Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
R. Grusin
ISBN: 9780230275270
DOI: 10.1057/9780230275270
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Premediation
Affect and Mediality After 9/11
Richard Grusin
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Concordia University Libraries - PalgraveConnect - 2013-01-21
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
10.1057/9780230275270 - Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11, Richard Grusin
CULTURE, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE CREATION OF
AMERICA’S NATIONAL PARKS
REMEDIATION: UNDERSTANDING NEW MEDIA (co-authored)
TRANSCENDENTALIST HERMENEUTICS: INSTITUTIONAL
AUTHORITY AND THE HIGHER CRITICISM OF THE BIBLE
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Also by Richard Grusin
Richard Grusin
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Premediation: Affect
and Mediality After 9/11
© Richard Grusin 2010
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Grusin, Richard A.
Premediation : affect and mediality after 9/11 / Richard Grusin.
p. cm.
Summary: “In an era of heightened securitization, print, televisual and
networked media have become obsessed with the pre-mediation of
future events. In response to the shock of 9/11, socially networked US
and global media work to premediate collective affects of anticipation
and connectivity, while also perpetuating low levels of apprehension or
fear” – Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–230–24251–7 (hbk.) – ISBN 978–0–230–24252–4 (pbk.)
1. Mass media and culture. 2. Mass media – Influence. 3. Image
(Philosophy) 4. Communication – Political aspects. 5. Civilization,
Modern – 21st century. I. Title.
P94.G79 2010
302.23—dc22
2009048519
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
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publication may be made without written permission.
And for my father,
whose life as an ad-man first taught me
the power of premediation
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For Sarah and Sam,
whose lives have inevitably begun to unfold
in the shadow of 9/11
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This page intentionally left blank
Preface and Acknowledgements
ix
Introduction
Remediation after 9/11
Brief notes on method
1
1
4
1.
Remediating 9/11
“After 9/11”
Remediating 9/11
9/11: theorization or mediatization?
“We are all Americans”
The new normal
The emergence of premediated time
8
8
11
16
23
25
33
2.
Premediation
Remediation and premediation
The media regime of pre-emptive war
Autopoiesis and the liveness of futurity
From virtual reality to the reality of the virtual
38
38
41
50
57
3.
Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib
The trouble with Abu Ghraib
Remediating pornography?
Unknown knowns
Mediality
Affectivity
Torture and pornography
Transmitting affect
62
62
67
69
72
77
82
86
4.
The Affective Life of Media
Cyborgs
Feedback loops
Affective computing
Mediators
90
90
97
109
118
5.
The Anticipation of Security
Premediation and securitization
Anticipatory gestures
122
122
126
vii
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Contents
Contents
Mediaphilia
Premediation and politics
131
134
Conclusion
Beyond 9/11
Natural things
Economic things
Social things
143
143
144
147
151
Notes
156
Works Cited
180
Index
189
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viii
Where were you on 9/11? Individuals around the networked world have
asked and answered this question millions of times in the past decade.
Like the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert
Kennedy, or John Lennon, the attack on the World Trade Center on
11 September 2001 marked something like a sacred moment in time
among the individual and collective memories of the secular American
public.
Where were you on 9/11? In addition to the hypermediated shock
that burned this moment into the memory banks of the media public,
the attacks of 9/11 were profoundly significant because they introduced
a new demarcation in the Christian world’s calendar. The world changed
on 9/11. Coming so close upon the millennial year of 2000, 11 September
2001 in some sense began time anew. After the time before Christ and
the Christian era, we were presented with a new era, the post-9/11 era of
Islamic terrorism.
Where was I on 9/11? When American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into
the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 AM on 11 September
2001, I was in Beverly Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where I had
moved with my family just two months earlier to take the position as
chair of the English Department at Wayne State University. On my way
out of the house I was stopped by my wife Ann, who was intently watching the Today Show on the family room TV. Together we watched as the
second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, crashed into the second tower
live on global cable television. Needless to say, I never made it to campus that day.
Because my life in Detroit has coincided almost completely with my
life after 9/11, the sense that 9/11 marks a rupture or radical break in
time has always been accentuated for me. Although I lived in Michigan
for nearly two months prior to 9/11, I cannot clearly remember our life
in Detroit prior to 9/11 except as an affect of shock or dismay. Indeed,
our move to Detroit, which had been suffering and continues to suffer
its own economic catastrophe as the result of national and global geopolitical forces, seemed even before 9/11 a move to something like a
post-apocalyptic landscape. Escaping 15 years of uncontrolled growth
in the Atlanta metropolitan area, accelerated by the region-wide development brought on by the city’s hosting of the 1996 Olympics, my
ix
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Preface and Acknowledgements
Preface and Acknowledgements
family and I were dismayed by the deterioration and devastation in the
city of Detroit, which appeared to have been moving in precisely the
opposite direction of Atlanta. In less than two months before the attacks
of 9/11, a post-9/11 affect had, to a much lesser extent, begun to be premediated for us as a result of my move to Wayne State.
This book is a product of my life at Wayne State University in another
way as well. While Premediation follows up on the arguments I set forth
in Remediation (which was written during my tenure at Georgia Tech),
particularly insofar as Premediation traces out the ways in which remediation manifested itself after 9/11, it differs from my earlier work on new
media in part by its deployment of two conceptual frameworks largely
absent from Remediation. The first is affectivity, particularly as it is
developed in the work of Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and
Brian Massumi. The second is mediality, especially insofar as it engages
both with the Benjamin-Kracauer wing of the Frankfort School and the
Deleuzean reading of Foucauldian governmentality. Both of these conceptual frameworks were developed as a result of my move to Wayne
State.
Although in some sense I have been interested in questions of affect
since my undergraduate days, I was convinced of the importance of taking affect into account in my current project through the work, intellectual camaraderie, and friendship of three of the first colleagues I hired
as chair of the English Department at Wayne State – Dana Seitler,
Jonathan Flatley, and Steve Shaviro – each of whom in different ways
addresses affectivity in their writing and teaching. I owe a strong debt
of gratitude to each of them for steering me towards the rich theoretical
and conceptual framework that goes under the rubric of affect theory.
These same three friends and colleagues were also instrumental in
my engagement with Benjamin, Kracauer, and Deleuze, as were the
more broadly political and theoretical commitments of many of my
current and former colleagues at Wayne State. Among faculty colleagues I would single out Robert Aguirre, Dora Apel, Ellen Barton, Bob
Burgoyne, Sarika Chandra, Lara Cohen, Alex Day, Robert Diaz, Jacalyn
Harden, reneé hoogland, Ken Jackson, Donna Landry, Kathryne
Lindberg, Gerald Maclean, Richard Marback, Elena Past, Jeff Pruchnic,
Ross Pudaloff, Cannon Schmitt, Charles Stivale, Kirsten Thompson,
Carole Vernalis, and Lisa Ze Winters. I have profited also from interactions with students from several Wayne State graduate seminars, who
challenged me to more clearly define and redefine my concepts.
Notable among these students were Melissa Ames, Marie Buck, Andrew
Engel, Brad Flis, Amy Metcalf, Carole Piechota, Justin Prystash, Justin
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x
xi
Remeselnik, Michael Schmidt, and Clay Walker. Selmin Kara has been
my most valuable student interlocutor as I have been developing the
manuscript, in many ways as much colleague as student. Finally,
expressions of gratitude to members of the English Department at
Wayne State would not be complete without special mention of Kathy
Zamora, who makes everything work.
The book has also benefited tremendously from numerous opportunities to share my work with colleagues in Europe and in North America.
I first presented the concept of premediation in the Netherlands in
March 2003, on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, in lectures and doctoral seminars at the Universities of Utrecht and Amsterdam. The
affirmative response to the concept persuaded me that I had indeed
identified something distinctive about the way in which the logic of
remediation was manifesting itself after 9/11. Throughout the period in
which I worked on the book I returned to the Netherlands on several
occasions, where I have continued to develop productive working relationships and had opportunities to test out early versions of other arguments for engaged and challenging audiences. Among my Dutch
colleagues, I would single out especially Noortje Marres, Joost Raessens,
Richard Rogers, and José van Dijck for their friendship and intellectual
camaraderie. I want also to acknowledge the collegiality of Ansje Van
Beusekom, Keine Brillenburg-Wurth, Thomas Elsaesser, Isabella van
Elferen, Frank Kessler, Sabine Niederer, Ann Rigney, and Jan Simons.
My early work on premediation also found a welcoming audience in
Italy, thanks in large part to the efforts of Matteo Bittanti, who graciously hosted me in Milan when I lectured on premediation in October
2003. Matteo not only translated the original article on “Premediation”
but he also arranged to have it published as a special insert in the Italian
film magazine Duellanti. I am grateful as well to Giorgio Mariani and
Stefano Rosso, who invited me to present an early version of the Abu
Ghraib chapter as the keynote lecture at a symposium at Bergamo
University in December 2005 on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, and who published the essay (translated
into Italian by Giorgio Mariani), along with more than a half-dozen
critical responses, in Acoma, the leading Italian journal for American
Studies.
I have had several other opportunities to share my work among
European academics. In December 2005 I presented the Abu Ghraib lecture in Slovenia, at the University of Ljubljana. I am particularly grateful to Bojana Kunst for organizing the visit and hosting me in Ljubljana,
as well as for stimulating conversations around the ideas of affectivity
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Preface and Acknowledgements
and mediality. And in early 2007 I had opportunities to present the key
arguments for the book at seminars at the University of Bergen and the
IT University in Copenhagen, where I was graciously hosted by Kjetil
Jakobsen and Espen Aarseth, respectively.
I have also on several occasions presented early versions of the premediation argument in North America – at the Center for Writing Studies at
University of Illinois; the Great Plains Alliance for Computers and Writing
in Fargo, North Dakota; the Charlotte Visualization Center at the
University of North Carolina-Charlotte; Humanitech at the University of
California-Irvine; and the Infoscape Research Lab at Ryerson University
in Toronto. For support and intellectual companionship at these venues,
I am grateful especially to Gale Hawisher, Robert Markley, Kevin Brooks,
Alan Rauch, William Ribarsky, Barbara Cohen, Jerry Christensen, Jim
Steintrager, and Greg Elmer.
Over the past seven years I have had the pleasure of working through
parts of the book’s arguments with many other people as well, including Corey Creekmur, Jodi Dean, Zachary Devereaux, Lauren Ellsworth,
Gonzala Frasca, Anne Friedberg, Michael Gillespie, Marieke de Goede,
Tom Gunning, Andrew Hoskins, Shira Kapplin, Eric Ketelaar, Brian
Massumi, Sonja Neef, Dominic Pettman, Jason Sperb, and others whom
I am undoubtedly forgetting. I am also grateful to the two anonymous
readers for Palgrave Macmillan, whose responses to the manuscript
helped make its arguments stronger, and to the editorial staff at the
press, including Christabel Scaife, who advocated for the book from the
beginning, Penny Simmons, who provided a light but sure editorial
hand to the manuscript, and Renee Takken.
Last but not of course least, I would like to acknowledge my family –
Ann, Sarah, and Sam Grusin – for providing me with sympathetic ears,
supportive eyes, and the network of domesticity necessary to complete
the book’s research and writing over the course of the past seven years.
Without their love this book could never have been written.
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xii Preface and Acknowledgements
Remediation after 9/11
This book takes up the logics and practices of mediation circulating
through the United States in the period after 11 September 2001. The
book traces the emergence, or more accurately the intensification, of a
logic of “premediation” in post-9/11 America. Although premediation
predates the event of 9/11, it became plainly evident in the run-up to
the Iraq War in 2002 and 2003. Moreover, premediation has continued
to proliferate throughout innumerable media practices and formations
in the years following the commencement of the war in Iraq in March
2003 – through the abuses of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and indefinite
detention, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 US presidential election, the global financial crisis commencing in the fall of 2008,
and the contested Iranian election in June 2009.
Premediation can be seen as a counterpart to the concept of remediation that Jay Bolter and I developed to make sense of the logics and
practices of mediation circulating at the end of the previous millennium. In Remediation we outlined the simultaneous operation of two
contradictory media logics, which aimed respectively for immediacy
and hypermediacy, roughly understood at the end of the 1990s as transparency and multiplicity. This double logic of remediation, we argued,
took a particular form in the last decade of the twentieth century, in
which media sought simultaneously to erase themselves and to proliferate multiple forms and practices of mediation. Remediation operated
at the end of the twentieth century within a logical opposition between
reality and mediation. Different technologies of mediation were classified in relation to how close they came to presenting an unmediated
reality. Beginning in late 2002, I have been tracing the emergence of
1
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Introduction
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
a media logic or formation that I call “premediation,” which intensified after 9/11 as a form of medial pre-emption. Premediation works
to prevent citizens of the global mediasphere from experiencing again
the kind of systemic or traumatic shock produced by the events of 9/11
by perpetuating an almost constant, low level of fear or anxiety about
another terrorist attack. Premediation does not displace remediation
but deploys it in different aesthetic, sociotechnical, or political formations. The double logic of remediation still obtains, but its conflicting
media logics are formally different.
In the 1990s the ultimate in immediacy was conceived of along the
lines of virtual realities free from the cumbersome gloves and headpieces of early VR technology. Such technology came as close to representing reality free from the distortions of mediation as technological
enthusiasts could conceive. Artists, academics, and activists envisioned
and pursued projects that explored and advanced military, commercial, and cultural applications and the implications of these new media
technologies. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century,
however, immediacy is now epitomized in the form of IT models like
cloud computing or projects like Open ID and the Open Web, which
aim to make seamless one’s multiple interactions with commercial and
social networking, with health and medical records, juridical and educational records, shopping and entertainment preferences. Immediacy
after 9/11 materializes itself as an unconstrained connectivity so that
one can access with no restrictions one’s socially networked mediated
life at any time or anywhere through any of one’s media devices.
Hypermediacy in the 1990s was marked by the proliferation of
mediation or by fragmentation and multiplicity – the graphic design
of Wired Magazine, the windowed desktop or TV screen, or the audiovisual style of MTV videos and TV commercials. In the IT boom of
the 1990s, the proliferation of new media forms and technologies and
an increasingly hypermediated screen space was enthusiastically celebrated along with IPOs, venture capitalist funds, and Silicon Valley
start-ups. After 9/11 the logic of hypermediacy is marked by the multiplication of mediation among sociotechnical, commercial, and political
networks – less the hypermediacy of formal features or technologies of
mediation than the hypermediacy of network connectivities, of affective participation in and distribution of one’s networked identity across
multiple sociotechnical and medial networks. Hypermediacy after 9/11
operates within a paradigm of securitization, which entails the registration of every commercial, communicational, or juridical transaction by
a networked media security infrastructure, the complexity and scope of
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2
which proliferates in direct relation to the seamlessness of circulation
through an increasingly open web.
In other words, remediation no longer operates within the binary
logic of reality versus mediation, concerning itself instead with mobility, connectivity, and flow. The real is no longer that which is free from
mediation, but that which is thoroughly enmeshed with networks of
social, technical, aesthetic, political, cultural, or economic mediation.
The real is defined not in terms of representational accuracy, but in
terms of liquidity or mobility. In this sense the credit crisis of 2008 was
a crisis precisely of the real – as the problem of capital that didn’t move,
of credit that didn’t flow, was seen as both the cause and the consequence of the financial crisis. In the hypermediated post-capitalism of
the twenty-first century, wealth is not representation but mobility.
During the 2008 US presidential campaign this new idea of immediacy appeared most explicitly (and most simply) in the rhetoric of Sarah
Palin, who employed metaphors of flow, openness, and circulation to
talk both about the energy she provided for the teetering McCain campaign and about the petroleum-based energy the McCain-Palin ticket
would provide for America. Palin repeatedly insisted that she and John
McCain would keep the energy flowing through their “Drill, Baby, Drill”
platform and their endorsement of the radical expansion of nuclear
power. In the aftermath of several disastrous television interviews, she
also began to employ a right-wing version of the anti-establishment
rhetoric of participatory media. In her campaign stump speeches she
would insist that her communication with Americans should be “unfiltered by mainstream media” like ABC, Fox, or CBS, ironically echoing
the claims of many net activists that the powers of social networking,
smart mobs, and so forth constitute an informal media network that
bypasses the mainstream media (MSM).
This shared aim of escaping the filters of the MSM points out that at
the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the double logic
of remediation marks immediacy both in terms of uninterrupted flow
and in opposition to mainstream media. And hypermediacy takes the
form not of a fragmented visual screen space but of the proliferation of
diverse and interconnected media formats of social networking. That
is, after 9/11 the real is increasingly defined in terms of the desirability,
indeed the necessity, of being on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and the
mobile web. Leaving multiple traces of yourself on socially networked
media sites is seen as a necessary goal – and interacting with such sites is
made pleasurable or desirable in part because they work to produce and
maintain positive affective relations with their users, to set up affective
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Introduction 3
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
feedback loops that make one want to proliferate one’s media transactions. Indeed, something as seemingly innocuous as the fact that
Facebook offers its users the option to “like” or “unlike” an item but not
to “dislike” it epitomizes its bias towards fostering positive individual
and collective affect.
Where remediation characterized what was “new” about new media
at the end of the twentieth century as its insistent re-mediation of prior
media forms and practices, premediation characterizes the mediality of
the first decade of the twenty-first century as focused on the cultural
desire to make sure that the future has already been pre-mediated before
it turns into the present (or the past) – in large part to try to prevent the
media, and hence the American public, from being caught unawares as
it was on the morning of 11 September 2001. As I argue in greater detail
in the following chapters, however, premediation is not to be confused
with prediction. Premediation is not about getting the future right, but
about proliferating multiple remediations of the future both to maintain a low level of fear in the present and to prevent a recurrence of the
kind of tremendous media shock that the United States and much of the
networked world experienced on 9/11.
This book begins with a chapter that takes up the ways in which 9/11
remains actively engaged in the American present, looking at just a few
of the many different ways in which 9/11 has been remediated in the
past decade. The next chapter maps out the emergence and intensification of premediation in the run-up to the Iraq War from George W.
Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address until the war’s commencement
in March 2003. The third chapter introduces the concepts of affectivity
and mediality to offer a medialogical explanation of why the photographs from Abu Ghraib were so disturbing and became a matter of
such public concern where news of other similar abuses had not. The
fourth chapter delineates what I call the affective life of media, the way
in which we engage in complex affective interactions with our media
technologies and practices. In the final chapter I take up the affectivity of anticipation that marks our interaction with socially networked
media. I conclude with some examples of premediation beyond 9/11,
culminating in the Iranian “twitter revolution” of 2009.
Brief notes on method
1. This book employs several theoretical or methodological approaches
to the question of mediation after 9/11. Premediation begins from the
perspective of media theory that informed Remediation, and the broader
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4
field of new media studies that had barely begun to exist when Jay
Bolter and I wrote Remediation and that has in some sense developed
from the work that we did in that book. In developing the concept of
premediation, I have relied upon and sought to contribute to the explosion of critical and theoretical work on new media in the ten years since
Remediation was published. I operate from the assumption that all media
forms and practices are interrelated. Thus I take up movies, television,
and the Internet; sports, entertainment, and news; academic, journalistic, and popular texts; individual, collective, and mobile media. Media
should not be studied in isolation, but placed in relation to their patterns and flows of interaction as well as to their incommensurabilities
and discontinuities.
2. Just as we traced out a double logic of mediation at the end of the
twentieth century, so here I lay out the logic of premediation in the first
decade of the twenty-first century. My intellectual commitment to the
term “logic” goes back at least to late 1980s American cultural studies,
for example, “the logic of naturalism” (Michaels, 1988) or “the cultural
logic of late capitalism” (Jameson, 1991). As such it is meant to hold on
to the Foucauldian sense that there are rhetorical and conceptual continuities across different discursive and biopolitical formations. To take
just one example, the nineteenth-century Western industrial concept of
an economy of nature both enabled human exchanges with nature to
be understood according to the logic of economics and helped to provide the existing capitalist economic laws of men with the force of natural law. Such “logics,” however, are not universal or a priori principles
that govern practice, nor are they unchallengeable and unchangeable.
Rather, they express tendencies that emerge from and within particular
historical practices and assemblages.1 Thus while a logic of premediation can be identified in diverse discursive and technical media formats
(e.g., journalism, economics, security, entertainment, or law), competing or contradictory logics or illogics can also be identified at work in
these same and other areas as well.
3. I also operate from the assumption that media are objects in the
world no different in kind from any other. Even more strongly I treat
mediation itself as an object – a point made in Remediation in terms of
the way in which people would, for example, routinely walk around
or pause before the line of mediation between a photographer or
videographer and her subject, just as they might walk around a wire
stretched across their path or wait at a traffic light. In treating media
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Introduction 5
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
and mediation as objects within the world, I follow Bruno Latour’s distinction between intermediaries and mediators, in which mediators
are not neutral means of transmission but actively involved in changing whatever they mediate. Mediation operates through what Latour
characterizes as “translation,” not by neutrally reproducing meaning
or information but by actively transforming conceptual and affective
states.2
4. Where remediation was marked by a double logic of immediacy and
hypermediacy, premediation entails the affiliated concepts of affect
and mediality. In Remediation we offered the following restatements
of remediation: as the mediation of mediation; as the inseparability
of mediation and reality; and as remedy or reform (Grusin and Bolter,
1999, pp. 55–62). Premediation can also be restated in three ways: as
the remediation of future media forms and technologies; as the remediation of future events and affective states; and as the extension of sociotechnical media networks into the future. I develop these corollaries in
greater detail in the following chapters.
5. By employing the concept of “mediality” rather than the category
of “new media,” I mean to signal both a break with the methodological
framework of Remediation and a dissatisfaction with the rhetoric of the
“new” or the “avant-garde” that still informs a great deal of new media
theory and practice. Thus while the book addresses concerns that could
readily be included under the category of “new media,” my use of the
term “mediality” marks my insistence that, in the first decade of the
twenty-first century, when virtually all textual, visual, and audio media
are produced, circulated, and remediated via networked digital technologies, it no longer makes sense to distinguish between “old media”
like print, radio, television, or cinema, and “new media” like the World
Wide Web, mobile phones, streaming video, or MP3 players.
6. As I detail more fully in the third and fourth chapters of this book,
my interest in “affect” grows partly out of the affective turn in literary,
cultural, and social theory in the past decade and more. The affective
turn helps explain the embodied individual and collective social and
medialogical response to 9/11. Affectivity offers a more fully developed
way to think about what Remediation called “perceptual immediacy”,
which was produced either by the transparency of media technologies
like digital photography and virtual reality or the hypermediacy of
technologies like the World Wide Web and the windowed computer or
televisual screen.
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6
7. The concern with affect also helps to explain the absence of a methodological framework that has been prominent in treatments of 9/11 or
the scandals of Abu Ghraib or the unlawful detention at Guantanamo
Bay or at dark sites across the globe. That framework is trauma theory,
which has itself become an extensive and influential methodology for
the treatment of the literary and cultural response to the violence perpetrated against innocent victims by the unjust and abusive exercise
of (mainly) state power. Growing initially out of the burgeoning field
of Holocaust Studies, which took up the most dramatic and inhuman
abuse of state power in the twentieth century, if not (by some accounts)
in all of human history, trauma theory relies upon various psychoanalytical methodologies to analyze the way in which literary and cultural artifacts are both expressions of and attempts to work through
traumatic events. Although I occasionally talk about the events of 9/11
as traumatic, I do not employ psychoanalytic methodologies to make
sense of how media have responded and will continue to respond to
these events.
8. In focusing on premediation, affect, and mediality, I have turned
explicitly to methodological and theoretical frameworks that offer
alternatives to some of the leading assumptions of trauma theory in
the humanities.3 As my later discussions of Silvan Tomkins, Deleuze
and Guattari, Brian Massumi, and other affect theorists lay out, one of
the attractions of affect theory is that it provides an alternative model
of the human subject and its motivations to the post-structuralist psychoanalytic models favored by most contemporary cultural and media
theorists. Affectivity helps shift the focus from representation to mediation, deploying an ontological model that refuses the dualism built
into the concept of representation. Affectivity entails an ontology of
multiplicity that refuses what Bruno Latour has characterized as the
modern divide, variously understood in terms of such fundamental
oppositions as those between human and non-human, mind and the
world, culture and nature, or civilization and savagery (Latour, 1993).
Drawing on varieties of what Nigel Thrift calls “non-representational
theory,” I concern myself throughout with the things that mediation
does rather than what media mean or represent (Thrift, 2007).
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Introduction 7
1
“After 9/11”
Like Walter Benjamin’s concept of dialectical history, premediation
does not consider the future as an empty and homogeneous time into
which the present moves progressively forward (Benjamin, 1940). Just
as Benjamin characterizes two kinds of history, one which sees the past
as dead or as autonomous, the other that sees it actively engaged with
the present, so there are two ways to look at the future – one which
operates on a model of prediction, which imagines the future as settled (or to-be-settled), as moving from possible to definite, and another
which imagines the future as immanent in the present, as consisting of
potentialities that impact or affect the present whether or not they ever
come about. Premediation imagines multiple futures which are alive in
the present, which always exist as not quite fully formed potentialities
or possibilities. These futures are remediated not only as they might
become but also as they have already been in the past. Premediation
is not free from history but only from what Benjamin characterizes as
“historicism.” Premediating the future entails remediating the past.
Premediation is actively engaged in the process of reconstructing history, particularly the history of 9/11, in its incessant remediation of the
future. Thus the historical event of 9/11 continues to live and make
itself felt in the present as an event that both overshadows other recent
historical events and that continues to justify and make possible certain
governmental and medial practices of securitization.
In this chapter I take up some ways in which the event of 9/11 continues to live in the present by looking at a small sampling of the nearly
innumerable ways that 9/11 has been remediated in the past decade.
I begin by asking what it means to situate my project “after 9/11.”
8
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Remediating 9/11
In answering this question, I would identify in the prepositional phrase
“after 9/11” at least three interrelated senses.
The first, and most obvious, sense is historical, meaning that this
book will take up premediation, affect, and mediality in the era after
9/11/2001. While I would insist that premediation has been at work
for a very long time, the book’s chief concern is with the way in which
it has intensified and proliferated in the decade following 9/11. “After
9/11” signals, then, that this is a historical book, and that the historical
period that this book is concerned with is the present, understood as
the historical moment after 11 September 2001. To position the book
in the historical period “after 9/11” is also, at the end of the first decade
of the twenty-first century, to situate it “after Bush-Cheney,” which is
to say after two terms of arguably the most extensive and systematic
arrogation of executive power in the history of the United States. To
situate the book after 9/11 is also to situate the book after the landmark
election of Barack Hussein Obama as the first president of color in the
history of the United States of America. “After 9/11” must now also be
understood as after the global financial collapse of 2008, which, like
the Obama campaign and presidency, participated in the same logic of
premediation that came to the forefront in the run-up to the Iraq War,
the installation of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption, and the initiation
of a juridical regime of preventive prosecution authorized by the Patriot
Act and its affiliated legislation and executive orders.1
But “after 9/11” also means after the “event” of 9/11, the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as distinct from the date
marked by that term. So “after 9/11” signals this book’s interest in premediation, affect, and mediality after the shock or catastrophe of global
terror, after the largest, most compelling global media event in human
history. But it also places the project after related events of global terror
like Spain’s 3/11, 7/7 in Britain, or “India’s 9/11,” the November 2008
attacks on Mumbai. More specifically the book is concerned with the
way in which the event of 9/11 changed the flow or frequency of networked global media. If as McLuhan tells us, media change the ratio of
the senses, then the global media event of 9/11 altered our sense ratios
in a profound way. This change was not instantaneous, and it is still
happening, as our media continue to respond to 9/11 by premediating
possible futures. After 9/11 mediality has followed a trajectory of premediation as a means of mobilizing collective affect in order to protect
us from the impending threat of global terrorism. Media are not stable
entities but are agents or forces of translation and interaction which
remain fundamentally altered by the events of 9/11.
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Remediating 9/11 9
There is a third sense in which I intend the phrase “after 9/11” – as
something like “in the way of” or “akin to” 9/11, that is, in the way
that one does something “after the fashion of” or “after the manner of”
another. In this sense the subtitle could be glossed as meaning “affect
and mediality in the image of 9/11.” Or as one says that “she takes after
her father,” this book might be said to consider the way in which post9/11 mediality mobilizes affect according to a logic or trajectory of premediation that resembles, or serves to remind us of, or traces its origins
to, the event of 9/11.
In each of these three senses, it is important for me to acknowledge
that “after 9/11” also assumes an American emphasis or orientation:
9/11 is the American formulation of the date, with its rhyme with 911,
the emergency phone number in the United States. I purposely use this
form of the date to signal that – although the book is informed by the
global context, particularly insofar as “global” is understood to signify
the sphere of influence of the American global empire – it is unavoidably written from an American perspective by an American academic,
and thus primarily concerns affect and mediality in an American context after the event of 9/11.
But what kind of “event” was 9/11? In the days and months following
the attack, there was no shortage of political, theoretical, and medialogical speculation and analysis concerning its implications. On the US
political front, 9/11 marked the first large-scale attack on American soil,
an act of terror promulgated by an “enemy” who hated us for our way
of life, for our freedom. For months after the attack, it was common
even for traditional spokesmen of the American left, particularly those
who lived in or had personal connections with New York, to wave the
American flag, figuratively as well as literally. For the neocons of the
Bush administration, 9/11 represented the first major battle in Samuel
Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” and the wars in Afghanistan and
especially Iraq were seen as taking the fight to the enemy. According
to The 9/11 Report: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the
United States, released in 2004, “September 11, 2001, was a day of unprecedented shock and suffering in the history of the United States” that
“transformed” the nation (p. lxxxi). And today, although Wikipedia (the
Internet’s reference work of record) characterizes the event of 9/11 under
the heading “September 11, 2001, Attacks,” rather than “September 11,
2001, Terrorist Attacks,” its entry presents a detailed timeline of the
“War on Terrorism” in which the 9/11 attacks are listed as the first strike.
Wikipedia also includes an extended entry on 9/11 conspiracy theories,
laying out some of the arguments of, and providing links to, most of the
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10 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
major groups who maintain that the event of 9/11 was planned by the
US government or other affiliated agents.
In the next section I take up the way that media coverage of 9/11
exemplified the double logic of remediation, after which I look at how
theoretical reflection on the significance of 9/11 often elided the specificity of the event’s mediation. I then turn to the question of the
project’s specifically American and medialogical elements through a
detailed reading of Art Spiegelman’s monumental comic, In the Shadow
of No Towers. I conclude the introduction with some brief remarks about
Project Rebirth, which provides an interesting example of premediation
in aiming to overcome the affective horror of 9/11.
Remediating 9/11
Global media coverage of the September 11 attack on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, not only in Western television networks like
CNN and Fox but also in early non-Western imitators such as Al-Jazeera,
closely followed the double logic of remediation. On and after 9/11 global networked news media repeatedly demonstrated the double logic
of remediation in televisual space, simultaneously multiplying mediation in the familiar collage-like look pioneered by CNN (and adopted
by Fox, CNBC, MSNBC, and almost all US news stations) and erasing
the evidence of mediation in presenting the immediacy of the extreme
close-up of the Twin Towers in flame. Media coverage during and after
9/11, especially in regard to the destruction of the World Trade Center,
combined the immediacy of televisual monitoring with the hypermediacy of the web. The double logic of these remediations worked simultaneously to erase the televisual medium in our act of experiencing the
reality of the Twin Towers in flame, and to multiply mediation through
split screens, scrolling headlines, the importation of radio feeds, cellphones, videophones, and so forth.
In some important sense, however, 9/11 signaled a shift in the US
cultural or media dominant.2 The events of 9/11 did not in and of themselves of course produce a total shift in our cultural logic of mediation.
They proved less a categorical break or rupture than a kind of watershed
moment, a sea change not fully evident until some time after it had
occurred.3 The intensity of the double logic of remediation expressed
during the attacks of 9/11 – the immediacy of the bombing, burning,
and collapse of the Twin Towers coupled with the hypermediacy of its
mediation on screens across the world – led many to describe 9/11 as the
“first live global media event.”4 For the United States, however, it could
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Remediating 9/11 11
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
also be seen to have marked the last live global media event, or at least
US media seemed to want to make it such in their obsession with premediating the future in the months following the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. As I argue in much greater detail in the
following chapter, premediation took a fundamentally American form
in the years immediately following 9/11, as the United States sought to
try to make sure that the American public never again experienced live
a large-scale catastrophic event that had not already been premediated.
In some sense the event of 9/11 can be seen to have marked an end to
the technocultural desire for immediacy fueled by the dot.com and virtual reality hysteria of the nineties, and to have replaced it with a desire
for a nation (or indeed a world) in which the immediacy of the catastrophe, the immediacy of disaster, could not happen again – because
it would always already have been premediated. In a kind of cultural
reaction formation, the desire or demand among US media since 9/11
has been to make sure that when the future comes it will already have
been remediated, to prepare the public to be ready for the future not as
it emerges immediately into the present but before it ever happens.
The claim that the current media regime is preoccupied with the
premediation of the future runs counter to the contention (set forth
paradigmatically, but not exclusively, by Paul Virilio) that our current
historical moment is “monochronic.” Virilio contends that the increasing temporal and spatial acceleration of technologies in the past 200
years and more reached its limit in the “real time” technologies of
digital media and telecommunication. Writing at the end of the twentieth century, Virilio sees the invention of cinema as leading almost
inevitably to telecommunication technologies and networked media,
which work to collapse space and time into a moment of instantaneity
and thus to produce a preoccupation not with the past or future, but
with the present, the “time freeze” of “real time.”5 Although critical
of the effects of such instantaneity – the production of “a personality
split in time” – Virilio shares with enthusiasts of telecommunication
and digital technology the belief that these new technologies do indeed
provide a fundamental break with prior technologies. This intense preoccupation with the present and real time was very much a feature of
the ideology of technology at the end of the twentieth century, both in
the utopian rhetoric of technological progress and determinism and its
dystopian counterparts.
But where dreams of real time were very much alive prior to 9/11,
the televisual and perceptual immediacy of the catastrophe of 9/11
prompted, at least for the time being, a cultural hesitation about the
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immediacy of digital technology. Print, networked, and particularly
televisual media began to concern themselves less with the immediate present than with the premediated future. In asserting a shift in
the televisual coverage of catastrophe, I do not mean to suggest that
the desire to premediate the future suddenly emerged full-blown after
September 11, nor that it confined itself to televisual news. Rather premediation can be seen to have been emerging over the course of the
1990s, and may even prove to be a kind of unseen structural counterpart to the double logic of remediation, indeed perhaps to all new technologies.6 Still, there can be little question that since 9/11 the US media
environment has become increasingly populated by remediations not
only of the present or the immediate past but also of the future. In
the post-9/11 logic of premediation, the threat of additional acts of terrorism, of another 9/11, stands for the catastrophic or traumatic possibility of an act that has not been, or cannot be, premediated – what
Derrida characterizes as “l’a’venir,” as opposed to the predictable future
on which one can count and plan.7 Or perhaps another way to say this
is that the shock of 9/11 generated a medial desire never to experience
another catastrophe that had not already been premediated (which
would of course make it a different kind of catastrophe indeed).
In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, many cultural theorists,
particularly but not exclusively European ones, found the 9/11 event to
be further evidence of the loss of the real in the immateriality of digital
mediation. For Jean Baudrillard the event of 9/11 was “not ‘real.’ In a
sense, it [was] worse; it [was] symbolic” (Baudrillard, 2002, p. 29). Slavoj
Žižek saw “the collapse of the WTC towers as the climactic conclusion of
twentieth-century art’s ‘passion for the Real’ – the terrorists themselves
did not do it primarily to provoke real material damage, but for the spectacular effect of it” (Žižek, 2002, p. 11). Nearly ten years after 9/11 early
theoretical responses like these seem somewhat premature (or even simplistic) in their evaluation of this historical event. Indeed Baudrillard
and Žižek have often been criticized for maintaining that the immateriality or dematerializing powers of media and mediation prevented the
events of 9/11 from being instances of the real. For Baudrillard, 9/11 was
not real because it was a medial simulacrum. For Žižek the hypermediation of 9/11 prevents us from getting to the real 9/11, which is understood as distinct from, if not prior to, its mediation, and which is taken
as something to be avoided or opposed or simply erased.
Žižek and Baudrillard are perhaps only the most notable figures to
remark upon the fact that prior to 9/11 catastrophes like planes crashing
into skyscrapers had often been depicted in Hollywood disaster films.
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Remediating 9/11 13
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
In this sense 9/11 was both a paradigmatic remediation event and an
important moment in the emergence of premediation. These uncanny
cinematic precursors work differently, however, from the way premediation has operated after 9/11 in print, networked, and televisual media.
That is, there is a medial specificity to the event of 9/11 that should not
be elided or denied, a specificity related not only to its human and nonhuman casualties but also psychologically to its surprise or unpredictability; 9/11 was a surprise not in terms of the structural or imaginative
possibility of such an attack, but in terms of the precise time and place,
the particular human and non-human actants involved, and the way in
which it altered the ratio of our senses in our everyday media environment. While Baudrillard, Žižek, and others were right to say that before
9/11 we had already seen such terrorist acts on our screens and knew
that even in the United States they were possible – indeed we had even
witnessed such acts in Hollywood films – these cinematic depictions
differ from print, networked, and most significantly televisual remediation of the destruction of the World Trade Center.
One difference between cinematic and televisual depictions of disaster involves the formal and aesthetic practices of the two media. Geoff
King has detailed the significant differences between the formal techniques and visual strategies used in cinematic depictions of the collapse
of major American skyscrapers in films like Independence Day (1996),
Armageddon (1998), and Fight Club (1999) and those used in televisual
coverage of the collapse of the World Trade Center, particularly in terms
of both visual framing and the deployment of semiotic markers of the
real (King, 2005). Where the premediation of the Iraq War, for example,
entailed the televisual mediation of possible war scenarios in a formal
style virtually indistinguishable from the way in which the war was
mediated once it had occurred, these cinematic tours de force have more
in common with what Angela Ndalianis, following Tom Gunning’s
influential formulation, has called “the 1990s cinema of attractions” of
special effects (Ndalianis, 2000). Perhaps the most striking difference
between these two forms of “premediation” can be explained by the fact
that, despite having previously seen the destruction of major American
skyscrapers in the movies, the American (and the global) public were
still shocked and traumatized by the event of 9/11.
A related difference between cinematic and televisual depictions of
catastrophes like 9/11 can be traced to the psychological or structural
differences between the media of television and film. In an essay from
1990, Mary Ann Doane argued compellingly that “in its structural
emphasis upon discontinuity and rupture, it often seems that television
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15
itself is formed on the model of catastrophe” (Doane, 1990, p. 228).
Taking as her chief examples such late-eighties catastrophes as the 1986
Challenger explosion, a 1987 Detroit Northwest Airlines crash, and 1988’s
Hurricane Gilbert, Doane sees real-time, liveness, and instantaneity as
key elements of televisual catastrophe, which works by interrupting the
predictability and reassurance of regularly scheduled programming.
The live coverage of catastrophe on television functions both to generate anxiety and to suppress it. At the beginning of the nineties, televisual catastrophe worked to bring the audience into immediate contact
with a “real” which disrupted the normal and the everyday, even while
such catastrophe was “characterized by everything which it is said not
to be – it is expected, predictable, its presence crucial to television’s
operation” (Doane, 2002, p. 238). Even though it cannot account for
how the scale of a traumatic catastrophe like 9/11 would be able to shift
the focus of televisual catastrophe away from the present and towards
the future, Doane’s analysis of the way in which television news generates and suppresses anxiety by both disrupting and perpetuating the
everyday and the predictable helps to illuminate further the differences
between televisual remediation and the kind of cinematic depictions of
spectacular destruction cited by Baudrillard and Žižek. Because of the
repetitive structure of the everyday built into televisual programming,
the repeated premediation of future disasters or catastrophes works to
guard against the recurrence of a media trauma like 9/11 by maintaining, as Doane suggests of televisual catastrophe, an almost constant low
level of fear.8
Although Žižek and Baudrillard see cinematic catastrophe as indicative of something like a collective terrorist or apocalyptic wish, the
drive towards premediation in the post-9/11 media climate more tellingly represents the media’s own cinematic and televisual war against
terror. Just as the US government multiplies and extends its own networks of political, investigative, and juridical practices to prevent the
occurrence of another 9/11, so the media multiply or proliferate their
own premediations of potential terror attacks, as a way to try to prevent the occurrence of another media 9/11. Like the establishment of
a color-coded security system of terror alert, the media’s preoccupation
with premediating the future strives to maintain a low level of anxiety
among the American public in order to protect them from experiencing the immediacy of another catastrophe like 9/11.9 The desire that
no future catastrophic event (war, snipers, terrorism, natural disaster)
be unmediated is the desire to premediate the future, the desire that
the future never be free from mediation.10 The logic of premediation,
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Remediating 9/11
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
to which I will return in much greater detail in the following chapter,
differs from the double logic of remediation in that it represents not a
desire for experiential immediacy, but rather a fear of such immediacy,
of the kind of extreme moment of immediacy or transparency that 9/11
produced, in which the burning and collapse of the Twin Towers were
perceived as if free from their mediation by radio, TV, the web, and so
forth, even while these mediations were multiplying at an almost dizzying pace. Over the past decade, an important aspect of premediation
was still concerned with remediating 9/11, both in trying to reform the
damage done to the nation’s sense of economic, political, and cultural
security and in the Benjaminian sense that historical events are not
definitively past, but continue to live in the present where they can be
readily reactivated or invoked.
9/11: theorization or mediatization?
In 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, David Simpson, an AngloAmerican literary scholar, defends both Žižek and Baudrillard in urging
the necessity of theoretical reflection in the attempt to commemorate
the event of 9/11. Simpson’s concern with commemoration is in many
ways a concern with remediation as well – both in remediating the horror of 9/11 and reforming the popular reputation of continental theory
in the period after 9/11. Singling out (among others) Baudrillard’s and
Žižek’s responses to 9/11, he makes a compelling case for the role of
high theory “in the homeland” after 9/11, despite claims in the popular
press to the contrary that the severity of the attack on US soil revealed
how ridiculous or empty or irrelevant postmodern theory was.
Simpson takes on arguments from (mainly) Anglo-American literary critics, who have condemned “theory” in the name of the universal truths of “literature,” and who see theory as disconnected
from the trans-historical truths of embodied human existence.11 He
takes a famous passage from William Wordsworth as an instance of
how the experience of loss through literature prepared him for the
sight of death, prevented him from being shocked by the vulnerability, indeed the mortality, of the human body. Simpson explains how
Wordsworth recounts that as a nine-year-old boy he was not startled
or surprised when he encountered the body of a drowned man on the
lake of Esthwaite because he had experienced such things imaginatively through his “early reading”:
Wordsworth records this event as a positive instance of early reading,
which accustoms us to sights we have not yet seen and makes them
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bearable when we do see them .... The self can encounter these potentially traumatic events without collapsing. It does not even need to
experience a period of working through; it bears up, and carries on ....
The prefigurative imaginative experience makes bearable the shock
of the real.
(Simpson, 2006, p. 127)
Simpson introduces the idea of “prefigurative imaginative experience”
to argue that just as literature neither guarantees nor forecloses a compassionate or action-oriented response, so the unmediated experience
of trauma does not guarantee sympathy or action. Simpson’s defense
of theory is that it works both to make familiar and to defamiliarize
events like 9/11: “Finding something bearable need not of itself lead to a
deadening of sympathy, provided that some other order of thinking or
feeling supervene to modify any sense of complacency. Similarly there
is no guarantee that an unmediated experience (before and without the
literary imagination) will not lead to a traumatic state that is equally
inert and unable to act” (Simpson, 2006, p. 128). The attack on theory
in the name of literature, he charges, ignores the fact that how one
responds to literature depends on the situation one is in.
What Simpson describes literature doing for Wordsworth is similar to
what Benjamin has described cinema as doing in training the human
sensorium to deal with the shocks and traumas of modernity. And, as I
will argue later, mediality today similarly helps the twenty-first-century
global citizen to deal with the potential recurrence of the terror and
trauma of events like 9/11. It is important, though, to clarify the differences between Simpson’s notion of “prefigurative imaginative experience” and the concept of premediation that I set forth throughout this
book – particularly as they involve historically disparate media formations. Insofar as Wordsworth’s literary experiences of death were, in
Simpson’s terms, “prefigurative,” these experiences are largely imaginary, mediated through language. For Benjamin, on the other hand, the
experience of cinema has an imaginary as well as a physical impact
on the audience, not to mention its indexical (if culturally and aesthetically variable) relation to the real. And (as I will argue in the following chapters) with networked digital media, “prefigurative” media
events are in almost every respect indistinguishable, formally as well as
in some sense affectively, from the medial experience of future terror
events. More to the point, premediation can both prefigure the future
event in the very medium within which the event itself is experienced
(as with cable news in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003) and bring
about a kind of affective response to media that helps to inure us to, or
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Remediating 9/11
train us to endure, media events that produce frightening, shocking,
fearful, or traumatic responses.
This affective premediation is evident in films like Steven Spielberg’s
War of the Worlds (2005) or Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006),
for example, which, while not dealing explicitly with the event of
9/11, work to dramatize thematically and affectively what it feels
like to survive in the environment of post-9/11 New York or post-7/7
London. Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (2006) brilliantly captures the
affectivity of post-9/11 premediation, remediating the formats of our
security everyday to present an impending catastrophe as distributed
across various media forms and networks and practices. Steven Shaviro
describes the “post-cinematic media regime” presented in the film as
participating in a kind of temporality of premediation in which the
future impinges on the present through our hypermediated environment: “Not only do we see multiple, heterogeneous screens within the
movie screen; we also see the characters in the movie appearing on
these screens, creating content for them, and watching them – often
all at the same time” (Shaviro, 2009). Where Wordsworth might not
have been surprised by the body of the drowned man because he had
already imagined dead or drowned bodies through his reading, films
like Southland Tales exemplify the Benjaminian point that experiences
like having already seen the Twin Towers fall on TV or on the Internet
can both be rekindled and contained by the forms and practices
through which our affective relations are mobilized by media as part
of our daily lives. We become affectively accustomed to experiencing
media terror so that if (or, so we are told, when) another terrorist attack
occurs, we can, in Simpson’s terms, “encounter these potentially traumatic events without collapsing, we bear up, we carry on.” In the first
decades of the twenty-first century, premediation alters the sensory or
affective ratios of all forms of media, just as remediation did in the last
decades of the twentieth.
Thus, although Simpson makes an important point in arguing
that theoretical reflection is necessary in making sense of 9/11 and
its aftermath, such reflection needs also to pay sustained analytical
attention to the formal, medial aspects of 9/11. Unfortunately, when
Simpson turns towards media he too often resorts to Baudrillardian
metaphysics, as when he links the Wordsworth example to the
simulacrum:
Are the drowned man and the falling towers instances of what we
call, after Baudrillard, the simulacrum, the sign without a signified,
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18 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
the image emptied of any connection to the real? Is their preexistence in the world of romance and fairy tale or of the movies
enough to deprive them of the power of identification and purposive shock, the power to move and move to action? Are we trapped by
the repetition of the spectacle as a commodified form able to digest
whatever associates with it in the realm of new experience, making
such experience never new and never shocking?
(Simpson, 2006, p. 129)
To invoke the conceptual terms of remediation, Simpson fears that
hypermediacy (“the repetition of the spectacle as a commodified form”)
will work to rule out the immediacy of the “shocking” and “new,” after
the event of 9/11, just as “early reading” prevented Wordsworth from
being shocked by the new experience of seeing the body of a man
drowned in the Lake of Esthwaite. In order to make this argument, however, Simpson must ignore the formal and material differences between
reading about death and seeing it, or of seeing the Twin Towers collapse in a disaster film and seeing them collapse on CNN. In so doing
he erases the historical specificity of different forms of mediation and
makes the question only one of the content of the signified, not of the
forms of the signifier in any material or technical sense.
Like Baudrillard and Žižek, Simpson participates in a theorization of
new media that elides the materiality or agency of mediation, taking
such media as constituting an almost magical, dematerializing force,
rather than, as I will argue most explicitly in subsequent chapters, a
material form of governmentality in a society of control. Indeed for
Simpson the Baudrillardian simulacrum (whether in Wordsworth or on
CNN) empties media of all connection with the real:
Baudrillard, one of the exponents of what is called theory, had
engaged with these questions before 9/11 and pursued the argument
to the point of apparent absurdity in his infamous contention that
the 1991 Gulf War did not take place. This aggressively counterintuitive statement was widely reproduced as an instance of the silliness and even the moral turpitude of theory – for how can we say
that a war in which at least 100,000 people died in the military phase
alone did not take place? But Baudrillard’s point is a serious one.
(Simpson, 2006, p. 129)
What makes this point serious for Simpson (even in light of more than
100,000 deaths) is his conviction that the Gulf War was mediated by
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
The war was conducted by and represented to the victors as if it were
a glorified computer game directed by remote control from afar and
involving no American casualties worth listing. Apart from the horrible photos of the “highway of death” that appeared during the final
phases of the Iraqi retreat from Kuwait, there were hardly any images
of combat or its consequences for the violated bodies of its victims.
We had seen it all before in video games. (A similar video culture of
Iraq-based “real” combat games was generated during the 2003 war
and circulated during the “real” time of the invasion.) The minimal
numbers of American dead meant that for those in the homeland
who were the targeted readers of Baudrillard’s sardonic narrative,
the war never had to be removed from a purely virtual existence:
everything took on the status of information, just as information
technology itself operated the weapons apparently without human
instigation. In a pattern that repeats itself across the reported experiences of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq, the hyperbolic insights of
Baudrillard’s theory are borne out by the empirical record.
(Simpson, 2006, pp. 129–30)
At the same time that Simpson insists on the importance of mediation, however, he continues to downplay or even ignore its materiality
or historical specificity. Although he repeatedly cites the importance
of mediation, his argument makes sense only if we erase almost all formal and material differences among different historical media events
and their audiences. If we take into account the formal and material elements of mediality, this passage only raises more questions.
