The term plastiglomerate was coined by geologist Patricia Corcoran, oceanographer Charles Moore, and artist Kelly Jazvac in 2013, who formally described the substance as an “indurated, multi-composite material made hard by agglutination of rock and molten plastic,” or, as Kirsty Robinson abbreviates in her 2016 essay, Plastiglomerate, a “sand and plastic conglomerate” (6). while Moore is credited for discovering the plastiglomerate on Kamilo Beach, Hawaii in 2006, Corcoran and Jazvac, upon excavating the location in 2010 to retrieve more variant samples of the substance, took part in naming and publishing ür scientific entry, “An anthropogenic marker horizon in the future rock record,” on the plastiglomerate in 2014 (2). the species of rock was discovered to result from the particulate clumping of “natural sediments to melted plastic” due to “[anthropogenic] campfire burning” (2). in 2015, Jazvac displays plastiglomerates in her fourth solo exhibition, Site Words, Spoilers and Shoplifters, which constituted her interest in “combining recycled materials and objects as signifiers of a broader anthropogenic landscape” (1).
Kelly Jazvac’s [Hypo]critical Self Awareness and the Immi/Immanence of Capitalist Subjugation
While the word, “anthropogenic,” is useful for inciting a sense of accountability in terms of the human and the manners with which it performs its relation to the landscapes it treads, impresses and inhabits upon, its proliferate use in contemporary discourses that surround the plastiglomerate and its implications in our current geological epoch, the so-called “Anthropocene,” concerns me. what does it mean when we describe the plastiglomerate as an “anthropogenic” substance (2)? is it really so? what histories and epistemologies do we lose, neglect, renounce or forget when we attribute the formation of this mascot of eco/geological precarity to the cause of solely human forces (and their deadly accomplice, the machine)? i share this concern with other thinkers, writers, and theorists who comprise a nascent tradition of ecological, geological, and new materialist discourses that interrogate the efficacy of naming the current planetary epoch after the ‘human.’ even Jazvac, whose work on the plastiglomerate i shall be challenging in this section, seems to be aware of the flattening consequences of anthropocentralizing our analyses of the drastic geological changes occurred in the last century (6). the critique is further complicated (yet completed) by Métis scholar Zoe Todd, who Kirsty Robinson references in Plastiglomerate:
“The current framing of the Anthropocene blunts the distinctions between the people, nations, and collectives who drive the fossil-fuel economy and those who do not. The complex and paradoxical experiences of diverse people as humans-in-the-world, including the ongoing damage of colonial and imperialist agendas, can be lost when the narrative is collapsed to a universalizing species paradigm” (3).
Yet, the plastiglomerate, this “horizon marker of the Anthropocene,” in its fusing of plastics and native sediments, does, indeed, in some way, collapse a presence of peoples whose livelihoods depend little upon the fossil-fuel economy and that of those who uphold its capitalist legacy. perhaps, then, the plastiglomerate is most appropriately constituted to designate this controversial coinage—the Anthropocene—as it directly embodies the ideological collapse of the distinctions between fossil-fuel companies (the colonizer in this analogy) and the collectives disassociated from such neoliberal regimes (an indigenous people) into a colonial encounter of sorts (6). therefore, a plastiglomerate formed on Kamilo Beach, as Tiare Ribeaux writes, might represent the “invasion of the melding of toxic/colonial substrates with Pele's sacred and spiritual body” and a “metaphor for the loss of native spiritual beliefs with the invasion of settler-colonialists” (5). yet, this inexactly direct projection of colonial histories onto the material processes that occur during the formation of the plastiglomerate—the intermingling of foreign, hazardous, yet quotidian debris (sailed from distance shores on ocean currents or Gyres) with native, diasporic sediment—arrives us at the premise of [post]colonial miscegenation. And Ribeaux seems curious, if not warily optimistic, about this hermeneutic as she ponders, “what new spiritualities, perhaps melded with ancient beliefs, can emerge with the materiality of this new geological layer of the island” (5)?
