Immediacy as cultural style derives from space-time compression in capitalism.

Evidence

The twenty-first-century concentration on circulation, with its premium on flow, conditions immediacy as cultural style that immanentizes presence, eclipses relay, and negates mediation. While capacity hypothetically exists for cultural aesthetics to resist rather than insist upon this logic, our moment overwhelmingly leans into circulatory flow. Already in the 1980s, Fredric Jameson and David Harvey understood postmodernism as issuing from space-time compression (bringing the places and zones of the globe in more proximate contact through communications technology and transportation). Turn-of-the-millennium observers underscored the consummation of this compression: “the world is flat,” laminated by a “culture of speed.” Speed is, of course, the preeminent colloquial connotation of “immediacy,” and flatness is the dimension of smooth flow. Now there remain to be elaborated other notions of immediacy, enacted in the protracted intensification of circulation: doing away with go-betweens and intercessions, promoting perpetual motion, streaming emanative exchange. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 60

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages Jameson’s and Harvey’s postmodernism-as-space-time-compression thesis; the reader’s stated task is judging Kornbluh’s structural debt to Jameson. This is the core theoretical lineage passage. — connects to: Event-spectacle media culture causes the postmodern collapse of time horizons — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 394; Economic globalization undermined realist narrative structure by introducing spatial simultaneity. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1678; Annihilation of space through time has always driven capitalism — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1850 (+8 more)
• DEFINE: Defines immediacy in operational terms: immanentizes presence, eclipses relay, negates mediation — the three-part definition the reader needs to name the aesthetic features.
• DEEPTHINKING: The non-identical restatement of Jameson’s space-time compression into a style that ‘eclipses relay’ and ‘negates mediation’ is a genuinely rich reformulation — mediating the very concept of mediation, which the reader will contest.