Capitalist circulation velocity drives cultural immediacy as an aesthetic style

Evidence

Fluid, smooth, fast circulation, whether of oil or information, fuels contemporary capitalism’s extremization of its eternal systematic pretext: things are produced for the purpose of being exchanged; money supersedes its role as mediator of exchange to become its end point; the means of circulation become the end of circulation … The price for this velocity in the present is outrageous destruction: pipeline leaks, atmospheric carbonization, planetary arson. And, in turn, these elemental calamities betide immediacy as cultural style. Flow as essential value for this aesthetic swells from flow as essential value for the twenty-first-century economy. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 50

Categorization

• XREF: This is the chapter’s core thesis statement tying economic circulation to aesthetic immediacy — the exact mechanism the reader’s goal asks to extract; connects to the book’s earlier thesis chapters and to Harvey’s circulation argument. — connects to: Accelerated turnover transforms modernist aesthetics into postmodernist flux — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 940; Technology’s cultural effects are mediated by late capitalism not deterministically — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 410; Capitalism’s material system is interwoven with cultural reproduction — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 122 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Defines how ‘flow’ migrates from an economic description to an aesthetic category, a term the reader must be able to name for her immediacy vocabulary.