There’s so much culture out there these days that it can be hard to keep up, let alone see it all as a whole. But that only makes it all the more important to make the effort to find perspective. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s not always clear, but when people look back in the future, they’ll almost certainly see the shared concerns beneath the fragmented surface of 2020s culture more clearly than we do.
Literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has an idea about this. She argues that what characterizes the art of the now might actually be a particular hunger for the now. Her book, published this year by Verso, is titled “Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism.” As she writes, Kornbluh pursues immediacy as a main category for understanding 21st century cultural production across a broad spectrum of culture, both high and low.
She shows how the urge for immediacy can explain a variety of developments, and asks why. It’s a slim but ambitious book. Immediacy was Ben Davis’s choice for our summer reading list, and we’re not the only ones who found it useful. Writing in Art Review magazine, author Alex Niven said Kornbluh managed to define the elusive, claustrophobic zeitgeist better than almost anyone in recent memory.
It’s an exciting terrain to explore, and this week on the podcast, Kornbluh takes us through it with Ben Davis.
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