NOW UNLOCKED - Camus part 2: Nomos of the Airport

Global replacism as moral framework

Edit 18 October 2024: This is part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 is here and part 3 is here. I’ve lifted the paywall on part 1 already, with subscriber discussion here.

I’ll do the same with part 3 next week.

Credited with coining the term “The Great Replacement” and famous - indeed notorious - as a byword for “conspiracy theory”, Renaud Camus has become occluded by a mushroom-cloud of accusation and opprobrium, often at the hands of people who have read little of his actual work.

This is the second of a three-part essay on that work, which I’m undertaking for two principal reasons. Firstly, because while Camus is indeed a fiery polemicist, he is innocent of the conspiracy-mongering with which his name is usually tarred. Having read a little of his writing, I believe his ideas deserve to be better understood. Then, if they are dismissed, this can at least be for things he has said, rather than views imputed to him in bad faith. Secondly, and more importantly, because Camus’ work deserves to be better understood: his thinking on the ideology he calls “replacism” occupies a politically unclassifiable and woefully underpopulated terrain adjacent to several areas of urgent contemporary importance, including ecology, cultural transmission, and feminism. Notwithstanding contemporary taboos, anyone thinking seriously about long-term human sustainability should be reading Camus.

In the first part of this series, Are We Replaceable?, I set out to disaggregate “replacism” from the accusations of “conspiracy theory” that have - variously via bad faith or misunderstanding - become attached to Camus’ work. I offered a reading of “replacism” as ideology, in connection with what Carl Schmitt calls “the spirit of technicity”. Since I published this, Camus’ translators have been kind enough to send me some more recent material, which develops themes in Enemy of the Disaster and addresses a number of the points that I noted in part 1 seemed absent in that earlier work.

In particular, a French-language excerpt from Camus’ 2022 La Dépossession, subtitled Du remplacisme globale, or On global replacism, presents the management theorist Frederick Winslow Taylor as a key thinker in the evolution of replacism. In it Camus shows how Taylor proposed a notionally narrow set of methods, but always believed in the broader applicability of the management mindset. This aspiration has since been realised. In discussing this, I’ll set Camus’ reading of Taylor against my own of Martin Heidegger’s classic 1954 lecture on technology, looking in particular at the epistemological violence Taylorism both enacts and occludes: a kind of unseeing, that I’ll connect with Camus’ own coinage: “nocence”. I’ll discuss how this manifests in our built environment, and in the wider sociocultural implications of what I’ve called “the nomos of the airport”. And with these references in place, I’ll explain how Camus’ work deepens my own inquiry into the the industrialisation of humans: what we might call the replacism of the body.

A Replacist Origin-Story

What is the origin of global replacism? There is, Camus points out in La Dépossession, always an origin to the origin: one could argue that the roots of replacism lie in England’s 18th-century industrial revolution, or indeed the scientific one of the previous century: a hinge moment at which progress came, for the first time, to be identified with what can be measured. But for Camus, the emblematic figure is the inventor of Taylorist management theory.

“Frederick Winslow Taylor”, Camus argues¹, “is to replacism what Marx is to Marxism". For Camus, he is emblematic because his management doctrine is blind to everything emergent, contingent, qualitative or immeasurable. It does not meet the world as it is, but instead imposes a kind of non-consensual epistemological re-ordering: “counting everything, without pausing for acquiescence”.

For Camus, management in this sense implies a new anthropology: what Taylor calls “a complete mental revolution”. But this isn’t an idealistic revolution, aspiring to the good of all mankind. Rather, it is a revolution of elite moral withdrawal: its result is an order in which the manager is liberated from any benevolent obligation to that which is managed. And those thus managed - the ordinary man, that is - is now “a machine, for all that he is sometimes an animal; but, when he is an animal, this is in that that animals are machines.”

But humans are not animals. Animals are not machines. Counting everything without waiting for acquiescence really is a kind of aggression.

You may be wondering by now: how can we speak of a mode of perception as aggressive? What kind of woke nonsense is this? What I want to do here, though, is free the idea of “epistemological violence” from just that straitjacket, and bring it to bear on topics that are strictly forbidden within such political dogmas. But first we need a bit more context, to understand what I mean here by ‘violence’.

