tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40277981584422868062024-03-13T14:27:49.121-07:00Premediationin which i attempt to think through the concept of premediation on the flyRichard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.comBlogger90125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-15358726765116273682020-11-11T13:22:00.002-08:002020-11-11T13:27:01.963-08:00Recipe for a Coup<p>Prior to the November 3 election, Donald Trump and GOP senators stressed
the urgency of putting Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court as soon
as possible because there was a good chance that the presidential
election would be decided there. And it still might. But it will not be a
replay of 2000, when SCOTUS ruled that the Florida recount should be
stopped and George W. Bush won the presidency by 537 votes. <br /><br />Biden’s
putative Electoral College lead and his margin in each of the five
closest state races are too large to be overturned. But the 2020
presidential election might still be decided in the courts. The issue,
however, will not involve recounting or disqualifying votes, but rather
the legality of state legislatures voting to go against their state’s
popular votes in appointing their state’s electors.<br /><br />Let me explain how the GOP might try to make this go down.<br /><br />There
are five states with Republican-controlled legislatures in which Biden
will have won the popular vote—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania,
and Wisconsin. If Trump and his allies were somehow able to persuade
any four of those five legislatures to appoint Trump rather than Biden
electors, Trump would win the Electoral College and the presidency.
Clearly this would be a stretch, but it is probably the best bet that
Trump and the Republican Party have outside of declaring martial law.
And it is an option that has widely been reported to have been floated
by Republican partisans in the weeks before November 3.<br /><br />According
to Article II of the US Constitution, the authority to appoint Elctors
resides in State Legislatures: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner
as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to
the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may
be entitled in the Congress.” Since 1836, tradition and precedent have
consistently resulted in Electors being appointed according to popular
vote. Although the president is not elected by the people, Electors
historically have been, as we have seen most recently in 2016.<br /><br />But
what would prevent individual legislatures in those five states from
doing otherwise? If four of these state legislatures voted to appoint
Trump rather than Biden Electors, Trump would reach the coveted 270 mark
and be re-elected by the Electoral College. Whether such rogue
appointments would withstand the legal challenge of Biden and the
Democrats would need to be decided in court. Such a move by the GOP
seems to be the most likely way for the Supreme Court to decide the 2020
presidential election as Trumpublicans had predicted. <br /><br />Let me be clear: this would not be a matter of what are
called “faithless electors,” defined as those who pledged to vote for
one candidate but decide to vote otherwise. The strategy I’m sketching
out does not involve faithless electors, but rather state legislatures
appointing electors who have already pledged to vote for Trump. Three of
these five states (all but Georgia and Pennsylvania) outlaw faithless
electors. But if Biden holds his significant leads in all five of these
states, as it appears he will, Georgia and Pennsylvania would not be
sufficient to give Trump the presidency. <br /><br />Nor does this strategy
involve Bill Barr’s Justice Department digging up enough evidence to
invalidate Biden’s election in court. The reason Barr recently
authorized investigations into voter fraud is the same reason that
McConnell’s Senate Republicans have been all over national news media
supporting Trump’s vague but loud claims of election fraud, and
Secretary of Defense Mike Pompeo has assured reporters that there would
be a smooth transition in January to “a second Trump administration.”
Through the creation of clouds of ungrounded suspicion, Trumpublicans
seek to use print, televisual, and socially networked news media to
infuence enough elected Republican officials in these five states to
appoint Trump instead of Biden electors.<br /><br />It is important to
remember that such influence does not depend on legislatures or news
media meeting legal standards of evidence. Trump’s affective politics
operate not in the legal sphere but in the mediasphere. He weaponizes
Twitter and TV to generate and intensify the shared sense among his
followers that all of them, especially Trump, have been aggrieved by
Democrats and the news media working together to stop him and them from
their rightful victory. <br /><br />As Sarah Ahmed has taught us, affective
communities of hate emerge through the alignment of white supremacist
subjects with the nation (in this case their president). By intensifying
affective states of hate and fear, Trumpublicans will try to move their
legislative allies to act on their behalf. (And if you doubt whether
Republican legislatures would stoop to such measures, I encourage you to
revisit the lame-duck Republican legislation passed in North Carolina
in 2016 and Wisconin in 2018 to severely limit the powers of those
states’ newly elected Democratic governors before they were
inaugurated.) <br /><br />Admittedly, the chance of something like this
succeeding remain slim. But it is not impossible. Short of invoking the
Insurrection Act and declaring martial law to prevent Biden from
assuming the presidency, persuading four of these five states to appoint
Trump electors may be the most likely way for the 2020 presidential
election to be decided in the Supreme Court, as Trump, McConnell, and
others have assured us it would be. In the highest court of the land,
law, evidence, and precedent are supposed to prevail. And if things were
to get that far, let’s hope that they will prevail, for the sake of
this nation’s democracy, and perhaps for the world. </p>Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-50283868383552898912016-11-14T07:55:00.002-08:002016-11-14T08:12:51.824-08:00Premediation as Normalization: The New York Times and "President-Elect Donald Trump"In less than a week since the 2016 presidential election, the New York Times website counts over 300 uses of the phrase "President-Elect Donald [J.] Trump." The effect of this constant repetition of the phrase is to normalize his election, prompting a kind of affectivity of numbness and a sense of inevitability and legitimacy to him and his presidency.<br />
<br />
There is a kind of sycophantic quality to this close attentiveness to Trump's every move, even in those cases where the Times is critical of his actions. It is the quotidian mediality of these usages, their weaving into the fabric of our media everyday, that has brought the US to this place we are now in, that have made Trump seem like a credible presidential candidate (and soon president) despite the editorial content of the Times and other media outlets.<br />
<br />
Another way to put it, borrowing a distinction from J. L. Austin, is that these apparently constative speech acts, which seem only to describe or assert matters of fact, have a powerful performative function as well, in reiterating and legitimating the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, implicitly premediating both the vote of the Electoral College and his inauguration.<br />
<br />
In saying this I am not making a claim that The New York Times is doing anything different from what they did when, for example, Barack Obama was elected in 2008. In fact, I am making the opposite point: that they are doing for Trump precisely what they would do for any president-elect.<br />
<br />
By premediating a Trump presidency as if there was nothing extraordinary about it, The New York Times is in effect producing a counter-affect to the "not my president" protests that have been going on with increasing intensity since Wednesday and that will continue to intensify up to and perhaps beyond the moment when The New York Times silently and almost without notice shifts its everyday utterances from "President-elect Donald [J.] Trump" to "President Trump."<br />
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<br /></div>
Here is a small curated sampling of those performative utterances by The New York Times.<br />
<br />
**********************************************<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Wednesday, November 9</b><br />
<br />
“President-elect Donald J. Trump and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada will need to work together despite vast differences on climate change, trade and migrants.”<br />
<br />
“U.S. President-elect Donald Trump should stay committed to the international nuclear deal with Iran, Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency on Wednesday.”<br />
<br />
“President-elect Donald Trump's victory Tuesday has prompted embattled pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli (SHKREL'-ee) to publicly debut some songs off the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album he bought for $2 million last year.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Thursday, November 10</b><br />
<br />
“President-elect Donald Trump is strongly considering naming his campaign chief Steve Bannon to serve as White House chief of staff, CNN reported on Thursday, citing a source with knowledge of the situation.”<br />
<br />
“Advisers to president-elect Donald Trump have considered the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase for Treasury secretary, reports Kate Kelly of CNBC.”<br />
<br />
“Aides to President-elect Donald Trump are considering Republican Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas as a candidate for Treasury secretary, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Friday, November 11</b><br />
<br />
“U.S. President-elect Donald Trump is considering outgoing Senator Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire for the post of defense secretary, the Washington Post reported on Friday, citing two sources familiar with the discussions.<br />
<br />
“President-elect Donald J. Trump said Friday that he was likely to abandon the American effort to support ‘moderate’ opposition groups in Syria who are battling the government of President Bashar al-Assad, saying ‘we have no idea who these people are.’”<br />
<br />
“President-elect Donald Trump told the Wall Street Journal he is considering retaining parts of President Barack Obama's healthcare law including provisions letting parents keep adult children up to age 26 on insurance policies and barring insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Saturday, November 12</b><br />
<br />
“Even as President-elect Donald J. Trump vows to unify a divided nation, he faces a momentous decision over whether to make good on his oft-repeated campaign pledge to have a special prosecutor ‘lock up’ Hillary Clinton.”<br />
<br />
“President-elect Donald Trump's policies are likely to make it harder for developing nations to obtain the growing finance they need to combat climate change, threatening one pillar of a 2015 international agreement to slow global warming.”<br />
<br />
“President-elect Donald Trump has said he may keep some parts of his predecessor's signature health care overhaul. “<br />
<br />
<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Sunday, November 13</b><br />
<br />
“President-elect Donald Trump is seeking quick ways to withdraw the United States from a global accord to combat climate change, a source on his transition team said, defying broad international backing for the plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions.”<br />
<br />
“President-elect Donald J. Trump appeared to soften some of his hardest-line campaign positions on immigration on Sunday, but he also restated his pledge to roll back abortion rights and used Twitter to lash out at his critics, leaving open the possibility that he would continue using social media in the Oval Office and radically change the way presidents speak to Americans.”<br />
<br />
“U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has requested that a trial over a lawsuit by former students of his now-defunct Trump University be put on hold until after the presidential inauguration, according to a motion filed by his lawyer late Saturday.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Monday. November 14</b><br />
<br />
“President-elect Donald J. Trump has suggested he will end support, which some groups hope would encourage Saudi Arabia and Turkey to provide more sophisticated weapons.”<br />
<br />
“President-elect Donald Trump is considering oil billionaire Harold Hamm and North Dakota Rep. Kevin Cramer to lead the Department of Energy.”<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-7904505132470878312015-08-19T11:37:00.000-07:002015-08-19T11:38:01.396-07:00"Radical Mediation" (from Secret Life of Objects: Media Ecologies, São Paulo, August 3, 2015)[NB: This is the text of the talk I gave in São Paulo on Aug 3 at The Secret Life of Objects: Media Ecologies. The middle section of the talk is crudely drawn from "Radical Mediation," which is forthcoming in the Fall 2015 <i>Critical Inquiry</i>.]<br />
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b>1. The Secret Life of Mediation<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Three
Augusts ago, Erick Felinto and his collaborators staged a conference called
“The Secret Life of Objects: Materialities, Medialities, Temporalities.” A traveling circus disguised as a movable
feast, the conference featured different permutations of speakers in São Paulo,
Rio, Salvador, and Fortaleza. This year’s conference in São Paulo and Rio is
something of a sequel. The first conference was conceived and executed in
response to the rapid inflation of the theoretical bubble known as “speculative
realism” or “object-oriented ontology” (SR/OOO). “Secret Life of Objects-1” put
speculative realism in dialogue with media theory, particularly German media
theory, for the Brazilian academic public. It was no accident that Graham
Harman and Siegfried Zielinski were the only two scholars to speak in all four
cities, squaring off (though not really) in a scholarly remediation of King Kong vs. Godzilla. Other non-Brazilian speakers included Bruno
Latour, Steve Shaviro, Joachim Paech, and Sybille Krämer. I spoke in three
of the four cities as well; and as the only non-Brazilian speaker from the
first conference to be speaking at this one, I want to open my talk today by revisiting
the lecture Graham Harman gave in Rio in 2012.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Harman addressed
the conference theme by taking the secret life of objects to refer to his own position
that objects can never make contact, that all objects “withdraw” from
contact. He unfolded his argument
through a reading of Eric and Marshall McLuhan’s “Laws of Media,” reading Marshall
McLuhan’s famous slogan, “the medium is the message,” as a statement about
figure and ground. For Harman, McLuhan’s famous formulation insists that the
ground (the medium), not the figure (the message), is where the action is, unsurprisingly
echoing Harman’s claim about the withdrawn object (ground), in contrast to its
sensible or other qualities (figure). McLuhan provides Harman a way to argue
that objects are media, and that media, like objects, withdraw from contact
with either human subjects or other objects. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Throughout his
lecture, as in much of his published work, Harman spoke of different kinds of
contact, like direct, total, or partial.
