Art’s essential function is to thwart immediacy by defamiliarizing reality.

Evidence

As this preliminary discussion suggests, understanding immediacy as style involves aesthetic description, historical periodization, an inquiry into causality, and a flirtation with the encyclopedic. These are operations of analysis that fulfill theory’s task to attain a meta-reflection on the production of ideas, including theoretical ideas. Traditionally, theory has been able to take a push toward this mediating function from art itself. Art constitutively thwarts immediacy, urgency, and utility; its most direct use rests in this indirection—but today’s immediatist art aspires to void itself, and theory has been following in its wake. Recalling a different vocation for both art and theory requires esteeming mediation at the outset. Adorno writes: “By the affront to needs, by the inherent tendency of art to cast different lights on the familiar, artworks correspond to the objective need for a transformation of consciousness that could become a transformation of reality.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 42

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly serves the reader’s stated goal of articulating a defense of mediation as politically necessary — this is the theoretical core of that defense, worth staging against the Antitheory chapter.
• XREF: Connects to Jameson’s ‘no longer possible to theorize’ and Adorno’s defamiliarization; relevant to judging Kornbluh’s structural debt to Jameson.