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.
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| 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 20th 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)
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