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Title: Ecology of Everyday Life
Author: Chaia Heller
Date: 1999
Language: en
Topics: social anarchism, social ecology, ecofeminism, desire, dialectical naturalism, romanticism, Murray Bookchin, feminism
Source: Retrieved on 2021-07-10 from https://libcom.org/files/EcologyofEverydayLife.pdf

Chaia Heller

Ecology of Everyday Life

Acknowledgements

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes several communities to

write a book. Writing is indeed, a social process and this book would

never have been written without the support and insight of a wide number

of wonderful people.

I give great thanks to the Institute for Social Ecology for providing a

forum in which to develop these ideas since I first arrived there

fifteen years ago. To Dan Chodorkoff who welcomes me into the ISE at

such a young age, allowing me to develop my abilities as a teacher, and

I thank Peggy Luhrs and Ynestra King for leading me into the world of

feminist theory and practice. I am grateful to Paula Emery, for her wit,

wisdom, and relentless sense of style, and to Claudia Bagiackas, Betsy

Chodorkoff, Cathy Chodorkoff, and Michael Mazzenga, whose everyday

labors of intelligence and love make the Institute for Social Ecology a

much needed reality. I am grateful to the entire faculty at the ISE who

are working to keep revolutionary ideas alive, and I thank Cindy

Milstein and Janet Biehl for their enduring integrity and commitment to

keeping the struggle honest and visionary. I owe many thanks as well to

Zöe Erwin who has always made me feel that my ideas were worth getting

out into the world. The students in my ecofeminism classes over the

years have been central to writing this book. I am deeply appreciative

of all of their questions and criticism that have continually challenged

me to push my ideas forward. I owe much gratitude to Brian Tokar who has

been a tremendous source of support and inspiration both as a fellow

thinker and as a friend, helping me through this process at difficult

times, and reminding me of the reasons to keep going.

I also thank the wonderful people at the University of Massachusetts

Department of Anthropology who have inspired me to venture into

unfamiliar and exciting new theoretical waters. Jackie Urla, Brooke

Thomas, Ralph Faulkingham, Art Keene, and Rick Fantasia are just some of

the people who have been an invaluable source of support and guidance. I

thank Arturo Escobar for his generous support for me work and for making

my return to school nothing short of a joy.

For reading and making valuable comments on parts of this book, I thank

the many women of Northampton who gave their time and attention to this

manuscript; special thanks to Janet Aalfs, Sally Bellerose, Susan

Stinson, Allison Smith, Susan Edelstien, Elena Deutch, and Hillary

Sloin. To the folks in the living-room study group of ’96, I give great

thanks to you all; Zöe Erwin, Eric Toensmeir, Tania Tolchin, Rebecca De

Witt, Jonathan Stevens, and Nancy Lustgarten, for receiving my ideas

with intelligent criticism and generous enthusiasm—and a special thanks

to Bob Spivey for endless moral support, encouragement, and willingness

to laugh and listen. Big thanks too, to James Creedon and Morgan Kennedy

who speed-read their way through the book in (one of) its last

incarnations, giving important insights and suggestions.

Thanks also to the friends who helped me through the last pangs of

producing this manuscript. Thanks to Brian Tokar, Cindy Milstein, Peter

Staudenmaier, and in particular, Greta Gaard who painstakingly took care

to make sure the book entered the world in good form. I thank Greta for

the years of encouragement and wisdom which have motivated and inspired

me. Thanks also to Carolyn Merchant for the time and generosity it takes

to support the arrival of a new book.

Friends and family have given me strength that has made this book

possible. I am indebted to Ilana Boss-Markowitz, Allison De Fren, and

Nancy Bael for decades (!) of love, humor, and endurance, for being

crucial touch stones that make life navigable. I thank Alison Prine for

reminding me always of courage and imagination, and of course, poetry.

Crow and Clove have provided me with years of patience, advice, and

wisdom. Hillary Mullins, I thank for being my first feminist buddy and

Jaime Morton, I thank for music and a solid first try. To my newer

friends in the Valley, Beverly, Bob and Sam Naidus-Spivoy, Nancy

Lustgarten, Valija Ivalds, Lisa Beskin and Robin, Allison Smith, Sally

and Cindy, Susan Stinson, and Elena Deutch, I thank you all for

providing me with sustenance and phone-friendship during periods when I

could not leave my computer. And to my incredible family, thanks to my

parents who have patiently supported every page of this journey, my

sisters Laura, Carol, and my brother-in-law Jorge, who keep me anchored

in love and humor from year to year. Thanks to Allen, Judy, Jane, and

Paul Kronick whom continue to provide generosity and warmth. And I wish

to express deepest appreciation to Sandra and Dick Smith for providing

endless encouragement, insight, and support to pursue the work and life

I love.

Thanks to Steve Chase who first put the bug in my ear, Pavlos

Stavropoulos and Riki Matthews at Aigis who got the ball rolling, and I

owe many, many thanks to Dimitrios Roussopoulos and Linda Barton of

Black Rose Books who were able to get the book out into the world.

I am most grateful to Murray Bookchin whose relentless vision, bravery,

and brilliance has blazed a trail upon which I have traveled, and hope

to continue to travel, for many years to come. I am reminded daily of my

good fortune to have found in Bookchin a mentor, generous and

encouraging, who has been willing and able to gently prod me to

recognize my own potential to think, write, and speak about

revolutionary ideas. For this, and for so much more, I will always be

indebted.

This book would not have been written without Lizzie Donahue, leprechaun

extraordinaire, whose love, encouragement, humor, and flair for the

absurd, gave me the peace of mind to finally sit down and write.

Introduction: Ecology and Desire

Ecology is as much about desire as it is about need. While the ecology

movement of the sixties addressed the need for clean air and water for

survival, it also expressed a popular desire for an improved quality of

life. People took to the streets in the seventies to fight nuclear

power; but many also took to the land to build ecological communities

hoping to enrich their social relationship as well as their ties to the

natural world. Ecology addresses two demands, then—one quantitative, the

other qualitative. Born out of the call for enough clean water, air, and

land to survive, ecology is also the demand for a particular quality of

life worth living.

Ecology and the Dialectic of Need and Desire

As political protest to ecological degradation began to wane in the

mid-eighties, an emphasis on quality of life issues held steady.

Enthusiasm for nature-based spirituality, as well as for natural foods

and medicine, reflected a continuing popular desire for health and

meaning associated with ecology. However, this emphasis on quality of

life has taken on an individualistic tone often expressed through

personal changes in life-style and consumption habits. If middle-class

North Americans feel socially disempowered to ensure the planet’s

survival, they can at least command the buying power to ensure that

their individual lives will be ecologically pleasurable in the short

term.

In turn, ecology has taken on a romantic dimension. For privileged

peoples within industrialized capitalist contexts, there is a tendency

to desire a ‘pure’ or ‘innocent’ nature that is prior to or outside of

society. Such ecological discussion can range from a longing to protect

an ideal ‘mother nature’, to a yearning to return to a golden age that

may have never existed. The growing popularity of wilderness exploration

hips on the one hand reflects a genuine wish for a meaningful connection

with the rest of nature. But on the other hand, such ventures echo the

myth of the romantic hero strutting off into the “wilds of nature”,

turning away from the society he has left behind.

More and more, questions of desire upstage questions of need within

ecological discussion. Insulated from (and often desensitized to) the

immediate effects of ecological breakdown, people of privilege still

have sufficient natural resources to survive. However, not everyone is

protected from immediate ecological crises. Due to the effects of

capitalism, racism, sexism, and state power, most people on the planet

are obliged to design a very different ecological agenda. While also

sharing the desire for quality of life, most of the world’s people are

increasingly under pressure to emphasize questions of need and survival

in their work for ecological justice.

There exists a global ‘division of ecological labor’ in which, while the

poor in the Southern hemisphere are forced to work to sustain the

viability of life, addressing questions of access to food, water, and

land, many in the North are able to work to establish a quality of life,

considering what kind of food to eat, what quality of water to drink, as

well as what kind of spiritual or cultural sensibility to embrace.

Again, while all people desire a better quality of life, the question of

who has the freedom to fulfill these desires is largely informed by

global questions of power and privilege.

And yet, this division of privilege cannot be reduced to geography. Due

to the global nature of advanced capitalism, there is a bit of the North

in the South and a bit of the South in the North. Indeed, as the

under-class swells within the U.S. and Europe, a privileged elite

continues to grow within the Southern continents as well. Still, despite

these complexities, it makes sense to point to this global division: it

allows us to acknowledge conditions of inequality under global

capitalism that are generally manifested on opposite sides of the

equator.

In response to this global division of ecological labor, many

well-meaning activists suggest that we should eliminate ‘superfluous’

qualitative questions to focus on issues of survival alone. Concerned

with the ecological bottom line’, they reduce ecology to quantitative

issues of demographics and population, calculating the number of people

that may survive in ecosystems without exceeding a ‘carrying capacity’.

Or, romanticizing the predicaments of indigenous peoples, activists of

privilege often reduce these struggles to questions of need and

subsistence, perpetuating the myth of the ‘needy primitive’ who depends

on the benevolent assistance of white men.

When activists focus solely on questions of ecological need and

survival, they fail to recognize the qualitative concerns of poor

peoples who also share desires for a meaningful and pleasurable quality

of life. In this way, they ignore the fact that most poor people cannot

access the things they may desire. A vast number of people in the U.S.

cannot afford quality organic produce enjoyed by middle and upper-class

peoples, nor can they afford the time, cost, equipment, or

transportation to take pleasure in the vistas of ‘nature’ by vacationing

in national parks—no matter how much they might like to.

Each community, rich or poor, has its own struggle for quality of life.

Activists in Harlem fight for a clean and beautiful neighborhood park

for their children to enjoy, while also organizing campaigns for dean

air. In turn, intrinsic to indigenous struggles for ecological

sustainability are attempts to protect meaningful cultural practices

that are also threatened by capital-driven poverty and ecological

devastation.

By reducing the ecological agenda of others to issues of need,

ecological activists miss the opportunity to redirect their own desire

for an ecological quality of life in a more radical direction. In fact,

the desire for an ecological way of life among both poor and privileged

peoples carries within it the nascent demand for an ecological society,

a demand that has potentially revolutionary implications. For, once we

collectively translate this desire into political terms, we are able to

challenge a global system that immiserates most of the world’s

inhabitants, forcing them to forgo their desires, lowering their

ecological expectations to the level of mere survival. Keeping a

desire-focus within the ecology movement keeps our demand for

satisfaction, vitality, and meaning alive, invigorating our ability to

envision a socially and ecologically desirable society.

What is more, a needs-focused agenda directs our attention away from the

qualitative dimensions of everyday life that are so crucial to ecology.

Ecological activists need not repeat the same errors committed by the

old left which emphasized issues of quantitative need over matters of

qualitative desire. Marx believed that a universal condition of material

need caused all social strife and injustice. Accordingly, Marx asserted

that after material inequity was abolished through the revolutionary

process, social relations would be automatically improved, restoring

quality of life to realms outside of labor as well. Marx could not have

anticipated the degree to which capitalism would invade and erode the

realm of home and the everyday in the post-war era. Again, for Marx, it

was primarily the sphere of work that was poisoned with alienation, and

it was there that he placed the locus of his theory.

The sixties brought a needed challenge to Marxist theory. Groups such as

the Situationists in France, as well as sectors of the American New Left

expanded their focus to address the encroachment of capitalism into

everyday life. The New Left’s emphasis on such qualitative domains as

sensuality, art, and nature stood as a response to Emma Goldman’s

apocryphal warning to Marxists decades before: “If I can’t dance, in

your revolution, I’m not coming.” As these movements illustrated, a

focus on desire keeps our eyes on the qualitative dimension of life. It

allows us to attend to the ways in which the process of commodification

extends into our relationships with each other and with the natural

world, reducing parents to ‘child-care providers’, the sick to

‘consumers of health-care’, and nature to patentable ‘genetic material’.

A focus on desire offers us a way to counter this emptiness with a

desire for a qualitatively new world of our own making.

Finally, focusing solely on need and survival naturalizes conditions of

ecological scarcity and destruction. When we lose sight of the

qualitative dimensions of life, we lose the ability to contrast the

world that is to the world that ought to be. We lose the ability to see

and name the very institutions that prevent society from becoming the

desirable creation that it ought to become. Paradoxically, focusing on

desire allows us to expose the social mechanisms that produce conditions

of scarcity. Such a focus reveals the true solution to the ecological

division of labor: to challenge the political and economic institutions

that force the world’s majority to struggle to satisfy basic ecological

and social needs. Clearly, this challenge would entail a politicization

of an ecology predicated on a redefinition of need and desire as well as

a transformation of economic and political power. Not only would we have

to rethink the quality of our needs and desires, but we would have to

explore new ways to meet them within new social and political

institutions.

Nature and Desire: Toward a New Understanding

As the contemporary ecology movement approaches the end of its third

decade, the ecological division of labor remains intact. What impedes

ecology from fulfilling its potential to transform institutions that

fabricate social and ecological need in the first place? Certainly, a

primary cause of the ecological division of labor is a global

hierarchical system of political and economic power which benefits the

privileged who, in turn, keep the system in place. Yet, in addition to

this problem of social hierarchy, there is also a crucial issue

regarding how privileged peoples within advanced capitalist society

frame concepts of nature and desire.

Ideas about nature and desire stem from centuries of ideology that

support existing political and economic structures in the West. To a

large extent, we inherit our romantic ideas regarding nature from

thinkers of the colonial era. By the eighteenth century, Rousseau became

the first in the West to position the category of nature in explicit

moral opposition to society, describing nature as an exotic, eden-like

state of innocence to which ‘man’ must emulate. Indeed, the nature we

know and love in the West is largely born out of the colonial

imagination. It is Diderot’s Tahiti where the colonizer fixed his gaze

upon an exotic other dwelling in an objectified realm of purity.

We have also inherited a Germanic understanding of nature formalized

during the nineteenth century by thinkers such as Ernst Haeckel. For

Haeckel, who coined the term ‘ecology’ in 1867, nature represented a

pristine and mystical realm bound to the people of the German nation, a

wholesome haven which must be protected from exogenous elements. We in

the West are the inheritors of such understandings. Our notions of

nature are often abstract and romantic, proscribing idealized places and

times to protect or return to, rather than proposing radical social

change that could provide the basis for a free and ecological society.

Our ideas regarding desire are also highly problematic. As citizens of a

liberal capitalist society, our desires constitute an amalgam of

individualistic, competitive, and acquisitive yearnings. Consequently,

we tend to see ourselves as individuals destined to compete for scarce

resources, striving to fulfill a range of personal desires for sex,

wealth, status, or security. Desire is largely viewed as a matter of

self-interest expressed within the realms of work, politics, and even

love. Informed by a capitalist sensibility, desire is often reduced to

yearnings for an accumulation of private property, both material and

symbolic. Even matters of spirituality, meaning, and aesthetics tend to

be translated into quests to ‘acquire’ personal truth and beauty. Rarely

do we view desire as a yearning to enhance a social whole greater than

our selves, a desire to enrich the larger community.

When such approaches to nature and desire meet, they give rise to an

unfortunate approach to ecology. Combining an individualized and

capitalistic notion of desire with an abstract and romanticized

understanding of nature, we engender a movement of people who long to

return to a more pristine quality of life by consuming artifacts and

experiences that they deem ‘natural’. Ecology becomes a movement of

people who see themselves as individuals and consumers yearning for

ecological asylum rather than as part of a social whole that strives to

radically transform systems of power.

Thus, our ideas of nature and desire direct ecological criticism away

from social change and toward the protection of a ‘nature’ to be enjoyed

by privileged peoples. This tendency has dismayed social change

activists who regard middle-class desires for wilderness preservation

and personal life-style as being insensitive to the needs and desires of

poor people.

Yet as we have seen, the question is not whether to focus on

ecologically-related need or desire; clearly, we must address both. The

question is what kind of desire will inform the movement and what kind

of ‘nature’ will be the subject of that desire within ecological

discussions? Will it be an individualistic desire for a nature that is

understood to be outside of society? Or will it be a social desire, a

yearning to be part of a greater collectivity that will challenge the

structure of society to create a cooperative and ecological world?

I believe social ecology, feminism, and social anarchism can help

illuminate a definition of desire that is profoundly social, rather than

purely romantic or individualistic. This is crucial because, while our

society offers us a variety of ways to describe the many dimensions of

individualistic desire, we are offered a paltry vocabulary with which to

describe a social understanding of desire. We are saturated by

consumerist rhetoric of ‘personal satisfaction’, yet rarely do we hear

eloquent discussion regarding the cooperative impulse, or regarding the

craving for a free and non-hierarchical society. Instead, our society

worships at the fountain of capitalism whose insatiable waters of

material greed and sexual domination crowd out the opportunity to

cultivate a desire to regenerate rather than deplete cooperative social

and ecological relationships.

Yet while there is little talk of social desire within the domain of

liberal capitalism, it continues to speak its own name within many

social movements. Within social anarchist movements of the Old Left and

the more recent movements of the New Left, there exists an implicit

understanding of both the complex needs and desires which people bring

to the revolutionary project. Activists in the civil rights, women’s

liberation, gay and lesbian liberation, ecology, and anti-war movements

fight to recreate social life from a qualitative perspective in addition

to opposing material inequality in society.

Indeed, the feminist and ecological movements are compelling

illustrations of ‘desirous movements.’ Radical feminists of the sixties

and seventies demanded more than to merely survive male violence and

sexual inequality: they also addressed a wide spectrum of aesthetic,

sexual, and relational concerns. Similarly, the ecology movement of the

seventies and early eighties wanted more than to stem ecological

destruction. The back-to-the-land movement crystallized a desire for a

more healthful and sensual expression of everyday life.

In turn, the civil rights movement embodied a sensual impulse in its

plea for ‘brotherhood’ between the races expressed in Martin Luther

King’s speech, “I Have a Dream”. King’s speech represents one of the

most passionate and poetic in history, giving voice to the collective

desire of the African American community not just for political and

economic equality, but for a particular quality of life infused with

dignity, beauty, and cultural integrity. Civil rights activists sought

to awaken a sensibility based on mutual respect and a reclamation of

collective cultural self-love.

Even within movements driven primarily by material scarcity, a dimension

of desire plays a vital role. Among the anarchists in the Spanish Civil

War were peasants who fought not merely for an allotment of bread, but

for a spectrum of social and moral freedoms as well. What made their

struggle different from communist sectors within the Old Left was their

demand for beauty, pleasure, and collectivity as well as access to food,

land, and control of the means of production. Film footage of this

revolution reveals the dual nature of the struggle: while

revolutionaries risked their lives in combat, they also, in the process,

converted luxury hotels previously owned by the rich into halls in which

everyone could eat, drink, dance—and enjoy, if for only a moment, the

quality of life for which they were willing to die.

This book represents an attempt to begin to rethink our notions of

desire in the hope of radicalizing our approach to ecological questions.

It emerges out of the belief that ecology should not be reduced solely

to issues of physical need and survival, but should also embrace the

desire for an improved quality of everyday life that can only be

achieved through a profound transformation of social, economic, and

political institutions. It also represents an attempt to reconsider our

understandings of nature by challenging romantic and dualistic

assumptions that underlie notions of what constitutes ecological change.

The Ecology of Everyday Life brings together some of the ideas I have

grappled with during the years 1984 to 1998. These chapters were written

from within the movements in which I traveled as an activist and a

teacher; movements ranging from the greens and ecofeminist movements to

the anarchist movements that have re-emerged in recent years. The ideas

presented here were developed during a time in which activists in these

movements were rethinking such basic categories as nature, desire,

identity, and politics, reaching for more nuanced and complex

understandings of questions of power related to social and ecological

questions.

These ideas also emerged from my work as a psychotherapist and social

worker. For over a decade, I worked with a range of people—poor and

privileged—developing an appreciation for the everyday struggles that

people endure as they search for meaning, community, and pleasure in a

world that is often alienating and disempowering. Through this work, I

began to understand the enormous burdens and joys that people bring to

ecology; I began to appreciate both the personal and political sources

of their hopes and dreams for a better world.

Coming of age in a greater-New York suburb in the seventies, and raised

in a conservative middle-class Jewish family, my own voyage to feminism,

social ecology, and social anarchism has been complicated indeed. The

‘nature’ I knew was an acre of woods behind my elementary school,

‘politics’ was Richard Nixon and the cold war, and ‘feminism’ was the

white business-woman standing proud with her briefcase on the cover of

Ms. magazine.

This book reflects my attempt to understand the origins of my own dreams

and assumptions about society and nature, as well as my ongoing struggle

to articulate new ways of thinking about social and ecological change.

The ‘radical ecologists’ I address and critique in these chapters are my

friends, fellow activists, students—and myself, as I, too, continue to

work to transcend the epistemological and institutional constraints this

society imposes upon a world we are all trying so desperately to

transform.

Throughout the eighties and nineties, I recognized a need for privileged

people active within such movements to be more critical about the way

they approach ecological issues. Focusing on the trials and tribulations

within the radical ecology movement, the chapters in part one were

written in an attempt to encourage others in the movement to consider

the historical and political forces that lead their ecological activism

in a romantic or individualistic direction. These chapters treat ecology

as a discussion that is constrained by systems of racism, capitalism,

sexism, and state power; a discussion in which activists must locate

themselves in reference to questions of social privilege and power.

I wrote the middle set of chapters in an effort to expand our current

vocabulary for discussing desire within progressive movements. Dismayed

by what I saw as a reduction of desire to romantic and individualistic

terms, I decided to explore the cooperative impulse within social

anarchism, feminism, and social ecology to uncover a more ‘social’

expression of desire that I believe draws out a cooperative sensibility

within ecological discussion. The second chapter in the section is an

exercise in thinking through what it means to be sensual, creative, and

dynamic, appealing to the metaphor of the ‘erotic’ to point to different

facets of social desire. I wrote this chapter in response to a tendency

among radical ecologists to counterpose questions of intuition and

reason or spirituality and rationality. I wanted to explore the

possibility of transcending this dualism by using a different metaphor

for conveying deeply meaningful social and ecological experiences that

are marked by both emotion and rationality.

Finally, the last section brings together the idea of social desire with

a new understanding of nature drawn from social ecology. Positing desire

as social, and nature as ‘natural evolution’, I explore a ‘social desire

for nature’: a desire to create cooperative social and political

structures to establish a society that allows people to participate

constructively in natural evolution. To ground an ethics for a ‘social

desire for nature’, I look to Bookchin’s natural philosophy, concluding

that a rational desire for nature entails the decision to create an

ecological society based on direct democracy. Finally, I explore a

framework for thinking through how to enact such a social desire for

nature, illustrating a way to reflect a broad political and

revolutionary vision within particular ecological and social struggles.

My purpose is to be both critical and reconstructive, illustrating

limitations in our ecological thinking while offering insight into how

to transcend those constraints by creating a more radical understanding

of both nature and desire. I have come to believe that it is crucial for

society to become aware of the ways in which ecological ideas are

informed by qualitative questions of desire and longing, a desire that

must be approached in a social rather than individualistic direction if

true political transformation is to occur.

To challenge previous ecological thinking is not merely a matter of

arguing that the approaches taken by radical ecologists have been

politically biased or socially constructed. What is necessary is not to

criticize previous thinking for being a product of history, but to

understand the historical processes which have produced such thinking in

order to create new ways of conceptualizing ecological change. A

critical discussion of ‘ecological thinking’ is particularly crucial

today because, as I have just mentioned, a major tendency in the U.S.

ecology movement has been to polarize questions of reason and emotion so

that ecological yearning for such ideas as ‘wilderness,’ ‘community’, or

animal liberation are often understood as lying outside the domain of

rational reflection and discourse. Too often, ecology has become a thing

to ‘feel’ rather than a thing to ‘think’ as well.

In this book, I have tried to transcend this binary between thinking and

feeling to create an understanding of ‘informed desire’. I believe that

we do not degrade the integrity of our desires, be they spiritual or

aesthetic, by understanding their origins and implications. I also

believe that our thinking is of little value if our thoughts do not move

us to take compassionate and political action to improve the lives of

other people and of the planet. Ultimately, I believe that a desire

informed by an appreciation of history, politics, and ethics can help us

to look critically and passionately at how to solve the social and

ecological problems that we face today.

Of the many thinkers I have read, there are four who, for me, most

exemplify the ability to synthesize reason and passion. For each of

these thinkers, there is one work that inspired me to write this book:

first, Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin; second, an essay

written by Audre Lorde called “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as

Power”; third, the chapter “The First Bond” in Jessica Benjamin’s book

The Bonds of Love; and fourth, a short poetic essay by James Baldwin

entitled “The Creative Process.”[1]

I point to these pieces as a way to illustrate the sources of a few of

the many threads I have knitted together in an attempt to develop a new

understanding of the ‘desire for nature’. I am teetering on the

shoulders of these great thinkers—one a natural and political

philosopher, one a feminist poet and theorist, another a feminist

psychoanalytic theorist, and yet another, a novelist and essayist—trying

to perhaps bring together pieces of myself that I can in turn, integrate

toward a new understanding of the questions I pose in this text. As a

poet, psychologist, social ecologist, and feminist, I have tried over

the years to consider the social and political conditions that are

necessary to allow all people to express their desire or creativity in

ways that will make the world a more interesting, ethical, and

pleasurable place.

I offer this book as a reflection on how to draw from a variety of

sources, both reasoned and impassioned, to think about how to create a

more desirable and ecological world. It is my belief that desire fleshes

out the revolutionary project, inciting us to expect more than that

which we need, enlivening us to demand the fullness of social and

ecological life, in all of its passionate complexity.

Part I: The Desire for Nature

Chapter One — Rescuing Lady Nature: Ecology and the Cult of the

Romantic

Ecological awareness of the planet peaked in 1972 when astronauts first

photographed the planet, revealing thick furrows of smog encasing a blue

and green ball. ‘The world is dying’, became the common cry as the

planet, personified as ‘Mother Earth’, captured national, sentimental

attention. Nature became rendered as a victimized woman, a Madonna-like

angel to be idealized, protected, and ‘saved’ from society’s inability

to restrain itself. Decades later, we still witness popular expressions

of the desire to protect ‘nature’. As we observe each April on Earth

Day, politicians, corporate agents, and environmentalists take their

annual leap into the romantic, ecological drama, becoming ‘eco-knights’

ready to save helpless ‘lady nature’ from the dragon of human

irresponsibility.

The cult of romantic love, which emerged first in the twelfth century

poetry of the French troubadours of Longuedoc, still provides a cauldron

of images and metaphors for today’s depictions of nature.[2]

Contemporary Western representations of ‘mother nature’ emerged out of

this “cult of the romantic” tradition based on a dialectic between an

heroic savior and an ideal lover. Indeed, the metaphors and myths used

to discuss ecological problems often find their origins within romantic

literature. Yet despite its association with love, romanticism often

shows its cool side when it surfaces within ecological discourse. While

often expressing a desire to protect ‘mother nature’, it may ignore the

social and political struggles of marginalized peoples. In particular,

romantic ecology fails to challenge the ideologies and institutions of

social domination that legitimize social injustice. Instead of

challenging institutions and ideologies of domination within society in

general, romantic ecology too often points its sword toward abstract

dragons such as ‘human nature’, ‘technology’, or ‘western civilization’,

all of which are held responsible for slaying “Lady Nature.” In turn,

romantic ecology often veils a theme of animosity toward marginalized

groups under a silk cloak of idealism, protection, and a promise of

self-constraint. It not only refuses to make social liberation a

priority, but in some cases, actually holds the oppressed responsible

for the destruction of the natural world.

Before exploring the romanticization of nature, we might look briefly at

the romanticization of women in the middle-ages as depicted in romantic

love poetry. Unlike ‘modern romance’ which consists of moon-lit dinners,

crimson sunsets, and sexual contact, medieval romanticism represents an

unconsummated love. As in the story of Tristan and Iseult, an Arthurian

romance in which two ill-fated young lovers spend their short lives in

pursuit of an unconsummated, yet passionate love, lovers rarely express

their desire for each other physically.[3] Instead, classical romance

emphasizes the act of passionate longing, an intensity of feeling that

is heightened by deprivation. Knightly and courtly romance is a love

from afar, expressing its desire in the form of passionate love poetry.

The origins of romantic love may be traced to Plato’s concept of

desire.[4] Platonic love emerges out of metaphysical dualism which

divides the world into two discrete material and spiritual domains. The

realm of spirit, or ‘idea’, is regarded as superior to the transient and

perishable realm of the body, or matter. According to Plato,

intellectual and sexual knowledge is most valuable when gleaned

independent of physical experience for ideal love represents a

disembodied yearning that remains ‘unpolluted’ by physical contact. For

Plato, the highest form of love is the intellectual ‘fondling’ of

eternal, rational ideas found in geometry, philosophy, and logic. For

the romantic, ideal love is the exercise of sexual restraint and an

intellectual expression of passion through love poetry.

Idealization, Protection, and Constraint

Romantic poetry often consists of the wistful desire of a man for an

idealized woman to whom he rarely gains sexual access. This ‘noblest

desire’ thrives in a realm of purity, in contrast to marriage, which is

seen as merely reproductive. Courtly romance consists of elaborate

rituals of devotion in which the lover promises to protect the beloved

from human and mythical villains, while also promising to restrain his

sexual desire for the beloved lady.

However, the lover’s inauthentic idealization of his beloved is

reflected in the incongruity between the celebratory spirit of the

poetry and the actual social context in which it was written. Certainly,

the idealized, pedestaled position of the women in the poetry does not

reflect the actual status of the majority of women in feudal society.

The theme of romantic protection represents a fantastical projection by

the male romantic. Even when the lady’s lack of social power seeps

through into the fabric of the poetry, her powerlessness is framed as a

need for knightly protection. The romantic fantasizes that the woman

needs knightly protection from predators instead of recognizing her

desire for social potency. The simultaneous act of elevating and

protecting the idealized woman in romanticism allows the hero to sustain

the fantasy of the woman-on-pedestal while indirectly acknowledging her

very real low social status. In this way, the romantic becomes the

protector of the pedestaled woman, creating a subtle amalgamation of

male fantasy and social reality.

The fantasy of romantic protection is predicated on the lover’s promise

of sexual self-constraint toward his lady. However, romanticism never

questions the social conditions which make such constraint necessary. A

romantic story would lose its charm if the knight were to challenge the

social or political institutions which render the Lady powerless in the

first place. Romanticism patently accepts that men inherently desire to

plunder women, while regarding promises of male self-control as heroic

acts of self-mastery.

At this juncture, we might ask why the romantic fails to critique the

social conditions which regard idealization, protection, and male

self-constraint as a necessary good? Surely, the lover wishes his

beloved to be truly free. Perhaps the function of romantic love is to

camouflage the lover’s complicity in perpetuating the domination of the

beloved. Perhaps idealizing, protecting, and promising to constrain the

desire to ‘defile’ the beloved emerges out of a power structure from

which the lover knowingly or unknowingly benefits and thus wishes to

maintain. In the name of protecting the beloved from the dragon that

threatens to slay her, then, the knight actually slays his beloved

himself: He slays His Lady’s’ self-determination and agency in the

world. In this way, the knight is really the dragon in drag.

Romance, Hierarchy, and Alienated Desire

In addition to prescribing idealization, protection, and

self-constraint, romanticism also prescribes an alienated form of desire

and knowledge. Romantic love is based on the lover’s desires, rather

than on an authentic knowledge of the beloved. The romantic’s love

depends on his fantasy of his beloved as inherently powerless and good

according to his definition. He views his beloved through a narrow lens,

focusing only on a minute, vulnerable section of her full identity;

meanwhile, the rest of her body becomes a screen for the projection of

his fantasy of the ideal woman. The romantic glosses over information

about his beloved which contradicts his personal yearnings. In this way,

romantic love is a form of reductionism, reducing the idea of ‘woman’

from a full range of human potential to a tiny list of male desires.

Romanticism is a way of knowing which is wedded to ignorance. The

romantic clearly does not know his lady to be a woman capable of

self-determination and resistance. He does not recognize her ability to

express what is most human, including her capacity for rationality and

critical self-consciousness. Most significantly, the romantic is unaware

of women’s capacity for self-assertion through sabotage and

resistance.[5] The subject of romantic poetry rarely includes stories of

‘good’ women poisoning their romantic lovers food, or stories of

admirable women being emotionally unavailable to their lovers. Few are

the poems or stories which tell of strong, lovable women resisting

compulsory motherhood, marriage, and yes, even heterosexual romance. The

cult of the romantic erases the idea that woman can be a wrench in the

machine of male domination.

Romantic love represents an attempt to love and know another from behind

a wall of domination. Indeed, true love and understanding can only occur

when both subjects are free to express their own desires. The knight can

only love the lady if he is willing to relinquish his power over her,

supporting her struggle if and when she requests it; then and only then,

can they begin to talk about love.

Romantic desire is predicated on a hierarchical separation between the

lover and the beloved, separations that are, in turn, predicated on

hierarchies based on such factors as sex, age, race, and class.

Traditionally, just as the master may romanticize the slave, men may

romanticize women, adults may romanticize children, and the rich may

romanticize the poor. These separations are reinforced by institutions

and ideologies that exaggerate differences between identity groups

within social hierarchies. In turn, while the idea of gender is

polarized and performed through rigid gender roles and children are

segregated in school-ghettos, adults are ghettoized in work places often

segregated by race, class, and sex. These structural barriers facilitate

the condition of social alienation based on ignorance. Romantic desire

flourishes between the walls of social hierarchy as the privileged paint

their own romantic fantasies of the lives and condition of the

oppressed. When all is said and done, the privileged know very little

about the history and lives of those upon whose backs their privilege

weighs.

Contemporary Ecology and the Romantic Protection of Nature

Today, society’s increasingly alienated understanding of ‘nature’ opens

the way for romantic discussions of ecology. More and more, the ‘nature’

we know is a romantic presentation of an exaggerated ‘hypernature’

marketing researchers believe we would be likely to buy. The less we

know about rural life, for instance, the more we desire it. Ideas of

‘nature’, a blend of notions of exotic ‘wilderness’ and ‘country

living’, form a repository for dreams of a desirable quality of life. So

many of us long wistfully for a life we have never lived but hope to

find someday on vacation at a Disneyfied ‘jungle safari’ or glittering

sweetly inside a bottle of Vermont Made maple syrup.

Murray Bookchin, creator of the theory of social ecology, said years ago

that the more the rural dissolves into poverty, development, and

agribusiness, the more we would see romantic images of the rural in the

media.[6] Sure enough, in the 1990s, just as the family farm crisis

peaked, commercials and magazine ads were suddenly riddled with rural

images: Grandfathers were everywhere, rocking on rustic porches,

uttering wise platitudes regarding the goodness of oat-bran. Red-cheeked

kids began running down dirt roads after a day of hard wholesome play in

the country, ready for Stove-Top Stuffing. And just as the Vermont

family dairy farm began to vanish in the early eighties, “Ben and Jerry”

bought the rights to the Woody Jackson cow graphic, transforming the

Holstein cow logo into the sacred calf of Vermont.

The tendency to idealize nature is often accompanied by the desire to

protect a ‘nature’ that is portrayed as weak and vulnerable. Each year

on Earth Day, an epidemic of tee-shirts hits the stores depicting

sentimental images of ‘nature’. One shirt in particular presents an

image of a white man’s hands cradling a soft bluish ball of earth.

Huddled around the protective hands, stands a lovable crowd of

characteristically wide-eyed, long-lashed, feminine looking deer, seals,

and birds. Under the picture, written in a child-like scrawl, reads the

caption, ‘love Your Mother.” The message is clear: nature is ideal,

chaste, and helpless as a baby girl. We must save ‘her’ from the dragon

of ‘every man’.

Ironically, this romantic posture toward nature often promotes an

uncompassionate portrayal of the causes of ‘nature’s woes’. The desire

to protect nature often conceals the underlying desire to control and

denigrate marginalized peoples. For example, during the late 1980s,

members of several radical ecology groups were called to task for

attributing environmental problems to over-population and immigration.

The Earth First! journal has consistently over the years advertised a

sticker that reads “Love Your Mother, Don’t Become One.” Paradoxically,

the same radical ecologists who express a romantic desire for ‘Mother

Earth’, also suggest that mothers themselves are to blame for the

denigration of nature. In the name of ‘protecting mother earth’, Third

World women are reduced to masses of faceless bodies devouring the

scarce resources of the world. Meanwhile Gaia, the idealized mother

herself, sits elevated on her galactic pedestal awaiting knightly

protection from women’s insatiable wombs.

The fantasy of romantic protection blends perceptions of social reality

with desire and fantasy. The romantic can remain disdainful and ignorant

of systems of social oppression while pursuing the desire to protect

‘Mother nature’. However, removing the veil of romantic protection from

population debates reveals population imbalances to be the result of a

continuing legacy of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, and capitalism.

For centuries, while suppressing indigenous cultural practices that

regulate fertility, social and political forces have created economic

and cultural demands for increased fertility. Throughout history, small

scale cultures have been able to control population through a range of

medicinal, technical, and sexual practices ranging from post-natal

sexual taboos to herbal abortificants.[7] However, as capitalist wage

economies emerged throughout Europe and the now Third World, factors of

poverty, high infant mortality, and religious reproductive control

unsettled cultural practices hat balance reproduction. Indeed, factors

including lack of reproductive health care, colonially induced religious

taboos against contraception, high infant mortality, poverty, and

families, needs for child labor within cash economies create a context

in which women bear more children than they historically would have

otherwise.

Moreover, population fetishists rarely highlight the fact that

‘overpopulation’ in the Third World contributes little to the overall

depletion of the earth’s resources. While one middle-class person in the

U.S. consumes three-hundred times the food and energy mass of one Third

World person, First World corporations and the U.S. military are the

biggest resource consumers and polluters. In 1992, with less than 5

percent of the world’s population, the U.S, consumes 25 percent of the

world’s commercial energy.[8] As Bookchin stated as early as 1969, there

is something disturbing about the fact that population growth is given

the primacy in the ecological crisis by a nation which has a fraction of

the world’s population and wastefully destroys more than fifty percent

of the world’s resources.[9] Consistently, those who consume the most

are held the least accountable while the poorest are blamed for the

world’s problems. Meanwhile the real corporate and state perpetrators of

ecocide remain hidden under a shroud of innocence. Statistical numbers

games that calculate national resource consumption to include a woman on

welfare as well as that of General Motors, or people of color as well as

whites, create an illusion of a generically ‘human’ consumer. Such games

serve to focus on numbers and demographics rather than social

relationships and institutions such as capitalism.

Deep ecologists such as Bill Devall and George Sessions have also often

failed to address the social conditions of poor women. While their

writings express a desire to protect ‘nature’, their romantic approach

to ecological problems often entails a less than compassionate analysis

of the origins of and solutions to the denigration of nature:

Humans are valued more highly individually and collectively than is the

endangered species. Excessive human intervention in natural process has

led other species to near-extinction. For deep ecologists, the balance

has long been tipped in favor of humans. Now we must shift the balance

back to protect the habitat of other species... Protection of wilderness

is imperative.[10]

A careful analysis of this quote reveals the sexism and racism which

often underlies a desire to protect ‘nature’. Constructing an unmediated

category of ‘humanity’, these writers hold an abstract ‘human’

responsible for the destruction of nature. However, it is unclear just

whom is subsumed under this category of ‘human’. Do the authors refer to

disenfranchised peoples who, rather than participating intentionally and

profitably in “human intervention” over nature, are degraded along with

natural processes themselves?

Blaming ‘humanity’ for nature’s woes blames the human victims as well as

perpetrators of the ecological crisis. Certainly, those most victimized

by capitalist processes are not to blame for ecological destruction. For

example, due to structural adjustment programs, laborers in so called

Third World countries are coerced by multi-national conglomerates and

international development agencies to become instruments of ecological

destruction.

In the attempt to repay debt to the World Bank, local communities

throughout the Third World are forced to convert land areas to

cash-cropping sites, destroying ecosystems that have sustained them for

centuries.[11] Poor workers in both the First and Third Worlds fight

daily to survive the low-pay slavery which subjects them to toxic and

deadening working conditions—yet they too, are subsumed under the

general category of the accountable ‘human’. Failing to expose the

social hierarchies within the category of ‘human’ erases the dignity and

struggle of those who are reduced to and degraded along with ‘nature’.

But again, the liberation struggles of marginalized peoples are never

quite so romantic as the plight of the ecological activist struggling to

protect ‘nature’.

Ecology and the Desire for Purity

Romantic ecology is often predicated on the desire for purity. This

desire carries within it a yearning to destroy all that is corrupt

within society, as well as that which threatens the integrity of

‘nature’. Choosing their own dragon of choice to bear the blame for

ecological corruption, each yearns for a romanticized time, place, and

people of the past whom they deem as having been idyllic. For some, it

is ‘the foreigner’ who destroys the integrity of a race morality, or

culture that the romantic craves so bitterly. For others the dragon is

identified as ‘modernity’ whose technologies, cities, and ‘progressive’

ideas degrade a past social order that is romanticized as having been

morally and ecologically superior. What purists share in common though,

is a love for ‘simplicity’ and simple ideas: if the cause of social evil

is ‘impurity,’ then the solution is the removal of the offending

substance or subject.

Romantic ecologists also have the tautological argument of ‘natural law’

on their side. If nature is pure, then it is lawful and ‘natural’ that

such purity shall pervade. Why should there be population control? To

protect the natural limit of resources of the planet. It is only natural

that there should be so many people on the planet. Ecology is the

perfect environment for the cultivation of a purist critique of

‘modernity’. Its green pastures provide free reign for the unbridled

advance of a theory which provides both moral and scientistic ground for

a critique of both modern and post-modern society.[12] Within the green

expanses of ecology, the wild imagination of the nature romantic can run

free with the certainty that what was old was not only good, but most

importantly, it was ‘natural.’

The longing for an ecologically pure society reflects the desire to

return to a time and place when society was free from the decadence

associated with urban life. There is a distinctly rural bias within

ecological discourse, a depiction of the rural landscape as a vestige of

past golden age of ecological purity and morality. Since the emergence

of capitalism and the arrival of the urban capitalist center, the gap

which opened between a world that had been largely agrarian and an

increasingly urban society provided a space for the purist’s romantic

reverie. Often a bourgeois urbanite and rarely directly engaged in

agricultural work, the nature romantic wrote about the abstract goodness

of a rural life of the past, longing for an end to modernization and

urbanization.

However, the story of the town and country divide is hardly one of good

and evil: while the country has not always constituted a realm of

innocence, the city has not always been such a bad thing. As Raymond

Williams points out in the case of Britain, the real histories of the

‘country way of life’ and ‘city life’ are astonishingly varied and

uneven.[13] While the rural village is often associated with ecological

well-being and social cohesiveness, there exists a less liberatory

association with the rural village that is not commonly discussed within

contemporary ecological discussions.[14] The parochial tendency of rural

life has often been a source of alienation for the stranger as well for

those viewed as strange within the village itself. Women,

gender-benders, those with a vision that extends beyond the scope of the

close knit community, have often been suppressed by the homogenizing

tendency of small village life. Standing in sharp contrast to the

harmonious and wholesome portrayals of ‘country life’ are such parochial

European rural disasters as the Spanish Inquisition, European witch

burning, Eastern European Pogroms, and U.S. plantation

slavery—atrocities that often took place within pastoral, ‘natural’

rural contexts.

In turn, while much contemporary ecological discussion portrays the city

as a center of industry, pollution, and social alienation, it has also

represented a haven of social freedom. Out of the broken ties to family

and village, came as well the opportunity to encounter new ideas and

liberties. It is within cities that many social movements have emerged

over the centuries, providing a refuge for those who were not always

accepted within parochial rural villages such as Jews, Gypsies,

intellectuals, secularists, anarchists, artists, and sexual

non-conformists. While rural life undeniably offers the potential for

close community ties and a closer tie to the land, it can also prove

hospitable to xenophobia, social conformity, and parochialism.

Despite the heterogeneity of categories of ‘city’ and ‘country’, there

still exists a strong rural bias within ecological discourse. For

example, a generic description of ‘ecotopia’ is primarily located within

a rural environment. The inhabitants of that imagined ecotopia are

usually wholesome, able-bodied, white, and heterosexual. These

taken-for-granted associations latent within popular consciousness are

often shared particularly by European descendants raised within

industrialized capitalist societies that define ‘nature’ in opposition

to society and the evil town in opposition to the wholesome country.

Rarely would one imagine the ‘ecological subject’ to be a Puerto Rican

lesbian in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a poor disabled man of

color in Chicago, or a Jew in Brooklyn, for ecology is primarily defined

in opposition to the urban subject. The predominantly urban identity of

such progressive movements such as feminism, lesbian and gay liberation,

civil rights, and labor movements, renders feminists, queers, Jews,

people of color, and urban workers as incongruent with white

middle-class ‘wholesome’ understandings of ‘ecology’.

Implicit within the rural bias which marks much ecological discussion,

is a reactionary nostalgia for the goodness of ‘the simple life’ of the

past. Today, the old guy on the Quaker’s Oatmeal commercial suggests

that living simply is “the right thing to do.” An Emersonian nature

romanticism wafts through the air, informing us that all we need is a

simple house, a good book, and a chestnut or two to roast on the fire.

It is time, we are told, to end our years of debauchery, time to buckle

down. The family is re-romanticized as in the fifties, babies are ‘in’

and ‘family values’ must be restored.

This romantic rurally biased ‘conservationism’ smacks of political

conservatism. A recent ad put out by Geo says, “In the future, more

people will lead simpler lives, protect the environment, rediscover

romance and...get to know Geo.” The full-page ad presents a

black-and-white photograph of a home-town looking teenage boy and girl

relaxing wholesomely in a convertible. The girl sports a fountain of

long blond flowing hair, her face clear of make-up, and reclines with

the boy, wearing clothing lifted directly from the late fifties; a time

when the country was still ‘innocent’. The ad suggests that it would be

desirable to restore the simplicity of the days before the Vietnam War,

the civil rights and women’s movements. ‘Romance’, which the women’s

movement is blamed for destroying by challenging gender roles, will be

restored as well. Environmental campaigns increasingly conflate the

decadence of today’s neo liberal capitalism with yesterday’s New Left,

citing the latter as the cause of social and ecological breakdown.

However, there is nothing romantic about living simply. Women and the

poor have lived the real ‘simple life’ for centuries, impoverished by

economic and social institutions of compulsory heterosexuality and

alienated labor. A life without choices, alternatives, and in many

cases, material subsistence, is indeed very simple. Our world is

becoming increasingly culturally impoverished and simplified, filled

with senseless commodities and spectacles. Women and all marginalized

peoples, at the center of this quality crisis, cannot afford to live any

more simply. And because so many have lived simply, restrained by

authorities for centuries, the romantic appeal to conserve nature sounds

seductively familiar; so familiar that many accept such admonitions

without even thinking. However, upon closer look, we see that we are

being implored not to release human potential for social and political

transformation within society but instead, to ‘conserve’ nature.

Consumer Ecology: The Romance of Ecological Self-Constraint

The desire for a pure, ‘simple’ social world has claimed a new theater

within contemporary society, this time wearing the mask of the

ecological consumer. Within this contemporary play, the well-meaning

purist yearns to slay a new dragon: the impure product. For those who

feel demoralized and poisoned by social and ecological degradation,

consumer ecology offers a way to combat the dragon of ecocide while

purifying the body and soul at the same time, all without destabilizing

institutions such as the state, capitalism, or racism.

