Tim Morton has a brief, yet interesting, post up on ethnographers problematizing climate change. I found the comments particularly interesting. Jerome Whitington, to whom Morton is responding, writes:
All of climate science is organized around a problem of anticipating an uncertain future. Hence it plays into the quasi-apocalyptic fears …
I actually wrote a post along these lines a couple years ago. There I was intent on analyzing the prevalence of apocalyptic discourse in the contemporary American social imaginary. Whitington’s remark is too brief to be sure, but he seems to be suggesting that worries about climate change are yet another variation of apocalyptic fantasies. This would be a way of reducing climate change to a phantasmatic entity.
My view is rather different. While I readily recognize that discussions of climate change have an apocalyptic dimension, I think Whitington– if I’m reading him right –draws the wrong lesson from this. In my view, we should read the theme of apocalypticism in popular culture psychoanalytically as a symptom. Here I am thinking specifically of religious apocalyptic fantasies, as well as the sort of apocalyptic fantasies we see in various disaster films.
Recall that a symptom is often a compromise formation. While we do indeed suffer from our symptoms, with a psychoanalytic framework, symptoms are a solution to a deadlock of desire that allows the subject to attain jouissance under the mark of erasure. Symptoms speak a truth, but in disguised form. Thus, for example, in his analysis of jokes, Freud shows how the joke allows the person to enjoy a repressed desire in a socially acceptable form. The desire here is the truth, while the joke is the symptom (or, at the very least, the parapraxis). As solutions to deadlocks of desire and jouissance, symptoms can often be compromise formations. In this context, Freud often gives the example of obsessive hand washing. Obsessive hand washing here is conceived as a compromise between the unconscious desire to masturbate and the social prohibition against masturbation coupled with the imperative of cleanliness. Obsessive hand washing becomes a substitute satisfaction that brings all of these elements together in a single activity. This is, in part, what Freud means by overdetermination.
The first question, then, is what truth apocalyptic fantasies might express? Rather than treating the apocalyptic as grounds for dismissing something, we should instead ask what truths these fantasies are speaking in a disguised fashion. Second, we should ask what compromises are being forged in these apocalyptic fantasies? When Freud speaks of fetishes and screen-memories– other forms symptoms can take –he discusses them as ways of averting recollection or confrontation with something traumatic. For example, Freud discusses a screen-memory in a patient who intensely remembered the print of his mother’s dress. He speculates that the reason the free association or recollection stops at this particular memory is that the next thing the person saw was what was under the dress, thereby confronting castration. The fetish, Freud argues, functions in a similar way. Unable to confront castration, the fetishist through displacement or metonymy instead transforms another object such as shoes, stockings, dresses, undies, etc., into the object of sexual desire.
One can find Freud’s points about castration suspect, but the concept of screen-memories is nonetheless very useful in this context. Returning to Whitington’s point about quasi-apocalyptic fantasies, the proper gesture is not metonymical, such that we argue that worries about the impact of climate change are just one more variation in a series of apocalyptic fantasies. Rather, the proper gesture lies arguing that the sorts of apocalyptic fantasies we encounter in religion and popular culture are metonymical displacements or screens of real (intended as a homonym) catastrophe’s that are facing us.
Take your average End of Times apocalyptic fantasy, so popular among variants of Christianity in the United States today. These fantasies refer to a real, but in disguised, screened, or fetishized form. There is a truth in these fantasies, without a knowledge of this truth (recall that for Lacan, knowledge is in the position of the unconscious). The truth of these fantasies is that we really are facing global catastrophe. Knowledge of this truth would entail seeing how this global catastrophe is deeply linked to capitalism, climate change, and the link between the two. Instead, within the popular imaginary, we get a distortion of this link, presenting impending catastrophe as the result of cosmic supernatural forces fighting a battle between good and evil.
