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Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Post-Consumer: some reflections on bottled water
'Post-Consumer' (or the bilingual 'post-consommation') appears on my water bottle as part of a description of the recycled plastic from which it's made. Printed on a green ribbon-like strip above the familiar "100% recycled" logo, next to the garish "President's Choice" brand name. It obviously means the bottle itself will live on after its user as a recyclable consumer artifact, in which case the 'Recycled Plastic' part of the complete 'Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic' phrase makes it seem a little redundant or, more interestingly, turns 'Post-Consumer' into a kind of devouring abstraction, leaving in its wake nothing but bits of recyclable plastic. Nonetheless the title tries to maintain a salubrious green-friendly sense of both bottle and water. But does it?
Post-Consumer. I'm wondering if something more than just water and name doesn't, after all, threaten to destroy what it wants to preserve: if 'Post-Consumer' isn't just a term for a bottle-producing process but a sort of tag for a consumer culture trying to invoke a stern metaphysics of 'materiality' or, in a more interesting post-environmentalist sense, purposely complicate the notion of the health-conscious Self itself. Strike the water drinker right out of the picture completely! I wonder if what I've just consumed doesn't threaten the very saving waters (read metaphorically) on which the recycling idea rests because I've taken in an ideal configured to make water a consumable whose pure state is becoming harder and harder to come by. And recyclable plastic its purest form of expression.
I'm beginning to think that Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson is right: that Nature, like the Unconscious or Self itself, is being swallowed whole but not just by a late capitalist logic: the abusrdity of drinking from a recyclable ideal can only be possible in a stupid language posturing (buttressed by capitalist production) that's having a similar deleterious effect on a lot of contemporary politics, poetry and media in general. Also interesting in this regard are Žižek‘s views on the end-of-the-biosphere discourses that seem to have been assimilated to eco-friendly capitalist uses. It's language that's been gutted & gilded.
Post-Consumer. If there was ever a fitting analogue for an age of deep cultural inanity. Is it the bottle itself, as recycled artifact, or the recycle process that is primary? Just what comes after the consumer anyways? Water as thing or the act of drinking raised to a purer exploitable function? Is the bottle used for drinking or is it code simply, with or without contents, for a water fetishization that's premised on some clearly irrational 'posthuman' fears of our own. It's as if the 'post-consumer' title is a redundant signifier for the hope that plastic bottles can never provide enough of what's inside it. That the water we essentially are & come from can never be drunk often enough. Legitimate fears of self-extinction used as a surplus value to be branded and endlessly repeated.
Post-Consumer Recycled Plastic. Stupid abstraction work typical of the age of late-capitalist production (and consumption). Of stupid producers and consumers in general.
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2 comments:
next thing we'll have
is
Post-Avant-Consumer-Po
or
PACPO
which is alligatored with
FORNPO
ciaoo, Kokie-san
Right on, Kokie-san!
Thanks for keeping it real.
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