Reawakenings to the improbable: Offerings of the limit situation for media theory in a disorderly world

Abstract

The global pandemic threw the world in all its asymmetries and diversities into a limit situation without known coordinates. This article suggests that in its aftermath there is actually a call and an opportunity for more than rethinking existing keywords in the field. It argues that the crisis was “improbable” in the meaning of the word offered by Amitav Ghosh who traces a common sense forged by probabilistic science, that expelled the unthinkable from the modern imaginary. Tracking down this regime of certainty, the essay offers a discussion on the place or displacement of the disorderly, the uncertain, and the disruptive in media theory. It submits that reawakening to the improbable, in light of Karl Jaspers’ philosophical anthropology of the limit situation, offers a fruitful conceptual avenue ahead. Apart from introducing the concept of the (digital) limit situation, the article offers a conversation between existential media studies, critical disability studies, feminist STS, and the environmental humanities, by also inviting an extended family of unruly concepts, including dismediation and deferral. It concludes that limit situations can be transformative also for media theory, if we dare to seize them, by means of existential modes of transversal listening to ghostly pasts never fulfilled.

Introduction: in the pandemic aftermath

The disruptive character of the global pandemic threw the world in all its asymmetries and diversities into a limit situation without known coordinates. For the German existential philosopher Karl Jaspers (1932/1970) limit situations are our encounters with death, crisis, guilt, and conflict as well as with birth and love – unprecedented moments when we face the limits of what we can control, verbalize, and know. They are sites of profound disorder, uncertainty and antinomy, which means that we cannot use reason to overcome them. As contradictions of life that we simply have to live with, they do not spare us. They throw us out of joint: “In every limit situation, the rug is so to speak yanked from under my feet” (Jaspers cited in Fuchs, 2013).

The limit situation, which has not been a key concept in media theory, is universal yet always experienced as specific to individuals in their historical moment. By expanding on the originary definition, I suggest it may be mobilized so as to also analyze collective upheaval as well as the specific challenges of our present age of advanced technologies and all-powerful platform ecologies. In the digital limit situation (which I will discuss more fully further on), accelerated by the pandemic, technologies became lifelines for better or worse (Lagerkvist, 2022). The lifeworld was teeming with an overabundance of logistical digital media, filling up the voids of daily isolation, and sustaining those of us who zoomed our way through our professional duties. These media offered both shock and consolation. Simultaneously governments and businesses alike speeded up the project of deep datafication of our societies, heightening human vulnerabilities to the exploitative regime of surveillance capitalism, and profiting from the crisis (Burckhardt et al., 2022). This prompted questions about what our evident overreliance of digital media implies in our lives and for our societies.

The pandemic was cataclysmic and lives were lost. It also acutely displayed the inequalities of the world. It was a time of deep uncertainty, leaving citizens hanging there in mid-air, waiting without a given script. But limit situations can be transformative if we seize them. They call on human beings to pay attention, to listen, to respond, and to ask key questions about what really matters. In the pandemic aftermath, returning to an increasingly strange and estranging world meant for scholarly communities to seek to reconnect and rethink their projects anew. As in limit situations overall, there was also a sense of awakening, and a broad drive for querying. I suggest, in this context, that media studies was stirred by questions such as: did the COVID-19 pandemic challenge the temporalities and formats of both swift catastrophic news events, and their longer tails of duration in “disaster marathons,” as well as their management in mediated ritualization? Are we equipped to make sense of the crisis, or are we stranded with increasingly obsolete frameworks of analysis? Has the digital limit situation hurtled the field out of its orbit, so there is in fact no simple business as usual to “return to”?

This essay focuses specifically on one such question emanating from the digital limit situation, that follows on from the other three: what types of approaches, sensibilities and acumens are needed now, to take on a technology saturated “world on edge” (cf. Casey, 2017)? I will argue that what is needed is allowing for a sense of the improbable, in the meaning of the word suggested by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). Ghosh tracks down a common sense in modernity reliant on an attitude that partitioned and tamed the (natural) world into discrete regularities, and simultaneously expelled the improbable and the disruptive from the cultural imaginary. Might we dare to suggest that media studies shares in this common sense in some way? This may sound counter-intuitive, since the disruptive events of crisis, catastrophe and war are taken for granted features of the global news machine and by consequence phenomena of default interest for scholars in the field (cf. Katz and Liebes, 2007). Media feed on them. Risks and conflicts, mediated suffering and trauma have therefore merited prominent empirical and theoretical work. The past decade has also seen important media anthropological scholarship on media rituals and catastrophes (Chouliaraki, 2006; Pinchevski, 2019; Sumiala, 2013). Most recently climate change and the ecological crisis have drawn the attention of the fields of crisis communication, journalism, environmental communication, and materialist media philosophy alike (Hansen, 2018; Peters, 2015). Importantly, recent debates span positionings against catastrophe that problematize the news cycle-based temporality of contemporary catastrophism (https://againstcatastrophe.net/) and a deep reckoning with catastrophe; as wildfires and floods are today incorporated into climate communication itself, scholars ponder how extreme events may become integral to both teaching and scholarship (Aronczyk and Russell, 2023).

