Unredeemed

“Only for a redeemed mankind,” Walter Benjamin famously wrote, “has its past become citable in all its moments” (254). Thanks to YouTube, we now know that Benjamin was wrong. All culture is available at all times, the algorithm magically knowing exactly what you feel like watching at exactly the right moment. Yet humanity is, by all accounts, quite far from redemption, trapped in what Anna Kornbluh, in Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, calls the “omnicrisis”: “murdered earth, failed states . . . razed institutions” and the psychological and social distress attendant upon this lack of futurity (17, 15). The world may be on fire, but the fiddles are everywhere. Living, as we do, in the slipstream of just-in-time capitalism, everything is one click away. ATMs have “fast cash” buttons, food delivery services provide real-time updates for your burritos, while buffering puts intolerable seconds between you and the consumption of whatever cultural fragment you currently desire. Our phones work nearly as hard as we do, operating twenty-four seven to keep us from spending uninterrupted time on literally any task actually in front of us.But lurking behind all this seeming immediacy is a heavily mediated social world. That YouTube reaction video you've just watched is not really about the belated discovery by some person younger than you of one of your cherished cultural objects; instead, it is just the medium through which your opinions have been repackaged to you as clickbait, part of a side hustle—likely one among many—for a member of the increasingly large precariat. Lurking behind the “everything all at once” culture, then, is the structure of a society that not only curates what we see—thus giving Benjamin a reprieve, since we are far from recovering all of our past—but also, through its vehicles of circulation, shapes the inner form of the culture we consume.Immediacy, that is to say, is, at its core, a book about mediation, or what Kornbluh calls “the active process of relating” (5). As such, it is simultaneously a persuasive defense of the power of mediation—one consonant with her earlier work on literary form—while also a vivid demonstration of its efficacy. Developing an account of a dominant cultural logic that connects aesthetic production to the multiple crises of our moment, Kornbluh sweeps an impressive range of cultural forms under her dialectical gaze. NFTs and immersive Van Gogh, Karl Knausgaard and gig work, Kim Kardashian's selfies and the flowering of creative writing majors: all of these pieces of our contemporary moment are linked together in an entirely persuasive account of the historical conditions behind our “reality hunger” (57).One obvious condition for this state of affairs is the unfolding climate crisis. “The material corollary” of the hunger for immediacy is “the inevitable environmental ruin wreaked by undead zombie capitalism” (14). “It is too late,” Kornbluh writes, “Ecocide has already taken place. . . . The ideology of immediacy holds a kernel of truth: we are fastened to appalling circumstances from which we cannot take distance” (14). But if ecocide is the clearest cultural explanation for the uptake of immediacy, Kornbluh ties it directly to an explicitly Marxist argument, reading immediacy as the cultural expression of a definitive shift in capitalism from production to circulation.Her account starts with Robert Brenner's “long downturn”: “[C]apitalist growth began to lag irreversibly in the 1970s” due to what Marx described as the “law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall” (Kornbluh 26; Marx qtd. 28). “While theorists debate this law in the abstract,” Kornbluh writes, “the concrete situation of secular stagnation is well-acknowledged empirical reality. Capitalist production has been contracting” (28). The reason the law is a “tendency,” however, is because real-world circumstances arise to temporarily counteract it. The constitutive relationship between production and circulation—no value realized without the sale of commodities—means that the two work in tandem. When production is curtailed, “a compensatory expansion of circulation” takes place (28). “Late-twentieth-century technological, epistemological, and political developments, such as advanced information systems” fuel this expansion, leading directly to notable features of our contemporary world, including just-in-time production and the sharing economy (31). “In this gigification of labor,” Kornbluh argues, “companies and jobs are on the wane, while services sold by the unit are on the rise. The resulting conditions for both workers and consumers bypass the firm as middleman to facilitate direct contact and instant fulfillment, begetting an image of the economy as consentingly intimate independent contractors” (34). At the same time, the rise of gig work coincides with the uptake in social media, training individuals “to think of themselves as image managers and avatars, performing exhaustive unwaged digital labor as brand-identity consultants and data producers” (36). Work and leisure combine in a boundaryless flow.If part of this is a story we've often told—the speedup of our lives as a result of the so-called third industrial revolution and its technologies of the self—what's most striking about Kornbluh's account is the way she persuasively ties these changes to a structural account of capitalist production, which, paradoxically, is