Simon Springer -Space Space Time and the Politics of Immanence

8/10/2019 Simon Springer -Space Space Time and the Politics of Immanence

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Space, Time, and the Politics of Immanence

Simon SpringerDepartment of Geography, University of Victoria

[email protected]

Abstract As part of a special issue on Protest, and in reply to Nicholas Kierseys Occupy DameStreet as Slow-Motion General Strike? Justifying Optimism in the Wake of Irelands FailedMultitudinal Moment, I argue that we need to attune our accounts of emancipation to bothspace and time in articulating a politics of immanence. Immanence becomes a resource forhorizontal organization and prefigurative politics precisely because the here and now foldsprotest and process together in an integral embrace. Through such a politics we no longermake demands of a political system that has never listened to us and has never beendemocratic. Instead, we simply start organizing for ourselves. This does not suggest that thelarge public spectacle of protest suddenly becomes unimportant, but instead requires that westart to think about such action through a very different logic, wherein it becomes seen as aconduit not for the contestation of power, but for powers reclamation. Protest isaccordingly recast a rite of passage towards a new consciousness, wherein the idea that wecan explore alternatives without seeking permission is both celebrated and actually lived.

Keywordsdirect action; immanence; prefigurative politics; protest; space; time

A life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss.- Gilles Deleuze (2001: 27)

There is growing recognition both within the academy and on the street that emancipation is

intimately tied to the organization of horizontal politics. The Occupy Wall Street movement

was a watershed moment in this general process of awakening, which some are calling an

anarchist turn (Blumenfeld et al. 2013), but perhaps more appropriately should be thought

of as a re turn given that Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and

Elise Reclus all proved the worth of anarchism over a century ago. While these recent

developments signal a reanimation of interest in anarchist politics within the academy

(Springer et al. 2012), and certainly the spectacle of the Occupy movement brought greater

attention to anarchist sensibilities, the prefigurative politics of direct action have been an


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ever-present feature of human history. So while contemporary social scientists have generally

been preoccupied with a hierarchical view of power that treats sovereign authority and the

workings of capital as the primary loci of all that goes on in our world (Foucault 2003;

Gibson Graham 1996), the immanence of non-capitalist activities and non-statist modes of

organizing reach back even early than the anarchist thinkers of the late 19 th century, owing

their essence to time immemorial. In this context, Nicholas Kierseys (2014) musings on the

utility of Eugene Hollands (2011) concept of the slow-motion general strike in

contemporary Ireland offer a welcome intervention insofar as his account assists us in

thinking through how a horizontal sense of politics might be organized to actually succeed in

the long-term. Unlike Hart and Negri (2005, 2012) who place their emphasis on temporal

optimism wherein the multitude will spontaneously self-actualize, a position that is said to

risk a perpetual politics of waiting, Kiersey locates his account of emancipation in the

materiality of public space. Such grounding provides a more concretized account of the

possibilities of liberation by offering a visible medium for the contestation of hierarchical

power relations. Given that Kiersey has given a very favorable reading of my own work in

the construction of his argument (Springer 2011), Im obviously inclined to agree with his

general thesis, yet I offer a minor critique, suggesting that there are a few nuances to an

anarchist praxis that actually accommodate and even necessitate a temporal framing that

embraces a certain sense of providence. What I would suggest is that for an emancipatory

politics to thrive, we need to properly attune our accounts to both space and time in

articulating a politics of immanence.

Kiersey appropriately foregrounds direct action as a principal practice of horizontal

or anarchist politics, and yet I think to a certain degree he overlooks the ways in which it

materializes self-realization through the kind of spontaneity that Hart and Negri describe.


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Direct action politics can be seen as the practice of just getting on with things, which is

insurrectionary as opposed to revolutionary in the sense of simply walking ones own way

and doing things on our own account, where we no longer allow ourselves be arranged, but

instead arrange ourselves (Stirner 1845/1993). Direct action is necessarily non-

interventionist in its orientation as its sentiments appeal not to a grand gesture of defiance,

but instead to the active prefiguration of alternative worlds (Graeber 2009), played out

through the eternal process of becoming and a politics of infinitely demanding possibilities

(Critchley 2008). In this sense, direct action doesnt defer the event of self-realization, where

emancipatory politics become a future event. Rather direct action encourages an embrace of

the immediacy of the here and now as the most emancipatory spatio-temporal dimension,

precisely because it is the location and moment in which we actually live our lives (Springer

2012: 1607). The power of hereand nowis to be found in the freedom it accumulates not only

by imagining alternative free institutions and voluntary associations, but in their active

prefiguration. The significance of direct action politics is thus not to establish a fixed

program for all time, but to actively seek alternatives that provide a point of alterity or

exteriority that calls the limits of the existing order into question (Newman 2010). In this

precise space and moment of refusal, individuals are self-empowered to chart their own

paths, free from the coercive guidance of hierarchical power relations.

