out to un-
known dimensions of existence—to forms of existential communication, as in

1 Walter et al., “Does the Internet Change” and Walter, What Death Means Now.
150 Digital Limit Situations

Jaspers, which implies transcending acts of utter exposure. The purpose is fur-
thermore to think with media limits as banisters, handrails that have a function
and role of stabilizing and securing. Caring media may limit and mitigate our
fall, as we can lean against them. As literal lifelines, caring media may also save
our lives.
As discussed in the previous chapter, discussions of care and media often begin
with the dominant tendencies of a biopolitical order in which individuals are left
to fend for themselves. Self-care is a huge topic in North America, not least be-
cause of a lack of welfare programs—a lack making the lifeworld into a space
where one is left to care for oneself. But these forms of governmentality and thus
of care have traveled, and they are now part of the global neoliberal economy. In
this context, metric media can also be conceived of as caring media, since self-
quantification can be a form of self-care. But as critics are quick to point out, such
forms are often appropriated by neoliberalism, within a discourse of self-optimi-
zation, compliance, and capitalist productivity. Such ideals are evidently at odds
with the realities of both chronic illness and bereavement. This is where scholars
trace forms of radical care for the self to forms of activism emerging from un-
derstanding the importance of histories of pain, and presents of vulnerability,
violence, and suffering. Activist practices here have the capacity to point toward
“an otherwise” that is reliant upon but not contained within neoliberal self-care.2
In further stressing the social role of mediated, embodied vulnerability and care,
one may observe the importance of different forms of caregiving by civil society
actors in the digital context. This is also played out in different ways in different
parts of our neoliberal global world. Care work in our societies, as discussed
earlier, often occurs within those intimate, feminized publics tailored to certain
groups and identities—such as NGOS for the bereaved or for those suffering
from illness. But these are also forms of social activism that seek to fill the gaps
in a society that neglects those in need of care and fails to meet their needs, due
to both a structural breakdown in welfare services and a cultural absence of rit-
uals and means for dealing with loss. This is precisely what mourners involved in
NGOs for bereaved persons in Sweden explain as the rationale and motivation
behind joining and later committing to the group and its cause. There is a lack of
emotional support and psychological understanding overall in Swedish society
for people in bereavement, and a general neglect, for example, of the shattering
experiences of losing a child and what that does to the entire life and world of a

2 See Tamara Kneese and Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, “Radical Care: Survival

Strategies for Uncertain Times,” Social Text 142, 38, no. 1 (2020): 4, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642
472-7971067; and Gibson, Hjorth, and Choi, “Introduction: Caring Media Futures,” 563. Recent
conceptualizations of self-care in the age of digital media have drawn upon Michel Foucault’s ideas
of caring for the self in examining the relationships between the digital self and the feeling self. See
Ganaele Langlois, “Social Media and the Care of the Self,” in Lagerkvist, Digital Existence.
Caring Media 151

person. The default response, until very recently, has been that people need to
get over their grief rather quickly and to “solve” it in private. Intimate publics of
online mourning and illness are for many a remedy to this, and a safe haven in
which it is all right to mourn.3
Within the confines of their predicament and often at a loss for words or
compass, bloggers and mourners voice their utmost existential concerns in
hyperpublicness, and in what Suzanne Bost calls, as discussed previously,
shared vulnerability. This concept highlights the possibility of overcoming and
transgressing former boundaries between people. Bost regards the “unexpected
identifications and relationships forged by illness as an alternate foundation for
politics.”4 Here I wish to add to this debate the idea of shared vulnerability in and
through the digital as an aspect of caring media. Practices are now emerging as
the lived experience of embodied connectivity of the posthuman condition: of
recounting pain and bodily states online, of posting hearts and holding hands.
Hence, beyond a generic, philosophical self, there is a stress in recent theoriza-
tion on care and media on a situated self, engaged in complex sets of human
and more than human relations. Again, the Jaspersian relational, networked, and
interdependent as well as utterly hurting self is in fact invoked: thus what I call
the coexister. This relationality also extends to the human and/as machine nexus.
In resonance with this, caring aspects of interrelationships between human and
nonhuman caretaking devices are currently emphasized within posthuman
contributions to disability studies. Hence, existential media may be seen here as
grounding a disabled person in being, creating conditions for becoming other-
wise with technology. In the case of disabled cyborgs, according to for example
design scholar Laura Forlano, their bodies are both reliant upon and enabled by
technology, in a mutual relationship of caring.5 For mourners, by contrast, it is
their hearts that are chained to the machines. The technology is a lifeline and thus
a caregiver in itself.6 It is always on, and it offers constant consolation around the

3 Katrin Döveling, Ylva Hård af Segerstad, and Dick Kasperowski, “ ‘Safe Havens’: Online Peer

Grief Support and Emotion Regulation in Coping with the Loss of a Close Relative,” Conference
Paper, Sixth European Communication Conference, ECREA, 2016.
4 Suzanne Bost, “From Race/ Sex/Etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The Shifting
Matter of Chicana Feminism,” in Alaimo and Hekman, Material Feminisms, 342.
5 Laura Forlano describes how such assemblages allow her disabled cyborg body to function: “In

caring for myself, I am enlisted into a practice of actively participating in, maintaining, repairing
and caring for . . . multiple medical technologies (rather than using them passively).” In Kneese and
Hobart, “Radical Care,” 5. For a problematization, however, of the ableist assumptions that often
connect cyborgism to disability through the idea of technological ‘fixes’ that are imagined to create
wholeness, see Kafer’s critical engagement with Donna Haraway in Feminist, Queer, Crip, 103-128.
6 Pamela Roberts and Lourdes A. Vidal explored this aspect of mourning online in the early pre–

Web 2.0 context, but the development of the internet has made this an even more accentuated trait.
“Perpetual Care in Cyberspace: A Portrait of Memorials on the Web,” Omega: Journal of Death and
Dying, 40, no. 4 (2000): 57–76, https://doi.org/10.2190/3BPT-UYJR-192R-U969.
152 Digital Limit Situations

clock—the network itself never sleeps.7 Reconceiving social media as lifelines

of the internet in this way—that is, as care webs8—makes visible the fact that
caring media are also reliant upon embodied forms of connective copresence.
Such interdependencies with technology also pertain to bodies thrown into the
limit situation of illness. Here we encounter people who also choose to commu-
nicate about what they are going through—that is, severe sickness online. These
are voices at the limit.
Brita Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage argue in this context for a deep-felt
connection between mediation, vulnerability, and suffering, which demands a
sophisticated theorization. Mediation can engage us in the suffering, death, or
loss of the Other, motivating experiences of “feeling like” the suffering body. The
medium itself thus triggers affective experiences of shared vulnerability. When
media remediate the sick body, it is also given—notwithstanding its fragility and
weakness—agential clout in the world.9 In addition, and importantly, digital
media have themselves become technologies of vulnerability as they are consti-
tuted by connections of pain. Bodily vulnerability is thus part and parcel of con-
temporary affective mediation processes.10 Cancer blogs, for example, have this
capacity to become social forces, through their “powerful mediation of vulnera-
bility as a catalyst of interbodily affective involvement and activation.”11
As we will see, affective digitality is thus a key dimension of caring media, as
the networks have a clear role to play through their semiautonomous, viral, and
automated dimensions of stickiness, agency, and propulsion. But for scholarship
in the burgeoning field of death online research, which focalizes the posthuman
condition in a “thanatosensitive” manner, debates on affect that stress the proces-
sual, moving, and vital character of being also evoke several questions: What of
the end? What is the status of limits within the affective turn? And what can be
said about suffering and inevitable death—the grand interruption—in this lively
debate? In centering on death—as catalyzed in these practices of mourning and
sharing reports on ailments and disease—I hope also to problematize a particular
posthuman approach that describes death as overvalued in human existence.12

7 Amanda Lagerkvist, “The Internet Is Always Awake: Sensations, Sounds and Silences of the

Digital Grave,” in Lagerkvist, Digital Existence.

8 This resonates with activist Leah-Lakhshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha’s concept of care webs, a pro-

ject aiming to reveal “the often feminized and under-respected work of care. We’ll map what allows
us to ask for and give care well, and how ableism, racism, capitalism and sexism complicate who feels
worthy of care and who is expected to care.” https://brownstargirl.org/care-webs-experiments-in-col
lective-care/.
9 Timm Knudsen and Stage, Global Media, 37.
10 Ibid., 28.
11 Ibid., 32.
12 Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of ‘Life Itself ’ and New Ways of Dying,” in New

Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 201–218.
Caring Media 153

In order to probe lifeline communication in line with these interests, I will de-
velop my theoretical approach further in the next section, beginning with an
overview of the role of life in the turn to affect, scrutinizing its seeming neglect
of finitude and finally offering an alternative inspired by existential philosophy.

Between Life and Death

Within the recent intellectual currents of the affective turn, a centrality to “life
itself ” has been bestowed, and death has been willfully decentered. Buttressed by
new groundbreaking research in science and technology, the desire both within
and outside feminism was to push beyond social constructivism, and to remedy
the neglect of the enfleshed body in previous paradigms in the humanities and
social sciences.13 In a seminal article about affect, Nigel Thrift describes “good
theory” with reference to its distancing from mortality: “It has become increas-
ingly evident that the biological constitution of being . . . has to be taken into
account if performative force is ever to be understood, and in particular, the dy-
namics of birth (and creativity) rather than death.”14 Similarly, when assessing
important recent new materialist contributions in feminist science and tech-
nology studies and media philosophy, we find that life is all around. For instance,
in order to highlight the ever-accelerating speed of entanglements of biotech-
nologies, infotechnologies, and media, Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke propose
a “bits of life” metaphor as a follow-up to Donna Haraway’s cyborg.15 And Sarah
Kember and Joanna Zylinska shed light on mediation as vital process, stressing
not only the exuberance but also the importance of media and mediation, un-
derstood as being-in-and-becoming-with technology. Following Karen Barad,
they emphasize that mediations are material-discursive practices—that is, mate-
rial (re)configurations of the world through which worldly limits, qualities, and
meaning take shape. Discursive practices are “intra-actions” with the world—
that is, border-making processes without end, a continuous becoming. In that way
they are, according to Kember and Zylinska, life-giving. Mediation is life; it is
another term for life: “for being-in and emerging-with-the-world.”16
In the preceding examples one discerns a stress on, perhaps a celebration
of, the animated and interrelated forces of matter, media, subjects, bodies,
and things—an emphasis on the autopoiesis and vibrancy of materiality, and a
conception of life as generative process. The debate conjures up a world that is

13 Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect,”

Body & Society, 16, no. 1 (2010): 34, https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X09355231.

14 Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling,” 59, italics added.
15 Smelik and Lykke, Bits of Life.
16 Kember and Zylinska, Life after New Media, 23.
154 Digital Limit Situations

everywhere alive and in movement, processual and flowing: “In fact, it is evident
from new materialist writing that forces, energies, and intensities (rather than
substances) and complex, even random, processes (rather than simple, predict-
able states) have become the new currency.”17 As I apprehend it, in its stress on
ongoing processes, complex relations, and indeterminacy, the vitalist approach
may fail to recognize the universal absolutes and determining constants of death
and finitude. When vitality is emphasized, death sometimes seems entirely off
the radar; and when made visible—as, for example, in “The Politics of ‘Life Itself ’
and New Ways of Dying,” a key posthumanist intervention by Rosi Braidotti—it
is turned into a utopian abstraction.
Braidotti proposes a “postsecular affirmative ethics” to provide a social ho-
rizon of hope. Her ethics rethinks subjectivity in terms of “forces,” puts a wel-
come stress on bio-organic limits (bodies are mortal and can only take so much),
and proclaims that it “respects vulnerability.” But Braidotti goes on to under-
stand biopower “not only in the sense of the government of the living but also
with respect to practices of dying. By extension this means that our relationship
to pain, loss and practices of mourning needs to be reconsidered in biopolitical
terms.”18 This biopolitical reconception results in seeing death as “overrated” in
human existence.19 Posthumans will stoically approach it on a superindividual
level, soaring above and beyond human misconceptions about the importance of
our individual bodies, singular vulnerable selves, and overvalued species: “This
nonanthropocentric view expresses both a profound love for Life as a cosmic
force and the desire to depersonalize subjective life-and-death: This is just one
life, not my life. The life in ‘me’ does not answer my name: ‘I’ is just passing.”20
This is an astoundingly bloodless form of new materialism. While I thoroughly
agree with the criticism of the autonomous and rational subject and acknowl-
edge that humans are part of the biosphere as relational, affective, embodied, and
technological beings, I maintain it is problematic to eschew the subjectivity of
death and to truncate the depths of individual struggling and suffering. When
avoiding giving aggrieved individuals and tormented bodies their due consid-
eration, and in its coercive normative homily for moving to “the next stage,”21
the project may fail to produce a truly inclusive ethics. There is a clear risk that
new grand norms for being posthuman may become a straitjacket. The perspec-
tive is also at odds with the lived experiences of the death online field, which
have brought a series of spatial, temporal, social, and embodied expansions to
the realm of death and bereavement that already bespeak this so-called next

17 Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, 13.

18 Braidotti, “The Politics of Life,” 201.
19 Ibid., 212.
20 Ibid., 210.
21 Ibid., 214.
Caring Media 155

stage—through what is phenomenally there, in actuality.22 These are existential

givens currently appearing in a partially new guise; the abyss is enmeshed in our
technologized existence. This calls once more for revisiting classic existential
philosophy.
As existential philosophers have famously argued, it is through facing the re-
ality of our subjective finitude and the limits of our existence that we become
conscious of ourselves and our possibilities. As already discussed, for many
existential philosophers, recognizing our mortality is a prerequisite for living
an authentic life and for authentic action. In broadening beyond the existen-
tial preoccupation with being-toward-death, I place the main emphasis in line
with Jaspers, on the frailty of human existence in general. This is manifest in
experiences of loss, ill health, and suffering, which in this tradition are also con-
ceived of as sources of fecundity.23 As we have already seen, for Jaspers, the limit
situation—of loss, death, crisis, guilt, conflict, and love—is vital, since it requires
that the individual human being seize it, thereby entailing the possibility of real-
izing her Existenz. There is something definite and defining about the limit situ-
ations and the ways in which they call upon Existenz “to decide its destiny,”24 and
about the ways in which they both allow us and force us to become ourselves by
entering with open eyes into them.25 There is also a radical openness in the limit
situation. Thornhill addresses this openness in terms of “the unconditioned”:

The category of the unconditioned also produces an important theory of ac-

tion, through which Jaspers anticipates many ideas of Hannah Arendt. In limit
situations, Jaspers argues that human existence can be radically self-creating
and transcendentally spontaneous, for it can interpret itself at its own limits,
and thus respond directly to its primary metaphysical possibilities for transfor-
mation and newness.26

Finitude and vulnerability can also be constructive and mobilizing on a cul-

tural level—for collectives, groups, and societies. As the activist Leah-Lakhshmi
Piepzna-Samarsinha similarly concludes in her blog, where she discusses the in-
tricacy and integrity of her childhood trauma:

My abuse isn’t something to resolve, a number on a pain scale, a simple wound

that can go away with Neosporin. My trauma is an opera, a gorgeous and tough

22 Cf. Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish, “Beyond the Grave.”

23 Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death; Jaspers, Philosophy II; Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and
Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1961/1991).
24 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 185.
25 Ibid., 179, translation modified.
26 Thornhill, Karl Jaspers, 24.
156 Digital Limit Situations

dress made out of my best scars, a seed library, a Gutenberg Bible, a thun-
derstorm to climb and buck in a small plane, a mountain range, a supernova
to map.
It’s trauma. It’s also a resource. A resource that isn’t just an individual one,
but one that connects me to other survivors and their collective knowledge.
Knowledge that we have used to survive, and that we could potentially use to
change the world, end rape culture, and create new forms of healing, family,
communication, and justice.27

Again, individual, embodied hurt, collective hurt, and the world are linked
through testimony on the internet that may, as Timm Knudsen and Stage argue,
engage others and set something important into motion. In a very interesting
contribution to new materialist feminism, Suzanne Bost has shown how the
vulnerable body can serve as a more inclusive point of departure for produc-
tive political agency, beyond the identity politics of gender, ethnicity, race, and
so on. The experience of vulnerability can unite people who hitherto have not
realized they have anything in common. In shared vulnerability, wounds open
out to others, and they make us present before each other.28 For Bost, a new
“ethics of care” can emerge based on crossing boundaries between people who
have in common their mutual recognition of being dependent and vulnerable.29
Inspired by Bost, and by placing coexisters in a round, at the center, I will in
the following sketch out the contours of an ethics stemming from those bodies
that are hurting, aching, bleeding, dying, and connecting—on the lifelines of the
internet.

Lifelines of the Internet

In this section, I will delve into the notion of the lifeline and its various meanings
in the materials, in order to show how shared vulnerability online may offer a
basis for individual and collective support, solidarity, ethics, and agency, while
also disclosing how life and death are related in digital existence. The lifeline
appears in four different yet overlapping forms: it is salvific; it offers humani-
tarian presence; it is mundane and material; and it constitutes an ongoing project.
In what follows I will carve out what these signify, one by one.
In the sharing of useful information on practical matters concerning the law,
money, or other challenges in the wake of loss, the NGO VIMIL constitutes a

27 https://w ww.vice.com/en/article/bj9gpm/not-over-it-not-fixed-and-living-a-life-worth-liv

ing-whatever-gets-you-through.
28 Anzaldúa, cited in Bost, “From Race/Sex/Etc.,” 353.
29 Ibid., 360.
Caring Media 157

lifeline for its members. In interviews, however, mourners often use the con-
cept of the lifeline to describe an even more urgent sense in which VIMIL’s so-
cial media group has become essential. Without the group, some of the women
wonder if they would be alive today. Hence the lifeline is first of all salvific. In
interviews and other materials from VIMIL, it is stressed over and again that
the group is a literal form of rescue. Take the example of retiree Anna, a sixty-
two-year-old member of VIMIL who unexpectedly lost her husband three years
ago. When asked what the Facebook group meant to her, she elaborates on the
meaning of the lifeline:

It may sound harsh, but I think that I would barely have survived without this
Facebook group. . . . I was so determined from the day one not to take any
drugs that were sedating, no sleeping pills. So I did a lot of things to get some
kind of—to relieve the stress in my body. So I walked a lot, as much as I could,
from the beginning. I did not manage well, so I took a lot of treatments. I took
healing, all kinds of things to diminish the . . . not anxiety, but there were so
many feelings that I can’t even begin to describe them. But then I discovered
that when I joined the VIMIL Facebook group, you could just write and let
it out.30

Anna describes writing a diary as important early on in the process of mourning,

and Facebook provided an exemplary outlet for that. For Anna there was a vis-
ceral aspect of writing about the loss, and a felt need to empty herself in writing
both online and in a diary: “just to empty the body and the head—out, out,
out. . . . When I joined the Facebook group, I discovered that there, too, you could
do that.”
It is critical to note that, as these technologies assume the role of literal and
potential salvations, their importance increases irrepressibly. But for some, the
meetings of the support group offline are equally essential. Margareta, a thirty-
nine-year-old nurse who is a devoted member of VIMIL both on Facebook and
in physical space, argued that for many members, the importance of the on-
line support group as a lifeline is particularly strong during the initial period of
mourning. It is also especially essential for those who, because they live in rural
areas or are bound to the home for various reasons, have few other everyday so-
cial contacts. For Margareta herself, VIMIL was the only option:

There was no support to be gained from society. VIMIL was like a sanc-
tuary. . . . Everyone understood what it felt like, and you did not have to explain

30 Interview, August 2015.

158 Digital Limit Situations

or struggle to make them understand. You were met by warmth and compas-
sion. If I had not found VIMIL, I don’t think I could have sorted it out.31

But vulnerability can both unite and tear apart. Sometimes a loss is accompanied by
social loss. Bloggers bear witness to relationships breaking due to severe or terminal
illness. The crisis redraws the social landscape of both mourners and the sick. Old
friends disappear, but new ones arrive who completely understand the nature of the
ordeal. And yet their interactions are filled with respect for the inherent alterity that
the experience entails. This means lifeline communication materializes the “proper
distance” that the media scholar Roger Silverstone advocated as the desired ethics
for cyberspace, which entails concern for the other without assimilation.32 The
commentary fields of bloggers as well as interviews with mourners show the im-
portance of finding peers with similar experiences of exposure, in a meeting place
where the norm is empathic communication in a spirit of ethical solemnity and im-
mediacy.33 Hence the lifeline signifies, second, humanitarian charitable presence,
which is about receiving and giving support to others in similar situations, in an
accepting, nonjudgmental atmosphere. On its home page, the NGO refers to itself
using the notion of the lifeline precisely in the context of social support: “VIMIL is
often called the lifeline, which has proven to be a very suitable epithet. Many lifelong
friendships have been forged through VIMIL” (www.vimil.se). Here it is the actual
people who bond that constitute the lifeline.
The support need not be complex or verbose. To know that someone is lis-
tening is often enough. As Paula, a fifty-one-year-old cancer blogger says in
a post: “Feel my invisible hand in your hand. Together we are strong.”34 Or as
Margareta puts it: “A small heart is enough. You have been seen.”35 The lifeline
is there, allowing for those who wish to simply pour out their feelings, without
expecting long responses. Hence it is often just about the small hearts, and they
suffice, says Eva-Britt, a fifty-five-year-old entrepreneur and VIMIL member,
mourning her husband.36 There is in that respect a digital instantiation of af-
fect—in the sense of an ability to affect and be affected—operating on multiple
levels of sensation beyond mere linguistics.37 And for Anna, the communication
is likened to a big bosom:

31 Email interview, November 2016.

32 Roger Silverstone, “Proper Distance: Towards an Ethics for Cyberspace,” in Digital Media
Revisited: Theoretical and Conceptual Innovations in Digital Domains, ed. Gunnar Liestøl, Andrew
Morrison, and Terje Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 469–490.
33 See Mia Lövheim, “Negotiating Empathic Communication,” Feminist Media Studies, 13, no. 4

(2013): 613–628, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2012.659672.

34 Blog post, April 13, 2016.
35 Interview, November 2015.
36 Interview, April 2016.
37 This aspect of affect was stressed by Brian Massumi in early contributions to these debates.

Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).
Caring Media 159

And you got sympathy instantly! Everything from just a hug to someone
writing an even longer post to tell you, “I have also been through this,” and you
know it just describes their situation. It was like a mirror and a big bosom, and
you got hugs and it was all I needed.38

In fact, lifeline communication often follows a template format. This occurs both
through comments and emoticons. These express warmheartedness, often by
simple means, and convey a sense of just being there. This relates to J. D. Peters’s
theory of communication. For Peters, as we saw previously, meaningful commu-
nication is not reducible to the exchange of information (the transmission of a
particular message or content); nor does it necessarily imply a narrative. Peters
stresses instead, in resonance with Jaspers, the importance and value of commu-
nicative breakdown, and of simply being and being there—that is, of meaningful
presence. Where Peters emphasizes the value of physical presence and proximity
in a world of media saturation, I propose to further substantiate his position by
attending to the affective aspects of being there together, for one another, online.
One of the key gratifications for online mourners is simply to know that someone
is present, as well as to know it is possible to connect should the need make itself
felt. Eva-Britt explains the meanings of the lifeline, while stressing the impor-
tance of the physical encounters in her support group:

AL: Are the physical meetings the most important thing for you?
EB: Yes . . . and at the same time to simply know that they were there, so that
I could go there, sit down, and read what others thought, or what it was
like . . . and the thing that’s often discussed, the sense of it being there around
the clock. . . whatever the time . . . even if I did not go there in the middle of
the night. But I knew that I could go there and sit down to read or write or
do whatever I want. . . .Yes, you think about a lifeline, something to keep you
hanging in there, not hanging yourself with (laughter). . . . It’s an enormous
support. . . . But you choose yourself what kind of support you want, how
much, and when. I can choose myself; when I’m not in the mood for talking to
someone, I don’t. But I know they are there.

Anna describes an ethical praxis that has evolved tacitly, through which someone
in the group always takes on the rotating role of just being there, and confirming
her presence. And in a way, it is enough to know that the lifeline “is there all the
time.” If you are not up for it, moreover, as Eva-Britt also underlines, “You can
choose not to talk to people.”39 In Levinasian terms, one might say that this type

38 Interview, August 2015.

39 Interview, April 2016.
160 Digital Limit Situations

of digital communication—with the “other” in the shape of a connective “face”—

does make a demand on coexisters to act, but also to respect inaction, recipro-
cally. Hence, lifeline communication also reveres the very act of switching off
and withdrawing.40 What matters is the very possibility of connection, and the
space allowed for disconnection. The option of retreating into silence is thus key
to fulfillments of lifeline communication. Disconnection can be, importantly, a
mode of care. The dimension of remaining in some kind of control is also essen-
tial here.
A sense of a lack of control, by contrast, dominates the surreal experience of
receiving a cancer diagnosis or news of death. The grand interruption defies un-
derstanding, resists words, and leaves the aggrieved out in the cold. Hence life-
line communication is yielded by, and makes sense in relation to, shortcomings
within and even breakdowns of communication itself. It is therefore a form in
which interruptions of narrative are as inevitable as they are meaningful and eth-
ically beneficial, and it is only through the breakdown of communication that
we can break through into realizing our human Existenz41—that is, the poten-
tiality of becoming authentic—which is never about wholeness: “Existenz is the
unintelligible, standing by and against other Existenzen breaking up every whole
and never reaching any real totality.”42 And yet realizing one’s Existenz is both an
individual and collective achievement, since it involves transcendence: a relation
to the other.
When the world looks different and must be managed and understood
anew, the digital lifeline assists in that effort. Here, a third rendition of the life-
line concerns the mundane, material, and haptic dimensions of this device.43
Grabbing the lifeline in trying to live through the ordeal will mean, in a mun-
dane and unpretentious fashion in digital existence, to link oneself to routine as
a coping strategy for keeping despair at bay, by using media as tools and crafts
in writing, photographing, and sharing.44 This is given expression in cancer
blogs and Instagram accounts that involve selfies. These are taken at hospitals,
when entering a specialist clinic, when going through tests, or being given che-
motherapy. The selfie secures and anchors the person in the new and unknown
terrain—the hospital, the state of ailment—that the stricken women have been
forced to enter. These selfies are often uploaded onto the blog and/or Instagram

40 Cf. Amit Pinchevski, “Levinas as a Media Theorist,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 47, no. 1 (2014): 67.
41 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 51.
42 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 62.
43 Hence, as Paul Frosh has illuminated, all engagements with media are always in themselves

embodied: media enable embodied realignment and palpable tangibilities in multisensory environ-
ments. Poetics of Digital Media, 30–31.
44 Lisa Sand, “När döden utmanar livet: Om existentiell kris och livslänkar som coping i pallia-

tive vård” [When Death Challenges Life: On Existential Crisis and Life Links as Coping in Palliative
Care], Socialmedicinsk Tidskrift, 1 (2013): 140–146.
Caring Media 161

straightaway, sending a message to the world—“Look what is happening to

me”—while simultaneously situating the person in the world. When followers,
family, and friends notice this, they respond by sending short empathic, en-
couraging messages such as “hugs” or emoji (hearts, smileys, etc.). The selfie is a
bodily “invitation to distant others” to make similar responses, incarnating what
Paul Frosh calls “a gestural economy of affection.”45 While those involved remain
physically distant, selfies afford mutual validation through embodied connec-
tivity. This once more pinpoints the existentially meaningful sense of just being
there, à la Peters, in phatic communion rather than exchanging or transmitting
any clear-cut content or long-winded narration.46
Moreover, the mobile, the iPad, and other technologies have essential haptic
functions, since you can literally hold onto them while keeping yourself occupied
when the fear of the unknown threatens to invade. Coexisters develop an impas-
sioned relationship to mobile devices, which come to symbolize safety.47 Sherry
Turkle describes them as “relation artefacts” that are always on and always on us,
and through which “the tethered self ” emerges.48 This haptic quality also relates
to the processual continuity with which the devices are employed. Fourth, then,
the notion of a lifeline is evoked as a designation of an ongoing project. The life-
line is made up of an occupation and a purpose in life. Cancer blogger Caroline
describes running as such a life-sustaining project or lifeline: “Running kindled
a spark and a zest for life in me. Running has literally got me standing upright
after surgery and depression. Without running, I don’t know how I would feel
or live today.” Throughout her entire cancer treatment, she continued to run, to
envision a goal (such as a new contest), and to log her training results online.49
She and another blogger in a similar situation say they were running “for life.” As
long as she runs she keeps going, and she cannot die. By focusing on what you
can manage, what you can do, and what is not hurting, you can keep death at bay.
Similarly, blogging and logging are life-sustaining projects: as long as you keep
writing, updating, photographing, and uploading, you can’t die! Both blogging
and Facebooking can in this way keep the person going: she stays alive through
the medium. A life-threatening experience like a severe illness can be life-de-
fining, and for many life will never be the same, even if hope returns:

Today, I finally realized that I could have been dead now. It’s difficult to write
it down, difficult to just think about it, but I have to. Can’t hide anymore. The

45 Frosh, Poetics of Digital Media, 114–137.

46 Vincent Miller, “New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture,” Convergence, 14, no. 4
(2008): 387–400, https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856508094659.
47 Cf. Kathleen M. Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth, Haunting Hands: Mobile Media Practices and

Loss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

48 Turkle, Alone Together, 171–186.
49 Runners World, April 30, 2016.
162 Digital Limit Situations

chemotherapy is over and it’s time to start the rehabilitation, but I know there is
no turning back. I can never be the same Jenny I was before.50

There is no way back to what was before; the life you once lived does not exist
any longer. Something fundamental has changed. The survivor is forced to create
a new life, which happens partially through mediation. For some, however, the
ongoing project is to record, mediate, and communicate until the very end.
The technology constitutes a final lifeline, filled with the struggles of the body.
A couple of days before dying, blogger Lisa wrote: “It doesn’t feel so good that the
body is giving in more and more. It’s one thing really replacing the other, and the
‘good days’ are more and more conspicuous by their absence. That’s all for now.”51
In her last posting a few days later, entitled “Goodnight,” she described the pains
and hardships of the day:

This day has really been horrendous! Have had such pains, difficulties in oxy-
genating enough, have had a temperature, and felt bad. Have had visitors that
I have not been able to receive. So you can say this has been one of my worst
days so far. Have either been in too much pain or been knocked out by all the
painkillers. Now this evening I’ve had moments that felt a little better.

Perhaps writing the post contributed to this momentary relief for Lisa? Perhaps
it was in this moment that mediation was life? Her post represents the most car-
dinal existential message of all, as simple as it is harsh: I write to you, therefore
I am (still). As Lisa’s final words online illustrate, using the technology of blog-
ging as a lifeline is thus very concretely a matter of life and death—of existence.
Lifeline communication is ultimately about more than coping with or writing
about life: it is about living life in the shadow of death or illness, even as the
end nears.
Hence social media in the shape of lifelines constitute, from the perspective of
coexisters, both the humdrum rhythm-of-life links that provide a sense of exis-
tential security—however transient and limited—and vital tools of existence in
the limit situation. They enable meaningful connective presence and allow for
diversity and silences. But it must also be noted that these technologies imply
ambivalences. Sometimes there is insecurity in relation to the vexed issue of who
is ultimately “watching,” and where these lifeline communications may wind up.
Anna, for instance, frets about whether VIMIL can guarantee personal integrity
in its use of Facebook, and she raises several questions about copyright.52 Lovisa,

50 Jenny, age twenty-nine, cancer blogger, March 7, 2015.

51 Lisa, March 2011.
52 Interview, August 2015.
Caring Media 163

a sixty-year-old VIMIL member working in the tourism industry who lost her
partner to cancer, stresses (not without ambivalence) that for some mourners the
online environment “has become their life, not just a lifeline, but life actually.”53
The lifeline is thus literal, involving risks for mourners of getting stuck: “But if
you read about this pain that some people express so vividly, and you’re there
writing and being active, even if several years have passed, I believe you don’t
really get over it. You’re stuck. . . . I think you have to make a leap.” Hence, as al-
ready discussed in relation to risks of getting stuck in grief and trapped by the
technologies themselves, the technologies afford both hazards and possibilities.
Mourners will be thrown into the digital limit situation, whereupon they latch
onto the lifeline—only to be digitally thrown, and thrown anew, in the face of
uncertainties as well as possibilities.

Living and Dying with Technology

“These are authentic meetings,” says Anna. The support group, which she joined
quite early on in the grief process, literally saved her life. Eventually Anna be-
came a committed member of the board and a support person herself. One of
the most important things about these communities, she says, is that people
are prone to cut to the chase in their utmost grief and despair, to speak about
what really matters without clandestine motives, and far beyond the taken-for-
granted carefreeness and buoyancy of nonafflicted contexts. It seems, then, that
these meetings, connections, exchanges, and encounters represent a “cut of the
real.” Something takes place here that can only be accounted for from within
the authenticity of the moment itself. There is both a subjective sense of truth in
Anna’s claim about an absolute alterity and a significance to these connections
in the heaves of mourning, while they also occur on the leading social media
platform or in real-life encounters always deeply entangled with the digital in
different ways. In both respects, the strong sense of being there for one another
applies. This is a form of networked solidarity that is ultimately based in bodies
and embodiment, and in their mutual recognition of pain. Existential media as
caring media thus also speak to and about our shared vulnerability and deep
relationality. Caring media are infused with and come about as a consequence of
a sense of longing for connection with others in pain, on a level exceeding what
many of the afflicted individuals have experienced before in life.
In this chapter, I set out by discussing how the tenet of life, not death, has be-
come common coin in the turns to affect in the new materialism. The focus on
life does have an important bearing on the technologies and practices discussed

53 Interview, April 2016.

164 Digital Limit Situations

in this chapter: those involved in lifeline communication. At the same time

I showed that, in the digital limit situation, the realms of illness and death are
equally constitutive parts of being in and becoming with the digital world. The
point is that technologies become lifelines precisely because of fragility, trauma,
wounds, imminent death, or sudden loss. Hence, when digital mediations mold
and coconstruct the experiences of suffering, death, and bereavement, there is
reason to complicate the theorization of mediation as simply on the side of life.
In effect, as much as interruption is constitutive of connection, the grand inter-
ruption of the limit situation is what actually generates “becomings.” From the
vantage point of the hurting, dying, and vulnerable coexisters after the grand
interruption, the salvific, mundane, haptic, and processual lifelines of the in-
ternet are life-sustaining as well as life-changing, exemplifying a being-in-and-
emerging-with-digital-technology. Hence, beyond being vital simply in the
generative or exuberant sense, existential media are even more significant: they
are momentous. This also enables movement toward a media philosophy that
embraces the fundamental role of death as a given within our media lives and
ontologies, and which recognizes the simultaneous role of digital technologies
for enabling, saving, giving, and recreating life in its shadow. In conclusion,
I suggest, consciously reiterating Kierkegaard’s wisdom, that life (mediation) and
death (limit and interruption) coconstitute each other. Or to put it differently, ex-
istential media here reveal both the finitude and vitality of our being.
In sum, on the lifelines of the internet and in the online sharing of vulner-
ability, digital technology itself plays a vital role—for mourners, for the sick,
and for others. Hence, for some people in dire straits, the internet seems to offer
salvation and a refuge; a quality of the medium that relates to its arguably all-
encompassing role as steadying and offering something to lean on, hold onto,
and grasp. Media in the middle and at the limit become railings with which to
steady ourselves as we move about and along the lines. But informants also stress,
as we saw in the previous chapter, that the lifeline actualizes debilitating risks of
becoming stuck in grief.
In this context, lifeline communication insinuates a key dimension that
explains why digital media are of existential import, while posing particular ex-
istential burdens—at the same time. Acknowledging the vitalizing role of dig-
ital technologies in the shadow, or as the outcome, of grand interruptions, will
also serve to upgrade the existential. The stress on being there in meaningful
copresence thus incorporates these forms of technological mediation—at least
to a certain degree and in some circumstances. The examples signpost the need
for attending both to affective movements and to lived experiences of shared vul-
nerability, in and through digital mediation. The digital limit situation of death—
the grand interruption—allows for the perception of important meanings of
mediation, from the horizon of those individuals who in the wake of loss or ill
Caring Media 165

health stand before the abyss, and who live and die with the technology. Our
digital media are existential media in and through shared vulnerability online.
It is through the affective yet meaningful encounters with others that one can
encounter the depths within, and the depths of transcendence beyond. Lifeline
communication thereby adds force to the enduring existential claim about
human potentiality as expressed by Jaspers: “I and thou, divided in existence, are
one in transcendence.”54
When coexisters hold onto the lifeline—that is, onto the network and each
other in mediated copresence and through embodied connectivity—their shared
vulnerability transcends the limits and establishes new ones: media frames that
shield and soothe. Something emerges. It is a digitally mediated, simple promise
in the darkest of moments. It is the promise of being there, for one another—on-
line. Affective forms of caring for beings on the (life)line are thus triggered by the
frailty of bodies and the inexorability of death. But even more importantly, life-
line communication exemplifies major aspects of existential communication, in
which breakdown and interruption are not contra to, but inherent in and condu-
cive to ethical engagement as practice. Speechlessness may be both the medium
and the message. It can also constitute a particular form of care. I have discerned
this in the emphasis on the potential for connection as meaningful charitable
presence—through emoticons and simple validations—as well as in the respect
for interruptions and silences.
Communication at the very limits of existence broadens the existential reg-
ister beyond the habitual. Here we encounter, in full-fledged, hybrid form, a
blend of the extraordinary, the techno-spiritual, and the numinous. Jaspers sees
communication as our destiny, and transcendence as achievable in communi-
cation only. In the next chapter, such aspects of being human will be parsed as
representing existential strivings in relating to the dead and reaching out across
the abyss in the limit situation of grief and commemoration. Cuts of the real here
border on the thresholds of reality, as transcendent media open out to an else-
where of ultimate familiarity and otherness, in internet heaven.

54 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 65.

7
Transcendent Media
Caring for the Dead, Relating at the Threshold

AL: Can you describe in a little more detail how you know that Niklas can hear
you on the digital memorial and not by the physical grave?
Sara: It’s very difficult to explain, but I think the written word becomes so def-
inite, it remains, but spoken words disappear into nothingness (an empty
void). They land nowhere, although sometimes I’m thinking he can actually
hear my thoughts . . . and it feels good to think that way.1

Sara has mourned her brother Niklas online for over ten years. In chapter 5, we
learned that she built a web memorial on a home page in memory of her dead
brother, who died in an accident on a vacation trip abroad. Writing a diary there
directly to him has meant a great deal for her in her grief process, although she
also thinks of him and thereby talks to him that way. When she has written to him
online, however, she feels that her words have landed. Rickard, who lost his son
Emil in a skiing accident a few years ago, testifies to the importance of the Fathers’
Group he belongs to in the Gothenburg area. He talks about the need to give back
by supporting others who had been recently afflicted. In passing, right after our
interview was finished, he mentions the role of the digital grave, as that site where
his relationship with his dead son is easiest to maintain: “I just feel I can connect
so much easier with Emil on Facebook than by the grave.”2 The feelings expressed
by Sara and Rickard corroborate what has been observed in other contexts. Elaine
Kasket cites a British mourner who said similarly: “I feel she will see it if it’s on
her wall. If I were to leave a letter for her at the gravesite . . . when I can’t see what
I wrote to her, I feel like she won’t be able to see it too.”3 There is the permanence of
words, retrievable on the web, which makes the communication seem successful.
Hence, as has been noted by several scholars, talking directly to the dead in
online mourning environments is widespread. People speak to them in writing

1Interview, April 2016.

2Interview, November 2017.
3 Elaine Kasket, “Continuing Bonds in the Age of Social Networking: Facebook as a Modern-Day

Medium,” Bereavement Care, 31, no. 2 (2012): 66, https://doi.org/10.1080/02682621.2012.710493.

Existential Media. Amanda Lagerkvist, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925567.003.0008
Transcendent Media 167

messages on their walls, in commentary fields, and in blogs.4 Typically it is next of

kin, close relatives, and friends who set up these spaces and post there, but some-
times this involves strangers who write to the dead person as well.5 Importantly,
today the dead are not conceived of as being in a complete elsewhere, as has been
the norm within the Protestant tradition. The dead are instead envisioned in fa-
miliar or longed-for places, and as doing things similar to what they did in life,
which brings them closer to the living.6 There is also an explicit belief among
some mourners that the dead are getting the message on Facebook or on other
memorial sites. As Tony Walter, a sociologist of death, puts it: “Offline the veil be-
tween the living and the dead is particularly thin in certain liminal spaces—the
household altar, the Eastern Orthodox church . . . the Western cemetery. Online,
the veil may hardly exist; online, the dead are no longer sequestrated.”7 Hence,
for the bereaved parents I met, and for many others who are mourning on the in-
ternet, the dead are in fact in that familiar yet in-between space we can only par-
tially know, but connect to and inhabit all the time: they are online. Importantly,
imagined as angels—not souls or ghosts—they are on the receiving end of our
communications.8 The digital dead are simply online, awake and watching; like

4 Talking to the dead occurs in memorial groups on social media sites, on blogs, and in web

memorials on personal home pages, in closed support groups for the bereaved, and on sites where one
may post condolences and light a digital candle. The prevalence of after-death communication online
is not new. Scholars have been highlighting this for about a decade. See, for example, Jed Brubaker
and Janet Vertesi, “Death and the Social Network,” in Proceedings from CHI Workshop on Death and
the Digital (Atlanta: Citeseer, 2010), 3; Erin Staley, “Messaging the Dead: Social Network Sites and
Theologies of Afterlife,” in Digital Death: Mortality and Beyond in the Digital Age, ed. Christopher M.
Moreman and A. David Lewis (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014), 9–22.
5 Margaret Gibson, “YouTube and Bereavement Vlogging: Emotional Exchange between

Strangers,” Journal of Sociology, 52, no. 4 (2016): 631–645, https://doi.org/10.1177/144078331

5573613.
6 Kellaher and Worpole, cited in Connor Graham, Michael Arnold, Tamara Kohn, and Martin

Gibbs, “Gravesites and Websites: A Comparison of Memorialization,” Visual Studies, 30, no. 1
(2015): 38, https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586x.2015.996395. See also Anders Gustavsson’s study of
online memorial websites in Sweden and Norway: “The concept that the deceased is somewhere in
heaven is very common. There she or he can meet with others who have died and live together with
them. . . . Existence in heaven is thus considered to be very similar to that on earth.” Gustavsson fur-
ther finds a widespread belief in the possibilities of communicating with the dead online.Cultural
Studies of Death and Dying in Scandinavia (Oslo: Novus, 2011), 147.
7 Tony Walter, “The Dead Who Become Angels: Bereavement and Vernacular Religion in the 21st

Century,” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying, 73, no. 1 (2016): 16, https://doi.org/10.1177/00302
22815575697.
8 Scholars have stressed that the dead online are often depicted as angels. Tony Walter

writes: “Angels, unlike souls, have wings, traversing the boundary between heaven and earth, be-
tween life and death; and unlike souls locked up in heaven, angels can read social media posts. Thus
technological development affords a new space for, if not creedal faith, then spiritual discourse.”
Walter, What Death Means Now, 105. This theme is furthermore visible in popular culture in the re-
enchanted West, which is overpopulated by angels, vampires, and other dead and undead creatures.
See Tony Walter, “Angels Not Souls: Popular Religion in the Online Mourning for British Celebrity
Jade Goody,” Religion, 41, no. 1 (2011): 29–51, https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2011.553138;
Walter, “Dead Who Become Angels,” 16; Christopher Partridge, The Re-enchantment of the West,
2 vols. (London: T&T Clark International, 2004 and 2005). This can also be understood as a form
168 Digital Limit Situations

the network itself, they are always there around the clock. They are connected to,
and there is a sense of immediate and full connection.
On the contemporary Swedish internet, speaking to the dead online may
further take the shape of eulogies. The following example is a series of voices
mourning a childhood friend. These excerpts stem from a thread appearing on a
public memorial site, set up by the funerary sector:

I don’t get it. I have no idea what happened to you. How you passed. We lost
touch lately, but you were my best friend in elementary school. In (name of city
deleted). Despite this, I have to say I was deeply affected when I heard you are
gone. I really hope you are in a much better place. Where you are now. Rest in
peace! (Sabina)
Johanna, my darling fighter and friend! I can’t believe it’s true that I will
never see you again. But I hope we meet again in heaven ❤ (Maria)
I can hear your gorgeous laughter within, and I feel warm inside . . . I know
you are the strongest and most lovely star in the sky waking over your loved
ones . . . you are the most beautiful angel in the Kingdom of Heaven.!! You are
missed. (Nenne)9

This thread represents several features belonging to the contemporary practice

of talking to the dead online. When their personalities are praised through after-
death communication, the dead are given homage. There is one posting about
seeing each other again in the afterlife in an embodied reunion, which can be
interpreted as a form of vernacular religiosity or a post-Christian sentiment.10
Or it may simply be a way of resorting to and using whatever linguistic, techno-
logical, or other means available to the coexister, in the cultural context of her ex-
istential striving.11 Despite the alleged widespread secularism in Sweden, there

of vernacular religiosity. Studies have shown that mourners feel the internet itself enables a connec-
tion to the beyond, to “heaven” and the sacred. See, for example, Nina R. Jakobi and Simone Reiser,
“Grief 2.0: Exploring Virtual Cemeteries,” in Internet and Emotions, ed. Tova Benski and Eran Fisher
(London: Routledge, 2014). As discussed by two sociologists of religion, Dick Houtman and Stef
Aupers, the sacred itself has been relocated in late modernity to the digital and to the self. Religions
of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital (Leiden: Brill, 2010). These features
also pertain to the specificities of digital time and timelessness—that is, to “digital eternity.” Michael
C. Kearl, a sociologist of death, relates this to what he calls the immortalist zeitgeist in Western culture
as displayed in the phenomenon of the digital dead. “The Proliferation of Postselves in American
Civic and Popular Cultures,” Mortality, 15, no. 1 (2010): 47–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/1357627090
3537591.

9 Condolence book https://www.minnesrummet.se, retrieved January 16, 2015.

10 David Thurfjell, Det gudlösa folket: De postkristna svenskarna och religionen (Stockholm:
Norstedts, 2019).
11 Cf. Peter Horsfield, “Rethinking the Study of ‘Religion’ and Media from an Existential

Perspective,” Journal of Religion, Media and Digital Culture, 7 (2018): 50–66, https://doi.org/10.1163/
25888099-00701004.
Transcendent Media 169

are also, nota bene, references to angels and to heaven. There is the strong pre-
sumption that the dead girl is awake, that she possesses some kind of agency, and
that she is silently watching or hearing. Hence, and importantly, the dead person
is believed to be somewhere else right now. She is an angel existing in another
realm, but with a connection.

From Vernacular Voices and Sacrilegious Scenarios

to Bodies Setting Borders

This chapter remains within the limit situation of loss, with a focus on contempo-
rary vernacular expressions of after-death communication as an important aspect
of caring for the dead in today’s society. At the same time, however, it pits these
practices against the fact that they belong to the broader emergence of a new cul-
tural form: the digital afterlife. In the digital limit situation, the transcendence in-
dustry mines this very realm of ultimate loss and longing. This presents a somewhat
unnerving scenario. Even as your name may have been spoken (or typed) for the
last time, in your digital afterlife you remain in eternal perpetuation. Your digital
“lights” are on, shining throughout seemingly eternal networks. Some links and
platforms from the era of Web 2.0 are alive, some are dead; but even so your web me-
morial remains somewhere in circuits of data that contain your textual and visual
remnants. If your survivors can afford it, your digital remains are then scraped and
you are recreated and resurrected robotically. You will never really die. And when
you are in bereavement, you move about the world supported by your digital tools
of existence, holding onto the all-pervasive digital dead whose memorials follow
you everywhere, protracted in time and space. Their digital bodies of substitution
remain as awake as the network itself, buzzing you, offering to chat with you around
the clock. The dead have thus also safeguarded, premortem, their postmortem pres-
ence in your life: you are receiving automated messages from the grave, and you are
interacting with the avatar bodies of the AI dead, who may evolve and learn. Hence,
since the end has somehow been ended by media, you face the task of mourning
in and through media that aspire to a full re-presencing of the departed. This is all
good, is it not? Or is something missing?
This scenario, as sacrilegious or uncanny as it may seem, is in some circles
of AI developers far from remote.12 Such a project seeks to transcend, enhance,
and expand the leeway of the human beyond all limits. At once it makes our
embodied state of being irrelevant for our understanding of what a person is.

12 See, for example, https://qz.com/896207/death-technology-will-allow-grieving-people-to-

bring-back-their-loved-ones-from-the-dead-digitally/ and https://medium.com/s/when-robots-

rule-the-world/can-bots-help-us-deal-with-grief-3de488cae96.
170 Digital Limit Situations

In the transhumanist imaginary, the human body is made altogether archaic: a

thing of the past.13 But most importantly, from this vantage point, the digital af-
terlife is also an instantiation of imaginaries of transcending tech, in which media
offer a cure for our failing bodies and limited beings. This occurs in the con-
text, moreover, of powerful tech companies with metaphysical aspirations.
Hence, spawning fantasies about limitlessness (the digital records all, predicts
all, and connects effortlessly), total recall (the digital remembers all and is fully
present), and disembodiment (the digital never dies), this mythology entails a
masculinist distance from bodies. It belongs to a long-standing utopian dream
of leaving the meat and the flesh behind, of communicating via ethereal forms
of immaterial contact.14 In many ways, the digital afterlife reiterates the mind-
body dualism anew. Some of these debaters, particularly in the transhumanist
camp, even argue that technologies may allow for transcending the finite, corpo-
real fact of human life. Transhumanist projects thereby reflect what critics such
as N. Katherine Hayles have long argued about cybernetics: that it represents a
myth of disembodied masculinist selfhood.15
In his cultural history of mortal remains, Thomas W. Laqueur makes a forceful
argument for the unrivaled significance of the materiality of the dead body in
Western culture. He furthermore argues that the essential work of the dead in
any society, and across time, is to set the borders of the social world: “The rec-
ognition of death and of the dead—that special liminal category of the human,”
he argues, is “a civilizational ground zero: neither just biological nor just cultural
but a mark of their boundary.”16 Hence for Laqueur, the body matters greatly in
culture by virtue of its significance in human death practices. The way we care for
the dead is foundational for our humanity. Following Laqueur, we may ask: what
can the disembodied digital afterlife reveal about the borders of our world? What
kind of cultural work can the digital dead accomplish, as they are merely visual

13 The goal is to bring us back to life after death, through cybernetic download, data mining,

and a recomposing of our persons. The pledge is to immortalize humans through digital tech-
nology: the digital self can become eternal. In transhumanist fantasies about enhancement,
humans are envisioned as becoming invigorated by media: humanity (those who can pay) will be-
come software-based and hence immortal. Michael Kearl and Michael Hviid Jacobsen, “Time,
Late Modernity and the Demise of Forever: From Eternal Salvation to Completed Bucket Lists,” in
Christensen and Willerslev, Taming Time, Timing Death, 59–77. According to Jeanine Thweatt-Bates,
there is a major contradiction at the heart of the transhumanist upload scenario. In line with reduc-
tive materialism, it emphasizes the importance of science and sees the mind as reducible to biology.
On the other hand, it understands the mind as a pattern of information. In a dualistic manner, there-
fore, the human mind could be functional in a different substratum made up of a different form of
matter: silicon chips could be substituted for the gray matter inside the skull. Jeanine Thweatt-Bates,
Cyborg Selves: A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman (Adlershot: Ashgate, 2012).
14 Peters, Speaking into the Air, 64. See also the discussion in Lisa Blackman, Immaterial

Bodies: Affect, Embodiment, Mediation (London: Sage, 2012), 61.

15 Hayles, When We Became Post-human.
16 Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton,

NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 31.

Transcendent Media 171

and textual epitaphs, severed from their bodies, both literally and representa-
tionally? Here the existentialist cannot resist asking: what are the possibilities
for closure, for coming to terms with finitude, or for reclaiming mortal embod-
iment within the growing practices online that allow for unprecedented contin-
uing bonds with the dead? The springboard for this chapter is the fact that caring
for the dead also implies reaching out, trying to communicate with them. This is
a perennial part of human history, although of course it also varies greatly across
cultures and religious contexts. This is fundamentally a communicative practice
where media—from the grave, to the prayer, to photographs, the diary, and the
digital memorial—are central. Here they are existential media on the threshold,
verging on something else.
Acknowledging that questions about memory and nonpresent interaction
with the living as well as the dead are fundamental to media theory, I will in
the following push to a fresh extreme the age-old connections among media,
memory, and death. Oscillating between two things here—between staying with
the mourner in her embodied moorings and trying to get a grasp on the prospects
and excesses of the transcendence industry of griefbots and avatars—is not in-
tended to diminish the value and meaningfulness of speaking to the dead on-
line, for those involved in this type of after-death communication. It simply shifts
perspective, in order to place these emergent practices within a thicker context of
contemporary currents of the digital limit situation, as well as along longer histor-
ical lines. This will be accomplished by underscoring a dynamic tension between
disembodiment and re-embodiment in this context, flanked by strange forms of
lack and fullness. Hence, as people reach out to connect with the dead online—
whether they do it emotionally, symbolically, spiritually, devoutly, realistically,
ironically, or metaphorically—they also activate age-old discourses about the
body and disembodiment, about media and technological transcendence. I thus
posit the digital afterlife as a cultural form that ultimately bespeaks its signifying
absence: the body. Indeed, this also recapitulates the crux of death practices and
after-death communication overall, as tombs, graves, and memorials are always
attempting to fill the void the dead have left: the grave is the originary medium.17
As discussed in c hapter 4, I embrace a broad media concept that sees media
as entanglements of matter, representation, and signification. In my examina-
tion of the intersection of death and the digital, I furthermore choose to see em-
bodiment as well as media multifocally. Following Margaret Schwartz’s work on
corpses in modern media history and culture, the body is seen here an object of
signification, and a symbol subject to ample representation and datafied recir-
culation.18 But dead bodies can also be seen as media that perform active work,

17 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 145.

