The Theory of Immediacy or the Immediacy of Theory?

Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism sets itself an admirable and worthwhile task: to counter the “immediatist” emphasis on affect over reason, materiality over medium, memoir over fiction, individual over collective, pervading contemporary culture and theory. The book is a tour de force polemic in its synthetic presentation of writers from Knausgaard to Cusk and theorists like Felski, Moten, and Latour as making common cause in their embrace of anti-politics, anti-theory, and all other manner of immediacy. What is most compelling about Kornbluh’s project is its central provocation, its willingness to defend the basically “rationalist” philosophical lineage stretching from Aristotle to Hegel to Marx and beyond. Kornbluh’s defense of this tradition against proponents of autotheory, vibrant materialism and object-oriented ontology, Afro-pessimism, and other varieties of the “new nihilism,” as it might be called, is important and necessary work. New materialism erases the distinction between human agents and inanimate objects in order to establish our continuity with the natural world, while Afro-pessimism ontologizes anti-Blackness as a constitutive feature of human reason. Kornbluh recognizes these as the disastrous positions they are, but it is not always clear that she is providing an argument as to why we should reject them. Kornbluh frequently frames this debate as a choice between two alternatives: anarchy or organization? simplicity or contradiction? immutability or history? immediacy or mediation? And Kornbluh is clear that she means to embrace “construction, contradiction, contingency … struggle and solidarity,” instead of the nihilism of her peers.1 But I want to question this framing and ask whether—for all of its synthetic pirouetting—Kornbluh’s project offers less a theory of immediacy than an immediate theory, committing a version of the fallacy she herself identifies. I note three places in the book where this becomes apparent. First, Kornbluh’s account of Hegel will enable us to specify the general nature of the difficulty. Second, the chapter on “Circulation” misses the socially necessary character of immediacy—the way that immediacy is itself mediated. And finally, Kornbluh’s account of autofiction and of Rachel Cusk in particular bears the poisoned fruit of her “immediate” conception of immediacy.

I.

Kornbluh addresses the philosophical origins of the critique of immediacy—in German, Unmittelbarkeit—rather late in the book, in the penultimate chapter on “Antitheory.” After detailed analyses in “Writing” and “Video” of the “immediacy style” of Knausgaard, the Safdie brothers, and others and the genealogical tracing of immediacy in “Circulation” to the purported predominance of capital circulation over production since the turn of the century, Kornbluh turns to the original, pathbreaking account of immediacy that opens Hegel’s Phenomenology. According to Kornbluh, Hegel “right away introduces immediacy as a prevalent error that any rigorous philosophy taking up a critical relation to its own conditions of possibility must preempt” (I, 153). Here, as elsewhere, Kornbluh presents immediacy as an option that theorists can choose or not; to refuse immediacy is to embrace the correct perspective, which centers relation, connection, collectivity, and structure. And in the opening chapter of the Phenomenology, on “Sense-Certainty,” Kornbluh finds Hegel similarly diagnosing and rejecting the erroneous perspective, thereby inaugurating theory proper. But does Hegel actually treat sense-certainty as simply an error to be opposed?

To answer this question, let’s look more closely at Kornbluh’s reconstruction. In her picture, sense-certainty is a paradigm of experience in which “fundamental objects present themselves to the mind through the senses and the mind enjoys certainty that it knows the objects” (I, 153). This represents a form of epistemological immediacy since thought takes itself to be acquainted with the world through the “simple data” that “present themselves to perception.” According to Kornbluh’s Hegel, “consciousness immediately integrates the data into concepts of the objects,” and the resulting immediacy “is both insufficient and illusory.” In contrast to this immediatist perspective, “[t]hought worthy of its name” grasps the apparently immediate objects of sense-certainty as the product of a complex process of mediation, via processing tools that are “socially and linguistically determined—such as the categories of space and time” (I, 154).

The first thing of note here is the details of the view ascribed to Hegel. Kornbluh’s claim that data is presented to “perception” and that sense-certain consciousness integrates data into concepts of objects distorts Hegel’s actual account. The idea that consciousness integrates data into concepts is a basically inductive Humean picture, which takes far more for granted than natural consciousness is meant to in these opening pages. Likewise, with “perception,” which is the subsequent paradigm in “Consciousness” and consists in discrimination of a substrate from its attributes, its perceptible qualities. In “Sense-Certainty,” all we have is the brute, sensuous this, bereft of all determinations.

I don’t mean to score cheap points here by way of a kind of flat-footed Hegel scholasticism. The reason this matters is that Kornbluh’s misreading of Hegel structures and informs the critique of immediacy pursued over the course of the book. Hegel does not proceed in the Phenomenology by opposing sense-certain consciousness to “thought worthy of its name” or, as Kornbluh writes in relation to the Logic, by showing that “philosophy necessarily begins not with [the] empty abstraction [of pure being] but rather with a more mediated ‘essence’” (I, 154). Hegel rather proceeds famously, “presuppositionlessly,” that is, without presupposing any higher-order principles or conceptual determinations. In the Logic, for example, Hegel takes as his starting point a logically purified and anonymized version of Parmenides’s founding insight into the identity of being and thinking: being is what is, non-being is what is not; accordingly, being is the true, non-being is the false, since whatever is not cannot be said to be. The point is not to reject this naïve, purely positive conception of being as the starting point of philosophy; the point is to show (1) that it is where we must begin if we are not to beg any questions or assume a conceptual apparatus in advance and (2) that “pure being” is an internally defective conception of being that fails by its own lights. That is, if being were restricted to what is, then we could not say of this that it is notthat, and of that that it is notthis. There would be no determinate distinguishability of one thing from another, such that pure being would prove identical with nothing.

A similar point can be made regarding “Sense-Certainty”: natural consciousness specifies the object of experience by exclaiming this or here. But such indexicals are too abstract to do the intending work with which they are tasked since “this” applies just as much to “this table” as to “this tree.” Consciousness does not integrate data into concepts but finds itself dependent upon universals that preclude its intending anything in particular. This is to say that if the object of experience is construed as it is in “Sense-Certainty,” as a “sensuous This,” then there can be no determinate experience of objects; this paradigm of knowing is shown to have been internally inconsistent. What sense-certain consciousness learns is not some grand theory of mediation (Hegel’s theory of the concept) but its own unavoidable dependence on universals, which generates a new paradigm of knowing and its object, perception.

What this is supposed to show is that there is no realist competitor to the conceptualist, rationalist view, and one shows this not by rejecting immediacy from the outset but by taking it as the necessary starting point of philosophy—both historically in the figure of Parmenides and logically.2 Immediacy proves to be self-mediating, and this has several consequences. First, it means that immediacy is a critical concept only to the extent that it undermines itself; unlike Kornbluh, Hegel does not oppose immediacy because he is a partisan of synthesis and solidarity rather than anarchy and dissolution. The necessity of conceptual, discursive, social, and intersubjective mediation can only be shown by confronting the standpoint of immediacy with its own internal defects, as we saw above.

