Life in Plastic: Plastic's Capitalism (Part 2)
Part of my interest in all of this is the ubiquity of plastics throughout the world, but that we focus on certain graspable objects. And that because of that, we miss the kind of, malleability and the changeable forms that plastic goes through in the long temporality of plastic.
Caren Irr:Even if we stopped producing plastic right now, we would still have tons and tons and tons of it around as waste for hundreds, thousands of years. There's lots to be said about how challenging it is to envision these post plastic utopian scenes? Like, is it even possible to live after plastic?
Crystal Bartolovich:You know, I keep on coming back to the problem of totality and how easy it is to simply evacuate from the frame the things that you don't wanna think about.
Christopher Breu:Part of our responsibility as as humanists is to try and imagine better worlds, other collectivities, other possibilities, other political possibilities. And I think this project and this book actually demonstrates why the humanities are so important.
Caren Irr:Hello, everybody. I'm Karen Eyre from Brandeis University. I'm I'm so happy to be here for this podcast devoted to our new collection, Life in Plastic, Artistic Responses to Petro Modernity, just fresh off the griddle from University of Minnesota Press and here with some of our contributors, and we're gonna hear from each of them about their piece and, see what points of connection and have general ideas build out of our discussion, on the topic of plastics, petro modernity, petro capitalism, the whole phenomenon of extractive energy economies. So I'm just gonna go ahead and introduce all three of our speakers, and then we'll go ahead and hear from them, I guess, in the order that I'll introduce you, if you don't mind. So our first speaker will be Christopher Brew, who's a professor of English in at Illinois State University, and he's written widely on questions of masculinity, sex, materialism in the body.
Caren Irr:And his essay in the collection is entitled The Petrochemical Unconscious, Destructive Plasticities in Richard Powers' Game. Our second speaker today is, Krystle Bartolovich, who's associate professor of English at Syracuse University. And she is currently writing a project titled Hating Utopia Properly. And her essay is titled, for the collection is titled Refuge of Ignorance, A Prehistory of Plastic. And our third speaker today is Sean Gratton, independent scholar and author of Hope Isn't Stupid, also taking up the utopia's theme, and his essay, for the collection is titled the impossible figure of oceanic plastic.
Caren Irr:Take it away, Chris.
Christopher Breu:Alright. It's really good to be here. Thank you, Karen, for the introduction, and, good to see all of you and and, be here in this podcast. And thank you, to University of Minnesota and, and Maggie, Sattler for for setting this up. My piece in the in the collection is, it focuses on, Richard Powers, late nineties novel.
Christopher Breu:I think it's '99 or '98. I can't remember. But, Gain, and the novel is an in a really interesting novel. Powers is is probably most famous now for the overstory, which he published a couple years ago. And he's really one of our leading, novelists, who sort of address issues of systematicity, address ecological issues, meditate on capitalism, although it's sometimes hard to pull apart what where where he comes down on it among other things.
Christopher Breu:But he at least engages it. Basically, what I argued in the collection was that the novel was really interesting, and this links both to, issues that Sean and Crystal talk about in their pieces. It, is interesting because it actually meditates on questions of scale and how we address issues of scale when when dealing with climate emergency and, the ways in which plastics in general and various aspects of the petrol economy actually contribute to climate change and contribute to the to the the global destination of the world ecology. One of the really interesting things in, in GAIN is that there's this split narration between the story of Laura Boady, who is a realtor living in a small town in Illinois. Actually, not that different from the town I live in, at all.
Christopher Breu:I'm actually in Normal a town called Normal, Illinois, which really does exist, believe it or not. You know, I try and be one of the less normal features of it, but, you know, you never know. But, anyway, it it's it's a story of her getting cancer probably from insecticide that she used at home, although it's never fully clear. And it's it's something produced by the company that basically dominates the town or or settled in the town for its headquarters quarters, which was originally Soap Company, but it becomes the Clare Chemical Company. And they make all kinds of, plastics and all kinds of petrochemical products.
Christopher Breu:And so the the book actually splits its narration. And what's interesting is it it only at one point does the narration really connect, and there's all these sort of attempts at connection that don't really fully connect. And it sort of suggests the incommensurability of scales, when we talk about the large scale destruction of the planet by capitalist and and, ecocidal forces on the one hand, and then, on the other hand, this woman living a an everyday life in a in a small Midwestern town. One half of the narration is the narration of of the Clare Company growing from a small Boston firm, all the way into a a huge multinational that's doing you know? And and it goes through every stage of capitalism from Taylorism to Fordism to sort of post Fordist, marketing processes, financialization, all of that.
Christopher Breu:And it and it sort of traces, you know, diversification, all of those things. And it it traces the the development of the Clare company, the rise and rise of the Clare company. It just keeps going forward. Meanwhile, the book shows the kind of human cost, with, you know, a very detailed account of of Bodie's death. And it suggests that, in fact, you know, her story is not atypical.
Christopher Breu:It's very typical. And this is part of the the the ecological costs of of what the CLEAR company represents. There are only kind of two moments where the two narratives sort of interconnect. One of them is through advertising rhetoric that shows up at the as as sort of interludes between chapters. And you get all these kinds of, you know, rhetoric that we we all are bombarded with all the time from television, from radio, you know, and if anything, the, you know, marketing has just gotten even more intense in the twenty plus years since this book was written.
