Speculative realism, surface reading, and postcritique are all iterations of immediacy’s anti-mediation

Evidence

The framework of algorithms—discrete quanta and their near-infinite serialization—quickens the many trends in contemporary theory that comport themselves as anti-mediation “realism.” The movement of “speculative realism” has its origins in negating the distinction between the human and the nonhuman, unbinding the finitude that might divide philosophical apperception from worldly matter like rocks. Connectedness overcomes distance in the work of Levi Bryant and Graham Harman, among many others, where ontologies of vitality ensure continuity between humans and other citizens in “the democracy of objects.” “Vitality” and “vibrant matter” are the proper core of philosophical attention for Jane Bennett, who borrows from travelogues and literary sources to deem her method “realism.” Similarly, Karen Barad offers “agential realism” as a disputation of “representation”: philosophers too often focus on epistemology at the expense of ontology, but truly enlightened theory cuts through the chaff of representation to revel in the real entanglings of “human and nonhuman, material and discursive, natural and cultural factors.” These insistent copulatives encode the continuity of immediacy, and their regnant theological guide (whom we have already encountered, Bruno Latour) deems the epistemology adequate to this “and-ing” horizontalism and vitalist immanence “a more realistic realism.” “Realism” is also what Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus call their program for “minimal critical agency” in the 2009 manifesto for surface reading, one of several rejections of “critique” in favor of a metaphysics of proximity, flatness, and intimacy. The pursuant rapid-uptake anti-interpretative thrust of descriptivism, postcritique, weak theory, and amateur criticism, alongside computational analytics and cognitive criticism, share in this scientizing deflation of speculative interpretation, amounting to “the new critical modesty,” which Jeff Williams pinpointed in an oft-cited piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education by underscoring that “realism” as reading practice punctures arrogance, resigns political purchase, and demurs to the immediately given. In each of these domains—philosophy, theology, geology, literary and cultural study—“realism” presages an imperative to immersion, a renunciation of gaps and distance, a spiritualized negation of intercession, constellating as immediacy. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 298

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to her central Jamesonian thesis that immediacy tracks capital’s compression of circulation time; also names Bennett, Harman, Bryant, Barad, Best/Marcus as instances the reader can verify.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘realism’ family of anti-mediation theory movements as sharing an imperative to immersion, renunciation of gaps, and negation of intercession.