Immediacy
Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism
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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.
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In this thought-provoking if abstruse analysis, Kornbluh (The Order of Forms), an English professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, argues that postmodernism has been replaced by a new aesthetic called "immediacy," which prioritizes "directness and literalism" and aspires to collapse the distance between artist and consumer. Immediacy's literary dominance, Kornbluh contends, can be seen in the booming popularity of memoirs and personal narratives, such as Karl Ove Knausgaard's "philosophical rejection of fictional mediation" in his My Struggle series, which recounts events from the author's life in meticulous detail. Examining how filmmakers have used technological advances to evoke a greater sense of immediacy in their work, Kornbluh posits that Steven Soderbergh's and Kathryn Bigelow's experiments shooting on iPhones and small digital cameras evoke "documentary aesthetics" aimed at immersing viewers in fictional worlds. Kornbluh suggests immediacy has also stretched into the economic sector, as exemplified by vendors able to cut out retailers and other middlemen by selling their goods and services directly to consumers online. Kornbluh is a keen observer of modern culture, but her novel arguments are weighed down by jargony prose (" Nelson's conjugation of autoemanation with professional agility raises the specter of the flexibility that has been the buzzword of circulation capitalism"). Still, it's a refreshing take on contemporary media.
