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Heather Davis, "Plastic Matter" (Duke UP, 2022)
01:01:04
An interview with Heather Davis
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This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate. C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Extra value meals are back. That means 10 tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just $8 only at McDonald's for a limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska, and California. And for delivery. Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo. There's no Milo here. Who picked up my son from school? Streaming only on Peacock. I'm going to need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand.
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It was just so this was all planned.
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What are you gonna do? I will do whatever it takes to get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other. All her fault. A new series, streaming now only on Peacock. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hi. Welcome back to the New Books Network. My name is Adam Bobeck, and I'm a PhD candidate in sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. I am super excited today to welcome Professor Heather Davis to the show. Heather Davis is assistant professor of Culture and Media at the New School and the editor of Desire Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada and co editor of Art in the Anthropocene Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments, and Epistemologies. Today we are discussing her new book, Plastic Matter, which was published in 2022 with Duke University Press. Professor Davis, welcome to the show.
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Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
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B
Could you talk about your personal relationship to plastic?
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Sure, yeah. So I started thinking about plastic in many different ways, and one of those is, of course, because of its ubiquity. It's something that I think we all have some kind of personal relationship to. It's one of the most intimate manifestations of our relationships to oil. So we see it in everything from our clothing. Clothing to sex toys to baby bottles to computer networks. Really, everything that we use to mediate our existence at this point is in part mediated through plastics or virtually everything. And so that's one of the ways in which I've come to think about plastics, is through that kind of bodily intimacy with our relationships to oil as a larger product. But the Other way for me that is a little bit personal is my maternal grandfather was a chemical engineer at dupont and later a manager for dupont Canada. And growing up, you know, there was all kinds of discussions of plastics, especially plastic textiles, which is what he was primarily involved with. But also there was the story that he helped to develop the plastic milk bag. And this will be really familiar for people who live in Canada or Europe or. Or India or parts of South America, less familiar for an American audience, but it's literally just kind of a bladder of milk. And the reason why they developed it was because they realized that this was the cheapest way to package a liquid. And this really speaks to a lot of the different ways in which plastics come to appear in our lives. Many of them are. It's not because of a kind of necessity. It's not driven by consumer demand. It's really driven by the ways in which industry is trying to create cheaper and cheaper products in order to maximize profits, obviously. And one of the things, the other thing about my grandfather helping to invent this sort of strange plastic object is, is that he would often bring it home to my grandmother to test. So my grandmother would. Would. Would be presented with all different types of sort of prototyp, these plastic milk bags. And I don't know about in other parts of the world, but in the end, in Canada, they're packaged in 1.3 liter bags. And then there's a set of three of them that are. That you buy together. And this kind of dimensionality or like how big it's going to be or what it kind of appears as a consumer product. My grandmother helped to sort of decide, in terms of. As a kind of quintessential sort, suburban housewife of the 1960s, really trying to, you know, she was the kind of ultimate focus group in terms of. In terms of what. What these kinds of domestic plastic products could be used for. On the other hand, I think it also speaks to the ways in which, you know, in the kind of official versions of the story that my grandfather would tell about this, you know, at dupont gatherings, et cetera, he would always exclude my grandmother's participation in this, despite the fact that she was so instrumental in relationship to basically designing the milk bag, figuring out what was actually going to work and what people were actually going to use and what people were actually going to buy and what was kind of a usable product. And I think that this also speaks to the ways in which women's labor at the time was often undervalued and erased in the course of history. So I think it really ties in a lot of the kinds of stories around plastic in terms of why plastics exist in the world, how they come to proliferate. But also, for me, I was really interested in this kind of question of inheritance. So what do we do with this world that we've inherited? Because we can't, at this point, say that we are going to live our lives without plastic. That's completely and utterly unrealistic, both for the purposes of sort of thinking about how much plastic informs contemporary existence, but also because of the longevity of the material and the pervasiveness of the material. So I think that one of the things that I was really interested in is both, like, how does a material like this come to exist in the world? To begin with, what are the kinds of philosophical assumptions about matter and materiality that cause plastic to exist? And then the second part of that being, what do we do now that it is so pervasive? And Jacques Derrida talks about the ways in which inheritance is always before us. It's not in the past. We often think about inheritance as something that comes from the past, but he reformulates that to think about that as something that is actually before us, in the sense that our job is to figure out what to carry from an inheritance and what to move forward with. And also that inheritance really structures who we are. So one of the other things that's. That's been really informative to me about thinking with the petro cultures, literature, for example, is really about the ways in which we are already constituted by this material. So it is fundamental to our subjectivities. Um, so how do we think about that? And how do we think about our relationships to something that is fundamental to who we are and in fact, constitutes our identities? But that is something that we might want to shift our relations to.
