Ole Frahm / Friedrich Tietjen
“NOTHING in life happens without packaging.
Premature babies are put in incubators, the dead in coffins or body bags.
Children are reminded: ‘Wrap yourselves up warmly! It is cold outside’. The car
is a tin can that carries us from one enclosure to the next. Whereas such
packaging still protects the packed contents from the rigors of the
environment, this FUNCTION is largely lost for the commodities at the
supermarket. The packaging is a CALL to USE that which is packed. It calls for
its own DESTRUCTION!”1
Even those who do not care to share the
anonymous authors of these statements’ drastic tone will still have to admit
that what they say is valid: nothing in life happens without packaging, or at
least nothing in societies molded by their spheres of consumption, and scarcely
anything in the rest of the world. Packaging is ubiquitous and omnipresent, its
protean forms wrap flowers, toys, beer, cement, marmalade, machines, in short:
practically every conceivable tangible commodity. If we consider the advent of
trade to be its origins, then even in its initial stages it provided more than
just practical protection from damage and ease of transport. Since antiquity,
bailiff’s seals and lead seals have provided evidence of the origins of
commodities, while the packaging itself identified – at times through stamps –
its producer and, not least, its own commodity form. That packaging still holds
these particular qualities until today is immediately evident with every visit
to the supermarket and also in the growing interest in its final gestalt. Used
and destroyed, as garbage it once again becomes a commodity traded between
various recycling enterprises, then re-enters the circulation of commodities as
a secondary raw material producing heat and more or less poisonous gases in
incinerators, or it is exported all over the world, to rot in dumps.
Nothing
in life happens without packaging – and we could add, very little in life
happens without plastic bags. Although just as current as the cardboard box,
cellophane bag, tin can and PET bottles as packaging for consumer needs, the
plastic bag’s peculiar double function hinders it from being placed in the same
neat category. As both packaging without commodities and packaging for all
commodities, it makes its entrance into the consumption sphere as a carrying
bag, and quite often departs as a rubbish bag. Moreover: when consumers make
their way home, the plastic bag not only has a use value for them, but also for
the merchant: imprints advertise for shopping, and businesses, from record
stores to department store chains. Furthermore: as objects of mass culture,
plastic bags undergo manifold reuses. Customers, the homeless, collectors, and
criminals have invented a series of uses for them that go beyond their original
purpose in the narrow sense, and that the producer could hardly have intended.
This essay will delve into these three aspects of uses and re-uses of bags in
more detail.
As an ephemeral use object,
short-lived and durable, conspicuous and incidental, purposeful and alienable,
useful and dangerous, the plastic bag is like fashion, whose qualities of
prognosis were pointed out by Walter Benjamin: “For philosophers, the burning
interest in fashion lies in its extraordinary anticipations. ... Every new
season, its newest creations harbor some sort of secret flag signals about
upcoming events. Those who are able to read these signals not only know in
advance of new currents in art, but also new laws, wars, and revolutions.”2
A bit of reading into bags, their theoretical
identification as aesthetic commodities and beyond the aesthetics of
commodities, might not contain premonitions of future social arrangements, but
it might lead our gaze to the superficial mediation of everyday life, through
which these inherent possibilities for transforming social relations become
visible.
Forms of Product Aesthetics – Uses of Bags
Packaging
Those who have grown up with plastic bags use
them self-evidently as part of social nature. There are not many tricks or
facts to learn about them. The rustling transparent bags from the fruit and
vegetable section are hardly strong enough to carry heavy bottles and glass
jars. Two plastic bags together, one inside of the other, can handle more
weight. They are almost never sold out at the cashier of any supermarket, and
it is therefore possible to go shopping spontaneously at any time during
business hours without making prior plans for the subsequent transport. Only
its grim, antagonistic counterpart, the money pouch (money is also a commodity
which requires packaging) limits what and how much can be bought and carried
off, stashed away in the shopping bags. The market’s range of products allows a
sheer endless amount of variations: only seldom are the purchases of one
customer identical with those of another. The checkout counter in front of the
cash register is the catwalk on which consumers present their newest
collections to each other and the cashier. When the buyers, after the free
program of selection and the compulsory exercise of payment, leave the shop,
fully packed plastic bags that can hardly be differentiated from one another
hang from their wrists; the protrusions, folds, and sizes divulge little about
the contents of the bags, whose outer appearance resembles each other, in
shape, material, and imprint, like one egg does another.
Although an integral element,
packaging is superficial and removable from the commodity: on the one hand it
prevents consumption, and on the other, makes it possible. It is first by
opening it, and thus the packaging’s destruction, that the packed material
becomes accessible.3 Packaging can mediate its contents and its use
value in various ways – not only by providing the product’s image: “packaging
deceives and disappoints. it contains something different than promised. a
gelatinous cylinder with sardines and hearts falls out of the tin, and not the
cuddly cat that stretches across the banderole; although no one really expected
that. packaging plays with its consumers in the anti-everyday life produced by
advertising and symbols. it supplies every commodity, stylized as essential for
personal happiness. everyone knows the senselessness of this promise of
happiness. it is not satisfaction that is bought, but the taste of happiness.”4
In other words: the use value of the commodities that the packaging promises
does not necessarily have anything to do with their essential use value, which
likewise has consequences for their production. “In all commodity production, a
double is produced: first, the use value, and second, the appearance of use
value.”5 This phenomenon can be examined in greater detail in the
framework of the commodity’s aesthetics.
Promises
The split of commodities and packaging also makes
clear why bags appear, on the one hand, as packaging without any specific
commodity and, on the other hand, why their outer surface seldom advertises for
their own use value, or specifically for the value of other commodities, but
advertises all the more for, and with, brand names. Because they package in
general, and not anything in particular, they form a utopian space in two
respects. First, their contingent and constantly changing contents anticipate
their reuse, their productive misuse; second, every full shopping bag has the
potential of carrying all possible commodities and their use values.
