The Plastocene

 In an essay published early this week in the New York Times, the science writer David Wallace-Wells rattled through some of the more disturbing recent empirical studies about the omnipresence of microplastics in the human environment. 

Wallace-Wells notes that some researchers are now re-examining their laboratory equipment to make sure it is not itself contaminated with microplastics—because, if we take their findings at face value, they show an almost inconceivably high quantity of plastic content in the human brain. 

One finding he cites: the sum of microplastics in the average brain has increased 50% in the last eight years. Another: the given person may now well have the equivalent of about a full plastic spoon lodged in their grey matter—measured by weight and volume.  

Some days of the week I think I can feel it rattling around in there. 

Whenever I read a new piece about the great microplastics panic—I always think back to that Roland Barthes essay on the subject in his collection Mythologies. Writing at the very dawn of the plastic age, Barthes had already sensed something sinister in this new all-purpose material. 

He seems to have had a prophecy—long before it reached the rest of us—that plastic was destined to dominate the Earth. Having been somewhere—he foresaw—plastic must by a teleological necessity eventually be everywhere: 

The hierarchy of substances is abolished, he writes. [A] single one replaces them all. The whole world can be plasticized. (Howard/Lavers trans.)

And that seems indeed to be what's happened. Even we ourselves—we humans—have been plasticized. 

I am reminded of that scene in Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet, when the two clerks turn their attention to Spinoza as part of their ongoing curriculum in universal learning. 

The only impression they retain from the Ethics—and perhaps it's all any of us retain from that nebulous work—is the vision of a universe flattened out and pervaded only by an indistinguishable Substance, having extension but no form. 

The plastic universe will fulfill the clerks' nightmare. 

But is this a problem? The maddening thing is that we don't know. Most of us feel intuitively that it can't be good for us to have a plastic spoon in our brains. But we also can't point as yet to any specific health consequence that definitely correlates with the presence of microplastics. 

All we know is that this substance has become inescapable—that plastic now occupies "every scrap of the living earth" (to borrow a phrase from D.H. Lawrence); that the whole world has indeed been plasticized. And that is disturbing enough.