Anna Kornbluh — Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism

404 published claims from this book.

• A culture stripped of surrealism renders banality as its cosmology
• A demolished landmark can hover over intimate scenes to mark historical rupture
• A film sequence can fuse gem interiority into human colonoscopy footage.
• A mediated style prioritizes relay, discontinuity, and withheld payoff over immediacy.
• A normative ‘should’ breaks with immediacy’s present toward collective flourishing
• A recurring physical landmark can anchor a novel’s historical longue durée
• A structured collectivity can transcend individual finitude without mystical infinity
• Aboutness reduces art to its topical content, erasing its mediacy
• Abramović’s The Artist Is Present makes presence itself the artwork
• Abstract artistic mediation predates language, writing, and ritual burial.
• Abundant content obscures the industrial concentration that actually produces it
• Adorno defines thinking as the refusal to bow to the immediately given
• Adult cartoons domesticate the blurring of cinema and animation caused by digital fabrication
• Adult cartoons flourish because cinema has become indistinguishable from animation
• Aesthetic judgment is the processing of social relations
• Aesthetics of immediacy cannot build the political will needed for change
• Affirmation culture degrades recognitive politics into feel-seen consumerism.
• Algorithmic ad revenue profits from outrage and affirmation equally.
• Algorithmic personalization erodes the shared public space that allows surprise
• Algorithmic personalization fragments viewing into solipsistic echo chambers that block encounter with the other
• Algorithms fabricate uniformity by compositing varied content into data categories
• Amassing negations of genre undoes form and mediation
• Ambient TV minimizes plot and event to enable near-passive consumption
• Ambient TV’s coinage moved from scholarship to criticism to industry use
• Ambient TV’s defining aesthetic is its dispensability of attention
• An artist’s public persona can be used to domesticate genuinely opaque artworks
• An isolation epidemic predated the COVID-19 pandemic by years.
• Antidisciplinary work occupies spaces outside all existing disciplines
• Antifiction’s rejection of representation also rejects the collective agency fiction enables
• Antitheory abandons abstraction, distance, generalization, and futurity
• Anxiety and depression are immersive states eroding relation to others
• Architectural space itself is reconfigured into temporary circulation under immediacy
• Art that claims identity with reality doubly obscures mediation
• Art trends unite in a compulsion to have done with mediation
• Art’s essential function is to thwart immediacy by defamiliarizing reality.
• Artworld presence promises unmediated communication and authentic human encounter.
• Auto-play and binge release are engineered erasures of viewing choice and tempo
• Autofiction authors articulate a physical revulsion toward invented narrative
• Autofiction functions as the prestige version of reality TV
• Autofiction is defined by identity of author and protagonist plus present-tense uneventfulness
• Autofiction is defined by refusing character, plot, and narrative devices
• Autofiction moved from literary play toward earnest claims on the real.
• Autofiction presents selfhood as presence that substantifies the real.
• Autofiction serves as the self-theorizing vanguard of first-person literary circulation.
• Autofiction’s ‘auto’ fixation stems from the industrial restructuring of cultural labor
• Autofiction’s antifictional fervor is rationalized by a circulation-forward economic phase
• Autofiction’s celebrated practitioners actively reject character, form, and fictionality itself
• Autofiction’s term evolved from 1970s play into earnest zeal for the real
• Autotheory as discourse cannot sustain argument because experience is undisputable.
• Autotheory claims the personal against poststructuralism’s reduction of self to textuality
• Autotheory converts theoretical claims into bodily sensation at the expense of mediation
• Autotheory defines itself by negating theory’s mediating abstractions.
• Autotheory emerged around 2003 and was popularized by Preciado in 2008
• Autotheory erases prior women-of-color practices it claims to invent
• Autotheory posits lived experience as theory’s proper basis.
• Autotheory replaces discursive construction with phenomenological documentation
• Autotheory stems from gigified academic labor and loss of peer audiences
• Autotheory’s anti-symbolic flesh performs a capture in the imaginary matching macroeconomic privatization.
