by Gabriel Meier

Header Photo: Autre Ne Veut 'Anxiety' (2013)

Presence, immersive interiority, flat ontology, everything is everything, infinitesimal tessellation, infinitizing identification, planate exchange, intimacy, immersion, negation of intercession, phenomenality, antitheory, flow as dissolution, hyperexposure, evanescent plenum, amiable oozing. These are a handful of the stylistic features that Anna Kornbluh, an English professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, identifies under the designation of ‘immediacy’; or rather, the cultural style par excellence of a too late capitalism. Capitalism is too late because its future has been eclipsed, its present immanentized and its environment ruined. Yogic Van Gogh experiences, Marina Abramović’s performance art and NFTs are what remains, cultural instances that seek to renounce, negate or destroy their own mediations and, in the process, void themselves in a sea of vibe and flow.

Kornbluh is omnivorous in her derivation of the immediate style in cultural and intellectual products, and Immediacy takes on communization theory, popular film, performance art, phenomenology, social media and autofiction. Her argumentation is, in response, nearly as much of a deluge as the cultural forms and stylistic apparatuses elicited in the text. Naming and listing, two modes described as the ‘empiricist style’ in a chapter on “Antitheory”, are not unfamiliar to Kornbluh. Nor is a malleable approach to explanation that moves fluidly between descriptive hyperbole and dry exegesis of the technical conditions of cultural production; yet, in contrast to those autofictions, phenomenologies and personal essays, Kornbluh situates her own critique in a tradition of mediacy.

Mediations are, for Kornbluh, active processes of relating and making sense, those artworks that make “available in language and image and rhythm the super-valent abstractions otherwise unavailable to our sensuous perception.”^[1] Hegelian in origin, mediation is an expression of the material conditions of cultural production, corporeality and social interdependence. The category situates Kornbluh in a rich lineage of critical aesthetic studies wherein capital’s metabolism with nature, thought and cultural production are interrelated as moments of a totality rather than separate structures of analysis. Theodor Adorno, Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson are obvious forebears, while Olúfẹ́mi O Táíwò, Caroline Levine and Sianne Ngai are invoked as contemporary theorists of mediacy.

Mediated style requires the relativization of surface-level phenomena and reckons with the contingency of social relations. It situates both in the logic of capital’s perpetual efforts to valorize itself in an ever-expanded pattern and considers the making of style from the shapes, purposes or meanings of culture. “Arts of mediation,” Kornbluh argues, “make apparent this relationship between media technology and capitalist valorization” and “interlace forms of relation like the family with the corporation, or romance with the police, or mentorship with patriarchy.”^[2]

Immediacy, on the other hand, renounces art’s potential for mediation, replacing it with techniques of directness and literalism, and effects of immersiveness and surety.^[3] Kornbluh situates the immediate style in a capitalist logic riven with crisis, as secular stagnation engenders a turn to the sphere of circulation in lieu of profitability at sites of production. Immediacy is thus periodized as a phenomenon tied to the ‘long downturn’ that began in the latter half of the mid-century, and Kornbluh draws on critical geography, Marxist economic history and apprehensions of automation and communications technology to map out correspondences between cultural production and accumulation. In her reading, the mainframe computer, credit card, automated teller machine and just-in-time production are all illustrations of the syncing of money, information and culture, as are more recent developments in 3D printing, robotics, artificial intelligence and gig platforms.

“Through these arrangements,” Kornbluh argues, “space as the solid medium of social relations is itself pressed into fluid circulation,” while flow, an ‘essential value’ driven by capital into culture, takes precedence over previous logics of accumulation.^[4] This argument draws on geographers like David Harvey and Charmaine Chua to ground the immediate style in capitalism’s historical geography. The logic of circulation–“metabolic flow and fluid motion, urban traffic, news and newspapers, ideas and gossip”–is, likewise, understood as indicative of the crisis of accumulation.

The symptoms of this circulatory logic redound through cultural production. Kornbluh, accordingly, hits on a narcissistic streak in contemporary culture: the selfie, autofiction, phenomenology and the use of handheld cameras in film all signify a desire for unmediated experience. Kim Kardashian’s Selfish photo book is posed in contradistinction to the industrial photography of Edward Burtynsky, while particular ire is reserved for the ‘fast food for thought’ of autotheory texts like Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie, Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life. The barbs continue: Knausgaard’s My Struggle (“a virtually endless and utterly homogeneous stream”); the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems (“colonoscopy cinematography”); Mckenzie Wark’s Reverse Cowgirl (“so effulgently bare and corporeally vivid as to preclude distance-taking or concept-making”).