why her argument is not in any sense deterministic. “Immediacy” she writes, “is not an inner disposition of media, attaining ever-greater actualization in the digital era, but an outer configuration of the circulation system that digital media effectuate, with the mode of production as its cause” (42). Kornbluh here avoids the technological determinism characteristic of many readings of our moment. In doing so, she illustrates the essential point of her argument: a defense of the idea of the commons and of our ability to construct one. It may be too late to fully arrest ecocide, but “it is not too late for us to build things less worse” (217). Modes of production may determine cultural production, but they are themselves produced by human sociality and thus can be constructed differently. Kornbluh's conclusion illustrates exactly this point, as she demonstrates how writers such as Fredric Jameson, Sianne Ngai, and Colson Whitehead foreground mediation in their work. In doing so, she argues for our ability to critically assess, and therefore work against, our determining conditions.Nevertheless, many of us find ourselves increasingly immersed in the stream, which Kornbluh reads symptomatically in Lacanian terms: “[T]he more that images comprise our lifeworld . . . the more effectually the media substrate impels an immense imaginary” (50). The oft-cited narcissism of the moment becomes here a symptom of a culture in trauma: “Mass shootings . . . racist extrajudicial killing” and pandemics (among other things) produce feelings of “futurelessness, isolation, anxiety, distance: these plights trigger an overwhelming absorption, an incapacity to relate beyond the self in either language or action” (46, 47). The result is “a decline of the symbolic: a malfunctioning of socially sanctioned language, a sagging of meaning and norms. . . . To say that the symbolic is in decline or disarray is thus to mark the loss of this effective common” (58). “When this ordinary entrance into the symbolic is obstructed,” Kornbluh continues, the subject remains trapped in Lacan's mirror stage (51). The “reflection must be repeated. One selfie is never enough. An insistence on recognition is at the core, often distending in demands to be recognized in a particular way, and flattening the other as mirror, mere vehicle of reflection” (52). But there is a further turn of the screw, for the “narcissist's auto-affection circumscribes the other, in a diminishment intimately connected to sadism. . . . The sadist flattens the other” (56). The most obvious components of our online culture—binary politics, snap judgments, curated selves, vicious trolling—are all here persuasively described through the Lacanian lens.Kornbluh's chapters then take up, in turn, writing, video, and antitheory. Given space limitations, I will leave video alone—though her account of the way “the material qualities of the circulatory apparatus come now to condition the form of what appears” is as smart and insightful as the rest of the book (123)—to focus on the two forms of writing. The writing chapter is a tour de force, connecting trends in autofiction, memoirs, personal essays, and prose poetry to a larger reading of the institutional structure of the academy and the assault on disciplinary expertise more broadly. Again the brilliance of the book is in its synthesis. Even when the individual components are familiar—it is hard not to find in Knausgaard a narcissistic disregard for the power of fictional form—the overall arc of the argument is exciting. Here is Kornbluh: “The circulation economy crafts this stylistic unity of annulled mediation, in conditions encompassing the expansion of university writing programs amid a university labor crisis, the dramatic downsizing in the publishing and journalism industries, and the ubiquity of freelance entrepreneurs. Professions without experts leave individuals flailing to auto-actualize alone in the society that does not exist. Contemporary jettisoning of literary mediation simply aestheticizes these conditions, shedding literature's potential to immanently criticize the known world” (69). Strikingly, the term autofiction was first coined in 1972; it is more or less exactly coterminous with Brenner's periodization of the long downturn. Perhaps even more interesting, the 1970s marks the precise point at which the first person began to take over literary production. Kornbluh rests here on the kind of big data she normally eschews, but to good purpose. For with this data she is able to tell a story about shifts in the novel form across the last two centuries. “The third person,” Kornbluh argues, “proves definitional for the novel form: an extraordinary construction of a mode of thought unavailable to us in everyday lived experience, in our own stupid envelopes. Third person stretches away from phenomenal subjectivity, toward speculative objectivity” (79). The shift toward the first person suggests a sea change, a “tendency to redact the very impersonal, antiphenomenal, speculative point of view that defined the novel across its history” (80).But if memoirs and autofiction enshrine the individual subject and its immediate sensations, they do so within the larger context of forced austerity. One of its features is “responsibilization”—that is, the increased pressure on the subject to perform labor that used to be taken up by other parts of society. (Perhaps this is why Sheila