Because the Gulf War was conducted as a computer game, Simpson
contends, it did not take place: but wouldn’t it be more accurate to suggest that it took place as a computer game takes place and to explore
what this might mean? There were hardly any images of bodies or victims in the media, Simpson claims, but we’d seen it all before in video
games: shouldn’t we examine the relationship between the depiction
of dead or wounded bodies in video games and in other media? And
does it make sense to equate “the targeted readers of Baudrillard’s sardonic narrative” with, or to fail to distinguish them from, those “who
had seen it before in video games?” How much of an overlap is there
between those two audiences? How many of those who had “seen
it all before in video games” had read Baudrillard? And how many
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the US government and the military as if it were a computer or video
game:
readers of Baudrillard’s sardonic narrative are regular video game
players? Perhaps most egregiously the passage identifies Wordsworth’s
experience of a drowned man (whom he sees in the same physically contiguous space) with the American public’s experience of the
Gulf War, 9/11, or the Iraq War (which by Simpson’s Baudrillardian
account didn’t even occur on the TV sets through which they were
experienced). That is, Simpson equates the difference between reading
about death and seeing it in person with, for example, the difference
between seeing the event of 9/11 on television and seeing the Twin
Towers destroyed in a disaster film.
While I argued above that there were significant differences between the televisual media experience of 9/11 and that of watching skyscrapers destroyed in cinema, these two screen media experiences have
more in common, affectively and perceptually, than do the experiences
of reading about dead bodies and that of seeing one in person for the
first time. Because Simpson follows Baudrillard in identifying images
with information, however, he flattens formal and medial distinctions,
and dematerializes mediation, even as he cites Baudrillard to accuse the
United States of using images to flatten all information into simulation
or simulacrum:
Baudrillard saw in the first Gulf War evidence that the power of images
worked to flatten all information to the point where it might be true
or not true, real or not real: “just as everything psychical becomes
the object of interminable speculation, so everything which is turned
into information becomes the object of endless speculation, the site
of total uncertainty. We are left with the symptomatic reading on our
screens of the effects of the war, or the effects of discourse about the
war” [Baudrillard, 1995, p. 41]. Nothing can be fully denied or fully
believed, every item of information is just that, an item of information. This commits us to an epistemology of fantasy and paranoia in
a world in which anything could or could not be true.
(Simpson, 2006, p. 130)
Sharing Baudrillard’s fear of the radical epistemological uncertainty
of the image, Simpson seems unable to distinguish one image-based
medium from another: “This world of images in which everything can
be made to confirm or deny anything is the limit case of a proliferation
of a culture of the simulacrum that has been at least latent in the human
propensity for producing art objects of all kinds since who knows when,
but it has been dramatically speeded up with the invention and rapid
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
extension of reproducible technologies: photograph, film, video, computer” (Simpson, 2006, p. 132).
It is not insignificant that Simpson invokes an abbreviated media
genealogy of “reproducible technologies” (“photography, film, video,
computer”) which omits not only the invention of linear perspective
but arguably the most influential reproducible technology of all – the
text-based printing press. His privileging of literature in the Wordsworth
example ignores the fact that literature, too, is a medium of reproducible technology. For Simpson, the fear of the visual, of “images in
which everything can be made to confirm or deny anything” marks
the media “culture of the simulacrum” as threatening the epistemological stability of literary, text-based truth.12 One consequence of the
kind of epistemological free-for-all that Simpson fears from a world of
media simulacra, “in which everything can be made to confirm or deny
anything,” can be found in the emergence of something like the 9/11
Truth Movement, characterized on Wikipedia as “the name adopted by
organizations and individuals that question the mainstream account
of the September 11 attacks against the United States.” Members of this
movement mine print, mass, and digital media for evidence to support
their conviction that the US government had a much more substantial
and active role in the events of 9/11 than has been acknowledged in the
mainstream media. Perhaps most interesting is the way in which the
movement mobilizes the participatory agency of these same media to
make their case – particularly the way in which they use both the Web
and the social networking capabilities of the blogosphere to circulate
their arguments, counter-arguments, and evidence.
Jodi Dean has suggested that the rhetoric of the 9/11 Truth Movement
constitutes a kind of psychotic double of academic discourse, and that
the movement “gained in momentum because of the involvement of
credentialed academics” (Dean, 2009). The flourishing of 9/11 Truth,
Dean argues, exemplifies the changing conditions of credibility and
certainty in our era of participatory networked communication. Like
Simpson, Dean follows Žižek (as well as Lacan) in seeing “the problem
posed by 9/11 truth not as one of credibility but of its absence, more
specifically, as the absence of conditions of possibility for something
like belief or credibility” (Dean, 2009). Dean shares Simpson’s concern
that the explosion of participatory networked media threatens to produce an epistemological free-for-all that does away with the possibility
of authoritative belief or credibility. Her treatment is more helpful than
Simpson’s, however, in that she understands that the absence of credibility is paradoxically accompanied by the production of certainty. And
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23
unlike Simpson, Dean takes mediation seriously, paying close critical
attention to the way in which 9/11 Truth remediates the event of 9/11
by mobilizing participatory and mass media, as well as by its production of the Internet blockbuster Loose Change, which employs sophisticated techniques of audiovisual media to affectively underscore and
reinforce its message. Dean is particularly insightful about the interplay
of affect and mediality in the context of conspiracy theories after 9/11
in America, an interplay that I take up in a different context in my discussion of Abu Ghraib in the third chapter.
“We are all Americans”
For Simpson, the cure for the epistemological illness brought about by
the poison of media simulacra is “theory,” particularly the European
theory of Derrida, Lacan, and “postmodern” theorists like Baudrillard,
Žižek, or Agamben. Simpson insists throughout on the importance of
this theory’s “foreignness” to explain what is both familiar and unfamiliar about the event of 9/11. I have singled Simpson out because his book
is an insightful instance of a line of theoretical argumentation about
media that flourished after 9/11 and that continues to hold a prominent place in academic media theory today. Challenging this theoretical
dematerialization of media in the aftermath of 9/11, I take my cue from
Jean-Marie Colombani’s famous proclamation in the 12 September
2001, issue of Le Monde that “We are all Americans,” in order to take up
what is distinctively American about premediation after 9/11.
The American media experience needs to be understood neither as
exceptional nor as unexceptional, but as historically specific, if we
are to make sense of the differences between America and the rest of
the world, to account for how the American experience of 9/11 differs
from, for example, the continental European experience of that event
(although it has much closer affinities to the British experience of 7/7,
which amplified and was amplified by its resemblances to 9/11). But at
the same time globally networked digital media make these differences
more fluid and harder to maintain than they have ever been, as Jill
Bennett perceptively explains:
If the trauma of 9/11 was geographically centered in the United
States, it clearly was not contained within national boundaries. The
immediate shock of 9/11 was felt viscerally across the globe – even
though it may not have been experienced identically by citizens of
New York City, London, and Pakistan; but, by the same token, the
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Remediating 9/11
nature of one’s affective or empathetic response was not necessarily
a function of belonging to a nation. There were bereaved families
in Asia and Europe, for example, who were more traumatized than
many Americans who weren’t directly affected by the tragedy; and
there are asylum seekers in Australian detention centers who might
be regarded as suffering greater hardship than the average US citizen as a direct result of the events of September 11.
(Bennett, 2005, pp. 127–8)
Writing from an Australian perspective, Bennett perceptively illuminates the ways in which the events of 9/11 produced impacts around
the world that were often invisible to those of us in America:
In relation to 9/11, the issue of interconnectivity is a fraught one. In
the United States, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, there was
a huge investment in denying potential connections between events
lest this mitigate the culpability of terrorists. On another level, the very
real sense in which the trauma of refugees flows from the attacks and
related political maneuvers is often underplayed. When we speak of the
trauma of 9/11, for example, we think instantly – and unsurprisingly –
of those who suffered at the World Trade Center, or of those who lost
loved ones there, but we don’t think automatically of the Afghan refugees in Australian detention centers. We may think of isolated examples of racial abuse flowing directly from the attacks (Muslim children
abused on a bus in Brisbane, a Sikh attacked in the New York City subway) but we don’t necessarily think in terms of the networks of social
relations by which subjects and bodies are inscribed with racial and
colonial identities that become fixed in places over time.
(Bennett, 2005, pp. 146–7)
Bennett’s characterization of the uneven geopolitical impact of the
events of 9/11 is right on the mark. Nonetheless, in making sense of
the aftermath of 9/11 “in America” I want to talk about how some of
the affective experiences of mediation in the United States were different from those in other nations – as seen, for example, in the post-9/11
militarization of American sporting events (Air Force flyovers for significant baseball and football games, patriotic tributes, increased use of
smoke, fire, and other explosives in player introductions during basketball and hockey games) or the continued presence of regular features
like “A Nation at War” or “The War on Terror” on CNN, Fox, and other
news networks. The chapters that follow will focus on such everyday,
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24 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
25
ordinary practices of mediation that are distinctively or particularly or
historically American after 9/11, in a way that the focus on what has
come to be called European or high “theory” is not. Unlike Simpson,
I want to argue that the proliferation of media responses is not something to be countered with theory, but rather something to be theorized
and analyzed itself.
For the purposes of this book, then, I consider 9/11 mostly as an
American medialogical event. This emphasis on America is not meant
to make a case for American exceptionalism or to minimize the significance of European or non-Western responses to 9/11, but rather to recognize the specificity of the American media experience after 9/11, to
insist that American experience should not be taken as universally or
globally to be the case. In taking up various socio-technical forms and
practices of premediation through which the event of 9/11 has been
(implicitly or explicitly) remediated in the United States both individually and collectively through mass, networked, and digital media, my
aim is to make this quotidian experience of mediation, both of and
after 9/11, a matter of intellectual and critical concern. This focus on
mediation is not to say, à la Baudrillard, that the attack on the World
Trade Center was not a real event. Nor does the claim that the event of
9/11 was medialogical mean that there were no cultural or biopolitical
consequences of this attack – nothing could be further from the case.
To be concerned with mediality, as I explain in more detail throughout the book, is precisely to see media as agents or aspects of governmentality in the management and mobilization of populations, of
what Foucault characterizes as the imbrication of “people and things”
(Foucault, 1991, p. 93). For the world outside of the United States (and
to a significant extent Britain), the event of 9/11 and its governmental
and medialogical effects were only, or primarily, experienced through
global print, mass, or networked media. And even for those who witnessed 9/11 first hand in New York City, and for those Americans who
experience the governmental and medialogical effects on an everyday
basis, the event of 9/11 was and continues to be inextricably mixed up
with mediation.
The new normal
The imbrication of mediality and affective experience is at the core of Art
Spiegelman’s powerful graphic book In the Shadow of No Towers, which
recounts in ten over-sized, color newsprint pages, written over nearly two
years, his personal experience of the attack and destruction of the Twin
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Towers as a resident of Lower Manhattan. Spiegelman is arguably the
most famous comic author of our time, whose two-volume comic treatment of the Holocaust, the most traumatic geopolitical event of the
twentieth century, overdetermines him as someone well-positioned
to make sense of the historical experience of 9/11. Spiegelman’s book
clearly exemplifies the double logic of remediation, insisting simultaneously on the unmediated authenticity of his immediate experience
and on the inseparability of his experience from the materiality of its
hypermediation. Throughout the comics, and especially in the book’s
introduction, Spiegelman both distinguishes his personal eyewitness
experience from televisual or other medial responses and insists that
his affective experience of the fall of the towers can only be understood
in terms of, and cannot be separated from, his experience of the multiple remediations of 9/11 in a variety of media. The conceit or conceptual condition that underlies his book is its remediation of an earlier
historical moment, the innovation of Sunday comics in mass-market
American newspapers of the first two decades of the twentieth century.
Despite the solidity of its sturdy cardboard pages, the book’s large-scale
format and the style of the comics themselves lovingly remediate the
look and feel of the newspaper comics of early modernity. As such the
book serves to remind us that Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer
were also interested in the illustrated newspapers and magazines of the
first few decades of the twentieth century as phenomena of mechanical reproduction (Benjamin) or mass ornaments (Kracauer) suitable
to, or reflective of, the affective experience of the historical conditions
of European modernity. Spiegelman underscores his commitment to
the connection between the mediality of the early twentieth century
and that of the early twenty-first by including in his book a “Comic
Supplement,” which reprints seven Sunday comics from such American
newspapers as the New York American, New York Herald, and Chicago
Tribune – from 1902’s “The Glorious Fourth of July!” to 1921’s “Bringing
up Father.” But it is in his introduction and in his comics themselves
that the implications of these connections are most fully developed.
Spiegelman prefaces his comics with an introduction that lays out his
motivations for the project and provides a guide to how the following
pages might be understood. The introduction begins with Spiegelman
asserting his identity as a son of Auschwitz survivors and noting how
9/11 seemed at first to be the holocaust that his parents had warned
him about when they taught him “to always keep [his] bags packed.”
Insofar as Auschwitz and World War II are indicative of the culmination of the traumas of European, especially German, modernity, then
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26 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
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we could say that for Spiegelman, 9/11 “took after” Auschwitz as in
some senses In the Shadow of No Towers takes after Maus. But ignoring his
parents’ advice, he didn’t run from New York after 9/11 because of his
“allegiance” to New York City, what he describes as “the depth of my
affection for the chaotic neighborhood that I can honestly call home.”
This “affection” is meant on the most literal level to indicate something
like fondness, but it becomes clear from the introduction and the comics themselves that it is also indicative of his affectedness, of the bodily
affect produced by his “chaotic neighborhood” both before and after
9/11. Spiegelman defends his choice of the large-scale medium of the
Sunday comics to depict the event of 9/11 and its aftermath:
The giant scale of the color newsprint pages seemed perfect for oversized skyscrapers and outsized events, and the idea of working in single page units corresponded to my existential conviction that I might
not live long enough to see them published. I wanted to sort out the
fragments of what I’d experienced from the media images that threatened to engulf what I actually saw, and the collagelike nature of a
newspaper page encouraged my impulse to juxtapose my fragmentary thoughts in different styles.
(Spiegelman, 2004, pp. i–ii)
Spiegelman here demonstrates the double logic of remediation informing
his project, setting up a categorical and rhetorical opposition between
the immediacy of what he had “experienced” and “actually saw” and
the hypermediacy of “media images that threatened to engulf” him.
Although he characteristically distinguishes between his unmediated
experience and the mediated experiences which threatened to overwhelm his actual experiences of the real, he can only express his “existential conviction” of impending doom through the remediation of
another medium, the “collagelike nature of a newspaper.” His appeal to
the empirical, to his first-hand experience, is simultaneously an appeal
to the collage-like medium of the early-twentieth-century newspaper
rather than the “engulfing” or “totalizing” or “fluid” medium of television, cinema, or the Internet at the start of the twenty-first century.
This affiliation between a particular autobiographical experience and
a particular medium continues in his description of the “pivotal image”
of his experience of 9/11, the vaporization of the north tower. Again
he begins by describing his experience in contradistinction to mechanical or electronic media like photography or video. But he goes on
to describe his personal vision in a way that characterizes his body as a
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
The pivotal image from my 9/11 morning – one that didn’t get photographed or videotaped into public memory but still remains burned
onto the inside of my eyelids several years later – was the image of
the looming north tower’s glowing bones just before it vaporized.
I repeatedly tried to paint this with humiliating results but eventually came close to capturing the vision of disintegration digitally on
my computer. I managed to place some sequences of my most vivid
memories around that central image but never got to draw others.
(Spiegelman, 2004, p. ii)
In addition to characterizing his body as a photo-sensitive organism
which is physically impacted by an image, or as a kind of visual medium
for producing memories, or for reproducing or remembering images
and experiences, Spiegelman contrasts his private memory of this
image with the “public memory” of photography or video. Tellingly,
his repeated artistic failure to paint this “vision of disintegration,” “the
looming north tower’s glowing bones just before it vaporized,” is overcome only by capturing it “digitally on my computer.”
For Spiegelman (as for Bill Brown, who has argued that 9/11 should
be seen to mark the beginning of postmodernism), the ground zero
of 9/11 marks a kind of “year zero as well.” Spiegelman’s, however, is
a year zero of the “dystopian Big Brother mode” that transformed the
early glow of idealism of Lower Manhattan, marked by the impromptu
memorials at Ground Zero, “into one of those suburban gated communities as we flashed IDs at the police barriers on 14th Street before being
allowed to walk home” (Spiegelman, 2004, p. i). Spiegelman credits this
transformation, along with the way in which the Bush administration
“immediately instrumentalized the attack for their own agenda,” with
motivating him into doing political cartooning, which he had resisted
earlier at least in part because he claimed that his slow working pace
seemed unsuitable in relation to the transience of political events. Yet
the persistence of the “new normal” of 9/11 in the cultural, political,
and media imaginary convinced him to try his hand at it. As he began
to complete his initial pages, however, he found a “less than enthusiastic” reception in the American press. Accordingly, he assembled what
he wryly calls his own “coalition of the willing,” largely from the press
of the “ ‘old Europe’ – France, Italy, the Netherlands, England – where
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medium, so that, as in the extract above, the opposition between mediated and unmediated experiences or images turns out to be an opposition between two forms of embodied, mediated experience:
29
[his] political views hardly seemed extreme” (Spiegelman, 2004, p. ii).
But while it is true that the press in those nations was indeed more
sympathetic to Spiegelman’s politics, it is also the case that in some
of those nations the medium of political newspaper comics is a more
familiar historical or cultural practice than in the United States, in part
because the history of European politics has prepared them to be receptive to the use of media as a way to modulate one’s collective moods, to
enable one to deal with the conditions of modernity. Indeed, this point
is underscored by the fact that in the United States only the Forward, the
English-language successor of an older Yiddish newspaper, was willing
to take on Spiegelman’s 9/11 comics.
The comics themselves continue Spiegelman’s graphic meditation on
mediation and 9/11. On the first page the sequence above the series
title (“In the Shadow of No Towers”) is itself titled “The New Normal.”
This sequence of three panels presents the question of normality, “the
normal,” in relation to practices of watching TV. The first panel shows
an adult man and woman on a sofa next to a toddler, all three sitting
across from a television with a cable box converter on top. The man and
woman are asleep: the man is holding what appears to be a glass of beer;
the woman has a cat sleeping on her lap; the toddler is awake, sucking
her thumb as she watches the TV. The calendar on the wall is dated
“Sept. 10.” The second panel shows the four of them in the same positions but wide-eyed awake, staring at the TV, with their hair and bodies jumping out of their seats as if they were electrified or shocked; the
calendar is dated “Sept. 11.” The third panel repeats the body language
of the first, but with the hair still spiked as in the second panel and the
cat, like the toddler, awake; in place of the calendar on the wall we see
an American flag. In relation to our TV viewing practices, this new normal looks very much like the old normal, except that the experience of
watching 9/11 on TV has had an affective, bodily impact on its viewers,
making their senses appear to be shocked awake even while they return
to sleep (Spiegelman, 2004, p. 1).
Another comic sequence on this first page also addresses the televisual mediation of the attack on the towers. The first of three panels
shows the first tower smoking and wounded after its attack; the second
panel has Dan Rather with flag-like red/white stripes over his shoulder in the upper-right corner, with the words “NEW ATTACK” across
it; and the third panel shows Spiegelman himself sitting on the floor
smoking, looking up at a TV with a flag for a screen. Across all three
panels is a dashed yellow line leading to the rear of a plane crashing
into Spiegelman’s TV as if it were the second of the towers. The text of
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Remediating 9/11
the sequence reads: (1) “Those crumbling towers burned their way into
every brain, but I live on the outskirts of Ground Zero and first saw it
all live – unmediated.” (2) “Maybe it’s just a question of scale. Even on a
large TV, the towers aren’t much bigger than, say, Dan Rather’s head ....”
(3) “Logos, on the other hand, look enormous on television; it’s a
medium almost as well suited as comics for dealing in abstractions.”
Spiegelman again begins with the distinction between live and mediated experience, underscoring the contrast between his “live – unmediated” experience and the public media experience that “burned” “those
crumbling towers” “into every brain.” He ends with a moment of comparative medialogical analysis, noting that TV is “a medium almost as
well suited as comics for dealing in abstractions.” Earlier he had singled
out comics as the best medium to express or represent his unmediated
experience. But if TV is almost as well suited as comics for dealing in
abstractions, then TV might also be a suitable medium for expressing
the experience of 9/11. And of course it is significant that the crashing
of the plane into the tower is repeated with the TV and its Americanflag logo exceeding the screen. Both the towers and American television
are seen to have taken a hit on 9/11 (Spiegelman, 2004, p. 1).
Spiegelman’s second comic page explicitly links his own work to the
early days of Sunday comics. The page’s main image depicts Spiegelman
as Maus sleeping over his work-table with an old comic page in his hands
(a comic with images of a painting pig encountering a naked woman in
blue and then chasing her with hearts of love above his head), positioning In the Shadow of No Towers here, as elsewhere, as a remediation of old
comics. A yellow text box below the sleeping Maus (flanked on either
side by a standoff between a stereotypical-looking Arab with bloody
scimitar on the left and a white guy in a blue suit with a gun and a US
flag on the right) reads: “EQUALLY TERRORIZED BY AL-QAEDA AND
BY HIS OWN GOVERNMENT ... Our hero looks over some ancient
comics pages instead of working. He dozes off and relives his ringside
seat to that day’s disaster yet again, trying to figure out what he actually saw ...” (panel 2). Once again, it is only through the process of mass
mediation (in this case that of “ancient comics”) that Spiegelman can
know “what he actually saw” (Spiegelman, 2004, p. 2).
The super-sequence provides another interesting commentary on
the medium of comics, depicting Spiegelman as a post-9/11 Ancient
Mariner, with an Albatross in the guise of a bald eagle-cum-American
flag hat on a rope around his neck. In the first panel Spiegelman
exclaims that he is “Doomed to drag this damned albatross around
my neck, and compulsively retell the calamities of September 11th to
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30 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
31
anyone who’ll still listen!” In the second panel he complains that “they
roll their eyes and tell me it’s only my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
The third panel glosses PTSD as “when Time stands still at the moment
of trauma,” which, Spiegelman says, “strikes me as a totally reasonable
response to current events!” The fourth panel reads “... I see that awesome tower, glowing as it collapses! ...,” which is the very image that
Spegelman says in the introduction was burned into the inside of his
eyelids. The super-sequence ends not with a panel per se but with an
image of the two towers, with only the first one burning from its attack.
It then becomes clear that the panels have been turning sideways, and
are drawn on what look like three-dimensional tablets, which are progressively turned almost perpendicular to the viewer, and metamorphose into those two towers. Where in the first comic Spiegelman equated
the towers with TV, here he presents a visual equation of the towers
with comic panels. Running beneath Spiegelman’s speech bubbles, the
Uncle Sam albatross reiterates a sequence of messages indicative of the
Bush administration’s evolving media responses to the event of 9/11:
(1) “Everything’s changed! Awk!” (2) “Go out and shop! Awk!” (3) “Awk!”
(4) “Be afraid!” (Spiegelman, 2004, p. 2).
The largest sequence on the page works through in even greater detail
the relationship between various forms of media and “what he actually
saw.” In a sequence of eight narrative panels detailing his experience on
the morning of 9/11, Spiegelman tries to sort out the moment of trauma
that he is doomed to repeat, the moment at which time stands still, a
moment inextricably entangled with his experience of mediation. In
the first panel he notes that “He didn’t actually see the first plane smash
into the tower a few blocks south of his Soho home,” but only “heard the
crash behind them while heading North.” The second panel notes that
after seeing the first crash mediated by “the face of a woman heading
South,” “he and his wife, blasé new Yorkers, deigned to turn around.” In
the fifth panel, he notes that “He ran back home to phone the school,
so he only saw the second plane smash into the tower on TV .... Though
he heard the deafening crash right outside his window.” Here again,
what he actually saw was mediated through television, though as with
the first crash he heard this one as well. The sixth panel notes that “He
saw the burning towers as he and his wife ran to Canal Street, toward
the school ... [new box] but his view was obstructed as he ran up the
next block ....” In the seventh panel his view is blocked again, this time
by an advertisement for a film: “He could only see smoke billowing
behind a giant billboard .... It was for some dopey new Schwarzenegger
movie about terrorism.” The final panel shows an image of a billboard
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Remediating 9/11
for the Schwarzeneger movie, Collateral Damage, the release of which
was delayed in the aftermath of the attack. Spiegelman concludes this
sequence: “Oddly, in the aftermath of September 11, some pundits
insisted that irony was Dead.” Finally, the bottom panels of the second
comic page continues a visual and narrative sequence from the first
page, which leads to the towers disintegrating and dematerializing – the
vision burnt into his brain. The panel includes a jab at the provocative
claims circulated just after the attacks that 9/11 was an act of “radical
architectural criticism,” noting that even though he doesn’t like the
way his nose looks, “I just don’t want somebody ramming a damn plane
into it!” (Spiegelman, 2004, p. 2).
The remaining comics take up the question of mediation more sporadically and obliquely, as they move even more directly into specific
remediations of the Sunday comics included in the supplement. The
first panel of the fourth comic page has Spiegelman’s wife saying,
“I oughta run home and get our camera,” while Spiegelman replies:
“nah! There’ll be lotsa photographers!” The second panel shows a photographer as vulture with an old-style box camera taking pictures of
the crying Katz-and-Jammer tower-head kids. The text boxes reprieve
Spiegelman’s concern with the relation between mediated and unmediated experience: “In mere moments their quiet Soho street was
FILLED with paparazzi. And camera crews remained on their corner,
at the perimeter of Ground Zero, for days after ... [new box] He saw the
falling bodies on tv much later ... but what he actually saw got seared
into his skull forever.” And the bottom sequence reprieves his rooted
cosmopolitan line from the introduction, likening himself to Jews who
didn’t leave Berlin after Kristallnacht and also reiterating his embodied
“pang of affection for his familiar, vulnerable streets” (Spiegelman,
2004, p. 4). The super-sequence of the seventh page cleverly remediates
the Homeland Security color-coded alert system: “Orange Alert (high
risk of terrorist attack),” “Red Alert (Severe Risk of Terrorist Attack),”
and “Red, White & Blue Alert (Virtual Certitude of Terrorist Attack)”
(Spiegelman, 2004, p. 7).13 The eighth page takes up the affective implications of news, both print and televisual, in the aftermath of 9/11.
The first sequence deals with newspapers: “I’ve consumed ‘news’ till
my brain aches. The papers have confirmed that the towers I saw fall
really did fall .... Aside from that, the news just confirms that I’m right
to feel paranoid. My subconscious is drowning in newspaper headlines!” The bottom half of the page remediates “Bringing up Father,”
PLATE 7 from the comics supplement, to comment upon Spiegelman’s
obsession with 9/11 and with media reports of it. Punningly entitled
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32 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
“Marital Blitz,” the sequence begins with Spiegelman as Father, online
at 2 AM looking for information to feed his conspiracy theories. His
wife says that he should go to bed or he’s “gonna get news poisoning.”
Then the third panel shows him in bed, remote control in hand, sighing: “I guess I can watch some CNN.” The fourth panel shows someone
on the TV repeating one of the foundations of conspiracy theory ideology: “ ‘Clearly no Arab had the know-how to fly into-’ ” before Father
turns off the TV in disgust, saying “Bah! The paranoid putz!” Finally,
the next morning the neighbor below, dressed as a terrorist, wakes him
with his radio, announcing that “President Bush will be at Ground
Zero today,” telling Father Art, “I listen to the radio every morning”
(Spiegelman, 2004, p. 8). And the final comic of the sequence concludes with Spiegelman invited to be part of “a collage of interviews
with typical New Yorkers” featured on Tom Brokaw’s show on a 9/11
concert for America in Washington, DC (Spiegelman, 2004, p. 10). In
America after 9/11 the televisual collage has definitively taken the place
of the collage of the illustrated newspapers from which these comics
emerged. Spiegelman’s remediation of the event of 9/11 in the image
of the Sunday comics of the early twentieth century simultaneously
remediates it in terms of the hypermediated environment of the first
decade of the twenty-first.
The emergence of premediated time
Spiegelman’s powerful remediation of the Sunday comics of the early
twentieth century tellingly links the media environment of modernity
to that of the present moment. The relationship between technologies
of mediation and temporality, or in Bernard Stiegler’s terms, “technics
and time,” while traceable back to the earliest periods of humanity, has
become increasingly complex in the past century. Mary Ann Doane has
made a similar connection between cinema and the media environment
just prior to 9/11, arguing that one of the most important accomplishments of the new medium of cinema was its ability to make the contingency of time representable, as photography had done with space:
the rationalization of time characterizing industrialization and the
expansion of capitalism was accompanied by a structuring of contingency and temporality through emerging technologies of representation – a structuring that attempted to ensure their residence outside
structure, to make tolerable an incessant rationalization. Such a strategy is not designed simply to deal with the leakage or by-products of
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Remediating 9/11 33
34
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
Completed just before the events of 9/11, Doane’s The Emergence of
Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive brilliantly maps
out the relations among cinema and other technologies and discursive
practices of capitalist modernity in representing the immediacy and
contingency of temporality in the twentieth century. In the book’s final
chapter Doane links cinematic, televisual, and digital representation in a
common “obsession with instantaneity and contingency” through three
representations of the destruction and collapse of a building (Doane,
2002, p. 208). Juxtaposing a 1901 actuality film, The Mighty Tumble,
with the televisual broadcasting and digital archiving of the 19 April
1995, bombing and ultimate destruction of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, which prior to 9/11 was the most catastrophic
act of terrorism on American soil, Doane argues that each of these different media expresses a common desire for “liveness.” This desire is
epitomized most intensively by a local television station’s decision to
place a camera inside the Murrah building to record its demolition the
month after it had been bombed: “Such an excessive technique registers
the extraordinary desire of ‘liveness’ – to be there at the instance of the
catastrophic event, to witness death as ultimate referent or as collision
with the real in all its intractability” (Doane, 2002, p. 207).
As I have been arguing, however, this desire for liveness, for a “collision with the real in all its intractability,” has undergone a fundamental
transformation in the aftermath of the events of 9/11. Rather than a
desire for the immediacy of the catastrophe, premediation seeks instead
to protect the American media public from having to experience again
the shock or cultural trauma experienced on 9/11 by concerning itself
with the remediation not of the present, but of the future. One instructive example of this altered relation between technology and temporality, of the emergence of premediated time, was encapsulated in the
creation of a 9/11 commemorative enterprise called Project Rebirth. As
early as the spring of 2002, Project Rebirth sought to use time-lapse
photography to document the “rebirth” or rebuilding of the site of the
World Trade Center. Beginning with only three 35 mm cameras, placed
at the site and set to take a picture every five minutes, Project Rebirth
currently has 13 cameras in place (Lyman, 2002). The result, when run
at the conventional cinematic projection rate of 24 frames per second,
would be a time-lapse film of the changes on the site as it is being
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rationalization; it is structurally necessary to the ideologies of capitalist modernization.
(Doane, 2002, p. 11)
rebuilt. Initial plans for the film’s post-production were vague, ranging
from editing the resulting films into a short feature for public screening,
presenting them as raw footage to the Library of Congress, or exhibiting them in raw or edited form in museums. Current plans include the
release of a documentary in 2010, which will combine time-lapse photography from the site (whose rebuilding has been remarkably slow),
with the stories of “10 lives coping with 9/11,” drawn from interview
footage of volunteer subjects whose lives were dramatically changed by
9/11. The ongoing project is documented on its own website, which
includes information on its aims, its various media technologies, and
the current state of the rebuilding of Ground Zero. In addition the site
includes “trailers” of the future film and a webcam to provide minuteby-minute still images of the site. Future plans (contingent on funding)
include the establishment of the Project Rebirth Center, which would
provide a resource “for victims of and first responders to events of traumatic loss.”
No matter how it eventually turns out, Project Rebirth strikingly
exemplifies how the temporal doubleness of the logic of premediation
differs from the temporality outlined by Doane in her analysis of the
emergence of cinematic time. Project Rebirth exemplifies the archival impulses of both medial and cinematic time. Writing at the end
of the 1990s, Doane compellingly documents a century of cinematic
time, when media were largely oriented towards the present and the
past, seeking both to erase the signs of their presence in the transparent
remediation of history and to foreground their mediation of the present
by relentlessly remediating earlier media forms (Doane, 2002). At the
current historical moment, however, American (and increasingly global) culture find themselves operating amidst a different media environment, in which media have become increasingly concerned with
making sure that the future will also have been premediated. In this
concern with premediation, remediation does not disappear: the past,
as well as the future, is understood as that which has always already
been remediated.14 Project Rebirth participates in the autopoietic
impulse of premediation to extend our networks of media technologies
into the future, so that the future will already be remediated when it
emerges into the present and so that the media system will continue to
function.15
Where the premediation of the Iraq War and the ongoing premediation of the War on Terror work to produce a low level of anxiety in
the public so that they will be able to deal with the uncertainties, or
even the eventuality, of another future terrorist attack, Project Rebirth
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Remediating 9/11 35
36 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
A month after September 11th, I visited Ground Zero and experienced a profound sense of dread and anxiety. Twenty minutes later,
after witnessing the extraordinary effort, determination, and concentration on the faces of the men and women cleaning up the site,
I realized that we would be able to move through this tragedy; in
fact, I felt hope. An idea emerged to create a time-lapse film documenting the entire rebuilding and rebirth of the site, allowing audiences from all over the world to experience how our dread turned
into hope, then pride. The film documents our ability to heal in the
face of a seemingly insurmountable catastrophe. It is a meditation on
resilience, optimism and hope, qualities that are the bedrock of this
nation and our world. Our film is called Project Rebirth.16
In response to the “dread and anxiety” produced by the liveness and
immediacy of the media event of 9/11, Project Rebirth would premediate in multiple media formats the rebirth of Ground Zero before it has
even happened, seeking to remediate the horror of 9/11 by fostering
an affective orientation of hopefulness or pride towards the future not
only of Ground Zero and New York but also by extension of the United
States and its global empire.
In aiming to premediate an affect of hopefulness through the medium
of time-lapse photography, Project Rebirth also remediates some of
the earliest moments of American and European cinema, which often
grounded its documentary and archival impulses in the photographic
ontology of film. Like Project Rebirth these early cinematic projects also
conveyed a kind of hopefulness about the possibilities of the new cinematic medium. One need only remember the Lumière brothers’ trick
film on the demolition of a wall, which, played backwards, reveals the
wall miraculously rebuilding itself in reverse. But unlike Spiegelman’s
In the Shadow of No Towers, which remediates early twentieth century
comics in a dialectical approach both to history and to mediation,
Project Rebirth’s remediation of early cinema approaches the events
of 9/11 from a historicist perspective of the kind Benjamin’s “On the
Concept of History” critiques. Where Spiegelman sees the catastrophe
of 9/11 both as a re-activation of the trauma of the Holocaust and as
an experience that will forever be seared into his brain, Whitaker sees
the “tragedy” of 9/11 as “something that we would be able to move
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uses a similar media logic in the aim of creating a very different affect,
an affect of hope. In a note “From the Director” on its website, Jim
Whitaker wrote:
through.” Project Rebirth responds to the radical disruption of 9/11 not
by acknowledging or investigating what it might mean for history to be
marked by discontinuity or by return, but by asserting a model of history as moving inexorably forward through homogeneous, empty time,
culminating in the rebirth and continuation of the global American
empire. Whitaker describes the time-lapse photographic documentation
of the rebuilding at Ground Zero, with its confidence that the future,
too, will unfold in an unbroken, linear progression of the kind that had
been threatened by 9/11, as “a meditation on resilience, optimism, and
hope, qualities that are the bedrock of this nation and our world.”
Right around the time that Project Rebirth began to document the
rebuilding at Ground Zero, the Bush-Cheney administration was also
embarking upon their project to premediate the Iraq War, a project that
was also motivated by qualities that they took to be “the bedrock of this
nation and our world.” In the following chapter I take up the premediation of the Iraq War, arguing that premediation furnished the media
logic of the Bush-Cheney doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. This version
of premediation, like the premediation of Project Rebirth, has more in
common with the linearity of prediction or forecasting than with the
virtuality that marks our premediated everyday at the end of the first
decade of the twenty-first century.
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Remediating 9/11 37
2
Remediation and premediation
Although the remediation of 9/11 began at least as soon as the first televisual images of the crash into the first tower, its premediation had in
some sense been under way for some time. So, too, had premediation
more generally. In Remediation we took Kathryne Bigelow’s 1995 film
Strange Days as exemplifying the often contradictory logics of mediation at work at the end of the twentieth century, tracing out what we
described as the double logic of remediation by which contemporary
culture seeks simultaneously to proliferate and to erase mediation, to
eliminate all signs of mediation in the very act of multiplying them.
Looking back, I would maintain that we were right to single out Strange
Days as an instance of remediation as a cultural dominant at the end
of the twentieth century. But we did not at that point recognize the
way in which this double logic – if not precisely nearing its end – was
at least in the process of being re-mediated according to another logic,
a logic of premediation in which the future has always already been
pre-mediated. In other words we failed to understand fully the way in
which Strange Days was already participating in a logic of premediation insofar as it both pre-mediated the United States (particularly
Los Angeles) nearly five years into the future and pre-mediated future
media practices and technologies. In depicting the “wire” as a device
that records one person’s sensory perception of the past (according to
the logic of appropriate media forms) and makes it available in the
future for playback by another person (through means of appropriate
media technologies), Strange Days anticipated one aspect of premediation in imagining future media technologies as remediations of current ones.
38
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Premediation
39
Much as Strange Days epitomized the double logic of remediation
near the end of the twentieth century, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report
(2002), released less than a year after 9/11, epitomized the logic of premediation that had been intensifying over the past decade and more.
Like Strange Days, Minority Report portrays a future United States, albeit
roughly half a century out rather than half a decade. Remediating a
short story by Philip K. Dick, Spielberg imagines a technological medium
that, like the wire, works by recording sensory or neural experience
for playback. But in Minority Report, rather than capturing past neural
experience for playback in the future, the technology captures “precognitions” of the future for playback in the present – for the purpose of
preventing the recorded events from becoming actual history, to prevent the future from becoming the past. Furthermore, where Strange
Days imagines a private, individualized form of mediation, in Minority
Report precognition is a fundamentally public medium, a distributed
network of biological, technological, social, juridical, and medial actants. The technology of precognition in Minority Report records the distributed cognition of three “pre-cognitives,” or occasionally (as denoted
by the film’s title) the “minority report” of one of them, to be publicly
displayed within the headquarters of the PreCrime unit.
Technically the recording device would seem to work very similarly to
the wire in Strange Days. Even though the device in Minority Report is supposed to be recording murders that will be committed in the future, the
sensory experience that it records is recently past experience, that is, the
past mental experience of the three precogs. But unlike the wire the events
that are recorded and played back are not themselves past events – they are
future events, premediated murders that the precognitives and PreCrime
make it possible to prevent. The logic of remediation insists that there has
never been a past prior to mediation and that there is no ontological difference between mediation and reality. All mediations are remediations, in
that mediation of the real is always a mediation of another mediation.
Although sharing remediation’s insistence on the ontological continuity between reality and mediation, premediation insists that the future
itself is also already remediated. With the right technologies – in this case
the distributed cognition made possible by the hybridized institution
of PreCrime, with its three precogs, nurtured in the appropriate physical environment and attached to the correct hardware and software –
the future can be remediated before it happens. This remediation of the
future is not only formal but also reformative. Insofar as capital crime can
be prevented, precognition allows for the remedying of the future, the
prevention of the crime of murder through premediation.
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Premediation
Like Strange Days, then, Minority Report imagines a technology that is
direct and immediate. Also like Strange Days, Minority Report depicts a
world awash in mediation. Detective John Anderton (Tom Cruise) lives
in an apartment with transparent screens for the playback of homemovie discs of his dead son and ex-wife, clips in which the images are
not contained on the two-dimensional plane of the screen but come
towards the viewer into three-dimensional space, while never quite
entering it. Cereal boxes have cartoon animation (audio and visual)
on the front. Newspapers have up-to-the-minute, self-refreshing audiovideo clips as illustrations. The malls are full of interactive audiovisual
ads that greet consumers by name as they come towards them in threedimensional space. In addition there is a kind of VR arcade that provides
users with fantasy experiences that, like the wire in Strange Days, work
through neural connections, bypassing projection and screening. But
despite the ubiquity of media technologies in the near-future worlds of
both films, the precogs’ premediations of murder are not (like the wire
clips) simply recorded for private consumption, but are part of an elaborate mechanism of securitization. These precognitions are monitored
in real time then displayed in a public, quite hypermediated fashion –
exhibited on interactive transparent screens, any part of which can be
magnified or minimized, and connected with networked databases
which can be searched and scanned in moments. Unlike Strange Days,
however, which imagines the wire and its clips as a form of mediation
that marks a potential end to projection and public screening or exhibition, Minority Report imagines the precogs’ clips as a way to premediate
the future and to project and screen it publicly in the present. Where
the wire is presented chiefly as a form of morally decadent entertainment (like video-games for adults), the precogs are part of a distributed juridical and disciplinary assemblage of securitization, aimed at
eliminating murder from American society.1 The aim of the PreCrime
Unit is preventive prosecution, which was to become one of the Bush
Administration’s leading strategies for tracking down and preventing
terrorism in post-9/11 America.
In light of the draconian techniques of torture, surveillance, and datamining employed by the Bush-Cheney administration to execute their
policies of preventive prosecution of potential terrorists, the PreCrime
Unit of Minority Report seems somewhat quaint (as does a 2004 BBC
TV show, Murder Prevention, which pursued the PreCrime angle without
the aid of the precogs). But given the timetable of the film’s production (which was well underway on 9/11/2001) and even its theatrical
release in June 2002, Minority Report speaks to the fact that the current
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40 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
41
formation of securitization and premediation did not begin with the
events of 9/11 and the Bush-Cheney declaration of the policy of preemptive warfare and preventive prosecution, even if those events intensified and gave shape to this media regime. I will return to Strange Days
and Minority Report near the end of this chapter. But for now I want to
turn my attention to the way in which premediation has been functioning more broadly in the US media environment since the event of
9/11. More particularly I want to take up the role that the tragic events
of 11 September 2001, played in shaping this new media dominant in
US (and increasingly global) media, in the run-up to the Iraq War and
the period immediately following its commencement.
The media regime of pre-emptive war
For American and to a degree global audiences as well, the most powerful manifestation of the logic of premediation in the 18 months following 9/11 was the onslaught of media coverage leading up to the March
2003 invasion of Iraq. Even before the run-up to war could get under
way, however, one of the earliest expressions of post-9/11 premediation
could be found in the overwhelming American media hysteria about
anthrax exposure in the days immediately following September 11.
Despite the fact that the number of deaths caused by these “anthrax
attacks” was miniscule in comparison, for example, to the magnitude of the AIDS epidemic, or to genocides in Darfur and elsewhere,
which continue to receive only sporadic coverage in the US media, the
post-9/11 news media devoted an inordinate amount of attention to
premediating potential attacks. On 18 September 2001, letters containing powdered anthrax were sent to five media outlets in New York
City and Boca Raton, Florida. Three weeks later two more were sent
to Democratic US senators Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick
Leahy of Vermont. In focusing its coverage extensively on the possibility of future anthrax attacks, the US media response to what the FBI
labeled “Amerithrax” provides an instance of how the role of the news
media had increasingly come to consist not only of reporting what had
already happened, but also of premediating what could happen next.
The anthrax scare became an obsession of the media not for the damage
it had done (which was minimal) but for the damage it might do, for the
extreme threat of what it might become in the future. In order that the
American public would not be surprised as it had been by the events of
9/11, it was imperative that the fullest extent of the national security
threat from anthrax be premediated before it ever happened, or even
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if it never did. And further, it was not accidental that this premediated
coverage of the future superseded more traditional coverage of the present or recent past.
The anthrax scare underscored one of the indirect consequences of
acts of irrational or random violence – to force people to re-examine
those everyday practices that they take for granted, to be extra vigilant about business as usual or day-to-dayness. Anthrax preoccupied US
media in part because of its mode of delivery through the Postal Service.
The routine act of opening the mail had become a potential threat to
one’s life. Because such acts interrupt and challenge one’s sense of business as usual, of the ordinary or the appropriate, they often motivate
people to feel the need to establish, or re-establish, their sense of why
things are the way they are, of what is truly important. In cases like the
anthrax scare, where the perpetrator is unknown, the news media not
only try to premediate the next terrorist attack, but also become part
of the juridical apparatus of securitization involved in the investigation
and (anticipated) apprehension of the people responsible for these acts
of terror.2
In addition to their role as agents of juridicality, the US media also
participate as agents of governmentality.3 This was particularly evident
in the nearly 18-month run-up to the Iraq War, as the print, televisual, and networked news media served as willing participants in the
Bush administration’s propaganda campaign for the Iraq War. It is
now a matter of historical record that, beginning almost immediately
after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration systematically misled the American public in making its case for a pre- emptive
war against Iraq. It is also widely held that the US news media did
not do enough to challenge or question the misinformation that they
received from the Bush administration.4 Indeed, events of the past several years have left no doubt that this is the case. In April 2008 the
New York Times published its comprehensive and well-documented
investigation of the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 practice of paying
retired military officers to rehearse a series of talking points and military scenarios on global networked televisual news media; the article’s
authors succeeded in furnishing concrete written evidence of what
many people have been arguing for more than five years. Two months
later the Senate Intelligence Committee released its long-delayed report
charging that “President Bush and his aides built the public case for
war against Iraq by exaggerating available intelligence and by ignoring disagreements among spy agencies about Iraq’s weapons programs
and Saddam Hussein’s links to Al Qaeda” (Mazzetti and Shane, 2008).
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The form that this argument most often takes is that almost from the
very moment of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration perpetuated
an ideological tissue of lies and manufactured evidence to persuade the
American public to support its neo-conservative geopolitical agenda in
the Middle East. The Times investigation made explicit what had been
implicit in the functioning of the globally networked info-tainment
media: that after 9/11 the media has seen itself as working in conjunction with other governmental entities to help manage the public’s collective moods and perceptions. The Times article and most other media
analysts understand this alliance among the Bush administration, military, and media as proof that the administration paid retired military
officers and the networked news media to make sure that the US media
public shared its own point of view on the appropriate way to execute
the War on Terror.
While this is undeniably the case, I want to make a different point: that
the significance of this social networking among the executive branch,
the military, and the media lies not only in the specific content of the
messages that these retired offices presented to the public but also in
the media formats within which they were presented. For, as the Times
article notes, not all of the retired officers who served as expert analysts in different news forums always advocated the same positions, or
counseled the same military policies. While one might argue that these
dissenting opinions were simply overwhelmed by the preponderance of
former generals uniformly repeating the Bush administration’s talking
points, I want to insist instead that, particularly in the run-up to the
Iraq War, what was most important was not that any particular military
or political scenario was put forward but rather that so many different
possible scenarios were pre-mediated that war with Iraq came to seem
an inevitable event, indeed seemed in many senses to have already been
a televisually mediated news event. Insofar as media theorists, political
analysts, and cultural critics focus their attention only on the truth or
falsity of the content of the information being provided to the media
(and through the media to the public), they run the risk of overlooking
the powerful way in which the formal or structural aspects of pre-war
media coverage contributed to the public’s sense (even the informed,
oppositional public’s sense) of the inevitability of a pre- emptive war
against Iraq. One of the most striking features in the months leading up
to the US invasion was that, despite the largest, most widespread antiwar protests in more than a generation, there seemed to be little real
sense that anything could actually be done to stop the war. If we think
only of the media’s informational content, we overlook the way that the
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formal and structural premediation of the war, as much as any specific
misinformation about it, created a sense of the war’s inevitability.
Beginning with the January 2002 State of the Union Address, the
Bush-Cheney administration repeatedly played out the forthcoming
war against Iraq in print and televisual news media. Cynically, such
premediations functioned to help frighten the American public so that
it would return control of Congress to the Republican Party in the 2002
mid-term elections. Equally cynically, however, this premediation of
the war against Iraq allowed the networked news media to increase
their ratings in the run-up to war, as well as to engage in a kind of audience testing on how best to cover the war when it did occur. Thus cable
news networks proliferated any number of premediated war shows like
“Countdown to War” or “Showdown with Iraq,” not only as a ploy for
ratings but also as a way to help networks like CNN, Fox, or MSNBC
determine how best to present the war to the American public to obtain
the largest audience share.5 These cynical readings of media and political self-interest should not be underemphasized but they do not in
and of themselves explain away the logic of premediation. Rather, they
underscore the attraction of premediation to an American public whose
sense of invincibility or invulnerability had been shaken by the events
of 9/11 and which, in the face of the economic collapse of 2008, in
many respects remains shaken.
From the moment that the text of Bush’s 2002 State of the Union
Address was released to print, networked, and televisual media, the war
against Iraq was premediated in almost every possible imaginable manifestation. It was premediated as a war in which the United States and
Britain would go it almost alone and as a war in which they would
go in with the support of the United Nations. It was premediated as a
war with a northern and a southern front, or one that would be waged
primarily from the south. It was premediated as an overwhelming aerial assault leading to the immediate surrender of the Iraqi people, who
would welcome the American liberators with open arms. It was premediated as a war that would lead quickly to a military coup, or to the
capture, murder, or exile of Saddam Hussein and his immediate circle.
It was premediated (both in the US media and on Al Jazeera and the
Internet) as an extended urban war in which US and allied troops would
engage in house to house, street to street combat with an entrenched
Iraqi military and populace. It was premediated as a war in which
Saddam Hussein would empty his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction – on invading soldiers, on his own people, on his oil wells, and on
the Israelis. In addition the aftermath of the war was premediated as
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well. Post-war Iraq was premediated as a nation ruled by a coalition of
diverse ethnic groups; as a nation governed by a new Iraqi democracy;
as the site of countless intra-national conflicts and score-settling; as a
nation ruled for one, three, or as many as five years by a government of
the US military; as a nation governed by a coalition of UN forces; or as
the catalyst for massive unrest within the Middle East.
