Beyond temporality: Notes on the anthropology of time from a shrinking fieldsite

Beyond temporality

Frankly, my discomfort with the term temporality stems from my general inability to comprehend what exactly is meant when it is used (see Hodges, 2008: 414–16; Bear, 2014: 18). What I have in mind are the many prescriptions of particular temporal characteristics (in the form of specific historicities, futurities or temporalities) onto specific groups, situations, sets of practices, institutions and material objects as well as onto certain ideas and concepts. These prescriptions entail pre-theoretical, indeed, metaphysical commitments (Moore, 2004), for instance, to theories of causation, endurance and change. The objects of analysis become thus envisioned as having a certain temporal property, which predetermines their existence in time. And we, by representing these properties, seem to know the temporal logic they entail, i.e. how time has evolved and is to evolve in and around them, and which turn history will take given that we can discern these properties (on anthropological forecasting see Persoon and Van Est, 2000: 11, 16).

Most analytic terms have theoretical pitfalls whilst still being heuristically useful. However, more can be said. While Dalsgaard and Nielsen have convincingly urged us to clarify ‘how discrete temporalities can be studied and represented’ (2013: 2), I believe, in contrast, that to ascribe one or many discrete temporalities, recently referred to as multiple, multi- or poly-temporalities (Pels, 2015; Dalsgaard and Nielsen, 2013: 11; Birth, 2008; Knight, 2014) is analytically misleading. As actual properties (or qualities, according to Dalsgaard and Nielsen, 2013, and James and Mills, 2005) of the given object of analysis, they entail implications about both the object’s actual past and future. Although these objects’ presumed histories might be tentatively ‘truthful’ representations of their past, I find them to be of questionable heuristic value, not just because of our discipline’s prominent presentist methodology of fieldwork. As Persoon and Van Est (2000: 7) put it, in anthropology questions ‘of present-day life are explained by using causal reasoning and argumentation drawing heavily on events in bygone times’, ² which prompts some anthropologists to ‘even argue that by knowing the past we can better understand the present and “forecast” the future’ (2007: 11–12). It is against such deterministic implications that I put forward my argument against temporality. ³

In contrast to such a historicizing approach, I want this presentist perspective to be understood as an analytical approach to the world whose focus on the present vehemently opposes a determining role of the past. This approach partially mirrors Rabinow’s ‘anthropology of the contemporary’ (Rabinow, 2003, 2008). However, as I argue below, it is also already ingrained in anthropology’s defining methodology of fieldwork. By strongly emphasizing indeterminacy, it also accounts for the role the future plays in human lives. Whilst discussing the emergent anthropology of the future (in section four) in order to rethink our discipline’s relationship to the past, I advance this presentist framework and argue for a non-ontological approach to time. As I show in the next section, when the term ‘temporality’ is used in an ontological and/or cultural sense, ⁴ it distracts our attention from exactly the multiple and indeterminate kinds of agency that humans exercise with regard to time (see Flaherty, 2003; Ringel, 2016).

‘Temporality’ as culture and property

Most anthropological approaches to time work with two different meanings of temporality, and my argument is positioned against both. First, temporality is often conceptualized as something akin to – or part of – culture (for instance in the Sahlins-Obeyesekere debate: Sahlins, 1985, 1995; Obeyesekere, 1992; Borofsky, 1997; see Bear, 2014: 13). This approach tries to create an image of a certain group of people adhering to a particular and often limited, homogeneous understanding of – and relationship to – time. Traditionally, we think of circular and linear or modern and pre-modern conceptualizations of time, the essentializing and homogenizing implications of which have already been criticized (see Howe, 1981, on Geertz, 1977, and Bloch, 1973). In Hoyerswerda’s case, such categorization can also be done with the term post-socialism, subsuming the city’s present existence under the influence of its socialist past, thereby explaining its current failure with its inhabitants’ presumed (cultural or ontological) ‘being stuck’ in this past.

