Anna Kornbluh: Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism [Book review]

I don’t think I can remember the last time so many people in my milieu were talking about the same book. This would no doubt delight Anna Kornbluh, not only for the obvious reasons, but moreover because Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism is precisely a clarion call for collective meaning-making, as opposed to the siloed irreducible individuality that pervades our culture. As Kornbluh tells it, capitalism has masked its multi-decade crisis in production with an expansion in circulation – an ‘immediatised infinite flow’ – that has resulted in a cultural sphere enamoured with ‘viscerally affecting stuff’ but with little regard as to how such stuff is mediated by capital.