Such superimpositions are useful for absconding the flattening effect of a “universal species paradigm” with a good chunk of its effect toward establishing a human accountability, allowing us to proceed with the acknowledgment that the plastiglomerate is only partially a [by]product of the deeds of some humans while foregrounding postcolonial differences and the power asymmetries that constitute in both the capitalist regime and its purchase over “geontopower” (4). thus, the plastiglomerate, in its messy, trashy, dirty constitution, is not solely or necessarily an “anthropogenic” material, and certainly a substance of entangling geontogenic and capitogenic forces: a collision, if not collaboration, between the erosive, precarious, chaotic mattering of geological phenomena and extractive, transmutative, accumulative acts of late capitalism (6).
yet, such epistemological pursuits are, perhaps, under[mine]d when we consider Kelly Jazvac’s work on and relationship with the plastiglomerate and its expeditious induction into the art world, an act that rendered the rock into not only a fetish-object and display, but a mirror for uneasy projections that cloud, press into, and push out its inherent and potential epistemological agencies. no longer did the plastiglomerate retain the latent powers of its perversely complicated constitution as an object-in-the-world-itself, as it became, rather, a surface activated by an anthropocentrically driven seduction, guilt, hubris or narcissism for reiterating and intensifying our all-too-human “habits of projection” (2). therefore, the plastiglomerate, in its branding as not only an art object, but some “horizon marker” of some geological epoch, was rendered imminently to represent for us, to matter for us, instead of with or to (1).
while Robinson argues that Jazvac’s presentation of the plastiglomerate as a ready-made—as opposed to a manufactured or manipulated material—liberates it from the colonial touch or grasp, i am dubious about the effort, and convinced, rather, that the tactical juxtaposition Robinson makes between artists who make or manipulate the plastiglomerate and those who solely source and displace it dissimulates the notion that Jazvac’s ready-made approach to the plastiglomerate plausibly required and involved a series of colonial interactions (that consist the capture, possession and displacement of the rock). to further foreground Jazvac’s personal (and political) “uneasiness” around the capitocolonial nature of her own decisions to “discover,” remove and co-opt the plastiglomerate only disarms the epistemological efficacy of the object and roots the analysis in a self-conscious, hubristic, and sanctimonious projection of anthropocentric policy (8):
“Following on Todd, Jazvac remarks on her uneasiness with the way that she is often described as having “discovered” plastiglomerate, a word that has strong colonial connotations, and that imagines a manufactured landscape as something like a frontier to explore and possess. Every time plastiglomerate is shown, Jazvac notes, it is evidence of removing and describing something from a land that is not hers—an action that is misunderstood and perpetuated constantly in the coverage and use of plastiglomerate as material. Perhaps, then, it is an anticolonial and a feminist action to refuse to see plastiglomerate as an ideal object or substance that can be discovered, extracted, gathered, and used to bolster careers in a capitalist system or to highlight the “newness” of an anthropogenic substance” (8).
Jazvac is only falsely convinced that the theoretical problematics of “discovery” and its colonial implications are simply absolved by obtaining, having, or enacting a postcolonial paranoia and awareness around the matter, as it is not merely the fact that an exploration/excavation was performed or that an object was acquired that immediately or necessarily enters it into a colonial relationship, but rather, the aftermath of its capture, and the stakes of its possession. for one, the act of displaying the plastiglomerate as an art object (among other modes; a geological artifact, a sample of the 21st century rock record) in the art world inevitably subjected the material to the capitalist gaze of the art market. while there is no information on whether Jazvac has entered the plastiglomerate into the market deliberately or not, or whether the rock was subject to economic circulation at all, it would not be totally incongruous to claim that the plastiglomerate was immediately subject to modes of late capitalist valuation upon its submission into the gallery space.
Jazvac, for having inducted the plastiglomerate into a realm of presentation, viewership, and economic interest while expressing her own critically informed awareness of such colonially tinged stakes, might, therefore, assume responsibility for her own failure to reify the object’s de-colonial aspirations. or, instead of chewing anxiously over the possibility that she exerted capitalocolonial forces over the rock, could she have interrogated the efficacy of thrusting her postcolonial paranoia onto plastiglomerate analyses? might she, instead, have attempted to foreground the epistemological agencies embedded in such a complicated ontology, as opposed to crowding out its livelihood with projections of anthropocentric “uneasiness” (8)? did she “discover” the plastiglomerate? or did the rock happen to stumble upon her? rather than insecure she could have been inquisitive. but instead, it's a refusal that produces a denial, a denial that negates the political precarity inherent to such an object.
