Value Form

On Anna Kornbluh's Immediacy, Marxist literary criticism, and the desire for fiction to reflect reality

I care less and less

about the shapes of shapes because forms

change and nothing is more durable than feeling.

Terrance Hayes, ‘What it Look Like’

1. Types of Guys

This post is partly a response to the book Immediacy, by Anna Kornbluh, which is a fascinating polemic about everything wrong with culture these days. But I also want to write more broadly about Marxism, and what Marxism does for literary criticism—if it does anything—as well as its relationship to taste. So we’re going to begin, not with Immediacy, but with Georg Lukács, who, I think, basically set the terms for what seems to me to the predominant line of Marxist criticism, extending through Frederic Jameson to Kornbluh; his judgments still register in the ways other critics, even those who may not care about the law of value or the like, think about the function of literature.

This is Lukács complaining about what is wrong with culture these days (1957):

Precisely in modern art, with which [Walter Benjamin] is ultimately concerned, descriptive detail is often of an extraordinary sensuous, suggestive power - we think again of Kafka. But this, as we showed in the case of Musil (a writer who does not consciously aim at allegory) does not prevent the materiality of the world from undergoing permanent alteration, from becoming transferable and arbitrary. Just this, modernist writers maintain, is typical of their own apprehension of reality. Yet presented in this way, the world becomes, as Benjamin puts it, "exalted and depreciated at the same time". For the conviction that phenomena are not ultimately transferable is rooted in a belief in the world’s rationality and in man’s ability to penetrate its secrets. In realistic literature each descriptive detail is both individual and typical. Modern allegory, and modernist ideology, however, deny the typical. By destroying the coherence of the world, they reduce detail to the level of mere particularity (once again, the connection between modernism and naturalism is plain). Detail, in its allegorical transferability, though brought into a direct, if paradoxical connection with transcendence, becomes an abstract function of the transcendence to which it points. Modernist literature thus replaces concrete typicality with abstract particularity.

This is a complicated and, I think, brilliant (though to me unconvincing) case for the superiority of ‘realist’ art to modernism. Typicality, Lukacs seems to suggest, is needed for an object to stand forth as itself. Without a sense of the back and forth between the idea of a tree, and this particular tree, the particularity is lost, and becomes an abstraction, particularity itself, a sensation. The particulars in a modernist novel, the brown stocking in To The Lighthouse, say, matter only as symbols of that particularity. Typicality is the structure of thought, the thing that holds things together. For a thing to be understood as a thing, it has to be a type of thing. This is, in a way, the world’s rationality.

A gnomic way of putting it: There is no way to understand the world other than rationally. That’s how you get a world at all. Without rationality you just have sensation. But how do you even know you have that?

If you like, we can trace such thinking back to Hegel. The Phenomenology of Spirit begins with a chapter on ‘sense certainty’, i.e. the fact of pure sense experience before we carve it up with concepts. Hegel suggests that the apparent truth of sense experience as This, is:

really and admittedly the abstractest and the poorest kind of truth. It merely says regarding what it knows: it is; and its truth contains solely the being of the fact it knows. Consciousness, on its part, in the case of this form of certainty, takes the shape merely of pure Ego. […] Rather, the thing, the fact, is; and it is merely because it is. It is – that is the essential point for sense-knowledge, and that bare fact of being, that simple immediacy, constitutes its truth. […] But, when we look closely, there is a good deal more implied in that bare pure being, which constitutes the kernel of this form of certainty, and is given out by it as its truth. A concrete actual certainty of sense is not merely this pure immediacy, but an example, an instance, of that immediacy.

I speak very halting Hegelian. But I take him to be saying that before our immediate experience even of experience itself, we need to understand that it is an instance, an instance of experience, that experience is a type of thing. It can’t just come to us. So where did we get the type idea from? Everything, Hegel wants us to see, is mediated, and mediation is made especially clear in instances of immediacy.

The question of typicality matters, Lukacs thinks, because without it, we are left cut off from reality, which is not our experiences, but also the things which structure our experiences. You exist as a result of relationships, the push and pull of various social forces which govern the experiences which you experience. A young man moves to Paris, he tries to make it; he falls in love; and these things acquire their pathos from their typicality, even when the author and the young man both disdain the typicality as cliche. Crucially, these relationships, these forces, have a pattern that can be apprehended, and understood, they obey, or rather instantiate, Lukacs thinks, certain laws. Typicality is another way of thinking about the lawlike nature of human relationships (at least at present).

As for the question of what those laws actually are; well, that’s what Marx is for; but Marxist literary criticism, in the Lukascian mode, is about whether literature might offer us a glimpse of truth, by aligning with those laws; not in content, by being ideologically pro-worker; but in form, by being about the dynamic relationship between character and ‘society’.

