Imediatez: ou o estilo do capitalismo tardio demais

by Anna Kornbluh

O que a autobiografia de Michelle Obama, a onda de exposições artísticas imersivas e a série Fleabag têm em comum com a catástrofe climática, o sucateamento das universidades e a uberização do trabalho? Imediatez parte do gesto audacioso – e fora de moda – de propor uma chave mestra para diagnosticar o capitalismo contemporâneo.

Seja você mesmo, sem filtro, fale a real, conte sua própria história, sem artifícios ficcionais ou estéticos, promova uma conexão direta, sem média nem mediação... Anna Kornbluh identifica que os valores que marcam a paisagem cultural hegemônica do nosso tempo não apenas são enganosos – um estilo caracterizado por uma pretensa "ausência de estilo" –, como são imperativos decalcados da nova fase que o capitalismo ingressou nas últimas décadas.

Atualizando o diagnóstico de Fredric Jameson que marcou época, ou o estilo do capitalismo tardio demais indaga o que vem depois do pós-modernismo e formula uma resposta à altura. Em um momento no qual as urgências econômicas, ecológicas e sociais do presente transformaram em um luxo supérfluo a opacidade das obras de arte, desvios literários e reflexão demorada, este livro aposta no poder de revelação da crítica cultural dialética para reabilitar o espaço da política no século XXI.

Kornbluh se debruça sobre a forma e o conteúdo dos filmes e séries mais comentados do streaming, os queridinhos de crítica e público da literatura de autoficção, as tendências do mundo da arte e até as modas acadêmicas para explicar o que está por trás da atual intolerância à mediação e à representação. Mas não só, aponta também alternativas presentes nos produtos culturais e teóricos mais desafiadores que priorizam a distância, a impessoalidade e as grandes "A recusa ética e política ao 'capitalismo de imediatez' aparece como fissura no tecido discursivo da catástrofe e do colapso que tenta nos impedir de ver que, embora pareça 'tarde demais', o tempo de agir é sempre o nosso tempo de vida", escreve Rita von Hunty no prefácio.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, Politics, Art, Economics, Sociology

270 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 30, 2024

About the author

Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor of English at UIC. She is the author of Realizing Capital, and the manuscript, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. Articles on Marxist aesthetics have appeared in Mediations, Novel, the LARB, Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives, Lacan & Contemporary Cinema, and the Bloomsbury Companion to Marx.

Reviews

[Eli · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book because my thesis is on autofiction, and I'm writing about critical moods around autofiction / the reasons people dislike it. (As such, I bounced around a bit, mainly focusing on the sections on autofiction/autotheory.)

Kornbluh's fervour is at times enjoyable but comes at the cost of substantial rigour; this book is incredibly reductive, at times insultingly so. For instance, she says autofiction and autotheory are basically the same thing (they aren't), conflates 'autofiction' with 'antifiction' (it isn't) and 'anti-mediation' (lmao), and continually makes breathless, anguished statements about autofiction's complete abandonment of Structures and Collectives and Imaginative Potential, that just don't ring remotely true as someone who has actually read a substantial body of autofiction. I don't like Olivia Laing's Crudo either, lol, but if you need to caricature a genre in order to fold it into your critical schema then your schema needs work.

There are places in which autofiction, for instance, is actually responding to the conditions she talks about; many autofictions are nowhere as naive about the idea of authorial intimacy and authorial project as Kornbluh believes them to be, but that would require engaging with the explicitly /fictional/ element of their formal enterprise, which she refuses to do. Also, at times the book is noticeably sloppy - e.g. referring to a comedian's creative Yelp reviews as a 'critically acclaimed work' because they got written about in a couple 300-word articles, or informing us that present tense is used in both literary fiction and The Hunger Games in a tone of Abject Doom.

There's also a lot of value and taste judgments in here, some of which I'm down with (I also like collective imagining and labour protections) and some of which I find more suspect (I work on autofiction as a genre for writing about abuse, and, accordingly, some of the comments about 'wallowing', obsession with domesticity, obsession with 'parental blame' and 'solicitation of empathy' read as reactionary to me).

But primarily, I think Kornbluh's identified a real and interesting thing - the popularity of immediacy effects, how the contemporary artistic landscape induces their usage, and their political and artistic limits - that she's determined to make both more extreme and more total than it actually is. (Literature has not been Entirely Captured by the books she's mad at; autofictions are popular, sure, but they're not generally winning the Booker or appearing in celebrity book club baskets.)

