Ranjan Ghosh
In June 1833, Charles Darwin asked the captain of the HMS Beagle to delay the departure from Tierra del Fuego because a “strange group of granite boulders” had stirred his investigative and imaginative energy – “One of these, shaped somewhat like a barn, was forty-seven feet in circumference and projected five feet above the sand beach,” he later wrote.1 In his accounts of the voyage, Darwin described crystalline boulders of notable size and abundance near Bahía San Sebastian, south of the Strait of Magellan. Darwin was curious about the shape of the boulders and could not understand how they got there and this intense interest in granite is an expression of his geological and romantic imagination.
Surprise. Those large masses of rock were later called Darwin’s Boulders – erratic and enigmatic, speculative and romantic. Geologically, Darwin attributed the “erratic to ice rafting,”2 but their enormity and strangeness added to their wild beauty, and they ignited Darwin’s post-Lyell geological temper and imagination.
Bizarre. Granite has its own complicated formations – unstable and not simple in its petrological origin as the granite controversy attests – “consisting of known materials yet combined in a secret manner, it is impossible to determine whether its origin is from fire or water. Extremely variable in the greatest simplicity, its mixture presents innumerable combinations.”3
Becoming. The granite genesis has its competing explanations: “magmatic (granites are igneous rocks resulting from the crystallisation of magma) and metamorphic (granites are the result of a dry or wet granitisation process that transformed sialic sedimentary rocks into granite), because granites are the result of ultra-metamorphism involving melting (anatexis) of crustal rocks.”4 When H. H. Read suggested that “there are granites and granites,”5 he was referring to an overwhelmingly variegated schematic emergence – something that stares back at us as a prospect for a petri-becoming.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s “On Granite” (1784) speaks about the antiquity of earth, a nearly unfathomable processual build-up within the Earth’s crust—the romantic and scientific imagination in a becoming earth. He observes that “composed of familiar materials, formed in mysterious ways, its origins are as little to be found in fire as they are in water. Extremely diverse in the greatest simplicity, its mixtures are compounded in numberless variety.”6 Granite has its own mix of quartz, feldspar, and mica, as Goethe observed in “On Geology,” particularly the Bohemian, in which he tried to analyse the mysterious trinity of Dreieinheit. The solidity, interestingly, conceals a fluidity of coming together, a kinesis in mineralization.
Conglomerate. The “word Granitgeschiebe indicates,” argues Jason Groves, that “these ‘granite boulders’ are neither conceived in terms of static form nor in terms of the anteriority of ruins but rather in terms of an ongoing movement of ruination; rather than as a substance, granite is presented as a thing in motion.”7 Goethe’s sensitivity to earth formations is revealed in his principle of incongruence, in which the earth is left to transform and transit in a complex geoerotics. Reflecting on such “mineral actants,” Groves observes further that “stones and rock formations present themselves, express themselves, transform themselves, let themselves be seen, produce themselves, spread themselves out, alter themselves, and conceal themselves [zeigensich, sprechensichaus, verwandelnsich, lassensichsehen, erzeugensich, verbreitensich, verändernsich, verbergensich]. In this drama of things, mineral agents take humans as accusative objects: they direct our attention, they address us, they come together to make formations.”8
But the fascination and fetish, imagination and indignation today, is with plastic, and an aggrieved and aggressive turn to plastic has brought us not before granite or Darwin’s boulders but a strange petri-kin in “plastiglomerate.” It is a mixture of plastic-intermateriality – surprising, bizarre, becoming, erratic, and aberrant. Like granite, it is the “plastic-controversy.” Granite and the plastiglomerates are deeply embedded each in their own way – poesis in petrology and the petrochemical. Plastic was formed a little more than a hundred years ago; it was made formative and formable; finally, it forms itself. Today, like Darwin’s and Goethe’s granite, plastiglomerate comes through as a romantic rock, speculative and spectacular, with its distinct geological aesthetic.9 Like Goethe’s erratic granite (umherliegendeGranitblöcke, and Granitgeschiebe) and Darwin’s errant boulders, plastiglomerate – as an idiorhythmic emergence – signals a fresh poesis in geopoetical thought and the lithospheric imaginary. Living through inhuman time, we are attuned to a nonhuman surge and profusion both on land and in water. Humans had their event with plastic and now the whole of Earth is an event itself. If granite is the Ur-stone, plastiglomerate is the novice stone, the controversial stone. One demonstrates geological plasticity, the other a kind of plastic materialization – both attesting to an extraordinary geological becoming.
