Características del Sistema de Vigilancia del MINCOM

In this chapter, I read Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Shikasta (1979) in the context of the development of eugenicist thinking in Britain, first as a Victorian project constructing whiteness in opposition to the ‘non-whiteness’ of colonised and working class groups, with its attendant assumptions about a founding hierarchy of human ‘types’, and second, as a legacy of post-World War Two social policy, which continued a Eurocentric hierarchy of race in post-war international finance and production systems through the related vocabularies of liberal multiculturalism and developmentalism. Memoirs and Shikasta demonstrate a specifically British project of whiteness in the development of eugenic thought. In Memoirs, Lessing stages the reconstitution of whiteness in the imperial centre at a moment of socio-economic collapse, and in Shikasta, she puts whiteness on trial. Eugenic thinking emerges in the novels first, through the (re)constitution of whiteness at the top of a racial hierarchy in Memoirs of a Survivor, and second, as eugenic measures in Shikasta that echo the utopian socialist ambitions of interwar British eugenicists such as J. B. S. Haldane, Ronald Fisher and Julian Huxley. In the speculative mode, Lessing mingles different historical moments in order to create a general atmosphere of long-wave historical oppression, under the governing logic of ‘race’.

As defined by Francis Galton, eugenics is grounded in racialising ideology, as ‘the study of the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally’ (‘Eugenics, its definition, scope and aims’ 43). ‘Race’ did not disappear from social organisation after World War II; what developed instead was an ethos of liberal multiculturalism in which cultures are differentiated through racial origin, mapped into a general typology of social groups. Reading Lessing’s literary treatment of ‘racial hierarchy’ and ‘genetic usefulness’ in her space fiction

alongside the historical development of British Eugenics, particularly the interwar eugenicists, her Canopean characters can be read as resurrections of utopian socialists such as Haldane and Julian Huxley. Huxley coined the word transhumanism in a lecture given in 1951, secularising the idea of spiritual transcendence, and describing it as ‘the idea of humanity attempting to overcome its limitations and to arrive at fuller fruition’ (‘Knowledge’ 139). In the speculative mode, the Canopus novels imagine the theoretical ambitions of these transhumanist thinkers around the perfectibility of humanity in practice. Lessing’s representations of imperial eugenics in Canopus undo the binary opposition of this debate to consider the broader implications of biology deployed as a disciplinary technique in an uneven world-system, already bound to the legislated ideal of a liberal subject, and therefore premised on the exclusion of others.

The narratives stage alternative histories in which certain eugenic ambitions play out in practice, examining the possible scale of cost of such practices. Read alongside this history, the novels represent the context of race relations in the 1970s, both in the former imperial centre and in post-colonial and decolonising nation-states. These novels foreground the ongoing narratives of racialisation, eugenics and imperialism throughout the Canopus in Argos series, and introduce the deployment of genetics as a language of sovereign intervention. By arranging this history in speculative fiction, rather than in a realist mode (as in, for example, in The Good Terrorist (1985)), Lessing enters a longer tradition of scientific pessimism around eugenics in British sf, characterised not least by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), countering some of the speculative claims of the interwar transhumanists about the possibilities for socio-genetic engineering afforded by eugenics.

Eugenic Governmentality: Whiteness and Multiculturalism

Throughout Canopus in Argos, eugenic initiatives appear as failing policies of the dominant imperial powers, Canopus and Sirius. These failures bring to crisis the reduction of life itself into a set of identifiable characteristics based on observable

criteria. In The Taming of Chance (1990), Ian Hacking describes this reduction in the context of the emergence of the statistical imagination during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the ‘counting’ of human behaviour: ‘Data about averages and dispersions engendered the idea of normal people, and led to new kinds of social engineering, new ways to modify undesirable classes’ (9-10). Biological and behavioural surveillance become the tools of a disciplinary society, to follow Michel Foucault. Moreover, the need for discipline creates these disciplinary boundaries between realms of experience. Certain phenomena are translated into discrete units of observed characteristics as the coordinates for social organisation, obscuring socio-political change not determined from the top down, and not accounting for biological events that appear as non-genetic inherited changes.

