Immediacy Ruined Our Politics

How our economy and culture became ever less mediated—and corroded our collective life.

By , an American intellectual and cultural historian.
People look at their phones as they stand in line at an Apple store.
People look at their phones as they stand in line at an Apple store.
Customers line up at an Apple store in Hong Kong on Nov. 3, 2017. Anthony Wallace/AFP via Getty Images)

There’s a general recognition that the pace of our economic and cultural lives is marked by growing expectations of acceleration and instant gratification, whether in the form of gig work and just-in-time supply chains or hot takes and digital streaming. It is the great virtue of Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or the Style of too Late Capitalism that she clarifies the way these two tendencies—the economic and the cultural—are mutually linked and reinforcing. She also offers a fresh lens through which to consider how our compulsion for immediacy is also fatally distorting our political life.

Working from within a Marxist intellectual tradition, Kornbluh deconstructs the hegemonic cultural style—our seeming addiction for immediacy, presence, and experience—by probing its formal features and identifying them in particular media practices across five short chapters. But Immediacy is more than diagnosis: It’s a call to intellectual arms on behalf of mediation—the marginalized cultural style that expounds, dislodges, mixes, relates, and develops. Everything, in other words, that the dominant cultural style of immediacy attempts to close off as a possibility. The stakes are high—politically, ethically, and historically.

There’s a general recognition that the pace of our economic and cultural lives is marked by growing expectations of acceleration and instant gratification, whether in the form of gig work and just-in-time supply chains or hot takes and digital streaming. It is the great virtue of Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or the Style of too Late Capitalism that she clarifies the way these two tendencies—the economic and the cultural—are mutually linked and reinforcing. She also offers a fresh lens through which to consider how our compulsion for immediacy is also fatally distorting our political life.

Working from within a Marxist intellectual tradition, Kornbluh deconstructs the hegemonic cultural style—our seeming addiction for immediacy, presence, and experience—by probing its formal features and identifying them in particular media practices across five short chapters. But Immediacy is more than diagnosis: It’s a call to intellectual arms on behalf of mediation—the marginalized cultural style that expounds, dislodges, mixes, relates, and develops. Everything, in other words, that the dominant cultural style of immediacy attempts to close off as a possibility. The stakes are high—politically, ethically, and historically.

Much of what Kornbluh is up to in her book is a mediating of immediacy—an examination of how our present culture took shape and what it consists of. In chapter one, “Circulation,” she delves into the notion of “secular stagnation,” a concept that describes the contraction in global productivity since the 1980s. For Kornbluh, the slowdown in the production of value has been accompanied by an acceleration of its circulation—a focus on speed and flow rather than manufacturing, intensified by microelectronic and logistical revolutions, creating “conditions for [cultural] immediacy.” She goes on to investigate how this dominant style’s “everyday psychic contours” “reconfigure cognition and affect” through the sharing of images in our contemporary media ecosystem. Here, Kornbluh exploits French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s concepts of the imaginary, symbolic, and real in order to provide a materialist perspective on “what is misdiagnosed as a raging narcissism epidemic.”

Kornbluh then examines various expressive forms characteristic of our present cultural style of immediacy. In her third chapter, Kornbluh argues that immediacy’s focus on singular experiences, private viewpoint, and individual voice, along with the casualization of university labor and the publishing sector, has mutated writing by demolishing the capacity for representation and, with it, the ability to produce fiction, including the novel. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s 3,600-page formless auto-fictional work, My Struggle, is an exemplar of the writing that results. Chapter four, “Video,” argues that the convergence between the technological and economic processes of streaming is embodied in the stylistic features of moving images, like the front-facing camera, universe sprawl, and perpetual looping. In its endless and shapeless flow of images, YouTube, for example, dismantles barriers between genres.

In her concluding chapter, “Antitheory,” Kornbluh argues that present-day critical theories advance the hegemonic cultural style of immediacy, yielding to a quietist acceptance of uniformity, enmeshment, and pessimism. Postcritique, affect theory, attachment theory, and more—all, for Kornbluh, are styles of hyper-empiricism used in recent years by literary and cultural critics to move beyond the “hermeneutics of suspicion” in order to engage texts as objects not of depth or density but surface and simplicity. The editors of the influential book Critique and Postcritique, for example, captured this anti-critique zeitgeist: “the intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so self-evident.”

For Kornbluh, though, such theories of the zeitgeist are really anti-theories; they reproduce our economic and political circumstances in forms of immediacy aesthetics. Rather than purely confirming what is present, what we need, Kornbluh argues, are abundant, strong theories that intercede into and negotiate the assumptions and complexities of the present era. With such strong theories, we can regain our lost capacity for critique, step back from our cultural (and presumably economic and political) circumstances, and then reasonably apply judgment.

But can mediations, in fact, short-circuit our dominant cultural style of immediacy, much less its economic foundation? In her conclusion, Kornbluh attempts an answer by schematizing countertendencies that still exist alongside the hegemony of immediacy. For example, she argues that “[s]ome trajectories in recent theory” work against immediacy by offering “exhortations to assent to collective visions and take collective responsibility.” And Kornbluh points to how such mediating cultural forms are analogous to disrupters in the circulation economy, like labor actions at Amazon and Starbucks, or culture workers in the Writers Guild of America. These struggles, in addition to collective organizing and the mediating roles of the state and university, construct a foundation for renewed representations, for another cultural style.

