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Title: A Radicalization of Reich Author: Patrick Dunn Date: 2010 Language: en Topics: Wilhelm Reich, sexuality, civilization, repression, prehistory, materialism Source: Fifth Estate #383
Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism (MPF) was written in
1933, at the peak of Hitler’s rise to power. The book is, most
immediately, an attempt to explain the spread of fascism in Germany, at
a time when economic hardship should have provoked a turn to the Left.
More fundamentally, it is an effort to diagnose the fascist phenomenon,
not as a trend of national politics, but as “the basic emotional
attitude of man in authoritarian society, with its machine civilization
and its mechanistic-mystical view of life.”[1]
A physician by training, Reich described this condition as an “emotional
plague,” a diseased character-structure common to individuals in mass
society. Its source, he claimed, was the “mystification and inhibition
of natural sexuality.”[2] Sexual repression was the cause not only of
Nazi enthusiasm, but of social misery and human servitude more
generally. Only by developing new, coherent forms of sex-economic
practice could this servitude be overcome.
In order to grasp the radical potential of Reich’s thought, we have to
revise its basic logic. The analysis of MPF is built upon three theses.
First, the economic theory of sexuality, borrowed from Reich’s teacher,
Freud. This makes it possible for Reich to claim that sexual repression
is the root cause of all social dysfunction. Second, the belief that
social pathology is essentially a problem of ideology. Sexual repression
induces irrational beliefs, which in turn lead to bad politics. For
Reich, this “irrationality” is defined as a failure to conform to the
prescriptions of Marxist and psychoanalytic science. Finally, the
hypothesis of “work-democracy” – Reich’s vision of a society in which
sexuality is rationally self-managed. Here, scientific-industrial
rationality serves as an implicit model for social and sexual health.
All of these theses are presupposed in the arguments of MPF. None of
them captures what is most vital in Reich’s critical project. By taking
Marxist and sex-economic categories as his ultimate frame of reference
for sex-political inquiry, Reich obscures his own radical insight into
the nature of the emotional plague. A deeper inspiration is found in his
attention to bodies and pleasures, and to their evisceration at the
hands of mass society – in short, to sexuality as a material force.
Civilization operates as a self-imposed confinement of the powers of
bodies and pleasures. We are much like Sade in his prison cell – except
that our imprisonment takes place within the industrialized grid of
everyday life. Repression is enforced, not through a mysterious psychic
mechanism, but as a violence imposed by the material system of
civilization itself. Until this system is dissolved, there can be no
authentic sexual liberation.
Reich glimpsed this insight in his discovery of the “orgone energy,” and
in his experimental studies of pleasure and anxiety. His research was
shaped by heteronormative, masculine assumptions, and by an excessive
emphasis on the orgasm-function, but his vision of sexuality as a
dynamic material force, discernible by the senses, remains significant.
It is by viewing sexuality as a struggle of material forces that we can
understand the pervasive suffering that afflicts civilized life at all
levels of the social order. The “emotional plague” is not an aberrant
condition, limited only to Nazis and God-fearing mystics; it affects all
who inhabit the technologized landscape of mass society. Its principal
manifestation is not a renunciation of sex, or a lack of “orgastic
potency,” but a loss of our capacity for ordinary embodied experience.
We have become estranged from our basic relationality as physical
beings. Our sense of place has vanished. We are “deterritorialized,” cut
off from our immediate connection to the earth. It is quite possible to
say that we no longer experience ourselves as living. Most of our human
relationships are abstracted, mediated, projected through screens and
electronic circuits. Our sensory contact with other human bodies is
indistinguishable from a virtual simulation. Metropolitan city streets
provide the starkest image of our separation – the spectacular
glass-and-concrete jungles, where ghost-like pedestrians brush shoulders
without a glimmer of physical intimacy. The whole complex of industrial
civilization seems to function as a gigantic orgone-box, in which erotic
energy is sequestered and blocked out by a maze of artificial barriers.
This condition undoubtedly has roots in a crisis endured by our
prehistoric ancestors. Sexual pleasure was an element of human
experience from the earliest times. Domination of women, children, and
nature must have played a role in the first eruptions of violence, human
against human. Territorial conflicts among competing tribes might also
have emerged at this time. We can only speculate about when sexual
pleasure first became a source of anxiety, but one thing is clear:
Something occurred to precipitate a shift in the physical relations
among early humans, and the wound has never healed. A terror was
awakened, a skin-fear, a flesh-panic. Bodies that once moved in harmony
became alienated and divided. For millennia, prior to the use of
language, sexual relations between humans must have been guided by
direct empathic communication. At some point, this communion was
disturbed, and the relatively short process of civilization was
initiated.