I begin with his ideas about contact, particularly his claim that objects
(human or nonhuman) never come into contact with one another or can at best only
come into “partial contact,” in part because I have difficulty accepting, or
even finally understanding, what he means by direct or total contact, and why
he places so much pressure on whether contact is total or partial. Indeed contact seems to me to be the very
state of things for embodied or material humans and nonhumans. Are we ever in complete contact with every
aspect or quality or essence or being of other objects? I’m not even sure what this would mean. With
Merleau-Ponty, however, I believe that we are always immediately in contact within
and through our bodies with other animate and inanimate creatures and entities
that occupy, traverse, and make up what William James calls the pluriverse.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
One problem I have
with Harman’s formulation is that he consistently treats contact (and
causation, which for him is connected logically and directly with contact) as
unidirectional. This unidirectionality
in thinking about contact and causality was evident when in answer to a
question from the audience he offered the example of touching another’s hand to
point out that one never touches the hand in its entirety, that one is never in
total contact with another’s hand.
Harman contended that it may be that one touches the epidermis, but what
of blood vessels, bones, tendons, nerves, ligaments, muscles, and so forth? First, it is not clear why one would need to
touch all of these things to be touching another person’s hand, or that the hand
is reducible to these constitutent elements. But more tellingly, the problem
with this example is that contact is seen as a fundamentally unidirectional interaction. Harman poses the question of contact in terms
of one person touching another’s hand rather than two hands (or two people)
touching one another, because he fails to think of contact going in more than
one direction at once, or to take seriously the idea that contact can be found
in the interaction, mutuality, or multidimensionality of agency and causation. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
This unidirectionality
is crucial to Harman’s paradigmatic example of fire burning cotton, which he
borrows from the Occasionalists of medieval Islamic philosophy to support his
claim that objects can never come into contact. If fire burns cotton, Harman
argues, it does not come into contact with cotton’s texture or color or other
features but only with its flammability. Fire burns cotton. But why not think
of it in reverse, in terms of cotton being burned by fire? Or why describe it as fire burning cotton, as
if fire itself is an object like cotton, rather than itself an action, event,
or interaction? What if we thought of
fire burning cotton as a multidirectional event of cotton combusting, in which
case we would not be talking about two autonomous, independent objects (cotton
and fire) but rather one complex, collaborative, and transient event, the
combustion of cotton? But Harman chooses
instead to objectify fire, to insist on understanding something that is an
action, event, or interaction as one of the <i>dramatis
personae</i> in an object-oriented drama. This polemical use of the example of
fire burning cotton is emblematic of Harman’s argument as a whole, the way in
which humans and nonhumans, flows and relations, are either objectified and
made into autonomous entitites or dismissed as irrelevant, unreal, or
insignificant. To think instead of fire burning cotton as an event of
combustion lets us reject the idea that objects (or subjects for that matter)
are originary, are ontological starting points, but rather that they are the
outcomes of complex processes of mediation.
By mediation here I refer both to the physical-natural-organic-technological-economic
mediations that collectively generate cotton from seed, soil, water, sunlight,
and labor, and to the conceptual mediations which single out and purify cotton
or fire or an observer not only from one another but also from other objects
and entitities, events and phenomena. If we start not with objects but with mediation, we start already and immediately in the middle, with what we might
playfully want to think of as a form of mediation-oriented-ontology, or MOO. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b>2. Radical Mediation </b><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Mediation has
become one of the central intellectual problems of the twenty-first century. The
question of mediation has come to the forefront in part because of
extraordinary technological acceleration in the late twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, the rampant proliferation of digital media technologies that
sometimes goes under the name of “mediatization.” Despite widespread theorizing
about media prompted by the intense mediatization of the past several decades,
John Guillory has contended “that the concept of mediation remains
undertheorized in the study of culture and only tenuously integrated into the
study of media.” Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska similarly “see mediation as
the underlying, and unaddressed, problem of the media.” Alex Galloway, Eugene
Thacker, and McKenzie Wark concur with these assessments, contending that “New
kinds of limitations and biases have made it difficult for media scholars to
take the ultimate step and consider the basic conditions of mediation.” In <i>Excommunication</i> Galloway, Thacker, and
Wark offer separate but complementary answers to the question of mediation: “Distracted by the tumult of concern around
what media do or how media are built,” they write in their collective
introduction, “have we not lost the central question: <i>what is mediation?</i>”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
In
“Radical Mediation” I attempt to answer
this “central question.” I do not,
however, consider what media do or how they are built to be distractions from
the question of mediation, but rather part and parcel of it. Nor do I mean to limit the question of
mediation to what media do or how they are built, or to media themselves as
they are now conventionally understood. As I will suggest, mediation operates
not just across communication, representation, or the arts, but is a
fundamental process of human and nonhuman existence. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
I
developed the concept of radical mediation, which alludes to William James’s
“radical empiricism,” in order to make related but independent arguments about
the dualistic character of mediation in the history of Western thought. I argue
that, although media and media technologies have operated and continue to
operate epistemologically as modes of knowledge production, they also function
ontologically (technically, bodily, materially) to generate and modulate
individual and collective affective moods or structures of feeling among
assemblages of humans and nonhumans. This affective mediation of collective
human and nonhuman assemblages operates independently of (and often more
efficaciously than) the production of knowledge. Like the way media operate
affectively to premediate potentialities, mediation must also be understood as
a process or event prior to, generative of, and ultimately not reducible to
particular media technologies. Mediation operates physically and materially as
an object, event, or process in the world, impacting humans and nonhumans
alike. Radical mediation participates in recent critiques of the dualism of the
Western philosophical tradition, which make up what I have elsewhere called the
nonhuman turn in twenty-first century studies.<sup> </sup> Indeed, as I suggest in the talk’s final
section, radical mediation might in some sense be understood as nonhuman
mediation. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
To understand
radical mediation as affective and experiential rather than strictly visual is
to think about our immediate affective experience of mediation as that which is
felt, embodied, near—not distant from us, and thus not illuminated or pictured,
but experienced by us as living, embodied human and nonhuman creatures. Where
remediation focused largely on the visual aspects of mediation, radical
mediation would take into account the entire human sensorium. For radical
mediation, all bodies (whether human or nonhuman) are fundamentally media and
life itself a form of mediation. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
As Walter Benjamin
had similarly noted about mechanical reproduction, the remediation of new
digital media has worked to bring our media devices nearer our bodily medium,
engaging us directly in what I have elsewhere characterized as the affective
life of media. The core of radical mediation is its immanence, is immediacy
itself—not the transparent immediacy that makes up half of remediation’s double
logic, but the embodied immediacy of the event of mediation. In our affective, bodily interactions with
media devices, indeed with the world of humans and nonhumans, there is no
distance or perspective from which to “see” immediacy, from which immediacy
could be made into something one could paint or draw or re-present, or
something that needed mediation. “Bodies,” writes Karen Barad apropos the
invertebrate brittlestar, “are not situated <i>in
</i>the world; they are part <i>of </i>the
world.” The same claim, I would aver, can be made for media and mediation. In
theorizing the affective embodiment of radical mediation, we should attend to
the immediate affective experience of mediation itself. But to suggest that mediation is immediate is
to swim against a strong popular current running through the history of Western
thought, one which would categorically distinguish mediation from immediacy. In
the books <i>Remediation</i> and <i>Premediation</i>, I set out to challenge this
distinction. The concept of radical
mediation further problematizes the distinction of mediation from immediacy. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Hegel’s
influential critique of immediacy to the contrary, radical mediation does not
take mediation as coming or standing between already actualized subjects,
objects, actants, or entities (or even as being within objects) but rather