Each chapter of Immediacy interweaves theoretical critique, readings of immediate style, and analysis of the technical infrastructures that mediate the production and circulation of mass culture. Its scope is expansive and many of the individual critiques sparkle with humor and a shrewd apprehension of meaning in even the most banal cultural products. The novelty of this style, though, must be examined against the historical geography outlined by Kornbluh. Accordingly, I take up the turn to circulation and the crisis of accumulation as the condition of possibility for immediate style and, second, the pinpointing of an assemblage of cultural products and techniques that evoke its presentist disposition. I will address these in turn.

Kornbluh’s emphasis on circulation as the logic of contemporary capital is attentive to recent developments in logistical and extractivist sectors. Nonetheless, a common mistake is made in historicizing and explaining these dynamics: the physical circuit of commodities, which includes circuits of information and money materialized in digital infrastructures, is conflated with the circulation of value through its various moments on the way to valorization. Kornbluh finds immediacy in the apparent form of capital’s compulsion to speed up, make close and annihilate space with time, all under the imperative of flow; yet, the logistics, financial and communications revolutions were and are as much about valorization through fixity as through infinite flow.

Kornbluh is not wrong to foreground speed, flatness and smoothness– nor the “doing away with go-betweens and intercessions, promoting perpetual motion, streaming emanative exchange”;^[5] nevertheless, this only represents one window into the totality of capital’s production-circulation nexus. This is because the circulation of capital cannot be reduced to the movement of physical things or discrete data. Instead, logistical and financial logics are better understood as a means of exerting power and control over the entire circuit of capital, and in particular the labor process, rather than merely speeding up the flow of goods.

Logistical power allows manufacturing and transportation capital to stall production in one location in order to evade labor struggles, port blockades and military conflicts, while simultaneously expanding capacity in another. Or, as Mazen Labban demonstrates at a more fundamental level, “for capital to continue to circulate–to expand and to accumulate–commodities must come to a standstill and exit circulation” or face waste and devaluation.^[6] Value must be embedded in the built environment in order for circulation to proceed apace, so while capital might seek its ideal form in M-M’, self-valorizing value or what Kornbluh describes as “[c]irculation qua immediatized infinite flow,” its reproduction and expansion is nonetheless reliant on both intensified exploitation of labor-power and a set of social relations that are hardly reducible to the accelerated physical movement of money and commodities.^[7]

Scholars of logistics have provided sheafs of evidence in support of capital’s destructive movement towards acceleration and circulation-over-production but simultaneously nod to its dialectical obverse: the logic of production, with its deforming separation of head and hand, insinuates itself in social reproduction writ large. Thus, Deborah Cowen takes up Mario Tronti to explain logistics as the expanded reproduction of the global social factory, and with it expanded logics of bordering and militarization, while Labban draws on Clyde Woods to explain logistics space as “a fragmented and integrated global plantation system.”^[8]

Kornbluh’s conception of space and its relationship to the social also demands scrutiny. Space is the ‘solid medium’ for social relations and the ‘fluid circulation’ of capital, an argument presaged in the annihilation of space by time recognized by Marx in the Grundrisse notebooks of 1857-8 and later elaborated by David Harvey.^[9] Kornbluh, with this in mind, argues that the immediate style is best understood as a foregrounding of presence–herein a signifier for the spatial–without a future.^[10] Capital’s temporal imperative rules over all, not least the conditions of possibility for cultural production.

Kornbluh emphasizes the closeness, connectivity and instancy of contemporary capitalism’s circulatory dynamics, however the other side of uneven development’s characteristic seesaw of difference and equalization–displacement, distance, scale–are elided at the level of both theory and cultural production. Curiously, Kornbluh’s previous elaboration on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of social space, most extensively detailed in 2019’s The Order of Forms, is almost entirely absent from Immediacy. That text’s emphasis on the figurality, multiplicity and “galvanized modeling of social spaces wrought of aestheticized materials” is set aside in favor of the absolute subsumption of space as the medium of circulation.^[11]

