Melmed, Michael

Bound by Infinities: Technology, Immediacy and our Environmental Crisis - 2020.


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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. The paper argues that omnipotent fantasies organizing our relationship to technology, to each other, and to the non-human world have cocooned us in a kind of virtual reality that devastates a sense of deep obligation to the environment.