Second, the immediacy of sense-certainty and of pure being is not only negated; it is also “preserved.” That is, when absolutized, immediacy collapses under its own conceptual weight, but it ultimately proves to be a neutral meta-concept that specifies a constitutive aspect of experience and of conceptual activity. This dimension of the account can be traced back to Aristotle’s notion of a τόδε τι, a this-something, a kind instantiated by this singular, non-fungible bit of matter. What is immediate and singular, matter, must be mediated and individuated by a kind-concept if it is to be the matter it is. On this view, immediacy is indispensable for understanding things as they are.

Both of the above points militate against the sort of polemic Kornbluh pursues. First of all, Kornbluh writes as if contemporary cultural products actually are immediate and thereby “decapacitate” reflection on them. This is why the critic must oppose immediacy from the outside. But the logical lesson we learn from Hegel is that pure immediacy is not possible in principle. The task of the critic is not to lord it over her object but to articulate the social, historical, and discursive mediations that make possible both the object and the critic’s knowledge of it. Kornbluh fails to live up to her book’s own epigraph—“Immediacy itself is essentially mediated”—in her repeated insinuation that immediacy is, in fact, immediate. In passage after passage, we are told that we must endorse “mediacy against immediacy” (I, 189), “embrace … construction, contradiction, contingency,” and exhibit a “taste for Hegelian determination” (I, 203), as if this were a question of preference, style, or allegiance. 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—a claim we explore below. We need not start from a commitment to mediation as our choice analytical bludgeon but immanently derive the necessity of mediation presuppositionlessly from the originary standpoint of immediacy—as I will demonstrate in the case of Cusk below.

There is a further issue here. Our contemporary predicament is not well-captured by the extremely abstract, meta-conceptual discourse of immediacy and mediation. These are, undoubtedly, invaluable analytic tools that enable us to diagnose a particularly intransigent epistemic defect. And Kornbluh rightly highlights Hegel’s concern in the Phenomenology and Logic with a kind of “epistemological immediacy” (or phenomenological and logical immediacy). But at the level of an analysis of concrete social forms, where immediacy in some form or another has—according to Hegel—characterized “all history hitherto,” greater specificity is required.3 That is, to anticipate our argument in the next section, Lukács’s classic account in History and Class Consciousness of reification specifies the form of immediacy characteristic of capitalist modernity, and it shows that immediacy has indeed been definitive of capitalism from the start.

II.

The task of Kornbluh’s chapter on “Circulation” is to establish the “economic substrate” of immediacy style (I, 33). This raises a number of important questions about the “causality” of the base, but for the sake of this discussion, I will leave them aside. Kornbluh denominates this new phase of cultural production “too late capitalism,” in which—she writes—the “overmuchness of lateness arrests itself.” If, according to Jameson’s well-known claim, postmodernism was the cultural logic of late capitalism, then immediacy style is the “cultural dominant” of too late capitalism; where postmodernism exhibits a “crisis of historicity,” immediacy style “encodes a crisis of futurity” (I, 13). Admittedly, it is not totally clear to me how this claim is supposed to work: Jameson, after all, already famously describes experience under postmodern conditions as “a series of pure and unrelated presents in time,” blocking the possibility of a future-oriented praxis.4 And those features that Kornbluh identifies as characteristic of immediacy style—like the breaking of the fourth wall in the series Fleabag—can seem arbitrary. (In an earlier passage, “irony” and “the meta” are associated with postmodernism [I, 13].) Nevertheless, let us turn to Kornbluh’s account of the economic underpinnings of the putatively new immediacy style.

In “Circulation,” Kornbluh follows the consensus view according to which, in the 1970s, a long economic downturn began to take hold. Marxist theorists like Robert Brenner have shown that the downturn can be explained in terms of Marx’s theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which is concisely summarized by Kornbluh (I, 27–28). Marx’s basic point, which was first made not by Marx but by bourgeois political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, is that the growing proportion of constant to variable capital tendentially results in a decrease in the rate of profit, owing to the displacement of living labor by dead labor, i.e., machines. According to Kornbluh, the resulting secular stagnation and contraction of capitalist production induces a “compensatory expansion of circulation,” meaning that capital compensates for its diminished productivity by, in essence, decreasing the time capital spends in its money and commodity forms. Following Giovanni Arrighi, Kornbluh points to multiple instances of “circulation dominance,” such as seventeenth-century mercantilism and nineteenth-century financialization. The twenty-first century represents a new period of circulation dominance, in which the focus on capital “flows” is held to “condition immediacy as cultural style” (30). Said differently, the compression of forms of mediation in the circulation process is taken to lead to the negation of mediacy as an orienting principle in artistic and theoretical practices.

This is, in many ways, a sophisticated effort to come to terms with the material conditions of contemporary cultural production. But the account contains several major difficulties. First, Marx is emphatic that “production, distribution, exchange and consumption … all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production dominates not only over itself … but over the other moments as well.”5 At a crucial juncture in her reconstruction of Marx’s account, Kornbluh claims that “labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is the activity that generates value qua value” (I, 29). But this neglects Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor, or labor as productive of value and labor as productive of objects of use. Contrary to Kornbluh, value is not “generated” by exchange but rather by the expenditure of labor time and realized through exchange. So long as value—labor time—is the measure of social wealth, workers must expend abstract labor in exchange for a wage, while the capitalist appropriates the products the worker has valorized. This implies that the form of distribution—the propertylessness of the worker—is grounded in the form of production itself.

If the above account is correct, then circulation can never predominate over production since it is an analytic truth that the form of production determines the positions of individuals in society and only thereby how the products of labor are circulated and distributed. The mercantilist and financial forms of capitalism identified by Arrighi must, if forms of capitalism, share a fundamental foundation in the waged form of labor. Production for the sake of value drives the dynamic of the shifting organic composition of production rightly noted by Kornbluh, but this dynamic does not involve a lag in productivity that entails in turn a decrease in profit. Rather, surplus value falls, according to Marx, as the result of an increase in productivity. As Moishe Postone has argued extensively, this suggests that the value-form of wealth has been rendered anachronistic by the very productive potential it has created, pointing beyond the capitalist mode of production.6

