Overview

"Contemporary cultural style rejects mediation in favor of direct access, extreme affect, and rapid uptake. These are values it borrows from the 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 21st century capitalism demand that art pretend it isn't. Smearing our noses in realness seems to be the only goal of much of contemporary culture, and that goal synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. Circulation strives to be instantaneous, with ""flow"" the ultimate 21st century buzzword, but these speedy gears grind art down to the nub. And the bad news is, the political turmoil and social challenges we face - climate crisis foremost among them - require more rather than less mediation. Collective will, inspiring ideas, and deliberate construction are the only way out, but our dominant style undoes them. Considering original streaming tv, popular fiction, artworld trends, and academic theories, Immediacy explains the recent obsession with immersion, authenticity, and total transparency, and it points to alternative forms of representation in photography, tv, novels, and constructive theory, that prioritize distance, impersonality, and big ideas instead."

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9781804291344

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Reviews

"The sensation of reading Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy is of someone turning on the light in a dark room. Suddenly one beholds a world one had only been stumbling through and can begin, with Kornbluh's help, to trace a whole new set of relations between the disparate phenomena that define contemporary culture. The shocking conceptual clarity and rightness of its dialectical reversal of everything we thought we knew about life lived under conditions of postmodern hyper-mediation should make this book the starting point of future discussions of the nature of the present. -- Mark McGurl, Stanford University, author of <i>Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon</i> This brilliantly written, wild ride of a book is an enthralling, gloves-off critical intervention urgently needed in this moment. -- Jonathan Crary, author of <i>24/7</i> and <i>Scorched Earth</i> Kornbluh offers a swift -- and much needed -- kick to one of the most insidious symptoms of our time: the demand for the now, the immediately felt, the one-off. Armed with a strong imperative: ""Think!"" which she reiterates in an uncommonly rich vocabulary and from a variety of perspectives, she succeeds at the very least in holding up this runaway trend. Together with her previous critiques of capitalism, Immediacy establishes Kornbluh as one of the most inventive new voices in the field. -- Joan Copjec, Brown University To the things themselves! Fuck no, that's precisely the problem. In this book on the poetics of social forms, Kornbluh has expertly diagnosed the contemporary yen for immediacy and immanence, presence and reality, the indistinct blurs and liquid flows of seemingly authentic experience. Taking it all as a kind of social pathology, she reads contemporary style through the deterritorializations of hyper capitalism, and the crushing lateness of an economic logic that insists on no alternative for society and no future for the planet. What results is a plea for the labor of mediation, and an insistence on dialectics as the central mechanism of art and culture. -- Alexander R. Galloway, author of <i>Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age</i> Anna Kornbluh brilliantly reinvigorates critique for an age drowning under the deluge of self-presentation. Embracing structure over style, representation over personalization, and collectivity over narcissism, she creates a space for thinking -- the necessary space for politics. -- Jodi Dean"

