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.

"Electrifying." - Chicago Review

"[O]ffers a fresh lens through which to consider how our compulsion for immediacy is also fatally distorting our political life." - Foreign Policy

"Kornbluh has done better than almost anyone in recent memory to define the elusive, claustrophobic spirit of the age and get started on excavating its cultural subterranea." - Alex Niven

"Immediacy is very, very good at giving us what it promises: the style of the present, the feel of streaming (of goods and information as well as the products of culture) as a deluge that crushes and paralyzes and teaches us to like feeling crushed and paralyzed. Its prose has some of the same exhilarating adrenaline rush that it wants to stop us from admiring. In that sense it has a kind of dialectical richness: an immediacy that makes the reader reach for mediation." - Baffler

"Illuminating, profound, and relevant." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"Immediacy is a powerful intervention into the aesthetic status quo, with valuable detours into the destructive potential of capital." - Los Angeles Review of Books

"A refreshing take on contemporary media." - Publishers Weekly