In popular music, the “style of late capitalism” is NOTHING

I have written a lot about the fact that contemporary American popular culture (note that’s 5 links to 5 pieces) is increasingly shifting away from the political ontology that subtends both Western Enlightenment aesthetics (what Ranciere calls “the aesthetic regime of art”) and classically liberal social contract theory and towards one that prioritizes things like private responsibility, private individual preference, the performance of bad taste as a rejection of society and its potential normativity. The traditional ideals of bourgeois good taste, sensus communis, and so on, are out, and we’re figuring out what’s now in. 

Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy is also about this shift: on page one, she notes “the social activity of representation is slackening.” Elsewhere she remarks that corresponding ideals like disinterestedness and fine art – aka “creative distance from ordinary communications or banal functionality” (5) are likewise falling out of fashion. Similarly, the classically liberal ideal of the “abstract equivalent” (4) is on the wane; the subject of the “Ethical Substance” section of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the “abstract equivalent” is the civil person who is formally equally to every other civil person by virtue of their separation from private differences (like gender, or more accurately, femininity) – think “one person, one vote.” All of these phenomena are thought to embody objectivity and universality because they exist at the level of civil society, the public sphere, or however you prefer to frame this realm separated out from the world of private difference and social reproduction.

Fine art is likewise universal because it is separate from the private sphere of social reproduction and its pesky tethering to material necessity (you can’t make a cup and saucer with fur and expect people to like drink out of it, but it sure looks good under plexiglass at The Art Institute). As feminist art historians of the 1970s pointed out, the fine art/craft hierarchy is nestled in the public/private distinction of classical liberalism.

In place of subjective universality, disinterestedness, the sensus communis, and all those other aesthetic concepts rooted in the political ontology of the classically liberal public/private divide, Kornbluh locates “immediacy”. For her, immediacy is “affective transfer” (2), “directness and literalness…immersiveness” (5), and “atomistic absorption” (15). Examples include “immersive” art happenings, social practice art, streaming video, and autotheory.

The “immediacy” Kornbluh identifies is a psychoanalytic one. In all cases, lots of mediation happens to produce the subjective experience of psychoanalytic immediacy. For example, Kornbluh argues that “all this [algorithmic] personalization upholds a permalingering mirror stage, a fortress of the imaginary, minimizing the possibility for mediations of the other” (128). My psychoanalytic theory is certainly rusty (I think the last time I published anything in that area was like 2010?), but her basic idea is that there has arisen a class of aesthetic experiences that lack the capacity to demonstrate to a perceiver that their experience is not an unbroken continuous whole with the rest of the universe because they lack a representation of something that is not the self (such as one’s mirror image). “Immediacy’s metaphysics of presence chafes against representation” (11), she writes. Note the use of the phrase “metaphysics of presence” – I’ll come back to this later – immediacy is the experience of being, pure being, unbroken by representations of otherness that might suggest to the perceiver that they are not fully present to or knowledgeable of themselves (e.g., that they might have things in their mind that they’re not conscious of).

As someone not at all invested in the psychoanalytic concept of self or consciousness, the book felt a bit like a top-down application of a concept to popular culture: the psychoanalytic theory was in the driver’s seat and the examples came along for the ride. Methodologically lean toward another kind of analysis: music analysis, where we break down how a musical text or performance or recording works to understand what the parts are and how they all work together (and why we think that works, sounds good, etc.). My work tends to be fairly bottom-up, where I start with an analysis of a cultural object and build a theory up from there. That’s what I did in Resilience & Melancholy with the soar, and that’s what I do in the vibes book, where I look to how things like recommender algorithms “think” (i.e., what kinds of mathematical models of probability they build and how those models are structured) and then found a philosophical model with a similar epistemology (it’s phenomenology). If recommender algorithms are doing phenomenology with math, then the critical phenomenological tradition provides a wealth of resources for both critiquing what’s wrong with that way of thinking and model better, more just was to do it. So while I do agree with Kornbluh that the phenomenon she identifies as “immediacy” exists, but I don’t think it’s a problem for the reason she thinks it’s a problem because I don’t really have a horse in the psychoanalysis race.

In popular music studies, what Kornbluh calls “immediacy” is described more in the same terms that the tech/UX world uses to describe their ideals, namely, “frictionless” experience. In the tech/UX world, “friction is any element that makes users stop and consider their options in experience design.” If something in an interface makes a user step out of the task directly at hand and reflect on themselves and the interface, that’s friction – it impedes the efficient use of the interface by making people stop and think. This is Heidegger’s broken hammer for the age of platform capitalism.

As Liz Pelly explains in her book on Spotify, from about 2017 until very recently, the platform’s main aim was to keep users constantly tuned in so they were continually harvesting data from them. To do that, they had to reduce any friction that might cause someone to press pause, close the app, and stop listening. This quest for frictionless UX led Spotify to something quite different than immediacy, however. As Pelly puts it, “the quest for a frictionless user experience resulted in a deluge of frictionless music” (40). She interviews many workers in the music industry who all note that Spotify actively promoted (e.g., by putting on popular playlists) “chill inoffensive” music that sounded like “emotional wallpaper” (83). This was music for “soundtracking” one’s day, on in the background as one does other things. Far from immersive immediacy, this so-called “lean-back listening” is more of a void than a plenum. This is most evident in Pelly’s reporting on the platform’s understanding of what constituted “chill”: “Anything can be chilled and repurposed in the economy of passive listening…Another source told me that no one internally could agree on what ‘chill’ meant–that it was so ambiguous, it had ‘no definition that is meaningful’” (53). As I explain in Good Vibes Only, “chill” is a profile that can be applied to any style of music; it has no definitive features, just a signature alignment among whatever set of features one may be working with in a given song. Put differently, chill has no essential determinate properties. Chill’s void of clear and distinct meaning echoes Spotify’s approach to frictionless listening: empty music out and reduce it to more or less nothing.

