Table Of ContentLife
in
artistic responses
to petromodernity
Plas
caren irr, editor
tic
Life in Plastic
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Life in Plastic
Artistic responses to petromodernity
Caren Irr, Editor
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
This project has benefited from support from the Theodore and Jane Norman
Fund at Brandeis University.
Excerpts from Craig Santos Perez, “The Age of Plastics,” Big Energy Poets:
Ecopoetry Thinks Climate Change, ed. Heidi Lynn Staples and Amy King
(Kenmore, N.Y.: BlazeVOX, 2017), reprinted with permission. Excerpts from
Orchid Tierney, ocean plastic (Kenmore, N.Y.: BlazeVOX, 2019), reprinted with
permission. Excerpts from Divya Victor, “Countertranslation,” The Margins:
Asian American Writers’ Workshop (November 1, 2018), https://aaww.org/
the-age-of-plastic/, reprinted with permission. Excerpts from Jennifer Cooke,
“Second Hand,” The Other Room Anthology 4, ed. James Davies, Tom Jenks, and
Scott Thurston, reprinted with permission. Excerpts from Styrofoam by Evelyn
Reilly (New York: Roof, 2009), reprinted with permission.
Copyright 2021 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
isBn 978-1-5179-0987-1 (hc)
isBn 978-1-5179-0988-8 (pb)
Library of Congress record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021023173.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Concepts and Consequences of Plastic 1
Caren Irr and Nayoung Kim
I. The Plastic Sensorium
1 “Paper or Plastic?” and Other Conundrums of 11
Environmental Change
W. Dana Phillips
2 Smelling Polyester 31
Paul Morrison
3 The Album Era 59
Loren Glass
4 The Plastic You: Plastination and the Postmortal Self 77
Jane Kuenz
II. The Plasticity of Genre
5 Plastic Man and Other Petrochemical Fantasies 97
Daniel Worden
6 Organic Form, Plastic Forms: The Nature of Plastic 115
in Contemporary Ecopoetics
Margaret Ronda
7 On the Beach: Porous Plasticity, Migration Art, 137
and the Objet Trouvé of the Wasteocene
Maurizia Boscagli
III. Plastic’s Capitalism
8 “Refuge of Ignorance”: A Prehistory of “Plastic” 165
Crystal Bartolovich
9 The Petrochemical Unconscious: Destructive 181
Plasticities in Richard Powers’s Gain
Christopher Breu
10 The Impossible Figure of Oceanic Plastic 199
Sean Grattan
IV. Postplastic Futures?
11 From Protoplastics to the Plastiglomerate: 217
Science Fiction’s Shifting Synthetic Sensibilities
Lisa Swanstrom
12 Futures in Plastic: Science Fiction, Climate Change, 239
and the New North
Phillip E. Wegner
13 Plastic’s “Untiring Solicitation”: Geographies of Myth, 259
Corporate Alibis, and the Plaesthetics of the Matacão
Jennifer A. Wagner- Lawlor
Contributors 281
Index 283
Acknowledgments
This collection would not have been possible without a great deal
of camaraderie and assistance. I would especially like to thank
Na young Kim, a skilled investigator and collaborator, for her invalu-
able research assistance. Support of a financial nature was provided
by the office of the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University.
Editorial advice from Jason Weidemann, Danielle Kasprzak, Anne
Carter, and Kristine Hunt has been essential to the success of the
project. The comments of the external readers guided and encour-
aged our contributions in innumerable ways. The many usually
anonymous acts of professional generosity involved in comment-
ing on another person or group’s work as it develops are essential
to scholarly inquiry, and here, as so often, they have substantially
improved our work.
I wish to dedicate this volume to my mother, Mickey Irr. For de-
cades, her Styrofoam sculptures and cassette tape weavings, as well
as her enormous stockpile of repurposed yogurt containers and her
mysterious collections of plastic binding strips, have helped me en-
vision alternative ways of engaging with the physical environment.
• vii •
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Introduction
Concepts and Consequences of Plastic
Caren Irr and Nayoung Kim
One of the many terrible ironies of the COVID- 19 pandemic is the
vast increase in plastic waste that it has triggered. Anxiety about
vectors of transmission of the coronavirus led almost immediately
to bans on reusable containers and shopping bags in favor of plastic
items. Personal protective equipment (PPE) frequently consists of
single- use gloves, gowns, and masks that are made from plastics,
briefly employed, and immediately sent to the trash. From take- out
containers and water bottles to body bags, plastic goods have prolif-
erated thanks to the pandemic. As photographers around the world
have documented, the resulting waste has rapidly accumulated in
landfills and oceans, accelerating the process of environmental deg-
radation and habitat loss that launched the virus into human popu-
lations in the first place.
Abundant use of disposable synthetic materials has taken place
despite studies demonstrating that viruses survive on plastic sur-
faces far longer than they do on cardboard, cloth, or metal surfaces.
Lobbying by the plastics industry certainly plays a role in the rapid
resurgence of single- use polymers and suspicion of reusable ma-
terials, but the phenomenon also has deeper sources. Plastics are
deeply integrated into the cultural imaginary of petromodernity. In
a culture and economy defined by its dependence on the energy pro-
vided by finite fossil fuels, plastics promise a bright, cheap, and ster-
ile perfection that obscures the broken, soggy waste on our shores.
From the career opportunity recommended to Mike Nichols’s hero
in The Graduate (1967) to the celluloid on which the film narrative
• 1 •