I suggest that extant paradigms could be invigorated further by the concept of the limit situation, due to its unique capacities to encompass the disorderly and the disruptive. A key objection is of course that searching for patterns of regularity is the very mission of scientific research, and that what is needed in the face of a chaotic world, is more data and more probabilistic science to sort it all out. In addition, it is deeply human to seek to render narrative order to the world. But considering that the world of today is disorderly, and that many of the developments of the past years would have seemed unbelievable a decade ago, it is high time also for a rethinking of our scholarly endeavors. Subject to the destructive exploitations of platform capitalism, we find ourselves in a chaotic media world that is literally on fire (Couldry and Meiljas, 2019; Mullaney et al., 2021; Zuboff, 2019). Chaos agents sit at the helm of the big tech companies. The mediated political domain has itself become increasingly disordered. Supported by social media platforms, autocratic chaos agents are similarly at the helm of different political systems. Through information warfare they exploit uncertainty and chaos in order to leverage power, exert control, and even wage catastrophic war.

So where do we turn in media scholarship for dealing with a world so acutely ravaged by the improbable? I submit that a fresh conceptualization of the disorderly and the unthinkable – in light of Jaspers’ philosophical anthropology of the limit situation, with its insistence upon uncertainty and the humbling limits of knowledge, and its reluctance to proclaim any ontological enclosures – is one way to begin. This article argues that in this moment there is actually a call and an opportunity for more than rethinking existing keywords, compelled by the need to both study and probe the many faces of “the disorderly.” I suggest we harness insights from existential media studies and bring them into conversation with a series of critical interventions in critical disability studies, feminist STS, and the environmental humanities. This move is not a about radical novelty: it is about reawakening to something lost, to something haunting (cf. Lagerkvist and Reimer, 2023). This is in the spirit of Jaspers’ philosophy which seeks to reawaken us to what we already know, deep down. It is thus a move that enables us to re-cognize the human condition and media situation in all its diversity, as well as our scholarly purpose and directions, in order to ask with Benjamin Peters (2021): “How do we live now? In the aftermath of ourselves.” This will be a delicate meandering along an admittedly uncertain path, in a wilder terrain of contingency and urgency. On this trajectory I will also invite a series of kindred and refreshingly unruly concepts to come along – including dismediation and deferral – to finally arrive at the need for existential sensibilities and modes of listening.

The improbable: the regime of certainty and beyond

The crisis was “improbable” in the meaning of the word offered by Ghosh (2016) who traces unconscious patterns of thought in modernity based on probabilistic science that gained ascendancy in conjunction with “the growing faith in the regularity of bourgeois life” (p. 17). This produced a common sense, reliant on the statistical attitude of prediction, that simultaneously expelled the improbable from the modern imaginary and in turn made climate change unthinkable. Behind this process was a habit of mind “that proceeded by creating discontinuities.” This prompted “breaking problems into smaller and smaller puzzles until a solution presented itself. This is a way of thinking that deliberately excludes things and forces (“externalities”) that lie beyond the horizon of the matter at hand: it is a perspective that renders the interconnectedness of Gaia unthinkable” (ibid: 56). The partitioning of the world into settings, scenarios and discrete problems to be solved, enabled the great acceleration in carbon emissions (ibid: 79–80). This regime of ideas found its way into the literary imagination, which is wholly reliant on discontinuities of particular settings in time and space narrow enough to “carry a narrative” (ibid: 61), in which an individual moral adventure can take place.

Is media theory similarly in the habit of searching for the patterned and predictable? Turning to a classic critical intervention in media sociology, there is support for the proposition that media studies is steeped in the formworks scrutinized by Ghosh. As Gitlin’s (1978) searing critique of the dominant paradigm laid bare, it behests the world “to sit still and become data,” by stabilizing and harmonizing it (p. 233). Attending to this regime of certainty anew, Chun (2021) argues that the intellectual history of the social sciences and mass communication research reveals a gravitational pull toward correlation and eugenic homophily; a search for sameness and order in populations (or in masses/audiences) which co-produced a simultaneous forging of social worlds and neighborhoods. These genealogies are today replayed, she shows, in biometrics, and the person-obsessed antagonistic social media landscapes of datafication. AI and LLMs in addition – which operate within strictly statistical and probabilistic spaces of computational order – further reproduce such a discrete and partitioned world par excellence.