treats mediation as the process, action, or event that generates or provides
the conditions for the emergence of subjects and objects, for the individuation
of entities within the world. In this sense radical mediation has affinities
with Gilbert Simondon’s concepts of individuation, transduction, and
ontogenesis. The process of individuation, whose true principle Simondon identifies
as mediation, “must be considered primordial, for it is this process that at
once brings the individual into being and determines all the distinguishing
characteristic of its development, organization and modalities.” Although
Simondon considers individuation “to form only one part of an ontogenetic
process,” he also maintains that “in a certain sense, ontogenetic development [<i>devenir</i>] itself can be considered as
mediation.” <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
In radical
mediation all connections (or contact) involve modulation, translation, or
transformation, not just linking. I
insist upon this distinction because connection could be taken to imply
experiences (or experienced relations) that preexist their mediation, whereas I
understand mediation as fundamentally what Simondon calls “transductive,” part
and parcel of, yet not reducible to, experience. For Simondon a relation is “a
way of being and not a simple connection between two terms that could be
adequately comprehended using concepts because they both enjoy what amounts to
an independent existence.” Following James, I refuse to separate mediation from
other experienced relations. Mediation does not stand between preexistent
subjects and objects,with their own “independent existence.” Nor does mediation prevent immediate experience
or relations, but on the contrary transduces or generates immediate experiences
and relations. Not only is mediation immediate, but it is also individuating,
operating through a process of becoming to generate individual subjects and
objects through what James might have meant to understand as experienced
relations, subjects and objects which are themselves remediations. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Another way to
explain radical mediation is through Charles Sanders Peirce’s thinking about
mediation in the later part of his life, particularly his conviction that
“Mediation is more than the conjunction of two dyadic relations,” but a form of
thirdness “operative in Nature.” In their later years both Peirce and James worked
towards different but not entirely incompatible metaphysical understandings of
what Barad has characterized as “agential realism,” in which relations or
mediations are seen to be more real for what they do or how they act than for
what they mean or represent. Indeed despite being primarily associated with
language and linguistics, Peirce in his later theories of biosemiosis moved
even more radically than did James towards an ontological understanding of
mediation, particularly in relation to nonhuman nature, as
non-representational. Thus for Peirce a sunflower, for example, can be
understood as a mediation, or “representamen,” of the sun: “If a sunflower, in
turning towards the sun, becomes by that very act fully capable, without
further condition, of reproducing a sunflower which turns in precisely
corresponding ways toward the sun, and of doing so with the same reproductive
power, the sunflower would become a Representamen of the sun.”<sup> </sup> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
What Peirce here
calls “Representamen” he elsewhere, and increasingly in his later work, comes
to understand as mediation. But in either case each is a category of what he
calls “thirdness,” a form of thought whose most radical formulation is
operative in nonhuman nature, as for example when Peirce claims that “thought
is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of
crystals, and throughout the purely physical world.” As thirdness, mediation does not come between
preformed subjects and objects, but operates like that nonhuman process or
activity which generates honeycombs, crystalline structures, sunflowers, or
language. Peirce sees this as the same
process from which human and nonhuman signification emerges, with or without
what we conventionally understand as thought. In linking radical mediation to
Peirce’s category of “thirdness” I mean to underscore the notion that all
activity is mediation, and that for radical mediation there is no discontinuity
between human and nonhuman agency or semiosis. Although Peirce is notorious for
his terminological inconsistency, he associated mediation with thirdness as
early as 1875. As Winfried Nöth points out, from 1890 on he applies mediation
fairly consistently “to phenomena from logic to metaphysics and natural
philosophy. In evolutionary terms, thirdness is the ‘tendency to take habits’
[…]. Thirdness manifests itself in ‘generality, infinity, continuity,
diffusion, growth, and intelligence.’” In his later writings, Peirce regularly
treats <i>Thirdness </i>as a metaphysical category which “is operative in
Nature.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
In asserting the
radical nature of mediation I am not referring only to the way that media
theorists talk about the ubiquitous and quotidian nature of our media
everyday—phones, tablets, TVs, laptops, and gaming platforms; Facebook,
Twitter, email, Tumblr, Reddit, and Tinder; securitization, finance, surveillance,
and transaction data. Rather I am referring as well to the ubiquitous nature of
mediation itself—flowers, trees, rivers, lakes, and deserts; microbes, insects,
fish, mammals, and birds; digestion, respiration, sensation, reproduction,
circulation, and cognition; planes, trains, and automobiles; factories,
schools, and malls; nation-states, NGOs, indigenous communities, or religious
organizations; rising sea levels, increased atmospheric concentrations of CO<sup>2</sup>,
melting icecaps, intensified droughts, violent storms. Following the
groundbreaking work of Jussi Parikka and others, radical mediation also insists
upon taking account of the multiple materialities of our communication media,
their dependence upon destructive extractive industries for the minerals and
other materials from which media devices are built, their extravagant use of
electrical power with all of its attendant environmental costs, and their
proliferation and persistence as technical waste, whose ecological consequences
remain largely unknown. But in calling
attention to the costs, destruction, and waste of mediation I do not mean to
understand these materialities simply as economic or industrial supports or
infrastructure for media and mediation, but as mediations themselves no different
from the texts, photos, sounds, videos, or transaction data that circulate on
our media devices and that provide the data for corporate, technical, and
governmental surveillance. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Radical mediation
does not take mediation as a unifying or totalizing epistemological concept
that holds together disparate and heterogeneous practices, events, and
entities. Nor does it maintain ontologically that there are only disparate and
heterogeneous objects and things that do not relate to each other. Rather
radical mediation takes existence itself as a form of mediation. Because
mediation is always transformative, one of the things that is radical about
mediation is its ability dramatically to change scale, moving among smaller and
larger, simpler and more complex, briefer and more extended, assemblages or
entities. Radical mediation insists that it is mediation all the way down. Even the smallest or most basic components
are mediations, which by scaling up can be remediated into larger entities,
just as by scaling down, larger or more complex entities and events can be
remediated into smaller or less complex ones. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
Such a
multi-scalar approach to mediation is essential to making sense of phenomena like
climate change, the sixth extinction, or the anthropocene, which names the
human as the dominant influence on the planet. In its recognition that humans
must now be understood as climatological or geological forces on the planet
that operate just as nonhumans would, the anthropocene demands a form of
mediation that can operate on multiple scales, independent of human will,
belief, or desires. One of the most striking legacies of the 2011 Sendai
earthquake, for example, and its dramatic impact on the Fukashima nuclear power
plant (as with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster some twenty-five years earlier) was
the reminder that the nuclear reactions produced in damaged fuel rods operate
according to their own time-scale having more to do with the half-life of uranium
than with the periodicity of the mediatic system. These reactions might be
minimized, modulated, or redirected, not by acting upon them directly as if
they were inert, passive matter, or nonhuman physical processes, but rather by
accepting the fact that their agency, trajectory, and development operate
according to their own laws, their own temporality, their own scale. Remediation (both in the environmental and in
the medialogical sense) must take these radically different scales into
account.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b>3. The Mediation Ecology of Ebola <o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
Radical
mediation calls for a shift of focus from media to mediation. I want to
conclude by thinking about this shift in relation to the conference’s focus on
“media ecologies.” What would it mean to
think not of ecologies of media, but ecologies of mediation? How might this help us to move away from
thinking only about communication media and to begin thinking more broadly
about all sorts of human and nonhuman media, especially about the process of
mediation itself? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
To pursue these
questions I want briefly to take as an example of mediation ecology the Ebola
outbreaks that peaked in 2014 but that are still, to a lesser and much less
visible extent, ongoing today in parts of Africa. The radical mediation of the
human body might provide a way to make sense of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, by
starting in the middle with mediation itself.
