7 Caring for the Multiple Cares of Plastics

We have termed this introductory account an “ethnographic trajectory”—a series of encounters with plastics that spans different molecules, objects, species, uses, practices, activities, sites, politics, identities, relations, bodies, and so on. Given the multiplicity and ubiquity of plastics that Dey experienced, we prefer the notion of ethnographic trajectory to that of multi-sited ethnography (e.g., Falzon 2009; Marcus 1995). After all, the unifying element—plastic—that might tie together the sites of a multi-sited ethnography comes in so many forms, and involves so many heterogeneous relations, that multi-sited ethnography (with its tactic of follow-the-object) does not quite capture what the present disparate ethnographic encounters with plastics entail. Additionally, unlike the methodological planning entailed in multi-sited ethnography, the foregoing examples indicate an accidental or opportunistic engagement with plastic. As such, rather than following a more or less prescribed route through a series of cases, an ethnographic trajectory traces a fortuitous path through a range of plastic encounters.

If there is a unifying dimension here, then it is the ethnographer himself—Dey. However, this is not quite right, for Dey is hardly a unity: his understanding of plastic emerged from these encounters with its complexity. As it turned out, these encounters were life changing and led him to sidetrack a career in engineering and development for an immersion in the social sciences and anthropology. It became clear to him that engineering solutions needed social and political dimensions and empathy and, in any case, simply could not address the complexity, heterogeneity, multiplicity, and ubiquity of plastic’s persistent presence. The accounts provided above can also be understood as anecdotes or, more precisely, as a process of anecdotalization (Michael 2012) in the sense that they report events in which, directly or indirectly, Dey was embroiled and that have shaped him and, iteratively, his subsequent accounts of those events. We should also note here our use of the third-person singular, meant to underscore the anecdotalized emergence of Dey.

Be that as it may, the difficulty in situating the present approach lies as much in the objects of the study themselves. The complexity, heterogeneity, multiplicity, and especially ubiquity that attach to plastics render them hugely problematic—perhaps even intractable—as objects of investigation. Yet these very aspects of plastics render them so urgently in need of investigation.

Of course, not only we must deal with these expansive features of plastics. The various individuals, groups, communities, and movements that Dey encountered along his ethnographic trajectory also dealt with them. One way in which they did so was by exercising care. As we have seen, this was multifarious and involuted care that spanned the care of plastic objects and plastic wastes, the care of body and identity, the care of religious beliefs and animals, the care of relations of power and prestige, and so on. How do we, as authors, address the various patterns or configurations of care that have been witnessed? Or, within the framework of care, we might ask how do we care for (others’) care, in the sense of carefully addressing both our own and our participants’ careful immersion in the ubiquity and heterogeneity of plastics.

To be caring and careful is also to be responsible—or response-able (in the dual sense of taking responsibility and being attuned to/skilled in responding to the proximal, suffering other [e.g., Davies et al. 2018; Haraway 2008]). To be able to respond to, and to be responsible in relation to, a matter of care require the making of judgments about what to care for. We thus also ask how does one, at once, limit and exercise care? How does one make the cuts and draw the boundaries while also making the connections and traversing the borders in the process of being careful about care? In the next section, we extend these questions by situating them within the literature on care. Following that, we return to our opening accounts of encounters with plastics and reread them through analytical and ethico-political lenses of care (and caring for care) both separately and en masse.

Bruno Latour’s (2004a) Politics of Nature entails an effort to refigure what it means to respond to seemingly imminent global ecological disasters. Central to this effort is the project of giving a political voice to nature, to those “new beings that have previously found themselves under-represented or badly represented” (9). The key is wresting nature from the predominant voice of Science (with a capital ‘s’) that “render[s] ordinary political life impotent through the threat of an incontestable nature” (10). This requires the deprivileging of Science. Obviously, this has become a far thornier issue in the era of fake news and the concerted onslaught against “expertise.” However, Latour’s argument still holds because his version attempts to overcome the ironies of critique.

Rather than critiquing Science because of its animation by social interests (a critique that finds parallels in fake news/corrupt expertise arguments and can be applied to critique itself), Latour aims to move beyond this debunking of matters of fact by focusing on how matters of fact come to be fabricated and stabilized. Thus, Latour (2004b) asks us to grasp the multiplicity and heterogeneity that compose this or that matter of fact (here “this” or “that” body of plastic). To do so would be to shift to a concern with “matters of concern.” As he puts it, “reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are not all that is given in experience. Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern” (231–32).

