Decline of shared symbolic meaning heightens exposure to unassimilable excess and generates immediacy

Evidence

In general, symbolic consistency is a function of tacit buy-in, collective identification, and repetitive social practices. We learn to speak and write, and we observe institutions coordinating and responding to language as though it is held in common. To say that the symbolic is in decline or disarray is thus to mark the loss of this effective common, to find that the authority backing the use of signifiers and grounding their felicitous signification across differences in context and groups has dissipated. Words drift freely and, as a result, fail to secure an order of stable interpretation; to the extent that interpretations held in common can provide defenses against traumatic antagonisms, the loss of functional meaning harbingers intensified encounters with the unassimilable. Such heightened exposure to unspeakables tends to generate a sense of immediacy: lacking common language, there is only the funhouse mirror of “alternative facts” and ghastly visages, distortion and eruption. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 98

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘decline of the symbolic’ as the loss of authority backing signifier use — the diagnostic concept for immediacy’s rise.
• XREF: Directly engages the reader’s Jameson comparison — this Lacanian register maps onto Jameson’s postmodernism-as-loss-of-depth thesis. — connects to: Shared symbolic meanings within movements generate empirical regularities needing causal explanation — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 303; Meaning threats evoke a content-independent need for meaning structure — Travis Proulx, Steven J. Heine, and Kathleen D. Vohs, When Is the Unfamiliar the Uncanny?…, 64