Harcourt’s praxis rejects representation and universality for individual presence.

Evidence

Existing modes of writing cannot work; theory is no longer tenable. Collective demands and objective courses of action do not hold; only the subjective and singular are appropriately moderate. The very project of representation—presenting at some remove, binding together more than individuals, speaking for others—has become illegitimate. In opposition to the syntheses of critique, by which groups agree on what is bad (structural racism, say), and what is to be done (defunding the police, say), and with which common signifiers to constitute collectives (“Black Lives Matter,” say), praxis here infinitizes minute actions of irreducible individuals, permanently deferring integration. Rather than compose demands or slogans or visions of what would be less bad for more people “in universal form” (freedom from fear of extrajudicial death, say), praxis extrudes “spaces where all can be heard,” where perpetual presence abounds. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 244

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The whole book’s argument crystallizes: immediacy as anti-representation is not just an aesthetic but a political-epistemic orientation. The explicit contrast of synthesis (naming collective bads like structural racism) versus infinitized individual praxis is the load-bearing antithesis of mediation’s defense.
• XREF: Strongly echoes the reader’s fight with the Antitheory chapter — this is concrete evidence of theory consuming anti-theory. Also Jameson’s ‘always historicize’ and the political unconscious as mediation.
• BMF: Harcourt’s ‘praxis extrudes spaces where all can be heard, where perpetual presence abounds’ faintly echoes the collective that surrenders individual mediation to continuous surveillance-presence in Zamyatin’s We — Everyone must always be heard and seen.