Typicality then, is a form of truth to life, needed for a work of fiction to be of any value. To cut ourselves off from typicality leaves us in the realm of ‘bourgeois ideology’, or a version of it, that can described much as Hegel describes sense certainty: ‘Consciousness… takes the shape merely of pure ego’. The experiencer and not the experience is what gets taken as given. I like this, I’m touching this, I’m tasting this. But who we are is hopelessly social. This immediate experience is not immediate. It is wrong to treat one’s self as a natural fact, just as Marx says one does with the commodity form or the market itself. I buy this object without even thinking about the economy, about what buying means for the other people involved in this transaction, the thousands living and dead who make it possible.

For Lukacs, modernism, in spite of seeming to go against what we might take to be the common sense depiction of the world in realism, is actually a more profound expression of empiricism, the ‘bourgeois epistemology’ in which what we know is simply what we experience. Modernism posits, Lukacs thinks, only one subject’s experience of a world of objects, turning that experience into a kind of transcendent irrationality, a celebration of the fact that the world cannot be understood, cannot be fully grasped, only experienced. It is, we might say, all flux, and thus cannot be changed.

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For this reason, we will always get more, Lukacs argues, from the work of Thomas Mann than of Kafka.

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Such an argument for the superiority of dialectical thinking, a great 19^th century invention, is, I think, especially important for those who study and appreciate the great masterworks of Victorian realism in the academy. Compare the formidable Victorianist and theorist of the novel Catherine Gallagher, who builds on Lukacs to discuss the achievement of George Eliot in terms that derive from this sense of what a dialectic between abstract and particular, typical and individual etc, means:

…the novel—in which the type is the presumed referent while individuals are presumed to be fictional—inverts normal empirical ways of thinking about the relation between the real and the imaginary, the sensual or experiential, on the one hand, and the ideational, on the other. Most novelists would freely have admitted that the species is that which one never expects to encounter in actuality; it is to be grasped only by an abstracting effort of the mind. Individuals, on the other hand, present themselves as the given data of the world. The novel thus reverses the commonsensical empiricism that pervaded the intellectual atmosphere of England at the time of its invention. […] The novel is thus ‘‘true’’ in its generality even though all of its particulars are merely imaginary.

Eliot, by the way, is great for Gallagher, because ‘she atypically and consciously exploited and explored these standard assumptions of her medium’.

It has sometimes seemed to me that a large part of the point of Victorianist scholarship, is, in some ways to defend the achievements of realism from the disdain of modernism. The latter, of course, was co-extensive with the founding of academic literary studies, and in many well-known ways, shaped the methods we have for judging literature. You can see the same kind of sophisticated use of 19th century thought’s great achievements against modernism in Isobel Armstrong’s wonderfully constructed concept of the Victorian ‘double poem’— a defence of Browning and Tennyson from Pound and Eliot. These are, aside from their achievements as scholarship, also worth considering as heroic attempts to recreate the taste by which Victorian literature might be enjoyed.

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Which brings us to the great American attempt to understand all literature as truly historical material, to understand the ideological work that it is doing as new tastes and ways of life are formed: that of Frederic Jameson. I’m not going to talk about the Jamesonian project as such here, he leaves behind a body of work that reminds me a bit of Bunting’s description of Pound’s Cantos:

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

But I want to stress that one important stratum of Jameson’s work is his attempts to understand modernism and ‘post-modernism’, as the expressions of changes in the way individuals experience the law-like nature of the economy, in their loss of a ‘cognitive map’. It seems to me that this argument resembles, indeed is an instance of, the Lukacsian longing for typicality.

For Jameson, the creation of a truly global economy, ‘what Lenin called the “stage of imperialism” created important ‘problems of figuration’:

a growing contradiction between lived experience and structure, or between a phenomenological description of the life of an individual and a more properly structural model of the conditions of existence of that experience. Too rapidly we can say that, while in older societies and perhaps even in the early stages of market capital, the immediate and limited experience of individuals is still able to encompass and coincide with the true economic and social form that governs that experience, in the next moment these two levels drift ever further apart […]

This is to say that we can no longer tell ourselves a story about our own lives, even our relationships, without taking into account the extraction of rare earth metals etc on the other side of the planet. Towards the end of the 19^th century, for Jameson:

the phenomenological experience of the individual subject, traditionally the supreme raw materials of the work of art, becomes limited to a tiny corner of the social world, a fixed camera view of a certain section of London or the countryside or whatever. But the truth of that experience no longer coincides with the place in which it takes place. The truth of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual's subjective life. Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people.

