Gabriel Abrantes, Arguments in Favor of Love, 2025, film still.

How to be responsible irresponsibly? I’ve insisted on asking this question in public art talks for a couple of years now. “Responsibility” and “irresponsibility” are heavy words. Philosophically, they refer to an individual’s actions towards oneself and others, but they extend as much to art objects—as when the contents or timing of a film or novel are deemed responsible or not in a given historical context. Responsibility tends to have positive connotations; irresponsibility, negative. As such, the invocation of “responsibility” can easily fall into the traps of lofty, oftentimes naive, but no less real, moral ideals. It describes an intention, demands an object of attachment, and is on the lookout for results. Utilitarian, the urge for responsibility can thus slip treacherously from an ethical concept to a form of power: a slippage from righteousness to intransigence.¹ In contrast, “irresponsibility” might be generally understood as either a conscious refusal of given moral codes, or as an unawareness that is often regarded, condescendingly, as self-centered. In today’s contemporary art field, responsibility is easily portrayed as “political”; while, evading efficacy, irresponsibility is shunned as “apolitical.”² Feeling the weight of this polarity hanging over (the reception and production of) artworks can be anxiety-inducing for artists. Free yet always looking over one’s shoulder, the result is a panicky art, unsure of itself even when purposeful, perfectly inspiring and still always insufficient. But can’t artists and their art be both?

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The question with which this text begins feels relevant today because you and I and most everyone else this century is submerged in the immediacy of affects and effects. It is an immediacy that is instrumental to a personalized economy, held together by the ongoing production and management of an impatiently narcissistic, economically lean, and ultimately banal notion of the individual; but just as well for flattening ideas and ideals, which are reduced to polarized ideological camps and knee-jerk efficiency in a media-accelerated, survivalist struggle for attention.³

In her recent book Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism (2024), literary scholar Anna Kornbluh theorizes the concept of “immediacy” to diagnose contemporary cultural production. In certain theoretical and online circles, her thesis has polarized debates over the state of art today, a contentiousness to which the book’s polemical tone contributes. In her view, “immediacy” purposely negates “mediation,” a concept dear to Marxist thought. A quality inherent to artworks, mediation challenges facile interpretation, stimulating skepticism and criticality in the audience.⁴ In doing so, the artwork demands an interruption of mimetic capitalist flows between viewer and object, planting an emancipatory seed for the creation of a politicized subject. Immediacy, by contrast, aspires to a seamless, direct, and even apologetic (to the point of subservience) access to an audience. It invites instant identification with the artwork, facilitating a transference between audience and artwork that foregrounds self-affirmation in place of self-problematization.

According to Kornbluh, immediacy foments ostensibly self-evident artistic expressions and interpretations—for example, confessional formats characterized by non-imposing, patchy plots that center individual or identitarian experience. This has created a self-serving cultural landscape where even intellectual discourse, from philosophical debates to social and psychological analysis, is reduced to “content,” commodified and serviced to easily streamlined egos. The consequence is a passive audience, prone to reactionary instincts when confronted with objects that resist their preconceived self-image.

The problem with Kornbluh’s thesis is that it hangs on a division, in which responsibility and irresponsibility play a part. On the one hand, art reduced to a mere reflection of its time and place; on the other, art as a frictional element at odds with society. In a recent article for The Atlantic, cultural critic Spencer Kornhaber anxiously attempts to refute doomer pronouncements of a contemporary cultural malaise.⁵ The article, however, ends by giving the poorest of answers to the question of art’s social role: an expression of the times we live in. In contrast, it is similarly obvious that there would be no avant-garde or counterculture if there were no hegemonic culture to contest to begin with. Naturally, and less polemically, then, the political nature of art is found somewhere in between these two views.

Take the above example of the confessional. Kornbluh offers a bold critique of autofiction and autotheory. We can concede that autofiction’s first-person biographical perspective aligns phenomenologically with the reduction of every individual subjectivity to an agent of capital, and that autotheory obfuscates the financial precarization of academia, opening the door to conservative anti-intellectualism. However, one should strive to understand why this tendency toward self-narrative arose; for example, as a response to the fading of grand narratives (History, Progress, etc.), or a symptom of a need for intimacy beyond postmodern cynicism.⁶

Kornbluh focuses mostly on literature, television, and theory. But how does immediacy reflect the political role of contemporary art at the end of neoliberalism? Neoliberal globalization was the backbone of what came to be understood as contemporary art. The free circulation of commodities created the conditions for an explosion of art markets, curatorial MFAs, biennials, and global corporation-like art galleries. It also produced the illusion of a progressive globe-trotting community acting in concert with but also beyond market forces, and gave rise to the historically unprecedented entrance of working- and middle-class artists and curators into the art world.

