May 21, 2005

 

                        A Psychoanalytic Approach to Contemporary Ecological Threat

 

Modern Threats

Contemporary environmental threats are the contested product of human agency, more specifically, of the 20th century techno-scientific and industrial practice (p. 90). 

 

The threats are:

1.                  Environmental: Environmental threats include global warming, ozone depletion, water shortages, the rising level of oceans, the toxicity of rivers, the introduction of exotic species, the decline of fisheries, the disappearance of species, population growth, city over-crowding, smog, mad cow disease, HIV and many others (pp. ix, x, 86, 90 and 96).

 

2.                  Nuclear: Nuclear threats include nuclear weapons, nuclear electricity-generating plants and nuclear wastes (pp. xiv-xvi, 3-6 and 75-76).

 

The Legacy of the 20th Century

The 20th century was a time when events exceeded our capacity to understand them or speak of them.  The traumatic event may be the model for the century.  A recent short list of traumas would include the Holocaust, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Uganda, Rwanda, Zaire, Guatemala and Chile (p. 109).

 

The ecology of the 20th century was one of war and spills.  We need now to take seriously the serious deficit in contemporary ecological thought and practice (p. x).

 

Our Present Situation

Modern threats ( Aecological risks@) present us with the following:

1.                  Transformations: The threats bring about immense transformations.

 

2.                  The Need for New Concepts to understand these Transformations: The threats converge on a point that is purely excessive and thereby reveal a lack of fit between the transformations they bring about and the traditional means for thinking about these transformations (p. 85-86).

 

In the language of game theory, ecological threat is best described as a negative-sum game of collective self-damage (p. 92).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Uniqueness of Contemporary Ecological Threat

Contemporary ecological threats are: 

3.                  Artificial: The Anew generation@ of risks exists in an uneasy relation with the traditional conception of responsibility.  They are on the level of natural catastrophes, disasters.  Unlike these, however, they derive from human activity, from technological progress, and as such are, if not known, then at least foreseeable, extrapolatable and accepted.  They are artificial catastrophes (p. 86).

 

4.                  Directed at two Deaths: Modern threats present themselves un-representably, as both the threat of individual death and the threat of ecological death:

a.                   Death of the Biological Body B an organic death.  AI will die@ (p. 99).

 

b.                  Death of the Cycles of Nature: At the center of ecological and nuclear threat is the annihilation of the very cycles of life and death which transform nature.  This death robs death from death in that it annihilates the very cycles of life and death.  As these cycles disappear, so does the symbolic universe within which they are staged (p. 99).

 

The basic conditions of meaning have changed.  Prior to ecological threats, to say, AI worry about the future,@ no matter how deeply existential the motivation may have been, did not have the same meaning as it has now, after the acknowledgment of such threats.  One might mean that one worries about the state of the future, and perhaps one=s mark upon it, but one would have no reason to mean whether in fact the future will take place.  That is, one would have every reason to believe in some manner of continuity.  Today, this is no longer the case.  We have the second death, ecological death (p. 118).

 

This second (ecological) death points to the circularity of the logic that tethers us to solutions in the form of further techno-scientific incursions (p. 119).

 

3.                  Overly Invasive: The threats are distributed above threshold, in the sense that they are trans-national and trans-generational.  The Chernobyl accident is an example (p. 86).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4.                  Overly Diffuse: Although the effect of modern threats is direct, it is too large and too complex to be analyzed in terms of a model of responsibility.  For threats such as global warming or aquifer depletion, the risk is:

Non-localizable: There is no responsible party, no place where in the final instance, the buck stops.  This is so for reasons beyond mere complexity B sorting out degrees of responsibility,  culpability, foresight etc...  Invariably, contemporary threats present us with problems of cause and reasonable doubt (p. 86).

 

Non-calculable: From the point of view of the insurable, only the calculation of the probability of the accident is objective.  Responsibility is determined by a juridical logic B a judgment B and this judgment is non-calculable (p. 86).  

