Premediation

40 Days in the Wilderness: Premediation and the Virtual Occupation of Wall Street

2011-10-26T11:53:00.000-07:00

Given the biblical implications of 40 days and nights, this is as good a time as any to add my voice to the swelling chorus of academic analyses of #occupywallstreet. Nearly two weeks into the occupation of Wall Street I had suggested in an initial analysis that no matter how the occupation turned out it was already successful insofar as it had premediated the occupation of Wall Street and other occupations across the world. In particular I argued that “Insofar as premediation generates potential or virtual futures as a way to mobilize individual and collective affect in the present,… #occupywallstreet opens up paths to potential futures in which the occupation of Wall Street (or the political occupation of other sites) is actualized.” 40 days into the occupation, I want to develop this claim further to argue that it is precisely its virtuality, its resistance to making specific demands or adopting a platform, that makes #occupywallstreet successful and that will keep it growing and thriving.

The virtuality of the movement is evident in its very name, which calls for the occupation of Wall Street even while not occupying Wall Street per se. The occupation of Zuccotti Park is near Wall Street, but Wall Street is not occupied either as street, building, or financial institution. Wall Street is, however, virtually occupied, as Times Square has been, as Chicago or Los Angeles or the London Stock Exchange have been. While some veterans of earlier protest movements have argued that occupation involves going inside buildings and taking possession—as Wisconsin protesters did in the State Capitol—it is the potentiality of these virtual occupations, I would argue, their premediation of greater and more numerous and powerful potential occupations in the future, that vitalizes the Occupy movement.

The virtuality of the Occupy movement is evident as well in the widespread feeling that the movement should not at this point make explicit demands, for doing so would prematurely and unnecessarily constrain or limit the movement’s gathering strength. Despite increasingly vocal appeals by the chattering class of the mainstream political media for the Occupy movement to develop a list of specific demands it has now become almost a truism that such demands would be premature. In a brief video interview Wallace Shawn gives voice to the widely shared belief that the movement is in the preliminary stage, that it is "before the moment of specifics." Judith Butler plays off of this belief in her recent speech at Washington Square Park about demanding the impossible, which is another way to refuse actualizing or realizing any particular demands, but rather of encouraging the proliferation of informed, half-formed, nascent or potential exams.

Premediation works by mobilizing affect in the present, by deploying multiple modes of mediation and remediation in shaping the affectivity of the public, in preparing people for some field of possible future actions, in producing a mood or structure of feeling that makes possible certain kinds of actions, thoughts, speech, affectivities, feelings, moods, mediations that might not have seemed possible before or that might have fallen flat or died on the vine or not produced echoes and reverberations. As an event of premediation, #occupywallstreet is also working to change the mood or collective affective tone in the media, in public discourse, in social networks, and in the political sphere so that talking about amnesty for college or mortgage debt or demanding increased taxes on the wealthiest individuals and corporations or thinking about restructuring property relations and economic becomes not only permissible, but indeed begins to appear as common sense or received wisdom. So #occupywallstreet may make it possible, say, for politicians to take positions they could not have taken before, by providing cover, or clearing the ground, by means of the shaping of collective moods or structures of feeling out of which more intense feelings about economic injustice are generated.

Before any specific goals or demands can be formulated, and perhaps even if they never are, what has to happen first is that #occupywallstreet must continue to do what it is already doing—fostering and intensifying what Jonathan Flatley would characterizes as “a revolutionary counter-mood.” The heart of this revolutionary counter-mood can be found in what the opening lines of the September 29 Declaration of the Occupation of New York City call a collective "feeling of mass injustice." “As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.” The initial aims of #occupywallstreet seem clear—to produce and intensify a mood of occupation or civil disobedience, a shared feeling of injustice towards such developments as income inequality, the foreclosure crisis, workplace discrimination, student loan debt, and a host of other 21st century developments. It is too early to have the kind of specific list of grievances, demands, goals, but rather this is the time to try to spread and complexify the networks of revolutionary feelings, to try out the power of popular assembly, to let it grow and mutate and mobilize to see how powerful or extensive it might get.

40 days into the occupation, #occupywallstreet is perhaps still becoming a movement. Or to play off of Erin Manning’s recent book, Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, I would suggest that #occupywallstreet might best be understood as a becoming movement, still in a stage of preacceleration or incipient movement. As a virtual movement #occupywallstreet remains in an ongoing process of inventing what a global social and political movement can be in the 21st century. In so doing it is producing its own rhythms, its own temporality, through stages of preacceleration and intensification and emergence and articulation, only then to return to another interval of preacceleration and re-intensification and re-individuaton. “When articulation becomes collective, a politics is made palpable whereby what is produced is the potential for divergent series of movements. This is a virtual politics, a politics of the not-yet… These are not politics we can choreograph but politics in the making…. These are politics of that many-bodied state of transition that is the collective” (27).

It is precisely this incipience, this preacceleration, that makes #occupywallstreet so frustrating to politicians and political commentators, who are trapped within neoliberalism’s calculus “of the rational modern subject,” according to which the Occupy movement does not compute—does not even compute exactly as a movement, since it has no clear aim or goal. This incipient emergence can be both powerful and frustrating for those participating in the occupation, as expressed in this recent piece from Harrison Schultz: “For the sake of keeping your head sane and your heart still engaged, be aware: we are not in control. You are not in control. We at the NYC occupation are not in control. The website hosts are not in control. No one is in control of this hurricane.” As Schultz suggests, not unlike recent geotechnical, political disasters like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the BP Oil Spill, or the Sendai quake, or the occupation’s more immediate precursors in the University of California student protests, the Arab Spring, or the labor protests in Madison, #occupywallstreet is emerging as a complex 21st-century media event, with its own temporality, its own affectivities, and its own scale.

In her recent post on “Lessons from #occupywallstreet,” Jodi Dean addresses the movement’s incipience and its untapped potential, the fact that “the movement exceeds any single occupation.” Dean writes: “We will start learning the different tonalities and variations of this movement. Some sites might become more intensive as others regroup. Some might abandon one site in order to occupy new possibilities. Regrouping is an opportunity: an opportunity to build outside of the prying eyes and presumptive expectations of a 24/7 media cycle concerned only with pumping content through feeds.” The “regrouping” that Dean speaks of functions similarly to what Manning describes as the “interval.” “Political philosophy has not made space for the interval within the vocabulary of the rational modern subject,” writes Manning, “yet the interval has nonetheless leaked into the complex iterations of pure plastic rhythm’s political becomings” (28).

Insofar as #occupywallstreet in fact creates such an interval in the daily rhythm of business as usual, it has the ability to open the political space for potential becomings whose scope and power remain untapped and unsounded. Dean sees the arrival of winter in the northern hemisphere as providing for an opportunity to regroup, an interval, from which the Occupy movement can emerge with even greater vitality than it currently possesses. In the past few days, police crackdowns in Chicago, Atlanta, and most violently Oakland have brought about state-sponsored intervals which will almost certainly have the result of intensifying the movement. And insofar as Atlanta and Oakland are relatively temperate in the winter, it would not be surprising to see those nodes on the Occupy network intensify in the coming months. As a virtual occupation of Wall Street and hundreds of other sites around the world, the Occupy movement should take advantage of whatever intervals it can make or find to help actualize a more just world. By premediating and proliferating potential futures for social and political opposition and a more just world, #occupywallstreet will be able to intensify "a feeling of mass injustice," thereby mobilizing collective affectivity towards an increasingly powerful revolutionary counter-mood of occupation.

Occupy Wall Street Premediates the Occupation of Wall Street

2011-09-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

Nearing the end of its second week, the movement called Occupy Wall Street has begun to attract both media and celebrity attention. Excessive police brutality over the past weekend caught the eye of the New York Times, the big three US network news broadcasts, and (before either of the other two) cable news networks like MSNBC, CNN, and Fox. This mainstream media discussion has fostered an increasingly intense debate in online media and the blogosphere about the trivial or condescending nature of the media coverage, as well as about the significance of this "occupation," its strategy, tactics, messaging, and long-term goals.

The focus of much of this discussion (even the meta-media critiques) has been on the significance of the occupation itself, what it represents, what it might become. What has been missing from these mainstream and participatory media accounts is any sustained critical and theoretical discussion of Occupy Wall Street as itself an act of mediation, or as I understand it, of premediation. Occupy Wall Street is best understood as a premediation of the occupation of Wall Street. Let me explain.

Because most of the successful political premediations of the 21st century have been in the service of state and corporate power, I have often been asked whether premediation could contest, oppose, or overturn hegemonic power. Put most starkly, can premediation advocate or help to actualize political change or revolution?

Since introducing the concept in 2003, I have consistently maintained that premediation is not tied to a particular politics. Premediation describes a media formation which emerged and intensified within a historically specific social, political, and technical media regime. Because premediation readily fuels and is fueled by fear, the post-9/11 security environment has been a particularly rich moment for state power to deploy strategies of premediation as a form of preemptive control, as seen in Bush-Cheney's dramatic expansion of executive power in waging the Iraq War and creating a powerful domestic security apparatus.

Insofar as premediation generates potential or virtual futures as a way to mobilize individual and collective affect in the present, there is no reason why such futures could not kindle or nourish a collective affective state of opposition or rebellion. This, I would argue, is what Occupy Wall Street has succeeded in doing, no matter how long the occupation lasts or what eventually comes of it. And in so doing Occupy Wall Street opens up paths to potential futures in which the occupation of Wall Street (or the political occupation of other sites) is actualized. No matter what its goals, tactics, or ultimate conclusion, Occupy Wall Street is successfully premediating the occupation of Wall Street.

This premediation was already evident in the July call for a September 17 occupation, presented on the Adbusters website. The current site archives the ways in which the September 17 event was premediated for over two months. In its initial call to occupy Wall Street on September 17, the Adbusters website seemed designed more to premediate potential occupations in the future than to prompt an actual occupation in September 2011. In the run-up to September 17 the site offered a variety of premediated formats to promote and mobilize individual and collective revolutionary affect through circulation across socially networked media.

The way that Occupy Wall Street functions mainly as a premediation of the occupation of Wall Street can be further drawn out if we compare it to the large protests and 24-7 occupation of the Wisconsin state capitol building in Madison in February and March of this year. Writing about those protests in February, I suggested that they functioned as Benjaminian test performances for socially networked media. This seems even more to be the case with Occupy Wall Street, which seems to have as much to do with generating audiovisual images of protest, occupation, and rebellion in print, televisual, and networked media as with occupying any particular portion of institutional Wall Street.

Still the differences between the two protests should not be understated. The Madison protests were motivated by clear and immediate political wrongs, which were threatening to be made into state law. Occupy Wall Street scheduled its demonstrations and occupations as far back as July and premediated the September 17 occupation in a variety of media forms. Occupy Wall Street differs from the Madison protests as well in regard to the contrast between the significant national celebrity presence at the Wall Street protest as compared to the more regional presence of labor leaders and local politicians in the Madison protests earlier this year.

In making this comparison I am not making the (perhaps justifiable) claim that the Madison protests were authentic expressions of widespread popular political opposition while Occupy Wall Street was an inauthentic political action staged by a group of net activists. Rather I am arguing that it is precisely the premediation of potential future occupations that constitutes Occupy Wall Street's political efficacy and that this premediation is no less "authentic" (a concept I find problematic in any event) than the protests in Wisconsin.

That Occupy Wall Street is first and foremost a successful instance of premediation is borne out in part by the heavy Hollywood and public intellectual media presence, from Roseanne Barr, Susan Sarandon, and Lupe Fiasco to Michael Moore, Cornel West, and the Yes Men. Again, this is not to criticize Occupy Wall Street but to try to explain what I take to be its long-term social and political impact. The presence of media figures from the left is part and parcel of the liberal premediation assemblage, much as the presence of televangelicals and right-wing "intellectuals" populate and propagate conservative versions of premediation.

The most lasting legacy of Occupy Wall Street might very well be precisely its successful demonstration of how premediation can be mobilized in the service of resistance and opposition rather than securitization and control.

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Part 3: Conversation with Henry Jenkins on Remediation, Premediation, and Transmedia

2011-03-10T08:47:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to the third and final part of my conversation with Henry Jenkins on remediation, premediation, and transmedia. It's on history and politics--the meatiest of the three parts. Check it out.

Part 2: Conversation with Henry Jenkins on Remediation, Premediation, and Transmedia

2011-03-09T07:13:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to the second part of an extended conversation I had with Henry Jenkins on the relationship between remediation, premediation, and transmedia.

Conversation concludes with Part 3 on Friday.

Enjoy.

Conversation with Henry Jenkins on Remediation, Premediation, and Transmedia

2011-03-07T08:48:00.001-08:00

Here's a link to the first part of an extended conversation I had with Henry Jenkins on the relationship between remediation, premediation, and transmedia.

Enjoy.

Are Recent Protests Test Performances for Social Media?

2011-02-23T08:34:00.001-08:00

Were the mass protests-turned-revolt in Egypt inspired by mobile, social media? Variations of this question have generated innumerable blogs, tweets, status updates, emails, and stories in the print, televisual, and networked media over the past month. I posted on this question myself in a recent entry, in which I concluded, after suggesting some of the many ways that social media operated within the Egyptian revolt, that it was time to begin asking some different questions.

Having on Wednesday taught Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on mechanical reproduction and spending Saturday in Madison, Wisconsin, protesting the attempt by newly elected Republican Governor Scott Walker to strip public employees of almost all of their rights to bargain collectively, I have some new questions to ask about the relations among social media and collective political action. For now, I’ll stick to one: are events like the protests in the Middle East and the Midwest 21st century versions of the “test performances” Benjamin describes occurring in film.

The concept of “test performances” comes up in Benjamin’s distinction between the stage actor and the film actor. While the stage actor performs for an audience in a theater, the film actor performs for the apparatus of cinema. The performance of the film actor for an audience of experts involved in making the film is a test like those of athletes or of office and factory workers in the 1930s, whose performance is measured and evaluated by various experts and authorities. The film actor, though, was further distinguished by the reproduction of his performance on film, which removed its auratic qualities.

The key issue in answering the question might concern audience. The protest in Wisconsin was performed less for the audience at the Capitol in Madison than for the local, national, and global news media. The protests have generated hundreds of thousands of emails, photos, sound clips, videos, tweets, FB updates, blogs, and news items for the print, televisual, and global news media. Over the past week Madison has been a dense and complex node at the intersection of many different networks—television, newspaper, government, education, labor, media, and so forth. As thousands of protesters follow transportation networks (car, bus, bike, or foot) to the capital, they bring with them a variety of other networks, geolocated via phones, GPS, or other mobile devices, as well as connected by cameras, audiovisual recorders, or credit cards, each of which has the power to activate other networks.

The protesters, I would argue, act through these networks. This action is amplified by numbers—both because the increased number of protesters increases the number of network media events but because in representing a larger number of protesters, each mediation stands for or carries with it or acts as a spokesman for a larger number of people, a larger collectivity.

Two events I witnessed/participated in can help elucidate the way in which the protests work as test performances. The first occurred last Saturday, where Nathaniel Stern and I watched a small group of Tea Partiers try to provoke a union leader and union supporters for the sole purpose of capturing it on video.

The young man in the brown leather jacket with a video camera was with the Tea Party provocateur in the blue and purple hockey jacket and ski cap. They were trying to rile up protesters then film them up close with shaky video to give the impression that the protesters were angry and violent. Initially the provocateur tried to provoke a union leader, who showed admirable restraint in trying to explain the process of collective bargaining before turning away. Meanwhile some union supporters had begun a chant; the man with the video camera went up in their faces, shaking the camera to give the impression that the scene was riotous and potentially violent. This is an increasingly familiar media tactic used on the right, performed solely as a test for the media. The audiovisual event that was produced from this event bears little relation to the actual historical events as they happened on the grounds of the Capitol—nor was it meant to.

A second, more benign version of this occurred on Tuesday at the Capitol, when Lane Hall and I were asked to participate in a press conference being staged by union organizers. The organizers had rounded up demonstrators to stand behind the three union members who spoke and answered questions. This test performance, too, was oriented not towards the small audience in the Capitol’s NW hearing room but to a local, regional, and national television audience. Indeed on the 5:00 local news on TJM4, the “supporters” were plainly visible behind the 3 union spokespeople (though I was off to the side, out of camera range).

Both of these performances, one from the right and one from the left, were not aimed at the audiences on the spot, at a particular historical moment, but were directed at the local, national, and global print, televisual, and networked media. In the ongoing protests, whatever pressure the protests put on Wisconsin’s Republican leadership comes much less from the results of the action of protesting at the Capitol itself than from its amplification, multiplication, and distribution across millions of screens—from HD television and computer monitors, to mobile devicess, and so forth. For the battle to be won on the grounds of the capital it will have to be won as well on the screens of the world.

Was Egypt an Internet Revolution?

2011-02-10T09:05:00.000-08:00

January 2011 will go down in media history as a momentous month. The month began with the continuation of extensive coverage of the Wikileaks Cablegate controversy in print, televisual, and networked media. Media attention to Wikileaks was eclipsed in large part by the mass shooting in Arizona on January 8, echoes of which had already begun to fade by the time that mass protests forced Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to step down on January 15. But the most geopolitically significant event of the month was the popular revolution in Egypt, which started on January 25 and which finally culminated on February 11 with the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.

Was this an internet revolution?

Two weeks ago I blogged about the way in which live coverage of the Egyptian protests participated in widespread premediation of the future of Egypt. That premediation continued on February 10 as the world awaited Mubarak's supposed resignation speech; it continued up until Mubarak finally resigned on February 11. Both before and now after his resignation, cable news networks and the political blogosphere have been filled with premediations of what will follow Mubarak's departure. And you can rest assured that such premediations will not end any time soon. In the 21st century print, televisual, and networked news media are oriented largely to anticipating the future, even while covering news live as it happens.

One proiminent theme running through the premediation of Egypt's and the region's future involved the role of the internet in mobilizing political revolution. The uprisings in Egypt have produced the latest chapter in a familiar debate about the political efficacy of social media: were these mass protests caused by mobile social media like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, or were they the genuine, authentic expression of the will to democracy of the Egyptian people? Cable news networks are obsessed with the connections to Twitter and Facebook, focusing on Google marketing executive Wael Ghonim, who first set up a crucial Facebook page and was arrested and interrogated by Egyptian security forces before being released on February 7. Malcolm Gladwell has weighed in with his typically superficial dismissal of the role of social media in political revolution, and Frank Rich has echoed him in his February 6 NYT column.

As the Egyptian revolution continues to intensify, the debate over whether it is a Twitter or Facebook revolution or whether it is a popular revolution caused by mass popular unrest looks in many senses increasingly simple-minded. On the eve of and in the aftermath of Mubarak's departure it seems impossible to deny that the revolution was intensified, amplified, and mobilized by all sorts of media--not just social media but also by global networked print and televisual news media. The pressure put by mass and participatory media on politicians in US and Egypt undoubtedly has helped to accelerate Mubarak's departure. But this pressure was inseparable from, and given its own urgency and intensification by, the proliferation of audiovisual mediations of mass protests in Cairo and Alexandria, as well as elsewhere in the West and in the Middle East.

It is time to move beyond the tired liberal antinomy between the human and the technical, between social and medial agency. As I have argued in response to the similar debate surrounding the mass shootings in Arizona, agency is never singular but is always the product of hybrid networks of human, social, technical, medial, and other actants. What makes social media efficacious is precisely that they are such hybrid networks, complex alliances of human will and desire, technical networks, media formats, embodied individual and collective affectivity, and so forth.

While I have no patience with utopian technologically determinist claims that social movements like those currently under way in the Middle East are caused by Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or mobile phones or cable news networks like Al Jazeera, I have even less patience for the stubborn resistance of Gladwell, Rich, and others to the idea that these social media networks have little or no effect on the ongoing events in the Middle East. We do not have to deny the amplifying, intensifying, and co-creative effects of social media in order to recognize the mass popular movements in the Middle East as the expression of revolutionary fervor or agency.

Sadly, continuing to deny these effects begins to look increasingly like the denial by Fox News and others on the right that the media climate of anti-government violence in the run-up to the 2010 election had no impact on Jared Lee Loughner's mass assassination efforts in Arizona. When Frank Rich, Malcolm Gladwell, and other vocal deniers of the agency of social media in the Egyptian revolution end up maintaining the same simple-minded account of human agency expressed by Sarah Palin in regard to the mass shootings in Arizona, it's a sure sign that they need to embrace a more complex understanding of human, technical, and medial agency.

So was Egypt an internet revolution? We need to begin asking a different question.

Egypt, Premediation, and the Liveness of Futurity

2011-01-31T11:02:00.000-08:00

Although it may go without saying, I will say it anyway: the current crisis in Egypt is a case study for premediation in action. The questions that preoccupy print, televisual, and socially networked media all pertain to the premediation of the future of the Egyptian demonstrations. Will Mubarak go or stay? If he goes, who will replace him? El Baradei? The Muslim brotherhood? What are the potential global economic impacts of these events? What does this mean for the future of US relations in the Mideast? How will it impact Israel? Is this a democratic revolution? An Islamic revolution? A class revolution? Will this spread to other Mideast countries as it did from Tunisia?

Undoubtedly there has been a great deal of attention paid to live coverage of the demonstrations in Egypt that began on January 25--whether through mobile media like videophones and SMS, social networks like Twitter and FB, participatory networks on the blogosphere, major international networked newspapers like The Guardian or The New York Times, and live television coverage by cable news networks like BBC, CNN, or Al Jazeera. Indeed the shutdown of internet traffic by the Egyptian government, followed by its disruption of Al Jazeera's live feed, caused much consternation in the global mediasphere. But even while these shutdowns blocked much of the live media traffic out of Egypt, they have also prompted the generation of other channels to bypass the Egyptian government's censorship efforts.

What is interesting about the emphasis on liveness in the media coverage of the Egyptian demonstrations is that, unlike many earlier global media events, the focus on liveness is less about immediacy and real-time coverage than it is about trying to determine where these events are heading, what the future will bring. Think, for example, about two major live media events from the summer of 1997, internet and televisual coverage of the Mars Pathfinder's unmanned exploration or the fatal vehicle crash that killed Princess Diana. These late 1990s remediation events emphasized the immediacy of globally networked telecommunication and its hypermediacy in various media formations--the story was immediacy, connectivity, and real-time coverage. In premediation events like those unfolding in Egypt, the story is much more focused on potentiality, or the liveness of futurity.

In part of course this is due to the emergent nature of the mass demonstrations themselves. Day by day they continue to grow and to change, showing no signs of waning and beginning to manifest various fragile and temporary forms of self-organization. But the characteristics of the demonstrations cannot be separated from their forms of mediation and the way in which they perpetuate an almost constant affectivity of anticipation, an orientation towards the next tweet, or live video, or public address. Indeed it is more telling to recognize that the demonstrations themselves are forms of mediation or counter-mediation of power in opposition and resistance to the forms of state-mediated power perpetuated by the Mubarak government--and that these respective mediations of power are inextricable from, and borrow the forms of, the variety of networks of mediation available in the first decades of the 21st century.

Tired debates about whether this is a Twitter of Facebook revolution or whether it is a popular revolution or the beginning of class warfare (about which debates I hope to post later today or tomorrow) are caught up in fundamental logical and conceptual antinomies that have underwritten liberalism in the West since before the 18th century. But even if one wants to take sides in this classic liberal debate (and whichever side one chooses to argue) it is difficult to deny that news coverage in print, televisual, and socially networked media is focused on the premediation of potential geopolitical scenarios. And insofar as these premediations repeatedly emphasize the immediacy of real-time communication across these heterogeneous media channels, the Egyptian demonstrations make evident both the potentiality of mediation and the liveness of futurity.

Jared Lee Loughner and the Affective Contagion of Violent Rhetoric

2011-01-11T08:16:00.000-08:00

Almost from the moment Jared Lee Loughner's assassination attempt was first reported, many in the print, televisual, and networked media (and a handful of politicians) have claimed that his actions were motivated or influenced by the increasingly heated rhetorical climate that has prevailed in the US at least since the 1990s when Republicans undertook a coordinated campaign to delegitimize the Clinton presidency. The past several days have seen an intensification of objections to this claim from across the political spectrum. Moderates and those on the left have argued that such a claim only further perpetuated a hostile and violent political and media climate. On the right the most common argument was that there was no evidence that Loughner had been exposed to any of the offending rhetoric or that he was politically motivated in any way.

John Protevi has written a persuasive blog entry contesting the linear, mechanistic notion of causality that underlies these defenses from the right. This causal logic informs this comment left on my previous blog entry: "there is literally no evidence tying Loughner to the usual overheated rhetoric people have been complaining about." Protevi argues that human action is much more complex than such accounts of "billiard-ball" causality suggest. The violent right-wing political rhetoric of Palin, Beck, and others could have influenced Loughner, Protevi argues, even if he had never directly been exposed to any of it because actions always occur within complex social environments.

In his brilliant 2008 book, Affective Mapping, Jonathan Flatley details the ways in which Heideggerian stimmung, or mood, and Raymond Williams' structure of feeling, describe how individual and collective affect can be influenced by the affective environment created by natural, social, cultural, and technical factors. Mood, Flatley argues, extrapolating from Heidegger, is how "historical forces most directly intervene in our affective lives." Flatley follows Heidegger (whose experience in Nazi Germany made this evident almost daily) in seeing moods as "an atmosphere, a kind of weather," which are not inner states but work through us both individually and collectively. "Stimmung is a collective, public phenomenon, something inevitably shared. Moods constitute the 'way in which we are together.'" Flatley likens Heideggerian stimmung to Williams's concept of "structure of feeling," but sees the latter as more social or even class-based. Thus where anger would be a mood, the anti-government attitude of the Tea Party would be a structure of feeling. Both, however, work to mediate individual and collective affectivity and action.

Seen from the perspective of mood or structure of feeling, the relation between Jared Loughner's actions and the violent, anti-government rhetoric of politicians and media figures on the right becomes more clear. Repeated assertions of the appropriateness of using violence against elected government officials when one is unable to use democratic measures to get one's way produce a structure of feeling and an anti-government violent mood within which individual and collective political action and affectivity unfold. We do not directly have to read or hear any particular call for anti-government violence for it to influence our actions. The totality of such violent rhetorical expressions, repeated ad nauseum in print, televisual, and networked media, provides the atmosphere or environment within which our relation to the government takes shape.

While the current anti-government mood or stimmung does not directly cause any particular action, it does, in Fltley's terms, provide us with the knowledge of "what is collectively possible at [this] moment; it tells us what our shared situation is and what may be done within that situation." It is from this perspective of mood or structure of feeling that Jared Lee Loughner can be seen to have been influenced by the violent anti-government rhetoric that has become an unfortunate but inescapable feature of media and political discourse on the right in the first decades of the 21st century.

