Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Just One Word: Plastics

1997; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rah.1997.0020

1080-6628

John Raeburn,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Just One Word: Plastics John Raeburn (bio) Jeffrey L. Meikle. American Plastics: A Cultural History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993. xiv + 403 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $49.95. Arguably the most resonant moment in any American movie of the past thirty years occurs in the opening scene of The Graduate, when a Babbittish family friend confronts the film’s eponymous hero and offers him unsolicited advice about his postcollegiate career. “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word,” he intones portentiously: “plastics.” Audiences howled and the line instantly passed into the folklore of late-twentieth-century America. With its connotations of the imitative, the shoddy, the unnatural, and the inauthentic, this single word seemed to condense all the disquiets that were coursing through American culture in 1968, the year of the film’s release. And yet, of course, at the very moment that audiences were hooting at this synecdoche for contemporary culture, they were also using more and more of the stuff itself, so much so that in its omnipresence plastic had paradoxically become nearly invisible. Their infants were swaddled in polyvinyl chloride pants to keep diapers from leaking, their older schoolchildren sat at imitation wooden desks of melamine-phenolic laminate, and they themselves dressed in polyester-blends. At home vegetables maintained crispness in polystyrene drawers, while elsewhere in the refrigerator styrofoam containers sheltered eggs and milk was stored in polyethylene bottles. After meal preparation, commonly on a Formica surface and perhaps in a tetrafluoroethylene Teflon saucepan, leftovers could be stored in a Tupperware container or discarded into a polypropylene garbage can. Such an inventory of plastic’s applications was almost infinitely extendible. By 1979 more plastic than steel was being produced in the United States, and this measure only gauged weight; a volume measurement would have made plastic’s margin exponentially greater. Practically no branch of human activity escaped plastic’s grasp, and it is impossible to overestimate the degree to which it has transformed the material structure of everyday life in the 125 years since its first contrivance. In American Plastics: A Cultural History Jeffrey L. Meikle undertakes to chart this transformation and, as his subtitle indicates, to explore its effects on culture and consciousness. He makes a convincing case that the half-century [End Page 140] after World War II ought to be called “the plastic age” rather than the more hip “information age,” not least because information technologies are themselves so dependent on plastic. But he is less interested in bragging that his characterization is the biggest kid on the block than in providing a meticulous demonstration of the process by which plastic became so pervasive that by the latter half of the twentieth century it would generate pregnant metaphors by which the culture attempted to understand itself. Meikle’s book deploys a series of overlapping and interpenetrating histories to illuminate plastic’s ever-increasing salience. Because his procedures are so richly interdisciplinary, specification of their constituent parts does violence to the seamlessness with which he has woven them together, but historians of technology, corporate enterprise, consumerism, industrial design, intellectual life, and the expressive arts will all find much to stimulate them in his pages. The bedrock of the book, if the metaphor may be excused, is Meikle’s account of the inception of various plastics and how these products of the “science of gunks” were fashioned into usable objects. Celluloid came first, shortly after the Civil War, inspired by the desire to find a substitute for the rare and expensive ivory in billiard balls. Very quickly, however, other industrial and consumer applications suggested themselves, the celluloid detachable collar simulating linen perhaps the best-known. Bakelite, however, was the first chemically synthetic plastic (celluloid was made from pulped paper or cotton and camphor derived from the bark of a Formosan tree), invented in 1907 by Leo Bakeland, who sought a substitute for shellac. Bakeland was a Belgian immigrant who spurned pure science and a European academic career to emigrate to America with his disapproving mentor’s daughter, there to grow rich, appear on Time’s cover, and name his first son after George Washington. Bakelite, which advertised itself as “the...