Adorno defines thinking as the refusal to bow to the immediately given

Evidence

Still other permutations of mediation propel theory after Marx. Theodor Adorno extended the exploration of social mediation by more deeply investigating both the subject of philosophy and its object. It is not enough for critique to register that there is no immediately perceiving subject independent of its social constitution; critique must also explore how there is not any simply given object, how reality and phenomena are produced through means like war, bureaucracy, mass media, and ideology. As he insists, “It is through the transition to the priority of the object that the dialectic becomes materialist.” The social relations that determine and mediate the thinking subject do not immediately present themselves for analysis. Indeed, the very definition of thinking for Adorno is nothing other than “the rejection of the overweening demand of bowing to everything immediate.” … If taking an object as a given constitutes a mistake of an idealist stripe, then objects that insist upon their own givenness—their lack of mediation, their authenticity, their formlessness—must be equally suspicious. Art claiming its identity with reality doubly obfuscates the primacy of mediation, presenting a difficulty that perpetually concerned Adorno. When that art is mass-produced and mass-circulated, mass immersion compromises perceptual faculties. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 255

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the aesthetic judgment of immediacy: Adorno’s suspicion of objects that insist on their own givenness is the theoretical weapon for reading autofiction and other immediacy forms. — connects to: Adorno refuses to reduce existing reality to mere positivity — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1487
• QUESTION: Does her embrace of Adorno’s mass-immersion critique sit comfortably with her own Total History of Blackness critique in earlier chapters, or does it re-center a European mass-culture pessimism?