University of Minnesota Press

University of Minnesota Press Trailer Bonus Episode 32 Season 1

Life in Plastic: Petrochemical Fantasies and Synthetic Sensibilities (Part 1)

Life in Plastic: Petrochemical Fantasies and Synthetic Sensibilities (Part 1)Life in Plastic: Petrochemical Fantasies and Synthetic Sensibilities (Part 1)

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Plastics have been a defining feature of contemporary life since at least the 1960s. Yet our proliferating use of plastics has also triggered catastrophic environmental consequences. Plastics are derived from petrochemicals and enmeshed with the global oil economy, and they permeate our consumer goods and their packaging, our clothing and buildings, our bodies and minds. In this first episode of a two-part series, contributors to the volume LIFE IN PLASTIC: ARTISTIC RESPONSES TO PETROMODERNITY discuss plasticity and myth, stretchy superheroes, how plastic became gendered, plastic as a colonizing force, plastic in art and everyday life, and more. Featuring Caren Irr, Lisa Swanstrom, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, and Daniel Worden.


Caren Irr is a professor of English at Brandeis University and author of Toward the Geopolitical Novel, Pink Pirates, and The Suburb of Dissent.

Lisa Swanstrom is an associate professor of English at the University of Utah, coeditor of Science Fiction Studies, and author of Animal, Vegetable, Digital.

Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor is professor of English and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Postmodern Utopias and co-curator of Plastic Entanglements.

Daniel Worden is associate professor of interdisciplinary humanities at the Rochester Institute of Technology and author of Masculine Style, editor of The Comics of Joe Sacco, and coeditor of Oil Culture and Postmodern/Postwar—and After.

Works and people referenced in the episode:
Catherine Malabou
Roland Barthes
Through the Arc of the Rain Forest by Karen Tei Yamashita
The Drought by J.G. Ballard
Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters
Covehithe by China Miéville
Artist Pinar Yoldas
Plastic by Doug Wagner and Daniel Hillyard
Great Pacific (comic, 16-issue series)
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin

What is University of Minnesota Press?

Authors join peers, scholars, and friends in conversation. Topics include environment, humanities, race, social justice, cultural studies, art, literature and literary criticism, media studies, sociology, anthropology, grief and loss, mental health, and more.

Lisa Swanstrom:

Plastic became gendered in fascinating ways where you move away from plastics as here is a shield we need for our aircraft. Plastics. Here are the tires that we're using for our our tanks and our trucks and what have you. Two, plastics. Here's Saran wrap for our kitchen and plastics through Tupperware to keep everything neat and orderly.

Daniel Worden:

Oil is is interesting because we interact with it, but it tends to be kind of walked away. Like, you don't touch oil. Plastic, which is a petrochemical derivative, we have intimate relationships with in a way that we don't have with oil. We touch it. We eat it.

Daniel Worden:

Right? It's part of us.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

And I was prepared to talk about Classic at this conference, so I was sort of railing about it. A woman was listening to my rant, and she said, but wouldn't it be interesting to think about I mean, what would happen if, you know, you you were ingesting this plastic? And what if it started to change who we are? Wouldn't it be interesting to think about that? No, says I.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

It's toxic. It's terrible. But now that's what I'm doing, and that's what other people are doing.

Caren Irr:

Hello, and thank you for joining this, podcast devoted to our exciting new book Life in Plastic. This is a great edited collection, that's initially came about, during that phase when there was a lot of interest in banning plastic bags and straws and these kind of small consumer goods. And getting going with those ideas and connecting the immediately observable small bits of plastic in everyday life to much broader set of concerns having to do with the extraction economies and the management of waste on a global scale and dependence on petroleum and fossil fuels more generally and the whole energy system. Those are the kinds of questions that as the editor, Kieran here, I thought would be useful and exciting for, people to contribute, essays about. So I invited bunch of the smartest people I knew, gave them free reigns, said, what do you have to say about plastic?

Caren Irr:

And, wow, they they really brought it to this discussion, and I'm thrilled to have, with me here three of our contributors. And I'm just gonna introduce them and ask them to say a little bit about, what they've been doing on this topic, what they did for the collection, and we'll look for points of connection and have a bit of discussion about that. With no further ado, I'll introduce all three, here at the outset. Our first person who's joining us today is Daniel Wharton. He is associate professor of art and design at the University of Rochester, and he's written and edited books on documentary aesthetics, western literature, and comics.

Caren Irr:

His essay for this volume is entitled Plastic Man and Other Petrochemical Fantasies. Second person joining us, Lisa Swanstrom. Lisa is associate professor of English at the University of Utah and the co editor of Science Fiction Studies. She's written on new media aesthetics and ecology, you know, from all kinds of interesting directions. And her essay here is titled From Proto Plastics to the Plastoglomerate, Science Fiction's Shifting Synthetic Sensibilities.

Caren Irr:

Kind of a tongue twister there. Our last, discussant today is Jennifer Wagner Lawler. She is professor of women's gender and sexuality studies at Penn State. She's written on postmodern utopias and feminist fiction among many other topics. And her essay for this volume is titled Plastics Untiring Solicitation, Geographies of Myth, Corporate Alibis, and the Plasthetics of the Matakau.

Caren Irr:

So if you kind of go around in that order that I just introduced you and say a little bit about what you've done, that would be terrific. Can't wait to hear how our discussion goes.

