On Askesis and Form-of-Life

 

1.

Whenever I start a new journal, I always open the first entry in the same way, with a reflection on the act of journal writing and its importance. I’ve decided something like that is in order here; firstly, as my use of this blog has taken a downturn over the last two years and as such is in need of reviving. But also because some recent AI assisted self-analysis has pointed out the broader importance of this activity.

My employer recently saw fit to grant me access to the latest iteration of Claude, no doubt in the hope of accelerating our products to market, or perhaps at least accelerating myself into redundancy. The long-term effects remain to be seen, but in the meantime, I’ve also been using it as an interlocutor for my writing. Perhaps a slight indulgence, but I’ve been impressed at its ability to synthesise different themes across articles and essays that cover a range of divergent topics. I suppose if generative AI is meant to be good at anything then it’s this kind of pattern recognition. But what was fascinating was that it highlighted several core concerns and approaches that I was unaware of or had perhaps forgotten. Particularly interesting was its insistence that the concepts of Askesis – as expressed through practices of writing, reading and listening -   and of Form-of-Life, were the key to pretty much everything I’ve done. Now, I’m a little suspicious of this ‘revelatory’ function, which has the effect of imposing a unity and purpose to a collection of writings compiled over many years and produced for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, after asking it to speculate as to why the blog is called Askesis, it came up with this:

A major thread in his work is the erosion of autonomy under modern regimes of governance. He worries that identity is increasingly shaped by systems of classification, visibility, recognition and administration. Against that background, askēsis suggests the cultivation of a self capable of resisting automatic adaptation to the system. The title may imply that autonomy is not simply given. It has to be practiced. One has to train oneself to perceive the forces shaping one’s desires, identities and assumptions. So, calling the blog Áskēsis may indicate a counter-practice: a disciplined attempt to resist being passively formed by modern systems.

That’s not bad, though the part that I hadn’t considered was the function of askesis as a kind of dissident practice, a way to personally resist the forces in contemporary culture that chip away at our autonomy rather than just analyse them. In my first post in 2013 I’d made it clear that the notion of askesis I was invoking was derived from the late work of Michel Foucault. As I said back then: I’m using the word in its older archaic meaning which denotes not so much a rejection of worldly pleasures aimed at a regime of self renunciation, but rather a practice or exercise of self on self; in this case using writing as its means. I added a little joke regarding the etymology of the word and what a blog centred on a monkish ascetic life might consist of: perhaps a litany of temptations refused, or worldly pleasures forsaken in pursuit of a transcendent holy life or profound inner peace? That was a joke then, but over time I think my intellectual practice has turned out to aim at something very much like that, though not in an obvious way.

Another thing Claude did was to claim to have detected a darkening of my outlook and a sharper ethical focus on technocracy and ‘civilizational issues’ during and in the wake of the pandemic which reflected a general radicalisation of my worldview, where what was previously analysed at a distance was now being played out in real time. This is a sound observation, one also made by my real-life non-AI friends. It’s also significant as the pandemic was the moment when I couldn’t help but see myself and my future implicated in what was occurring. I described that moment, when Boris Johnson announced the second full lockdown in December 2020, in an essay a couple of years later:

…something snapped, and I recall the apoplexy I felt at the prospect of another interminable period of lockdown and isolation. Up until that point I had approached the pandemic with as cool and analytical an eye as possible. Neither weep nor laugh but understand. Spinoza’s well known encomium to enlightened enquiry was a straightforward response to an otherwise chaotic and unforeseen situation. But in truth, this rational attempt to grasp what was happening was always destined to have its limits. When the world is changed we cannot avoid being changed along with it, and as the Winter dragged on I found myself turning towards thoughts of a pessimistic and atavistic kind.

In hindsight I’ve come to realise that evening was the subjective break which began the process of transition from one form-of-life towards another; from my life in London, with certain well trodden routines, honed over at least a decade and a half, to another quite different life outside the city.

2.