Christopher Breu:And the other one is a fascinating passage, in which there's one of those disposable cameras that gets left in a hospital room, and it never gets used. But Powers springs into this kind of lyrical, profound account of the production of this this simple disposable object from the materials of seven different continents and sort of explains how many different forms of labor that produce the plastic in it. Part of what I think the book gets at is Powers demonstrates the ways in which so much of how we interact with plastics and how we interact with the the world ecology and and the specific, ecosystems that we're in is unconscious. And in fact, we can't begin to sort of recognize that that those conscious dimensions, without doing a really fundamental reorienting of of what we perceive, very much like the ways in which commodity fetishism functions to obscure labor and conditions of the labor that go into that product. Part of what I'm trying to do with this piece is actually start to say, we need to come we need to find a way of actually talking about that unconscious.
Christopher Breu:And in the larger project, I'm combining Frederic Jameson's idea of the political unconscious where there's a political both desire and a set of contradictions that exist in contradiction to representation and and put pressures on representation. I'm combining that with, and Catherine Hales' notion of the the nonconscious. Part of what Hales argues is it's is a lot of what functions in our electronic devices is not so much an unconscious as a nonconscious. And this comes to the question of of nonhuman agency, which, I think is one of the crux of the different papers that we're, talking about today. But I think we could talk about the agency or or or actors is a term that Sean uses nicely, I think, in his piece.
Christopher Breu:We can talk about the action or actors of of various nonhuman entities, including things like code and, algorithms, you know, which actually shape our nonconscious in various ways. So that's that's what I'm working on. I'm also really interested in how we actually start to think about desire, like Jamieson does in relationship to ecological functioning and the building of of nontoxic worlds. But I'll stop here and, and turn it over.
Caren Irr:Fantastic. Thanks, Chris. I really think one of the implicit ideas shared by a lot of our contributions in this in this volume has to do with that relationship between, you know, petro capitalism as something that we don't observe directly and plastic in the form of the commodity that we use every day. And if we wanna think about that as your positing has a relationship of the of the unconscious where petro capitalism is the unconscious of the forms of plastic that we know we're encountering. Of course, there are lots of plastics that we don't know we're encountering, and that's a different kind of problem.
Caren Irr:Let's hear from Crystal.
Crystal Bartolovich:Thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this. I'm very excited to speak about, my project with these other projects that are so closely allied in so many interesting ways. And there are some interesting differences too. I'd wanna affirm, though, Chris's observation about, incommensurability of scale because incommensurability of scale is in many ways what I'm dealing with too and the debate in theory about totality versus assemblages. And the view in Psalms strong assemblage theory, the land, a la tour, that there is no totality.
Crystal Bartolovich:Right? That scale simply does not exist and cannot be referred to or referenced as having any kind of agency. Whereas for Marxist scholars, the agency of the totality is key. Key. Even if we can't understand it completely or have complete access to it, as Chris rightly said, it's still imperative for a Marxist understanding to attempt to access it.
Crystal Bartolovich:And one of the famous versions of this is cognitive mapping, Frederick Jameson's cognitive mapping. And that is the attempts we make to access the totality from which that will always be incomplete or, inaccessible in its fullness to us and yet has effects on us that we have to trace. That is what Jamieson underscores, that in order to act politically, we have to be able to situate ourselves in totality, however obscurely. So from a Marxist point of view, strongest language theory actually makes politics impossible as we understand it, and that is crucial. So, Jane Bennett encountering the objects in the gutter.
Crystal Bartolovich:Right? And she says, we need to stand back and, you know, form an assemblage with these objects and contemplate them with awe. And I'm like, no. Pick them up before they get into the ocean. Right?
Crystal Bartolovich:All theories produce ignorance as well as knowledge, and you have to choose carefully. Right? If you're gonna, you know, focus on totality, you're gonna miss a lot of dots. Right? And sometimes the dots are crucial.
Crystal Bartolovich:My essay, unlike the others in the collection, takes a long historical view. Many of us refer to, Jason Moore's theory of world ecology, and for him, it's crucial that we actually take this long historical view. He argues that the ecological catastrophe we currently inhabit emerges, with capitalism in the fourteenth century. Right? 14 century.
Crystal Bartolovich:And so primitive accumulation is the primitive accumulation of catastrophe. My essay argues that this is exactly what Latour continuously brackets. And I look at his famous example, and we've never been modern, of his recasting of the oil debate and the divide that gets made between politics and science in those seventeenth century debates over the air pump actually produce the perceived rupture between nature and society that's been catastrophic for us. The about the rupture, no disagreement. But what I point out is that he entirely brackets capitalism as having any bearing whatsoever on this divide, and that that itself is catastrophic for politics.
Crystal Bartolovich:Do we have to change the mode of production, or can we, as Bennett says, attach ourselves to a different assemblage that might have better effects? I I think that both of those modes can seem abstract, and therefore, you have to work out in practice exactly what the politics should be, but that you also have to have in mind whether there can be any ecological, reparation of the planet and any social justice while capitalist property relations exist. That's the bottom line for me. And I talk in my essay about how when we look at the long history, we can see that already the seeds, right, of this dispute about what counts. Right?
Crystal Bartolovich:Would you have to look at the larger structure, or can you actually deal at these more localized assemblage levels and have an effective politics? That's what I'm trying to get out of my piece. It's it's about those concepts, and it is about the longer history of plastic. And I can actually fill in more gaps about that longer history of plastic as we go along, but I wanna give Sean a chance.
