Toward the end of The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord writes that critical theory is “not a negation of style, but the style of negation.”[1] Nearly sixty years later, Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism echoes this chiasmic distinction as a fundamental lesson which critics, creatives, and the public urgently need to relearn. What Debord calls the “negation of style” is, for Kornbluh, the central feature of today’s dominant aesthetics and critical thought. She calls this new dominant “immediacy style” (9), a prevailing mode of cultural expression across art, literature, social media, film, TV, and theory that is a “paradox of anti-style” because it “negates mediation” (9, 30). Like the late-twentieth-century spectacle that precedes it, twenty-first-century immediacy style prizes immersion, absorption, and simple forms of identification. As a consequence, Kornbluh argues, our ability to think critically and collectively—to mediate—has been weakened. To counter this dismal trend, some crucial reversals and returns are in order. In the spirit of Debord’s statement, Kornbluh presents her own style of negation: the critique and rejection of immediacy style.
Kornbluh’s previous work has largely focused on Marxist theories of form and realism in the Victorian novel and contemporary film. Immediacy, published by Verso, is her fourth book and her first with a non-academic press. As her entrance into trade publishing, this polemical text seeks to extend her work to a wider readership. However, it does so without adopting an expressly self-reflective, confessional, or genre-bending register that many academics in the humanities have taken up when making this public turn. According to Kornbluh, that would only add to our problems. Rather, the main task of Immediacy is to boldly generalize. Kornbluh outlines the pervasive yet unrecognized presence of immediacy style as a generalized aesthetic category (principally across North America and Western Europe). Depending on the medium, immediacy style finds ways to express intimate experiences directly, immerse viewers totally, validate feelings emphatically, or provoke visceral encounters that stop people in their tracks. It’s what selfies, autofiction, Reddit AITA posts, immersive art experiences, personal essays, Netflix shows, and autotheory have in common.
The book’s central aim is to identify the operation of immediacy style and correlate its movements to “too late capitalism,” a clever shorthand for twenty-first century world capitalism where economic growth and production falter, circulation accelerates, infrastructure disappears, and ecocide looms ever larger. Typical of the style of Kornbluh’s prose, “too late capitalism” is a faintly idiomatic expression loaded with conversational and critical-theoretical references. In using it, Kornbluh pays tribute to previous Marxist writing on twentieth-century culture while underscoring that global society has since reached a significant tipping point. Yet she also insists that her use of the term “too late” should not be construed as a fatalistic verdict on our futures. In Immediacy, “too late” still holds out the possibility that things can be “less worse” and that “old forms, outmoded institutions, and residual constructs still have more to offer” (19). The term thus signals that anachronism has an important—yet also, I think, somewhat inflated and overly prescriptive—part to play in Kornbluh’s polemic.
Immediacy dedicates two chapters, “Circulation” and “Imaginary,” to outlining the political, economic, and psychic contexts in which immediacy style has taken root, before turning in detail to trends in audiovisual and literary works. “Disintermediation” and “discretization” are the keywords of the opening sections. They affirm the book’s commitment to abstraction since they describe processes across a wide range of fields and practices. Essentially, disintermediation is a negation of mediation—it’s the dismantling of middleman institutions (whether state-owned structures or brick-and-mortar stores) that process, stabilize, or centralize the flow of money, information, services, and goods, producing a dubious “new ‘sharing’ economy” in their stead (34). Disintermediation is a core aspect of circulation in the contemporary global economy, where, since the 1970s, the production and growth of value have stagnated, causing the circulation of commodities, money, and people to kick into a compensatory overdrive. The core instantiations of our circulation-heavy world include “just in time” logistics, high-frequency trading, and personal digital technologies like the smartphone. These disintermediating forms produce an ever-greater compression of space and time; they promote directness and flow as liberatory experiences for businesses and individuals alike. The forceful proliferation of experiential immediacy, Kornbluh argues, has shaped cultural production at the levels of platform and form. If Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls today’s disintermediated social structure an “antistate state,” Kornbluh calls its corollary aesthetics an “anti-style” (9).[2]
Discretization, meanwhile, names the process by which phenomena are flattened and separated when codified for consumption, ready to be added to the infinite scroll of content. This tendency is at the core of the chapter “Imaginary,” where Kornbluh, leaning on Lacanian psychoanalysis, outlines the psychic changes that a circulation-forward, disintermediating society produces: it “begets in culture a waning symbolic and heightened imaginary” (115). In Kornbluh’s view, more and more of our common language favors the directness of images and icons (served to us via algorithms and screens) over the complexity of words and symbols. With this waning of the symbolic, subjects lose the ability to discern nuance, hold contradiction, or relate to others in non-simplistic ways. What predominate instead, in Immediacy’s grim yet sobering account, are the image and the spectacle, foremost among them the alluring “I” of the individual, precipitating an epidemic of narcissism, depression, and personal branding. To some, this perspective could give Immediacy a grouchy or conservative air, but such a view would fail to account for Kornbluh’s enthusiasm for contemporary, popular alternatives, as well as the formal exuberance of her own critical style.
