Plastic has bad press. Thoughts towards this book began just as the National Geographic launched their multi-year âPlanet or Plasticâ campaign. The front page of the related issue of their magazine bore a picture of a plastic âicebergâ.1 Look at what we have made of the world, the image warns: it is time to choose between the Blue Marble that we have come to romanticize and an alternative oikos whose bedrock is no longer rock but polymer, whose ice is no longer ice but a plastic mass devoid of any life-form, and whose oceans are saturated with the stuffâvisible and invisibleâplastic marking time in the cycles of the Ocean Gyres. Now! the issue and campaign demands, we must wage war against plastic, in its material form, and with respect to our own habits. It is time for us to take stock of our daily dependence on plastic and plastic-related products. By the time this book was teetering on the brink of production, the National Geographic, again, had a plastic-centred headline article, âThe Story of Plastic: Breaking the Habitâ.2 It only took over a year, it seems, for plasticâs popularly conceived object-life to effect the shift from a lesser-observed object to one which is so phenomenalized, so implicated within our globalized day-to-day that narrative story-telling, addictive habit, even habitus are invoked.
Globally collated statistical and scientific evidence demonstrates the extent to which plastic materials have far outstripped, or âoutgrownâ, even other human-made materials in terms of production, consumption, and waste.3 Marina Zurkowâs Petroleum Manga (2014) makes explicit on verbal and pictorial levels the extent of plasticâs reach, its interconnectedness with the late twentieth century, and the ongoing concern about fossil fuels, its potential afterlives. The global battle cry against plastic is seen, too, in the work of the Plastic Oceans Foundation and their landmark documentary A Plastic Ocean (2016). It is a call that has been taken up by the BBC and Sir David Attenborough in the second series of Blue Planet (2017) and which has been extended ever since. To draw our attention to the difficulty we have in fully conceiving of the global plastic cycle, as well as our dependencies upon it, British surf company Finisterre has launched surf and swim products made from regenerated nylon waste, as well as a âmicroplasticsâ design collection, all of which you will receive wrapped in plastic-free totally biodegradable packaging (2018âongoing); we can play a part in mitigating plastic waste by quite literally wearing the problem to the end of the earth.
Alongside this plastic Zeitgeist in the media, celebrities, companies, lobbyists, and community groups have increasingly become âplastic awareâ, an awareness previously reserved for surfers, fishermen, divers, beachcombers, eco-warriors, and those of us who live in areas which are recipients of plastic waste. XR, or Extinction Rebellionâs âOperation Plastic Attackâ, and other responses to climate (and associated anti-plastic) activism take centre stage in world news. The EU has issued a series of directives regarding plastic use.4 To a greater or lesser extent, everything we have come to call Anthropocene life is touched by plastic; the newly minted global war against plastic affects us all. And yet it is quite plain that we have not yet plumbed the depths of our understanding of plasticâs reach over the planet, our plastic understanding of the planet, or our own relation with and conceptualization of what is and is not âplasticâ.
Indeed, by the time that you are reading this sentence, it is likely you will have supplemented the list of plastic awareness exercises above with some, perhaps more historic, perhaps more up-to-date, perhaps closer to home, of your own: âWhat about Curtis Ebbesmeyerâs rubber duck obsession of the â90s and all the work that has, since then, been accomplished mapping the garbage patches around which the ocean gyres circle?â you may be thinking. Or, âhow has all the new research into photodegradation not been mentioned? Kansuke Yamamotoâs âplastic poetryâ?â Or, âwhat about the infamous plastic bag scene in Sam Mendesâs American Beauty (1999) and its arguable progenitor in Jem Cohenâs Lost Book Found (1996)? Jeffrey Meikleâs cultural history of plastic in America (1997)? David de Rothchildâs catamaran Plastiki (2009)? Susan Freinkelâs popular âoutâing of our plastic addiction (2011)? Robert Bezeauâs Panamanian Plastic Bottle Village? Vanuatuâs total ban on single-use plastics (2019)? The reactionary art of Mandy Barker or Kate V. Robertson?â, or even âwhat about the rise of the so-called Plastic Studies in the Humanities?â You may even question: âWhat about the plastic keyboard keys with which this has been typed?â5 We can read the traces of plastic in these words. If you are holding a printed copy of this book, look at the thin layer of protection on its cover, or its binding. The miscellaneous piles amass; the list goes on.
