Library Lusts

The eroticism of the Main Library is a real thing. As much as the brutalist box of a building might seem sterile, soulless, and sterile again, some people are feeling aroused in certain circumstances. Not by the attraction to other people (although that can happen), but instead by their actions — their productivity, to be exact. This productivity stimulates eroticism in full swing.  

Credit: Remi Mathis

Let’s consider the library’s key aim of productivity as our pleasure principle. We want to feel that we have achieved productivity as we gloriously leave the library into the hubbub of whatever else, because it is a pleasurable sensation.  

Now what constitutes being productive in the library? Well, it certainly isn’t mooching about the café with a delicious panini or milling around the foyer chewing the fat with a friend, as enjoyable as that is. No, no, it is the ever-fixed mark of the third and fourth level which demands silence and is not shaken (to rephrase Sonnet 116). These floors are where the magic happens — where those readings can be done, or where that lit. crit. can be cracked or where the maths equation can be solved!  

So, when I work in the silent areas of the library, I try to achieve the elusive, lofty heights of productivity. And this is how to accomplish the pleasure principle: to “lock in”, as a Gen Z might say. Yet sometimes it is impossible to do this; tiredness, boredom, and distraction are the culprits that should be locked up in the Dundee cell.  

So, when you can’t be productive yourself, you look around your environment, you scan and seek others doing what you can’t — you seek others achieving the pleasure principle (or what seems like it). I’m doing it as I write in the library now — yes, look! There’s a person being productive. The studying of a textbook tome; the furious scribble of some notes; that delicious, annoyingly loud clatter of the keyboard as they write what can only be gobbledegook because they are going so fast: all enough to make one feel quite queasy with jealous attraction.  

Freud’s theory of the pleasure principle is summarised by ‘the instinctive seeking of pleasure and avoiding of pain to satisfy biological and psychological needs.’ So, if we can’t achieve the pleasure of productivity from ourselves, we must avoid the pain and enviously, lustfully look onto those others who can. So surely we are then eroticised by not the person, but their productivity? 

Suddenly then, this library — this zombifying horcrux of a space — has become an arena for primitive hedonism: it’s either be productive or be “productived”. So next time you go into this bookish biome and are failing to be efficient, let yourself hear and see the sounds of everyone else, of any gender. Take note of that erotic flicker in you, that fulfilling of pleasure in yourself from the productivity of others. And when you’re being productive yourself, you best believe that someone around you is looking on, desperately thinking “Where the hell do they go on a Wednesday night and where can I find them?”.