Violence, Agency, and Technical Mediation in Arizona

2011-01-10T08:08:00.000-08:00

The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and others in Arizona on Saturday has prompted a vigorous debate about the role of violent right-wing rhetoric in prompting the criminal behavior of Jared Lee Loughner. Many sensible people (mainly on the left) have sought to blame politicians who urged their supporters to "reload" or to make use of "Second Amendment remedies" or to "overthrow the liberal government." Less sensible people (mainly on the right but disappointingly in the conservative, i.e., mainstream, media as well) have argued that laying blame in this way only further inflames an already volatile climate. The arguments against this "false equivalence" between rhetoric on the right and the left have been widely distributed and are persuasive.

The current debate has seen the revival of a favorite NRA meme--"Guns don't kill people; people kill people"--as well as its extension to rhetoric or words. The most brilliant discussion of this meme that I know is Bruno Latour's, in his 1994 article "On Technical Mediation." Latour criticizes both the sociological determinism of the NRA (who see guns, or technology generally, as only a neutral instrument) and the technological determinism of those who blame gun violence on the technology itself. For Latour, agency is always hybrid and distributed; it is the actant formed by the alliance between gun and shooter that kills people. Latour cleverly diagrams how agency is commonly detoured or translated into some other form when actors encounter other potential actants.

Thus, an angry man who finds a gun becomes a different agent that an angry man without one; the alliance of man and gun produces the potential for a different action than an angry man alone, transforming the possibility of say violent words or physical violence into the possiblity of gun violence. Similarly a gun on the shelf of a gunstore is a very different agent than a concealed weapon brought to an Arizona Congresswoman's meet and greet.

This schematic account of the relation between agency and technical mediation is of course only a sketch. Latour sees action as always occurring within more complex assemblages or networks of humans and nonhumans, individuals and institutions, words and things. Which brings us back to the role of the current right-wing political rhetoric in Saturday's shootings. It is of course an oversimplification to blame the shootings on such technical mediators as Sarah Palin's famous map of Congressional districts in the crosshairs, as disturing as such images are.

But it is even more simple-minded to claim that such images and their accompanying rhetoric, circulated and amplified in the print, televisual, and networked media, play no role in acts of violence like that committed by Jared Lee Loughner. As I have argued in my recent book, technical and social media work to mobilize individual and collective affect and action. By premediating acts of violence against elected officials, such mediations as Palin's map, circulated and remediated by mainstream and participatory media, work to mobilize all sorts of actions, including those for which Loughner was the trigger.

As an agent, Loughner cannot be understood simply as an isolated, autonomous human (sane or insane). Rather his action must be seen (like all action) as the act of a complex, hybrid agent or quasi-agent, an assemblage made up of a troubled young man who liked to read and saw himself as a dreamer, the rhetorical incitements to violence proliferating on print, televisual, and networked media, the Glock 19- 9mm gun that was legally purchased at Sportsman's Warehouse in Tucson on Nov 30, and other potential actants yet to be identified. Neither guns nor people kill people. People are killed as the result of complex chains and hybrid assemblages of humans, nonhumans, rhetorical mediations, and countless other potential actants. To think that violent right-wing rhetoric did not contribute to the agency of Saturday's murders is as simplistic as the politicans and media figures who spouted, circulated, and amplified such rhetoric in the media.

Wikileaks and the Affectivity of Openness

2010-10-29T21:10:00.000-07:00

In the span of just over six months in the spring, summer, and fall of 2010, WikiLeaks has made headlines in national and international news sources with three different releases documenting ethically problematic practices in the ongoing US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On April 5, WikiLeaks released edited and unedited documentary videos of “a classified US military video depicting three airstrikes from a US Apache helicopter on July 12, 2007 in New Baghdad, Iraq.” On July 25, they released the “Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010,” “an extraordinary compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010.” And on October 22, WikiLeaks released nearly 400,000 additional reports from Iraq, detailing in the Iraq War Logs evidence of previously unreported incidents of torture and tens of thousands of additional unacknowledged civilian deaths.

Each of these releases has garnered WikiLeaks an extraordinary amount of attention, both positive and negative, in print, televisual, and networked news media. WikiLeaks has both been lauded for making available audiovisual and textual evidence of atrocities perpetrated in the conduct of the war and been accused of taking information out of context and of making available confidential information that could further endanger US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as inflaming anti-American sentiment in ways that could increase the risks of terror attacks on US soil. Almost all of the discussion surrounding WikiLeaks, however, has focused on the question of media content, on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of releasing confidential information to the global media public. I want to pursue a different tack, however, by taking up the formal and affective qualities of these releases, particularly the way in which they function to foster what I would call an affectivity of openness. WikiLeaks works as much by modulating collective affect, or structures of feeling as it does by providing people with information or content about the war that they did not otherwise possess.

WikiLeaks’ mobilization of the affective sociality of militarism, video, and gaming is one way in which it participates in the politics of everyday affects. The release of 92,000 military field reports from Afghanistan and another 391,832 from Iraq is another form of mediality which provides the affective links to accepting the war as part of our screen-based environment. In both the Afghanistan and the Iraq releases US military and political figures simultaneously insisted both that there was very little "news" in the WikiLeaks releases and that these releases have endangered the lives of American military and other citizens in Iraq, Afghanistan, and across the world. How can both of these perspectives be true? One way to approach this contradiction is to look at the way in which the Afghan War Diaries and the Iraq War Logs deploy socially networked media for the mobilization of collective affect.

Word of these leaks first came to me, as to large numbers of people, through social media like Facebook or Twitter, through email updates from political sites like Huffington Post, Politico, or Daily Koz, or through the increasingly socially networked cable news networks. In our current premediated moment, such "news" operates largely through anticipation. Reading a tweet or a shared link on Facebook or an email alert from our political blogs produces in the socially networked media user the affective state of anticipation that fuels our social networks and mobilizes collective affect. Although the Afghan and Iraq releases report on the recent past, the mode in which they have been circulated by WikiLeaks produces an anticipatory readiness, a bodily and perceptual orientation towards the future--perhaps first to an intermediary site like the New York Times or Huffington Post and then to WikiLeaks itself. These tweets and their accompanying links would then be retweeted or shared on Facebook, be picked up by RSS feeds, simultaneously producing the technical and social anticipation of further responses and social media sharing.

Such circulating texts are not just about sharing information but operate affectively as well, not only through being read but also through their premediated formats--indeed often not through reading them but simply through scrolling or scanning or downloading them or just knowing they will be available in the future. The materiality of the screens of mediated texts, and the variety of options provided by Wikileaks—which consisted in the case of the Afghanistan Diaries of “HTML (web), CSV (comma-separated values) and SQL (database) formats, and was rendered into KML (Keyhole Markup Language) mapping data that can be used with Google Earth"—produce and intensify an affectivity of anticipation for the experience of a variety of embodied and technical formats.

In the hours leading up to the formal release of the Iraq War Logs, WikiLeaks tried to orchestrate this anticipation through its Twitter feed, both premediating the upcoming release and then tweeting with links the publication of these leaks in major news sources like The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, Al Jazeera, Swedish TV, and the New York Times. On its site, WikiLeaks describes the significance and magnitude of its action in releasing the Iraq Web Logs in the following self-aggrandizing terms:

"At 5pm EST Friday 22nd October 2010 WikiLeaks released the largest classified military leak in history. The 391,832 reports ('The Iraq War Logs'), document the war and occupation in Iraq, from 1st January 2004 to 31st December 2009 (except for the months of May 2004 and March 2009) as told by soldiers in the United States Army. Each is a 'SIGACT' or Significant Action in the war. They detail events as seen and heard by the US military troops on the ground in Iraq and are the first real glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to throughout.

"The reports detail 109,032 deaths in Iraq, comprised of 66,081 'civilians'; 23,984 'enemy' (those labeled as insurgents); 15,196 'host nation' (Iraqi government forces) and 3,771 'friendly' (coalition forces). The majority of the deaths (66,000, over 60%) of these are civilian deaths. That is 31 civilians dying every day during the six year period. For comparison, the 'Afghan War Diaries', previously released by WikiLeaks, covering the same period, detail the deaths of some 20,000 people. Iraq during the same period, was five times as lethal with equivallent population size."

Wikipedia offers two different ways to access the documents, each of which works to intensify an affectivity. “Diary Dig” allows visitors to the site to browse and search the reports for key terms or dates or locations, bringing up long lists of reports which match the terms entered into the site's search engine. And “War Logs,” which allows them to browse and comment on the various sigact reports, uses participatory media techniques like tagging, favoriting, and sharing to encourage the wisdom of the crowd to deploy affective or cognitive labor to give shape to the mass of date presented on the site. As an incentive to help tag and thereby provide some kind of order to the nearly 400,000 reports, WikiLeaks has created a kind of War Logs competition, a list of high scores of people who have favorited the most sites. Both modes of interacting with the site work to emphasize and reinforce the feeling of participating in a process of openness that is WikiLeaks' "raison d'être."

In calling attention to the way in which the premediated materiality of the Iraq War Logs mobilize and intensify individual and collective affectivities of openness, I do not mean to minimize the political importance of the leak in making evident, open, or "transparent" (in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's term) the conduct of the US-led War in Afghanistan. Rather I mean to try to explain this importance in a different way, as resulting less from the specifics of the new revelations contained in the Diary than from the mode in which the anticipation of reading these revelations was circulated and intensified by our print, televisual, and socially networked media and fulfilled by the documents' availability on the WikiLeaks site.

Organizations like WikiLeaks, as well as many “open government” organizations and software design projects, do extremely important work both in making the content of government transparent and, arguably more importantly, designing software that will allow the networked public to monitor the statements, policies, and actions of powerful governmental, media, and non-governmental organizations. What I have been calling attention to here is another, often neglected, element of these open government and open software movements—the way in which they produce, mobilize, and intensify an affectivity of openness among global netizens that operates according to different temporalities and media logics, some of which work almost independently (or even against) the development of open software or government platforms. To understand the efficacy of our print, televisual, and networked media in an era of premediation and social networking, we need to attend not only to the content of the messages circulated by these media but to their affectivity and mediality as well.

"LEAN FORWARD"--MSNBC'S PREMEDIATION CAMPAIGN

2010-10-29T20:21:00.000-07:00

The distribution and intensification of premediation in the 21st century is evident in the new slogan for MSNBC’s political news programs, “Lean Forward,” which is of a piece with the temporality of anticipation that I have outlined in Premediation, especially the anticipatory gesture with which today’s global netizens lean forward almost lovingly towards their media devices.

MSNBC's new slogan speaks to the idea that global media today, as well as our networked public culture, are focused on the future rather than on the present or recent past, that we live in a moment of anticipation in which people are encouraged to “lean forward” towards the next moment of socially mediated interaction. This anticipation is tied directly to the media formation of the first decades of the 21st century, to the structure of social media, Facebook, Twitter, email, and texts—to something as seemingly innocuous as the proliferation of and everyday media form like the shared, synchronized online calendar, which fills the future with, and orchestrates, premediated individual and collective personal, social, or professional events. MSNBC has tried to plug in to this anticipatory temporality of the 21st century in its branding campaign for“Lean Forward,” which features two 1-minute commercials to introduce the campaign and six additional 30-second commercials, one for each of its various news shows. I want to focus here on the two longer branding commercials, to look at the ways in which they present a televisual mediation of the temporality of anticipation that marks our premediated moment.

Each spot features a variety of different people in motion, depicting mobile embodiment, people moving forward. In each commercial, interestingly, the predominant motion forward is from left to right across the screen, as in a book or as in a scroll across the bottom of the screen—a textual lean forward in an audiovisual medium. But this movement from left to right is also significant in another respect, in that it reverses one of the standard iconographic tropes of American progress from the 19th century, the movement of the American empire across the continent from right to left, marking the move from East to West as if across a map. This trope figures prominently in Emanuel Leutze’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, which hangs in the US Capitol,

as well in popular lithographs like Thomas Gast’s American Progress, which represents an allegory of technological progress moving from the civilized East to the Western frontier, from right to left again as on a map.

In the 19th century, the iconography of westward movement in nationalistic images like these deployed a harmony between pictorial and cartographic space in order to naturalize and make inevitable the manifest destiny of the United States to control the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.

MSNBC’s remediation of cartographic visual space as televisual space marks a cultural shift from a more fixed, geopolitically stable world to a more fluid one, in which it is motion itself that matters. Perhaps a cynical critic from the right might see the movement from left to right as marking the movement of Hollywood liberalism from California across the nation. While I don’t think that was the aim of those who produced the commercials, there is a sense in which something not unlike this might indeed be the case, as the two commercials work to present the movement of affectivity and mobility across the nation from West to East as a reversal for the age of premediation of the 19th-century march of the progress of the American nation from East to West, or right to left, across the national pictorial and geographical space. However one might read the movement of the images, MSNBC is clearly promoting the idea that the country needs to move forward from the left.

In 2010 the MSNBC branding ads portray mobile bodies and technologies moving through US national space, with technology, culture, and a wide variety of people communicating a kind of affectivity of forwardness, an affectivity of motion of progress of anticipation. In the first spot, “Declaration of Forward,” this anticipatory movement is depicted not only visually but also in terms laid out by the narrative voiceover:

The governing conceit of the ad is of course MSNBC’s remediation of the Declaration of Independence as a 60-second branding commercial. From its initial sampling of the Declaration of Independence (1776), “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” MSNBC positions itself as the 21st century media equivalent of the American colonies contesting the sovereignty of the British crown. “The Declaration of Forward” distinguishes itself from the “Declaration of Independence” of the United States of America, through its commitment to a principle of leaning forward, a vital, affective anticipatory premediation of the future. In remediating the 1776 Declaration, MSNBC elides, condenses, and supplements the document’s fundamental assertion of human equality and inalienable rights into a declaration of moving forwardness, of physical and temporal anticipation. Even while explicitly including women among those counted by the “Declaration of Forward,” the commercial moves ahead quickly from “self-evident truths” to the “pursuit of happiness,” by eliding the agency of a Creator who endows people with rights. People aren’t endowed with these three famous rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they just “have” them—and they have as well in the “Declaration of Forward” a fourth right, the freedom to believe that “our best days are still ahead.” In MSNBC’s “Declaration of Forward,” the freedom to anticipate that our best days are ahead takes the place of independence. The declaration of this new freedom rewrites the 1776 “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and the freedom to believe that our best days are still ahead.” This new premediated freedom to believe in a better future replaces the 1776 Declaration’s fundamental assertion that governmental power comes from the consent of the people governed and that therefore people have the right to abolish their government if it fails to secure these rights.

“Hardwired,” the second spot in MSNBC’s “Lean Forward” campaign, picks up both the question of unalienability and the anticipatory gesture of leaning forward. “Hardwired” uses visual and narrative mediation to suggest a technical rather than a divine agency. People are not “endowed” by a “Creator” with inalienable rights but possess “an innate sense of direction.” “Hardwired” implies both a technological and a genetic agency in originating and maintaining an anticipatory vitality that seems to start at the moment of conception.

This commercial’s opening montage begins with an image of vital, swimming sperm, juxtaposed with an ultrasound image of a fetus, followed by a sequence of three topless infants trying to move forward, one on its stomach, another on its hands and knees, and a third just rising to two feet before heading forward into the camera and screen. The “innate” quality of this moving-forwardness is clearly tied to female reproduction, from the female narrative voiceover to the images of graduation and wedding ceremonies among othere. The action in the spot, both visually and narratively, is forward-moving, as in the first spot almost exclusively from left to right and towards the screen and the viewer’s mediated space. In the final lines of the commercial, the narrator’s cadence creates in the viewer an expectation or anticipation of the pledge of allegiance. “We are one nation, in progress,” is followed by a long pause which recalls the last lines of the pledge of allegiance: “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” But instead of God, indivisibility, liberty, and justice for all, we get “in progress” accompanied by the declaration of the nation’s innate evolution and movement forward: “We were built to evolve, we were not made to sit still.”

In both of these ads, MSNBC models portions of its rhetoric on two of the “sacred texts” of every American’s high school civics class. In each case the document is rewritten to eliminate both the agency of divine sovereignty and the universal right to self-governance. As an avowedly political news network, as opposed to financial networks like CNBC, sports networks like ESPN, entertainment networks like E or BET, or general news networks like CNN, MSNBC uses its Lean Forward campaign to remediate the governmentality of these national documents in terms of the mediality and affectivity of anticipation. In so doing MSNBC redefines American national identity, depicting the nation not in terms of spatial qualities like wholeness or universality but in terms of temporal qualities like evolution, progress, or motion. Anticipation, not independence or allegiance, marks MSNBC’s forward-leaning, premediated America.

The Chilean Miner Rescue and the Premediation of Positive Global Affect

2010-10-13T17:51:00.000-07:00

What made the Chilean miner rescue into an almost instantaneous global media event? What made it into history?

There is no shortage of reasons for the rapid mobilization of such intense, widespread media and public interest in the rescue of 33 Chilean miners trapped underground for 69 days. Simply from a feel-good perspective, such an event commands the attention of print, televisual, or networked news media. Whether on Twitter, Buzz, or Facebook, in the socially networked blogosphere, or among national and global English-language corporate media like CNN, Fox, NBC, or BBC, how could anyone not be overjoyed to watch the lives of 33 trapped miners saved through a successful high-tech engineering rescue mission?

Around the world, the rescue of the miners infused into our media everyday a socially networked affectivity of collective, indeed global interest, hope, and joy. The narrative emerging both from and into this media event combined elements of heroism, hope, technology, and national pride. The mediated, collective joy that marks the Chilean miner rescue feels like a compensation for the mediated suffering of recent disaster-events, going back to Katrina, but encompassing Haiti, the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and most tellingly here the Chilean earthquakes of 2007 and 2010—made more welcome, and more powerful, among a media public suffering from the worst global economic recession since the 1930s.

But media events—especially feel-good ones like this one—do not emerge magically or without effort. They require tending and care. The rescue of the Chilean miners became a global media event by mobilizing an extensive, heterogeneous social network of human and non-human technical resources. These resources were deployed not only to articulate the feel-good narrative, but also (I would argue) more importantly to distribute positive affectivity through and immanently within global media forms and practices. The Chilean miner rescue afforded an opportunity for collective global mediation of an almost unqualified joy.

Among individual, social, and corporate media networks, the rescue provided an affective reaffirmation of the necessity of technology for the subordination of the planet. Media professionals, amateur hacktivists, or engaged netizens—throughout the socially networked world everyone took an interest in, became hopeful for, and then felt good about the successful rescue. In light of other recent natural, ecological, and economic disasters, the positive technological resolution of an industrial accident by a national government provided a sense of reassurance concerning the human mastery of nature through the use of drilling technology—particularly in the Western Hemisphere.

Although mining and drilling for oil at great depths represent analogous structures of extractive capitalism, it is important to note that many of the extractive technologies used to allow humans to travel from the surface of the planet to its depths for the capitalization of nature are of a piece with the media technologies used in the rescue, as well as those that enable networked communication across the globe. On the second night of the rescue CNN made particular note that the fiber optic and tele-video technologies used in the rescue were the very same technologies used regularly by CNN.

As John Stewart lampooned on the rescue’s second day, CNN had earlier conflated the television studio with the Chilean mine by among other things producing a replica of the rescue capsule, which provided the opportunity for its reporters and other staff to play the role of trapped miners to demonstrate how the miners would be bodily impacted during the rescue. But as The Daily Show also reported, the complicity between mining and media technologies went both ways. On every side the heroic and technological rescue was performed with the global media in mind. Even before the rescue had begun the miners had already been developing a verbal contract for sharing revenues generated from selling their stories to the media just as the Chilean government took full advantage of print, televisual, and global news media to distribute its own affectivity of caring and competence.

The Chilean miner rescue emerged as an exemplary premediation event in the globally networked and socially mediated second decade of the 21st century. Like all premediation events, the rescue functioned to mobilize collective affectivity. The rescue event was a complex and heterogeneous assemblage, made up of rocks and air, water and food, laborers and capitalists, clothing and equipment, technology and society. All of these diverse elements of the assemblage and more were held together under the intensifying mediated force of the rescue event.

Most crucially the Chilean miner rescue occurs over an extended period of time, which allows for the mobilization and proliferation of anticipation—marked in this case not as the negative affective anticipation of fear or danger, but the positive affectivity of hope and joy. Indeed the temporality of the miner’s rescue was anticipatory through and through, beginning with the earliest determination of the number and health of the survivors, to the days of anticipating the completion of the drilling, followed by the successful lowering of the rescue capsule down into the mine, to the scheduled rescue of the first miner, to the repetition of this structure of anticipation and joy. Each stage of the event anticipated the next, keeping the anticipatory premediation moving forward, intensifying into a global media event as the moment of the rescue approached.

The Chilean miner rescue has already established itself as a global historical event. This is of course on account of the heroic actions of the Chilean government, US and international technological experts, and the miners and rescuers themselves. But equally importantly it has established itself as a historic event not only through its heroic rescue narrative but also for the way in which it mobilized global affectivity through the workings of premediation. In the second decade of the 21st century historical events are not separable from global media events.

Google and the Premediation of Everything

2010-09-09T08:31:00.000-07:00

If it wasn't already evident, events of the last few weeks should have made it clear that Google's new strategy is "the premediation of everything." Although Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the heyday of what Jay Bolter and I characterized as the double logic of remediation, its current media logic has much more to do with the affectivity and mediality of what I have been describing as premediation.

In its earliest incarnation Google aimed to revolutionalize internet search through its PageRank technology, employing remediation's twin logics, immediacy and hypermediacy, to structure its search interface. "I'm Feeling Lucky," still a signal feature of the Google search interface, offered the user an experience of immediacy, bypassing the mediation of the long list of extraneous results offered by other search engines like Lycos, Yahoo, or AltaVista, and sending the user directly to her desired website. But Google also offered users the hypermediated experience of pages and pages of search results, an experience that has only become more hypermediated over the years as Google added a multiplicity of search options (Images, Videos, Maps, Images, Shopping, etc.) as well as a variety of other search tools for organizing and representing its results.

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, however, Google has come increasingly to shift its logic of mediation from remediation to premediation. An explicit expression of this new corporate logic appeared in a recent interview that Eric Schmidt gave to the Wall Street Journal. In describing Google's use of targeted advertising, for example, Schmidt portrays a fully premediated future in which Google's "technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them."

But the quote that grabbed the most public attention (including William Gibson's in an excellent New York Times op-ed) was the one that best captured Google's commitment to the logic of premediation: "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," Schmidt elaborates. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." As Schmidt makes clear, Google's aim is no longer to remediate the web through search, but to mobilize the individual and collective affectivity of anticipation that marks the premediated everyday of the 21st century.

Now Google continues its relentless campaign of premediation with its newest search feature, which it hyperbolically claims will revolutionize the search experience. Explaining its introduction of Instant Search, the Official Google Blog explains how its new Instant Search improves on earlier versions: "Because you don’t really want search-as-you-type. . . . You really want search-before-you-type—that is, you want results for the most likely search given what you have already typed."

The media temporality of Instant Search follows closely on the logic of premediation behind Schmidt's claim that "most people don't want Google to answer their questions... They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." To answer someone's questions (no matter how immediately one does so) involves a past-oriented temporality of remediation. To provide them with search results before they type involves the future-oriented temporality of premediation.

Of course, the emergence of premediation does not do away with, but supplements, the double logic of remediation. This is nowhere more evident than in Google's stomach-turning video remediation of Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," as presented in D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back.

Indeed, if one were to couple Google's shift from the double logic of remediation to its newly intensified focus on the premediation of everything with its recent questionable collaboration with Verizon in relation to the question of net neutrality, one might want to say that the remediated Dylan video signals a shift in Google's corporate motto from "Don't be evil" to "Don't look back."

Just saying.

The Securitization of Iraq

2010-08-19T07:11:00.000-07:00

"Civilians to Take U.S. Lead After Military Leaves Iraq," trumpets the front-page headline of this morning's New York Times. The departure of the US military and the concomitant transfer of security responsibility to civilians does not signal the disappearance of US governmental power or control in Iraq, but the transfer of responsibility for maintaining order in Iraq from the Pentagon to the State Department, a transfer unprecedented in scope.

“'I don’t think State has ever operated on its own, independent of the U.S. military, in an environment that is quite as threatening on such a large scale,' said James Dobbins, a former ambassador who has seen his share of trouble spots as a special envoy for Afghanistan, Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo and Somalia. 'It is unprecedented in scale.'”

The end of the US combat mission in Iraq, as the Obama Administration has pledged, is not then, as the Times article emphasizes, the end of US security presence in Iraq. But this replacement of soldiers with security contractors should not lead to the cynical conclusion that the military mission in Iraq has no more been accomplished under Obama in 2010 than it was under Bush in 2003. Instead it should be taken as further indication of the transformation of the form of US biopower in the 21st century.

The significance of the end of combat operations lies in the transformation of the Iraq operation from a military operation to a security one, a transformation that is of a piece with what Foucault has described as the shift from a disciplinary state to a governmental one. Indeed the replacement of defense with security, of militarization with securitization, can be seen in almost any discussion of US foreign policy in the 21st century.

In transferring control of the US Iraq mission from the Pentagon to the State Department, the Obama administration is participating in, and instantiating, the shift from a modality of power that works by constraining and limiting mobility of individuals and groups of individuals to one that works by allowing and encouraging mobility. This modality of power goes under the name of "securitization" and has been examined by scholars of international relations in the nascent field of "securitization studies."

The establishment of securitization as the dominant modality of US power can be seen in an unremarkable use of the term "security" in another article in today's Times. "U.S. Strategy in Pakistan Is Upended by Floods" discusses the way in which the major disruptions of Pakistani society caused by the catastrophic flooding that has beset the nation have also disrupted US foreign policy. “'Every dimension of our relationship — politics, economics, security — is going to see major shifts as a result of this historic disaster,' said Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the White House coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan. 'All the tools of diplomacy have to be examined in light of this new reality.'”

What is telling about this quotation is not just its assessment of the way in which the Pakistani flooding is a security as well as a natural event, a complex quasi-object that has had both material and virtual effects, damaging homes, businesses, crops, and bodies as well as less tangible entities like "the tools of diplomacy." But for our purposes General Lute's comment is also telling for his taxonomization of the US relationship with Pakistan in terms of "politics, economics, security." The shift from militarization to securitization in Iraq is only of a piece with the ongoing transformation of US geopower in the 21st century in the Middle East as well as elsewhere around the globe, including the US "homeland."

In my recently published book, Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11, I begin to explore the relationship between securitization and mediality, the way in which our quotidian media interactions are both enabled by and enable the globalized formation of securitization. In particular I point out the way in which we are individually and collectively encouraged to generate terrabytes of data to be mined for purposes of security through our participation in social media networks, electronic commerce, and the mobile internet.