Perhaps the most prescient treatment of this question is Martin Heidegger’s 1954 lecture The Question Concerning Technology. A detailed reading of Camus’ “replacism” against Heidegger’s phenomenological account of “technology” will have to wait for a future essay; for our purposes here, let’s just note that as I’ve outlined here, Heidegger characterises technology not as a set of machines, methods, skills, or tools, but a mode of encountering reality.

When we organise our world under the rubric of technology, everything around us comes to be seen not as it is, but only inasmuch as it’s legible as resources to be instrumentalised: what Heidegger calls“enframing” (Gestell) in which everything comes to be present only as “standing-reserve”. And when Heidegger speaks of a “challenging-forth” by technology of those aspects of a thing that may be understood within the order of standing-reserve, it evokes the same sense of casual perceptual violence as Camus’ account of Taylorism. What both describe is mode of epistemological refactoring blind to the full nature of what it re-orders, and which then uses that blindness to justify an extractive relation to the world.

In The Question Concerning Technology, Heidegger discusses those ways we have re-factored the world outside our heads in this way. But a key recurring theme in my work is what happens when we extend enframing to humans. Up till now, I’ve understood the decisive moment in this story as being the contraceptive revolution, both for its inversion of the medical paradigm and for its decisive contribution to extending the logic of commodification to our bodies. But Camus shows how the path was long since cleared for this revolution by Taylor’s management classic, written 1911.

Taylorism radically reframed (or rather, enframed) human workers as resources, whose nature is of interest only inasmuch as understanding it is conducive to the maximisation of productivity. That this was nonconsensual and involved a measure of covert violence was, Camus notes, well understood by Taylor’s contemporaries. Following the publication of The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, an American government enquiry was conducted, into the risk of his approach reviving the (then only recently abolished) order of chattel slavery. But, Camus points out, this represents less a causal relationship than the fact that “scientific management” emerged from the same overall paradigm, across both slavery and management theory. “Both reflect the same mechanistic vision of human work,” he argues, “and both rest on the premise that careful observation will enable the discovery of physical laws that will guarantee the maximum return.”

Those physical laws guaranteeing maximum return require, in other words, enframing humans, and thus by extension minimising or excluding what can’t be monetised. This is accomplished by demoting all that may be understood phenomenologically about a person - that is, through inductive encounter and relationship - in favour of all that may be ascribed to them in the abstract. This is summed by Taylor’s bold assertion, quoted by Camus, that “In the past, man has been first; in the future, the system must be first”. This means, in effect, rendering workers “as disposable as possible, as dispensable, as replacable - in sum, as little human”.

Taylor never intended this to stop at the narrow field of factory management. While Principles of Scientific Management presents Taylorism as being chiefly of interest to engineers, as Camus points out “work” does not appear in the books’ title. Rather, it merely discusses the principles in question without specifying what is to be thus managed. And from the introduction on, Taylor emphasises that these principles are applicable across all areas of human activity, from farms, to housing, and even religious worship.

Nomos of the Airport

And so it has proved. A century on, it’s hard to dispute the sense that Taylorism has burst the bounds of industrial management and become a social, aesthetic, and moral order. What does the world look like, then, when we organise it in accordance with the belief that what is most salient about us is what makes us abstractly legible, tradeable, and interchangeable within what Taylor calls “the system”?

Perhaps the most successful and aspirational instance of such an environment is an international airport. Understood as a site of moral as much as practical activity, an airport is as sacred to the replacist order as the great medieval cathedrals were to the Christian one. The architecture is as elaborate and often grandiose in scale as a cathedral; the purification rituals imposed before a supplicant may enter the inner sanctum are every bit as elaborate as those required by even the holiest of religious centres. And the replacist moral hierarchy is evident both in the activity enabled by an airport, and in the ways individual visitors are addressed and directed by the airport environment.

