Thoughts on “Immediacy and its discontents”
This is a brief analysis of “Immediacy and its discontents”, an interview with Anna Kornbluh, author of the 2024 book Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism . My writings originate from a long message in a Messenger group, in reply to a friend who asked more about its action items and conclusions. The irony of the origin of these writings is not lost on me! DS: I don't necessarily disagree with anything she says, but I feel like I read 15 minutes of content for almost no actual takeaways. What action items or conclusions does she actually say here? This essay contains no action items except the sense that all proposed analytic frames ask that you buy into them as explanatory and critical tools. The conclusion is that much of the aesthetic in our current day around authenticity and low barriers to art purport to have a democratizing effect in art when it really has a popularizing and anti-intellectual effect. Where I read into it is this following observation: mediation in