Sean Grattan:I guess this for for me, the my piece in in the text has been in gestation for a really long time. I I think I have the first version of it I gave as a talk at Penn State in, like, 2014 or so. And it came from having read Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for a Time Being and this moment in the book that sort of recurs over and over again about the the main character Ruth well, one of the main characters, Ruth, trying to sort of grasp the idea of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. She keeps returning to her partner who kind of mansplains the garbage patch at her a number of times. And so I was thinking a little bit about the difficulty of representations of of sort of large scale, ecological depredations.
Sean Grattan:So this is gonna be part of a book project that I'm I've been working on, currently called The Aesthetics of the Fucked. And it's an attempt to kind of think through, versions of scale and apocalypse and affect, in sort of contemporary, literature and art. So we had that on one hand where the character Ruth couldn't really understand this thing that was actually the sort of, like, the plot device that made the whole book go forward and but it couldn't stick in her mind. There's this giant thing on the ocean that was swirling, you know, Fukushima reactor disaster garbage up into Canada. And the other thing was, this picture that I kept seeing on the Internet of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which was not the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Sean Grattan:It was a picture of a man canoeing in, the Manila Bay Harbor surrounded by, like, these giant heaps of garbage. Right? And I think it's really interesting. The the further away I've gone from that first moment of thinking about the essay, the more prevalent the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is in the discussion of what plastic waste looks like. But the problem hasn't changed insofar as it's still not really telling us what that looks like because the garbage patch isn't something you can really see, for the most part.
Sean Grattan:Most of it is microplastics. So I talk about four different people, the poet Evelyn Riley, the photographer and filmmaker Chris Jordan, the British poet, Jennifer Cook, and then Ruth Ozeki. And each person tries in different ways to sort of get us as people to think about the large structures of plastic. So for Chris Jordan, right, the most famous set of photographs of of his from, messages from the midway, which is a bunch of dead albatrosses. Their guts have been basically replaced by plastic.
Sean Grattan:Thinking about what that does or doesn't tell us about how we how plastic circulates, both in terms of humans and and animals. Right? And very so they're sort of nonhuman actors. Because I mean, if we're thinking about what the garbage patch is, it's a it's a nonhuman actor and has been described in ways that are very much very lively. So, shredder is my favorite version of this where it's like you get into the sort of whirl of the gyre and the plastic breaks down and it's it's it's, you know, it's an activity.
Sean Grattan:Right? You know, one of the questions that looms over, I think, all of, at least for me, my interest in ecological crises and what I'm describing as aesthetics of the fucked, Rob Nixon's talked about how there's a crisis, or drama deficit in in the crisis of climate change. We don't affectively feel what's happening in part because of the long term scales, the temporal scales that these things are working at. But also, you know, the other sort of argument inside of my piece is that what happens when we're trying to think about large scale ecological crises like this is that the responsibility for that large scale gets placed onto the shoulders of individual people. This is part of a sort of neoliberal, subjectivity in which, you know, you're going to be able to fix climate change by just picking up a water bottle.
Sean Grattan:Like, that's great, and you should do that, obviously. But, that's can do very little. And, obviously, like, if you're just focusing on that, you're missing out on the the ways in which various institutions perpetuate and continue producing plastics. And then there's this kind of, like, guilt and desire that, like, we can all do this, as individuals, which we we can't. So so part of my interest here is, like, how do we both combine the drama of what's happening right now?
Sean Grattan:And what kinds of aesthetic moves might produce a sense of, you know, I think I think Heather Hauser has a really great term for this, which is info well without being, like, overwhelmed by all the information that's on the table. And and Jennifer Cook's poem, the second hand, is really good about this because she's talking about trying to, like, hold the idea of the garbage patch in her head, but then it wakes her up in the middle of the night, and she sort of, you know, scream sort of shit. Like, this is here and, like but then she's on the Internet trying to figure out what else she can do. And and there's this weird kind of, like it's I mean, it's obviously not ideology critique, but the way in which one uncovers what plastic is then sort of says out in the world that, oh, there's plastic in your tea bags, for instance. Then you sort of feel worse and better about that because you've said something, but that, you know, individually isn't gonna do very much.
Sean Grattan:So I think part of my interest in all of this is the ubiquity of plastics throughout the world, but that we focus on certain graspable objects. And that because of that, we miss the kind of, malleability and the changeable forms that plastic goes through in the long temporality of plastic. So that's kind of where I'm going with this and thinking about, you know, what kinds of forms of politics might might come through if we think about the sort of large scale connectivity and thinking about, like, what, you know, the sort of circulation of plastic might tell us about the ways that we might work collectively and communally with one another.
Caren Irr:Thanks. I really feel like that ubiquity of plastics problem is one that so many people are trying to grapple with in different ways, especially the the creepy, the eerie, the ominous ubiquity of plastic that's partially on the interior of meat, you know, like us as meat, but also, you know, meats and things that we eat. I feel like that's a phenomenon we can now recognize and we continue as you as Sean just said, to inform each other about. Did you know that your liver contains large amounts of plastic waste and so on? I feel like we need to be able to name that condition of being.
Caren Irr:It's not a commodity, right? It's not waste exactly. It's a form of accumulation, but it's not primitive accumulation, right? And it has to do with how we're imbricated into, folded deeply into this world that derives from the needs of a petro capitalist economy and not, you know, of some kind of a, you know, economy of thriving or something like that.