Kornbluh’s professed debt to Jameson’s 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, which shares many of the same assumptions regarding the spatial as Immediacy, is foregrounded instead. For Jameson, the postmodern style hinges on the fact that “our daily life, our psychic experience, our cultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories of time.”^[12] Los Angeles’ Bonaventure Hotel represents the apex of this domination of time by space, an architectural experience about which he memorably declared a ‘postmodern hyperspace’ and a stylistic expression of the “incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subject.”^[13] Yet, as Doreen Massey expertly deciphered as far back as 1992, the opposition of time and space in Jameson’s critical theory, with the former privileged as the realm of action and history, not only reduces space to a flattened level of time but also makes the uneven development of capitalism’s production of space effectively illegible as a chaotic hyperspace.^[14]

A third critique concerns Kornbluh’s periodization. The immediate style is located in the ‘severity and duration’ of the ‘long downturn’ but the particular mechanisms that led to its emergence are left vague. The ‘new media hypothesis’ of a digital, informational, surveillance, platform or vectorialist capitalism is derided by Kornbluh as “brand competition among synonyms for circulation” but the turn-to-circulation does clearly have something to do with logics of informational discretization and data capture.^[15] Is it the mingling of crisis and information technology that lends immediacy its flavor? Or the contradistinction between the ‘long downturn’ and the false promises of globalization that suffuses culture with the compulsion to flow?

Kornbluh does not attempt to draw out discordances between our present immediacy and past, mediated cultural styles but instead argues that “the totalization of these dynamics in cultural aesthetics has taken some time,” only to be realized in the past several decades as the post-postmodern.^[16] Giovanni Arrighi’s spiral model of accumulation, wherein moments of production alternate with moments of circulation and speculation, is alluded to yet it is unclear whether the immediate style or its analogs can be found in prior conjunctures or, contrarily, whether the modern or postmodern appear elsewhere in the world-system. This latency, or spatial dislocation, is left unexplained, as is the distinction between the cultural mediations of the annihilation of space by time, recognized by Marx in the mid-nineteenth century, and those of the present. Was there an immediate modernism or an immanentization of postmodernism? Or does immediate style indicate a more final crisis of accumulation?

These concerns do not only bear down on the spatiality and periodicity of immediacy, but also on its conditions of possibility and negation. Capitalist totality is mediated by real abstractions that compel the practical activity of individuals through categories of the wage, price and interest rate, while cultural forms both express and are in surplus of these real abstractions. Jameson, in a later essay on the postmodern against the backdrop of Arrighi’s spiral-schema, notes that the ‘problem of abstraction’ is not one of degree qua the concrete but of its particular cultural expressions in relation to categories like money.^[17]

Kornbluh, likewise, dispenses with a romantic critique that identifies abstraction with finance and spectacle. But instead of scrutinizing the abstractive mediations of the immediate style, its emphasis on “experience, the self, the body, its beauty, its pain, its pleasure, its transformation,” is dismissed in its ‘inexhaustible concreteness’.^[18] Immediate style is instead an unbroken expression of the identity of self and labor power suborned to circulation; or, more simply, of the capriciousness of a capitalism in crisis. Are expulsion, immiseration, incarceration and crisis, the ‘quicksand grounds of immediacy’ uncovered by Kornbluh, so concrete as to lack mediation in their cultural expression? One side of the dualism (the abstract/abstraction), in other words, is dispensed with in favor of the other and, henceforth, immediacy is autonomized as an object of critique.

If Immediacy approaches space and circulation with a more subtle touch than Jameson’s 1984 essay, its counter-examples of durable forms of mediacy–Edward Burtynsky’s industrial photography, Andreas Malm’s How To Blow Up A Pipeline, Jesse Armstrong’s Succession, Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle–leave much to be desired for those seeking a renascent cultural program. Kornbluh seeks out three facets of mediacy in these works: scale, impersonality and hold. These works evoke a dialectic of everyday practices, conventional meaning and the possibility of their overcoming, yet their mediacy is that of a mechanical relationship between whole and part, abstraction and empirics: the family and firm in Succession; the ‘pragmatic policy white paper’ of How To Blow Up A Pipeline; the ‘obscure zones’ and ‘thirdness’ of Burtynsky’s industrial landscapes.^[19]

“These are theories that begin from concrete, urgent problems,” Kornbluh explains, that are “experienceable at the level of the body and affects, but which understand the trajectory of argumentation to pull away from that level.”^[20] Photographer Allan Sekula, writing in 1995’s Fish Story, forewarned against this sort of emphasis on the concrete, evoking the image of a crate breaking open as “too easy an image of sudden disclosure, at once archaic and cinematic.”^[21] Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, in another apprehension of logistical aesthetics, also chide the easy pleasure in this sort of reveal; films like Blood Diamond, Traffic and Syriana are what the authors describe as ‘hyperlink cinema’ or commodity chain art, works that posit a circulatory opacity that can only be unraveled through a conspicuous disclosure.^[22]