Plastiglomerate, this new-found geo-reality, is a product of hardened molten plastic holding sediment, basaltic lava fragments, and organic debris, natural debris, and sedimentary grains. If sedimentary or igneous rock speaks about the impact that a changing earth had on its own formations, plastiglomerate leaves behind the traces of a predatory human species and what it did to extinguish itself through an invention that ensured an eventual ruin. Patricia Concoron and Charles Moore admit that plastic melts beyond recognition in some plastiglomerates and in some it is still visible and recognizable as “netting/ropes, pellets, partial containers/packaging, lids, tubes/pipes, and confetti.”10 Embrittled remains– in the form of containers and lids, ropes, nylon fishing line, and parts of oyster spacer tubes– countenance the rock identity.
If granite grew out of a blend of quartz, feldspar, and mica – building its own mineralization with certainty and mystery– then the materials identified in the formation of the plastiglomerate speak of a larger story of civilization and its discontents and of a febrile controversy in the making: a “kind of junkyard Frankenstein.”11 In the spirit of transcendental geology, standing on ground that has always been a dynamic ungrounding, we are left to ask: What legacy will humans leave in the rocks?12 As plastic is made to sieve through into the remotest nonhuman corners of this planet, the subterranean infiltration is no less emphatic – call it plastiturbation. Within anthropogenic morphostratigraphy, we have human inputs influencing sedimentation and the lithoscape. Imagine reading in a future textbook:
The interesting part of this development is in seeing how rocks that signaled inhuman time come to be humanized through the material remnants of a particular species. If geological imagination aspires to make the scalar and stratigraphic developments comprehensible to us, plastiglomerate evokes a new imagination that projects its own post-anthropocenic potentials – a future that will talk only about the past. “Plastifossilization” is a relentless and inexorable process that recharacterizes an already unstable earth that is a “compilation machine, an assembly line,” where “trash, construction debris, coal ash, dredged sediments, petroleum contamination, green lawns, decomposing bodies, and rock ballast not only alter the formation of soil but themselves form soil bodies, and in this respect are taxonomically indistinguishable from soil.”14 Plastic seepage and sedimentation keep changing the soil’s character and habit – plasticization of the soil-ego – to create a deterritorialized Earth weighed down by irrevocable plastic sink. Earth’s deep time, hence, is increasingly invaded by plastic time. Besides its nonplasticity and decay-resistant trajectory, this time includes forces that are global, capitalist, economic, and political. The processes that make the Earth’s crust chemicalize differently involve a temporality of a different order as soil organisms, including plants, face a different order of existence and expiry. When other fossilizations generated interest in the earth depths, tele-plastic fossilization has left us frozen in options: deposition as depravity, consequences as controversy. Plastiglomerate, however, announces no abrupt collapse of time and historical distance in understanding; it speaks of a clear trajectory of evolution even in the last sixty years, wedging the subject and the object together – the antiromantic formulation of reversal of subjectivity where the object formation has its own precise scientific understanding and clear heuristic discourse on the relational map with a transforming object. Plastic geolayering has its own telematic genealogy. It is here that a controversial parallelism builds between the plastic materiality and biological plasticity, where running away from plastic is always already a running into plastic. The plastic hardwaring of Earth develops its own vanishing and expiry moments, points of sustainability, composite fractures – a kind of ‘variantology.’15
The plastic objects swept up and unearthed reveal the threshold points of anthropogenic understanding of Earth and its elementality and phenomenality. It is in the exceeding of the scope of human knowledge and systems of representation that Amanda Boetzkes finds an “excess of the earth.”16 The elemental in artwork encourages a fresh sense generation where nature comes to create its own forms of representation that challenges our limits of understanding about what makes an intelligible form. Plastic nature never returns to itself, it merely re-turns. It is strange to itself and has become its own alterity. The plastic stones and the geo-sea profile come to reinforce our sheltering within the elemental. John Sallis points out that “fleeing to one’s home as a storm approaches does not allow one to escape from the storm but only to shelter oneself from its force. Cultivating the field, fishing in the sea, and cutting wood in the forest do not open a path beyond the field, the sea, or the forest but rather constitute certain kinds of human comportment to these elementals in which one is encompassed.”17 Fleeing and staying away from plastic is to dwell in the plastic elemental.