To start with mediation is not to suggest, however, that we start with
the way print, televisual, and networked news media worked together to generate
a high level of fear regarding the contagiousness of the Ebola virus particularly
through playing on American media public fears of Africa as a “dark continent”
from which danger of all sorts would be likely to arise from unprotected
contact with dark bodies. Nor do I mean that we should start with how popular
media accounts of Ebola remediated literature, film, and other narratives of
contagious epidemics in order to premediate potential medical catastrophes. As
useful, illuminating, and on point as such approaches might be, they remain
within the traditional concept of mediation as representation or communication
that I have been contesting here today. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
By
starting in the middle with mediation, I mean instead to suggest that the
consequences of Ebola mediation are no different in kind and cannot be
separated from those produced by the Ebola virus itself. Ebola mediation is not
distinct in kind from the Ebola virus but a hybrid or mutant variant of the
virus, an effect and a constituent of Ebola in the same way that people
infected with the disease are also effects of Ebola. Thus in October 2014 when
several US states invoked the medically accepted 21-day incubation period of
Ebola to impose mandatory quarantines on specific individuals who had been
directly exposed to the Ebola virus, it was the mediashock generated by Ebola
mediation rather than empirical evidence of infection that brought about the
quarantine. Just as being infected can
get you put into quarantine, so can the media’s or the state’s fear of
infection. As an extension of the virus which works in tandem with its
virological elements as part of its destructiveness, Ebola mediation was far
more widely distributed than Ebola itself. More people were at risk for
quarantine as a result of the collective affectivity or mood (generated and
transmitted by media and politicians) than by the virus itself.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To
think Ebola in terms of radical mediation is also to remember that the Ebola
virus is “zoonotic,” that is, it crosses over from nonhumans to humans. In <i>Spillover,</i> David Quammen makes it clear
that as far as Ebola and related diseases are concerned there is no categorical
or epidemiological distinction between human and nonhuman host animals. In between outbreaks of the disease, Ebola is
thought to reside in bat colonies from which the virus can be passed on to
gorillas and humans. In transgressing the boundaries between humans and
nonhumans, Ebola acts as a form of viral mediation that “spills over” from organic
to inorganic form, from its virological contagion through the circulation of
bodily fluids to its medialogical contagion through the circulation of print,
televisual, and socially networked media. There can be no firm ontological
boundaries drawn between Ebola virus and Ebola mediation in regard to
quarantines and other political and social acts of the state. As the
overreaction of US state governments dramatized, the confinement of citizens
and contagious bodies can occur not only as a result of being physiologically infected
by the disease, but also from the viral affectivity of fear. Far more contagious than the disease itself,
premediated fear extends the means and sites of Ebola’s contagion through its
mediation by news, or by politicians. This is by no means to say that the
effects of quarantine are identical or equivalent to the effects of being
infected by Ebola, or that quarantines are necessarily a bad technique for
slowing the spread of infection. Rather
it is to say that the ontological spillover of Ebola mediation flattens the
distinctions between disease and mediation in much the same way that the virus
refuses to distinguish between human and nonhuman hosts. <o:p></o:p></div>
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While
in some sense it would not be wrong to say that the mediation of Ebola is more
socially and politically contagious than the virus itself, in thinking through
the concept of radical mediation I do not want to make a categorical
distinction between the virus and its mediation, not to treat Ebola mediation
as a representation of Ebola rather than as part of Ebola itself. It is not simply a metaphor to say that in
2014 print, televisual, and networked media caught Ebola and transmitted it to
the public. Unlike the metaphor of computer viruses, to think Ebola as radical
mediation is not meant as a metaphor. Jussi Parikka has persuasively traced the
use of the viral metaphor of (especially) AIDS to describe malicious computer
software programs, and to explore the ways in which computer viruses are
modeled on organic viruses in terms of their threat, their means of
reproduction, and their contagion. He has compellingly explained how viruses
and the viral become models for culture and technology and media, how both
kinds of virus, computer and biological, employ diagrams of contagion. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In
talking about Ebola mediation, however, I want to make a different but not
unrelated point about how Ebola itself functions as radical mediation. Mediation
is not metaphorical of Ebola, mediation is metonymous with it. Ebola mediation
is not, like metaphor would be, analogous to Ebola but, like metonomy, is
continuous with it. This metonymic continuity between virological infection in
one's body or immune system and medialogical infection can be seen most
tellingly in the way that scientific accounts employ the concept of “mediation”
to describe the operation of the Ebola virus: “The main Ebola surface
protein, encoded by the gp gene, <i>mediates </i>entry
of the virus into the host cell. . . . VP40 proteins interact
with the viral membrane and with each other. The membrane interaction
is <i>mediated</i> by the short
C-terminal domain, and the relatively large N-terminal domain is
responsible for binding VP40 proteins to each other.” Although used
similarly to its conventional historical denotation, the mediation described
here does not strictly stand between the Ebola virus and the world. Because the
virus is parasitic on its host to survive, the mediation of Ebola’s entry into
the host cell by its surface protein constitutes the very contagiousness of the
Ebola virus. The Ebola protein’s operation
in binding to a host is what guarantees its continued existence. In Ebola (and related viruses) mediation
generates its infectiousness through transforming the binding together of
proteins, genes, and a suitable host into Ebola. Without the radical mediation
of these specific proteins, Ebola would not exist.<o:p></o:p></div>
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I have only just begun to partially sketch out
here what I might tentatively call a “mediation ecology” of the 2014 Ebola
outbreak, in contradistinction to its media ecology. From its inception, media ecology has been
concerned to look at the ways in which communication media interacted to create
an ecology or environment that impacted human culture, society, or
perception. Although often concerned
with the coevolution of humans and technology, an important difference from
what I want to think of as mediation ecology is that media ecology generally
brackets out the nonhuman, organic and inorganic relations that made up
ecological science proper. Media ecology
also tends to bracket our mediation, treating media objects as already
preexisting their interactions or remediations. Media ecology focuses largely
on communication media, treating them separately from other human and nonhuman,
natural and social, entities or actants, or as related through an ecology,
through cybernetic or even autopoietic systems.
“Mediation” ecology might instead think about how various elements at
different scales are transformed or changed, through processes of mediation,
remediation, and premediation. Going
beyond the bounds of communication media that have traditionally defined media
ecology, mediation ecology might also provide another answer to the question of
the secret life of objects, and Harman’s contention that objects can never
touch. The secret life of objects is
their ongoing participation in ecologies of mediation. As this brief sketch of a mediation ecology of
Ebola can help to show, contact is not something that does or does not follow
from the existence of objects. Rather
the secret life of mediation ecology shows us that contact, mediation, and
transformation describe the very state of things in which humans and nonhumans
already find themselves and through which they have always made their way. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-54058009986185859222015-01-30T10:15:00.001-08:002015-01-30T10:20:34.126-08:00Public Authority: The End of Public Higher Education in Wisconsin?[REPOSTED FROM <a href="https://ragmanscircles.wordpress.com/">RAGMAN's CIRCLES</a>]<br />
<br />
In Scott Walker’s first budget in 2011, the one that included the notorious Act 10, which outlawed the formation of, and any substantive bargaining from, public employee unions, there was a proposal to split off UW-Madison from the UW System by making Madison a “public authority.” Back in 2011 plans for this separation of Madison from the UW System went so far that Biddy Martin, then UW-Madison Chancellor, had prepared the <a href="http://www.secfac.wisc.edu/senate/2011/0404/2263.pdf">text for a new Chapter 37</a>, which would apply only to UW-Madison and would govern it as a public authority that preserved all of the protections for academic freedom, faculty governance, and tenure that are written in to the Wisconsin Statutes. This 2011 proposal would have left the legal status of the rest of the System unchanged under <a href="http://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/36">Chapter 36</a>, which lays out the statutory authority (and guidelines) for the University of Wisconsin System, the only university system in the nation so authorized. Indeed in 2010, when I was recruited to University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee as Director of the <a href="http://www4.uwm.edu/c21/">Center for 21st Century Studies</a> (and when Scott Walker was only a candidate for the governorship of Wisconsin), this statutory protection was held up as a point of pride for the UW System because it provided more substantive academic protections than in other states.<br />
<br />
In 2011 resistance both by the UW System and by Republican lawmakers with UW campuses in their districts caused this plan to be dropped; instead the Republican legislature took the option behind door number 2, which was to slash funding for the System and freeze tuition, thus forcing severe budget cuts on all campuses, including Madison. Knowing that no major proposal from Scott Walker could go forward without consultation with his big-money handlers about how it would impact his future as a presidential candidate, I do not think that this public authority idea was raised lightly, or that it was dropped from Walker’s <a href="http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed">ALEC-inspired playbook</a> simply because of initial opposition in 2011. Indeed the idea has resurfaced in 2015 in the <a href="http://www.wisfarmer.com/news/headlines/walker-announces-cuts-to-uw-system-b99434801z1-290080201.html">run-up to Walker’s budget announcement</a> on February 3, but this time in relation to the whole system, without singling out Madison. What would it mean to transform the University of Wisconsin System from a state agency to a public authority? To answer this question we need to understand what the consequences would be for the UW System, how this might serve as a model for other red states (think Kansas, for example), and how it could be leveraged to propel Walker’s campaign for the 2016 GOP nomination.<br />
<br />
