Book Review | Plastic Matter, by Heather Davis (Duke University Press, 2022)

In her 2022 book Plastic Matter, Heather Davis offers readers a provocation: Plastic is "not just any material but is emblematic of material relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries" (1).Davis's goals over the book's four chapters are about thinking with plastic in ways that include, but exceed, specific brute materials and industrial infrastructures that make them possible.Plastic and plasticity signify and manifest something "deeper" and "beyond" materials (23).That "something" is an orientation to matter that idealizes it as available for exploitation and able to take any form desired by a clever master manipulator.Davis explains that plastic, the actual material, is a synthetic product derived from conditions that do not exist outside the envelopes of technoscience.Those conditions of production are part of the paradox of plastic.Plastic is derived only from particular arrangements of Earth-bound people, machines, and living and nonliving nonhuman others, yet it is not "natural."It is also ubiquitous.Like Earth's atmosphere, plastic and plasticity are environs for all.For Davis, they compose surroundings and conditions into which everyone and everything is born and of which all are heirs.These are conditions Davis calls "synthetic universality" and they force a question: What might it mean to live in and with such ubiquity, one composed of mineralized fossil life, the ravages of settler colonialism and extractivism, but also a ubiquity that might just offer hints of other more salutary ways of being?As Davis points out in the book's second chapter, once plastic is manufactured, it proliferates beyond the envelopes of industrialism and consumerism and spills into the broader environment.Plastic is everywhere, even becoming geologically significant as a novel form of rock called "plastiglomerate."Plastiglomerate-an