Page 170 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

CHAPTER 13

The Anamorphic Politics of Climate

Change

Jodi Dean

Politics in the Anthropocene is a matter of perspective. We can’tlookat
climate change directly. Relying on multiple disparate measurements, we
look for patterns and estimate probabilities. We see in parts; the melting ice
caps, glaciers, and permafrost; the advancing deserts and diminishing coral
reefs; and the disappearing coastlines and migrating species. Evidence
becomes a matter of extremes, as extremes themselves become the evi-
dence for an encroaching catastrophe that has already happened: the
highest recorded temperatures; the ‘hockey stick’ model of predicted
warming, sea-level rise and extinction. Once we see it—the “it” of climate
change encapsulated into a data point or disastrous image—it’s already too
late. But, too late for what and for whom remains unsaid and unknowable.
The challenge in this scenario becomes grappling with continuity. How can
we conceive and wage the struggles already dividing the collectivity pre-
sumed in processes whose outcomes are estimated and predicted?
Climate change tethers us to a perspective that oscillates between the
impossible and the inevitable, already and not yet, everywhere but not
here, not quite. Slavoj Žižek reminds us that such oscillation indexes the
‘too much or too little’ of jouissance. For psychoanalysis, particularly in

J. Dean (&)
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, USA
e-mail: jdean@hws.edu

© The Author(s) 2017 163
B. Brevini and G. Murdock (eds.), Carbon Capitalism and Communication,
Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57876-7_13