Space, Time, and the Politics of Immanence

Simon Springer
Department of Geography, University of Victoria
simonspringer@gmail.com
Abstract
As part of a special issue on Protest, and in reply to Nicholas Kierseys Occupy Dame
Street as Slow-Motion General Strike? Justifying Optimism in the Wake of Irelands Failed
Multitudinal Moment, I argue that we need to attune our accounts of emancipation to both
space and time in articulating a politics of immanence. Immanence becomes a resource for
horizontal organization and prefigurative politics precisely because the here and now folds
protest and process together in an integral embrace. Through such a politics we no longer
make demands of a political system that has never listened to us and has never been
democratic. Instead, we simply start organizing for ourselves. This does not suggest that 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
accordingly 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.
Keywords
direct 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 return 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

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 19th 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.

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 noninterventionist 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 here and now is 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

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 here and 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 the here 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

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 selfrealization, 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 is
exactly 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

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 pieces that 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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