While each of these scenarios had its own level of plausibility and its
own set of motivations, one thing was consistent among them all – the
way in which they participated in a logic of premediation in which the
mediation of war and its aftermath always preceded the events themselves, in which such real events as war and its aftermath occurred only
after they had also been premediated by networked media, by government spokesmen, and by the culture at large. This incessant premediation of the war helps to explain the sense of inevitability that preceded
the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 – even for the hundreds of thousands of people who protested the impending war in cities across the
globe. Most powerfully, premediation furnished the media logic for
coverage of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. In the BushCheney political regime of pre-emptive war, premediation became the
dominant media regime. By premediating the war before it ever happened, the formal structure of US news media effectively supported
US military doctrine, participating in the pre-emptive remediation
of a future (premediated) war. The Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive war
required a pre-emptive media plan, a premediation of the inevitable
future (or of any number of possible inevitable futures, as long as they
all led to war with Iraq). As has been well documented, this doctrine of
pre-emption, as opposed to the prior doctrine of deterrence, had been
circulating in neo-con circles at least since 1992.6 Similarly, the media
logics of premediation had been emerging over the course of the 1990s,
often as remediation’s unseen double.7 Where prior to 1989 we saw a US
military regime oriented primarily towards the past, particularly to the
Cold War aftermath of World War II, the “pre-medial” doctrine of preemptive war, as opposed to the more “remedial” doctrine of deterrence,
looked to refashion not the past but the future.8
In emphasizing the way in which premediation strives to preclude
the possibility of an unmediated future, or unmediated real, I do not
want to be misunderstood as rehearsing a Baudrillardian account of the
precession of simulacra, an account which led him, unsurprisingly, to
assert that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were not real, although acknowledging their singularity as symbolic events. Just as remediation insists
on the inseparability of reality and mediation – the reality of media,
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their materiality as objects of circulation within the world of humans
and non-humans, of society and of things – so the concept of premediation insists on the reality of premediated futures, or, as I argue later
in this chapter, on the reality of these virtual futures. But in refusing
the Baudrillardian account of simulation I also do not want to be misunderstood as saying that premediation predetermines the form of the
real. Rather, by trying to premediate as many of the possible worlds,
or possible paths, as the future could be imagined to take, premediation bears some affinities to the logic of designing a video game. More
like designing a video game than predicting the future, premediation is
not concerned with getting the future right, as much as with trying to
map out a multiplicity of possible futures. Premediation would in some
sense transform the world into a video or computer game, which only
permits certain moves depending on where the player is in the space of
the game, how far advanced she is in achieving the goal of the game, or
the attributes of her avatar. Although within these premediated moves
there are a seemingly infinite number of different possibilities available, only some of those possibilities are encouraged by the protocols
and reward systems built into the game.
Premediation is in this sense distinct from prediction. Unlike prediction, premediation is not about getting the future right. In fact it is
precisely the proliferation of competing and often contradictory future
scenarios that enables premediation to prevent the experience of a
traumatic future by generating and maintaining a low level of anxiety
as a kind of affective prophylactic. Premediation is not like a weather
forecast, which aims to predict correctly the weather for tomorrow or
the weekend or the week ahead. To premediate the weather would be
to try to imagine all of the possible scenarios that might conceivably
arise so that the weather could never come as a surprise. Furthermore,
premediation differs from something like predicting the weather in a
formal sense as well. Where the premediation of war in Iraq on cable
news networks, for example, involved remediating any number of possible futures by means of the very formal features with which the war
itself would be remediated (maps, retired generals, split-screen debates,
video clips, and so forth), a weather map does not premediate tomorrow’s storm in the way in which it will be remediated after it strikes, but
follows particular formal conventions of representing the forecast.9 The
emerging conventions of premediation, on the other hand, required
that the future prosecution of the War in Iraq, for example, be premediated in ways that are almost indistinguishable from the way it would
be remediated when it happens, prompting an affective orientation
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towards the war that prepared the media public to accept it as a fait
accompli when it actually happened.
Premediation operates similarly to “the politics of information networks” like the Internet, which functions neither as a space of complete
freedom, nor as a controlled, predetermined or pre-censored space, but
as a space of virtuality where links and networks are already laid out
to enable users to navigate only according to possible paths (and where
patterns of linking and networking make it much more likely that users
will navigate according to some possible paths rather than others).10
To say that the World Wide Web is a premediated space of virtuality is
not to say that any particular individual or collective uses of the World
Wide Web, or any specific paths or linking patterns, are mandated or
ruled out. Rather, one can only work within those potentialities that
the Internet allows or has been made to allow, within what has already
been networked or premediated – technically, algorithmically, socially,
and culturally.11 But the Internet also functions as a participatory social
network in which new links, new content, and new formats are potentially always in the process of being added through a form of intellectual
labor that Paolo Virno names the “public disposition.” Following Virno,
Nigel Thrift writes that in the information capitalism of the twentyfirst century, “value increasingly arises not from what is but from what
is not yet but can potentially become, that is from the pull of the future,
and from the new distributions of the sensible that can arise from that
change” (Thrift, 2007, p. 31). Premediation is part of a heterogeneous
media regime, one purpose of which is to make sure that, no matter
what tomorrow might bring, it will always feel as if it had already been
premediated or that it could have been. Premediation does not do away
with the real. Rather it insists that the future, like the past, is a reality
that will already have been premediated, through the maintenance of
what Thrift calls the “continuous interactivity of the media” (Thrift,
2007, p. 35).
To think of premediation as characterizing the media regime of post9/11 America is therefore to be concerned not with the truth or falsity
of specific future scenarios but with the widespread proliferation of premediated futures. Premediation entails the generation of possible future
scenarios or possibilities which may come true or which may not, but
which work in any event to guide action (or shape public sentiment)
in the present. These scenarios are perpetuated both by governmental
actors and by the formal and informal media, as part of what I discuss
more fully in the Abu Ghraib chapter through the concept of “mediality.” While individual scenarios can often take the rhetorical form of
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game-planning or predicting the outcome of future geopolitical events,
such medial formations also contribute to the production of a collective
affective orientation both towards particular futures and towards the
future or futurity in general. This affective orientation links the future
to the present in a way that tries to ensure that the future will continue
to be connected to or grow out of the present, that the future will not,
as it was on 9/11, be catastrophically disrupted.12 Premediation names
both of these senses – the production of specific future scenarios and
the creation and maintenance of an affective orientation towards the
future, a sense of continuity or the feeling of assurance that there will
not be another catastrophic surprise.
In addition to these two senses of premediation in which the future is
remediated before it even happens, there is also something like an ontological aspect of premediation in which the future is always remediated
at the very moment that it emerges into the present, because the world
is already so thoroughly hypermediated that it becomes impossible
for anything to happen outside of its premediation. That is, premediation also names the socio-technical persistence of nonhuman objects,
networks, social practices, calendars, and protocols into the future
(Galloway, 2004). In this sense premediation manifests the desire that
the world of the future be always premediated by colonizing the future
with media – mobile phones, pda’s, laptops, personal computers, digital
cameras, videophones, mp3 players, and so forth. Insofar as the future is
full of such media technologies and their attendant social formats and
practices, it will be full of remediations of prior media. Premediation
is thus connected both with the idea of the ubiquity of media and the
sense that after 9/11 the world (and its future) has somehow changed.
The force of this ontological aspect of premediation is not only consistent with the inseparability of mediation and reality, the object-ness
of mediation, but the ongoing proliferation of premediated networks,
devices, and practices into a not fully differentiated future also underscores the force that premediation has to impact the present. In this
very real way, then, the war against terror or the war against Iraq were
both wars about the future, not only about how the future will be and
is being premediated, but about which and whose premediations will
predominate or persist and thus about how we will act in the present.
Thus, quite unlike the Gulf War of 1991, when media coverage was
tightly controlled and filtered through the American military, the premediation of the Iraq war provided for embedded media access unprecedented “since World War II and on a scale never before seen in the
American military.”13 The access offered by the military’s innovative
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deployment of embedded media provided a marked contrast to what
had been widely described as the “unprecedented Pentagon censorship
of the press during the Persian Gulf War” (Norris, 1984, p. 286). Margot
Norris argued that this regime of “pre-censorship” (a term coined by
Walter Cronkite) transformed the reality of the Gulf War into the
Baudrillardian “hyperreal” chiefly by concealing the war’s dead bodies
from the public eye: “Precensorship allows the Pentagon to determine
in advance what will be seen and not seen, known and not known,
shown and not shown, of the war. The effect is that the military is
able to program history in advance of preediting its possible narratives”
(Norris, 1984, p. 286). Norris invokes Baudrillard in service of an epistemic model that posits a sense of knowledge, truth, or facts independent of mediation, claiming that in the Persian Gulf War these facts were
censored by the Pentagon so that the media and the public would only
get an incomplete, partial account of the “secret reality and dreadful
truth” that lay behind the “media extravaganza” that the military enabled with its briefings and rocket’s-eye videos. Unlike pre-censorship,
premediation operates according to the assumption that knowledge,
truth, or facts are never independent of mediation, but are continually
constructed, stabilized, destabilized, and reconstructed through the
remediation of political, cultural, and technological networks.14
Where Pentagon pre-censorship in the Persian Gulf War was marked
by its radical limitation of media coverage, the premediation of the War
in Iraq worked in precisely the opposite fashion – to proliferate mediation. The Bush-Cheney administration purposely chose not to precensor the media in the same way it had been during the Persian Gulf
War, not because they were committed to openness or transparency
but because they were confident that embedded media would see the
war as the military did. Of course members of the embedded media
did not experience the war directly or without mediation, but rather
mediated according to the principles and protocols of the military, or of
the soldiers themselves. As David Simon effectively dramatized in his
powerful HBO miniseries, Over There, even embedded journalists from
“alternative” media like Rolling Stone quickly found themselves adopting
the mindset and collective affect of the military while embedded in a
unit in the field. Although pre-censorship characterizes the media logic
of the Persian Gulf War, it cannot account for how the proliferation of
premediations of the Iraq War brought about the sense of that war’s
inevitability – or how subsequent media coverage in print, televisual,
and networked media worked to bring about a sense of the war’s senselessness and folly. To focus only on the Bush-Cheney administration’s
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deception or misinformation in making its case for pre-emptive war
against Iraq would be to miss what is most distinctive about the medial
logics informing the Iraq War and the “global War on Terror.” Insofar
as the news media tried to premediate as many of the possible worlds,
or possible paths, as the war might take, premediation did not predetermine the form of the real, but tried to ensure that whatever form
the future takes it will emerge only within the possible futures enabled
by premediated networks of technical, social, and cultural actors. And
in the run-up to the Iraq War, as in other instances of televisual premediation, these possible outcomes were premediated on national and
international cable news networks as programs that were in many of
their formal features nearly indistinguishable from those that would be
presented after the war had begun.
Autopoiesis and the liveness of futurity
On Monday, 3 March 2008, Austin-based GSD&M Idea City ran a fullpage ad in the first section of the national edition of the New York Times,
as part of its new branding campaign for the US Air Force. In an era of
all-volunteer military recruiting, such branding campaigns are hardly
unusual. What is noteworthy in this ad, however, is its participation
in the logic of premediation that had become increasingly prevalent in
the years following the event of 9/11. The ad remediated the layout of
the front page of a print newspaper as a premediation of future catastrophes, with headlines of news stories that “could” go here: “This Could
be a Headline About a Cyber Attack Causing a Blackout”; “An Article
About Shifting World Powers Could Go Here”; “News About a Rogue
Leader Making Threats Could Go Here”; “This Could Be a Report About
a Hurricane Displacing Thousands.” Each of these headlines represents a
potential threat, something for the newspaper-reading American public
to be afraid of. But interestingly the ad premediates newspaper headlines
more than news events – it is the news of tomorrow that is presented
as frightening rather than any specific geopolitical event. The point of
the advertisement’s premediation of fearful, dangerous headlines is not
to scare the public – or rather only to scare them temporarily. For the
fears raised by the advertisement are ones that the ad assures us can be
assuaged by the security of the US Air Force. The visual arrangement of
the page has all of these headlines “underwritten” by, or resting on a
foundation of, the “US Air Force Above All,” which runs across the bottom of the page in a bold typeface. This visual positioning suggests that
the fears themselves are simultaneously produced by the US Air Force
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(or by a discourse and practice of US Military ideology that produces the
particular form or manifestation that global terror takes at this historical moment) even while the US Air Force is presented as the power that
will protect us from these threats (by reassuring us that, like God himself, the US Air Force is “Above All”: “Air, Space, and Cyberspace”).
The creators of this ad capitalized on the fact that at the current historical moment American news media remediate the present and the
immediate past in order to premediate the future. Clearly related to
a shift in news reporting from historically oriented technologies like
print, photography, and film to such real-time technologies as video
and the Internet (a shift already well under way by 1990), news media
have begun to give up on, or perhaps more accurately to subordinate,
their traditionally historical role as reporters of the very recent past,
in favor of a proleptic role of reporting on what might happen in the
very near future. The systemization of this altered temporality of the
print, televisual, and networked news can be elucidated with the help
of Niklas Luhmann’s account of the mass media, which he understands
as constituting an autopoietic system for the construction of reality.
For Luhmann “the mass media are one of the function systems of modern society,” which construct reality through a process of autopoiesis
(Luhmann, 2000, p. 8). More specifically, he sees the mass media as
making up an autonomous system of communication, which operates
according to the binary code information/non-information and which
thus depends on new information for its own continuation. What is
particularly telling about Luhmann’s account is that, in predating
the events of 9/11, it underscores the fact that premediation had been
emerging over the course of the twentieth century in a variety of mass
media.
Luhmann’s explanation of the reality of mass media takes into
account what I have been describing as the ontological aspect of premediation, the extension of media forms, practices, and technologies
into the future so that the future will always already have been remediated. Luhmann describes this in terms of media programs: “The
system takes its time and forms every operation in the expectation
that others will follow. The system of the mass media also works in
this way, with the assumption that its own communications will be
continued during the next hour or the next day. Each programme
holds the promise of another programme. It is never a matter of simply representing the world in any one given moment” (Luhmann,
2000, p. 11). Because of “the media’s chronic need for information,”
Luhmann sees “the successful military censorship of reports about
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the Gulf War,” for example, not as running counter to the media’s
aims but as furthering them by providing “new information for the
necessary continuation of programmes.”15 What Norris and others
have seen as censorship of the news media’s right to know the truth,
Luhmann describes in terms of the media’s systemic need for new
information and new programs:
All the censorship had to do was operate according to the ways of
the media; it had to contribute to achieving the desired construction
and exclude independent information, which would hardly have
been obtainable anyway. Since the war was staged as a media event
from the start and since the parallel action of filming or interpreting
data simultaneously served military and news production purposes,
de-coupling would have brought about an almost total loss of information in any case.
(Luhmann, 2000, p. 8)
Luhmann presents a compelling account of the mass media as instrumental to the temporal logic of modernity. Indeed, he credits the mass
media with helping to bring about “the much debated characteristics of
modern temporal structures, such as the dominance of the past/future
schema, the uniformization of world time, acceleration, the extension of
simultaneity to non-simultaneous events. [The mass media] generate the
time they presuppose, and society adapts itself accordingly” (Luhmann,
2000, p. 21). Luhmann’s persuasive description of the temporality of
mass media helps by contrast to clarify the shift in media temporality
in America after 9/11. In modernity, he argues, “News generates and
reproduces future uncertainties” (Luhmann, 2000, p. 35). For the mass
media of modernity, “the most important characteristic of the information/non-information code is its relationship to time. Information
cannot be repeated; as soon as it becomes an event, it becomes noninformation. A news item run twice might still have its meaning, but it
loses its information value” (Luhmann, 2000, p. 19). Because news must
be “new,” “it is the idea of surprise, of something new, interesting and
newsworthy which we associate with news” (Luhmann, 2000, p. 25).
Autopoietically, surprises function as irritations to the media system,
which serve temporarily to destabilize it until the system restabilizes
itself by transforming the irritant of surprise into information or news.
“It might be said, then, that the mass media keep society on its toes.
They generate a constantly renewed willingness to be prepared for surprises, disruptions even” (Luhmann, 2000, p. 22).
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Placing modern mass media in historical context, Luhmann argues
that when news became a regularly occurring institution rather than
one that was only needed when something notable happened, it
became necessary to create a sense among the public that something
new was always occurring.16 Print journalism was faced with the need
to develop a new style of reporting on the recent past, which “conveyed
the impression that something had already happened, but only just –
in other words, it could not actually be presented in the normal tenses
of past or present. Using all the methods at the disposal of a journalistic writing style specially developed for the purpose, the impression
must be given that what has just gone into the past is still present, is
still interesting and informative” (Luhmann, 2000, p. 25). The success of this style is evident in the fact that “The observations of events
throughout society now occur almost at the same time as the events
themselves” (Luhmann, 2000, pp. 25–6).
Although accurately describing a journalistic style (in both print and
televisual media) that still persists today, Luhmann did not live long
enough to see the news media remediate this modern style in response
to the catastrophic surprise of the attacks of 9/11.17 In our era of premediation, the news media’s style is now to convey the impression
both that something newsworthy has only just happened in the very
recent past and that something newsworthy is just about to happen in
the future (think of the ubiquity of “Breaking News” and “Happening
Now” on local, national, and international televisual news programs).
Furthermore, as we saw in the run-up to the Iraq War, in an era of
24-7 news coverage on television and on the Internet, news items do
not necessarily lose their information value when they are repeated but
under the media regime of premediation increase their informational
and affective value as they are repeated. It is now not only the case
that “what has just gone into the past is still present,” but that what
is about to go on in the future is also depicted as occurring in the present. The aim of this double presenting is, as Luhmann maintains, to
produce a sense of potential surprise (for this is what keeps the news
going as an autopoietic system of modernity). But it is also to try to
protect against a catastrophic or disruptive surprise like the terrorist
attacks on the Pentagon or the World Trade Center. This double presenting involves the production not only of future uncertainty but also of
future certainty – the certainty that the future will already have been
made into the past, that the future is in some sense already (or will soon
be) behind us. In the wake of 9/11, however, what counts as news has
changed – not only is the very recent past news but what has not yet
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
happened, the near future, is also news. News not only makes the past
present but it makes the future present as well.
While it is surely the case that news has always to some extent been
concerned with the future, there has been a major shift in the nature of
this concern. For Luhmann the importance of the media’s orientation
to future probabilities was primarily as a guide to action in the present.
While acknowledging that “the present can calculate a future that can
always turn out otherwise,” he insists that
this break between the present future and the future presents does
not necessarily rule out prognoses. But their only value lies in the
quickness with which they can be corrected and in knowing what is
important in this regard. There exists, therefore, only a “provisional”
foresight, and its value lies not in the certainty that it provides but in
the quick and specific adjustment to a reality that comes to be other
than what was expected.
(Luhmann, 1998, p. 70)
What Luhmann himself was not in a position to foresee was the way
in which competing premediations of the future would come to serve
not only as providing adjustments to the realities of the present but also
as providing protection from, or adaptation to, potentially unwanted
futures. When Luhmann says that “the observations of events throughout society now occurs almost at the same time as the events themselves,” he understands these observations as following right on the
heels of the events. In post-9/11 premediation, observations of events
throughout society also occur before the events themselves (which in
many cases often occur only as news but never as historical events). Put
another way, if the mass media of modernity bring the events of the very
recent past into the present by remediating them as items of news, premediation makes events of the future into items of news, thereby making future events themselves both into items of news and into items of
the past.18 That is, premediation insists upon the liveness of futurity, the
presentness and temporal immediacy of futurity – and insofar as futurity is news, upon the pastness of futurity as well. Premediation entails a
kind of futurity that is both immediately present through the liveness
of global networked cable TV and Internet news and already past in that
this futurity is taken as news, which remains committed to making the
recent past (as well as the near future) immediately present.
Luhmann’s description of the mass media as an autopoietic system
for orienting modern society to the future helps to explain both what
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is new about premediation and what is of a piece with the media formations of modernity. Particularly helpful is his distinction between
“operation” and “observation” in making sense of the functioning of
the mass media. “Operation” refers to the autopoietic reproduction of
the system, the reproduction of communication from outcomes of communication, the continuation of a recursive system of irritation and
stabilization. “Observation,” on the other hand, refers to distinctions
used to describe something. In this way, the distinction between information and not-information, or between something that happened
in the past and something that just happened, or between event and
non-event – all of these are ways that the mass media, particularly the
news media, have described or observed their objects. The change that
premediation introduces is not only in the autopoietic operations of the
news, but also in its informational observations. These cognitive observations, however, do not govern the system but are dependent upon the
continued operations of the system, without which they could not or
would not exist. For Luhmann mass media exist not to produce truth or
to inform the public or to educate society or to serve as a watchdog on
politicians, corporations, or the powerful, but to generate and process
incidents of irritation, that is, to reproduce the system:
The mass media realize in society precisely that dual structure of
reproduction and information, of continuation of an always already
adapted autopoiesis and cognitive willingness to be irritated. Their
preference for information, which loses its surprise value through
publication, that is, is constantly transformed into non-information,
makes it clear that the function of the mass media consists in the
constant generation and processing of irritation – and neither in
increasing knowledge nor in socializing or educating people in conformity to norms.
(Luhmann, 2000, p. 98)
For Luhmann, science is concerned with cognitive matters, while law
concerns itself with normative matters. Mass media, on the other hand,
are concerned with the production of continuity between past, present,
and future.
Under normal circumstances social communication is oriented
towards neither science nor the law. But neither can it be left in modern global society to the merely local everyday knowledge that is
only found in the nearest vicinity. Accordingly, it seems to be the
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Premediation
function of the mass media to remedy this neither cognitively nor
normatively specified requirement. The mass media guarantee all
function systems a present which is accepted throughout society and
is familiar to individuals, and which they can take as given when it is
a matter of selecting a system-specific past and establishing decisions
about future expectations important to the system.
(Luhmann, 2000, p. 99)
Perhaps the most crucial thing to understand about Luhmann’s account
of the mass media is that in “guaranteeing all function systems a present
which is accepted throughout society and is familiar to individuals,”
mass media work not through consensus or reason, but through the
production of objects or quasi-objects. Luhmann’s autopoietic account
of social systems presents a critique of the Enlightenment-based ideals
of someone like Habermas – that cognition or consensus or reason produce social stability. Like Michel Serres or Bruno Latour, Luhmann sees
social stability and social order as resulting from a process of autopoietic reproduction that is held together through objects, not words or
contracts or beliefs. Citing Serres’s notion of “quasi-objects,” Luhmann
finds the assemblage of society to be
based in the first instance on the generation of objects, which can be
taken as given in further communication. It would be much too risky
to rely primarily on contracts or consensuses that can be called for as
a normative requirement. Objects arise out of the recursive functioning of communication without prohibiting the opposing side. And they
only leave residual problems for deciding the issue of whether one
wants to agree or disagree. Modern society owes it to the mass media
that such objects “exist,” and it would be hard to imagine how a society of communicative operations that extends far beyond individual
horizons of experience could function if this indispensable condition were not secured through the communication process itself.
(Luhmann, 2000, p. 100)
In other words the mass media generate objects about which news can
be produced, like the global War on Terror, climate change, the World
Cup, the US presidential election, global financial crises, or social and
political unrest in Iran, Honduras, China, or elsewhere. These objects
are such that consensus about them is not required – they “arise out
of the recursive functioning of communication without prohibiting the
opposing side.”19 And after 9/11 the objects presented in the news are as
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57
From virtual reality to the reality of the virtual
The shift in the operation of the mass media that was brought into
focus by the events of 9/11 is evident in the contrast between Strange
Days and Minority Report. When Strange Days was released in 1995, virtual reality was widely seen as marking the ultimate potential of digital
immediacy. By the time that Minority Report was released in 2002, the
objects and practices of digital mediation had become inextricably part
of the everyday public space in which we work, play, and live. More so
than Strange Days, where the liveness and immediacy of the wire were
marked precisely by the elimination of screening, exhibition, and display, Minority Report participates in two distinct, contradictory media
temporalities – the instantaneity of cinematic time and the futurity of
premediated potentiality. In imagining a more private form of mediation
and display, one tied more to nineties dreams of virtual reality than to
contemporary dreams of ubiquitous media, Strange Days marks its own
difference from a film like Minority Report, the difference between the
new media imaginary of 1995 and that of 2002. But insofar as Minority
Report marks a logic of premediation that supplants the double logic of
remediation epitomized by Strange Days, Spielberg also self-consciously
embraces the cinematic roots of premediation. Indeed, where Bigelow
has Lenny Nero insist in Strange Days that the wire is “not TV only better,” Spielberg ties the premediation of the precognitives not only to
television but also to some of the earliest moments of cinema.20
Minority Report helps to clarify the threefold character of premediation at work at the beginning of the third millennium. Where remediation entailed the refashioning of prior media forms and technologies,
premediation entails the remediation of future media forms and technologies, like the wire in Strange Days, or pre-crime and precognition in
Minority Report. In addition, premediation entails the desire to remediate the future before it happens, the desire that catastrophic events like
those of 9/11 never catch us unawares, or by surprise, the desire to avoid
the catastrophic immediacy of watching live on TV a plane crash into
the World Trade Center, or the Twin Towers burning and collapsing –
or in Minority Report the desire to rid society of murder. Finally, this
desire to premediate the future before it happens is accompanied by
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likely to figure in future events as they are in events of the very recent
past. This change of temporality is related not only to the traumas of
9/11 but also to the ongoing changes in technologies of mediation and
the altered temporalities they enable.
the desire to colonize the future by extending our networks of media
technologies not only spatially across the globe and beyond, but also
temporally into the future. In this sense, premediation seeks to make
sure that the future is so fully mediated by new media forms that it is
unable to emerge into the present without having already been remediated in the past.
Like the PreCrime Unit of Minority Report, premediation seeks to prevent the future by premediating it – to make sure, in some sense, that
the future never happens. On the other hand, like the project to premediate the rebuilding and “rebirth” of (or from) Ground Zero, premediation seeks to make sure, by extending our media networks into the
future, that the future has already happened by capturing the moment
when the future emerges into the present, that is, the moment when the
future has already become the past. While premediation differs from
remediation in that the latter seems to focus largely on prior media
forms where the former focuses chiefly on future media events, this
difference in emphasis helps to underscore an important point of continuity between the two media logics, the way in which form and event
are inseparable under any media regime. Much as remediation involves
both prior and current media events, so premediation involves the
remediation of current or future media forms. Not unlike the double
logic of remediation, which sought simultaneously to erase mediation
and to proliferate it in the practice of reforming or refashioning prior
media forms, the logic of premediation seeks to prevent an unforeseen future by proliferating its remediation by current media forms. In
so doing premediation simultaneously insists both on imagining the
future in terms of new media practices and technologies and on extending the media networks of the present so that they seem to reach indefinitely into a securely (if indeterminately) colonized future. In Minority
Report this pre-existence of mediality is deployed to make sure that a
particular future has been prevented and can thereby be made a matter
of present concern. As we have seen in relation to news, this double presenting of past and future is crucial to the new temporality of premediation operative at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
In addition to the formal differences between 1990s virtual reality
and the post-9/11 ubiquity of mobile networked computing, there are
sociocultural or political consequences arising from these two different
media formations. Insofar as premediation furnishes the media regime
of pre-emptive warfare, or perhaps, as Brian Massumi could be seen to
argue, of pre-emption itself, then I would suggest that the immediacy of
virtual reality, or the double logic of remediation more generally, can be
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seen to have constituted the medial regime for the dot.com bubble of the
1990s. Unlike premediation, this medial formation was marked not by
the fear of a catastrophic or apocalyptic future, but by the unwavering
confidence of a future that would be just like the present, only bigger
and better. The simultaneous medial orientation towards the immediacy of the present and the remediation of the past worked as a way to
gather up and commodify historical forms of technical mediation into
a forward-moving, ever-expanding present and to bring them forward
into a future of unlimited immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation –
a golden age of hyper-mediated capitalism marked cinematically by the
utopian romantic conclusion of Strange Days amidst the carnivalesque
celebration of the coming of the new millennium.
The current cultural moment, on the other hand, is marked by the logic
of premediation, in which not just the past and present, but the future
as well, has already been remediated, already exists as a feature on the
media landscape of the present. Unlike the double logic of remediation,
which seeks a kind of perceptual immediacy either through the transparent remediation of past media formations or through the hypermediation of present ones, premediation seeks to remediate potentialities,
future events or occurrences which may or may not ever happen. The
media regime of premediation marks not the desire for a virtual reality,
but an engagement with the reality of the virtual, what Deleuze understands as “virtuality” or “potentiality.” While premediation often takes
the form (as in the run-up to the Iraq War) of the proliferation of specific possibilities, or particular scenarios, the generation of these specific
possibilities entails the remediation of potentialities or virtualities out of
which future actions, decisions, or events might (or might not) emerge.
This distinction between the possible and the virtual distinguishes premediation from game-planning or scenario-building or prediction, each
of which imagines the real as something like a predetermined or preexisting state that can be predicted or forecast or planned.
In Minority Report the difference between predicting possible futures
and premediating virtual ones can be seen in the three different
accounts of temporality the film offers to explain PreCrime. The first
two are tied up with cinematic time, the third with premediated time.
In the models based upon cinematic time, PreCrime is explained in relation to the idea of prediction, of a future determined by the sequence
of past events. In one version of this the future is seen to be added
on to the present and past in accordance with the regular operation
of the rules, laws, and habitual behaviors that produce future actions
and events. In this account the future is like the past and the object
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of law enforcement is understood as the discovery and punishment of
criminal behavior – with the exception that in the juridical formation
of PreCrime and precognition, the crime has been committed, or will
have been committed, in the future, not in the past. In the related position of those who oppose PreCrime in the film, although future behavior can be predicted it is not predetermined because at every moment
individuals are faced with free choice. A murder might be likely to
happen, but the murderer might change his mind at the last moment.
This account still sees the future as following from or added on to the
past, but imagines the future itself as finally blank or unwritten. The
future is constrained by the past not as completely predetermined, but
insofar as the choices one has to make are determined by the actions
and events that have come before. Throughout Minority Report there
is a recurrent refrain, voiced by several of its characters, that one can
choose one’s future.
There is a third account of temporality in the film, however, one
which Agatha, the precog who provides the minority report that gives
the film its title, sets forth, or perhaps unwittingly embodies. This
account is most closely related to the virtuality of premediation, to
the idea that there are multiple potential futures and that these future
events always and already impinge upon the present. In the PreCrime
version of this, the future seen by the precogs determines the present
in the same way that the past would. But in the version exemplified by
Agatha, the weight or force of these futures impact the present but do
not determine it, as when she complains at one point in the film about
the future becoming so wearisome, about how tired she is of the future.
The most extended account of these premediated, virtual futures comes
in a long scene with Anderton and his ex-wife Lara, in her house on the
coast, where Agatha tells them in relation to their dead son Sean that
people don’t die. She begins to detail Sean’s futures for them, beginning
when he was ten years old, some two years before the film’s present, and
continuing until he is in high school and in university and beyond. The
point of this crucial episode in the film, which serves emotionally to
reunite the estranged couple in their shared love for their dead son, is
that Sean’s potential futures are as real as the future that was cut short,
emphasizing that the future impacts the present not by determining it
or by adding on to it, but by a process of selection and subtraction.
Minority Report exemplifies that to see premediation as the remediation
of virtuality or potentiality is to recognize that there are always multiple competing and incomplete reals – multiple actualities which can
emerge from any potential present, but which emerge not by negation
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or addition but by differentiation and divergence from other potential
but never realized actualities. What is key here is that these virtualities
are real, these premediations as virtualities have a reality in the present,
a force in the present, no matter how the future might turn out. That is,
the model of possibility or prediction in scenarios, game-planning, or
simulation ultimately involves the creation or determination of distinctions between false or illusory possibilities on the one hand and the real
or the actual on the other – only those possible scenarios that come true
are real, while the others are proved false or illusory or wrong. To think
of premediation as virtual, and therefore as real, is to refuse this metaphysical distinction and to insist instead on the efficacy, or force, of the
multiplicity of premediations in and of themselves – no matter how the
future might actually turn out.
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Premediation
Affect, Mediality, and
Abu Ghraib
The trouble with Abu Ghraib
As I detailed in the previous chapter one of the predominant aspects
of premediation in the past decade, deployed in particular by the US
news media in the wake of 9/11, concerned the desire to premediate the
geopolitical future so thoroughly that the American public would be
protected from experiencing a catastrophic shock or surprise like that
produced by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Of course medial desire is not always fulfilled, and the strategies of premediation are not always successful. In this chapter I take up an instance
in which shock broke through the protective barrier of premediation –
the public outrage produced by the release of torture photographs from
Abu Ghraib. Jean Baudrillard links these photos to the images that proliferated on 9/11: “Before both a worldwide violent reaction: in the first
case a feeling of wonder, in the second, a feeling of abjection.” “These
images,” Baudrillard maintains, “are as murderous for America as those
of the World Trade Center in flames” (Baudrillard, 2005, p. 1).1
Why did these photographs, which have elsewhere been described as
“shock photographs that really did shock,” have such a powerful effect
on Americans and in the Western world more generally? (Simpson,
2006, p. 104). Why did the photographs from Abu Ghraib have a public
and political impact far greater than, say, the unlawful establishment
of a detention center at Guantanamo Bay, or the policy and practice of
“extraordinary rendition,” or the countless other US violations of the
Geneva Convention and the bounds of accepted behavior more generally? When these photos were made public, everybody agreed that they
were scandalous: left, right, center; Bush administration, Bush supporters, Bush opponents; Americans, Iraqis, Europeans. The question I want
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to ask is what was it about these photographs, and not the thousands of
other images of violent death, dismemberment, or atrocities available
on the Internet, that managed to produce such a widespread sense of
shock and disgust, and to become a matter of concern for the US and
global media and for international governmental and non-governmental organizations.
Most explanations tend to consider the photographs as disturbing
because they reveal clear, unmistakable, immediately visible evidence
of horrible, unacceptable behavior. Whose horrible behavior or what
caused the horrible behavior is one place where opinions diverged.
Some saw the photographs as revealing the horrible behavior of a few
bad apples. Others saw them as revealing the scandalous behavior of
the Bush-Cheney administration’s systematic post-9/11 dismantling of
Geneva conventions in favor of the legalization of torture. Some saw
them as revealing the immorality of American popular media culture
(Hollywood, video games, TV, etc.). And some saw them as evidence
of America as the “Great Satan.” My own inclinations lean strongly
towards the systematic dismantling of Geneva conventions explanation. But others have already made that argument far more powerfully
and completely than I can.2
Why were the photographs from Abu Ghraib so disturbing? In one
sense there would seem to be no reason to ask this question, as the
answer would appear to be immediately self-evident. Indeed, it is precisely self-evidence that underwrites the immediately disturbing nature
of the photographs. They themselves are “self-evident,” that is, they
provide visual evidence of degrading, brutal torture and violence, of
the systematic abuse of political and military power. The photographs
don’t lie. Verbal reports of this (and other instances of) torture had been
circulating for some time in early 2004, and the US Army had been
investigating charges of criminal abuse at the prison since May 2003.
Nonetheless, it was only after an American television news-magazine,
60 Minutes II, showed the now-iconic photos of “hooded man” and
“leashed man” on prime-time US TV on 28 April 2004, and after The
New Yorker posted an article and photographs on its website on 30 April,
that the news media, the public, the American government, and its
allies were forced to do something about them. Only when the photographs were released in the print, televisual, and networked news media
were people compelled to take notice. The common explanation for
this has to do with the fact that the events depicted were horrible and
that seeing is believing, that visual imagery has a much more powerful impact than verbal accounts do. True enough. Photographs, unlike
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Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
printed texts, are by their nature public, visible, out in the open. Once
they have been released, what they depict can’t be ignored.
But might there be something else going on as well, something that
has to do with the nature of our media practices, our experience of the
photographs as socio-technical, material artifacts? David Simpson has
argued that, despite what we know about the ease with which digital
imaging technologies allow photographs to be framed, faked, or forged,
the photographs from Abu Ghraib had a resonance and credibility that
cut through much of the fog of media war coverage, that seemed to
resist or elude premediation. “What then might explain the peculiar
resonance and apparent credibility of the Abu Ghraib torture images?”
Simpson asks. “First,” he explains:
they are technologically explicable as the products of amateurs with
high-tech home cameras that process images on computers. They
have no high finish; in their very posings they are unposed, informal. They do not seem staged to shock, or staged to do anything: one
of them apparently functioned as the screen saver image on one of
the prison computers. They only came to public notice because one
soldier (Private Joseph Darby), troubled by what he saw, slid a disk
under the door of an investigator. They are both unofficial and out
of the sphere of the press corps; they seem of the people and by the
people, though who or what they are for is an open question. They
are aesthetically and technologically as surprising as they are upsetting in their content. We have not seen things like this before, or not
quite. But they also show us what we already know: ... The true focus
of our curiosity here is therefore not on the suffering Iraqis, who are
unknown to us and can barely be distinguished one from another in
these poorly defined and airbrushed images, but on ourselves.
(Simpson, 2006, pp. 106–7)
Simpson draws our attention to, but does not pursue further, the
significance of the photographs’ mediality in their reception by the US
media and public. Although “technologically explicable as the products of amateurs with high-tech home cameras that process images on
computers,” the photographs are, for him, “aesthetically and technologically as surprising as they are upsetting in their content.” Rather
than take the photographs simply as evidence of how military and
political power was unjustly directed against Iraqi prisoners, he takes
these photographs as reflective of the American public. But in contending that the photographs were aesthetically and technologically
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surprising, Simpson misses the way in which their production and distribution were part of our familiar everyday media practices. What I
want to focus on in this chapter is the public’s response not to what
the photographs depict but to the photographs themselves, particularly the response of the United States and the West. And I want to
begin by arguing that our response to the photographs is so powerful
and immediate not simply because they reveal to us abuses of power
and horrible acts of torture, completely out of the ordinary and beyond
the pale of acceptable, civilized, humane behavior, but also because
they reveal to us the continuity between our experience of the Abu
Ghraib photographs (and their creation and distribution by American
soldiers) and our own acceptable, civilized, everyday, humane media
practices. Put in another way: rather than treat the photographs as
transparent windows through which we can view unthinkable, horrible practices of torture and humiliation (practices virtually identical
to those going on in Guantanamo Bay or elsewhere in occupied Iraq or
Afghanistan or at clandestine torture sites around the globe), I treat the
Abu Ghraib photographs as objects of medialogical analysis, as media
practices similar, if not identical, to those practices widespread among
students, tourists, parents, pet-owners, photo-bloggers, and in the military itself. That is, what makes the Abu Ghraib photos so powerful is
not only that they reveal to us acts of torture and humiliation that are
almost universally and immediately understood to be beyond the pale
even of military interrogation. The shock of these photographs is also
explicable because they came into existence through ordinary media
practices – taking digital photographs, burning them on CDs, uploading them on websites, and emailing them to friends and family – that
were of a piece with our own everyday media practices of photographing our pets, our vacations, or our loved ones, and then sharing these
images with friends, family, or strangers via the same media of filesharing, email, social networking, mobile phones, and the web, practices which were employed by the soldiers at Abu Ghraib, and with
which we have become increasingly familiar and comfortable. And of
course, these photos, like so many other iconic cultural images, have
been remediated as well through other familiar participatory media
practices for political purposes antithetical to those of the US military
under whose authority the acts of torture depicted in the photographs
were carried out.3
One example of this different way of thinking about what was so disturbing about the Abu Ghraib photographs can be found in a passage
about Democrat Richard “Dick” Durbin, then Assistant Minority Leader
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
Before [Durbin’s] tenure [on the Senate Intelligence Committee] ended,
he looked at the full, classified set of photographs from Abu Ghraib.
In a recent interview at his office in the Capitol, he said, “You can’t
imagine what it’s like to go to a closed room where you have a classified briefing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues in
the Senate, and see hundreds and hundreds of slides like those of Abu
Ghraib, most of which have never been publicly disclosed. I had a sick
feeling when I left.” He went on, “It was then that I began to have
suspicions that something significant was happening at the highest
levels of the government when it came to torture policy.”
(Mayer, 2005)5
In describing his reaction to the photographs Durbin is clearly troubled by the US military’s apparently government-sanctioned practice
of torture and humiliation as depicted in the photographs. But what
he is also troubled by (though without perhaps recognizing it in any
conscious sense) is the mediality of the photographs themselves, the
act of viewing photographic slides standing shoulder to shoulder with
his colleagues in the Senate. It is telling that Durbin describes himself as first feeling sick and only afterwards recognizing that there
was a problem with US torture policy. This sick feeling is produced
by the act of viewing the photographs, irrespective of their content,
or perhaps more accurately inseparable from, but independent of, the
acts depicted in them. Interestingly, Durbin does not say, “you can’t
imagine what it’s like to see such horrible acts of torture,” but rather,
“you can’t imagine what it’s like to ... stand shoulder to shoulder with
your Senate colleagues and see hundreds and hundreds of these photos.” What he comments on is the humiliation, the embarrassment,
of being side-by-side with his Senate colleagues and looking at such
photographs, where he might in some other circumstances have stood
with many of those same colleagues to look at pictures of their children’s weddings or their most recent vacation or a new house they
might have bought. Durbin’s characterization of his affective and political response to the full set of classified photos is not meaningless,
I would maintain, but rather points our attention to an overlooked
aspect of the outrage evoked by these photographs from Abu Ghraib:
how the affective intensity that these photographs evoked as media
artifacts preceded the judgment of their political import. I will return
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of the US Senate, from a 2005 New Yorker article on the torture and brutal murder of Manadel al-Jamadi in Abu Ghraib.4
Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib
67
to this point later in the chapter. I want first to turn to initial reactions
to the release of the photographs by two prominent public intellectuals, Susan Sontag and Slavoj Žižek.
Shortly after the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs, Susan Sontag
addressed their status as media artifacts in her essay “Regarding the
Torture of Others,” which extends the critical position set forth more
fully in her powerful 2002 monograph, Regarding the Pain of Others.
Sontag argued that the horror of the acts of torture depicted in the
photos cannot be separated from the horror of the acts of photography
themselves. She asks: “So, then, is the real issue not the photographs
themselves but what the photographs reveal to have happened to ‘suspects’ in American custody? No: the horror of what is shown in the
photographs cannot be separated from the horror that the photographs
were taken – with the perpetrators posing, gloating, over their helpless
captives” (Sontag, 2004, pp. 26–7). As others have as well, Sontag likens
these photographs to those that German soldiers took of the horrors of
Nazi concentration camps in World War II or to those taken of lynching
victims by Ku Klux Klansman in the United States, who then distributed them to their friends and family as postcards.6 But she also notes
that, unlike these earlier acts of photography, the Abu Ghraib photos
produced a heightened impact because of the widespread possession
of digital cameras and the ease of circulating photos across networked
media: “A digital camera is a common possession among soldiers. Where
once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the
soldiers themselves are all photographers – recording their war, their
fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities –
and swapping images among themselves and e-mailing them around
the globe” (Sontag, 2004, p. 27).
For Sontag, however, what soldiers find “fun” seems increasingly
beyond the pale of what she considers to be moral behavior, particularly insofar as it seems connected with the prevalence of Internet
pornography:7
An erotic life is, for more and more people, that whither can be
captured in digital photographs and on video. And perhaps the
torture is more attractive, as something to record, when it has a
sexual component. It is surely revealing, as more Abu Ghraib photographs enter public view, that torture photographs are interleaved
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Remediating pornography?
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
with pornographic images of American soldiers having sex with
one another. In fact, most of the torture photographs have a sexual
theme, as in those showing the coercing of prisoners to perform,
or simulate, sexual acts among themselves .... [M]ost of the pictures
seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young
woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix
imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted
on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of
pornographic imagery available on the Internet – and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.
(Sontag, 2004, p. 27)8
Baudrillard, too, understands these photographs as pornographic, but
for him it is the pornography of the war itself that the photographs
remediate.9
Sontag calls attention to the mediality of the photographs primarily
to condemn them for what they reveal about the media environment
from which they emerge – or more specifically to condemn the culture that produces both that media environment and the soldiers who
inhabit it: “For the meaning of these pictures is not just that these acts
were performed, but that their perpetrators apparently had no sense
that there was anything wrong in what the pictures show” (Sontag,
2004, p. 28). Arguing that the horror of these images derives in large
part from how they function as photographs, Sontag simultaneously
condemns the Bush administration for the abuses at Abu Ghraib and
for thinking that “the fault or horror lay in the images, not in what
they depict.” For Sontag what these images depict is the corruption of
American culture: “What is illustrated by these photographs is as much
the culture of shamelessness as the reigning admiration for unapologetic brutality” (Sontag, 2004, p. 29).10
Ironically, the terms of Sontag’s condemnation of the Abu Ghraib
photographs are not very different (at least medialogically) from the
morally conservative position that the existence of the Abu Ghraib
photographs (if not the torture itself) is the result of America’s media
culture: “It is hard to measure the increasing acceptance of brutality in
American life, but its evidence is everywhere, starting with the video
games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys – can the
video game ‘Interrogating the Terrorists’ really be far behind? – and on
to the violence that has become endemic in the group rites of youth
on an exuberant kick” (Sontag, 2004, p. 28).11 In the weeks following
the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, such condemnation of US media
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68
69
culture was a staple of conservative Christian media, exemplified in
print, televisual, and networked news media by figures like born-again
Watergate conspirator Charles Colson, Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, or Ted Olsen, former US Solicitor General who successfully represented George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore, the US Supreme
Court case that effectively handed the presidency to Bush (“Abuse,”
2004; Olsen, 2004). While on almost every other issue their politics are diametrically opposed, both Sontag and the Christian right
acknowledge the importance of thinking about the Abu Ghraib photographs in relation to decadent US media practices. In doing so, however, their arguments focus on content and morality, seeking chiefly
to pin the blame on somebody else’s media practices, by seeing both
the Abu Ghraib torture and the Hollywood media-industrial entertainment complex as beyond the pale of humane, civilized, moral
behavior. The argument I am pursuing about the mediality of the
photographs, on the other hand, focuses on the continuity between
the formal, technical media practices entailed in the Abu Ghraib photos and our own everyday practices of digital photography. While I do
not want to ignore the force of the content of the photos in producing
public outrage, I want to try to make sense of this outrage in terms of
the medialogical affinities between looking at the Abu Ghraib photos
on TV, in the newspaper, or on the web and our everyday practices of
seeing photos of friends, family, or co-workers, or looking at photographs in the news. Similarly, I want to try to highlight the affinities between our ordinary digital photographic practices (including
burning photo CDs, posting them on Flickr or Facebook, and emailing
them to friends) and the media practices engaged in by the soldiers at
Abu Ghraib.12
Unknown knowns
Like Sontag, Slavoj Žižek also saw the crux of the matter of the Abu
Ghraib photos to lie in their continuity with US popular culture:
Anyone acquainted with the US way of life will have recognized in
the photographs the obscene underside of US popular culture. You
can find similar photographs in the US press whenever an initiation
rite goes wrong in an army unit or on a high school campus and
soldiers or students die or get injured in the course of performing
a stunt, assuming a humiliating pose or undergoing sexual humiliation .... This, then, was not simply a case of American arrogance
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Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib
70 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
Žižek’s response to the photographs’ continuity with American culture
differed, however, from that of Sontag, who might have agreed that the
photographs represented the obscene underside of American culture,
but would seek to quarantine the values that the photographs embody
from the more appropriate or humane “public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom.”
Even more than Sontag, however, Žižek ignores the medialogical significance of the photographs. While he was certainly right to see the
events of Abu Ghraib as in some sense initiating the Iraqi prisoners into
American culture, he does not seem to understand that they would not
be fully initiated until they were given cameras and allowed to take and
circulate pictures themselves, or even until they were allowed to pose
freely and smile, thumbs-up signals and all. That is to say, there are two
elements to US media culture’s production of what Nicholas Mirzoeff
calls “the visual subject,” and being made into an object of mediation
is only one of them.13 What makes the Abu Ghraib incident most congruent with everyday American popular culture is its participation in
the practices of taking digital photographs and circulating them across
premediated socio-technical networks like the Internet or email. Thus
while I agree with Žižek that the events of Abu Ghraib should be seen as
continuous with US popular culture, what I want to underscore is not
chiefly the continuity of the torture and interrogation practices with
hazing or initiation rites, but more centrally the continuity of the photographs themselves with US media practices. Despite insisting on the
continuity of the photos with American culture, Žižek does not make
the connections with our everyday media practices explicit, but continues to see the photographs chiefly in terms of evidence: “The photographs don’t lie.” In Žižek’s account Abu Ghraib is still understood
through a representational logic in which photographs or other audiovisual or textual media function indexically as records of prior events,
as evidence or testimony. What this perspective fails to understand is
the way in which the photographs do not simply report or testify to
immoral or pornographic political, criminal, or military events at Abu
Ghraib, but are themselves specific, distinct media events with their
own political and social consequences.
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towards a Third World people. The Iraqi prisoners were effectively
being initiated into American culture; they were getting a taste of
the obscenity that counterpoints the public values of personal dignity, democracy and freedom.