Some clarification is in order when talking about these ideas, since it’s easy to mistake form-of-life with lifestyle or some other more obviously chosen aspect of human existence that we create primarily by our own sustained volition through time. As a starting point it’s worth going back to Giorgio Agamben’s clearest definition of the term from his short book Means Without Ends; “By the term form-of-life, on the other hand, I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.” Within Agamben’s philosophical project, this basic definition is ranged against its opposite, bare (naked) life; the administered, visible and governable lowest common denominator of human existence abstracted from any particular form and which is the object of sovereign power. In the same passage Agamben emphasises that the specific ways of a form-of-life are never reducible to a set of facts, but instead are always possibilities of life, of potentiality itself. A form-of-life is thus not a life that happens to have a particular set of characteristics; being a father, being a worker, being gay. Its basic characteristic is precisely that its way of living remains a possibility. Or, in a line that echoes Heidegger’s famous description of Dasein as the being for whom Being is in question, Agamben writes that “a life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself”.

This idea can on face value appear a little circular. What is the relationship between form-of-life and ways of life? And how can we ever attain a stable form-of-life if the potential inherent in all that life’s characteristics exist as permanent and open possibilities? What is clear is that for Agamben a form-of-life cannot be chosen or at least chosen in advance. If it could, the concept wouldn’t have the foundational ontological status that Agamben affords it. Instead, it would be something like an addendum to our own volition, which would be the ultimate seat of potential – which is essentially the notion of freedom articulated by Sartre.

In contrast, for Wittgenstein - from who the concept originates - form of life (Lebensform) denotes the practical, embodied, social background within which concepts, language and practices gain their sense, notably in his example of language games. The idea, as expressed sparingly in his Philosophical Investigations, is less the kind of ontological-political concept found in Agamben’s writing than a description of the background conditions of possibility that allow language to mean anything at all. Hence his famous comment that if a lion could speak, we wouldn’t be able to understand him because we do not share the same fundamental experiential ground.

Nevertheless, form-of-life for both thinkers is a fundamental mode of existence and as such not something that is easily transformed (especially so when it comes to being a lion!) One of Wittgenstein’s most successful interpreters, the American philosopher Stanley Cavell, has developed the concept in a way that plots a course between the other two. For him, form of life (no hyphens) isn’t just the ground which gives language meaning, but is also what makes possible shared human responses, attunement to one another and the ground for acknowledgment (we might say recognition nowadays); these are things we inherit, participate in and can at least go some way to changing. As he writes in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome; “The only thing natural to the human being is its capacity to change its nature, to take on certain forms of social, linguistic life … as natural and to cast them off in favour of others, e.g. when they come to seem unnatural, chafing, confining”. I find the reference here to social forms that appear chafing and confining especially attractive as it suggests that our form of life can become burdensome and that a key characteristic of human beings is their willingness to transcend these burdens to forge something new.

Similarly, Cavell’s emphasis on forms of life constituting the basis for mutual recognition also resonates for me, as one of the factors ante pandemic that led me to move out of London was the sense that part of the substance for functioning social life had been lost there, to be replaced with impersonal systems, screens and apps. This change, which had been coming for a long time, was drastically accelerated during the pandemic. As a result, I increasingly found myself alienated from people and places where I had previously felt at home. Even innocuous exchanges – or lack thereof – in retail environments had developed the character of an encounter with indifferent or hostile aliens. And when negotiating public space, most of all public transport, I couldn’t help but notice how, by their behaviour, that everyone seemed to occupy their own private social world. Even the great British pub, once a global symbol of conviviality (I exaggerate) has been reduced post-pandemic to another overpriced and underwhelming experience in managed decline, itself a victim of the social atomisation it was once a bulwark against. One could argue that big cities have always had this character compared to rural communities and there’s obviously some truth to that. But from my experience, having lived 42 years in London, the precipitous collapse of anything like a shared set of social conventions in the past decade has been jarring. To borrow Cavell’s word for it; living there had really begun to chafe, so it was clear to me that taking practical steps to change this situation was needed.