The question, then, is why this knowledge must disguise itself in this way. The answer to this question, I believe, is the same as the answer to the question of why the obsessional repeatedly washes his hands, but now in inverted form. Apocalyptic fantasies allow those that harbor them to simultaneously acknowledge the truth of the ravages of capitalism and impending environmental disaster, while simultaneously continuing to live as they wish, keeping the system in place that is leading in these directions. Safe in the imaginary “knowledge” that catastrophe is the result of divine will, I go and buy a Hum-V and McMansion. However, the fact that these fantasies have intensified in recent years– and could the fact that much of this imaginary revolves around the Middle East, ground zero of fossil fuels, be any more telling? –indicates a growing awareness of the real and its omnipresence in our current situation.
Larval Subjects . 
January 4, 2011 at 2:29 am
Dr Sinthome, in REAL Christianity, and I have so many times told you that is the Orthodox Christianity, of the good ole Byzantium, not the Bible Thumping Society of Texas, or the Catholic Conquistadors of Holland, the Apocalypse is not a static notion, and the Apocalypse, also, isn’t the ”end of the world”, but the beginning of a new world. If you focused a bit more on that, you’d see that there isn’t really a conflict with your fancy new objectotheories!
January 4, 2011 at 2:50 am
I’m not sure what this “real Christianity” is, Dejan. Here I adopt the Forrest Gump position on these movements: “Christianity is what Christianity does.” Your Orthodox Christianity is one variant among many. I am, of course, aware that there are many who don’t advocate this sort of End Times theology. That’s really rather irrelevant, though. There are also many who do and the existence of that belief is interesting as a social system.
January 4, 2011 at 5:46 am
Leaving aside the question of “real Christianity” (I’m a Byzantine fan myself), I thank you for this much-needed reminder that the question of whether climate change fears are symptomatic of underlying anxieties is a separate question from, and has very little bearing upon, whether the climate is really changing and if so, why. I see way, way too many “climate change skeptics” (who I seem to keep reading, if only because I have a soft spot for questioners of consensus) say “hysteria!” as if that somehow explained something.
January 4, 2011 at 6:06 am
The most Zizekian of posts. Apocalypticism is also very Hollywood and whilst I would argue that this specific narrative may mask the fact that Hollywood is bereft of fresh ideas I feel there is more involved. It does seem we are glimpsing the Lacanian Real from increasingly (anamorphic) domains. We glimpse this little piece of the Real through Technology, the media, religious zealotry, terrorism, biological and ecological breakdown, and so on. We are living in end times because of the multiplicity of delivery systems for information, often span in a negative light, opens a crack in what we have always assumed to be the fabric of concrete reality. This is often the revenge of the object.
Russell
January 4, 2011 at 6:15 am
It seems almost that your analysis hints at a future encounter with the real. I might construe this as an unspoken urge of the writer toward scribbling the fantasy of the Hegelian consolation prize, namely an organic revolution propelling culture toward a denouement of the real. Who in this day and age would dare to write out such an urgent fantasy, with all the ghoulish criticisms waiting to feast on the flesh of the Word?
By which I mean to say, there is some difficulty in managing to solve these problems you mention about our current situation. These words “capitalism” and “climate change” are rather monstrous. Uttering the prophetic performance of the necessity of the reorganization of social order as a method of stabilizing the biome is perhaps even too real for your audience to consider. Perhaps this is one reason you do not mention what you must.
January 4, 2011 at 8:35 am
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/01/global-warming-as-narrative-and-not.html
January 4, 2011 at 4:01 pm
I’m not sure what this “real Christianity” is, Dejan.
I was not specific enough. The great Schism between the East and the West, as you can read in the work of philosopher Nikolai Berdzayev*, was about the West placing an accent on ”God” in the construction ”Godman”, and the East translating it as ”Mangod” (accent on ”man”). Philosophically this means that Christ’s incarnation as man is all-important: the blending of body and spirit, not their separation into various dualisms. It is a much more ”materialist” religion that way, because it finds life on Earth the most crucial, and the praxis of religious living essential. As it is said, the church is the BODY of Christ. Marxism was only successful in Russia because Marxism and Orthodoxy share this respect of the praxis; their argument was about the use of violence to accomplish revolutionary goals – the church forbids this.
