Style is a historically-graspable mark of deliberate making, not mere decoration
Evidence
From the Latin for pencil or pillar, “style” denotes marks, the lineating that brings a thing into being. While colloquialisms oppose style to substance, it is tricky to actually disentangle the two, since style simultaneously augurs “semblances, referring to how things generally seem, look, or appear” and vests essences, what is definitional for such “things.” At once appearance and essence, style also straddles purpose and purposelessness: even though in fashion the de rigueur adjective for style is “effortless,” style often precisely indicates deliberateness, exertion, and target beyond the haphazard. And, as a classification of a certain place, person, period, or proclivity, style provides a heuristic for history; a style category grasps specificity stamped in time. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 27
Categorization
Category: Definitional Content
- DEFINE: This is Kornbluh’s working definition of ‘style’ as a serious theoretical category — the counterweight she sets up so that ‘immediacy as anti-style’ has something to rub against.
- XREF: Her ‘style as work/made-ness’ defense of mediation will be the core of the argument you’re building — grounds her ‘mediation is politically necessary’ thesis.
Related
- Style denotes marks that bring things into being, fusing appearance with essence (similarity 0.92)
- Style is the trace of human work and constraint within given conditions (similarity 0.87)
- Immediacy style resists the very critical frames that would interpret it (similarity 0.85)
- Immediacy is a discrete style that paradoxically presents itself as anti-style (similarity 0.83)
- Style promises to reconcile individual expression with a shared universal idiom. (similarity 0.80)
- A mediated style prioritizes relay, discontinuity, and withheld payoff over immediacy. (similarity 0.79)
- Aesthetics of immediacy cannot build the political will needed for change (similarity 0.79)
- Style is the constrained field of choices available to makers. (similarity 0.79)
- Immediacy reduces discourse to self-evident presence while mediation demands deliberate construction (similarity 0.78)