The notion of “matters of concern”, therefore, suggests that things are composed of a multiplicity of disparate elements, materializing from complex negotiated relationalities—efforts, affinities, interests, concerns, troubles, and cares in these elements (themselves hybrid entities “held together”) adhering together, enduring time, space, and resistance. Latour’s aspiration is to render these elements not subject to critique, as a mode of debunking, but available for acknowledgement and debate in what he calls, borrowing from Isabelle Stengers (2005a, 2005b), “cosmopolitics”—working together with heterogeneous expertise and positions of concern. Accordingly,

the critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The critic is … the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile and thus in great need of care and caution.” (Latour 2004b, 246)

In view of the heterogeneity, multiplicity, and ubiquity of plastics and the ensuing complexity of their assemblages that Dey encountered, “matters of concern” serve as an apt foregrounding for the aesthetic, ethico-(thing)political, and affective dimensions of these heterogeneous hybrid entities, though only partially.

With Latour’s mention of care and caution, we move to another dimension of our approach to plastics. Although we might trace the complexity that leads to plastics as multiple matters of concern, we must also ask how we and others can do so “carefully”: that is, address these issues as “matters of care,” mindful especially of the many mischiefs of plastics. Here we draw on Puig de la Bellacasa’s important discussion, whose “emphasis on care signifies … an affective state, a material vital doing, and an ethico-political obligation” (2011, 90). For Puig de la Bellacasa, the thing that is the object of care is multiply emergent through a variety of practices, including one’s own care(s) and the care(s) of others who care in different ways. Thus, to care for the environmental impacts of SUVs also means to be careful of/caring for those who enact alternative cares for the SUV (e.g., as means of conspicuous consumption). There is, from the perspective of Puig de la Bellacasa, an ethico-political injunction to be careful about caring, to be sensitive to the questions “who is doing the caring?” and “who is being harmed or excluded by this caring?” and “what are the observer’s (researcher’s) own cares?” (91–92). This entails a recursivity that can address the drawbacks of care, for instance where it is exploitative, denigrating, or moralistic. At base, to engage with “matters of care” is to keep open the possibility of dialogue or, more radically, to co-become in the sense that all who care for a particular entity or event are co-carers despite their antagonism or opposition. That is, they might mutually shape one another in the process of pursuing their intersecting, tangential, or contrasting cares. Of course, this is highly optimistic, though a first step is that one is committed to the “knowledge and curiosity about the other” (98; see also Puig de la Bellacasa 2012).

However, one also needs to exercise judgment here. As Martin, Myers, and Viseu (2015, 635–36) argue,

holding onto critique as a way of unsettling care may itself be an expression of care. Given the asymmetrical power relations that care can set in motion, it must be enacted carefully: care’s partialities, limits, and effects must be located, situated, and questioned. … As the contexts in which we work become seemingly more urgent, that is, more critical, we must become even more cautious about how we enact our care (as Science and Technology Studies [STS] researchers).

As the authors go on to discuss, to pursue care “critically” in this respect might mean looking at how care is attached to privileged and powerful actors, not least when it becomes a formulaic element in neoliberal practices of management and consumption (e.g., bottled water [Hawkins, Potter, and Race 2015]) or, as in one of our cases, a means of reasserting a specific sort of social ranking. This applies no less to STS researchers. How is their care reflective of their own positionality? What is obscured or rendered partial—or uncaring—in the process of engaging in matters of concern?

In the following section, we address these questions in detail as we apply the perspective of “matters of care” to the empirical material presented above. Key, here, is the question what are the complexities of caring for plastics? But also, what does it mean to treat plastic’s multiplicity and ubiquity as a matter of care?

In returning to the encounters with plastics, we see a range of cares enacted by our ethnographic “participants.” In the case of the Bishnoi men, there is care for the environment, but it is folded into care for certain forms of class, caste, and gender identity, religiosity, and regional politics (we see parallel enactments of care in relation to the suffering and death of animals, specifically cows). This is especially evident in the care taken to limit care: to pick up plastic debris is to be careless with one’s caste status (and the hierarchical corporeality of the social system per se). Plastic here is enacted in terms of a complex, variegated ontology (Mol 2002) in which care of plastics is patterned in ways that reinforce particular types of identities. In the case of the engineer, Dey, care was played out in other ways. His efforts to encourage the participants on the marches to collect plastics carefully—for recycling—were met with a certain degree of hostility. His status as both insider and outsider meant that his attempts to care for the caring practices of the marchers were not appreciated. Here we see how care is multiple in the sense that it is always already embroiled. To practise care for plastics is inevitably to practise care for a series of other relations, entities, and events that in some ways might compromise that environmental care (additionally, we can point to the Bishnoi men’s use of their mobile phones to take celebratory photographs of their careful actions), at least from the perspective of an insider-outsider such as Dey. To have that care challenged is thus to have these multiple other cares also challenged. Moreover, they are challenged by those (the engineers) whose legitimacy (that is, the right to care about others’ care) is not altogether established, to say the least.