The search for an ecological life style reflects the longing to

establish congruence between consumption practices of everyday life and

ecological ideals. Consumer ecology expresses a scientistic dimension of

ecology, dictating methods of environmental and physical ‘hygiene’

loaded with moral and spiritual meaning. Practices such as recycling,

energy conservation, veganism, vegetarianism, or consuming organic

products, are considered not only physically and environmentally more

healthful, but resonate with the moral desires to be pure of spirit as

well.

Consumer ecology is a discreet ‘private practice’ articulated within the

dialogue between private industry and the private domestic sphere: a

private response to the popular observation that both these spheres have

been degraded and must be purged.

Consumer ecology is a postmodern brand of asceticism based on romantic

values of idealization, protection and constraint. Promoting an

idealized commodity that is chemical and waste-free, consumer ecology

encourages the never ending search for the ‘pure commodity’ that

contains as much ‘pure nature’ as possible, while making the least

impact on the natural world.

In turn, the preoccupation with protection is deeply embedded in the

world of commodity purity as well. Eco-consumers and green capitalists

alike express their value of self-constraint by exercising self-control

in the production and consumption of impure commodities. Upholding this

impulse is the belief that down deep we are all greedy consumers who

must restrain the desire to over-consume. Just as the courtly troubadour

demonstrates desire for his lady by promising sexual self-constraint,

individuals in society are encouraged to express their desire for nature

by promising to constrain their inclination to spoil and deplete the

environment.

The impulse toward romantic self-constraint assumes a variety of forms,

ranging from self-restraint regarding consumption to reproductive

restraint. At the more benign end of the spectrum, corporations appeal

to individuals to restrain their everyday appetites for ‘natural

resources’. Advertisers often deploy emotionally laden images of nature

in their attempt to evoke in individuals a sense of shame and

accountability for the destruction of the natural world. For example, a

few years ago, a TV campaign by Pepsi depicted a sentimental image of

baby ducks swimming in a reedy pond with small children playing in the

sand nearby. The caption read in pink script, “Preserve It: They Deserve

It.” Through the use of soft lenses and young children, Pepsi

effectively associated the idea of nature preservation with an

underlying injunction against defiling innocent children. The

Environmental Defense Fund had a recent TV commercial in which the

camera zoomed in upon the hands of a white man crumpling a ‘whole earth’

photograph. As the earth’s image was reduced to a tight paper ball, a

stem voice announced dryly, “If you don’t recycle, you’re throwing it

all away.” In both instances, the message was clear: If individuals fail

to constrain their desire to ‘trash’ nature, the natural world is done

for.

Green capital participates in the cult of romantic consumption,

promoting collective self-constraint on the part of consumers.

Stonyfield Farm for instance, recently launched a campaign called

“Planet Protectors” which makes a romantic plea to children to change

their own unchivalrous ways as well as those their parents. Planet

Protector’s mascot is a cartoon cow soaring through the air like

superman, cape and all, ready to save planet earth. The theme is clear:

by re-using Stonyfield Farm’s plastic yogurt containers, we all can

protect the planet from harm. In their quarterly “moosletter” they ask

their young readers: “Are you a planet protector? Are you committed to

taking ACTION to protect and restore the Earth? Do you act in ways that

protect Earth from harm and heal damage already done?”[15]

After providing information regarding the status of tropical rain

forests (whose living things, they report, include only plants and

animals, no mention of people), they explain “tropical rain forests are

rapidly disappearing due to logging and other development.” As for the

solutions to these problems, Stonyfield Farm encourages children to

“make a difference” by choosing to “use public transportation, carpool,

walk, and don’t leave lights on when you’re not using them.” Finally,

the children are warned “every time you flick on a light or go for a

ride in the car, CO2 is released into the atmosphere from the coal, oil,

or gas burned to make energy. Be a planet Protector!”[16]

On the surface, Stonyfield’s message seems reasonable enough: we should

each do our part to save the planet. However, it is what is left out of

the message that is deeply troubling. First, by failing to discuss the

human suffering of peoples living within the ‘natures’ they represent,

they separate the ecological from the social, blaming the entire society

for ecological harm. Second, Stonyfield individualizes the problem by

making no mention of institutional causes of ecological degradation such

as capitalism, government, the World Trade Organization, or the military

industrial complex (responsible for an overwhelming majority of

pollution and resource extraction). Children are led to believe that by

failing to restrain their individual hungers for car travel and

electricity, they are as responsible for causing and solving ecological

problems as are those unidentified institutions responsible for logging

and other development.

In the more extreme wing of the ecology movement, individuals are warned

to restrain not only consumption practices, but sexual reproduction

practices as well. In such discussions, the mere presence of ‘humanity’

itself (resulting from an ‘unrestrained’ fertility) is cited as the

cause of ecological injustice. According to the “Voluntary Human

Extinction Movement” (VHEM), individuals should express a love of nature

by endorsing voluntary childlessness. On their home-page on the Web, the

VHEM presents a series of brief question and answers about the movement

presented in a light and jocular style that explains their philosophy.

According to “Les U. Knight,” the movements’ “spokes organism,” the

human “experiment” has run its course:

The hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions, probably

billions, of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction

of one species: Homo Sapiens...us. Each time another one of us decides

to not add another one of us to file burgeoning billions already

squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the

gloom. When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth will be allowed

to return to its former glory, and all creatures will be free to live,

die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away,

as so many of Mother Nature’s “experiments” have done throughout the

eons. Good health will be restored to Earth’s ecology...to the life form

known as Gaia. It’s going to take all of us going.[17]

According to the saddening reasoning of VHEM, ‘humans’ are so flawed as

a species, so inherently carnivorous and unrestrainable, they will

inevitably devour the planet. The only way to address this

irrestrainable nature is for an ambiguous ‘us’ to phase out ‘humanity’.

At file even more extreme end of the movement stand blatantly

reactionary groups that advocate authoritarian measures to eradicate

‘humanity’ itself. The Gaia Liberation Front (GLF) asserts that “all

life on planet Earth is more important than the survival of the human

race.”[18] According to their 1997 mission statement, “the total

liberation of Earth can only be accomplished through the extinction of

the Humans as a species.”[19] Yet unlike the VHEM, the GLF endorses

“involuntary” genocidal tactics including involuntary mass sterilization

as well as the release of “anti-Human” viruses such as the airborne

version of AIDS. According to “spokes organism” “Geophilus” whose

writings can be found in their Web home page, authoritarian tactics are

the only option for restoring ecological integrity:

The evidence is overwhelming that the Humans are programmed to kill the

Earth. This programming is not only cultural, but probably also genetic

since the major technologies Humans use for this purpose, from

agriculture and metallurgy to writing and mathematics, have all been

invented independently more than once. In any case, Human now carries

the seeds of terracide. If any Humans survive, they may start the whole

thing over again. Our policy is to take no chances.[20]

What makes this expression of ecology particularly troubling is its

appeal to the concept of an innately flawed ‘human nature’ that must be

cast in toto out of the ‘garden’. Unlike other reactionary tendencies

which blame particular social groups or ‘technology’ for ecological

injustice, longing for a pre-fall industrial era, this group sees no

possible ‘return’ or salvation for any sector within humanity. Invoking

scientistic language deployed by Nazis (terms which describe humans as

“vermin,” or as “an alien species genetically programmed to kill

Earth”), the GLF attempts to legitimize its claims by assuming the

authoritative voice of the human technocrats they so condemn.

Of course most ecologically minded peoples do not present such extreme

dictums for self constraint. Pleas for total reproductive restraint

stands in sharp contrast to Stonyfield’s reasonable request for

individuals to turn off lights when leaving a room. Yet a common theme

pervades the thinking of such romantics for whom true love can only be

demonstrated by constraining the desire to defile nature. According to

the romantic, the betrayal of nature results from a refusal of

individuals to restrain themselves by failing to curb the tendency to

consume, reproduce, pollute, and waste inherently scarce ‘resources’.

However, we must ask ourselves, is environmental degradation a mere

betrayal of nature caused by the failure of individual self-constraint?

Or is this degradation caused by a system of social institutions which

allow a privileged few to denigrate and betray most of humanity and the

rest of the natural world?

The environmental call for individual self-constraint implies a

pessimistic view of society’s potential relationship with nature. It

suggests that our relationship with the natural world is inherently

predicated on a repression of an inherent desire to destroy, rather than

to enhance, natural processes. The idea of love as self-constraint

reduces the idea of love to a holding back, or to a repression of a

destructive desire rather than as an articulation of a social desire to

participate creatively in natural and social processes. Thus we fail to

see that we can actually cultivate new desires to create a just society

where there would be neither helpless ‘ladies’ nor helpless ‘mother

natures’ to protect. Privileging the idea of self-constraint obscures

the idea of society’s potential for rational ecological self-expression

necessary for creating a world free of social and ecological

denigration.

Romantic Concealment: The Nothingness of the Banana

While allowing people to lighten their anxiety about ecological

problems, consumer ecology is predicated on romantic concealment. Just

as the knight’s idealization of his lady conceals his underlying desire

to maintain his own social privilege, the idealization of pure

commodities conceals consumers’ (often unconscious) desires to maintain

their own privilege within a global capitalist economy. The mythology of

a pure commodity based on consumer and producer protection and

constraint conceals the deeper reality of a grotesquely immoral economic

system which is sucking the very life out of the planet, along with over

ninety percent of its inhabitants. Puritanical consumers who can afford

to buy costly ‘ecologically friendly’ commodities can retreat into the

discrete world of consumer heaven, where they are absolved of the sin of

impure consumption. Focusing on the content of consumption allows

consumers to remain within the kingdom of consumer heaven without

looking down to see the very hell that capitalist production makes of

the earth.

Carol Adams explores a similar problem of ‘concealment’ in her book, The

Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist, Vegetarian Critical Theory.[21] In

this work, Adams describes the concealment of the grim realities of the

meat industry within capitalist patriarchy. Adams describes this

concealment as the fabricated nothingness of meat, a popular perception

shared by most consumers of factory-farmed meat products. According to

Adams, vital to an ecological ethics is a challenge to the fabricated

belief that meat is “nothing”:

...awareness of the constructed nothingness of meat arises because one

sees that it came from something, or rather someone, and it has been

made into a no-thing, no-body...In experiencing the nothingness of meat,

one realizes that one is not eating food but dead bodies.[22]

Adams calls feminists and all meat eaters to challenge the idea that

meat is ‘nothing’, to reveal the cruelty and immorality of factory

farming and of meat-eating in general.

As we deepen our social analysis of production practices in general, we

see that the idea of the “nothingness of meat” may be extended to reveal

the “nothingness of commodities” in general. Just as meat-eaters often

fail to appreciate the subjectivity of animals that are plundered by

factory farming, consumers in general fail to recognize the subjectivity

of the people who are exploited in the production of commodities in

general. For instance, while people are often unaware of the suffering

of the factory farmed calf when they buy a plastic-covered slab of veal;

they are often unaware of the struggle of women workers in a

multi-national textile industry that produce the very shirts on their

backs.

In addition, when we consider the social and ecological devastation

caused by agribusiness, we see that the consumption of vegetable

products is often as immoral as the consumption of animal products. For

instance, a banana is not always a more moral food choice than a

chicken. If we look at the social and economic relationships that

transform bananas and chickens into commodities, we often uncover a far

more complex set of social problems which determine whether the chicken

or the banana represents a more ‘moral’ food choice. When we reveal the

social context of banana production, we are confronted by a moral

paradox: while the content of the banana (a form of non-sentient plant

life) may represent a moral food choice, the social relations

surrounding the agricultural production of a factory-farmed banana, may

render such a food choice immoral.

When we reveal the nothingness of a banana, we become aware of the truly

lethal social and ecological realities that deliver the banana from the

Third World to the First. Most bananas sold in the First World

constitute a cash crop which many Third World countries export in order

to repay their debt to the World Bank or to the International Monetary

Fund. These crops are cultivated on soil which could be used for the

cultivation of foods for the local community itself. Consequently,

people across the Third World literally starve while their land is

controlled and converted to export zones for cash crops such as fruits,

vegetables, sugar, tobacco, coffee, and timber. Agricultural workers are

paid slave wages, denied health benefits, and are exposed to pesticides,

herbicides, and chemical fertilizers (bananas are one of the most

pesticide-toxic fruits).[23] Certainly the agricultural worker, who is

poisoned with over-work and chemical inputs, whose indigenous land was

first confiscated by colonialists, then repossessed by the World Bank,

should be given the moral consideration that many vegetarians would give

to the chicken. Yet it is often easier to reveal the ‘nothingness of

meat’ than to reveal the ‘nothingness of workers’ or the ‘nothingness of

cultures’ that are degraded by producing bananas.

As we recognize the complex and contradictory nature of capitalist

production, it becomes clear why activism regarding the unethical

consumption of meat often exceeds activism regarding the unethical

consumption of commodities in general. While animals have been reduced

to a specific commodity that we may eliminate from our diet, commodities

in general thoroughly permeate our social world. It would be impossible

to expel each one from our daily lives. The fact is, within a global

capitalist system, we are largely unable to determine the modes and

ethics of production. It is understandable, then, that many of us focus

on areas of consumption (such as diet) over which we feel we can

exercise some control. However, the longer we focus on the ethics of

consumption, as if we could consume morally within a capitalist system,

the longer before we reveal the inherent immorality of the capitalist

system itself.

The desire for ‘nature’, the desire for ethical organic practices such

as food production, must be broadened and deepened to include as well, a

desire for social and political freedom. The desire to spare animals

from disrespectful and harmful practices must be elaborated to include

an overall challenge to a capitalist system that threatens the very

survival of people. Once we reveal the ‘nothingness’ of the commodity,

overcoming what Marx called “commodity fetishism,” we will recognize

that each commodity, as Adams says, “came from something, or rather

someone, and it has been made into a no-thing, no-body.”[24] In

recognizing the fabricated nothingness of the commodity, we realize that

we are not merely consuming abstract commodities but that we are

devastating actual people’s lives, land, and cultures. Ultimately, it

becomes immoral to separate contents of consumption from forms of

production; for in so doing, we turn our heads from the social,

ecological, and political costs of global capitalism itself.

The Romance of Techno-Dragons: The Fight to Slay ‘Technology’

Accompanying the struggle for ‘pure’ commodities, has emerged the

struggle for pure technologies. Despondent about the degradation of

ecological and social life, people look to the most obvious visible

tropes of modern and postmodern society: technology itself. Noting the

historical correlation between ‘advanced’ technologies and the reduction

in quality of life, people create causal connections between

‘technology’ as a general category and ecological injustice in

particular. In search of solutions, many look longingly to a past golden

age where ‘low’ technologies did not plunder the earth’s riches; a time

before the dragon of ‘modern technology’ bore its mechanized and

treacherous claws, destroying all that it encountered.

Yet today’s romantic discussions concerning modern ‘technology’ really

reflect crises concerning capitalism and democracy: crises in which

citizens are deprived of political forums in which to shape the forms

and functions of capital driven technologies. All around us, we see new

technologies sprout up within Newsweek or on the nightly news. Yet we

play no direct political role in determining what effect they shall have

upon our social and ecological lives. The technologies which most

concern us tend to be referred to as ‘high’ or ‘industrial’

technologies, technologies whose deployment requires intensive degrees

of centralized capital or labor, often at the expense of both social and

ecological integrity. Hence, computer, nuclear, communications and

biotechnologies, represent sources of tremendous concern for those

concerned with social and ecological justice. However, when we remove

such discussions from their calls to ‘go back’ to earlier, easier times

and places, we see a different set of problems and opportunities emerge.

By exploring the social and political context of these ‘high’

technologies, we see that they are after all, capitalist commodities

produced by corporations, regulated by the state, and often originally

researched and developed by the military.

So often, ‘backward-looking’ discussions portray ‘technology’ as a

universal event that emerges within a social and political vacuum. We

live in an era of technological determinism in which we are told that

‘technology’ exists as an autonomous force which determines social and

political events. Today, we become familiar with ideas of technical

determinism in journalistic stories which speak of “technology out of

control,” or “computers transforming the world” exemplified by the

opening of this Newsweek article:

The (computer) revolution has only just begun, but already it’s starting

to overwhelm us. It’s outstripping our capacity to cope, antiquating our

laws, transforming our mores, reshuffling our economy, reordering our

priorities, redefining our workplaces and making us sit for long periods

in front of computer screens....Everything from media to medicine, from

data to dating has been radically transformed by a tool invented barely

50 years ago. It’s the Big Bang of our time.[25]

Such narratives present the idea of ‘technology’ as a self-driven force

within ‘humanity’ which can shape or level a social world with the same

power as a giant meteor. For the technological determinist, it is not

economic or political institutions which reshape our practices of media,

medicine, economy, law, and morality: It is the autonomous and

unstoppable ‘advance’ of ‘technology’ which demands that we either get

‘wired’ or get wasted.

By regarding technology as a general ‘human’ force or a universal

dragon, we fail to locate specific institutions which design, finance,

and deploy harmful technological practices. Too often, no one is to

blame when a technology goes wrong. Instead, each ecological disaster is

portrayed as a case of technology out of control. Or, worse, when we do

identify individuals or institutions as accountable for disaster, our

analysis often remains too narrow: when the Exxon Valdez spilled its

lethal tons of oil, the drunk driver of the oil rig was identified as

the guilty party rather than the broader institutions of capital and

state apparatuses which stress and regulate workers and natural

processes for profit. When we blame technology in general, not only do

we fail to identify corporations who financed the technology, but we

fail to identify the state who granted the patent, and subsidized the

corporation, excluding citizens from the decision making process.

The truth is, talking about technology is often an excuse for not

talking about institutionalized power. It is often an excuse for not

talking about the specific ways that institutions such as corporations

and the state collude in shaping technologies that are socially and

ecologically unjust. It is an excuse for not talking about the lack of

real democracy. And what do we gain by talking about ‘technology’

instead of talking about capitalism and the state? We comfort ourselves

with the romantic illusion of being institutionally oppositional when in

fact, we actually support capitalism by providing new opportunities for

corporations to diversify their markets by creating ‘soft’, ‘low

impact’, and ‘environmental friendly’ technological alternatives for the

rich which exist alongside of the really dangerous ones.

We cannot fight social institutions merely by critiquing social mediums,

or the material expressions of culture. Just as art and language

represent social mediums, technology is a social medium that represents

a cultural practice of technics or a prosthetic engagement with the

world. Social mediums such as art, language, and technology are often

determined by social institutions such as the state, capitalism, or

patriarchy. For example, today, while corporations, the state, and

universities determine much of what will be considered ‘high’ art, they

also determine what will be considered ‘high’ technology. Although there

exist popular grassroots artists and technicians who maintain degrees of

autonomy from large hierarchical institutions, their cultural practices

impact far less dramatically upon society than those subsidized by

powerful institutions. In France, language is actually controlled by the

patriarchal state which manages and sustains not only highly gendered

linguistic standards, but the incorporation of foreign language and food

as well.

However, while it is wrong for the state, corporations, or universities

to autocratically determine any aspect of social media, we cannot

abolish authoritarian institutions merely by protesting against

language, art, or technology per se. Attempts to upgrade social media by

creating for instance ‘a feminine language’, ‘a people’s art’, or a ‘low

technology’, fail to eradicate the source of control of social media.

Whereas we may create the alternative of a feminine language, there will

still exist patriarchy and the state which oppress women. Similarly,

while we may create a people’s art or a low technology, we will still be

confronted by a state, a corporate edifice, and an educational system

which controls our lives and destroys the earth in a vast array of other

dangerous ways. Finally, proposing ‘low’ technologies, while opening up

potentially thoughtful dialogue regarding the ethics of technology, does

little to oblige people to consider the political and economic

conditions which allow corporations and governments to autocratically

create social and ecological injustice in the first place.

What is more, the ‘lowness’ of a technology does not determine the

justness of its social application. Despite romantic dreams of the

inherent goodness of technologies of the past, there exists much in our

technological history that is to be desired. As Bookchin points out,

while the pyramids in Egypt were built by slaves using very low

technologies, early American settlers clear-cut miles of native forest

merely by burning and felling, as opposed to using the “high-tech” chain

saws of today.[26] Furthermore, before implementing the ‘higher’ and

more efficient modern technologies of mega gas-chambers, Hitler was

quite effective in using simple bread trucks and exhaust hoses to round

up and asphyxiate entire villages of Jews (before ‘advancing’ to gas

chambers). Clearly, we could not say that technological ‘advance’ was

the determining factor for the death of six million Jews. Rather, it was

a set of social relationships that allowed for the horrific collusion

between a fascist state, a racist ideology, a legacy of anti-Semitism,

and an entrepreneurial factor, giving way to genocidal devastation. We

must consider the absurdity of fighters in the Polish resistance

protesting the Holocaust on the basis of objections to the high

‘technology’ of gas chambers alone.

Low technologies that are supposedly fulfilling a benign function, are

not always liberatory on a social level. Along the coast of Northern

California, stretch miles of gargantuan windmills: while representing a

‘low’ technology, these monstrosities also represent the state’s

techno-fix to the problem of doling out ‘energy’ in a centralized and

bureaucratic fashion, blotting out the glittering sea shore along the

way. Similarly, the enormous solar collectors in the Southwest represent

a low technology of preposterous proportion. Rather than promote local

and direct expression of technological ethics, such large scale

technologies promote instead the centralized power of the state and

corporations who engineer and execute the design of their own choosing.

It is indeed crucial that our technological practices do not degrade

natural processes. Yet it is also necessary that we do not harm the

social world by usurping community self-determination. There is no

recipe for a ‘good’ or ‘ecological’ technology independent of a truly

democratic context.

So, we might ask, if technology is not deterministic, if it is informed

by particular social relationships, is it in fact simply ‘neutral’? Are

technologies blank slates to be written upon by those in power? Nothing

could be farther from the truth. While there are many technologies, such

as a knife, which contain a wide spectrum of potential functions, good

and bad, there are many technologies which by their very design are

‘loaded’ in positive or dangerous ways.[27] For instance, a nuclear bomb

is structurally biased by its design and function to kill inordinate

amounts of people quickly or to ‘peacefully’ intimidate political

leaders into submission. However, while we might say that a nuclear bomb

is not neutral we could not say that the technology of nuclear bombs

alone determined the events in Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Although the nuclear bomb represented a necessary condition for the

nuclear bombing of Japan, it did not constitute a sufficient condition.

The sufficient condition was comprised of a set of social relationships:

a hideous amalgam of foreign policy and a technological expression of

that highly undemocratic and capital driven system, called ‘nuclear

technology’. Given enough time, money, and undemocratic power to develop

‘technology’, those in authority can dream up some pretty lethal

inventions.

Similarly, organic fertilizer is structurally biased in a clear

direction, albeit a positive one. It is constituted by the very

intention underlying its design to enhance, rather than deplete, the

composition of soil and water. However, while we might say that the

technology of organic fertilizer is not ‘neutral’, we could not say that

the technology of organic fertilizer will actually determine that the

world’s soil and water will be enhanced. Rather, it is a set of social

relationships that determines the scale by which agricultural workers

will be able to apply organic fertilizer, as well as whether the soil

and water will be too damaged by previous chemical abuse. Hence, whereas

organic fertilizer represents a necessary condition for an ethical and

ecological agriculture, it alone represents an insufficient condition.

The sufficient condition for a liberatory organic agriculture is a

social and politically just context: the reconstruction of political and

social institutions which not only ecologize, but democratize

agricultural practice.

The Techno-Fix: Slaying the Techno-Dragon

At this juncture we might ask ourselves: why are there so few

discussions which explore questions of institutional power in regards to

technology in the Ecology Movement? Why have ecological discussions of

technology tended toward romantic dreams of slaying dragons of ‘modern

technology’? Why would so many in the ecology movement prefer to

critique the universal category of ‘technology’ in general as a social

medium, rather than critique the political and economic social relations

which engender particular technological practices?[28]

Many of us who grew up in post-cold war America have little

consciousness of a revolutionary tradition. Few are aware that there

existed a time before the state or capitalism. We accept these hegemonic

institutions as inevitable, irreplaceable, and taken-for-granted.

Therefore, when we are moved to critique society, we focus on questions

of social mediums we believe we can change, rather than on social or

political relationships and institutions which we see as universal and

insurmountable.

Romantic yearnings for ‘low’ technologies tend to lead to some pretty

ironic outcomes. A few years back, neo-Luddite Kirkpatrick Sale enacted

his anger at ‘technology’ by smashing a computer on stage at New York’s

Town Hall. Now surely, Sale knows as he takes a hammer to the machine

that the computer possesses no autonomous institutional social power. He

knows that the computer is neither neutral nor technologically

determined, but that it represents a social medium, a

social-technological expression of the institutions of the military, the

state, and corporations such as IBM or Microsoft. By smashing the

computer in the social forum of New York City’s Town Hall in Manhattan,

Sale tells us that he wishes his critique to be social if not explicitly

public. Yet Sale belongs to no municipal political forum in which his

position regarding the goodness or badness of computer technology has

any authentic political power. Rather than express his voice

politically, Sale’s voice is rendered spectacular as the glossy

(computer enhanced) photograph of him heroically slaying the computer on

a page of Wired Magazine (a computer users’ publication).

If Sale were to think socially and politically, rather than

romantically, about the computer he smashes, he might think about how,

while it might feel cathartic to smash the computer, there might be

still more oppositional ways in which to express his sentiments

regarding computer technology.[29] Rather than smash the computer with a

sledge hammer, were Sale to critique the lack of economic democracy

surrounding the computer industry, he might have considered the fact

that only privileged people gain access to computers, such as those

working at the press which publishes his books. Instead, Sale might have

thought to perhaps share his computer, for instance, with a community

center some forty blocks down in the Lower East Side, called Charas,

where radical activists in the Puerto Rican community are engaged in

oppositional work for social, ecological, and political change.

Activists at a non-profit organization like Charas, who may not be able

to afford a costly computer, might be able to use the machine to publish

a newsletter for the activist community or might use it for some other

activist project.

After giving his computer to activists at Charas, Sale could have then

joined his neighborhood association where he could have engaged in a

political debate regarding the social and ecological ethics of

computerization while discussing too, the need for direct democracy. He

could have discussed the need for political forums in which we all may

participate in making decisions regarding an even broader spectrum of

social and technological issues. Rather than point his weapon at the

dragon of technology, industrial society, or mass society, he could have

discussed how computer technology is driven by an undemocratic global

capitalist economy. Moreover, he could have assisted others in

understanding how capitalism in general dehumanizes people and destroys

the rest of the natural world. In short, if Kirkpatrick Sale were to

talk about social relationships rather than generalized social media

such as ‘technology’, he would talk about computers in the context of

such institutions as the state, capitalism, racism, and sexism. However,

were he to take such a position, would he have ended up being featured

in Wired magazine?

Each of us must ask ourselves such difficult questions as we enter

discussions concerning technology, or any social medium, for that

matter. We need to constantly ask ourselves: are there necessary pieces

of the picture that we leave out, and why? The fact is, we can often

glean more support for critiquing a social medium such as technology (or

for slaying vaporous dragons such as mass society or industrialism) than

for attempting to abolish and transcend social institutions such as the

state or capitalism. We must extend our critique beyond social mediums

because social institutions exist prior to and independent of such

mediums. For example, while merchant and rural factory capitalism

emerged as a dehumanizing system prior to the emergence of industrial

capitalism, the state preceded the emergence of capitalism itself. The

desire to eliminate ‘high’ technology therefore, is not just

insufficient for creating a free and ecological society; it also shifts

the focus from the real problem of undemocratic, dehumanizing, and

anti-ecological social institutions.

And so the question remains: just because we have no direct democratic

control over our economies or state (and thus over technological

practice), do we cease to critique technologies which we esteem to be

socially and ecologically dangerous? Are we obliged to choose between a

critique of technology per se and a critique of the state or capitalism?

Clearly, the answer to these questions is no on both counts. Questions

concerning technology may allow us to broaden our thinking about the

lack of political and economic democracy surrounding particular

technological practices. We can explore the specific harms of particular

technologies, calling for social and political action, while broadening

our understanding of the political and economic context in which we have

little control over capitalist and state practice. In this way, each

specific issue concerning technology provides a forum to speak generally

about the need for economic and political democracy. Each time we talk

about a specific technology or about technology in general, without

discussing the urgent need for political democracy, we miss a vital

opportunity to raise consciousness regarding the broader context of

social or ecological change.

For the Love of Nature: Knowing Self, Knowing Other

In love, there is a paradox. In order to know and understand that which

we love, we must first know ourselves. We must engage in a continual

process of becoming conscious of our own beliefs, prejudices, and

desires if we are to truly see that which we love. When we fail to know

ourselves in this way, the beloved can be nothing more than a projection

of our own desires, a projection that obstructs our vision of the

desires, history, and distinctiveness of those we love.

In order to truly love nature, society must know itself; it must

understand its own social, political, and economic structure,

understanding in turn how each individual benefits or suffers from such

structures.

Yet instead of knowing society, many in the ecology movement tend to

focus exclusively on an idea of ‘nature’ that has become the small blue

pool into which Narcissus gazed, enamored by his own reflection. Rapt

with his own image, Narcissus saw neither the color of the water, nor

did he feel its coolness against his fingers. In the same way, when the

privileged look into the ‘pool of nature’, they too, cannot see what

grows there. They cannot see ‘nature’ as a contested political and

social ground whose abundance and scarcity are unevenly distributed.

Instead they see only the romantic reflection of their desire to

preserve the institutions and ideologies that grant them access to both

social and ecological privileges; they see only the image of ‘mother

earth’ as a nurturing victim in need of their protection and control.

The practice of authentically ‘knowing’ nature is one of politicized

critical self-consciousness. As social creatures, we look at the world

through social eyes. In order to see nature, we must be increasingly

conscious of how our understandings of ‘nature’ are shaped by historical

institutions such as Christianity, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy

which give rise to contradictory yet persistent notions of nature as

pure, greedy, competitive, dark, passive, and nurturing. For instance,

if we are not conscious of the social-religious causes of our own social

guilt and self-hatred, we will romanticize nature as a pure and superior

being before which we feel puny, humbled, and wretched. In the same way,

if we do not transcend “internalized capitalism,” a hegemonic acceptance

of capitalism as normative, inevitable, and progressive, we will

continue to portray nature as a social Darwinian nightmare: a romantic

drama in which only the strongest knights, or those best able to make a

buck, can survive. In this shameful narrative, the privileged turn their

backs on the ‘poor majority’ who carry both the brunt of and the blame

for ecological injustices. In contrast, a radical love of nature entails

that we become aware of the history of ideas of nature in addition to

politically resisting social hierarchies that nurture distorted

understandings and practices of nature as well.

In particular, we must extend this critical self-consciousness to our

poetic and visual expressions of our desire for nature. We must be

critical of our use of metaphors and images of natural processes, making

sure that they do not reproduce racist or sexist cultural stereotypes.

While there are indigenous cultures that appeal to non-sexist female

images of nature, when members of non-indigenous cultures attempt to

deploy ‘mother-earth’ metaphors, something vital is lost in the

translation. Indeed, a metaphor which emerges within the language of an

indigenous people cannot always be translated into the language of a

culture that emerged in an era of modern and postmodern capitalism.

Audre Lorde points to a similar linguistic difficulty when discussing

the slave who uses the “master’s tools” to dismantle the master’s

house.[30] This has been an ongoing struggle especially for ecofeminists

relying upon patriarchal language and philosophical constructs to

critique and reconstruct patriarchal discourses that relate to ecology.

Often, the origin of words and their historical relationship to

oppressive ideologies actually contradicts the very spirit of liberation

that ecofeminists attempt to convey. Within the current society, female

metaphors of nature cannot be abstracted from Western patriarchal

values, desires, and definitions of women that saturate media, religion,

and educational forums. The metaphor of ‘mother-nature’ is culturally

loaded with masculinist ideologies that ‘justify’ women’s compulsory

heterosexuality, motherhood, and subjugation: It contains the history of

what it has meant to be both a woman and a mother within this society.

Because we are social creatures, our understandings of nature will never

be pure or free of social meaning or contingencies. Nature is not a

thing from which we can separate ourselves and know completely, no

matter how liberatory our culture or language may be. Instead of trying

to grasp a romantic knowledge of a people-less ‘nature’ through abstract

love, protection, and contemplation, we must begin to know and

reconstruct the social and political institutions that determine both

social and ecological practices. By engaging in a life long process of

politicized critical self-reflection and action, we may become a society

conscious of the historical origins of its own desire for ‘nature’; a

socialized desire that begs to be developed in a truly radical

direction.

Chapter Two — Reflections on the Ecofeminist Desire for Nature

During the past several decades, strands of ecological theory have

emerged reflecting diverse expressions of the desire for ecological

integrity. By tracing the development of specific ecological discussions

within a wider ecology movement, we may gain an appreciation for the

challenges and possibilities that arise as particular groups begin to

explore the connections between social and ecological justice.

As noted in the previous chapter, the desire for ecological integrity

can be marked by moments of individualism, abstraction, and romanticism

that can be traced back to ecology’s European origins. Yet as this

chapter illustrates, ecological activists may also express this desire

in more social and political terms, linking problems of ecological

degradation to questions of hierarchy and oppression within society. In

such cases, the “desire for nature”—or the desire for a quality of

everyday life that is healthful, meaningful, and ecological—is framed as

a need to overcome social as well as ecological injustice.

Using ecofeminism as a case study, this chapter examines the process by

which different groups approach ecological issues from a more social,

rather than individualistic or romantic perspective, recasting questions

of nature in terms that reflect their own identities and situations. It

is through exploring the connections between ecology and social justice

that ecofeminists ground their desire for ecological integrity in

concrete social and ecological realities of everyday life. In so doing,

ecofeminism is largely able to articulate a social desire for nature,

transcending many of the limitations that mark the wider radical ecology

movement as a whole.

Yet the history of ecofeminism has not been without hurdles. Emerging

from a variety of different ecological and feminist tendencies,

ecofeminists have often struggled, particularly in the early years, with

questions such as how to avoid the tendency to invoke universal notions

of gender, nature, and culture, or how to fit into a wider multicultural

feminist movement.

This chapter explores a few of the primary trajectories by which

ecofeminism originally unfolded in the 1980s. These “originating

influences,” radical feminism, social ecology, environmental justice and

international environmental movements, reflect only several of the many

movements that informed the development of contemporary ecofeminism. Yet

by studying these tendencies, we may gain a general appreciation for the

wider context in which women were beginning to approach the question of

ecology in the 1980s, providing insight into the problems and

possibilities that emerge as groups link questions of nature to issues

of social, cultural, and political justice.

Radical Feminism and the Emergence of the Body Politic

Within the radical feminism of the late sixties and early seventies, an

organic sensibility began to germinate, eventually finding its

expression within many ecofeminist writings today. This organic

sensibility emerged within an exploration of the ‘embodied personal’

that found its first seeds within the context of the New Left.

Since the late 1960s, the body has become a touchstone to which many

feminists return in order to measure the ‘groundedness’ of feminist

theory. The body politic, developed by radical feminists, attempted to

render feminist theory resonant with women’s lived experience as flesh

and blood in the world, providing a palpable praxis that corresponded

with women’s bodily reality. Ecological politics has also played a role

in grounding feminist politics. Ecology, like the body, offers feminism

an organic dimension by which to explore women’s survival not as

abstract ‘sisters in patriarchy’, but as women addressing the concrete

and visceral dimensions of social and ecological injustice. And as we

shall see, radical feminist body politics contains a latent ecological

sensibility that, in turn, gives way to what would soon be called

“ecofeminism.”

In the late sixties and early seventies, thousands of women were

involved in political organizations such as Students for a Democratic

Society and the anti-war and civil rights movements. While participating

in these struggles, many women brought to light glaring contradictions

between the abstract principles and goals of political movements and

their own personal, embodied experiences as women in the world. While

men spoke of goals of liberty, freedom, and equality for ‘humanity’,

movement women were often cloistered in the kitchen doing the mailings

and making coffee for movement men. When women attempted to focus on

their own liberation, they were often advised to wait for the ‘greater

liberation of humanity’ at which time women’s liberation would

inevitably follow.

The women of the New Left soon grew tired of waiting. They began to

recognize the contradictions between their own private, embodied

struggles and the public, political ideals of larger struggles for

social justice. Standing together in kitchens, or while licking

envelopes, women began to engage in informal discussions regarding

contradictions such as the irony of fighting against U.S. aggression in

Vietnam during the day while often being abused physically at night by

the same men who opposed the war. In a speech given at a city-wide

meeting of radical women’s groups in New York City in 1968, Anne Koedt

expressed women’s dissatisfaction with leftist movements:

Within the last year many radical women’s groups have sprung up

throughout the country. This was caused by the fact that movement women

found themselves playing secondary roles on every level—be it in terms

of leadership, or simply in terms of being listened to. They found

themselves afraid to speak up because of self-doubts when in the

presence of men. They ended up concentrating on food-making, typing,

mimeographing, general assistance work, and serving as a sexual supply

for their male comrades after hours.[31]

Women from all over the country formed groups where they could discuss

their experiences in the movement and talk about the embodied details of

their everyday lives. Some of these groups emerged into formal

“consciousness raising groups” in which women began to see that insights

and experiences once thought of as idiosyncratic or purely personal were

shared by many others as well. Soon, like astronomers linking a

seemingly random scattering of stars into a constellation, women began

to link disparate personal experiences into a constellation of

oppressions, which they referred to as ‘patriarchy’, that was highly

political and historical in nature. Issues such as sexuality,

relationships, health, work, family, and violence in the home and

street, all once seen as women’s personal ‘bodily’ issues not to be

considered or discussed in public, now were examined and understood

through a distinctly political lens.

Out of this analysis was born a “body politic,” an attempt to understand

the political implications of women’s experience of male domination in

their everyday lives. From this analysis came a radical feminist

movement that created counter institutions to address the bodily

dimension of women’s oppression.

Women had begun to invoke new understandings of a ‘biological’ dimension

of social life. All activities relegated to the domestic realm, the

daily ‘reproductive’ biological activities such as cooking, cleaning,

caring for the sick, bearing and nurturing children, and sexuality were

now considered worthy of political attention. The great wall between the

public and private realm shattered as women began to examine the organic

dimension of their own work, lives, and ways of being in the world. In

developing the dialectical body politic, women began to examine an

organic dimension to social life unexplored by the wider New Left. It

would not be long before the contradictions between the body and the

rest of the natural world would be pressed to give way to an

understanding of an ecological body that stands in direct relationship

to a political, social world. Phrases including ‘the personal is

political,’ ‘sexual politics,’ or ‘body politics,’ all reflected this

new tendency to recognize the interconnections between the body and the

political, shifting political discussion to include issues deemed

‘organic’ or ‘embodied’, reflecting an implicit ecological impulse.

To further contextualize this ecological impulse, it is crucial to

locate radical feminism within the wider context of the New Left in

which a new ecological movement was steadily emerging during the late

1960s. Indeed, during these years, an ecological sensibility had

developed, reflecting a rejection of middle-class suburban values,

aesthetics, and cultural practices. The publication of the Whole Earth

Catalogue in 1968 heralded the arrival of a generation of youth seeking

a new quality of everyday life deemed more organic, immediate, and

“natural.” The catalogue’s pages offered “earthy” advice ranging from

homesteading in the country to making natural soap in a spirit of

ecology and “do it yourself’ self-sufficiency. As a feminist correlate,

Our Bodies, Ourselves, published in 1973 by the Boston Women’s Health

Collective, offered lay knowledge to women seeking self-sufficiency in

the domain of reproductive health. The publication of both books

signaled a time in which people sought asylum from a world they

perceived as sterile, impersonal, and disempowering. The U.S. ecology

movement spoke to these desires, providing “natural” alternatives for

people striving to reconstitute a more healthful and self-determined

quality of everyday life.

Along with this new ecological sensibility, there emerged within radical

feminism an implicit anarchist sensibility as well: a critique of

hierarchy in general that flowed from a specific critique of male

domination. Seeking to incorporate this spirit of non-hierarchy into

feminist projects and organizations, women adopted cooperative ways of

working and relating together. By the beginning of the 1970s, a

flourishing women’s movement had emerged, creating collectives,

cooperatives, and consciousness raising groups, many of which were

organized according to principles of non-hierarchy. Women had developed

distinctively “feminist” styles of organization and action, instituting

small non-hierarchical groups such as the consciousness raising group,

as the cellular structure from which would emerge a national and

international movement.

These institutions were designed to give women freedom from particular

bodily harms such as rape, battering, and abuse from the male medical

establishment. Indeed, projects such as women’s health centers, rape

crisis centers, and shelters for battered women constituted an

institutional expression of the radical feminist demand for freedom from

male control of women’s bodies.

Yet, in addition to representing a demand for freedom from bodily harm

and oppression, there was a tendency within radical feminism to demand

the freedom to enjoy the body as a site of liberation, passion, and

pleasure. Recognizing the degree to which their sexuality, creativity,

and intelligence had been shaped by men, feminists realized that they

could rethink their own bodily experience. Women began to create a new

aesthetic based on an affirmation of sexuality, intuition, spirituality,

art, and health. The arrival of innovative forms of “women’s”

literature, music, art, theater, dance, and ritual signaled the

construction of a “universal woman” who could forge a new identity based

on self-love, power, and creativity.

The implicit ecological impulse within radical feminist body politics,

then, reflected an emerging social, rather than individualistic, desire

for a quality of everyday life infused with bodily freedom, safety, and

pleasure for ‘all women’. Citing ‘patriarchy’, or male dominated

hierarchy, as the cause of women’s oppression, radical feminism sought

to establish a new set of cultural practices defined in opposition to

what women often described as a body-hating society. Within this

implicit ‘desire for nature’, stood a demand for more than abstract

values of ‘freedom’ and ‘justice’ that marked many of the student

movements of the New Left. Instead, we see an attempt to ground

questions of freedom in everyday social relationships and cultural

practices that reflected values of collectivity, sensuality, health, and

self-determination.

The Disembodied Body: The Emergence of Cultural Feminism

It is here, however, that the social desire for a new embodied

sensibility took a risky turn. Moving from concrete issues of health,

safety, and institutional structure to more abstract questions of

cultural practice and meaning, radical feminism ventured into the

pleasurable yet problematic realm of the symbolic. Questions of how to

represent new understandings and practices such as health and

spirituality, questions of how to symbolically unify ‘women’ into a

‘universal’ category that would ‘stand for’ the cultural feminist

subject, became paramount as a movement of predominantly white,

middle-class women looked to ‘other’ cultures for inspiration. These

‘cultural feminists’ attempted to represent new embodied cultural

practices of their own everyday lives by deploying new symbols,

meanings, and images that they often ‘borrowed’ from the symbols, times,

and places of other cultures.[32]

Rejecting patriarchal and hierarchical approaches to spirituality,

medicine, and aesthetics, radical cultural feminists sought practices

intended to empower ‘all women’. This search for new cultural practices

was again marked by an ecological sensibility as feminists turned to

‘nature based’ cultures that had their roots in pagan, Neolithic,

Eastern, indigenous, Native American, and African traditions. However,

this turn to the ‘old’ to reconstruct the ‘new’ is often characterized

by the tendency toward abstraction and romanticization: the desire for

an idealized ‘golden age’ expressed by women who drew inspiration from

cultures of the past believed to be free of gendered hierarchy and

ecological injustice.

The failure of many radical feminists to problematize the process by

which they cultivated symbols to represent and routinize feminist

nature-based cultural practices contributed to the problem of

essentialism within ‘cultural feminism’. That many women of color did

not identify with symbols that white women deemed ‘universal’ women’s

symbols, and that many indigenous women criticized the appropriation by

white women of symbols and practices of their own cultures, reflects the

failure of white radical feminists to be sufficiently self-conscious

about the social and political contingencies that constrain the ways in

which feminists reconstruct past and present categories of gender and

culture. Indeed, in Audre Lorde’s essay, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,”

Lorde inquired why Daly used symbols from pre-capitalist Western Europe

to represent an empowering cultural image of ‘women’. Lorde asked

herself, “Why doesn’t Mary deal with Afrekete as an example? Why are her

goddess images only white, western European, judeo-christian? Where was

Afrekete, Yemanje, Oyo, and Mawulisa?”[33]

The radical potential of early feminism, then, was undercut by problems

of symbolic representation and cultural practice; problems that

reflected deeper issues of institutional racism within the movement. By

the mid-1980s, radical women of color had confronted the feminist

movement on its inadequate analysis of race, class, and ethnicity,

illustrating that the ‘unified body’ of the body politic mirrored only a

small minority of the diverse world body of women. The 1987 publication

of the anthology “This Bridge Called My Back,” edited by Gloria Anzaldua

and Cherri Moraga, signaled an era in which women of color transformed

the politics of representation forever. This Bridge created a forum in

which women who previously had no voice in the feminist movement were

able to write critically about issues of race, gender, culture, and

power.[34]

Other feminist writers of color during this time challenged as well an

analytical framework predicated on a binary between domestic and public

deployed by white feminists at the time. This understanding of a

“domestic/public split” can be traced back to Simone de Beauvoir’s 1958

publication of The Second Sex, which rooted the universal cause of

women’s oppression to be their ghettoization within the ‘embodied’ realm

of domestic sphere and their exclusion from the public sphere of work

and culture. For de Beauvoir, women’s liberation would follow the

liberation of women from this embodied domestic realm into the public

sphere enjoyed by men.

As bell hooks articulated in her 1984 essay “Rethinking the Nature of

Work,” the idea that “all women” would be liberated by moving beyond the

domestic sphere was based on a classist and racist set of assumptions:

Attitudes towards work in much feminist writings reflect bourgeois class

biases. Middle-class women shaping feminist thought assumed that the

most pressing problem for women was the need to get outside the home and

work—to cease being “just” housewives...They were so blinded by their

own experiences that they ignored the fact that a vast majority of women

were already working outside the home, working in jobs that neither

liberated them from dependence on men nor made them economically

self-sufficient.[35]

In this way, questions of race and class complexified previously

universal notions of gender and the body tied to the feminist project.

No longer was “woman” a universal subject tapped within a timeless

domestic sphere, the escape from which would provide universal

liberation. Indeed, for poor women of color who had been “working”

outside the home for centuries, there had clearly been no such

liberation.

As the writers in This Bridge illustrated, the body politic, originally

intended to counter the abstract politics of men in the New Left, had

given rise to a cultural feminism that presented a new set of

abstractions. Just as the New Left had organized its political agenda

within liberal and universal categories of ‘man’, and ‘justice’

generalized from a particular privileged group of white men, the radical

feminist movement had organized its agenda around universal categories

of ‘woman’ and “domesticity” generalized from a privileged group of

white women. By failing to sufficiently articulate issues of race,

class, and ethnicity, radical feminists were unable to fully clarify the

many social factors that determine the particular ways in which women

experience and resist oppression. Audre Lorde, again, in her letter to

Mary Daly, questioned Daly on the white bias surrounding her body

politics, stating:

You fail to recognize that, as women, there are (vital) differences

which we do not all share. For instance, breast cancer; three times the

number of unnecessary eventrations, hysterectomies and sterilizations as

for white women; three times as many chances of being raped, murdered,

or assaulted as exist for white women. These are statistical facts, not

coincidences nor paranoid fantasies.[36]

Audre Lorde was one of the first radical feminists to bring to body

politics an understanding of the relationship between race, health,

class, and gender. In her ground breaking work, The Cancer Journals,

Lorde examined the specific social context in which she had been exposed

to toxins at home and at work.[37] In addition, she articulated the

specific social contexts in which she faced her own medical crises and

recovery. Lorde’s perspective anticipated the struggles of women of

color in the environmental justice movement of the 1980s; a struggle to

bring questions of race and class into an ecologically oriented body

politic.