This logic of disclosure, of something fetishized demonstrated to be what it really is, helps us understand Immediacy’s undertheorization of circulation and capitalist space and Kornbluh’s suggestion that commercial television and industrial photography are prime examples of contemporary mediacy. The book's thinly veiled nostalgia for cultural forms redolent of a past mediacy–industry, family, party–points to the mediacy of immediacy: the dying embers of twentieth-century aesthetic and political revolutions inverted into a vast assemblage of malignant cultural commodities. An easy resolution and demystification sought in Succession, on the other hand, reveals only the formal exhaustion of art under capitalism and the impossibility of realizing past mediacy through old forms posited as somehow new.

Kornbluh’s critical apparatus is, it must be said, powerful, and Immediacy is at its best as polemic against those narcissistic cultural forms that predominate across genre and sector. The auto- and self-centered cultural and theoretical productions of our moment, premised in anti-totalizing and anti-abstraction dispositions, no less guarantee realism than their formalist predecessors. Paradoxically then, Kornbluh’s text is successful in its unraveling of the necessarily false, yet really abstract, infinitude of contemporary cultural production. The mediations between circulation and cultural production, even at their most vapid, do express the reified sociality of the individual qua capital and, in kind, the expanded cycles of stagnation and immiseration that propound today. Kornbluh is attentive to how immediate style inverts and deforms social life; the content of its negation will only appear through those collectively, purposefully operating in its interstices.

1. Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (London ; New York: Verso, 2024), p. 5. ↑
2. Kornbluh, Immediacy, p. 209. ↑
3. Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique (Cambridge; Malden: Polity, 2013), p. 20; Adorno writes that it “is perhaps the most disastrous consequence of the assumption of immediacy, with which the subject desperately deceives itself about itself as mediation” and that, in relation to the ‘first philosophy’ of Husserl, a “tendency to regression, a hatred of the complicated, is steadily at work in theory of origins, thus guaranteeing its affinity with lordship.” ↑
4. Kornbluh, Immediacy, p. 35. ↑
5. Kornbluh, Immediacy, p. 31. ↑
6. Mazen Labban, ‘Reading Deborah Cowen’s The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade’, Political Geography, 61, p. 267. ↑
7. Kornbluh, Immediacy, p. 29. ↑
8. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Labban, ‘Reading Deborah Cowen’, p. 268. ↑
9. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin Classics, 2023); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990). ↑
10. Kornbluh, Immediacy, p. 35. ↑
11. Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), p. 165. ↑
12. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 16. ↑
13. Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 44. ↑
14. Doreen Massey, ‘Politics and Space/Time’, New Left Review, 196, pp. 65-84. ↑
15. Kornbluh, Immediacy, p. 60. ↑
16. Kornbluh, Immediacy, pp. 31-2. ↑
17. Fredric Jameson ‘Culture and Finance Capital’, Critical Inquiry, 24(1), pp. 246-265. ↑
18. Kornbluh, Immediacy, p. 168. ↑
19. Christian Lotz and Alberto Toscano have each taken aim at Burtunsky’s landscape photography. Lotz lauds the Canadian artist for his empathetic relationship to the effects of ecospheric destruction but notes how his landscapes of industrial detritus obfuscate social totality behind a ‘veil of purely aesthetical properties’ and a ‘principle of forgetting’. Toscano, likewise, critiques Burtynsky as an exemplar of the “vanishing of labor from the visual field of northern capitalist ideology,” a vanishing that facilitates the naturalization of economic-cum-ecological processes as outside of history. Christian Lotz ‘Representing Capital: Mimesis, Realism, and Contemporary Photography’ in The Social Ontology of Capitalism, edited by Daniel Krier and Mark P. Worrell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2017); Alberto Toscano ‘The World Is Already without Us’, Social Text, 34(2), pp. 109–24. ↑
20. Kornbluh, Immediacy, p. 211. ↑
21. Allan Sekula, Fish Story (London: Mack Books, 2018), p. 32. ↑
22. Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (London: Zer0 Books, 2015). Toscano and Kinkle evoke nineteenth century ‘novels of circulation’, narratives “written from the point of view of objects in circulation,” as a precursor to ‘hyperlink cinema’ and contemporary logistical aesthetics. Are these then examples of a proto-immediate literary form? ↑