This would be a better book if Kornbluh was willing to interrogate her irritation in some ways; she's hardly taking on untouched darlings of the literary landscape here (some of the fruit here is less low-hanging than windfall). As it is, she's on a crusade that simplifies everything it touches. I'm not really a fan.

[Nathan Shuherk · Rating 3 out of 5]

Argonauts isn’t my favorite book either, but I’m not gonna write a book about it. Damn.

[Iris · Rating 5 out of 5]

sensationally grouchy

[Max · Rating 1 out of 5]

I saw a tweet that ranked criticism of style one level above ad hominem, so I feel bad but frankly the style was so irritating and obtrusive that I think it’s a valid criticism anyway. Firstly, a sample: “for enhancing circulation, immediacy stylizes essences that auto manifest, language that concretizes, images that denude, streams that surge, and dissolutionisms that blur. The ensuing continuities, intensities, and expresses cradle the allure of that style.” Secondly, the author’s defence: “in quest against that other style, this meditation against immediacy, this book synthesises at a saucy scale, speaks impersonally without the ‘I,’ and composes prose that holds off intuition and holds out interpretation.” Thirdly: does criticizing a lack of mediation in contemporary novels/autofiction/movies/TV license prose like this? Prose that is unbearably dense, full of nominalizations, and which jumps incessantly from one unintelligible phrase to the next. I think not. This is a technically masterful but really cheap solution—we’re gonna push back against immediacy by making you read prose which is so dense you have to stop and think after every sentence. Maybe it’s just a skill issue, but to me reading this book is like a punishment disguised as an opportunity to escape the deluge of immediacy which (I think it is fair to say) has invaded all forms of contemporary media. Is this actually necessary? Would a more straightforward style be too un-mediated to distinguish itself from the antitheory she’s worried about. I’m skeptical. To be fair, this is not her point—in many ways this is supposed to be an exaggerated alternative to immediacy—something that goes as far in the direction of mediation as the archetypal example of immediacy—Kim Kardashian’s book of selfies—goes towards its antipode. But what, in practice, the reader is presented with feels remarkably close to the kind of deluge this book is supposed to call out.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well I for one am extremely glad someone has explained why all the things I've hated about the last 7 or so years of swaggy liberal-left-anarcho cultural production (and one or two things I've liked) are, in fact, capitalism.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's very satisfying when you read a book of theory that articulates in a structured fashion something that you've vaguely noticed and felt annoyed by, but been unable to categorise or explain. However it has taken me weeks to review Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism as it deserves in-depth consideration, something I've lacked the energy for. (In part because I inadvertently gave up coffee for the first time in a decade.) Anyway, Kornbluh looks across fiction, nonfiction, video, art, and theory to suggest that our current cultural moment is increasingly hostile to mediation and abstraction, instead obsessed with proximity and literalism. This tendency has significant political and social implications, not least my creeping dissatisfaction with a lot of newly released media that I don't think is solely due to ageing. From the start of the book, I appreciated the writing style. It avoids the academic density of intensely philosophical theory, while still demanding attentive reading:

Immediacy style short-circuits and preempts this social process [of making representation], swelling with self-identical thisness. Its reign in culture has evaded critical analysis because of its obvious appeal, but also because cultural theorists have succumbed to its intoxications. Across a wide variety of disciplines, theorists propagate the style in both form and content, denouncing abstraction while enthusing concretudes, writing in conspicuously 'postcritical' modes like acafandom and autotheory to extol entanglement, the body, and tautological haecceity. Eating the real with a spoon.

That paragraph includes the first of several new words I learned from this book (for definitions, refer to the glossary at the end of this review). After explaining what immediacy is, Kornbluh broadly explains why economic, social, political, and technological factors have brought about its dominance:

The ideology of immediacy holds a kernel of truth: we are fastened to appalling circumstances from which we cannot take distance, neither contemplative nor agential, every thing a catastrophe riveting our attention. [...]
Explusion, immiseration, incarceration, crisis: these are the quicksand grounds of immediacy. The more dehumanising our world becomes, the more gross failures of human society, the more splintered the efforts at collective transformation - the more tightly immediacy clinches. The material irrefutability of catastrophic ecocide, the historical outmodedness of the irrational and immiserating capitalism, the epidemic of depression and anxiety, declining life expectancy, domestic abuse, mass violence, mass incarceration and the group-differentiated vulnerability to these terrors (to slightly bend Ruth Wilson Gilmore's definition of racism) - these deformaties tar existing sociability, begetting atomistic absorption and evanescent egress as its only alternatives. When the mediations of society miscarry so systematically, it begins to look as if mediation itself is to blame.

