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Packaging water: plastic bottles

as market and public devicesGay HawkinsPublished online: 21 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Gay Hawkins (2011) Packaging water: plastic bottlesas market and public devices, Economy and Society, 40:4, 534-552, DOI:

10.1080/03085147.2011.602295

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Packaging water: plastic

bottles as market and publicdevices

Gay Hawkins

Abstract

The emergence of bottled water as one of the fastest growing markets in the globalbeverage industry has attracted much attention, most of it negative. It seems that nosooner had the plastic bottle of water appeared as a mass rather than a boutiquecommodity than it became a matter of concern. A huge variety of activist campaignshave sprung up against bottles, focusing on everything from plastic wastes tochemical leaching. There is now no question that, in many places, diverseenvironmental publics stalk this commodity. How then does the framing of bottledwater as a controversial issue interact with its markets? Using a range of examples,this paper investigates Callon’s idea of markets as hybrid forums and key sites for theproliferation of the social. However, rather than focus on the deliberative processesof democracy the idea of hybrid forums is extended with an analysis of how affect,vital materiality and the evanescence of publics can reveal the fecundity of an issue.By sticking to the bottle the aim is to understand how, in particular arrangements,the vital materialism of plastic can be unleashed, inviting consumers to reflect on itsorigins and afterlife, long after games of value are exhausted. Analysis of affectivemodulation and vital materialism extends debates in economic sociology in criticalways. First, it shows how objects can acquire political capacity, how their materialforce, or ‘thing-power’ as Jane Bennett calls it, can become ethically and politicallypotent. Second, it reveals more-than-human politics and publics as often affective, ascaught up in the play of ontological meaning and disturbance.

Keywords: hybrid forum; markets; vital materiality; publics; affective force.

Gay Hawkins, Level 4, Forgan Smith Tower, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane

QLD, 4072, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]

Copyright # 2011 Taylor & Francis

ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.602295

Economy and Society Volume 40 Number 4 November 2011: 534 552



http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.602295http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.602295


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Economic markets are caught in reflexive activity: the actors concerned

explicitly question their organization and, based on an analysis of their

functioning, try to conceive and establish new rules for the game. This

reflexivity is evident mainly in the proliferation of hybrid forums in whichthe functioning and organization of particular markets . . . are discussed and

debated.

(Callon, Méadel & Rabeharisoa, 2002, pp. 194 5)

One other strategy has been to think of commodities as ‘resonating’ in many

sensory registers at once, increasing the commodities stickiness . . . the aim is to

add in more feeling by appealing to registers of the senses formerly neglected,

thus stimulating the emotions connected with things, and so generally

producing more affective grip for those things.

(Thrift, 2006, p. 288)

Introduction

This is an essay about the social and political life of packaging. My particular

interest is in plastic water bottles, those seemingly innocuous things that

entered everyday life relatively recently and now appear to be everywhere.

While there is no question that bottled water is a ‘hot situation’, to use Michel

Callon’s (1998, p. 260) term, my interest is not so much in the wider politics of

water but in the containers that have made a market in single-serve, portable

water possible. Plastic bottles are both a ‘market device’ (Muniesa, Millo, &

Callon, 2007, p. 2) and an issue. They articulate various forms of economic

action in relation to other devices, from pricing to supermarket placement to

branding. They are also the focus of an enormous variety of techno-scientific

disputes and publicity about their origins, effects and afterlife.

There are now a significant number of activist websites, media reports and

boycotting campaigns focused on the impacts of the phenomenal increase in

plastic bottle usage over the last twenty years. In 2008 New Internationalist

published a special edition on plastic that explored the problem of bottles.Articles examined the dependency on diminishing fossil fuels in bottle

production, and the cosy relationship between the main beverage companies

and the petroleum industry. The carbon load involved in making plastic bottles

and transporting them thousands of kilometres from the site of filling has also

been extensively documented (Cormier, 2008). Then there are the various

health scares relating to plastic that have gained significant public attention in

news media. These focus on the increasing toxic load on bodies and the

environment as a result of chemicals leaching from plastic. Of most concern is

BPA (Bisphenol A) which becomes unstable when heated or as it ages. This hasbeen shown to alter gene behaviour and has been linked to breast cancer

(Ellwood, 2008). Another major focus of dispute and activism is the rise of a

global problem in plastics waste. Again bottles have been identified as the main

culprit. In a recent article ‘Message in a bottle’, published in the glossy

Gay Hawkins: Packaging water 535




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inadvertently or deliberately call publics into being as well? In what ways do

bottles’ various material affordances participate in the making of products and

protests? How might publics be immanent to markets?

Drinking oil: markets or publics?

A powerful example of the inter-articulation between markets and publics, and

one that prompts many of the questions under examination here, is a recent

image of someone drinking oil. Picture this: a head and shoulders photograph

of a young woman staring directly at the camera. Running out of her mouth

and down her neck is black viscous oil. A small box of text in the top right-

hand corner of the image declares: ‘Last year 16 million gallons of oilwere consumed to make plastic water bottles’. Above the women’s head is a

website address: filterforgood.com. It’s a powerful and puzzling photograph.

