Punctum Books

Chapter Title: Plastic

Chapter Author(s): Anand Pandian

Book Title: Anthropocene Unseen

Book Subtitle: A Lexicon
Book Editor(s): Cymene Howe, Anand Pandian
Published by: Punctum Books. (2020)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv11hptbw.55

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 anthropocene unseen

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 52

Plastic
Anand Pandian

Plastic substances are now a ubiquitous planetary presence,

far beyond the human places for which they were meant. At
this point, ninety percent of global seabirds have probably in-
gested plastic fragments (Wilcox, Sebille, and Hardesty 2015),
while oceanographers write of the plastic debris teeming in the
world’s oceans as a “plastisphere” habitat for microbial commu-
nities (Zettler, Mincer, and Amaral-Zettler 2013). For those who
would identify the Anthropocene with the “Great Acceleration”
of the postwar era, terrestrial plastic deposits turn out to be an
ideal way to mark the beginning of this epoch (Zalasiewicz et
al. 2014). Indeed, global plastic production has skyrocketed in
these decades, from two million tons in 1950 to 299 million tons
in 2013 (PlasticsEurope 2015) with no signs of slackening in this
frenetic pace of growth.
Some observers have begun to call our time a Plasticene,
with these stubborn and swelling tides of manmade debris in
mind (Reed 2015). This proposal is most intriguing if we keep
in mind that plastic as a material has always yielded objects in
the form of questions: what else could your life become in the
company of this shiny new thing? “Plastic plummeted us into a
collective dream, a heritage of magic we thought was dead, com-
ing to life in perplexed new forms,” the poet Christine Hume

doi: 10.21983/P3.0265.1.54 325

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 anthropocene unseen

(2014, 78) writes. “We projected ourselves into plastic material’s

will to change.”
Take a look at a surface like this one. Imagine it rippling and
billowing with the wind. Say you heard a voice that said some-
thing like this — 

Odysseus, Homer tells us, was tumbled by Zeus into a “wine

dark sea,” left clinging to a keel for survival. A wine dark
sea… Were the Greeks color-blind? Did the thunderbolt
strike at sunset? People still wonder. I tell you, though, I’ve
seen it too, with these eyes of mine. It happened one day in
the city of Baltimore, as I was walking down St. Paul. Look
up, and there it was, rippling with the wind, glistening like
oil on water, a wine dark plastic sea. Mineral spirits from the
Jurassic, remnants of countless dead things, pressed from the
plankton, algae, and mud of forgotten seas. How did we get
from that, to this?
The sea now is full of plastic, “plastic soup” is what they
call it. “There are more plastic particles in the North Atlantic
than stars in the Milky Way galaxy,” an activist once told me.
We went trawling for plastic on the Chesapeake Bay. Every
dip brought up something new. A sliver of plastic box. A slice
of plastic film. Something bright and round, nestled like a
fish egg in the jellies and sea grass. Where had they come
from? How long would they stay?
We call it the Anthropocene now, this time of ours, giving
it the feel of an epic tale. It’s like the Odyssey all over again,
but without an Ithaca to come back to. We forget our pow-
ers come from long-dead creatures. Or that the garbage will
outlast the hubris.
Go. Comb the beaches of Hawaii for plastic rocks. Try to
get a picture of that albatross gagging on a toothbrush in the
Pacific. There’s enough plastic made each year to pack the
United States in cling wrap.
All this began with the powers sunk into long-gone seas,
and to the deep these things will go. “You throw something

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 Plastic

into the sea,” Bruno Munari once said, “and the sea hands it
back to you carved, finished, smooth, shiny or polished.” This
sea, this plastic sea, isn’t quite so artful. But remember that
plastic is much more than a thing. “Plastic,” Roland Barthes
tells us, “is the very idea of its infinite transformation.”
Call it the Plasticene, I say, this wine dark time of danger.
There are all those bottles, yes, those plastic sheets, and cups,
and wrappers. But there still remains, in all of these things,
the promise of change they were meant to carry. For we are
also plastic. And we can also bend, with them. We still have
the chance to learn, with these things and their buried ener-
gies, the most crucial lesson of all. What would it take to live
profoundly otherwise?

I tried with this video essay, Wine Dark Plastic Sea (Pandian
2015), to wrestle with the beauty and the terror of such trans-
formative potential. Its mood is mythopoetic. Plastic embod-
ies, like no other substance, the arc of utopian hope and deep
despair around the very possibility of fundamental change in
modern times (Meikle 1995). These materials convey the plastic-
ity (Malabou 2008) of human being, the power of encounters to
catalyze new modes of life. What if we learned to see such banal
and quotidian things — this construction tarp billowing over a
renovated rowhouse in Baltimore, for example — as openings
into a common pulse of existence, as fluid expressions of the
ceaseless “play of forces and waves of forces” evoked by Frie-
drich Nietzsche (1968, 550), rather than as isolated and finished
forms of consumer satisfaction?
For these objects, after all, have destinations far beyond our
sidewalks and wastebins, passing into the muddied tides (Capps
2015), ash-flecked skies, and grotesque bellies of our time (Karu-
na Society for Animals and Nature, n.d.). And they begin as well
with life and death, as fossil fuels, with the “animal bodies in the
browned oil procured from the distillation of fossilized things,”
as the Russian scientist Mikhael Lomonosov first speculated in
1757. Say we confronted more squarely these chemical, biologi-
cal, and geological currents eddying in the stuff of our lives.

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 anthropocene unseen

Could we find a way of cultivating more livable relationships

with those countless things and beings that we use and dispose
of so lightly?

References

Capps, Kriston. 2015. “What I Learned Trawling for Trash in

the Chesapeake Bay.” Citylab. September 10. https://www.
citylab.com/life/2015/09/what-i-learned-trawling-for-trash-
in-the-chesapeake-bay/404419/.
Hume, Christine. 2014. “Parachute.” In The Petroleum Manga,
edited by Marina Zurkow, 78–79. Brooklyn: punctum
books.
Karuna Society for Animals and Nature. n.d. “The Plastic Cow
Project.” http://www.karunasociety.org/projects/the-plastic-
cow-project.
Malabou, Catherine. 2008. What Should We Do with Our
Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand. New York: Fordham
University Press.
Meikle, Jeffrey L. 1995. American Plastic: A Cultural History.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. Translated by
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Books.
Pandian, Anand, dir. Wine Dark Plastic Sea. 3’53”. https://
vimeo.com/150433274.
PlasticsEurope. 2015. Plastics — The Facts 2015: An Analysis
of European Plastics Production, Demand, and Waste
Data. Brussels: PlasticsEurope Association of Plastics
Manufacturers.
Reed, Christina. 2015. “Plastic Age: How It’s Reshaping Rocks,
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newscientist.com/article/mg22530060–200-plastic-age-
how-its-reshaping-rocks-oceans-and-life/.
Wilcox, Chris, Erik van Sebille, and Britta Denise Hardesty.
2015. “Threat of Plastic Pollution to Seabirds is Global,

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 Plastic

Pervasive, and Increasing.” PNAS 112, no. 38: 11899–904.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1502108112.
Zalasiewicz, Jan, Mark Williams, Colin L. Waters, Anthony D.
Barnosky, and Peter Haff. 2014. “The Technofossil Record of
Humans.” Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1: 34–43. https://doi.
org/10.1177/2053019613514953.
Zettler, Erik, Tracy Mincer, and Linda Amaral-Zettler.
2013. “Life in the ‘Plastisphere’: Microbial Communities
on Plastic Marine Debris.” Environmental Science and
Technology 47: 7137–46. https://doi.org/10.1021/es401288x.

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