Thus the ‘body politics’, which offered a potential ‘organic’ ground for

radical feminism, was constrained by a tendency toward abstraction and

romanticization. Indeed, degrees of immediacy and historicity were lost

in the translation as white women began to extrapolate from their own

lives a politics of representation that often either appropriated or

excluded the experience of women of color. And as we shall see, this

problem of how to engender new meanings surrounding categories of

non-hierarchy, body, gender, and nature, persisted as a nascent desire

for nature continued to emerge within radical feminism.

Yet despite these limitations, by framing issues of health, sexual

freedom, rape, and battering, as political issues, radical feminists

began to move toward a social, rather than individualistic, desire for

nature, expressing a collective desire for a more healthful,

pleasurable, and “natural” expression of everyday life free from social

oppression. In turn, the nascent anarchist impulse that marked the

cooperative structure of feminist organizations speaks to the

revolutionary potential within feminist body politics.

Body-Ecology: The Emergence of Ecofeminism

To explore the movement of radical feminist body politics into an

explicit desire for nature, we will return briefly to the earlier days

of the movement. Here, once again, we witness a set of mostly white,

middle-class activists for whom ecological questions will represent an

attempt to make sense out of abstract understandings of categories of

nature and gender: understandings that will reflect their own

identities.

The WITCH movement represents one of the first feminist actions that

expressed an explicit ecological sensibility. At this time, feminists

began to articulate moments of resonance between the idea of a new

‘embodied’ political culture and the culture of witches in pagan Europe

hundreds of years ago. Beginning on Halloween, 1968, radical feminists

formed a series of autonomous ‘covens’ across the country. The group was

explicitly non-hierarchical, and their style was theatrical, humorous,

and passionately strident. They expressed a brilliance of wit in their

ever-changing acronyms ranging from Women’s International Terrorist

Conspiracy from Hell, and Women Infuriated at Taking Care of Hoodlums,

to Women Interested in Toppling Consumption Holidays. A coven in New

York City leafleted a statement hat would anticipate later ecofeminist

writings:

WITCH is an all-woman Everything. It’s theater, revolution, magic,

terror, joy, garlic flowers, spells. It’s an awareness that witches and

Gypsies were the original guerrillas and resistance fighters against

oppression—particularly the oppression of women—down through the ages.

Witches have always been women who dared to be: groovy, courageous,

aggressive, intelligent, non-conformist, explorative, curious,

independent, sexually liberated, revolutionary. (This possibly explains

why nine million of them have been burned.) Witches were the first

Friendly Heads and Dealers, the first birth-control practitioners and

abortionists, the first alchemists (turn dross into gold and you devalue

the whole idea of money!). They bowed to no man, being the living

remnants of the oldest culture of all—one in which men and women were

equal sharers in a truly cooperative society, before the death-dealing

sexual, economic and spiritual repression of the Imperialist Phallic

Society took over and began to destroy nature and human society.[38]

In one action, a coven in Washington D.C. ‘hexed’ the United Fruit

Company because of their “oppressive policy on the Third World and on

secretaries in its offices at home.” A leaflet distributed at the

demonstration contained the spell:

Bananas and rifles, sugar and death,

war for profit, tarantulas’ breath,

United Fruit makes lots of loot,

the CIA is in its boot.[39]

As early as 1969, women were beginning to bring together an analysis of

militarism, capitalism, sexism, and colonialism that was regarded as

destroying “nature and human society.” In this action we see a

light-hearted, yet significant, ‘backward-looking’ impulse that will

mark both cultural feminism and later forms of ‘cultural’ ecofeminism.

The witty and romantic appeal to a ‘witch culture’ of the past

represents an attempt by a group of mainly white suburban youth to

invoke the idea of an era that was more cooperative and ecological.

In 1978, Susan Griffin wrote Woman and Nature,[40] a book-length prose

poem that juxtaposed objectified representations of women with

managerial writings about plant and animal ‘nature’. Griffin’s book,

which soon became part of an emerging radical feminist/ecological

cannon, was influential in revealing the socially constructed

correspondence between ideas of ‘woman’ and ‘nature’ within capitalist

patriarchy. In 1980, Carolyn Merchant published an important feminist

perspective on the scientific revolution, further contributing to this

newly developing feminist ecological literature. Merchant’s book, The

Death of Nature, discussed the historical relationship between

capitalism, modern science, and women’s oppression.[41] Merchant, a

socialist feminist, articulated how patriarchy and capitalism functioned

together to control both ‘woman’ and ‘nature’.

During these years, the body politic expanded to address not only

understandings of women’s physical survival and vitality, but ideas of

‘global’ survival in general. Once early feminists asserted that

‘patriarchy’ had invaded their very bodies, it wasn’t a big leap for

them to assert that the same system had invaded the rest of the natural

world as well. However, the ways in which women articulated the causes

of ecological problems varied immensely. In both the WITCH movement and

in the writings of Merchant, there is a critique of capitalism that

names capitalism in particular, not just ‘patriarchy’ in general, as a

primary cause of ecological malaise. In contrast, Susan Griffin’s book

displays the ‘universalizing tendency’ that marked much of 1970s radical

feminism; a tendency to identify ‘man’ in the abstract as the cause of

ecological injustice:

The fact that man does not consider himself a part of nature, but indeed

considers himself superior to matter, seemed to me to gain significance

when placed against man’s attitude that woman is both inferior to him

and closer to nature. Hence this book called Woman and Nature grew.[42]

Yet while Griffin reproduces the essentialist tendency that had emerged

within cultural feminism, she does extend a radical feminist analysis of

social hierarchy to an exploration of ecological concerns. According to

Griffin, problems of sexism and ecological malaise are caused by men who

regard themselves as ‘superior to’, rather than ‘part of,’ nature. Thus

in Woman and Nature, Griffin suggests the idea of a potentially

complementary relationship between society and nature, given the right

social conditions.

By the early eighties, feminists began to define the organic sensibility

latent within radical feminist body politics in more explicitly

ecological terms.[43] Radical feminists began to develop the idea of a

time that was prior to social and ecological injustice, a time in which

‘women’ had more power and control over their everyday relationships

with each other and with nature. Women began to cultivate a desire for

nature that conveyed a yearning for a more cooperative way of life free

of sexism and ecological degradation.

The Anti-Nuclear Movement and Ecofeminist Activism of the Early

1980s: Bringing Together Peace and Ecology

During this time, another movement had been gaining steam. In the

seventies, anti-nuclear activism emerged as one of the most potent

political forces within the New Left. In particular, the nuclear issue

brought together both radical feminists involved in feminist peace

politics and women interested in ecology. While nuclear militarism

resonated with concerns of feminists peace activists, nuclear power

became the focus for feminists concerned with problems of ecology and

health. Continuing to utilize the domestic/public framework introduced

in the 1960s, many radical feminists extended their critique of

“domestic” acts of male violence such as rape and battering, to include

a critique of “public” and institutional acts of male violence such as

militarism. It was in this context that many women began to make

connections between the domination of women in the domestic sphere

(within personal, sexual relationships) and the destruction of the

natural world by public institutions such as the military and the

nuclear industry.

The feminist peace movement, emerging out of radical feminism and the

civil rights and anti-war movements, greatly informed a newly emerging

ecofeminist activism. Inspired by the philosophy of anti-racist peace

activists such as Barbara Deming, feminists had been developing an

anti-militarist movement in response to mounting U.S. aggression.

Learning of the nuclear testing in Nevada in the fifties and the

subsequent rise in birth defects and gynecological cancers, they also

discovered the current problem of nuclear waste for which there was no

safe means of disposal. And while appreciating the ecological

implications of nuclear energy, feminists also addressed the military

implications’ of an industry that produced plutonium necessary for

nuclear warheads. The issues of militarism, male violence, and ecology

came together to form a truly ecological, broad-based body politic.

In 1980, the crisis at the nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island served

as the catalyst for a beginning of ecofeminist direct action. This first

major ecofeminist event was initiated by feminist activists Ynestra King

and Celeste Wesson during an interview on WBAI radio in New York in

which they discussed the crisis from a specifically ecofeminist

perspective. The following April, King and Wesson, along with a group of

other feminist, peace, and environmental activists, organized “The

Conference on Women and life on Earth: Ecofeminism in the 80s” in which

800 women gathered in Amherst, Massachusetts to address the nuclear

question. Many of the conference organizers and attendees identified as

social anarchists who had been involved in the anti-nuclear movement.

Out of this conference emerged an ecofeminist network that, in 1981,

planned the first ecofeminist action: the “Women’s Pentagon Action”

(WPA) in which 3,000 women participated in a massive theatrical

ecofeminist demonstration in Washington D.C. The WPA was an ecofeminist

and anti-militarist action whose “Unity Statement,” written collectively

and arranged by Grace Paley, tied together issues of feminism,

capitalism, ecology, anti-racism, and anti-militarism:

With that sense, that ecological right, we oppose the financial

connections between the Pentagon and the multinational corporations and

banks that the Pentagon serves. Those connections are made of gold and

oil. We are made of blood and bone, we are made of the sweet and finite

resource, water. We will not allow these violent games to continue. If

we are here in our stubborn thousands today, we will certainly return in

the hundreds of thousands in the months and years to come.[44]

In the first WPA action (there was another the following year),

activists used a style reminiscent of the WITCH actions, circling the

Pentagon to express rage, sadness, and fear about the history of male

violence by performing street theater on the Pentagon’s steps. While the

WPAs echoed the sensibility of the WITCH movement, they also echoed the

domestic sensibility of an earlier anti-nuclear movement of 1962, known

as the “Women’s Strike for Peace” movement, in which women from across

the country, identifying as ‘mothers’ (rather than as feminists)

demonstrated against the nuclear testing that had taken place in the

fifties.

Whereas radical feminism had been often criticized for espousing an

anti-mother sentiment (traced back to de Beauvoir’s assertion of women’s

need to transcend the maternal activities associated with the domestic

sphere), early ecofeminists reversed de Beauvoir’s assertion, arguing

instead that women must restore value to the roles of mothering and

nurturing. This motherist sensibility (often blamed for creating yet

another romantic essentialism) was translated into the creation of a

form of direct action that came to be associated with ecofeminist

actions in the future. Blending both ‘witchy’ and ‘motherist’

sensibilities, the WPAs created a new kind of distinctively ecofeminist

aesthetics. At the WPAs, women wove webs of yarn containing symbols of

mothers’ everyday lives, such as aprons, clothespins, photographs of

children as well as artifacts from women’s everyday lives around fences,

doors and missile sites as described by Ynestra King:

We create an iconography designed to bring people to life—parading with

enormous puppets, quilting scenes from everyday life, weaving the doors

of the Pentagon closed with brilliantly colored yarn, waltzing around

police barricades, shaking down fences, spray-painting runways, placing

photos of beloved places in nature and children woven in the miles of

fencing around military installations, wearing flowers and brilliant

colors as we face into the gray and khaki of militarism, opposing

machines with hand-crafted alternatives.[45]

By reversing (yet reproducing) the domestic/public split as an

analytical framework, the WPA began to counter the values of capitalist

consumerism and state militarism by expressing a new revalorization of

the everyday life of the domestic sphere.

By 1981, an international ecofeminist network had emerged. Ecofeminism,

with its analysis of the interconnectedness of oppressions and its

insistence on the need for international dialogue, provided a global

forum for addressing women’s social and ecological crises. In response

to this ‘missile crisis’, a group of British peace and ecology

activists, along with the recently established group, ‘Women and Life on

Earth’ in England, created the Greenham Common Peace Encampment at the

military base located there. At the time, Greenham represented an

ongoing international direct action, a demonstration of women’s work of

everyday survival in a patriarchal nuclear age. Setting up camp outside

the gates of the base, women lived in tents and shelters and were

re-evicted each morning by the military police. Subsequently, in

solidarity with Greenham, women in the U.S. founded the Seneca Women’s

Peace Encampment in Seneca Falls, NY, to protest cruise missiles that

were positioned to leave Seneca for Europe.[46]

Finally, in the mid-1980s, a group of ecofeminists began to specifically

address issues of race and class in relationship to the ecofeminist

project. Initiated in 1984, the WomanEarth Feminist Peace Institute was

founded by a group of radical women of color, ecofeminists, and feminist

peace activists including Ynestra King, Gwyn Kirk, Barbara Smith, Rachel

Bagby, Luisah Teish, and Starhawk, who came together to create a

multi-racial, multi-cultural forum in which women could discuss issues

of race, gender, class, peace, spirituality, and ecology. Following the

suggestion of Barbara Smith, WomanEarth became the first feminist

institute to be organized around the principle of racial parity, giving

equal voice, participation, and leadership to both women of color and

white women.[47]

While WomanEarth sought to become an educational and political institute

that could provide a base for an ecofeminist movement, internal

struggles within the organizing group regarding race and class

privilege, in addition to financial pressures, led to the eventual

dissolution of the project in 1989. As Noël Sturgeon points out,

however, WomanEarth still serves as an example of a moment in

ecofeminist history in which white ecofeminists placed questions of

racial privilege and power at the center of their political agenda. The

commitment that ecofeminists brought to this project was reflected in

WomanEarth’s conference “Reconstituting Feminist Peace Politics” held in

Amherst, MA, in June of 1986, a conference in which fifty women (half

women of color, half women of European descent) met to discuss a range

of issues relating to questions of race, class, and feminist peace

politics, WomanEarth signaled an important shift within ecofeminism.

Responding to critiques of racism within the feminist movement as a

whole in the mid-1980s, women such as King understood that ecofeminism

had to prioritize the question of racism if the movement was to achieve

political validity and integrity.[48]

WomanEarth, as an ecofeminist project, emerged out of radical feminist

body politics that sought to particularize the general question of

ecology by addressing issues of ‘nature’ along with those of gender and

social justice. Initially, the nuclear issue brought out the most

concrete, social, and historical dimensions of the “nature question”

within ecofeminism. Departing from mainstream environmentalism’s

tendency to privilege abstract notions of a pristine and “people-less”

wilderness to be protected, these early ecofeminist activists generally

expressed their “desire for nature” by showing the concrete connections

between public and domestic acts of militarism and male violence,

pointing to the ecological and social implications of such issues.

Again, although early ecofeminist activism tended to reproduce the

problematic domestic/public framework, they were able to ground their

politics in a social and material analysis of ecological questions.

Thus, in the early 1980s, radical feminism had given rise to an

increasingly social approach to ecological questions that grew out of a

body politics grounded in the concrete dimensions of women’s everyday

lives. This body politics was predicated upon the ability of radical

feminists to link questions such as health and sexuality to systems of

male dominated hierarchy, reflecting a nascent, and sometimes explicit,

anarchist impulse. And as we have seen, this nascent anarchism within

body politics finds expression within early ecofeminist claims regarding

the connection between ecological degradation and questions of social

domination and oppression in general.

Social Ecology and Ecofeminism

At this point in the narrative, it would be helpful to take a few steps

back to explore a key political and theoretical context in which Ynestra

King, a major figure in the early years of ecofeminist activity,

developed ecofeminist theory and activism. King’s approach to ecological

theory and politics both informed, and was formed by, another desire for

nature that unfolded simultaneously with the radical feminist movement.

That desire for nature is social ecology.

Social ecology is a branch of the radical ecology movement that surfaced

in the U.S. during the 1960s. Since its inception, social ecology has

played a major role in shaping radical ecological politics both in the

U.S. and abroad by pushing ecological discussion in a social anarchist

direction to include critiques of capitalism, the state, and all forms

of social and political hierarchy. Beginning in the early 1960s, Murray

Bookchin, the theorist primarily associated with the theory, began to

examine the social and political origins of ecological problems from a

leftist perspective. While offering a philosophical and historical

analysis of the relationship between society and nature, social ecology

is praxis-based, calling not only for direct action, but for a

reconstructive vision of a confederation of communities engaged in

direct democracy and municipalized economics.

While an ecological sensibility emerged within the body politics of

radical feminism in the 1960s and 70s, a nascent feminist sensibility

surfaced within social ecology. The common denominator that led both

radical feminists and social ecology to make the connection between

ecology and feminism can be traced back to the anarchist impulse within

both theories. While early feminist analysis of hierarchy led to a

critique of the ‘patriarchal’ project to dominate nature, the social and

ecological analysis of hierarchy led to a critique of systems of male

domination.

Inspired by the newly emerging radical feminist movement, Bookchin too,

saw in feminism, as he saw in ecology, the potential for a movement that

was general enough to include, yet not be limited to, economic concerns.

like others, Bookchin saw feminism as potentially one of the “great

issues” that, like ecology, democracy, and urbanization, could bring to

the revolutionary struggle those who faced hierarchical as well as class

oppression.[49] He recognized in feminism the potential for a

trans-class movement that could lead to an anti-hierarchical position

that could ultimately challenge capitalism.

In 1978, the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE), which Bookchin

co-founded in 1974, invited Ynestra King to develop what would become

the first curriculum in a feminist approach to ecology, thus coining the

term ecofeminism.[50] As there were not yet any explicitly ecofeminist

writings, King created the first ecofeminist curriculum which reviewed

essays written by theorists including liberal, socialist, radical

feminist, and anti-militarist thinkers, as well as feminist

anthropologists and feminist philosophers of science. Through a critical

reading of these essays, King explored the evolution of feminist

drinking from the first to the second wave, looking at moments of

liberalism, rationalism, and essentialism within file different strands

of feminist theory, examining their implications for ecological theory

and feminist peace politics.

Bringing together insights gleaned from both social ecology and feminist

epistemology, King developed a way to rethink the self/other

relationship central to both ecology and feminism. In particular, King

drew from feminist theorists such as Nancy Chodorow, Gayle Rubin, and

Sherry Ortner, examining the historical implications of the Western

nature/culture dichotomy for the construction of gender.

For King, the woman/nature analogy was a social, rather than biological,

construction that she sought to historicize and appropriate as a way to

develop a feminist critique of the epistemological foundations of

Western society. According to King, this analogy was directly linked to

a “nature/culture split” which was in turn, tied to the domestic/public

dichotomy discussed by white feminists during the late 1960s and early

70s.[51] Again, departing from de Beauvoir, King called for women to

analyze the historical construction of that dichotomy as a way to

understand men’s alienation from “domestic” realms of nature and the

body, rather than for women to join men in the project of

“transcendence” over nature. However the failure of King (and of many

white feminists at the time) to problematize the domestic/public split

itself, left early ecofeminist theory vulnerable to critiques of

essentialism that continue today. As already stated, the tendency among

white feminists during those years to focus on the domestic/public

dichotomy reflected unexamined assumptions regarding the universality of

the structural causes of women’s subordination. Again, as theorists such

as bell hooks pointed out, poor women of color in the U.S. had always

been forced into the “public” sphere of work—without “transcending”

their oppression as women.

Yet while retaining this problematic domestic/public framework, King’s

approach to ecofeminism was profoundly radical in a variety of ways.

Social ecology had provided an explicitly revolutionary, anarchist, and

ecological lens through which King analyzed questions regarding

objectivity raised by feminist psychoanalytic theorists, scientists, and

anthropologists. Offering a way to ‘ecologize’ the Hegelian dialectic

between self and other, social ecology articulated the need for society

to create a relationship with the rest of the natural world marked by

degrees of cooperation, complementary, and ever greater levels of

freedom. Social ecology’s discussion of “unity in diversity” also

provided a way to reconcile the relationship between self and other by

articulating the possibility for recognizing both the differences and

connections between organic phenomena. Within the ‘ecologized’ dialectic

of social ecology, the self could be both related to, and distinct from,

the other.

King drew out the feminist implications of social ecology, exploring

non-hierarchical and anarchic ways of approaching self/other

relationships in domains of political and ecological organizing and

theory. In addition to teaching at the ISE, King went on to create the

first body of writing to be called explicitly “ecofeminist,” creating an

innovative synthesis of theories including social ecology, radical

feminist body politics, feminist critiques of science, feminist peace

politics, and critical theory.[52] Yet while King sought to integrate

feminist and social ecological theory, she articulated in turn, the need

for a feminist dimension to the theory of social ecology:

The perspective that self-consciously attempts to integrate both

biological and social aspects of the relationship between human beings

and their environment is known as social ecology... while this analysis

is useful, social ecology without feminism is incomplete. Feminism

grounds this critique of domination by identifying the prototype of

other forms of domination: that of man over woman.[53]

In this way, King drew out the feminist implications of social ecology,

exploring new ways of examining the relationship between systems of male

domination and ecological crises in general from a perspective informed

by social anarchism. Although feminists such as those in the WITCH

collective were drawing similar connections between oppressions almost a

decade earlier, King made the articulations between forms of social

hierarchy explicit, demonstrating their relationship to ecological

injustice.

King’s grounding in anarchist theory and social ecology allowed her to

avoid many of the epistemological traps into which feminists fell during

those years. Through a social ecological critique of hierarchy, she

recognized the need to abolish all forms of oppression, while

emphasizing as well, the potential for political collaboration between

women of different class, race, and ethnic backgrounds. King’s key role

in establishing WomanEarth, as well her participation in international

feminist forums such as the United Nations Conference on Women in

Nairobi in 1985, reflect her epistemological sensitivity to questions of

difference as well as her anarchistic appreciation of the need to

simultaneously fight against all forms of hierarchy and oppression.

King’s ecofeminism did more than just recognize the importance of making

connections between different forms of social and ecological injustice:

It recognized the importance of making connections between different

women all over the world to counter these interconnected crises.

Repeatedly in her writings, King expressed the need to create

face-to-face dialogue between women, both internationally and

cross-culturally within the United States, to create unified anti-racist

strategies to address women’s diverse struggles for social and

ecological justice.

Ecofeminism, Environmental Justice, and International

Environmentalism

To fully appreciate the historical distinctiveness of King’s

participation in multicultural and anti-racist projects such as

WomanEarth, we must locate it within a larger history of both the

feminist and ecology movements of the mid-1980s. As a mostly white

feminist movement was being challenged regarding problems of racism and

essentialism, the ecology movement was confronted on its exclusion of

the concerns and participation of communities of color. WomanEarth most

particularly reflected the simultaneity of these challenges as white

women active in both feminist and ecology movements began to prioritize

the issue of race within both the feminist and ecological agenda.

While WomanEarth was forming, two other forums emerged in which women

addressed questions of race, culture, class, and ecology: the

environmental justice movement and the movement surrounding feminist

international environmental politics. I include a discussion of these

movements as a way to depict the wider, politicized climate of the

environmental movement in which ecofeminism was located in the mid-1980s

to better contextualize concerns faced by ecofeminists during this time.

During the mid 1980s, the grassroots anti-toxics movement, which had

previously been composed of mostly white communities fighting toxic

dumping, also began to undergo a transformation. Activists of color who

had fought for decades against environmental injustices that targeted

their communities throughout the U.S., began to take leadership in this

movement, and within the wider environmental movement, linking questions

of social, political, and economic justice to the ecological question.

They began to recast issues previously regarded as ‘community’ or

‘social’ problems in ‘ecological’ terms. In so doing, they appropriated

an ecological discourse from which they had been marginalized.

The anti-racist wing of the environmental justice movement emerged in

response to the marginalization of people of color from the mainly white

ecological million. To mainstream white environmentalists,

community-based struggles of activists of color are often understood as

‘social’ rather than ‘environmental’.[54] Ongoing attempts within poor

communities of color to secure services such as paved streets, sewers,

indoor plumbing in addition to struggles for a pleasurable quality of

everyday life, have been largely ignored by mainstream environmentalists

as such issues often fall outside of, or between, the boundary that

separates ‘the city’ and ‘the country’; a boundary that exists within

the Euro-American environmental imagination. In this way, then, neither

the cityscape nor the poor rural community in which activists of color

work to achieve quality of life, fit white categories of ‘social’ and

‘environmental’. Indeed, according to activist and theorist Dorceta E.

Taylor, the myth that people of color are unconcerned with environmental

issues is allowed to continue due to the way that white mainstream

environmentalists frame and strategically address ecological

problems.[55]

However, by the late 1980s an environmental coalition of activists

emerged from within the African American, Native American, Puerto Rican,

Latino, and Asian and Pacific Islander communities: a coalition to fight

environmental racism. Environmental racism includes the official

sanctioning of polluting industries, poisons, and pollutants in

communities of color in addition to the exclusion of people of color

from environmental policy making, regulatory bodies, and from mainstream

environmental groups. Unlike mainstream environmentalism or deep

ecology, the struggle against environmental racism does not historically

emerge from an abstract or romantic desire for nature expressed as a

yearning to ‘protect’ a pre-social idea of nature, but from an

historical appreciation of the inseparable conditions of ecological and

social injustice.

Unlike early ecofeminist theory that emerged out of the analytical

framework of domestic/public or nature/culture, the environmental

justice movement tended to deploy categories defined in terms of race,

class, and culture. For activists in the environmental justice movement,

environmental problems are not seen to be the result of man’s alienation

from an embodied, domestic sphere identified with women. Instead,

environmental injustice is seen to be the consequence of a specifically

Western, racist, and capitalist society that has constructed itself at

the ecological and cultural expense of poor communities of color.

Thus, in the movement for environmental justice, we see another

expression of the desire for nature, a desire for ecological integrity

that reflects yet another set of identities and situations. Often

identifying as members of indigenous cultures or communities of color

struggling for survival, rather than as “feminists” (a term emerging out

of white middle-class context), a new wave of women leaders arose during

the 1980s, changing the ecological landscape in the U.S. Over the past

ten years, women such as Winona La Duke, Peggy Dye, Dorceta E. Taylor,

Vernice Miller, and Cynthia Hamilton have emerged as internationally

recognized leaders in the struggle to end environmental injustice.

According to Cynthia Hamilton:

Women often play a primary part in community action because it is about

things they know best. Minority women in several urban areas have found

themselves part of a new radical core as the new wave of environmental

action, precipitated by the irrationalities of capital intensive growth,

has catapulted them forward. These individuals are responding not to

nature in the abstract but to the threat to their homes and to the

health of their children.[56]

Women active in struggles against environmental racism have

particularized the ecological question with a politics grounded in an

analysis of history, capitalism, and racism. During a time when many

deep ecologists and mainstream environmentalists rarely speak of

capitalism as a factor in ecological and social devastation (referring

instead to euphemisms such as ‘technology’ ‘modern society’, or

‘industrial society’), environmental justice activists, such as Cynthia

Hamilton, have consistently named capitalism as a primary force behind

ecological and social injustice.

Women in the environmental justice movement became a source of

inspiration to white ecofeminists who, by the mid-1980s, were at a loss

for how to reconstitute an activist base for the movement. Indeed, in

contrast to the ecofeminist movement which was constituted in national

anti-militarist campaigns, women involved in the fight for environmental

justice were engaged in community based, struggles for cultural and

ecological justice tied to everyday issues ranging from land rights to

toxic waste. Yet while white ecologists have often been drawn to the

work of environmental justice activists such as Winona La Duke, often

seeking their endorsement of the movement, ecofeminism per se has not

held significant appeal or relevance to women engaged in local struggles

for community and cultural survival. Women in these movements tend to

identify as ‘community’ or ‘environmental’ rather than ‘feminist’

activists. Though the two groups are primarily led by women engaged in

ecological concerns, there has been little overlap between environmental

justice organizing and ecofeminism.

In turn, the continuing segregation of communities of color and white

communities, combined with unresolved tendencies toward white bias

within feminist theory, have greatly impeded the formation of coalitions

between white ecofeminists and women of color active in the

environmental justice movement. Within this context, WomanEarth

represented an important moment in ecofeminist history. Recognizing that

a multi-cultural, multi-racial project such as WomanEarth would require

intentional and careful planning involving both white women and women of

color from the beginning stages, WomanEarth signaled an attempt by

ecofeminists to address racial constraints that hindered the movement

from fulfilling its potential. Rare moments such as WomanEarth reflect

the racialized context of ecological politics in the U.S., complexifying

abstract notions of ‘woman’ and ‘nature’ that lingered within

ecofeminist theory during these years.

There has been considerably greater overlap between ecofeminists in the

North and women in South engaged in development discourse. This coming

together was originally facilitated by two international conferences

sponsored by the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women designed to

provide forums in which women could meet to discuss their economic and

social status in an international setting. Launched in 1975, the Decade

for Women intended to trace the improving status of poor women in the

Third World during the ten years of a UN funded development campaign.

However, the research instead revealed that the lives of many poor women

had actually worsened during the ten years, as women had to bear not

only the declining economic conditions brought on by a new phase of

neo-colonialism, but the ongoing burdens of sexism as well.[57]

At the end of the Decade, in 1985, the UN sponsored the Second UN

Conference on Women in Nairobi, stimulating unprecedented discussion

between northern and southern feminist activists, shedding light on the

global, diverse, and complex nature of women’s approaches to social and

ecological questions. The Nairobi conference signaled the beginning of a

new international phase of feminist activism and dialogue that, like the

publication of This Bridge, began to challenge universal categories of

gender, as well as domestic/public binaries, that marked white

ecofeminism in the U.S. In addition, as women in the South spoke

publicly about multiple issues of globalization, cultural identity, and

development, they began to challenge essentialist understandings of the

monolithic “Third World Woman” or “indigenous woman” that were embedded

within white feminism of the 1980s.

For many poor women in Third World situations, discussions of

“development” reflect a desire for ecological integrity, that in turn,

are born out of a particular set of identities and situations. For many

in the South, the desire for “nature” is rooted in an analysis and

critique of colonialism, global capital, sexism, and environmental

policy—rather than out of a nature/culture dualism. Within such

discussions, “nature” itself is a contentious ground owned and

controlled by international regulatory agencies, development agencies,

and trade agreements. In turn, “nature” also often represents a set of

agricultural, economic, medicinal, spiritual, and cultural practices

based on local knowledge built up over generations.

For women in subsistence economies, ecology often represents the

day-to-day articulations between an encroaching global capitalist

economy, governmental formations, and traditional organic cultural

symbolic practices. In turn, for many poor southern women undergoing

processes of proletarianization within newly emerging industrialized

contexts, ecological issues mean not only poisoned water and air, but

toxic work places where women are exposed to harmful chemicals,

over-work, and under-pay which keep women in a continual state of stress

and poverty.

Through international dialogue, women addressing issues surrounding

development began to articulate a “global feminism” that brings together

the economic, cultural, and ecological insights of women in both the

North and South. Vandana Shiva, one of the few environmental activists

from the South to identify with the term ‘ecofeminism’, has emerged as a

major voice in global feminist forums. In her work over the last fifteen

years, Shiva has articulated the struggles of women in rural India to

resist colonial policies of deforestation, agriculture, and land use. In

particular, as a socialist ecofeminist, Shiva has been instrumental in

elucidating issues relating to biotechnology and seed patenting, tying

issues of biotechnology to the larger struggle between neo-colonialism,

global capital, ecological sustainability, and women’s local

knowledge.[58]

The emergence of post-colonial feminist discussion in the mid-1980s

brought U.S. ecofeminists engaged in such forums into a transnational

feminist movement. Ecofeminists have assumed leadership in international

forums such as the Women’s Environment and Development Organization

(WEDO) which sponsored the World Women’s Congress for a Healthy Planet

in November of 1991. While WEDO is not an explicitly ecofeminist

organization, a distinct ecofeminist perspective is visible within their

literature that still emphasizes the woman/nature dichotomy and the

question of peace. Indeed, WEDO’s Declaration of Interdependence of 1989

is reminiscent of the Women’s Pentagon Action’s Unity Statement almost a

decade before:

It is our belief that man’s dominion over nature parallels the

subjugation of women in many societies, denying them sovereignty over

their lives and bodies. Until all societies truly value women and the

environment, their joint degradation will continue...Women’s views on

economic justice, human rights, reproduction and the achievement of

peace must be heard at local, national, and international forums,

wherever policies are made that could affect the future of life on

earth. Partnership among all peoples is essential for the survival of

the planet.

Yet while retaining some of the analytical categories of its earlier

“anti-militarist” days, U.S. ecofeminists in international forums such

as WEDO have sought to link questions of nature to issues of gender,

social justice, and health, thus expressing a desire for nature that

tends to be socially, rather than individually, based. Again, when we

compare WEDO’s Declaration to anti-humanist statements written by many

in the deep ecology movement during the late 1980s, we can better

appreciate the significance of ecofeminist attempts to raise questions

of “economic justice, human rights, reproduction, and the achievement of

peace” in relation to the question of ecology.

The shift from an ecofeminism derived from a U.S. based anti-militarist

movement to a transnational ecofeminism focused on questions of

development, complexified ecofeminist theory, both broadening and

grounding the idea of the ecological subject. As poor women in the South

inscribed issues of development, colonialism, and globalization as

‘ecological’, they unsettled universal assumptions often built into

northern ecofeminists’ “desires for nature.”

U.S. Ecofeminism of the Late 1980s and Beyond

While ecofeminists from the U.S. participated in international feminist

forums during the mid-1980s, an autonomous ecofeminist movement in their

own country began to wind down. The early years of U.S. ecofeminist

activity were for many the ‘high point’ of the movement’s history.

Punctuated by the Women and Life on Earth Conference, WPAs, Seneca Peace

Encampment, WomanEarth, and an array of local actions in the Northeast

and throughout the country, these short years in the early 1980s were a

time in which U.S. ecofeminism was particularly rooted in an activist

tradition originally constituted by the New Left.

Indeed, by the late 1980s, although many individual ecofeminists were

active in Green movements, struggles for animal rights, and forest

defense work, there was little to suggest that autonomous ecofeminist

activism would be revived. If ecofeminism did not take to the streets,

it took to the many literary and educational forums that would

proliferate over the next decade. The bursts of early ecofeminist

activity had captured the imaginations of a wide range of activists,

students, and scholars interested in feminist critiques of science,

environmentalism, animal rights, feminist theology, and feminist

philosophy, both within and outside of the academy. By the early 1990s,

there were three ecofeminist anthologies, an array of ecofeminist

journals, related books, major conferences, workshops and university

curricula that helped to further stimulate excitement about ecofeminism.

During this time, some left-oriented feminists noticed a problematic

tendency within the movement: its vague relationship to anarchist or

leftist politics. The ecofeminism introduced by King at the ISE was

linked to a vision of a non-hierarchical, ecological society free of

statist and capitalist social relations.[59] The Women’s Unity Statement

of the WPAs reflected this sentiment by challenging the power of the

state and capital through its defamation of the Pentagon, the U.S.

government, and multinational corporations.

From a social ecofeminist perspective, an ecofeminist perspective

informed by social ecology and social anarchism, the writings that

filled the pages of the first two major anthologies on ecofeminism were

disappointing indeed. Of the twenty-six chapters of the anthology

Healing the Wounds, published in 1989, there were only two authors,

Vandana Shiva and Ynestra King, who mentioned the words capitalism or

the state. Instead, writers pointed to the causes of ecological

destruction by appealing to terms such as “technology”, “patriarchal

rationality”, “economic motivation” and “industrialization.” For

instance, in her introduction to the anthology, Judith Plant describes

the causes of ecological destruction to be the result of a man’s world:

[T]he world is rapidly being penetrated, consumed, and destroyed by this

man’s world—spreading across the face of the earth, teasing and tempting

the last remnants of loving peoples with its modern glass

beads—televisions and tanks; filling the ears of poor peoples with

doublespeak about security, only to establish dangerous technology on

their homelands; voraciously trying to control all that is natural,

regarding nature as a natural resource to be exploited for the gain of a

few.[60]

In this passage, Plant points to the effects of, and social relations

within, a market economy by discussing the exploitative “gain of the

few.” Yet Plant fails to mediate her discussion of the causes of

ecological problems with categories of race, class, or with an

understanding of institutional forms of capitalist and state power.

Instead, she invokes universal notions such as this man’s world

(retained from radical feminist theory) that did not help to clarify her

political position.

During this time, some social ecofeminists, along with other

ecofeminists, also began to notice a minor, but notable, romantic

tendency within several ecofeminist writings that made the theory a

target for unending, and often unfair, criticisms of essentialism.[61]

The second major ecofeminist anthology, Reweaving the World (containing

essays written in the late 1980s),[62] was punctuated with several

unproblematized essentialisms regarding nature and culture. For example,

in her essay “Ecofeminism: Our Roots and Flowering,” Charlene Spretnak

described “the elemental power of the female”[63] appealing to an

essentialist notion of ‘gender’. In turn, while reflecting upon the day

on which she introduced her newborn daughter to the world of nature by

bringing her into the backyard of a Los Angeles hospital, Spretnak

conflates this act with that of ritual practiced by Omaha Indians:

I introduced her to the pine trees and the plants and the flowers, and

they to her, and finally to the pearly moon wrapped in a soft haze and

to the stars. I, knowing nothing then of nature-based religious ritual

or ecofeminist theory, had felt an impulse for my wondrous little child

to meet the rest of cosmic society...that experience was so disconnected

from life in a modern, technocratic society...(that) last year when I

heard about a ritual of Omaha Indians in which the infant is presented

to the cosmos, I waxed enthusiastic...but forgot completely that I, too,

had once been there, so effective is our cultural denial of

nature...[64] (emphasis added)

Spretnak’s text demonstrated the problem that surfaced as some

ecofeminists asserted universal notions of ‘nature’, ritual, and

cultural practice. As a middle-class white woman of Christian heritage,

Spretnak described giving birth to a child in a hospital in an

industrialized capitalist society in the U.S. The trees and plants on

the hospital grounds to which she introduced her child, represented a

‘nature’ that had been carefully crafted to convey culturally specific

understandings of what kinds of plants, grass, flowers, and ‘view’

should represent ‘nature’ within the setting of post-industrial Los

Angeles. Yet, despite the multiple layerings of time, place, and culture

that produced the hospital and its grounds, Spretnak described her

surroundings as part of a universal and essential “there” of the Omaha

Indians, to which “she, too,” once belonged.

I mention this example not to single out Spretnak, nor to construct an

essentialist ‘straw ecofeminist’, but to point to a tendency that

emerged as ecofeminist theory was integrated with particular strands of

feminist spirituality during the late 1980s. Trying to ‘reach’ for the

ecological in a well-meaning and spiritual way, several theorists failed

to sufficiently problematize categories of ‘woman’, ‘nature’, and

‘culture’. And, while the early 1990s brought eloquent anti-essentialist

critiques by theorists such as Val Plumwood and Karen Warren, a

popularized version of ecofeminist spirituality endured. Both within the

anti-feminist imaginary of those that wage what Greta Gaard refers to as

ecofeminist backlash, and within real instances of essentialist

ecofeminism outside of the academy, essentialist ecofeminism still

flourishes today.[65]

Although the 1990s have not brought a revival of an autonomous

ecofeminist movement in the U.S., the decade has given rise to a

promising new wave of ecofeminist activism and scholarship. Ecofeminist

critiques of deep ecology, initiated in the late 1980s, raised awareness

of sexism within such organizations as Earth First! and within forest

defense work, signaling increased participation by ecofeminists within

such movements. In turn, ecofeminists such as Greta Gaard and Marti

Kheel, engaged in animal rights activism, broadened the discussion to

include crucial insights into the social and cultural contexts

surrounding issues such as vegetarianism and hunting.[66] Within

feminist philosophy, ecofeminists such as Val Plumwood and Karen Warren

made significant strides in addressing and transcending problems of

essentialism within the theory. And quite recently, there have emerged

thoughtful and critical discussions of ecofeminist history by

ecofeminists such as Greta Gaard, Noël Sturgeon, and Chris Cuomo,

ushering in a new era of self-reflexivity by activists and scholars

within the movement itself.[67]

While not all of this activity emerged directly out of ecofeminism’s

originating tendencies, the contributions of the women involved in

ecofeminism’s early years are still very much felt today. The ‘desire

for nature’ within radical feminism, social ecology, environmental

justice, and international environmental politics gave rise to an

ecofeminism that still expresses an embodied and non-hierarchical

approach to the desire for nature that goes beyond individualistic and

romantic tendencies within the wider ecology movement. Overall,

ecofeminism has consistently offered a politicized and collective

expression of a social, rather than individual, desire for political and

ecological integrity. Striving to make connections between women’s

everyday lives and ecological degradation within the context of

hierarchy and oppression, ecofeminism has continued to push the radical

ecology movement forward by raising awareness of the ongoing need to

examine issues of gender, culture, race, class, and power.

As we look toward the next decade, we may begin to consider how to

continue to elaborate upon ecofeminist theory and action by building

upon and transcending the possibilities and problems presented by its

origins. By integrating new areas of ecofeminist scholarship with the

best of what its ‘originating traditions’ have to offer, we may begin to

explore the potentialities for creating an increasingly social ‘desire

for nature’ that can take U.S. passionately and thoughtfully into the

next century.

Part II: The Nature of Desire

Chapter Three — The Nature of Social Desire: Social Anarchism,

Feminism, and the Desire to be Social

To create a truly radical approach to ecological politics, we must move

discussions of ecology from the realm of romantic desire toward a new

kind of social desire for a just and ecological society. This chapter

represents a step toward that end by tracing developments within the

West of a desire to be social in the broadest sense, a kind of sociality

that highlights the potential for pleasure and meaning within a range of

social and cooperative activities. By exploring the social, rather than

individualistic or romantic side of desire, we may begin to understand

our place within a wider social and ecological community, understanding

in turn an expression of desire found in the history of social anarchism

and in the new social movements that began in the sixties. This ‘social

desire,’ or desire to be social, assumes a variety of forms ranging from

a nascent anarchist impulse of centuries ago, to an explicitly social

understanding of the erotic articulated within radical feminism of the

seventies and eighties. By exploring desire from a social perspective,

we may begin to appreciate new ways of constituting ourselves as

subjects capable of creating the ecological society we so desire.

Anarchism: The Desire to be Social

The anarchist tradition offers a rich and varied vision of an ethical

and cooperative new world. While offering a range of often conflicting

reconstructive visions, most anarchists share a value of mutualism and

sensuality, portraying humanity as potentially cooperative and sociable.

The most crude definition of modern anarchism is derived from the

literal translation of the term, without rule, which reduces anarchism

to a rejection of any kind of social, economic, or governmental

organization. However, anarchism has a far more nuanced history that

includes a variety of complex interpretations of exactly what without

rule means. For instance, while many anarchists agree on the need to

abolish the state, not all agree that all forms of governance should be

abolished. In turn, while most anarchists agree that capitalism should

be transcended, there exist a variety of interpretations regarding the

role of production and labor in creating the new society. Questions

regarding what kind of non-statist governance, or what kind of

non-capitalist economic system to adopt, remain to be sorted out by

anarchists today.

Beginning in the 13^(th) century with the Brethren of the Free Spirit,

through to the social anarchists of the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, and finally resurfacing in the counter-culture of the 1960s

and 1970s, the anarchist impulse has continued to offer a vision of

society based on a sensual and social understanding of the

potentialities of human nature and desire. Like liberalism, the social

tradition finds its roots within the womb of the old society, within the

Middle Ages of Europe. But while liberalism was marked by a capitalist

response to the breakdown of the feudal order, the early pre-anarchist

and anarchist impulse represents a response that was overwhelmingly

anti-capitalist. In turn, whereas most liberal theorists condoned the

emergence of the nation-state within Europe and North America, many

early anarchists opposed the formation of the state in general.

As early as the thirteenth century, Medieval socialists expressed a

nascent anarchist impulse. During this time, there developed a series of

popular sects ranging from religious and ascetic, to secular and

hedonistic. One sect in particular, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, was

marked by an undeniably pre-anarchist impulse. During the thirteenth and

fourteenth centuries, the Brethren of the Free Spirit formed a loose

confederation of sects in the Rhineland of central Germany.[68]

Resisting institutions of class in general, the Brethren of the Free

Spirit appeared primarily in towns marked by the struggle between the

artisan class and the rising class of bourgeois patricians. The Free

Spirit maintained that “a handmaiden or serf should sell their master’s

goods without his permission, and should refuse to pay tithes to the

Church.”[69]

Since the Brethren of the Free Spirit asserted that the Holy Spirit

dwelled within each person, they advised that grace should be derived

from the individual rather than from the Church. Promoting a hedonistic

way of life, the Brethren of the Free Spirit encouraged the pleasures of

sumptuous food, dress, and sexual promiscuity. Their emphasis on

sensuality represents a striking departure from other similar

pre-anarchist Medieval sects which merely promoted a kind of happiness

derived from adherence to an ascetic life. The Brethren of the Free

Spirit, like many hedonistic sects of the time, had begun to explore the

utopian and social dimensions of sensuality, articulating the

relationship between ideas of freedom and desire. As Bookchin points

out, the Free Spirit’s “concept of freedom was expanded from a limited

ideal of happiness based on the constraints of shared needs, into an

ideal of pleasure based on the satisfaction of desire.”[70]

Over the next several centuries more formal expressions of the anarchist

impulse developed, articulated in less hedonistic terms. Nonetheless,

the Brethren of the Free Spirit’s desirous tendency, retained within

many contemporary expressions of anarchism, linked the demand for desire

to the demand for social freedom.

Social Anarchism: The Dialectic of Desire and Structure

Although anarchism represents a varied and often misunderstood body of

ideas, it is possible to point to a tendency within anarchist history, a

social anarchism, that represents a challenge to classical liberal

precepts of individualism and competition, proposing instead values of

collectivity and cooperation. Social anarchism finds its origins in the

works of such thinkers as Pierre Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, Emma

Goldman, Errico Malatesta, and the Spanish Anarchists as well as

contemporary thinkers such as Murray Bookchin. Unlike their liberal

counterparts, these thinkers propose a cooperative vision of society

infused with constructive expressions of social desire.

Social anarchists unsettle the classical liberal assumption that human

nature is primarily individualistic and competitive. According to

classical liberal theorists such as Locke and Mill; the individual

exists prior to society, and society represents a social contract

between abstract individuals whose primary wish is to protect their own

self-interest. In contrast, for social anarchism, society emerges out of

both the material need for interdependence in addition to the desire to

be social. Assuming the social group before the individual, social

anarchism predicates the viability and pleasure of the individual upon

that of the social group as a whole. Social anarchism recognizes the

potential of individuals to mediate, rather than negate, their desire in

a way that reflects responsibility to the larger group. Individual

desire is both informed by the social group while also informing that

group, allowing individuality and sociality to be constitutive of a

social whole.[71] For Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta, the human

spirit is characterized by an implicit desire to be social: a desire

embedded in a matrix of symbolism, meaning, and self-sacrifice, that

cannot be reduced to material necessity.

...this need of a social life, of an exchange of thoughts and feelings,

has become for [human beings] a way of being which is essential to our

way of life and has been transformed into sympathy, friendship, love and

goes on independently of the material advantages that association

provides, so much so that in order to satisfy it one often faces all

kinds of suffering and even death.[72]

Unlike classical liberal theory that portrays competition for material

advantage as a primary human motivation, social anarchism identifies

competition as but one human proclivity nurtured by hierarchical

structures themselves. Further, social anarchism embraces a dialectical

understanding of the complementary relationship between individuals and

society.