An image of someone literally drinking oil is shocking and disgusting,

reverberating on the most visceral registers of the self. The text, on the other

hand, is blunt and matter of fact. A statistic offering information that does not

simply contextualize the image but also regulates it in certain ways. By

pointing out the amount of oil used to make plastic water bottles the image

becomes framed as a techno-scientific issue. And what of the website address?

Where is the viewer being directed? To one of the numerous anti-bottled water

sites that have proliferated in the last ten years: this is the automatic

assumption. ‘Filterforgood’ implies an ethical encounter, an invitation to

consumers to make a virtuous choice rather than an environmentally

exploitative one. Turns out that you end up at the ‘filter for good’ homepage,

supported by the Brita Water Filter company, and offering detailed informa-

tion about the shocking environmental impacts of bottles, a series of links to

mainstream press articles about plastics hazards and wastes, and advice on why

Brita filters are more sustainable. All the time you thought you were looking at

a powerful activist campaign and it turns out to be just another ‘infomercial’.

The ambiguity of this image is powerful. It invites the viewer to apprehendbottled water as a matter of concern, at the same time as it seeks to create a

market for water filters. By making explicit the petroleum intensity of plastic

the bottle becomes a troubling object with disturbing environmental impacts.

All those luscious bottled-water ads featuring images of remote island aquifers

or alpine streams are disrupted by exposing the material origins of the

container. The imaginary life worlds that bottled-water advertising so

assiduously creates: ‘purity’, ‘organic’, ‘natural’, collapse in the face of the

brute reality of the bottle and its filthy industrial origins.

In this way, Brita’s marketing campaign explicitly calls a public into being.Using a startlingly effective aesthetic of disturbance the viewer is shocked into

confronting the fundamental interdependency of plastic bottles on the

petrochemical industry, one of the worst environmental polluters around.

Accepting this mode of address, by giving it even minimal attention, means





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that one is participating in the discursive and political dynamics of a public; in

a voluntary identification with an issue that appeals to a disinterested concern

for a wider good. At the same time, however, one feels the pull of promotion,

the mediated discourses of marketing that invite you to choose certain productsover others. Looking at this image it is very hard to determine where a market

stops and a public begins, for the bottle as oil is engaging both these collective

identities at once.

How to make sense of this example of a very knowing capitalism (Thrift,

2005)? One approach would be to reduce the drinking oil campaign to the logic

of capital accumulation. Brita is simply exploiting already existing concerns

about bottled water to sell more filters, destabilizing bottle markets in the

interests of extending their own: yet more evidence of the corporate

manipulation of consumer passions in order to expand the pervasive reachof the market. According to an analysis of this campaign in the newsletter of

the International Public Relations Association (2010) this was precisely Brita’s

objective, to turn the growing public hostility to bottled water into a market

opportunity by offering filters as the environmentally sustainable alternative.

Another approach would be to analyse the Brita ad as an example of ethical

consumption. There is now a significant body of work from geography,

sociology and cultural studies investigating how consumption is at the heart of

many forms of political practice; how governing the self through specific

consumer choices is a key way that politics is mediated and dispersed through

everyday life (Michael, 2006, p. 75). This work focuses on the ‘responsibiliza-

tion of the consumer’ (Barnett, Clarke, Cloke, & Malpass, 2008, p. 626) or the

ways in which shopping becomes implicated in techniques of ethical

subjectification, political identity and resistance. Again, this analytic mode is

relevant to the Brita example. There is no doubt that the consumer is being

addressed as an ethical agent. However, what often remains absent in this

analytic mode is any significant recognition of how citizen consumers are

materially engaged; exactly how the matter of the commodity comes to matter

in the formation of a political issue or identity. The tendency is to give

excessive primacy to humans and the subject/object distinction. The functionof the commodity is to remind humans of their political agency, to confirm

their capacity to act on a world of nonhuman stuff out there and say no to shoes

made in sweatshops or yes to filters rather than bottles. The freedom to choose,

that gesture so fundamental to the formation of the neoliberal subject, is also

the freedom not to choose. In this account of how consumer choice becomes an

ethical practice, things matter only because of their capacity to reveal human

will and mastery. Whether selected or rejected, objects are in the service of a

political hierarchy in which subjects rule.

To my mind, the questions the Brita ad raises cannot be adequatelyinvestigated via a focus on corporate intentions or ethical consumption. Both

these approaches seem somewhat blind to the materiality of markets and

publics and the role of technical devices in their formation. While it is

acknowledged that the subjectivity of the ethical consumer is market mediated,

538 Economy and Society




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the actual modalities of markets, their particular forms of co-ordination and

entanglements are generally ignored. Nor do these approaches recognize the

significance of advertising as an affective technology in media intensive

cultures, capable of calling various evanescent collectives into being: markets,publics, fans, stakeholders. Advertising is both a market device and an

important element in the expansion of publicity across all registers of everyday

life. As Warner (2002) argues, in cultures structured by mass media and

consumption, regimes of publicity are omnipresent. This means that the realm

of politics is often accessed in the same way as the circulation of commodities:

via multiple sites of publicity that make up a heterogeneous and dispersed

public sphere. While different sites of publicity involve distinct conventions

and techniques (news headlines, blogging, advertisements, brands) each is also

capable of illuminating the others via common devices for capturing andsustaining mass attention.