"Praise for The Order of Forms * : * The Order of Forms offers a probing, ambitious, and innovative argument with far-reaching implications across fields. Kornbluh turns away from dominant particularist and historicist methods in literary and cultural studies and gives shape to a stimulating new set of strategies for thinking the political in the humanities and beyond. That she is capable of bringing together psychoanalysis, Marxism, literary formalism, and mathematics makes this a virtuoso work of theory. -- Caroline Levine, Cornell University The Order of Forms is one of the most exciting books I've read in several decades. Staging the convergence of discourses that, however historically contemporaneous, have never been rigorously linked together, Kornbluh generates a series of provocative and convincing arguments about literature, criticism, and the agency of form. Her approach makes her a theoretical singularity. -- Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago Kornbluh should revolutionize our understanding of literary realism and its relationship to representation. -- Rachael Scarborough King * Los Angeles Review of Books * Rarely does a work of criticism come along that has the potential to transform existing fields or to establish novel modes of inquiry within the literary humanities, but I believe that The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space by Anna Kornbluh has the capacity to do so. It strikes me as the kind of book that could have an effect somewhat like that of Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations, Eve Kofovsky Sedgwick's Between Men, or Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, texts that helped to inaugurate new approaches to literature. -- Robert Tally * Symploke * Kornbluh works across several disciplinary registers. Hers is a daring and ambitious program of research, and on all terrains the discussion is enviably sophisticated, rigorous, and fluent. -- Benjamin Parker * Genre * As proficient in contemporary critical theory, historical materialism, and formalist geometry as in theories of the novel ... The Order of Forms makes a case for the 'world-building' nature of novels, which do not just unfold in particulars but also play in abstractions, performing and forming as well as reflecting their world. -- Victoria Baena * Los Angeles Review of Books * Kornbluh anchors her brilliant and challenging book in the 19th-century realist novel but goes well beyond those confines to argue forcefully for the political dynamism and durability of forms and formalisms in our timeForms are not merely immovable perimeters or momentary playthings. They are, for Kornbluh, the tools sustaining art and literature that we can use to build a better world. -- Daniel Williams * Public Books * In Kornbluh's dazzling book, formalist mathematics crystallises what forms can do, introducing new ways of organising thought and relationships. ... Thinking about the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the 19th century alongside 21st-century psychoanalysis and Marxism, Kornbluh boldly gives shape to a new set of strategies for thinking politically in the humanities. -- Charlotte Jones * Times Higher Education * The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Science is an ambitious and timely work. * Victoriographies * Everyone seriously interested in Victorian fiction should read The Order of Forms... It mounts sharp, polemical, hugely stimulating arguments about the basic categories, form and realism, that structures its topic. * Victorian Literature and Culture * Praise for Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club * : * Kornbluh has devised a remarkable two-fisted engine that examines simultaneously and in turns Marxist film theory and Fight Club. She offers a rigorous and highly original analysis of the film, in which cinematic form and economic circumstances vie with and outstrip each other, and a superb demonstration of the dialectic at work. -- Joan Copjec, Brown University The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. So, what's the first rule of Marxist film theory? If you or Anna Kornbluh can't talk about that either, her short sharp introduction nonetheless offers an expert account of what Marxism is and why-maybe more than ever-it matters. Moving elegantly between different theories of film and a film that does the work of theory, she both explains how several modes of Marxist analysis work and makes a powerful case for Marxism's status not as one method among many but rather as our best and maybe last chance to engage and to engage critically with the forms of a world we must find wanting. -- Kent Puckett, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, USA Kornbluh's book convincingly shows the advantage of Marxist film theory, which is that it focuses on film form allowing one to reflect on the film in practically all its aspects including its conditions of production. -- Damian Winczewski Kornbluh's books put forward versions of Marxism that are as vigorous, erudite, and committed as one would wish any kind of Marxist theorising to be. -- Ali Alizadeh * Sydney Review of Books * Praise for Realizing Capital * : * Realizing Capital is not just about the psychic life of financial capital, about how the mad dance of the capital affects human psyche, and about how Victorian literature from Dickens onwards registered the psychic distortions imposed by the mad circulation of the capital. The underlying premise is a much more radical one: the psychic life of capital, the way individuals experience and fictionalize financial circulation, is a key ingredient of economic reality itself, since the reality of financial capital is itself structured like a fiction. Although Kornbluh's book deals with Victorian England, it holds a mirror to our era - if you want to understand what goes on today, how a madness like the 2008 meltdown was possible, read Realizing Capital! -- Slavoj Zizek, University of Ljubljana This highly original and far-reaching book puts Marx and Freud into an exciting new dialogue with the Victorian novel. Kornbluh reads these imposing thinkers as engaged in the same project as the realist novelists, all of them struggling to defamiliarize the frighteningly fictitious character of capital. Offering thrilling new insights into Great Expectations, Middlemarch, and The Way We Live Now, this book culminates in a tour de force reading of Marx's Capital as a Bildungsroman and a radical rethinking of Freud's 'psychic economy.' -- Caroline Levine, author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network For Kornbluh, realism written in the 19th-century blossoming of finance capitalism performs much of the same work as political theory. She works with a specifically Marxist framework, but instead of subjugating literature to a Marxist program, her version of 'aesthetic mediation' finds similar historical, aesthetic, scientific, and political thought in Marx's metaphors and in the critiques embodied in novels. -- Michelle Chihara * LA Review of Books * Realizing Capital should be essential reading for anyone wishing to follow cutting edge work on the form of the Victorian novel. -- Adela Pinch * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 * By tracing the cultural circulation of two specific tropes ? ""fictitious capital"" and ""psychic economy"" ? Kornbluh makes a compelling argument about the complex figurative ties that bind the realist novel to our understanding of both capitalism and the psyche. This exciting and original book will make us reconsider the novel's cultural work as well as that of its criticism. -- Mario Ortiz-Robles, University of Wisconsin-Madison Impressively researched, highly inventive, and powerfully driven by original close readings of nineteenth-century fiction and non-fiction. -- Zarena Aslami, Michigan State University An exceptionally insightful and important book, one that will fascinate and enable readers interested in capitalism and culture in the modern era. * Victorian Studies * Kornbluh's book, beautifully argued, makes the case for a return to material and psychoanalytic critique through formalist methods allied with the 'best historicist impulses'... Realizing Capital is invaluable for its reminder that 'the financial metaphors' of the Victorian period not only structured realism itself but continue to fundamentally 'corrugate our world'. * The British Society for Literature and Science *"