This utopia can be found as a
promise made on a plastic bag from the late 1960s, or early 1970s. It shows a
friendly, smiling figure that metaphorically stands for the retail chain thus
advertised as “your big friend.” In one hand, the figure holds out to the
viewer, a globe with the respective regionally produced products, and with the
other hand presents this abundance. Instead of the idiomatic nutshell, the
world fits in a plastic bag. The bag’s image promises the whole world to the
whole world: “an allegory for the everyday life of utopia?”6
The material is also
important in this context. The common term “plastic bag,” which has been around
for decades, shows that the carry bag’s actual material, polyethylene, is not
recognized, but rather, a whole group of materials known as plastics, processed
in a number of different varieties since the nineteenth century and used for
all conceivable purposes since the 1950s at the latest.7 This
universality, especially in Germany, did not meet solely with progressive
enthusiasm, but also with skepticism. Hans Schwippert, well known in his day as
the head of the worker’s association and as designer of Konrad Adenauer’s desk,
assuming that the character of materials can be read in their resistance to the
design, commented in 1952: “Now we are being given materials that no longer
have these character forms. The new materials that we have here before us, are,
in a sense, compliant to such a degree that we have never known before. ... The
materials give us no specific, strict character. Instead, they say: as you
please, you are the master, I am the servant, I will do exactly what you want.”8
If this sounds like an implicit accusation of plastic’s lack of essence and
character, it is because it echoes the preference for hard and supposedly
natural materials such as Krupp steel and leather, cultivated by National
Socialist ideology.
Together with its modernity
and everyday presence, it was precisely these qualities that made not only
plastic in general, but also foils and bags appear interesting for various
artistic trends that employed consumer objects’ serial and mass-production
techniques for their production of art. When Joseph Beuys designed plastic bags
for the Organization for Direct Democracy in 1969 with imprints that showed
diagrams of his ideas of a better division of power, their insides remained a
space that awaited development. Andy Warhol used different methods to emphasize
the utopian contents of the plastic bag: as silver coated and helium filled
clouds they floated through the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1966 – the artist’s
idea to let them fly away through the open window was not carried out.9
In both cases virtually everything and practically nothing is packed and so one
characteristic of the bag emerges: its medial character.
Urban Medium
The bag is an urban medium. The need for bags in
rural communities was quite minimal. An individual’s needs could be acquired in
the fields, gardens, and stalls, through traveling salesmen, or in the small
shops in town. Needs which went beyond that could be satisfied with the
occasional trip into the nearest city. In the urban economy, the possibilities
for self-sufficiency are greatly reduced. Daily necessities must be bought with
the money that is earned by working for wages. So that the masses of gainfully
employed persons can be taken care of, production must occur en-masse. In
addition, the mass of products must be directed towards individual consumption.
This is accomplished mainly with the help of packaging, or, more precisely:
individual packaging, which, over the course of time, was brought into contact
with commodities at ever-earlier stages. Whereas in nineteenth-century shops
the cone-shaped paper bags were simply rolled ad hoc to carry the weighed or
counted commodities, the shops soon offered a variety of prefabricated
packaging, and later prepackaged commodities themselves, until finally the
packaging was taken care of by the producers directly and the commodities,
almost exclusively in the form of boxes, cans, packs, and sacks with precise
machine-weighed quantities, were delivered to and sold in the supermarkets, to
be brought home individually in carry bags.10 This also describes
the decisive moments of the capital flow into cities in the last two centuries,
whose fundamental features were described by Karl Marx: “The capitalist means
of production lessens the transport costs for individual commodities through
the development of means of transportation and communication and also through
the concentration of transport. It increases the amount of labor societies put
into transport, of active and hypostatic labor put into the transportation of
commodities, first through the transformation of the great majority of all
products into commodities and then through the replacement of local markets
through distant ones. The circulation, e.g., actual rotation of the commodities
in space, is dissolved in the transport of the commodities. On the one hand,
the transport industry forms an independent branch of production, and therefore
a particular sphere for investment of productive capital. On the other hand, it
is also something quite different in that it appears as a continuation of a
production process for the circulation process and within accumulation
processes.”11
Without
packaging in general, and without bags in particular, circulation as the
transport of products that have become commodities is unimaginable. If the
packing in paper cones and other containers created the prerequisites for the
industrialization of food production,12 the plastic bag is the
vehicle to carry it on its last stretch in the direction of its consumption.
The packaging industry, developed as of the mid-nineteenth century, made
possible the development and definition of new classes of consumers and
increased the prices of the products which were offered to them – a price
increase which can certainly appear as a price reduction for the consumers,
since local small producers with their much smaller markets, are befallen with
higher absolute production costs, and also relatively higher transportation
costs: mass production and mass import make apples from South Africa cheaper
than those from the farmers at the gates of the city.
This is one of the greatest
achievements of the capitalist means of production: lowering the price of
transport and at the same time inventing new means of transport and
communication. This became possible because the transport sphere was of
interest to productive capital, which led to enormous investments being made,
investments, which, by the way, did not pay off in all cases (the disaster of
the new markets in the late 1990s had its precursor in the railway speculations
of the mid-nineteenth century). On the other hand it is well known that the bag
industry was only able to establish itself by very particular exploitation of
human workers in its early stages; namely, orphaned children, inmates in
workhouses, and finally, prisoners, who were forced to glue bags to earn even
minimal financial means. The profit margins for the industrialists were
correspondingly high. Yet, as long as the cone-shaped bags were still manually
produced in the packaging industry, many individual merchants fell back on even
less expensive labor power: they had their apprentices glue bags during their
training time.13 It was first with the development of machines for
the automatic production of bags in 1875 that they could be made cheaper than
by hand.14 The apprenticeship could be shortened, other educational
and occupational methods were developed for the children, and workhouses were
abolished. Only the prisoners remained bound to the drudgery: even today,
carrying bags are produced by hand in some correctional facilities.15
“Inferior”
By the end of the
nineteenth century, gluing bags had already become synonymous in colloquial
language with imprisonment. Not only their production and as a result,
employment in the producing industry, became suspect but also the bags
themselves. Attempts to alleviate this situation aimed at changing the
terminology, not the production conditions. In 1942, a professional committee
assembled from various authorities and institutions, negotiated over a new
semi-skilled job: the term “mechanical bag-gluer” was unanimously rejected. It
was argued, for one, that bags, as opposed to sacks, represented only a minor
portion of the total production, and for another, there were fears that the
term was too loaded from the production in prisons and penitentiaries.
