A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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critical hermeneutics as a theoretical-analytic is best described as disclosing, tracing, and describing the contours of the not-yet. As such, critical hermeneutics as an anthropology of potentiality does not simply take fieldwork “data” as that complicated empirical stuff that must be made sense of. But rather it asks, for example: What potential for becoming is trying to be enacted? Or, what other possibilities of being are pointed toward? In doing so, critical hermeneutics not only discloses the normalizing limits of ordinary everyday existence but, more importantly, participates in the opening of new possibilities for thinking, saying, doing, or being. Critical hermeneutics, then, is a theoretical-analytic of the otherwise.73
In the rest of this book, therefore, I begin with a basic starting assumption of which I am (critically) aware and which can be articulated as the following: if the kind of political activity done by the anti–drug war movement attempts to allow potentialities to emerge as new possible modalities of being-with one another in new worlds, then an anthropology of potentiality can participate in this emergence, and critical hermeneutics would be one, but certainly not the only, way of doing so. This book, then, is best not read as an ethnographic thick description of a social movement but rather as a critical hermeneutics as an anthropology of potentiality.74
A BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE BOOK
What are these political agonists doing, and what can they teach us as intellectuals and as politically concerned beings? That is to ask: What potential are these agonists ushering into possibilities? Furthermore, what can I do as an intellectual to participate in their worldbuilding activity? Several years ago I was lucky enough to be welcomed by a number of anti–drug war agonists around the globe to observe and participate in their political and everyday activity. Many of them were already quite used to having researchers around and, frankly, had grown a bit wary of them. As I was told on more than one occasion, “we have researchers here all the time but they usually just tell us what we already know.” From the beginning, however, I was clear that I have no interest in telling them or anyone else what they already know they are doing. Rather, my concern is what they are trying to do; what possibilities they are trying to bring into being.75 That is, I told them that I am interested in the ways in which their political and everyday ethical activity opens new possibilities for being and acting together and, as such, may provide a model for a new form of politics and ethics in our time. This intrigued them. This, they wanted to hear. And this is what I hope to have done in what follows.
I could have written this book as yet another account of a rights-based social movement looking to make reformist legislative change. To write such a book, however, would be to break my collaborative promise of disclosively articulating the potentialities this political movement is trying to turn into possibilities. Thus, by critically hermeneutically thinking with the anti–drug war movement, in this book I disclose and articulate three interrelated but analytically separable interventions that I contend these agonists are already living out, even if some of them may not yet be aware of this fact and most certainly would not articulate as I do here.76 What I hope becomes clear is that these three interventions are not only important for understanding what it is the anti–drug war movement is trying to do through political and ethical activity but, perhaps more importantly for our purposes, how they point us toward what both an anthropology of potentiality and a politics of worldbuilding could become.
Widely Diffused Complexity
The first intervention is in terms of addressing the widely diffused complex phenomena that constitute our contemporary condition (chapter 1 and throughout). Intellectually, this condition demands that we question just how it is that we can conceive of, articulate, and study widely diffused and nontotalizable complex phenomena that can potentially emerge at any time and at any point on the globe. Anthropologists are already excellent at analyzing the complicated intricacies of locality. But complexity is not complicated intricacy. Given enough time and information, complications can be figured out. Complexity, in contrast, can never be fully grasped since the nonlinearity of its dynamics resists totality, predictable causal relations, stability of being, and spatial and temporal contiguity and limitation.77 All of this combined with the assemblic nature of complex phenomena makes them ripe with potential. In order to remain relevant in an increasingly complex global condition, anthropology would do well to begin to develop new methods and conceptual apparatuses for the study and analysis of these widely diffused complex phenomena, part of which would entail tracing the contours of their potential not-yet. Throughout this book I hope to have contributed to this in some small way by showing how such concepts as situation, assemblic ethnography, hermeneutics, community of those without community, and attunement can begin to help us conceptualize a contemporary condition constituted by widely diffused complex phenomena ripe with potential.
Comprehending, analyzing, and addressing globally diffused complexity is also necessary for any political activity today that expects to have actual transformative effects on our worlds.78 The simplification of global complexity by the contemporary “folk politics” of the Left, through its emphasis on temporal, spatial, and conceptual immediacy, is in large part responsible for the Left’s recent failure to bring about any large-scale transformation and even to imagine what a possible alternative future might be like.79 As Srnicek and Williams argue,80 the Left today not only needs a new political imaginary or vision but must accept, comprehend, and learn to address the complexity of our global condition for it to come about. It is my contention that this is precisely what the anti–drug war movement has done, and this, at least in part, accounts for the successes those involved have so far realized in changing the worlds in which they are attempting to dwell. Recognizing and politically addressing this widely diffused complexity, then, is one essential achievement of the anti–drug war movement that the political Left in general could learn from.
Concept Creation and Reconceptualization
The second intervention I seek to make concerns the rethinking of concepts, most particularly those ethical concepts that have political implications. Over the course of the last decade or so, anthropology has gone through a so-called ethical turn, by which anthropologists have increasingly and explicitly taken up ethics and morality as objects of research and theorization.81 Unfortunately, however, much of this work has done very little to actually rethink morality, ethics, and their concepts. Instead, for the most part, anthropologists of moralities and ethics have tended, for lack of a better way of putting it, to socialize already well-established traditional Western moral and ethical concepts. As I have argued elsewhere,82 the ordinary ethics approach is perhaps the most obvious example of this, but no matter where one looks these days, it is not very difficult to find an anthropologist writing about such things as the good, the right, or concerns with dignity. It is as if we already know what morality and ethics are, what motivations and aims are related to them, and more or less how these are done, so the task of the anthropologist has primarily become to show how all of this plays out in localized social relationships. If an anthropologist writing about divination, for example, interpreted this phenomenon utilizing concepts from the Catholic catechism or biomedical therapeutics, most would no doubt simply find this to be bad scholarship, if not inappropriate. Yet for some reason, it has become perfectly acceptable, for example, to write about our informants in terms of doing “what they think right or good” and “act[ing] largely from a sense of their own dignity.”83 This general acceptance I find interesting, and we might consider its relationship to a broader moralism that seems to have become prevalent within the discipline, most obviously so with an overwhelming concern with suffering while simultaneously turning a blind eye to the foundations of this concern within political liberalism.84
In contrast, much of my previous work has sought to rethink morality, ethics, and their concepts by recursively engaging my ethnographic work with both moral philosophy and post-Heideggerian continental philosophy so as to reconceive moral and ethical motivations, processes, and aims in terms of relationalities and thus to move beyond thinking and being in terms of the qualified behavior of good and evil individuals.85 In this book I continue this project through an explicit reconceptualization of being-with in a community of whoever arrives (chapter 3), freedom as the openness