The Plastic Turn

Abstract:There is currently considerable interest, across a variety of different fields, in the quality of plasticity. The philosopher Catherine Malabou, for instance, identifies plasticity as “the motor scheme of our time,” and has applied the concept to fields ranging from continental philosophy to neuroscience to literature. In this essay, I propose a plastic turn that emphasizes not the formal quality of plasticity, as do Malabou and others, but rather a plastic turn that takes inspiration from the materiality of plastic itself—what I call the material-aesthetic. Plastic speaks as a material, in its material formations, in modes of structuration, and in metaphoric figurality that imports “excess signification” into our aesthetic understanding and critical thinking. Explaining briefly what I mean by material-aesthetic, I propose to construct the plastic turn around two points of connection: first, through what I call the “in-laboratory” event that foregrounds the distinctness of polymeric forms and the manifestations that additives bring to plastic’s behavior, and second, the “outside-laboratory” event where plastic becomes an increasingly ubiquitous contaminant within the global ecosystem and develops its own ways and character traits. My argument considers the growth and formation (substance-variety through multiple applications and chemical synthesis) and dissemination (oceanic movements and sea-land drifts and percolations) of plastic in the context of corresponding developments in literature and critical thought beginning with the turn of the twentieth century. In its molecularity, polymericity and molarity, plastic points to a turn in twentieth-century thinking across disciplines and discourses. It is the material-aesthetic as the operative theory-machine.