Although all of the details are not filled in, it looks like <a href="http://walker.wi.gov/newsroom/press-release/transforming-education-governor-scott-walker-announces-plan-tuition-freeze">Scott Walker’s bold presidential campaign move for 2016 </a>will be the transformation of the university system from a state agency dependent on taxpayer funding to a quasi-independent <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public-benefit_corporation">"public-benefit corporation,"</a> thus legalizing in practice what has already been happening in theory, the corporatization of the University of Wisconsin System. By granting the System autonomy and freedom to make its own administrative/business decisions and therefore, or so the neoliberalism of the ALEC playbook goes, Walker and his Republican allies will enable the System to find “efficiencies” and raise revenues that will compensate for the cuts in state funding, which according to an <a href="http://www.wisconsingazette.com/wisconsin/walkers-plan-to-slash-300-million-from-uw-system-could-lead-to-unchecked-tuition-hikes.html">announcement on January 27</a>, will return to their 1998 levels with a $300 million cut to the University of Wisconsin System in the upcoming biennial. In addition to these devastating cuts, the first year of which for University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee would be equivalent to the entire budget of the <a href="https://uwm.edu/business/">Lubar School of Business,</a> the danger of this transformation to semi-private corporation is that System employees and faculty would lose their statutory protections (things like tenure, faculty governance, job security, and academic freedom are currently protected by state statutes) in favor of the contractual protections offered by the Board of Regents, who will now have almost complete authority over the UW System.<br />
<br />
The problem with this change, of course, is that <a href="https://www.wisconsin.edu/regents/">16 of the 18 Regents are political appointees (appointed by the governor)</a>—two ex-officio and 14 on staggered seven-year terms—as opposed to being elected, say, as they are (on a campus-by-campus basis) in Michigan, where I formerly taught. That means, four years into the Walker administration, that more than half of the governor-appointed Regents are Walker appointees; before the end of Scott Walker's second term all of them will be. So by the end of this next biennial budget (2017), tenure and faculty governance, as well as such decisions like the appropriate number of campuses needed for the System, will be at the whims of a board made up entirely of Scott Walker appointees.<br />
<br />
The political brilliance of this move (make no mistake, Walker and his handlers are brilliant electoral politicians) is that if and when these protections are stripped in the next couple of years, the blame will not go to the Governor or the legislature but to the Walker-appointed Board of Regents, who will claim to have acted responsibly and in the system's interests to make changes to deal with the terrible crisis caused by the Republican tax cuts. When tuition is raised and campuses closed, it will not be the state government that did it, but those egg-headed academics and their Board of Regents. Indeed in a <a href="http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/scott-walker-says-uw-faculty-should-teach-more-classes-do-more-work-b99434737z1-290087401.html">January 28 interview on right-wing radio</a>, Walker premediated the possibility of Regents raising faculty workloads: "I think you were right, your comments today on Right Wisconsin, that maybe it's time for faculty and staff to start thinking about teaching more classes and doing more work. And this authority frees up the UW administration to make those sorts of requests, which I think are needed not only here but across the country."<br />
<br />
In considering the financial situation in Wisconsin, it is important to recognize that the current budget crisis is not, as in 2008, a systematic breakdown, but the product of political decisions made by Walker and the Republican legislature in Madison. <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/scott-walker-wisconsin-tax-cuts-103551.html">The deficit has been manufactured by $800 million in tax cuts</a>, mainly to property owners, that the state could not afford. Unfortunately, rather than highlight this fact and suggest that the easiest way to get out of this budget crisis would be to roll back (if only temporarily) the tax cuts instituted in Walker’s first term, our University System leaders have accepted that deficit, and the reduced University funding that it has prompted, as a given, a natural fact like Lake Michigan or the North Woods. There seems to be no effort to be proactive, to try to control or at least shape the narrative to counter Walker's anticipated (and widely forecasted) budget announcement on February 3.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.wisconsin.edu/president/">UW System president Ray Cross</a> is doing little or nothing to combat the dominant narrative in the media, which is to say the Walker administration’s narrative. Locally <a href="http://uwm.edu/ucnews/">our Chancellor's stance</a> has mainly been to prepare to deal with the massive and devastating cuts that are coming down the pike, preparing to address the situation in more detail when the specifics become known on February 3. And even though it does not look good for UWM, there are many people in Madison who feel that they will benefit from this shift to a public authority, especially if they are given the opportunity to set their own tuition rates. Being free from the state HR and purchasing systems and being able to follow the Michigan model in raising out-of-state tuition and increasing out-of-state students, Madison should eventually do quite well financially, although like University of Michigan they will less and less serve as a public institution serving the people of their state. But in the short run, these draconian budget cuts will be impossible to accommodate without cutting hundreds of part-time and full-time faculty and staff. Indeed <a href="http://chancellor.wisc.edu/blog/reaction-to-the-latest-state-budget-news/">UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank</a> has said explicitly that there would be no way to absorb such a dramatic revenue cut without “laying off” employees in every one of her units, particularly on the educational side of the university.<br />
<br />
Most disturbingly, System President Cross has painted the proposal as something of a bargain or negotiation, in which the State gives the University System autonomy “in exchange” for rolling back state funding of the System to 1998 levels and providing guaranteed funding from sales tax revenue, albeit starting with a budget cut back to 1998 levels. Cross responded to the proposal to make the UW System a public authority in a <a href="http://www.news8000.com/blob/view/-/30937466/data/3/-/hucdbc/-/UW-System-Pres--email.pdf">document from the Office of the President released on January 26</a>. The document is full of unsubstantiated assertions about financial benefits gained from public authority status. There appears to have been no research conducted on whether this will indeed be true, no debate or discussion among faculty, staff, and students about whether this is a change worth pursuing.<br />
<br />
In the document Cross begins by accepting the Walker claim that these budget cuts to the system have been “dictated” by the "large state budget shortfall.” He writes: "Looking ahead, a large state budget shortfall dictates that the UW System will be receiving a sizeable funding cut. This follows significant cuts over the last three budgets as well as a continuation of the current tuition freeze for the upcoming biennium. The UW System expects a $300 million cut over the 2015‐17 biennium.” As I have noted, this shortfall doesn't "dictate" a funding cut; Walker and his allies dictate that. The current budget shortfall is a direct consequence of recent property tax cuts that the state had no way to pay for.<br />
<br />
In welcoming the new freedoms of a public authority, Cross then glosses over the hundreds (if not thousands) of people who will lose their jobs to accommodate these cuts as posing "difficult and significant choices" that will be compensated for in the long run by making the UW System "more nimble and more responsive," demonstrating a true insensitivity to the people who make Wisconsin's universities work and the students they serve: "To manage these cuts, the UW System and its institutions will be forced to make difficult and significant choices in the short term…. In the longer term, the flexibilities granted through the authority and the consistency generated by the dedicated, sustainable funding source will help make the UW System a stronger, more nimble and more responsive higher educational system for generations to come."<br />
<br />
His attempt to reassure system faculty, staff, and students that tenure and shared governance will be protected raises as many questions as it answers. He writes: "Shared governance and tenure--two principles that are critical to delivering a high‐quality education--will be managed by the Board of Regents through board policy rather than by the legislature through statute. This is the standard among many other state higher education systems.” Note that Cross does not say that tenure and shared governance will be “protected” but that they will be "managed" by the governor-appointed Board of Regents. This “management” by the Regents is fundamentally weaker than the current statutory protections in Wisconsin's Chapter 36. What Cross (and all UW System leaders) should be advocating for, if the move to a public authority must go through, is that the statutory protections of Chapter 36 be imported into a new Chapter 37, which will form the basis of the transformation of the UW System into a public authority. Anything less makes such protections subject to the whims of an appointed, not elected, Board of Regents, which represents a de facto power shift from the legislative to the executive branch of state government, a de facto weakening of local control. (Thanks to Aneesh Aneesh for this observation.)<br />
<br />
Finally, it is important to note that while Wisconsin may be the first state to corporatize its university system as a public authority, it is unlikely to be the last. In a Republican Party committed to privatizing education at all levels, from K-16 and beyond, what happens in Wisconsin will be closely watched—and if successful, emulated in statehouses across the nation. The clever combination of granting “freedom” and “autonomy” to University leaders while simultaneously slashing even further the obligations of state governments to fund public higher education, will be a centerpiece of Walker’s presidential campaign and a model for Republican governors nationwide to consolidate power in their states.<br />
<br />
To conclude, I would invoke a Biblical analogy I have used <a href="https://ragmanscircles.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/is-the-uw-system-selling-its-birthright-for-a-mess-of-pottage/">elsewhere</a> to criticize the UW System's participation in Scott Walker's online flexible degrees. If these proposed changes succeed, Ray Cross will have sold the University of Wisconsin System's birthright to Scott Walker for less than a <a href="http://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/2372639/jewish/For-a-Mess-of-Pottage.htm">mess of pottage</a>, and is likely to go down in the history of public higher education as a modern-day Esau, the System President on whose watch a once-respected public University System was reduced to a second-rate “public-benefit corporation.”<br />
<br />
Richard GrusinRichard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-72764881674067025532012-10-30T08:28:00.000-07:002012-10-30T09:50:35.551-07:00Coda on Premediation and Preemption<style>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">In the final paragraph of yesterday’s blog post on
the premediation of Hurricane (now post-tropical cyclone turned post-tropical
storm) Sandy, I wrote:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">“The premediation of Sandy does not work to preempt
damage; there is no possibility that the damage is going to be prevented or
displaced. Rather premediation works to prepare people affectively for
what might be coming and to multiply the virtual forms in which the damage
might emerge, what kind of event Sandy will turn out to have been.