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I think this transitions beautifully into my second question, which is, of course, what is plastic matter?
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Yeah, so as I was saying, one of the things I was really interested in is what are the kinds of philosophical assumptions that are necessary to be there as a kind of precondition to the emergence of plastic as a material that would then take place off. And so plastic matter is a way to describe these relations, a way to describe the fact of our orientation to matter itself as plastic? Not just plastic as a material or really as a set of materials. I should say plastic is actually thousands of different materials. We just group it together under this kind of common name. But. But that plastic matter describes this relationship, this kind of recursive relationship. Between the desire for matter to be plastic and what I mean by that is all matter, right? And we can see this in the kind of pickup of material engineering and molecular engineering that happens after plastic. So one of the other things that's really fascinating about plastic as a material is it does mark the beginning of molecular engineering. So it's one of the first types of products that both allows for scientists to be able to really study and explore how molecules form themselves into chains, how we think through the polymer structure. And all of that is being developed through industry as they're trying to develop new different types of consumer products. And then in addition to that, there's a way in which that kind of investigation, in the kind of polymer structure of matter itself or the molecular structure of matter itself, that that kind of orientation to the world allows for then a much larger exploration of how we think about matter. So the ways in which we come to assume that matter can be pliable, that can be bent, that it can and should kind of conform to human desires. And we can see this throughout the rest of the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, which, of course, lead to all kinds of amazing things that many of us probably wouldn't want to do without. But it does rest upon this fundamental presupposition that there is a plasticity to the world that is ingrained into. Into matter. That it is our right and our. Well, we have the ability and we also have a kind of fundamental right to be able to manipulate those materials. And so I was interested in how that kind of philosophical assumption about plasticity that you can see kind of kind of ebbing and flowing throughout the kind of history of Western Western thought, going all the way back to Plato, is really kind of emerging in relationship to plastic itself as a material. And then seeing the ways in which plastic then changes our relationships to matter more broadly. So what are the things that plastic then shows us about the world that is maybe different from those kind of fundamental presuppositions that go into its making? So plastic matter is the concept that describes this recursive relationship.
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B
In the introduction you write that plastic pollution can be thought of as a form of colonialism. Why is that?
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This is something that. One of the thoughts that I'm indebted to Max Libran, who wrote this incredibly beautiful and really groundbreaking book called Pollution, is Colonialism, and who has been working with their lab, the Clear Lab, in Newfoundland, for many years now. And one of the things that they say very clearly, which I think is really helpful because I think that A lot of us have a kind of intuitive sense that there is, there is something along these lines, right. I think that the environmental justice movement has shown us for at least since the 1950s that there is this correlation between pollution and the extensions of white supremacist culture, so really extending into and subtending and exacerbating the kind of pre existing conditions of anti blackness and settler colonialism. But Librarind takes this and really shows it very clearly by way of saying that pollution itself has within it the kind of logics of pollution have within it this understanding that land is there to be used. Right? And in this case used to be able to pollute. That something like a landfill is a perfectly acceptable use of material of the land itself. And what they want to challenge or really show is the way that the kind of availability of land, especially in the lands that I'm familiar with, which is northern North America, that the availability of land is conditioned by settler colonialism. So you don't have the availability of land just the ability to be able to go out and just kind of disperse toxins across the land without, often without a lot of regulation. You don't have that ability without this kind of fundamental understanding that the land is infinitely available to be used and also to be polluted. Then of course, I think again, if we look back at the relationships to environmental justice and we look at those maps, we can see very clearly that the consequences of whose bodies are being most put on the line in relationship to the emergence of these kinds of products very clearly falls along class and race lines. That's something that I explore more fully through concepts like synthetic universality. I argue that plastic is really built to be universal, to be a product and to be a set of molecular conditions that is divorced from its environment and that it moves out. And part of the violence of plastic is that it moves out into the world with this kind of understanding of itself as a kind of universal object that has no. Has no relationship to a particular place. Right? Like, I mean, if we think of something like artisanal plastic, right? That's just. It's kind of a ridiculous concept. And so there's a way in which. There's a way in which the kind of logics of extraction are heightened and exacerbated through the production of plastics and then help to reveal many of the kind of conditions of contemporary global capitalism through the kind of alienation of materials and labor. But also in relationship to thinking about how much of that, at least within the context that I'm Working within and from are really subtendent upon the dispossession of land from indigenous peoples and the availability of land, the presumed availability of land. And one of the other things that I think is also really important to sort of thinking about pollution as colonialism is the ways in which the land itself was really understood through settler colonialism to be plastic. So that plasticity, as a kind of concept doesn't just only apply to our relationships to molecular structures or to the ability to engineer matter at a molecular level, but rather also applies to the kind of orientation of settler colonialism to land. So when you. When you see settlers arrive on Turtle island, one of the first things that happens is terraforming, right? And. And you see this in all kinds of different ways. You see it from the fact of. Of the. The genocide of indigenous peoples, and you see it from the ways in