18 Schwartz, Dead Matter.
172 Digital Limit Situations

as both Laqueur and Schwartz maintain. In the ensuing analysis, I dwell on the
sites where we place them—physically and/or symbolically—as part of relating
at the limits of being. I thus probe the fate and position of embodiment, in order
to existentially appreciate and problematize both the digital grave and the digital
afterlife more generally.
Hence, I hope through these deliberations to provide a rich discussion of exis-
tential media as transcendent media: media that promise to transcend the ultimate
boundaries, by allowing for relating across the threshold. This makes it incum-
bent to also provide a philosophical context through a definition and discussion
of transcendence and its crucial relationship to technology. I briefly touch down
on Kant’s seminal distinctions; however, I parse its meanings and implications
further—in Jaspers’s philosophy, in postphenomenology and in posthumanism.
Before I do so, however, I will begin my contextualization synchronically, pro-
viding a typology of the digital afterlife and situating after-death communication
in its immediate context: the present moment of the digital limit situation.

The Digital Afterlife

I have elsewhere offered a provisional and processual typology of the digital af-
terlife.19 In contrast with other frameworks suggested by scholars with a primary
focus on political economy or ethical issues in this new domain,20 my typology

19 I offered a first mapping in “The Netlore of the Infinite: Death (and Beyond) in the Digital

Memory Ecology,” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, online first (December 2014):
185–195, https://doi.org/10.1080/13614568.2014.983563, followed by a more elaborate typology in
“The Media End.” I framed my analysis by raising the issue of whether the inclination toward end-
less recording and eternalization in fact aggravates loss, as it heightens the sense in which loss itself
has been lost. That is, the more memories on stock (since data is big), the less the mnemonic sense;
the more traces of the dead, the less we may actually be enabled to remember them. I also queried
what happens to death as restful and peaceful when the network never sleeps and the dead are on-
line. Lagerkvist, “Internet Is Always Awake.” I recently developed the typology in the context of a
discussion of vernacular religiosity online, wherein I queried about how embodiment is at work in
such imaginaries. Lagerkvist, “The Digital Afterlife,” in Campbell and Tsuria, Digital Religion. These
discussions have been synthesized here, so as to offer a reframing within a media theory of the limit
situation. One problem of typologizing the digital afterlife is that these services and phenomena are
constantly changing and developing. And even though the companies trade in the eternal, they are
actually quite ephemeral, often with short life spans. As emergent start-up branches, they seemingly
go out of business more often than they succeed. Nevertheless, despite the short-lived features of
the digital afterlife, I suggest that the services covered here may indeed keep a somewhat persistent
toehold for the foreseeable future. However, I eschew trying to measure the general impact these phe-
nomena may have across demographic categories, cultural contexts, and groups.
20 In trying to map the digital afterlife, scholars within sociology, ethics, and media studies have

primarily targeted the managerial and “rational” aspects of emergent entrepreneurial projects within
the transcendence industry. They have argued for a political economy approach to the digital after-
life, thus studying the logic at work within its industries. Paula Kiel, “The Emerging Practices of the
Collective Afterlife: Multimodal Analysis of Websites for Post Mortem Digital Interaction,” paper
presented at AoIR 2016, Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers.
Berlin, 2016; Carl Öhman and Luciano Floridi, “An Ethical Framework for the Digital Afterlife
Transcendent Media 173

covers both afterlife phenomena and afterlife industries. This makes it possible to
stress that the digital afterlife is definitely like everything else dependent upon
the contemporary neoliberal economy. But it also enables an analysis of how
it is caught up with affective and emotional modes, even constituting a realm
of re-enchantment: a vernacular form of spirituality, or what I have elsewhere
called “a netlore of the infinite.” I argue here, in line with Laqueur, that our
relationship to the dead in the Western world essentially reveals that we have
never been disenchanted: “What is modern about the work of the dead in our
era is this: a protean magic that we believe despite ourselves.”21 This way I un-
derstand the digital afterlife existentially, and promise in the course of doing
so to look out for the body as well as its dis/locations, in the im/material world
of media.
The digital afterlife spans three types of afterlife phenomena. These comprise,
first, our digital traces: that is, our recirculated textual and visual remnants and
search traces on the internet, whether we are dead or alive. Today we would in-
clude our afterlife social media presence in this category. This type of presence
can be in the shape of Facebook ghosts—that is, active accounts of dead users
that entail a kind of nonhuman agency, where the dead show up in reminders.22
But this is often a field of human intervention through memorialization of the
profile. Through online memorializations, the social existence of the dead is pro-
longed after biological death, and their continued connective presence, as we
have seen in previous chapters, is a comfort for mourners.23 The digital afterlife
is hence, second, also part of the phenomenon of posthumous memory work
online. Last but not least, digital afterlife phenomena consist of after-death com-
munication: that is, talking to the dead online. As this chapter brings to the fore,

Industry,” Nature Human Behavior, March 1, 2018, 318–320, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-

0335-2. Öhman and Floridi identify four types of firms: (a) information management services,
(b) posthumous messaging services, (c) online memorial services, and (d) recreation services. Debra
Bassett analyzes the effects on the boundary between the living and the dead and on the bereaved
through the transcendence industry, “Digital Afterlives: From Social Media Platforms to Thanabots
and Beyond,” in Death and Anti-death, vol. 16: 200 Years after Frankenstein, ed. Charles Tandy (Ann
Arbor: Ria University Press, 2018); Tamara Kneese analyzes the digital afterlife from the economic
and affective dimensions in “Networked Heirlooms: The Affective and Financial Logics of Digital
Estate Planning,” Cultural Studies 33 (2): 297–324, https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2018.1466904.
See also a recent collection tackling this theme, particularly focusing on the creation and design of
the digital afterlife, Maggi Savin-Baden and Victoria Mason-Robbie, Digital Afterlife: Death Matters
in a Digital Age (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2020).

21 Laqueur, 27.
22 Encountering Facebook ghosts—that is, active accounts with dead users—is an estranging phe-
nomenon. This is also a space of temporal crisis and of creepy returnings. Facebook’s asynchronous
nature further results in temporal slippages, as users’ postings may permeate the network in unpre-
dictable ways. Brubaker, Hayes, and Dourish, “Beyond the Grave,” 95.
23 This in fact echoes the history in the nineteenth century of modern media, the introduction of

which implied that while “our bodies know fatigue and finitude . . . our effigies, once recorded, can
circulate through media systems indefinitely.” Peters, Speaking into the Air, 140.
174 Digital Limit Situations

the deceased are very often addressed directly on social network profiles and in
support groups; this is the predominant way in which after-death communica-
tion occurs online.
The digital afterlife furthermore relates to three types of afterlife industries that
also overlap. These are digital estate planners within the digital inheritance area
who promise to save your legacy and to preserve your digital assets and your
memory for new generations. These are often private pay services that provide
storage facility and digital estate planning, for instance digital wills.24 These estate
planners also offer services for digital closure that include the option of erasing
parts of your legacy. The Google Inactive Account Manager, for instance, will as-
sist you in choosing whether to save or delete yourself postmortem.25 These serv-
ices also offer the bereaved, in quite concrete terms, a choice either to preserve
the posthumous memory of their deceased relatives or to actively turn off their
digital lights. Such penchants can be observed most strikingly in software for
digital suicide—that is, for shutting down social media profiles.26 Attesting to the
need for such forms of closure today, one service, which offers mourners the pos-
sibility of shutting the digital lights of their loved ones, argues that “the one who

24 Everest, for example, is a Houston-based funeral caretaker that targets “millennials,” encour-

aging them to start planning and managing their digital afterlives. It has developed an app for stream-
lining end-of-life planning. The app is designed to help a person organize her entire online life in one
place—including passwords from social media accounts, newspaper subscriptions, and online bank
accounts—into a package of digital wills and estate arrangements. The package should also contain
funeral plans; and, as a facet of the contemporary personalization of digital memories, it also includes
the curation of future memories in multimedia memorial portfolios. Death apps are supposed to
allow people to give their loved ones unconditional control over all of their online accounts, by digit-
ally transmitting their passwords to their successors, who may retrieve this future anterior memory
package and dispose of it as they wish. DeadSocial, for its part, is a company that provides tools for
the management of death in the digital age. It offers help with reassembling the dismantled and dis-
tributed networked “person.” The type of person it targets is “the connected and creative” individual.
Working with several different actors in the end-of-life sector, such as healthcare agencies, funeral
services, and hospices, DeadSocial’s goal is to help society through a major transition. Its vision is
epochal: “We are living through the greatest period of change since the industrial revolution. Our
end of life wishes, the way we prepare for death, remember the deceased and grieve have recently
changed beyond recognition.” The company’s purpose is to summon up and reassemble our distrib-
uted fragmented traces, for the sake of society: “In a world where our communications are fragmented
and leave a trace, we serve the requirements of society when trying to relocate these traces in order to
collect and collate them” (ibid.).
25 https://myaccount.google.com/u/0/inactive?pli=1.
26 Scholars discuss the suicide machine in terms of decisive acts of political resistance against the

power exerted by neoliberal biopolitics through the business models of social networking sites, and
their excruciating user conditions. While stressing that the machine might represent what Matthew
Fuller calls “critical software,” Anna Munster traces to this phenomenon, more profoundly, the
emergence of a digital ethos that is “cognizant of finitude, consequence and even death” and which
sees a “sobering digital mood” emerging in digital life that acknowledges the dark consequences of
the military, informational, soft power subtending it. For Munster code is here, thus conducting it-
self “toward death,” but when we use the machine, we are not surrendering our online life. Instead,
through humor and sobriety the suicide act produces a “different constitution of digital life.” See
Anna Munster, “From a Biopolitical ‘Will to Life’ to a Noopolitical Ethos of Death in the Aesthetics
of Digital Code,” Theory, Culture and Society, 28, no. 6 (2011): 85, https://doi.org/10.1177/026327641
1417458.
Transcendent Media 175

finally cracks the hard nut of how to efficiently and comprehensively help people
with a digital cleansing will have succeeded. Such a company has a lot to win.”27
Companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook also offer users the pos-
sibility of handing over control of their accounts to their loved ones when they
die. Second, we find services for pre-or postmortem memory work and activity.
These are services that enable memorializing the dead online or saying goodbye
via automated farewell messaging. In addition to sharing practical informa-
tion about your digital legacy, passwords, and so on, these services allow you to
communicate from the other side, to send farewell messages, and to record film
clips with your last wishes to be shared after your passing.28 Here you can speak
to the living from the grave and plan messages to be sent at different points in
time in the future. You can congratulate your child on his seventieth birthday,
be telepresent at your daughter’s wedding after you have passed, or tell your wife
to move on and to stop mourning you once three years have passed since your
death. Implied in this crafting of future agency and of rigging messages from the
grave is the idea that the self should be in charge even after its passing. When we
are dead, we will in a spirited manner transfer messages to the living, and even di-
rect actions among them. Finally, there are recreation services for robotic resur-
rection: that is, legacy avatars, mind clones, griefbots, and chatbots, which offer
new ways of communicating with the dead and relating at the threshold. Even
more radical projects, in transhumanisn, offer up your robotic resurrection.
In sum, we may note that the digital inheritance area and its end-of-life serv-
ices are motivated by rationality: our digital estates have to be looked after and
managed. But the digital afterlife is arguably also a resource for vernacular forms
of spirituality.29 This vernacular, which one may easily locate within a Cartesian

27 CEO Efterhjälpen, interview, 2018. Following on from the European Commission court ruling

from May 2014, which states that Google is a data processor under European law, it is today possible
for citizens to make an erasure request of personal data to search engines such as Google. Several
“erase your history” software companies offer services of this kind. There are also funeral directors’
and undertakers’ services that allow you to save or delete your digital life. This involves making
conscious choices in relation to the either/or of salvaging or deletion. In Sweden, a company called
Efterhjälpen.se (Afterhelp) is an interesting example of a digital estate manager within what seems
to be a growing market. As one of the owners said in an interview: as we die, our relatives have more
than the funeral to attend to; they may also be in disagreement about our digital heirlooms and ac-
tive accounts. This man said there are sometimes splits in families relating to the digital remains: a
wife, for instance, accessed her dead husband’s account and posted content in his name, which stirred
a lot of emotions in his network. The mother of the deceased man did not want the account to be
maintained, but the wife was allowed to keep it (interview, June 2015).
28 The Israeli-based digital inheritance company Safebeyond offers such a service.
29 Brubaker and Vertesi argue that the material qualities of the medium may affect how after-death

communication is appreciated and understood. They stress how a sense of technospirituality pertains
to these practices: “The use of SNS to continuously communicate with a user in the afterlife and
engage in posthumous profile management can be framed as another example of ‘techno-spiritual’
practice.” Moreover, while the ethereality of the medium is often underplayed, “This quality may be
central to users’ experiences, explanations and emergent interactions with such intangible media.”
Brubaker and Vertesi, “Death and the Social Network,” 3.
176 Digital Limit Situations

worldview, can be traced to examples of re-enchantment in spooky and ghostly

hauntings in pre-and postmortem messaging, and in circulations of the dead
that percolate throughout the network. This vernacular can also be traced to the
technospiritualities of scientism within the tech sector, with their aspirations to
digital eternity. It should also be noted that, within both the phenomena and the
industries, the three types are overlapping and intersecting, motivated both by
what seems rational and by what seems less so. The phenomena also correspond
to some degree to the interests and pursuits of the managers. Those who take the
entrepreneurial/industrial initiative are thus trying to respond commercially to
the existential needs and strivings that the coexisters now express in this realm.30
Hence, one key need—now turned into a commercially successful enterprise—
has to do with reaching out at the threshold.

Transcendent Media of Lack and Fullness: From German

Idealism to New Materialism

As we saw in chapter 3, a range of scholars have highlighted how media seem to

enable the impossible: to see around corners, to bridge and relate at the ultimate
limits across the thresholds of the (un)known. They offer transcendence. The in-
ternet and digital technologies are no exception, although as already discussed,
the digital dead as they emerge in after-death communication are not ghostly
or creepy; they do not return to haunt us. Instead, they are reliably present as si-
lent angels, who remain as stable as the network itself can possibly be. It is worth
noting that, in the history of Christianity, angels are pure spirits without bodies.
Their cognition is not dependent upon any material substance, as St. Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274) explains in Summa Theologica. The received assumption
that we have about angels in our culture is thus that they are bodiless and spir-
itual, delivering their messages noetically and instantly. Angels whisper or shout
to our hearts, minds, and spirits. In biblical stories they often speak through
dreams. In the dominant Thomistic tradition, they represent the ideal speech sit-
uation, in which communication occurs as if bodies did not matter. Thus, they

30 For example, Richard Boyd works on a technology called Tanjo Animated Personas, which

models our ancestors from data and resurrects them in a form that lets us interact with them today.
His defines his solutionist and ambitious mission as “existential.” In this quest, Boyd also decided
to create a chatbot of his own father, who died in 2017: “From the first moment I encountered com-
puting, I have been interested in how we can use technology to solve our most existential problems.
I had a professor in college (UNC Chapel Hill) who told me that most of the problems humanity faces
are simply the result of bad ideas. This led me to think that with better ideas, aided by better tech-
nologies, we could solve those problems, potentially forever changing the course of human history.”
Fotis Georgiadis, “The Future Is Now: Artificial Intelligence with ‘Empathy,’ ” Authority Magazine,
November 16, 2018, https://medium.com/authority-magazine/the-future-is-now-artificial-intellige
nce-with-empathy-ba2395f0b27d.
Transcendent Media 177

are “the epitome of perfect communication,”31 since they are not impeded by
any fleshy freight. Importantly, spirit outplays the letter in the immediate com-
munion of angels.
As the angels are now online, they seem to be delivering a message of silence in
the midst of the buzz of the network. There is no expectation of receiving a mes-
sage from the grave.32 How should we interpret this? According to one possible
critical interpretation, communication with the dead can thereby be said to re-
flect the gist of the social media practices of our time: selves in constant connec-
tivity even with the ultimate others—the dead. Connecting with the dead, in this
reading, is to relay one’s self to the ubiquitous streams of connectivity, rather than
to sound out voices from the beyond or to aspire to an exchange with them. The
digital dead can be connected to, and the internet is a medium of imagined full
presence and constant connectivity. It is always awake, transcending both space
and time. It thereby entails new parameters of unprecedented media presence: the
sensuous always-thereness of the digital. The digital grave engages the senses
and offers a form of fullness. It is in our pockets and on our bodies, bustling and
moving and making itself felt while also being strangely unincorporated.33 The
disembodied digital dead are thus affectively and immediately present anywhere
and everywhere, which makes the transcendent medium into an environmental
force.34 It is simply there all the time and everywhere—thus seemingly dissolving
limits, as we have already discussed. This feature of the medium also reflects back
in interesting ways on the digital dead, who are as pervasive as the network itself.
It seems then that technologies are foundational for transcendence. In phil-
osophical and social thought, by contrast, a commonplace conceptualization of
the relations between technology, society, and humanity affords technologies
the role of limiting our relations to the transcendent and to what lies beyond
our control. This is reflected, for example, in Max Weber’s secularization thesis,
which describes the disenchantment of modernity. Such disenchantment, Weber
argued, was occurring through rationalization and intellectualization, and was
visible not least in the drive to master nature through technology.35 A broad
range of studies have upended and problematized this position, both empiri-
cally and theoretically. In Ghostly Apparitions, for example, Stefan Andriopoulos
discusses the connections between the philosophical arguments of German

31 Peters, Speaking into the Air, 76.

32 See my discussion in Lagerkvist, “Internet Is Always Awake.”
33 Graham et al., “Gravesites and Websites,” 38.
34 This feature reflects one aspect of the shift, described by Jeffrey Sconce, in the history of elec-

tronic presence from point-to-point communication (as in telegraphy and wireless radio) to mass
broadcasting (network radio and television). Through this gradual transferal, “presence became less
a function of engaging an extraordinary yet fleeting entity across frontiers of time and space and in-
stead assumed the forms of an all-enveloping force.” Sconce, Haunted Media, 11, italics added.
35 See a discussion on this in Aydin and Verbeek, “Transcendence in Technology.”
178 Digital Limit Situations

idealism and the occultism and ghost shows of that era, showing how its repre-
sentatives appropriated optical media effects and spiritualist notions for various
purposes of argument. Immanuel Kant, for example, wrote about apparitions
philosophically at the same time that hidden magic lanterns were used to terrify
audiences with ghostly projections.36 Kant, Andriopoulos argues, transformed
the optical instrument into an epistemic figure for the limits of philosophy and
of knowledge.
When we look more closely at the concept of transcendence in Kant’s phi-
losophy, we learn that the transcendent refers to those experiences that cannot
be verified empirically, and which therefore cannot be deemed knowledge.
Or, more specifically, the transcendent for Kant refers to efforts to know what
cannot be known empirically: that is, as grounded in sense experience—prima-
rily, God, freedom, and the immortality of the soul. As he shows, starting in the
Paralogisms of Pure Reason in the first Critique, any effort to make a positive
claim of knowledge about any of these ideas is a misguided effort to push our
epistemological apparatus (the frameworks of time and space and the categories
of understanding) beyond their proper limits—Grenzen—namely, what is given
within empirical experience. The transcendental, in turn, refers to the conditions
that make knowledge possible—time and space as the frameworks of intuition
and the categories of understanding—which structure and thereby make our
empirical knowledge of the world possible.37 Hence, the transcendental refers to
that which makes it possible to grasp and understand the world in a more gener-
alized sense. Andriopoulos argues that this thinking was conceived within, and
therefore reflects, a particular material media context. His point is that German
idealism has a closer affinity to the technologies of Kant’s day than we might at
first think. Magical lanterns, brain phantoms, and concave mirrors thus aspired
to a form of transcendence. These illusions troubled Kant and made him skep-
tical, while informing his careful thinking at the same time, thus aiding him in his
pursuit. One could say they were transcendent media in a flawed and contorted
manner, even as they related to—and laid claims to magically mediate—the re-
ality of the unknown that his originary sense of the concept was meant to define.
Speaking to our deep human relationality, these illusory technologies express the
needs and inclinations to relate to something beyond the threshold, and as such
they can be called existential media.

36 Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions.

37 I am indebted to Charles M. Ess for explaining this distinction in technical detail and for
directing me to the right passages in Kant’s works. The definition of the transcendental is to be found
in Die Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), 11 and (1787), 25; and a discussion on the difference be-
tween the transcendent and transcendental is to be found in (1781), 293ff. and (1787), 349ff. These
can be found in Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp
Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965).
Transcendent Media 179

In Jaspers’s philosophy, by contrast, the transcendent and the transcendental

are merged, while remaining perched on the edge, suspended without resolve.
We may note an interesting connection between Jaspers’s later philosophy of
technology and the transcendent dimension. For Jaspers, transcendence is al-
ways bound to immanence. According to him, as we saw in c hapter 1, technol-
ogies of this world may, as Ciano Aydin and Peter-Paul Verbeek put it, “mediate
experiences of transcendence rather than rendering them impossible.”38 In order
to arrive at this, we need to delve deeper into the different ways in which tran-
scendence may be experienced.
Aydin and Verbeek have distinguished between three types of experiences
of transcendence, while at the same time offering an important theory of limit.
First, they understand the experience of transcendence in terms of “recognizing
limits that are difficult, if not impossible, to overcome.”39 This resonates with the
existential definition of transcendence which in fact stresses its relation to limit
experiences. Accordingly, for Jaspers, there is a sense of void for the intellect at
the heart of the experience of transcendence:

When I face this being as transcendence, I am seeking the ultimate ground in

a singular fashion. The ground seems to open up, but it no sooner comes into
view than it dissolves again: if I mean to grasp it, I take hold of nothing. If I try
to advance the source of being, I drop into the unfathomable. I never get to
know, substantially, what is. Yet, this abyss, a void for the intellect, can fill up
for Existenz. I am transcending where this depth has opened and the search as
such has become a finding in temporal existence. . . . In transcending I have no
objective knowledge of being, as in world orientation, nor do I come to be aware of
it as of myself as in the elucidation of Existenz. I know about it, rather, in an inner
action which lets me stay with this intrinsic being even as I fail. Without finding it
as an objective support, Existenz can look to this being for the strength to uplift
itself in existence, to rise to itself and to transcendence in one. The modes of this
search for being by possible Existenz are ways to Transcendence. Their elucida-
tion is philosophical metaphysics.40

Transcendence refers to a nonempirical and all-encompassing dimension of re-

ality. It is inseparable from the empirical world, but it is also beyond all objec-
tivity. Transcendence is hidden; it cannot become a finite object of knowledge.41
Transcendence, for Jaspers, furthermore relates to how the coexister (what he

38Aydin and Verbeek, “Transcendence in Techonology,” 304.

39Ibid., 302.
40Jaspers, Philosophy II, 4–5, italics added.
41 As Filiz Peach explains: “Transcendence and Existenz cannot be defined because any definition

would make them what they cannot become: an object of thought.” Death, 37.
180 Digital Limit Situations

calls “possible Existenz”) strives and fails. Failure in the shape of limits, absence,
and voids is here a key constituent of transcendence.
For Aydin and Verbeek there is, however, a second technoscientific and capi-
talistic form of transcendence understood in terms of experiences of overcoming
those very arduous existential limits. As discussed above, our internet culture
prides itself on excelling in this respect, while displaying the grand ambition of
enabling the transcendent in both new and old guises. As I’ve argued, the high
priests of Silicon Valley portray digital culture as holding out a utopian antidote
to the flaws, lacks, and limits of human existence. As suggested by Aydin and
Verbeek:

At first sight, technologies and technological developments seem to be directed

at overcoming limits (the second type of transcendence) and principally are not
willing to recognize limits (the first type of transcendence). If “genuine tran-
scendence” requires a “boundary experience,” then technologies indeed seem
to be at odds with transcendence. Technological endeavors might then be rec-
oncilable with “transcending” boundaries, but would not acknowledge some-
thing that escapes or goes beyond their attempts to grasp and control.42

Drawing on Jaspers’s philosophy of technology, they then offer a third type of ex-
perience of transcendence. They suggest an understanding of transcendence that
relates to reverence for a bigger totality. Even as technologies can offer an over-
coming of obstacles and impediments, there is a limit to the control of nature, be-
cause nature in fact constitutes a cut of the real, or what they call a “transcendent
order”: something that precedes, supersedes, and in itself conditions any human
intervention. Hence, the fact that we are able to technologically intervene in the
world does not imply we can completely control the rules of life. Technological
meddling with nature is only possible if the structures and laws that enable us to
do so are recognized and to a certain extent obeyed. This indicates that techno-
logical power cannot exist unless we accept a transcendent order within which all
our actions and operations take place. This thus opens out to a numinous under-
standing, which accentuates limits that also speak to what lies beyond our aware-
ness—what in effect transcends as well as precedes our consciousness. Rather
than excluding transcendence, Aydin and Verbeek conclude, with support from
their reading of Jaspers, that technology mediates our relationship to it.
In accordance with this type of thinking on the coconstituting role of tech-
nology and the human condition, we often find in posthumanism and the new
materialism an openness to technological transformations of human experi-
ence. In Braidotti’s and Zylinska’s visions for posthuman becoming, for example,

42 Ibid.
Transcendent Media 181

such transformations offer opportunities to imagine a different and perhaps

collaborative relationship between humans, more than humans, technologies,
and the planet. These approaches also stress that such developments allow for
new understandings of distributed morality, agency, care, and memory. Yet, as
Braidotti underlines, posthuman knowledge is not simply about offering alter-
native ways of knowing the world; it is above all a critical call.43 What happens
when such insights are brought all the way to the thanatological thresholds of
existence? In posthumanist thinking, technologies in the area of bereavement
are seen as offering alternatives for working through grief and suffering, while
potentially redefining and reconditioning how we see life and death, and how
we relate to and care for the dead altogether. In this view, the AI dead will also
challenge the idea that death is something that specifically defines humans.
They may also aid us in building resilience against suffering. Most importantly,
however, they provide alternative forms of being human in grief. This entails a
framing of the AI dead in a context of human history of extending our bodies
via technologies.44 Hence, since technologies are us, worrying about posthuman
agency, posthumanists argue, is futile and misdirected. Here we also find exis-
tentially resonant approaches to affirmatively engaging with randomness, as well
as arbitrary patterns of code and algorithm, suggesting that we may—through
encounters with remains of our loved ones within the network—actually learn
to see and discover new things about them, thereby becoming attuned to new
forms of memory work.45 Posthumanist proponents argue that we might even
develop an altogether different relationship to bodies and embodiment in the
process.
One such contemporary mnemonic technology often invoked in these
discussions is the griefbot: a recreation technology that features the mainte-
nance of the mental and digital traces of the dead. We are supposed to grieve by
communicating, not via textual or visual messages relayed through any ethereal

43 Rosi Braidotti, Posthuman Knowledge (Oxford: Polity, 2019).

44 Margaret Gibson offers a posthuman provocation on this topic: “We are always already ciphers
and crypts of the living and the dead. . . . Reactive and dystopian responses to the technological
affordances of posthumous agency or aliveness misrecognise that our living bodies are these incar-
nating animations of the dead. Machine copies via bots or avatars are just another form of the cor-
poreal life extension of the deceased in the bodies of the living. The human heart’s desire to remain
connected to vestiges of deceased loved ones will continue to be enmeshed in the trajectories, dy-
namics and adaptions of representational and recording technologies. This is already our past and
will remain in the futures of grief.” Gibson, “The Futures of Grief,” Australian Association of Writing
Programs, 2018, https://research.usc.edu.au/discovery/fulldisplay/alma99451442002621/613.
45 See, for example, Denisa Kera, “Digital Memorials and Design for Apocalypse: Towards a

Non-anthropocentric Design,” 2008, http://www.abs-center.si/gbccd/papers/P029.pdf; Selina Ellis

Grey, “Remains in the Network: Reconsidering Thanatosensitive Design in Loss” (PhD dissertation,
Lancaster University, 2015); Siobhan Lynch, Death and the Machine (Basingstoke: Palgrave Pivot,
2018). For a discussion on these services and their impact on our understanding of what constitutes
a person, see James Meese et al., “Posthumous Personhood and the Affordances of Digital Media,”
Mortality, 20, no. 4 (November 2015): 408–420.
182 Digital Limit Situations

all-enveloping network, but via a concrete robotic incarnation (with or without

a technical replication of the physical body) of the dead person. These are inter-
esting approaches, yet they are often in deep alignment with the visionary claims
of developers and their cultural imaginaries of discorporeality.
This is visible in services that spectacularly promise to convey you to the fu-
ture. These include recreation services that “use personal data in order to gen-
erate new content replicating a dead person’s social behavior, often through a
chat-bot like application that generates new messages based on past data.”46 One
example is Eterni.me, which builds avatars from your digital traces. The web-
site explains by asking: “What if you could live on forever as a digital avatar?
And people in the future could actually interact with your memories, stories and
ideas, almost as if they were talking to you?”47 In an interview with the BBC,
one of the creators of Eterni.me explained the imperative behind this business
initiative: “It’s about creating an interactive legacy, a way to avoid being totally
forgotten in the future.” The main motif for Eterni.me is to achieve a continuing
bond with the dead that is more realistic and spirited. Its creators claim that in-
teraction with legacy avatars will be the chief way our great-grandchildren access
information about us. These avatars will replace search engines and timelines,
and they will contain everything “from photos of family events to your thoughts
on certain topics to songs you wrote but never published.” Interaction with
avatars is believed to provide a great comfort for mourners, the idea being that
it makes our dear departed seem less gone from our lives. Caring for the dead
in the digital limit situation certainly offers extraordinary prospects. It seems
to provide solace from the abyss of bereavement and loss—an escape from this
mortal coil.

