Fanged Noumena: On Nick Land and the New Amazons

Nick Land and Die Nacht der Amazonen [a]

'We are the Amazons. We are the killers of beasts and men. 

Wild ourselves, we inhabit the wild places. Freedom courses in our blood, 

and death whispers at the tip of our arrows. 

We fear nothing, fear runs from us. Try to stop us, and you will feel our rage.' [b]

                                                          

 

I. 

 

For a thinker who once dismissed politics as "the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind" [c], Land spends an awful amount of time addressing political issues and discussing modern philosophy in relation to capitalism. 

 

And although he was never a traditional leftist even in his early writings, it's amusing to note just how deeply rooted in Marxist analysis, postcolonial theory, radical feminism, and femdom fantasy his thinking was in the late-1980s.   

 

 

II. 

 

In his essay 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest' (1988), Land is at pains to argue that the Sage of Königsberg's philosophy cunningly disguised the violent, exclusionary realities of free-market capitalism, such as racism, by hiding them behind abstract, universal moral ideals:  

 

"Kant was able to remain bourgeois without overtly promoting racism only because he also remained an idealist, or in other words a Christian [...] and identified universality with ideality rather than with power." [d] 

 

Western modernity may portray itself as enlightened and speak of freedom and equality, but it's structurally dependent on class and racial hierarchies in order to exploit labour and foreign resources. Liberals want to reap the benefits of the bourgeois order, but they want to do so without feeling morally compromised by its more brutal aspects and Kant provides them with a way to wriggle off the hook and evade their guilt.      

 

That makes Kant not just a crypto-theologian, but also an apologist for capitalism; someone who enables the liberal elite to preach universal human rights whilst, at the same time, build a global economic system that is radically inhuman and which will eventually do away with mankind altogether.   

 

 

III. 

 

Not that Land objects to the death of man, of course. 

 

In fact, he wishes to accelerate the forces that capitalism itself unleashes by dissolving all borders and boundaries, all structures and identities (particularly national structures and identities). Ultimately, Nick's objection to the bourgeois order is that it never goes far or fast enough toward its own external limit. 

 

Similarly, his objection to old school socialism is that it isn't revolutionary enough; being as it is all too male, pale, and stale it doesn't offer the unrestrained programme born of the "theoretical and libidinal dissolution of national totality" (77) that he longs for. 

 

And so, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, at the end of 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest', Land turns to militant feminists, such as Monique Wittig, for support ...   

 

 

IV.

 

Wittig - a French philosopher and lesbian theorist - is also known for her fictional writings, including the hugely influential novel Les Guérillères (1969) [e].  

 

This term, a neologism, is sometimes translated into English as 'warrior women', but Land has a penchant for the idea of new Amazons, who, in his view, are alone capable of destroying the patriarchal and nationalistic structures that act as brakes on global capitalism, finally unleashing the market's unrestricted flow of desire.

 

Land writes:

 

"The only resolutely revolutionary politics is feminist in orientation [...] It is because women are the historical realisation of the potentially euphoric synthetic or communicative function which patriarchy both exploits and inhibits that they are invested with a revolutionary destiny, and it is only through their struggle that politics will be able to escape from all fatherlands." (78)

 

Whilst praising Luce Irigaray's meticulous analysis of patriarchal power, Land says the political solutions she suggests "are often feebly nostalgic, sentimental, and pacifistic" (78). It is only Wittig who has "adequately grasped the inescapably military task faced by any serious revolutionary feminism" (79). 

 

Land argues that liberating women from an ethno-geographical identity will result in a revolutionary subversion of the state.  He dismisses liberal feminism and reformism as co-opted mechanisms that simply give women access to wealth while leaving the brutal patriarchal-capitalist system intact.

 

But Land also insists that uprooting the patriarchal endogamy requires a fierce willingness to fight the modern state and he posits feminist violence as crucial. His new Amazons, as schizonomadic agents of feminist chaos, will end the bourgeois order (or Human Security System) not with love and kisses, but bullets and bombs. 

