Solitude

Here's a link to an article from the CHE. It reads like an angry op-ed piece about technology and our drive for constant connectivity. I have my own responses to this complaint as my research interests have made me somewhat of a lightning rod for older family members and former professors who are anti-tech. All the same, I'd be interested to hear what other people think about this issue and your thoughts on connectivity, Twitter, etc.

Obama and God

In case anyone is interested, here's a link to the Time magazine article that seems to suggest that Obama's presidency was partially premediated by James Earl Jones doing the voice of God: Obama

One of my current academic interests is how this current election cycle was premediated over the last two years. In various films and television series, the concept of an African American or minority president has been explored from a myriad of perspectives. I am in the process of researching this because I do not watch most of these shows on a regular basis. A few years ago, the inference that a minority would/could be in the White House was often only a backdrop to the rest of the action in the film or show. Even with the origin of series such as 24, the presidential character was second to the hero figure. Additionally, the minority (woman, Hispanic or black) leader often rises to power by default due to death, scandal or other incapacitating circumstance.

How has the representation of race, specifically African-American, changed in film and television? How does that representation relate to both premediation and the idea of an African American president?

The following are some of the preliminary searches I conducted and interesting finds within them (of course, Prof. Grusin appears in most of the searches):

premediation racial representation
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=premediation+racial+representation

This search produced weak results because most of them dealt with legal issues and how race was handled. Upon discovering the limited focus of these results, I expanded my search by narrowing it through adding the word “film” to it.

premediation racial representation film
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=premediation+racial+representation+film

Through this search I discovered a link to the Washington State University website on Popular Culture focused on Race and Ethnicity. This site will be a great resource for not only this present study/interest, but will help gather additional information from people such as Manthia Diawara who are critical to African American film studies and how those works relate to others. This link also lists several online resources that can be accessed from anywhere and also deal with the representation of blacks and other minority groups in film. Specific correlations to the topic of premediation, however, are probably not very strong in this area because these articles and books appear to be more focused on cultural issues and their representation in the media than how media shapes representation. Within the results, however, as particular writers unpack the issues of race and representation in film, these discussions will offer correlations that will enhance future study of premediation in this area.

premediation African American president
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&fkt=79502&fsdt=90352&q=premediating+african+american+president&aq=o&oq=

The first result in this search was an article discussing JA Rogers’ book, The Five Negro Presidents as it relates to President Obama’s campaign. When returning to the link to access the article, I encountered issues but was able to find it. This article and the book it discusses was one of the most interesting of all my searches. One issue about Barack Obama and how he conducted his presidential run that interested me was his mixed heritage and how it did or did not factor in his election. Apparently, based on the review of Roger’s book, there may be valuable information in it that speaks to how other presidents of mixed heritage conducted their campaigns and presidencies. Could Obama’s methods and messages have been outlined in a book from the 1960s that discusses these issues as it relates to previous presidents? This is a resource I will use in some form as I continue to explore this topic.

Additional related thoughts:

In Grusin’s article on “Premediation,” he discusses the coverage of the events of 9/11 and how although they were covered live on television, they were not premediated in the same way other perilous incidents such as the anthrax scare or sniper attacks were premediated. He indicates that the media “multiphy or proliferate their own premeditations of potential terror attacks, or war in Iraq, as a way to try to prevent the occurrence of another media 9/11.” (26) His observation was driven primarily from a catastrophic perception, although further in his article, he works into the logic behind the concept which is to try to premediate as many possible futures as could be imagined. (28).

While observing many of the inaugural and commemorative events of last week that celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King and welcomed Barack Obama into the White House, I observed a repetitive form of premediation, much of which pulled on types of remediation. During the concert televised by HBO on Sunday evening and the coverage by CNN of MLK Day activities, the media group used the knowledge of historical events both presidential (recaps of Kennedy’s and FDR’s inauguration speeches) and civil rights (Marian Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and King’s “I Have a Dream”) to premediate President Obama’s inauguration speech. By examining all the potential models on which he could base his speech, they tried to hone in on whether Obama would continue his popular rhetorical style or borrow from presidents based on the type of economic and social climate they were facing when they took office. Remediating past speeches and events that occurred on the Washington mall appeared to be an attempt at setting an expectation of the future president’s performance based on how his predecessors handled similar situations.