Therefore, they decided on the new job title “mechanical sack-gluer.” The bags
therefore became sacks to assure new blood for the paper processing industry.16
This anecdote about the
wording to be used would not have had any further significance, if it were not
historically located in the Third Reich. Already working under regimented
conditions in 1942, the producers of paper shopping and handbags were expressly
forbidden to produce anything other than “paper and cardboard products
important and decisive for the war.”17 Bags did not contribute to
the endsieg. Generally, the reduction
and ban on bag production was attributed to the scarcity of raw materials. But
why was the production of “carrying bags, carrying sacks and phonograph-covers”
already stopped “after 1936 (with the start of the first four-year plan)”?18
A discussion paraphrased by Heinz Schmidt-Bachem, a historian and bag
collector, leads to suspicions that also the ban on paper bags was based in
national socialist ideology: “In the opinion of the department of press and
propaganda in the central department 1 of the commercial group, in the past,
packaging means [have] developed into a true luxury item, not only in terms of
quantity but also quality... for which there is absolutely no justification.
Where there is no change or improvement of an essential product possible, in
those cases it is the packaging, the furnishings, which are meant to be
decisive in the competition. Even for competitive reasons, it would seem unhealthy
if the user had to ask whether he or she has just paid for the often inferior
commodities or for the frequently superior packaging.”19
In the
differentiation of the “essential commodities” from the nonessential packaging,
the use value of the commodities is set as a manifest absolute. All other
values are no longer essential – including that of the packaging, which lacking
an essential use value is denied “every justification.” It is not understood as
a product within and for the sphere of production as in Marx’s writing, but,
rather, as a pointless luxury. To put it more precisely: in national socialist
ideology, the commodities are identical with their use value; the packaging,
the bag, is added as foreign matter from outside. The means of transport encompasses
the use value and the exchange value. The double character of the commodities,
in this division, is portioned out so that the naturalization of its fetish
character, which is common in capitalism, is re-interpreted by the national
socialist ideology in a biological personification. The “making work,” the
production of the use value of the commodities, is “Aryan,” whereas all forms
of finance capital, the entire sphere of exchange value, appear as
“money-raking capital,” as “Jewish.” The sphere of use value is assigned to the
“Aryan,” and the exchange sphere to “the Jews.” 20 Whereas the
“’making’ work” creates use value, in this logic, the “high-quality packaging”
presents mere deception of values that are “inferior” and “unhealthy.”
Hidden in these biological
connotations is the denunciation of the Jews as dangerous vermin, and
conversely, also the implicit connotation of the packaging and with it, the
bag, as parasitical, and therefore Jewish. In that the transport sphere is
pushed closer to the exchange sphere, categorized as the sphere of
“money-raking capital,” it can be “unhealthy” for the essential commodities.
And thus when anti-capitalist anti-Semitism already mixes with a biologically
based racial-anti-Semitism, a third anti-Semitic element appears when high
quality packaging is accused of possibly hiding the inferiority of the
commodities. Such deceptive masking motives, of “Jewish cunning,” surface
consistently in national socialist ideology. In 1930, Joseph Goebbels, who
later became propaganda minister, diagnoses: “He [the Jew] dresses himself in
the masks of those he wants to deceive.”21 The yellow star, the J
stamped in the passport, the mandatory, prescribed first names, Sara and
Israel, from the NŸrnberg Racial Laws, should ensure that the inferiority of
those beings recognized as Jews remain visible, despite all other outer
features.22 Marked in this way, they were first driven out of
public, and then business life; those who were not able to emigrate were later
herded together in ghettos, deported to concentration and extermination camps
and killed. The “extermination through work” reduced the victims to their labor
power, which is retrospectively often seen as more or less unproductively
squandered. The fact that these jobs, uniformly, can all be considered as
punishment stands without question. Therefore, it is not very surprising that
gluing bags was also among these extorted forms of labor which Victor Klemperer
was also coerced to do as of 1943: the forced laborer, seen as inferior,
produced the packaging, also seen as inferior.23
Differentiation
Every description,
every theoretical determination of the bag, must resist its devaluation. The
bag is a fleeting surface, which also advertises. This does not render it
“unhealthy” but rather, can also be practical. Delicate commodities such as
records first become adequately transportable for consumers with carry bags.
The temporal proximity of the first spread of the phonogram and the “hand-free
carry bag” at the beginning of the twentieth century is hardly surprising.24
This is not a historical coincidence, but rather, a concomitant effect of the
creation of a new culture, the employee culture. At the end of the 1920s,
Siegfried Kracauer writes: “Hundreds of thousands of employees fill the streets
of Berlin every day, and yet we know less about their lives than those of the
primitive tribes whose customs the employees admire in films.”25
They present themselves as a new class of workers, “forerunners of mass
society, the era of mass consumption,” marked by a “distinctly individual
social identity.”26 With them, “leisure” first came into being – and
being able to rush into the city and shop once again after work without being
previously burdened by a package, went along with it. The employees, for whom
differentiation from the workers was a central problem, developed several
little methods for distinction. After they had already distanced themselves
from laborers through their “collar lines”27 they had to prove their
superior taste through the places where they chose to make their daily
purchases, which were clearly readable on the bags. Nowadays, those who can
afford to purchase expensive groceries in a noble department store can look
down with composure on the customers of cheap supermarkets. The fact that the
upper classes visit these stores for their basic food supplies is just as much
a part of this logic as their natural reuse of once acquired prestigious bags.
