Immediacy’s experiential correlate is presence bleed and time without time.

Evidence

Instantification of communications and exchange precipitate a sensation of immediacy not only as rapidity but as fullness, the instant as intense presence, an “always on,” indistinct from time off. “Presence bleed,” as the social scientist and Intel Corp engineer Melissa Gregg deems it, spreads our engagement everywhere all the time, a ferment vehiculated by social networking sites where “deliberate confusion of work and friendship” marries labor and enjoyment, extraction and connection. The resulting immanentization and instantification (total presence, every moment everything all at once) contrives, as the art historian Jonathan Crary chronicles, “a time without time”—the sleepless Groundhog Day in which we socialize all the time, work all the time, consume all the time, answer all the time. And the tax for this absolutization of time is “homogeneity” and “monotonous indistinction.” Total activation in undifferentiated continuity, immediacy’s zombie phenomenality. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 69

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key definitional passage: immediacy named as ‘presence bleed’ (Gregg), ‘a time without time’ (Crary), homogeneous total activation. These are the named aesthetic features the reader wants to identify in works.
• DEEPTHINKING: ‘Total activation in undifferentiated continuity, immediacy’s zombie phenomenality’ — the refusal to let immediacy be a positive aesthetic (it produces monotony, not richness) is a dense, arguable claim the reader should sit with, since it complicates her own desire to name immediacy’s features.