Plastic

A deep history

A microplastic fibre, as seen under an electron microscope at a scale of 100 microns. (Image: Zaknite Flores Ocampo via Wikimedia Commons)

My latest contribution at Unherd is on the scary subject of microplastics; the tiny plastic particles which appear to have penetrated much of the human body, as well as water systems, food chains, and just about every corner of the globe. I’ve been struggling for years to tackle the problem of plastic in writing. This family of materials and its consequences weigh on my mind with neurotic force. More than 400 million tonnes of plastic are produced every year, an output that is still rising fast; and although much of this plastic will only be used once, its disintegrating remains will persist for generations in the places where it ends up as waste. There is already a good deal of evidence that the build-up of plastics and microplastics is wreaking damage on a wide range of organisms, though its implications for human health remain unclear.

Unpleasant as it sounds, I was glad to get the commission for this piece, because it forced me to stop putting it off. Writing can function as an apotropaic ritual: a practice for warding off evil spirits. It forces us to engage critically with the world around us, but also with the emotional tensions that lurk in our thoughts and our culture (which is not to say, of course, that it always brings us to the right conclusions). To that end, I was not only interested in the reality of plastic, but its meaning and significance. It’s often said that climate change fails to gain emotional traction because it is too abstract and diffuse. With plastic, almost the opposite is true. It seems to me that the prospect of polluting the world with this substance is disturbing in a way that concepts of harm, risk and injustice cannot capture. Why?

One reason is surely that, given its persistence, plastic denies us the forlorn hope that someone can always clean up later. Another is socio-aesthetic. Because plastic is so cheap and abundant – and despite its many useful applications – we tend to think of it as worthless, as rubbish. But the story I wanted to explore was about nature, or rather, the modern tendency to declare certain things “natural.” I’m going to give a slightly fuller version of that story now, since it’s central to how I understand the role of design in history.

It starts with an ideological shift that can be traced to the seventeenth century. Along with the revolutions in European science, philosophy and political thought happening at that time (Descartes, Hobbes, the Royal Society etc.) came a new vision of nature, or perhaps, the invention of nature. In the existing paradigm, human beings occupied a place, like every other entity, in a divinely ordered cosmos. But now the human world began to be perceived (such transitions require the passive voice) as something distinct from the rest of creation; something that people could shape according to their own will.

The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, quoting the historian Stephen Collins, says of this fateful development that

order was coming to be understood not as natural, but as artificial, created by man, and manifestly political and social… order became a matter of power, and power a matter of will, force and calculation (my emphasis).

In other words, what makes the modern perspective different is that it assumes the world we inhabit can and must be designed by us; the conditions of our existence are “effected and sustained by design, manipulation, management, engineering.” It is this human world – the world of artifice; of politics, technology and society – which conjures as its negative a distinctly non-human world, that is, nature. Or as Bauman puts it, “‘Nature’ means, after all, nothing but the silence of man.”

Plastic, though it didn’t fully appear until the twentieth century, is one of the most vivid representations of the artificial, human order that stands in contrast to nature. It is not just that, as a matter of phenomenology, plastic is conspicuously fake in a way that, say, glass or paper or metal are not. Plastic is entirely dependent on modern industry, technology, and science; polymers are designed in laboratories, using hydrogen and carbon molecules which are distilled from the same fossil fuels we pump out of the ground for energy. And from the outset, plastic was explicitly seen a signifying a new rupture with nature. Its early proponents boasted that, for the first time, humanity could escape the limitations imposed by the properties of natural materials. As the theorist Roland Barthes pointed out in the 1950s, the same was true of aesthetics. Whereas nature had always provided the ultimate model of beauty, now “an artificial Matter… [was] about to replace her, and to determine the very invention of forms.”

But the separation of humanity and nature has never been a clean one. Having created nature as the counterpoint of its own autonomy, the modern mind began to worship it as a sacred principle. As I wrote in my original essay:

Throughout the modern era, the development of increasingly complex, artificial societies has produced an undercurrent of reverence for the purely natural, the “unspoilt”. Even as we enjoy the products of science and technology, we designate certain spaces as natural, and seek to protect them from the corrupting forces of modernity. These natural domains include not just wild and bucolic places… but also the human body, childhood, and vestiges of traditional culture.

This, to me, explains much of the peculiar horror of plastic pollution. It is the horror of transgression, of the profane violating the sacred. As a consummately artificial substance, plastic has its own domains. It belongs in hospitals, supermarkets, laboratories, and other places where cleanliness and precision are prized. In emotional terms, the problem begins when plastic, in its rank abundance, spills into the realm of the natural. Hence the revolting quality of plastic bags littering beaches and country paths, plastic bottles and wrappers floating in the oceans, or indeed microscopic plastic fibres entering the tissues of your body.