Unfortunately immediacy encourages more commoditisation, more consumption, more social disconnection, more despair, essentially feeding the same problems listed above. As Kornbluh puts it, 'Immediacy style alludes to to a desire for mediation while also ideologically enjoining us to enjoy our devastation.' Immediacy prioritises doomscrolling through thousands of brief and emotive updates on the latest crisis over attempts at deeper understanding, placing information in context, and seeking collective solutions. While immediacy is essentially a theory about art, its implications are far wider because art and media consumption have now become key sites of political debate. On social media apps, responses to art and politics alike collapse into a dichtomy of affirmation or disjection:

The flatness of this binary coin is crucial: when presentation is personalisation, when all content is self, when experience trumps idea, any dimensionality, ambivalence, or ambiguity disappears. As a result, tension and contradiction are excluded; only opposition remains. This is all the better for the infotech companies, since the algorithm does not distinguish between good and bad clicks.

I was particularly intrigued by Kornbluh linking the rise of autofiction, memoir, and writing in the first person to the ideology of immediacy:

Economic premiums on speed, flow, and auto-actualisation inscribe themselves into literary style; immediacy writing's anti-representational, antifictional centrifugiality of charisma aestheticises this capitalist base.

This appears plausible to me and I enjoyed her discussion of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Maggie Nelson. Immediacy is a more subtle concept than it might immediately seem, encompassing (among other things) speed, individualisation, prioritisation of emotional over analytical response, loss of context, and fragmentation. The penultimate chapter tackles how immediacy has infected theory itself, negating the concept by prioritising personal experience over structures of understanding:

Existing modes of writing cannot work; theory is no longer tenable. Collective demands and objective courses of action do not hold; only the subjective and singular are appropriately moderate. The very project of representation - presenting at some remove, binding together more than individuals, speaking for others - has become illegitimate. In opposition to syntheses of critique, by which groups agree on what is bad (structural racism, say), and what is to be done (defund the police, say), and with which common signifiers to constitute collectives ('Black Lives Matter', say), praxis here infinitises minute actions of irreducible individuals, permanently deferring integration.

Kornbluh defends theory as a means of recognition and explanation of power structures, in order to critique them: 'It ought to be the medium in which we can step back from the merely evident'. It should enable us to understand the symptoms of immediacy, rather than ending up among them. The concept of 'autotheory' is the somewhat paradoxical result. I've read some of this without realising, by Sara Ahmed and Paul Preciado. I've greatly enjoyed books by both of them and thought they used their own experiences as illustrations rather than substitutes for theoretical points. I do wonder, though, whether this was a form of sweetening the pill for readability, potentially at the expense of rigor and substance. Did their anecdotes distract or even detract from the theory, even as I enjoyed reading them? Kornbluh's book seemed refreshing to me because it did not include any details of authorial personal experiences, relying upon more old-fashioned means of explanation and justification. Perhaps I'd become more accustomed to autotheory than I realised, with its elision of empirical and personal. As Kornbluh puts it, 'Immediacy as the unambiguous transmission of affect from author to reader, autonomic responses imagined untainted by the symbolic'.

I was pleased to see Andreas Malm cited as a theorist who resists immediacy, given his focus on climate change. He is specifically quoted regarding the anti-intellectual tendency to dismiss higher education and academic knowledge, the point of which is 'to ruin as much analytical equipment as possible' (from The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World, an excellent and thorough dismantling of critical theory that cannot handle climate change as a concept). It strikes me that immediacy encourages dismissiveness as a frequent and reflexive response, perhaps an understandable defense mechanism in the fact of information overwhelm. Dismissal of genuine and extremely important environmental crises breeds nihilism and hopelessness, both antithetical to dealing with complicated long-term ecological problems:

In historical dematerialised nihilism, horrors of the present are chained to horrors of the past in continuous current, overflowing the record of struggle for freedom and of contingent events with the oceans of domination. The identity of past and present ('It has always been this way') poses to capture the essence of the social order in its unchanging stone. [...] There are frequently spiritual or theological overtones to these epics of 'original sin', and their rhetorical and epistemological effect, as historian Matt Karp and others have observed, is the keenness of immutability. By the light of the category of immediacy, we can see how this eternity of immanence, this ineluctable total everythingness, mirrors the motifs of timeless instantaneity and frictionless flow that organise the culture of circulation.

