Immediacy

A visit with Anna Kornbluh's new book

Is this site becoming a book review weblog? I don’t think so, not quite. I will say that I’m consciously making an effort to set aside time for reading each week, and part of the way that I’ve incentivized myself to do so is by tying that work to the writing I’m doing here. But I’m not really interested in doing formal book reviews—reading in order to “report” is a different kind of practice. I ran into this a bit with Klein, I found. Certain parts of her book were more relevant to my immediate needs than others, so I focused my energy there, but I could feel myself experiencing some obligation to represent her book as a whole. I think I’m going to temper that feeling moving forward, though, and be a little more mercenary about the “review” part of things. That means I’m going to focus on the pieces that are more relevant to my own purposes, even if that means offering a less-than-thorough account of the books I’m reading.

Anyhow, this week, I read Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, Or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, which came out earlier this year. It’s a book that’s provocative both in its message and its style. It shares some concerns that I’ve talked about before—I mentioned in my last post temporal bandwidth, for instance—and I’ve seen it quoted a few times in other newsletters I read, so I thought I’d give it a go.

When I talked about Young’s Wrong, I mentioned that Wrong was the kind of book that I appreciated because it connected with my interests while being a book that I myself would never write. I think I’d say the same for Immediacy. Insofar as I imagine myself on a spectrum that stretches from social science to the humanities (without feeling like I necessarily belong in either), Young is a little more social science than I am, while Kornbluh is a little more humanities. Neither book lands quite squarely for me, but that’s more about me than it is about the books themselves.

Kornbluh’s book, as the title suggests, takes on immediacy, which she describes as a cultural style (or mood, or ideology) that is particularly pervasive today. Most of the book is diagnostic, as she traces immediacy across the milieus of fiction/literature, video, and literary/critical theory. In other words, immediacy is the name she gives to a pattern that she sees operating across a wide range of texts and practices in the humanities, and it’s ultimately one that she opposes, even as she grants that “The ideology of immediacy holds a kernel of truth: we are fastened to appalling circumstances from which we cannot take distance, neither contemplative nor agential, every single thing a catastrophe riveting our attention” (22).

“Too late capitalism” puns on the way that many critics frame our current era as one of “late capitalism” while younger generations worry that it’s “too late” to do anything about it. Ultimately, Kornbluh describes immediacy as a strategy for coping with what she calls our “omnicrisis,” but it’s one that surrenders (fatalistically) to those conditions. “immediatism is a reaction to crisis that fails the bar of strategy, a reflex that is ultimately crisis-continuous” (25). The immediatist developments that she identifies are of a piece, she argues, with the larger forces that have brought us to this point. It was interesting to go back and re-read Ted Gioia’s State of the Culture post in light of this. Kornbluh’s emphasis on the primacy of circulation (as opposed to production) could provide a caption for Gioia’s chart of the dopamine cycle, for instance:

“Total activation in undifferentiated continuity, immediacy’s zombie phenomenality” (42).

Whether it’s ultimately fair to the writers and trends that she’s critiquing, Kornbluh’s argument is that, faced with a zombie apocalypse, the immediatists’ strategy is to get bit. So on the one hand, immediacy involves yielding to one’s immediate circumstances. The second piece of her argument is that immediacy quite literally entails delegitimizing mediation. And she’s working with an especially capacious definition of media—it’s more than the “mainstream media,” more even than media like books, television, or video. It includes culture, institutions, other people. For the most part, immediacy involves an abandonment of mediation altogether, “a mistrust of authority untethered from experience; the filtering of social and historical dynamics through subjective lenses (or the active discrediting of objective lenses);…[and] a centering of the historical present” (97), among other things.

[I think I’ll probably dig into this in a separate post. While I don’t necessarily find Kornbluh’s diagnoses accurate in every detail¹, I did find myself agreeing with the general sweep of her argument.]

Immediacy was a fun book to read. Part of the reason that I picked it up now was that I’ve seen citations in other newsletters, and it is eminently quotable, informationally and stylistically. I tried to think of a good analogy for my reading experience (which was a bit odd)—the best I’ve come up with is that reading the book was a bit like playing pinball. There are stretches where the ball drifts across the table and it’s easy to follow. You can watch her catch an idea with a flipper, pin it down, then slingshot it up a ramp and drop it into a field of bumpers, where it bangs out short, catchy phrases or sentences, almost moving faster than it’s possible to process. Late in the book, Kornbluh offers the following praise of Colson Whitehead’s novels:

Lush details and lurid textures ferried in lyrical, figurative prose confound rapid reading and problematize superficial vision.

When I hit that sentence, it struck me as a perfect instance that both makes Kornbluh’s argument and performs the very prose style that it attempts to articulate. There’s an intentional stylishness to her writing which includes alliteration (lush, lurid, lyrical) and what felt like Constance Hale levels² of avoiding “to be” verbs. I found it a little distracting early on, but the style grew on me. That said, and as I implied above, it’s a very humanities-theoretical book—I’ll be curious to see more folk engage with it (those who are more immersed in this particular culture than I am).

There are ideas that I’ll probably pick up and consider in the next week or so. In the meantime, there are a couple of books that Immediacy prompted me to follow up on, which may show up here as well. More soon.

1. There is a small stretch where she scoops up what she describes as “university writing pedagogy” into her critique, for example. Her understanding of my own discipline is based largely upon a couple of texts from the 1970s, and an attitude toward the writing classroom that was fading from disciplinary relevance when I began graduate study in the early 90s. I do think her argument holds relevance for my field, but in a very different way than she assumes, for other reasons. I did pause, though, to wonder how much nuance got erased by the broad brush of the critique.

2. I use Hale’s work on verbs in my style class regularly, so this is not a dig.