Whispers of a Secret: From Non-reception to New Life in Existential Media Studies – Speaking into the Air in Sweden

AMANDA LAGERKVIST

Uppsala University, SWEDEN

 

Abstract

Upon arrival in Sweden, Speaking into the Air was not spoken about. Instead, it was whispered about—often with admiration, sometimes in perplexment. This article contextualizes the non-reception in light of three circumstances: the Swedish consensus culture in which dialogue is sacred, the role of media in the nation for disseminating the dialogical praxis and its results, and the Swedish model of media studies. The article shows how the book’s many open secrets (the stress on the simplicity of being there, human fragility, death and communication, embodiment and interruption) eventually provided the richest source of inspiration, as Speaking enjoyed new life in existential media studies. 

Keywords

memoir, existentialism, limits, Karl Jaspers, communicative breakdown, consensus culture, the Swedish model, history of media studies

 

Version of record: http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/151 

The sense of shortcoming in communication is thus an origin of the breakthrough to Existenz, and of a philosophizing that tends to elucidate the breakthrough. 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.

Karl Jaspers, Philosophy Vol II (1932/1970: 51)

Those who have ears to hear will hear.

John D. Peters, Speaking into the Air (1999: 63)

 

The untold tale of Speaking into the Air in Sweden is one of lapses and gaps, but also of a new beginning. It’s a story about interruptions and secrets and, perhaps, a tardily seized opportunity. In this essay I will set out in an unusually permissive manner. I will allow myself to rely on somewhat impressionistic memories of its reception from my PhD student days. I will also share the personal account of what Speaking came to mean in my own scholarship and intellectual growth. As I hope to show, the seeds sown in the book are enjoying a late and perhaps unexpected bloom in one corner of the media studies field and reaping its fruits have only begun.

Upon arrival in Sweden, most importantly, I recall that Speaking was a book not spoken about. It was one of those books that some professors whispered about, often with great admiration, sometimes in bewilderment. It was seen as brilliant and odd, fascinating but weird, gripping yet provocative, and for some, notably, too religious for their tastes.^[1] The book was to my knowledge not reviewed in key journals in the Nordic media context.^[2] It never became a staple reading of the curriculum in media history classes (if there were any): it was not elevated to the status of a key text in need of being engaged, discussed and critiqued in the PhD programs across the country, etc. Sweden is thus an aberration from the depiction of its impact in other parts of the world, as described in the call to this special issue:

Peters provocatively inverts these two communicative modes—dialogue, so readily assumed by the Western tradition to be a guarantor of democracy and community, and dissemination, usually denigrated as useless noise or mindless chatter— arguing that in fact “dialogue can be tyrannical and dissemination can be just” (1999: 34). The concision of this idea and its power to disrupt conventional thinking about communication has led to its ubiquitous presence in introductory undergraduate courses around the world. The book’s hospitality to creative and experimental approaches to questions of communication and media means it is a mainstay on Ph.D. comprehensive examination lists in the field.

Instead of becoming a mainstay, it has been briefly cited here and there in introductions to key concepts, or to the canonized texts and frameworks for students in Swedish.^[3] But to my mind, it seems to have been received mostly as a special case, an exotic and eccentric outlook on things, adding new aspects rather than stirring things up profoundly. For some it was clearly a book of revealing insight. Perhaps this was mostly the case for the individual scholar with humanistic passions who, we might conjecture, turned to it during isolated hours under the nightlight; an imperiled creature who was then, and is even more today, at risk. In broad daylight by contrast, it was whispered about and thus omitted from the powerful story that we tell about ourselves as a discipline through which students are taught the disciplining lessons about what matters, what trails to follow and who to cite. In any case, rather than agitating the field, it became an open secret.

Around the Millennium I was four years into the PhD program in MCS at Stockholm University. The whispers dominated my initial impressions. But what happens when you start whispering things around the PhD students is that some of them will get really interested. When I opened the book, I knew immediately that it was too late for me. In spite of being young and green, I was able to perceive that it contained a true shift of perspective. Indeed, it turned doxa on its head, suggesting that the chief ideal for communication in our culture, captured through the trope of dialogue could in fact be tyrannical and that dissemination could in some senses be more democratic. This seemed counterintuitive, scandalous and—yes, imperative. But the scope was so daunting that I decided that this was for another day. I had to finish my thesis. And yet as an aspiring media historian with a degree in intellectual history, theology, philosophy and gender studies, it was closer to my way of approaching the world of media than much that was published at that time.