What the Brita ad reveals are the complex inter-articulations between

market devices and public engagement. It is a potent example of how existing

activist publicity surrounding an issue can be used to create new and expansive

circulation for commodities and vice versa: how critical reflection on

consumption practices can generate significant public engagement (Warner,

2002, p. 102). It is also evidence of how marketing can operate as a zone of

experimentation and innovation, as a platform for debate about matters of

concern. In this way, the ad could be described as a ‘hybrid forum’, as a site

where questions about matter, politics, nature, science and more proliferate

(Callon, Lascoumes, & Barthe, 2009). However, it generates these questions,

not through deliberative negotiations or disputes with various stakeholders, but

via the affective force of what Bennett (2004) calls ‘thing-power’. In the image

of drinking oil we witness a disturbing example of human and non-human

intermingling that unsettles cultural boundaries and the intelligibility of social

order. This is definitely matter out of place and it triggers a very uncomfortable

sense of ontological insecurity.

In the rest of this paper I investigate the role of the bottle in the organization

of markets and publics, and the ways in which these processes can becomeconnected. I develop my argument in three steps. First, I look at the

significance of Callon’s concept of hybrid forum and the ways in which it can

be productively extended with theoretical perspectives from political philoso-

phy. The work of Connolly, Bennett, Warner and Clough offers rich insights

into the dynamics of affective modulation and the cultural density of politics.

This work shows how the expressivity of affect or matter can disrupt the

calculative power of the market and prompt evanescent publics. The value of

Callon’s concept of hybrid forum is to show how markets can acquire a political

dimension, the value of political philosophy is to foreground how matter andaffect might participate in this process.

I then consider two examples where the inter-articulations between bottles

as market and public devices can be traced. In the first example I examine how

the affordances of plastic packaging have been central to the development of





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markets in bottled water. However, just as the bottle participates in assembling

markets, it is also a key player in the formation of environmental publics.

These publics are called into being by the capacity of the bottle, as recalcitrant

waste matter, to capture consumers in networks of obligation to a wider good.Recycling is where we can see this dynamic most starkly. In noticing the

recycling logo imprinted in the plastic the consumer is invited to respond to

the bottle as an ethical intermediary that suggests different human practices.

In the second example I return to the Brita ad in order to investigate a

different form of material presence and capacity: the idea of vital materiality or

thing-power. I consider how advertising can deploy a ‘neuro-aesthetics’

(Thrift, 2006), or intensities that can unleash affective forces with disturbing

impacts. While advertising, like packaging, is a crucial market device in the

economy of qualities that constitute a product, it is also at the forefront of affective sociality. Its technical and aesthetic capacities can involve sophisti-

cated and diverse techniques that often play with the vitality or agency of the

commodity: cars that turn into robots, bottles becoming oil. This vital

materiality operates in very different registers from ethical materiality;

however, it is equally potent. In these examples of bottles as ethical or vital

matter, deliberative notions of hybrid forums are extended with an expanded

empiricism attentive to the dynamics of affect and material emergence not just

enactment.

Hybrid forums, affect and the political

Actor-network theory-inflected economic sociology has developed a signifi-

cant body of empirical and analytic work showing how markets are never

simply economic nor can they be considered natural. This approach

highlights the variety of market forms and the ways in which they are

highly differentiated and constantly changing. While the key functions of

markets might be to organize exchange and to establish calculative agencies

between participants, these functions can be performed in many differentways. Callon (1998) shows that common to all market functions are a

multitude of technical and material devices that enable them. Equally

important are the dynamics of framing. Markets need to establish boundaries

in order to be able to deal with ‘overflowings’: all those things that are

classified as outside the interest of, or that might threaten, exchange. For

example, overflowings can occur when goods refuse to behave or when they

transgress the market frames imposed on them and reveal their polluting

effects or health risks (Callon, 2007, p. 144). The consequences of

overflowings are always unstable: ‘what is created outside the boundariesof the market is not something which is reducible to economic calculations,

because markets create new collective identities that are not very well

defined’ (Barry & Slater, 2002, p. 286). Callon goes on to argue that in

recognizing these identities a political space is created, a space where ‘these





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identities are discussed and confronted with each other’ (Barry & Slater,

2002, p. 286). In this framework the relationship of politics to markets is

radically reconfigured. Overflowings can generate political processes and

innovative configurations with a range of actors, making clear distinctionsbetween the institutions of markets, techno-sciences and publics difficult to

ascertain. The issues and questions that proliferate in these configurations,

and the reflexive activity they prompt, constitute hybrid forums (Callon

et al ., 2009).