Crystal Bartolovich:I I
Caren Irr:don't know if you guys have a way of of thinking about that phenomenon.
Crystal Bartolovich:I was really struck by a quote in Sean's essay from, I think, Hauser, you can tell me. And she observes that how did it happen that plastic, which is such a durable material, right, became the throwaway culture, main object. And I thought that was beautiful. And I also want to stress, as I think my panelists would also, that that's not an accident. Right?
Crystal Bartolovich:That that did not happen accidentally. Just today, right, in the in the local paper, there was an article about a new study that was released about, ocean waste, and we have to stop producing plastic. The United States should, set limits on plastic production. And I'm like, yes. Great great idea.
Crystal Bartolovich:You know, it's exactly the right scale and so on. Okay. So here was the response of the American Chemistry Council, the group that lobbies for the plastic industry. Okay. Here's what they said.
Crystal Bartolovich:This is misguided and would lead to supply chain disruptions, economic and inflationary pressure on already hurt consumers, and worst environmental outcomes, particularly related to climate change. Okay. So on the one hand, right, as all of us would agree, you have to look at everything holistically. Right? The first essay in the collection is called paper or plastic.
Crystal Bartolovich:Paper is terribly ecologically destructive. Right? I mean, they you know, it's not like having a paper bag is better than having a plastic bag if we're, you know, not reusing, recycling, and looking at the total production and effects of the circulation. Right? So it's not that it's easy, but I was thinking, okay.
Crystal Bartolovich:So here I am at home thinking, you know, in the way that, you know, Sean rightly points out. BP wants us to all think about our carbon footprint. Right? So that we will not say that, you know, BP needs to be, you know, stop getting its, you know, millions of dollars of subsidies. Right?
Crystal Bartolovich:Which is what they're defending. Right? They wanna put everything on us because that is the kinds of subsidies that go to fossil fuels, which is massive, and the fact that, you know, this lobbying group gives millions of dollars to politicians. Right? So they will not put those limits on plastic production.
Crystal Bartolovich:And so this great idea, right, that, you know, the production itself needs to be limited is probably not going to occur or certainly not going to occur at the level that is imagined by the oceanographers who are concerned about, you know, plastic in the ocean. Because capitalist interests are gonna make sure that politicians are going to hear them. But, really, when everything is so flanted, right, to the side of corporate power, Making our voices heard is really hard. To me, that's one of the fatal flaws in, you know, a parliament of things kind of argument. Okay.
Christopher Breu:Yeah. I wanna pick up on a couple things. One, I'm fascinated, Karen, with what you were talking about in terms of, like, how do we theorize the accumulation of plastic in the body. It actually is reminding me of my work on my in defense of sex project. One of the things I'm interested in is is the ways in which, intersex bodies and also racialized bodies were used, to actually produce forms of knowledge, both urological knowledge and gynecological knowledge, and, and that that it was a kind of accumulation via the body, which is interesting.
Christopher Breu:And I mean, it's a it's a version of accumulation by dispossession, but it's almost a a version of accumulation by by, prosthesis, you know, or or by surgical invasion, in various conditions of non non consent among other things. But, but I'm I'm interested in in how plastic being in us is a kind of it's a mode of transforming bodies into, you know, a kind of toxic posthumanism, if you will. It's maybe the waste product of accumulation. I mean, we have to think on a number of scales, but thinking on the scale of the body may be really important. And not just our subjectivities, but actually thinking about how the body intersects with it with all of this, you know, and and collective bodies, because I think Sean's exactly right.
Christopher Breu:We we can't solve this on the level of the individual. I mean, that's exactly the way and, Crystal, as you put it, that's exactly the way corporations have been basically writing off their own responsibility by by by foisting it on us. If we all recycled a %, it wouldn't put a dent in what we need to really address. One of the things I really appreciated about Sean's piece was that we need to think about how representation functions in the in in this context. How do we think about affect?
Christopher Breu:How do we produce affects that actually get people to react to climate change? But, of course, Crystal's right too that that we also are facing huge political obstacles. I would love to still see some of this done on the level of policy. We need state actors too. We can't just do this as a collective.
Christopher Breu:Although, Sean, as you point out, the garbage patch, just are precisely non state spaces, you know, and so there's no regulation of them necessarily at all. I've been dealing with the ways in which the concept of plasticity has been one of the ways in which gender has been narrated by people like John Money. And plastic seems to be often a kind of excuse to say that you can mold things into whatever shape you wanna mold them into. Plastic is actually a material still. You know, it's this absolutely malleable thing that you can manipulate in anything, except for it doesn't disappear.
Christopher Breu:And it's interesting the ways in which the cultural uses of the concept of plasticity are all about the ability of science to manipulate without resistance. And so I I think that's also part of the ideology of the present around plasticity, if that makes sense.
Sean Grattan:Yeah. Chris, I think I think well, there's two things. One, getting back to the kind of, like, sense of the importance of both collective action and these sort of, institutional actions. I I think I think Crystal's really right. There's a lot of political forces against the sort of collective forces.
Sean Grattan:And, and I think one of the really brilliant things about the intro to this book is, the ways in which in the sort of pandemic COVID moment, everything became single use. And I'm I don't know if it's the case where everybody else lives. I'm walking down the street, and I see masks on the ground constantly or on the on the beach. I'm about a forty five minute walk from the ocean. So you see them, like, around there all the time.
