Genre dissolution produces disorientation rather than political critique

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

• DEEPTHINKING: The core argument that ‘flow is crisis continuous’ rather than crisis critique, plus the reversal of Berlant’s framework, is the chapter’s densest theoretical payoff — arguably the heart of her whole thesis.
• XREF: Disorientation-themed comments connect directly to her earlier chapter on ‘Imaginary’ shattering and smoothness, and this gestures at the Jameson cognitive-mapping framework that the reader wants to trace. — connects to: Only new conspiracism causes both delegitimation and disorientation simultaneously
• QUESTION: “Flow is crisis continuous” is a provocative contraction worth unpacking further against Jameson’s own account of postmodern pastiche and schizophrenic time.