which dams and other extraction projects almost immediately start to happen. You also see it in the ways in which people had a very specific. What fertile land should look like and what it should do. And therefore, there was this total imposition of a completely sort of untenable ecological conditions, which is the reason why you end up with things like the great dust bowl in the 1930s, or many of the water problems that we're seeing today. All of these emerge because of the fact that there is a forced plasticity of the land here, and there's an imposition of a kind of European understanding of what the land should do onto ecological conditions that make absolutely no sense in this particular context. So you see the ways in which pollution is colonialism in this kind of multivalent way. So both the availability of land, the kind of terraforming of land, but then also in the accumulation of toxins and toxicity within certain populations, where other populations get to believe that we can somehow be saved. Although I think that it's very clear that this is not actually the case, but we get to live within a kind of myth of the inviolability of our bodies. And I think that one of the things that's so exciting about a lot of the work in this area at the moment is the ways in which people are really breaking these things down in all kinds of different ways.
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B
I'd like to shift tracks now and maybe get to something else that you talk about in the book, which is the queer agency of plastic. Can you speak to the queer agency of plastic?
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A
Sure. So one of the things that sort of becomes really apparent when you start looking into plastic is. Is its weirdness. Right? So when I talk about queerness in the book, I really am linking it to LGBTQ movements and to people and to really thinking with and through that theoretical and embodied lens. But there is also a valence of queer agency in relationship to plastic that takes up the more kind of expansive terminologies of queer that folks like Karen Barad have developed in relationship to thinking about matters agential queerness, and the kind of just total, kind of bizarre relations of the universe. So there's definitely something queer about plastics to begin with, in the sense that plastics, you know, and you can see, even in. Even in the way that I talk about it, it's like, you know, you. I kind of. It's hard to slip. It's hard to stick to either a singular or plural understanding of. Of plastic, because we think of it as a singular category. But as I was saying before, plastics are actually a really wide range of materials. So there's thousands and thousands of different plastics that we currently use. So the one to seven categories on your recycling containers is a complete fiction. And in addition to that, there's up to 80,000 additional chemicals that will be added to any particular product. So there's a. This huge range of materiality to plastics. And then, of course, the ways that they behave is to a large extent, really unknown at this point. I mean, keeping in mind that the first plastics were only created at the beginning of the 20th century, so we've only been living with them for about 120 years. And there's all kinds of things that people didn't predict about what they were going to do. I mean, first of all, I think that no one was really thinking about the longevity of plastics when they were first being created. There also is all kinds of evidence that even though people had a pretty clear knowledge of the potential toxicities and harms of plastic, the companies buried that in order to put these products out into the world. So there's all of that that goes into the kind of creation and proliferation of plastics, but then there's also just kind of like these very strange events. And one of the things that really captured my ATT when I first started working on this project was the Plastisphere. This was an article written by Zettler and Zettler, and they documented the ways in which tiny pieces of plastic in the ocean were becoming microbial reefs for different forms of bacteria and other microorganisms. Plastic became this kind of strange, novel ecosystem that we had never seen before. And there was all kinds of speculation about whether or not the microorganisms were using the plastics just merely as a home or whether they were using them also as a food source. Since then, there's been a lot more research done and there's all kinds of novel organisms that have developed to use plastic as a food source, which of course is not that surprising when you think about it, because it's an incredibly rich food source, right? Oil is such an intense and energy intensive medium and of course biological organisms are going to figure out how to do that. And so that is sort of what we're seeing. So that was one of the ways in which I started thinking about the kind of queer agency of plastics was, was to think about the kind of like strange proliferations and the kind of unruly ness of it as a material. So, you know, one of the other things that was really guiding my thinking at the beginning of the project that's maybe not as present in the book, is the ways in which plastics were really contained within this. They were really defined through this logic of containment, right? That like one of the things that plastics is really about is about the kind of this desire for a container, right? It's the desire to be able to separate ourselves from the earth. It's the desire to be able to preserve, to kind of put at bay the processes of decay and of decomposition, to really contain ourselves within a particular kind of unit and within that. So within that, that's sort of the desire of plastics, but instead, or our desire for plastics rather, but instead what we see is plastics penetrating all of everything we've sort of turned our attention to. So at this point, you know, plastics are in our bloodstreams, they're in our cells and in our body. Microplastics are in the cellular of our body. So they're able to penetrate down to some of the smallest elements of bodily existence. And so instead of it being contained, it's done the exact opposite, right? Like that plastics have within them this kind of desire for a kind of containment, but instead within that desire, within the kind of belief in the possibility of containment, what we did instead was create this material that then proliferates virtually every environment that we can possibly think of and every bodily aspect that, that we could, that we could see. And so I think that there's something really perverse in that kind of relationship, right? Also, I think just sort of like on a, on a totally kind of metaphorical level, the ways in which we think about plastics as kind of as sort of of cheap or flashy or toxic, you know, all of these things are also things that get launched at queer people. So a lot of the metaphorical associations between plastics are also launched at the queer community. So the kind of like campiness or the flashiness or the kind of toxicity of plastics, there's. There are all kinds of relations there that were worth teasing out.