Neither disintermediation nor discretization is distinctive to our era. At one point, Kornbluh observes that Marx, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, thought that the process of disintermediation was “capitalism’s central drive” (29). Similarly, her account of Lacan’s mirror stage implies that discretization is fundamental to all subjectivity and thus transhistorical: she declares that the infant’s “‘I’ consolidate[s] at the cost of separation from a newly discretized (m)other” (50, my emphasis). This is an important theme of Immediacy—the book theorizes the intensification of longstanding phenomena, more so than historical breaks or singular events. To that extent, Kornbluh follows historical materialist arguments about postmodernity by Fredric Jameson and David Harvey from the late 1980s and, in a longer view, should be seen as continuing the Frankfurt School and the Situationists’ critiques of the homogenizing effects of mass media.
Still, Kornbluh persuasively argues that the intensification of circulation, disintermediation, and discretization have produced notable alterations in the forms and commitments of twenty-first-century culture. Immediacy’s later chapters demonstrate how immediacy style differs from postmodernism in crucial ways. If postmodern art amplifies the absence of fixed meaning through irony and pastiche, then immediacy style reasserts a belief in authentic presence and realness through the simulation of direct experiences. It’s here that Immediacy’s argument parallels, to some degree, discussions of “new sincerity,” “post-postmodernism,” and “new historical sincerity.”[3] Kornbluh’s contribution is distinctive, though, in that she not only argues that contemporary artists produce the feel of presence, directness, sincerity, and immediacy through the by-now-familiar trope of blurring genre boundaries, but that this blurring of formal aesthetic conventions mirrors the larger disintermediation of globalized late capitalist society.
The second half of Immediacy lays out a wide-ranging critique. Its polemic has many targets, but prominent among them are: autofiction (Knausgaard, Offill); the personal essay (Gawker, HuffPo Voices); the historical eclipsing of third-person narration in novels by the first-person (Elena Ferrante, Viet Thanh Nguyen); the prosification of poetry (Rankine, Boyer); adrenaline-fueled immersive cinema (Uncut Gems); recent documentary aesthetics (The Hurt Locker); front-facing cinematography (Fleabag, House of Cards); TV produced for streaming platforms (Emily in Paris, Orange is the New Black); autotheory (Nelson, Preciado, Wark); actor-network theory (Latour); postcritique (Felski); and what Kornbluh calls nihilist or indistinctive theory (Yusoff, Moten and Harney). Each of these pursue immediacy style’s project of “negating mediation” (46). As the above list demonstrates, part of the text’s verve lies in its determination to criticize the voguish darlings of literary and theoretical circles for the same faults as Instagram’s and Netflix’s patently commercial content. There’s certainly a bracing consistency here, one that helps readers identify additional examples and draw new connections across habitual categories. It may also provoke some discomfiting personal resistances to seeing one’s favorite film, novel, or theorist mapped in Immediacy’s full picture, accused as another case of culture unreflectively succumbing to immediacy’s “obvious appeal” (8).
