Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism
The fight to reclaim symbolic mediation in the age of imagistic immediacy
This month at The Portal we focus on the concept of Democracy, see here: The Portal.
The next course at Philosophy Portal focuses on Christian Atheism and starts October 20. See here: Christian Atheism.
Earlier this year I had an extended discussion with professor Anna Kornbluh focused on her latest book Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. Throughout our discussion we focus on how mediation of the symbolic is today drowning under a new style of immediate imagistic production, and how this must be situated in the context of capitalist production.
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; Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club; Realizing Capital; and Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism.
Throughout the video we discuss:
Philosophy requires that immediacy is both a starting ground (sensation, experience), but also that it must be structured, historically situated (i.e. immediacy itself is essentially mediated)
Post-war period begins a transition to immediacy, businesses cutting out mediation; thus, the style of too late capitalism is immediacy without mediation, phenomena that are not in history, not constructed/without construction
Aspects of capitalist immediacy: on-demand/instant access, intense circulation, digital revolution/platform capitalism; algorithmic capture/image scrolling; gig economy/flexible labour; apps cutting out the middle man
Mediation is important because it is a connective collectiviser; difficult to commodify but essential for community; in order to mediate we have to make space for time and for concepts (imaginary to symbolic)
Psychoanalytic mediate theorists emphasise we are in mass psychosis, psychotic is full (not lacking); in our mediate ecology we are full of narcissistic images, selfies, scrolling of the image, instant glut of images
The digital leads towards our imprisonment in the algorithm, consuming more and more of the image, mirroring and establishing the imaginary relation; capitalist exploits this tendency for data extraction
Question: how might we introduce fiction to commodities of immediacy?; how might we regenerate some distance?; the point would be the reanimate the symbolic which is now drowning in imaginary immediacy
Contemporary teaching and education: there is a low quality of dialogue, questions and answers; there is an atmosphere of thinness and coldness, how to regenerate thickness and warmth?
Leftist politics is anti-institution and anti-state; but we need to rethink both institutions and states as they are essential actors in the process towards symbolic mediation over imaginary immediacy
Politics of immediacy: rejection of party politics and unions for an ecstatic fetish of anarchy and eruption and revolution; stereotypes of “beautiful soul leftism” who prize the riot, subscribe to anything messianic, spontaneous formlessness
Right wing immediacy also focuses on dismantling institutions, attacking schools and churches; mass shootings; destroying places where people can come together in a structured relation; focusing on charismatic “id-leadership” for mirroring
When immediacy crushes mediation, all mediation is swallowed into a self-identity without representation, a ferment with no words; thought that is anti-representational does not value contradiction, gaps, cuts
In “Too Late” capitalism the future itself is eclipsed (no future/loss of futurity) and the present is immanentized; “step on it!”; all space and time is compressed for a proximity in which no distance or differentiation is possible
The hard work is confronting where we really are in history; art, collective planning and visions can be a guide to anti-immediacy work; need to re-think ecology, care work, work for human growth: teachers, professors, doctors
In Marxist philosophy anything is possible on the horizon of human activity struggling/wrestling a realm of freedom from a realm of necessity; there can always be a political space more adequate to the human being
Theoretically we must not renounce either Marxism or dialectical analysis and interpretation which can add a layer of political-economic mediation; we need again large-scale cultural analysis/critical evaluation of cultural objects
Artificial intelligence is a condition for degrading social reproduction, we need to focus on labour that is impervious to automation; work that is essential for climate and community projects; reclaim conceptuality
To find out more about Anna Kornbluh’s work, see: