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American Plastic: A Cultural History by Jeffrey L. Meikle

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.1998.0176

1097-3729

David J. Rhees,

Art, Technology, and Culture

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 169 (pp. 2, 3, 43, 59, 107, 200). Indeed, his lack ofattention to the actual technologies involved in his story precludes him from doing more than this. “Sound flowed into and out of the booths via electrical circuitry” (p. 100), is about as technically detailed as it gets. Closer attention to the technology of sound recording—to its innovation, development, and deployment—might have highlighted unique as­ pects of this particular case oflabor displacement. It would certainly have helped to explain more fully why entertainment corporations such as RCA, NBC, and Warner Bros, were able to exploit that new technology so successfully in their efforts to obtain control over com­ mercial musical entertainment in America. In the end, Kraft’s story is a tale not of musicians versus micro­ phones but of musicians versus the corporate forces who wielded microphones to their detriment: employees versus employers in a struggle to control a new technology. The actual role of sound re­ cording technology in this particular skirmish in the age-old struggle remains to be identified and analyzed. Emily Thompson Dr. Thompson teaches the history of technology at the University ofPennsylvania. She is writing a book on architectural acoustics in America. American Plastic: A Cultural History. ByJeffrey L. Meikle. New Bruns­ wick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv+403; illustrations, notes, index. $49.95 (hardcover). After the enjoyable experience of reading American Plastic one is nevertheless tempted to say (paraphrasing Steve Shapin’s recent book on the scientific revolution), that there is no such thing as “plastic”—and this is a book about it. It is a very good, sophisticated, and exhaustively researched book. One that vastly enriches our understanding ofhow we have invented and marketed these new materials and taken them into our homes and workplaces, even our bodies. A book that expertly recounts the technical details of making and working plastic and deftly captures the character of the scientists, businessmen, engineers, entrepre­ neurs, and skilled workers who have built the industry. A book that displays a connoisseur’s understanding ofplastic, a sometimes exqui­ site sensitivity to all its varied textures, shapes, and smells, even the sounds of its many names. A book that integrates technology and culture in ways that few works in the history of technology have equaled. A worthy recipient of the 1996 Dexter Prize. And yet the ironic conclusion one comes to after completingJef­ frey Meikle’s award-winning book is that “plastic” is an extremely plastic term (in the original sense of changeable, moldable), and itself represents a problematic social construction, encompassing 170 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE materials of an enormous range of properties, and attracting wildly varying cultural interpretations. As the author points out, even the leaders of the plastics industry acknowledged that the incredible va­ riety of plastics made the notion of “plastic” a misleading one. Nev­ ertheless, “plastic” became a convenient umbrella for defining the turf of trade associations and trade journals and was useful as well to consumers bewildered by the chemical nomenclature and market­ ing neologisms that were rapidly invading the English language. “Plastic” also has served as a convenient term for artists, cultural critics, and others who have appropriated it as a symbol for the vir­ tues, or more often the ills, of modern, technological society. As Meikle brilliantly shows, plastic has served as a kind of Rorschach ink blot for both the utopian fantasies and dystopian nightmares of the American psyche. Meikle himself showsjust how plastic the concept of “plastic” can be by including an entire chapter on nylon fibers. He uses the case of nylon to support his broader and quite fascinating argument that, in spite of the manipulations of chemical manufacturers and their advertising departments, independent-thinking American consum­ ers have tended to seize control of the image and meaning of plas­ tics—they have “domesticated” these new materials. More specifi­ cally (and less convincingly), Meikle argues that Du Pont made a major mistake in marketing nylon stockings during the late 1930s as a triumph of “better living through chemistry” because, in actual­ ity, the public was fearful of science. Women consumers, he finds, rejected the “alien realm of industrial...