Bound by Infinities: Technology, Immediacy and Our Environmental Crisis*
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Article BOUND BY INFINITIES: TECHNOLOGY, IMMEDIACY AND OUR ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS* Michael L. Melmed1
This paper explores the relationship between human desire, technology, and imagination, emphasizing (1) the phenomenology of this relationship, and (2) its ontological and ecological ramifications. Drawing on the work of Bion and Winnicott, the paper will develop a psychoanalytic container for attitudes contributing to our current climate-based crisis, paying special attention to the problematic effect technology has had on our sense of time and place. Many of our technologies stunt sensuous engagement, collapse psychic space, diminish our capacity to tolerate frustration, and blind us to our dependence on worlds beyond the human. In short, our technologies trouble our relationship to our bodies and other bodies. The paper argues that omnipotent fantasies organizing our relationship to technology, to each other, and to the nonhuman world, have cocooned us in a kind of virtual reality that devastates a sense of deep obligation to the environment.
KEY WORDS: omnipotent fantasy; technology; Bion; Winnicott; the body; climate crisis; Covid-19 https://doi.org/10.1057/s11231-020-09258-8
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. Hamlet, II:2
Life is built up and broken down by many tendencies that counter, fuse and split, amplifying this here, and muting that there. One obvious fact of life is that it is always mediated by more life. Nothing exists in isolation. Oddly, Michael L. Melmed, Psy. D., clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor, supervisor, Department of Psychiatry, Columbia University. Psychoanalytic candidate, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; in private practice in Lower Manhattan. Address Correspondence to: Michael L. Melmed, Psy. D., 29 Fifth Avenue Suite 1B, New York, NY, 10003, USA. Email: [email protected] *A version of this paper was presented to the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture & Society, Rutgers, N.J., on October, 25th, 2019.
TECHNOLOGY, IMMEDIACY AND OUR ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
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though, life also has a tendency to be immediated, to bypass itself so it can both go on being and become something new. A simple example of this is the way in which a chick will hatch from its egg (Melmed, 2018). It does so using an egg-tooth, a tool of sorts the chick soon outgrows and discards after emerging. Mediating and immediating tendencies in ways oppose, and in ways reciprocally presuppose each other. There are elements of each inextricably woven into the other, moving in a continual teeter-totter throughout life. I posit that certain attitudes in our culture have emerged from and congealed around life’s immediating tendency and—to great destructive effect, especially in times like ours—have organized into a cult of immediacy. The stirrings of such attitudes may be traced back to the advent of human technology, which in a very general sense is the extension or amplification of our
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