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The general effect of Kornbluh’s abstracting, tracking, and synthesizing is electrifying. While reading, you start to see the flash of immediacy style everywhere, so dumbstruck by its stupid innovations that sometimes you can only point to its happening. And yet, there are several turns in Kornbluh’s wide-ranging analysis that flatten or conflate more complex aesthetic and social dynamics. Part of this issue may lie in the rather general definitions of immediacy and mediation throughout the book. Mediation is defined as “the active process of relating,” and aesthetic mediation as “representation in excess of messaging, creativity in excess of use, giving sensuous form to the unexpressed” (5, 16). Both of these processes are hard to pinpoint or assess in the text. Immediacy style, meanwhile, is said to “evacuate mediation” or place mediation “under erasure” (217, 17). But just as being under erasure is not the same thing as having been erased, it’s unclear in this polemic if immediacy style’s evacuation of mediation should be understood as in-process, complete, or technically impossible.
These moments of imprecision are conspicuous when the argument turns to writing. Simply put, the written word’s minimum requirement for mediation resists the self-obvious effect of immediacy to a greater degree than the images and icons of film, TV, and smartphones do. Kornbluh herself implies as much in the chapter “Imaginary,” where she links images with Lacan’s concept of the imaginary and language with Lacan’s concept of the symbolic (47–48). But if writing is more firmly located within the symbolic than images or icons are, it follows that the immediacy effect in this medium would be less seamless or direct—in other words, less immediate. Immediacy in writing can still produce dissonant effects that resist simple readerly absorption, but the examination of this quality is sidelined by Immediacy’s swift analysis. Consider the chapter “Writing,” where Kornbluh makes the contentious claim that autofiction, in its insistence on narrating the lives of the real author, is actually “antifiction” (68). This chapter’s discussion of contemporary novelists’ aversion to invention, character development, third-person narration, distance, and description in favor of individualism is revelatory, but its argument is underwritten by a restrictive definition of fictionality (literature’s form of mediation, according to Kornbluh) that most short stories written in the first person and many experimental novels, from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable to Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, wouldn’t clear. These forms of fiction do not necessarily provide the lengthy plots, objective perspective, world-building, or lyrical figuration that Kornbluh wants most from literary writing.
Kornbluh’s restrictive premises lead to a couple of disappointingly broad-strokes or cursory analyses where both fictionality and mediation are assumed to be successfully suppressed by autofictional works. (Aside from a few passages from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, there are no quotations from the prose of autofiction or autotheory; Kornbluh mainly relies on interviews with authors about their work.) The over-extension of the argument is most pronounced during the chapter’s perfunctory discussion of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, a high-water mark of the autofiction genre. Here, Kornbluh ignores the possibility that the narrator’s icy impersonality could have a uniquely estranging effect on the novels’ prose, facilitating both fictionality and mediation—the very things Kornbluh says autofiction shuts down. While Cusk’s novels do not present the work of mediation through a third-person narrator, they nevertheless press readers into active participation, asking them to interpret the pattern behind the narrator, Faye’s, numerous ambiguous conversations with strangers and what her silences and distance signify. Cusk’s resistance to immediacy is unmistakably declared in Kudos, when Faye’s son complains over the phone that “[people] ask me things… but they don’t connect the things up. They don’t relate them to things I’ve already told them.”[4] Later, Kudos’s final scene has Faye swimming alone in the sea, an image of flow, swells, and absorption that would seem to support Kornbluh’s description of contemporary literature as reaching for “the freedom of self-actualization, and emancipation from mediation” (77). But Cusk undercuts this moment of would-be immediacy on the sea’s surface. Faye soon sees a man approach from the shore, watching as he “grasped his thick penis and began to urinate into the water… I looked into his cruel, merry eyes, and I waited for him to stop.”[5] This concluding moment of desired absorption and dissolve—of Faye’s wish to sync with the rhythms of the heaving water—is spoiled by another’s steady stream. Cusk’s prose flirts with the tropes of immediacy, but still finds ways to disrupt the seductions of immersion and kickstart the work of mediation.
Immediacy’s critique of the cult of individualism and the dominance of first-person in literary prose is well taken, then, but the contention that autofiction negates mediation is less persuasive. Similar issues occur in the later chapter “Antitheory,” where Immediacy takes works of autotheory to task for refusing to interpret and synthesize (though they do “thematize” [165]). This discussion is partially adapted from a Diacritics article, “In Defense of Feminist Abstraction,” where Kornbluh objects to the popularization of standpoint feminism and écriture féminine in feminist theory, which she claims leads to a restrictive and atomizing situation where “every woman speaks, of and from her own body, in her own voice, her truth.”[6] In “Antitheory,” Kornbluh’s attention moves from feminist theory to autotheory, but with similar concerns. She designates autotheory’s emphasis on embodiment and personal experience (and its proclivity toward fragmentary and aphoristic form, invocations of ineffability and impossibility, and light quotations of other theorists) as capitulations to too late capitalism’s investment in fluidity, indulgence, and individualism.
