Plastics

It is difficult to consider plastic as fuel when you confront its ubiquity as urban litter or ocean waste. It seems so passive and inert, the dead stuff of disposability denied even the biological momentum of decay. The eternal persistence of plastic seems to fuel only apocalyptic visions of ecological DISASTER; petrochemical cultures buried in their own DETRITUS. From a different angle, however, plastic represents not the end of NATURE but rather movement or process. The understanding of plastic recognizes what Manuel DeLanda calls “the expressivity of materials,” or their morphogenetic potential (1995). For DeLanda, materials lack inherent fixed qualities, and their multiple forms are not the outcome of externally imposed structures. Rather, the capacities of materials emerge as they participate in new relations; they are both shaped by and shape those relations in distinct ways. They inevitably “have their say” (DeLanda 1995).