Daniel Worden:

Sure. So I'll go first. I should say I'm I teach at the Rochester Institute of Technology, not at the University of Rochester. No. It's okay.

Daniel Worden:

We're we're down the road, a little different, but it's I get along just fine with the u of r. My essay in this collection is about is about Plastic Man, as as Karen just said. And it's part of a book that I'm working on that's about, American comics and its relationship to, energy culture, beginning with coal and oil in the late nineteenth century in Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers, where you see a lot of representations of this kind of new fossil fuel energy regime that is that is beginning to pretty rapidly reshape, American space and life, in that period through, the golden age of superhero comics where plastic man is is created along with Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman, in the late thirties and the '9 in the early nineteen forties. Plastic man was created by an artist named Jack Cole, who is a great great artist of golden age American comics. He was originally supposed to be named India Rubber Man, in the nineteen forties.

Daniel Worden:

But that name was changed to Plastic Man because plastics were a a a new technology, especially thermoplastics and plastics that were derived from petrochemicals as opposed to the more organic, plastics, like cellulite celluloid and things like that. So plastic man was designed to be a character who kind of seized on a lot of the enthusiasm about what plastics were going to offer. And in plastic man specifically, you see the template for the kind of stretchy, bindy superhero. Plastic Man would then kind of lead to the elongated man, in the nineteen fifties in DC Comics, mister Fantastic, the patriarch of the Fantastic Four in the nineteen sixties at Marvel. And then later on, you see newer characters like miss Marvel, at Marvel, a twenty first century creation, who also is a stretchy Bendy figure.

Daniel Worden:

So, you know, this template, this model for the stretchy superhero kind of comes into place alongside the emergence of petrochemical plastics and consumer culture, especially. And I think comics in general, whether it's through fantasies about infinitely stretchable plastic bodies or fantasies of nuclear radiation giving you superpowers rather than giving you cancer. Right? Comics have been a site that imagines, especially kind of utopian versions of our of our energy and fossil fuel culture. So Plastic Man, I think, is a really interesting site for thinking about the kind of ideological work that our fantasies about these materials do.

Daniel Worden:

And it provides comics, especially, I think, provide a really interesting representation of the commercial intertwinement of our, energy aesthetics. Since, for example, in in, you know, Plastic Man comics, it's not at all unusual to see advertisements from the American Rubber Company, selling bicycle tires that are made out of the same plastics that are used to make, navy fighter jets, and things like that. So you see the the kind of consumer commercialism of our plastic culture as well as a lot of the artistic fantasies, about that material, in the comics.

Caren Irr:

That's great. I can't wait to talk more about bendiness. Let's see, let's hear a little bit from Lisa and see, what points of connection we discover with her.

Lisa Swanstrom:

Thanks so much. I am really excited to be a part of this project because it's not often that someone says, hey. Do you have any thoughts about a topic? And you realize, you know, I do actually. And so the idea for my essay had to do with the problem of materials in science fiction historically.

Lisa Swanstrom:

Science fiction, like comics, is really invested in new substances, new materials, new technologies and it became really clear when tracing the trajectory of the invention of popular plastics and, the advent of science fiction that there was a really striking, interconnection with those two, trajectories. And one thing I noticed, that I focus on in the essay is that early plastics, in science fiction are really kind of hilariously campy. They're depicted in ways that are just kind of excessive, hyperbolic, and outrageous. And I think the connections to Plastic Man are are really close in some ways. And what I found though in looking through old advertisements for plastic, alongside the war effort from, World War two is that there's this really curious masculine, approach to the advertising of plastic that has much in common, with the advertisement of rubber, of oil, of petroleum, that in the early stages of advertising were really kind of squashed together however, as the, as the war concluded and as plastic became a massively popular consumer good plastic became gendered in fascinating ways where you move away from plastics as here is a shield we need for our aircraft.

Lisa Swanstrom:

Plastics. Here are the tires that we're using for our tanks and our trucks and what have you. Two, plastics. Here's saran wrap for our kitchen and plastics. Here's Tupperware to keep everything neat and orderly.

Lisa Swanstrom:

And in science fiction, this plays out. So I focus for in the first part of the essay on, HG Wells' first men in the moon, which predates, World War two, but which has some really striking similarities with the kind of early protoplastics that were coming out at the same time. And the way that HG Wells describes the substance called kavorite, which allows his protagonists to launch off the, Earth and voyage to the moon, really has a lot in common with the manufacturing of plastic as it was described at the time, but also, curiously, a lot in common with domestic arts, the way that plastic is cut for this spacecraft is like a curtain. And you open and close the curtain in order to control the velocity of the spacecraft. So I found that fascinating.

Lisa Swanstrom:

But I also noticed that there's this real blind spot in science fiction in terms of treating plastic as the sign of futurity and progress, you know, filled with excitement and progressive ideologies, I would say, that is still lurking around in science fiction. Even though we now have some really interesting texts that are coming out that I I'm kind of looking at right now but didn't make it into the essay that are dealing with plastic per se as a problem, as a substance. But even in very contemporary science fiction, plastic still has the sheen of futurity, progress, and success. And so I end the essay by looking at depictions of the plastiglomerate, the way that, a few writers have taken this terrible material reality of plastic detritus that's melted and recomposited itself within, natural substances and turned it into a very suggestive and empowering aesthetic technique. Heather Davis's work, has been really exciting for me to think through with that, aesthetic trope in mind.

