(Self-)introduction to the Plasticene

Hi everyone!

I am joining Steem today and thought I would share a quick word on what motivates my writing as an introduction to the posts that will follow. My imaginary world revolves around anthropology, philosophy and poetics, with a special interest in human-nonhuman relationships and what we now call the Anthropocene. I am very much drawn to what moves us as (non)humans, what makes the world spin, at which speed and for whom.

On this vein, I am particularly interested in the issue of plastic proliferation, which is one of the driving force of this new geological epoch mentioned earlier. Oil and its plastic derivatives have imbedded our world system so massively that we now live in what some call the Plasticene. Plastic come into shape mainly for functional purposes. It is waste by design, consuming fossilized organic bodies that took millions of years to accumulate under the ground, only to become a single-use object, but is nonetheless part of human intimacy. Plastic is said to betray its own meaninglessness by what it sounds like: emptiness. To get a sense of how plastic intimately touches us, in the original sense of the latin word “fingere” which refers to both friction and fiction, I have started mapping the contemporary routes of plastic by listening to the chemico-physical life cycle of this material, as well as its affective one. Like oil or even plastic’s sticky texture, one that permeates and render some bodies abject, viscosity has become my own methodology. I stick to places where, like waste, my presence is “out of place”, not meant to be. This allows me to capture the phonic tracks plastic leaves when passing through its human coupling. In doing so, I hope to give a new sense of what plastic means and does to us, and render somewhat intelligible what is often discarded as noise.