Cuts of Mortal Embodiment: Reclaiming

the Existential Body

The existentialist will instinctively snub the digital afterlife, including the
chatbots and avatars. Within the tradition of existential philosophy, there can be
more or less sustainable ways of being human in and with technology (here, dig-
ital media), and this also applies to death practices online. Existential philosophy
will remind us that the digital afterlife emerges in the face of three entangled
and nonnegotiable existential facts. First, existence is limited. This means that
it ends. Its limitations make it imperfect, strange, messy, and nonsensical. But
they are also what makes it meaningful, beautiful, and enhancing. The shortness

46 Öhman and Floridi, “Ethical Framework,” n.p.

47 http://eterni.me.
Transcendent Media 183

of life, which limits what we may know, in fact guarantees meaning.48 Existence
is thus forgetful. Memory itself is essentially selective, and meaning depends
on that condition.49 Finally, existence is embodied and, as such, vulnerable and
mortal. The body is the prime existential pivot of our unique yet deeply relational
selves.50 As Peters put it in Speaking into the Air, stressing the materiality and
bounds of both bodies and media:

Media matter to practices of communication because embodiment matters.

The body is our existence, not our container. . . . the body is not a vehicle to
be cast off, it is in part the homeland to which we are travelling. Any adequate
account of the social life of word and gesture—of “communication” in the
broadest sense—needs to face the splendid and flawed material by which we
make common cause with each other. That any achievement of communion
exists in a concert of difference is a blessing rather than a curse.51

More recently, Peters has furthermore parsed the faults of speaking to the dead
via media—that is, via mediums—while stressing the value of limit:

Judging from the results of spiritualism, the spirits of the dead are boring,
at least when they speak to us: they have no looming crisis to solve, no cycle
of bodily needs to attend to, no headlines to read or deadlines to heed, no
decisions to make, no people to welcome or ignore, no horizon of dying.
Finitude concentrates the mind. A postmortal spirit would be deprived of the
many powers that come from mortal embodiment, including the looming in-
evitability of death: How could we communicate with a being suffering from
such framelessness? Nothing sharpens the style like the prospect of dying.52

48 Cf. Michael Hviid Jacobsen, who argues that “trying to cope with, avoid, understand or live with

death and the knowledge of it is thus one of the main defining features of all human life and of any
kind of social and cultural organization. The apparent absurdity of a life lived-towards-death there-
fore turns into the very source of meaning in life. Without death, much of what we do, say, think or
plan would be incomprehensible or even downright meaningless. Hence death, just as much as life,
is a defining characteristic of human existence.” “‘Spectacular Death’: Proposing a New Fifth Phase
to Philippe Ariès’s Admirable History of Death,” Humanities, 5, no. 19 (2016): n.p., https://doi.org/
10.3390/h5020019; https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/5/2/19/htm.
49 The tension between memory and forgetting is a key antinomy in human existence. Forgetting

seems inevitably both a vice and a virtue of the human condition. Too often the past does not provide
a lesson, and too seldom do those who came before us set an example for us. But the ability to forget
is equally fundamental, and it constitutes a key dimension of our possibilities of reorienting ourselves
to the future.
50 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 1945/2014).
51 Peters, Speaking into the Air, 65.
52 Peters, Promiscuous Knowledge, 281.
184 Digital Limit Situations

Mortal embodiment is thus that bedrock I referred to in chapter 4, which every-

thing else in existence is ultimately bound to confront. It’s a pivot on which the
ciphers of thinking about the digital limit situation of death—across construc-
tivism, realism, and posthumanism—inevitably hinge. It represents a cut of the
real, the totality of which we cannot take in. The stake is thus normative, because
for the existentialist the body epitomizes the very value of limit and limitation in
significant ways.
In what follows, I will continue to lay claim to mortal embodiment and the
situatedness of the dead body for furthering our understanding of the digital af-
terlife. My discussion will be suggestive, yet it will follow Laqueur and thus be
historically rooted in deep time: death is seen as a universal, existential given in
the hands of versatile humans, whose relationship to it varies across time and
space. Where we have placed the dead across human history matters greatly, and
the intervention will be shot through with bodies missing and bodies returning
in a number of different ways. Providing a brief cultural-historical background
to the Western relationship to the dead, by also drawing on Philippe Ariès’s
classic book L’homme devant la mort,53 I proceed to search for the (dead) body
in modernity and in digital modernity. As I have already been sojourning ex-
tensively among the bodiless dead of the digital afterlife in this chapter, I will
in the remainder of this exploration touch down on two bodily returns in the
shadow of both digitalization and climate change. I will then attend to sites in
which the dead are placed and suggest ways of destabilizing the digital afterlife
by situating it within the (media) ecologies we inhabit and belong to, in life as in
death. This will finally return me to the mourners and their experiences today,
for a reality check.

Bodies in Human Culture: Missing and Returning

The human relationship to death and our bodily remains has changed dramat-
ically over history, as reflected in the sites where the dead have been placed.
Where we place the dead body, in Laqueur’s account, is also crucial for upholding
culture. In ancient times, burials always took place in fields outside the cities
and towns. With the establishment of Christianity, the dead were buried on
consecrated ground, next to churches in the cities. For over a thousand years
in premodern and early medieval Europe, Ariès argues, dead bodies, including
skeletons, were therefore part of human everyday experience. In a culture where
we were all mortal (Et Moriemur), death was tamed, expected, and ritualized.

53 Philippe Ariés, Western Attitudes toward Death (L’Homme devant la Mort) (Baltimore: John

Hopkins University Press, 1974).

Transcendent Media 185

The dead were buried in churchyards and assembled in charnel houses right
next to churches in the city center. Visible and jumbled in these messy spaces,
bones were deindividualized, safely awaiting Judgment Day in the custody of the
church’s sanctuary.54 The bodies of the saints were of course revered as relics, and
not to be buried in their vicinity (what Laqueur calls “necro-sociability”)55 was
not to be buried at all. The placement of the dead mattered a great deal.
The Reformation for its part implied, politically and theologically, that “the
dead were on the frontlines of the break,”56 argues Laqueur. Since the dead did
not need to be buried near the bodies of the saints anymore, a field or a meadow
or any other inconspicuous place would do. Luther himself suggested he
would like to be buried “in the Elbe or in the forest, rather than in the crowded
Wittenberg churchyard.”57 In reality, however, the Reformation had little effect
on the practices of commemoration and caring for the dead body. It seems the
big game-changer had to do with the metaphysical question about whether the
living could in fact intercede on behalf of the dead. This followed on from the
rejection of the doctrine of Purgatory, and it established a firm separation of
spheres between the living and the dead in Protestant countries—a dominant
feature of beliefs and practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As
Purgatory had been abolished, Protestant forms of piety prohibited praying for
or speaking to the dead. But, as Laqueur shows, there is in fact a remarkable con-
tinuity in terms of the roles played by both tombs and dead bodies. So other than
ending the custom of praying for the dead, Protestantism did not imply any mon-
umental change when it came to these traditions. Despite the new proscription
on praying for the dead, the number of tombs actually seems to have increased
in the same era.

And the bodies of the dead with attendant monuments became even more
closely identified with the parish church and its most sacred spaces underneath
the altar than before, because monastic burial grounds were no longer an op-
tion and because space opened up with the removal of altar screens and shrines.
But all in all, the ancient tradition of building tombs for those who could afford
it found new energy in the Renaissance as a way of abiding with the dead. The
supposed rupture of the Protestant Reformation had relatively little effect on
the burial practices. . . . This because tombs, like the care of the dead more gen-
erally, were believed to serve deep civilizational purposes.58

54 Ibid., 22.
55 Laqueur, Work of the Dead, 41.
56 Ibid., 98.
57 Ibid., 99.
58 Ibid., 102.
186 Digital Limit Situations

As modernization developed, the dead had to be accommodated within the

growing urban areas. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, due
to rapid population growth in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution, there
were continued outbreaks of infectious disease near graveyards. Now that the
churchyards and charnel houses—that is, the burial of the dead in graveyards
next to churches in the cities—had been done away with, the cemetery at the end
of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century “once again gained
a place in the city—a place both physical and moral—which it had lost in the
early Middle Ages, but which it had occupied throughout Antiquity.”59 Many
European societies outlawed burial in graveyards altogether. New burial places
emerged, on the outskirts of the urban centers, away from the populated areas.
These modern cemeteries, moreover, were often owned and run by the munici-
pality rather than the church.
One tendency runs from the twelfth century through early modernization,
the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and industrialization: death became in-

creasingly individualized. It was a question of la mort de soi—one’s own death.60
Individualization continued during the nineteenth century, when death instead
became a question of the death of the other, engendering a romantic, dramatized,
and highly individualized death cult, with the bereaved and their grief rituals
placed at center. This lies at the heart of the cult of the tomb in this era, which
was seen as the estate of the departed: a house with its own delimited yard to be
guarded, and visited by mourners in an exalted and emotive mode. In twentieth-
century modernity, as Ariès famously points out, death and dead bodies were
sequestered and placed out of sight: they were hidden away and taken care of in
hospitals and institutions, as death was forbidden and tabooed. Bodies thus went
missing.61
Media, Anthony Giddens argued, returned death to the modern world
through fiction and the news.62 This mediated return has been massively
reenforced in digital media culture (particularly in parts of secular Europe, for
example), as social media, as scholarship has established, has de-severed death
and mourning, making them present in everyday life once again. Death is clearly
no longer forbidden, for the dead today are pervasively online. If not represen-
tative of a full-blown death cult, the digital grave, as we have seen, is at least an
emotional site of great adornment and vibrancy. With an abundance of visual
representations in online memorials and memorialized social media profiles, the

59 Ariès, Western Attitudes, 74.

60 Ibid., 27ff.
61 Resonating with this observation, a particular Scandinavian tradition of visual spectacles and

a passion for effigies has emerged in this phase of modernization, according to Mark B. Sandberg,
resulting in a proliferation both of images and of missing persons. See Living Pictures, Missing
Persons: Mannequins, Museums, and Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
62 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
Transcendent Media 187

dead are present as pixels. Thus, even if death and death practices of grieving are
more visible again, the dead body is obviously still missing. Indeed, it is quite rare
(although it happens) that online mourners post images of the dead when they
are dead. In the digital afterlife, too, bodies are missing as dead bodies. Here then
we find a complicating fact—another relentless cut of the real—that cannot be
reduced and ignored in relation to death and digitalization. The digital afterlife
evinces practices that discard bodies, organs, sounds, and smells. In this way, it
can be argued, the technology rehearses technofuturist fantasies that ultimately
dismiss embodiment, emotions, femininity, and vulnerability.
Existentially speaking, however, death and loss are always at heart a question
of a vanishing and missing body. After a human being has suffered bodily decay
or damage, death implies further disintegration followed by disappearance. But
in the meantime, as Margaret Schwartz maintains, corpses mean as matter. The
corpse is a hybrid object, active and in movement. It is “a literal figure for medi-
ation, an object in transition between one kind of being and another.”63 En route
to exploring how bones, ashes, and names do their work in culture, Laqueur pro-
ductively distinguishes between the natural dead (as bodies, as matter), the so-
cial dead (as beings with a social existence), the not-quite-dead: the returning
dead and the undead (zombies).64 In line with Schwartz’s approach, the natural
dead, the social dead, and not-quite-dead belong to several interrelated orders
of signification, spanning the techno-existential spectrum of the material and
immaterial (yet being irreducible to neither). First, as Schwartz points out, the
corpse itself stands in an indexical relationship to a lost someone—it is a medium
to that subject. Second, the corpse is anthropologically the object of meaningful
rituals of remembrance; when embalmed, it is on display as a visual object, and
it is heavily figured as a realistic representation in photographic conventions.
The third order of signification, I propose, lets go of the material substrate of the
corpse and enters more fully into the ethereal (if also deeply material) spaces of
digital existence—that is, into the realm of digital memories of the social dead.
Here we find the digital dead. Without significant remains, they are placed on-
line via photographic reminders of their fully embodied lives; they are social-
informational beings. The notion of the digital dead, as I proposed earlier, can
arguably be claimed to feed into the myth of a disembodied and perhaps eternal
digital domain.
But what might the alternatives be to this in a (post)digital age? I will in the
following discuss two forms of bodily returns, which with different inferences
invoke the three existential facts I discussed at the outset: our being is one of
limitation, forgetfulness, and— as avowed throughout— embodiment. What

63 Schwartz, Dead Matter, 2.

64 Ibid., 62.
188 Digital Limit Situations

are the implications of rendering the body obscure, of culturally discarding the
flesh? One clue can be obtained from Schwartz, who argues that the dynamics of
visibility-invisibility of the dead body itself affects its digital afterlife. When dead
bodies become invisible, as she shows in relation to celebrity deaths of Michael
Jackson and Princess Diana, this foments a profusion of posthumous image pro-
duction. Such invisibility makes these bodies into a resource: since they cannot
decompose and disappear, they therefore remain productive.65 One could argue
that this logic is in place for the entire digital afterlife, beyond iconic public deaths
and bodies. Digital media are body proxies, in a culture of obscured corpses and
a disregard for embodiment. Hence the digital dead are represented in a produc-
tive glut, not only because human existence is now digital, but also due to the
overall invisibility of dead bodies across modern digital societies.
In dystopian sci-fi, we find negotiations of this posthuman condition, where
the culturally discarded body also engenders, as per Schwartz’s analysis, new
bodies of representation. In this genre, I suggest, the body plays the lead despite
its ambivalent status. The cyberpunk TV series Altered Carbon, adapted after
Richard K. Morgan’s novel by the same name, describes a future where embodi-
ment is crucial for being. Bodies are essential but only as disposables, and death is
overcome, since the mind is stored in a cybernetic “stack.” Hence, the temporary
body that the person/consciousness inhabits is quite indifferent to them: their
identity remains throughout changes of bodily gear. In the Black Mirror ep-
isode “Be Right Back,” as I have argued elsewhere, questions are raised about
the (im)possibility of grieving, when fully embodied yet nonsentient griefbots
enter into the realm of human bereavement, as replicas of the departed.66 Here
the authentic and original human body is invoked as that irreplaceable, primary
site of our unique humanity. Yet another angle on the body is presented in West
World, where immortal robots gradually awakened to sentience, built with skin
texture and with the four senses in place, are programmed with a human sense
of finitude—of being finite embodied beings—struggling immensely with the
injustices befallen upon them, but also with the mysteries of being alive, after
having been killed over and over.
Apart, I suggest, from dislodging mortal humans from their privileged
standing in History—as robots either feel precisely the same as we do, or rep-
resent a deeply alien epistemology—the main theme in these foretelling design
fictions of the AI dead is extinction. That is, they thematize limitation in the
guise of the mortality of culture and civilization, as well as invoking the death of
human supremacy, or alternatively its potential survival. This is accomplished via
the prism of the lost and reappropriated body. Cast in multiple roles, the body is

65 Ibid., 88.
66 Lagerkvist, “The Media End.”
Transcendent Media 189

sometimes disrespected altogether; sometimes it is plunked in phenomenolog-

ical bewilderment before the profound alienations of technological (dis)corpo-
reality. Either way, preoccupation with the body underlines a desire for a return
of the fullness of that body, which in bereavement always means that beloved
somebody. Hence, even when we zoom in closer on afterlife imaginaries and
technospiritualities of scientism within the tech sector itself, we find cravings for
the immediate re-presencing of that body, which is why some developers are now
crafting mind clones with bodies. The circle is thus closing: bodies are discarded,
yet we wind up with bodies anew, underlining the profound sense in which we
exist as bodies. Bodies that are loving, hurting, needing, desiring, mourning, and
dying. We are bodies—and therefore we are.

Situating Dead Bodies across Media:

Earth, Data, Vinyl, and Light

The preceding discussion has shown that there are affinities and dependencies
between how the body disappears and how it then makes a variegated yet man-
ifest return in representational surplus within the digital afterlife of today—
something I also trace to cybernetics, cyberpunk, and the secular-rational tech
sector itself, including its visions for the AI dead. These all depend, one might
argue, on the prospect of extinction at the end times. The second example of re-
turn will bring me to another limit: I will end on a speculative note about bodies
reclaimed for earth, energy, and sound. I will thus be assessing a postdigital re-
sponse to a culture of discorporeality. As we will see these initiatives may allow
for reclaiming the body in heretofore unexpected ways: as vinyl record and as
light. Could the ecological approach to death enrich our relationship to our fini-
tude beyond the hegemon of digital eternity, and be a complement to the proph-
ecies of a posthuman becoming?
The postdigital response to the surfeit of the noncorporeal dimensions of the
digital afterlife, in which the dead linger as recirculated visual data, is perhaps a
turn toward the material. One example of what media activist Marcel O’Gorman
calls necromedia literally turns the dead body into a medium, as after cremation
it is pressed into a vinyl record.67 This service has been available in the UK for
some years. A company called AndVinily offers this weird concept, developed
by Jason Leach, who founded the EDM group and label Subhead in the 1990s.68
AndVinily converts the ashes of the deceased into a finished, vinyl record: “We

67 Marcel O’Gorman, Necromedia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

68 Paul Resnikoff, “Your Cremated Remains Can Now be Pressed into a Vinyl Record,” Digital
Music News, March 21, 2016, https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2016/03/21/your-cremated-rema
ins-can-be-burned-into-a-vinyl-record/.
190 Digital Limit Situations

offer you the chance to press your ashes in a vinyl recording your loved ones
will cherish for generations. Live on from beyond the groove!” Profiting from
the nostalgia revival for vinyl in the United Kingdom and the United States, this
innovation may feel sacrilegious and creepy. But for some people it offers some-
thing else, a different value. Buyers are often terminally ill, and the prices start
at £3,000. AndVinily beseeches customers to consider the option: “When the
album that is life finally reaches the end, wouldn’t it be nice to keep that record
spinning for eternity?” In a new kind of ritual of re-embodiment, or rather re-
mediation, survivors can watch the pressing of the record. The record includes
twelve minutes of audio per side. It can contain the dead persons’ final words, and
it can also be a repository for memories and licensed music. Additionally, there
is an opportunity to hear simple popping and cracking, which essentially means
“hearing” the ashes. One can also choose a jacket with portraits by artists and
with details about the deceased person’s date of birth and death. It is also possible
to get customized music on the record, for an additional fee. The remediated re-
mains thus stabilize the memory of the dead person into a postdigital relic of
incomparable value, one imagines. Importantly, the memorial is once again
directly and indexically connected to the dead body—yet in a reappropriated
manner, through a recycling of the ashes. The vinyl itself, I suggest, represents
stability and history in a world of ephemerality. Since vinyl is of the past, the new
tomb of the departed is itself a media-historical relic of sorts. In existential terms,
however, it contains a limited biographical story, making possible a patchwork
wherein we selectively make meaning, cherish the dead, and preserve them in
living memory.
Turning the dead body into a medium is also the goal of ecologists of our time
who are concerned with finding new practices of burial, for the sake of both lim-
iting carbon emissions and finding space for all the urban dwellers of the fu-
ture. The “Sylvan Constellation” won the Future Cemetery design competition
in 2016, which was aimed at considering new ideas for urban burial. Here the
dead body is reinvented for new purposes, and it is turned into a recycled asset.
The decomposing dead will be turned into light, for their remains are to power
cemeteries. Addressing urban space limitations, this also reflects a desire for a
more eco-friendly death, and it explores a new use value for our digital after-
lives, each “lamp” containing an individual’s digital data alongside her remains.
Laqueur believes these initiatives seldom enjoy broad support, precisely because
they seem to toss out the body. They express an irreverent position in relation
to our human remains—a position that has never had a real purchase in our
culture. Nevertheless, it is refreshing to see an agenda of making the digital less
central, reimagining it as an aid—a supplement to what really matters—rather
than affirming it at the center of the cultural order. Perhaps, via this recycling of
the corpse into body lights, we can remember our connection to the planet and
Transcendent Media 191

the physical universe. By seeing bodies as mediums of light, at any rate, and by
attaching these effigies of light to the digital remains of the deceased, the pro-
ject offers a different way to conceive of the future of the body within the digital
afterlife. The digital is in fact an auxiliary resource, not a central shrine. Such
designs describe what embodiment could mean in a future where the ecological
crisis defines how humans are compelled to care for the dead. Interestingly, Tony
Walter also depicts the dead in our era as the “pervasive dead” who are span-
ning this range. When we keep the dead in living memory within the everyday
in the digital limit situation, this covers both the digital dead and a new relation-
ship to physical remains. Walter argues thus that people “express on social media
their continuing bond with the dead who pop up on the screens of friends and
acquaintances; the dead are addressed as angels with agency to hear and care;
and the body’s physical remains are pictured as an active part of the everyday
environment.”69
In these sections, I have encircled an important aspect of the relationship
between technology and transcendence today: the role of the missing and re-
turning body. The discussion has shown that the body, after having been dis-
placed in digital culture, has made forceful and assorted comebacks. This is even
evident, for example, from within those cyberpunk imaginaries that themselves
propel an expulsion of the classic humanist body. It is also clear from how the
AI dead are sometimes designed—with bodies. I have also stressed the impor-
tance of the places where the natural and social dead have been located across
history. Whether buried in the earth, stored as photographic images, embedded
in code and pixels, set up as avatar instantiations of automation, circulated as
data, or reappropriated as light, the dead act upon the present. The dead are
placed at various (media) sites, spanning the material and the representational.
I have thus tracked an active physical, symbolic, or iconic body throughout his-
tory, in culture, into our transient moment of the digital limit situation and its
discontents—going from the ossuary to the graveyard to the Victorian and then
digital cemetery, to the dead in/of both analog media and the ecological and
physical landscape.
Especially in postdigital cases of return, there are interesting fusions of the
dead body with media. I suggest there is a providence of sorts in these rearrivals
of the body via vinyl and light. They invoke how a deeper relationship to the
earth, to each other, and to the technologies within our lifeworlds may be brought
into being at the end of our times. Following Laqueur’s point about the work of
the dead in any society, these strivings speak to ultimate issues at the limits of
our mortality and humanity. They are occurring at a time of vast technoscientific

69 Tony Walter, “The Pervasive Dead,” Mortality, online first (January 3, 2018): 11, italics added,

https://doi.org/10.1080/13576275.2017.1415317.
192 Digital Limit Situations

transformations, when such borders are being subjected to profound renegotia-

tion, and when we are facing the brinks of our very existence. The existentialist
will recognize in them a momentum for setting the record straight, a norma-
tive opportunity for reclaiming limit, forgetfulness, and embodiment anew. In
closing I will suggest that through the case of mourning parents relating at the
threshold, we might already discern prospects for living with the dead that honor
their memory as singular limited beings whose bodies imprinted themselves on
us and on the world, but whose digital afterlives offer but one among many places
where we may care for them. Here we approach a different possibility for appre-
ciating what relating at the threshold by communicating with the digital dead
means today, for those who participate in these communicative practices.