Virtually all of these media transactions, particularly their role in bolstering securitization, go unnoticed by us, insofar as they have happened incrementally and almost invisibly. These mechanisms of securitization work paradoxically to control populations by encouraging us to move quickly and effortlessly through mediated networks of transportation, communication, and information. As we move forward into the second decade of the 21st century, it is incumbent upon us as media scholars and as media users to continue to be alert to, to interrogate, and where necessary to oppose the mechanisms of securitization that make up the fabric of our media everyday.

Some Questions about Net Neutrality--A Divergent View

2010-08-10T10:23:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it's the Emersonian in me, but when I see large numbers of people thinking in lockstep about an issue, I begin to feel a little uneasy. So as FB friend after FB friend have declared the recent Google-Verizon proposal "the end of the Internet as we know it," have signed petitions urging Google not to be evil, and have posted and reposted the same alarmist articles about the apocalyptic impact that would result from the implementation of this proposal, I have begun to ask questions about some of the arguments and the impetus behind them.

1. Would the implementation of this proposal really be the end of Internet as we know it, or the end of the mobile Internet as currently used by a privileged group of a technically-savvy, well-off community of mobile users?

2. Put differently, who does the "we" in the phrase "the end of the Internet as WE know it" refer to?

3. Is the wireless mobile network distributed through cellphone providers like Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint the same as the Internet, or isn't it already a pay for play service with access available to those willing to pay the added fees for 3G or 4G service?

4. How can the current mobile internet be considered to be the same as the wired Internet, when unlike the Internet itself, which can be accessed at libraries, schools, and other places for free, this network is only available via subscription to cellphone service, at a price?

5. Has there ever been anything like "net neutrality" or "a level playing field" in the first place?

6. Does the technical equality of all packets produce an information equality for all users or does the ideology of net neutrality merely facilitate a form of inequality that benefits those with the resources (economic, social, educational, technical) to make more of the Internet than those without those resources?

7. Is there a necessary, definite relationship between the technical form of the Internet and its social, political, cultural uses?

I suppose I could go on, but I think these should do. Don't get me wrong--I am not advocating the Google-Verizon proposal or the creation of pay-for-play fastlanes on the wired, wireless, or mobile Internet (or on any future manifestation we, or Google-Verizon, may not have thought of yet). But I raise these questions to make two points.

First, I would want to suggest that if such a proposal were to be adopted, it would not replace a neutral net but rather the unequal net that currently exists. The issue is not a neutral net as opposed to a biased or unequal net, but the current net inequality as opposed to some other form of net inequality, a form which might very well, as has been argued, be even less equal, less neutral, than the form we have now.

Second, I would argue that technical neutrality, particularly insofar as it is defined in terms of the speed by which packets move across the Internet, is not the same as cultural, social, or political neutrality. The Internet comprises so much more than the switching of packets, but you wouldn't know that from listening to the current debate. The technical defense of net neutrality obscures or erases the multiple forms of inequality and non-neutrality that this defense would seek to protect.

More on the Affectivity of WikiLeaks Afghan War Diary

2010-08-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times, Frank Rich likened the potential effect of the recent WikiLeaks data dump to The Pentagon Papers. He did so not because of the new or shocking nature of the information about the Afghan War, but rather because of what he characterizes as the limited effect of the Pentagon Papers on US policy towards Vietnam. Rich argues that the Pentagon Papers were published after public opinion had turned against the Vietnam war; similarly he contends that the relative indifference to the WikiLeaks release (an indifference that is arguable, I would say) marks the public's indifference to the War in Afghanistan.

While I don't completely agree with Rich's argument, I do think that he may be on to something about the effect of the Afghan War Diary. As I suggested earlier this week, I don't think that there was anything particularly shocking about the content of the WikiLeaks material. More interesting was the way in which its release activated individual and collective circuits of affectivity, particularly of negative affective feeling about the ongoing war. In my previous blog entry I traced out the way in which these leaks fed into the affect of anticipation that marks our current media moment. But what I did not emphasize was the quality of this anticipatory affect--specifically its intensification (in a quotidian fashion) of the negative affect towards the war that has come to predominate among the mediated American public.

Put differently, the significance of WikiLeaks' Afghan War Diary is almost certain to have little or nothing to do with the news it reveals about the current state of the US War in Afghanistan. What it might do, however, is serve as something like an affective tipping point, coalescing the widespread opposition to the war into a collective affective feeling that the war has outlived its usefulness, an affective premediation of the war's impending end.

Wikileaks and the Affectivity of Socially Networked Text

2010-07-27T07:11:00.000-07:00

On the Op-Ed page of today's New York Times, Andrew Exum, of the Center for a New American Security, opines that there was very little "news" in the latest WikiLeaks release of 92,000 military field reports and other documents about the progress (or lack thereof) of the US-led Afghanistan War. According to Exum, anyone who has been paying attention to news reports from Afghanistan would find little to be shocked or surprised at in the Afghan War Diary, the name that WikiLeaks has given to its latest leak. Exum's response was, to a large degree, mine as well--though I have not made my way through anything close to the 92,000 reports. Nonetheless, I have not found anything surprising in the reports I have read--though of course I have found much that was distasteful, inhumane, and perhaps criminal.

Why, then, has the Afghan War Diary generated as much media and public outrage as it has?

From the Obama Administration's perspective, the latest leak has complicated and made public the conflicting opinions within the presidential circle about how to proceed in Afghanistan. Thus the White House has been forced to mobilize its media machine to counter and contain the perceived damage caused by WikiLeaks. And cynical media critics will point to the 24-7 news cycle and the eagerness of every political "side" to find material with which to propogate its point of view. Certainly print, televisual, and networked news media are always looking for new content, new stories--new "irritations" to the system, which in Niklas Luhmann's terms work both to destabilize and maintain the autopoietic system of the media. What better irritation than 92,000 field reports?

Clearly both of these perspectives make sense. But I think we need to take seriously Andrew Exum's claim that there is in fact nothing "new" in these leaks, not to dismiss their import as he would, but to offer another explanation of their efficacy: that the Afghan War Diary deploys socially networked media for the mobilization of collective affect.

Word of the leak first came to me, as to large numbers of people, through social media like Facebook or Twitter, through email updates from political sites like Huffington Post, Politico, or Daily Koz, or through the increasingly socially networked cable news networks. In our current premediated moment, such "news" operates through anticipation. Reading a tweet or a shared link on Facebook or an email alert from our political blogs produces in the socially networked media user the affective state of anticipation that fuels our social networks and mobilizes collective affect.

Although the Afghan War Diary reports on the recent past, the mode in which it has been circulated by WikiLeaks produces an anticipatory readiness, a bodily and perceptual orientation towards the future--perhaps first to an intermediary site like the New York Times or Huffington Post and then to WikiLeaks itself. Or even before this, or somewhere along the line, many users would retweet or share the link themselves, simultaneously producing the technical and social anticipation of further responses and social media sharing.

Finally, I want at least to point to the role that the affectivity of text has in media events like this. I have written elsewhere (as have others) about the affectivity of audiovisual media, the way in which such media operate as much through how they move people affectively as through what they represent or communicate. But texts, too, operate affectively, not only through reading them but also through their mediated formats--indeed often not through reading them but simply through scrolling or scanning or downloading them. The materiality of the screens of mediated texts, and the variety of options provided by Wikileaks--"The data is provided in HTML (web), CSV (comma-separated values) and SQL (database) formats, and was rendered into KML (Keyhole Markup Language) mapping data that can be used with Google Earth"--produce and intensify an affectivity of anticipation for the experience of a variety of embodied and technical formats.

In calling attention to the way in which the materiality of the Afghan War Diary's mediations mobilize and intensify individual and collective affectivities of anticipation I do not mean to minimize the political importance of the WikiLeaks leak in making evident or "transparent" (in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's term) the conduct of the US-led War in Afghanistan. Rather I mean to try to explain this importance in a different way, as resulting less from the new revelations contained in the Diary than from the mode in which the anticipation of reading these revelations was circulated and intensified by our print, televisual, and socially networked media.

Premediation on the High Seas

2010-06-02T06:11:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times has a front-page article detailing the competing video wars going on in the aftermath of the recent Israeli raid in international waters on the Turkish-supported aid ships heading towards Gaza. The article does a good job of laying out the competing claims made by videos on each side, the ways in which these videos participate in competing political remediations of the historical event.

But what is made less apparent here is, I think, the more interesting element of this event, the competing premediations of the event by the Israelis and the organizers of the aid mission. How one understands what happened during the raid depends upon how the situation was premediated prior to the Israeli boarding of the lead ship--aggressive attempt to violate a legal blockade or legal attempt to provide humanitarian aid to suffering Palestinians in Gaza.

From a medialogical standpoint, however, what was more interesting is the way these competing premediations were supported by sociotechnical media networks in place to make sure that whatever happened on board the ship would already have been mediated at the very moment that it emerged into the present, if not before.

Thus not only did the Israeli Army make sure the event was premediated before its commandos even dropped down from the helicopters on to the deck of the ship, but the organizers of the aid trip did the same:

"The flotilla’s organizers, from Insani Yardim Vakfi, the Free Gaza Movement and other groups, were Webcasting live from the open seas as the confrontation started, using the services of Livestream, a New York-based company that hosts free Webcasts.

"The organizers 'chose to make their trip to Gaza a media event,' said Max Haot, Livestream’s co-founder. Aboard the ship was a 'full multicamera production,' he said, uplinked to the Internet and to a satellite that allowed news channels to rebroadcast live pictures of the raid in progress."

While we have been accustomed to thinking about the immediacy of live, networked video and the competing political remediations of recent (and not so recent) historical events, we need also to bear in mind the ubiquity of premediated social media networks in our current historical moment and to begin to consider how these premediated networks might serve to impact not only our actions in the present but our understanding of the past.

The Affective Continuity between Modern War and "Modern Warfare"

2010-04-07T05:16:00.000-07:00

The front page of today's New York Times presents an important story about a video decrypted by and posted on Wikileaks.org, as well as shared on YouTube. The Times headline, "Airstrike Video Brings Notice to a Web Site," focuses on the ongoing competition between mainstream and socially networked digital media. The article takes up the controversial nature of Wikileaks.org, especially in the eyes of the US military and other governmental agencies. For me, the more powerful impact of the video, posted in greater detail on a Wikileaks website called Collateral Murder, is the way in which it reveals, or perhaps more accurately makes us feel, the continuity of the socially mediated collective affect of our ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with that of the multiplayer online shooter games that my son plays with his friends, and which are played by millions of youth across the globe.

This Wikileaks video is the most powerful documentary video I can remember seeing. For me this is in some sense more powerful even than the Abu Ghraib photos, precisely because of the apparent ordinariness of the experience. In my forthcoming book I argue that the affective force of the Abu Ghraib photos derived in large part from their continuity with our everyday media practices. My argument is that the affective continuity of these socially networked digital photos with our media everyday explains why the incidents at Abu Ghraib, unlike similar incidents at Guantanamo or at dark sites across the globe, became a matter of widespread political concern, a global media news event. I do not know if this event will have a similar impact--the length of time required to watch the video makes me almost certain that it will not. Nonetheless, I want to comment here on the affective and medial affinities between this video (and by extension of course the incident it documents) and the current practices of online video game playing not only on PCs but more powerfully I think on video-game platforms like X-Box Live and PSN (Play Station Network).

Multiplayer shooter games, like other online games, involve teams of players, sharing the same networked space but in different physical spaces, competing against other teams or against the game itself (in this latter scenario teams of 2-4 players can also share the same physical space, playing in a family media room). My son, presumably like many players, sometimes plays against the game, sometimes joins teams randomly on line, but most often plays with a pretty constant team of friends. This last option produces a kind of affective sociality, held together through the networked mediation of online gaming, that bears affinities with, and helps to premediate, the kinds of social interactions that occur among soldiers in the field,

The scenarios in these games, most notably the Modern Warfare series, are remarkably similar to what US soldiers experience, as the Wikileaks video makes clear. Take, for example, a single-player AC-130 sequence from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. In this sequence the individual player interacts with his enemies/targets via video screens with black-and-white images (infrared in the game but remarkably similar in look and feel to the videos in Collateral Murder). The player must wait for permission to engage and is told which targets he must avoid. Targets are vehicles or individuals on foot, just like the Collateral Murder footage. Especially interesting is the dialogue programmed into the mission. After particular kills, one of the characters in the game is programmed to say things like "nice shot" or "way to go"--just like the soldiers say in the video.

There are other striking affinities between the Collateral Murder video and Modern Warfare 2, which help in some sense to illuminate, if not to account for or justify, some of the actions undertaken by the soldiers in the video. For one, it is interesting to note that in MW2, becoming a helicopter gunner is one of the rewards in the game, which a player achieves by sccomplishing eleven "kills." So the position of the helicopter gunner is already something of a privileged position.

A more interesting connection with the Modern Warfare games concerns what is called "last stand" or "final stand," which are perks available to players who reach a certain level of gameplay. In multiplayer games especially, if a character who has this perk is shot and wounded, he is given the ability to crawl away and keep firing, even to stand up if he is not quickly killed. This perk perhaps helps to illuminate the scene in the Wikileaks video where one of the two Reuters photographers is spotted wounded on the ground. The soldiers are eager to kill him, but according to rules of engagement cannot shoot an injured man unless he goes for his weapon, which is the explicit reason you hear them hoping aloud that he will do so (a weapon which is, as we know, only his camera). But their eagerness might also be attributed to the premediated video game scenarios of last or final stands, where wounded enemies have the ability to keep fighting as if they had not been shot before. This unrealistic feature of MW2 could easily contribute to the impulse to use excessive force against already wounded enemy combatants.

One point in comparing Collateral Murder with multiplayer shooters, particularly the Modern Warfare franchise, has been to call attention to their similar video and medial interfaces. Of course I do not mean to understate the significant differences between the experience of playing a video game and fighting in a war--beginning of course with the difference between human and algorithmically generated victims. And certainly the embodiment of flying in a helicopter with its ambient noise and vibration and smells and its sensations of physical movement, is fundamentally different from the experience of playing a video game in the proverbial comforts of your home. But these differences are not between an embodied and a disembodied experience but between two different embodied experiences. With vibrating controllers providing feedback when one "shoots" in a game, these differences, though still profound, are being lessened--and will likely continue to be lessened with technological advances in the gaming experience.

But the point I am most interested in making concerns some of the uncanny similarities between the affectivity and sociality of the two experiences, the ways in which the collective affect of multiplayer gaming simultaneously remediates and premediates the affectivity of soldiers in the field. Not only are video game designers basing the affective and social behavior of their algorithmically generated characters on the behavior of soldiers in the field, but it is undoubtedly the case that soldiers in the field are remediating affective behaviors that they have themselves experienced and participated in while playing video games at home. And when you remember that these games are not only being played by teenagers at home in the US and across the globalized West, but are being played by the soldiers themselves both before they deploy abroad and in between missions back at their base, then the force of Wikileaks' Collateral Murder video is to make the boundaries between these two experiences ever more difficult to secure. By premediating the sociality and affectivity of warfare for American youth, video games like Modern Warfare work not only to prepare a new generation of soldiers for combat but also (given the demographics of our current volunteer military) to modulate the collective affect of an even larger group of US and global citizens to accept modern war as an unexceptional feature of our everyday media landscape.

NB: I want to give a shout-out to my son Sam for his essential insights on the Modern Warfare games.

Cyber Shock Wave--Fearmongering on CNN

2010-02-25T05:36:00.001-08:00

So this past weekend CNN broadcast its two-hour prime-time special on the recent Shock-Wave exercise. The aim of the exercise was to simulate a catastrophic cyber attack in order to scare the American public so that they would be willing to accept the imposition of even more draconian security powers for the US government. As a one-off, the broadcast will inevitably fail to succeed. As part of a continued premediation campaign distributed across print, televisual, and networked media, a campaign that is in full swing and appears to be heating up, Cyber Shock Wave might have some small effect on modulating individual and collective affect.

What was most striking about this simulation was its simplistic model of how the government might respond to such a catastrophe. The largest problem was that the simulation began from an assumption of nearly autonomous, separate spheres of action. So the whole event involved discussions among various government officials, responding to breaking news of the cyber attack received from GNN, a faux-CNN news outlet, in preparation for advising the President on what he should say to the American people and how he should deal with it.

The model of power deployed here was so one-dimensional as to be hysterical. There was no sense, for example, that such an attack would immediately, and in some sense always already, invoke massive distributed technical responses from government hackers and cyber-security personnel (both human and more importantly non-human). Any deliberation about response would inevitably have to incorporate and address the massive data flow that would be coming in about source, nature of the attack, possible counter-attacks, and so forth. Undoubtedly millions of bots and other network crawlers and scrapers would already have been deployed in anticipation of and response to such an attack. The idea that the government response would consist of a bunch of mostly card-carrying AARP-member white guys sitting around a room responding to cable news reports imagines a model of government already outmoded when Kubrick released Dr. Strangelove.

Nor was there any sense that such an attack (carried out via cellphones, which the President apparently had no authority to "quarantine") would also be met immediately by millions of netizens, who would undoubtedly circulate via social media both the need to avoid using these phones to spread the "virus" and possible ways to resist such a virus or to work around it. Participatory media would undoubtedly play a significant, if not quite calculable, role in responding to any such attack.

By failing to recognize the intermingling of the technical and the social realms (among others), this "simulation" did not simulate anything but a fantasy of white male governmental power seeking to reinforce or recover a sphere of influence that has been rapidly diminishing in an age of socially mediated networks. Cyber Shock Wave was nothing but a bald-faced attempt to scare the American public away from its increased reliance on, and involvement with, socially networked media and back into the arms of cable television and pasty-faced government officials.

"We Were Warned": CNN Premediates Cyber.ShockWave

2010-02-16T17:52:00.001-08:00

On Saturday and Sunday at 8 PM ET, CNN will televise the results of the Bipartisan Policy Center's Cyber.Shockwave, the simulation of a major cyber-attack on the United States staged today, February 16. For now, here is a video from CNN's American Morning news show featuring an interview by John Roberts with former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and Fran Townsend, CNN reporter and former Homeland Security Advisor for the Bush-Cheney administration, two of the principals in today's simulation. This interview premediates the scenario that will unfold in Tuesday's simulation, which itself is a premediation of possible cyber attacks on the US.

Both Hayden and Townsend underscore their belief that the US is not prepared for a potential attack. In describing the possible consequences of such an attack, they paint any number of potentially terrifying scenarios, like the breakdown of transportation networks, the loss of electrical power, the shutdown of ATMs, or the disruption of the nation's cellphone networks--all intended to frighten the public. Roberts plays into this fear-mongering throughout the interview, repeating on more than one occasion how what they are telling him makes him and the audience anxious or terrified or frightened. At no point does he or his guests note that any such disruptions would undoubtedly prove temporary. While there may be vulnerabilities in the nation's cyber-defense system, the damage from such attacks would most likely be quickly repaired. It's not as if the entire nation will lose electrical power or internet service or cellphone connectivity for an extended period of time.

In the interview Hayden makes it clear that the simulation is not an attempt to predict a particular future scenario but to impact policy decisions today, including front and center questions of privacy, the relation between government and the private sector, or the question of chain of command. What seems clear from this preview of today's event is that the aim of those staging and participating in this "shock wave" is precisely to shock or scare the American public into accepting further incursions on individual and collective liberties by premediating the most frightening possible implications of a cyber attack on the US.

CNN's weekend report on today's scenario will undoubtedly prove to be the US media's most extensive premediation of cyber war to date--or perhaps more accurately its premediation of a premediated cyber war. In any event, this special report will bear watching. Check it out. You've been warned!

Are Twitter Users Agents of US Cyber War?

2010-02-12T05:36:00.000-08:00

In an interesting story in this morning's New York Times, Sharon LaFraniere and Jonathan Ansfield describe China's concern about cyber-security threats resulting from the omnipresence of western-based hardware and software among China's networked computing infrastructure. Because of this concern, the authors write, China has become "'absolutely the world leader' in development of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6)—-the successor to the current Internet." China's leaders seem determined to free themselves from their current reliance on Western IT companies by developing a home-grown Internet infrastructure.

What was most striking about this article, however, was this take on the so-called Iranian Twitter revolution: "'How did the unrest after the Iranian elections come about?' People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, asked in a Jan. 24 editorial. 'It was because online warfare launched by America, via YouTube video and Twitter micro-blogging, spread rumors, created splits, stirred up and sowed discord.'" Where print, televisual, and networked media in the Western world celebrated the use of Twitter and YouTube as instances of grass-roots, anti-fascist cyber-democracy, China (and Iran) see these social media networks as weapons of online warfare launched by the US.

In my forthcoming book, I argue that in generating and proliferating pleasurable affects, social media networks encourage people to furnish all sorts of transactional data that help to vitalize our current securitization regime. From this perspective grass-roots netivism does something similar not only for US netizens but for those on the ground in other nations as well. And perhaps even more insidiously, does the promotion of an ideology of grass-roots socially networked activism among print, televisual, and networked media work to transform socially conscious users of Twitter and YouTube into unwitting agents of US cyber war? And how might this connect with the extensive premediation of cyber war under way at the current moment, particularly the February 16 "simulation" of an attack against the US by foreign sources?

Premediating Cyber War

2010-02-10T14:21:00.000-08:00

According to a post by the Atlantic's Mark Ambinder, the US government will be war-gaming a cyber attack in public on television on February 16. While some may consider this a form of simulation or rehearsal, it seems clear that its real value is as a premediation of Cyber War. This fictionalization of a cyber attack seems designed less to work out how the US military might defend such an attack or how it might be prevented than to premediate for the American public the likelihood of such an attack.

This premediated war-gaming goes hand in hand with recent Senate testimony by US intelligence and defense officials about the likelihood of such attacks, as well as with related state-based and media premediations in the US, the UK, Israel, and other nations. Given our increasing affective, social, and commercial dependence on information and communication networks, any extended disruption of these networks could cause incalculable damage to our social, affective, and financial exchanges--not to mention other kinds of damage to power networks, transportation networks, water purification and sanitation networks, and so forth.

Premediating such attacks is not likely to have a major effect on our social, technical, and commercial networks, but may help prepare the public affectively for major network disruptions. The aim of these various premediations is less to predict specific attacks or to prepare specific lines of defense than to modulate public affect with an eye toward encouraging us to accept the necessity of increased practices of state and corporate securitization.

US Intelligence Officials Premediate Terrorism and Cyber-Attacks

2010-02-03T04:58:00.000-08:00

In an article nearly buried on page 6 of the front section of the New York Times, "Senators Warned of Terror Attack by July," top US intelligence officials are quoted as premediating terrorist attacks on US soil within the next 3 to 6 months.

Dennis C. Blair, who directs the nation's intelligence operations, and Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, both pre-mediated an attack by Al Qaeda or one of its affiliates. Panetta said that "The biggest threat is not so much that we face an attack like 9/11," but "that Al Qaeda is adapting its methods in ways that oftentimes make it difficult to detect." Blair underscored this point, but began his testimony by premediating the possibility of a crippling cyber-attack on US telecommunications and computer networks, contributing to increasing concerns among the intelligence community of a "cyber Pearl Harbor."

The fact that such news does not merit placement on the front page is worth considering, particularly insofar as we are only six weeks or so beyond the failed Christmas Day bombing. Perhaps it is simply a sign of the short attention span of the US public. Perhaps it means that the American public is beginning to take a more mature approach to the inevitability of terrorist attacks. More likely it means that the US media does not yet see such premediation as something that will sell newspapers this week. After all, this is Super Bowl week; the media's premediations seem oriented largely towards the Colts and the Saints.

It is also worth considering the aim of the intelligence community and the Obama Administration in issuing such premediations. Prior to 9/11 there was very little specific talk of this nature in the media; on the contrary the Bush-Cheney crew wanted to keep such intelligence on the QT, even from the president himself, it seems. After 9/11, however, in the run-up to the Iraq War, the Bush-Cheney administration used massive, widespread premediation to prepare the public affectively to accept (even when it cognitively or politically opposed) the invasion of Iraq. While the decision to invade Iraq, unlike the terrorist attacks premediated by the intelligence community, was in the hands of the US government, something similar nonetheless would seem to be involved here.

By premediating potential terrorist attacks on US soil or US networks before they happened, the Obama administration might be seeking to accomplish at least three related goals. First, such premediations can work to prepare the public affectively for such attacks so that their effects (particularly on the US economy) will not be as devastating as they were in the aftermath of 9/11. Second, by premediating such attacks now, the Republican opposition and their print, televisual, and networked media allies will have a more difficult time blaming the Obama administration for being unprepared (although of course that will not stop them from making such claims). Third, if such premediated attacks do not come off before the next election, say, Obama and the Democrats will be in a position to take credit for having kept the US safe.

Undoubtedly, there are other motivations one might imagine. From my perspective, what is most interesting is the fact that premediation continues to play an important role in US media and political discourse. And, in terms of a new research project that I am just beginning to undertake, it is telling that cyber war is being premediated alongside of terrorist attacks on US soil as an imminent threat to the security of the homeland.

8th Swiss Biennale on Science, Technics, and Aesthetics--Part 2

2010-01-24T17:33:00.001-08:00

Held at Lucerne's Swiss Museum of Transport, an interesting, relatively high-tech facility, the 8th Swiss Biennale on Science, Technics, and Aesthetics set out to address some of the big global problems facing humanity at the start of the second decade of the 21st century. The Biennale charged 90 Swiss francs for the weekend and drew an audience of several hundred people. With the notable exception of the first day's intervention by Latour and Stengers (about which I posted an entry last week), the tenor of the papers was mostly non-academic, which was presumably part of the design of Rene Stettler, who has organized these events from their inception. Or perhaps more accurately, the overall tone of the event was something like a self-congratulatory celebration of the possibilities of a socially conscious science to redeem the world. Indeed, for much of the weekend, science and technology were presented as the new religion and the new priesthood, offering an enlightened public a new age, pseudo-ecological theology of the inter-connectedness of humanity, nature, earth, and the cosmos.

Day 1 was devoted mainly to science, beginning with a lecture on Leonardo by Frijof Capra, whose book The Tao of Physics was hugely influential among intellectually inclined seekers in the 1970s and beyond. Capra's thesis, which made virtually no reference to any of the voluminous scholarship on Leonardo, was that Leonardo had anticipated many of the tenets of contemporary non-linear science, including fluid dynamics, organic form, ecological design, the Gaia theory, and so forth. All that was missing was the claim that Leonardo had invented the internet. Margaret Wertheim, an Australian science writer based in California, followed with a critique of the Pythagorean idea that mathematical equations could describe the natural world, ending with a critique of the misplaced priorities of such scientific projects as the Large Hadron Collider. The other lectures included a critique of the idea that humans were inherently warlike by science journalist John Horgan and a defense of systems theory as a way for science to account for conscious experience, by Michel Bitbol, a philosopher of science at the École Polytechnique in Paris, which was the most academic of the four talks. While all of the talks offered what one might characterize as "enlightened" critiques of science, none of them broke any new intellectual ground. Each talk could be seen to participate in the construction of something like a socially conscious scientific theology, belief in which could somehow lead the way to a more humane future.