The concluding chapter presents examples of books, TV, and theory that both exemplify and resist immediacy. The ultimate book of immediacy is apparently Kim Kardashian's selfie collection Selfish, while Real Life by Brandon Taylor is a novel that resists it. The latter is described rather beautifully: 'Economic inequalities, academic hierarchies, empiricist epistemes, and individualised perception become thinkable in the third person, that bird mode which constitutively defies the immediately observable.' Meanwhile in the realm of theory: 'Any challenge to this pervasive antitheory in the present must therefore embrace the mediating function of the symbolic while committing to the work of construction beyond emanation'. I think this sentence from the final paragraph summarises very neatly why we should all care about this; immediacy divides us: 'The style of immediacy precludes art, literature, video, and theory from convoking collectives and from catalysing representation itself as a medium of collectivity.'

Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism left me with a lot to think about, not least how to fit it amongst the other theory and philosophy of the present moment that I've read. I think there is some overlap between immediacy and the concept of intensity as expounded by Tristan Garcia in The Life Intense: A Modern Obsession. The former is more encompassing and thus useful for understanding current culture, as intensity is formulated in the context of ethics rather than cultural theory. Nonetheless, they share relativism, speed, and constant fluctuation as key characteristics. Intensity strikes me as a significant part of the individual experience of immediacy, driving its short-term appeal.

The concept of immediacy has given me an interesting new means of explaining things I read on a daily basis. Two examples from today: Monsters: What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People? turned out to be an elegantly-written memoir rather than the media criticism I anticipated, more concerned with the author's emotions about art than the ethical question of media by abusive men. And I saw a debate on tumblr about whether sufficient enthusiasm about a topic is indistinguishable from academic rigor. (I really don't think it is; my considerable enthusiasm about the French Revolution results in a totally different level and form of knowledge to more than a decade of academic training in, use of, and teaching statistics.) Conflating personal emotions with social ethics and amateur enthusiasm with academic study both seem characteristic of immediacy. I also wonder about LLM-based chatbots as a driver of this cultural tendency, given that they are designed to always validate the feelings and opinions of their users as they instantly regurgitate patterns from their training dataset. Not to mention tech companies pushing them as replacements for synoptic reading and critical thinking.

On the other hand, perhaps immediacy is a little too convenient as a theory, given that it appears so broad and is ready to explain so much. I find it a very useful structuring concept, but one that definitely requires further exploration and specification. Can the level of immediacy in different contexts be compared? At what point does it become harmful? Is it accelerating overall? Does it manifest differently in different nations and generations? Does it explain why increasingly often people on the bus subject me to the loud videos they are watching on their smart phones? Etc etc. Still, in a book is only just over 200 pages long, Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism attempts and in my view pulls off an audacious feat of theorisation. I definitely recommend it.

Glossary
Haecceity = the essence & defining qualities of a thing.
Enisled = to isolate, set apart.
Scaturient = abundant, effusive, overflowing.
Auratic = relating to the distinctive quality, aura of something.
Deixis = use of a word or phrase whose meaning depends on the context of who is talking.
Educing = bringing out something latent.

[tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

I lost my review of this because, like the immediacy-pilled millennial I am, I typed it on my phone in the bath, straight into the Goodreads text box which has a 50% chance of eating all of your text before you submit it. Normally I take this as a sign my writing was not worth the world’s eyes, for the Amazon-owned goodreads text box is surely benevolent, and treat the review as a sort of journal entry, appreciative at least that I took the time to work through some of my feelings on a book. But I’m choosing to write this again, both because I want to think through this one more than usual, and because I want to evangelise it. I firmly plant my flag in Anna Kornbluh’s pro-mediation camp. I think this book is phenomenal, if not a masterwork. And unlike when Kornbluh wields these superlatives, me saying this does not mean I am about to savage it through a long quotation for the reader to shake their head at.