perhaps, the plastiglomerate’s epistemological compromise is not so much an effect of its induction into the gallery space or subsumption by an anthropocentric projection as it is the result of its possession as property and its consequent association to the identity of its proprietor. when the plastiglomerate was presented under Jazvac (the person/the name itself) in Site Words, Spoilers and Shoplifters, it was indubitably tethered to her reputation; it became hers in more manners than legal, as even its conceptual orientation was subject to art world established art-artist associations. this inextricable bind between artist and object surpasses just an institutional calibre, however, as Jazvac herself, via modes of widespread media coverage such as art promotion, journalism or criticism, sustains an almost “theological abstraction of identity” while the plastiglomerate constitutes as her property (3).
additionally, this associative possession further consolidates as Jazvac expresses her postcolonial paranoia; the acknowledgement of her own guilty conscious as constituted by the merit of a claimed critical awareness optically absolves her from the de-colonial promise and responsibility, thus, further entitling her to the capture, possession and display of the plastiglomerate. this interpretation extrapolates Asad Haider’s reference to Judith Butler in Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump, that “claims to entitlement can only be made on the basis if a singular and injured identity” (3). While Jazvac’s identity as an artist is surely emboldened by its association to the plastiglomerate, it is the injury this identity sustains as she performs the anthropocentric/morphic “uneasiness” that consolidates her claims to a creative and epistemological entitlement over the rock (8). Hence, the plastiglomerate’s association to the individual identity thrusts it into a colonial relationship, where its latent, material, and epistemological agencies are relegated by the irreproachable presence of its possessor.
how then, do we actually fulfill the de-colonial promise we make to the plastiglomerate as we engage with the matter at hand? perhaps, for now, we might look towards some precolonial notions of property: that property, in the past, “was at first originally communal in nature rather than individually owned” (9). if the plastiglomerate were to be seen as an object constituted and owned-up-to by communal forces that entangle the mattering of humans-animals, bonfires, geontologies, and capitalistic systems, might it help—as opposed to enable—us to reckon with our collective immanence and refuse a neoliberal agenda/anxiety that privileges/centers the efficacy of the individual? if so, how do we get there? in what ways might this allow us to encounter the plastiglomerate in manners that sustain the de-colonial promises we’ve made? to which we’ve claimed to aspire?
Tuning Into: Georality
while the plastiglomerate is an object well-suited to epitomize our current state of global eco-geological turbulence, it is difficult to know what it says about that exactly, or, more aptly, whether it says anything at all. the plastiglomerate, this “horizon marker of the Anthropocene,” an entity who simultaneously embodies and bears witness to drastic geological change in the last century: the cross-continental profusion and compenetration of plastics across land and sea; the constitution of the human as a “geomorphic” force; late capitalism’s tenacious dominance over “geontologies” (Chakrabarty, Povinelli). What is it saying? Or, to rephrase, what can the plastiglomerate tell us about the troubling epistemologies it represents for us? in lieu of writing love letters, might we listen to and thus speculate from within the husk of a trash-fossil and its deeply conflicted ontology? might we employ a somatic or material analysis that is at once impressionable, immanent, and not solely projective? where are you from / where did you go? where do you lack? what do you feel / fear? what stories can you tell? can you lead me? to a mountain / a capitalist / a speck of dust? these are the things i would like to know, but can’t currently hear. though, surely, i am wide-eyed enough to witness them, and gullible enough to believe.
the pared-down, almost humiliating desire to know without the knowing that precedes it is self-contradictory and unlikely, for mere perception, which presupposes and informs such a cognition, contains and is mobilized by “habits of projection” (2). just moments ago, i attempted to sketch my regressive desire to become some clean receptacle to a plastiglomerate’s diegetic historicity: a passed and ongoing collection of geohistories to be delivered ‘orally’ to my emptied conscious, from which i would hallucinate this orality (or, georality) and its elusive legibilities. in other words, i would become a vessel, an avatar waiting to be entered by the oracle; a zygote on the edge of feeling [the flesh of its mother]; a shell, a vase, a pouch of skin. there is, however, an extent to which one can hollow oneself out in order to experience the wholeness of a subaltern ontology, as we have seen in the likes of exorcism, buddhism, and fascism: there is always a residue. how, then, does one thoroughly exorcise the gunk of the self in order to perfectly apprehend the gunk of the other? i would have to rid my self all together in order to create enough space in me to hold an orality of the other without meddling with its meaning; and that space could be a clean, capacious emptiness to be dirtied or colored-in; or an anechoic chamber for ‘unadulterated’ listening, a space without the nuisance (and nuance) of reverb, distortion, delay…
nonetheless, i am wary of the dangers of such inquiries as they ultimately return us to a [post]colonial erotics and its fantasy of a hegemonic purity ‘soiled’ by the exotic; an illusive flipping of power dynamics that eroticizes and alienates implications of the reversal itself and legitimizes the asymmetrical default, a premise i am opposed to aligning with, especially in the context of our “late liberal governance” and its reign over “geontologies” (). i am, therefore, not interested in the possibility of perfect comprehension at all. instead, i embrace the artifacts of comprehension as the act fails to acquire pure totalities. in regards to this failure, i want to offer an inexact alternative. that is, the praxis in which we tune into, rather than attempt to acquire, the stuff of georality.