• Autotheory’s echolalic circularity elevates voice’s timbre over its meaning
• Autotheory’s form preempts criticism through vulnerable persona rather than argument
• Autotheory’s genre-dissolving style mirrors precarious academic labor generalism
• Autotheory’s rise mirrors the precarity and gigification of academic labor
• Autotheory’s stated distrust of words and genres constitutes a rejection of linguistic mediation.
• Autotheory’s trait is argumentless intensity that insulates itself from criticism
• Badiou links the passion for immediacy to twentieth-century violence
• Bernard Harcourt’s critique-of-critique claims feminist and Black epistemology as its own lineage.
• Blockbusters are defined by economic function more than aesthetics
• Blockbusters are defined by economic studio function and extreme visual style
• Burtynsky’s art mediates the material substrate beneath circulation’s instantaneity.
• Burtynsky’s landscapes depict pattern and extraction logic, not the sublime.
• Burtynsky’s landscapes mediate supply chains selfies render invisible
• Burtynsky’s vast manufactured-landscape panoramas depict the slow-violence infrastructure that immediacy culture hides.
• Calls to compile one’s infinite traces feel redemptive before they are understood
• Cancel-culture gotcha logic is a flat, horizontal malice rather than radical praxis.
• Capital’s self-expansion is limitless because valorization occurs only in ceaseless movement
• Capitalism’s endemic crises are so predictable they are commodified as reinsurance
• Capitalist circulation velocity drives cultural immediacy as an aesthetic style
• Capitalist growth has been in secular decline since the 1970s
• Capitalist speed and flow premiums directly inscribe themselves into literary style.
• Circulation pressures push academic theory to erase its medium’s distinctness
• Circulation-friendly art like installation is celebrated as democratic and philosophically honest.
• Circulation-phase capitalism produces riots rather than strikes as its signature struggle
• Circulation-phase capitalism provokes riots and blockades rather than strikes.
• Colonoscopy cinematography consolidates immediacy as an intensified video style
• Communization theory collapses both past and future distance into a presentist claim
• Communization theory Endnotes rejects fixed theory for phenomenology of revolt.
• Compressed capital circulation conditions immediacy as a culture that eliminates mediation
• Compressed capital circulation time produces cultural impatience with mediation
• Compressed capitalist circulation makes culture value disintermediation as a style.
• Computational convergence affects every stage and type of media.
• Computerization demonstrably failed to lift productivity statistics for decades.
• Constructive reparations for climate harm follow from acknowledging its layered distributive causes
• Contemporary aesthetics is slackening representation and dissolving medium
• Contemporary Black novelists practice mediated form against the immediacy dominant
• Contemporary critical theory now reproduces rather than analyzes immediacy’s market logic
• Contemporary critical-theory praxis renewal is itself an immediacy phenomenon.
• Contemporary cultural aesthetics are slackening mediation and representation in favor of presence
• Contemporary entertainment produces enthrallment in abjection rather than escapist delusion.
• Contemporary fiction evicts third-person narration through privatized perspective
• Contemporary fiction has been memoirized into first-person presentism
• Contemporary fiction shifts from representing characters toward presencing raw voice and sensation
• Contemporary literary fiction transits immediacy through constricted narratorship and looping present-tense temporality
• Contemporary novels fabricate form to emulate social media idioms
• Contemporary novels increasingly mimic social media formats in their very form
• Contemporary political struggle targets flow because circulation underpins the current order
• Contemporary psychic misery is structural, not a narcissism epidemic
• Contemporary realism shifts from personalized content to personalized narrative frame
• Contemporary theory has adopted the immediacy style it should critique
• Contemporary theory has resolved the old mediation question decisively toward immediacy
• Contemporary theory’s nihilisms are algorithmic in structure, not merely philosophical
• Contemporary theory’s nihilisms derive from algorithmic flatness and data accumulation.
