Wilhelm Reich and the origins of modern subjectivism - Chris Shutes

“The dialectical materialist does not see the economy on the one hand and man on the other, but sees man through the economy and at the same time the economy through man.”

— Wilhelm Reich

The Subjectivism of Mass Psychology

Modern subjectivism has found its legitimate justification in Reich. If this justification has been up till now the almost exclusive result of all the considerations of Reich — revolutionary or openly reformist — it is not because that’s all there is to find in the old boy, but because nobody has taken him up precisely where he didn’t want to be taken up: in a critique of his methodology. It’s the results of his investigations, or part of them, that are being taken up everywhere, lauded or condemned as the case may be; consequently, it is generally supposed that there was a fundamental break in his works, usually thought to have occured sometime in the late Thirties, with the advent of “orgonomy” and “vegetotherapy.” It is commonly believed, therefore, that Reich abandoned all considerations of society at a certain point, thus reducing the problem raised by Reich’s work to a banal dualism of “society or not society.” On the contrary, there was never any question of Reich completely denying the importance of the social question in his later activity: “There was never any doubt that the biology of man could not be separated from his social existence, that biological drives were moulded by the social forces at work in a particular period” (Reich, 1952, in Reich Speaks of Freud). The question, then, is how he sees society, and why he is led to see it as he does.

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Reich begins completely within the framework of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis wanted to deduce the laws of human behavior; it wanted truths as timeless as those of any other science. But much to their chagrin and constant frustration, the psychoanalysts were a priori unable to isolate the objects of their study in a satisfactorily scientific way: they could not eliminate all the variables, could not attain a pure, natural man to investigate. They wanted to deal with abstract individuals; but abstract individuals don’t exist in reality. The object of psychoanalytic research — regardless of how adamantly the psychoanalysts themselves denied it —was real man, i.e. social man. To develop a science true to the standards of scientific investigation itself, the psychoanalysts were forced to consider the society which is part of each individual and which each individual is part of. In this sense, Reich is right to say that psychoanalysis “was a science that transcended its own principles.”

Reich was virtually alone among the psychoanalysts in having any semblance of consistently developing the social consequences of his own research. Reich always claimed — and rightly so — to have been truer to psychoanalysis than Freud himself. Reich did not recoil in the face of the implications of the discovery that “sexual repression is of a socio-economic and not of a biological origin.”

“The sociological and cultural-political character of psychoanalysis cannot be eliminated from this world by any measure whatever. The nature of its discoveries (infantile sexuality, sexual repression, sexuality and religion) make it the arch enemy of political reaction. One may hide behind such illusory beliefs as ‘non-political’ science: this will only harm scientific research, but will never prevent the ruling powers from sensing the dangers where indeed they are, and fighting them accordingly”

(Letter, 1933, in Reich Speaks of Freud).

As Reich’s techniques became more conscious, he was dialectically forced to become more explicit concerning their essentially negative quality; i.e., he had to line up more and more with the proletariat for the sake of his science itself. It was his increasing movement towards the totality of social relations that was the very motor of his progress.

“I owe my sociological knowledge not to books, but primarily to the struggles on the part of the masses for a decent, free existence, The best sex-economic insights, in fact, were gained as a result of the errors in thinking on the part of the masses, the errors which brought them to the fascist pestilence”

(Preface to the third edition of Mass Psychology of Fascism).

As a result of his battle with Freud over the “death instinct,” Reich became explicitly revolutionary:

“It was not Marxism that caused me to criticize the empirically unproven hypothesis leading to horrendous conclusions (death instinct and repetition compulsion), but it was analytic empiricism which brought me to Marxism”

(Letter, 1932).

The above cited letter of 1933, however, not only exposes the merits of Reich, but also contains the key to his shortcomings. Reich assumes that the scientific discoveries of psychoanalysis are always and will always be “dangers” to the ruling powers. On the contrary, psychoanalysis must be understood as having developed in essential accordance with the needs of bourgeois society, but in apparent contradiction to it, i.e., in contradiction with the then existing political forms of bourgeois society. Reich’s writings remain explicitly revolutionary only as long as he is contested by archaic apologists for the existing capitalist order (and in this case, under a developing German fascism, one of the most archaic forms of modern capitalism). During the Twenties and Thirties, the society which founds itself on a scientific basis was, in the realm of the human psyche, defended by and supportive of “scientists” who openly denied scientific truth in favor of the affirmation of dominant powers and ideologies. Reich posits himself in opposition to these anti-scientific tendencies, and thus to the society which supports them and which they support. But this positing of Reich never comprehends itself totally; it loses its criticality as this type of falsification is swept aside by the development of society itself. Reich never understood his opponents as representatives of a particular stage of bourgeois development. Thus Reich can believe that his own work is developing truths valid for all time, and whose scientific validity will of itself guarantee a true use of them. His “sociology” returns to the science of its origins.

