Back to the Postindustrial Future. Felix Ringel
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of the many shrinking cities produced in the postindustrial era of finance capitalism. Outside of the former Eastern Bloc, particularly cities in the United States (for Chicago, see Walley 2013; for Flint, Michigan, see Young 2013) and broader cultural changes in countries such as Japan (for example, Allison 2013) caught scientific attention. However, it is no coincidence that the comparative literature on shrinking cities first emerged in East Germany (Hannemann 2003; Oswalt 2005, 2006; Oswalt and Rieniets 2006, see also Bude et al. 2011; Willisch 2012; Cliver and Smith-Prei 2014), and cities such as Hoyerswerda might as well provide a unique perspective on the postindustrial future.
To explore how Hoyerswerda’s inhabitants have overcome their postindustrial representational paralysis with regard to the future and how social scientists can follow suit analytically, I argue for a particular way of studying the future. I claim that anthropology, with its inherently presentist methodology of ethnographic fieldwork, allows us to come to a better understanding of the role the future plays in human life than other social science disciplines. Once this new conceptualization of the future is established, it will also change our understanding of the past. To assist in the elucidation of these two related arguments, I will briefly discuss the philosophical theory of presentism. Like Alfred Gell (1992), I take inspiration from the metaphysics of time in order to draw from this renewed transdisciplinary conversation a link to our own concerns (compare Bear 2014; Hodges 2008).
Anthropology and Presentism: Past, Present and Future Reconsidered
In the metaphysics of time, presentism is the account of time that holds that only the present exists, while the past and future are in some way unreal; it is contrasted with eternalism, which holds that the past, present and future are equally real. Metaphysical presentism resembles the approach of those anthropologists who hold that both the past and the future do not exist other than in their not necessarily accurate representations in the present (for example, Gell 1992; Munn 1992). Kirsten Hastrup’s 1990 definition of ethnographic presentism argues that in the discipline of anthropology this form of presentism is not just a literary device; it is the essentially presentist methodological approach to ethnographic material, which shapes anthropology’s ‘necessary construction of time’ (Hastrup 1990: 45). Pushed to the extreme, as Alfred Gell so convincingly showed in his discussion of the temporal quality of the Magna Carta, it does not matter from an anthropological point of view whether a document held in a British library or cathedral dates from 1215 or not. What matters is how people attach meaning to it, that is, whatever ‘temporality’ or ‘historicity’ they construct in their respective presents (see Ringel 2016b). To focus on the ethnographic present therefore does not detemporalize anthropological analysis (de Pina-Cabral 2000), but helps us to put invocations of pasts that potentially never were and of futures that potentially never will be on their proper metaphysical footing.
However, historically minded scholars can easily counter the idea of ethnographic presentism. In their view, although any future might be open, the present came to be the way it is through a long and complex process of historical causation. Hence, for them, it would be important to read Hoyerswerda’s postsocialist present through the lens of the socialist or an even earlier past. This seriously downplays the influence the representations of the future might have in and on the present, and it severely restricts human agency or, more specifically, human temporal agency (Ringel 2016a). In their conceptual framework, the present is reduced to a momentary pause in an ever-continuous process of causation. Only the past gains a proper ontological quality. To undermine the view that the present is determined by the past, I turn to a recent discussion of presentism in the metaphysics of time.
In 2006, the philosopher Craig Bourne published a defence of metaphysical presentism – entitled The Future of Presentism – and the work contains a piece of reasoning that is relevant to my concerns. Bourne seeks to identify and invalidate deterministic fallacies, using an argument that I simplify here.
The first premise is that, given a certain degree of contingency and indeterminacy, at any moment in time, we face the probable emergence of a variety of possible futures. In other words, Bourne claims that our future is not predetermined, as at any point in time many possible futures may come to pass. I suspect that most anthropologists would accept this premise (although many philosophers would not). Otherwise, meaningful action is hard to envision: most people at least seem to presume that their decisions have an impact on the future. The second premise is that if our future is not predetermined, then our actual pasts – events, which were once one of these possible futures, but have actually become a present and then a past – were at no point predetermined to become an actual present either. Given both premises, the conclusion follows that neither our future nor our past is or was predetermined.
Bourne’s understanding of metaphysical presentism does not entail that there is no causal relationship between past and present. Rather, it puts the past and the future on an equal ontological footing: neither past nor future exists in the present, and neither is predetermined. For a presentist, only the present exists. This framework suggests a new way of understanding anthropological presentism, both theoretically and methodologically: we should treat the past and future symmetrically in anthropological analysis, paying in-depth attention to all the temporal relations and experiences – pertaining to the past, present and future – found in our fieldsites’ many successive presents. Building on this, I attempt to reconceptualize the anthropology of time with an increased and explicit attention to the future.
This approach helps me to avoid two traps: first, explaining postsocialist change solely through the perspective of the socialist past (Ringel 2013a); and second, projecting my own hopes and wishes for a better future, as much as my fears and worries, onto my informants’ lives and struggles (Ringel 2012). As the experiences of my informants prove, any future might hold various surprises, as past futures have already done. For instance, had my informants been told twenty years ago that their city’s population would decrease by half in 2008, the dystopian imaginaries to capture such an allegation would have had their own self-fulfilling prophetic effects. However, now that people live in the deindustrialized future, the new present suddenly allows otherwise unforeseen spaces for hope and different, if still tentative, ideas of other futures. What counts for the future also has to count for the past: from a presentist point of view, neither of these temporal dimensions exists ontologically outside the present, in which they are presented and negotiated (see Adam 1990: 38). These temporal representations stem from a temporal agency all human beings have (see Ringel and Moroşanu 2016) and are usually subjected to all kinds of temporal politics (for example, Antze and Lambek 1996; Kaneff 2003).
For their analysis, this book follows Jane Guyer’s aim ‘to develop an ethnography of the near future of the 21st century’ (Guyer 2007: 410) and thus empirically explores the (epistemic) repercussions of a much broader collapse of formerly powerful modern and postmodern narratives of the future. Therefore, it is not about memory, nostalgia or other representations of the past (see Gilbert 2006); rather, it approaches change through the perspective of alterations in temporal knowledge in relations to the future. Following its presentist inclinations, it proposes that these temporal relations are primarily of an epistemic kind, which in turn entails our own practices of knowledge production (compare Fabian 1983; Wolf 1982).
This analytical decision has major repercussions for the study of change and transformation. Primarily, I have to reconsider the role of knowledge in times of change, exploring its adaptability and flexibility, without repeating the anthropology of postsocialism’s initial tendency of depicting the former socialist ‘other’ (in Fabian’s terms) as surprisingly adaptable to new socioeconomic environments (see Buyandelgeriyn 2008). By that I distance myself from the implicit idea of a postsocialist ontology, fully predetermined by – and mostly directed to – the past, which took hold in many academic and nonacademic circles, particularly in the field of transitology. As other accounts from the vast and diverse body of literature in the field of postsocialist anthropology (for example, Pelkmans 2003; Boyer 2006; Gilbert 2006; Pedersen 2012; Jansen 2014; Knudsen and Frederikson 2015), my case study depicts one example in which this paradigm ultimately fails. Instead of memories of – and concerns with – the past, I encountered an abundant variety of local knowledges, imaginaries and affects pertaining to the future, which,