who's afraid of mediation?
frogs don't boil immediately
“Could it be that time is too narrow for all events? Could it happen that all the seats within time might have been sold? Worried, we run along the train of events, preparing ourselves for the journey.”
- Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, Bruno Schulz
Tugging on a thread we’ve found coming out of a stone we find ourselves pulling with full faith, convincing ourselves that our pulling is legitimate action, maybe even our main vocation, hobby, occupation, our thing.
Thinking we are bringing whatever is buried inside to the light of day, we lean back with the full weight of our bodies on this length of yarn, hoping sooner rather than later we can pull out some sort of real human experience from this stone so we can finally allow ourselves the right collapse on the ground (ahh finally, stability!) because the rock has finally let loose its inner truth.
A rock is not nuanced. This is fine. Nuance is dead.
Pivoting away from discussions of rocks and threads: according to legend, in the smoky agave stained bars of the old West, a hand painted sign would hang from the piano cabinet saying PLEASE DON’T SHOOT THE PIANIST. HE IS DOING THE BEST HE CAN. The pianist played all the same, but he had to hold onto the hope that the bar’s patrons were as literate as they were armed.
Shooting artists in the back is as much an American pasttime as is revisiting their work in hindsight and embellishing them with “brilliant! but misunderstood :(.” Only after they’re dead can an artist’s “assets” be appraised properly by the marketplace — and how can they be when the artist themselves are in the way of their art becoming trading commodity? Humans are far too messy, especially artists, to maintain value for value’s sake. My friend has a Warhol print hanging on their wall. I shake my fist at it whenever I’m there. Warhol’s the only artist who dabbled in value for value’s sake to provide “art” to the late-stage capitalist shrine. Dick.
But here and now in the post-pandemic world, the prophecy of the old West has come true. The marketplace has finally killed the artist. Shot them in the back and burgled their goods away into “content” to be handed around via the marketplace of the feed. What goes into feed? Slop. Can’t imagine it will be very long until platforms are referred to as the trough.
The circulation of media and of content, of art and of creations, have become distanced from the real and have become merely a variety of engravings on the single monolithic flow to which we’re all attached at the hip. That flow demands participation as it demands consumption from you and from me.
When you or I consume any medium, — be that films, videos, games novels, articles, blog posts, newsletters — we also consume the flow itself. The circulation of media is tied completely to its consumption and its consumption has become a totalizing one. The circulation itself is a medium to which we are all adhered. A snake eating its own tail.
Everything is a flow: pipelines for oil; pipelines for fresh water; pipelines of information; pipelines for consumer goods; global shipping logistics; metabolic bloodflow in the body, across oceans; headlines, gossip, memes on a feed; underground piping and wiring systems; open air signals; 5G networks sending and receiving 10 gigabytes a second; the chunnel; public transportation; computerized accounting; app store stock trading; corporate buybacks; über and AirBnb; the gigification of labor; direct contact, immediate fulfillment; dopamine straight to a vein; quickly built, purely immediate architecture in high rises and store fronts; Crumbl cookies and Starbucks: instantaneous, purely efficient storefronts aimed towards a single satisfaction; dating apps and Facebook marketplace; Snapchat and BeReal; texting and direct messaging lubricated with autocorrect, made into a serviceable but streamlined communication faster than thought itself.
Stacking them all together like this, into something of a flow itself, it becomes hard for me to separate any of it; they’re all symptomatic of the same crisis: the crisis of the streamline.
For the first time, labor has become less the primary source of surplus in Capitalistic production and more of an afterthought in favor of an increasing reliance upon circulation itself to produce a surplus of stimuli exploitable enough to turn a dollar into a twenty.
“Need” and “use” have less meaning in a consumer economy predicated on “value” and “value” alone. Whether or not a sense of value is valid doesn’t matter as much if the packaging is valuable in itself, in how easy it fits inside the tenants of mass circulation. Any mediation of a piece of media makes that piece of media less valuable almost automatically, and so the artistic je nes sais quoi of our era is that of attempting to drop mediation, retrospection, and discernment in their entirety.
