A critical cartography of the governing power of disposable plastic : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology at Massey University, New Zealand

Abstract

Plastic pollution is a global, wicked problem leading to large scale ecocide, but the burden of pollution is carried asymmetrically on the various bodies, including human ones, that are affected by it. Western psychology has been slow to respond to the crisis, even though plastic is a ubiquitous part of daily socio-cultural practices and has catastrophic impacts on people going about their everyday lives. In this thesis, I offer a critical cartography (Braidotti, 2019) tracing the agency of waste, plastic, and particularly of disposable plastic, informed by new materialist methodology, in order to explore whether plastic is a governing power. I take up the concept of mundane governance (Woolgar & Neyland, 2014) mapping three landmarks as sites of potential governance – material semiotics, the circular economy and disposable plastic as an ethical intermediary. The figuration of the privileged consumer emerges from discussion of these sites to become ethically questionable within a cyclical process of governance and coercion. Questions of power and violence consistently surface from the cartography, questioning not only the agency of the visible privileged consumer but also the impacts of continual plastic colonialism on those who invisibly (humans, animals, plants, the environment) and silently bear the brunt of western capitalist recycling and waste disposal systems. The importance of bodies (human and non-human) and of bodies-as-politics emerged as an essential landmark feature that underpins disposable plastic governance and our relations with this material. The formulation of the plasticised psychological subject as one who is inextricably intertwined asymmetrically within practices of biopower, global power relations and unpredictable and unstable associations with the plastic itself opens up questions for the discipline of psychology.