A recent essay by the artist/author has been published by CLOT Magazine.
Artist and writer, Sarah-Jane Field has written a compelling analysis of Smartness in her recent essay, ‘Feeling Smartly: In the dust motes’ for Clot Magazine. Examining Anna Kornbluh’s theories of immediacy, mediation, and being in the twenty-first century in her 2023 book, Immediacy: The Style of Too Late Capitalism, Field unflattens and problematises what Kornbluh tells us the algorithm has erased. Much of Field’s essay argues against the stickiness and coherency of machine thinking for the messy randomisation of human creativity. She asks in opposition to Kornbluh’s theories, ‘but what if thinking is a form of feeling?’ This is a significant question, and one at the heart of the debate. Machine thinking is not machine feeling. I would counter, can we think without feeling? Separating one from the other is the bifurcation of a whole that renders the parts dispossessed of each other. In this deprivation, the whole is lost. We are feeling this loss every day when we see the annihilation of humanities subjects in academia; when we see creativity turned into slop; when we see a neoliberal immediacy become the currency of our existence.
Field is right to contrast Jerome Bruner’s notion that we are constructed by the narratives we construct with Kornbluh’s understanding of a new immediacy paradigm because within this contrast we see the symbiosis become antagonistic; we see the immediacy of awareness that generates the narratives we tell become a voracious impatience eviscerating the flesh of our experience, leaving the entrails of meaning like waste on the ground.
Immediacy vs narrative, this is the neoliberal notion of immediate stimulus and satisfaction, against the stories we tell of and about ourselves from a perspective where we occupy the central vantage point, not because of some privilege but because we are compelled to express. As Field points out, Kornbluh’s theories place us in the agitative position of having our expressive selves subsumed by the algorithm and the Large Learning Models (LLM). This agitates because our human experience is debased by having the meaning removed while feeding the machine learning. We, and our experiences, become flattened ‘informational substance,’ as Field interprets Kornbluh’s analysis.
Immediacy once fostered thoughts of being in the moment, being present, and engaging our capacity for sensory awareness, even before mindfulness became a wellness trend. Immediacy was a reflective prospect that allowed us to see ourselves in relation to what existed outside us. It reinforced boundaries that made us feel the recognition of where we began and ended. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting this was always a halcyon experience. What I’m suggesting is that immediacy was a moment of reckoning with ourselves, the place in the world we existed in, and the consequences of our being there. Narratives flowed in, around, and through these moments of reckoning. This immediacy was not opposed to narrative, but entangled with it, feeding it, feeding us — like thinking and feeling.
Field is right to contrast Jerome Bruner’s notion that we are constructed by the narratives we construct with Kornbluh’s understanding of a new immediacy paradigm because within this contrast we see the symbiosis become antagonistic; we see the immediacy of awareness that generates the narratives we tell become a voracious impatience eviscerating the flesh of our experience, leaving the entrails of meaning like waste on the ground. How’s that for a metaphor! We are being put in an impossible position by technocracies through the insistence that we welcome AI into our lives. But many of us don’t want this. I like machines, but I don’t want to be ruled and dictated to by them. Nor do I want them to flatten my experience into meaningless information substance. It comes down to human vs. machine, and because we are human with insecurities, self-doubts, and inadequacies, we are in a strange position of having to justify our intelligence, our worth, and our miraculous capacity for thinking, creating, living, loving, and surviving, pitted against the machine. There is no contest here. Instead, what we are seeing is a forced redundancy of humanity. Humans have a lot to answer for and most of the time we let ourselves and others down by being so much less than what we should be, but machine thinking is no replacement for lived experience.
Sarah-Jane Field is the author of ‘Feeling Smartly: In the dust motes,’ was published 17 June 2026 on Clot Magazine and is one of several articles commissioned by Six Minutes Past Nine as part of their Plastic Prognosticate programme.
