
Get in, loser. We’re going theorizing. Anna Kornbluh’s new book, Immediacy Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), is about the economic imperatives that subsume all aspects of our cultural lives and, as I will suggest, degrade our educational and professional lives. Really, it’s a book about everything. And everythingness is central to its ambition and method. Deriving her title from Fredric Jameson’s totalizing work of cultural theory, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Kornbluh at once names a social totality and provides an analysis of the “master category for making sense of [it]” (6): immediacy.
Periodize the present how you want—neoliberalism, the long downturn, the autumn of the system—its crises and attendant “immediacy style” carbon date to the secular stagnation (Kornbluh’s preferred term) that kicked off in the 1970s when “capitalist growth began to lag irreversibly” (26). Following Giovanni Arrighi and Joshua Clover, Kornbluh understands too late capitalism as a moment when capital flails to solve its own crisis of accumulation.1 As capital becomes less absorptive, expelling more workers from waged labor, “a limit arises beyond which surplus cannot be accumulated” (28) because accumulation relies on exploiting labor. To compensate, capitalism leans on circulation, whose “hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money … generates value qua value” (29). The aggressive expansion of circulation is indexed, for example, by the streamlined flow of “just in time” logistics, high-frequency trading, the gigification of labor, and the reintroduction of private real estate into the market by homestay companies. This “economic substrate” (33), Kornbluh argues, sanctions immediacy as cultural style.
Immediacy registers the permacrisis of the present, and Kornbluh never loses sight of the fact that livelihoods and lives are on the line (that’s what “too late” signals, that today’s struggle is over how not dystopian the future will be). But what is at stake in immediacy as our cultural style is the collapse of mediation. Just as money seeks to overcome its role as mediator between commodities (C-M-C) and become self-valorizing (M-M’), art now “renounces its own project of mediation” (5). This is a big deal, since the conventional point of art is that it “takes creative distance from ordinary communication and banal functionality, making an appeal to the senses that reroutes common sense” (5). This is an aesthetic problem that demands a solution from aesthetic theory.
Kornbluh’s solution is something refreshingly old-fashioned: a Marxist approach that understands art and culture as activities performed on the world instead of just reflections of it. Raymond Williams is therefore just as prominent an influence on Kornbluh as Jameson, due to his “insist[ence] on the interpenetration of the economic mode of production alongside the cultural institutions and meaning frames accruing to it.”2 As Kornbluh writes elsewhere, following Williams, “Mediation is … in broadest terms the sense making and sensuous rendering of the mode of production, a vocation for representation to render ‘relatable’ and thinkable the abstract, systemic conditions of social life.”3 Without mediation, we can longer sense social totality. And, really, we can no longer sense ourselves. Drawing on Lacan’s observation that we come to ourselves through images of ourselves, Kornbluh argues that in today’s technological media landscape, we are today detained in an “immediacy imaginary” (58) and unable to pass into the realm of the symbolic. That passage is crucial because the symbolic is where we are exposed to social language, norms, laws, and institutions that can foster “collective identification” and transform individuals into an “effective common” (58).
The symbolically stunted self is living their best life in one of Kornbluh’s main indices of immediacy style, autofiction. In the confessional disclosure of Karl Ove Knausgård, Sheila Heti, Ocean Vuong, Ben Lerner, et al., the transparency that de-distinguishes author from character also disintegrates third person perspective, which Kornbluh understands as “definitional to the novel form: an extraordinary construction of a mode of thought unavailable to us in everyday lived experience” (79). Where omniscience, plot, and speculation once granted the novel its ontology, the cud of today’s autofictional ruminant is first-person phenomenalism. With its “naked rejection of fictionality,” autofiction is an “expression of a much wider representational tendency to redact the very impersonal, antiphenomenal, speculative point of view that defined the novel across its history” (80). That redaction “forecloses the [novel’s] project of regarding the lives of others, and hocks literature instead as the idiomatically privatized circulation of human capital” (75n24).
Like autofiction, most texts in Kornbluh’s archive are academically favored artworks of high distinction: quality TV and streaming; A24 films; literary fiction; prose poetry; and memoir-theory hybrids. With occasional nods to mass culture, Kornbluh focuses on consecrated works that cater to elite audiences, whatever is enjoyed by a relatively wealthy, culturally enriched, and educated class stratum. But Kornbluh understands this neglects the artworks of imperial peripheries, as should readers (I mean here to resist the moralizing tendency to suggest an author should have written a different book than the one they did). Her selective archive is not so much the result of blind spots as a provocation to the largely Anglo-American academic audience she anticipates. Many of us are more than ready to dismiss NFTs or superhero schlock. But it’s not mass culture alone that lets loose immediatist flow; it’s also Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag (2016–19), HBO dramas, Marina Abramović, and Maggie Nelson’s autotheory. It’s everything, including the things “we” like— and it’s “our” culture that needs to be ruined for us. It is not immune from the pull of immediacy just because super smart people enjoy it.