Praise for The Order of Forms: The Order of Forms offers a probing, ambitious, and innovative argument with far-reaching implications across fields. Kornbluh turns away from dominant particularist and historicist methods in literary and cultural studies and gives shape to a stimulating new set of strategies for thinking the political in the humanities and beyond. That she is capable of bringing together psychoanalysis, Marxism, literary formalism, and mathematics makes this a virtuoso work of theory. -- Caroline Levine, Cornell University Praise for The Order of Forms: The Order of Forms is one of the most exciting books I've read in several decades. Staging the convergence of discourses that, however historically contemporaneous, have never been rigorously linked together, Kornbluh generates a series of provocative and convincing arguments about literature, criticism, and the agency of form. Her approach makes her a theoretical singularity. -- Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago Praise for The Order of Forms: Kornbluh should revolutionize our understanding of literary realism and its relationship to representation. -- Rachael Scarborough King * Los Angeles Review of Books * Praise for The Order of Forms: Rarely does a work of criticism come along that has the potential to transform existing fields or to establish novel modes of inquiry within the literary humanities, but I believe that The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space by Anna Kornbluh has the capacity to do so. It strikes me as the kind of book that could have an effect somewhat like that of Stephen Greenblatt's Shakespearean Negotiations, Eve Kofovsky Sedgwick's Between Men, or Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious, texts that helped to inaugurate new approaches to literature. -- Robert Tally * Symploke * Praise for The Order of Forms: Kornbluh works across several disciplinary registers. Hers is a daring and ambitious program of research, and on all terrains the discussion is enviably sophisticated, rigorous, and fluent. -- Benjamin Parker * Genre * Praise for The Order of Forms: As proficient in contemporary critical theory, historical materialism, and formalist geometry as in theories of the novel ... The Order of Forms makes a case for the 'world-building' nature of novels, which do not just unfold in particulars but also play in abstractions, performing and forming as well as reflecting their world. -- Victoria Baena * Los Angeles Review of Books * Praise for The Order of Forms: Kornbluh anchors her brilliant and challenging book in the 19th-century realist novel but goes well beyond those confines to argue forcefully for the political dynamism and durability of forms and formalisms in our timeForms are not merely immovable perimeters or momentary playthings. They are, for Kornbluh, the tools sustaining art and literature that we can use to build a better world. -- Daniel Williams * Public Books * Praise for The Order of Forms: In Kornbluh's dazzling book, formalist mathematics crystallises what forms can do, introducing new ways of organising thought and relationships. ... Thinking about the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the 19th century alongside 21st-century psychoanalysis and Marxism, Kornbluh boldly gives shape to a new set of strategies for thinking politically in the humanities. -- Charlotte Jones * Times Higher Education * Praise for The Order of Forms: The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Science is an ambitious and timely work. * Victoriographies * Praise for The Order of Forms: Everyone seriously interested in Victorian fiction should read The Order of Forms... It mounts sharp, polemical, hugely stimulating arguments about the basic categories, form and realism, that structures its topic. * Victorian Literature and Culture * Praise for Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club: Kornbluh has devised a remarkable two-fisted engine that examines simultaneously and in turns Marxist film theory and Fight Club. She offers a rigorous and highly original analysis of the film, in which cinematic form and economic circumstances vie with and outstrip each other, and a superb demonstration of the dialectic at work. -- Joan Copjec, Brown University Praise for Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club: The first rule of Fight Club is: You do not talk about Fight Club. So, what's the first rule of Marxist film theory? If you or Anna Kornbluh can't talk about that either, her short sharp introduction nonetheless offers an expert account of what Marxism is and why-maybe more than ever-it matters. Moving elegantly between different theories of film and a film that does the work of theory, she both explains how several modes of Marxist analysis work and makes a powerful case for Marxism's status not as one method among many but rather as our best and maybe last chance to engage and to engage critically with the forms of a world we must find wanting. -- Kent Puckett, Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley, USA