There comes into being, then, a situation in which we can say that if individual experience is authentic, then it cannot be true; and that if a scientific or cognitive model of the same content is true, then it escapes individual experience. It is evident that this new situation poses tremendous and crippling problems for a work of art; and I have argued that it is as an attempt to square this circle and to invent new and elaborate formal strategies for overcoming this dilemma that modernism or, perhaps better, the various modernisms as such emerge: in forms that inscribe a new sense of the absent global colonial system on the very syntax of poetic language itself.

This is, I think, the pithiest version of Jameson’s attempt to understand why realism was abandoned, why it ceased to function for serious artists, and yet why it is valuable not just to the historian but to the believer in the force of history. Only in the 19^thcentury, could the capitalist system be grasped, when it was new enough to notice, and small enough to see. Modernism, instead, became a way of seeking typicality in the material itself by making it seem charged with significance on its surface. Rather than connect small view of London to the wider world, modernist writings dramatize the search for form.

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For Jameson, we might say, the modernist search for form is a bit like those recipes for Martinis that bow in the direction of France rather than pour the Vermouth into the glass. The absent colonial world system is itself an important part of the taste.

Jameson is keen to stress that his descriptions of literary history in this fashion are not a call to return to Balzac, but it does seem that, for him, there are reasons to prefer Balzac to the modernists, that there are genuine matters of taste at stake. The force and insight of Jameson’s criticism on Balzac in The Political Unconscious, where he is in some sense a heroic visionary figure, forcibly inscribing the systemic economic forces onto his own desires, strikes me as also the expression of taste, not for bowing towards France, but pouring the sweet stuff of realism into your books. Realism is desirable as a uniquely dialectical moment in narrative writing, where the formal principle of the work is real: type. The endless search for form, the poetic making, that governs modernist writing, or the failure of that which animates post-modernity are both, by contrast, unmoored from reality.

Jameson’s story can never announce itself as a preference, it has to be described as a literary historical conjuncture. But it is a taste nevertheless; there is, I want to acknowledge, a rightness to what Jameson says towards the end of A Singular Modernity, for example, about Beckett-style late modernism’s exhaustion of poetic form as a way of structuring biographical experience, but it seems hard to disentangle it from personal judgment:

In both Nabokov and Beckett alike …an anecdotal core or given always marks the inassimilable empirical content which was to have been the pretext for sheer form. Indeed, this is what made up the paradigmatic nature of Beckett's late plays: the shock lies in discovering, at the heart of these eternally recurring spec­tacles, an empirical situation - unhappy marriage, intolerable youthful memories, a banal family structure, with irreducible names and characters, the bourgeois dwelling at a certain date, the punctual biographical events that stand out unre­deemably from the failure of a drab and sorry life - which might have offered the material of a dreary realist novel and instead persists as the indigestible brute facts to which the form reverts over and over again in its vain attempt to dissolve them. […]

This is, however, a fortunate failure: for the replacement of the varied and incomprehensible Absolutes of modernism by the far more modest and comprehensible aesthetic auton­omies of the late modern not only opens up the space and possibility for that theorization we have characterized as the ideology of modernism, it also enables and authorizes the production of a far more accessible literature of what can be called the middlebrow type.

Jameson is not calling Beckett middlebrow here, but he’s not not doing that. What Beckett permits in lesser writers, we might say is a way for certain formal strategies (refusal of plot, character, etc, refusal itself) to dignify banal material, to put the typical modernist particularity of style in place of a more interesting typicality, allowing you to make ‘literature’ that isn’t about interesting things (social relations) but about boring things (personal life).

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Jameson’s glacially submerged judgement, as I understand it, is not a cry to return to Balzacian realism, but nevertheless a claim that Balzacian realism is superior to what we have because it could hold both individual and type in balance, could allow us to experience structure. Modernism was an attempt to respond to changes or expansions in structure that mistook itself for a step towards transcendence, and post-modernism was jumping in the puddle that modernism thought was an ocean, but neither actually provide us the type of experience we need or ought to have if a proletarian ‘revolutionary subject’ is to come to self-awareness.

Jameson is absolutely suspicious of the attempts by writers to use poetic language to transcend history. Think of how he describes Bob Pereleman, the LANGUAGE poet, as a too late adopter of the ‘schizophrenic affect’ that was apparently employed more subtly and gracefully in Flaubert:

When such features become themselves the cultural norm, they shed all negative affect and become available for other more decorative uses.

I wonder what it means to think of Language writing, some of the least popular and accessible poetry ever written, as decorative. But it has a certain truth to it. From the standpoint of history, it all becomes period style in the end.

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Embracing this becoming typical, which is also becoming historical, is one of the things that Jameson later (in The Antinomies of Realism) says he likes about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Or rather, what he likes is that Mitchell puts such an embrace to work in grasping possible futures.

