Reality hunger traces from twentieth-century war to twenty-first-century social media

Evidence

Philosophers have, for this reason, identified recent history with a “passion for the real” or a “reality hunger”—a pursuit of extremity, violence, and suffering as some antidote to abundant artifice—questing for intensity behind all the bullshit, for irrefutable stuff that resists representation. While such passions animated the twentieth century’s projects of world war, they become simultaneously totalized and banalized by the twenty-first century’s opening of near-universal access to immersive technologies virtuosically hiding their own mediations: on Instagram, everyone can be General Patton. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 96

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to judging her debt to Jameson’s ‘postmodernism as cultural logic of late capitalism’; also echoes Foster’s ‘passion for the real’ and Shields’ ‘reality hunger’ texts the reader may know.