Style is the trace of human work and constraint within given conditions

Evidence

As small as how a novelist uses verbs (Henry James famously likes to nominalize them) or as diffuse as the rituals that comprise a zeitgeist (pandemic-era mask refusal as mass enactment of our nonsociety), style marks the features of an event, era, text, or form as having been made. It thus indexes work: effort was expended to configure a what in this particular how. It could have been different. Style also indexes constraint: we make art, but not in conditions of our choosing. Exertions within limits, style finally connotes nothing other, critic Michael Dango argues, than “action”: neither the affective expectations of genre nor the structuring affordances of form, but an ongoing adaptation or accommodation, “how we continue to move around in the world … we cannot not act; we are always doing something.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 28

Categorization

• DEFINE: Definitional core: style as an index of made-ness (effort, constraint, could-have-been-different) — exactly the resources for her defense of mediation as the sphere of human freedom and politics.
• XREF: The ‘could have been different’ and ‘not in conditions of our choosing’ directly echo Marx’s 18th Brumaire and structuralist historiography — her debt to dialectical materialism is palpable here.
• SEED: The ‘style as action’ line from Dango gives you a bridge to formulate the defense of mediation: if immediacy is anti-style, it is anti-action — a political abdication in the face of the given.