[Nettime-nl] PreWar - Richard Grusin at de Balie, Wednesday, 12 November

[Eric Kluitenberg <epk@xs4all.nl>]

Geachte nettimers,

Komende week organiseert de Govcom.org Foundation, ism De Balie, een 
internationale media workshop in De Balie getiteld "The News about 
Networks". De workshop onderzoekt de relatie tussen nieuwsproductie 
en media netwerken.

In het kader van de workshop worden twee publieke activiteiten georganiseerd:
- op woensdagavond 12 november een publiek debat met Richard Grusin,
- en op vrijdagavond 14 november een afsluitende presentatie met als 
titel "Doing without News".
Beide avondprogramma's beginnen om 20.00 uur.

Meer details treft u hieronder aan en in het media katern van de 
nieuwe balie website.

vriendelijke groet,

Richard Rogers
http://www.govcom.org

Eric Kluitenberg
http://www.debalie.nl

_______________________

From: Richard Rogers <rogers@hum.uva.nl>

PreWar: Media Logics in the run-up to the Iraq War

Richard Grusin, Wayne State University, Detroit


Wednesday, 12 November 2003
20.00 hrs.
De Balie - Salon,  Amsterdam
http://www.debalie.nl/artikel.jsp?articleid=4478&podiumid=media


Why did the Iraq War seem inevitable? Richard Grusin addresses the 
question in a presentation at de Balie, followed by a debate.

Introduction by Richard Rogers, Media Studies, University of Amsterdam
Debate led by Noortje Marres, Philosophy, University of Amsterdam



Richard Grusin:


In the presentation I elaborate what I see the threefold character of 
premediation at work at the beginning of the twenty-first century. 
First, where remediation entailed the refashioning of prior media 
forms, I claim that premediation entails the desire to remediate 
future media forms and technologies. In addition, I argue that 
premediation entails the desire to remediate the future before it 
happens, the desire that the future be always already pre-mediated. 
Finally, I suggest that this desire to premediate the future before 
it happens is accompanied by the desire to insure that the future is 
so fully mediated by new media forms and technologies that it is 
unable to emerge into the present without having already been 
remediated in the past.

The concept of premediation helps to explain the sense of 
inevitability that preceded the U.S. invasion of Iraq March 2003. 
Premediation functions in some important sense as the medial logic of 
the Bush administration's doctrine of pre-emptive warfare. In a 
political regime of preemptive war, premediation is the dominant 
media regime-by premediating the war, remediating it before it 
happens, the formal structure of U.S. news media effectively 
supported U.S. military doctrine, participating in the preemptive 
remediation of a future (premediated) war. That is, the Bush doctrine 
of preemptive war required a preemptive 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). This doctrine of 
preemption, as opposed to the prior doctrine of deterrence, has been 
circulating in neo-con circles at least since 1989; similarly 
premediation has been emerging over the course of the 1990s, often as 
remediation's unseen double. Where prior to 1989 we see a U.S. media 
regime oriented primarily towards the past, particularly to the Cold 
War aftermath of WW II, the doctrine of preemptive war, as opposed to 
the more "remedial" doctrine of deterrence, looks to refashion not 
the past but the future.

Beginning with the 2002 State of the Union Address, the Bush 
administration repeatedly played out the war against Iraq in print 
and televisual news media.  Cynically such premediations functioned 
to help insure that the American public would return control of the 
Congress to Bush's Republican party in the 2002 mid-term elections. 
Equally cynically, however, this premediation of the war against Iraq 
allowed the networked 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. 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 invulnerabilty 
remains shaken by the events of 9/11.   



Biographical sketch

Richard Grusin is Professor and Chair in the Department of English at 
Wayne State University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of 
California at Berkeley in 1983. He is the author of three books.  The 
first, Transcendentalist Hermeneutics: Institutional Authority and 
the Higher Criticism of the Bible (Duke, 1991), concerns the 
influence of European (primarily German) theories of biblical 
interpretation on the interpretive theories of New England 
Transcendentalists like Emerson, Thoreau, and Theodore Parker.  His 
more recent work concerns historical, cultural, and aesthetic aspects 
of technologies of visual representation. With Jay David Bolter he is 
the author of Remediation: Understanding New Media (MIT, 1999), which 
sketches out a genealogy of new media, beginning with the 
contradictory visual logics underlying contemporary digital media. 
Grusin's latest book, Culture, Technology, and the Creation of 
America's National Parks (Cambridge, 2003), focuses on the 
problematics of visual representation involved in the founding of 
America's national parks.  Currently he is working on the social, 
political, and aesthetic relationships among film and new digital 
media.

--------------------------

Tickets & Reservations:

Ticket price: Euro 7,50, with reduction: Euro 5,00

Opening hours ticket office:
On weekdays 13.00-18.00 hrs or till the start of a program.
In the weekend 1,5 hour before the program starts.
Reserve by phone: 020 55 35 100, during opening hours until 45 
minutes before the program starts.

debalie / Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10 / 1017 RR / Amsterdam
http://www.debalie.nl


_____________________


Doing without News

Workshop presentation
Friday November 14, 2003
20.00 hrs.
De Balie - Salon,  Amsterdam

News may be thought of as a media space that devours - a ghetto-land 
of personalities and story templates that require constant attention 
to the smiles, styles and cycles of its production. The evening is 
devoted to a series of questions about whether we can do without 
news. Is it still necessary to be appear in the news? Is 
newsworthiness and news attention still a sign of value? Do we need 
news to be known? More to the point, do Internet-based networks 
challenge our perceived need for press attention? 20 media activists 
and advocates have spent one week testing the conditions of news 
marginalisation. They also have looked into tactics that may lessen 
the importance of press appearance. They present their findings as 
well as their strategies for being known without appearing in the 
news. The evening is the culmination of the week-long workshop, The 
News about Networks, co-produced by de Balie and the Govcom.org 
Foundation, Amsterdam, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, New 
York.

On Friday admission is free, but please reserve a ticket or obtain it 
at the Balie ticket office because of limited seating.


Both events are part of the News about Networks workshop, co-produced 
by de Balie and the Govcom.org Foundation, Amsterdam, 
http://www.issuenetwork.org, with support from the Ford Foundation, 
New York.


--------------------------

Opening hours ticket office:
On weekdays 13.00-18.00 hrs or till the start of a program.
In the weekend 1,5 hour before the program starts.
Reserve by phone: 020 55 35 100, during opening hours until 45 
minutes before the program starts.
debalie / Kleine-Gartmanplantsoen 10 / 1017 RR / Amsterdam
http://www.debalie.nl

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