The Horizon of Immanence

I haven't been doing much else in my spare time besides watching and reading as much as I can about the situation in Cairo, but I do want to share a few quotes about a notion that resonates with me more deeply than most any: a "horizon of immanence". This 'horizon' is the very worldspace, or clearing which affords us the opportunity to be, know and do.

I will have much more to say on this topic over the next few weeks as I begin to make explicit some key tropes in my thought which continue to shape my explorations.

From Hardt and Negri's Empire:

“By the time we arrive at Spinoza, in fact, the horizon of immanence and the horizon of the democratic political order coincide completely.” (Hardt and Negri 2001:73)

And from Fredric Jameson's Valences Of The Dialectic:

“We have indeed secreted a human age out of ourselves as spiders secrete their webs: an immense, all-encompassing ceiling of secularity which shuts down visibility on all sides even as it absorbs all the formerly natural elements in its habitat, transmuting them into its own man-made substance. Yet within the horizon of immanence, we wander as alien as tribal people, or as visitors from outer space, admiring its unimaginably complex and fragile filigree and recoiling from its bottomless potholes, lounging against a rainwall of exotic and artificial plants or else agonizing among poisonous colors and lethal stems we were not taught to avoid. The world of the human age is an aesthetic pretext for grinding terror or pathological ecstasy, and in its cosmos, all of it drawn form the very fibers of our own being and at one with us in every post-natural cell more alien to us than nature itself we continue murmuring Kant's old questions - what can I know? What should I do? How may I hope? - under a starry heaven, no more responsive than a mirror or a space ship, not understanding that they require the adjunct of an ugly and bureaucratic qualification: what can I know in this system? What should I do in this new world completely invented by me? What can I hope for in alone in an altogether human age? And failing to replace them by the only meaningful one, namely how can I recognize this forbiddingly foreign totality as my own doing, how may I appropriate it and make it my own handiwork and acknowledge its laws as my own projection and praxis?

“... We may argue that Utopia is no longer in time just as with the end of voyages of discovery and the exploration of the globe it disappeared from geographical space as such. Utopia as the absolute negation of the fully realized Absolute which our own system has attained cannot now be imagined as lying ahead of us in historical time as an evolutionary or even revolutionary possibility. Indeed, it cannot be imagined at all; and one needs the languages and figurations of physics - the conception of closed worlds and a multiplicity of unconnected yet simultaneous universes - in order to convey what might be the ontology of this now so seemingly empty and abstract idea. Yet it is not to be grapsed in this logic of religious transcendence either, as some other world after or before this one, or beyond it. It would be best, perhaps, to think of an alternate world - better to say the alternate world, our alternate world - as one contiguous with ours but without any connection or access to it. Then, from time to time, like a diseased eyeball in which disturbing flashes of light are perceived or like those baroque sunbursts in which rays from another world suddenly break into this one, we are reminded that Utopia exists and that other systems, other spaces, are still possible.” (Jameson 2009:608)

[ h/t Mark Fisher ]