(Lecture delivered at Wyoming Debate Cooperative, August 3, 2004, Laramie, Wyoming)
(mpf=Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism)
"THE FORMATION OF THE AUTHORITARIAN STRUCTURE TAKES PLACE THROUGH THE ANCHORING OF SEXUAL INHIBITION AND SEXUAL ANXIETY." (MPF 25)
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) brought the body into psychology; that is, not only did he take seriously the biological urges Freud had discovered, but he also boldly asserted the influence of those urges on the whole of a society.
As a psychologist, he touched his patients during therapy, breaking that wall of words.
Similarly, in debate, there are walls of words. I don't want to break that wall today, but I would like to ask a question: What is the role of repressed or misused sexuality in shaping rhetorical argument?
Others have spoken of repressed desire. The "Nuclear Desire" criticism run by a few teams this year (West GA, Fullerton) says we desire the bomb like we desire other fetishized objects. The social psychology of Lacan speaks similarly of all sorts of utopian fantasies, often including debate advocacies. But Reich is concerned mainly with the interaction of sexuality and materiality--sex and economics. Hence, instead of Marx's "political economy" we have Reich's "sexual economy."
Psychoanalysis reveals the mechanisms of sexual suppression and repression and
their pathological effects in the individual. Sex-economic sociology goes
on from here and asks, For what sociological reason does society suppress
sexuality and does the individual repress it? (MPF 23)
A little longer ago, a team from the University of Southern California argued that debate was a "theater of pain," and following the work of Marquis de Sade, pointed out that we love to talk about pain in debate, that much of what happens in debate rounds is sexual, masturbatory, and that to authentically live this, we might want to advocate violence in debates (with the hint that such rituals would make us less likely to hurt one another outside of debate).
So if I were writing a book about Reichian social analysis, I would entitle it:
NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND RIDING CROPS: THE REPRESSION OF SEXUALITY AS KEY TO WARMAKING AND BRUTALITY
For Reich, the following four things feed on each other:
1. Strong paternal authority
2. Sexual repression
3. Authoritarian personalities
4. Reactionary political ideologies
It's an uncomfortable fact to point out that people found fascism very, very sexy.
Reich borrowed from Freud the notion that the "repression of infantile sexuality is the rule in 'civilized man'". Furthermore, that "human morality, far from being of supernatural origin, results from the suppressive measures of early infantile education, particularly those directed against sexuality" (MPF 22).
However, Reich lamented that the sociological implications of these discoveries were blocked by Frued's resistance to mass-social explanation based on his theories. Because Freud dismissed Marxism, he also dismissed any attempt to combine a study of mass political economy with the study of repressed sexuality in individuals.
But for Reich, this separation made no sense, since he saw in Germany an entire generation of fascist-friendly people who were obviously struggling with their own repressed sexuality.
So Reich proposed the following:
"THE FORMATION OF THE AUTHORITARIAN STRUCTURE TAKES PLACE THROUGH THE ANCHORING OF SEXUAL INHIBITION AND SEXUAL ANXIETY." (MPF 25)
Reich asks us to consider the caseof a working class woman, the wife of a worker. "Her economic situation is the same as that of the revolutionary worker's, but she votes fascist" because "the anti-sexual, moralistic structure of a conservative woman makes it impossible for her to develop a consciousness of her social position, it ties her to the church..." and thus refutes the basic Marxist notion that one's social position absolutely determines one's revolutionary consciousness. Of this hypothetical case, Reich concludes:
...the suppression of the gratification of primitive material needs has a
result different from that of the suppression of the gratification of sexual
needs. The former incites rebellion. The latter, however--by
repressing the sexual needs and by becoming anchored as a moralistic
defense--paralyzes the rebellion against either kind of suppression. (MPF
25-26)
Reich mentions the peacock-like military uniforms, the use of attractive women in recruitment ads, rhythmically perfect parades, as ways in which repressed sexuality can be slowly and carefully extracted from people, to unconsciously satisfy (but not completely satisfy) sexual urges people often don't even know that they have.
Thus: "Sexual inhibition alters the structure of the economically suppressed individual in such a manner that he thinks, feels and acts against his own material interests." (MPF 26)
For Reich, moralistic sexual repression is vital to solidifying class hierarchy:
Since one does not enjoy the economic position of the upper middle classes but
at the same time identifies oneself ideologically with them, the sexual moral
ideologies must make up for the economic deprivations." This is partially
completed through the patriarchal family, in which a sexually repressive father
is submissive to his boss, but then "in turn reproduces submissiveness to
authority in his children, especially his sons. This is the basis of the
passive, submissive attitude of middle class individuals toward Fuhrer figures.
(MPF 44-45)
Put another way:
The establishment of economic freedom of the working people
goes hand in hand with the dissolution of the old institutions, especially the
sexual ones, a process of which the reactionary individual is afraid.
Specifically, the fear of 'sexual freedom'--which in reactionary thinking is
represented as 'sexual chaos'--checks the longing for freedom from economic
exploitation. (MPF 50)
So far, we have explained why sexually repressed societies are susceptible to authoritarianism, but we haven't yet explored the link between authoritarianism and sado-masochism.
