Theory’s immediacy turns unwittingly mirror corporate software epistemes

Evidence

This unwitting corroboration of the hegemonic episteme unifies a wave of turns in theory and method that might at first appear unrelated. The flat metaphysics of actor–network theory (ANT), object-oriented ontology, thing theory, posthumanism, and romantic ecological fusionism all directly aim to oust analyses of class relations with maps of distributed agency and to enmesh the knowing subject in hypercomplexity. The affective turn in literary study, anthropology, and political psychology de-emphasizes the subject (including the subject of interpretation and the subject of the unconscious), emphasizing autonomic response, bodily force, and preand trans-individuality, along with felt experience, irrational choice, and theaters of cruelty as all more real and intense than the administered world. Varieties of postcritique—in anthropology and theology, in art history and literature—enjoin critics to resign critical distance and symptomatic interpretation in favor of more phenomenological and “amateur” concerns such as “surface reading” and identificatory “attachment.” Posing itself as theory’s other, the computational humanities—including data analytics, text mining, corpus mapping—use quantitative processing to join immediatist theory’s dethroning of interpretative, qualitative inquiry: numbers are better than words. To each of these turns belong their own celebrities, book series, special issues, and symposia, and across them as well as beyond them, theory has unseated distance, decolonized reason, and subverted abstraction to arrive at realist entanglement with vibrant objects and their pulsating kinships. Each of these developments weld the theoretical to the technological by taking up, as Alexander Galloway incisively diagnoses, the selfsame epistemes of the software that powers Google, Monsanto, Equifax, and other super-corporations. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 297

Categorization

• XREF: The dialectic of these readings will recur as the midwife presses forward into a third stage; also bears on the autopsy claim that decline narratives are symptoms of the writing revolution.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the reader’s challenge that immediacy is a style with an economic cause; Kornbluh’s Galloway citation gives the specific mechanism — immediatist theory emulates corporate algorithmic epistemes.
• DEFINE: Inventories the immediacy school: ANT, object-oriented ontology, thing theory, posthumanism, romantic ecological fusionism, the affective turn, postcritique, and computational humanities.
• QUESTION: Is the claim about unwitting corroboration actually fair to ANT and object-oriented ontology, whose political intent is anti-corporate? Worth interrogating in the Antitheory-chapter fight.
• SEED: The observation that ‘theory has unseated distance, decolonized reason, and subverted abstraction’ — all freedom-vocabulary applied to immanence — is an essay angle on rhetorical inversion.