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.
Figure 0.3 Anarchist graffito, KuFa building, Hoyerswerda, men’s toilet, 2009, ‘Utopias to Reality; Shit to Gold!!!’
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 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 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 fastest-shrinking 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.
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 reference to contentious
