Death by Trinkets
on not seeing the collective effects of itty bitty shit bits of plastic at civilisational repetition and planetary scale
In our recent conversation, Chris and I talked about how a lot of contemporary life tends toward the unwitting, unintentional yet systemic and consequential production of ‘itty bitty shit bits’, life shredded into the micro plastics of attention and electronic-reactive piecemeal work tasks, which are consequential, but lack meaning. In some cases, as I explore here, it’s actual plastic…
Two things about humanity.
Firstly, we tend to be all caught up in whatever is preoccupying us, quite often some sticky worry that sticks to us and stops us seeing and hearing what’s actually present.
The real danger is often that we don’t clock the real danger.
Secondly, whether in the contractions of our small obsessive worries, or the protractions of our big epochal fears, we are almost always apprehensive about the wrong thing.
All apprehensiveness is a misapprehension, as a general rule.
Consider the role of the Katechon in some iterations of Christianity: the Antichrist *is* coming (this is taken as a given); the Eschaton is imminent (but we don’t quite know when). Given the kind of Christian you were, this was/is either the Big Worry, or it’s the Big Surprise Party we’re all standing in the dark for (when will He come? – shh!). But unlike for certain sects who eagerly awaited the Eschaton, the Katechon was posited as a world-restraining counterforce, a law-based holding off of the chaos, disorder and lawlessness of the Antichrist ‘to come’ (Biden contra Trump, kinda).
As an interesting post in Critical Legal Thinking explores, for Carl Schmitt, odd Hobbesian Catholic and careerist Nazi that he was, “[t]he symbolization of the katechon... is used not only to legitimize his concept of sovereignty, but also becomes the basic structural principle around which the totality of history is to be conceived”. By positing the inevitable imminence of an End, one can then counterposit a whole theory of law, the state, sovereignty, and political order. The Order that is is also the only defence against the End. No mean feat! Machina ex deus.
I have lived with a person in my extended family whose Protestant millenarian sect likewise based their whole Being on earth on the promise of a Paradise to come (for them) and the joyful imminence of a cleaving judgment (for all). In this case, that includes the eternal damnation of intimate family members who were not accepting of this particular interpretation of scriptural prophecy. So as someone outside the sect, I too was eternally damned, when it came down to it. This always seemed to me to be a harsh thing to believe about one’s loved ones; it was also hard to square with the sweet, bubbly, optimistic grandparent they also were.
Our beliefs – all our beliefs – are curious things whose weirdness we don’t credit enough.
One inadvertent effect of the way this person’s beliefs structured their relation to time and materiality – in a life lived almost entirely in middle class suburbia in the twentieth century, in something like Howard Arkley’s inversion of the above picture – manifested in their choice of kitchen appliances. Perhaps it was just that they were cheap, or of undiscerning tastes (both kinda partly true). But I could never let go of the idea that, in actual fact, their fondness for the cheapest, shittest appliances was directly and deeply related to their Christian understanding of a very imminent and totally final judgment, followed by eternal life, in another world in which all our toasters and all our trinkets would be annuled in some final, historical God-fiery negation. No one who believes in the looming end of the world forks out for Miele.
The reversal of this idea then forms as the rhetorical question I had over the weekend: is this why parents in my neighbourhood are continuing to hold children’s parties almost completely facilitated by single use plastic? There is a pattern I’ve just lived through a decade of, whereby tertiary-educated professional ‘double income’ middle-class parents are 100% okay with the version of that party that was as ecologically damaging as it could possibly be while ensuring the amusement of children and fulfilling the script of ‘what a party should be’. More than that: my anecdotal experience indicates this is actually increasingly the pattern, even the norm. The more our neighbourhood has gentrified, the more my kids get invited to the kinds of parties where parents have forked out to give their kids’ pre-fab, package experience parties in childrens’ play centres.
Children’s play centres – like Lombard Party and Events that supply the many plastic bits that this post is headed toward – have proliferated in an age where parties tend increasingly to be hosted by harried parents who both work insane hours in full-time work (per the Gorz-based posts I was doing on this): parties are held on weekends, invite the whole class, and need to supply a good enough ‘experience’ that lasts no longer than two hours. This is also so that other parents can make it back across town to (eg) pick up the other sibling(s) from team sport, or (and this is a life phase thing that lasted a few years in my case) make it to the next children’s party, in the next children’s play centre, in the next suburb. And you wonder why the traffic is so bad on the weekend now.
In essence then, the change of children’s parties mirrors changes in the patterns of parenting and work, and above all the entry of women into the full-time work force. For I lived in an era where children’s parties were hosted by mothers in family homes. In my middle class milieu, these were mothers who might have read The Feminine Mystique, The Female Eunuch, and Damned Whores and God’s Police, but still did 95% of the labour of providing everything – and above all, choosing the cake from the Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Book. Nonetheless, everything back then would now be regarded as ‘artisanal’ by comparison, what the craft beer and kombucha marketing people call ‘crafted with love’. The intraparty dynamic was smaller, more personal, structured around traditional games, and implied a full day’s worth of labour – again by the mother (dad was taking photos on a manual focus SLR with some kind of travel zoom on it). In other words, all the ‘niceness’ of the old way of doing things was by and large a socio-cultural effect of the subjection of women via their exclusion from ‘career’ style full time work, and/or the full expectation that they would finish their week as teachers and nurses and give over their full weekend to the party prep, hosting, and clean up.
In the 2020s double income professionals have disposable income, but no time at all. As they are indisposed, so we have commensurate disposable napkins, disposable plates, disposable cutlery, disposable food, and disposable items in disposable party bags. What we see, then, is a move from gender-based subjection, to the disposability of everything.
The shadow of disposibility, of pervasive single use binge-bin everything, is the fungibility of everyone and everything: people and experiences are a pop up you pop along to before popping in the bin. All the world’s a Port-a-Loo, everything a tray table to be stowed after we’ve harfed whatever garbage the airlines have fed us. In this world, the choice is never ‘plastic or no plastic’, only chicken or beef.
But what about the precise place and meaning of this kind of plastic tat that ended up broken in my house and ‘ready for landfill’ only hours after last weekend’s party? For the party bag, which was itself metallicised plastic (see above), was full of plastic stuff: heaps and heaps of it. All of it was plastic, much of it was wrapped in plastic, and none of it lasted or was... I hesitate to say “what children might ‘use’, ‘need’, or ‘want’”, because what could any child actually do with a tiny plastic rhino? What need has any kid of a plastic stretchy sticky hand that breaks on day one? And how could a young person want, or get to cherish, a plastic bubble blower that doesn’t even work to blow bubbles? None of this stuff is any good, even in the beginning. And within hours, or even just minutes, in this case, all of it was either broken, or had never worked to begin with. Much of was trash while it was still in the bag, before it even got home. All of it was plastic.
And yet, just as it’s totally legal-normal to festoon your front yard with inflatable plastic for the season’s ex-Christian festival, it’s totally legal-normal to purchase and dispense party bags full of such items at children’s parties in my local hood in 2024. There are, of course, counter-cliques who do not do this, who got the zero waste memo; but the other cliques, at least as big, didn’t get the memo, have yet to notice or care (if they ever will). Participation in mass wastage, then, is sometimes obligatory, because objecting directly is practically impossible (how can a child be denied a party bag that everyone else is getting), and returning it once you saw it was all plastic shit would make you seem like a tinfoil crank or some kind of upper middle-class hippy from the zero waste enclaves of the northern suburbs (“some of my best friends are…”), where people with similar class privilege but different aesthetic prejudices drive Subaru Foresters to bulk food shops, instead of driving Volkswagen Tiguans to Lombard Party and Events (with negligible differences in emissions).
Alongside the social facts created by ambivalent societal transformations shorthanded above is the shitty reality of passable acceptability writ large, conformity with group norms, legality as a cover or blessing for what would otherwise be obviously pointless ecological wastage, and a highly uneven international division of labour. It’s this last factor, above all, that shapes the middle class suburban reality at the end of my middle class supply chains here in Melbourne, no doubt, the ability of the China Inc iteration of industrial modernity pump out at whatever we demand-to-consume-excessively for a checkout pittance – and then some. In other words, nearly anyone can afford the up-front cost of more plastic crap than anyone could possibly countenance: even a struggling household can still live this festive sense of The Australian Dream – for Easter, Halloween, Christmas, and birthdays. And millions still do, and seem to think nothing of it.
What do the plastic-dispensing parents – the Pez? – believe here?
Perhaps they believe nothing and think nothing of their nothing. Perhaps they have no awareness, or trust that anything legally for sale must be ecologically acceptable, or just socially acceptable? Or is it just a prudent, just-in-time pragmatic solution to a looming event: plastic stuff is so abundantly there, so very conveniently available to purchase to solve that afternoon’s problem, and when we buy it, we prove our love for their children, festively. Is it just this? Is it that giving plastic, sugar and screen-mediated entertainment is the way parents show love for their children now, bestowing the values of the culture on their loved ones while displaying that show of love to the other parents who are attending the party? If so, then we could follow George Saunders to the full implications of the Semplica-Girl Diaries: parents would do anything for their kids; they would string third world girls up in the front yard for them.
But, to return to the End of the World, what about the Eschaton, and what of the Katechon? Might the the possibility that trinkets restrain the End, and the Antichrist, play a role here?
To open this thought up, I wonder, first, if it’s possible that the ecologically devastating single use plastics are all there by the bag and bagful because the parents actually believe that all this is going to end very soon? For this would be completely consistent with my Christian relative’s belief: it will all end soon, and it’s God’s created world in His hands – so none of it matters.
Or is it that they are cool to roll with disposable plastic crap für alles because – precisely as secular and well educated professionals – they have no hope in the future or our redemption, because they have no belief in ‘a’ future, because they believe there is no future? Surely this belies the very Being of their children and friends attending the party, their youthful loveliness, and the hope implied in their future (and indeed ‘a’ future) by the very celebration of their birth in public and with other people and plastic? ‘I believe the children are our future/teach them well and let them lead the way’.
Or: are the bags and their single-used contents themselves functioning as a tchotchke katechon here? Is it that we ‘somehow’ believe that the Antichrist could not come to a party that was full of such normal children having such a normal good time and enjoying normal good party bags? In this sense, the Australian phrase ‘getting a bag’ is exactly the same thing for coke-hoofing adults, is it not? So then, once the party is done, the Antichrist can surely come – but not until all the bags have been distributed, and all their industrially-processed contents have been dispensed into the partygoers and dispersed out across the neighbourhood?
Is sugar and plastic the new Katechon; can trinkets restrain the Antichrist? This would be the sugar crash, comedown theory of The End of the World. And, to be sure, there are crashes and comedowns that must just like that. It checks out.
This comes full circle, and the circle starts to spiral, once we start thinking about civilisational repetition and planetary scale. For it is not just these parents, not just this suburb, or city, or country that is involved in the wanton distribution of single-use trinkets. Increasingly, this is part and parcel of the good(s) life that containerised shipping contains-conveys; the goods delivered include plastic bags full of plastic bags full of plastic thing’ns for the kids – so they know we love them, so we know we are affluent, the winners of life in this century.
After they died, my partner and I cleared out the house of our aforesaid beloved Christian relative, as I wrote about in the early days, here. Under the house was not one or two, but maybe four or five Aldi brand pod coffee machines. The passing relative had been a tea drinker to a fault, but also, as a good Christian, took in boarders, each of whom, it would seem, bought or brought the same kind of cheap pod coffee machines that appeal who the kind of Christians who need a place to stay in Melbourne for a few months, and want a regular and convenient caffeine hit of a morning, before the end of the world. Five years, five boarders, five Expressi, five hulkish hunks of plastic that in the skip out front. And every house on that street, a house full of a plague of objects, and dozens of skip-able, broken, useless, piece of crap goods. No one who needs a coffee needs one of these machines to make one. The world never needed to have pod machines added to its landfill. But for each one of those five machines’ purchasers, the Expressi was cheap, it was convenient, it was on sale – it was a good deal. The Expressi might not function as a Katechon, but, perhaps, for 79.99 it would deliver ‘coffee enough’ – before the Resurrection – to make it worthwhile for that consumer, given their beliefs and (thus) relation to time and materiality.
How can the world contain such plastic, the trinkets of literally billions of us?
The pod contains the coffee, the under-the-house contained the dead Expressi, the skip contained all the house’s other-many broken appliances, and the landfill on the edge of the conurbation contains the contents of every skip of every deceased relative, regardless of their personal beliefs about time and materiality. But, as a planet, still ‘holding’ this civilisation, for a time, does our collective container contain, let alone restrain, and do we not see in the piles of junk we’re circulating the collective spectre of our cumulative death by trinkets?
This is my worry now: that aside from anything else, the end of the world won’t even be caused by a geopolitical flex or the long ecological sigh of methane leaving permafrost, but just by the accumulation of a bunch of broken plastic stuff for which there is no use and for which there was never any need or want. That for the temporary amusement of children, we annuled their future. But, to return to the beginning: two things about humanity...