Psychoanalysis – mags neg General 1NC
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Impact – WarmingPsychoanalysis is the only way to end our addiction to carbon --- otherwise, oil-funded climate deniers and banking claims of free markets doom solvencyHealy 10 --- Professor, Worcester State College (Stephen, "Psychoanalysis and the Geography of the Anthropocene: Fantasy, Oil Addiction and the Politics of Global Warming”, http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/stephenhealy/PAGhealy.pdf)//trepka Introduction “Addiction” connotes a dangerous dependency with severe, potentially fatal, consequences. In the United States “oil addiction” is regarded as an economic, geostrategic, and ecological challenge. The ecological consequence of oil addiction that receives the most attention is anthropogenic global warming. Just as the consequences of alcohol abuse, from DUIs to cirrhosis, are symptoms, global warming is a symptom of oil addiction (Speth 2009, Roelvink and GibsonGraham 2009).1 For geographers interested in demonstrating the usefulness of psychoanalytic insights, talk of addiction has two implications. On the one hand it is discouraging. “Addiction” is casually deployed in popular discourse, encompassing everything from heroin to social media use, appearing to render the concept theoretically impotent. On the other hand use of the word addiction does indeed imply a connection between global warming, the habituated pattern of fossil fuel use— from individual auto-driving to a fossil fuel based agriculture—and the human desires and drives that animate this abuse. Even the pattern of casual admission followed by denial speaks to the similarity between oil addiction and other addictions. In this chapter, drawing largely on work of Lacanian clinicians and Stavrakakis’s (2007) Left Lacanian theorists,Zizargue that it is important to take oil addiction seriously if we are to address the ecological challenge of global warming. Contemporary Lacanian theory asserts that the addict’s relationship to substance or habit is mediated through language and fantasy and is thus open to analytic intervention (Loose 2011). This chapter is an intervention into “oil addiction” that attempts to understand the fantasies animating the politics of global warming: fantasies of carbon markets solving the problem, fantasies of adapting to climate change through sustainable cities, and fantasies that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by people with a nefarious agenda. Psychoanalytic theory allows us to understand the underlying architecture of these disparate familiar fantasies and their connection to addiction. Certainly they are palliative fantasies that promise an ‘easy fix’, but more centrally, each fantasy is connected to addiction in so far the promised solution allows the subject to avoid entering the social-bond of language, confronting and assuming responsibility for their own desires in relation to others. Entering into relation with others is precisely what is required to shift our relationship with oil and to address the challenge of global warming. Psychic distancing from global warming ensures its inevitability --- the aff externalizes responsibility onto institutions motivated by profit-seeking behaviorHealy 10 --- Professor, Worcester State College (Stephen, "Psychoanalysis and the Geography of the Anthropocene: Fantasy, Oil Addiction and the Politics of Global Warming”, http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/stephenhealy/PAGhealy.pdf)//trepka Fantasies and Global Warming Case One: An Easy Way Out Recent efforts by Swyngedouw (2010) and Davidson (2012) make deft use of psychoanalysis to understand the fantasies that surround global warming and possible responses to climate change. Both authors argue the specter of a climate induced “dystoptic urban future” (Davidson 2012: 15) or a coming ecological apocalypse (Swyngedouw 2010: 216) animate popular climate change discourse, generating a desire for an immediate response. Swyngedouw notes that what has accompanied the rise of this populist apocryphal sentiment is the emergence of post-political approaches to governance which gives license to a class of experts to solve the problem Nurturing of the promise of a more benign retrofitted climate exhausts the horizon of our aspirations and imaginations… In other words, we have to change radically but within the contours of the existing state of the situation. (Swyngedouw 2010: 219) Swyngedouw goes onto argue that this apocryphal populism fixates on expert lead control of carbon dioxide. CO2 becomes the fetish, or in Lacanian parlance “the objet petit a” that simultaneously 9 expresses our deepest fears and desires for change” (220). Most national and international attempts to control CO2 emissions focus on turning the emission of CO2 into a commodity that has transaction costs associated with it, either through a carbon tax or through the creation of carbon markets (Swyngedouw 2010: 222). These markets are post-political in the sense that they are a product of expert administration and not political debate. They obscure other solutions, legitimate the existing economic and political order, all while allowing manufacturers to pass the final costs of carbon dioxide onto consumers. Writing in a similar vein Davidson (2012) notes that this sense of emergency legitimates new “sustainable” approaches to urban planning. Sustainable cities are a topic of discussion amongst planning experts legitimated and impelled forward by a sense of crisis. Visions of the sustainable city are responsible for “mediating the relationship between climate change science and public policy” (Davidson 2012: 15). In developing his argument throughout the paper Davidson points out it is easy to see these plans, particularly in an age of municipal austerity, taking the form of a gentrified response to climate change: some