From this
perspective, plastic bags did not produce any novelties, but rather, the
duplication of such distinctions. The carry bags’ diverse colors made them Ð
and therefore also the distinction which they displayed – more visible. This
distinction seemed to contradict the serial nature of the bags, their mass
production, which nevertheless is what originally made them a medium. Yet the
opposite is the case: mass production belongs to distinction; it enables the
identification of like-minded people through a brand name, a trademark that is
easily recognizable. Therefore, the serial nature of production finds its echo
in the serial nature of the motif on the bags. For retail chain stores, it
shows their numbers: there is not only one, they offer their fine service
everywhere; the intention of instant recognition is emphasized. The advertisement
on the plastic bags must be recognizable in passing, and to the scattered gaze,
even from the corner of the eye, to identify the carrier.
Of course this is
advertisement, publicity for the purpose of influencing the masses, for guiding
sales, and like every banality, this too is surrounded by supposedly
anti-capitalist myths: consumers succumb to the advertising only because they
are subliminally manipulated – not because needs are produced and satisfied.
The communication material, plastic bag, together with many other products Ð
from billboards to stickers to the T-shirt – makes consumption a part of
identity, a positive condition of existence in post-Fordian capitalism. Plastic
bags do not hide anything. They are acquired with the purchase; the imprint
shows what they contain. An Aldi-bag carries products from the Aldi market, in
the Penny-bag are products from a Penny market, and a bag with a Marlboro
tobacco image on it contains Marlboro tobacco. The fact that, even when it has
a bottle of Laphroaig or a carton of Senior Service cigarettes in it, the
Marlboro tobacco bag also advertises for Marlboro, does not change this
principle: the image shows a product that has been bought duty-free. Naturally,
this redundancy advertises for Marlboro tobacco, but precisely that is what
makes the advertisement everything but mysterious or subliminal. It jumps
immediately into view. The bag advertises for the shop that gives it out, for
itself, and its contents. It advertises for the act of purchasing in this shop
in that it simply testifies to it.
This convincing principle of
simple testimony is what first generated modern shopping. After the
proclamation of the “era of the carrier-bag” in Germany at the beginning of the
1960s,28 the number of self-service shops quadrupled between 1960
and 1969. “Over time, a steady bag culture developed.”29 Through
this, a new practice of shopping arose which in professional jargon is called
“impulse shopping.” Here, the bags are not simply there because commodities are
purchased, but the commodities are purchased because there are bags for them.
Shopping
For the consumer, the bag appears as a product,
as a means to make possible the speedier and more comfortable consumption of
other products, not as a commodity. The imprint confirms this impression,
common in everyday life. The delivery and use of the bag seems to be a tacit
agreement made between free persons; the price that the consumers pay is not
settled with money, but rather, through the advertisement which they make
carrying their commodities home. The Federal Republic of Germany was one of the
first countries in the world to introduce a small bag fee in opposition to this
arrangement. Why? There were campaigns “against this packaging.”30
In contrast to the U.S.A., the resentment of the bags as something alien to the
“essential commodities” was sufficiently present to justify this expense. This
resentment can undoubtedly be called unconscious. It can only be discerned in
the matter of course way in which the bag’s superfluousness is common in
Germany.
The price for
the plastic bags makes them a commodity just like any other for the consumers.
The few cents which are currently paid for the bags at the cash register, not
only create a small extra-profit for the supermarket – they are the symbolic
and real price for the luxury of thoughtlessness, for alleviating a guilty
conscience with respect to the environment, the guilty conscience for the
self-empowerment to “deal with things superficially,” 31 that is all
the rage in Germany for the reasons stated. It therefore comes as no surprise
that it is Germany, with “DER GR†NE PUNKT (THE GREEN POINT),” the “Duale System
Deutschland” (DSD), that subsidizes a recycling industry which makes it
possible for the bag’s material to be recycled as many as eighteen times.32
Since 1992, DER GR†NE PUNKT, found on many plastic bags, has become a sign that
the producer has paid a packaging fee: a sign that is meant to guarantee its
recycling.
Although the bag has also
indisputably become a commodity for the consumer, for which they must pay a
price just like for any other commodity, it is nonetheless not equal to other
commodities because it does not appear as a commodity. Its use, from the very
beginning, means not only the possibility of a certain circulation of
commodities, but also its increase. The commodity character of the bag is not
realized in use value for the customers, but primarily in use value for the
supermarkets. The customers buy more commodities than they would without bags
because they can pack this excess of commodities in the bags. When the
Doppel-Kraft-TŸte or DKT-bag (double power bag) with a proven carrying capacity
of five kilograms, nowadays distributed everywhere, was introduced in 1975 by
the department store chain Karstadt in cooperation with the Firm LEMO from
Mondorf, the department stores were able to calculate that based on the new
type of bag, customers bought 21 percent more commodities, especially those
types of commodities which were previously more difficult to transport, such as
bottles or tins. The Reiterband bags that were used until that time were not
only less stable than the DKT bags, but they also had a smaller, less flexible
opening.33 For the customers, these facts were seen as a subjective
advantage, and not as the use value for the merchant that they continually
realized through their larger purchases. In this way, the use value of the
PE-bags for the merchants – which was directly realized on the way from the
supermarket or department store to the consumer’s home – doubled.
Without this doubling of use
value, there would be no plastic bags. The plastic bags must have a use value
for the merchant for them to buy this commodity in greater quantities from the
packaging industry. To establish the commodity character of plastic bags here,
in the relationship between producers and the initial consumers, the merchants,
would be reductive, yet likewise, such a determination is lacking in daily
life. The commodity character of the plastic bags first reveals itself in the
double character as commodity and garbage. Its use value was fulfilled for the
customer at the moment in which he or she unpacks the other commodities from
it. Now the bag can be thrown away like other packaging. The re-use as a
rubbish bag, or the recycling of the bag for the next shopping trip, extend the
use of the bag, but do not change anything about the fundamental fact that the
bag, after its multiple use-values have been realized, is worthless and this
worthlessness is first realized when the bag transports garbage and itself
becomes garbage.
The commodity character of
the plastic bag thereby divides itself into two spheres: in that of the plastic
bag market, in which various producers with various models of plastic bags
compete for economical and usable solutions, like in other areas of the
capitalist economy. Here, the plastic bag is a commodity among others, with a
promised use value for the merchant and with an exchange value for the
producer. The bag behaves as a commodity like yogurt, bouillon cubes, or mops.
