Concrete and Plastic

Front matter

a

R

F

Index

Contents viii

191 209

1.1 2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1

4.2

5.1

Figures

Berlin Wall souvenir

‘Plastiglomerate’ by Joshua Franzos

‘Boulder Dam, 1942’ by Ansel Adams

‘Boulder Dam, 1941’ by Ansel Adams

“Matilija Dam, California 2014 by Carsten Meier ‘Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980-83’ by Christo and Jeanne-Claude

“The Floating Piers, Lake Iseo, Italy, 2014-16’ by Christo and Jeanne-Claude

‘= = Ae -panoramio (1)’ by The Erica Chang

130 165

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the multiple privileges that meant I could write this book. I acknowledge the systematic disadvantages that are un-dis-entangle-able from my own privileges. I acknowledge the violently displaced and decimated peoples, the Noongar, whose lands sustained my childhood. I acknowledge the livelihoods and livelinesses that sustain my life now. I acknowledge the shortcomings of these acknowledgements.

I acknowledge that a project like this ekes out space and time (ten years!) from other things, and other people. I owe thanks, at least, to many things and people.

This book had a previous life as a thesis, a German creature called a Habilitation, submitted at the University of Potsdam. For their generous reports I would like to thank Anja Schwarz, Nicole Waller and Ingrid Hotz-Davies. I would like to thank the colleagues and friends who stood by me during that phase and at a distance, outside, to celebrate.

Thanks go to my colleagues at the University of Mainz (Germersheim), at the University of Potsdam and at the University of Rostock: in particular to Oliver Czulo and Sabina Matter-Seibel in Germersheim, Anja Miller-Wood in Mainz, for her remarks on chapters, as well as her support for the project in its earlier stages, and at Potsdam, I would like to thank Lars Eckstein (in addition to those mentioned above), the people of the RTG ‘minor cosmopolitanisms, and the very collegial English Department there, as well as the fine people of my current workplace in Rostock.

Thanks go to further colleagues who were generous in giving their time to read and comment on parts of the project. My thanks go to Roman Bartosch and Sonja Frenzel, and to Ingrid Hotz-Davies, who continues to be a most perceptive mentor. Nina Jürgens deserves a special thanks for her readings and comments and for the index. Thanks must go to many other colleagues and students who replenished my thinking with seemingly random concrete and plastic stuff, and to Baldeep Kaur for being a great reading partner. For invites to give talks about different parts of this project, thanks go to Roman Bartosch, Joanna Durczak, Sonja Frenzel, Alexandra Ganser, Kerstin Knopf, Pavan Malreddy, Kai Merten, Timo Miller, Miriam Nandi, Caroline Rosenthal, Wolfgang Struck and the x Acknowledgements organizers and participants at several GAPS summer schools. My thanks also go to Alexandra Rossiyskaya for her work on helping shape the final manuscript.

At Bloomsbury and adjacent, I would like to thank Greg Garrard (series editor), Ben Doyle (Publisher), Laura Cope (Assistant Editor), Joe Skingsley (publishing team), Rebecca Heselton (cover design) and Balasuwathiga (Project Manager at Newgen). For their feedback, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers from Bloomsbury. I would also like to explicitly thank Julie Sperling for allowing me to use a photo of her mosaic “We Were Here Now’ on the cover.

I am obliged to the University of Rostock and its University Library, whom I would like to thank for their financial support making Open Access publication possible.

Thanks go to the artists who have allowed me to include their artwork in this book, and thanks also to the thinkers, writers and makers whose work made my work possible: You will find these people acknowledged throughout the book.

I want to also thank my friends, who have provided support over the years: the time span has meant several moves, several new jobs and two children. Here I think in particular of Mathilde Bessert-Nettelbeck, Julia Boll, Julie Fielder, Jennifer Henke, Nina Jürgens, Ines Koenen, Louise Niggermeier, Angy Polania, Geoff Rodoreda, Anja Schwarz, Julia Spanke, and the ex-bowling-crew in Bremen.

Thanks go to my family. To my mum, Ann Crane, RIP, to my dad, Les Crane, and to my brothers, Murray Crane and Gavin Crane. Thanks also to Reinhild Duda and Thomas Miiller for their support. And, of course, to Sebastian, Elliot and Oscar Duda, for their patience and other things. This is the book I’ve been writing for so long.

