Immediacy rules out both continuity and discontinuity as modes of knowing

Evidence

Theory negating mediation performs immediacy rather than interpreting it. Interpretation mediates by encountering phenomena and putting them into medium, like an articulated category that connects them to other phenomena or a historical narrative that helps explain how they came to appear. Interpretation of a dialectical sort pays attention to contradictions and negations, including the openings for thought to negate the circumstances of its own emergence, as well as the contradictory relations dissembled by that which solely appears. Dialectics attune to what is not immediate—to what a perceiving self doesn’t first see about itself, to what is contingent, to what is on the move, to what does not dawn. Immediacy style’s reification of what merely appears, by contrast, stamps out contradiction. What you see is what you get. However much this self-identical manifestiveness feels warranted in these times, its voiding of contradiction eliminates the gap by which theory distinguishes between the actual and the possible. Without this gap, there can be no projects, no synthesis. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 326 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

The paradox of immediacy is a cultural style that imagines itself unstyled. As such, it nixes many regular frames for interpretation. In the habitual “substance versus style” contrast, for example, ordinary information conveyance detaches from extraordinary bedazzling: “style is understood as emphasis (expressive, affective, or aesthetic) added to the information conveyed. Language expresses and style stresses.” In immediacy, though, the express/stress difference falls away; to express is to stress. Similarly, if style often pins historical context, immediacy’s temporality of instantaneity resists tether. Where stylization palpates the seams of its own appearance, immediacy’s metaphysics of presence chafes against representation. And wherever art slants, immediacy pools, in medium dissolve and ad-lib unformedness. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 30 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

The world is human. We can see the very particular position of consciousness: being is everywhere, opposite me, around me; it weighs down on me, it besieges me, and I am perpetually referred from being to being; that table which is there is being and nothing more; that rock, that tree, that landscape—being and nothing else. I want to grasp this being and I no longer find anything but myself. This is because knowledge, intermediate between being and non-being, refers me to absolute being if I want to make knowledge subjective and refers me to myself when I think to grasp the absolute. The very meaning of knowledge is what it is not and is not what it is; for in order to know being such as it is, it would be necessary to be that being. But there is this “such as it is” only because I am not the being which I know; and if I should become it, then the “such as it is” would vanish and could no longer even be thought. We are not dealing here either with scepticism—which supposes precisely that the such as it is belongs to being—nor with relativism. Knowledge puts us in the presence of the absolute, and there is a truth of knowledge. But this truth, although releasing to us nothing more and nothing less than the absolute, remains strictly human. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 653 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Dialectics attend to what is not immediately visible, whereas immediacy erases contradiction — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 326; Immediacy style resists the very critical frames that would interpret it — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 30; Immediacy style achieves flat ontology by collapsing the novel’s immanence-empirical dissonance — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 113 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Dialectics attend to what is not immediately visible, whereas immediacy erases contradiction #corroborates (0.85) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 326
• Immediacy style resists the very critical frames that would interpret it #exemplifies (0.80) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 30
• Knowledge of being presupposes the knower’s separation from the being known #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 653
• Immediacy style achieves flat ontology by collapsing the novel’s immanence-empirical dissonance #exemplifies (0.75) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 113