Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism
(Verso Books, 2024)

TOC

Introduction
Circulation
Imaginary
Writing
Video
Antitheory
Conclusion

advance words:

The sensation of reading Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy is of someone turning on the light in a dark room. Suddenly one beholds a world one had only been stumbling through and can begin, with Kornbluh’s help, to trace a whole new set of relations between the disparate phenomena that define contemporary culture. The shocking conceptual clarity and rightness of its dialectical reversal of everything we thought we knew about life lived under conditions of postmodern hyper-mediation should make this book the starting point of future discussions of the nature of the present.

Mark McGurl, Stanford University, author of Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon
This brilliantly written, wild ride of a book is an enthralling, gloves-off critical intervention urgently needed in this moment.

Jonathan Crary, author of 24/7 and Scorched Earth
Kornbluh offers a swift — and much needed — kick to one of the most insidious symptoms of our time: the demand for the now, the immediately felt, the one-off. Armed with a strong imperative: “Think!” which she reiterates in an uncommonly rich vocabulary and from a variety of perspectives, she succeeds at the very least in holding up this runaway trend. Together with her previous critiques of capitalism, Immediacy establishes Kornbluh as one of the most inventive new voices in the field.

Joan Copjec, Brown University

To the things themselves! Fuck no, that’s precisely the problem. In this book on the poetics of social forms, Kornbluh has expertly diagnosed the contemporary yen for immediacy and immanence, presence and reality, the indistinct blurs and liquid flows of seemingly authentic experience. Taking it all as a kind of social pathology, she reads contemporary style through the deterritorializations of hyper capitalism, and the crushing lateness of an economic logic that insists on no alternative for society and no future for the planet. What results is a plea for the labor of mediation, and an insistence on dialectics as the central mechanism of art and culture.

Alexander R. Galloway, author of Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age
Anna Kornbluh brilliantly reinvigorates critique for an age drowning under the deluge of self-presentation. Embracing structure over style, representation over personalization, and collectivity over narcissism, she creates a space for thinking — the necessary space for politics.

Jodi Dean
Immediacy masterfully exposes the common core of many different problems and phenomena that we do not necessarily think of as related. The imperative of immediacy and its suffocating logic are the hallmarks of what Kornbluh calls “too late capitalism”. Drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis and art she makes a vivid, passionate, and most compelling case for mediation that creates the much-needed capacity to imaginatively break with the merely given. An extremely precious book that goes far beyond purely academic concerns.

Alenka Zupancic
Anna Kornbluh simply nails it in this fearless, witty, and conceptually powerful indictment of contemporary capitalist culture’s desire to annihilate negation-while also “negating the negation” by showing how things might be otherwise. A stunning and unignorable book.

Sianne Ngai, author of Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form