The concept of hybrid forums offers an important challenge to many

existing accounts of politics. This analysis of democratic process refuses any

separation between epistemic and ontological dynamics. Making an issue

known, by debating the meanings for it, is not a matter of competing facts or

discourses, it is just as crucially a matter of different ontological relations.Another distinctive feature of hybrid forums is the central role of technology,

nature and non-human agents in democratic process: their capacity to

participate in issue formation in various ways (Marres, 2007, p. 763). Hybrid

forums focus on the uncertainty and contingency that overflows can prompt,

they foreground the political as a field of emergence and collective

experimentation. For Callon (2007) markets trigger an increasing range of

techno-scientific issues and emergent concerned groups. These groups

demand to be heard and included in recomposed collectives that allow them

to participate in dialogue, design, the iteration of new solutions and more.There is no guarantee that emergent concerned groups will be listened to, their

capacity to participate requires technical devices and various forms of

organization. Callon et al . (2009) also document the variety of procedures

for organizing hybrid forums and classify them according to two key

dimensions. The first is characterized by the extent of the co-operation

established between secluded or specialized research and research ‘in the wild’

or more vernacular forms of expertise. The second dimension considers the

amount of space left open for the ‘emergence and consideration of new groups

and identities’ (2009, p. 10), the continuous opening out of issues to reveal theirfecundity, their ‘fertilizing power’ (2009, p. 9).

What is so significant about this conceptualization of hybrid forums is the

implicit recognition of the generative tension between the political and politics.

For Barry (2001) ‘politics’ are codified forms of contestation that rely on

conventional devices, institutions and organization, whereas ‘the political’ is

the unpredictable process of opening up new sites of dissent that may or may

not adopt the logics of existing politics. (2001, p. 207). Callon’s account of

hybrid forums recognizes their capacity to produce spaces for the political, but

it also acknowledges the role of technical devices and procedures in enabling‘measured action’ in response to dissent. These technical devices and

procedures need to be dialogic not just delegative if they are to avoid limiting

the spaces and possibilities for contestation, or what Barry calls the ‘anti-

political’ effects of politics. Reactive opposition and adversarial techniques are





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often the least effective way to establish lasting and democratic collaboration.

As Callon et al . say:

By trial and error and progressive reconfigurations of problems and identities,socio-technical controversies tend to bring about a common world that is not

just habitable but also livable and living, not closed on itself but open to new

explorations and learning processes. What is at stake . . . is not only reacting but

constructing.

(Callon et al ., 2009, p. 35)

This focus on generative and exploratory techniques in the operations of

hybrid forums is significant and richly suggestive. It shows how markets,

publics and matter can become caught up in relations of interrogation anddialogue, and how products are far from fixed things but iterative processes,

susceptible to continual qualification and requalification. These processes of

requalification can result from multiple sources, including what DeLanda

(2006) calls ‘the expressivity of matter’ meaning the ways in which matter

might resist the disciplines of the commodity form. They may also come from

the unpredictable impacts of affective modulation and sensation. The question

is how might the dynamics of material expressivity or affect prompt the

emergence of an issue or reveal its fecundity? And in what ways are these

dynamics implicated in prompting hybrid forums or the simultaneous

emergence of markets and publics?

Post-structuralist political philosophy offers some important answers to

these questions that elaborate and extend the conceptual reach of hybrid

forums in valuable ways. It offers an analysis attentive to the cultural density

and multifaceted character of the political, and the complex layers of dissent,

persuasion and judgement operative in public life. Connolly (1999), for

example, argues for a political analysis that recognizes the affective and visceral

registers of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, and their inescapable force in

public life. His notion of the ‘infrasensible’ draws attention to the intensities of

thinking and being that work on more than one level, that operate below theculturally organized logics of conscious thinking, feeling and judgement. This

infrasensible register can provide a ‘reservoir from which surprise sometimes

unsettles fixed explanations, [where] new pressures periodically swell up to

disrupt existing practices of rationality’ (1999, p. 40). It is akin to Deleuze’s

concept of transcendental empiricism with its focus on the role of potentiality,

affect and emergence in sociality. It also acknowledges how surprise and

disturbance might come from the unexpected expressivity of matter when

captured in new associations. The infrasensible register is not exclusively

human; it is a relational field of virtual intensities that are actual in theireffects.

Warner’s analysis of publics and counter-publics is equally attentive to

cultural density and the dynamics of affect and emergence. Like Connolly,

Warner is sceptical of deliberative notions of issue formation and controversy.





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For him, public formation does not only involve persuasion as this presumes

that a public already exists waiting to be convinced by the appeal of reason. It

also presumes that individuals in a public will all have the same reading of

available discourses. The problem with privileging rational discourse as thefoundation of public formation is that the expressive and affective qualities of

public speech and dissent are excluded. Yet these might be the very forces that

prompt public attention and engagement with an issue. Deliberative

approaches to issues and publics cannot adequately account for the messy

and unpredictable modulations of affect, sensation and materiality or the

multiplicity of modes of address and publicity at play in public spheres. As

Warner (2002, p. 89) shows, the contemporary system of publics creates a

demanding social phenomenology with an enormous variety of polysemic texts,

images and issues clamouring for attention. The appellative energy of mediatedsociality means that controversies seem to be everywhere.

Like Callon, Warner acknowledges the role of specific devices and

technologies in the emergence of publics and the need to investigate these.

However, unlike Callon and actor-network theory more generally, he has a

much more nuanced account of the evanescence and virtuality of publics, their

intense mediation and their various relations to political process. Not all

publics are political; they do not necessarily prefigure rational debate or

prompt participation. The contexts of publicness and of publics can be thought

of as a field of potential where transformative actions might or might not be

possible. What calls a public into being is not a common identity but a shared

acceptance of a distinct form of address or response to an affective modulation.

