Erotics in wonderland
Kenneth Minogue
The Party of Eros Richard King (University of North Carolina Press £3.75) Counter Revolution and Revolt Herbert Marcuse (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press £2) Modern secular religions all begin with a single proposition: not that we are all sinners, but that we are all flotsam and jetsam. This leaves open the question of what sea it is we float upon. Much thought on this teasing question has prbduced only two fundamental answers: one, that we are drowning in our own psyches. The prophet of this belief is Freud. The other (and more powerful) answer takes the line that we are all bobbing about on the social system, and its effective originator is, of course, Karl Marx. In spite of endless reshuffling and transposition these two masters still retain an unchallenged preeminence in the field. The fact that both prophets were German Jews remains a teasing but inconclusive clue to the real character of these modern religions.
Just as the Christian church has its ecumenical movement, so modern secular religions are also afflicted with the desire to merge their prophecies into a single message. Can Freud and Marx be made to sing the same tune? As Professor King recognises in this discussion of some syncretising followers of Freud, this unity can only be achieved at the cost of amputating part of the message of at least one of them. For Marx believed in the possibility of a happy and satisfying future, whilst Freud was generally convinced that human life involved a tragic choice between civilisation and gratification. Whoever unites these two messages will co' tainly have to be a compromising revisiofl. ist, certain to displease some of the followers of each. Such is one problem faced bY King's Party of Eros. But since he is con
cerned with American radicals, he is forced to face the fact that this is not the end of their troubles. For it has been the classic difficulty of American radicals that all the good theoretical equipment stems from Central Europe, and has rather an Alice in Wonderland look when applied to Americans (or, for that matter, to Anglo-Saxons anywhere). They are faced by a very common problem of life: what is indispensable is also what is intolerable. Nonetheless, the dominance of European radical theory is clear from the fact that two of Professor King's Erotics come from the same Central European stable as the masters themselves.
One of these, who in the simplicity of his message may be taken to stand for them all, is Wilhelm Reich, who is at present greatly in vogue. Before he slipped into the final dottiness of the orgone box Reich brought much hope to simple people by preaching a belief which had already been vulgarly fathered on Freud himself: that all human misery is the consequence of sexual repression. The other Central European passed in review by Professor King is the much more intellectually formidable Herbert Marcuse, the only man who came within shouting distance of a proper Marx Freud merger. But Marcuse's success was paid for by a sedulous avoidance of any contact with life as she is lived. At the height of his powers, Marcuse turned the Marxian vocabulary into a kind of poetry, and called up in his readers' minds the golden spires of a better city. This was a world away from a really indigenous American radical like Paul Goodman whose tendency to social generalisation never strayed very far from the twists and moods of his own life.
What most torments a reader of Professor King's book is the question of how we are to understand these writers. Do they belong to an intellectual realm in which truth and veracity have any relevance at all? Or are we to treat them rather as inspirational discourse? For example, what can Norman 0. Brown possibly mean when he says that in the Oedipal situation, the child attempts to become the father of himself, and simultaneously to be united with the mother? Do we not have here, as in so many other of the doctrines Professor King describes, a case where meanings can be invented at will? The same thing is true of one of the great old radical doctrines, whose recital can only bring tears of nostalgia to anyone who ever gave the radical boat a shove: I refer to the doctrine that political oppression and sexual repression are bound up together. It is only by carefully channelling sexual Impulses in early childhood (so the doctrine goes) that the system can generate docile and obedient subjects. But in the easygoing world of radical Speculation even this fundamental tenet can be reversed, as when Marcuse writes: Wilhelm Reich was right in emphasising the roots of fascism in instinctual repression; he was wrong when he saw the mainsprings for the defeat of fascism in sexual liberation. The latter can proceed quite far without endangering the capitalist system at the advanced stage . . " Copulation has become the new opiate of the people. It is certainly much more fun than singing hymns in dusty chapels.
Again, which of the prophets of Eros are we to follow when we find that Reich regards genital sexuality as the only way of avoiding repression, whereas Norman 0. Brown regards it as a catastrophic triumph of the reality principle at the expense of the pleasure principle? Clearly no very serious questions are involved in this endless reshuffling of relevant and resonant categories. It is, rather, a craft industry catering for a market where sheer variety is the main value.
Professor King's guided tour of this world deserves a wider patronage that the University of North Carolina Press is likely to secure for him. It is not that his critical comments are particularly profound, but that, apart from an addiction to the floating adverb ' hopefully ' and to split infinitives, he writes clearly and with common sense. Neither quality distinguishes late Marcuse. A quite heroic effort is needed not to dismiss his latest set of essays as thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season. Here is the familiar pontification about the ghastly state of our civilisation, with capitalism moving towards its crisis in a "technostructure of exploitation." Here are the familiar lists of bads: "the fragmentation of work, the necessity and productivity of stupid performances and stupid merchandise, servitude in the guise of technology, deprivation in the guise of the good life . . . " More frequently than in earlier work, he swoops into the real world for tendentious exemplification: the fight for the People's Park in Berkeley is described as an "explosion of sensibility in political action." In the midst of this tedious nonsense old themes reappear (such as the relation between man and nature) which remind us of the fact that Marcuse was once at least a very convincing copy of a philosopher. But what is finally likely to make all but the addict hurl this volume into the waste paper basket is the impertinent assumption that only someone whose mind is also full of this pretentious metaphysics can be described as " conscious " or "aware." The task of the New Left is said to be the spreading of this awareness. It is understandable that prophets should wish to spread their message, but when they dress up as philosophers they become quite intolerable.
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