A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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If the concern of these and other contemporary ontologists is the explication of a posthumanist politics, then it seems odd to do so in logicomathematical terms or by simply reversing the subject/object distinction and thus perpetuating a metaphysical humanist approach. In contrast, the critical hermeneutic approach begins with Heidegger’s notion of phenomenon (“what shows itself in itself”) and through analysis discloses that humans are always already intertwined in various situations, and this intertwining both precedes and exceeds any possible humanist projection onto it. To be in any world at all, and the situations that structure them, is always already to be so intertwined and as such always becoming that which situations make possible.62 But this alone does not make a situation a more compelling analytic and political concept. In the rest of this section, then, I consider further the phenomenon of situation as it “shows itself in itself.” In so doing I delineate the fundamental characteristics of a situation, which in turn will set the background for the following section, in which I consider some of the political activity of the anti–drug war movement as a way of setting the scene for the rest of the book. So as to make this analytically clear, I will delineate the various characteristics of situations in numbered subsections.
1. A Situation Is a Nontotalizable Assemblage
As we have already seen, the drug war is a complex assemblage of diverse aspects of other assemblages, such as global militarism; state-based surveillance and control; border security; carceral political economics; national and international inequalities; and as I will show in the next section, biopolitical therapeutics. What is called the drug war, then, is no “thing” in itself but rather is assembled aspects of other assemblages that together create a widely diffused situation that is differentially distributed with very real effects in worlds. Here we can begin to see how the concept of assemblages can be helpful for thinking the complexity of situations about which I wrote in the opening paragraphs of this section and how this differs from Morton’s hyperobjects and Badiou’s situations/worlds.
Anthropologists are likely most familiar with the notion of assemblage through Ong and Collier’s rendering of it in terms of global assemblages.63 There is little doubt that their edited volume has made an important and influential contribution to the development of the discipline since its publication. And to the extent that Ong and Collier’s global assemblage articulates the basics of a general theory of assemblages most fully developed, for example, by Deleuze and Guattari, Latour, and DeLanda, there are similarities with what I am calling a situation, which is a nontotalized assemblage. I differ significantly from Ong and Collier, however, in that despite claims to the contrary, they seem to conceive global assemblages as supplements to what they variously refer to as “social and cultural situations,” “spheres of life,” “environments,” and “context.”64 In contrast, over the course of the last decade I have been thinking through the concept of nontotalizable assemblages—whether in terms of moral and ethical assemblages65 or worlds and situations66—in such a way that entails that they not be thought of in terms of a supplement. In some ways my thinking of assemblages has paralleled that of Paul Rabinow.67 But while Rabinow seems to conceive of assemblages as primarily localized and temporary (thus, not unlike how I conceive of situations), I have come to think of our worlds as nothing other than densely intertwined knots of several much more widely diffused and nontotalizable assemblages that constantly flow together and slip apart in a potentially infinite number of combinations. This flowing and slippage of the singular multiplicity of situations defies totalized categorization or identification. This is precisely why as nontotalizable assemblages situations cannot be thought as supplement, for there is nothing other than traces of other such assemblages to “supplement.”
Thus, for example, the diverse aspects of the drug war situation can easily slip into other nontotalized assemblages and thereby defy easy identification with either. As we saw in the previous section, the global militarism aspect of the drug war situation can be foregrounded and reconceived as the war on terrorism or a defense against Communist insurgents, and police militarization and carceral political economics can be repositioned as being tough on crime. As a result a situation is quite slippery since it never all at once can be fully grasped because part of its very nature is the capacity for its constitutive aspects to be temporarily refigured. Such refiguration can occur “naturally,” as it were, since aspects of situations take on different signification as they are represented, experienced, or considered differently. Or, this refiguration can be done intentionally and strategically, as certain persons may wish to emphasize one particular “interpretation” of an aspect over others—for example, mandatory minimum prison sentencing as being tough on crime rather than judicial procedures with clear racial and class prejudices. Indeed, this slippery intertwining is one of the primary characteristics of the robust complexity of the drug war that makes resisting it so difficult and that an assemblic ethnography seeks to disentangle. Because of this complexity, I am trying to argue that we must begin our anthropological analyses not at so-called global assemblages that supplement a preexisting context but instead with the situations that make evident that we are always already caught up in singular multiples that provide the widely diffused but yet shared conditions that significantly affect our possible ways of being-in-the-world.
2. A Situation Is Not Singularly Locatable
Because a situation is never isolable and only exists as a singular multiple—that is, as always intertwined with other assemblages, a situation is never located. Rather, as I have been emphasizing so far, a situation becomes temporarily localized. Thus, for example, the situation of the drug war is not simply located in the veins of heroin users crouched under American highway overpasses or in the jungles of South America or the borders between the United States and Mexico or the poppy fields of Afghanistan; nor is the drug war simply located in the substance called heroin that is actually a range of potentially infinite kinds of beings as opium derivatives get cut with more contaminants every step they move through the underground commodity chain; nor is the drug war simply located in American, Russian, or Thai prisons or in the infectious disease wards of hospitals around the globe. Rather, the drug war emerges—at times but not always—in all of these locales and more. Notice, however, that these locales are not always and only caught up in the drug war. For example, there are people in prisons, infectious disease wards, and under bridges who are there for reasons unrelated to the drug war. Thus, only by attending and being attuned to each of these situated manifestations of the drug war, and their unique, similar, and shared potentialities and emergent actualities, can this situation be effectively politically addressed or anthropologically analyzed. It is precisely this attunement that characterizes an assemblic ethnography.
3. Sites of Potentiality for Political Activity Arise from the Interstices of Situations
The conglomeritic and flowing nature of assembled situations leaves them with interstices of noncohesion. As we saw in the previous section, these interstitial sites disrupt any possibility for an actually existing totality of a situation and therefore, any possibility for thinking or articulating the totality of a situation. At these interstices, problematics of a situation likely occur, and sites of potentiality can be found, from which possibilities for political activity emerge.68 This differs significantly from the “untouchable” hyperobjects of Morton or even the bounded issues or identities that dominate most contemporary politics. To some extent this rendering of situations as sites of potentiality is similar to Max Gluckman’s69 classic articulation of situations as moments of paradox, confrontation, conflict, process, and potential change.70 Despite this similarity, however, I entirely reject the Gluckmanian claim that they disclose social structure conceived as a transcendental. Indeed, the argument I am trying to make is that situations allow us to begin to conceive shared conditions that are widely dispersed across various levels, horizontally and vertically, as it were, without the necessity of any transcendental at all, whether this be thought of in terms of social structure, culture, Badiou’s logic, or Ong and Collier’s “context.” In the next section and throughout this book, I will show how the anti–drug war movement is now addressing such sites of potentiality in their experimental political activity without the need of such “bannisters.”
The Situationists similarly