Introduction
Anthropology and the Future
Notes from a Shrinking Fieldsite
The future is a flying bullet.
It carries my name and it’s going to hit me no matter what. /
My question is, How shall I catch it? –
With my head, my arse, my hand or with my cheek? /
Does it hit me like a torpedo, or brush me like a kiss?
—Gerhard Gundermann, ‘The Future’1
I started fieldwork in the East German city of Hoyerswerda in 2008.
On my arrival, huge excavators were busily tearing down several
of the socialist apartment blocks in Hoyerswerda’s New City
(subsequently Neustadt). Some used the usual wrecking ball; others
deployed enormous forceps, breaking up these formerly five-, sixor
eleven-floor buildings piece-by-piece. The piercing sounds of the
heavy machines contrasted with the dull noise made by the falling
concrete units. When mounting the heaps of rubble left over from
what just months before had still been people’s homes, the excavators
wobbled like a ship on a sea of concrete, adding a crunching
sound to the somewhat eerie situation. Only the water pumps,
fighting the dust formation, ran constantly. Once in a while, a
former resident would pass by, take pictures and start a chat with
the usually smoking operator of the excavator. The latter might have
already heard some stories from the lifeworlds he was deconstructing
here. He was, however, more eager to answer the not uncommon
question of where all the debris would be going when his work
is done.
2  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
The process of the city’s large-scale physical demolition had started
exactly ten years earlier in 1998. That same year, the local singersongwriter
Gerhard Gundermannn performed a song, ‘The Future’,
for the last time. In this song, whose first lines open this Introduction,
Gundermann describes the future as a ‘flying bullet’, which carries
his name and is going to hit him ‘no matter what’. In Hoyerswerda,
which would later in 2009 be officially labelled Germany’s fastestshrinking
city, the future indeed appeared to relentlessly bring its
demise. However, Gundermann adds a twist to his deterministic,
hopeless characterization of the future as a flying bullet: ‘My question
is, How shall I catch it?’ Instead of giving in to the inevitable
flow of time, he claims that we have the power to relate to the future
in our own ways: we can – arguably – determine whether this future
is to hit us ‘like a torpedo’ or brush us ‘like a kiss’.
For the urban community of a shrinking city, the future poses an
ongoing problem. This monograph explores the ways in which inhabitants
of Hoyerswerda relate to their oncoming futures and shows how
their experiences of shrinkage can help anthropology as a discipline to
properly constitute the future as an integral part of its analysis. In the
following sections, I will first introduce my fieldsite and then sketch
Figure 0.1  Excavator on remains of the ‘PaintBlock’ building, WK 10, winter
2009
Introduction  ◆  3
my vision of the anthropology of the future, continuing an old tradition
in the anthropology of time by taking inspiration from recent
philosophical work on metaphysics. Having linked ‘ethnographic’ to
‘metaphysical’ presentism, I show how in Hoyerswerda the future
has been rendered problematic and how it has become an epistemic
object in its own right – for both my informants and myself – in the
third section. In the last two sections, I proceed by conceptualizing
knowledge and time in relation to one another I close by reviewing
my overall argument. This book’s general aim is to provide the reader
with an ethnography of hope and the future in a city that, for many,
was doomed to have neither of those. However, I read this city’s
present not through the lens of its (failed) past(s) – socialist or postsocialist
– but from the perspective of what my informants considered
a much more pressing concern: their personal and collective futures.
Introducing Hoyerswerda
Gundermann’s song poses the question for the whole book: how
is the urban community of a shrinking city to relate to the future;
and how is the discipline of anthropology to account for this effort?
Gundermann’s life is intimately linked to Hoyerswerda’s past, and
I will briefly reconstruct it here by way of introducing the troubled
history of my fieldsite. Importantly, Hoyerswerda is much more
than an old town in the Lausitz region (Lusatia)2
near to the Polish
and Czech borders, which rose to national and international fame as
a model industrial city during state-socialism. As will become apparent,
Hoyerswerda’s current problems might be intimately linked
with the recent political and economic past of Germany. However,
these problems are similarly, if not more, drawn to the dystopian
futures they seem to prefigure.
Gundermann grew up in Hoyerswerda during Neustadt’s construction.
