Strikes across publishing and culture build a base for renewed representation

Evidence

The style of immediacy precludes art, literature, video, and theory from convoking collectives and from catalyzing representation itself as a medium of collectivity. Mediations are composites of language, composites of images, compositions of meaning, composed ideas—that produce something more than immediate experience. It is this putting into medium and generating of the middle that actually responds to crisis, instead of perpetuating its intrinsic immersions and extremes. As this conclusion has highlighted, residual, emergent, and extra forms of cultural production activate rather than evacuate mediation. And still more promising than these fomentive imaginings in aesthetics are the brave stoppers in the circulation economy: labor acting militantly in unprecedented ways, from Amazon and Starbucks to educators in West Virginia and Chicago, to academics at Rutgers, Temple, Illinois, and even Columbia and Harvard, to culture workers in the Writers Guild, at the Guggenheim, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the New Museum, New Yorker, New York Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Duke University Press, and Verso Books. Their fights are all the harder because our dominant culture so negates mediations, but even so, these struggles build a base for renewed representations, for another cultural style. The omnicrisis will not autosettle. The old world is dying, but immediacy poorly midwives the new world’s struggle to be born. It is not too late for us to build things less worse. Mediation is not a luxury. Let’s get it on. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 378

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The compressed thesis that immediacy is ‘the style of too late capitalism’ and that mediation is ‘not a luxury’ — plus the claim that immediacy ‘poorly midwives’ the new world — is the densest precis of the whole argument, sitting at the book’s terse stopping point.
• ADDENDUM: For the ‘Grafting & Growth’ essay, the rereading of ‘production’ as ‘making things not worse’ resonates with the grafting-as-care metaphor — mediation as tending, not just representing.
• XREF: connects to: Independent publishing can revive a public intellectual discourse — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 292