places will get nice landscaping while others will be subjected to the next Katrina. In his view they are a kind of “acting out” an adaptive response for some communities to climate change while preserving, intact the larger set of practices that give rise to ecological challenges in the first place. These would include the continued pursuit of economic growth without necessary reductions in carbon emissions, carbon neutral scheme standing alongside coal-fired power stations, extensive suburban expansion with policies advocating reduced auto-transit. (Davidson 2012: 14-15) As with Swyngedouw’s analysis of carbon market fetishism the sustainable city has now become the ideal of expert-led urban planning and yet idealizing one thing and doing another requires another twist in the fantasy of the sustainable city—cynical investment. According to Davidson, it is really the psychic distance cynicism creates that allows fantasy to function effectively. On the one hand fantasy creates a space for acting out a utopian, gentrified “sustainable city” while 10 on the other hand leaving intact the usual processes that contribute to urban and economic development, and fossil fuel consumption, as usual. All that is required, Davidson argues, is that someone believes in sustainability sincerely for the planner to act-out sustainably, keeping at bay the traumatizing recognition of the impotence of these half measures. The alternative’s overidentification is the ultimate political act --- it’s a precondition for addressing warmingHealy 10 --- Professor, Worcester State College (Stephen, "Psychoanalysis and the Geography of the Anthropocene: Fantasy, Oil Addiction and the Politics of Global Warming”, http://www.communityeconomies.org/site/assets/media/stephenhealy/PAGhealy.pdf)//trepka What then does psychoanalysis offer in the way of an intervention in relation to addiction? For Loose (2011) the process is complicated by how addicts tend to relate to enjoyment and the ego ideal—they want to enjoy life too much and they expect to be able to do it perfectly. In this sense addicts are the perfect subjects of the society of enjoyment. Freud famously observed that the point of analysis was to allow for the patient to experience ordinary unhappiness in love and work. For the addict this is always a step down. According to Loose, Lacan’s attempt at a general understanding of how patients can assume responsibility for their own desire in the context of a society of enjoyment has particular implications for the treatment of addicts. We cannot return to a society of prohibition: just saying “no” doesn’t work. It is equally unacceptable to abandon the addict to the tyrannical rule of enjoyment. According to Loose, Lacan’s answer lay in recognizing that the nomination of desire can represent the subject symbolically, it can consolidate their imaginary identity, or it can position them in relation to the real—to the limits of symbolization. It was his conclusion that exposing the addict to the void of the real, “real nomination” would help the addict to attenuate their belief in an idealized enjoyment, traversing the fantasy that structures addiction and, in so doing, enter into relation with others and the social bond that implies. What might ‘real nomination’ look like for the oil addict, in a practical and political sense? The Transition Town movement, inspired by the popular writings of Robert Hopkins (2008), seeks to create locally resilient post-carbon eco-municipalities that can continue to function socially and 15 economically. Accepting both anthropogenic climate change and peak oil as reality the more than 300 transition towns seek to enroll citizens in a democratic and participatory approach to surviving the end of the oil-age. Fittingly, Hopkins offers a guide for composing citizen groups capable of researching and implementing an Energy Action Descent Plan in twelve steps. Similarly, solidarity economy movements have sprung upon around the world seeking to build economies based on principles of mutual aid rather than competition, democratic social inclusion, and non-capitalist economic development. These movements seek to build ecologically resilient communities while injecting social-justice into collective considerations of ecological challenges. In the United States both these social movements are in their incipient stages and yet their response to climate change seems quite a bit different than the fetishism described by Swyngedouw or the “acting out” critiqued by Davidson. Solidarity NYC’s recent policy statement pointed out how super-storm Sandy underscored the need to considered economic justice in responses to ecological challenges. Their position is that NYC needs to minister to the social and economic vulnerabilities that attend climate change now, and in making this point many solidarity economy practitioners mobilized a cooperative civil response to the effects of Sandy well-ahead of any municipal initiatives (Solidarity NYC: 2013). Both of these movements reject ‘easy solutions’ in favor of the ordinary unhappiness that attends a political process of building more ecologically and economically resilient communities. Rather than avoid social bond through fantasies of quick fixes, geographic cures or denial, they have entered into the social bond by figuring out what to do when the answers are not obvious. What the formation of this social bond seems to imply is a collective reworking of our relationship with the society of enjoyment, one in which subjects may be in a position to be accepting of social, ecological and personal limits on individual enjoyment. Indeed, following Roelvink and Zolkos (forthcoming) we might see these movements as engaged in the 16 ‘embrace’ of climate change, a kind of hitting bottom in our relation to oil addiction as a precondition for moving beyond it. 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