But enough with My Struggle

Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism is Kornbluh’s attempt to be the one who labels the dominant cultural style of the present and make it stick. Freddy Jameson was the last to do this, and this book follows Jameson in detailing the reciprocal relationship between economic and cultural production. The pervading style emerges from the conditions of its production, but it also naturalises these conditions, on the level of economics as well as culture. Post financial crisis, Kornbluh identifies the economic climate as one of stagnating production, but rapidly accelerating circulation. Think same-day delivery, bitcoin and on demand streaming. Think predictive algorithms that tell you what you want to watch. We can’t make it better or even more efficiently, but we can get it to you faster.

So what does Kornbluh put forward as the hegemonic cultural style of the present, because in writing this book she is also asserting it is no longer post-modernism? One word, no ambiguous hyphens: Immediacy. Immediacy means what you think it means, but it also means a lack of mediation. A desire to bypass any distance or distortion from producer to consumer or artist and viewer, signifier and signified. If immediacy manifests as product at the click of a button in the economic world, in the cultural world it is an elevation of presence, feeling and relatability over distance/scope, thought and empathy. If post-modern style attempted to overwhelm the senses, immediacy style soothes the already overwhelmed consumer-customer. It’s a retreat to and for the individual from the state of the world. It’s too late to do anything about climate change, collective action is impossible, and we can only really address the self.

Kornbluh is primarily a literary scholar, and the book is most convincing when centring on literature and theory, of which immediacy manifests in the prefix “auto-”. In the realm of literature it’s the autofiction of Knausgaard, Cusk, Heti et al, and the personal essay you’ll find on awful news/culture website of choice - or more likely through twitter discourse about said essay. Autofiction destroys immediacy in very clear ways. It views fiction as a mediation of truth (which is of course only ever personal truth - or “your” truth), so it writes about banal reality. It’s in the first person, of course, and is narrated by the author-avatar. There aren’t really any characters besides the protagonist, because everything is filtered through the narrators consciousness, which is of course the author’s consciousness. It’s often present tense to further immerse the reader and remove the mediation of time and perspective. It essentially attempts to remove as many boundaries between reading and experiencing as possible - because for the autofiction writers, direct experience is everything.

Autotheory comes off even worse. In Kornbluh’s rendering, it has surrendered entirely to immediacy. Everything is flow, motion, propulsion and the body - which is real because unlike thought it is yours. Also unlike thought, you can’t argue with it. It’s affect, delivered straight from theorist to reader.

I’m getting bored, So I’ll let Kornbluh sum up her arguments on theory in reference to antitheory/surface-reading.

Hegemonically ordained by all these vectors of power, ardently esteemed by all our leading lights, immediacy theory remains glaring in its negation of theory, which ought to be one of the ultimate media of mediation: intercession; thick, slow, strange relay; and hewing out relative autonomy. It ought to be the medium in which we can step back from the merely evident. It ought to be the medium in which we can situate the valorization of immediacy as a historical specificity. It ought to be the medium through which we can perceive the systematic and surprising interrelation of culture (what front- facing cinematography has to do with supply chain logistics, what engaged art has to do with networked algorithms). And it ought to be the medium in which ideas themselves negate their own delimiting determinations, shed their old baggage as mere interpretations, and hit the dialectical jackpot to intervene in the world. Theory effects distance, abstraction, movement away. Immediacy foments intimacy, immersion, the negation of intercession. Theory takes us out of a situation, out of phenomenality, out of ourselves, and into realms of reflection that escalate to include the dislocation of our ineluctable situatedness, conceptualization of our many determinations, and speculation about inexperienced possibilities. Immediacy imbibes the immanent. Theory cultivates and cooks, constituting new nourishment for flourishing. Taking distance and cutting distinctions, lineating formations and daring construction, theory risks something other than absorption or blur. Through its orotund negations, immediacy theory is antitheory.”

She’s right, you know. And she's also right in pointing out that autotheory/fiction are produced in an environment of unprecedented destruction of the universities and publishing houses, the two great mediators of intellectual culture. And these forms internalise this shrinkage of the mediating apparatus and repackage it as radicalism. You don't need an institution to "speak your truth", they just get in the way - they're too bogged down in complicated networks of relationships.

