Plastic / Plasticity

Literature and Culture and the Material of a (Bygone?) Era

Plastic is a defining material of our era. Its properties—plasticity, durability, the ability to imitate any shape, its toxicity, and indecomposability—are also properties of contemporary culture and literature. The proposed thematic issue begins with the premise that plastic can be read simultaneously as a historical substance and as a "theory machine"—a tool for understanding cultural texts and the experience of contemporary times.

"My approach, in this paper, is one of thinking with plastic through its metaphoricity and materiality, its relationality and gestationality; in short, a material mediality.” [R. Gosh]

Ghosh and the "plastic humanities" project

In his book The Plastic Turn (Cornell UP, 2022), Ranjan Ghosh proposes the concept of material-aesthetic as a way of reading literature through the lens of plastic and, conversely, understanding plastic as an aesthetic and philosophical category. Ghosh traces the emergence of synthetic polymers along the same historical trajectory as Western literary modernism, demonstrating that plastic and modern literature co-create each other. Ghosh's project, however, does not encompass the context of the Eastern Bloc—a space where plastic was a completely different symbol. The proposed issue fills this gap, situatingthe literature of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) within the broader constellation of the peripheries of chemical modernization.

The Specific Context of Central and Eastern Europe during the Socialist Period

In Central and Eastern Europe in the second half of the 20th century, plastics were synonymous with modernity and the "Western style" amidst an economy of scarcity. This creates an inverted ideological tension compared to the West: there, plastic symbolized consumer abundance; here, it symbolized a substitute for that abundance, a dream of it, a prosthesis of modernity. This tension is the issue's original contribution to the international debate.

Conceptual Openness

The issue's title deliberately plays on three registers: material (synthetic substance), philosophical (the plasticity of the subject, neuroplasticity, Christine Malabou's concept), and aesthetic (plasticity as art, plastic literature according to Ghosh). This broadening of the conceptual framework allows the issue to engage in a dialogue (even a critical one) with Ghosh's project, but not to replicate it.

Suggested Thematic Areas

I. History and Ideology

• Plastic as a Promise of Modernity in the Culture and Literature of Central and Eastern Europe in the Second Half of the 20th Century

• Plastics in the Propaganda Discourse and Press of the Era

• Socialist Plastic vs. Consumer Plastic: East and West Confronting the Same Material

II. Aesthetics and Form

• Plastic as an Aesthetic Problem: Artificiality, Counterfeiting, and Simulacrum

• CEE Avant-Garde and Popular Literature Confronting Synthetic Materials

• Poetics of Plastic: Material as Motif, Metaphor, and Compositional Principle

III. Ecology and the Anthropocene

• Plastic as a Toxic Substance: Microplastics, Plastic Oceans, and Environmental Literature

• CEE Prose and Poetry Confronting the Environmental Crisis of Plastics

• Postcolonial Perspective: Waste Export and the Literature of the Global South

IV. Body and Subjectivity

• Plasticity as a Metaphor for Identity—Malabou's Philosophy, Neuroplasticity, Posthumanism

• The Modified, Prosthetic, and Hybrid Body in Polish and International Literature

• Gender and Plasticity: The Body as Material in Queer and Feminist Discourses