Plastic Theory/Studies

This chapter considers four of the most significant books on plastic theory and studies published in 2022: Alice Mah’s Plastic Unlimited: How Corporations Are Fuelling the Ecological Crisis and What We Can Do About It, Heather Davis’s Plastic Matter, Catherine Malabou’s Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion, and Ranjan Ghosh’s The Plastic Turn. It tries to show the common threads among these works and to see how their differences bespeak contemporary notions of plastic and plasticity that allow a diversity of thinkers to reflect not only on the emergency of a plastic and ecological crisis, but also on the role of ‘plastic thought’ in modernity, modern thought and science, and modernism. By way of conclusion, it looks at a notion that repeats itself among most of the volumes, the platonic term khôra, and how it relates to our conceptions of plasticity.