This general outline of Reich’s rise and fall is reflected in particular works of even his most coherent period. In the Zeitschrift fir Politische Psychologie und Sexualoekonomie, for instance, Reich correctly criticizes Erich Fromm for “psychologizing” social phenomena. But in opposition to the crude subjectivism of Fromm, Reich can only oppose a more sophisticated, more modern form of subjectivism. In opposition to Fromm, Reich wants to leave to psychoanalysis a terrain unto itself, as if the content of science itself could be unaffected once it had served as departure point to the totality. Reich “stumbled across” a materialist dialectic in his psychoanalytic practice; but once he arrives at a critique of society as a whole, he forgets the explicitly dialectical nature of his development — that, in other words, it was his (semi-conscious) dialectical methodology that got him anywhere in the first place. He goes from particulars (individual social people, people in society) to general, to totality; but in returning to the particular, he stops regarding it as a particular. Psychoanalysis is returned to as a totality unto itself. Thus he comes back to the abstract individual, the individual as individual, the human animal:

“Man is essentially nothing more than, in the first place, sexuality, and in the second, hunger”

(Selected Sex-Pol Essays 1934-37, p. 115).

He forgets that sexuality, hunger — human nature as a whole — are transformed by society, that they are social needs, socialized needs, inseparable from the totality of social relations.

In sum, Reich is the prototype of modern subjectivism because:

1. He dealt in a consistent way with the whole individual — an essential premise for Reich is that the individual is the product of society. Thus he moves from the individual to a critique of society. But,
2. He takes particular forms of bourgeois society to be its essence, parallel to which,
3. At a certain point in his theory, there is a block in the dialectical process, which block leads him from concrete, social man to totality, but back to abstract man, and positivist proposals for the amelioration of the conditions of abstract man.

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Reich’s specific mistakes on society reflect his subjectivism explicitly. The proof of how modern Reich is (which is to say, how archaic society is) is demonstrated by how extremely close Reich’s mistakes are — often in content as well as form — to some of the most sophisticated ideological tendencies of today. Reich, for instance, because he ends up at the abstract individual, subjectivizes criteria for judging Russia. Since he measures a given society on a one-to-one relationship with the immediately given status of sexuality and the family in that society, he is led to say that Russia “degenerated” after 1929. His mistake is not that he was wrong in the terms he was dealing in — Russia was less sexually repressive and less conservative on the family before 1929 than after — but that he takes certain limited criteria and makes them the criteria for judging the whole society. In a similar way, many subjectivists today say that all countries are the same because life is miserable everywhere. Which amounts to saying that all misery is the same, and that the particular determinants of misery in a given place are not important. This leads to a lack of strategy; the subjectivist doesn’t know the particulars of what he is fighting, its weak spots, its nexes. If everything is the same, then one can fight it anywhere at any time with the same effect. In fact, this posture makes it possible for the subjectivist to know virtually nothing about what he’s talking about, even though he thinks he is penetrating it to its most profound essence.

Reich moves away from the truth because he moves away, theoretically and practically, from the social-critical forces that carry the truth. Because he subjectivizes his criteria for judging the class struggle, he thinks that capitalism really has abolished the proletariat: when under fascism there is no visible continuation of the class struggle on a subjective level, Reich assumes that the fight for human liberation must now take place on a totally different basis, that history itself has to start all over again from scratch. It’s as though fascism were the logical and only possible outcome of the class struggle, its end. One can see where, taken to its conclusions, this type of thinking can lead: Reich becomes more and more consistently subjectivist. Thus, he explains his revision of Mass Psychology of Fascism:

“There are no ‘class distinctions’ when it comes to character. For that reason the purely economic terms ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘proletariat’ were replaced by the concepts ‘reactionary’ and ‘revolutionary’ or ‘free minded,’ which relate to a man’s character and not his social class. These changes were forced upon us by the fascist plague”

(Preface to the third edition of Mass Psychology of Fascism).

Although most subjectivists today are not so explicit about their own subjectivism, and usually make some effort not to be dualistic on the individual and class struggle, their confusion in this sphere generally leads them into hope- lessly contorted assertions and phraseology. Thus, they remain on the whole far less useful than Reich, who despite his one-sidedness was at least concrete and clear on the limited terrain he established for himself.

The Soviet Union, in a feeble attempt to head off the widespread publicity of sexual misery, recently announced the results of a government-sponsored study of sex life in Russia: “Russian women have decidedly more orgasms than Western women.”’ This totalitarian imposition of sexual happiness cannot possibly succeed. But the report does indicate the tremendous pressure put on the State by the mass rejection of the ideology of personal renunciation. Formerly, sexuality was only recognized as a biological function. Now the government is trying to recover some of the prestige lost in having to reverse its position so abruptly, by demonstrating another facet of the superiority of the Soviet way of life to that of the West.