In his subsequent travels around the region (and country), Dey encountered many more forms of recovering and reusing plastics. Again, the variegation of care was evident: the use of plastics as road-building materials and for insulation marks both professional care and the politico-cultural aesthetics of environmental care (reducing urban landfills). In this respect, one can ask whether these innovations and the broader agendas/policies that enabled them were negotiated carefully with other relevant constituencies.² Indeed, one can ask whether building better roads as part of a development strategy actually ends up being environmentally uncareful in a more systemic sense. In contrast to these more “infrastructural” uses of plastics, the local domestic inventive redeployments of, say, PET bottles (as buckets, planters, air-conditioners, water sprinklers, lighting enhancers, and so on) similarly reflected an environmentalist care for plastics not only as materials to be taken out of circulation but also as materials that enabled forms of economic or household care. Here the care of plastics is set within a context of material lack and all the cares that follow in the wake of it. On this score, we might ask whether there is an environmental care of plastics or whether plastics are incidental to a range of more immediate cares.

Economic cares of plastics find expression in the collective craft enterprise by the Delhi women or in Dey’s mother’s use of plastic artifacts (reusing plastic containers for storage, buying plastic plates in bulk). But these cares are nestled within a series of other cares, including care of the domestic space (keeping the house tidy), care of one’s reputation (giving quality bags as presents, using polystyrene plates to ensure better hospitality for guests), care of hygiene (replacing insect-attracting leaf-based plates), care of dignity (the plastic bag as a means of socially managing infirmity and privacy), and care of the body (the plastic bag as a means of minimizing painful movements). Needless to say, as hinted in Dey’s account, these cares do not go uncontested. Thus, Dey and his father urged Dey’s mother into getting rid of some of her collected plastic artifacts when the house became too full of them. And his father was not much pleased with getting rid of the many polystyrene foam plates that are impossible to compress and fit into the trash bin (unlike the more compliant leaf plates).

In this section, we have simply listed a few of the ways in which practices in relation to plastics—including collecting them by the roadside and integrating them into new roads, deploying them out of social nicety, and redeploying them out of economic necessity—manifest complex and contrary forms of care. But in the process, we hope, we have also begun to explore what it means for the ethnographer/observer to care for caring. By unpicking the complexities of care, and the interdigitations of multiple cares, we hope that we have shown that to focus on and valorize one particular care (environmental) risks neglecting the nexus of cares within which this particular care is likely to be embedded. This, as Dey found to his cost with regard to the Bishnoi men, might turn out to be counterproductive. In light of care’s variegation and multifariousness, perhaps what is needed is a caring for multiplicity or, as Bensaude-Vincent (2007) might put it, plasticity. We turn to this in the next section.

In Bensaude-Vincent’s (2007, 2013) now classic account, “plastic” is marked by the quality of plasticity. Within the context of the shifting borders between the inflexibility of the natural and the pliability of the artificial, plastic is characterized by a pronounced plasticity: this artificial polymeric class of materials has enabled a proliferation of artifacts and components. With this multiplicity also comes ubiquity: it is difficult to imagine any aspect of life untouched by the presence of plastic. In contrast, Michael (2013) argued that this plasticity, in fact, is constrained insofar as its multiplicity can be realized only at the production stage. Subject to highly industrialized processes of production, plastics offer limited possibilities for the local or everyday manufacture of objects. Inventive uses of plastics have been matters of bricolage, reuse, or adaptation rather than production. Michael further argued that the promises attached to the then novel technology of 3-D plastic printing enabled, potentially at least, the manufacture of plastic goods within the domestic sphere.

