Anna Kornbluh: Immediacy — or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism. New York: Verso, 2023.
Anyone reading this letter is probably familiar with the overbearing, content-sloshing character of contemporary digital media. Everything immersive, urgent, and on-demand. A drip feed of content from every device.
In a previous letter about “synthetic cinema,” we sort of touched on some of the problems going on in our cultural superstructure, how the conglomeration of media companies has led to flabby and stagnant movies and TV for lowest common denomenator audiences.
In a recent book from Verso that has generated some buzz, literary scholar Anna Kornbluh seems to consider the same issues, but with a much wider framework. This framework includes not just the superstructure but the economic structure beneath it. That is, both the production and circulation of commodities and the diverse cultural products of our society fundamentally go along the same logic of cutting out the middle man.
Modernity loves immediacy. “Immediacy rules art as well as economics, politics as much as intimacy. It’s at the art auction, in the boardroom, in the lingo, on the brain.”
Overall, while I found Immediacy or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism to be deeply flawed in the economic aspects of its theoretical argument, and possessing a clotted academic style bordering on obscurantism, Kornbluh’s book is a bold polemical argument trained on aesthetic trends in the petty-bourgeois left that to Kornbluh are in thrall to the hegemony of immediacy.
Our social reality is a "deluge of intense immanence," an oil swell, a surge; the displacement of volumes (of water). By immanence, Kornbluh points to how contemporary aesthetics generally presents, well, a intensely eternal present time. It’s a flood of imagery, and it just doesn’t stop.
In a long introduction full of examples, Kornbluh suggests that this fluid metaphor captures our cultural moment as well as the characteristics of global capitalism’s current shape. Blockades of pipelines have played a salient role in political struggles (at least at the grassroots level). Flow is the essential aesthetic value in the 21st century economy. Capital sloshes from one sector to another in the pursuit of profits.
The “immanence” of the present is not only about its own insistence, but also its emphasis on its difference from the past, even as everything gets blurred together into a vague mixture. “Late capitalism” (a term we’re not sympathetic to here at SF) is now 40 years old: the phrase for our current moment of just-in-time production is “too late capitalism,” incorporating a touch of environmental doomerism.
Part of embracing immanence and flow means also accepting volubility. The river is placid one moment and raging the next. The implication of this in economics is resigning ourselves to crises as an intrinsic part of the capitalist mode of production. Even so, the great recession of 2008 as well as America’s economic stagnation beginning in the 70s points to "unusual stress" in the economy, prompting the immediacy style. "Growth began in to lag irreversibly in the 1970s."
Kornbluh locates the hegemonic immediacy of our culture in this moment in the capitalist system, where the secular fall in the rate of profit (from investments in more machines for more productivity) in the production sector requires a compensation in the ciruclation sector.
This is a fascinating connection to make, though Kornbluh’s political economy is not so strong (though it still passes for ‘orthodox’ Marxian thought in the eyes of Kornbluh’s postmodernist critics).
She rightly says that “Both production and circulation are essential to capitalism.” A capitalist society is one dominated by the production and circulation of commodities (not tithes, not gifts), and one in which labor-power itself can be a commodity on the market.
In production, a capitalist employs workers to labor on raw materials to make products, and in this process, their capital is productive. Capital also circulates in the shape of commodities and money, as these products get exchanged and realize profits from the capitalist (sourced from the surplus-value produced by the workers without remuneration).
It’s also true that the means of circulating commodities themselves become profit-making industries. Actually, it’s very clear for us today, dominated as we are by the logistics of Amazon package deliveries.
When Marx presents on commodity production in Volume 1 of Capital, he tells a narrative of simple commodity circulation, selling in order to buy, evolving into the movement of industrial capital, buying in order to sell: buying material and labor-power to sell the products for more money.
The prices of commodities facilitate their exchange as equivalent incarnations of their value (objectified labor-time), and the fluctuation of prices is the linkage point between production and circulation. But this is not Kornbluh’s assertion. A post-Althusserian Marxist, she claims that the “interdependence of production and circulation” indicates that “‘value’ is an abstraction that can only be concretized retroactively
This interdependence of production and circulation orients Marx’s foundational insight that “value” is an abstraction that can only be concretized retroactively. Attention to this actualization of abstraction distinguishes Marxism from a flat-footed labor theory of value à la classical economist David Ricardo since it is, rather, a systematic theory of value as a cardinal abstraction realized in concrete practices of both production and circulation. Labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is the activity that generates value qua value. This is why, for Marx, value as such only becomes the ruling idea in a society of widespread commoditization.
