Immediacy aesthetic rests on unattainable imagined reals that disavow subjectivity

Evidence

Much of immediacy’s lure rests in the momentary compensatory solidities of imagined contact with an imagined real. “An imagined real” might imply that there is a real real out there for a different kind of aesthetics. But for psychoanalysis, a real real is an “impossibility.” The mundane manifestations of this impossibility are contradictory: the real can seem exterior to language—putative solidities like the body; indescribable enigmas like death; unspeakable gaps like trauma; the unthought unthinkables; the anti-negation of the unconscious—but can also seem interior to language, as with the evasive chain of metonymy or the disturbing parapraxis of symptoms and desire. These semblances endow imaginary reals: ineffable experiences struggling for expression, signifiers that mean exactly what we want them to mean. Immediatism demands these imaginary reals, grasping encounters with what circumvents or precedes mediation—but its aesthetic and political effects propagate infinite, individualized, phenomenalized attempts that perpetually, repetitively circle, multiplying into a hall of mirrors. Trapped in the reflective one-to-one chamber, images eclipse signifiers, presence fore-closes absence, and plenitude averts lack. Then, reality-hungry immediacy egos ultimately disavow subjectivity itself, evacuating the dynamic of subject, the throwing under the bar of symbolization, in a castration denialism ensuring there is no otherness, least of all in ourselves. Instead of opaque subjects and enigmatic others, limits and contradictions, the immediacy imaginary posits only self-commanded human resources, a vital reservoir of affective flow and identity property. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 97

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘imagined real’ as the psychoanalytic construct immediatism chases, clarifying the core conceptual machinery of the book’s diagnosis.
• XREF: The psychoanalytic structure (Lacan’s castration, the Real as impossibility, the bar of symbolization) parallels the Marxist-Structuralist framework the reader will weigh against Jameson. — connects to: Attempts to capture reality unmediated transform it into hyperreality instead — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 99