Abstract
An exposition of our contemporary perspectives on plastic, and a counterpoint to this in a short history of plastic and plasticity. The ‘work’ of plastic and the literary work are linked together. High Modernism is established as a crux for our contemporary understanding of plastic. An introduction to the idea of Literary Plasticity. An exhortation to take care.
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Notes
- 1.
Ellen MacArthur (Guest Ed.) National Geographic (June 2018). The photograph is in fact a plastic bag, floating partly above, partly below the water, ‘as if’ an iceberg. The very smallest font on the cover of the magazine, at the bottom left, gives a quotation from Sylvia Earle which goes some way to undercut the apocalyptic melodrama: ‘Plastics aren’t inherently bad. It’s what we do, or don’t do, with them that counts.’ Plastic, she hints, should inspire an attitude of care as well as one of concern (or worry). This idea of care with respect to plasticity is something with which the ensuing study, with attention to the double meaning of the German ‘Sorge’, is concerned.
- 2.
National Geographic (December 2019). In the issue, the ‘Story of Plastic’ (68–80) comes after a dispatch on circular. Waste economies, promoting the updated interactive online element of the ‘Planet or Plastic’ campaign: the ‘plastic pledge’ (20).
- 3.
Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law, ‘Production, Use, and Fate, of all Plastics ever made’, Science Advances 3.7 (2017): n.p. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700782
- 4.
‘Annexes to the Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: A European Strategy for Plastics in a Circular Economy’ (Brussels 16.1.2018).
- 5.
Reading David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics as I edited the manuscript for this book, I was amused to read that he, too, draws our attention to the writer’s keyboard in his assessment of the ‘smoothness, fluency, and invisibility’, or difficult graspability, of plastic: ‘Each key on the keyboard on which I type has a slight concavity to better accommodate my fingertips. The plastic bottle I drink from has also been shaped to sit easily in my hand, with a ridged cap that twists off with minimal pressure.’ The writer’s interface with their typescripts has changed radically over the last century, but can we parse this back through Walter Benjamin’s pronouncement that the ‘typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters’ (Selected Writings v.11913–1926, Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 457)? We are only beginning to think through the ecological aesthetics of the effects of these plastic alienation devices.
- 6.
Neither reference to nor notes towards ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ are to be found in the Blue Octavo Notebooks, where Kafka first lists the prospective arrangements of the Country Doctor volume (different versions of this listing are found in the first and sixth of the notebooks; see The Blue Octavo Notebooks: 102, n.4). Kafka writes to Martin Buber in April of 1917 a list of contents for the book that was to become Ein Landarzt, which does not include ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’. That August a letter to Kurt Wolff includes the Kurzprosa in the list. Subsequently, ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ appears in a magazine (1919), and is subsequently collected (d.1919 pub.1920). There exists no manuscript draft. See A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia Ed. Richard Gray, et al. (Westport CT: Greenwood, 2005): 254.
- 7.
See Roland Geyer, Jenna R. Jambeck, and Kara Lavender Law, ‘Production, Use, and Fate, of all Plastics ever made’, Science Advances 3.7 (2017): p.1/5 (n.p.): DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700782
- 8.
The transition of dominant meanings of this word towards an emphasis on the synthetic polymer was remarkably swift. Bearing in mind that the development of early synthetics blossomed in the 1920s, and plastic’s industrial use was accelerated by the World Wars, and its domestic use by post-war economies, references pertaining to ‘plastic’ as a distinct material are seen charted in the OED from the 1900s onwards, and ‘plastic’ related compounds and specific objects enter the dictionary within the first few decades of the substance’s invention.
- 9.
Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural History (New York: Rutgers University Press, 1997): 2.
- 10.
Edwin Muir We Moderns: Enigmas and Guesses (New York: Knopf, 1920): 69. Muir’s original publication of the essays in The New Age, the English collection of 1918 (George Allen and Unwin) bear this anglicized pseudonym, which was in later editions ‘corrected’, as H.L. Mencken’s Introduction in the American edition (1920) makes clear.
- 11.
This resonates in turn with the overall tenor of the Muirs’ translations of Kafka, their, as Stanley Corngold so persuasively writes, diluting or domesticating of the broader than atropic, Gnostic, force of Kafka’s ethical positions (see Stanley Corngold, Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), particularly the chapter ‘Translation Mistakes’, pp. 176–93).
- 12.
This common association is one which is not typically fully translated into English nowadays. See, for instance, Herder’s seminal work on sculpture (and the soul) of 1778, Plastik: einige Wahrenehmungen über Form und Testalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Traume, whose most recent translation by Jason Gaiger is entitled Sculpture: Some observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
- 13.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe briefly traces this inheritance in Typography, also emphasizing both the witzig, or plastic, nature of the word itself in translation particularly with reference to the modality of the Attic plattein, and its evolution to plassein and the Platonic plastikos [πλαστικός], and the word’s relationship to ‘fashioning, modeling, [and] fictioning’. See Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998): 96 and 126.