Premediation helps to bring Sandy into being not to prevent it. Most
importantly the premediation of Sandy does not exist outside of the event as
something distinct from it but rather is immanent to the event; premediation is
part and parcel of Sandy itself.”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">I wanted to return to the relation between
premediation and preemption to expand on and clarify this paragraph.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For on the face of it the claim that the
premediation of Sandy does not preempt damage seems plain wrong.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The global aim of the massive premediation of
disaster and catastrophe by media, government, and non-governmental agencies is
precisely to minimize damage to life and property.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By prefiguring, modeling, and simulating the
potential paths and consequences of Hurricane Sandy’s landfall, premediation
may not aim to preempt damage completely, but surely does aim to preempt some
potential damage, particularly to human life and to technical
infrastructure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">But what is so interesting about the way
premediation works, and what links it to preemption, is that is does not
consist merely of warnings about the potential dangers that would result from
the event of Sandy but it creates these very dangers in advance of Sandy’s
arrival as a way to try to contain, control, or minimize the damage that Sandy
will cause.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That is, rather than wait
for the disaster to occur and then to repair or remediate it, premediation
creates the effects of the disaster before they happen—closing subways,
schools, Wall Street, businesses, government offices, and so forth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">The working of premediation here is indeed very
close to what Brian Massumi has characterized as “the primacy of preemption” in
US politics during the Bush (and now the Obama) administration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But in the case of Sandy, and similar events
of geopolitical and natural catastrophes, what we are witnessing could more
accurately be described as “the primacy of premediation” in which our print,
televisual, and networked news media create the damage of the catastrophe or
disaster before it happens through the force of premediation alone.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Cambria; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Premediation constitutes the virtuality of
the catastrophe or disaster produced by Sandy, generating real effects prior to
and in some sense independent of the actualization of the hurricane
itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is immanent to the disaster
insofar as it is generated in advance of the hurricane itself, much as the wind,
waves, and rains that serve as the forerunners to Sandy’s landfall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And, I would argue, the multiple premediations
of Sandy’s eventual landfall and ultimate dissipation are no less real than the
storm’s meteorological and climatological effects, and are no less part of the
heterogeneous event known throughout the print, televisual, and socially
networked media as Hurricane Sandy.</span></div>
Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-76368716386861654482012-10-29T08:10:00.000-07:002012-10-29T15:42:30.316-07:00Premediating SandyFor several days in advance of its eventual landfall, Sandy has been premediated throughout the print, televisual, and socially networked news media as a "Frankenstorm," a once in a thousand year event. Meteorologists, media professionals, and netizens have been waiting in anxious anticipation of an event whose arrival seems in some sense already to have come. <br />
<br />
For nearly a decade I have been tracking the way in which the temporality of news media has shifted from a focus on the present and recent past to a focus on the future. Made visible first in the run-up to the Iraq War, news media have increasingly concerned themselves with the premediation of potential futures as much as with the remediation of the recent past. This shift from remediation to premediation has in part been fueled by the proliferation of big data, of computing technologies that aggregate massive amounts of information in order to mine them for indications of futures that are or might be coming. It has also involved a massive expansion of what kinds of media count as news.<br />
<br />
The introduction of global cable news networks in the 1980s and 1990s expanded the reach of live, real-time news coverage from regularly scheduled broadcasts to a 24-7, always on capability to cover whatever crisis or catastrophe or item of interest might arise anywhere in the world (or beyond) at any time. In the 21st century social media have expanded the reach of news media exponentially. Now, in addition to local, network, and cable news on television, and daily and weekly print news media, socially networked media like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, TUMBLR, Instagram, and others all participate in the remediation and premediation of news across the globally networked world. <br />
<br />
In addition to the temporal shift enabled by this proliferation of forms of mediation we have also seen a shift in focus from the idea that the aim of the news was to report on what actually happened ("all the news that's fit to print") to the idea that the aim of the news is to premediate what might happen, a shift in emphasis from the actual to the virtual as the province of news media. While this is a daily feature of news in the 21st century, some events make this shift to the premediation of the virtual more evident. Clearly we can see this in the nearly non-stop election coverage of the past 18 months or so, where news media focus much more on the potential implications of any actual occurrences (debates, public statements, revelations of past actions) than on the occurrences themselves. And the future-oriented media temporality of catastrophes like the impending landfall of Hurricane Sandy make particularly clear the way in which print, televisual, and socially networked media today participate in a logic of premediation in which media attend less to what is happening or has happened and more to anticipating what might, or is about to, happen.<br />
<br />
In keeping with the Deleuzian version of this distinction, it is important to remember that this shift in media temporality is not a shift from "real" news to "simulated" or "imaginary" news. With Deleuze, Guattari, and others, I want to insist that what we are witnessing is a shift in the notion of the real, in which the virtual futures premediated across our socially networked media are as real as the actual pasts reported in our print, televisual, and networked news. Indeed because of the surplus of virtual futures premediated across our socially networked media, it makes sense to think that these virtual futures are indeed more real than the actual pasts that have been traditionally reported in the news.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
One of the things that becomes evident in the premediation
of Sandy is the realization that Sandy itself is not the sole agent or origin or
cause of catastrophic disaster but that this disaster precedes Sandy’s arrival.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So on Sunday, a full 24 hours before Sandy's expected landfall, subways and roads were closed; flights were
cancelled; schools were cancelled; government offices were closed; people were
evacuated; power may be shut off in anticipation of Sandy's disrupting it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All of
these events preceded the arrival of the storm, its hurricane-force winds, its torrential rains, its
massive flooding.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> Sandy's premediation has real social, political, and economic effects prior to its meteorological impact. The print, televisual, and socially networked news media do not just report on the effects of Sandy after they happen but in some sense produce these effects virtually before they happen, in anticipation of their happening.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
What is key here is the realization that disaster and
catastrophe are always and already forms of premediation, strategies for premediating the
hurricane and the damage and destruction it might bring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The forms that this destruction will take, and
many of its most significant economic and social effects, precede the
hurricane event—or perhaps are part of that event’s becoming.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Premediation helps to bring forth events, to
structure them, not just representationally or cognitively but more
importantly, or more accurately, ontogenetically. In this sense premediation is related to Brian Massumi’s account of preemption—but differs from it in certain key respects.<br />
<br />
The premediation of Sandy does not work to preempt damage; there is no possibility that the
damage is going to be prevented or displaced. Rather premediation works
to prepare people affectively for what might be coming and to multiply the virtual forms in which the damage might emerge, what kind of event Sandy will turn out to have been. Premediation helps to bring Sandy into being not to
prevent it. Most importantly the premediation of Sandy does not exist outside of the event as something distinct from it but rather is
immanent to the event; premediation is part and parcel of Sandy itself.</div>
Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-1906183780467649652012-02-20T07:02:00.001-08:002012-02-23T18:42:25.486-08:00Obama Premediates War With Iran By Discouraging ItAbout ten days ago I got a tweet from Cosmopolitan Scum <a class=" twitter-atreply pretty-link" name="TheBig0ther" href="https://twitter.com/#%21/TheBig0ther" rel="nofollow"><s>@</s><b>TheBig0ther</b></a><a class=" twitter-atreply pretty-link" name="rgrusin" href="https://twitter.com/#%21/rgrusin" rel="nofollow"><s></s></a> asking me if there was any thinking on how anti-war protests act, in a sense, to premediate the war to come? It was only when this tweeter actually saw a poster for a "Don't attack Iran" protest that s/he felt that such a war was actually possible. While a similar phenomenon had been recounted in regard to the worldwide protests against war with Iraq in February 2003, the question got me thinking about how negative premediations might function, a question I had taken up in 2008 in a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-19k2JbcAQ">paranoid video premediation</a> about the possibility of Bush-Cheney refusing to relinquish control of the executive branch on January 20, 2009.<br /><br />It is hardly news to note that the premediation of war with Iran has been intensifying over the past month or so both in official government statements and in the print, televisual, and networked news media. Glenn Greenwald has been particularly good on <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/02/14/us_media_takes_the_lead_on_iran/singleton/">this topic in Salon</a>, taking on The New York Times, NBC Nightly News, and CNN's Erin Burnett as leading the chorus of voices premediating war with Iran, even engaging in a heated Twitter exchange with Burnett over the past few days. Last Friday, the headline of <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/17/iran-nuclear-iraq-media-coverage_n_1280772.html?ref=media">a piece </a>by Huffington Post's Michael Calderone explicitly drew the connection with the run-up to the Iraq War: "Iran Nuclear Coverage Echoes Iraq War Media Frenzy." That same day Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/another-march-to-war-20120217?print=true">cited Greenwald</a> in arguing that we are seeing in the media a rehearsal of the drumbeats that led up to the Iraq War in 2003: "You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms."<br /><br />While the comparison of the current premediation of Iran with the media's role in premediating war with Iraq in 2002-3 is well-taken, what can get lost in the comparison is the arguably more interesting differences between the two situations, particularly between the way in which war with Iran is being premediated by the Obama administration and the way in which the Bush-Cheney administration premediated the war in Iraq. In both cases premediation operates through government spokesmen, military and intelligence proxies, and media outlets. But what distinguishes the current premediation of war in Iran is the way in which, unlike Bush-Cheney, the Obama administration spokesmen operate to premediate war with Iran not by making the case for such war, but the opposite--premediating war with Iran by explaining why such a war would be a bad idea.<br /><br />Over the past weekend both the US and British governments (who together led the way in making the case for war against Iraq in 2002-3) have made it clear that they disapprove of an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. Statements from the Israeli government, on the other hand, insist that all options are on the table. Meanwhile, Iran has cut off shipments of oil to Britain and France, ahead of sanctions by the French and the British that would have ended that trade in the near future, and are now threatening to cut off other European nations as well.