As a horizontal practice, direct action does not appeal to authority in the vain hope

that it can be reasoned with or temporarily restrained by a proletarian vanguard. Instead, it

recognizes the corruption of authority and the conceit of hierarchy all too well and has

nothing left to say. Direct action is thus the spontaneous liberation of space, time, and

imagination, producing what Hakim Bey (1991) referred to as a temporary autonomous zone

(TAZ), which emerges outside of authoritys gaze, only to dissolve and reform elsewhere


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before capitalism and sovereignty can crush or co-opt it. A TAZ is driven by an ontological

anarchism that lives through the confluence of action, being, and rebellion. There is no

separation between theory and practice, and the organizational choices of self-actualization

are not subordinated to an indeterminate future, they are continually negotiated as an

unfolding rhizome that lives though process (Springer 2014a). Prefiguration is thus

synonymous with direct action, which in contrast to civil disobedience and its logic of visible

defiance, proceeds with no consideration of authority whatsoever, viewing all authority as

illegitimate (Graeber 2009). Such a politics offers a very different political orientation to the

vanguardism of Marxism (Dean 2012), as the spectacular moment of revolution is replaced

with the ongoing course of insurrection (Springer forthcoming), the rising up above

government, religion, and other hierarchies, not necessarily to overthrow them, but to simply

disregard these structures by taking control of ones own individual life and creating

alternatives on the ground (Stirner 1845/1993). In other words, prefigurative politics actively

create a new society in the shell of the old (Ince 2012), where any politics of waiting is

subverted by embracing the immanent possibilities of the hereand now(Springer 2012).

When we think of self-realization as a form of immanence, we dont need a

revolutionary event, and can instead welcome the insurrectionary possibilities that are

immediately available to us in each moment of every day. Immanence becomes a resource

for prefigurative politics precisely because thehere and now folds protest and process together

in an integral embrace. Through such a politics, which is fundamentally anarchistic, we may

reject the politics of waiting outright, where we no longer make demands of a political

system that has never listened to us and has never been democratic. Instead we simply start

doing . We begin organizing alternatives by following our bliss and opening ourselves to the

possibilities that serendipity and experimentation have to offer. This is not to suggest that


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the large public spectacle of protest suddenly becomes unimportant, but instead requires that

we start to think about such action through a very different logic, wherein it becomes seen as

a conduit not for the contestation of power, but for powers reclamation. Protest is recast a

rite of passage towards a new consciousness, wherein the idea that we can explore

alternatives without seeking permission is both celebrated and actually lived. This is self-

realization, this very process of seeing ourselves as power. But it goes deeper still. Such

awareness is actually a reflection of immanence:

It is that you are looking right at the brilliant light now. That the experience you are having, which you call ordinary everyday consciousness, pretending youre not it, that experience isexactly the same thing as it. Theres no difference at all. And when you find that out, you

laugh yourself silly (Watts 1960). We are power, and we exercise that power when we finally awaken to the idea that the

audience is not and has never been an ambivalent elite class that rules over us, but rather the

audience is us. It has always been us. Such recognition demonstrates that a horizontal politics

is possible by simply doing it, organizing it, creating it, and refusing to take no for an

answer. Hierarchy and authority may respond with the full force of sovereign violence but

the spirit of revolt can never be broken. Like a seed beneath the snow it will always find a way to grow (Ward 1973). The weight of the system that sits on our back in a cruel attempt

to hold us down only encourages more rhizomic growth.

Gilles Deleuze (2001) viewed immanence as a liberatory space-time precisely because

it is obliged to create action and results, rather than establish a framework for transcendence,

where to live well means to fully express ones power in attendance with, rather than over

others. Yet we also know that the power that represents and defines us all can be, will be,

and has been accumulated by those who lose sight of our horizontal positioning in this

world as radical equals. At the precise moment of our birth before our bodies are judged,

categorized, measured, designated, registered, enrolled, numbered, managed, licensed, and


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assessed, that is, before being governed (Proudhon 1851/2007: 294) we each exist on

precisely the same plane of immanence. This anarchist ontology of horizontalism is the very

ethos of peace, and yet at the world turns, almost every event that follows ones birth is a

process whereby s/he becomes evermore mutilated into the ideals of nationalism, religion,

class, ethnicity, gender and so forth, which are the fragmented piecesthat are antecedent to

war (Springer 2014b). Any notion of utopia is banished by the affirmation of reality, which

Deleuze (2001) recognized as a flux of change and difference. The passage between a

hierarchal and horizontal mode of politics is thus an endlessly recursive dance, so that we

must recognize utopia etymologically as no place , as myth. All we have is immanence, this

precise instant of space-time in which we live and breathe, and because we are it, we can

change, reshape, and ultimately transform it. This is the importance of Kiersleys (2014)

argument, which is not so dissimilar from Hart and Negri (2005, 2012), because the

materiality of public space provides grounding and spectacle to the awakening of our

collective courage in ways that inspire greater awareness for the notion that we are all, each

one of us, powerful. In spite of, or perhaps even because of an appreciation for the notion

that every triumph will be met with loss, and every loss met with triumph, the contestation

of public space enables a possibility to become all that we can become. Each of these small

victories is self-realizing in that they redistribute power in new and alternative ways,

embedding its creative capacities in our collective, everyday consciousness. Such a process

gives us purpose by demonstrating to our children that another world is not only possible,

but that it already exists in this very space, in this exact time. Such is the politics of

immanence, where life, power, and bliss coalesce as the brilliant light that illuminates our

emancipation.


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Simon Springer -Space Space Time and the Politics of Immanence