Banal Violence

This essay explores how one plastics factory produces plastic air, and the consequences for how we think about waste, plastic, air quality, and bodily knowledge through the conceptual framework of banal violence. Highlighting workers’ experiences in plastic production and decentering narratives of individual consumer choice, the essay draws attention to petrocapitalism's structural violence, through which harmful environmental conditions have been normalized and integrated into what it means to build a life in the image of the American Dream. Modifying Rob Nixon's seminal concept of slow violence to highlight banality focuses attention not only on the temporality of violence as incremental and accretive, but on its affective and bodily registers. The essay calls this process banal violence to describe the normalization and obfuscation of harmful environmental conditions, where everyday practices of industrial production quietly degrade ecosystems and human health over time in the heart of empire. Banality also highlights how commonplace such violence has become: The plastic cup factory is not even the worst of the environmental problems in the region, much less globally. Stressing its banal nature draws attention to the fact that environmental violence is now an ordinary, even expected part of our lives.