MARK SHECHNER
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Andyet,
one wants also to observe the degree to which Reichian–
ism
did
elevate the freelance intellectual into the role of moral and
cultural leader who could exercise a salubrious influence on the cul–
ture by the example of transcending it. As Paul Goodman, as Nor–
man Mailer, as Allen Ginsberg all understood in the sixties, it was
not only their ideas that elevated them to positions of moral eminence
but their examples, the lives of free eroticism they
seemed
to be living.
Goodman, chagrined by the prospect of sainthood before death, en–
deavored mightily to keep all that was raw and tormented in his
character on show. It did little good, as the cachet attached to his
spokesmanship for desublimation overshadowed the more unsavory
aspects of his compulsive cruising. Reichianism is indeed, as Rieff
has complained, an antipolitics, though a more precise term might
be counterpolitics, since it seeks to revolutionize the social order by
transforming the individual, rather than organizing and deploying
power. In Reichian thought - and the politics of Goodman's Gestalt
were essentially Reichian - personal culture, rather than being a
superstructure, is the very engine of the social order and therefore
the key to social change . It is the magnetic field that binds the politics
of the body to the body politic and the crucible in which the liberated
intellectual, not the politician or the minister or even the soldier, is
the indispensable catalyst of change. Yet, in a counterpolitics as in
any other, the rebel has his eye on power; he simply approaches it in
new ways and looks for new windows of vulnerability. The hero of a
counterpolitics confronts power without a sword, armed only with
the moral example of his being, an example which the isolate, the
martyr, and the poet are best equipped to furnish. In a counterpoli–
tics, the only slingshot David permits himself is his superior moral
character. Where Gandhi, modern history's outstanding counterpol–
itician, took that superiority from an exemplary abstinence, Reich
supposed it to derive from an exemplary indulgence.
If
Freud, then,
was the social philosopher for intellectuals who saw in the agony of
Europe a picture of man's fate, Reich supplied the program for those
who saw in America, an eroticized, Whitmanized America to be
sure, a picture of man's hope.
It was Reich, then, more than Freud, who captured the imagi–
nation of stranded Trotskyists in the 1940s and provided the program
that , for a brief moment, was the implicit script for efforts to confirm
a new literary radicalism. Jew, exile, and finally martyr, he was the
Trotsky of mental revolutionism, a romantic hero for homeless radi–
cals in search of a rallying point during and just after the war. Like
