The immediacy aesthetic holds that extreme experience resists all mediated representation

Evidence

For all of the ways that I remain bound to pain, I can find almost nothing to say about its specificity. When I first tried to write about extreme physical pain, I discovered that I could only write in opaque poetic fragments. Pain seemed to belong more to poetry than to narrative prose. But even poetry, for all of its subtle rendering, fails to capture the pain of pain, its illegible core. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 270

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls Scarry’s claim that pain resists language — an antecedent Kornbluh implicitly invokes by way of Singh’s text.