(Žižek, 2004)
71
Žižek’s erasure of the mediality of the photographs is most tellingly
evident in his discussion of a widely cited quotation from Donald
Rumsfeld, in which Rumsfeld distinguishes between “known knowns,”
“known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” Žižek astutely points
out that Rumsfeld omits the most important permutation of this
sequence, the “unknown knowns,” the “things we don’t know that
we know, which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the ‘knowledge
which doesn’t know itself,’ as Lacan used to say.” Žižek continues: “The
Abu Ghraib scandal shows where the real dangers are: in the ‘unknown
knowns,’ the disavowed beliefs, suppositions, and obscene practices we
pretend not to know about, although they form the flipside of public morality” (Žižek, 2004). Because Žižek characteristically glosses
“unknown knowns” in terms of (his Lacanian understanding of) the
Freudian unconscious, he is unable to recognize that there are other
kinds of “knowledge which doesn’t know itself” at play in the Abu
Ghraib scandal, such as the kinds of knowledge built into our media
practices, into the hardware and software of our digital protocols, or
the non-discursive or pre-discursive affective intensity of these photographs. That is, in addition to those “unknown knowns” that reside
in our unconscious there are any number of other unknown knowns
built in to our media practices in ways that we are not aware of, in
ways that we do not know that we know – not because they have been
repressed or sublimated but because they are concealed or invisible or
unrecognized in everyday practices that we participate in and take for
granted.14
Katherine Hayles makes a similar point about unconscious technological formations in a different context, contending that “as the
unconscious is to the conscious, so computer code is to language ...; in
our computationally intensive culture, code is the unconscious of language” (Hayles, 2006, p. 137). Hayles invokes Nigel Thrift’s powerful
concept of the “technological unconscious,” which refers to “the everyday
habits initiated, regulated, and disciplined by multiple strata of technological devices and inventions, ranging from an artifact as ordinary as
a wristwatch to the extensive and pervasive effects of the World Wide
Web” (Hayles, 2006, p. 138; Thrift, 2004). Citing proponents of distributed cognition like Edward Hutchins and Andy Clark, Hayles renames
Thrift’s concept the “technological nonconscious”15
Human cognition increasingly takes place within environments where
human behavior is entrained by intelligent machines through such
everyday activities as cursor movement and scrolling, interacting with
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Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib
computerized voice tress, talking and text messaging on cell phones,
and searching the web to find whatever information is needed at the
moment. As computation moves out of the desktop into the environment with embedded sensors, smart coatings on walls, fabrics, and
appliances, and RFID (radio frequency ID) tags, the cognitive systems
entraining human behavior become even more pervasive, flexible,
and powerful in their effects on human conscious and nonconscious
cognition .... Enmeshed within this flow of data, human behavior is
increasingly integrated with the technological nonconscious through
somatic responses, haptic feedback, gestural interactions, and a wide
variety of other cognitive activities that are habitual and repetitive
and that therefore fall below the threshold of conscious awareness.
(Hayles, 2006, p. 140)
Part of the force of the Abu Ghraib photographs comes precisely from
their participation in our technological nonconscious – the way in
which they are integrated within our everyday unconscious use of technology. What enabled the photographs from Abu Ghraib to create an
almost instant issue of global media publicity was not just that they
brought to the attention of the global public the criminal behavior of
the soldiers involved, but that our awareness of this behavior was mediated by the unconscious or nonconscious documentation and circulation of this behavior across networked media. That is to say, not only
does this nonconscious behavior make the photos into objects of media
publicity, but the way in which this behavior duplicates and intersects
with our own premediated media practices adds to their shock as well
as to their publicity. Insofar as these photos were continuous with our
everyday practices they also worked to give us a feeling of the continuity of these everyday practices with the violence of empire, or of torture – a feeling that one’s media practices are connected in some way
with committing or abetting torture, with the humiliation or dehumanization of others.
Mediality
In treating the Abu Ghraib photographs in terms of their mediality,
I want to highlight the way in which the affective elements of our
interactions with everyday media technologies work both socially and
politically. By “mediality” I mean generally to call attention to what
media do, to the ways in which they function as agents within the
heterogeneous assemblage of twenty-first-century American and global
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72 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
73
society. But I mean more specifically in this chapter to call attention to
the way that the media practices that make up our technological nonconscious function as part of what Michel Foucault has identified as
“governmentality,” the biopolitical discursive formation that followed
upon both sovereignty as the dominant juridical form of ruling a state
or managing its territory and upon discipline as the dominant juridical
form of the surveillance and punishment of individuals. Foucault sets
forth the concept of governmentality in a series of lectures on security
from 1978, which attend to the biopolitical formation that succeeds, or
emerges from and within, discipline – what Deleuze will refer to as a
society of control.
In the governmentality lecture, Foucault notes that in addition to governing populations, one of the chief aims of governmentality is what
Guillaume de La Perrière calls “the right disposition of things, arranged
so as to lead to a convenient end” (Foucault, 1991, p. 93). By citing
Guillaume’s idea of the “right disposition of things,” Foucault means
to emphasize the way in which governmentality is concerned not only
with people and populations but also with goods, commodities, production, infrastructure, information, and so forth. Or more precisely,
he means to emphasize the network of people and things, of humans
and nonhumans with which governmentality is concerned. Foucault
glosses “the right disposition of things” in the following lengthy but
crucial passage, the point of which is often neglected or ignored in treatments of Foucauldian governmentality that focus too single-mindedly
on the question of the human.16
One governs things. But what does this mean? I do not think this is
a matter of opposing things to men, but rather of showing that what
government has to do with is not territory but rather a sort of complex
composed of men and things. The things with which in this sense
government is to be concerned are in fact men, but men in their relations, their links, their imbrication with those other things which are
wealth, resources, means of subsistence, the territory with its specific
qualities, climate, irrigation, fertility, etc.; men in their relation to that
other kinds of things, customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking,
etc.; lastly, men in their relation to that other kind of things, accidents
and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc.
(Foucault, 1991, p. 93)
For Foucault, government is concerned not with humans in themselves
(if such a concern was even possible for Foucault), but with humans in
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Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib
relation to three kinds of “things”: economic things (“wealth, resources,
means of subsistence”); social things (“customs, habits, ways of thinking”); and natural things (“famine, epidemics, death”). Where sovereignty was concerned primarily with the juridical ruling of territory,
and discipline with the administration of populations and of bodies,
governmentality concerns itself with “men in their relations, their
links, their imbrication” with things – with “a sort of complex composed of men and things.”
In this sense Foucault is closer to someone like Gabriel Tarde before
him, or Bruno Latour after him, both of whom see the object of government, characterized as the social, as consisting not of “a special
domain of reality but a principle of connections” among humans and
nonhumans – understood both as organic beings and as technical actants and artifacts (Latour, 2005, p. 13). For Foucault this “principle of
connections” is exemplified in the metaphors of governing a ship or a
household:
The fact that government concerns things understood in this way,
this imbrication of men and things, is I believe readily confirmed
by the metaphor which is inevitably invoked in these treatises on
government, namely that of the ship. What does it mean to govern
a ship? It means clearly to take charge of the sailors, but also of the
boat and its cargo; to take care of a ship means also to reckon with
winds, rocks and storms; and it consists in that activity of establishing a relation between the sailors who are to be taken care of
and the ship which is to be taken care of, and the cargo which is
to be brought safely to port, and all those eventualities like winds,
rocks, storms and so on; this is what characterizes the government
of a ship. The same goes for the running of a household. Governing
a household, a family, does not essentially mean safeguarding the
family property; what concerns it is the individuals that compose
the family, their wealth and prosperity. It means to reckon with all
the possible events that may intervene, such as births and deaths,
and with all the things that can be done, such as possible alliances
with other families; it is this general form of management that is
characteristic of government; by comparison, the question of landed
property for the family, and the question of the acquisition of sovereignty over a territory for a prince, are only relatively secondary
matters. What counts essentially is this complex of men and things;
property and territory are merely one of its variables.
(Foucault, 1991, pp. 93–4)
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74 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
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Crucial to Foucault’s account here, and often neglected by political theorists, is the key role of what Latour refers to as the relations or links among
human and nonhuman actors, which sometimes goes under the name
of “assemblage theory.”17 For Foucault, to govern is not to be concerned
with land or territory in itself, with administrative institutions within
themselves, or with humans or populations in themselves. “On the contrary, with government it is a question not of imposing law on men, but
of disposing things: that is to say, of employing tactics rather than laws,
and even of using laws themselves as tactics.” To govern is to be concerned with the relations among these different elements, “this complex
of men and things,” as governing a ship involves “establishing a relation
between the sailors who are to be taken care of and the ship which is to
be taken care of, and the cargo which is to brought safely to port, and all
those eventualities like winds, rocks, storms, and so on.” Because governmentality is concerned not with laws but with finding “an end which
is ‘convenient’ for each of the things to be governed,” its aims are not
strictly juridical or political: governmentality “implies a plurality of specific aims,” a multiplicity of tactics both within and increasingly outside
of the networks of state power (Foucault, 1991, p. 95).
In a late essay Gilles Deleuze characterized the governmental formations that follow upon sovereign and disciplinary societies as “control societies,” his term for what Foucault understands as societies of
securitization. Where sovereign societies took bodies and territories as
their objects, and disciplinary societies followed analogical logics of
confinement in molding individuals into a mass, Deleuze sees control
societies as employing digital tactics in modulating “dividuals” [sic]
and collectivities into a “multitude” “through continuous control and
instant communication” (Deleuze, 1995 and 1995a). Deleuze schematically maps out a correspondence between these three different kinds of
societies and three “particular kind[s] of machine – with simple mechanical machines corresponding to sovereign societies, thermodynamic
machines to disciplinary societies, cybernetic machines and computers
to control societies” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 175).18 In glossing governmentality in terms of control Deleuze enables us to see that in the first
decade of the twenty-first century, in the current regime of securitization, governmentality and mediality work hand-in-hand. If governmentality is the way in which biopolitical power controls and manages
(and also makes possible particular forms of) “this complex of men and
things,” including people, bodies, cultural and economic practices, natural events, and so on, then in a society of control mediality necessarily participates in this project through a diverse network of forms and
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Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib
practices – including but not limited to film, TV, print media, the World
Wide Web, email, video games, mobile phones, MP3 players, radio, theater, or art. Thus to try to understand the Abu Ghraib photos as media
practices is not just (or perhaps not at all) to look at the ways in which
power is allegorized or represented or emblematized in these photos,
but rather to look at the way in which governmental power is mediated,
the way in which biopower is actualized, through the everyday practices of taking, uploading, and distributing these photographs.
Media practices in this sense are techniques of power in a control
society. Mediality works in concert with the state – works, as Foucault
says of governmentality more generally, to “vitalize” the state. It is in
this complex sense of the government of things in their imbrication
with people and population that we can see the role of mediality in
governmentality, the way in which our media practices concern themselves with things like “customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking,”
or with responses to “that other kind of things, accidents and misfortunes such as famine, epidemics, death, etc.” Mediality works both
to help dispose these things and to spur the state, or its institutions
of government, to act, to do their job in relation to these things. One
need only think of how the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs in
the American print, televisual, and online media served to spur the
US government to respond with investigations, with commissions, and
with charges against a small number of soldiers. Or, in a similar vein,
one could remember how globally networked televisual news coverage
in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina forced the Bush administration
to accelerate its efforts to rescue and provide aid to the victims of the
disaster (or at least appear to).
In America after 9/11, I want to insist, the functioning of governmentality cannot be opposed to the workings of mediality. Rather,
they both participate in a heterogeneous network composed of political
and medial agencies, mutually imbricated in the “proper disposition
of things.”19 In saying this I do not mean to deny that communication
media have in some form always been a part of governmental power but
that their role has intensified and changed with the widespread proliferation of networked, personal digital media in a society of control. One
key element of this new regime of power is that medial power is not,
as in a disciplinary society, unidirectional. Rather, mediality works as
a bi- directional or multi-directional process. Mediality does not simply
mean (as Foucault often maintains) that government or media manage
or control the imbricated networks of people and things, but also that
people and things function actively together to create or invent new
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forms of mediation. In setting forth the concept of “affective labor,”
Michael Hardt takes issue with the “Foucauldian view of biopower”
because it “only poses the situation from above” (Hardt, 1999, p. 98).
Paolo Virno explains that capitalism takes different forms in a control
society, that it appropriates or exploits or “capitalizes” on the dynamic
energies of general intellect or affective labor, distributed among what
he (like Hardt and Antonio Negri) characterizes as the “multitude.” To
think of the mediality of the Abu Ghraib photographs is to call attention
to how their production by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison exemplifies the way in which capitalism in a control society makes use of
affective labor or general intellect in the production of “biopower from
below.” In making this point we cannot ignore the fact that in abusing
and torturing Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib the soldiers involved were
in fact exercising “biopower from above” in carrying out illegal and
immoral US policies of interrogation and indefinite detention. What I
want to emphasize, however, is the mediality of the acts of photographing and distributing the images of these acts of torture and abuse – the
way in which the production of these images participated in the general
intellect, the affective labor of “biopower from below.” Furthermore,
I want to underscore how the shock of these photos, their power to create such public outrage, was intensified by the fact that their circulation
and reception participated in the everyday practices of such affective
labor both for those who took the photographs and for those who saw
them online or on TV or in an email or in the newspaper.
Affectivity
One way not to understand the concept of mediality I am trying to
develop is to see it as redescribing the traditional role of a free press
in a democracy, which is said to serve as a watchdog on the exercise
of governmental power. This is not what I am arguing, in two senses.
First, I am interested as much in making sense of the participation in
the processes of governmentality by the so-called “informal media”
of email, the Internet, blogs, and social networking sites like YouTube,
Facebook, and Twitter as I am in the “free press” in a more traditional
sense. In an age of networked digital media, as we saw, for example,
in the Iranian “Twitter revolution,” the mainstream press as such has
become increasingly less powerful as a vehicle for informing the public
of political, cultural, and social events. But more importantly in developing the concept of mediality I am trying to offer an alternative model
of how the public is mobilized to act and in turn to impact the action of
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state and governmental agencies – a model in keeping with much recent
work on the role of emotion and other pre-cognitive or non-cognitive
(embodied) forces in guiding individual and collective action.
In thinking of the Abu Ghraib photographs in terms of the ways that
mediality functions to “vitalize” the state, to mobilize the complex of
people and things, I have alluded to the affective intensity of these photographs as constituting an alternative way to make sense of their public
impact. In referring to the notion of affective quality or intensity, I am
relying upon a diverse project, developing in the past decade and more
in literary, cultural, social, and political theory, to understand the role
of “affect” in literature, media, culture, and society.20 This project draws
upon recent work in neuropsychology and cognitive science, which
insists upon the inseparability of cognition from affect or emotion,
often on the priority of affect and emotion to cognition and rational
judgment (Damasio, 1995, 1999, 2003; LeDoux, 1996). In the humanities (as opposed to psychology and cognitive science) these attempts to
theorize affect seem characteristically to be involved in efforts to recruit
or reinterpret earlier philosophical and theoretical precursors whose
concerns with questions of affect have been overlooked, neglected, or
minimized. Eve Sedgwick, for example, has mobilized mid-twentiethcentury American psychologist Silvan Tomkins and his account of the
affect system as more central than Freud’s drives in motivating human
behavior, to think about what she and Adam Frank have called “the
cybernetic fold” between modernism and postmodernism (Sedgwick
and Frank, 1995; Sedgwick, 2003). Brian Massumi has mobilized
Bergson and William James and Spinoza, as read through Deleuze and
Guattari, to think about the non-subjective autonomy of affect functions in our image-based media culture in ways that are distinct from
either objective reason or subjective emotion (Massumi, 2002, 2005).
Steven Shaviro mobilizes Blanchot, Bataille, and Benjamin, also read
through and against Deleuze and Guattari, to think about the affective
state of the cinematic body, or what it feels like to live in a networked
culture (Shaviro, 1993, 2003). And Mark Hansen has mobilized Bergson,
Merleau-Ponty, Gilbert Simondon, and Bernard Stiegler in the service of
his ambitious, if densely written, trilogy on the role of affectivity in the
functioning of new digital media (Hansen, 2004, 2006).
What all of these diverse treatments of affect have in common is a
resistance to the totalizing narratives of psychoanalysis and ideology
critique, what Sedgwick calls “paranoid reading,” in which literary, cultural, and media texts are understood chiefly in terms of the ways in
which they work either to subvert or to enable the hegemony of global
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capital, or patriarchy, or ideology.21 For Sedgwick paranoid reading
remains caught within the binary opposition of hegemony and subversion, contenting itself with arguing the ways in which texts or cultural
practices function as “kinda hegemonic, kinda subversive.” Rather than
focus on exposing or revealing the evidence of power in structures of
representation and signification, affect theorists seek instead to focus on
the functionality of literature, media, and culture, on the ways in which
our embodied selves, what Walter Benjamin refers to as “the human
sensorium,” is affected by these various media events prior to and independent of their cognitive impact or interpretation. Thus thinking of
mediality in terms of affect is to think of our media practices not only in
terms of their structures of signification or symbolic representation but
more crucially in terms of the ways in which media function on the one
hand to discipline, control, contain, manage, or govern human affectivity and its affiliated things “from above,” at the same time that they
work to enable particular forms of human action, particular collective
expressions or formations of human affect “from below.”
In linking affect to mediality and governmentality, then, I mean to
distinguish the current regime of mediality from an earlier regime of
power in which communication media were oriented more towards
truth or fidelity of representation. To paint with broad strokes, I would
argue that modern forms of visual representation, beginning at least
with the invention and technologization of linear perspective, and continuing with photography and then cinema, tended (at least in part)
towards an increasing accuracy or fidelity to nature, and that forms of
verbal representation did the same, whether through the rise of realism
and naturalism in narrative fiction, the emergence of notions of scientific reason and description, or the development in journalism of a
sense of objective reporting. Where Foucault would oppose the regime
of governmentality both to sovereignty, which concerned itself with
ruling territories as opposed to managing people or populations, and
to discipline, which operated to administer biopower, I would oppose
mediality to representationality, which concerned itself chiefly with
a referential fidelity to its object rather than, as mediality does, with
mobilizing people or populations, or as Massumi and others would put
it, with modulating affect.22
In a 2003 interview Massumi describes the operation of what I am
here characterizing as the regime of mediality:
So power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its
disciplinary forms, it’s affective. The mass media have an extremely
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
important role to play in that. The legitimisation of political power,
of state power, no longer goes through the reason of state and the correct application of governmental judgment. It goes through affective channels. For example, an American president can deploy troops
overseas because it makes a population feel good about their country
or feel secure, not because the leader is able to present well-honed
arguments that convince the population that it is a justified use
of force. So there is no longer political justification within a moral
framework provided by the sovereign state. And the mass media are
not mediating anymore – they become direct mechanisms of control
by their ability to modulate the affective dimension.
...
Affect is now much more important for understanding power, even
state power narrowly defined, than concepts like ideology. Direct
affect modulation takes the place of old-style ideology.
(Zournazi, 2003)23
Of course, as with sovereignty and governmentality, the relation between
representationality and mediality, or between ideology and affect, is
not so clear-cut. Nor does it involve some absolute break or rupture, the
elimination of ideology or representationality or sovereignty. Judith
Butler argues in Precarious Life that sovereignty has re-emerged in the
current Bush administration’s unprecedented expansion of executive
power – even if sovereignty can only manifest itself through the techniques and discursive formations of governmentality.24 Massumi notes
as much himself: “It is really important to understand affect ‘after a
society of ideology’. Ideology is still around but it is not as embracing as it was, and in fact it does operate. But to really understand it
you have to understand its materialisation, which goes through affect.
That’s a very different way of addressing the political, because it is having to say that there is a whole range of ideological structures in place.”
The same is true with representationality and its commitment to a
regime of fidelity or truthfulness. This regime has never disappeared;
there is still a “whole range of representational structures in place”
(Zournazi, 2003). But these structures have been supplemented, and
in many instances supplanted, by mediality. Representationality, like
ideology, has been made to manifest itself through the techniques and
discursive formations of contemporary mediality, as blogs and other
web-based genres and forms of social networking are enlisted in the
fight for truth or the proper – in politics, in social matters, in law, in
science, or in culture.
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Addressing the role of affect in “the cultural-political functioning of
the media,” Massumi would insist on affect’s autonomy, its independence not only of cognition but even of individual human subjectivity. Like other affect theorists, he is careful to distinguish affect from
emotion, characterizing affects as uncontained bodily intensities and
emotions as limited and contained expressions of affects first felt by the
body, and only afterwards recognized as particular emotional states.25
While I would want to qualify what it means to claim that affect is
autonomous, Massumi’s formulation is useful for isolating or bringing
into focus the way our affective system helps to modulate or attune
our relations with our human and non-human environment. In this
sense the affect produced by the Abu Ghraib photos would be understood not only as a response to what the photographs reveal or mean
or to the emotions they evoke, but as an unqualified bodily response
independent of, and perhaps phenomenally prior to, our understanding of the emotions they evoke or the meanings they entail. And if our
everyday practices of digital photography or photo-sharing also involve
an affective relationship with our media, and these practices are continuous with the media practices at Abu Ghraib, then looking at the
Abu Ghraib photographs would be experienced affectively as well as
cognitively, would produce an affective response that would somehow
impact or alter our prior affective relationship with our everyday media
practices. That is, insofar as the very act of viewing the Abu Ghraib photos was necessarily an act that was continuous with taking the photos
and circulating them online, in email, or in print, the affective force or
physical shock of the photos is heightened by the mediality of the photos themselves. While this affective response cannot be separated from
the content of the photos, it helps to account for the shock we feel when
we recognize, along with and distinct from the affective experience of
seeing the photographs, what their content actually is, what kind of
inhumane practices they are remediating. On an affective level the
shock comes not after recognizing them cognitively or intellectually,
but in some sense prior to that recognition. We experience the shock
and then afterwards recognize what it is that had shocked us.
This insistence on embodied affect is very much like what William
James has described in arguing that we do not run away because we
are afraid but are afraid because we run, or that we do not cry because
we are sad but are sad because we cry. For James, the bodily response
to events that are frightening or sad both precedes and produces the
emotions of fear and sadness – indeed in some sense the bodily sensations are these emotions.26 To apply this concept of bodily affectivity
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Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib
in the case of the photos from Abu Ghraib would allow us to see that
we were outraged because we were shocked, rather than being shocked
because we were outraged. Or put in terms of their mediality, we see
the photographs as outside the pale of civilized behavior because we
first experienced them affectively within our everyday media practices.
While one might then want to conclude from this pre-cognitive aspect
of our affective response to these and other violent images that our current media practices are culturally corrupt and that we should control
or even censor the content of our culture’s media, that is not an argument that I would endorse. Rather, in calling attention to how pervasive
and powerful these media practices are in constructing our identities
or our affective lives, I want to emphasize the importance of understanding the mediality of our contemporary media practices, both how
they mobilize affect in managing or governing human and nonhuman
populations (what Foucault characterizes as the imbrication of people
and things) and how they produce and are produced by collectivities
of humans and nonhumans in the creation of affective labor and value
from below.
Torture and pornography
I want to introduce a much less publicized controversy over scandalous digital photographs circulated on the Web by US soldiers in
Iraq, as a way to consider the affective function of such photographs
for the soldiers who take them and distribute them online, the creation of affective value through the functioning of mediality from
below. On 28 September 2005, nearly 18 months after the release
of the photographs from Abu Ghraib, the New York Times reported
that the US Army was investigating photographs of Iraqi war dead
that had been posted on a website called NowThatsFuckedUp.com
(NTFU), owned by an American named Chris Wilson, but hosted in
Amsterdam. The Times piece referred to a 20 September article in the
Online Journalism Review, which was the first mainstream US venue
to report the story (though it had been investigated by a journalist/
blogger associated with the Christian Science Monitor, who had learned
about it from an Italian blogger and the Italian news agency ANSA). If
the story’s complex provenance is typical of the interwoven linkages
among the blogosphere and networked news media, both print and
online, the details of the story itself were less typical, even though it
entailed many of the same elements raised by the Abu Ghraib photos –
graphic photographic images, the violation of Geneva Conventions,
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the relationship between pornography and violence, the omnipresence of digital cameras.
NTFU.com was created as a bulletin board site for (mainly) men to
exchange pornographic images of their girlfriends or wives. The site
had a structure familiar to those who had used similar forums, offering general access boards available to anyone and special access boards
available for those who provided a certain level of content to the site
or who were willing to pay for full access. As such NTFU.com typified the way in which postmodern capitalism produces affective value
through collectivities enabled by the interactivity of networked digital
media. The site quickly became popular with soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere, who began to post soft-core pictures of partially dressed, partially nude female (and occasionally male) soldiers. After the Pentagon
blocked access to the site from computers in the field and soldiers in
Iraq reported difficulty using their credit cards to access some of the
paid features of the site, Wilson decided to offer soldiers free access to
these features in exchange for photos from the field. His offer on the
site read:
As a Thank-You for the work you do and the sacrifices you make I
would like to offer you guys who want it the ability to get free access
as a SUPPORTER member. [¶] Just post a picture of you guys hanging out, or saying hi, or of other cool stuff you see while your there.
Something like the kinda pictures you would be sending home to your
family and friends. Lets see some tanks, guns, the place your living
in, some dead Taliban, just anything. I would like to get a glimpse of
what you guys are seeing over there and I think everyone here would
also. [¶] In return for your submission I will give you SUPPORTER
access in the forums. When I get a few pictures I will setup a special
forum called something like “Pictures From The Field” or something
like that and post them all there for people to see.27
Many of the photographs that soldiers began to post depicted mutilated
dead bodies and parts of bodies of Iraqi civilians and insurgents, the
kinds of images that the Bush administration as well as the mainstream
media had sought systematically to prevent the American and global
public from seeing.28
News stories covering the NTFU incident emphasized its connection
with Abu Ghraib and brought up many of the same issues raised by
those photographs. Nonetheless, there was very little public awareness
of these photos among the US public (or, for that matter, in Europe or
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Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib
the Middle East).29 I introduce this incident of war photos traded for
pornography not to make the now familiar claim that such photos are
themselves pornographic, but as a way to think about what makes an
issue into a matter of public concern, how media and publicity interact with our media everyday. Even less than the Abu Ghraib photos, I
would argue, these graphic photos of Iraqi dead bear little formal relationship to the photographic conventions of pornography, nor are they
designed to arouse their viewers erotically, unlike the photos of female
American soldiers and other amateur pornography that were posted
on the NTFU site. Following the lead of now-familiar arguments by
Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, Sontag and others would
account for the outrage produced by the photos of Abu Ghraib by
equating them with pornography, based upon the degrading and damaging effect of such images on those who produce the images, those
whom the images reproduce, and those who consume them. Although
such arguments about the injuriousness of pornography continue to be
contested on a variety of fronts, there is a good deal of force to them.
And it is hard to imagine anyone who would deny the horrible abuses
of power produced by the soldiers at Abu Ghraib and documented by
their photos. Nonetheless, if we think about how the Abu Ghraib photos functioned medialogically, about the kinds of work they perform,
there may be a different way to make sense of them as pornographic,
or at least as erotic, for the soldiers who were involved in their production. Felix Guattari has suggested that in considering behavior like
obsessive hand-washing, we think not of its psychological or symbolic
significance, but of its sensation, “the feeling that one is in the washing of one’s hands.” If we think of the Abu Ghraib photos in this way,
then Žižek’s characterization of them as something like trophy photos
of fraternity pranks would make sense of them as productive not of the
feeling that one is being sexually aroused but of the feeling that one is
displaying a trophy.30
Jaspir Puar, however, provides a persuasive account of how the photographs might have provided sexual arousal for some of the soldiers, particularly those like Lynndie England and Charles Graner, who “became
romantically involved while in Iraq.” Puar speculates that “sharing torture functions to instigate and heighten sexual chemistries or release
them or both. What is the relationship between the kinds of sex they
were having with each other and the kind of corporeal experiences of
sexual domination they were jointly having with the prisoners? While
torture elevates the erotic charge and intensity for those already ready
to fuck each other, it externalizes the hatred between those ready to kill
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each other” (Puar, 2007, p. 101). Thinking explicitly about the affectivity of the acts of taking and circulating these digital photographs, Puar
makes a compelling case for the eroticism of their mediality: “the separation of participant from voyeur becomes infinitely complicated by the
pleasures of taking, posing for, and looking at pictures, especially as the
use of cameras and videos inform varied practices (watching porn, nudie
pics, to name a few) between partners of all genders in all kind of sex”
(Puar, 2007, pp. 101–2). Puar takes seriously Guattari’s injunction to think
not only about what the photographs might mean, but about the feeling
that one is taking and distributing photographs of sexual torture:
the giddy process of documentation, the visual evidence of corporeal shame, the keen ecstatic eye of the voyeur, the haunting of surveillance, the dissemination of the images, like pornography on the
Internet, the speed of transmission an aphrodisiac in itself, “swapped
from computer to computer throughout the 320th Battalion,” perpetuating humiliation ad nauseum. Taken between 2 A.M. and
4 A.M., the digital photos project their anticipated audience not as a
representational demographic but through the affective economies
of speed, time, pace, circulation, transit, distribution, flows, and, of
course, exchange.
(Puar, 2007, p. 102)
Puar’s spirited description of the affectivity of producing these photographs helps to illuminate their mediality for the soldiers and prison
guards at Abu Ghraib, whose interactions with digital photography and
video were both as “participants” and as “voyeurs.” Irrespective of the
sexual components of the behavior produced for and documented in the
Abu Ghraib photos, however, I would still maintain that pornography
was not what made them into global media issues. On the contrary, in
the case of NTFU, the conjunction of graphic images of dead bodies
and Internet pornography helped prevent this issue from becoming a
matter of widespread media concern. For while hardcore Internet pornography is widespread enough that it has become a regular staple of
comedy in popular media, explicitly pornographic images themselves
are not yet visible on mainstream US televisual or other popular media.
Not unlike dead and mutilated bodies, explicit images of sexual activity
are still kept out of the mainstream media public. We know that they
are available on the Internet or pay-per-view TV, we can refer to them
humorously or seriously or with shock and outrage, but they are not
allowed to be exhibited publicly. Thus, rather than condemn the NTFU
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photos of Iraqi war dead as pornographic, I introduced them as a way
to think about how they functioned as media practices for the soldiers
who took them and for those of us who saw them.
I want to conclude this chapter by thinking about how the photos of
injured and dead Iraqis function medialogically in relation to the specific problems of post-traumatic stress disorder in Iraq, particularly insofar as the distinctive conditions of this war (suicide bombers, snipers,
IEDs, etc.) differed from previous wars. A 2005 article in the New York
Times reported on psychologists and psychiatrists on the ground in
Iraq, who were working to “identify the mental reactions particular to
this war”:
One of [these reactions], these experts say, is profound, unreleased
anger. Unlike in Vietnam, where service members served shorter
tours and were rotated in and out of the country individually, troops
in Iraq have deployed as units and tend to have trained together as
full-time military or in the Reserves or the National Guard. Group
cohesion is strong, and the bonds only deepen in the hostile desert
terrain of Iraq.
For these tight-knit groups, certain kinds of ambushes – roadside
bombs, for instance – can be mentally devastating, for a variety of
reasons.
“These guys go out in convoys, and boom: the first vehicle gets hit,
their best friend dies, and now they’re seeing life flash before them
and get a surge of adrenaline and want to do something,” said Lt.
Col. Alan Peterson, an Air Force psychologist who completed a tour
in Iraq last year. “But often there’s nothing they can do. There’s no
enemy there.”
Many, Colonel Peterson said, become deeply frustrated because
“they wish they could act out on this adrenaline rush and do what
they were trained to do but can’t.”
Some soldiers and marines describe foot patrols as “drawing fire,”
and gunmen so often disappear into crowds that many have the feeling that they are fighting ghosts. In roadside ambushes, service men
and women may never see the enemy.
Sgt. Benjamin Flanders, 27, a graduate student in math who went
to Iraq with the New Hampshire National Guard, recalled: “It was
kind of a joke: if you got to shoot back at the enemy, people were
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Transmitting affect
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What was true of Iraq generally was also true of Abu Ghraib, which was
under almost nightly mortar attack from the outside, but against which
the soldiers were not able to retaliate, to shoot back.
Building on Freud’s analysis of the compulsive behavior of World War I
veterans in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Walter Benjamin has argued
that film and other modern media functioned in the first decades of the
twentieth century to train people to deal with the shocks of urban modernity (Benjamin, 1940a). So if Benjamin is right in thinking that the
formal and technical properties of cinema and other forms of mechanical
reproduction provided a way to cushion people from the shocks of modernity, then it makes sense to think about how taking digital photos of
Iraqi dead might become a way to cushion and even to distribute the shock
or traumatic affect of fighting in Iraq across media artifacts. Taking such
photos can be seen as an attempt to displace the affect of shock to a media
memory rather than having to retain it as a human memory.31 For Freud,
consciousness functions to screen traumatic events from the unconscious.
In Iraq mediation served a similar purpose, as a form of technological
consciousness operating according to the laws of its concomitant technological unconscious. That is to say, photos of Iraqi war dead may function
as some form of screen, as an attempt to block or contain or minimize the
perhaps traumatic effect of seeing these things, a way of distributing the
negative affect of shock or trauma across media artifacts as well, and by
extension communicating or distributing it to others.
I want to underscore that my interest in the role of photography in
distributing (or releasing) negative affect is less psychoanalytic than
medialogical. Following Guattari, I want to think about the act of taking these photographs in terms of the feeling that one is shooting back.
In conditions like those in Iraq, it is important to understand the affective role that photographs like these can play. If the adrenaline surge
produced by an enemy attack can’t be used to shoot, can’t be released
by attacking the enemy, it can perhaps be distributed or released, at least
in part, by taking digital photos or videos of a suicide bomber’s decapitated head, or an insurgent with his limbs blown off, or even some Iraqi
civilians who have been wounded, maimed, or violently murdered. The
anger, the thirst for revenge, which often cannot be expressed by shooting back at the enemy with one’s gun, might be able to be expressed by
shooting back at one’s enemy with a digital camera or video-recorder.
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jealous. It was a stress reliever, a great release, because usually these
guys disappear.”
(Carey, 2005)
While the effect is different militarily, affectively there may be some
significant similarities – the digital images, captured, downloaded to
one’s computer, and circulated among friends on the front, friends and
family back home, and then on sites like NTFU to strangers on the web,
can serve to distribute the affect of anger and perhaps in some small way
work to dissipate or release it, in what Theresa Brennan has analyzed as
“the transmission of affect.”32 The force of seeing these photographs is
not only intellectual or cognitive, but more powerfully affective in giving one the feeling of wanting to avenge or shoot back or violently hurt
or abuse the enemy. This revenge is likely directed in part at those of us
at home, those of us who are part of this social network but not part of
the experience on the ground in Iraq.
This connection between shooting a photo and shooting an enemy
might also help to explain the behavior of the US prison guards at Abu
Ghraib, where soldiers could take out on detainees (who are potential
enemies, or who stand in for enemies) the anger that they (or their fellow soldiers on the front lines) could not take out on their enemies in
a war fought like the insurgency was being fought in Iraq. Indeed, two
recent US documentaries, HBO’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Errol Morris’s
Standard Operating Procedure, feature multiple quotations from former
Abu Ghraib prison guards and MPs about the constant threats of bombing that the prison was subjected to and the tension it produced among
the soldiers there. In the print narrative that accompanied the release
of Morris’s documentary, Philip Gourevitch describes how Sabrina
Harman, the “thumbs-up” girl featured in several Abu Ghraib photos,
used her own photographs and letters home as means to distribute affect
to and through media practices: “To the prisoners, being photographed
may have seemed an added dash of mortification, but to Harman, taking pictures was a way of deflecting her own humiliation in the transaction – by taking ownership of her position as a spectator.” Harman
used letters home to her partner Kelly as media for remembering, or for
allowing her not to have to: “ ‘I put everything down on paper that I
was thinking. That’s the only way I can remember things, is letters and
photos.’ ” Gourevich speculates that “Harman seemed to conceive of
memory as an external storage device. By downloading her impressions
to a document she could clear them from her mind and transform reality into an artifact (Gourevitch and Morris, 2008, p. 113).”
If Harman’s distribution of her own affective response to the situation at Abu Ghraib was symptomatic, then it would likely be the case
that part of our response to these photos of Iraqi dead (as similarly to
the Abu Ghraib torture photos) is an affective response to the fear or
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anger or shame distributed across and through them. The stark contrast
with the kinds of affective response we normally associate with viewing
digital photos on our computers or on TV or in the newspapers is part
of what was so shocking, what affected us even before we were cognizant of what we were seeing or how horrible it was – as was our (perhaps
unconscious) recognition that we use digital photos in the same way,
to distribute our affective responses (surprise, awe, happiness, arousal,
shame, fear, etc.) to our mediated artifacts and through them to others we know or love or care about. Which is only to say, again, that we
experience at some level (what Žižek characterizes as our “unknown
known,” or what Nigel Thrift calls our “technological unconscious”)
that what these soldiers were doing with their Abu Ghraib photos or
their photos of maimed and mutilated bodies was not fundamentally
different as media practices from what we do with our digital cameras
and video cameras when we capture scenes of a wedding or birthday
party, a young child’s first step, our pets, our children’s orchestra performance, our vacations, or our new possessions. And that part of the
horror of these images, if the unarticulated or non-symbolic part of
that horror, is this bodily feeling both of the affectivity of these digital
images and of the affinity between our own practices of distributing
affect across and through other media as well.
Why, then, did the photographs from Abu Ghraib have a public and
political impact far greater than, say, the unlawful establishment of
a detention center at Guantanamo Bay or the policy and practice of
“extraordinary rendition” or the countless other US violations of the
Geneva Convention and the bounds of accepted behavior more generally? Put most epigrammatically, my answer would be that the shock of
photos like those from Abu Ghraib derived not only from the extraordinarily horrifying images that they showed us, but more powerfully
from what they did to us by means of the ordinary practices of everyday
mediality they participated in.
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Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib
4
Cyborgs
Elsewhere I have developed the concept of a cinema of interactions to
describe the media hybridity that is one of the defining conditions of
contemporary mediality (Grusin, 2007).1 Significant media events are
no longer confined to a single medium, but are distributed across a variety of media forms and practices. Popular music, Hollywood films, or
networked television series are distributed across DVDs, the Internet,
fan communities, publicity media, and so forth. As we saw in the case
of the horrifying behavior at Abu Ghraib, social, cultural, and political
events as well exist today only insofar as they mobilize and are mobilized by a network of complementary and overlapping media forms
and practices. Media can no longer be seen to operate as the distinct,
autonomous forms defined by the medium specificity that dominated
much twentieth-century discussion of cinema and other media, but are
now better described in terms of tendencies or translations or attributes.
With MP3 players, web browsers, cameras, and video recorders built in
to our computers, mobile phones, and other personal digital devices, all
of our media interact and combine to the extent that it no longer makes
sense to consider specific media in formal, cultural, or technical isolation. Media themselves help to construct and maintain assemblages of
humans, technologies, and nature, at the same time that they emerge
from and are part of the assemblages they maintain and construct.2
I invoke this concept of distributed mediation to call attention to a
similar distribution of affect across human and nonhuman actors. In
this chapter I take up the affective feedback loops that structure our
“media everyday,” the ways in which we interact with multiple media
in almost every aspect of our daily lives.3 Consider, for example, the fact
90
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that in our current media everyday if you pass a car and see the driver
animatedly talking, it is just as likely that she will be talking to someone
not in the car as that she will be talking to a passenger riding along with
her. The fact that the driver is located in one geographical location and
talking with someone in another means that she is interacting simultaneously within two different socio-technical, cultural networks – the
network of automotive transportation within which she is moving and
the network of mobile telecommunication within which she is communicating. In fact the ubiquity of mobile phones (hand-held or not)
means that when you encounter a person in public today it is almost
as ordinary to see her speaking with someone not in the same physical
space that you share as it is to see her speaking with someone who is. The
seeming omnipresence of mobile networked media devices changes the
nature of physical embodiment and identity – changes the relationship
of proximity, closeness, or intimacy to embodiment. Where once coembodiment and proximity signaled closeness or intimacy or presence,
it no longer necessarily does so. In fact, immediacy and presence now
seem to be associated as much with one’s mediated relationships with
absent others as with one’s (albeit equally mediated) relationships with
people sharing the same physical space or embodied environment.4
Today we interact (both affectively and cognitively) with people who
are not present as commonly as we interact with people who are. These
interactions occur with media technologies and artifacts that are present, and with networks of absent technical artifacts as well. Rather
than social interactions occurring with other people located within our
physical space, such interactions occur with and by means of media
technologies within our physical space, sometimes even (in the case of
wearable devices) within our bodily space.5 Just as different media interact formally, technically, and economically among themselves, so media
users or consumers (individually and collectively) interact cognitively
and affectively with a variety of networked and increasingly mobile
media. Interactivity, particularly in its cognitive and epistemological
aspects, has long been a buzzword for new media enthusiasts, who have
argued that the “digital revolution” inaugurated radically new forms of
interaction among new media and their new users. Such interactivity is
not unique to digital technologies, however, but rather operates as an
aspect of all human and nonhuman media transactions. Where earlier
discussions have illuminated some of the cognitive or epistemological
implications of such interactivity, I am interested in looking at the way
in which media interactivity is also bodily and affective, what Steve
Shaviro, following Deleuze or Whitehead, characterizes as aesthetic.6
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
In the past couple of decades, cognitive psychologists, neurobiologists, and even media and cultural theorists have begun to argue that
humans have co-evolved with technology throughout their history, by
distributing their cognitive and other functions across an increasingly
complex network of technical artifacts.7 Andy Clark, for example, argues
that what distinguishes humans from other species is less our innate
cognitive or analytical aptitude than our capacity to distribute cognition across a wide range of cultural practices and technical artifacts.
Basing his argument on his and others’ research programs in cognitive science and neurobiology, he draws on a wide range of thinkers –
including, among others, Don Norman, Ed Hutchins, Daniel Dennett,
N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour – to maintain
that humans co-evolve with technology and always have. Humans are
“natural-born cyborgs,” Clark argues, not because we use pacemakers
or contact lenses or wearable computers but because, beginning at least
with the use of language, humans have used technologies both to train
our brains and to distribute cognition across other technical artifacts
outside of our “skin-bag” (as he likes to refer to the human body). In tracing our cyborgian nature as far back as the development of language,
Clark does not ignore or dismiss the ways in which new digital technologies have accelerated our co-evolution with technology, suggesting
that networked digital media may even have brought us to the cusp
of a new model of cyborgs.8 He cites the cell-phone as an example of
“a prime, if entry-level, cyborg technology. It is a technology that may,
indeed, turn out to mark a crucial transition point between the first
(pen, paper, diagrams, and digital media dominated) and the second
waves (marked by more personalized, online, dynamic biotechnological unions) of natural-born cyborgs” (Clark, 2003, p. 27). Clark sees
the proliferation of interactive, digital technologies as furthering the
co-evolution of humans with our environment: “More and more parts
of our worlds will come to share the moral and psychological status of
parts of our brains. We are already primed by nature to dovetail our
minds to our worlds. Once the world starts dovetailing back in earnest,
the last few seams must burst, and we will stand revealed: cyborgs without surgery, symbionts without sutures” (Clark, 2003, p. 34).
One of Clark’s more compelling explanations of this co-evolution
of humans and technology builds upon a series of experiments which
“show that our sense of our own bodily limits and bodily presence is
not fixed and immovable,” but “is an ongoing construct, open to rapid
influence by tricks” and “new technologies” (Clark, 2003, p. 27). These
experiments involved blindfolded subjects who touch another’s nose
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(or a desktop or dummy hand) with the same rhythm and pattern as
their own nose or hand is being touched by a volunteer. After roughly
half a minute the subjects begin to feel as if the other person or object
that they are touching is indeed part of themselves, so much so that
when, in the case of the desktop experiment, the volunteer hits the
desktop with a hammer, the subject’s galvanic skin response jumps as if
it were the subject, not the desktop, being hit (Clark, 2003, pp. 59–60).
The lesson Clark draws from these alterations in our sense of proprioception is that human minds are inherently plastic, and that through
such everyday practices as language learning, the mind develops its
cognitive powers in conjunction with its development of technical artifacts. “In all this we discern two distinct, but deeply interanimated,
ways in which biological cognition leans on cultural and environmental structures. One way involves a developmental loop, in which exposure
to external symbols adds something to the brain’s own inner toolkit.
The other involves a persisting loop, in which ongoing neural activity
becomes geared to the presence of specific external tools and media”
(Clark, 2003, p. 78).
Clark extends his argument from the origins of language to society,
technology, and culture as well. Humans, he contends, are
by nature, products of a more complex and heterogeneous developmental matrix in which culture, technology, and biology are pretty
well inextricably intermingled. It is a mistake to posit a biologically
fixed “human nature” with simple wrap-around tools and culture; the
tools and culture are indeed as much determiners of our nature as
products of it. Ours are (by nature) unusually plastic and opportunistic brains whose biological proper functioning has always involved the
recruitment and exploitation of nonbiological props and scaffolds.
(Clark, 2003, p. 86)
He explains how this co-evolution works by referring to a recent study
which
showed that young people’s thumbs have overtaken fingers as the
most muscled and dexterous digits among the under-twenty-fives,
simply as a result of their extensive use of handheld electronic game
controllers and text messaging on cell phones. New generations
of phones will be designed around this greater agility, leading to
even further changes in manual dexterity and the like, in a golden
loop. The same kind of user-technology co-adaptation can occur
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Although the concept of distributed cognition has begun to be widely
accepted, little attention has been paid to the parallel concept of distributed affect. Clark’s work, however, provides a way to think about
humans as affective as well as cognitive cyborgs, who interact affectively with media technologies in both “developmental” and “persisting” feedback loops. Clark takes the proprioception experiments cited
above as emblematic of the way in which humans interact with their
technologies in an autopoietic feedback loop through “some kind of
local, circular process in which neural commands, motor actions, and
sensory feedback are closely and continuously correlated” (Clark, 2003,
p. 104): “in all the cases we have examined, what matters are the complex feedback loops that connect action-commands, bodily motions,
environmental effects, and multisensory perceptual inputs. It is the
two-way flow of influence between brain, body, and world that matters,
and on the basis of which we construct (and constantly re-reconstruct)
our sense of self, potential, and presence. The biological skin-bag has
no special significance here. It is the flow that counts” (Clark, 2003,
p. 114). Despite Clark’s claim that the biological skin-bag has “no special
significance” for this cognitive feedback loop, the body is indispensable for considering affective feedback loops. Furthermore it is crucial
for Clark’s explanation of these experiments that the body responds to
extra-corporal stimuli as if it were receiving tactile signals:
Remember the compelling demonstrations ... where the subjects
came to feel as if the desktop or dummy hand were the source of
tactile signals being fed to their biological brain? When the dummy
or desktop was then hit with a hammer, these subjects showed a galvanic skin response consistent with the expectation of damage to
their biological body. They had, at the very deepest level (and after
only a few minutes of training), come to identify themselves with the
nonbiological “extensions.”
(Clark, 2003, p. 104)
What is especially interesting about the experiments that Clark
describes is that their use of cross-modal synchronicity to trick the mind
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at the deepest levels of neural processing. Such developmentally
open brains are not just opportunistic, but explosively opportunistic.
They are ready to change themselves to make the most of the structures, media, and opportunities encountered during learning.
(Clark, 2003, p. 86)
95
works very much like what neuropsychologist Daniel Stern calls “affective attunement” (Stern, 1985, pp. 138–61). In The Interpersonal World
of the Infant, his paradigmatic mid-1980s work in infant psychology,
Stern argues that the infant’s sense of self emerges through affective
cross-modal sensations or experiences, both with other people and with
other things. The infant’s sense of distinction between self and other,
as well as of the unity of perception and the connection between perceptions and a world of people and things, Stern maintains, is created
and grounded at a very early level of psychological development by the
infant’s affective experience. He relates the interpersonal world of the
infant to the idea of distinct affect categories and their attendant facial
and other bodily expressions, building upon Darwin, Silvan Tomkins,
and others who have claimed that the affect system is largely innate,
universal, and cross-cultural. Stern understands affective attunement
as working across different sensory modes, independent of specifically defined, classified affect categories. He emphasizes how, for infants
especially, it is the amodal patterning of affects, what he calls “vitality
affects” (e.g., surging, falling, fading, increasing, crescendo, explosion,
and so forth), which tend to predominate in their development of a
sense of self (Stern, 1985, pp. 53–61). These vitality affects work in both
cross-modal or amodal fashion, so that increasing intensity of sound
and increasing intensity of light or touch, for example, all register as
affectively alike. And Stern argues that by linking together these different modalities of sense perception, the infant begins to get a sense
of the world and its attendant people and things, as well as of the relation between her feelings and sensations and those of other people and
things in the world.
For questions concerning our affective relations with media, what
is particularly intriguing about Stern’s account is that he takes crossmodal affective patterning or mapping to be basic to our interactions
with the world from infancy. In this light one can begin to understand
how such audio-visual media like film, television, mobile phones, computer and video games, and the web work to imitate, reinforce, or reproduce the virtuality of our embodied experience. From the perspective
of affective attunement, sound film or TV become crucial forms of
affect modulation because of the way in which they couple visual and
auditory patterns or sensations, as well as the way in which they present
audiovisual images of the affective states of other people. Even more
complexly in some sense, video games (and interactive media generally)
would seem to work as modes of trans-modal or cross-modal affective and cognitive modulation by adding touch to sight and sound, so
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when you move your avatar in a game, for example, or use your mouse
to move the cursor on the screen of your PC, or manipulate the touch
screen on your iPhone, you are adding cross-modal patterns of touch to
the coupling of sight and sound. That is, the haptic movement of hand
on controller, along with other bodily/muscular movements involved,
produces a change in the medial other, in both the user’s avatar or cursor and the other human and nonhuman actors on screen. In this way
our media interactivity provides a kind of intensification or reduplication of affective interpersonal relations.
