The information economy’s compression determines an anti-mediation aesthetic ethos.
Evidence
The discretizing short-circuiting for the information economy determines the anti-mediation ethos of contemporary aesthetic production. Nothing makes this more obvious than the quintessential format of our time, the emoji. Exchanged more than 6 billion times per day in text messages and on social media, emoji replace words with tiny pictures, as generic as a smile or as specific as two Rockettes dancing in formation, available in a range of skin colors. Emojis instantaneously flash an affirmation (heart ), opinion (thumbs up ), an affective state (pouty face ), an evaluative judgment (bananas ). Efficient treasure, they function as written communication for the pre-literate (young children love them) as well as across language barriers (emoji speak Japanese and English and Arabic). Not indexical but iconic, they accelerate the dynamic of the instant messaging that is their milieu, generating the illusion of dragless expression. In their anti-semanticism, emojis oppose symbolic delegation, auto-constructing as pure immanence and aesthetically crystallizing the political economy of instantaneity and flow. The world is flat, and so is representation. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 73
Categorization
- DEFINE: Establishes the emoji as paradigmatic exemplar of the immediacy style — non-indexical iconicity, anti-semanticism, pure immanence.
- XREF: The ‘world is flat, so is representation’ formula is a compressed, neo-Jamesonian claim about postmodern spatialization flattened onto culture — a core site for judging her structural debt to Jameson.
- SEED: The emoji as a diagnostic artifact for naming immediacy in real works: a concrete test case for identifying anti-mediation aesthetics in contemporary text.
- CANDY: Emoji exchanged 6 billion times a day; they speak Japanese, English, and Arabic — a light cocktail-party fact.