Economic precarity drives a style that erases literature’s critical distance

Evidence

The circulation economy crafts this stylistic unity of annulled mediation, in conditions encompassing the expansion of university writing programs amid a university labor crisis, the dramatic downsizing in the publishing and journalism industries, and the ubiquity of freelance entrepreneurs. Professions without experts leave individuals flailing to auto-actualize alone in the society that does not exist. Contemporary jettisoning of literary mediation simply aestheticizes these conditions, shedding literature’s potential to immanently criticize the known world. Instead, immediacy writing is too close with us. It’s suffocating. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 120

Categorization

• QUESTION: Clarify the mechanism: does the writing-program boom cause the style, or does the style arise before and the programs merely institutionalize it? Also ‘auto-actualize alone in the society that does not exist’ needs unpacking.
• XREF: The claim that a profession’s collapse erases its cultural artifacts’ critical function parallels the Frankfurt School material on how culture-industry jobs reproduce labor relations (see prior reading on The Frankfurt School).