Lisa Swanstrom:

So I'm very excited about the project and and still kind of thinking about ways that plastic is shot through, depictions of the future, even now.

Caren Irr:

Great. Thanks. Yeah. There's a definitely some kind of dark futurity associated with plastic durability, that has a complicated relationship to the the bendy, exciting, exhilarating thrill of, you know, you know, the modernist moment when suddenly you have this explosion of new shapes, new textures, new colors, you know, those tulip chairs and, and so on that are would not have been possible with any other material. And so it become replaced by something like, you know, the the plastic drink bottle accumulated on the beach in piles and piles as the emblem of plastic.

Caren Irr:

And you can talk through how we get from the utopian to the dystopian, as the touchstone for plastic. Jennifer?

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

Yeah. My essay kinda pulls together different threads that I've been thinking about for for years. So I actually have been working with this group, Plastic Pollution Coalition, for over ten years. They sort of launched their organization in, I think, it was 02/2009. And I happened to like, just after that to kind of find them and and meet up with them, and did a lot of volunteer work for them because they had no paid people at all.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

So I was doing a lot of writing and learned a lot about, artwork for one thing that was being made from plastic. Got very interested in that. And, at the same time, I was trying to sort of figure out that essay by Roland Barthes called plastic. I when I first read it, I thought this makes you know, I don't get it. You know?

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

Took me a while, but, you know, the irony of it finally, like, dawned on me, and I then all of a a sudden, I got it. But, actually, I I saw it and I've written about it as a science fiction story because I I really think that it is. And that just got me interested in the whole kind of theoretical side of it. So even as I was, you know, with beach cleanups and that kind of thing, I also started to research the idea of plasticity and the connections between plastic as a materialization of a certain kind of history, and myth too. And that's where Roland Barthes got me started there, thinking about myth and history.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

I I just find that essay so completely amazing because he foresaw so many things. And gradually, I wanted to pursue much, more deeply this idea of the myth of plastic and its relationship to history. And, also, I'm a utopia scholar, so I immediately thought about the utopians and aspirations of the myth of plastic versus the dystopia, that it was creating in reality. I've written articles in the past that have to do with the material plastic and artwork even though, actually, I have no I have no art anything art degree in art anything. But I have two articles actually on artwork based in plastic.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

And then, at the same time, kind of pursuing this idea of plasticity and myth, got into the work of Catherine Malibu. I say all this because it took me a long time to figure out that my conclusion about plastic is that it's actually a betrayal of plasticity. And so the this quality of plasticity, which is really sort of behind life itself, right, between the plasticity of of cells and of, you know, living things. There's a kind of generativity behind the idea of plasticity and that sort of creative evolution. Plastic pretends that that's what it's doing, but it actually brings it to a halt.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

It actually betrays the creativity of plasticity and couches it in terms of this kind of capitalist myth. So that's what this article, I think, was was also trying to get at, to think about both the utopian and dystopian aspects of plastic as consumer items, but also the kind of grounding of, contemporary culture in this plastic layer beneath the Amazon area. So, basically, you know, the article tries to trace through the kind of myth of capitalism, the idea of making history. Right? The sort of progressive notion of history.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

I have a picture of an ad as well. History in the making was the tagline that, Monsanto found, and I thought that was just brilliant. You know, history in the making history. And so in the the novel, the through the arc of the rain of the rainfore. To me, it's just an uncannily precise fictional worlding of Bart's attribution of the mythic or or miraculous power of plastic.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

That Bart essay keeps being the kind of my touchstone, you know, where I I look at the the trajectory he plots out for plastic, and there it is in through the arc of the of the rainforest. And so in the end, I actually sort of deploy Bart's theorization of myth in order to read the novel and to read the kind of tension between the meaning making and what Barth called an out the alibi. It's that myth is an alibi, right, for the covering up, right, that a a myth wants to effect. You know, this capitalist myth. Right?

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

But at the center of it is kind of nothing, You know? The meaninglessness. And it's this plastic orb that follows us around the the novel becomes this kind of uncanny voice of history that, it becomes this sort of trope of, the alibi of being here and not here at the same time. Plastic is everywhere. Right?

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

And then, plastic is nowhere when we throw it away. And so these tensions between presence and absence and trying to sort of disappear the negative side of plastic.

Caren Irr:

Thank you. I just think it's so fascinating to see how we have reflections, of a serious nature on plastic in all these different media, from comics to science fiction to artful experimental, writings of, Karante Yamashita and so on. But it's certainly the case that mass culture has a deep relationship to plastics, not only as a medium through which things like, you know, vinyl records are produced or the toys that are reflected on, you know, in Yamashita's novel and so on. I wonder, do you guys think that we could even have what we understand by mass culture without plastic? Is mass culture the effect of emergence of this material in its kind of current form?

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

I think it's almost symbolic of the history of mass culture. You know, just the proliferation of all this stuff that wouldn't have been like, I guess that's why Bart wrote about it. Right? The proliferation of all this stuff that then finds its way through the oldest sort of trade routes in the world, you know, throughout the planet. And now even, like, above the planet since we have plastic space junk.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

This is, to me, is the sort of the science fiction side of it, the replication, I guess. And this is what Bart hated so much, the this idea, this sort of power of replication of sameness that is modern manufacturing and that plastic made possible because it was so cheap. Did that made, I mean, certainly, much of what we think of as mass culture possible? I mean, from records to toys. I I mean, even, like, the cables under the ocean.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

Actually, Heather Davis writes about this. I think it's part and parcel of the western version of mass culture, which also brings in colonialism, and I see plastic as a colonizing force.

