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What follows could have been an essay or an interview In the event, it resembles the one as little as it resembles the other The images are nearly all by Vanessa Hodgkinson David Trotter supplied most of the words   This is the story of a critic’s encounter with work by an artist who had encountered some of his ideas Although the artist the story describes is an artist and the critic a critic, it’s not always easy to tell exactly where in the art the artist ends and the critic begins, and exactly where in the criticism the critic ends and the artist begins What follows is the log of a conversation which has been going on in various ways for about six months, and will be continued It is the record of images that would not have been made and thoughts that would not have been thought had two individuals not chanced to become conversant   Techno-primitivism made its first public appearance in an essay I published in the London Review of Books in August 2012 on DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover Lady Chatterley’s Lover is full-on primitivist During the First World War, Lawrence finally became convinced that Europe was in the process of destroying itself, and that renewal – if renewal were still possible – could only come from sources in a mentality at once beyond and before the civilisation it had brought about In works like Fantasia of the Unconscious, St Mawr, The Plumed Serpent, and Mornings in Mexico, he drew a stark contrast between a white European and North American civilisation rendered lethally sterile by its commitment to Christian-Platonic idealism and doctrines of scientific-industrial ‘progress’, and that of aboriginal peoples whose custodianship of ancient intuitive and animist modes of consciousness had encouraged momentous if ultimately futile resistance to colonial expansion After the war, he travelled to Italy, Ceylon, Australia, and New Mexico in search of the few remaining custodians His letters of this period express both contempt for Western attitudes and ways of life in toxic decline, and uncertainty about what the available alternatives might add up to