Back to the Postindustrial Future. Felix Ringel
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the heading of postindustrial shrinkage, I foreground the future in all its openness, indeterminacy and malleability, rather than depict the past as powerfully predetermining the present and the future. This is particularly important because, as Nancy Munn observed, in the discipline of anthropology, ‘futurity is poorly tended as a temporal problem … in contrast to the close attention given to “the past in the present”’ (Munn 1992: 116). It also challenges academic hopes that postsocialist persons because of their socialist past can articulate a fundamental critique of Western capitalism and actively partake in some form of ‘co-determination’ (Dunn 2004). Such new solutions, ideas, concepts and practices were also locally awaited, but never really occurred; rather, a new present demanded altogether new solutions for novel, problematic futures. By inspecting the diverse modes of temporal agency of Hoyerswerda’s inhabitants in relation to the future, my ethnographic material contributes to the overall discipline what the subdiscipline of postsocialist anthropology has always been concerned with: the issue of time.
Gilbert et al. (2008: 11) already put it rather felicitously regarding the potential theoretical contributions of postsocialism: ‘If anthropology is the social science of the present, it ought to offer insight into the future in the present.’ They aspire to assemble a ‘social historiography of the future – a futuricity to complement historicity’ (ibid.). However, my approach also substantially differs from such culturally exclusive prescriptions. For instance, in contrast to Hirsch and Stewart’s 2005 take on historicity, I doubt that we can convincingly account for the historical predetermination of relations to the past (and by extension to the future), that is, what Hirsch and Stewart refer to as the historically specific and thereby determined ‘relevant ways in which (social) pasts and futures are implicated in current circumstances’ (see Ringel 2016b). Futuricity, as a coherent, homogeneous and collectively shared way of relating to the future, does not account for how my informants relate to the future (see again Ringel 2016b). Instead, as the overall postsocialist experience (Yurchak 2006) captures: things seem rather less determined and homogenous; they might radically change from one day to the other, and we should not be surprised by how (comparatively) easily humans adapt to this. As I claim throughout this book, for a presentist, both change and continuity are in some way subject to people’s temporal agency: in each present, different relations to different pasts and futures are possible.
Faced with the contemporary epistemic changes, the inhabitants of Hoyerswerda deploy their knowledge and experience to problems that are ‘conceptual’ and ‘new’. They refer to them as problems of ‘shrinkage’ (Schrumpfung), thus establishing a postpostsocialist epistemic arena. Superficially, the term ‘shrinkage’ might be understood to describe the merging of three different processes of transformation: postsocialist transition, (neoliberally orchestrated) globalization and (post-Fordist) deindustrialization. I propose to study the concurrence of these processes not through a political economy perspective, but by regarding their epistemic impact on the life of the inhabitants of this shrinking city. My ethnographic material maps the final establishment and acceptance of the trope of shrinkage, and then tracks how this temporal regime too has been challenged. The emergence of the possibility of asking a new, rather simple question regarding the future depicts this challenge. ‘What happens after shrinkage?’, however, incorporates a local revolution in epistemic terms; it gives Hoyerswerda a new future by epistemically reclaiming it. The fact that futures can be lost and exchanged for other futures is an essential part of Hoyerswerda’s story, and I show how its citizens overcame their particular forms of enforced presentism and dystopian fantasy futurism, and established a new present from which to relate to yet other futures.
As Dominic Boyer (2006, 2010) suggested, this strategy has further political implications: such local concerns about the future might provide a position that finally allows East Germans – or anybody else, for that matter – to take their future in their own hands. Since the postindustrial decline hit East Germany faster and harder than their West German countrymen, the latter are less interested in what is officially seen as a specifically East German problem. In turn, knowledge in and about this shrinking city is locally specific, practical, malleable and adaptable – not just postsocialist or East German in kind. This reconsideration of presumably postsocialist knowledge practices entails the reconceptualization of the notion of ‘East Germanness’. Accordingly, this ethnography is not a study of East German culture. Beyond the construction of alterity between East and West Germany, which was the core object of study in the anthropology of East Germany (compare Borneman 1992; Glaeser 2000, 2001; Boyer 2001a), I leave the comparative reference to ‘the West’ out of my analysis. Hoyerswerdians, like many other East Germans, face problems of their own, and it is their responses to these concrete epistemic problems that I analyse here.
Still, I also refrain from celebrating the many attempts of Hoyerswerda’s inhabitants involved in the endless endeavour to regain or uphold a sense of a personal and the city’s future. By that, I do not follow the future solely via uncovering the epistemic logic of the ‘method of hope’, as Hirokazu Miyazaki (2004) so admirably did for his Fijian fieldsite. Rather, I attempt to approach the future as an ethnographic object that is – in many different ways – not only an epistemic problem for my informants in their presents, whose solution needs the constant ‘redirection of knowledge’, but is also a social, ethical and political concern. Importantly, the local production of knowledge is linked to the future not by myself as the analyst, but explicitly by my friends and informants in the field. My informants establish these links foremost because they face a situation in which their hometown’s future is rendered fundamentally problematic. The next section answers Jane Guyer’s question, which follows from this observation: ‘What kind of “stories” does imagination create when the reference points lie in the future?’ (Guyer 2007: 417).
The Future in the Present
In Hoyerswerda, the overwhelming omnipresence of the future in daily life entails mundane long-term and short-term decisions; official planning practices; business development plans; strategy papers of local social clubs, organizations and associations; private and public investment plans; and the conceptualization and organization of potential future projects. It also comprises more intimate aspects: personal future prospects; expectations of the local youth’s outmigration; individual feelings and collective affects of fear, hope and despair; issues of trust and the lack of self-confidence; and the constricted capacity to envision one’s own life in the future.
In recent years, topics such as hope (Appadurai 2002, 2013; Miyazaki 2004, 2006, 2010; Zigon 2006, 2009; Pedersen 2012; Jansen 2014; Kleist and Jansen 2016) and planning (Alexander 2007; Guyer 2007; Weszkalnys 2010; Nielsen 2011, 2014; Baxstrom 2012; Abram and Weszkalnys 2013; Bear 2015) have received special attention as modes of relating to the future. In this book, I follow the more thoroughly collective, socially embedded, and continuously negotiated and contested future-relations (see Bear 2014, 2015). I thus focus on a specific set of collective epistemic practices and conflicts: public negotiations of temporal problems, specifically with the future, in which the citizens of Hoyerswerda collectively scrutinize their own and their hometown’s existence in time. This, in the first half of the book, combines different local arenas, such as educational and sociocultural projects, and controversial discourses, in which, for example, urban development strategies and the city’s future are passionately debated in moral, social, political or technological terms. Later in the book, I focus on two further aspects: the systematic imposition of affects of the future – spurred by dystopian predictions – and teleological practices of permanence and endurance. I use such sets of practices in order to reconsider issues of, and relations between, hope, knowledge and temporal agency. The analysis of these heterogeneous practices draws together very different local groups, events, institutions, perspectives and opinions. The links between these different persons, places and situations were upheld by the widespread problematization of postindustrial shrinkage, the then characteristic feature of what I refer to as the local economy of knowledge: the collective exchange and contestation of ideas and opinions about the city and its future.
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