Peak Libido

Sex, Ecology, and the Collapse of Desire

Dominic Pettman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509543045
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

What is the carbon footprint of your libido? In this highly original book, Dominic Pettman examines the mutual influence and impact of human desire and ecological crisis. His account is premised on a simple but startling observation: the decline of libido among the world's population, the loss of the human sex drive, closely tracks the destruction of environments worldwide. The advent of the Anthropocene leads to the decline of eros, the weakening of the link between sexual pleasure and human reproduction, and thus, potentially, to human extinction. Our capacity to care for one another in any meaningful way is being replaced by a restless, technologically-enhanced zombie drive. The environmental crisis of our time is also, and simultaneously, a crisis of human reproduction and of interpersonal intimacy. What Freud called 'libidinal economy' has morphed into libidinal ecology. Drawing on the work of a wide range of thinkers from Georges Bataille to Donna Haraway, Pettman explores the implications of peak libido, linking this development to the new cultural interest in eco-sexuality, polyamory, and other cases of the 'greening of the libido'. Peak Libido is a forceful reminder that our hearts and loins are primarily ecological organs, beholden to their wider environments, and, as such, they share the same fate.

Chapter 1
Queer Nature: Pink in Tooth and Claw

Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1862–3) provides a canonical portal into the ambient romantic understanding of libidinal ecology in mid-nineteenth century Europe. The two women in the painting fulfil their traditional aesthetic function – being barely troubled by clothing at all – while two fully dressed gentlemen seem to be more involved in a post-feast discussion than any kind of frenzied Dionysian pursuits. While there is no single key to decode this famously cryptic tableau, we can agree that the necessary elements are there to suggest a modern twist on a powerful legacy that combines the naked (female) body and landscape. The setting may be the Bois de Boulogne, in Paris, or it may be somewhere even more bucolic, far from the city. We are not, as viewers, given that information. But on the canvas we find the simultaneous apotheosis and deconstruction of the Western idyll, in which a pagan Eros is sublated or supplemented by a Victorian Vacuna, the goddess of leisure and repose.

Despite the rather prickly (or at least perplexing) gender dynamics, all four figures seem at ease with being outdoors, even as they will surely take a carriage back to their urban homes. (Hopefully after the woman in the front of the picture has found her clothing.) Nature is a place so hospitable to these men and women of means that it is possible to feel comfortable enough to go au naturel. Surely this scene would not be nearly as pastoral and soothing were it depicting a similar group trying to picnic in South Africa or Australia or the Amazon. “Nature,” for nineteenth-century Europeans – at least the local kind, accessible in urbanized forms, like the Bois de Bologne – was a place of gentle disposition, in which the libido could find its reassuring reflection, whether this be through the prism of fertility, harmony, or even a kind of erotic sublimity. This is why Gauguin and, later, Picasso, felt suffocated by such sentimental images, and sought wilder locales and visual models to inspire a release, and swift capture, of the sexual spirit, so stifled by domesticated landscapes and bourgeois metropolitan aesthetics. But where did this erotic ease come from, so vividly portrayed by Manet?¹ Why is his depiction of the erotic arrangement between environment and libido so tranquil, beneath the startling impropriety of nude woman and fully dressed men? This is the enigma that animates this rather static painting. And it is the ambiguous gaze of the naked woman in the foreground that seems to oblige the viewer to come up with some kind of answer. Her nudity perhaps functions as a sudden and vivid “return of the repressed”: an incongruous material reminder of what was considered the undeniable (and perhaps irredeemable) naturalness of the female body.²

Nature, of course, was (and indeed still is) often coded as feminine; especially in terms of Mother Earth.³ She may be a harsh mistress, or a maternal comfort, but in either case, Nature – as a reified concept running loose in the popular imaginary, rather than as the material actuality of ecological conditions – has traditionally been presented in the West as “the Other” of masculine culture, knowledge, law. The cultural freight or value of this gendering can, however, change as quickly as the weather, depending on the author and the intention. Sometimes she embodies all that is wise, true, and right. While at other moments she symbolizes all those problematic aspects of our animal existence that need to be controlled, denied, or hidden away: bodily instincts, biological functions, and so on. When nature calls, we are not always to answer. (And if we must, this response must be given according to strict cultural codes.)

When not figured as a motherly presence, Nature has been depicted as an innocent maiden – both figures inviting different kinds of libidinal attachment. In his playful and erudite piece, “Funhouse Goddess,” D. Graham Burnett introduces the reader to the twelfth-century defrocked priest, Alain de Lille, who, in a treatise entitled The Plaint of Nature, imagined suddenly chancing upon a heavenly chariot, carrying a “magnificent maiden queen.” “Around her head whirl the very stars and planets, and upon her billowing robes an overcome Alain seems to see the medieval equivalent of an IMAX nature documentary” (183). Burnett goes on to note, “Alain de Lille didn’t invent the idea that ‘nature,’ rightly understood, teaches us how to live and what to do, but he gave dramatic shape and voice to this proposition, which would organize much of the intellectual life of Europe well into the nineteenth century.” Moreover, “When nature showed up, it was generally time for a lesson – about politics, about sex, and, above all, about sexual politics” (184). In other words, various divine, mythic, or folkloric avatars for an anthropomorphic Nature are ubiquitous in the Western cultural record; often bearing some kind of message about how to be the best stewards of our own person, or cautionary tales about human weakness.