The construction started in the mid 1950s and was part
of the socialist government’s response to a widespread existential
housing crisis. The socialist part of Germany, the German
Democratic Republic (GDR), like all of Germany – indeed, most of
Europe and many other places in the world – lay bare and devastated
at the end of World War II. After the official division of Germany
in 1949, early Cold War conflicts were fought out between capitalist
Western Germany and the GDR by competing in terms of state provisioning
and economic success (Borneman 1992), and Hoyerswerda,
part of the GDR, was quickly caught up in this conflict: which
4  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
political system could overcome the war legacies quicker and provide
its population with the much-needed material goods, housing and
sociocultural infrastructure? Which system could better live up to its
promises of a better future?
Gundermann was part of the second generation of Neustadt’s
inhabitants, the children of those workers who had come to build
Hoyerswerda’s Neustadt as the GDR’s second socialist model city and
the major settlement for the nearby emerging brown coal industrial
complex exploiting the region’s vast lignite deposits. He was raised in
an avant-garde city that was constructed from scratch on top of the
endless Lusation sands and the heaps of brown coal, which, as a local
Sorbic myth has it, the devil himself had placed beneath it. And the
different political economies surrounding the exploitation of lignite
proved to be a blessing and a curse for Hoyerswerda’s ­existence –
although at first a blessing. Hoyerswerda Neustadt was the first city
in the world solely erected using industrially ­prefabricated concrete
units; a vanguard socialist-modern project – meticulously planned,
quickly expanded and fervently drawn towards a socialist future.
Hoyerswerda was a GDR state experiment, full of personal promises
and splendid future prospects for those privileged to live and work
there.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Gundermann witnessed the construction
of most of Neustadt’s ten living complexes (Wohnkomplexe –
subsequently WK), including their many schools, kindergartens,
‘WK-shops’ (Nahversorger), playgrounds, parks, sculptures, streets
and pavements – everything that belongs to a new city. He attended
local schools, did his A-levels in the Old City’s prestigious Lessing
Gymnasium and then found a job in the mines, as did so many
Hoyerswerdians of the first Neustadt generation. On his arrival,
the city’s population had already dramatically increased in size,
from previously 7,000 to over 70,000 inhabitants by the early 1980s.
Besides being a professional operator of one of the huge coal excavators
(the length of which is twice the height of the Eiffel Tower, I was
told proudly by many informants), he also played in Hoyerswerda’s
most famous band of that time: the ‘Brigade Firestone’ (Brigade
Feuerstein). This band was not part of the socialist plan for the city.
Neither were the many social, cultural and musical clubs and associations
founded by those inhabitants who were ‘hungry for life’ – as
a local idiom has it – in an environment dominated by planned efficiency
and functionality.
With German reunification in 1990, the Cold War ended in
Germany. The former GDR’s sudden incorporation into the capitalist
Introduction  ◆  5
world system had severe social and economic consequences all over
East Germany: unemployment roared and outmigration skyrocketed.
With the modernization of the industrial complex, for which
Hoyerswerda was originally built, Gundermann lost his job too. Of
the original 30,000 ‘miners and energy workers’, only a tenth were
still needed. The city’s population shrank drastically in a very short
period of time, eventually causing the widespread demolition of
Neustadt’s cityscape. In the mid 1990s, Gundermann tried to retrain
as a carpenter. Meanwhile, he was touring around the former GDR,
celebrated as ‘the voice of East Germany’. For many, he was one
of the few public figures expressing the feelings and problems of a
whole society in rapid transformation. Change, justice, solidarity and
the future were topics of his songs. He found words for what – from
one day to the next – had hit the whole region, but Hoyerswerda
most dramatically: deindustrialization, decline and the loss not only
of the socialist future it once had, but also the future of the ‘imaginary
West’ (Yurchak 2006: 158ff). It was the latter capitalist future
that earlier came to dominate the nascent East German peaceful revolution
and later, after the 1989 ‘turn’ or Wende, failed to deliver on its
promises of post-reunification prosperity. Another recurrent theme
in Gundermann’s work is the inevitable finitude of life. His own premature
death in 1998, at the age of forty-three, tragically underlined
the melancholy of his songs.
