Genre-blurring praised as radical actually leaves audiences disoriented without expectations

Evidence

Critics like to celebrate these generic undoings as aesthetically and politically radical, a liberatory flailing in the crisis ordinary, and writers for the small screen surely share the conceit of contemporary literary production as a whole we studied in “Writing”—namely, that boundary-pushing is freedom. But there’s no guarantee that blurry indistinction aids cognitive mapping; far from crisis critique, flow is crisis continuous. What cultural theorist Lauren Berlant commends as the denormalizing function of “the waning of genre” might also be understood as a disorienting promotion of spectatorial immersion. If genre manages expectations, immediacy as the dissolution of genre leaves us without expectations, other than the expectation that our expectations will be thwarted; that we will be caught gasping at the sudden turns from tragedy to comedy and back again; that we will be, paradoxically, attentionally inundated in the aesthetic stream. Immediacy is this engrossing disorienting flow, in the middle of things without mooring. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 236

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘cognitive mapping’ framing is a direct Jameson inheritance — supports judging her structural debt; also converses with the book’s earlier ‘Writing’ chapter.
• DEEPTHINKING: Packs her entire thesis into one move: dissolving genre does not liberate but disorients, replacing managed expectation with unmooring inundation — the crux of her defense of mediation.