An airport is maximally replacist. It conveys the sense of existing outside place and time. Its practical purpose is to facilitate the transit of goods and people across geographies as frictionlessly as possible: to make us maximally mobile, liquid, interchangeable. The only activities made easily available once admitted to a departure lounge are the main forms of citizenship within the replacist order: spending money, and being on the way somewhere. Concessions to geography and specific culture are minimised. Human needs are acknowledged and accommodated either at a price (for example buying food, rest, or the privilege of silence in a premium lounge) or at best grudgingly when these cannot be easily commercialised (multifaith bus shelters, lactation pods).

And if the airport itself is a repository of replacist moral hierarchy, its very architecture shaped to marginalise those things we can’t sell, so too in terms of its wider function it expresses and enables replacist praxis. International airports don’t just draw in people, generate income, and enact the sacred placelessness and unrelatedness of the Taylorist social paradigm. They also serve as principal arteries for the mass international circulation of people, understood in replacist terms as interchangeable units shorn of roots or cultural specificity.

Camus’ writing focuses on the specific dynamics of subaltern migration to Europe, largely from the global South. But the replacism facilitated by the nomos of the airport is not confined to this mode, as illustrated by the impact on diverse international cities of “digital nomads”: habitués of the airport, unencumbered young single men and women who work remotely in fields such as tech, media, or crypto while leading a transient, rootless, existence drifting from one international city to another.

As described in one recent report, such “digital nomads” bring with them the nomos of the airport: of human needs repackaged as vending opportunities, of optionality-at-a-price, of rational transaction over organic ongoing relationship. Despite not being the subaltern migrant demographics at the heart of so much contemporary European and American culture war, these individuals are also apostles of replacism:

The digital nomads’ visits are transitory, but they leave neighborhoods permanently transformed. Today, there are streets in Medellín, as in Mexico City or Canggu, that look more like Bushwick — where English is more common than the local language, and where the streets are dotted with brightly painted coworking hubs and prissy restaurants serving international cuisine. The more nomads arrive, the more these locations begin to resemble one another. Building exteriors retain their historic character, but interiors converge to a sterile homogeneity of hotdesking, free charging outlets, affordable coffee, and Wi-Fi with purchase.

We might even argue they are fuller representatives of replacism than the migrants Camus deplores. For where low-skilled migrants into Europe in most cases bring a version of their culture of origin with them, “digital nomads” are much closer to the maximally fungible, interchangeable individuals constructed by replacism as the ideal human subject.

Nocence is Violence

Rather than replacing one local culture with another, at scale the presence of digital nomads replaces local culture with the global culture of culturelessness. But in each case, the same kind of violence is at work: one for which I didn’t have a word, until Camus coined it: nocence. In his 2010 essay Nocence, instrument of The Great Replacement, Camus uses this term to describe a host of forms of social damage: crime, degradation of the social fabric, and religious and ethnic conflict, all of which he understands as manifestations of - or enabled by - nocence.

What is this nocence? In my reading, behind each of these forms of harm lies the epistemological violence performed by what Camus and Heidegger respectively call replacism, or enframing. That is, the insult offered to the world by treating it as legible only inasmuch as it may be used as resource. This inheres in what Camus calls a refusal “to consider as a whole” (my italics) what is occurring: that is, a blindness to systems, ecologies, and relationships. Thanks to this exclusion of holistic and relational perception, problems of relationality and normativity “appear to float in the air totally independent of reality and have not the slightest chance of ever finding solutions because they have no explanations”.

The result is visible across multiple kinds of public damage:

pollution in in the ecological sense of the term: attacks on nature and the quality of life, the quality of the air, the quality of the water, the quality of the landscape, and of our national heritage. It is also all the attacks on person and property (the famous and oh-so-delicately named incivilities), up to and including organized crime.

Understood thus, it names a phenomenon I’ve been trying to describe for some years: the violence involved in elevating abstraction over phenomenology, “the system” over “man”. For while nocence opens new possibilities for economic gain, it does so by dissolving and exhausting the domain of meaning pattern, repetition, ecology, and relationality - that is, those aspects of a thing that can’t be privatised, and thus by definition have to be discarded in order to view a person or thing as standing-reserve.