In a way, the magisterial achievement of Jameson, what pushes him beyond Lukacs, is his sense that period styles are not philosophies with truth content, but are more truly historical, they are stories. Some periods have greater affordances in their stories, exceptional writers can make use of those affordances, but the point is that they can only go as far as history will carry them.

For me, whose first love is poetry, there is something bracing about Jameson’s hostility to what I take to be poetic rather than narrative attempts to find Utopia, glimpses of a better world in the form giving of language itself, which, being contingent on things like the sounds of words and specific national etymologies, can never be rational. There are no particular patterns or shapes of language that can be the gaps through which the messiah might enter. Jameson:

that the very conception of something like language as "unique", as having "properties" in the first place and as though it were a thing that could be compared or not to other "things," is itself the modernist ideology in question here.”

But often when Jameson offers particular judgments of books, forms and strategies that might serve his Utopian urges today—Utopian urges that require grasping the typicality of certain kinds of experience, rather than their particularity—the works strike me as profoundly idiosyncratic choices, to say the least. Is Cloud Atlas’s use of historical pastiche a glimpse of Utopia? Is Cloud Atlas any good? Even the poetry of Bob Perelman is better.

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Jameson’s strikes me, personally, as typical of the great judgments of this kind of Marxist criticism. The experience of structure is prioritised as the truth of a work of art. But the structure has to be, as it were, actually true, has to be typical. The way such critics look at the writing of their contemporaries, generally, seems to systematically deprecate the stylistic achievements of the present, seems incapable of grasping what is not typical about them.

This has something, to do, I think, with the dismissal, or lack of interest in the lyric, the lyrical, by which I, personally, mean the truthfulness of phenomenal experience itself. Character is a form of social relation, but the sensory, emotional capacities of lyric are sometimes thought of as anti-social, even when they are about real people—real social situations—they tend inevitably towards Lukacs’ abstract particularity. If what Lukacs describes is true, if modernism is to be dismissed by comparison to realism, so too is the entirety of lyric poetry. For the early Lukacs, only the novel could overcome the meaninglessness of the world.

Because lyric poetry is often seen as in some sense ‘universal’ rather than typical, or, on the other hand purely individual, the essence of the lyrical—the impulse to dignify phenomenal experience—is at best decorative and at worst a symptom of ‘bourgeois ideology’. But this is to underrate the utopian potential, I think, and certainly the power, and the importance to what we love, of the human sensorium itself.

Which ought to bring us to the present and Anna Kornbluh’s immediacy, where some of the issues seem easier for me to grasp.

2. Immediacy

I’ll let Kornbluh define her terms, which she does with undeniable distinctiveness. Immediacy is: ‘a master category for making sense of twenty-first-century cultural production.’:

Immediacy is instant; mediation dilates.

Immediacy is urgent; mediation displaces.

Immediacy flows; mediation bars.

Immediacy confesses; mediation intermixes.

Immediacy laps; mediation relates.”

I found the very conscious decision to use transitive verbs intransitively across the book annoying at first, but once you go with the flow, the argument is an interesting one.

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At present, instead of trying to create a complex work of art in which the medium (language, paint, film, etc) is foregrounded to occasion a certain kind of reflection, cultural production, Kornbluh thinks, is under an intense gravitational pressure to bypass the medium—to ‘cut out the middleman’. As she puts it: “In the current climate [...] art renounces its own project of mediation. Directness and literalism are the techniques; immersiveness and surety are the effects.” Immediacy, then, is the drive to simplify and intensify, to do without mediation; to cut out the middleman; to become content.

What makes a film and a listicle and a gallery show all content? What are they the content of? They are the content of human attention, all equally This in the sensorium of a consumer, quantifiable in the time measured on whatever platform offers them up, and qualitatively registered as affecting. This is, I think, under-attended to in all the reviews I’ve seen of Immediacy. Its attempt to connect the commodification of attention to the slackening craft of contemporary fiction hangs on a critique of affect as a poor substitute for reflection. That is to say not that emotion is less important than thought, but that to be affected, to respond at all, does not necessarily grasp the shape of the process doing the affecting. Indeed, the true shape of the process, as we shall see, is hidden by (or is) a culture that fosters the illusion of direct, interpersonal communication. An immediate work, then, aims to collapse the thought of the creator into the work’s medium and into the body of the reader. Content is flow between the producer and consumer. It is registered as presence, showing up, essentially, as bodily affect, being moved.

Kornbluh opens with illustrations drawn from highish art (Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present) and Kitsch (Van Gogha, an immersive digital art/Yoga abomination that Kornbluh seems to have attended ironically). Both are emblems of the “hulling of artforms down to affective transfer.”