The 2020s, however, are driving a rapid transition out of an already decadent and bankrupt neoliberalism into yet-ungraspable systems of biopower.⁷ The lawlessness of deregulated markets is propelling militarized violence, fascist nationalism, and technocratic feudalism. Is this what the all-knowing intelligence of markets, as promoted by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, was supposed to give us? Even as it falls apart, it is undeniable that neoliberalism has succeeded in molding people’s inner lives to satisfy the gaze of others (even within discourses of self-care); like a hall of mirrors, we scrutinize each other constantly but human connection is only transactional. It has also created an ever-looping temporality built on both cultural nostalgia and art-historical amnesia.⁸ After all, when even critique, dumbed down from humanities syllabi, is twisted performatively into capital gains, who can say that neoliberalism hasn’t won? You and I may very well be living in neoliberalism’s aftermath, but its culture far outlives its economics.

After neoliberalism, how could contemporary art stay the same? Mirroring a widening economic disparity, contemporary art’s egalitarian promise is eroding fast. While we should celebrate art’s utopian inclusion of diverse geographical and cultural histories—to the point of the system’s breakdown: a regionalized art world for a nascent multipolar world—the reality of financial strain means that, once again, only those from wealthy backgrounds or with access to capital can afford art’s lifestyles and infrastructure (rent, studios, materials, time). Similarly, institutions and galleries can only bet on art that will bring a return on investment. Therefore, they tend to capitulate to populist artistic choices that appeal, harmlessly and photogenically, to a generic audience—akin to the situation in cinema and the music industry—or fall into the trap of a polarized culture war. It is perhaps the art world more than art itself, then, that best mirrors the times.

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Art’s push-and-pull dynamic with theory has a long history.⁹ Yet the emergence of contemporary art created the conditions for “discourse”—a theoretical concept in itself—to permeate and define practices and exhibitions. Art and theory became somewhat inextricable in both art’s making and reception. The shift in the role of curators from preserving and interpreting a collection to acting as independent agents on a global stage probably played the biggest role in this transformation, but contemporary art schools, art bookshops, biennials, and related symposia were equally important. From my own experience, many artists, curators, and writers regarded discourse as a political act in itself, thought to push against normalizing market forces and conservative views on the role of art. Through linguistic means, discourse created the conditions for embedding art in reality (geopolitics, ecology, technology, etc.) in an epoch of thorough commodification.

In the mid-2000s, a return to modernity after the “End of History,” and the corollary pursuit of “alternative modernities,” was reflected in efforts to include and comprehend post-Soviet and postcolonial art practices. This emerged from, and reacted to, the “fun” ethos and unorthodox exhibition practices of relational aesthetics, as later critiqued by Claire Bishop.¹⁰ For a while, politics could be poetics, to paraphrase Francis Alÿs, but that didn’t last long—inequalities endured, and before them poetics were powerless. The 2008 financial crisis generated a necessary Marxist revival among precarious art laborers and elite economists alike—a running joke at the time was the many copies of Capital one could spot in the hands of first-class airline passengers—with artists introducing a lexicon of financial abstraction and critiques of austerity into art exhibitions. Slowly, into the 2010s, the genre of speculative realism and its more-than-human ideals spilled out from philosophy classes into exhibition press releases. Under the influence of speculative realism, ecologically minded art practices were no longer simply “green”; they were entwined with the lifeworlds, and increasing visibility, of Indigenous and historically marginalized peoples, enriching Anthropocene debates. Speculative realism also influenced post-internet art, a tendency more material than virtual; the translation from the coded realm into galleristic objecthood was, after all, its key aesthetic move. Intent on unveiling tech infrastructure, post-internet art was nonetheless muddled by a cynical posturing. Each moment had its theoretical canons, and each pushed a certain type of “discourse” onto art. Throughout, fiction mostly remained at the margins of curating and art education, overlooked by theory—until it wasn’t. Indeed, it is the absorption of poetry and autofiction into discourse that explains the confessional turn analyzed by Kornbluh.

Then something paradoxical happened in the late-2010s: a bottom-up distrust of theory simultaneous to a demand that art be explicitly political. This tension could only be resolved if “political” meant “autonomous,” in an Adornoian sense—that is, critically embedded in society yet separate from social utility and the productive labor process.¹¹ On the contrary, what emerged among a vocal swath of artists and audiences alike was a furious yet much-needed demand for accountability, mostly in the shape of diversity and representation, on art institutions and the market, but also on the art object, abruptly reduced to a moral calculus and, worse, efficacy—again, the immediacy of both affects and effects. This push was felt equally in academia, with the distrust of grand narratives giving way to a focus on individual histories that nonetheless relied on and crystalize predetermined sociological categories. This instrumentalization of art was not new; what was novel, however, was the impatience with theory, and in many ways also with art. Philosophy and its abstractions have since all but disappeared, since they lack the necessary utilitarianism. Even climate change, once an emergency, has lost its urgency: whereas a decade ago interdisciplinary dialogues between art and science felt palpable and UN resolutions achievable, now the discussion continues institutionally but no one seems to truly believe in it anymore.