This chapter firmly underscores how autotheory, taken as a whole, unconsciously responds to the weakening of humanities institutions and professions. It also fairly criticizes the argumentlessness of many works of autotheory, lending them a drifting or oblique quality that is often underwhelming. The problem is that Kornbluh’s commentary is ungenerous to any theoretical writing that does not promote political organization across differences. It’s obvious that autotheory does not align with this prescription, just as autofiction does not fit Kornbluh’s definition of fictionality. From Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake to Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie, Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies to A. V. Marraccini’s We the Parasites, the strongest works of autotheory focus on experiences of self-construction from situations of social exclusion or foreclosure. They start from experiences outside groups, looking for suitable models and references that can help describe their subjectivity. There is little room in Immediacy’s diagnosis of the contemporary moment for this kind of writing, since Kornbluh generally understands the effort of personal expression as, at this historical juncture, a labor developed at the cost of progressive social formations. She views such writers, whether memoirists, autotheorists, or theorists, as abandoning the social and the symbolic to discuss the phenomenal or corporeal, rather than as commenting on numerous social and symbolic poverties, especially as they pertain to the matrices of sex/gender and race. This position leads Kornbluh to an unexplored implication, most pronounced in the chapter “Antitheory,” that the articulation of queer, racialized, and non-normative experiences of embodiment and desire have little purpose other than to serve as useful tools for spreading capitalist immediacy.
Take the chapter’s most outlandish offender: McKenzie Wark’s Reverse Cowgirl, “a sort of autofiction account of someone who was trans all along and did not know it yet.”[7] Kornbluh assesses a short entry, “User Manual,” where Wark instructs the reader to fuck the book. Kornbluh reads this as a crystallized moment where immediacy is established “as the unambiguous transmission of affect from author to reader, autonomic responses imagined untainted by the symbolic” (168). It’s true that this moment of immediacy does not abstract or synthesize, nor is it especially concerned with building solidarities, but there are plenty of ambiguous and symbolic qualities to assess, especially given the text’s interest in giving form to trans experience when few models are/were available. One could note the self-reflexive presentation of this queer act as an intended “image” that would pass through “the whole” of Reverse Cowgirl[8]; the prose’s amendments to accommodate the reader’s possible genitalia even as the pronoun “you” remains constant; or the entry’s striking resonances with the previous section, where Wark recounts her own experience learning to become another’s instrument for sex (“(How to) Get Yourself Fucked”). These are symbolic experiments, and through them, Reverse Cowgirl self-consciously engages in what Kevin Ohi identifies as the queer literary tradition of “thwarted transmission,” a “communication of sexual desire and the secrets of minority sexual cultures” and a meditation “on what constitutes literary knowledge.”[9] As with Cusk, Kornbluh insists that interpretation is forestalled here, but the source material has more to say. Autotheory is faulted for its non-constructive indulgences and its refusal to map experience to abstractions, but this at times risks diminishing the connections these works are trying to produce from the margins of established scripts.
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It may be the case that, for Kornbluh, some of these tensions or nuances are simply beside the point when measured against the larger trend. Exceptions are less important to her argument than the influence of (and change in) aesthetic norms. Furthermore, Kornbluh would likely respond to these criticisms by noting that even critiquing the “I” from a marginalized or non-normative subject position through an individual perspective still reinforces the general impulse toward immediacy and individualism. In such cases, systematic thought—the production of “collectivizing, generalizing theories”—is passed over (169). This notion is essential to Kornbluh’s objections to works of autotheory by Maggie Nelson, McKenzie Wark, Julietta Singh, Andrea Long Chu, and others, most of whom would seem to share her general political principles but differ in strategy or formal style.
