Immediacy


title: Immediacy
subtitle: Affective computing

About the Concept

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Immediacy is here understood from a double approach, as a sensation, a modality
of relation in time and movement and as a modality of communication that affects
interpersonal relations.

Sources

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  • [Parables for the virtual][1]: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Brian Massumi 2002)

[1]: /library/Brian MASSUMI - Parables for the Virtual, Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002).pdf

Immediacy is an affective notion.

Here, abstract means: never present in position, only ever in passing. This is
an abstractness pertaining to the transitional immediacy of a real
relation—that of a body to its own indeterminacy (its openness to an else
where and otherwise than it is, in any here and now).

Immediacy is characterised as a complex dynamic unity in wich resides all
emergence, a relation to immediacy is inherently an association in power, not a
power onto but a power within.

Immediacy qualifies a dynamic concept, the self-disjunctive coincidence of a
thing’s immediacy to its own variation. The self-relation is immediate—in and of
itself, only its own event—even though it requires distance to occur, this
distance is yet already filled in resonance by this dynamic unity.

Reaching to it implies to follow how concepts of dynamic unity and unmediated
heterogeneity reciprocally presuppose each other.

The best word for a complicating immediacy of self-relation is “intensity”
Resonance can be seen as converting distance, or extension, into intensity. It
is a qualitative transformation of distance into an immediacy of self-relation.

In communication practice, Immediacy implies the absence of media, however
contemporary sense of immediacy in communication is achieved by a high level of
media usage, media becomes the contradictory tool for a sensory relation to the
public leading to the quality or feeling of being directly involved: producing
in the feeling that something seems real and important. The penetration of
communication in every moment distorts the means of social relation otherwise in
place and while originally led to the possibility of unexpected relations; while
massified it gives birth to important amounts of emotional communication,
provoking the apparition of unbalanced social apparitions, fake news, extreme
election schemes, etc.

Therefore issue of power is at the same time the core of immediacy and while
being non political is abstracted and simulated in communication and media.

Tree of Significance

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SYNONYM
: self-relation, instantaneity

ANTONYM
: binary, preempted

HYPERNYM
: emergence, non-binary, dynamic, relation, perception

HYPONYM
: attention, existence, intensity