All kinds of contemporary cultural production styles seem to Kornbluh to seek this condition of immediacy, to grab people. Her examples of what counts as immediacy are many and varied, including the baggy autofiction of Knausgaard, the preeminence of the prose poem in the last decade, and in the most successful chapter, I think, various kinds of contemporary critical theory that foreground the author’s affective involvement with their critique.

Immediacy is a style in something like the way that postmodernism was a ‘cultural logic’ for Jameson. In both cases, a condition of the global economy conditions a style. I’m going to belabour some of this economic stuff, partly because I think critics have a tendency to rush over it, accepting the suggestive analogy without really making clear the mechanism. Or at least that’s what it feels like for me.

Modernism, as I said, for Jameson, comes from the expansion of the economic world system. Basically, because such a large-scale imperial system is made functional and comprehensible only through the abstraction of money, it results in an abstraction of style, indeed an abstraction into style. Postmodernism, meanwhile, is the recognition of the total subsumption of culture into the global market, causing a ‘loss of historicity’, as he puts it in Postmodernism, or later a ‘deterritorialization’ (in this suggestive essay). This deterretorialization is caused by an intensification of the processes of modernism, resulting in the full autonomy of finance from anyone trying to comprehend it. In modernity, money made the world go round by making everything equivalent, but this equivalency was viewed from the standpoint of the bourgeois consumer, we might say, resulting in modernism’s flux of images. But in postmodernity, finance capital became independent of any human perspective, fully autonomous. This resulted, Jameson argued, in the ‘waning of affect’.

Immediacy, meanwhile, riffs on the same change as Jameson, financialization; but it deals with the failure of certain financial speculations in the present. Immediacy is a different matter from postmodernism:

Where postmodernism revels in mediation—intertextuality, irony, the meta—immediacy negates mediation to effect flow and indistinction. [...] Where postmodern affect undergoes “waning”—a dilution of modernist ferocity like anomie and alienation into “free-floating” flatness—immediacy’s affects wax rapt and veritable. Where postmodernism inscribes “a crisis of historicity,” immediacy encodes a crisis of futurity, a beclouded nonhorizon”

We might argue, perhaps, that the destruction of a lot of fictitious capital (valueless financial instruments) in the late 2000s resulted in the waning of fictionality.¹ What David Shields called ‘Reality Hunger’, and more generally, autofiction, came to seem the most culturally apt styles.

Kornbluh’s immediacy seems to imply a more direct homology or shared form between the economy and culture than Jameson did. In Jameson’s model, the unmappability of the economy has an effect on the psychic life of subjects, who imagine vast and incomprehensible patterns from inhuman perspectives, or treat the whole of literary history as flatly available to pastiche because nothing really ‘fits’ anywhere. It is absence really that shows up in his system. For Kornbluh, what matters is presence, a presence which is directly modelled on the rapid transmission she says has become the backbone of the 21^st century economy. Partly because we now experience the abstracted world as presence, a buzzing in the pocket, we write in a similar way:

For it turns out that this urge to cut out the middleman does not upraise art so much as merge it with a sweeping spate of other social and commercial activities, from gig labor to self-publishing to e-brokerage. The big business of “disintermediation” accompanies the aesthetic happenings we’re observing: flexibility and fluidity, emanation and connectivity, directness and instantaneity are economic premiums as much as they are artistic ones.”

Kornbluh’s account of what brings on this urge to cut out the middle man is the one that Marxists, including Jameson, have tended to offer in recent years. That is to say the declining productivity/profitability of the developed world economies since the 1970s—what Robert Brenner calls ‘the long downturn’ –has reshaped first production and then cultural production.

Because production is no longer a functional path to the accumulation of value, our whole economy is becoming more and more geared towards circulation. “Capitalist production has been contracting. A compensatory expansion of circulation is underway.” We are not making more goods. But we are selling them more easily. Circulation, in the Marxist sense is simply selling. While in theory for Marx, value can only be made by expropriating the value of labour power, and then selling it on the market, money can still be made purely by the increasing circulation of money and commodities. Even if you are not producing more, you can make more money by speeding up the process of selling across the whole economy in a kind of musical chairs fashion, people running faster around a shrinking number of prizes.

For Kornbluh this is not just a question of fictitious capital, of financial instruments and pumping up the stock market etc, but rather of the infrastructure that mediates circulation in general. It is not about designing derivatives, but rather making it possible to do stock market trades on your phone. For Jameson, the global economy (like history) is basically one vast absence; whereas Kornbluh thinks everything in our current era tends towards making it present for you, conceived as something like a personal relationship. Thus we end up with a kind of dialectical inversion of postmodernism:

The magnification of the circulation process impresses the express—everything emanates; everything is instant—and creates the conditions for immediacy. After the digital, we remain in the same historical phase of the accumulation crisis that defines postmodernism, but, through the severity and duration of secular stagnation, we take up a different relation to the very media of which that style might be composed: an obfuscation of mediation.

