Unfreezing the truth: knowledge and denial in climate change imagery

This book chapter is part of an ongoing project to examine the images associated with climate change in order to understand and undo the psychic structures that hold back an adequate response to it. The work builds on long-term research in which I have developed tools for analysing public imagery from a combination of semiotic, psychoanalytic and political perspectives. The wider project investigates how images of climate change affect our imaginations and behaviour. My thesis in this output is broadly that images of the Arctic and Antarctic, of polar bears and melting glaciers, while apparently drawing attention to climate change, function on a deeper level as a negation of it, since they mask the effects of warming on the rest of the globe, and operate as a form of imaginative denial about the changes taking place in populated areas. I employ Freudian notions of melancholy and repression to analyse the psychic structures that are fed by the predominantly frozen imagery. Both this chapter and the wider project address non-academic international audiences. The aim is to help shift public discourse about climate change on a range of fronts: the work offers activists a psychoanalytical perspective, and offers the academic and art worlds a political focus. The book chapter developed from a talk in a 2010 public series on climate change in New Zealand, available online; this led to further public talks and broadcasts, including a substantial interview on Radio New Zealand. Earlier developments of the research include a keynote public lecture at the 2008 Frieze Art Fair, which was made available on iTunes and has also reached a wide online audience