Similar historicizing temporal attributions, mostly vis-à-vis people presumably without history, have first been criticized by scholars such as Johannes Fabian (1983), Eric Wolf (1982) and Dipresh Chakrabarty (2000). However, these critics have arguably only given ‘people without history’ the history that others had denied them (see Birth, 2008), but have not attended their futures. In contrast, recent scholars focus on the heterogeneous multiplicity of temporal relations in any social arrangement with regards to the past, present and future (Bear, 2014; Ringel, 2013; Ssorin-Chaikov, 2006; James and Mills, 2005; Orlove, 2002). By that, they have successfully opened up the anthropological analysis of time for the future. They have, as Laura Bear underlined, overcome ‘the sole focus on the past that characterized the rapprochement between anthropology and history in the 1980s’ (2014: 3). The following section discusses this with reference to the anthropology of post-socialism and its particular upkeep of the past as a reference point for present analyses, which so forcefully contradicts the multiplicity of temporal attributions, logics, and tropes found in my presumably post-socialist field site. In its vast variety, this multiplicity escapes a general attribution such as the one that is implied by ‘post-socialism’.

What counts for the ‘culture’ of people, which is seen to entail a hegemonic temporality, also works for other objects of analysis. The second more implicit and subtle meaning of temporality thus occurs when it is perceived as a property of any such object. As most dictionaries agree, ‘temporality’ initially only refers to the more general ‘state or quality of being temporal’. ⁵ In itself, this definition lacks any heuristic or analytic value – indeed, things do exist in time and in space, for that matter. Many anthropologists, including myself, have used the term precisely in this vein in order to underline that the dimension of time needs to be attended to, or for thinking through the abstract temporal logics of certain phenomena or tropes: the one of shrinkage in my case (Ringel, 2013), but also of hope and ‘no hope’ (Miyazaki, 2004, 2010), crisis (Knight and Stewart, 2016), infrastructure (Bowker, 2015), landscape (Ingold, 1993), plans (Abram and Weszkalnys, 2013), gifts to Soviet leaders (Ssorin-Chaikov, 2006) or analytical terms such as problematization, apparatus and assemblages (Rabinow, 2003: 55–6), to only name a few.

However, there is a problem when we specify the term. As a few dictionaries add: ‘like spatial position, temporality is an intrinsic property of the object’. ⁶ If a certain temporality (e.g. a ‘modern temporality’ or the ‘temporality of modernity’) is then held to be an intrinsic property of a particular culture, group, era or any other object of anthropological analysis – from kinship structures to particular social relations, from social institutions to specific practices, from textiles and masks to whole buildings – the problem is the establishment of the specificity of this property of being temporal, i.e. to establish how exactly these objects exist in time, and what trajectory they have towards the future.

On the one hand, we face the same homogenizing danger as before. For instance, when Miyazaki defines the temporality of no hope, he claims that any situation of ‘no hope’ is subject to the same temporal logic, which fully pervades this situation. Similar to Ferguson’s (2009) critique of neoliberalism, this prescription of a determining temporal logic empties our analyses by, for instance, making its outcome too predictable. On the other hand, we ascribe temporal properties as if they actually existed: every landscape, for instance, in Ingold’s view, has one temporality (potentially the sum of all events inscribed into it) and if I could comprehensively know this total history, I could see where the landscape is going, so to speak. Or I would know that a socialist apartment block from the 1960s will surely only cease to exist somewhere between 2040 and 2060.

If we combine these two challenges, we see that any ‘post-’ascriptions (post-socialist; post-colonial; post-industrial) implicitly impose and inscribe a certain temporal logic as a property by presuming, first, that the object has a past which it broke away from, as is logically implied by the prefix; and, second, that its past continues – with or without the break – to determine, condition or affect its current existence in some causal way (in the case of post-socialism for over 20 years). But how can a whole city, region or era be convincingly characterized as ‘post-socialist’? Or why is a house in socialist modernity convincingly expected to exist for somewhere between 80 and 100 years? Apart from the – in philosophical terms – still arguable fact that things, people, ideas and houses do have a past, present and future, is this existence in time actually predetermined as a certain temporality in form of an intrinsic property would suggest? In contrast, I propose to refrain from such attributions and from the use of the word ‘temporality’ in anthropological analysis altogether. I find intellectual encouragement for this in the philosophical theory of presentism, in particular, in one of its current formulation in the metaphysics of time. For my purposes, this reformulation allows the inclusion of the future in my analysis, which I demonstrate in the next section with reference to the anthropology of post-socialism.

