THE POLITICS OF WORLDBUILDING
If the political objective of war as governance is the violent imposition of a biopolitical will such that victory is measured by the normalization, or perhaps better put, the rectification of being-human with an extremely narrow a priori definition of what, who, and how to count as human, then the struggle against this war is primarily fought as a nonnormative attempt to become human and worldly otherwise.31 To put it plainly, if war on people is meant to force persons to become what counts as human today and to exclude all those who will not or cannot be counted as such, then the struggle against this war entails not only remaining uncountable but doing so in a manner that discloses the violence of the count and through that disclosure brings into the open new possibilities for becoming human and worldly otherwise. This is precisely what I will show those in the anti–drug war movement doing through their political and everyday ethical activity. For by means of this political struggle against a global condition of war as governance, the anti–drug war movement is allowing potentialities to emerge as new possibilities for nonnormative political and communal ways of being-with.
This is a politics, then, as a process of worldbuilding. In Disappointment I described a politics of worldbuilding as the political activity done within particular situations, the aim of which is altering the range of possibilities that limit a world and its existents.32 In that book I argue against the single-world ontology increasingly advocated by some anthropologists and instead posit a relational ontology of multiple worlds.33 In doing so I begin from the position set out by the philosopher Andrew J. Mitchell, which he articulates as “there is no ‘world’ in the abstract but always only [populated and articulated ones] of particular situations at particular times, and likewise no encapsulated things, but always these outpouring gestures of relationality.”34 Because this conception of world is so central to this book and the politics of worldbuilding I am trying to critically hermeneutically describe, I will quote at length from Disappointment so as to make it as clear as possible for our purposes here:
By world, then, I intend a multiplicity of situations structured by nothing other than this very multiplicity,35 and because worlds are structured by these situations that are never contained within one world, these situations constitute a link or a bridge between multiple worlds. The fact of multiple worlds and their linkage by situations entails not just that worlds can exist separately, as it were—although, to be clear, they are always potentially connected through the “wormhole” of a situation. But also, importantly, some of these worlds can partially overlap such that we have “worlds within worlds,”36 as Elizabeth Povinelli has put it echoing the words of Malinowski, which can and do slip into one another, even if temporarily. In this sense, both worlds and the situations that structure and link them can be described as ecstatically relational and emergent multiplicities. Such a notion of world is ripe with sites of potentiality, and thus open for a politics of worldbuilding.37
Thus, in that book and in this one, I intend worlds as a multiplicity of situations ontologically structured by ecstatic relationality. As a result, a politics of worldbuilding begins from a situation (chapter 1) and is aimed at opening possibilities for what worlds can become and how to dwell (be-with openly) within them by means of altering the relationalities between those existents that populate a world.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in contrast, have famously responded to the condition of war as governance with a call to the multitude to resist by means of what they call biopolitical production, or the immanent creation of “social relationships and forms through collaborative forms of labor.”38 But the question must be asked: Why fight the imposition of biopolitical will with more biopolitics? Because it remains within the plane of bios, or socially qualified life, does biopolitical production not risk a differential reproduction of the same that I have argued elsewhere is characteristic of reformist politics?39 In contrast to this call for more biopolitical production, I will argue and show throughout this book that today we need to think, conceive, and act beyond biopolitics and begin thinking in terms of an onto-ethical politics of worldbuilding. It is my contention that the anti–drug war movement offers a glimpse of such a politics, by which new forms of social relations are created because new worlds and ways of being-with are created. This is recognition that worlds and social life—including labor—as well as, human-nonhuman relations always have a particular onto-ethical grounding, and so a desire to change the former demands the political and intellectual experimental creation of the latter.40
As I hope to make clear, a politics of worldbuilding is quite different from what most left-leaning political activity has become today. This difference is best understood in terms of the necessity of offering a political vision and the tactics for realizing this vision in a lasting manner. Although there are certainly some left-leaning movements that have clear and articulated aims with a variety of tactics well suited to meet them, this is clearly not the case for the Left in general and especially so for the most visible of left political activity today. To a great extent this political activity—perhaps the epitome of which was the horizontalist prefiguration of Occupy and other similar “activity”—has become limited to temporary spectacular and carnivalesque protest, increasingly combined with some form of occupation, that emphasizes process over results, tactics over strategy, intimate locality over abstract globality, identity over conditions, and individualizing simplicity over complexity.41 This has led to a current state of affairs in which it often seems as though the only aim of political activity is little more than performative rituals for voicing dissatisfaction,42 oftentimes articulated in the register of moralism,43 symbolic occupation of buildings or public space, and a temporary prefigurative enactment of a localized process with no long-term strategy for any actual transformation.44 Far from actually changing worlds, this prefigurative politics of performative ritual primarily results in a seemingly endless process of network building and the realization of affective solidarity.45 Such a “politics,” then, has come “to be about feelings of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.”46 To paraphrase Lauren Berlant’s assessment of a similar form of political activity: this may feel good but it does very little to change anything.47
In contrast, a politics of worldbuilding rejuvenates one of the essential features of political thinking and activity—that is, the articulation of and attempt to realize a political vision.48 As Srnicek and Williams rightly 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