Which brings us to “antitheory.” Kornbluh understands this as a constellation of autotheoretical and postcritical registers whose “[u]nrepresentative personalism … repudiate[es] the ground between one experience and another” (151). Just as art balks at mediation, this strand of theory abdicates its duty to make ideas that intervene in the world. This is a drum Kornbluh has been beating for a while; antitheory updates her previous book’s takedown of “anarcho-vitalism,” just as “immediacy” is an update to the “formlessness” she there understood as “the ideal uniting a variety of theories, from the mosh of the multitude to the localization of microstruggle and microaggression, from the voluntarist assembly of actors and networks to the flow of affects untethered from constructs, from the deification of irony or incompletion to the culminating conviction that life springs forth without form and thrives in form’s absence.”4 When even our critical registers succumb to immediatism, what would Kornbluh have us do? If today we are conditioned to value the phasing out of our human capacity to manifest in media the contradictions of capitalism—thereby making them available to thought and critique—what does that mean for a theorist studying contemporary art media? For Kornbluh, it means “reestablishing theoretical distance” (6). Doing so, Kornbluh admits, is “tricky—a listy, circuitous, roving vibeology” (6). This may seem a bit woo-woo, like theory by divining rod or healing crystals. But in roving the bad vibes of bad times, Kornbluh is hard to disagree with: the vibes are indeed off.
What I suppose some will find infuriating about Immediacy is that it proceeds by vibe. Or, really, by axiom. Axioms cannot be proved or disproved, but they can be assessed for their usefulness. To see Kornbluh’s critiques merely as a buzzkill would be to misapprehend her deep investment in the joys of going theorizing. There isn’t a page of Immediacy that doesn’t exult in the pleasures of reading and writing. The book is a trove of exciting, if sometimes truncated, interpretations, where the excitement derives from Kornbluh’s often-counterintuitive conclusions. That is, if you’re willing to go with the flow.
Immediacy is not only a useful critique of less-useful theory, but a model of how we might theorize during an extinction-level event in academia itself. Like ambient TV or the doom scroll, the collapse of the humanities is a collective navel-gazing with which we nihilistically distract ourselves from the “Ponzi austerity” scheme that is killing off higher education.5 Crisis everywhere all at once, from macroeconomy to academia, threatens our ability to articulate professional grievances, shared values, ideals, and demands for a better profession and a better institutional form to house it.
Everything is aesthetic, but who gets to theorize it, where, and under what conditions matter. As Kornbluh contends across her writing, “aesthetic experience is starkly maldistributed” because a “multi-decade institutional and economic restructuring of creative labor, professional writing, and education has terribly constrained who makes art, who makes ideas, and who has access to the conditions for their making and making anew.” She would likely agree with Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado’s prediction that “the humanities, including the critical study of race, gender, and class, will mostly be accessible only to students at elite private institutions and a handful of flagship universities in the more liberal states.” In this future of pay-to-play humanities, I think students who benefit from universities with robust humanities programs will also be those for whom that education is least liberating, on whom its lessons are most lost. The prolongation of aesthetic experience and the thoughts of collectivization it can instigate are incidental to elite universities’ real mission (elite reproduction).
So, the ultimate project of aesthetic theory is to broaden access to its study. Given Kornbluh’s investments in the collective organization of labor (she served on the University of Illinois at Chicago’s United Faculty bargaining committee from 2021–23), she knows that most academics do not have the resources to write the book she has. Most of us, indeed, are already history’s losers. But Kornbluh wants us academics to understand that we are good at knowing how things work—how aesthetics relates to ideology and class struggle—and how they could work differently. With that understanding comes the possibility and responsibility of identifying bottlenecks where academic laborers can stopper the immediatist deluge that threatens our profession. In the meantime, if you’re one of the lucky ones whose job description includes writing books of theory, then make those books count, loser.
Endnotes
- See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and Our Times (London: Verso, 1994) and Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot. (London: Verso, 2016).
- Anna Kornbluh, “Mediation Metabolized,” Raymond Williams at 100, edited by Paul Stasi (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 8.
- Ibid., 2.
- Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 2.
- See Matt Seybolt, Jed Esty, Anna Kornbluh, and Christopher Newfield, “Ponzi Austerity in the Age of Cultural Abundance,” The American Vandal (podcast), August 21, 2023. https://marktwainstudies.com/ponziausterity/.