Immediacy aestheticizes capital’s premiums on speed, flow, and self-actualization

Evidence

The mode of production in the twenty-first century does not fundamentally differ from that in the 1960s, but, as we saw in “Circulation,” the relative importance accorded to circulation (including financialization, communications, and networking) is new. Similarly, the conceit of the self as the scaturient seat of human capital, a conceit we in “Imaginary” saw constituted as psychic truth by the enterprise to squeeze efficiencies from the social reproduction process, is also a determinant of literary immediacy as style. Economic premiums on speed, flow, and auto-actualization inscribe themselves into literary style; immediacy writing’s anti-representational, antifictional centrifugality of charisma aestheticizes this capitalist base. But, if this all sounds like vulgar Marxism, pinpointing a cause for the privatization and demediation of fiction in the privatization and stalling of macroeconomic relations, we can granulate that causality by attending to more mundane and institutional levels; at the same time, we can also appreciate the array of effects of these causes by studying other significant trends activating immediacy in contemporary literary production. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 135

Categorization

• XREF: Reader judges Kornbluh’s structural debt to Jameson; the phrase ‘aestheticizes this capitalist base’ is the classic Jamesonian ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’/late-capitalist aesthetic homology move, worth flagging for that assessment. — connects to: Under knowledge capitalism, idleness gets absorbed into producing the person as Capital. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 115; Capital’s managers have defaulted to retromanic repetition rather than innovation — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1970
• QUESTION: ‘Granulate that causality by attending to more mundane and institutional levels’ — does she actually deliver institutional-level mediation, or stay at homology? Worth checking against her own Anti-theory criticisms.