Plasticity, recycling and procrastination: the dialectic between resistance and change

This article offers a critique of the adoption of incentivised recycling policies in the UK, through an exploration of Hegel's dialectic and concept of plasticity, as developed by French philosopher Catherine Malabou. With reference to Malabou’s use of neuroscientific research, it argues that the brain can be viewed as a metaphor for the connections between people in the world, with neural pathways representing habits that can be formed and resist deformation. What plasticity captures is our propensity to procrastinate, both individually and socially. I argue that the plastic brain represents the connections between all entities, that is human beings and the environment. It is suggested that UK policies will only succeed in diverting waste from landfill by means of retraining our habitual behaviour away from throwing unwanted waster away and towards recycling. The article then considers how the work of Hegel and Malabou can be used to demonstrate that recycling is a matter of maintaining the connectivity of the whole plastic brain, whilst waste disposal disrupts this connectivity, like Alzheimers or some other degenerative condition, through being forgotten 6. Furthermore, because the environment is incorporated in the plastic brain through a post-humanist approach, it can be argued that discarding waste can also be taken as a metaphor for marginalising people in wasted lives, because they are no longer needed or don’t meet requirements anymore. The plasticity of the dialectic shows that resistance or procrastination is an essential or natural element of recycling, which is therefore naturally going to take time.