As an ethnography of the failures and aftermath of German reunification,
this book could be an elaborate account of dying, vanishing
or demise. Hoyerswerda is a city of ‘historically unprecedented
decline and deconstruction in peacetimes’, as German journalists
were recurrently eager to point out. Between 1989 and 2009,
Hoyerswerda’s population halved from approximately 70,000 to
less than 35,000 residents. The average age of the remaining inhabitants
had doubled over the course of four decades. Demographically
speaking, Hoyerswerda had turned from Germany’s youngest city in
the 1950s into one of its oldest by 2009. The future prospects were,
to put it mildly, bleak, and especially the young and well-educated
continued to leave the city; already at the beginning of my fieldwork
in 2008, the population was predicted to halve yet again by 2020.
Furthermore, Hoyerswerda not only had the reputation of having
‘no future’, it was also widely known to be of the past in at least two
different ways. First, as a socialist model city, it seemed stuck in the
socialist past, unable to enter the capitalist present and future. The
local election successes of the leftist successor party to the former
state-ruling Socialist Unity Party seemed to confirm this in the early
6  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
1990s. The same goes for the city’s apartment houses built in prefab
style architecture (Plattenbau; see Hannemann 1996), which – as in
West Germany – soon became defamed as soulless social housing for
the poor and a representative of the failed project of state-socialism.
Second, in September 1991, Hoyerswerda was also the first city in
Germany to showcase xenophobic attacks on foreigners – newly
arriving asylum seekers and former contract workers from other
social states. The images of a drunken mob harassing innocent refugees
went around the world and linked the city to the even more
distant past of Nazi Germany.
However, rather than providing an ethnography of dramatic
demise or heroic survival, this monograph seeks to advance something
different: an ethnography of the future.3
From a presentist
perspective (and despite the initial historical contextualization), this
study takes as its ethnographic objects the many explicit, tacit and
always concrete temporal notions that are sparked by – as much as
they relate to – the temporal dimension of the future. These temporal
relations to the future include all kinds of representational and nonrepresentational
forms of knowledge that pertain to this dimension.
In Hoyerswerda, they obviously first of all deal with the negative
developments the city faces. However, relations to the future have
been rendered problematic in many parts of the world. The postindustrial
era, which arguably started with the 1970s oil crises, has had
severe effects. As Jane Guyer argued in her seminal 2007 article on
contemporary forms of temporal reasoning, people worldwide have
lost their hold particularly on the near future. In place of five-year
plans and widespread construction, they experience what Guyer
labels ‘enforced presentism’: they are coerced to live only in the
immediate present, having lost the ability to plan ahead. The postCold
War era and its numerous new crises have, indeed, forced many
people to face a reality in which the (better) future seems to be lost
to the realm of fantasy (Guyer refers to this as fantasy futurism).
However, the idea of the modernist future, of ongoing economic
growth as well as urban and other development has been overthrown
in Hoyerswerda and in many other parts of the former socialist bloc
much more suddenly than elsewhere in the postindustrial world. In
less than a decade, the city had changed from a booming and lively
mining settlement to a drastically shrinking city without a future.
In 2008, this loss of the future constituted the city’s most important
problem.
In what follows, I ethnographically explore Hoyerswerda’s future.
My central thesis is that the future as an ethnographic object should
Introduction  ◆  7
be an integral part of anthropological analysis – regardless of whether
it seems lost or not in a specific fieldsite. Anthropologists as much
as other social scientists tend to think that our present lives are the
results of complex historical processes of causation. Accordingly,
when analysing peoples’ presents, their pasts are frequently discussed
to the exclusion of their futures (see Persoon and van Est 2000).
Against this, I argue that the different ways in which people relate
to the future is as, if not more, crucial for understanding their presents.
This book explores the postindustrial condition and its social,
cultural and epistemic repercussions in one social setting by mapping
the loss, and reappropriation, of the future by a particular urban community.
Hoyerswerda is an ideal place to study this. No longer a vanguard
socialist industrial city, it can be understood as a vanguard city
of a different kind: a herald of the postindustrial future in Europe and
beyond, to which, as I claim in the book’s title, we should return more
consciously. Although it is a most drastic example, Hoyerswerda is
only one 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).