In this impulse, and Cavell’s treatment of it, we can perhaps glimpse the conceptual link Agamben insists on between form-of-life and a possibility for living that is never exhausted, and which neatly brings us to Claude’s unexpected interpretation on the value of askesis for resisting co-option into modern regimes of governance that diminish autonomy. For without the nurturing and safeguarding of autonomy, which is nothing more than our capacity to give oneself the rule - to use a rather Kantian expression - our possibility for living is greatly diminished.

3.

Glossing these interpretations somewhat, the importance then of askesis, as a work of self on self, is its relationship to the cultivation of autonomy in the face of forces which seek to undermine it, thus coopting us to sovereign power. For me, this practice has been aimed more often than not at those systems and forms of thought which reduce human beings to profiles, data-points, consumers, officially recognised identities and consequently into administrable subjects. This became particularly acute during the pandemic but it’s also what I was doing earlier by analysing contemporary social phenomena like consent classes, activist discourse around intersex conditions/DSDs, the problems of modern personhood and of course bureaucracy. The fruit of this counter-practice (as Claude called it) is autonomy of thought and action, sufficient perhaps to open the door to new ways of living and a form-of-life. Or as Agamben puts it, thought becomes “an experience, an experimentum that has as its object the potential character of life and of human intelligence.” Thought, thus conceived, isn’t merely something that happens inside an individual subject; thought is the experience of one's own potentiality, the awareness that one's life is not exhausted by its currently actualised form. Experimentum is then the appropriate term, since like all true experiments, those conducted in thought and action are a form of test, the ultimate outcome of which is not decided in advance and the failure of which would not extinguish the possibility of future experiments.

I would also contend that the aim of askesis is not only to maintain and build on our intellectual autonomy but also to influence what Martin Heidegger calls our Alltäglichkeit, usually translated in his works as ordinary-everydayness. This is the primary, unreflective way that humans practically inhabit the world. If this pre-reflective dwelling can be habituated with the character of inextinguishable potentiality then we might be a little closer to the more difficult ontological understanding of form-of-life pointed to by Agamben – though at this stage I’m inclined to view his version of the concept as a regulating ideal of political ontology rather than a design for life.

If for me the cultivation of autonomy has gone hand in hand with a critique of bureaucratic systems, that is because they have become the principle and near exclusive means by which power dominates our lives in late Modernity. Indeed, that domination is now so pervasive that it has come to define the language and concepts by which many people seek recognition and find orientation in society. Worst of all, because bureaucratic power presents itself as both technically necessary and politically neutral, it is rarely perceived as oppressive. Bureaucratic rule doesn’t work primarily through dramatic acts of sovereign power but through becoming part of our everydayness itself, shaping habits, categories, routines, and expectations until they appear natural and self-evident. When this insight is set alongside the decline of civil society which has accompanied successive waves of disenchantment in the modern West, then we can begin to see how the critique of bureaucratic rationality is all the more urgent, since there is precious little left outside that rationality to counter it.

There is therefore an unspoken but nevertheless clear normative distinction running through my writing between what I consider healthy and damaged forms-of-life. For instance, a healthy form-of-life must include practices of mourning and memory, as the act of working through the past in this fashion helps preserve autonomy against reduction into the abstract and alienating systems that govern us. en memoria mía is not the melancholy and demoralised yearning for times lost but a constant process of using nostalgia as a form of cultural archaeology and potential for renewal. Thus questions over heritage are always ultimately questions about the possibility of use in the present rather than fidelity to the past.

This is by design an emotional register that refutes any cheerful surrender to the so-called Eternal Now of Capitalist Realism, which is perhaps why I’ve moved away from the ideas of Hauntology towards a more anthropological understanding of cultural memory. Most recently I’ve been attracted to the what the German sociology Hartmut Rosa has described as the accelerated time regime of late modernity, which I agree with him is the seat of so much modern disaffection and alienation. Resistance to this time regime through practices of lingering, ritual, deep literacy and memorialising are approaches to living that open breathing room for possibility.