  

He finds it dispiriting that women have historically shown "enormous reluctance [...] to prosecute their struggle with sufficient ruthlessness and aggression [...] feminism is often particularly fastidious in this respect, even reverting to absurd mystical and Ghandian [sic] ideologies" (79).  

 

Land calls this reluctance idealistic recoil and insists that terror and atrocity are "the very motor" (79) of politics and that a "revolutionary war against a modern metropolitan state can only be fought in hell" (79). 

 

This is what Land terms a harsh truth ... 

 

He ends by relating this call to "escalate the cycle of violence without limit" (79) in the name of overthrowing "the contemporary world order " (80), back to Kant, whose philosophy remains for Land at the heart of the problem:

 

"With the abolition [...] of Kantian thought - a sordid cowardice will be washed away [...] But the only conceivable end of Kantianism is the end of modernity, and to reach this we must foster new Amazons in our midst." (80) [f] 

 

 

V.

 

So, what are we to make of all this? 

 

Well, if you're a Nick Land fanboy or happen to fantasise about dominant women, then I suppose you'll say he's speaking here with the voice of a "revolutionary and a feminist male who has shifted into hyperaccelerationist mode" and cheer him on as he sides with futural amazons fighting a guerrilla war that "displaces five thousand years of patriarchal endogamy and the rule of androcracies" [g].

  

But if, like me, you wrote your PhD on various post-Nietzschean forms of politics (including the politics of desire, cruelty, and evil), then you might have certain reservations about those who speak in favour of revolutionary violence and justify even the most atrocious acts and echo Deleuze and Guattari's call for caution at all times [h].  

It seems to me that Nietzsche was right to say that whilst revolutionary violence can be a source of stimulation via the resurrection of the "most savage energies in the shape of the long-buried dreadfulness and excesses of the most distant ages" [i], it can do no more than this. For change of a truly profound nature, it requires something else. Not something noisier or more brutal in character, but, on the contrary, something that administers small doses of change "unremittingly over long periods of time" [j].  

 

In other words, the revaluation of all values involves patience. 

 

Unfortunately, that's probably not a Landian virtue and it might explain why Land fails to give his own philosophy a plausible political identity (although I'm sure he would say that was not something he ever wanted to do). 

 

It might also help to explain how it is Land goes from expressing a desire to escape from all fatherlands to promoting a neoreactionary philosophy based on corporate techno-feudalism and ends up living in Shanghai - which is ironic when one recalls that Nietzsche often characterised Kant as Chinese [k].  

 

 

Notes

 

[a] While the Amazon shown here is an illustration for the 1937 programme for Die Nacht der Amazonen by Albert Reich, this is not to imply that Land would have been anything other than horrified by the open-air Nazi propaganda and variety event held annually in Munich during the period 1936-39. 

      It may have delighted thousands of German spectators with its mix of mythology, racial ideology, and near-naked showgirls dancing or parading on horseback, but I can't imagine it would have been Nick's cup of tea and, as we will see in this post, his Amazons are of a very different kind to those lusted after by the leaders of the Third Reich. 

 

[b] Anne Fortier, The Lost Sisterhood (Ballantine Books, 2014), p. 3. 

 

[c] Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (Routledge, 1992), p. 197.

 

[d] Nick Land, 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity', in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), p. 72. 

      Future page references to this book will be given directly in the post between round brackets.

 

[e] Les Guérillères is today considered a pivotal text for feminist and lesbian thinkers around the world. It was first translated into English by David Le Vey in 1971 and published in a recent edition by the University of Illinois Press, 2007. Wittig clearly had an influence on Land - particularly the idea of Amazonian women leading a violent revolution. Also, for Land, heteronormative lifestyles are one of the major brakes on capital and so Wittig's lesbianism is valued in and of itself. 