Kornbluh’s adamancy has the benefit of clarifying her priorities and desired outcomes. If the text’s formula is correct—that centering the personal in today’s climate enforces the lure of immediacy, and therefore impedes critical generalization and abstract thought—then it follows that immediacy style, as symptom and servant of too late capitalism’s culture industry, cannot be effectively critiqued using (or experimenting with) its established techniques. The problem is not aided by artists or theorists pushing this contemporary aesthetic to its limits, satirizing it, bringing additional identities into the fold, further removing conventional framing devices, or demonstrating that the I is Another through self-reflection. It also seems that, for Kornbluh, critics should not spend too much time appraising the nuances or vagaries of autofiction and autotheory. This would only reinforce the style’s position as a cultural dominant. The solution is not to deconstruct immediacy, artistically or critically, but to back out and redirect our efforts and attention altogether.
Indeed, this is largely what the book’s conclusion argues: we need to produce creative and intellectual works that avow “‘scale,’ ‘impersonality’ and ‘hold.’” Kornbluh writes:
Scale extrapolates that which is readily present into relation with something of a different order, transcending the concretude of the body and the individual for an alternate level. Impersonality acknowledges conflicts and seeks possible middle grounds, deflecting the absorptions of auto-emanative charisma with a collectivizing, dislocated perspective—one which needn’t be as exclusive as helicopter cameras, since fictional omniscience and theoretical abstraction cost but little. Hold clogs circulation, keeping some reserve from exchange, or slowing down processing, or impeding flow, making palpable the work of relation. (195–96)
Responding to our collective inundation with immediacy style, Kornbluh calls for an appreciation of older styles and genres that, having survived the lurch toward immediacy, exude these three critical qualities. The direct counterparts to autofiction, Netflix, and autotheory are the “finely figurative” social realist novel (Kornbluh showcases Colson Whitehead, Diana Evans, and Brandon Taylor, but she could have just as easily chosen George Eliot), prestige TV (Succession, Queen Sugar), and Marxist literary criticism (Jameson, Ngai, Levine) (198). Although much about Immediacy is urgent and clear-sighted, especially its commitment to strengthening institutions and the demand for more critical and distant engagement with cultural objects, its closing program is slightly underwhelming. Given that both Whitehead and Succession are among the most decorated and popular middlebrow fixtures in their respective mediums, the alternatives to immediacy style might not be as underappreciated or as generative as Immediacy would have them be. If in earlier moments Kornbluh inflates what immediacy style, as symptom of too late capitalism, prohibits critically and politically, then the book’s conclusion similarly overestimates what returning our focus to the older styles of free indirect discourse, impersonality, and realist fiction, as aesthetic counterforces, could enable.
Immediacy’s strength stems from its upsetting reminder that we are living in an overwhelming time of stagnation and capture, where our best institutions are perilously weak and even the most critically celebrated works of culture quietly communicate an endorsement of capitalist circulation. With each passing day, readers will find more and more objects in their lives that avow the direct, absorptive style that Kornbluh pinpoints, catalogs, and connects across an extraordinary range of categories. Still, immediacy style’s dominance across all mediums may not be as pervasive as described in Immediacy’s pages, nor its aesthetic effects as singularly simple or powerful. We could afford to expand our critical definitions and aesthetic experiments even as we join Kornbluh’s realist call to build the “less worse.”
Notes:
[1] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Fredy Perlman, rev. ed. (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), 204, https://situationist.org/book/sots/chapter/chapter-8-negation-and-consumption-within-culture.
[2] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, The Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 245.
[3] For “new sincerity,” see the work of Adam Kelly and his forthcoming New Sincerity: American Fiction in the Neoliberal Age (Stanford University Press, 2024). For “post-postmodernism,” see Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Stanford University Press, 2012). For “new historical sincerity,” see Alexander Manshel’s Writing Backwards: Historical Fiction and the Reshaping of the American Canon (Columbia University Press, 2023).
[4] Rachel Cusk, Kudos (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 229–30.
[5] Cusk, Kudos, 232.
[6] Anna Kornbluh, “In Defense of Feminist Abstraction,” Diacritics 49, no. 2 (2021): 54.
[7] McKenzie Wark, Reverse Cowgirl (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2020), 179.
[8] Wark, Reverse Cowgirl, 61.
[9] Kevin Ohi, Dead Letters Sent: Queer Literary Transmission (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 2.