Kornbluh’s book is by turns devastating and impenetrable. The latter would be down to this reader’s philosophy deficit; some half-remembered fragments of Hegel and a thirty year old reading of Writing and Difference aren’t going to do the trick here. You will get lost along the way. But you will also stumble into corners of brilliant elucidation. Above all the way in which the author riffs off up to the minute references (Knausgaard, the Safdie Brothers etc) to interrogate where the fuck we are at, culturally, psycho-culturally, as a species etc. I might get this all wrong, but it feels as thought she is constructing a connection between rampant ‘late’ capitalism and its cult of the individual (pace Foucault?) and the vogue for auto-fiction in things literary and immediacy in things audiovisual. Auto-fiction is the attempt to erase the idea of the fiction within fiction, even if the act of writing and ostensibly translating reality into words is of itself an inevitably fictional process. It also encapsulates a society where the individual has become prioritised over the collective. Kornbluh is very effective in the manner she explores the negative aspects of this process and how it betrays some of what might be called the fictional project. Immediacy has to do with a quest to extract the middle man from the audio visual process, a clearly paradoxical endeavour, in keeping with a world where we expect everything, everywhere, all at once. The way in which this restricts the possibilities of depth, or reflection, are self-evident, and noted.
All of this and more is contextualised in rampant theory. Although there was much in the book with which this reader struggled, to see the way it articulated a theory in defence of the collective, against the cult of the individual, which is so clearly an apolitical cult, one with a strong capitalist vibe, was refreshing.
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