Cracks, Gaps, and Oil Spills in the Settler-Colonial Symbolic Order: Confronting Socio-Ecological Antagonism in Canada

Cracks, Gaps, and Oil Spills in the Settler-Colonial Symbolic Order: Confronting Socio-Ecological Antagonism in Canada Isaac Thornley (bio) Fossil capitalism, and its settler-colonial symbolic order1 in Canada, traffics not just in bitumen and liquefied natural gas but also in fantasies and disavowal that—for some of us—inhibit our ability to (imagine how to) infrastructure our wellbeing in less inequitable and environmentally degrading ways. Assessing the politics of extractivism in Canada, this paper provides an overview of some of the Lacanian and Žižekian-inspired concepts that have been used to analyze settler colonialism, (fossil) capitalism, and environmental conflict and offers new points of interaction. The overall argument is that Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially when combined with Marxist (critique of) political economy, offers tools for analyzing the ideological terrain of extractivism and orienting toward an [End Page 9] emancipatory politics founded on a (negative) universality. That said, for Lacanian psychoanalysis to be useful and appropriate toward these ends, it is necessary to confront the colonial origins and legacies of psychoanalytic theory and to deepen connections between the studies of psychoanalysis, settler colonialism, infrastructure, and extractivism. This frames what I attempt to do throughout this article. I will begin by introducing the idea of Canada as a settler-colonial symbolic order in relation to fossil capitalism and the concept of extractivism. Against this backdrop, I will consider pipelines as symptoms that emerge from and render visible the antagonistic dimensions of Canadian extractivism. Specifically, it is the leaky materiality of pipelines themselves, the precarious colonial jurisdictions upon which they are erected, and the strong Indigenous-led resistance to pipeline developments that bring the immanent cracks in Canada’s settler-colonial symbolic order out into the open. While proponents of extractive development mobilize ideological fantasies to conceal these antagonisms, psychoanalysis can be a useful tool for critique. Throughout the paper, I will also attempt to probe the limits of the applicability of psychoanalytic theory (given its origins as a colonial discourse) and look for points of convergence and solidarity between psychoanalytic, Marxist, and decolonial perspectives. Extractivism and the settler-colonial symbolic order Deriving from the work of ecological Marxists, “fossil capitalism” captures the fact that, first, modern industrial capitalism (since the mid-nineteenth century) has been largely powered by fossil-fuel energy sources, and, second, the material properties of fossil fuels render them amenable to capitalist control over labour (Malm, “Fossil Capital” 44) and the self-expansion and accumulation of capital (Altvater 41): “a key aspect of fossil capitalism is the flexibility that fossil energies provide in regard to the temporal distribution and spatial location of consumption” (Scott, “Networked Infrastructure” 19). All economic systems involve practices that could be described as “resource extraction”2 (collecting raw materials from the environment and transforming them into useful goods and services) [End Page 10] (Fast 33), but “extractivism” describes a non-reciprocal way of relating to natural environments that is oriented to short-term accumulation, generating benefits for distant capital without generating benefits to local people (Scott, “Extractivism” 124). My interest in “extractivism” as a concept is that it describes antagonistic relationships and processes that are common to settler colonialism, fossil capitalism, and ecological degradation in Canada. Contemporary settler-colonial regimes, such as Canada, have emerged and are co-produced in relation to the global political economy of capitalism (Pasternak and Dafnos 2). Extractivism refers to a specific logic (the logic of capital accumulation) that is endemic to capitalism (Scott, “Extractivism” 124), one that “not only encourages, but structurally enforces the drive to extract on ever-greater scales and to ever-greater depths” (Fast 33–34). Extractivism can be applied to both socio-ecological relations (like unsustainable and environmentally degrading forms of resource extraction) and to social relations (like extraction of surplus value from workers, appropriation of land and culture from colonized peoples). While extractivism can be useful as a conceptual link between colonialism and capitalism, the risk, as Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel have highlighted, is that when used for analytical purposes it can be imprecise and garner excessive abstraction (resulting in multiple distinct concepts and systems collapsing into one another). With this caveat in mind, I believe extractivism can still...

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