Mediation means recommitting to symbolic, organizational, and synthesizing forms against immediacy.

Evidence

We creative types can generate dialectical images and poems and novels and art that precipitate new passages from the mesmeric imaginary to the sticky symbolic. … We activists working to collectively confront the unevenly distributed catastrophe of our extinction thanks to capitalogenic climate crisis can challenge the immediatist tendencies of enisled localism and spontaneous anarchism, revalorizing the mediating function of forms like the party, the union, the state. We theorists especially owe our colleagues the engagement in real disagreement about the limits of so many paradigms of concretude, expressivism, and nihilism, carrying out our work instead as speculative synthesis and capacitating abstraction. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 46

Categorization

• XREF: This concretizes her positive program for mediation — the ‘we’ of collectivity versus the ‘I’ of autofiction — fitting with her broader materialist-style defense of mediation over immediacy. — connects to: The problem of mediation links psychological, social, and economic levels — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 20
• CANDY: ‘get in, loser’ and the self-aware acknowledgment that a theory book is a tiny stop against the tide make for a quotable close.