The Master discourse seeks to transform Nature into a state of harmony and stability by projecting certain symptoms within the system as the sole cause of environmental problems which can only be solved by techno managerial governance. This denies the possibility of reckoning with the socio-ecological processes that underpin the environment while simultaneously sustaining libidinal attachments to the existing order

The Discourse of the Master operates through the Imaginary and the Symbolic. The Symbolic stands for the assemblage of institutions, laws, formal and informal rules, regulations, and actors that constitute society as a fully closed configuration (Dean 2006). It quilts a chain of signifiers (like democracy, state, cohesion, freedom, etc. for liberal democracy) – a discourse – that sustains the order and assigns everyone a certain place within the social edifice. It constitutes the Law (the big Other) that pre- scribes, enjoins, prohibits, entices, punishes, or rewards. The Master tells us what to do and what not, what to desire and, most importantly, how to desire. It assigns and ascribes a place and a function to all; it tells us who and what we are or should be (Gunder and Hillier 2009). In the present config- uration, the symbolic order constitutes the pluralist representative institu- tions of government, the formal and informal rules that order the social bond, the arrangements that organize universalized commodity exchange as the mode of socio-ecological production and reproduction. Of course, as implied above, this is a symbolic representation of something that has neither unity nor coherence and is utterly contingent. The symbolic dimension of the Master Discourse that sustains the domi- nant climate configuration revolves around parrticular discursive enchain- ment. The master signifier here is of course ‘Climate Change as a Problem’, i.e. the excessive accumulation of greenhouse gases that drives global warm- ing and causes a significant problem to the present socio-ecological config- uration. Humans are co-responsible and action requires a combination of individual adjustment and appropriate techno-managerial governance such that things can go on as ‘normal’; ‘sustainability’ becomes the central ‘empty’ Master signifier (Swyngedouw 2007). As Ingolfur Blühdorn (2013, 2017) has repeatedly argued, the dominant climate discourse and practice sustains the sustainability of unsustainability, referring to the process whereby the very socio-technical and governance procedures mobilized to mitigate the pro- blem in fact sustain the very process that produces unsustainability. The Imaginary part of the Discourse of the Master can be identified as the view that pluralist liberal democracy-cum-market-economy is the only workable, realistic, and quasi-naturalised social order – one without excess, remainder, or gap. The Imaginary is the terrain of fantasy, of giving meaning and providing a sense of coherence and wholeness. It is constituted through seductive and alluring images of wholesomeness, often providing an illu- sionary sense of unity and transparency (Galanopoulos and Stavrakakis 2019, p. 10). It offers a way through which things and relations are seen and understood as common sense and self-evident. The fantasy screen that nurtures the imaginary promises of the environmental Master Discourse circles around a particular fantasy of what ‘Nature’ is (Stavrakakis 1999, pp. 62–63), articulated through empty signifiers like sustainability, adapta- tion, resilience, socio-ecological inclusion and socio-ecological harmony (Swyngedouw 2007). The lure of this fantasy circles around simultaneously portraying a catastrophic and horrifying future to be avoided and promising the possibility of a return to a lost but presumable wholesome world for both human and non-human earthlings, a promise that can be realized within the framework of the existing system. Of course, this imaginary of a presumably lost arcadian environment or climate that has to be restored never really existed. The Imaginary invariably covers up or conceals the abyss between the Real (of capital) and the Symbolic. Fantasy becomes the mechanism through which the gap that marks their inconsistency is contained (Žižek 1997). We can even consume ourselves out of unethical ways of producing (by buying environmentally responsible and ethically sourced products) or of unsustainable ecological practices (by offsetting our car- bon footprint). Indeed, the climate Master discourse displaces the realiza- tion of the fantasy script onto object a, the object-cause of desire, and this becomes crystallized around a ‘thing’ – in this case greenhouse gases – that is staged as both the cause of and the entity around which the realization of desire becomes articulated. Since enjoyment is never fully attainable, such a fantasy screen permits us to displace the lack of satis- faction on to something or someone else who has ‘it’ and has stolen it from us (like the migrants who steal our jobs, CO2 that makes our planet heat up, elites that revel in pleasure on our back, etc.) (Žižek 1993, p. 203). CO2 and other greenhouse gases become as such the fetishized foe that requires sequestration as the means to achieve a fully harmonious socio-climatic world while sustaining libidinal attachment to the existing order. Indeed, the symbolic/imaginary formation of a world is always incom- plete, fails inherently to suture fully the social order. This remainder, the Real, i.e. that which cannot be symbolised by the existing interplay of political forces, disrupts and destabilises. The Real is both unaccounted for in the symbolic order and excluded from the imaginary register. As it escapes symbolisation, it can only be discerned in a slanted way. The Real becomes spectrally sensed through symptoms that both reveal and hide the truth of the repressed. For example, in the climate context, the continuing growth of greenhouse emissions, the obsession with sustaining the ‘mad dance of accumulation’, the deepening of all manner of socio-ecological attachments, and the spectral presences of the class relation that underpin global capitalism are customa- rily negated. The place of the Real is taken by, for example, undocumented migrants for xeno-nationalist populists or by carbon for climate populists and this often figures as the excessive torsion point, ‘an alien intruder’ (Stavrakakis 1999, p. 108), which shatters the myth of unity. They are the supernumerary excess, standing in the way of ‘our’ enjoyment. In doing so, it interrupts the symbolic order as that what cannot be symbolised without changing the very co-ordinates of the symbolic order.