Dead Letters Online: Transcendent Existential Media

Like an unbreakable bond hanging there and wavering freely at the

other end, as the receiver is now unavailable. It is precisely as the
proverb states: grief is homeless love.
—Kari, mourner, VIMIL guestbook, summer 2021

As Aydin and Verbeek demonstrate, there is a foundational and coconstitutive

relationship between transcendence and limits, and a role for technology to
play in mediating transcendence. The foremost quality of a transcendent expe-
rience is to come up against a boundary; and as Jaspers stresses, transcendence
relates to failures, absences, and voids. Since the dominant medium today ideally
knows no boundaries or interruptions, the digital dead thereby reflect at face
value, as discussed in this chapter, the seeming all-pervasiveness of the internet
itself. They are always there, close by, offering vividness and, as angels, imme-
diacy and presence. In light of this some will deem the digital afterlife insipid and
bland: a repository of Cartesian fantasies and of empty chasings after immor-
tality, depth, and meaning in the wrong place. On reflection, however, one thing
is clear: coexisters, while reaching out across the threshold, are not acquisitively
expecting a return message. There is a sense of nonavailability at the core of the
unbreakable continuing bond. Their practices and experiences thus reflect the
existential realization that “as communicators the dead are a particularly enig-
matic bunch. They tend not to respond to our entreaties.”70 When we communi-
cate with them, J. D. Peters thus argues, we send them dead letters:

70 Peters, Speaking into the Air, 149.

Transcendent Media 193

Our communications with the dead consist of dead letters, correspondence

never delivered. The communicative stance to the dead can only be the one of
dissemination. The dead are tutors in the art of reading traces where dialogue is
impossible. Communication with the dead is the paradigm case of hermeneu-
tics: the art of interpretation where no return message can be received.71

Consequently, I suggest, the highlighted affective sensibilities in practices of

after-death communication online should be defined as expressions of existen-
tial strivings. Here, among mourners in today’s digital world, it seems we move
onto another much more pragmatic level of relationality, given expression in
communicative practices at the threshold. Two mothers belonging to the NGO
Spädbarnsfonden further illustrate the features of this phenomenon. Mourning
mother Kristina lost one of her twins, Sally, right after birth a few years back. She
chose to be very open about her grief on social media, outside the closed sup-
port groups. She has often shared long accounts of and direct messages to her
daughter Sally on her Facebook page, and as a result her friends sometimes had
the impression that she was in a worse shape than she actually was.

AL: Do you speak or write directly to your dead child on the internet? Do you
believe there is a life after death and that you can connect with the dead
somehow?
Kristina: I often write directly to Sally, but I don’t believe in a life after this one. It’s
just a technical writing thing, it makes it more personal that way. . . . No, I’m not
experiencing any spirituality or contact with Sally through these support groups;
it’s instead a support for me, and a contact between me and other parents.72

She shares with me a full posting from her wall, which expresses a sense of con-
tinuing bonds with her dead daughter. This is not just the case emotionally; the
bond is also enacted through the actual practices of her everyday life:

Beloved Sally. It will soon be 3.5 years since you died; you have been dead for
so much longer than you lived. But I still plan for you in our lives. When Agnes
was about to begin kindergarten, you had been dead for over a year, but I was
still googling how to help the teachers to distinguish you and Agnes (giving
you different haircuts was the best tip). When we were moving, I planned what
to do with the rooms if you had been alive (you would probably have shared
a bedroom, all three of you, and had the big room as a playroom; sometimes
I thought you and Agnes would have shared the big room and Sebastian would

71 Ibid.
72 E-mail interview, November 2018.
194 Digital Limit Situations

have been given the small room). When we went to the zoo, I thought that
I would buy tickets for two three-year-olds. I still look out for you sometimes
in the playground, when I scan for where my children are. Sometimes it feels
a little bit crazy that it is that way, but sometimes it feels like a fine thing. But
mostly I think this is the way it is when you have one child too few. I miss you
forever, my finest Sally.

The ongoing presence of the dead child in Kristina’s material world is an expres-
sion of a particular form of time work. It makes for a parallel temporality, a future
that is lost but can be processed inwardly as well as outwardly as it unfolds.73
The online sharing of these efforts to make sense by weaving the dead child into
routines, activities, and practices, with others who also share this difficult experi-
ence constitutes the lifeline I discussed in the previous chapter. Simone has used
Instagram in her grief work, and she also writes a blog that she set up just after
her daughter Alva was stillborn. She felt a dire need to contact others in the same
situation for support, so her idea from the very beginning was to share.

This was also a way for me to communicate with my dead daughter and a way
to preserve my thoughts, feelings, and the grief also in order for her big sister
to be able to read when she gets older. Since Alva died, my Instagram has been
used mostly for that purpose, as an outlet for grief, loss, and emptiness, and to
confirm the child that exists for me although she is invisible—a way to remind
all my close ones that she still means something. . . . I often write directly to my
dead daughter online. It’s my way of communicating with her, a need that I have
and that I have needed to find a way to give vent to. I want to believe that the
soul lives on and that she is waiting for me on the other side. I have to believe it.
I cannot otherwise grasp how she could have died before even taking her first
breath. Sometimes I have felt that she is communicating with me through small
heart-shaped clouds in the sky, and so on. I need to believe that because it gives
me energy, hope, and a moment of joy.74

Mourners thus range from stressing that they communicate with the dead
without believing in an afterlife, that writing to the dead is purely therapeutic,
to professing a belief in a life after this one and in an embodied reunion with the
dead. The internet, in any one of these modes of reaching out to the dead, is a

73 For an in- depth discussion of this and other types of time work among bereaved parents,
see Christensen and Sandvik, “Sharing Death”; and Dorthe Refslund Christensen and Kjetil
Sandvik, “Inventing New Time: Time Work in the Grief Practices of Bereaved Parents,” in Time
Work: Studies of Temporal Agency, ed. Michael Flaherty, Lotte Meinert, and Anne Line Dalsgård
(New York: Berghahn, 2020), 139–157.
74 E-mail interview, October 2018.
Transcendent Media 195

superior medium of communication. A striking feature of commemorating the

dead through after-death communication is thus not only that the dead are on-
line, but also that this is the key interface through which mourners feel connected
to them. There is vibrancy and vitality, it seems, by the digital grave. Those who
relate to transcendent dimensions in life and those who transcend their own sol-
itary mourning predicament online, simply reaching out to family and friends
and followers, both affirm what scholars have described as a sense of dismantled
boundaries between the living and the dead in late modernity.75
In sum, communicating with the dead in the digital afterlife is thus for some
simply a practical means for coping and reaching out. For others it’s a tran-
scendent experience, opening a channel that they feel connects them to their
departed loved ones, thereby overcoming the boundary between the living and
the dead. However, the difference between coexisters relating at the threshold,
and the flamboyant actors and agents in the spiritualist circles of the nineteenth
century, is that mourners here respect the silence of the dead online, their angels
of sorts. Angels might communicate, for instance through enigmatic signs such
as a cloud, a bird, or a stone containing a secret message, but they remain silent.
The Jaspersian definition of transcendence as encompassing a failure and a void,
right at the brink of the (un)known, is thus noticeably invoked here. This is cru-
cial, since in that particular way they leave the dead be, to in fact rest in peace. It’s
not up to the living to demand anything from them. From the standpoint of spir-
itualism, this would seem to be a remarkable aberration. Instead, these practices
invoke the human potential for existential communication—that is, for a careful
threading through the existential terrain where something may open up—which
we can only hear in silence. For coexisters, publishing dead letters in the (semi)
publicness of the internet is a deeply worthwhile practice. The web is an excep-
tionally suitable medium for reaching across the abyss, for connecting with the
departed. This is where existential media speak to punctures and restraints, while
opening new prospects at the same time.
Beyond the consolations of the lifeline around the clock, beyond the sense of
comfort in a digital body of substitution, and beyond the support of the intimate
public of mourners, this may be an additional explanation for why, in after-death
communication, mourners feel rewarded by the medium. Coexisters are deeply
embedded in technology, and they revere the limit as well. Their words seem to
land, precisely by remaining hanging in the air. Hence, after-death communica-
tion online, I submit, is a postinteractive practice that flags an alternative for being
digital altogether. When we place the mourning coexister at the center of our

75 Glennys Howarth, “Dismantling the Boundaries between Life and Death,” Mortality 5, no. 2

(2000): 127–138, https://doi.org/10.1080/713685998.

196 Digital Limit Situations

explorations, an alternate vision for both communication and transcendence, as

mediated by technology, emerges. This is the realm of possible Existenz.
Here we may note in closing that, since the virtues of silence are key, the jury
is still evidently out on what chatbots and the AI dead in the making may mean,
as they will undoubtedly reconstruct the dead more loudly. What will this imply
for the future of mourning? Will their programmed voices make death seem less
final, replaying the myths of limitlessness? Or will they add something else to
the picture, something we will find existentially sustainable and beneficial? In
any case, I suspect, and I think I do so with good reason, that the fate of mortal
embodiment and the placement of bodies will play key roles in any future with
media. Therefore, dislocating the almost sacramental position of the digital of
our cultural moment—when AI seems inevitably to be filling up the very ho-
rizon of possibility—is a key feature of realizing a sustainable future with existen-
tial media, in which we can reclaim anticipation as it belongs to us, the coexisters.
That is the topic of the final chapter.
8
Anticipatory Media
Futurability on the Brinks of Time

Terrestrial and electronic globalization tore down the universals of

the axial age to build a climate of overconsumption, a global green-
house which makes room for tiny islands of pampered pleasure in
a vast ocean of injustice and devastation. Existentialists bore wit-
ness to the shipwreck, of nature, God and the world. They did not
witness with critical distance, judging and observing as if from out-
side. They became shipwrecked themselves. . . . They bemoaned the
construction of the global hothouse, . . . recognizing it as another
heaven-on-earth fantasy denying finitude, uncertainty, death and
the unbearable reality of things. They were attempting to let the
emergency of coexistence emerge, letting the suffering hurt, prac-
ticing to become attentive and sensitive again in the remains of the
homogenizing hegemony of “world.”1

The present age is a watershed. We are living through a new Jaspersian axial
age of vast uncertainty and multifaceted challenges, writes Sam Mickey. In the
quoted scenario, he is also imaginatively foreseeing a coexistentialist awakening.
As he concludes, we stand on the brink of time, but we are also able to reopen the
future horizon. Mickey therefore suggests in the vein of Jaspers: “With the break-
down of traditional and modern immune systems under conditions of ecolog-
ical emergency it is not unreasonable to consider the possibility that humanity is
somewhere near—before, on, or past—the threshold of a new beginning, a new
axial age. . . . a beginning that gets in the political fray and affirms coexistence.”2
For Mickey this evokes Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, which indicates the
possibility of a new beginning with every new person who is born into the world.
How to achieve a new beginning, and to be able to anticipate the future, was
precisely also the theme of the correspondence between Karl Jaspers and Hannah
Arendt. In the limit situation of the aftermath of the Second World War, they

1 Mickey, Coexistentialism, 216.

2 Ibid., 211.

Existential Media. Amanda Lagerkvist, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925567.003.0009
198 Digital Limit Situations

pondered questions about how to live in the gap between the past and the future.
Jaspers had provided Arendt with a clue, in a paper from 1958, where he placed
emphasis on the present moment: “Give yourself up neither to the past nor to the
future. The important thing is to remain wholly in the present.”3 In that present,
Jaspers argued, we can begin to create a common world (that human artifice, as
Hannah Arendt called it) fit for all humans to inhabit. What roles can existential
media play today for achieving such a vision in the digital limit situation? Can we
reclaim anticipation as an existential need that belongs to us, and as a key facet of
our human condition of technicity? And how can we achieve a world not only of
technology but also for humanity in all its diversity, and for all living beings? To
begin asking ourselves such questions, without resorting too quickly to any neat
solutions or ready answers, is how we can inhabit the digital limit situation.
Paying particular attention to the limit situations of the digital, this book has
been seeking out the brims and the barriers of digital existence, with an eye to
philosophizing and recognizing our media situation. I have allowed limits a
seat at the table, as they are palpably felt in bodies at the limits of loss and ill-
ness, or when they suddenly appear in the punctum of an unexpected or wel-
come pause in moments of technical disconnect. They were also tapped into as
infrastructures that, through an impervious ontology of numbers, set the limits
of the lifeworld (metric media). Observant and still, in waiting and listening,
I also learned that limits were often enacted in mutual silences among coexisters
hanging in there, on the lifeline (caring media). I saw them instantiated in com-
municative yearnings at the threshold, and in the ways in which mourners
desisted from exacting rejoinders from the grave (transcendent media). I have
sought to bring limits into both visibility and audibility, as they are underplayed
and hidden away, silenced by default, and need to be consciously made manifest.
This I have attempted to do conceptually, philosophically, and empirically.
To value the virtues of our condition of limit—our finitude, our human sus-
ceptible bodies, and the limitations of both knowledge and memory—is as we
have seen a classic point of departure within existential phenomenology, for cri-
tiquing the many problems wrought by technological modernity. For the exis-
tentialist, the digital limit situation also points to the necessity for closure. Here
we might suggest a different possibility in the face of the seemingly relentless
developments of digital media. Existenz-philosophie will always remind us—
even as we concede fully to the theory of human technicity—that the existential
may offer up some defiance to the digital. Even if everything is always already
mediated and coconditioned by tools and technologies, this does not imply that
all forms of human life are equally suitable, as already discussed in this book, for
a digital or numerical instantiation. Or as the philosopher Franco Bifo Berardi

3 Karl Jaspers, Philosophische Logic (1958), cited in Hannah Arendt /Karl Jaspers Correspondence,

1926–1969 (San Diego: Harcourt, 1992), 153.

Anticipatory Media 199

flamboyantly pitches his critical yet hopeful existentialism in Futurability: The

Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility:

The development of artificial intelligence and the penetration of intelligent

devices into the sphere of daily life and of cognitive activity imply that new
areas of being will become the realm of computing. But the entire sphere of
being cannot be experienced in a computer. Existence is what cannot be reduced
by any amount of processing power.
The existential vibration escapes computation. Time, death, self-perception,
fear, anxiety and pleasure: the incomputable is the excess in the process of cog-
nitive automation. Therefore I assert that the incomputable is the leading force
of human evolution: incomputability is why history is human.4

Embracing such a perspective means to retain a richness to the prospects of

being and becoming human, since it will continue to provide us with and de-
mand not just constant connectivity, but also media of absence and sounds of
silence. Jaspers knew that there is a value in silence, and in the void. He himself
curiously and courageously asks, at the very peak of high modernity, whether
we can ever reach a point at which technology has fulfilled its promise. He here
reflects on the prospects for a technological finale, from his 1953 horizon:

The course of technological invention is perhaps confined to a possible goal

and predetermined by an end. . . . It may look as though the end has been fun-
damentally reached. If the end were already here in essentials, there would still
remain the gigantic, qualitative intensification to be brought about by the trans-
formation of the whole of the earth’s surface into a single field of utilisation.5

Jaspers suggests that the technological mission to innovate and expand always
renews and perpetuates itself. Developers are always standing by, willing to take
on the enduring, gigantic task of overcoming the never-ending limits of our exist-
ence. But he also suggests, importantly, that even if a particular and limited goal
has been reached by the technologists, the quest for new technological innovations
to accomplish a wholesale encapsulation of our world is likely always to eagerly
re-establish itself. Hence, this process would envelope all of the earth and hu-
manity within “a single field of utilisation.” Jaspers sounds here like a herald from
the past speaking to our era. Today, computational technologies and the global in-
ternet are already in place to encapsulate the whole world. They are its deep back-
ground and flagrant foreground. They have offered a range of specific solutions
and enhancements of life. Yet, precisely as Jaspers foresaw, another technology is
4 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility

(London: Verso, 2017), 237, italics added.

5 Jaspers, Origin and Goal., 121.
200 Digital Limit Situations

readily mounting once again on the human horizon, promising to deliver such
a single field, with ever greater efficiency. The course of history seems inevitable.
AI will bring about monumental changes to our entire societies. Echoing these
sentiments, former Latvian President Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga writes on the 75th an-
niversary of the United Nations, and predicts similarly that:

By 2045, when the United Nations Organization will be entering the second
century of its existence, the world will have changed in many substantial ways.
A significant part of these changes will be due to the pervading influence of
Artificial Intelligence (AI), which will have become more powerful and flexible
than it is now and more omnipresent in people’s lives.6

Numerous prophecies in the past few years have flooded public discourse, according
to which we are inexorably moving into a future driven by autonomous systems with
transformative consequences for families and households—for how we work, pro-
duce things, combat crime, and take care of our vulnerable, sick, and elderly.7 For
many visionaries, the horizons of AI promise to provide brighter solutions—increased
accuracy, efficiency, cost savings, and speed—to our many problems, and to offer en-
tirely new insights into behavior and cognition. For others, these horizons also presage
thresholds of the unknown, raising fears about new threats and existential risks to our
species from an AI superintelligence possessed of brainpower far surpassing that of
humanity.8 Yet for major agents, the main risk is falling behind in the race toward this
new future. Accordingly, commercial interests blend with chief geopolitical and mili-
tary wagers, as exemplified by North American stakeholders of the “AI race,” who aim
to ensure that “the coming AI century is an American one.” The Chinese government
and weapons industry, for their part, foresee that lethal autonomous weapons will be
commonplace by 2025, and claim that an ever-increasing military use of AI is “inevi-
table. . . . We are sure about the direction and that this is the future.”9
Boosted by corporate concerns about avoiding another AI winter, the ethical
imperatives raised by these technologies have called into being an entire industry,
which mobilizes, for example, investors, academia, governments, engineers, and

6 Vaira Vīķe- Freiberga, “UN75: AI in the Next Century of the United Nations,” https://www.
un.org/en/academic-impact/un75-ai-next-century-united-nations.
7 Kevin Kelly, The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our

Future (New York: Viking Press, 2016).

8 Nick Boström, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
9 The Center for New American Security promises to ensure “. . . a new technological era where

America’s national security—and that of U.S. allies and partners—is more secure, its economy is
poised to flourish, and its norms and values underpin AI technologies worldwide.” https://www.
cnas.org/publications/reports/the-american-ai-century-a-blueprint-for-action. See also Gregory
C. Allen who reports for The Center for New American Security about the Chinese AI policy, here
citing Zeng Yi, a senior executive at China’s third largest defense company, Norinco, at the Xiangshan
Forum. See https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/understanding-chinas-ai-strategy. See also
China State Council, “Made in China 2025,” July 7, 2015; English translation available at http://www.
cittadellascienza.it/cina/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/IoT-ONE-Made-in-China-2025.pdf
Anticipatory Media 201

think tanks to promote and secure sustainable, benevolent, responsible, and eth-
ical AI. The “New AI Alliance,” for example, puts the point as follows in its mis-
sion statement inviting the citizens of Europe to take part in a dialogue on AI
applications and ethics:

To lay the foundations of responsible development, this platform will host a

dialogue on the principles that should govern our technological future and on
their practical implementation. A High-level Expert group nominated by the
European Commission will engage the members of the Alliance in the discus-
sion. . . . I would like to invite you to reflect on what the future holds for all of us
and how we can best prepare for it. Let us use the European AI Alliance to shape
our digital future together. I hope you will take this opportunity to actively par-
ticipate in the debate!10

Taking responsibility for AI also means pausing in the present in order to col-
laboratively shape the future. Yet positing AI as both a medium to and a mes-
sage about (or even from) the future, measured as well as unbridled responses,
and utopian as well as dystopian scenarios, in fact allows this technology to
eclipse all other possible prospects.11 Here we might interpret Jaspers’s pru-
dence somewhat differently. Perhaps he is trying to make us see a connection
between, on the one hand, those particular moments in history when we are
inundated with prophecies of preordained, all-embracing transformations
through technology, and, on the other, the loss of an open, existential future. If
we stay attentive to this connection, might we in fact be able to read signs of an
end times of sorts?
Expectations of the next AI century are here saturated with what Donald
Mackenzie and Judy Wajcman call a “technological trajectory,”12 which is an in-
stitutional form of technological change that entails a “course of development
that seems natural and autonomous.”13 The massive mobilization of this future
across the board is thus awash with “illusions of inevitability”—that is, what
Zuboff in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism calls “inevitabilism.”14 This future
is now, as already discussed in the opening of this book, colonized by particular

10 The New AI Alliance, EU (2019).

11 Lina Dencik, “Surveillance Realism and the Politics of Imagination: Is There No Alternative?”
Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy, 1 (2018): 31–43, https://archive.krisis.eu/surveillance-
realism-and-the-politics-of-imagination-is-there-no-alternative/and “Mobilizing Media Studies in
an Age of Datafication,” Television & New Media 21, no. 6 (2020): 568–573, https://doi.org/10.1177/
1527476420918848; Dan McQuillan, “AI Realism and Structural Alternatives,” paper given at Data
Justice Lab Workshop, Cardiff University, 2019, http://danmcquillan.io/ai_realism.html.
12 Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, The Social Shaping of Technology (Philadelphia: Open

University Press, 1999).

13 Kelly Gates, Our Biometric Future (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 24,

italics added.
14 Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 194, 223–224.
202 Digital Limit Situations

larger commercial projects of instrumentarian and rogue surveillance capi-

talism. These have powerfully lured us all into an iron cage of datafication, where
human experience is rendered as behavioral data. This implies a massive mining
of our bodies and our personal lives, excavating the depths of human existential
needs—without consent.
Zuboff contends this is a new frontier of power, a new form of capitalism that
has hijacked the promises held by new media technologies and digitalization. But
even more profoundly, it has robbed us of a future tense. Beyond what she calls
“the prediction imperative,”15 the tech sector within the “economies of action”
is involved in molding our future behavior. Zuboff thus shows that this “ubiq-
uitous apparatus” (i.e., Google, Facebook, Apple, etc.) is exploiting the human
faculty of anticipation, in declaring the right to harvest our behavioral data and
to shape behavior in the real world. In fact, this form of capitalism succeeds pri-
marily by exploiting what second-modernity humans caught up on the grids of
callous bureaucracies actually crave and expect of life: an inner sense of worth
and dignity, a search for value, meaning, and self-expression. As these vast voids
are filled with effective, accessible technologies that promise to make life worth
living, absolute certainty has replaced trust for the purpose of control. All of this
occurs for the ultimate benefit of the few, and with nothing less than the human
future in the balance. Hence AI—one key technique in this drama—not only sits
on but also seemingly closes the horizons of futurity.
This enclosing scenario might make Kierkegaard roll over in his grave. In his
fervent critique of “the present age,” from 1846, he painted his era as “devoid of
passion,” as serious, abstract, and calculating, while indulging itself in endless
publicity and public relations activities, only offering “reflection” in the shape
of sober thought or bland imagery. He argued that, in the present age of moder-
nity, we are reduced to quantifiable common denominators—to a public—and
in fact disabled from undertaking real action. Nothing is unforeseen: “The age
of great and good actions is past; the present age is the age of anticipation.”16
“Anticipation” for Kierkegaard thus refers to the urge to know everything in
advance, which also feeds into a leveling of the value of the unique singular
human being, and in turn disables and nullifies human choice, action, and eth-
ical responsibility. The horizons of AI are one evident outcome of the statis-
tical attitude that Kierkegaard deeply lamented in his time. For contemporary
technoprogressivists, who promise to leverage AI to solve humanity’s many
problems, “anticipation” is understood in ways that reflect how modernity at
large executes “an ‘abstract future’ subject to deterministic or probabilistic laws

15 Ibid., 197–200.
16 Ibid., 253.
Anticipatory Media 203

for science, economics, and public administration.”17 This in turn has engen-
dered the pursuit of empty futures. The hype around predictive AI is in effect
forging further this rampant form of modernity, which entails a “de-contextu-
alized future emptied of content” that is “open to exploration and exploitation,
calculation and control.”18
The purpose of this final chapter is to wrap up the main themes of this book,
through adding yet another form of existential media to our dangerous cocktail.
I will examine existential media’s anticipatory features and potentials, by scruti-
nizing the inevitability of AI-driven abstract futures, and by probing how such
imaginaries become living myths. I hope to achieve this by exploring how this
technology is embedded in broader appropriations of the future tense. In addi-
tion, I will return in particular to the fourth property of existential media: they
demand that we take responsibility. Hence I will discuss what ethics can mean,
beyond being embedded in the AI industry itself, and how we can conceptu-
alize anticipation existentially, in awareness of more than human webs of care
and significance. Here I see anticipation as centrally important to reclaim and
safeguard, and also as ultimately important for scholars of digital society and of
existential media to collaboratively theorize. I take my cue from Barbara Adam
and Chris Groves, who have stressed the role of the imagination and of acting
responsibly in creating futures in the present. Through a Heideggerian frame-
work, and in order to restore a sense that the future matters, they hope to offer
“some new conceptual coordinates for thinking about the ethical underpinnings
for our relationship with the future and for reshaping the legal and thereby the
political expressions of our responsibilities to it.”19
As I have shown in this book, Jaspers’s philosophy of communication and
limit offers precisely such new conceptual coordinates. His development—from
seeing destruction as inherent in technological development to seeing the future
of technology as more open, while still stressing the need to take responsibility
for the overall trend of development—is key. And yet his position in the early
phase also has some bearing on the digital limit situation. This is exemplified in
how Zuboff, in a classic move, opposes the “tyranny of prediction” to a “human
future,” reflecting a distinction in Jaspers’s early philosophy of technology (as well
as among many critics of modernity and mass culture in his generation) between
human value and technological deprivation. Echoing Kierkegaard, Jaspers saw a
problematic loss of meaning and of a life worth living resulting from unchecked
technological developments, in which humans were at risk. These developments

17 Barbara Adam and Chris Groves, “Futures Tended: Care and Future Oriented Responsibility,”

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 31, no. 1 (2011): 17, https://doi.org/10.1177/027046761
0391237.
18 Adam and Groves, Futures, 2.
19 Ibid., 17–18.
204 Digital Limit Situations

lacked deep respect for singular unique beings, who were reduced to statistical
averages. As discussed in my introduction and throughout this book, mortality
and morbidity are deeply connected to the modern projects of calculating prob-
able futures. On the front lines, the illness-stricken, bereft, and mortal coexisters
have throughout the modern period been the target of such calculation. Today,
as we saw in c hapter 5, they are also part of predictive modeling, reduced to data,
and at the mercy of metric media. For Jaspers, the modern conflicts of mass so-
ciety brought about what he calls a universal “life-apparatus,” similar to an all-
enveloping utilities field—which implied most of all a reductive threat to real
people, who may in time be seen as mere cogs in a system, or simply forgotten
altogether. Today, these reductions and vulnerabilities are evident in algorithms
of oppression.20 In the following, I will place particular emphasis on human
precarity in light of these developments, for the future itself seems, at one and the
same time, to be precarious, conflicted, and fully predicted.