Sean Grattan:And coming from a state, it was a very early adopter of multiuse bags and, things like that, then, like, immediately that disappears. If you think about, like, the speed that that could happen, that we could go in that direction, and that plastic becomes this clean thing. But it's as Karen rightly points out in the introduction, that, actually, the virus holds on to plastic easier than it did with with cloth and other other materials. But if we could just reverse that, that would be great. Right?
Sean Grattan:But, like, have the the speed of, like, being like, oh, no. We can't use plastic, would be that would be one of the sort of utopian options here, but that's obviously not on the table in the same way. Then then thinking about the the sort of utopian element that Chris was talking about in terms of plastics. So a number of the essays, I'm thinking about, like, the way that the bakelite stuff appears in a couple essays. It's like there's this wondrous material that can do anything, and the sort of, like, way in which we theorize the idea of plasticity, wanting to be malleable, wanting to, like, shift and change, how it seeped into our discourse, plastic has, much like it seeped into our bodies, might be an interesting thing to think about in terms of of the way that we're sort of approaching some of this stuff.
Caren Irr:Yeah. You know, do we think in a plastic mode? I do wanna say, I think there's some potential for understanding and developing a kind of rhetoric of crisis around plastic as a public health problem. The other piece, of the pandemic, of course, that we see in addition to the waste is, you know, the ability to transform all kinds of social institutions on a dime. Right?
Caren Irr:You know, the way you work, the way you go to school, the way you shop, you know, all kinds of production and so on. It can change very rapidly when public health is the risk. That's, I think, a whole different set of terms and way of reacting and just understanding of our collective entanglement with each other. I mean, obviously they need to be entangled and you can't address the public health crisis while continuing to crank out masses and masses of this stuff. But it is the fact that even if we stopped producing plastic right now, and no more entered, you know, entered our environment, we would still have tons and tons and tons of it around as waste for hundreds, thousands of years, to deal with and it's as it degrades, those health issues continue.
Caren Irr:And some of the poets actually that Margaret Ronta talks about in her piece really have interesting ways of imagining that Adam Dickinson in his book, Anatomic is like registering his, the changes to his endocrine system that happens, you know, as he's encountering different petrochemicals and like measuring what's part of his interior, what's happening in it to his own chemistry as he lives in a kind of poisoned environment. And that's a kind of living with your own horror that I don't think very many people could sustain, but maybe a dose of that kind of horror is, politically powerful.
Crystal Bartolovich:I'm really glad we're talking about public health. I too, like Sean, was really struck by that really great way that you started the introduction bringing in this massive increase in, plastic waste. But it also led me to think about the flip side being a dialectical thinker of the kinds of plus to public health measures that you're discussing. On the other hand, there is, of course, all of the people who refuse to get vaccinated, wear masks. And that's a issue of, quote, unquote, individual rights to go back to the problem of the individual that Sean was talking about and a wanting to ignore the collective good.
Crystal Bartolovich:Right? I mean and it's really important that we remember how powerfully that is invested into American politics. Right? This the as I heard a senator say yesterday, the people have a right to be wrong. Seriously?
Crystal Bartolovich:And he was specifically talking about not being vaccinated. Right? I mean, that everybody has a right not to be right. And I'm thinking not if it's going to impact on everybody and everything else. Right?
Crystal Bartolovich:How does that get written out of the script? You know, I keep on coming back to the problem of totality and how easy it is to simply evacuate, right, from the frame, the things that you don't wanna think about. I am worried about what will happen to me if I get this vaccine. What what about the two year old of, you know, your next door neighbor who can't get vaccinated? Right?
Crystal Bartolovich:And that you could help perpetuate some terribly variant that is going to, you know in fact, I want us to remember also the flip side because I totally agree, you know, that the public health framing is really interesting, that it's really interesting on how it works on both, you know, as a positive.
Christopher Breu:I agree, Crystal, that, you know, we we're we're up against certain kinds of, individualist thinking and and a kind of almost joy in not taking responsibility for what one puts out in the world, you know, whether it's anger, whether it's trash, whether it's violence. When we start thinking about totality, I think the other thing that we have to think about is how much of a global issue this is. The US, for its population, produces way more waste than any other country, and yet we are not the people who actually wind up dealing with its its effects for the most part. That image of the Manila Harbor, right, captures it. That most of our waste goes to other countries, and other countries get paid off to deal with the waste.
Christopher Breu:The the question of scale becomes a a question outside of national borders. How do you produce alliances that that actually, transcend national boundaries? I I have a former grad student who, is my favorite grad student of all time, PhD student, Erica Wills, a labor, educator and and activist, as well as a professor of labor studies. For her, so much activism turns on the transnational. Linking by the sort of chain of production rather than by national contacts or or by labor labels.
Christopher Breu:Instead, the idea is to link all the laborers, you know, whether they're they're skilled or not. That's the kind of organizing I think we need to think about.
Sean Grattan:So, yes. I mean, I think I think one of the crucial things is to think about this as a transnational issue. Borders aren't really a thing. Right? I mean, they are.
Sean Grattan:But, like, in terms of the ways in which climate change happens, like, borders don't matter. But the borders do matter insofar as certain national entities produce way more waste. And we all know this, but The US produces way more waste than any other place. And we as Chris rightly says, like, we don't necessarily deal with it in the same ways that other places do. So there's uneven development of apocalypse happening here.
