Chapter Title: Plastics

Chapter Author(s): Gay Hawkins

Book Title: Fueling Culture

Book Subtitle: 101 Words for Energy and Environment
Book Editor(s): Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel and Patricia Yaeger
Published by: Fordham University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1hfr0s3.76

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Fordham University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Fueling Culture

This content downloaded from

35.176.190.142 on Sat, 25 Feb 2023 21:06:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Plastics

Gay Hawkins

It is difficult to consider plastic as fuel when you confront its ubiquity as urban litter or ocean
waste. It seems so passive and inert, the dead stuff of disposability denied even the biologi-
cal momentum of decay. The eternal persistence of plastic seems to fuel only apocalyptic
visions of ecological DISASTER: petrochemical cultures buried in their own DETRITUS.
From a different angle, however, plastic represents not the end of NATURE but rather
movement or process. This understanding of plastic recognizes what Manuel DeLanda
calls “the expressivity of materials,” or their morphogenetic potential (1995). For DeLanda,
materials lack inherent fixed qualities, and their multiple forms are not the outcome of ex-
ternally imposed structures. Rather, the capacities of materials emerge as they participate
in new relations; they are both shaped by and shape those relations in distinct ways. They
inevitably “have their say” (DeLanda 1995).
How does plastic have its say in contemporary culture? Through what processes has
this material become a force in the world, fueling new economic, ecological, and politi-
cal realities? And in what ways are the forces of plastic, its variable capacities to intervene
in the world, realized? Thinking of plastic as process is more than just a material turn; it
recognizes the active role of the more-than-human in assembling the social. Material and
nonhuman elements do not simply express culture or mechanistically enable human being;
through ontological alliances they participate in making realities.
The particular reality I want to investigate is disposability: the cultural and ecological
implications of more and more things produced for a single use. Disposability entails a

271

This content downloaded from

35.176.190.142 on Sat, 25 Feb 2023 21:06:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
272 Plastics

fundamental interdependency in petrochemical cultures that drives the ACCUMULATION

of plastics in environments and bodies, human and nonhuman. Most understandings of
disposability trace a narrative from resource extraction of finite oil reserves to industrial
production, to global supply chains, to fleeting use, to excessive waste. Disposability’s cas-
cading effects seem to unfold according to a linear and destructive logic. But the most
striking thing about disposability is that it forces one to consider the interrelationships
among markets, resources, materiality, consumers, and environmental degradation all at
once: not as a sequence of effects but as an “agentic swarm.” This is Jane Bennett’s term for
the agency of assemblages, where multiple actants interact in uneven, unpredictable ways
(2010, 32). Understanding disposability as assemblage, rather than narrative, allows one
to perceive processes of change and emergent causation as multidirectional rather than
teleological. One can investigate how materials act, how they shape relations in expected
and unexpected ways, and thus ask new questions about how plastic, once considered so
durable, emerged as the definitive material of disposability.
In American Plastic, Jeffrey Meikle (1995) argues that after World War II, plastic shifted
from being a synthetic replacement for natural materials into something made neither to
last nor as a substitute but instead made to be wasted. This massive shift had several aspects:
economically, the fundamental integration of the plastics and petroleum industries and
the expansion of mass consumption; culturally, the material density of everyday life and
the equation of plastic artifacts with modernity and consumer choice; environmentally, in
escalating amounts of urban waste. Plastic began to express itself as the promise of a gleam-
ing, ever-new FUTURE. It shifted from being ersatz synthetic substitute to standing on its
own feet and “having its say.” It acquired an identity Meikle calls “plastic as plastic.”
The rapid growth of disposability was central to this transformation. Single-use ob-
jects—plastic bags, spoons, lids, straws, food containers, the list goes on and on—facil-
itated the emergence of new cultural formations. As Meikle says, what was remarkable
about disposable plastic things was that they appeared stylistically as rubbish from the very
beginning (1995, 186). In postwar consumer culture, plastic’s capacity to express itself as
a throwaway changed how “waste” and wastefulness were understood—materially and
morally—and how people experienced movement. The anonymity and ubiquity of ever
more plastic generated cultural consciousness of an increasing flow of plastic in everyday
life. Disposable plastic things seemed to come from an inexhaustible source; they arrived
from a “continuous infinite” (Boetzkes and Pendakis 2013). Relations with plastic were
fleeting; the unbearable lightness of disposable being denied any sense of permanence.
The rise of plastics and disposability reverberated in culture and economy by changing
perceptions of social time and space. Movement no longer meant simply passing through
particular times and spaces; it was also an ordering of continuity that worked in many
directions. If things could appear as waste before they were used, then production and
consumption did not create waste; rather, waste emerged as intrinsic to plastic ontologies,
present from the beginning.
Consider, for example, the plastic lid on a takeaway coffee. It is a market device facilitat-
ing consumption on the move, a plastic object with unique design and physical properties,

