Esteemed scholar Ranjan Ghosh, Professor in the Department of English, University of North Bengal in India presented Plastic Nature (9/23/24) at the Environmental Forum at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard. Not only does he talk rocks (plastiglomerate), he posits a new way of talking about language itself and brings to mind a plastic way of thinking.
We are pleased that he uses our graphic chart to describe the geological age in which we now live. The age that we named The Plasticene Discontinuity in 2004 for our exhibition at the Bay Model.
THOMPSON ROOM (BARKER CENTER 110)
SPEAKER: RANJAN GHOSH
MODERATED BY ROBIN KELSEY
About the Event
What kind of a negotiation and home has nature built with plastic, a material that is a travelling and transformative genius? In a neo-materialist and an interobjective presence, plastic and nature have built a deeply entangled relationship – the problematic connection between the nature of plastic with what Ranjan Ghosh calls “plastic nature”. Within the material democracy of plastic, nature has been the object of change, but hasn’t nature through its own rounds of plasticity changed the way we see nature today? Hasn’t nature changed itself and plasticized plastic in ways that are startling and unique? The subject-object position has undergone massive revision as also the philosophy of seeing a material and nature. What, then, is this plastic nature?