 

[f] This invoking of new Amazons is similar to Nietzsche's calling upon a new breed of barbarians who come from the heights and combine spiritual superiority with an excess of physical well-being. See The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (Vintage Books, 1968), IV. 899-900, pp. 478-479. 

 

[g] S. C. Hickman, 'Nick Land: Amazons and the Post-Capitalist World', The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and the Digital Arts (16 December 2016): click here. 

 

[h] In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari write: "Staying stratified - organised, signified, subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us heavier than ever." See ATP, trans. Brian Massumi (The Athlone Press, 1996), p. 161. 

      Land of course violently repudiates Deleuze and Guattari's warnings against the dangers of going too far, too fast and the need to exercise caution. In Land's eyes, this is "a lamentable step backwards from Anti-Oedipus' most audacious innovations, and fatally lays open the latter's unequivocal declaration of war on the strata to the classic compromise-formations and policing of desire that they [D&G] had previously so effectively challenged". - Mackay and Brassier writing in their 'Editor's Introduction' to Nick Land's Fanged Noumena ... p. 30.

 

[i] Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1993), I. 8. 463, p. 169. 

      Admittedly, this is Nietzsche writing in one of his calmer periods and one can find plenty of examples - even in the same work - of him offering support for grand politics and "the greatest and most terrible wars" - HAH, I. 8. 477, p. 176.  

 

[j] Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge University Press, 1986), V. 534, p. 211.

 

[k] Nietzsche called Kant the 'Chinaman of Königsberg' because of the latter's rigid, dogmatic, bureaucratic moralism. See, for example, Beyond Good and Evil § 210 and The Anti-Christ § 11. 

 

 

For the first post in this series of posts on Nick Land's writings in Fanged Noumena (2011), please click here .   

 

 

Jean Baudrillard: Notes on a Biography by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol (Part Two)

Reworked front cover image to Jean Baudrillard 

by Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol 

(Reaktion Books, 2025)

 

'Identity is a dream pathetic in its absurdity.' 

 

 

I.

 

There are several reasons why I like Baudrillard and feel a certain degree of kinship. For one thing, we both come from humble backgrounds ... 

 

If I insist on (but do not identify in terms of) my working class origin, Baudrillard deployed his rusticity "against the intellectual milieu he would inhait for the major part of his life" [21] and often cited his peasant-nature "in order to portray himself as an alien driven into the world of the elite" [21], but never comfortably at home there.  

 

And if he was a prolific writer - publishing over forty books - he retained a certain rural laziness in defiance of an industrial work ethic and its associated values, such as competitiveness and ambition (values which underpin academia as much as they do the world of commerce). 

 

Baudrillard really didn't give a shit about belonging or becoming a benign success: "'I'm something of a [...] barbarian at heart, and I do my best to stay that way'" [21] [a]. 

 

  

II. 

 

Another reason I like Baudrillard: his style of poetry is one I recognise and have tried to emulate; little fragments of language that trigger thoughts rather than feelings (Lawrence calls them pansies). Although his poetic influences - Hölderlin, Rimbaud and Artaud - are not mine and he is a naturally more lyrical writer than I am.    

 

They key point is: Baudrillard's poetic sensibility shaped his later theory which, like the work of other French theorists, is "close to philosophical thought, but more literary and speculative in spirit, and more interdisciplinary in method" [39]. 

 

I loved this style of thinking when I first encountered it in the 1990s and I still love it now; even if others are now returning to common sense and are so over writers like Baudrillard, Barthes, Derrida, et al. 

 

 

III. 

 

Like Sid Vicious, I was too busy playing with my Action Man to really know what was going on in Paris in May '68, but Baudrillard was very much, as a sociologist at Nanterre, Johnny-on-the-spot (if not exactly in the thick of the action). 

 

His attitude to the Situationists, however, was ambivalent: "He accepted Debord's broad definition of the society of the spectacle, but rejected its Marxist theoretical foundations, which he considered far too 'normative'." [45]

 

Baudrillard thought "a more advanced theory of how signs operate in the modern world was needed - to understand images not as travesties of reality but as reality themselves" [46].

