Why Is Our Culture So Obsessed With Individual Experience?
From immersive art to personal essays and first-person novels, our culture is obsessed with the idea of individual experience. Anna Kornbluh, the author of Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, spoke to Jacobin about why.
The Beyond Van Gogh Experience during a media preview at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California, July 19, 2021. (Jeff Gritchen / MediaNews Group / Orange County Register via Getty Images)
Contemporary culture is obsessed with experience, from immersive painting shows to first-person narration novels. Everywhere the idea that it is possible to speak and write in a way that isn’t fundamentally dependent on one’s identity is under attack. Anna Kornbluh, a literary theorist and author of Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (Verso, 2024), spoke to Jacobin about the causes of these developments within the cultural sphere. In a wide-ranging conversation, she argues that they are the aesthetic parallel of similar changes taking place within the world of economics.
Daniel Zamora
You start the book by discussing the proliferation of so-called “immersive” painting exhibitions. Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, or Claude Monet “experiences” are now popping up everywhere around the globe. One way to look at this development is from the economic perspective. Such shows are obviously easily replicable and cheaper than more traditional exhibitions. But you argue that there is something more going on. Could you say what this is?
Anna Kornbluh
The book tries to think about why there are so many pressures on representation in the present. There is a general sense that people have no time for art, that we can’t afford the slowness of thinking that representation demands. If you stand before a Van Gogh painting, its meaning is not self-evident; maybe the shoes on the floor are the point, maybe the angle of perspective is the point, maybe something about the market for yellow pigment is the point, and so we have to process what is before us.
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