Political theory’s classic mediation debates now seem settled against mediation

Evidence

Theory perpetually relativizes itself vis-à-vis practice and has historically wrestled with the problem of immediacy in questions about the imminence of revolution, the immanence of the general will, spontaneity, and party-planning—a swath of thinkers from Thomas Hobbes and Gustave Le Bon to Bruno Bauer and Karl Marx, from Sigmund Freud to Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin, from Angela Davis to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, have recurrently asked whether the mass or class is identical to itself and on a trajectory of becoming conscious of itself, what intellectuals do to facilitate or impede mass action, and whether political theory is inherently descriptive and belated, or possibly projective and electrifying. But now, in the present theoretical landscape, the questions seem decided and the match seems won; antipolitics renounces the mediation of organization, antitheory renounces the mediation of theory, and immediacy autonomizes. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 316