 

5.         Insidious: Threats such as radiation, are insidious, virtual.  Though they may put continued life in jeopardy, they are again significantly non-localizable and, as such, displaced in relation to a victim/perpetrator model (p. 86).         

 

6.                  Slow: Trends are difficult to recognize, and even when we do recognize them, they may seem insufficiently traumatic to move us to action (p. 102).

 

7.                  Too Many:

a.                   In Surplus: The surplus of possible threats allows for easy substitution, modification and transposition B Ajust in time@ threats.  Thus, if air pollution from coal-fired energy production is the threat du jour, nuclear power generation finds an opening for re-entering the market Adefensively,@ through the back door of current anxiety and collective forgetting (pp. 91-92).

 

b.                  Routine: The routineness of accident and disaster have fostered a situation of ontological numbing to the suffering of others (p. 102).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Present Discourse

8.                  Threats as Risk: Ecological threats are traditionally thought of as natural disasters (earthquakes, volcano eruptions, mud slides, typhoons), and hence as differing from these natural disasters only quantitatively.  As such, they are analyzed in terms of risk, probabilities, cost/benefit ratios and insurability (p. 87).

 

The modern idea of risk is a neologism of the insurance industry.  Insurance is a manner of thinking about the possibility of an event in terms of its probability.  By fixing a probability, insurance maintains itself by distributing loss (Ewald, interpreted p. 84).

 

In the face of massive catastrophic events (Asupercat events@), however, the calculation of the insurable breaks down.  The passing in the United States of the 1957 Price-Anderson Act acknowledges this and caps the liability limits for accidents occurring at nuclear electric utilities (p. 85).

 

The view of threat as risk is heuristic and keeps threat on the level of the symbolic (pp. 102-103).

 

9.                  Ecology as Interconnectedness: Interconnectedness is a central claim of modern ecological thought.  Indicator organisms, the introduction of exotic species, the decline of fisheries, global warming B are palpable concepts of how the epistemology of interconnectedness has fostered forms of knowledge that have and continue to challenge various techno-scientific incursions (pp. viii and ix).

 

To say that everything is connected, is to mean that everything is, if not already, then at least potentially, integrated into a framework of understanding.  It is to see the fissures and cracks rendered by ecological threats as a result of a failure to have properly understood the connections.  The real punishing the epistemic for its sins of omission.  With this model, all we can do is suffer under the crushing weight of events and cast looks of suspicion on our inadequate models (p. ix).

 

The view of threat as the result of a failure of understanding keeps threat on the level of the symbolic (pp. 102-103).

 

 

 

 

Deficiencies in the Present Discourse

The present discourse fails us for the following reasons:

1.                  Nature is now Political: Nature is no longer where or what we thought it was.  Perhaps it is not there at all.  We need to judge the implications of living with a nature that is no longer what or where we once thought it to be.  Nature has become political.  It is a contested and virtual object.  It derives its normative character not from the world but from the sphere of human action.  One way or another, all forms of contemporary wilderness contain the presence of humans (pp. vi-vii and xix). 

 

If nature has slipped into the register of the political, it is perilous to continue to think of it as though it can assist in the formulation of a radical politics, as though it is a guide in contesting social practices.  Nature does not whisper truth to us.  It is not a reminder of what is possible, good and desirable.  It cannot be these things.  It cannot be the expressive force of a cultural counter-image, nor can it be the given ground of human affairs (p. vii).

 

2.                  Ecology is more than Interconnectedness: Everything is not integrated into a framework of understanding.  A rising ocean, a falling building, a toxified river, a disappeared species, a nuclear landscape B all of these represent completely different matters and forces, each marked by features that are powerfully and radically new, and gathered together uniquely (p. ix).       

 

Ecological threats, including the nuclear, do not call for a boundless understanding of connections or presence.  Visible ecologies cannot tell us about the future (p. xii).