Conversely, I remain highly critical of those social movements that seek recognition and affirmation via the never-ending expansion of administrative, regulatory and procedural dispensations as if they were the benign hand of an imminent and caring God. It never ceases to amaze me how otherwise intelligent people surrender their autonomy and adopt the latest set of approved categories with which they are expected to make sense of their lives in the dying world. This is perhaps a more complicated story, and I hope to be able to give a less one-sided account of it at some point in the near future.

Finaly, if I was going to condense the role of askesis in shaping our possibilities for living into a simple definition, I might say that askesis denotes a disciplined practice of thought and action that is both a grounding and the holding of one’s ground from out of which a form-of-life might be cultivated. The ‘might be’ is essential here, since if we are talking about a true experimentum in living, then the possibility towards which the hypothesis points must also include its opposite, its possibility for failure. Nevertheless, no failure can extinguish the potential for living which ultimately defines the human being. 

Outsidergrad at The Battleground

Back in May The Battleground published a collaborative record of field recordings by myself and their editor in chief Joel Schalit who also very kindly sorted out mastering the recordings. The collection takes as its subject the London borough of Hounslow and the acoustic ecology of this part of the city which sits beneath the Heathrow Airport flight path. 

The record is available in digital format here: 

The Battleground also very kindly organised a a joint launch and discussion event along with my good friend Josh White whose latest book Tories are Dead was published this Spring. 

For the release I wrote an essay of reflections on the recording process and the practice of field recordings more generally. Writing this was something of a cathartic experience for me, since making the recordings in the summer and Autumn of 2023 was one of the last creative things I did while living in that area of West London. In November I moved out to Fleet in Hampshire and then two years later to Ash Vale just over the border in Surrey. 

Plans are in the works to finally make available the collection of field recordings I made in the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea over two days in August 2017 as a response to the Grenfell fire and which were the focus of this blog entry a year later lamenting the fact I'd done nothing with them. Well, almost nothing. I did use a small selection of them to produce this track from an EP I released in 2022. The title Twinkle@Street Piano (For Grenfell) refences the source of the recordings and two nuggets of urban acoustic ecology encountered during those two longs days nine years ago. 

The Things we Leave Behind

 

I don't know if this is a habit peculiar to me, but I occasionally read though older entries in my journal, and I’m surprised sometimes by the things I find. Odd fixations that I’ve since expunged from my memory; semi drunken musings on banal encounters. Anyway, I found this one today from just over a year ago at the time when my soon-to-be wife and I were going through our belongings in preparation for a house move which in fact wouldn’t happen for another seven months.

“I found an eggcup with legs in one of my boxes, broken and repaired. Why? Why was it repaired and why have I carried it with me for so long? Was it special to me as a child? And despite having no memory of ever having used it, I’ve carried it with me from childhood through my whole adult life. I’m sure there’s nothing to it really, but I do wonder whether I’ve just committed some awful sin against myself by tossing it into the bin. I have many objects like this”.

Can one be held hostage by objects one has no memory of? It’s an odd set up, one which Borges might have made something of in a characteristically surreal short story. In truth I think it’s an all-too-common habit of people to lug vast quantities of possessions from place to place with little understanding of what things are for or how they came to be owned. I frequently, not without some injustice, pull my wife up on random knick-knacks cluttering up our house, which may on occasion have been kept on account of some permanently deferred use value, or more often than not because it was “cute”. No matter, I’m not innocent in these things myself and have recently embarked on a campaign of selling various holdings of mine which have outlived their time. CDs! – worthless you say – and I agree but you’d be surprised what people will pay for said digitised sound on plastic if it’s wrapped in a handmade cardboard sleeve folded in a natty way. Throw in a bit of over-exposed arty urban photography printed on premium card and you’ve got yourself a collector’s item. I’ve just sent two of these things to Germany after owning them for over two decades. £65 in the bank. A significant profit as far as I can discern. The text I included for the Ebay auction read “selling because I have always found the music boring”.

