Fiction can derealize concrete settings into figures of broad social determination.

Evidence

Setting, architecture, urban texture: the social space of sentiment, the infrastructure of intimacy that does not individuate charismatic singletons so much as illustrate common ties—this is a faculty of fiction Whitehead shares with Diana Evans, whose Ordinary People makes apparently concrete references that transmute into figures of social determination, helping to abstractly intimate broad social relations. The Crystal Palace first occurs as an ordinary geographic detail, but, in the course of the narration, the book de-realizes this figure. Plasticizing the signifier “crystal palace” into both imperial jubilee and diasporic despair, the architecture of the past and the infrastructure of the present, the novel is able to evoke a longue durée of historical sociality that contextualizes the domestic scenes it relays. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 346

Categorization

• XREF: This anti-immediacy, antiphenomenal realism directly counterpoints the ‘stream’ aesthetics named in the book’s chapter on ‘Video’ — the two forms Kornbluh sets against each other.
• DEFINE: Names a specific technique — derealizing, dematerializing a concrete referent to figure longue durée historical sociality — as a distinguishing feature of mediation.