540
PARTISAN REVIEW
Joel Kovel:
A great deal has been said about cultural decline and
cultural analysis, and I was thinking, as these remarks were being
made by a number of people, of something that Gibbon wrote about
Byzantium. He said that the culture of Byzantium entered into a
period of premature perpetual decay that lasted a thousand years,
and I wonder whether we are also in for a thousand millennium of
cultural decay. The cultural decay will last for a thousand years or
until the culture is overthrown, as Byzantium was overthrown
finally by the Turks in the fifteenth century. But we can't further
our discussion by talking about culture as a force that is autonomous
and moves in its own spheres; it's rather a force that is secondary to
the main structures of society and, particularly, the class structures of
society. I would take exception to what Steven Marcus said, that we
are now in a period of decay whereas the 1930s were the period of
pseudo-decay and pseudo-crisis.
It
was not a pseudo-crisis; the
society came very close to a revolutionary transformation at that
time, and it was interesting then that psychoanalysts who considered
themselves orthodox and followers of Freud were not loathe or
adverse
to
taking an ideological position in seeing psychoanalysis as
linked
to
these potential changes in bourgeois society of a revolu–
tionary nature. I am referring to, amongst others, no less a figure
than Otto Fenichel, who is considered the pillar of psychoanalytic
orthodoxy, who was nonetheless a committed Marxist and saw fit
to
bring psychoanalysis and Marxism together in a number of very
trenchant and important papers.
The point behind all of this is that it is impossible
to
be
nonideological, to say that one is simply interested in pure science
and that psychoanalysis is a member of the natural sciences, because
when you're doing that you're talking about creating the human
object, the human subject within the objective sphere of nature
science. Psychoanalysis arises from verbal discourse, an intrasubjec–
tive situation. Obviously it has its roots in nature, but
to
say that it is
part of natural science, that it took place as an "isolated scientific
rebellion ," or revolution, is
to
miss the point that the ideology of
science is a very definite ideology and has to be criticized like all
others and that there really are no non ideological positions; there are
only greater or lesser degrees of consciousness of one's ideological
position . In my opinion, psychoanalysis is definitely dependent
upon a free society. And it is my hope that any revolutionary theory
could perceive that psychoanalysis would provide one of the mea–
sures of maintaining freedom within revolutionary theory; but there