The signal instances for Kornbluh of this obfuscation, this extremely complex way of making things very simple include just in time logistics, high frequency trading, and the graphic interfaces of modern digital programmes. All of these things are extremely elaborate structures that help to create the experience of frictionlessness, “to facilitate direct contact and instant fulfillment...”

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I think this description of the way that global capital ‘shows up’ for us seems very plausible. And when you consider, for example, the way that social media platforms both simulate direct connection, and even channel these direct connections into a rigid structure, like and share, registering simplified affect and furthering circulation, we can see how works of art might become optimised not so much to be content of attention, but content of the measured attention of social media platforms. Films are made to be clipped to tiktok, books are made to be emoted about on tiktok, or liked on twitter etc—we have the illusion of personal presence, a poem speaking to you, but really it speaks about the medium of digital platforms.

In each chapter, Kornbluh lays a lot of emphasis on other, secondary mediations, such as the pubslihing industry itself, and the economics of higher ed, but because there are all small circles within the large circle of circulation, they tend towards the same effect. Her chapter on fiction. thus offers a persuasive diagnosis and critique of the current ‘dominant style’:

—one that converges hitherto-distinct genres of theory, fiction, memoir, the essay, and informal personal expression in a ubiquitous polyvalent writing. In the liquid emulsion of these modes, in their propensity for indistinct blur, in their churning flow, glides the writerly guise of propulsive circulation: [...] Slick with this style, we may fail to read how the “auto” of autofiction inscribes the self-manifestive quality common to the governmental ideology of human capital, how the engulfing formlessness of genre melt ferries less the genius of authors than the flooded ruins of institutions like the university or the publishing house, how the defigurative realness of unadorned charismatic persons suffering execrably presages the dystopia already here. Immediacy as literary style holds incredible lure, but it sticks too close. In resigning the potential of writing to estrange, abstract, and mediate; in castigating the capacity of writing to collectivize and convoke; in deflating the power of writing to fabricate more than the immediately tangible detritus of evacuated sociality, immediacy writing collapses into self-identical emission: “This!”

Immediacy, thus, is pure ideology. The ‘This’ takes so much for granted that when we focus on it, we cannot really see anything at all. Kornbluh quite cleverly and subtly quotes Karl Ove Knausgaard echoing almost word for word Margaret Thatcher’s ‘There’s no such thing as society’, when explaining how his form of reality hunger works. My Struggle is not our struggle. And to write in this way, Kornbluh implies, is to foreclose the possibility that we might recognise a shared struggle.

We might say that the traditional structures of fictionality, for Kornbluh, are society. A good novel portrays character as a social dynamic, whereas My Struggle pretends to address you directly, or even to be speaking to itself. Rachel Cusk, Ocean Vuong, Tao Lin, Megan Boyle, among others all prioritise directness over fiction. For fiction, you need type. Without it you end up repeating the lies undergirding all our other economic activities:

The category of immediacy situates these antifictional energies in conjunction with the emissive proclivities of a circulation-forward economic phase, with the obfuscation of symbolic code that underwrites digital interfaces

There’s something to this, I think. That what is typical of our present moment in writing has this urge to cut out the middleman in common with the wider economy seems self-evidently true. The question that I have is, does that make it necessarily bad?

For Kornbluh, it clearly does, because the waning of fictionality lies. Even though Knausgaard is claiming the mantle of realism, he is rejecting the true reference of the novel to reality, to the structure of society. It seems obvious to me, that like Jameson, Korbluh is basically throwing in her lot with Lukacs, and saying that the novel has to show us something more real than the subject and their phenomenal experience (which of course is an illusion in language anyway). There is quite a lengthy and impassioned footnote on the question of realism:

“Current realism virtually exclusively composes itself in the first person. The practitioners, as we have seen, theorize this phenomenal consciousness as the antifictional, identifying author and “I,” razing the inventive houses of fiction, laminating plotlessness to the sensate plane of experience, abrading the representational capacities of language down into imagistic expressivism. Immediatist, expressivist self-possession of the first-person dominant evicts the radical fictionality of nonphenomenal consciousness, forecloses the project of regarding the lives of others, and hocks literature instead as the idiomatically privatized circulation of human capital, good only for stroking ego psychology and soliciting identifications.”

For Lukacs, the real is the typical, because it is the typical through which humans as social animals graps reality in its individuality. For Kornbluh, we might say, the typical is a kind of mediation, a way of grasping things not in isolation, but as related separate processes, as other than blur.

