Immediacy personalism repudiates the collective and generalizing work that critique requires

Evidence

Successional self-itemization configures praxis as a “decentering” in which “universality is replaced by particularity: what is true now turns on personal self-interests” and as a retreat “from institutions to the personal” because “organizations are obstacles to organizing ourselves … we need to turn inward to transform the self.” First-person present as idiom solves the democratic paradox of representing others, electing itself as more politically and aesthetically sound than theories or tactics scaffolded by collective subjectivity or shared signifiers. Of course, it’s significant to see a white man voluntarily decenter himself, and gratifying to clock the practical effects of venerable theories that have audited the malfeasance of institutions and the harm of universals. Yet, in emptying out the convocative and generalizing dimensions of critique and then filling that void with the genre-bending fulminations of real talk, immediacy pronounces its univocity. Unrepresentative personalism becomes epistemic silo and political prophylactic, explicitly repudiating the middle ground between one experience and another. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 245

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s Antitheory chapter fight — her defense of mediation as politically necessary rests on this repudiation of collective synthesis. — connects to: Open political discussion blurred the line between personal morality and structural critique — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1246