Indeed, as Burnett insists:

These ways of reasoning and arguing have never really died, despite a number of excellent arguments against them (Mill comes to mind). From the cataleptic Bible thumpers of our heart-land railing against legal sanction for ‘unnatural’ domestic arrangements, to evolutionary psychologists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lecturing us soberly about game-theoretical models of monogamy, plenty of folks continue to think, explicitly or implicitly, that we learn the way things should be by looking at the way they are – that is, in nature. What’s nature trying to tell us? How would we know? Who’s in a position to say? These are fundamental questions that haunt the philosophical traditions of Christendom and the secular societies it has spawned. The efforts to answer them amount, in the end, to the history of science, since this is the body of practices, institutions, and instruments that evolved to hear what Alain’s psychedelic angel was saying. (184)

In Lille’s account, Nature (as an extension or manifestation of God) is not happy with humanity, and even wears a dress, torn from the libidinal excesses of mankind. She tells of her sadness at witnessing the ongoing depravity of Nature’s most precocious and presumptuous species. Humans, she observes sadly, are perverse creatures, seeking perverse and excessive pleasures beyond the natural aims of monogamous procreation and heterosexual domestic fidelity. As Burnett goes on to note, Nature would, over the coming centuries, continue to “be stripped of her royal robes” in a metaphoric violation in search of her secrets: an allegorical framework that still has some purchase today. (It is the long history of this metaphor that forms the basis of Carolyn Merchant’s classic feminist critique of scientific machismo, The Death of Nature.)

A millennia before Lille’s Christian ecological fable, classical thinkers were less interested in dissuading the populace from sodomy, and more concerned with the divine origins of the material world. On the Nature of Things, for instance – an epic and lyrical account of Epicurean philosophy by the Roman poet and thinker Lucretius – begins with an account of how Nature and Eros are infused absolutely, one in the other. Nature is shown to be animated from the first by the breath and spirit of Venus, the life-giving Goddess of Love:

Venus, power of life, it is you who beneath the sky’s sliding stars inspirit the ship-bearing sea, inspirit the productive land. To you every kind of living creature owes its conception and first glimpse of the sun’s light. You, goddess, at your coming hush the winds and scatter the clouds; for you the creative earth thrusts up fragrant flowers; for you the smooth stretches of the ocean smile, and the sky, tranquil now, is flooded with effulgent light.

Once the door to spring is flung open and Favonius’ fertilizing breeze, released from imprisonment, is active, first, goddess, the birds of the air, pierced to the heart with your powerful shafts, signal your entry. Next wild creatures and cattle bound over rich pastures and swim rushing rivers: so surely are they all captivated by your charm and eagerly follow your lead. Then you inject seductive love into the heart of every creature that lives in the seas and mountains and river torrents and bird-haunted thickets and verdant plains, implanting in it the passionate urge to reproduce its kind. (2–3)

Lucretius even dedicates his epic poem to this same muse: “Since you [Venus] and you alone stand at the helm of nature’s ship, and since without your sanction nothing springs up into the shining shores of light, nothing blossoms into mature loveliness, it is you whom I desire to be my associate in writing this poem On the Nature of Things” (3). Animals, in the Lucretian pagan Genesis, are depicted as essentially enamored. Simply to exist is to be erotically enchanted (which is why all creatures exhibit such a passion for life, and do everything in their nature to prolong it). This is surely one of the primal scenes of Western libidinal ecology, equating all planetary life with love, long before Freud revivified the old Latin term for lust.

In a short piece, tracing a conceptual trajectory between Lucretius and Freud, James I. Porter interprets the Roman’s opening gambit as essentially saying that nature, “like some magnificent femme fatale, imperiously seduces creatures to life.” While such a reading risks projecting modern figures on to the pagan canvas, it does helpfully place this passage at the beginning of a key genealogy for the general cultural understanding of the intimate relationship between Eros and the environment. Porter goes on to ask why and how nature would be involved in such a process of seduction: “What would nature be like in the absence of this desire for futurity and for continued existence?”

Because they have no duty to life, no rational and certainly no objective reason to be rather than not to be, creatures need some other motive to cooperate in the business of life and its laws. The kinds of nature are as if reluctant victims of life; they would be unwilling helpmates, were it not for love … . Life absent love would not be … . Love is their minimum condition of existence. And existence evidently requires coercion – the coercion to be. Is love anything other than this coercion? It is as if life were not for the sake of the living but the other way around: the living seem to be for the sake of life, even if life is not for the sake of anything at all. (118)⁴

Certainly, Epicurus himself believed that the earth was literally the ground of a correct philosophical orientation to life; one which was materialist to the core, eschewing the idealist metaphysics of Plato. Students lived in Epicurus’s Garden School outside Athens, and ate food that they themselves had cultivated, learning an ethos of nurturing, both the soil and the soul. Even the gods were material, in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface: Libidinal Ecology
• Introduction: This Coital Mortal
• 1 Queer Nature: Pink in Tooth and Claw
• 2 Whose Libido? Exploring the Natural Philosophy of Love
• 3 Get Thee to a Phalanstery (or How Fourier Can Still Teach Us to Make Lemonade)
• Conclusion: Sex and Sustainability
• Epilogue: Seeking Carnal Knowledge in the Midst of Idiocracy
• Bibliography
• End User License Agreement