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. 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 their practices and lives to the future (see Crapanzano 2007). What kind of ethnographic object and analytical tool are hope and knowledge of the future? And how should we approach temporal agency in this context of shrinkage?
My ethnographic material consists of the local mediation of Hoyerswerda’s present and future by its citizens. As Donna Haraway (1988) pointed out, knowledge is always situated; this means it is part of a specific social context and manifests there as the interface of sociopolitical processes of negotiation (Boyer 2005) and personal interpretations of the world (Barth 2002). In a presentist framework, I account for both the ‘radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowledge subjects’ and the ‘radical multiplicity of local knowledges’ (Haraway 1988: 579). Accordingly, I approach knowledge less as an access point to local cultures (something ontologically given) and more as radically contingent, collectively negotiated outcomes of a multiplicity of local knowledge practices. In Hoyerswerda, as elsewhere, these negotiations happen in discourses among friends and family members, at all sorts of social gatherings, professional city planning procedures, in expert circles, around conference and coffee tables, at public speeches and sociocultural projects targeting the city’s future. This book maps a variety of public engagements with the city, presenting a citizenry that passionately produces and discusses knowledge about its own life, city and future.
Such a practice-based approach to time and knowledge (see Rabinow 1986) throws light on local politics and the way in which the future is made to play a role in Hoyerswerda’s citizens’ lives and experiences. It has a longstanding tradition in the discipline of anthropology. As Gell in The Anthropology of Time pointed out, Durkheim in his The Elementary Forms of Religious Life already made clear ‘that collective representations of time do not passively reflect time, but actually create time as a phenomenon apprehended by sentient human beings’ (Gell 1992: 4). However, I concur with Gell’s critique of Durkheim, whose ‘thesis of the social origination of human temporal experience offers the prospect of a limitless variety of vicarious experiences of unfamiliar, exotic, temporal worlds’ and ‘their distinctive temporalities’ (both ibid.). In contrast to such an ontologizing idea of temporality as a homogeneous, closed cultural system (compare Ringel 2016b), and in accordance with Gell, I define time as an issue of (knowledge) practices, politics and changing social conventions, but not as an aspect of culture, a term that, for example, one of the most influential theorist of knowledge, Michel Foucault, in his early works uses only very unreflectively (for example, Foucault 2004 [1961], 2005 [1966]).
As Gell emphasizes, instead of searching for distinct temporal cultures, we should instead account for a more specific ‘contextual sensitivity of knowledge’ – including temporal knowledge: ‘how much a person “knows” about the world depends not only on what he has internalized and what … is in his permanent possession, but also on the context within which this knowledge is to be elicited, and by what means’ (1992: 109), that is, the present context of its production. For example, as he observed in Bourdieu’s early work, the Kabyle ‘operate with a multitude of different kinds of temporal schemes, appropriate to specific contexts of discourse or action’ (Gell 1992: 296). In Hoyerswerda, I am going to discern different forms of reasoning in similar ways. In both cases, political claims to time are part of the ‘continuous production of socially useful knowledge’ (ibid.: 304). Gell very successfully poses this idea of ‘contingent beliefs’ against ‘the doctrine of temporal “mentalities” or “world-views”’ (ibid.: 55).9
Carol Greenhouse also emphasizes the politics of time, and reminds us that we have to think about time and temporal representations always in relation to, in her case, changing or contested conceptions of social order and agency (1996: 4). As in Gell’s analysis, this goes beyond wondering about the ‘geometry of time’ (ibid.: 5), that is, its presumed cyclicity or linearity. Whereas she still focuses on temporality as an aspect of culture, I concentrate on the particular knowledge practices that reference different temporal dimensions. As she observes, however, any dominant formulation of temporality is, in fact, hard to be maintained (see ibid.: 82). Following Greenhouse, we could define shrinkage as the dominant formulation of time in Hoyerswerda, and it comes with the dominance of a particular version of temporal reasoning, what I call ‘enforced futurism’ – a constant attention to and problematization of the temporal dimension of the future. This form of temporal reasoning might have its histories (compare Rosenberg and Harding 2005; Pels 2016) or buy into particularly long-lasting problematizations (Rabinow 2003: 56), but I claim that there is no historical force that determines these practices. From a presentist point of view, the agency expressed in them might yield surprising results against all odds. Indeed, relations to the future in postindustrial modernity require the production of specific kinds of knowledges.
