Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

(Paperback)

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Contemporary cultural style rejects mediation in favor of direct access, extreme affect, and rapid uptake. These are values it borrows from the economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of 21st century capitalism demand that art pretend it isn't. Smearing our noses in realness seems to be the only goal of much of contemporary culture, and that goal synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. Circulation strives to be instantaneous, with "flow" the ultimate 21st century buzzword, but these speedy gears grind art down to the nub. And the bad news is, the political turmoil and social challenges we face - climate crisis foremost among them - require more rather than less mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style undoes them. Considering original streaming tv, popular fiction, artworld trends, and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion, authenticity, and total transparency, and it points to alternative forms of representation in photography, tv, novels, and constructive theory, that prioritize distance, impersonality, and big ideas instead.

Reviews

This brilliantly written, wild ride of a book is an enthralling, gloves-off critical intervention urgently needed in this moment. -- Jonathan Crary, author of 24/7 and Scorched Earth
Kornbluh offers a swift -- and much needed -- kick to one of the most insidious symptoms of our time: the demand for the now, the immediately felt, the one-off. Armed with a strong imperative: "Think!" which she reiterates in an uncommonly rich vocabulary and from a variety of perspectives, she succeeds at the very least in holding up this runaway trend. Together with her previous critiques of capitalism, Immediacy establishes Kornbluh as one of the most inventive new voices in the field. -- Joan Copjec, Brown University, author of Read My Desire
Anna Kornbluh brilliantly reinvigorates critique for an age drowning under the deluge of self-presentation. Embracing structure over style, representation over personalization, and collectivity over narcissism, she creates a space for thinking -- the necessary space for politics. -- Jodi Dean, author of The Communist Horizon
The sensation of reading Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy is of someone turning on the light in a dark room. Suddenly one beholds a world one had only been stumbling through and can begin, with Kornbluh's help, to trace a whole new set of relations between the disparate phenomena that define contemporary culture. The shocking conceptual clarity and rightness of its dialectical reversal of everything we thought we knew about life lived under conditions of postmodern hyper-mediation should make this book the starting point of future discussions of the nature of the present. -- Mark McGurl, Stanford University, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon
To the things themselves! Fuck no, that's precisely the problem. In this book on the poetics of social forms, Kornbluh has expertly diagnosed the contemporary yen for immediacy and immanence, presence and reality, the indistinct blurs and liquid flows of seemingly authentic experience. Taking it all as a kind of social pathology, she reads contemporary style through the deterritorializations of hyper capitalism, and the crushing lateness of an economic logic that insists on no alternative for society and no future for the planet. What results is a plea for the labor of mediation, and an insistence on dialectics as the central mechanism of art and culture. -- Alexander R. Galloway, author of Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age
Immediacy masterfully exposes the common core of many different problems and phenomena that we do not necessarily think of as related. The imperative of immediacy and its suffocating logic are the hallmarks of what Kornbluh calls "too late capitalism". Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis and art she makes a vivid, passionate, and most compelling case for mediation that creates the much-needed capacity to imaginatively break with the merely given. An extremely precious book that goes far beyond purely academic concerns. -- Alenka Zupancic, author of Let Them Rot
Anna Kornbluh simply nails it in this fearless, witty, and conceptually powerful indictment of contemporary capitalist culture's desire to annihilate negation-while also "negating the negation" by showing how things might be otherwise. A stunning and unignorable book. -- Sianne Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form

Author Bio

Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where her research and teaching center on literature, film, and Marxist cultural theory. She is the author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, and Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club, and Realizing Capital. Anna Kornbluh has a prominent international profile in academic circles ranging from literature and film to political economy and history, in the artworld increasingly as critic-in-residence at gallery events for contemporary work in Chicago, and in journalistic venues like The Times Literary Supplement (which has repeatedly reviewed her work), The Chronicle of Higher Education (which recurrently commissions essays and interviews from/with her), and The Paris Review, as well as podcasts with over 10,000 individual listeners, such as Why Theory. This recent youtube interview has over 6000 views: https://www.youtube.com/watchv=AIdqjKf8c5g&t=445s. While she tweets impersonally, her account has nearly 12,000 followers. The Los Angeles Review of Books has already commissioned an essay from her to coincide with the books publication.