Mediation is our way of attuning to what is not immediate — mediation is completely superfluous to immediacy’s demand towards quick circulation. What don’t you see? What exists outside the flow of this present encounter? What is moving? What is trying to dawn on you? What is not? Why? The act of seeing a painting is to spend a silent moment trying to unconsciously put these pieces together, to puzzle the painting into your lived experience. To have a painting projected around you, as it is in the interactive Van Gogh exhibit, instead encourages the viewer to take a selfie inside a painting’s manufactured flow. There’s no need to understand, only to be.
This leads us to Immediacy, Anna Kornbluh’s “style of too late capitalism.” If Postmodernism is dead, here we have the dominant artistic style of the early twenty-first century. The project of immediatism is to eliminate any need for mediation in favor of the immediately obvious.
Represented by Kim Kardashian’s selfie-book Selfish and the Van Gogh interactive experience both of which encourage participation (take out your phone and take a selfie!) instead of reflection, Immediate Art strives to place itself so much on the surface that it becomes something you can almost touch. Skin-to-skin contact is the goal; true human feeling from a rock would at least feel possible if the rock could ask something of you. And these rocks are asking quite a bit of us.
“Immediacy style’s reification of what merely appears, by contrast [to past styles], stamps out contradiction. What you see is what you get. However much this self-identical manifestiveness feels warranted in these times, its voiding of contradicting eliminates the gap by which theory distinguishes between the actual and the possible. Without this gap, there can be no projects, no synthesis. Nothing other than too late.”
- Kornbluh, Immediacy: The Style of Too Late Capitalism
The feeling of “too late capitalism” is that it has become too late to do anything, to take any action, to save ourselves at all — in a world increasingly burning and drowning, what is there left to do but cast away mediation, waste away writing autofiction and posting, posting, posting? Maybe even our slow deaths could be beautiful as they happen if retrospection proves actually impossible. “In too late capitalism, critique resigns and futurity forecloses; only mesmerizing emissions present.”1
Immediatism. Instant affirmation. Immediacy, then, is a broad cultural attempt to be as transparent as possible in order to bridge representation and presentation.
Unfettered communication is our chosen route. Emojis, the typographic symbology of our time, require almost no contemplation and when their use does require thought or interpretation, we panic and quickly text our friends what does this mean? Our world is more flat than ever, and if we see a three dimensional structure we can’t trust it.
Everything strives to be valuable on the surface because otherwise there might be a need for contemplation, and, based on the American public’s treatment of Trans people these last couple months, such a thing is impermissible. The all-too-online American public seems more ready to shoot whatever they don’t understand in favor of the more readily understandable.
In the United States, there’s been a broad decline in english degree programs but a rapid expansion of writing programs. What an odd contradiction… Write and don’t read seems to be the message here.
Autofiction’s rise over the past forty years coincides with a growing nausea felt by authors, best typified by Knausgaard, about using fictional characters in novels or work. The first-person has become ubiquitous for the first time in the history of the novel. The voice is king. I would say this is less a symptom of the narcissism of the “me-generation” as much as it is a symptom of immediate understanding being the value case for art. The third person is a mediation that can be eliminated in favor of the more immediate I. The third person creates distance and that in itself devalues the work.
“None of us get to think in the third person,” Kornbluh writes. “If we want to know what other people think, we have to ask them, and fantasize and project, and misunderstand. If we want to know about places and times we’ve never been, we have to research and read and interpret. Connection is a process.” Building connection is hard because it happens slowly.
This is similarly why so much of our media is built upon existing connections to nostalgic material. Every Marvel film is the same as the last. Marvel movies are no different than a handful Youtube Let’s Play personalities playing through the same triple-A title with slightly different monetized quips. “Well that just happened.” The media most aware of how trapped it is inside the flow tends to repeat, to loop until its resonances are completely dried up.