- 14.
See Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Breifweschel. Ed. Ernst Pfeiffer (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1975): 105.
- 15.
Ghosh, ‘Plastic Literature’, University of Toronto Quarterly 88.2 (2019): 288.
- 16.
It is in her Ontology of the Accident that Malabou gives the most succinct account of this ‘destructive plasticity’ – of the possibility of ‘the appearance of formation of alterity where the other is absolutely lacking […] where no flight or escape is left’ (11). Recourse is perhaps inevitably made to Ovid and Kafka to illustrate destructive plasticity’s relation to absolute metamorphosis (the creation of the wholly other). See: Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity Trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013).
- 17.
Roland Barthes, ‘Le plastique’, Mythologies (Paris, Seuil: 1957): 171. Translation from The Plastics Age: Modernity to Post-Modernity. Ed. Penny Sparke (London, Victoria and Albert Museum: 1996): 110–111. This translation is used throughout.
- 18.
Steve Allen, Deonie Allen, Vernon R. Phoenix et al. ‘Atmospheric transport and deposition of microplastics in a remote mountain catchment’ Nature Geoscience 12 (2019: 339–344. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0335-5
- 19.
David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
- 20.
Malabou The Future of Hegel: 186.
- 21.
Malabou writes, ‘a form that attests from between the modes, that bears scars from its transitions’. See: The Heidegger Change: 231.
- 22.
Ranjan Ghosh, ‘Plastic Literature’: 277.
- 23.
This is to be seen in particular in the continued use of les arts plastiques, l’artiste plasticienne, die Plastiken or der Plastiker (‘plastic arts’ and ‘plastic artist’) in French and German where in an Anglophone context this may be as readily translated as ‘sculpture’ and ‘sculptor’, even as the former designations—subject specific in English, in the main, to art criticism and practice—have a much wider designation outside of an Anglophone context, and may cover fine art practice, architecture, aesthetics, and poetics.
- 24.
Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017): 84.
- 25.
Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rainforest: 85, 177.
- 26.
See Heise ‘Local Rock and Global Plastic’, later rewritten as a chapter of Imagining Extinction.
- 27.
This is Wai-Chee Dimock’s local–global feedback loop of deep time thinking, and ‘denationalized space’ that this implies. See Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009): 23, 28.
- 28.
Adam Dickinson, The Polymers (House of Anansi Press, 2013): 1.
- 29.
Inasmuch as it is not Promethean.
- 30.
Hans Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River. Trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010): 139–141.
- 31.
Blumenberg, Care Crosses the River: 143.
- 32.
Robert Plot, The Natural History of Staffordshire (Oxford: 1686): 272.
- 33.
Plot, 272.
- 34.
Plot, 272.
- 35.
‘No less than seven cities strove for the birth of Homer; and thus, Middlesex and Oxfordshire contest the birth of Chaucer’ (Plot: 272). He later devotes pages to listing of ‘Writers’ and their places of birth (i.e. the crucibles in which their genius was formed).
- 36.
See Ollivier Dyens, Metal and Flesh: The Evolution of Man: Technology Takes Over. Trans. Evan J. Bibbee and Ollivier Dyens (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001).
- 37.
Richard Coyne’s Network Nature addresses the plastic food chain; Serenella Iovino’s ‘From Thomas Mann to Porto Marghera: Material Ecocriticism, Literary Interpretation, and Death in Venice’ addresses the distinctly twenty-first-century ‘trans-substantiation between plastic and flesh’. See: Coyne, Network Nature: The Place of Nature in the Digital Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); Iovino ‘From Thomas Mann to Porto Marghera: Material Ecocriticism, Literary Interpretation, and Death in Venice’ in Hubert Zapf (ed.) Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016): 357. More generally, in ecotoxicological microplastic attentive studies, see Christopher Blair Crawford and Brian Quinn, Microplastic Pollutants (Elsevier, 2016), and for a popular anthropocentric take, Danielle Smith-Llera, Are You Eating Plastic Every Day: What’s in Our Food? (Oxford: Raintree, 2019).
- 38.
The OED gives the first print appearance of ‘Plastic Surgery’ ca. 1836; by 1863, the Lancet uses without ambiguity the term ‘Plastic Surgeon’. Note how this is related to the sculptor’s art rather than the use of synthetic substances to mould; medics only began to experiment with the embedded use of synthetic plastics in the 1940s, and at this point it was rare to find a synthetic substance that would be tolerated by human tissues (see Ingraham, Alexander, and Matsen ‘Polyethylene: a new synthetic plastic for use in surgery’ (1946)).
