Wrapping things up : making plastic into a political material

How can we understand the role of plastic in generating diverse political impacts and situations? The introduction of plastic packaging into food markets in post-WWII Australia is used to pursue this question. This empirical foray is informed by debates about political materials and the interactions between technical devices and the administration of life. Making plastic packaging into a mundane market device involved establishing the responsibilities of the package: what it was obliged to do across various networks from food production to self-service. This history also shows how plastic packaging changed the ontological status of food. It provided a new point of articulation between the natural and the synthetic in relation to governing food that also had the effect of conditioning the government of humans, of suggesting to consumers that food wrapped in plastic was better across numerous registers. What the case of mundane plastic packaging shows is that the political impacts of materials aren't essential or inevitable; they emerge in the process of enacting the capacities of materials in particular situations. Impacts do not exist independently of relations or the ways in which a material is made to matter.