The demands weren’t new, but the reality of perpetual injustice gave it impetus; or rather, that the injustice wasn’t new only corroborated the demands. Slowly, art institutions began to capitulate. Victories have been won. Although continuing vigilance is needed, I believe that recent structural changes, such as more egalitarian exhibitions and more diverse museum staff, will endure. What I am pointing to is how the pressure on artists to “solve” sociopolitical issues mounted as art institutions suddenly saw themselves as the moral compass for wrecked social promises. Burdened with the weight of responsibility, art was pushed into a corner: before a broken society, it became the last bastion of activism. And just like I aligned myself, as a young artist, with the political nature of discourse, so do I align myself with a relentlessly exigent political art. But the necessity of self-critique remains; this is where politics lies. For what do you do with art that is either uninterested in saving the world (or does so beyond artistic intent), or vainly attempts to do so, only to fail by its own standards? Such questions risk being closed off when art is turned into a mere instrument, not only political but financial. After all, if the personal is political, then the political is capital.

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Forgive the linearity of my narrative. Thankfully, there is always someone and something outside a narrative: other artists, concerned with still other narratives. For artists, art is our lives. We are people for whom last year’s major event may have been a divorce, or it may just as well have been reading a tacky novel at the beach—idiosyncrasies that curating, as the repository for discourse, simply can’t keep up with, especially when in service of an attention-grabbing economy. The issue with curating today is that it cannot commit to thought, because thought isn’t fast enough for the times; and it cannot believe in art, unless the art passes the test of producing materialistic moral results.

This brings me back to the issue of responsibility and irresponsibility. Kornbluh offers a penetrating analysis of the contemporary cultural field; however, her dichotomy between mediation and immediacy is symptomatic of the polarization that impoverishes our moment. However ancient, the dichotomy between art’s imaginative freedom and its materialistic usefulness is a rhetorical trap—as are the modalities of efficacy (passivity vs. reactivity) contrasted in Immediacy. Thinking responsibly irresponsibly is an attempt to break away from this polarization.

Being responsible irresponsibly means letting go of the fundamental divide between imagination and politics. It means being faithful to imagination, blindly and fearlessly, otherwise it will deflate uninspiringly or pop from too much pressure, like an overinflated balloon. But it also means being conscious of imagination’s context. This is the responsible side of irresponsibility. Imagination is not God-given or rent-free, but rather emerges from pasts, presents, and futures: embedded in reality, as it was, as it is, as it could be. Imagination is not self-indulgent reverie; it has its anthropological scriptures, artistic preconceptions, and socially tested waters. Imagination is what happens between the contradictory, arcane impulses in one’s brain and a massaged, hypervigilant reality. It lies between what the heart wants (often irresponsibly) and what society dictates (a forceful responsibility). In other words, to be responsible irresponsibly means that imagination is inherently political—by which I mean emancipatory—because it does not, should not, function according to social or even personal expectations. Rather, imagination is a way to short-circuit expectations—including our own.

This is akin to the distinction between subtext and “open text.” Subtext is the underlying meaning behind a text. But more importantly, it is the set of techniques, beyond moralizing and prohibition, used to insert messages in an artwork. With subtext, only those “in the know” grasp the underlying message, because they get the codes that are used to hide what is really going on—the fact that the protagonists are gay, for example, or that a plot is a thinly veiled call for revolution. In other words, techniques such as metaphor and analogy are used to communicate what cannot be said. In the past few decades, as content about sexuality, race, and inequality, for example, has become more socially accepted in liberal societies, the tendency has been to forget and frown upon subtext, portraying it as conservative and no longer necessary. Thus, the film or novel that insists on subtext is deemed insufficiently outspoken and condemned as reactionary—not only by audiences but also, for example, in cinema even by studios. The problem here is that politics is reduced to a matter of visibility, of immediacy, rather than treated also as a matter of localized narrative strategy, coding, and speculation. As if deception were not historically, if not inherently, queer.

