Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism : Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism - Anna Kornbluh

Immediacy, Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism

Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism

By: Anna Kornbluh

Paperback | 30 January 2024

At a Glance

Paperback


$47.75

or 4 interest-free payments of $11.94 with

 or 
In Stock and Aims to ship in 1-2 business days
Why speed, flow, and direct expression now dominate cultural style

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of "disintermediation": cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. "Flow" is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub. And the bad news is that political turmoil and social challenges require more mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style forgoes them.

Considering original streaming TV, popular literature, artworld trends, and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion and today's intolerance of representation, and points to alternative forms in photography, TV, novels, and constructive theory that prioritize distance, impersonality, and big ideas instead.

About the Author

Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where her research and teaching center on literature, film, and Marxist cultural theory. She is the author of The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, and Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club, and Realizing Capital.

More in Literary Theory

How to Read a Book : A Touchstone book - Charles Van Doren

RRP $34.99

$19.90

43%
OFF
Middlemarch : Collins Classics - George Eliot
An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory : 6th Edition - Andrew Bennett
Metaphors We Live By - George Lakoff

RRP $31.95

$26.25

18%
OFF
The Social Production of Art : Communications and Culture - Janet Wolff
Literacies : 2nd edition - Mary Kalantzis

RRP $141.95

$113.90

20%
OFF
Art Monsters : Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art - Lauren Elkin

RRP $55.00

$42.25

23%
OFF
Create Dangerously : Penguin Modern - Albert Camus
Restaurant : Object Lessons - Brian Duff
American Modernism (Re)Considered - Robert C. Hauhart

RRP $190.00

$157.95

17%
OFF