Sean Grattan:Right? I think one thing that we're leaving out of this, and I was struck by this in terms of of talking about the flip side of public health and the sort of kind of, like, these are my individual rights, is desire and the kind of concept of desire both in consumption but also in flouting your consumption. I'm thinking about those trucks when you, like, put the sort of semi, like, exhaust pipes on the back of your, like, pickup truck and the joy or that people get out of driving by, like, someone in a Prius, you know, exhaling a bunch of gas. There's something really important to think about the ways in which, like and what is it ideologically that's I mean, it's this kind of, like, ideological individualism, but not for a sense that I'm an individual that can be part of the common good, but I'm an individual that gets to assert my individuality over other people, people I don't agree with and people who I think that, like, are, you know, namby pamby woke social justice warriors or whatever. And all of this, like, is obviously nonsense, but it's nonsense that people feel very deeply.
Sean Grattan:So then I think we have to grapple with in very real ways in terms of thinking about how we identify, as consumers and what we identify as consuming. Right? And excessive consumption, you know, is is, I think, in some ways, a very American sense of being in the world. Right? You know, and identifying with products and identifying with the actually, the deadliness of those products is worth worth keeping on the table here.
Christopher Breu:Just a a quick response to that. You know, maybe we can actually articulate forms of utopian or positive desire for, like, a drinkable water for, the environmental surround that that doesn't immediately poison you, that that we could actually have collective desires for a a rich and redeeming world. I mean and the we here is very complicated. For the world that that many of us thought we were sort of vaguely living in, while we were destroying it in in various ways. Maybe we can think about a different version of that that isn't built on on toxic violence and destruction.
Christopher Breu:Do you want a livable environment? Are you just are you happy to live underground all the time and with with masks, you know, and not not just by because, you know, governments are telling you you have to wear masks because you won't be able to breathe otherwise. On the other hand, I also think that one of the things we don't think about and I think you got it exactly right, Sean. The when you when you we talk about those people who, you know, are driving their their trucks with glee, past the Prius, that part of this is also a kind of complicated resentment that that takes on class characteristics. You know, part of what part of the divide during the pandemic was between those of us who could actually stay at home and work and those who actually were working because they were essential workers, which means they were paid like shit and treated as disposable, who actually had to work out in the world.
Christopher Breu:And there's the feeling like, well, I'm not safe. Why should you be safe?
Crystal Bartolovich:Yeah. I I think that those class issues are crucial, and it can be super complicated. I mean, I I'm from Southern Ohio. Right? Appalachian, Ohio.
Crystal Bartolovich:My grandfather was a coal miner. I have grown up with the discourse of, you know, King Cole and the importance of the fossil fuel industry and protecting it. There's a really, really firm, but, like, for all of us with different things to believe. I mean, not to say I put had to put myself at risk. You know, you should be at risk too, but to believe that there isn't any risk.
Crystal Bartolovich:You know? I've spent my whole life in the coal mine, and I'm fine. There's a really strong sense that, you know, we lie. Right? The you know, the if if you're trying to make a an environmental case.
Crystal Bartolovich:But, you know, to go back to the desire, it's very difficult. I I know from my own experience and, you know, I've been reading lots of books where people try. Right? I mean, I've I've just been reading, Wassa Se. And, Leanne Simpson, University of Minnesota Press author, you know, writing about how difficult it can be to get people to join political struggles.
Crystal Bartolovich:Right? I mean, I there I there is nobody on this call who has not experienced it themselves. Right? And about any number of issues, it's really hard to get people to participate in collective political acts. One has to think about what is making the shift even when you know.
Crystal Bartolovich:Right? I I I'm talking about people who know that, you know, global warming exists and is bad. How do we shift? Right? I think that this is something that all three of our essays share.
Crystal Bartolovich:And in fact, that I think the volume shares in general. How do we shift from a certain kind of knowing and even feeling to effective politics? And that's the hard thing. So I think that we kind of did the in this book, really great work on different images or texts that can help people think these really complicated issues through as teachers are likely to do. Right?
Crystal Bartolovich:But that next step is the hard one. Right? How how do we translate that or help participate in? I guess that's the only way it can be properly put. Going from that desire to movement because it the the it certainly does not happen spontaneously.
Caren Irr:Yeah. I think that's a good thread to draw the pieces together and and part of the conversation that we've been having. What are the tasks that relate to plastic now that are important to accomplish? And clearly, a major one that a lot of different people have been taking up, especially in the visually arts interestingly, is just making plastic waste visible. And, you know, that often involves, projects that accumulate, you know, lots and lots of instances that are, you know, they have accretion and numerousness, you know, as their theme to build up those questions about scale.
Caren Irr:So just making waste that we, you know, extrude from our immediate environments visible and reminding ourselves, collectively of the of the fact that, you know, matter doesn't disappear, right? That, you know, the of conservation of matter, you know, as a fundamental principle is crucial. But for narrative arts, for writing, I think we have different kinds of options, you know, different kinds of tasks that become present from Chris's essay that makes the links, you know, between something like individual experience to, to kind of corporate presence or crystals that helps us see the the long evolution and prehistories of, of things that we might take for granted in the present to Sean's that, expands the geographic scale and multiplies our perspectives, you know, on something that we might think we already know. Like, it sounds like there's a place you can go and visit the the patch, you know, but maybe it's not. And kind of gives us a different way of thinking about space.