In the same way that Reich repeatedly speaks of “dialectics” wherever there is opposition or antithesis, the modern subjectivist will often see “dialectics” in anything that involves interrelations, movement, becoming. A particular (a situation, for example) is erected as the totality, a totality unto itself, abstracted from the totality of social relations. In practice, what is aimed at is the construction of such pseudo-totalities: to create an environment where people feel that they don’t have to be defensive, so they can assimilate without inhibitions the ideology that is floating around.

“When I talk to a sexually inhibited woman in my office about her sexual needs, I am confronted with her entire moralistic apparatus. If, however, the same woman is exposed to a mass atmosphere, is present, for instance, at a rally at which her sexual needs are discussed clearly and openly in medical or social terms, then she doesn’t feel herself to be alone. After all, the others are also listening to ‘forbidden things’. . .”

(Mass Psychology of Fascism).

For the subjectivist the problem is not to develop a form and content of criticism according to the determinants of a real situation, but to create an abstract situation by means of a prescribed form and content.

The materialized psychology of subjectivism

“In the end he identified himself so completely with authority that he became unemployable.”

— Trocchi, Cain’s Book

It is no longer possible to separate the individual from history, from the society which produces him or her. The movement of the individual towards history and towards his own self-realization is no longer a privileged terrain to which a few exceptional individuals aspire and which the masses gaze at from afar. The rendezvous with history now demands the attention of each individual because of his own existence.

The daily consumption of the abstract movement of things is relinquishing its prized position in the spectacle to the abstract movement of the life of each individual. All of the individual’s time and experiences in modern society come to be treated as raw material for various new situations which have as a model the mode of movement of the commodity form,1 and which the individual imposes on himself as the uses of socially organized time. Subjective time and subjective change is a great new frontier for the system of commodity consumption. What is essential for the spectacle is that the subjective history of each person remain subjective, a self-contained closed system, a pseudo-history which offers no points of transition to the totality, to publicity.

This pseudo-history which is asserting itself everywhere does not begin with the manufacture of “pseudo-events.” The notion of “pseudo-event” retains the false conception that the spectacle is essentially a falsehood of content, rather than of form. If we use the term “pseudo-history”, it is not to imply by the “pseudo” that we are making a judgement on any particular social act (we reserve such judgement for concrete situations). Any act can have thousands of different consequences, and it is on the basis of these consequences that one must judge it (in judging an act when it happens, it is similarly a question of judging the usefulness of the consequences which the act potentially opens up). What concerns us is the generalized lack of talent in following acts out to a radical use of their consequences, and the support given by subjectivism to this enforced scarcity of practical intelligence.

As history was once “eliminated in oneself,” pseudo-history is now exalted in oneself and others out of a fear that inactivity might remind the individual of the degeneration of his own existence — which degeneration itself continues. Spectacular activism (in the widest, not merely the political sense) is the bribe that the subjectivist offers up to history: he’ll confront hundreds of banal obstacles in order to avoid confronting anything fundamental, especially the misery of his own historical engagement. Pseudo-history is itself essentially anti-historical.

As people become more and more conscious of the fact that what they say is going to have practical consequences (regardless of how superficial these consequences might be), what is detested more and more, and perhaps more than anything else, is pretension. Corollary to this, the old masculine alienation — which could be described as a pseudo-historical alienation in an explicitly anti-historical social framework — is on the decline. Arrogance, bravado, the image of conceited self-sufficience — all come to be ridiculed as farcical, as bullshit. What people are much less likely to be critical of, however, is the superficiality and banality of most of the attempts to put ones life where ones mouth is; people do the most awkward, grotesque and contrived things and are admired for the apparent spontaneity and grace with which they do them. If one projects the right attitude about what one is doing, if one does it with style, that’s good enough for most. Bourgeois freedom of expression now finds a partner in bourgeois freedom of action.

If the subjectivist who thinks himself revolutionary disdains the vulgarity of the cadre, it is because he has the same social aspirations as the cadre, but has enough lucidity to realize that conspicuous commodity consumption is somehow counter-revolutionary. If the cadre is the active consumer, continually searching for the perfect commodity (be it object, role, experience, or ideology), who must abandon the old trip he was enraptured with last week because it didn’t “do it” for him, the subjectivist revolutionary is faced with the problem that his commodity — revolution — has a critique of all the others. Marx noted that “in bourgeois society, there rules the fictio juris that every man, as seller of commodities, possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of commodities.” The subjectivist revolutionary takes this one step farther: he aims to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of just one commodity. No doubt, this can keep him busy for years, since it is certainly possible to rename the revolutionary project in millions of different ways without it meaning anything. The subjectivist revolutionary knows that there is supposed to be coherence between his theory and his practice; he understands that his ideas are going to have consequences. Thus, he censors his own ideas down to the ones which have consequences which he can easily handle; and, on the other hand, his life is the opposite of concretely confronting resistances and obstacles: he sees obstacles just enough to know that he might get his fingers burned if he messes around, and so keeps away. Ideology becomes life and life becomes ideology: that’s how the subjectivist revolutionary solves the problem of theory and practice!