Post-socialism and no end

Johannes Fabian’s (1983) critique of anthropological writing strategies scrutinizes the assignation of temporal qualities in the form of positioning others as ‘outside’ history. While current anthropology has learned from his intervention, I still want to recount the anthropology of post-socialism’s critical engagements with its defining term, and its struggle with a similar positioning: post-socialism as a designation positions everything it refers to as after state-socialism – and thereby in the socialist past’s enduring repercussions. I claim that the term fails to describe social reality in Hoyerswerda, foremost because there is obviously more to a ‘post-socialist’ city than its socialist past, as many anthropologists have shown for their ethnographic cases (see Berdahl, 1999; Boyer, 2006; Kaneff, 2003; see also Hann, 2002; Gilbert, 2006). By adding the perspective of the future, I contribute to the before mentioned urge for temporal multiplicity (instead of multiple temporalities). With reference to the same kind of houses mentioned above, I do not construct their potentially manifold discrete temporal properties. Rather, before taking the argument one step further, I want to account for the many different futures and pasts that can be reasonably discerned for them from our present point of view. For that, I construct a fitting ‘history’ to the broken, indeterminate and non-post-socialist narrative I advance here. This reference to the past fulfils its present purposes and is for many reasons selective.

Let me take you to living district number ten, until recently the youngest of the ten Neustadt districts. It is in WK 10 that the city is most intensely affected by the process of shrinkage. The fate of WK 10 effectively accommodates common narratives of necessary post-socialist decline and dystopian predictions of the future. Factually, WK 10 has ceased to exist. Of the original 37 apartment blocks, only one remains today. Most streets around the demolished blocks have been demolished, too. New grass is growing where the apartments once stood, so that it is hard to picture their former impressive materiality. However, even this fairly self-evident outcome of large-scale demolition has not been as predetermined as we might think. During the last two decades, WK 10 has seen many surprises despite the fact that its recent past has been all too suggestive of its rather dystopian present.

Interestingly, WK 10’s actual material make-up seems tainted. Some blocks were only finished in 1990, after the so-called ‘changes’ of 1989 had taken place, but by the 1980s, when the district was being constructed, the GDR had run out of financial means. On a visit to a freelance journalist in 2008, I experienced the results. At the downstairs buzzer, my interview partner said that he lived on the sixth floor. ‘But there is no elevator; you will have to walk all the way up.’ In contrast to the other WKs, he told me later, the six floors featured in WK 10 blocks were unusual. GDR building law usually required an elevator in every building with more than five floors, so that architects either built five-floor apartment houses or went much higher. But here an exceptional permission was issued. A similar exception permitted inferior concrete to be used in this WK, as an architect had previously pointed out to me. However, although the blocks’ unusually porous material texture suggestively mirrored the increasingly precarious times of its erection, we should remember that it was still built for a glorious communist future. We would now presume that this relation to the future immediately changed with the fall of socialism in 1989/1990.

On entry into my interviewee’s flat I recognized the typical layout that I had so often seen in Hoyerswerda. In the small kitchen, I was presented with a wonderful view over the fields towards a nearby village. I should see the sunset – better than on Mallorca, my host and his wife underlined passionately. Then they got out photo albums and I saw WK 10 in its infancy: the trees, then only recently planted, looked surprisingly small next to the newly finished blocks. I saw photos of their two young daughters with their friends on a playground in front of their entrance. Even though the pictures were in black-and-white, you could see that the whole WK was well-tended. By 2008 their daughters had both found jobs in West German Munich. Since most of the houses around them already stood empty and ready for deconstruction, the journalist and his wife were seriously considering a move to Munich as well. There were few job prospects here, and they wanted to be close to their children and future grandchildren. But they would miss the sunset, they said.

