Richard Grusin, “Premediation”

## **Richard Grusin, “Premediation,” *Criticism.* 2004.**

Powerpoint

**Grusin’s Argument**: In the post-9/11 era, the future has been premediated through the media. This premediated age was building throughout the 1990s, and reached a tipping point through 9/11 and its repercussions on America’s media and politics: because of the seeming immediacy and hypermediacy of 9/11, and the terror it induced, the American people wanted future acts of terror premediated so they would not suffer through such an unprecedented event again.

* “[T]his double logic [of remediation] —if not precisely nearing its end—was at least on the verge of being re-mediated according to another logic, a logic of *premediation* in which the future has always already been *pre-mediated.*” (18)
* “In the post-9/11 logic of premediation, terrorism stands for the catastrophic or traumatic possibility of an act that has not been, or cannot be, premediated…[t]he shock of 9/11 produced the desire or determination never to experience anything that has not already been premediated.” (24-25)

**Context:** Written three years after 9/11 and a year after the US invasion of Iraq. Grusin builds off of his theory on remediation, which is a form of double logic that “seeks simultaneously to proliferate and to erase mediation” (18), refashioning and building off of older forms of media to create “new” ones.

**Remediation and Premediation** (17-20): In Minority Report, the pre-cogs mediate the future through their broadcasted visions of the murder, so that the future is always remediated and premediated, making the future in the vision an expected possibility. Further, these visions are hypermediated and fundamentally public.

* “The logic of premediation...insists that the future itself is also already mediated, and that with the right technologies...the future can be remediated before it happens.” (19)

**Remediating 9/11** (20-26): The events of 9/11 were thoroughly remediated by newsites and the internet, which added to its hypermediacy and immediacy, and therefore the terror it induced. 9/11 was both the first - through remediation - and last - through premediation - live global media event, becoming the turning point to the age of premeditation in an attempt to avoid the live, catastrophic immediacy of such an attack again: “[T]he desire or demand since 9/11 has been to make sure that when the future comes it has already been remediated, to see the future not as it emerges immediately into the present but before it ever happens.” (21)

* *Paul Virilio*: Our current media technology has collapsed time down to the present moment, obliterating the past and future into “real time”, increasing immediacy.
* *Anthrax Scare* (2001): The media covered the possibility of its threat to the fullest extent, reporting not on what had happened but premediating what would happen next. The real-time quality of video and the internet contributed to news media’s shift from the historical role of reporting the past to this more “prophetic” role. Through premediating the scare, the media became part of the juridico-disciplinary apparatus of investigating the suspected terrorists.

	+ “At the current historical moment, American news media remediate the past in order to premediate the future.” (23)

* *The Sniper Killings* (2002): The media participated as actors in investigating and capturing the snipers. It was part of the “network of forces” (24) raising the level of terror of the sniper killings, remediating them repeatedly through media coverage.
* *Zizek, Baudrillard, King, and Doane*: Slavoj Zizak and Jean Baudrillard argue that cinematic premediation is similar to premediation in media, where “catastrophes like planes crashing into skyscrapers had often been premediated in Hollywood disaster films” (25). Grusin disagrees:

	1. Geoff King: the two modes have “different visual logics” (25). Cinema focuses on the attraction of special effects, compared to the visual framing of the collapse of the Twin Towers and how certain visual signs mark it as real.
	2. Mary Ann Doane: TV differs psychologically and structurally from film. Television is “‘formed on the model of catastrophe’” (25), using real-time, liveness, and instantaneity to interrupt the predictability of regular programming. Live coverage both generates and suppresses anxiety through the simultaneous disruption and perpetuation of the everyday. Since premediation is the fear of immediacy, the premediation of disaster guards against disaster by maintaining a constant low level of fear.

* “Premediation then differs from the double logic of remediation in that it represents not a desire for immediacy but rather a fear of immediacy, of the kind of extreme moment of immediacy or transparency that 9/11 produced” (26)

***The Media Regime of Preemptive War*** (26-31):

* *The War with Iraq*: The Iraq war was premediated in the American news, which helped Bush’s Republican party be re-elected, networks to increase their ratings, and networks to test how best to cover the future war. The incessant premediation meant the war felt inevitable, supporting the logic of pre-emptive, premediated warfare, which looked to refashion the future.
	+ “Premediation is part of a heterogeneous media regime whose fundamental purpose is to preclude that no matter what tomorrow might bring, it will always already have been premediated.” (29)
* *Premediation v. Prediction*: Premediation isn’t prediction, but instead maps out possible futures to maintain a low level of anxiety and avoid catastrophic and traumatic events. Like the internet, possible futures exist within a network of what has already been constructed.
* *Colonizing the Future*: Premediation exists according to a double logic where it ensures the future will always be premediated by filling the world with media. In turn, “the war against terror or the war against Iraq is a war about the future—not only about how the future will be and is being premediated but about which and whose premediations will predominate or persist.” (30)

* *Media Mobilization*: The media was mobilized and embedded to an unprecedented amount for the Iraq war, mediating the war through the eyes of the military in hopes that civilians would see the war the way they did.

***Premediation and the Ontology of Film*** (31-37):

* *Life as cinema*: Filmmakers’ desire to record the rebuilding of Ground Zero reveals the “desire that the future be remediated as something like a film” (31). Moreover, the recording of the event means that the future is already mediated by the time it becomes the present.
	+ “The current cultural moment is marked by the hypermediacy of premediation, in which not just the past and present but also the future has already been remediated.” (34)
* *Evidence of a Film and Minority Report*: These films reveal that film and photos must be exhibited publicly to count as evidence. *Minority Report*’s connections to early cinema and the premediation of the Pre-Crime unit show the fears of “universal surveillance made possible by networked telecommunication media” (36), and reveal that premedation desires to: remediate future technologies; remediate the future; colonize the future by extending media networks globally, spatially, and temporally into the future.
	+ “premediation seeks to make sure that the future is so fully mediated by new media forms that it is unable to emerge into the present without having already been remediated in the past” (37)

**Questions**:

1. Twelve years later, are we still in a premediated age? Or some combination of the two? Or a new type of age? How do we see ourselves, media, and the world around mediated today?

2. How does social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, factor into predmediation - like how Doane argues about the interruption of the everyday? Have they become more immediate? More hypermediated?

3. How does the idea of preemptivity - and the concern about futures that could happen in order to avoid a catastrophic future – factor into *Looper* and *Minority Report*?