My dissertation Imaginary America: Gender, Media and Visuality in Swedish Post-war Travelogues (Lagerkvist, 2005; see 2008)^[4] was a media phenomenological study at the intersection of intellectual history, media history, cultural studies, cultural geography, American Studies, feminist media theory and travel theory. Influenced by The New Cultural History and historians such as Lynn Hunt, Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra (see Hunt, 1989) and inspired by the Danish media scholar Kirsten Drotner, I advocated that we needed a cultural history of media that included a focus on visual culture. I also adamantly argued for pluralizing our media histories (Lagerkvist, 2003). A cultural history of media in Sweden in the postwar era, I argued, could not be separated from our relationship to ‘The Future’, that is, to the United States. Having identified the symbolically significant European journey to America, and more specifically the US (a central trope in both contexts) as key for my theorization, I examined the role of mediation for traveling and the roles of traveling cultures for media history. Studying how traveling Swedes on physical journeys to the USA made sense of their encounters with the mediated land in travelogues, I was also always at heart a media phenomenologist, trying to grasp how media, time, space, visuality and the imaginary intersect. Without jettisoning discourse and representation, I thus placed emphasis on real bodies and physical environments in relation to media and the imagination.

Hence, these historical, theoretical and philosophical interests made me a dormant ally of Speaking from the very onset, one in waiting for providence. To properly engage with the book in my research became possible only later. This was a journey that I seriously set out on exactly ten years ago when I started to think about ‘existentializing’ media theory. It was actually my encounters with Kierkegaard in the spring of 2010 that brought me back to Speaking. My own fuller reception could finally occur in the context of a project I headed called Existential Terrains: Memory and Meaning in Cultures of Connectivity (2014-2018) that focused specifically but not exclusively on death in digital existence.^[5] The book played an important role as I set out together with my group to argue that since we are today encountering and exploring the larger issues of meaning and meaninglessness, loneliness and sociality, the finite and the infinite on the internet, we need to study it from the vantage point of being, rather than reducing these phenomena to aspects of the political, cultural, social or economic dimensions of mediated human communication.

Existential media studies, in a nutshell then, revisits what it means to be human in the digital age. It remaps media, digital culture and automation in light of existential philosophy’s key themes, beginning with limits (finitude), vulnerability (thrownness, contingency), relationality (intersubjectivity), and responsibility (ethics) (Lagerkvist, 2016; 2019). Finally, it reconceives of media as an existential terrain that needs to be navigated and of the media user as a coexisting being, a coexister, who in shared vulnerability and through lifeline communication confirms being there for one another in and with the digital world (Lagerkvist and Andersson, 2017). Placing mourners, the coexisters, centrally in the slow field of existential media studies is also an act of rebellion, asking us to reflect on the norms of speed and quantification in both life and research. This is especially pregnant and important today as the world is in a civilizational limit situation: a moment of rupture and crisis, of global mourning and of grief. In the limit situation of loss, crisis and guilt, argued the German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, there is an utter potentiality for “becoming ourselves”. As I will discuss further below, ours is in fact a digital limit situation (Lagerkvist, 2022) in which there are profound politico-ethical and existential stakes of digital media.

In this brief essay, I will first try to contextualize the non-response and then devote the remainder to how Speaking has both inspired and been given new life in existential media studies. I will suggest that there may have been particular reasons that its main mission and chief message fell under our radar. To approach why this was the case a familiar method will be used. As we so often reiterate in media and cultural studies, the bearings of texts always rely on contexts and achieve their meaning through them. This text arrived in a very specific setting, to which I now turn.

 

Swedish Models: Sacred Dialogue and Solemn Dissemination

I suggest that the non-reception of such a trailblazing text can be interpreted in light of three circumstances in which dialogue and dissemination are enacted and played out in specific ways. First, Speaking into the Air arrived in a context—late modern Sweden—wherein dialogue was and had been for a very long time, holy, because it sustained the entire social contract. As for the Swedes, one can even say that dialogue is our ‘middle name’. We are peaceable beings, inclined to avoid conflict or dissent and believing in consensus.^[6] This has an important history. The interwar era was marked by conflicts between workers and employers and there was social unrest in Swedish society, which called for solutions. Workers, academics, representatives from the Church of Sweden and employers were in accord that something had to be done. They began a decades-long dialogue from 1922 and then met annually on neutral ground at the Sigtuna Foundation near Stockholm. This laid the groundwork for the conference in 1928 when work peace was achieved (de Geer, 2008), which in turn paved the way for the codification of this in the agreement at Saltsjöbaden in 1938.