Renaud Camus on Culture: Heritage and Transmission in the Era of Hyperdemocracy

 

I’m currently reading some of the political writings of Renaud Camus, the French author who is most notorious for propagating the variant of white genocide theory known as the Great Replacement, a phrase that is becoming increasingly common as the Right continues to rise across Europe and the US. Although it’s primarily that side to his thought I’m researching - for a blog piece I’m intending to write addressing some recently published articles by Mary Harrington – it’s impossible to get to the root of the Great Replacement without also confronting Camus’ views on culture and education, which, I would have to admit, are rather more slippery and at times harder to dismiss. 

Renaud Camus at an anti-immigration protest in 2016

Indeed, reading through the collection of essays and speeches recently published by Vauban Books, one gets the clear impression that Camus’ views on mass immigration, polemical and inflammatory as they may be, are a secondary concern to what he terms The Great Deculturation; the victory, as he sees it, of a post-literary, “hyperdemocratic” society of endless dumbing down and petty bourgeois values. On this subject he’s worth quoting in full:

“It is significant and indicative of the lack of connection between hyperdemocracy and democracy that, wherever hyperdemocracy is to be found (and it is to be found everywhere), men of culture are turned into corporate managers or replaced by them. In a neat paradox, as soon as equality exits its legitimate domain (equality of rights from birth among citizens and equal opportunities), business, money, and the struggle of great interests are everywhere to be found. This is true of museums and it is even more so of television, which we have seen becomes ever more commercial, that is to say, ever less cultural and ever more sensationalistic as it became widespread among the general public and television sets appeared in every home, subjecting the entire population to advertising, which naturally demanded ever baser programming, programming that was ever less demanding in a cultural sense and ever more immediately pleasing and in keeping with the requirements of the majority since it is this majority that brings in the most money, thus rendering what Patrick Le Lay, former head of TF1, infamously called “available human brain time” ever more valuable”   

The Great Deculturation (2008)

In the main, this is standard reactionary conservative boilerplate against what in a previous era was termed ‘massification’; essentially the entry of the mass of the common people into democratic and cultural life off the back of industrialisation, the extension of the franchise, and the rise of mass media. Arguments of this kind have been made consistently for a century or more, and while Left and Right often agree on the diagnoses, their social aetiology and prescribed remedies usually diverge markedly.

For Camus, the original sin lies not so much in the nature of Capitalism itself but in the Liberal democratic political system which should, he believes, promote high cultural values – not least through the education system – and restrain formal equality from usurping the “natural inequality” inherent in culture. When it fails to do this, hyperdemocracy is what results, a caustic liquification where the high values of the ancien régime, which is “all hills and valleys, nuance, differences in levels of quality, merit, and talent”, is subject to a relentless drive towards the lowest common denominator; to “equality from below”.

It’s worth comparing his attack from the Right with another, this time from the Left. Here’s Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer nearly eighty years ago: “Culture today is infecting everything with sameness. Film, radio, and magazines form a system. Each branch of culture is unanimous within itself and all are unanimous together. […] Films and radio no longer need to present themselves as art. The truth that they are nothing but business is used as an ideology to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce. They call themselves industries, and the published figures for their directors’ incomes quell any doubts about the social necessity of their finished products”. – Dialectic Of Enlightenment (1944)

The complaint is familiar, including the slight against the spoils reaped by the professional managerial class. But where the thinkers of the Frankfurt school place the blame for deculturation within the structures and effects of consumer capitalism, Camus is more in line with their ideological opposites of the 1930s among the writers of the German Conservative Revolution. What he laments is not capitalism’s internal tendency to exploit and submit all resources, including the “highest” cultural resources to the logic of the profit motive, but rather the loss of the hierarchical social and cultural ordering that was inherent to the ancien régime and which was largely preserved within the formally Liberal democratic core until the second half of the 20^th century.

