A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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difficult to discern precisely the distinction between drug war and Cold War military operations. This was particularly so throughout Latin America and the Caribbean as the U.S. military became fully entangled with counternarcotics operations. Senator Bob Dole was just one of many at the time to call for a “total war” against drugs and asserted that it was “time to bring the full force [of] military and intelligence communities into this war.”47 It was only a matter of time before the George H. W. Bush administration fully committed the U.S. military to the drug war, which was clearly demonstrated in the 1989 invasion of Panama. Although many of the top military brass had resisted the military’s increased role in counternarcotics operations abroad, with the end of the Cold War, many of them came to see the military’s participation in such operations as a means to secure the inflated budgets they had enjoyed over the past decades. Economic analysts who feared the onset of a recession if military expenditures were cut echoed this concern. William Taylor, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, offered one solution to this concern that would prove prescient. Arguing that with the “Soviet threat” eliminated the U.S. military would need to “develop some social-utility arguments” in order to defend its standing reserve of personnel, equipment, and funding, Taylor recommended that the so-called Third World might offer a solution in the form of “insurgency, terrorism, and narcotics interdiction.”48
If one of the initial intertwinings of the drug war assemblage was that of counternarcotics operations, global militarism, and the Cold War, then by the late 1990s and the 2000s this would morph into counternarcotics operations, global militarism, and counterterrorism.49 Just as the U.S. government claimed that Communist insurgents in Latin America funded their operations with drug trafficking—a claim that at times was tenuous at best—so too it currently makes similar claims about terrorist organizations.50 And just as such claims in the 1980s and 1990s allowed for the increased intertwining of economic and military aid, military and law enforcement operations, and military interventions in drug war situations, so too today have these become tightly knotted and manifest in locations such as Afghanistan; Mexico; Central Asia; Southeast Europe; and increasingly, parts of Africa; as well as continuing what had already begun in the 1980s in the United States.51 At both the national and international levels, then, counternarcotics and counterterrorism often intertwine and emerge in the form of either military intervention as in Afghanistan, Special Ops in Latin America, or militarized police in the United States and elsewhere.
It is primarily this particular emergence of a drug war situation in Mexico that Javier talked about that evening in Vancouver and that the Movimiento focuses its political activity on. This is also the “drug war” that gets most of the media and other public discursive attention. Bud’s poem, however, disrupts this narrow public discursive focus and discloses the nonlocalized complexity that is the drug war. Beginning with his poem as a hermeneutic entrée, I have tried to trace the assemblic relations of the drug war to show that it goes well beyond these localized and situated emergences, which, it should be noted, typical anthropological ethnography tends to focus upon, and that any comprehensive analysis of the drug war must recognize this widely diffused and complex assemblic phenomenon. In other words, in this section I have tried to show that the drug war can only be understood as a complex assemblage of, among other things, state-based surveillance and control, biopolitical therapeutics, carceral-political economics, militarized police violence, and global militarism in its various forms over the past forty years, and, as a consequence, all of these can only be understood in terms of their relation to the drug war.
INTERLUDE—A SITUATION THEORETICALLY DESCRIBED
So far I have been trying to show that the way in which the global anti–drug war movement conceives of, experiences, and addresses the drug war is best analyzed as what I am calling a situation. By situation I mean a nontotalizable assemblage widely diffused across different global scales that allows us to conceptualize how persons and objects that are geographically, socioeconomically, and “culturally” distributed get caught up in shared conditions that significantly affect their possible ways of being-in-the-world. This might become clearer if we consider what we normally mean when we say something like, “We found ourselves in this situation” or ask, “What can I do in this situation I’m in?” These are ways we articulate the recognition that “to be in a situation” is at one and the same time something that falls upon us, or perhaps better put, we get caught up in, and to a great extent, but not entirely, provides the conditions for possible ways of being, doing, speaking, and thinking within that situation. Thus, this is recognition that a situation is both a singularity of which one has become a part and a multiplicity that both preexists one’s participation in it and as already having been, exceeds this localized instance of it. The multiplicity of a situation, however, denotes more than its durative and widely diffused existence. It also indicates its multiaspectual nature; for a situation is not a closed and totalized occurrence that appears as if from nowhere. Rather, and as I have been trying to show, a situation is constituted by diverse phenomena that become intertwined and emerge temporarily as localized manifestations. It is in these ways, then, that a situation can be described as a singular multiplicity that provides widely diffused but shared conditions.
Recently, some nonanthropological scholars have also recognized the significance of widely diffused phenomena with localized affect and have reconceived analytic and political concepts accordingly.52 Timothy Morton, for example, has done this to address global warming, which he conceives as a hyperobject.53 Morton defines hyperobjects as “things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.” As a result, hyperobjects are nonlocal because any local manifestation of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject itself, or at least not the totality of the object. A hurricane or a tsunami, for example, may be a local manifestation of the hyperobject of global warming, but it is not global warming as such. Similarly, although the drug war locally emerges differentially in various forms, such as the surveillance-induced oppression experienced, for example, by Terrance in New York City, Bud in California, or Joey in Denpasar, these are not the drug war as such.
Despite this and other similarities, however, there are real differences between hyperobjects and situations as I am trying to articulate them. The most significant difference is that Morton conceives a hyperobject as a real object, or a unit unto itself that withdraws from other objects as well as itself and thus can never fully be known or touched by another object. This is how the object-oriented ontology to which Morton subscribes defines objects,54 and within this perspective everything, including humans, are objects with just these qualities. But this raises the question: if objects cannot touch or influence each other,55 except for perhaps in aesthetic ways, then what are we left to do politically when confronted with a hyperobject such as global warming? Although the notion of a hyperobject as “massively distributed in time and space” is compelling and in some ways similar to a situation, it is difficult to imagine the kind of politics to be done by those who cannot “touch” and against that which itself cannot be “touched.” In contrast, because situations can be described as ecstatically relational, assembling, and thus emergent multiplicities, they can and do slip into one another. This makes situations ripe with sites of potentiality and thus open for political activity.
A similar concern arises with Alain Badiou’s notion of situation. In the most recent explication of his ontology, Badiou replaces the concept of situation with world, but for our purposes we can still think of this as his rendering of situation.56 For Badiou, a situation/world comes into existence, maintains that existence, and is recognizable as such because it has a particular and unique logic that orders it. If for Badiou “being qua being is thought by mathematics,” then a situation/world as “appearing, or being-there-in-a-world, is thought by logic.”57 Indeed, as he goes on to put it, situations/worlds are not simply thought by logic, they are logic.58 And this logic is not a procedure that a human subject utilizes to understand a situation/world, so argues Badiou, but rather this logic that fundamentally is situations/worlds “is altogether anterior to every subjective constitution.”59 A situation/world for Badiou, then, is the local emplacement of a logical operation that occurs regardless of human existence.60 This is clearly not what I intend by a situation, and in fact, it is precisely the kind