The price for the compromise for the unions was to do away with Marxism and class struggle and the employers had to commit themselves to continue the dialogue and to invest in the workers’ wellbeing. The result was a strong trust in Folkhemmet—the People’s Home—and in turn in a reinvestment in society’s institutions. At the heart of the The Swedish Model were the salary negotiations. It further implied a strong state and high taxes, universal allowances, universal and free childcare and healthcare, parental leave and free education. The famous Swedish model was thus the result of decades of compromise. It was founded on the pragmatic and urgent need to cooperate, compromise, to solve common problems, ensure stability and build a functioning society. It was never a radical or progressive model, but it was effective as a broadly shared vision of reality (Hedin, 2015). In communicative terms, following Peters, it was a making do for pragmatic results. It exemplified a unity around certain values, yet without complete unification. Hence, this comes close to what Speaking calls “a pragmatist mode of communication” for creating community, exemplifying communication as an act of making common an ideal and of forging a world.

Importantly this world had to be continuously re-forged. Unions and employers met every year for salary negotiations and these rituals reestablished the contract in physical space, in every organization or company across the country. But as James Carey has taught us, in our modern societies, media have played crucial roles precisely in such symbolic processes of maintaining and repairing reality. Could we infer that—and this is the second dimension I wish to call attention to—public service radio and later television broadcasted the result of this grand dialogic endeavor: ideas that corresponded to the social contract and upheld it? It seems not farfetched to suggest that dissemination of those central tenets of the Swedish model via broadcasting and the press, from the center to the broad general public and electorate, was a key feature of Swedish life for decades. These values were, in such a reading, thus solemnly articulated and distributed via media, which reproduced the ideology and the common goal—also of the dialogue itself. For example, Sweden was in journalistic discourse at the height of the powers of the Swedish model in the mid-50s, broadly depicted as a literal and metaphoric “bridge-building” society (Ekecrantz, 1997: 404).

The third dimension pertains to the research field of media studies and its local timbre. While worries about propaganda seem to be less manifest in Sweden in the conception of media studies than in other places (see Jakobsson and Stiernstedt, 2020) here—as elsewhere in modern societies—the concerns around American mass culture had been a major issue for intellectuals and elites at least from the interwar era and onwards, long before the Americanization debates of the 1960s and 70s (see Lagerkvist, 2005).^[7] Since the inception of mass communication research in the 1950s and 1960s—and during its formative phase in 1970s, but also later— ​the ways in which the mass media potentially influence the audience, with harmful effects, was thus a key mobiliser. But there are also other defining traits of the Swedish case. My impression, from my admittedly limited viewpoint and subjective memoirs, is that the focus was often on examining features of media pitted against how they contributed to or undermined, maintained or preserved the ideals and values of the welfare state. Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to speak of a dominance of such a perspective or to argue that the Swedish Model with its dialogic ideals was a master signifier within the discourse that constituted the often-acclaimed multidisciplinary field of Swedish media studies. To me it was nevertheless evident that certain core features of the Swedish Model—and the dialogic praxis behind it—were reflected in research interests of senior faculty during my PhD years in the 1990s, as they examined the history of the press or of television with critical and feminist edges (Ekecrantz, 1997; Kleberg, 1999).

Speaking into the Air arrived in an intellectual space steeped from the beginning in social sciences perspectives and prone to place journalism and political communication at the center. And yet, around the turn of the Millennium, many things had been, and were continuously, changing. The media context was itself transforming through a growing commercialization of the media system and through digitalization of society.^[8] Speaking also came to our shores, importantly, when cultural studies—focusing on meaning, culture, hegemony and resistance—was at a peak and had been making important inroads into this very field for more than a decade. MCS had since the 1980s undergone a “cultural turn” (von Feilitzen, 1994; Carlsson, 2007) and cultural studies brought its own humanistic, feminist, critical and culturalist stakes to the table, broadening the purview of both the object of study and the means for critically engaging media cultures (see Fornäs, 1995; Ganetz, 1997; 1998).