Heti finds it “so tiresome to make up a fake person” [qtd. on 71].) Others include the disappearance of tenure-track jobs and the de-skilling of academic labor. All of these features take shape alongside the rise of creative writing majors: “[T]here are now 728 BA programs in creative writing nationwide, which reflects a large increase during the same thirty-year period in which humanities majors overall and English majors in particular have declined” (85). This growth—an “efflorescence of writing without readings”—coincides, in other words, “with ruinous declines in the percentage of instruction performed by tenured faculty, and with enormous tuition increases” (84, 86). And this development, in turn, is linked to the dispersal of writing across the disciplines and the rise of freshman composition. “One elementary tributary to first-personalism in the echelons of MFA workshops,” Kornbluh contends, “is surely the pedagogy of the freshman composition courses required of virtually every college student in the country. Voice-centered experiential writing, reflective writing, and metacognitive writing anoint the metadiscipline writing classroom now, where the content of writing is not subject matter but the subject's intellective and spiritual journey toward prose” (87).This critique of writing as self-expression—a critique, it is worth pointing out, many scholars in rhetoric and composition share—leads to a series of further claims about transformations in the distribution of texts, the rise of self-publishing, the loss of the mediating functions of publishing houses and magazines, alongside “the dispersion of writing beyond the recognizable register of literature and into almost every aspect of the corporate service and circulation economy” (93). Writing gains in importance, while the institutional structures built to teach it are allowed to wither and die. Enter the chatbots.Perhaps the most incisive critique in the book, though, emerges in the chapter on theory. Here Kornbluh once again shows the range and depth of her reading, gathering up developments such as surface reading, actor-network theory, object-oriented ontology, and affect studies alongside the prevalence for personalized academic memoirs by writers such as Mackenzie Wark and Andrea Long Chu, as well as forms of nihilism in works by Afro-pessimists and others. Kornbluh is not, of course, wholly dismissive of this work: “This makeover of theory as concrete” she writes, “derives from well-meant reprove of impersonal abstraction, masculinist reserve, and rationalist systematicity” (151). But theory has overcorrected course, abandoning its foundational aim to refuse to “reproduce and reify what is immediately given” (190).Autotheory, however, foregrounds immediacy. “The trademark rhetorical posture of unassailability for the authotheorist,” she writes, “as Andrea Long Chu herself admits, ‘relies on her own vulnerability to insulate herself from close scrutiny’” (160). Confession disables the critique that theory, for Kornbluh, requires. In this gesture toward immediacy, autotheory seems to be reaching for a wider audience. Kornbluh is rightly suspicious. “It is good to make theory for the people,” she writes. “It is bad to portray the historical erosion of theory's conditions of production, including the reproduction of the class of professional intellectuals, as an endogenous style evolution of self-proclaimed ‘weak theory’ and ‘amateur criticism’” (163). Once again, a seemingly autonomous intellectual development is understood to reflect its social conditions. “Autotheory,” Kornbluh concludes, “must be seen as efflux of a context in which theorists with fair labor conditions like tenure encounter their dire lack of peer audience, and theorists without fair labor conditions hustle for crossover appeal to eke out a living” (162).This broader “withdrawal of argument” also animates a range of contemporary nihilisms, for whom “all ‘ends’ are bad, all institutions are oppressive, human history is only the history of domination, values like freedom or responsibility are instruments of these forces of bad oppressive domination, and therefore the only minimally affirmable virtues are ephemerality, hybridity, destabilization, fugitivity” (177, 178). Arguing against the ahistorical thinking of nihilism, Kornbluh here simultaneously, if implicitly, mounts a defense of institutions, of their fundamentally dialectical nature, and of the utopian possibilities of freedom even in a historical moment defined by its negation. Meanwhile, attacks on the university as unfreedom necessarily align themselves with “Republican efforts to tar higher education as an elite playground” (182).Maggie Nelson, one of Kornbluh's main examples of autotheory, writes, “I have never been able to answer to comrade. . . . Our diagnosis is similar, but our perversities are not compatible” (qtd. 84). These words are the exact opposite of the goal of Kornbluh's book, which amounts to a ringing defense of collectivity and of theory's place in its construction. Understanding theory “as the metalevel seeing of how we see,” Kornbluh concludes, “requires perceiving theory's own conjunction with the ruling ideas and class rule, while nonetheless activating the dialectic through which that conjunction can also host the coherent, synthetic demand for that rule's end” (190). This book is an excellent demonstration of just how we might begin such a project.