• Contradiction’s erasure removes the gap between actual and possible needed for projects
• Corporate service sectors have displaced literature as the site of radical narrative innovation
• Corporations have displaced literary fiction as the cultural avant-garde
• Creative writing degrees grew sixfold from the late 1980s to 2013
• Cringe comedy extends Linda Williams’s body genres to banality rather than explicitness.
• Cringe TV extends body genres by transmitting discomfort through banality rather than explicitness
• Critical empiricism treats artworks as irreducible phenomena rather than effects of deeper causes
• Critical theory itself has been captured by immediacy
• Critical theory must intentionally break from its own immediate conditions to be critical
• Cultural forms can both cement existing relations and reveal they are fabricated.
• Cultural theorists themselves have succumbed to the immediacy style
• Cultural valuation of immediacy derives from economic premium on circulation
• Cusk’s Outline trilogy advances anti-fiction by erasing character and plot
• Data circulation requires compressing semantically rich behavior into discrete tags.
• Data’s self-evidence requires no interpretation, mirroring theory’s disavowal of argument.
• Decline of shared symbolic meaning heightens exposure to unassimilable excess and generates immediacy
• Dialectical analysis sees a thing through awareness of what it is not
• Dialectics attend to what is not immediately visible, whereas immediacy erases contradiction
• Diffuse distributed power models undermine the possibility of political action
• Digital computing boosted circulation and exchange, not productive output.
• Digital image society erases privacy by mandating self-visibility
• Digital immediacy emerged from an obfuscated mediation, not a resolved crisis
• Digital immediacy obscures the material extraction beneath it
• Digital miniaturization strips apparatus and enables continuous action.
• Digital networking chiefly accelerated circulation, not productivity
• Digital platforms erase the institutional walls separating art from commerce.
• Digital-image society has nearly eliminated legal and metaphysical privacy
• Direct-address cinema closes the narratorial gap that autofiction merely narrows.
• Direct-to-camera address in Fleabag merges narrator and character, abolishing retrospection
• Each era’s capitalist dynamics generate a corresponding novelistic form
• Each major novelistic form answers to a specific phase of capitalist development.
• Ecocide has already occurred and its effects are now irreversible.
• Ecological catastrophe justifies immediacy’s claim that proactive agency is exhausted
• Economic arrangements of image circulation industrially produce narcissistic structure.
• Economic precarity drives a style that erases literature’s critical distance
• Effective political action depends on mediation, not immediate style.
• Emojis crystallize the profit-driven aesthetic of flow and anti-mediation.
• Equating separate institutions reduces political critique to indistinction and nihilism.
• Even literary critics and theorists authored memoirs, domesticating theory within direct testimony.
• Expanding the Anthropocene to include decarbonization erases the term’s causal distinctiveness
• Extreme physical closeness defines immediacy as a visual style.
• Extreme visual aesthetics respond to heightened media competition
• Facebook users campaigned to replace third-person status with first-person format
• Falling rates of profit follow from capital’s diminishing reliance on labor
• Fast web surfing is economically engineered to maximize data harvesting
• Fiction can derealize concrete settings into figures of broad social determination.
• Fiction can derealize concrete settings into figures of long historical sociality
• Fiction writers can develop genuine nausea and crisis over the artificiality of made-up narrative
• Fiction’s absorption of memoir and self-branding erases fictionality
• Film anchors in pastness while video inhabits a continuous present
• First-person narration dropped sharply after the early eighteenth century
• First-person presentism elevates personal experience above the mediating collectivity that real praxis needs
• Flat condemnation of all institutions aggrandizes the critic and abandons critiquing itself
• Flat-ontology theory mimes and rationalizes the precaritization of academic labor
• For post-Kantian idealism, immediacy is an anti-philosophical defense foreclosing critical movement.
• Formalist analysis of social forms reveals strategic sites for action
• Fox News and QAnon exemplify symbolic decline through paranoid rejection of common facts
• Freshman composition pedagogy’s voice-centered ethos produced the first-personalism of MFA workshops.