I want to emphasize this last point because, near the end of Immediacy, Kornbluh identifies “decarbonization, universal care, and vibrant cities that prioritize people over profit, liberate sexuality, and combat racist imperialism” as the most urgent and essential political ends (I, 211). She calls for “the embrace of mass agency to expel the hyperconsuming majority,” echoing her condemnation in the introduction of a “small number of hyper-consuming billionaires, their oligarchic plutocratic enablers, and syndicates of lumpen McShoppers [who] have irreparably degraded the planet” (I, 14). Yet this represents a form of practical voluntarism. On the one hand, the ends Kornbluh rightly endorses are, in my view, unachievable if value remains the measure of social wealth and structuring principle of production. Both nature and human beings will remain mere means to valorization since our mode of production requires for its own self-maintenance the extraction of natural resources at an ever-expanding scale as well as the intensification of the labor process to keep up with its ever-accelerating tempo. Cities cannot prioritize “people over profit” if wealth can only be produced through the expenditure of direct labor time, and the existence of imperialist hegemons will remain unavoidable so long as capital accumulation continues apace since the drive to dominate foreign markets is a non-optional attribute of capitalist production. On the other hand, both the billionaires and the “lumpen McShoppers” are beholden to structural imperatives that require them to compete, in the one case, and to eat cheaply, in the other, for the sake of their survival. The issue of “hyper-consumption” is not the moral one of gluttony and greed but the political-economic one of luxury goods production as structurally integral to capitalism.7

Finally, given the analytic priority for Marx of production over distribution, it is essential to note that “immediacy” cannot be a function of “circulation dominance”—precisely because there cannot be such dominance. This is consistent with Marx’s own account in Vol. 1, where “immediacy” is shown to follow from a form of labor oriented toward the production of commodities. According to Marx’s analysis of fetishism, the private discretized character of wage labor masks the social character of the product, which thus “reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.”8 Value, a socially and historically specific measure of wealth, thus appears as an immediate physical attribute of things.

In Lukács’s Hegelian-Marxist masterwork, History and Class Consciousness, he further elaborates on the analysis of immediacy in Capital through an account of reification. I do not have the space to go into the details of this account here, but it is worth noting a few of its most relevant features. The basic thought is that the fetish character of the commodity “influence[s] the total outer and inner life of society.”9 The production for the sake of value, or commodity production, results not only in the rationalization and fragmentation of the labor process but also in the fragmentation and atomization of the subject of labor. On one side, the objectifications of human labor power appear as a pre-existing ensemble, properties of capital, to which the individual stands in helpless opposition, an “isolated particle … fed into an alien system.” On the other side, this process of atomization “destroys those bonds that had bound individuals to a community in the days when production was still ‘organic.’”10 Such atomicity appears not as what it is—namely, as the result of a complex process of social organization—but rather as reality “as such,” in its immediacy.

III.

In this concluding section, I want to examine the implications of the above criticisms for Kornbluh’s account of autofiction. On the account I have been advancing, immediacy is not a “style” specific to a phase of capitalist history so much as it is the basic orienting principle of consciousness shaped by the commodity-form of labor and wealth. If, as I have argued, immediacy is as a logical matter always self-mediating (anything “immediate” requires mediating determinations just to be what it is), and immediacy under capitalism is a socially necessary “illusion” or form of appearance (in fetishism and reification), then something like autofiction must be understood not just as an error or wrong turn but in its “self-mediating” necessity.

Kornbluh establishes a 1:1 correspondence between culture and the economy, such that the dominance of circulation is meant to explain the emergence and popularity of authors like Knausgaard and Cusk. But autofiction must first be understood in terms of the prior history of aesthetic problems to which it is responding—I am thinking in particular of Beckett’s exhaustion of the first-personal fictional voice and even the fiction of a voice beyond fiction: the fully present, unmediated voice of the Unnamable. It precisely cannot get beyond stories: even its refusal to engage in narration it itself must narrate and so on. Autofiction responds to this narrative conundrum of the exhaustion of the fiction of the first-person by turning to the real first-person of the author. But to the extent that there is even a minimal difference between a memoir and a novel, the “real” first-person is just as much a fiction as Kafka’s K. or Stephen Dedalus in Joyce. And this is the formal problem that must now be explained as a social problem. Or, to revise Walter Benn Michaels’s slogan: at issue is not the beauty of a social problem but beauty as such a problem, since what counts as beauty—as artistic or literary success—is precisely what is being contested and worked out by authors and critics as a way of contesting and working out who it is we are.11

Kornbluh, at key points in Immediacy, identifies the novel with the third-personal narrative standpoint and condemns the first-personal novel as “immediacy style,” identifying it with Knausgaard’s intolerable intoning of “the voice of your own personality” as the one true reality. Citing the statistical work of Ted Underwood, Kornbluh emphasizes that until the 1970s, the third person predominated (78–80). Yet this precisely neglects the period of high modernism, when an admittedly small number of novels made an enormous difference in the direction of the tradition. Joyce’s “Proteus” episode, Woolf’s Dalloway, Faulkner’s Sound and Fury, Beckett’s trilogy—such novels represented the progressive modernist recognition of the irreducible role of a free individuality in the legislation of narrative norms. Discours indirect libre in Flaubert and erlebte Rede in Kafka paved the way to Mann’s individuated, yet anonymous, narrator, to an autonomized narratorial voice in Joyce, and finally to Beckett’s “unnamable.” This marked the explicitation in literature of the indispensability of the normative attitude and individuality of the author—of the way the authoritativeness of novelistic norms depends on authors’ collectively taking them to be authoritative. And in the case of Beckett, it also marked the dissolution of narrative agency in the aftermath of the collapse of international solidarity. No I without a We, no We without an I.

This sets the stage for autofiction. As Katie Ebner-Landy has argued in the case of Cusk, her work aims to resist the “fake security” promised by the “set narrative arcs of lives” the novel represents.12 Cusk thus chooses to narrate experiences like motherhood and divorce because they “stand outside” such narrative contrivances: in divorce, a plot breaks down, and in motherhood, one of the key drivers of plot disappears—“a protagonist characterized by their decisions, actions, and choices.” While I am skeptical that motherhood and divorce truly do stand outside narrative in the way Cusk imagines, her fiction can nevertheless be understood as a post-Beckettian response to the challenge of being a narrative agent when the social conditions for the exercise of agency are in disrepair. If to be a mother is—in Cusk’s words—to feel “so determined by forces greater than myself that I could hardly be said to have had any choice in the matter at all,” this suggests not so much the fraudulence of narrative per se but the fraudulence of the sorts of historical narratives available to us.13

In Outline, a nameless narrator (we only learn her name, Faye, towards the end) travels to Athens to teach a writing class for the summer. The novel is structured by a series of encounters and conversations narrated by this fictionalized version of Cusk. The point, for the author, is precisely not to produce a narrative of oneself and one’s own life but to become a kind of transparent vessel or “outline” for the narratives of others. The intention is to re-achieve the sense of contingency and spontaneity—of reality—that the procrustean structures of narrative fiction repress or altogether eliminate. As we have seen, Kornbluh explains novels like Outline as a function of the predominance of circulation over production. But Cusk’s novel cannot be so understood because the notion of circulation predominating over production is not a coherent thought. At the same time, novels like Outline should indeed be understood in terms of a historical shift in the way we reproduce our lives. The shift in question is not a shift from mediation to immediacy but a shift within the capitalist form of immediacy (reification) itself. Outline, on my reading, is a kind of bare “outline” of the biographical subject under the neoliberal conditions of its pseudo-reassertion. The passivity of the narrator is meant to skirt narrative form by allowing the spontaneous and “intensely real” stories of others to be told.14 This is not a matter of circulation-predominance but of a new ideology of individual independence in which economic deregulation and the erosion of welfare capitalism find their rationale following the long downturn of the seventies. Through works of autofiction like Outline, we partly make ourselves into atoms adrift in the void by taking ourselves as such atoms, where the “intensely real” thing is the monadic individual outside shared narrative structures.

