Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
“People want everything”, she whispers. “That's their problem.” Even
when Don suggests that one of the products being scrutinized in the legal
proceedings is a Clare herbicide that she used on her garden, she sees
that the dispute has no real meaning.
It makes no difference whether this business gave her cancer. They have
given her everything else. Taken her life and molded it in every way
imaginable, plus six degrees beyond imagining. Changed her life so
greatly that not even cancer can change it more than halfway back.
[Powers 2001, p. 320]
Is Powers promoting anti-capitalist dissent, or fatalism? It seems more
likely that he is advocating no simple polarities; rather, Heise (2002)
argues that his position is informed by modern commentaries on risk that
present it as an inseparable component of the techno-economic system.
According to sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992), “in advanced modernity,
the social production of
wealth
is systematically associated with the
social production of
risks
”. Not only are such risks inevitable and perva-
sive, but they are uncertain and unpredictable even to specialists. Heise
cites the work of historian of technology Thomas Hughes (1989), who,
she says, argues that “these large-scale systems into which technologies
are embedded have become so complex that they can no longer be easily
understood or controlled, and therefore they give rise to risks whose
origins and outcomes are extremely difficult to trace and to manage”
(Heise 2002). While DeLillo explores the unnerving effects of such a
cultural environment on its hapless inhabitants, Powers confronts more
directly the question of who is to blame for it. His conclusion appears to
be that blame becomes itself an outdated and meaningless notion. The
industrialized world has its own ecology, its own food chains through
which materials and energy are processed (as Powers illustrates with a
dissection of the components of a disposable camera and their prove-
nance), its own inevitable dangers and lines of defense. This ecosystem
is self-sustaining: even Tim Bodey's protein-drug technology becomes,
at the very end of the topic, the foundation for a new corporation, a
future pharmaceuticals company. 'Plastic' stands proxy for all our tech-
nologies when Powers says that “Plastic happens; that is all we need to
know on earth” (Powers 1998, p. 771).