Again, this could be the end to a common story of post-socialist decline. However, the journalist’s story continued. He had been the official spokesman for WK 10 from 1986 to 1990, something like a mayor for the district’s 4500 inhabitants. Although ‘his’ WK 10 at the time of our conversation seemed far advanced on the path to total demolition, he remembered that at least throughout the 1990s there had still been much prospect for the district. Although many had to move away, those remaining were still fighting for the district. He remembered one fight most vividly. Everybody involved knew that block maintenance was key to securing its future. As in GDR times, the inhabitants had volunteered to take over several tasks to avoid deterioration; one was to tend the surrounding green spaces. The cooperative landlord, however, who decided on the building’s futures, opted against that: the outside taps for water were removed, and the green space maintenance outsourced to a private company. This post-post-socialist infrastructural change indicates that the historical process is more complicated than a simple narrative of decline suggests. Similarly, even though, at first, it was inconceivable to many people in Hoyerswerda that the youngest of Hoyerswerda’s apartment houses could be demolished first, only over a long period of time did both inhabitants’ expectation and official urban planning strategies change in combination with an ever increasing and accelerating process of population shrinkage. For long much appreciated, the WK 10 outpost, close to the fields as well as to a main federal road, was only gradually given up. It was not the political changes of 1989/1990 that brought deconstruction, it was a continuous and less determinate series of practices, events and contested decisions, retrospectively so easily forgotten, that led to WK 10’s doomed (future) present. Its demolition was not predetermined. If the landlord had decided to accede to the comparatively young, committed inhabitants’ demands in the 1990s, WK 10 could potentially still stand.

As we can see, the story about how these blocks in WK 10 lost their future overnight and found themselves in novel, post-socialist times, fated for demolition, is wrong; although it looks like they were set on the path to demolition then, the story unfolds less determinately. Many WK 10 art and science projects spurred even more unrealistic fantasies about maintaining a few blocks as free exhibition spaces. Are these blocks then post-socialist or can their existence in each present be captured with different attributes – despite all factual fatal outcomes that only retrospectively acquired a quality of inevitability?

The anthropology of post-socialism faces many such temporal problems. Initially, this kind of social reality was studied under the trope of post-socialism as opposed to the paradigm of transition. Katherine Verdery’s book title from the mid-1990s, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Verdery, 1996), summarizes this period’s important efforts against other discipline’s blatant transitology (see also Bridger and Pine, 1998; Burawoy and Verdery, 1999; Gal and Kligman, 2000; Berdahl et al., 2000). However, the main analytic move of those authors was to question the powerful prescription of a Western future to the dramatic process of rapid transformation. Like many of their informants, they scarcely doubted the influence of the socialist past on the usually failing post-socialist presents. To use Caroline Humphrey’s apt phrasing, anthropologists of post-socialism were tracing the ‘unmaking of socialist life’ (Humphrey, 2002), particularly in order to argue against the prescription of a Western future.

In the early 2000s, the first doubts emerged regarding the term’s general applicability. Verdery and Humphrey, but also Chris Hann and Don Kalb, tried to answer the question ‘Whither Post-Socialism?’ by proposing a spatially larger approach, which re-embeds post-socialism in post-Cold War studies of globalization (all in Hann, 2002). These scholars already posed the question: when would this category stop making sense, i.e. when would the socialist past stop effecting the post-socialist present? This influence was seen to linger in people’s ideas and experiences and, with a new generation devoid of these experiences, it would disappear, they predicted (Hann, Humphrey, Verdery, all 2002; see also Haukanes and Trnka, 2013).

More recently, particularly scholars working in the former Yugoslavia have continued to problematize post-socialist anthropology’s own ‘challenges with periodization’ (Gilbert et al., 2008; see Gilbert, 2006). They claim that anthropologists of post-socialism face severe problems when trying to adequately position their informants in time. As a subfield of post-socialist studies, the anthropology of East Germany (Berdahl, 2009; Borneman, 1992; Boyer, 2001a, 2001b, 2006; Gallinat, 2009; Glaeser, 2000; Ten Dyke, 2001) has sought to emphasize that such positioning always entails a political dimension. Daphne Berdahl and Dominic Boyer, in particular, have been increasingly critical about post-socialist anthropology’s own predicament of being fixated on the past, a predicament that mirrored the temporal logic imposed by West Germans on their Eastern counterparts in a wider, post-Cold War ideological project (see Berdahl, 2009; Boyer, 2006).

In fact, East German post-socialist references to the socialist past, such as in the phenomenon of Ostalgie (East Germany’s infamous form of nostalgia), are not a matter of longing for the GDR past. Instead, they express otherwise denied and silenced concerns with the present (see esp. Berdahl, 1999, 2009) or even a longing for the future (Boyer, 2001a, 2001b, 2006, 2010). Berdahl (2009), for instance, interpreted seemingly nostalgic expressions as remarks on the future because of the socialist past’s distinct feature that – in contrast to the unpromising post-socialist present – it actually did have a future. The socialist past, she claimed (Berdahl, 2009: 87ff), continues to provide at least a rhetorical, though (from my presentist point of view) obviously indeterminate resource for imagining a different future in the present. It assisted local attempts to recapture differently the quickly evacuated post-socialist future. Similarly, Boyer’s (2006) two phases in inner-German national temporal politics – first, the total devaluation of the East German past by West Germans; and second, the Western gift of its particular re-historization – both deny East Germans a say concerning their own and the nation-state’s future (Boyer, 2006: 379; also 2010: 26).