Caren Irr:

Or essential to the kinds of neocolonial economies that make mass culture run. You know? Exactly. Right. Daniel and Lisa, do you have thoughts on the relationship between mass culture and plastic at a kinda macro level?

Lisa Swanstrom:

I have to say it was really, really great to read Lauren's essay about vinyl and just to be reminded, oh, once again, here's a cherished material object that's, of course, embedded in non plastic materials itself, but is nevertheless, a synthetic material that provides so much pleasure that we don't tend to think of as a pollutant. But, of course, when you, you know, do that broad, macroscopic view, it is. Right? So I it to answer the kind of question in a in a in a just a very simple way, I don't think we we do. I don't think we could have mass culture in the same way, at least, that we have it with without plastic.

Lisa Swanstrom:

And I'll say too that I love that Barthesay, and it cracked the first line of it. They sound like Greek shepherds. You know, Paula Polyurethane. And it's really instructive, and I loved your essay to kind of reframe that and to think about the promise of mythology. You You know, when I teach science fiction, I start with illusion.

Lisa Swanstrom:

I don't I don't start with Frankenstein. And I love this promise of plasticity and malleability and the kind of porous nature of bodies and materials. And I love this notion. Well, I don't love it. I hate it, but I think it's really apt that plastic becomes the material concretization of that betrayal.

Lisa Swanstrom:

It's interesting again to see this new wave of of science fiction that's coming out that is focusing now on this problem explicitly. So, Chen Chifin's book, waste tide, is kind of focusing on this problem in a way that science fiction hasn't. So we're still grappling with it.

Daniel Worden:

I I agree. I think that that distinction between, like, plastic as waste and plasticity as, like, this utopian possibility is really interesting, especially since, you know, I I teach predominantly now, I teach comic studies. Like, I'm looking at my desk right now, and I have, like, a plastic bat man action figure, and there's a plastic hellboy up there and a couple of other plastic things. And that's not unusual, I think, for somebody that is part of, like, just pop culture, or comics culture or fandom in general that we kind of surround ourselves with these plastic objects that aren't disposable, that are meant to be collectible and are meant to be preserved. And I think increasingly now, I see that as evidence that plastic, in fact, is ubiquitous with mass culture to the point that certain bits of plastic I pluck out and preserve as art, similar to how maybe in in, you know, in a paper cultural regime, pre plastic regime, you know, you would pulp unsold books or pulp unsold newspapers and magazines.

Daniel Worden:

Like, the waste would get recycled. And then, you know, certain books you would preserve and keep them in a library or in an archive somewhere. Increasingly now, I find that my relationship to plastic is is similar, but at a much higher level of consumption. We're, like, I consume way more plastic than I do paper, and yet the amount of plastic that I'm interested in preserving is way smaller than the amount of paper that I'm interested in preserving. There's an interesting way, especially in consumer culture, where plastic has in a way overtaken and superseded other cultural materials like paper that maybe were more environmentally friendly, still are more environmentally friendly.

Daniel Worden:

And I increasingly find myself wondering about the perversity of, for example, you know, talking to my colleagues in museum studies about how you would preserve a plastic action figure. Right? It seems perverse to even think that such things should be preserved, because, you know, I knowing what we know about the toxicity, that that goes into their production, the fact that they are kind of derived from a very exploitative, very colonialist industrial practice, yet, you know, we have these very emotional, very nostalgic, very physical attachments, to this material. So I think it does hit at that interesting interesting place. And for me, it hits that in an interestingly aesthetic way today as especially things like comics, action figures are becoming more legitimized as art forms.

Daniel Worden:

We now have to think about at least I find it interesting to think about plastic as an arts material today, that has all of these messy attachments and associations with it. You know, the question of, like, how does one exhibit plastic responsibly, in a cultural museum context, I think, is an interesting question that we'll have to deal with similar to the way that we've dealt with or protested, oil industry sponsorship of art museums and things like that. Right? How would we divest from plastics, if they're simply everywhere? I mean, it's a big complicated question.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

I actually, with Heather Davis, co curated an exhibition called plastic entanglements that, had something like, I don't know, 60 works of art from 27 artists, and it, began here at Penn State. Heather had been a postdoc at Art Humanities Institute, and it was just this astonishing moment of, like, synchronicity or fate or something that she ended up coming just as I was doing this work and starting to write about it. We we both looked at each other like, how can this be? How can we, like, both be working on the the same thing? You know, we thought a lot about, you know, how do we present these these objects?

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

And so in addition to the, you know, sort of thinking about the organization of the items themselves, we also had all kinds of extra events around it. You know, lectures and cleanups and just, you know, to to hit sort of every kind of audience member. More people came to that exhibition than had ever come to any exhibition before that. You know, people were curious. Some of them, you know, didn't know about the extent of the the problem.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

And they had interesting kind of instinctive reactions too, but why are you making these things that many of which are are beautiful out of this stuff that's also so toxic. So, you know, they were kind of voicing some of the contradictions, about plastic that you are thinking about. Yeah.