• Freud framed narcissism as normal libidinal imbalance that only culture makes abnormal
• Genre dissolution produces disorientation rather than political critique
• Genre-blurring praised as radical actually leaves audiences disoriented without expectations
• Global literacy movements sustained the need for accessible books
• Gramsci frames critical consciousness as needing a patient inventory of one’s historical traces
• Harcourt’s praxis rejects representation and universality for individual presence.
• Hegel showed that epistemological immediacy is an illusory and insufficient starting point for thought.
• High-frame-rate film technology strives for immersive realism yet failed commercially.
• Immanent, immersive theory aesthetics abandon critique and thereby affirm capitalism’s permanence
• Immediacy across culture is overdetermined by economic conditions, not endogenous to theory
• Immediacy aesthetic rests on unattainable imagined reals that disavow subjectivity
• Immediacy aestheticizes capital’s premiums on speed, flow, and self-actualization
• Immediacy aesthetics mirror the immersive pathologies of late-capitalist suffering
• Immediacy as cultural style derives from space-time compression in capitalism.
• Immediacy cinema transforms spectators into accomplices through adrenaline-torrent immersion
• Immediacy consummates video’s postmodern total-flow into a pure present with no future
• Immediacy flattens figuration and history into suffocating present-tense elemental immanence.
• Immediacy forms the cultural style of the unresolved accumulation crisis.
• Immediacy ideology now commands academic critical theory to abandon representation.
• Immediacy is a discrete style that paradoxically presents itself as anti-style
• Immediacy is a symptom that both avoids and announces the crises it responds to.
• Immediacy is caused by capital circulation pressures, not by media’s inner nature.
• Immediacy is the subjective corollary of accelerated capital circulation
• Immediacy negates mediation, blur, and depth where postmodernism embraced them.
• Immediacy offers a pharmakon-like escape from crisis that forecloses working through.
• Immediacy personalism repudiates the collective and generalizing work that critique requires
• Immediacy pressures prose fiction toward brevity, present tense, and associative fragments
• Immediacy prioritizes circulation while mediation produces relations and difference
• Immediacy pushes toward embodied realism despite digital simulation possibilities
• Immediacy reduces discourse to self-evident presence while mediation demands deliberate construction
• Immediacy rules out both continuity and discontinuity as modes of knowing
• Immediacy style achieves flat ontology by collapsing the novel’s immanence-empirical dissonance
• Immediacy style deliberately subordinates narrative to transitive experience.
• Immediacy style reduces lived experience to dyadic binary data capture
• Immediacy style resists the very critical frames that would interpret it
• Immediacy supervenes on postmodernism’s capitalist dynamics compounded by millennium economics
• Immediacy theory compounds academic deskilling caused by plutocratic destruction of education
• Immediacy theory favors lists and inventories over critique because they emulate algorithms.
• Immediacy theory mirrors rather than analyzes the cultural trends of late capitalism
• Immediacy theory replaces collective critique and shared slogans with atomized individual action
• Immediacy’s confessional style is an economic product, not authentic selfhood.
• Immediacy’s experiential correlate is presence bleed and time without time.
• Immediacy’s fluid dissolution provokes sadistic spectacle as its aesthetic excess
• Immediacy’s insistence on pure presence structurally parallels sadism’s flattening of others
• Immediacy’s languor is punctured by abjection to produce immersive mood
• Immediacy’s pragmatic urgency is fused to the disintermediation that drives ecocide
• Immediacy’s prose makes flow the only discernible structural unit
• Immediacy’s speed is cognitive and affective, not merely technological
• Immediacy’s temporality is a present stripped of any future.
• Information capitalism requires semantic compression of behaviors into countable data tags.
• Institutional conditions in education and publishing explain the personalist immediacy style
• Internet-era communicative speed is cognitive and affective, not merely technological
• Jenny Offill’s Weather formalizes immediacy as twitter-feed prose in present tense
• Kabyle associations are contextual traces, not symbolic codes
• Knausgaard’s global popularity signals a cultural value crisis resolved by abandoning mediation
• Labor-compression strategies of production were already compounding the very declines they aimed to fix
• Lacan reframed narcissism as a product of mirror and image technologies
• Lacan’s imaginary-symbolic-real triad is a science of mediation
• Left critics reject Afro-pessimism’s ontological framing as anti-solidarity and anti-utopian
• Loss of commonly held symbolic meaning generates a sense of immediacy
• Loss of private opacity makes people forget mediating material infrastructures
• Major novelists were pressured by publishers to write memoirs, the more abject the better.
