A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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war movement begins by disclosing already existing situations that must be permanently transformed so as to build new worlds in which drug users and nonusers alike can dwell. The conceptual, analytical, and methodological problem the complexity of situations presents, then, is how precisely to trace and articulate the movement, force, and limits of the intertwining so as to initiate this transformation. Similarly, I submit that these problems are central to anthropology and the other human and social sciences today, as they struggle to address the increasingly complex contemporary global configuration of things. Thus, I have been attempting to delineate the concept of situation and the method of assemblic ethnography as possible ways of addressing this complexity.
In the next section, I turn to a brief example of how some actors in the anti–drug war movement show us how a politics that begins from a situation can be done. What I want to emphasize is how this political activity does not begin from a “problem” singularly conceptualized, and thus it does not focus its energy on simply trying to “change policy” or laws—although there is, of course, some effort aimed at this—or to become included into that which already is. Rather, because of their recognition of the complexity of the drug war, anti–drug war agonists focus upon interstitial potentiality, from which they can begin to clear and open new possibilities for other ways of being and, eventually, for other worlds to emerge. In the final section of this chapter, then, I consider how this has started to occur from the interstitial site between the surveillance and control aspect and that of biopolitical therapeutics.
A POLITICS THAT BEGINS FROM A SITUATION
Bud read his poem at a public anti–drug war event held at a university annex that is part of a recently constructed public-private housing complex on the border of the Downtown Eastside neighborhood in Vancouver, where a politics of worldbuilding has been going on for twenty years. By 1997 an estimated six thousand to ten thousand drug users, over half of whom were HIV positive, were concentrated in just a few square blocks; over six thousand persons lived in single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels; a constant police presence resulted in regular and random harassment and arrests; and the death toll mounted. The potential for a situation-focused politics was all around and in fact was already emerging in 1993 when what would eventually become one of the key housing and drug user organizations in the neighborhood was formed and made harm reduction—and particularly the provisioning of clean syringes and works—an inseparable part of its political activity related to housing. As one of the cofounders of the organization put it, at the time this was quite radical and experimental, and now it is fairly common practice. The key political point here is that these anti–drug war agonists recognized that in the Downtown Eastside the housing problem, drug use, police harassment, and HIV and other infectious diseases were inextricably intertwined, and thus addressing only one in isolation would be more or less as if they were not addressing anything at all. This was the recognition of the necessity of a politics that addresses situations and not isolated issues, and it would be this recognition that would become characteristic of the global anti–drug war movement.
Indeed, well beyond Vancouver the anti–drug war movement is a global political movement that mirrors the characteristics of the situation it addresses. Just as the drug war is an assemblage of diverse aspects of other assemblages, so too is the anti–drug war movement an assemblage of diverse collaborators73 that mobilize to address, for example, local, national, and international antidrug legislation and policy; fatally dangerous therapeutics; carceral-political economics; and punitive policing, among other items. The kind of politics done by those in the anti–drug war movement, then, recognizes the multiple ways in which the drug war touches and affects their and most others’ ways of being and mobilizes accordingly. This is the kind of political movement that William Connolly argues is needed today to address what he calls the “contemporary condition,” a movement he describes as “anchored entirely in no single class, gender, ethnic group, creed or generation” and taking “the shape of a vibrant pluralist assemblage acting at multiple sites within and across states.”74 This is precisely what the anti–drug war movement is, and it takes this form because it is addressing one of the most widely diffused situations that significantly shapes the “contemporary condition” no matter where one might be.
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