I wish the book was longer, the 240 pages are about 40% footnotes. It's a joy when Kornbluh sets her sights on something particularly egregious, but she never really has time to sink her teeth into it. The argument largely happens outside of analysis of texts, which serve as examples which propel her argument. I would have appreciated the argument developing through the readings of these texts. But this is inevitable in a slim volume of a small scope. I also find the expression irritating in places. Sentences are densely laden with jargony adverbs and archaic or obscure words but often lack connective tissue, so that full stops feel like especially hard cuts. I think the density is appropriate, it causes friction and encourages grappling with the sentences, but I can't help noticing some immediacy by osmosis in sentences like "Immersive intensity transmits an instant message; it brooks no abstract mediations. Sir, this is an Arby's."

These criticisms are small in the face of what this book achieves, however, which is nothing less than establishing a new lens through which you will not be able to help but view contemporary culture. You will spot immediacy everywhere where before you just felt a hollowness or indistinct irritation. To provide shape to the vagaries of discontent is surely one of the critic's most valuable vocations.

[ADB · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really, really, really hate this book.

I also think it’s the most important work of the 21st century and everyone should read it—RIGHT NOW.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

giving this five starts to cover up the fact that it has ruined my life

[Lukia · Rating 2 out of 5]

i think immediacy works as a theory—but this book doesn’t. somewhere around the last chapter it takes a left turn from an ungenerous (but not unjustified!) theory of contemporary aesthetics to railing against the types of cultural opinions the author doesn’t like. Kornbluh starts going off on university students who believe that “all institutions are oppressive, human history is only the history of domination…and therefore the only minimally affordable virtues are ephemerality, hybridity, destabilization, fugitivity.” well….yes!

then Kornbluh moves onto culture itself—designating shows as immediate or not immediate through cherry-picked methods. Succession is just a genre-bending as Euphoria, is it not? (it appears a tv show is not an example of Immediacy if she likes it.) why are you angling a group of contemporary Black novelists against Maggie Nelson and autofiction as a whole? i became resentful of the whole conclusion which now framed the best Marxist & materialist thinkers as oppositional to contemporary antitheory and autotheory writers, which is simply not true! also she, just like, never addresses hyperreality which kind of negates a lot of her points….frustratingly becomes an emperor with no clothes situation very quickly once you get into the weeds.

[Clara · Rating 3 out of 5]

the critique of autofiction I can handle but hating on Fleabag goes too far…

[imogen · Rating 4 out of 5]

a thoughtful, well researched account of how immediacy is eroding our society and brains. contemporary cultural attitudes favour immediacy as the main form of consumption (especially in media) and this book was a valuable read to learn about how we got here, and what we can do now.

[Grace Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

A zippy polemic that begins from the premise that since the 1970s, capitalist productivity has entered a long downturn in dynamism and growth. Because investment in new productive capacity is so low, value is now generated primarily by quickening and accelerating the circulation of commodities (“cutting out the middle man”). What does living in a historical period dominated by circulation do to aesthetics? Kornbluh’s answer is Immediacy.

By immediacy, Kornbluh points to a widespread distaste for abstraction, narrative, generalisation, and conceptualisation. In short, a distaste for any categories and forms that determine and mediate. Instead, the dominant culture style is marked by a deluge of confessionalism, memoirisation, “lived experience” as the only grounds for epistemology, presentism, and affect. One key example of immediacy that the book outlines is Fleabag, which elides narrative and genre in lieu of a flowing intensity of first person trauma-dumps.

The problem with immediacy as a dominant culture style is that evacuates the shared symbolic forms and signifiers (like the trade union or the political party) that make collective action and solidarity possible. As a critique, this is a timely one. But where the book perhaps falls short is its half-assed insertion of Lacanian theory, seemingly thrown in to pre-empt criticisms of mechanical Marxist determinism(productive base determining cultural superstructure). Kornbluh conjures Lacan’s category of the Imaginary, arguing that this socio-psychic category (as opposed to the Symbolic or the Real) closely correlates with a circulation forward economy and its attendant cultural pathologies. However, it’s then dropped almost as quickly, and adds little to the overall thesis.

Still, it’s a lively riposte to the most insipid, stultifying, and faux-radical cultural tendencies of our historical moment.

[Finn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe the best academic/theory book I've read in years

[Dandi · Rating 3 out of 5]

felt like the Subway Takes guy the way I was swinging violently between 100% agree and 100% disagree with every sentence

[Paul Reef · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was either written by mr. Milchick or with a thesaurus

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love it when a book articulates an irritation that had been so barely perceptible it might as well have been unconscious. Now that irritation will be seen and felt in almost every waking moment.

