Immediacy, mediation and praxis: reading Anna Kornbluh through the lens of Guy Debord

In Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh claims that in the fields of literature, film, art, and theory, immediacy as a style which excludes representation, reflection, and distance has become dominant. According to Kornbluh, the reign of immediacy also has negative political effects: it leads to forms of political action that are no longer mediated and therefore ineffective in creating collective action or political subjects. This coincides with a plea for a politics in which institutions like the state, the party, or the union play a leading role. In this article, I want to question Kornbluh's critique of immediacy and the apparent self-evidence with which it leads to a defense politics based on mediation. In order to so, I want to offer a reading of Kornbluh's Immediacy trough the lens of Debord's Society of the Spectacle. This reading will allow me to present a more complex relation between immediacy and mediation. It will bring me to the conclusion that rather than the binary mediation/immediacy, the relationship between theory and praxis might be a better starting point to evaluate both political action and theory.