Part of the initiation in this era for PhD students was to learn how to navigate a rather polarized field, where the cultural studies strand stood for the humanistic focus on meaning, text, and context in the everyday, and the social scientific strand stood for a focus on institutions, sociological structures and power relations. Another key opposition concerned the coarsened dividing line between an appreciation for popular culture and a focus on the hardcore of the media field: journalism. There were in reality, of course, intermediaries and quite a number of humanistic and culturalist approaches to, for example, the history of journalism (see Åker, 1998; Widestedt, 2001), but the polarization was nevertheless felt. It seemed even at times to have produced tribes of culturalists versus structuralists.^[9] The former were often underdogs in their own self-perception. By contrast, Ulla Carlsson (2007) looks back and critically addresses a new hegemony for the culturalist approach in this phase, as an expression of both dissention and eclecticism, and traces a consensus culture to the field, at once:

The “cultural turn” has had a far stronger impact on media studies than on many other fields. The outcome, however, has not been greater unity of focus, but rather the opposite, and in retrospect we may ask: In an era when issues relating to the power and morality of media institutions were more urgently important than ever before, where were the social scientists—why were they so quiet? Was it because they were busy pursuing consensus in the field, or was it because of “marketisation”? Or, were they simply totally absorbed in the Zeitgeist? (Carlsson, 2007: 225-226).

So, at that point in time, according to Carlsson, humanistic perspectives had a strong authority, and they had even overtaken the initiative from other approaches during the field’s gestation. Yet, as much as the cultural turn was impactful, it never seemed for me to constitute such a dominant force. Still, in the late 90s, as I entered the field, cultural studies rather appeared as a newcomer with a fresh outlook, in the process of disembarking a solidly established center of knowledge production located in the tradition of the social sciences.^[10] By bringing into view popular cultural forms, cultural studies provided a problematization of the primacy of journalism for understanding why and how media matter.

At the time, and especially for those bogged down in the mud as it were, media studies thus seemed grounded in and constituted by oppositional trenches. A birds-eye view might however reveal a topography that actually quite successfully combined humanistic and social science perspectives (see Bolin and Forsman in Jakobsson and Stiernstedt, 2020). A multidisciplinary openness was also prized by pioneers such as professor Kjell Nowak, a ‘founding father’ of the discipline who was himself trained in economic behaviorism which informed his early effects research, but whose open-mindedness to new perspectives became key during the formative years of media and communication studies in Sweden. It was during Nowak’s time that I was invited aboard by feminist media historian Madeleine Kleberg.

Speaking did not neatly belong to any camp on this map. Yet it is also a very critical book, a reaction to a field that seems unable to grasp the profundities and complexities of what it means to be human, and by consequence what it could mean to be communicating with each other. Its core ideas had normative implications that cut across and beyond the debates so firmly in place. I believe all these circumstances may to some extent account for the non-reception of Speaking. At least they serve as a partial explanation.

 

Ultimate Matters: Existential Media Studies

I found myself ‘thrown’, to speak in Heideggerian terms, into media studies. Yet I cherished important perspectives offered in critical cultural theory, such as, for example, feminism and qualitative methods. From my horizon, and this dawned upon me progressively, other key humanistic treasures than those safeguarded by cultural studies, such as cultural history and certain strands of philosophy, were not sufficiently engaged with in media studies overall. I also gradually felt that something else was wanting. This way Speaking into the Air has been and remains an important source for those of us in media studies who feel that the field is sometimes sterile, removed from what really matters, and thus from ultimate issues. For me, the book is deeply existential and has offered a wealth of ideas fundamental to the project of existential media studies. From it I subsequently took several important cues for attempting to remedy what I have called the “existential deficit” in media studies (Lagerkvist, 2022). It opened up the richest source of inspiration as it combined a pragmatist and existential approach through a focus on embodiment and silence, as it placed stress on the simplicity of being there and through its emphasis on human fragility. And as we will see in the following, Peters’ discussions on death and communication were also pivotal for the work I subsequently set out to do on death in the digital age.

Existential media studies brings existential philosophy into a renewed conversation with media theory. Following Søren Kierkegaard, to be human is to be passionately involved in this life in the face of absurdities and risks (1843). Speaking, which discusses Kierkegaard at length, had a similar message. It thus gave me license to say: what if life, media life and media studies is a passionate drama that means something? Beginning like this in nineteenth century Copenhagen (rather than at, for example, Columbia University) allows for seeing human life also in the age of media as an irresolvable paradox, involving both freedom and necessity and containing inescapable tragedy. So, for this reader, Speaking was thus ultimately an existentialist intervention. Its historicizations made media and communication part of the human condition in deep time, allowing our field to take on grander missions (as Peters has also argued of late, 2015). It also offers a series of non-realized potentials, sending its reader (again, me) along alternative and potential trajectories for thinking about what media and communication are, and most importantly what they could mean. It’s almost as if it is threading through an underbelly of the discipline, in revaluing abject forms of strangeness and otherness, silence and embodiment in obscure terrains among canonized philosophers, iconic figures such as Socrates and Jesus, and other even more alien beings.