Caren Irr:

Isn't it interesting to think about what would be involved in preserving plastic artworks, especially plastic arts made through a process of salvage, you know, as, as some of the other essays in the in volume, attest to? There's a certainly a whole practice of collecting plastic waste of various types and manifesting it in an artful form, you know, that attest to the the massive volume of materials. There's an interesting piece that Maurizio Bascaglia, talks about in Paris made from discarded plastic life vests that refugees are are wearing. So we have this art made from plastic detritus, but then the preservation practices themselves so often involve layers of, of plastic for preservation of one sort or another. So there's this kind of, like, homeopathy, you know, of preservation.

Caren Irr:

Like, you you save it with the with more of the same because, of course, like, the majority of plastic does not go towards making, you know, an action figures, but wrapping and packaging of one sort or another. So even if we're, you know, interested in you know, we wanna live in the world of paper, you know, with the books on our bookshelf, you get them and they're wrapped, in plastic and then put in plastic back, and then, you know, sent on a ship and, sewn in plastic containers. So there's this issue where plastic becomes, you know, the cure to its own decay and means of preservation for non plastic, art forms that has all this paradoxical quality. And I I wonder if the myth of plastic or if the ways in which it's a symptom, as as Daniel was saying, or has a kind of, you know, projected future, at least what we're saying. Like, if the if the the representations that we have of plastic attend enough to these paradoxical elements.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

The Smithsonian, I know, has a, you know, archive on underground, you know, collection of every kind of plastic that it's, like, ever been made. There's a woman, Odile Madden is her name, and she actually is sort of the the keeper or has been had the keeper of all that, and she's written about preserving plastic. And one of the things that does happen with some of the materials that are there is they they explode. And so, you know, some of them just sort of crumble. My friend who's the CEO of classic machine, she herself is an artist.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

And and, you know, she had these things framed. She made all these things out of, plastic bags, and they started kind of breaking apart a little bit. She loved that. She loved, you know, oh, they have a kind of ephemeral on this. That was before people started talking about microplastics, but now she understands what's happening to her stuff.

Lisa Swanstrom:

The historic archive here is so problematic too because I you know, I've been doing more digging into, plastics and synthetics in terms of, you know, depictions of futurism and science fiction. And one thing I'm just finding fascinating is all these new advertisements that are coming out post war or right in the middle of the war about synthetic materials or companies that make them, it's not clear actually if they are promoting something that is wool, for example, or, kind of synthetic, fiber. Right? And there's no real great way to dig down what it is. And so perhaps the Smithsonian's collection would be, useful along these lines too in terms of not just preservation not just preserving these artifacts, but preserving the the historic information about them, which is just strangely not as accessible as you would think because, of course, it would seem too early to need a history of plastic, but it's clearly clearly not.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

Or but also probably it's proprietary information.

Caren Irr:

Right. Right. So they don't want you to No. Yeah. Yeah.

Caren Irr:

Which suggests that there might be some really interesting ways that thinking about plastic, we could learn something from people who've worked on, you know, the complicated legal issues involved in, like, owning DNA sequences and things like that. What happens when the material, not only of our own body, but also of our, you know, immediate world and the that seeps the material world that seeps into our body and alters its composition becomes a contest of two proprietary entities of some way or another. It's tricky. But a simpler question I would love to hear you guys reflect on is just this this relationship between the durable and the malleable that's so essential to plastic. How do you think that plays out?

Caren Irr:

Does one win? You know? Do we have to have happy, utopian, malleable plastic and, you know, sad, depressing waste plastic that endures too long and doesn't degrade, or do they combine, in different ways in the arts that you've been studying?

Daniel Worden:

I I think I have two different answers, maybe. I think on the one hand, to go back to what Lisa was saying, like, in in looking at plastic Man, especially in the nineteen forties, it was really interesting to find that same problem that she described finding. It's, like, really hard to find evidence of when a company, even a science article, is referring to rubber, the organic stuff that comes from trees, or rubber, which very quickly becomes a kind of, there's petrochemical additives that are first added to organic rubber. And then rubber just means plastic in general, and it no longer has any reference necessarily to any kind of, you know, organic compound that would have been produced at a at a plantation or something like that. So it can be really hard.

Daniel Worden:

My project looking at comics and and energy began my my beginning research question that I I have yet to find a good answer for. I wanted to know when petrochemical additives started being introduced to ink. That was where I started. Since ink is ink is a carbon byproduct. Right?

Daniel Worden:

Ink ink, at least since the eleventh century, ink has been produced by, fossil fuel consumption. And so I was curious to know at what point, in the twentieth century, did ink start to become plastic too. But that information is really hard to find because it's proprietary and because no ink company is gonna say, hey. Our ink is plastic because that seems fake and flimsy. Like, you want ink to be, India black, alright, to have a kind of colonial authenticity to it.

Daniel Worden:

And so it it can be really hard to track down and to make visible the presence of these plastics and petrochemicals in our lives. And I think that that, at least from my initial involvement with the energy humanities, when I was editing a book with with Ross Barrett called Oil Culture, what we're really interested in back then about ten years ago was in making oil kind of more visible in scholarship as an energy source. And oil is is interesting because we interact with it, but it tends to be kind of locked away. Like, you don't touch oil. Like, it's it's toxic and flammable and smells bad and and all that stuff.

