What happens when you write? For me, it starts as capturing raw ideas as a stream of words pouring onto the page (screen). The first step of the process is not much different than writing a tweet, posting a selfie, or recording a TikTok video. But what happens next is critical: editing. The text takes shape as ideas are moved around, removed, and added. Themes emerge, and a structure is created.
Sometimes, the whole thing is discarded (deleted), and other times, the ideas are incorporated into a different text, but it always grows and changes.
This is mediation.
In many ways, I created this newsletter as a form of mediation. Recently, I was talking to a colleague who subscribes, and she mentioned that she doesn’t read my newsletter right away; she has to wait until she has time to process it. That was the greatest compliment I could have received. In a world where the focus is on easy consumption, there is value in something that requires a bit more effort.
In her recent book, Immediacy: The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Anna Kornbluh suggests that our current cultural style is immediacy at the expense of mediation. 1
What is Immediacy?
At its simplest, Immediacy is the lack of mediation.
“mediation” means the active process of relating—making sense and making meaning by inlaying into medium; making middles that merge extremes; making available in language and image and rhythm the super-valent abstractions otherwise unavailable to our sensuous perception—like “justice” or “value.”2
The word immediacy also conjures up a sense of urgency, which is an important aspect.
The colloquial connotation of immediacy as “urgency” underlines the temporal dimension of this style, a hurry-hurry that compresses time into a tingling present. Spatially, immediacy encloses while delivering everything close: the world at your fingertips; “Let’s go places.” The flexible psychology surfing these urgencies and proximities is self-possessed and transparent: “Speak your truth!” “Live your best life!” “You do you!”—the auto-actualization of human capital… Individuated epistemology (“Do your own research!”) ensues from alternative facts, horseshoe both-sidesism, faux news, and personal-pan propaganda. Ideological variants of immediacy include virulent opinionism, cults of charisma, nihilist absolutism, and ecstatic anarchy. Its politics eschew organizations and institutions in favor of organic horizontalism, aleatory uprisings, and local autonomy; its adherents refuse vehicles of power while enthusing the omnipresence of power, and rhapsodize the immutability of domination, exonerating inertia. And underlying all these compressions and expressivities is the economy of hurry and harry, same-day shipping and on-demand services, where the ease of one-click buying covers up a human hamster wheel, and innovative circulation pulls off a just-in-time deflection from the multi-decade crisis in capitalist production. 3
There is a lot to unpack in this, but I am sure you can see how your daily life expectations and cultural trends are reflected in this definition of immediacy.
Put more simply:
Immediacy is instant; mediation dilates.
Immediacy is urgent; mediation displaces.
Immediacy flows; mediation bars.
Immediacy confesses; mediation intermixes.
Immediacy laps; mediation relates.” 4
A focus on the imaginary
Before we get into how this shows up at work, I want to show how immediacy links to ideas I shared a few weeks ago, namely the Lacanian registers of Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real.
The imaginary is the register of images, identifications, wholes, and projections; the symbolic is the register of language, institutions, norms, laws, practices, and order; the real is the register of what catalyzes the imaginary and eludes the symbolic—the impossible, the unrepresentable, the material, the contradictory or unmeaningful. In one sense, these registers describe psychic development: an infantile experience of embodiment and umbilical reciprocity (imaginary) matures into the mediations of language (symbolic), while an inkling of something inaccessible and unspeakable is retroactively effected by this progression (real). In another sense, though, simultaneous overlap and underlap of these three is fundamental, since the subject of the unconscious is variegated, divergent, never directly fully itself. 5
Kornbluh explains the focus of immediacy, though, is on the imaginary.
Much of immediacy’s lure rests in the momentary compensatory solidities of imagined contact with an imagined real. “An imagined real” might imply that there is a real real out there for a different kind of aesthetics. But for psychoanalysis, a real real is an “impossibility.” 6
The focus on the imaginary as if it is real is part of how immediacy functions. That is helpful to consider while we see how this plays out at work.
Immediacy at work
There are phrases that we hear all the time in technology companies:
“Move fast and break things.”
“Don’t let great be the enemy of good.”
“Take a bias towards action.”