This new religion was most evident on Day 2, which focused on art and science, particularly in the presentations of Kevin Kelley and David McConville. Kevin Kelley, not to be confused with the founder of Wired magazine and former editor and publisher of The Whole Earth Catalog, is "an artist, best-selling author, and entrepeneur," author of a 198 NY Times best-seller, The Home Planet, which featured photographs of earth from space coupled with inspirational prose from scientists, poets, and philosophers, among others. Kelley presented a new digital tool to visualize our place in the evolution of the universe. His hypnotic narrative of the digitally generated images was accompanied by songs and poems by Rachel Bagby, "an arts and social change innovator." The aim of their presentation of this visualization tool, which was received with awe and wonder by most of the audience, was to dramatize how brief humanity's time on earth was and yet how dramatic its impact had been. Kelley claimed that his plan was eventually to make his software into open source media and to make it ubiquitous--on computers, cellphones, watches, and so forth. At no time did he give any indication of the impact that networked digital media might have had on the planet.

The erasure of technical mediation was even more complete in the planetarium presentation by David McConville, a disciple of Buckminster Fuller and "noospheric researcher" at the Elumenati, a full service design and engineering firm specializing in the creation and deployment of immersive environments, located in Ashville, North Carolina. McConville presented a dazzling planetarium show of the observable universe, whose aim was to "invite" the audience members "to imagine stepping outside of their own perspectives to reflexively consider how suspending beliefs can enable new ways of seeing and knowing the world." While the display was impressive, what was most interesting about the planetarium presentation was the way it transformed the museum into something like a 21st-century cathedral, as the priests of a new-age scientific theology dazzled believers with powerful digital visualization technologies of mediation. Reclining in the dark among a crowd of fellow believers, looking up to the digitally projected heavens, the audience was invited to immerse itself in the power of these new technologies, which worked to erase all signs of their mediation in the presentation of a new cosmology. What wasn't reflexively considered was the role of computational and visualization technologies in producing this interactive display or the info-capitalist aims of the Elumenati.

With the exception of the intervention by Latour and Stengers, the weekend's presentations aimed primarily at feel-good solutions to complicated global problems. The 8th Swiss Biennale could be seen to represent a popularization of an interdisciplinary academic conference, one focused more on edu-tainment than education, more on celebrating a shared set of cultural beliefs about science and technology than on contesting and composing the complex interrelations among science, technics, and aesthetics today.

8th Swiss Biennale on Science, Technics, and Aesthetics--Part 1

2010-01-19T03:15:00.001-08:00

I don't usually use this blog to report on my travels, but I was recently in Lucerne, Switzerland, in the midst of a two-week lecturing tour in anticipation of the release of Premediation in April, so I thought it would be worth while to report on what proved to be a disappointing but nonetheless interesting event.

My attendance at the Biennale was due to a coincidence of circumstances. First, I found myself with a free weekend between talks at University of Warwick and Anglia Ruskin University last week and a workshop at University of Durham this coming Tuesday, followed by a keynote address I will deliver on January 21st at a conference in Amsterdam on "Futures in Finance and Security." During the months before the conference, I began receiving emails publicizing the Swiss Biennale, which is designed as something like a gathering of public intellectuals--scientists, philosophers, writers, and so forth--to address the question of The Large, The Small, and the Human Mind, a theme based upon a 1997 book by Roger Penrose. Normally I wouldn't find such an event of much interest, but I noticed that the first day of the Biennale featured an "intervention" by Bruno Latour, chaired by Isabelle Stengers. I have great respect for the work of both Latour and Stengers, and I have known Bruno for more than twenty years, since my early days at Georgia Tech (though I don't think I had seen him for more than a decade before this weekend). Given the coincidence of my free weekend and the opportunity to renew an old friendship and perhaps to start a new one, I decided to give the event a go.

The highlight of the Biennale for me was the “intervention” on the first day by Latour and Stengers. Designed as something like a dialogue, with Latour addressing the audience and Stengers interrupting him with questions which helped move the argument along, the intervention represented an early attempt at what Latour is calling his Compositionist Manifesto.

Latour’s lecture was of interest to me for several reasons. First, he framed his talk with a reading of James Cameron’s Avatar. In fact Latour joked that if he had an agent he would sue Cameron for plagiarism as the ending of the film, in which the planet Pandora asserted itself in Gaia-like fashion to repel the colonialist invaders and to transform the crippled Marine into a full-fledged N’avi, could be seen as a cinematic depiction of a possible way forward out of the modern dilemma which Latour sketches out in Pandora’s Hope. Insofar as I have been working on a short piece on Avatar tentatively titled, “We Have Never Been Avatars: The Last Film of the Twentieth Century,” this claim was of interest to me. Latour’s compositionist manifesto was also interesting because of the distinction he invoked at the end between “le future” and “l’avenir,” a distinction that bears some relation to the distinction between the two different understandings of the future entailed in prediction and premediation, respectively, which I develop in some detail in my forthcoming book.

But what does Latour’s Compositionist Manifesto consist of? He begins with a definition of what he sees as the new spirit of our time, in which the modern belief in time as an inevitable forward progression has begun to give way to a recognition among non-moderns that progress is fully reversible. Compositionism transforms what it means to progress or to go forward, issuing a warning or call for attention so that we will stop going further in the same way as before, the way in which moderns have tried to do ever since the great divide instituted by Descartes and fortified by Kant.

Compositionism distinguishes between progress and progressiveness, taking up the search for universality without believing that universality is already there in the future waiting to be discovered by the progress of modern science. Composition conceives of universality as composed of utterly heterogeneous parts that will never make a complete, uniform whole, but at best a fragile, barely held together whole.

Stengers replied at this point, contending that the fact that this universality will never make a whole means that it will never be at rest, but must be continually maintained, must be composed and constantly kept together through activity and motion. Any composition must always be maintained and attended to. Different kinds of care or physical attention are always required.

Latour then explained that composition is the opposite of critique, which depends upon the fundamental opposition between illusion or delusion and reality. In so doing, Latour maintained, critique creates a massive gap between what is felt and what is real and must depend upon a belief in a world beyond this world on which to base critique. Composition, on the other hand, is completely mundane, and entails a question of having the right tools for the right jobs. So while a hammer may be a good tool for destroying idols it is less good at stitching together heterogeneous elements that make up a composition. Iconoclasm depends upon a sturdy or juvenile belief in the beyond, which can only be reached by destroying the idols that stand between the critic, the iconoclast, and reality. We must leave the 20th century behind, Latour proclaimed, let the dead bury the dead.

But what of Nature, Stengers asked? What about the 19th century idea of the natural as a foundation for narratives of the modern of the 20th century. Even life, if it is composition, is not natural ini this 19th-century sense. Latour replied that while “post-natural” has some currency as a term to address the end of nature, compositionism is perhaps more comfortable with the term pre-naturalism. Nobody has ever lived in nature, Latour maintained. Ever since the bifurcation of Descartes between the cogitating mind and the objective world, nature has always been something made, constructed, composed. How, then, can we move forward without the engine of progress? Perhaps by recognizing that we are closer to the 16th century than we are to the 20th. We’re now more familiar with the time before the modern bifurcation. Everything is now in some sense post-natural.

Stengers then suggested that we need to take seriously the idea of breaks, of a succession of breaks in the 20th century, so that we can see that each time an old alliance was broken it was taken by the moderns as a sign of progress or science. We were beyond the break—breaking science is beyond the break. If we are closer to the 16th century, it is a different 16th century, a different point. To return to the animated cosmos of the 16th century we must take advantage of this idea of animation without thinking about intention. Lovelock’s idea of the revenge of Gaia is a problem if it’s understood that Gaia is intentional. It’s better, Stengers said, if Gaia doesn’t know us. Agency only operates within assemblages. There is no agency without composition, no anime without connection.

Latour picked up on Stengers’ point, claiming that the invention of the inanimate was more remarkable than the invention of the animate. The inanimate is not to be taken as the given state, with the animate developing or evolving out of it, but rather is the more interesting phenomenon, which can only be invented or composed by animate agents. In practice all agency has to be distributed at each step, in theory this is not necessarily the case. Realism is dependent upon the contradictory, irrational idea of action without agency in which inanimate objects act on their own—nature is already assembled. For Latour (and for Stengers) the agency of the natural world is distributed among animate and inanimate, human and non-human agents.

Latour then took up the question of the continuity of cause and consequences. Compositionists, he maintained, cannot rely upon continuity, which is a given to realists or naturalists, but which for a compositionist must be composed slowly and progressively from discontinuous pieces. The concept of matter, Latour claimed, is too anthropocentric and especially too idealistic. We need a more mundane, materialistic definition of matter, if we are to compose the material world.

Stengers then responded that consequence always overflows the material cause (much as affect overflows intention or cognition). For Stengers, everything we do must be disputed, discussed, imagined, and reimagined. We must slow down, but to do so is seen as a betrayal of modern ideas of progress in which we must feel this imperative to go quickly, to advance—and feel this deep anxiety if we slow down. Rationality ignored consequences—don’t worry about them, let them take care of themselves.

Latour then introduced the idea that modernists never actually run to the future, but only run from the past. Benjamin’s Angel of History looks behind, not ahead. Modernity, Latour claimed, flies backwards from the past. At this point, Latour began moving humorously backwards across the stage, demonstrating how the modernists move into the future while facing the past.

Only recently by a sudden conversion have moderns finally realized how much catastrophe has been left behind by the progress of science, technology, and society, because for the past century or so moderns have never looked to the future because they have been so busy fleeing from the pat and now begin to realize that they have in fact been creating the destruction they have been fleeing in the first place. Moderns have never contemplated their future until a few years back, that is, their future of fleeing their past backwards.

Here, Latour introduced the distinction in the French language between two kinds of futurity, le future” and “l’avenir.” “Le future” is like the English term and denotes a predictable determined future into which one is moving in a linear, progressive way. “L’avenir” means something more like prospects, which are not determined, and which have to be composed from many potential future directions or paths. The moderns had “le future” but did not have “l’avenir.” But now they have begun to have one—the future and the prospect of things to come have really no connection with each other. The moderns, Latour now seems to hope, have no future, but many prospects—but prospects very different from the future teleological development of progress that they had imagined while they were moving forward while facing behind.

Stengers ended her remarks by asking about the relation between the Communist Manifesto and the Compositionist Manifesto. Both she and Latour agreed that the search for the common is what the two have in common, though they insisted that this search had to be slowly composed rather than taken for granted, or revealed in a sudden revolutionary action.

Latour ended by returning to Avatar as a sign of Pandora’s Hope, the hope for a new prospect, for the composition of a fragile assemblage of humans, technologies, and nature in a heterogeneous network of animate and inanimate actants.

What was perhaps most astounding about this intervention was how at odds it was with every other presentation over the course of the weekend. I hope in the next couple of days to post the second part of this report, on the ways in which the Bienniale's mystification of science, coupled with the erasure of practices of technical mediation, not only served as a 21st-century version of the cathedral but also suggested a different reading of James Cameron's Avatar, one less hopeful than that offered by Latour.

NCTC's Failure to Premediate Terrorism

2009-12-31T06:54:00.000-08:00

This morning the Grey Lady featured two front-page stories on the failure of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to uncover and prevent the plot, sponsored by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day. The first, "Spy Agencies Failed to Collate Clues on Terror," detailed the failure of the NSA and other affiliated organizations to "connect the dots" about the plot. The second, "Shadow of 9/11 Is Cast Again," analyzed the way in which the NCTC, described as "the crown jewel of intelligence reform after the September 11, 2001, attacks," repeated the mistakes made before 9/11, mistakes which the NCTC had been established precisely to avoid.

The categories with which the Times analyzed this failure, which most likely mirror those with which the NSA approaches the problem of preventing terrorist attacks, were by now familiar and were focused predictably on treating the problem as one of data and information and detection: the NCTC didn't "connect the dots"; they hadn't "assembled the clues"; they failed in their "mission to unite every scrap of data"; they didn't "put the pieces of the puzzle together." Unfortunately, the problem with this approach, like the problem with pre-9/11 security, is that it focuses on the future in terms of probability not potentiality, as a problem of prediction rather than premediation. In other words the thinking of the NSA seems focused on identifying and disrupting plots that already exist rather than premediating potential plots that could, but might never, materialize. Sadly this posture bears a tragic similarity to the way in which the US military seems always to be fighting the last war against Al Qaeda, while Al Qaeda has already moved on to the next one or the one after that.

In other words, the NSA and NCTC have failed to approach the problem of preventing terrorism as a problem of premediation. What this means on the one hand is that they continue to approach the problem as one of trying to identify connections that already exist among the terabytes of data they possess rather than trying to generate from that data as many possible future scenarios as they can. But what it means more sigificantly is that they continue to pursue the problem in terms of data or information rather than in terms of affectivity or structures of feeling. For what seems most telling about the report that the father of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the accused bomber, visited the US Embassy in Nigeria to express concerns about his son’s radicalization, is not that he came with specific data about a possible plot, but with an affectivity of concern over his son's recently radicalized affect. Taken as data or information, this report failed to trigger a security alert. Taken for what it was, an affective premediation, it might have.

Of course, as we now know so well, profiling of all sorts is a regular tool of governmental and private security organizations, which would seem to make this failure to premediate even more curious. After all, the aim of profiling (what Ryan Bingham jokingly trivializes as "stereotyping" in Up in the Air) is to predict future behavior on the basis of demographic and other personal characteristics. But like connecting the dots or assembling the clues, profiling relies largely on a model of data and information, which imagines the future as inevitably knowable and always on the verge of being fixed or determined. Such an approach is focused chiefly on using the past to predict the future. What premediation provides is an alternative model in which the potentiality of the future is used to impact the present. If the affective potentiality reported by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father had somehow been deployed to premediate potential futures, the NCTC and the NSA might have been in a much better position to have prevented his son from ever having boarded NWA flight 253.

Al Qaeda, Cancer, and the Obama Doctrine of Preemption

2009-12-04T05:19:00.000-08:00

I have seen surprisingly little discussion in the print, televisual, and networked media of President Obama's rhetorical decision to characterize the Al Qaeda threat in Pakistan and Afghanistan in terms of the metaphor of cancer, which he introduced just past the half-way point of the speech:

"We're in Afghanistan to prevent a cancer from once again spreading through that country. But this same cancer has also taken root in the border region of Pakistan. That's why we need a strategy that works on both sides of the border."

This metaphor is troubling for any number of reasons. It participates in the long human history of characterizing one's enemies as threats to the health of one's own nation or state--such terms as vermin, parasites, and plagues have historically been employed to unite a nation against its enemies and to make it easier for soldiers to kill other humans. This kind of dehumanization is often coupled with racism or xenophobia, as was the case in Nazi Germany, in Vietnam, and in recent and ongoing military campaigns against Islamic nations. In characterizing Al Qaeda and the Taliban as cancers, Obama sadly opens the door for increased Islamophobia.

The cancer metaphor is also of concern for the way in which it medicalizes the threat of terrorism in order to naturalize or take for granted the need to eradicate it. I mean, who would simply let a cancer spread or metastasize if we could contain it through radiation, chemotherapy, or surgical removal? Choosing to characterize the threat as a cancer presumes one set of approaches to the problem and precludes many others. For example, it undercuts the possibility of seeing either Al Qaeda or the Taliban as having any legitimate concerns and it rules out the possibility of making an argument about the culpability of the US or the West in the development of these different, but at this point interrelated, organizations.

It is perhaps ironic in light of the current administration's focus on health care reform at home that Obama chooses to justify his deployment of additional troops as a form of preventive health care aimed at saving not only lives but billions of dollars in future medical expenses. Painting himself as the good physician, Obama sees no choice but to remove this cancerous invader in order to prevent it from spreading even further. Indeed it might not be going too far to say that the discourse of health care reform serves in some non-trivial sense as a premediation of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy.

Perhaps the most disheartening aspect of Obama's cancer metaphor, however, is that it seeks to provide rhetorical cover for the disturbing fact, pointed out by The American Conservative, that the Obama Administration has endorsed and continues to perpetuate the Bush Doctrine of preemptive warfare, which the Bush-Cheney administration used to justify the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a military action that initiated the war that Obama has only intensified in the past year. Although rhetorically different from its manifestation during the Bush-Cheney Administration, premediation will continue to furnish the dominant media logic of the Obama Doctrine of preemptive military care.

FlashForward and V: The Media's Desire for Another 9/11

2009-11-04T07:40:00.000-08:00

Last night ABC (the American Broadcasting Corporation) showed the pilot episode of the second of its two new series which exemplify the US media’s ongoing concern with premediation: FlashForward and V. Tellingly, the first commercial break in V’s pilot episode anticipates the November 13 release of 2012, the latest instance of Hollywood's cinematic premediation, based on the belief that the Mayan calendar predicts that the world will end in 2012. All of these televisual and cinematic premediations (and there are countless more, in print media like comics and fiction as well as in other audiovisual media), manifest the media's powerful desire for another 9/11, another global catastrophe or terrorist event. Let me explain.

Most obviously each of these new television shows pre-mediates a potential global catastrophe. In FlashForward, this catastrophe is depicted as a period of the missing two minutes and 17 seconds, during which every person on the planet blacks out and experiences a piece of their lives exactly six months in the future. In the most obvious sense, this is a form of individualized premediation, extended on a global scale. Very quickly, a website named Mosaic is set up (with the obvious reference to the first popularly successful web browser of the same name), which allows people to share their flashforwards so that, through the use of social networking, people can construct a comprehensive premediation of what will be happening six months from the blackout. One of the key questions that the show addresses is whether these flashforwards are predetermined to happen or whether knowing about them can enable people to change or avoid them. Indeed one of the final commercial breaks for the season premiere of V, unsurprisingly for the next episode of FlashForward, contains the tagline: “How far would you go to prevent the future?”

FlashForward clearly participates in the current cultural desire to premediate potential futures before they happen as a way to shape action in the present (as the Bush-Cheney administration’s incessant premediation of the war in Iraq in print, televisual, and networked media helped to make that war inevitable). But in some sense V promises to reflect the more interesting aspects of premediation, particularly the way in which media today work to modulate individual and collective affect.

Like FlashForward, V portrays a global catastrophe, the simultaneous arrival of huge spacecraft, which hover over major cities across the globe. The bottom of each craft is transformed into an enormous media screen on which the telegenic face of a white female Visitor speaks reassuringly to the world about the delight of the Visitors (as they call themselves) in finding other intelligent life in the universe and about the Visitors’ peaceful aims (“We come in peace, always”). Unlike the blackout, which marks a breakdown of connectivity (though automated surveillance satellites and security cameras continue to operate, providing key elements of the narrative), the arrival of the Visitors provides an ongoing global media event. This media event works to modulate collective affect by spreading feelings of peace and happiness through its “spread hope” website and other forms of social networking, aided by the establishment of Visitor Healing Centers which can miraculously cure innumerable diseases. Unlike the death, destruction, and overall terror prompted by the unexplained global blackout in FlashForward, the arrival of the Visitors initially prompts individual and collective feelings of faith, happiness, and well-being.

Of course, being television and all, these feelings of happiness cannot last. Before the pilot episode is over, we are introduced to the fact that the Visitors are really reptilian creatures in human skin (wolves in sheep clothing). The Visitors, we learn, have come to earth as terrorists. There are sleeper cells already in place on the planet. There are even Visitors who have turned traitor and are actively, if surreptitiously, waging counter-terrorism against their fellow Visitors and encouraging counter-insurgency among humanity. We will have to see how the plot unfolds, but V runs the risk of turning into a less interesting alien version of Sleeper Cell, the smart but short-lived (two seasons) Showtime series that followed the formation and disruption of Islamic terrorist sleeper cells in post-9/11 LA.

In claiming that these two new American television series (and other print, televisual, and cinematic examples) premediate global media catastrophes, I want to make two different but related points. First, as I have been arguing for the past several years, and as I argue in more detail in my forthcoming book, in the post-9/11 era all forms of media have participated in the premediation of future catastrophic events as a way of preparing the media public to deal affectively with the threats and uncertainties of a world filled with potential geopolitical, ecological, or financial apocalypse—to provide some kind of at least affective control over events that they have no other way to influence or prevent. Indeed, the premediation of post-apocalyptic scenarios has become widespread in mainstream and alternative media. The premediation of potential future catastrophes in V and FlashForward function, I would argue, less as specific predictions or representations of future events than as attempts to perpetuate individual and collective affectivity towards the anticipation of an uninterrupted, if potentially threatening, future.

Second, as I contended in my initial paragraph, premediations like V and FlashForward also express the media’s ongoing desire for another 9/11, another global media catastrophe. In making this claim, I am not suggesting that humanity or the media desire the end of the world, or a repetition of the large-scale death and destruction brought about by the events of 9/11 and other similar terrorist attacks in Spain, England, or India. Rather I am suggesting that our media desire a repetition of the intense, global media connectivity and shared, collective affectivity that was experienced during the attacks of 9/11, as well as the shared sense of purpose, mainly in the US but also to a large extent across the world, felt in the aftermath of 9/11. And that this desire is motivated of course in large part, but not exclusively, by the media industry's desire for an increased audience share, for more eyeballs on the screen, and the revenue stream that results. It is precisely this desire, I would argue, that has shifted the orientation of our print, televisual, and networked news media from its historical focus on the present and recent past to its preoccupation with the present and near future, as well as bringing about the proliferation of print, televisual, and cinematic premediations of future global catastrophes epitomized by FlashForward and V. By promoting an affectivity of anticipation (“next,” “coming soon,” “stay tuned”) media of all sorts seek to repeat the intense, collective global medial experience brought about by the events of 9/11.

FBI's Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide to Premediation

2009-10-29T05:57:00.000-07:00

An article in today's New York Times reports that the FBI has released its "Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide" as a consequence of a Freedom of Information suit. The article makes it clear that the FBI is authorized to commence investigations not only on evidence of actions that threaten national security but more importantly on the premediation of actions that might threaten national security.

Valerie Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, makes this point explicit: "'Those who say the F.B.I. should not collect information on a person or group unless there is a specific reason to suspect that the target is up to no good seriously miss the mark,'" Ms. Caproni said. 'The F.B.I. has been told that we need to determine who poses a threat to the national security — not simply to investigate persons who have come onto our radar screen.'"

The FBI manual encourages agents to premediate potential security threats, authorizing them "to open an 'assessment' to 'proactively' seek information about whether people or organizations are involved in national security threats." That is, rather than investigating national security threats that have already "come onto [their] radar screen," agents are encouraged to premediate threats that may not already exist.

The metaphor of the "radar screen" is telling, as radar is a real-time technology of monitoring or surveillance linked closely with the media formations and disciplinary apparatus in place when the FBI emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century. No longer tied to monitoring national security threats in real time, the FBI is now empowered to open assessments and conduct investigations based on its premediation of potential security threats in the future. Rather than using technologies of audio-visual surveillance to spot such threats, FBI agents now use technologies of premediation to incite, encourage, or enable individuals to join potential terrorist plots.

This move from surveillance to premediation, from constraining or preventing terrorist behavior to encouraging or enabling it, characterizes the emergence of the current regime of securitization. I describe the distinction between surveilance and securitization in a passage from my forthcoming book: "As opposed to fundamentally disciplinary technologies like surveillance, confinement, and constraint, which aim to 'predict, survey, [and] prohibit' potentially illicit or disruptive activities in order to maintain social and political control, technologies of securitization aim to let happen, open up, and circulate, to encourage mobility and the proliferation of transactions of transportation, communication, and mediation."

Paradoxically, the new powers granted to the FBI in its Domestic Investigations and Operation Guide do not constrain individual freedom of movement, collaboration, or assembly, as would have been the aim of an earlier disciplinary regime of surveillance, but rather encourage it in the name of premediating threats to the nation's security that have yet to, and may never, materialize. And it is precisely on the basis of their potentiality that such threats will be assessed and may eventually become the objects of "preliminary" or "full" investigations.

Premediation Gaming

2009-10-23T18:28:00.001-07:00

H/T to Ian Bogost for this link to an online game premediating armed resistance to an attempted coup by the Obama administration. This fear echoes my own and others about the Bush administration failing to surrender power on 1/20/09. Indeed at the end of 2007 I was paranoid enough to create and post a video expressing my fears. After seven years of the greatest arrogation of executive power in the history of the United States, I had some reason to be concerned. After less than a year of Obama's obsessive search for bipartisanship, the makers of The United States of Earth seem nothing but loony. Here is Huffington Post's take on the matter.

Cyberculture Seminar Description

2009-10-23T18:06:00.000-07:00

ENG 7035—CYBERCULTURE (Richard Grusin)

This seminar will study cyberculture as a historical phenomenon, dating roughly from the publication of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) until the late 1990s. For purposes of the course, we will define cyberculture as the cultural response to the introduction of networked personal computers, particularly in the US and Canada, but with attention to European and Japanese responses as well. We will begin with the emergence of cybernetics in the mid-20th century, then proceed to sketch out the connections between the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s and the emergence of cyberculture in the 1980s. We will study a variety of print, audiovisual, and networked media forms, including cyberpunk fiction and film and online cyberculture. The seminar will conclude with a survey of the academic development of cyberculture studies in the 1990s.

By studying cyberculture historically we will attempt to identify its cultural, medial, and theoretical particularity—not only as it differs from our current understandings of mobile, socially networked digital media, but also as it shares with and in some sense premediates our current media practices and theories. Cyberculture emerged according to what Jay Bolter and I characterize as the double logic of remediation—a logic of immediacy in which individuals interact with each other through immersion in cyberspace, free from the mediation of bodies, language, or institutions, and a logic of hypermediacy which celebrates the hybridity of the cyborgian human-machine interface. But cyberculture can also be seen to mark an early formation of what I have since 2003 been describing as our current era of premediation, in which print, televisual, and networked media are increasingly concerned not with the remediation of the past, or the immersion in the present, but with the pre-mediation of the future. For in addition to exemplifying the double logic of remediation, cyberspace articulates a logic of premediation in its insistent preoccupation with the future of digital, networked computing.

Several questions will govern our work in the seminar, beginning with “Whither cyberculture?” Was cyberculture a passing historical formation? Or like the counter-culture of the 1960s, has it largely been incorporated by postmodern capitalism into mainstream media culture? Put another way, is cyberculture dead or has it morphed into a new social media formation, perhaps becoming the latest form of participatory media in an age marked by premediation?