For social anarchists, it is not ‘human nature’ in general, but

hierarchy in particular, that inhibits the potential for true social

maturity. It is social hierarchy that facilitates the emergence and

perpetuation of anti-social behaviors such as greed, competition,

alienation, and violence. In this way, social anarchism is not only a

philosophy of human ‘nature’; it is also a philosophy of social

structure. Ironically, social anarchists, parodied as ‘lovers of chaos’,

have often been extremely attentive to structure, for they realize that

particular forms of structure either inhibit or nurture positive human

potential for cooperation and sociality. For Goldman, the challenge for

social anarchists is to create structures that are free of ‘rule over’,

authority or hierarchy; to create structures that will restore to

humanity the possibility for mature and liberatory association:

...government, with its unjust, arbitrary, repressive measures, must be

done away with. Anarchism proposes to rescue the self-respect and

independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by

authority. Only in freedom can [human beings] grow to their full

stature. Only in freedom will [we] learn to think and move, and give the

very best of ourselves. Only in freedom will we realize the true force

of the social bonds which knit us together, and which are the true

foundation of a normal social life.[73]

Indeed, social anarchists do not embrace a naively optimistic view of

human nature. In fact, they often maintain a keen and sober

understanding of the potential for individuals to abuse power when

placed in positions of authority. If social anarchists are optimistic

about anything, it is about the potential to create modes of social

organization that bring out the very best in humanity. For social

anarchism, it is not that people are always good or altruistic. Rather,

social anarchism appreciates the fact that centralized and hierarchical

structures allow those who are anti-social to make everyone else’s lives

miserable.

Desire and structure, then, work together dialectically so that the

creation of socially desirable structures allows for the constructive

expression of desire. It is out of social empathy and rationality,

impulses that cultivate a movement toward the joy and freedom of the

collective, that social anarchists create structures that allow the most

freedom and expression to the widest number of people. And from the

anarchist emphasis on structure flows an attention to the quality of the

means as well as the end. While more authoritarian theories, such as

Marxism, posit the state as a transitional and necessary structure,

social anarchists do not tolerate expressions of hierarchy at any point

in the revolutionary process. For social anarchism, the revolution

itself represents an educational process that transforms each individual

into the kind of person desirable for the new society. In order for this

gradual transformation to take place, the process of revolution must

embody the same values and structure of the good society itself.

Social anarchism focuses both on improving the quantitative material

aspects of life and on improving the qualitative, sensual aspects of

life. Expanding the revolutionary vista to include demands for roses as

well as bread, social anarchism emphasizes the desire for beauty,

pleasure, and self-expression in addition to emphasizing the desire for

economic abundance and social cooperation. For Goldman, the process by

which we transform society must be infused with degrees of meaning,

sensuality, and pleasure that will characterize the new society we

struggle to create. Her often quoted statement, “If I can’t dance in

your revolution, I’m not coming,” stands as an emblem of the social

anarchist appreciation for the crucial role that desire plays in the

political struggle.[74]

New Left Desire: Social Desire Within the New Social Movements

Goldman’s appeal for a revolution that makes room for dancing, a

revolution that answers to the call of desire as well as need, was

largely overshadowed by the Marx-influenced movements of the Old Left.

For Marx, it is through material production that society achieves

freedom from conditions of universal scarcity or need. Thus, it

identified social relations of production as the primary focus for

revolutionary activity.

With the emergence of the New Left, however, we see a revival of an old

anarchist sensibility: a proclivity to widen the political agenda beyond

ideas of need and social relations of production to re-encounter

understandings of desire and social relations in general. In the United

States, the civil rights, anti-war, student, and women’s movements,

demonstrated a new political sensibility that stretched the

productionist perimeters of the Old Left. Critiquing racial and sexual

inequality, U.S. military aggression, and the rationalization of

consumer capitalism, a new culture cried out against such institutions

as racism, the government, the military, the university, the church, and

the nuclear family. The dual appeals to anti-authoritarianism and desire

constituted a qualitative sensibility that gave the New Left its

anarchic flavor. Disenchanted with the current social order, American

youth demanded a quality of life that was sensually engaging. By the

early sixties, the movement had transformed the landscape of the Old

Left, creating a new sensibility that resonated with that of the

Brethren of the Free Spirit from centuries before.

The anarchist sensibility of the American New Left re-articulated the

concept of social desire as an expression of desire informed by a social

and political vision. While the civil rights movement called for an end

to racial inequality, it also made pleas for universal ‘brotherly love’

and compassion; while the anti-war movement called for an end to

military aggression, it also appealed to ideas of sexual and sensual

liberation, painting placards with the slogan, ‘make love not war’. The

qualitative flavor of these events, emphasizing the quality of social

relationships and artistic and sensual expression, represented a

rejection of a society hat had been eviscerated by a post-war era of

gross commodification and social conformity.

The civil rights movement, whose ideals are most equated with the

brilliant speeches of Martin Luther King, were also articulated within

the literature of essayist and novelist James Baldwin. While Baldwin, as

an African American gay man, addressed the need to overcome the material

injustices of racism, sexism, and classism, he also wrote prolifically

of the vital role that creativity and sensuality play in the struggle

for society to reclaim its humanity. Like others of the New Left,

Baldwin was critical of the qualitative impoverishment that

characterized Anglo-American culture, an impoverishment that led many

white Americans to appropriate the cultural riches of African American

culture without questioning racial injustice. For Baldwin, the struggle

to overcome cultural and social impoverishment intensified by racism

entailed a qualitative reconfiguration of the psychic world itself. To

overcome racism, Baldwin reasoned, white Americans must transform not

only structural, but aesthetic and psychic practices, addressing deeper

cultural and sensual longings:

[Racial] tensions are rooted in the very same depths as those from which

love springs, or murder. The white man’s unadmitted, and apparently, to

him, unspeakable—private fears and longings are projected onto the

Negro. The only way he can be released from the Negro’s tyrannical power

over him is to consent, in effect, to become black himself, to become

part of that suffering and dancing country that he now watches wistfully

from the heights of his lonely power and, armed with spiritual

traveler’s checks, visits surreptitiously after dark.[75]

In the literary works of Baldwin we witness a valorization of social

desire: an acknowledgment of the transformative role that desire, art,

and empathy may play in remaking society itself. For Baldwin, the role

of the artist is to “illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that

vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its

purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling

place.”[76] Baldwin displayed a unique ability to seamlessly integrate

themes of creativity and empathy within the political project,

elaborating a new sensual-political sensibility that was to unfold

throughout the course of the decade.

A focus on the qualitative dimensions of social transformation can also

be found in the writings of Murray Bookchin. Whereas an explicit

anarchism in the U.S. had been eclipsed by socialist movements of the

pre-war period, anarchist thought was reintroduced in Bookchin’s

canonical work, Post-Scarcity Anarchism.[77] Written during the late

sixties, the essays in Post-Scarcity heralded the potential for what

Bookchin called a “social libido,” a radical integration of reason and

passion that he hoped would be fulfilled within the new social

movements. While Bookchin emphasized the need to overcome material

necessity, he also asserted the importance of expanding the

revolutionary horizon to encompass qualitative concerns as well:

...the revolution can no longer be imprisoned in the realm of Need. It

can no longer be satisfied merely with the prose of political economy.

The task of the Marxian critique has been completed and must be

transcended. The subject has entered the revolutionary project with

entirely new demands for experience, for re-integration, for

fulfillment, for the merveilleux [marvelous].[78]

What we see in Bookchin’s early writings is an attention to the

qualitative and subjective dimensions of the revolution, dimensions that

could not be accounted for by Marxist-based theories that dissolved the

individual into essentialist categories of history or society. As

Bookchin states so passionately, “A revolution that fails to achieve a

liberation of daily life is counterrevolution. The self must always be

identifiable in the revolution, not overwhelmed by it.”[79] For

Bookchin, questions of desire and need constitute a complementary matrix

through which to reconstruct society as a whole: while countering the

fabricated scarcity of the post-war period by constructing social and

political counter-institutions (institutions and practices such as

decentralized participatory democracy, municipal economics, and

ecological technologies), revolutionaries must infuse these new

cooperative and decentralized structures with creativity and

sensuality—a vitality that he recognized within the “social libido” of

the new social movements.

During the same period, in Europe, a similar sensibility emerged,

culminating in the May 1968 revolt in Paris. In 1957, inspired by

earlier aesthetic movements such as the Symbolist, Dadaist, and

Surrealist movements, a group of avant-garde artists and writers from

across Europe formed the Situationists International (SI). While

situationist writer Guy Debord called for an end to the passive

spectatorship of consumer capitalism, Raoul Vaneigem, joining the SI in

1962, called for a “revolution of everyday life.”[80] While retaining a

Marxian emphasis on production (promoting a program of workers

councils), the SI departed from Marx by broadening the revolutionary

focus to include a wide range of qualitative, aesthetic, and sexual

demands. Articles published in Internationale Situationiste convey the

spectrum of political and cultural concerns, ranging from questions of

urban planning (referred to as ‘urban geography’); artistic intervention

(which included public poetry writing and graffitti); critiques of

cinema and language; political responses to the Vietnam and Algerian

wars; and the situations in China and the Middle East.[81]

Distinctive of the SI was the ability to infuse an urban idiom of

political reconstruction with a poetic idiom of everyday life. In a

communiqué delivered during the 1968 occupation of the Sorbonne, the SLs

“Occupation Committee of the Autonomous and Popular Sorbonne University”

advised others to disseminate slogans by:

...leaflets, announcements over microphones, comic strips, songs,

graffiti, balloons on paintings in the Sorbonne, announcements in

theaters during films or while disrupting them, balloons on subway

billboards, before making love, after making love, in elevators, each

time you raise your glass in a bar.[82]

The committee’s list of slogans, including “occupy the factories,” “down

with the spectacle-commodity society,” “abolish alienation,” and

“humanity won’t be happy until the last bureaucrat is hung with the guts

of the last capitalist,” reflects an analysis grounded in a set of

cultural, political, and economic concerns.[83] The SI called for

ordinary people to “construct situations” within urban centers to awaken

others from the deep sleep of capital and state-induced passivity. In

this spirit, they called for the construction of aesthetic and political

activities such as street theater, poetry, and graffiti, as well as

public ‘play’ or ‘games’. Unsettling vernacular distinctions between

actor and audience, spectators and spectacle, so integral to consumer

society, the SI promoted a sensual and creative re-activation of a

desire that had been blunted by life in a bureaucratic and capitalist

society, a desire that would engender a new political and social

reality:

The really experimental direction of situationist activity consists in

setting up, on the basis of more or less clearly recognized desires, a

temporary field of activity favorable to these desires. This alone can

lead to the further clarification of these primitive desires, and to the

confused emergence of new desires whose material roots will be precisely

the new reality engendered by the situationist constructions.[84]

However, despite these promising expressions of social desire, by the

end of the decade the social potentiality of this renewed desire

remained unfulfilled. Between the early sixties and the Woodstock years,

crucial tensions inherent within the new social movements in both the

U.S, and in Europe came to the surface. Tensions between ‘individualism’

and ‘individuality’, tensions between an ardent egoism and a sense of

selfhood grounded in a wider social consciousness and commitment

emerged, making the movement susceptible to commercial appropriation.

There is, indeed, always a tendency for social desire to ‘break off’

from the social and political project, expressing itself through

cultural practices that emphasize individual satisfaction over the

political project to liberate society as a whole. The tendency toward

‘me-ism’, so endemic to liberal capitalism in general, makes any

qualitatively oriented social movement potential grist for the

capitalist mill: the potential desire for social and political

opposition is too often corralled into the desire for

pseudo-oppositional fashion, music, and other expressions of

life-style.[85]

In the case of anarchism, this tension may be attributed, in part, to an

historical and unresolved relationship to the social contract theory of

such classical liberals as John Locke and John Stuart Mill, and to the

individualistic existentialism of Nietzsche. While social anarchism

emphasizes the idea of an individual dependent upon and constitutive of

a social whole, there exists among some anarchists, a liberal and

existential tendency to view the individual as prior to, or independent

of, the collective. And paradoxically, the individualist tendency within

anarchism resonates with the liberal capitalist subject: an individual

committed to promoting its own self-interest and pleasure. Hence,

challenging the Marxian emphasis on production and need, an anarchist

impulse surfaced within the new social movements in the U.S. and Europe,

giving rise to a renewed expression of social desire. However, as the

decade wore on, the dialectic of need and desire was upstaged by the

dialectic between individualism and cooperation, a dialectic that

yielded finally to a grossly commodified Woodstockian counter-culture

based on individualistic cultural indulgence.

Yet, while the new social movements of the sixties were unable to fully

actualize their potential to sustain and elaborate a truly politicized

expression of social desire, they did achieve some remarkable feats.

Critical of modern post-war society, the new social movements offered an

approach to qualitative questions that was quite progressive in nature.

Instead of blaming ‘humanity’, or a failed consciousness for social and

cultural malaise, figures like James Baldwin, Murray Bookchin, and

groups like the SI identified problems of economic and political

structure, while attending to qualitative themes of desire, creativity,

and ‘love’.

Finding their roots in the Old Left, the anti-war, civil rights,

women’s, and Situationist movements were able to circumvent degrees of

abstraction and romanticization that undermine the potential of the

radical ecology and mainstream environmental movements today. Indeed,

the SI was not constrained by a backward-looking critique of modernity,

a critique that juxtaposed an idealized rural past to an inherently

flawed and fallen city. Instead, they proposed a reclamation of all that

was liberatory within the modern city, a celebration of

self-determination and poetry that could reinvigorate an urban life

eviscerated not by ‘modernity’ and ‘technology’, but by state

bureaucracy and capitalism. Bypassing a regressive anti-modernism, the

new social movements offered a bold expression of social desire: a

demand for new liberatory structures infused with sensuality and empathy

rather than a sentimental plea to return to a pre-fallen world.

Feminist Eros: Second-Wave Desire

While the theme of desire was articulated within ‘mixed’ movements of

the New Left, it was steadily being developed by an emerging radical

feminist movement as well. Like social anarchism, feminists of the New

Left demonstrated the need to transform the qualitative as well as the

quantitative dimensions of society. Departing from their liberal

feminist predecessors and contemporaries, a new breed of radical

feminists sought more than just material and institutional justice and

equality with men within the present society. In addition to justice,

they demanded a free society in which women could create themselves anew

on a qualitative level, innovating new forms of aesthetics, political

organizing, theory, and sensuality.

As we have seen earlier, the second wave of feminism emerged within the

context of the New Left, which at its inception was dominated by a

needs-oriented approach to social change. And, while an anarchist

dimension emerged within the New Left, there also flourished the

influence of Marxism, Maoism, and other forms of socialist thought,

yielding a rationalized, instrumental approach to politics that

alienated many women within the movement. While leftist politicos fought

for the satisfaction of material need, women were often told that the

more qualitative changes that they sought were irrelevant to the “big

work” of revolution.

Women grew critical of the contradictions between the New Left’s values

of equality and the hierarchical structures that characterized a

majority of New Left organizations. The new student movement,

positioning its materialist goals within the realm of necessity, often

rationalized the deployment of hierarchical and authoritarian means to

execute its plans for achieving justice. Here the relationship between

needs and authority surfaced as the preoccupation with filling urgent

‘necessary’ needs led to an ends justifies the means approach to social

change. As is often the case, a focus on ‘necessary ends’ tends to bring

revolution into a more authoritarian mood as the goal of abolishing need

is used to legitimize the implementation of authoritarian methods.

A women’s liberation movement responded to the authoritarian and

instrumental tendency in the New Left, uncovering a wider revolutionary

project, one that integrated need with desire and ends with means. In

addition to fighting for ‘freedom from’ economic oppression and male

violence, women in the movement began to fight for a new articulation of

desire. This new desire was framed as ‘freedom to’ pursue a range of

sensual, creative, and political satisfactions, emerging from a

sensitivity to the qualitative dimensions of social and political life.

The Psychology of Desire: Toward a Social Eros

While giving rise to a ‘cultural feminism’, radical feminism also

ventured into such arenas as feminist sociology and psychoanalytic

theory. By the late 1970s, feminist critiques of Freudian theories

flourished, critiques that explored the implications of patriarchy for

the construction of understandings of desire. Feminist sociologists and

psychoanalytic theorists such as Nancy Chodorow and Jessica Benjamin

were among the many whose writings had tremendous implications for a

feminist reconstruction of desire.[86] In particular, these theorists

examined the transformation of the qualitative dimensions of women’s

psychology, unsettling liberal and individualistic understandings of

desire.

The search for a new understanding of desire reflects the quest for a

qualitatively better way of being that these new theorists hoped would

be more cooperative, non-hierarchical, and supportive of women’s

self-expression. Theorists explored the possibility of a feminist Eros,

what I call a socio-erotic, a continuum of social and sensual desires

endowed with ethical, personal, and political meaning. While

traditionally the word ‘desire’ has had both sexual and social meaning,

the word ‘erotic’ has maintained an exclusively sexual definition. By

attributing a social meaning to the ‘erotic’, theorists translated

understandings of satisfaction and pleasure into non-sexual realms such

as work and friendship, endowing, ‘the erotic’ with the vernacular

qualities of everyday life.

In 1970, Shulamith Firestone articulated an understanding of the erotic

that included a broader range of specifically social passions. In her

groundbreaking book, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case For Feminist

Revolution,[87] Firestone called for a wider demand for everyday

pleasure, challenging “the concentration of sexuality into highly

charged objects, signifying the displacement of other social/affection

needs onto sex.”[88] In a spirit akin with the Situationists, Firestone

called for a re-invigoration of desire within an otherwise deadening

everyday world:

Eroticism is exciting...life would be a drab routine without at least

that spark. That’s the point. Why has all joy and excitement been

concentrated, driven into that one narrow, difficult-to-find alley of

human experience, and all the rest laid to waste? There’s plenty to go

around [within] the spectrum of our lives.[89]

Soon, other feminists began to articulate the relationship between a

narrow understanding of the erotic and an impoverished quality of

everyday life within patriarchy. Critical of a process of socialization

that teaches women to vicariously enjoy the pleasure of men and

children, the movement demanded a broader range of social passions, both

personal and political. Feminists began to expand the definition of the

erotic, accommodating a new spectrum of sensual and social demands.

The feminist quest for a ‘social desire’ ran parallel to the critique of

male defined desire and rationality as feminist theorists explored the

psychological construction of the liberal male subject. Questioning

ideas of male desire and behavior, theorists critiqued such institutions

as ‘romance’, tying the concept to the problem of male domination in

general. For Firestone, romantic desire constituted “a cultural tool of

male power to keep women from knowing their condition, a cultural tool

to reinforce sex-class,” a form of “gallantry” that keeps women from

recognizing their subordinated position “in the name of love.”[90] In

turn, feminist ethicists such as Carol Gilligan and Mary Belenky began

to challenge the rationality of the liberal subject. For these thinkers,

a male approach to epistemological questions, precludes ethical ways of

knowing often characteristic of women and others marginalized from the

public sphere of liberal capitalist society.[91]

As these theorists unraveled the male subject of liberal capitalist

society, they uncovered a subject who possessed a rationality reduced to

cool instrumentality, an individualism reduced to egoistic autonomy, and

a competitive impulse coddled to the point of infantile aggression. Such

a male subject, they reasoned, to function effectively within a

repressive capitalistic society, required a dispassionate and

unempathetic psychology: a detached posture conducive to a tolerance for

competition.[92] Accordingly, feminists reasoned that it was women’s

marginalization from capitalist practice that allowed them to maintain

degrees of ‘relationality’. Within the female subject, these theorists

uncovered a psychology more relational than autonomously egoistic, more

empathetic than competitive: an understanding of selfhood derived from

women’s socialized role within the relational world of the home.

Excluded from the realm of entrepreneurial competition, these theorists

maintained, women had retained vital aspects of their humanity.

This discussion of women’s relational orientation was accompanied by an

exploration of expressions of ‘relational desire’. In 1978, sociologist

Nancy Chodorow wrote The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and

the Sociology of Gender,[93] challenging the ‘biological’ origin of

women’s desire to mother. Exploring the social construction of a female

‘relational self’, Chodorow suggested that the same socialization

process that led girls to want to become mothers also led girls to

desire more ‘relationality’ in general. Suggesting an idea of a

‘relational desire’, Chodorow shed light on a desire distinct from a

sexual desire for men, a desire for connection with women friends,

sisters, and mothers. While historically women’s desire had been

primarily defined as either an irrational and carnal desire for men or

as a self-less yearning to nurture children, Chodorow opened a window

into a world where women desired other women, expressing a desire that

could be constructive, relational, and social.

Chodorow was among the first to examine the very mechanisms by which

women develop the desire to care for others, challenging the assumed

primacy of the male figure in the formation of female desire. While

Freud asserted that little girls invariably desire to bond with their

fathers, Chodorow asserted that it is the mother that girls primarily

desire: Whereas the mother is the primary caretaker during the early

years of a child’s life, she forms a primal bond and identification with

her daughter; and it is from this bond that the mother becomes the

prototype for women’s lifelong relationships with other women. Thus, for

Chodorow, while most little girls are socialized to become genitally

heterosexual, they often maintain a strong and primal desire to bond

socially with other women.

Feminist psychoanalytical theorist Jessica Benjamin also explored

women’s desire, unsettling the liberal portrayal of desire as inevitably

individualistic and competitive. In her book The Bonds of Love:

Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination,[94] Benjamin

revealed a relational desire between a mother and her newborn. According

to Benjamin, early child development can be seen as a dynamic

development: a process potentially marked by increasing degrees of

mutuality and cooperation between mother and child, a mutualism that may

in turn lead to increasing levels of cooperation and greater selfhood

for both. Displacing the idea of an ‘innate’ capitalist inclination for

competition and hyper-individualism, Benjamin posited the possibility

that we are born with the potential for social desire.

In pursuit of a social side of desire, Benjamin challenged the

neo-Freudian theory of Margaret Mahler that portrays early child

development as an inevitable conflict between mother and child; a

conflict marked by a process of ‘individuation’ that entails that the

child ‘negate’ its connection to its mother by separating from her. In

contrast to Mahler, Benjamin proposed that the child actually develops

in cooperation with the mother within a nurturing process of mutual

recognition. In this way, Benjamin challenged the liberal, capitalist

bias within Mahler’s theory, a bias that privileged the idea of

individual autonomy over the idea of a potentially cooperative and

relational self. In Benjamin’s view, individual development occurs

within the context of a social desire for connectedness. In her studies

of early child development, she documented moments of mutualism and

cooperation between mother and child:

Frame by frame analysis of mothers and babies interacting reveals the

minute adaptation of each partner’s facial and gestural response to the

other: mutual influence. The mother addresses the baby with the

coordinated action of her voice, face, and hands. The infant responds

with his whole body, wriggling or alert, mouth agape or smiling broadly.

Then they may begin a dance of interaction in which the partners are so

attuned that they move together in unison.[95]

In this ‘dance of interaction’, Benjamin saw a way of relating untainted

by inherent conflict between self and other. Moreover, for Benjamin,

early experiences of mutual recognition “prefigure the dynamics of

erotic life.”[96] In sexual, erotic union, she maintained, we can

experience that form of mutual recognition in which both partners lose

themselves in each other without a loss of self, losing

self-consciousness without loss of awareness.

Benjamin described a desire both to know and be known, a desire that is

not only sexual, but is profoundly social and relational, a longing to

become part of another while retaining individuality. This process of

mutual recognition represents a ‘socio erotic’ dance of separateness and

connection, a nuanced dialogue which actually enhances and develops the

subjectivity of both dancers. Far from the liberal Freudian drama in

which every self is assumed to desire either complete merging with or

annihilation of the other self, Benjamin proposes a mutualistic and

cooperative understanding of selfhood, a proposal that has revolutionary

implications. Ultimately, Benjamin suggests a potential for a

subjectivity that is socially prepared to be cooperative rather than

biologically driven to compete; a subject equipped to engage in a

socially and ecologically cooperative world.

However, while Chodorow and Benjamin challenged the biological argument

for an ‘inherent’ competitive human nature and desire, their failure to

fully historicize and politicize their argument limited the utopian

potential of their conclusions. Using the white, middle-class, nuclear

family as their subject, both Chodorow and Benjamin generalized from

this subject to the rest of humanity. Indeed, both theorists

insufficiently problematized the modern ‘invention’ of the nuclear

family and were thus unable to adequately situate their study

historically. Further, their proposals to create more cooperative and

relational subjectivities did not sufficiently address the need for deep

institutional change that extends beyond the nuclear family itself.

Rather than challenge capitalist and state structures that nurture

competitive and individualistic practices, the authors focused on

retooling the parenting dynamics within the nuclear family.

Yet again, we may appreciate the emergence of an attempt to propose a

new understanding of human nature and desire. Like the Situationists and

social anarchists before them, these feminists looked beyond a

reactionary ‘returnist’ outlook toward a reconstructive possibility of

creating a new kind of subject able to cooperate and live harmoniously

with others. Although neither theorist identifies as anarchist, both

Chodorow and Benjamin expressed an implicitly anarchist challenge to the

idea that hierarchy, hyper-individuation and domination are inherent,

necessary, and universal. Rejecting romantic notions of selfhood,

notions predicated on a self that finds love and security only through a

dialectic of predation and protection, these theorists offer the

possibility of a kind of sociality marked by mutualism, a desire to see

the other as part of, yet excitingly distinct from, the self.

Toward a Socio-Erotic

Drawing inspiration from new psychoanalytic understandings of desire,

other feminist theorists explored the radical potential of community,

empathy, and a new way of being in the world. One of the most striking

contributions of this new feminist culture was a new perspective on

female sexual desire. The idea of female sexuality, framed historically

as the realm of competition over men, of romance, and sexual domination,

was now framed as the feminist desire to bond with other women, a desire

to form mutualistic relationships poised on the intersection between

autonomy and connection.[97] This new concept of woman-bonding acquired

new meaning within the context of an emerging ‘lesbian feminism’ that

captured the imagination of many feminists in the New Left, engendering

new understandings of eroticism.

From the late sixties through to the early eighties, several feminists

initiated discussions about a specifically ‘lesbian’ desire that was to

be both sexual and social. In 1980, Adrienne Rich played a primary role

in highlighting the social dimension of lesbian desire in her

ground-breaking article, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian

Existence”.[98] Drawing from Chodorow, Rich challenged the idea of

women’s innate desire for men. In this essay, Rich uncovered a continuum

of non-sexual forms of bonding between women that have always existed

within the context of patriarchy, despite the attempts of patriarchal

institutions and practices to guarantee exclusive male access to women’s

attention and affection.[99]

Introducing the concept of the “lesbian continuum,” Rich articulated a

wide spectrum of social and sexual desires that women have expressed to

each other throughout history. Rich encouraged feminists to expand the

concept of ‘lesbianism’ to include a wider variety of relationships

between women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, bonding

against male tyranny, sharing of political support, resisting

heterosexual marriage, and choosing, instead, female friendship.[100]

As the term lesbian has been held to limiting, clinical associations in

its patriarchal definition, female friendship and comradeship have been

set apart from the erotic, thus limiting the erotic itself. But as we

deepen and broaden the range of what we define as lesbian existence, as

we delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover the erotic in

female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body

or solely to the body itself.[101]

While Rich’s concept of the lesbian continuum was highly controversial

(accused by many of de-emphasizing the specificity of the oppression

faced by women involved in same sex relationships), it constitutes a

significant and historical attempt to recognize degrees of autonomy,

intensity, and sociality within women’s relationships; relationships

that, according to Rich, have been consistently trivialized,

discouraged, and obstructed throughout history. For Rich, women’s desire

to bond with, and care for, other women, is essential to the process of

reconstructing society: Activities such as female friendship and

mothering should be valorized for their potential to make social life

more pleasurable, meaningful, and cooperative.

In 1978, Audre Lorde, feminist anti-racist activist, theorist, and poet

articulated one of the most innovative and influential positions on

women’s social desire in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as

Power”.[102] In this landmark work, Lorde explored the erotic as a

creative force, a way of knowing and being that becomes warped and

distorted by racism, sexism, and other expressions of social hierarchy.

For Lorde, the erotic constitutes a spectrum of social and sensual

satisfactions ranging from the joy of engaging in passionate

conversation to the pleasure of cooperative and meaningful work. In

“Uses of the Erotic”, Lorde was the first to explicitly develop a

feminist ‘erotic’ that is social and sensual, endowed with revolutionary

implications.

Audre Lorde’s primary contribution to ‘desirous discourse’ was to

explicitly broaden the definition of the erotic to include a spectrum of

everyday practices. Unlike Freud, who examined the infusion of an often

destructive sexual erotic into the realm of everyday life, Lorde

highlighted the constructive potential of a social desire that could

restore to everyday life dimensions of mutualism and creativity. And

while Lorde did not identify as an anarchist, her concept of the erotic

suggests an anarchist view of human nature, implying too, the utopian

potentiality of desire. According to Lorde, “in order to perpetuate

itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources

of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for

change.”[103] The sources of power, then, to which Lorde refers,

constitute an anarchist impulse, a proclivity toward non-hierarchy that

is quashed by hierarchical systems of power. In this way, Lorde endows

the erotic with an ethical dimension, establishing it as a quality of

being against which all of our actions may be measured for ethical

content and meaning. Lorde describes the erotic as an impulse that moves

women to take creative and courageous action to fight racism and sexism

to change the world. Lorde’s erotic represents a creative and social

force reminiscent of the “social bonds which knit us together” described

by Emma Goldman nearly a half-century before.[104]

The revolutionary implications of Lorde’s essay unfold as we follow its

logic to its most reasonable conclusions: if we were to demand from our

everyday lives the same pleasure and passion that we hope to find in

sexuality, then we would have to make some pretty profound institutional

changes. If such institutions as racism, sexism, capitalism, and the

state make misery out of our work and political engagement, in turn

making a misery out of our social, familial, and sexual relationships;

if hierarchy and authority inhibit the cultivation of creativity,

participation, and pleasure, then surely, fighting to restore the erotic

means nothing short of a social and political revolution:

For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin

to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in

accordance, with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our

erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize

all aspects of our existence; forcing us to evaluate those aspects

honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this

is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to

settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor

the merely safe.[105]

Lorde’s essay conveys a desire to resist that which obstructs a free

expression of creativity, political empowerment, and collectivity. It

suggests that within all of us is a potential for a desire that is

bigger than just sexual appetite. It is the appetite for efficacy in a

world which de-skills us, a hunger for a kind of revolutionary

competence. Lorde asserts that beneath layers of self-hatred, there

often lies an untapped body of self-love and courage which could emerge

into a revolutionary force so vast that it could transform not only

women but the social and political landscape with its fierce

intelligence. Hence, in “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, Lorde

offers an invitation to women to demand pleasure, passion, and

creativity in more aspects of their lives. By expanding the idea of

desire, Lorde touched the wide range of social desires of many women.

Finally, feminist explorations of desire permeated a spectrum of

literary genres. Indeed, both Lorde and Rich, women whose poetry,

fiction, and theory enriched a radical feminist literary canon, were

complemented by the works of other women committed to carving out new

understandings of subjectivity and desire. In particular, this impulse

found literary fulfillment within the fiction, theory, and poetry of

Alice Walker, particularly within her novel, The Color Purple, published

in 1982.[106]

In this story, Celie, a young African American woman comes of age,

discovering within herself an erotic impulse, both sensual and

revolutionary. Within the course of the novel, Celie falls in love with

“Shug Avery,” a sensual and spiritual mentor, who helps Celie to

recognize her own intelligence, talent, and capacity for love. It is

within the matrix: of the relationship between these two women that

Celie comes to experience Benjamin’s mutual recognition: the experience

of being recognized fully while recognizing the other. After a life of

subjugation by men, Celie rises to claim her own power as the forces of

sensuality, mutualism, and autonomy come together, bringing her to a

state of self-love. Separating from ideologies of racism, sexism, and

Christianity, Celie is finally free to see “the color purple,” a

metaphor for the new erotic Shug teaches Celie to recognize within her

own body and in the rest of the natural world.

In the character of Shug Avery, Walker articulates a new understanding

of the erotic that has anarchistic implications. No longer a stingy

authoritarian creator, Shug’s ‘god’ becomes a fecund, non-hierarchical

and creative natural process to be enjoyed through sensuality,

sexuality, and pleasure. In one passage, Shug explains to Celie the

potential for complementarity between sensuality and ethics saying, “Oh

God love all them [sexual] feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God

did. And when you know God loves ‘em you enjoys ‘em a lot more. You can

just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking

what you like.”[107]

In The Color Purple, Walker displaces the romantic dialectic of

predation and protection that characterizes most love relationships in

literature. In her offer of love, Shug makes no pretense of

‘protection’. Rather, she assists Celie as she faces the realities of

her own oppression, encouraging Celie to claim her own freedom. In turn,

Shug is no romantic hero ‘gallantly’ constraining her desire for Celie.

Instead, she proudly offers to Celie her own sexuality in an ethics of

‘impurity’. In this way, Shug celebrates her own body and the natural

world appealing to a sexual ethics reminiscent of the Brethren of the

Free Spirit. Walker conveys the possibility of a love between women that

is neither idealized nor constrained, but delicious in its imperfection.

While Celie adores Shug, she is able to recognize and accept Shug’s

weaknesses and failings. Walker transcends a liberal as well as romantic

portrayal of desire, depicting a love that is unegoistic, a desire that

seeks neither status nor triumph in ‘winning’. In fact, Walker’s

depiction of Shug’s non-monogamy illustrates a decidedly unproprietarian

approach to love. Shug loves Celie in a spirit of mutualism, wanting

only to further empower her to develop her own autonomy and potential

for self-love, mutualism, and pleasure.

In The Color Purple, Walker paints a world that is both social and

sensual, ethical and anarchistic. The life which Walker creates for

Celie toward the end of the novel represents a metaphor for social

utopia: a grand reconciliation of differences between the sexes and a

reclamation of power, pleasure, and self-love by women. As we leave

Celie, we find her living cooperatively within her small community of

friends, engaged in work that she loves, generously giving to and

receiving from her loved ones. Through the love of another woman, she

has come home to herself, seated firmly at the center of her own ability

to desire herself, others, and the natural world.

Hence, within second-wave feminism, we find a reach for a new “socio

erotic,” an understanding of desire that has distinctly social, and even

revolutionary, implications. While Rich valorized the idea of women’s

mutualistic desire, Lorde elaborated a poetic and evocative exploration

of a desire to reclaim a cooperative impulse in the face of such

injustices as racism and sexism. In turn, in The Color Purple, we see a

literary illustration of social desire: a story that explores the

possibility for re-establishing new understandings of the impulse toward

mutualism, interdependence, and sensual pleasure.

Perhaps most significant, we see in this ‘erotic moment’ a critique of

modernity that is not regressive or romantic, but is decidedly forward

looking. Critiquing such modern forms of hierarchy as racism, sexism,

and capitalism, these theorists do not offer an anti-modernist

alternative. Tracing hierarchies such as patriarchy back to pre-modern

times, theorists such as Rich, Lorde, and Walker do not romanticize the

past, blaming modern ‘technology’, ‘urban life’, or ‘humanity’ in

general for causing social suffering. Instead, these theorists ground

their critique in a historicized objection to practices of sexism and

racism, offering possibilities for new forms of subjectivity that may

emerge when people come to resist and transform these structures.

Further, the ‘erotic’ that these writers appeal to is not ‘pre-modern’,

‘rural’, or ‘free’ from humanity: That Celie faces the racist and sexist

horrors of her childhood in a rural setting speaks to Walker’s rejection

of a romantic impulse that ignores a legacy of racism that still

flourishes within the rural South as well as throughout the country.

Most important, in these critiques and reconstructions of modern desire,

we see a utopian impulse that recognizes within the human spirit a

potentiality for cooperation and ecological harmony: From the joyous

mutualism depicted by Rich and Lorde to the ‘ecological sensuality’

depicted by Walker in the character of Shug, we see an antidote to the

anti-humanism that marks much contemporary ecological discourse. Here we

see an expression of the desire to be deeply related both socially and

ecologically; a desire obstructed not by ‘modernity’ or ‘humanity’, but

by social hierarchy itself.

Chapter Four — The Five Fingers of Social Desire: the Dimensions of

the Socio-Erotic

The cultural landscape within the age of global capital leaves much to

be desired. Looking out across any small town, suburb, or city in the

United States we can detect two yellow glints: McDonald’s arches poking

up into the sky, competing with the white church steeples that used to

dominate the horizon. The glaring signs of fast-food chains and the

endless sound bites of telecommunications are tropes of a brave new

service economy, an economy that has been equated with the

de-spiritualization of culture itself. Capitalist standardization and

regularization have encroached into our everyday lives, reducing social,

cultural, and political relationships to ‘consumer’ and ‘producer’ as we

buy and sell standardized food, infotainment, health care, new age

religion, education, and even political representatives. In turn, as the

cultural landscape succumbs to social alienation and erosion, the

‘natural’ landscape deteriorates as well. Each night, newscasters

announce the arrival of yet another ‘endangered species’ or a ‘disaster

of the week’, another hurricane, tornado, earthquake, or flood resulting

from greenhouse-induced climatic instability. And while the natural

world is literally disintegrating, it is also being rationalized on

unprecedented levels—reduced to genetic ‘natural resources’ to be

surveyed, patented, and sold for profit.

How we interpret these events is deeply significant. Whether we

attribute these ‘rationalizations’ to a failed spiritual or romantic

orientation or to centuries of capitalist driven industry and an

authoritarian state, such interpretations have tremendous implications

for how we address problems of social and ecological injustice. Whereas

a focus on the former tends to bring the revolution into a more

contemplative and individualistic mood, the latter opens the way for a

critique of hierarchical institutional structures. Yet it is not

necessary to engender a false dilemma between spirituality and politics

in order to address issues of social and ecological change. Rather, we

may develop new ways to talk about questions of meaning, quality,

sensibility or spirituality, ways that are integral to talking about

institutional and political change. For the common link between ideas of

meaning and ideas of structure is the idea of relationality. The idea of

social relationships is integral to the idea of social

structures—non-hierarchical structures that facilitate meaningful

cooperative social relationships in all areas of our lives.

This chapter initiates a discussion of how to re-cast common

understandings of ‘meaning’ that are conventionally framed in spiritual

or romantic terms, ways to discuss those meaningful aspects of social

and ecological life that are degraded by capital-driven technology and

state formations, ways to talk about those aspects of reality that

cannot be reduced to capitalist rationalization with its productionist

idiom of means-ends, bottom lines’, or standardization. Moving beyond

dualistic concepts such as ‘spirit’ provides the opportunity to

cultivate new metaphors for articulating that which is intensely

meaningful and connective, metaphors that are derived from a relational

tradition of Eros. By shifting from discussions of spirituality or

romantic idealization to idioms of the erotic and social desire, we are

better able to transcend binaries between the spiritual and the

political that currently limit discussions of social and ecological

justice.

Beyond Rationalization: From Spiritus to Eros

The McDonaldsization of culture is often associated with the dramatic

decline in the quality of social and ecological relationships. Reducing

social relationships to predetermined interactions between server and

servee, each aspect of a McDonald’s is prescribed, regularized,

number-crunched, and market-analyzed. The McDonald’s idiom is so

embedded in everyday cultural practice that McDonald’s itself may serve

as a symbol of the cultural effects of advanced capitalist

rationalization.[108] McDonald’s translation of assembly-line industrial

practice to service production typifies all that is de-spirited within

‘advanced’ capitalism.

However, the problem of capitalist rationalization has a history that

began long before the appearance of those plastic golden arches. At the

turn of the century, Max Weber described the disenchantment of everyday

life and work due to modern capitalist rationalization.[109] For Weber,

a rationalized capitalism implied a disciplined labor force and the

regularized investment of capital, practices that entail the continual

accumulation of wealth for its own sake. Contemporary critiques of such

principles as ‘profit over quality of life’, ‘regularization over

individual expression’, and ‘standardization of everyday life’, are

often derived from Weber’s description of the cultural implications of a

modern capitalism.

Yet Weber’s crucial insights into the cultural implications of

capitalism have often been upstaged by popular critiques of modernity

that emphasize ‘rationality’ and ‘spiritual decay’ as causes of an

impoverished quality of everyday life and work. As in the case of early

eco-fascism in Germany, instead of critiquing capitalist

rationalization, theorists blamed modern rationality for society’s

ills.[110] And rather than fight capitalism by creating cooperative

social and political institutions, such critics fought the cultural and

ecological effects of capitalism by proposing a spirituality and

anti-rationality that would either co-exist with, or perhaps reform, the

capitalist system.

Yet the cause of cultural and ecological degradation is indeed

capitalist rationalization, not a modern fall from spiritual grace. And

if capitalism is a set of social relationships based on exploitation,

regularization, alienation, and commodification, then the antidote to

capitalist rationalization is a new relationality, an empathetic,

sensual, and rational way of relating that is deeply cooperative,

pleasurable, and meaningful.

Instead of pitting the idea of spirit against the idea of rationality,

we need to cultivate a new rational and empathetic orientation capable

of de-stabilizing capitalist rationalization. We need to move beyond a

focus on spirituality to a focus on a rational and empathetic

relationality to create institutions that will nurture cooperative ways

of relating socially and ecologically. However, the shift from

spirituality to a relationality entails a great leap for Westerners

steeped in normative dualisms between spirit and matter, or intuition

and rationality. Just as we learn that black is the opposite of white,

we learn that rationality is the opposite of intuition and spirituality.

Accordingly, when disenchanted by a rationalized and ‘McDonaldsian’

world, we confuse rationalization with rationality, and look immediately

to intuition and spirit for both solace and a solution.

Today, when we appeal to the term spirituality to discuss cultural and

ecological meaning, we end up taking home more than we bargained for.

Anchoring contemporary ideas of social and ecological integrity to

ancient dualistic ‘activating principles’ perpetuates reductive and

polarized understandings of reality. The term spirit is embedded within

the psychic trenches of Western metaphysical dualism. Its origin can be

traced to the Latin ‘spiritus’, an ‘activating principle’ that was

believed to animate an inert, feminine, and passive body with the

invigorating properties of breath. According to the ancient Romans, it

is when we breathe (spirare) an eternal breath (spiritus) that an

otherwise inactive and ephemeral body comes to life. Conversely, it is

when spiritus leaves the body that we die.

And when we blend this Western notion of spirituality with non-Western

systems of meaning, we face another set of problems. The journey from a

non-Western language into the language of spiritus is a tricky one

indeed. Hopes to find in pagan, Neolithic, Eastern, and indigenous

religious practices, a non-dualistic understanding of spirit are

undermined by appeals to a dualistic linguistic tradition of spiritus; a

tradition predicated on ideas of activating principles counterposed to a

passive matter. While the idea of spiritus, or breath, is appealing to

ecologically oriented theorists, for the ancient Romans, spiritus

entailed a breath that activated an otherwise dead body. Today we know

that breath does not activate, but rather, is functionally integral to a

body that is already very much alive.

Still faced with the need for a metaphorical antidote to the problem of

capitalist rationalization, a trend in society that cheapens all that is

meaningful, we must engender other ways to articulate meaning.

Disenchanted with capital-driven science and technics that promise to

render all knowledge and experience ‘operative’, ‘useful’, and

‘efficient’, theologians are left with few alternatives (other than

spiritus) for describing meaningful practice and perception. Such

theorists yearn to be able to point to qualities of reality that are

irreducible, qualities that cannot be known or conveyed through the

language of logical positivism, behaviorism, biological determinism, or

physics.[111] Moreover, such thinkers long to be able to convey the

possibility of knowing the poetry of bodies and the natural world,

illustrating the irreducible quality of the connections between bodies

and within bodies themselves.

However, there is another tradition to which we may appeal. Leaving the

world of spiritual metaphysics, we may engage another way of talking

about meaning. There exists another kind of principle that, while not

activating, or spiritual, is relational and social. The term ‘Eros’

contains an idea of love, an expression of desire between individuals.

It is in the space between individuals, within the hearts of

individuals, that Eros flourishes. Eros, then, represents an embodied

quality of social relationships—an attraction, passion, and yearning of

one self for other selves.

However, to emphasize the relational and social quality of Eros, we must

first establish an understanding that is distinct from the Freudian

definition that reduced Eros to a physical energy.[112] Freud

reconstituted the idea of Eros into an energistic life force that must

be repressed in surrender to a civilizing reality principle. In the era

of liberal capitalism, desire is often cast within energistic or

individualized terms, and it is usually framed in terms of scarcity, as

the will to overcome a particular deprivation, replacing desire with a

particular object of want that is external to the self.[113] However,

when we shake our theoretical kaleidoscope slightly, we may reconfigure

the idea of desire as a will to express a potentiality that lies not

outside of ourselves, but inside our very being, inside our social and

political communities. We may articulate an idea of a potential to

express sensuality, sociability, and creativity in all of its delectable

complexity, a potential for social desire that exists within us at every

given moment; not as an individual triumph over an inner emptiness, but

as a social and cooperative expression of a fullness that yearns to

emerge.

And yet, when we seek to elaborate discussions of social desire, we are

confronted by a linguistic and conceptual vacuum: While the language of

liberal capitalism offers a rich vocabulary for describing what is

anti-social, it offers an impoverished vocabulary for describing the

cooperative impulse. We know far more about anti-social, irrational

desires such as greed, acquisitiveness, domination, and competition,

than we do about desires that enhance the subjectivity of both self and

other. In turn, as Michel Foucault points out, we are indeed saturated

by discourses on ‘sexuality’.[114] However, we have a paucity of

discourses on social desires for creativity and solidarity.

As we move beyond an energistic Freudian idiom of forces, repression,

drives, and release, Eros could represent a metaphor for sociality

itself. The idea of Eros, or the more vernacular term, the erotic,

provides a metaphor for a quality of social relationships that is

passionate, loving, mutualistic, and empathetic. And building upon the

idea of the erotic, we may point to a cooperative dimension of desire.

We may speak of a socio-erotic, a spectrum of social and sensual desires

that enhance social cooperation and a progressive revolutionary impulse.

The socio-erotic, as a metaphor for a relational orientation that may

counter capitalist rationalization, places social and cultural criticism

on much firmer ground. Instead of conflating rationalization with a

rationality to be countered by an irrational spirit, we may appeal to

the idea of a socio-erotic, a way of talking about an impulse toward

collectivity, sensuality, and non-hierarchy that may be nourished and

encouraged by the creation of non-hierarchical institutions. The idea of

a socio-erotic, or a spectrum of social desires, is implicit within many

feminist and social anarchist writings that reveal the delicate and

crucial link between desire and freedom. The desire for a quality of

life that is sensual, cooperative, creative, and ethical resonates with

the impulse for a way of life that is not only based on justice and

equality, but on a profound sense of freedom as well. The socio-erotic

represents the spectrum of social desires that emerges from this longing

for freedom, this impulse toward an interdependent and harmonious world.

The very act of thinking through the socio-erotic represents an exercise

in strolling the perimeters of a passionate landscape that could

potentially encompass the full scope of our personal, social, and

political lives.