By changing the form of alienation, the spectacle is able to really make use of the almost infinite quantity of possibilities for spectacular realization which it always implicitly contained. To make a simplified and vulgarized analogy: how could ten ideologies possibly stand up against all the combinations and permutations of interrelations of those ideologies? And then against the millions of different ways those interrelations can be taken up by millions of different individuals?

The pseudo-dialectical form of the modern spectacle is the reason why, at every point, it is essential to attack the ideological form of the lie, and why any particular lie becomes of itself less and less significant to demystify. It is essential for the economy of the revolutionary critique not to treat the lie on its own terms. What is important is not so much what this or that ideologue or ideology mystifies, or even what a whole bunch of ideologues or ideologies mystify. The question is first of all how they mystify, and in general the strategy for determining which ideologues or ideologies to publicly criticize must be based on how much their methods of mystification reveal about the general outlines of mystification in modern society.

Reich had the great merit of showing that the apparent absence of social relations (“contactlessnes”) is itself a social relation. But he doesn’t realize that once this absence is comprehended, the real work has only begun. Thus he can abstractly oppose “activity,” “energy” to the extreme isolation of the severely armored character. Today, the “genital character” which Reich saw as revolutionary has become a prototype for the average alienation of spectacular man. In Character Analysis, Reich says:

“To what extent is a change of character at all necessary? . . . the neurotic character must be changed so that it ceases to be the basis of neurotic symptoms and to interfere with the capacity for work and the capacity for sexual enjoyment.”

Not only does Reich’s character analysis eliminate only symptoms, but the symptoms Reich wanted to eliminate are among those that the modern spectacle wants to eliminate most. The spectacle is looking for men who have the attributes that Reich saw in the genital character: “a high degree of harmony therefore exists between the id and the superego.”

Unlike Reich, we aren’t particularly concerned with eliminating symptoms; we don’t start out by considering character. We’re concerned with character when it presents, concretely, obstacles to our ongoing activity and the goals we define for ourselves, to our practice of theory.

The tendency to want to take a critique of one’s character as the cornerstone of one’s revolutionary practice ignores the fact that character is not the only form of complicity in the ruling spectacle. The proponents of this tendency see ‘‘character’’ everywhere, as the essence of everything that isn’t theory. Thus, on the one hand, character becomes a determinist justification for individual failure; citing the horrors of the ‘‘unconscious,”’ the character fetishist excuses both himself and others from taking the responsibility for their own activity. On the other hand, ‘‘autonomy’’ becomes in this context an idealist goal, without content. Thus, the abstract desire to be ‘‘autonomous’”’ comes to play a similar function to the abstract goal promoted by Reich of achieving a ‘‘genital character.”’

The fetish of “character assassination” within the revolutionary movement reproduces in miniature a general tendency of the modern spectacle: as the mode of the spectacle becomes essentially pseudo-historical as opposed to explicitly antihistorical, armor, chronicity and rigidity become less and less desirable. The spectacle itself must now become a psychoanalyst, in order to eliminate the resistances to the active engagement it demands of each individual. The question is not simply for capitalism to involve people; it must at the same time help to create the subjective pre-conditions for that involvement. One doesn’t turn workers into machines with impunity! And, to be sure, capitalism isn’t going to make workers more creative, independent and dynamic with impunity either. If you bust up one routine, habit, or fetish, a bunch of others might start to get busted up as well. The reformists in the bureaucracy are in the uncomfortable position of having to more or less consciously control the dissolution of the form of individual control which is an inevitable by-product of the system they support. And since the bureaucracy’s techniques for controlling this process of dissolution are necessarily inadequate, the bureaucracy faces the contradiction that it can only de-bureaucratize and decentralize by extending the domain of its control, and thus its size.

C.S.

• 1“The process of dialectical thinking is synthetic thinking, a process of continually synthesizing one’s current body of self-theory with new theoretical observations and appropriations; a resolution of the contradictions between the previous body of theory and new theoretical elements. The resulting synthesis is thus not some quantitative summation of the: previous and the new, but their qualitative supersession, a new totality” (For Ourselves, The Minimum Definition of Intelligence. P.O. Box 754, Berkeley, CA 94701). What these subjectivists term “dialectical” is in fact a beautiful exposition of the mode of the modern spectacle — the constant apparent transformation of the totality through the addition of new fragments (commodities). The mode of the spectacle is one of non- dialectical supersession — each “new” element is related to the others and knows it. The spectacle is not the sum of its parts but the sum of the inter-relations of its parts.