In addition to regularly scheduled face-to-face seminar meetings, we will experiment with forms of synchronous and asynchronous communication that helped to vitalize cyberculture and cyberculture studies in the 1980s and 1990s. Students will be expected to write regular short pieces leading to a final seminar project on some aspect of cyberculture growing out of the concerns of the course.

Michael Jackson and Kurt Cobain

2009-06-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

Watching this weekend’s Michael Jackson video retrospectives on MTV Jams and VH1 Classic, I was reminded of the experience of watching the video of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York, which MTV aired repeatedly on the weekend after Kurt Cobain was discovered dead on Friday, April 8, 1994. Like Jackson, Cobain had died unexpectedly. And like Jackson, his death was not a complete surprise. Just as Michael had been rumored to have health problems related to or exacerbated by his consumption of prescription medication, so Cobain had been battling with heroin and other drugs, having flirted in the months before his death with drug overdoses and attempted suicide.

But what struck me most forcefully about the experience of watching the video retrospective was how affectively different it was from watching the video of Kurt Cobain’s live performance after his death. In an era before YouTube and the omnipresence of embedded videos, before CNN had adopted the running crawl at the bottom of the screen or borrowed the hypermediacy of the PC’s windowed interface, the medium of video still carried with it an almost automatic affective charge of liveness and immediacy, particularly in contrast to film. Watching Nirvana’s Unplugged produced a powerful affective-cognitive dissonance between the feeling that I was watching Kurt Cobain performing live and the knowledge that he was dead.

The uncanny, haunted feelings I had watching Cobain’s video performance were quite different from the way I felt watching the video retrospective of Michael Jackson’s career. Whether taken from his studio albums or live performances, Michael’s videos did not evoke the sense of liveness or immediacy produced by MTV Unplugged in New York. The self-conscious hypermediacy of the videos for Bad, the cinematic production values of the famous "Thriller" video, or the theatrical quality of the stage sets for the live performances—all of them produced a sense not of Michael’s liveness but in some curious sense of his being already dead. This feeling was enforced in part by the fact that one can witness in the video retrospective the death of many earlier MJ personae, from the young lead singer of the Jackson 5 to the teenaged member of the Jacksons to the twenty-something solo megastar of Off the Wall and Thriller, and so forth. Each of these Michael Jacksons had, in some sense, already died.

To note this affective difference is not to make a claim about the relative import of the two deaths, either personally or collectively. Indeed, at the time of Cobain’s suicide I did not own a single Nirvana album, while I had spent countless sweaty evenings from the mid-70s to mid-90s dancing to the music of the King of Pop. Furthermore, Michael Jackson was and always will be a hugely more important figure than Kurt Cobain, both musically and culturally. Nor do I mean to make a claim about the relative emotional impact of the two deaths, for their fans or for the media public at large.

Rather by invoking the affective-cognitive dissonance produced by watching Nirvana Unplugged after Kurt Cobain's suicide, I want to make a claim about the contrasting affectivity of two different historical medial formations: video in 1994 and video in 2009. In 1994 video epitomized the cultural desire for immediacy that made up one half of what Jay Bolter and I characterized as the double logic of remediation. In 2009 video participates in the hypermediacy that lies at the heart of our current culture of premediation, in which we have in some sense always already experienced Michael Jackson’s death.

Iran, Twitter, Anticipation

2009-06-20T15:13:00.000-07:00

A quick addendum to the entry below.

In the 6:00 pm EST hour on Saturday, watching CNN's coverage of the "Breaking News" from Iran, "Iran Election Fallout: Blood on the Streets of Iran," I was struck by the affect/emphasis of the commentators. The discussion between Josh Levs and Don Lemon concerning the repeated and continued updating of one's Twitter page was especially interesting.

The affective orientation presented in their exchange is quite different from the affective or temporal immediacy of live video coverage, with its monitoring of action in the present in real-time. With live video there is a sense of connection in real-time, with what is being shown on screen occurring at the same moment as you are watching it. With these Twitter feeds rushing past, there is a different temporality and a different affective sense. On the one hand what is being retweeted on cable news or on live blogs or other online sites has happened in the past; it is not happening now; it is not immediate in the way that live video is. But on the other hand, there is a sense that it is in some sense more immediate insofar as there is an emphasis not on what has been tweeted already, but on what is about to be tweeted. Viewers are encouraged to retweet; Iranians are encouraged to provide reports, however brief. Don Lemon leads into a commercial break, saying "All of that new video and new information coming into CNN moment by moment."

What we are witnessing is the new form of immediacy in an age of premediation. Rather than emphasizing the liveness and immediacy of a real-time video feed, the CNN reporters talk excitedly about how the Twitter stream changes every second. On the one hand this is analogous to Walter Benjamin's account of the affective distraction of watching cinema, as the images flash by faster than one can process them. But the affect of social networks is more an affect of anticipation than distraction. Lemon and Levs, like all social networkers, have an anticipatory orientation, looking forward towards the next refreshing of the tweet stream or the live blog, the next email of status update. Rather than monitoring the action in Iran in real time, they position themselves as monitoring the Twitter feed as it is about to flash by.

As I concluded in my previous post, in our current media formation, immediacy is less about the liveness of real-time than the liveness of futurity. Immediacy is not about the experience of what is happening on screen now but about the anticipation of what is about to happen in the immediate future. The real-time of Virilio has given way to the virtual time of premediation.

Iran, Immediacy, Premediation

2009-06-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

Media coverage of the aftermath of the fraudulent Iranian presidential election is notable for the ways in which televisual immediacy in the news has shifted in an era of social networking and premediation. As I have argued elsewhere, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 mark in some sense the last global remediation event, epitomizing the double logic of remediation that emerged most powerfully in the dot.com explosion of the 1990s. Televisual media coverage of 9/11 combined the immediacy of live video with the hypermediacy of the windowed interface. Across the globe people could watch live the burning and collapse of the Twin Towers in the midst of a hypermediated environment of multiple media feeds, both visually on screen and textually through print, televisual, and networked media. Televisual immediacy and digital hypermediacy combined to produce a collective affective sense of shock and terror.

In the past week, media coverage of events in Iran has had a very different feel and has demonstrated a very different media logic. In part this is the result of the heavy-handed media crackdown by the repressive Iranian regime. Live video coverage has been interdicted; journalists' visas have not been renewed; news reports to the outside world have been severely curtailed. In the absence of live and robust media coverage by global media outlets like CNN, BBC, or Al Jazeera, social networks like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have stepped in to fill the void. Live-blogging on sites like Huffington Post has been particularly helpful in mediating the chaotic flow of words, images, sounds, and videos coming from Iran. While we may not have live video feeds coming to us directly from Iran, we do have multiple social networks just waiting for the next tweet or video or status update.

Hyperbolic claims for a new Twitter Revolution have filled the print, televisual, and socially networked mediasphere. Internet guru Clay Shirkey epitomizes this media hyperbole in claiming that this is "the big one[,] . . . the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media." It was certainly true that, especially in the first days after the election, in the face of the Iranian government's crackdown on many socially networked internet sites, Twitter proved to be extremely agile and difficult to shut down. Almost by the minute, specifications for mirror sites and other non-Iranian servers were spread through hundreds and thousands of tweets. Many Iranians took advantage of software developed by the Falun Gong to resist Chinese censorship by providing servers that changed IP addresses almost by the minute. Yet as many others have noted, what has been transformed is not the Iranian revolution (if it in fact proves to be one) but Western media coverage. Twitter and other social media have provided vehicles for those in Iran to communicate to the rest of the world, and in some cases has been used to publicize protests and demonstrations in Iran. But these instances mainly intensify practices that have been under way for some time.

Indeed, after some initial mis-steps in the weekend following the June 12 election, CNN has begun to foreground the constraints under which it has been forced to operate, reporting dramatically on the restrictions its reporters have had to deal with. Consequently, instead of its reporters covering live events in Iran, CNN has been covering other media, particularly social networks like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. Although CNN has taken great pains to emphasize the difference between their usual practices and their current reporting on social networks and amateur videos, Jon Stewart has not been alone in pointing out that CNN's Iran reporting only intensifies and extends their growing reliance on email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and iReporters over the past couple of years.

This fascination with social networking on the part of the MSM marks a transformation of the notion of perceptual or affective immediacy, from the liveness of video to the connectivity of social networking. As I spell out in much greater detail in my forthcoming book, this shift is part of a larger sea change from remediation to premediation. This change is particularly evident in the temporality of print, televisual, and networked news media, which has increasingly modulated from remedition's concern with the immediate present or the recent past to premediation's concern with the becoming present of the future. As epitomized by the ongoing media coverage of the social unrest in Iran, which is focused on the next tweet or YouTube video, the next email message or Facebook update, the concern with immediacy has not disappeared, but rather has been relocated from the liveness of the present to the liveness of futurity.

Preemption to Prevention : Bush to Obama

2009-05-22T10:40:00.000-07:00

Glenn Greenwald provides a thorough FAQ about the contexts and consequences of Obama's suggestion in yesterday's speech at the National Archive, that the US might need to institute "preventive detention" as a security strategy to protect the US from terrorist threats, particularly threats from Al Qaeda. As critics from the left and the libertarian right have quickly noted, the institutionalization of indefinite preventive detention would provide the US president with far more power to detain without trial so-called enemies of the nation than was ever granted to the Bush or any previous administration.

I count myself among the ranks of those who oppose preventive detention. As the medio-political blogosphere is loudly and correctly objecting, this policy would violate fundamental principles of the US Constitution. What is most interesting about preventive detention for me, however, is the way it indicates the persistence of premediation in the age of Obama.

Premediation furnishes the media regime for the Obama administration's preventive approach to terrorism as it did the Bush Administration's doctrine of preemption. In the case of Obama's prevention as of Bush's preemption, government security action (or "pre"action) is triggered not by an act of terrorism that has been committed in the past, nor by any specific threat or plan or plot to commit terrorism that presently exists, but by the potential to commit terrorism in the future.

Premediated terrorism takes no specific or particular form, and may never come about--or perhaps it may. But in the case of preventive detention it is immaterial if the terrorist threat is actual or not. It is a virtual terrorism that has real (which is to say virtual) consequences. The potential to commit virtual terrorist acts against the US may have as one of its consequences the triggering of US security action, the indefinite preventive detention of the virtual terrorist. Like Brian Massumi's characterization of the primacy of preemption in the Bush era, Obama's prevention comes prior to, or precedes, the terrorist action it would prevent. Prevention operates within a realm of premediated security--securitization, or security action, is triggered by the premediation of potential terrorism rather than the mediation (or remediation) of ongoing or completed terrorist acts.

The political conseqences of preventive detention are horrifying. Medialogically, however, the consequences of prevention are in some sense business as usual. At the present historical moment mediation is oriented persistently towards ongoing futures which can only emerge through the present and into the past by being subtracted or selected from an amorphous and indefinite field of other potential futures. Which is to underscore that premediation was not invented by the Bush administration but creatively deployed by them, particularly during the Cheney-Bush years from 2001-2005--and that premediation persists virtually into any number of potential future media regimes.

Transparency and Affectivity

2009-05-14T06:03:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's decision by the Obama administration to bar the release of more than 2000 additional photos of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan has been criticized from the left by groups like the ACLU as an about-face in Obama's earlier claim that these photos would be released. Refusing to release these photographs, Obama's critics argue, makes a mockery of his avowed commitment to "transparency" in government. Obama justified his decision to keep these photos from the public by arguing that “The publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to our understanding of what was carried out in the past by a small number of individuals. . . . In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”

"Transparency" is indeed the crux of the issue here, but not in the way that the ACLU (or perhaps the Obama administration) understands it. What underwrites the ACLU's position is a commitment to the idea that photographs provide transparent evidence of unconscionable, illegal behavior by US soldiers. For the ACLU photographs are understood chiefly as evidentiary; the right of the public to know about their government's behavior is the fundamental principle on which their argument rests. This right to know is more important than considerations about the consequences of making the photographs public. Transparency, not affectivity, is foremost for the ACLU.

For the Obama administration, on the other hand, knowledge of the existence of the photographs and the kinds of behavior they show is enough. Or perhaps more accurately, the need for the American public to have photographic evidence of this behavior is outweighed by the global affective and military consequences that releasing these photographs would produce. Obama's argument for withholding the photographs is based not upon what the photographs depict, about the knowledge they would provide about unlawful, inhuman behavior by US soldiers, but about how the photographs would act in the world as media artifacts. The photos "would not add any additional benefit to our understanding," he insists, but would "further inflame anti-American opinion" and endanger "our troops." Affectivity, not transparency, guides Obama's decision to bar the release of these photographs.

My aim in unpacking the assumptions underlying this debate is not to make a strong case either for or against the release of the photographs (although as an academic scholar I generally tend to favor accessibility to and availability of the historical record). Rather I invoke this debate because of its affinities to the argument I make about Abu Ghraib in my forthcoming book--that the outrage produced by the release and distribution of the Abu Ghraib photographs derived less from their evidentiary transparency than from their affectivity as media artifacts. Obama's justification for barring the release of these 2000-plus additional photographs, because of their affective potential to inflame anti-American opinion and thus further endanger US troops, restages part of my argument about the Abu Ghriab photographs--that their powerful global impact can be explained less by what they showed the public than by what they did. While I have sympathy with the ACLU's arguments about transparency of government I find their single-minded focus on the evidentiary transparency of the photographs to be medialogically naive.

Pandemic Premediation (Cont.)

2009-04-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

I want to elaborate with a little more specificity what I mean by saying that the swine flu pandemic is being premediated. By premediation, I am not simply referring to a kind of vague or general forecast of a possibility that the current swine flu outbreak that began apparently in Mexico could transform itself into a global pandemic. Rather I mean to call attention to the ways in which print, televisual, and networked news media are pre-mediating the epidemic according to the same formal, conventional media practices that they would (or will) employ if such a pandemic would occur.

As in the run-up to the Iraq War (which I detailed more fully in my 2004 essay,"Premediation"), the run-up to a potential pandemic is notable for the way in which news media rehearse the forms of coverage that they would undoubtedly employ if a pandemic would occur. Take, for example, the use of maps. Here's the New York Times:

Obviously, this is precisely the kind of map that would be used (though with much more color and detail) if a pandemic were to occur. CNN News was (unsurprisingly) more dramatic in their cartographics, using a map of North America in much the same way they would use an electoral map, coloring in those states where cases of swine flu had been reported. In their map, Canada was treated not as the Times did, province by province, but as a single country. As John Stewart, who understands premediation as well as anyone, so insightfully asked in his report on "Snoutbreak '09: The Last 100 Days," "For six mild cases of the flu, you're going to turn 4 million square miles bright red?"

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But maps are not the only form of premediation being employed in the swine flu pandemic. Crawls, breaking news, dramatic lead-ins, special reports, interviews with government officials and people affected by the virus--all of the usual modes of televisual news reporting are being deployed. My local paper, The Detroit Free Press, featured a story on how the Michigan state government was combatting the virus and published a syndicated AP article, "What you can do to protect yourself from swine flu," an article that would likely be no different, if more urgent, than the article they would print if a pandemic were to occur. And one does not have to look far to find numerous other examples of this premediated pandemic.

In calling attention to some of the specific forms of premediation being employed, I mean to underscore and elaborate the point I made in my previous post: that medialogically we are already experiencing the pandemic. Our media experience in the run-up to a pandemic that might never occur is very much of a piece with, and in many cases identical to, the media experience we will have if a pandemic does occur. The effect of this virtual pandemic is at least twofold: to prepare us affectively for a pandemic if it were to happen, so that the public could deal more effectively with the shock of the disaster; and to provide us with the affective, medialogical experience of a pandemic whether or not it ever materializes.

Pandemic Premediation

2009-04-28T05:53:00.000-07:00

It hardly bears saying, but I'll say it anyway. The swine flu pandemic is just the latest instance of premediation in the global print, televisual, and networked media. As is its current practice, news media are focusing their "reporting" of the swine flu pandemic less on what has happened than on what might. True, news media are reporting on the present and recent past--most notably the roughly 100 deaths in Mexico, the serious responses by the Mexican government and populace, and the reported new cases of the flu in the US, Canada, and other nations around the globe. But the bulk of the new coverage is on what might happen--on the future-oriented WHO and CDC declarations of medical emergencies or alerts, on the possibility of shutting down global travel, or on a global outbreak of a swine flu pandemic.

The premediation of this pandemic performs two functions: to create a low level of anxiety and to warn the public for the possibility of a pandemic that might never happen so that whether or not it does happen they will already have been affectively prepared. We are, in other words, already experiencing a virtual swine flu pandemic. The aim of this premediated pandemic is to affectively innoculate the public so that no matter how extensively the virus spreads, no matter how many deaths it might cause, the media public will already have built up its affective defenses against the pandemic. Of course, even if the swine flu pandemic never materializes, the virtuality of this pandemic premediation has already insured the materiality of our collective affective response. Always couched in terms of what tomorrow might bring, premediation works through the mobilization of the present moment to modulate our ongoing affective orientation towards futurity.

Premediation, Economic Crisis, and the Post-9/11 Security Bubble

2009-03-10T05:32:00.001-07:00

In "Conspicuous Consumption, A Casualty of Recession," an article on the front page of this morning's New York Times, Shaila Dewan chronicles the shift in economic mood among the American public, even among those people whose income has not been directly impacted by the current recession/depression:

"In just the seven months since the stock market began to plummet, the recession has aimed its death ray not just at the credit market, the Dow and Detroit, but at the very ethos of conspicuous consumption. Even those with a regular income are reassessing their spending habits, perhaps for the long term. They are shopping their closets, downscaling their vacations and holding off on trading in their cars. If the race to have the latest fashions and gadgets was like an endless, ever-faster video game, then someone has pushed the reset button."

Although many people are confident that this turn away from conspicuous consumption will end when the economy rebounds (these people are the same ones who are confident that the economy will magically return to its pre-2008 ways), others see this shift as more permanent: "To many, the adjustment feels less like a temporary, emergency response than a permanent recalibration, one they view in terms of ethics rather than expediency."

Whatever the global economic future may bring, the current recession/depression brings into sharp relief the relationship between the credit bubble and the nation's response to the catastrophic attacks of 9/11. The Times article takes note of the much-ridiculed advice of George W. Bush that Americans should respond to 9/11 by going shopping. The reason for this advice is that 9/11 produced both a security crisis and a economic one. In the weeks following 9/11 the stock market suffered tremendous losses, unprecedented until the current crisis. What now becomes clear is how this frantic shopping spree, which spread like wildfire from retail shopping at the mall to car leases and sales to domestic and commercial real estate--all of which was financed by credit that buyers could not afford--functioned as a collective affective response to the dual shocks of 9/11, an attempt to protect the US public from having to face the real possibility that such shocks (to our nation's security and to its economy) could happen again.

As I have been arguing since 2003, the attacks of 9/11 intensified a shift in the temporal logic of mediation in US and global media--particularly in the print, televisual, and networked news media but also in info-tainment media as well. Increasing almost exponentially in the run-up to the Iraq War, US and global news media began to focus less on reporting the actual news of the immediate past and more on pre-mediating the potential news of the near- and long-term future. This premediation manifested itself initially in the run-up to the Iraq War, where for more than a year before its commencement, the print, televisual, and networked news pre-mediated its execution in as many possible variations as news reporters, ex-military commentators, and government officials could imagine. The aim of this premediation, I have argued, was in large part to try to ensure that the US public would not be caught unaware as it had been on 9/11, would not have to suffer the same kind of collective media trauma that the attacks on 9/11 provoked. Premediation functioned as the media logic of the Bush doctrine of preemption, particularly insofar as the Bush administration used premediation of additional terrorist attacks to frighten the American public into accepting a regime of securitization that threatened many of the fundamental civil liberties on which the nation was founded.

What is now becoming clear is how the Bush credit bubble followed the same temporal logic of premediation, through the proliferation of positive, rather than negative, scenarios. As we now know, the credit frenzy of the post-9/11 years (including the lengthy bull market that eventually succeeded the post-9/11 crash) was sustainable only in the face of a future in which housing prices continued to rise, in which capital appreciation never ended. Where security officials stoked the public's fears by premediating the possibility of additional terrorist attacks on American soil, financial officials stoked the public's hopes by premediating the possibility of an endless appreciation of capital and real estate values, literally of the economic value of American soil.

What may now also be coming clear is that, just as we had been living in a post-9/11 credit bubble, we have been living in a post-9/11 security bubble--fueled by preemption and fear rather than appreciation and hope. In other words, after 9/11 premediation in the US media took a double affective road, simultaneously fostering among the American public security fears and economic hopes. Both affective states were contagious, and both functioned to orient the US public to a rosier future in which the economic and security shocks of 9/11 would never happen again.

We have now seen that such hopeful economic premediation could not succeed forever in maintaining the subprime credit bubble. It seems only inevitable that it will not be long until the post-9/11 security bubble suffers a similar fate.

Mediation's Multiple Temporalities

2009-03-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

We are living in the midst of fundamental economic, social, and political change. The scale of the forces by which we are being moved and with which we are trying to contend is so immense as to make it difficult to get any clear sense of where we as a nation, a species, and a global organism are heading. But one thing is clear. Economic conditions are bad and getting worse. The rapid deterioration of the US and global economy is bringing with it radical alterations in individual and collective affect. Daily reminders like job layoffs, home foreclosures, and commercial vacancies only intensify the affectivity of scarcity, insecurity, and fear.

According to the New York Times, one way people are dealing with this acceleration of negative affect is by going to the movies. Yesterday my wife and I went to see Slumdog Millionaire; its nearly universal popularity had for some time discouraged me from wanting to see it. Watching the film, I was struck by how its overwhelming popular and industry acclaim was largely the result of the kinds of historical coincidences that had enabled Jamal to know the answers to many of the questions on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Released in limited distribution in November 2008, the film's cinematic portrayal of the slums of Mumbai, and its feel-good message that even a slumdog could succeed by means of the agency of global televisual media, clearly spoke to an American public increasingly battered by the economic recession/depression now understood to have begun in December 2007.

My sense of the fortuitousness of Slumdog's scheduled release and distribution was underscored by the trailers that preceded the film, the way in which, as projects conceived, financed, and produced before the subprime bubble burst at the end of 2008, they seemed particularly out of touch with the affective timbre and tone of most print, televisual, and networked news media. Perhaps, as the Times suggests, this is what people want from the movies. But I'm not so sure.

The trailer for Adventureland, for example, seemed especially to strike the wrong note. Directed by Superbad's Greg Mottola, and set in 1987, the teen comedy tells the story of a young college graduate who, unable to find suitable employment, takes a job at Adventureland, an amusement park. The film's tagline, "The Worst Job Ever--The Best Time of His Life," seemed somehow anachronistic at a moment in US history when real unemployment is well over 10% and when people are lining up by the hundreds and thousands for jobs just like the one that is disparaged in the film. When you can't find a job, it's hard to be amused at a film that makes fun of "the worst job ever."

My point here is not to criticize the Superbad gang for their social insensitivity; that's what the Superbad and Knocked Up franchise is all about. Rather it's to notice the multiple temporalities of our media everyday, the different speeds at which different media are able to respond to major social, political, and affective changes like those that accompany our current economic crisis. Where print, televisual, and networked news are able to adjust to such changes quickly and comprehensively, the much longer production timetables of entertainment media like television series, films, or music videos make rapid response more difficult. For example, there is something unsettling about the juxtaposition on MTV Jams of music videos celebrating bling, Kristal, and other forms of conspicuous consumption with commercials inviting people to mail in their gold jewelry for cash.

We find ourselves, then, at a particularly interesting moment in terms of media temporality, when even previews and coming attractions attempt to create anticipation for forthcoming films and television shows that belong to a moment that is already past. But this is not to argue that media from prior to the current economic crisis cannot speak to our present situation or that all contemporary news media, for example, gets it. Thus in Week In Review in today's New York Times, a series of opinion pieces on the current economic crisis are juxtaposed on the same page with a Maureen Dowd screed titled "Should Michelle Cover Up?" Where Frank Rich and Thomas Friedman take up things that really matter to us today, Maureen Dowd is still stuck in the Bush era--where, for the time being, many of our films, television shows, and music videos also still reside.

Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, given the fact that the economic crisis itself had its inception and production in the Bush era, that what we are witnessing today is the persistence of older affective media formations into the individual and collective affect of the present. The conflation of media times is, after all, in some ways or another always the case. But it is made dramatically evident in times of rapid and significant changes like the ones we find ourselves in today.

The Reality of Cable Television

2009-02-10T05:34:00.000-08:00

I continue to question the Obama campaign's media strategy. Obama Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' claim yesterday that there is a gap between cable news and the public illustrates what I described in my previous post as Obama's failure to understand the importance of premediation in the current media environment. Here's Gibbs:

"But I mean, you know, I think David [Axelrod] talked to you about where the public is on this and I think it's illuminating because it may not necessarily be where cable television is on all of this. But, you know, we're sort of used to that. We lost on cable television virtually every day last year. So, you know, there's a conventional wisdom to what's going on in America via Washington, and there's the reality of what's happening in America."

Gibbs (and by extension the Obama team) fails to understand what Niklas Luhmann characterizes as "the reality of the mass media." Luhmann writes: "Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media." When Gibbs opposes the "conventional wisdom to what's going on in America via Washington" (by which he means via cable television) to "the reality of what's happening in America," he fails to understand the way in which the mass media construct that reality through what Luhmann calls their "operations" and their "observations." It is the failure in particular to understand the media's "operations" that threatens the success of the Obama administration's plan for economic recovery.

Heady from the Obama campaign's brilliant and innovative use of social networking software in the Democratic primaries and the general election campaign, Gibbs et al underestimate the role of the mass media in contributing to the Obama victory (think especially MSNBC or The Daily Show, but also CNN, SNL, and so forth). Gibbs further misunderstands the role of the mass media in premediating the possibility of a change in the course of events as a way of insuring that there will be more news tomorrow--or in the next hour. The fact that cable television news kept alive the possibility that the front-runner might stumble is not an indication that they got it wrong but an example of how they work to leave open the possibility of a "change in the weather," i.e., how the system of the mass media generates new information.

As Luhmann so brilliantly recognizes, the system of the mass media is relentless--it is continuous in its operations, in its generation of the possibility of surprise. Failing to take advantage of its premediated formats, topics, and programs will not serve Obama well. Organizing through social networks, distributing videos via YouTube and other Internet outlets, and participating in news conferences and town halls are all useful media tactics. But to think that these "public" media operations are, or should be, distinguished from mass media like cable television is to betray either an amazing arrogance or a stunning naivete about the workings of media in the current media regime of premediation.

The Failure of Obama to Premediate Economic Recovery

2009-02-06T05:45:00.000-08:00

The Obama administration is struggling mightily to get Congress to pass an economic stimulus bill that will do what Obama and his team feel is necessary to turn the US economy around. As Paul Krugman notes in today's New York Times, the debate over the stimulus package is being controlled by the terms of the Republican arguments of the last eight years about tax cuts, excessive government spending, and so forth. Unlike the Bush administration, which did a masteful job of controlling the terms of the political and, perhaps more important, media debate, Obama and his team are on the defensive, reacting to Republican and media talking points rather than shaping or guiding the political media flow.