 

3.                  Accidents are Normal: It is no longer possible to think of practice and accident as temporally and functionally distinct.  To Virilio, it is the accident that is essential and substance itself that is relative and contingent.  The accident is no longer something that can be added-on to a technical production without at the same time radically modifying that substance.  The practice contains the accident, not simply as a possibility (as that which many or may not happen) but fully and completely as virtuality (Virilio, interpreted pp. xx and 13).

 

The normal accident is inscribed into the design of technological endeavors.  When the safety of a design is given as, AThe reactor is expected to operate within design expectations x times out of 100 for y hours of operation,@ the subcontrary is also the case.  To speak of a safety probability is to have already inscribed the probability for failure (Perrow, interpreted p. 14).

 

The accident is not the empirical falsification of human endeavor, as some disaster theorists have it (p. 13).


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4.                  There is no Distinction between ANatural@ and ATechnological@ Disasters: Part of the difference between a toxic event and a Aclassical@ form of disaster, is in the way the tragedy is incomplete.  Beginnings are retroactively constituted and ends are indeterminate.  The Love Canal disaster is an example.  The beginnings were retroactively constituted and the ending is equally indeterminate (Erikson, interpreted p. 14).

 

However, the distinction between the technological and the natural accident is superficial.  Both are Anormal.@  A flood may be as much due to technology as the failure of a reactor (Perrow, interpreted p. 14).

 

5.                  Modern Threats are Ontological: Contemporary ecological threats are very difficult to picture.  They cannot adequately be contained within an arithmetic of risk and probability.  They threaten the basis of what supports life, as well as the symbolic universe within which threat itself has meaning (p. xvi).

 

Risks become acceptable or unacceptable for reason that have to do with politics, not nature.  We are condemned to live in an order of pure politics and pure decision.  A transformation takes place when nature becomes political whereby death is no longer situated beyond the edge of life.  Ecological threats re-situate death into life in the form of an unknowable risk.  The future is now organized around the discourse of threat and disaster (pp. 88-89).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6.                  Modern Threats are not Calculable: Analyses of risk focus on the distribution of profits, prosperity, progress and the promise of progress.  There is something at stake for which a trade-off can be made.  Risk represents the negative side of the equation, the positive side of the equation having been readily identified and evaluated (p. 91).

 

In modern societies, however, risk is subsumed and transformed by threat because technological practices embody externalities that exceed both social and temporal limits, and also exceed limits of accountability.  They fail to fit any standard notion of compensation.  Risk by definition is calculable.  Threat is not calculable (p. 91).

 

The distinction between threat and risk is the expression of a fault line between industrial and modern societies.  The game is one between losers (Beck, interpreted (p. 91).

 

The presence of modern threat is in no meaningful way an environmental problem.  It is, rather, and institutional crisis.  Threats are:

Aproduced industrially, externalized economically, individualized juridically, legitimized scientifically, and minimized politically@ (Beck, cited p. 91).

 

Discourses of risk (risk analysis, risk communication), contribute to a profound and potentially perilous misunderstanding by consigning threat B expressed, for example, as a probability B to the realm of the merely possible (p. xx).  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Present Responses to Modern Threat

Typical responses to ecological threats blind us to understanding their non-representability (p. 94):

1.                  Denial: By far the predominant reaction to ecological threats belongs to those who resist the very idea of a crisis: AI know it is true (whatever it is) but all the same... (I will behave as though it were not the case) (p. 94).

 

Disavowal B resistance to acknowledgment of a threat B grows in direct proportion to the size of the threat and its proximity.  Denial behavior thus varies in direct proportion to the threat.  This is because the greater the magnitude of the threat, the greater the resistance even to constitute it symbolically in any coherent fashion (Beck, interpreted p. 92). 