The link between the science of cognition and the science of emotion or affect, which has been popularized in recent years by Antonio
Damasio, Joseph LeDoux, and others, suggests that just as our cognitive
sense of our own body is not stable but always in a process of becoming,
so our affective sense of our body (and others’ bodies), as well as of the
world more generally, is being constructed and reconstructed through
affective feedback loops not unlike those cognitive ones engaged in language learning or visual scanning (Damasio, 1995, 1999, 2003; LeDoux,
1996). Stern describes the process of affective development much like
how Clark describes cognitive development. Stern details the operation
of an affective feedback loop in which exposure to external feelings
and emotions adds something to what, adapting Clark’s notion of the
“cognitive toolkit,” we might call a person’s “affective toolkit.” Just as
Clark sees the distribution of cognition to entail a persisting loop in
which ongoing cognitive activity is geared to specific external tools
and media, so Stern sees affective attunement as entailing a persisting
loop through which we interact affectively with other people, and by
extension with our external tools and media. Following Stern, I would
argue that we learn how to modulate our affective states by interacting with things, people, media, or technologies in our environment,
much as Clark maintains that we learn how to acquire data or information. Furthermore, just as the long human childhood has been seen as
a window of opportunity in which our cultural scaffolding can change
the dynamics of our cognitive system, so it can be understood to do
the same for our affective system in a way that opens up new affective possibilities and combinations.9 If brains and neural processing
co-evolve like thumbs and video-game controllers, it then seems likely
that our affective states would also co-evolve with our media and other
new technologies. It is thus not unreasonable to imagine that certain
affects become stronger and more muscular in different cultural and
historical contexts, while others might atrophy or grow weak from disuse. Consequently, we might, then, seek out media (as well as other
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social, technical, or cultural environments) in which we can continue
to develop and extend certain kinds of affective states or combinations
and sequences of affective states, and which would then heighten,
refine, or attune those states and capabilities in what Clark describes
as a “golden loop.” Indeed, as I have suggested throughout this book,
premediation operates on a collective scale as such a loop in relation to
post-9/11 fear or terror.
In the past few decades, the relation between affect and media has
begun to be studied from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and in
different discursive contexts. Neuropsychologists have measured affective responses to computer and video games, TV, and other media forms
and practices. Computer scientists have begun to develop computers
that can sense and then respond affectively to the affective states of
their users. Philosophers, media theorists, and cultural theorists have
addressed the affective functions of media and other aesthetic artifacts. In the remainder of this chapter I build upon some of this work to
develop the idea that humans are affective as well as cognitive cyborgs –
that we are engaged in a complex and overlapping network of heterogeneous feedback loops not only with other people but increasingly
with our media as well. These feedback loops, I argue, have become
increasingly important in the post-9/11 era in helping us to cope not
only with the ongoing threats posed by global terrorism, but also with
the incessant media accounts of these threats and with our own government’s efforts to protect us from these threats through the everyday
media practices of securitization.
Feedback loops
Until 1995, when Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank brought
out Shame and Her Sisters, Silvan Tomkins had been chiefly read by
psychologists and psychiatrists as an important figure in the history of twentieth-century psychiatry, whose theory of the human
affect system helped to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis
of behaviorism and psychoanalysis.10 Thanks largely to Sedgwick
and Frank, Tomkins has begun to be more widely known among
literary and cultural theorists interested in exploring the question
of affect, particularly but not exclusively as opposed to, or distinct
from, cognition. Tomkins has also been of interest to those theorists
who would contest particular elements of the Freudian psychoanalytic model, such as its reliance on the concept of fundamental drives
as human motivators and on the governing hermeneutic distinction
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The Affective Life of Media
of true from illusory motives and motivations. For Sedgwick and
Frank, Tomkins’s attempt to think through the affect system as a
“thought-realm of finitely many (n>2) values” helps to counter some of
the theoretical truisms of the late twentieth century, particularly the
theoretical amalgamation of “the concepts of the essential, the natural, and the biological” that motivate and are motivated by a “hypervigilant antiessentialism and antinaturalism” (Sedgwick and Frank,
1995, p. 17). Like Clark or Stern after him, Tomkins appeals to qualities that humans possess “by nature,” characterizing the human
affect system as being composed of a finite number of biologically
innate affects.11
In thinking about affect and mediality in the twenty-first century,
I am interested precisely in thinking about “the finitely many (n>2)”
forms and practices that occupy our “media everyday,” partly as a way
of resisting the tendencies in much media theory either to elide, universalize, or proliferate infinitely the concept of media and mediation.
Tomkins is useful for this project not only because he provides a model
of how to think through our media everyday, but also because his cybernetic theory of the affects as part of a system of linked and overlapping
feedback mechanisms and assemblies helps to illuminate the ways in
which we interact affectively with our media artifacts. Sedgwick and
Frank situate Tomkins’s intellectual project historically in “the cybernetic fold” between modernity and post-modernity, at a moment when
the conceptualization of the possibilities of high-speed computation far
exceeded its technical capabilities. It is not insignificant that the period
of this cybernetic fold (roughly 1945–60) is also the period of the birth of
network television in the United States, particularly in light of Marshall
McLuhan’s characterization of television as a cool medium preoccupied
not with cognitive action but with affective reaction (McLuhan, 1964).
Tomkins’s theory of affect thus can be seen to emerge both from computational and from networked broadcast media, and has implications
not only for our relations with our computers but for our relations with
media as well.
Tomkins credits Norbert Wiener’s early writing on cybernetics, particularly “the concept of multiple assemblies of varying degrees of
independence, dependence, interdependence, and control and transformation of one by another,” with allowing him to conceptualize “the
role of the affect mechanism as a separate but amplifying co-assembly”
in our daily interactions with other people, as well as with texts and
representations, or objects and artifacts (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995,
pp. 7–8). For Tomkins, this affect mechanism works in conjunction
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not only with higher order “central assemblies” and “images” that
provide us with our larger sense of identity and aims, but also with
more direct and constrained feedback mechanisms like the drives or
the senses. The affect system has more freedom than such feedback
systems, however, particularly in its choice of objects. Thus where,
for example, hunger or thirst work as feedback systems because one
quickly learns that one can eliminate hunger by eating or quench
one’s thirst by drinking, the affect system is less direct. Indeed, for
Tomkins, “most human beings never attain great precision of control of their affects,” in part because affects are so promiscuous in
their choice of objects (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995, pp. 37–8). A piece
of music that might make us happy one day could leave us cold the
next. One day we might be ashamed of how we look, the next by the
sound of our voice.
The affect mechanism works with feedback systems like the drives
or the senses but is not identical or fixed in relation to them.12 For
Tomkins, the affect system is not necessarily a strict feedback system,
but a recursive cybernetic system which works with other overlapping
assemblies in the pursuit of particular aims or goals. For example, while
affect modulation may or may not be an explicit goal of reading a book
or listening to music or playing a video game, there is no question that
it is one of the results of pursuing (what Tomkins would call) that general image, aim, or goal. So that when I use my cellphone, play a video
game, browse the web, or go to the movies, I will undoubtedly have
any number of different personal, cognitive, or social aims or goals
in initiating these media interactions. But each of these interactions
also establishes an affective relationship between my media and my
embodied self. This affective mechanism intersects and overlaps with
other feedback systems, but also has a kind of autonomy or force of its
own.13 That is to say, within any particular set of media interactions
there will be a number of affective relations of varying intensity or
centrality to the interaction. Through these relations, media themselves develop something like an affective life or force. Not only are
human motivations governed by the desire to maximize positive affect
and to minimize negative affect, but our relations with our media, like
our relations with other people, are shaped by a feedback mechanism
in which we seek to repeat those things which create positive affect
and try to minimize or avoid those which produce negative affect. In
our media relations we establish feedback systems or cybernetic loops
that distribute our affect across various media forms, technologies, and
practices.
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The Affective Life of Media
To understand how these affective relations work, it is instructive to
think in fairly concrete, particular terms about specific interactions
among humans, technology, and media. Take, for example, the eye–
hand-controller–screen feedback loop that figures in almost all of our
media relations: playing video games; taking, uploading, and sharing
digital photos; sending text messages, chatting online, or visiting virtual worlds; using email or browsing the web; interacting with DVDs or
channel-surfing cable TV with the remote; interacting with our social
networks via our PC, laptop, or other mobile device. Each of these different “controllers” (the keyboard/mouse interface to the PC, the TV,
cable, or DVD remote control, the mobile phone or PDA, or the videogame controller for console games) functions as an element in a hybrid
human-media assemblage. All of these media assemblages work in similar ways to establish and maintain affective feedback loops. They translate human intention or agency into some form of action or activity
that is distributed across, and is only possible through, our media technologies, even as these technologies have no independent agency of
their own.
These affective media interactions can be seen to operate as forms of
what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “machinic enslavement,” which
they distinguish from more traditional ideological or psychoanalytical notions of subjectification (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, pp. 456–9).
Taking the “television-machine” as an example, Maurizio Lazzarato
describes how this machinic enslavement works at the molecular level
of affect or sensation, very much like what I have been calling the
affective life of media:
In machinic enslavement, we are connected to the television and
we function as components of the televisual device, as its input/
output elements, its simple relays, facilitating and/or blocking
the transmission of information, communication and signs ....
Machinic enslavement operates by making no distinction between
the “human” and the non-human, between subject and object, sentient and intelligible ... The individual and the machine are sets of
elements, affects, organs, flux and functions, all of which operate
on the same level and which cannot be articulated as binary oppositions: subject/object, human/non-human, sentient/intelligible.
The functions, organs, and strengths of man are connected with
certain functions, organs and strengths of the technical machine
and together they constitute an arrangement.
(Lazzarato, 2006, p. 4)
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Although Lazzarato’s account of machinic enslavement, like that of
Deleuze and Guattari, emphasizes “the pre-individual, pre-cognitive
and pre-verbal components of subjectivity,” which cause “affects, perceptions and sensations as yet unindividuated ... to function like the
cogs and components in a machine,” this undifferentiated molecular
“arrangement” works in concert with the more molar form of “subjectification” familiar to analyses of capitalism and ideology.
In thinking about the relations between machinic enslavement
and our affective interactions with media, it is important to note that
Deleuze and Guattari do not privilege the eye over the other senses, or
totalize vision. Affect also operates, as we will discuss in the following
section, through the ear–hand-controller–speaker loop that occurs in
cell-phones, iPods, or other audio and audiovisual devices. Feedback
from the “screen” comes via other senses as well, not just hearing but
especially through touch.14 Motivated largely by the Lacanian model
of the cinematic gaze of an immobilized viewer in a darkened space,
much work in new media studies has minimized or elided the nonvisual senses. This is one reason I emphasize here the crucial role of the
hand and controller in supplementing (or indeed making possible) the
visual aspects of the affective feedback loop created with our media.15
In his ambitious project on affectivity and new media, Mark Hansen
has invoked Merleau-Ponty to maintain that our visual relation to the
world emerges from our sense of touch, that vision is an extension of
touch, optics an extension of haptics (Hansen, 2006). I would expand
this claim to include all of our senses, which function not as independent, autonomous perceptual capacities but as different manifestations
of touch via different bodily organs. That is, insofar as seeing the world
is touching it with one’s eyes, or hearing the world is touching it with
one’s ears, so smelling it is touching it with one’s nose, or tasting it is
touching it with one’s tongue. Strictly speaking, all of our senses are
haptic.16
In the media everyday of global post-capitalism in the twenty-first
century, social or political agency is only possible by means of, or
within, the constraints of machinic enslavement. More than 25 years
ago William Gibson had already noticed the empowerment enabled by
the affective feedback loops of machinic enslavement, particularly in
the interactions between gamers and their games. In arcades, Gibson
recalls:
I could see in the physical intensity of their postures how rapt these
kids were. It was like one of those closed systems out of a Pynchon
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novel: you had this feedback loop, with photons coming off the
screen into the kids’ eyes, the neurons moving through their bodies, electrons moving through the computer. And these kids clearly
believed in the space these games projected. Everyone who works with
computers seems to develop an intuitive faith that there’s some kind
of actual space behind the screen.
(Greenland, 1986; qtd. in Lahti, 2003, p. 157)
In an essay on the corporealized pleasures of our machinic enslavement to video games, Martti Lahti has argued that “videogames
epitomize a new cyborgian relationship with entertainment technologies, linking our everyday social space and computer technologies
to virtual spaces and futuristic technologies” (Lahti, 2003, p. 158).
In an insightful phenomenology of the experience of gaming, Lahti
describes how the “delirium of virtual mobility, sensory feedback,
and the incorporation of the player into a larger system” enable video
games to “tie the body into a cybernetic loop with the computer,
where its affective thrills can spill over into the player’s space. This
desire is perhaps best exemplified by players’ attempts to control the
game world more fully with their own, empathetic bodily movement.
By this I mean that familiar experience of, say, craning forward, trying to peer around corners by leaning left or right, or ducking as you
desperately try to save your character – that is, yourself – from being
annihilated” (Lahti, 2003, p. 163). Julian Stallabrass underscores the
negative implications of this machinic enslavement, arguing that
“computer games force a mechanization of the body on their players
in which their movements and the image of their alter-ego provide a
physical and simulated image of the self under capital, is subject to
fragmentation, reification and the play of allegory” (Stallabrass, 1996,
p. 89; qtd. Lahti, 2003, p. 166). Lahti, on the other hand, emphasizes
the way in which, “by locating knowledge and experience firmly in
the familiar terrain of the body,” video games “accustom us to the
newness of new technologies by coupling the game world’s cyborg
bodies and subjectivities (reassuringly) with our own bodies, making the virtual and the physical complementary rather than mutually exclusive realms. Joysticks, game controllers, pedals, and various
steering systems further foreground haptic interaction and simultaneously encapsulate players in a game world complete with bodily
sensation” (Lahti, 2003, pp. 168–9).
Lahti’s perceptive account of the role of video games in accustoming gamers to the newness of new technologies should not lead us to
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imagine that these affective feedback loops are specific to new media or
digital technologies. The association of optic and haptic senses informs
Walter Benjamin’s numerous accounts of how various technologies help
to diffuse or deflect the shocks of modernity, thereby accommodating
people to the new communication and transportation technologies of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.17 Benjamin discusses,
for example, the way in which such acts as striking a wooden match,
talking on a telephone, or releasing a photographic shutter translates
into one decisive, compound action a series of other, prior human activities and technical objects required to light a fire, make a photograph,
or talk on the phone.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the invention of the match brought
forth a number of innovations which have one thing in common:
a single abrupt movement of the hand triggers a process of many
steps. This development is taking place in many areas. A case in
point is the telephone, where the lifting of a receiver has taken the
place of the steady movement that used to be required to crank
the older models. With regard to countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing, and the like, the “snapping” by the photographer had the greatest consequences. Henceforth a touch of the
finger sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited period of time. The
camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were.
(Benjamin, 1940a, p. 328)
Whether for the technologies of the early twentieth century or those of
today, it is important to remember that each interaction, each step in
the process, involves what Latour calls a translation from one affective
formation to another. These movements, both human and technical,
do not function as passive or neutral intermediaries, but work actively
to translate or mediate action into another affective form or networked
assemblage.
For Benjamin, technological artifacts like the telephone or the camera help to explain how the human sensorium has been able to adapt to
the complexity and heterogeneity of modernity from the middle of the
nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century. As I
have been maintaining, in the first decades of the twenty-first century
our multiple daily interactions with networked media perform a similar
function for our post-9/11 age of global terror. Our contemporary media
forms and practices also collapse into a single heterogeneous action a
number of specific human and nonhuman, cognitive and affective,
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interactions, which create affective feedback loops in conjunction with
our everyday media forms and practices. Following Freud, Benjamin
understands the function of consciousness to consist not in the reception of stimuli but in “protection against stimuli.” Just as optic and
haptic experiences are linked in the feedback loops that run through
our contemporary media practices, so Benjamin finds them linked in
modernity:
Haptic experiences of this kind were joined by optic ones, such as
are supplied by the advertising pages of a newspaper or the traffic of
a big city. Moving through this traffic involves the individual in a
series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous
impulses flow through him in rapid successions, like the energy from
a battery. Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as
into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of
the shock, he calls this man “a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness.” Whereas Poe’s passers-by cast glances in all directions, seemingly without cause, today’s pedestrians are obliged to look about
them so that they can be aware of traffic signals. Thus, technology
has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training.
(Benjamin, 1940a, p. 328)
Drawing on Baudelaire’s intriguing reading of Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,”
Benjamin links haptic experiences like lighting matches, talking on
the telephone, and taking a photograph with optic experiences like
watching a film, reading a newspaper, or moving through traffic. For
Benjamin, all of these everyday technologies help to train the human
sensorium to protect us from the shocks of modernity.
Cinema is a paradigmatic example for Benjamin of the way such
human-technological (or human-media) hybrids are mimetic of the
large-scale relation between humans and technology under the social
and political conditions of modernity. “There came a day when a new
and urgent need for stimuli was met by film. In a film, perception
conditioned by shock [chockförmige Wahrnehmung] was established
as a formal principle. What determines the rhythm of production
on a conveyor belt is the same thing that underlies the rhythm of
reception in the film” (Benjamin, 1940a, p. 328). Benjamin grants
particular agency to cinema because it has the potential, as Miriam
Hansen argues, to create space or room for play (Benjamin’s “spielraum”), which might work to enervate the mass public of modernity
to counter or challenge dominant socio-technical, aesthetico-cultural
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formations (Hansen, 2004). In a short but important essay, Benjamin
distinguishes the mimetic faculty from mechanical reproduction,
which aims to produce an exact replica or copy of an original work
of art, or of reality. Mimesis works, on the other hand, according to
a logic of non-sensuous similarity, as when a child plays at being a
windmill or a train. When a child imitates a windmill or a train, for
example, he does not try to represent or reproduce their formal features, but rather to move his arms or legs in a way that embodies their
physical motion (Benjamin, 1933). Benjamin’s notion of mimesis is
similar in this respect to Stern’s idea of vitality affects like surging,
diminishing, or exploding, which denote not particular formal features in particular sensory modalities, but rather changes in intensity
over time and in particular directions. In this sense the affective feedback loop between human beings and their media screens imitates the
affective attunement between human beings and each other, as well
as the more large-scale relation between humans and technologies at
the current historical moment.18 For Benjamin, the mimetic force of
cinema derives not from resemblance or reproduction but from imitation or gesture.
Throughout his career Benjamin describes various kinds of affective responses that emerge in response to conditions of modernity.
I would identify other kinds of responses that emerge with today’s
digital media, epitomized most clearly in the socio-technical interfaces we deploy in our media interactions. For Benjamin the structure
of modernity is epitomized by the way in which “one abrupt movement of the hand triggers a process of many steps,” which he famously
explains in terms of the coup of gambling, the turning of a card or
roll of the dice that determines the winning or losing of a particular
hand or bet (Benjamin, 1940a, pp. 329–30). Benjamin links the gesture
of the coup to Marx’s discussion of the factory worker on the assembly line, who must adapt himself to the machines: “In working with
machines, workers learn to co-ordinate ‘their own movements with
the uniformly constant movements of an automaton’ ” (Benjamin,
1940a, p. 328). If the linearity of the assembly line marked the form of
the affective cyborg of modernity, the fluidity of surfing the Web or
playing video games marks the shape of the affective cyborg in the era
after 9/11.19 Like the match, the telephone, or the camera, our digital
media also involve the triggering of a multiply stepped process by the
abrupt movement of the hand. But rather than this movement culminating in the single decisive action of the gambling coup, an action
which of course can be repeated almost indefinitely, the movements
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The Affective Life of Media
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of the remote control, the mouse, or the video-game controller participate in interactive feedback loops in which affect is maintained,
circulated, and translated for an extended, continuous period of time,
in which the key move is not the coup which determines the end of
a particular hand or roll of the dice, but the rebooting or starting up
that initiates the next game.
Don DeLillo recognized the significance of this post-9/11 medial
structure in Falling Man, his long-awaited but not particularly wellreceived “9/11 novel.” One of the main narrative strands of the novel
concerns the aptly named Keith Neudecker, who escapes the World
Trade Center before the Twin Towers collapse on the morning of
September 11, 2001. After moving in with his estranged wife Lianne
and their elementary-school-aged son, Justin, Keith embarks at the
end of the novel to spend his time playing poker tournaments. The
novel’s final section finds Keith in Las Vegas playing in Texas Hold
’Em tournaments. Although Las Vegas would be an obvious site for
DeLillo to rehearse some of his thematic hobby-horses, like the confusion of reality and simulation explored so brilliantly in White Noise,
DeLillo is conspicuously uninterested in these questions in Falling
Man. The key point of the novel’s narrative denouement is to consider the way in which casino poker tournaments epitomize the medial condition of post-9/11 America, and the way in which this form
of gambling (and the historical moment in which it operates) differs
from the “coup” of Benjamin and the historical moment in which he
was writing. 20
Early in the novel’s final chapter DeLillo notes that Keith “was
fitting into something that was made to his shape. He was never
more himself than when in these rooms, with a dealer crying out
a vacancy at table seventeen” (DeLillo, 2007, p. 225). Both like and
unlike Benjamin’s factory worker, who learns to co-ordinate his
movements to the assembly line, Keith learns to co-ordinate himself
with the premediated structure and routines of the casinos and of
the poker tournaments, which turn out already to be “made to his
shape”:
He was becoming the air he breathed. He moved in a tide of noise
and talk made to his shape. The look under the thumb at ace-queen.
Along the aisles, roulette wheels clicking. He sat in the sports book
unaware of scores or odds or point spreads. He watched the miniskirted women serving drinks. Out on the Strip a dead and heavy
heat. He folded eight or nine hands in a row. He stood in the
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Keith’s enslavement to the Las Vegas poker tournament-machine is
emblematic for DeLillo of life in a post-9/11 United States, where people
function as nodes in a machinic assemblage of human and nonhuman
affective mediation.
Like Benjamin, DeLillo acknowledges the role of the “coup” in the
folding of a hand, although he insists that the most important factor
in these tournaments is not the decisive moment of the outcome of an
individual hand but the moment of starting again, the reassurance that
the tournaments are ongoing, that there will always be another deck.
Where Benjamin insists “that no game is dependent on the preceding
one” (Benjamin, 1940a, p. 329), DeLillo suggests that the affective value
of the coup of these poker tournaments is dependent on the succeeding
game; what makes Keith feel most like himself is the “dealer crying out
a vacancy at table seventeen.” Indeed, what makes poker different from
other Vegas games is precisely the fact of the coup, the fact that unlike
the continuous clicking of the roulette wheels, or the endless televised
races at the sports book, poker involves “finitely many (n>2)” decisions
and opportunities. Although Keith likes “the effect on the senses” of
the sports book, “he never bet on these events” (DeLillo, 2007, p. 211).
In poker, Keith prefers both the coup and the repetition, the moment of
decision coupled with the promise of another hand: “Then, always, in
the crucial instant ever repeated hand after hand, the choice of yes or
no. Call or raise, call or fold, the little binary pulse located behind the
eyes, the choice that reminds you who you are. It belonged to him, this
yes or no, not to a horse running in the mud somewhere in New Jersey”
(DeLillo, 2007, p. 212). Where Benjamin took the coup of modernity
to consist chiefly in the decisive turn of the card or roll of the dice
that marks the outcome of a hand or game, DeLillo sees the reassuring
“coup” of our media everyday after 9/11 in the embodied premediation
of the process, the promise that there will always be another hand, a
new deck to play.
Over the course of five pages in the final chapter, DeLillo selfconsciously underscores that the significance of these tournaments
as a way for Keith to cope with the trauma of 9/11 is not primarily in their outcomes or meaning, in who wins or who loses, but in
their ongoingness, the fact that the next hand, the next vacancy,
will already have been premediated. In three increasingly complex
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sportswear shop wondering what he might buy for the kid. There
were no days or times except for the tournament schedule.
(DeLillo, 2007, p. 230)
108 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
The lucky jack did not fall.
He didn’t listen to what was said around him, the incidental
bounce of dialogue, player to player. A fresh deck rose to the tabletop.
(DeLillo, 2007, p. 227)
He was looking at five-deuce off-suit. He thought for a moment he
might get up and leave. He thought he might walk out and get the
first plane, pack and go, get a window seat and lower the shade and
fall asleep. He folded his cards and sat back. By the time a fresh deck
floated up he was ready to play again.
(DeLillo, 2007, p. 229)
These were the days after and now the years, a thousand heaving
dreams, the trapped man, the fixed limbs, the dream of paralysis, the
gasping man, the dream of asphyxiation, the dream of helplessness.
A fresh deck rose to the tabletop.
(DeLillo, 2007, pp. 230–1)
Each of these three passages presents Keith engaged in an interactive
feedback loop with the game at the table, a closed circuit in which he
is nearly oblivious to everything in his immediate surroundings except
for the play of the cards. In the first passage, after the Benjaminian
coup (“The lucky jack did not fall”) DeLillo notes explicitly that Keith
ignored the dialogue of his fellow players as “A fresh deck rose to the
tabletop.” In the course of playing his hand in the second passage, Keith
considers a coup of a different kind, leaving Las Vegas, presumably to fly
back home to New York. But instead of the more dramatic and decisive
flight, he chooses instead the quotidian embodied gesture of the selfinflicted coup: “He folded his cards and sat back. By the time a fresh deck
floated up he was ready to play again.” The third mention of the new deck
makes it most explicit, however, that the coup that these poker hands
imitate, the coup that Jack can’t shake, is the coup of 9/11, the collapse
of the two towers, the death that he had somehow avoided, the immobility of “the trapped man, the fixed limbs, the dream of paralysis, the
gasping man, the dream of asphyxiation, the dream of helplessness.”
For Keith Neudecker, having survived the coup of 9/11, it is the new deck
that matters, the small but reassuring movements of the poker tournament that make him ready to play again. It is not the decisiveness of the
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permutations involving the phrase “a fresh deck,” DeLillo makes it
clear that although an outcome is rendered, and a coup occurs, it is not
chiefly the coup that matters to Keith, but the re-booting of the game.
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Affective computing
Interestingly, contrary to the image of the intensely engaged video
game player described by Gibson and Lahti, some physiological
experiments to measure the affective intensity of computer games
have found that the highest level of affective response occurred not
during game play but when the system froze or the game was unexpectedly terminated. The idea suggested by these experiments, that
media might work through premediation to protect us from negative
affect rather than, as critics of video games and television fear, to
heighten such affect, can be explained in terms of Silvan Tomkins’s
conception of affect theories, particularly negative affect theories.
Where positive affect theories help to promote actions or behaviors
that maximize positive affects, like smiling at friendly faces, negative affect theories do not promote negative affects but prevent
or pre-empt them. Tomkins’s paradigmatic example of a negative
affect theory is the theory that allows people to cross a busy street
without fear.
A commonplace example is the pause of the individual at a curb
before he crosses the street. It is certain that most of us at the curb
learn to anticipate not only danger but fear. Few individuals experience fear at the sight of automobiles on the street. One of the reasons
for this is an ideo-affective organization which informs the individual of the relevance of a broad band of contingencies for danger and
for fear, and a set of strategies for coping with each of these contingencies. Thus on the curb of a city street, if automobiles do not exceed
35 or 40 miles an hour and do not deviate from relatively straight
paths by more than a few degrees and if the individual allows a few
hundred feet between himself and the oncoming automobiles, he
characteristically crosses the street without the experience of either
danger or fear.
(Sedgwick and Frank, 1995, p. 166)
Although Tomkins does not refer to Benjamin here, and it is unclear
if he would have been familiar with Benjamin’s work, it is interesting
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coup but the recommencement of the game that counts. The comfort he
finds in the Las Vegas poker tournaments is the comfort offered by premediation, the embodied knowledge that there will always be another
hand after the coup of the previous one, even in “the days after and now
the years.”
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
that he takes crossing a busy street as his example of how a negative
affect theory would function. What is important to understand is that,
for Tomkins, such a theory is one which prevents the experience of negative affect, which is consistent with the general aim of humans to minimize negative affect. This affect theory works, as consciousness does for
Freud, not to produce or proliferate the experience of negative affects, but
to prevent us from having to experience them by protecting us against
stimuli that might provoke such affects as anger or shame or fear.
It is crucial to note in Tomkins’s example that the negative affect
theory that allows one to cross the street without experiencing fear
also allows one to cross the street safely – or perhaps more accurately
that this negative affect theory works in conjunction with a cognitive
assembly or cognitive theory about how to cross the street safely.
The affect theory (a fear theory) here operates so silently and effectively that it would surprise everyman if the question of fear about
crossing the street were even to be raised. He would say, quite selfpersuasively, that he uses his common sense so that he doesn’t need
to be afraid. This is one of the major functions of any negative affect
theory – to guide action so that negative affect is not experienced. It
is affect acting at a distance. Just as human beings can learn to avoid
danger, to shun the flame before one is burnt, so also they can learn
to avoid shame or fear before they are seared by the experience of
such negative affect.
(Sedgwick and Frank, 1995, p. 166)
Tomkins does not explicitly discuss this example in terms of the feedback loops we create with our technologies, but it is not inconsistent
with his understanding to think that negative affect theories like those
involved in crossing the street without fear would entail the establishment of affective feedback loops with cars and streets and stop-lights
as well as with drivers and other pedestrians. Benjamin claims that the
technologies of modernity subject the human sensorium to a complex
kind of training that enables them more readily to do things like work
in a factory or move through the busy traffic of a large metropolis. So,
I would argue, the technologies of the present day do something similar in enabling us to deal with the complex environment of our media
everyday, including but not limited to, the global media’s daily premediations of the almost ever-present threats of impending violence
– from global terrorism or global warming, identity thieves or illegal
immigrants, your government or somebody else’s. Just as we distribute
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cognition across technologies like language by means of both developmental and persisting feedback loops, so we distribute affectivity across
different media and technologies, across all kinds of nonhuman actants, in feedback loops that both develop and perpetuate new cyborgian affects among humans and nonhumans.
One computer scientist who has taken seriously this affective life
of media is Rosalind Picard, Founder and Director of MIT’S Affective
Computing Group. Picard’s group defines affective computing as “computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotion or
other affective phenomena” and “develops new technologies and theories that advance basic understanding of affect and its role in human
experience.” More than a decade ago, Picard first laid out a comprehensive theory of affective computing and some of the practical problems facing the development of computers that respond to and evoke
affect. In her research Picard defines “computer” broadly to include
many forms of digital media as well: “Let me remind the reader, that
when I refer to ‘computers’ I mean not just a monitor and keyboard
with one or more CPUs, but also computational agents such as software assistants and animated interactive creatures, robots, and a host
of other forms of computing devices, including ‘wearables,’ ... Any computational system, in software or hardware, might be given affective
abilities” (Picard, 1997, p. 47). Picard’s interest in affect is based upon
her Tomkins-influenced conviction that affect plays a crucial role in
human cognition and motivation. Her group strives to create computers
or computational agents with human-like affective abilities, which can
be added to their already quite powerful computational and visualization capabilities. Picard seems less interested, however, in media that
do not have affective abilities but only produce affective effects – or
perhaps that have affective affordances that operate only unwittingly,
or inadvertently, as a co-assemblage of other aims or functions. But
when video or computer games respond to the commands, actions, or
moves of a player, they operate as computational systems that produce
changes in the game state represented on screen or in the simulated
world of the game. Consequently, it makes sense to think about how
these responses produce affective changes in the player of the game. In
other words, players are engaged in affective exchanges with the game
even if the algorithms of the game are not designed explicitly for that
purpose. (The same would also be true for changing the channel of
your cable or satellite TV with your remote, selecting a special feature
on a DVD, updating your Facebook status, or sending a text message on
your mobile phone.)
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The Affective Life of Media
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In fact Picard and her fellow researchers are among those scientists
who have sought to measure such affective changes. In research on
the affective or emotional state of an undergraduate who “played the
computer game of ‘Doom’ while wired up to several physiological sensors detecting signals that change with affective responses,” Picard
writes, “We saw minor changes in several of the signals when he
‘found the rocket launcher’ or when he ‘was killed.’ However, the biggest response we found, significantly higher than any other in the
game, occurred not during a stressful life-threatening battle, but at a
more surprising moment: when the software failed to work properly.
None of the violent events in the game aroused the player as much as
the software problem” (Picard, 1997, pp. 163–4). 21 The fact that the
biggest affective responses were measured when the game failed to
work properly does not minimize or contradict the claim that playing
video games establishes an affective feedback loop between the player
and the game, but suggests instead that maintaining the relationship
with media artifacts, forms, and practices themselves is more affectively significant than the particular cognitive or representational or
semiotic content depicted in games or other media. The experiment
suggests that the disruption of this loop produced a different level or
quality of affective intensity, an affective response which was not the
aim of the game and was even inconsistent with the affective state that
playing the game produced. We might further consider whether the
low level of affective response evoked even by a first-person shooter
game like “Doom” could mean that game-playing serves precisely as
a way for people to modulate or regulate their affective states by creating a media activity, a space within their media everyday, where
they could have cognitive or sensory stimulation with a minimum of
affective turbulence.
In designing computational devices that respond to their users’
affective states in specific ways and communicate particular affects to
their users, Picard may miss an important point to be drawn from the
“Doom” experiment, which is that video games, violent or not, do not
necessarily produce violent emotions, but rather may create a space that
is free from, or that protects people from, the violent or negative affective states produced by an ever-threatening world. This media space
functions in some sense as the current historical moment’s counterpart
to Benjamin’s “spielraum,” even if more individualized and distributed,
and perhaps less suited to the kind of critical opposition that Benjamin
sought to foster. Still, it is no accident that the Internet and other distributed media networks are regularly credited with creating a place
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for political opposition or alternative discourse. Indeed, Nigel Thrift
has argued that it is precisely because digital media produce spaces
for boredom or stillness that they are able to produce political effects.
Thrift argues against common claims that the socio-technical and medial formations of our time produce fleetingness, transience, or distraction: “I think it can be argued that greater awareness of movement has
in turn produced a set of resources that enable us to separate out and
value a present-orientated stillness, thus promoting a ‘politics’ based in
intensified attention to the present and unqualified affectivity” (Thrift,
2007, pp. 64–5). For Thrift, the affective stillness evoked by our relations with digital media entails not the disenchantment that most critiques of modernity propose but a re-enchantment that makes possible
a politics oriented to the medial conditions of the present moment.
Picard’s Doom experiment treats affective intensity as something to be
measured and quantified. The difference between this more instrumental understanding of affective computing and my sense of the affective
life of media manifests itself most clearly when Picard talks about the
affective dimension of communication media like email or cellphones.
Picard is not interested directly in the affective feedback loops produced
between humans and their media, but rather in the way these media
operate as vehicles for transmitting human affect and emotion from
one human to another.
A machine can be used as a channel for transmitting human emotions. When two humans communicate via email or via teleconference, the machine and network act as a communication channel
connecting people. Typically, the channel is band-limited: all the
information it receives at one end cannot be sent to the other end;
some of it is lost. For example, it might convert a speech signal
to text, throwing away the affective part of the signal. We might
describe the affective bandwidth of a channel as how much affective information the channel lets through. Affective information might
refer to the entropy of the affective part of the signal, which indicates how many bits are required to describe the part of the signal
that carries the affective message. The idea of entropy as information
is that of Claude Shannon, whose renowned theory of information
applies also as a framework for emotion communication .... Using the
framework of information theory, we might also speak of the relative
“affective channel capacity” of various forms of communication, to
indicate how much affective information can be carried.
(Picard, 1997, pp. 56–7)
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Building upon the instrumental model of Shannon and Weaver, Picard
sees affect as a form of information that can be calculated just as
Shannon would calculate the cognitive or informational content of a
message. Just as each act of communication, she maintains, has a measurable informational content, so it has a measurable affective content
as well. There should be another way, however, to think of affect – not
as part of the content of a computationally mediated message from
a sender to a receiver, but as an element of the interaction between
individuals and particular media technologies that is distinct but not
separable from the information or cognitive content of any particular
interaction.
In thinking about the “affective channel capacity” of different media
technologies, Picard reveals the limitations of a model that ends up
reducing affect to information and ignores the embodied materiality of
the medium or machine with which or through which that message is
communicated.22
When sending the same words, different channels allow for more or
for less affective channel capacity: email usually communicates the
least affect, phone slightly more, video teleconferencing more still,
and “in person” communication the most. It is usually assumed
that technology-mediated communication always has less affective bandwidth than person-to-person communication. Sometimes
the limits on affective bandwidth are desirable. You might wish
to choose a medium where your emotions are not as easily seen.
However, rarely is it desirable to have these limits forced on you.
Affective recognition and expression can be used to allow for more
possibilities in communication, even with limited technology. For
example, if there is not enough bandwidth to transmit each person’s facial expression, the computer might recognize the expression, send just a few bits describing it, and then represent these
with an animated face on the other side of the channel.
(Picard, 1997, p. 57)
Picard’s taxonomy of affective mediation misses arguably the most
interesting point about different “channels” or media. The question of
affect and media is not just about how much affect is transmitted in the
communication of a message from one person to another, but also about
the degree or characteristics that affect assumes in the relationships
we engage in with our technical media artifacts. From this perspective, it is possible that more affect might be communicated via phones
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than through videoconferencing, not because phones have what Picard
would call more affective bandwidth (they don’t communicate, for
example, facial expressions or bodily postures), but because people are
more intimately and intensely engaged in affective relationships with
their phones, are more comfortable using them as affective media – so
much so that they often seem designed (or at least implemented) more
as affective than as informational devices.
Think about cellphones, for example, and the complex affective relations that many people have with their phones (including such everyday
practices as assigning particular ringtones to particular callers). Especially
since 9/11, as Jonathan Franzen irritatedly notes, cellphones have become
the medium of choice for affective or emotional expression:
The cell phone came of age on September 11, 2001. Imprinted that
day on our collective consciousness was the image of cell phones as
conduits of intimacy for the desperate. In every too-loud I love you
that I hear nowadays, as in the more general national orgy of connectedness – the imperative for parents and children to connect by
phone once or twice or five or ten times daily – it’s difficult not to
hear an echo of those terrible, entirely appropriate, heartbreaking I
love yous uttered on the four doomed planes and in the two doomed
towers. And it’s precisely this echo, the fact that it’s an echo, the sentimentality of it, that so irritates me.
(Franzen, 2008, p. 92)
Franzen’s perceptive observation that our collective affective attachment to networked mobile media like cellphones is a response to the
events of 9/11 is right on the money. And his irritation at their contribution to the proliferation of public displays of emotion is shared
by many. But, like Picard, he only sees the cellphone as a conduit of
intimacy, failing to recognize the force of the affective relation between
individuals and their phones themselves.
Such affective relations become particularly evident in situations in
which you can watch or listen to people talking on their phones but
cannot understand what they are saying – looking at someone talking
on her cellphone through a car or store window, or listening to someone speaking on a cellphone in a language you don’t understand. A few
years ago, while in Slovenia to present some of the material from this
book, I found myself in such a situation, which helped to clarify what
I am calling the affective life of media. I was having lunch with my
host when her partner called to say that his plane had landed safely
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in Ljubljana. Although I could not understand her side of the conversation (which was conducted in Slovenian) I could certainly see (and
hear and feel) how happy and relieved she was that he was back (she
had told me earlier that she was anxiously waiting for his call because
his flying made her nervous). Picard would most likely describe this
incident as demonstrating how the cellphone functions as a channel
for transmitting human emotions between two individuals. But what
was striking (if not unusual) about the situation was that my host’s
emotions were not only being transmitted to her partner, but were
also being distributed as well to me, to the restaurant, and (I would
contend) to the cellphone itself. Insofar as the cellphone did not channel all of my host’s emotions, perhaps Picard would characterize this
excess as something like affective entropy, or maybe affective waste
or surplus. The cellphone serves both as the medium through which
my host received the welcome information that her partner was back
safely, and as the medium through which she communicated her relief
and joy. But, I would argue, there was something else at work here
as well. Her happiness also produced vocal tones, facial expressions,
hand gestures, and bodily movements and postures sensible to me and
to others in the restaurant. Like the sound of her voice (which was
one means of transmitting her affect) or the sight of her face (another
means for transmitting that affect), the affective state communicated
to and through the cellphone was also audible and visible to others in
the room.
Even more significant for the argument of this chapter is the feedback loop established between my host and her cellphone, which not
only served as a channel to transmit her affect to her partner but
also as a medium through which she could receive both his affective state and the message that he had landed safely. In serving as a
channel for the bi-directional exchange of affect between my two
friends, the cellphone also served, in the physical space of the restaurant and in its embodied intimacy with my host, as an affective
computing device, both receiving affective expression or communication from my host and providing affective expression or communication back to her. But in addition to serving as a medium for the
mutual transmission of affect, the phone also served as a participant
in an affective interaction with my friend. If we were to abstract the
partner at the airport for a moment, and look at the situation solely as
it existed in that restaurant, what we would see is a woman engaged
in an intense affective exchange with a communication device, an
everyday media technology. That is to say, we could see that the
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affective joy addressed via the phone from my host to her partner
was also directed at the phone itself, which in turn evoked an affective response from my host. As Deleuze notes in Cinema 1, affectivity
is a quality of things as well as people. “And why is expression not
available to things? There are affects of things. The ‘edge,’ ‘the blade,’
or rather the ‘point’ of Jack the Ripper’s knife, is no less an affect
than the fear which overcomes his features and the resignation which
finally seizes hold of the whole of his face. The Stoics showed that
things themselves were bearers of ideal events which did not exactly
coincide with their properties, their actions and reactions: the edge
of a knife” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 97). Or a cellphone. Following Deleuze,
we can see that my host was simultaneously engaged in an affective
exchange with her partner and with her cellphone, which was also
engaged in an affective interaction with her.
This kind of thing is not, of course, unique to cellphones, but happens with other media and technical artifacts as well, whether communicational ones like email, or others like the web, TV, cinema,
games, personal computing devices, or even with tools like hammers
or saws, musical instruments like guitars or pianos, sporting equipment like baseball bats or basketballs, weapons like knives and guns,
and so forth. I single out this exemplary yet ordinary everyday cellphone experience in part because it was a moment that crystallized
some of my own thinking about the affective life of media and about
the differences between emotion and affect, between human emotionality and nonhuman affectivity. For while it is certainly the case that
my host was expressing her emotional relief and joy that her partner
had arrived safely in Ljubljana, the situation also revealed that there
were other significant elements to this mediated event, including
an affective feedback loop involving her mobile phone. In thinking
about the affective life of media, however, it is important not to think
of affect only as a quality or intensity being circulated in a one-to-one
interaction between two individuals or between an individual and a
particular media artifact, but also as distributed across and translated
through the socio-technical networks of the cellphone industry and its
interaction/linkage with other networked and embodied spaces – like
the restaurant we were sitting in or a train car or a mall or the streets
of a twenty-first-century city. Indeed, as noted in a 2008 Macarthur
Foundation report (produced by the Berkeley-based Digital Youth
Project) on the significance of the Internet for the social life of teens,
cellphones are part of a suite of mobile, socially networked media
technologies that play crucial roles in the mediation and maintenance
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not only of romantic relationships between individuals, but also of
affective bonds among larger social groups (Digital Youth Research,
2008). Although the Macarthur report does not push its conclusions
in this direction, it would be fair to say that in the formation and evolution of social groups among “digital youth,” affectivity is distributed
among an amorous assemblage of humans and nonhumans, in a kind
of group or open relationship including social networking software,
cellphones, email, YouTube videos, music sharing, videogames, and
so forth.
Mediators
I have developed the concept of the affective life of media not only to
describe such emotional interactions with media as I have outlined
above, but also to describe what Brian Massumi might characterize (following Gilbert Simondon) as the pre-individual circulation of affective potentialities among human, social, technical, and medial actants.
With Massumi, I think it is important to resist the collapse of affect
into individual emotion or feeling, a collapse that sometimes informs
current work that goes under the broad rubric of “affect theory” and
that reduces bodily and autonomic affect to a synonym for human
emotion. But in focusing on the affective life of our media everyday,
I also want to provide a corrective to Massumi’s occasionally mystical
or romantic account of the modulation of collective affect, particularly
in his thinking about the role of media in modulating the affective
state of America after 9/11. Just as some cultural theorists tend to elide
the bodily materiality of affect in reducing it to another term for emotion, so some media theorists sometimes tend to elide the technical
materiality of media in focusing on the play of digital signification.
In his insightful essay, “Fear (The Spectrum Said),” Massumi imagines
that the Bush Administration’s Homeland Security color-coded warning system works directly to modulate the American public’s collective
affects by plugging in to their nervous systems and directly tuning
their affect:
The alert system was introduced to calibrate the public’s anxiety. In
the aftermath of 9/11, the public’s fearfulness had tended to swing
out of control in response to dramatic, but maddeningly vague,
government warnings of an impending follow-up attack. The alert
system was designed to modulate that fear. It could raise it a pitch,
then lower it before it became too intense, or even worse, before
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Like the government’s “dramatic” warnings, some of Massumi’s assertions about politics and culture here are also “maddeningly vague.”
Claims that “the public’s fearfulness had tended to swing out of control”
or that “Affective modulation of the populace was now an official, central function” of the government are both plausible and appealing. But
Massumi characteristically fails to substantiate these claims in terms of
specific media events or to delineate particular historical examples of
either the American public’s out-of-control fearfulness or the government’s declaration of a policy of affect modulation.
Massumi characterizes the modulation of affect in terms of a kind
of Gibsonian cyberpunk scenario, in which the Bush Administration
“jacks in” to the American public:
The self-defensive reflex-response to perceptual cues that the system
was designed to train into the population wirelessly jacked central
government functioning directly into each individual’s nervous system. The whole population became a networked jumpiness, a distributed neuronal network registering en masse quantum shifts in the
nation’s global state of discomfiture in rhythm with leaps between
color levels. Across the geographical and social differentials dividing
them, the population fell into affective attunement. That the shifts
registered en masse did not necessarily mean that people began to
act similarly, as in social imitation of each other, or of a model proposed for each and all .... Jacked into the same modulation of feeling, bodies reacted in unison without necessarily acting alike. Their
responses could, and did, take many forms. What they shared was
the central nervousness. How it translated somatically varied body
to body.
(Massumi, 2005, p. 32)
At a time when William Gibson himself has chosen to abandon the
dystopian vision of cyberspace for his own novelistic explorations of
our distributed, globalized media everyday, Massumi would perpetuate
the immersive fantasy of virtual immediacy laid out more than 25 years
ago in Neuromancer and other cyberpunk fiction.23
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habituation dampened response. Timing was everything. Less fear
itself than fear fatigue became an issue of public concern. Affective
modulation of the populace was now an official, central function of
an increasingly time-sensitive government.
(Massumi, 2005, p. 32)
While Massumi would likely defend his lack of empirical evidence
by pointing to the fact that collective affectivity might not be verifiable by forms of evidence that could be cited (people didn’t act similarly; bodies responded differently), this lack of specific examples
detracts from his otherwise insightful account of post-9/11 mediality. A crucial problem with this approach is its failure to account for
the intermediary steps, links, or assemblages that make up the media
environment that enacts governmentality. Consequently, Massumi
only cites TV in general (with no specific discussions of specific TV
channels or programs or events), claiming that TV allows a direct
manipulation of collective US affect. In addition to ignoring other
media, thereby failing to make sense of how TV works together with
the web, movies, newspapers, cellphones, or video games, in complex media formations to manipulate affectivity after 9/11, Massumi’s
model also simplifies and generalizes notions of political or governmental agency, running the risk of imagining government as an
autonomous, unified agent exerting its affective control on the populace “from above.”
The concepts of mediality and affectivity that I have been developing throughout this book not only assume a more complex and multivariable everyday media environment through which public affect is
modulated but also allow for a more complex sense of social and governmental agency than Massumi admits. For as loathsome as it may
have been, the Bush-Cheney administration was only one, thankfully
temporary, agent of governmentality in a complex system of premediation, which included not only political institutions but also social,
cultural, and medial institutions and practices whose technical and
social formats work in sometimes contradictory and inconsistent
manners to modulate or govern what Foucault calls “the imbrication
of people and things.” By focusing on the affective life of media, I
have been trying to suggest a way in which we can begin to trace out
the complex and heterogeneous ways in which individual and collective affect are modulated and distributed throughout our media
everyday. In the next chapter I discuss how in the post-9/11 regime of
securitization, affectivity is distributed not only among individuals
and their media, but among media technologies that are increasingly
embedded in and distributed among the networks of objects that
make up our media everyday. Through the promotion of an affectivity
of anticipation and its accompanying bodily and technical gestures,
premediation helps to provide the mediators that Deleuze says are
“fundamental” to creation and without which “nothing happens.”24
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If we are to understand how such affective mediators work in a society
of securitization and control, it is crucial to make sense of the specific ways in which affectivity is distributed, mediated, and translated
among human and nonhuman actors in what I have been describing
as the affective life of media.
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5
Premediation and securitization
Earlier I argued that the public shock and outrage produced by the
release of the Abu Ghraib photographs derived as much or more from
the affective intensity they introduced to our everyday practices of
mediality as from their evidentiary status in regard to the unacceptable practices of torture and interrogation that had gone on at the Abu
Ghraib prison. My argument was based in part on the fact that reports
of similar practices at Guantanamo Bay and at dark sites across the
globe did not produce anywhere near the same intensity of public outrage produced by the release of the photographs from Abu Ghraib. The
continuity of these photographs with our practices of digital photography and photo-sharing and the affective life of our media everyday
combined to make Abu Ghraib a matter of much greater public concern
than similar practices elsewhere.
Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede have argued that heightened
attention to Abu Ghraib and other “intolerable examples of the logic of
the camp,” by focusing on “the sovereign lines that designate the exceptional spaces of the war on terror,” has tended to overshadow “other
violences at work in the war on terror that are relatively unacknowledged and, perhaps as a result, are in danger of being accepted as ubiquitous features of contemporary life” (Amoore and de Goede, 2008,
p. 174). The “other violences” they refer to can be understood as part of
what Nigel Thrift calls our “technological unconscious” (Thrift, 2004),
glossed in this instance as a failure to be aware of “the more prosaic
prejudices concealed in the actions taken on the basis of the minutiae of daily life – the newspaper bought at a railway station, the wire
transfer made from an Amsterdam branch of Western Union, the cash
122
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paid for an airline ticket. Indeed, it is precisely on the basis of such
transactions ... that people are stopped at the border, separated from
their families and enter the circuits of extraordinary rendition and
offshore detention” (Amoore and de Goede, 2008, p. 174). As I suggested in the chapter on Abu Ghraib, the resurgence of sovereignty as a
state of exception is interdependent with our everyday medial transactions and interactions, without which it would not be able to maintain
itself.
