More-Than-Human Politics: The Case Of Plastic Bags

In “More-than-Human Politics: The Case of Plastic Bags” Gay Hawkins argues that culture is anthropocentric in the way that humans interact with objects and matter. Hawkins argues that people should become more aware of the subject-object relationship. Hawkins is attempting to equalize the relationship between object and human, and escape from the cultural view always focused on humans. As Hawkins says, “My broad aim is to show why socio-ecological humanities research needs to pay more attention to questions of matter, and to argue that nonhuman entities are now central participants in many political processes” (2), the major point in the article is to expand human horizons of thinking and to convince them to not view objects as non-impactful
Hawkins proceeds, to analyze two different ads, one that she agrees with and another that she disagrees with. The ads being an Adidas ad and a “say no” campaign ad, respectively.
Main Argument Hawkins begins her argument by bringing up the current obsession of turning away from plastic bags in an attempt to be eco-friendlier. She then examines the attention being given by asking “what of the bag in all this?” (1). Hawkins argues that we should pay more attention to the bag in this situation instead of assigning qualities of good or bad to the bags instead of ourselves. Hawkins says “By refusing to situate plastic bags in a moral framework, as always already bad, their materiality becomes more contingent and more active.” (2) Hawkins brings up the point of the possibility of coexisting as subjects and objects, instead of understanding the relationship from only one point of view. We should as humans, stop assigning roles to objects. Hawkins, in this article, uses environmentalism as an example of politics and ethical practice, not as the
Hawkins argues that the immediate issue with the campaign is there immediate attempt to create “concerned shoppers” (3). Hawkins continue to argue that the campaign invites the shoppers to engage in self-scrutiny and reflect on their everyday conducts around them. (3) The campaign creates a focus on the humans using the bags instead of the bags themselves, which is exactly what Hawkins was arguing throughout the entire essay. The framing of the campaign is moral; it raises a moral dilemma for humans to rethink their actions. Hawkins argues that turning away shoppers from plastic bags is dependent on their conscience. Hawkins throughout this section of the article continues to argue that guilt is the only ploy that the campaigns use to appeal to the subjects. The problem with that ploy is that because it addresses the object or the bag as something that is only bad and only has a role of harming the environment. Hawkins states the campaigns although some have been successful have pretty substantial limits, and that these limits must be observed. “William Connolly argues that conscience and other code driven moral techniques are crude and blunt tools for coping with the world.” (4) The Say No campaign is poor, because they make people feel bad about themselves for possibly not using them or forgetting to use them. Hawkins argues that it should not be that way and that