 

2.                  Neurotic Activity: The threat provokes an obsessional psychic economy and frenzied activity aimed at preventing the calamitous X from taking place.  It does not matter what X is.  The point is that it must be prevented and to do so requires constant vigilance and activity.  The activity is deprived of its affect (p. 95).

 

3.                  Seeing Threats as ASigns@: Threats are taken to be very specific kinds of Asigns@ B messages to be understood and heeded.  These are generally presumed to be related to an angry nature and are read as providing a link between a manifest crisis and a disrupted or transgressed nature.  The signs imply a larger narrative concerning the ecological B and therefore moral B improprieties of humans (p. 96).  

 

Such a response cannot find a resolution through tending to the needs of a nature-out-of-balance because this is simply not the problem to begin with.  The presumption that nature knows B regardless of which of the varied forms this may take B is simply and irreducibly a transference.  Measuring the Aadequacy@ of a response (with its resonance of Winnicottian good-enough) might rid discourse of its appeal to an imaginary equilibrium of a good-nature, a call to renounce the very idea of a Anatural balance@ supposedly upset by the intervention of humans (p. 99). 

 

The view of threats as nature=s commentary keeps threat on a symbolic level (pp. 102-103).

 

 

 

 

 

 

Re-thinking Ecological Threats

Nuclear and ecological threats are not only unique but also virtual (p. xxi).

 

Contemporary threats are:

1.                  Virtual, not Visible: The virtual is a way to think about ecological threats (p. xi).

 

We need to think in terms of the virtual world as well as the visible world:

AThe contemporary world B tied up in its ecological, demographic and urban impasses B is incapable of absorbing, in a way that is compatible with the interests of humanity, the extraordinary techno-scientific mutations which shake it.  It is locked in a vertiginous race toward ruin or radical renewal.  All the bearings B economic, social, political, moral, traditional B break down one after the other.  It has become imperative to recast the axes of values, the fundamental finalities of human relations and productive activity.  An ecology of the virtual is thus just as pressing as ecologies of the visible world@ (Guattari, cited p. xi).

 

2.                  Virtual, not just Possible: Ecological threats can find a meaning only within the social.  They are first and foremost a threat to democracy and any idea of a fundamental social contract.  No longer do threats turn on distinctions between public and private interest:

AEcological [threat] divides society against itself at its most intangible, least measurable, and perhaps most essential point.  It divides society on what is supposed to unite it B its values, the definition of its collective interest@ (Ewald, cited p. 87).                               

 

We need to realize that we can come to know such threats only indirectly, only perhaps through our responses to them, and (above all) only through a radical re-appraisal of the discourses of ecology and risk that have come to operate as the clearinghouse of questions of social well-being (p. xii). 

 

Such threats as those posed by nuclear activities do not conform to traditional notions of responsibility and reparation, location and jurisdiction, or even cause and effect.  They do not neatly cut along lines of class or location, victim and perpetrator, and do not adhere to assumptions about sovereignty or geopolitical regions.  They are chimerical B unlike previous industrial threats which could be located and circumscribed, understood and written off.  We must work toward a philosophy of threat based not on the possible but on the virtual (pp. xvi and xxi).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3.                  The Virtual Aspect of the Accident: The particular messianism of threat is Anot yet.@  Not history as the site of the now, but the present as the site of the not yet.  The threat is a paradoxical event.  It is something that is in advance of that which befalls; however, by the time one is under threat, many things have already taken place.  This is in part what distinguishes contemporary techno-scientific endeavors from their industrial precursors (p. xix).

 

The threat of an accident is real without being actual.  In this sense, it is the virtual aspect of the accident.  Threat has one foot in a virtual space, the other in the accident (p. 13).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another (Ethical) Response

1.                  Attention to the Gap between the real and its Symbolization: The pathological responses all blind one to

                                    Athe irreducible gap separating the real from the modes of its symbolization@ (Zizek, cited p. 96).