By challenging the presumed impact of the past on the present, which is so well rehearsed by studies of memory, loss and trauma (for example, Antze and Lambek, 1996 ; Knight, 2014; Haukanes and Trnka, 2013), I argue that it is important to reintroduce further analytic complexity by re-emphasizing the temporal dimension of the future. As increasingly argued (Boyer and Yurchak, 2010; Gilbert et al., 2008; Hann, 2002; Hörschelmann and Stennings, 2008; Thelen, 2011), it is time to specify in which instances the category of post-socialism remains of analytical value. The future might, as in my field-site, re-enter the stage of shared concerns through new problems introduced not by socialism’s legacy, but by contemporary problems with de-industrialization, a neoliberally orchestrated globalization and long-term repercussions of German reunification. Ultimately a combination of these problems shape in unforeseen and accelerating manners my informants’ existence and subsequently the variety of temporal narratives they generate (Humphrey, 1998).

Even more importantly, whilst attending, as Humphrey convincingly suggested, ‘whatever other frameworks of analysis arise from within’ (Humphrey, 2002: 13–14), we encounter an endless variety of local concerns with the future. However, before they can be attributed to a coherent, say, ‘temporality of shrinkage’, let me point out that even in high modernist (socialist) times quite similar predictions of a worse future had already arisen. East German author Brigitte Reimann, who lived in Hoyerswerda in the 1960s, noted prophetically in her diary in 1969(!): ‘The coal is coming to an end. In twenty years, perhaps, Hoy[erswerda] will be nothing more than a ghost town, like one of these abandoned gold digger towns.’

Like Berdahl and Boyer, Andrew Gilbert et al. (2008: 11) envisioned the theoretical contributions of the studies of post-socialism in the following way: ‘If anthropology is the social science of the present, it ought to offer insight into the future in the present’ (Gilbert, 2008: 11; see Brandstädter, 2007). However, in the post-socialist literature, this inclusion of the future usually takes, yet again, the detour to the past. As Brandstädter writes, for instance, it ‘is in their orientation to the future … that postsocialist societies share a common predicament with their own socialist past’ (2007: 132). Haukanes and Trnka (2013: 3) also underline that while ‘much has been written about the past and present of postsocialist societies, comparatively less attention has been devoted to the interconnections between people’s past experiences and future expectations in these sites’. In an otherwise convincing statement, again, we see the past being foregrounded in order to explain the present and the future. With a presentist perspective, we sidestep what, following Haukanes and Trnka’s analysis, has ‘been at the core of anthropological analyses of postsocialism’, namely, ‘remembrance and forgetting’ (2013: 4), in order to dislodge analyses united under the otherwise productive comparative trope of post-socialism from its strong focus on the past.

Such an approach questions what, in her 2008 review of the anthropology of post-socialism, Buyandelgeriyn perceives as the post-socialist temporality, in which the socialist past at times manifests itself not by being ‘evoked to serve the uncertain present’ (which I would agree with) but because, for example, any new cultural state practices ‘are directly related to and shaped by repercussions of the socialist state’ (Buyandelgeriyn, 2008: 246) or because – in the domain of gender – ‘the values and principles from socialism were able to appropriate, shape, and modify the … Western ideas and approaches’ (2008: 243). If there is anything like a post-socialist epoch, as I argued in this section, it currently constitutes a new present demanding altogether new solutions for newly problematic futures. To be sure, the analytical problems of a certain past-fixation have not only been detected for post-socialism, but also in other areas of anthropological inquiry, for instance, in Melanesia (Rollason, 2014).

As I have pointed out before, in Hoyerswerda, we encounter such problems of periodization with the emergence of a new dominant context: shrinkage. This trope is directed towards a future that is rendered problematic. Contrary to some post-socialist scholars’ usual expectations, my informants only rarely reference the socialist past; local production of temporal meaning is less occupied with issues of former ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ Cold War politics (see Boyer, 2001a). As the future is at stake and widely debated in manifold local discourses, the socialist past remains a strategically exploited (see Kaneff, 2003) and continuously scarce resource (Appadurai, 1981) amongst other concerns and other resources. Despite its dystopian undertones, the context of shrinkage is often productive and challenging instead of disempowering precisely because it enforces a relationship to the future.