In the sphere of supermarkets and retail merchants, the bag is suddenly, as if
by magic, no longer a commodity like all others. It is placed under the cash
register, as though it must be hidden, and is personally handed over by the
cashier upon request. Its price is not aimed at gaining a profit, but, rather,
functions to make the service of offering a bag, economical.
Forms beyond commodity aesthetics Ð
re-uses of bags
It is not without irony, that in its early
stages commercial bag production presented a re-use process. When the first
bags were glued by hand in the paper commodities factory Allendorfer
Papierwaren Fabrik Bodenheim & Co in 1853, emptied files served as raw
material.34 The bag thereby possessed an inner potential that could
lead to uses that had little or nothing to do with its planned purposes, but
could simultaneously reflect them. These re-uses thereby expand the use value
of the bags into an area in which no exchange value is suitable; even the
aesthetic aspects of the bags, for the time being, have no significance. And
yet, it is precisely this area that provides information about the status
currently given to the aestheticizing of plastic bags. Here, those signals are
recognizable whose meanings can only, initially, be depicted in schemes.
The shopping bag
The material of most of the bags given out at
store cash registers is tough enough to withstand not only the transport of the
purchase; until holes, protrusions, and tears endanger its carrying capacity,
it can be reused several times and always for the same purpose. The bag thereby
realizes its double use value each time anew. Yet whereas it always represents
transport ease for the shopper, it can represent a discrepancy for the
salesperson: what the shopping bag contains does not necessarily have to have
been bought in the shop whose logo decorates it. From small towns in
particular, the opposite case has been reported, that consumers do not dare to
enter a shop because they are already underway with the competitor’s plastic
bag.
The reuse through further use
and the subsequently continued advertisement was, by the way, one of the
arguments with which the carrying bag producers had already tried to win
customers in 1925.35 Nowadays, many bags appeal to their carriers
and place short sentences on the bottom of the bag to try to animate them to
such uses. It sounds as though they are competing with each other for the most
beautiful request:
“Your contribution to environmental protection Ð
please, use bag repeatedly”
“This carry bag is made from polyethylene and is
therefore much better than its reputation: it can be used repeatedly”
“For 1 x use, a shame – a real multi-use
container”
“Carry bags that can be used repeatedly are
found to be ecologically less expensive than paper carry bags”
The rubbish bag
Whereas the bag, in its new implementation for
further purchases is still more or less used in keeping with its original
purpose, its use as a rubbish bag presents an obvious and therefore massively
occurring reuse. In his study on the history of the bag, Heinz Schmidt-Bachem
reports that, already in 1965, four years after the cautious introduction of
the plastic bag, which was relatively expensive to produce in comparison with
the paper bag, “the PE-bags were so popular among customers (mainly as rubbish
bags) ... that they were snatched up by the bundle when not watched over for a
moment.”36 The fact that PE-bags were seen as rubbish bags is
illuminating: water resistant, stable, and flexible, they hold back the smell
of the decaying, decomposing, rotting portions of the garbage and therefore
have an unsurpassable advantage over paper bags, whose quality, by the way, was
so seriously compromised during massive competition among the producers during
the mid-1960s, that the plastic bag was easily able to establish itself as the
wise alternative.37
It is also clear why the
packaging industry did not stop the “unguarded moment” of bag snatching: as
rubbish bags, the PE-bags held the packaging from other commodities, which they
had previously transported together with the contents. The packaging of the
commodities was a decisive prerequisite for their circulation in the
supermarket. It is the plastic bag that first made it possible to carry these
individually packaged commodities home from the supermarket. At home the bags
were then reused as rubbish bags, the packaging of the commodities was thus
packed for a second and last time. In this calculation the packaging industry
gains twice and is thus able to first expand, and since the early 1990s to
extend the circulation by one more revolution – DER GR†NE PUNKT and the DSD Ð
to gain a third time when the plastic garbage, the plastic packaging and the
plastic bags, are recycled, which means: turned into cash.
The consumers, in the belief
that they purloined something from the markets and were doing something
subversive by reusing the bags for garbage, a use that was only useful for
themselves, actually spurred on the plastic bag industry through the increased
need for PE-bags. Reuse for garbage is what established the bag, and that is
also the reason why they have been considered the number one pollutant since
1971: they were garbage to begin with.38 This myth, which was not
substantiated in any way, also arose from the guilty conscience of the Germans
which dictated that they must be punished every time they enjoy appropriating
something for their own needs – in this case taking plastic bags as rubbish
bags. When the punishment failed to materialize, then all of nature had to
suffer for the unjust deed. If, from the beginning of their history onward, the
plastic bag through its reuse, turns out to be garbage, then there is no irony
of history, but rather, an allegory for the progressive and also pacified
capitalism of Germany, which no longer has to conceal its disposable character.
The bag people
The plastic bag can be understood as the
legitimate heir of the nineteenth-century servant’s chest. Whereas the vassals
traveled with their chests from one master to another, for the homeless as
urban, and usually non-voluntary nomads, the plastic bag replaces roof and
closet. The chests held the entire possessions of the exploited, and this is
also true for the bags of the outcasts. The servants’ chests were painted with
ornamentation and roughly rhymed aphorisms – “In MŸh und Arbeit bring ich mein
Leben zu, hier kanns nicht anders sein im Himmel ist die Ruh 1817”39
(My life, with trouble and work it goes, it must be so here, in heaven is
repose 1817) – and the plastic bags advertise with promises of commodities that
are only available to the homeless in their utopian dreams.
The plastic bags of the bag
ladies (and men) can be understood as the discarded bourgeois suitcase. Whereas
the suitcase, over the course of its history, became the sign of mobility of a
developed capitalist society, the plastic bag marks the forced mobility of
those who no longer move within the spheres of circulation. Cynical culture
pessimists could speak in this sense of the stable chest’s deterioration to the
thin polyethylene-skin of the bag. But the containers are not the only things
that have changed; needs have as well. A servant did not have to transport his
possessions all that often from one sleeping place to another. The bourgeois
family, traveling every summer, with their frequently voluminous luggage packed
into wardrobe trunks, only had to transport them once from their urban
residence to the far-flung summer residence. For the homeless, who are seldom
able to spend more than one night in the same place, it is very different. Like
the shopping cart as the contemporary vehicle, the plastic bag – free or easily
acquired, resilient, waterproof, spacious, and flexible – is the contemporary
suitcase for the never-ending journey of those excluded from the capitalist
exploitation process.
