Immediacy

Art constitutively thwarts immediacy, urgency, and utility; its most direct use rests in this indirection—but today’s immediatist art aspires to void itself, and theory has been following in its wake.

It is this slackening that thinkers like Jodi Dean, Slavoj Žižek, Mark Andrejevic, Byung-Chul Han and others have warned of as a decline of the symbolic: a malfunctioning of socially sanctioned language, a sagging of meaning and norms.

the imaginary waxes while the symbolic wanes.