Daniel Worden:

Plastic, which is a petrochemical derivative. So it's it's in the chain of oil. Without oil, there's no plastic. Plastic, we have intimate relationships with in a way that we don't have with oil. Even though plastic can be toxic, it is toxic.

Daniel Worden:

Right? We touch it. We, like, caress it. We, like, rub it against our bodies. We eat it.

Daniel Worden:

Right? It's part of us. And I find that realizing that and and trying to make that visible. On the one hand, you realize how malleable plastic is because it's everywhere. It's the air that we breathe in lots of ways.

Daniel Worden:

But on the other hand, it is this material force that has a very real kind of empirical history that still remains somewhat invisible to us. And I find that really compelling. It's an object that I know really well, but I don't really know historically when it fully comes into being or when it fully begins to kind of overwrite and overdetermine my consumer life. So it's this kind of mysterious durable good. It has a kind of magic to it that that just comes from the fact that capitalism has hidden its origin, I think.

Lisa Swanstrom:

Oh, so great. And I thought your your reading of plastic man's origin and Superman in terms of these different energy sources was just so so smart. And I had gone back to I'm not a I'm not a superhero comics person, but I was fascinated with Plastic Man, and I'm fascinated with a couple other ones that I'm actually curious about your thoughts on. But when the plastic man falls in that chemical, like, Matt. Right?

Lisa Swanstrom:

Like, what are those chemicals? And and in terms of the time period, you know, I'm like, could it be that these are chemicals that are a part of petroleum manufacturing and petroleum byproducts? We don't know. They don't know. Right?

Lisa Swanstrom:

But it's really fascinating to see how that history has been completely kind of cleansed, clean from the, kind of entwined, interconnected, stories and life cycles, I would say, of plastic and petroleum and how we interact with both. So I just I thought that was great. And I I was kind of curious about the it's from this book. I found out about it, this the book of regrettable superheroes. So superheroes that didn't quite make it.

Lisa Swanstrom:

Captain Marvel, who yells split and it's not the same as the kind of fluid stretchiness of Plastic Man, although certainly zany in the same way. But there's a kind of weird durability there that's in contrast to, Plastic Man's kind of cheeky transformations. And to kinda go back to that question that Karen asked about durability versus plasticity, I just was curious in terms of comics if you'd seen that play out across time.

Daniel Worden:

Yeah. I mean, I think and I think your reading of sci fi speaks to this as well. Like, I think of and this is pretty typical for comics historians. We tend to look back to the golden age of comics from, like, the nineteen thirties to the mid nineteen fifties as this period of intense experimentation where comics are really wild. In America, they're not censored at that point, so the newsstand isn't being monitored by any code or rating system.

Daniel Worden:

And artists are really kind of making up the medium of the comic book, and the superhero is a major part of that in the the late thirties through World War two. And Jack Cole, the creator of Plastic Man, is, like, renowned for his bendy stretchy bodies, whether it's Plastic Man or his crime comics. Frederick Wortham, who wrote the seduction of the innocent in the nineteen fifties that critique comics, he used a panel from a Jack Cole crime comic called Murder, Morphine, and Me. That's an image of of a of an eye that's gonna be pierced with a needle. And it was it was used as evidence of the kind of of the of the ways that that comics were corrupting the youth of America, in the nineteen fifties.

Daniel Worden:

But Cole was renowned for these, like, wild exaggerated bodies, really stretchy and bendy, very much in keeping with, you know, animation styles from the nineteen thirties and the nineteen forties as well. So I do think, yeah, there is this period of experimentation, and then there's a standardization of the superhero type of, like, the plastic stretchy superhero that we kind of see from the nineteen sixties forward. One of the interesting things about plastic man is that he begins as a criminal. His his secret identity his his real identity is Eel O'Brien, and he's like a two bit thug. He falls into the chemical vat just like the Joker or any number of characters, comes out as plastic man, and then becomes a crime fighter.

Daniel Worden:

But he fights crime like every superhero only insofar as he then reinstates, like, the social norm. Right? Every superhero comic is essentially an episode of law and order where there's some kind of trouble. The superhero resolves it, and then everything returns to normal. Right?

Daniel Worden:

Umberto Eco famously said about Superman that Superman could, like, solve world hunger, but he doesn't. Instead, he just saves cats from trees. Right? He's fundamentally like a liberal superhero who doesn't wanna break the social regime that he belongs to. And with Plastic Man, you see the same thing.

Daniel Worden:

Like, he's this kind of amazing body with all these new energetic possibilities. And, ultimately, he ends up becoming a policeman, essentially, which is like a really, for me, at least, a pretty depressingly limited view of what one could do, if one had, you know, powers and abilities that reach beyond what an everyday person, could be. I wonder if you see a similar arc with science fiction where there is this period of early experimentation with wells and figures and then an ossification or something.

