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 anything (art, politics, morality, ethics) tends to be viewed as good when one has a view of uninhibited human nature as inherently good, and bad when one has a view of uninhibited human nature as inherently good. I think that the hidden assumption in this piece is that the average person's naive take on art is actually quite bad, especially since art in many ways depends on forming a language and a common language cannot form without a strong community or a robust edifying literature. When we promote outsider art and various forms of frictionlessness, we end up simply advocating for a lack of any standards or institutions to use as guardrails. The criticized viewpoint ignores that there is indeed a high degree of freedom and expression within (perceived) masterpieces, but as a matter of fluency and mastery within a learned medium rather than a complete rejection of the very idea of a worthwhile medium to learn.
An example would be writing. One can disagree on whether I am a good writer or a bad writer, but certainly my writing is a product of my experience and my interactions. It succeeds at its aims in its main instrumental contexts, namely my personal notes and the bulk of my online social interactions. It fails in the context of this chat. In each case, there is an objective contextual standard that emerges from interaction and interplay. My writings are themselves products of long periods of engagement not only with specific communities but also the entire construct of the English language, or maybe with language altogether. One could say that maybe I sound like I am babbling a lot of the time, but this is skilled babbling within the context of English compared to someone who literally has never learned this tongue before.
The analogy I propose for understanding this essay (which I found to be enlightening even though I propose it myself) would be that mediation is to language what immediacy is to babbling.
I think I disagree with the essay in one way, which is that it discounts more meta or emergent or interdisciplinary forms of artistic expression. Is a tweet art? How about the combination of a tweet plus some ad that shows up below it which happens to serendipitously match? Maybe me screenshotting that combination and posting it would be a form of art? I think that having a looser hold on what "art" means is a healthy thing. At one point, synthesized music was considered unartistic.
The authenticity movement, in my view, succeeds at creating new arenas of expression and showing the different ways in which all parts of life have informed people's everyday "creative" acts. Think about how much culture and history goes into even one Tumblr rant. But I think that in general this has a degenerative effect on existing established art forms, which I think is worth mitigating.
The key to immediacy is that it ought to inform creation in the moment, but can also be a building block for greater aesthetic achievements. It is not something to which we must limit ourselves. It is but one of many creative vehicles.
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