• Making artifacts is the fundamental archetype underlying all lyric expression
• Malaise novels offer an experience in lieu of ideas or an about
• Marxian mediation is material, not merely conceptual or ideal
• Material forces distinguish autotheory from prior feminist and queer life-writing traditions
• Mediatic art exposes how immediacy’s expressive styles serve capital circulation
• Mediation generates collectivity which immediacy’s style forecloses.
• Mediation is production for its own sake rather than circulation.
• Mediation means recommitting to symbolic, organizational, and synthesizing forms against immediacy.
• Mediation operates as a thirdness beyond body and image
• Mediation’s alternatives are scale, impersonality, and hold
• Mediation’s residual forms still create impersonality and objectivity against privatizing subjectivism.
• Medium-distance, group-focused framing blocks empathetic identification.
• Memoir’s dominance expresses immediacy’s antifictional turn toward owned autobiographical voice as property
• MFA aspirants seek therapeutic self-permission rather than literary fame
• MFA enrollments surge because therapy is costlier and less credentialing than a degree
• MFA hopefuls seek therapeutic self-permission rather than fame or fortune.
• Modern art renounces mediation in favor of directness and literalism.
• Naming immediacy as a totalizing category makes mediatory alternatives visible
• Narcissism is an attachment to a technologically produced ego image.
• Narcissism is structurally an imbalance in allocating scarce libido
• Narcissism makes maternal and lesbian lovers equivalent in structure.
• Narcissism-epidemic discourse ignores the economic causes of self-engrossment
• Narcissism’s demand for repeated recognition flattens the other into sameness.
• Negation-by-accumulation lets writing undo its own form yet still congeal
• Neoliberal welfare collapse makes self-image production the individual’s job
• Neoliberalism redefined human being itself as human capital.
• Netflix transformed video distribution by gradually disintermediating physical rental
• Netscape’s interface-first browsing marked the death of postmodernism in 1995.
• Networked portable video dissolved fixed times and places of moving-image viewing
• Networked video now saturates every interstitial moment of daily life
• Online platforms collapse the institutional framing that once distinguished cultural forms from capital flows.
• Orange Is the New Black broke form boundaries as a landmark genre melt.
• Personal essays serve as self-authorizing résumé gateways for marginalized writers
• Platform gig economy bypasses firms to make laborers self-branding contractors.
• Platform gig labor bypasses the mediating firm just as immediacy fiction bypasses mediating form.
• Political theory’s classic mediation debates now seem settled against mediation
• Post-2008 literary realism claims to index capitalism directly
• Post-prestige spectacle renders plot obsolete in favor of experienced excess
• Postmodern irony gave way to antifiction realism as the new literary orthodoxy.
• Present tense forecloses judgment by compressing event and narration into the here-now
• Present tense narration collapses event and telling into an immediate here-now
• Prestige TV was a transitional business-era artifact, not a permanent golden age
• Production contraction triggers a compensatory expansion of circulation
• Project-based theory exhorts collective responsibility instead of individual intensities
• Project-based theory proposes collective agency while entanglement theory pretends preferences suffice
• Proponents frame social media memoir as collapsing writer-reader distance into feminist immediacy
• Prose poems thin the medium toward unmediated flow, undoing genre
• Psychoanalysis holds that a direct unmediated real is an impossibility
• Psychoanalysis, unions, parties, and universities all function as mediating forums.
• Public shaming is usually horizontal status rivalry, not bottom-up resistance.