Amoore and de Goede maintain that “in the ordinary transactions
of daily life another spatiality of exception is emerging” (Amoore and
de Goede, 2008, p. 174). This spatiality of exception operates under the
paradigm of securitization, in which (following Foucault’s 1978 lectures
on the subject) security is taken to supplant surveillance as the juridical regime of control societies.1 As opposed to fundamentally disciplinary technologies like surveillance, confinement, and constraint,
which aim to “predict, survey, [and] prohibit” potentially illicit or disruptive activities in order to maintain social and political control, technologies of securitization aim to let happen, open up, and circulate, to
encourage mobility and the proliferation of transactions of transportation, communication, and mediation. Concerned less with individuals
than with populations, securitization works not by restricting travel
and mobility but by making it easier to move, travel, or cross borders
(understood broadly as spatial, cultural, or temporal). In outlining the
ways in which such transactions are encouraged and made more easily
and readily available under the regime of securitization, Amoore and de
Goede concern themselves mainly with transactions pertaining to the
mobility of physical bodies, particularly as they move across cultural or
geopolitical borders.
Such transactions make it possible to “connect the dots,” as it is called
in the post-9/11 security environment. This incentive to connect the
dots grows out of the belief in the security community that there was
enough data available prior to 9/11 that it would have been possible
to have pre-empted these terrorist attacks if someone had known how
or where to look, or had even been looking. Put more exactly, however, connecting the dots is not really a question of looking, which is
more appropriate to the functioning of surveillance technologies like
the Foucauldian panopticon. Rather, connecting the dots involves more
precisely the implementation of premediated algorithms of data mining and risk analysis to uncover patterns of suspicious behavior before
they could be actualized in terrorist acts like those of 9/11 in the United
States, 7/7 in Britain, or “India’s 9/11,” the November 2008 attacks in
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The Anticipation of Security
Mumbai. Because the quantity of transaction data generated every day
across the globe makes it impossible even to conceive of monitoring
potential terrorist behavior in real time, data mining and risk management algorithms seek to uncover patterns of behavior in the immediate
past that might reveal terrorist behavior before it could happen. Only
after such behavior is uncovered would more conventional technologies of surveillance come into play in order to pre-empt it before it could
be enacted, much as the PreCrime unit in Minority Report pre-empted
murders before they could occur.2 As Foucault insists in his lecture on
governmentality, security does not replace discipline or sovereignty,
but is added to them in a way that translates or remediates them into
different formations of power.
The disciplinary regime of securitization not only depends upon but
also encourages the proliferation of transaction and other data so that its
algorithms can connect the dots. Premediation operates in the current
security regime to ensure that there will always be enough data (enough
dots) in any particular, potential, or imagined future to be able to know
in advance, before something happened, that it was about to happen –
enough transaction data to prevent (or pre-empt) future threats to
national or international security. In October 2008 the British government began floating the idea of “an innocuous-sounding communications data bill,” which would entail “the development of a centralised
database that will track, in real time, every call we make, every website
we visit, and every text and email we send. That information will then
be stored and analysed – perhaps for decades. It will mean the end of
privacy as we know it” (Russell, 2008). Jenni Russell was one among a
chorus of British journalists who decried the “Orwellian” nature of such
a database. But in so doing she persists in understanding the database
strictly under the older paradigm of surveillance. In their analysis of the
role of transaction data in a regime of securitization, Amoore and de
Goede make clear that “privacy as we know it” has already ended, not
because surveillance has become totalized and succeeded in eradicating
it, but because it has been eclipsed by a regime of securitization in which
privacy manifests itself in different juridical and medial forms. Unlike
Orwell’s dystopian world of 1984, which worked in real time to monitor
and control the mobility of human bodies in the service of eliminating
or radically restricting privacy, the post-9/11 security paradigm encourages such mobility precisely so that it can be used to pre-empt future
acts of terrorism or other threats to the security of the state by making
all social transactions and media interactions a potential matter of public record.
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Premediation thus can be seen to represent a security desire. Or, put
differently, premediation furnishes one of the predominant media
logics of the contemporary security regime, much as it furnished the
media logic for the Bush doctrine of pre-emption. De Goede characterizes premediation “as a promising term to denote the discursive economies through which terrorist futures are imagined, because it draws
attention to the cultural practices of mediation at work” (de Goede,
2008, p. 158). She argues that “the political importance of premediation
and its ability to inform security action in the present has significantly
increased in the post-9/11 context” (de Goede, 2008, p. 156). Socially
networked media technologies, like other practices of mediation, help
to maintain the security regime both by enabling or encouraging
mobility – whether physical or virtual, embodied or distributed – and
by promoting or proliferating everyday media transactions.
In this chapter I want to expand the notion of security transactions
set forth by Amoore and de Goede to include all of our interactions with
socially networked media. So when, for example, I move from home to
my local café or from there to my office on campus, the transactions I
perform in each location help to mark my path, or to provide the data
(still potential, but available to be mobilized as necessary) for locating
me in time as well as in space. As I log in to the wireless network at my
office or in my local café, my computer’s IP address is being registered,
as are my GPS co-ordinates when I send a text or receive a call on my
Android, or my status (and location on the net) when I tweet or update
my Facebook profile. These and other socially networked transactions
provide pleasurable, embodied affective interactions with media technologies, which encourage and enable similar future transactions for
the purposes of securitization. The securitization of all of these transactions is making possible, and indeed encouraging, the development of
mobile social networking, which avails itself of the media technologies
enabled by the current regime of securitization to allow people to carry
their social networks with them wherever they may go.3
Following the previous chapter’s discussion of the affective life of
media, this chapter explores how socially networked media transactions are fostered and encouraged by mobilizing or intensifying pleasurable affects in the production of multiple, overlapping feedback loops
among people (individually and collectively) and their media. I begin
by outlining how, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, social media, like cellphones, instant messaging, Facebook, or
YouTube, encourage different historical formations of mediated affect.
This distribution of affectivity across heterogeneous social networks or
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
assemblages is coupled to the framework of securitization, which helps
to explain why these particular socially networked media formations
have emerged at this particular historical moment. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the political implications of this security
regime – what it means for the explosive growth of socially networked
media after 9/11 to have as one of its many consequences the proliferation of media transactions or interactions, which help (as Foucault says
of governmentality and the state) to “vitalize” the political formation of
securitization. If, as I argued in the previous chapters, mediality today
employs the strategies of premediation to mobilize individual and collective affect in a society of security and control, then we need to look
at the ways in which premediation deploys an affectivity of anticipation
that functions to vitalize the regime of securitization that has replaced
surveillance as the predominant juridical formation of our control society. Our everyday transactions of mediation, transportation, and communication are encouraged for security purposes not only by making
them easy and readily available but also by making them affectively
pleasurable – or as I discuss later in the chapter, at least not unpleasurable, by maintaining low levels of affective intensity that provide a kind
of buffer or safe space, a form of security, in relation to an increasingly
threatening global media environment.
Anticipatory gestures
Earlier in this book, I outlined three aspects of the logic of premediation: the premediation of future media forms and technologies; the premediation of future events before they happen; and the proliferation of
networked media technologies so that the future cannot emerge into the
present without having been premediated in the past. In the remainder
of this chapter I unpack this third aspect of premediation.
Networked technologies are becoming increasingly social and mobile
as well as ever-more embedded in the objects with which we interact
and the locations in which we move and dwell. Spurred on by technological entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and utopian digerati, the proliferation and embedding of networked media technologies takes several
different forms, often presented as new IT business models, including
mobile social networking, cloud computing, the Open Web, and the
Internet of Things. Mobile social networking imagines a future in which
social networks like Facebook and Twitter are embedded in our mobile
devices and networked with GPS technologies so that you not only
can tell which members of your network are on-line but also whether
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any of them are, for example, in the same movie theater, shopping
mall, or museum with you. In this model the space of social networking becomes embedded with, if not identical to, the embodied space
in which we move and dwell. The Internet of Things refers to a world
in which objects (both natural and man-made) are tagged with RFID
(radio-frequency identification) technology, which couples bar-codes or
their miniaturized equivalents with GPS technologies to identify particular objects and track those objects as they move through the world.
Cloud computing and the Open Web refer to two different technical
models through which media formations like mobile social networking
and the Internet of Things can be enabled. Cloud computing imagines
a world in which computation and data storage happens not on individual mobile or desktop devices but on massive networked servers, thereby
enabling one to have access to all of one’s social networks and personal
data from anywhere in the networked world. The Open Web refers to
the development of standards and practices that will allow all of our different applications and interfaces to communicate seamlessly with each
other with a minimum of clumsy intermediaries like passwords, logins,
or site registrations.4
These various IT business models for premediating the objects, practices, and devices that make up our media everyday are motivated
by a number of different factors. For individual and collective media
users the maximization of positive affect by striving to mediatize the
entire world helps to prevent a recurrence of shocks like those produced
by 9/11 by producing a feeling of anywhere, anytime connectivity.
Mobilizing our social networks and embedding mediation into objects
and geographic locales combine to protect us from the kind of negative
surprises that might await us in an unmediated world. For the regime of
securitization, the goal of proliferating and enabling media transactions
concerns the prevention or pre-emption of future terrorist attacks. By
encouraging mobility and networked interactivity, securitization makes
possible the identification and disruption of behavior that may threaten
the existing sociopolitical order. For global post-capitalism the project
of extending our networked media into the future and across the globe
works to transform the objects of the world into commodities, and our
media interactions into a kind of ongoing marketing. Thrift describes
this latter project as “producing a new ‘post-phenomenological’ commodity architecture, a frame that can combine interactive systems
(most of which rely on software in one form or another) and commodities with the spaces and times of everyday life, thereby producing an
environment filled with applied and firmly embedded intelligence that
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is involved in constant iteration and feedback” (Thrift, 2007, p. 43).
These new commodities help to produce “a streaming space in which
the circuits of value and culture would be fused through a redefinition
of the nature of materiality, through what is, in effect, a redistribution
of the sensible” (Thrift, 2007, p. 43). What Thrift describes here as the
redistribution of the sensible is related to what I have been referring to
as the affective life of our media everyday, in which affect now imbues
technical, material objects and in which the sensible, like the affective,
is distributed across humans, nonhumans, and geopolitical spaces.
My interest in such commodified premediation technologies as
mobile social networking and the Internet of Things is to emphasize
how media today work to produce affective states of anticipation and
connection rather than the surprise of the real that constituted the
aim of remediation at the end of the twentieth century. (Computer and
video games, as well, especially as they are now networked through
PCs, consoles, or portables, work on the same affective and temporal
registers of anticipation and connection.) Before 9/11 the double
logic of remediation worked to foster an affect of surprise at the real,
whether because it seemed to confront us free from mediation or as an
effect of the overwhelming multiplicity of mediation. In the security
environment after 9/11, surprise is often something to be afraid of or
prevented rather than to be desired or sought after. The proliferation
of premediated social networks of people and things fosters an anticipation of security rather than shock or surprise. Social networks exist
for the purpose of premediating connectivity, by promoting an anticipation that a connection will be made – that somebody will comment
on your blog or your Facebook profile or respond to your Tweet, that
you will hear the distinctive ringtone of one of your favorites, that
your computer or your networked phone will alert you that you have
new mail or that you have been texted. These anticipated connections, however, are not determined or specified in any particular way.
It is connectivity itself that one anticipates, not necessarily a specific
connection.5
Just as one anticipates not a specific connection, but connectivity
or the affectivity of medial interactions in themselves, so in thinking
about the distribution of affect among media, I have not meant to suggest that the affective life of media operates only in discreet one-toone interactions between individuals and particular networked media.
Rather, I have sought to point to a more fluid and ever-changing field
of affective interactions among premediated networks of humans and
nonhumans, of technical and embodied mediators. In the first part of
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the twenty-first century, we live and work in a medial environment
of affective anticipation, which includes the shape and flow of social
networking and its affiliated sites (blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter,
delicious, Flickr, and so forth). This affective anticipation produces a
temporality which is always divided, oriented towards both the immediate moment and the very near future, neither present to itself nor
ever completely gone. This anticipatory temporality sometimes creates
a heightened sense of alertness, while at other times (and perhaps more
often) it generates a muted or low-level affect of waiting or passing time.
Anticipation names the temporal state appropriate to premediation,
as well as the affective quality fostered by the proliferation of mobile
social networks or the creation of an Internet of Things in which people
and their mobile devices navigate through social networks made up not
only of humans and their sociotechnical media but, through technologies like GPS and RFID, of localities and objects as well.6
In the 1920s and 1930s Benjamin and Kracauer each identified distraction as the collective and individuated affective state fostered in
Weimar Germany by modernity’s technologies of mechanical reproduction. In today’s world of mobile social networking and always-on
media, anticipation, not distraction, is the collective and individuated
affective state fostered by the premediated everyday. Where Kracauer
describes the picture palaces of Berlin as providing the media sites for
the formation of distracted collectivities of German shop-girls, wireless
mobile devices and networked desktops provide the premediated sites
for the anticipation of connectivity, of the next affective media interaction, for collectivities of socially networked youth and young adults
of the early twenty-first century. For Benjamin mechanical reproduction is marked by the distracted repetition of automatic bodily gestures,
and cinema is a medium that can only be experienced through distraction. Premediation is marked instead by the gesture of anticipation.7
In developing the idea of the anticipatory gesture I mean to clarify
or further explain the contrast between distraction and mechanical
reproduction as marks of modernity, and anticipation and premediation as marking the current moment. Where Benjamin and Kracauer
consider the cinematic gesture as producing an affect of distraction in
the moviegoer, in an age of mobile networked media the cinematic gesture is relocated from the screen to the interaction between mediated
and human actants. The anticipatory gesture of the mobile “netizen”
towards her media is met by the anticipatory gesture of socially networked and stand-alone media towards their users. Anticipation not
distraction marks our current moment.
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Linda Stone describes something similar to the anticipatory gesture
in her notion of “continuous partial attention.” For Stone, continuous
partial attention “is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network.” “Another way of saying this,” she explains, “is that we want to
connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity
and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any
given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.” Because we are determined not to miss anything,
she contends, “we are always in high alert when we pay continuous
partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking,” which
concerns itself with “doing things that are automatic, that require very
little cognitive processing” (Stone, 2009). For Stone the concept of continuous partial attention works to explain the way in which people try
to cope with the overwhelming media everyday of the twenty-first century. In focusing chiefly on the cognitive element of our current state
of anticipation, however, Stone ignores the affectivity built into continuous partial attention. Similarly, she fails to account fully either for
embodiment or for the role of technology in co-producing this anticipation of connectivity.
The anticipatory gesture, on the other hand, which exemplifies the
media regime of premediation, includes not only your physical, embodied
turn to the keyboard and screen to check your email or Facebook page,
but also the technical gesture of your mobile phone or texting alert sound
ringing, the built-in anticipation of a Facebook comment box, or the premediated option of an email or text reply (Grusin, 2006). The anticipatory gesture of premediation entails both the temporality of anticipation
and the affectivity of the embodied gesture – not only the gesture of the
hand, but also the embodied shift or turn of attention (physically and perceptually) towards a screen or a mobile device or a moving vehicle. The
anticipatory gesture is fundamental to premediation not only because it
brings together the elements of temporality, mediality, and affectivity
which vitalize premediation, but also because it is oriented towards the
future, towards the pre-existence and continued existence of networked
media formations which, recognizing and responding to the gesture, are
already anticipating something like the gesture you will make towards
them and the technical gesture with which they will respond. Your gesture, in being responded to, is remediated in the most basic sense, as your
posting of an update on Twitter or Facebook automatically invokes the
comment feature or the reply – the anticipation that your anticipatory
medial gesture will be met by another. And what the move towards the
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Open Web, mobile social networking, cloud computing, or an Internet
of Things would bring about is a world in which anticipatory gestures do
not only have to be addressed to and answered by a particular class or
set of media devices (computers, mobile phones, TVs, cars, PDAs, DVD
players, MP3 players, gaming systems, ATMs, and so forth) but could be
addressed in theory to anything and everything in the world. In this
premediated world of the future, you wouldn’t have to go to Google Maps
to find out how to get to where you wanted to go, for example, but you
would address the world itself to find your directions and anticipate that
the world will respond with a gesture of its own.8
Mediaphilia
To consider some of the political implications of the anticipatory gesture of premediation, it is useful to turn towards Giorgio Agamben,
who “has returned these questions of ‘mediality’ to political theory”
(Crocker, 2007). In “Notes on Gesture,” a short but important essay,
Agamben links gesture to what he calls “pure mediality.” Invoking
Marcus Terentius Varro’s On the Latin Language, Agamben challenges
Deleuze’s concepts of the time image and the movement image as
characterizing cinema in the twentieth century. Agamben argues that
gesture, not image, is the fundamental element of cinema, describing
cinema as a means which is neither oriented towards a goal nor meaningful in itself, but exists only in the embodied gestural movement in
between purposeful and purposeless, goal-oriented and aesthetic, action
(Agamben, 2000, p. 54). He suggests that gesture functions as a form of
pure mediality, a means without ends. “The gesture is the exhibition of a
mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such” (Agamben,
2000, p. 57). Agamben’s characterization of cinema as essentially gestural ties him to Benjamin, for whom gestures like striking a match,
picking up a phone, or taking a photograph are marks of modernity.
In State of Exception, where he engages Benjamin more directly,
Agamben characterizes violence, too, as “pure means” or “mediality
without end” (Agamben, 2004, pp. 52–64). As in other texts, Agamben’s
interest in exceptional forms of violence often focuses on “the camp”
or other spaces of sovereign exception. But as Amoore and de Goede
have contended, such violence can also be seen in the affective interactions that make up our media everyday. Indeed, in the current security regime of premediation, “mediality without end” can refer not only
to the founding acts of exceptional violence that make possible or establish juridical or political order, but also to the anticipatory gestures that
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are both produced by and produce our everyday affective medial
interactions. Agamben’s description of both gesture and violence as
pure medialities is useful in suggesting the way in which violence
resides not only in the powerful acts of the sovereign but also in the
everyday gestures through which individuals relate to and are related
to their media. Where Agamben sees gesture in terms of pure mediality, however, the anticipatory gesture of premediation is always
impure in that it invokes an affective response that participates in
an ongoing and potentially endless feedback loop with technical
media. Premediation can thus be seen as the transformation of the
pure mediality of the state of exception into the impure mediality of
the everyday. Through the mediality and affectivity of the anticipatory gesture, the state of exception becomes the unexceptional. The
anticipatory gesture entails both the anticipation of the exception
and protection against the shock of surprise. But it is an exception
that remains potential or virtual – that is always about to emerge into
the present but never does. Premediation transforms the violence
that establishes the state of exception as the rule from an externally
imposed or enforced violence to one which is continuously in the
process of being imposed and reimposed by means of the mediality
of the anticipatory gesture, by our networked, affective interactions
with our media everyday.
Agamben’s focus on the pure mediality of violence ignores the
everyday violence involved in the impure mediality of our affective
interactions. This commitment to the concept of gesture as “pure
mediality” might be explained by his commitment to the primacy
of language, the fact that, like Benjamin, he sees the possibility of
language as a “pure and simple communicability” (Agamben, 2004,
p. 62). Samuel Weber seeks to complicate the Benjaminian notion of
pure linguistic mediality, explaining that for Benjamin such purity is
not substantial, but relational. The “pure mediality” of language, as of
violence, is defined paradoxically in terms of its relation to something
external to itself, the recognition that language or the self is never
identical to itself, but always separate from itself as other (Weber,
2006, pp. 66–7). Weber, following Agamben’s reading of Benjamin,
takes pure mediality or mediality without end as a gesture of violence
through which language separates from (or “parts with”) itself. The
anticipatory gesture of premediation, on the other hand, provides a
counterpart to this in one’s affective turn towards technical media,
and the affective turning of technical media towards oneself. But if the
violence of the letter both authorizes and is exterior to the juridical
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violence of the sovereign state, how does premediation participate in
or resist this violence?
Rather than deploying the now familiar post-structuralist turn to language, which defines the human’s difference from itself in terms of the
technical violence of language or of the letter, I have throughout this
book been working with an understanding of the human in terms of its
collaboration with technical media in a heterogeneous assemblage of
humans and nonhumans. Drawing on the work of Gilbert Simondon
and Bernard Stiegler, Mark Hansen has characterized this collaboration in terms of “technogenesis.” “What the massive acceleration of
the evolution of technics makes overwhelmingly clear is that human
evolution is necessarily, and has always been, co-evolution with technics. Human evolution is ‘technogenesis’ in the sense that humans have
always evolved in recursive correlation with the evolution of technics”
(Hansen, 2006a, p. 300). Hansen’s account of mediation in terms of
technogenesis is one of the most compelling of contemporary media
theories. In detailing the ways in which premediation promotes and
depends upon mutually anticipatory gestural relations among humans
and technical media, I have been trying to articulate the affective
life of media that vitalizes what Hansen describes as co-evolutionary
technogenesis.9
Instead of subsuming cinema to language, as Agamben and Weber do,
I have been concerned throughout to understand cinema as anticipating
the advent of the medial regime of premediation. Jason Sperb offers a
similar kind of understanding in what he calls the “cinephilia of anticipation,” by which he means to characterize the heightened affectivity
of the temporal and cultural formation that is built into the release of a
new film in our premediated era – particularly but not exclusively a film
that is part of a series (the Bond franchise is Sperb’s personal cinephilic
favorite) (Sperb, 2009). Together, the anticipatory gesture and the affective life of media work to make up what might be called a “mediaphilia
of anticipation.” The mediaphilia of anticipation depends upon repetition and seriation, but multiplies these anticipatory moments to the
point that they are built in to all of our everyday media interactions.
Whether it is the anticipation of checking your email when you wake
up in the morning, or logging in to see who has commented on your
MySpace or Facebook profile, or checking your RSS feeds, or even the
undetermined anticipation of receiving a text or a call on your mobile,
our anticipatory gestures towards our media are indeed the anticipatory gestures of mediaphilia, if not of media love. And the anticipatory
gestures of our media themselves, as they await our touch or our gaze
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to call them into action, are part of the affective life of media that these
past two chapters have been sketching out.
The anticipatory gestures of mediaphilia that mobilize and vitalize the affective life of media work individually and socially to provide
the reassurance of networked affective interactions in the face both of
the collectively mediated fear that intensified in the years following the
events of 9/11 and of the increasingly threatening future of geopolitical,
environmental, and now economic dangers. In terms of post-industrial
global capitalism, this anticipatory mediaphilia helps to fuel the demand
for new media commodities – whether technical devices like 3G mobile
phones, laptops, eBook readers, flat-screen TVs, or HD DVRs; digital content like downloadable music, film, and television shows, or new DVDs
or video and computer game releases; or software like digital editing platforms, new productivity tools, or mobile Apps for the Android, iPhone,
or Blackberry. And in the framework of securitization with which this
chapter began, the affective life of media and the anticipatory gestures
of mediaphilia operate to encourage, make possible, and proliferate an
ongoing flow of everyday media transactions, which provide the raw
data to be mined so that future, potentially disruptive events of terrorism or other violent attacks can be pre-empted before they ever happen.
The affective life of media helps to promote a mediaphilia of anticipation that nourishes the affective bonds that allow our social, economic,
and security networks to hang together in the loose, sometimes fragile,
but mainly robust assemblages that vitalize premediation at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Digital Youth Research, 2008).
Premediation and politics
Throughout this book I have been articulating the ways in which premediation has operated since 9/11 as a technology of control, whether in
the Bush-Cheney administration of pre-emptive warfare and preventive
prosecution or in the more broad-based regime of post-9/11 securitization, particularly in the West. Given this account, the question arises
of the possibility of resisting premediation or of turning premediation
against the dominant workings of biopolitics after 9/11. What would
such a resistance look like? Does premediation have a politics?
In a recent, cogent essay entitled “Media Theory,” Mark Hansen
offers one model for opposing the hegemony of premediation, posing the problem in terms of the autonomy and agency of “personal
consciousness” or “lived experience.” In this account premediation
does indeed have a politics, and it is a politics that threatens and
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constrains the freedom of individual consciousness or imagination
through the operation of what he calls (following Bernard Stiegler) the
“culture industry” (Stiegler, 2008). By furnishing premediated social
and technical formats, Hansen writes, the culture industry “aims precisely and in the most calculated manner imaginable to subordinate
the subjective flux of thinking to pre-programmed and thoroughly
standardized temporal patterns of media artifacts. In this sense – and
here is where politics enters the scene – the contemporary temporal
object/media artifact constitutes the very site for a struggle over who
controls the flux of consciousness” (Hansen, 2006a, p. 304). The politics of premediation thus appears in the first instance to be negative and
oppressive, particularly insofar as media forms and practices work to
control what Hansen here characterizes as “the flux of consciousness.”
Allying himself with Stiegler’s compelling account of the co-evolution
of humans and technics, Hansen condemns the way in which
the contemporary culture industries strive to exercise and maintain
a stranglehold on cultural memory ... by offering pre-programmed,
media artifactual memory objects ... that, because of their seduction
and their ubiquity, work to erode the role of personal consciousness
and to displace lived experience as the basis for [cultural] memory.
This is precisely how (say) television functions today as a temporal
object and as a cultural industry, and it is more and more how –
so Stiegler argues – tradition is handed down to new consciousness,
which is to say, as something that has not been lived by personal consciousness but is available for adoption – and increasingly required to
be adopted by that consciousness.
(Hansen, 2006a, p. 304)
In this concern with the political implications of the “contemporary
culture industries,” Hansen and Stiegler are troubled precisely by the
dangers of what I have been calling premediation, which could be seen
to furnish “pre-programmed and thoroughly standardized temporal
patterns of media artifacts” in an effort “to subordinate the subjective flux of thinking” and to “erode the role of personal consciousness
and to displace lived experience.” For Hansen as well as for Stiegler,
the question of political opposition becomes therefore a question of
“whether there is any way to resist this industrialization of consciousness. For if the culture industries offer media artifacts that succeed
in displacing the role of personal memory on the production of new
experiences, on new presencings, then they will have succeeded in
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controlling the future itself, to the extent at least that the future arises
out of anticipations or expectations” (Hansen, 2006a, p. 304).
Hansen gets precisely at one of the crucial elements of premediation
in addressing the way in which the culture industry premediates the
future through media artifacts, because our anticipations or expectations can only be defined, can only come into being, in relation to the
media projections of this consciousness industry. For Hansen what needs
to be resisted is what Stiegler calls the “industrialization of memory.”10
But it is not exactly clear what he means by this. At times he poses the
problem in terms of “the subjective flux of thinking” or the “standardized temporal patterns of media artifacts,” both of which concern
what media do, the way they impact the human sensorium. But at other
times, sounding more like Adorno than Benjamin, Hansen sees premediation as a threat to the dignity of the human and the autonomy of
the individual, focusing on tradition and cultural memory, what media
mean rather than what they do. If we think of premediation strictly
in terms of preformatted media scenarios handed down from above to
individuals, or groups of individuals, by something like the contemporary culture industry (or worse, by the government’s manipulation of
that culture industry), then premediation would indeed be a grim story,
as Hansen’s adoption of Stiegler’s dystopic narrative recounts. Such
preformatted “memory objects” are much more deterministic than the
virtuality of premediation. What Hansen describes is in fact not premediation in a society of control but something more like ideology in
a society of discipline.
While I would agree with Hansen’s claim that “the future arises out
of anticipations or expectations,” such anticipations do not control the
future but provide the potentiality for any particular future that we may
encounter, as well as for innumerable futures that will never come into
being. Because Hansen is convinced that pre-programmed media formats deprive individuals of an authentic, lived consciousness, he can
only conceive of political agency in terms of degrees of individual freedom. Thus he hopes that “by facilitating personal control over the flux of
time – whether this be the flux of television in one’s living room (think
of the potential of TIVO and other digital storage systems) or the flux of
global broadband networks and informational databases – digital technologies [will] empower” individuals “to reassert some control ... over the
projection of the future” (Hansen, 2006a, p. 304). Because digital technologies “allow personal lived consciousness control over the flux of the
media artifact that is its surrogate temporal object,” Hansen avers, “they
allow consciousness to live time (at least to some extent) according to its
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own rhythms.” Hansen again invokes Stiegler to underscore his claim
that “digital technologies restore some of the agency that personal lived
consciousness has (apparently) lost over the past two centuries of rapidly accelerated technical evolution; by exemplifying the way that technologies function as correlates of embodied life (as our above account
of the concept of mediation argued), digital technologies help personal
consciousness intervene creatively and substantively in the production
of presencing that constitutes – and constitutes as an essentially technical
process – lived reality itself, including the lived reality of (constituting)
consciousness” (Hansen, 2006a, p. 304).
Although this account of resisting the hegemony of the culture
industry focuses more on affectivity and mediality than on narrative and representation, one hesitates to think of the televisual timeshifting enabled by Tivo as a form of political resistance. In raising
this objection I am not necessarily calling for a more radical form of
resistance, but rather suggesting that Hansen’s formulation of the problem of politics continues to retain an earlier conception of power in
which media technologies are opposed to, not productive of, individual agency and in which power is understood to operate only from
above. The invocation of the autonomous agency of “personal lived
consciousness” in the midst of an argument about co-evolutionary
technogenesis leaves Hansen with nowhere else to turn but to advocate the now-familiar hope that the participatory nature of new digital
technologies might work to enable political critique, to provide agency
for political opposition.11 Hansen seems to recognize this, insofar as he
would distinguish his position, as well as Steigler’s, from the more utopian arguments that imagine the disappearance of mass media, or the
emergence of digital technologies as constituting a post-mass media
era. “While these accounts are important and do contribute to a critical media politics,” Hansen writes, “they remain partial in the sense
that they fail to grapple with the continuing force, indeed hegemony,
exercised by the mass media today. In this respect, one of the merits
of Stiegler’s analysis (and Stiegler, let us reiterate, also appreciates the
critical potential of digital technologies) is its resistance to any utopian hope (or delusion) that new media would somehow displace and
succeed mass media, that mass media would simply wither away”
(Hansen, 2006a, pp. 304–5). Unlike the technophobia of earlier critics
of mass culture like Horkheimer and Adorno, Hansen follows Stiegler
in insisting that opposition to the culture industries can and must
be “an essentially technical process,” because of humanity’s ongoing
co-evolution with technics.
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This separation between mass media and individualized, networked
personal media is one that I, too, have refused to make. Throughout this
book I have avoided such a separation, partly by bringing together, in
the notion of our “media everyday,” Benjamin’s and Kracauer’s ideas of
mass media, mass audience, or mass ornament, with contemporary ideas
about distributed, networked media (Benjamin, 1936, 1940a; Kracauer,
1995). Although Hansen wants to resist the utopian hope that mass
media might wither or fade away, he remains convinced that any hope
for an open, viable future entails a struggle for control “with today’s culture industries and with the media artifacts that they produce .... That
is why finding new ways to tap the creativity of human embodiment –
to rediscover the singularity of embodied temporal fluxes – comprises
the most pressing challenge, and the most inspiring task, for media
theorists today” (Hansen, 2006a, p. 305). With Hansen I would agree
that the question of media theory today is a question of the future –
which is, I would argue, the question of premediation. The point I have
been trying to make, however, in focusing on the affectivity of media
and the proliferation of networked technical devices throughout the
environment, is that media theory needs to move away from what Eve
Sedgwick identified as the paranoid reading strategies of psychoanalysis
and ideology critique, to shift its focus from what media represent or
depict to what media do (Sedgwick, 2003).
Insofar as Hansen and Steigler pose the problem of resistance in
terms of “embodied temporal fluxes” or the “structural coupling” of
the human with technics, or something like machinic enslavement,
I find their arguments compelling. But I part company when, as is too
often the case in contemporary work in cultural and media studies
(including at moments like the ones I have discussed in the work of
Hansen or Stiegler), the question of politics, of opposition to the dominant structure of global post-capitalism, or the culture industry, is
framed as a question of how mass or digital media can be deployed
to create new cultural memory, autonomous agency, or personal lived
consciousness. Indeed, the problem with this account may very well be
the idea of the culture industry itself, which adds an unnecessary third
element to the human/technics relation, something that seems to be
separate from, or outside of, that co-evolutionary technogenesis. What,
after all, is the consciousness or culture industry but the product of
the co-evolution of humanity and technics? To imagine it as somehow
different from, or outside of, that is simply to reformulate the divide
between the human and technology which Hansen and Stiegler would
contest, to include technics as part of the human while the culture
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139
industry becomes something exterior to the co-evolution of humanity
and technics.
Another problem with this account becomes evident when we compare
premediated cultural narratives or media artifacts with other premediated or preformatted objects. If we are to take seriously the materiality
of media and mediation, their continuity with other technical objects –
like chairs and tables, cars and planes, paths and waterways, cans and
bottles, clothes and shoes, or walls and doors – then we need to think
about the preformatted or premediated nature of those objects as well.
While one might justifiably complain about the inauthenticity of a
technologically manufactured life in general, realistically most of us are
glad that the preformatted roof stays over our head at night or the preformatted stove lights when we turn it on, that our preformatted shoes
stay on our feet when we walk or the preformatted plane remains in the
sky when we fly. If mediation is like any other object, then we need to
think about cultural “narratives” or “memories” in the same way we
think about networked connectivity or keyboards or screens. And while
of course one might want to think about ways to improve these technical objects, to make them more effective, or even more “authentic,” to
do so would not be to reject their preformattedness or to replace them
with unformatted media or other artifacts. Preformatted narratives and
memories, like preformatted technical objects and artifacts, are useful
and helpful and necessary. They provide for the kind of security that
we anticipate everyday – the security that things will be in the same
place, work the same way, take the same amount of time. The same
thing is true of our bodies as well. Aren’t we glad that our preformatted
or premediated nervous, cognitive, limbic, or digestive systems are still
in place when we awake in the morning? That our neural nets, language
skills, affective theories, and muscle memories remain in their preformatted states, as they were when we went to sleep? To imagine otherwise is to imagine, for example, waking with a stroke, or with amnesia,
and to imagine doing so as more “authentic” than awakening to our
preformatted cognitive and affective maps. To imagine the politics of
media theory as otherwise than this is to imagine a world in which
media or cultural memories are categorically different from all other
objects in the world.12
By thinking through the question of premediation in relation to different varieties of what Nigel Thrift has called non-representational theory, I have been arguing for a media theory that focuses on the kinds
of everyday transactions with which this chapter began. We need to
begin to understand how the regime of securitization, like the regime of
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
global post-capitalism, maintains its hegemony less by the ideological
narratives or symbolic content of the media images it purveys than
by the distribution of these images through complex, heterogeneous
assemblages of networked technical media, sociocultural formations,
and the affectivity of things. Premediation helps to foster what Thrift,
following Paolo Virno, calls habits of “forethought,” which capitalism
makes use of (through automatisms, intuition, and forms of embodied
affectivity) as a fund or reservoir for the creation of value or the invention or ideas.13 The forethought produced by, and essential to the functioning of, capitalism operates according to the logic of premediation,
as a media formation which is itself engaged in producing the affective
state of anticipatory readiness in both humans and technical media.
“In other words,” Thrift writes, “the aim is to produce a certain anticipatory readiness about the world, a perceptual style which can move
easily between interchangeable opportunities, thus adding to the sum
total of intellect that can be drawn on. This is a style which is congenial
to capitalism, arising out of new senses of kinds and collections of matter,” which “will mobilize new structures of forethought out of which
can arise new ideas” (Thrift, 2007, p. 38). This anticipatory readiness
describes a state of individual and collective affectivity, a posture of
forethought rather than any specific thoughts themselves.
Unlike Hansen or Steigler, Thrift sees the capitalist production of
anticipatory readiness not only as foreclosing new possibilities but also
as enabling them. For Thrift the question of politics is not chiefly a matter of rejecting the preformatted media artifacts furnished by the culture industry because they subordinate the flux of human thought and
action, but of understanding how capitalism works to foster “a perceptual style which can move easily between interchangeable opportunities” and which “will mobilize new structures of forethought.” The very
modes of resistance advocated by Hansen or Stiegler are those which
an affective, premediated capitalism makes possible. Premediation
furnishes a means of proliferating possible futures into which this
“momentary world ... must be acted into” (Thrift, 2007, p. 114). By fostering an affectivity of anticipation, premediation not only vitalizes the
heterogeneous media formation that makes up the regime of securitization and the formation of global post-capitalism but also helps to explain
how the complex assemblage that Thrift describes as “our world” works
to maintain itself. Through something like the anticipatory gestures
of mediaphilia, people and things co-create, by means of what Stiegler
calls a kind of “structural coupling,” or what Luhmann understands
as an “autopoietic system,” what Thrift describes as “a world of radical
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possibility.” If political change or opposition is to occur, it must begin
not with the ideological narratives or symbolic imaginaries that fuel
these systems but with an understanding of and attention to the everyday mediality and affectivity through which these premediated systems
of forethought operate to generate a world of anticipation “in which
each actual event lies amidst many alternatives, in which possibilities
exceed actualities” (Thrift, 2007, p. 114).
In a post-9/11 biopolitics of securitization, premediation works simultaneously to foster and to fulfill an anticipation of security. While
continuing to promote collective insecurity about future geopolitical
catastrophes like terrorism, economic collapse, or global climate change,
premediation offers a kind of network of reassurance through the proliferation of such media formations as the mobile web and the Internet
of Things. The insecurity of premediated catastrophes is countered and
overcome by the affectivity of security produced by the repeated anticipation of interaction with one’s mobile social networks, coupled with
the repeated relief in finding that those networks are still there. In this
regime of securitization, the problem of politics is not constituted in
terms of a rejection of preformatted media techniques and practices,
or shared cultural memories, in favor of an individualized or authentic
media experience. Insofar as premediation can furnish an oppositional
politics, it operates both by identifying and working within individual
and collective mechanisms for producing, fulfilling, and maintaining
the anticipation of security in a post-9/11 world. If premediation has
or is to have political agency or efficacy, it must come not simply from
identifying and opposing the agency of capitalism or the culture industry. Nor can it come from the rejection of preformed cultural histories or narratives provided by the culture or consciousness industries in
favor of authentic or individualized ones.
Like the concept of premediation itself politics is largely nonrepresentational. If premediation is to have political efficacy or agency
it will be through the political affordances or potentialities that the concept entails and the political uses that humans and nonhumans, individually and collectively, make of it.14 The politics of premediation is
not chiefly a question of how premediation represents politics or is represented politically, but of the politics that premediation does. Political
opposition will happen as it already is happening – in movements like
free software, in fights over the ownership and management of digital
rights, in socially networked opposition to practices of securitization
implemented by the Bush-Cheney administration in the United States
and in the United Kingdom by Tony Blair, as well as elsewhere in the
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
securitized West. In calling attention to mediality as the biopolitical
form of governmentality in the twenty-first century, and to the power
of affectivity in maintaining political order and control in an era of
securitization, I mean to suggest that political opposition must operate
in these realms rather than in terms of earlier conceptions of individual
agency or autonomy.
In this chapter I have delineated the dual nature of the concept of the
anticipation of security – both the way in which securitization deploys
anticipatory affect to encourage and mobilize all sorts of networked
transactions so that data can be generated that would allow security
agents to connect the dots, and the way in which anticipation works
both individually and collectively to provide feelings or affects of security when anticipation is safely and predictably fulfilled. In doing so, I
have not meant to prescribe or advocate an opposition to these practices as much as to detail or excavate them through the development of
conceptual frameworks that others might make use of. Insofar as I can
imagine an oppositional politics of premediation, I am fairly certain
that it would take as its object the affectivity of the technical formats
and practices of our media everyday as much as the content of the messages, memories, or cultural narratives that circulate through them.
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Beyond 9/11
In this book, I have concerned myself largely with the intensification of premediation after 9/11, as a response to and defense against
the media shock that followed the attacks on the Pentagon and the
World Trade Center both in the United States and in the globalized
mediasphere. Premediation, I have argued, pre-existed the events of
9/11, but intensified in response to those events, both in relation to
the Bush doctrine of pre-emption and in relation to the concomitant
shift in print, televisual, and networked news media from a focus on
the immediacy of the present and recent past to a focus on the premediacy of the future, the liveness of futurity. In this conclusion I
want briefly to consider the functioning of premediation beyond 9/11,
the ways in which premediation has continued, and will continue, to
function in areas not directly related to 9/11 and the pre-emptive War
against Terror. Over the past couple of years, heading into and moving
beyond the 2008 election of Barack Obama as the first US president of
color, I have been tracking the workings of premediation in print, televisual, and networked news media. I want to conclude the book with
three examples of premediation in US media beyond 9/11: Hurricanes
Gustav and Ike, both of which made landfall in the Gulf of Mexico in
September 2008; the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009; and the
so-called “Twitter revolution” in Iran. These instances of premediation
correspond to the three kinds of “things” that Foucault considers governmentality to be concerned with in relation to populations: “natural,” “economic,” and “social.” As I argued earlier, mediality today
also concerns itself with the imbrication between humans and these
kinds of nonhuman things.
143
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Conclusion
144
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
Hurricanes are arguably the epitome of premediated televisual news
events. The lengthy period leading up to landfall provides for numerous
opportunities to premediate future catastrophic events – evacuation,
flooding, wind damage, looting, death, property damage, and so forth.
News coverage usually consists of a week or more of build-up as these
named storms are tracked from their emergence as tropical depressions
in the Atlantic to their development into tropical storms and then
finally their arrival as actual hurricanes headed towards landfall in the
Gulf of Mexico or on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. In the
run-up to landfall (or sometimes the turn away to the open seas), global
print, televisual, and networked media coverage focuses exclusively on
the virtuality of these hurricanes, premediating possible future paths
along with the death, damage, and destruction that might lie ahead.
More than any other natural disaster, hurricanes provide ample evidence of the ways in which news media today are focused as much on
the liveness of futurity as they are on the immediacy of the present or
recent past. But as with other forms of premediation, hurricane coverage also participates in the remediation of prior storms, which serve
as the basis of comparison and as benchmarks for the premediation of
impending hurricanes.
Late summer is hurricane season in the southeast United States.
Once every four years, hurricane season coincides with presidential
election season. The coincidence of the two proved particularly interesting in August and September 2008. On 31 August, Hurricane Gustav
entered the Gulf of Mexico. Meteorologists were predicting that it
would make landfall near New Orleans exactly three years to the date
from Hurricane Katrina. Gustav proved to be an unusually rewarding opportunity for premediation as well as for remediation, both
because it appeared headed directly towards New Orleans and because
it appeared that its landfall would coincide with the beginning of the
Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St Paul. News reporters were preoccupied with questions about how New Orleans would
withstand its second major hurricane in three years and how well the
Bush administration would be prepared to deal with Hurricane Gustav
in comparison to its bungling of Katrina. But political reporters found
themselves addressing a different question: how would the hurricane
headed for the mouth of the Mississippi impact the Republican convention being held near its source in Minneapolis-St Paul, more than
1000 miles away? This political impact, of course, would not be caused
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Natural things
by wind or storm surge or rain or tornadoes, but rather by the storm
of media coverage the hurricane would attract. How would it look for
Republicans to be celebrating the nomination of the McCain-Palin
ticket and attacking their Democratic opponents if New Orleans was
once again flooded by broken levees and people were seen stranded, or
worse dying, in Gustav’s wake? Perhaps equally important, how much
media coverage would the Republicans receive in the face of another
Katrina-like disaster? When the first day of the Republican Convention
was dramatically truncated in anticipation of Gustav’s landfall on
Monday morning, it was a clear example of how the premediation of a
hurricane could have an impact not unlike a hurricane itself. The virtual Gustav had a real impact on thousands of delegates, convention
support people, transportation and communication networks, and of
course the media themselves.
Gustav was particularly interesting because its premediation inevitably entailed the remediation of Katrina. Not only was Gustav’s trajectory and intensity compared repeatedly to Katrina’s, but the response
of local, state, and federal governments was measured against what had
happened three years ago to the week. This remediation took many
forms. It was a formal remediation in that the modes of coverage (maps,
weather reporters, hurricane graphics, etc.) were similar to those of
Katrina or most other hurricanes. It was a remediation as well of the political practices of evacuation and storm preparation that occurred prior
to Katrina. But it was also a remediation in the sense that new media
forms claim to entail improvements of older media forms, or remedies
of past defects. This reformative aspect of remediation was most evident
in the coverage of the rebuilt and reinforced levees, the new evacuation
procedures, the enhanced generators at Tulane’s hospital, and the preparations made by FEMA and the federal government – all of which were
remediations of earlier technologies, practices, and bureaucratic procedures. Finally Gustav offered George W. Bush something of a “do-over,” a
chance to prove that he had learned the lessons of Katrina, that he had
remediated his own approach to natural disasters. It also offered John
McCain a chance to remediate his and Bush’s non-response to Katrina
by flying to the Gulf Coast with his vice-presidential selection, Sarah
Palin, in advance of the hurricane’s arrival, hoping thereby to demonstrate that he would be a president who could take charge in crisis situations like this. And in deciding to cut short the Republican Convention
in advance of Gustav’s landfall, McCain could underscore his claim to
be concerned more with the welfare of the nation than with his own
political ambitions. In so doing McCain sought to premediate his own
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
presidential behavior through the remediation of Bush’s belated and
feeble response to Katrina.
As often happens in the case of premediation and virtuality, however,
the real often emerges in ways quite different from its prior remediations. Gustav struck only a glancing blow to New Orleans, though perhaps a more direct blow to the prospects of the Republican presidential
ticket. Premediation, however, is less about getting the future right than
it is about making futurity present. In the case of Hurricane Ike, the
strongest storm of the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season, premediation of
its impact took a different tack than with Gustav, including some interesting narratives about the dramatic spike in oil prices and multiple gas
shortages that could result from the potential disruption of oil refining
in the Gulf and in the Gulf Coast states. In fact as the storm approached
the coast of Texas, US news media reported regularly about cars lining up at gas stations as far away as South Carolina, not in response to
shortages that had already occurred but in anticipation of shortages
that were being premediated on TV.
CNN’s 24-7 coverage of the impending landfall of Hurricane Ike provided another interesting example of televisual remediation. On Friday,
12 September, the day after the seven-year anniversary of the event of
9/11, CNN began calling its ongoing coverage of Hurricane Ike “Extreme
Weather.” This moniker clearly alluded to the familiar narrative of global climate change, but more interestingly presented CNN’s coverage as
a remediation of a popular televisual genre, “Extreme TV,” epitomized
by such cable shows as Ice Road Truckers, Dirty Jobs, or The Deadliest
Catch. What was particularly interesting about CNN’s coverage was
how its on-site reporters could be seen to remediate the formats of these
extreme TV shows, providing televisual media coverage of extreme
situations that are inaccessible to the average viewer. CNN set up its
operation on-site at a recently evacuated Holiday Inn Express, with its
reporter bravely telling viewers that the management had turned over
its keys to the CNN crew. Only the latest instance of a long line of news
events that have been treated as episodes of an ongoing television series
or mini-series, “Extreme Weather” epitomized the ways in which news
media continued to shift their focus from reporting on the present or
recent past to premediating the future. Even when they do report on
what is happening live, as in the run-up to Hurricane Ike’s landfall,
they do so within a premediated format, in this case that of extreme TV.
Indeed, the arrival of Hurricane season in the United States has become
almost as regular and predictable as the arrival of football season. And
the premediated formats through which it is presented to the public on
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Conclusion 147
the Weather Channel and the various cable news networks have now
become nearly as conventionalized and regularized as those that can be
found on networks like ESPN and other major US sports networks.
In 2008 the US hurricane season was interrupted by the premediation of an unexpected major disaster scenario, the collapse of global
finance capitalism. The announcement on Sunday, 14 September, that
Lehmann Brothers would declare bankruptcy triggered a global financial crisis as stock markets worldwide plunged precipitously. Seemingly
overnight, the structure of feeling in the United States turned dramatically economic, modulating from a concern with hurricanes or the
November presidential election to a preoccupation with the economic
everyday.1 The relation between individual and collective affect in our
media environment began to focus almost obsessively on the current
“economic crisis.” Whether at cafés and supermarkets, in schools and
libraries, in the workplace or over the dinner table, at the mechanic’s
shop or the doctor’s office – small talk almost immediately turned to the
crisis in the economy and the proposed bailout. People wanted to know:
what is going to happen to the economy in the future? What kind of
economic news will tomorrow, next week, or the election bring?
This economic chatter was even more extreme in local, national,
and global print, televisual, and networked news media. The New York
Times, Washington Post, and other major newspapers in the United States
began to read like the Wall Street Journal. In the United States, CNN, Fox,
CNBC, and MSNBC were populated with new faces, new charts, and
new graphics, discussing details of the mortgage and liquidity crisis,
explaining potential features of the proposed bailout, and most interestingly premediating the economic and social disasters that would
occur if Wall Street was not rescued from its crisis. Economic bloggers
became more visible and economic matters began to garner an especially large portion of US and global web-based media attention. This
proliferation of media talking heads, historical narratives, and graphic
formats concerned with the economy and the market crisis worked to
provide competing, potential, not-fully-defined premediations of possible future disaster scenarios into which US and global citizens, corporations, NGOs, and nation-states found themselves thrown and among
which they would have to navigate.
Such economic premediations worked to modulate individual and
collective structures of feeling as the US media public found itself faced
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Economic things
Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
with any number of dismal potential economic futures. These structures of feeling, which Raymond Williams describes as “emergent or
pre-emergent,” are not fixed and institutionally defined. In fostering
structures of feeling, premediation promotes and modulates potential
individual and collective affective qualities and intensities from which
actual personal and social structures might or might not emerge. Such
structures of feeling operate ordinarily as part of our media everyday, but
in periods of crisis and rapid affective change their operations became
much more intense and thus much more visible than at moments of
relative quiescence or stability. At times of such intensity the scale of
individual and collective affective modulation increases exponentially.
This affective intensification fosters public and media sentiment in
mobilizing or opposing large-scale resources for governmental action.
As during the nearly 18-month run-up to the Bush-Cheney Iraq War,
the speeded-up premediations of financial apocalypse in the autumn
of 2008 worked to proliferate scenarios of future disaster to foster a
level of terror or fear that would help mobilize support for the government to spend $1 trillion to bail out banks and insurance companies.
