Immediacy theory favors lists and inventories over critique because they emulate algorithms.

Evidence

Numerous innovations and “turns” in the twenty-first century embrace objects on their own terrain, enjoining theorists to attachments and entanglements that close distance. As Harcourt so vividly avers, these intimacies require a rejection of the definitional trajectory from German idealism to materialist dialectics to the Frankfurt school and cultural studies, in which immediacy has always stood for an error to be corrected or fantasy to be traversed. Instead of critique and theoretical interpretation, immediacy theory propounds fluid interaction, the theorist imbibing the object, the object immersing the theorist. Abjuring abstractions, this empiricism favors inventories, iteration against mediation. As the ensuing lists discretize experience archipelagoes and push asymptotically toward infinite dispersals, they redirect theory as the emulation of algorithms. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 296

Categorization

• XREF: This directly builds on Jameson’s analysis of late capitalism and postmodernism’s collapse of critical distance, and connects to the reader’s plan to judge Kornbluh’s structural debt to Jameson.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that discrete lists and inventories ‘redirect theory as the emulation of algorithms’ reframes the whole antitheory wave as mimesis of computational logic — a dense, paradigm-shifting observation.