Too Late Capitalism and the Vibes Economy: On Immediacy and Music
Immediacy Style
In my little corner of the internet, Anna Kornbluh’s new book Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism has been everywhere lately. Its critique doesn’t shatter as much as it slices cleanly through any lingering illusions about the promise of the future while living in a capitalist regime that has already ruined the planet, and as such seems to have struck something of a nerve. Even for someone fairly well-read in critical theory, I experienced anew and throughout that particular combination of overwhelming dread and simultaneous excitement at the clarity of the diagnosis that was characteristic of my first encounters with Adorno, Jameson, and Marx. Indeed, the book is in part a kind of answer to Jameson, proceeding from the premise that postmodernism is no longer an adequate aesthetico-political framework for understanding our times.
Distinct from postmodernism’s pastiched mashups of media, Kornbluh advances immediacy as a style seeking to reduce mediation altogether, producing work that aims to sensorily overwhelm, to flood the eyes so as to reduce the distance between perceiver and perceived such that there is no gap in transmission—the smoothest flow possible, the ambition behind the imperative to “inject that shit into my veins.” The catch of course is that art requires distance.
Conventionally, art takes up a discernible medium and takes creative distance from ordinary communication or banal functionality, making an appeal to the senses that reroutes common sense. A painting isn’t an efficient way to send a message or achieve a goal, but beholding its inefficient indirection can stimulate thought.
Immediacy, by contrast, “repudiates representation itself,” for example, in literature, by “dismantling narration, character, plot, and the smoke of myth in favor of simply manifesting viscerally affecting stuff.” In the same way that Amazon’s business thrives on getting anything from anywhere to you as quickly as possible (and on the backs of contingent laborers), immediacy aesthetics take shape in a world remade by the surplus value generated by hypercirculation, the reduction of inefficiencies rather than the production of new goods. Social media doesn’t need to provide anything materially beneficial in order to make you click through its contents; but the faster, longer, and more efficiently you do, the more money they make on advertising.
Following Jameson, Kornbluh insists on immediacy style as an expression of underlying material conditions: “Crushing lateness and routinized abjection increasingly limit imaginative departures from reality. The petrodepression hell-scape is quashing creativity.” Because art needs mediation in order to exist, it’s not that mediation disappears; rather, work trapped by epistemologies of the present increasingly pretends it does, works for mediation’s abolition, reduces it so thoroughly that it becomes imperceptible. In other words, Kornbluh suggests that in the regime of immediacy, mediation has all but disappeared; aesthetic experience no longer raises the entanglement of self-other-medium-context but conflates them all so that we can simply inhabit a vibe. While it’s technically true that #ImmersiveVanGogh requires as much material (in this case digital) mediation as his original paintings did, the affective experience of doing yoga in the gallery forces an infinite recession of that fact to the null-point of the now.
These arguments are rolling around my head during what remains, if waning, our collective brat summer. It’s difficult not to see the uptake of Jools Lebron’s “demure” phrasing by everyone from Joe Biden to PacSun as damning evidence that we live inside a forever present where culture is reduced to infinitely fungible content. What is the message here? What does it mean to be/have/act demure? Like the brat meme, there’s nothing behind this trend but an imperative to be in with the current discourse, to know what everyone’s talking about even if that never requires thinking about it in any detail. Inhabit this now, our culture says; tomorrow it will be something else.
This is why our brains hurt.
Beyond endorsing the broad Marxist framework shared by Jameson and Kornbluh, I am particularly convinced by the latter’s theorizing about the affective and cognitive experiences of immediacy, or to ground it in an example, how the scrolling through feeds warps the way we perceive reality. Her writing captures what it feels like to perceive my brain perceiving itself getting worse at skills like short-term memory, focus, and nervous system regulation, the feeling of disorientation from imbibing a succession of non-related media—police brutality/cabbage pancake recipe/congressional hearing/outfit of the day—“everything everywhere all at once.” “Drowning in a deluge of images without context, words without meaning [“It’s so aesthetic!”], information without distinction—this is the subjective experience in an economy of immediacy.” Reading this is distressing both because it’s accurate and because of its implications on our future capacities to even apprehend what’s happening to us. Like the threat of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—which Kornbluh points out diminishes cognitive abilities—the immediacy economy steadily erodes that most definitive human capability: thinking. When aesthetic experience is reduced to a feed, “seeing becomes reading”—we need only look, rather than consider.
To be fair, something of this dynamic has been with us since the beginning of the age of mechanical reproducibility—Walter Benjamin, for example, disapprovingly cites Georges Duhamel’s contemporary lament from 1930: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.” Nevertheless, as the economy shifts ever more towards circulation and away from production (or more toward financialized abstraction, or more towards the climate death drive, et al.)—it feels increasingly difficult to deny that we are experiencing a shift rather than an intensification of older dynamics. In the same way that postmodernism retained and mutated elements of modernist aesthetics, immediacy doesn’t totally depart from postmodernism; the floating circulation of the image susceptible to manipulation that Benjamin identified is still characteristic of culture under too late capitalism. What’s different is the transformation in how those images are circulated and consumed, a process that has so overwhelmed human anatomy such that the formal qualities of that delivery system have started to imprint themselves upon the work itself, turning a pastiche of mediated styles into one homogenous stream of anti-mediated overwhelm.
Academia and Critical Theory’s Music Problem
I suspect that the most controversial aspect of the argument will be Kornbluh’s inclusion of autotheory under the framework of immediacy, not because academics are hyper-sensitive to critique (although we are) but because autotheory has in some ways developed with self-reflexive attention to its own formation as a style specifically oriented towards contesting hegemonic white/masculine modes of writing; in other words, that queer, feminist, and minoritized academics are overrepresented in autotheory should indicate a complication in Kornbluh’s framing, one that isn’t adequately addressed in the book.
I myself bristled during this chapter, particularly when Kornbluh came for affect, a central methodological framework in my work. On the one hand, and like another polemic I slightly too naively reviewed, Kornbluh’s generalizing of a field of critical theory while cherry-picking a few examples comes across, at times, as a bad-faith endeavor—particularly fraught when (again) the associations between that field of theory and minoritized scholars is both strong and justified. On the other hand, while this section moves too quickly and too carelessly for my taste, it also continually returns to points with which I have a hard time disagreeing. Here’s one:
It is good to make theory for the people. It is bad to portray the historical erosion of theory’s conditions of production, including the reproduction of the class of professional intellectuals, as an endogenous style evolution of self-proclaimed “weak theory” and “amateur criticism.”
As I understand it, the argument here is that autotheoretical/engaging/public writing shouldn’t be celebrated as an innovative way to expand theory beyond the ivory tower so much as it should be recognized as a logical outgrowth of the fact that academic scholarship that doesn’t cut it with the public is increasingly disposable for administrators, an esoteric genre for those few of us left on the tenure track who can afford to continue talking to one another. As someone who has always believed that “public humanities” work solves a problem different from the ones actually assailing academia, the above is a welcome and pithy argument: we can’t brand ourselves out of structural problems, can’t find enough public engagement on an private level to fix the fact that state governments no longer believe in funding education as a public good, no matter how much the attention from New York Times readers might help us individually stay afloat.
I’m less sure about the conceit informing Kornbluh’s reading, however, which implies that our collapsing institutional supports are the cause behind a turn to autotheory and lifewriting as critical theory, that the latter is effectively a symptom of the former. This, it seems to me, mostly sidesteps the point that feminist standpoint theory coming out of the Combahee River Collective statement—and much subsequent work in Queer/Black feminism—advanced. It does a disservice to those works that self-consciously theorized out from personal experience, rather than myopically remaining there, as Kornbluh implies. At worst, it participates in the Western/patriarchal conflation that reads personal writing as inherently non-rigorous. Here’s another area where any engagement with music (scholarship) might have complicated the argument: Francesca Royster, Hanif Abdurraqib, Carl Wilson, Ann Powers, and loads of others have long since put to rest the fiction that poetic, engaging writing can’t co-exist with our most profound scholarly insights, as if the effort of wordcraft doesn’t help to arrive there in the first place.
And as with any critical theory worth its name, there are other critiques to be made. Critical theory can’t by definition capture everything it aims to; the point is to provoke new frameworks for thinking. For my part, I am still very much digesting Immediacy and its critiques. In the meantime, I am also trying to think through how its ideas might apply to music, that artform so reliably left out of critical theory and indeed ignored in this book, capacious as its other references are. From Berlant to Rancière, to Kornbluh herself, Adorno seems the exception that proves this rule—perhaps for good reason. In Immediacy, the opening of the second chapter reads, “Immediacy stylizes the intensification of circulation, and nothing circulates faster than images.” This left me wondering whether or not and to what extent music might naturally resist the economy of immediacy insofar as it stubbornly insists on unfolding in phenomenological time. Your brain can process a dump of images in seconds; but to listen to a song from beginning to end requires the amount of time that it takes. There’s no rushing it without distortion.
While one might be tempted to identify Billie Eilish’s ASMR-inflected approach to mic technique as an example of immediacy style’s distance-shrinking operation, other aspects of her career—for example, the highly stylized and shifting characters presented in her music videos—contradict the impression that her music takes listeners directly into her (real, actual) bedroom, her unmediated mind. On the other hand, Olivia Rodrigo rose to fame with the kind of first-person “confessional” narratives that help fans feel as if they actually know her; but reading creative musical productions as “authentic” translations of an artist’s inner emotional life is a tradition as old as popular music itself, particularly where concerns the history of “singer songwriters” at the piano. Consequently, I am not convinced that anything happening in music at the top of the charts necessarily demonstrates a sea-change in which mediation—utterly necessary for musical production—is waning.
This gets at one of the tensions in Immediacy, which to my mind involves the (non)distinction between production and distribution. Where popular music itself may complicate some of Kornbluh’s arguments, its distribution across streaming platforms like Spotify perfectly accords with her readings of Netflix as one of the primary drivers of immediacy style, a delivery vehicle facilitating our willing burial under a flood of “content.” Music has always felt to me like the weirdest outlier in Jameson’s theory of postmodernism; but focusing on shifts in how music is distributed to the public clearly connects to corresponding shifts in the broader economy, a connection that scholars have started to theorize by linking streaming algorithms to the finance capital that funds them.
The Vibes Economy
One important aspect of how too late capitalism circulates ever more violently is the precondition of flattening: in order to reduce experience into an algorithmic feed, complex qualities must be reduced to tags and categories for easier sorting. The closest too late capitalism has gotten to rendering music flat—i.e. hyperconsumable—has been through the intervention of financialized streaming platforms like Spotify, which have mitigated music’s natural resistance to information flood by flattening music down to a common affective denominator; as Robin James has argued, “vibes” are increasingly overcoming “genres” as organizational categories not because our culture transcended the need for genre categories, but because vibes are more financially useful for the advertising that underwrites Spotify’s perpetual growth. Subordinating musical differences to an ur-cateogory, vibes like “chill,” and vibes-oriented playlists like “POLLEN” organize music based on affective orientations that belie the ways in which taste preferences tied to identity markers continue to structure decision-making behind the scenes. When cathected to vibes, user listening experiences become useful mood indicators that advertisers can use to target specific perceived needs, making Spotify more appealing as a business and therefore raising its stock value. As James puts it, “Vibes are how we perceive ourselves the way AI and finance perceive us.” Thus the “official visualizer” overtakes the music video as a format emerging from YouTube itself, moving away from narrative in favor of atmospherics, and demonstrating how distribution platforms affect form.
This has everything to do with music as an industry rather than a practice, with its circulation and distribution by an increasingly small number of companies with an increasingly large share of power. Music accords with immediacy style to the extent that it is caught up in our in profit-making and financialization, which, in a moment when Spotify has demonetized most of its artists, actually represents a small fraction of the music that’s out there. While Beyoncé and Taylor Swift represent the music industry’s franchise era, any semblance of basic social support for working musicians have been all but destroyed by successive decades of neoliberal policy, creating a stark disjunction between those at the top of the industry and everyone else. I am left to wonder if Kornbluh’s argument therefore applies to music only to the extent that music is synonymous with the music industry. Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX, on this view, produce music that fits perfectly within the immediacy economy’s fetish of mood, atmosphere, and vibe: Carpenter’s “Espresso” gives us—among other wonderful things—ultimate neoliberal chill (“I can’t relate/to desperation”), where brat repackages the realities of living messily (as a woman) under capitalism as resistance to a mainstream that insists nothing’s happening.
On this view, the greater a band’s distance from this industry, the less relevant Immediacy becomes for interpreting its aesthetic and social work. In the era of the luxury condo, the eviscerated social safety net, and zombie public services, a band that can afford to make music not a ton of people listen to is rare, precious, and worth protecting.
