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be a mistake to fi nd nature in such 'natural kinds'. By the same token, as Braun notes,
it is a mistake to under-appreciate that these relative permanences are in certain
respects constitutive of how nature is organised. (A view of nature as pure fl ow, pure
process, in which anything is possible at any time, is not sustainable. Rather, there are
limits 'to the open-ended actualisation of being' [Braun, 2006, p. 210].)
The immediate appeal of an immanentist outlook may well stop here, however.
For as Braun insists the philosophers who propound this outlook (e.g., Michel
Serres, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), view nature as organised
in only a very particular sort of way. To wit, the immanentist view of nature is that
its various parts/processes are not founded upon something more real than the
parts/processes themselves. Nothing underlies the so-called 'plane of immanence':
all things that are real are equally real. Evolution is not more real than any given
organism; plate tectonics is not more real than any given mountain range. And there
is nothing in nature that is determined by something outside it, supplemental to it,
whether God, Spirit or Law. Reality is not 'stratifi ed'. Moreover, the world is forever
becoming 'otherwise': we are not witness to a replay of the same processes entering
into the same interactions that they always have entered into. That matters are not
settled beforehand imparts a political quality to the notion of immanentism: 'What-
ever organisation exists at any given moment must be understood as an effect of
the forces and practices that cause things to hold together in a particular way, even
if to us the 'things' of the world appear stable and unchanging. . . . [And yet] at any
given moment the rules of combination are precise: they have to do with
this
prac-
tice,
this
connection,
this
bifurcation - which is why becoming is the domain of
ethics and politics, not blind chance, and why politics must always begin 'in the
middle of things' (Braun, 2006, pp. 204, 211, emphasis in original). Why must
politics now be a constituent feature of the 'natural'? It must be so in a world with
humans. That is, a politics of nature, of humans in nature, of humans as more-than-
human, cannot be about compliance to putative natural laws. These smack too
much of the eternal, of forces outside time and history. As Braun (following another
philosopher, Manuel DeLanda) stipulates, the immanentist conception of nature
takes time seriously. Time is not about a replay of the eternal same; it is directional,
irreversible. 'The earth is
in the making
. . . in ways that cannot simply be undone'
(p. 206). It is open, not closed, and thus we are positioned ethically rather than
with respect to discoverable, timeless essences and rules for living. (Note though
how Altvater draws a somewhat contrasting conclusion: that nature is irreversible
- fossil energy capitalism will come to a close - should inform our 'rules' for living!
[Altvater, 2006].)
Braun argues that immanentism disturbs the ecological Marxism of O'Connor
because of the latter's emphasis on a pre-given nature,
as well as
the Marxism of
geographers such as Neil Smith and David Harvey (whose work Braun's essay
addresses), whose production of nature thesis actually shares with immanentism a
notion of nature as an open-ended becoming. For Braun the problem has to do with
centering the production of nature too much on capital. In the production of nature
thesis, recall, the social-nature produced under capitalism takes on the qualities of
capital itself. (Although Smith may be more fl exible than Braun gives him credit
for, in so far as Smith argues that 'second nature' has become a
context
for the
operations of 'fi rst nature'). Social-nature comes to serve the dictates of commodity
production and exchange. Its geographical particularities refl ect the uneven develop-
ment that is one of capitalism's hallmarks. Even its dystopic qualities (e.g., anthro-