The reason for this is plain to see--and Dick Cheney's recent attempt to terrify Americans about Obama's security policies underscores the problem with Obama's handling of the economic crisis. What Cheney reminds us of is the way in which, especially during the run-up to the Iraq War, the Bush administration blanketed the print, televisual, and networked media with hundreds of spokespeople premediating both the terrible things that would happen if we did not invade Iraq and the wonderful things that would happen in the Middle East after we succeeded in establishing a beach-head for democracy in the Muslim world.

What Obama and his team need to do, and what we have seen very little of over the past few weeks (or in the transition period between the election and the inauguration), is to undertake their own premediation campaign on the economy. And they need to do it now.

First, what needs to happen is that they need to premediate a second Great Depression if we do not act large and act fast. Where are the images of soup-lines, of abandoned storefronts, of hungry children? Obama's team must send out its emissaries to all of the cable news networks to remind the nation of the potential consequences of failing to respond adequately to the current financial crisis. And their appearances need to be accompanied not only by images and sounds from the era of the Depression, but also by downward graphs, diminishing (and increasing) numbers, and shrinking charts to dramatize the potential implications of failing to pass the stimulus package that Obama is convinced that the country needs.

Simultaneous with this, the Obama team needs to premediate a successful recovery. They need to provide potential scenarios of economic rebirth based on the elements of their plan. These premediations must not only take the shape of a return to business as usual, but must present potential futures that are transformative and made possible by the important, forward-looking elements of the stimulus package. Here, Obama people need to bring with them, or circulate among the media, images of wind-farms, of solar installations, of rebuilt bridges and roads, of a renovated and modernized power grid. And they need charts and graphs and numbers. And they need images of future prosperity--again, not a return to some past era but a compelling, attractive, desirable future with green energy, smart consumption, fuel-efficient cars, and so forth.

Some may see this as cynical. But I would call it realistic. Collective public mood and affect are shaped and modulated these days by the premediated flows of print, televisual, and networked media. Arguments do not prevail on their "merits" or on the rational calculus of individual citizens. Mood and "structures of feeling" are contagious and are shaped by the repetition of audiovisual images of potential futures. As with Iraq, the key is not that any one future be premediated, or that these premediations prove true in any specific sense, but that our everyday media are so replete both with negative premediations of failing to follow Obama's stimulus plan and positive premediations of the recovery that will happen if we do follow this plan that the force of public sentiment behind Obama's plan grows so strong that those who would oppose it must get out of the way or be overrun.

The difficulty here, as opposed to the period in the run-up to the Iraq War, is time. Bush-Cheney had months during which to beat the drums, to deploy their troops of media spokespeople with (s)talking points and figures and images and maps. In the current economic crisis, time is of the essence. If Obama fails to get a stimulus robust enough to begin to turn the economy around, and if things begin to get worse, the current economic crisis will no longer be felt to be the fault of the Bush administration or of the Republicans in Congress who watered it down. If Obama does not stick to his guns and make it clear that anything short of his plan could lead the nation into its second Great Depression, he and his administration will be made to own the economic mess that should rightly belong to the Bush-Cheney administration and their Congressional Republican collaborators.

Premediating Dick

2009-02-05T11:23:00.000-08:00

So, barely a fortnight after leaving office, the gnarly old Dick is at it again, premediating on Politico.com the end of the world, or at least a terrorist attack on US soil that will make us appreciate 9/11 for the walk in the park he thinks it was. Next time, he says, we will face “a 9/11-type event where the terrorists are armed with something much more dangerous than an airline ticket and a box cutter – a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind.”

On Huffington Post, Mark Ginsberg, former US ambassador to Morocco, paints Cheney as a Wyoming Dorothy, skipping through the darkened forest exclaiming, "Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!" Ginsberg reminds us, as have many other commentators on Cheney's paranoid premediation, that Cheney, Bush, and Rice, among others, blithely ignored warnings in the summer of 2001 that Al Qaeda was planning an attack on US soil. And to Cheney's prediction that Obama will simply open the doors of Guantanamo prison and let loose hundreds of hard-core terrorists to wreak havoc on the US, Ginsberg points out that Cheney et al have already been responsible for the release of a dozen or more Guantanamo detainees who have now found their way into leadership positions in Al Qaeda-related organizations.

Perhaps most indicative of Cheney's inability to accept responsibility for anything that the Bush administration did or didn't do are his comments on the current economic crisis: “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” Cheney said. “The combination of the financial crisis that started last year, coupled now with, obviously, a major recession, I think we’re a long way from having solved these problems.” The financial crisis and the recession, like 9/11 or Abu Ghraib, were things that just happened, like Hurricane Katrina. Who could blame the Bush administration for a hurricane? Or for that matter, who could blame Bush-Cheney for failing to provide funds to repair and maintain the levees or failing to provide sufficient and timely relief aid or failing to provide adequate funds to rebuild the levee system and restore New Orleans to something approximating a pre-Katrina level of functionality?

For wrinkled Dick Cheney, the Bush administration bears no responsibility for anything negative that happened during its time in office, while the Obama administration is to blame for all of the negative things that haven't yet happened during its time in office, but which Cheney is certain are inevitable. This is the logic of premediation par excellence by the master premediator of them all. And the consequence of this kind of premediation is that if or when such an attack like that predicted by Cheney does happen, it will prompt among many Republicans the response that (unlike the attacks of 9/11) these new attacks are to be blamed on the administration on whose watch they occurred.

This is not only devious. It is evil.

Lecture at Ryerson University's Infoscape Lab

2009-02-01T10:25:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to a lecture I gave on Thursday at Ryerson's Infoscape Research Lab. The lab is directed by Greg Elmer, who holds the Bell Globemedia Research Chair at Ryerson. The lecture was co-sponsored by Ryerson's Digital Cinema Laboratory, as well as by York University's Augmented Reality, Future Cinema, and Mobile Media Labs.

Obama's Blackberry and the Affective Life of Media

2009-01-23T06:14:00.000-08:00

There has been endless media fascination with and speculation about the issue of whether President Obama would be allowed to keep his Blackberry. That issue has now been resolved. Obama will be allowed to have a specially designed model, approved by national security officials. He has also agreed to abide by a certain set of rules on how he can use it and whom he can communicate with.

The arguments for and against allowing him to keep the Blackberry have focused on information and communication. Obama has argued that the Blackberry will allow him to keep in touch with people "outside the bubble" so that he will be able to make more informed decisions as president. His security advisors have argued that Obama's email communications via the Blackberry would be vulnerable to hacking, thereby creating a risk that the nation's enemies might obtain confidential information that could jeopardize the nation's security. The compromise solution employs both behavioral protocols to limit who Obama can communicate with and technical protocols that limit the information that Obama is authorized to receive and that unauthorized parties are able to obtain (I use the term "protocol" here in the sense outlined by Alexander Galloway in his excellent book of that name).

What this limited solution makes evident, however, is another, perhaps more fundamental, reason that Obama was so insistent on keeping his Blackberry--his affective engagement with the device itself. In my recently completed book manuscript I detail "the affective life of media." I argue that our media devices participate in everyday affective interactions with us, that we are affective cyborgs who distribute our affectivity in something like feedback loops among our embodied selves and our media devices.

While the compromise solution of a constrained Blackberry and a constrained Blackberry user might seem to miss the mark of keeping Obama in touch with the world outside the presidential bubble, to offer Obama only a limited and therefore less attractive Blackberry experience, what it leaves unchanged is Obama's physical relationship with the device. What really matters is that he remains in touch with his Blackberry. Interestingly, in the debate over the Blackberry, Obama has repeatedly said that the Blackberry would have to be "pried out of his hands." Aides have speculated that it would be impossible to get the Blackberry off of Obama's belt. These comments, and others like them, emphasize without recognizing it, the embodied, affective character of Obama's relationship with his Blackberry.

While much speculation about the presidential Blackberry has focused on the communication security engineered into the device, and the precise limitations on the information that the President will be allowed to obtain, what would be most interesting to know is what, if any, changes will be made in the device's affective affordances, in the way in which Obama relates affectively to his Blackberry. It would also be interesting to know whether other elements of the interface will change, thereby modifying Obama's affective interaction with the software. No matter what changes are engineered into the new presidential Blackberry, my guess is that the key embodied affective interactions--wearing it on his belt and holding it in his hand--will remain unchanged. This would help to explain why Obama would accept the limitations on the information he is able to obtain via the device and the people with whom he is able to communicate.

[NB: Andrew Engel, a doctoral student at Wayne State, argues persuasively that mobile phones can be understood as "companion species," in the sense outlined by Donna Haraway in two recent books. In this light, it is interesting to see Obama's fight to keep his Blackberry as analogous to his daughter's insistence that the family get a dog for the move to the White House--although this connection has, as far as I know, gone unnoticed in print, televisual, and networked media.]

Israeli Premediation

2009-01-21T18:45:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Jeremy Clemmons for pointing out this article on how the Israeli government attempted to premediate their "war" against Hamas in Gaza. One can't help but wondering if the nearly universal condemnation of the Israeli aggression was due in part to the failure to premediate this war effectively in the global mediasphere. A more effective premediation campaign, as in the case of the US premediation of the war against Iraq, would not have made the assault on Gaza any more justifiable, but it might have served to modify the international response to this unjustifiably one-sided act of aggression.

Premediating Post-Inauguration Letdown

2009-01-18T19:12:00.001-08:00

Two days before the inauguration, the Los Angeles Times is already premediating a post-inauguration letdown for Obama supporters: "For Obama Supporters, Post-Inauguration Letdown is Inevitable."

Progressive Patriotism

2009-01-18T13:06:00.000-08:00

Among the premediated inaugural activities covered by CNN, Fox, and other news networks was a live program on HBO, which presented the "Obama Inaugural Celebration," featuring performances on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial by notable progressive celebrities from the entertainment media. Actors like Tom Hanks and Samuel Jackson did short readings. Musicians like John Mellencamp, who sang "Ain't That America" before a flag-filled backdrop, did patriotic numbers. will.i.am, for example, performed as part of a trio with Sheryl Crow and Herbie Hancock singing Bob Marley's "One Love," and Queen Latifah sang a duet of "My Country 'tis of Thee" with Josh Groban.

Perhaps the most troubling moment of the entire Inaugural Celebration was the performance of Garth Brooks, who sang a medley that included a truncated version of Don Maclean's "American Pie" and a raucous sing-along of "Shout," the theme song of John Belushi's Animal House and a hackneyed and un-selfconscious example of white America's centuries-long exploitation of black American musical traditions.

Brooks was followed shortly by U2, whose performance began with Bono's questionable assertion that Obama's inauguration fulfilled the "Dream" that Martin Luther King articulated on the same location some 46 years ago. Bono's rose-colored vision of American racial politics was usefully countered later by his insistence that freedom was not just an American dream but one of other people as well, including among his shouted list of people who wanted to be free "the Palestinians."

Obama's brief speech freely remediated King's "I Have a Dream" speech in urging people to be patient in dealing with the difficult problems faced by the nation. Obama was followed by the trio of Springsteen, Pete Seeger, and Seeger's grandson leading a sing-along version of "This Land Is Your Land." The Inaugural Celebration ended with Beyonce soulfully singing "America the Beautiful" joined by a chorus of all of the performers of the 2-hour special, the conventional closing tactic of star-studded events like this one.

As enjoyable as some of the performances were, and as happy-making it is that this celebration means that eight years of Bush-Cheney rule are about to end, the sorry but unavoidable conclusion to be drawn from this entire event is that the ideological performance of liberal or progressive patriotism is only barely more tolerable than its conservative counterpart. And insofar as it is more tolerable, this is due perhaps more to the better musical and aesthetic taste of progressive patriots than to the particulars of their political vision of America.

The progressive patriotism of the nationalism and American exceptionalism that premediate Obama's inauguration and presidency reminds us that the more things change in Washington, the more they stay the same in the premediated imaginary of the United States of America.

"The Inauguration of Barack Obama"

2009-01-17T15:12:00.000-08:00

"The Inauguration of Barack Obama" has become a multi-day, globally networked premediation event. The frenzied premediation of Barack Obama's inauguration, which has been underway at least since his Grant Park acceptance speech, is finally about to come to an end. In a mere couple of days we will know which Lincoln speeches Obama alludes to, whichwere the best parties, how many people will actually attend the Washington (or how many the various official and unofficial estimates report). Given the weekly cycle of print and televisual news media, inaugural premediation intensified on Sunday, two days before the inauguration.

My local paper, the Detroit Free Press, provided a 10-page Special Section, "The Inauguration of Barack Obama," as an added front section in which the Sunday paper was wrapped. The New York Times featured the inauguration on the Op-Ed page, the Week In Review, and the Magazine, not to mention in multiple stories in its front section. CNN featured a program from 2-5 pm EST, called "The Inauguration of Barack Obama." The Comcast Information Guide description makes CNN's premediation a part of the inauguration itself: "Preinaugural Activities Are Covered. Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, John King and Soledad O'Brien anchor."

And in the next 48 hours there will be more. "The Inauguration of Barack Obama" is a recurring program on CNN, increasing in frequency until Inauguration Day, when CNN will begin its coverage of this premediation event at 5 AM, before any of its competitors. MSNBC begins its Inaugural Day premediation at 6 AM, ABC, NBC, and CBS at 7 AM, and Fox News at 8:30.

Premediations 'R' Us.

Obama and the Premediated Presidency

2008-11-25T07:46:00.000-08:00

Caroline Maun perceptively asks below if I am theorizing the premediated presidency. Yes, we can. I may do this in more detail in the conclusion to my book, but for now a quick sketch.

First, presidential campaigns are inevitably exercises in premediation. Campaign promises are not predictions; they are not contracts; they are not promises in a strict sense. What they are (along with platforms and policy statements) are premediations of what a potential future might look like under, say, a McCain or an Obama presidency. These promises are fluid--they respond to the exigencies of a long campaign. They are, one might say, virtual promises, or premediated promises of the kinds of presidency that might be brought about. Like other premediations, campaign promises and platforms work to prepare the public to be ready for the laws, policies, and presidential decisions that will follow the election of a new president.

The Obama campaign understood the nature of electoral premediation in a much more detailed and complex manner than did the McCain campaign. Indeed, one might even say that Obama's election was a result of his furnishing a much more successful premediation of an Obama presidency than the McCain campaign was able to muster of a McCain presidency. From the get-go Obama decided to appear presidential--to assume the mantle of the presidency even before he had won the Democratic nomination. The famous kerfuffle over the pseudo-presidential seal might have been a case of going to far--but it was emblematic of the Obama strategy to premediate an Obama presidency as a strategy for getting elected president.

Obama understood, as well, that premediation involved the deployment of mediality as a way to shape and modulate the electorate's affectivity. "My Barack Obama" and the extraordinary use of mobile social networking software enabled the Obama campaign both to create an affect of "hope" and "change" among his supporters but also provided the tools for his supporters to appropriate those tools to provide affective collectivities that supported the goals of the campaign. Obama's major speeches, too, both during the primary campaign and on election night, were similarly presidential, presenting him rhetorically and affectively as if he were already president.

This premediated presidency has only intensified in this unusual (but also ordinary) period between the election and the inauguration. What makes this ordinary transition period unusual in this case is in part the intensity of the financial crisis that the nation (and its next president) faces; this crisis contributes to the intensity of the premediated presidency. Even before the election, Obama and McCain were positioned as virtual presidents in their response to the potential end of finance capitalism that reached crisis stage in September.

Now that the nation knows who will succeed Bush, the pressure to premediate how the Obama administration would address the financial crisis is even greater than during the campaign. Indeed, through his skillful deployment of print, televisual, and networked media, Obama is attempting to manipulate the economy through premediation--which is at this point the most powerful weapon he has. Even working with a Democratic-controlled Congress has serious limitations, as any legislation that gets passed must be signed off on by Bush. So Obama orchestrates his transition announcements thoughtfully and with confidence--using the tools of the media (leaks, interviews, press conferences, bloggers, etc.) to try to reassure the public and the financial markets that an Obama presidency will bring better days ahead.

Given the snarky Republican references to Obama as the chosen one, the next messiah, it is worth noting the affinities between this transitional time and what Giorgio Agamben characterizes (following Paul) as "the time that remains"--the time between the announcement of the messiah and the commencement of messianic time. For Agamben this temporal space is the space of the coming community, the space of promise or hope.

I'll end for now by suggesting that we are, in relation to the premediated Obama presidency, precisely in this messianic moment, awaiting the community to come. Of course, Obama is not the messiah and messianic time will not begin on 1/20/09. Which means that, in some sense, it is this moment before the election that is bound to be the most promising of the Obama presidency, the moment that premediates the time that is to come. When the Obama presidency does come, Obama's best strategy would be to continue to premediate the community to come, to try to maintain his presidency as a continuation of the time that remains, a continuation of the promise of messianic time. At its worst, however, the Obama presidency will transform itself into business as usual, a presidency like all others that brings us back not to this interesting moment of the time that remains but to the daily temporality of the Washington grind that has worn us all down during the increasingly dismal second term of George W. Bush.

Premature Inauguration

2008-10-28T17:28:00.000-07:00

In yet another desperate attempt at a "game changer," the McCain campaign today accused Obama of "premature inauguration."

McCain, on the other hand, has the stamina to keep going until election day.

MoveOn.org: Premediating an Obama Defeat to GOTV

2008-10-23T14:40:00.000-07:00

Last evening I received the following email from MoveOn.org (you probably did, too):

When I clicked on the link in the email, my web browser (like your's, but with a difference) opened to the following screen:

When I clicked on the video, here's what I saw and heard, which was similar to what you saw and heard:

MoveOn's decision to premediate an Obama defeat as a means of getting out the vote is simultaneously brilliant and risky. While it is clearly meant to be ironic, insulting voters to get them to the polls could be a dangerous move. But it is brilliant premediation, remediating the format of any number of political blogs to premediate a future that presumably no MoveOn supporter would ever want to experience. There are a number of deft touches, including a Dow under 8000 and an array of other stories below the window pictured above that premediate the consequences of an Obama defeat in a mixture of semi-serious and tongue-in-cheek stories:

Whether this works as a get-out-the-vote strategy will probably be impossible to determine. But what is undeniable is that it is a brilliant example of premediation, another example of the predominance of premediation as the post-9/11 media regime. But where the Bush administration worked with the print, televisual, and networked media in 2002 and 2003 to manipulate the public to support the Iraq War, MoveOn is employing premediation in an attempt to mobilize voters to act to put the opposition party in power, not by premediating an Obama victory, but an Obama defeat. Let's hope it works.

Polling, Projection, Premediation: The Affective Force of FiveThirtyEight.com

2008-10-23T06:55:00.000-07:00

Whenever I feel down about the prospects of an Obama victory, I click on FiveThirtyEight.com: Electoral Projections Done Right. The reassuring blue-and-red pie-charts showing Obama with more than 340 electoral votes, a 93% chance of an Obama victory, and a projection of as many as 57 Democratic senate seats always calm my nerves. As I drill down the site to monitor the latest national and state-by-state polls, the super-poll tracker, the graph of simulated electoral vote distributions, and the reassuring scenario analyses, I am almost instantly reassured about the sanity of my fellow Americans.

FiveThirtyEight.com is to my mind the smartest of the various websites that correlate polling data from across the country. And so far at least the most reassuring. I've been meaning for a while to say something about this phenomenon, in particular about the relationship between polling, projection, and premediation.

According to Wikipedia, the first presidential electoral poll was a straw vote taken in 1824, which (incorrectly) showed Andrew Jackson defeating John Quincy Adams. Such polls or straw votes are indicative of the nearly universal human desire to predict or foresee what will transpire in the future. But I would be reluctant to call such polls early versions of premediation, which I have tried consistently to distinguish from prediction on the basis of the more open, creative, and potential nature of premediation.

I have also tried to underscore the formal features of premediation, the way in which premediation invariably involves the remediation of the future in a mediated format meant to be indistinguishable from the remediation of the present or recent past. Thus the formal conventions through which weather maps forecast a hurricane, a blizzard, or a heat wave are very different from the way in which those meteorological events are reported as and after they occur. Insofar as polling or projection manifests itself in a media format different from that in which the election will be presented when it occurs, it is not in a strict sense premediation.

The remarkable proliferation of polls and projections in the age of networked digital media, however, is clearly of a piece with the overall cultural orientation towards the future that the concept of premediation is meant to mark. And when those electoral projections are remediated in precisely the same graphic media formats that will be used on election day and beyond, premediation is clearly at work. Thus on CNN John King has been premediating the results of the upcoming election using precisely the same interactive mapping technologies he used for the primaries, which allow him to write on the map like John Madden using a telestrator and to zoom in to precinct level with technology identical to that of Google Maps.

The affective power of premediation is, I would argue, undeniable. What makes FiveThirtyEight.com so reassuring, however, is not only the information it presents about Obama's lead in multiple state and national polls. Indeed, I would argue that the reassuring affect that this site invariably produces in me is hardly due to the data it furnishes at all--as I already know most of this data from reading newspapers, watching cable news, and surfing the web. What makes this site so reassuring is its conventionalized map of the United States, showing a predominance of blue states in exactly the same media format as I expect it to appear on the evening of November 4, or perhaps the morning of November 5, when we learn that Barack Hussein Obama has been elected the 44th president of the United States of America.

Ohio Resident Hangs Obama in Effigy

2008-10-19T18:21:00.000-07:00

I really wonder if we're going to get more of these kind of desperate racist expressions as Obama's election seems more and more inevitable. And, of course, the real worry is whether these kinds of things will haunt an Obama presidency for its duration.

McCain Radio Address Calls Obama a Socialist

2008-10-18T05:36:00.000-07:00

To follow up on my last two posts, here is a premediated link to McCain's weekly radio address (posted on the web, as is customary, before the address is broadcast), in which he deploys Joe the Plumber again, using him to explicitly call Obama a socialist.

Red Baiting/Race Baiting Photo

2008-10-16T18:59:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Steve Shaviro for calling my attention to this photo, found on Flickr.

Joe the Plumber: From Race Baiting to Red Baiting

2008-10-16T09:58:00.000-07:00

Joe the Plumber, McCain's version of Sarah Palin's Joe Six-Pack, is McCain's way of suggesting that Obama is a communist.

As McCain repeated in a Pennsylvania rally the day after the third and final debate, Obama's problematic answer to Joe the Plumber's question about his taxes was that Obama "wanted to spread Joe's wealth around." To criticize Obama for wanting to spread Joe's wealth around is another way to scare Americans about Obama's communism, joining the campaign's efforts to paint him (or have him painted) as a terrorist, an extreme liberal, a Muslim, an un-American other.

Not content to be compared to George Wallace, McCain may now have set out to see if he could be compared to Joe McCarthy. If he succeeds, he will have another opportunity to be indignant, and another opportunity to scare Americans from choosing Obama when they get into the voting booth.

Premediating an Osama bin Laden Presidency

2008-10-13T11:20:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Feldman reports that McCain volunteers are being taught to accuse Obama of terrorism by coaching them to tell potential voters that both Osama bin Laden and Barack Hussein Obama have "friends who bombed the Pentagon." The obvious lie in this historically inaccurate statement (William Ayers, Obama's "friend," never bombed the Pentagon and Obama was only a child, who obviously did not know Ayers, when the Weather Underground contemplated such an act) is scandalous.

From a medialogical perspective, however, what is most worthy of note about this lie is the way in which McCain volunteers are being taught to premediate the election of Barack Obama as the victory of Osama bin Laden over the United States. This builds upon the virtual racism I have described in earlier posts, with an aim towards premediating an Obama presidency as a way to frighten voters into changing their minds when they step into the polling booth.

As The Daily Show brilliantly dramatizes in a montage of premediation on Fox News, this orientation towards the voting booth is clearly laid out when, after the second debate, when the majority of a Fox debate-watching focus group raised its hands to say that Obama won the debate. "So, Obama clearly looks like the winner tonight," the Fox "reporter" concluded, "The key is not who they like. The key is who they're going to vote for."

All campaigns attempt to premediate the negative consequences of a victory by their opponents. What seems different as the McCain campaign pushes towards November 4 is the increased emphasis on the moment of voting or the moment of waking up the morning after to a world in which Barack Hussein Obama is the president-elect of the US of A.

"Hussein," Premediation, Virtual Racism

2008-10-08T17:24:00.000-07:00

PBS news anchor Ray Suarez has recently claimed that "religion has become a proxy for race" in the presidential campaign, with the invocation of Barack Obama's middle name serving to rekindle doubts about his faith, to paint him as a Muslim. Suarez points out that the "pseudo controversies" about Obama's background are representative of a "racial calculus" at work.

As I suggested yesterday, this racial calculus can be understood as a kind of premediated virtual racism, which works not by making an explicitly racist claim at the moment of utterance but by premediating racist doubts about Obama that will come to the fore in the voting booth on November 4. In the past couple of days two Republican surrogates have referred to "Barack Hussein Obama" in introducing Palin or McCain. In each of these instances, I would maintain, it is no accident that Obama's middle name is employed in the context of a mention of the date of the election.

Before Sarah Palin appeared at a rally in Estero, Fla., on Tuesday, one of the speakers introducing her used Obama’s middle name in the context of Election Day. “On Nov. 4,” yelled fully uniformed Lee County (Fla.) Sheriff Mike Scott, “let’s leave Barack Hussein Obama wondering what happened!”

The next day, William Platt, the local GOP chairman in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, introduced McCain at a Lehigh University rally. The gist of his comment, which reporters weren't able to tape because they were entering the venue as he was speaking, was: "Imagine if you woke up on November 5th and Barack Obama - Barack Hussein Obama - was our new president, and you knew you could have volunteered to prevent it." Here premediating Obama's election is meant as a form of electoral preemption, urging McCain supporters to act preemptively to prevent Obama's election.

These will not be the last premediations of virtual racism that we see in the days and weeks leading up to the election. And, as McCain's "That One" remark at the debate attests, the racism may become more and more explicit as November 4 approaches. But in all of these cases, what is telling is that they are oriented towards the future, premediating the fearful prospect of waking up on November 5 to the election of Barrack Hussein Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

Olbermann, Maddow, and Progressive Premediation

2008-10-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

I have focused much of my discussion of premediation on its negative uses by the Bush Administration, or the print, networked, and televisual news media, or more recently the McCain-Palin campaign. But premediation can also work as a progressive strategy. Take, for example, "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's multi-media assemblage of PowerPoint slideshow, Hollywood feature documentary, website (http://www.climatecrisis.net/), book, policy center, audio CD, or educational guide for K-16 teachers. Gore has brilliantly premediated numerous different but related potential ecological catastrophes that are resulting, and that might result, from global warming (or climate change).

