A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community
215
A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community
215Paperback(First Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520297708 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2018 |
| Edition description: | First Edition |
| Pages: | 215 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
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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. 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.
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. Unlike many post- 1968 political movements that self-define as addressing issues or identities that tend to be conceived as totalized, closed, and located, 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." 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, I hope to go beyond a notion of globalization and the tracing of global connections across a closed and totalized globe, as Anna Tsing's notion of friction could be read. Instead, I seek to explore how situations as widely diffused assembled phenomena that are differentially distributed participate in the ontological conditioning of our contemporary worlds and yet as assemblages always hold the potential to become otherwise. The drug war is one such phenomenon.
ASSEMBLIC ETHNOGRAPHY
The study of widely diffused assembled phenomena requires an ethnographic method and style of writing that I call assemblic ethnography. Assemblic ethnography as a method shares some similarities with multisited ethnography as George Marcus originally and schematically articulated it. But in practice and true to its name, most multisited research has tended to focus on a few, oftentimes prechosen, sites and the connections between them. In contrast, assemblic ethnography is a method of chasing and tracing a complex phenomenon through its continual process of assembling across different global scales and its temporally differential localization as situations in diverse places. Just as one never knows if, when, and where she or he will get caught up in a situation, so too the anthropologist doing assemblic ethnography can never know beforehand when and where the research will lead. For example, in 2006 I began research at an Orthodox-run rehabilitation program in Russia, during which I became attuned to the political struggle there for harm-reduction services. This led me to the central role of user unions in this struggle, which had been initially funded by the Open Society Foundation based in New York. While in New York researchingthis initiative, I became attuned to Voices of Community Activists and Leaders (VOCAL-NY), a local political organization dedicated to fighting the drug war and its pernicious consequences, and how they politically address their drug war situation, which, I came to learn, was partly informed by the successes in Vancouver, where I then went before going on to Copenhagen, Denpasar, and elsewhere.
Unlike the traditional ethnographer, then, the assemblic ethnographer realizes that research focused on any one site — and in practice, most multisited research as well — results in a decomplexification of the situation under study. This is so because the assemblic ethnographer recognizes that complexity is knotted nonlocally at least as much as it is locally. Perhaps most significantly, to do an assemblic ethnography is to recognize that this knotted complexity is the consequence of the temporary emergence of nontotalized assemblages, and thus a primary characteristic of this method is tracing the various assemblic relations that constitute the assemblage. Thus, my research did not simply move from one site to the next but rather moved along diverse assemblic relations of the drug war. For example, when the aspects of carceral political economics and state-based surveillance revealed themselves in New York, I traced those assemblic relations and their differential distribution to Denpasar and back again to Russia; when the aspect of biopolitical therapeutics revealed itself, I traced it from Russia to New York to Vancouver to Copenhagen. In contrast to a project with one or several fieldwork sites, then, this research unfolded along assemblic relations as they became differentially distributed. Thus, in order to consider anthropologically the contemporary condition, it is not enough to note the various frictions that constitute local intricacies; we must ourselves travel along the assemblic relations that constitute the nonlocal complexity that sets the shared conditions for ways of being in diverse locations across the globe.
Assemblic ethnographic writing seeks to mirror this method in that it describes horizontal thickness, as it were, just as much as vertical thickness. In other words, assemblic ethnographic writing gives as much attention to tracing the widely diffused complexity of a situation across its various assemblic relations as it does to localized complexity. This book is an attempt at such assemblic ethnographic writing. For through my analysis of the ways in which the anti–drug war movement fights the drug war through political experimentations for being- together otherwise, I will also analytically describe the widely diffused complexity of the drug war that becomes differentially distributed across the globe and that in large part constitutes the shared conditions of those who get caught up within it. Primarily, I will do this through a number of localized drug war manifestations where this widely diffused complexity has become particularly knotted and the response of the anti–drug war movement has been particularly intense; that is, in New York City, Vancouver, and Copenhagen.
But because assemblic ethnography traces assemblic relations and does not focus on sites, I will also occasionally follow these relations so as to better understand just how truly complex this nontotalizable assemblage has become. Because the anti–drug war movement, in a sense, has already been doing assemblic analysis of that against which it fights, this book will primarily follow those involved in their endeavors to win this now forty-plus-year-old "war on people" so as to disclose some of the contours and limits of the complexity named the drug war and how it affects the being-in-the-world of those who have become caught up in its situated manifestations. In the rest of this chapter, then, I will begin by disclosing, in very broad strokes, some of the assemblic relations that constitute the drug war. In the first section, I try to show the widely diffused complexity of the drug war by briefly tracing some of its various assemblic relations as they become manifest as situations in diverse parts of the globe. After a brief interlude in which I attempt to clarify the concept of situation, I turn to Vancouver in the final section for a closer analysis of one localized and rather intense manifestation of the drug war situation and the political response to it. By briefly illustrating how anti–drug war agonists in Vancouver started doing a situation-based politics of worldbuilding and how this kind of political activity has influenced the global anti–drug war movement, I hope to provide a hermeneutic entrée into the rest of the book so the reader can better understand how the political and ethical experimentations of the anti–drug war movement unfold within the interstices of variously localized drug war situations.