On Pheobe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Kornbluh writes:
“Being a person is hard, but in Fleabag, the streaming form of hyperscrutinous closeness takes the camera as a prosthesis of intimacy that finally reifies banal social isolation; why make the effort to relate to the real other beside you when you can so seamlessly orate to the imaginary other in the screen?”
It is so much easier to emanate appearances to the camera than it is to actually connect with real, human others. We emanate, or even auto-emanate, with an imaginary real and the buffers of language and thought has been stripped. Everything is conjoined by a collective imaginary world for which we have no language to understand. Nothing evades immediacy when all kinds of presence is downstream of a digital world we don’t understand.
The feeling of being always on comes not only from instantaneous circulation but from the ubiquity of our growing web of circulations — “presence bleed” as described by social scientist Melissa Gregg — under which engagement is everywhere all the time even if we are unaware of its happening. It is easy to forget browser cookies and geolocation tracking.
Everything bleeds together into a “delicate confusion of work and friendship”2 meant to marry, as Kornbluh writes, “labor and enjoyment, extraction and connection.”3 We live in a time without clarity in which, through the active posting of time, time itself has bloomed into something ethereal and daunting. The enforcement of time through the blunt reality of aging is one of the few things we share in our lives, which makes it into something that it doesn’t have to be, a monstrous spirit looming heavy over our heads like an impending shoe waiting to be dropped.
With this heavy fear of time in our hearts, like a flat rock skipping across still water, we skim and surf information highways and our eyes and ears only latch onto what is the most obvious and what is most comprehensive immediately. Anything demanding a moment of comprehension, the hazy swirl of mediation that creates a personal space with the media being consumed, is left for a later that might never arrive.
Who’s afraid of mediation? We both are. One day we will die, or we will become older, and I’m not sure what is worse in the eyes of the internet.
We want to be young when we’re juiced for content. Otherwise what’s the point? The problem is not only that the small two-dimensional dopamine hits of the digital, in the platform economy, hope to emulate full sensory experience, but that we as users crave such a thing too. We want to be consumed, subsumed by the stream, and to squeeze and be squeezed for real sensory experience.
Sometimes I see data collection presented in a positive light as a way of helping us achieve this goal of a streamlined emulation of feeling more effectively, and the more effectively we receive these dopamine hits, the better sensory stimulus is at feeling “real” for us, the more mediation and contemplation is pushed to the periphery of our lives. Unneeded and discarded.
And with social ties fraying, we’re even more lost in this glass maze. The internet as it is, that being a streamlined immediacy machine at the service of a need for surplus value for its proprietors, is driving all of us insane—you and I included. As Kornbluh puts it so perfectly: “intensity intensifies.”
We’re constantly exposed to unspeakables that are at the same time, and for the same reason, unknowable and uncommunicatable: like the chocolate tunnel in Willy Wonka, we see the appearances of ghastly images and nonreal entities for no rhyme or reason, things that we cannot locate in our real lived understandings because, like the true appearance of an all-too-personal hallucination, there’s no real common language at hand apt enough to square them away.
If language were to create reality, and a sense of understanding, if common language were to create for us a common, shared ground, what does it mean for us to be so adrift on an ocean of images unbound from common language?
Culturally relevant posts, articles, discourses, and memes are so bound up with quickly accumulated lore that there’s not a common language at hand to digest any of it. These things defy mediation like they defy complete understanding because we’re so immediately onto the next, and the next, and the next. Unmoored! Untethered! We have lost our anchors and didn’t even fully realize, I think, that we had been sharing anchors this whole time.
Our placeholder language of online affairs, online affirmation and dejection, the “I feel seen” and “I’ve been cancelled” respectively, don’t do much in terms of legitimate political action — media inclusion and the #girlboss feminism only gave unjust hierarchical relationships a negotiated new sheen of valuation, and “cancelled” comedians, actors, and authors certainly haven’t really, truly been excluded from anywhere, really — but both feel satisfying in their instantaneous dopamine responses, either for or against, that they feel to us like real action. In terms of online dejection, dogpiling feels like legitimate action only in the moments before hitting post.
