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.

If you stand in a yoga pose at the Immersive Van Gogh Morning Class, contemplation isn’t the goal; total sensory fusion is. This shift from contemplation to intense experience is sold as liberating, but it parallels other social and economic shifts that aren’t so great.

In these exhibitions, the emphasis is on experience: embodied, sensory, overwhelming experience. The emphasis is not on the work of art, nor the techniques through which it is mediated and the contemplation they solicit. Part of the reason for the rise in prominence of this kind of art is, as you say, that it is inexpensive. From one perspective, this is part of a process of democratization. But we have to understand it also as cutting out the artwork, and therefore as a profound rejection of art.

We furthermore have to understand that this is also an economic endeavor: cutting out the middleman is part of the model of big business in twenty-first century industry, from car-shares to e-brokerage. Profits come less from making and more from exchanging. When our dominant aesthetic style embraces direct messages and instant access, it clings too close to capitalist relations instead of shedding light on them.

“Crisis of historicity” is the literary theorist Frederic Jameson’s term for postmodernism’s aesthetic. This is an aesthetic that takes styles or techniques out of their historical context and blends them together, a pastiche he sees as a response to the unified time of the globalized economy. “Crisis of futurity” is my term for one aspect of our aesthetic situation that “postmodernism” doesn’t quite describe: we have lost the future — humanity is facing forced extinction — and instead of playing with the past, our dominant aesthetic style magnifies the present and presence.

This loss of the future is of course unevenly distributed, but it does nevertheless implicate the species as a whole. It is a way to explaining how our culture makes emotional experience more extreme — in art, film, and literature, grief, rage, and desperation become more profound.

Pervasive in the work of the artists you mention is a repudiation of the thickness of representation, an intolerance for indirect messages, a refusal of mediation. Mediation is the social activity of making meaning, making sense, putting something into a medium, constructing relations between things, people, and places; without it art falls apart, the world becomes incomprehensible, and collective movements for change become unsustainable. In the work of these artists, mediation is being expressly rejected.

The project originated in my attempt to examine changes in literary style and how those seemed to respond to a broader cultural shift. In the history of the English novel, fiction is majority composed in the third person. Third person is the grammatical mode not only of the speculative experiment of omniscience, but in some sense of fictionality itself. This is because it constructs counterfactual perspectives across different times and spaces — a perspective that individual experience is naturally incapable of accessing.

The third person is also the mode that makes possible free indirect discourse, a way of blending the thought of different minds unique to the novel. Nowhere else can we get to think collectively shared thoughts (that’s what makes them “free”; they are no one’s property).

It is this very third person, this magical mode, which seems to be dying out: novels in English in the twenty-first century are majority first person. This is a radical event in the history of literature, which demands explanation. Why do writers want to nix the unique capacity of fictional consciousness? Why in the course of explicitly dismantling narrativity as such do so many contemporary novelists also explicitly reject the notion of literary character, or plot, or the temporal duration with which the novel form is often associated?

I try and answer this question in a chapter in the book where I address transformations in media industries like journalism, literary publishing, and social networking, as well as in the university. In these areas, I look at the economic conditions for creative cultural production.

According to the New York Times, memoir sales have increased 400 percent this century relative to the previous one. At the same time the personal essay predominates as an inexpensive or deskilled mode of journalism and “content” generation. And there is a related dynamic, the hegemony of a weakened standpoint epistemology. This theory, which prioritizes knowledge shaped by the perspective of the knower, was initially developed to advance working-class, feminist, queer, and other minority goals. In the present culture, however, it has provided justification for a hostility toward abstraction and universal knowledge claims.

Some cultural critics and mental health professionals explain this surge of the self as a result of a growing “narcissism epidemic.” And certainly, the antisocial tendencies in our society are palpable. But it is not sufficient to understand contemporary cultural production through a lens that psychologizes or moralizes, for several reasons.

Chief among these is that psychology is not walled off from the rest of society; culture, the economy, and technology play a huge role in structuring symptoms and disorders. If we are living through some kind of inflation of the ego and the self-image, this has to be connected to our media ecology, and to the dominant economic ideology of human capital and bootstrapping, as well as to the dismantling of social institutions that support everyday life — like public education.

But the other reason why it’s not enough to describe our culture as narcissistic is that the kinds of prioritization of self we might notice in artworks are also accompanied by the hollowing out of mediation. If there’s an attack on collective meaning, individual meaning surges in its place. If there’s a disruption of mediation, things that seem immediate — experience, the body, the personal — rise up. But it’s the attack, the disruption — what in business is called “disintermediation” — that comes first.

Absolutely. Identifying immediacy as a cultural style involves connecting the arts to knowledge and economics as well as to politics. Arts are usually the arena where mediation shows itself. It is definitely the arena where specific “works” have contours and limits that lend themselves to analysis. In contrast, “politics” can be trickier to make a rigorous object of study.

That’s probably my training as a scholar of aesthetics talking, but it can be easier to know where to look to see the rejection of mediation happening in a TV show or poems than in the general movement of populism in the political sphere. Nonetheless, the book absolutely tries to indicate that the style of immediacy governs the tactical (and ideological) preferences for horizontalism, localism, anarcho-spontaneity, anti-unionism, and the lack of disciplined organization on the Left. The latter is often replace by cults of charisma, virulent opinionism, and anti-institutionalism. All of these trends can be observed on the political left and right. There have been really important analyses of these politics as they have developed over the last decade; I hope someone else writes a comprehensive in-depth study of immediacy in politics.