[Swarthout · Rating 4 out of 5]

the immediacy problem as the writer sees it goes to capitalism, more specically neoliberal capitalism. time compresses as profits and economic growth become stagnated or bottle necked, as a way through. we are living in an era of circulation crises, thus the financialization of everything, the fleeing to the servicization or the fictionalization of money, and the increased rapidity within that financialization. the book just covered the effect this ephemeral quality has had on contemporary culture ie autofiction, autotheory. a flight into the psychological and the personal, at the expense of the social or collective. this fleeing is not explained by narcissism, but a normal human coping response to generally ignored stimulii. what she did not cover, and would have liked a theory, why is this different from previous circulation crises ? or is this different at all? is neoliberalism distinctly different than other eras of capitalism ?

[Robby Bishop · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed the polemical aspects of The Order of Forms (i.e., her attacks on anarcho-vitalism) and her recent essay "Prospective Criticism." This book extends these arguments, clarifying which artistic and critical approaches she finds troubling and which she finds promising. Her prose is a bit over the top but very fun to read. I was laughing aloud at her criticism of Uncut Gems. Wide-ranging in its references, showing that she is not alone in her critique and pointing to many other interesting books to read.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Savage.

[Marc Rosen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book will ruin the way you look at all your favorite books/movies/tv shows but in a fun way

[Joshua Line]

'It's not too late for us to build things less worse.'

[Jane Freiman · Rating 4 out of 5]

** edit: I am better understanding Kornbluh’s proposals for mediation, dialectics, fictionality, free indirect discourse, and other alternatives to immediacy style. My criticisms below are perhaps a little impatient and…immediate**

New guidepost for me, as well as being readable required reading. So much here to do so much with: genre, form, personalism, circulation, opacity, the affective and reparative, the material and institutional formations that produce culture and criticism. I especially liked the chapter on autofiction, perhaps bc I was most familiar with the objects of study. Conflicted by “liking” some of these objects and the (hybrid) genre of prose poetry in general. Is the dissolution of genre and fragmentation of form always “bad” or capitalist in nature? Is there a difference btwn genre-bending genre-less-ness/formlessness?

Skillfully integrates the social and material with the aesthetic, and provides a thorough and compelling critique of pretty much most strains of contemporary criticism (affect theory, new materialism, afropessimism, autotheory, etc etc). It would be nice—and perhaps this is too much to ask of this one slim book—if Kornbluh offered any inklings at alternatives or new directions for criticism, aside from her implied preference for a return to classic Marxism / historical materialism. Is that…it? What does good theory look like for Kornbluh? Good fiction? Good film? I think it would help to situate the string of eviscerating (and almost always correct/necessary) critiques alongside some examples of what she regards as successful mediation in practice.

I guess I’m left with more questions than answers, and I guess that’s sort of the point. This book is a provocation—let’s look again!!—rather than a plan.

[D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tengo dos páginas de apuntes sobre lo que pensé de este libro, pero quiero usarlos para un ensayo-reseña más extenso. Lo que diría a modo de síntesis es que Kornbluh tiene una tesis muy fuerte y bien armada: la "inmediatez" (lo no-mediado) como un modo cultural definitorio de la contemporaneidad. Lo justifica con un enfoque lacaniano-marxista clásico: al mayor peso en la circulación (por sobre la producción) en la esfera económica, corresponde una hipertrofia del registro de lo imaginario por sobre lo simbólico. Hasta ahí vamos bien. También es bueno el capítulo de análisis cultural de la literatura contemporánea, con foco en la literatura del yo, la autoficción y otros géneros.
El libro se empieza a caer a pedazos en el capítulo siguiente, destinado al "video". Es evidente que Kornbluh no tiene el andamiaje conceptual para abordar la televisión y el cine del mismo modo que lo hace con la literatura. Y todo empieza a fallar más aún en el apartado destinado a teoría, donde ni siquiera intenta un análisis complejo de los nuevos materialismos u otras corrientes; de hecho, la falta de abordaje de algunas tendencias filosóficas que ponen el foco en la alienación es sorprendente. El problema es que esos capítulos no sólo fallan en argumentos puntuales sino que hacen caer la hipótesis del libro: el concepto de mediación se revela como poco explicado y argumentado, y todo el andamiaje teórico termina pareciendo una justificación de por qué a la autora no le gusta Fleabag. Y, lo que es peor, todo lo que no sea la Escuela de Frankfurt le parece directamente reaccionario.
Y, sin embargo, creo que hay algo valioso en el comienzo del libro, en cómo empieza a pensar algunas tendencias de la cultura contemporánea.

