Immediacy theory mirrors rather than analyzes the cultural trends of late capitalism

Evidence

This makeover of theory as concrete, fluid—in the mix—derives from well-meant reprove of impersonal abstraction, masculinist reserve, and rationalist systematicity. Moving in formation, however, the overcorrection has swerved, with immediacy virtuously and undialectically opposing a hypostasized sin of too much mediation. Immediacy theory thus clinches the trends in cultural production we have studied in arts and letters: the absorptive relationality of practice without medium, the enclosed voice of emanative antifiction, the delugent flow of apostrophic recursion, and the premium on planate exchange. In this concurrence, contemporary theory verifies rather than relativizes the mode of production. Immersive intensity transmits an instant message; it brooks no abstract mediations. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 249

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The key causal claim of the whole book crystallized: theory meant to relativize the mode of production instead verifies it by absorbing its anti-mediation form.
• XREF: connects to: Technology’s cultural effects are mediated by late capitalism not deterministically — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 410; In late capitalism cultural theory displaces tactical political questions; Radically open, recomposable realities in culture mirror late capitalism’s care-destroying impermanence — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 759