Cultural valuation of immediacy derives from economic premium on circulation

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; as economic geographer David Harvey observes, “when circulation stops, value disappears and the whole system comes tumbling down.” 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. This premium on circulation is historically distinct, and the story of its coursing importance is a juicy one. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 50

Categorization

• DEFINE: Names the core causal thesis tying the aesthetic style ‘immediacy’ to financialized circulation speed.
• XREF: Harvey’s ‘circulation stops, value disappears’ is the same frame the reader’s Antitheory fight chapter engages; also clearly echoes Jameson’s ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’ — the reader’s goal of judging her structural debt to Jameson.