The project to further elaborate understandings of desire is central to

ecology. By exploring the social desire for ecological justice and

integrity, we may begin to uncover new ways to articulate what it is

that we really yearn for when we talk about ‘nature’. Often framed in

terms of a spiritual or romantic longing for connectedness, wholeness,

and integrity, the social desire for nature is often contrasted to

universalizing notions of rationality and technology that are accused of

destroying all that is good in the world.[115] Again, conflating

rationality with a particular kind of rationalization, ‘nature lovers’

often propose a return to an intuition and spirituality that would

better resonate with ecological principles such as connectedness,

diversity, or inter-dependence. However, as we shall see, it is possible

to think rationally, with great feeling, about the social desire for

nature. Instead of appealing to ideas of spirit and intuition to

identify moments of meaning, connectedness, and integrity, we may appeal

to the embodied and relational idiom of the socio-erotic.

The Five Fingers of Social Desire

When a child reaches out to the world, it reaches with both hands.

Often, the child reaches for something it needs physically or for some

form of social interaction that it desires. As we dive into the vast

blue world of the socio-erotic, we no longer define desire as the

singular will to satisfy an individualistic longing for that which we do

not have, nor do we reduce desire to material need. Instead, we may

explore desire as a rich dialectic, as a yearning to unfold all that we

can feel and do together within a free society. In particular, social

desire represents an organic and profoundly social spectrum of

potentialities, inclinations, or tendencies. It represents a will to

know ourselves, each other, and the world. From within this spectrum of

social desire, there emerge five dimensions of desire, “five fingers of

social desire,” which are implicit within the social tradition itself.

These dimensions are linked to the desire for sensuality, association,

differentiation, development, and political opposition. And like the

graceful movements of a hand, the socio-erotic can best grasp the world

when all five fingers and palm work in unison.

Sensual Desire: The Desire to Know

Let us begin with one of the most common understandings of desire, one

with which we are most familiar. The first finger of desire, sensual

desire, is the desire for sensual expression, satisfaction, and

engagement with any one, or all, of our senses. Sensual desire begins

with the assertion, “I want to know” sensually, engaging ourselves on a

visceral level. The idea of sensual desire represents the most

unmediated dimension of desire, referring to a will to know through the

senses, to express our potential for sensual enjoyment and experience.

When we think of sensual desire, we may think of the way children seek

out the world through their mouths and fingers, yearning in return for

nourishment and affection. We may let the little finger symbolize

sensual desire, the desire to delight in our senses, which incorporates

itself within all other dimensions of social desire.

Within sensual desire, we also immediately discover a dimension of

social meaning, for we see that it is impossible to consider the idea of

sensual desire without situating this desire within a specific social

context. Indeed, there is no pre-social sensual desire. While infants

are born with a suckling instinct, they must learn to respond to the

world visually, tactually, and aurally. The ability to glean pleasure

from gazing at the world, the ability to distinguish and interpret

sensations around us emerges from the stimulation of caretakers who gaze

into an infant’s eyes, touching and cooing at them in an engaging

manner. It is through being sensually stimulated within a social

relationship, that infants develop the ability to recognize, integrate,

and enjoy sensual stimulation. In this way, the capacity for cultivating

and expressing sensual desire is predicated on a deeply relational

social context.

In addition, sensual desire is culturally constrained. While we may

desire sensual engagement through our senses by eating, drinking,

hearing, smelling, or touching the world, the way in which we approach

and encode these sensual practices is overwhelmingly informed by the

culture in which we live. Similarly, the sensual desire for ‘nature’ is

a social form of desire. In the West, for instance, from the day we are

born, we develop culturally specific understandings of what we will

categorize as ‘natural’ as well as what aspects of this ‘nature’ we will

find appealing. As illustrated by theorist Donna Haraway, historical

understandings of ‘landscape’, ‘the pastoral’, ‘wilderness’, and

‘animality’ inform the ability to identify and respond to those sensual

aspects of ecological reality we take for granted as ‘natural’.[116]

Sensual desire is contingent upon social, cultural, and political

practices that establish the standards by which we distinguish such

sensual values as beauty, strength, grace, and taste. Whether we express

a desire to see, touch, smell, or talk to another person, this desire to

associate sensually is both socially constrained and facilitated. And

because we endow these social interactions with specifically sensual

contexts, such as in the sharing of food, music, dance, or sexuality, we

imbue these associative activities with a dimension of sensual desire as

well.

Associative Desire: The Desire to Know Other

Associative desire, the second finger of social desire, adds another

dimension by beginning with the assertion: “I want to know you.” Whereas

association is not always explicitly ‘physical’ or ‘sexual’, there

exists a dimension of sensuality within an association between people

who feel related or bonded. This sensuality may range from the flow of

voices or hand gestures of spoken communication, to the visual gaze

between two people standing at opposite ends of a room. In turn, we may

express our desire for sensual association through activities ranging

from the breaking of bread to the sharing of sexual intimacy. Hence, we

may allow the ‘ring finger’ to symbolize associative desire,

representing the finger that is most associated with relationships,

friendship, and love.

As we think through the dialectic of social desire, we must regard the

metaphor of the hand as only a point of departure, asking our minds to

do that which the static symbol of the hand cannot: our minds can think

dialectically, allowing each dimension of social desire to be

incorporated and integrated into the next, bringing a cumulative and

non-linear fullness to our understanding of social desire. We may derive

the idea of sensual desire from the idea of associative desire, allowing

the one to give richness and meaning to the other. Hence, from the idea

of sensuality, we may educe an idea of associative desire, mediating the

idea of sensuality with the idea of association. Sensual, associative

desire is what we commonly call ‘love’; it is the expression of bonds of

friendship or lovership, the desire to create and maintain bonds with

family, community, and with the stranger for whom we feel empathy. While

we may not always express overt sensual desire to those with whom we

feel a connection, the very idea of ‘feeling’ a ‘connection’ conveys the

ever present dimension of sensual desire within the associative moment.

Social anarchists ranging from Peter Kropotkin to Murray Bookchin have

explored this desire for association, demonstrating its salience within

the revolutionary project. Human nature is marked by tendencies toward

both the social and the anti-social. It is however, the social tendency

that represents the potential to be cooperative, to exist within a vital

social matrix on which all depend. Associative desire acts as a glue

which binds people together, allowing them to express the yearning to

enhance the richness of each other’s material and social lives.

Associative desire is precisely the human desire to fend off alienation

by creating rich relationships based on degrees of interdependence and

mutuality; it represents the desire to know others and to be recognized

as being integral part of a relationship, group, family, or community.

Associative desire is the desire to be part of a collectivity greater

than the self, a striving to be part of a larger identity. In addition,

it represents the desire to express and receive empathy, to care for,

and to be cared for, by others.

In contrast, liberal capitalist society, with its individualistic

expression of desire, confines associative desire to the romantic

private sphere, believing it ‘unnatural’ for people to truly desire

association and cooperation within the public spheres of economics or

politics. Whereas the Church attempts to mitigate this ‘inherently’

selfish nature through the obligation of charity, associative desire is

generally regarded as inherently reserved for the private family or for

those endowed with ‘remarkable’ altruistic abilities. A cooperative,

associative desire within the social or political realms is regarded as

the exception rather than the rule.

However, as anarchism and feminism demonstrate, we have the potential to

express associative desire within both the public and private spheres by

cultivating social relationships ranging from friendship and lovership

to family, community, and political ties. Associative desire represents

the potential which brings people to form culture and community, to

participate in activities as diverse as joining clubs, attending

parties, and engaging in politics. For better or for worse, most people

have a desire to be in the presence of others, both in the intimate

setting of friends and family and in the anonymity of the bustling city

or market place. And in addition to constituting the basic desire for

sociability, associative desire represents the creative striving toward

greater levels of mutuality and cooperation: within the matrix of a

cooperative community, people may create art, technologies, labor,

relationships, and forms of self-government, centering such practices

around the desire for mutualism and inter-dependence. Associative desire

is the tendency to create social richness, to create non-hierarchical

societies with mediated decision-making systems, complementary divisions

of labor, and distributive economies.

In turn, associative desire moves individuals to cultivate structures

which nurture the ability to express social desire. Associative desire

is most easily expressed in contexts that are cooperative,

non-hierarchical, and participatory. As social anarchism demonstrates,

hierarchy and competition nurture social alienation, creating a climate

of intimidation, mistrust, and animosity. In contrast, free from

hierarchy and competition, people are better able to give each other the

recognition, empathy, and attention that render life meaningful. Social

anarchist and feminist structures which foster mutual aid and

cooperation represent the associative dimension of the socio-erotic.

Cooperative structures such as rotating leadership, collective ownership

and labor, and direct participatory democracy represent but a few

structural examples of the associative dimension of the socio-erotic

within society.

Differentiative Desire: Knowing Self, Knowing the World

However, to fully actualize its liberatory potential, associative desire

must be complemented by another form of desire, differentiative desire.

Differentiative desire, the third finger of desire, is the desire to

differentiate oneself within the context of a social group. Yet it also

represents the desire to ‘differentiate the world’—to make sense of the

world through artistic or intellectual creative expression. Thus, while

the first dimension of differentiative desire begins with the assertion

“I want to know myself,” the second dimension begins with the assertion,

“I want to know the world.”

The first dimension of differentiative desire represents the desire to

distinguish one’s own identity within, a wider social context. We may

let the third finger of social desire be symbolized by the middle

finger, representing the need to know and express the uniqueness of the

self, to uncover one’s particular efficacy, skill, strength, and

potentiality. Differentiative desire rounds out associative desire by

adding a complementary dimension of individuality. While we each yearn

to feel part of a whole that is greater than ourselves, we also yearn to

know and assert a self that is distinct within that greater

collectivity. While associative desire represents a kind of ‘urge to

merge’, differentiative desire represents a crucial ‘urge to diverge’

which allows an association to remain open to variation, innovation, and

difference. Without the ‘urge to diverge’ of differentiative desire, an

association is at risk of remaining static, homogeneous, and stifling.

The idea of differentiative desire could be termed the most ‘Western’ of

the five dimensions of desire. In many cultures of the world people do

not emphasize a notion of a ‘self’ that is separable from ‘the people’.

In fact, critics of Western societies often identify the idea of an

‘individuated ego’ as the cause of a lack of social humility and

collectivity, qualities which are often associated with Asian, African,

and indigenous cultures throughout the world. However, particularly

within the liberal capitalist West, the idea of an undifferentiated self

has often proven to be anything but liberatory. Paradoxically, although

the idea of individualism is emphasized within the West, the idea of

self-surrender is prominent as well. The fascist and nationalistic

legacy of Europe illustrates the consequences of self-submission to a

hyper-individuated authority or to the ‘people’, or Volk. As social

anarchism demonstrates, Westerners must come to terms with the dangers

of both hyper-individuation and hyper-association—expressions of

selfhood that are equally capable of thriving within hierarchical and

authoritarian societies. Both tendencies are capable of nurturing

despotic abuses of and submission to authority.

Within the liberal capitalist West, association without differentiation

enhances the likelihood of a mass of undifferentiated desires,

increasing the possibility that individuals will join an association

whose membership is predicated on expediency or the submission to

religious and political charismatic authorities. In contrast, the ‘urge

to diverge’ adds a complementary, liberatory dimension to associative

desire which allows the self to be both collective and distinct. The

desire to assert an innovative identity within a given collectivity

allows for an open-endedness that is essential to the development of

individuals and to the collectivity itself.

Feminist psychoanalytic theory has given significant attention to the

potentially complementary relationship between associative and

differentiative desire. According to Jessica Benjamin, each of us yearns

to participate in what she calls “mutual recognition,” a process in

which two complete selves recognize each other as both dependent and

independent. For Benjamin, the desire to both recognize otherness and to

be recognized creates a dynamic tension which propels us to develop the

capacity to recognize another person as a separate individual “who is

like us, yet distinct.”[117] For Benjamin, the idea of mutuality is

predicated on this rich dialectic between two distinct selves rather

than on a collapse of two selves into one.

Benjamin’s notion of erotic “mutual recognition” differs dramatically

from Freud’s notion of erotic union. For Freud, union between

individuals represents a desire “to make the one out of the more than

one” in which the “more than one” represents a static totality, a

suffocating unity that requires a negation of individual identity.[118]

For Freud, because the self is inherently hostile to encounters with

other distinct selves, erotic union requires the loss of self,

permitting two identities to merge into one. Thus, for Freud, the desire

to become one requires a unity achieved through the negation of self. In

contrast, Benjamin’s mutual recognition entails a unity in diversity. It

implies a unity of distinct selves based on independence and

interdependence. In turn, it implies a differentiation within

association, a desire to maintain individual identity while recognizing

a connection to others. Together, differentiative and associative desire

can form an erotic dance between autonomy, community, individuality, and

collectivity.

Differentiative desire is essential to true association with and to true

differentiation from others. To know the particular ways in which we are

distinctive, to understand our own complex motivations, dreams, and

visions, allows us to ‘get ourselves out of the way’ when we seek to

really see others. Paradoxically, knowing self allows us to really see

and know others, for when we know ourselves, including our own

prejudices, motivations, likes, and dislikes, we can see all that may

obscure our ability to really recognize another person.

Whereas self-contemplation may represent a personal indulgence,

authentic self-knowledge may serve a vital social purpose. For what we

do not know about ourselves is potentially dangerous to others. For

instance, in the case of racism or sexism, social ignorance can be

lethal. What men do not know about the history of being men, or about

their own socialization, or about how their desire for women has been

constructed, may be dangerous to women. Most white people know little

about the historical origins of their ideas of ‘race’ or ‘whiteness,’

remaining ignorant of the ways in which they benefit from and perpetuate

hegemonic racist practices. Throughout history, the oppressed have

always paid dearly for what the oppressors do not know about themselves.

In addition, what we do not know about ourselves is potentially

dangerous to ourselves as well. Members of oppressed social groups are

often deprived of knowledge of their own histories or cultures. This

lack of self, or ‘collective-self’ knowledge destabilizes a group and

makes it further vulnerable to social control. In contrast, self

knowledge fortifies our ability to determine the degree to which we may

be truly seen or known by another person. If we truly know ourselves, we

are better able to assess the ability of another to perceive us

accurately. In the same way, the degree to which we know ourselves

heightens the degree of satisfaction we feel when another is truly able

to see the qualities which render us utterly distinct.

Knowing the World

The second dimension of differentiative desire is the desire to know the

world through creative and intellectual expression, to develop new ideas

and art forms which give meaning to our lives, nuancing our

understanding of the world. The ability to conceptualize is predicated

on the capacity to translate abstract meaning into the differentiated

forms of symbol or language. Differentiative desire is the desire to

differentiate the world conceptually, making meaning where there was

none before, to express our interpretation of reality. From the time we

are children, we take great joy in finding the right words to describe a

particular feeling. Language allows us to point to specific shades of

meaning, allows us to experience the wondrous “ah-hah!” that emerges as

we elaborate a theory that explains a mystery we might never have been

able to articulate before.

Differentiative desire finds its expression in both the informal and

formal philosophies of peoples all over the world. Although the mediums

vary, the desire to differentiate the world through conceptual and

verbal expression is a universal phenomenon. Language gives form to our

ideas and feelings, allowing us to communicate the particularities of

our experience. Through language, we may give shape to our experience

and perceptions while also giving the world edges, texture, and meaning.

Historically, in the West, those in power have rigidly determined what

would be defined as legitimate ‘theory’. The most liberatory

possibilities of the Enlightenment have too often been eclipsed by a

capitalist tendency toward rationalization and instrumental logic. As

many feminists, social ecologists, and indigenous theorists have

demonstrated, the desire to differentiate the world solely through

deductive, linear, or instrumental reason alone, has led to a way of

thinking that is often reductive, fragmented, or relativistic. However,

while breaking a subject down to its components can lead to a greater

understanding of the whole, it can also fragment the whole into a sea of

meaningless incoherent components, Hence, our desire to differentiate

the world through ideas, language, and abstract conceptualization must

also integrate an ethical associative moment: Through thinking

associatively as well as differentiatively we give ethical coherence and

unity to our thoughts as well.

While we may derive differentiative desire from the idea of association,

differentiative desire also incorporates the idea of sensual desire. The

‘sensual moment’, we could say, is retained within differentiative

desire. Although reason and sensuality are dualistically portrayed as

‘opposites’, theoretical engagement is often an intensely sensual event.

As sensual, embodied beings, we may appreciate moments of pleasure that

emerge as we articulate an elegant, well-crafted idea or argument.

Sitting among friends, rapt in stimulating discussion, we may almost

burst with the new idea percolating inside us. What could be more

sensual than the great “ah hah!” that emerges from our throats when we

finally grasp a new idea?

This ‘sensual moment’ surfaces within the act of artistic creativity

itself. The artistic, creative impulse represents the desire to engender

meaning and form that express something distinctive about the self or

about the world. Differentiative desire represents the desire to use our

senses aesthetically to express what is deepest within the human

imagination, what tingles along the tips of our fingers. Few recognize

the creative impulse to be as vital as the desire for sexual or sensual

fulfillment; whereas it is expected that even the most ‘average’ person

can achieve sensual fulfillment, it is rarely expected that each can

achieve creative satisfaction through artistic expression. Creativity is

reserved for the elite, regarded as a mere ‘creative means’ to an end

that is generally quantified in terms of an economically valuable

elitist ‘product’.

However, the creative impulse need not constitute an instrumental means

to an end. Creativity can represent a two-fold end in itself: the

expression of a self, and another’s recognition of this self-expression.

In addition to yearning to creatively differentiate the world, we also

long for the world to differentiate us, to distinguish us within the

grand mosaic of life itself. In this way, the experience of both

creating and being recognized brings fullness to creative

self-expression. However, it is not necessary that our creativity be

recognized as ‘superior’, awarding us social status, power, or profit.

Rather, the acts of self-expression and recognition can be sufficient in

themselves. While we long to be recognized as a part of an association,

we also long to be recognized as distinctive within that association. In

a free and cooperative society, creativity would become a dance of

self-expression and recognition, reinforcing our sense of

distinctiveness, community, and shared meaning.

Differentiative desire is the yearning to discover what is most

distinctive about ourselves on an individual, community, or regional

level. It is the desire to maintain and further elaborate personal and

collective identity. And once we have identified what is most

distinctive about ourselves, we often yearn to fulfill that distinctive

potentiality. For instance, let us imagine being presented with the

opportunity to learn to paint. Imagine that during this process we

discover that we truly enjoy painting and that we find that we can paint

particularly well. Indeed, we might yearn to further explore this

particular form of self-expression. Differentiate desire represents the

impulse to pursue all talents and abilities: social, creative, personal,

and political. Differentiative desire is the desire of the self to

become more of itself: more complex, actualized, and elaborate than ever

before.

Developmental Desire: The Desire to Become

It is here, at the conceptual boundaries of the differentiative moment,

that the socio-erotic incorporates a developmental dimension.

Developmental desire, the fourth finger, represents the desire to

fulfill the distinctive talents or abilities which we uncover through

the expression of differentiate desire. While we yearn to express who we

are, we also seek to fulfill whom we ought to become as well.

Developmental desire begins with the assertion “I want to become.” It

represents the striving to bridge the gap between who we are at any

given moment, who we could be, and who we ought to be—if we had the

opportunity. Hence, developmental desire is symbolized by the pointer

finger, the finger which points to the direction in which the self

yearns to go.

In our society, developmental desire is often reduced to an instrumental

motivation for the accumulation of power, status, or capital.

Ironically, old people, who represent the elaborate and savory summation

of a lifetime of differentiation and development, are largely regarded

as “unproductive” unless they have accumulated a tremendous amount of

capital over the years.[119] However, despite this narrow view of human

development, the desire to develop endures. Developmental desire

resurfaces as the relentless craving of the individual to uncover

distinctive potentialities and as the collective desire of society to

unfold its distinctive possibilities as well. The desire to develop

emerges as a restless apprehension; a desire to taste possibility on the

tip of our tongues, unable to rest until we taste more.

In addition to differentiating ourselves to uncover the widest spectrum

of creativity, sensuality, empathy, and personality, we also yearn to

grow developmentally. In this way, development is linked, but not

reducible, to differentiation. Understandably, many confuse change,

growth, and variation with development. We reason that by

differentiating ourselves from a particular time, place, or identity we

will develop, mature, or ‘evolve’. However, rather than cultivate

degrees of maturity or coherence, we may achieve a differentiated

stasis: We may have changed our show and taken it on the road, only to

find that the road is winding in circles. Hence, differentiation is not

equivalent to development. In the case of multiple personality disorder,

an individual unconsciously responds to trauma by splitting the

personality, differentiating the self into a myriad of sub-selves, each

of which endures and copes with the stress and pain of abuse. In this

instance, while the self succeeds in the task of differentiation, it

fails to develop into a coherent unity. As a result, an individual

suffering from this disorder serves as a host to a diversity of

differentiated sub-selves, each lacking the unity and maturity necessary

for true development and integration.

Developmental desire is precisely the desire of the self to become

increasingly unified within the diversity of its own differentiation.

For instance, while we may wish to uncover our distinctive

potentialities for creativity, sensuality, and cooperation, we also

yearn to discover an overriding logic that can endow our lives with

meaning and wholeness. We can all think of someone in our lives who

possesses a myriad of interests yet is incapable of focusing long enough

to sufficiently develop a single one. We would say that their focus

lacks the very unity or coherence necessary for self-development. In

this way, whereas differentiation rounds out the idea of association,

development rounds out the idea of differentiation, adding to it a

dimension of unity necessary to make the self not only diverse, but

dynamic, whole, and meaningful. Hence, development is qualitatively

different than a mere process of change or growth. According to

Bookchin, the often painful dialectic of a developmental desire is

necessary for the differentiation or maturation of the self:

Desire itself is the sensuous apprehension of possibility, a complete

psychic synthesis achieved by a “yearning for... ” Without the pain of

this dialectic, without the struggle that yields the achievement of the

possible, growth and Desire are divested of all differentiation and

content.[120]

So far, we have been exploring the idea of development on an individual

level. Yet such a utopian understanding of development may be applied to

society as well. Each society has the potential to express its

collective developmental desire to become increasingly differentiated

and whole. However, under capitalism, the naturalistic metaphor of

‘growth’ is deployed to naturalize the immoral hoarding of capital.

Within the social Darwinian view of development, the ‘fittest’ that

survive are those who accrue the most profit and power. Few expect

society to become ever more differentiated, dynamic, and whole. Rather

than being evaluated qualitatively, social development is measured

quantitatively as the growth of capital itself. Developmental desire is

reduced to the individual desire to differentiate one’s self from the

masses through the accumulation of capital and social status.

This individual desire is then ‘collectivized’ into the shared desire of

most Americans to distinguish themselves from those of ‘less developed’

Third World countries. Meanwhile, this social arrogance is predicated on

a capitalistic idea of ‘growth’, obscuring a true understanding of

development as an incremental process in which individuals and society

may become qualitatively richer, developing deeply textured capacities

for empathy, interdependence, and creativity.

Hence, the idea of ‘growth’, individual or social, is insufficient for

cultivating a full understanding of development. As we have seen, true

organic development is a process of differentiation and wholeness. In

turn, this development entails the act of becoming which is

distinguishable from the simple idea of growth. For instance, when a

seed unfolds into a flower, the seed does not merely ‘grow’ or become a

bigger seed. If development were simply growth or expansion, then there

would be no flowers at all, just gargantuan seeds swaying in the fields.

Instead, something dramatic occurs within the logic of the seed;

something within the seed’s very structure allows it to differentiate

into a new, more elaborate form. The seed gradually gives way to the

flower not merely by expanding but by differentiating into an ever more

complex organism. This dialectical process of becoming moves from the

first thread-like root of the seedling to the upward rising of the stem

through the gradual maturation and emergence of the blossom itself.

Through this development, the seed is not destroyed; rather, it unfolds

within the logical progression of its own internal structure. In this

way, we could say that there was something distinctive about the seed’s

structure which allowed it to engage in this process of ‘becoming’,

undergoing a series of phases in which it was able to become ‘more of

itself’. We could say that the flower represents the differentiated

expression of the seed’s potential for becoming a flower.[121]

In contrast to this social ecological view of development, capitalist

society regards development as hierarchical, competitive and determined.

Under the rubric of liberal capitalism, to differentiate means to

separate and surpass what we were before, assuming a state of

superiority over others. Such an approach to development emerges within

the deterministic models of development proposed by thinkers such as

Hegel or Marx. Whereas these thinkers contributed immeasurably to the

world of dialectics, offering an understanding of the logical unfolding

of symbolic and material reality respectively, their dialectical

approaches retained a determinism that must be transcended. Both

thinkers portrayed development as a series of necessary negations: a

linear and hierarchical process in which earlier phases of development

are necessarily overcome by ‘superior’ later phases. According to Hegel,

whereas change is made possible by the process of contradiction and

negation, conflict and opposition represent the only means by which

development may occur; thus, out of the bland, static world of ‘being’

emerges the oppositional, dynamic world of ‘becoming’. In order for a

thing to become something else, it must overcome that which preceded it.

Similarly, Marx regarded the development of society as a series of

necessary negations. For Marx, whereas earlier ‘primitive’ societies

must be overcome by increasingly rational and civilized societies,

social history represents an inevitable linear trajectory. Beginning

with so-called primitive societies that become increasingly

technological, hierarchical, and competitive, history finally gives way

to a free and socialist society. In this way, Marx ascribed to a liberal

notion of ‘progress’, asserting the necessity of hierarchical systems

such as capitalism as a stepping stone toward a higher expression of

civilization. Moreover, in the same way, Freud follows in this

tradition, regarding child development as a series of self-negations or

repressions. Whereas ‘maturity’ is marked by a negation of earlier

impulses and desires, Freud’s ‘rational adult’ marks the pinnacle of

white male self-repression.

However, the ‘history of society’, is not a singular or monolithic

event. Society and culture develop in different locations, fashions, and

times. Each society must be understood integrally as the summation of

its own historical development. Furthermore, the process of social

development is uneven; within a given society, there may be particular

cultural or political practices that are more complex and developed than

others. For instance, while one culture may develop a particularly

sophisticated system of agricultural or industrial technology, that same

culture might be marked by a particularly ‘maldeveloped’ form of

governance incorporating violence, dominance, and rigid social

stratification.[122] Similarly, while one society may practice

particularly laborious systems of agriculture, that same society may

have developed intricate systems of self-government, nuanced in their

degree of non-hierarchy, complementarity, and cooperation.

In contrast, new ‘organic’ dialectical thinkers such as social ecologist

Murray Bookchin and psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin propose an

alternative view of development. Indebted to Hegel, both thinkers regard

development as cumulative, depicting later phases of development as

incorporating earlier ones and bringing them to a level of more complex

differentiation. However, for Bookchin and Benjamin, this crucial

‘negative moment’, inherent within all processes of development, is

mediated by the idea that development may be cumulative, cooperative,

potential, and open-ended rather than determined and hierarchical.

Bookchin and Benjamin elaborate upon what is best within Hegelian

‘negativism’ by drawing out a more organic and non-hierarchical view of

development.

For Hegel, when a self recognizes itself as separate from another self,

it will strive to annihilate the other. For Hegel, social relationships

are inherently marked by a conflictual struggle for power in which

individuals vie for attention and recognition, generally ending in a

one-up situation. In contrast, Benjamin asserts that the self may

potentially yearn for the presence of others out of a desire to develop.

For Benjamin, development does not occur despite others, but because of

others: the relationship between an infant and mother is potentially

mutually beneficial rather than inherently conflictual.[123]

According to Benjamin, development occurs within a social context,

preferably within a context that nurtures both individuality and

connection. Rather than constitute a series of negations, development

represents a series of increasingly complex expressions of relatedness

and individuality. For instance, a child does not necessarily have to

separate from its mother in order to mature. Rather, it may

differentiate itself within that relationship, developing an

increasingly nuanced ability to be both related and independent, both

recognizing and being recognized by its mother, In this way, Benjamin

introduces the idea that development may be a cooperative, dialectical

process in which latent abilities for independence and dependence are

developed and expressed.

In addition to being marked by accumulation and cooperation, human

development can be marked by open-endedness and non-determination. For

instance, at birth, each individual represents a series of biological

and environmental ‘givens’. In turn, there exists a degree of chance, or

spontaneity, that informs how these ‘givens’ will be organized and how

they will evolve. Biological and environmental factors, then, represent

a set of potentialities rather than a set of determinants. There exists

no determined blueprint which guarantees how an individual will

necessarily develop, or whether they will develop at all. Organic life

is marked by a dimension of potentiality which provides a horizon of

logical yet undetermined possibilities that may or may not unfold.

Developmental desire is precisely the desire to develop the particular

spectrum of ‘logical possibilities’ that exists within each of us. It is

the desire to participate actively in our own development,

differentiating ourselves into what we could be, bringing ourselves to a

new level of complexity and integration. Developmental desire is not the

desire to develop our abilities to dominate or master our earlier or

less mature impulses; rather, it is the desire to integrate our earlier

‘child self’ with our emerging ‘adult self’. When this integration is

achieved, we are able to retain levels of spontaneity, flexibility, and

authenticity characteristic of the child, integrating these qualities

into the cognitive, self-reflexive, and empathetic capacities of

adulthood.

We long to differentiate ourselves, to coherently unfold what is

distinctive within us. We yearn as well to develop cooperatively in a

spirit of open-endedness and possibility rather than in a spirit of

reductive determination. Instead of merely striving to accumulate

capital or power, developmental desire represents the desire to develop

qualitatively, to lead richer, more meaningful lives. Within a free

society, developmental desire represents the motivation that propels

individuals and society toward an open horizon of unending development.

However, within the context of liberal capitalism, the full range of

cooperative and creative potentiality lies largely undeveloped while a

narrow spectrum of competitive and instrumental abilities are nurtured

to extremes. Even within this narrow range of ‘acceptable

potentialities’, it is mainly the most privileged who gain access to the

material means by which to develop their abilities, be they

intellectual, athletic, artistic, or even the more instrumental

abilities such as state politics or business. Hence, we might ask

ourselves: what happens to developmental desire in a world which

eclipses its utopian potential?

Oppositional Desire: The Desire to Fight Injustice

To explore the fate of developmental desire within the context of social

hierarchy, we must uncover within the socio-erotic an oppositional

dimension that may potentially emerge as we confront obstacles that

impede our full individual and social development. Oppositional desire,

the fifth finger of social desire, represents the rational inclination

to oppose all individuals, institutions, and ideologies that obstruct

the full expression of all forms of social desire, be they sensual,

associative, differentiative, or developmental. Oppositional desire may

be symbolized by the open palm. This first moment of opposition, the

moment of critique, represents the act of rationally reflecting upon

that which obstructs our expression of other forms of social desire,

analyzing the history of oppression, and reasoning out coherent plans

for future resistance. When we (metaphorically) ‘read’ the receptive and

integrative palm, we know when to oppose even the desire for opposition,

recognizing the appropriate time to wait, listen, and be critical,

holding the serious and specific weight of the world in our open hand.

However, opposition cannot be waged by contemplative critique alone.

When the five fingers of desire come together, they also form a fist of

collective or individual defiance. This second moment of opposition,

then, the moment of resistance, represents taking passionate and

rational action to defy institutions that impede the creation of a just

new world. Such acts may be covert or overt, or they may assume the form

of armed insurrection or active non-violence. Throughout history,

wherever there is a story of oppression, there is a hidden and unspoken

story of resistance. The oppositional desire of the fist held high

symbolizes the unity and strength of social and political contestation.

Finally, opposition requires a third, reconstructive moment.

Oppositional desire may be symbolized by the ‘opposable thumb’ that

brings reconstructive and evolutionary possibilities into being through

critical invention. Often, the desire for resistance is the mother of

invention as oppressive circumstances inspire us to imagine and reason

new ways not only to survive but to flourish. Opposition is incomplete

without the act of reconstructing a coherent and organically rational

vision of the future. It is insufficient to merely critique and contest

social and ecological injustice. Opposition enters into its fullness

when we begin to think through our oppression to create a desirable new

world.

The expression of oppositional desire can be suppressed by authority,

but it cannot be dissipated altogether. Moments of overt oppositional

desire emerge in the direct demands for freedom that make up the body of

social demonstrations and resistance throughout history. However,

oppositional desire cannot always be expressed overfly. Sometimes, it

will assume covert forms ranging from anonymous acts of sabotage to the

most subtle expressions of psychological resistance. The socio-erotic,

then, represents not just the overt expression of a range of social

desire. It also represents the potential for social desire, the impulse

toward freedom itself. Oppositional desire is the force that pushes

green tongues of weeds through cracks of the blandest parking lots, just

to say: “I will not go away.” It is that which inspires us to resist,

not just to fulfill our basic material needs, but to express our desire

for a particular quality of life, a particular sensuality,

connectedness, and texture that endows life with meaning and a deep

sense of satisfaction.

Five Qualities of Oppositional Desire

All five fingers of social desire can be rendered oppositional in a

context of social hierarchy and oppression. For instance, sensual desire

may assume an oppositional dimension when we oppose forces which

obstruct our desire for sexual or sensual self-expression. Women’s fight

for sexual freedom represents a form of oppositional sensual desire as

women fight for file right to love and determine the fate of their own

bodies. The movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered

liberation represents moments of overt oppositional desire when people

take action to challenge patriarchal institutions of compulsory

heterosexuality. Sensual desire assumes an oppositional dimension when

we incorporate our love for beauty into forms of direct action, creating

new ways to express dissent and visions of a utopian future through

visual art, theater, music, and poetry. The desire for ‘nature’, when

expressed in oppositional terms, represents as well an expression of

oppositional developmental desire. The yearning to restore and elaborate

ecological integrity by contesting capitalist and state practices, and

the desire to fight file parallel social and ecological injustices that

constitute environmental racism reflect what happens when the social

desire for ‘nature’ encounters moments of ecological injustice.

The second finger of social desire, associative desire, may assume an

oppositional dimension when we resist forces that obstruct cooperation.

Resistance to oppressive institutions such as racism, sexism, and

capitalism, which counter the desire for mutual recognition, is born out

of associative oppositional desire. In turn, social experiments in

intentional communities, or worker-collectives, represent examples of

associative oppositional desire. Attempts to share, barter, or cooperate

when such activities are discouraged or prohibited, demonstrate the

relentless socio-erotic opposition to the institution of capitalism. In

addition, when people risked their lives to work the underground

railroads or to hide slaves in the U.S.; when a battered woman runs to a

phone booth in the middle of the night to call a friend; when a poor

woman gives her neighbor money for food, such acts represent expressions

of the desire to oppose through association, pushing past

institutionalized sources of separation, isolation, and alienation.

The third finger of social desire, differentiative desire, may become

oppositional when we are confronted by systems of authority that demand

expedience and conformity. Oppositional differentiative desire is the

push to differentiate our own desire from the desire of those in power.

Within the context of hierarchy, differentiative desire takes on a new

impulse. Rather than differentiation within the context of a greater

cooperative collectivity, differentiative desire becomes the desire to

differentiate from the ideas, institutions, or individuals in power.

Sabotage, often misinterpreted as self-defeating behavior, can represent

a vital act of self assertion. Just as men may misinterpret women’s

sexual desire as ‘irrational’, they may misinterpret women’s

oppositional desire too, misperceiving women’s resistance as

‘incompetence’. In Lesbian Ethics, Sarah Lucia Hoagland discusses Donna

Deitch’s documentary Woman to Woman, in which a working class housewife

describes feelings of frustration and helplessness in regard to her life

and work within the home.[124] At one point in the interview, the woman

gets a gleam in her eye, lowers her voice, and asks the interviewer,

“Have you ever bought something you don’t need?” Confessing to the

interviewer that she often buys cans of beans she has no intention of

using, just to waste her husband’s money, she concludes, “You have to

know you’re alive; you have to make sure you exist.”[125]

This desire for agency or self-determination is an act of oppositional

differentiative desire. This desire is expressed in a spectrum of

sabotage activities ranging from burning dinners to hiding the master’s

tools on the plantation. As Hoagland points out:

Acts of sabotage can function to establish that self, to affirm a

woman’s separateness in her own mind. It may be more important to the

woman who burns dinners to remind herself (and maybe her husband) that

he cannot take her for granted than it is for her to rise socially and

economically... And it may be more important to the slave that she

affirm her existence by thwarting the master’s plan in some way than it

is to secure safety in a situation in which believing she is safe is

dangerously foolish. If a woman establishes her self as separate (at

least in her own awareness) from the will of him who dominates by making

certain decisions and carrying them out, then those choices are not

self-defeating, since without them there would be no self to

defeat.[126]

Differentiative desire lies at the heart of oppositional desire. Through

opposing the power which oppresses us, we differentiate ourselves from

that power, asserting our independent desire for freedom. Often, the

cost of differentiative oppositional desire is our own physical defeat,

a sacrifice that challenges an exclusively materialist interpretation of

social resistance. Predicating social and political resistance on

material necessity alone can never account for the ways in which the

subjugated often forgo their own physical security, safety, and even

survival, in order to maintain an integral sense of selfhood and

community.

The fourth finger of desire, developmental desire, assumes an

oppositional dimension when confronted by obstacles to self-development

on an individual, social, or community level. Social hierarchy functions

to stay the development of those at the bottom. This ‘pressing down’ on

individual and social development takes place on levels that are

physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, ethical, and creative. For

instance, within many capitalist cultures, women are de-skilled

technologically and intellectually, instilling a lack of confidence and

competence in abilities that should belong to both sexes. Within liberal

capitalist societies, knowledge regarding such areas as sexuality,

health, and technology is often stolen from women and other oppressed

peoples to be hoarded and controlled within centralized institutions

such as hospitals, universities, corporations, and governments.

In the crisis today over intellectual property rights, First World

corporations steal and patent seeds cultivated over thousands of years

by indigenous peoples in the Third World. The goal of such capitalistic

exploits is to centralize the cultivation and distribution of seeds,

de-skilling local farmers in the process. Unless interrupted, such

action threatens to erase not only local agricultural knowledge but the

communal and historical development of agricultural knowledge

itself.[127]

In addition, while the oppressed are often de-skilled, they are also

taught to forgo their own developmental desire. In many societies, women

are encouraged to engage in vicarious expressions of desire, nurturing

the development of children and men. Viewed as less developed than the

mature male capitalist subject, for example women are often described as

being closer to nature; a nature that is in turn portrayed as lowly and

static, deprived of developmental, self-organizing properties.

Accordingly, women, like nature, must await the ‘animating principle’ of

man and his technology and intellect in order to develop or grow. As

Simone de Beauvoir points out in The Second Sex, only elite modern man

can ever hope to gain development, or transcendence over the alleged

stasis and repetition of the natural world.[128] Women and the rest of

the oppressed must remain within immanence, or within a state of

unending latency, without any hope for development.

Developmental desire becomes oppositional when people begin to

acknowledge and elaborate the development which they have achieved. In

1936, the “Mujeres Libres,” an anarchist organization of “free women”

who fought in the Spanish Civil War, established self-development as a

central focus in women’s revolutionary work. like most social

anarchists, the Mujeres Libres regarded the transformation of the self

as crucial to the transformation of society.[129] Transcending a Marxian

oriented ‘needs agenda,’ the Mujeres Libres asserted women’s desire for

social freedom, working to develop new skills and abilities while

fighting to create a qualitatively new society. In particular, the

Mujeres Libres established capacitacion, an agenda which prepared women

for revolutionary engagement, and captacion, which incorporated women

into the libertarian movement. This dual orientation was expressed

clearly in its statement of purpose:

...to create a conscientious and responsible female force [originally, a

“revolutionary force”] that can act as a vanguard of progress; and to

this end, to establish schools, institutes, conferences, special

courses, etc., designed to empower women and emancipate them from the

triple enslavement to which they have been, and continue to be, subject,

the enslavement of ignorance, enslavement as a woman, and enslavement as

a worker.[130]

Through an agenda of captacion, women focused on developing their

participation within anarchist organizations. Due to the widespread

neglect of women’s issues by the larger anarcho-syndicalist movement,

the Mujeres Libres addressed social and economic oppression that

specifically affected women, working to overcome those obstacles, to

integrate women into the wider revolutionary movement.[131] In turn,

through capacitacion, women expressed their desire to reestablish their

capacities for both social and self renewal. While their education

focused primarily on the areas of literacy and sexual education, they

emphasized as well a wide range of other skills that would prepare women

for their life and work in the new anarchist society. In the Fall of

1936, the Mujeres Libres in Barcelona offered intensive courses in

general culture, social history, economics, and law in its offices in

the Plaza de Cataluna. Regardless of the topic, the theme was the same:

Women must take responsibility for their own development, education, and

participation within the larger movement.

Oppositional developmental desire has continued to surface throughout

history as people challenge conditions of personal and collective stasis

caused by oppression. During the New Left for example, feminists

established a ‘developmental’ agenda, creating consciousness-raising

groups designed to allow women to increase awareness of oppressive

gender roles. In turn, in the Third World, beginning in 1977, women have

expressed developmental oppositional desire in the “Green Belt Movement”

in Kenya. In this movement, activist and scholar Wangari Maathai formed

a network of grassroots educational and activist groups throughout that

country to prepare women to address the parallel crises of deforestation

and poverty. Training women to work in such areas as seed cultivation,

marketing, and forest management, the Green Belt Movement restored green

areas around school compounds and city limits throughout the country.

Seeking more than ecological and economic restoration, however, The

Green Belt Movement allowed women to develop their status as holders of

expert knowledge.[132]

Expressing oppositional desire is a way to feel alive in a world which

deadens our yearning for freedom. To resist, on an individual and social

level, is vital to the revolutionary project; when people forget that

they possess the very means for social change, they become ignorant of

their own potential for dynamism and self-development. “When people see

themselves as ‘stuck’, they are likely to believe that the world is

inevitably unchangeable as well. When we lose confidence in our ability

to develop new oppositional ways of being, we lose faith in our ability

to change the world. Propelled by our oppositional desire, we have the

potential to challenge the ‘big lie of stasis’ that teaches us that the

world is controlled by an unchanging set of natural laws that keeps each

thing and each person in place. Once we recognize that we can fight

oppression to become more sensual, cooperative, creative, and whole, the

big static book of natural law looses its yellowed pages as they scatter

in the winds of opposition.

The Socio-Erotic: Toward an Informed Desire

The five dimensions of desire provide a way to talk about qualitative

dimensions of reality without appealing to spiritual or purely intuitive

explanations, a way to translate that which is conventionally called

spiritual into that which is erotic. Yet such an approach requires a

re-thinking of vernacular understandings of meaning that are commonly

contrasted against the idea of reason. In a world of capitalist

rationalization, a world that reduces social and ecological

relationships to standardized units of profit, it is tempting to appeal

to ideas of sacredness or spirit to convey the poetry of life,

dimensions of reality that cannot be reduced to instrumental or linear

reason. However, when we equate all that is rich, deep, and intensely

meaningful with that which is not rational, we conflate rationalization

with rationality, failing in turn to recognize moments of organic

rationality and history within what is usually invoked as spiritual. We

fail to realize that we can use reason to create structures and ways of

being that are intensely meaningful in the most cooperative and

liberatory sense.

Again, the desire to assert a dimension of life that cannot be bought,

sold, or biologically determined moves us to embrace the idiom of

spiritus rather than that of rationality or cooperative relationality.

Believing that rationality is inherently reductive, we posit the poetry,

sensuality, and inter-relatedness of life as a kind of universal essence

or energy that flows through the world, a kind of activating principle

that is beyond history or reason. Yet there are other more relational,

rational, and historical ways to describe moments of holism, ways to

articulate instances in which the whole cannot be reduced to a mere sum

of its parts. The idiom of the socio-erotic provides a way to point to

such qualitatively irreducible moments, re-configuring the dimensions of

social desire as social rather than spiritual or intuitive, rational

rather than irrational, historical rather than universal, and common

rather than sacred.

The socio-erotic, then, provides a way to talk about that which is

rational and irreducible, that which is poetic and rational, historical,

and social. Social desires are marked by moments of rationality or logic

that are reflective of the historical, social, and political contexts in

which they emerge.[133] In this way, the socio-erotic is not a

universal, irrational essence or spirit; rather, it represents a way to

talk about a range of social desires that are informed by and answerable

to historically situated cultural practice. Moving beyond essentialist

ideas of spirits, energies, forces, or drives, we may uncover the most

meaningful and social implications of cooperative relationality itself.

As social creatures, than, our most meaningful and cooperative social

yearnings are marked by an underlying rational, historical, and

relational logic. When participants in the civil rights movement yearned

for social justice, for example, such yearnings were not a priori, or

instinctual. Instead, they reflected historically rooted and rational

understandings of what ideas of ‘race’, ‘justice’, and ‘injustice’ meant

during the post-war period of post-slavery America. The social desire

articulated through the poetic prose of James Baldwin reflects a highly

rational mind capable of articulating compelling arguments against

racism and heterosexism in a language of sensuality and profound

emotion. Baldwin’s creativity cannot be explained as a simple energy,

force, or drive, but as an expression of a particular relationality: a

meditation upon a rich matrix of social and political relationships that

Baldwin observed, lived, and reflected upon in a particular place and

time in history. By describing the social desire of Baldwin as a merely

intuitive expression, we miss the profoundly historical, rational, and

relational nature of this artist’s work.

Articulated through the language of the socio-erotic, we may see moments

of sensual desire in Baldwin’s prose: a relational desire for a quality

of mutual recognition that countered racism, classism, and heterosexism.

Baldwin expressed a rational desire for association in his discussions

of brotherhood, unity, love, and compassion. Yet again, rather than

represent essential intuitions or an expression of spirit, we may

recognize within the genius of Baldwin the ability to seamlessly join a

critique of political and social structures with a plea for a sensuous

expression of human compassion and unity. Baldwin’s reflection upon his

own thirst for creativity, sensuality, and knowledge as a young black

man in Harlem in the 1940s, a desire that sent him to the public

library, to the pulpit, and into the arms of young men, represents not

an irrational spiritual drive or intuition but a highly rational and

historically situated expression of a relational differentiative and

developmental desire. In turn, Baldwin’s writings against racism

represent sensually articulated expressions of oppositional desire, a

desire that is impassioned and marked by an undeniable logic:

At bottom, to be colored means that one has been caught in some utterly

unbelievable cosmic joke, a joke so hideous and in such bad taste that

it defeats all categories and definitions. One’s only hope of

supporting, to say nothing of surviving, this joke is to flaunt in the

teeth of it one’s own particular and invincible style. It is at this

turning, this level, that the word color, ravaged by experience and

heavy with the weight of peculiar spoils, returns to its first meaning,

which is not negro, the Spanish word for black, but vivid, many hued...

the rainbow, and warm and quick and vital... life.[134]

To attribute Baldwin’s genius to spiritus denies the distinctly

embodied, historical and human quality of this work. By identifying

Baldwin’s genius as an expression of social desire, we may reclaim an

appreciation of the human potential for making liberatory, creative, and

meaningful connections out of the matrix of social relationships

themselves. We may indeed describe Baldwin’s work as socio-erotic.