Lisa Swanstrom:

Oh, I would say absolutely. And it's really kind of fun to think about how plastic as a material becomes really played with during the science fiction's new wave in the sixties and seventies where formal experimentation becomes just as exciting as these new substances that are appearing into in these texts. So, absolutely.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

I'm I'm thinking of the novel called the drought by Ballard. I don't know if that that doesn't really qualify as science fiction. But plastic appears there in a really fascinating way. So the the the drought is, you know, at some point in history, it's basically stopped raining through over most of the Earth. And one, we don't even really know where the novel's set, but it is near an ocean.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

And one of the things that the scientists have realized about the the lack of rain is that the entire sort of water cycle has been disrupted, and the cause of it is in part the effluence that's been dumped into oceans for decades has actually transformed itself. It's sort of turned into a, extremely thin, like, molecule thin polymer film on top of the ocean. Like like a like saran wrap had just been, like, just, like, floated down onto the surface of the ocean, and the moisture can't get back up. So the whole, you know, lot of water cycle is disrupted, and that's why there's no rain. But the description of this sort of film of toxic polymer is really fascinating.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

It was from, like, 1965. So it it kind of the plastic sneaks itself into, you know, these kind of speculative fictions or, in the case of Ballard, it's sort of almost climate change kind of novel. And, I have to ask you, have you read mutant 59? It's actually about a bacteria that can eat plastic. And so the world is you know, everyone's flying in planes and everything is plastic.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

The first sign that something has gone awry is that a plane, you know, like an airliner, right, with passengers, is up in the sky and gradually little bits that then you start to sort of fall off. Right? Basically, the plane disintegrates mid air, and it's so almost sort of campy. It's actually funny. And sort of like the blob, the bacteria is it's still there.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

You know? Like, they're it basically ruins, you know, economy, and it's like this disaster for the world. And they think that they've kind of flushed it out, but, in fact, they have flushed it into the sewers, so it's still alive. So it's pretty funny read, actually.

Lisa Swanstrom:

That sounds great. And I think too, like, you know, some of my co editors and some of my science fiction, you know, scholar friends, they hate the term cli fi. You know? They hate the kind of fuzziness of it. I think it's a very useful term, but I think there's, like, another genre too that's kind of that's very interesting that's that's coming out.

Lisa Swanstrom:

Chen and Mee Abel had a really interesting short story too about oil oil rigs that come back and give birth to new oil rigs. And it's like this is kind of totally strange associative, logic going on in these works that, I don't think clarify quite encapsulates. That sounds like another fantastic example. Mutant 59.

Caren Irr:

Yeah. Isn't that interesting, though, how we seem to have shifted from a concern with the brittleness, the delicacy, the breakability of plastic to, you know, a really dark sense that it's everywhere. It's not going away. We are going to be swallowed up by mounds and mounds of it. I wonder how you think about the transition, because we could say, from the utopian to the dystopian view of plastic or, but maybe it would be more interesting, to say, you know, shifting from the brittle, to, like, the plastiglomerates to the that entity plastic as an entity that has, joined and reshaped the geology of of the Earth.

Caren Irr:

You know? How how do we make that transition?

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

I have a a distinct memory of I I went to one of the first eco poetics conferences, at Berkeley. I think it was 2014 or something like that. And I was in the middle of anti plastic advocacy and, you know, avoiding every piece of plastic I could. And I was prepared to talk about plastic at this conference, and so I was sort of railing about it. A woman was listening to my rant, and she said, but wouldn't it be interesting to think about I mean, what would happen if, you know, you you were ingesting this plastic?

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

And what if it started to change who we are? Wouldn't it be interesting to think about that? No, says I. It's toxic. It's terrible.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

But now that's what I'm doing, and that's what other people are doing. And I wish I could I wish I had known who this woman was who clearly was just kind of annoyed by my, you know, demonly anti plastic stance because hers was a much more interesting idea. Right? I mean, if if it's entering our bodies, if it's in our water, if it's already in everything, what's gonna happen? And some artists like Pina Yildas, if you don't know if she's Turkish.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

I think she's in Michigan right now. That's what her one of her her, art projects is all about. She imagines, you know, say, like, a million years from now, human beings evolving with plastic, and what might that look like? You know? So she has a whole series of, almost like sort of large test tube bubbling, like, bubbling test tube kind of container that has plastic organ like systems.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

Like, so a digestive system that had had evolved in order to be able to digest plastic. You know, nervous system, reproductive system, all the systems in the body, she kind of, you know, thinks you know, what would our systems look like, you know, if we were able to evolve for a

Caren Irr:

million years with plastic? So there is no after plastic. There's just adapting, absorbing, and, breathing with it, if I can say it that way. Do you feel like you you see that trajectory in science fiction or in comics where we kind of move through a phase of horror at plastic excess towards some kind of adaptation? Is that what the futures look like, or is there a post plastic idol out there?

Daniel Worden:

I don't know. There's I mean, definitely, in comics, you see a lot of, like, invocations of plastic. Just like you see a lot of invocations of just, you know, climate change and climate catastrophe in general since there's just so many. It seems like, you know, every third or fourth new comic series these days is some, like, post apocalyptic future where, you know, New York is underwater or everyone's living on a glacier or whatever version. You know, choose your version of the climate apocalypse, and there's an image comic, that that that will give you an action adventure story based on that.

Daniel Worden:

And it's very similar to, like, the comic that, that that Dana Phillips reads in the first chapter in your collection, plastic. Those kinds of, like, action adventure stories that use plastic or the environment as, like, a theme or like a foil, I think, are really everywhere. There's a comic called Great Pacific that was a 16 issue series about a rich, Texan who claims one of the great plastic garbage patches in the ocean as a sovereign state, and then tries to get it recognized by the United Nations.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

I have that, except I thought it was called trashed. At least my the version I have.

