Isabella Rosselini’s recent series of shorts on insect sex for the Sundance Film Festival may have been entitled ‘Green Porno’ (an interview with her can be seen over at Matthias Merkel Hess’ Eco Art Blog), but the films, all of which star Rosselini, prove little more than Tim Burton-esque fairytale and could not in any sense be considered as of a piece with the very literal variety of ‘Eco-porn’ emergent in the wake of Web 2.0.
The term had always seemed sportive to my mind, a sardonic and thus more or less healthy response to the contemporary ‘Green wash’ phenomenon. Evoking an overly benign and grossly over-determined ‘nature’ (or Nature as subject), ‘Eco-Pornography’ suggested that which had come to appear captured by delimiting centre-spreads in lavishly produced (and often Photoshopped) pages of expensive wildlife magazines, or served up as soft-focus, reified consumables in television documentaries for ‘eco’-hungry consumer markets.
As the extremely literal act of ‘fucking for the forest’, however, Eco-Porn emerges as an ostensibly ‘radical’ expression of Green ’sex activism’ (or ‘porn aid’). Taking its part in the necessary de-romanticisation of nature, the phenomenon might, then, be seen to summon forth the sort of ‘Dark Ecology’ prescribed by Morton and Žižek, albeit not unproblematically. Rather than supplying images or footage of their own production, however, the hosts of the Fuck For Forest website work to encourage active participation in their particularly ardent brand of eco-politics, intending FFF to facilitate as a non-profit node for those inspired by such activism, and who might wish to submit their own material in order to propagate further ‘environmental’ awareness. Holding submitted footage under consent, the website subsequently makes this available to subscribers who effectively donate towards sympathetic projects and actions.
“FFF is a non-profit erotic ecological project. FFF wishes to normalize sex and nudity to protect nature and liberate life. We collect money for ecology while exploring the power of sexuality.”
Despite how amusing initial contact with FFF might prove, the movement nevertheless poses broader challenges to what we take sexual politics to be; pornography, it seems, remains difficult to reclaim for social justice concerns, unless of course it is sufficiently de- and re-territorialised. Take the post-feminist ‘art sleaze’ of Suicide Girls for example, an enterprise that would seem owned and operated for the most part by women who would deploy the site towards a creative celebration of female sexuality over and against the androcentric passifications of such male-oriented publications as Playboy or Hustler.
If pornography remains corrupting today, then it would seem to remain not so much morally (in any caricatural sense) as pragmatically in terms of the impact its endorsement might have upon such inviolable late capitalist institutions as the paranoically-maintained ’self’, which is to say, upon the personal image (or ‘avatar’) so essential to the furtherance of career and the maintenance of appropriate social standing. Unless mediated in some fashion, the consumption of pornography would appear to run wholly counter to the sort of ‘bookish’ middle-class social values that have come to seem so desirable (particularly in Britain, it seems) as guarantor against the ‘unrefined’ thrill-seeking of the (‘uneducated’) working-classes. Succinctly formulated by Alain de Botton in terms of ’status anxiety’, this symptom calls for the phantasmatic support of ‘clean lines’ (the ethico-aesthetic of anodynised living) and, to my mind at least, is suggestive of a number of diagnostic or symptomnal readings of the ethics of pornography, particularly where ‘clean’ living is (and was always) the moral expression of insustainable living.
If the FFF phenomenon appears an inevitable symptom of web-based media centralisation, of the inevitable (perhaps inadvertent) cut-up of eco-political material, high capitalist film-making and unavoidable sex ‘hook up’ sites, does this not itself warrant further investigation in terms of ‘eco-justice’? Whilst close-quarter shots of day-glo, dread-locked poster hippies indulging in oral and anal sex acts might prove little more than ‘entertaining’, what of the millions of web users who regularly use internet pornography as a masturbatory aid and ostensibly as part of a ‘normal’ late capitalist lifestyle? Consider, if you will, the ignominious fate of a billion Kleenex tissues sourced from the unchecked clear-cutting of arboreal Canadian forests.