Introduction

Denkstoff: A souvenir

An object on my desk: A strip of plastic, 2 mm thick, curved like a ‘C; and fixed in it, a chunk of concrete, around 30 mm x 20 mm x 15 mm in size. The concrete part has yellow and orange paint on one, flattened, side, otherwise its edges are uneven. The plastic has printed on it a stylized map of Berlin, with flags showing the division into sectors following the Second World War, and reads ‘Berlin Wall; 13.09.1961-09.11.1989; Allied Checkpoint Charlie’ on the side where the paint on the concrete is visible.' The other side reads “You are leaving the American Sector in English, Russian, French and, in much smaller print, ‘Sie verlassen den amerikanischen Sektor.

Describing it now in such detail several years after purchasing it on a whim - feeling ‘tickled’ that such a small object in a souvenir stand might make use of both of the materials in my book - it becomes clear to me that the object itself does not explicitly claim to be what I never believed it was: a piece of the Berlin Wall. The sum of the materials — in particular the concrete, the paint and, crucially, the quasi-preserving plastic - together with the information printed on the plastic obliquely suggest that this is what Iam purchasing. But the artefact stops short of the outright claim to such a provenance. My souvenir does not re-present the Berlin Wall, but it cannot exist without it.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its banality, it is an interesting object. And it is an interesting amalgamation of materials. As an object, it relies heavily on its context: as a souvenir bought at the Berlin airport, through the writing and images printed on the plastic, and through the lurid yellow and orange paint on one, flatter, surface of the concrete. As souvenir, it functions within a

1 As of 5 February 2018, the wall was down longer than it was up.

Figure 1.1 Berlin Wall souvenir.

L: With sunlight and shadow, atop concrete. R: Less ‘busy’ background. Both photographs by the author.

semiotics of travel and tourism (cf. Urry 2002, Culler 1988: 153-67). According to the dictionary, it is ‘a thing that is kept as a reminder of a person, place or event’ (‘Souvenir’). It is a material reminder of a trip to Berlin, for myself, and perhaps it also reminds others that I am the sort of person who has been to Berlin. The souvenir also speaks to political projects, specifically the historical circumstances that gave rise to the construction of the wall. In this, it also speaks to the ways in which we organize and conceptualize the (social) world within which we live.’ In particular ways, the object, sitting on my desk, objects to being ‘simply’ an object.

> The trajectory from the singular T to the plural ‘we’ is never straight or straightforward. I use the ‘we’ in this book to evoke a collective position that extends beyond the singular of the T throughout this book. I recognize that this is problematic for the ways in which it interpellates the reader into positions of identification or resistance. The ‘we, nonetheless, is used for exactly this reason, and with my own hesitations riding with it. This ‘we’ should work to probe my own privilege as well as, potentially, that of my readers: This privilege - although it will map differently over the identity categories of gender, sex, sexuality, class, nationality, residence, disability, ethnicity and race - is a given. Those who can and who take the time to read this book inhabit positions of privilege: privileges of education, of time (affordances of occupation or preoccupation), of class and of intellectual capacity, amongst others. I also use these first-person pronouns to indicate the positions and angles (cf. esp. Ahmed 2010: 37), which the material of the book presents. You(!) will note there are a series of footnotes trying to do this work throughout the book: My hope is that, together, they can trace the problems, and also the necessity, of the first-person plural.

For Bill Brown, the ‘object-ness’ of objects is a function of the way in which they are made objects, that is, placed in relation to subjects (humans, often of an unspecified kind), where ‘things’ are that which trouble, or escape, such simple, dichotomic relations. He argues: ‘As they circulate through our lives, we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture - above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things’ (Brown 2001: 4, emphasis in original). Things, or ‘thingness, begin(s) to become evident when such relations break down: “The story of objects asserting themselves as things, Brown claims, ‘is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation’ (ibid.).

The ‘clunkiness’ of the souvenir as an object is its ‘thingness, the ways it forms and resists ‘straightforward’ attributions of meaning.’ Such ‘straightforwardness’ is, of course, a function of very specific ways of thinking. For Alison Jones and Te Kawehau Hoskins, in their discussion of Maori ontology, a ‘thing’ ‘is not understood as discrete or independent, but emerges through, and as, relations with everything else’ (Jones and Hoskins 2016: 80). This is one example for how indigenous epistemologies recognize relations in ways with which dominant epistemologies might struggle, and part of that has to do with language. In my examination of the souvenir, the object (noun) begins to object (verb) at the moment of discovery: I didn’t buy it believing it was a piece of the Berlin Wall - even as I later realized that the object itself does not specifically claim to be so. But it doesn’t ‘stop’ here: ‘souvenir, deriving from the Latin subvenire, ‘occur to the mind, is incredibly generative, lots of ‘stuff to think about. A kind of Denkobjekt, a Denkfigur, but most pressingly, Denkstoff. It has, for me, never been a ‘simple object’

