Our Plastic Frankenstein WORLD - The Anthropocene Revisited

I have decided to revisit a consistent topic of my writing - The Anthropocene. This time, I will examine plastic as a substance of relevance.

Despite being seen as a throwaway commodity, which can be shaped and reshaped to infinity – hence the word “plasticity”(van der Laan 2001) – plastic is not very easy to get rid of. On the contrary, it is so durable that some have proposed it as a geological marker of the anthropocene (Davis 2015, Corcoran 2013), as it might be around for a time long enough to eventually turn into a strange kind of fossil (Chen 2014). Hence, I want to discuss briefly some different ways of understanding our plastic futures, in both senses of the word.

PLASTIC ROCKS

Plastiglomerate is the proposed name for the type of rock cobbled together of plastic, volcanic rock and additional debris which has been found on the shores of Hawaii. “When the plastic melts, it cements rock fragments, sand, and shell debris together, or the plastic can flow into larger rocks and fill in cracks and bubbles to form a kind of junkyard Frankenstein.” (Chen 2014) Hence the title of this essay, which in short is suggesting the patchwork or assemblage (un)nature of things. Thus, the point that I want to make is that plastic is a strong indicator of the leaky – or plastic – boundaries significant of our time and our future. The porous uncertainty regarding the border between natural and artificial, life and death, is however not a new phenomena. It is actually quite unusual for things to be independent islands rather than interdependent archipelagos (Robin 2014, Latour 2014, Morton 2010/2013 ). The plastiglomerate case shows in a very direct way how spatiotemporal binaries are literally collapsing into each other: the “artificial” and “short-lived” plastic seeping into the “natural” and “inert” rock, which results in an uncanny fossilized assemblage of perceived opposites becoming intimate. (Freud 1919).

The muddling of borders is central for my understanding of the queer and the monstrous, which becomes the basis for my Junkyard Frankenstein comes label.

The figure of the monster is per definition evasive, but in this particular case I will use the word to connote the queer, dark or uncanny side of ecology that imagines sickness as well as extinction, where boundaries are per definition dynamic. Monsters are further nothing like the “flagship species” or the “charismatic megafauna”, not elegant, not favorable but rather noisy, askew and quite bizarre. (Kearney 2003, Heise 2010, Robin 2014). One of such monsters is Frankenstein’s, being himself an assemblage, simultaneously himself and not himself, incorporating the border between living and dead, natural and artificial, self and other. A dermaglomerate one might say. The point I want to make with Frankenstein’s monster is in many ways similar to that of Latour’s – that Humanity must admit an extended family and take responsibility for its technological progeny (Latour 2012, Davis 2015), which also pertains to taking care of our own already monstrous (double)natures. This poses questions of the future, and what it could mean (not) to have one.

HUMAN NATURE(S)

Separating humans from the non-human has always been more ideologically than onto-logically motivated: “[…]wild nature as a touchstone has always been more a matter of fiction than of fact—indigenous peoples reshaped ecosystems through fire on a grand scale long before the modern age” (Heise 2013, Muir et al 2010). The belief in wilderness as virgin soil is – on multiple levels – a highly problematic illusion, which is in fact obstructing an ethical relation – as not acknowledging one has relations at all makes it hard to challenge or discuss. Further, this conception of Nature or Wilderness likely says more about how humans perceive themselves. Illusions are however harder to let go of than reality (Morton 2007/2010, Žižek 1997, Kareiva et al 2007). In the long run, it totally isolates a certain perception of “the Human” from Nature, turning places into pseudo-sacral heterotopias by virtue of human exclusion. (Robin 2014, Lekan 2014, Foley et al 2013). This belief, causes the “wasteland” and the “wilderness”, the pure and the defiled, to converge – plastic operates in a similar manner. Once again, the binary crackles.

