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, 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.6 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.7 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.8 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,9 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 researching this initiative, I became attuned to Voices of Community Activists and Leaders (VOCAL-NY),10 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;11 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.12 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
