Introduction by Richard Rogers
Debate led by Noortje Marres
Richard Grusin: In the presentation I elaborate what I see the threefold character of premediation at work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. First, where remediation entailed the refashioning of prior media forms, I claim that premediation entails the desire to remediate future media forms and technologies. In addition, I argue that premediation entails the desire to remediate the future before it happens, the desire that the future be always already pre-mediated. Finally, I suggest that this desire to premediate the future before it happens is accompanied by the desire to insure that the future is so fully mediated by new media forms and technologies that it is unable to emerge into the present without having already been remediated in the past.
The concept of premediation helps to explain the sense of inevitability that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq March 2003. Premediation functions in some important sense as the medial logic of the Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. In a political regime of preemptive war, premediation is the dominant media regime-by premediating the war, remediating it before it happens, the formal structure of U.S. news media effectively supported U.S. military doctrine, participating in the preemptive remediation of a future (premediated) war. That is, the Bush doctrine of preemptive war required a preemptive media plan, a premediation of the inevitable future (or of any number of possible inevitable futures, as long as they all led to war with Iraq). This doctrine of preemption, as opposed to the prior doctrine of deterrence, has been circulating in neo-con circles at least since 1989; similarly premediation has been emerging over the course of the 1990s, often as remediation's unseen double. Where prior to 1989 we see a U.S. media regime oriented primarily towards the past, particularly to the Cold War aftermath of WW II, the doctrine of preemptive war, as opposed to the more "remedial" doctrine of deterrence, looks to refashion not the past but the future.
Beginning with the 2002 State of the Union Address, the Bush administration repeatedly played out the war against Iraq in print and televisual news media. Cynically such premediations functioned to help insure that the American public would return control of the Congress to Bush's Republican party in the 2002 mid-term elections. Equally cynically, however, this premediation of the war against Iraq allowed the networked media to increase their ratings in the run-up to war, as well as to engage in a kind of audience testing on how best to cover the war when it did occur. These cynical readings of media and political self-interest should not be underemphasized. But they do not in and of themselves explain away the logic of premediation; rather they underscore the attraction of premediation to an American public whose sense of invincibility or invulnerabilty remains shaken by the events of 9/11.
Richard Grusin is Professor and Chair of the Department of English, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA. He is co-author with Jay David Bolter of Remediation (MIT Press, 2000).
Noortje Marres works in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam.
Richard Rogers works in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and is director of the Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam.
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