Immediacy consummates video’s postmodern total-flow into a pure present with no future

Evidence

Video struck Fredric Jameson and other observers of the postmodern as the “art form par excellence of late capitalism” on account of its “total flow”; in the too late, immediacy consummates these propensities to instantaneity and dissolution. Video’s essence as instant relay emblematizes the immanentized circuit of value realization that has been the main source of economic activity in secular stagnation, while its fluidity courses in the current that immerses too late capitalism in an ineluctable present. No future, only flow. In the temporality of unremitting instantaneity, in the fluid pressure of stream aesthetics, what used to come after now comes before: the circulatory apparatus for streaming content determines what content gets produced. The end is the beginning; the colonoscope is the camera. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 195

Categorization

• XREF: Direct homage to Jameson’s ‘video as art form par excellence of late capitalism’ and ‘total flow’—the reader judging her structural debt to Jameson must anchor on this. — connects to: Event-spectacle media culture causes the postmodern collapse of time horizons — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 394; Digital-native generations experience time as disconnected micro-slices — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 53
• DEEPTHINKING: The retroversion claim—circulatory apparatus determines content, the end becomes the beginning, colonoscope as camera—is her most compressed statement of the economic-cause thesis and deserves sustained engagement.