The plastic controversy questions: How could a toothbrush or nylon rope get into a particular rock? What force and instant synergized with the melting of the rock, the temperature gradient, the flow, the molecularity, the seepage and the conjugation? The interlocking of matter is unstable, unpredictable, and dynamic. If plastic clams its way into the digestive system of a fish and clanks out a space in the human body, it clings to rocks in exquisitely esoteric forms too. The earth delivers the unknown – plastiglomerate, in that sense, is a controversial event. Plastic at large, in its nonlaboratory avatar, is not limited to hylomorphic materialism. The turn to plastic has become a turn to composite plastic, dynamic multiform plastic, and nonstructural plastic in the sense of exceeding forms beyond human cognition and imagination. Where do we identify the connectors between a plastic toy and the degraded ghost of its own form after unknown periods of forcible weathering? How does the toothbrush we use relationalize with the frayed and frumpy toothbrush in the body of the plastiglomerate? Jeremy Skrzypek points out that in hyloenergeism “a material object is not itself an activity or process; it is something composed of matter, which comes into existence when that matter is engaged in a certain activity or process. Understood mereologically, a material object is composed of both its matter and the activity or process that is occurring in that matter.”18 Plasticofutures, through synchronic mineralization, reveal altplastics that infuse each other through substructural changes and processual energy. The figurality of plastic as an event (in the sense of a formation) and as an occurrence (as a state of occurring) emphasizes the “endurantist account of the persistence of material objects.” There is a chance in the indifference of altplastics, the hasard objectif (objective chance) – a sudden confluence point of contrasting objects. It’s the random in a process, causality not without probability. Mark the nylon-inscribed plastiglomerate.
Here is a displacement of agency that the invention of plastic a hundred years ago had never envisaged. The nylon-stamped rock announces a distant human hand to it. It’s both about how the Earth separates from its inmates and from itself; altplastics remind Earth how it can surprise itself and be its own cause of wonder. Isn’t that controversial enough?
Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the Department of English, University of North Bengal. His forthcoming book The Plastic Turn will be published by Cornell University Press in 2022.
Website: http://www.ranjanghosh.com
1 Richard A. Lovett, “Darwin’s Geological Mystery Solved,” Nature, 20 Oct. 2009.
3 See Heather I. Sullivan, “Collecting the Rocks of Time: Goethe, the Romantics and Early Geology,” European Romantic Review 10, nos. 1-4 (1999): 346.
4 Guo-Neng Chen and Rodney Grapes, Granite Genesis: In Situ Melting and Crustal Evolution (New York, 2007), p. 4
5 Guo-Neng Chen and Rodney Grapes, Granite Genesis: In Situ Melting and Crustal Evolution (Berlin, 2007), p. 4.
6 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On Granite (1784),” in The Essential Goethe, trans. pub., ed. Matthew Bell (Princeton, N.J., 2016), p. 913; my emphasis.
7 Jason Groves, “Goethe’s Petrofiction: Reading the Wanderjahre in the Anthropocene,” Goethe Yearbook 22 (Rochester, N.Y., 2015): 95-113.
8 Ibid.
9 See Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y., 2010). See also Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (New York, 1997).
10 Patricia L. Corcoran, Charles J. Moore, and Kelly Jazvac, “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record,” GSA TODAY 24 (June 2014): 4-8.
11 Angus Chen Jun, “Rocks Made of Plastic Found on Hawaiian Beach,” Science, 4 June 2014.
12 See Jan Zalasiewicz, The Earth after Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? (New York, 2008). See also The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History (New York, 2010).
13 Judith Selby and Richard Lang, “Plasticene Discontinuity.” Plastic Forever.
14 Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis, 2015), p. 110.
15 Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), p. 7.
16 Amanda Boetzkes, The Ethics of Earth Art (Minneapolis, 2010), p. 3.
17 John Sallis, Elemental Discourses (Bloomington, Ind., 2018), p. 95.
18 Jeremy W. Skrzypek, “From Potency to Act: Hyloenergeism,” Synthese , 21 Jan. 2019, p. 28.
In the Moment 
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