Theory’s failure to analyze immediacy stems from theorists producing immediacy themselves

Evidence

Fast food for thought, immediacy theory gorges on the very unmitigated emission demanded by the intensified circulation dispositive of too late capitalism. Because theory emerges in conditions not of its own making (the ruling ideas in every epoch are the ideas of the ruling class), it must deliberately introduce a break among its determinants. Within the manifest zeitgeist of too late capitalism, immediacy theory cleaves too close. If contemporary theory has not recognized or analyzed immediacy despite its undeniable hegemony in cultural production—if the summative descriptions and causal narrative this book provides have been necessary—this is finally because so many of the experts in cultural criticism across so many disciplines and traditions have spent the twenty-first century manufacturing immediacy themselves. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 250

Categorization

• XREF: Central to the reader’s task of judging Kornbluh’s debt to Jameson — the claim that theory mirrors its economic base rather than breaking from it is a classic Jamesonian move, here turned against theory itself.
• QUESTION: Is this self-inculpation of theory consistent with where the book ultimately stands defensively? Worth interrogating in the Antitheory chapter fight.