a performance score in five acts
after Matmos’ Plastic Anniversary
Act I
In the end there is not nothing. In the end there is endless everything. The silence a deafening roar of white noise, the landscape a bottomless oasis of plasticine deathlessness. Abandoned plastic objects longing for a home.
Act II
Plastic snaps its fingers. Plastic doesn’t have time for your considered reservations, your platitudes. Plastic has business to do. Plastic believes in the ABC ethos, and plastic is always selling, always closing. Plastic is sinister and sexy, enamored of its own slick planes and glittering prisms. Believes in its own myths. Doesn’t believe in yours. Don’t blame plastic, blame its instrumentalizers. Plastic wants what it wants. Plastic wants what you want: utopia. Infinity. Plenitude for all. Ownership of a finely hewn bubblesphere, a delicately patterned cube, a deceptively minor key. What do we talk about when we talk about plastic? Climate of synthesizers and wax. Ecology of vinyl and bubble wrap. Dinosaur fossil fuels and robotics. Squeaky clean death. Flesh transmuted into silicone. Sophisticated preservative, bright and fresh. Its vision exceeds our attempts to restrain it. The material becomes its own promise, sliming into the horizon, blossoming onto the screen, ballooning into our hearts. Staticky it resonates. Stickily it moans. Sturdily it propogates. Silently it roams. Be still, oh dream plastic of our very own image, oh nightmare plastic of our very own dawn. Sampling a densely layered sequence, a pattern of deathly echoes.
Act III
Just before it falls asleep, plastic has been said to make a sound that is nearly human. The horns in unison, cue the strings. Cue the rubber duckies, now the storage bins. Cue the packing peanuts, now the vegan pleather shoes. Saran-wrapped ocean waves, screeching polyethylene pill bottle seagulls, styrofoaming wind. Polymer clay starfish belly up, its soft middle, its sensitive touch.
Act IV
A shiny plastic animal spawns a soft fleshy animal. A sinuous textured animal spawns a fleshy plastic animal. The study of animal behavior includes the recognition of diverse characteristics embedded within perceptual fields. Plastic spawns a bewildering variety of aquatic life. From one spawn to another: the progeny too great. The brood too vast. Infinite in its swaying hopefulness. Embarrassing in its persistent largess. Reverberating echo buried deep within the monstrous child. Birth as a grim oath to escape the deafening mesh. Being alive an exercise in forgetting the body, remembering the image. Being alive an exercise in remembering how to die.
Act V
We the spurned animals full of sensations. We the spawned animals eating our fill. We the mutant mineral-vegetable-plastic-animals building our kingdom. Waiting to be called beautiful. Smooth pebbles massaging our aching limbs, sun warming our grotesque faces. No terrestrial zone is bounded by fixed geographical coordinates. When we stretch our toes, the web imperceptibly opens. We leap into the rushing current. We fix our gaze on the depths.
I. Extinction
In the plastic theatre, all is possible. To buy and preserve, fresh and smooth. But it is also toxic. Micro-toxic, hiding in the shiny texture. Plastic calls on us. To ignore how it is made and how it is disposed of – dumped – but never gone. All the plastic produced is still here, on this cling-film covered earth. In the age of extinction, plastic is what is left. Plastic legacy, plastic archeology. The plastic theatre is one that manufactures and consumes its own extinction.
II. Plastic Wants
Plastic colonises. Or plastic materialises colonialism. It matters the narratives of oppression, supremacy, entitlement, empire, extraction. We take your art, your culture, your aesthetics (the ‘Western’ theatre is based on appropriation) and we give you our used up, thrown away, no-longer-useful, poisonous plastic.
As the Global North exports our plastic, exports our extractivism, our capitalist accumulation, the smooth texture of plastic hides the differentiated bodies and inequalities it reflects. Who dumps on whom always depends on race, class, gender, and political capital. The convenient, the easy, the disposable but also the life-saving and accessible. Minor players such as the straw are banned while oil companies sponsor the theatre.
III. ‘Nearly Human’
A plastic theatre is flexible and malleable. The binaries we use to categorize have been breached, broken, exploded. We are porous and we are now plastic. We produce it, consume it, eat it, absorb it, excrete it, and feed it to our offspring in our breast milk. We are not bounded and secure, bordered and safe. We are vulnerable and exposed with different bodies exposed differentially. We are already plant-mineral-animal-water-plastic.
IV. ‘Deafening Mesh’
As Stacy Alaimo would have it, the world is made up of fleshy beings that are corporeally connected. This means thinking across bodies and considering the wanted and unwanted ways in which the more-than-human world is in us. Environmental histories, presents and futures are in our bodies. Plastic in our bloodstream, skin, lungs, digestive system will not die, it will only recirculate across fleshy bodies. ‘Plastic spawns a bewildering variety of aquatic life’ with islands of plastic trash and UK rivers full of escaped plastic nurdles, breaking out of their manufactured prison and let loose to spawn. Plastic spawns, monstrous children, are not out there, they are in us. They are us. Plastic potently destroys the human/nature and nature/culture dualisms on which we have pinned so many of our hopes. The mesh of our plastic entanglements is inexorable.
V. Dark Ecology
A plastic theatre is deathless, staticky, sticky, silent. It is scary and strangely safe. Creepy and clinical but also ubiquitous. Our progress has led to our extinction. There is grief in this realisation. A dark optimism in facing the depths, in coming to terms with our dark legacy, feeling the sun on our grotesque faces. Understanding that progress has let us down. It has only benefited the few, the white, the hetero, the able-bodied, the wealthy, the powerful. Abandoning the myth of technology overcoming ecology, of human invention overcoming climate crisis, opens up other possibilities of living differently. Grotesqueness cast in another light can become something else. We are already living in this theatre of plastic. Now what?
Works Cited
Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.