"An Inconvenient Truth" is but one of the more spectacular instances of a progressive premediated Gesamtkunstwerk--with Neil Young's "Living With War" a less grandiose but perhaps medialogically more self-conscious instance. And then of course there are the more everyday forms of progressive premediation like MSNBC, featuring "Countdown With Keith Olbermann" and the super-smart "Rachel Maddow Show." What Olbermann's "Countdown" format makes especialy clear, with its ticking clock and its quotidianly apocalyptic orientation to a future that is also each night an end of time, is the way in which the print, televisual, and networked news media have refashioned their temporal orientation from the immediacy of the present or recent past to the virtuality of the present or near future.

Each news medium, then, aims not only to report on what has just happened or what is happening now but more crucially on what is about to happen (or not) in the future. Different news stories, formats, and programs premediate the news in different ways, working in the process to mobilize readers, viewers, or participants to move towards some particular kinds of futures rather than others. As I have elsewhere suggested, one of the key ways through which news and other media premediate particular futures is through encouraging or intensifying shared affective and political stances among members of particular collectivities, multitudes, or sociotechnical networks.

We live today in a media world that is inexorably oriented towards and moving into an array of potential futures, an ecology of media which Niklas Luhmann might describe as a self-regulating system which is repeatedly destabilized by the irritants of new events and which attempts to restabilize itself through the proliferation of premediated futures. Although Luhmann's description of this systemic oscillation between stabilized and destabilized states sounds linear and schematic, this does not have to be the case. If we remember that these oscillations occur simultaneously in multiple sociotechnical and geopolitical sites and in heterogeneous media forms and practices, we can see that Luhmann offers a useful way to make sense of one of the mechanisms through which premediation operates but that his account must be supplemented, as in my understanding it invariably is, with other accounts that take up both questions of individual and collective affect and questions of the agency of assemblages or collectivities of humans and non-humans.

It is safe to say, then, that we watch a progressive network like MSNBC not, as many critics of polemically oriented news networks complain, so that we can learn what we already know, but so that we can in some sense feel what we already feel about the assemblage of humans and non-humans that make up our worlds. Or, more precisely, we watch or read news in print, televisual, or networked media not only to attune our political affects to the affective states of others but also to attune our affective politics to the issues, positions, and policies either of particular networks, whether CNN, Fox, MSNBC, PBS, or BBC, or increasingly to such individual programs as "The Daily Show," "The Colbert Report," "Real Time with Bill Maher," or "Saturday Night Live."

"That One": Virtual Racism and Premediation

2008-10-08T08:42:00.001-07:00

Evil Tongue has a scathing indictment of McCain for calling Obama "That One" in last night's debate. ET contextualizes the remark in the context of John and Cindy McCain's adopted daughter Bridget, who was herself used by the Bush team as an object of attack against McCain in the 2000 campaign. Check it out.

What struck me as also offensive about the phrase, including McCain's affective intonation and embodiment, was its "virtual racism," the way in which it offered a not-so-distant echo of the gestural expression one might hear from a slave buyer at an auction. In the context of the thinly veiled racism of Sarah Palin's current stump speech, which abjects Obama as a terrorist sympathizer who is not one of us, McCain's performative remediation of the slave-owner is aimed at fostering or producing racist fears in voters, not only at the present moment but, for the McCain campaign more importantly, in the voting booths on November 4.

This "virtual racism" deploys a deliberate strategy of premediation. Neither Palin or McCain is making particular charges about Obama's racial make-up (though McCain's "That One" nearly crosses the line). In fact there is no coherent narrative about Obama at all. Instead the McCain campaign tries to throw out into the mainstream and informal media-spheres hundreds of potential irritants that might produce in voters different forms of negative racist affect towards the idea of a President Obama.

Palin's current stump speech in particular sets out to proliferate potential racist affects so that undecided voters, or even weak Obama supporters, might find themselves turning away from Obama as they went to the polls. McCain-Palin's power to prompt powerful racial affects is evidenced in the outbursts provoked from Palin supporters at recent campaign events, including calling "the real Barack Obama" a "terrorist," screaming "treason" and "kill him," and telling an African-American sound man to "Sit down, boy." The campaign strives to maintain deniability, but importantly has yet to denounce or even to address these remarks.

To underscore the strategies of premediation and virtuality at work in these racist attacks is not, as I hope is clear, to minimize or to dismiss them. Indeed, precisely to the contrary, I call attention to these strategies because they are among the most powerful ways in which mediality works at the present historical moment to mobilize the collective affective intensities of citizens, consumers, media audiences, and other multitudes or assemblages. It is important to identify these strategies if we are to successfully resist or oppose them.

Debate Viewership and the New Media Temporality

2008-09-30T05:37:00.000-07:00

Media observers were surprised at the relatively small viewing audience reported by Neilsen for Friday's presidential debate, as in this morning's short New York Times piece:

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/29/debate-ratings-524-million-viewers-watched-round-one/

The article's final paragraph contains the explanation for this data, but doesn't explicitly connect the dots: Nielsen numbers fail to include other forms of viewing besides families watching at home, particularly debate parties, Internet streaming, and deferred viewing on Tivo, DVRs, or the Web.

Nielsen is an institution based in an earlier media formation, when liveness and immediacy were the hallmarks of TV, were the features that distinguished it especially from film or print. In some of its earliest manifestations at the end of the 90s, the Internet remediated TV's liveness through web-cams, live video streams, and so forth. And today, via Twitter, blogging, and other forms of live chat, the Internet continues to assume some of TV's mantle of immediacy. A related media shift has been marked on by many observers in relation to polling data, which like the Neilsen ratings, is grounded on media and telecommunications patterns that do not capture the dynamic usage of a significant portion of Obama supporters. The liveness of the home telephone has been increasingly remediated by cellphones and texting.

In today's era of premediation, however, networked media users are less committed to liveness and immediacy. So much of our TV universe persists well beyond its initial broadcast that TV "viewers" are perfectly content to watch all or part of important shows on YouTube or other video-sharing sites. Viewers can be assured, for example, that if they miss Tina Fey's spot-on remediation of Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric, they will be able to find it on the Web. Obviously the same is true of the presidential debates--or of the coverage of the political conventions, where observers were similarly surprised to note that the Republican convention was viewed by more people than the Democratic convention (which may have been the case, but the number of Obama supporters who viewed his speech in another medium is most likely significantly higher than those who similarly viewed McCain's or Palin's speeches).

Because live events are already premediated in any number of different media formats (even before a live event is televised its availability on YouTube and other networked media is always assured), institutions like Neilsen and other mainstream media will continue to have to find new metrics to measure today's and tomorrow's ever-changing media audience.

Premediating McCain

2008-09-26T05:21:00.001-07:00

John McCain's behavior in Washington Thursday seemed anything but leader-like as he sat silent for most of the bipartisan meeting in the White House, apparently failing to make clear his position on how to proceed in resolving the stalemate on how to fix the nation's economy.

So, McCain's theatrics leave him with two options to try to use the current economic crisis to resuscitate his failing presidential campaign.

1. First mess up an imminent bailout deal, as he appeared to do Thursday, only to end up bringing conservative House Republicans into the fold, portraying himself as the leader who brought the bipartisan deal together.

2. More radically, come out Friday against the bailout, and try to capitalize on the overwhelming popular sentiment against bailing out Wall Street, portraying himself as a maverick who is willing to fight the entrenched interests of Washington and New York for the good of the American people.

The first option seems to have little chance of working. The second, however, has a frightening plausibility to it and may be the only chance the McCain candidacy has of claiming the presidency.

John McCain, Drama Queen

2008-09-24T13:04:00.000-07:00

One thing would be certain--a McCain-Palin presidency would not be boring. In response to almost any kind of disturbance, McCain has shown that he would do something dramatic. Bomb, bomb, Iran! Dismiss senior campaign advisors! Attack Russia! Create a commission! Fire the head of the SEC! Institute a new federal agency! Suspend the campaign! Delay the debates!

Every day we could hope for someone to be fired or demoted, for some function of government to be suspended or disestablished, for some country to be threatened or attacked, for media access to be limited or cut off.

It might make for great theater, but it would surely be disastrous government!

Wall Street: Abstraction or Virtuality?

2008-09-24T05:02:00.000-07:00

In yesterday's hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was asked by the Democratic Senator of Ohio, Sherrod Brown, "Does Wall Street owe the American people an apology?" Wall Street, Bernanke answered, is "an abstraction."

As I began to address here yesterday, the question of agency during this extended moment of financial crisis is an interesting one--particularly the question of how agency is mediated among our print, televisual, and networked news media. Although Bernanke followed up his characterization of Wall Street as an abstraction by acknowledging that "a lot of people made big mistakes," the agency I am interested in identifying is not that of individuals--not the agency that the FBI is reportedly seeking to identify in its current investigation of fraudulent mortgage lending practices on Wall Street.

Don't get me wrong. I believe it is crucial that those individuals responsible for getting us into this mess be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law (and perhaps even beyond). My concern as a media theorist, however, is a different one. What I am interested in making sense of is how both formal and informal media help to create and amplify the agency of financial crisis to the point where Congress is on the verge of approving $700 billion for an economic downturn that has not yet happened, a crisis that we are told might or will happen unless Congress acts now. In other words, how does it come about that Congress is about to approve a $700 billion bailout in response to the premediation of recession?

Which brings us back to the question of Wall Street's agency.

Ben Bernanke could not be further from the truth in characterizing Wall Street as an "abstraction." Such a characterization depends upon a series of familiar fundamental binary oppositions that go back to the earliest moves of modernity: abstract vs. concrete, idealism vs. materialism, imaginary vs. real, mind vs. body, and so forth. The very financial practices that have inflated the current economic bubble and that now threaten to throw the US and perhaps the world into a recession stand as the refutation of these oppositions. While critics of these financial practices often point out, for example, that the problem with the buying and selling of derivatives stems from the fact that such mortgages appear to have lost their connection to real properties, these criticisms resort to the same dualistic metaphysics underlying Bernanke's characterization of Wall Street as an "abstraction."

As I tried to suggest yesterday by likening "Wall Street" or "the market" or "the Dow" to a pantheon of gods, these agents are anything but abstract. They are powerfully complex and heterogeneous actors in our economic drama, what Bruno Latour has characterized as "hybrids," "quasi-objects," or (more recently, in a term also employed by Gilles Deleuze) "assemblages."* Like Greco-Roman deities, which are complex sociotechnical actants inseparable from their votaries and priests, their icons and temples, their calendars and sacred places, their rituals of sacrifice and remuneration, so our current economic deities are anything but "abstractions." "Wall Street," "the market," and "the Dow" name heterogeneous formations of humans and non-humans, of material and immaterial forces, of technical and social networks--including their own votaries and priests, icons and temples, calendars and sacred places, and rituals of sacrifice and economic remuneration. The agency of Wall Street is not the agency of an abstraction, but rather the agency of the complex sociotechnical assemblage of financial employees, bank statements, office buildings, powerful computer servers and distributed financial software networks, and so forth.

But to return to the question posed to Bernanke, does Wall Street owe the American people an apology? Or, to put it differently, what would it mean for "Wall Street" to apologize to the American people? Who or what would make that apology? And to whom or what would it apologize?

Such questions can best be answered if we think of Wall Street not as "abstract," but as what Deleuze might characterize as "virtual." In describing Wall Street as a Latourian quasi-object or Deleuzian assemblage, I have been trying to resist thinking of it as some kind of immaterial essence or abstraction or conceptualization of very real and concrete sociotechnical, cultural, and economic practices and capital resources. Similarly, however, I would resist thinking of Wall Street as a fixed or stable entity. By invoking the Deleuzian concept of virtuality I want to highlight the way in which such entities as Wall Street, the market, or the Dow are always emergent or in a state of becoming--and that, like the Greco-Roman gods, their agency derives precisely from this potentiality, from what they have just done and from what they may do in the future.

Hence premediation. The priests and oracles of the Greco-Roman pantheon explained many political, economic, and natural occurrences and historical events in terms of the agency of the gods. Simultaneously they devoted considerable energies and resources to placating, predicting, and even controlling the agency of the gods in the future. Similarly, in invoking the virtual agency of our financial pantheon, today's print, televisual, and networked news media work both to explain the present and recent past in terms of such economic demigods as Wall Street, the market, or the Dow, and to premediate how these gods will act in the near and not-so-near future. It is the agency of premediation, I would argue, that provides much of the force that is moving Congress to the verge of authorizing as much as $700 billion to prevent what is currently a virtual recession, that is to say, a recession that has only been premediated and that might, despite possibly having motivated Congress to authorize a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street, never even have occurred.

* "An assemblage is, first, an ad hoc grouping, a collectivity whose origins are historical and circumstantial, though its contingent status says nothing about its efficacy, which can be quite strong. An assemblage is, second, a living, throbbing grouping whose coherence coexists with energies and countercultures that exceed and confound it. An assemblage is, third, a web with an uneven topography: some of the points at which the trajectories of actants cross each other are more heavily trafficked than others, and thus power is not equally distributed across the assemblage. An assemblage is, fourth, not governed by a central power: no one member has sufficient competence to fully determine the consequences of the activities of the assemblage. An assemblage, finally, is made up of many types of actants: humans and nonhumans; animals, vegetables, and minerals; nature, culture, and technology." [Jane Bennett, "The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout," Public Culture (17)3: 445-465.]

Agency and Financial Crisis

2008-09-22T12:50:00.001-07:00

Let's get this straight. The current financial crisis that is said to make government action imperative is first and foremost a market crisis.

For now, in any event, it is not a crisis in massive unemployment (though we have been in something like an employment crisis for some time); it is not a crisis in massive foreclosures (though we have been in a foreclosure crisis for some time); it is not an urban crisis (though many of our cities have been in crisis for some time); it is not a crisis in our infrastructure (though our infrastructure has been in crisis for some time); it is not a famine or a drought or a health epidemic (though we have seen our share of those in the past). The current crisis is a crisis in our financial markets. Its most immediate potential victims are those individuals who work in the financial markets, those individuals with substantial investments in those financial markets, including those whose retirement funds are invested in the market, and the corporations that seek to profit from those financial markets.

So, where does the current financial crisis derive such tremendous agency that it can prompt the US government (on behalf of the American taxpayers) to give something on the order of $1 trillion in aid to these markets to address this crisis, while other crises, like those mentioned above, are unable to garner even a fraction of the support that they need and deserve?

This might appear to be a ridiculously foolish question. The agency garnered by this financial crisis is capital, is money--it's the economy, stupid! Of course. True enough, I suppose. But it is interesting to note the forms in which this monetary or economic damage manifests itself to the American public, to the average citizen of the US. So maybe a better way to phrase the question is this: how does the agency of the current financial crisis manifest itself in our media?

At the current moment this agency manifests itself chiefly in non-stop media coverage and diminishing financial statements. Or more accurately it manifests itself in the fear and trembling produced by the obsessive premediation of impending economic catastrophe in our print, televisual, and networked media. We turn on the TV and see anchors and politicians, economists and financiers, warning us about the impending financial catastrophe heralded by recent turbulence in the markets. We hear about the billions of dollars in value that have been lost. We see graphs of the recent financial past heading almost inevitably downwards into our financial future. We look at our 401Ks or our mutual funds or our e-portfolios and we see how much value they have lost. We see gas prices rising and "for sale" signs and foreclosed properties growing like mushrooms.

So where does the agency of the market to prompt the federal government to hand over nearly $1 trillion to bail out Wall Street come from? This agency, I would argue, in some sense comes from, participates in, the agency of premediation. The tone of this mediation is urgency. We are to be on the alert, to be concerned, and ultimately to be scared. The agents that we should fear are called "the market" or "Wall Street" or "the Dow." "The market will not be happy if too many limitations are put on this bailout." "Wall Street is worried that unless the Fed acts, more turbulence lies ahead." "The Dow is demonstrating its concern about the terms of the bailout." Not unlike the pantheon of Greco-Roman gods, these powerful creatures need to be feared and respected and pacified. The mediasphere is filled with the priests and votaries of these gods, warning the public of the danger that could come if they are angered or their will is flaunted.

What is at stake in the premediation of the current financial crisis is whether (to borrow the distinction currently in use by both Obama and McCain) it is Wall Street or Main Street who should be protected from the consequences of the current crisis of confidence in the financial markets. At the present moment, the gods of Wall Street have a much greater share of the mediasphere than the crowds of Main Street. On Monday afternoon, the agency of Main Street had manifested itself chiefly in brief reports of taxpayers complaining about having to bail out Wall Street, with CNN quickly suggesting and moving away from the question of a populist revolt. On Tuesday morning we are beginning to hear dissenting voices, not only in the liberal blogosphere but on the pages of our local and national newspapers and even on televisual news.

But the gods of Wall Street are in turmoil and they are still at the present moment more powerful than the collective voices of Main Street. Only when the premediation of Main Street's agency begins to compete with the premediation of Wall Street's agency will it be possible to imagine an economic future in which the US government acts to bail out the overwhelming majority of the American public who are threatened by this financial crisis, not the minority of those whose investments and livelihoods depend upon the financial markets.

Premediation and Structure of Feeling

2008-09-22T11:30:00.000-07:00

Raymond Williams coined the concept "structure of feeling," as my friend and colleague Jonathan Flatley reminds us, not only because "structure of feeling" "enables us to talk about the sociality of affect, but because it enables us to describe those structures that mediate between the social and the personal that are more ephemeral and transitory than set ideologies or institutions." "Premediation" in one sense functions as such an ephemeral and transitory structure, mediating between individual and collective affect, and in another sense could be seen to describe one of the strategies or frameworks such structures of feeling employ in mediating "between the social and the personal." In either sense, it is clear that at the present moment changes in structures of feeling invariably manifest themselves through our print, televisual, and networked media.

Seemingly overnight, the current structure of feeling has turned dramatically economic. The relation between individual and collective affect in our media environment has begun to focus almost obsessively on the current "economic crisis." Small talk--at Caribou or Starbucks, at PTA meetings or the high school cafeteria, in the workplace or over the dinner table, at CVS or Home Depot, in the library or the doctor's office--almost immediately turns to the crisis in the economy and the proposed bailout. People want to know: what is going to happen to the economy in the future, tomorrow, next week, after the election, and beyond?

This economic chatter is even more extreme on local, national, and global news media. In the US, CNN, Fox, CNBC, and MSNBC are populated with new faces and new charts and visuals, discussing the details of the mortgage and liquidity crisis, explaining the potential features of the proposed bailout, and most interestingly premediating what economic and social disasters would occur if we did not bail out Wall Street. Non-US media outlets like BBC, CBC, or Al Jazeera are similarly participating in this proliferation of economic scenarios.

Of course, all of these media formations are part of what I characterize as "premediation," as they concern themselves with furnishing the content of our media environment and modulating affective structures of feeling as we move into and through any number of potential futures. These structures of feeling, I would argue, which Williams describes as "emergent or pre-emergent," are not fixed and institutionally defined, but like premediation function as something like what, following Deleuze, I would call virtual structures, as potential individual and collective affective qualities and intensities from which actual personal and social structures emerge.

This discursive proliferation of media talking heads, historical narratives, and graphic formats concerned with the economy and the market crisis works to provide competing potential, not-fully-defined premediations of possible futures into which US and global citizens, corporations, collectivities, and nation-states find themselves thrown and among which they will have to navigate. Such structures of feeling operate ordinarily as part of our media everyday, but in periods of crisis and rapid affective change like this one their operations become much more intense and thus much more visible than at moments of relative quiescence or stability.

Premediating the Next Great Depression: "Won't Get Fooled Again!"

2008-09-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

In a classic example of the Bush Administration's use of the strategies of premediation to further its own interests, Congress is once again on the verge of being suckered into approving a Bush Administration proposal that is guaranteed to cost the nation over a trillion dollars. The Bush Administration is succeeding in this effort not in response to a catastrophe but on the basis of the premediation of catastrophe. And as today's news headlines make plain, the chief beneficiaries of this "rescue plan" will be Wall Street financial firms, whose CEOs, executives, board members, and major shareholders are among the chief supporters and business partners not only of Republicans in the Bush Administration and Congress, but of Democratic politicians as well.

We've seen this episode before people!

Flash back to October 2002, when the Bush Administration came to Congress seeking authorization to conduct a war against Iraq, not because Iraq had attacked us but to pre-empt Iraq from attacking us. How did the Bush Administration persuade the Congress, the media, and most of the American public that this authorization was necessary? They did it by premediating the consequences of Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction and their distribution to terrorists, particularly to Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Print, televisual, and networked news media were filled with Bush Administration spokesmen, warning us about the consequences of letting Iraq act in this way, assuring us of their possession of these weapons and of their intent to distribute them to the very people who attacked us on 9/11 because they hate our freedom. You know the rest of the story. Thousands and thousands of deaths later, billions of dollars of damage to Iraq, trillions of dollars of US debt, much of it headed into the pockets of companies like Halliburton and the oil companies--and Congress and the public is finally fed up with funneling taxpayer dollars to this boondoggle.

But wait! Here's another boondoggle! The real-estate mortgage crisis threatens our very way of life, indeed it may even hate us for our freedoms! What should we do? Let's give a trillion dollars of our money to bail out Wall Street from its risk-taking and irresponsible speculation. Why? Not because of what has happened to our economy over the past eight years (which is significant enough), but because of what might happen to our economy if we do not give in to the Bush Administration's demands, if we refuse to accept Hank Paulson's premediation of another Great Depression in his briefings behind closed-doors in Wall Street.

This is, remember, exactly the same script the Bush Administration followed in 2002, only with different Congressional committees as their dupes. Flash back again to the Autumn of 2002. Remember the confidential briefing reports distributed to members of key Congressional committees but kept from the American public, the briefings that convinced people like Hilary Rodham Clinton of the threat posed by Iraq and the necessity of giving Bush authorization to initiate a war? Last Friday, on multiple news channels, an ashen Senator Chris Dodd told financial reporters of the catastrophic horrors that Hank Paulson had premediated for Dodd's Senate Banking Committee. Thus Dodd and other Senate leaders seem convinced (including McCain and Obama) that to prevent this catastrophe from happening the Bush Administration needs to be authorized to wage a pre-emptive war against the threat of another Great Depression.

To its credit, the Times details the feeding frenzy under way on Wall Street, even posting photographs and identifications of ten white guys angling to turn the bailout into a profit-maker for their companies:

Naming names is a good start. But what really needs to happen is that we need to remind ourselves and our elected representatives of the mistakes that were made in October 2002, when the powerful premediation of another 9/11 persuaded the Congress to authorize a absolutely unnecessary and tremendously costly war in Iraq. Here we go again, as the Bush Administration, Congress, and the global news media all participate in the premediation of another Great Depression, with the aim of persuading the Congress to authorize what will amount undoubtedly to more than $1 trillion in bailouts which, like the war in Iraq, will help the corporate friends, supporters, and business partners of those in the government at the expense, once again, of the American people.

As W liked to say in frightening us into a war in Iraq, "Fool me once, shame on you--Fool me twice, shame on me."

I prefer Pete Townsend:

"Won't Get Fooled Again!"

We'll be fighting in the streets
With our children at our feet
And the morals that they worship will be gone
And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgement of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again

The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the foe, that' all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain't changed
'Cause the banners, they all flown in the next war

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
No, no!

I'll move myself and my family aside
If we happen to be left half alive
I'll get all my papers and smile at the sky
For I know that the hypnotized never lie

Do ya?

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

There's nothing in the street
Looks any different to me
And the slogans are replaced, by-the-bye
And the parking on the left
Is now the parking on the right
And the beards have all grown longer overnight

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around me
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again
Don't get fooled again
No, no!

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss

Feeding Frenzy on Wall Street!

2008-09-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

FRONT-PAGE HEADLINE, NEW YORK TIMES, SEPTEMBER 22, 2008:

"Big Financiers Start Lobbying for Wider Aid"

And on A20, where the article is continued:

"Big Financial Firms Start Lobbying, Seeking to Profit From Rescue Plan"

Wall Street refrain in re proposed Fed bailout:

"There's MONEY to be made!

There's MONEY to be MADE!

THERE'S MONNNEEEEY TO BE MAAAAAAADE!"

"Irresponsible" Bailout

2008-09-20T06:09:00.000-07:00

As a taxpayer who will have to help foot the bill for the massive bailout of our corrupt borrowing and lending system, I do not accept the fact that my family and I (and millions of other individuals and families who have been responsible economic citizens) should have to be responsible for rescuing other people and corporations from their irresponsible behavior. As Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson reminded us just yesterday, "we all know" that the economic crisis we find ourselves in is a direct result of "lax lending practices earlier this decade [that] led to irresponsible lending and irresponsible borrowing." Given that this is common knowledge, shouldn't those who have engaged in such "irresponsible lending and irresponsible borrowing" be forced to be responsible for their own actions?

Rather than begin by bailing out irresponsible corporations and individuals, the federal government should begin by protecting the investments of the millions of Americans who have behaved responsibly. Why not devote half a trillion dollars to insure the savings, insurance, and investments of those of us who did not participate in the frenzy of irresponsible borrowing, or those companies who did not lend irresponsibly? Once those who have behaved responsibly are protected, only then should the government turn towards bailing out those who, by acting so irresponsibly, have gotten the country into this mess in the first place?

I'm not an economist or a legislator, so I'm not certain how a principle like this might be put into place. But perhaps one place to start would be to protect individual worth up to a certain dollar amount per person, protecting those with the least rather than, as this bailout promises to do, those with the most?

Premediating Economic Recovery

2008-09-18T07:54:00.003-07:00

In what was arguably the most cynical speech yet in what has been arguably the most cynical campaign in the history of American presidential politics, John McCain took a page out of the Bush-Cheney playbook from the run-up to the Iraq War, attempting to premediate economic recovery under a McCain-Palin administration. In a speech scheduled at 9:00 AM EST (8:00 AM in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where McCain and Palin found themselves this morning), McCain provided his own analysis of the current economic crisis (blame Barack Obama) and premediated the way in which a McCain-Palin administration would solve the problem. McCain's speech attempted to premediate economic recovery in the following ways.

1. McCain's speech was scheduled in advance of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's scheduled 10:00 AM EST speech in which he was to announce a bipartisan agreement with Congressional leaders to establish a government-funded trust to secure the billions of dollars of failing mortgages that have led to the current financial crisis. Thus McCain's address pre-mediated Paulson's address, trying to present McCain as getting the jump on the crisis.

2. In his speech McCain proposed a Mortgage and Financial Institutions trust that would work similarly to the solution that Paulson was to describe, except that McCain's proposed MFI would aim to address economic crises before they happened, pre-mediating rather than re-mediating these crises.

