Immediacy aesthetics mirror the immersive pathologies of late-capitalist suffering

Evidence

The category of immediacy connects both these immersive miseries and the apparent excess of ego to the technological transformations and economic contradictions we studied in “Circulation.” Immediacy’s stylized engrossments mimic our epidemic paths of suffering, its inundative presence swallows the horizon of no-future, its urgent extremities affright and awe, and its prized flow perpetuates the cult of “resilience” to which we are remaindered. Too late capitalism’s circulation-centricity expedites a historically contingent inflation of the image, and arguably, the subjective corollary is an inflation of the imaginary. An inner flood marked by a lack of symbolic constraint—an insufficiency of language (“no words”), a dearth of social ties, a reflective glass maze, overflowing oceanic feeling—casts the psychic style through which immediacy grips. Intensity intensifies. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 82

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s project of judging structural debt to Jameson: this inflation-of-image/inflation-of-imaginary move is the Jamesonian homology between circulation time and culture.
• ADDENDUM: The ‘cult of resilience’ remark connects to the reader’s established critiques, though more centrally the passage supports her immediacy-as-symptom thesis.