Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11

This book takes up the logics and practices of mediation circulating through the United States in the period after 11 September 2001. The book traces the emergence, or more accurately the intensification, of a logic of “premediation” in post-9/11 America. Although premediation predates the event of 9/11, it became plainly evident in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003. Moreover, premediation has continued to proliferate throughout innumerable media practices and formations in the years following the commencement of the war in Iraq in March 2003 — through the abuses of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and indefinite detention, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 US presidential election, the global financial crisis commencing in the fall of 2008, and the contested Iranian election in June 2009.

Like Walter Benjamin’s concept of dialectical history, premediation does not consider the future as an empty and homogeneous time into which the present moves progressively forward (Benjamin, 1940). Just as Benjamin characterizes two kinds of history, one which sees the past as dead or as autonomous, the other that sees it actively engaged with the present, so there are two ways to look at the future — one which operates on a model of prediction, which imagines the future as settled (or to-be-settled), as moving from possible to definite, and another which imagines the future as immanent in the present, as consisting of potentialities that impact or affect the present whether or not they ever come about. Premediation imagines multiple futures which are alive in the present, which always exist as not quite fully formed potentialities or possibilities. These futures are remediated not only as they might become but also as they have already been in the past. Premediation is not free from history but only from what Benjamin characterizes as “historicism.” Premediating the future entails remediating the past. Premediation is actively engaged in the process of reconstructing history, particularly the history of 9/11, in its incessant remediation of the future. Thus the historical event of 9/11 continues to live and make itself felt in the present as an event that both overshadows other recent historical events and that continues to justify and make possible certain governmental and medial practices of securitization.

Although the remediation of 9/11 began at least as soon as the first televisual images of the crash into the first tower, its premediation had in some sense been under way for some time. So, too, had premediation more generally. In Remediation we took Kathryne Bigelow’s 1995 film Strange Days as exemplifying the often contradictory logics of mediation at work at the end of the twentieth century, tracing out what we described as the double logic of remediation by which contemporary culture seeks simultaneously to proliferate and to erase mediation, to eliminate all signs of mediation in the very act of multiplying them. Looking back, I would maintain that we were right to single out Strange Days as an instance of remediation as a cultural dominant at the end of the twentieth century. But we did not at that point recognize the way in which this double logic — if not precisely nearing its end — was at least in the process of being re-mediated according to another logic, a logic of premediation in which the future has always already been pre-mediated. In other words we failed to understand fully the way in which Strange Days was already participating in a logic of premediation insofar as it both pre-mediated the United States (particularly Los Angeles) nearly five years into the future and pre-mediated future media practices and technologies.

As I detailed in the previous chapter one of the predominant aspects of premediation in the past decade, deployed in particular by the US news media in the wake of 9/11, concerned the desire to premediate the geopolitical future so thoroughly that the American public would be protected from experiencing a catastrophic shock or surprise like that produced by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Of course medial desire is not always fulfilled, and the strategies of pre-mediation are not always successful. In this chapter I take up an instance in which shock broke through the protective barrier of premediation — the public outrage produced by the release of torture photographs from Abu Ghraib. Jean Baudrillard links these photos to the images that proliferated on 9/11: “Before both a worldwide violent reaction: in the first case a feeling of wonder, in the second, a feeling of abjection.” “These images,” Baudrillard maintains, “are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames” (Baudrillard, 2005, p. 1).¹

Elsewhere I have developed the concept of a cinema of interactions to describe the media hybridity that is one of the defining conditions of contemporary mediality (Grusin, 2007).¹ Significant media events are no longer confined to a single medium, but are distributed across a variety of media forms and practices. Popular music, Hollywood films, or networked television series are distributed across DVDs, the Internet, fan communities, publicity media, and so forth. As we saw in the case of the horrifying behavior at Abu Ghraib, social, cultural, and political events as well exist today only insofar as they mobilize and are mobilized by a network of complementary and overlapping media forms and practices. Media can no longer be seen to operate as the distinct, autonomous forms defined by the medium specificity that dominated much twentieth-century discussion of cinema and other media, but are now better described in terms of tendencies or translations or attributes. With MP3 players, web browsers, cameras, and video recorders built in to our computers, mobile phones, and other personal digital devices, all of our media interact and combine to the extent that it no longer makes sense to consider specific media in formal, cultural, or technical isolation. Media themselves help to construct and maintain assemblages of humans, technologies, and nature, at the same time that they emerge from and are part of the assemblages they maintain and construct.²

Earlier I argued that the public shock and outrage produced by the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs derived as much or more from the affective intensity they introduced to our everyday practices of mediality as from their evidentiary status in regard to the unacceptable practices of torture and interrogation that had gone on at the Abu Ghraib prison. My argument was based in part on the fact that reports of similar practices at Guantanamo Bay and at dark sites across the globe did not produce anywhere near the same intensity of public outrage produced by the release of the photographs from Abu Ghraib. The continuity of these photographs with our practices of digital photography and photo-sharing and the affective life of our media everyday combined to make Abu Ghraib a matter of much greater public concern than similar practices elsewhere.

In this book, I have concerned myself largely with the intensification of premediation after 9/11, as a response to and defense against the media shock that followed the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center both in the United States and in the globalized mediasphere. Premediation, I have argued, pre-existed the events of 9/11, but intensified in response to those events, both in relation to the Bush doctrine of pre-emption and in relation to the concomitant shift in print, televisual, and networked news media from a focus on the immediacy of the present and recent past to a focus on the pre-mediacy of the future, the liveness of futurity. In this conclusion I want briefly to consider the functioning of premediation beyond 9/11, the ways in which premediation has continued, and will continue, to function in areas not directly related to 9/11 and the pre-emptive War against Terror. Over the past couple of years, heading into and moving beyond the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first US president of color, I have been tracking the workings of premediation in print, televisual, and networked news media. I want to conclude the book with three examples of premediation in US media beyond 9/11: Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, both of which made landfall in the Gulf of Mexico in September 2008; the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009; and the so-called “Twitter revolution” in Iran.