Now, in the context of this chapter, we need to revisit the notions of plasticity and multiplicity as applied to plastics. Of course, plasticity is derived partly from the chemical compositions of plastics, and realized through industrialized manufacturing and particular techno-natural parameters such as temperature, pressure, other chemicals and so on that this process entails. However, we can also conceptualize plastics as complex matters of care: here we would need to address the local forms of invention that constitute and reflect those situated and multi-layered cares. Put another way, the informedness of molecular plastic objects (Barry 2005; Bensaude-Vincent and Stengers 1996), multiple though it might be (function, commerce, consumer aesthetics, legal and environmental responsibilities, and so on), is not determined—that is, inscribed into the molecular configuration and object character—at the point of industrial manufacture alone. Informedness is also elaborated at the point(s) of use (read as subsequent interventions within the adventurous trajectories of the polymers). For us, informedness is interwoven with carefulness, not least when those uses involve reuses and repurposings that inflect environmental matters of concern. The point is that plastics accrete informedness and carefulness, and they shift and change as the plastics are used, discarded, collected, reused, reconditioned, and reconfigured. The plasticity of plastics that Bensaude-Vincent identifies is thus ongoing.

However, lest we forget, sometimes this carefulness and informedness aim at decelerating or halting this plasticity, as in the case of fixing plastic materials within the matrix of a road surface or the cavity of a wall. Ironically, then, in caring for plasticity, one might also need to respect and care for stability and uniformity. In other words, we need to treat care itself in terms of plasticity: to engage with the “care of plasticity” is also to be attuned to the “plasticity of care.”

But there is another issue to address here. To exercise care, as noted above, is also to exercise response-ability in the sense of opening oneself up to the suffering other in which the complexities of instrumentalization and care, humans and non-humans, means and ends, subjectivity and objectivity are attended to. Yet we might ask if there is a hint of the individualistic in the notion of response-ability. Is there a moralization of the individual responsible self that does not quite capture the “ability to respond” when it is embedded within a complexly stratified economy? In the cases that we have described, we cannot help but note that ability, in the sense of capacity to enact responsible action, takes on a political character problematized by class, caste, gender, religion, bodily capacity, and so on. How, then, do these varying abilities problematize care and the politics of caring? Put more broadly, how might particular forms of postcolonial politics (re-)enact the cosmopolitical?

This is a co-authored chapter entailing shared anecdotes, exchanged ideas, and negotiated analyses that have shaped both of us and our writing (and our caring for) the chapter together. If Dey—in the third person—appears in the foregoing to be the central narrative figure, then this is a figure composed of joint work that speaks in a voice that embodies—or so we hope—some of the commonalities and differences between us.

In addition, it is important to reflect on the fact that co-authorship itself is entangled in the processes of the plasticity of plastic care and response-ability across a range of socio-material levels. This process is variously manifested in (re)making and electronically exchanging drafts, for example. Co-authoring is also part of broader processes of navigating and making interconnected life worlds and their political economies. Travelling back and forth between countries and continents, family, work, and multiple homes (yet no home at all), looking through the window of the airplane, made fuel efficient by a lighter plastic build, Dey gazes at the ocean below. The gyres must be thickly populated with plastics of all forms, mediated by marine life, transformed forever, and transforming, he thinks. The bottled water served by the caring flight attendant might also contain microplastics: “Sir, you all right?”

Paddling a plastic canoe down the Exe, in our university backyard, we see birds, fishes, insects feeding and breeding amid plastic debris. The beaches along the coast are covered with plastic objects of different shapes, sizes, colours, and textures, washed in by the waves, cleaned up by concerned citizens who organize, act, and voice opinions. We thus see dedicated care. “Writing” into a white Word document on HDPE/Bakelite keys, editing, (re)formulating words—sustained by plastics, we are exercising another sort of care, emergent with idioms of inclusion and exclusion embedded in its formulation and practice. One day this laptop will be disassembled, its components perhaps buried somewhere deep or reconfigured, reused to prevent them from doing harm. Yet, through some form of careful mediation (degradation, transformation), this might empower some life form yet choke another to premature death—the care of plastics is nothing if not plastic.

1. 1. Writers such as Chakrabarty (1992), Doron and Raja (2015), Kaviraj (1997), Mukhopadhyay (2006), and Phadke, Khan, and Ranade (2011), among others, offer compelling reflections on the messy contention for space in India. Whereas space assumes a central character in the discussion of postcolonial political economy in India and the many forms of negotiation and assertion of subaltern agency, the fluid over-runnings of “public” and “private” are also discussed within historical and socio-political contexts.
2. 2. In November 2015, the Indian government stipulated that plastic debris (e.g., from urban landfills) be made a component of urban road building. Thus road network (re)development, as part of nation building, sits together with the current prime minister’s much-debated pet project, the Clean India Mission. Parallel narratives on the safety and environmental impacts (degradation, leaching, etc.) of such a massive project near highly populated sites animate public debate, together with subjects such as the politics of vision, urban planning, religiosity, caste, gender, and so on.

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