Praise for Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club: Kornbluh's book convincingly shows the advantage of Marxist film theory, which is that it focuses on film form allowing one to reflect on the film in practically all its aspects including its conditions of production. -- Damian Winczewski Praise for Marxist Film Theory and Fight Club: Kornbluh's books put forward versions of Marxism that are as vigorous, erudite, and committed as one would wish any kind of Marxist theorising to be. -- Ali Alizadeh * Sydney Review of Books * Praise for Realizing Capital: Realizing Capital is not just about the psychic life of financial capital, about how the mad dance of the capital affects human psyche, and about how Victorian literature from Dickens onwards registered the psychic distortions imposed by the mad circulation of the capital. The underlying premise is a much more radical one: the psychic life of capital, the way individuals experience and fictionalize financial circulation, is a key ingredient of economic reality itself, since the reality of financial capital is itself structured like a fiction. Although Kornbluh's book deals with Victorian England, it holds a mirror to our era - if you want to understand what goes on today, how a madness like the 2008 meltdown was possible, read Realizing Capital! -- Slavoj Zizek, University of Ljubljana Praise for Realizing Capital: This highly original and far-reaching book puts Marx and Freud into an exciting new dialogue with the Victorian novel. Kornbluh reads these imposing thinkers as engaged in the same project as the realist novelists, all of them struggling to defamiliarize the frighteningly fictitious character of capital. Offering thrilling new insights into Great Expectations, Middlemarch, and The Way We Live Now, this book culminates in a tour de force reading of Marx's Capital as a Bildungsroman and a radical rethinking of Freud's 'psychic economy.' -- Caroline Levine, author of Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network Praise for Realizing Capital: For Kornbluh, realism written in the 19th-century blossoming of finance capitalism performs much of the same work as political theory. She works with a specifically Marxist framework, but instead of subjugating literature to a Marxist program, her version of 'aesthetic mediation' finds similar historical, aesthetic, scientific, and political thought in Marx's metaphors and in the critiques embodied in novels. -- Michelle Chihara * LA Review of Books * Praise for Realizing Capital: Realizing Capital should be essential reading for anyone wishing to follow cutting edge work on the form of the Victorian novel. -- Adela Pinch * Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 * Praise for Realizing Capital: By tracing the cultural circulation of two specific tropes ? fictitious capital and psychic economy ? Kornbluh makes a compelling argument about the complex figurative ties that bind the realist novel to our understanding of both capitalism and the psyche. This exciting and original book will make us reconsider the novel's cultural work as well as that of its criticism. -- Mario Ortiz-Robles, University of Wisconsin-Madison Praise for Realizing Capital: Impressively researched, highly inventive, and powerfully driven by original close readings of nineteenth-century fiction and non-fiction. -- Zarena Aslami, Michigan State University Praise for Realizing Capital: An exceptionally insightful and important book, one that will fascinate and enable readers interested in capitalism and culture in the modern era. * Victorian Studies * Praise for Realizing Capital: Kornbluh's book, beautifully argued, makes the case for a return to material and psychoanalytic critique through formalist methods allied with the 'best historicist impulses'... Realizing Capital is invaluable for its reminder that 'the financial metaphors' of the Victorian period not only structured realism itself but continue to fundamentally 'corrugate our world'. * The British Society for Literature and Science *

Author Information

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. Anna Kornbluh has a prominent international profile in academic circles ranging from literature and film to political economy and history, in the artworld increasingly as critic-in-residence at gallery events for contemporary work in Chicago, and in journalistic venues like The Times Literary Supplement (which has repeatedly reviewed her work), The Chronicle of Higher Education (which recurrently commissions essays and interviews from/with her), and The Paris Review, as well as podcasts with over 10,000 individual listeners, such as Why Theory. This recent youtube interview has over 6000 views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIdqjKf8c5g&t=445s. While she tweets impersonally, her account has nearly 12,000 followers. The Los Angeles Review of Books has already commissioned an essay from her to coincide with the book’s publication.

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