Beyond risk: Premediation and the post-9/11 security imagination

In the context of the 'war on terror', techniques of imagining the future have taken on new political significance. Richard Grusin has coined the term 'premediation' to describe the way in which news media and cultural industries map and visualize a plurality of possible futures. This article examines the relation between the politics of risk and premediation as a security practice. Premediation simultaneously deploys and exceeds the language of risk. Its self-conscious deployment of imagination in security practice feeds economies of both anxiety and desire.