First-person presentism elevates personal experience above the mediating collectivity that real praxis needs

Evidence

Successional self-itemization configures praxis as a “decentering” in which “universality is replaced by particularity: what is true now turns on personal self-interests” and as a retreat “from institutions to the personal” because “organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves … we need to turn inward to transform the self.” First-person present as idiom solves the democratic paradox of representing others, electing itself as more politically and aesthetically sound than theories or tactics scaffolded by collective subjectivity or shared signifiers. Of course, it’s significant to see a white man voluntarily decenter himself, and gratifying to clock the practical effects of venerable theories that have audited the malfeasance of institutions and the harm of universals. Yet, in emptying out the convocative and generalizing dimensions of critique and then filling that void with the genre-bending fulminations of real talk, immediacy pronounces its univocity. Unrepresentative personalism becomes epistemic silo and political prophylactic, explicitly repudiating the middle ground between one experience and another. If you rightly thought praxis involved mediations like repetitive genres to scale upward from the individual and buttress a mass—the face-to-face production of using “we,” the narrative of where power lives and how we might want to live, the email reminder to participate in rallies, the phone-bank script, the local op-ed, the concrete slogan around which many can unite—then Critique and Praxis is here to set you straight. That old notion of praxis owes too much to representation and synthesis, and yields too much impersonality and mediation. Against such abstractions, praxis must concretize itself, atomistically animating the magnetic “I.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 245

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core theoretical claim to weigh against Jameson’s notion of the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ and his insistence on the political value of mediation through totality. — connects to: Including personal experience transforms pedagogy more than radical curriculum alone — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 282; Personal healing drives transformative theory when experience grounds it — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 133; Personal experience is the ground of liberatory feminist theorizing — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 151
• SEED: The passage’s inventory of concrete praxis mediations (slogans, phone-bank scripts, local op-eds, the ‘we’) could be quoted against any modern essay valorizing direct personal narrative as inherently more radical.
• DEFINE: Identifies ‘successional self-itemization’ — a succession of first-person items replacing collective structuration — as a key feature of immediacy tied to autofiction and activism alike.