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B
And why are queer values helpful for us to think about ecology?
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So this is a term that I get from Nicole Seymour, and she writes that queer values, caring not just about the individual, the family, or one's descendants, but about the other species and persons to whom one has no meaning relations, may be the most effective ecological values. And I found this, like, profoundly important in the ways in which I was thinking through how we might rethink our relations to plastic and to all of these kinds of microorganisms that are developing in the wake of plastics proliferation. So, you know, I think, as. I think that queer values, I think, have. Have a sort of twofold use in this context, one being what Seymour says, which is that there's. For many queer people, our families of origin are not necessarily the place where we find the most comfort, or not even necessarily the place where we even are connected anymore. And so as we grow up, and so it's incumbent upon most queer people to develop chosen family of some kind. And I think that what is interesting is within the kind of field of queer ecology or within the kind of emerging kind of cross, cross referenced or intersectional approach of thinking about environmental movements with LGBTQ movements, is that there is a kind of understanding that. That if we are going to be expanding our families and our understanding of family to be beyond any kind of normative framework of who gets to count as your sister or your mother or your father, or that those biological ties have already been abandoned for whatever reasons and have and have been reconfigured along the lines of thinking about what are the kinds of affinities and affiliations that you want to have, why not expand that outwards to non human species as well? Right? Why not include non human species within that kind of set of relations? And I think that that is precisely what Seymour is getting at, is that if we think about care and care networks and familial, familial networks beyond the kind of confines of biological relations, and instead to be a more political concept that is about questions of care and affiliation, then we can also expand that out into the non human world. And I would also say that the other thing that I think is really important about thinking with LGBTQ communities in relationship to kind of queer values and thinking around the kind of question of plastics is that I think that there's a deep understanding that the state and state mechanisms, despite the fact that policy is incredibly important. And I really always kind of advocate for people to try to change policies because it has such a wide reaching effect that there is still an understanding that the state is not going to save us. Right. And so that there's a fundamental orientation to the world that we are going to have to save ourselves and that we cannot rely upon government structures in order to do so. Because it's clear from I now live in the United States, and it's very obvious that the state has absolutely no interest in seeing queer people thrive, especially trans folks. In fact, it's the exact opposite, right. They're doing everything they possibly can to undermine trans lives. So you can see how within this kind of framework, it allows you to begin to make different kinds of affiliations that I think are politically useful in our present moment and in trying to deal with the effects of plastic pollution.
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B
And here you also write about the symbolic logic of the child in politics. Could you maybe explain for listeners what the symbolic logic of the child is and what that means for how we think about plastic?