You might valuably pair this book with Timothy Bewes’ anti-Lukacsian Free Indirect, which tells a story of the 21^st century novel seeking to break with typicality. For Bewes, this break is good, the culmination of the true ‘thought’ of the novel, doubly good insofar it resembles the transcendental empiricism of Deleuze. The dissolution of typicality serves as a higher order ‘realism’ than realism. Kornbluh, on the other hand, says that any such rupture is a symptom of a political-economic transformation, obfuscating the true, mediated nature of social experience, which is bad. In both cases, there is something like a need in fiction for an anchoring in the ontologically real, they just locate this in different places. Indeed, Kornbluh suggests that the Deleuzian flux precisely is the false vision of ‘bourgeois ideology’.

I’m inclined to agree with Kornbluh that we ought to understand the world as the production of historical, categorical processes that need to be delineated. That we ought to read the waning of fictionality as a symptom seems right to me, and that we ought to be suspicious of letting platforms form our transmission of affect. And yet I find this ultimate insistence on realism to be somehow missing the point. I’ll try to clarify below, but the most pithy way I can put it is that you go to war with the army you have. Writers ought to be symptomatic, typical of their age—that’s the first step towards being exceptional. That typicality however is not because they are trying to reflect reality, but because they have to start by rejecting it.²

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Kornbluh’s traditionalism in matters of reality, also, I think, leads her into some strange cul-de sacs. In one case she cites statistical evidence from Ted Underwood that there has been a decline in third-person narration. This is taken as an index both of narcissism, a bloating of subjectivity, and also of the inability for such writing to grapple with reality. But her preference here for “historical realists who worked in antiphenomenal omniscience”, seems to imply that say, Great Expectations, would fall short of the true power of fictional mediation and not connect the individual to social life.

First-person and third person narration don’t seem to me to have anything to do with it. Sure, in the aggregate it indexes something, but how useful is the aggregate? If you can write Robinson Crusoe, Moby Dick, The Good Soldier, The Waves, Hunger, Malina, Invisible Man, White Noise, A Heart so White, a large chunk of Japanese fiction, etc... in the first person, what does it tell you? At the end, Kornbluh extols Brandon Taylor’s ok novel Real Life, basically just for using the third person. But it seems to me that Real Life shares the autofictional preoccupation with what Kornbluh calls the ‘realness of unadorned charismatic persons suffering execrably’, to its detriment. It’s an interesting novel, in the way that the later fiction of Salley Rooney is interesting, because it tries to use some elements of conventional fictionality to deal with the current imperatives of presence. And yet, how could the third person alone possibly be adequate? What the well-enough-wrought fictional carapace does, in Taylor’s case, is make the novel seem flat, overly studied. The bursting in of intense feeling towards the end becomes formulaic, in spite of its intensity. It could have done with more formlessness.

On a wider view, it also, I think, seems neglectful to write about autofiction and leave out Ben Lerner. This is a man who writes, in his own words about experiencing ‘our mediacy immediately’, who uses every stylistic trick that Kornbluh deprecates, and yet is obsessed with these questions at a self-conscious mediated level. How and whether he falls short of adequate mediation would have been an interesting topic, but would have required dealing with the exceptional as well as the typical in an individual writer, and not simply taking a cursory measurement of narratorial pronouns.

Kornbluh’s reading seems to me to miss the point of autofiction—yes it shares a shape with the larger aesthetics of presence, but why in particular in prestige literature is there a line, developing from (let’s guess) Beckett through to Bernhard and Bachman, Marias, and Sebald, towards the contemporary pseudo-monologic forms? If from the outside it is mediated by immediacy, what is visible on the inside?

I have argued elsewhere that some Anglophone autofiction was, if anything, an attempt to find the cognitive map called for by Jameson, after the conspiratorial plots of hysterical realism came to seem inadequate for that task. The thinker themselves is positioned in social reality by their thoughts, the essaysistic is a concession to formlessness because nothing can give social life form—it has become content in precisely the affective manner Kornbluh talks about, a tugging on the nerves. The writer has to find a way to dramatise this tugging, to give it rhythm in excess of the reality of experience.

An effort at Jamesonian cognitive mapping can be witnessed most obviously (indeed sometimes clunkingly) in moments that I have elsewhere called the supply-chain sublime. These books are full of moments when the direct access of persons to things reveal the huge undergirding infrastructure of global capitalism itself. If, as Kornbluh suggests, the personal, unmediated experience is in fact profoundly mediated, why couldn’t writers work from this perspective to get to the real? I think that price itself, as a mediating fiction between desire and society, might be one path for writers to attempt that contact with reality. That this kind of self-consciousness seems to have calcified into a somewhat lame cliche, doesn’t mean that there wasn’t something vital in the best instances of autofiction. Perhaps however, the value lay not in the cognitive map, but in the effort put into mapping. Immediacy hides not just mediation, but labour, and the question I think any writer needs to ask is how to put the work in, how to make it show up for others. Sometimes that can even take the form of disappearing (‘If it does not seem a moment’s thought/ our stitching and unstitching has been nought’).