Nevertheless, despite his perspective being redolent of a well-worn strain of French reaction, many of his observations resonated with me. The notion that culture itself is inherently unequal, even under conditions of free access, is an argument I’d not considered before. He sums it up with the maxim: “To become cultured is to become unequal to oneself”. There is substantial truth to this, a truth anyone who has set about becoming better read, or better cultured will relate to. It does over time have the potential to change relations with one’s peers, even family; to invite ridicule; to cause old friendships to weaken and new ones with persons outside one’s former milieu to form. In short, to become cultured – dare say, to “elevate” oneself - is not reducible to notions of self-actualization, but also includes a potentially painful experience of decentering and estrangement.

So, what is the opposite of this process, which Camus identifies with massification and the metastasis of formal Liberal egalitarianism into an endless process of leveling from below? One form the modern experience of culture takes today, about which Camus is particularly scathing, is the conversion of former institutions of cultural transmission and preservation into places of mass entertainment and profit. It’s undeniable that museums and art galleries have over the past twenty years been thoroughly subsumed into the tourist industry and that much of their activity is now geared towards getting people through the door who have absolutely no interest in the contents of the building, and who may have been attracted solely by some picturesque vantage point to shoot their Instagram content. 

The cultural anthropologist Marc Auge identifies in this commercial appeal to the ephemerality of the tourist a more fundamental contraction of historical time into the present, “as if there were no history other than the last forty-eight hours of news, as if each individual history were drawing its motives, its words and images, from the inexhaustible stock of an unending history in the present” (1). This condition of “supermodernity” as Augé calls it, renders all history and thus the experience of all historical culture into a spectacle.

As everyone instinctively knows, it’s the airport departure lounge that is the paradigm for Augé’s “non-places”. But it’s also true that every other cultural site that is reduced to a transit point for plague tourism is on the way to becoming a non-place, an extension of the global departure lounge. And as the environment alters to accommodate the transient, those who pass through are similarly affected over time by this endless sea of surfaces, of immediate “experiences” and appeals to instant gratification. One consequence of pivoting to plague tourism is that the care and respect one would hope from people visiting a place of cultural significance – be that the Milan opera, the Louve, Hampton Court Palace or the British Museum – has degenerated into a feral scrum of bemused and entitled day trippers. Let us call the apogee of this phenomenon “Auschwitz selfie”. 

In this constant appeal to the uninterested, the day-tripper, the bucket-lister, Camus identifies a key motor of deculturation:

“What is ruinously expensive is the exhausting need to keep ignorance occupied, amusing it, channeling it, and satisfying it for reasons of social peace, safety, and profit. […] Ignorance is boring by definition and is thus always hungry for novelty, even cultural novelty if necessary, but it is not the culture but the novelty itself that matters”.

As a consequence of this mass appeal to the ignorant the experience of visiting museums or galleries has been more or less ruined for anyone not staring into their phone screen. A couple of weeks ago I visited the Roman Baths at Bath (UK), I hadn’t been since 2016. It was late on a Sunday morning and the place was crawling with tourists with audio guides glued to their ears walking in clumps around the tight spaces of the interpretation centre (God there’s a name born of a committee!). Few bothered to spend much time looking at whatever their audio guide was explaining and instead many would just get in the way of anyone (myself of course) who was trying to take the old fashioned approach and contemplate for a few moments, the ancient bottles, jewellery and stone carvings presented.   

Around the main bath tourists were posing for selfies, including several who were acting as if the place had been booked solely for their photoshoot. On several occasions a toddler nearly ended up in the hot sulphurous water on account of its mother paying more attention to her phone than the welfare of her kid. Eventually one of the staff had to step in and remind her of her duties. The entire visit had more in common with a trip to Ikea on a Saturday afternoon than anything that could be described as “enriching”.

