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Enjoyment in the Anthropocene: the extimacy of ecological catastrophe in Donut County
Abstract
Consciousness raising seems to be the most pressing task facing any project for environmental sustainability today. A psychoanalytic interpretation of the climate crisis, however, reveals that a far more urgent challenge is recognizing that we might be deriving jouissance, or unconscious enjoyment, from the very worsening of the crisis. This article contends that videogames are the ideal medium through which to grasp the form that our unconscious enjoyment takes—and, if mobilized against self-destructive capitalism, the emancipatory form our enjoyment could take—in the Anthropocene. Drawing on an analysis of the videogame Donut County, it makes two psychoanalytic interventions in ecocritical theory. The first is that any theory of the climate crisis must account for the subject of the unconscious—not as a nature-dominating individual, but as a hole in material reality. The second is that any project for environmental sustainability must avow the subject’s death-driven enjoyment rather than repress or avoid it.
... It will be argued that social imaginaries, utopian thinking and social visioning are shaped not only by what is potentially possible and can be actualised but also by what is not. Through this, we contribute to and expand upon existing geography scholarship on critical sustainability studies and the depoliticisation of sustainability (Anderson, 2023;Blühdorn, 2013;Nicoll, 2023;Pohl and Swyngedouw, 2023), to argue that the idea that we can be individually sustainable is only possible with radical collective change. Indeed, over the last couple of decades, social scientists in general, and geographers more specifically, have paid significant attention to the many challenges and contradictions posed by the ever-pressing -and seemingly unattainable -societal thrust towards sustainability. ...
This paper mobilises the idea of impossible worlds to conceptualise and explore inconsistent and illogical visions and ways of living sustainably. Specifically, the paper focuses on an understanding of sustainability based on classic Kantian universalistic ethics (suppose everyone did the same) and relative feelings of responsibility and guilt for the environment. By mobilising three vignettes, the paper argues that impossibility is present in current environmental thinking, and narratives of impossibility have an emotional and political role in shaping popular discourses concerning environmentalism and responsibility. It suggests that exploring glitches, impossibilities, contradictions and inconsistencies may contribute to understanding the role of personal guilt in sustainability narratives, and potentially trigger change.
... This speculative capacity of games has been embraced by a number of scholars including those analyzing the way that the Pokémon series of games might encourage a latent form of environmental awareness among its players (Bainbridge, 2014), how representations of renewable power generation in mainstream games works to normalize sustainable visions of the future (Abraham, 2018a), that ludic simulations of precarity contribute to preparations for futures (catalyzed by climate change) in which scarcity is the operating principle (Kelly & Nardi, 2014), and a growing tendency to represent the vast scale of planetarity within games that could improve consciousness of ecological systems for audiences and heighten an important sense of co-presence with Earth (op de Beke, 2020). Connecting more explicitly to the context of the Anthropocene, others have addressed the potential of games to catalyze reflection on human complicity in the current crisis (May, 2021a), the psychoanalytic connection between unconscious pleasure and an anthropocentric form of the condition Sigmund Freud termed the "death drive" (a repeated impulse or tendency toward experiences of failure, loss and self-destruction) (Nicoll, 2023), and the capacity of games to reflect and interrogate the devastating toll of industrial capitalism on earth's health (Abraham, 2018b;Clark, 2022;Felczak, 2020). Ecocritical game studies has also benefited from foundational models specific to this medium. ...
Anchored in the Anthropocene era's paradigm of human mastery over nature, Cities: Skylines grants its players extensive agency to shape untouched terrains into sprawling cities. We draw upon “ecological thought”—a mode of awareness that highlights the radical interconnectedness of all beings and their environments—to consider the ecological dynamics of city-building by the game's players. Analyzing player-generated paratexts from online game communities reveals that while many players aspire toward ecocentric city designs, they instead inadvertently restage the asymmetric planetary relationship emblematic of our current era. Our analysis uncovers the capital-driven assumptions that characterize human–environment relations in the game. Attempts at ecocentric aesthetics invariably subsumed by cybernetic interactions that privilege the Anthropocene's prevailing power dynamics. These expressions highlight the inherent contradictions of the Anthropocene era as encountered in Cities: Skylines and illustrate the permeability between the contemporary material world and digital play.
