Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

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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.

Reviews

  • Praise for The Order of Forms

    :
  • The Order of Forms offers a probing, ambitious, and innovative argument with far-reaching implications across fields. Kornbluh turns away from dominant particularist and historicist methods in literary and cultural studies and gives shape to a stimulating new set of strategies for thinking the political in the humanities and beyond. That she is capable of bringing together psychoanalysis, Marxism, literary formalism, and mathematics makes this a virtuoso work of theory.

    Caroline Levine, Cornell University
  • The Order of Forms is one of the most exciting books I’ve read in several decades. Staging the convergence of discourses that, however historically contemporaneous, have never been rigorously linked together, Kornbluh generates a series of provocative and convincing arguments about literature, criticism, and the agency of form. Her approach makes her a theoretical singularity.

    Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago