In popular music, the "style of late capitalism" is NOTHING

I have written a lot about the fact that contemporary American popular culture (note that’s 5 links to 5 pieces) is increasingly shifting away from the political ontology that subtends both Western Enlightenment aesthetics (what Ranciere calls “the aesthetic regime of art”) and classically liberal social contract theory and towards one that prioritizes things like private responsibility, private individual preference, the performance of bad taste as a rejection of society and its potential normativity. The traditional ideals of bourgeois good taste, sensus communis, and so on, are out, and we’re figuring out what’s now in.

Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy is also about this shift: on page one, she notes “the social activity of representation is slackening.” Elsewhere she remarks that corresponding ideals like disinterestedness and fine art - aka “creative distance from ordinary communications or banal functionality” (5) are likewise falling out of fashion. Similarly, the classically liberal ideal of the “abstract equivalent” (4) is on the wane; the subject of the “Ethical Substance” section of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the “abstract equivalent” is the civil person who is formally equally to every other civil person by virtue of their separation from private differences (like gender, or more accurately, femininity) - think “one person, one vote.” All of these phenomena are thought to embody objectivity and universality because they exist at the level of civil society, the public sphere, or however you prefer to frame this realm separated out from the world of private difference and social reproduction.

Fine art is likewise universal because it is separate from the private sphere of social reproduction and its pesky tethering to material necessity (you can’t make a cup and saucer with fur and expect people to like drink out of it, but it sure looks good under plexiglass at The Art Institute). As feminist art historians of the 1970s pointed out, the fine art/craft hierarchy is nestled in the public/private distinction of classical liberalism.

In place of subjective universality, disinterestedness, the sensus communis, and all those other aesthetic concepts rooted in the political ontology of the classically liberal public/private divide, Kornbluh locates “immediacy”. For her, immediacy is “affective transfer” (2), “directness and literalness…immersiveness” (5), and “atomistic absorption” (15). Examples include “immersive” art happenings, social practice art, streaming video, and autotheory.

The “immediacy” Kornbluh identifies is a psychoanalytic one. In all cases, lots of mediation happens to produce the subjective experience ...