Lean-back listening is the determinate negation of immediacy: they’re both produced and motivated by political economies of platformed algorithmic recommendation, but in one context (music) we have experiential nothingness and in the other (Kornbluh’s take on streaming video) we have experiential immediacy. Whereas my friend and colleague Dan DiPiero claims that the Spotify sound is “the aural equivalent of the kind of image flattening that Kornbluh writes about, where sounds become meaningless placeholders for our distracted need for noise in the background,” he’s both right and wrong at the same time. Lean-back listening and immediacy are dialectically related: on the one hand, there’s being, pure being, so full and unbroken that it’s…absent specific identifiable features…which makes it identical to nothing, pure nothing.

This same-but-different relation between being, pure being, and nothing, pure nothing is the subject of the first chapter of Hegel’s Science of Logic. There’s “being, pure being, without any further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equally only to itself.” This is being as pure undifferentiated presence. However, lacking differentiation, “it is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. There is NOTHING to be intuited in it…Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact NOTHING.” Pure being is void of qualification. At the same time, to the extent that “nothing IS (exists) in our thinking” it is “empty intuition and thought itself, and the same empty intuition or thought as pure being.” To be so full as to have no differentiation is the same as to have no discernible content – being pure being is nothing pure nothing. As examples of pure being and pure nothing, immediacy and lean-back listening/chill embody the same dialectical relationship Hegel identifies in their exemplars.

So the question of whether Kornbluh’s immediacy thesis applies to popular music is: yes and no. Music is a context where what she theorizes as a plenum and full presence emerged as a void. Platforms and their personalization algorithms absolutely contribute to the erosion of anything like a sensus communis (which, for the record, was not great to begin with and basically a theory of white masculine superiority) or a common distribution of the sensible. But they don’t necessarily or inherently push users towards fast, immersive ~being~. 2025’s biggest song is basically empty slop designed to soundtrack whatever poignant social media moment TikTok or Instagram users want to share at a particular moment. In popular music the style of late capitalism is nothing.

***

There’s a philosophical reason why music can’t exhibit immediacy in the way Kornbluh theorizes it in the 21st century. At least in the Western tradition, music was thought to be an immediate expression of physical reality back in the eighteenth century; as Derrida’s Grammatology sort of intuits, music’s moment with the “metaphysics of presence” was back when people like Rousseau and composer/music theorist Jean-Phillippe Rameau were debating whether harmonic function should be tied to the order of intervals in the overtone series.

I said Derrida sort of intuits this because he gets the stakes of Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages correct, but he misunderstands which side of those stakes Rousseau himself comes down on. Tl;dr – Rousseau and Derrida actually agree more than they disagree.

This is the subject of the second chapter of my first book, so I’m going to stick to the main point and let you look there for the details. Before he was known as a philosopher, Rousseau was known for his work in music. His beef with Rameau was the Kendric v Drake of its day, and the substance of that beef was whether the principles of music theory should be derived from the physical properties of sound, or whether they were cultural (or “moral” as Rousseau describes it). Rameau was arguing for what became the model for tonal harmony, which orders the harmonic syntax of Western classical music according to the order of intervals in the overtone series: the octave, the major fifth, the major fourth, etc. Parodying Rameau’s argument Rousseau summarizes: “Gentlemen, he would say to them, if we are to philosophize properly we must go back to the physical causes” (EOL 285). Rameau argued that this system was universal because it was natural and unmediated by culture – it’s based in the (supposedly objective) physics of sound. Rousseau argued that “nature” itself is a cultural construct and all musical perception is learned and cultural – i.e., mediated. Rousseau writes,

Physical observations have occasioned every kind of absurdity in discussions of the fine arts…by itself a sound has no absolute character by which it might be recognized…the power which music exercises over our souls is not the project of sounds…[but] moral effects [which] also have moral causes” (EOL 290/284).

Rameau was arguing for the immediacy of quote-unquote “nature,” and Rousseau countered with cultural mediation. That’s what Derrida gets wrong: in the Essay and all the musical writing that preceded it (Letter on French Music, Examination of Two Principles, etc.) Rousseau is not team presence, he’s team mediation and culture.

Charles Mills calls this era of Rousseau’s writing his “non-ideal” period, where, unlike in his later writing on contractarianism or education, Rousseau is arguing against forms of abstraction that naturalize patriarchal racial capitalist epistemologies (Contract & Domination, 96). So if this early Rousseau feels inconsistent with the later, more famous Rousseau, it is!

Rameau wanted to argue for the unmediated character of tonal harmony because the only way the emerging classically liberal thought of the day permitted the existence of hierarchies was if they were natural. Civil society and the public sphere were supposedly universal, disinterested, and equal; differences and inequities existed, but in the private sphere. For music to be a fine art, it needed to demonstrate fine art’s definitive capacity to be universal, objective, and free of overt bias; any existing biases, inequities, etc., had to be rooted in nature, like for example they thought gender and racial difference was.

So the project of musical immediacy is in fact tied to the 18th century classically liberal public/private distinction, not to its 21st century obsolescence.