Confronting high-velocity culture

Rapidly advancing information technologies were once widely expected to liberate humanity from routine tasks and spur fresh creative and stimulating activity.  Yet their recent impact, powerfully influenced by giant corporations, has posed formidable problems in a period already marked by social and economic crises. “Immediacy”, a new book by University of Illinois professor Anna Kornbluh, exposes an increasing focus on the present and the personal within Western aesthetics and broader culture, eroding necessary reflection, mediation as an active process and theoretical analysis.  This is sustained by the current dramatic expansion of public access to instant electronic media, shaped by commercial interests pursuing novel forms of profit maximisation from monetised customer data.  A widespread ‘auto-actualisation’ of individualised ‘human capital’ is now starting to undermine established layers of “expensive” middle-man roles, standards and structures.  ‘Gigified’ labour, self-publishing and e-brokering are encouraging greater flexibility and fluidity amid a growing emphasis on immediate service delivery.  This creates a breeding ground for virulent opinionism and cults of charisma, while “the ease of one-click buying covers up a human hamster wheel”.

The author firmly situates these key developments in the context of declining global economic growth since the 1970s, as generally acknowledged since the late 1990s.  She cites Giovanni Arrighe’s work on the alternating dominance of production for use and the limitless circulation of money in world markets over different periods and identifies the heavy 21^st century concentration on the latter as the primary source of immediacy as contemporary cultural style.  Furthermore, the faster despatch of commodities and instant market information transfers are now actually merging, through the syncing of logistics and investor data on some platforms. Kornbluh notes, however, that this immediatised circulation has not resolved the stalling of world economic growth, despite generating detrimental cultural changes and attendant social hazards.

Self-presentation

Social media and modern advertising can induce “image overload” (the frames per second which the human eye can handle are well below the speed video cameras can relay) leading to anxiety, depression, fatigue, memory impairment and consequent rushed ‘surfing’ as opposed to reading and interpreting.  The self is constantly and narrowly reinforced and the ‘other’ demoted.  Taking selfie photos is common, the booming commercial ‘wellness’ industry is now worth $4 trillion, and narcissism incubates.  A related desire for some immediate ‘reality’ beyond this isolated ‘present’ can now safely seek extremity and violence through standard immersive technology – “on Instagram, everyone can be General Patton”.

This book provides particularly valuable insights into the consequences of enhanced cultural immediacy for writing and video production.  Kornbluh explores the extensive genre of literary ‘autofiction’ associated with Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jenny Offill and others which, despite its name, frequently mixes elements of fiction with real-life memories and characters.  She references the growth of ‘first person’ literature, personal essays and prose poetry reflected in much internet writing. This squeezes out space for novels with richer philosophical, artistic, or abstract content and neglects the unique power of line-break poetry. The author records the remarkable explosion of various types of writing courses now delivered by US universities.  Seven hundred and twenty-eight BA programmes in creative writing are now offered across the country to assist self-expression, while traditional English and wider Humanities teaching has declined, literary representation and mediation fade, and professional publishing and journalism wane. 

 The book then turns to Fredric Jameson’s description of video as “the art form par excellence of late capitalism” given its “total flow”, which immediacy culture now embraces for its instantaneity and immersion in the present.  Cinema going and TV programme schedules are yielding to video’s moving images accessed by mobile phones at any time or place.  Among other insights, the author reveals how the resultant ‘stream aesthetics’ influence how we consume films, TV and games, encouraging greater genre fluidity and confluence.  Kornbluh highlights Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s made-for-streaming show ‘Fleabag’, typifying a style of direct address to the audience and face-framed tight shots, confirming the lead player’s stronger personal intimacy with the camera than with other characters in the series, as she shares her immediate experiences, desires and feelings as in a “FaceTime friendship”. A broad tendency towards simpler storylines with heavy dialogue becomes visible, along with deference to monitored viewer preferences and the recycling of material through follow-up ‘spinoff’ series.  “The heterogenous composition of video as a medium” notes the author, “has curiously consolidated into the style of homogenous flow … We might drown.”

Antitheory

An important chapter on the emergence of ‘antitheory’ connected to cultural immediacy points to the writings of Foucauldian law professor Bernard Harcourt, who argues that critique has become too divorced from praxis and therefore requires reformulation through “decentred” individual self-substantiation as opposed to collective subjectivity.  A post-truth and anti-expert populism is thereby encouraged, controversially claiming to reflect the empiricist perspectives on science and analytic philosophy once associated with Bruno Latour.  Kornbluh also outlines the “autotheory” of the diaristic Paul Preciado, Maggie Nelson, and other writers, which has resonated among some gender theorists, and certain Black Studies, feminist, and other writers welcoming a new focus on self-presentation, while more contemplative academic production becomes ‘gigified’ and university-based career insecurity deepens.

The critic Ralph Clare is quoted describing autotheory’s triumph as a marriage of the truly personal with opposition to “the poststructuralist reduction of self purely to a textuality that produces a distancing kind of impersonality”.  This implies that even postmodernism is now superseded since the irrecoverable global environmental damage already inflicted by “Too Late Capitalism” has eclipsed the future.  The present is immanentised, a “beclouded non-horizon”.  As the resultant empiricism resists distance, mediation and abstraction, it generates inventories of ‘real’ felt experience, lists open to quantification and closer to today’s algorithmic world of electronic platform culture.  The book identifies links between this broad rejection of ordered theory and various contemporary advocates of a nihilistic anti-politics which effectively leaves today’s powerful and volatile market forces unchallenged.

Kornbluh sometimes playfully deploys overly rich language (“medium dissolves, extremes effulge, exposure streams”) which can briefly distract from a serious central critique of current cultural trends.  Nonetheless, her detailed depiction of the negative repercussions of growing immediate self-representation in modern society makes a significant contribution to understanding the trajectory of contemporary Western culture and deserves a wide audience.  Thinking of artworks in particular, John Berger once noted that, by turning them into commodities “images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free”^[3] – in short, lacking the aura of authenticity which attracts reflection.  This book warns that today’s massive flows of words and images are often merely briefly scrolled, leaving the individual adrift, yearning for the consolation of immediacy and presence.  The book duly closes with an appeal for the development of an alternative productivist cultural style, based on collective effort to catalyse representation as a medium and move beyond immediate experience.  

Kornbluh’s analysis has important political implications for the future.  Any progressive strategy for building a creative, democratic and egalitarian Western culture needs to take full account of the evolving narrow hyper-individualism exposed in this volume and diagnose funding and concrete policies to positively widen and reinforce collective creative endeavour.  This should include an urgent review of our education system to equip the next generation with the deeper critical thinking and strong sense of interrelation required to navigate and ameliorate today’s instantly interconnected world.  We should remember that, in themselves, the latest information technologies offer enormous potential for significantly enhancing cultural progress.  This book underlines the need to both analyse and confront today’s self-centred and high velocity culture.

John Chowcat is the retired general secretary of the education union ASPECT. He was previously assistant general secretary of the union MSF.

“Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism” by Anna Kornbluh was published by Verso in 2023 and is available now.