The dangers of immediacy: why speed, flow, and direct expression now dominate cultural style
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. Anna Kornbluh has a prominent international profile in academic circles ranging from literature and film to political economy and history, in the artworld increasingly as critic-in-residence at gallery events for contemporary work in Chicago, and in journalistic venues like The Times Literary Supplement (which has repeatedly reviewed her work), The Chronicle of Higher Education (which recurrently commissions essays and interviews from/with her), and The Paris Review, as well as podcasts with over 10,000 individual listeners, such as Why Theory. This recent youtube interview has over 6000 views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIdqjKf8c5g&t=445s. While she tweets impersonally, her account has nearly 12,000 followers. The Los Angeles Review of Books has already commissioned an essay from her to coincide with the book’s publication.
This brilliantly written, wild ride of a book is an enthralling,
gloves-off critical intervention urgently needed in this
moment.
*Jonathan Crary, author of 24/7 and Scorched
Earth*
Kornbluh offers a swift -- and much needed -- kick to one of the
most insidious symptoms of our time: the demand for the now, the
immediately felt, the one-off. Armed with a strong imperative:
"Think!" which she reiterates in an uncommonly rich vocabulary and
from a variety of perspectives, she succeeds at the very least in
holding up this runaway trend. Together with her previous critiques
of capitalism, Immediacy establishes Kornbluh as one of the most
inventive new voices in the field.
*Joan Copjec, Brown University, author of Read My
Desire*
Anna Kornbluh brilliantly reinvigorates critique for an age
drowning under the deluge of self-presentation. Embracing structure
over style, representation over personalization, and collectivity
over narcissism, she creates a space for thinking -- the necessary
space for politics.
*Jodi Dean, author of The Communist Horizon*
The sensation of reading Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy is of someone
turning on the light in a dark room. Suddenly one beholds a world
one had only been stumbling through and can begin, with Kornbluh's
help, to trace a whole new set of relations between the disparate
phenomena that define contemporary culture. The shocking conceptual
clarity and rightness of its dialectical reversal of everything we
thought we knew about life lived under conditions of postmodern
hyper-mediation should make this book the starting point of future
discussions of the nature of the present.
*Mark McGurl, Stanford University, author of Everything and
Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon*
To the things themselves! Fuck no, that's precisely the problem. In
this book on the poetics of social forms, Kornbluh has expertly
diagnosed the contemporary yen for immediacy and immanence,
presence and reality, the indistinct blurs and liquid flows of
seemingly authentic experience. Taking it all as a kind of social
pathology, she reads contemporary style through the
deterritorializations of hyper capitalism, and the crushing
lateness of an economic logic that insists on no alternative for
society and no future for the planet. What results is a plea for
the labor of mediation, and an insistence on dialectics as the
central mechanism of art and culture.
*Alexander R. Galloway, author of Uncomputable: Play and
Politics in the Long Digital Age*
Immediacy masterfully exposes the common core of many different
problems and phenomena that we do not necessarily think of as
related. The imperative of immediacy and its suffocating logic are
the hallmarks of what Kornbluh calls "too late capitalism". Drawing
on philosophy, psychoanalysis and art she makes a vivid,
passionate, and most compelling case for mediation that creates the
much-needed capacity to imaginatively break with the merely given.
An extremely precious book that goes far beyond purely academic
concerns.
*Alenka Zupancic, author of Let Them Rot*
Anna Kornbluh simply nails it in this fearless, witty, and
conceptually powerful indictment of contemporary capitalist
culture's desire to annihilate negation-while also "negating the
negation" by showing how things might be otherwise. A stunning and
unignorable book.
*Sianne Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic
Judgment and Capitalist Form*
Electrifying.
*Chicago Review*
[O]ffers a fresh lens through which to consider how our compulsion
for immediacy is also fatally distorting our political life.
*Foreign Policy*
Kornbluh has done better than almost anyone in recent memory to
define the elusive, claustrophobic spirit of the age and get
started on excavating its cultural subterranea.
*Alex Niven*
Immediacy is very, very good at giving us what it promises: the
style of the present, the feel of streaming (of goods and
information as well as the products of culture) as a deluge that
crushes and paralyzes and teaches us to like feeling crushed and
paralyzed. Its prose has some of the same exhilarating adrenaline
rush that it wants to stop us from admiring. In that sense it has a
kind of dialectical richness: an immediacy that makes the reader
reach for mediation.
*Baffler*
Illuminating, profound, and relevant.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Immediacy is a powerful intervention into the aesthetic status quo,
with valuable detours into the destructive potential of
capital.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
A refreshing take on contemporary media.
*Publishers Weekly*
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