and space relative to humans.” As a result, hyperobjects are nonlocal because any local manifestation of a hyperobject is not directly the hyperobject itself, or at least not the totality of the object. A hurricane or a tsunami, for example, may be a local manifestation of the hyperobject of global warming, but it is not global warming as such. Similarly, although the drug war locally emerges differentially in various forms, such as the surveillance-induced oppression experienced, for example, by Terrance in New York City, Bud in California, or Joey in Denpasar, these are not the drug war as such.
Despite this and other similarities, however, there are real differences between hyperobjects and situations as I am trying to articulate them. The most significant difference is that Morton conceives a hyperobject as a real object, or a unit unto itself that withdraws from other objects as well as itself and thus can never fully be known or touched by another object. This is how the object-oriented ontology to which Morton subscribes defines objects,54 and within this perspective everything, including humans, are objects with just these qualities. But this raises the question: if objects cannot touch or influence each other,55 except for perhaps in aesthetic ways, then what are we left to do politically when confronted with a hyperobject such as global warming? Although the notion of a hyperobject as “massively distributed in time and space” is compelling and in some ways similar to a situation, it is difficult to imagine the kind of politics to be done by those who cannot “touch” and against that which itself cannot be “touched.” In contrast, because situations can be described as ecstatically relational, assembling, and thus emergent multiplicities, they can and do slip into one another. This makes situations ripe with sites of potentiality and thus open for political activity.
A similar concern arises with Alain Badiou’s notion of situation. In the most recent explication of his ontology, Badiou replaces the concept of situation with world, but for our purposes we can still think of this as his rendering of situation.56 For Badiou, a situation/world comes into existence, maintains that existence, and is recognizable as such because it has a particular and unique logic that orders it. If for Badiou “being qua being is thought by mathematics,” then a situation/world as “appearing, or being-there-in-a-world, is thought by logic.”57 Indeed, as he goes on to put it, situations/worlds are not simply thought by logic, they are logic.58 And this logic is not a procedure that a human subject utilizes to understand a situation/world, so argues Badiou, but rather this logic that fundamentally is situations/worlds “is altogether anterior to every subjective constitution.”59 A situation/world for Badiou, then, is the local emplacement of a logical operation that occurs regardless of human existence.60 This is clearly not what I intend by a situation, and in fact, it is precisely the kind of metaphysical humanist thinking and politics that I am trying to argue against.61
If the concern of these and other contemporary ontologists is the explication of a posthumanist politics, then it seems odd to do so in logicomathematical terms or by simply reversing the subject/object distinction and thus perpetuating a metaphysical humanist approach. In contrast, the critical hermeneutic approach begins with Heidegger’s notion of phenomenon (“what shows itself in itself”) and through analysis discloses that humans are always already intertwined in various situations, and this intertwining both precedes and exceeds any possible humanist projection onto it. To be in any world at all, and the situations that structure them, is always already to be so intertwined and as such always becoming that which situations make possible.62 But this alone does not make a situation a more compelling analytic and political concept. In the rest of this section, then, I consider further the phenomenon of situation as it “shows itself in itself.” In so doing I delineate the fundamental characteristics of a situation, which in turn will set the background for the following section, in which I consider some of the political activity of the anti–drug war movement as a way of setting the scene for the rest of the book. So as to make this analytically clear, I will delineate the various characteristics of situations in numbered subsections.
1. A Situation Is a Nontotalizable Assemblage
As we have already seen, the drug war is a complex assemblage of diverse aspects of other assemblages, such as global militarism; state-based surveillance and control; border security; carceral political economics; national and international inequalities; and as I will show in the next section, biopolitical therapeutics. What is called the drug war, then, is no “thing” in itself but rather is assembled aspects of other assemblages that together create a widely diffused situation that is differentially distributed with very real effects in worlds. Here we can begin to see how the concept of assemblages can be helpful for thinking the complexity of situations about which I wrote in the opening paragraphs of this section and how this differs from Morton’s hyperobjects and Badiou’s situations/worlds.
Anthropologists are likely most familiar with the notion of assemblage through Ong and Collier’s rendering of it in terms of global assemblages.63 There is little doubt that their edited volume has made an important and influential contribution to the development of the discipline since its publication. And to the extent that Ong and Collier’s global assemblage articulates the basics of a general theory of assemblages most fully developed, for example, by Deleuze and Guattari, Latour, and DeLanda, there are similarities with what I am calling a situation, which is a nontotalized assemblage. I differ significantly from Ong and Collier, however, in that despite claims to the contrary, they seem to conceive global assemblages as supplements to what they variously refer to as “social and cultural situations,” “spheres of life,” “environments,” and “context.”64 In contrast, over the course of the last decade I have been thinking through the concept of nontotalizable assemblages—whether in terms of moral and ethical assemblages65 or worlds and situations66—in such a way that entails that they not be thought of in terms of a supplement. In some ways my thinking of assemblages has paralleled that of Paul Rabinow.67 But while Rabinow seems to conceive of assemblages as primarily localized and temporary (thus, not unlike how I conceive of situations), I have come to think of our worlds as nothing other than densely intertwined knots of several much more widely diffused and nontotalizable assemblages that constantly flow together and slip apart in a potentially infinite number of combinations. This flowing and slippage of the singular multiplicity of situations defies totalized categorization or identification. This is precisely why as nontotalizable assemblages situations cannot be thought as supplement, for there is nothing other than traces of other such assemblages to “supplement.”
Thus, for example, the diverse aspects of the drug war situation can easily slip into other nontotalized assemblages and thereby defy easy identification with either. As we saw in the previous section, the global militarism aspect of the drug war situation can be foregrounded and reconceived as the war on terrorism or a defense against Communist insurgents, and police militarization and carceral political economics can be repositioned as being tough on crime. As a result a situation is quite slippery since it never all at once can be fully grasped because part of its very nature is the capacity for its constitutive aspects to be temporarily refigured. Such refiguration can occur “naturally,” as it were, since aspects of situations take on different signification as they are represented, experienced, or considered differently. Or, this refiguration can be done intentionally and strategically, as certain persons may wish to emphasize one particular “interpretation” of an aspect over others—for example, mandatory minimum prison sentencing as being tough on crime rather than judicial procedures with clear racial and class prejudices. Indeed, this slippery intertwining is one of the primary characteristics of the robust complexity of the drug war that makes resisting it so difficult and that an assemblic ethnography seeks to disentangle. Because of this complexity, I am trying to argue that we must begin our anthropological analyses not at so-called global assemblages that supplement a preexisting context but instead with the situations that make evident that we are always already caught up in singular multiples that provide the widely diffused but yet shared conditions that significantly affect our possible ways of being-in-the-world.
2. A Situation Is Not Singularly Locatable