Speaking quite manifestly suggests, as the fourth of the five listed communication theories in its introduction, a distinctly existential mode of communicating. It here stresses the potential of communication as world disclosure, and with inspiration from Heidegger, as the hearing of otherness. It furthermore offers a germane existential concept of vulnerability that speaks to us all, a vision in which love and frailty are deeply connected (Peters, 1999: “Conclusion: A squeeze of the hand”). For the Existential Terrains project that was conceived already in 2011, but started in 2014, Chapter 4: “Phantasms of the living, dialogues with the dead”, was especially significant and became a source of inspiration for exploring death also in the digital age, existentially. Peters here identified that “[t]he 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” (1999: 149). This set us on course to try to track down the key “existential facts” of our digital media culture—a grand venture still not completed (Lagerkvist, 2013).

Finally, but most importantly, the emphasis in Speaking on limits, failures and irreducibilities opened up a way to rethink authenticity as our condition of interruption and breakdown. This is much in line with Karl Jaspers, a key thinker of the classic tradition of existential philosophy whom I’m drawing on extensively in my book Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (Lagerkvist, 2022), which offers a reappreciation of Jaspers’ philosophy of communication for media studies, and a media theory of limit and the limit situation, as a corrective to an era of limitless connectivity and ideals for speed and immediacy. There is in fact confluence in the thinking of Jaspers and Peters. Peters stresses the sense in which communication must be conceived “never as the touching of consciousness, only as the interpretation of traces” (Peters 1999: 153). Communication thus understood is more than the result of limits, of gaps (Peters, 1994), but will inevitably in itself also produce new interruptions, new failures. Emphasizing the breakdown of communication, the impossibility of dialogue, Peters argues that Søren Kierkegaard saw “communication as a mode of revealing and concealing, not of information exchange” (Peters 1999: 129). To speak the unspeakable, Kierkegaard thus resorted to indirect communication.

Instead of offering such reflexively ironic maneuvers, Jaspers suggests there is an opportunity in the break itself: “The sense of shortcoming in communication is thus an origin of the breakthrough to Existenz, and of a philosophizing that tends to elucidate the breakthrough” (1932/1970: 51). Jaspers fully recognizes both limits and uncertainty, and how they are given exemplary form in speech. Speech is a risk, since it is fated to fail when the stakes are highest. In other words, for Jaspers the most important things human beings can say to one another, or share, cannot quite be said. Yet, precisely here in dysfluency is the starting point for another form of communication. Our failure constitutes the moment when we are called to act in order to ‘become ourselves’, in the limit situations of life, which requires our whole being. This is when we may enter into existential communication. There is thus a deep connection for Jaspers between truth and uncertainty, and between truth and communicative breakdown:

If, however, truth for us in every form remains a limit in the realization of communication, then the insurmountable incompleteness of the world and all worldly, knowable truth is final for immanence. Every form of truth must be shipwrecked in the world and none can substitute itself absolutely for the truth (Jaspers, 1935/1997: 98, italics added).

Hence, for both Peters and Jaspers the truth and communicative failure are fundamentally bracketed. In The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media, Peters moves his epicenter from such shipwrecks to ships (at sea) as a literal metaphor for survival. Surviving comes down to crafts and technē, that is, fundamental artificial techniques that bring environments and media into being: “The ship makes the sea into a medium” (2015: 111). This demonstrates the book’s chief argument, namely that infrastructure precedes both the medium (of communication/transportation) and the cargo onboard. Chiseling out an elemental philosophy of existential import, and continuing the broadening move made in Speaking (where he stretched the potential for communication beyond transmission of intended messages), media are here in turn broadly understood as “vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible. The idea that media are message-bearing institutions such as newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet is relatively recent in intellectual history” (Peters, 2015: 2). By intersecting philosophy, theology and media studies with approaches from the natural sciences, The Clouds contributes to neorealist, materialist and post-humanist currents in which the truth and the real return onto the scene to play powerful roles, yet in a humbling sense. Peters redefines media elementally as clouds, sea, earth and fire, while remaining in full awe of their marvels and mysteries. By opening up media to nature, Peters’ media ontology both retains the idea of an altogether mediated universe and situates elements and environmental media as operating in and on the world and thereby constituting a limit against “the corrosiveness of the hermeneutics of suspicion” (2020: 216-217). In addition to these pronounced post-humanist sympathies, I read The Clouds in alignment with the existential and pragmatist concerns in Speaking. Hence, it offers a philosophical anthropology inspired by Martin Heidegger’s foundational ontology (as well as by Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler and André Leroi-Gourhan), emphasizing the fact that media are world makers, and that the human condition is co-conditioned by media technologies as well as by other people, animals and things.

