Chemical artifacts are everywhere. Not only can it be argued that chemical compounds are the constitutive blocks of material realities, but also the chemical industry is the transformative node in the economic systems of the world. Where raw materials are transformed, making the technological worlds and operating cuts into reality where the possibilities of matter come to life.
Moreover, chemical objects have histories and geographies dispersed through transformative processes where politics, knowledge, and technologies come together in world-making activities, delivering chemical stories. Nonetheless, most of these processes may appear as alchemical fantasies, not captured by the day-to-day interaction with the thousands of chemical artifacts that constitute our lives in Western Societies.
In one of his recent books, Amitav Ghosh (2021) argued that one of the hidden consequences of Western domination has been making the world silent. This is to say that the underlying narratives rooted in thinking paradigms from the Enlightenment, contend that the only legitimate entities with the right to communicate are humans (and not even all humans, one may argue). Because, of course, it is completely irrational to think that things such as trees, mountains, animals, and buildings can communicate. However, this is precisely the matter at stake: what type of worldviews are we pretending to have if we are willing to hear only one single story?
In this sense, in this short article, I assume that chemical objects have stories to tell; the question becomes, how can they communicate their stories to us? The issue at stake is one of the most urgent, as it highlights the question of who has the right to speak: by silencing the plurality of worlds encapsulated within chemical objects, negating their accessibility becomes a political matter. Thus, the main aim of this piece is to address how to make the invisible inside chemical objects visible.
The essay's story and origin
During one of the sessions of the Philosophy of Technology course, to which this essay belongs, we discussed the Billie Cup as an object of design. To those unfamiliar, the Billie Cup is a reusable cup found on most Dutch university campuses and aimed at decreasing waste. In the session, I was amazed by how much discussion and analysis such an ordinary object as the Billie Cup stimulated; thus, I will use it as my main chemical object for discussion.
The Billie Cup is made of polypropene (PP), a versatile thermoplastic easily made and considered hazard-free. Nevertheless, it is made from hydrocarbon; its primary raw material is oil. However, throughout all the processes, this identity is lost in favour of a sustainable image. Therefore, in what follows, I will illustrate ways for the Billie Cup to tell its complicated story, from crude oil to an answer to waste production.
To do so, I will explore what techniques the experts in making inanimate objects alive use. Thus, I first look at animation, particularly Studio Ghibli’s movies. The aim is to see how spaces of narration are constructed where not only humans can communicate and what lessons we can draw if we want to tell the stories of chemical objects.
Second, I look at designers, particularly the practice of fictional design, where the audience can experience alternative possibilities from the design and interaction of artifacts. By combining the two approaches, the hope is to give the Billie Cup (and other chemical objects) the possibility to tell their stories.
Spaces of narration for nonhumans
What is at stake is to give nonhumans the space to tell their story. In this sense, it is probably unsurprising that one of the best examples are the Ghibli movies by director Hayao Miyazaki. In his films, Miyazaki can create worlds where all elements possess their own vitality, providing spaces of expression where the narrative unfolds through relationship-making.
Moreover, what makes distinctive Ghibli movies is that in most of them, the classical dualist distinction between bad and good characters does not hold; instead, each character is moved by its own story, enriching the plot with an ongoing transformative space where through empathy and understanding, narratives unfold, and identities are made explicit.
Several examples throughout Ghibli’s filmography, from the wind in Nausica of the Valley of the Wind, where it is an element of life and destiny that entangles the individual stories of the characters. Or the iron in Princess Mononoke, where its vitality is represented as the element that guides human exploitation of the forest, as well as a curse that poisons the main character Ashitaka. However, the best example of a narrative space of transformation for nonhuman vitality is the river spirit scene in Spirited Away.
The scene opens by showing the spectator a blob monstrous creature that heavily carries itself toward the bathhouse, the central space of the unfolding narrative, creating vivid reactions to the characters surrounding it due to its smell and disgusting form.