• Publishers pressured even literary theorists to write personal memoirs
• Radical hopelessness can open political horizons by refusing growth logics
• Realist narration can analyze global totality through defamiliarized local spaces
• Reality hunger traces from twentieth-century war to twenty-first-century social media
• Reality Hunger’s antifiction manifesto centers on the blurring of fiction and nonfiction
• Relational aesthetics reduce art to bodily affective experience rather than representation
• Repackaged self-published celebrity imagery empties art of aesthetic distinction
• Reparations are a worldmaking project rather than a penalty for past injustice
• Residual mediate art forms persist at the margins of contemporary aesthetics.
• Respected trauma narratives and trash horror both operate by visceral infliction
• Riots targeting shops reflect the collapse of the public, not mere consumerism
• Rita Felski’s postcritical method replaces analysis with unruly enumeration
• Scale, impersonality, and hold each counteract a defining trait of immediacy.
• Scholars largely see autofiction as an old novelistic propensity, not a new form.
• Second-person address functions as an immediatist tactic to evade representation of another.
• Secular economic stagnation beginning in the 1970s drives immediacy as a novel cultural style
• Security and reparations read constructively become freedom-building worldmaking projects.
• Self-branding’s demand for total presence becomes sadistic control
• Self-help profiteers while its promised benefits coincide with declining well-being
• Self-help’s explosion proliferated while public wellbeing indicators collapsed
• Self-loathing compradors replace collective identity with individual persona to express self-hatred
• Selfie immediacy is totalized while Burtynsky’s scale deliberately stays incomplete
• Sequels dominate Hollywood’s top-grossing films in the 2010s.
• Shrinking time between impulse and capture is experienced as aesthetic energy
• Slow cinematic pacing and scale resist stream aesthetics’ imperative immediacy
• Slow pacing and scaled camerawork position realism against streaming immediacy.
• Social crisis makes mediation itself appear culpable for misery
• Social media makes users unwaged image managers and avatars.
• Social media platforms institutionalized first-person self-expression norms that emptied fictionality
• Social media rerouted the internet’s early anonymity into compulsory self-expression
• Social media’s 2006-2007 arrival furnished the material infrastructure for immediatism’s culture
• Social power arises from hierarchies interacting with rhythms and composed wholes
• Spatial distance gives perceptual access to systemic harms we cannot directly see
• Speculative realism, surface reading, and postcritique are all iterations of immediacy’s anti-mediation
• Speculative realisms negate the human-nonhuman distinction as an anti-representation move.
• Stasis and non-resolution can themselves be aesthetic principles against immediacy.
• Stream-of-consciousness autofiction systematically revolts against character and form
• Streaming abundance replaces complex plotting with ambient atmospherics
• Streaming aesthetics center circulation and business over artistic craft
• Streaming creators design direct address to implicate viewers in a character’s thoughts
• Streaming direct address integrates devices where Brechtian theater alienated them.
• Streaming distribution rights kept Breaking Bad alive and reshaped its franchise.
• Streaming dominates web traffic and normalized original content within three years
• Streaming infrastructure determines the aesthetic shape of the content it carries.
• Streaming intensifies compulsive flow rather than freeing viewing from scheduled flow
• Streaming’s flagship shows blur genre to dissolve politics into tone
• Strikes across publishing and culture build a base for renewed representation
• Style denotes marks that bring things into being, fusing appearance with essence
• Style is a historically-graspable mark of deliberate making, not mere decoration
• Style is the constrained field of choices available to makers.
• Style is the trace of human work and constraint within given conditions
• Style promises to reconcile individual expression with a shared universal idiom.
• Succession’s estranging dialogue holds open mediation by obstructing ordinary language
• Succession’s mediating aesthetic features stasis and corporate form over dynamic plots
• Succession’s medium-distance ensemble framing formally encodes social structure over empathy
• Symbolic decline leaves people trapped in incommunicable personal realities
• Television can offer mediating perspective that streaming aesthetics void
• Television’s felt immediacy stems from transmission velocity, not image quality
• Textual interpretation disrupts immediacy through acts of reading
• The academic writing economy instantiates the flexible labor of circulation capitalism.