I believe the media set its own expectations on how President Obama’s first speech would be constructed but they tried to expand expectations by offering a myriad of outcomes: will he give the world another rhetorical device like King, Kennedy and FDR did? Will he appeal to the nation at a level of its pain as Lincoln did? Will he inspire and challenge the world and his constituents as Reagan did? In the newspapers and on-air coverage in the days following the speech, reporters seemed to split on the issue, some reaching for phrases such as “Hope over Fear” and some recognizing the sensitive nature of the times and how “appropriate” it was that he did not opt for the rhetorical mainstay.

In conclusion, I also thought it interesting that in most of the discussions about King, Obama and how many people were expected at the Mall, the issue of the Million Marches--specifically The Million Man March--was never seriously used in conjunction with the recent events even though African American men were the center of it.

Clay's Dissertation Go[o/g]gle

Grusin's work on remediation has enjoyed great success in the field of composition and rhetoric. In many ways, I think, the work on remediation is already primed to be borrowed by scholarship in rhetoric and composition. That the concept of remediation encourages us to think about how immediacy is composed by digital media through processes that amount to reading, interpreting, then imitating or writing the immediacy of other media, 'remediation' is in many ways already in close proximity to the sort of research interests predominant in composition and rhetoric (i.e. the reading, writing, and rewriting entailed by the writing process). However, premediation seems to be harder to locate in composition and rhetoric. To be clear, I have chosen 'composition' as a search term rather than 'rhetoric' because I am more interested in composition theory and composition pedagogy in general than I am in rhetorical theories in particular. So while much of my own work may imply rhetorics, more or less, I do not take up the field of rhetorical studies explicitly.

Some interesting finds:

Search Terms - 1st Set: premediation + Grusin + composition

• [Herb, Amelia. "Filtering Meaning: The Rhetoric of the Archive." University of Illinois: 2003.] Listed as an untitled document on the google returns (#20), "Filtering Meaning: The Rhetoric of the Archive" mentions Grusin's 'premediation' nine times. It seems that premediation serves mostly as a way of updating or expanding Derrida's discussion of the archive. Herb explains perhaps most simply the function of Grusin's concept of 'premediation' in Massumian-esque terms as: "Through premediation, the past can still speak." For my project, the current dissertation plan includes a chapter that would incorporate data from archival research in the Walter P. Reuther library, including the United Farm Workers' Archives and the César Chávez papers. Later, Herb clarifies the importance of Grusin's concept to this project, arguing that 'premediation' enables a view of the "archivist as mediator of the archive."

Search Terms - 2nd Set: Premediation + Grusin + Literacies

• This set is closer to my disciplinary interests; literacy studies is my primary field. The search produced only material related directly to the English Department at Wayne State. Nothing else was of much value for my purposes.
• A closely related 2nd-2nd search replaced 'literacies' with 'discourses + gee' in order to target the theoretical term 'Discourse' (note the capital 'D') developed by James Paul Gee. This theory has had much traction in literacy studies, and Discourses may be understood to represent literacies. This search produced four results, all of which were useless, including an MA thesis on North Korea wherein 'gee' was tagged by the search engine in the word 'refugee.' I found similarly useless results using the terms "latino" and "pedagogy".

Search Terms - 3rd Set: Premediation + Grusin + Writing

• This set produced an interesting result for me. I think one challenge I have been facing, on an intellectual level, is how I can construct a connection between 'premediaton' and 'mediation' in a way that is not necessarily centered on digital technologies. I do not anticipate my dissertation to focus on digital media; however the mediation of experience through language and language practices, including but not limited to digital media is an interest of mine. In the following passage, I found a reference to 'premediation' that seems to dovetail with the way I have been thinking about it. Astrid Eril notes in "Literature, Film, and the Mediality of Cultural Memory" that "The term 'premediation' draws attention to the fact that existent media which circulate in a given society provide schemata for future experience and its representation" (Eril, in Cultural Memory Studies, p 392). I am interested in understanding how literacies mediate experience in ways that, as Eril puts it, offer a schemata for future experiences.
  

