The skin of commerce: governing through plastic food packaging

Is it possible to say that we have become governed by plastic? This paper uses the introduction of plastic packaging into food markets in the post-Second World War Australia to pursue this question. This empirical foray is informed by recent debates about the ‘government of things’ and explorations about how political and ontological processes interact. Making plastic packaging into a mundane market device involved the development of accountability relations that established the ‘responsibilities’ of the package: what it was obliged to do across various networks from production to self-service. Equally important were processes that attached consumers to this new material and provoked changed practices. This history shows how the normalisation of plastic packaging changed the ontological status of food in markets. Plastic provided a new point of articulation between the natural and the synthetic in relation to governing the life of food that also conditioned the governance of consumers: convincing them that food wrapped in plastic was better across numerous registers. What the case of mundane plastic packaging shows is that ‘government’ does not exist first and enrol technologies to achieve its aims. Rather, that devices and technologies can become capable of introducing new conducts into markets and everyday life.