[samoht99 · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

[Tauan Tinti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sempre fui simpático ao ódio ao existente como motor da inteligência, e esse livro é um bom exemplo da sua produtividade. O capítulo menos forte, como é de praxe com radicais americanos, é a conclusão meio-propositiva, meio-gosto-dessas-coisas-aqui (ou seja, nem tudo está perdido). Eu provavelmente mudaria uma coisa ou outra de lugar, ou pelo menos prestaria um pouco mais de atenção nos sucessos parciais ou fracassos interessantes (acho que estou pensando especificamente em My year of rest and relaxation, só porque tenho um hot take meio morno sobre o livro), já que o que neles não funciona pode ser também determinado (historicamente etc.).

(e, nos termos da minha superstição com relação ao que vou ver/ler/jogar na sequência, esse livro me convenceu em definitivo a ir atrás do tal Succession)

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not gonna lie, this book was a real struggle. But I'm interested in work that's gonna come from people who found this book inspiring.

Just know if you're reading on kindle, the end is at 60% the rest is footnotes and the index.

[F · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this thought provoking despite not entirely agreeing with Kornbluh’s close readings or conclusions.

The argument for immediacy’s cultural hegemony is, I think, incontrovertible, and the analysis of its material base - in the circulation-forward economy, and more specifically the contraction of publishing and academia as well as the dominance of immediate modes of communication and commerce - was illuminating. But I don’t necessarily agree that many of the media she exemplifies as unmediated and personalised are quite as naive as her readings suggest. There are eg. many examples of autofiction which are very aware of and ironise their immediacy effects - and are in this way highly mediated. (This to me feels like quite a basic premise of literary style.)

Expanding on this, I wondered if some reflexive thinking about immediate aesthetics might in turn conceive of immediacy more as a culturally hegemonic mode of reading, rather than as a style. This is in some way evident in Kornbluh’s own close readings, which in instances felt as though they were deliberately obfuscating texts’ various mediations in an attempt to advance her thesis.

Kornbluh’s commentary on the vitiated institutional place of writing and creativity was really interesting, as were her observations on the seemingly inherent pessimism of immediate media. Equally, I found her valuations of various modes of pessimism (Afro-, queer, gyno- and otherwise) quite reactionary, though I see how immediacy, pessimism and a crisis of futurity might well be related.

All the same, this made me think, I enjoyed reading it, and it will change the way I read contemporary media of all forms for the better, I hope? Inevitably there are many nits to pick with such an overarching omnithesis, but it was entertaining to read a piece of cultural criticism which managed to encompass so much.

[Holly Acker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took a second for me to get into, but once I made it through the (kind of grueling) introduction, I was really fascinated by Kornbluh’s argument. She draws connections across all aspects of culture, arts, politics, & the economy to illustrate the drastic shift our culture has taken away from mediation, away from theory, to a present-focused, flow-oriented, personalized immediacy-centered paradigm. I particularly enjoyed the chapters on literature and video; the anti theory chapter was a bit heavier but definitely prompted me to reconsider my view of theoretical practices. I don’t necessarily agree with the view that a rise in auto-fiction/first person perspectives in literature is necessarily a bad thing, and I also think there is value to be found in the new styles video has taken within the streaming era. In the conclusion, she offers counter-examples for her three main points, showcasing that mediation has not been completely removed from popular media, ending with a call-to-action of sorts, claiming that reclaiming a version of the new world without immediacy will help us combat the features of “too late” capitalism. Certainly an interesting read, would recommend if anyone wants a challenge, def need fiction next though.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book comes out strong with the zingers. kornbluh does not mince words as she constructs a compelling theory of cultural style in the present. i think kornbluh’s theory of immediacy itself is much more compelling than how she draws it out in the chapters. it seems to be a resounding critique based on what i’ve read so far, but her chapter on antitheory in particular is reductive and condenses so much varied work into a singular stroke. still, kornbluh’s insistence that we need to repudiate the nihilism of our streaming world is so needed and i think she’s ultimately right that mediation is a helpful mode of production in the way forward.