1052 ALH Online Review, Series XXXVI https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajad055 © The Author 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity ed. Caren Irr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 291 pp. Reviewed by Leerom Medovoi, University of Arizona “Life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness by life,” Marx and Engels famously declared in their classic formulation of historical materialism. For any materialist critic today, the fact cannot be avoided that plastic is the chief material out of which we have built our modern life. Wood, metal, glass, stone, and cement still play their part, but since at least the mid-twentieth century, plastic predominates. Plastic is light and durable yet flexible and easily shaped into any form. It has also been cheap to produce. It is perfectly suited to the standardizing requirements of mass industrial production. A valuable contribution to environmental cultural criticism, Caren Irr’s collection, Life in Plastic: Artistic Responses to Petromodernity, also speaks strongly to the historical materialist question that we inherit from Marx and Engels: How does our consciousness, our culture, express our plastic life and the mode of production that gives rise to it? How does our twenty-first-century species-being coincide today with the plasticity of our material production? The book’s 13 chapters consider these questions by means of a wide variety of plastic artifacts. Along the way, we encounter a graphic novel about a plastic sex doll, John Waters’s trash masterpiece Polyester (1981), the era of the long-playing vinyl album, human bodies entombed in plastic, climate change poetry, inflatable lifeboats in a museum installation about political refugees, the swirls of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a respected novel by Richard Powers, and several works of postapocalyptic science fiction. Predictably, these wide-ranging artifacts express our plastic life in strikingly different ways. Irr’s is a centrifugal collection that spirals out in many directions, and I cannot address all its essays individually here. Still, there are important common themes. In one way or another, all the chapters address some combination of three distinctive characteristics of plastic materiality: its malleability, its durability, and finally its disposability. As we know, plastic is composed of compounds refined out of crude oil that are then chemically altered into long molecular chains (polymers) that offer a malleability hitherto associated with only a few other substances such as clay or wax. Naming these synthetic materials “plastic” allowed their malleability to eclipse their petro-sourcing. Like all commodities, plastic’s fetishization obscures the process of its production. The name indexes neither what it is made from nor how it is made but instead what it can do. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/article/35/2/1052/7159625 by guest on 13 May 2023