The Perspiration of Immanence
Do you feel the steam rising from the warm earth?
The Perspiration of Immanence
Do you feel the steam rising from the warm earth?
The morning dew dripping from the intertwined bodies of the world?
Weaving with wet roots and ancient skin.
Immanence does not speak, it perspires.
It exudes from the open pores of the world’s body,
moistening the boundaries between inside and outside, between knowing and feeling.
To sweat is to let the heat of the bond evaporate through us without being captured or controlled.
The perspiration of immanence reminds us that we are alive with, not separate from.
It is how the relationship manifests itself in the smell of the earth after rain, in the sweat shared in collective work, in the intertwined breathing of those who truly listen.
Listening to the world bathes us in its own vitality.
Immanence transpires, moves, infiltrates, spreads.
It undoes the fiction of separation.
Where there is transpiration, there is porosity.
Where there is porosity, there is kinship. And where there is kinship, there is the possibility of living, knowing, and caring with, not about.
Immanence as a Web of Kinship
Immanence is not just a philosophical or spiritual idea. It is an earthly force of relational insubordination, a thread of continuity between bodies, lands, and spirits that rejects the colonial verticality of separation and hierarchy. Immanence is the ground where everything touches without merging into one, where each entity vibrates by itself, with others, in a dance of mutual affections.
We speak of vital entanglement, a kinship that refuses to ask Western logic for permission to exist. Like so many contextual, native, indigenous, and aboriginal cultures that struggle to exist, they still remember.
Lorraine Code has already given us gossip as a horizontal methodology. And immanence appears as its affective territory: there is no tower of reason, only intertwined corridors of living matter, which touch each other in whispers, resistance, and reexistence.
In this living and vibrant context, immanence:
Breaks down the division between mind/body, subject/object, human/nature. Each being is constituted in the relationship, and not before it. There are no independent “things”; only occasions of encounter, as Whitehead suggests. Or Ecologies of Kinship, as Martinez and Salmón bring us.
Exposes the coloniality of abstraction. The idea of inert matter served as an excuse to dehumanize racialized bodies and exploit territories. Immanence restores agency to everything that has been reduced to a “resource.” The non-human, non-normative bodies, border bodies, ritual gestures, emotional atmospheres; everything is once again recognized as a worthy participant.
It calls for an ethics of feeling. Immanence is not about knowing, but about being affected. This brings it radically closer to Codean gossip: both are ways of generating knowledge from connection, intimacy, lateral listening. Both reject neutrality and cultivate an episteme of situated care.
It sends us back to the pluriverse. Not a single ontology, but many ways of being and knowing that recognize each other, without hierarchies, as Aura Cumes or Arturo Escobar (among many others) remind us.
In an immanent world, knowledge is not gathered from above, but germinates intertwined in the webs of affection. Gossip, like the roots of a forest, operates beneath visible logic, not to destroy, but to nurture relationships that colonialism tries to silence. Every whisper is a mycelium. Every intimate sharing is a commitment to belonging. Ecology, here, is not just the study of the home (oikos), it is the dance of collective living, in living impermanence. Immanence is that condition in which everything is related to everything else. Not by identity, but by affinity in movement, as in the fluttering of wings and feathers.
Immanence does not ask, “What are you?”, but “With whom are you in relation?”. And in this, immanence, gossip and dancing sisters: both refuse the tower, both listen to the vibration of the ground. Both have the power to give body to a world in which knowledge is not extracted, but cultivated in common, in the interstices.
Immanence is the condition in which there is no outside. Everything is within the relationship, without external hierarchies, without a higher plane. Immanence rejects theological, colonial, epistemological verticality. It insists on the here. On the now. On the body. On the ground.
The world can only be known by being felt, not as data or resource, but as presence and relationship.
References
Trans-Corporeal Feminisms And The Ethical Space Of Nature (Stacy Alaimo)
At Work In The Ruins (Dougald Hine)
Earthly Things, Immanence, New Materialisms, And Planetary Thinking (Karen Bray, Heather Eaton, And Whitney Bauman, Editors)
Eco-Concepts, Ecocritical Theory And Practice (Series Editor: Douglas A. Vakoch)
Ecology And Theology In The Ancient World (Ailsa Hunt, Hilary Marlow And Contributors)
All Incomplete (Stefano Harney, Fred Moten)
Meaningful Flesh: Reflections On Religion And Nature For A Queer Planet (Edited By Whitney A. Bauman)
Religion, Materialism, and Ecology (Edited by Sigurd Bergmann, Kate Rigby, and Peter Manley Scott)
The Ecological Self (Freya Mathews)
Vibrant Matter, A Political Ecology of Things (Jane Bennett)
CODE, Lorraine. Ecological Thinking: The Politics of Epistemic Location. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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