[Nettime-nl] [Mediaprogrammering] PreWar - Richard Grusin in de Balie - woensdag12 november

[balie-wonderland-admin@balie.nl]

Geacht Balie-publiek,
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

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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 / Amsterdamhttp://www.debalie.nl


_____________________

Doing without News
Workshop presentationFriday 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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