Rhetoric Of Racism Revisited Book

A thought-provoking book, full of fertile ideas. Chapters 3 & 4 are brilliant, and Chapter 5 anticipates the Snowden affair by several years. The first two chapters seem underdeveloped. It's not clear whether "premediation" is meaningful without "preemption" or vice versa.

Is premediation distinct from "risk society" or "society of control?" Are Grusin's ideas about mediality distinct from Beaudrillard's or Zizek's? That is, is premediation a novel phenomenon resulting from 9/11 or is it a manifestation of a logic already decades old? I will leave these questions to someone with better knowledge of media theory and history.

Grusin's ideas appear to explain both the reactions to Abu Ghraib and the initial swift successes of the Arab Spring, e.g., the role of social media in the Egyptian revolution. Affect --> emotion --> action/revolution mediated by our everyday use of global-social-networks. But the power of this explanation appears to be independent of the idea of premediation itself. Premediation adds a layer of complexity involving potentialities/virtualities/futures, which in turn are integral elements of affect and cognition. By controlling, modulating potentialities/futures government can hope to (indirectly) modulate/mediate emotion. Others have shown how this is more difficult than it, perhaps, appears in Premediation--thin of the laughable "terror color alerts" of the Bush Era. Perhaps further research could verify whether "premediation" has indeed played a more important role in mass media than it did pre-9/11. It would, then, also clarify what it means for the consumer and the citizen today.