Corporations have displaced literary fiction as the cultural avant-garde

Evidence

As for the world of anthropology, so for the world of literature. It is not just that people with degrees in English generally go to work for corporations (which of course they do); the point is that the company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed. While “official” fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 153

Categorization

• XREF: This is a striking inversion of the Frankfurt school’s critique — the culture industry thesis turned on its head, worth noting as the reader fights with this chapter. — connects to: Once-despised urban liminal spaces get emptied of menace by corporate media culture — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 469
• SEED: The claim that brand consultancies now do avant-garde narrative work could anchor an essay about where formal innovation actually happens today.