The commonly expected responses to problems with the future – nostalgic attachment to the (in this case socialist) past8 or Guyer’s otherwise accurate enforced presentism/fantasy futurism-dyad – set strong limits to the capacity of Hoyerswerda’s inhabitants to discern not only change and a different future, but to the ability to envision a future altogether. They also do not provide convincing reasons for the fact that people nonetheless continue in myriad ways to direct their practices and lives to the future (see Crapanzano 2007). What kind of ethnographic object and analytical tool are hope and knowledge of the future? And how should we approach temporal agency in this context of shrinkage?
My ethnographic material consists of the local mediation of Hoyerswerda’s present and future by its citizens. As Donna Haraway (1988) pointed out, knowledge is always situated; this means it is part of a specific social context and manifests there as the interface of sociopolitical processes of negotiation (Boyer 2005) and personal interpretations of the world (Barth 2002). In a presentist framework, I account for both the ‘radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowledge subjects’ and the ‘radical multiplicity of local knowledges’ (Haraway 1988: 579). Accordingly, I approach knowledge less as an access point to local cultures (something ontologically given) and more as radically contingent, collectively negotiated outcomes of a multiplicity of local knowledge practices. In Hoyerswerda, as elsewhere, these negotiations happen in discourses among friends and family members, at all sorts of social gatherings, professional city planning procedures, in expert circles, around conference and coffee tables, at public speeches and sociocultural projects targeting the city’s future. This book maps a variety of public engagements with the city, presenting a citizenry that passionately produces and discusses knowledge about its own life, city and future.
Such a practice-based approach to time and knowledge (see Rabinow 1986) throws light on local politics and the way in which the future is made to play a role in Hoyerswerda’s citizens’ lives and experiences. It has a longstanding tradition in the discipline of anthropology. As Gell in The Anthropology of Time pointed out, Durkheim in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life already made clear ‘that collective representations of time do not passively reflect time, but actually create time as a phenomenon apprehended by sentient human beings’ (Gell 1992: 4). However, I concur with Gell’s critique of Durkheim, whose ‘thesis of the social origination of human temporal experience offers the prospect of a limitless variety of vicarious experiences of unfamiliar, exotic, temporal worlds’ and ‘their distinctive temporalities’ (both ibid.). In contrast to such an ontologizing idea of temporality as a homogeneous, closed cultural system (compare Ringel 2016b), and in accordance with Gell, I define time as an issue of (knowledge) practices, politics and changing social conventions, but not as an aspect of culture, a term that, for example, one of the most influential theorist of knowledge, Michel Foucault, in his early works uses only very unreflectively (for example, Foucault 2004 [1961], 2005 [1966]).
As Gell emphasizes, instead of searching for distinct temporal cultures, we should instead account for a more specific ‘contextual sensitivity of knowledge’ – including temporal knowledge: ‘how much a person “knows” about the world depends not only on what he has internalized and what … is in his permanent possession, but also on the context within which this knowledge is to be elicited, and by what means’ (1992: 109), that is, the present context of its production. For example, as he observed in Bourdieu’s early work, the Kabyle ‘operate with a multitude of different kinds of temporal schemes, appropriate to specific contexts of discourse or action’ (Gell 1992: 296). In Hoyerswerda, I am going to discern different forms of reasoning in similar ways. In both cases, political claims to time are part of the ‘continuous production of socially useful knowledge’ (ibid.: 304). Gell very successfully poses this idea of ‘contingent beliefs’ against ‘the doctrine of temporal “mentalities” or “world-views”’ (ibid.: 55).9
Carol Greenhouse also emphasizes the politics of time, and reminds us that we have to think about time and temporal representations always in relation to, in her case, changing or contested conceptions of social order and agency (1996: 4). As in Gell’s analysis, this goes beyond wondering about the ‘geometry of time’ (ibid.: 5), that is, its presumed cyclicity or linearity. Whereas she still focuses on temporality as an aspect of culture, I concentrate on the particular knowledge practices that reference different temporal dimensions. As she observes, however, any dominant formulation of temporality is, in fact, hard to be maintained (see ibid.: 82). Following Greenhouse, we could define shrinkage as the dominant formulation of time in Hoyerswerda, and it comes with the dominance of a particular version of temporal reasoning, what I call ‘enforced futurism’ – a constant attention to and problematization of the temporal dimension of the future. This form of temporal reasoning might have its histories (compare Rosenberg and Harding 2005; Pels 2016) or buy into particularly long-lasting problematizations (Rabinow 2003: 56), but I claim that there is no historical force that determines these practices. From a presentist point of view, the agency expressed in them might yield surprising results against all odds. Indeed, relations to the future in postindustrial modernity require the production of specific kinds of knowledges. As Ferguson has pointed out, these different kinds follow ‘the need to come to terms with a social world that can no longer be grasped in terms of the old script’ (Ferguson 1999: 252), in which dominant temporal frames fail to convincingly deliver epistemic clarification.
Ferguson claims that we should focus on the epistemic consequences of such changes. In Expectations of Modernity, he advances an ethnography of decline in which he strongly argues against modernist linear narratives, whilst emphasizing our discipline’s own investments in these temporal knowledge regimes. He contrasts their counterparts (deindustrialization, deurbanization and de-Zambianization) to his informants’ various expressions of agency. His aim is to trace the decline’s ‘effects on people’s modes of conduct and ways of understanding their lives’ (ibid.: 11–12). Whereas he sees most hope for overcoming the decline in the past as a resource for countering the false future promises of the modernization narrative, I want to establish the future as a resource for countering narratives of decline and shrinkage.
Facing widespread problems of and with knowledge itself, how do we specifically approach knowledge about the future? As I have pointed out above, I investigate particular forms of temporal thought, practice, affect, ethics and agency in a context where the future is rendered problematic. In short, the future is not just a matter of professional planning practices in local, regional and national state institutions or their citizen’s responses. Rather, the future is created, related to and represented in a variety of different arenas, such as art, social, cultural and other communal milieus, and many more places. Accordingly, through their practices, many inhabitants of this shrinking city have become new experts of the (postindustrial) future.
However, if we follow the German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s central predicament of The Principle of Hope (1986 [1959]), namely, that men are essentially determined by the future, we have to acknowledge that most social sciences still lack a comprehensive methodological and analytic toolkit for accounting for the future and the role it plays in human life. Liisa Malkki describes this as the ‘theoretical invisibility of the future’10 (2000: 326). Akin to my approach, she concludes that ‘futures as well as traditions and histories are constituted in and constitutive of present struggles, identities … communities, and social formations’ (ibid.: 28–29). The acknowledged abundance of relations to the future – ‘Once we start looking, it becomes clear that much of our political energy and cultural imagination is expended in personal and collective efforts to direct and shape (and, sometimes, to see) the future’ (ibid.) – provides enough ethnographic material to the future