Caren Irr:Like, we have all of these problems that are specific maybe to plastic and some of the other new forms of waste and new new materials of the twentieth century. You know, we have these problems of of visibility and interconnectedness. We need to know where they are as dots in the totality or as, you know, as strings, as as spaces there. And a lot of these arts are using their particular capacities to achieve that issue of visibility. That definitely doesn't solve the question of what comes next, but it's, important.
Caren Irr:I think there's a, there's lots to be said about how challenging it is to envision these post plastic utopian scenes. Like, is it even possible to live after plastic because it endures so long? Should we in fact be thinking about environments that are managing and mitigating effects and, and so on? Do we need to have a different kind of utopian imaginary in order to to live with the ways that we've already created? I think of this sometimes as like a really middle aged way of being utopian.
Caren Irr:It's like, yeah, you made those decisions. You still got you got olive with them, you know? But it doesn't mean you have no options or you know, that everything is, is foretold, you know, a teenager looks at a middle aged person and says, your life is over, you know, it's terrible, just, you know, like, you know, somebody from a completely pristine environment might you know, from a country, you might look at the city or whatever and say, this is a poisoned, you know, damaged place. Don't be here. But when you're actually in those in those spaces, you see there's there's room to operate.
Caren Irr:You know, there's space for transformation and we have to figure out what those spaces and visions of a non pure, but future oriented environment that includes BLAST might be like.
Sean Grattan:No. I think that's I think that's exactly the point. What I'm trying to write towards, and I I think I'm I'm really interested in different kinds of moments which these, like, the fix people start talking about what kinds of fixes we we might have. I'm sure I'm not the person coining this, but, like, the mycological turn that sort of happened, whereas, like, mushrooms are everywhere. Right?
Sean Grattan:And, like, I mean, physically, they are everywhere, but they're also, like, in sort of pop culture, and they are sort of being seen as this fix. But often with the language of, like, well, you've really you've really fucked this one up. So but look. Mushrooms. And that's gonna make everything better.
Sean Grattan:We don't need to actually do anything different. So that's terrifying because we obviously need to do a lot of things different because the mushrooms were there before too. We just didn't really realize it. For all of, like, the the sort of, obviously, like, apocalyptic and disgusting forms of, like, the great Pacific garbage patch. Like, there are ecosystems that are being built there by various creatures and, that are making this thing that we did work.
Sean Grattan:And this doesn't say mean, let's keep doing the bad thing. But as you were saying earlier, even if we stop all plastic production, like, that we're we're gonna there's no post plastic because we're all gonna be done living by the time the plastic is done. So we have to think of a living with plastic, and what that looks like.
Crystal Bartolovich:I wanna raise at this point, Sylvia Wynter's famous quote that white utopia was a black inferno. As soon as we start talking about the utopia, and I think it's really important to, you know, meditate on that for a while. But what can look good, right, to one group can be built on the destruction of many other groups, and historically, that's indeed been the case. In fact, hating utopia properly is precisely about that dilemma. That critique is now really widespread.
Crystal Bartolovich:Right? That, you know, utopia is actually really dangerous. Now I'm talking about on the left. That utopianism can be really dangerous. You know, look what it's done historically.
Crystal Bartolovich:There's tons of these critiques. Often though, the authors do not completely throw away utopia though, unlike the conservative critics of utopia who do wanna reject it wholesale, that any attempt to make the world better is actually gonna make it worse. That's actually one of Latour's arguments against totality. Right? That, you know, attempting to have a total transformation is bound to destroy.
Crystal Bartolovich:But that's actually a conservative argument. I mean, it goes all the way back to Burke. And what I'm doing in my book is actually looking at the first one hundred years of responses to Moore's utopia in England. There are hundreds of them. Virtually all of them are negative or ambivalent, and I think that's really telling.
Crystal Bartolovich:I I think we have to keep in mind this anti utopianism as itself destructive, and yet also remember that there's a real critique of utopianism to be made at the same time. Dialectical thinking, everybody.
Caren Irr:Yeah. I think there's something that you're just mentioning. You know, Thomas More famously saying that we should make toilets out of gold, so that people change their relationship, to gold and are don't, like, fixate on it and work, you know, so on. That's such a good reminder of the way that materials are so important for utopian thinking, right? That it's of course, they're predominantly about social organization, but visions of the transformation of our of our material environments are crucial.
Caren Irr:You're thinking too of a Fourier, isn't it? Fourier who has, like, the fountains of lemonade, and, you know, these visions of how you're going to change not only your landscape, but what can be in it, you know, and so on. Maybe that's helpful for us for thinking about plastic. I mean, plastic itself is a utopian product about which people respond in a really exuberant way. It's, you know, it's magic, it's transformative, it's gonna make everything clean, bright, cheap, and beautiful, even though obviously, you know, it's followed by dystopian, quickly turns into something that's, you know, cheap and disposable and, trashy.
Caren Irr:It has that kind of dialectic of attitudes embedded in it as a material. Drawing on this tradition of thinking about the ways we can revalue and reorganize the matter of our physical worlds in that utopian tradition, I think would be really productive. You know, we have a way of grappling with the problem of plastic that's tied to its to its already existing shapes, right, almost, you know, to to nurgles, to the plastiglomerates, you know, we're we're sort of, you know, to these plastic bottles that wash around, like, we're sort of struck in dismay and awe at the abundance of shapes that the stuff can take, you know, in its own right, and we're kind of collecting and fascinating ourselves with those things. But going a step further, which is completely reasonable with a synthetic manmade, substance to envision transforming it and the places that it holds in our physical environment. That seems like a site for utopian thinking, and I'm curious what's happening there.