It’s much easier to treat animals as production units in a factory farm if you don’t give them names or notice their capacity to feel pain or fear. Similarly, it’s easier to treat humans as machines in the Taylorist sense if you discard specific relationships. Nocence, that is, attacks relationship. And when we recall that, as the late biosemiotician Wendy Wheeler noted, meaning as such inheres not in abstraction but in pattern and relationship, it becomes clear that what Camus calls “replacism” and Heidegger “enframing” maps closely to what futurist Yuval Noah Harari called the “deal” underlying all of modernity.

In this deal, Harari argues, “humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power”. But where Harari seems relatively sanguine about this trade-off, it is far more radical and consequential than this would suggest - not to mention less consensual. For if “giving up meaning” sounds like a choice we might make, in reality this doesn’t usually look like the opt-in pleasure of frictionlessness and agency-at-a-price that we find synthesised within the carefully ringfenced high-security domain of the airport. For most, it’s a kind of expropriation, that falls most heavily on those least able to resist.

Bringing together Heidegger, Harari, and Camus within the air-conditioned airport, then, we can fine-tune the association between replacism and the United States. Replacism, we might say, is one of the engines of modernity itself. If it seems closely identified with the American empire, this is not because there’s something reprehensible about Americans as people, encountered in relationship. But at least for the last century, the propagation of modernity and the propagation of American power have been, by and large, the same process. Nocence, meanwhile, comprises the uncounted, multifarious, ever-increasing costs of that process.

And here we may also find the link between Camus’ heavily proscribed arguments on migration, more socially-acceptable ones on environmental stewardship (a topic also dear to Camus), and my own area of interest, which is women and children. For the corollary of nocence for the natural world is ecocide, and for animals the horrors of extinction in the wild or factory farming in captivity. But these insults also extend, usually with as little overt consent, to human societies as well. Some of these harms are at least somewhat socially acceptable to notice, across both sides of the political aisle: social atomisation, for example, or the marginalised and often exploited nature of altruistic, caring relations. Camus is unusual in his willingness to extend this critique of replacism, and with it of nocence, the destruction of relationship, to those harms that proceed at scale from the replacist delusion that relationship may be disregarded at the level of whole peoples.

But as Camus himself makes clear, the critique goes further still. For if nocence destroys relationship as a side-effect of replacism, this is inevitably not an event but a process: a kind of blind appetite endlessly in search of new, still-unexhausted relational resources. In his 2017 Appeal of Colombey, collected in Enemy of the Disaster, Camus captures this sense of hunger, and its dehumanising endpoint:

A specter is haunting Europe and the world. It is replacism, the tendency to replace everything with its normalized, standardized, interchangeable double: the original by its copy, the authentic by its imitation, the true by the false, mothers by surrogate mothers, culture by leisure activities and entertainment, knowledge by diplomas, the countryside and city by the universal suburb, the native by the non- native, Europe by Africa, men by women, men and women by robots, peoples by other peoples, humanity by a savage, undifferentiated, stan- dardized, infinitely interchangeable posthumanity.

In a forthcoming translated work, provocatively titled Elegy for Enoch Powell, Camus points out that the moral force of replacism is a byproduct of making man himself a product. For doing so collapses any distinction between free circulation of goods and services, and the free circulation of people, meaning the economic interests of big business merge seamlessly with the moral rubric of “equality” in a vision of humans not as in relationship with others, but interchangeable: what Camus calls “undifferentiated human matter”.

But we can also enframe individual people within the same logic: a move the produces what I’ve characterised elsewhere as the “Meat Lego” mindset. Here, in this replacism of the body, we are invited to view our own bodies via the nomos of the airport: not as a whole or in relationship either with themselves or with the world, but as separable, interchangeable fleshy elements - bits of Lego, made of meat.

Reading Camus on Taylor has not altered my view that the contraceptive revolution is a watershed moment, in propelling us toward the replacism of the body. But his analysis offers a vital insight, on the intermediary contribution of management theory, in degrading our shared anthropologies to the point of being willing to accept having the nomos of the airport inscribed in our flesh itself. This analysis also offers new lines of reflection on the otherwise bewildering question of how this replacism of the flesh became so established, and so accepted, seemingly so quickly.

The answer is: it didn’t. We’ve been preparing for this moment for over a century.

More about all this, though, in part 3. Stay tuned!

1. Translations of La Dépossesion here are my own