In this paper, we explore this dissonance between knowing and acting that produces the current climate deadlock by focusing on ‘enjoyment’ as a political factor. The enjoyment that infuses the climate change consensus and climate activism stands as an avatar for the wider impasse that characterizes most attempts to inflect the trajectory of the future away from ‘accumulation for accumulation sake’ and its associated socio-ecological catastrophe. Considering enjoyment as a political factor might open avenues for re-framing the impasse of the present socio-ecological condition. We engage the Lacanian notion of enjoyment (jouissance). Our overall argument is that climate, and its change, is not only a threat to the world, but also something that is enjoyed in one way or the other. To illustrate the Lacanian take on enjoyment, we will differentiate between two dominant strands of enjoying climate change: First, a passionate engagement in destroying Nature based on an imperative to enjoy fossil fuels and what this metonymically stand for, and second, an equally passionate commitment to saving Nature based on an imaginary enjoyment that stems from renunciation and sacrifice. The paper proceeds by arguing for the need to traverse the fantasies that sustain the very deadlock of the current situation, a process that requires re-scripting the process of political subjectivation and our libidinal attachments to the enjoyment of climate and its change.
This article mounts a defense of my and Slavoj Žižek’s co-edited anthology, Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, against the two main criticisms of it made throughout Graham Harman’s article “The Battle of Objects and Subjects”: (1) that we and our fellow contributors are guilty of gross overgeneralization when we classify thinkers from various schools of thought – among them New Materialism, object-oriented ontology, speculative realism, and actor–network theory – under the broad rubric of the “new materialisms”; and (2) that despite our pretensions to the mantle of materialism, our Lacano-Hegelian position is actually a full-blown idealism. In responding to and attempting to refute these criticisms, I make the case that our Lacano-Hegelian model of dialectical materialism is an “extimate materialism.”
Amidst ecological collapse and environmental catastrophe, humankind is surrounded by indications that our habitat is turning against us in monstrous ways. The very environments we live within now evoke existential terror, and this state of ecological monstrosity has permeated popular media, including video games. Such cultural manifestations of planetary catastrophe are particularly evident in video game monsters. These virtual figures continue monsters’ long-held role in reflecting the socio-cultural anxieties of their particular era. The horrific figures that monsters present play a culturally reflexive role, echoing the fears and anxieties of their social, political and cultural context. Media monsters closely reflect their surrounding cultural conditions (Cohen 47), representing “a symptom of or a metaphor for something bigger and more significant than the ostensible reality of the monster itself” (Hutchings 37). Society’s deepest anxieties culminate in these figures in forms that are “threatening and impure” (Carroll 28), “unnatural, transgressive, obscene, contradictory” (Kearney 4–5), and abject (Kristeva 4). In this article I ask how the appearance of the monstrous within contemporary video games reflects an era of climate change and ecological collapse, and how this could inform the engagement of players with discourse concerning climate change. Central to this inquiry is the literary practice of ecocriticism, which seeks to examine environmental rather than human representation in cultural artefacts, increasingly including accounts of contemporary ecological decay and disorder (Bulfin 144). I build on such perspectives to address play encounters that foreground figures of monstrosity borne of the escalating climate crisis, and summarise case studies of two recent video games undertaken as part of this project — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo EPD) and The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog). An ecocritical approach to the monsters that populate these case studies reveals the emergence of a ludic form of ecological monstrosity tied closely to our contemporary climatic conditions and taking two significant forms: one accentuating a visceral otherness and aberrance, and the other marked by the uncanny recognition of human authorship of climate change.
It seems intuitive to conflate the gamic gaze with the player’s act of looking. To do so, however, would be to inherit from the first wave of psychoanalytic screen theory a misleading presupposition that the gaze is synonymous with the look. Taking influence from new Lacanian film theorists such as Joan Copjec and Todd McGowan, this article contends that the gamic gaze is an object in the visual field of play that disrupts the mastery of the player’s look. I develop this argument through an analysis of the 2017 videogame Gorogoa. By confronting the player with the gaze, Gorogoa reveals that the jouissance (enjoyment) of videogame play consists in the player’s unconscious drive to fail rather than their conscious wish for pleasure or mastery. To borrow terminology from Copjec, the gamic gaze marks the point of the player’s culpability—rather than visibility—in the visual field of play.
“This outstanding volume throws a new light not only on Lacan but also on environmental issues: we cannot really understand ecology without taking into account all the fantasies that overdetermine our approach to this topic.”
- Slavoj Žižek, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, UK
“These smart, urgent essays consider a broad range of cultural contexts, illustrate the centrality of fantasy, desire, and symbolization to ecological transformation, and should inspire and terrify readers of many stripes.”
