Orgone Addicts

To examine the roots of the Situationist project, understand that it represented the tendency to bind psychoanalytic ideas with dialectical materialism. As the surrealists had brought Freudian dream analysis into a bolshevik artistic putsch, the situs had their psychogeography and their conception of alienation from the subjective standpoint of desire.

“Wilhelm Reich attributes most neurotic behavior to disturbances of the orgasm, to what he called “orgastic impotence.” He maintains that anxiety is created by inability to experience a complete orgasm, by a sexual discharge which fails to liquidate all the excitation mobilized by preliminary sexual activity. The accumulated and unspent energy becomes free-floating and is converted into anxiety. Anxiety in its turn still further impedes orgastic potency.

But the problem of tensions and their liquidation does not exist solely on the level of sexuality. It characterizes all human relationships. And Reich, although he sensed that this was so,failed to emphasize strongly enough that the present social crisis is also a crisis of an orgastic kind. If it is true that “The energy source of neurosis lies in the disparity between the accumulation and discharge of sexual energy,” it seems to me that such neurotic energy also derives from the accumulation and discharge of the energy set in motion by human relationships. Total enjoyment is still possible in the moment of love, but as soon as one tries to prolong this moment, to extend it into social life itself, one cannot avoid what Reich called ‘stasis.’ The world of dissatisfaction and non-consummation is a world of permanent crisis. What would a society without neurosis be like? An endless banquet, with pleasure as the only yardstick.”

(Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, pp 196-197)

Here, Vaneigem admires Reich’s theory of orgastic potency the primary biological impulse is a yearning for pleasure and health and is regulated by the capacity of an organism to discharge accumulated tension completely through orgasm. Reich disappoints Vaneigem in his failure to politicize orgastic pleasure. It is unlikely that Vaneigem had read Reich’s book People in Trouble, since it was not published in English until 1953. Reich describes his participation in the “social irrationalism of Central Europe” and makes precisely the kind of analogy Vaneigem found missing, that between individual and collective intercourse. In a remarkably intense and personal account, Reich conveys his deep conviction that politics is bankrupt. He convicts right-wing mysticism alongside left-wing mechanism with the same gavel. He seems personally hurt by the left’s immobilization of healthy aggression, it’s hiding from life, its emotional stasis. To him, the Nazis seemed more direct.

Later, pamphlets appeared in the United States which attempted to rehabilitate Reich from a situationist standpoint. Ken Knabb, in a touching pamphlet published in 1973, titled Remarks on Contradiction and its Failure, evaluated his own participation in an American pro-situ group (“Contradiction”) from the standpoint of Reich’s character analysis. This was Reich’s novel technique of therapy which identified the petrified role played by the neurotic, at the service of defending him or her from total contact with life. It focuses specifically on the resistance to analysis, and uses deep breathing along with the physical release of muscular holding (character armor) to restore health.

“The members of Contradiction might well have confronted their dilemma by enlisting that fundamental tactic of breaking the impasse by concentrating precisely on the resistance to analysis. This would have pointed not only to the basic collective organizational errors I have outlined in “Remarks,” but also to our individual resistances, that is to say, our characters…Suffice it to say, for now, that if it is indisputable that the practice of theory is individually therapeutic, it seems to me equally true that an assault on one’s own character is socially strategic, a practical contribution to the international revolutionary movement. The character of the pro-situ is objectively reinforced by the spectacle (which character, of course is most evidenced by his inability to recognize its existence, other than as a “banality,” until excessive symptoms, perhaps visibly inhibiting his social practice, force his attention there). At the opposite pole, all the lucidity of an Artaud, who attacks his character in isolation, does not prevent the “external” commodity-spectacle he disdainfully brushes aside from reappearing in his internal world as the fantasy of being possessed by alien, malignant beings. Like a revolution in a small country, the person who breaks a block, a routine, or a fetish must advance aggressively to discover or incite radical allies outside, or lose what he gained and fall victim to his own internal Thermidor. The dissolution of character and the dissolution of the spectacle are two movements which imply and require each other.”

Here Knabb puts his finger on the heart of the matter. He restates Reich’s critique of the character rebel. He surpasses anything the Situationists ever wrote about pro-situs by this self-referential analysis. Unlike the french philosophers, he has been able to understand Reich’s work.

That same year Knabb published a broadside, Jean-Pierre Voyer’s Reich: How to Use. Voyer discusses the dissolution of character and its role in the dissolution of the spectacle.

“In all of the societies in which modern conditions of production prevail, the impossibility of living takes individually the form of death, of madness, or of character. With the intrepid Dr. Reich, and against his horrified recuperators and vilifiers, we postulate the pathological nature of all character traits, that is to say of all chronicity in human behavior. What is important to us is not the individual structure of our character, nor the explanation of it’s formulation, but the impossibility of its application in the construction of situations. Character is therefore not simply an unhealthy excrescence which could be treated separately, but at the same time an individual remedy in a globally ill society, a remedy which enables us to bear the illness while aggravating it. We hold that people can only dissolve their character in contesting the entire society (this is in opposition to Reich insofar as he envisages character analysis from a specialized point of view); where, on the other hand, the function of character being accommodation to the state of things, its dissolution is preliminary to the global critique of society. We must destroy this vicious cycle.”

In 1975 Black and Red of Detroit republished a Solidarity (UK) pamphlet by Maurice Brinton called “Authoritarian Conditioning, Sexual Repression and the Irrational in Politics.” It contains a worthy recount of three of Reich’s books: The Invasion of Compulsory Sex-Morality, The Sexual Revolution and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. The first of these three was a study of the relevance of the work of anthropologist Stanislaw Malinowski in uncovering the cultural-specific nature of the oedipal complex, pathology and sexual repression. The Sexual Revolution is mainly a report of Reich’s visit to the Soviet Union which led toward his disillusionment with the Bolshevik revolution, having retreated from its initial removal of all moralistic marriage and sex laws. From The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Brinton draws on Reich’s analysis of “the various methods whereby modern society manipulates its slaves into accepting their slavery.” Although Brinton seems to have done quite a bit of research into the anthropology of Malinowski, he seems to have missed one of the main features of his work: the study of primitive economies in the light of industrial capitalism. One of the most fascinating aspects of Malinowski’s work is his discussion of gift-exchange, an economy which was reciprocal, wageless, and pervaded all aspects of cultural life (unitary). All production was geared toward the free exchange of gifts on holidays with neighboring clans. Competition was based not on who could get the most, but who could give the most. This form of economy was given little serious consideration, although one presituationist journal was significantly entitled Potlatch (referring to tribal gifts).

The basic problem for Brinton is that he would have rather Reich died in 1936. From Brinton we will search in vain for any mention of the concept of red fascism, the emotional plague or orgone.