Plastic Toys
“The whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself…”, wrote Roland Barthes in the mid-1950s after viewing a plastics exhibition. The proliferation of plastic has led to this statement becoming increasingly true. As more and more plastic is produced, consumed, and disposed of, the forms of life that inhabit our world are changing. Microplastics, which are created through the progressive fragmentation of larger plastic objects have become ubiquitous in marine environments through the millions of tons of plastic that enter the ocean each year (Galloway et al. 2016). These bits of plastic become environments for various bacterias and viruses, creating new life as they poison other forms of life. As the world has become increasingly plasticized, so too have our understandings of toxicity and futurity. Our understandings of a changing world have become steeped in the notion of staying as far away from toxicity as possible. In the wake of the discovery of microplastics in human blood, what does a plastic world tell us about toxicity? More importantly, what does it mean for the future?
I became interested in thinking about plastics through this lens after reading a piece by Heather Davis, titled “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures”. Davis writes about Bisphenol A (BPA), a plasticizer which is characterized in part by its “reproductive toxicity”, and has been used to make certain plastics since the 1950s. BPA, and its reproductive toxicity are spaces through which queerness, and a non-reproductive future might begin to be understood. Davis posits that “reproductive futurism organizes political discourse and the social imaginary as the projected fantasy of continuance. […] This is especially true when it comes to environmental discourses, where the notion of reproductive futurity is precisely what we are called to protect, in the almost ubiquitous appeals to “protect our children.” However, what these discourses are often seeking to protect is not the health of any future child but rather the maintenance of a particular way of life”. The image of the child is a signifier of a continuation of normalcy, while a non-reproductive future, and toxicity as a whole are fundamentally abnormal. Davis, in the vein of Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, turns towards toxicity, rather than away from it, as a means of approaching the future. Toxicity, as Davis writes, “is about a kind of futurity that struggles to be hopeful, but is certainly not apocalyptic. […] toxicity, and the figure of queerness that she puts forth, recognize and privilege mutation, sickness, and the permutation of the body by its outside”. This embracing of toxicity is particularly important because, as Davis and Chen both assert, the fiction of impermeability to toxins is one few people have access to. These lines of access echo existing power dynamics.
One striking example of this is Mossville, a primarily Black community infiltrated in 2012 by Sasol, a company hoping to expand their petrochemical plant. Like many petrochemical plants, the petrochemical plant in Mossville leached thousands of pounds of vinyl chloride into the environment. Vinyl chloride, an offshoot of PVC production, is known to have adverse health impacts. The toxins released from the petrochemical plants located in Mossville led to a drastic increase in a wide range of health problems among residents, including cancer and asthma, among others. Mossville’s population is particularly important here. Their exposure to toxicity was out of their control, and was rather a symptom of their disenfranchisement. Davis posits that our drive for impermeability is ultimately an exclusion, both of the new life our toxicity has created, and of those already living in toxicity, like the residents of Mossville. Mossville’s residents were subject to this slow violence, or what Zakiyyah Iman Jackson terms “ontologized plasticity”, not by their own free will, but because their homes, communities, and lives were understood as disposable. In “Plastic Media”, Davis writes “plastic’s inheritance, the wealth and supposed safety and sterility that it brings for certain people, depends on the disposability of Black, Indigenous, and poor communities”. The disposability of these disenfranchised communities can also be understood as being made “fill”, as Marisa Solomon argues in “Ecologies Elsewhere: Flyness, Fill, and Black Women’s Fugitive Matter(s)”. Plastic, much like the waste infrastructures Solomon explores, made Mossville an absent space through which Black residents were made “fill”, while richer, whiter communities profited. This totalizing form of violence, through which entire communities become disposable can also be understood in Christina Sharpe’s theorizations of anagrammatical anti-blackness, in which instances like the poisoning of Mossville are not singular, but are instead anagrams of past forms of anti-blackness. Anti-blackness then, is the singularity, which structures our world, and therefore toxicity. Sharpe conceptualizes this as the weather, writing “the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack”. Plastic becomes transmitted onto people and lands, who become dispossessed and disposable so that it can continue to proliferate.
In thinking about toxicity and reproductive futurism, I felt compelled to think about the imagery of the toy, which has long been connected to both children and toxicity. In “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections”, Chen begins the discussion of toxicity by thinking about how “vulnerability, safety, immunity, threat, and toxicity itself are sexually and racially instantiated in the recent panic about lead content in Chinese- manufactured toys exported to the United States”. Toxicity became a vehicle to fuel Sinophobic commentary and languages of terror, which Chen terms “a rhetorical weapon in the rehearsal of U.S. economic sovereignty”. Impermeability and reproductive futurism function as ways of maintaining “normalcy”, but are often used as a guise of change, or as environmental “calls to action”. I became interested in the imagery of a child playing with a toy made out of plastic bags, which seem ever pervasive, and what that imagery might mean in the contexts of toxicity and reproductive futurism. How might this challenge the image of the child as a continuation of normalcy, or the fiction of impermeability? I created a plastic teddy bear out of plastic bag waste collected from around New York City. Using these plastic bags I made “plarn”, or plastic yarn by cutting the bags into strips and looping them together. I then spun these looped strips using a drop spindle to create a plastic yarn, which I then knit into a small teddy bear. This teddy bear is meant to invite viewers to play with it, and to engage with the materiality of the plastic. Additionally, the knit fabric is meant to play with ideas of domesticity. I hand knit the bear using fairly thin strips of plastic and 3.00 millimeter knitting needles. The longevity of the knitting process in contrast with the prescribed disposable nature of the plastic bags complicates notions of mortality that the new bacteria and viruses living on microplastic fragments do not have, as well as the practice of working with a material that will outlive me.
