Beyond the Aestheticization of Plastic

In 1958, French film director Alain Resnais, then just starting out in his long career associated with the Nouvelle Vague, directed a short film extolling the virtues of plastic at the behest of a major aluminium producer that had also branched out into these “new materials”. ‘Le Chant du Styrene’ (‘Styrene’s call’ is a play on words on siren’s call) takes the viewer on a lyrical journey from finished plastic product back to petrochemical origin, accompanied by rhyming couplets written by the poet Raymond Queneau. Full of beautiful curves, shiny metallic surfaces and seductive primary colours, one of the most noticeable absences from the film is human labour. In the first minutes we catch only the odd glimpse of human hands, while everyday translucent plastic objects appear, unfurl and suspend as though of their own accord as a voiceover extols: “Oh plastic, where did you come from, who are you, and what explains your rare qualities?”

Although hegemonic perceptions of plastic have moved from wonder to disenchantment, Resnais’s film foreshadows a recent tendency within multidisciplinary studies and popular discussions of plastic to downplay or ignore the role of labour in the plastic life cycle. Drawing on wider work that explores techniques through which the marginalisation of plastic labour occurs, this paper focuses on the role of aestheticization. Drawing on close to a decade of ethnographic research on different aspects of the plastics value chain, I suggest that the aestheticization of plastics as modernist design objects, waste, and technofossils encourages a celebration of beauty over harm, instils a focus on the consumer object over the production process, and narrows the parameters of “plastic time”.

Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Michaelmas Term 2026

Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)

In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close) except for Week 5, which will be online only.

Convened by Professor Elizabeth Hallam and Dr Charlotte Linton.