Kornbluh doesn’t fully explore the ways that our dominant culture and its “everyday practices and conventional meaning” affect our very idea of politics and its possibilities. Our immediacy addiction, though, can be clearly found in populism and the dangers it poses to democracy. “[W]e are witnessing,” Henrik Boedker and Chris Anderson wrote in 2019, “an increasing divergence between the mechanisms of delay built into liberal democracy”—such as representatives’ debates in a governing body—“and a ‘politics of impatience’ that is part of a larger populist communications style.”

Social media and online news sites, both of which have replaced journalism, a traditional mediating mechanism between political and other social processes, helped, Boedker and Anderson argue, pave the way for populist intolerance, particularly for “procedures (and that can include referenda…) and elections at regular intervals.” Widespread conspiracy theories of fraud committed during the 2020 U.S. presidential election might be read as the sublimated urge for immediacy as well.

The wish for immediate political outcomes has also led many to yearn for a powerful leader, one whose quick decisions, instead of democratic processes and the accompanying delays of institutions, promise to solve political problems. Accordingly, as Boedker and Anderson note, populist leaders, in contrast with the slower pace of “elitist” political and legal institutions—those mediating structures that distance through bureaucratic postponements—often use social media to connect with an already impatient public. Think here of former U.S. President Donald Trump on Truth Social, where he, not simply a narcissist but an embodiment of the hegemonic cultural style, often speaks straight to his followers of felt dangers—immigrants, corruption, etc.—supposedly neglected by the judicial and legislative branches.

Such populist leaders present their electronic statements as unmediated and thus uncorrupted—these are communicative acts that temporarily sate the unquenchable desire for presence. The electronic statements then flood and shape our political world: When Trump’s followers at rallies chanted “Lock her up!” or “Build the wall!” or when then-candidate for president of Argentina Javier Milei pledged to take a “chainsaw” to institutions, like the central bank (and, in a stunt, actually wielded one), they incarnated the presentist cultural impulse, reinforcing prejudices and bigotries built into the circulation-forward base. Perhaps even the elevation of celebrities and tech billionaires—Andrew Tate and Elon Musk come to mind—in our collective political imaginative life is also such a sign. Tech entrepreneurs live by Mark Zuckerberg’s dictum: “Move fast and break things.”

It would have been useful if Kornbluh expanded her analysis in these directions. What’s more, Kornbluh only implicitly grapples with the forces so strongly aligned against her aim to call on readers to take up the cause of mediation. She, for instance, considers immediacy and writing, yet an analysis of reading is absent in Immediacy.

Although, maybe it doesn’t matter, because Americans don’t read anyway. A December 2021 Gallup poll found that American adults read fewer books each year. We’re well on our way, as Caleb Crain has noted, to a “secondary orality”—a sociological term, first used by Walter J. Ong, for a post-literature culture where immediate communication is central; the rise of social media and smartphones has something to do with this shift, of course. Perhaps this itself explains why Immediacy is so short: We seem not to have the time, really the patience, to engage a massive tome like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (a bestseller—but who read the entire text?). The advent of our secondary orality surely narrows visions of political life, orienting us away from mediation and toward (desiring) ever-simpler explanations and solutions.

Formed by a flood of immediacy, our intellectual habits also appear to ensure our imagination about politics is continuous with crisis, as we disengage from any capacity to envision the future, as Kornbluh recognizes. Before history concluded, the future was integral to politics, whether democratic capitalist or communist. But as our patience lessens, we’re inclined to further indulge in consuming cultural projects of immediacy: About 50 percent of adults in the United Kingdom believe that their ability to focus is decreasing, whereas educators observe a similar trend among children. Our shortening attention spans raise barriers against developing and then deploying the very mediations that Kornbluh, rightly, believes could make things “less worse.”

Amid the worrying trend, backlash does exist. The criticism of the new Apple iPad “Crush” ad hints at the public’s sense of the destructiveness of our immediacy addiction. In the ad, a hydraulic crusher presses an array of creative tools, including musical instruments, paints, and cameras, until all the objects are flattened into the company’s new tablet. “The destruction of the human experience. Courtesy of Silicon Valley,” Hugh Grant quipped (on X, formerly Twitter). Criticism has been so great that Apple issued a mea culpa. But this form of backlash against the presentist impulse won’t be enough, on its own, to correct for the distortions that Kornbluh shows our politics has already suffered.

The fundamental point of Kornbluh’s book may be that it is itself an example of what she argues is required—and a trigger to further such production. One might quibble with her summaries and categorization of certain cultural objects, such as the series Fleabag, as advancing the formal features of immediacy—though such a critique would itself be the kind of marginalized meditation that Kornbluh wants to help bring into existence. “The very point of proposing a totalizing category like immediacy,” she writes, “is to delimit the dominant formation so that alternatives come into the light.” Immediacy is one such alternative, and a potential inspiration for others.

Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.

Gregory Jones-Katz is an American intellectual and cultural historian. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg, Germany and a research associate at the Institute for General and Comparative Literature at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.

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