There’s a lot to unpack about this problematic passage, but it’s actually the fact that value is formed by labor that Marx took up from the classical bourgeois economics like Ricardo. But the labor theory of value and the transformation of value into price are precisely the points where heterodox Marxians like to demolish the original doctrine.
Moving on, Kornbluh says that the predominating economic situation of the 70s, given the name postmodernity, can be understood as spacetime compression via developed means of communication and transport (these come from David Harvey, another false Marxist — Ed). It finds its consumation in speed-based immediacy aesthetics. It’s a "world is flat" mentality. The watchwords of the just-in-time production system: Flexibilty (gig econ), Integration, Flow.
The twenty-first-century concentration on circulation, with its premium on flow, conditions immediacy as cultural style that immanentizes presence, eclipses relay, and negates mediation. While capacity hypothetically exists for cultural aesthetics to resist rather than insist upon this logic, our moment overwhelmingly leans into circulatory flow. Already in the 1980s, Fredric Jameson and David Harvey understood postmodernism as issuing from space-time compression (bringing the places and zones of the globe in more proximate contact through communications technology and transportation).
Now everything is instant and immanent. Homogeneity and monotonous indistinction: memes and culturejamming as modes of prosumerism: emojis as flattened representations. For Kornbluh, the capitalist mode of production causes the outer configuration of circulation into the immediacy-driven media, effecutatd by digital media.
Things get better as we move from political economy to reflecting on the kind of psychic states endured in the world of immediacy. Take for example a critique of identitarianism from the left via Nancy Fraser:
Affirmation is the flat mutuality that immediacy style most often solicits. Consuming the style, we mirror it in merger: “It me!” [sic] Versions of affirmation orient everything from the accumulation of social media likes touniversity composition pedagogy, from “I feel seen” mantras to industrial-scale selfhelp, from Hollywood writers’ rooms to electoral candidates. It is an attenuated version of “recognition,” what the political theorist Nancy Fraser has long described as the vector of liberalism that deflects struggles over power and resources into struggles over respect and identity. The diminished struggle makes affirmation a truly hollow cultural goal, a rallying cry and demand devoid of almost any political content.
We come to the highlight chapter of this text for me, which is headed "Antitheory." It is an acerbic and necessary takedown of a certain "autotheory" form of writing that comes out of the radical democratic left-liberal corners of academia: think of Maggie Nelson, or McKenzie Wark.
The task of theory in these theorists and their ilk is precisely to turn away from mediation. Mediation contains "processing and sublating, as defamiliarizing and abstracting, as contextualizing and narrating." Anti-theory, often overtly feminst, advances itself as the negation. Its first-person narrative theorizing offers a new mode of realism.
In Kornbluh's reading (I am heavily paraphrasing her verbiage), autotheory is an overcorrection against a "hypostatized," male-coded mediation; it verifies rather than relatavises the mode of production; its individuated epistemology is a divestment from knowledge.
Put another way: Kornbluh locates familiar postmodernist premises as the foundation for auto-theory, namely, subjective idealism that limits what we can know to our personal standpoints ("individuated epistemology"), and rejecting the prospect of understanding reality in a systematic way ("divestment from knowledge"), including a science of society.
Autotheory's "repudiation of mediation" is unqualifiably anti-Marxist. It's a rejection of rationality, valorization of intuition. "For philosophers in this wake then, immediacy has to be understood as a kind of anti-philosophical defense—an over-presence, over-identity, over-certainty that forecloses speculative and critical movement."
We come to the moment of the book that nearly made your host cry out “Yippee!”: a takedown of McKenzie Wark's execrable autotheory exercises.
The best example is from her breathtakingly stupid book Reverse Cowgirl, which exorts the reader to fuck the book, as in, “Take your cock, press it against one end of the ass that is this book. Slide it in, out, in, out, until somebody cums.” If “radical” theory is meant to be a hammer for reshaping social reality, this is theory as sex toy for narcissistic indulgence.
These are acute and perhaps even vulnerable performances, insuring in advance that assessing them critically would amount to some kind of mean violation—and that seems indeed to be the very point: to be so effulgently bare and corporeally vivid as to preclude distance-taking or concept-making. Immediacy as the unambiguous transmission of affect from author to reader, autonomic responses imagined untainted by the symbolic.