Yet recognizing the historicity and sociality of our social desires does

not imply that we should rationalize or reduce such experiences to

behaviors that are operative, biologically determined, or merely

socially constructed to fulfill some adaptive function. Appreciating the

socio-erotic does not entail that we become self-conscious each time we

engage in meaningful activity, wringing the poetry out of each

experience by analyzing its rational and political implications. To be

sure, there are some experiences that are degraded by in-the-moment

analysis: The poetry of sexuality, artistic expression, and parental

love, for instance, may be compromised by constant appeals to critical

self-reflection. What makes a particular song beautiful or pleasurable

is often the ability to temporarily lose or suspend self-awareness,

allowing the self to dissolve into a delicious rhythm, However, it is

naive and perhaps even dangerous to think that because we can suspend

awareness of the rationality or history underpinning such experiences,

because we can shift awareness away from what it is that makes us label

a particular song, face, or mountain as beautiful, that those

inscriptions of what is beautiful stand outside the realms of

rationality or history.

Assertions of irrationality or intuition as epistemologically more

authentic or immediate than reason are predicated on the myth that

reason is the opposite of intuition. However, intuition often

constitutes a pre-reflexive expression of rationality: when intuitions

are right, they reflect historically grounded insights that we have

rationally cultivated about the world; when they are wrong, they often

reflect more about ourselves and our unconscious desires, Intuitions

can, indeed, often be wrong and destructive: Whereas Hitler intuited

that the Jews were a sub-human enemy to the German Heimat or homeland,

and anti-abortionists intuit that first trimester fetuses are ‘babies’

that should be protected, there exist many men who intuit that their

wives are unfaithful, and deserve a beating. Conversely, many

intuitions, defined as irrational, or pre-rational, are often grounded

in highly refined bodies of local knowledge. So often throughout the

history of the patriarchal and colonial West, ‘women’s intuitions’ and

indigenous ‘folk knowledge’ are cast as irrational to dismiss highly

rational understandings of human behavior and natural processes.

The Enlightenment’s failure to transcend misguided and solipsistic views

of rationality, views that often dismissed the rational knowledge of the

marginalized, may inspire us to cultivate new ways of approaching

questions of rationality so central to feminist and subaltern

epistemology. As we reject reductive discussions of rationality, we may

engender epistemological options beyond appeals to spirituality and

intuition. The idea of the socio-erotic represents an embodied and

historical approach to questions of meaning, connectedness, sensuality,

development, and moral opposition. A rationally informed social desire,

a desire informed, provides a radical new approach to such crucial

questions, so central to the social and ecological struggle. The

socio-erotic provides a metaphor that better resonates with the shift

from a spirituality-based essentialism to a historically situated

relationality.

By appreciating the meaning of the socio-erotic, the dimensions of

social desire, we valorize the immense beauty, power, and intelligence

that marks our most sensual, empathetic, and developmental ways of

relating. Far from being reductive, we may elaborate an appreciation for

the stunning potential of humanity to express its relationality in

sensual, creative, and dynamic ways. Thus, if the socio-erotic is the

opposite of anything, it is not spirituality or the sacred, but to

capitalist rationalization, and an anti-humanism that reduces humanity

to a cold and controlling anti-social species: a portrayal that

dismisses and trivializes the potential of humanity for engendering

institutions that nurture the most empathetic and sensual expression of

social and ecological relationships.

By viewing meaningful experiences through the lens of the socio-erotic

we regain a poetic appreciation of the diverse expressions of human

sociality. We root our goodness not in spirituality or in romantic

purity, but in our humanness, a humanness that is derived from and

constituted by, natural history itself. It is deeply radical to assert

what is potentially good in humanity during cruel and truly anti-human

times such as these. In a neo-liberal era in which the majority of

humanity is exploited, despised, and tyrannized, it is an act of the

greatest empathy to recognize within those who are not free, the

potential for beauty, intelligence, cooperation, and freedom.

In an era dominated by Christianity and neo-liberal capitalism, it is

tempting to yield to portrayals of a humanity that is inevitably flawed,

selfish, and ecologically destructive, a species inherently opposed to

an innocent and pristine natural world. The anti-humanism that pervades

the radical ecology movement, an anti-humanism that encodes ‘knowledge’

and ‘rationality’ as sinful or regressive, perpetuates the religious

myth of a world that ‘fell’ because of humanity’s quest for knowledge

and pleasure. In turn, the romantic idealism that marks ecological

discussions encourages us to idealize ‘nature’ (while hating our

‘flawed’ selves) rather than resist social institutions that allow the

anti-social few to degrade the rest of humanity and the natural world.

Ecological romanticism allows us to keep social hierarchies intact,

constructing idealized ‘nature preserves’ or ‘natural products’ for the

pleasure and guilt reduction of the privileged few.

The socio-erotic represents the attempt to further differentiate the

idea of social desire, differentiating in turn, the cooperative impulse

itself: elaborating the desire for mutualism and an ethical and

oppositional progression toward a utopian horizon. Our vocabulary for

describing moments of desire has been impoverished for centuries;

indeed, it has been limited to the language of energistic,

individualistic, and romantic drives for material acquisition, status

and personal sensual pleasure. We need to develop a new language of

desire, offering ourselves a broader palette of colors to paint ever

finer shades of meaning, subtlety, and nuance. Thinking through the

socio-erotic represents one step toward developing this language, moving

us toward a greater fluency in the language of freedom itself. We need

to rationally fall in love with what is potentially most empathetic and

progressive within social relationships. By focusing on the quality of

relationships to self, others, and to the rest of the natural world, we

move away from appeals to universalizing essences, to articulate crucial

cultural meanings and social relationships. Trusting ourselves to think

compassionately, organically, and relationally, we may take the apple of

knowledge into both hands and bite down hard.

Part III: Toward a Social Desire for Nature

Chapter Five — The Joy of Life: the Natural Evolution of Social

Desire

Exploring the social nature of desire has profound implications for

understanding the desire for nature. By recasting desire as potentially

relational rather than essential, and social rather than

individualistic, we are able to rethink not only relationships within

society, but society’s relationship to nature as well. We see that just

as we have the potential to desire social cooperation, we also have the

potential to desire an interdependent relationship with the natural

world.

Far from the romantic desire to protect a ‘nature’ that is a pristine

other, a realm prior to and outside of human action, a social desire for

nature understands nature as a process of natural evolution in which

humanity may potentially play a liberatory role. Departing from a desire

for nature that regards human intervention into nature as inherently

destructive and ‘unnatural’, we can begin to consider the ‘naturalness’

of our social desire to engage creatively in ecological processes. We

may begin to see that throughout natural evolution, organisms are marked

by a tendency to elaborate upon the natural world through mutualistic

activity, creative self-differentiation, and development. These

evolutionary tendencies constitute a wider natural history of the social

desire for nature.

Social desire does not appear suddenly like a bolt of lightning, or with

a wave of a god’s finger, but emerges organically through the process of

natural evolution. As we have seen, rather than constitute an energy,

spirit, or essence that activates an otherwise passive humanity, the

socio-erotic is a set of relational potentialities. And unlike ideas of

spirit or energy which cannot be explained in organic evolutionary

terms, we can indeed, trace the nature history of the socio-erotic.

Thus we have two tasks at hand: to rethink the natural origins of social

desire and to cultivate a new social desire for nature. To this, we may

add one last task: to develop a way to distinguish between desire that

is social and anti-social, rational and irrational. Our discussion of

social desire would be meaningless if understandings of what constitutes

ethical social desire were left to matters of personal opinion. We must

move, then, toward an objective historical, rather than personal and

relativistic, criterion for distinguishing between social and

anti-social desire. To accomplish this task, we might look to the

natural history of social desire to explore how trends in natural

evolution toward mutualism, differentiation, and development may

constitute ecological principles that provide a theoretical ‘ground’ for

an objective understanding of social desire.

It is crucial to explore the organic origins and ethical implications of

the desire for both social cooperation within society and between

society and the natural world. Reflecting upon the origins of this

desire within nature itself, we may explore what social ecology has to

offer to a discussion of objective criteria for distinguishing between

social and anti-social desire, exploring its implications for the desire

for nature. Ultimately, we may examine the social desire for nature,

moving toward a new revolutionary way to express the yearning for a

meaningful and ecological quality of everyday life.

The Eco-Erotic: Principles of Mutualism, Differentiation, and

Development in Nature

To understand the origins of social desire, we may look to natural

evolution to find tendencies in nature toward mutualism,

differentiation, and development—tendencies that are homologous to

dimensions of the socio-erotic. We may call these tendencies in natural

evolution the ‘eco-erotic’ which represents three ecological principles

that provide natural evolution with degrees of directionality and

stability.

This discussion of natural evolution rests on an understanding of a

significant qualitative distinction between the ecological principles I

will explore and the dimensions of social desire. While the former exist

prior to human history, the latter are inseparable from historical and

social constraints that shape and limit the expression of human

sociality in all of its forms. It is for this reason that I will not

explore sensual or oppositional moments within the natural world.

Understandings of sensuality are predicated on a social and historical

set of aesthetic, sexual, and relational practices specific to human

cultural practices. In turn, the idea of opposition represents a

response to social and political institutions created by societies. It

is not that I believe that other species are not sensual or that they

never oppose obstacles which may confront them. It is that, of the five

moments of desire described previously, these two imply greater degrees

of subjectivity and consciousness than do the others. To attribute these

qualities to species in general in the natural world would run a greater

risk of anthropomorphizing.

I have chosen to focus on the three ecological principles of mutualism,

differentiation, and development, because they are general and

meaningful enough to help illustrate moments of continuity between

natural and social expressions of what I am calling the erotic. What I

seek here is to establish ecological principles of mutualism,

differentiation, and development as prototypical of social expression of

desire. I will attempt to show that, while social desire is not

reducible to principles that inform natural processes, there does in

fact, exist an evolutionary continuity between the socio- and the

eco-erotic. Such a discussion hopefully leads the way for a greater

appreciation of the ‘naturalness’ of social desire, that as we shall

see, has its roots within a wider natural history.

The Eco-Erotic Principle of Mutualism

Mutualism is the first principle of the eco-erotic. At the end of the

19^(th) century, social anarchists began to identify mutualistic

tendencies in the natural world, tendencies that may be framed in

‘erotic’ terms. As early as 1891, social anarchist Errico Malatesta

challenged social Darwinian and Malthusian theories that portrayed

nature as an inevitably competitive struggle for scarce resources,

asserting instead that “cooperation has played, and continues to play, a

most important role in the development of the organic world.”[135]

Similarly, Peter Kropotkin began writing about mutual aid in 1890. In

his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, Kropotkin criticized

bourgeois theorists for downplaying Darwin’s emphasis on the cooperative

as well as competitive nature of evolution.[136] Kropotkin challenged

this interpretation by presenting a series of zoological studies

demonstrating examples of inter-species mutual aid as a major factor in

species survival:

...mutual aid is as much a law of animal life as mutual struggle, but

that, as a factor of evolution, it most probably has a far greater

importance, inasmuch as it favours the development of such habits and

characters as insure the maintenance and further development of the

species, together with the greatest amount of welfare and enjoyment of

life for the individual, with the least waste of energy.[137]

In addition, Kropotkin regarded the latent sociability of animals as

being more than a survival strategy. According to Kropotkin, animals

associate with one another because they experience pleasure in so doing,

not just because they are obliged to for physical need or survival.

Identifying a nascent expression of subjective sensuality in the natural

world, Kropotkin portrayed the pleasure gleaned from the animal play of

higher mammals as a joy of life.

The idea that animal behavior may be driven by something other than

utility or necessity, something homologous to human desire, represents a

radical break with the Hobbseyan portrayal of nature (and society) as a

war of all against all. In turn, by emphasizing the theme of a tendency

in the natural world toward mutualism, Kropotkin challenged the Baconian

portrayal of nature as an inert passive machine, a portrayal popularized

with the emergence of modern Cartesian science. For Kropotkin, a trend

toward latent mutualism is constitutive of a development that becomes

more complex, rational, and conscious through the evolutionary process.

According to Kropotkin, this trend expresses itself “in proportion as we

ascend the scale of evolution, growing more and more conscious

(eventually losing its) purely physical character...ceasing to be simply

instinctive, it becomes reasoned, it becomes a voluntary deviation from

habitual moods of life.”[138]

Hence, this latent level of mutualistic ‘joy’ in more simple species

gradually gives way to degrees of more intentional and conscious

associative ‘joy’ in more complex species. This trend can be observed in

the elaborate grooming behaviors of most primates which serve not only

the function of necessary hygiene, but of sensual nurturing and social

reassurance as well.

We may trace humanity’s social desire for sensual association back to

this latent mutualistic tendency in the natural world. The human

yearning for a particular quality of association, one that is

subjectively pleasurable, finds its origin within latent degrees of

subjectivity in the animal world as species strive not only for that

which is physically necessary, but that which is qualitatively desirable

as well. In this way, we could say that in the natural world, there

exist nascent expressions of a sensual and associative subjectivity that

become increasingly conscious within humanity in the form of

self-conscious sensual and associative desire.

However, we must not overstate the homology between a mutualistic

tendency in nature and social desire in society. Kropotkin erred on the

side of romanticism in his exuberant anthropomorphic celebration of

‘dancing ants’. What makes Kropotkin’s discussion radical is not his

romantic idealization of animal behavior, but rather, his understanding

of the continuity between the tendency for mutualism in nature and

culture that runs through natural evolution.

The Eco-Erotic Principle of Differentiation

Exploring the qualitative and subjective dimensions within species

brings us to the second ecological principle of differentiation. The

principle of differentiation in nature represents the tendency toward

flexibility, spontaneity, and creativity which allows organisms to

deviate from established patterns or norms. Geneticist Barbara

McClintock, who studied genetic mutations in corn, explored the role of

genetic variegation and mutation in natural evolution.[139] In addition

to searching for coherent patterns of genetic regularity in corn plants,

McClintock explored the seemingly chaotic patterns of corn kernels as

well. Out of the differentiated chaos of kernel arrangements, McClintock

found larger patterns of regularity, recognizing that the deviations

within such patterns were not only inevitable, but developmentally

favorable, often leading to vital degrees of organic innovation.

Evolution itself is made possible by the tendency toward innovation that

marks both the micro-organic and the organic worlds. In contrast to

Freud’s belief that Eros creates “the one” out of “the more than one,”

eco-erotic differentiation tends to make “more than one” out of “the

one” through a process of spontaneous complexification. Throughout the

evolutionary process, a tendency towards self-differentiation

continually opens up new avenues for organic development. Without

differentiation, the process of natural evolution would be reduced to

mere stasis, repetition, and circularity. It would be what systems

theorists call a “closed system” in which organic evolution would never

have gotten off the proverbial ground.[140]

Yet the tendency toward spontaneity in nature should not be conflated

with an idea of a randomness or incoherence which precludes an organic

logic or order. In the same way that unity does not entail the sacrifice

of diversity, diversity does not require the breakdown of all coherence

or unity. Rather, it is precisely the patterns of regularity within the

natural world which lay the ground for creative deviation from those

patterns. The developmental process toward ever greater levels of

differentiation and complexity takes place within larger patterns that

are often marked by dimensions of order, balance, and symmetry. And as

McClintock illustrates, out of seemingly chaotic or random genetic

deviations within com plants, emerge new patterns of stability and

regularity; patterns that, in turn, serve as the ground for further

creative deviation. In this way, there is a dialectical relationship

between chaos and order, in which the spontaneous tendency toward

disorder is predicated on both a background of order, as well as a reach

for new levels of integration and coherence.

Degrees of spontaneity in nature play a crucial and creative role in

opening up possibilities for new levels of complex development. This

innovative tendency stems from the tendency within nature for organisms

to become something else, to complicate things, to make natural

evolution innovatively ‘messy’. In turn, the breaking of patterns also

makes for diverse eco-communities[141] which display a greater chance

for survival and sustainability. Ecology has shown that the more complex

and diversified a particular eco-community, the greater the chance for

species to survive such changes as climatic variation or the

introduction of new insects or animal predators. In this way, the

deviation or differentiation of particular organisms represents a form

of individual flexibility which leads to the greater flexibility of the

larger unity.

To return to the homology between the eco- and socio-erotic, we may say

that the latent striving in natural evolution for differentiation

represents a nascent form of the social desire within individuals and

society for differentiation. We could say that humanity incorporates

nature’s tendency for differentiation, bringing it to a more complex and

conscious level of development. The social desire for spontaneous

creative expression, for dynamism and change, while not reducible to

organic differentiation, resonates historically with this impulse. The

spontaneous divergence of corn plants from seemingly stable genetic

patterns is evolutionarily homologous to the social desire in society to

spontaneously diverge from social and cultural patterns to create

something new, to further expand the horizon of freedom, choice, and

social complexity.

The Desire for Nature Revisited: Toward a Social Desire for Nature

Yet as in the case of the socio-erotic, the idea of differentiation in

the eco-erotic remains unfulfilled unless complemented by the idea of

development. The tendency toward development in the natural world

represents the latent striving for ever greater degrees of coherent

self-organization and maturation. As explored in the previous chapter,

the idea of development is qualitatively different from the idea of

simple growth or change. The idea of development implies the movement

from that which is more general to that which is more particular,

complex, and differentiated. Yet again, within this process of

differentiation, degrees of unity and order within previous phases of

development are retained throughout the process of developmental

complexification.

As an organism develops to become something new, it retains its old

identity, incorporating and transforming the structure of the old

identity into a more mature form. To digress briefly from our discussion

of nature, we might consider the experience of meeting an individual we

have not seen since they were a child. While we may be struck by their

new mature physique, we are often able to identify this new individual

precisely because we can derive from this more mature form, a previous

less differentiated form. When we say “I know you from third grade!” we

are saying that, despite the process of developmental transformation, we

understand that the old individual we knew has been incorporated and

retained throughout the process of maturation. We are able to see

through the more particularized form of the adult presented to us,

recognizing the more general form of the child that has been retained.

This cumulative process is integral to an eco-erotic principle of

development. It represents the process by which organisms both retain

and transform their old identity to become something newer, more

complex, and differentiated. The process of ‘becoming’ that constitutes

natural evolution is indeed a process in which organisms ‘change’ while

paradoxically staying the ‘same’.

This latent striving toward development in nature represents a process

of self-development which is not determined, but is endowed with degrees

of open-ended and active participation that gradually emerges into the

social developmental desire in society. In The Ecology of Freedom,[142]

Bookchin emphasizes the ‘self-organizing’ properties of organisms,

describing the degree to which they actively participate in their own

development by shaping and organizing their environment:

I wish to propose that the evolution of living beings is no passive

process, the product of chance conjunctions between random genetic

changes...evolution has been marked until very recently by the

development of ever more complex species and eco-communities. Diversity

may be regarded as a source not only of greater eco-community

stability...it may also be regarded in a very fundamental sense as an

ever expanding, albeit nascent, source of freedom within nature, a

medium for objectively anchoring varying degrees of choice,

self-directiveness and participation by life forms in their own

evolution.[143]

Bookchin unsettles the idea that organisms merely adapt passively to an

already determined environment, asserting instead that organisms become

increasingly participatory and self-directed as the evolutionary process

unfolds.

Social ecology rejects notions of biological determinism and

evolutionary necessity. Moving beyond mechanistic and lawful portrayals

of ‘nature’, it depicts an evolutionary process that is marked by

spontaneity and potentiality rather than natural law and pre-determined

order. Nature is not a static green box sitting at the edge of society;

nor is it a metallic spring that unwinds mechanically. Rather, natural

evolution represents the ongoing dance of life itself moving toward ever

greater levels of self-expression, eventually giving rise to a

potentially rational and desirous second nature. Organisms are marked by

a tendency to adapt, modify, and to develop creatively by making nascent

evolutionary choices.

This developmental tendency within natural evolution resonates

historically with social developmental desire. Just as organisms have a

latent desire to fulfill their potential for development, humanity

possesses a social desire to develop its unique talents, abilities, and

potentialities as well. This striving not only to survive at the

minimum, but to cultivate ever new creative ways of relating to the

environment is shared by both human and other species on the planet. The

tendency toward not only stasis and stability, but toward innovation and

development, provides the basis for evolution within both nature and

society as well.

However, it is vital to distinguish this social ecological

interpretation of ecological tendencies toward mutualism,

differentiation, and development from the erotic naturalism of Wilhelm

Reich. In the early 1900s, Wilhelm Reich, psychoanalyst and later,

physicist, developed an ‘erotic’ theory of nature.[144] Influenced by

Freud, Reich reduced his concept of ‘desire’, or Eros to sexual energy.

Reich called this sexual energy, orgone, demonstrating how it permeated

both natural and social worlds. According to Reich, both nature and

society are regulated by the basic properties of orgone energy, namely

the process of tension and release the same process that marks the

sexual act. When this process of tension and release is obstructed,

Reich contended, an impairment of biological functioning occurs within

the individual organism. Accordingly, Reich identified ‘orgonic

blockages’ as the cause of problems ranging from impaired cellular

functioning and sexual/social neurosis to cancer. Throughout his career,

Reich advocated for creating a society that would allow for the free

flow of orgone energy on both ecological and social levels.

At first view, Reich’s orgone energy could be seen as similar to the

idea of an eco-erotic. However, there are many differences. First, Reich

focused on the energetic processes of nature without focusing on the

developmental process of nature. Fascinated by processes of movement,

change, and stimulus-response, Reich was unconcerned with the ways in

which such processes differentiated or became more complex through the

evolutionary process. Reich expressed a far greater interest in

exploring the structural and functional similarities between cells,

organisms, and humans than the differences. Accordingly, Reich

identified moments of desire in nature which he designated as

functionally identical to human desire. For instance, Reich believed

that the cytoplasmic movement of cells was functionally identical with

the emotional movement or responsiveness of humans. In turn, the

expansion and contraction of microorganisms were expressions of pleasure

and displeasure that shared functional identity with the emotional

correlates in humans. Again, Reich’s exclusive emphasis on consistency

or functional similarity, rather than differentiated development as

well, distinguishes a Reichian from a Bookchinian view of the

relationship between organic and social phenomena.

While it is meaningful to explore the similarities between an

‘eco-erotic’ and a ‘socio-erotic’, it is also crucial to appreciate that

which developmentally distinguishes the two. Whereas Reich was looking

for an energetic unity between the desire of all life forms, we need to

examine the developmental ‘unity in diversity’ in which desire itself is

engaged in a developmental evolutionary process, moving from moments of

organic latency to social and self-conscious actualization.

To reduce the social desire for association, for example, to the

ecological desire for mutualism, would be to erase the cultural, social,

political, and economic forces that both shape and constrain human

associations at any given moment in history. The fact is, the desire to

join a worker’s collective is not reducible to the mutualism of ‘worker

bees’ that are attracted to a particular hive. Whereas the behavior of

worker bees is primarily guided by biological instinct, the behavior of

human workers is primarily shaped by self-consciousness and by the

social institutions that historically shape notions of work, freedom,

and resistance that are fundamental to human history in the modern and

post-modern period.

First and Second Nature: A Way to Talk About Evolutionary Difference

and Continuity

So far we have discussed the dimensions of the eco-erotic, noting both

the evolutionary continuities and discontinuities between the eco- and

socio-erotic. In order to further flesh out this discussion, we need to

be able to distinguish the eco-erotic from the socio-erotic to

demonstrate the differences between the two. Yet if we appeal to

conventional categories, we might just assign the eco- and socio-erotic

to the categories of society and nature to highlight their differences.

We need, then, a way to understand the relationship between ideas of

nature and society that will allow us to appreciate the ‘evolutionary

difference’ between the social and natural worlds.

Social ecology differentiates between categories of ‘nature’ and

‘society’ revealing a developmental continuum between the social and

natural worlds. Referring to two distinct yet continuous phases in

natural history, first and second nature, it illustrates how the latter

is derived developmentally from the former. Quite simply, first nature

represents all processes and products of natural evolution that emerged

from the beginning of the earth’s formation through to the gradual

appearance of human society. In turn, second nature represents humanity,

human consciousness, and human practices including the formation of

diverse cultures, the creation of institutionalized human communities,

the creation of an effective human technics, the development of a richly

symbolic language, and a carefully managed source of nutriment.[145] For

example, whereas a tree may represent first nature, a table constructed

from that tree represents second nature. In this way, the two categories

are not necessarily discrete. With the emergence of second nature, the

two ‘phases’ of first and second nature begin to overlap as human

cultural practice informs the processes of first nature. Long before the

emergence of capitalism, human societies began to dramatically inform

natural processes. Ancient practices ranging from grazing of lands by

livestock and hunting and gathering to shifting cultivation and

irrigation practices have radically informed ecosystems across the globe

for thousands of years. As societies emerged throughout natural history,

their practices have always mediated first nature—a mediation that

challenges romantic notions of a pure, pristine, or untouched

wilderness. Thus, whereas we can differentiate between first and second

nature historically by identifying two distinct yet continuous phases of

natural evolution, it is inaccurate to assert the persistence of two

discrete categories once societies begin to emerge within natural

history.

We can apply the idea of first and second nature to our understanding of

the eco- and socio-erotic. Whereas the eco-erotic represents the

tendency toward mutualism, differentiation, and participatory

development in first nature, the socio-erotic represents the social

expression of these desires in second nature. And just as second nature

gradually emerges out of first nature through the evolutionary process,

the socio-erotic emerges out of the eco-erotic as the latent striving

for mutualism, pleasurable creativity, and development becomes

increasingly conscious and subjective.

The eco- and socio-erotic represent two major phases within natural

evolution. And whereas the eco-erotic of first nature is primarily

informed by degrees of biological instinct, the socio-erotic of second

nature is primarily informed by cultural practices, social institutions,

and degrees of self-conscious choice and intentionality. Thus, the terms

first and second nature allow us to point to the evolutionary

continuities as well as discontinuities between the eco- and

socio-erotic by helping us to see natural evolution as a continuous

evolutionary process that is comprised of distinct, increasingly

differentiated phases. In this way, the terms ‘first’ and ‘second’

nature offer a way to further nuance our discussion of the eco- and

socio-erotic by transcending essentialist and dualistic terms such as

‘nature’ and ‘society’.

However, there are those who are concerned that such terms imply a

hierarchical relationship between the natural and social phases of

evolution.[146] Aware of the ways that ideas of difference have been

used to justify the unethical treatment of animals and the destruction

of natural processes, many believe that we should, instead, emphasize

the similarities between humans and other organisms, asserting that

humanity is essentially no different from or even inferior to other

organisms.

This sentiment has become popular among many privileged peoples in the

era of advanced capitalism. Rightfully dismayed by ecological injustices

caused by irrational social relationships constituted by capitalism,

patriarchy, racism, and the state, many believe that the cause of

ecological destruction is humanity itself, a humanity that has placed

itself above nature. In reaction, ecology becomes a form of social

criticism that posits nature as everything good that humanity is not.

While nature is spiritualized and romanticized, portrayed as a martyred

innocent that we must save, the idea of humanity is cast out of notions

of earthly paradise that we have constructed in reaction, frustration,

and pain. Unfortunately, however, 99% of this humanity, denigrated along

with nature, is blamed for the unjust deeds of the 1% in power.

Rather than place the idea of humanity below or above the idea of

nature, it is crucial to locate humanity within natural evolution in a

historical and developmental relationship to other species. While

understanding the developmental similarities between humans and other

organisms allows us to understand our historical origins and relatedness

to previous forms of development, understanding evolutionary difference

allows us to understand our unique capacities for innovation, both

creative and destructive. For instance, to know our individual potential

as human beings, we need to explore what makes us unique, uncovering our

particular interests, talents, or desires. To know ourselves, we must

cultivate a differentiated sense of ourselves within the context of

others, being able to identify that which renders us both like and

unlike others.

Similarly, for society to know itself, it must be able to point to that

which renders it both like and unlike first nature. To solely emphasize

continuities between nature and society is potentially dangerous. For we

are then unable to identify both our distinctively liberatory

potentialities as well as our harmful capacities. The emergence of

society itself represents an undeniable novelty within the whole of

natural history. With the emergence of humanity, we see the introduction

of novel expressions of abstract language systems, elaborate social

institutions, and unique forms of rationality, consciousness, and desire

whose liberatory potential has yet to be actualized through the

elaboration of a truly humane and ecological society.

It is indeed challenging to find an adequate analogy for the

developmental relationship between society and nature. Liberal

capitalist society is so thoroughly steeped in the ideology of

domination and hierarchy that developmental metaphors often smack of

anything ranging from romantic to reactionary. It is then, tempting to

merely assert that nature and society are part of one another and leave

it at that. But what do we lose when we look only at the developmental

continuities between nature and society, ignoring the evolutionary

differences? We lose the opportunity to look closely at the organic

derivation of society within the natural world, losing too, a vital

understanding of our own natural history and distinctive social

potentiality. Naming and exploring the developmental relationship

between first and second nature allows us to see where we come from,

where we are, and what constitutes our unique potential for creating a

responsible and ethical ecological future.

The antidote to our negative feelings about humanity (or our

‘anti-humanism’), is to see what is best in humanity, tracing the

origins of these qualities back to first nature itself, exploring our

erotic origins in, and resonance with, natural history. What we like

most about the idea of ‘nature’, the ‘innocence’ we describe, resonates

with humanity’s cooperative sensibility—the antithesis to capitalist

rationalization, greed, and corruption. What we love most about

particular landscapes, the unbounded interplay between symmetry and

dissonance, the dance of form, depth, light, and color—these qualities

resurface within our own sensual and intellectual creativity. They

resurface within our own differentiative desire to combine spontaneity

with reason, widening the horizons of meaning, beauty, and poetry. What

we savor in ‘nature’ and society is the expression of the erotic in its

many forms: the striving for such relational pleasures as

interdependence, creativity, self-determination, and self and collective

development—in both the social and natural worlds.

To say that ‘humanity’ is part of nature means more than acknowledging a

biological inheritance from an evolutionary past, more than recognizing

humanity’s incorporation of ancient cellular structures and spinal

columns among the first vertebrates. While appreciating this biological

inheritance, we must comprehend the qualitative implications of

inheriting a biology that is marked by a developmental trend toward

increasing complexity and consciousness. We must also recognize that

humanity is potentially a qualitative and erotic elaboration within

natural history of all that we love about the idea of ‘nature’: a trend

toward increasing sensuality, mutualism, creativity, and the relentless

insistence on diverging, ordering, and becoming. Exploring the

evolutionary relationship between a first and second nature allows us to

understand both the erotic continuity and differences between the

natural and social worlds. We may perhaps begin to transcend this

anti-humanism, looking back through natural history to see what is best

in ourselves winking back at us in a nascent form.

Toward an Objective Understanding of Social Desire

We may now consider whether there is ethical meaning that can be gleaned

from the notion of evolutionary difference. Are there, indeed, ethical

implications to be drawn from the fact that natural evolution moves in a

developmental trend from the simple to the more complex, from the

conscious to the self-conscious, and from the eco-erotic to the

socio-erotic? What does it mean that tendencies in first nature toward

mutualism, differentiation, and development are part of a larger

evolutionary trend toward increasing consciousness, subjectivity, and

rationality? What ethical sense do we make of Kropotkin’s assertion that

desire grows more conscious, rational, and voluntary, eventually losing

its primarily “physical, instinctive character” as it develops from

first to second nature?

The assertion that the potentiality in first nature for mutualism,

differentiation, and development becomes increasingly conscious and

rational as it moves through natural evolution introduces a novel

ethical question: If humanity has the ability to consciously respond to

its desires, then it has the potential to be responsible for its desires

as well. That second nature has the potential to mediate, reflect upon

its impulses, inclinations and yearnings, implies an evolutionarily

unique expression of ‘desire’. Far from the Freudian view of desire as

primarily pre-rational and animalistic, an impulse that must be

suppressed by the rational ego, we may now appreciate the rational and

social dimensions of desire itself. Unlike non-human species whose

latent subjectivity is highly mediated by biological instinct,

humanity’s biological instincts are largely mediated by consciousness,

rationality, and history. We are, after all social creatures whose

desires are informed, for better or for worse, by the idiosyncrasies of

the particular cultures in which we live.

The fact that humanity can reflect upon, choose, and even

institutionalize which shades of desire to act upon introduces an

ethical dimension to the idea of desire. For now we are obliged to ask:

what kind of desire ought humanity to express? Is it is equally valid to

express an individualistic desire that inhibits others from fulfilling

their potential for freedom as it is to express a social desire that

enhances the subjectivity of others? Would we assert that it is as valid

to destroy ecocommunities to fulfill individualistic yearnings for power

and profit as it is to enhance ecological complexity for the good of

all? What criteria do we use to evaluate the validity of our social

desire? When we express the oppositional desire to transform social and

ecological reality, how do we distinguish between reconstructive

activity that is rational from irrational, social from anti-social, or

erotic from anti-erotic? As I have suggested earlier, the ‘desire for

nature’ represents a social construct that may be expressed in wide

range of forms. For some, a romantic, anti-humanistic desire to

annihilate the human species to protect the natural world is a valid

desire for nature. For others, such as the CEOs of Novartis, a

capitalist desire to reduce the biological complexity of Amazon rain

forests to ‘cell lines’ to be patented and sold represents a valid way

to desire ‘nature’. Still, for others, the desire to create directly

democratic institutions to empower citizens to engage creatively and

cooperatively with natural processes, represents an ethical ‘desire for

nature’.

In light of this ideological ‘diversity’, who, indeed, is to say which

‘desire for nature’ is objectively more rational, ethical, or valid than

any other? Why shouldn’t the privileged express their sensual desire for

nature, relaxing at lush island resorts where indigenous workers refill

their Margaritas? Why shouldn’t white middle-class Americans express

associative desire by communing with ‘nature’ by appropriating Native

American rituals while actual native peoples can no longer practice such

rituals because their lands are stolen or poisoned by toxic waste? Why

shouldn’t privileged First World theorists express their differentiative

desire for nature by writing elaborate theories that blame immigrants

and women for destroying ecosystems by ‘overpopulating’?

In turn, can we assert an objectively rational ground for a social

desire in general? While we have the potential to cultivate the

socio-erotic in a cooperative direction, we also have the capacity to

direct our desires in an authoritarian or capitalist direction, using

sexuality for domination and intimidation and creativity for profit to

enhance personal status and authority. If we fail to identify a set of

criteria for making such distinctions, we have no way of asserting that

the social desire for non-hierarchy is more ethical or ‘erotic’ than the

desire to construct hierarchy, or that ecological cultivation is more

ethical than a capitalist rationalization of nature. Without a stable,

general, or objective criteria for determining what makes social desire

more ethically valid than anti-social desire, the quality of our

relationships with each other and with the rest of the natural world

becomes just a matter of arbitrary personal opinion.

To transcend this relativism, we must anchor ideas about the ‘desire for

nature’ in something more stable than subjective inclination. The real

question becomes: on what can we ground an organic rationality that will

be able to distinguish between desirous actions that enhance or threaten

an evolutionary trend toward increasing social and ecological

complexity?

Natural Evolution as a Ground for a Social Ethics of Desire

To address this problem of objectivity, we might again turn to the

natural philosophy of social ecology. Dialectical naturalism is an

approach to natural philosophy developed by Bookchin which builds on,

yet transcends, the dialectical traditions of such thinkers as Hegel and

Marx.[147] For Bookchin, ‘nature’ is a dialectical process of unfolding

that is marked by tendencies toward ever greater levels of

differentiation, consciousness, and freedom. While it is beyond the

scope of this book to fully explore this rich and important theory, we

may look briefly at a few key concepts drawn from Bookchin’s dialectical

naturalism to elaborate our understanding of social desire.

Bookchin appeals to the idea of natural evolution to establish

ecological principles which we may be utilized to evaluate the ethical

dimensions of our social desire. As we begin to understand ‘nature’ as a

process of natural evolution, we recognize the ethical implications of

the idea of ‘nature’ as flowing out of the idea of evolution itself.

Locating humanity within natural evolution raises an ethical question:

what is humanity’s role within the process of natural evolution? If

humanity has the potential to build upon this evolutionary trend toward

complexity, ought it to do so? Again, we might ask, is it equally

rational for societies to reverse this evolutionary trend by

institutionalizing hierarchical social relationships based on command

and control, while also undoing horizons of biological and cultural

differentiation or diversity? In turn, is it equally ‘rational’ for

humanity to reverse the developmental directionality of natural

evolution, a trend that has led from simple unicellular organisms to

increasingly complex species, from consciousness to self-consciousness,

from simple to more complex expressions of subjectivity? As social

ecology illustrates, this reversal is irrational for it contradicts the

developmental logic of natural evolution itself.

The ecological principles of mutualism, differentiation, and development

provide a set of criteria by which to measure the ethical validity of

human action. Again, as social ecology shows, humanity ought to further

this trend toward increasing mutualism, differentiation, and development

and that, in contrast, it is irrational to counter this evolutionary

trend. We may assert that the social desire to create cooperative

institutions and social practices is ethical and rational because such

practices further the trend in natural evolution toward ever greater

levels of mutualism, differentiation, and developmental complexity that

provide the basis for natural evolution itself.

For instance, the practice of direct democracy requires and enhances

degrees of mutualism, differentiation, and development more than does

the practice of representational democracy. Direct democracy is a

process in which members of a local community are empowered to

participate directly in creating the public policy that gives shape to

their everyday lives, both public and private. Unlike a representational

democracy in which citizens elect a centralized body of ‘politicians’

who make decisions on their behalf, a direct democracy is one in which

decision-making power is decentralized among citizens themselves.[148]

A direct democracy supports the principle of mutualism or non-hierarchy

by creating a forum in which an entire community is engaged in

participating cooperatively to discuss, debate, and determine public

policies. Direct democracy draws from the principle of differentiation

or social complexity by encouraging a rich process of public discussion

in which a diversity of perspectives are presented and considered.

Difference of opinion is welcomed as members of a community continually

work to nuance and complexify their understanding of freedom. The

process of self-reflection, the give and take of dialogue, the intricate

mediations of self-consciousness and consideration for others, requires

and nurtures a highly differentiated ‘body politic’, a body of citizens

capable of thinking for themselves. In turn, the idea of direct

democracy draws from the principle of development by encouraging members

to cultivate their abilities to discuss and debate with others in a

collaborative decision making process. Through the process of

participating in a direct democracy, members develop both the capacity

for self-knowledge and the maturity to critically consider the

perspectives of others as well.

In contrast, a representational democracy (really, a contradiction of

terms) reduces dimensions of mutualism, social complexity, and

development. Countering the principal of mutualism, a representational

democracy reduces citizens to individual voters or separate

‘constituencies’ who back particular representatives, depriving them of

the opportunity to work cooperatively to make policy that provides for a

common good. While direct democracy offers a rich process of discussion

and debate that engages a wide range of complex social issues, a

representational democracy opposes the principle of social

differentiation by reducing social issues to campaign slogans and

‘platforms’ which simplify social and political issues to appeal to the

lowest common denominator. Finally, a representational democracy goes

against the principle of development by centralizing not only

decision-making power, but also by depriving citizens the opportunity to

develop their abilities to think, speak, write, and debate about public

issues that determine their very own lives.

We can apply the same principles to a discussion of economics as well.

The practice of a directly democratic economy, or a moral economy

fosters social complexity.[149] According to Bookchin, a moral economy

is based on the principle of mutualism as goods are produced and

distributed democratically according to needs and abilities of all

members of a community. Fostering relationships based on interdependence

and complementarity, a moral economy allows communities to try to

minimize, rather than enhance, disparities of wealth or privilege that

could otherwise emerge from physical differences and abilities. The

practice of complementing individual need with the abilities of the

community allows for ever greater degrees of participation, freedom,

choice, and subjectivity by all, for all.

A moral economy is in accordance with the principle of social

differentiation and complexity as community members reflect upon,

discuss, and decide how to provide for a common good. The rich social

relationships that emerge as community members provide collectively for

their own needs and desires opens up ever new avenues for the

development of creativity, self-determination, and cooperation. Free of

the constraints of a market economy that requires workers to stunt their

own development by spending the majority of their lives engaged in

alienated labor, a cooperative moral economy supports the principle of

development by freeing people to pursue a range of creative and

intellectual developmental desires.

In contrast, a capitalist market economy reduces mutualism, social

differentiation, and development. Based on social relationships of

owner/worker and consumer/producer, capitalism counters principles of

mutualism and differentiation, supporting instead a simple system of

command and control. For example, within an increasingly ‘global’

capitalist economy, a handful of transnational corporations

autocratically determine what shall be produced, by whom, and at what

cost for people and eco-communities throughout the world. Rather than

local communities participating in a decentralized way, determining

their own needs and desires in a spirit of mutualism and social

complexity, the corporation determines, through market research and

media manipulation, what ‘consumers’ will buy, centralizing the power

and resources that determine the social and ecological fate of the many.

Capitalism counters the principle of development by reducing members of

a community to ‘consumers’ and ‘workers’ whose labor and Eyes are marked

by degrees of alienation. Deprived of the ability to develop rich social

and ecological networks based on inter-dependence and mutual aid, people

are reduced to buyer and seller as the natural world is stripped and

sold, reversing the developmental trend toward biological complexity.

Having looked briefly at the examples above, we may now assert that it

is objectively true that the social relationships surrounding

participatory democracy and a moral economy are more likely to enhance

the evolutionary tendencies toward mutualism, differentiation, and

development than are the social relationships surrounding a state-run

democracy and a capitalist economy. And when we say that it is

objectively true, we mean that it is not relative, arbitrary, or a

matter of personal opinion.

If as we have shown, ‘nature’ is a natural history, a process of organic

development marked by a trend toward increasing complexity and freedom,

then a social desire for nature implies a desire to play a creative role

in furthering this trend. It is indeed irrational to reverse the natural

and social complexity that has emerged throughout natural history. It is

‘irrational’ for those in power to make most of the earth’s population

unfree, to simplify social relationships to ‘top-down’ and ‘command and

control’ characteristic of centralized and hierarchical structures. It

is irrational to lull individuals and communities into mass conformity

and expedience, coercing them to embrace a simple ‘blind faith’, or an

‘unquestionable authority’. Finally, it is irrational to ‘undo’ the rich

complexity of social and eco-communities that evolved over thousands of

years, giving way to degrees of increasing flexibility, creativity,

stability, and complexity.

In contrast, it is organically rational to elaborate upon this

evolutionary trend—to organically ‘complicate’, rather than simplify,

social and ecological reality by creating institutions that allow people

to be freer, more joyous, and creative.

Organic Objectivity: A Ground That Moves

Yet here we witness a new approach to questions of objectivity. The

objective dimension within social ecology’s ethics, far from being

rooted in deterministic universal ‘natural facts’, is rooted in the idea

of general, nascent, and organic potentiality. Here, the understanding

of ‘objectivity’ represents a recognition of an identifiable, stable,

yet dynamic trend toward the potential for increasing complexity and

freedom in natural history. The ‘ground’ for this ‘organic objectivity’

is paradoxically ‘unstable’—it is, as social ecologist Amy Harmon says,

a “ground that moves.”[150] Rather than be anchored in static biological

facts, it is anchored in the ‘flexible’ field of potentiality that

allows for ever greater degrees of stability and order to emerge within

the process of natural evolution.

Again, such socio- and eco-erotic principles of mutualism,

differentiation, and development are not reductive, essential, or

deterministic ‘natural facts’. Instead, they are complex and rational

organizing tendencies that give shape, symmetry, and directionality to

the process of natural evolution that are open-ended, diverse, and

multi-directional, rather than determined or unilinear.

As a non-deterministic perspective, social ecology does not view this

trend toward increasing mutualism, differentiation, and development, as

the ‘dominant’ trend in natural or social history; nor does it propose

that this trend will necessarily triumph over the irrational anti-social

tendency toward social hierarchy, homogenization, and simplification.

For the fact that particular societies today are characterized by

irrational and tenacious forms of hierarchy that reduce social

complexity and interdependence and that global capitalism is currently

‘undoing’ the process of natural evolution by simplifying the

environment, is testament to the unactualized potential of societies to

participate creatively and rationally in elaborating the evolutionary

process.

The trend toward a social desire based on ecological principles of

mutualism, differentiation, and development, while not the most

pervasive trend, is ‘objectively’ the most promising and rational trend,

both ethically and politically. For, when societies elaborate upon such

a trend, they open the way for greater evolutionary choice and social

freedom. It is on this basis that we may ground an ethics of social

desire on something more stable than relative or arbitrary ‘personal

opinion’. The decision to actualize our social desire for mutualism,

differentiation, and self-organized development, represents an

organically rational expression of desire, for it allows us to

participate in elaborating upon, rather than reversing, the evolutionary

process itself.

The Desire for Nature Revisited: Toward a Social Desire for Nature

If the rational expression of social desire strives to enhance social

complexity, then a rational social desire for nature would strive to

enhance ecological complexity as well. Instead of idealizing and

preserving ‘pure’ peoples, times, and places, a social desire for nature

leads us to contribute to the diverse and interdependent splendor of

eco-communities, elaborating upon the subjectivity in first nature by

engaging in practices that enrich biodiversity, stability, and

complexity.

Exploring a social desire for nature offers a way to draw meaning out of

our sensual, associative, differentiative, and developmental

relationships to the natural world. It allows us to point to what is

meaningful in the idea of nature without relying upon reductive notions

of spiritus, energy or natural essences. In an era in which social

relations to nature are reduced to capitalist commodification, we need a

way to point to those aspects of our relationship to natural processes

that cannot and should not be reduced to relationships of profit and

production. Moving away from a language of capitalist rationalization,

we need a way to describe the qualitative dimension of our relationships

to the natural world that are sensual, cooperative, creative, and

elaborative.

The Five Dimensions of the Social Desire for Nature

To begin, a sensual desire for nature is the yearning to taste, touch,

smell, hear, and see the creative magnificence of the natural world.

Unlike a romantic sensual desire predicated on a people-free ‘natural

purity’, a social-sensual desire for nature appreciates what Donna

Haraway refers to as a ‘cyborgian’ interplay between human technics and

the natural world.[151] In this way, a social-sensual desire for nature

is non-essentialist, a craving not for pure essences of a bounded idea

of ‘nature’, but instead, a delight in the delicate phasing of natural

evolution into the social.

When we stand upon a mountain, looking out, savoring the elegant expanse

of forest and plain, instead of relishing in the absence of humanity in

the vista, we may recognize our place in the scene, appreciating our

potential to glean sensual, philosophical, and aesthetic meaning from

this evolutionary process that unfolds before us. Any moment of desiring

or loving the sensual qualities of ‘nature’ is a deeply social act,

located within social history as well as within a wider natural

evolution.

In addition, a social-sensual desire for nature entails stretching

conventional understandings of what constitutes a ‘nature’ worthy of

appreciation. Moving beyond romantic understandings of ‘nature’ cast

within the idioms of the rural and the wild, we may include the

cityscape as an expression of natural evolution as well. Although the

city has been reduced to a dense population clustered around centers of

industrial capitalism, even within these centers, there exists the

sensual yearning for clean tree-lined streets, city parks, open-air

cafes, community gardens, and farmers’ markets. By expanding our notions

of ‘nature’ to include cities, we include the urban within discussions

of quality of everyday life, appreciating the places where much of the

world’s population lives, struggles, and despite it all, often thrives.

In turn, an associative desire for nature incorporates this sensual

appreciation for natural processes, transforming it to a sense of

association with the natural world around us.

An associative desire for nature, often referred to as feeling ‘at one

with nature’, represents our joy in empathizing with other species,

identifying with the larger process of natural evolution that binds each

of us to every organism on the planet. Yet, again, in contrast to a

romantic associative desire for nature, a social-associative desire

extends this empathy to the rest of humanity, wanting not to transcend

our humanity to love a ‘pure nature’, but to join with the rest of

humanity to create a world that is ecologically whole. Feeling at one

with nature means feeling solidarity with communities who have emerged

from and dwell within the places that we love; it means becoming allies

in the twin struggles for social and ecological justice.