Existential Stakes of Futures Lost

Indeed, the human capacity to anticipate, aspire, and look forward seems kid-
napped by machines and screens. For Zuboff, humanity’s entire future is there-
fore at risk. When the future tense itself seems lost, there are deep existential
stakes. Zuboff is passionately searching for an existential language to describe
this sense of demise and loss of possibilities for willing the future itself, in a world
of all-pervasive datafication and automation. “This act of will is my claim to the
future tense,” she argues.21 Echoing one influential strand of the existentialist
tradition, which submits that the very possibility of projecting ourselves into
a future22 is key to what makes us human, she holds that “the freedom of will
is the existential bone structure that carries the moral flesh of every promise,
and my insistence on its integrity is not an indulgence in nostalgia or a random

20 See Noble, who stresses the connection between what she calls big-data optimism and discrimi-

nation: “I do not think it a coincidence that when women and people of color are finally given oppor-
tunity to participate in limited spheres of decision making in society, computers are simultaneously
celebrated as a more optimal choice for making social decisions. The rise of big-data optimism is
here, and if ever there were a time when politicians, industry leaders, and academics were enamored
with artificial intelligence as a superior approach to sense-making, it is now. This should be a wake-up
call for people living in the margins, and people aligned with them, to engage in thinking through the
interventions we need.” Algorithms of Oppression, 168–169, italics added.
21 Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 329.
22 This is a theme in Heidegger, Being and Time; Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie

phénoménologique (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, Philosophical Library, 1943); de Beauvoir, The Ethics of
Ambiguity; Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World (London: Heinemann Educational,
1972); and Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind, vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).
Anticipatory Media 205

privileging of the pre-digital human story as somehow more truly human.”23 She
further reflects:

No matter how much is taken from me, this inward freedom to create meaning re-
mains my ultimate sanctuary. Jean-Paul Sartre writes that “freedom is nothing but
the existence of our will,” and he elaborates: “Actually it is not enough to will: it is
necessary to will to will.” The rising up of the will to will, is the inner act that secures
us as autonomous beings who project choice into the world and who exercise the
qualities of self-determining moral judgment that are civilizations’ necessary and
final bulwark.24

The question is, will big data, AI, and the machine learning of the present age, with
their technocratic, entrepreneurial, and capitalistic ethos, further impede, as Zuboff
details, our prospects for realizing ourselves through projects of our own will?
Or will they even relieve humans of the responsibility they have for their lives, for
each other, and for the planet? Do they in fact offer an escape from that responsi-
bility—for those Kierkegaardian choices that will the future? Should they be seen as
hollowing out human value, or in fact as enhancing it? And can both these things be
true at once?
Zuboff ’s freedom of will is important, but we actually need an even broader ex-
istentialist purview to address the existential stakes of AI horizons. As I will show,
consulting Jaspers enriches and complements the temporal subjectivities of, for
example, Heidegger’s sense-making and resolute yet antisubjectivist Dasein, and
Sartre’s subject that wills to will. Here we need to ask, in addition, whether these
technologies can become part of what Arjun Appadurai describes as an ethics of pos-
sibility, which is based on “those ways of thinking, feeling and acting that increase
the horizon of hope, that expand the field of the imagination, that produce greater
equity” within our aspirational capacities, so as to “widen the field of informed, cre-
ative and critical citizenship.”25 As I will argue in the following, the present moment
is in fact a time when human beings—in all our plurality—might potentially begin
to realize what Adam and Groves call a concrete practical future with technology.26
The presence of AI on the human horizon, accordingly, presents coexisters with a
momentous assignment.
In their seminal work in anticipation studies, Adam and Groves have identi-
fied a weakness within the abstract futures model: “The key problem for an empty
futures perspective remains that the future is not simply beyond the present but

23 Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 330–331.

24 Ibid., 290, italics in original.
25 Arjun Appadurai, The Future as Cultural Fact (London: Verso, 2013), 295.
26 Barbara Adam and Chris Groves, Future Matters (Leiden: Brill, 2007).
206 Digital Limit Situations

is a latent and ‘living future’ within it.”27 They argue for turning to the existen-
tialist tradition in order to reconceive the living future, which we have to tend
to and care for, by caring for each other as well as for the objects, phenomena,
progressive ideas, and other beings that we share existence with. They conclude
that different forms of social action “facilitated by advanced technologies and
complex social structures need to be based around a different image of the fu-
ture.” One possibility, they argue, is the kind of “ ‘lived future’ that is articulated
in Heidegger’s . . . account of Dasein’s characteristic temporality,” in combina-
tion with perspectives from Hans Jonas’s biology. They hold that “the perspective
of a lived future, dependent on a situated subject whose being is an issue for it,
relates itself very differently to the living, latent futures of action that surround it
and in which it itself is embedded.”28 Here technologies play a major role, with a
bearing on how we may or may not anticipate the future. In order to further open
these vistas, I will offer a minor mapping exercise of key concepts, definitions,
and insights within anticipation studies. How do contemporary media futures
map onto the concept of anticipation itself? And what are the alternatives? How
can we conceive of anticipation existentially?

From Abstract Media Futures to Anticipation Proper

Media studies as a field has a peculiar and complicit relationship with media fu-
tures and their imaginaries. Media of the bleeding edge figure more or less un-
consciously as both pointers to, and foretellings about, the Future. Due to the
anticipatory features of data and predictive modeling, however, the relation-
ship between media and the future is changing. This in turn has prompted a
tide of explorations of the future tense in media studies, to which I also hope to
contribute.29
AI is anticipatory media, in several senses. First, we may note that the phe-
nomena we call AI seem to be, both as media technologies and as analytical

27 Adam and Groves, “Futures Tended,” 17, italics in original.

28 Ibid., 18.
29 Mark Andrejevic, “Automating Surveillance,” Surveillance & Society 17, nos. 1–2 (2019): 7–13,
https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i1/2.12930; Sun-ha Hong and Piotr M. Szpunar, “The Futures of
Anticipatory Reason: Contingency and Speculation in the Sting Operation,” Security Dialogue, 50,
no. 4 (2019); 314–330, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010619850332; Christian Pentzold, Anne Kaun,
and Christine Lohmeier, eds., “Imagining and Instituting Future Media: Introduction to the Special
Issue” (Back to the Future: Telling and Taming Anticipatory Media Visions and Technologies),
Convergence, online first (July 10 2020): https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856520938584; Joanna
Zylinska, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020);
Jeroen Oomen, Jesse Hoffman, and Maarten A. Hajer, “Techniques of Futuring: On How Imagined
Futures Become Socially Performative,” European Journal of Social Theory, online first (January 27,
2021): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431020988826.
Anticipatory Media 207

phenomena, essentially about anticipation. They materially and symbolically

foresee, and thereby bring a world into being. AI forecasting, modeling, and
prognosis advises; indeed, it outright decides how data are to be interpreted
and what actions should be taken as a result of such inferences.30 As Christian
Pentzold and colleagues recently put it: “Digital media, networked services and
aggregated data are beacons of the future.”31 Hence, they “do not only forecast
uncharted times or predict what comes next. They are, it seems, both prognostic
and progressive media: they don’t await the times to come but realize the utopian
as well as dystopian visions which they have always already foreseen.”32 AI thus
cocreates the future in predicting it. Coupled with the ideology of dataism, such
aptitudes on the part of AI seem thereby to assume metaphysical, magical, or
even divinatory capacities to foresee the future.33
As Joanna Zylinska maintains, these technological imaginaries also belong
to a narrative with a gendered tenor of “messianic-apocalyptic undertones” and
“masculinist-solutionist ambitions.”34 The hype looks suspiciously like a new
form of the biopolitics of outsourced species survival—a survival at the mercy of
AI. On the one hand, these visions seek to raise awareness of the limit, and of the
scarcity of planetary resources; on the other hand, they seek once again to over-
come these things technologically. Granted that we accept AI as the grand savior,
we can carry on pretty much as usual. Hence, the advent of this technology is in
the guise of anticipatory media that may salvage us. This furthermore feeds into
Jane Guyer’s analysis of contemporary temporalities in which the near future—a
social and material world that we could previously imagine, plan, hope for, and
intelligibly try to shape and realize—has disappeared.35 It has been replaced by
a combination of an absolute sense of the next moment—a punctuated time of
rigid calendrics and dates modeled upon the finance sector—with the long term,
widely touted both in myths of the macroeconomics of eternal progress and in
evangelical ideas of prophetic time. AI thus arrives on the empty horizon of the
future, and both fills up that next moment with datafied answers and fulfills the
expectation of an arrival—a salvation at the end times. In fact, the notion of the

30 Brent Daniel Mittelstadt, Patrick Allo, Mariarosaria Taddeo, Sandra Wachter, and Luciano

Floridi, “The Ethics of Algorithms: Mapping the Debate,” Big Data & Society, online first (December
1, 2016): 1–21, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716679679.
31 Pentzold, Kaun, and Lohmeier, “Imagining and Instituting,” 2.
32 Ibid., 7.
33 Van Dijck, “Datafication, Dataism and Dataveillance”; Chun, Updating to Remain; Elena

Esposito, “Future and Uncertainty in the Digital Society,” Lecture at “Making Sense of the Digital
Society,” Alexander von Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft, March 12, 2018.
34 Joanna Zylinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 2018), 15.

35 Jane Guyer, “Prophecy and the Near Future: Thoughts on Macroeconomic, Evangelical and

Punctuated Time,” American Ethnologist, 34, no. 39 (2007): 409–421, and “Anthropology and the
Near-Future Concept,” in Handbook of Anticipation, ed. Roberto Poli (Cham, Switzerland: Springer
International Publishing, 2019).
208 Digital Limit Situations

new AI era itself illustrates this hybrid temporal modality of the “next” and the
“infinite.”
As already noted, this ideology of numbers and dataism invests data with al-
most religious and revelational potential. The predictive process seeks to fix and
demarcate users in a set of correlations amounting to a kind of metaphysics of
seeing into the likely future. This form of future orientation goes in the field of
anticipation studies under the name of forecasting.36 Forecasting “is the properly
predictive component of futures study. Its models tend to adopt either a very
short—as with econometric models—or a very long—as with climate change
models—temporal window”37—hence a combination of the next and the infi-
nite. It often focuses on quantitative models and methods for trying to capture
continuity. As already noted, Adam and Groves distinguish between two types
of futures: abstract and concrete futures. “Abstract futures . . . correspond to
forecasting extrapolations, or more generally to system dynamics modelling in
which the future is seen as a projection and a product of the past.”38 Such “pre-
sent futures” are “imagined, planned, projected and produced in and for the pre-
sent.”39 These are, for example, economic and scientific forecasts that colonize
the future from the present, through derivatory models of exploiting the future
for gain.40 We may thus place anticipatory AI within the precincts of an eco-
nomic and political order that “encourages us to fly blindly forward into the fu-
ture, trusting in the protection of forecast and scientific prediction.”41 That is,
“The practices through which these institutions construct futures effectively in-
stitutionalize irresponsibility, exploiting the future in the narrow interests of the
present.”42 As discussed previously, Zuboff has pinpointed the latest and most
pervasive of all such exploits of the future though forecasting. In this diagnosis,
the future has thus returned, via anticipatory media, which seem to have kid-
napped it at the same time.
To theoretically and imaginatively propose existentialist openings, one must
first possess a more fine-grained concept of anticipation. The field of anticipa-
tion studies distinguishes further between forecast, foresight, and anticipation.43
While forecasting implies prediction and calculus, foresighting is not predictive.
It produces a variety of possible futures. It is qualitative, and it focuses instead on

36 Roberto Poli, Introduction to Anticipation Studies (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International

Publishers, 2017), 67.

37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 35.
39 Adam and Groves, Futures, 28.
40 See, for example, Riel Miller, “Futures Literacy: A Hybrid Strategic Scenario Method,” Futures,

39, no. 4 (2007): 341, 362, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2006.12.001; Orit Halpern, “Golden

Futures,” limn, no. 10 (April 2018), https://limn.it/articles/golden-futures/.
41 Adam and Groves, “Futures Tended,” 18.
42 Ibid., italics added; also see a discussion in Poli, Introduction, 33.
43 Adam and Groves, “Futures Tended,” 67.
Anticipatory Media 209

discontinuities. “Foresight exercises are primarily used to challenge the mindset

of decision makers by exploring possible futures.”44 Anticipation, in turn,
involves both a future-oriented attitude and using the knowledge one has gained
from that attitude to plan and act accordingly. Hence, a system behaving in an
anticipatory manner takes decisions in the present according to anticipations
about something that may occur in the future. Using the future is in fact the very
meaning of anticipatory behavior. It seems then that AI is anticipatory if this is
the main qualifying characteristic.
Yet anticipation also shares some features with foresight: it is nonpredictive,
qualitative, complex, and focused on discontinuity and uncertainty. Hence an-
ticipation proper also has an impredicative nature. Roberto Poli traces this to
aspects of biology and society that fail, or refuse, to be reduced to quantification.
For example, in relational biology and the study of autopoietic systems, there is
an acknowledgment that all of the dynamic processes within an organism are
self-referential and mutually linked. Poli explains: “The thesis of impredicativity
has wide consequences, one of the most important being that all the information
describing an organism will never be completely captured by any algorithmic
(i.e. mechanistic) model.”45 Discussing anthropological concepts of anticipation,
he concludes that theological reflections on the future are “in perfect accord with
the theory of complex and impredicative systems.”46 The exegetic tradition thus
similarly concludes: “The real future is ‘uncertain’ and is not just the unfolding
of our present ideas or strategies. It is not simply a calculated human creation
involving ‘plans plus time.’ Rather the open future that comes to meet us brings
surprises. That unforeseen future requires provisionality, since it cannot be cal-
culated or controlled.”47 By these criteria, anticipatory AI would in fact flunk out
as an example of anticipation proper. Scholars in the field furthermore see antic-
ipation as a faculty fundamental for human flourishing, creativity, ethics, and
politics; for society as a whole; and for the technologies we build, embrace and
ultimately enable. Anticipation proper shares qualities with the limit situation—
in particular that of uncertainty.

Uncertainty: The Necessary Habitat of the Lived

Future Present

With support from anticipation studies, we can actually establish that the real
future is uncertain, thus containing uncontrollable and incalculable openness.

44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., 19, italics added.
46 Ibid., 28.
47 Prusak, cited in Poli, Introduction, 33.
210 Digital Limit Situations

There is something liberatory about straightforwardly proclaiming that the fu-

ture is existential in this way. Simply embracing futurity as openness and uncer-
tainty is a profoundly existential move. The anticipatory dynamic itself—which
includes the capacity to keep futures radically open and the recognition that
there is innate uncertainty in existence—is deeply existential and thus integral to
the limit situation. And concomitantly, as coexisters we are in fact beings of deep
uncertainty assigned to navigate, anticipate, and thereby pursue a lived future in
attending to what is called upon us within the limits of the present: within what
I call the digital limit situation. We are thus inevitably involved in what Adam
and Groves call the latent future: our dealings and doings, our media practices
and projects, our designs and deliberations—including careful academic and
philosophical thinking in and about the present age—all in fact constitute futures
present, which is why they are of import and consequence.
Jaspers’s philosophy delves into both presentness and uncertainty in creative
ways, since it sits on the limits of the known and the controllable. His approach
allows us to recognize that carefully attending to the present situation contains
a potential for realizing a sustainable concrete future with media. In the con-
cluding chapter of The Perennial Scope of Philosophy, “The Philosophy of the
Future,” Jaspers offers an understanding of truth in time, as belonging ultimately
to the present:

But is life for the future the essential import of our work? I do not believe so.
For we serve the future only in so far as we realize the present. We must not ex-
pect the authentic only from the future. Even though this presentness cannot
in fact attain to durable consummation, in which I can rest and endure in time,
it is nevertheless possible in penetrating this actuality to penetrate in a sense
the eternal present in its temporal manifestation. The actuality of the truth in
time is, to be sure, as impossible to capture as an optical image,—but it is always
with us.48

Jaspers argues that a philosophy of the future must be able to take hold of the
riches and possibilities of the present, in which we can realize ourselves, as
we have already seen, as what he calls living Existenz with other Existenzen.
There is, furthermore, truth to being in presentness though practical engage-
ment. And carefully attending to the present is also how we can actually gain
any traction to thread our way forward, to edge through the vast complexities
of the wicked moment. This in effect is how we influence the future outcome.
In similarly asserting a future present, Chris Groves echoes Jaspers in insisting
on a concrete, embedded, relational, and existential future: “What presence does

48 Karl Jaspers, The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library,1949), 157.
Anticipatory Media 211

the future have, here and now, and in what way does our relation to it affect our
wellbeing and capacity for flourishing? Not any specific future, but the future as
an existential dimension of our relationship to others, to ourselves and to the
world.”49 This emphasis on the future present thus resonates with the limit sit-
uation, which if seized authentically and sincerely can be a site for opening new
futures. Importantly for my argument in the following, the human limit situation
is indeterminate and uncertain, and it can never be fully surveyed. Uncertainty
is thus key.
Zuboff relies on Hanna Arendt’s concept of will as “the organ for the fu-
ture”: “The power of will,” Zuboff argues, citing Arendt, “lies in its unique ability
to deal with things, ‘visibles and invisibles that have never existed at all. Just as the
past always presents itself to the mind in the guise of certainty, the future’s main
characteristic is its main uncertainty, no matter how high degree of probability a
prediction may attain’. ”50 As Zuboff maintains, the most foundational aspects of
human existence are today embezzled by surveillance capitalism, with the ulti-
mate goal of combating “chaos.” As she acknowledges, however, “Uncertainty is
not chaos but rather the necessary habitat of the present tense.”51
In the existentialist tradition, freedom and necessity/finitude—corresponding
to uncertainty and situatedness, openness and limits—are fundamental and ir-
reducibly interdependent dimensions of human existence.52 Uncertainty and
unhomeliness as connected to freedom thus belong to the human condition
itself. They can also, by contrast, be seen as a dimension of contemporary and
historically specific times of political, ecological, epidemiological, and tech-
nological crisis, with asymmetrical consequences for those affected.53 Guyer
ponders similarly:

One could perhaps reduce all this to an ahistorical “life in uncertain times”
or an ancient philosophy of risk “taken on the flood” (to quote Cassius in
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar). There is, however, a historical specificity to uncer-
tainty now. It is an emerging chronotope . . . honed into technologies that can
deliberately unsettle and create arbitrage opportunities and gridlocks as well as
logistical feats of extraordinary precision and power.54

49 Chris Groves, “Flourishing for the Future: Anticipation as Meta-capability,” in Handbook of

Social Futures, ed. Emily Spiers et al. (forthcoming).

50 Ibid., 329–330, italics added.
51 Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 336, italics added.
52 See de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity.
53 Cf. Yoko Akama, Sarah Pink, and Shanti Sumartojo, Uncertainty and Possibility: New Approaches

to Future Making in Design Anthropology (London: Routledge, 2018), 19.

54 Guyer, “Prophecy,” 418, italics added.
212 Digital Limit Situations

These technologies of calculative precision reflect Zuboff ’s “prediction impera-

tive,” which concerns the quest for complete certainty within surveillance cap-
italism. In Zuboff ’s own words, which again bring what I call the digital limit
situation to mind: “I suggest that we now face a moment in history when the
elemental right to the future tense is endangered by a panvasive digital architec-
ture of behavior modification owned and operated by surveillance capital, neces-
sitated by its economic imperatives, and driven by its laws of motion, all for the
sake of its guaranteed outcomes.”55 In this reading, AI as anticipatory media will
offer nothing but guaranteed prediction; and in blackboxing its own workings,
surveillance capitalism may further increase uncertainty.56
Uncertainty is a given perennial dimension, belonging to the human con-
dition—to being itself—even if we are simultaneously situated differently in
political and social conditions that deeply affect our lives. The technologically
enforced lifeworld, however, may usher in heightened uncertainties, vulnerabil-
ities, and existential anxieties.57 I thus see uncertainty as a given and as contex-
tually dependent at the same time. In line with how a number of scholars today
are arguing for embracing uncertainty, I hold that it should be subjected to new
forms of postdisciplinary scrutiny. If we are to begin to reclaim an existential
future with media, we must proceed to this move, both conceptually and practi-
cally, in order to find ways both to dissolve and to create the future “horizon”: that
is, to intervene imaginatively in its making.

Dissolving and Creating the Horizon: Complicating Matters

and Methods of Hope

In mundane experience, there is something resistant about the horizon. There

is a definite limit to any meddling with it on our part, as embodied beings with
eyesight. Indeed, it is an absolute limit, although dependent upon our eyes.
The horizon is an ambiguous phenomenon, and an equally ambiguous meta-
phor for the future. Rooted in the medium of the human visual cortex, it is thus

55 Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 331.

56 Ibid., 342–343.
57 Lagerkvist, “Existential Media.” Sociologists have often drawn such conclusions. See, for ex-

ample, Adam and Groves, Futures, 55. Anthony Giddens argues that we are in effect at the end times.
We are here after the end of nature, meaning there are few parts of the physical world in which we
have not intervened; and we are living after the end of tradition, which means we no longer live as if
we are ruled by fate. In the risk society, we also live “at the barbaric outer edge of modern technology”;
this is its defining characteristic. Here technologies are a “frontier which absolutely no one com-
pletely understands, and which generates a diversity of possible futures.” Giddens, “Risk Society: The
Context of British Politics,” in The Politics of Risk Society, ed. Ulrich Beck et al. (Oxford: Polity Press,
1998), 25.
Anticipatory Media 213

part of physical reality, and yet always in movement along with the eyes of the
beholders.58 Horizons are limits of our imagination. They are also fraught with
symbolism, with fears and hopes about technology. That way the horizon is al-
ways in essence an uncertain space, an opening, a coastline along which a ship
may suddenly appear and become visible as a threat, or a promise or a simple
sign of human life, labor, and routine. For Jaspers, in the metaphoric sense,
horizons are always there as prerequisites of what makes the world appear real to
us. We need them to envision and apprehend anything at all. Hence phenomena
and visions, bodies and things, always emerge against a backdrop. Accordingly,
what fills the horizons becomes crucial for our sense of reality. Horizons can
also be created and crafted with skill: thus they are also sites and metaphors for
futurability itself.
For Berardi, the indeterminacy of actual lived time is the condition of possibility
for futurability, which he defines as “a layer of possibility that may or may not de-
velop into actuality.”59 In our age, we are standing before a horizon containing a
massive dilemma:

The horizon of our time is marked by a dilemma: in the first scenario, the general
intellect will unfold and develop according to the paradigmatic line of the semio-
capitalist code. In the second scenario, the general intellect is combined into form
according to a principle of autonomy and non-dogmatic useful knowledge.60

How then to bring about such nondogmatic useful knowledge? In other words,
how do we dissolve the spell of the horizons of the new AI era, and bring about
alternatives? How do we act and “think what we are doing”61 in the present mo-
ment: the digital limit situation? By pausing—which is in the very nature of the
limit situation—we will note a cluster of complicating matters. First, the afore-
mentioned colonization of anticipation for profit also applies, in a disturbing
manner, to the uncertainties of being. Jane Guyer illustrates how the language
of “brinks” and “adventures,” “emergencies” and “indeterminacies,” has filled the
evacuated near future, both in popular and formal discourse and in economic
thinking and academic debate.62 And in the present moment, the limit situation

58 As Don Ihde puts it: “Progressing now within this simplified framework, I return to my visual

experience. I note that in ordinary experience there are certain patterns and resistances to the way in
which these structures function. For example, no matter how hard I try, I cannot extend my horizon
as limit. It remains at the ‘edge’ of the visual field, and as I turn my head it ‘turns,’ too, but in such a
way that it remains an absolute if vague ‘edge’ while what is central also remains before me.” Ihde,
Listening and Voice, 39, italics added.
59 Berardi, Futurability, 3.
60 Ibid, 6.
61 Hanna Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
62 Jane Guyer, “‘On the Verge’: From the Possible to the Emergent,” HAU Journal, 6, no. 1

(2016): 373–377, https:/doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.020.