These are minor gripes in isolation, but when you’re having similar experiences almost every time you venture out then you start to question whether it’s worth the effort at all. I used to visit the Tate galleries on a nearly weekly basis, enjoying the ability to wander up if I had an hour spare and go and spend to some with a Magritte or a Bacon. But the pandemic has gutted whatever remained of these institution’s sense of civic duty to aid cultural transmission. It’s bums on seats and sales in the gift shop that matter, and so a tendency towards inflated hype and no less inflated entry prices for shows is now the norm. We have it pretty bad in the UK, but it’s nothing compared to the great cultural treasures of Italy and France which are swamped beneath a tidal wave of day-trippers, cruise liner parties and the new middle classes of South and East Asia, who are no better behaved than their European counterparts.

Commodification and marketisation are two concepts one might ordinarily deploy to make sense of these phenomena. The reduction of everything to calculable, saleable units is a universal characteristic, which, if I were being charitable, I might connect with the era of the European grand tours, when scions of the British aristocracy would bring back little intaglios depicting classical scenes from places like Florence and Rome. These were the souvenir keyrings or fridge magnets of their time, collected as a memento of days spent immersed in the culture of antiquity and Renaissance Europe, with the express aim of elevating the aspiring gentlemen (it was usually gentlemen) into the loftier climes of Western civilisation. The analogy is a distant one, since more often than not the fridge magnet or selfie is all that the average visitor takes with them from their visit to the Louve or Colosseum. 

It is perhaps not necessary to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Livy’s history of Rome, Mozart’s symphonies or the works of Euripides in order to appreciate high culture (as Camus sometimes seems to imply), but as a mark of just how far from the most minimal ideal of cultural literacy we have drifted, one only need observe in every major national gallery in Europe, the legions of people moving from artwork to artwork, hastily snapping pictures on their phone without seemingly letting their eyes rest upon the thing they are photographing. The phone remembers, so they don’t have to. I have named this practice Doomstrolling, since it shares the fleeting, low attention and compulsive character of scrolling through a TikTok or Instagram feed. 

It isn’t just the sheer number of people now swarming around sites of Europe’s cultural heritage, although the advent of plague tourism is a hot topic for many European cities; Venice banning cruise liners from docking in the lagoon is a courageous move the likes of which you could never imagine happening in the UK. And over the last few years I’ve increasingly seen graffiti in places like Lisbon, Bologna or Barcelona raging against the effects of mass tourism. But as I say, it can’t all be put down to numbers. Build it and they will come, and what we have built is a cheap, easily consumable parody of European culture that appeals to the lowest common denominator while allowing what remains to fall into disrepair. 

The financial crisis of the late 2000s and the effects of austerity no doubt accelerated this process as government subsidies for cultural institutions across Europe dried up and many had to start charging for entry or taking on corporate sponsors. The moment that happens there’s pressure to give ‘bang for your buck’; naked commercial initiatives can be given a progressive sheen by appealing to inclusivity, which, as Camus remarks, is less about effective marketing and more about forcibly levelling the inherent inequality of culture, a practice that some claim has led to distortions of history and even outright censorship.

Where Camus errs is in viewing these developments as political failings rather than movements inherent to the nature of Capital, at most revealing a structural flaw in Liberal society’s capacity for effective self-regard. It is a characteristic blindspot for many thinkers on the Right that they fail to see the paradigm shift in capitalism that has occurred over the past five decades, fail to see that deindustrialisation has shifted the economies of the most developed nations toward a system of production comprised largely of cognitive and cultural technologies; those which Bernard Stiegler has termed ‘technologies of the spirit’ (2). Under these conditions Marx’s good old dictum, according to which everything solid melts into air, everything sacred is profaned, rings more true than ever, and never more so than for former subjects of traditional Industrial society.   

Echoing much of Camus’ sentiment Stiegler identifies the new man of ‘hyperindustrial’ society – as he calls it - as ever more dispossessed of initiative and responsibility; ceaselessly infantilized and stripped of any authority (including parental authority) “by cultural industries whose function is to make him adopt new “ways of life”, which are essentially modes of employment replacing and short circuiting his savoir-vivre”. These modes of employment would include the compulsive harvesting of data made possible by the limbic enslavement of hundreds of millions of people to digital media pumped into their minds via smartphones.

