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Packaging water: plastic bottles

as market and public devices
Gay Hawkins
Published online: 21 Nov 2011.

To cite this article: Gay Hawkins (2011) Packaging water: plastic bottles
as market and public devices, Economy and Society, 40:4, 534-552, DOI:
10.1080/03085147.2011.602295
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Economy and Society Volume 40 Number 4 November 2011: 534
552

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Packaging water: plastic

bottles as market and public
devices
Gay Hawkins

Abstract
The emergence of bottled water as one of the fastest growing markets in the global
beverage industry has attracted much attention, most of it negative. It seems that no
sooner had the plastic bottle of water appeared as a mass rather than a boutique
commodity than it became a matter of concern. A huge variety of activist campaigns
have sprung up against bottles, focusing on everything from plastic wastes to
chemical leaching. There is now no question that, in many places, diverse
environmental publics stalk this commodity. How then does the framing of bottled
water as a controversial issue interact with its markets? Using a range of examples,
this paper investigates Callons idea of markets as hybrid forums and key sites for the
proliferation of the social. However, rather than focus on the deliberative processes
of 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 its
origins and afterlife, long after games of value are exhausted. Analysis of affective
modulation and vital materialism extends debates in economic sociology in critical
ways. First, it shows how objects can acquire political capacity, how their material
force, or thing-power as Jane Bennett calls it, can become ethically and politically
potent. Second, it reveals more-than-human politics and publics as often affective, as
caught 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: g.hawkins@uq.edu.au
Copyright # 2011 Taylor & Francis
ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.602295

Gay Hawkins: Packaging water

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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 which
the functioning and organization of particular markets . . . are discussed and
debated.
(Callon, Me adel & 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
Callons (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 has
been 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

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weekend magazine of the Sydney Morning Herald, Richard Grant described in

graphic detail the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre. This is a zone where several
major currents converge bringing with them all the flotsam from the Pacific
Rim coasts: Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These
days it is 90 per cent plastic . . . plastic particles in our oceans are killing a
million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals a year (2009, p. 21). The
beverage industrys claim that single-use bottles are sustainable thanks to
recycling is also regularly disputed. Data collected in Clarkes book Inside the
bottle (2008, p. 73) show that only a small percentage of bottles make it into
effective recycling facilities, it also shows that plastics are the fastest growing
form of municipal waste in the US.
These controversies provide a snapshot of the extent of the dissent around
bottles. While the commodification of water is equally provocative and has its
own range of campaigns these often, inevitably, return to the bottle. As much
as beverage companies may try to neutralize the bottle by representing it as an
innocuous means to an end: a container for accessing mountain springs or
pure health, its reputation as a problem continues to grow. This is because
bottled water represents the triumph of packaging. In many cases the contents
of the bottle are nothing more than purified tap water, easily and cheaply
available in most developed countries. So what the consumer is really buying is
a package, a portable device for drinking, for hydration on the go as the ads
like to say. In the case of bottled water the package is at the heart of market
arrangements, it allows new relations of calculation to be established around
water that interfere with its status as a ubiquitous service. Even though water
flowing through taps and provided by utilities is often subject to various
market arrangements it is generally not experienced as a singularized good.
Bottles contain and delimit water and make it mobile in ways that taps do not
and this is why their role in market arrangements is so crucial. And, as the
massive range of anti-bottle campaigns show, these arrangements are increasingly contested and fragile.
While the branding and labels on bottles may be full of information about
the qualities and source of the water, its role in personal health management or
its superiority to taps, an article in a newspaper might be pointing out the risks
of chemical leaching from the container. This foregrounds the bottles
material-semiotic multiplicity, its different, and sometimes conflicting, identities in various associations and its capacity to capture consumers and
concerned publics. The challenge is to understand the interactions and partial
connections between these identities (Strathern, 1991). How do bottles
participate in the materialization of markets and the engagement of publics
and how might these processes become interconnected? These are the
questions driving this essay. However, rather than look at bottled-water
packaging and the numerous environmental publics opposed to it as separate
phenomena, activities specific to the domains of the economy or politics,
I want to investigate how the processes of making markets and publics can
become inter-articulated. How do the devices used to assemble markets

Gay Hawkins: Packaging water

537

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?

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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 righthand corner of the image declares: Last year 16 million gallons of oil
were consumed to make plastic water bottles. Above the womens head is a
website address: filterforgood.com. Its 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 information 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 apprehend
bottled 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, Britas 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 products
over 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 reach
of the market. According to an analysis of this campaign in the newsletter of
the International Public Relations Association (2010) this was precisely Britas
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 responsibilization 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 function
of 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 adequately
investigated 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,

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539

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 and
sustaining 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 become
connected. I develop my argument in three steps. First, I look at the
significance of Callons concept of hybrid forum and the ways in which it can
be productively extended with theoretical perspectives from political philosophy. 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
Callons concept of hybrid forum is to show how markets can acquire a political
dimension, the value of political philosophy is to foreground how matter and
affect 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 sophisticated 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 significant 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 different
ways. 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 boundaries
of 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 distinctions
between 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 their
fecundity, 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). Callons 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 antipolitical 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:

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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 and
dialogue, 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 the
culturally 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 Deleuzes
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 their
effects.
Warners 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 the
foundation 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 mediated
sociality 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, displacing
disciplining 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 ontological
disturbance 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 the
multiple 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 is
acknowledged in critiques of bottled water, its role is generally reduced to
that of a highly moralized bad material. Most activist analyses of the bottledwater 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 markets
and 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. From
the 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 extend
these markets. PETs 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 Grandcle ment-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 more
mediated 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 that
consumption 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
Grandcle ment-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 Grandcle ment-Chaffys 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
consumers attention. Political packaging, as they call it, is supported by
wider policy regimes and health regulations and it gradually claims more space
on 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 Grandcle ment-Chaffys 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 and
affordance. 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. Lurys argument about brand as assemblage can be
equally 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. The
recycling 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 Lurys (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 develop
techniques 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 packaging
can 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 recycling
logo. 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 where
things end up. Recycling is a private gesture made public that implicates the
recycler in disinterested concern for a wider public good.

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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 nonhuman
intermingling; 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 overcoded 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 case
of 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 things
imbrication 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 this
distinct 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 expose of the bottles 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 Connollys (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 transcodings 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 they
apprehend 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 selfmotivations of choice and the making of a market-mediated identity. These
personal 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-thanhuman. 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). Bennetts 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 planetendangering 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 here
markets 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 the
bottle 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 refusing
its 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.