214 Digital Limit Situations

seems seized in AI projects such as “AI for Earth” or “AI for Good” at Microsoft,
or in the technologies launched for tracking contagion during the current Covid-
19 crisis.63 The tech agents are seizing their opportunity. Boosted by a righteous
project, framed within well-meaning goals and benign intentions of salvaging
the planet and the species, they are at the same time operating through the logic
of surveillance capitalism, and they are taking their imperative to mine the
depths of our lives even further. The digital-human limit situation is ultimately in
the hands of very powerful agents, with a gargantuan apparatus of rhetorical and
infrastructural means at their disposal.
It seems, then, that it is not enough to reclaim the future tense; it is also ur-
gent to lay claim anew to the very limit situation itself, and to ruminate metic-
ulously on its meanings and stakes. This implies an awakening. As Jaspers puts
it: “Awaking to myself, in my situation, I raised the question of being.”64 In fact,
for Jaspers, “Philosophizing starts with our situation.”65 This means we must
raise the most profound philosophical questions—together—in a search for new
light ahead: What is the meaning of our technologized existence? How do we
wish to live our lives together on the planet with machines? How can we diver-
sify AI-driven lifeworlds? Can autonomous systems be subject to a democratic
screening, a vetting, so as to guarantee a bedrock of nonnegotiable goals—per-
haps justice, equity, sustainability, nonviolence? And how does automation,
entangled with human needs and necessities, change our situation? How can
these technologies be harnessed to realize an existentially and environmentally
sustainable and concrete future that is embedded, embodied, and contextual?
Can they in fact become “technologies of the imagination” that generate some-
thing beyond the ethos of surveillance capitalists?66
The time has come, as many seem to agree in this moment, to recenter
concerns and agendas and to in fact reclaim a utopian future. In this spirit,
Zylinska follows Berardi in raising the questions about whether our future has al-
ready been expended, or whether it can still be redeemed.67 Drawing on Berardi’s
idea that there is a multiplicity of immanent possible futures, and invoking some-
thing close to the digital limit situation, Zylinska states:

The present moment, with its ecological and economic destructions, and the
material and discursive havoc wreaked upon our planet, seems to suggest
humanity is on a downward trajectory, that it has already ordered in its own

63 Naomi Klein, “How Big Tech Plans to Profit from the Pandemic,” The Guardian, May 13, 2020.
64 Jaspers, Philosophy, vol. 1 (1932/1969).
65 Ibid., 43, italics added.
66 David Sneath, Martin Holbraad, and Morten Axel Pedersen, “Technologies of the

Imagination: An Introduction,” Ethnos, 74, no. 1 (2009): 5–30, https://doi.org/10.1080/0014184090

2751147.
67 Berardi, Futurability.
Anticipatory Media 215

expiration. Yet, contrary to the predictions of the various fetishists of the apoc-
alypse, I want to follow Bifo in arguing that our shared future has not yet been
totally spent, irrevocably conquered or deterministically designed. And so,
amidst the ruin of our current political thought, a possibility of another, more
utopian, future can perhaps be sought and fought for.68

Enter hope, which importantly is not, if we follow Hiro Miyazaki, a thing or a

possession: instead, it is an open-ended method for self-knowledge, allowing for
a reorientation of oneself and of knowledge toward the future.69 This method
resonates with the limit situation, since “The moment of hope that emerged at
the moment of abeyance of agency was, then, simultaneously open and closed.”70
Seizing the limit situation allows, Jaspers argues, “for the possibility of an un-
certain future.”71 Uncertainty is thus the flip side of existential freedom: “The
unrest in this boundary situation is that what is up to me lies still ahead.”72 As
we have seen, Jaspers fully acknowledges the suffering and exposure that are
often key experiences within the limit situation, but he sees both profundity and
equanimity in that pain, suggesting it may be productive.73 Vulnerability may
thus be a source of creativity; and as has already been addressed in this book,
it does not stand in disjoined opposition to resistance through mobilization, or
to other forms of deliberate and agentic politics. Uncertainty may be genera-
tive.74 In ways that echo these insights, and much in line with how I read Jaspers,
Marianne Hirsch has launched the notion of vulnerable time, ultimately arguing
that, “unlike trauma, vulnerability shapes an open-ended temporality—that of
the threshold of an alternate, reimagined reality.”75
How do we reimagine reality in the wake of the digital limit situation? As a
method of hope, Zuboff calls for replacing the abstract future of the surveillance
capitalists with a plan of her own for third-modernity humans. She suggests that,
instead of an individualistic framework of counterdeclarations of hiding from
the networks, we need synthetic declarations involving civil society, collective
action, and legislation: “Only a synthetic alternative vision . . . will transform raw

68 Zylinska, AI Art, 148.

69 Miyazaki explains how the Suvavou people, who had no reason to feel hope as their land was
taken from them, still kept their hope across generations. For the Suvavou, hope was such an open-
ended “method for self-knowledge,” which informed their relation to and orientation toward the fu-
ture. Hiro Miyazaki, The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy and Fijian Knowledge (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 139.
70 Ibid., 106.
71 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 183–184.
72 Ibid., 184.
73 Ibid., 195, italics added.
74 Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay,

Vulnerability in Resistance, 12–27; Akama, Pink, and Sumartojo, Uncertainty and Possibility, 45.
75 Marianne Hirsch, “Vulnerable Time,” in Butler, Gambetti, and Sabsay, Vulnerability in

Resistance, 80.
216 Digital Limit Situations

surveillance capitalism in favor of a digital culture that we can call home.”76 We

must will to will together! Zuboff is terrified of companies taking their responsi-
bility, as this consequentially becomes part of their logic for extraction and pre-
diction. Zylinska also argues against the corporate social responsibility of ethical
AI, which she sees as a way for companies to try to suspend and ward off policy
intervention.77 Safya U. Noble notes similarly:

I encourage us all to take notice and to reconsider the affordances and the
consequences of our hyperreliance on these technologies as they shift and take
on more import over time. What we need now, more than ever, is public policy
that advocates protections from the effects of unregulated and unethical artificial
intelligence.78

Media scholar Mark Andrejevic sees a risk in offloading human agency and
judgment to machines; he wants us to move beyond the “ethical turn” and to re-
place it with “data civics”:

The fact that ethical guidelines may not reach far enough to address this form
of social de-skilling may help explain an ambivalent response toward the
burgeoning politico-academic-industrial promotion of an ethical turn (in
Artificial Intelligence, big data, data mining, and so on). At one level, this re-
sponse is driven by concerns that such programs could serve, at least on the
part of the tech sector and its political allies, as public relations strategies for
avoiding more stringent forms of regulation.79

For all four of these scholars, the emphasis should thus be put on a veteran method
of hope: the modernist form of intervention through near-future planning,
which implies regulating politically and legally the leeway, scope, and scale of
the current tech giants, and thereby controlling their development of AI in the
service of humanity. We may note that, by the same token, Jaspers sees the ge-
neral situatedness of human life as encompassing change within; it is in essence
transformable.80 From this perspective, even a future seemingly encapsulated by
prediction technologies reflects this essentially open-ended quality of the human
situation:

76 Zuboff, Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 344.

77 Zylinska, AI Art, 34–35.
78 Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, 181, italics added.
79 Andrejevic, “Automating Surveillance,” 565.
80 Jaspers, Philosophy II, 178.
Anticipatory Media 217

I have to put up with them as given, but not as definitely given: there remains a
chance of transforming them, even in the sense that I can calculate and bring
about situations, in which I am going to act as given henceforth. This is the
character of purposive arrangements. In technological, legal, political action we
create situations: We do not proceed directly toward a goal, we bring about the
situation from which it will arise.81

For Jaspers, in his relentlessly hopeful manner, these modernist plans thus also
contain openings. An alternative to the next AI century would be to place regu-
lated and controllable AI in the hands of human collectives as aids in the mun-
dane and deeply existential projects of sustaining relationships to each other and
to our planet. In order to bring about a century of care and attendance, as Jaspers
would probably suggest in his insistence upon limits, the wise thing would be to
sometimes pursue the option of automation, and sometimes not. Indeed, there
may be no-go zones for AI, not because the solutions do not yet exist, but because
we value something else. Only with a foothold firmly in the soil of a deep reali-
zation of the human situation—in the earthbound knowledge of the stuff we are
made of, and of our perennial needs and necessities—can the horizons of AI be-
come a deeply human-and planet-centered project.82
Efforts to politically steer, plan, and design must be combined with other
methods of hope as well, such as a focus on care and the human imagination.
In this vein Groves holds out new horizons of care, arguing for a political ethos
that enables establishing a relationship to the future “with a particular aesthetic,
ethical and epistemological orientation.”83 Following feminist ethicists Sara
Ruddick and Joan Tronto, he connects care with life, rather than with principles
divorced from life:

A future horizon of care is a different way of bringing the future into the pre-
sent than that which characterizes the quantifying and instrumentalizing
projections of the empty future. It domesticates uncertainty by beginning from
within relationality and connection rather than by beginning from an assumed
position of autonomy.84

This ethics of care is in close alignment with the goals of existential media
studies and its practices of careful listening, wrapping around (as in Bachelard’s

81 Ibid.
82 Cf. Arendt, The Human Condition.
83 Cf. Chris Groves, “Horizons of Care: From Future Imaginaries to Responsible Research and

Innovation,” in Shaping Emerging Technologies: Governance, Innovation, Discourse, ed. Kornelia

Konrad, Christopher Coenen, Anne Dijkstra, Colin Milburn, and Harro van Lente (Amsterdam: IOS
Press/AKA, 2013), 6.
84 Ibid., 13–14.
218 Digital Limit Situations

roundness), and curating while keeping a proper careful distance. That is, caring
is also about dissolving oppressive horizons—those that remain detached and
exploitative of the future. The future is latent within what we do. As Fisher and
Tronto emphasize:

We suggest that caring be viewed a species activity that includes everything that
we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as
well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environ-
ment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.85

This comes close to Salvatore Iaconesi’s vision of La Cura. The word “cura-
tion” stems from the Latin word cura, which means to take care of, heed, heal,
cure, care for, and give attention to. Curation thus also has direct connotations
of curing, treating, and tending, as in Groves and Adam’s vision for tending to
the future in the present. In this sense, curating one’s own and other people’s
lives with technologies might mean a mindful and attentive attendance to
how we compose our relationships with technologies and each other within a
life-sustaining web. This also implies calibrating an awareness of the various
relationships that technologies form in the present, including those they have
formed and which act upon us now, and those that will take form beyond our
immediate perception in the future. This implies an intergenerational approach
to curating and caring.
The future also demands a role for the imagination, and imagining the fu-
ture is an existential practice.86 Hence imagination and creativity are crucial for
achieving an alternative that makes a difference.87 Jaspers explains the pivotal
role of the imagination for transformation: “It is precisely when they explain
nothing and are meaningless, by the criteria of rational consequence, causality
and end that myth and fairy tale can have great depth and infinite interpreta-
bility. . . . Only the language of imagination—so it seems—touches reality that
evades all objective investigation.”88 In discussing the role of the imaginary,
Zylinska proposes, in resonance with this, that “this possibility of envisaging a
different future and painting a different picture of the world may require us to

85 Fisher and Tronto in Joan Tronto, Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care

(London, Routledge, 1993), 103.

86 Lisette Josephides, “Imagining the Future: An Existential and Practical Activity,” in Pacific

Futures, Projects, Politics and Interests, ed. Will Rollason (Oxford: Berg, 2014), 28–47.
87 There are plenty of examples of this in projects that seek to design otherwise. Drawing on

Julie Cohen’s critique of individualism and her notion of “semantic discontinuity,” Frischmann
and Selinger stress a design principle that allows for building gaps and inconsistencies into our
technosocial engineering: “Often the imperfections in our techno-social systems, particularly
those that shape our everyday lives and practices, afford people with room to play.” Frischmann and
Selinger, Re-engineering Humanity, 275.
88 Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 83, italics in original.
Anticipatory Media 219

extend an invitation to nonhuman others to join the project and help redraft its
aesthetic boundaries.”89 Furthermore, she underlines that

we need to open up the human sensorium to other forms of intelligence and

perception, to recognize our entanglement with creatures and machines,
to look around, askew. This opening needs to involve our recognition of the
human capacity for telling stories, having visions and dreaming dreams. Yet
it also has to take up the ethical task of acknowledging our ability to reflect on
those stories, visions and dreams critically, while widely awake.90

For Jaspers, this type of awakeness is represented in our capacity to enter with
open eyes into the limit situation. I suggest that, in order to embrace such
alien epistemologies, we may—in addition to turning to the more than human
realm—explore the neglected and alien depths of the terrains of Existenz. The
limit situation is the long-lost relative who should be reunited with the family of
human imagination, play, creativity, aesthetic sensibility, and—as José Esteban
Muñoz stresses, drawing upon Ernst Bloch’s work on hope and utopia—aston-
ished contemplation.91 In fact, embracing the imaginary as well as contempla-
tion as part of that existential practice means summoning the radical openness
and indeterminacy of the limit situation and, thus, simultaneously moving be-
yond even that which we can imagine.92 Here I argue that the limit situation
offers up a possibility of capturing a neglected potentiality of being human.
Hence, the alternative often sought in animals and in machines is an ultimate
otherness that can also be found at the heart of what matters to us, and in our
very acts of rebelliously imagining and waiting while carefully attending. It is to
be found in acts that evade objectivism and that allow for a creative broadening
of both the human register and our anticipatory modes and media, beyond the
instrumental, logical, controlled, autonomous, certain—and in effect predicted
and absolutely predictable—idea of the Human and His Future with AI in the
new era.

89 Zylinska, AI Art, 148.

90 Ibid.
91 For José Esteban Muñoz, who draws extensively on Bloch, the right here and now is not enough.

In rejection of presentness, queerness is defined as an aesthetic and performative utopian force. It is

conceived as a yet-ness. It promises warm illuminations of horizons imbued with immense potenti-
ality, of astonishment and awe, related to other worlds and to an otherwise. Cruising Utopia: The Then
and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
92 Berardi, Futurability.
220 Digital Limit Situations

Inviting a Future of Existential Media

I set out in this final chapter by discussing how AI succeeds in presenting itself
as that earth-shattering arrival on the human horizon at the end times, in which
some forms of religious and macroeconomic discourse share a stake. This, as
Zuboff has demonstrated, includes a pillaging for profit of the depths of human
experience, of humanity’s existential concerns. In addition, AI entrepreneurs are
at the time of writing aiming to benefit from the nonsurveyable and, as some
would argue, interlinked crises of our present age, attempting to fill that empty,
uncertain future of the next moment with inevitable datafication. One could
even argue that AI enterprises are rummaging at the brink of a destructive form
of life that they simultaneously co-and reproduce, while effectively closing the
very horizon of the future at the same time.
An important objective of this book has thus also been to offer an invitation be-
yond the prospects and limits of all-pervasive digital networks, including the “new
AI era” of predictive modeling, ubiquitous technologies, and dataism. The invita-
tion goes: let’s collaboratively imagine and craft a future of existentially sustainable
media. Let’s pause in the present to reflect on the future and thus engage it, and in-
deed to zealously philosophize in the spirit of Jaspers in order to bring something else
into being. Let’s seek out methods of hope, beginning with the act of embracing the
present moment—the digital limit situation—as a task. And let’s pick up the torch
from the Futures Anthropologies Manifesto and “probe, interrogate and play with fu-
tures that are plural, non-linear, cyclical, implausible and always unraveling.”93
Precisely here lies the assignment ahead for pursuing an integrative and genera-
tive form of humanities and social sciences that engages those who build the tech-
nologies, in the pursuit of a design for the benefit of an inclusive and open future of
existential and ecological sustainability. This posits postdisciplinary humanities as
a method of hope. Thus bridging “the two cultures” may mean, I suggest, exploring
an existential ethics in collaboration with those who engineer the systems, in the
joint practice of imagining the future at the limits of what can be imagined. The
digital limit situation means a chance to open up the present to other possibilities
than those that are visible, embedded, forecast, or scientifically conceivable: to the
indeterminate, open-ended, or completely unbelievable.94 Berardi suggests, for ex-
ample, the implausible scenario of a worldwide ethico-political awakening of all
the cognitive workers of the world: designers, programmers, AI builders who con-
trol the developments. That is where a new future may begin to take shape.
It seems clear that being able to anticipate Jane Guyer’s near future is phenom-
enologically required for our common life and well-being, and for existential

93 Akama, Pink, and Sumartojo, Uncertainty and Possibility, n.p.

94 Berardi, Futurability, 232.
Anticipatory Media 221

sustainability in a life of and with environmental media technologies. The only

way to achieve it is through a combination of plans, policies, imaginings, dreams,
and practices of care in the present.95 Thus, we need a blend of particular
abstractions and carefully crafted concrete and lived futures with the ingredients
of playful fantasies—with AI at our voluntary disposal. This will imply tenderly
tending to, and caring for, the future in the present: practically forging a common
culture (a latent future) and imaginatively producing progressive plans at the
same time. In the words of Jaspers, who as we noted believes artistic ciphers can
be our prod: “Only by attending to the ciphers of being, can one perceive this
indubitable reality; it is as if in the act of attending a transformation occurs: not
only into transparency, but into the ungrounded necessity that is no longer the
opposite of possibility.”96 Hence, the act of attending is key, and this is a method
of hope—as well as a crucial mode of radical care as tender curation—that will
open up unforeseen possibilities and new horizons of futurability.
I have suggested that, if we read Jaspers’s philosophy carefully and inventively, we
find that it engenders a way of thinking both creatively and critically about the life
apparatus of AI and autonomous systems, and about (digital) media more broadly.
Framing these technologies as existential media enables us to ask when and how
they can or cannot afford anticipation proper (for example). I have revisited Jaspers’s
writings on the most profound human experiences of all: the limit situations of life,
where insight can be gained about what makes us human, in moments of utter un-
certainty and contingency; and I have sought to bring them into a conversation
with our contemporary technologized human condition. I chose this path not only
because such profundity is in fact heavily enmeshed in the digital—for example,
through death practices—in a variety of ways. Existential media—as per their iden-
tified properties—may furnish a foundation for us; they may also throw us. They
may remind us of our frailty, our desires to (dis)connect, and our need to ethically
contain the technologies we live and die by. But all of these properties and stakes ul-
timately recall us to our worldly and embodied selves in our situation.
I have found in Jaspers’s mediating approach a very important middle road
for media theory. It enables threading between an all-out embrace of emergent
technological forms (as so often in posthumanism and the new materialism) and
an all-out rejection (as often found in critical theory and classic existentialism).
Jaspers’s philosophy allows for envisaging a sustainable and open future, in which
we may become human with our faulty and limited machines. I have suggested
we need to place human mortal embodiment and existential vulnerability at the
center, as a kind of corrective balancing—again in a Jaspersian manner—between

95 Or as Don Ihde explains: “Nietzsche, who much later placed into a dialectic the Apollonian and

the dark and furious Dionysian, affirmed that one must also accept a ‘god who dances’ as well as the
stability of Apollonian form.” Ihde, Listening and Voice, 14.
96 Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, 83.
222 Digital Limit Situations

them. The practices of grieving through caring for the dead online, for example—
in reverent silence, in responsible abeyance and careful waiting—may be a tem-
plate in the present moment, when we must find responsible ways of taking on
and crafting futures present in and with existential media. If we are to cross the
frontiers of the digital limit situation, we must seize its uncertainties and see
human vulnerability in loss as a source of fecundity because it recognizes limit. We
can learn from the silent ones. And mourning bodies in themselves stand on the
rim, where limits are evinced, but where several potentialities may also open out.
A focus on the limit situations of the digital thus pushes, as already stated, to-
ward reconceiving of media in light of a multifocal sense of limits rather than of
endless progress. This will also enable us to recognize that existential media are in
fact anticipatory, which may complement Zuboff ’s ultimate remedy: reclaiming
will.97 The existential palette is broader and more nuanced. And even as we
reclaim the future tense, through our will to will, we can never be sure of the
upshot. In all lived-in practices, namely, “multiple dynamics interact in indeter-
minate ways.”98 Or in Jaspers’s words:

Nobody knows where man [sic] and his thinking are going. Since existence,
man and his world are not at an end, a completed philosophy is as little possible
as an anticipation of the whole. We men have plans with finite ends, but some-
thing else always comes out which no one willed.99

Thankfully. For individual singular-plural beings in their historic situation,

within the confines and potentials of our technologized culture, the horizon is
thus ultimately still open, impredicative, and as such anticipatory. Here await fun-
damental, abyssal, and enormous tasks for each and every one of us.100 To borrow
the words of Appadurai, the future for coexisters “is not just a technical and neu-
tral space, it is shot through with affect and sensation,” thus also producing “awe,
vertigo, excitement, disorientation.”101 In our collective and diversified digital limit
situation—constituted by technologically mediated crises, which offer limitations,
contingencies, and possibilities—the future also deeply matters to us. And where
anticipation proper musters openness and indeterminacy, existentiality will inter-
rupt them in deep acknowledgment also of limits. In the present age, such uncer-
tainties and limits in fact carry—in their inherent inconclusiveness—a hope within.
97 Heyes similarly produces her own ethics of ambiguity, and theory of embedded being, through

what resembles a Jaspersian mediation between subjectivity and practice: “I have long been inter-
ested, too, in related paradoxes of freedom: Could freedom live in accepting what is as well as in the
exercise of the will? Could freedom be found in an as-yet-unknown (and in-principle-unknowable)
future as well as in programmatic recommendations? Is freedom a quality of subjects, or a worldly
practice?” Heyes, Anaesthetics of Existence, 12.
98 Guyer, “Anthropology,” 377.
99 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, 48.
100 Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, Enten-eller: Et livsfragment (Copenhagen, 1843).
101 Appadurai, Future as Cultural Fact, 286–287.
Postscript—Going Dark
Refusals in Slowness, Silence, and Waiting

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
—Walt Whitman, “A Noiseless Patient Spider”

Existential media are tools of existence. We forge them out of our own needs and
desires, and out of the riches and penuries of our being, in our search for some-
where to land and to safely belong. Ceaselessly daring to form new bridges and
new connections, which we are then obliged to rely upon, we both throw our-
selves out and are thrown into existence. Connections provide fragile lifelines of
support—filaments in Whitman’s poem. It is our reliance upon these as they bear
up and bear out—within limits and with open-ended implications—that makes
them so essential and deeply existential.
To be able to take note of the coexisters hanging there, in midair, requires
that we dare to slow down. It also calls for loyally remaining with the singular
human and the existential body in order to reconceive being human after
posthumanism. We need to place the embodied mourner and disabled or ailing
person, the coexister, focally for existential media studies, and as a first for a
media theory of limit. In hearing these voices on the edge, we have encountered
cuts of the real that move, guide, and anchor us. We, too, are coexisters who try to
navigate through the planetary and personal—as well as globally distributed and
locally enfleshed—realities of the digital limit situation.
Inspired by Karl Jaspers, who offered a mediation between the two main
emphases of the tradition of existentialism— the instrumental and the

Existential Media. Amanda Lagerkvist, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2022.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190925567.003.0010
224 Digital Limit Situations

subjectivist—this book has shown the crucial importance of being able to keep
both the technological and experiential, the material and moral, the mundane
and extraordinary dimensions of existence in play when conceptualizing media
today. As has been demonstrated, existential media studies will not retire from
asking uncomfortable questions, pushed to the margins within more established
or fashionable paradigms. It contends it is high time to reclaim being human
within a richer register, by also embracing what seems off limits. In this spirit,
I have begun in this book to offer a media theory of the limit situation.
This has also brought about a different tale for our age. Limits are not glitches
in the perfect system; they are features of the world and thus of existence. We
may note a disjunction between, on the one hand, what the internet means and
flags within our cultural imaginaries and, on the other, its complex realities. It
aspires to and promises an Eldorado of smooth connections, interactive imme-
diacy, and seamless presence within an imaginary of transcending tech—an im-
aginary that belongs to the cultural logic of modernity, and which has pervaded
media-historical epochs from the earliest dreams of the telegraph to the most ro-
mantic visions for cyberspace. This clashes head-on with a reality of both willful
and unwitting disconnection, and of actual and ambivalent deliveries in the limit
situation of loss.
This provides a useful starting point for an existential critique. Placing
mourners centrally has rendered crucial insights. For the coexisters, such breaks
may also, in a strange way, actually reflect back their own realism—their lived
realities of the limit situation, which entails the grand interruption of death and
loss. In addition, we learn from the coexisters that, even as the lifeline is there
around the clock, the comfort it offers actually lies in its always-thereness—not
in the constant online activity of the mourner herself. As we have seen, moreover,
memorials mean the world to the bereaved; however, the latter’s attachment to the
internet and to its grammar and ethos of quantification is as factual as it is ambiv-
alent. Coexisters remind us here of the need both for respectful communication
on the frail lifelines, and for silence and disconnection on the existential terrain.
In addition, since the medium displays a steadfast disregard for bodies, it
is actually reminding us all the time about its own limits. Its mythologies have
flatly and pompously established its position precisely by parading the displace-
ment of embodiment in a space of immediacy. Its alleged perfections and point-
blank fullness—most recently echoed in the promises of autonomous systems
and (close to our concerns) of the AI dead—ignore the fact that it flauntingly
fails to bring back that lost somebody. In other words, it doubly projects the void
that loss opens up. Finally, in what I call their postinteractive modes of being
human and caring for the digital dead, invoking the Jaspersian sense of tran-
scendence, coexisters display an alternative where the dead are respected in their
utter otherness, as silent angels, and where modes of being digital emerge that
Postscript—Going Dark 225

revere waiting and remaining suspended at the limit. In these instances, impor-
tantly, the medium also contains its own ends, gaps, failures, and voids, but also
its openings within itself. Media, I argue, are thus antinomies, belonging more to
the limit than we have been prone to see.
Ever since its inception, existential media studies has been raising scandalous
and playful questions about limits, and about media disintegration and discon-
nection: Can we shut down this monster? Do we have to live with it indefinitely?1
This sounds like blasphemy or insanity; but most importantly, as we are evolving
with machines and tools, it is of course a deeply unrealistic and also in many
respects unwanted scenario. The important and serious question is to what ex-
tent, and in what capacity, we can employ strategies of refusal within the digital
limit situation, or strategies for moving under the radar, as Olivia Banner puts it:

For some media studies and cultural studies theorists, there are benefits to re-
maining in the dark, to maintaining a queer and crip stance “against the fu-
ture.” Today’s computational networked technologies, in consort with global
neoliberal capitalism, aim for total visibility—or rather, they aim to force all
life into grids that are legible to their optics. Silence, refusing to participate,
“going dark,” are all viable tactics to take against the overwhelming colonisa-
tion of life for which Silicon Valley aims. That colonisation is predicated on
enlightenment logics of control at a distance; on rationalisation and the ration-
alisation of behaviour; on an underlying ideology of human improvement via
technology, with its strong echo of eugenics. Disability theory provides us with
ample insights that challenge these logics. We would do well to madden these
logics, to crip them—to value . . . “disordering logics.” This would be not only to
honour core disability studies insights—it would also conjoin disability theory
with other theoretical traditions, especially feminist and critical race theory.2

Existential media studies volunteers here to join forces with these crucial and
essential debates. Theorizing media at and of the limit, and in the limit situa-
tion, and continuing the calling of inverting communication as per Jaspers and
Peters after him, it supports the idea that silence—and slowing down, remaining
in waiting, going dark—is a fruitful site of refusal, of resistance, and of creation.
The world is on edge, pushed there by a normative recklessness of speed and

1 See, for example, Lagerkvist, “The Media End,” and “Digital Caesura as Fecundity: Limit

Situations of the Digital,” presentation at the DIGMEX conference “Digital Existence II: Precarious
Media Life,” Sigtuna Foundation, October 2017. For another playful example in this genre, see Zack
Blas’s art project I Hate the Internet, https://zachblas.info/events/i-hate-the-internet-techno-dystop
ian-malaise-and-visions-of-rebellion/.
2 Olivia Banner, “Disability Studies, Big Data and Algorithmic Culture,” in Interdisciplinary

Approaches to Disability: Looking Towards the Future, vol. 2, ed. Katie Ellis et al. (New York: Routledge,
2019), 55–56.
226 Digital Limit Situations

strength and a limitless culture of ruthless quantification, which reinforces the

disregard for the needs of the coexister in health and suffering, in disability and
bereavement. But it also profoundly discounts any spirituality of awe, which in
turn is reflected in the neglect of the needs of a healthy planet. In fact, limit situ-
ations of the digital imply the existence of dimensions that are radically tran-
scendent in the Jaspersian sense, since they cannot be fully understood, forecast,
or explained. The uncertainties at hand actually accentuate the limits of what we
can control—even if the world aims to do so via more automations. As I have
argued, we therefore need existential concepts of care, vulnerability, communi-
cability, and accountability: concepts wide enough also to encompass the round-
ness, stillness, slowness, attendance, waiting, and astonished contemplation
invited by the limit situation. This is not a theoretical exercise, or something that
applies to the practices or faults of someone else. It is rather, as I have argued in
this book, the very task ahead for the humanities and social sciences if they move
out to confront the unbearable intimacies of emergency situated at the forefront
of the digital limit situation.
Recommended Reading

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Kierkegaard, Søren. Sickness unto Death by Anti-Climacus. Harmondsworth: Penguin,

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Further Recommended Readings

Adam, Barbara and Chris Groves. Future Matters. Leiden: Brill, 2007.
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Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
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Bost, Suzanne. “From Race/Sex/Etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The
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and Susan Hekman, 340–372. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.
Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
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Casey, Edward S. The World on Edge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
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Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same. Cambridge, MA: MIT
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Recommended Reading 229

Coeckelbergh, Mark. Human Being @ Risk: Enhancement, Technology, and the Evaluation
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230 Recommended Reading

Lagerkvist, Amanda. “Existential Media: Toward a Theorization of Digital Thrownness.”

