"Premediation and the Mediaphilia of Anticipation"

6pm, 29 January 2009
Rogers Communication Centre, Ryerson University 359A

Hosted by Infoscape Research Lab

Co-hosted by the Digital Cinema Lab, Ryerson University; Augmented Reality Lab, Mobile Media Lab, and the Visible City Project (all York University).

Abstract

In this talk I will set forth the main arguments of my recently completed book, Premediation; Affect and Mediality after 9/11, which takes up where my earlier, co-authored study of new media, Remediation: Understanding New Media, left off. Premediation extends the theoretical concerns of Remediation both historically to the period after 9/11 and politically to the ways in which print, televisual, and networked media mobilize individual and collective affect in an era of heightened securitization. The book expands upon my 2004 article, “Premediation,” in which I set out to explain the geopolitical and medialogical inevitability that prevailed in the run-up to the Iraq war. In addition to functioning as the media logic of the Bush administration’s doctrine of “preemptive war,” premediation helps to structure our post 9-11 media environment both in its social and in its technical formations. The project develops its arguments in terms of three key concepts—premediation, mediality, and affectivity—which I will sketch out in my talk.