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Yeah, so this is something that comes from Lee Edelman, but also gets taken up, I think, in really important ways by a theorist called Rebecca Sheldon, who wrote this incredible book called the Child to Come. And in that book, she really maps out the ways in which the child often becomes the figure of the future. Right? So we see this all the time, right? Like, constantly, especially in environmental discourses. You know, you think about like, oh, you know, who are we saving the planet for? Saving the planet for the. For the children, right? And there's almost always a picture of some idyllic looking child, you know, who's then going to be the kind of inheritor of this earth. And that is who we're saving the earth for. And I think that she points out that there's a number of things sort of like that are problematic about the ways in which we think about this. One is that along with Edelman, she points to the ways in which that the child is not just about actual children who will be born, who will then grow up and turn into adults, and who will actually have to deal with the real material conditions of whatever environments they are then encountering, which do look pretty scary at this moment in time, but rather is often about the passing on the world as we know it now. So saving the future, saving the earth for our children, or saving the kind of like, you know, Say like to, to kind of think about our relationships to the kind of symbolic investments in, in the child is not so much about actually creating a livable world for the greatest number of actual children who will actually be born, but really is about reproducing the logics of petro capitalism in order for them to be extended. Right? And we can see this in the ways in which people really want their children to have a better. And of course, of course everybody wants their children to not suffer and of course they want happiness and you know, all of these things, but the ways in which the kind of logics of that not suffering or the logics of happiness or the logic of, logics of betterment have been kind of constructed within the state of Petra. Capitalism, which is obviously deeply informed by the logics of white supremacy and settler colonialism is really about the way, ways that, that we are invested in, you know, consumption, the ways that we are invested in home ownership, the ways that we are invested in the kind of heteronormative reproductive family unit, you know, all of these things, the ways that, that white supremacy itself is a kind of shoring up of privilege and then passing it down, right, to accumulate at every stage. Right. And, and you can see how these things operate in the world in general. And so when people are saying they want to save the earth for their children, they're often not saying, oh, we want to save the earth for our children by way of radically reconfiguring our relationships to property, to other humans, to the non human world, to rethinking our relations to materiality. Instead, what they're often saying is we want our children to have a nice house with a nice lawn and all of the kind of accoutrements of what it means to have a kind of good existence within the logics of petro capitalism, which are really only enabled through the kind of fundamental reliance upon fossil fuels that we have seen within the past couple hundred years. So this is the reason why she's so deeply skeptical of the logic, the symbolic logic of the child, right? Because it's not about creating livable conditions, it's about shoring up privilege and power along the same lines that we've seen for many generations now. Toast the holidays in a new way and raise a glass of rumchata, a delicious creamy blend of horchata with rum. Enjoy it over ice or in your coffee. Rumchata. Your holiday cocktails just got sweeter. Tap or click the banner for more Drink responsibly Caribbean rum with real dairy cream. Natural and artificial flavors. Alcohol 13.75% by volume 27.5 proof. Copyright 2025 Agave Loco Brands, Pojoaquee, Wisconsin. All rights reserved. Meet the computer you can talk to with Copilot on Windows. Working, creating and collaborating is as easy as talking. Got writer's block? Share your screen with Copilot Vision to help spark inspiration and use Copilot voice to have a conversation and brainstorm ideas. Or maybe you need some tech help with Copilot Vision. Copilot sees what you see. Let Copilot talk you through step by step guidance so you can master new apps, games and skills faster. Try now@windows.com copilot well, could you, could.
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B
You maybe connect this now to your idea of Petrotechnic?
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A
So yeah. So Petra, time encompasses a couple of different things. One is that, one is that when you look to plastics, one of the things that becomes so readily apparent is that plastics poses all these problems of temporality, right? So in, in one way, plastic is the kind of literal compressed time of thousands and thousands of years of, of evolution, right? Because it comes from the bodies of mostly plants and algae and you know, things like this, but also other smaller, smaller organisms that then it becomes compressed into oil or other, other fossil fuels that then of course get, you know, gets transformed through these chemical processes into, into various kinds of plastic plastics which, you know, if they're packaging for us as consumers, we often interact with only very briefly before it then gets put back out into the world as an end product where it has a very unknown but most likely quite far reaching existence. So we're never really quite sure how long plastics are going to survive on their own, kind of in the wild or in landfills. But there's a lot of evidence that those plastics could be there for hundreds of years into the future and potentially thousands depending upon the conditions where they end up. And so clearly you immediately run into this incredible problem of temporality where the cheapest materials that we deal with, which are these sets of plastics, have been defined, have these incredibly long, long reaching existences, right? So there's this very odd kind of undermining of any kind of relationship of deep time that would be thought of in terms of like opening up to the kind of indebtedness that we have to other organisms and to our ancestors. And instead there's a real undermining or cutting out of that by, of making this incredibly long lived material. And by that I mean both sort of in its initiation phase as oil and then also in what it's going to become that we deal with it in such a quick manner, right. That it's like it's meant as completely disposable item. So that's part of what I'm thinking about when I'm thinking about petro time. But I'm also thinking about the ways in which plastics have these kinds of relations where the effects of plastic pollution can often have these real lags to them. For example, Michelle Murphy talks about latency in relationship to plastics and plastic pollution where whereas they note you can be exposed to a particular plastic toxin mainly through its production phase and that the effect of that exposure might not appear for two generations later, there's this incredible time lag and that creates all kinds