Unlike stakeholders or concerned groups, publics are not necessarily

implicated in an issue; they are affected or interested but do not have an

interest. Inhabiting a mode of public address implicates people in a relation

with strangers. ‘The existence of a public is contingent on its members’

activity, however notional or compromised, and not on its members’ categorical

classification, objectively determined position in the social structure, or

material existence . . . They are virtual entities not voluntary associations’

(Warner, 2002, pp. 88 9).Warner and Connolly extend the analytic reach of hybrid forums in valuable

ways. Their attention to the infrasensible registers of the political and the

evanescence of publics invokes what Clough (drawing on Deleuze) refers to as

‘expanded empiricism’ (Clough, 2009). This is empiricism attentive to the

modulating effects of affect and the potential immanent in matter. It is both

post-human, in its displacement of human consciousness and agency as the

locus of the social, and also performative, in its attention to the dynamics of

enactment and emergence. For Clough ‘affect modulation’ (2009, p. 50) now

plays a potent role in the background registers of everyday life, displacingdisciplining regimes of governance and the economy. Affect modulation can be

shaped by technology and other devices from advertising to biometric

techniques, and its reach and effects are unpredictable, pre-conscious and

pre-individual. Investigations of the affective dimensions of hybrid forums





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produce an ‘empiricism of sensation, not an empiricism of the senses, not the

sense knowledge underpinning methodological positivism, but an empiricism

of the ‘‘in-experience’’ of affect at the very limit of the phenomenal’ (2009,

p. 51). This renders the political as a space of invention or ontologicaldisturbance not just contestation. Surprising affects, or matter that makes itself

present in unexpected ways, might prompt evanescent publics less concerned

with measured action than with the imagination of new worlds, the activation

of altered modes of thinking or an enlarged sense of entanglements with the

more-than-human. The political might emerge from any number of different

sites of everyday life: in marketing, in objects that pose questions, in various

modes of publicity, in the ways in which surprise or shock or ‘new pressures’

can prompt public attention and engagement. In this way political philosophy

extends the concept of hybrid forum by offering powerful insights into themultiple sources of re-qualification and socio-technical controversies and the

dynamics of not only ‘reacting but constructing’ (Callon et al ., 2009, p. 35).

In the rest of this paper my focus is on the ways in which bottled-water

packaging and marketing become implicated in the political and the formation

of publics. My interest is in how the material expressivity of bottles can reveal

the fecundity of an issue and disturb humans’ comfortable sense of being at the

ontological centre of the world. The capacity for bottles to disturb relies on

various technical devices and relations. In the examples I explore, these devices

and relations come from the organization of markets but that is by no means

the extent of their reach. These bottles, following Bennett, ‘move, threaten,

inspire and animate the more obviously animated things called humans’ (2004,

p. 358) and in this way they have the capacity to call publics into being: virtual

social collectives engaged by the life of the commodity long after games of

value are over.

Packaging water, recycling and ethical materiality

Although the importance of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic isacknowledged in critiques of bottled water, its role is generally reduced to

that of a highly moralized bad material. Most activist analyses of the bottled-

water industry represent the bottle as a passive object whose political and

environmental impacts are written in advance. This has the effect of making it

difficult to understand how its material presence is enacted in markets and in

everyday use, and how this materiality has shifting affordances and political

implications. What is missing in these accounts is any sense of the agency of

the plastic bottle as an object that participates in contexts of application and

use in dynamic ways, an object critical to the materialization of both marketsand publics.

While the beverage industry was already heavily involved in using plastic

bottles for sweet drinks, the rise of PET plastic had important implications for

the rapid growth of bottled-water markets. In the mid-1970s PET plastic was





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teased out of the laboratory at DuPont. This was a low-cost plastic produced in

different grades and used primarily in polyester fibre clothing, carpeting and

bottles. A key material quality of PET was its lightness, strength and physical

lustre that was equivalent to glass in terms of translucency and clarity. Fromthe late 1980s PET and its economic and material affordances began to shape

bottled-water markets in critical ways. Here was a packaging material that

could mirror the product, ‘pure’ water, enhancing its economy of qualities

(Callon et al ., 2002). It allowed the beverage companies to either develop their

own PET bottle manufacturing plants, as is the case with Coca Cola in North

America, or become the main buyers from key packaging companies such as

Amcor. As the big beverage companies already had extensive distribution

networks in place for sweet drinks, bottled water was easily inserted into

existing markets as a new product. At the same time it was also used to extendthese markets. PET’s lightness and low cost made mass distribution from

bottling source to distant locations much easier. Unlike glass which is heavy

and fragile, PET bottles could also be incorporated into mobile personal use,

becoming yet another object caught up in the material density of everyday life.

The PET bottle of water made drinking on the run possible; with the help of

ads and wider discourses about hydration and health, the water bottle

suggested a whole range of new drinking practices to consumers. PET plastic

changed the social life of bottled water, helping it to move into places it had

never been before. Its material affordances dramatically expanded the uses for

and identities of the bottle and of water. In other words, PET packaging was

crucial to assembling bottled-water markets and drinkers.

