Plastic Matter: On Materiality, Plasticity and Toxicity

Dr Heather Davis
Dialoguing with indigenous epistemologies, such as the Lenape of the United States, Davis begins by analysing the presence of plastic in the environment, its effect on bodies and how Western infrastructure makes this invasion invisible. Plastic and its toxicity, as well as its creativity, is a planetary event associated with the idea of an evolutionary techno-scientific notion, the industrial revolution, the expansion of capitalism as an ontology, the capitalocene, the anthropocene. These abilities of plastic as a non-human agent unfold in other different ways, of which the ones raised so far concern the development of diseases such as certain types of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, or bacteria that feed on plastic. Plastic, Davis teaches us, is part of an infrastructure that is invisible to the eye until it begins to overflow everywhere.
Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School in New York whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022) explores the transformation of geology, media, and bodies in light of plastic’s saturation. She is the editor of the award-winning Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017) and co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015). Davis is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes.

Learning points

  • Why is plastic a social actor?
  • What are plastic’s social skills?
  • Why is the omnipresence of plastic in the world being associated with the Anthropocene?
  • Can you cite any of the effects of plastic incorporated by people, animals and the environment that Davis mentioned?