Blinded by the stars? Celebrity, fantasy, and desire in neoliberal environmental governance

Abstract

The growing prominence of celebrities within the global environmental movement – and their power to shape and advance this movement’s aims – has been a burgeoning focus of recent research. Thus far, such analysis has viewed the phenomenon primarily through a political economy lens, contending that celebrity is harnessed to further the agenda of a mainstream environmental movement which has become increasingly conjoined with neoliberal capitalism, as expressed in the mounting enthusiasm to address ecological decline through corporate partnership and incentive-based market mechanisms. This article draws on a psychoanalytic approach to offer the complementary suggestion that celebrity also functions as a form of transference helping to sustain the fantasy implicit in this neoliberal vision ‘that capitalist markets are the answer to their own ecological contradictions’. Through transference, the charismatic authority conferred to larger-than-life celebrities helps to conceal the gaps between Real and Symbolic in this vision and thus obfuscates contradictions inherent in the execution of neoliberal environmental strategies. From this perspective, cynical suspicion concerning celebrities’ authenticity may paradoxically enhance their authority, and thus this analysis helps to explain counterintuitive findings that widespread ambivalence towards celebrities does little to diminish their power to shape public sentiment.

Keywords:

• neoliberalism
• environment
• cynical reason
• disavowal
• public secrecy

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the symposium ‘Capitalism, Democracy, and Celebrity Advocacy’ held at the University of Manchester, UK, 19–20 June 2012. Thanks to the other participants in the symposium for helpful comments and critiques of this analysis and to Dan Brockington in particular for organising both the symposium and this special issue.

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Notes on contributors

Robert Fletcher

Robert Fletcher is Assistant Professor of International Development Studies in the Department of Human Geography and Planning at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. His main research interests include environmental governance, conservation, ecotourism, and climate change. He is the author of Romancing the Wild: Cultural Dimensions of Ecotourism (2014) and co-editor of Nature™ Inc.: Environmental Conservation in the Neoliberal Age (2014).