In contrast to critique, a focus on markets as socio-material assemblages

offers important insights into how the bottle acts, how aspects of its materiality

participate in the constitution of markets. In this approach the PET bottle is a

‘market device’ (Muniesa et al ., 2007, p. 2), something that helps articulate

economic action, reconfigures everyday drinking practices, the qualities of

water and more. According to Cochoy and Grandclément-Chaffy (2005,

p. 646) packaging has been central to the development of markets and the

reordering of relations between products and consumers. It inaugurated a moremediated relationship to products in which consumers had to rely on indirect,

written or visual information to access knowledge of what they were buying.

Physical encounters were replaced by facts about the chemical, scientific or

cultural dimensions of the product, information that was previously largely

unknown or inaccessible. The growth of packaging made it possible (and, in

fact, necessary) to invent and highlight product differences. It is also deeply

connected to the expansion of branding and brand strategies, the package

providing a crucial surface for establishing the symbolic qualities of the

product. Packaging is now so normalized in market assemblages thatconsumption would be impossible without it. This is not simply for pragmatic

reasons but because shoppers expect packages, they have become an integral

part of the socio-material meaning and practice of consuming. Cochoy and

Grandclément-Chaffy claim that: ‘‘‘Naked’’ products would trouble us now.





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There would be no images to stimulate our fancy and, more seriously, no

product guarantees or traceability’ (2005, p. 649). This is how packaging has

come to affect consumers and their practices by establishing new normative

regimes for what constitutes a product and how its qualities are guaranteed.However, as important as Cochoy and Grandclément-Chaffy’s account of

packaging is, it lacks an adequate explanation of exactly how the matter of the

package comes to matter politically. In their discussion of the Marlboro box

they show how the rise of anti-smoking messages on the front of the cigarette

box functions as a cognitive device that turns it into a ‘veritable courtroom’,

where health information sits alongside manufacturing and brand information.

This signals the presence of different actors and messages vying for the

consumer’s attention. ‘Political packaging’, as they call it, is supported by

wider policy regimes and health regulations and it gradually claims more spaceon the box. As the anti-smoking message gains ascendancy it makes trouble for

the brand, the health message contaminates the brand qualities (2005, pp. 649

50). Here packaging functions as a hybrid forum for questions about the health

impacts of cigarettes but this is the limit of the political work that the cigarette

box appears to be capable of. In Cochoy and Grandclément-Chaffy’s analysis

the box remains strangely passive, a surface for inscription rather than an

actant. Reducing packaging to a cognitive device does not adequately

acknowledge its performative role in engaging markets or publics.

In contrast to the package problematizing the product, as is the case with the

cigarette box, with bottled water the package itself is a major issue. As argued

in the introduction, the product is impossible without it, and there are now

many diverse campaigns focused on a variety of techno-scientific issues about

bottles. This extensive publicity about plastic, its hazards and troubling

afterlife, circulates around the bottle revealing its risky and various material

identities as waste, pollutant and more. Thanks to this publicity, even before

one twists the lid, the bottle is a contentious object, something with a

reputation. While there is no question that many consumers may not be aware

of these problematic identities or, if they are, even care, their existence in

public discourse highlights the precarious nature of meaning, association andaffordance. The challenge for manufacturers of bottled water is to try and keep

these problematic qualities of the bottle out of the market frame, to contain the

socio-material meanings of the container.

One strategy for achieving this is with the use of a recycling logo on the

package. The neat triangle made out of arrows printed on the label or embedded

in the plastic signals that the bottle is willing to participate in other economies,

that it has a potential afterlife beyond waste. In many senses the recycling logo is a

form of branding that enables the bottle to play an active part in modelling

markets in many dimensions. Lury’s argument about brand as assemblage can beequally applied to packaging: ‘To describe the brand as assemblage is thus to

acknowledge that it is one of a number of devices that embody a logic of

calculative continuities and the modelling, manipulation and naming of relations

of variations so as to multiply possibilities’ (2009, p. 78). In this framework the





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recycling logo multiplies the material and calculative possibilities of the bottle but

it does not necessarily do this in a linear way. While it may seem that the bottle

branded as recyclable is suggesting the next stage of a material and economic

narrative, becoming resource rather than waste, it is also inviting reflexivity. Therecycling logo prompts a hybrid forum, a proliferation of questions about the

future of the bottle; these questions are economic, material, ethical, political,

environmental and more: where will this empty container end up?

Adkins and Lury’s (2009, p. 16) topological model of assemblage uses the

concept of surface to argue that economic systems are no longer linear or

Euclidean nor can they be reduced to singular logics or causation. They now

work in multi-dimensional registers of space/time and have complex

functionalities: ‘This surface is the topological space of all the possible states

that a system can have’ (2009, p. 16). The empirical challenge is to developtechniques for tracking the movement and immanence of these possible states,

the processes of performance and emergence. I have argued elsewhere

(Hawkins, 2006, p. 95) that recycling is a performance that assembles a distinct

set of relations between persons, things, ethical calculations and a range of

technical and regulatory devices from special bins to government policies. It can

also be considered as an emergent economy, not simply because it commodifies

waste but because it establishes a dynamic structure for producing and

transacting various forms of ethical value in the person who chooses to recycle,

from environmental concern to displays of public virtue. Central to the

enactment of recycling is the constitution of relevant forms of agency and

subjectivity. Thanks to public awareness campaigns, activism and governmental

injunctions, the afterlife of the bottle as environmental hazard has been

revealed. This publicity changes the ontological realities of the bottle, making

the disposable container present as a matter of concern, a materially potent

object capable of capturing humans in networks of obligation and responsibility.

