Immanent, immersive theory aesthetics abandon critique and thereby affirm capitalism’s permanence

Evidence

Across contemporary theory, realism and immanence, immersion and horizontality unseat reflection, transcendence, and the verticality of perspectival remove or causal analysis. These offer genuine redress for shortcomings—such as ignorance of the ecological in structuralism and poststructuralism alike. Yet in unshutting theory to ever more counter-rationalist topoi (affects, dogs, rocks, affects again), an aesthetic experience of fusion takes precedence over educing contradictions, critiquing ideology, or drawing lines in the sand. All is intensity, infinite concretude, oceanic feeling. The given and theory, one surging wave together, drowning the possibility of anchor or dam. As Lukács already foretold, “In the last analysis, all ‘immanence’ in imperialist bourgeois philosophy is aiming at the same target: to deduce from epistemology the ‘everlastingness’ of capitalist society.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 300

Categorization

• XREF: This is the core anti-immediacy theoretical stance the reader is fighting with in the ‘Antitheory’ chapter — Lukács’s line is also the Jameson lineage she wants to trace.
• DEEPTHINKING: The fusion of immanence with the capitalist given — theory that dissolves into the real also dissolves capitalism’s critique — is a dense, paradigm-level claim.
• QUESTION: Is Kornbluh fair in collapsing all immanentist theory (affects, new materialism) into a single ‘fusion’ strawman? Worth interrogating for the Antitheory fight.