By producing the plastic
bags, no one thought of meeting the needs of this non-economical realm. The
homeless cull a use value from the bags that they never even promised and yet Ð
based on their material character – are able to fulfill without a problem. The
constant ability to make some sense beyond its own inherent rationality clearly
counts among the greatest miracles of capitalist productivity. Unwittingly, it
produces perfectly suitable solutions for areas whose problems it created in
the first place.
The image of the homeless,
wheeling a shopping cart full of plastic bags holding his or her possessions,
day in and day out, from one sleeping site to another, parodies the figure of
the consumer. They don’t buy anything, their possessions are not commodities,
and their bags do not promise anything more than protection for the little that
remains to them. Whereas the shopping cart provides the promise of autonomous
access to all commodities, the shopping carts of the homeless recall how
useless this promise is when it does not apply to everyone. The attractiveness
of the plastic bags that repeat this promise endlessly with their colorful
imprints, is stripped away in the shopping carts of the homeless. The advertisement,
which their constant bag transport continues to allow, ridicules the idea of
advertising with something that is as useful as a plastic bag.
The coffin
The fact that the plastic bag can have a lethal
function has had an amazingly minimal effect on its reputation. Whether they
serve to suffocate one’s self or another, are useful for the short-term
transport of body parts or to hide them under bushes, plastic bags have enabled
new practices in this area. Their density and capability to shield odors, their
inconspicuous presence in everyday life, their durability and their slow
decomposition have proven excellent qualities for such purposes. It would be
rash to see the realization of a murderous capitalist socialization in such
practices. Like the knife that rests on the artery ready to slice it, like the
suitcase with the corpse temporarily deposited in a train station locker, 40
the plastic bag and its advertising is completely innocent in these activities.
It is a malicious person who would read a corpse packed in a supermarket bag as
an allegory for commodities.
The mask
To use the bag as a mask is one of its most
obvious reuses. It is not a coincidence that holes have been and are punched
into some bags. They are then of only limited use as rubbish bags, yet on the
other hand, the danger of suffocation for small children is largely eliminated.
If the excitement of the game is soon past, the bag as a mask enjoys non-stop
popularity in another context: In some confessional videos and photographs, the
protagonists make themselves unrecognizable with bags. In this context, it is
difficult to imagine a more logical reuse than occurred on 25 February 2002 in
the Styrian town of Knittelfeld:
Roughly twenty minutes before
closing time there was hardly any more business in the Billa-supermarket
on the [...] Herrengasse. So the cashier, Waltraud Labner, 42 years old, left
her cash register and filled a shelf around ten meters away, with bottles. She
was holding a plastic crate in her hand when suddenly a masked man entered the
store. He had a Billa-sack with eye holes cut into it pulled over his head and
held a roughly 30-centimeter kitchen knife in his hand. According to police, he
wanted to use it to stab the cashier. Yet she was able to defend herself thanks
to the crate. The robber ordered the 42-year-old upper Styrian woman, “Hand
over the register. Now!” Before the situation escalated any further, however, a
customer intervened. The customer had only just entered the store when he
noticed the armed man near the cash register. At the same moment he heard the
cries of the cashier, whereby he immediately came to her aid. “Shit,” was the
only word that the perpetrator uttered, and before the customer could
intervene, he stormed out of the supermarket without the loot, running in the
direction of Hauptplatz. All tracks end there.41
In that the robber pulled the empty sack over
his head with the opening facing downward, he also turned the normal practice
of the purchase on its head. What he wanted to carry home were not groceries,
but, rather, money – money, that he would have possibly spent later in the same
supermarket.
The collectors
There are only a few objects that can be
suitably archived in plastic bags – although at times they are used to collect
and sort comics. Yet to store paper, the PE-bags are too non-breathable, for
other objects too non-transparent, and they also reveal the poverty of the
collectors, and the meagerness of their collection. Those who collect in
plastic bags cannot afford anything better.
But those who collect the
plastic bags themselves, free them of every use value that is sought and found
in the most far-flung reuse. Transformed into objects, they are brought
together and piece for piece formulate a history of fleetingness, in which the
actual fate of the collector can be experienced. The city is arranged
differently for plastic bag collectors than it is for its inhabitants. They are
not interested in street names, connections, places of residence. For them, the
streets are foyers of a gallery in which the people heedlessly or with an
enchanting effortlessness display the worthless and therein meaningful
collector’s items.
As with all collections, a
peculiar fetishism comes into effect here by which not only the motif, but also
all of the factual data, the entire past of the plastic bags, becomes
interesting. Only a collector can identify the various plastic bags: the Sinus,
Lemo-Reiterband, or Polymatador bags. Like the onologist
knows a wine by its color, aroma, and taste, they like to categorize the bags
according to material and design. This knowledge, which is as diverse and
superfluous as the collected objects themselves, allows the collectors to
competently discuss the meaning of the first machine-glued cone shaped bags,
the awkwardness of the early plastic sack, and the graphical finesse of a
department store’s special edition. Yet, at the same time, an emancipatory
element is hidden in the senselessness of the debates and the collecting. The
knowledge that is accumulated also shows that the plastic bags, as plastic, are
not absorbed “entirely in their use,” as Roland Barthes claimed.42
The collecting of plastic bags allows the enjoyment of the senseless: beyond
the dialectic of use and exchange value, the collector enjoys the artificiality
of the flexible surfaces, purely for pleasure, and recalls other not yet
realized economies beyond capitalist socialization.
