“Autofiction, first-person fiction, memoir, social media, and the personal essay compromise a continuum of auto-emission, indicating how much of literary production follows the human-capital ideology that makes of quotidian well-being a mandate to optimize one’s inner material and to actualize the self, and how much contemporary literature is constituted by its rejection of mediation. Streaming content free-flowing from free-lancers, auto-writing without “the distance between writer, reader, and critic”, writerly immediacy aestheticizes industrial conditions in publishing, which, as cultural scholar Sarah Brouillette points out, track closely with gigification and precaritization in other industries. Absent institutions like writers' guilds and staff unions, absent salaries for hours on background, absent knowledge protocols like investigative reporting or long-form synthesis, and drowning in student loan debt, content creators wield their only asset: expression of their inner life. Your story is something to own.” (101)
“Anti-mediation coalesces the literary field at present into a dominant style – one that converges hitherto-distinct genres of theory, fiction, memoir, the essay, and informal personal expression in a ubiquitous polyvalent writing. In the liquid emulsion of these modes, in their propensity for indistinct blur, in their churning flow, glides the writerly guise of propulsive circulation: frictionless uptake, fluid exchange, pouring directness, jet speed. Slick with this style, we may fail to read how the ‘auto’ of autofiction inscribes the self-manifestive quality common to the governmental ideologies of human capital, how the engulfing formlessness of genre melt ferries less the genius of authors than the flooded ruins of institutions like the university or the publishing house, how the defigurative realness of unadorned charismatic persons suffering execrably presages the dystopia already here. Immediacy as literary style holds incredible lure, but it sticks too close. In resigning the potential of writing to estrange, abstract, and mediate; in castigating the capacity of writing to collectivize and convoke; in deflating the power of writing to fabricate more than the immediately tangible detritus of evacuated sociality, immediacy writing collapses into self-identical emission: “This!”” (111-12)
Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2023).