Inside of the knitted plastic teddy bear, I inserted a contact microphone, which picks up vibrations based on contact, in this case with the plastic knit fabric. I then connected the contact microphone to a quarter inch cable, which is connected to an audio interface, which was then connected to my computer. Using a program built by Gallatin alumni Emma Waddell, my computer can then respond to the input of someone playing with the toy to create an original piece of music. This program, which uses supervised learning, creates a more intense version of the audio input. The user creates a starting rhythmic pattern through playing with the toy. The program then uses reinforcement learning to extract important qualities from the rhythmic pattern to create a more intense, but still cohesive version of it. As a user plays with the toy, and creates noise through the plastic knitted fabric interacting with the contact microphone, the computer tracks both the amplitude and frequency with which sound is created. The computer will switch to a higher intensity pattern once the user creates enough noise for a long enough period of time to indicate that the piece should switch to a new section. In the below videos, you can see a section titled “total score” on my computer screen in the background. This shows two numbers on top of each other. The top number sums the amount of time in any one time period that the noise being inputted to the software is loud enough and in the right frequency range to trigger so that the computer knows that the plastic toy is making the sound. Everytime this number reaches five or above, the bottom number is incremented by one. Once the bottom number reaches three, the computer moves to the next section and will change the music, hence what causes the delayed change in music heard in the videos.
This interactive musical element encourages viewers to play and engage tangibly with the toy, rather than remaining passive viewers. In “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations”, Michelle Murphy outlines the unequal ways we are impacted by chemical violence, and how we are inextricably tied to it. Murphy rejects analyses of chemical violence that pathologize disenfranchised communities, or view chemical violence as distinctly separate from lived experience, and suggests that instead, we embrace “alterlife”, or “life already altered”. Much like Davis and Chen’s criticisms of impermeability, alterlife suggests that many of our lives have been permeated and altered by toxicity and chemical violence. Murphy writes, “studying alterlife requires bursting open categories of organism, individual, and body to acknowledge a shared, entangling, and extensive condition of being with capitalism and its racist colonial manifestations. It asks that we situate life as a kind of varied enmeshment and enfleshment in infrastructures — as well as in water as a distributed being. It is thus an entrapment in and a response to each other’s life supports and conditions. Such concept work is a tactic for taking back phenomena from the epistemologies that have consistently erased the constitutive violence propping them up”. This enmeshment necessitates an active shift in how we engage with questions of toxicity. It asks viewers to confront their own relationships to chemical violence — how they are being harmed by it and how they are benefitting from it. In the interactive element of the toy, I hope that this encourages viewers to engage actively with a toxic object, and to confront the fiction of impermeability. In “Discarding Well: A Theory of Change”, Max Liboiron and Josh Lepawsky quote Murphy and write, “when difference meets power, discarding is about “what forms of life are supported to persist, thrive, and alter, and what forms of life are destroyed, injured, and constrained” (Murphy 2017a, 141–142)”. What might it mean to embrace the new forms of life living on microplastics, which Davis calls our “plasticized, microbial progeny”?
These forms of interactive engagement with the plastic toy reaffirm the restructuring of social structures both Murphy and Davis call for. Rather than relying on categories of the nuclear family, and human/non-human, we must burst “open categories of organism, individual, and body to acknowledge a shared entangling” (Murphy 2017). Davis posits that we should learn from queer social structures, “of families not based on biology, and lives not necessarily afforded protection from the state or other institutions of power”. Our approaches to a changing world must not be based on keeping up the fiction of impermeability, but rather an unflinching openness to toxicity.
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland. “Plastic.” In Mythologies, 97–99. Translated by Jonathan Cape Ltd. New York: The Noonday Press, 1972
Barthes, Roland. “Toys.” In Mythologies, 53–55. Translated by Jonathan Cape Ltd. New York: The Noonday Press, 1972
Cone, Marla. “California Intends to Declare BPA a Reproductive Health Hazard.” Scientific American. Scientific American, January 25, 2013. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/california-intends-to-declare-bpa-a-reproductive-health-hazard/.
Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
Chen, Mel Y. “Toxic Animacies, Inanimate Affections.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17, no. 2–3 (2011): 265–86. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-1163400.
Davis, Heather. Plastic Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022.
Davis, Heather. “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures.” philoSOPHIA 5, no. 2 (2015): 231–50.
Galloway, Tamara S., and Ceri N. Lewis. “Marine Microplastics Spell Big Problems for Future Generations.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 9 (2016): 2331–33. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1600715113.
Liboiron, Max, and Josh Lepawsky. Discard Studies: Wasting, Systems, and Power. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2022.
Liboiron, Max. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.
Murphy, Michelle. “Alterlife and Decolonial Chemical Relations.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4 (2017): 494–503. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.4.02.
Solomon, Marisa. “Ecologies Elsewhere.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 28, no. 4 (2022): 567–87. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9991341.
