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Description
Why speed, flow, and direct expression now dominate cultural style
Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current 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 twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. "Flow" is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them. Considering original streaming TV, popular literature, artworld trends, and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion and today’s intolerance of representation, and points to alternative forms in photography, TV, novels, and constructive theory that prioritize distance, impersonality, and big ideas instead.
Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current 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 twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. "Flow" is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them. Considering original streaming TV, popular literature, artworld trends, and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion and today’s intolerance of representation, and points to alternative forms in photography, TV, novels, and constructive theory that prioritize distance, impersonality, and big ideas instead.
Product Details
| Publisher | Verso |
| Publish Date | January 30, 2024 |
| Pages | 240 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781804291344 |
| Dimensions | 8.3 X 5.5 X 0.6 inches | 0.5 pounds |
About the Author
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.
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
"Electrifying."
—Omid Bagherli, Chicago Review
"[O]ffers a fresh lens through which to consider how our compulsion for immediacy is also fatally distorting our political life."
—Gregory Jones-Katz, Foreign Policy
"Kornbluh has done better than almost anyone in recent memory to define the elusive, claustrophobic spirit of the age and get started on excavating its cultural subterranea."
—ArtReview, Alex Niven
"Immediacy is very, very good at giving us what it promises: the style of the present, the feel of streaming (of goods and information as well as the products of culture) as a deluge that crushes and paralyzes and teaches us to like feeling crushed and paralyzed. Its prose has some of the same exhilarating adrenaline rush that it wants to stop us from admiring. In that sense it has a kind of dialectical richness: an immediacy that makes the reader reach for mediation."
—Bruce Robbins, Baffler
"Illuminating, profound, and relevant."
—Christina Fogarasi, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Immediacy is a powerful intervention into the aesthetic status quo, with valuable detours into the destructive potential of capital."
—Grace Byron, Los Angeles Review of Books
"A refreshing take on contemporary media."
—Publishers Weekly
"[Immediacy] is a tour de force polemic in its synthetic presentation of writers from Knausgaard to Cusk and theorists like Felski, Moten, and Latour as making common cause in their embrace of anti-politics, anti-theory, and all other manner of immediacy."
—Jensen Suther, Nonsite
"The book’s subtitle boldly positions it as a successor to Fredric Jameson’s era-defining Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). But it’s not bragging if you back it up, and Immediacy does."
—Artreview
"Kornbluh’s theory is almost a weapon: a means of severing the tightening webs of cultural and socioeconomic “immediacy” that threaten to absorb each of us at any moment. For her, theory is essential for creating distance, giving us the breathing room necessary to observe, to think abstractly, and to envision a world that is not identical to this one."
—Brendan Chambers, Public Books
—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
"Electrifying."
—Omid Bagherli, Chicago Review
"[O]ffers a fresh lens through which to consider how our compulsion for immediacy is also fatally distorting our political life."
—Gregory Jones-Katz, Foreign Policy
"Kornbluh has done better than almost anyone in recent memory to define the elusive, claustrophobic spirit of the age and get started on excavating its cultural subterranea."
—ArtReview, Alex Niven
"Immediacy is very, very good at giving us what it promises: the style of the present, the feel of streaming (of goods and information as well as the products of culture) as a deluge that crushes and paralyzes and teaches us to like feeling crushed and paralyzed. Its prose has some of the same exhilarating adrenaline rush that it wants to stop us from admiring. In that sense it has a kind of dialectical richness: an immediacy that makes the reader reach for mediation."
—Bruce Robbins, Baffler
"Illuminating, profound, and relevant."
—Christina Fogarasi, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Immediacy is a powerful intervention into the aesthetic status quo, with valuable detours into the destructive potential of capital."
—Grace Byron, Los Angeles Review of Books
"A refreshing take on contemporary media."
—Publishers Weekly
"[Immediacy] is a tour de force polemic in its synthetic presentation of writers from Knausgaard to Cusk and theorists like Felski, Moten, and Latour as making common cause in their embrace of anti-politics, anti-theory, and all other manner of immediacy."
—Jensen Suther, Nonsite
"The book’s subtitle boldly positions it as a successor to Fredric Jameson’s era-defining Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). But it’s not bragging if you back it up, and Immediacy does."
—Artreview
"Kornbluh’s theory is almost a weapon: a means of severing the tightening webs of cultural and socioeconomic “immediacy” that threaten to absorb each of us at any moment. For her, theory is essential for creating distance, giving us the breathing room necessary to observe, to think abstractly, and to envision a world that is not identical to this one."
—Brendan Chambers, Public Books
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