put it, such a political vision and a sense of how to realize it is precisely what is missing in contemporary Left politics, and therefore, “articulating and achieving . . . better world[s] [should be] the fundamental task of the left today.”49 While there is no doubt that articulating a vision of postcapitalism and postwork worlds is vital, what is missing from Srnicek and William’s political imaginary is the fact that worlds do not change through the mere alteration of relations of production, labor, and exchange. Rather, these alterations must be accompanied by, if not preceded by, alterations in the onto-ethical relationalities that constitute these worlds. If nothing else, then, the primary argument of this book—and what I hope to show the anti–drug war movement is doing through political activity—is that worlds are built first and foremost through the creative and experimental enactment of such relationalities of being-with, which give way to new modes of labor and exchange, and that it is only through these newly acquired habits of being-with that new worlds can stick and endure.50
Sticking and enduring is key to a politics of worldbuilding. For the demand to build a new world is a demand to build one that persists, and if it does not, then it must remain as a resource for yet another new world to come. Imagination is key for this. But imagination must be enacted—and not merely discussed and debated—if there is any hope of turning a vision into an actual new world.51 To the extent that prefigurative politics creates such worlds of duration and potential, then I would consider these examples of worldbuilding. Perhaps the Paris Commune or prerevolution 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