Yet there is a twofold problem with this “immediate” strategy. First, the stories the narrator passively hears already in themselves bear a narrative form. For example, her “neighbor” from the flight that opens the novel describes the dissolution of his first marriage and the irreversible collapse of his world. Yet the divorce itself is a kind of narrative: he wanted “‘more—life,’ he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. ‘And more affection,’ he added, after a pause. ‘I wanted more affection.’” Even though he and his first wife had “built things that flourished” and lived a life of “abundance,” he leaves the marriage for the sake of a different kind of life and thus is oriented by a different future (the possibility of “more affection”).15 His actions are thereby embedded in a new narrative structure, however dissatisfying and shapeless it ultimately proves to be.

Second, to passively receive a story is to actively take it as a story in contrast to, say, an academic lecture or a pill. There can be no passive reception without this activity of discrimination, whereby one attends to why this ought to be taken as a narrative and not as something else. Without such active discrimination, Cusk’s passive narrator would cease to be an agent at all—capable of getting things both right and wrong—and would be more akin to a recording device, reliably disposed to turning on at the sound of a human voice. Yet the novel outstrips Cusk’s one-sided reading of her own work in the way that the narrator’s putative passivity is an active device for bringing into view our own status as atoms. The narrative pretension to passivity makes visible the basically contemplative attitude with which we regard the lives of others. In chapter three, the Cusk stand-in observes a photograph on the wall of a café depicting a woman “with her head thrown back, laughing” (O, 50). The phrase is repeated in the next chapter when she observes in her bedroom “a painting hanging on the wall … of a man in a trilby hat throwing back his head and laughing.” She continues: “When you looked you saw that he had no face, just a blank oval with the laughing void of his mouth in the middle. I kept waiting for his eyes and nose to become visible as the room got light, but they never did” (O, 59–60). These meditations on representation within the novel reflect the narrator’s own standardizing gaze through which the narratives of others are first reduced to convention, a “determinative” structure (O, 24), and are only regarded as truly “real” in moments of collapse (“What was real,” the narrator notes of her neighbor, “was the loss of the house” in his divorce [O, 12]).

In the final chapter of the novel, the narrator is confronted with a doppelganger-like figure—a woman from Manchester named Anne who has come to Athens to teach a writing course and who will take over the narrator’s flat. Anne explains to the narrator that she has recently had a problem with her writing on account of an incident—a brutal mugging—that had occurred six months before. She describes the problem as one of “summing up,” where one word seems to suffice for describing a complex phenomenon, like “tension” or “mother-in-law.” “As soon as something was summed up,” she observes, “it was to all intents and purposes dead, a sitting duck.” It was no longer necessary to write a long play about jealousy, for instance, because “jealousy just about summed it up.” It is perhaps no coincidence that Beckett makes an appearance here, who, “her god, had been destroyed by meaninglessness” (O, 232). And crucially, the problem extends beyond literature and Anne’s writing to her relationship with other people: “She was having a drink with a friend the other night and she looked across the table and thought, friend, with the result that she strongly suspected their friendship was over” (O, 232–33). She begins to see her own life simply as “Anne’s life” (O, 233).

This idea of “summing up” encapsulates the novel’s own aversion to generality and, by extension, to narrative. That Beckett can be reduced to the general “meaning” of meaninglessness ruins his work for Anne, just as the friendship is ruined by its distillation into a single word or convention. The formal strategy of Cusk’s novel is to resist such summing up through the radical passivity of the narrator, which, we saw above, cannot but fail. Nevertheless, by explicitly naming what it hopes to resist, the novel also brings to light its own formal strategy as a strategy—as a distinctly narrative attempt to reckon with our historical predicament.

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.16 As she herself notes at one point to her neighbor, “I was not interested in any relationship with any man, not now and probably not ever again,” as if to signal her transcendence of just one more narrative genre (O, 178). But the autofictive narratorial voice has of course not achieved transcendence but is in fact constrained by yet another narrative—the self-deceived narrative of the “beyond” of narrative. At its best, Outline enacts at the level of its “passive” form the way that the immediate and “intensely real” is the precipitate of a complex web of new “narrative” mediations—mediations through which we reproduce the capitalist form of our life.

Notes

1. Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2023). Hereafter cited in the text as “I” followed by the page number.

2. For the classic account of this claim in Hegel, see Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfaction of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

3. See, for example, the analysis of traditional societies’ fetishistic (“immediate”) treatment of socially instituted norms as if they were objective properties of the world in Robert Brandom, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Harvard University Press, 2019), 30.

4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1997), 27.

5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolas (Penguin Books, 1993), 99.

6. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

7. See Marx’s account of subdivision B of Department II, which produces “Luxury means of consumption, which enter the consumption only of the capitalist class, i.e. can be exchanged only for the expenditure of surplus-value, which does not accrue to workers.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, vol. 2 (Penguin Books, 1992), 479.

8. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (Penguin Books, 1976), 164–65.

9. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (MIT Press, 1972), 84.

10. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 90.

11. See Walter Benn Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

12. Katie Ebner-Landy, “Rachel Cusk and the Search for Moral Fiction,” Iride 35, no. 97 (2022): 646. The phrase “fake security” is Cusk’s; see Heidi Julavits, “Choose Your Own Rachel Cusk,” New York Magazine, March 6, 2017.

13. Ebner-Landy, “Rachel Cusk and the Search for Moral Fiction,” 647.

14. Rachel Cusk, “A Man in Love,” Guardian, April 12, 2013. Cited in I, 70.

15. Rachel Cusk, Outline (Picador, 2014), 16. Hereafter cited in the text as “O” followed by the page number.

16. Merve Emre, “Of Note: Rachel Cusk’s Unforgiving Eye,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2018.

The Theory of Immediacy or the Immediacy of Theory?

Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism sets itself an admirable and worthwhile task: to counter the “immediatist” emphasis on affect over reason, materiality over medium, memoir over fiction, individual over collective, pervading contemporary culture and theory. The book is a tour de force polemic in its synthetic presentation of writers from Knausgaard to Cusk and theorists like Felski, Moten, and Latour as making common cause in their embrace of anti-politics, anti-theory, and all other manner of immediacy. What is most compelling about Kornbluh’s project is its central provocation, its willingness to defend the basically “rationalist” philosophical lineage stretching from Aristotle to Hegel to Marx and beyond. Kornbluh’s defense of this tradition against proponents of autotheory, vibrant materialism and object-oriented ontology, Afro-pessimism, and other varieties of the “new nihilism,” as it might be called, is important and necessary work. New materialism erases the distinction between human agents and inanimate objects in order to establish our continuity with the natural world, while Afro-pessimism ontologizes anti-Blackness as a constitutive feature of human reason. Kornbluh recognizes these as the disastrous positions they are, but it is not always clear that she is providing an argument as to why we should reject them. Kornbluh frequently frames this debate as a choice between two alternatives: anarchy or organization? simplicity or contradiction? immutability or history? immediacy or mediation? And Kornbluh is clear that she means to embrace “construction, contradiction, contingency … struggle and solidarity,” instead of the nihilism of her peers.1 But I want to question this framing and ask whether—for all of its synthetic pirouetting—Kornbluh’s project offers less a theory of immediacy than an immediate theory, committing a version of the fallacy she herself identifies. I note three places in the book where this becomes apparent. First, Kornbluh’s account of Hegel will enable us to specify the general nature of the difficulty. Second, the chapter on “Circulation” misses the socially necessary character of immediacy—the way that immediacy is itself mediated. And finally, Kornbluh’s account of autofiction and of Rachel Cusk in particular bears the poisoned fruit of her “immediate” conception of immediacy.

I.

Kornbluh addresses the philosophical origins of the critique of immediacy—in German, Unmittelbarkeit—rather late in the book, in the penultimate chapter on “Antitheory.” After detailed analyses in “Writing” and “Video” of the “immediacy style” of Knausgaard, the Safdie brothers, and others and the genealogical tracing of immediacy in “Circulation” to the purported predominance of capital circulation over production since the turn of the century, Kornbluh turns to the original, pathbreaking account of immediacy that opens Hegel’s Phenomenology. According to Kornbluh, Hegel “right away introduces immediacy as a prevalent error that any rigorous philosophy taking up a critical relation to its own conditions of possibility must preempt” (I, 153). Here, as elsewhere, Kornbluh presents immediacy as an option that theorists can choose or not; to refuse immediacy is to embrace the correct perspective, which centers relation, connection, collectivity, and structure. And in the opening chapter of the Phenomenology, on “Sense-Certainty,” Kornbluh finds Hegel similarly diagnosing and rejecting the erroneous perspective, thereby inaugurating theory proper. But does Hegel actually treat sense-certainty as simply an error to be opposed?

To answer this question, let’s look more closely at Kornbluh’s reconstruction. In her picture, sense-certainty is a paradigm of experience in which “fundamental objects present themselves to the mind through the senses and the mind enjoys certainty that it knows the objects” (I, 153). This represents a form of epistemological immediacy since thought takes itself to be acquainted with the world through the “simple data” that “present themselves to perception.” According to Kornbluh’s Hegel, “consciousness immediately integrates the data into concepts of the objects,” and the resulting immediacy “is both insufficient and illusory.” In contrast to this immediatist perspective, “[t]hought worthy of its name” grasps the apparently immediate objects of sense-certainty as the product of a complex process of mediation, via processing tools that are “socially and linguistically determined—such as the categories of space and time” (I, 154).

The first thing of note here is the details of the view ascribed to Hegel. Kornbluh’s claim that data is presented to “perception” and that sense-certain consciousness integrates data into concepts of objects distorts Hegel’s actual account. The idea that consciousness integrates data into concepts is a basically inductive Humean picture, which takes far more for granted than natural consciousness is meant to in these opening pages. Likewise, with “perception,” which is the subsequent paradigm in “Consciousness” and consists in discrimination of a substrate from its attributes, its perceptible qualities. In “Sense-Certainty,” all we have is the brute, sensuous this, bereft of all determinations.

I don’t mean to score cheap points here by way of a kind of flat-footed Hegel scholasticism. The reason this matters is that Kornbluh’s misreading of Hegel structures and informs the critique of immediacy pursued over the course of the book. Hegel does not proceed in the Phenomenology by opposing sense-certain consciousness to “thought worthy of its name” or, as Kornbluh writes in relation to the Logic, by showing that “philosophy necessarily begins not with [the] empty abstraction [of pure being] but rather with a more mediated ‘essence’” (I, 154). Hegel rather proceeds famously, “presuppositionlessly,” that is, without presupposing any higher-order principles or conceptual determinations. In the Logic, for example, Hegel takes as his starting point a logically purified and anonymized version of Parmenides’s founding insight into the identity of being and thinking: being is what is, non-being is what is not; accordingly, being is the true, non-being is the false, since whatever is not cannot be said to be. The point is not to reject this naïve, purely positive conception of being as the starting point of philosophy; the point is to show (1) that it is where we must begin if we are not to beg any questions or assume a conceptual apparatus in advance and (2) that “pure being” is an internally defective conception of being that fails by its own lights. That is, if being were restricted to what is, then we could not say of this that it is notthat, and of that that it is notthis. There would be no determinate distinguishability of one thing from another, such that pure being would prove identical with nothing.

A similar point can be made regarding “Sense-Certainty”: natural consciousness specifies the object of experience by exclaiming this or here. But such indexicals are too abstract to do the intending work with which they are tasked since “this” applies just as much to “this table” as to “this tree.” Consciousness does not integrate data into concepts but finds itself dependent upon universals that preclude its intending anything in particular. This is to say that if the object of experience is construed as it is in “Sense-Certainty,” as a “sensuous This,” then there can be no determinate experience of objects; this paradigm of knowing is shown to have been internally inconsistent. What sense-certain consciousness learns is not some grand theory of mediation (Hegel’s theory of the concept) but its own unavoidable dependence on universals, which generates a new paradigm of knowing and its object, perception.

What this is supposed to show is that there is no realist competitor to the conceptualist, rationalist view, and one shows this not by rejecting immediacy from the outset but by taking it as the necessary starting point of philosophy—both historically in the figure of Parmenides and logically.2 Immediacy proves to be self-mediating, and this has several consequences. First, it means that immediacy is a critical concept only to the extent that it undermines itself; unlike Kornbluh, Hegel does not oppose immediacy because he is a partisan of synthesis and solidarity rather than anarchy and dissolution. The necessity of conceptual, discursive, social, and intersubjective mediation can only be shown by confronting the standpoint of immediacy with its own internal defects, as we saw above.