In Hoyerswerda these days, another abandoned building does not fit the city’s post-socialist narrative as described above. Built a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the local Burger King – a building with no socialist heritage – stands as empty as its socialist architectural contemporaries. Shrinkage affects even younger constructions, confirming that this process is not rightly captured as post-socialist decline. Indeed, many post-socialist developments such as small shopping centres, office buildings and a business park on Hoyerswerda’s outskirts are abandoned, too. The link between the past and the future is not as straightforward as we might believe, but how can we account for this indeterminacy theoretically?

Problems with the anthropology of the future

As shown above, my own response to the inherent danger of a past-fixation in the anthropology of post-socialism is to substitute, for the perspective from the past, that of the future, thereby closely following my informants’ strategy for dealing with the changes at hand. I claim that areas of inquiry such as post-socialism can profit from the still emergent and fashionable anthropology of the future (e.g. Pelkmans, 2003; Pedersen, 2012). By pointing out a few problems in this body of literature before discussing the philosophical concept of presentism in the next section, I underline what kind of analytical and empirical object the future in anthropology is, and what repercussions, such a conceptualization, have for our approach to the past, and to time more generally.

First attempts to reconsider the dominance of the past in the discipline of anthropology, particularly following the historical turn, appeared in 1992 with two hugely influential publications: Nancy Munn’s article on ‘The Cultural Anthropology of Time’ and Alfred Gell’s monograph on The Anthropology of Time. As Munn specifies, whilst ‘people operate in a present that is always infused … with pasts and futures’ (Munn, 1992: 115), especially ‘futurity is poorly tended as a temporal problem … in contrast to the close attention given to “the past in the present”’ (Munn, 1992: 116). However, the future – arguably more so than the past, since it is always only not yet – inherently depends on being represented in the present, which poses an analytical as much as a methodological problem. How is one to study the future?

As Barbara Adam emphasized in her explicitly presentist approach two years earlier, ‘[a]ny reality that transcends the present must itself be exhibited in it’ (Adam, 1990: 38). Gell similarly defines the future as ‘inaccessible except as a representation, an imaginary present’ (Gell, 1992: 288, see also 237–41). Bamby Schieffelin supports this point by underlining that the abundance of relations to the future proves that the future – arguably ‘the most unknown of the temporal dimensions’ – ‘has to be marked in the present’ (both Schieffelin, 2002: 12). In fact, ethnographic material collected in the present – or presence – of the ethnographer is all there is ‘of the future’ at any given time. And what counts for one temporal dimension (the future) should, if we follow Adam’s advice properly, also count for the other (the past).

In Hoyerswerda as elsewhere, there is no shortage of temporal material, especially concerning the future. As Rosenberg and Harding in their edited volume on the Histories of the Future claim, the current ‘remarkable proliferation of words and images about the future’ (2005: 3) is linked to a ‘swirl of uncertainty’, in which futures have become ‘overdetermined’ (Rosenberg and Harding, 2005: 4). A city with ‘no future’ is exactly a place for studying such overdetermination, since the future has been existentially rendered problematic. Methodologically, however, rather than asking how to study the future, I pose the question: how does one study contemporary knowledge (or others modes of knowing) about it? As Jane Guyer asks, ‘What kind of “stories” does imagination create when the reference points lie in the future?’ (Guyer, 2007: 417).

The focus on the future as an epistemic phenomenon stems from the problem that the future does not exist. Or rather that it only ever exists not yet (Bloch, 1986 [1959]). Anthropologists, more so than historians, I argue, can take refuge in theories of indeterminacy and contingency to counter this problem. These concepts help us to welcome (rather than to analytically sidestep) the unpredictability of the future and the subsequent under- or indeterminateness of the present (Nielsen, 2011, 2014). As I have shown elsewhere (Ringel, 2012, 2014), in Hoyerswerda the representation of the temporal dimension of the yet-to-come in an indeterminate present entails a variety of different ethnographic material: mundane long- and short-term decisions, official urban planning practices, business development plans, strategy papers of local social clubs and associations, private and public investment plans, the conceptualization and organization of future socio-cultural projects and so forth. It also comprises more intimate aspects: personal future prospects, expectations of one’s children’s or grandchildren’s outmigration, individual feelings of fear, hope, and despair, issues of trust, a lack of self-confidence, or the constricted capacity to envision one’s own life in the future.

