Introduction

Plastic is everywhere, all around us, and yet do we see it? What does the plastic gyre in the North Pacific tell us? Much like climate crisis, often considered intangible, plastic deposition on the surface of the earth is as much invisible as it is visible. In the “Introduction” to Lacan and the Environment (2021), Clint Burnham and Paul Kingsbury invoke the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s famous reference in Seminar XI to a sardine can floating on the waves in the oceans of Brittany. Lacan remembers his friend Petit-Jean saying to him that even though he may see the can, the can does not see him. From the garbage, not seeing the human, Burnham and Kingsbury draw the conclusion that we cannot see the plastic despite that it surrounds us (Burnham and Kingsbury 2021, 5). If we return to Lacan’s text, we see that his point is different. He disagrees with Petit-Jean’s view that the can does not see them, although they can see it:Unlike what Burnham and Kingsbury argue, Lacan’s point is not that the can does not see us, nor that we do not see the can. If the can as garbage is a metonymy for plastic deposition (as how Burnham and Kingsbury read it), Lacan holds that plastic does not see us precisely because it looks at us. In other words, the plastic has its own gaze, and as he reminds us, this is not a metaphoric statement. Far from not seeing the plastic all around us, Lacan suggests that the plastic responds to our looking at it by gazing back at us. It has its own uncanny gaze on the human. This gaze makes it turn toward us as much as we turn or shift our subjectivities in accordance with the plastic that zooms in from all sides.The last sentence of Heather Davis’s book Plastic Matter reads: “They said plastic was disposable. Turns out, plastic will not let go” (Davis 2022, 108). Plastic materiality foregrounds this paradox of disposability and inextricability. What seemed easily removable at one point has turned out to be so permeable that now there is no outside to the plastic text—to revise Derrida, as it were. The disposable has become the inextricable. There is plastic everywhere, but is there plasticity in the plastic? Does the Plasticene know true change? Plastic without plasticity (understood as change) seems to be a dominant way the material manifests in the era of anthropogenic climate change. Plastic has stagnated and produced an ontology of stasis (though it endlessly heaps up, of course), uncoupling itself from plasticity as an ontology of true change.If there is such a dialectical tension between plastic as matter and plasticity as an ontological concept, Ranjan Ghosh’s book The Plastic Turn makes us think about both in a synthetic way. For him, when plastic “exceeds its materiality as a signifier (the material as code),” the excess situates plasticity as “a material-figural event that comes after the discovery of plastic” (Ghosh 2022, 7; emphasis original). In Ghosh’s thought, plasticity is not a pre-material but a post-material phenomenon—a semiotic turn that changes how the material thinks about us and how we make meanings from it. Plastic deposition may well be without change, dooming life on the planet in the process, but plasticity as a generative turn from the plastic is fluid in the complex networks of signification that it produces all around the earth. Plastic, plastic everywhere, with as much meaning as we pump into it as it pumps into us! It sees us as much as we see it. Ghosh studies the plastic in art, literature, culture, modernity and embodiment, just to mention a few sites of engagement from his book.In this issue, our purpose is twofold. We want to analyze Ghosh’s book as an exercise in plastic thinking, but textual exegesis is only the first step. We have a second purpose: to use Ghosh’s book as a point of departure for conducting our own collective plastic thinking. The Plastic Turn for us thus becomes a trigger, a paradigm, and a fulcrum to extend plastic thinking in different fields—philosophy, politics, literature, art, and so on. I am glad to open this issue with an interview that Arthur Rose and I conducted online with Catherine Malabou (a major inspiration for Ghosh’s plastic thought) and Ranjan Ghosh.1 In the wide-ranging interview, we discuss Malabou’s and Ghosh’s ongoing work on plasticity and the plastic, which includes an exciting prefiguration of the latter’s forthcoming books on the topic. I believe this will serve as a significant preface to this issue.Coming to the contributions, the first article, Haun Saussy’s “Plastic Before Plastic,” traces a prehistory of plastic thinking in philosophy, going all the way back to Plato and taking plasticity as a generative condition for the cultural and political reform initiated in Republic. Her reading of Plato’s signifier for plastic, plassō, shows how plastic is not a docile substance and that when it starts acting on humans, it exposes the illusion of human mastery. Thomas Wormald’s article, “Plastics, Plasticity, and the Plastic,” in a line of inquiry not all that dissimilar to Saussy’s, follows the plastic philosophy of Cudworth and Shaftesbury in the seventeenth century and that of Catherine Malabou in the twenty-first century to place Ghosh’s work in a tradition of plastic thinkers. His analysis highlights how plastic thought shifts from a passive idea of being molded to an active principle of effecting change. His article ends with a critical question about whether Ghosh’s plastic thinking makes plastic normative for the earth. We continue with genealogies, archaeologies, and extensions of plastic thought in Robert Tally’s article, “The World Is Bent: Plasticity, Globalization, and the Cosmopolitan Critic.” He approaches the world of globalization as a bent and rounded world of plastic relations where flatness has disappeared. The article creates a dialogue between the world imagined by Ghosh and Christian Moraru’s “geomethodology” as a planetary mode of thinking. It ends with a turn to cosmopolitan criticism in the wake of Ghosh’s book to comment on how we need to think about the world system in our close readings of art and literature.Samrat Sengupta’s article, “Can We Think of a Plastic Subaltern? Denaturing Marginality and Resistance in Dalit Narratives,” intensifies the interventionist idea of treating Ghosh’s work as a critical paradigm to extend plastic thought in the political direction of subaltern and Dalit subjectivities. Sengupta bridges plastic thinking with new materialism and object-oriented ontology to argue how plastic, plasticity, and plastic social relations form a principle of contamination that underwrites the caste system and yet could break the identitarian determinism of the same system. My article, “Plastic Onto-Logic of Relation and Non-Relation: Ghosh avec Malabou,” stages a reading of Ghosh that pinpoints his similarities with and differences from Catherine Malabou’s work on plasticity. What emerges from this comparative approach is how non-relation and death remain understudied in Ghosh’s critical emphasis on plastic matter’s incessant ability to create new relations. It is on this point of what Malabou calls “destructive plasticity” that their otherwise complementary work drifts apart, creating a fissure between plastic and plasticity.By way of concluding this brief introduction, let me go back to the dialectic of surplus and lack with which I began. Plastic is everywhere, yet it seems difficult for the layperson to see it. It is there in its plenitude, and at the same time, it seems to be missing from a certain popular imagination. The plastic sees us from its position as we see it from ours. But we cannot see it from its positionality. Is that not true of any Other (including the human) in a good, old Hegelian way? Even if this is the case, it is important that plastic has become a dominant Other for us in the current age of climate crisis. Plastic, plastic everywhere, but does the plastic Other exist

Crafts, Textile, and Design · Materials Science