If our goal is to restore our capacity for spontaneous bodily
affirmation, we will need to pay close attention to this trajectory. It
is absurd to think that sexual freedom could be achieved within the very
institutions that have facilitated our enslavement. The logic born of
our prehistoric crisis – enshrined in the image of Adam and Eve hiding
their naked bodies – culminates in the disembodied rationality of
technological civilization. The destructive capacity of this logic is
directly responsible for our present catastrophe, sexual and social.
Reich recognized the inseparability of social and sexual misery, but he
believed, falsely, that a solution could be found within the order of
work and rational self-control. As a devoted scientist, he judged the
world according to the standards of his own ideal-type.
Now the problem has deepened, and more radical solutions must be
explored. Instead of rejecting the logic of slave-rationality,
contemporary society has driven its forces to new extremes. In our age
of terror and globalized mass media, the violent assault on bodies and
pleasures is carried out through a total technologization of everyday
life. Our senses are invaded by a constant stream of electronic voices,
digitized images, and pre-programmed mass communication. Zombie-like
participation in spectacle replaces the richness of immediate sensory
experience, and we ingest psychiatric drugs to numb ourselves against
the loss. The sovereign, self-propelled human body is reduced to a
lifeless cyborg. Headphones, cell phones, and handheld devices bind all
attention to the channels of the centralized disinformation-machine,
precluding any face-to-face contact. Despite having nine hundred
Facebook friends, nobody knows anyone else. It is as if our senses are
no longer able to rest on another body, on another a human face, unless
it corresponds to some image within the globalized mass spectacle. We
have forgotten the joy of a chance encounter, the flash of shared
intimacy, the sparks of silent attraction. Pleasure is ritualized and
regulated at best; at worst, it is a packaged commodity, cooked up in a
high-tech laboratory, and sold on the mass market as an exotic
love-potion.
The irony of all this is that the more deeply technology penetrates into
our embodied experience, the more hypersexualized society becomes.
Thirty years ago Foucault observed that power, in the realm of
sexuality, is defined less by prohibition than by the inducement and
multiplication of sexual performances. The question is not how to free
sexual instinct from law and taboo, but how to use bodies and pleasures
to counteract the organized regime of sexual self-constitution. What
Foucault failed to see is that this counter-conduct cannot simply be a
matter of tactical modification – of finding techniques that will
disrupt the dominant patterns and discourses of sexualization. Sexuality
is fully integrated into the material infrastructure of
machine-civilization, and it must be dismantled as a whole.
Sexuality is what results when the spontaneous power of bodies is
divested, and pleasure is projected onto external objects of desire. It
is a reification, rooted in forces of violence. The proliferation of
sexualized representations is at the same time an intensification of the
assault on bodies and their ungovernable capacity for pleasure. In
technological society, the reified grid of sexuality gives way to an
all-encompassing spectacle, in which bodies are transformed into
fragmented images, a kaleidoscopic theater of sexualized simulations.
Internet pornography, cybersex, the omnipresent display of plastic and
artificial bodies, sex-enhancement drugs, medicalized sex, sex with
machines – these are the ruins of our common bodily existence. We
participate in endless ordeals of sexual selection, governed by the
normalizing images of celebrity culture and mass media. We groom and
fashion ourselves in conformity with this image-logic, only to consume a
pleasure that has been determined, in its very nature, by the alien
demands of technological necessity.
In one sense, it is the dispossession of sexual pleasure that drives
civilization to generate new and more elaborate forms of bodily
confinement. Given the originary nature of sex, and the patriarchal
roots of domestication, it is logical to assume that the suspension of
sexual pleasure was instrumental in establishing the first marks of
physical separation. This would corroborate Freud’s hypothesis of a
primordial rupture in human life – an original moment in which symbolic
culture triumphed over eros, reality over pleasure. We must not,
however, make the mistake of transferring this rupture into modern life
in the form of an unconscious principle – a notion that only obscures
the material conditions of our ongoing imprisonment and blinds us to the
choice with which we are perpetually faced. Moreover, recognizing an
essential link between sex and civilization does not validate the
attempt, as in Reich’s case, to seek out a universal sexual energy,
which could then be examined, classified, and controlled as the basis
for a new biopolitical order. The importance of Reich’s example lies not
in the possibility of subjecting sexuality to the scientific gaze, but
in the struggle to break down civilized barriers by experimenting with
new bodily practices.
As Spinoza said, we do not yet know what a body can do. We can add that
the only way to find out is by trying. Our greatest potential for
liberation is found in our ability to mobilize bodies to confront the
civilized order that keeps pleasure imprisoned. This means not only
seeking out wild, ungovernable pleasures, but also tearing down the
material structures that make these pleasures unattainable. And these
destructive acts are themselves immensely pleasurable! Revolt against
the civilized death-machine, carried out in a blur of common
electricities, is an experience of sensual awakening unlike any other.
By pursuing such experiences, we restore the forgotten powers of the
ordinary body and summon the forces of a harmonious future.
[1] The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. viii.
[2] Ibid, p. xvii.