Compressed capital circulation conditions immediacy as a culture that eliminates mediation

Evidence

The twenty-first-century concentration on circulation, with its premium on flow, conditions immediacy as cultural style that immanentizes presence, eclipses relay, and negates mediation. While capacity hypothetically exists for cultural aesthetics to resist rather than insist upon this logic, our moment overwhelmingly leans into circulatory flow. Already in the 1980s, Fredric Jameson and David Harvey understood postmodernism as issuing from space-time compression (bringing the places and zones of the globe in more proximate contact through communications technology and transportation). Turn-of-the-millennium observers underscored the consummation of this compression: “the world is flat,” laminated by a “culture of speed.” Speed is, of course, the preeminent colloquial connotation of “immediacy,” and flatness is the dimension of smooth flow. Now there remain to be elaborated other notions of immediacy, enacted in the protracted intensification of circulation: doing away with go-betweens and intercessions, promoting perpetual motion, streaming emanative exchange. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 60

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s stated thesis: judging her structural debt to Jameson and Harvey, both named here, whose space-time compression framework she extends one step further.
• ADDENDUM: Relevant to reader’s own theorized project on immediacy as style with an economic cause, the central architectural claim of her engagement.