8  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
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
Introduction  ◆  9
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
10  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
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 Moros˛anu 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, for a presentist,
remain not (fully) predetermined by the past.4
Under 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
Introduction  ◆  11
“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,
12  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
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
Introduction  ◆  13
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
14  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
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.
All of these practices conceptually, practically and affectively
targeted the temporal dimension of the future (in the present).
Nonetheless, they still did not add up to a local temporal culture.
Rather, my informants’ production of knowledge and affects about
themselves, their city and respective futures remained concrete and
situated. Their epistemic practices answered specific questions and
concerns, and indicated in their variety a complex, diverse and even
contradictory reservoir of temporal thoughts and relations, and
a certain flexibility in people’s capacity to negotiate this multiplicity.
If anything, it was the then current omnipresence of potential
and widely feared repercussions of the drastic local economic, social
and demographic decline that characterizes this local economy
of knowledge.
Figure 0.2  View from the Lausitz Tower in Neustadt’s city centre towards
WK 10 (beige buildings, centre left), with the coal-fired power plant Schwarze
Pumpe in the background (centre right)
Introduction  ◆  15
Despite the fact that actual shrinkage has very different effects on
different people, depending on their socioeconomic standing, age,
education and personal conviction, all Hoyerswerdians were forced
to ask themselves what kind of future their hometown has. In concrete
terms, this meant that they had to define what for them, in their
particular circumstances, the locally ubiquitous phrase ‘quality of
life’ entailed and how much of that they were ready to sacrifice when
facing a bleak future. Is life worth living in a shrinking city? The
sometimes prosaic, performative claim that Hoyerswerda was, after
all, a ‘loveable and liveable city’ (liebens- und lebenswerte Stadt) – a
phrase continuously brought forward by the Lord Mayor, local journalists
and other public voices – has a somewhat empty and sober,
but at the same time passionate and desperate appeal to it.
However, actual shrinkage as well as its imagined future consequences
impeded on the most intimate, relational aspects of social
life – and even there sparked the production of knowledge about
the future. The severe holes in the city’s social fabric affected every
citizen. For example, all of the seven host families I stayed with during
my sixteen months of fieldwork faced important changes stemming
from their children’s outmigration. Out of my seventeen host siblings
(all in their late teens to early thirties), thirteen had already left
the city when I was doing fieldwork; by 2011, only four remained
with three more to leave soon. Most host families usually housed
me in the bedrooms of their offspring, who had already left the city.
Even if the parents’ own futures in the city seemed secure (and three
of the seven families seriously considered leaving during my time in
Hoyerswerda), there were still potentially dramatic changes ahead.
My first host parents, both teachers, worried about the future of the
respective schools they worked at. If one of them closed down due
to a lack of new pupils, where would they be allocated to – another
school in Hoyerswerda or another city altogether? My second host
mother’s main concern was the impending move out of her WK 10
apartment. Already in 2008 WK 10 was widely predicted to be completely
demolished by 2013 (which, indeed, it was) despite being
Hoyerswerda’s youngest living district. Should she move to Dresden
where her two sons live? Should she stay in Hoyerswerda where she
is only precariously employed? Until that decision was made, she
had to endure all the concerns of living in a WK that is doomed to be
demolished: the ongoing deconstruction of nearby apartment houses,
the decay of green spaces and playgrounds, the accelerating departure
of neighbours and friends. My third host parents faced leaving
after their two children finished their A-levels and started university
16  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
degrees elsewhere. They seriously considered moving to Dresden,
Berlin or some alternative living project in the countryside. My host
mother was constantly on the brink of being made redundant from
her job as a headmistress of a local nursing school due to the school’s
potential closure. My host father commuted daily to Berlin – why
not move there for good?
Such personal concerns, problems and impediments are themselves
not unusual and can be found in most parts of the world.
Everywhere, institutions, shops and surgeries shut down; people face
migration, insecurity and temporary hopelessness. Worldwide, children
are leaving their parents’ homes, and communities are forced
to deal with fundamental alterations stemming from such outmigration.
In particular, what is known as the former First World suffers
from ageing populations and demographic implosions. The division
into winners and losers of contemporary changes has set into
motion new flows of people, goods and investments, which severely
affect – as this account’s focus on outmigration suggests – not only
those going away, but also those staying behind (compare Ferguson
1999; Walley 2013; Young 2013; Gaibazzi 2015; Vacarro et al. 2016).
