Climate Change and Knowledge Production

In Susan Kassouf's essay “A New Thing Under the Sun” (ROOM 6.21), she writes of her dismay in finding that there would be no mention of the more-than-human environment during her psychoanalytic training. I want to expand Kassouf's premise about the importance of the more-than-human to psychoanalysis by addressing the relationship between climate change and digital media/technologies, which are dramatically altering the way we live and communicate and, perhaps most importantly, the way we know. Like Kassouf, I didn't find it easy to bring my academic thinking as a media studies scholar in line with my psychoanalytic training. Even now, when most psychoanalysts have spent a good deal of time working with digital media/technologies, it seems difficult to face the challenges they pose to psychoanalytic theory and practice at a time when human knowing is becoming intimately linked with the more-than-human “cognition” or “thinking” of algorithms and datafication.

Climate change, in particular, urges psychoanalysts to take up these challenges due to the unique way that most of us come to understand its effects. After all, climate scientists analyze massive amounts of data utilizing profoundly complicated earth system models to target long-term trends and patterns across vast temporal and spatial scales to make assumptions about the presence and trajectory of climate change. But most of us are not equipped to understand these models. We are more convinced by reports like the recent IPCC report that strongly link climate change to extreme weather and its cascading destructive effects. This is because while we cannot directly or consciously experience climate change as such, we can experience weather. A gap is opened between weather—which we consciously experience through our senses—and climate change—which becomes available to us mostly through digitalized data that only provide a range of probabilities, rather than strict knowledge of c