Once it arrives, Chihiro (i.e., the main character) is ordered to take care of the unwanted guest by guiding it to one of the bathrooms. Noticeably, the blob's presence actively changes the environment by routing food and leaving sticky traces. However, once the water, enriched by salts, starts to flow on the creature, Chihiro notices something inside, making the narrative space a transformative field.
The blob is revealed to be an assemblage of waste that humans have dumped into the river and have accumulated on the spirit that lives there. Chihiro, helped by other characters working at the bathhouse, removes the waste that covers the river spirit until a critical point is reached, and the blob’s assemblage collapses, liberating the spirit and revealing its identity.
Figure 1. Spirited Away: The Spirit of the River enters the bathhouse and encounters Chihiro. Source
Plan of fictional transformation
What I want to illustrate with this example is how the scene makes explicit the implicit story of the nonhuman. By analyzing it, we can identify several elements that allow Miyazaki to construct a narrative space where fictional design expresses the invisible.
In this sense, the first element that stands out is the sensory presence of the object of design. In its monstrous blob form, the river spirit reveals itself through the sensory field, engaging with the other characters' perceptions.
All five senses are addressed: the tactile as its slime body, the auditory as the sounds that the creature emits, the eyes by the presence of the body, and more than any other, smells and taste are directly addressed by the disgust reaction of the character that the viewer associates with the rottenness feeling of waste.
Moreover, engaging with the sensory field leads to the making of relations. This is visible in how Chihiro addresses the guest by emphatically relating to it. Chihiro does not reject the disgusting creature; instead, it seems she projects on herself the uncomfortable sensation of stickiness and smell that, understandably, leads to wanting a bath. Therefore, she actively reacts to what is in front of her, a slimy, stinky blob, by doing what she would do in that situation: have a bath. Such projection of engaging with the needs of others makes the space of narrative open to the possibility of transformative processes.
The transformation is revealed once the invisible is made visible. Chihiro starts to fill the bath with water and brush the creature, and through this process, the unity of the assemblage that makes the blob begins to fall apart, showing that what was making the river spirit a disgusting blob was the accumulation of waste dumped by humans in the riverbed.
Once the river spirit is separated from the waste, its identity is revealed to the spectator and the characters of the story, showing that the transformative process within the space of narrative enacts a fictional possibility of the river spirits true identity. This transformation shows what was previously invisible (I.e., the separation between the river spirit and the human waste) and a transformative narrative to the spectator of the object occupying the scene.
The lesson to extract from this example is that by constructing a space for narration, Miyazaki operates a process of fiction design, making the invisible visible by emphasizing the sensory presence of the object and using empathic projections to enable transformation and the making of possible presents. In the next section, we will explore how this model can be used for the fictional design of ordinary chemical objects.
Designing fiction in the ordinary
The question we are left with is how we can design spaces of narration like the ones that Miyazaki uses to give life to his animation into ordinary objects. In his article on fictional design, James Auger writes that “the crafting of complex narrative in real-life ecologies is by taking advantage of contemporary media, familiar settings, and complexity of human desires.” This is not dissimilar from the techniques used in Ghibli’s movies, where sensory presence, the creation of relations, and processes of transformation allow for a space of narration where the invisible is made visible.
However, the challenge of designing fiction for ordinary objects is that the narration space needs to be introduced in the ecologies of real life rather than unfolding within the plot as in animation. This means, for instance, that the sensory dimension needs to be present and relatable to the subject as connecting meanings and memories. Moreover, introducing relations in societal ecologies means the relations occur on two levels: the individual and symbolic.
When Chihiro engages with the river spirit under its blob form, the sensory presence enacts an empathic relation, such as “what I would do if I were you,” which leads Chihiro to guide the guest to the bathroom. However, the relationality between the two characters ends there because it does not find continuity outside that relationship. This is to say that the relationship between Chihiro and the river spirit cannot be connected to a deeper level; the meaning of the relationship cannot be linked to memories, being individual or collective. In a certain sense, the possibilities of animation are always in the present.