And yet we are at a point in time when the quest for order has simultaneously been interrupted by the complexities of our age of interrelated crises. Today the improbable rare event has returned and it is uncannily familiar. According to Ghosh, this forces us to re-cognize the proximity of non-human interlocutors. The imperiled natural-cultural world is speaking to us, ravaging the order of things. This calls for opening up our endeavors to the “cunning of uncertainty” (Novotny, 2015) in the humanities and social sciences overall. It should be noted that something has long been stirring in this direction in adjacent fields. In design anthropology, the unexpected and the uncertain have been given due attention (Akama et al., 2018). The very raison d’être of feminist posthumanities and STS is to trouble received wisdom and dominant patriarchal ways of thinking about technology (Åsberg and Braidotti, 2020), as exemplified in the work of feminist digital philosopher Joanna Zylinska who suggests we develop a “post-masculinist rationality” for the era of the Anthropocene. This is a move that requires the courage “to face the uncertainty of that which we cannot control; [. . .] the courage to be let go into action that begins something truly new and unpredictable” (Barney cited in Zylinska, 2014: 15, italics added). When improbable, extreme and disruptive events overturn both the world and discourse, I submit additionally, we will be served by the concept of the limit situation.

Staying with the disruptive and disorderly: the digital limit situation

But wait: is not disruption already present in the field, thanks to the media events paradigm? This is true. Yet, even if media events are spectacular and interrupt the everyday life flow, their ultimate aim is to re-integrate society (Bolin and Ståhlberg, 2022). Media rituals bring about conciliatory order as they provide means for mending and restoring society after upheaval. Transformative media events that function as ceremonial “harbingers of change” are not employed to uphold the established order, but they are still scripted. Like classic media events such as coronations and so on, they follow a sequential structure or a “recognizable scenario of progress through a succession of identifiable phases” (Dayan and Katz, 1992: 167). They lead to narrative closure. In fairness, the theory of media events developed a recognition of the increased unruliness of the digital ecology. Yet, due to the ordering narrative logic of the media event, Katz and Liebes (2007) concluded that “disruptive media events” would in fact be a contradiction in terms. To sum up, within the analytical framework of media events the improbable, the disorderly and the disruptive seem underestimated.

By contrast, disruption and disorder sit at the heart of the limit situation. Here we must stress its radical uncertainty: it is not an existing liminal stage acknowledged by the cultural order, or a licensed in-between of broken or bent rules, when roles can be reversed or overturned, to be followed by a re-envisioning of the collective. The emphasis is instead on the ultimate human experience at the limit, which defies our understanding, and implies an unrelenting sense of dislocation – both individually and collectively. In moments of unimaginable pain, confusion and rupture, humans face the improbable, and surrender to not knowing. But in a state of ruin and decay, as Tsing (2015) argues, there is still life. Something is growing and mushrooming. The limit situation thus carries within it a potential for something unforeseen, for something to be born. As creatures of the limit situation we are at the mercy of its complex temporalities. On the one hand, limits call on us to slow down and to stay, at least for a while, with the trouble (Haraway, 2016). On the other hand, limits also provoke us to seek higher modes of existence and knowledge. They challenge us and thus require some kind of agentic movement. This may seem like a paradox, but these two modes of processing our encounters with limit situations shape their very dynamic.

In light of this, how can we further understand the digital limit situation? While the limit situation itself is irreducible to digital media culture, media co-shape human experiences also at the edges of what we can fully express. Today, the digital is entangled with limit situations in ways that allow for reconceiving of media as “existential media,” defined as media of limits that speak to our shared vulnerability and deep relationality. Existential media are thus co-constituted by the digital limit situation. While the limit situation pertains to dimensions of being human that have been of concern for centuries, the digital limit situation also profoundly co-shapes our contemporary symbolic and material lifeworlds. The approach parses their entanglements across individual and collective scales and it stays with the trouble, that is with the disruptive and the disorderly.

First, disruptive and improbable events are often digitally mediated: digital media are thus where the limit situations of life are habitually experienced or processed – for example in podcasting about traumatic life changing experiences, in blogging about terminal illness, in therapy forums, in mourning communities online, and in the live streaming of catastrophes. Furthermore, and second, the medium is the message of disruption itself, as digital media constitute in themselves limit situations and new “normals,” such as in the case of the techno-existential “shock” of introducing digitally streamed funerals during the pandemic, or when AI as a forceful socio-technical imaginary presents itself as that salvific solution to all of humanity’s problems, thus often bringing us its own message of being a “disruptive game changer.” Third, and related, they usher in an era of disruption and uncertainty, as they are of paramount importance in the present moment of calamitous crises: a time in which there are entrenched ethical, political and existential stakes of media. Our age can thus in itself be named a digital limit situation. Embracing the expanded realities of the digital limit situation offers both empirical grounds and theoretical avenues for unsettling the quest for order. But they also oblige a particular epistemological approach to which I now turn.