In the last full-scale instance of the Bush administration’s use of premediation to further its own interests, Congress was frightened into
voting into law a proposal that would cost the nation over a trillion
dollars.
As it had in Iraq, the Bush administration succeeded not in response
to an existing catastrophe but on the basis of the premediation of a
catastrophe – of what might have happened to our economy if we had
not acted to prevent the next Great Depression that Hank Paulson was
reported to be premediating in briefings behind Wall Street closeddoors. This is, of course, exactly the same script the Bush-Cheney
administration followed in 2002, only with different Congressional
committees and behind different closed doors. Like the confidential
briefing reports distributed to members of key Congressional committees but kept from the American public, the briefings that convinced
senators like Hilary Rodham Clinton and Joe Biden of the threat posed
by Iraq and the necessity of giving Bush authorization to initiate a
war, closed-door briefings by Hank Paulson proved equally terrifying.
On Friday, 19 September, on multiple news channels, an ashen-faced
Democratic Senator Chris Dodd told financial reporters of the catastrophic horrors that Hank Paulson had premediated for Dodd’s Senate
Banking Committee. Dodd and other Senate leaders (including presidential rivals McCain and Obama) seemed convinced that the only way
to prevent this catastrophe from happening was to authorize the Bush
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administration to wage a pre-emptive war against the threat of another
Great Depression.
In the case of Iraq, however, the enemy had a face: Osama bin Laden
or Saddam Hussein. Who or what was the enemy in Paulson’s and
Bernanke’s premediations of financial meltdown? For many people it
was Wall Street itself, but the political and financial establishments
could not allow the mortgage crisis to be blamed on Wall Street if they
were to persuade the nation that Wall Street needed to be bailed out.
In a hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, Federal Reserve
Chairman Ben Bernanke was asked by Senator Sherrod Brown, a
Democrat from Ohio, “Does Wall Street owe the American people an
apology?” Bernanke deflected an answer, claiming that Wall Street
was “an abstraction.”2 This exchange raised an interesting question of
agency and responsibility during this extended moment of financial
crisis – particularly the question of how financial agency is premediated among print, televisual, and networked news media. Although
Bernanke followed up his characterization of Wall Street as an abstraction by acknowledging that “a lot of people made big mistakes,” my
interest as a media theorist is not with identifying those responsible
for the sub-prime mortgage crisis, but with understanding how both
formal and informal media helped to create and amplify the agency
of financial crisis to the point where Congress approved a $700 billion
bailout in response to the multiple premediations of economic
catastrophe.
Bernanke’s sidestep to the contrary, Wall Street is anything but an
abstraction in our media everyday. At first blush the agency of the subprime mortgage crisis appeared chiefly economic – it hurt individuals
in their pocket-books and businesses on the bottom line. But it is worth
considering the media forms in which this monetary or economic damage manifested itself to the American public: how was the agency of the
current financial crisis manifested in US and global media? Initially the
agency of financial crisis manifested itself in nearly non-stop media
coverage of the impending catastrophe and diminishing online and
print financial statements. Or more accurately it manifested itself in
the fear and trembling that was produced by the obsessive premediation of impending economic catastrophe in our print, televisual, and
networked media. People turned on the TV and saw news anchors
and politicians, economists and financiers, warning them about the
impending financial catastrophe heralded by recent turbulence in the
markets. They heard about billions of dollars in value that had been lost.
They saw graphs of the recent financial past heading almost inevitably
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Conclusion 149
downwards into their financial future. Those fortunate enough to have
them looked at their 401Ks or mutual funds or e-portfolios and saw how
much value these financial instruments had lost. People saw gas prices
rising and “for sale” and “for lease” signs sprouting up like mushrooms.
All of these examples participated in an over-heated logic of premediation, whose tone was one of extreme urgency. People were on the alert,
concerned, and ultimately scared.
The agents to fear in the financial crisis were not Osama bin Laden,
Saddam Hussein, or al Qaeda, however, but were called “the market” or
“Wall Street” or “the Dow.” “The market will not be happy if too many
limitations are put on this bailout.” “Wall Street is worried that unless
the Fed acts, more turbulence lies ahead.” “The Dow is demonstrating
its concern about the terms of the bailout.” Print, televisual, and networked news media depicted these agents as if they made up a pantheon of economic or financial gods, powerful creatures which must
be feared and respected, which must be pacified. “Wall Street,” “the
market,” and “the Dow” appeared incessantly in the headlines, crawls,
and splash screens of our media everyday as agents who were anything
but abstract. The mediasphere was filled with the priests and votaries of these gods, warning the public of the danger that could come if
they were angered or their will was flaunted. These financial deities are
powerfully complex and heterogeneous actors in our economic drama,
what Bruno Latour has characterized (remediating Michel Serres) as
“quasi-objects” or (more recently, in a term also employed by Gilles
Deleuze) as “assemblages.”3 Like Greco-Roman deities, which are complex socio-technical actants inseparable from their votaries and priests,
their icons and temples, their calendars and sacred places, their rituals of sacrifice and remuneration, so these economic deities are
anything but “abstractions.” “Wall Street,” “the market,” and “the
Dow” name heterogeneous formations of humans and nonhumans,
of material and immaterial forces, of technical and social networks –
including their own votaries and priests, icons and temples, calendars
and sacred places, and rituals of sacrifice and economic remuneration.
The agency of Wall Street (like that of the City in the United Kingdom)
is not the agency of an abstraction, but rather the agency of the complex
socio-technical assemblage of financial employees, bank statements,
office buildings, powerful computer servers, distributed financial software networks, and so forth.
But to return to the question posed to Bernanke, did Wall Street owe
the American people an apology? Or, to put it differently, what would
it mean for “Wall Street” to apologize to the American people? Who or
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150 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
what would make that apology? And to whom or what would it apologize? Such questions might best be answered if we think of Wall Street
not as “abstract,” but as “virtual.” In describing Wall Street as a Latourian
quasi-object or Deleuzian assemblage, I mean to resist describing economic agency as an immaterial essence or abstraction of very real and
concrete socio-technical, cultural, and economic practices and capital
resources. Wall Street is as real an object as any other. Similarly, though,
I would resist thinking of Wall Street as a fixed, stable, or unified entity.
I invoke Latour and Deleuze to highlight the way in which such entities
as Wall Street, the market, or the Dow are always emergent or in a state of
becoming, even as they are already powerful actors on the geopolitical
and economic stage. Like the Greco-Roman gods, their agency derives
precisely from their virtuality, both from the reality of what they have
just done and from the potentiality of what they may do in the future.
The priests and oracles of the Greco-Roman pantheon remediated many
political, economic, and natural occurrences and historical events in
terms of the agency of the gods. Simultaneously, they devoted considerable energies and resources to placating, premediating, and even trying
to control the agency of the gods in the future. Similarly, in invoking
the virtual agency of our financial pantheon, the print, televisual, and
networked news media work both to explain the present and recent past
in terms of such economic demigods as Wall Street, the market, or the
Dow, and to premediate how these gods will act in the near and notso-near future. It was through the terrifying agency of these demigods
that the US Congress was moved to authorize more than $700 billion
to prevent a depression that had only been premediated and that might
never have occurred.
Social things
In addition to mobilizing people in relation to economic and natural things, mediality also works to mobilize the social. Media coverage of the aftermath of the contested Iranian presidential election
in June 2009 was notable for marking the ways in which televisual
immediacy in the news had shifted in an era of social networking
and premediation. As I have argued earlier, media treatment of the
terrorist attacks of 9/11 can be seen to have marked the perfect global remediation event, epitomizing the double logic of remediation
that emerged most powerfully in the dot.com explosion of the 1990s.
Televisual media coverage of 9/11 combined the immediacy of live
video with the hypermediacy of the windowed interface. Across the
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Conclusion 151
globe people could watch live the burning and collapse of the Twin
Towers in the midst of a hyper-mediated environment of multiple
media feeds, both visually on screen and textually through print,
televisual, and networked media. Televisual immediacy and digital
hypermediacy combined to produce a collective affective sense of
shock and terror.
US and global media coverage was very different in the wide-scale
popular demonstrations against the results of the Iranian presidential
election, specifically the determination that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
had won by more than 11 million votes. In order to prevent US and
global media from filling their pages, programs, and screens with live
and otherwise remediated images of the anti-government demonstrations, the repressive Iranian regime imposed a stiff media crackdown.
Live video coverage was interdicted. Journalist visa renewals were
routinely denied. News reports to the outside world were severely curtailed. Because global media outlets like CNN, BBC, or Al Jazeera could
not provide robust live coverage of events on the street in Tehran
and other Iranian cities, social networks like Facebook, YouTube,
and Twitter stepped in to fill the void. After being challenged for its
lack of coverage in the weekend following the 12 June election, CNN
began to foreground the constraints under which it was being forced
to operate, reporting dramatically on the restrictions its reporters
had to deal with. Consequently, instead of its reporters covering live
events in Iran, CNN began covering other media, particularly social
networks like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. While there were
no live video feeds coming directly from Iran, there were multiple
social networks in a state of continual anticipation for the next hundred tweets or videos or status updates. In the earliest stages of the
Iranian demonstrations live-blogging on sites like Huffington Post
proved particularly helpful in mediating the chaotic flow of words,
images, sounds, and videos coming from Iran. As the demonstrations
continued, CNN and other cable news networks televisually remediated live-blogging, providing viewers with updates from other online
sources not through remediated text, but through premediated televisual flow.
In the midst of these premediated social networks, enthusiastic claims
for a new Twitter revolution could be heard. Self-styled Internet guru
Clay Shirkey called it a social media revolution, hyperbolically calling
the social unrest in Iran “the first revolution that has been catapulted
onto a global stage and transformed by social media” (Shirkey, 2009).
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152 Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
Especially in the first days after the election, in the face of the Iranian
government’s attempt to crack down on many socially networked
Internet sites, Twitter proved to be extremely agile and difficult to shut
down. In an effort to confuse Iranian censors, Twitter users around the
world changed their local time-zones to Tehran. Almost by the minute,
specifications for mirror sites and other non-Iranian servers were spread
through hundreds and thousands of tweets. Many Iranians took advantage of software developed by the Falun Gong to resist Chinese censorship by providing servers that changed IP addresses almost by the
minute. Yet it is not clear what had been most transformed by Twitter,
the Iranian revolution (if it in fact proves to be one) or Western media
coverage. Twitter and other social media provided vehicles for those in
Iran to communicate to the rest of the world, and in some cases were
used to publicize protests and demonstrations in Iran. But this Iranian
“media revolution” mainly intensified social media practices that had
been under way for some time.
Indeed the affectivity and mediality of the distributed Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008 had already taken a different shape from 9/11,
due partly to the shift in temporality from the dramatic explosions of
the Twin Towers (and even the Pentagon and failed fourth plane) to the
ongoing series of recursive attacks in Mumbai. Extended over a longer
period of time, the Mumbai attacks evolved recursively in response to
the actions of the Indian security forces, which they were monitoring
in part through networked and televisual media. These attacks were
being directed from Lashkar E Toiba headquarters in Pakistan through
cellphones used as monitors or controllers to manipulate the terrorist
avatars on the ground in Mumbai. Well before the Iranian Twitter revolution, televisual news reports in the Mumbai attacks were not dominated by TV reporters but were populated by Twitter, Facebook, Flickr,
live blogging, and so forth. Thus, although CNN took great pains to
emphasize how different its reporting on Iranian social networks and
amateur videos was from its usual practice of verifying reports and
sources, its Iran reporting only intensified and extended the network’s
already growing reliance on email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube,
and iReporters over the previous few years. This fascination with social
media on the part of the mainstream media marked the transformation
of the notion of perceptual or affective immediacy from the liveness of
video to the connectivity of social networking. As epitomized by the
media coverage of the social unrest in Iran, which focused on the next
tweet or YouTube video, the next email message or Facebook update,
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Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11
the concern with immediacy had not disappeared, but rather had been
relocated from the liveness of the present to the liveness of futurity.
This mediality of anticipation was epitomized by CNN’s coverage on
the second weekend following the Iranian election. On that Saturday,
for example, in the 6:00 pm EST hour, CNN’s coverage of the “Breaking
News” from Iran, “Iran Election Fallout: Blood on the Streets of Iran,”
presented an especially interesting discussion between Josh Levs and
Don Lemon concerning the repeated and continued updating of one’s
Twitter page. The affective orientation towards social media presented
in their exchange differed from the affective or temporal immediacy
of live video coverage, with its monitoring of action in the present in
real-time. With live video there is a sense of connection in real-time,
with what is being shown on screen occurring at the same moment as
you are watching it. With these Twitter feeds rushing past, however,
there is a different temporality and a different affective sense. On the
one hand what is being retweeted on cable news or on live blogs or
other online sites has already happened in the past. It is not happening
now. It is not immediate in the way that live video is. But on the other
hand, CNN sought to present the sense that their coverage was even
more immediate than live or recently recorded video insofar as they
emphasized not what had been tweeted already, but what was about to
be tweeted. Viewers were encouraged to retweet. Iranians were encouraged to provide reports, however brief or anonymous they might have
had to be.
What we witnessed in the media coverage of the Iranian demonstrations was not a new social media revolution, but the form that televisual
immediacy has assumed in an age of premediation. Rather than emphasizing the liveness and immediacy of their real-time video feed, the
CNN reporters talked excitedly about how the Twitter stream changed
every second. On the one hand this could be seen as analogous to Walter
Benjamin’s account of the affective distraction of watching cinema, as
the images flash by faster than one can process them. But the affect
of social networks is more an affect of anticipation than distraction.
The CNN reporters, like all social networkers, displayed an anticipatory
orientation, looking forward towards the next refreshing of the tweet
stream or the next live blog, the next email of status update. Instead of
monitoring the action in Iran in real time, they positioned themselves
as monitoring the Twitter feed as it was about to flash by. When Don
Lemon led into a commercial break, saying “All of that new video and
new information coming into CNN moment by moment,” the point
was clear that it was the socially networked information that was being
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154
covered, not the live events themselves. In our current media formation, immediacy is less about the experience of what is happening on
screen at any particular moment than about the anticipation of what
is going to happen in the immediate future. In an era of premediation beyond 9/11, immediacy is less about the liveness of real-time than
about the liveness of futurity.
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Conclusion 155
Introduction
1. For a fuller discussion of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concept of
the economy of nature and how its logic might be, and has been, challenged
in terms of other economies of nature and society (see Grusin, 1993).
2. The distinction between mediators and intermediaries, as well as the related
concepts of mediation and translation, figure in many places in Latour’s
work, perhaps most directly in We Have Never Been Modern (Latour, 1993).
3. Jill Bennett provides a model of how to think about trauma in a way that is
affective rather than psychoanalytical (Bennett, 2005).
1
Remediating 9/11
1. For an engaging and trenchant critique of these practices (see Elmer and
Opel, 2008).
2. As I indicate in the introduction, I use the US form of the date throughout
this book for its inescapable allusion to 911, the telephone number one dials
in an emergency in the United States, and to indicate the book’s primary
focus on the specifically American logic of post-9/11 mediality.
3. Rey Chow argues that the key rupture, or epistemic change, can be marked
by the moment when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, after which “war was more and more to be fought in
virtuality .... Warring in virtuality meant competing with the enemy for the
stockpiling, rather than the actual use, of preclusively horrifying weaponry”
(Chow, 2006, p. 33).
4. Jill Bennett describes the global scope of 9/11 this way: “The attacks seemed
to shatter the notion of distanced perception, coming closer than any event
in recent memory to constituting a genuinely global tragedy, from which geographic distance no longer guarantees isolation” (Bennett, 2005, p. 126).
5. “With the instant photoprint enabling invention of the cinematographic
sequence, time will not stand still again. The film strip, the film reel, and later,
the real-time video cassette of non-stop telesurveillance will all illustrate the
incredible innovation of a continuous time-light .... These days, the screen
of real-time televised broadcasts is no longer a monochromatic filter like
the one familiar to photographers which lets through a single colour only
of the spectrum, but a mono-chronic filter which allows a glimpse only of
the present” (Virilio, 1997, p. 27). Identifying “time freeze, finally, in the
real instant of the live television broadcast,” or in the networked immediacy
of the computer screen, Virilio articulates a dystopian version of utopian
claims that technologies of telecommunication bring people together across
space in the instantaneity of “real time.” Like nineties techno-enthusiasts,
Virilio is convinced that the era of networked satellite telecommunication
156
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Notes
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
eradicates what he sees as the interval of communication, the distance in
time and space between the act of issuing a communication and the act
of receiving or interpreting that communication. Both past and future are
obliterated in favor of “the instant,” “real time,” “the present.” Furthermore,
the “real time” of the present itself, he argues, is split between “the real time
of our immediate activities – in which we act both here and now – and the
real time of a media interactivity that privileges the ‘now’ of the time slot of
the televised broadcast to the detriment of the ‘here,’ that is to say, of the
space of the meeting place” (Virilio, 1997, p. 38).
Tom Gunning argues as much in the conclusion to his essay, “Re-Newing Old
Technologies: Astonishment, Second Nature, and the Uncanny in Technology
from the Previous Turn-of-the Century.” Commenting on “the prophetic
nature of new technologies, their address to a previously unimagined future,”
Gunning avers: “Every new technology has a utopian dimension that imagines a future radically transformed by the implications of the device or practice” (Gunning, 2003, p. 56).
The idea of “l’a’venir,” a future that can never be known, recurs throughout
Derrida’s work, as in the following passage from Archive Fever: “The condition on which the future remains to come is not only that it not be known,
but that it not be knowable as such. Its determination should no longer
come under the order of knowledge or of a horizon of pre-knowledge but
rather a coming or an event which one allows or incites to come (without
seeing anything come) in an experience which is heterogeneous to all taking note, as to any horizon of waiting as such” (Derrida, 1996, p. 47). I am
grateful to Ken Jackson for alerting me to this passage.
Doane supports her account of the logic of televisual catastrophe with reference to Freud’s account in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” of the psychic
need to maintain low levels of anxiety witnessed in soldiers who had been
traumatized by the war, or to Benjamin’s account of a similar phenomenon
in terms of the shocks of modernity (Benjamin, 1940a). Clearly the current
expression of premediation in televisual news media and film bears some
affinities to the traumas of modernity, particularly to the preoccupation
with predicting and controlling the future attendant upon the increased
risks and consequences of industrial accidents in modernity. Developments
like insurance, political polls, or economic forecasts, for example, are in
some sense, early efforts to premediate the future. Yet they differ from the
current logic of premediation in their desire to control the future rather
than to proliferate competing mediations of it. I take up Benjamin’s account
in Chapter 3 in relation to Abu Ghraib and the Iraq War.
Brian Massumi argues persuasively that the Bush Administration’s adoption of a color-coded warning scheme for homeland security served to
modulate the level of fear among the US public. In the fourth chapter I take
up Massumi’s argument in more detail, differentiating his philosophical
approach from my medialogical one, largely in terms of the particularity of
our respective discussions of the ways in which media function to modulate
collective affect (Massumi, 2005).
The idea of a technology of premediation that would in fact see into the
future is a central part of the premise of John Woo’s Paycheck (2004), an
adaptation of yet another Philip K. Dick story.
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Notes 157
11. Simpson criticizes Felicity Nussbaum and Terry Eagleton, in particular, each
of whom argues that literary theory prevents, or works against, the kind of
trans-historical humanist empathy or understanding that literature enables.
Simpson introduces an episode from William Wordsworth’s The Prelude to
refute the claim that, unlike theory, which only paralyzes empathy and
action, literature allows one to act empathetically in the face of death, loss,
or trauma.
12. Simpson here extends into twenty-first-century American theory the
twentieth-century French theoretical suspicion of visual images detailed
persuasively by Martin Jay, 1993.
13. In one super-sequence Spiegelman provides a more pointed and medialogically specific expression of one of the central points in Brian Massumi’s
powerful essay, “Fear (The Spectrum Said),” which I discuss in greater detail
in the book’s fourth chapter.
14. One feature of this simultaneous concern with the remediation of both
past and future has been a proliferation of scholarly and popular historical
projects, in a variety of media and in a variety of national and transnational
contexts, to uncover and explain the world’s mediated past. Among these
projects are the history of early cinema and other optical technologies; the
prehistory of computers; the early days of radio, television, and telegraph;
the material history of print culture; the archiving and interpretation of
dead media in all their forms. This collective project to rewrite the past is
also motivated by, or participates in, the practice of premediating the future
by enforcing the idea that the past, too, had always been premediated, that
historical and cultural difference (past or future) is constituted at least in
part according to the emergence or development of different media technologies and practices.
15. Project Rebirth also serves to remind us that the desire to mediate the
future at the moment it emerges into the present has its historical antecedents. Andy Warhol’s 1964 Empire, an eight-hour film of the Empire State
Building, is one obvious project that Project Rebirth’s documentation of
Ground Zero is meant to remediate. But where Empire, as many of Warhol’s
films, aimed to create an affect or mood of boredom, Project Rebirth aims
to produce a collective affect or mood of hope, as its title makes clear. For
an insightful discussion of the role of boredom in Warhol’s aesthetics (see
Flatley, 2004).
16. This director’s note, accessed in the summer of 2007, has been replaced with
a similar, but less hopeful note, which reads, in part:
Shortly after 9/11, I was visiting New York City from my home in LA, and
went to Ground Zero to experience for myself as best I could what was
happening there. Along with the despair and anger I felt, I sensed the
determination and resolve of the first responders and volunteers working to clear the site – and knew then that somehow New York would
cope, the site would be rebuilt, and that this process urgently needed to
be captured on film over the coming years ....
So myself and our small team began Project Rebirth by installing
time-lapse cameras at Ground Zero to record the hour-by-hour
re- development of the site, and began chronicling the lives of ten people grieving and coping post 9/11. Today, we are more than halfway
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158 Notes
through creating this unique historical record, and Project Rebirth will
be a part of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, and
archived at the US Library of Congress. In the coming months and years
we will continue working to ensure that as much of the physical re-building is captured before this history is lost forever, and to tell as fully as
possible our subjects’ stories – so that audiences will better understand
and appreciate how people cope with the trauma of disasters.
(“Project Rebirth | From the Director,” http://www.projectrebirth.
org/director.php, accessed 11 December 2008)
2
Premediation
1. To emphasize further the fully premediated character of this imagined US
society in the middle of the twenty-first century, Spielberg presents a TV
commercial for PreCrime very early in the film as a means of initial narrative
exposition for the viewer, showing the audience of the film in the theater, as
well as the TV audience in the world of the film, the history, and workings of
PreCrime. The force of this form of ubiquitous premediation (that our knowledge of the future, as well as of the past, is already mediated) is underscored
by the fact that when the film opens the very first images that the viewer sees
on screen are images of a premediated crime displayed on the monitors of the
PreCrime Unit. The film begins with images not of the unmediated real-time
world of the film, but of the premediated world of a crime that is about to
be committed. Like Strange Days, which opens with a first-person snuff clip
from the wire, Minority Report begins with cinematic images of the mediated
and screened perceptions of the precogs, rather than of the United States of
2054 in which these images are being screened.
2. Although the FBI was reportedly pressured by the White House to blame Al
Qaeda for these attacks, no connection was found. As of this writing, the
attacks have been officially blamed on Bruce Ivins, a biodefense researcher
at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Ivins committed suicide in July, 2008, prior to
formal charges being filed. Many people with knowledge of Ivins and the
case continue to question whether he was indeed responsible for the anthrax
attacks.
3. The role of the media as part of the US disciplinary apparatus was also
explicit in the challenge to the everydayness of American life posed in the
fall of 2002 by the serial sniper killings that occurred in and around the
Baltimore-Washington, DC, metropolitan area. This sense of the disruption
of business as usual produced by the snipers was reinforced by the news
media in print, on the Internet, and especially on TV, which interrupted its
daily schedules with the creation of the newest reality news shows (“Terror
in Suburbia” or “D.C. Snipers”), complemented with 24-7 coverage by
means of multiple crawls on the bottom of the screen. In the overwhelming desire to identify and apprehend these “terrorists,” the public often lost
sight of the news media’s participation in the fabric or network of forces out
of which such acts of terror emerge. In a distributed form of premediation,
print, radio, TV, and Internet media; local, state, and federal police; the
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Notes 159
Notes
snipers and the public – all participated in the same heterogeneous sociotechnical disciplinary formation. The news media did not cover the police
or the snipers as autonomous entities, but rather participated as actors in
the investigation and capture of the snipers. In the same way the police,
with pre-scheduled briefings and news conferences and official daily media
communications, participated as actors in the practices and schedules of
networked media.
What was distinctive about this media event was the extent to which the
snipers themselves were both part of, and made possible by, the news media
in which they participated not only as viewers of their own mediation, but
also as programmers (in the participatory sense of today’s networked media
and “reality TV”). Indeed, the snipers ultimately proved instrumental in
their own identification and apprehension, through their communication
in letters at the scene of the crime or pre-scheduled phone calls to the police,
as well, of course, as by continuing to commit the murders themselves. No
murder, no crime, no police, no law enforcement, no media. But one could
say the same of any of these elements, without which the sniper crisis or the
anthrax scare would not have been the particular events that they were. At
the current historical moment in the United States, acts of terror like those of
the DC snipers are not only acts of crime or violence, but also their remediation in televisual media coverage and programming. Domestic terrorists
today do not exist without expert analyses by professors of psychology or
criminal justice, retired detectives or undercover agents, print and magazine
journalists. Terrorists, too, serve as agents of their own capture and discipline
through their premediation both in the media and by police and other law
enforcement agencies.
4. Scott McClellan’s 2008 tell-all book was only the latest inside evidence of the
Bush administration’s systematic propaganda campaign to mislead Congress,
the media, and the American public into accepting the need to wage war
against Iraq. This kind of propaganda campaign fits into the argument about
lying, as well as about the failure of the media to investigate or challenge the
web of unsubstantiated or misleading assertions that made up the case for
war. But McClellan did not really take up the way in which the war’s premediation prepared the public to accept it when it finally occurred.
5. The competition among cable news networks in the run-up to war was featured in an article in the New York Times, which detailed the war’s premediation without using the term:
Recalling how CNN made its name during the gulf war, each channel is
trying to distinguish itself and outdo its rivals. And because cable news
success often seems to rest as much on the presentation of the programs
as the journalism itself, executives are looking for different production
twists to enhance their war, and prewar, coverage. As a result, the reports
are taking on a hypercharged tone as the cable networks try to persuade
viewers ahead of time that they are the ones to watch should war break
out. But even as these news executives conceded that competition had
electrified their presentations, they took pains to emphasize that they
were covering the story with appropriate gravity, not to mention significant resources.
(Rutenberg, 2003)
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160
6. In February 1992 Paul Wolfowitz published a report with Scooter Libby that
outlined the justification for pre-emptive warfare. The confidential report
was leaked to the New York Times (Tyler, 1992).
7. One example of an early 1990s cinematic premediation is Wim Wenders’
Until the End of the World (1991) which, like Strange Days, is set in the closing days of 1999. Also like Strange Days, Until the End of the World imagines
a technology that captures neurological perceptions and transmits them
from one person to another – in this case, recording audio-visual impressions for a blind woman or recording dreams for broadcast on a television
monitor or video screen.
8. The idea of pre-emptive warfare has as its counterpart the domestic practice
of “preventive prosecution” of terrorists, which is now the official policy
of the US government. Like pre-emptive warfare, preventive prosecution
aims to stop acts of domestic terror before they happen. For a trenchant
discussion of the legal and policy issues entailed in this policy, see Chesney,
2007.
9. Interestingly, the website for the Weather Channel in the United States now
offers on its interactive radar screen the option of looping not only the past
few hours of Doppler images but also a few hours of “future” images as well,
in a digital format identical to its remediation of the past.
10. For interesting and important discussions of the politics of information
networks, the essays by Rogers, Noortje Marres, and Greg Elmer (in Rogers,
2000). See also (Elmer, 2004, and Rogers, 2004).
11. Similarly, just as one can only move within a video game according to the
game’s algorithms, there is a mathematically infinite number of ways in
which a particular game can be played – including choosing to play to lose
or for other ends than the game establishes (like making a machinima film)
or just to hang out or spend one’s time stealing cars and randomly killing
people (as in games like the Grand Theft Auto series).
12. This latter sense of premediation manifests itself in different medial formations at different historical moments, but it also participates in or persists more trans-historically as part of the more general human and social
ongoingness into the future, what Thrift, following Virno, characterizes as
“forethought” (Thrift, 2007, pp. 37–8).
13. This “media mobilization” required “vast logistical planning of its own,
[and] involve[d] at least 500 reporters, photographers and television crew
members – about 100 of them from foreign and international news organizations, including the Arab network Al Jazeera” (Blumenthal and Rutenberg,
2003).
14. Here I am indebted to Bruno Latour’s concept of “faction,” which refers
to the constructed and produced nature of facts, even while refusing the
extreme position of social constructivism that all facts are only constructions (see, for example, Latour, 1999).
15. Although acknowledging that “the victims’ side of the war was almost completely erased in the process,” Luhmann notes that presenting the victims’
side would have “completely contradicted the picture built up by the media
themselves of what a war should look like” (Luhmann, 2000, pp. 8–9).
16. For an informative account of the evolution of news from a spoken medium
to an electronic one (see Stephens, 1997).
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Notes 161
Notes
17. Indeed, for Luhmann, “Modern society experiences its future in the form of
the risk of deciding” between probable and improbable futures (Luhmann,
1998, pp. 70–1).
18. The relation between past and future is key to the functioning of mass media
in modern society, particularly as they set up what Luhmann describes as “a
horizon of self-generated uncertainty” which has to be serviced with ever
more information:
Mass media increase society’s capacity for irritation and thus also its
ability to produce information. Or, to be more precise: they increase the
complexity of contexts of meaning in which society exposes itself to
irritation through self-produced differences. The capacity for irritation,
it will be remembered, is generated by horizons of expectation which
may provide expectations of normality but which in isolated cases can
be shattered by coincidences, incidents, accidents; or by spots of indeterminacy, which are re-produced as being constantly in need of completion. What is happening in each case is autopoiesis – the reproduction of
communication from outcomes of communication.
For this (as for any) autopoiesis there is neither a goal nor a natural
end. Rather, informative communications are autopoietic elements
which serve the reproduction of just such elements. With each operation, discontinuity, surprise, pleasant or unpleasant disappointment
is reproduced. And the structures which are reproduced in this process
and which tie it to what is known and capable of repetition (otherwise
information could not be recognized as difference) simultaneously
serve its reproduction and are adapted for it in the meanings they hold.
Thus time becomes the dominating distinction of meaning, and in this
dimension the distinction which defines time, starting with the before/
after distinction. The connection between past and future is now nothing but an artificially arranged chronometry – and nothing more than
would be necessary or impossible in terms of its natural essence. The
present – the differential of the two temporal horizons which itself is
neither future nor past – becomes the place where information solidifies and decisions have to be made. But the present is in itself only this
point of change or only the position of the observer distinguishing
future and past. It does not occur within time.
(Luhmann, 2000, pp. 82–3)
Like Virilio, who sees the acceleration of the media technologies of modernity as bringing us to a point of monochrony in which only the present
is visible, Luhman takes the mass media, in their autopoietic reproduction
of communication from outcomes of communication, as producing the present as “the place where information solidifies and decisions have to be
made.” Also like Virilio, Luhman considers the present to be outside of time,
characterizing the present as “only this point of change or only the position
of the observer distinguishing future and past.”
19. Mass media generate such “quasi-objects” as part of their role as the memory
of society. Memory participates in the double temporal orientation of the
mass media towards the past and towards the future: “This double orientation, comprising a memory on the one hand and an open future on the
other, maintains the possibility of oscillating between the two sides of any
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162
distinction” (Luhmann, 2000, p. 101). For Luhmann, memory (along with
its co-occurring double, forgetting) is constantly at work in the mass media.
Luhmann dismisses
the psychologically plausible idea that memory has the task, only needed
occasionally, of recalling past events. Rather, memory is performing a
constantly co-occurring discrimination of forgetting and remembering
that accompanies all observations even as they occur. The main part of
this activity is the forgetting, whereas only exceptionally is something
remembered. For without forgetting, without the freeing up of capacities
for new operations, the system would have no future, let alone opportunities for oscillating from one side to the other of the distinctions used
in each instance. To put it another way: memory functions as a deletion
of traces, as repression and as occasional inhibiting of repression.
(2000, p. 101)
For Luhmann, then, it is precisely this memory function of the mass media
that “produces functions appropriate for the entire social system. Obviously
this social use of the mass media constantly to link past and future is connected to the extremely high expectations of redundancy and variety
which modern society poses and which it must attribute temporally and
take account of via the distinction of past and future” (2000, p. 102).
20. What tips Anderton off to the fact that there has been some manipulation of the evidence is that in looking at what appear to be two different
clips of the same premediated murder, he notices that the ripples on the
water are moving in opposite directions, thus concluding that the films
must have been shot (or rather the precognitions perceived) at different
moments. Anderton’s observation of the ripples in the water lets Spielberg
allude to the opening scene of the movie in which Anderton is looking
at the precognition of an about-to-be-murdered adulterer waiting in the
park outside the townhouse of his lover. In examining the hypermediated
precognition of this murder, Anderton sees a boy in the background first
on one side of the man then on another. He correctly deduces from this
that the boy must be on a merry-go-round, a deduction that helps to locate
the townhouse and thus to prevent the crime. In this scene as well, where
Anderton is interacting with the precognition displayed on the screen at
PreCrime headquarters, he is shown turning a knob back and forth between
two digital freeze frames of the potential victim in the park with the boy
behind him on different sides. The narrative point of this sequence is for
Anderton to locate the townhouse by identifying the park through the presence of its merry-go-round. But the cinematic point that Spielberg means
to make involves a self-conscious reference to early pre-cinematic optical
devices like the zootrope, which took still images and moved them in a circle to create motion.
This attention to the details of the film, whether the direction of the
ripples on the water or the placement of a bystander in the background
of a film, is not unlike the attention paid by viewers of very early cinema,
in which filmgoers watched films not to be absorbed by a transparent,
seamless narrative, but to be astonished by the images captured on film.
More specifically, among the images that early viewers commented on with
some regularity in early cinema were such contingent events as the wind
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Notes 163
164
Notes
3
Affect, Mediality, and Abu Ghraib
1. This is a translation of “Pornographie de la guerre,” which Baudrillard published in Liberation on May 19, 2004, shortly after the release in the media of
the Abu Ghraib photos.
2. Michelle Brown, for example, argues that the “cause” of Abu Ghraib can be
found in the US “prison-industrial complex,” and their “shock value” in the
“apparent patriotic delight of the torturers.” Brown places Abu Ghraib in
the context of American prison practices and cites Amy Kaplan’s claim that
“ ‘homeland security will increasingly depend on proliferating these mobile,
ambiguous spaces between the domestic and foreign’ ” (Brown, 2005, p. 973).
Gregory Hooks and Clayton Mosher (2005) see the abuses at Abu Ghraib as
systematic of a regime of torture practiced by US national security agencies
and embraced and authorized by the Bush Administration. The books on
Abu Ghraib are too numerous to include here. (Some of the major accounts
include Danner, 2004; Hersh, 2004; and Greenberg and Dratel, 2005.)
3. Dora Apel provides a powerful survey and analysis of some of these remediated images in relation to the history of lynching photographs in the
American South (Apel, 2005).
4. Manadel Al-Jamadi was the only murdered prisoner to have been photographed at Abu Ghraib. These images included those widely reproduced ones
with Sabrina Harman and Charles Graner giving the thumbs up signals and
smiling while leaning over Al-Jamadi in his body-bag.
5. Of course the context of Senator Durbin’s experience of the photographs was
very different from that of most Americans, in regard both to the greater
quantity of them he was allowed to see and to the media format in which he
was able to see them. For most of us, the Abu Ghraib photographs were available only through print, televisual, and networked media. But in whatever
media format one accessed these photos, they were made available through
the pervasiveness of digital cameras and networked digital media. It is important, then, to pause for a moment here to rehearse some of the medialogical
implications of networked digital photographs as opposed to instant snapshots like Kodaks or even self-developing pictures like Polaroids. First, digital
cameras make possible a significant increase in magnitude of the number of
pictures able to be taken and stored on memory cards as opposed to a roll of
celluloid film. Second, there is a significant decrease in the cost of taking a
photograph, as memory cards can be downloaded and reused, while each roll
of exposed celluloid film must be developed and new film purchased. Third,
there is a substantive shift in the timeframe involved in the act of photography, as digital photos are available to be seen (or deleted) instantly – continuing what Paul Virilio would call the “dromological” acceleration from
the early days of metal- and glass-plate photography with exceedingly long
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blowing through the leaves of trees and the rhythmic motion of the waves
of the sea. At this most crucial moment in Anderton’s solving of the crime,
Spielberg conflates these two paradigmatic moments of early cinematic contingency in the example of the ripples on the water, which were produced by
a momentary shift in the wind.
6.
7.
8.
9.
exposure times, to the development of snapshots and then Polaroids where
you can watch your picture developed on the spot (Virilio, 1997). Fourth,
there is an increase in technical reproducibility, as digital photos once downloaded can be duplicated nearly infinitely, with little effort or cost or degradation of image; while photographic negatives can also be reproduced, this is
a slow and costly process that has historically been dependent on owning the
original negative. Fifth, there is an order of magnitude increase in distributability, as digital photos can be emailed to hundreds or thousands of people
as attachments, can be posted on websites and made available thereby for
copying or downloading at a click of the mouse. Sixth, there is an expansion
of the potential audience available for a digital photo, a shift in the relationship of the private and public spheres, as photos that once would have been
mainly shown to friends or family can now be distributed across the globe to
strangers in different countries or cultures, or perhaps to the neighbor next
door.
My point in rehearsing these differences between digital and celluloid
photography is not to celebrate or bemoan the heightened powers of new
digital media, but to call attention to the way in which the Abu Ghraib
photographs participated in premediated networks and media formats
that encourage (or at the very least make much more readily available)
the taking and distribution of photographs and videos, that provide the
conditions for photographic or medialogical agency at the present historical moment.
For a brief but powerful account of the continuity of Abu Ghraib with a history of torture and particularly lynching in America (see Carby, 2004).
The connection between the Abu Ghraib photographs and pornography has
been widespread (see, for example, Brison, 2004; Willis, 2005; and Simpson,
2006).
Nicholas Mirzoeff notes that the acts of sexual degradation and abuse depicted
in the photos are primarily sodomistic and Orientalist. As such they worked
more to dehumanize these men for their ethnicity than to present them as
objects of the heterosexual pornographic gaze found in mainstream Internet
pornography. Where lesbian pornographic images are typically found in
straight heterosexual pornography, male on male images like those in the
Abu Ghraib photos are taboo (Mirzoeff, 2006). Jasbir Puar provides a more
extensive and powerful version of this argument, claiming that the “ ‘Abu
Ghraib prisoner sexual torture/abuse scandal’ ... vividly reveals that sexuality constitutes a central and crucial component of the machinic assemblage
that is American patriotism,” what she characterizes as “homonationalism”
(2007, p. 112). According to Puar, “not only is the Muslim body constructed
as pathologically sexually deviant and as potentially homosexual, and thus
read as a particularized object for torture, but the torture itself is constituted
on the body as such .... As the space of ‘illicit and dangerous sex,’ the Orient is
the site of carefully suppressed animalistic, perverse, homo- and hypersexual
instincts” (p. 87).
Baudrillard also sees the photographs to be reflective of America and to be
evidence of the way in which digital images are “definitively integrated into
the war.” But for him it is the pornography of the war itself that the images
reflect (2004).
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Notes 165
Notes
10. Donald Rumsfeld was excoriated for claiming that the real problem at Abu
Ghraib was the fact that every soldier had a digital camera or video recorder.
Politically, of course, such a remark is indefensible; medialogically, however,
Rumsfeld seems to recognize that what made this a matter of public concern
has much to do with the circulation of the photographs themselves.
11. The practice of blaming video games for horrible acts of violence committed
by youth was most evident in the aftermath of the Columbine massacre in
1999.
12. Two things seem to be at stake here: (1) the nature of the United States, i.e.,
what is defined as appropriately American behavior, as within the norms of
what is acceptable for/to Americans, and what should be excluded or ruled
out as inappropriate to America, but rather caused by something else, a few
bad apples, Hollywood/media complex, corrupt Bush administration; and
(2) the nature of the human, i.e., what is acceptable as appropriately human
behavior, and what can/should be excluded or ruled out as inhuman, as
caused by something else, e.g., American government, Bush, Hollywood,
digital media, and so forth. These are both similar to the situation described
by Stanley Cavell in response to Jerry Mander’s theses against television in
the 1970s, i.e., that media are seen as being to blame for the inhumanity of
American culture. But for Cavell, TV only serves to monitor or reveal the evil/
violence/corruption of the human (Cavell, 1982). My argument here is similar to Cavell’s, although I would emphasize (following Bruno Latour’s work
on technical mediation) the delegation of agency to technical/technological
artifacts or nonhumans as marking what it means to be human (Latour,
1994).
13. “By the visual subject I mean a person who is both the agent of sight –
regardless of his or her biological abilities to see – and an object of certain
discourses of visuality” (Mirzoeff, 2006, p. 22).
14. I have in mind here, among other things, the concept of “protocol” developed by Alexander Galloway, which takes seriously the forms of discursive
biopower that are built into our networked digital computers and the ways
in which they interact (Galloway, 2004).
15. In the following chapter I take up these models of distributed cognition as
a way to think about how, like cognition, human affect is distributed across
and among nonhuman artifacts.
16. Of course Foucault is often taken as a key figure in the emergence of “Thing
Theory,” particularly in earlier works like The Order of Things (see Brown,
2001). But discussions of governmentality too often proceed as if Foucault
had left this concern with things behind him, which this crucial passage
demonstrates is far from the truth.
17. Assemblage theory is a theory of social complexity which has a diverse
genealogy. Its proponents include Gilles Deleuze, Manuel De Landa, Bruno
Latour, Nigel Thrift, and others. A cogent definition is offered by Jane
Bennett, who writes:
An assemblage is, first, an ad hoc grouping, a collectivity whose origins are historical and circumstantial, though its contingent status says
nothing about its efficacy, which can be quite strong. An assemblage
is, second, a living, throbbing grouping whose coherence coexists with
energies and countercultures that exceed and confound it. An assemblage
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166
18.
19.
20.
21.
is, third, a web with an uneven topography: some of the points at which
the trajectories of actants cross each other are more heavily trafficked
than others, and thus power is not equally distributed across the assemblage. An assemblage is, fourth, not governed by a central power: no one
member has sufficient competence to fully determine the consequences
of the activities of the assemblage. An assemblage, finally, is made up of
many types of actants: humans and nonhumans; animals, vegetables,
and minerals; nature, culture, and technology.
(Bennett, 2005, p. 445)
Deleuze elaborates on this correspondence in the “Postscript on Control
Societies”:
It’s easy to set up a correspondence between any society and some
kind of machine, which isn’t to say that their machines determine different kinds of society but that they express the social forms capable
of producing them and making use of them. The old sovereign societies worked with simple machines, levers, pulleys, clocks; but recent
disciplinary societies were equipped with thermodynamic machines
presenting the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; control societies function with a third generation of machines,
with information technology and computers, where the passive danger is noise, and the active, piracy and viral communication.
(Deleuze, 1995a, p. 180)
In both passages Deleuze is careful to emphasize that this relationship is
not one of technological determinism; but his model of social expression
runs the risk of substituting a social or cultural determinism for a technological one.
Diane Rubenstein reviews two 1999 books on governmentality; she sees
these books as describing aptly the ways in which governmentality operates in post-9/11 America (which she calls, in the heat of late 2002, Bush/
Ashcroft’s America). Rubenstein underscores Nikolas Rose’s contention
that “Governing takes place in ‘multitudes of encounters ... prisons, clinics, schoolrooms and bedrooms, factories and offices, airports and military
organizations, the marketplace and shopping mall, sexual relations and
much more’ (2003, p. 5).”
Nigel Thrift usefully summarizes “five schools of thought about affect that
populate modern social thought”: Darwinian “affect program theory”;
“the James-Lange theory”; the Sylvan Tomkins school; the school of Gilles
Deleuze; and the “psychosocial” school (Thrift, 2007, pp. 223–5). Jonathan
Flatley offers an affective glossary that helps to distinguish between different ways of understanding affect; Flatley distinguishes between affect, emotion, mood (stimmung), and structure of feeling (Flatley, 2008, pp. 11–27).
Clare Hemmings criticizes Sedgwick and Massumi for invoking affect as
something like a magical bullet for all that ails cultural theory. Aligning
them, but playing them off against Tomkins and Deleuze, respectively,
Hemmings criticizes “the contemporary fascination with affect as outside social meaning, as providing a break in both the social and in critics’
engagements with the nature of the social” (Hemmings, 2005, p. 565). This
critique is more accurate, I would contend, for Massumi than for Sedgwick –
both of whom Hemmings takes to task for overlooking “theory written
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Notes 167
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
Notes
from the margins” (Hemmings, 2005, p. 558). Although I do not agree with
many of the specific points she makes, I do concur with her sense that the
autonomy of affect, especially in Massumi, often takes on a kind of magical
or mystical force. My interest here is not to celebrate affect or affect theory,
but to call our attention to the ways in which affect and media interact in
governmentality after 9/11.
Of course this is not to say that earlier media forms did not concern themselves with modulating affect. Indeed, Derrida’s essay “Economimesis”
argues precisely that mimesis is less a matter of representational fidelity than it is of intersubjective reproducibility. In my earlier book on the
American national parks, I take up the nineteenth-century formation of
representationality in a chapter on fidelity to nature in relation to the creation of Yellowstone National Park. My argument is that representational
fidelity to nature is not only about formal mimetic accuracy of representation but also about the intersubjective reproduction of the feeling produced
by a particular natural landscape or location (Grusin, 2004).
In this interview, as throughout much of his work, Massumi tends to skip
over the intermediary role played in this process by particular media forms
and practices. In the following chapter I take up in greater detail my differences with Massumi on this point.
Butler is not entirely explicit about the dependence of a resurgent sovereignty on the discursive technologies of the regime of governmentality
which supplanted both surveillance and sovereignty. Wendy Brown provides a more worked out account of the relation between sovereignty, discipline, governmentality, and historicity (Brown, 2006).
See, especially, “The Autonomy of Affect” (Massumi, 2002).
William James’s insistence on the bodily production of affect or emotion has
becomes something of a touchstone for affect theorists (James, 1890). Some
examples of James’s appropriation include Silvan Tomkins, who cites James
in insisting that individual affects have distinct bodily and facial manifestations (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995); Deleuze, who deploys James’s theory of
emotion to describe T. E. Lawrence’s shame at having an erection in the
midst of being tortured (Deleuze, 1997); Massumi, who provides an extended
and very useful gloss on James’s theory of the bodily basis of affect in relation to the experience of fear (Massumi, 2005); Nigel Thrift, who includes
the James-Lange theory as one of the five main forms of affect theory in the
social sciences (Thrift, 2007); and Jonathan Flatley, for whom James helps
explain the difference between affect and emotion (Flatley, 2008).
This site is no longer available on the Internet, even on the Wayback
Machine site, which provides only the message that the domain name is
for sale.
When Brian De Palma sought to end his 2007 film Redacted with a photomontage of such photographs of wounded, dead, and fragmented Iraqi bodies, Magnolia Pictures, the film’s US distributor, forced him to conceal the
faces of these bodies, ostensibly to protect the company from lawsuits.
Perhaps for that reason, the US Army decided not to pursue disciplinary
charges against soldiers who had posted on the site. But on 7 October 2005,
Wilson was arrested in his home in Lakeland, Florida, by Polk county sheriff’s deputies on charges of obscenity – not for the photos of Iraqi dead but
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168
for the sexually explicit photos on the site. Four days later he was released
on bail. On 16 December 2005, Wilson’s bail was revoked and he was
returned to jail because he had continued to operate the Web site while
out on bail. On 13 January of the following year, Wilson pleaded guilty to
five misdemeanor obscenity charges in exchange for the state of Florida
agreeing to drop its felony charge against him as well as the remaining 295
obscenity counts. Wilson also agreed not to work on any adult Web sites for
the next five years and to shut down his site within 90 days, after which he
turned over the URL to the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, which now hosts
the site with a message warning against using the Internet for pornographic
purposes. Wilson has not completely disappeared, however. On 31 March
2006 he opened a short-lived site called barbecuestopper.com, which followed the same bulletin board format as NTFU. After a time as the purveyor
of the Liberal Blogger, a site that, from the statistical evidence provided,
has failed to find its audience, Wilson now hosts the site “Documenting
Reality,” which follows the online forum format of NTFU and explicitly
links itself to NTFU in the heading on its home page, “Documenting the
Strange, Bizarre, and Unusual Formerly NTFU.”
30. Nicholas Mirzoeff reads the Abu Ghraib photographs in relation to a long
historical tradition of sodomitic and Orientalist constructions of the body
of the other in service of the hegemony of the Imperial body. This account
is not unpersuasive, and it helps to unpack the similarities between different practices and discourse of power inequalities that have to do with
alterity or otherness in racial, ethnic, or gendered terms. Medialogically,
however, the Abu Ghraib photographs do not function in the same way
as pornographic images do in regard to what he himself names “the visual
subject” (Mirzoeff, 2006).
31. Jose van Dijck has discussed the various ways in which our memories are
distributed across media artifacts and practices (2007).
32. Teresa Brennan takes up the various ways in which affective and emotional
energies can be distributed among individuals and groups of people. What
I am interested in here, and which I take up in much greater length in the
following chapter, is the way in which humans increasingly transmit or distribute their affect to and through their media and other technical artifacts
(Brennan, 2004).