Second, the immediacy of sense-certainty and of pure being is not only negated; it is also “preserved.” That is, when absolutized, immediacy collapses under its own conceptual weight, but it ultimately proves to be a neutral meta-concept that specifies a constitutive aspect of experience and of conceptual activity. This dimension of the account can be traced back to Aristotle’s notion of a τόδε τι, a this-something, a kind instantiated by this singular, non-fungible bit of matter. What is immediate and singular, matter, must be mediated and individuated by a kind-concept if it is to be the matter it is. On this view, immediacy is indispensable for understanding things as they are.

Both of the above points militate against the sort of polemic Kornbluh pursues. First of all, Kornbluh writes as if contemporary cultural products actually are immediate and thereby “decapacitate” reflection on them. This is why the critic must oppose immediacy from the outside. But the logical lesson we learn from Hegel is that pure immediacy is not possible in principle. The task of the critic is not to lord it over her object but to articulate the social, historical, and discursive mediations that make possible both the object and the critic’s knowledge of it. Kornbluh fails to live up to her book’s own epigraph—“Immediacy itself is essentially mediated”—in her repeated insinuation that immediacy is, in fact, immediate. In passage after passage, we are told that we must endorse “mediacy against immediacy” (I, 189), “embrace … construction, contradiction, contingency,” and exhibit a “taste for Hegelian determination” (I, 203), as if this were a question of preference, style, or allegiance. 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—a claim we explore below. We need not start from a commitment to mediation as our choice analytical bludgeon but immanently derive the necessity of mediation presuppositionlessly from the originary standpoint of immediacy—as I will demonstrate in the case of Cusk below.

There is a further issue here. Our contemporary predicament is not well-captured by the extremely abstract, meta-conceptual discourse of immediacy and mediation. These are, undoubtedly, invaluable analytic tools that enable us to diagnose a particularly intransigent epistemic defect. And Kornbluh rightly highlights Hegel’s concern in the Phenomenology and Logic with a kind of “epistemological immediacy” (or phenomenological and logical immediacy). But at the level of an analysis of concrete social forms, where immediacy in some form or another has—according to Hegel—characterized “all history hitherto,” greater specificity is required.3 That is, to anticipate our argument in the next section, Lukács’s classic account in History and Class Consciousness of reification specifies the form of immediacy characteristic of capitalist modernity, and it shows that immediacy has indeed been definitive of capitalism from the start.

II.

The task of Kornbluh’s chapter on “Circulation” is to establish the “economic substrate” of immediacy style (I, 33). This raises a number of important questions about the “causality” of the base, but for the sake of this discussion, I will leave them aside. Kornbluh denominates this new phase of cultural production “too late capitalism,” in which—she writes—the “overmuchness of lateness arrests itself.” If, according to Jameson’s well-known claim, postmodernism was the cultural logic of late capitalism, then immediacy style is the “cultural dominant” of too late capitalism; where postmodernism exhibits a “crisis of historicity,” immediacy style “encodes a crisis of futurity” (I, 13). Admittedly, it is not totally clear to me how this claim is supposed to work: Jameson, after all, already famously describes experience under postmodern conditions as “a series of pure and unrelated presents in time,” blocking the possibility of a future-oriented praxis.4 And those features that Kornbluh identifies as characteristic of immediacy style—like the breaking of the fourth wall in the series Fleabag—can seem arbitrary. (In an earlier passage, “irony” and “the meta” are associated with postmodernism [I, 13].) Nevertheless, let us turn to Kornbluh’s account of the economic underpinnings of the putatively new immediacy style.

In “Circulation,” Kornbluh follows the consensus view according to which, in the 1970s, a long economic downturn began to take hold. Marxist theorists like Robert Brenner have shown that the downturn can be explained in terms of Marx’s theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which is concisely summarized by Kornbluh (I, 27–28). Marx’s basic point, which was first made not by Marx but by bourgeois political economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, is that the growing proportion of constant to variable capital tendentially results in a decrease in the rate of profit, owing to the displacement of living labor by dead labor, i.e., machines. According to Kornbluh, the resulting secular stagnation and contraction of capitalist production induces a “compensatory expansion of circulation,” meaning that capital compensates for its diminished productivity by, in essence, decreasing the time capital spends in its money and commodity forms. Following Giovanni Arrighi, Kornbluh points to multiple instances of “circulation dominance,” such as seventeenth-century mercantilism and nineteenth-century financialization. The twenty-first century represents a new period of circulation dominance, in which the focus on capital “flows” is held to “condition immediacy as cultural style” (30). Said differently, the compression of forms of mediation in the circulation process is taken to lead to the negation of mediacy as an orienting principle in artistic and theoretical practices.

This is, in many ways, a sophisticated effort to come to terms with the material conditions of contemporary cultural production. But the account contains several major difficulties. First, Marx is emphatic that “production, distribution, exchange and consumption … all form the members of a totality, distinctions within a unity. Production dominates not only over itself … but over the other moments as well.”5 At a crucial juncture in her reconstruction of Marx’s account, Kornbluh claims that “labor makes things useful, while exchange and its hypostasis in the concept of value and the medium of money is the activity that generates value qua value” (I, 29). But this neglects Marx’s distinction between abstract and concrete labor, or labor as productive of value and labor as productive of objects of use. Contrary to Kornbluh, value is not “generated” by exchange but rather by the expenditure of labor time and realized through exchange. So long as value—labor time—is the measure of social wealth, workers must expend abstract labor in exchange for a wage, while the capitalist appropriates the products the worker has valorized. This implies that the form of distribution—the propertylessness of the worker—is grounded in the form of production itself.

If the above account is correct, then circulation can never predominate over production since it is an analytic truth that the form of production determines the positions of individuals in society and only thereby how the products of labor are circulated and distributed. The mercantilist and financial forms of capitalism identified by Arrighi must, if forms of capitalism, share a fundamental foundation in the waged form of labor. Production for the sake of value drives the dynamic of the shifting organic composition of production rightly noted by Kornbluh, but this dynamic does not involve a lag in productivity that entails in turn a decrease in profit. Rather, surplus value falls, according to Marx, as the result of an increase in productivity. As Moishe Postone has argued extensively, this suggests that the value-form of wealth has been rendered anachronistic by the very productive potential it has created, pointing beyond the capitalist mode of production.6

