It is commonly acknowledged that the pace of our economy and cultural life is characterized by increasing expectations of acceleration and instant gratification, whether in the form of gig work and just-in-time supply chains, hot takes and digital streaming. This is what Anna Kornbluh calls Immediacy, or the Capitalist Style That Came Too Late She shows how these two trends, economic and cultural, are interrelated and reinforcing, and offers a new way of thinking about how our obsession with immediacy is fatally distorting our political life.
Immediacy, or the Capitalist Style That Came Too LateAnna Kornbluh, Verso, 240 pages, $24.95, January 2024.
Working within the framework of the Marxist intellectual tradition, Kornbluh, over five short chapters, deconstructs hegemonic cultural styles (immediacy, presence, reliance on experience) by investigating their formal features and locating them in specific media practices. Immediate This is not just a diagnosis; it is an intellectual call to arms for a marginalized cultural style of mediation, of explaining, removing, blending, relating, and developing; in other words, everything that the dominant cultural style of immediacy seeks to close off as a possibility. The stakes are high: politically, ethically, and historically.
Much of Kornbluh’s book is concerned with examining the mediation of immediacy – how culture of the present is formed and what it consists of. In chapter 1, “Circulations,” he explores the notion of “secular stagnation” to explain the contraction of global productivity since the 1980s. For Kornbluh, the slowdown in the production of value has been accompanied by an acceleration in its circulation, with an emphasis on speed and flow rather than manufacture, reinforced by revolutions in microelectronics and logistics, ” [cultural] She goes on to explore how the “everyday psychic contours” of this dominant style “reconfigure cognition and emotion” through the sharing of images in the contemporary media ecosystem.Here, Kornbluh draws on French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s concepts of imagination, symbol, and reality to offer a materialist perspective on “what has been misdiagnosed as an epidemic of raving narcissism.”
Kornbluh then considers the various forms of expression that characterize our current cultural style of immediacy. In chapter three, he argues that immediacy’s focus on single experiences, personal perspectives, and individual voices, as well as the casualization of academic labor and the publishing sector, have transformed writing by destroying its capacity for expression and, in turn, its ability to produce fiction, including novels. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 3,600-page formless autobiographical work, My Struggleis typical of the resulting text.Chapter 4, “Video,” argues that the convergence of the technical and economic processes of streaming is embodied in the stylistic features of video, such as the front camera, the expanse of space, and the perpetual loop.YouTube, for example, dismantles barriers between genres with its endless, formless stream of images.
In his final chapter, “Anti-Theory,” Kornbluh argues that contemporary critical theory has advanced a hegemonic cultural style of immediacy and moved toward a quietist embrace of uniformity, entanglement, and pessimism. Postcriticism, affect theory, attachment theory: for Kornbluh, these are all hyper-empirical styles used by recent literary and cultural critics to move beyond a “hermeneutics of suspicion” and treat texts as objects of surface and simplicity rather than depth and density. The editors of an influential book have Critique and post-critiqueFor example, he captures the zeitgeist of counter-critique: “The intellectual or political benefits of questioning, demystifying, and secularizing are no longer so self-evident.”
But for Kornbluh, such a theory of the zeitgeist is actually an anti-theory, a reproduction of our economic and political conditions in the form of an aesthetic of immediacy. Kornbluh argues that what we need is a rich and powerful theory that does not simply confirm the status quo, but intervenes and comes to terms with the assumptions and complexities of our current era. With such a powerful theory, we can recover our lost critical faculties and make rational judgments, detached from our cultural (and perhaps economic and political) conditions.
But can mediation short-circuit the immediacy of our dominant cultural style, let alone its economic bases? In the conclusion, Kornbluh attempts to answer by charting the counter-tendencies that still exist alongside the hegemony of immediacy. For example, she argues:[s]”Several recent trajectories in theory” work against immediacy by “inviting us to subscribe to a collective vision and to take collective responsibility,” and Kornbluh points out how such mediated cultural forms resemble disruptors of the distribution economy, such as the labor movements at Amazon and Starbucks, or the cultural workers of the Writers Guild of America. These struggles, along with collective organizing and the mediating role of the state and the university, build the foundations for new expressions, alternative cultural styles.
Kornbluh does not fully explore how our dominant culture and its “everyday practices and conventional meanings” affect how we think about and what is possible in politics, but our reliance on immediacy is clearly visible in populism and the danger it poses to democracy.[W]”We are witnessing a widening disconnect between the mechanisms of delay built into liberal democracies, such as representative debate in governing bodies, and the ‘politics of impatience’ that is part of a broader populist communication style,” Henrik Boedker and Chris Anderson wrote in 2019.