 

"Nevertheless Baudrillard sympathized with the Situationists' anti-authoritarian impulses, appreciated their fusion of artistic practice and politics, and enjoyed their Hegelian strategy of 'immanent critique' and attacking from within." [46]

 

Thus, there would "remain something fundamentally 'situationist' about Baudrillard's work" [46] and he cheerfully accepted the image of himself as an intellectual terrorist; i.e., one who blows up ideas and shatters beliefs: I am not a man I am dynamite, as Nietzsche would say [b]. 

  

 

IV.   

 

Yet another reason I like Baudrillard is that he shares my fascination with objects and the way they relate to each other "as a system and a syntax, denoting a world that is more complex than it seems" [50].

 

However, Baudrillard wasn't merely interested in objects as signs and the role they played within human social interactions: 

 

"He was more concerned with the object itself. For him [...] the object allows us to choose a path away from the question of the subject [...] which always tended to be privileged in contemporary philosophy." [50]    

 

It's a slightly magical way of thinking; the object doesn't simply signify - it enchants. Baudrillard thus restores a sense of mystery to the things "we share our world with and normally take for granted" [51]: lamps, mirrors, clocks, chairs, etc. 

 

 

V. 

 

Was Baudrillard a bit of a fraud? 

 

That seems a bit harsh to me.  

 

Nevertheless, his self-presentation as a lone theorist on the outside of everything was "always characteristically ironic and performative" [62] and he participated in many collective projects. 

 

The one thing he did place himself outside of in the early-mid '70s was Marxism, which he came to regard as "nothing other than the mirror-image of bourgeois society because it placed production at the centre of existence and thereby normalized the capitalist system" [65]. 

 

One of his most important works, L'échange symbolique et la mort (1976) [c], attempted a "radically different way of understanding society and culture by turning to both pre-capitalist systems as models and to a range of radical and eclectic French cultural theorists and writers, such as Georges Bataille, Marcel Mauss and Alfred Jarry" [65]. 

 

Now, excess and expenditure were key terms and Baudrillard spoke of sacrifice and death. The book thus consolidated his reputation as "a highly idiosyncratic and controversial thinker, inhabiting the margins of conventional sociology or philosophy" [65]. 

 

In brief: symbolic exchange is an alternative political economy to the one imagined by Marxism and it "confounds the system of complete exchangeability or reversibility of signs that defines modern capitalism" [66].     

 

It also lets death back into the game (as the ultimate challenge). 

 

I know that, thanks to The Matrix (1999) [d], if people can name one book by Baudrillard it's Simulacra and Simulation. But, if asked to name the one text that really sets the scene for his later work and in which he becomes "no longer just a leading representative of French theory but an enigmatic, provocative and, eventually, iconic figure" [67], then it would have to be Symbolic Exchange and Death.    

 

  

Notes

 

[a] Having said that, Fantin and Nicol say that Baudrillard "would always harbour a paradoxical sene of resentment that he was never fully accepted by the French philosophical establishment" (2025, p. 27).  

 

[b] See Nietzsche writing in Ecce Homo, 'Why I Am a Destiny' (1). In the following section (2), Nietzsche adds: "I know joy in destruction to a degree corresponding to my strength for destruction ..." I am quoting from the English translation by R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1979), p. 127.

      Baudrillard's self-characterisation as a terrorist can be found in Simulacres et Simulation (1981), where he writes: "I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us." I am quoting from the English translation by Sheila Faria Glaser (University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 163.   

 

[c] This work was translated into English as Symbolic Exchange and Death, by Iain Hamilton Grant (Sage Publications, 1993).

 

[d] In The Matrix (dir. the Wachowski's, 1999), the protagonist Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, hides a floppy disk inside a copy of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation - and so it was author and book suddenly found a whole new level of fame. 