Summary notes: I will have to think about how to construct a research project for this class that will enable me to draw from some of my broader interests in literacy studies and affect theory while sufficiently addressing the issues raised by the course. My google goggles have shown me that there is very very little, if not nothing, on literacy studies that connects with 'premediation.' Now as I mentioned, 'remediation' has a broad network in composition studies; a search using remediation and literacies surfaces plenty of material. So, these findings suggest there are limitless directions for me to pursue, and most will likely present few work that directly connects with my trajectories. Perhaps I could have expanded the search terms to beyond composition and rhetoric, but my primary goal was to come out of this exercise understanding what the position of this concept in my primary field was.

As I have been writing this conclusion, I am thinking about exploring how contemporary multiply mediated writing spaces like blogs and facebook may be understood or analyzed through a model that combines a theoretical framework organized around 'premediation' and affect theory in conjunction with some qualitative research methods such as interviews and focus groups. This should help me imagine the potential trajectories for a research project in this course.

Andy: Project 1

Note 1: Here are the two constraints I used in running my searches: I used the Google search engine. I used three terms, two fixed and one variable, "premediation+grusin+variable" (I included "grusin" as a term after receiving results for punk lyrics and other off-track results). In listing my results I'll refer only to the variable term that I plugged into the search string, the highlighted words are links to the searches.

Note 2: I ran two broadly-themed searches based on my interests. The first focused on architecture and issues of collective consciousness in spaces. The second was aimed at the ideas of new media and emergence as well as my recent fascination with (computer) viruses.

1: Architecture
Basically nothing came of this search. "Architecture" as a term is most often used as a synonym for framework. However, Grusin does talk in his article about imagining possible displays of terrorism and in doing so protecting ourselves from the shock when they happen. I wonder about how the Bush administration's notion of security/preparation gets manifest physically as in the TSA queues at airports and metal detectors at high schools. More intimately, how can a study of Detroit serve as some sort of desensitization through premediation in the sense that it has been devastated by a number of issues like economics, labor, and race. What I'm imagining is a adding Detroit to other cities that have been damaged by other factors: energy issues, lack of water, environmental destruction, and political or religious issues. Together these real-world "worst-case" scenarios encompass a lot of the possible outcomes for "post-apocalypse" cities thereby creating a "premediation cloud" and also giving some ideas to the movie industry for destruction movies that don't all include tidal waves.

2: Public space / Public sphere
"Public sphere" brought up a blog that talks about premediation in the sense that it is when "a prescripted event is brought into public knowledge ahead of time to ensure support for the venture." The blogger further connects this to Chomsky's idea of manufacturing consent.

3: Environment
Here's a great search result for the 3rd ed. of Human Geography. It includes a quote by John R. Stilgoe talking about the word "landscape": "A landscape happens not by chance but by contrivance, by premediation, by design; a forest or swamp or prairie no more constitutes a landscape than does a chain of mountains. Such land forms are only wilderness, the chaos from which landscapes are created by men intent on ordering and shaping space for their own ends. But landscapes always display a fragile equilibrium between natural and human force; terrain and vegetation are molded, not dominated. When men wholly dominate the land, when they shroud it almost completely with structure and chiseled space, landscape is no longer landscape; it is cityscape, a related but different form. Landscape is essentially rural, the product of traditional agriculture interrupted here and there by traditional artifice, a mix of natural and man-made form."

4: Emergence

It seems like a lot of the uses of premediation are towards things like politics, security, and socio-cultural issues, etc, essentially elements that relate to how we cognize and create future developments in our world. I am interested in how premediation can be used address our connection to the physical landscape. The obvious usage here would be how do the spaces we interact with in a repetitive manner influence, determine, or premediate our responses to them. And if we reverse this condition, how do inhabitants’ reactions to and understandings of a space premediate how it is used, evolves, or decays? Of course, there is a well-known connection between people and their spaces, however, where I see premediation fitting in as a way of describing in a more concrete manner how that relationship works.