I want to emphasize this last point because, near the end of Immediacy, Kornbluh identifies “decarbonization, universal care, and vibrant cities that prioritize people over profit, liberate sexuality, and combat racist imperialism” as the most urgent and essential political ends (I, 211). She calls for “the embrace of mass agency to expel the hyperconsuming majority,” echoing her condemnation in the introduction of a “small number of hyper-consuming billionaires, their oligarchic plutocratic enablers, and syndicates of lumpen McShoppers [who] have irreparably degraded the planet” (I, 14). Yet this represents a form of practical voluntarism. On the one hand, the ends Kornbluh rightly endorses are, in my view, unachievable if value remains the measure of social wealth and structuring principle of production. Both nature and human beings will remain mere means to valorization since our mode of production requires for its own self-maintenance the extraction of natural resources at an ever-expanding scale as well as the intensification of the labor process to keep up with its ever-accelerating tempo. Cities cannot prioritize “people over profit” if wealth can only be produced through the expenditure of direct labor time, and the existence of imperialist hegemons will remain unavoidable so long as capital accumulation continues apace since the drive to dominate foreign markets is a non-optional attribute of capitalist production. On the other hand, both the billionaires and the “lumpen McShoppers” are beholden to structural imperatives that require them to compete, in the one case, and to eat cheaply, in the other, for the sake of their survival. The issue of “hyper-consumption” is not the moral one of gluttony and greed but the political-economic one of luxury goods production as structurally integral to capitalism.7

Finally, given the analytic priority for Marx of production over distribution, it is essential to note that “immediacy” cannot be a function of “circulation dominance”—precisely because there cannot be such dominance. This is consistent with Marx’s own account in Vol. 1, where “immediacy” is shown to follow from a form of labor oriented toward the production of commodities. According to Marx’s analysis of fetishism, the private discretized character of wage labor masks the social character of the product, which thus “reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things.”8 Value, a socially and historically specific measure of wealth, thus appears as an immediate physical attribute of things.

In Lukács’s Hegelian-Marxist masterwork, History and Class Consciousness, he further elaborates on the analysis of immediacy in Capital through an account of reification. I do not have the space to go into the details of this account here, but it is worth noting a few of its most relevant features. The basic thought is that the fetish character of the commodity “influence[s] the total outer and inner life of society.”9 The production for the sake of value, or commodity production, results not only in the rationalization and fragmentation of the labor process but also in the fragmentation and atomization of the subject of labor. On one side, the objectifications of human labor power appear as a pre-existing ensemble, properties of capital, to which the individual stands in helpless opposition, an “isolated particle … fed into an alien system.” On the other side, this process of atomization “destroys those bonds that had bound individuals to a community in the days when production was still ‘organic.’”10 Such atomicity appears not as what it is—namely, as the result of a complex process of social organization—but rather as reality “as such,” in its immediacy.

III.

In this concluding section, I want to examine the implications of the above criticisms for Kornbluh’s account of autofiction. On the account I have been advancing, immediacy is not a “style” specific to a phase of capitalist history so much as it is the basic orienting principle of consciousness shaped by the commodity-form of labor and wealth. If, as I have argued, immediacy is as a logical matter always self-mediating (anything “immediate” requires mediating determinations just to be what it is), and immediacy under capitalism is a socially necessary “illusion” or form of appearance (in fetishism and reification), then something like autofiction must be understood not just as an error or wrong turn but in its “self-mediating” necessity.

Kornbluh establishes a 1:1 correspondence between culture and the economy, such that the dominance of circulation is meant to explain the emergence and popularity of authors like Knausgaard and Cusk. But autofiction must first be understood in terms of the prior history of aesthetic problems to which it is responding—I am thinking in particular of Beckett’s exhaustion of the first-personal fictional voice and even the fiction of a voice beyond fiction: the fully present, unmediated voice of the Unnamable. It precisely cannot get beyond stories: even its refusal to engage in narration it itself must narrate and so on. Autofiction responds to this narrative conundrum of the exhaustion of the fiction of the first-person by turning to the real first-person of the author. But to the extent that there is even a minimal difference between a memoir and a novel, the “real” first-person is just as much a fiction as Kafka’s K. or Stephen Dedalus in Joyce. And this is the formal problem that must now be explained as a social problem. Or, to revise Walter Benn Michaels’s slogan: at issue is not the beauty of a social problem but beauty as such a problem, since what counts as beauty—as artistic or literary success—is precisely what is being contested and worked out by authors and critics as a way of contesting and working out who it is we are.11

Kornbluh, at key points in Immediacy, identifies the novel with the third-personal narrative standpoint and condemns the first-personal novel as “immediacy style,” identifying it with Knausgaard’s intolerable intoning of “the voice of your own personality” as the one true reality. Citing the statistical work of Ted Underwood, Kornbluh emphasizes that until the 1970s, the third person predominated (78–80). Yet this precisely neglects the period of high modernism, when an admittedly small number of novels made an enormous difference in the direction of the tradition. Joyce’s “Proteus” episode, Woolf’s Dalloway, Faulkner’s Sound and Fury, Beckett’s trilogy—such novels represented the progressive modernist recognition of the irreducible role of a free individuality in the legislation of narrative norms. Discours indirect libre in Flaubert and erlebte Rede in Kafka paved the way to Mann’s individuated, yet anonymous, narrator, to an autonomized narratorial voice in Joyce, and finally to Beckett’s “unnamable.” This marked the explicitation in literature of the indispensability of the normative attitude and individuality of the author—of the way the authoritativeness of novelistic norms depends on authors’ collectively taking them to be authoritative. And in the case of Beckett, it also marked the dissolution of narrative agency in the aftermath of the collapse of international solidarity. No I without a We, no We without an I.

This sets the stage for autofiction. As Katie Ebner-Landy has argued in the case of Cusk, her work aims to resist the “fake security” promised by the “set narrative arcs of lives” the novel represents.12 Cusk thus chooses to narrate experiences like motherhood and divorce because they “stand outside” such narrative contrivances: in divorce, a plot breaks down, and in motherhood, one of the key drivers of plot disappears—“a protagonist characterized by their decisions, actions, and choices.” While I am skeptical that motherhood and divorce truly do stand outside narrative in the way Cusk imagines, her fiction can nevertheless be understood as a post-Beckettian response to the challenge of being a narrative agent when the social conditions for the exercise of agency are in disrepair. If to be a mother is—in Cusk’s words—to feel “so determined by forces greater than myself that I could hardly be said to have had any choice in the matter at all,” this suggests not so much the fraudulence of narrative per se but the fraudulence of the sorts of historical narratives available to us.13

In Outline, a nameless narrator (we only learn her name, Faye, towards the end) travels to Athens to teach a writing class for the summer. The novel is structured by a series of encounters and conversations narrated by this fictionalized version of Cusk. The point, for the author, is precisely not to produce a narrative of oneself and one’s own life but to become a kind of transparent vessel or “outline” for the narratives of others. The intention is to re-achieve the sense of contingency and spontaneity—of reality—that the procrustean structures of narrative fiction repress or altogether eliminate. As we have seen, Kornbluh explains novels like Outline as a function of the predominance of circulation over production. But Cusk’s novel cannot be so understood because the notion of circulation predominating over production is not a coherent thought. At the same time, novels like Outline should indeed be understood in terms of a historical shift in the way we reproduce our lives. The shift in question is not a shift from mediation to immediacy but a shift within the capitalist form of immediacy (reification) itself. Outline, on my reading, is a kind of bare “outline” of the biographical subject under the neoliberal conditions of its pseudo-reassertion. The passivity of the narrator is meant to skirt narrative form by allowing the spontaneous and “intensely real” stories of others to be told.14 This is not a matter of circulation-predominance but of a new ideology of individual independence in which economic deregulation and the erosion of welfare capitalism find their rationale following the long downturn of the seventies. Through works of autofiction like Outline, we partly make ourselves into atoms adrift in the void by taking ourselves as such atoms, where the “intensely real” thing is the monadic individual outside shared narrative structures.

