Abstract
In light of recent criticism of data visualizations within Anthropocene discourse, this chapter considers the social and political implications of one of the most widespread scientific images associated with public awareness of climate change: the line graph. Focusing on the geometric form of the line graph, I argue that the line graph serves to obscure the social relations at the core of the climate crisis in part due to the mapping of its data within the Euclidean space of the Cartesian plane. Against such a framework of time and space, I propose that topological approaches in Lacanian psychoanalysis offer an alternative spatio-temporal modality for thinking about climate change, which convey the significance of political relation in place of the generalised humanity of Anthropocene discourse.
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Notes
- 1.
Daniel Hartley, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and the Problem of Culture,” in Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, ed. Jason W. Moore (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016), 155.
- 2.
Hartley, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene,” 157.
- 3.
T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2017), 15.
- 4.
Demos, Against the Anthropocene, 17.
- 5.
Heather Houser, “The Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations: More Than Information Ecstasy?” Public Culture 26, no. 2 (2014): 319–37, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-2392084. See also Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim (Los Angeles: Paramount Classics, 2006).
- 6.
Nicholas W. Smith and Hélène Joffe, “Climate Change in the British Press: The Role of the Visual.” Journal of Risk Research 12, no. 5 (2009): 647–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669870802586512.
- 7.
Houser, “Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations,” 327–28.
- 8.
As Houser notes, the scale of latter being particularly well-suited to literally “dramatizing the expression ‘off the charts’” (Houser, “Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations,” 322).
- 9.
World Meteorological Organization/United Nations Environment Programme, Climate Change: The IPCC 1990 and 1992 Assessments, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. June 1992, 79, 52, https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/ipcc_90_92_assessments_far_full_report.pdf (accessed October 1, 2019).
- 10.
Hartley, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene,” 157.
- 11.
Virginia Blum and Anna Secor, “Psychotopologies: Closing the Circuit between Psychic and Material Space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 6 (2011): 1034, https://doi.org/10.1068/d11910.
- 12.
Michael Friendly and Daniel J. Denis, “Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography, Statistical Graphics, and Data Visualisation,” November 2006, 7, http://datavis.ca/milestones/ (accessed May 27, 2020)
- 13.
Sarah A. Radcliffe, “Re-Mapping the Nation: Cartography, Geographical Knowledge and Ecuadorean Multiculturalism,” Journal of Latin American Studies 42, no. 2 (2010): 306, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40784984.
- 14.
Friendly and Denis, “Milestones,” 15.
- 15.
Harro Maas and Mary S. Morgan, “Timing History: The Introduction of Graphical Analysis in 19th Century British Economics,” Revue D’Histoire Des Sciences Humaines 7, no. 2 (2002): 97, https://www.cairn.info/revue-histoire-des-sciences-humaines-2002-2-page-97.htm (accessed, October 1, 2019).
- 16.
Maas and Morgan, “Timing History,” 97.
- 17.
Maas and Morgan, “Timing History,” 97.
- 18.
Barbara Adam, Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 73.
- 19.
Maas and Morgan, “Timing History,” 97.
- 20.
Judy L. Klein, “Reflections from the Age of Economic Measurement,” History of Political Economy 33 Annual Supplement (2001): 112, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/13335/pdf.
- 21.
Klein, “Reflections,” 112.
- 22.
Moishe Postone, quoted in Jonathan Martineau, Time, Capitalism and Alienation: A Socio-Historical Inquiry Into the Making of Modern Time (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 107.
- 23.
Houser, “Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations,” 321.
- 24.
Suzanne Goldenberg, “Climate Change: The Poor Will Suffer Most,” Guardian. March 31, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/31/climate-change-poor-suffer-most-un-report (accessed January 9, 2020); and United Nations General Assembly, “Unprecedented Impacts of Climate Change Disproportionately Burdening Developing Countries, Delegate Stresses, as Second Committee Concludes General Debate,” GA/EF/3516, 74th Session, October 8, 2019, https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/gaef3516.doc.htm (accessed January 9, 2020).
- 25.
Blum and Secor, “Psychotopologies,” 1034.
- 26.
James R. Munkres, Topology (New York: Pearson, 2018).
- 27.
Stephen Barr, Experiments in Topology (New York: Dover, 1989), 2.
- 28.
Barr, Experiments in Topology, 2–3.
- 29.
Rona Cohen, “The Spatiality of Being: Topology as Ontology in Lacan’s Thinking of the Body,” in Psychoanalysis: Topological Perspectives: New Conceptions of Geometry and Space in Freud and Lacan, ed. Michael Friedman and Samo Tomšič (Bielefeld, Germany: transcript-Verlag, 2016), 240.
- 30.
Slavoj Žižek, Sex and the Failed Absolute (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 223–24.
- 31.
Jacques Lacan, Seminar XXIII: Joyce and the Sinthome Part 1; Joyce and the Sinthome Part 2, trans. Cormac Gallagher, 5, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/THE-SEMINAR-OF-JACQUES-LACAN-XXIII.pdf (accessed January 9, 2020).
- 32.
Mai Wegener, “Psychoanalysis and Topology: Four Vignettes,” in Psychoanalysis: Topological Perspectives: New Conceptions of Geometry and Space in Freud and Lacan, ed. Michael Friedman and Samo Tomšič (Bielefeld, Germany: transcript-Verlag, 2016), 35.
- 33.
Jacques Lacan, L’insu que sait…Seminar XXIV Final Sessions 1–12 1976–1977, trans. Cormac Gallagher, 12, http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/insu-Seminar-XXIV-Final-Sessions-1-12-1976-1977.pdf (accessed January 9, 2020).
- 34.
Hoens, “Why Topology?” 58.
- 35.
Calum Neill, Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 17.
- 36.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 103.
- 37.
Neill, Lacanian Ethics, 17.
- 38.
For example, see Nature Climate Change, “Certain Uncertainty” (editorial), Nature Climate Change 3, no. 689 (2013), https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1978; and Clara Deser, Adam Phillips, Vincent Bourdette, and Haiyan Teng, “Uncertainty in Climate Change Projections: The Role of Internal Variability,” Climate Dynamics 38, nos. 3–4 (2012): 527–46, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-010-0977-x; among others.
- 39.
Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 44.
- 40.
Morton, Hyperobjects, 184.
- 41.
Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Miller, trans. Grigg, 103.
- 42.
Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: A Selection, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 233.
- 43.
Anna Kornbluh, “States of Psychoanalysis: Formalization and the Space of the Political,” Theory & Event 19, no. 3 (2016), https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/623989.
- 44.
Kornbluh, “States of Psychoanalysis.”
- 45.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Heat,” Canadian Art (online edition), October 29, 2018, emphasis in the original; https://canadianart.ca/features/on-heat/ (accessed October 1, 2019).
- 46.
Ferreira da Silva, “On Heat.”
- 47.
Samo Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (London: Verso, 2015), 28.
- 48.
Tomšič, Capitalist Unconscious, 29.
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Langford, S.J. (2021). The Psychotopology of Climate. In: Burnham, C., Kingsbury, P. (eds) Lacan and the Environment. The Palgrave Lacan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67205-8_6
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