5: Swarm
This return a cool blog called Default Settings. There's a post on premediation and a vlog of Grusin, but also of interest is post about Alexander Galloway's "latest project, an online version of the Game of War. This is a ‘remake’ of a board game created by French Situationist Guy Debord in 1978, a somewhat forgotten departure by the filmmaker and writer so closely associated with the Paris riots of 1968." A great question from Galloway here is, "If there are games that simulate the swarm-like behavior of the distributed network, do these provide any clues as to how progressive this organizational form is, or can be?" Nice.

6: Virus
From this search came up with a text by N. Katherine Hayles, "Metaphoric Networks in Lexia to Perplexia," which is in the collection, "First Person: New Media as story, Performance, and Game." She says, ""Synamatic," a homophsone for cinematic, perhaps alludes to the Symantic (semantic) Corporation, creator of the Norton Anti-Virus and Norton Utilities, in a conflation that implies computer health is integral to the reproduction of screen image and therefore to subjectivity. "Communification," which can be read as a neologism conflating commodification and communication, arises when the circuit is completed; that is, when humans and intelligent machines are interconnected in a network whose reach is reinforced by naming the few exceptions "detached" machines. "

7: Viral
I am interested in issues like emergence, swarm intelligence, and most recently, viruses. These conditions, to varying degrees, raise issues like agency and collective consciousness. In an article by Samuel Nunn, "Tell us What's Going to Happen," he says, "Cells learn from mistakes, and react tactically to anti-terrorism measures. There is a viral aspect to this: mediated representations of successful crime and terror attacks can inform real criminals and terrorists of vulnerabilities and strategies."

In a recent conversation with my sister (an oceanography grad student at Univ. of Washington) we ended up on the topic of viruses from a book I was reading called “The Exploit” by Thacker and Galloway. In it, they ask offhandedly whether a (computer) virus is alive. My sister’s response (that of a biologist) was explicitly, no. Viruses fail to fulfill the criteria of living organisms. How does this relate back to premediation? My most fruitful search was “premediation & viral.” This got me to thinking about the effervescent and compounding nature of premediation. How does a concept of critical mass (or something like viral load) fit into this discussion? From Grusin’s article it sounds like the-more-the-better in terms of possible outcomes. I wonder, then, how this relates to the life cycles of viruses. Do viruses, like humans in the Matrix multiply endlessly until their resources are consumed as opposed to arriving at a state of equilibrium? This makes me wonder about (premediated) states of perpetual rising action vs. states of relative balance in terms of predictions about the future and their relative proximity and importance to the masses/group/collective.

     My dissertation project aims, through the Abu Ghraib Prisoner Abuse Scandal, to grapple with the notion of "image as witness"--stated otherwise, the project hopes to interrogate how the images depicting the goings-on at the infamous prison "witness" a particular moment as well as "witness" prior instances of violence towards the "Other".  

     I began my search utilizing the search terms "image", "witness", "richard grusin", and "premediation" which yielded the "Premediation" article, but also resulted in an interesting article by Andrew Hoskins at the University of Warwick, England titled "Temporality, Proximity and Security: Terror in a Media Drenched Age" which can be found in the Journal of International Relations with the abstract locatable at: http://ire.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/20/4/453.

Also terribly interesting is an article by Diana George at Michigan Tech titled "Witness to Voyeur: A Visual Rhetoric of Execution and the Death Penalty Debates" which can be found at http://www.cws.uiuc.edu/initiatives/colloquium/archive/george/

I continued to find fascinating outlets dealing with the original search such as an article titled "Tell Us What is Going to Happen: Information Feeds to the War on Terror" found at: http://www.ctheory.net/articles/aspx?id=518

Even more interesting was a site detailing the proceedings from a News about Networks Workshop in Amsterdam titled "All American Issues: Seven Stories from the Homeland" which centered on the notion of Premediation and can be found at: http://www.issuenetwork.org/node.php?id=46