Yet there is a twofold problem with this “immediate” strategy. First, the stories the narrator passively hears already in themselves bear a narrative form. For example, her “neighbor” from the flight that opens the novel describes the dissolution of his first marriage and the irreversible collapse of his world. Yet the divorce itself is a kind of narrative: he wanted “‘more—life,’ he said, opening his hands in a gesture of receipt. ‘And more affection,’ he added, after a pause. ‘I wanted more affection.’” Even though he and his first wife had “built things that flourished” and lived a life of “abundance,” he leaves the marriage for the sake of a different kind of life and thus is oriented by a different future (the possibility of “more affection”).15 His actions are thereby embedded in a new narrative structure, however dissatisfying and shapeless it ultimately proves to be.

Second, to passively receive a story is to actively take it as a story in contrast to, say, an academic lecture or a pill. There can be no passive reception without this activity of discrimination, whereby one attends to why this ought to be taken as a narrative and not as something else. Without such active discrimination, Cusk’s passive narrator would cease to be an agent at all—capable of getting things both right and wrong—and would be more akin to a recording device, reliably disposed to turning on at the sound of a human voice. Yet the novel outstrips Cusk’s one-sided reading of her own work in the way that the narrator’s putative passivity is an active device for bringing into view our own status as atoms. The narrative pretension to passivity makes visible the basically contemplative attitude with which we regard the lives of others. In chapter three, the Cusk stand-in observes a photograph on the wall of a café depicting a woman “with her head thrown back, laughing” (O, 50). The phrase is repeated in the next chapter when she observes in her bedroom “a painting hanging on the wall … of a man in a trilby hat throwing back his head and laughing.” She continues: “When you looked you saw that he had no face, just a blank oval with the laughing void of his mouth in the middle. I kept waiting for his eyes and nose to become visible as the room got light, but they never did” (O, 59–60). These meditations on representation within the novel reflect the narrator’s own standardizing gaze through which the narratives of others are first reduced to convention, a “determinative” structure (O, 24), and are only regarded as truly “real” in moments of collapse (“What was real,” the narrator notes of her neighbor, “was the loss of the house” in his divorce [O, 12]).

In the final chapter of the novel, the narrator is confronted with a doppelganger-like figure—a woman from Manchester named Anne who has come to Athens to teach a writing course and who will take over the narrator’s flat. Anne explains to the narrator that she has recently had a problem with her writing on account of an incident—a brutal mugging—that had occurred six months before. She describes the problem as one of “summing up,” where one word seems to suffice for describing a complex phenomenon, like “tension” or “mother-in-law.” “As soon as something was summed up,” she observes, “it was to all intents and purposes dead, a sitting duck.” It was no longer necessary to write a long play about jealousy, for instance, because “jealousy just about summed it up.” It is perhaps no coincidence that Beckett makes an appearance here, who, “her god, had been destroyed by meaninglessness” (O, 232). And crucially, the problem extends beyond literature and Anne’s writing to her relationship with other people: “She was having a drink with a friend the other night and she looked across the table and thought, friend, with the result that she strongly suspected their friendship was over” (O, 232–33). She begins to see her own life simply as “Anne’s life” (O, 233).

This idea of “summing up” encapsulates the novel’s own aversion to generality and, by extension, to narrative. That Beckett can be reduced to the general “meaning” of meaninglessness ruins his work for Anne, just as the friendship is ruined by its distillation into a single word or convention. The formal strategy of Cusk’s novel is to resist such summing up through the radical passivity of the narrator, which, we saw above, cannot but fail. Nevertheless, by explicitly naming what it hopes to resist, the novel also brings to light its own formal strategy as a strategy—as a distinctly narrative attempt to reckon with our historical predicament.

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.16 As she herself notes at one point to her neighbor, “I was not interested in any relationship with any man, not now and probably not ever again,” as if to signal her transcendence of just one more narrative genre (O, 178). But the autofictive narratorial voice has of course not achieved transcendence but is in fact constrained by yet another narrative—the self-deceived narrative of the “beyond” of narrative. At its best, Outline enacts at the level of its “passive” form the way that the immediate and “intensely real” is the precipitate of a complex web of new “narrative” mediations—mediations through which we reproduce the capitalist form of our life.

Notes

1. Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2023). Hereafter cited in the text as “I” followed by the page number.

2. For the classic account of this claim in Hegel, see Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfaction of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

3. See, for example, the analysis of traditional societies’ fetishistic (“immediate”) treatment of socially instituted norms as if they were objective properties of the world in Robert Brandom, A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Harvard University Press, 2019), 30.

4. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 1997), 27.

5. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolas (Penguin Books, 1993), 99.

6. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1993).

7. See Marx’s account of subdivision B of Department II, which produces “Luxury means of consumption, which enter the consumption only of the capitalist class, i.e. can be exchanged only for the expenditure of surplus-value, which does not accrue to workers.” Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach, vol. 2 (Penguin Books, 1992), 479.

8. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1 (Penguin Books, 1976), 164–65.

9. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (MIT Press, 1972), 84.

10. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 90.

11. See Walter Benn Michaels, The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

12. Katie Ebner-Landy, “Rachel Cusk and the Search for Moral Fiction,” Iride 35, no. 97 (2022): 646. The phrase “fake security” is Cusk’s; see Heidi Julavits, “Choose Your Own Rachel Cusk,” New York Magazine, March 6, 2017.

13. Ebner-Landy, “Rachel Cusk and the Search for Moral Fiction,” 647.

14. Rachel Cusk, “A Man in Love,” Guardian, April 12, 2013. Cited in I, 70.

15. Rachel Cusk, Outline (Picador, 2014), 16. Hereafter cited in the text as “O” followed by the page number.

16. Merve Emre, “Of Note: Rachel Cusk’s Unforgiving Eye,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2018.