<br /><br />Despite the Obama administration's caution, global news media continue to premediate a variety of different military confrontations involving Iran. The most visible involves the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has threatened to cut off oil traffic through the Gulf. Cable news media like CNN have begun accompanying their stories about this potential development with maps of the Gulf oil routes and video of Iranian warships, premediating (as they had in the run-up to the Iraq War) the audiovisual mood of war in advance of any potential blockade--and irrespective of whether such a conflict even occurs.<br /><br />On February 20, the front page of the New York Times provides an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/20/world/middleeast/iran-raid-seen-as-complex-task-for-israeli-military.html?scp=3&sq=iran%20israel&st=cse">even more complex premediation</a> of a possible Israeli attack on Iran, one which bears more than a passing resemblance to the shape of articles and cable news stories that proliferated in the run-up to the Iraq War. Although the thrust of the article is to outline the difficulties of an Israeli attack, the detailed premediation of various options--including how many (and what kind of) planes Israel would need, where their flight paths could take them, how they would have to refuel, what their targets and timing would be, and whether they could pull it off without the help of the US--make such an attack all the more tangible. And while such an attack remains for the moment only virtual, its effects on the collective mood of the global media public is quite real.<br /><br />On NBC Nightly News that same evening, a similar case was made, including maps in motion with the three different flight plan options and a retired general to make the case against Israel attacking Iran.<br /><br /><object id="msnbc3539e5" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=10,0,0,0" width="420" height="245"><param name="movie" value="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640"><param name="FlashVars" value="launch=46457850^115501^191191&width=420&height=245"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed name="msnbc3539e5" src="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640" flashvars="launch=46457850^115501^191191&width=420&height=245" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash" width="420" height="245"></embed></object><p style="font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: #999; margin-top: 5px; background: transparent; text-align: center; width: 420px;">Visit msnbc.com for <a style="text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/">breaking news</a>, <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032507" style="text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;">world news</a>, and <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3032072" style="text-decoration:none !important; border-bottom: 1px dotted #999 !important; font-weight:normal !important; height: 13px; color:#5799DB !important;">news about the economy</a></p><br /><br />The question to be asked about these negative premediations is whether they work to make such attacks less likely or whether, even while arguing against an Israeli attack, such premediations make such an attack, or some form of war with Iran, more likely. What seems clear is that these premediations (both for and against a potential war with Iran) are serving to shape the mood of the nation, in part to prepare the media public to accept a war if it were to come about, and in part to minimize the sense that such a war would be unnecessary, unjust, or just plain wrong.<br /><br />Interestingly, if Israel were to attack Iran despite the Obama administration's negative premediations, this would not be the first time that Obama has discouraged a course of action in the Middle East that his administration later followed in some form or another. Clearly some version of this course of action was followed with Libya, and the current hands off policy in Syria might also turn out to be a similar prelude to US intervention of some sort or another.<br /><br />But I am less concerned, and less qualified, to analyze the Obama administration's foreign policy strategy than I am interested in making sense of their policies and practices of premediation. What makes the Obama administration's negative premediation strategy so interesting is the way in which it clarifies that premediation works independent of its specific content. That is, although the Bush-Cheney premediation of potential paths to war with Iraq turned out to be followed by the shock and awe of March 2003, the premediation of this war had already worked to produce a national affect of at-warness prior to and independent of the war itself.<br /><br />Similarly, in the current situation we can see that premediation does not only have to work by advocating a particular course of action but can work as well to produce a warlike national mood even while discouraging a course of action. What distinguishes premediation from prediction or preparation or planning is that it works not only whether any of the premediated possibilities actually come about but even when what is being premediated is the opposite of what might come about. Or put differently one can premediate war not only by rehearsing it or making the arguments for it but by discourarging it, making the arguments against it. Both open up, or proliferate, potential paths towards (or away from) war. And most powerfully both produce the same collective mood or orientation towards war, thereby providing an environment in which such war seems not unthinkable but rather thinkable as something that we may see, and indeed have already seen, on TV.<br /><br />So, can anti-war protests be seen to premediate the very course of action they are protesting against? To answer a question with a question, how could they not?Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-24526948752345850092011-10-26T11:53:00.000-07:002011-10-26T15:04:30.175-07:0040 Days in the Wilderness: Premediation and the Virtual Occupation of Wall Street<style>@font-face { font-family: "Times"; }@font-face { font-family: "MS 明朝"; }@font-face { font-family: "MS 明朝"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue; text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color: purple; text-decoration: underline; }p { margin-right: 0in; margin-left: 0in; font-size: 10pt; font-family: Times; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; font-family: Cambria; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; }</style> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Cambria;">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 <a href="http://premediation.blogspot.com/2011/09/occupy-wall-street-premediates.html">an initial analysis</a> 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 </span><span style="font-family:Cambria;">“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, </span><span style="font-family:Cambria;">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.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Cambria;">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 </span><span style="font-family:Cambria;">is not occupied either</span><span style="font-family:Cambria;"> as street, building, or financial institution.<span style=""> </span>Wall Street is, however, virtually occupied, as Times Square has been, as Chicago or Los Angeles or the London Stock Exchange have been.<span style=""> </span>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.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Cambria;">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.<span style=""> </span>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 <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg8pZh07yRk">Wallace Shawn</a> gives voice to the widely shared belief that the movement is in the preliminary stage, that it is "before the moment of specifics." <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYfLZsb9by4">Judith Butler</a> 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.<span style=""> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Cambria;">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. </span><span style="font-family:Cambria;">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.</span><span style="font-family:Cambria;"></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Cambria;">Before any specific goals or demands can be formulated, and perhaps even if they never are, </span><span style="font-family:Cambria;">what has to happen first is that #occupywallstreet must continue to do what it is already doing—fostering and intensifying what <a href="http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17599800">Jonathan Flatley</a> would characterizes as “a revolutionary counter-mood.” The heart of this revolutionary counter-mood can be found in what the opening lines of the <a href="http://www.nycga.net/resources/declaration/">September 29 Declaration of the Occupation of New York City</a> 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.”<span style=""> </span>The initial aims of #occupywallstreet seem </span> <style>@font-face { font-family: "MS 明朝"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria Math"; }@font-face { font-family: "Cambria"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 10pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }.MsoChpDefault { font-size: 10pt; font-family: Cambria; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; }</style> <span style=";font-family:Cambria;font-size:12pt;" >clear—to </span> <span style="font-family:Cambria;">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. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Cambria;">40 days into the occupation, #occupywallstreet is perhaps still becoming a movement. Or to play off of Erin Manning’s recent book, <a href="http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=11760&ttype=2"><span style="font-style: italic;">Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy</span></a>, 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.<span style=""> </span>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). </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:Cambria;">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 <a href="http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/10/the-view-from-zuccotti-park-on-the-post-political-thrust-of-ows/">piece from Harrison Schultz</a>: </span><span style="font-family:Cambria;">“For the sake of keeping your head sane and your heart still engaged, be aware: <strong><span style="font-family:Cambria;">we are not in control.</span></strong> 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.” </span><span style="font-family:Cambria;">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.</span><span style="font-family:Cambria;"></span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Cambria;font-size:12pt;" >In her recent post on <a href="http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2011/10/lessons-from-occupywallstreet.html">“Lessons from #occupywallstreet,”</a> 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.”<span style=""> </span>“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).<span style=""> </span></span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Cambria;font-size:12pt;" >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.<span style=""> </span>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.<span style=""> </span>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.<span style=""> </span>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,"</span><span style=";font-family:Cambria;font-size:12pt;" > thereby mobilizing</span><span style=";font-family:Cambria;font-size:12pt;" > collective affectivity towards an increasingly powerful revolutionary counter-mood of occupation.<span style=""><br /></span></span></p> <p><span style=";font-family:Cambria;font-size:12pt;" > </span></p>Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-37134541004387957002011-09-18T11:31:00.000-07:002011-09-28T10:15:55.802-07:00Occupy Wall Street Premediates the Occupation of Wall StreetNearing 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.<br /><br />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. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Occupy Wall Street is best understood as a premediation of the occupation of Wall Street.</span> Let me explain.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <a href="http://premediation.blogspot.com/2011/02/are-recent-protests-test-performances.html">Writing about those protests in February</a>, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><br /><br />]Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-88290774331441350412011-03-10T08:47:00.000-08:002011-03-10T08:49:08.057-08:00Part 3: Conversation with Henry Jenkins on Remediation, Premediation, and TransmediaHere's a link to the <a href="http://henryjenkins.org/2011/03/a_remediated_premediated_and_t_2.html">third and final part</a> 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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-80268768363365855712011-03-09T07:13:00.000-08:002011-03-09T07:15:40.512-08:00Part 2: Conversation with Henry Jenkins on Remediation, Premediation, and TransmediaHere's a link to the <a href="http://henryjenkins.org/2011/03/a_remediated_premediated_and_t_1.html">second part</a> of an extended conversation I had with Henry Jenkins on the relationship between remediation, premediation, and transmedia. <br /><br />Conversation concludes with Part 3 on Friday.<br /><br />Enjoy.