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.