The appeal of the souvenir was not only the way that it pushed back on its meanings, the way that it purported to be something it probably wasn't. Simultaneously, the myth of clear relations between it as object and its social relations (that somehow are external to it) crumbled, like concrete. For me, the

> Things assert themselves most readily when they no longer function as objects, for Bill Brown. He explains his ‘thing’ as encompassing ‘a massive generality as well as particularities, ... the concrete yet ambiguous within the everyday ...[,] a place holder for some future specifying operation ...[,] an amorphous characteristic or a frankly irresolvable enigma (Brown 2001: 4, emphasis added). Things, Brown argues, tend to ‘index a certain limit or liminality, to hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and the unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable’ (ibid.: 5). Note the auspicious use of ‘concrete’ in the first quotation, and the ‘plasticity’ of the ways in which ‘things’ shift through thresholds.

appeal of the object was also the materials from which it was made, the substance as much as its substantiality: its materiality.

The materiality of the souvenir is its very concreteness and plasticity: made of concrete (noun) and plastic (noun), but also in the other senses of the words. It ‘exist[s] in a material or physical form’ (as adjective; ‘Concrete’) and is ‘easily shaped or moulded’ (again, as adjective; Plastic’). This duality of meanings stretches the relations of the materials to their respective environments, and such stretching reaches through dimensions of place and time, that is, it is temporal and spatial. In this book, I shift from asking questions of the object-thing-itemartefact — that which pertains to be discrete, somehow - to the materials of which it is made.

Take a second look at the photos of my souvenir (Figure 1.1). I took them outside, to take advantage of the good light conditions. I used my phone to take the left photograph first, only to realize how difficult it was to see it against the background of my balcony. The patterns of the background ‘interrupted’ the image. I went inside and got a piece of paper, altered the orientation of the souvenir to be parallel to the camera and shifted it into the shade. This was a ‘better’ image, I initially thought. But: It is only better with respect to some criteria.

Tim Ingold notes the exclusion of particular phenomena of our worlds from philosophical considerations. He invites his reader in “Materials against Materiality’ to consider sunlight as part of the ‘material world, despite its exclusion from conceptual frames (cf. Ingold 2007: 3-4). In the images of my souvenir, the left photograph is the more captivating, perhaps not just because of the ‘interferences’ of the concrete tiles upon which it was photographed, but also the inclusion of the shadows, giving ‘shape’ and mass to the object. The shadow appeals to the senses: not just the visual sense, but also the tactile ones (as flitting between direct sunlight and the shade will prove, on a hot sunny day as much as a cold one). It seems as if reckoning with artefacts as objects, if not things, relies on a visual paradigm of knowledge, that ‘draws boundaries’ around objects: The shadow impinges on this otherwise seemingly absolute separability.

Other senses will also undoubtedly suggest boundedness: We can touch, smell and taste. We run into things, drop things, feel things; we can listen to them, sniff at them (or turn away from their odours), and savour their flavours, or spit things out in disgust. But this list already suggests the ways in which this boundedness, or separability, becomes (increasingly) fragile. Sight and sound require a medium for us to perceive them, and this medium links us to that which is perceived; touching, smelling and tasting are even more ‘trans-corporeal’ senses, that is, those, following Stacy Alaimo, ‘in which the human is always inter-meshed with the more-than-human world’ (Alaimo 2010: 2).* Smell, like taste, involves particles passing into our bodies.

My wonder, happenchance-like-happiness (cf. Ahmed 2010), at the souvenir is coupled with a dismay that derives from realizing the purchase has solidified the demand for what is ultimately a piece of junk, a-thing-becoming-waste. These oscillating feelings unsettle the presence of the souvenir on my desk. Stephanie Bunn helps here, reminding me to think about the act of making as a ‘working with rather than a doing to’ (Bunn 1999: 15, emphasis in original): How can we work with the souvenir, the Denkstoff, rather than doing something to it? My answer is to consider it in terms of its materiality, the materials of which it is made. It is a turn towards material culture that takes the material seriously.

