Contemporary theory has adopted the immediacy style it should critique

Evidence

To everything, turn, turn, turn. Theory as mediation—as processing and sublating, as defamiliarizing and abstracting, as contextualizing and narrating—turns now away from its task, instead endorsing the cultural style it ought rightly to critique. In too late capitalism, critique resigns and futurity forecloses; only mesmerizing emissions present. The sublime and the singular solicit successive spreads, in a series that suspends synthesis, simulating nothing so much as the integers of digital computation. Autotheory’s vaporization of argument is merely the most stylized example of contemporary theory’s immediacy style; with less flair but more reach, the current romance of empiricism negates the mediations of theory and fuses thought to the program language of circulatory platforms. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 295

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names mediation via four operations — processing, sublating, defamiliarizing, abstracting, contextualizing/narrating — and identifies autotheory’s vaporization of argument as theory’s own immediacy style.
• XREF: Directly extends the book’s core thesis about compressed capital circulation causing cultural impatience with mediation; also relevant to the reader’s Antitheory-chapter fight.