WIDELY DIFFUSED COMPLEXITY AND THE SHARED CONDITIONS OF THE DRUG WAR
In October 2013, while doing research with anti–drug war agonists in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, I attended a public anti–drug war event on the Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad (Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity). The Mexican poet Javier Sicilia, who was the guest of honor at this Vancouver event, organized the Movimiento as a response to the death of his son by drug war violence, and it now consists of thousands of family members of persons similarly killed or disappeared in the violence of the drug war situation in Mexico. This is a situation in Mexico that has taken its current form in large part by means of American funds, equipment, support, and training to carry out a war in and on the border of Mexico. This is a war in which over one hundred thousand people have been killed since 2006, many of whom, if not the majority, were not drug users, traffickers, cartel members, or police. Rather, most of these drug war dead were simply "average" people who happened to get caught up in this drug war situation.
The Movimiento today is most known for the traveling protests it organized called the Caravan for Peace. In 2012 the Caravan traveled throughout Mexico and the United States disclosing the violence of the drug war through stories and performances they enacted in public protest of the unnecessary deaths brought on by the drug war. Through the stories told and performances given by the Caravan, the public image of the drug war as a war against dangerous cartels that seek to harm "our children" is deconstructed, and instead a "war on people" is disclosed as an assemblage partly constituted by militarism, border security, and inequality. The hope of such deconstructive political activity is that it can dislodge hegemonic views and practices and thus provide a clearing from which political possibilities for conceiving, doing, and becoming otherwise emerge.
While this localization of the drug war situation in Mexico, like that of the localization in Colombia, tends to dominate public discourse, such localizations far from exhaust this widely diffused and differentially distributed phenomenon. Consider, for example, the short poem read at the opening of this Vancouver event by Bud Osborn, the Vancouver-area user-agonist-poet and one of the founding members of that city's user union. I choose to begin with Bud's poem, which is called "Ironic" and depicts an experience he had while hitchhiking in the United States, because it offers a hermeneutic entrée into the drug war-situated assemblage and discloses the complex, widely diffused nature of this phenomenon. Much like the deconstructive political activity of the Caravan for Peace, so too does Bud's poem disclose a complexity that goes well beyond a closed issue defined by policy and legislation and that is located in some fixed place like "isolated drug wars" in Mexico and Colombia or "isolated drug addicts" in American inner cities. Rather, this poem reveals that the drug war is a complex assembled phenomenon that manifests situationally and is constituted by aspects of other assemblages such as global militarism, state-based surveillance and control, border security, carceral political economics, biopolitical therapeutics, and international and national inequalities.
Through this disclosure we also see how the concept of situation opens analytic possibilities that allow us to move between located manifestations and the widely diffused phenomena that provide the conditions for this emergence. In other words, a critical hermeneutic reading of Bud's poem discloses how the situation he found himself in along a California highway can only be understood as one local manifestation of a widely diffused assemblage that potentially can be distributed differentially and localized anywhere. Beginning from the entrée Bud's poem provides, then, in the rest of this section, I trace multiple aspects of the drug war as revealed in the poem and do so through various ethnographic knots that have emerged from my ongoing assemblic ethnography. What I hope becomes clear is that the local emergences that Bud's poem and the ethnographic knots depict — or what some might call the drug war reterritorialization — can never be preknown in terms of their location, form, affect, or temporality; nevertheless, they reveal a range of possibilities provided by a globally diffused, shared condition that becomes differentially distributed. I begin by reproducing the transcript of his reading in full:
Hitchhiking from Los Angeles to San Francisco, I stand in front of a highway sign. "No hitchhiking beyond this point." So I am legal, and the traffic is heavy. Two police cars pull in front of me. A short cop wears a big grin. The other cop is tall and grim. I assume they just wanna check my identification, but the first thing the short cop says is: "from the other side of the road I didn't know whether to come over here and jump you or rape you." I freeze, silent and wary. "Take everything out of your pockets." I put some change and cigarettes on the hood of his car. I reach to pull a book out of an inside coat pocket. Both cops pull their guns and aim them at me. The tall police says, "what's this?" as though he has never seen a book before. The short glowing cop tells me, "we can take you out in the desert and shoot you and no one would ever know." I remain speechless, as if any word I speak has very thin ice across it. They sort through a small traveling bag I have with me, and the short cop says, "what if I find some drugs?" I tell 'em, "I don't have any." The short cop replies, "but what if I find some?" "Well" I say, "there isn't any." "Yeah", the cop presses on, "but what if I find some?" I finally get the message. The cop's liable to magically materialize drugs where none previously existed. The tall cop pulls a notebook out of the bag, they read a couple of pages of poems and laugh out loud, and one of them snaps the binding and pages flutter and float and are blown away by onrushing traffic. Next they each examine my cigarettes and break them into pieces. The short cop says, "get in the car. We're going to have to strip you bare-ass naked." I'm shoved into the front seat between the two cops. The beaming big-bellied cop grabs my long hair around his fist, slams my head against the steering wheel. The other cop hauls my pants down to my ankles. He forces a slender metal flashlight up my ass. It hurts. The fat cop says, "nothing huh?" The other one shakes his head. He gets out of the car. The engine starts. The cop tells me "to never come back to [name of place inaudible] and get that shit off the hood of my car or I'm gonna take it with me." I leap from the police car, grab my pants with one hand; sweep my wreckage off the hood with my other hand. The squad cars roar away, spitting gravel into my face. A steady stream of staring faces passes me. I finally fasten my pants and cover my genitals. I gather what I can from the ground. I look up at the blank blue sky. The longing shredded, threatened with execution, raped, reduced to nothingness. The drug war.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A War on People"
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