In Hoyerswerda, it is not the kind of social, economic and cultural
change – postindustrial, after all – that is significant, but rather its
magnitude and rapid intensity. For many inhabitants, the actual survival
of their city is under threat, since there seems to be no end to this
accelerated process of change. At its core, then, ‘shrinkage’ precisely
entails this problematization of the future because it pre-­emptively
prescribes to current changes a bad outcome, directing them to a
future that seems already lost. It is for this reason that inhabitants
of Hoyerswerda continuously renegotiated their personal and collective
futures with one another.
The Future as an Epistemic Problem
Once a city decreases in size, do its citizens subsequently increase
in relevance?
—Uwe Proksch, CEO KulturFabrik e.V., September 2008
At the end of my fieldwork in the spring of 2009, the Federal Office
for Building and Regional Planning pronounced Hoyerswerda to
be Germany’s fastest-shrinking and soon (demographically speaking)
oldest city. More than before, the term ‘shrinkage’ came to
signify the myriad intricate and large-scale changes experienced by
Introduction  ◆  17
Hoyerswerda’s citizens, and put their city in the national media spotlight.
The future dimension, as shown in the previous section, had a
special role to play in locally perceiving and making sense of these
alterations. But how did shrinkage – or what it refers to – come to
be a problem, and with which epistemic and social repercussions? In
particular, the search for a proper context, out of, in and with which
to create new meaning for the present and the future in it, was essential
in Hoyerswerda, since the daily encounters with the deconstruction
of major parts of the cityscape and continuous threats of further
deconstruction, closure and new impediments kept on influencing
my informants’ lives. Although many Hoyerswerdians claimed that
they got used to the sight of the huge excavators tearing down apartment
blocks, the noises of the concrete panels crashing down on huge
heaps of rubble or the smell of the irrigated cement residue, they,
like I, often still experienced a sense of confusion when stumbling
yet again over the absence of a particular apartment house, school
or kindergarten – not to mention the absence of friends, children
and neighbours.
In my first chapter, I scrutinize the following possibility: anthropologists
could convincingly approach life in Germany’s fastestshrinking
city from the perspective of postsocialism – composing a
narrative about postsocialist failure and the burdens of the socialist
past, tracking in detail what Caroline Humphrey aptly referred to as
the ‘unmaking of socialist life’ (Humphrey 2002a). In a bleak version
of this – common in German media – the Hoyerswerdians could then
be seen not as facing problems with their future, but as postsocialist
subjects who have never been fit for the new (Western) future in
the first place. Accounts of nostalgic attachments to the past (which
I hardly ever encountered during my sixteen months of fieldwork)
would neatly illustrate this situation, and the failure of German
reunification could remain as depoliticized as it is in most public discourses
in Germany. As I argue, however, the fundamental upheaval
in Hoyerswerda cannot be reduced to being merely a postsocialist
phenomenon. Rather, much broader processes simultaneously come
to bear in Hoyerswerda, producing an unprecedented dimension of
change, which my informants tackled daily in their personal and professional
lives.
From Hoyerswerda alone, approximately 50,000 people have left,
with far fewer people moving to the city. What happens when more
than half of a city’s population leave in a comparatively short period
of time, and when urban life and sociality suddenly lose their endurance,
permanence and predictability? In Hoyerswerda, the answer
18  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
to these questions required the production of new knowledge in my
informants’ continuously problematic presents. The shift from the
refusal of the term ‘shrinkage’ to accepting it as a valid description of
the process gave a new structure to this knowledge. One of the crucial
understandings it entails is an ethical one, namely that a ‘good’ life is
not only possible in times of growth. Rather, in the eyes of my informants,
life in times of shrinkage and decline is to be lived in as good a
way as possible, despite (or even because of) their hometown’s current
decline. Established practices and institutions are to be maintained,
and new forms of practices have to be tried out. At the core of this
ethical response are the profound temporal operations in the form of
temporal reasoning. This particular form of temporal agency allows
for the reappropriation of the temporal dimension of the near future
in concrete terms, and beyond the local politicians’ dubious invigorations
of the ‘chances of shrinkage’ (Chancen der Schrumpfung).
