Countries across the world are creating utopias. Look around and see practices – from the law to tenancy that are meant to ‘clean up’ the place, deny entry and residence, and even refuse the right to access public spaces. We hear of cities slowly, steadily losing their multicultural, multi-community demographics as specific communities, neighbours for long, shift out and away, into silos peopled by their ‘own’ kind.
Popular cultural representations, including but not restricted to futuristic, sci-fi texts from Gattaca to The Handmaid’s Tale, are full of pristine, super-organised spaces of clean, symmetrical lines, buildings, streets: even the people possess a uniform appearance and behaviour. These are the ordered utopias of the future. They are utopias where certain people can live the good life without having to encounter dirt, chaos and their cultural enemies – defined as those who look, speak, eat and think differently.
Neo-Utopias in History
The cleansing of rivers, cities and spaces, redesigning them by law or by the more effective means of cultural animosity and psycho-social warfare – denial of rental spaces to specific communities, for instance – is not new. In the early 20th century, a man who would go on to redraw the map of the world retrieved the idea of Lebensraum, originally a term from 19th century geography. Lebensraum meant ‘living space’. It translated into a programme of acquiring spaces via imperial moves. Lebensraum enabled the conquest of territory. And within Germany, Adolf Hitler would propose:
“Truly, this earth is a trophy cup for the industrious man. And this rightly so, in the service of natural selection. He who does not possess the force to secure his Lebensraum in this world, and, if necessary, to enlarge it, does not deserve to possess the necessities of life. He must step aside and allow stronger peoples to pass him by.”
In his Mein Kampf he would write:
“Without consideration of ‘traditions’ and prejudices, it [Germany] must find the courage to gather our people and their strength for an advance along the road that will lead this people from its present restricted living space to new land and soil, and hence also free it from the danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation.”
He made the imperial ambition, and the cleansing doctrine, explicit when he said that Germany should ‘concentrate all of its strength on marking out a way of life for our people through the allocation of adequate Lebensraum for the next one hundred years’. The key term is of course ‘our people’.
Hitler’s enunciation meant, simply, the evacuation of Jews, Slavs and those not counted as ‘our people’, to other regions of Europe, including the Soviet Union. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum makes the connection between Lebensraum, the Soviet invasion by Germany and anti-Semitism that climaxed in the Holocaust:
‘The drive to clear the East of inferior populations in preparation for German colonization led to intensive planning for the mass starvation of over 30 million people there. Policy guidelines issued before the invasion of the Soviet Union stated unequivocally that “many tens of millions of people in this territory will become superfluous and will have to die or migrate to Siberia… With regard to this, absolute clarity must reign.”
Known as the Generalplan Ost, this set of economic and demographic plans placed the necessity for Lebensraum and the colonization of the East at the center of the invasion. By blaming Jews and Bolshevists for the “backwardness” of the region, the plans also reinforced other forms of Nazi antisemitism demanding the removal of Jews from the territory and eventually their physical destruction.’
What is evident is: whenever a statesman or political order sets out to create the myth of a certain kind of ‘rajya’, an ideal Lebensraum and a utopia, it entails a process of identifying the people who (i) have the right to live in that rajya (ii) have to be removed from that place for the others to continue to have a proper Lebensraum.
Zones of Exclusion
In pop cultural texts, neo-utopias are ‘societies of control’ (as the philosopher Gilles Deleuze called them), where access and movement of peoples in places are regulated by passwords, codes, documentation and necessary ‘approvals’. These are ‘new systems of domination’, Deleuze wrote.
This form of control does not always take coercive forms. The barricade and ‘Do not enter’ signage are only crude forms of exclusionary zoning. Cultural practices of zoning regulations, tenancy modalities, denial of services, segregation of people of specific communities by ‘persuading’ them to move away for ‘their own safety’ are more powerful forms. Or, by excluding them from the necessary registries and official documentation – the recent protests in India about certain Acts where religious identity becomes your passport to acceptance is a clear indication that the nation is aware of such moves towards the society of control – one creates zones of exclusion.
Studies show this alarming trend of sanitised Lebensraums that set about excluding people. The work of Raphael Susekind (2017), Sukhdeo Thorat (2015), Christophe Jaffrelot (2015), among others, demonstrate, metropolises and even Tier II cities are increasingly segregated in terms of communities. This means, any of these cities is already approximating to the neo-utopia, since the social imaginary is the same: ghettoisation in the name of clean cities and the Lebensraum.
‘Sticky Web of Carcerality’
It is time to think of a new carceral imaginary, if what we have seen of the new politics and cultural frames of the Lebensraum is true. Ruha Benjamin in the introduction to Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (2019) argues that:
“The sticky web of carcerality extends even further, into the everyday lives of those who are purportedly free, wrapping around hospitals, schools, banks, social service agencies, humanitarian organizations, shopping malls, and the digital service economy.”
We need to rethink the carceral not as prison alone, but as modes of immobilisation and regulated mobility that restrict the access of certain people, certain communities from what is technically ‘public’ spaces. (Nandini Sundar recently spoke of the right to the same public space, of the commuter and that of the protestor) That is, when one wishes to enter a mall or take a detour via a particular road known for its public protests, the fees levied (as happened in a mall in Ahmedabad some years ago, although the mall of course reserves the right to regulate entry) or the prohibition on movement is a form of carcerality. Surveillance, ambient or not, produces a ‘carceral continuum’ in everyday life.
Utopias are worrying projects – they are effectively carceral societies. Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison would summarise it pithily: ‘All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in’.
(The author is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad)
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