Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Author: Thomas Decreus
Institution: Tilburg University
Language: English
Topic: Marxism and Critical Theory
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4415139765