On the other hand, real-life ecologies expand on the continuity of the relationship. Thus, when engaging in an ordinary object such as a Billie cup, the sensory presence does not show itself exclusively in the present but also the past in the form of memories. For instance, the memories of a good or terrible coffee or the old days when you were a student.
The sensory dimensions of the object under this connotation open the introduction of relations in the narration space on the two different levels. The first is a one-to-one relationship where there is a recognition that the Billie Cup is as real as the subject viewing it, meaning that the empathic relation is framed as “thinking with the cup”; by the cup, the access of specific memories is directed.
The second dimension is collective, where the cup is accessed as a societal symbol. In this sense, the Billie Cup is not only a daily use object and the gateway to pass experiences but also an object with specific histories, geographies, and politics. For instance, the Billie Cup is an object that would not have been possible one hundred years ago; its origins are deep from the Earth, being an oil field in the Middle East or the North Sea, and part of a political agenda where, arguably, extractives practices are covered by sustainable rhetoric.
Spaces of narration and acts of transformation
To make the invisible visible, the space of narration needs a transformative action in the design process. In the Spirited Away scene, this is operated by the metaphorical act of the water washing away the waste accumulated by the river's spirit.
In the case of the Billie Cup, the transformation process needs to occur by anchoring it with the social ecologies. In this sense, Augier suggests considering three aspects: (i) the perception of lifestyle, for instance, the routine of drinking coffee; (ii) the psychological dimension, such as the triggering of emotions or self-reflection; (iii) the believability of the technology, as the artifact needs to be relatable and understood by the viewer.
Considering these aspects, the suggestion is that it is possible to make a space of narration where the invisible is made visible in ordinary objects. For instance, in the Billie Cup, the sensory presence of the object can be stressed by engaging on multiple sensory levels.
Figure 2. Examples of different Billie Cups. Source
Therefore, a possible path to constructing a narration space is to combine and make visible the histories of the two entities that form the relationships. Thus, in the person-Billie Cup interaction, what is needed is that the Billie Cup also becomes a subject.
A way to do so is to make the identity of the Billie Cup explicit, meaning revealing its “memories,” showing the histories, geographies, and hidden characters. To achieve this, communication with the second subject (i.e., the person) needs to be created, which can be made by engaging with the sensory field.
To do so, fictional design choices become crucial. For instance, to make visible the material histories of the Billie Cup, one can think of which design choices can give vitality to the material. A suggestion that was proposed during the course was to integrate the Billie Cup with a membrane that slowly released the coffee on its external surface so that the user would feel the stickiness of the coffee on their hands, and together with the color of the coffee, would resemble the materiality of the oil from where the Billie Cup is derived from.
Using the above design choices, a space of narration is created by addressing the sensory field, thus undergoing a transformation process where the Billie Cup from object becomes a subject due to the visibility of its story. The transformation of the Billie Cup within the narration space from a statical object to a subject of vitality opens a relationship of “thinking with,” referring that my memories are enriched by the revelation of the Billie Cup histories, thus connecting both the individual and symbolic dimensions.
Conclusion
The combination between spaces of narration and fictional design is only one possibility; many other paths are open to exploration. The suggestion for philosophers of technology (but not only!) is that if we want to understand objects, we must let them talk. As I have illustrated, this is a matter of story-making, and by engaging with animators and designers, philosophers can learn essential lessons theoretically and methodologically. This essay is only the first small step to allow (chemical) objects and other nonhumans to tell their invisible stories; are we willing to listen to them?
References
Ghosh, A. (2021). The nutmeg’s curse: Parables for a planet in crisis. University of Chicago Press.
James Auger (2013) Speculative design: crafting the speculation, Digital Creativity, 24:1, 11-35, DOI: 10.1080/146268.2013.767276