In another sense, the requirement of human absence for Nature to be “in peace” points to the injustices implicit in this idea of the Human, because one consequently ignores the fact that indigenous people are actually co-existing with their land since long ago. The culturally imperialistic project of “freeing” the land from its own inhabitants – as if one could contaminate something with its own constituents – is one of the consequences of seeing humans as something external to their surroundings (Chakrabarty 2009, Kareiva et al 2007, Kruse 2011, Heise 2013 Cronon 1996, Morton 2013).

At first, human impacts on the environment did not start until modern civilization, and then, when time has come for accountability, all of those kinds of subjects “disappear” in the distance (Jonsson 2012, Zalasiewicz et al 2015, Ruddiman 2003, Lekan 2014). A similar boomerang is made in reference to what’s “natural”, by applying societal norms on other animals (like cisheterosexuality and sexual binary difference), upon which one scoops the normative valuations back into the cultural setting saying “this is natural”. The nature-culture divide is to say the least a “wicked problem”, which in a very direct sense is disturbed by the ubiquity of toxic and the plastic, as they – with a dark irony – is as democratic as death. Plastic then demands a resilience debate that is socially as well as epistemologically nuanced, taking into account the always ongoing negotiations of boundaries and interpretative prerogatives, as the ontological complexity of the interdependence of both human and nonhuman organisms. (Powell et al 2014)

When it comes to plastic it is surely a good candidate to propose as a bizarre disturbance, on different strata. Not only are rocks becoming plastic, so is the ocean, as well as our bodies – human and nonhuman alike. For example, the weak oestrogen in Bisphenol A in a very concrete sense affect reproductive (in)capacity and therefore in an intimate way also the future as a linear continuation of biological realization (Edelman 2003, Halberstam 2011, Heise 2010&2013, Chakrabarty 2009).

As Latour points out, we are not getting detached or fallen from “Nature”, rather the opposite. As we, like Victor Frankenstein, aspire to create more artificial life as well as colonizing new places , we fail at sustaining or take care of the life or the places we already know (Latour, Steffen et al 2011, Lekan 2004). Or, like Gutkind put it: “The solution lies somewhere nearer to home and is less expensive. It lies within ourselves, but it may cost more effort to discover than the brave new world in the outer spaces of the heavens” (Lekan 2014:186). As an alternative to the “upwards-and-forwards-futurity” , I am posing a parallel and horizontal de-territorializing move, where one looks at how organisms are entangled and interdependent, which opens up the possibility to analyze and rate changes. (Jonsson, Halberstam 2011) The plastic Frankenstein as an uncanny and queer conglomerate shows in a very direct way the interdependent mesh constituted both by connections and the imperfections. (Morton 2013&2013, Wheeler 2016)

Our bodies are, in short, in themselves plastic ecosystems with a myriad of inhabitants that is both us and not us. Polluting the river is polluting the aquatic plants on which we are dependent for oxygen is polluting the human. In this way, by turning the world into an object, we are turning ourselves into objects for that object.(Serres 1995, Chakrabarty 2009, Muir et al 2010)

WICKED PLASTIC

Plastic is both an affirmation and a critique of the Anthropocene concept. On one hand, the use of plastic can be seen as a strong marker of a time where a lot of people have an abundance of throwaway commodities, where life in a broad sense circulates rapidly. On the other hand, not all people on the planet lead lives like this, as well as the collapsed or plastic binaries is hardly something new even if “we” have pretended not to notice until recent. Clearly, one cannot say that plastic or plasticity is either this or that, and this wicked ambitiousness is in itself part of the point that I want to make here. The world is always already undergoing processional demolitions of molar subjects as a condition for becoming. Or with Heise: “extinction is the signal of a failure that should be prevented whenever possible; yet the failure of one experiment also becomes the point of a departure for new ones.” (Heise 2010&2013, Ireland 2009, Ruddiman 2003). Therefore, extinction is not an entropy or end point where the flow of life is choked – quite the opposite.

This way of living or becoming-with extinction, toxicity and transition in general, embraces the plastic as a prerequisite for a conception of an always ongoing flow of possibilities of and to life. Hence, in the Anthropocene, we are all, in a way, Frankenstein plastiglomerates.

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