Ergo, Orthodoxy would view an idea such as object-oriented philosophy with much less suspicion than the churches in the Western hemisphere.
What you also notice is the lack of interest in meddling in world affairs on the side of the Orth. church, starkly contrasting the Catholic church’s strategy in this regard.
My other point was about the Apocalypse. In the Orthodox texts I read that deal with this issue, I found the concept that the Kingdomcome will not be a static position, but a kind of a Marxist ”permanent revolution” in that human beings, with their new bodies, will continuously accomplish ever-newer plateaus of perfection.
So although we are well-advised to realistically endorse the dangers of collapse, we are also not to be all neeeegaaative about it, dr. Sinthome.
* not to be confused with Comrade Mikhail Emelianov or Dostoyevski
January 4, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Good analysis. I think it may be even simpler. We are facing real catastrophe and aren’t dealing with it (see Lester Brown’s Plan B 4.0 for an example of rational ways to deal directly with current ecological crisis). When people deal driectly with real problems, paranoid fantasies tend to disperse.
I would also caution against psychoanalyzing away the notion of a cosmic battle between Good and Evil. Perhaps facing our collective demons and vanquishing (or integrating) them is in fact an accurate narrative.
January 4, 2011 at 7:39 pm
Also, there is the possibility that evildoers, though not supernatural ones, are in fact manipulating whatever can be manipulated (see HAARP below) to create certain Biblist-terroristic effects–birds falling out of the sky, tornadoes in December, 22 inches of snow on the big apple, etc,–to swoop and prey upon the images and scaffold on the “prophecies” in the Judeo-Christian narrative, in a kind of supra-literary Bush Doctrinaire preemption. Yes, to induce and justify nihilism, eliminative or otherwise, but also to neutralize the currently largely withdrawn political potential, the intelligence and passion,the ready infrastructure, facilities and community bonds, of the tens of millions of believers, many of whom also happen to be members of the working class, or as they would call themselves, folks just getting by. By cynically feeding more pulp into the already extant, rooted, and widely held fiction Power can (Rapturously) perpetuate the processes of top-down impoverishment, dispossession and enslavement almost completely unperturbed.
If a butterfly can have an effect, what about all these antennae in the rarified Alaska ionosphere? http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/
I believe this can change if we follow Levi’s lead and embrace the narrative, and plumb it like Brassier did the word “thing” in item 32 of page 59 of The Speculative Turn. That a facile misreading of the word “thing” could cause all that confusion and destruction and philosophical retardation, I found frightening! And so should you. What other simple, simple tweaks of consciousness are just waiting for us?
Which I suppose is a nice way of saying, there are no legitimate grounds for intellectual elitism, friends. They haven’t yet been earned, not by anyone. If Einstein could be tricked into galvanizing his prowess to unleash atomic power for Power, no one should feel unduly badly about their own unwitting intellectual capitulations. But let’s acknowledge them and repent and make amends and move forward quickly while we still can. We have about, oh, I don’t know, five minutes. Let’s use them wisely.
January 4, 2011 at 8:31 pm
Frances’ tone was perfect.
January 4, 2011 at 8:32 pm
I agree with your view of apocalyptic thinking as a symptom. I would add that it is also a symptom of our desire to witness the end. We like knowing the ending. We’re drawn to scenes of massive devastation because it appeals to our fascination with death.
The truth is also our not wanting to be the ones who leave the party early. We’re certain of our individual endings. The concept of an afterlife (like the concept of evil) is a fantasy to placate our desire for our own deaths to be the death of everything.
The lure of devastation allows us to be momentary witnesses to the end. Climate change is likely to increase these moments and thus feedback into the fantasy.
January 5, 2011 at 1:35 am
Byzantine Christianity is an heir to Roman Imperial Chrisianity, which was formalized by bishops loyal to Constantine’s regime over three centuries after the life of Christ. Christianity threfore preceded its orthodox variant.
Among the the more important decisions of the early Orthodox Church was the choice to include the Book of Revelation in the canonical version of the Bible (at the third Council of Carthage in 397 A.D). It did so despite a longstanding controversy as to whether or not the book should be accepted as scripture. Orthodoxy therefore facilitated the incorporation of a previously contested apocalyptic vision into the Christian canon–with huge consequences for the subsequent religious imagination and history of Christendom.
The following clip is germaine to the question of what constitutes the “REAL” Christianity. In it, Cornel West talks to Toni Morrison about the difference between Constantian Christianity (which includes Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism–all of which accept the Nicean version of the Bible) and what he calls “prophetic Christianity.” Interesting stuff:
January 5, 2011 at 1:40 am
Sorry, I meant to say “Carthaginian version of the Bible” in my parenthetical aside. An old misconception about the Council of Nicea was factoring there.
January 5, 2011 at 8:36 pm
[…] Bryant at LarvalSubjects has pushed forward an aspect of my last blog post concerning ways in which anthropologists might […]
January 5, 2011 at 8:43 pm
The point I was making is that, especially in market-oriented climate policy, hypothetical futures circulate as dynamic possibilities, which indeed do drive decisions, investments or practices but not as matters of belief. They are speculative in a different way, as matters of logical extrapolation, and especially of the logical extrapolation of material technologies. The apocalyptic dynamic is derivative of this, and overall I think your analysis in terms of symptoms of repression is workable as long as it incorporates power (including the power of technologies) as a fundamental aspect of that.
Accountingforatmosphere.wordpress.com
January 5, 2011 at 11:05 pm
We also have to be careful not to equate our apocalyptic fantasies too specifically with Christian apocalypticism. I dont’t think you are doing this, Levi, in your post, but per the comments it seems that this has emerged as the primary focus. The problem is that the particular Christian apocalyptic fantasy is only one aspect of several important parallax points of observation for the central truth. Someone above mentioned Zizek, and it is Zizek who lists the “Christian” apocalypse as one among four primary apocalyptic fantasies, also including the techno-fetishist apocalypse (i.e., we will upload our brains into computers or robots will take over or any of the other singularity nonsense) the ecological apocalyptic fantasies (these are the narratives of ecological apocalypse and not the real science, but they certainly include the more pseudo-sciencey future predictions of people like the permaculturist David Holmgren) and the New Age apocalypse (a la 2012, Age of Aquarius, panpsychic rapture, etc. etc.). Each gives us a slightly different take on what the “apocalypse” means and how we should act in relation to the enormous impending eruption of the real into the symbolic framework.
Interestingly, however, Zizek actually cuts the ecological apocalyptic narrative OUT of the list in his most recent book. I think it’s an uncalled for exclusion, though I’m not sure WHY he even made it.
January 6, 2011 at 5:30 am
“If life were fully present to itself, if it were not haunted by what has been lost in
the past and what may be lost in the future, there would be nothing that could cause the concern for justice. Indeed, justice can only be brought about by ‘living-mortals’who will exclude and annihilate by maintaining the memory and life of certain others at the expense of other others.” Hägglund, p128
Why does this smack of a confession? Speculating, naturally–but could one of the “annihilated” be Alain Robbe-Grillet and the “excluded” be reference to his work Les Gommes from the footnotes from the fascinating discussion of succession, destructon, etc. on pages 120-121? Maybe by “justice” MH means trial by ordeal?
December 11, 2011 at 7:38 am
[…] philosopher, psychoanalyst, and blogger Levi Bryant sees “apocalypticism in popular culture […] as a symptom. Recall that a symptom is often a […]
October 30, 2012 at 7:35 am
[…] (a topic completely ignored in the presidential campaign). This is an illustrative example of an apocalyptic fantasy which simply is a metonymical displacement of the real global ecological disaster that is facing […]