From a transcendental empiricist perspective, however, several things appear to be happening in the FFF phenomenon. In Logique du Sens, the sexual surfaces of the libido are restricted, blocked, and reduced; such flows are repressed “in order to contain them in the narrow cells of the type ‘couple,’ ‘family,’ ‘person,’ ‘objects’”. In Proust, Deleuze discerns how “a molecular sexuality bubbles away beneath the surface of the integrated sexes”. The notion of sexuality, then, not so much as instinct but as creation, not so much as a transcendent mode of organization but as a revolutionary machine, becomes one that might be experimented with noologically; sexuality is linked closely to the possibility of immanence and thinking, to the all important event of thought, to the transformation of the dogmatic images that would constrain healthy experimentation. We might, then, consider how if true thought is possible only when liberated from the notion of castration as transcendent law, then castration needs to be thought of, instead, as a crack, a fracture that does not produce a lack but a surface of thought, “projecting the entire corporeal surface of sexuality over the metaphysical surface of thought.” If the transcendent law of castration results in a blockage of thought, it also results in the mastering and moulding of the sexual body into the molar notion of two sexes rather than the (pregenital) Harlequin’s cloak to which Deleuze compares it.
For ecological discussion, the sexual body might be seen to retain a revolutionary potential and sexuality a significant source of becoming; there is immense power in the ‘thousand tiny sexes’ of desiring-machines, in sexuality beyond the “all too human” idea of castration as absence, and in the multiplicity of surfaces that are opened up in its place. Striving to recognise the potential of sexuality when liberated from genitality as well as anthropomorphic presuppositions, recent Deleuzian scholarship has sought to explore sexuality and the machinic, sexuality and surfaces, and sexuality and animality (a forthcoming volume in the Edinburgh Deleuze Connections series promises useful material in this regard).
The FFF phenomenon might thus be conceived of after the ontology of sex and how we can begin to know of it when it is no longer captive to molar representations. Investigating the strengths and potentials but also the weaknesses and dangers that sexuality opens for thinking, bodies, and becomings, we open onto the ethico-aesthetic, the (eco)political, a noological force that enables change. Whilst the Fuck For Forest poster portrays heterosexual sex acts, the website itself contains images that run largely against hetero-normative practices, suggestive (albeit in something of a caricatural way) of activities that whilst crudely hitched to a ‘radical’ eco-politics, surely suggest ‘healthier’ alternatives to the sort of domesticated privations that remain enthralled to humdrum Oedipal coordinates.
After schizoanalysis, we might detect a purview that would usefully exceed not only the jejune institution of sex as a commodified aspect of ‘contemporary living’, but moreover, challenge new age Gaian-ism with its problematic Oedipalisation of indifferent, resolutely inhuman processes. Whilst the FFF website draws on a measure of ‘mother earth’ symbolism, surely the very concept of sex activism is one that suggests a wealth of post-Oedipal relations? The organisers of the FFF movement appear to uphold the orientation as a ‘healthy’ response (ostensibly for its ‘punk’ savvy) to the harrowing realities of internet pornography and the non-participatory ineffectualities of orthodox Green lobbying. By virtue of its unapologetically-explicit nature, or its de-romanticisations of both ‘loving’ sex and a neutered nature made safe for contemporary domestic needs, even the lingering ‘flower child’ sentiment appears displaced somewhat by the unsentimental emphasis on ‘fucking’, supplanting the image of the ‘tree-hugging’ flower-child with that of the ardent eco-nymph or satyr.
Of course, we remain entitled to think such sex activism ’silly’. But for those who (at the very least) have perhaps never had sex out of doors, or more significantly, have never considered their ‘private’ sexual practices as anything other than the carnal expression of ‘love’ for another human being, well, we might ask, is the home you love not also the extent of your desire?


Just a quick post to acknowledge an inspiring (if somewhat scandalous) comment on a thread over at Kvond’s always interesting 



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before too much virtual ink is spilled that in closing a recent post on 