In terms of online affirmation, identity and surface level identity is most immediately accessible. As Mark Fisher phrases it, “the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became a quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.”4
Real political mediations ranging from labor rights to reproductive rights are essential to manifest real action or change, and they have been cast almost completely aside for the sake of immediacy. Who needs labor unions, planned parenthood clinics, political parties, or even democracy itself if those would require a tactile slowdown, a brief laborious moment of consideration that would keep us from our next hit of dopamine?
But let’s also not forget the importance of a long, slow contemplation — after all, love itself is a mediation of sorts. Love paves the snowy road of contradiction. It makes such things possible.
Kornbluh, Immediacy: The Style of Too Late Capitalism
Gregg, Work’s Intimacy
Kornbluh, Immediacy: The Style of Too Late Capitalism
Fisher, Exiting the Vampire Castle
It's rather funny enough, more than its suprising that this is the first thing I see, while I open substack, after having an intense dicsussion of the very same topic "meditation" with my grandfather and a diagnosis of the digital condition, where our generation lives today with so much hyper-information around, which can never truly reach the core of the actual practice. Like I was almost arguing, that how this generation could be satisfied with just a meditative experience of sorts, which exactly relates to a person being nothing more than existing in a concious flow state.
It's haunting really, that how immediacy has supplanted mediation, and in doing so, has eroded our shared sense of meaning. And this written piece of yours, really brings that out to the surface, in rather an existentialist take. That fear of meditation, and looking inwards and feeling the tremors of oneself, only to realise we share a common space, where we do everything possible to subdue from the same.
And it it is not just the loss of contemplation, but the loss of a common language that allows us to locate ourselves in relation to the world, to each other, and to reality itself. The internet promises an endless stream of sensory stimulus, packaged in digestible digital fragments, yet the very nature of this delivery system strips away the necessary slowness required for true comprehension.
I remember how when I started writing this substack, essentially my first written piece was on lingering and the very aspect of slowing down, and to make that aspect very much comprehensible, I had to draw in the example of the movie, "Perfect Days" and its main character, "Hirayama". And I feel that's truly a necessary practice, that we need to hone.
The phrase “intensity intensifies” that you wrote, very rightly encapsulates this feedback loop; one in which we are both desperate for more and utterly unprepared to metabolize what we receive. The bombardment of images, references, and micro-narratives accumulates into a kind of digital sediment, but without the natural erosion of time and thought, these layers do not settle into something meaningful. Like, they keep stacking upon each other, demanding attention but denying coherence.
I mean dude, this write-up of yours is making me think so many things. But truly, it is about the landscape we navigate daily as a generation: a maze of flashing figures, ephemeral discourses, and algorithmically tailored horrors, all of which elude full comprehension because they are not meant to be understood in any traditional sense. They are meant to be seen, reacted to, and then replaced. The internet, in its current form, has turned even horror into spectacle, even knowledge into a dopamine cycle, even connection into something transactional.
But perhaps the most unsettling and rather a sad realization is the part where you mentioned, how we don't see but we all have lost our anchors. The common ground we once relied upon, that shared sense of cultural digestion, of meaning-making through language; all that has been eroded so gradually that its absence only reveals itself in hindsight. Like how you mentioned, what does it mean that we now float in an ocean of images that evade linguistic capture? What does it mean that we can no longer sit with a thought long enough to let it shape us?
I truly am thankful, for you to write this, and not just highlight a cultural shift, but to bring the idea of that collective notion of mourning something deeply human - the ability to process, to understand, to collectively navigate meaning. And in that mourning, it poses an unspoken question: can we reclaim mediation before we forget what it even felt like?
And this, I feel is kind of a sorcery that you have pulled off brother, because all of this is so relevant, and so so important.
i really appreciate how smoothly you’re able to connect the dots in places where the rest of us struggle to see patterns. it’s truly something special