Abstract
Not even the most eminent intellectuals have much control over what people will do with their ideas. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels could not have anticipated what others have done over the years, for good or ill, to their original image of socioeconomic base and cultural superstructure. They could not foresee that their revolutionary thought would evolve into such unexpected forms as the gnomic aphorisms of Adorno. Nor could the late Fredric Jameson have fully known in the 1980s how his riffing on that Marxian imagery and the title he gave to his animadversions—Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism—would continue to inspire and influence later Marxist theorists.
The latest contribution to this intellectual heritage is Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. The title conveys indebtedness to Jameson in various ways, both substantively and stylistically. The book operates somewhere between homage, pastiche, and original contribution. Published by leftist publisher Verso, it is a very Verso sort of book.
Jameson argued that what he called the “postmodern” cultural forms of the 1980s were both expressions and ideological legitimations of the then-current phase of global capitalism. Kornbluh revisits this position for capitalism today. The critical target this time is not “postmodernism” but “immediacy.” This is an umbrella term that encompasses many types of cultural forms of the present, as well as specific types of theorizing about them and the wider world. Immediacy is a set of aesthetic styles and ways of thinking that operate by “denouncing abstraction while enthusing concretudes” (8).
In its examination of immediacy, the book merges media theory with critical theory but is much more compelling in its moments of critical theorizing. On Kornbluh’s account, “immediacy” in forms like TV shows, video, memoirs, and novels today is spurious, concealing more than it reveals while claiming to be wholly transparent. Meanwhile, theorizing, which reflects and eulogizes rather than interrogates such immediacy, betrays the old but vital critical impulse, which unpicks how apparent immediacy is manufactured through complex modes of mediation and translation. “Immediacy” thus describes the dominant cultural logic of “too late” capitalism, an out-of-control system hurtling toward ecological catastrophe, a condition that cultural forms of faux instantaneity obfuscate (43). Kornbluh’s book seeks to expose such matters in their full horror, while advocating for a return to nonimmediacy and nontransparency in critical-theoretical practice. She presents a (rather fleeting) account of how a critical attitude characterized by “radical hopelessness” in the face of capitalism’s disaster-making properties is not necessarily fatalistic and could open new political horizons (19).
Kornbluh’s argument is sound, if one accepts its basic theoretical assumptions and does not stray far from them. But especially toward the beginning of the book, it skates near and sometimes falls into many of the pitfalls to which both media theory and post-Adorno critical theory are susceptible. Yet in its latter stages, the argument becomes much more forceful. There, the book drops the media-theoretical verbiage and presents a lucid defense of critical theory within the post-Adorno orbit. There is also some comfort for the early twenty-first-century proletarianized intellectual producer, academic or extra-academic, a forlorn figure whom Kornbluh speaks about with irony and sympathy.
As this book is as much an exercise in style as in substantive things, not engaging with its style would be to avoid engaging with its content. This book is firmly located within the stylistics of the post–Frankfurt School wing of cultural theory. Some critical theorists of this persuasion value Adorno’s capacities for aphorism creation and accordingly like to write aphoristically. Indeed, the first three-quarters of Kornbluh’s book are replete with aphoristic soundbites. They tend to come at the end of paragraphs. Examples include “Eating the real with a spoon” (8); “Party before the lights come up” (17); “[O]n Instagram, everyone can be General Patton” (57); “The end is the beginning; the colonoscope is the camera” (116); and “As the artform par excellence of too late capitalism, stream video is rushing, delugent. We might drown” (147).
Kornbluh occasionally reflects on how aphoristic style is part of immediacy’s aesthetics (160), without thematizing, self-criticizing, or reigning in her own writerly tendencies in this direction. What an author may perceive as clever soundbites can be perceived by some readers as an irritating stylistic tic. The writing style in the first three-quarters of the book often feels like it is trying too hard to be hip. It called to mind a very non-Adornian aphorism, spoken by Muriel Spark’s fictional 1930s Scottish schoolteacher and fascist sympathizer Miss Jean Brodie, who expressed disapproval in this way: For those who like that kind of thing, that is the kind of thing that they like. Kornbluh’s book often reads as if it were mostly pitched to individuals who are already wholly sold on her preferred brands of theory and the verging-on-self-indulgent stylistics through which they are typically expressed.
Presumably, in certain corners of U.S. academia, one must write in a manner that sounds hyper-hip and terribly sassy to win the attention of one’s peers. The early chapters of the book are very much pitched to representatives of those corners. But is it wise to sound uber-trendy when one is engaged in the critique of overly trendy things, be they media products or the works of other, noncritical theorists? References to the latest TV shows may have currency within a particular demographic at the time of writing, but they will soon become awfully out of date. This is critical theory, apparently uninterested in empirical social science of the sociological and anthropological kind that reveals quotidian depths and textures of life, which are not readily representable in the grandiloquent theoretical terms and pithy aperçus imported wholesale from Frankfurt or media theory schools.
