Anthropocene Ouroboros

The ever-increasing abundance and expanding affordances of plastics have come to instantiate modernity through their successes and failures in usage and beyond. Materially, plastics have a capacity to stubbornly endure yet simultaneously to fracture. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork on an Indian Ocean island, this article will explore the heritage of plastic objects in their shattering and dispersal. The novel presence and ubiquity of plastics have caused some scholars to propose that the presence of plastics could constitute a possible marker of the Anthropocene. Yet plastics won’t stay in their own epoch. Microplastics can migrate and infuse sedimentary layers from previous eras, shimmying down to earlier stratigraphic layers and complicating the very knowability of the past. This paper will look at the temporal vertiginousness of the current epoch through the recalcitrance of human-made materials, arguing that, even in their material remnants, plastics radically complicate the delineation and understanding of geological time.