Utopian Spaces and Their Everyday Traces in Thomas Stuber’s In den Gängen (2018)

This article examines utopian elements in Thomas Stuber’s 2018 film In den Gängen. Despite the neoliberal forces that constrain a group of supermarket shelf stackers in the former East Germany, the film’s characters exhibit congenial bonds in the face of alienated work. Strikingly, their encounters with machines also convey an other-directedness and improvised conviviality, or energy that enables them to devise bonds in fleeting moments. As much as the film presumes a foreclosed-on socialist utopia, it also depicts a range of contemporary challenges to neoliberalism, including practices of commoning, non-normative forms of relationality, and human-machine interactions that gesture towards a posthumanist selfhood. At the same time, the three main characters’ personal circumstances and histories necessarily impact their ability to benefit from these elements. Both age and gender play crucial roles in their individual fates, and not all of them thrive within their caring, other-directed community. Ultimately, In den Gängen suggests the possibility of mundane existences gesturing towards superlative futures.