 

Minding the gap, that is, focusing on symbolic activity around the threats B identifying, naming, understanding, classifying, prioritizing them B might inform our response to the threats.  How we come to accommodate the unwelcome intrusions, displacements and upsets posed by ecological threats, is not only instrumental B modulating the changes they introduce in our world B but ethical as well (pp. 100-101).

 

The challenge is to make ecological threats coherent, not reduce, displace, contain, rename, administrate, or otherwise capture them into pre-existing categories of concepts of risk.  The challenge of ecological threats is to bring about a new manner of thought and action to inform our time B a time in which the productive capacity of threats seem to outstrip any reasonable capacity for reflective (affective) response (p. 113).

 

Threat is everything not accomplished by the accident.  This is precisely the direction in which we need to travel in order to understand the workings of ecological threat (p. 119).       

 

Threat, not disaster, must become the model.  Disaster must be seen as an expression of the threat (p. 114).

 

The psychoanalytic concepts of the imaginary, symbolic and real developed by Jacques Lacan offer a potent language with which to speak about responses to the extreme.  Psychoanalysis gives voice to the unspeakable B in Lacan=s terms, the real, that which has not been symbolized (pp. 94-96).

 

2.                  Focus on the Trauma, not the Event: Sole focus on threats may foster a kind of fatalism.  If events arrive largely unannounced, with no warning, then the ethical reflection is called on only after the event, after it is too late.  The call to ethical reflection is Atoo late.@  It is the retroactive discovery of the interruption into life that is the call to the ethical, and it is Atoo@ late that the call is heard.   It is the sound of the call which is the problem.  Therefore, we must re-conceptualize the Aevent.@  The trauma should be seen as the Aevent,@ not the disaster (pp. 101-102).

 

 

 

 

 

Re-thinking Trauma

1.                  Characteristics of Trauma: Trauma is marked by two necessary features:

Unassimilable: The traumatic event represents an experience that exceeds one=s capacity to experience and understand.  Accordingly, it has the quality of a paradoxical experience.  It is to have been there, yet be unable to integrate the experience into one=s biography, into one=s practicable universe.  It is an experience not fully owned in the sense that although one has had it, it is not something one possesses (p. 104).

 

Unrepresentable: Trauma is something that effectively happens after many things which lead to disaster have already happened.  It is experienced as the effect which precedes B indeed eclipses B the cause (p. 104).

 

The unassimilability and unrepresentability of the traumatic event sets up a hole in the subject=s symbolic universe.  It becomes a place where the symbolic falters.  It is like a gap that is marked by the absence of an experience that was undergone but not registered and is given only in evidence by its effects B flashbacks, recollections, dreams, hallucinations etc... B that is, symptoms.  Trauma persists, then, somewhere between an event and the impossibility to symbolize that event (p. 104). 

 

1.                  Trauma Itself as an Event: Disaster literature tends to emphasize disasters as events, without generally linking these events to trauma.  Disasters are seen as events, and moreover, events which result in an upsurge of community togetherness, caring, selflessness, cooperation, etc... (p. 107).

 

2.                  Trauma as applying to Groups: There has been a trend in the concept of trauma away from the limited and bounded sense of a blow or injury sustained to the body, toward a sense of trauma that encompasses the individual and, ultimately, the social (p. 103).

 

Trauma as an unmediated and excessive event that overwhelms by its very excessiveness applies to groups as well as individuals (p. 110).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Present Conceptualization of Disasters

Limit events or disasters, are not characteristically thought of from a point of view of trauma B at least not until post-Vietnam B and even here, trauma became a psychiatric, not a psychoanalytic category (p. 106).

 

Disasters are most commonly seen in the following categories:

1.                  Nature as Aggressor: The most prevalent way to conceptualize disaster is to think about it as an attack visited upon humans from a hostile outside agency B a Hobbesian Nature, nasty, harsh and brutish.  In the face of a hostile nature, science B the techno-military B alone is capable of a response (p. 106).    

