The stream retroacts the images it carries, shaping content into circulation-forward form

Evidence

Throughout this book, we have studied immediacy as fundamentally negating mediation: cutting out the middleman for instant relay of emanative intensity in continuous flow. Fluidifying medium takes different forms when different media are in question; the circulation-forward economy of algorithmic discretization begets in culture a waning symbolic and heightened imaginary, which materializes in the expanded field of writing as a repudiation of fictionality and genre, purifying charismatic presence, affective extremity, and unfiltered authenticity. In the field of moving images, immediacy eddies “the stream” of increasingly homogenous customized content in a continuous loop of deformatted genre-fluid absorption, propelled by you-are-here experientialism, intimate confessionalism, and periodic surges. The stream is circulation, the infrastructure and modality for the exchange of moving images, and in the era of its dominance, the stream retroacts the images themselves. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 194

Categorization

• XREF: Core of her Jameson debt: the stream as infrastructure retroacting content echoes Jameson’s postmodernism-as-cultural-logic-of-late-capitalism thesis.
• DEFINE: Defines ‘the stream’ itself as the circulation-forward aesthetic infrastructure at the heart of immediacy in moving images.