As we saw above, Kornbluh says autotheory locks itself in the intellectual history of postmodernism by "hypostasizing" (i.e. treating an abstract object like a concrete entity) the mediated theory it claims to reject, fashioning a conceptual strawman that it can attack in the name of autonomous self-actualization or what have you.
Autotheory’s vaporization of argument is merely the most stylized example of contemporary theory’s immediacy style; with less flair but more reach, the current romance of empiricism negates the mediations of theory and fuses thought to the program language of circulatory platforms.
What is the romance of empiricism? Afraid of ideas and rigor, postmodernist autotheorists subscribe to empiricism, which says all our knowledge comes from the senses. Fredric Jameson once used the phrase "the weight of the empirical" to get at the same thing, which is a current fashion in contemporary literature for this intensified first-person, “What I see and do is what you get” type of writing, from Knausgaard to Cusk. It's as if using your imagination would be too shamefully indulgent for these literary lights, what with the state of the world being what it is.
The aesthetic result? A dry and sterile formalism of lists and inventories. “Abjuring abstractions, this empiricism favors inventories, iteration against mediation. As the ensuing lists discretize experience archipelagoes and push asymptotically toward infinite dispersals, they redirect theory as the emulation of algorithms.”
Also thrown into the mix is the wave of object-oriented ontology in bourgeois philosophy and the “new materialisms” of Jane Bennett or Bruno Lator. The attacks on what desiccated remains of progressive tendencies in our intellectual climate are carried out here under the signboard of “realism.”
In each of these domains—philosophy, theology, geology, literary and cultural study—“realism” presages an imperative to
immersion, a renunciation of gaps and distance, a spiritualized negation of intercession, constellating as immediacy. Reality hunger indeed.
What seems to be "democratic" and radical is really a form of bourgeois positivism, which says nothing can be known but positive facts, without any integrating or overarching framework. Science and philosophy are therefore at best constructs or guidelines.
[T]hen knowledge is immanentized, “amateur” and “weak” and “lay” become the buzzwords of retreats-qua-advances. And it is in this way that such a realism often signals indifference to the deinstitutionalization of higher education: flat ontology mimes the flattening of the academic profession, while weak theory rationalizes the loss of a living wage for theorists.
Considering all the elements Kornbluh includes in these dense pages, one has to say that we are in a moment of profound weakness for our intellectual culture. Autotheory and other contemporary trends represent a capitulation, not a critique. It's ultimately nihilistic in its rhetoric. They have "onanized" self-emancipation. "As Lukács already foretold, “In the last analysis, all ‘immanence’ in imperialist bourgeois philosophy is aiming at the same target: to deduce from epistemology the ‘everlastingness’ of capitalist society.”
What could the anti-dote to the autoness of it all in this situation? For Kornbluh it is the stubborn commitment to categorical thinking in people including Jameson: Caroline Levine and Sianne Ngai:
Engaging the problems of representation and dynamics of figuration with all the patience and strangeness they compel, these theorists commit to categorical thought, the composition of categories that work for and through scale, impersonality, and hold. They offer interpretations of aesthetics to propound syntheses that can, in turn, capacitate new understandings and other kinds of critical theorizing.
Some pages later:
Categorical thinking links up with the other countertendencies to antitheory we’ve outlined — namely scaled policy programs and constructive philosophizing — in the work of Fredric Jameson. Over the course of his extraordinarily generative career, Jameson has produced countless concepts designed to help other people produce still more interpretations and ideas —concepts like “the political unconscious,” “postmodernism,” “a singular modernity,” “utopia exists,” and the emancipatory impetus of dialectics. At the same time as he has devised concepts through readings of mediated culture like novels, films, art, and architecture, he has also deployed them for social blueprints — for constructions that will support collective flourishing.
Maybe so, but Kornbluh’s concrete suggestions, like recuperating third-person fiction, seem to pragmatic to match the scale of the problem she diagnosed. All along, this book has really been like postmodernism’s auto-critique, hence its use of theoretical jargon, as well as a quippy rhetoric that has a levelling effect similar to what it complains about.
Despite its theoretical shortcomings, Kornbluh’s book elucidates how immediacy attacks the materialist way of thought. And I must say, it has been nice to see champions of postmodernism writing critical reviews pushing back on Kornbluh’s polemics against their values, decrying the “totalizing” drift and lack of “nuance.” If Kornbluh is throwing the baby of the “emancipatory” qualities of current petty-bourgeois trends in literature with the bathwater of pomo’s nihilism, then it could be a welcome inversion of how postmodernists attack truth and rationality in order to liquidate Marx and socialist politics.