3. The conclusion of McCain's speech was timed to coincide with the opening bell on Wall Street, where stocks were universally expected to open significantly higher this morning. The money shot for the speech was a split screen with McCain and the ritualistic ringing of the bell on the floor of the NYSE, which opened up nearly 400 points in less than 15 minutes. Because of this brilliant theatrical maneuver, McCain's economic speech pre-mediated a sharp rise in the DJIA, as if he was in some sense responsible for its rise.

Given the prominent role played by former Karl Rove operatives, it is no surprise to see the McCain campaign employ the strategies of premediation that worked to mobilize Congress and American public opinion to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These strategies, while powerful, may not have the same efficacy in a presidential campaign that they did when they were employed by a White House that could control the media landscape. The Obama campaign will contest these narratives point by point in a way that did not happen in the run-up to the Iraq War. If they are to be successful, however, they, too, will need to continue to employ their own premediation strategies, as they did so brilliantly in the primaries with their message of hope and change. These strategies must be coupled with aggressive attacks on the McCain campaign's message and McCain's record (and Palin's lack). But elections are about the future, and it is only by prevailing in the contest to premediate the next presidential administration that Obama and Biden can be sure that it is they, and not McPain, who will be inaugurated on 1/20/09.

The Rain in Spain is Raining on McCain

2008-09-18T07:54:00.002-07:00

I know that the liberal press and left-wing blogosphere is belitting John McCain for an interview with a Spanish-language radio station, Radio Caracol Miami, in which he apparently failed to realize that Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was the prime minister of Spain. McCain repeatedly answered quetions about his willingness to meet with Zapatero as if he was talking about a Latin American, not a European, leader. But, come on, be fair. McCain's interviewer, a woman, was speaking a heavily accented English. When, in her last attempt to get him to understand the question, she said that she was talking about Europe not Latin America, McCain can be heard to ask, "What? New York?" If this woman can't learn to pronounce English names in a manner that is clear enough for McCain to understand, is it fair to blame him? Even if Arizona shares a border with Mexico....

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/McCain_asked_if_he_would_invite_0918.html

Credit Crisis/National Debt

2008-09-18T07:54:00.001-07:00

As I watch CNBC report on the Fed's efforts to quadruple the amount of US$ available for foreign banks to lend to their borrowers hungry for dollars, I am reminded that the real crisis we face is not the price of securities but the credit crisis resulting in very large part from the sub-prime lending practices that proliferated during the past 8 years of Republican-controlled government. During these same 8 years, the Federal Budget has gone from having a surplus to having record deficits. The National Debt now stands at something over $9 trillion ($9,000,000,000,000).

This raises a question: to what extent is the Federal Government's voracious appetite for cash related to the current credit crisis? I'm no economist, but I can't help believe that there must be a connection. And if there is, then shouldn't this be part of the message that the Obama/Biden campaign needs to be communicating to the American people?

My 2 cents--cash on the barrel.

Is Recession Possible in a Networked Global Economy?

2008-09-17T04:43:00.000-07:00

In a front-page article in today's New York Times, David Leonhardt notes that, "just as at the start of the summer, economists can't even agree whether the country is in a recession."

On the face of it this is a stunningly absurd comment. American industry continues to lay off thousands of employees, fuel costs are way up even as the speculative rise of oil prices has for the moment reversed itself, major financial companies are collapsing or being bought out by the federal government. And economists can't decide if we're in a recession??? Maybe they can ask John McCain to set up a commission!

But in thinking about the idea of a recession, I wonder if perhaps this model no longer makes sense in a networked global economy fueled by financial theories and practices only made possible by the computations enabled by digital computing. The metaphors of inflation, recession, and depression are based on an analog model of the economy, of the economy as a physical, even an organic, system. Do these metaphors make sense for today's economy?

Perhaps it would make more sense to think about the success or failure of today's economy in different terms, on the basis of models of networked connectivity and robustness. The collapse of Fannie and Freddie, of Lehman Brothers or AIG--should we think of these as server crashes, as losses of connectivity, of a narrowing of broadbands of commerce and communication? In a networked digital model, servers can crash and traffic can be re-routed. One site may be down but other sites might continue to operate.

I'm not an economist--I'm just a media theorist who follows the news and thinks about things. So I am hardly in a position to explain what the implications would be of shifting the metaphors through which economists think about the economy. But there is one thing I am in a position to say and one thing I want to make clear. In suggesting that recession might no longer be possible in a networked global economy I do not mean to minimize the damage and pain caused by our current economic crisis. Rather I mean the reverse.

Whether the economy can best be understood in analog or digital terms, it is clear that server crashes or network disruptions or other economic troubles cause real human pain. In suggesting that the metaphors of inflation, recession, or growth might no longer be applicable to a networked digital economy I do not mean to minimize the destruction that the current formation of global capitalism has caused to our planet and its human and nonhuman inhabitants, but rather to suggest that by sticking to these outmoded analog metaphors, economists seem more like scholastic arguing about how many angels you can get on the head of a pin than they do like experts or authorities able to help us move forward through what are unarguably the worst economic times this country has seen since the Great Depression.

Cell Phone Anointing Miracle

2008-09-15T12:12:00.000-07:00

Below is video of Day 9 of a "Holy Spirit Awakening" that happened in May 2008 at MorningStar Fellowship Church in Fort Mill, SC. This church is affiliated with Sarah Palin's home church in Wasilla. But what is of particular interest for media theory is the way in which this spiritual awakening avails itself of premediated cell phone networks to spread the spirit of God and accompanying miracles. Apparently similar miracles have been reported from people watching the webstream of MorningStar church services.

For more on Sarah Palin's connections to MorningStar and the "Third Wave/New Apostolic Reformation" movement, see this article by Bruce Wilson.

"Kill, Kill, Kill"/ "BYE BYE, BLING": On the Superiority of Print

2008-09-14T10:33:00.000-07:00

Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer both commented on the cultural significance of the daily or weekly illustrated newspaper, whose juxtapositions of text, photography, and advertisements provided unprecedented insights into the contradictions of modernity. A single page in today's national edition of the New York Times provides an example of the largely unconscious revelations available in print newspapers, revelations that are not visible, or non-existent, in the online edition of the Times.

Page 11 of the September 14, 2008, National Edition features articles with three headlines containing the word "kill," each of which reports on political violence in a different part of the Middle East.

1. "Palestinian Is Killed In a Clash With Israelis."

2. "Bomb Kills 8 Kurdish Soldiers, Inflaming an Iraqi Regional Dispute."

3. "A Bomb Blast Near Kabul Kills an Afghan Governor and 3 Others."

The first two headlines are at the top of the page; the third is just below the fold. Above the fold (and thus above the third headline) is the following photograph, which accompanies the third article:

While the juxtaposition of three headlines of political violence in the Middle East with a graphic photograph of the wreckage of a car in which a provincial Afghan governor was killed by a suicide bomber is unsettling enough to encounter over a cup of Sunday morning coffee, the truly disturbing juxtaposition involves the advertisement that anchors the bottom third of the page.

A photograph of a large graduated diamond necklace on the right side of the ad accompanies the following text, in large caps: "BYE BYE BLING, HELLO POSSIBILITIES" The ad, for a company called CIRCA, is not selling the necklace, but offering to buy it. The text of the ad, in much smaller print, reads as follows: "You never imagined letting go of something could be so rewarding. As the only international jewelry buying house, CIRCA understands. We give you power to transform yesterday's trinkets into tomorrow's treasures instantly. Impeccable service and knowledgeable staff; with unprecedented pricing, CIRCA knows Change is Good."

One hardly knows where to begin. Underneath the photograph of an Afghan man grieving over his dead relative, we read of how rewarding it is to let something go: BYE BYE BLING, HELLO POSSIBILITIES. A diamond necklace worth tens of thousands of dollars is characterized as "yesterday's trinket." It would not be unreasonable to imagine that the circumstances that might put one in position to want to sell such a "trinket" could even be the death of a relative whose "trinket" it was. "You never imagined letting go of something could be so rewarding." And then the coup de grace of the final line, which remediates John McCain's remediation of Barack Obama's campaign slogan: "Change is Good."

To think seriously about this newspaper page is to think seriously about the possibility that the United States of America has gone insane. That such obscene juxtapositions go unnoticed by those responsible for the layout of the Sunday Times, that the American public encounters without noticing such obscene incongruities as a matter of course on an everyday basis, cannot be dismissed as insignificant. As Benjamin and Kracauer knew, the media formation of the illustrated print newspaper provided what Kracauer in a different context characterized as an ornament of mass culture. But as print newspapers are increasingly giving way to online versions, we need to ask, in the words of the CIRCA ad, if letting go of print newspapers is indeed so rewarding.

For readers of the New York Times online, these juxtapositions would be invisible. The three articles on page 11 appear in a list of clickable headlines on the "International" page of the online times. The photograph of the bombed-out car and the grieving relative is visible only if one clicks on the article about the Afghan bomb blast. And the CIRCA ad is nowhere to be found. What are the effects of this difference in the Times reader's experience?

To read the Times online is to be protected from the shock of these unintended juxtapositions. Maybe this is a good thing. One doesn't need to be hammered with the juxtaposition of three headlines about killing in the Middle East. One doesn't have to be assaulted by graphic photographs one doesn't choose to know about. One doesn't need to be exposed to the hyper-capitalism of newspaper advertising. As the CIRCA ad insists, maybe letting go of yesterday's media formation of the print newspaper has indeed let us transform the online newspaper into tomorrow's treasure.

Or maybe not. Maybe something important is lost by the disappearance of these unintended juxtapositions. Maybe it is important for us to be exposed to images that we might not choose to see, to be kept appraised of advertisements for products or services or points of view we may not be aware of or do not agree with. While technophiles and marketing gurus have for the past two decades touted the glories of the customized consumer experiences made possible by networked digital media, maybe such customization is responsible for the fragmentation of our politics and society at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

As I have argued elsewhere, in the years following the events of 9/11 print, televisual, and networked media have been increasingly preoccupied with pre-mediating the future so that the American public will not again have to experience the shock of a traumatic surprise like that they faced on September 11, 2001. The print newspaper is a media formation that predates that shock and that persists beyond it. Although the print newspaper reading public continues to dwindle in the face of digital newspaper formats, juxtapositions like those on page 11 of the September 14, 2008, Sunday Times provide perhaps the strongest argument why such "trinkets" should not be disposed of so quickly.

Hurricane Ike, Premediation, and Extreme TV

2008-09-12T08:10:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post I noted that hurricanes provide exemplary opportunities for premediation by especially televisual news media. The lengthy period leading up to landfall provides for numerous opportunities to premediate future catastrophic events--evacuation, flooding, wind damage, looting, death, property damage, etc. In the case of Hurricane Ike, this includes some interesting narratives about the impact on oil prices and potential oil shortages resulting from the disruption of oil refining in the Gulf and in the Gulf Coast states. In fact CNN reports how cars are lining up at gas stations as far away as South Carolina, not in response to shortages that have already occured but in anticipation of shortages that are being premediated on TV.

CNN's 24/7 coverage of the impending landfall of Hurricane Ike provides another interesting example of the form this premediation takes. On Friday, September 12, its ongoing coverage is being called "Extreme Weather"--presented as CNN's version of one of the newest televisual genres, "Extreme TV." Epitomized by recent shows like Ice Road Truckers or The Deadliest Catch, extreme TV will be coming soon to the major networks as well. What is interesting about CNN's coverage is that it not only remediates the concept of extreme TV, but its reporters on-site can be seen to remediate the formats of these shows as well, providing media coverage of extreme situations that are unavailable to the average viewer. For example, CNN has set up its operation on-site at a Holiday Inn Express that has been evacuated; the CNN reporter bravely tells viewers that the management turned over the keys to the CNN crew. Where the public and the property owners have evacuated, CNN presents its extreme weather coverage.

CNN's "Extreme Weather" is only the latest example of a long line of news events that have been treated as if they were episodes of an ongling television series or mini-series. As with other such examples, this is but the latest evidence of the ways in which news media continue to shift their focus from reporting on the present or recent past to premediating the future. Even when they do report on what is happening live, as in the run-up to Hurricane Ike's landfall, they do so within a premediated format, in this case that of extreme TV. Indeed the arrival of Hurricane season has become almost as regular and predictable as the arrival of football season. And the premediated formats through which it is presented to the public on the Weather Channel and the various cable news networks have now become nearly as conventionalized and regulated as those that can be found on networks like ESPN and other major sports networks.

Virtually Sarah Palin

2008-09-12T06:44:00.000-07:00

Much energy on behalf of Democratic operatives and liberal bloggers has gone into the effort to discover and make public "the real Sarah Palin." What this effort has failed to understand is that the real Sarah Palin is virtual: Sarah Palin is the first virtual candidate for the vice-presidency.

The search for the real Sarah Palin has operated on a variety of different fronts, in every case with the aim of making the American public aware of Palin's true positions on domestic, local, national, and international issues. Networked, print, and televisual media have spent the past two weeks engaged in the enterprise of exposing contradictions and inconsistencies between her past positions and her campaign stump speech. Scores of investigators have devoted themselves to digging up dirt from her personal life that would challenge the "hockey mom" narrative of a socially conservative mother of five turned governor of the largest state in the nation.

Unsurprisingly, in light of the media anonymity in which the first-term governor of Alaska has lived and governed, all of these efforts have born fruit. The media has presented us with "Troopergate," the ethics probe into Governor Palin's alleged firing of a state employee for failing to fire her ex-brother-in-law, an Alaska state trooper. We've learned that the repeated assertion in Palin's and John McCain's stump speeches that Palin opposes earmarks, particularly the infamous "bridge to nowhere" is a lie--Palin campaigned in support of the bridge and took the over $200 million of earmark money designated for the bridge and spent it on other Alaska projects. The media has exposed Palin's questionable decision to claim "per diem" travel money for choosing to live at home rather than in the governor's residence in Juneau. And we've heard numerous allegations about Palin and her family: that Palin's daughter is the real mother of Trig Palin; that Sarah Palin had an affair with her husband's business partner; that Track Palin, her 18-year-old son who has been lionized for his decision to join the military and his deployment to Iraq, is a drug-addicted thug, whose Oxycontin abuse was but one of the reasons his parents pressured him to enlist. And the list of verified and alleged facts and contradictions goes on.

But all of these efforts to uncover the real Sarah Palin miss the point. Palin is a virtual candidate, whose role in the campaign is to generate support for and increase the intensity of the McCain campaign by providing a source of potentiality and possibility onto which voters and the media can project their own beliefs and desires. This virtual candidacy works by intensifying the affect of both McCain and Obama supporters, for whom the reality of Sarah Palin means and feels quite differently, and mobilizes and amplifies different premediated networks of practices, behaviors, and beliefs.

This virtuality is epitomized in the brilliant way in which the McCain campaign has introduced Sarah Palin to the American media public. For the first two weeks after the announcement of her selection she has been off-limits to the media, who have been prevented from interviewing her, from trying to determine what she really thinks, what her real capabilities are, how she thinks. The McCain campaign has made her available through the narrative of the Republican Convention and through her joint campaign appearances with McCain, where she has repeated a series of lines drawn from or based upon her acceptance speech. Both mainstream and participatory media have had to define her through her mediated traces on print, televisual, and networked media--videos, newspaper and magazine articles, political records, and so forth. A viral email from Ann Kilkenny, an Alaskan neighbor of Palin, epitomizes the way in which the search for the real Sarah Palin has proceeded.

After two weeks, however, Palin has finally been allowed to be interviewed by Charles Gibson, the ABC News anchor. After the first night of a multi-part interview, the news about the real Sarah Palin is that she doesn't know what the Bush Doctrine is (the declaration in September 2002 that the US has the right to engage in preemptive warfare) and that she is equivocating about her earlier proclamation that global warming was not the result of human causes. Although in subsequent interviews it is likely that we will learn more about "the real Sarah Palin," the McCain campaign has staged these interviews to allow them to continue to mobilize the virtual Palin.

Look at the interview structure, which is scheduled to take place over two days at different Alaskan locations. On the first day Gibson interviewed Palin in two locations, sitting down inside somewhere and walking outdoors near a section of the Alaskan oil pipeline. Why these two different sites? So that the McCain campaign can benefit from two different manifestations of the virtual Palin to determine how to deploy her in future media events, to allow different elements of their supporters to realize different aspects of Palin's virtuality. This virtuality, it is important to emphasize has affective and bodily affordances. How does Palin impact viewers while sitting across from Gibson, with her business skirt lying across her crossed legs above the knees? What is the effect of her strolling with Gibson, showing him the technologized Alaskan landscape like a landed woman showing off her estate? And of course, these different settings provide different video formats to be remediated in different media formations--on the campaign website, on TV ads, on networked print, televisual, and networked news. Furthermore, the multi-day format gives the McCain/Palin campaign the chance to recalibrate her message both in terms of its content and in terms of its affective qualities. The ABC interview should not be understood as the first opportunity for the media to present the public with the real Sarah Palin, but rather the latest opportunity for the premediation of the virtual Sarah Palin. This interview is less about what Palin has done or said, about what Palin knows, than it is about how Palin will be remediated by the McCain campaign and the media themselves in the less than two month before the 2008 election.

In focusing on what Palin really thinks or knows or believes or has done (on Sunday, CNN will present Joe Biden and Sarah Palin "revealed"), the media will continue to fail to recognize the way in which what she brings to the McCain campaign is her virtuality, not her reality, and that the search for the real Sarah Palin will do little or nothing to reduce the intensity of support that she brings to the Republican ticket. The same is true of the Obama campaign. Rather than continue to deploy their considerable resources on uncovering and exposing the real Sarah Palin, the Obama campaign needs to figure out how to reduce or redirect the affective intensity that the virtual Sarah Palin has brought to the presidential race, which can only be done by recognizing that it is precisely this virtuality that has brought Obama himself to the position he is in.

To spend time responding or reacting to what Palin has said is to misunderstand what she brings to the McCain campaign, is like trying to catch a sunbeam or a soap bubble The election of 2008, more intensively than any prior presidential election, hinges on the respective campaigns' abilities to premediate their candidates' (and the American people's) potentialities and virtuality rather than to present the most convincing case about the candidates' solutions to the realities of the global geopolitical situation that faces us today. Or more precisely, the result hinges on convincing the public of the potentiality of the candidates to deal with the realities of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Obama vs. McCain: Social Networking vs. Reality TV

2008-09-06T08:40:00.000-07:00

John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate has been described in the media as a "game changer"--a decision that helps to clarify the sharp differences between the two candidates. What hasn't been recognized is the way in which the selection of Sarah Palin has framed the upcoming election as a battle between two different 21st-century media formations--social networking and reality TV.

Common wisdom has it that Barack Obama's victory over Hillary Clinton was due in large part to his campaign's technologically savvy deployment of social networking media to recruit supporters and register voters, raise money, and engage a swarm or "smart mob" of millions of volunteer activists in getting out the message and the primary vote. The build-up to Obama's vice-presidential choice, culminating in the announcement of Joe Biden via text-messaging, epitomized the bottom-up new media technologies that the Obama campaign has used to systematically remediate late 20th-century practices of presidential campaigning.

McCain's campaign, by contrast, has been criticized for failing to employ the internet and other new networked technologies to empower its supporters. As a self-avowed technological illiterate, McCain has failed to capitalize on social networking technologies to expand and mobilize his base. As a 21st-century man, however, McCain is not innocent of new media formations. He is reportedly addicted to his cellphone, to the point that his advisers have, like parents of a misbehaving teenager, had to restrict his usage of this new media technology.

While Obama employs the texting capabilities of cellphones as part of his social networking campaign, McCain uses the cellphone strictly for one-on-one interpersonal communication. The selection of Sarah Palin, however, reveals that it would be a mistake to dismiss McCain as someone who is unable to use new media formations in the service of his campaign. Her surprise selection, which elevated a woman virtually unknown to the US media audience to the overnight media celebrity of the Republican vice-presidential nominee, remediates the structure of reality TV shows that are also significant parts of our contemporary televisual media environment. The intensity of feeling surrounding the selection of Sarah Palin, manifested in the explosion of emotional commentary throughout the blogosphere, is virtually identical to the way in which the virtues and vices of reality TV contestants are debated on the internet by avid fans. Although many of us have been amazed to see how someone who was unknown to the American media public ten days ago can inspire such intense and widespread support (and criticism), this kind of public fan reaction has been premediated for more than a decade by the emergence of reality TV as arguably the dominant genre of serialized television in the first decade of the 21st century.

In some sense, one might want to frame this contest of media formations as a battle between past and present, old and new--a battle that mirrors the contrast between McCain and Obama. But this too would be a mistake. Sarah Palin's youthfulness reminds us that history works unevenly and is not in any strict sense progressive. Broadcast media have not been superseded by networked media--social networking has not eliminated other more top-down forms of collectivity. New technologies do not determine new media or social formations even if they enable new possibilities that could not have been actualized in the same way in other technological regimes.

The outcome of the 2008 presidential election will not determine which of these competing new media formations--social networking or reality TV--prevails in the future. Nor will the outcome be determined by which media formation is more powerful in contemporary American culture. But one thing is certain: the outcome of the 2008 presidential election will be impacted as much by the efficacy of competing media formations as it will by the differences between policy formations and party platforms.

Premediating Gustav, Remediating Katrina

2008-09-02T06:48:00.001-07:00

Hurricanes are arguably the epitome of premediated news events. News coverage consists of a week or more of build-up as they are tracked from their emergence as tropical depressions in the Atlantic to their development into tropical storms and then finally their arrival as actual hurricanes headed towards landfall in the Gulf of Mexico or the Eastern seaboard of the US. In the run-up to landfall (or sometimes the turn away to the open seas), global print, televisual, and networked media coverage focuses exclusively on the virtual, premediating possible future paths along with the death, damage, and destruction that might lie ahead. More than any other natural disaster, hurricanes provide ample evidence that news media today are focused as much on the virtuality of the future as they are on the actuality of the present or recent past.

Hurricane Gustav proved particularly susceptible to premediation, both because it appeared headed directly towards New Orleans and because it appeared that its landfall would coincide with the beginning of the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul. Not only were news reporters preoccupied with questions about how New Orleans would withstand its second major hurricane in three years and how well the Bush administration would be prepared to deal with this hurricane, but political reporters found themselves addressing the question of how the hurricane headed for the mouth of the Mississippi would impact the Republican convention being held near its source.

This impact, of course, would not be a result of wind or storm surge or rain or tornadoes, but rather of media coverage. How would it look for the Republicans to be celebrating and attacking their Democratic opponents if New Orleans was once again flooded by broken levees and people were seen stranded, or worse dying, in Gustav's wake? Perhaps equally important, how much media coverage would the Republicans receive in the face of another Katrina-like disaster? When the first day of the Republican Convention was dramatically truncated in anticipation of Gustav's landfall on Monday morning, it was a clear example of how premediation of a hurricane could have an impact not unlike a hurricane itself, how the virtual Gustav could have a real impact on thousands of delegates, convention support people, transportation and communication networks, and of course the media themselves.

Gustav was particularly interesting because its premediation inevitably entailed the re-mediation of Katrina. Not only was Gustav's trajectory and intensity compared to Katrina's, but the response of local, state, and federal governments was measured against what had happened three years ago to the week. This remediation took many forms. It was a formal remediation in that the modes of coverage (maps, weather reporters, hurricane graphics, etc.) were similar to those of Katrina or most other hurricanes. It was a remediation as well of the political practices of evacuation and storm preparation that occurred prior to Katrina. But it was also a remediation in the sense that remediation involves the notion that new media forms mark improvements of older media forms, or remedies of past defects. This was most evident in the coverage of the rebuilt and reinforced levees, the new evacuation procedures, the enhanced generators at Tulane's hospital, and the preparations made by FEMA and the federal government.

Finally Gustav offered the Bush administration something of a "do-over," a chance to prove that it had learned the lessons of Katrina, that it had remediated its own approach to natural disasters. It also offered John McCain a chance to remediate his and Bush's response to Katrina by flying to the Gulf Coast with his vice-presidential selection, Sarah Palin, in advance of the hurricane's arrival, to demonstrate that he would be a president who could take charge in situations like this. And in cutting short the convention in advance of Gustav's landfall, he could underscore his claim to be concerned more with the welfare of the nation than with his own political ambitions. McCain himself sought to premediate his own presidential behavior through the remediation of Bush's belated and feeble response to Katrina.

As often happens in the case of premediation and virtuality, the real often emerges in ways quite different from its prior mediations. Gustav struck only a glancing blow. Sarah Palin, rather than demonstrating her heroism in the hurricane ended up disclosing her daughter's pregnancy and hiring an attorney to defend her in ethics charges in her home state. And George W. Bush, in his first statement after Gustav's landfall to the west of New Orleans, emphasized the importance of what we did after the hurricane struck, underscoring the need to make sure that the energy infrastructure of the Gulf oil industries was intact and urging the Congress to enact legislation opening offshore oilfields for immediate drilling. The Bush administration fails once again to remediate itself, preferring, as in the run-up to the Iraq War and the War Against Terror more broadly, the premediation of the future to the remediation of the present or recent past.

Premediating Obama's VP

2008-08-22T14:39:00.001-07:00

The run-up to Obama's announcement of his VP choice is an exemplary instance of premediation at work. As I have elsewhere defined it, premediation involves the cultural desire to mediate the future before it happens. Intensifying since the events of 9/11, premediation describes the predominant media formation of the first decade of the 21st century. Premediation not only entails the incessant remediation of future events (Obama's announcement of his VP) but also entails the desire that no future event emerge that had not already been pre-mediated. It operates in part by the proliferation of media technologies, so that there appears to be no possibility of anything happening that is not instantly (or has not already been) remediated.

In the weeks leading up to the selection of Obama's VP, print, televisual, and online media have tirelessly previewed the possible candidates--ad nauseum for most of us. As the Democratic Convention approaches, these media reports have proliferated exponentially--to the point that beginning Thursday evening before the convention (August 21), CNN has had cameras outside the houses of the three presumed finalists (Bayh, Biden, and Kaine) as well as on Friday afternoon Midway airport, from where Obama would be expected to fly to Springfield for the Saturday afternoon event that has been assumed to be the place/time of the first joint appearance of Obama and his VP pick.

Of course, the Obama camp has itself engaged in premediation--particularly in their announcement that the first news of the choice would be sent to supporters via text-messaging. This plan is of course a brilliant ploy to add tens of thousands or more cellphone numbers to the campaign database, but it also participates in a logic of premediation in which the announcement is dependent upon a pre-mediated social network of telecommunication technologies.

Since 9/11 the predominant orientation of print, televisual, and online media has been toward the future. Where news media have historically aimed at the mediation of the very recent past, and then more recently of the live, immediate present, today we see the focus to be predominantly on the future. This has, of course, been always true of election coverage to a great extent, but ever since 9/11 all events have been treated as if they were elections.