There are two projects of whiteness in Memoirs and Shikasta: first, the project of racial hierarchy in the early phase of the British Eugenics movement, and multiculturalism as ‘genetic usefulness’ in the later phase. By negating the constituted political difference between them as a false opposition (the post- Windrush institutional ‘forgetting’ of racial hierarchies in the name of meritocracy), the texts stage a critique of the general project to racialise life itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, allied to the categorisation of species in European biology from the sixteenth century. In Lessing’s novels, there is no culmination of violence in this project, but rather ongoing brutalisation, dehumanisation and extermination in support of maintaining a racial hierarchy. Historically, this project has determined decisions about the capacities and behaviours of differentiated living populations (human and non-human). It facilitates the co-option of genetics into eugenics in the late nineteenth century to mount a scientific justification for imperial subjugation of ‘non-whites’, in defence of racial hierarchy: certain genetic ‘types’ are considered to be fitter than others with regard to their hereditary germ-cell material (with regard to criteria of intelligence, physicality and so on), and certain populations are naturally predisposed to certain kinds of labour.

I understand ‘whiteness’ not as a biological category, but as signifying a social position, following Noel Ignatiev’s definition:

Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no other reason than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet. (‘The Point of Whiteness’)

For Ignatiev, whiteness refers to a set of conventions, rather than signifying something ‘natural’. This is similar to Paul Gilroy’s project ‘to introduce a more sophisticated theory of culture into the political analysis of “race” and racism in Britain by claiming the term back from ethnicity [as] a calculated challenge to the absolutist definitions of “race” and ethnicity’ (4). In order to understand racism, it is important – for both Gilroy and Ignatiev – to capture ‘race’ as a governing fiction, rather than any kind of essentialist cultural and/or biological truth. Gilroy argues that in the British context, racial borders and national frontiers are inextricable; British national history must be read alongside ‘the racist logic [that] has pinpointed obstacles to genuine belonging in the culture and identity of the alien interlopers’ (46).

I read Memoirs and Shikasta as interventions in a conflict around race relations in Britain after post-war migration from former colonial territories, particularly India, African nations, the Caribbean, and the Republic of Ireland. While Memoirs demonstrates the challenge of escaping the social reproduction of whiteness, Shikasta explores the ideology of interwar utopian transhumanism, which implicitly adhered to a racialised economy of ‘good’ genes. In different ways, these novels reconstruct how whiteness functions in the broader field of biopolitical power wielded in the name of nation and empire. Through this, these novels challenge the typological construction of life itself into differentiated and unequal socio-political units through racialising practices. By confronting whiteness as a social position, rather than a narrow demarcation of ethnicity, Memoirs probes the discursive limits of a liberal subject legislated on the exclusion of others. The intersection of race and social organisation went through different phases in Britain during the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries, in synchrony with the requirements of labour for industrial production, resource extraction and exchange out of colonised territories, settler domestic policies of land demarcation and apartheid, and post-war migration to the imperial centre from former colonised territories, oscillating between a taxonomic grid of assigned places (racial hierarchy) to a more porous scale of economic position (multiculturalism). In both instances, ‘whiteness’ remains a stable category of sovereign power.

The second project of whiteness redirects the focus from racial superiority to multiculturalism, which appears in Shikasta under the euphemism of ‘genetic usefulness’, while continuing to centre whiteness as the neutral, privileged category of existence. Both projects are a way of establishing a natural (biological) order out of social conventions. This culminates in a mock trial at the end of Shikasta in which these two projects take the position of defendant (racial hierarchy) and prosecutor (genetic usefulness). Memoirs and Shikasta do not present multiculturalism as a post-colonial remedy to imperial racism, but as a continuation of it.