A differentiative desire for nature means that while feeling at one with

nature, we understand this oneness to represent a unity in diversity. It

means that we can hold the sense of being both similar to, and distinct

from, other species. While retaining the sensual and associative desire

to be part of the natural world, we can complement this yearning with

the striving to understand that which makes humanity evolutionarily

distinct. Thus, while standing on top of a building or mountain peak, we

can include ourselves within the picture. We can understand that we are

both similar to and different from the other organisms that slither,

crawl, and fly through the sensual field.

We express our creative differentiative desire for nature when we draw

meaning from our relationship to the natural world. Creative

differentiative desire for nature entails the desire to highlight the

poignancy of particular moments of natural evolution by representing the

earth’s beauty through such mediums as philosophy, poetry, song, dance,

or painting. As this desire is highly culturally mediated, its

expression reflects the values and practices of particular peoples. For

some cultures, it entails differentiating natural processes through a

fluency in such scientific practices as biology, physics, or ecology;

for others, it entails the creation of practices of herbal medicine.

The desire to give names to places and species, represents our yearning

to translate the natural world into terms we can relate to, order, and

know. Unlike a capitalist desire to taxonomize species for the sake of

control and profit, a social desire seeks to name and distinguish

species for the sake of knowledge, pleasure, and ecological enhancement.

Creative differentiative desire is the yearning to sensitize ourselves

to our relationship to the natural world, to draw philosophical and

aesthetic meaning from the patterns, symmetries, and rhythms that

continually unfold around us.

In this vein, a developmental desire for nature entails wanting not only

to know, or differentiate particular ‘moments’ of natural evolution, but

to actively participate in this development in a complementary fashion,

using ecological technologies, art, language, and other social practices

to elaborate upon the trend toward diversity, complexity, and

subjectivity. We may express this developmental desire through creating

ecological practices such as solar, wind, and water power, or by

practicing organic agriculture and edible landscaping to enrich the

eco-communities in which we live.

In turn, we express our developmental desire for nature not only by

expanding tire richness of the biological horizons around us, but by

expanding our consciousness as well. As natural evolution represents a

trend toward increasing subjectivity, humanity has the potential to

further expand the horizons of consciousness, by elaborating upon the

idea of freedom itself. Throughout history, emerging in tandem with the

emergence of hierarchy, surfaces the idea of freedom. Each act of

writing, discussing, debating, or theorizing about freedom constitutes

an expression of the developmental desire to widen the horizon of what

we can know and think about what it means to live with liberty and

integrity. By striving to further differentiate ideas of freedom, we

bring human consciousness, evolving for thousands of years, to new

levels of complexity.

An Oppositional Desire for Nature: Toward an Ecological Politics

The current ecological crisis serves as a bitter reminder that our

social desire for nature must be translated into political action. It

would be naive to believe that a simple ‘paradigm shift’ to a new set of

understandings about nature and desire could abolish social and

ecological injustice. For flowing through and around such understandings

are social institutions of capitalism, the state, racism, and patriarchy

which shape particular ways that we relate to the natural world as well

as to each other. We need, then, to cultivate an oppositional desire for

nature, a rational yearning to oppose all institutions and ideologies

that are reversing the trend toward natural evolution by destroying

biological and cultural diversity and inter-dependence across the

planet.

As previously discussed, there are three moments to oppositional desire.

In the first critical moment, we begin to analyze social relationships

or institutions, assessing the extent to which they enhance or reverse

the trend in natural evolution toward increasing mutualism,

differentiation, and development. Here, for instance, we look critically

at social relationships such as the state and capitalism that inhibit

full and direct participation of citizens, reducing them to passive

consumers of pre-packaged representatives. We look as well at capitalist

activity that hoards native lands, disenfranchising diverse cultures

into extinction, and driving species into extinction through pollution

and eco-system destruction.

In the next phase of oppositional desire, the moment of resistance, we

begin to resist these institutions, protesting specific harms that they

cause, while popularizing a general critique of the implications of

their hierarchical structure. A resistant dimension of oppositional

desire for nature is expressed by environmental groups who link the

general problem of capitalism and the state to particular moments of

ecological destruction. For instance, during the campaign against Hydro

Quebec, spokeswoman Winona La Duke contested the building of a system of

dams at James Bay that would flood thousands of acres of native land in

Canada and the U.S., identifying both capital and state structures as

playing a crucial and devastating role in social and ecological

devastation. The oppositional desire expressed by indigenous peoples,

feminists, social anarchists, and social ecologists—all those fighting

for social and ecological justice—represents moments of resistance

against the qualitatively dangerous aspects of the hierarchical

structure of the state and capital.

Finally, oppositional desire would be incomplete if it were not

fulfilled by a reconstructive moment. For the struggle for freedom

assumes two forms: while ‘negative freedom’ represents the desire to

negate, or abolish unjust institutions, ‘substantive freedom’ is the

assertion of that which must replace those negated structures. Again,

while negative freedom is a demand for ‘freedom from’ particular forms

of injustice, substantive freedom is a demand for the ‘freedom to’

create new institutions that will improve the quality of life for all.

And so, as we move into the reconstructive moment of oppositional

desire, the moment in which we consider our substantive desires, we now

face a series of intriguing questions: what quality of social

relationships is rational to desire? What kinds of social relationships

will allow us to further the evolutionary trends toward social and

biological complexity and freedom? And what kind of political

institutions will best facilitate the fulfillment of rational social

desire? Perhaps most important, we need to think about what objective

criteria we may use to determine what constitutes social relationships

that are conducive to creating a socially and ecologically just society.

The answers to these questions represent the core of revolutionary

praxis, and clearly, cannot be sufficiently explored within the scope of

this book. However, we may take a brief look at some key issues that we

must consider as we begin to approach such questions of social and

ecological reconstruction.

To begin with a caveat, it is crucial to emphasize that such questions

should not lead to a series of static formulas that dictate how to

‘universally’ engage in creating a new ecological politics. The

revolutionary process, the movement from where society is to where it

ought to go, must be created by the very people who are engaged in

particular struggles for freedom. However, by invoking an organic

rationality, we may explore how particular communities, in concert with

other communities, may think about how to develop a set of political

practices that are meaningful and relevant to their own needs and

desires.

For example, the principle of mutualism may serve as an objective

criterion to which different communities can appeal as they think about

how to create rational political practices. In this dialectical process,

communities may both differentiate and retain the general principle of

mutualism to create new forms of non-hierarchical self-government. For

instance, the idea of a New England town meeting represents a

‘differentiated’ form of the general idea of ‘mutualism’. Although the

idea of a New England town meetings is not reducible to the general idea

of ‘mutualism’, the general idea of mutualism is dialectically retained

within the particular idea of a New England ‘town meeting’. Again, the

idea of a New England town meeting is a political practice developed by

a particular group of people at a specific time and place within

history. Yet, within this particular historical institution is the

general idea of ‘mutualism’ that existed centuries before the New

England town meeting ever came into being.

By thinking about how to particularize a general and objective

organizing principle such as ‘mutualism’, communities may begin to think

rationally about how to create ecological political structures. It is

through the dialectic of public debate and discussion that citizens move

from the general to the particular, differentiating such nascent ideas

as mutualism into a multitude of public policies that will shape

political, social, and ecological practices within a particular

community.

Yet once again, these principles do not represent deterministic ‘natural

facts’. Rather, they constitute nascent yet stable objective

potentialities that may be worked like clay by citizens as they respond

to the particular sensibility, culture, and ecology of their own

community. They represent potentialities that have been actualized

throughout the evolutionary record, giving rise to a world that is

increasingly complex, diverse, conscious, and free.

A social desire for nature requires the reclamation of direct political

expression by local people. Only by participating in a state-less direct

democracy, will people to begin to articulate the grounds for a new

non-hierarchical ecological society. However, localism alone is

insufficient for creating the broadest context for democracy. The

principle of localism represents only one moment within a dialectic

between unity and diversity. A world of ‘diverse’ self-governing

localities could mean a string of parochial islands empowered to ‘do

their own thing’ without being accountable to a wider community. Thus,

this spirit of diversity needs to be complemented by a unifying trend as

well. A confederation is necessary that would bring together a community

of self-governing local cities, towns, and villages who are united

through a common commitment to general principles of cooperation and

non-hierarchy (mutualism), self-determination and participation,

(differentiation), and development.[152]

A rational desire for nature, then, would lead us to establish

cooperative political institutions in which we could create a free and

ecological society. It would move us to foster complex and social

relationships both within society and with the rest of the natural world

in order to build upon the objectively identifiable trend in natural

evolution toward mutualism, differentiation, and development.

We must cease identifying such abstractions as ‘humanity’, ‘technology’,

or ‘industrial society’ as the cause of ecological problems, or goading

‘Third World women’ or ‘immigrants’ for causing ecological harm. It is

time to begin to critique the social relationships in society,

particularly those that constitute our systems of government and

economics, understanding their role in perpetuating ecological

injustice. An oppositional desire for nature moves us to create a new

kind of society in which we are empowered to determine our social

relations with nature.

The social desire for nature is worlds away from a romantic or spiritual

desire to protect an ecological ‘purity’ or ‘integrity’ that is ‘above’

us, or ‘in’ us. Rather than regard nature from afar, starry-eyed, and

yearning, we may recognize ourselves as part of a developmental and

creative process called natural history, recognizing in turn, creative

and liberatory potentialities within ourselves. After all, we are each

organically derived from first nature, we each represent a distinctive

‘moment’ within a larger natural history.

As we begin to understand our own natural history, we may begin to

reinterpret the potentialities latent within our own second nature. By

understanding the tendency within first nature for mutualism,

differentiation, and development, we are able to comprehend the organic

dimension of our own desire for non-hierarchy, creativity, development,

and ultimately, freedom. A social desire for nature moves us to regain

the courage to see what is best in ourselves, to appreciate our

potential to create social and political institutions that bring out

what is most empathetic and intelligent within humanity.

The revolutionary impulse is fiercely organic, traceable to the impulse

toward creativity and development in first nature itself. Yet all over

the planet, the trend toward increasing mutualism, differentiation, and

development which has been evolving since the beginning of natural

history, is at risk of being reversed completely. By recognizing the

very tenuousness of natural evolution, we see that we can no longer

reify nature as a kind of spirit, eternal flame, or energy which remains

the same while enduring throughout time. Unlike an enduring spirit,

natural evolution is a process which can either move forward or regress

into simpler phases. Each time a wetland is ‘filled in’ and a shopping

mall shoots up, we lose one more horizon in which both first and second

natures are able to unfold.

Creating the conditions for social and ecological complexity is not only

evolutionary, it is revolutionary. By creating social and political

institutions which encourage first and second nature to express what is

most creative and cooperative, we create erotic resonance between

natural and social phases of natural history. It is then that the

socio-erotic and the eco-erotic meet: in the work of creating a socially

and ecologically desirable world.

Chapter Six — Illustrative Opposition: Drawing the Revolutionary out

of the Ecological

The project of incorporating a broad revolutionary analysis into

particular struggles for ecological justice can be daunting. Each night

the news presents us with yet another immediate ecological crisis that

demands our attention. Confronted with stories of greenhouse-related

disasters, environmentally induced illnesses, or rising levels of

pollution, we feel overwhelmed as we try to prioritize our ecological

agendas, attempting in turn to link particular struggles for ecological

justice to questions of deeper political change. We want to go beyond

pragmatic environmentalists who focus on single-issue reforms, yet we

are faced with a dilemma: While we know it is crucial to engage in

particular ecological struggles, while we know that such struggles are

necessary to slow down the pace of wider ecological collapse, we also

know that addressing single issues alone is insufficient to bring about

radical social and political transformation. We need, then, to explore

ways to engage in particular, necessary ecological struggles while

drawing out a sufficient revolutionary vision for a new desirable

ecological society.

Necessary vs. Sufficient Conditions for Political Transformation

Movements for social or ecological change focus primarily on that which

is necessary to remake society. Whereas many in the Old Left regarded

the abolishment of material inequity to be the most necessary condition

for a free society, in the 1970s, radical feminists asserted that social

justice would necessarily be won with the transcendence of patriarchy.

Similarly, many involved in the Civil Rights movement of the sixties

believed the elimination of racism to be a primary necessity around

which wider social change would unfold. For many in these movements, the

abolishment of one specific form of hierarchy was viewed as necessary

for radical social transformation. In such movements, people often

reasoned: “Once we dismantle this form of hierarchy, other forms will

dissolve as well.” In this way, what is necessary was conflated with

what is sufficient. And still today, we often believe that if we succeed

in the necessary task of abolishing one specific form of hierarchy, then

this necessary act will be sufficient to create a free society.

What is necessary is not the same as what is sufficient. For instance,

if we want to boil water, we need to fulfill a few necessary conditions:

water and a heat factor which can raise the temperature of the water to

212 degrees. We recognize that if we have only one of the necessary

conditions, a pot of water for example, it alone will represent an

insufficient condition for boiling water. In the same way, if we have

only a heating coil raised to 212 degrees with no water present, the

heating coil will represent an insufficient condition as well. Or, if we

have a pot of water at one end of a room and the heating coil raised to

212 degrees at the other end of the room, we will still lack the

sufficient condition for boiling water—even though we have organized the

necessary conditions for boiling water to occur at the same time. If we

think only in terms of what is necessary, we may spend hours staring

bewilderedly at a pot of unheated water, or at a heating coil, or we may

move the heating coil and the pot of water around the room, wondering

why we are unable to make the water boil.

Obviously, most people do not have to think critically about the

necessary and sufficient conditions for such everyday activities as

boiling water. We know intuitively and rationally through conventional

logic that the sufficient condition for boiling water represents the

accumulation of the necessary conditions for boiling water (water and a

heat factor), arranged in a particular physical and temporal

relationship to each other. In this way, we understand implicitly that

the sufficient condition represents a holistic, accumulative, and

integrative whole comprised of all necessary conditions for making water

boil.

However, we run up against the limitations of the boiling water analogy

when we begin to think about the necessary and sufficient conditions for

social and ecological change. For while the conditions that allow one to

possess a pot and a heating coil might be clearly social and arbitrary,

the mechanics of boiling water dwell largely within a world of physical,

inorganic processes that pertain to the movement of heated water

molecules. Such an event can occur independently of human action, as in

the case of a forest fire boiling ground moisture into wisps of steam.

In contrast, the event of revolution is a distinctly social phenomenon

existing within the realm of potential freedom rather than natural law

or necessity. And while this inorganic analogy is in itself insufficient

for providing us with a plan to create a revolution, we may use this

analogy to begin to think through the necessary and sufficient

conditions for an ecological and social revolution. We may ask

ourselves: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions to “heat up”

society to produce a revolutionary situation?

As we think through the necessary and sufficient conditions for social

and political change, the sufficient condition must be understood to be

just that—sufficient—neither perfect, nor a determined end in itself,

but an incomplete beginning. Hence, the sufficient condition is not a

deterministic factor. Just because we may have the pot, the water, the

heating coil, the right time, and the right place, a great rainbow could

majestically appear outside the window and we could find ourselves

wholly disenchanted with the idea of boiling water after all. Or the pot

could turn out to have an undetectable leak. The sufficient condition

means merely that we have fleshed out the idea of necessity enough to

begin the work that is set out before us. It does not mean that we will

be successful in our work, or that the work will turn out to be what we

had in mind. It only means that we have a good enough chance, that we

have done almost all that we can to increase the likelihood that we will

actualize our goals. The sufficient condition, then, represents a

glorious point of departure, open-ended as the utopian horizon whose

band of brilliant color recedes incrementally as we make our approach so

that we never arrive but forever enjoy the desirous and sensuous

apprehension of arrival.

In embarking upon this question, we see, as already stated above, that

most movements for social change conflate that which is necessary with

that which is sufficient. People often select a single issue, source of

oppression, or form of hierarchy as the sole focus for necessary social

action, never thinking through the sufficient condition for a free and

ecological society. However, when we begin to. think holistically, we

begin to see that the sufficient condition for an ecological society

represents the accumulative integration of non-hierarchical institutions

and an ecological technics, ethics, and sensibility.

As social anarchism implies, unless we abolish hierarchy in general as

the sufficient condition for a free society, specific forms of hierarchy

may endure. The idea of abolishing only specific forms of hierarchy

(such as the State, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy), while

necessary, proves over and over again throughout history to be woefully

insufficient. For instance, while Marxian socialism seeks to abolish

hierarchies derived from material inequities, hierarchies such as the

State and patriarchal institutions remain largely unchallenged.

Similarly, while liberal feminists seek to abolish hierarchies that

exclude women from male dominated social and political institutions,

hierarchical structures such as capitalism remain unchallenged, leaving

women as well as men to be exploited by capitalist production. What is

more, while it is necessary to eliminate specific forms of hierarchy

such as capitalism and women’s oppression, this elimination is not only

insufficient for creating a new world, it is even compatible with the

survival of many other forms of hierarchy.

The compatibility between non-hierarchy and hierarchy can be quite

insidious. If we were to eliminate racism, if we were to create the

social conditions in which people of all ethnicities were treated

equally, capitalists and the State could still refine other criteria

such as age, sex, or class, by which to justify social exploitation. In

this way, hierarchical systems such as capitalism and the State are

compatible with the non-hierarchical conditions of ethnic equality. Or

in the event of a non-sexist society, there could conceivably coexist a

capitalist and statist society that bases privilege primarily on class

and race, rather than on sex, A society organized around egalitarian

sexual relations is potentially compatible with a racist, classist, and

statist society. What is more, we could conceivably eliminate the idea

of dominating nature, establishing a social ‘reverence’ for the natural

world such as expressed by ancient Egyptians, Mayans (or Nazis, for that

matter), while still maintaining immiserating social hierarchies.

Finally, we could even imagine dismantling the hierarchy of the State

only to find that hierarchical corporations take over the management of

social and political life completely.

Hierarchy is much like a cancer which, if not rooted out completely, is

able to find ever new configurations of domination and submission in

which to grow and thrive. Hence, if we eliminate specific forms of

hierarchy without eliminating hierarchy in general, we may find that new

hierarchies merely replace the ones abolished, while old hierarchies dig

their heels in deeper. However, the general idea of non-hierarchy, while

sufficient in its scope, remains insufficient in its differentiation and

focus. The call to abolish ‘hierarchy in general’ must in turn be

developed into a specific interpretation of social and ecological

transformation. As it stands alone, the, idea of non-hierarchy or

cooperation remains too broad and ambiguous to have specific meaning. We

are left wondering: What forms of non-hierarchy or cooperation are

required? Unless we bring the idea of non-hierarchy into its specific

fullness, we will be unable to translate it into a tangible social

vision or practice. In the same way, without bringing the idea of

boiling water into its specific fullness, we are left with an incoherent

pile of necessary factors such as pots, water, and heating coils. We are

left with little understanding of the relationship between the pot of

water, the heating coil, and the synchronicity of time and place.

There exists a potentially complementary relationship, then, between

that which is necessary and that which is sufficient if and only if all

necessary conditions are consciously coordinated and integrated. Often,

when people are overwhelmed by the complexity and urgency of social and

ecological crises, they express frustration at the imperative to create

a coordinated sufficient condition. They may reason, “Well, as long as

we all do our own little necessary part, then eventually it will all

form a sufficient whole.” Such a response, while again understandable,

fails to convey that if we each choose a necessary part, without

consciously integrating those parts into a larger sufficient whole, we

will keep the social project from realizing its full potentiality.

It is insufficient for one group to fight racism over here, while

another group struggles against toxic dumping over there, while still

another individual organizes a food coop some place else. This kind of

‘piece work’ is insufficient because it is non-holistic. When we see our

activism as a series of single issues, we end up arranging the pot, the

water, and the heating coil in different places at different times,

failing to form a coherent vision of what we are striving for: a

dazzling image of society boiled over, making room in the social stew

for ever new revolutionary possibilities.

Once we have asserted the general idea of non-hierarchy as the

integrated and coordinated sufficient condition for a free society, we

may draw out the many necessary and specific forms of non-hierarchy

needed to remake society. By differentiating the idea of non-hierarchy,

we begin to educe a fully differentiated vision and plan for social and

political reconstruction.

The Spheres of our Lives: Where Hierarchy Lives

In order to move toward a reconstructive vision, we need to comprehend

the structure of the society we wish to transform. Just as the idea of

non-hierarchy must be fully differentiated to understand the complex

quality of institutional power, the idea of society must also be fully

differentiated in order to convey the specific locations of

institutional power.

When we think of society, we rarely think of the distinct spheres which

give shape to our everyday lives. We usually refer to society as a

monolithic structure as if we lived in a completely undifferentiated

societal realm. Yet society is constituted of three distinct realms: the

social, the political, and the State.

The social sphere is comprised of community and personal life. It is the

sphere in which we create the everyday aspects of our existence as

social beings. It is the realm of ‘works and plays’, the place in which

we engage in production and distribution, fulfill community obligations,

attend to practices of education, religion, as well as participate in a

range of other social activities. While there is a public dimension to

social activities such as work, school, and community life, there is

also a private or personal component to social life as well. This is the

space in which we reproduce the conditions of our most immediate

physical and psychological needs and desires for food, love, sexuality,

and nurturing. The personal dimension of the social sphere represents a

specific quality of privacy predicated on an intimate knowledge of

ourselves and of our closest relations.

In contrast, the political sphere is the space in which we assert

ourselves publicly as managers of our own community affairs. It is the

space in which we discuss, decide upon, and carry out the public

policies which give form to social and political practices of our

communities. The political sphere constitutes a specific quality of

action which is distinct from the social sphere. Marked by a quality of

public responsibility, the political sphere is the place in which we, as

citizens of a town, village, or city, participate in shaping the

policies which in turn inform our everyday lives.

Clearly, this description of the social and political spheres represents

a brief sketch of what these spheres ought to be, rather than what is

within our current society. Today, these spheres are dominated and

degraded by the sphere of the State. The modern Republican state

represents a hierarchical and centralized institution that both invades

and appropriates activities that should be managed directly by citizens

within the political sphere. The State coopts the power of citizens to

directly determine and administer public policies regarding community

activities such as production, technological practice, health, and

education. To secure its own power, the State wields an often

undetectable, yet constant, everyday threat of violence manifested

through an army and police force.

The State has so thoroughly appropriated our understanding of

‘government’ that we are scarcely aware of our estrangement from truly

autonomous political activity. Taking the State for granted as

inevitable, we retreat into the social sphere looking for a site of both

survival and resistance.

The Public Sphere: the Necessity of Political Reconstruction

Yet in order to transform society, we cannot retreat into our social

lives; we must address political questions as well. However, most social

activists fail to sufficiently include the problem of reconstructing the

political sphere within their activist vision. Instead, they often focus

exclusively on the public and private dimensions of the social sphere.

The reasons for this are two-fold. First, the political sphere has been

replaced by what Murray Bookchin refers to as “Statecraft”: a system in

which political power is placed in the hands of elected representatives

(professional politicians) who make decisions regarding public policy on

behalf of a voter ‘constituency’. Disempowered by statecraft, and

unaware of a political alternative, activists often turn away from

questions of politics, turning instead to the social sphere where they

feel they can at least exercise some control over their lives.[153]

Second, activists often neglect the political sphere because, estranged

from their political identities, they identify primarily as consumers.

The emergence of post-war consumer society gave rise to a generation of

Americans who identified themselves through their consumption patterns.

For instance, within the ecology movement, activists often identify more

as consumers and technology ‘users’ than they do as political citizens.

As a result, they tend to express resistance in the form of consumer

activism by attempting to select, produce, or boycott particular

commodities to establish congruence between their personal and political

values. In this way, political power is reduced to ‘buying power’ as

activists focus on questions of production and consumption rather than

on trying to regain the political agency to determine what and how their

community should produce.

For these two reasons—a politics reduced to statecraft and a political

identity reduced to a consumer identity—activists tend to frame their

opposition within social, rather than explicitly political terms. Within

the social sphere, they feel empowered to make qualitative personal and

social changes by improving the quality of their relationships with

friends and family, improving schools and churches, or by creating

economic alternatives such as coops or systems of community currency or

barter. What is more, activists often unknowingly conflate social action

with political action. Working to create social change within the

domains of sexuality, spirituality, education, economics, and health

care, they refer to this work as ‘political’, rather than social, as a

way to emphasize the importance of the particular issue at hand or the

necessity of changing public policy related to the issue.

For instance, members of such social organizations as Earth First! or

Greenpeace are often referred to as ‘political’ organizations. Yet all

members, from financial supporters to grassroots activists who

participate in local and global campaigns, exist within a distinctly

social, rather than political, relationship to one another. Again,

political activity is that which takes place within the public sphere as

citizens come together to discuss, debate, and determine the public

policy that shapes their lives as members of a town, village, or city.

Greenpeace, then, does not engage in politics in the literal sense.

Instead, they wield crucial social contestation to state and corporate

policy.

Social change is, indeed, crucial but without an actual transformation

of political practice, we will never be in the position to actually

determine the very economic, social, and ecological policies for which

we are fighting. Instead, we will always be treated as children

incapable of making our own decisions, forever appealing to the

authority of parental representatives to do ‘the right thing’. Temporary

triumphs might be won; like little children who throw a tantrum to bend

the will of their parents, we may beg our representatives to provide us

with affordable housing or better environmental policy. However, the

power relationship remains the same. The fact is, until citizens are

able to make their own public policy regarding social issues, there will

be no justice. We will be forever little children, tugging and whining

at the hems of our parents’ coats, begging them to make good decisions

on our behalf.

Hence, our oppositional work is drained of its full potential as we

linger along the periphery of the political realm, focusing mainly on

social issues. In this way, we are weavers dreaming of beautiful

tapestries, spinning and dyeing wool, envisioning clothes to be

collectively woven and distributed, unaware that, without actually

getting our hands on the equipment, our dreams will go unrealized.

Direct democracy is the very process by which we make our dreams for a

free society come into being. Without walking into the place where the

cloth is woven, we will never be able to take those threads into our own

hands to weave more cooperatively and more ethically. Instead, we will

be left to wander about sheering, spinning, dyeing, and merely dreaming

of beautiful shimmering cloth. Without walking into the public sphere,

taking the power to make decisions into our own hands, we will be left

to merely dream of freedom.

Illustrative Opposition: Illustrating the Political Implications of

the Social

Recognizing the necessity of political reconstruction leads us to look

toward a process of political re-empowerment. Social ecology provides a

thoughtful and comprehensive interpretation regarding how to engage in a

political revolution by engaging in local municipal politics to initiate

a broader move toward a confederation of directly democratic

communities. Murray Bookchin’s theory of libertarian municipalism

proposes such a vision, offering a glimmer of hope for true democracy in

a world where the political sphere has been hollowed out by the

State.[154]

However, we confront a paradox when we consider the necessity of

focusing on political reconstruction. While it is crucial to reconstruct

an authentic political sphere, there will remain immediate social crises

which also demand our attention. Clearly we cannot wait to address

social issues such as homelessness, environmental racism, or violence

against women until we have established a confederation of

self-governing communities.

Illustrative opposition is way to focus upon a particular social issue

while illustrating a broader political critique and reconstructive

vision. In addition to demonstrating the necessity of a particular

social issue, we may also illustrate the general sufficient condition

required to fully address the particular issue at hand. For instance,

early ecofeminist activists practiced a nascent form of illustrative

opposition in the Women’s Pentagon Action of the early 1980s. Beginning

with an initial focus on the crisis of nuclear power, ecofeminists

illustrated a wider social and political picture, drawing out broader

issues of racism, capitalism, nationalism, militarism, male violence,

and state power.[155]

Illustrative opposition must be specific enough to be meaningful, yet

broad enough in order to deepen political consciousness. Had the Women’s

Pentagon Action presented too wide a focus, both participants and media

would have been bombarded by the interconnecting issues of social and

ecological injustice. However, had they focused too narrowly, say, on

the ecological devastation of the earth by nuclear technology, they

would have missed the opportunity to illustrate the widest implications

of the nuclear crisis. The Women’s Pentagon Action was successful in

broadening an understanding of the necessary conditions for creating a

nuclear-free society. Through theatrical demonstrations and written

media, these early ecofeminists helped others to explore a range of

necessary conditions pertaining to the spheres of the social and the

State by demanding an end to racist and masculinist state practices in

regards to nuclear energy and militarism, and by confronting capitalist

production of nuclear technologies.

However, while the Women’s Pentagon Action presented an extensive

critique of the spheres of the social and the State, like most movements

of the New Left, they failed to extend their critique to the political

sphere. By linking a critique of social and state institutions to a

demand for direct democratic control over social and political life in

general, the Women’s Pentagon Action would have presented a sufficient

condition for a nuclear free society.

In this way, illustrative opposition is a practice of holistic

picture-making in which one brush stroke serves as an invocation to

bring an entire picture to fullness. The idea of holism, inherent within

the idea of illustrative opposition, conveys that a whole is not just

the sum of its parts. For instance, in the case of the pot of boiling

water, the whole, or the boiling pot of water, is not reducible to the

pot, to the water, or to the heating element. Accordingly, it is

insufficient to simply throw the necessary parts together in a room,

expecting to bring water to a boil. As we have seen, it is the specific

and irreducible relationship between the parts that gives the whole its

particular form and function. It is the specific and irreducible

relationship between individual forms or parts of oppression, which

gives the whole oppressive system its form and function as well. Hence,

the goal of illustrative opposition is to focus on one part of a larger

system of oppression to depict a whole which is appreciated in its

interconnected complexity.

Three Moments of Illustrative Opposition

Illustrative opposition unfolds in three phases. In the first critical

moment, we recognize a particular form of social or political injustice,

responding in turn with critique. In this moment, we may sort through

the separate strands which compose the central cord of a particular form

of injustice. We may analyze how this form of injustice surfaces and is

perpetuated within realms of the social, the political, and the State.

In the critical moment, we ask ourselves what makes this particular form

of injustice unique or particular, asking: How is this form of injustice

different from other injustices; why has it become a crucial issue at

this point in time; or what makes it historically unique?

In the critical moment, we look at the historical development of the

particular issue, examining in turn, the lesser known radical history

which surrounds the form of injustice. Hence we would ask: Were there

attempts in the past to resist this form of injustice; what made these

attempts successful or unsuccessful; what is to be learned from both the

history of how this injustice came to be, and the history of what almost

was, or would have been?

In the second reconstructive moment, we begin to draw out the wider

reconstructive potential nascent within the struggle against a

particular form of injustice. We begin by examining the implications of

engendering wider conditions of justice surrounding the issue within the

realms of the social, political and the State, examining in turn, the

ecological implications of the particular injustice at hand for each

sphere. Here, we explore how to transform each sphere of society

sufficiently in order to thoroughly transcend the particular form of

injustice. Ultimately, the reconstructive moment serves as an

opportunity to draw out the social and political conditions that are

necessary to sufficiently oppose and transcend the particular form of

injustice.

Finally, the third moment constitutes the illustrative moment. Here, we

begin to elaborate ways to articulate and demonstrate the many insights

we glean as we move through the previous moments. There are many forms

through which we may express these comprehensive insights: We may print

pamphlets which are critical, historical, and reconstructive in nature;

develop a performance piece that integrates our insights and

conclusions; take direct action, creating banners with slogans that

point to salient threads of our overall analysis or vision; articulate

our analysis on alternative and mainstream media such as pirate radio or

the Internet; or create teach-ins and ongoing lecture-discussion series

within our communities.

Our ‘illustrations’ must be utopian and visibly socio-erotic. For our

goal is not only to inform, but to inspire ourselves and others to take

direct action. As previously discussed, we need to restore to the erotic

a distinctly social meaning, articulating the different ‘moments’ or

aspects of social desire, cultivating a language to describe our

yearnings for community and association, creativity and meaning, self

and community development, and social and political opposition. Such

yearnings stand in sharp contrast to the vernacular understandings of

desire that are framed in terms of individualized accumulation of

status, power, or pleasure. To understand the socio-erotic is to locate

moments of individual desire within a distinctly social and political

context, appreciating the potential of our individual desires to be

accountable to, and enhancing of, a greater social collectivity.

Our illustrations must speak to our socio-erotic desires. Within the

bland culture of global capitalism, people crave authentic integral

sensual stimulation. The appeal of theater groups such as Bread and

Puppet attests to the sensual power of creative media. The display of

towering and colorful puppets parading down barren city streets during

demonstrations summons up the sensual awe and desire for our own

creativity in a world of commodified alienation, allowing us in turn to

remember our own creative potential. We need to appeal to as many media

as possible to illustrate our analysis and vision, utilizing art,

theater, dance, electronic media, print media, speak-outs, and street

demonstrations, illustrating the sensual presence and resistance of our

physical bodies as well. In this way, illustrative opposition must be

sensual: it should constitute the ultimate body politic in which we

literally throw our bodies into social contestation, taking illustrative

and expressive direct action. However, such actions must not only ‘show’

but they must also ‘tell’ a narrative, moving from the particular to the

general or from the personal to the social and political. People join

social movements for a variety of reasons. In addition to wishing to

transform the world, activists often yearn to transform themselves. They

come to movements out of associative desire: out of the desire to find

friendship, lovership, community, and meaning. Seeking a sense of

connection and purpose, people are drawn to particular social movements

because the people within the movements embody the intelligence,

passion, and communality they wish to develop within themselves. Hence,

our illustrations must convey both the values of the world we want to

create as well as the values of the people we want to draw into our

movements. While our work must be collective and non-hierarchical, our

forms of contestation must put forth a display of communality as well.

We must clearly articulate the ways in which others may join our

struggle, continually illustrating points of entry into our social

movements.

Further, we must address our creative or differentiative desire as we

illustrate our opposition. In this age of incoherence, we each have an

underlying desire to differentiate, or to ‘make sense’ of the chaos

which surrounds us. As we are overwhelmed by social, political, and

ecological crises, we yearn for illustrations that render our world more

legible and intelligible. Our illustrations must draw what is coherent

and clear out of what is confusing and opaque. The goal of illustrative

opposition, then, is to help others to literally ‘sort out’ the

different spheres of social and political injustice, bringing others to

a state of increased confidence and desire for ever greater levels of

understanding. Hence, our illustrations must be educational as well as

sensual and associative; they must represent ongoing teach-ins in which

we assist ourselves and each other to recover lost radical history and a

rational and coherent analysis of injustice.

In turn, we must consider our developmental desire as we create new

expressions of social opposition. Developmental desire represents the

yearning of the self to become more of itself, to uncover ever wider

horizons of competence, joy, and community. Our illustrations must

represent opportunities for self-development in general that offer more

opportunities for participation than spectacle-gazing. Through social

contestation, we may develop abilities for public speaking, writing,

teaching, and art-making; we may become lecturers, poets, and painters,

speaking at coffee houses, concerts, universities, street corners,

community health centers, libraries, cable stations, and city halls,

creating a counter-spectacle of coherent disruption.

Finally, our illustrations must inspire oppositional desire. Far from

the individualistic and acquisitive desires that constitute our everyday

lives under global capitalism, we need to publicly articulate and

express a new vision of desire: a social desire, a desire informed.

Engendering a new oppositional desire is a potent antidote to an age of

authority-induced passivity. Corporate CEO’s and state agents dismiss

our rants about ‘desire’—as long as we keep our desire bound within the

social sphere. Once we draw out the political implications of desire,

informing our desire with a rational demand for direct participation in

determining the conditions of our everyday lives, then we will see real

opposition and fertile conflict.

Illustratively Opposing Biological Patenting

We may begin to think through a potential illustrative opposition by

addressing a particular form of social injustice: the patenting of human

and biological life. Beginning with an ecological problem that touches

upon realms of the social and the State, we may transform this problem

into a point of departure, a seed out of which we may draw a wider

analytics of revolutionary political reconstruction. We may begin by

taking a brief look at the issue at hand, then explore a series of

questions that may lay the ground for a deeper understanding of the

sufficient condition for a ‘patent free’ society.

Problem Background: What are Biological Patents?

Within the world of biotechnology, a new vocabulary emerges that equates

the genetic modification of cells to an act of ‘creation’.[156] Just as

Columbus ‘discovered’ and thus ‘claimed’ the New World of North America,

a continent that had been home to civilizations of native people for

thousands of years, biotechnologists are ‘discovering’, recombining, and

laying claim to the cell-lines of plants, animals, and even human beings

whose DNA might prove useful to such industries as agriculture,

pharmaceuticals, or reproductive medicine.

The question of legal patents of cellular materials is one of the most

controversial issues surrounding biotechnology. Historically, a patent

gave exclusive rights to an inventor to exploit a product, process, or a

particular use of a product for a limited time, usually ranging between

17–24 years. In order to obtain a patent, the product or process had to

be invented. The precedent for patenting was established at the

International Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property held

in Paris in 1883, the first international agreement on intellectual

property rights. By 1930, the Plant Patent Act permitted the granting of

patents for plants reproduced by cutting or grafting to produce plant

hybrids in the United States. Toward the end of the 1970s, as practices

of genetic engineering through recombinant DNA became increasingly

successful (and thus potentially commercially viable), a quiet war began

to emerge between private corporations, patenting courts, and the

Supreme Court regarding the right of individuals to patent a wider

variety of life forms.

Beginning in 1971, the General Electric (GE) company embarked on the

crusade to obtain the first patent for a non-plant life form. In 1970,

GE engineer Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty developed a specialized bacterium

that promised to break down or ‘eat’ oil from tankers spills. Over a

period of ten years, GE and the Court of Customs and Patents Appealed

(CCPA) waged a relentless campaign of litigation against the U.S. Patent

and Trademark Office (PTO) and the Supreme Court to patent this

oil-eating bacteria. Once patented, GE knew, the bacteria could set a

precedent for future patenting of other life forms to be appropriated by

biotechnology corporations.[157] In 1980, GE’s oil-eating bacteria won

its case as the Supreme Court granted Chakrabarty his patent. In this

gesture, the Supreme Court determined life itself patentable, stating

that “the relevant distinction was not between living and inanimate

things” but whether living products could be seen as “human made

inventions.”[158]

As predicted, GE’s Chakrabarty case opened the floodgates for the

budding biotechnology industry. That same year, emerging biotechnology

industries such as Genetech and Cetus took Wall Street by storm, setting

records for the fastest price per share increase ever. The burgeoning

biotechnology industry inspired other corporations and scientists to

patent not only microorganisms, but plant, animal, and even human life

forms as well.[159]

Presented as a solution to urgent problems of disease or world hunger,

biotechnological inventions also ‘solve’ capitalists’ ‘need’ for profit

and growth. The development of the new biotechnology is controlled

primarily within capitalist structures such as transnational

enterprises, universities funded by corporations, and small ‘start-up’

corporate firms. Already, biotechnology has been applied in primary

industries of agriculture, forestry, and mining; in secondary industries

of chemicals, drugs, and food; and finally in tertiary industries of

health care, education, research and advisory services.[160]

Addressing the Question of Biological Patents

When a group sets out to address a problem such as intellectual property

rights, or biological patenting, the group faces a crisis so complex and

overwhelming that to merely address the particular problem at hand seems

insurmountable. For instance, indigenous communities in the Amazon

engaged in fighting the patenting of local medicinal plants by

transnational biotechnology corporations, are already often so involved

in other struggles for survival that contestation often focuses on

protecting indigenous communities from the specific harm of biological

enclosure.[161]

Accordingly, questions of biotechnology are often cast within the terms

of the offending party itself, framed in social terms of economics and

production (as groups resist particular corporate practices), in terms

of state power (as groups address national and international patenting

policies); and in the social-statist terms of international trade (as

groups deal with international trade agreements facilitated by the World

Trade Organization (WTO)). Yet for contestation to such practices as

biological patenting to be rendered sufficient, they must be understood

not solely in the terms of freedom from specific injustices within the

realms of the social and the State, but in terms of freedom to create a

socially and politically free society in general.

How can we reason from a particular crisis such as the patenting of

living organisms to reach a general analysis of social and political

transformation? How can we reason from the dystopic crisis of life

patenting to a vision of a world that is not only patent free, but is

free of all forms of hierarchy in general? What follows offers a brief

outline, a set of illustrative and oppositional questions that allow us

to begin to reason from the particular to the general, from the social

to the political, and ultimately, from the ecological to the

revolutionary.

I. The Critical Moment

In the critical moment, we begin explore the social and statist

dimensions of life patenting. We initially ask: How does the patenting

of biological life inform the social sphere, both public and private?

Beginning by looking at the private dimension of the social sphere, we

might ask: If the most basic and organic unit of private life lies

within the body itself, then we may explore how the body’s autonomy and

privacy are degraded by patents that impose new capitalist relations

within the very germ plasm of life. As we attempt to critique the

private dimensions of this crisis, we need to look for historical

novelties, asking: What makes this form of injustice distinctive and

new? By addressing such questions, we examine the particular

implications of patenting for private life in general, exploring novel

ways in which patenting disrupts bodily integrity, reducing cell-lines

to marketable materials to be owned and hoarded by corporations.

Next, we would critique life-patenting in relation to the public

dimension of the social sphere. Here, we would explore such issues as

capitalist production, consumption, and public education as they relate

to biotechnology. We may point to moments of commodification and

ownership of life forms as well as corporations’ search for ever new

colonies (biological as well as social) for never-ending expansion. As

we recognize the particular urgency of this crisis, we may point to what

makes this particular crisis distinctive, asking: What makes

biotechnology different from, and potentially more harmful than, other

forms of commodified scientific practice? Or, what makes life patenting

different from other forms of colonialism? Or, how does the

imperialistic devaluation of local indigenous knowledge and life itself

‘legitimize’ the patenting of species used in indigenous agricultural

and medicinal practices?

As we critique the implications of patenting for the social sphere, we

may explore the novel impacts of such practice on institutions of public

education. Here we may explore how patenting practices inform research

agendas and funding priorities within microbiology departments in

universities throughout the United States and much of Europe. In

particular, we may begin to examine the increasingly intimate

relationship between publicly funded research and private industry.[162]

This relationship is changing dramatically as public universities grow

increasingly dependent on private industry for funding, and as

biotechnology industries become attractive and socially accepted

research arenas for scientists. We must explore the implication of

scientific practice within a context in which increasingly, scientists

conduct research out of personal economic interest, rather than out of

the ‘love’ of ‘pure’ science.

When we engage in the critical moment, we may also show moments of

resistance which show the limits of hegemony itself. For instance, we

would explore how in India, farmers have engaged for years in an ongoing

struggle against World Trade Organization (WTO) proposals on agriculture

and intellectual property rights which would allow transnational

companies monopolize the production and distribution of seeds and other

aspects of Third World agriculture. We might explore an earlier

struggle, in October of 1995, in which a half-million Indian farmers

from Karnataka took part in a day-long procession and rally in the South

Indian city of Bangalore, constituting the largest display of public

opinion anywhere in the world either for or against the round of Geneva

trade talks surrounding the WTO. At this event, Karnataka farmers

established an international research center in order to help develop

community seed banks and to protect the intellectual rights of their

communities.[163] It is vital to uncover the rich moments of resistance

such as these that are scattered across the globe. We need to

continually shed light on movements of social contestation that bubble

up amidst even the most oppressive conditions. In this way, our critique

is informed not only by urgency, but by vital inspiration.

Further, we may critique the sphere of the State surrounding patenting.

Here, we examine novel articulations between the State and the social

sphere, exploring how state institutions including the National

Institute of Health and the Department of Energy fund social

institutions such as corporations and universities to collect,

taxonomize, and warehouse genetic information through such projects as

the Human Genome Project (a three billion dollar program that is

currently ‘mapping’ the entire human genome).[164]

Finally, we may pose a series of critical questions relating to the

political sphere concerning the lack of popular awareness and

participation in determining public policy surrounding life patenting.

Here, we critique the lack of scientific literacy among citizens, the

lack of public forums for popular education, discussion, and debate

about current scientific practices. Here, it is crucial to draw out the

general crisis surrounding non-democracy from the particular crisis of

biological patenting.

In the critical moment, we may explore the historical context of

life-patenting by examining the radical history of resistance movements

related to the topic more generally. We might begin by looking at the

historical relationship between public and private institutions of

science, medicine, education, and capital, examining the theme of

colonization and privatization. Particularly, we would examine the

historical context surrounding intellectual property rights, looking at

the roles institutions have played in developing such practices over the

century. We would also analyze the broader history of colonialism,

capitalism, and patriarchy that frames such issues as seed cultivation

and ownership in Third World situations. We would look at the legacy of

the nation-state in the colonial and neo-colonial eras, examining the

breakdown of local indigenous self determination of social and

ecological policy.

In turn, we would explore the history of resistance to life-patenting.

We would explore movements throughout the Third World that have

continued to resist capitalist enclosure since the first phase of

colonialism. In order to reveal this radical history, we would need to

uncover the historical continuities between resistance to current life

patenting practices and to previous expressions of colonial enclosure.

In this spirit, we would generalize upon the particular meaning of

life-patenting, tracing the emergence of anti-imperial movements which

contested injustices such as slavery and land enclosure.

II. The Reconstructive Moment

In the reconstructive moment, we begin to consider the liberatory

possibilities presented by addressing the particular form of injustice

at hand. In the reconstructive moment we treat the three spheres of

society differently: while we look to transform the social and political

spheres, we examine avenues for transcending the sphere of the State.

Beginning again by looking at the implications of biological patenting

for the social sphere, we may explore the reconstructive possibilities

of revaluing the private dimension of the body. In the reconstructive

moment, we begin to highlight the continuities between particular and

general forms of injustice. For example, while life-patenting introduces

particular novel legal, cultural, and corporate practices related to

private ‘embodied’ dimensions of life, it also builds upon a more

general history of privatizing human and other life forms. It is

consistent with a capitalist ‘tradition’ which enslaved African

Americans in the American South, bound women legally to their husbands,

and continues this tradition by trafficking women and babies in sex

industries and black-market adoptions, in addition to commodifying land,

plants, animals, and other organisms.

Here we understand that-the sufficient condition for reclaiming the body

and ‘life’ itself, is to abolish the practice of patenting in all

spheres of society. A truly free society entails that no body, person,

or organism can be reduced to private property, no human can be rendered

subject, either in part or in entirety, to another person or

institution.

As we continue to think through the social sphere, we may consider what

it would take to create social and political conditions which render all

forms of private property (bodily or otherwise) unacceptable. Exploring

the role that medical, pharmaceutical, agribusiness, and chemical

companies play in determining research and regulation of genetically

modified organisms, we would look to remake the social sphere along

post-capitalist lines.

What is most crucial in the reconstructive moment, then, is to draw out

the most utopian and sufficient conditions of freedom which surround a

particular issue. For instance, while it is necessary to eliminate

patents of biological life, we must illustrate how merely abolishing

such patents represents an insufficient condition to engender a truly

free society in general. We would point to the widest conditions of

freedom that can be drawn out from the idea of a patent-free social

sphere. We would begin to articulate the need for a sphere of education,

technology, and economics that is based not on commodification, but upon

social cooperation.

