Immediacy flattens figuration and history into suffocating present-tense elemental immanence.

Evidence

Laminated into one miasmic hurricanic meld, the swirling, asymmetrical histories of Black suffering and subjugation and Black women’s nexus and governmental abandon combine with the immanentist temporality to produce a rivetingly brutal, all-subsuming eco-system. … Similes compulsively recur to pre-semantic elementality: “Blood smells like wet earth”; of the love interest she notes, “He was the sun”; if we couldn’t tell from her name, the dog “China is as white as the sand that will become a pearl”; so many ways of redacting figuration into concretude. And through it all—the gathering storm, the throbbing bodies, the suffocating immanence, the pulsing present tense—vibrates immediacy. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 187

Categorization

• DEFINE: Pinpoints the stylistic mechanics of immediacy: present tense, redacting figurative language into literal elementality, subsuming history into a single ecological “meld.”
• XREF: The immanentist temporality and reduction of history to elemental immanence is a deployment of Jameson’s reading of postmodernism as the waning of historicity — the reader’s stated job of judging Kornbluh’s structural debt to Jameson should record this.