Plastic by Roland Barthes, Close Reading
From the beginning of the essay, plastic is framed as magical and separate from human labour. Plastic is birthed by an “ideally-shaped machine, tubulated and oblong” which is “hardly watched over by an attendant in a cloth cap, half-god, half-robot.” (Barthes, 97). The transformation of plastic from material into object is unseen and undescribed, it just happens (“At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished human object; and between these two extremes, nothing; nothing but a transit” (Barthes, 97)). Barthes provides no scientific explanation for this transformation, plastic is simply “the stuff of alchemy” (97). The human reader is not given an opportunity to understand plastic, it is a mysterious material that magically appears as a product. In the essay, Barthes splits plastic into two forms: material and object. Plastic objects are familiar and useful but plastic as a material is elusive, he writes, “At the sight of each terminal form (suitcase, brush, car-body, toy, fabric, tube, basin or paper), the mind does not cease from considering the original matter as an enigma.” (Barthes, 97). Barthes’ mystification of plastic-as-material separates it from the human, situating plastic outside of human understanding removes our responsibility over it. The human is merely a detached onlooker of plastic production like the hardly-watching attendant at the beginning of the essay. Barthes writes of “the reverie of man at the sight of the proliferating forms of matter” (Barthes, 97) as if plastic simply grows wild. Barthes’ plastic is not only magical but almost intangible, he repeatedly downplays its materiality writing that plastic “hardly exists as a substance” (98), is “less a thing than a trace of movement” and “So, more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation” (97) . To describe plastic as an “idea” erases its tangibility, plastic stops being a physical material and instead exists in the mind, and consequently any material danger plastic may cause is superficially nullified. Through the act of reading too, plastic becomes intangible; reading abstracts plastic into an idea; when we read Barthes’ essay we are not experiencing plastic firsthand but through a human textual representation. Barthes’ intangible, magical depiction of plastic abstracts it out of human responsibility giving the illusion that plastic just is.
Barthes’ essay focuses on plastic’s life solely as a human object, he does not mention what happens to plastic once it falls out of use. If plastic is “infinite transformation”, Barthes ignores the continued transformation of plastic once humans have thrown it away. Heather Davis writes “plastic does not go away. It does not biodegrade. That is, it does not turn into something else. So all the plastic that has ever been made, from take-out containers to nylons to IV bags, is rapidly composing a new kind of geologic layer on the earth” (68) . Plastic transforms from magical substance to normal object to anthropogenic particle. Plastic objects do not magically disappear when they lose their functionality but instead become material again. No longer a useful human object, plastic breaks down into microplastics which float around in the environment and inside its creatures, including us. Despite Barthes’ externalisation of plastic, as we read his essay, plastic is inside us, reading with us. This returned materiality of plastic is not elusive and intangible but physical, as we read about plastic as an idea, plastic exists physically within us, the ‘magic’ of plastic becomes an anthropogenic internal threat. At the end of his essay, Barthes writes, “The hierarchy of substances is abolished, a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself” (99). The world has been plasticised but through recombination rather than replacement. Plastic, in the form of microplastics, has infiltrated the environment and combined with it, the stomachs of birds, fish, and humans too contain plastic, waterways become plastic soups, hybrid rock-plastic forms called plastiglomerates appear. Plastics are not an external concern for the reader but literally internal. Plastic’s return to a material form reinscribes a sense of agency over the material, in its decayed material state plastic is no longer elusive but threatening and we know where it came from. Barthes writes “Plastic is wholly swallowed up in the fact of being used: ultimately objects will be invented for the sole pleasure of using them.” (99), to passively state that objects “will be invented” rather than actively being invented by humans removes the human from plastic production, plastic seems to multiply independently of us as if human demand for and consumption of these objects does not contribute to their creation.
Despite Barthes’ description of plastic’s magical elusive creation, plastic is fundamentally connected to the human. The whole world can and has been plasticised but this is not an involuntary process, plastic-as-material has hybridised the environment and its creatures into plastic/natural forms. No longer an intangible thing outside of human understanding and responsibility, plastic is a totalising anthropogenic force that infiltrates all.
References:
Barthes, Roland. "Plastic." Mythologies. Editions du Seuil. Paris, 1957. 97-99. Print.
Davis, Heather. “Plastic: Accumulation without Metabolism.” Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene. Eds. Dehlia Hannah and Sara Krajewski. Jank Editions. Portland, 2015. 66-73. Web. heathermdavis.com. 10 April 2021.