‘Materiality’ I use in a way that could also be ‘material-ness’: it references the matters of material. It is not used in any sense that is divorceable from materials themselves. In the frame of this book, Tim Ingold’s statement that urges that ‘we take a step back, from the materiality of objects to the properties of materials’ (Ingold 2007: 9) does not make sense. My thinking insists on relations between sites, peoples, times, biotic and abiotic matters, and the ways these are upheld or truncated. If Ingold feels secure in stating that ‘it is significant that studies of so-called material culture have focused overwhelmingly on processes of consumption rather than productior (ibid.), this critique is met in the following sections, where I trace the becomings of plastic to ‘get’ concrete.

Why concrete and plastic? The materials that this book works through are both modern, at least in their application: they derive from industrial processes. They are abundant, ubiquitous, and readily identifiable (in opposition to, say, silica): they are (also) ‘cheap’ (cf. Patel and Moore 2020). I would wager that most (probably all) of my readers will be able to identify several items comprising these materials in their near vicinities, or at least in their day-to-day lives. Concrete and plastic accompany us through our lives.

Alaimo’s explication of the ‘trans-corporeal’ continues by stressing movement and shifts: By emphasizing the movement across bodies, trans-corporeality reveals the interchanges and interconnections between various bodily natures. But by underscoring that trans indicates movement across different sites, trans-corporeality also opens up a mobile space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors’ (Alaimo 2010: 2, emphasis in original).

Whilst there are some aspects of Ingold’s chapter that make coherent points for this book - “Wherever life is going on, they [materials] are relentlessly on the move - flowing, scraping, mixing and mutating’ (Ingold 2007: 11) for instance — the contradistinctions and oppositions Ingold establishes to make his point elsewhere read awkwardly in thinking through materialities here, possibly due to his dependencies on phenomenology, which often problematically draws on assumptions of universalist, privileged perception.

And yet, crucially, they are not dormant nor static. In production, they transform through various states (being fluid, then formed, then forms). Both plastic and concrete can be described as ‘paradigmatic matter-like material|[s]’ that ‘when poured into a rigid formwork ... appear [to] seamlessly to take on the shape of [their] mould’ (Lloyd Thomas 2015: 272).°

Concrete and plastic are present on different scales. Concrete, for instance, in household decorations (fashionable at the time of drafting this introduction) and even jewellery, as well as the material in memorials, (large) buildings and dams, infrastructures; plastic as ‘microscopic or tiny particles, both in our bodies and outside (as in glitter or body peelings), as well as packaging material, and as insulation of pipelines, also infrastructures. The kinds of connections I am forging through an examination of the materials belie such scales, going beyond the readily apprehensible ‘near-humar’ scales of the objects, to the molecular (through hormonal interventions) and the global (through trade). As Waters et al. suggest, polychlorinated biphenyls are ‘among the many distinct geochemical signatures that human activities have introduced into the sedimentary record’ (Waters et al. 2016: web). In Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron is more insistent, noting bisphenol A, or BPA’s ‘ubiquity is better understood as violence, a manifestation of the permission-to-pollute system that allows BPA to be found in nearly all those tested’ (Liboiron 2021: 87). The extremes of this scale - the molecular and the global - are in fact more interlinked than immediately apparent at the intermediate levels of perception (see also Chapter 2).

The fluidity of concrete and plastic at certain stages of their production lends itself to thinking about the interconnections of matter, at both discernible and indiscernible scales. That, further, these materials interact with fluids - the water contained by dams (cf. Chapter 3) or the oceans within which they coalesce (cf. Chapter 2) - is more than a coincidence: The fluidity of materials needs to be conceptualized alongside their quotidian status as objects that appear to resist, condense or suspend fluidity.

Whilst we might consider them as being already formed (as a consequence of having been poured, moulded or printed) and somehow inert, dormant or passive, concrete and plastic rather continually shape our lives and our imaginations. This, too, happens at various scales: global, local, individual and cellular. Plastic and concrete shape our (imagination of our) future and our

€ For Katie Lloyd Thomas, they are part ofa longer tradition of discussions of matter in the hylomorphic mode, comprising bronze, wax, clay, as well as gold (cf. Lloyd Thomas 2015: 271, 282-4). “These materials work well as paradigms of matter because, at least in their liquid state, they are formless in themselves, she argues (ibid.: 271).

responses to ever-shifting presences and the ever-shifting present. Although the bulk of this book separates the materials into analytical chapters - Chapters 2, 3, 4 and 5 - the impetus of reading the two materials in conjunction produces numerous insights, resulting in concrete plastics and plastic concretes. This is the plasticoncrete of the next section.