Daniel Worden:

Oh, yeah. The the comic that I'm thinking of is called Great Pacific, but it's possible there's more than one version of this story that's kind of comics is that, you know, they proliferate beyond

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

It has these weird mutant monsters. Is that what

Caren Irr:

you mean? Yeah. Yeah.

Daniel Worden:

Yeah. There's, like, squid monsters and stuff, of course, because it's comics. You know, you put a jetpack on the dinosaur. Why not? You see a lot of those kinds of, like, in that cli fi vein, you know, action and adventure genre stories that use climate change as a premise for whatever version of, you know, usually masculine heroic adventure they wanna enact.

Daniel Worden:

So, yeah, I think you definitely see the normalization of a kind of climate panic in these kinds of stories. I personally find it really interesting and compelling to think about what a, like, a post plastic narrative would look like. Similar to I think about the ways that I think about literary history now that I've been working on oil for so long. You know, I kind of have abandoned traditional artistic or literary periodization that I now think of at least a lot of the twentieth century as like, oh, well, it's the era of the automobile. And the nineteenth century is, you know, the maritime era.

Daniel Worden:

You know, we live currently in an era that is, like, after whale oil, and it's after timber and lumber. Right? We've kind of we live in the wake of these previous energy regimes. And I think looking at art and literary history through those lenses gives you a different sense of periodization. And so I I find it really compelling today to think about what a world would look like where plastic is everywhere, but plastic is also like a a commodity that we think of as a commodity that has to either be preserved or reused rather than disposed.

Daniel Worden:

And so I think even in a comic like Great Pacific or Plastic, like, these very mainstream comics that aren't really interesting as narratives, you still see this attempt to, like, deal with plastic as a material substance that's just kind of around you all the time rather than just taking it out to the curb and getting it away. Same way that, you know, you used to just, you know, pump gas into your automobile and not think about where it came from or the wars that were fought to get it there. You know, I look forward to a world where, like, you know, we think of plastic as something that we have an ethical obligation to as an object rather than just this kind of instrument that we can toss off.

Caren Irr:

I have to just say before we hear Lisa's thoughts, I but I think there's a really great feature of N. Kate Jameson's the fifth, season where without much explanation, it's fairly clear that it's a world where, there's not metal. You know, metal is not a big part of, what's there. It was it was the leftover from some previous civilization. And, consequently, they use the word rusting as, like, a swear word.

Caren Irr:

Oh, yeah. I threw out. And I I just it kept wondering, like, is there a way in which something comparable would happen with plastic? And, like, what would be the vocabulary where you, you know, that would recognize that shift?

Lisa Swanstrom:

Use single use disposable. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Sun just flown off the

Caren Irr:

You SUV?

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

Although in the sixties, right, to to call somebody plastic was a new kind of an insult. You know? Talk about plastic people. You know? Those were inauthentic,

Caren Irr:

Yeah. But we need a new one. One that testifies to, overabundance, and friability in some sense.

Lisa Swanstrom:

I don't know.

Caren Irr:

At least that's possible. Have you found anything like that in in sci fi world, Lisa?

Lisa Swanstrom:

I'll have to think about that because I feel like some things are, like, perking up in my brain that aren't coming to the front. But I think that question, though, of the trends that we're seeing in science fiction, I think they're quite similar to what Dan just described in terms of now we're reckoning with it. Right? There it's it's now in the forefront. It's no longer something that needs to be excavated by a critic.

Lisa Swanstrom:

Like, it it's part of the narrative now. But I find that I'm becoming really interested in that question of the life cycle of plastic and no longer distinguishing it from petroleum culture and representations of petroleum, but trying to find, like, where they're connected. And it's tricky because they are so completely cleansed in terms of representation, except now when we're seeing this flux of, popular writing, artistic work that is grappling with waste head on. And so, you know, the the comics, that that were just mentioned and the the novels that I've mentioned are absolutely very, very helpful for this in terms of kind of closing up the life cycle. So if we have the origin of petroleum and plastics as kind of very tightly bound and then separated.

Lisa Swanstrom:

We're seeing them now together in the landfill. Right? And we're seeing them now in artistic representations of, scavenging, appropriation, recycling, aesthetics, plastiglomerate aesthetics, which was that I was trying to get at in my essay. What I'm finding really fascinating now, and I'm trying to connect it all. It's tricky.

Lisa Swanstrom:

But I'm I'm finding really fascinating these texts that really are attempting to rewrite the taxonomies of materiality in the first place. So Jeff VanderMeer, people have written quite a lot about his work, and I'm not sure that I have, too much more to say there. But in terms of the porousness and the plasticity of the, like, the the natural order that he's depicting, there's something very useful there. And I'm thinking of the text of the in the film and the novel of The Expanse and the notion of a proto model fuel and this notion of constant flux is something that I keep coming back to. So certainly not something settled, but, some exciting possibilities.

Caren Irr:

That's wonderful. Well, I think we're gonna, have to keep our eyes open for ways that emerging arts rep grapple with some of these really interesting questions. Clearly, plastic is on a lot of people's minds as a medium of creation, as an object or a material in everyday life, as a political topic, as a matter of of activism and, as Jennifer's been describing. There's a lot of ferment, and concern around this. I'm so excited to have, all of your contributions to this ongoing conversation and hope that, you know, we can convene again, to talk about, the next the next phase of these of these questions.

Caren Irr:

Thank you so much for, coming together today.

Lisa Swanstrom:

Thank you so much.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor:

Thank you. Thanks.