Back to the Postindustrial Future. Felix Ringel
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informants (Hutu refugees in Canada), it is not the past that is problematic, but the future. However, as Bamby Schieffelin pointed out, since the ‘future is the most unknown of the temporal dimensions’, it ‘has to be marked in the present’ (Schieffelin 2002: 12). As a result, we can access the future’s ‘existence’ in the present through the knowledge, which is produced and reproduced about it in the present.
In modernity proper, as Rabinow claims in his discussion of the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, the future has been configured as a problem: it ‘appears as a contingent set of possibilities about which decisions are demanded; decisions are demanded because the future appears as something about which we must do something’ (Rabinow et al. 2008: 57). In times of postindustrial shrinkage, this seems as impossible as the undisturbed production of other narrative trajectories. Rather, the change of the content and form of particular (temporal) knowledge practices also accounts for the ways in which human beings position themselves and their agency vis-à-vis the changes they are experiencing. The trope of shrinkage, like other epistemic tools, provides a very distinct imagination of the future and yields specific epistemic repercussions. This book tries to locate, map and conceptualize agency in this context of shrinkage (see Ringel 2016a, 2016b). The methodological question – less about how to study time and more about how to study knowledge (about time) and the temporal dimensions of knowledge – translates into a focus on what Morten Nielsen (2011) calls ‘anticipatory actions’, which for him are guided by both unknown and known futures, and that help to reorient individual life trajectories by exploiting the former’s imaginative potentials.
However, ‘unknown futures’ are not ‘no future’. As a city with ‘no future’, Hoyerswerda could, indeed, be seen as one of the places where the unequal distribution of hope (Miyazaki 2010) drew away the prospects of a better future. Deploying Miyazaki’s own work (2004), this entails the loss of hope’s epistemic function: with no hope, people lose the ability to (radically) redirect their knowledge. However, as Zigon (2009) argues, this urge for a radical redirection of thought is not necessarily hope’s main point. Rather, hope entails particular incitements to maintaining practices – conceptually, ethically, and relationally (Ringel 2014). Apart from the need to diversify analytical approaches to the future, there is still an issue with the logic, practicality and efficacy of representations of the future in the present, which also needs to be taken into consideration. However, as I claim, this will only ever allow new insights into the present in which this knowledge is produced. As Miyazaki, for example, underlines in a different context, once the future is feared or otherwise made concrete, the present is itself imagined ‘from the perspective of the end’ (Miyazaki 2006: 157; compare Miyazaki and Riles 2005). However, ‘the end’ in my informants’ temporal knowledge practices is much more indeterminate than Miyazaki suggests. In the context of shrinkage, the challenge is to have an accurate idea of the future in the first place. As I will show in the following chapters, under this paradigm, Hoyerswerda’s citizenry continuously establishes arenas for the common imagination of the future whilst struggling daily with the imposition of official dystopian demographic, economic and social visions of the city’s future. This hopeful reappropriation of the future has been described by Appadurai (2002, 2013) as a political right, a right to aspire and to participate in the social practice of the imagination.
Finally, any consideration of our informants’ hope and future knowledge should also involve what is at stake with regards to the hopes and futures of the ethnographer and analyst. Most of the aforementioned scholars attach a particular form of hope to including the temporal dimension of the future in their analysis. As Ernst Bloch has it, only ‘philosophy that is open to the future entails a commitment to changing the world’ (quoted in Miyazaki 2004: 14). Miyazaki remains cautious with regard to the ‘ongoing effort in social theory to reclaim the category of hope’ in a broader ‘search for alternatives’ in times of the ‘apparent decline of progressive politics’ (ibid.: 1–2). The hopeful moments sustained in his fieldsite’s many knowledge practices show one efficacy of hope to be a method for the production of future knowledge: the continuation of thought (and) practice against all odds. Methodologically, Miyazaki answers his own questions of ‘how to approach the infinitely elusive quality of any present moment’ (ibid.: 11) by looking at concrete knowledge practices over time whilst being aware of their indeterminacy. In a presentist vein, he thus resolves the mundane paradox ‘to cherish indeterminacy and at the same time expect it to be resolved’ by showing how that ‘requires constant deferral of … closure for the better’ (ibid.: 69). For him, the maintenance of hope, despite its constant failure, affects not only our informants’ lives, but also our own academic practices. In Hoyerswerda, a city with supposedly no hope and no future, the analysis of questions of knowledge and the future require a similar continuous reflection upon my own hopes and relations to the future. This also allows for a different methodology.
Once we conceptualize issues of time to be matters of representation and understand that the production of knowledge about the future in a dramatically changing fieldsite keeps on changing too, anthropological representations of these practices remain necessarily inapt. All they can do is become part of this process by joining the search for more sustainable or convincing takes on the future. This methodological move is based upon an understanding that my informants are recursively adjusting their social metaphysics in order to find contexts and narratives for describing their current and past experiences. They do so collectively, passionately as much as pragmatically and in conflict with one another. As I claim in more detail elsewhere (Ringel 2013b), this continuous epistemic work allowed for several different forms of intervention during fieldwork. I therefore published weekly newspaper columns in the local newspaper over the course of a whole year, conducted a week-long anthropological research camp for sixteen local youths and initiated a two-week community art project.11 However, the instability of local representations, particular with regard to the future, also prevents me now in the process of writing from authoritatively imposing my own conclusive representation upon this local processual heterogeneity.
To sum up this section, the analysis of time has long focused on particular and situated social practices. The undoubtedly interesting theoretical concerns regarding the distinction between linear and cyclical time have been dissolved in a general trend to de-ontologize human understandings of time. In contrast, with attention being paid to the local construction of temporal knowledge – that is, knowledge about time and knowledge that reaches out in time – recent anthropology acknowledges that the flexibility and multiplicity of forms of temporal reasoning challenges notions of temporal knowledge as culture or given temporalities (Ringel 2016b). With a strictly ethnographic approach, anthropologists could subsequently show how this particular kind of knowledge is infused with political and ethical relevance, since it is deployed for fundamental claims on both the past and the future in the present, and on life and what it means to be human. The future in particular thereby gains a newly prominent standing in anthropological analyses. Representational and nonrepresentational dimensions of human relations to the future allow insights into the efficacy of knowledge about the future as much as the wide-ranging registers that are deployed in many different forms of practices to relate to the future. In this book I map a variety of local temporal knowledge practices and their relation to the future in order to continue this theoretical quest. To rephrase Gell slightly, there is, indeed, no need to be in awe of the future.
Figure 0.3 Anarchist graffito, KuFa building, Hoyerswerda, men’s toilet, 2009, ‘Utopias to Reality; Shit to Gold!!!’
Conclusion: Knowledge in Motion
As the song mentioned above by Gundermann indicated, the question at the heart of this study is how people relate to the future. Gundermann rightly draws attention to the human agency involved in one’s positioning towards the future. This requires an understanding of knowledge itself being in motion. The ways in which people relate to the future are not fixed and stable. They evolve in (and are reproduced by) everyday practice, in which all things social, political and ethical are at stake. With this in mind, I explore diverse aspects of a more general