Many traps of this sort of theorizing and writing are not evaded. It is best to avoid writing long lists of overly obvious points about the nature of contemporary capitalism, as this does not add much theoretically (37). The apparent uncritical adoption of Lacanian terminology (49–52), which some find verbose at best and questionable at worst, is inadvisable, especially when this is insufficiently fused with the otherwise Marxian conceptual framework of the book. The paradoxical conservatism of apparently radical critique sometimes surfaces, as it does perhaps in the criticism of emoji-based communication (38). Telling your readers that “we,” author and audience, are “creative” people is a self-description somewhat lacking in self-scrutiny (22). Addressing readers in terms of “our society,” where this only means the United States of America, may alienate non-U.S. readers and give a (false?) sense that this is an overly parochial “American” exercise (46).
The most important point is that it is very difficult to write about things in this sort of Marxist way without falling into several holes. First, writing can lapse into a base and superstructure determinism, even if one thinks that one is not doing that and is doing one’s best to avoid it (e.g., 26, 47, 53). This can lead to a form of textual schizophrenia: When writing about the cultural superstructure, one sounds like an avant-garde media theorist who fires off the sassy aphorisms, but when one is writing about where the real action is, the capitalist socioeconomic base, one writes as a political economist, soberly calling out, in a rather predictable if truthful way, a litany of benighted capitalist practices that bedevil humanity today (27, 32–34).
As far as these two contending authorial voices are concerned—that of the cultural theory hipster and the political economy doomster—never the twain shall meet, as a now unpopular imperialist aphorist once said. It is as if two different authors were writing about two different subject matters in the very same book. A sense of theoretical balance is not achieved (170). There exist two torn halves of a whole that do not add up, to paraphrase Adorno, a figure whose shadow falls over such enterprises as these.
One might bifurcate base and superstructure unintentionally. Or one might fall into the trap of talking about everything in terms of (vaguely formulated) totalities, such that everything gets muddled up with everything else. Things that are empirically separate, or are at least analytically separable, can be unfortunately conflated (e.g., 82).
In all these matters, the specter of reductionism is never far away. Certain things to which at least some degree of autonomy could be ascribed are ruthlessly pulled back and down to the level of the thing called “capitalism.” They are capitalism’s creatures through and through. Despite authorial protestations against vulgar Marxist reductionism, that is, in fact, what is often going on here. What chance is there of developing a book’s putatively “algorithmic” style (127) when the prose never escapes the prison-house of a certain kind of Marxism?
But the prose does escape about three-quarters of the way in, where the style changes from hip media theorist to straight (old-fashioned?) critical theorist. Signposted by the disappearance of knowing aphorisms, the book moves into brilliantly clear and trenchant prose. The writing excoriates forms of contemporary theory that bask in the aesthetics of immediacy and fake self-disclosure. Noncritical or anticritical theory denies the need for analytical distance, slow reflection, and breaking with the objects of analysis, as well as the desirability of founding political communities irreducible to the individualized subject that used to be called the atomized and self-atomizing bourgeois self.
The virtues of mediation in thought, whether as expressed in and practiced by Hegel (154), Marx (155), and others, are championed through a prose style that is cool, clear, straight-to-the-point, and convincing. The (shrinking, imperiled) social conditions of possibility for slow and difficult, as opposed to fast and facile, modes of thinking are laid out most acutely. The animadversions of post-critical (non-)criticism, as adumbrated by authors like Bernard Harcourt and McKenzie Wark, are efficiently eviscerated (148–53). The philosophical hinterland of anticritical flat ontologies out of which they come, promoted by Bruno Latour (150) and his fellow travelers, is vigorously taken to task.
As the book came alive in this way, with and because of a much more lucid and less show-off style, I started to like it. Were my feelings due to my own theoretical prejudices being pampered? Perhaps. Or was it because the enemy of my enemy is my friend? Maybe. Did I start to appreciate the book because what Kornbluh is criticizing is just that much worse than what she is defending? Probably. But when I read the book again, I noticed that its insights and contributions are scattered throughout, such as sharp observations about the hyper-neoliberalized material conditions that can make authors take facile options in their writing (90) and that make university professors write flashy stuff that they think will sell to ever-diminishing groups of buyers (64).
In essence, I started to feel more relaxed about the offered critique sounding too much like what it was criticizing. And I felt rather less unhappy about the insufficiently dialectical treatment of the overly stark division between immediacy and non-immediacy (62). But should I have? Was I responding to the textual presence of the author in an overly immediate and nonmediated manner—precisely what Kornbluh warns against over two hundred pages? The lesson I took away is that one needs a non-immediatist, non-hipster, and non-gnomic style of thought and expression to be able to criticize effectively both hip theoretical immediatism and its sullen, if unacknowledged, twin: self-aggrandizing and often cryptic Marxian miserabilism. In the spirit of consistency with Kornbluh’s advice, then, I conclude that the book is most problematic when it tries to be cool, and it is at its best when it is coolly mediated in substance and style. For it is then that form and content align, in ways that a certain sort of avant-garde author will not like at all.