- 39.
Malabou, The Future of Hegel; The Heidegger Change.
- 40.
Malabou, The Future of Hegel: 193.
- 41.
Heinrich Heine, ‘Die Romantik’ (1820).
- 42.
Quoted in Itta Scheldletsky, ‘Romantisierte Aufklärung – aufgeklärte Romantik?’ in Walter Benjamin und die romantische Moderne, ed. Heinz Brüggemann and Günter Oesterle (Hamburg: Köningshausen und Neuman, 2009): 58.
- 43.
I.e. Heine’s ‘Schilchtung des Streits “zwischen Romantikern und Plastickern”’. Norman Kaspar, ‘Hotho und Schnaase lesen Tieck Proto-Ästhetizimus - Ironike(kritik) – kunstgeschischliche Begriffsarbeit’ in Heine-Jahrbuch 52 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2013): 142.
- 44.
Scheldletsky: 58.
- 45.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch 16 Bde. in 32 Teilbänden. (Leipzig 1854–1961 Quellenverzeichnis Leipzig 1971) Bd. 13, Sp. 1900. Online. Accessed 04.07.2017. Tellingly, during Kafka’s studies at the University of Prague, Grimm’s etymological dictionary was a mainstay (see Corngold, Lambent Traces: 224 n.9).
- 46.
Fredrich von Schlegel, Athenaeumsfragment 116 (1798): ‘Die romantische Poesie ist eine progressive Universalpoesie’.
- 47.
Catherine Malabou, L’avenir du Hegel: plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (Vrin, 1996): 21, and Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: 68.
- 48.
Ted Geier even draws a line of influence between Kafka’s ‘dissociative’ narrative devices and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rainforest! See Geier, Kafka’s Nonhuman Form: Troubling the Boundaries of the Kafkaesque (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 3.
- 49.
Donovan Hohn, Moby Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them (London: Union Books, 2012): 189.
- 50.
The Pindaric Ode is always comprised of an odd number of strophic units, as its poetic argument is developed across a series of paired and often opposed stanzas (the strophe/antistrophe), culminating in the rhetorical flourish of the concluding epode (the final strophe). The work of such an ode, thus, formally (and so also in terms of its argument) represents a queered, haunting, dialectic of sorts.
- 51.
The celluloid business was thriving by the 1870s, and sits in an interesting parallel relationship with the rise of cinematic representation; precedent moments in the history of organic plastics include the presentation by Alexander Parkes of ‘parkesine’ to the Great London Exposition of 1862. We also know of Kafka’s fascination with the rise of ‘medial technologies’ (see Corngold, Lambent Traces, 45).
- 52.
‘zwei kleine, weiße blaugestreifte Zelluloidbälle’.
- 53.
See Mark M. Anderson, ‘Sliding down the evolutionary ladder? Aesthetic Autonomy in the Metamorphosis’ in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2008): 77–94, and in particular pp. 80–81.
- 54.
Benjamin, Selected Writings v.21927–1934: ‘Kafka could understand things only in the form of a gestus, and this gestus which he did not understand constitutes the cloudy part of the parables’ (129).
- 55.
Benjamin, [‘Franz Kafka’, Gesammelte Schriften vv.2.2: 431] Selected Writings v.21927–1934.
- 56.
Benjamin, Selected Writings v.21927–1934. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press): 810 and 811.
- 57.
Ron Silliman, The New Sentence, particularly p. 91.
- 58.
Corngold, Lambent Traces: 72.
- 59.
See Christopher Middleton, Putaxanadu (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977): 70.
- 60.
Benjamin, Selected Writings v.2: 113.
- 61.
Michelle Woods, Kafka Translated: How Translators have Shaped our Reading of Kafka (London: Bloomsbury, 2013): 137.
- 62.
For example, Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, ‘The Uncanny’ and ‘Ghosts’, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory 3rd Ed. (London: Pearson Education, 2004): 34–41; 133–141. And haunting haunts all aspects of this study, namely the section on ‘The Author’: ‘the author only ever haunts’ (22); ‘Monuments’: ‘This, then, is what needs to be explained: the way that literary works remain with us, haunt us’ (50); ‘The Performative’: ‘Every performative […] is haunted by the necessary possibility that it will fail or go astray’ (238); ‘The Postmodern’: ‘It haunts’ (249).
- 63.
I am thinking here in particular of Umberto Eco’s thesis of 1962: the opera aperta (the ‘open work’), especially the manner in which this aesthetics of openness, and of multivalent complicity between reader and work, how the reader brings his/her ‘own existential credentials’ to the work and the resultant change, is applicable to multiple types of artwork.
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Yeung, H.H. (2020). Plastic’s Long Reach. In: On Literary Plasticity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44158-6_1
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