Читать книгу Back to the Postindustrial Future - Felix Ringel - Страница 16

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 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.

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)

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.

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 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.