Richard Grusin, _Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11_ (draft manuscript, 2009) following with Jay Bolter (1999) _Remediation: Understanding New Media_ (MIT Press)

'Premediation' reflects the current cultural moment and the logic of preemption - in extending 'remediation' that followed the double logic of the immediacy of the past combined with the remediation of the past - to inform not just the present and past but the future too. A shift has occurred in logic from mediating past forms to pre-mediating future events and media - rather like media's pre-emptive strike on the cultural imagination. In this sense premediation is an attempt to mediate potentialities. 

Niklas Luhmann views on temporality are important here in taking media to be a system operating on the binary code of information and non-information. In mass media, each programme holds the promise of another programme: 'The system takes it s time and forms every operation in the expectation that others will follow.' (The Reality of Mass Media, NY: Polity Press 2000: 11) This is the media's systemic requirement for new information, generating and reproducing future uncertainties (2000: 35). In formation and non-information codes relate to time: 'Information cannot be repeated; as soon as it becomes an event, it becomes non-information.' (Grusin 2009: 69) Luhman's argument is that observations about events happen almost simultaneously with the events themselves. Grusin extents this to argue that media logic conveys that something has just happened in the past and also something is just about to happen in the future - the 'liveness of futurity' (2009: 71). Media thus operates as an autopoietic system of the generation of objects for orientating society towards the future. 

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Reader Report for Book Proposal
PREMEDIATION by Richard Grusin

The subject of the book is timely - in the light of culture's obsession with security, and the broader context of cognitive capitalism and affective dimension of communication technologies. At the heart of this is a post 9/11 reflection on mediality and how shock/terror is registered - extending the previous collaborative work 'Remediation' (1999). The distinction from this previous work is clearly expressed (if not overly) - that a shift has occurred in logic from mediating past forms to pre-mediating future events and media - rather like media's pre-emptive strike on the cultural imagination. The prehistory to this is Modernity and new modes of apperception. If, as the author argues, contemporary media prepares the public for shock/terror post 9/11, it is not simply a continuation of the project of modernity as earlier tactics associated with distraction are now tactics of anticipation. 

It is a clear and well organised manuscript with a broad range of sources - from media and cultural studies laced with broader ideas from a variety of disciplines. The introduction begins with a very North American focus (although the logic of this is fine - after 9/11 and after Bush - it does give the impression that it is the centre of the world). The introduction emphasises the link to the 'double logic of remediation' - how technologies were classified according to how close they came to presenting an unmediated reality - to position the concept of premediation and its conditions. Premediation attempts to remediate the future before it settles into the present. In this sense one might expect it to invoke the dialectic of Benjamin's 'Thesis on the Philosophy of History' and I'm not sure the historical dimension is registered as it might be. On p.34 the argument seems rather superfluous - does anyone still take the term 'new media' seriously? However the book concentrates on mediality and argues that this has been lacking in analysis - the materiality of this is clearly important (dematerialising mediality as he puts it) but what about the materiality of history and the idea of rupture in this sense? I wonder if this is a conceptual oversight.

Three main concepts are introduced - premediation, mediality and affectivity - that form the theoretical and methodological framework for the book. 

The first of these - chapter one - concentrates on premediation and how the future is pre-mediated (his examples are from science fiction films) and how it engenders a 'consensual hallucination' (as if a film). Post-Zizek and Baudrillard, the argument is well put if perhaps a little expected. I would repeat my comments about a more in depth analysis of historical processes here to situate the discussion of realtime, now-time and future time (no longer news but preemptive). Premediation remains a powerful conceptual tool but one to this point that is not analysed in depth – such as some commentators might suggest as the return of the repressed or the disavowal of the real. I do wonder whether the argument lacks verve, remaining in a rather straightforward mode of media analysis (ever more examples of films). Against this view, the section on autopoiesis is helpful in understanding the dynamics of premediation and adding some methodological detail on temporality and how disruption and surprise are always part of 'news'. Media logic conveys that something has just happened in the past and also something is just about to happen in the future - the 'liveness of futurity' (p. 71). I wonder whether something of the sophistication of this might have come earlier. The coda for this chapter is a clear summary all the same of the importance of the concept – no less than the attempt to mediate future possibilities and potentialities. 

In chapter two – affect and mediality are examined in more depth with reference to the Abu Ghraib photographs. In keeping with materialist analysis, the interest is in not simply in what is represented but in the horror of representation more generally. Although referring to Zizek and Sontag, and excessive/obscene representational regimes such as pornography, the chapter is quite descriptive. Although the parallel to American popular culture and participatory media practices is endorsed, the violence of participation and  democracy is underplayed (I say this as there has been considerable attention to these ideas recently). That the unconscious is evoked here also reminds the reader that this was underplayed in the previous chapter. Why here and not there? Later we are introduced to biopolitics, sovereignty and control societies (Foucault, Deleuze, Hardt, Negri, etc). The theoretical references are eclectic to say the least. I'm not sure how successful this is, even if the application is very clear in itself.  

Chapter three 'Premediation and Securitization', extends some of these lines of discussion to security as the dominant paradigm of control (after Foucault and Agamben, and Amoore and de Goede in particular) to imagine future scenarios and threats – before it happens. That apparent mobility and freedom is an important part of this is well argued. Social networking (or 'distributed mediation' as he puts it, p. 139) is seen in the context of securitization – as a kind of self-policing, collection and monitoring of data. These connections and the importance of the affective/communicative dimension are convincingly made and are very topical. The discussion of 'affective feedback loops' (and games theory) adds detail to the concept of premediation here – and partly answers my earlier worries about the dynamics of the temporal processes at work - but I still feel the theoretical aspects are too wide here. They work fine chapter by chapter, and clearly it is meant to be interdisciplinary, but as a whole the argument on a theoretical level seems to lack coherence. 

The last sections of the final chapter return to the central concept of premediation and I particularly welcome the critique of social networking, the internet of things, open web and cloud computing. This makes the book very current and helps to establish the central importance of the regime of securitization (and technological unconscious mentioned earlier in the book) and how this relates to preemption. The technologies can be seen to be based on affective states of anticipation and connectivity: 'commodified premediation technologies' (p. 181) – not surprise (or distraction) but the 'gesture of anticipation' that exemplifies premediation. The book ends on political agency through the idea of gesture (via Agamben and Benjamin) to characterise 'pure mediality'. This is a complex argument as far as I read it and the richness of the references are rather speedily covered (Benjamin's important essay 'Critique of Violence' for instance, not mentioned and the concept of 'pure means' brushed over). These sections are really important I think and the argument is rushed. The conclusions – where distance is maintained from ideological critique for a kind of relational model – are rushed too. I would have liked more clarity here as to how the political logic of premediation operates allowing for 'forethought' or premediated political possibilities. 

In overall terms I think the book is well worth publishing. I have some reservations as indicated but think the topic and discussion extremely important. Although not particularly theoretical, it is very readable with lots of examples. It summarises existing work and introduces the concept of premediation that I think readers will find fruitful. Although at times, I would worry that it is overly North American in its focus, clearly there are wider resonances. I think this would make a useful text book for undergraduate readers particularly on media and cultural studies programmes. Although I feel that references to Remediation are overused at times – if its reception is anything to judge by, there will be considerable interest in the book.