Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

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.

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.

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.

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.

Electrifying.

[O]ffers a fresh lens through which to consider how our compulsion for immediacy is also fatally distorting our political life.

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.

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.

Illuminating, profound, and relevant.

Immediacy is a powerful intervention into the aesthetic status quo, with valuable detours into the destructive potential of capital.

A refreshing take on contemporary media.

[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.

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.

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.