Contemporary theory’s nihilisms derive from algorithmic flatness and data accumulation.

Evidence

In their fixation on the unanswerability and immutability of eternal forces, or primordially recessive unorganizable chaos, contemporary theory’s many nihilisms have algorithmic underpinnings too. … Uniting queer anti-social hypotheses, afroand gynopessimism, and primal negativities in idioms of deconstruction, psychoanalysis, biopolitics, and phenomenology, the tenets of contemporary nihilism are so pervasive as to be almost imperceptible: all “ends” are bad, all institutions are oppressive, human history is only the history of domination, values like freedom or responsibility are instruments of these forces of bad oppressive domination, and therefore the only minimally affirmable virtues are ephemerality, hybridity, destabilization, fugitivity. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 306

Categorization

• QUESTION: Her naming of afro- and gynopessimism as ‘nihilism’ is a heavily contested frame; worth interrogating against the actual texts of those traditions when fighting her Antitheory chapter.
• XREF: This maps her whole argument onto Jameson’s postulate that culture reflects the economic base; reader wants to judge her structural debt to Jameson.