As long as these other
economies still await realization, the lesson of the produced and collected
bags remains. Yet how can such a lesson from bags still be ensured in light of
the exuberant abundance of available materials? Heinz Schmidt-Bachem, with a
collection of more than 150,000 bags, certainly the doyen of the bag
collectors, has offered a far-sighted answer to this question. More familiar
with the subject than anyone else, some time ago he was forced to sell off a
part of his stock, since he still received unsolicited, mass deliveries of
plastic bags even after he had announced the completion of his collection; he only
considered a small amount worthy for a future hermeneutics. Declared as
garbage, two trucks full of plastic bags set out on a path that had been paved
for them from the outset;43 and like a sinking ship, vanishing, they
waved one of those secret-code flag signals that Walter Benjamin knew of all
along.
Notes
1 Anonymous
flyer; Hamburg, December 1992. Capitalized as in the original German.
2 Walter
Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Frankfurt am
Main 1983, p. 112. The analogy between packaging and fashion can also be found
elsewhere “Packaging is the dress of the commodities,” can be found in the
catalogue of the traveling show, Besser Verpacken (Better Packing), see: Fritz
Weidinger, Erich Ketzler, Wanderschau Besser verpacken,
exhib. cat., [Vienna], [1956] no place or date stated and not paginated.
3
As long as it is packaged, a product remains in the form of a commodity – which
is why it is only in the case of serious complaints about the quality that it
is possible to exchange unpacked and therefore potentially used commodities.
4 Ole
Frahm, Friedrich Tietjen, “DER GR†NE PUNKT,” in: glas'z,
Nr. 2, Hamburg 1993, pp. 23Ð26, here: p. 26. As in the German original.
5 Wolfgang
Fritz Haug, Kritik der WarenŠsthetik, Frankfurt 1976,
p. 16f.; see also, in the same: WarenŠsthetik und kapitalistische Massenkultur
I, Berlin 1980, p. 47.
6 Benjamin,
see note 2, p. 236. The bag is depicted in Heinz Schmidt-Bachem, TŸten,
Beutel, Tragetaschen. Zur Geschichte der Papier, Pappe und Folien
verarbeitenden Industrie in Deutschland, MŸnster/New
York/Munich/Berlin 2001, p. 237, ill. 26.
7 In
contrast, the competing material, paper, has a considerably more narrow horizon
of uses in bag production. The transition from non-synthetic to entirely
synthetic plastics is marked by materials such as hardened rubber (ebonite) and
celluloid, which have been processed since roughly the mid-nineteenth century.
The first completely synthetic plastic was Bakelite, developed at the beginning
of the twentieth century. For more on the multiple uses of plastic, see, for
example, Sabine Wei§ler (ed.), Plastik Welten,
Berlin 1985; Penny Sparke (ed.), The Plastics Age. From Bakelite to Beanbags
and Beyond, Woodstock/New York 1993;
Jeffrey L Meikle, American Plastic. A Cultural History,
New Brunswick/New Jersey 1995.
8 Hans
Schwippert, DarmstŠdter GesprŠch: Mensch und Technik,
Darmstadt 1952, p. 84f.
9 Two
years previously, Warhol, together with other artists in pop art provided for
the re-creation of links between the worlds of art and consumption. “The
Bianchini Gallery in New York [was] rebuilt, and, with a turnstile at the
entrance and a cash register at the exit, mutated into an American supermarket.
Art and commodities were thus melded in the most confusing way: Robert Watts
chromed eggs, Claes Oldenburg offered new bonbons and Andy Warhol built an
impressive display of hand- signed Campbell’s soup cans.” (Friedrich Tietjen,
“The Making of: Multiple,” in: Peter Weibel (ed.), Kunst ohne Unikat,
Cologne 1999, see p. 55). Warhol was also responsible for the printed shopping
bags – but in this case, they were made from paper.
10 The
rationalizing effect of individual packaging touches upon further fields of
consumption. Reduction of product spoilage: “Replacing the normal parchment
packaging with aluminum foil prevents the formation of a rancid and spoiled
crust on the stocked butter. With the use of parchment packaging after five
months in storage, a 2 to 3.5 cm thick crust builds. For each keg of butter,
that means a loss of 0.5 bis 0.9 kg butter and for 100,000 barrels per year,
that is 70 tons of butter on average. .... In West Germany, last year 110 tons
of butter were protected from spoilage through the use of aluminum foil which
works out to a value of 600,000 DM.”
Acceleration of the sales process: “To weigh and
package loosely held foodstuffs, a salesperson requires 27.2 seconds on
average, to take the prepackaged commodities from the shelf, 3.3 seconds. For
non-packaged commodities the entire sales process lasts 60 seconds whereas for
prepackaged commodities it is 37 seconds, thus about half the time. ... Through
the measuring, weighing, packing, informing and ringing up of the commodities,
the salesperson is only left with 15 percent of the working time for his or her
actual task; selling.”
Facilitating consumption: “A tin with a meal for
two people undoubtedly presents packaging that is suitable for its use. ...
Perfect examples of use-fitted packaging are, however, the teabag and the match
box, which have been produced in the same form for decades and can hardly be
replaced by anything better.”
From: Weidinger/Ketzler, same as note 2.
11 Karl
Marx, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen …konomie. Vol. 2: Der
Zirkulationsproze§ des Kapitals. Edited by
Friedrich Engels, Berlin 1989, p. 153; see also, in the same: Grundrisse der
Kritik der politischen …konomie (first draft), Berlin 1974, p. 423: “In
accordance with its nature, capital drives beyond all spatial barriers.”
12 It
is not by chance that the first half-synthetic, technically produced foodstuffs
such as Liebig’s meat-extract did not arrive in the stores in a loose form, but
rather, in weighed-out, trademarked packages.
13 Schmidt-Bachem,
same as note 6, p. 40f. The apprentices were cheaper, because they not only had
to “pay” for their education metaphorically, but actually had to concretely pay
fees for their apprenticeship.
14 Ibid.,
chapter 8.
15 Ibid.,
p. 140ff.
16 Ibid.,
p. 144.
17 Ibid.,
p. 173f.
18 Ibid.,
p. 195.
19 Ibid.,
p. 168. We thank Torsten Michaelsen for his invaluable support in the
evaluation.
