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-hoyerswerda.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.
1
‘There Can Only Be One Narrative’
Postsocialism, Shrinkage and the Politics of Context in Hoyerswerda
I, as a political person, can change my politics
by … shifting my spatiotemporal horizon.
—David Harvey, Spaces of Hope
Demographic knowledge is powerful, particularly when it refers to the future in something that the title of this book describes as postindustrial times. During my fieldwork in 2008 and 2009, the demographic future of Hoyerswerda looked devastating: although the city had already lost more than half of its population over the previous twenty years, many of its citizens where expecting yet another wave of shrinkage in the years to come. Hoyerswerda’s population had reached one of the highest age-averages of all German cities, so what would happen, as a friend put it, once ‘all of these old people started to die’ (wenn die auch alle anfangen zu sterben)? Indeed, in the long run, there was no end in sight to the city’s demise, and dystopian narratives of decline were widely communicated in local, regional and national media. They had an impact on local thought about life and future prospects, but they did not take away people’s agency. As I claimed in the Introduction, the response to this kind of knowledge about the future and my informants’ everyday experiences of decline was not simply despair or lethargy. Rather, it sparked the production of new kinds of knowledge, deployed to make sense of the city’s problematic present and its unpromising future. Given the undeniably dramatic challenges ahead, such knowledge was in constant need for the right kind of midrange social metaphysics; in order to make (renewed) sense, it needed a context or narrative to fit in.
This chapter tracks the vast variety of contexts and narratives, in and through which my informants made sense of the problems and changes they faced. In its first half, I assemble a collage of short ethnographic examples in order to account for the local diversity and heterogeneity of such contexts. Instead of providing more ethnographic detail about the city’s demise, I focus, still ethnographically, on its inhabitants’ epistemic and conceptual responses to this demise. In its second half, I follow more closely what came to fruition during my time in Hoyerswerda – the emergence, establishment and final acceptance of one particular context: that of shrinkage. This chapter therefore pays tribute to the local diversity of expressions of epistemic or conceptual agency, and follows the contested social production of a context in an economy of knowledge one could rightly describe as ‘inchoate’ (Carrithers 2007), ‘unstable’ (Greenhouse et al. 2002), and characterized by a ‘loss of coherence’ (Lakoff and Collier 2004: 422) and a ‘crisis in meaning’ (Ferguson 1999: 14). It also constantly reflects upon potential academic contexts, which might and might not correspond with local ones. In lieu of a ‘normal’ first chapter, which would introduce the field through accounts of local history and geography, I offer an initial analysis of Hoyerswerda’s local economy of knowledge and ask which context is the best for this book to account for Hoyerswerda’s present.
However, as an epistemic tool, any context is simultaneously restricting and enabling, both for my informants and for me. A particular spatiotemporal context allows for a specific vision of the future, and has its specific repercussions on understanding one’s and others’ (temporal) agency. It affects what local inhabitants as well as external analysts can subject to thought and how they do it. This explains the clashes and conflicts that arise when different ideas about the city’s present collide. However, despite local contextual diversity and my own methodological interventions in search of a better or more promising context, the factual results of shrinkage and outmigration seem all too inevitable. Indeed, in times of postindustrial decline, one has to ask whether, after all, there can only be one narrative. The first ethnographic example of an art project in, and slightly out of, context will help me to expand on this question. It offers, for a start, a somewhat external perspective on the city’s past, present and future.
Figure 1.1 ‘ONE NARRATIVE’: ‘ArtBlock’ building, WK 10, Hoyerswerda Neustadt, August 2008
ONE NARRATIVE
In August 2008, Bjarke, a young Danish artist, attached the slogan THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE NARRATIVE in white capital letters onto the upper front of a soon-to-be-demolished five-storey apartment block in Hoyerswerda’s New City (Neustadt). His intervention was produced during an international student art residency, which took place in Neustadt’s youngest residential district WK 10. The district’s main landlord Lebensräume e.V., the LivingSpaces cooperation, temporarily offered thirty-six young international artists two abandoned apartment blocks, which gave the project its title: ‘ArtBlock’ (see http://www.art-block.blogspot.com). Initially, the project’s initiators had searched for other kinds of abandoned places. Such places, they told me, were increasingly common all over Western Europe and North America: places of no further use, redundant cities, factories and train stations, abject spaces of the postindustrial era. They had initially sought a dilapidated West German detached housing area, which in their understanding offered itself neatly for critical remarks on capitalist mainstream culture. Then they stumbled across the former socialist model city of Hoyerswerda and its other houses of other times and in other spaces. The officials and inhabitants of Hoyerswerda nonetheless happily provided the artists from Chile, Peru, Brazil, the United States, Israel, Botswana and several different European countries with ‘free space’ (Freiraum) in the German two
