Abstract
Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism garnered a lot of critical attention after its release in 2023. Its central claim was that contemporary cultural production prioritises instantaneity by negating mediation, leading to the hyper-circulation of artistic forms concerned with self-presentation over representation. Through a critical reading of various literary forms, TV, the artworld, and theory itself, Kornbluh’s book is a provocation to contemporary artistic production that is locked in narcissistic loops, and it situates mediation as a means to create the distance required to think and imagine beyond a world like this one. Here, six scholars and writers engage critically with different aspects of Kornbluh’s argument, finding both extensions of, and limits to, the book’s central claims.