20 See,
on this analysis, Moishe Postone, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism. Notes
on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’,” in: New German Critique, Nr. 19, Winter
1980, pp. 97Ð115, here p. 110 f.; on the differentiation between “’making’work”
und “money-raking capital,” especially Holger Schatz, Andrea Woelicke, Freiheit
und Wahn deutscher Arbeit. Zur historischen AktualitŠt einer folgenreichen
antisemitischen Projektion, Hamburg/MŸnster
2001, p. 87f.
21 The
quote is from the brochure of Joseph Goebbels/Mjoelnir (Hans Schweitzer), “Die
verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken,” Munich 1930, taken from p.
16, where it was illustrated with a revealing caricature. On the caricature and
anti-Semitic ideas of the masked Jew, see Hanno Loewy, “’ ... ohne Masken’ Ð
Juden im Visier der ‘Deutschen Fotografie’ 1933-1945,” in: Klaus Honnef, Rolf
Sachsse, Karin Thomas (eds), Deutsche Fotografie. Macht eines Mediums,
Cologne 1997, pp. 135Ð149, here p. 136f., and Ole Frahm, Das wei§e M – Zur
Genealogie von MAUS(CHWITZ). In: Fritz Bauer Institut (ed.), †berlebt und
unterwegs. JŸdische Displaced Persons im Nachkriegsdeutschland (Jahrbuch 1997
zur Geschichte und Wirkung des Holocaust).
Frankfurt am Main/New York 1997, pp. 303Ð340, esp. p. 329f.
22 See
Saul FriedlŠnder, “Der Erlšsungsantisemitismus,” in: the same; Das Dritte
Reich und die Juden. Die Jahre der Verfolgung 1933-1939,
Munich 2000, p. 276.
23 See
Victor Klemperer, LTI – Notizbuch eines Philologen,
Leipzig 1980, p. 101.
24 See
Schmidt-Bachem, same as note 6, p. 191.
25 Siegfried
Kracauer, Die Angestellten, Frankfurt am
Main 1971, p. 11.
26 Reinhard
Spree, “Angestellte als Modernisierungsagenten,” in: JŸrgen Kocka (ed.), Angestellte
im europŠischen Vergleich, Gšttingen 1981,
pp. 279Ð309, here p. 290.
27 Mario
Kšnig, Hannes Siegrist, Rudolf Vetterli, Warten und AufrŸcken. Die
Angestellten in der Schweiz 1870-1950, Zurich 1985, p.
14ff.
28 See
Schmidt-Bachem, same as note 6, p. 198.
29 Wei§ler,
same as note 7, p. 53.
30 Schmidt
Bachem, same as note 6, p. 241; see also, pages 242 and 247. With the
introduction of the bag-penny, the “competition of the thousand bags” was
offered. (Ibid., p. 246).
31 Wei§ler,
same as note 7, p. 53.
32 “Why
are our bags made of plastic: Because they are made from 100 percent recycled
plastic. We have learned that carrying bags made of 100 percent recycled
material are recyclable at least 18 times; paper only 6 times at most. ... In
light of the huge mountain of plastic waste ... the reuse of the raw material
for carrying bags seems to be a sensible alternative until someone once again
informs us of a better way,” writes Zweitausendeins, a mail order book company,
on the bottom of their bags (“TŸte Copyright © 2001 by Zweitausendeins”).
In 1991, there was still not much sign of this capitalization of garbage; see
Volker Grassmuck, Christian Unverzagt, Das MŸll-System, Frankfurt am Main 1991,
p. 108ff. und p. 145f., which indeed, analyzed the “garbage system,” but still
had no premonition of DSD which, through DER GR†NE PUNKT completely changed
this system; see also, Frahm/Tietjen, same as notes 4 and 23, and also in the
same: “Der GrŸne Punkt (Teil 2),” in: glas'z,
Nr. 3, Hamburg 1994, pp. 28Ð31, and in the same: “Der GrŸne Punkt (Teil 3),” in:
glas'z, Nr. 4, Hamburg 1995, pp.
24Ð26. The symbol with the three arrows in a triangle and the number four
indicates that the type of plastic is polyethylene.
33 Schmidt-Bachem,
same as note 6, p. 240.
34 Vgl.
Schmidt-Bachem, same as note 6, p. 55f.
35 Schmidt-Bachem,
same as note 6, p. 193.
36 Schmidt-Bachem,
same as note 6, p. 208; PE is the common acronym for the plastic, polyethylene.
37 In
the course of its continuing propagation as an environmentally protective
material, household garbage bags made of paper are still offered today (in
Austria from the firm Alufix).
38 Heinz
Schmidt-Bachem, Von DŸten und PlastiktŸten. Studien zur Geschichte der
Papier, Pappe und Kunststoffe verarbeitenden Industrie in Deutschland im 19.
und 20. Jahrhundert unter besonderer BerŸcksichtigung der Papier und Folien
verarbeitenden Industrie zur Herstellung von TŸten, Beuteln, Tragetaschen,
Dissertation, Hamburg 2000, p. 250. See also, Schmidt-Bachem, same as note 6,
p. 236f.
39 On
the servant’s chest and the bourgeois suitcase, see: Anndra Mihm, Packend É
eine Kulturgeschichte des Reisekoffers, Marburg 2001,
esp. pp. 12Ð20 and p. 36ff. Mihm does not mention the bag in her cultural
history of the suitcase: this derives solely from the chest.
40 On
murders involving suitcases, see: Peter Hiess, Christian Lunzer, Mord
Express. Die gršssten Verbrechen in der Geschichte der Eisenbahn,
Vienna/Munich 2000, esp. p. 114ff.
41 Daniele
Marcher, “Kassiererin wehrte Messerstich ab,” in: Kleine Zeitung,
p. 15, Graz, 27 February 2002.
42 Roland
Barthes, Mythen des Alltags, Frankfurt am
Main 1988, p. 81.
43 Without
author or year, under the title: “Die Welt der TŸten” at the Web address:
http://www.ueber30.de/texte_news/news/n_150120013.html in the Internet
(3/2002).