Working through psychic and social stuckness requires more mediation, not less

Evidence

A critical correlation of the prevalence of such aesthetics to the immediacy economy also tacitly asks for something else from art and mass media cultural forms, and poses a demand different from the passion for the real: a formalized solicitation of the symbolic. Though a genuine psychic emergency and a genuine stuckness underlie the imprisonment in the imaginary and hence the enjoyment of immediacy as style, the genuine response to such a situation must be more rather than less mediation—more arts and ideas, more ambiguity and adumbration. No matter how trendy or expedient, opting to drown in the extremity of bad affects without the punctuating relation to an other, to propagate immersiveness against contradiction, and to circulate ever more egoic image can do little but hinder working through. New constructions, new signifiers, new bases for connection, new orders of sociality can emerge only from mediation, not immediacy. Even our TV could be giving us more. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 106

Categorization

• XREF: This is the crux of her defense of mediation — the payoff to the reader’s central inquiry. Echoes Adorno’s insistence on negation and the ‘negation of the negation’ as the antidote to immediacy and the culture industry.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that real mediation — union, party, university, clinic, critical theory — is the only cure for the imaginary-imprisoned immediacy economy condenses her whole political defense into one passage.