of problems both in terms of attributing harm, right. We don't have mechanisms within our legal structure to be able to attribute harm for things that happened two generations before. We also don't have the kind of. And often that. That gets to be incredibly difficult because you know, the company that. That originally polluted often has ceased to exist two generations later, right? They got merged or bought out by some other company, you know, and then, you know, as you see in, as we've seen in relationship to things like the Bhopal disaster and Union Carbide, you know, one of their ways of evading any kind of responsibility was to sell off, off, sell off that part of the. Like to sell. That company got merged. So I think that one of the. It creates all kinds of problems for really addressing these things, but also it creates these very strange time relationships to time. So instead of kind of like operating within a kind of progressive linear times time frame, what plastics are really kind of forcing us to think about is the kind of multiple colliding temporalities that are emerging kind of simultaneously where we're kind of at the 1, on the 1 hand dealing with the kind of incredibly, the ways in which our present moment is constituted in such a manner that we are only ever being asked to look at the present not as like a way to really sit with the complexity of it, but as this kind of present presentism that is constantly passing us, right? So the ways in which like, you know, when you go to the consumer shelves, there's always, you know, kind of an abundance of things, although perhaps maybe not as much anymore. But before the pandemic, this was what, this is what we were kind of like accustomed to in the west, right? And so there's a way in which there's like this kind of endlessly reproducing present Right. Where we don't have to kind of like, take account for the passages of time. We also don't have to take into account the kind of deep time natures of things. And so there. So. But. But when we really look at plastics, we're sort of caught in that presentism at the same time as we're being asked to think about the deep time nature of oil, at the same time as we're being able to think about what is going to happen multiple generations from now that maybe has not yet even appeared as a kind of harm that might yet appear. And so I think that thinking about those kinds of multiple crashing and asynchronous temporalities is useful when we're thinking about plastics to be able to fully account for what they're doing in the world.
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B
Linking up to this idea of time. I think it's very easy to fall into sort of an apocalyptic feeling thinking about plastic in this way. And on page 97, you had this line that jumped out at me, which is, apocalypse and its associated narratives are a way to avoid responsibility. Why?
- [43:05]
A
So as far as I understand, and I grew up with scientists, so forgive me for all those folks who actually have a kind of Judeo, Christian or Abrahamic background that have maybe a deeper understanding of apocalypse than I do. But from what I understand, apocalypse carries with it the sense of both revelation and then also absolution. And that happens obviously, by the total ravaging of the world. Right. So the ways in which it kind of provides a kind of clean slate for the world, but also that through the kind of elimination of everything. So I think in our. In our contemporary imagination, I think that often, you know, especially in Hollywood movies, for example, we're kind of presented with these worlds that are, like, completely and utterly uninhabitable. And then there's like one or two people who are surviving, and then, you know, they reproduce the social order in this kind of like, symbolic logic that Rebecca Sheldon was talking about in relationship to the child. Right. So that the continuation of the social order continues unabated and unchanged, and we just kind of reproduce all the. All the problems of the past. But. But within the logics of apocalypse. Apocalyptism. I'm not sure I said that. Right. But. But you understand what I'm saying, Which is that. Which is that I think that there's like a sense that the world is really going to end. Right. That there is an actual end that is going to occur. And one of the things that I find kind of startling sometimes when I'M when I'm teaching is that I've encountered students who've said this. They said the world is going to end in 10 years following the IPCC reports. And I'm always curious about well, what does that mean the world is going to end in 10 years? Is it the sun is going to envelop the entire earth and then that's it? What is the kind of logic of that? But, but I think that we do get caught up in these kinds of narratives of, of the end. And the problem with the end is that there's no sense of like what comes after or having to rebuild. Right? And, and I mean if we look at things through a more scientific lens in terms of like prediction models, et cetera, et cetera, what we're going to be dealing with is not some catastrophic, catastrophic event that is going to happen that will mechanism for either revelation or any kind of mechanism of salvation or any kind of mechanism of absolution. Right? None of that is going to happen. Instead, what is most likely going to happen is things will get incrementally worse for many people. And that the kind of, the kind of, you know, and that may happen through various kinds of horrific events, but it might just happen in a much more incremental way. And the problem of the kind of apocalyptic logic or the logic projects of accelerationism, for example, is that I think that it really is coming from this place of believing that one first of all can be dislocated from the other people that you're surrounded with and the other beings that you're surrounded with in the first place. That like, that somehow others deaths are not going to affect you, but also that there is nothing incumbent upon you to try to do something about making others lives as livable as possible while we're here. And I think that there's a certain kind of nihilism that can happen within environmental movements that's just like, well, fuck it, it's all gonna, it's all gonna, you know, it's gonna be terrible in 10 years anyway, so, so why bother? And you know, even though I can understand that where that kind of sentiment comes from, I think that it's a completely untenable sentiment in terms of a kind of ethics, because especially in the ways in which we see all of these kinds of processes playing out. Everything to do with oil and its manifestations, whether that be through climate change or whether that be through plastics, is that it is most affecting the people who are least responsible. And as Kyle Palace White would argue, this is not an incidental condition. It's not like, oh, wow, that's really unfortunate that this turned out this way. It was a mechanism of power. If we care about things like settler colonialism, that it's incumbent upon us to do everything in our power to be able to undo these colonial relations, which, in part, that undoing is also an undoing of the land logics of absolution and salvation and a kind of catastrophic event that is going to, in a sense, release us from any sense of responsibility or obligation to others.