It is, I believe, possible for a book to exactly embody the period-style of immediacy and be profound and true. Just as it is possible for the kind of writing popular in the heyday of Victorian realism to be awful or brilliant. Kornbluh’s diagnosis, I think, will in future look just as strange as Lukacs’ insistence that modernism was a step down from realism.

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The most symptomatic aspect of the book’s Lukacsian marxism is not Kornbluh’s hostility to the first-person as a narrative form, but the hostility to a phenomenality and affect that have grown overweening. It is true that these are the symptoms of our age, that the ‘This’ (so much this!) of self-evident identificatory response has become a cliche of internet speak, and that it enables commodification. Perception and response have become blurry. People resonate with things. We talk too much about vibes. Kornbluh thinks that writing once apprehended objects as they were; that by modelling forms in their distinctness, we could understand the way the world works. And yet, I want to say, the thisness of things, their registration in our attention, is not so worthless as that.

What Kornbluh is interested in, always, is structure, social forms. But I think, if we must have ontologically/socially real structures to have valuable literature, then we can get to those through the effort needed to bring sensation into language and, if need be, through this alone. I don’t have time, and I doubt you have the patience for me to really explain what I mean, but I think it is possible to think of literature as not a model of the forms of reality, but modelling the power humans have to form. That’s what writing well is, and it doesn’t require any specific style or content or plot. It requires writerly labour. That doesn’t require a celebration of bourgeois subject hood--attention is genuinely social. If it wasn't social media wouldn't work.

Marxist criticism has, as a rule, been inadequately interested in not how humans are shaped but how humans are capable of shaping. Rather than talk just about social dynamics, literature is also about capacity—poetry, and fiction after modernism, are attempts to extend human capacity not because of any particular social content, or even social form but because of the things they do with our attention, the things they show us that we can do with it. The evidence of fiction is that we deserve better than reality.

I agree with Kornbluh that contemporary cultural production has an impoverished register of presence, shaped by platforms, homologous perhaps to the process of circulation that she talks about. Our attention has been enclosed. And yet I think that much of the best contemporary writing is capable of dramatising the play between this thin presence, and the real richness of the human senses, which are themselves, as a wise man once said historical and social, and which writing brings us back to: as evidence of our capability of living more beautifully than we really do:

Let us look at this in its subjective aspect. Just as only music awakens in man the sense of music, and just as the most beautiful music has no sense for the unmusical ear – is [no] object for it, because my object can only be the confirmation of one of my essential powers – it can therefore only exist for me insofar as my essential power exists for itself as a subjective capacity; because the meaning of an object for me goes only so far as my sense goes (has only a meaning for a sense corresponding to that object) – for this reason the senses of the social man differ from those of the non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for beauty of form – in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of man) either cultivated or brought into being. For not only the five senses but also the so-called mental senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, human sense, the human nature of the senses, comes to be by virtue of its object, by virtue of humanised nature. The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.

Our present constrains sensory experience for reasons precisely iterated by Kornbluh, but within this constraint, there is still much to be done.

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1. How does this square with the fact that right now, thanks to crypto, NFTS and the like, we have more investment in non-productive (fictitious capital) than ever? Perhaps Kornbluh would say that now we don’t really have a fiction of value. It’s bullshit capital rather than fictitious?

2. This review of Immediacy by Jensen Suther strikes me as interesting in this respect—his Hegelian, infinitely more fluent than mine, allows him to point out that sense certainty and its immediacy is something that cannot be refused but has to be sublated, gone through. As he puts it:

This reflects a form of theoretical voluntarism to the extent that immediacy is understood as a choice as opposed to a socially necessary thought-form

But then, following his claim of social necessity, it becomes clear that he simply reads contemporary autofictional work as essentially expressive of ‘the cunning of reason’. We move from socially symptomatic (derogatory) to sociallly symptomatic (laudatory) but we go no further:

This suggests that autofiction is less a wrong turn, an embrace of “immediacy,” than a socially and artistically necessary narration of the stultifying character of our social roles and of the illusion it engenders of individual authenticity in moments of dissolution, beyond any narrative “summing up.” The narrator’s “cruelty,” as one critic calls it, or her attitude of superiority towards the narratives of her “subjects,” reflects not a character flaw on the part of Cusk but the historically indexed inhumanity and solipsism of neoliberal individuality.

I think leaving out the question of Cusk’s character does a lot of damage here. Reflection, indeed, seems to beg the question of what novels are trying to do.