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-84172671990587726702011-03-07T08:48:00.001-08:002011-03-07T08:50:11.560-08:00Conversation with Henry Jenkins on Remediation, Premediation, and TransmediaHere's a link to the <a href="http://henryjenkins.org/2011/03/a_remediated_premediated_and_t.html">first part</a> of an extended conversation I had with Henry Jenkins on the relationship between remediation, premediation, and transmedia.<br /><br />Enjoy.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-42160116379806084902011-02-23T08:34:00.001-08:002011-02-23T09:00:48.689-08:00Are Recent Protests Test Performances for Social Media?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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHyRjmMY3L62qUSR6zucJaeB_KcWDy304CCtFzeYeecx-5HyvK9FawWw5bnsTjBggk9KygR5_3b5ugMo4zUJydTEvL8CP8PTQ9dvGf93z72XsNGK_zsNtRQbT4N2lsAPzOxT5Ke3BagzGe/s1600/IMG_1369.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHyRjmMY3L62qUSR6zucJaeB_KcWDy304CCtFzeYeecx-5HyvK9FawWw5bnsTjBggk9KygR5_3b5ugMo4zUJydTEvL8CP8PTQ9dvGf93z72XsNGK_zsNtRQbT4N2lsAPzOxT5Ke3BagzGe/s320/IMG_1369.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5576924889357306978" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTvPpE1q48pSZDG8Tcg16Fdc16RDADAjec04K3qDJ6YARnRMEHn03UyTUyakKozQ0gtHG5w9wnQkm4q8efGxeOQilydl_lhIWN2g0Rfg9_pqXRVx6zvMSABpS0HVZ5MOmqVisdupxkgtvT/s1600/IMG_1371.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTvPpE1q48pSZDG8Tcg16Fdc16RDADAjec04K3qDJ6YARnRMEHn03UyTUyakKozQ0gtHG5w9wnQkm4q8efGxeOQilydl_lhIWN2g0Rfg9_pqXRVx6zvMSABpS0HVZ5MOmqVisdupxkgtvT/s320/IMG_1371.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5576924891671500242" border="0" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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).<br /><br />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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-55965090690268030822011-02-10T09:05:00.000-08:002011-02-11T16:39:16.448-08:00Was Egypt an Internet Revolution?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.<br /><br />Was this an internet revolution?<br /><br />Two weeks ago I <a href="http://premediation.blogspot.com/2011/01/egypt-premediation-and-liveness-of.html">blogged</a> 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/02/does-egypt-need-twitter.html">typically superficial dismissal</a> of the role of social media in political revolution, and Frank Rich has echoed him in his <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opinion/06rich.html">February 6 NYT column</a>.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />So was Egypt an internet revolution? We need to begin asking a different question.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-80487059149332577842011-01-31T11:02:00.000-08:002011-01-31T12:53:50.442-08:00Egypt, Premediation, and the Liveness of FuturityAlthough 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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-88077582842828800732011-01-11T08:16:00.000-08:002011-01-12T05:51:38.383-08:00Jared Lee Loughner and the Affective Contagion of Violent RhetoricAlmost 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.<br /><br />John Protevi has written a persuasive <a href="http://contemporarycondition.blogspot.com/2011/01/impossible-demands-for-proof-in.html#comment-form">blog entry</a> 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.<br /><br />In his brilliant 2008 book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Affective-Mapping-Melancholia-Politics-Modernism/dp/0674030788"><span style="font-style: italic;">Affective Mapping</span></a>, Jonathan Flatley details the ways in which Heideggerian <span style="font-style: italic;">stimmung</span>, 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. "<span style="font-style: italic;">Stimmung</span> is a collective, public phenomenon, something inevitably shared. Moods constitute the '<span style="font-style: italic;">way</span> 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />While the current anti-government mood or <span style="font-style: italic;">stimmung</span> 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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-63264986386002510592011-01-10T08:08:00.000-08:002011-01-10T09:05:09.426-08:00Violence, Agency, and Technical Mediation in ArizonaThe 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/1994.html">"On Technical Mediation."</a> 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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCVvIu0UjkZPTeahTimk64sJw956oA0XqYzX7WyV_QbUuMQuTdpdnVInXW3fuk5AJITFUXgAXQUu1PktZNeuadBghwwNUstzDzfPBh47cGL8Fz2rCxgc7rXFwjUbLy45ymqO7gRiJ5H7Z-/s1600/Latour+Diagram--Technical+Mediation.gif"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 176px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjCVvIu0UjkZPTeahTimk64sJw956oA0XqYzX7WyV_QbUuMQuTdpdnVInXW3fuk5AJITFUXgAXQUu1PktZNeuadBghwwNUstzDzfPBh47cGL8Fz2rCxgc7rXFwjUbLy45ymqO7gRiJ5H7Z-/s320/Latour+Diagram--Technical+Mediation.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5560603225173714770" border="0" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLubn37SMaD5gG-IsO42xzuEqfg9ep01nvaJbrJIEP2UUBAC5dGGbpZ5gPUlYDcpK-gy4AYmMDDvyyslWWZyFSJox5rAc7eV0mYl-77XUY_RupBA843ZUZWc57KRErjZF6vRu3MupSbxA9/s1600/palin.gif"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLubn37SMaD5gG-IsO42xzuEqfg9ep01nvaJbrJIEP2UUBAC5dGGbpZ5gPUlYDcpK-gy4AYmMDDvyyslWWZyFSJox5rAc7eV0mYl-77XUY_RupBA843ZUZWc57KRErjZF6vRu3MupSbxA9/s320/palin.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5560596529696558466" border="0" /></a><br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Premediation-Affect-Mediality-After-11/dp/0230242529/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1294677874&sr=8-1">my recent book</a>, 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.<br /><br />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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-19470973085238218692010-10-29T21:10:00.000-07:002010-10-30T08:08:49.480-07:00Wikileaks and the Affectivity of OpennessIn 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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:<br /><div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote></blockquote>"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. <br /><blockquote></blockquote>"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."<br /></div><br />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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-25266626980273505882010-10-29T20:21:00.000-07:002010-10-29T20:41:22.403-07:00"LEAN FORWARD"--MSNBC'S PREMEDIATION CAMPAIGNThe 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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Premediation-Affect-Mediality-After-11/dp/0230242529">Premediation</a>, especially the anticipatory gesture with which today’s global netizens lean forward almost lovingly towards their media devices.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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,<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMwCiWdKibCmSEYBvJWhxdwa4nc3g0qNAlcGk67cVKqB6UZ_Wa7yMSgxes5-gr_vihIf9e6XtAH6nnYYI9-fGU_q5X7M5qntVoOLsXFGraO9fjsNKbbyXKlMRMXg_8yNPkpg3q_Bu64h7v/s1600/Westward_the_Course_of_Empire.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 244px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMwCiWdKibCmSEYBvJWhxdwa4nc3g0qNAlcGk67cVKqB6UZ_Wa7yMSgxes5-gr_vihIf9e6XtAH6nnYYI9-fGU_q5X7M5qntVoOLsXFGraO9fjsNKbbyXKlMRMXg_8yNPkpg3q_Bu64h7v/s320/Westward_the_Course_of_Empire.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533676580089008130" border="0" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioVC5BphijtPp_O49jl08YyaqM7T-w237chZDqadSaCpsa-0pKETNPLfN64mLYs_iVINkcFDWmFnpPIUdHFNXUJni45LLSkodLwNxBT54ffLcXsnSNlE1Oh2KZj7AhlkfLuzyi1i0t36EB/s1600/american_progress_large_003.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 237px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioVC5BphijtPp_O49jl08YyaqM7T-w237chZDqadSaCpsa-0pKETNPLfN64mLYs_iVINkcFDWmFnpPIUdHFNXUJni45LLSkodLwNxBT54ffLcXsnSNlE1Oh2KZj7AhlkfLuzyi1i0t36EB/s320/american_progress_large_003.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5533677087627818418" border="0" /></a><br /><br />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.<br /><br /> 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.<br /><br /> 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:<br /><br /><br /><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/dnzb2GSlCsY?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/dnzb2GSlCsY?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />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.<br /><br /> “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.<br /><br /><object width="640" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xlsPuWcBhPQ?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xlsPuWcBhPQ?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="640" height="385"></embed></object><br /><br /> 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.”<br /><br />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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-27472158488706780182010-10-13T17:51:00.000-07:002010-10-13T21:46:47.723-07:00The Chilean Miner Rescue and the Premediation of Positive Global AffectWhat made the Chilean miner rescue into an almost instantaneous global media event? What made it into history? <br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-75106194254222892032010-09-09T08:31:00.000-07:002010-09-09T09:53:48.823-07:00Google and the Premediation of EverythingIf 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704901104575423294099527212.html">recent interview</a> 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."<br /><br />But the quote that grabbed the most public attention (including William Gibson's in an excellent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html">New York Times op-ed</a>) 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/search-now-faster-than-speed-of-type.html">Official Google Blog</a> 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."<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br /><object height="385" width="640"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/qcm0rG8EKXI?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/qcm0rG8EKXI?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="385" width="640"></embed></object> <br /><br />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."<br /><br />Just saying.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-16339895911443249592010-08-19T07:11:00.000-07:002010-08-19T08:08:55.973-07:00The Securitization of Iraq"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/world/middleeast/19withdrawal.html?_r=1&hp">Civilians to Take U.S. Lead After Military Leaves Iraq</a>," 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.<br /><br />“'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.'”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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."<br /><br />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. "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/world/asia/19diplo.html?hp">U.S. Strategy in Pakistan Is Upended by Floods</a>" 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. <a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/douglas_e_lute_/index.html?inline=nyt-per" title="More articles about Douglas E. Lute." class="meta-per">Douglas Lute</a>, the White House coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan. 'All the tools of diplomacy have to be examined in light of this new reality.'”<br /><br />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."<br /><br />In my recently published book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11</span>, 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.<br /><br />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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-78373207368096080652010-08-10T10:23:00.000-07:002010-08-12T11:10:24.365-07:00Some Questions about Net Neutrality--A Divergent ViewPerhaps 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.<br /><br />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? <br /><br />2. Put differently, who does the "we" in the phrase "the end of the Internet as WE know it" refer to?<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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?<br /><br />5. Has there ever been anything like "net neutrality" or "a level playing field" in the first place?<br /><br />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?<br /><br />7. Is there a necessary, definite relationship between the technical form of the Internet and its social, political, cultural uses?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-48216008358631816812010-08-01T10:03:00.000-07:002010-08-01T10:19:30.119-07:00More on the Affectivity of WikiLeaks Afghan War DiaryIn today's <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/opinion/01rich.html?hp">New York Times</a>, 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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4027798158442286806.post-6525553996311306402010-07-27T07:11:00.000-07:002010-07-27T08:16:40.540-07:00Wikileaks and the Affectivity of Socially Networked TextOn the Op-Ed page of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/opinion/27exum.html?_r=1">today's New York Times</a>, 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. <br /><br />Why, then, has the Afghan War Diary generated as much media and public outrage as it has? <br /><br />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?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.Richard Grusinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16236393993863736840noreply@blogger.com0