Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism
By Anna Kornbluh
Published by Verso
London and New York, 2023

When the American film Don’t Look Up (2021) came out, its depressing humor seemed emblematic of a wider social condition: an anxious impotence now embedded in all aspects of culture. Described as a horror-comedy, the film’s “allegory” on climate change—a comet plummeting toward Earth—was far more literal than satirical, evading any alternative interpretation. An explicit, urgent reversal of its title, Don’t Look Up demanded that the audience engage while nihilistically propagating the fact that it is probably too late. That was the joke: we have made our bed, now we must die in it. 

In Immediacy: Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism, University of Illinois, Chicago professor and writer Anna Kornbluh identifies this prevailing “style” in contemporary art and theory as one of immediacy, or anti-mediation. While the latter is an “active process of relating—making sense and making meaning by inlaying into medium,” immediacy evades critical, collective reflection. Other stylistic movements reimagine, subvert, or escape the apparent, “giving sensuous form to the unexpressed,” while immediacy embraces reality in its purest, most juvenile form: “It is what it is.” The prevailing artistic medium has thus become immersion and presence, an individual’s immediate sensory experience of the here and now, which, by the framework’s very nature, is always an instant too late.