Dialectics attend to what is not immediately visible, whereas immediacy erases contradiction

Evidence

Theory negating mediation performs immediacy rather than interpreting it. Interpretation mediates by encountering phenomena and putting them into medium, like an articulated category that connects them to other phenomena or a historical narrative that helps explain how they came to appear. Interpretation of a dialectical sort pays attention to contradictions and negations, including the openings for thought to negate the circumstances of its own emergence, as well as the contradictory relations dissembled by that which solely appears. Dialectics attune to what is not immediate—to what a perceiving self doesn’t first see about itself, to what is contingent, to what is on the move, to what does not dawn. Immediacy style’s reification of what merely appears, by contrast, stamps out contradiction. What you see is what you get. However much this self-identical manifestiveness feels warranted in these times, its voiding of contradiction eliminates the gap by which theory distinguishes between the actual and the possible. Without this gap, there can be no projects, no synthesis. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 326

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the core polarity: dialectical interpretation vs. immediacy’s reification of what merely appears.
• XREF: This is the hinge connecting Kornbluh’s defense of mediation to the Jameson tradition (‘always historicize’, ‘reification’ as a category of analysis). — connects to: Immediacy rules out both continuity and discontinuity as modes of knowing; Thinking must hold dialectic and its opposite together at once — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 170; Critical dialectical language exposes contradiction while Orwellian language hides it — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 411 (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The move ‘without the gap between actual and possible there can be no projects, no synthesis’ distills her entire political case for mediation into one compressed argument.