by Neil Vodavzny

If you check the reference in Competitive-Edge to J-L Godard, to him the erotic is a thing in itself, and which signifies value. To Freud the opposite is true, value signifies the erotic - Freudian-capital (libido applied to products). However, both of these guys are to a lesser or greater extent talking about capital, and Godard is rabidly anti-capital. Why not literally leave capital to one side?

Consider that the sensual world also needs must be anti-Freudian, since it is associated with praxis (production), or the source of all value. If you extract things from the world, say iron ore, they could become something else – capital or technology. Both of these could be related to techne in Heidegger’s sense; capital isn’t something abstract, it’s valued in coinage – metal – and gained precedence over the industrial revolution.

The language of libido and capital can’t be applied to a world of praxis. Praxis in Heidegger’s scheme cannot be completely divorced from the natural world. You could cite maybe ancient engineering feats: Roman aqueducts, city-states, large-scale irrigation works (pioneered in Babylonia) etc. They relate to landscape, terrain, water-tables and natural features of all types (same for a boat on water).

One might grudgingly admit Freudianism as a part of Western post-Enlightenment industrial culture, but it’s impossible to square with ancient classics, say the 17th century epic Paradise Lost. The language is different. We are no longer in a world of products. We have to think less in terms of analysis – ie text – and more in terms of image – ie poetry or poesis.

These things are like a self-fulfilling prophecy, so that if one persists in talking text, one is seeing the world according to text, ie a capital one and thereby a Freudian one. Let’s consider that in Milton’s epic, there are some sexual allusions; the intro to the Penguin edition cites this slightly queer phraseology describing Adam and Eve’s embrace..(xxxvii)

half her swelling breast
Naked met his under the flowing gold
Of her loose tresses hid: he in delight
Both of her beauty and submissive charms
Smiled with superior love, as Jupiter
On Juno smiles, when he impregns the clouds
That shed May flowers.

This is a classical allusion to Ixion - who sired the centaurs on a cloud fashioned by Jupiter in the shape of Juno (don’t ask). The Victorians were apt to discount such references in the grand scheme of the work, but in truth the ancient world was fantastically scurrilous – check the graffiti at Pompeii. In truth, there was less hypocrisy in the 17th and 18th centuries – check Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, Defoe’s Moll Flanders – more like decorousness.

So, Milton meant exactly what he wrote by relating sex to sensuality in the natural world. That is, sex as in fecundity with a value in and of itself. It is erotic pure and simple, with no need for complexifying it with any analytical content. Sometimes simplicity is much closer to meaning than moderns realize. Milton’s is partly a prelapsarian vision. After all, innocence is still abroad in a pre-industrial landscape. Man is competing in a world of praxis and is not wholly caught up with his own preoccupations, hermetically-sealed as it were (possible reference The Airtight Garage of Moebius?)

That seems to be the danger of text, that it is sealed within its own terminology. Godard is himself notorious for totally unwatchable, politically programmatic films (not to be confused with 60s icons). European culture is possibly distorted for this very reason: the domain of capital and analytical reason. What appears real to us is very different to what would be perceived say in the Renaissance. The space in many Renaissance paintings is truly sensual – which to us appears like pure fantasy. Baroque ornament is the very breathe of fantasy. The place citizens dwelt in was much more like a stage; vernacular architecture, common ground for people to congregate, discuss issues of the day, haggle (street market economy).

Shakespeare to us appears fairly fantastical, but it’s likely he was merely exaggerating what was already historically there. The play’s the thing. Life in a sensual world is more felt because more fantastical. There is another sense in which the sensual comes to the fore. Titus Andronicus is replete with devastating gore, cannibalism and multiple rapes. Blood seeps through the boards. Verily scenes of sex and violence.

This is in truth what a sensual world is. In a scene of Breugel, one has wild frolicking peasants, who will go on wild boar hunts, slaughter and festivity, falconry and gore, minstrels strumming tall tales.

It’s what festivals are; nothing tame there. It’s moral insofar as self-reliant, not idle.

All the preceding is intended to indicate that the sensual world is something that has been lost – not to religion, but to capital. The European nature of this world wasn’t diluted by Christianity. It’s true the Christian ethos is fantastically moral, and a work such as Paradise Lost appears to us as pure fantasy. But, consider this: in Milton’s universe, time is real while space is largely the creation of abstract reason. He mentions moon, sun, Earth, planets, stars, but these are mere pinpricks in the colossal sphere with heaven on one side, hell on the other, chaos roundabout. To a casual observer this might seem redolent of modern theories on parallel worlds, but no. Milton’s universe is temporal, not spatial. All the moral content is temporal, and he creates the universe out of that.