In this way the bottle is implicated in calling a public into being, a public which

responds to it as an ethical intermediary: something that prompts techniques of

conscience and invites different practices (Hawkins, 2009).

The example of the recycling logo on the water bottle shows how packagingcan function as a market and public device. While there is no doubt that PET

plastic has been crucial to the growth of bottled-water markets and changes in

consumer drinking practices, it is also central to the formation of various

environmental publics. Most bottled-water activism dismisses recycling as

either ineffectual in terms of managing growing amounts of plastic wastes or as

a con designed to make gullible consumers believe that empty bottles are not a

problem but a resource. This is one kind of public produced by the bottle but it

positions itself in opposition to the market, in relations of resistance and

critique. My interest is in emergent publics called into being by the recyclinglogo. This is a public immanent to markets and their topological spaces, a

public that can be materially and ethically engaged by the capacity of the bottle

to pose questions. The bottle branded as recyclable opens up relations of

variation and multiplies the possible identities for the consumer and the





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packaging. It inaugurates a different assemblage where new values become

possible; these values are both public and personal. The recycled bottle helps

constitute the identity of ‘the recycler’ and also signals, as it sits on the street in

its proper container, a wider public space of political consideration for wherethings end up. Recycling is a private gesture made public that implicates the

recycler in disinterested concern for a wider public good.

Drinking oil: vital materiality

Returning, now, to the Brita advertisement I want to open up another line of

thinking about packaging as a market and public device. As outlined, this

image shocks the viewer with a startling example of human and nonhumanintermingling; its impact is affective and disturbing. Here is a mode of market

framing that exploits the overflowings of one market in order to develop

another. The Brita ad addresses consumers as already aware of existing

publicity about bottles as an issue. However, it does not just present this public

knowledge as expert information for the concerned or ethical consumer, it also

presents it imaginatively. And my argument in this section is that this

imaginative aesthetic of disturbance generates a hybrid forum that captures

consumers in political not just market entanglements.

It is possible to argue, as Thrift does, that this ad is evidence of the way

aesthetics are used to intensify the ‘calculated sincerity of allure’ (2008, p. 9) in

crowded market places. Brita is generating attention (one of the key technical

goals of advertising) via a visually confronting image that speaks to existing

passions and interests. Filters are ‘alluring’ because Brita has captured some of

the political efficacy established by anti-bottled-water activism and attached it

to them. This is no doubt accurate but it can veer dangerously close to an over-

coded assessment of markets and marketing as, ultimately, only in the service

of capital. If we accept that markets are increasingly hybrid forums, then this

position is hard to sustain for markets can also be sites for the proliferation of

the social and the political; the challenge is to understand how. How, in the caseof Brita, does advertising as a specific form of publicity generate a hybrid

forum with unpredictable effects? More importantly how does advertising

aesthetically render the materiality of objects in ways that capture their

presence and entanglements beyond existing market framings?

The bottle as oil makes present another material reality of packaging that is

generally suppressed. It is an example of ‘thing-power materialism’ at work. For

Bennett ‘thing-power’ refers to the specific kinds of materiality that are often

obliterated by human practices of objectification and classification. In claiming

that ‘there is an existence peculiar to a thing that is irreducible to the thing’simbrication with human subjectivity’ (2004, p. 348) Bennett is not arguing for an

essentialized materialism. Rather, she is insisting that things have the capacity to

assert themselves, that their anterior physicality, their free or aleatory movements,

can capture humans as much as humans like to think they have the world of





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things under control. Recognizing the thingness of things is not to deny the

dense web of connections that they are always caught up in. It is simply to be

open to the power of matter and the possibility that it might suggest different

ways of being. The Brita ad makes the thing-power of bottles explicit; in thisdistinct media marketing assemblage the object of the package appears more

vividly as oil, as matter-movement caught up in the network of industrial

chemical processes that will become a plastic bottle. And this is its shock effect:

not the exposé of the bottle’s origins, but the new connections that are

established between the matter of oil and the responding body.

Ads can surprise and disturb us in ways we barely understand until after the

impulse has reverberated across our flesh. Their influences can work beyond

the level of consciousness and thinking. While some might argue that this is

precisely the problem with advertising, its capacity to manipulate and distort,I agree with Connolly’s (2002) claim that it is in these very moments when the

body is captured by an image, when habitual modes of viewing are disrupted or

when the powerful forces of affect are mobilized, that media techniques can

become implicated in the reorganization of perception and the dynamics of the

infrasensible. For Connolly, media are one of several key sites that reveal the

complex relations between affect, thinking and language. Their capacity to

concentrate and intensify images can affirm the powers of the sensing body and

the layered processes of thinking. In this schema, consciousness is reframed

from a self-sufficient and disciplined zone of knowing and representing, to a

zone that is subject to massive layers of sensory material and filtering. The

embodied work of thinking involves ‘powerful pressures to assimilate new

things to old habits of perception’ (2002, p. 64) and it is in the interstices of

these pressures that new ideas and sensibilities might be created: ‘these new

ideas, concepts, sensibilities and identities later become objects of knowledge

and representation. Thinking is thus creative as well as representative, and its

creativity is aided by the fact that the process of thinking is not entirely controlled

by the agents of thought’ (2002, p. 65, my emphasis).

