Social crisis makes mediation itself appear culpable for misery

Evidence

The more dehumanizing our world becomes, the more gross the failures of human society, the more splintered the efforts at collective transformation—the more tightly immediacy cinches. The material irrefutability of catastrophic ecocide, the historical outmodedness of this irrational and immiserating capitalism, the epidemic of depression and anxiety, declining life expectancy, domestic abuse, mass violence, mass incarceration, and the group-differentiated vulnerability to all these terrors (to slightly bend Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism)—these deformities tar existing sociability, begetting atomistic absorption and evanescent egress as its only alternatives. When the mediations of society miscarry so systematically, it begins to look as if mediation itself is to blame. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 35

Categorization

• XREF: Explains the mechanism by which crisis conditions produce immediacy-as-ideology, connecting to her economic thesis from earlier chapters and to theorist Fredric Jameson’s historicism.