Bodies Do Matter: The Peculiar Persistence of Neoliberalism in Environmental Governance

Abstract

Substantial academic attention has recently highlighted the increasing and contradictory tendency to promote neoliberal market-based mechanisms such as “ethical” consumption as the solution to environmental problems exacerbated by processes of capitalist accumulation themselves. To date, the majority of this research has drawn on Marxist or Foucaultian frames, and thus has paid little attention to the embodied psychodynamic processes supporting this paradoxical dynamic. This article thus draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, primarily through the work of Slavoj Žižek, to analyze the role of fantasy and desire in sustaining faith in the potential of market-based environmental-ism. In the process, it seeks to synthesize Marxian, Foucaultian, and Lacanian perspectives in pursuit of a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding how contemporary environmental governance functions. It does so by treating the body as a crucial nexus of convergence among these different perspectives. The analysis is illustrated through discussion of how the practice of ecotourism, a quintessential market-based conservation strategy, is sustained through its promise to provide a transcendent experience of nature-culture unity yet instead offers, for the most part, a mere “pseudocatharsis” that paradoxically intensifies the very desire that it promises to satisfy and thereby supports the twin neoliberal fantasies of consumption without consequence and accumulation without end, in terms of which the body itself becomes a prime site of capitalization.