The emphasis on concrete and plastic arises from a conviction that the materials of the world are not ‘simply’ shaped by us’ - and the capacity for both materials to be formed addresses this aspect - but to query the ways in which, conversely, materials of the world might shape us. It is a project, then, that finds a particular urgency in its articulation within the rubrics of the Anthropocene, which I discuss in more detail later, in the section ‘Condensing relations. Thinking the Anthropocene demands careful consideration of the impact of human inventions and interventions on the environment and the way that this shapes us and our temporally and spatially removed others. The Anthropocene maps unevenly through disciplines, time, materials and space. It is not a concern that can be compartmentalized to the future, but might be, for a privileged few, a concern that is not considered immediate.

Against, or with, this, consider my conflicting feelings about the enduring materiality of the souvenir. As what I call a ‘future artefact’, my piece of concrete wrapped in a © of plastic will be, in a speculative future, only material. The concrete and plastic souvenir of (or at least, ‘pertaining to’) the Berlin Wall is going to be thrown ‘away’ at some time in the future: It has a future dimension which emerges with its materiality. It invites the invention of stories - what will happen to it? Who will throw it ‘away’? - not only of the future, but also of the past: Was it ever part of the Wall? Where was it made? Where do its ‘bits’ come from? And, what of my ‘Berlin Wall’ souvenir when memory of the wall no longer is in circulation? What of the physicality of this piece of concrete fused with plastic when the clues to its provenance have disappeared (rubbed off, or the languages have disappeared)? I respond to such questions by thinking about ‘future artefacts; evoking disruptive potentials that unfold through transformations of multiple presents and presences.

Without the cultural context of the Berlin Wall, and without the broader cultural context that gave rise to my purchase, my souvenir doesn't fulfil any particular function. It’s actually pretty useless: It can't contain or preserve anything (Chapter 4), it does not generate power (Chapter 3). If it does not

7 Again, recognize this first-person plural as a shorthand for a more-than-me plural, speculative as it is, and imbued with positions of privilege.

‘signify’ within a cultural context that values souvenirs, and that understands the importance of the Berlin Wall, then it is rather useless. The German slang word is Stehrumski (a thing that stands [steh] around [rum]), in English perhaps it is a thingimibob: a thing, exceeding its function as an object, by retreating back from its functionality. But inevitably, irrevocably, indisputably: material.

My souvenir, the Denkstoff, the piece of concrete wrapped in plastic, is undoubtedly a fabricated object. It was produced somewhere. Plastic is an industrial product, as is cement, a key component of concrete. Thinking materiality pushes back on the timelines of production, however, extending beyond the shaping into the prehistories of materials. Thinking materials connects plastic bottles to prehistoric creatures (e.g. Morton 2010: 29).8 It also connects coral reefs with concrete high-rises, as evoked in the strange, unsettling juxtapositions in Romesh Gunesekera’s novel Reef: “Mister Salgado only slowed down when we came to the skull-heaps of petrified coral — five-foot pyramids beside smoky kilns - marking the allotments of a line of impoverished limemakers, tomorrow’s cement fodder, crumbling on the loveliest stretch of the coast’ (Gunesekera 1994: 59-60). Here, off the coast of an imagined Sri Lanka, we recognize the material relations of concrete, with impoverished workers chipping away at localized beauty for construction sites elsewhere.

The temporal dimension of the futurity of my Denkstoff is an affair of the imagination. It is an invention (see also ‘Invention: Coming into relations’ section). Spatially removed dimensions are, for most of us, accessed through the imagination, as in the Gunesekera vignette. It is in the dimensions that stretch from the specific manifestations of the materials, connecting them to disparate places and times, that two, equally crucial, objectives and specifications of this project emerge: The cultural use of materials, coupled with recognition of the ways in which materials are formed by us and also form us (and thus shape our ways of engaging with the world).

Cultural representations, as human-made artefacts, might seem to willingly reproduce the anthropocentric conceptualization of materials and materiality (if distinct) that this book pushes back on: They are, predominantly, representations made by humans and for humans. However, this does not mean that they might not develop, or invent, alternate ways of imagining the world and its relations. Such cultural representations, or ‘texts, do not have to be overtly didactic (in

* Although not the dinosaurs Morton suggests, see Greg Garrard’s critique: “While it sounds cool to say that “We drive around using crushed dinosaur parts” (p. 29), the fact is that oil comes mainly from marine micro-organisms’ (Garrard 2012: 201). I still like the idea of thinking about this with dinosaurs, though.

the ‘prescribing’ or even ‘patronizing’ sense) to engage and challenge their audiences’ perceptions of the world: Oftentimes it is rather the subtle ways in which they shift or alter the way in which their audiences reflect on their own positionings and behaviours.’