Existential media studies suggests here, again with inspiration from Jaspers’ philosophy, that media philosophy would do well to reconcile these ontological claims about originary human technicity with our originary human vulnerability (Lagerkvist, 2016). On reflection, inspiration in this endeavor can also be found in Speaking itself. In its final chapter, Peters offers a possible route toward conceiving technicity and vulnerability in conjunction by pointing to the ultimate limits of being. He suggests here, in discussing historical and contemporary attempts to technologically reproduce humanness, that “[t]he fleshy residuum of finitude escapes simulation. It is human frailty, rather than rationality, that machines have difficulty mimicking” (1999: 237). This constitutes one of those existential facts about modern media—and today of automation and ‘AI’—at the intersection of the limits of media and the limits of the human, that prompt us to rethink media existentially.

Existential media, I submit—that both are and co-constitute our current digital limit situation—have four properties. First, and as Peters argues in The Clouds, they are world makers and our infrastructures of being, sustaining us and enabling (yet setting limits for, I will stress) our movement and dwelling. Second, they throw us up in the air, that is into a particular yet uncertain world and this involves opening limits: features of indeterminacy, anticipation and ambivalence, as well as limits that may in turn be productive. They also, third, activate our shared vulnerability and embodied mortality and deep sense of dependence and relationality in particular ways. Finally, they are imperative and urgent; they demand responsive action, critique, ethical choice, even an either/or (Lagerkvist, 2022). Here the field posits the coexister as the key subject in the dawning project of existential media studies—a vulnerable, relational, technological, responsible, stumbling, hurting, mortal, embodied, situated, communicative yet often silent, self-aware yet clueless, singular yet plural, being who navigates the limit situations of life in the digital age: the existential terrains of connectivity and increased automation. Furthermore, the coexister is something other than or irreducible to savvy users, early adopters, media citizens, entrepreneurial selves, or dividuals of various factions of theorization. And hence also something different from the liberal humanist subject: the masculine, autonomous self, certain of his prowess, entitled to this world. Jaspers argues that existential self-being is, by contrast, actually lacking at core: “To come to myself as I perish is the phenomenon of self-being” (1932/1970: 44). And moreover, it is deeply relational: “With self-being thus a product of communication, neither I nor the other have a solid substance of being previous to our communication” (ibid: 64). In her embeddedness in relations this main inhabitant of the digital ecology in fact pushes beyond and reinvents ‘the Human’ after post-humanism. Yet, while existential media studies puts stress on experiences of exposure, this is not, nota bene, a reiteration of the lonely or the chaotic mass of the mass communication schools. Existential media studies is not detached social science, so it will stubbornly argue that we are all coexisters. And since vulnerability is, as Jaspers argued, a position of fecundity, the coexister is not any simple victim to the forces of late modernity.

 

Conclusion: Destabilizing the Media Studies Vessel

I once called John Durham Peters a “steadfast serial destabilizer” (Lagerkvist, 2015) for our field.^[11] If you indeed have ears to hear with, he stirs things up by in fact both revealing and concealing, by both speaking his mind and resting his case. Speaking calls for opening up the field to both philosophical reframings, historical perspectives and religious analogies. But it does so not by loudly touting its vision. Instead, it both reveals and conceals its own existentiality, by employing forms of Kierkegaardian indirect communication (see Peters 1999, Chapter 3). Perhaps it is whispering something itself? And when someone whispers you need to be listening very carefully, struggling to receive the intended messages while piecing together what was almost audible, lest you miss the points.