Even agile, which has been incredibly successful for software organizations, is often in the style of immediacy. For example, in the Agile Manifesto, the reference to reflectivity is on helping the team more effectively deliver value and less about creating a narrative to help understand how the value the team is creating fits into the bigger picture. For example, we are likely to reflect on the process of delivering a feature and how we assessed its success rather than looking at any more significant systemic impacts that it may be correlated with and what that feature says about how our product fits into our worldview.
None of these approaches is wrong, per se. Continuous adaptation makes sense in fast-moving and complex conditions. Still, mediating and constructing larger narratives are crucial to making sense, and they are often overlooked. We end up thinking only of tactics and miss the larger strategic picture. The risk is that we constantly adapt in crisis mode.
This also shows up for individuals when we think about our career as accelerating how quickly we can get promoted rather than learning and figuring out what we want as we evolve. For people who have recently been laid off, there may be a natural feeling of immediacy. You may feel you need to find the next thing immediately; you need to start applying, getting interviews, etc. And, to be sure, the ability to mediate is a privilege.
At the same time:
immediatism is a reaction to crisis that fails the bar of strategy, a reflex that is ultimately crisis-continuous… Amid crisis, alienation, and stratification, immediacy feels right: urgent, engaging, homogenizing. But this is pharmakon: remedy and poison in one. Working through rather than working out would involve cognizing that it doesn’t have to be this way. It is too late at the same time as it is not too late. 7
Mediation at work
What would mediation at work look like?
It would entail slowing down—not necessarily slowing down to speed up, but slowing down to go deeper and understand that slowing can be meaningful. It would include approaches that encourage mediation.
This is perhaps the opportunity of Amazon’s memo-writing process; it introduces mediation and fights against the trend of immediacy. It allows for thinking both in the writing process and for the team that reviews the memo and takes notes before responding.
Mediation is not just an ideal process in the realm of ideas (we require categories of time and space to think) but a material process in the realm of corporeality and social interdependence (we tarry with nature to make our conditions of existence; our social relations are contingent rather than fixed). 8
Mediation allows us to think through what is happening, not as inevitable but contingent on our circumstances and context. With mediation, we create narratives to explain causes. A narrative requires a cause. As E.M. Forster said, “If I say to you the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I say the king died, and the queen died of grief, that’s a story.” 9
The creation of a narrative is also not a scientific understanding of causation. They are not narratives are not necessarily correct, but they are helpful for understanding and developing our perspective.
Today, we are more likely to trust our instincts, test and learn, or figure it out ourselves.
It is widely observed that ours is a culture of post-truth and anti-expert populism, in which every man does his own research in his own corner of the internet.” 10
Expertise is a form of mediation. Seeking out those with wide-ranging experiences that can fit events into existing narratives is incredibly useful; it allows for interpretation.
Interpretation mediates by encountering phenomena and putting them into medium, like an articulated category that connects them to other phenomena or a historical narrative that helps explain how they came to appear. Interpretation of a dialectical sort pays attention to contradictions and negations, including the openings for thought to negate the circumstances of its own emergence, as well as the contradictory relations dissembled by that which solely appears. Dialectics attune to what is not immediate—to what a perceiving self doesn’t first see about itself, to what is contingent, to what is on the move, to what does not dawn.11
Mediation allows us to move from the imaginary register of immediacy back to the symbolic of mediation. It allows us to make sense of our situation.
What can middle managers do?
Choose to take actions that allow things to slow down, not to go faster, but to be intentionally slower.
Create discussions and space for shared meaning-making.
Create and share narratives.
It is up to actions to produce the necessary mediations, and from there cultural style may follow, but actions themselves require mediation—for recognizable sustained effect rather than just undecidable entanglement, symbolic efficacy beyond imaginary feint, it takes conspicuously knitted chains of cause and effect, signifiers resounding, and collaborations exercising collective sovereignty.12
Finally, it is ok if things are more obscured than clarified. As Kornbluh writes, “A painting isn’t an efficient way to send a message or achieve a goal, but beholding its inefficient indirection can stimulate thought.” 13
And perhaps what we need are actions that create more space for thought rather than quicker action.
- The use of style vs culture here is deliberate, as Kornbluh explains: “[S]tyle bespeaks unity, while culture is admittedly heterogeneous, which led Fredric Jameson to prefer a term like “cultural dominant”: what characterizes a culture is more likely a hegemony rather than a unity.” (Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism) ↩
- Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Anna Kornbluh shared this quote in a Fredric Jameson Reading group. ↩
- Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩
- Ibid ↩