Multiculturalism depends on the transition of phenotypic racism to what Tariq Modood calls ‘cultural racism’: in Steve Garner’s words, the idea that ‘people’s cultures are read as determining levels of civilisation, intelligence, and ways of doing things’ (Garner 447). Judith Butler argues, ‘Multiculturalism tends to presuppose already constituted communities [and] already established subjects’ (31-32). For Butler, multiculturalism depends upon discursively produced gaps between groups in order to come into existence. That is, the concept of multiculturalism itself depends upon a simultaneous articulation and division of cultures based on discursively produced signifiers of difference, such as race, class, gender and religion. This division of cultures is then mapped onto space through the notion of ‘community’. Critical for the argument in this chapter and throughout the thesis, which I also identify as a critique in Lessing’s space fiction through their representation of racialising techniques, is Butler’s following argument:

discrete identity cannot yield the kinds of analytic vocabularies we need for thinking about global interdependency and the interlocking networks of power and position in contemporary life. (31)

In comprehending the globalised logic of power networks grounding division of labour and distribution of resources, the typological system of classifying humans is not only reductive, but should also be understood as constitutive of this unevenness. Doreen Massey discusses the mapping of society onto space as a technique of Western imperial hegemony, arguing that it is a particular strategy of an imperial modernising project that categorised and segregated different groups in a project of ‘organising global space’ (64).

Both Massey and Butler attribute this mapping of culture onto space, and the accompanying iteration that different cultures represent pre-constituted communities, to strategies of power relations in which capitalist imperialism asserted dominion by arranging the globe through a hierarchy of communities. This is what I read Lessing exploring throughout her space fiction. For Butler and Massey, as in Lessing’s space fiction, what is at stake is not ‘already constituted communities’, but rather ‘communities not quite recognised as such, subjects who are living, but not yet regarded as “lives”’ (32). This ongoing theme reaches its zenith in Planet 8, with the extinction of the genetically-engineered population on an outpost of Canopus. The point there is not just that they are not deemed important enough to Canopean interests to be saved by transport to another planet, but that their extinction is foreclosed by Canopus’s invention of them. Their ‘lives’ are not deemed ‘lives’ by Canopus.

Multiculturalist discourse is a developed version of the eugenic management of space in a biopolitical regime. Foucault argues that the emergence of biopower in the nineteenth century, which he calls the power to ‘make live and let die’ as opposed to the sovereign right to kill, ‘inscribes racism in the mechanisms of the state’ as ‘the basic mechanism of power’ (254). Racism, he argues, ‘is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die’ (254). A hierarchy of races disrupts the ‘biological continuum of the human race’

with ‘biological-type caesura[s] within a population that appears to be a biological domain’ (255). Foucault’s use of qualifiers here – ‘type’ and ‘appears to be’ – point to the construction of biological essentialisms around the notion of ‘race’, while questioning their validity. Race caesura give governments ‘the power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or […] to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races’ (255). Thus, racism ‘creates caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower’, and racism is the ‘indispensible precondition that allows someone (else) to be killed’ (255). Multiculturalist discourse, based on racialising techniques, facilitates violence by displacing biological caesuras into cultural ones. It is not the feature of a progressive society, but holds within it this potential for exclusionary violence, constantly reiterating imperial typology.

In this discourse, race continues to function as a medium – a semiotic configuration – that enables violent and oppressive relations; in Foucault’s words, by ‘appealing to the principle that the death of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or a population, insofar as one is an element in a unitary living plurality’ (260). This third clause is key to his argument about racism in socialist analysis; the problem across both ‘left’ and ‘right’ that allows racism to stand as the concept justifying the death-function is ‘unit thinking’, the grounding of democratic political structures of one-man, one- vote, and in the development of statistical imaginary as applied to ‘populations’ during the eighteenth century in Europe. Racism is not only a function of governance, but also becomes necessary in a ‘one-to-one’ encounter with an adversary carrying different cultural articulations into battle. It becomes the language of a binarised political field.