Yet it is not the aim of this book to catalogue or expose an apocalyptic or post-anthropic vision of a world annihilated by the human creation of and subsequent addiction to plastic. Rather, the starting point for this study was an interest in the fascination that plastic holds for some of us, and the fact that it has done so for centuries, a fascination that has exhibited itself in the wordâs changeable linguistic use, which is no less pervasive in its positive than in its negative manifestations, and which has led to and perpetuates the current public âwar against plasticâ. The plastic depths that we need to plumb in order to understand what plastic means for us today are not simply those of the now-much-maligned twentieth-century wonder substance. And even if we do take the twentieth century as a starting point, we must use the relative familiarity to look back at a deep plastic past which is as much (if not more) informed by the formation and rise of the modern humanities and the literary arts, as much as it is by scientific innovation in materials synthesis.
We can only come to appreciate all that âplasticâ and âplasticityâ means to us by engaging deeplyâsubstantivelyâwith both plasticâs substance and plasticityâs action, positive and negative alike. Further to this, we shall come to see the importance of the inextricability of âplasticâ (materially, ecologically, figuratively, neuroscientifically) and literature; that is, read together, through a substantive engagement with Kafkaâs Kurzprosa âDie Sorge des Hausvatersâ, literature and plastic show us something fundamental about plastic and plasticity which is more generative than the twenty-first-century addiction to its destructive aspects might lead us to think. Plastic has conditioned culture, and we are always-already in a binary bind about it. And co-existing in these two mindsâpositive and negative, creative and destructive, material and immaterialâmay be a good thing to be attentive to, rather than attempt to âpin downâ, reject, or argue against that equivocal non-thing that is plastic. Being in two minds about plastic is a reminder of what it might mean to take time to care , as well as, perhaps, showing how ironic it is to mobilize the plasticity fundamental to human understanding of the world to destroy the worldâs plastic aspects. Without a deeper engagement and âclose readingâ of plasticity and plastic, this book argues, we will never fully understand the hold that plastic exerts on us today.
1 Plastic/Literature
1919 . A moment when the writer Franz Kafka publishes a collection of short prose works, Ein Landarzt , which contains a provocative story of which there apparently exist no manuscript drafts, âDie Sorge des Hausvatersâ.6 A moment in High Modernity when âplasticâ takes on the physical and linguistic role that we now recognize as primaryâa noun denoting a non-conductive synthetic polymer. Before the late 1910s, due to a lack of scientific advance in the field of polymer synthesis and the fact that global industrial plastics production and trade only really intensified in the post-war 1950s,7 the wordâs primary force, and thus its effect upon us, was very different. Then, it was mostly adverbal and adjectival, to do with creation, dynamic form, expressions of powerful metamorphosis. Yet with polymer synthesis and a rise in domestic as well as industrial use of the synthesized material, the noun took precedence, as industry at all levels turned itself towards this new wonder substance at the time of and in the wake of both the First and the Second World War.8 It was with High Modernity that we saw the rise of plastic as a global commodity, to the extent that as early as the 1920s manufacturers diagnosed the era as an âage of plasticâ, extolling âpride in the ingenuity of illusionâ, alongside its other perhaps more important, although less aesthetic, properties (its malleability, and apparent indestructibility, amongst others).9 Plastic became adjective, verb, noun, and Zeitgeist. Thus, we take High Modernity as our starting point for a study of plastic and plasticity, as it was only then that the word took on the full significance to which we are used today.
âEdward Mooreâ, one-time pseudonym of Edwin Muir, the Scottish poet and translator into English of Kafka alongside his wife, Willa, writes, âThe believer in the future looks upon humanity as plasticâ.10 Muir was not gesturing towards potential future innovations in prosthesis; rather, he wrote out of a more fundamental battle of good and evil (or, of Futurity vs. Original Sin), to emphasize our resilience and adaptability, and our ability to fashion our material world, to âremakeâ ourselves, and to imagine worlds beyon...