Immediacy is the subjective corollary of accelerated capital circulation

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. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 82

Categorization

• DEFINE: The chapter’s key thesis sentence: circulation-intensification maps onto an inflation of the imaginary and a foreclosure of the symbolic.
• XREF: The ‘inflation of the imaginary’ under circulation is essentially her Lacanian re-reading of Jameson’s ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ — central to judging her structural debt. — connects to: Psychological destiny mirrors and instantiates the exchange principle of capital; Flexible capital’s ephemerality atomizes workers and enables individualism — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1049; Attention’s present-bound nature contradicts the notion of capital accumulation — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 157 (+2 more)