In contrast, when he does highlight dates and events - which isn’t that often - Camus prefers to lay the blame – at least in France – at the door of political decisions such as the ‘Haby Law’ of 1975, which effectively ended merit based separation for secondary education (what in the UK we called ‘streaming’), resulting in a single curriculum for all pupils known as the “one middle school”, and the policy of regroupement familial (also mid 1970s) which made an exception to France’s then highly restrictive immigration system in the case of spouses and children. These two unrelated policies seem to act together for Camus as an inflection point, combining what he describes as the “democratic crisis of culture” and the “ethnic crisis of culture”; the moment when the Great Deculturation was baked in, and the precipitous road towards remplacisme really began.

In all of this it’s worth noting how Camus treats the concept of culture in a far more essentialist and restrictive way than the word commonly implies. For him culture is not everything, not graphic novels, or reality television, or Mickey Mouse. Culture, which for him is above all to ‘be’ cultured, is a process of receiving the heritage of the past, a long apprenticeship that takes place within an education system and a society that guides individuals towards a position of inequality relative to those who fail to achieve or fail to find access to the higher levels. To be cultured then is not just to be “well read”, an expression we still occasionally hear today, but also to have acquired the sense of discernment, savoir-faire and moral character enough to grant the aspirant entry to what used to called polite society. 

 

The obvious response to this is of course that it’s an almost freakishly old fashioned and snobbish conception, made all the more so by the near total disappearance of the class of persons to whom this notion of social education applied. But that is in fact his key point, it is the disappearance of the high bourgeoisie and the betrayal – as he sees it – of those sections of the Middle-classes tasked with guarding and preserving the cultural heritage of the West, that has led to the “dictatorship of the petty bourgeoisie”, i.e. the Great Deculturation.

Here is where Camus’ racialism rears its head, for it is clear in his insistence of identifying national culture with the high bourgeoisie that he holds a notion of heritage that is more in keeping with its archaic definition than the common understanding which views it in a neutral way simply as ‘important things handed down to us’. In the archaic understanding – predominantly derived from the Bible – heritage is both a place, a land (such as the land of Israel promised to the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), and a spiritual heritage that binds a community in its succession through the generations. 

Camus’ unusual linking of the fate of collective education and immigration policy should I think be read in light of his views on heritage. The former, on this reading, would be the betrayal of cultural transmission by eliminating the elitest educational path which – again according to Camus – formerly maintained a class of persons dedicated to the preservation of France’s cultural heritage. The latter, on the other hand opened up the doors to mass migration and the eclipse of France’s “spiritual” heritage by inundating the country with people who did not share, nor care to assimilate to French culture, and to whom that heritage does not belong.  

Unlike Stiegler, or Byung-Chul Han, or the writers of the Frankfurt school, in short unlike writers on the Left, Camus principally laments the collapse of the hierarchical society of pre-revolutionary France. Thus, his white genocide theory of the Great Replacement is only the latest stage in a process that he believes has been on-going for over two centuries. That his exposition is unusually elaborate for someone on the far-Right shouldn’t distract us from the fact that his basic position is blinkered against an encounter with the voluminous literature dealing with the effects of late-stage consumer and cultural capitalism written from the Left, much of it by his fellow countrymen. 

His views on the sorry state of culture and the heritage industry – which as you can see I largely agree with - are not inaccurate; but, like the writers of the German conservative Revolution before him, they reveal a worldview and reading of European history that fails to capture the material reality of our time. This is not to say that the problems of cultural transmission or education are not real or urgent. I am largely in favour of some notion of Leitkultur, with all the pitfalls that this vexed notion contains. But I’m not convinced that over two centuries since the Revolution in France that attempts to revive the supposedly essential role of the upper classes as custodians of national heritage and identity is either plausible or even comprehensible.

1 – From Marc Augé - Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity (English translation, Verso 1995)

2 – See Bernard Stiegler – The Re-Enchantment of the World: The Value of Spirit against Industrial Populism (Bloomsbury, 2014)