Loss of commonly held symbolic meaning generates a sense of immediacy

Evidence

In the scopic and fetishistic terrain, reals erupt, and the imaginary waxes while the symbolic wanes. It is this slackening that thinkers like Jodi Dean, Slavoj Žižek, Mark Andrejevic, Byung-Chul Han and others have warned of as a decline of the symbolic: a malfunctioning of socially sanctioned language, a sagging of meaning and norms. In general, symbolic consistency is a function of tacit buy-in, collective identification, and repetitive social practices. We learn to speak and write, and we observe institutions coordinating and responding to language as though it is held in common. To say that the symbolic is in decline or disarray is thus to mark the loss of this effective common, to find that the authority backing the use of signifiers and grounding their felicitous signification across differences in context and groups has dissipated. Words drift freely and, as a result, fail to secure an order of stable interpretation; to the extent that interpretations held in common can provide defenses against traumatic antagonisms, the loss of functional meaning harbingers intensified encounters with the unassimilable. Such heightened exposure to unspeakables tends to generate a sense of immediacy: lacking common language, there is only the funhouse mirror of “alternative facts” and ghastly visages, distortion and eruption. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 98

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the hinge of her whole thesis: causal chain from weakened shared language through symbolic decline to felt immediacy. Dense, load-bearing, sits at the core of the book — a candidate for the reader’s Jameson comparison.
• XREF: Presages her later ‘Antitheory’ chapter fight — symbolic decline is her core argument against immediacy’s erasure of forms; connects to her defense of mediation as politically necessary. — connects to: No fixed symbolic relationships hold constant meaning across individual cases; Positing an inner referent makes interiority ineffable and merely intended — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 555
• QUESTION: Does ‘symbolic decline’ here duplicate or diverge from Jameson’s ‘waning of affect/loss of historicity’ in Postmodernism? Critical for the reader’s structural-debt judgment.