Science, being the opposite of this, exists in space but not time. Perhaps that’s the danger of text; Paradise Lost is above all an image of a man and a woman in a garden. Everything, all the allusions and literary value, follows. Apple, the computer company, presumably got their name from the tree of knowledge. Unlike the tree, though, it’s not knowledge of good and evil; instinct and image are left to one side and intellect decides the issue.

So, the fantasy aspect of Milton is intentional; it’s the moral aspect that’s the reality, the myth, the image. Myths, as I tend to think, are non-cultural signs (good/evil) so have no affect on race. It really helps some to have some knowledge of medieval militaristic chivalry. Robert Howard has one story, The Road Of Azrael’ (in Sword Woman, del Ray), set at the sack of Jerusalem. Saracens and Christian knights fight side by side against a relentless wave of Mongolian warrior “infidels” from the steppes. The ground here is common to both peoples against the intruders.

Race is something else entirely, which I’ll come to in awhile. First, here’s something militaristic and very European (albeit American):

As you see from these two pages, Gordon is a sort of blonde conqueror, like many pulp heroes almost fascistic. If you however view the strip as muscular Christianity, it doesn’t affect by one iota the fascistic imagery. Christianity, for all its faults, is steeped in blood and militarism (Onward Christian Soldiers). So any idea it’s something anti-European does nothing for me.

Modern fantasy, in effect, is a very good vehicle for morality, particularly sci-fi or space fantasy, in that space is fantastical. Another slightly extreme example of the sensual is Alan Moore’s fantastically scurrilous take on the sex lives of Lost Girls in fantasy (Alice, Dorothy, Wendy). I saw an interview where he seemed sort of vexed with the separation between pornography and the erotic; the interviewer here gives our fantasist numero uno a hard time:

Essentially, the difference is capital alone. How can we post-industrial Europeans renew contact with a sense of the erotic?

Put it another way, how do you connect with the world at all, whether by sex, violence, humour, ritual, sensuality? I’d suggest this is when we encounter race, because all these things connect to the temporal world. A traditional English village has image because it is a consequential artefact, with a type of stasis; the activities you see are consequential of a temporal universe, its resources – fields, sheep, haywain, tress, hounds, horses – and its racial lineage.

The sensual world is actually the antithesis of an information-rich one operating in (cyber) space. The aforementioned Alan Moore is a man of rural Northampton, a bleak, almost gothic post-industrial landscape built over medieval moats and forts. Listening to an interview with the latter-day shaman, Moore’s ideas are certainly weird, but the point I want to make here is that the environments artists frequent is reflected in their temperaments.

Without the rich, fragmented seams of Englishness which artists such as Hockney, Moorcock inhabit, they would disappear in a maelstrom of modernity (actually, Moorcock now lives in rural Texas). Temporal stasis is a type of independence. Listening to Moore, there’s no doubt he’s liberal-leaning, but nevertheless the depth of Englishness is unmistakable. Images, as I said, are implicitly racial, or there would be no tradition or settled state of being, no weird historical leftovers, no allusiveness, no romance, no lilies on moats lost to time.

Conversely, in a non-temporal world there are no settled images. We live in a Cartesian multiverse where people are continually travelling over space, just because they can. The 3 dimensions of space are arbitrary in terms of travel – IE you can go from A to C to E, E to F to A etc. Time is the dimension with direction (past, present, future). In Watchmen, Alan Moore has an essay “Blood From The Shoulders of Pallas” suggesting that the act of studying reality makes it fade, like gossamer. What if the reality we’re studying is itself fake?

What’s happening is that Whites are being called racist who defend a settled state of being. We’re against an egalitarian order to which all race-relations are equivalent to (my term) a Cartesian multiverse of products. We’re more for stasis and for what is rightfully ours, namely land, settled environments, and traditions.

Not only tradition but race has an ethos. I have a collection of retro-pulp TV adventure serials as mentioned here.

Nyoka, is typical ERB-style jungle action, pitting jungle-dwelling Africans against the nefarious Latimer, with Nyoka and the good White guys in the middle. What really struck me was the witch-doctor Shamba’s fabulously ingenious engineering, his cunning matched to Latimer’s evil. The native reed-roofed dwellings are positively Roman villa-like, ideal for a royal tryst. The racialism of characters actually serves them way better than our modern egalitarian capital does! The Whities are totally unfazed by swinging through crocodile-infested rivers. Classical restraint in the face of death. “You should know I don’t fall for strongarm tactics”, proclaims Stanton on his way to doom. “A hero, huh?”, sneers Latimer. Precisely, and the “sexist” situations are tone-perfect (did I say that already?)