the act of tuning into the radio is an asymptotic gesture towards exaction: even at the optimal setting (by which the knob is oriented to the frequency of the select station), the tune is still inflected by the matters that mediate it; the signal or the sound never achieves a holistic, unadulterated clarity. after all, there are the artifacts—static, cut-outs, lesions—of a radio signal that simultaneously interfere with and constitute a listening experience. i use the term, “listening,” loosely here to refer to processes that lead up to comprehension, which, deeply interrelate and entangle with acts of tuning into, with important distinctions, of course. listening, or, namely, comprehension entails the grasping and holding of the concept of a thing (the ‘signal’ in this inexact analogy), while the act of tuning abuts the advent of the grasp and, rather, relies on its wary adjacency or proximity to the grasp as a condition for beholding that thing. tuning is attentive, while comprehension is possessive. tuning precedes comprehension: we must tune in before we can listen; we cannot listen unless we tune in; we cannot encounter clear, intelligible bandwidths without wading through the dense, scrambling garble of static. therefore, tuning is not listening, but a listening for...
[to be continued]
footnotes:
¹ the ill-wording in this sentence causes it to express a rudimentary understanding of perception and its spatiotemporal and ontological occupations. i am aware that the boundary between perception and comprehension is fuzzy, or faded, in the least, as one extends into the other, and vise versa. Likewise, in Karan Barad’s work on agential realism, the ‘perceiving’ capacities of her nonhuman, “queer co-workers” constitute as a clairvoyant “chattering” between objects and their extensions into/entanglements with others, and vise versa, that presupposes the “response to difference,” or namely, as Barad writes, the “instance of divine apprehension”—“when awareness takes place,” (). spatially, this chattering figures both here and there; temporally, it is then, now, and not yet. and while the word “chattering” imbues our observations of nonhuman phenomena with a recognition of agency, i am interested in the other, human side of this interaction, or, “intra-action,” which i tentatively refer to here, in this footnote, as the act of sensing [the chatter of the other] (Barad). sensing, here is not so much an act of “making sense” as it is the acknowledgement and attention afforded to this primordial “chattering” that precedes, constitutes and, most particularly, anticipates an instance of apprehension. while, perhaps, perception might refer to the conceptual capture of the surface or image of an object that ultimately constitutes as comprehension, sensing (or tasting) is concerned with the index, latency, or premonition of such capture. therefore, sensing bleeds into seeing, seeing into knowing.
✿ 2020 steven chen
works cited:
(1) Anonymous, wall text for Site Words, Spoilers and Shoplifters, by Kelly Jazvac, 6. Jun. -11.Jul. 2015, Diaz Contemporary, Toronto.
(2) Barad, Karen. “Nature's Queer Performativity.” Qui Parle, vol. 19, no. 2, 2011, pp. 121–158. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/quiparle.19.2.0121.
(3) Haider, Asad. Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump. Verso Books, 2018.
(4) Patricia L. Corcoran, Charles J. Moore, and Kelly Jazvac. An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record. GSA Today, vol. 24, no. 6, 2014
(5) Picard, Caroline, “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd,” Bad at Sports, August 23, 2016
(6) Povinelli, Elizabeth A. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Duke University Press Books, 2016.
(7) Ribeaux, Tiare. “Bioplastic Cookbook for Ritual Healing from Petrochemical Landscapes.” Bioplastic Cookbook for Ritual Healing from Petrochemical Landscapes, Tiare Ribeaux, bioplastic-cookbook.schloss-post.com/plastiglomerate-pele.html.
(8) Robinson, Kirsty. Plastiglomerate. e-flux, 2016. www.e-flux.com/journal/78/82878/plastiglomerate/.
(9) Wall, Derek. The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict, and Ecology. MIT Press, 2017.