Sexual energy, repressed, must go somewhere. For some it becomes mystical, or religious energy. For others, it becomes political energy, given to hierarchy. In either case, it takes on a sadomasochistic brutality, because it is a distorted, frustrated kind of energy. Even the most loving sexual acts involve a kind of "violence" or "violation," a violation to partners' vulnerability even by consent. But unactualized sexual energy cannot control or mediate that violence. Thus, repressed desire becomes, through self-fulfilling prophesy, perverted sexuality: "...sexual stasis...the dammed-up sexual energies seek an outlet through all kinds of pathological channels...This distorted, disturbed, brutalized and debased sexuality in turn supports the very ideology to which it owes its existence." (MPF 75)
Reich suggests that religion is often a substitute for sexuality--
The religious feeling, then, is the same as
sexual feeling, except that it is attached to mystical, psychic contents.
This explains the return of the sexual element in so many ascetic experiences,
such as the nun's delusion that she is the bride of Christ. Such
experiences rarely reach the stage of genital consciousness and thus are apt to
take place in other sexual channels, such as masochistic martyrdom. (MPF
133)
The war-making tendency is an urge to manufacture and use weapons designed not merely to strategically neutralize an enemy (after all, we do not manufacture "weapons" that put everyone to sleep or temporarily paralize them), but to inflict pain and suffering, to destroy many people and inflict the torture of witnessing that death, as well as the physical pain of the survivors:
Man constantly reproduces the machine-like organism by his kind of education,
science and philosophy of life. This biological crippling is reaching the
pinnacle of its triumphs in the scientific, mathematically exact, machine-like
killing of today. As mechanistic philosophies and machines alone cannot
kill, sadism also comes into play; sadism, this secondary drive born of
suppressed nature, the only important characteristic which distinguishes man's
structure from that of the animal. (MPF 295)
THE ROLE OF WOMEN
Imperialistic wars require that there be no rebellion in the women against the
function that is imposed on them, that of being nothing but child-bearing
machines. That is, the function of sexual gratification must not be
allowed to interfere with the child-bearing function. (MPF 90)
It's pretty clear that, for Reich, there was no solvency for oppression and violence as long as sexual desire was repressed by binaristic and metaphysical notions of morality. In "Further Problems of Work Democracy" Reich wrote:
As long as [compulsory sexual repression] prevails, genuine democracy and
responsible freedom remain an illusion. Helpless subjugation to chaotic
social conditions is the hallmark of human existence. The murder of the
living triumphs in compulsory education and war.
WHAT ABOUT NOW? THIS ISN'T NAZI GERMANY
Now, consider: What has changed since Reich? Are we more "liberated?"
Marcuse, on sexuality in advanced industrial society: Just when we thought we had liberated ourselves from victorian sexual mores, along comes late capitalism to distort and commodify our sexuality. Marcuse wrote Eros and Civilization in 1955. In that book--
...he offered a dramatic re-interpretation of Freud's theory of repression and criticized Freud's stress on the genital organization of sexuality and on heterosexual intercourse. According to Freud,
adult sexual development is a progression from oral and anal eroticism in
infancy to the final adult stage of genital sexuality. In response, Marcuse
proposed sexual liberation through the cultivation of a "polymorphous perverse"
sexuality (which includes oral, anal, and genital eroticism) that eschews a
narrow focus on genital heterosexual intercourse.
Marcuse believed that sexual liberation was achieved by exploring new permutations of sexual desires,
sexual activities, and gender roles--what Freud called "perverse" sexual
desires, that is, all non-reproductive forms of sexual behavior, of which
kissing, oral sex, and anal sex are familiar examples.
Marcuse was himself heterosexual, but he identified the homosexual as the radical standard bearer of
sex for the sake of pleasure, a form of radical hedonism that repudiates those
forms of repressive sexuality organized around genital heterosexuality and
biological reproduction. "Against a society which employs sexuality as a means
for a useful end," Marcuse argued, "the perversions uphold sexuality as an end
itself . . . and challenge its very foundations." http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/marcuse_h.html
This may or may not have been an appropriate response to the commodification of sexuality in the wake of repressed desire. Marcuse is somewhat responsible for the role of sexual liberation in the 1960s; he played a role similar to Foucault in that respect. But it seems like "sexuality as an end in itself" was even more marketable than nuclear family, father-knows-best sexuality.
SEX ECONOMY AND THE MORAL IMPERATIVE: DO THESE SAME REPRESSED DESIRES LEAD US TO ENACT NORMATIVE CLAIMS?
So some speculative thoughts here:
Is a moral imperative a manifestation of your desire to control me?
Think of the way we utilize deontological imperatives in our criticisms, and essentially how the call for the ballot is a call to "punish" the other team. Ritualized, public punishment.
WHAT ABOUT UTILIZING CONSTRUCTED THREATS OF VIOLENCE AS RHETORICAL WARRANTS?
Is debate really a theater of pain? And specifically, is there a biological context to this?
--research speculating that male debaters like big impacts like nuclear war.
WHAT WOULD DEBATE LOOK LIKE IN A SOCIETY WITHOUT AN AUTHORITARIAN SEX ECONOMY?
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