• The anglophone novel has historically favored third person over first
• The belief that change is impossible dissolves the obligation to act
• The boundedness of artforms is necessary to theorize social immediacies
• The Cure’s art was grounded in inauthenticity as an existential condition
• The death of syndication drove the rise of genre-melting dramedies.
• The demand for transparent, topical art compounds the reductions of calculative reason.
• The graphical user interface conceals code so completely that software becomes an invisible medium.
• The Hurt Locker’s immersion aims to replicate war chaos and minimize narrative.
• The immediacy aesthetic holds that extreme experience resists all mediated representation
• The information economy’s compression determines an anti-mediation aesthetic ethos.
• The later 1990s and early 2000s were dominated by commercial memoir publishing.
• The market promotes manifestism and flow as self-corrections of its own harms
• The memoirization genre elevates individual lived experience over objective social analysis
• The mirror stage explains why images grant and destabilize selfhood
• The narcissism diagnosis fails to name the structural misery of our era
• The narcissism label surged in 1973 alongside productive-economy contraction
• The passion for the real intensifies across the twentieth century and fuels violent acts.
• The personal essay boom was driven by page-view monetization and journalist downsizing
• The research university’s mediating role has been dismantled under late capitalism.
• The selfie as genre collapses subject, artist, and mediated distance into proximity
• The stream is defined by circulation’s crush and immanence
• The stream retroacts the images it carries, shaping content into circulation-forward form
• The stream’s voluminous circulation itself conditions the form of content
• The symbolic register introduces lack and alterity against imaginary flatness
• The volume and speed of streaming circulation condition aesthetic form
• Theoretical abstraction itself functions as a form of cultural mediation.
• Theoretical empiricism mirrors algorithmic culture’s preference for accumulation over interpretation
• Theory and art must depart from context rather than dissolve into immediacy
• Theory and immediacy are defined by mutually opposed spatial relations to the situation
• Theory fails worst when it celebrates its own capitulation to immediacy
• Theory is assumed abstract the more it drags away from the personal
• Theory is defined as the critique of immediacy.
• Theory mediates abstraction into policy by practicing synthesis.
• Theory’s defining political value is the distance it effects from the immanent
• Theory’s embrace of immediacy compounds broader deskilling and anti-expert culture
• Theory’s essential promise is departure from whatever is merely given
• Theory’s failure to analyze immediacy stems from theorists producing immediacy themselves
• Theory’s immediacy turns unwittingly mirror corporate software epistemes
• Theory’s turn to immanence stems from disintermediated capital circulation
• Third-person abstraction can convey intimacy better than first-person immersion
• Third-person fiction enables thinking no individual experiences in everyday life
• Third-person figural narration can impersonalize intimacy to reveal systemic forces.
• Third-person narration creates modes of thought impossible in lived experience.
• Third-person narration defies immediate experience to make structural categories thinkable.
• Third-person narration dominated novels for 250 years until first person surged after 1970
• Third-person narration enables thinking inequality and social position
• Third-person narration enables thinking unavailable in lived experience
• Thought itself is a revolt against bowing to immediate things
• Twenty-first-century autofiction deletes fictionality and shrinks pronouns to the first person
• Uncut Gems commits to unfiltered sensate closeness rather than narrative mediation.
• Understanding experience requires mediating connections across history and social context
• University curricula shifted from disciplinary knowledge to self-optimization
• University writing programs multiplied even as humanities majors collapsed
• US mental health and mortality data reflect structural despair and inequality
• User interfaces hide the material code that structures digital capitalism.
• Value as an abstraction only rules societies built on commodified exchange
• Video as a medium has consolidated diverse forms into homogeneous flowing style
• Video’s intrinsic medium-fluidity renders it the material support for immediacy
• Visual images are processed faster than any other medium can circulate
• Weak theory rationalizes the academic profession’s loss of living wages.
• Whitehead’s third-person historical novels deliberately reject immediacy’s presentism
• Working through psychic and social stuckness requires more mediation, not less
• Writing degree programs function as substitutes for inaccessible mental health care.