Last time I talked a little bit about the various devices — frame tales, fictional prefaces, discursive editorialising — that authors often used to erect around their narratives: things that in various ways foregrounded those narratives’ craftedness and presented them as objects for the readers’ interpretation alongisde that of the purported author’s, even where — as in The Betrothed — the devices claimed themselves nonfictional. This might as well be called a form of mediation. You can contrast it with forms of writing that purport to be, in various different ways, the direct expression of the real, true thoughts and experiences of a real, existing author: notably, in recent years, in the “wan little husks” of autofiction.
On the whole I haven’t read these books, since while the constraints of the medium require that one mostly read books by writers, one oughtn’t compound the problem by reading books about writers, much less contemporary ones, and less yet ones that find their tenure-track creative writing sinecures dreadfully enervating. I’m sure I’ll get around to some of them one day. Least little of these husks, on whose wanness I cannot comment, is Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, which Kornbluh helpfully quotes in this book Immediacy:
Just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a frabricated plot made me feel nauseous, I reacted in a physical way […] The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality …
She also quotes Rachel Cusk, Ocean Vuong, Tao Lin, and Sheila Heti making similar declarations in favour of the real and against the fictional. But it’s a funny kind of real — it ain’t Zola or Balzac — that we’re here dealing with, as we can see from Knausgård’s emphasis on “personality” above: significant in what Kornbluh calls this “antifictional” tendency is the auto of autofiction, the declaration of the subject, and the seeming-confidence that what is really real is the author and their thoughts, to which the reader can get immediate access through the page. For Kornbluh, autofiction is hence
the self-justifying wing of contemporary literary production’s unprecedented preoccupation with the “auto,” across a variety of sole-proprietor genres ensuing from the industrial restructuring of publishing, journalism, and academic labor.
And she sees this as just one manifestation of the style of immediacy throughout the contemporary realm of cultural production. Gone are the various distancings, ironies, and Olympian pastiches of postmodernism, whose theorising by Jameson is a kind of lodestar for Kornbluh throughout: in are a whole variety of pretences toward the direct, the real, the visceral, and the immediate, understood almost always as being the “experience” of a singular and bounded self, from #OwnVoices to the general trend toward first-person narrative to novels about shitting in bed. (On this latter I am forever reminded of Eagleton’s remark somewhere that a word like “clod” is not actually any closer to reality or “earthier” than a word like, I don’t know, “cynosure” or indeed “mediation”; that we might think so is a kind of category error. I imagine the same holds for novels with lots of shit and blood in.)
This work cannot really be interpreted: it is just the ejection of a single self, pure and unmediated, and one can really only experience it, the same way, Kornbluh writes, as you experience the never-ending looping mush of Netflix ejecta — perhaps as a “mood”, a “vibe”; perhaps you “identify” with it; perhaps it makes you “feel seen”. What it doesn’t do is talk to you. Indeed to analyse it, perhaps subject it even to some critical thought, might amount to a violation: the author has bravely exposed themselves, after all. (On moods and vibes, I am tempted to recall Jameson’s history of the emotions in Allegory and Ideology, where he talks about how the emotions themselves reflect different ways of organising society, from the public-facing shames and honours of the Greek polis to the private sins of the Christianised empires; perhaps the immediatised, undifferentiated world of very late capitalism — on which below — is reflected in the growth of the “mood” and “vibe”, which at once reduces all emotions to one word and announces their radical unshareability; the mood of this panda video is self-identically and immediately the mood of this panda video, and nothing else, and as such unnameable.)
Anyway. Kornbluh gives a brief Lacanian analysis of the immediate style, saying that it accords basically to the Imaginary order introduced in the mirror stage of child development — where, I sort-of understand, the self is first grasped as a singular entity separated from others — and preceding induction into the various abstractions, intersubjectivities, and (yes!) mediations of the Symbolic order. In a none-too-subtle bit of polemicising she locates this description of the infantile ego just before all the quotes above about how wonderful and important the singular real self is; in general, if you like veiled rudeness of this type, Immediacy may be the book for you.
The style proceeds from our historical moment. Authors now must be go-getting entrepeneurs — “sole-proprietors”, as we saw above, or influencers — and must market themselves as saleable within the economy of writing, which has been gigified like many other fields. Indeed gigification is itself of the immediate style, involving as it does the shearing off of mediating structures — like permanent employment contracts, unions, benefits, etc — that once, to a degree, protected employees from visceral contact with the pitiless real of the market itself. As Marx observed and predicted, Kornbluh says, money, once the mediator in the Commodity-Money-Commodity relationship (C-M-C for the Capital heads) increasingly becomes an end in itself (M-C-M) as capitalism develops; and then, in our too-late time, eventually the only end (M-M). To put it another way, mediation is eliminated. Autofiction comes from neoliberalism.
And not just autofiction, but Fleabag as well! You can see it I guess — the winks to camera serve to scaffold the single relationship — between you, the viewer, and the real fleabag — to the point that any other character, not to mention any form of collective or intersubjective being, gets definitively drowned out. Immediacy is a slim book, but it packs in a lot: about streaming TV in general, about your Marvels, about the trend toward “shallow reading”, “identification”, “entanglement” and such in contemporary critical theory, even on Afropessimism and other essence-based ontologies. These all have the right vibe of immediacy, but they don’t all have the detailed material analysis of causes that you get in the chapter on writing — about how the general forces of neoliberalism manifest themselves in the publishing industry, the creative writing programme, and so on, to be in turn manifested in what passes for literature.
So not all of her analyses are massively persuasive but they are all very fun, once you get past Kornbluh’s deliberately estranging prose. She has a particular habit of using verbs that could be plural nouns — “rivets”, “signals” are two that come to mind — which makes ones stumble over her sentences, presumably precisely so that your reading experience does not mimic the “flow” or “ocean” of the immediate style. I quite enjoyed it by the end.
Anyway — the problem here is that in the precise moment where we are in need of countervailing tendencies to that of capitalism — because capitalism has destroyed and continues to worsen the world — art instead is recapitulating this too-latest form of capitalism’s own structural logic. What is needed is not immediacy, but careful and structured thought; not authentic and singular selves, but collective action — which can only proceed through mediation, through symbols and communication. Kornbluh offers a couple of examples of art that bucks the trend at the end — the novels of Colson Whitehead and Succession among them. I would add, because why would I ever not add, The Books of Jacob, that announces its mediation in its very title.
The whole book is pretty much laser-focused to appeal to my particular prejudices and preoccupations, and, yes, I liked it very much. It does name a tendency that one has suspected existed all along. One could even say I identified with it.