Immediacy

Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism

De: Anna Kornbluh

Narrado por: Sara Sheckells

Why speed, flow, and direct expression now dominate cultural style

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of disintermediation: cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. Flow is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them. Considering original streaming TV, popular literature, artworld trends, and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion and today’s intolerance of representation, and points to alternative forms in photography, TV, novels, and constructive theory that prioritize distance, impersonality, and big ideas instead.

This audiobook is expertly read by Sara Sheckells with audio engineering by Matthew Kulewicz, MPSE. It was produced and published by Echo Point Books & Media, an independent bookseller in Brattleboro, Vermont.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2023 Anna Kornbluh (P)2025 Echo Point Books & Media, LLC

Accessible, Interesting, and Immediately (lol) Applicable to Your Life

Kornbluh does an excellent job making modern Criticism/Theory accessible in this piece that uses “Immediacy” to describe the state of modern culture, from short-form videos to prose poetry to Kardashian self-published book of selfies titled “Selfish.” Kornbluh writes with an auto-theorists tone, weaving in phrases from pop-culture, a less academic voice (or more informal, might be appropriate), and auto-fiction’s unabashed inclusion of the sexual and personal (there’s a bit talking about an author who invites readers to literally use the book as a sex toy). I am a reader who reads to learn, someone who doesn’t have a smartphone, and is pursuing English at the PhD level, so perhaps I am a target reader for Kornbluh, but I think her grasp of technological immediacy—maybe not just the grasp but the dexterity with which she describes its crushing effects on the enjoyment of our lives—is something that could instantly improve the lives of anyone who read it. Get off your phone. Read a book. Trust expertise. Seek mediation over instant gratification. And while Kornbluh doesn’t admonish all of Immediacy culture as a whole, she does make a strong argument about Too Late Capitalism’s quiet apocalypse of attention capacity and that we still might mitigate its worst crises.