Anglia Ruskin and ArcDigital had the pleasure of hosting (with the support from CoDE-institute) yesterday a guest talk by professor Richard Grusin. Co-author of Remediation, Grusin has since been a key name in terms of media theory of the various logics of mediations that form the core of media cultural aesthetics and politics. With affinities to the field of media archaeology, the notion of remediation became a key way to understand that creative use of past media as a framework for the hypermediacy of new media.
Grusin's new research on Premediation focuses on the notions of affect and mediality in the post 9/11 American culture. His talk tied very nicely together with our networkpolitics-project in terms of how it talked about the logic of premediation tied together with security; the mode of anticipation inherent in social media culture, and the infiltration of mundane practices of premediation that are contrary to Agamben's claims of "pure mediality" according to Grusin "impure medialities."
Grusin was able to tie the positive desires/affects that social media creates in terms of frameworks of gestures (human gestural and software gestural) to security interests. According to Grusin, media technology is embedded by its nature with security interests where a growing amount of security happens on the level of preempted actions, pattern recognition and data mining. This naturally ties closely in with Greg Elmer's and Andy Opel's points about pre-emptive logic of control of contemporary political sphere.
The anticipatory mode of gesturing relates to how Grusin framed our relation to social media. If Benjamin and Kracauer were insisting that "fragmentation" and "distraction" were key modes of subjectivity in the age of emerging screen cultures and urbanity, Grusin argues that its "anticipation" that characterises social media culture. The potentiality of comments, responses, getting emails/responses and such creates a temporarlity of expectation that is I would say atmospheric and far from conscious. Indeed, as Grusin says, its affective and reaches also the somatic-gestural spheres of the embodied subject.
In his post-representational take on network politics, Grusin argued that its this connectivity of humans with non-humans in such temporal wirings where politics takes place. Similarly, if the sphere of politics is not perhaps most accurately captured by Agamben's state of exception-kind arguments (similarly as Hardt and Negri argue in their Commonwealth against such transcendent causes and for a more immanent and mundane mode of grey power) but through the workings of everyday procedures, technologies and technics, also resistance has to be immanent to such software mediated formations. In other words, Grusin was critical of any claims for "authenticity" that network-culture and its tribes might create, or any other nostalgic accounts.