Back to the Postindustrial Future. Felix Ringel
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can loosely be described as one from a postsocialist to a postindustrial temporal framework. I also encountered many moments when both frameworks were overcome. In specific social, cultural, political and educational projects, such moments bear witness to the indeterminateness of human thought, agency and practice, which East Germans and other people affected by decline are so often seen to have lost. This then is a ‘presentist ethnography’, and I see my analysis as an invitation to ponder on the issue of (temporal) knowledge, particularly on its efficacy and its relationship to present hopes and futures.
In the following chapters, I understand ‘knowledge in time’ in three different ways. First, I chart the ways in which knowledge (in terms of content, form and practice) changes over time: new concepts emerge, are negotiated and have particular effects (compare Rabinow 2003, 2007). Second, I consider the temporal dimension of knowledge as the many different ways in which people in their knowledge practices reach out in time to the past or the future, both near and far (compare Guyer 2007). Third, I approach the affective aspects of knowledge practices and according temporal implications, scrutinizing the phenomena of hope and fear and their relations to knowledge about particular temporal dimensions, especially the future (Anderson 2006a, 2006b; Berlant 2011; Povinelli 2011). This does not deploy the concept of temporality as usually attributed to particular objects, forms, relations and situations. Instead of discovering some inherent quality that allows such analytical objects to exist in time, I approach issues of time via the politics that are done with them, the effects they have and their own existence in time (Ringel 2016b).
In this book’s overall structure, one form emerges. First, I analytically zoom in on the theoretical issue of the future in Chapters 1 and 2, laying the groundwork for a more complex understanding of local practices of contextualization and narrativization, and local forms of temporal reasoning, which initially include the past. In Chapters 3 and 4, I investigate two aspects of local futurity more thoroughly. Whereas Chapter 3 enquires into the temporal dimension of the near future regarding conflictive local politics and forms of reasoning, Chapter 4 focuses on affect and affective politics, and their relations to the future. Chapter 5 accompanies the preceding two chapters by zooming out again, that is, proliferating the approach to the future. It presents the issue of maintenance and endurance in consideration of local beliefs in (and hopes for) the efficacy of future knowledge.
Through this explorative strategy, my overall account provides answers to the question posed in Gundermann’s song – by depicting a surprising variety of human relations to the future and bearing witness to a community’s hard work to regain its own sense of the yet-to-come in the conceptual space of the process of shrinkage. This impressive, continuous and multifaceted work stems from the choice that Gundermann had in mind, which motivated my own intellectual engagement with the lives of the inhabitants of Germany’s fastest-shrinking city. Its efficacy is hard to judge, but it keeps my informants going in their diversity towards a future that remains in many ways indeterminate by the past that once was their present. It keeps time, and knowledge about it, in motion.
Notes
1. The lyrics in German read rather beautifully: ‘Die Zukunft ist ´ne abgeschoss´ne Kugel, / auf der mein Name steht und die mich treffen muss. / Und meine Sache ist, wie ich sie fange, / mit’m Kopf, mit’m Arsch, mit der Hand oder mit der Wange. / Trifft sie mich wie ein Torpedo oder trifft sie wie ein Kuss?’ For the rest of the song, Gundermann uses further sets of metaphors, describing the future as an ‘unexplored country’ (ein unentdecktes Land), in which one has to choose sides with prey or predator; a ‘handed-in package’ (abgegebenes Päckchen), which could contain either a time bomb or precious issued stocks; and ‘a pale small woman’ (kleine blasse Frau), who is leaving and who one at this very moment could let go, force out or hold back. Despite their bleakness, these metaphors focus on the agency involved in how one might potentially define one’s relationship to the future.
2. Lusatia (Lausitz) is the name of the region surrounding Hoyerswerda. For centuries, it has been inhabited by the Slavic minority of the Sorbs (Sorben).
3. For another, although very different example of an ethnography looking at the future, see Lorenzo Cañás Bottos’ monograph on Old Colony Mennonites in Argentina and Bolovia (2008). He looks at the future relations of a community that for different and self-professed reasons was considered to be of the past. See also Holbraad and Pedersen 2013; Krøijer 2015.
4. I contrast this to theories that account for the influence of the past through a history of knowledge (practices). For example, Pels (2016) recently argued that we have to understand contemporary modes of representing and relating to the future in the West by accounting for the dominance of these modes over a time span of more than 500 years.
5. All names used in this monograph are real names. However, in reference to contentious issues, I altogether refrain from mentioning names and instead circumscribe the people involved via social status, age, gender, etc.
6. ‘Wenn eine Stadt kleiner wird, werden die Menschen in ihr dann größer?’
7. ‘Unser Ziel ist es in diesem Schrumpfungsprozess, den wir als solches akezeptiert haben, hier positiv einzugreifen, handlungsfähig zu bleiben, und darüber eine positive Stimmung zu erzeugen, die dann für eine andere, neue Lebensqualität und Lebenskultur sorgt.’
8. For critiques of East German Ostalgie, cf. Berdahl (1999, 2009) and Boyer (2001a, 2001b, 2006, 2010). Both authors show that temporal references to the GDR past should not be analysed as expressions of some form of past-fixation, but instead as critical contemporary statements with an inherent claim on the future.
9. He later strengthens this point by reference to the work of phenomenologists such as Husserl, who proposes that ‘our daily lives are lived within the set of temporal “horizons” which shift continually’ (Gell 1992: 221), ‘horizons of a temporally extended present’ (ibid.: 223), which still retain some continuity. Gell positions his own concept of temporal maps with regard to the key concepts of Husserl’s temporal phenomenology of perception, ‘retention’ and ‘protention’.
10. Guyer et al. draw attention to a particular disciplinary ‘prioritization of different temporal frames’ (2007: 7). In the field of anthropology, the future did indeed not play any prominent role for a long time (see Munn 1992).
11. For more detail on the newspaper columns, see the archive of the local newspaper, the Hoyerswerdaer Tageblatt. For visual material on the AnthroCamp08, the youth camp on anthropology, see www.kufa-hoyerswerda.de/anthro-camp-2008-2.html and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwmuMOZVe18. For visual material on the community art project Malplatte, see http://www.kufa-hoyerswerda.de/2009-malplatte.html.
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‘There Can Only Be One Narrative’
Postsocialism, Shrinkage and the Politics of Context in Hoyerswerda
I, as a political person, can change my politics
by … shifting my spatiotemporal horizon.
—David Harvey, Spaces of Hope
Demographic knowledge is powerful, particularly when it refers to the future in something that the title of this book describes as postindustrial times. During my fieldwork in 2008 and 2009, the demographic future of Hoyerswerda looked devastating: although the city had already lost more