As we consider transcending the State we may begin to draw connections

between the particular form of injustice in question and the lack of

direct democracy throughout society as a whole. It is vital to

articulate specific ways in which current state governments inhibit

citizens from participating directly in determining the policies that

affect their lives. In turn, we must also show how the lack of

confederal forums deprives us of informing the unfolding of events

outside our own municipalities and throughout the world.

In thinking through the issue of life-patenting, we recognize that

disruptions caused by such practices are not exclusively local in

nature. Within the age of global capital, we see that there exist few

uniquely local problems as currents of capital and state power flow

throughout towns, cities, states, and countries the world over. Although

corporate, governmental, and regulatory institutions that control the

collection and storage of genetic materials operate within specific

localities, these institutions function within an international system

of trade, production, regulation, and policy making which is

transnational in character.[165]

In the reconstructive moment, we would begin to explore how to transcend

the State by creating a new politics in which citizens have direct

control over technological practices such as biotechnology. We may

illustrate how, by replacing the State with a confederation of directly

democratic municipalities, citizens would empower themselves to discuss

and decide scientific matters that affect not only organisms and people

locally, but globally as well. In the reconstructive moment, then, the

criticism and analysis of a particular form of hierarchy opens the way

to elaborate the broadest understanding of non-hierarchy possible.

III. The Illustrative Moment

The illustrative moment represents an opportunity to inspire others to

demand the sufficient social and political conditions for a free and

ecological society. It is the forum in which we inspire others to move

beyond the scope of a particular crisis, to demand self-determination

within a broader political context. It is the moment to create

oppositional forums in which we may ask: What does life patenting have

to do with democracy? Or, what does abolishing patenting have to do with

creating a utopian society?

Illustrative opposition should compel ecological activists to reach for

new connections between social and ecological issues and their

authentically political implications. Each moment of illustrative

opposition to state practices for instance, should point to the wider

demand for authentic direct democracy. Illustrative opposition allows us

to highlight a particular moment in which we have no direct political

control, raising awareness of our lack of policy-making control in

general. The illustrative moment explains by asking questions. Through

our actions and our propaganda, we ask: how did it come to be that we

control so little regarding this particular issue and regarding our

lives in the broadest sense?

There are many ways to illustrate the need for direct democracy. As

discussed earlier, we can popularize the demand for political power

using a variety of media ranging from radio, pamphlets, and teach-ins to

guerrilla theater, bill board alteration, and murals. There is no

‘recipe’ for making the connection between ecological and revolutionary

political issues, as each activist group brings their own talents and

sensibility to the project of opposition.

I am a member of a small media collective in Western Massachusetts that

engaged in illustrative opposition regarding issues of biological

patenting and agricultural biotechnology. Last year, the group saw the

need to raise public awareness regarding the introduction of genetically

engineered organisms into the food supply that has begun in recent

years. In addition to being concerned by insufficient research on the

potentially allergenic and toxic effects of ingesting genetically

engineered foods, we were troubled by the lack of research regarding

environmental risks that surface as plants spread their genetically

engineered traits to other neighboring organisms (through

cross-pollination or ingestion).

But we were not solely concerned with environmental and health risks

associated with genetically engineered crops. The group also wanted to

address issues of economic and cultural self-determination surrounding

the issue. We wanted to educate ourselves and the public regarding how

local farmers throughout the world are economically and culturally

threatened as multi-national agro-chemical companies gradually

monopolize the seed industry worldwide.

We also had another primary concern. Our group wanted to illustrate the

link between the social and ecological problems presented by genetically

engineered crops and the need for political transformation. We wished to

demonstrate how both corporations and the State, rather than citizens,

determine economic, ecological, and political policy related to

agricultural biotechnology. As a media collective composed of writers,

actors, and artists, we decided to create a series of theatrical events

as a way to illustrate our opposition to biotechnology.

At a demonstration that protested Monsanto (a U.S. based multi-national

agro-chemical company heavily invested in biotechnology) corporate

offenses, our group performed a theater piece in which a two-headed

monster (wearing name-tags that read “the State” and “Capitalism”)

delivered an oratory regarding its autocratic decision to find new

avenues for capitalist expansion through biological patenting and

genetic engineering. Surrounding the monster, floated a sea of

zombie-like people (wearing signs that read “consumer”) who stared

blankly and passively at the monster as he announced his plan. Over the

course of our skit, the consumers first strolled about passively, then

attempted to fight the monster, and finally ended up gathering together

to discuss what to do next. Through this process, the consumers realized

that by gathering, discussing, and making decisions, they had actually

formed a town meeting of sorts, and they realized that what they really

wanted was to reclaim their political power. One by one, the consumers

flipped over their signs to reveal the word “citizen” written on the

other side.[166]

At the end of the piece, the actors sat in a circle and invited the

audience to join them in an impromptu town meeting to discuss plans for

continuing the struggle for direct democratic control over technology

and over life in general. What actually ended up occurring, though, was

a more concrete, yet highly democratic discussion of plans for the

anti-GMO movement itself.

We then did a series of “supermarket inspections” in which we dressed in

white bio-hazard suits to go ‘shopping’ at our local supermarkets. We

strolled down the supermarket aisles, ‘inspecting’ the produce with a

variety of bogus scientific instruments, dropping flyers into people’s

shopping carts and into produce and dairy displays. In addition, each

‘inspector’ (unable to speak through a gas-mask) had a plain-clothed

‘assistant’ who would strike up conversations about biotechnology and

democracy with other shoppers whose responses ranged from amusement and

interest, to suspicion and annoyance. During each action, we had between

five to fifteen minutes before we were asked (or aggressively forced by

security guards) to leave the store.

In our flyers, we explained that we were a renegade group that had

defected from the Food and Drug Administration after deciding that we

desired direct political power—in addition to ‘safe food’. Discussing

the economic and cultural issues associated with genetically engineered

foods, the flyer also talked about the connection between direct

democracy and technology, attempting to raise the level of public

discussion from questions of environmental and health risk to issues of

political power.

For our next action, we plan to set up a “patent office” on a busy

street in our town where we will hand out patent applications to

passersby, offering them the chance to patent their own cell-lines.

Through satire, we plan to educate members of our community about

biological patenting, both human and non-human, explaining the

relationship between issues of bodily integrity, social issues such as

capital-driven biotechnology, issues of state monopoly over policy

making, and political issues such as the need for direct democratic

control over technology and over our lives in general.

Through these small actions, we are trying to widen the discussion

surrounding biotechnology by talking about questions of political power

in addition to issues of environmental and health risk related to

genetically modified foods. It is our hope that people may begin to see

themselves as more than consumers seeking the power to buy safe food. We

want to encourage people to see themselves as citizens who desire the

political power to create a humane and ecological society.

In turn, we are hoping to move discussions surrounding biotechnology

beyond romantic yearnings for a golden age untainted by ‘technology’. In

our actions, the idea of ‘nature’ is taken from the realm of abstraction

and is brought down to the realm of the everyday. The ‘nature’ we invoke

is our bodies walking down a city street and it is the food we buy in

the supermarket. In turn, we show that the cause of ecological injustice

is not abstractions such as ‘civilization’ or ‘industrial society’—but

rather, a set of social relationships called the State and capitalism

that appropriate our power to create cooperative relationships within

society and with the rest of the natural world.

Our group has just begun to think through the process of illustrative

opposition. As a collective of actors and writers, we have chosen to

express our opposition in the form of theater and written text. But as I

mentioned earlier, dissent has a variety of forms. By giving a brief

sketch of some of our first actions, I have tried to depict a ‘work in

process’ that aims only to stimulate conversation, critique, and perhaps

action as well. As our group continues to explore the relationship

between direct democracy and technology, our actions will hopefully

embody an increasingly elaborate understanding of the necessary and

sufficient conditions for creating a free and ecological society.

As our group knows, revolution cannot be generated from a series of

individual protests against social and ecological injustices. It

requires that we articulate not only what we do not want, but what we

desire as well. The demand for substantive freedom, or the demand for

the very substance of what freedom means, stands in contrast to the

demand for negative freedom, which while necessary, represents an

incomplete demand to negate injustice. We must be able to articulate a

substantive vision of the society we desire, illustrating through our

activism, fire social and political freedoms for which we yearn. We must

illustrate a substantive demand for the freedom to create a society

based on a confederated direct democracy, a municipalized economy, and

on a new social and ecological sensibility based on values of

cooperation and mutual-aid.

Through illustrative opposition, we are neither locked into single-issue

activism, nor locked into the stagnation of ‘waiting’ for a local or

national political movement sufficiently comprehensive to address the

widest range of revolutionary desires. To be sure, we cannot sit back

and watch urgent crises pass before our eyes. Instead, we may address

the necessity of a single issue, presenting a wider sufficient condition

for a free society in the process. Thinking through each particular

moment of unfreedom opens the way to consider the widest vista of

freedom imaginable.

It is vital that we begin to think along coherent revolutionary lines.

In this age of incoherence, our thinking about social and political

change often tends to be scattered and fragmented. The spectacle of the

nightly news does not assist us in understanding the crucial link

between real political power and the struggle for social and ecological

justice. Instead, we are expected to sit back and watch the parade of

incoherent events presented to us as disparate and unrelated as the

commercials that flicker by every four to seven minutes.

To create coherence in the age of incoherence is a highly oppositional

act. By clearly conveying the ‘logic’ that underlies this irrational

world, we actually lessen the overwhelming burden of social

disorientation. To see how one crisis emerges from the other—to think

rationally—opens the way to understand how one phase of reconstruction

may emerge from the other allowing us to gradually transform society as

a whole.

A crucial component of any illustrative opposition is a process of

education in which we recover a sense of theoretical and historical

integrity. In this spirit, we may create study-groups and centers for

radical education, forums in which we may think through the moments of

illustrative opposition, educating ourselves in revolutionary history,

awakening ourselves to the possibilities for social and political

reconstruction.

Illustrative opposition, then, is not merely an instrumental means-ends

approach to social or political activism. Rather, it represents a

comprehensive and utopian analytics made visible. The illustrations that

we paint represent valuable ends in themselves; they represent an

ongoing challenge to the institutions that oppress us, a challenge that

shows the world that opposition is alive, well, and will not go away.

Our illustrative actions must curb the steady tide of social and

political injustice that gathers strength daily. As we begin to

popularize the demand for direct political power over our everyday

lives, the horizon of social and ecological justice no longer recedes

into the distance, but rather, calls out to us, yearning passionately

for its own actualization.

Postscript: On an Ecology of Everyday Life

While ecological restoration is necessary, it alone is insufficient for

reclaiming a desirable quality of social life. Ecology must evaluate the

social, political, cultural—as well as the biological—dimensions of

life, demanding the power for citizens to be able to determine the

nature of their relationships with each other and with the rest of the

natural world. An ecology of everyday life is a social ecology that

translates the desire for “nature” into a politicized desire for direct

democratic control through which citizens may create a society that is

whole, humane, and meaningful.

We must cease to portray “nature” as a distant, pure, abstract thing

removed from the everyday lives of people living in urban and degraded

rural environments. It is time for “nature” to be brought down to earth,

to become the very stuff of our lives: the crowded street in our

neighbourhood, the water with which we wash our clothes, both sky

scraper and smoke-stack, as well as the plants, animals, and other

creatures with whom we share this planet.

To fulfil its revolutionary potential, ecology must become the desire to

infuse the objects, relationships, and practices of everyday life with

the same quality of integrity, beauty, and meaning that people in

industrial capitalist contexts commonly reserve for “nature.” It means

recasting many of the values often associated with nature within social

terms, seizing the power to create new institutions that encourage,

rather than obstruct, the expression of a rational social desire for a

cooperative, healthful, and creative society. The idea of nature can no

longer be the “country home” of our desires, that place we run to in our

dreams, longing for escape from the pain and confusion of life in the

era of global capital. We must relocate the idea of nature within

society itself, transforming society into a ground in which we may

build, collectively, a new practice of both nature and community.

The call for an ecology of everyday life speaks not just to our

immediate physical needs for survival. In addition, it arouses the

desire for a world forged by social desire in all of its forms: a life

redolent with personal creativity and a quality of community life based

on humane and ecological practices. Ecology provides a lens through

which we may take a long and often excruciating look at our own lives, a

chance to evaluate the quality of our relationships, both local and

global. And if we are not heartened by what we see, we realize that we

have an enormous challenge before us. For once we appreciate the

interconnectedness of life, we understand that we cannot simply work to

save ourselves or a certain species of plant or animal—we realize that

we must transform society as a whole.

The demand for an ecological society cannot be reduced to an individual

or personal quest for a better quality of life. As I have tried to

illustrate, an ecology of everyday life entails instead a rational

social desire to establish a quality of life for all people, a desire

that ultimately requires a dramatic restructuring of political, social,

and economic institutions. It asks that we transform our love for nature

into an activist politics that strives to bring to society the best of

what we long for when we talk about “nature.”

This requires that privileged people reconsider attempts to simplify

their life styles, to, in addition, grapple with what I call “the

complexity of complicity”: a recognition that, despite the attempts of

privileged people to extricate themselves from systems of injustice

through personal life-style choices, because of the pervasiveness of

overlapping systems of power, they will always remain embedded and thus

complicit within such institutions as global capitalism, the State,

racism, and sexism.

But instead of despising themselves for this privilege, or trying to

assuage their guilt by individually trying to lead simple lives,

privileged peoples might instead begin to redefine their guilt as

“ineffective privilege.” They may identify their privilege—whether it be

based on physical ability, education, economic status, ethnicity,

gender, sexual orientation, or nationality—and they may transform this

privilege into a potent substance to be used for social and political

reconstruction. Guilt associated with the privilege of money, race, and

education, for example, may be transformed into time, economic

resources, and information useful to political struggles. Privilege

within complex systems of hierarchy can be morphed from paralyzing guilt

into an active process of thinking rationally and compassionately about

how to utilize particular resources to dismantle systems of power.

Recognizing the complexity of complicity means accepting that there are

no simple or romantic escapes from the challenges that stand before us.

We realize that instead of seeking comfort within a people-less

wilderness, we must confront and rebuild social and political

institutions—a task that entails a long-term struggle that is far from

romantic. It requires that we embark upon the often arduous struggle of

working with others to create ethical and rational political

organizations and movements. An ecology of everyday life transforms

ecology from a lofty romantic venture into an ongoing labour of love.

Ecology is as much about the drudgery of licking envelopes for a

mass-mailing and fighting to save an urban community center in the Lower

East Side of Manhattan as it is about saving a forest.

Once we let go of romantic conceptions of desire, we are free to explore

a social desire that rounds out our humanity, enticing us to become ever

more sensual, cooperative, creative, developmental, and oppositional. We

may recast our lives in social terms, recognizing desire as an

anticipation of the pleasure that comes from enhancing the satisfaction

and efficacy of both ourselves and others. Here, ecology becomes the

light by which we scrutinize our everyday lives; it is the voice through

which we demand the power to bring forth a world in which we may live

the boldest and most social expressions of our humanity.

An ecology of everyday life entails rethinking our understanding of

nature as well. Removing the idea of nature from its pristine and static

display case, we may see nature for what it is: a dazzling and dynamic

evolutionary process that continues to unfurl about us and within us.

Once we are able to locate ourselves within this evolution, we can begin

to measure our everyday lives as they are against what they could be if

only we were free to actualize our potential for such evolutionary coups

as cooperation, creativity, and development. Suddenly, the dull office

job, the lonely neighbourhood, the poverty, or even the unsatisfying

privilege—all take on new meaning. Rather than constituting a personal

failure or a lack of will, our withered communities and lives reflect an

anti-social and hierarchical trend that has spread through humanity like

an industrial fire. By recognizing our minds, our hands, our bones, and

our hearts as part of natural evolution—as an evolutionary

inheritance—we become outraged by this fire, breathing it into our

lungs, transforming it into a moral outrage that is fuel for rational

oppositional action.

Transcending romantic and individualistic approaches to ecology, we may

finally face the everyday questions of social and political

transformation. Ecology may then begin to strive to create the political

pre-conditions for establishing an ecological society. While the notion

of illustrative opposition proposed in these pages offers a way to

rethink such pre-conditions, it cannot replace the need to build a wider

revolutionary struggle. Instead, it provides a way to broaden

discussions of ecological issues to include the widest revolutionary

vision possible. That vision is one of direct democracy: the passionate

process through which citizens may claim the political power to create a

rational, ecological, and desirable society.

An ecology of everyday life is about reaching for this desirable

society, reclaiming our humanity as we reclaim our abilities to reason,

discuss, and to make decisions about our own communities. It is about

looking into the uncharted “wilderness” of democracy itself, that

delicious, empowering, and deeply social process through which we become

a truly humane expression of that nature for which we have yearned all

along.

[1] I am indebted to these writers for inspiration and direction. While

I have drawn inspiration from many of these writers’ works, the pieces

mentioned here represent for me particularly important sources for new

ways of thinking about desire. See Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity

Anarchism (1969; reprinted by Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1986); Audre

Lorde, “Use of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (New

York: The Crossing Press, 1984); Jessica Benjamin, “The First Bond,” in

The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of

Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988); James Baldwin, “The

Creative Process,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction

1948–1985 (New York: St. Martins, 1985). I cannot help but include a

quote from this last essay of Baldwin, who I hope, would forgive me for

modifying the pronouns: “Societies never know it, but the war of an

artist with society is a lover’s war, and the artist does, at best, what

lovers do, which is to reveal the beloved to themself and, with that

revelation, make freedom real.”

[2] Denis de Rougemont, Love in the Western World (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1983), pp. 106–7.

[3] Roger Sherman Loomis, Trans. The Romance of Tristan and Ysolt by

Thomas of Britain (New York: Boyer Books, 1931).

[4] Ibid., p. 64.

[5] For a discussion of the relationship between sabotage and agency,

see Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Value (Palo Alto:

Institute for Lesbian Studies, 1988), pp. 46–49.

[6] Murray Bookchin, personal communication, 18 July 1984.

[7] There have been a number of truly intelligent discussions of

reproduction issues by feminists such as Betsy Hartman that address

social and political considerations. See Betsy Hartman, Reproductive

Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control and

Reproductive Choice (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).

[8] World Bank. 1993. World Development Report 1993. New York: Oxford

University Press.

[9] Murray Bookchin, “The Power to Create, the Power to Destroy” in

Toward an Ecological Society (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1980), p. 37.

[10] Bill Devall and George Sessions, “Why Wilderness in the Nuclear

Age?” in Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City:

Peregrine Smith Books, 1985), p. 127.

[11] For a good discussion of structural adjustment programs, see Bruce

Rich, Mortgaging the Earth: The World Bank, Environment, Impoverishment,

and the Crisis of Development (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994).

[12] For an in-depth discussion of the historical relationship between

ecological discourse and reactionary thinking, particularly within the

German context, see Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism

(London: AK Press, 1995).

[13] Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford

University Press), p. 35.

[14] For more on the dialectics of town and country, see Murray

Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise and Decline of

Citizenship (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992).

[15] Earth First! Bumper sticker as advertised in their catalogue.

[16] Stonyfield Farm Planet Protectors Earth Action Moosletter. Winter

1997.

[17] The question of whether the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement is

a satirical or sincere expression of anti-humanist views is debatable.

The subtitle for their manifesto is “A Modest Proposal,” a clear

allusion to Swift’s famous pamphlet which satirically proposed eating

babies as a means of relieving Irish famine. However, whether they are

exaggerating Malthusian rhetoric as a means to expose its callous

insanity, or whether they are sincere, the fact that so many take it

seriously reflects a troubling state of affairs within the ecology

movement.

[18] Gaia Liberation Front. Web site: http://www:paranoia.com/coe/

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat (New York: Continuum,

1991), p. 175.

[22] Ibid., p. 175.

[23] For a closer look at issues of worker’s health and safety related

to Third World labor conditions, see Women in Development: A Resource

Guide for Organization and Action (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers,

1984). Also, For a broader discussion of the implications of Third World

‘development’ women’s labor, see Gita Sen and Caren Grown, Development,

Crises, and Alternative Visions: Third World Women’s Perspectives (New

York: Monthly Review Press, 1987).

[24] Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat, p. 175.

[25] Steven Levy, “Technomania: The Hype and the Hope,” in Newsweek 27

February 1995, p. 3.

[26] Murray Bookchin. Lecture. Institute for Social Ecology. 11 July

1995.

[27] Arturo Escobar. Lecture. University of Massachusetts. 8 March 1995.

[28] For a wider discussion of the relationship between technology and

democracy, see Richard E. Sclove, Democracy and Technology (New York:

The Guilford Press, 1995). Although Sclove’s book explores the

democratization of technology within the context of a representative

statist democracy, he does pose a series of crucial questions concerning

the lack of technological democracy within the present context. Also see

Bookchin’s discussion of the social and political implications of

technology in Re-Enchanting Humanity (London: Cassell. 1995), pp.

148–172.

[29] Kevin Kelly, “Interview with the Luddite,” in Wired (3.06 June

1995, p. 166). In his Wired interview, Sale comments on the personal

satisfaction he gleaned from smashing the computer: “It was astonishing

how good it made me feel! I cannot explain it to you, I was on stage of

New York City’s Town Hall with an audience of 1,500 people. I was behind

a lectern, and in front of the lectern was this computer. And I gave a

very short, minute-and-a-half description of what was wrong with the

technosphere, how it was destroying the biosphere. And then I walked

over and I got this very powerful sledge-hammer and smashed the screen

with one blow and smashed the keyboard with another blow. It felt

wonderful. The sound it made, the spewing of the undoubtedly poisonous

insides into the spotlight, the dust that hung in the air... some in the

audience applauded. I bowed and returned to my chair.”

[30] Audre Lorde, “The Masters Tool’s Will Never Dismantle the Master’s

House,” in Sister Outsider (New York: Crossing Press, 1984), pp.

110–113.

[31] Anne Koedt, “Women in the Radical Movement,” in Radical Feminism,

eds. Anne Koedt, Ellen Levine, and Anita Rapone (New York: New York

Times Books Co., 1973), p. 318.

[32] The term ‘cultural feminism’ emerged during the ‘70s as a way to

point to essentialist notions of sexual difference that surfaced within

feminist discussions of sexuality, gender, and culture; notions that

were embedded in new reconstructions of women’s cultural practices

including women’s music festivals, newspapers, and medical clinics. For

an indepth look at one of the earlier critiques of cultural feminism,

written during the thick of the feminist sexuality debates, see Alice

Echols, “The New Feminism of Yin and Yang,” in Powers of Desire: The

Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, et al. (New York: Monthly Review

Press, 1983), pp. 439–460. For a more comprehensive discussion also see

Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–75,

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

[33] Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly,” in Sister Outsider:

Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (New York: The Crossing Press, 1984),

p. 67.

[34] See Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, Second Edition, This Bridge

Called My Back (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983).

[35] bell hooks, “Rethinking the Nature of Work,” in Feminist Theory:

from margin to center, (Boston: South End Press, 1984) p. 98.

[36] Lorde, Sister Outsider, p. 70.

[37] Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Spinster’s Ink,

1980).

[38] “WITCH statement”, in Sisterhood is Powerful ed. Robin Morgan (New

York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 539.

[39] Ibid., p. 539.

[40] Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (New York:

Harper and Row, 1978).

[41] Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the

Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980).

[42] Griffin, Woman and Nature, p. xv.

[43] However, it is vital to note that the emergence of an ecological

sensibility within the feminist body politics of the New Left did not

negate or even necessarily inform radical feminism itself. Today,

strains of radical feminism continue to evolve independent of an

ecological focus or analysis. An ecological orientation was not endorsed

by radical feminists who maintained that it detracted from an agenda

that primarily addresses women’s immediate needs for bodily integrity

and civil rights.

[44] Unity Statement—Women’s Pentagon Action, 1980, in Ynestra King,

What is Ecofeminism? (New York: Ecofeminist Resources, 1990).

[45] Ynestra King, “If I Can’t Dance in Your Revolution, I’m Not

Coming,” in Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics,

eds. Adrienne Harris and Ynestra King (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989),

p. 282.

[46] See Gwyn Kirk, “Our Greenham Common: Feminism and Nonviolence,” in

Rocking the Ship of State: Toward a Feminist Peace Politics, eds.

Adrienne Harris and Ynestra King (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), pp.

115–130.

[47] For a sensitive and thorough discussion of WomanEarth, as well as

an exploration of issues of race and class in ecofeminist politics in

general, see Noël Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist

Theory and Political Action (New York: Routledge, 1997).

[48] Sturgeon, Ecofeminist Natures, p. 82.

[49] Murray Bookchin, personal communication, June 11, 1998.

[50] As ecofeminism has grown in popularity, there has been significant

confusion regarding the origins of the term and of the movement itself.

While during the early 1980s, the term (still largely unknown in many

feminist circles) was most closely associated with the Women’s Pentagon

Action of which King was a primary organizer, the mid- to late-1980s

brought newcomers unfamiliar with the movement’s origins.

In recent years, many have attributed the origins of the term

‘ecofeminism’ to an article written in 1974 by Frangoise d’Eaubonne

entitled Le Féminisme ou la Mort, (Paris: Pierre Horay, 1974). However,

the article did not reach English speaking audiences until 1994 (in an

essay translated by Ruth Hottel as “The Time for Ecofeminism,” in

Carolyn Merchant, ed., Key Concepts in Critical Theory: Ecology

(Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), almost fifteen years

after the theory and movement had emerged as a way to explicitly link an

anti-militarist, anti-capitalist, and anti-patriarchal stance to

questions of ecology. Though a version of the d’Eaubonne essay did

appear in 1980, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivon, eds. New

French Feminisms: An Anthology (Amherst: University of Massachusetts

Press, 1980), this version does not explicitly mention ecofeminism.

Examining the lineage of the term is a way to explore the specific

historical context in which ecofeminist theory and action emerged.

Attempts to trace the ecofeminist movement itself back to d’Eaubonne

obfuscate the historical continuity between ecofeminist curriculum and

writing that emerged at the ISE by King, and the wider context of the

U.S. New Left made up of activists involved in the radical feminist

movement, the feminist peace movement, the anti-war movement, and the

anti-nuclear movement.

[51] Indeed, many of the anthropological texts written by feminists

during the late 1960s and early 70s used the domestic/public split as a

key analytical framework. For a glimpse into this discussion, see Woman,

Culture & Society, eds. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).

[52] King continued to teach at the ISE through the 1980s and

participated in the ISE’s annual colloquium on ecofeminism until 1994.

For a more comprehensive discussion of the relationship between King,

Bookchin, and the ISE, see Noël Sturgeon’s book Ecofeminist Natures

(London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 32–40.

[53] Ynestra King, “What is Ecofeminism?” in What is Ecofeminism, ed.

Gwyn Kirk (New York: Ecofeminist Resources, 1990), p. 26

[54] Robert D. Bullard, Introduction in Confronting Environmental

Racism: Voices from the Grassroots, ed. Robert D. Bullard (Boston: South

End Press, 1993), p. 9.

[55] Taylor, Dorceta E., “Environmentalism and the Politics of

Inclusion.” Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the

Grassroots, ed. Robert D. Bullard (Boston: South End Press, 1993), p.

58.

[56] Cynthia Hamilton, “Women, Home, and Community: The Struggle in an

Urban Environment,” in Reweaving the World: The Emergence of

Ecofeminism, eds. Gloria Orenstein and Irene Diamond (San Francisco:

Sierra Club Books, 1992), p. 217.

[57] Gita Sen and Caren Grown, Development, Crises, and Alternative

Visions (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), p. 29.

[58] Vandana Shiva has contributed profoundly to a historical and

anti-capitalist ecofeminist critique of the intersection between

patriarchy, colonialism, global capital and ecological degradation. See

Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies, Ecofeminism (London: Zed Books, 1993).

[59] In 1987, I coined the term “social ecofeminism” to clarify a

specifically leftist trajectory within a steadily differentiating

ecofeminist milieu. That year, the term was embraced by the Left Green

Network that included social ecofeminism as one of its “Ten Key Values”.

In 1989, the Youth Greens embraced a social ecofeminism as well. Within

these green forums and at the ISE, the term referred to an approach to

ecofeminism informed by social anarchism and social ecology; it

reflected an attempt to combine an historical understanding of questions

of nature and gender with a reconstructive and utopian vision of a

post-capitalist, post-statist society.

[60] Judith Plant, “Introduction,” in Healing the Wounds: The Promise of

Ecofeminism, ed. Judith Plant (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers,

1989), pp. 1–7.

[61] Many of the essays within Reweaving The World were originally

presented as papers at the Ecofeminist Perspectives: Culture, Nature,

Theory conference held at the University of Southern California in 1987.

[62] In the early 1990s, there emerged a body of critical writings about

the relationship between ecofeminism and questions of spiritualism,

essentialism, and hegemony surrounding Third World development. See

Ynestra King, “Ecofeminism: The Necessity of History & Mystery,” in

King, What is Ecofeminism (New York: Ecofeminist Resources, 1990). Also,

for a more controversial discussion, see Janet Biehl, Rethinking

Ecofeminist Politics (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1991) and Catriona

Sandilands, “Ecofeminism and It’s Discontents: Notes Toward a Politics

of Diversity,” in Trumpeter, 8:2 Spring 1991. See also Cecile Jackson,

“Women/Nature or Gender/History? A Critique of Ecofeminist Development,”

in The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3. April 1993, pp.

389–419. Chris J. Cuomo also offers an interesting discussion of

anti-essential criticism in Feminism and Ecological Communities (London:

Routledge, 1998).

[63] Charlene Spretnak, “Ecofeminism: Our Roots and Flowering,” in

Reweaving the World: the Emergence of Ecofeminism, eds. Irene Diamond

and Gloria Feman Orenstein (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990), p.

6.

[64] Ibid., p. 10.

[65] See Greta Gaard, “Misunderstanding Ecofeminism,” Z Magazine 3 (1)

(1994): 22.

[66] For a look at ecofeminists discussions of animal liberation that

appeared in the early 1990s, see Greta Gaard’s anthology Ecofeminism:

Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).

[67] See Greta Gaard, Ecological Politics: Ecofeminists and the Greens

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); Noel Sturgeon,

Ecofeminist Natures: Race, Gender, Feminist Theory and Political Action,

(London: Routledge, 1987); and Chris Cuomo, Feminism and ecological

communities: an ethic of flourishing (London: Routledge, 1998).

[68] See Jeffrey B. Russell, “The Brethren of the Free Spirit,” in

Religious Dissent in the Middle Ages ed. J.B. Russell (New York: John

Wiley & Sons, 1971), p. 87–90.

[69] Quoted in Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto:

Cheshire Books, 1982).

[70] Ibid., p. 211.

[71] Concerning questions of desire, the social tradition departs from,

the romantic and liberal traditions dramatically. If the romantic

idealizes the exceptional qualities of a particular individual, the

social anarchist recognizes the potential for exceptional qualities

within the many. For those in the social tradition, the best in human

nature is to be expected and encouraged by and for everyone, rather than

being located within one ideal individual.

[72] Errico Malatesta, Anarchy (Great Britain: Freedom Press, 1974), p.

26.

[73] Emma Goldman, “Anarchism: What it Really Stands For,” in Anarchism

and Other Essays (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), p. 6l.

[74] In contrast to Freud, most social anarchists regard desire as a

vital catalyst toward releasing the human potential for cooperation and

dynamic self-governance within society. Social anarchism carries an

implicit philosophy of desire, proposing that individuals can

potentially express a wide variety of social desires when organized

within desirable non-hierarchical structures. For instance, Emma Goldman

in her essay, “Sex, The Great Element for Creative Work,” challenges the

Freudian notion that creativity is made possible by the repression of

sexual desire. She writes, “the creative spirit is not an antidote to

the sex instinct, but a part of its forceful expression...Sex is the

source of life... Since love is an art, sex love is likewise an art.” In

this way, Goldman maintained that sexual desire is not only compatible

with, but actually complementary to, a full social life. See Candace

Falk, Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University

Press, 1984), p. 99.

[75] James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” in The Price of the Ticket:

Collected Nonfiction 1943–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), p. 375.

[76] Ibid., p. 315.

[77] In Bookchin’s Post-Scarcity, we see the emergence of an

appreciation of the subjective dimensions of revolution that could not

be accounted for by Marxist based theories. See Murray Bookchin,

Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose Books, Reprinted 1986).

[78] Ibid., p. 307.

[79] Ibid., p. 66.

[80] Vaneigem’s text, with the writings of Guy Debord, constituted a

small but influential literary canon most associated with Situationism

and the events of 1968. See Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday

Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Aldgate Press 1983).

[81] For an exciting and well written discussion of Situationist history

and implications for contemporary postmodern discourse, see Sadie Plant,

The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern

Age (London: Routledge, 1992).

[82] Quoted in Situationist International Anthology, trans., ed. Ken

Knabb (Berkeley: The Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989), p. 344.

[83] Ibid., p. 344.

[84] Ibid., p. 43.

[85] Decades after publishing Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Bookchin has come

to reconsider his earlier enthusiasm regarding the potential of a

post-war generation to locate questions of subjectivity within a truly

oppositional and revolutionary trajectory. While dismayed by the

failures of the new social movements to transcend commercial cooptation,

nihilism, and an egoistic ‘me-ism’, Bookchin sees in much of today’s

expressions of anarchism a continuation of this disappointing trend. For

a provocative discussion of such issues, see Bookchin, Social Anarchism

or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm (London: AK Press, 1995).

[86] Beginning in the seventies, a school of feminist psychology emerged

in dialogue with a range of feminist epistemologists, ethicists,

sociologists, and feminist historians of science. Reconsidering

discourses such as modern science and psychoanalytic theory, feminists

challenged notions of universal objectivity, rationality, and

competition, offering insights into the ‘relational’ subjectivity of

women and other marginalized peoples. The reconstructive vision that

emerged from these forums focused primarily on re-orderings of social

and cultural institutions of family, education, and scientific

production. See Jean Baker Miller, Toward a New Psychology of Women

(Boston: Beacon Press, 1976), Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the

Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper

Colophon Books, 1976), and Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of

Self, Voice, and Mind, eds. Mary Field Belenky et al. (New York: Basic

Book Publishers, 1986). Also see Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice:

Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1982), Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web:

Separation, Sexism, and Self (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). Also, two

particularly good anthologies to emerge from these discussions are

Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing,

eds. Alison M. Jaggar and Susan R. Bordo (New Brunswick: Rutgers

University Press, 1989) and Women’s Consciousness, Women’s Conscience,

eds. Barbara Hilkert Andolsen et al. (San Francisco: Harper and Row,

1985). Both Evelyn Fox Keller and Donna J. Haraway have contributed

significantly to a new feminist approach to questions of scientific

objectivity and knowledge production in general. See Evelyn Fox Keller,

Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1985), Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of

Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

[87] Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case For Feminist

Revolution (New York: Bantam Books, 1970).

[88] Ibid., p. 67.

[89] Ibid., p. 159.

[90] Ibid., p. 147.

[91] See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and

Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), and

Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice, and Mind, eds.

Mary Field Belenky et al. (New York: Basic Book Publishers, 1986).

[92] For a feminist discussion of ‘competition’, see Competition: A

Feminist Taboo? eds. Valerie Miner and Helen E. Longino (New York: The

Feminist Press, 1987).

[93] Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and

the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1978).

[94] Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and

the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988).

[95] Ibid., p. 155.

[96] Ibid., p. 147.

[97] Ann Snitow offers an intriguing, yet controversial discussion of

the political context surrounding lesbian feminism in the wider feminist

movement. According to Snitow, lesbian feminists broadened the concept

of lesbian desire beyond sexuality for a few reasons. First, she

contends, lesbians sought to build acceptance within a larger,

historically heterosexist feminist movement. As a way to build bridges

with heterosexual women in the movement, she maintains, lesbian

feminists defined lesbianism as but one expression of desire between

women, thus situating lesbianism within the scope of a greater

‘sisterhood.’ For Snitow, this attempt was part of an even larger

feminist project to reconstruct not only desire but society as a whole

on feminist terms. Second, according to Snitow, lesbian feminists often

de-emphasized the sexual aspect of lesbian desire in order to

differentiate lesbian feminism from male defined lesbian images

portrayed in mainstream heterosexual pornography which present lesbian

identity in male terms. See Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical

Feminism 1967–1975 (Minnesota: University, 1989).

[98] Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,”

in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow et al.

(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).

[99] Ibid., p. 177–202.

[100] Ibid., p. 192.

[101] Ibid., p. 193.

[102] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (New York: The Crossing Press, 1984).

[103] Ibid., p. 55.

[104] Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays, p. 64.

[105] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, p. 53.

[106] Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Pocket Books, 1982).

[107] Ibid., p. 203.

[108] Benjamin Barber, in his book Jihad vs. McWorld, elaborates upon

the idea of McDonald’s as a metaphor for the mood and mechanism of

‘advanced’ capital. For Barber, the parallel emergences of global

capital and religious fundamentalism represent a paradoxically

complementary threat to democracy itself. See Barber, Jihad vs. McWorld

(New York: Random House, 1995). Also, for a truly stimulating discussion

of the meaning of service economy in an era of flexible accumulation,

see David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell,

1990).

[109] Max Weber initiated a century-long discussion of the idea of

‘disenchantment’. The term ‘re-enchantment’ was popularized by students

of Weber, members of the Frankfurt School including Max Horkheimer,

Theodore Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse. Both terms have subsequently

captured the imaginations of a range of theorists engaged in postmodern

and ecological discourse, thinkers searching for a way to talk about the

erosion of meaning and ecological integrity within modern and postmodern

capitalism.

[110] See Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism: Lessons from

the German Experience(London: AK Press, 1995).

[111] The question of ‘mystery’ has dominated much discussion in

feminist and ecological circles. Rightly dismayed by reductive

analytical reasoning that reduces phenomena to meaningless fragments in

the pursuit of rational knowledge’, many thinkers have advocated

embracing the idea of ‘mystery’ as a way to point to moments of

irreducible meaning. Such discussions have led to pleas to put ‘mystery’

back into politics as a way to ‘re-enchant’ an otherwise instrumental

political practice. For a brief discussion of ‘mystery’, see Ynestra

King, “The Necessity of History & Mystery,” in Woman of Power 1988.

[112] The modern transmogrification of Eros (a pre-Olympian deity who,

born of Chaos, personified love in all of its aspects) into an ‘energy’

or ‘Life Force’ is most closely associated with Sigmund Freud. Modeling

the human psyche after the steam pump, Freud described the psychic world

as a mechanism analogous to a series of pressure chambers activated by

the fluctuating pressure and release of steam energy. Freud transformed

the mythological narrative of Eros into this mechanistic model,

establishing Eros as a ‘steam-like’ impulse, energy, force, or drive

that would propel social behavior. Also, for a more historical and

social discussion of Eros, see Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization

(Boston: The Beacon Press, 1955). Although Marcuse retains the

energistic approach to Eros taken by Freud, he pioneered a discussion of

Eros as a potentially constructive social impulse.

[113] According to Nicholas Xenos, it is within classical liberal theory

that we first see an explicit theory of scarcity associated with ideas

of need, desire, individualism, and capitalism. See Nicholas Xenos,

Scarcity and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1989).

[114] For a discussion of the emergence of sexual discourses in Western

history, see Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (New York:

Vintage Books, 1980).

[115] For a critical examination of technology within contemporary

ecological discourse, see Murray Bookchin, Re-Enchanting Humanity

(London: Cassell, 1995).

[116] See Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of

Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

[117] Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and

the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 23.

[118] See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W.

W. Norton & Company, 1961).

[119] Lizzie Donahue. Personal Communication. 26 April 1995.

[120] Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Montreal: Black Rose

Books; reprinted 1986), p. 302.

[121] In the Philosophy of Social Ecology, Bookchin provides an in-depth

examination of notions of organic development from a dialectical

perspective. See Bookchin, “Thinking Ecologically,” in The Philosophy of

Social Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (Montreal: Black Rose

Books, 1995).

[122] As social ecology and ecofeminism demonstrate, the idea of “modern

development” is markedly biased by a capitalistic interpretation of

society and nature. As Vandana Shiva illustrates, the capitalist

interpretation of development represents a “maldevelopment” based on

unrestrained economic growth, predicated on the work of women and the

Third World itself. See Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and

Development (London: Zed Books, 1989), pp. 5–6.

[123] Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love.

[124] Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Lesbian Ethics: Toward New Value (Palo Alto:

Institute of Lesbian Studies, 1988).

[125] Ibid., p. 40.

[126] Ibid., p. 47.

[127] See Vandana Shiva, “The Seed and the Earth: Biotechnology and the

Colonisation of Regeneration,” in Close to Home, ed. Vandana Shiva

(Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1994).

[128] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 2^(nd) ed. (New York: Vintage

Books, 1952).

[129] Martha Ackelsburg, Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle

for the Emancipation of Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1991), p. 57.

[130] Ibid., p. 115.

[131] Ibid., p. 116.

[132] Annabel Rodda, Women and the Environment (London: Zed Books Ltd.,

1991), p. 111.

[133] A number of feminists theorists have explored the false dichotomy

between reason and emotion. For a particularly clear and elucidating

exploration, see Allison M. Jaggar, “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in

Feminist Epistemology,” in Gender/Body/Knowledge, eds. Alison M. Jaggar

and Susan R. Bordo (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989).

[134] James Baldwin, “Color,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected

Nonfiction 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martins, 1985), p. 320.

[135] Errico Malatesta, Anarchy (Great Britain: Freedom Press, 1974), p.

26.

[136] Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Boston:

Extending Horizons Books).

[137] Ibid., p. 6.

[138] Ibid., p. 6.

[139] Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work

of Barbara McClintock (New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1983), p. 97.

[140] Bookchin offers a convincing critique of the limitations of

systems theory in “Toward a Philosophy of Nature” and “Thinking

Ecologically” in The Philosophy of Social Ecology (Montreal: Black Rose

Books, 1995).

[141] Seeking to avoid a mechanistic ‘systems’ language, Bookchin

prefers the term ‘eco-community’ rather than eco-system, emphasizing the

relational and holistic qualities of natural processes.

[142] Murray Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom (Palo Alto: Cheshire

Books, 1982).

[143] Ibid., p. 54.

[144] Reich, as a post-Freudian Marxist, sought to create a totalizing

theory of human behavior that would have revolutionary implications. For

a broad overview of Reich’s work, see Wilhelm Reich: Selected Writings,

an Introduction to Orgonomy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, second

printing, 1974).

[145] Bookchin, The Philosophy of Social Ecology, p. 119.

[146] Radical ecologists reservations regarding the discussion of first

and second nature reflect deeper concerns regarding “anthropocentrism”

in general. For a provocative exploration of and response to these

concerns, see Bookchin, Re-Enchanting Humanity: A Defense of the Human

Spirit Against Anti-Humanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism and Primitivism

(London: Cassell, 1995).

[147] For a more elaborate discussion of dialectical naturalism, see

Murray Bookchin, “Thinking Ecologically,” in The Philosophy of Social

Ecology: Essays on Dialectical Naturalism (New York: Black Rose Books,

1990).

[148] The idea of direct democracy is directly tied to Bookchin’s theory

of libertarian municipalism which entails buildings a confederation of

municipalities engaged in a process of direct-democracy. For an

introduction to the theoretical ground for libertarian municipalism, see

Janet Biehl, The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism

(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998).

[149] See Murray Bookchin, “Market Economy or Moral Economy?” in The

Modern Crisis (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1986).

[150] I thank Amy Harmon for this phrase that she coined during a class

at the Institute for Social Ecology, summer 1997.

[151] See Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” in Simians, Cyborgs,

and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).

[152] Murray Bookchin. Lecture at the Institute for Social Ecology.

Summer 1996. For a wider discussion of confederalism, see Janet Biehl,

The Politics of Social Ecology.

[153] For a wider discussion of the distinction between statecraft and

authentic political practice, see Urbanization Without Cities: The Rise

and Decline of Citizenship (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1992), pp.

123–175.

[154] Libertarian municipalism represents the political vision of social

ecology, a body of philosophical and political theory developed by

Murray Bookchin. Beginning in the 1950s, Bookchin, a libertarian

socialist himself, began to create a synthesis of Marxist and left

libertarian thought, addressing problems raised by gender oppression,

ecology, and community as well as addressing the new developments of

capitalism. He then went on to formalize a coherent theory of the social

origins and solutions to ecological problems, establishing himself as

perhaps the most prominent ‘leftist voice’ in the ecology movement, a

role to which he is still fiercely committed today. His theory of

libertarian municipalism represents an interpretation of how to

gradually transform the current nation-state into a confederation of

direct democratic municipalities, drawing upon the libertarian

dimensions within the French and American revolutionary traditions. For

a cogent and compelling introduction to the idea of libertarian

municipalism, read Janet Biehl, The Politics of Social Ecology

(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1998).

[155] Ynestra King, a primary organizer of the Women’s Pentagon Action,

gives an excellent description of the kind of illustrative and

ecological thinking which surrounded the event. See “If I Can’t Dance in

Your Revolution, I’m Not Coming,” Adrienne Harris and Ynestra King,

eds., Rocking the Ship of State (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), pp.

281–298.

[156] According to Vandana Shiva, “Biotechnology, as the handmaiden of

capital in the post-industrial era, makes it possible to colonize and

control that which is autonomous, free and self-generative. Through

reductionism science, capital goes where it has never been before.” For

an excellent discussion of biological and cultural generativity, see

Vandana Shiva, “The Seed and the Earth: Biotechnology and the

Colonisation of Regeneration,” in Vandana Shiva, ed., Close to Home:

Women Reconnect Ecology, Health, and Development Worldwide

(Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1994).

[157] Pat Spallone, “The Gene Revolution,” Generation Games

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), p. 120.

[158] Andrew Kimbrell. “The Patenting of Life,” The Human Body Shop (San

Francisco: Harper, 1993), p. 195.

[159] Indeed, the patenting of human cell-lines has led to some dramatic

legal crises. In 1984, scientists at the University of California

licensed a cell line taken from the spleen of leukemia patient John

Moore to the Genetics Institute who, in turn sold the rights to a Swiss

pharmaceutical company, Sandoz. One estimate places the long-term

commercial use of Moore’s genetic material, known as the “Mo Cell line”

(patent #4,438,032) at about one billion dollars. In addition, Moore,

whose permission had not been sought for the taking of his cells,

demanded the return of his spleen cells before the California Supreme

Court. In response, the court determined that Moore had no direct claim

on his spleen cells but that he did have the right to sue doctors for

not advising him of his rights. See Beth Burrows, “Message in the Junk:

Commodification and Response.” Paper presented at New Currents in

Ecological Activism Colloquium. Institute for Social Ecology.

Plainfield, VT. 1 July 1995.

[160] Vandana Shiva, Biotechnology and the Environment (Pulau Pinang,

Malaysia: Third World Network, 1993), p. 2.

[161] For a wonderful discussion of the relationship between indigenous

knowledge and intellectual property, see Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy: The

Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (Boston: South End Press, 1997).

[162] Paul Rabinow provides an ethnographic account of the relationship

between private industry and genetic research in Making PCR: A Story of

Biotechnology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

[163] Martin Khor, “500,000 Indian Farmers Rally against GATT and

Patenting of Seeds,” Resurgence, Jan. 1993, p. 20.

[164] For a particularly insightful discussion of the Human Genome

Project, see R.C. Lewontin, “The Dream of the Human Genome,” in Cultures

on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, Gretchen Bender and Timothy

Druckrey, eds. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), pp. 107–129.

[165] See Vandana Shiva, Biopiracy.

[166] My thanks to Bob Spivey for developing what was truly, a wonderful

script.