      However, Baudrillard being Baudrillard, he distanced himself from the enormously successful movie by declaring that it was 'the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce'. See 'The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview with Jean Baudrillard', International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, 1/2 (July 2004). 

      The main issue Baudrillard had with the film was that, in his view, it completely missed the point of his work and confused the classical Platonic problem of illusion with the postmodern problem of simulation. For an interesting discussion of this, see the essay entitled 'Why Baudriilard Hated The Matrix: And Why He Was Wrong', on The Living Philosophy (17 April 2022): click here.      

 

 

To read part one of this post on Emmanuelle Fantin and Bran Nicol's biography of Jean Baudrillard, click here. 

 

Part three of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

Part four of this post can be read by clicking here. 

 

 

On the Politics of Accelerationism Contra Slowness

Jamie Reid, Nowhere Bus (2005)

giclee mounted cotton rag print (79 x 90.5 cm) 

bonhams.com

 

 

I. 

 

As everyone knows, the Sex Pistols were going nowhere - but they were going nowhere fast! Speed was the very essence of punk; even if travelling by bus [1]. Indeed, one might argue that Malcolm McLaren and Jamie Reid both subscribed to a political strategy that is now termed accelerationism ... 

 

In other words, theirs was a revolutionary project founded upon the idea that radical social and political change could only be achieved via an injection of speed (or chaos) into the current system in order to destabilise it and thus accelerate its demise. 

 

When everything is rotten and on the point of collapse, the task is not to try and reform or improve the situation, but, rather, to push the process of decay further and faster beyond the point of no return. Ultimately, the Sex Pistols wanted to make things worse - not better; McLaren and Reid believed in the ruins of culture, not its grand monuments. 

 

II. 

 

I'm not sure from where (or whom) McLaren and Reid adapt this line of thinking - one which attracts extremists on both the far-left and far-right - but, for me, it has its roots in the Nietzschean idea of pushing (or kicking) over that which is already falling [2]. 

 

One is also obliged to mention the work of Deleuze and Guattari in their seminal two-volume study Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in which they speak of accelerating the processes of the former all the way to a singular outer limit [3], effectively injecting Marxism with a little madness and speed.

 

And of course, it was from his idiosyncratic and delirious reading of Deleuze and Guattari, fuelled by amphetamine, that the British philosopher most associated with the theory of accelerationism, Nick Land, drew many key ideas in relation to his own brand of techno-nihilism that affirms rapid advances in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, human enhancement (or replacement), etc. [4]

 

 

III. 

    

As dangerously exciting as the idea of accelerationism is - and despite my own long advocacy of speed over slowness: Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! - I find myself now increasingly drawn toward the idea that it might, in fact, be advantageous and desirable to slow things down; that slowness is another softly-spoken S-term to be added to the list that includes silence, secrecy, and shadows ... [5]   

 

Of course, this might just be a sign that one is getting older, but not necessarily any wiser: I'm very aware of the fact that it was only when he had passed 60 years of age and approched the end of his life, that Malcolm McLaren also embraced the idea of slowness in various cultural forms, including slow art and film [6].

 

Thus, for example, when discussing his series of 'musical paintings' entitled Shallow 1-21 (2008), he was very keen to explain how they were based upon the idea of slowness; that speed and the idea of going nowhere fast wasn't attractive to him any longer; that Damien Hirst's spin paintings were essentially boring [7]. 

 

McLaren now wanted individuals to take their time; to focus on things and delight in the nuances and details; to enjoy the moment that leads up to the event or action as much as the event or action itself; to appreciate that Jamie Reid's bus destination could, with but one stroke of a pen, be transformed from Nowhere to Now/here - i.e., an immanent utopia that exists in the bonds between people, not the dissolution of those bonds.   

A still from Malcolm McLaren's Shallow 1-21 (2008) 

showing a woman slowly eating some grapes
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art

   

   

Notes

 

[1] I'm referring of course to the Jamie Reid artwork used to promote the Sex Pistols' single 'Pretty Vacant' (Virgin Records, 1977) which featured two buses; one headed to Nowhere and the other destined to terminate in Boredom. 

      This amusing image, however, pre-dates punk; Reid was reworking an earlier graphic produced for his radical Suburban Press, having appropriated the buses idea and design from a 1973 pamphlet published by the American situationist group Point-Blank! In 2010, the activist David Jacobs, founder of Point-Blank!, claimed that he was the one who should be credited with the original concept and design. 

 

[2] In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes: 

      "O my brothers, am I then cruel? But I say: That which is falling, should also be pushed! Everything of today - it is falling, it is decaying: who would support it? But I - want to push it too!" 

      - 'Of Old and New Law Tables' (20), trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Books, 1969), p. 226.

 

[3] In Anti-Oedipus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari advocate an acceleration of the forces and flows that capitalism has itself unleashed: "To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization." [239]

      It should be stressed, however, that whilst they think capitalism "produces an awesome schizophrenic accumulation of energy" [34], this also acts as its limit, which is why "schizophrenia is not the identity of capitalism, but on the contrary its difference, its divergence, and its death" [246]. 

      Page references are to the English edition, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (The Athlone Press, 1994).

 

[4] Readers interested in knowing more about Land's thinking in this area might like to see his essay 'A Quick-and-Dirty Introduction to Accelerationism' (2017), which can be located as a five page pdf on the Internet Archive: click here. 

      Ultimately, for Land, capitalism is something akin to an alien form of intelligence and a means of opening up the future. Thus, philosophers truly interested in change have a duty to affirm such regardless of the consequences to humanity or the planet. 

      See also Robin MacKay and Armen Avanessian (eds.), #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Urbanomic, 2014). 

 

[5] See the post 'In Defence of Isis Veiled' (9 Sept 2023), in which I suggest what a practice of occultism might mean today in an age of transparency: click here. 

 

[6] On the other hand, it's possible that this wasn't a sign of age, but an attempt by McLaren to get with the times and create a contemporary space for himself. For the slow movement as a cultural initiative encouraging individuals to reject the hustle and bustle of modern life, had, by the early 2000s, been (ironically) gathering pace for a number of years. 

      The core idea at the heart of the slow movement's philosophy is that faster is not necessarily better and that one should learn to relax a little so as to enjoy the moment and be able to appreciate and reflect upon things without feeling hurried or distracted. 

      The slow movement has found expression in many different areas; from slow art and photography, to slow fashion and food. There is also a political aspect to the movement; one that calls for local governance models that are inclusive and centered on deliberative democracy and community empowerment. 

      All this sounds very nice, but one suspects that this is essentially a middle-class movement; that the working class can't afford to take things slowly and lead a more leisurely lifestyle.

 

[7] I'm paraphrasing McLaren speaking in conversation with Prof. Jo Groebel, Direktor of the Deutsch Digital Institute, Berlin, at the American Academy in Berlin (29 Oct 2008): click here. Malcolm introduces the concept of slowness at 42:10. 

      For those who may not be familiar with the work, Shallow 1-21 is an 86-minute video consisting of 21 'musical paintings' that combine (but do not synchronise) musical snippets with short film clips - the latter appropriated from old sex movies - into a slow moving and hypnotically layered work of art.

 

 

For a follow up post to this one on making haste slowly and learning how, as an artist, one might be quick, even when standing still, please click here. 

 

The Hopi Indian Series: Kachina Dolls

Hopi Kachina dolls (aka Katsina figures)

Bowers Museum (Santa Ana, California) 

For more info click here. 

 

 

I.

 

As torpedophiles will know, I'm a big fan of all types of doll: from wooden dolls to rag dolls; sex dolls to voodoo dolls. But I think my favourite dolls at the moment are Hopi kachina dolls - once described by Paul Éluard as the most beautiful things in the world [1] ...

 

 

II. 