     I then decided to restart the search utilizing the same search words except substituted "remediation" for "premediation".  This did not yield the kind of results detailed above  although I came across an interesting article titled "Not Necessarily Not the News: Gatekeeping, Remediation and The Daily Show" which I plan on reading simply because it peaked my interest and can be found at: http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/mckain3/JACC_244.PDF

I also found an on-line journal discussing the role of witnessing in revealing human rights abuses in "Human Rights, Testimony and Transnational Publicity" located at http://www.barnard.edu/sfonline/ps/mclagan2.htm#section2

In addition, an article in the WSU journal Criticism titled "Performing Remediation: The Minstrel, The Camera and The Octoroon" discusses how theater aided in the social construction of photography, which although distant from my own interests instances remediation in a fascinating instance. 

Yet another article titled "Thinking Beyond the Shown: Implicit Inferences in Evidence and Argument" located at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers/cfm?abstract_id=1089109 may prove helpful insofar as one of my chapters focuses on the central picture-taker at Abu Ghraib, Sabrina Hariman who, when questioned about photographing the goings-on at the prison stated "I took pictures because no one would believe someone like me." During her trial, the pictures were interestingly absent given their affective power and referentiality to instances the military hoped to/needed to move past as quickly as possible.

     These two basic searches proved fruitful and I am looking forward to class this Monday evening in order to "unpack" both notions of remediation and premediation in more detail.

I am hoping to write my dissertation on cinematic skepticism—i.e. the various ways that film (and related media) have presented challenges to religious orthodoxy. The works of Luis Bunuel, Ingmar Bergman, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, Monty Python, and Martin Scorsese are of particular interest to me in this regard.

I began by doing a Google search of “premediation grusin religion,” but I found the results to be rather limited. (I was often linked to the issue of Criticism in which the “Premediation” article appeared, since that journal issue also featured an article by Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti called “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies.”) Most of the results had, at best, a very tenuous relationship to my academic interests. I tried similar searches (“premediation grusin blasphemy,” “premediation grusin heresy,” etc.), but these did not yield any results.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=premediation+grusin+religion&start=0&sa=N

Searches using the term “remediation” proved to be a bit more fruitful. For example, there were over a thousand hits for “remediation grusin religion” and about 100 for “remediation grusin blasphemy.” By far, the article I found most germane to my interests was a piece by Birgit Meyer from a 2005 issue of Postscripts entitled “Religious Remediations: Pentecostal Views in Ghanian Video-Movies.”

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=remediation+grusin+religion&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=remediation+grusin+blasphemy&btnG=Search
http://www.equinoxjournals.com/ojs/index.php/post/article/view/673/338

Meyer explores fundamentalist cinema in Ghana and the way it remediates Biblical stories, particularly stories of evil spirits, demonic possessions, and so on. She sees these films as embracing a kind of “techno-religious realism,” one which undermines simplistic dichotomies that see “technology and belief” as diametrically opposed. In Ghana, technology is often used to reinforce local beliefs in ghosts, demons, and other supernatural forces.

While Meyer’s analysis of the way Bible stories are remediated in cinematic form is adroit and engaging, she does not point out that these are actually remediations of remediations. In other words, it is often forgotten that Biblical texts themselves are not “original” mediations (which may be a meaningless term), but are actually the remediated form of more ancient oral traditions, legends, etc. In fact, a McLuhanesque consideration of how a remediated religious text conveys a different (and more authoritative and definitive) message from its oral counterpart would be an interesting line of inquiry.

One example of the powerful role that remediation can play involves accounts of demonic visitations. Many fundamentalist Christian groups, for example, exchange stories of supposed encounters with evil spirits. And yet, many of these same groups warn against seeing films (like The Exorcist) which tell very similar stories. Such films are denounced as demonic in and of themselves. Clearly, “the medium is the message” here—something about a direct cinematic portrayal of a demonic encounter (as opposed to an oral tradition) causes it to seem more nefarious, a strange distinction that would be worth exploring.

A problem that I had with this search (and it’s a problem that I have in general when trying to do research on heresy in film) is that a great deal of academic ink seems to be spilled on theorizing film either as as a supplement to religious experience or as a form of religious experience. Finding research on film’s power to undermine religious belief is often a challenging task.