Knausgaard’s global popularity signals a cultural value crisis resolved by abandoning mediation

Evidence

Unmediated presence has funded concepts of value in the Western metaphysical tradition since its origins, but Knausgaard’s ingenuity, and the global resonance of his voice (blockbuster sales and translation into thirty-five languages; an avant-garde cohort at work on the antifiction he enunciates) foretell something historically situated right now. Indeed, he names it: value crisis. Nothing more than what phenomenally exists can be produced; all that remains is fluid, effulgent, sui generis exchange. Fiction, narrative, impersonality, and collectivity withdraw; reality, voice, personality, and atomism ascend. To get at value, get rid of mediation. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 114

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘value crisis’ economic framing is where her debt to Jameson/core claim about compressed capital circulation lives.