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Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.

abeyance, 32, 215, 221–22 automation, 5n.12, 98, 104, 113, 191, 199, 204–
absurdity, 73, 81, 142–43, 183n.48 5, 214, 217
Adenauer era, 21 autonomous systems, 48, 98, 200, 214, 221
Adorno, Theodor, 21
affect, 38, 98, 132, 152–53, 158, 222 Becker, Ernst, 73
AI (artificial intelligence), 12, 34–35, 37, 101–2, Berardi, Franco, “Bifo” 198–99, 213, 214, 220
110–11, 123, 169–70, 180–81, 188–89, Berlant, Lauren, 95n.101
199–203, 205, 206–9, 211, 212, 213–14, big tech giants, 144–45, 216
215–16, 217, 220–21, 224–25 biometrics, 24–25, 34–35, 39–40, 65n.4, 121,
and anticipation, 206–7 122–23, 130–31, 201–2
and ethics, 200–1 birth, 2–3, 7–8, 7n.19, 52, 64–65, 112, 153, 193
and the future, 202 Bloch, Ernst, 21, 219
and the pandemic, 213–14 body/bodies, 10, 12–14, 30, 41–42, 44–45,
responsible, 111 71–72, 88, 96–98, 103–4, 114, 120–
ambiguity, 8–9, 35–36n.66, 37, 81, 89, 100, 101 21, 125–27
the ethics of, 37, 145, 204n.22, 211n.52, and affect, 38, 85–86, 153–54
222n.97 avatar, 169
ambivalence, 8–9, 41–42, 43–44, 48–49, cyborg, 151n.5
98n.112, 100, 114–15, 138–39, 138n.64, datafication of, 4, 40
143, 146, 162–63, 216, 224 definition of, 13n.30, 125–26
ambivalent status of the body, 188, 224 disabled, 13n.30, 103–4, 151–52, 151n.5
angels, 78–79, 166–69, 167–68n.8, 176–77, 190– discarding of in Western culture, 187–88
91, 192, 195, 224–25 and embodiment, 13n.30
Anthropocene, 67–68 existential, 123, 182–84, 223
anthropology, 24–25, 35–36, 69, 75n.35, failing, 169–70
98, 104–5 feelings in the, 72, 120–21
philosophical, 112 feminist definition of, 13n.30
anticipation frailty of the, 165
definition of, 208–9 human, 169–70
antinomy, 2–3, 8, 13n.31, 31, 38n.73, 100, 146, individualization of in clinical medicine in
183n.49, 224–25 the 19th century, 36n.67
media as, 37, 44–45 interwoven with digital media, 1–2, 12
anxiety, 7n.19, 8–9 , 33n.61, 37–3 8, 57, as limited, mortal, dead, 3–4, 41–42, 102,
64–65, 64–6 5n.3, 70, 73–7 4, 76–7 7, 122–23, 154, 162, 170–71, 182–83, 184–
157, 199 85, 186–87, 190–91
Arendt, Hannah, 14, 19–20n.3, 21, 21n.7, 23, mapped, 12
46, 66n.6, 70, 90–91, 112, 129–30, masculinist distance from, 169–70
155, 197–98 material, 121
on Kierkegaard, 128–29 as measurable machine, 122–23
on natality, 197 mind clones with, 188–89
theory of action, 155 mind-body dualism, 169–70
attendance, 137, 217, 218, 225–26 obedient, 58
234 Index

body/bodies (cont.) culture, 34–36

as object of signification, 171–73 definition of, 106–7
in pain, 163 existential, 11–12, 44–45, 91, 93–94, 97–
reduced to objectification, 130–31 98, 99, 102–7, 128, 146–47, 148–50,
return of, 188–89, 191 165, 195
singular-plural, 62 inversion model of, 93–94, 106–7
situated, 189–92 Jaspers’s philosophy of, 11–12
socially constituted, 96–97 lifeline, 37
stress in grieving, 157 a limit to, 6–7
suffering, 152 at the limit, 44–45
technical replication of the body, 181–82 media of, 1–2
turned into a medium, 190–91 networks, 27, 35–36
vulnerable, hurting, dying, 13n.30, 103–4, relationship between death and, 5–6n.14
154–55, 156 studies, 19, 64–65, 75–76, 75n.35, 77–
Braidotti, Rosi, 9–10, 36n.67, 103–4, 103–4n.10, 78, 80–81
154, 180–81 truth and/as, 19–20, 22
continuing bonds, 54–55, 134, 134n.55, 170–
cancer, 2, 2n.4, 10, 160 71, 193
blogs, 9, 52, 95–96, 97–98, 152, 158, 160–63 Couldry, Nick, 4n.10, 11nn.28–29, 31–32
narratives, 97–98 Craig, Robert T. 75n.35
care, 6–7, 9–10, 34n.64, 37–38, 42, 43–44, 46– creep, 42
47, 83, 96, 100–1, 112, 113, 115, 119–20, crip theory, 13n.30, 225
180–81, 200, 205–6, 217 crisis/crises, 2–3, 48–49, 158, 183
for the dead, 44–45, 170–71, 180–81, Covid-19, 213–14
185, 190–92 ecological, 67–68, 190–91
disconnection as, 159–60, 165 historically specific, 211
ethics of, 59, 62–63, 156, 217–18 interrelated, 113
existential ethics of, 225–26 and media, 42
a future horizon of, 217 journalism, 35–36n.66
intergenerational, 218 as limit situation, 30, 155
listening with, 145 of presence, authenticity, 24n.16
more than human webs of, 151–52, 203 critical disability studies, 3–4, 6–7, 8–9, 13n.30,
radical, 150–51 43, 48, 55n.14, 103–4, 151–52, 225
as self-care, 150–51 critical race theory, 58, 58n.24, 58–59n.26,
as species activity, 7–8, 218 60n.31, 225
work, 113, 150–51, 220–21 cultural studies, 69, 76–78
caregiver, 151–52 cure, 42, 54n.11, 169–70, 218
caring as species activity, 218 definition of, 218
caring media, 149–50
Casey, Edward S. 14, 36–37, 45 data
Chouliaraki, Lilie, 76n.37, 95–96 as broken, 20n.4
Christianity, 176–77, 184–85 cult of, 126n.20
Chun, Wendy H. K. 4, 67–68 as mundane, 40, 64–65n.3
civilizational critique, 11n.29 dataism, 14, 62, 121n.5, 126–27, 146
coexister(s), 12–14, 46–47, 57–58, 69n.17, data colonialism, 4n.10
100–1, 107–10, 113–14, 115, 130, 145, datafication, 4–6, 125, 126–27, 133, 146, 201–2,
146–47, 148–49, 151–52, 156, 159–60, 201n.11, 204–5, 220
161, 162–64, 165, 168–69, 175–76, dead
179–80, 192, 195–96, 198, 203–4, 205, the AI dead, 180–81, 189, 191, 196
209–10, 222, 223 the digital dead, 166–68, 190–92, 224–25
Cold War, 73 the pervasive dead, 190–91
communication, 23 death
authentic, 91 de-sequestration of, 9, 9n.22, 54
Index 235

deprivatization of, 9 37–38, 60–61, 63, 64–65, 65n.4, 66, 68,

digitalization of, 54 70–74, 77–78, 112, 145, 152–53, 154–
online, 78–79, 154–55 55, 221–22
online research, 9, 49, 152–53 and being human as defying
returned via media, 186–87 measurement, 128
sequestration of, 148–49 critique of, 7n.19, 73–74
Western attitudes towards, 184–85 and finitude, 7–8, 155
death online research, 9, 44–45, 49 introduction to, 70–71
de Beauvoir, Simone, 21–22, 37, 81 Jaspers’s, 82, 92, 121
disability, 3–4, 8, 32–33, 72, 87, 151–52 two emphases within, 64–65, 66, 80–
and invisibility, 54 90, 223–24
and intimate publics, 54n.12, 95–96 ethical self-transcendence, 45n.100
digital ethics, 110
afterlife and the Other, 45–46
industries, 174–75 as bodies, 65n.4
phenomena, 173–74 digital media, 53n.9, 65–66n.5, 87
bodies of substitution, 169–70 distributed, 9–10, 110–11
corporations, 1–2, 174–75, 202 existential, 37–38, 48n.2, 81, 115
capitalism, 212 feminist, 34n.63, 217
definition of, 101–2 incarnate and relational, 110–11
ecology, 108, 122–23, 145 Jaspers’s philosophy and, 21
estate planners/planning, 174–75 Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, 59,
life, 86–87, 88, 125–26, 174n.26 89, 113
media culture, 79–80, 89, 116, 186–87 of ambiguity, 37
media as environmental force, 4, 177 of care, 48n.2, 59, 115, 156, 217–18
media as environmental technologies, 1–2 of listening, 54–58
digital limit situation, 5n.12, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19– of media, 11, 19
47, 89, 94, 100, 101–2, 110, 113, 115, 198 research, 11–12, 49, 50, 52–53
Derrida, Jacques, 2n.3, 42 transversal, 112
disconnection, 102–7, 104n.12 virtue, 11n.29, 52–53
as existential silence, 105–6 European Commission, 175n.27
diversity, 11, 41–42, 75n.35, 76–77, 85–86, 94, existential media
115–16, 148–49, 162–63, 197–98 definition, 2–4
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 70–71 forms, 115–16
properties, 100, 114–15
Earth, 36–37, 115, 191–92
elemental media philosophy, 1n.2, 36–37, fatigue, 6–7
84–85, 88 feminism/feminist, 153
elements, 39, 103, 112 ethics of care, 59, 156, 217–18
empirical existence, 28–29 media ontology, 34
the Encompassing, 20n.4, 22, 22n.9, 27–29, 46 new materialism, 156
which we are, 91 philosophy, 55
which is being itself, 91 theory, 34
engineering finitude, 7–8, 155
techno-social, 105 Foucault, Michel, 56, 73–74
environmental humanities, 8–9, 36–37 Frischmann, Brett, 105
environmental media, 39, 220–21
environmental problems, 67–68 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 21
environmental vulnerability, 89 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 54–55
existential elucidation, 22, 148–49, 179 Gautier, Amina, 4–6
Existenz, 28n.37, 29, 30, 32, 35–36, 88, 93, 106–7 glitch, 4–6, 139
existentialism and existential philosophy, global, 10
2–3, 7–10, 14–15, 19–20, 21, 22–23, crisis, 20, 48–49
236 Index

global (cont.) precarious, at risk, 4n.10

greenhouse, 197 techno-moral needs of, 11n.29
and individual scales, 14 technologies as limiting, 24
internet, 148, 199–200 what defines, 44–45
media, 96–97, 120–21 human species, 3–4, 154
neoliberal economy, 150–51, 225 end times for, 42n.87
grave/graveyard, 119–20, 166 existential risks to, 89, 200, 207–8, 213–14
digital, 166, 171–72, 177, 186–87 extinction of, 188–89
as originary medium, 171 Husserl, Edmund, 127–29, 138–39, 155
Victorian, 191
grief Iaconesi, Salvatore, 1–2, 10, 31–32, 35–36, 48–49
models, 134n.55 Ihde, Don, 56, 100
stages of, 134n.55 immortalist zeitgeist, 167–68n.8
in Victorian England, 136 incomprehensibility, 8–9
work, 134, 138n.64, 194 incomputability, 199
guilt indeterminacy, 8–9
German, 21 infrastructures of being, 40, 83, 84, 114, 121
in Jaspers’s philosophy, 106–7 in medias res, 40–41
in Kierkegaard according to Arendt, 128–29 instrumentality, 81–82, 85n.64, 130n.39
as limit situation, 2–3, 29–30, 155 instrumentarianism, 15, 126n.20, 201–2
metaphysical, 66n.6, 97–98 intensive media, 108n.28
intimacy of emergency, 2–3, 61, 115, 225–26
Hayles, N. K. 13n.30, 110–11, 125–26, 127– intimate publics, 95–96, 95n.101, 150–51
28, 169–70
Heidegger, Martin Kafer, Alison, 13n.30, 55n.14
and being-toward-death, 7n.19, 91, 155 Kant, Immanuel, 23, 178
and concept of sorge, 149–50 Kant’s definition of transcendence and the
joining the Nazi Party, 73–74n.31 transcendental, 23, 178
philosophy of originary technicity, 2n.3 Kierkegaard, Søren, 6n.15, 7n.19, 23–24, 70–72,
Heideggerian media ontology, 83–87 73, 82, 105–6, 114–15
Heinämaa, Sara, 7n.19 Kittler, Friedrich, 2n.3, 3n.5
Heyes, Cressida J. 55n.15, 72, 87, 103 Klein, Naomi, 213–14
hope as method, 57–58 Kojève, Alexandre, 21
human
being, 11–14, 20 La Cura, 2
change of the very meaning of being, 36n.67 Laqueur, Thomas W. 170–73, 184–85
embodied modes of being, 12–14 Levinas, Emmanuel, 57–58, 81, 96, 106
existence, 3–4 lifeline(s), 41–42, 48–49, 141, 148, 156–63, 164–
Jaspers’s notion of, 20, 23, 28–29, 100–1 65, 194, 195–96
re-envisioning of after posthumanism, 2–3, lifeline communication, 148–49, 151–53, 163–65
99, 223 lifeline of care, 148–49
humanities, 130n.39, 142–43 lifeworld, 1–2, 71–72, 81–82, 127–28
future of, 132 digitally enforced, 63, 86–87, 143–44
main mission of, 100–1 liminality, 8–9, 35–36n.66
neglect of affect and the body within, 153 limits, 8–9, 198–99
and social sciences, 46–47, 153 media as, 40
humanity, 2 media at, 41–42, 225–26
across millennia, 67 media of, 1–15, 104–5
common, 76–77 theorizing media of, 2–3, 4–6, 101–2, 223
end times for, 42n.87 limit situation, 2–4, 7–8, 9, 19–20, 23, 27–28,
integrity of, 70–71 29, 29n.44
in a limit situation, 34–35 of the digital, 5n.12, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19–47, 89,
new styles of, 60n.31 94, 100, 110, 113, 115, 198
Index 237

listening, 54–58 occultism, 79n.45, 177–78

loss, 4–6, 152, 158 Oliver, Kelly, 108n.29
Lukács, Georg, 21 ontology, 80–90, 94–95
of numbers, 120–21, 125–26, 141–42, 144–
Marcuse, Herbert, 73–74 45, 198
margins, 8, 37–38, 49, 54–58 posthumanist, 109
of mourning, 3–4
Markham, Annette, 77n.40 Papacharissi, Zizi, 64–65
materiality, 37–38, 81–82, 83, 84, 110–11, Peters, John D. 21–22, 79–80, 83, 120–21
114, 126n.18, 153–54, 170–71, elemental media philosophy, 1n.2, 36–37,
182–83 84–85, 88
mathesis universalis, 130n.39 infrastructural approach, 36–37, 40, 83,
May, Rollo, 73 114, 121
Mayer, Gertrud, 22–23, 59–60 philosophical anthropology, 84–85, 112
McLuhan, Marshall, 27, 126n.18 philosophy of technology, 24n.16
media Jaspers’s, 84, 179, 203–4
broad concept of, 101, 171–72 photography, 67–68, 78–79
definition, 101 Pink, Sarah, 20n.4, 25n.20, 64–65n.3, 211n.53
theory of limit, 2–3, 4–6, 101–2, 223 post-Christian, 54, 127, 168–69
theory of the limit situation, 5n.12, 9, 85, post-masculinist rationality, 2–3, 90
172n.19 posthumanism, 2n.3, 3–4, 8–9, 15, 32, 36n.67,
users, 107–8, 108n.28, 109 38–39, 74n.33, 99, 110–11, 172, 180–81,
media, religion and culture (field of), 77–78 184, 221–22, 223
mediation, 67–70 prediction imperative, 130–31, 202
as vital process, 1n.2, 3–4, 65–66n.5 predictive modeling, 203–4, 206, 220
mediatization, 11n.28, 77–78 Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria, 112–13
memorial
digital, 170–71 race, 54, 54n.11
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 81 respons(e)ability, 108n.29
metaphysics/metaphysical, 87 responsibility, 110–14
material-moral, 112 distributed, 110n.32
metric culture, 8–9, 40, 121 for technology, 26–27
moral laws, 99 responsivity, 2–3, 115
morality Ricoeur, Paul, 71–72, 106–7
distributed, 180–81 robots, 129–30
mortality, 73, 153
media and, 78–79, 105–6, 123 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 21–22, 73–74, 81, 90–91,
Morrison, Toni, 124 124, 205
mourners, 57–58, 107–8, 146–47, Scott, Charles E. 71
195–96, 224 Sefa Dei, George J. 58n.24
NGOs of, 49, 51–52 self, 12–14, 69n.17
mourning, 186–87, 188–89, 191–92 as alien and exotic, 80n.50
online, 157, 166–68 as authentic, 70
Muñoz, José Esteban, 219 as coexister, 108–9
enterprising, 139–40
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 59, 70 existential concept of, 66n.7, 68
natality, 7–8, 155 as ghost effect of media, 69
necromedia, 189–90 heroic mythology of, 21
necro-sociability, 184–85 neoliberal, 140
new materialism, 2n.3, 9–10, 32, 38, 43, through the Other, 32
126n.18, 154–55, 163–64, 176– philosophical, 151–52
82, 221–22 as product of communication, 91
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 62–63, 70–72 protesting, 139–40
238 Index

self (cont.) Heidegger’s concept of, 33n.61

relational, 102, 182–83 time
sacred, 167–68n.8 anaesthetic time, 57
as singular-plural, 92 digital, 67–68, 167–68n.8
tethered, 161 tomb
theory of the, 12–14 cult of the, 186
self-care, 150–51 vinyl, 189–90
self-disclosure, 97–98 transcendence, 97–98, 101–2, 106–7, 109, 160
selfhood, 90–91 Jaspers’s definition of, 179
Jaspers’s definition of, 90–91, 96 media enabling, 78–79
as primary sociality, 96 transcendent
Sartre’s concept of, 90–91 in Kant, 178
self-imagining, 56 transcendental, 58
self-quantification, 122–23 in Jaspers, 179
self-realization, 91 in Kant, 178
self-tracking, 122–23 phenomenology, 72
Selinger, Evan, 105 transhumanism, 169–70
Siebers, Tobin, 3–4, 103–4 transversal, 89
silence, 11–12, 57, 88, 94, 102–7, 115–16, 146, trauma, 76–77, 76n.37, 85–86
148–49, 159–60
slowness, the slow field, 48–63 uncertainty, 2–3, 9, 23, 25, 33, 34–35, 46, 57, 98,
Sontag, Susan, 78n.42 114–16, 123, 197, 209–15, 217, 221
spirit, 28–29 the unconditioned, 31–32, 155
spiritualism, 78–79, 177–78, 183, 195
subjectivity, 12–14, 21, 55, 66, 68, 70, 81, 107–8 Vallor, Shannon, 11n.29
Jaspers’s concept of, 90–91 Verbeek, Peter-Paul, 26–27, 179
subject/self vulnerability, 9, 31–38, 41–42, 62–63, 64–65,
autonomous, 154–55 76–77, 76n.37, 88, 158
embodied, 1–2, 221 and caring media, 115–16
liberal humanist, 32, 108–9 coexistential, corporeal and common, 96–97
relational, 102, 182–83 and connectivity, 96–97
suffering, 21, 29–30, 33, 54–55, 60n.31, 76–77, definition of, 96
85–87, 95–96, 98–99, 106, 110, 115–16, design of, 112
120–21, 138n.64, 149, 150–51, 152–53, digital-human, 15, 151–52
154–55, 163–64, 180–81, 197, 215 and diversity, 123, 150–51
surveillance capitalism, 4, 12, 42, 89, 130–31, embodied, 115, 150–51, 152
201–2, 211, 212 environmental, 89
existential, 15, 66, 75–76, 85–86, 90, 94–99,
technē, 145 100–1, 111, 221–22, 225–26
technicity as fecundity, 34–35, 106, 215, 221–22
originary, 2n.3, 83, 86–87, 98, 104, 120– and femininity, 186–87
21, 197–98 and intimate affective publics, 67n.10, 95–96
technics, 81–82, 145 and invulnerability, 108n.28
techno-existential, 34–35, 144–45 Jaspers’s concept of, 20, 29, 29n.42
closure, 104, 174–75, 198–99 as lived experience, 94–95, 156
shock, 42 mediated, 96–97, 152
spectrum, 187 as obligation, 97–98, 107
vulnerability, 42 ontological and social, 96, 115–16
terror management theory, 7n.19, 73 originary (human), 11–12, 20, 32–33, 98
thanatology, 73 perennial, 115–16
Thrift, Nigel, 153 and political agency, 96–97, 150–51
thrownness, 34–35, 37–38, 100, 110, 145 posthuman definition of, 154
digital thrownness, 33n.61, 34 as precarious media life, 98
Index 239

shared, 59–60, 96, 115–16, 146–47, 151–52, Weber, Max, 23, 177–78
156, 163, 164–65 Weheliye Alexander G., 60n.31
and social constructivism, 110 Weimar, 21
as social force, 96–97, 97n.110 Weizenbaum, Joseph, 129–30
tactical and systemic, 95–96 West World, 188
techno-existential, 42, 46, 89 World War II, 73–74, 197–98
and temporality, 215 Wynter, Sylvia, 58

waiting, 3–4, 8, 8n.21, 12, 33–34, 57, 62–63, Zuboff, Shoshana, 4n.10, 125, 126–27, 130–31,
104–5, 115–16, 148–49, 198, 219, 221– 201–2, 203–4
22, 223–26 Zylinska, Joanna, 59, 89, 113, 153,
Wautischer, Helmut, 109 207–8

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Amanda Lagerkvist - Existential Media A Media Theory of The Limit Situation

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Amanda Lagerkvist - Existential Media A Media Theory of The Limit Situation

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Existential Media

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022900028

Introduction: Media of Limits  1

5. Metric Media: Numerical Being, Marginal Beings, and the

Postscript—​Going Dark: Refusals in Slowness, Silence, and Waiting  223

Recommended Reading  227

Huset (Association for Children in Bereavement), and Gergö Hadlaczky from

Parts of this book expand on portions of previously published materials and

tools, artifacts, and media of communication.3 While this approach provides

ID: Lexington Books, 2016).

Literature, 2nd ed. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990), 83.

common myth of all: the proclaimed unboundedness of digital media. In line

12 This is my key understanding, following Benjamin Peters, “Digital,” in Digital Keywords: A

of disconnection, breakdown, and shortage (as will be further elaborated in

15 Or as Kierkegaard muses: the sickness unto death—despair—can only be cured by an

echoes my concerns: “Activity—​both the daily actions of a person living in the

No subject has unlimited energy or unlimited resources—​and the same should be

17 Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Durham,

NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 164.

In addition, finitude must also be stretched beyond the individual level, as we

Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 170–​171, italics added.

Media and Society, online first (June 7, 2016): 1–​15, https://​doi.org/​10.1177/​14614​4481​6649​921.

Existential Media offers a series of encounters with media technologies along

of communication, which helps craft a crucial conceptualization of existential

individual, belonging to a concrete historical situation—​in the spotlight anew.30

of how media studies seems to have abandoned selfhood—​becoming consumed

University Press, 1935/​1997), 50.

Stumbling upon Karl Jaspers: Finding a Theory

5 Thornhill, Karl Jaspers, 1.

a treasure trove to be rediscovered. Coincidentally, media scholar John D. Peters

8 Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, 321.

19 Kember and Zylinska, Life after New Media, xv.

in Philosophy and Technology, 19, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 308, https://​doi.org/​10.5840/​techn​e201​5121​742.

can only develop their technologies in alignment with an understanding of the

The Realities of the Limit Situation

As already discussed, Karl Jaspers is not putting forth a grand hypothesis of

Realizing the incompleteness of our knowledge of reality, of our limits, is what

34 Peach, Death, 38.

Psychopathology, 46 (2013): 301, italics added https://​doi.org/​10.1159/​000351​838.

Limit situations thus represent the pronounced possibility of becoming aware

47 Ibid., 178, 184, translation modified.

The Digital Limit Situation: Technicity, Vulnerability,

Rediscovery of Karl Jaspers,” Psychopathology, 40, no. 2 (2007): 75–​82, https://​doi.org/​10.1159/​

57 Couldry, Media, Society, World, 181.

2006), 7, italics added.

aporias of technologized existence. If they are instead reconceived and named

60 Thornhill, Karl Jaspers, 19.

Thrownness leads to vulnerability because it marks the limits of individual con-

Hence broaching, in the spirit of Salvatore Iaconesi’s curatorial approach, the

65 Iaconesi, message to the AoIR List, March 25, 2020.

communication and transportation, biotechnological interventions and genetic

Thinking with Limits: Introducing the Essays

Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86, no. 1 (2004): 57–​78, http://​www.jstor.org/​sta​ble/​3554​460.

In speculative realism, by contrast, limits are reclaimed. The motivation be-

The limit exposed through a deconstructive gesture is a certainty of an in-

76 Kolozova, Cut of the Real, 100.

accessibility at our fingertips, produce both solace and, I suggest, an amplified

On my phone I got a notification. I had been added to a WhatsApp instant mes-

30, 2020, https://​www.aljaze​era.com/​featu​res/​2020/​4/​30/​death-​at-​a-​dista​nce-​zoom-​funer​als-​in-​

University of Chicago Press, 1968/1981), 63–171.

Yale University Press, 1951/​1973), 99.

fieldwork in several parts of the world, the existential anthropologist Michael

Was it possible therefore to identify any existential givens, common to all

renaming deconstruction. To read deconstruction as an ethical project, or better, to read it as con-

Being as such is not knowable, it can be experienced only as something “all

101 Ibid., 1680.

Existential media studies is not a field defined by a single subject area—​such as

Research Ethics and the Materials Studied

This book is a contribution to qualitative media studies and internet research.6

4 Interview, November 2018.

newspaper articles devoted to the network. On two occasions I conducted field-

9 Charles M. Ess, Digital Media Ethics (Oxford: Polity Press, 2014/​2020).

Introduction: Media of Limits 1

5. Metric Media: Numerical Being, Marginal Beings, and the

Postscript—Going Dark: Refusals in Slowness, Silence, and Waiting 223

Recommended Reading 227

echoes my concerns: “Activity—both the daily actions of a person living in the

No subject has unlimited energy or unlimited resources—and the same should be

Colebrook (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 170–171, italics added.

Media and Society, online first (June 7, 2016): 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444816649921.

individual, belonging to a concrete historical situation—in the spotlight anew.30

of how media studies seems to have abandoned selfhood—becoming consumed

University Press, 1935/1997), 50.

in Philosophy and Technology, 19, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 308, https://doi.org/10.5840/techne2015121742.

Psychopathology, 46 (2013): 301, italics added https://doi.org/10.1159/000351838.

Rediscovery of Karl Jaspers,” Psychopathology, 40, no. 2 (2007): 75–82, https://doi.org/10.1159/

Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 86, no. 1 (2004): 57–78, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3554460.

30, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/4/30/death-at-a-distance-zoom-funerals-in-

Yale University Press, 1951/1973), 99.

Existential media studies is not a field defined by a single subject area—such as

9 Charles M. Ess, Digital Media Ethics (Oxford: Polity Press, 2014/2020).

Studies Quarterly, 13, nos. 3–4 (2010), https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1273/1303.

14 Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” NWSA

ed. Steven Crowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3–24.

Books, August 11, 2019, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/habermas-up-from-heidegger/#_ftn14.

studies of offering a communication-based view of existence or Being. The

Critique is thus crucial still. The material/technological tradition, he argues,

(2011): 137–148, https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443710386518; Kember and Zylinska, Life after New

Frosh—who remain on the same material-praxical grounds—he is in full fidelity

A post-masculinist rationality is by no means non-or anti-rationalist; it

This resonates with the Jaspersian, low-profiled, Other-oriented, and communi-

Hence: “With self-being thus a product of communication, neither I nor the