As I begin this short text, it seems to me that this request to make a selection of what I have recently read, watched or listened to online harkens back to a not too distant time when online information still generated a useful hypertext for web browsers. I am referring to that golden age of blogs and publications scrupulously selected and placed on the browser’s header bar. Online criticism experienced its glory days, but they are now gone. I was recently surprised to find that an entire series of articles and essays I once published in a digital magazine had vanished without a trace. At least on paper there was an archive clipping. Information now revolves around a much more direct, flat and instantaneous principle of immediacy. As a regular social media user, this insatiable appetite for “content” is not compensated by any lasting satisfaction; all those hours wasted without productivity or benefit are lost, no matter how much information we record out of the corner of our eye.
Consumption is all there is now and a lot of production is created with immediacy. To counteract this incomprehensible and perhaps inevitable generic and undifferentiated flow, I always try to have books at hand. I carry them with me from place to place but use them rather than read them. They are usually exhibition catalogues and books on critical theory. I keep an eye out for new publications from the Verso publishing house. Over the past few months, I have been reading Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. According to her, mediation has been eliminated by the acceleration of the sphere of circulation, which has become the dominant factor in the capital valorisation process. She refers there to a new cultural production “style” in art and literature; for example, when all presentation is personalisation, the ultimate content is oneself, or when the immersive experience triumphs over the idea. Other symptoms of this immediacy are the narcissism of social media, the decline of the novel and the rise of autofiction, of increasingly aphoristic writing, and video as the ultimate medium (with increasingly shorter streaming series), not to mention what immediacy means for criticism.
Another book from the same English and American language publisher that follows me in the places I inhabit is Dominique Routhier’s With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation. It is an original and detailed study of the relationship of the Letterist International and the Situationist International with robotics and technology at the dawn of the cybernetic age. As the title suggests, it is an ambivalent relationship. It is an outstanding book because of its thorough research and the way in which the author combines art history and political thought without setting them against each other. I have also intermittently been reading about spatial issues, particularly Henri Levebvre and Kristin Ross. I have Constant’s book Nueva Babilonia. La utopía de la ciudad ideal en el siglo XX (Cátedra), but haven’t started it yet. These readings have no immediate benefit and I read them very slowly. I protect these books with a lining to prevent them from being damaged through handling, which is a very relaxing routine.
My reading habits vary according to the time of day. I increasingly find that reading theory, criticism and books on current affairs in the hours before bed is counterproductive. That is why I try to put literary books on the bedside table, as they are more conducive to relaxation than mental activity. That place is currently occupied by the mammoth tome Perdido Street Station (Macmillan) by China Miéville, a writer of “weird fiction” whose language I enjoy for its lexical richness and boundless imagination.
As for TV series, there is a very large void after Succession. I am incapable of watching series for entertainment. Shows that don’t hook me become boring and I quickly lose the thread. On the other hand, the cinema has given me some fine moments, including Jonathan Glazer’s Zone of Interest and Isaki Lacuesta and Pol Rodríguez’s film Segundo premio, about the Granada band Los Planetas. I am drawn to reading reviews of films when they are released in cinemas, and I’m now curious about by the opinions about the same films on social media when they are released on platforms, as if the visual and aural experience in the cinema is not relevant and only the “content” matters.
These cultural artefacts, mentioned here in passing and without the intention of being exhaustive, serve in my way to combat this sense of urgency and immediacy that characterises our present. They are objects of cultural consumption, which is also intellectual and cognitive, yet still consumption.
Peio Aguirre is a writer and curator based in Donostia. He is the curator of the exhibition Chillida. Usos aplicados (Chillida. Applied Uses) at Artium Museoa (25 October 2024 – 02 February 2025), that looks at a lesser-known facet of Eduardo Chillida as an illustrator and maker of two-dimensional shapes and icons.