‘Authentic’ folds: environmental audiences, activists and subjectification in hypocrisy micropolitics

Abstract

This paper examines how the trope of authenticity is communicated and enacted in environmental movements. The paper employs Deleuze’s concept of le pli, or the fold, and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality to argue that political subjects in the environmental movement emerge through folding the preoccupation with authenticity that they observe in news media, oil pipeline advertising and environmental activists’ campaigns, as a relationship they can develop to themselves. Taking a de-centred audience studies approach, this paper shows how authenticity is a state that can be acquired, sustained and lost through authenticity enactments and image relationships that work in relation to hypocrisy micropolitics. The paper argues that the preoccupation with authenticity events as a technology of subjectification becomes an object of concern for political subjects in social and environmental movements, and authenticy becomes an affective texture that is spatially and temporally produced.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank P. Taylor Webb, Claudia Ruitenberg, Paulina Semenec and the three anonymous reviewers for their very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. A content or discourse analysis of how hypocrisy is represented in news or pro-oil lobby groups’ advertising is outside of the scope of this paper. Instead, the paper focuses on more-than-representational (Lorimer 2005) elements such as relations, events and atmospheres of audiencing practices in environmental movements.

2. As of November 2016, the Canadian federal government officially rejected the Northern Gateway Pipeline and approved the Trans Mountain Pipeline project. The British Columbia government also gave its final approval for the Trans Mountain Pipeline in January 2017.

3. Participants’ names have been changed to ensure confidentiality.

4. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) discuss Mandelbrot’s fractals in relation to smooth space, however further discussion of the connection between folding and smooth space is outside of the scope of this paper.