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3. Immanence and Transcendence: Reich, Orgasm, and the Body
- Southern Illinois University Press
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84 3. Immanence and Transcendence Reich, Orgasm, and the Body The moment of orgasm catapults the human body into two spheres simultaneously . It is a crucial element in the continuation of the species, an “essential” act that calls us back to the importance the body plays in our lives. Yet, orgasm is also figured as ecstasy, a moment when the body is euphorically left behind. This twofold nature of orgasm makes it the perfect vehicle for discussing the sexual politics that the Beats were embracing. As Daniel Belgrad notes in The Culture of Spontaneity, “The recovery of an awareness of human experience as embodied experience became one of the most insistent themes of postwar culture” (156). But what exactly does this embodied experience look like, and how were the Beats using it to theorize a new “human experience”? The discourse surrounding the moment of orgasm provides an answer.1 While the Beats draw on modern notions of the body as a marker of authenticity, they also use the body as a site for experimentation that prefigures a move to the postmodern. Beat representations of orgasmic experience rely on a modernist preoccupation with the body as a “natural” ground for experience and communication. As with Ginsberg’s Buddhist return to corporeality, the body situates the subject in an authentic way within the material world. But the Beats also seek to transcend the body in their search for new experience. Here orgasm opens the body to a rhetoric of diffusion. The body undergoes a multiplicity of forces, sensations, and desires that reorganize subjectivity. Examining Beat representations of orgasm helps us to understand their desire to use the body as a site for both wholeness and experimentation. The Beats’ perpetual novelty as archrebels and timeless hipsters emanates from the desire to isolate the postwar decade as an anachronistic island, an example of when times were simpler. Nowhere is this more apparent than in discussions of sex. Hollywood is especially fond of appropriating the 1950s as a nostalgic site where time travelers in films such as Back to the Future and Pleasantville return with the wisdom of the late twentieth Mortenson Ch3.indd 84 9/9/10 2:32 PM I M M A N E N C E A N D T R A N S C E N D E N C E 85 century to inspire and invigorate a sexually repressed (if refreshingly naïve) postwar culture. Foisting such representations onto the past, however, does a disservice to our understanding of the fifties as a transitional decade in American culture. Witness the tumultuous reception of Alfred Kinsey’s publications Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Observers compared the publication of these works to the explosion of an atomic bomb. From 1938 until 1956, Kinsey and three of his associates conducted approximately eighteen thousand interviews designed to assess sexual behavior in America (Robinson, Modernization of Sex 44). What he found debunks the myth of the 1950s as a prudish decade. According to Miriam G. Reumann in American Sexual Character, Kinsey discovered that “much of Americans’ sexual activity took place outside marriage, and that the majority of the nation’s citizens had violated accepted moral standards” (1). Kinsey delighted in using his findings to “shock the squares” with the true licentiousness of American sexual behavior. Rather than viewing the Beats as the sole voice of dissent in a sea of morality, Beat representations of sexuality must be situated within a decade struggling to determine what sex “means” for them. Americans were shocked over the Kinsey report not because it revealed the kind of sex they were having but because the discourse surrounding sexuality was intimately connected with nation building and the question of American “character” as a whole. Reumann comments, Narratives of sexual danger could and did attach to specific kinds of acts or bodies: homosexuality was often rhetorically linked to political subversion and the betrayal of male institutions, women’s extramarital sexuality associated with the decline of female nurturance and motherhood, and male heterosexuality viewed as potentially becoming either passive or excessive, either of which would threaten family life and gender roles. (35–36) The Kinsey report did not “out” individuals; it “outed” a nation. Individuals whose sexual activities generated the report found their actions addressed on the national, rather than the personal, level. In fact, a more open sexuality was oftentimes the prescription for a country viewed by many to be on...