Aesthetics of immediacy cannot build the political will needed for change

Evidence

Productivist cultural style isn’t an economic resolution to the crisis of capitalist production like universal basic income, or abolition of the value form, or renewed Keynesian state capitalism where progressive taxation fuels general social welfare spending. But it just might prove pivotal to political resolution—both pluck and project—bringing into thinkability ideas of collective flourishing and common abundance despite the ecocide. The deluge is here. Whether any dams may be built depends upon fomenting mass political will—and the aesthetics of immediacy will not suffice for that. Autoemanation, flow, blur—these are not the modalities of knowledge or representation that work to produce deliberate signifiers, shared ideas, structured relations, nor are they lines in the sand of the drought zone. It is up to actions to produce the necessary mediations, and from there cultural style may follow, but actions themselves require mediation—for recognizable sustained effect rather than just undecidable entanglement, symbolic efficacy beyond imaginary feint, it takes conspicuously knitted chains of cause and effect, signifiers resounding, and collaborations exercising collective sovereignty. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 377

Categorization

• QUESTION: A weak point worth interrogating in the Antitheory fight: is she treating style as causally necessary for politics but declining to say exactly how, slipping from aesthetics into voluntarism (‘it is up to actions’)?
• XREF: connects to: Abandoning modernist becoming leaves only aestheticized spatial politics — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1934; Technically advanced art can only achieve politically mediated effects — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 171; Aesthetic experience functions as political apprenticeship for future freedom.