4 The Affective Life of Media
1. In characterizing our current historical moment as entailing a digital cinema of interactions, I mean to suggest that cinema, like other media, are
distributed among an already premediated world, inseparable from and distributed among a network of prior digital remediations. Our interactions
with audiovisual media have moved increasingly from the theatrical space
of performance and exhibition to domestic or mobile media spaces. The
Internet, social networking, and mobile communication devices have now
brought media not only into the space of the home but also into the bodily
spaces of everyday life. As TV has been doing for half a century or so, the
networked PC, video-game console, DVD player, and personal computing
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Notes 169
devices have brought virtually all of our media into domestic and mobile
personal space, making our interactions with media much more numerous,
frequent, interconnected, and complex. TV and other networked media have
redefined public, collective space in such a way that it is no longer marked
chiefly by the co-presence of bodies in the same physical space but by the
distribution of bodies across networked space. This distributed media formation demands that we recognize that there is today almost no sense of a
medium that exists in itself, but rather only media that exist in relation to
or in collaboration with other media. TV, video games, the Internet, or film
are media assemblages – networks or systems of technologies, practices, and
social formations, which are generally stable for the most part, but which in
the process of circulation and exchange tend to fluctuate or perhaps overlap
at various nodes or crossings. In everyday usage we often tend to identify
these media with their audiovisual manifestations on different screens (film,
computer, or TV), but we know that at the current historical moment these
screens are not technologically limited to the display of particular media, but
can each be used to display any of these three media. TV or the Internet can
be projected on cinema screens by digital projectors. We can watch movies
or surf the Internet on a TV screen. Personal computers let us watch TV and
movies on our monitors with relative ease. PDAs, portable music players, and
mobile phones are now able to display content from cinema, TV, and the
Internet. Media now operate as heterogeneous, dynamic assemblages made
up of various technical, social, aesthetic, economic, or political elements that
coalesce, and then regroup, in changing but relatively stable formations.
2. Take, for example, the historic US Presidential campaign of 2008 – both campaigns existed only as they were remediated and premediated across a complex network of media forms and practices, including print, televisual, and
Internet news and political advertisements, left- and right-wing blogs, and
robust candidate websites employing (especially Obama’s) the latest in social
networking software. It would be impossible to distinguish where either campaign ended and its mediation began. After his election, Obama continued
to employ many of the same media strategies used in the 2008 campaign.
Perhaps most interesting was the creation of the Office of the President Elect,
which governed the transitional period between Obama’s election and his
inauguration through a strategy of premediating an Obama presidency even
while insisting that “We only have one president at a time.”
3. By media everyday I mean something like what Arjun Appadurai means by
the term “mediascape” (Appadurai, 1996), or what Michel de Certeau means
by practices of everyday life, but with an emphasis on the agency of media,
on our daily, everyday interaction with particular media forms, practices,
and artifacts (de Certeau, 1984). “Media everyday” refers both to the allday, everyday global “media-logue” circulating among print, broadcast, and
Internet media, and also to the way in which our everyday experience is
now increasingly a media experience, the way multiple, networked media
practices are the fabric of our everyday lives. These two phenomena – that
our media are every-daily and that our everyday is interwoven with media –
together help both to frame a kind of public discourse and to modulate collective affective states or moods, to shape or enable both individual discourse
and forms of individual affect, the affective life of our media everyday.
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170 Notes
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
In thinking of the media everyday as the 24-7 hypermediated environment
within which we live, I am not claiming that media make up a coherent,
undifferentiated “environment.” Rather I want to look at the ways in which
particular media forms, technologies, and practices interact in the US in the
decade after 9/11.
Barry Richards provides a more managerial perspective on the media everyday (Richards, 2007). He delineates three levels of emotional regulation:
everyday life, institutions, and communications. Where Richards defines
everyday life as “deep culture” – thereby eliding or ignoring the material
artifacts of everyday life and their role in affective or emotional regulation
or governance – I take everyday life as including not only these deep cultural
habits and rituals and practices but also their manifestation or instantiation
in technical artifacts and our interactions with them. Richards understands
emotional regulation in the practice of “emotional governance,” which has
some affinities with my notion of “governmentality,” though from a different framework, from within governance, thinking of how governance (leadership) might best work.
In particular the chapter by Varnelis and Anne Friedberg, “Place: The
Networking of Public Space,” provides an excellent account of the ways in
which physical proximity and networked proximity are increasingly incommensurable in today’s society. One of their best and most familiar examples
is that of the experience of sitting in a café next to many other people, each
of whom is connected via their laptops and other mobile devices with people
and places located in a geographical elsewhere (Varnelis, 2008).
As I argue later in the chapter, these interactions produce affective relations
with the media themselves, as our faces glow with delight as we talk to an
absent loved one on a mobile phone, or as we react (or don’t) to our avatar’s
activity in a video game, or concentrate intently on a digital video editing
program.
If, as Steve Shaviro’s brilliant account of Whitehead maintains, all experience is aesthetic or affective, then our relationship with our media are by
definition aesthetic, but also are of interest in that they serve to emblematize
or make evident to us the aesthetic character of all experience. That is, our
media interactions in some sense double or externalize our embodied relations with experience more generally in both revealing how that experience
is based on sensation and in constituting a particular aestheticized, materialized, networked form of this experience. Shaviro cites Deleuze making a
related point about Kant’s aesthetic as having two meanings, one in the transcendental aesthetic to provide an account of sensation and experience and
another to account for particular forms of aesthetic judgment like sublimity
and beauty (Shaviro, 2009).
Similarly, as I argue later in this chapter, our affective lives have been distributed across a network of different media technologies and aesthetic practices,
as we interact not only with other people but also with the artifacts of our
media everyday.
Bernard Stiegler also argues for the co-evolution of humans and technology
in the first two volumes of his Technics and Time trilogy (Stiegler, 1998 and
2008). I take up Stiegler’s idea of the co-evolution of humanity and technics
in the final chapter.
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Notes 171
Notes
9. Part of the force of Stern’s argument is that our affective identities form a
much more constant element of our self than, say, our cognitive or social
identities. Nonetheless, if we think historically and collectively, it seems
definitely to be the case that affectivity, like cognition, co-evolves with
technology and culture.
10. Sedgwick was especially influential in introducing a Tomkinsian approach
to affectivity to the humanities, particularly literary studies, both as
co-editor of the Tomkins reader and as critic and affect theorist (Sedgwick
and Frank, 1995).
11. Sedgwick and Frank explain: “some momentum of modernity (call it
monotheism? call it the Reformation? call it capitalist rationalization?) has
so evacuated the conceptual space between two and infinity that it may
require the inertial friction of a biologism to even suggest the possibility of
reinhabiting that space.” I would concur with Sedgwick and Frank’s insistence that in appealing to the biological or the natural they are not “minimizing the continuing history of racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise
abusive biologisms, or the urgency of their exposure, that has made the
gravamen of so many contemporary projects of critique.” Nonetheless,
they worry (and I concur with this as well) that “the installation of an
automatic anti-biologism as the unshifting central tenet of ‘theory’ ” has
brought about a “loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm, the
analogic realm of finitely many (n>2) values. Access to this realm is important for, among other things, enabling a political vision of difference that
might resist both binary homogenization and infinitizing trivialization”
(Sedgwick and Frank, 2005, p. 15). In other words, Sedgwick and Frank
are concerned that the anti-essentialism of many contemporary theoretical critiques works against the politics of difference that it would seek to
advocate.
12. Rather, the affect system interacts with these and other human systems in
the course of pursuing goals or intentions, what Tomkins calls Images, and
in pursuing what he characterizes as the four General Images that he claims
are almost universally developed by human beings: “(1) Positive affect
should be maximized; (2) Negative affect should be minimized; (3) Affect
inhibition should be minimized; (4) Power to maximize positive affect, to
minimize negative affect, to minimize affect inhibition should be maximized” (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995, p. 67).
13. Brian Massumi offers one of the strongest accounts of the autonomy of affect
in his essay of that name. My thinking about affect owes a great deal to
Massumi’s work, although my focus differs from his in productive ways. For
further discussion of Massumi’s concept of affect, see the previous chapter
(Massumi, 2002).
14. The prevalence of Internet pornography, for example, encourages masturbatory feedback loops, as audiovisual media produce haptic and emotional
erotic feelings that then lead eye/hand/body to seek additional affect to
alter or modify or increase or climax those feelings. Interestingly, there is a
satiety built into (particularly male) sexuality that may or may not be built
into TV watching or video games or computer/net surfing. Increasingly
we encounter more and more interfaces that involve various parts of our
body. The twenty-first-century car, for example, increasingly functions as
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15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
an interface to communication as well as transportation. And the Nintendo
Wii has turned the whole body into an interface with such games as Wii
golf or baseball, as, too, has the arcade game turned home console game
Dance, Dance Revolution.
The New York Times Magazine published a piece showing images from Robbie
Cooper’s videos of the faces of children playing video games, videos taken
from a camera placed within the TV monitors on which the games were
displayed (the videos themselves are available online at nytimes.com:
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/11/21/magazine/1194833565213/
immersion.html?scp=1&sq=robbie%20cooper&st=cse). The piece quotes
Cooper, who says: “It’s fascinating that a world that’s purely visual can have
a physical effect.” Cooper gets it both right and wrong in this quote – right
in that video games have physical, bodily effects, but wrong in imagining
that these effects are purely visual (Cooper, 2008).
Laura Marks makes a similar argument (Marks, 2002). Mark Paterson also
offers an interesting treatment of the relations among touch, affects, and
technologies (Paterson, 2007).
This is a recurring theme in Benjamin’s work, developed most fully and
famously in the various versions of the “Artwork” essay (Benjamin, 1936;
Benjamin, 1939) and in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (Benjamin, 1940a).
Miriam Hansen provides probably the best discussion of the significance of
the differences among Benjamin’s three different versions of the essay that
has become known most widely in English as “The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction” (Hansen, 2004).
Jonathan Flatley makes a similar connection in Affective Mapping (Flately,
2008). I am especially indebted to him for numerous discussions concerning Stern, Benjamin, and other topics related to the arguments in this
chapter.
Zygmunt Bauman is arguably the most prominent advocate of what he calls
“Liquid Modernity,” which he distinguishes from the more industrial, solid,
material modernity of Benjamin’s time (Bauman, 2000). While Bauman is
clearly right to want to distinguish between the modernity of the digital age
and that of the industrial age, his account of the present (and of the past)
too often tends to homogenize what are often heterogeneous and complex
social formations.
Although poker tournaments on TV preceded 9/11, like premediation did,
they intensified in popularity after 2002 – partly due to first use of the
“pocket cam” in the United States in 2002. In some sense related to what
DeLillo describes in Falling Man, there is something about televised poker
tournaments that seems to speak to the post-9/11 cultural mood.
This is but one instance in a larger body of research on video games and
emotion that has been developing over the past decade. My aim in this
chapter is not to take up this research in detail. Rather I cite this example
both because of Picard’s major position in the development of affective
computing and because it is an emblematic instance of one of the ways in
which the affective life of media works.
The materiality of information has been an abiding concern of N. Katherine
Hayles. Her fullest treatment of the relationship between materiality and
information can be found in How We Became Posthuman (Hayles, 1999).
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Notes 173
Notes
23. In Spook Country, William Gibson’s second post-cyberpunk novel, a recurring idea is that cyberspace has “everted,” turned inside out, so that rather
than constituting a digitally networked world elsewhere, cyberspace has
become the material world of our media everyday (Gibson, 2007). Pattern
Recognition, too, introduces this notion in laying out a world of premediated
cool-hunting and viral marketing (Gibson, 2003).
24. In an intriguing essay called “Mediators,” Deleuze proclaims:
Mediators are fundamental. Creation’s all about mediators. Without
them nothing happens. They can be people – for a philosopher, artists
or scientists; for a scientist, philosophers or artists – but things too, even
plants or animals, as in Castaneda. Whether they’re real or imaginary,
animate or inanimate, you have to form your mediators. It’s a series.
If you’re not in some series, even a completely imaginary one, you’re
lost. I need my mediators to express myself, and they’d never express
themselves without me; you’re always working in a group, even when
you seem to be on your own. And still more when it’s apparent: Felix
Guattari and I are one another’s mediators.
(Deleuze, 1995b, p. 125)
The Deleuzean concept of mediators is worked out in much greater detail
over a series of works by Bruno Latour, whose ideas of mediation and translation have been central to the development of my own thinking and writing
about new media for more than a decade. The brilliance of Latour’s concepts
lies in his radical refusal to separate human from nonhuman mediation,
a refusal which Deleuze, too, seems to subscribe to in the passage above.
Deleuze’s theorization is much more fluid and inconsistent than Latour’s.
Deleuze, like his translator and interpreter Brian Massumi and many selfdescribed Deleuzeans, often tends to elide the particularity of mediation
in ways that someone like Latour rarely does. For a critique of this line of
thought in Deleuze and Guattari (see Hansen, 2000). Throughout my treatment of affectivity and mediation, I am trying on the one hand to avoid a
specific one-on-one notion of affective media interaction and on the other
hand to avoid a model of total, undifferentiated medial and affective flow.
5
The Anticipation of Security
1. In critical security studies, “securitization” has a technical meaning, related
to the mainly discursive processes through which some issues come to be
regarded as security issues. My use of the term is more general, related to
the concept of security spelled out by Foucault in the lectures on security
and governmentality. For a good example of recent work in security studies
(see Huysmans, 2006). Thanks to Marieke de Goede for directing me to the
important literature in critical security studies.
2. Indeed, connecting the dots cannot by itself prevent terrorism. In the case
of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, for example, US intelligence had connected
the dots sufficiently to communicate its suspicions of such an attack to the
Indian government a month earlier. Security expertise notwithstanding,
the ability to connect the dots does not guarantee the ability to identify and
prevent acts of terror.
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3. Mobile social networking refers to the extension of social networking technologies to mobile media so that (ideally) wherever you go you are interacting
both with your “local,” physical environment and your socially networked
environment. So, for example, if you go into a bar or a museum, you are
able to see if anyone in your environment is in your social network and who
they are (with appropriate privacy settings available). Social networks would
become completely mobile. Here premediation takes the form of a business
model for mobile social networking which markets a relation with our media
that helps to implement the current post-9/11 security regime. Securitization
works here to encourage fun, inexpensive, and easy mobile media transactions that are recorded and potentially able to help security agencies to “connect the dots” – find patterns that could prevent future acts of terrorism in
the United States or against US interests. Giuseppe Lugano provides a useful
summary of mobile social networking in an interesting article which reports
on a study of 18 young adults in Finland (Lugano, 2008).
4. All of these new technical and business models operate according to what
Alexander Galloway identifies as “protocol” in a society of control. The establishment of premediated protocols by the technical and business communities makes possible these, and other, formations of mobile social networking
(Galloway, 2004). Galloway develops this idea further in collaboration with
Eugene Thacker (Galloway and Thacker, 2007).
5. David Huron discusses the role of anticipation and expectation in music.
Huron cites, among other affect-oriented scientists, Antonio Damasio and
Joseph LeDoux, in arguing that expectation is a key affect in the appreciation
of music. Huron cites psychologist George Mandler in support of his claim
that the “primary affect” is “prediction response,” which is our response to
an event as either what we expected or predicted or as some sort of surprise
or unexpected outcome (Huron, 2006, pp. 12–13). Interestingly for my argument here, is Huron’s contention that the facial expressions of surprise are
seen to be identical to those of horror (Huron, 2006, pp. 25–6).
6. Jasbir Puar characterizes her project as participating in what I have been
describing throughout this book as premediation.
This project is thus profoundly impelled by an anticipatory temporality,
a modality that seeks to catch a small hold of many futures, to invite
futurity even as it refuses to script it, distinct from an anticipatory “paranoid temporality” that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick critiques. Sedgwick writes
of paranoia, “No time could be too early for one’s having-already-known,
for its having-already-been-inevitable, that something bad would happen. And no loss could be too far in the future to need to be preemptively
discounted.” Paranoid temporality is thus embedded in a risk economy
that attempts to ensure against future catastrophe. This is a temporality of negative exuberance – for we are never safe enough, never healthy
enough, never prepared enough – driven by imitation (repetition of the
same or in the service of maintaining the same) rather than innovation
(openness to disruption of the same, calling out the new).
A paranoid temporality therefore produces a suppression of critical creative politics; in contrast, the anticipatory temporalities that I advocate
more accurately reflect a Spivakian notion of “politics of the open end,”
of positively enticing unknowable political futures into our wake, taking
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Notes 175
Notes
risks rather than guarding against them. In that sense it is also ensconced
in an antedating temporality, an example of which is as follows: “The
runner’s belief that he consciously heard the gun and then, immediately,
exploded off the blocks is an illusion made possible ... because the mind
antedates the sound of the gun by almost half a second.” This book is an
attempt at antedating the sound of the gun, that is, not only or primarily
anticipating the future, but also recording the future that is already here,
yet unknown but for a split second.
(Puar, 2007, pp. xix–xx)
The critical project that Puar describes is a project of premediation, an
attempt to “catch a small hold of many futures, to invite futurity even as
it refuses to script it.” In glossing Sedgwick’s anticipatory paranoid temporality as attempting to ensure against future catastrophe, Puar helps to clarify the difference between premediation and prevention. Her invocation of
the “missing half-second” introduces what Massumi characterizes as the
autonomy of affect, and helps to connect her project to premediation in
yet another way (Massumi, 2002). What premediation strives for is not to
prevent future catastrophes but to prevent those catastrophes from having
been unanticipated to protect us from being caught unawares and shocked
by future catastrophes as we were on 9/11 – to antedate the sound of the gun.
Although Puar does not concern herself very often with questions of media
and mediation (with a notable exception being her superb analysis of the
erotics of digital photography in Abu Ghraib, which I discuss in the third
chapter), her description of her methodology interestingly portrays a project
that participates in the logic of premediation that this book sets forth.
7. Benjamin also talks about the temporality of daily newspapers, which present information in the present as the present, cut off from past or future.
His (and Kracauer’s) interest in the medium of the illustrated newspaper
provides an account of the ways that modernity produced a stream of experiences that exist for themselves and in the present, whose reference to the
past is contingent and non-determinative. In today’s news media we find a
similar phenomenon but oriented as much towards the future as towards
the past. The temporality that is paradigmatic of our moment is one in
which the affective anticipation produced by the news refers to the present moment almost as if it was structurally independent from the moment
that preceded it even as it anticipates the moment that will follow. So, for
example, in the weeks leading up to the election of the first democratic government in Iraq in January 2005, the news media in the US emphasized the
potential dangers in Iraq, the threats, deaths, or terrorism that could result
from these elections. But when the elections happened, and there seemed
to be no tremendous increases in violence or terror, and the Iraqi people
turned out to vote in large numbers, the media almost immediately shifted
its tone to report on the elections as good news – a victory for the US agenda
to spread democracy to Iraq. While one might criticize the media’s quick
transformation, its willingness to spin the story counter to the news of the
previous days or weeks or even months, it is more to the point to see this
instead as the temporality of a premediated news format in which the news
is presented as a way to anticipate the future, whether it turns out as it had
been premediated or not.
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8. For a series of speculative essays on locative media and mobile social
networking, see “Space is the Place!” an issue of the online receiver magazine; Vodafone, 2008. Sponsored by British IT giant Vodafone, receiver is
described on its website as follows: “Vodafone’s receiver portal is an exciting
place at the intersection of communication technologies, pioneer thinking
and digital playfulness. Come in and explore!” Since its first issue in 2000,
receiver has featured contributions by many new media theorists, practitioners, and researchers, although as the journal’s self-description indicates, the
essays tend to be more speculative and enthusiastic than critical or analytical. Nonetheless, the pieces on locative media provide a good introduction
to some of the possibilities envisioned for these new mobile social networking technologies at the end of 2008.
9. Andy Clark’s description of humans as natural-born cyborgs also addresses
this co-evolution, but Clark’s cognitive focus participates in the privileging
of language that I have been challenging here (Clark, 2003).
10. Hansen borrows this concept from the chapter of the same name in Stiegler’s
Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation (Stiegler, 2008, pp. 97–18). Published in
France in 1996, this second volume of Stiegler’s trilogy presents a view of
media temporality in line with Virilio’s notion of “real time,” which I discuss
earlier in the book (Virilio, 1997). Although Stiegler deploys a Heideggerian
notion of “anticipation” in his work, his (and Heidegger’s) anchoring of
the temporality of anticipation to the awareness of the inescapability of
impending death is different from my sense that the affectivity of anticipation at our present moment has more to do with trying to escape the repetition of shock or surprise epitomized by the mediality of the event of 9/11.
A fuller discussion of Stiegler’s or Heidegger’s philosophical conception of
anticipation, while undoubtedly worth pursuing, is beyond the scope of
this work.
11. This is only, I think, necessary if we see the agency of the contemporary
conscious industry as other from our individual agency, as providing a totalizing media environment, rather than seeing that our media environment,
our lived consciousness, is already heterogeneous, made up of individually
controlled media artifacts interacting in all sorts of non-determinative ways
with media artifacts furnished by the consciousness industry. If we resist
homogenizing and making other the current media formations, and see
them not simply as top-down but as emergent, from the bottom up, we don’t
need to provide some kind of critical agency for individual digital media
interventions, which then gets us out of the problem of possibly imagining
digital media as sources of radical breaks or liberation. My problem with this
objection is that it wants to make a categorical distinction between mediated memories and unmediated memories, or personal consciousness and
collective or mediated consciousness. For if we see “contemporary culture
industries” not as sources of ideological power/oppression/control, but as
the most current way in which culture has always co-evolved with human
bodies and with technics, then what is the problem with this?
12. In this paragraph, as indeed throughout, I am sympathetic to the ontology
and metaphysics of Bruno Latour. This paragraph is particularly indebted
to the account of Latour provided by Graham Harman in Prince of Networks
(Harman, 2009).
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Notes 177
13. Forethought, Thrift writes, is “a vital performative element of situations,
one which cannot only produce its own intelligibilities but which can be
trained to produce ideas .... But now the intention is to read and exploit
signs of invention by regarding the body as a mine of potentiality and to
generate and harness unpredictable interactions as a source of value by
regarding space as more than a map. The automaticity of intuition can
then be enrolled to produce better outcomes: it becomes a fund of expertise” (Thrift, 2007, p. 37). In this sense the pre-cognitives of Minority Report
and indeed the entire PreCrime system can be seen as emblematic of this
production of forethought, harnessed not only to capitalism but also to
juridicality. “Persons are to be trained to ‘unthinkingly’ conjure up more
and better things, both at work and as consumers, by drawing on a certain
kind of neuro-aesthetic which works on the myriad small periods of time
that are relevant to the structure of forethought and the ways that human
bodies routinely mobilize them to obtain results ... to produce more of the
kind of ideas that seem to just turn up, which, in reality, are thoughts that
we are forever prevented from becoming directly aware of” (Thrift, 2007,
p. 37). This can easily be seen as describing what the precogs are doing, a
kind of collective neuro-aesthetic production of innovation or creativity,
in which unconsciousness becomes produced/maintained as a more or less
permanent or constant state of mind rather than something that works sub
rosa or sporadically or intermittently or mixed with consciousness. And as
such it points to the way in which we are, in a world of premediation, all
pre-cognitives.
14. If anything, the problem of politics takes the form of something like the Free
Software movement, in which preformatted cultural memories or media
technologies are modified recursively according to collective principles and
needs, what Christopher Kelty calls a “recursive public” (Kelty, 2008).
Conclusion
1. Raymond Williams coined the concept “structure of feeling,” as Jonathan
Flatley reminds us, not only because “structure of feeling” “enables us to
talk about the sociality of affect, but because it enables us to describe those
structures that mediate between the social and the personal that are more
ephemeral and transitory than set ideologies or institutions” (Williams,
1977; Flatley, 2008, pp. 24–7). “Premediation” in one sense functions as
such an ephemeral and transitory structure, mediating between individual
and collective affect, and in another sense could be seen to describe one of
the strategies or frameworks such structures of feeling employ in mediating
“between the social and the personal.” In either sense, it is clear that at the
present moment changes in structures of feeling invariably manifest themselves through our print, televisual, and networked media.
2. Bernanke’s characterization of Wall Street as an “abstraction” operates
upon fundamental binary oppositions that go back to the earliest moves
of modernity: abstract vs. concrete, idealism vs. materialism, imaginary vs.
real, mind vs. body, and so forth. The very financial practices that have
inflated the current economic bubble and that now threaten to throw the
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178 Notes
United States and perhaps the world into a recession stand as the refutation
of these oppositions. While critics of these financial practices often point
out, for example, that the problem with the buying and selling of derivatives stems from the fact that such mortgages appear to have lost their
connection to real properties, these criticisms resort to the same dualistic metaphysics underlying Bernanke’s characterization of Wall Street as an
“abstraction.”
3. Read again Jane Bennett, quoted in Chapter 3 note 18.
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Notes 179
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———. (2004) State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
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———. (1939) “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”
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180
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7/7/05 9, 18, 23, 123
9/11 Truth Movement 22–3
9/11/2001 1–4, 6–7, 8–37, 38–45,
47–8, 50–4, 56–8, 62–3, 76, 97,
103, 105–11, 115, 118–20, 123–6,
127–8, 134, 141, 143, 146, 151,
153, 155, 156n2, 156n4, 158n16,
167n19, 168n21, 171n3, 173n20,
175n3, 176n6, 177n10
post- 1, 10, 13, 15, 18, 24, 30,
40, 41–2, 47, 54, 58, 63, 97, 103,
106–7, 120, 123–5, 134, 141,
156n2, 167n19, 173n20, 175n3
Abu Ghraib 1, 7, 23, 47, 65, 66, 68,
69, 70, 77, 83, 85, 87, 88, 89, 90,
122–3, 157n8, 164n2
photographs 4, 62–72, 76,
77, 78, 81–2, 84, 88, 89, 122,
164n4, 164–5n5, 165n6, 165n7,
165n8, 165–6n9, 166n10, 169n30,
176n6
torture 62–3, 66, 67–8, 83
Adorno, Theodor 136, 137
affect 78–81, 88–9, 97–9, 147
anticipatory 109, 120, 126,
128–31, 140–2, 177n10
attunement 95–7, 105, 119
autonomy of 78, 81, 99, 172n13
cross-modal 94–6
distribution of 87, 88–90, 94, 111,
115–18, 120–1, 125, 128
feedback loops 3–4, 90, 96–106,
110–13, 116–17, 125–6, 132
mediators 118–20, 125–6
modulation 79–80, 95, 99,
118–20, 147–8
negative theory 109–10
theory 6–7, 118, 167n20, 168n21,
168n26
transmission of 88–9, 116, 169n32
vitality 95, 105
affective computing 111–15
affective labor 76
affective life of media 90–121
passim, 95, 118, 138
affectivity 4, 6–7, 18, 24–5, 48,
65–6, 72, 77–82, 85, 88–9, 101,
111, 113, 117–18, 120–1, 125–6,
128, 130, 132–3, 137–8, 140–2,
153, 172n9, 172n10, 174n24,
177n10
Afghanistan 10, 65
Agamben, Giorgio 23, 131–3
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud 152
Al-Jamadi, Manadel 66, 164n4
Al Jazeera 11, 44, 152, 161n13
Alfred P. Murrah Building 34
Amoore, Louise 122–5, 131
anthrax attacks 41–2, 159n2, 160n3
anticipation 109, 120, 126, 128–34,
136–7, 139–42, 154–5, 175n5,
175n6, 177n10
cinephilia of 133
mediaphilia of 133–4
of security 139–40, 142
anticipatory gesture 129–34, 140
Apel, Dora 164n3
Appadurai, Arjun 170n3
Armageddon 14
assemblage 5, 40, 56, 72, 75, 90,
100, 103, 107, 111, 118, 120,
125–6, 133–4, 140, 150–1, 165n8,
166–7n17, 170n1
Auschwitz 26–7
autopoiesis 35, 51–7, 94, 140–1,
162n18
l’avenir 13, 157n7
Baltimore-Washington sniper killings
(2002) 159–60n3
Bataille, George 78
Baudelaire, Charles 104
Baudrillard, Jean 13–15, 16, 18–21,
25, 45–6, 49, 62, 68, 129,
165–6n9
Bauman, Zygmunt 173n19
189
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Index
Index
BBC 40, 152
Benjamin, Walter 8, 16, 17, 18,
26, 36, 78, 79, 87, 103–8,
109–10, 112, 129, 131–2, 136,
138, 154, 157n8, 173n17, 173n18,
173n19, 176n7
and coup of gambling 105–7
and dialectical history 8–9, 36
and gesture 104–5, 131–2
and mimesis 105
and modernity 103–6, 157n8
and “spielraum” 104–5, 112
Bennett, Jane 166–7n17, 179n3
Bennett, Jill 23–5, 156n3, 156n4
Bergson, Henri 78
Bernanke, Ben 149, 179n2
Biden, Joseph 148
bin Laden, Osama 149, 150
biopolitics 5, 25, 73, 75–7, 134, 141–2
Blair, Tony 141
Blanchot, Maurice 78
Bolter, Jay 1, 5
Brennan, Therese 88, 169n32
Brown, Bill 28, 166n16
Brown, Michelle 164n2
Brown, Sherrod 149
Brown, Wendy 168n24
Bush-Cheney administration 37,
40–1, 42–3, 44, 49, 62–3, 141,
148, 157n9, 160n4
preventive prosecution 9, 40–1,
134, 161n8
Bush doctrine of pre-emption 9, 37,
42–5, 49–50, 125, 134, 143
Butler, Judith 168n24
Precarious Life 80
capitalism 3, 5, 47, 59, 77, 83, 101,
127, 134, 138, 139–41, 147,
178n13
catastrophe 9, 12–15, 18, 34, 36, 50,
141, 148–9, 157n8, 176n6
cinematic 13–15
televisual 13–15
Cavell, Stanley 166n12
cellphone 6, 11, 48, 65, 76, 90–1, 92,
95–6, 99–100, 101, 111, 113–17,
118, 120, 125, 128, 130, 131, 134,
153, 170n1, 171n5
de Certeau 170n3
Children of Men (Cuarón) 18
Chow, Rey 156n3
cinema 6, 12, 13–15, 17, 21, 27,
33–5, 36, 37, 57, 59, 79, 87, 90,
101, 104–6, 117, 129, 131, 133,
154, 158n14, 159n1, 163–4n20,
169–70n1
cinema of interactions 90, 169–70n1
Clark, Andy 71, 177n9
Natural-Born Cyborgs 92–8
Clinton, Hilary Rodham 148
cloud computing 2, 126–7, 131
CNBC 11, 147
CNN 11, 19, 24, 33, 44, 146–7,
152–4, 160n5
co-evolution 92–3, 133, 135–9,
172n8, 177n9
cognitive feedback loops 92–4, 96
Colson, Charles 69
commodification 19, 59, 73,
127–8, 134
consciousness, industrialization
of 135–9, 177–8n11
continuous partial attention 130
control societies 19, 73, 75–7, 120–1,
123, 126, 136, 167n18, 175n4
controller 33, 93, 96, 100–2,
106, 153
Cooper, Robbie 173n15
coup of gambling 105–109
Cronkite, Walter 49
cultural studies 5
culture industry 135–9
cybernetics 98–9
Damasio, Antonio 96, 175n5
Dean, Jodi 22–23
De Landa, Manuel 166n17
Deleuze Gilles 7, 59, 73, 75–6, 78,
91, 100–1, 117, 120, 131, 150–1,
166n17, 167n18, 167n20, 167n21,
168n26, 171n6, 174n24
DeLillo, Don
Falling Man 106–9, 173n20
Dennett, Daniel 92
Derrida, Jacques 13, 23, 157n7,
168n22
Dick, Philip K. 39, 157n10
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Digital Youth Project 117–18
van Dijck, Jose 169n31
distraction 113, 129–30, 154
distributed affect 2, 47, 77, 87–9, 90,
95–7, 99–100, 110–11, 115–18,
120–1, 125–6, 128, 166n15,
169n32, 171n7
distributed cognition 39, 71, 92–94,
96–7, 110–11, 166n15
Doane, Mary Ann 14–15, 33–5,
157n8
Dodd, Christopher 148
“Doom” (video game) 112–13
Durbin, Richard 65–6, 164n5
Dworkin, Andrea 84
Eagleton, Terry 158n11
economic crisis of 2008 3, 143,
147–51
Elmer, Greg 156n1, 161n10
embedded media 48–50, 162n13
Empire (Warhol) 158n15
England, Lynndie 84
extreme TV 146–7
Facebook 3–4, 69, 77, 111, 125, 126,
128, 129, 130, 133, 152, 153
feedback loops 72, 99–102, 104, 108,
128, 172–3n14
Fight Club 14
Flatley, Jonathan 167n20, 168n26,
173n18
Flickr 69, 129, 153
forethought 140–1, 161n12, 178n13
Foucault, Michel 25, 73–7, 79, 82,
120, 123, 124, 126, 143, 166n16,
174n1
biopolitics 75–77
governmentality 25, 73–7, 79,
124, 126, 143, 174n1
imbrication of people and
things 25, 73–4, 82, 120
surveillance 123–4
Fox News 3, 11, 24, 44, 147
Frank, Adam 78, 97–8, 172n11
Franzen, Jonathan 115
free software 178n14
Freud, Sigmund 71, 78, 87, 97, 104,
110, 157n8
Friedberg, Anne 171n4
future 4, 6, 8, 9, 12–13, 15–17, 18,
34–7, 38–40, 41–2, 45–8, 50,
50–7, 58–61, 62, 124–6, 127,
129–31, 134, 136, 138, 140–1,
143–55, 157n5, 157n6, 157n7,
157n8, 157n10, 158n14, 158n15,
159n1, 161n9, 161n12, 162n17,
162n18, 162–3n19, 175n3,
175–6n6, 176–7n7
futurity 48, 53–4, 57–8, 143, 144,
146, 153–5, 175–6n6
Galloway, Alexander 48, 166n14,
175n4
gambling 105–9
general intellect 77
gesture 105, 116, 131–2
anticipatory 129–34, 140
cinematic 105, 129
embodied 105, 108, 128–30
medial 130–1
technical 120, 128, 130–1
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (HBO) 88
Gibson William 101–2, 109, 119
de Goede, Marieke 122–5, 131
Gourevitch, Philip 88
governmentality 19, 25, 42, 73–7,
79–80, 120, 124, 126, 142, 143,
166n16, 167n19, 168n21, 168n24,
171n3, 174n1
Grand Theft Auto 161n11
Graner, Charles 84
Ground Zero 28, 30, 32, 33, 35–7,
58, 158n15, 158n16
GSD&M Idea City 50–1
Guantanamo Bay Detention
Center 1, 7, 62, 65, 89, 122
Guattari, Felix 7, 78, 84, 85, 87,
100–1, 174n24
Gulf War (1991) 19–21, 48–50, 51–2
censorship 48–9, 51–2
Gunning, Tom 14, 157n6
Hansen, Mark 78, 101, 133, 134–40,
174n24, 177n10
Hansen, Miriam 104–5, 173n17
haptics 72, 96, 101–4, 172n14
Haraway, Donna 92
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Index
Hardt, Michael 77
Harman, Graham 178n12
Harman, Sabrina 88, 164n4
Hayles, N. Katherine 71–2, 92,
174n22
Heidegger, Martin 177n10
Hemmings, Claire 167–8n21
Homeland Security 164n2
color-coded alert system 32,
118–20, 157n9
Hooks, Gregory 164n2
Horkheimer, Max 137
Huntington, Samuel 10
Huron, David 175n5
Hurricane Gustav 143, 144–6
Hurricane Ike 143, 146
Hurricane Katrina 1, 76, 144–6
Hussein, Saddam 42, 44, 149, 150
Hutchins, Edward 71, 92
hypermediacy 1–3, 6, 11–12, 13,
18–19, 26–7, 33, 40, 48, 59, 151–2,
163n20, 171n3
ideology 12, 51, 78–9, 80, 101,
136–9
immateriality 13, 150, 151
immediacy 1–3, 6, 11–13, 15–16, 19,
26–7, 34, 40, 54, 57–9, 91, 119,
129, 143, 144, 147, 151–2, 153–5,
156–7n5, 176n6, 176n7
fear of 15–16, 36, 57
Independence Day 14
informal media 3, 47, 77, 149
interactivity 40, 47, 83, 91–2, 95–6,
106, 108, 127
affective 91, 99, 132, 171n5
cognitive 91–2
Internet 5, 10, 18, 23, 27, 44, 47, 51,
53, 54, 63, 67, 70, 77, 85, 90, 112,
117, 153, 159n3, 168n27, 169n29,
170n1, 170n2, 170n3
pornography 67, 85, 165n8,
172–3n14
of Things 126–30, 131, 141
Iran 56, 151–4
presidential election (2009) 1,
151–4
Twitter revolution 4, 77, 143,
152–5
Iraq 1, 10, 62, 64, 65, 70, 77, 82–4,
86–8, 148, 149, 176n7
Iraq War (2003) 1, 10, 14, 17, 20–1,
35, 41–6, 48, 62, 82–4, 86, 157n8,
160n4, 168n28, 169n29
inevitability of 44–5
premediation of 35, 37, 43–6,
48–50
run-up to 1, 4, 9, 41–5, 48, 50, 53,
59, 148
Ivins, Bruce 159n2
James, William
78, 81–2, 168n26
Kant, Immanuel 171n6
Kaplan, Amy 164n2
Kelty, Christopher 178n14
King, Geoff 14
Kracauer, Siegfried 26, 129, 138,
176n7
Lacan, Jacques 22, 23, 71, 101
Lahti, Martti 102–3, 109
language 132–3
Latour, Bruno 6, 7, 56, 74, 75, 92,
103, 150–1, 156n2, 161n14,
166n12, 166n17, 174n24, 178n12
Lazzarato, Maurizio 100–1
LeDoux, Joseph 96, 175n5
Lemon, Don 154
Levs, Josh 154
Libby, Lewis (Scooter) 161n6
liveness 15, 34, 36, 57, 153–5
of futurity 53–4, 143, 144, 153–5
locative media 177n8
Loose Change (film) 23
Lugano, Giuseppe 175n3
Luhmann, Niklas 51–7, 140, 161n15,
162n17, 162n18, 162–3n19
machinic enslavement 100–2, 138
MacKinnon, Catherine 84
mainstream media (MSM) 3, 22, 83,
85, 153
Mander, Jerry 166n12
Mandler, George 175n5
Marks, Laura 173n16
Marx, Karl 105
Marres, Noortje 161n10
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mass media 23, 30, 51–7, 79–80,
137–8, 162n18, 162–3n19
Massumi, Brian 78, 79–81, 118–20,
157n9, 158n13, 167–8n21,
168n23, 168n26, 172n13, 174n24,
176n6
materiality 26, 64, 80, 118, 128,
150–1, 158n14, 171n3, 171n6,
173n19, 174n23
of information 174n22
of mediation 19–21, 45–6, 114,
118, 139
McCain, John 3, 145, 148
McClellan, Scott 160n4
McLuhan, Marshall 9, 98
means without ends (see pure
mediality)
media everyday 65, 69, 84, 89, 90–1,
98, 101, 107, 110, 112, 118–20,
122–3, 125–6, 128, 130, 131–3,
138, 141, 148–50, 170–1n3,
171n7, 174n23
mediality 4, 6–7, 9–10, 17, 20, 23,
25, 26, 43, 47–8, 58, 64–6, 68–9,
71–7, 78–82, 85, 89–90, 98, 120,
122, 126, 130–3, 137, 141–2, 143,
151–5, 156n2, 177n10
impure 132–3
pure 131–3
mediation 1–3, 4–7, 11, 13–16,
19–21, 23, 24–5, 29–32, 33, 35–6,
38–40, 45, 48–9, 57–9, 70, 77, 87,
90, 98, 107, 114, 117, 123, 125–6,
127–8, 133, 137, 139, 156n2,
160n3, 166n12, 170n2, 174n24,
176n6
immateriality of 13, 150, 151
materiality of 19–21, 45–6, 114,
118, 139
reality of 5–6, 31, 45–6
televisual 14, 29–30, 43–4, 166n12
ubiquity of 40, 48, 53, 58, 91, 135
mediators 6, 118–21, 128 156n2,
174n24
memory 28, 87–8, 135, 138,
162–3n19, 177–8n11
industrialization of 135–6
mediated 87–8, 162–3n19, 164n5
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 78, 101
Minority Report (Spielberg) 18,
39–40, 57–61, 124, 159n1,
163–4n20, 178n13
Mirzoeff, Nicholas 70, 165n8,
166n13, 169n30
mobile networked media 91, 126–31
mobile phone (see cellphone)
mobile social networking 125,
126–9, 131, 141, 175n3, 175n4,
177n8
modernity 17, 26–7, 29, 33–4, 51–7,
87, 98, 103–7, 110, 113, 129,
131, 157n8, 162n18, 162–3n19,
172n11, 173n19, 176n7, 179n2
Mosher, Clayton 164n2
MSNBC 11, 44, 147
multitude 75, 77
Mumbai terrorist attacks 9, 123–4,
153, 174–5n2
Murder Prevention (BBC) 40
music 90, 99, 134, 175n5
MySpace 3, 129, 133
Ndalianis, Angela 14
negative affect theory 109–11
Negri, Antonio 77
New York Times 86–7, 160n5
news media 11, 41–5, 48–50, 51–7,
62–3, 69, 82, 143, 144, 146,
147, 149–51, 157n8, 159–60n3,
176–7n7
newspapers 26–7, 29, 32–3, 40, 50,
69, 77, 89, 104, 120, 122, 147,
176–7n7
Nintendo Wii 173n14
Norman, Donald 92
Norris, Margot 49
NowThatsFuckedUp.com 82–4,
169n29
Nussbaum, Felicity 158n11
Obama, Barack Hussein 9, 143, 148,
170n2
Olsen, Ted 69
Open ID 2
Open Web 2–3, 126–7, 131
optical technologies 158n14,
163n20
optics 101, 103–4
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Index
Orwell, George
1984 124
Palin, Sarah 3, 145
paranoid reading 78–9, 138
Paterson, Mark 173n16
Paulson, Henry 148–9
Paycheck (Woo) 157n10
Perkins, Tony 69
photography 22, 27, 28, 33, 34–6,
51, 62–72, 79, 87, 89
digital 6, 81, 85, 122, 164–5n5,
176n6
Picard, Rosalind 111–16, 173n21
Poe, Edgar Allen 104
poker tournaments 106–9, 173n20
politics 29, 69, 80, 113, 119, 131,
134–42, 172n11, 176n6, 178n14
of information networks 47, 161n10
of premediation 134–43
pornography 67–8, 82–6, 165n7,
165n8, 165–6n9, 172–3n14
post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD) 86
potentiality 57, 59–61, 136, 151,
178n13
pre-cinematic optical
devices 158n14, 163–4n20
prediction 4, 8, 37, 46–8, 59–61
pre-emption 2, 9, 37, 44–5, 58, 125,
127, 143
pre-emptive war 41–4
premediation 1–2, 4, 5–8, 12–14,
15–16, 17–18, 23, 25, 34–5,
38–61, 62, 64, 97, 107, 109, 110,
120, 124–6, 128–30, 131–4,
134–42, 143–51, 154–5, 157n8,
157n10, 158n14, 159n1,
159–60n3, 160n5, 161n12,
175n3, 175–6n6, 178n1
cinematic 13–15, 21, 57, 161n7
commodities 127–8
formal structure 43–4, 50
impurity of 132–3
logic of 5, 9, 13, 15–16, 35, 38–9,
41, 44–5, 50, 57–9, 126, 140, 150,
157n8
media logic of pre-emptive
war 43–5
media regime of post-9/11
America 47–8
ontological aspect 7, 39, 48, 51–2
politics of 131, 134–42
and potentiality 59–61, 132
reality of 45–6, 59–61
and security 124–5, 131
televisual 13–14
threefold character 57–8, 126
and time 33–7
virtuality of 59–61, 132
vs. prediction 4, 46–8
vs. “prefigurative imaginative
experience” 17–21
vs. simulation 45–6
preventive prosecution 40–1, 161n8
Project Rebirth 34–7, 158n15,
158–9n16
Protocol 46, 48, 49, 71, 166n14,
175n4
Puar, Jaspir 84–5, 165n8, 175–6n6
pure mediality 131–3
quasi-objects 56, 150–1, 162n19
Rather, Dan 29–30
real time 12, 15, 40, 51, 124, 154–5,
156–7n5, 159n1, 177n10
reality 1–3, 6, 39, 45–9, 51, 54,
59–61
Redacted (DePalma) 168n28
remediation 1–4, 6, 8, 11, 13–16,
18–19, 26–7, 30, 33–6, 38–9,
45–6, 49, 57–60, 128, 144–6, 151,
158n14, 160n3
double logic 1–3, 11–13, 16, 26–7,
38–9, 57–9, 128, 151–2
televisual 14–15, 146
Remediation 1, 4–5, 6, 38
representationality 70, 79–80,
168n22
Republican national convention
(2008) 144–6
Richards, Barry 171n3
Rogers, Richard 161n10
Rose, Nikolas 167n19
Rubenstein, Diane 167n19
Rumsfeld, Donald 71, 166n10
Russell, Jenni 124
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securitization 2, 8, 40–1, 42, 75,
97, 120–1, 122–6, 127–8, 134,
139–42, 174n1, 175n3
security 2, 5, 15–16, 18, 41, 50, 73,
123–6, 128, 131, 134, 139, 141–2
security studies 174n1
Sedgwick, Eve 78–9, 97–9, 138,
167–8n21, 172n10, 172n11, 175n6
Serres, Michel 56, 150
Shaviro, Steven 18, 78, 91, 171n6
Shirkey, Clay 152
Simon, David
Over There 49
Simondon, Gilbert 78, 118, 133
Simpson, David
9/11: The Culture of
Commemoration 16–23, 62,
64–5, 158n11, 158n12
social media 125–6, 126–31, 152–5
Sontag, Susan 67–70
Regarding the Pain of Others 67
Southland Tales (Kelly) 18
Sovereignty 73–5, 79–80, 122–4,
131–3, 167n18, 168n24
Sperb, Jason 133
Spiegelman, Art
In the Shadow of No Towers 25–33,
36, 158n13
Maus 26
Spielberg, Steven 18, 39–40, 159n1,
163–4n20
Spinoza, Baruch 78
Stallabrass, Julian 102
Standard Operating Procedure
(Morris) 88
Stern, Daniel 95–8, 105, 172n9,
173n18
Stiegler, Bernard 33, 78, 133,
134–40, 172n8, 177n10
Stone, Linda 130
Strange Days (Bigelow) 38–40, 57, 59,
159n1, 161n7
structure of feeling 147–8, 178n1
surveillance 23–4
Tarde, Gabriel 74
technics 33, 133, 135, 137–9, 172n8,
177–8n11
technogenesis 133, 137–8
technological non-conscious 71–2
technological unconscious 71–2, 87,
89, 122
telephone 10, 103–5, 131, 156n2,
160n3
televisuality 6, 11, 14–15, 21, 26,
29–30, 33, 34, 38, 43–4, 50, 76,
85, 100, 137, 146, 152, 166n12,
178n1
and catastrophe 13–15, 34, 157n8
and immediacy 12–13, 151,
152, 154
and news 13, 14, 32, 42, 44, 49,
51, 53, 63, 69, 143, 144, 147, 149,
150, 151, 152, 153, 160n3, 164n5,
170n2
temporality 33–7, 51–2, 57–60,
129–30, 153–4, 175–6n6,
176–7n7, 177n10
terrorism 9, 10, 13, 15, 31, 34, 40, 97,
110, 124, 134, 141, 174n2, 175n3,
176n7
Thacker, Eugene 175n4
The 9/11 Report: The National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks
upon the United States 10
The Mighty Tumble (film) 34
theory
affect 6–7, 118, 167n20, 168n21,
168n26
continental 16–23
non-representational 7, 139–40
postmodern 16, 23
trauma 7, 156n3
things 25, 46, 73–6, 78, 79, 82,
95–6, 117, 120, 128, 139–40, 143,
144, 147, 151, 166n16, 174n24
Thrift, Nigel 7, 47, 71–2, 89,
113, 122, 127–8, 139–41,
161n12, 166n17, 167n20,
168n26, 178n13
time
cinematic 33–4
premediated 33–7
televisual 14–15, 34
TiVo 136–7
Tomkins, Silvan 7, 78, 95, 97–9,
109–11, 167n20, 167n21, 168n26,
172n10, 172n12
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Index
torture 40, 62–6, 67–70, 72, 77,
82–6, 88, 122, 164n2, 165n6,
165n8
transactions 122–6, 127, 142
translation 5–6, 156n2
Twin Towers 11, 16, 18, 19, 21, 25–6,
57, 106, 152, 153
Twitter 3, 77, 128, 130, 152–4
Twitter revolution 77, 152–4
unknown knowns 71–2, 89
Until the End of the World (Wim
Wenders) 161n7
US Air Force 50–1
US presidential campaign of 2008
170n2
3,
Varnelis, Kazys 171n4
video games 20–1, 40, 46, 63,
68, 76, 95, 97, 100, 101–2, 105,
109, 111–13, 117, 118, 120, 128,
161n11, 166n11, 170n1, 173n14,
173n15, 173n21
violence 131–2
Virilio, Paul 12, 156–7n5, 162n18,
164–5n5, 177n10
Virno, Paolo 47, 77, 140, 161n12
virtual reality 6, 12, 57–9, 119
virtuality 37, 46–7, 59–61, 95, 100,
102, 125, 132, 136, 144, 146, 151,
156n3
Vodafone 177n8
Wall Street 149–51
War of the Worlds (Spielberg) 18
War on Terror 35
Warhol 158n15
Weather Channel 147, 161n9
Weber, Samuel 132–3
Whitaker, Jim 36–7
Whitehead, Alfred North 91, 171n6
Wiener, Norbert 98
Williams, Raymond 148, 178n1
Wilson, Chris 82–3, 169n29
Wired 2
Wolfowitz, Paul 161n6
Wordsworth, William 16–19, 21,
158n11
World Trade Center 9, 11, 12, 14, 24,
25, 34, 53, 57, 62, 106, 143
World Wide Web 6, 47, 71, 76
YouTube 77, 118, 125, 152, 153
Žižek, Slavoj 12–15, 16, 19, 22, 23,
67, 69–71, 84, 89
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