So, what can be concluded from all of this? Was the non-reception a lost opportunity for us to learn something new about communication or about ourselves as a nation and as a young discipline—as well as about the strengths and discontents of our statecraft? Would looking at Sweden, in turn, give media studies important insights about what communication can mean, not as an idea but as a practice for achieving a grander goal? Maybe so. I suggest that, in addition, a more profound engagement with the text in this context, would also make clear some of the dissatisfactions of the mythologized Swedish Model. The pandemic moment has for example illustrated the hazards of utilitarianism in a consensus culture of seemingly blind faith in authorities.

In retrospect, the whispers were perhaps a gift that allowed for the book to be given new lives in unexpected contexts. It is clear that it sowed and disseminated the seeds for a different media theoretical harvesting. Existential media studies, as I hope to have illustrated, is in deep debt to Speaking but also to JDP’s other works. I argue that we may continue to be prompted to try to hear its message and ask in curiosity: What can we say about what cannot be communicated? How do silences, limits, interruptions and gaps figure into how we must approach the “tyranny of communication” today in digital existence? How can we theorize originary vulnerability, embodiment and responsibility with media? The mission lives on, taking on new shapes in new areas. As we live in times awash with rampant myths of technological inevitability (Lagerkvist, 2020), through the forgings of seeming inexorable technological trajectories embraced by both industrial capital and philosophical minds, what could be more needed and welcome than JDP’s rocking of our boat again. And as our field seems now to be by leaps and bounds reaffirming the hegemony of the social sciences, pivoting around the merits of datafication—a turn that is boosted by Big Data Truths and dataism itself—existential media studies will here adamantly argue that at any point in time, when philosophy, science and cultural and intellectual frameworks capitulate to reductionist modes of objectification, philosophy must be existential philosophy. This also implies, moreover, that existentialism must be upgraded both to our moment of techno-existential saturation and to the ecological crisis (Mickey, 2016).

In light of this, and at a moment in time when the Earth itself is in fact screaming to us to develop an ethics of care, we may wonder if this is a time for whispers or hollers. Perhaps it is in fact an exceptional moment for communicating beings, prompted as we may be to “speak truth to power” (Parrhesia). And we may ponder the fates and prospects for both dialogue and dissemination in a world of increased datafication and automation and big tech non-accountability. Theorizing media, I argue, at the end times of ecological and technological crisis, will mean reconceiving of them as both environmental and momentous existential media. On these brinks we need to figure out how we can reclaim and recuperate both a sense of futurity and dignity. That is, how to live well and take ethical responsibility as humans embedded in more than human webs of nature, culture and technology (Zylinska, 2014; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). I propose that we conduct existential media studies in the spirit of the following questions: What could reawakening ourselves (in all our diversity and common humanity) to our existential embodied persons and needs—as Karl Jaspers endeavored for us to do—mean in this ultimate moment? And what might be learned from those who are so often shunned by a culture obsessed with strength and speed, perfection and progress—those endangered coexisting beings cast at the limit—for the task of crafting an inclusive, sustainable and open future with elemental and existential media? In seizing the digital limit situation, despite it all and with nothing but hope, I suggest we may continue to be inspired by the works of John Durham Peters and to receive both Speaking and The Clouds in their own spirit of prudence. Hearing them out jointly allows for putting stress on many things, including interruption, embodied and communicative limits, and on environments as media and media as environments that our species are forged by, relate to and depend upon. This will allow shunting our media studies vessel onto new tracks, with a partially novel and no doubt formidable freight aboard, which will both enable and require a grounded rethinking of our responsibilities before the Earth, each other and before our earthbound technologized existence—before Being itself.

 

References

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Notes

[1] This reaction among some senior scholars is not surprising in a context often claimed to be the most secularized in the world. See for example the World Value Survey: https://www.worldvaluessurvey.‌org/WVSNewsShow.jsp?ID=428&ID=428. In academic life, the sentiment is often anti-religious, haughtily modern, rational and arguably free of superstition.

[2]  Searching through the databases Mediearkivet, Artikelsök, Svenska dagstidningar, Libris, and Regina rendered zero hits. But there are obviously other forms of reception. The invitation of JDP to Stockholm and The Department of Journalism, Media and Communication (JMK) as Bonnier Professor in March of 2001 was one way of receiving the work. Peters was hosted by Madeleine Kleberg and gave three lectures: “The Relevance of Raymond Williams”, “Five Problems of the Public Sphere”, and “Democracy and Numbers”. The year before the Bonnier lectures he also got the Swedish-American Bicentennial Fellowship which he used in June 2000 in Norrköping and Stockholm. It should also be pointed out when tracking down Swedish connections, that at this point in time JDP had been friends with Jan Ekecrantz since he met him in 1983 at Stanford, and his closest colleague in Sweden was Per-Anders Forstorp, whom he met at a conference in Piran, Slovenia in 1997.