Not just a framework, culture is seen as product and producing agent, as creation, creator and creating (cf. also Sheller 2014: 64).'° How, from a perspective schooled in literary and cultural studies, is it possible to interpret (‘read’) the objects, things, indeed materials of the environment as not hyperseparated (Plumwood 1993) from representation, but as crucially, irrevocably, tangibly entangled with representation? Rejecting the commitment to mimesis that pervades assumptions that the ontological world is radically different and yet simultaneously grounds for (politically motivated schools of) literary analysis, I propose patterns of interpretation that diffract rather than reflect (drawing on the work of Karen Barad). Accordingly, texts are not readily divided into primary and secondary, a division that appears to suggest that some texts merely ‘support’ interpretations of others, or provide a structural framework through which they are interpreted. Following Jussi Parikka, we might consider that the (Foucauldian) archive ‘is not only about the statements and rules found in books and libraries. Instead [perhaps: Moreover], it is to be found in technological networks of machines and institutions, patterns of education and drilling’ (Parikka 2015: 2). To supplement this list, this sense of the archive is also in the unwritten records of oral histories (to name an obvious omission), as well as in the practiced and rehearsed (learnt and taught) practices of interaction with the material world passed on through trades, crafts and ‘tinkering’

° I adopt the term ‘positioning’ to reckon with shifting allegiances in manners pertaining to identity politics. Stuart Hall, in ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora, puts forward this term in opposition to essence, as a means of negotiating practices that nevertheless make meaning possible (1990). It is strategic, also in the sense of Gayatri Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ (2003), but also entails arbitrary and contingent endings producing an excess, something ‘left over’. The term ‘positioning’ references the spatial domain, as do the close-cognates ‘situated knowledge’ (Haraway 1988), ‘angle’ (Ahmed 2010: 37) and ‘besides’ (Sedgwick 2003: 8). The gerund form serves to stress this as a process, an ongoing endeavour, with the further, desired, effect of flitting between stasis and motion. It thus picks up on Karen Barad’s critique of self-positioning as a reflective practice that ultimately remains in the domain of mirroring, or, as literary scholars would put it, mimesis (e.g. Barad 2007: 72). Why do I stress positioning? As a corrective to universalist tendencies masked as ‘subject’ positions, and to stress the ethical impetus of this book.

A basic tenet of this book is that the forms available for the description of the world influence the way that access to this world is mediated and understood. This is not to suggest a teleology of increased comprehension, a development of ideas that reach towards a singular and attainable truth, but, instead, I want to suggest that asking different questions through different means with different texts will pluralize the truths of the world, and jostle beside other, perhaps more canonical or established, epistemologies.

s

Thinking concrete, thinking plastic: Plasticoncrete

For this section I use a neologism," plasticoncrete, to probe the ways in which the concrete informs the plastic, the ways in which concrete pushes back on plastic, and vice versa.” Plasticoncrete is a heuristic device, used to bring the two terms as close together as possible. Thinking concrete, thinking plastic - thinking plasticoncrete - means dwelling on relations forged between the two materialities: their etymologies and forms, their temporal and spatial locations, their import in quotidian material practices. Plasticoncrete entails mobilizing meanings with materialities.

The key terms of this book - concrete and plastic - are used both as a noun and as an adjective in English. Historically, the use of concrete and plastic as adjectives preceded the respective uses as nouns: In both cases, this suggests that the material, the noun, cannot be divorced from the associations of the adjective. Thinking concrete, thinking plastic entails mobilizing the valencies of plasticoncrete in language: the conceptual infrastructure that gives rise to (material) practices.

Concrete and the concrete: Fiona Allen notes that ‘as soon as concrete acquires a definite article, “the concrete’, it becomes an abstraction’ (Allen 2015: 237). This is concrete becoming less concrete, becoming abstract. At the same time, Leonard Koren observes: “We rely on [concrete’s] absolute physical integrity to lend solidity and certitude, real and metaphoric, to our lives’ (Koren 2012: 13). This is concrete becoming (more? is that possible?) concrete.