The etymology of the word reveals an undertone of artificiality and a vaguely pejorative bias, captured as early as 1807 in Thomas Morton’s Town and Country, or, Which is Best? In this hugely successful play Morton assigned to his character “Plastic” a comedic role that called on the ability of the actor to reveal phony and exaggerated expressions, thereby rendering him a cunning manipulator. One reviewer wrote in 1819 that, “Plastic was performed by Mr. Price—either the lights were bad or my distance from the stage would not suffer me to see the excellent expressions of his features, for which there was ample scope in Plastic.”² There was, of course, no connection to a kind of material, but there was, in “Plastic” something artificial, perhaps even mildly sinister.

With the invention of manufactured materials in the early twentieth century plastic became a generic noun with its chemical origin linking it to another pejorative—synthetic. As early as 1933 Art Author, writing for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, claimed that the perfect coat of arms for Hollywood’s “synthetic society” would be “a set of crossed eyes, crossed swords, crossed signals and double crossed wives mounted on the background of a high hat leaning jauntily over a lowbrow.”³ Worse, four years after the close of World War II an editor in Edmonton Alberta, wrote that, in contrast to an ethically based government, “Hitler attempted to shut God out of human relationships and, as a result, the highest virtue in his synthetic society was a sort of rough justice.”⁴ Hardly could one divorce oneself from the reverse implication that any society that even shaded toward synthetics must be treading the path of national socialism, and that even as Americans enthusiastically started purchasing Tupperware the next year. With the advent of the hula hoop in 1957 the medium became the message, but by the 1960s, as Jeffery Meikle points out, plastic had faded into the background as a mere object, the focus instead shifting to what it could do, or perhaps more precisely, what it conveyed—music, images, food, cars—and just like that the medium went suddenly invisible.⁵

More recently we have entered the age of a “new materialism,” which insists that all materials are fungible. Accordingly, “the time has come to study this new, plastic materiality in the sphere of the everyday and as part of the contemporary culture of capital.”⁶ Again, plastic becomes the modifier of materiality, making it clear that such materiality is somehow malignant, as is that malicious, ever-present “culture of capital.” An incessantly scornful effort to dismiss both the technology that underpins as well as the efficiency that fuels our economy lies in the domain of those who have never had to swap out a leaking intake manifold, worried that they might not make a payroll, or held a newborn. But they are only tapping into a long tradition of conflation—the deliberate association of “plastic” as that which is easily molded to suit the current need and fated for landfill once its temporary usefulness is expended. In such a view they are low-cost materials and therefore must be worthless from the get-go, ephemeral, even somehow disingenuous. Like a politician pandering to his base, plastic has come to be associated with hypocrisy, the faux amie of the made world. But all artifacts eventually become objects, then, eventually, rubbish, (until, eons later, they become priceless museum pieces.)  Not that such a lifecycle is inevitable. We assign worth to each phase of the material inventions of our culture.  For now, shorter equals unappreciated.  But that means only that we’ve not valued our synthetics properly, not that they’re inherently cheap, or that we are for making them. There is a reality out there, one that even includes synthetics, and if we’re ever to solve the problems posed by our technology, we might want to start by rethinking our concepts of value.

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