Camus part 2: Nomos of the Airport

Global replacism as moral framework

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.”