Antitheory abandons abstraction, distance, generalization, and futurity

Evidence

Photography, televisuality, and novels of this peripheral sort illustrate the richness of representation beyond expression, the liberations available via objectivity, publicness, and mediacy. Twinklings in contemporary theory also provide some fodder for sustaining this opposition between crushing mediation (the selfie as spontaneous, front-facing confession as vulnerable, autofiction as authentic) and constructing it in collective and compositive truss. In studying the tendencies of autotheory and the algorithmically ordained topics of entanglement and immutability in “Antitheory,” we registered the resignation of the mediating office of theory: no abstraction, no distance, no generalization, no future—no scale, no impersonality, no hold. Attacking mediation itself, these trends construe representation as alienation, imagining a real lost when the symbolic interjects. Any challenge to this pervasive antitheory in the present must therefore embrace the mediating function of the symbolic while committing to the work of construction beyond emanation. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 363

Categorization

• DEFINE: Captures Kornbluh’s core definition of what antitheory attacks — the mediating offices theory gives up: abstraction, distance, generalization, the future.
• QUESTION: The reader plans to fight the ‘Antitheory’ chapter — this compressed definition of antitheory’s resignations is her central target.
• XREF: Her catalog ‘no abstraction, no distance, no generalization, no future’ is precisely Jameson’s ‘depthlessness, waning of affect’ register; worth judging the structural debt.