Connolly is describing the capacity of matter to force thought. By presenting

itself as ingestible this bottle disturbs cultural boundaries and their transcod-ings on the body. Disturbance in all its multiplicity is evidence of the emergent

force of the political, of the ways in which disruption of established perceptions

and cultural classifications might prompt a different mode of political thinking,

less concerned with dissensus and contestation and more concerned with

generating other engagements with the world.

But how does this affective activation of the political in advertising generate

a public? The Brita ad is a particular form of publicity circulating in the

material and discursive realms of consumer culture. However, its distinct

aesthetic of disturbance makes it very ambiguous for viewers: should theyapprehend this public image as consumers or as concerned citizens? The

logics of its attraction are uncertain and disconcerting; it is inviting both these

identifications. In this way it shows how the contexts of commodities and

politics can share the same publicity, how they can use the same devices. Even





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though the logics of consumption and publics presume a distinction between

individual versus collective identifications this distinction is difficult to sustain.

Consumption is framed as the heartland of individualism, appealing to the self-

motivations of choice and the making of a market-mediated identity. Thesepersonal choices, however, always imagine a wider constituency, a collective

consumer witnessing our choices and symbolic identifications as a form of

public display (Warner, 2002, p. 170). In the same way responding to the

political reverberations of the Brita ad, acknowledging its affective address, also

imagines a wider constituency, an implicit connection to strangers who are also

affected by the same sense of ontological disturbance. For Bennett (2007,

p. 144), drawing on Dewey, a public requires a catalyst or dynamic event that

causes harm. If harm can mean affect modulation or disturbance then there is

no question that the political forces at work in this ad call into being a public of affected persons: a fleeting temporal assemblage ‘always in the process of

forming and dissolving’ (Bennett, 2007, p. 144). This public is also more-than-

human. In establishing new engagements with packaging, in being affected by

its vital materiality, the locus of political actancy emerges from an assemblage of

humans and nonhumans (Bennett, 2007, p.144). Bennett’s argument relates to

food but it is equally pertinent to the packages that contain it:

If an image of matter helps animate aggressively wasteful and planet-

endangering consumption, then materiality experienced as a lively force could

animate a more ecologically sustainable public. Human intentionality is surely

an essential element of the public that is emerging around the issues of obesity,

public health and food security, but it is not the only or even the key operator in

it. Food as a self-altering, dissipative materiality is also a player.

(Bennett, 2007, p. 145)

Conclusion

In the examples of packaging, recycling and advertising investigated heremarkets and publics inhabit each other. These PET bottles generate a series of

questions about their origins and destination that complicate their function as

mere market devices. These complications can be seen as hybrid forums that

activate the infrasensible registers of the political and reveal the fecundity of an

issue. While the bottle as ethical intermediary can be seen as reinforcing the

biopolitical regimes of recycling as population management, it is also more

than this. In the performance of recycling the bottle does more than simply

activate techniques of conscience, it also reveals the topological dynamics of

market assemblages, the overflowings that expose consuming as also wasting.This reflexivity implicitly captures consumers in wider collectives and

obligations to a common good beyond immediate self-interest.

In the Brita ad an expanded empiricism reveals the capacity of matter to

make explicit background affective modulations. These modulations speak to





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wider public fears of a contaminated world or a future without oil. While there

is no question that the aesthetic techniques of advertising constitute this

imaginative materiality, it is as real as any other and it prompts a questioning of

the bottle as harmless matter, the innocent stuff of packaging. In this way thebottle as oil interferes with the ontological reality that markets seek to establish.

In imagining another reality for the package other practices are suggested:

public rather than market practices.

More significantly, both these examples show how the concept of hybrid

forums can be elaborated with an investigation of the dynamics of material

expressivity and affect. What these dynamics reveal is the processual nature of

public formation, the ways in which bottles can open up a virtual space for a

potential or ‘infrapublic’ to engage in political practices. These practices might

be as minor as refilling the bottle rather than buying another, thereby refusingits disposability, or as major as starting a national campaign to re-establish

public water fountains. Whatever the dimension of these practices they

contribute to the contestation of markets. The idea of ‘infrapublics’ also

challenges the reification of publics, the assumption that they already exist and

are waiting to be convinced by the appeal of reason or that they are coherent

collectives who share a common conviction. Rather, the idea of an infrapublic,

like the infrasensible, foregrounds the political as a field of potential where

transformative actions or the construction of new collectives might emerge,

and where packaging is a participant not just a problem.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Noortje Marres and Rosalyn Diprose for helping me think through

the argument of this paper and for the very incisive readers’ reports. I am

particularly grateful to the reviewer who suggested the idea of the ‘infrapublic’

and hope my elaboration of it does it justice.

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Gay Hawkins is a Research Professor and Deputy Director of the Centre for

Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland.



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