Premediation

Abstract

Although the remediation of 9/11 began at least as soon as the first televisual images of the crash into the first tower, its premediation had in some sense been under way for some time. So, too, had premediation more generally. In Remediation we took Kathryne Bigelow’s 1995 film Strange Days as exemplifying the often contradictory logics of mediation at work at the end of the twentieth century, tracing out what we described as the double logic of remediation by which contemporary culture seeks simultaneously to proliferate and to erase mediation, to eliminate all signs of mediation in the very act of multiplying them. Looking back, I would maintain that we were right to single out Strange Days as an instance of remediation as a cultural dominant at the end of the twentieth century. But we did not at that point recognize the way in which this double logic — if not precisely nearing its end — was at least in the process of being re-mediated according to another logic, a logic of premediation in which the future has always already been pre-mediated. In other words we failed to understand fully the way in which Strange Days was already participating in a logic of premediation insofar as it both pre-mediated the United States (particularly Los Angeles) nearly five years into the future and pre-mediated future media practices and technologies.