That the city and its future are rendered problematic therefore
invites an analysis with reference to the anthropologies of time and of
knowledge. The key term ‘temporal reasoning’ combines these two
aspects most effectively. In Jane Guyer’s definition, it refers to the
different ways of ‘implicating oneself in the ongoing life of the social
and material world’ (Guyer 2007: 409). In its original sense, it comprised
‘the reach of thought and imagination, of planning and hoping,
of tracing out mutual influences, of engaging in struggles for specific
goals’ (ibid.) – all regarding relations to the near future, particularly
in modern times (see Bear 2014; compare Pels 2015). I explore with
it knowledge practices also aimed at other temporal dimensions, in
particular the past and the present, thus expanding its meaning to
all epistemic investments in issues of time and particular temporal
periods. Additionally, an analysis of human knowledge practices,
temporal politics and the local production of meaning for the future
also entails affective and ethical issues and questions about the efficacy
of future knowledge more generally. The problematization of
the city’s existence in time creates the city of Hoyerswerda as an
object of knowledge and stimulates the personal and public production,
exchange and dissemination of knowledge about it. Virtually all
citizens are drawn into these discursive or representational practices.
They are genuinely concerned about their hometown’s future and a
potential loss of their quality of life in it. Since Guyer specifically
attends the potential privatization of the near future, I focus on the
public explication, dissemination and negotiation of the (near) future.
In the following chapters, I refrain from extensively describing
disappearance, absence, change and hopelessness or the ongoing
Introduction  ◆  19
process of spatial and material deterioration, decay and deconstruction
of lifeworlds and former socialist and postsocialist living spaces.
Studying the epistemic or conceptual repercussions of the process of
shrinkage, I instead focus on specific local clashes in – and through –
which particular knowledge about the city and its future is made
explicit. In an urban context, public arenas of knowledge explication
are multiple, but in my case remain linked by the widely acknowledged
problematization of Hoyerswerda’s future.
Problematizing urban life and the city’s future also entails a
problematization of local citizenship and these citizens’ contemporary
role and agency. What does it mean to be a citizen in and of
a shrinking city? Uwe,5
the CEO of Hoyerswerda’s sociocultural
centre, posed the ingenious question: ‘Once a city decreases in size,
do its citizens subsequently increase in relevance?’6
He drew attention
to the fact that those staying in Hoyerswerda are much needed
for essential social responsibilities and functions. With every person
leaving, the city’s quality of life was seen to further deteriorate – so
the worth of each citizen should be at the centre of all political decisions
in these troubled times. Such considerations were not new in
Hoyerswerda. During the time of Neustadt’s erection, a time of constant
growth, the famous East German author Brigitte Reimann publicly
intervened on behalf of the young population and approached
the problem of the quality of urban life by asking a simple question:
‘Is it possible to kiss in Hoyerswerda?’ In critique of the increasingly
more economically restricted and functionally inclined official plans
under state-socialism, she insisted that the city’s architects should
include the new Hoyerswerdians’ social, cultural and emotional
needs in their planning. She demanded more social meeting places, a
central alley with shops and cafes, a theatre, a cinema, bars and a literature
café. A socialist model city, she underlined, should consider the
human beings in all their complexity. So should a shrinking postindustrial
city, I hasten to add, because it is not only that socialist life,
or modern industrial life, is being unmade, but a new form of life is
emerging, and we – as my informants – should aim at finding words
to capture this emergence.
In 2008, such questions were asked again in relation to the repercussions
of the process of shrinkage. As Dorit Baumeister, a local
architect, put it: ‘In this process of shrinkage, which we have come to
accept as such, it is our aim to intervene positively, to remain capable
of exercising agency. We want to create an optimistic atmosphere,
which in turn produces a different, a new quality and culture of life.’7
Her club’s response was and is sociocultural: more ‘togetherness’
20  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
(Miteinander) of those who remain in Hoyerswerda. However, it
is precisely these sociocultural arenas that faced the lack of public
funds most severely. Since state money is allocated to local communities
in relation to their population numbers, Hoyerswerda procured
increasingly lower levels of funds, but still had to maintain
the same urban infrastructure at increasing costs. The conservative
Lord Mayor Stefan Skora was acutely aware of the fact that if he followed
regional and state financial demands, he would have to close
down most cultural institutions, all of which are sponsored – in legal
terms – voluntarily by the city. He refused to do so in order not to
‘expel’ even more of his inhabitants. As he underlined, Hoyerswerda
was, is and will be ‘a loveable and liveable city’. The quality of life the
city was seen to provide is not only in this way an essential political,
technical and personal tool to handle shrinkage; its invocation might
also be a crucial, if nascent attempt to recolonize the city’s presumably
lost near future.