For their part, films and novel that take an “open text” approach are thought to be a sign of a healthy pluralist society. Artistically, it lifts a weight off artists’ shoulders: we can be who we are, say what we want to say! The problem with open text, however, is that we start to unconsciously project what we want onto reality and then get angry when it doesn’t give back what we expect. Take, for example, the way fan fiction has made its way from nerdy, peripheral message boards into writing rooms for movies and comics. After years of admiring Marvel and Star Wars, fans can finally get their hands on the characters; but surely their private vision for these fictional figures won’t align with everyone else’s. Characters are then deemed to behave incoherently. The fan wants longstanding characters to perform according to their desires, to the point of disrespecting the characters’ own biographies. By injecting their own desires into the fiction, the fan bends it to their will—in reality, to what they are lacking emotionally. In doing so, fans treat the material condescendingly, making the characters act out the self-affirming stories that the fans wish to make a reality in their own lives but cannot. The material becomes a surrogate, and in this way it is made shallow. Unwittingly, rather than opening up the canon, fanfiction reinforces it, since the diverging visions concocted by fans highlight the need for a baseline of purity to return to; as the editorial saying goes, once plotlines get too messy, “the toys are put back in the box.”

There is analogy here to art and theory (and politics, really). We want art to be a surrogate for realities that are not yet real. There is nothing wrong with this; on the contrary, it is a utopian urge. The problem is when good intentions constrain art, both its production and reception, since this ultimately diminishes us. By wanting artworks to do the work for us, art becomes purely useful. It is then that the range of other possible realities is occluded—including those already here but sidelined. Just like with a canon, there is a risk of tunnel vision. You don’t want to put so much pressure on the artwork that it is rendered, puzzlingly, mute. As I insist above, if being irresponsible means letting loose the imagination, then being responsible means acknowledging the roots of that same imagination.

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At the end of Immediacy, Kornbluh calls for a reclaiming of past forms as a way to confront present cultural exhaustion. For example, if immediacy implies a zero-sum closeness to the first-person voice, she suggests pulling back to the third-person. The disembodied third-person perspective, in asking us to “fantasize,” “project,” and, more importantly, “misunderstand” that which lies beyond our personal phenomenological experience, “makes a kind of thinking that individuals do not experience in their everyday lives,” argues Kornbluh.¹² She offers a number of other similar suggestions: a return to plotting, understood as an exercise in articulation that pushes both creators and audiences to make sense of disparity; an attention to scales, which must be transversed if we want to criticize them for the vectors of organization and control that they are; and a leap of faith in depersonalization, which compels us to subjectivize objects, along the lines of actor-network-theory. To sum up, if the individual is a product of dominant systems, then focus on complexity; pay attention to wholes rather than particulars.

Perhaps Kornbluh is right that contemporary audiences lack the necessary attention span for the reflexive demands of art. I would argue, however, that even if the confessional is “an infinite succession of ones,” as Kornbluh writes, it does not necessarily mean that the third-person voice is any better suited for emancipatory aims. Sometimes imagining ourselves in the shoes of another “I” is precisely what builds solidarity. Still, Kornbluh is right that art is at risk of being reduced to a market of subjectivities.

Contra Kornbluh, my impulse is to test the landscape of immediacy by pushing forward or interrupting established forms in ways that question the anthropological, social, and aesthetic expectations placed upon those same forms. It is always possible to recuperate demoded artistic techniques, as she suggests, but only doing so is insufficient. Autofiction and the confessional have become established forms now, and their visibility is sustained by a sociopolitical model that equates representation with personal exposure. This is a (neo)liberal creed that relies on the assumption that representing individual and social experience, and eliciting empathy, require realism—as if alterity could only be acknowledged when made transparent. The consequence is a distrust of non-realism. But if autofiction inherently raises the issue of eroding the distinction between fact and fiction—that is, the validity of a testimony when fabulation is part of the artwork’s structure—why not extrapolate on this tension between representation and nonrepresentation, in both the aesthetic and political meaning of the term? For example, can autofiction and the biographical coexist with speculative fiction? Or do speculative fiction techniques, from science fiction and fantasy to the paranormal and mythology, to name a few, cancel the veracity of the testimonial and, as such, of representation?

Speculative memoir, whether new or rediscovered in past novels, films, and artworks, may be able to test these waters. We might as well call it science (auto)fiction, or biographical fantasy. Another approach might be to use subtext in ways that short-circuit hegemonic culture and go beyond on-the-nose symbolism. Or to find forms of expression that evade causal effects while staying attuned to the human subjectivity of the audience, confident that their disturbance, however undetermined, is political. After all, if you and I stop believing that art can change lives—that it can change individual aspirations, social relationships, or simply ways of looking at art itself—then what are we doing here? Seeing every spectator and reader as a nail to be hammered into agreement, rather than letting them go on their way? True enough, the risk is contributing to the blurring of an already beleaguered truth—an untrustworthy concept to begin with. As long as flights of fancy are aware of their fancifulness, you and I should be fine.