Immediacy is a symptom that both avoids and announces the crises it responds to.

Evidence

However, a core argument of this book is that immediatism is a reaction to crisis that fails the bar of strategy, a reflex that is ultimately crisis-continuous. A working out of species death that is also a covering over, immediacy presses to be interpreted as a symptom, an unavowable but irrepressible truth routed through forms of expression or stylization that at once avoid and announce it. In this ambivalent structure, immediacy style alludes to a desire for mediation while also ideologically enjoining us to enjoy our devastation. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 38

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines immediacy style precisely: a symptomatic form that simultaneously avoids and announces mediation, structurally alluding to a desire for mediation while ideologically denying it.
• DEEPTHINKING: The pharmakon structure — immediacy as remedy and poison in one, a working-out that is also a covering-over — is the book’s most portable single concept.
• XREF: The pharmakon formulation echoes Derrida’s use of the term, and the symptom-reading method is squarely the Jamesonian task of interpretation she elsewhere aligns with.