Dismediation and deferral: toward existential modes of listening

The limit situation defies objectivism. It craves other modes of sensing, feeling and knowing. These resonate with approaches in critical disability studies. Mills and Sterne (2017) propose the concept of dismediation to refer to how media and disability are fundamentally co-constituted in the Western history of technology development. One of their key objectives is to bring more diverse colors to the conceptual palette of mediation, remediation and premediation. This family of concepts, I submit, shares one thing. Mediation in its most generic sense forges order of meaning or of the social world, thus enabling social reproduction. Remediation creates continuity as “new” media constantly borrows from or critiques “old” media while seeking immediacy (Bolter and Grusin, 2000). The cultural logic of premediation seeks to secure a predictable world (Grusin, 2004). In conclusion, they all lean toward order. I understand dismediation to be introduced in this context, precisely to stir things up. The overarching aim is to disturb the ableist epistemologies in operation in the discipline, offering an analysis that invites mess, deferral, and disorder by putting emphasis on broken, alienated, and partial communication. This is in line with Karl Jaspers’ philosophy of communication, which puts forward that humans in the limit situation become themselves (as realized Existenz) precisely in communicative breakdown. I argue that dismediation, buoyed by a fresh rereading of Jaspers’ philosophy, enacts important disorderly dimensions more in tune with, and also potentially with the capacity to take on, the uncertainties and ruptures of our times.

This move is in alignment with recent media scholarship that gravitate to a phenomenological register of being in the wild, of inability, echoes, and waiting. Addressing entanglements of neurodiversity with eco-diversity, Reading (2022) develops a new agenda for teaching and scholarship in media and memory studies. Centering on the mobilizing concept of “rewilding” she seeks to highlight “dimensions to more-than-human-memory found in neurodivergent memoirs: deep eco-memory, conversations with vibrant objects and memories of animating energie” (Reading, 2022: 2). Sterne (2022) posits impairment as the seat for his political phenomenology, defining vocal inability as rich with meaning, and locating it at the center of communication and thus of experience. This invokes a deferred existential self “founded on ambiguities, contradictions, fragments, webs” (Sterne, 2022: 19). In Pinchevski’s (2022) Echo, this sense of deferral is also at the core of subjectivation which occurs through echolalia: listening and echoing practices that are always a bit off track, and thus intrinsically unruly.

In sum, and for my purposes here, these dismediating projects drive at a “disordering logics” (McRuer, 2017) that will equip us to critique the erasure of the improbable and the uncertain. As these examples also infer, reawakenings to the improbable are possible through developing existential modes of listening. There are qualities of existence that can only be known through the pace and practices of careful listening and waiting, in respectful acknowledgment of others’ inviolability (Lagerkvist, 2022, forthcoming). Reawakening to the improbable through transversal listening across temporal, material, and cultural layers (Smolicki, 2021) offers alternate modes of knowing, and a return of what was deferred and lost in the overly strict rage for order. Focusing on listening across human and more-than-human realms, Heather Davis attends to the hauntings of “plastic media” of cinema, photography and digital artifacts (all built from carbon fossils), precisely in this manner. These media preserve images and voices of those who passed, both the dead persons and the dead plants. Davis (2022) thus asks: “What might we learn if we listened to what these chemical media were transmitting?” (p. 8). This implies to dare to sit with what was lost, which begets – as all limit situations – possibilities for an opening: “a utopian grace barely recognizable as such, an opening that offers little safety but potentially some solace through lines of relation that open onto ancestors, those to come, and the more-than-human world” (ibid). This way, existential modes of listening offer possible means for sounding out those relevant “externalities” – forces, exigencies and histories – that may be speaking to us.

In closing

This essay has argued that it is high time to welcome the improbable and disorderly and to try and reawaken ourselves to their indubitable realities in human history, the natural world, and media existence. Reawakening means naming, surrendering, and attending to the limit situation of our time of media. I have also invited an extended family of conceptual figurations such as dismediation and deferral, and existential modes of knowing such as transversal listening. As much as the approach is a critical call, it was born on a note of optimism. Reawakening to the improbable is thus a transformative recognition. It will release us from the probabilistic bondage, and free us to the unrealized and strange potentiality within pasts never fulfilled. For Ghosh (2016): “it is impossible to see any way out of this crisis without an acceptance of limits and limitations, and this in turn . . . is intimately related to the idea of the sacred, however one wishes to conceive of it” (p. 161). As such the limit situation enables an existential homecoming that kindles alternate possibilities, lost yet returning to us as friendly, iridescent ghosts. By this token, the limit situation can be transformative for media theory, if we seize it by careful listening, and by re-cognizing the disorderly at the limits of our media world of deep relationality.