 

The view of threats as nature biting back keeps threat as symbolic only (pp. 102-103).

 

2.                  Human Vulnerability: In this model, disaster is conceived of as an expression of the vulnerability of human communities in social, biological and technical spheres.  This is merely the distorted opposite of the first view, and like many oppositions, manages to preserve the explanatory force of the first view within its apparently different thrust (p. 106).

 

3.                  Uncertainty: Disaster sociology conceives of disaster as due to uncertainty B the absence of explanation reducible to either nature as hazard or the social as vulnerable.  It allows for complex causality and sees explanation of the disaster as an interruption in the social fabric of meaning.  The disaster is understood as a crisis in information and thus communication.  Accordingly, the only useful response is the reduplication of technological and scientific effort because these alone are Aable to probe and domesticate these further reaches of environmental and social >wildness=@ (p. 107; and Hewitt, cited p. 107).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Re-conceptualizing Disaster

Disasters as anything that produces Trauma: Rather than seeing trauma as an effect of an injury B in other words, finding in trauma a causally induced condition in the wake of the Adisaster,@ we should reverse the procedure.  In contrast to prevailing criteria, the traumatic reaction of the people would be an important criterion for defining Adisaster@(pp. 108-109). 

 

The list of events that have the capacity to induce trauma then would include:

AChronic conditions that do not have the quality of suddenness or explosiveness normally associated with the term...  The list would include such slow developing but nonetheless devastating events as plague, famine, and spoilage of natural resources...  A chronic disaster is one that gathers force slowly and insidiously, creeping around one=s defenses rather than smashing through them.  The person is unable to mobilize his normal defenses against the threat...@ (Erikson, cited p. 109).

 

Nuclear and ecological threats mimic the structure of trauma.  Culturally and socially, for example, there has been virtually no opportunity to work through the advent of nuclear threat.  The modern history of the nuclear was inaugurated by a stunning mass murder, moved into the high anxiety of the Cold war, gained attention briefly as an environmental issue and then an energy issue, and now, even while we are endeavoring to bury our excessive nuclear wastes, the electrical utilities are once again painting a picture of clean and safe nuclear future (p. 112).

 

Disasters as the Actualization of the Threats: When, as traditionally, the natural disaster is the model for understanding the unexpected event, we wind up with disciplines that attempt to transform and domesticate disaster by making it a function of probability.  Threat is then seen as only an expression of a prior probability, understandable as the key variable in the calculus of the disaster (p. 114). 

 

If we reverse this procedure, and look at the disaster secondarily, through the optic of threat, as a production, the picture begins to change.  The disastrous incursions of threat are transformed into something other than terrifying ciphers.  We see that threats themselves produce transformations which are not merely prefatory to an event (ineffectual but ambiguously prognostic), and we realize that these transformations are difficult to recognize through an optic of risk and possibility (pp. 114-115).

 

To think of threat as virtual, and disaster as one of its actualizations, may come to make a real difference in how we think about ecology, disaster, technology and the future (p. 115).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reducing the Traumatic Force of Ecological Threats

We live under ecological threat during a time when our culture either refuses to allow threats to register as concerns or else transforms them into something entirely different.  Much of the traumatic force of ecological threats, is precisely because so much social comportment feigns otherwise.  While ecological threats cannot be willed away, they can become less traumatic.  Ecological threat demands a new analytic of the accident (p. 118).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                      Reference

 

van Wyck, Peter, Signs of Danger B Waste, Trauma and Nuclear Threat (Theory out of Bounds, Volume 26) (University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN), 2005.

 

The following authors are cited or interpreted:

Ulrich Beck

Kai Erikson

Francois Ewald

Felix Guattari

Kenneth Hewitt

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)

Jacques Lacan

Charles Perrow

Paul Virilio

Donald Winnicott (1896-1971)

Slavoj Zizek

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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