Boedker and Anderson argue that social media and online news sites, which have replaced journalism as the traditional intermediary mechanism between political and other social processes, have fostered a populist intolerance, especially towards “procedures (including referendums) and regular elections.” The prevalence of conspiracy theories about fraud during the 2020 US presidential election may also be interpreted as a sublimation of the drive for immediacy.
The desire for immediate political results has also led many to crave strong leaders who promise to solve political problems through swift decisions, rather than through the delays of democratic processes and their associated institutions. Thus, as Boedker and Anderson point out, populist leaders often use social media to connect with an already impatient public, in contrast to the slow pace of “elitist” political and legal institutions, intermediary structures that distance themselves through bureaucratic postponements. Consider here former US President Donald Trump’s appearances on Truth Social, where he, not merely a narcissist but an embodiment of a hegemonic cultural style, often speaks candidly to his supporters about the perceived dangers of immigration, corruption, and other issues that are allegedly ignored by the judicial and legislative branches.
These populist leaders present their electronic statements as unmediated and therefore unaltered. They are communicative acts that momentarily satisfy an irrepressible desire for presence. Electronic statements then spill out and shape our political world. When Trump supporters chanted “Put her in jail!” and “Build a wall!” at rallies, or when then-Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milley vowed to turn “chainsaws” on institutions like central banks (and actually did wield one in a stunt), they embodied a presentist cultural impulse, reinforcing the prejudices and bigotry built into a cyclical-first base. Perhaps the elevation of celebrities and tech billionaires (Andrew Tate and Elon Musk spring to mind) in our collective political imaginative life is also such a symptom. Tech entrepreneurs live by Mark Zuckerberg’s maxim: “Move fast and break things.”
It would have been fruitful if Kornbluh had extended her analysis in these directions. Moreover, Kornbluh only implicitly engages with forces that strongly oppose her aim of inviting readers to assume mediated purposes. For example, while she considers immediacy and writing, an analysis of reading is lacking. Immediate.
But maybe that doesn’t matter, since Americans don’t read books in the first place. According to a December 2021 Gallup poll, American adults read fewer books every year. As Caleb Klein has pointed out, we are steadily moving toward “secondary orality,” a sociological term first used by Walter J. Ong to refer to a post-literary culture in which instant communication is central. Of course, the rise of social media and smartphones has something to do with this shift. Maybe this explains why Americans read less. Immediate It’s too short. We don’t seem to have the time or patience to read a tome like Thomas Piketty’s. Capital in the 21st Century (It’s a bestseller, but who’s read the whole thing?) The emergence of a secondary oral tradition narrows the scope of political life, moving us away from mediation and toward (we hope) simpler explanations and solutions.
Our intellectual habits, shaped by the flood of immediacy, seem to ensure that our imagination of politics is in continuity with crisis, as Kornbluh acknowledges, because we have lost the ability to envision the future. Before the end of history, the future was an essential element of politics, whether in democratic capitalism or communism. But as our patience decreases, we tend to indulge more in the consumption of cultural projects of immediacy. In the UK, about 50% of adults believe their attention span is declining, and educators observe a similar trend among children. Our shortening attention spans raise the barriers to developing and deploying the very mediations that Kornbluh rightly thinks could make things “not worse.”
Amid worrying trends, there is certainly a backlash. Criticism of Apple’s “Crush” ad for the new iPad alludes to a public awareness of the destructiveness of our addiction to immediacy. In it, a hydraulic crusher compresses various creative tools, including musical instruments, paints, and a camera, until all the objects are crushed into the company’s new tablet. “The destruction of the human experience. Credit: Silicon Valley,” Hugh Grant quipped (X, formerly Twitter). The criticism was so great that Apple apologized. But such a backlash against the presentist impulse will not be enough on its own to correct the distortions that our politics have already suffered, as Kornbluh shows.
The fundamental point of Kornbluh’s book may be that it is an example of the necessity she claims, and a catalyst for such production.The outlines and classifications of certain cultural objects, such as the “cultural heritage” series, may be contested. Fleabagcritiques the formal features of immediacy as advancing, but such a critique would itself become the kind of marginalized meditation that Kornbluh hopes to achieve: “The very purpose of proposing a totalizing category like immediacy is to circumscribe dominant formations so that alternatives can come to light,” she writes. Immediate is one such option and can be an inspiration for others.