- [48:29]
B
And this also leads really wonderfully into another one of your concepts, which is queer toxicity. Can you explain what you mean by queer toxicity?
- [48:39]
A
Yeah. So, I mean, one of the other things that. That I could have mentioned before is that one of the things that happens in relationship to plastics is that it's long been known since the 1930s, in fact, that many of the additives that are put into plastic products have the effect of queering the body. And this has been taken up by a lot of many, many feminists and queer thinkers, theorists, in relationship to kind of like addressing the kind of masculine panic that has arisen around this. So, you know, Eva Hayward, for example, has. Has written about the ways in which there was literally a campaign in Sweden to save the man. Because. Because one of the ways in which these types of. These types of endocrine disrupting chemicals emerge in the world, and one of the things that. That sort of. They. They manifest as is through what is called a feminization of male fetuses and also through lowering sperm counts, through, you know, different types of bodily changes that we are seeing in the world. And so this is. So we're dealing with these actual kind of material effects of all of these pollutants. Pollutants. And of course, there's a kind of moral panic that arises in relationship to that where there's a kind of reassertion of a kind of a masculinity that is then under threat of male bodies that are then under threat. And a kind of wanting to again, reassert the kind of value and the prominence of a kind of white supremacist patriarchal system where those bodies are at the top. And what. One of the other people that I've been really inspired by is Mel Chen's work. And in their work, they talk a lot about the kind of possibilities of toxicity, so the openings of toxicity. And they're not doing this in a naive way where they somehow believe that toxicity is like the way to liberation or something. It clearly is not. Toxicity is Incredibly harmful. Harmful. One of the primary effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals is cancers, right? Like, so even though it does cause these kind of bodily mutations, it also causes very real health problems for many people and premature deaths. So this is not in any way to kind of diminish the importance of looking at those kinds of very real health effects and bodily capacity, the effects of bodily capacity, these. But rather to acknowledge also the fact that toxicity comes with its own set of potentially kind of like, interesting affects. Right? So thinking about the ways in which we actually intoxicate ourselves on purpose lots of times, right. Because it opens up different ways of knowing and different ways of being in the world. And to also sort of ask after, what else does toxicity do? And one of the things that I think that is very clear through their work and also through just sort of like looking at plastics more generally is that these logics of containment are completely undone by toxicity. So the kind of. This belief in the individual, the belief in the kind of sanctity of an individual body, you know, these are fictions, right? That's not how our bodies actually function. Our bodies are porous. They're open to the world. World. They, you know, whatever is out in the world will be in our bodies. And. And I think that sometimes, you know, you can see this when, when, you know, when there first started being all these reports about how plastics are. You know, we're ingesting, you know, credit cards worth of plastic every week or, you know, plastics are now found in placentas or, you know, other kinds of places where people really didn't want plastics to be. I mean, you can understand why people didn't want plastics to. But. But there was. There is a kind of sense that, that the only reason why you would be shocked or surprised by that is if you did believe that somehow your body was separate from the world. And I think that what toxicity allows us to see in a very clear way, and maybe it's, you know, it's too bad we didn't learn that lesson in a different way. But. But for kind of Western modernity, it allows us to see the ways in which we are thoroughly and utterly enmeshed in the world. World. So queer toxicity is a way of. Of also maybe embracing the ways in which those. Those forms are potentially really useful. So, you know, another person, Bruce, has looked at all of the kind of queer animals that. That exist, and there's over 450 documented queer animals in the world. And a lot of those animals are incredibly successful in terms of survival and so maybe there's ways that in which the kind of adaptations of the body, the permutations of the body, the feminization of male fetuses, maybe these are survival strategies, right? Maybe there are ways in which we might actually be able to proliferate in more interesting and creative ways into the future.
