Introduction: Materia Media

The essays in this special issue of Criticism undertake various projects, not all of which are similar or even compatible. But a common thread runs throughout: whether elaborating on contemporary media practices or postmodern emotions, early modern horses, fin de siècle human anomalies, or Henry James, these essays broach the possibility of a new materialism. Such a materialism proposes that neither media nor mediation should be thought as insubstantial or passive relays between some "real" and our sensorium. Rather, both media and mediation incarnate their own materiality, and both must be analyzed with an eye to their specific and as yet insufficiently characterized effectivity or reality.¹ The coinage "materia media" aims to express in small compass some of the manifold complexities and consequences of that analysis. Modeled on the materia medica, "the remedial substances and preparations used in the practice of medicine" (OED), materia media names something we might call "medial substances" or "the substances used in media practice." The two kinds of substances are in some sense the same: mass communication as well as means, instruments, materials, and techniques more broadly are medial in that they mediate or stand between (between, for instance, humans and other animals, writers and readers, war and its spectators). The Internet, cable news networks, film, equine portraiture, medical and forensic photography, narrative fiction, the tape recorder—for the contributors to this special issue, these and other media are mediations that do not reflect or translate materiality so much as constitute it in their own right. Put starkly, and to adapt a slogan from Marshall McLuhan, these essays demonstrate that the media are the material.²

In the first essay, "Premediation," Richard Grusin revisits the argument he and Jay Bolter put forward in Remediation (1999), adding to their earlier claims about the mediation of the past by positing the mediation of the future as well. Remediation proper refers to a dialectic between past and present in which new media forms incorporate the old, and older media forms respond by incorporating the new: some video games, for instance, derive their overriding logic from film noir or cinematic science fiction; a film like Run, Lola, Run works like a video game. Premediation, on the other hand, may be understood as proleptic, anticipatory mediation. Quite different from what might initially appear to be synonyms (prediction, prophecy, premeditation), premediation does not predict a future event so much as saturate futurity by rehearsing, ahead of time, multiple possibilities. The Weather Channel deals in prediction: "Heavy snow in the Midwest tomorrow." The news media covering the so-called War on Terror premediate: a dirty bomb may be exploded in a population center; planes may be hijacked again; the Internet may be disrupted; biological weapons may contaminate the food supply; etc., etc., etc. If or when any one of these events comes to pass, it will have been premediated but not exactly predicted. And this has implications for the now, the quotidian: while prediction with its accuracy or failure of accuracy has specific future results (in the case of heavy snow, say, school closings), premediation smuggles the future into the present by forcing the present to reshape itself around a proliferation of possible futures. Under a regime of premediation, the present is a paradoxical time, a "now" deformed by a future against which it seeks to immunize itself.³

At one moment in his essay, Grusin brings to bear Bruno Latour's refusal of the subject-object dichotomy⁴ in the process of declaring the materiality of the medial: "Just as one of the three corollaries of remediation insists on the inseparability of reality and mediation, the reality of media, their materiality as objects of circulation within the world of humans and nonhumans, of society and of things, so the concept of premediation insists on the reality of the premediated future" (28). Donna Landry, as if in response to an odd oversight of such Latourian thought, makes room in the "world . . . of society and things" for animals, and specifically for a horse: the...