Plastic materialities

You see it walking into the supermarket: an image of a plastic bag with a big black cross over it and the words SAY NO TO PLASTIC BAGS emblazoned above. The message is clear: bags are bad. How did it come to this? How did this flimsy, disposable thing acquire such a shocking reputation? How did using one in public come to mark the shopper as irresponsible? How did this humble object come to have such a claim on us? As the supermarket poster shows, bags have changed. They have become contested matter: the focus of environmental education campaigns designed to demonize them and reform human practices. In this version of public pedagogy, there is no room for ambiguity about the meanings or affects of plastic materiality. As scientists discover marine life choking on bags and environmental activists document the bags' endless afterlife in landfills, plastic bags are transformed from innocuous, disposable containers to destructive matter. Say-no campaigns deploy a command morality designed to remind shoppers that bags are now problematic, yet another thing to register in the circuits of guilt and conscience that enfold us within forms of rule.