- Anna Kornbluh, Department of English, University of Illinois, Chicago, USA
“This brilliant edited volume not only reveals the environment to be an enduring theme in Lacan’s oeuvre, but also rethinks and reworks Lacan environmentally, showing ‘nature’ to be a site of both play and anxiety, interiority and radical externality, pleasure and pollution. Our study of the environment will never be the same.”
- Ilan Kapoor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, Canada
In this exciting new collection, leading and emerging Lacanian scholars seek to understand what psychoanalysis brings to debates about the environment and the climate crisis. They argue that we cannot understand climate change and all of its multifarious ramifications without first understanding how our terrifying proximity to the real undergirds our relation to the environment, how we mistake lack for loss and mourning for melancholy, and how we seek to destroy the same world we seek to protect. The book traces Lacan’s contribution through a consideration of topics including doomsday preppers, forest suicides, Indigenous resistance, post-apocalyptic films, the mathematics of climate science, and the relevance of Kant. They ask: What can you do if your neighbour is a climate change denier? What would Bartleby do? Does the animal desire? Who is cleaning up all the garbage on the internet? Why is the sudden greening of the planet under COVID-19 no help whatsoever?
It offers a timely intervention into Lacanian theory, environmental studies, geography, philosophy, and literary studies that illustrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to current social and environmental concerns.
Clint Burnham is Chair of the Graduate Program and Professor of English at Simon Fraser University, and President of the Lacan Salon, Vancouver, Canada.
Paul Kingsbury is Professor of Geography and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Environment at Simon Fraser University, and Vice President of the Lacan Salon Vancouver, Canada.
The current epoch is often described by cultural theorists as facing an ontological turn with regard to the question of nature. In the Anthropocene, ‘Mother Nature’ makes space for ‘Gaia’, a nature that is inseparably related to culture. In turn, Gaia has vehemently been criticized as a harmonious figure of whole-ism. Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework, this paper traces the shift from Nature to Gaia through Jacques Lacan's ‘formulas of sexuation’. From a Lacanian standpoint, sexual difference paves the way towards two different ways of relating nature and culture. Addressing the case of ruination, the author engages with the two underlying ontologies taking place in debates on nature: the narrative of Mother Nature based on a ‘masculine’ ontology, and the notion of Gaia as following a ‘feminine’ ontology. The paper concludes by outlining a feminine reading of the Anthropocene that captures nature and culture as ruined and immanently out of joint.
Why sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology.
Consider sublimation—conventionally understood as a substitute satisfaction for missing sexual satisfaction. But what if, as Lacan claims, we can get exactly the same satisfaction that we get from sex from talking (or writing, painting, praying, or other activities)? The point is not to explain the satisfaction from talking by pointing to its sexual origin, but that the satisfaction from talking is itself sexual. The satisfaction from talking contains a key to sexual satisfaction (and not the other way around)—even a key to sexuality itself and its inherent contradictions. The Lacanian perspective would make the answer to the simple-seeming question, “What is sex?” rather more complex. In this volume in the Short Circuits series, Alenka Zupančič approaches the question from just this perspective, considering sexuality a properly philosophical problem for psychoanalysis; and by psychoanalysis, she means that of Freud and Lacan, not that of the kind of clinician practitioners called by Lacan “orthopedists of the unconscious.”
Zupančič argues that sexuality is at the point of a “short circuit” between ontology and epistemology. Sexuality and knowledge are structured around a fundamental negativity, which unites them at the point of the unconscious. The unconscious (as linked to sexuality) is the concept of an inherent link between being and knowledge in their very negativity.
Although there have been many attempts to apply the ideas of psychoanalysis to political thought, this book is the first to identify the political project inherent in the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis. And this political project, Todd McGowan contends, provides an avenue for emancipatory politics after the failure of Marxism in the twentieth century. Where others seeking the political import of psychoanalysis have looked to Freud's early work on sexuality, McGowan focuses on Freud's discovery of the death drive and Jacques Lacan's elaboration of this concept. He argues that the self-destruction occurring as a result of the death drive is the foundational act of emancipation around which we should construct our political philosophy. Psychoanalysis offers the possibility for thinking about emancipation not as an act of overcoming loss but as the embrace of loss. It is only through the embrace of loss, McGowan suggests, that we find the path to enjoyment, and enjoyment is the determinative factor in all political struggles-and only in a political project that embraces the centrality of loss will we find a viable alternative to global capitalism. © 2013 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. All rights reserved.
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