Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Alberta Oil Sands (But Were Afraid to Ask Jacques Lacan)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter examines the pro-oil sands’ public relations campaign from the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Though supporters of oil sands’ development claim that such campaigns are motivated by the need to fight misinformation and “get the facts out there,” this chapter argues that their rhetorical appeal is less factual than emotive and symbolic. Drawing upon print and televisual examples from the current pro-oil sands public relations campaign, this chapter uses a Lacanian framework to examine how oil is presented in these ads as a fantastic object, or what Lacan terms the “petit objet a’,” whose possession promises to heal all personal, social, and environmental ills and bring about an ecstatic state of wholeness. In this light, I argue that countering the pro-oil sands rhetorical discourse may rest less in factual rebuttal than in what Lacan called “traversing the fantasy” by disclosing the symbolic and libidinal frameworks upon which they rest.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.028 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".