Caren Irr:And I feel like we've named all kinds of interesting projects for what I'm now envisioning as volume two. You know, the politics of plastic. I wonder I wanna invite, you guys if you have one last point you wanna speak about or kind of hit home to do that before we wrap up.
Christopher Breu:So, yeah. I've just been thinking about the role of the humanities in in all of this. And since this is a humanities project and one of the recent debates, internal to the, to the humanities and to literature to a certain degree recently has been the sort of post critique, argument, you know, against critique and and sort of appreciating other dimensions of of text. Working off of, but I also think transforming, Eve Sedgwick's, her account of paranoid versus reparative reading. And to me, the rejection of critique is wrong for a number of reasons.
Christopher Breu:We I think we're demonstrating why critique is necessary. What what Crystal is arguing for in terms of the, you know, thinking dialectically and and looking at, totality. That representation needs to actually get us to the place where we start to have a recognition and a feeling of what what the problem is in terms of, you know, the ecocidal violence that that contemporary capitalism and and, you know, of the organization of our of our life worlds, is producing. But the one thing I think the post critique crowd is right about, although I think this is already always part of, Jamieson's notion of of dialectics among other things, you know, is part of our responsibility as as humanists is to try and imagine better worlds, is to try and imagine how art relates to what Sean was talking about in terms of desire, how it relates to imagining other spaces, other collectivities, other possibilities, other political possibilities. And I think, you know, the humanities is under assault in in in all sorts of ways right now.
Christopher Breu:And I think this project and this book with its timeliness and its necessity actually demonstrates why the humanities are so important.
Crystal Bartolovich:I totally agree with what Chris just said, and I would throw in summarizing some threads from this conversation. When I thought about the section that Karen put us in, plastics capitalism, which, of course, was so apt for our three essays, I was really struck by, you know, how we think about that. And for me, it's plastic in capitalism, right, as as part of capitalism. But there are a number of ways, of course, to read that phrase. They think theorists might read it completely differently, but that's where I wanna make my intervention.
Crystal Bartolovich:In the correct and proper desire to critique human hubris and attempts at mastery. Too often, what's gotten thrown away is human and not equal. Right? Uneven responsibility. This is explicitly rejected by, Bennett, for example.
Crystal Bartolovich:Right? I mean, who argues against responsibility because it allows humans a hierarchy, right, in relationship to things. But, of course, if we've created humans damage, then we have a responsibility to repair it. That is a responsibility, not a mastery, a responsibility. And that distinction has got to be made.
Crystal Bartolovich:You can critique mastery. That's correct and proper, but you have to keep responsibility, and it's terrible unevenness. So when we critique individual behavior, we shouldn't have an individual politics, but at the same time, our lives actually are going to have to change. Right? They really are going to have to change in order to repair the earth and have global social justice.
Crystal Bartolovich:It's impossible to imagine how that would not be true. And so I I think that attempting to imagine that individuals' lives are not gonna be altered in The United States by the demands of ecological repair is not true and that we just have to suck it up. Right? And we should. Right?
Crystal Bartolovich:So critique mastery, but maintain responsibility uneven. Right? Recognizing that it's uneven.
Sean Grattan:So the weirdest thing that ever happened for me in terms of publishing a book was the first review I got described me as a post critique person, and I was surprised because that's not how I would imagine myself. But giving the post critique crowd a sort of sense that they're the space in which one is right to imagine other kinds of collective forms of, like, other worlds are possible, I think, is maybe seeding too much territory. Because, certainly, one of the key elements to critique, right, is that you're producing a sense of the possibility of thinking otherwise. You know, I I think I think one of the things that's that's crucial in talking about plastic and climate crisis and climate change and all these things is trying to figure out ways in which we can feel it. It can be effectively engaging, and that's really hard.
Sean Grattan:I come back to all the time, this moment, and I can't remember anymore who it was. But, on the senate floor, right, holding a snowball and saying, like, this is it's late spring in DC, and, like, there's a snowball here. And so, therefore, global warming doesn't exist. Because, like, look. It's cold out.
Sean Grattan:This is is just centered on that one particular sin acting like an ass. And it, like, that doesn't even imagine that, like, you know, the way in which, like, it's not even it's not even spring in a different hemisphere. You know? Like, and and so I think I think there's since that we need to imagine the world affectively otherwise, and how do we get there? Because that's, I think, one of the things that we've been talking about here is, like, the that feeling something is not the same thing as as as changing the world.
Sean Grattan:But it is a I think it's a crucial step. And so that that side of this, I think, is one of the things that connects all of the pieces in this in this book, some more opaquely than others. And then secondly, that that the world does need to change. And that as as as Crystal just pointed out, like, that means we need to change too. It's not like we can maintain what we're doing and, have the world become something other than it is.
Sean Grattan:And I I think that one of the things that came out of this conversation I was really excited about is that, like, there are some models that exist for rapid change and, and and to think through what those kinds of, like, utop and and it is that is a utopian possibility. That's a I mean, in utopia as a pedagogical mode. Right? So this kind of process of of moving towards something, if we see a model, like, why not fight for it?
Caren Irr:Thank you so much.