Page 171 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

164 J. DEAN

Lacan’s teaching, jouissance is a special substance, that intense
pleasure-pain of enjoyment that makes life worth living and some things
worth dying for. We will do anything to get what we think we will enjoy.
We then discover after we get it that it wasn’t what we really desired after
all. Likewise, we try to discipline, regulate, and control enjoyment, only to
find it emerging in another place. We get off even when we think we are
trying not to. Jouissance is what we want but can’t get and what we get
that we don’t want.
The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clock face created in 1947 by the
members of the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists. Its hands represent a countdown to possible global catastrophe.
Initially made to refer to nuclear war, since 2007 the clock has been used to
raise awareness for climate change.
Some use climate change as a vehicle for jouissance, for enjoying
destruction, punishment and knowing. A current of left anthropocenic
enjoyment circulates through evocations of unprecedented, unthinkable
catastrophe: the end of the world, the end of the human species and the
end of civilization. Theorists embrace extinction, focus on deep time and
displace a politics of the people onto the agency of things. Postmodern
Augustinians announce the guilt or hypocrisy of the entire human species.
Hubris is humanity’s, all of humanity’s, downfall. Philosophers and cultural
critics take on the authoritative rhetoric of geoscientists and evolutionary
biologists. Those of us who follow the reports of emissions, extreme
weather and failed states enjoy being in the know. We can’t do anything
about climate change, but this lets us off the hook when we stop trying.
Getting to name our new era, marking our impact as the
‘Anthropocene’, provides a compensatory charge—hey, we changed the
world after all. Even better than coming up with a name for our era is the
jouissance that comes from getting to judge everyone else for their
self-absorbed consumerist pleasures—why didn’t you change when you
should have? Anticipatory Cassandras, we watch from within our melan-
cholic ‘pre-loss’, to use Naomi Klein’s term, comforted by the fantasy of
our future capacity to say we knew it all along. We told you so. Your
capitalism, instrumental reason or Cartesian dualism killed us all. Or so we
fantasize, screening out the unequal distribution of the effects of warming
—Russia doesn’t worry about it as much as, say, Bangladesh.
The perfect storm of planetary catastrophe, species condemnation and
paralyzed incapacity allows the Left a form of jouissance that ongoing
deprivation, responsibility and struggle do not allow. Overlooked as too