A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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Russian workers’ councils (sovety) are the best-known examples.52 Unfortunately, however, because so much contemporary prefigurative politics has become primarily limited to process,53 as well as temporal and spatial immediacy, it has rendered itself little more than spectacle. That is, its “effectiveness” is primarily limited to a self-referential affective moment that has very little, if any, lasting effect on anything or anyone other than those who participated.
Process is also important to a politics of worldbuilding, but it is not an end in itself. Rather, it is the first step to action that changes worldly conditions: “Freedom of discussion, unity of action,” as Lenin once described democratic centralism.54 Thus, a politics of worldbuilding is first and foremost concerned that the effects of political activity endure and are always relationally linked to other globally dispersed situations (this will become clear throughout the book). In order to accomplish this, anti–drug war political agonists have become keen political actors who simultaneously do pragmatic policy-oriented political engagement while also experimentally enacting alternative relationalities, values, and thus, possibilities. Far from a reformist agenda, however, the pragmatic policy engagement is better understood as deploying potentiality time bombs within the “system” that open more sites of potentiality for future experimentations with new worlds. Thus, for example, the policy, legislative, and judicial work that was necessary to open Insite—the first legally sanctioned safe-injection site in North America—in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver was the opening that allowed for the eventual transformation of that neighborhood into an entirely new world (this worldbuilding process and how it is now expanding beyond the Downtown Eastside and across the globe will become clear throughout the book). The consequence, so I hope to show, is that anti–drug war political activity is effectively creating and experimenting with potentialities, out of which a future with radically different forms of sociality and politics can emerge.
The ultimate aim of a politics of worldbuilding, then, is the actual building of new worlds, which include not only infrastructure, values, and social and worldly interactive practices but, first and foremost, the onto-ethical grounds that allow for such worlds—that is, the relationalities of being-with that onto-ethically sustain new possibilities of community, freedom, and care. A politics of worldbuilding as agonistic experimentation with an otherwise, then, entails actually enacting this otherwise so that it begins to stick and endure, rather than dissipate as if it never was, as much prefigurative horizontalism tends to do.55
AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF POTENTIALITY AND CRITICAL HERMENEUTICS
A politics of worldbuilding is a form of politics that seeks to allow potentiality to emerge as new possibilities for being-with, thus laying the onto-ethical grounds for new worlds. To understand such a politics, we need a theoretical-analytic that is attuned to this link between potentiality and possibility. One such theoretical-analytic, and the one that I take up in this book, is what I call critical hermeneutics, which is one approach to an anthropology of potentiality. An anthropology of potentiality differs in significant ways from anthropology as a fieldwork-based science focused on the descriptive analysis of the actual.56 If the discipline has become one that primarily focuses upon the thick empirical description of that which is, then an anthropology of potentiality is perhaps best understood as a hermeneutics of the emerging contours of a not-yet.57
In this sense, an anthropology of potentiality is not very different from how some have recently described a newly developing philosophical anthropology. For example, the anthropologist Michael Jackson has described the contemporary challenge of philosophical anthropology in terms of resisting the intellectual reproduction of what already exists and instead, allow our thinking to point beyond itself.58 Perhaps, in this sense, following Vincent Crapanzano,59 we could consider philosophical anthropology as the analysis of imaginative horizons. Similarly, Jonathan Lear describes philosophical anthropology as an inquiry into possibilities.60 In contrast to empirical studies of the actual that might ask questions such as “what historical trajectories or cultural order have brought such and such about and rendered it meaningful,” Lear’s philosophical anthropology asks, “What are the conditions of its being possible?” or “What would it be?” for such a possibility to have been the case. For philosophers such as Thomas Schwarz Wentzer and Rasmus Dyring—both of whom have collaborated closely with some anthropologists—these questions are best taken up by considering the responsivity and therefore the openness of the human condition.61 Similar to these, an anthropology of potentiality seeks to disclose the conditions of the not-yet by hermeneutically considering enactments of an incipient otherwise in the here and now of everyday life. As a result, fieldwork and other forms of empirical research remain important to an anthropology of potentiality.62 But as will become clear throughout this book, the importance of these methods is not that they provide the “data” for a quasipositivist “thick description” of ordinary life but rather that they offer an entrée into the hermeneutic processes already underway within various worlds, from which critical hermeneutic analysis can begin.
Such an approach can be understood as similar to other recent anthropological work that has sought to go beyond the actual in its consideration of the incipient not-yet. I am thinking here, for example, of the work of Robert Desjarlais on image in relation to perception, memory, and fantasy;63 or Cheryl Mattingly on the possibilities invoked through moral striving and Jason Throop on the in-betweenness of moods;64 or Ghassan Hage on alter-politics and Elizabeth Povinelli on the otherwise and more recently on geontologies;65 or Anand Pandian on speculative anthropology and Stuart McLean on fictionalizing anthropology.66 Each of them in their own way have acknowledged the necessity, as Joel Robbins has put it, “to be attentive to the way people orientate to and act in a world that outstrips the one most concretely present to them.”67 Such attentiveness, I would argue, is precisely what is needed for those who wish to respond to recent calls both within and outside anthropology for new and creative attempts to be made in the analysis of the worlds we engage as researchers and intellectuals, as well as the concepts and models we might offer for further engagement in these worlds.68 A key component of this attentiveness and engagement, I would argue, and one that with few exceptions has not (yet) been embraced by anthropology,69 is concept creation and reconceptualization. As will become clear, concept creation and reconceptualization are central to critical hermeneutics.
So, then, what is critical hermeneutics? An adequate answer to such a question, I suggest, can only be found through a close reading of this book, in combination with my previous, more theoretically focused book Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding. But in short, a critical hermeneutics can be understood as at one and the same time an ungrounding and an opening. Thus, the critical ungrounding aspect can be considered in light of Foucault’s description of critique as “seeing on what type of assumptions, or familiar notions, of established, unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based . . . uncovering that thought and trying to change it.”70 Put another way, the critical component of critical hermeneutics is an analytically self-aware process of deconstructing the a priori that limits being and becoming to a narrow range of possibilities, or what we might alternatively call the a priori that grounds normalization. The hermeneutic aspect of critical hermeneutics, on the other hand, is a process of opening possibilities by disclosing the potentialities that always already have been but that have been foreclosed by the limiting assumptions of the a priori. Here we see how potentiality and possibility are always linked and that hermeneutics is the process of clearing and activating, as it were, this linkage. For on the one hand, potentiality can be understood as the always-already-have-been-possibility that is not-yet. Hermeneutics, on the other hand, is that which ushers potential into the possible, whether we consider hermeneutics as a theoretical-analytic or as an ontological condition.
This is so because a fundamental assumption of hermeneutics is that existence—human and otherwise—is always ahead of itself and as such is constantly engaged in an existentially responsive process of becoming in the attempt to catch up with that which it never is,71 a process that creates gaps of being that can never be filled.72 As such, hermeneutics as a theoretical-analytic understands being as an onto-hermeneutic process of becoming. Seeking to tap into, as it were, this