 

Typically carved from the root of the cottonwood tree and traditionally given to young girls (and new brides) of the Hopi tribe, kachina dolls represent the immortal beings - the katsinam - that control various aspects of the natural world, such as rainfall, and act as messengers between humans and the spirit world.  

 

Whilst, invariably, these fabulous-looking dolls are now sold as examples of Native American folk art to the public, they still, I think, retain something of their powerful magic - although they obviously do not speak to us as they do to the Hopi, for whom they are sacred objects with more than merey a decorative function or an aesthetic charm.

 

Having said that, it should be pointed out that the figures only began to take on a more naturalistic look and have a professional finish once white Americans began to take an interest in buying and collecting them during the twentieth-century. I'm not quite sure what it tells us about the Hopi, or the transformative effects of the free market, but an attention to detail was only shown once there was money to be made.

Elders of the Tribe may not have been very happy at first, but even they were impressed that as the carvings became more extravagant and consumer demand went up, prices also rose significantly. From once selling for a few cents by the roadside, some kachina dolls carved by those recognised as genuine artists can now fetch up to $10,000.

 

So, having said earlier they still retain something of their powerful magic, let me now qualify that by adding that this could simply be the allure of commercial value; i.e., more capitalist authenticity than religious authenticity.   

 

Notes

 

[1] Paul Éluard writing in a letter to his wife in late May 1927. See Lettres à Gala (Gallimard, 1984), p. 22. A bilingual (English/French) edition ed. Pierre Dreyfus, trans. Jesse Browner, was published by Paragon House in 1989.  

      The Surrealists, of course, were well-known for their love of work produced by indigenous peoples (or what was known at the time as primitive art).

 

 

To read other posts in the Hopi Indian series, click here and/or here.  

 

 

eBay and the Question of Holocaust Memoribilia

Image: BSkyB

The mock-horror and fake outrage that greeted the news that online auction site eBay does good business selling mementos from the Holocaust was, of course, all-too-predictable. 

When will the editors of The Mail on Sunday simply admit that such trade - just like child pornography - is inevitable in a free market in which, as Marx pointed out long ago, all values are resolved into exchange value and all objects and events are commodified and given price tags.

Capitalism doesn't care about respecting the memory of the dead anymore than it cares about the rights of the living. It is systematically amoral and inhuman: everything is permissible. To paraphrase Marx once more, under capitalism all the sensitive bonds and small kindnesses that tie us together are dissolved until all that's left is shameless greed, naked self-interest, and callous cash payment. 

Money is substituted by capitalism for the very notion of a social code and the possibility of living a good life. And whilst love of money may not be the root of all evil, it certainly doesn't seem to encourage ethical behaviour. And so it is that traders have no qualms about adding a small bar code beneath the yellow Star of David attached to the striped uniforms of death camp inmates.

It's a financial solution to the awkward question of genocide: what shall we do with the remains? Nazis everywhere will be smiling ...

Should We Lose the Lads' Mags?

When the defenders of so-called lads' mags argue that there is nothing wrong or shameful about the naked female form, you know they are either willfully misunderstanding the arguments made against pornography, or that they are morons. 

Personally, I tend to think that they are cynical and slimy rather than stupid. Thus they know perfectly well that the objection of feminists like Kat Banyard is not to female flesh per se, but to the sexual objectification and exploitation of female flesh.  

And they understand - as we all understand - how the young girls who model in such magazines are obliged to adopt a familiar series of poses and display their nakedness within a recognizable erotic environment. Reclining bodies on a bed, or bodies crawling around on all fours sticking out parts for penetration are not simply unclothed. They are, rather, naked for a purpose within a context of meaning and they don't so much expose the flesh as promote its desirability and advertise its availability as a commodity.

This doesn't mean I automatically lend support to the UK Feminista and Object campaign to "lose the lads' mags" from the shelves of supermarkets, but it does mean that there remains an important debate to be had on the intimate relationship between pornography, sexism and capital. 

Arguably, porn has always been the secretly privileged discourse of bourgeois society ...