- [54:18]
B
This book, it feels like it touches on everything despite, despite being so short. You, you talk about plastic glomerate and you talk about toxicity, of course plays a huge role in this. You talk about Cancer Alley in Louisiana, you talk about the anti blackness of plastic pollution. And despite touching on so many horrific things, reading the book doesn't feel like. It doesn't feel like horror to think through. And with plastic. I read this book twice. I could easily read it a third time in the next week. It's super exciting. Before I let you go, there is one tradition on the New Books Network I always like to uphold, which is to ask what you're working on now.
- [55:03]
A
Yeah. Oh, first of all, thank you so much for saying that. It's really, really so gratifying to hear that. It is something I cared really deeply about in terms of maybe avoiding some of those apocalyptic logics. It's like how do we train ourselves to be able sit with these things so that we can see what is interesting in them while also recognizing the harms that are happening. So I'm really grateful to hear that that came across. But the next project actually picks up on the petro time, but it actually will be a book about petro time. So taking that short section and expanding it much in a much more rigorous way, but really thinking through the ways and in which the kind of conceptualizations of Western modernity, the temporality of Western modernity comes about in and through fossil fuels. So when we think about, for example, the standardization of time that happens in terms of time zones, that comes about and happens only in the very late 19th century or up until the 19th century, there was, for example, over 250 different time zones in the United States. United States. And you know when, and that was fine. When, when nobody had to catch a train. But when you had to all of a sudden catch a train, this became incredibly problematic. And so the kind of ways in which the fossil fuels have shaped our understandings of time really kind of set out a kind of regulated time time frames for us. Right. You can also think about this in terms of electric lighting. So the way in which, through the kind of proliferation of first whale fuel and then after that, fossil fuels really reorganized our sense of what is Possible in terms of production, in terms of working, in terms of thinking about our relations to time and to everyday temporality. So I want to map the ways in which temporality, and especially a kind of Western modernity that's embedded in questions of progress and linearity comes about through fossil fuels, is sort of subtended by the exploration of fossil fuels. And then the other two parts of the book are about how do we sort of think about the relationships to the future in this time where there's so much investment, both in kind of deep futures as in science fiction, but also a kind of sense of no future, the kind of sense of the foreclosure of the future. And there I'm thinking about things like the climate change clock in Union Square in New York where it's like literally counting down that IPCC clock, that's like counting down until we run out of time to avoid, avoid 1.5 degrees Celsius warming by 2100. Then the third, how do we think about, how do we rethink something like progressive politics, for example, when our notions of progressive politics have been built upon the sense of it's going to get better despite the fact that we might want to think in more complicated linear ways within a kind of standard framework of again of coming out of a kind of Western tradition we often think about, you know, that's what, that's why I think when, when something happens, we're like, oh, what is this? The, the 19th century? Like, you know, this shouldn't be happening anymore. Right. Like we have a sense that, that progressive politics is supposed to proceed in a kind of linear fashion. And of course it doesn't. Right. But we have this kind of investment, this effective investment in that, in that kind of movement. So how do we rethink politics away from that kind of understanding of things? And then in the third section of the book I mentioned interested in more the kind of phenomenological experience of living in climate change. What does it mean? How do we think about temporality when seasons are totally random at this point? For those of us who live in places where there's meant to be kind of clear cut seasons, they just are not what they used to be. Even in my lifetime. And I might be middle aged, but I'm not that old yet. So there's like a very, I'm really interested in maybe more fully exploring these kind of colliding timeframes and the ways in which fossil fuels both build up a sense of linearity and progressive temporality. And now all of those things are becoming completely undone.
- [60:00]
B
Oh, that sounds fascinating. I'd love to have you back on the program to talk about about it.
- [60:05]
A
Thanks. I had to write it first. Yeah, right.
- [60:11]
B
The book is Plastic matter, published in 2022 with Duke University Press Professor Heather Davis. Thank you so much for your time today.
- [60:19]
A
Thank you. Foreign.
- [60:37]
B
Welcome to our PE Pathways Podcast series where experienced dealmakers share their thoughts on current private equity and M and A trends and developments.
- [60:46]
A
Thank you for listening to our podcast. Please keep an eye out for additional episodes of PE Pathways, where we bring experienced dealmakers together to share their thoughts thoughts on current private equity and M and A trends.