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.