[3] Here it seems Sweden is rather anomalous (although a colleague of mine in another Nordic country once told me that among her peers in MCS, the works of JDP are seen as so unique and done with such lucidity and brilliance, that everyone else is allowed to feel that they are off the hook, as it were). Anecdotal evidence may however suggest a different story. Professor Bo Reimer remembers that at The School of Arts and Communication, K3 at Malmö University, Speaking was included in the undergraduate curriculum for a number of semesters after its publication. There may be other such examples across the nation and I do not lay claims to a comprehensive mapping. For a recent example of a volume mainly targeting undergraduates, which includes a canonization of key names and texts without including Speaking into the tradition, see Medievetenskapens idétraditioner. The book is however mentioned in the introduction as an example of a work that provides a longer durée for a history of ideas of communication than the one offered by the collection itself (Bengtsson et al., 2020: 18). In the same volume JDP’s works are briefly referred to in relation to the media ecology school as represented by Neil Postman (Forsman, 2020: 324).

[4] It was published in Swedish as Amerikafantasier: Kön, medier och visualitet i svenska reseskildringar från USA 1945-63, in 2005, but a summary in English of its main analyses and conclusions can be found in Lagerkvist (2008).

[5] The project was funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation within the Wallenberg Academy Fellows program, which is a career program in collaboration between the Swedish Academies and the Wallenberg Foundations. I was appointed fellow in 2013 and started the project in January of 2014.

[6] This specific cultural context, following Herbert Marcuse, could perhaps be called a “one-dimensional society”, in which consensus across capital, politics, state, civil society, the academic world, and journalism, was not only an ideal but a practiced reality. Indeed, for Susan Sontag, in her famous “Letter from Sweden” (1969), the consensus culture was depicted as a pathology. Swedes were nationalists and proud of their modern social experiment, but something profound was lacking. The consensus society, according to Sontag, forged a certain programmatic mindset: a square-mindedness which amounted to a deeply problematic emotional dissonance among its citizens. Nothing but a proper revolution could save us!

[7] A classic book illustrative of this is Sven Lindqvist’s Reklamen är livsfarlig. En stridsskift (Advertising is Futile. A Polemic), from 1955.

[8] At the same time, around the year 2000, critique had already been mounting of the hegemony of the Swedish model among liberals and conservatives for a couple of decades. The democratic myth of Folkhemmet had many critics. And roughly since the murder of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986, the country’s self-righteous self-image had been stained.

[9] These positions obliquely rehearsed the often-invoked opposition between quantitative versus qualitative methods and of the “administrative versus critical” schools that Todd Gitlin outlined in his classic renunciation of the “dominant paradigm” from 1978.

[10] For me, media studies was not impacted by the cultural turn, it constituted the turn (see Lagerkvist, 2003). As other disciplines awakened to its core themes—media, mediation, popular culture and communication—this brought about a culturalist turn within them. Hence beyond its ways of critically and inventively addressing the key roles of media in modernity, society, culture and history, its very existence as a relative newcomer within the humanities and social sciences, I suggest, impacted profoundly on the interests of other disciplines, such as comparative literature and the history of ideas. This has also been the case more lately as these disciplines set out to reinvent themselves as ‘media studies’ or ‘media history’ etc. But that’s another story for another time.

[11] On October 26, 2015—the year of the publication of The Clouds—JDP gave the opening keynote lecture “Life, Death and Time on the Digital Ship” at the DIGMEX Conference “Digital Existence: Memory, Meaning, Vulnerability”, a joint venture between the DIGMEX network and the Nordic Network for the Study of Media and Religion at the Sigtuna Foundation in Stockholm.

 

Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of Media and Communication Studies in the Department of Informatics and Media at Uppsala University. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded the field of existential media studies. Her work covers digital memories, death online practices, biometrics in everyday lifeworlds and the datafication of the Earth. In her monograph, Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP, 2022), she offers a reappreciation of Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy of limit situations for media theory. By placing mourners centrally, the book provides a retheorization of media as media of limits, and introduces the key concerns and concepts of existential media studies, in dialogue with critical disability studies, the environmental humanities and the new materialism. Find out more: https://www.im.uu.se/research/hub-for-digtal-existence/

Email: amanda.lagerkvist@im.uu.se