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 as an important matter of knowledge, particular in contexts of crisis such as Hoyerswerda. 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 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 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