This content downloaded from

35.176.190.142 on Sat, 25 Feb 2023 21:06:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Plastics 273

and waste—pretty much simultaneously. Although you might think that the lid is pack-
aging that performs an essential function, and only becomes “useless” garbage after you
remove and trash it, this linear narrative misses how these qualities and calculations are
folded into each other. They do not emerge in a series of transitions and shifting valua-
tions; rather, they animate each other. The lid’s future as waste is anticipated even before
it is used. This quality does not appear later as a result of consumption but is inscribed in
its very form and function, its plastic materiality.
In this vignette of disposability, the disposable object shapes how things move, not
just how they are apprehended. The lid passes quickly from barista to consumer within a
distinct spatiality and temporality. This emergent time-space is not an accelerated product
life cycle—from production to consumption to disposal—but rather a horizontal network
of relations in which waste is immanent. Waste is not displaced to another time or space
after consumption, nor is it an effect; it is a material presence animating and ordering in-
teractions in particular ways.
This distinct form of movement that disposability engenders does not mean simply
“rapid turnover” or the intensification of commodity circulation. It indicates the dynamic
emergence of new social forms out of assemblages of differential relations. Becoming dis-
posable revealed novel capacities or forms of expressivity for plastic. For DeLanda, ca-
pacities are virtual unless they are being used. Material capacities are not fixed or hidden
within the material as a limited number of possibilities awaiting human discovery. They
are emergent and invented in the ongoing, contingent processes of materials interacting
in the world.
While there is no doubt that considerable money and effort went into disciplining the
biophysical properties of plastic to be amenable to numerous economic and industrial ap-
plications, plastic made its own suggestions. It revealed surprising capacities. Some of these
capacities were molecular, others cultural (Hawkins 2013). The capacity crucial to plastic’s
emergence as “disposable” was its willingness to perform as both market device and mass
material. As a market device, plastic reconfigured numerous industries. It offered a prag-
matic solution to the need for containerization and the logistics of distribution and mobile
consumption. In economic terms, it helped reconfigure and expand markets in ways that
shaped new forms of production. And culturally, plastic reconfigured how consumers ap-
prehended products (especially food and pharmaceuticals), how they shopped, and how
they became comfortable with an overpackaged world and a series of fleeting encounters
with plastic in more and more spaces of daily life.
In this way, plastic expressed itself as the archetypal mass material, quantitatively and
topologically. The quantitative sense refers to the “plastics explosion” of the 1950s and
1960s when plastic emerged as a massive industry that transformed other industrial pro-
cesses. The topological refers to the reverberation of this event across multiple registers.
With the proliferation of plastic things, plastic emerged as the ultimate marker of con-
sumer democracy, a culture of bewildering abundance and choice. And it was the material
experience of seriality as disposability. The constant flow of plastic, the sense that plastic
was always “ready to hand,” added to the effect of disposability as a cultural and bodily

This content downloaded from

35.176.190.142 on Sat, 25 Feb 2023 21:06:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
274 Plastics

experience. The senses were captured by plastic’s evanescence and transience, by its abun-
dance and endless replaceability. At the same time moral imaginations were learning to be
untroubled by its presence as always-already waste.
See also: CHINA, DETRITUS, ENERGY SYSTEMS, METABOLISM, NETWORKS, PLASTIGLOMER-
ATE, TEXTILES.

This content downloaded from

35.176.190.142 on Sat, 25 Feb 2023 21:06:36 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms