Can the Plastic Monster Listen?

Paul B. Preciado writes in his lecture/report to a psychoanalytic Academy Can the Monster Speak?:

Today, once monstrous bodies produced by the patriarchal-colonial regime of sex, gender and sexual difference speak for themselves and produce knowledge about themselves.

Echoing Kafka’s Red Peter in his short story ‘A Report to an Academy’, Preciado describes how through his position as a trans man he has fabricated and exercised a way out the ‘cage’ of heteropatriarchal and colonial violence through the adoption of a new name and his vaguely hirsute face and hoarse, gravely voice.

As he describes this hard-fought liberty, Preciado makes an analogy between his trans body and the colony, as produced by dominant medical and psychological discourse.

The trans body is a colony. Every day , on some street in Tijuana or Los Angeles, Saint Petersburg or Goa, Athens or Seville, a trans body is killed with the same impunity that a new settlement is built on one bank or the other of the River Jordan. Medicine and clinical psychology are waging war to impose and standardize the organs of the trans body.

As this analogy extends, Preciado articulates a striking camaraderie between the trans body and the natural world, both of which cannot be extinguished by extractivist and colonial violence:

The trans body is a life force, it is the inexhaustible Amazon flowing through the rainforests, impervious to dams and to mining.

It is this point in the analogy, a thin voice comes from within a bird-like creature called a Flinger, created by the Australian artist Bonita Ely in 2017 as part of her project Plastikus Progressus:

I may not live in the Amazon River but I know what life is like within other waters of this earth and the only ‘inexhaustible’ thing about them is the flow of plastic, stuffing up their banks and beaches. I was created in the future year 2054 to solve this problem as I was genetically engineered to swim, dive and surf propelled by my large, oar-like wings, harvesting toxic plastic waste that gathers in huge volumes where the oceans’ warm and cold currents meet to form huge, slow moving whirlpools. Fed by water’s trans-ecology, these whirlpools, or ‘gyres’, are located in the North and South Atlantic, North and South Pacific Oceans and the Indian Ocean. I also inhabit land locked waters such as the Mediterranean Sea, Sydney Harbour, the Baltic Sea, where trapped plastic garbage is plentiful. Modeled by geneticists on Bram Stocker’s Dracula, my large, sharp teeth rapidly break down large volumes of solid plastic and polystyrene. Diving with my tail arched and held aloft, I simultaneously scoop up a stew of plastic bags, bubble wrap, synthetic textiles to feed my chicks who require 15 feeds a day.

It is almost as if Ely’s Flinger had been channeling the voice of the albatross from reading the fourth issue of the documenta 14 take-over of the Greek art magazine South of a State of Mind and the essay by Gene Ray on extinction and ecocide, in a section called ‘Elegy for the Albatross’ that begins:

In 2009, the American artist Chris Jordan began a photographic series called “Midway: Message from the Gyre.” The image from this series that hit me hardest offers the death scene and carcass of a nestling Laysan albatross. The photograph captures a double movement in time: as the carcass breaks down, the indestructibility of the plastic flotsam that filled its stomach emerges with lurid pronouncement. Plastic is an exemplary material marker of modernity. As Heather Davis notes, “Plastic represents the promises of modernity: the promise of sealed, perfected, clean, smooth abundance.” Chemistry and consumption, hand in hand. But the candy-colored dream material turns out to be a toxic gift.

Returning to Preciado, where is the way out of the cage that has created the inexhaustible monstrosity of plastic? Perhaps it is unfair to posit such a question at the site of the trans body (coming as this does from the white typing fingers of my cis male body). As such, I write from within the (penal) colony, where we snipe at each others’ legs and expose our own to arrows. Where we all live according to these terms, as we know. Here, below my organs, I have a blind wound, but the belt of this blog – with its broad gold – conceals it. From where I sit, I may choose to cheat and deceive my own body, if I can, and when my readers say I’m wonderful I’ll simply believe them. But I am the plastic monster, growing pale with pleasure at the mere sight of a slender online fame. My virtual pen is whatever comes to me to write for thirsty ears from my apartment within myself, wings well and truly clipped.

In other – simpler – words, in spite of Bonita Ely’s creative solution in the form of the Flinger and other plastic-munching creatures, why should we expect a way out of our heteropatriarchal, colonial and extractionist violence to come from its victims and their bodies – whether that of the trans man or the plastic-filled albatross? Dear fellow settler colonizer, we esteemed members of the Academy, have always been and continue to be the plastic monsters in the water and it is only once we have recognized this fact to and for ourselves, that we can shut up and listen to what should be done about us.

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[‘Can the Plastic Monster Listen?’ is an extract from Chapter 4: BODIES of the ongoing online project Like Wind on Rushes which drafts a book to come called Whisper into a Hole.]