Before the 1930s and the rise of Nazi eugenics, eugenic thinkers across the political spectrum adopted genetic epistemology as a vehicle for the project of full-scale social improvement from the turn of the twentieth century. Biologist Ernst Mayr argues, ‘When one reads the literature of the first decades of this century, one is amazed at the virtually universal popularity of eugenics. It was supported by writers from the far left, all across to those of the far right’ (83-4). Eugenics historian Mazumdar agrees, writing that in the early phase of genetic

research, ‘[A]lmost every geneticist in Britain, the United States and Germany who was interested in human studies at all was involved with the eugenics movement’ (58). When Foucault argues that socialist racism was ‘liquidated in Europe’ by the ‘domination of social democracy’ and its attendant reformism, as well as by the Dreyfus affair (Society 262-63), this does not apply to the British utopian socialists. If eugenics was born out of Victorian racism towards the colonies as a way of justifying killing a declared other in the name of whiteness (as ‘reason’, ‘civilization’, ‘society’), or stealing their bio-energy through slavery or exploitation, it bore this legacy across the political spectrum in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The ‘science’ of racism was incorporated into eugenic pedigree models alongside genetics, through physical anthropology and evolutionary theory from the late nineteenth century, as Nils Rolls-Hansen has argued (8). Eugenicists in Britain used their doctrine to claim differential birthrates and declining national intelligence, suggesting that eugenic measures be put in place to prevent national decline.

Science historian Daniel Kevles explains the distinction between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ eugenics: ‘positive’ eugenics, following Mayr, is the idea of ‘increasing the frequency of desirable traits by encouraging reproduction by individuals with these traits’, and ‘negative’ eugenics would be ways to eradicate undesirable traits. Kevles also distinguishes, somewhat along this line of analysis, between ‘mainline’ and ‘reform’ eugenicists. According to mainline eugenicists, altering the environmental conditions for certain sections of the population – adequate housing, better education, free healthcare – would not save them from the defective material they carried in their germ cells. The reform eugenicists reconsidered the intersection between eugenic measures and ‘soft’ environmental reform, suggesting a delay of the former until the latter had been properly implemented. However, Kevles’s distinction between ‘mainline’ and ‘reform’ eugenics is still situated in the widespread interest across the British Left and Right from the late 1800s to the mid 1930s in improving the general hygiene of a population along intersectional grounds of race and class. Philosopher of race Nathaniel Coleman frames the problem of commemorating the invention of eugenics in British history in the following way:

Eugenics is a two-edged sword: as much a concern of the pre-First World War British Fabian Left as of the pre-Second World War German Nazi Right, it intellectually underpinned policies not only of segregation, sterilisation and Shoah, but also of birth control, public hospitals and the welfare state. (‘Eugenics: The Academy’s Complicity’)

The ambition of social improvement through biological intervention across both Left and Right, as exclusionary and meritocratic discourse, as well as multiculturalism, took whiteness as a social position as a governing narrative; race-blindness was grounded in meritocratic discourse about the best members of racialised groups rising to the surface. Its legacy is more than a historical moment in time, but underpins contemporary distribution of education, housing and healthcare, and, increasingly, private insurance.

If the Galton phase of eugenics was based on what Foucault calls a disciplinary society which, in Gilles Deleuze’s words, ‘organises vast spaces of enclosure’ (3), the second phase anticipated what Deleuze calls a ‘control society’, following a generalised crisis of institutions, and characterised by endless and open modulation. British eugenics in the first phase is about enclosing the immutable germ material and protecting it through biopolitical institutions, implemented within the time frames of a closed system. Eugenics in the second phase anticipates the replacement of the individual with ‘masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks”’ (Deleuze 5). In this second phase, the socio- scientific pursuit of either extracting or enhancing genetic predispositions takes ‘unit thinking’ to the de-individuated level of gene clusters or traits, based on the scientific fallacy of constructing ‘genes’ coding for X or Y characteristic as both heritable and eradicable. The Galton phase of individualised racial hierarchy in a disciplinary society is replaced with the Haldane phase of genetic usefulness in