Aboutness reduces art to its topical content, erasing its mediacy

Evidence

Adding up to so many lists, this empiricist style regards art and literature not as ambiguities for interpretation but as self-identical items. Itemization presses in interdisciplinary initiatives, administrative imperatives, and public humanities programming that erect “aboutness” as the stuff of art: what matters is not the way aesthetic ideas solicit a different kind of thinking than ordinary, but only their discretizable core and direct message. Aboutness, according to the philosopher Stephen Yablo, effects the prepositionality that defines immediacy, “whatever it is that [items] are on or of.” Works “about” ourselves spring affect; works “about” the other stimulate empathic serotonin; works “about” animals and rocks propagate vibrant materialism. In mining aboutness, consumer and administrative initiatives often vitiate mediation, shortcutting adumbration to align aesthetic cultural production more clearly with sociology or history. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 304

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘aboutness’ — Yablo’s prepositionality as the operational definition of immediacy — a concept fully nameable for the reader’s own thesis.
• XREF: The ‘itemization’ and ‘discretizable core’ of aboutness aligns with the reader’s earlier notes on digitization and data ontology, and with Jameson’s late-capitalist logic of the split subject. — connects to: Art’s specifically rational act is a reduction of the apparatus of appearance — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 834
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that administrative humanities (‘public health, policy, design’) admit literature only as topical content at the expense of ‘its own mediacy’ is a genuinely paradigm-shifting reframe of why interdisciplinary demand and immediacy share one root.