For the same reason, Skora introduced another group intervening
in the public definition of the city’s qualities: marketing and advertisement
experts. In search of unique selling points, they approached
Hoyerswerda’s quality of life as a major tool in the increasingly fierce
competition between small- and medium-sized cities. For their survival,
these cities compete not only for investors and state funding,
but also for the similarly scarce resource of citizens. Imagine there
is a city and nobody wants to live in it. In particular, the competition
for increasingly scarce skilled personnel defines cities, towns and
communities as quality providers for the lives of those much-desired
citizens who promise tax income and the potential attraction of more
people. However, the marketing experts’ job was also to convince
those living in Hoyerswerda of their own city’s advantages, thereby
creating a sense of togetherness like the architect’s sociocultural club
had in mind.
For a social anthropologist to intervene in such discourses on a
city’s quality of life, already captured as a neoliberal unique selling
point, entails several problems. For one thing, the emphasis on
the social and cultural dimensions of human life often similarly
reflects the anthropologist’s hopes and concerns. As Sara Ahmed
(2008) warned, there is a danger in our interventions in such discourses,
onto which we impose our own conceptualizations of social
harmony, for example, by wanting to put the ‘social glue’ back into
moments of crisis and divergence. I accept her critique. However, the
problematization of the core social relations that make up personal,
public, urban, professional and everyday life in Hoyerswerda (i.e.
Introduction  ◆  21
the local urge for more togetherness and social cohesion) is in itself
an ethnographic fact. As an outcome of various knowledge practices
that centre around the city’s fate and future, it should not be
easily debunked out of concerns about our own ethical and political
convictions. In order to explain what is theoretically at stake when
local forms of reasoning about the city’s worth in the present and the
future are approached via their temporal characteristics, I present a
few thoughts on the anthropologies of time and knowledge in relation
to one another.
Knowledge and Time/Knowledge in Time
There is no need to be in awe of time, which is no more mysterious than
any other facet of our experience of the world.
—A. Gell, The Anthropology of Time
In the eyes of many Germans, Hoyerswerda is just another East
German city with ‘no future’. A former avant-garde settlement
where the socialist future was daily facilitated, Hoyerswerda faces
social decline more strongly than other postsocialist cities, a continuously
decreasing and ageing population, and unrestrained physical
deconstruction. It has lost its economic foundation and with it its
modernist raison d’être. By all accounts, Hoyerswerda is perceived
as a hopeless case. Still, as shown in the previous sections, the city
remains infused with an urge towards the future. However, the new
temporal framework of shrinkage fundamentally questions any
future prospects for Hoyerswerda. It outruns in bleakness the disillusioning
loss of the hopes of the postsocialist transition. As shown
above, in the process of shrinkage, uncertainty prevails not only in
the domains of urban planning, the housing market, the education
system and other public domains, but also in personal lives. People
have lost the security they needed to plan the future. They cannot be
sure that their jobs, schools, dentists, favourite restaurants or football
clubs will continue to exist in the years to come.
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
22  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
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
Introduction  ◆  23
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 “worldviews”’
(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),
24  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
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 as an important matter
of knowledge, particular in contexts of crisis such as Hoyerswerda.
Introduction  ◆  25
Surprisingly, for Malkki’s 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
26  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
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
Introduction  ◆  27
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.
28  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
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
Figure 0.3  Anarchist graffito, KuFa building, Hoyerswerda, men’s toilet, 2009,
‘Utopias to Reality; Shit to Gold!!!’
Introduction  ◆  29
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 shift in local reasoning that occurred during my fieldwork
in 2008 and 2009, a shift that 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
30  ◆  Back to the Postindustrial Future
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 fastestshrinking
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.
Introduction  ◆  31
 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 refer-
ence 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-hoyers
werda.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.