A War on People. Jarrett Zigon
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(chapter 5) and do so by showing that these new ways of being-in-the-world emerge through the political activity of the anti–drug war movement.
As I argue throughout, transformative political activity is onto-ethical activity, and this becomes clear in the ways in which through explicit political activity new worlds emerge through the very process of this acting. Therefore, a key part of the argument I will make is that in a global condition of war as governance that is primarily fought on the two fronts of normalization and dehumanization, a central aspect of the counterattack is the invention and enactment of new ethical ways of being-with that can provide the onto-ethical grounds for actually transforming worlds, and not only prefiguratively. My contribution to this counterattack is the intellectual articulation of this reconceptualization of the onto-ethical grounding of these new worlds.
Otherwise
The third intervention I will make concerns the question of the otherwise. A good deal of what I will show throughout this book is the slow emergence of an otherwise. In this global condition of war as governance, thinking through and ethnographically showing how an otherwise emerges through sustained and organized political activity with a vision are crucial tasks both intellectually and politically. Since it has become abundantly clear that the horizontalism of the contemporary Left is incapable of making any actual and lasting political impact beyond personal empowerment, it is now a political and existential imperative to begin to imagine and do political activity that eschews the spectacular for the nitty-gritty of the long-term struggle of worldbuilding. The difficulties arise, however, when we realize that the otherwise of new worlds is not simply “measured” by change or transformation. As Giorgio Agamben puts it, the otherwise is not merely the fact that the dog outside has stopped barking or, in terms closer to this book,86 that populations are no longer incarcerated at extraordinary rates. Indeed, oftentimes the otherwise may not at first even be empirically observable. It is, again as Agamben puts it, in the “tiny displacements” of the sense and limits of things that the otherwise begins to emerge.87 This is why political activity must always be sustained over the long term. For “tiny displacements” do not occur and stick through spectacle or consensus but rather only through the sustained and grueling excavation of possibilities out of the seemingly impossible. This is the kind of onto-ethical-political activity I will consider and show throughout this book.
And here we return to the anthropology of potentiality. In a contemporary intellectual context in which academics are increasingly asking how they can contribute to the becoming of an otherwise, this book’s response is that our best bet is to do what intellectuals have traditionally always done: think, imagine, creatively experiment, and articulate the emergence of possibilities along with the worlds we find ourselves in. The great privilege of being an anthropologist is that we, more than most other academics, begin from worlds that we have been invited into. This hospitality, I suggest, is more than an invitation to record the happenings of everyday life or to make sense of their complicated intricacies. Rather, perhaps it is time to begin to understand these as invitations to enter the thresholds of possibilities within these worlds. In doing so, we may be able to understand these worlds better or perhaps even make a political contribution to the otherwise of those worlds. But ultimately and more importantly, we might be able to make a contribution to the ongoing openness of existence as such. This book is an attempt to do just this.
CHAPTER 1
The Drug War as Widely Diffused Complexity
Recent decades have seen an increasing complexity in the dynamics that impinge upon politics.
—Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
What do certain military missions in Afghanistan, domestic spying in the United States, therapeutic interventions in Russia and Denmark, torture and rape in an Indonesian police station, and stop-and-frisk policing in New York City all have in common? The answer is that they are just a few of the local situated manifestations of the widely diffused phenomenon named the drug war. Having roots in the nineteenth century and gradually emerging throughout the twentieth, the drug war was officially “declared” in 1971 by Richard Nixon and only became a full-blown global war in the 1980s, when it became militarized and intertwined with the Cold War through initiatives of the Reagan and then Bush administrations. Today what is named the drug war is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year globally and the social and political “death” or exclusion of many more people.1 But the drug war has potential effects that go well beyond these numbers. Whether by means of military interventions, policing and incarceration strategies, international and national surveillance, and the overblown budgets to pay for them or by means of biopolitical therapeutics, national and international legislation, and the normalization of labor regimes and discipline, all of which and more constitute aspects of the drug war, this is a war that potentially affects every human on the planet.2
How can the drug war have such widespread effects, and how do we conceptualize it? In this chapter and throughout this book, I hope to begin to offer an answer to this question. I will argue that the drug war should not be conceived as something like a singular policy issue or a totalized strategy, and neither should it be limited, as it often is in public discourse, to its localized manifestation in parts of Colombia, Mexico, or the inner cities of the United States. Rather, the drug war is best conceived as a nontotalizable and widely diffused complex phenomenon that manifests temporarily and locally as a situation. If the primary task of this book is to do a critical hermeneutics of the contemporary condition of war and the political possibilities the anti–drug war movement enact by addressing this condition, then a secondary, though still considerable, task is to show that the concept of a situation as a widely diffused phenomenon significantly adds to the anthropological conceptual apparatus. This is so because the concept of situation allows us to consider that which is widely diffused across different global scales as a nontotalizable assemblage yet in its occasional and temporary local manifestation allows us to understand how persons and objects that are geographically, socioeconomically, and “culturally” distributed get caught up in the shared conditions that emerge from a situation. Becoming “caught up” in the shared conditions of a situation, in turn, significantly affects the possible ways of being-in-the-world of those persons and objects that “get caught up.” The concept of situation, then, allows us analytically to recognize that in the current global configuration, complexity is at least as knotted nonlocally as it is locally, and thus, increasingly—so I contend—local complexity emerges within the shared conditions set by this diffused complexity.
Although they do not describe it quite like this, this is how those in the anti–drug war movement that I have been doing assemblic ethnography with view the drug war and their political activity. Anti–drug war politics is a politics of agonistic and creative experimentation with the otherwise, and as such it has had to define well what it is against and what it intends to transgress.3 Unlike many post-1968 political movements that self-define as addressing issues or identities that tend to be conceived as totalized, closed, and located,4 anti–drug war politics has defined its political agonist as a globally diffused phenomenon that locally manifests differentially and temporarily. Although there are some similarities between this and what is now known as intersectionality—most particularly in terms of recognizing the intertwining of various “factors” in the constitution of a phenomenon—intersectionality, nevertheless, assumes the existence of the same preconceived and totalized issues and identities—for example, class, race, and gender—as do other post-1968 approaches, even if these are now understood as “work[ing] together and influenc[ing] each other.”5 In contrast, the concept of a situation as the local and temporary manifestation of a widely diffused, complex phenomenon does not assume such preconceived and totalized issues and identities but rather articulates that these are themselves complex, emergent, and open phenomena that nevertheless provide the conditions for the being-in-the-world of those and that which have become caught up within them.
In this chapter and throughout this book, then, I would like to explore how what I have learned from the anti–drug war movement in terms of what those within it see themselves addressing, how they address it, and how they organize may help anthropologists, political theorists, and political agonists rethink their own objects of study. In so doing,