Political Matter: Technoscience, Democracy, and Public Life

5. Plastic Materialities

119 Plastic Materialities gay hawkins 5 You see it walking into the supermarket: an image of a plastic bag with a big black cross over it and the words say no to plastic bags emblazoned above. The message is clear: bags are bad. How did it come to this? How did this flimsy, disposable thing acquire such a shocking reputation? How did using one in public come to mark the shopper as irresponsible? How did this humble object come to have such a claim on us? As the supermarket poster shows, bags have changed. They have become contested matter: the focus of environmental education campaigns designed to demonize them and reform human practices. In this version of public pedagogy, there is no room for ambiguity about the meanings or affects of plastic materiality. As scientists discover marine life choking on bags and environmental activists document the bags’ endless afterlife in landfills, plastic bags are transformed from innocuous, disposable containers to destructive matter. Say-no campaigns deploy a command morality designed to remind shoppers that bags are now problematic, yet another thing to register in the circuits of guilt and conscience that enfold us within forms of rule. But what of the bag in all this? It appears as a passive object of reclassification. Scientific knowledge and social marketing frame it as bad stuff to be rejected by the environmentally responsible subject. But is this the only way in which plastic bags act on or make claims on us? If not, then we might wish to ask a different question: how does environmental education—and its command moralities—come to organize ethical transactions between plastic bags and humans in 120 GAY HAWKINS ways that disavow other transactions, other ways of encountering bags, that might suggest different, and more ecologically careful, modes of living? In many versions of environmental ethics, destructive matter manifests what Noel Castree (2003, 8) describes as a “materialist essentialism .” It is seen as having clearly definable properties that are ontologically fixed. And as Castree (8) explains, “these properties can, in the final instance, be appealed to by environmental ethicists (explicitly or implicitly) to anchor claims about the who, what and how of ethical considerability.” Despite the recognition of relational ontologies and calls for an ethics based on “transpersonal connections ,” the tendency is to demonize environmentally dangerous matter as materially irreducible and to fall back on the ontological distinctions that sustain this such as subjects–objects or nature–culture. This tendency inevitably privileges humans as the source of ethical awareness and action. Whereas natural matter is recognized as ethically significant and as a site of communicative vitality, destructive artificial material is afforded no capacity to affect us in ways that might call forth other ethical responses. Humans are not invited to be open to the affective intensities of plastic matter; rather, they are urged to enact their ethical will and eliminate it. This is how ethics slides into moralism. As much as one may agree that the world would be a better place without plastic bags, the moral imperative to refuse them denies the complexity of contexts in which we encounter them and the diversity of responses bags generate. It fixes the material qualities of plastic bags and assumes to know the affects they trigger. Catastrophic images of plastic bags as pollutants link them to the end of nature and fuel a sense of disgust and horror. There is no possibility that plastic bags might move us or enchant us or invite simple gratitude for their mundane convenience. There is no sense that they might prompt us to behave differently. Instead, approaches to environmental ethics invoke essential characteristics that deny the contingency of ethical constituencies and relations. In doing so, they may also deny the affective dimensions of ethics and the ways in which corporeal interactions with the world are always mixed up with ethical reasoning and negotiations. My goal is to get beyond this impasse—to examine how plastic bags come to matter without recourse to a materialist essentialism Plastic Materialities 121 and without putting humans at the center of the story. By letting plastic bags have their say, I want to open up a different line of thinking about the relation between ethics, affect, and the environment , one that begins from the modest recognition of plastic bags not as phobic objects ruining nature but as things we are caught up with: things that are materialized...