Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism

Why speed, flow, and direct expression now dominate cultural style

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.

Author: Anna Kornbluh
Publisher: Verso
Published: 01/30/2024
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9781804291344
ISBN10: 180429134X
BISAC Categories:
- Art | Popular Culture
- Social Science | Popular Culture
- Social Science | Sociology | Social Theory

About the Author
Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where her research and teaching center on literature, film, and Marxist cultural theory. She is the author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, and Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club, and Realizing Capital.