As we can see, most scholars attending the future in their analyses argue for an epistemic, thereby practice-based and ethnographic (see Rabinow, 1986), approach to time, which throws light on the way the future is made to play a role in local life. This has a longstanding tradition in the discipline of anthropology. As Gell has it, claims to time are part of the ‘continuous production of socially useful knowledge’ (Gell, 1992: 304), a set of ‘contingent beliefs’, which he successfully poses against ‘the doctrine of temporal “mentalities” or “world-views”’ (both Gell, 1992: 55). Carol Greenhouse pushes this approach to time further: Since ‘social time has no practical existence or intrinsic logic apart from its contexts of use’ (Greenhouse, 1996: 212), we must attend ‘the multiple ways in which the nature and meaning of time are indeterminate even in contexts where its representation is most explicit’ (p. 221).

Since anthropology’s defining methodology of fieldwork is inherently presentist, it is hard to discern the ‘temporal property’ of whatever we study by including its pasts and futures, especially if its endurance is subject to a context of accelerated change and continuously changing retrospective scrutiny. Historians with a long-term historical perspective, in contrast, can arguably claim to be able to retrospectively account for changes in the past. However, this historicity does not change the fact that in any given moment they could not have foreseen what was to happen afterwards. To retrospectively attribute this ‘temporality’ as if particular aspects of human life were to endure or to change independent of human practice is not only theoretically dubious, it is part of a deterministic fallacy. In the next section, I expand on the theory of presentism in order to show how to circumvent such fallacies.

The construction of ‘temporality’

In the metaphysics of time, presentism is the account of time which holds that only the present exists while the past and future are in some way unreal; it is contrasted with eternalism which holds that the past, present and future are equally real. Accordingly, presentism resembles the approach of most anthropologists discussed above who hold that both the past and the future do not exist other than in their representations in the present. Kirsten Hastrup’s (1990) definition of ethnographic presentism similarly argues that this form of presentism is not just a literary device; it is the essentially presentist methodological approach to our material which entails our discipline’s ‘necessary construction of time’ (1990: 45). Pushed to the extreme, as Gell showed in his discussion of the temporal quality of the Magna Carta, it does not matter from an anthropological point of view whether this document dates from 1215 or not. What matters is how people attach meaning to it, i.e. whatever ‘temporality’ they construct for it in their respective presents.

However, ethnographic presentism faces a particular problem. It can easily be countered by scholars who emphasize the influence of the past in their analysis of the present, some of whom I have already mentioned above. In their view, the present might indeed be open to the future, but it came to be the way it is through a long and complex process of historical causation (see Persoon and Van Est, 2000). Hence, for them, it would be important to read the post-socialist present through the lens of the socialist past. Rather than using local invocations of the past as a contrasting analytical foil for eliciting their significance in the present, they imbue the present with a property we might refer to as a historically determined temporality. This seriously downplays the influence the future might have in the present; it also gives the present a rather limited character as only a momentary pause in an ever continuous process of causation. As I show here, the theory of presentism might convincingly reconcile the future and the past with the present beyond concerns for determination and causation.

In 2006 the philosopher Craig Bourne published a monograph called A Future for Presentism. In his discussion of the deterministic fallacy, Bourne points out that, given a certain degree of contingency and indeterminacy, at any moment in time we face the emergence of various possible futures. This seems commonsensical and relates to the not-yet-real character of the future. However, even the fact that only one of all of these possible futures turns out to become the present (in the future) does not mean that this future was predetermined to do so: it did not pre-exist and then inevitably emerged in the future present. Such construction constitutes a deterministic fallacy (Bourne, 2006: 60f), which arises because, in comparison with the future, the past is presumed to have another ontological status (Ringel, 2016), another temporal property (indeed: a reality) that unrealized potential pasts (or past futures) lacked. It is supposed that the actual past’s temporal property deterministically influenced the present, i.e. made this past become a present. Similarly, from a deterministic point of view, only the actual future-to-be leans into – and affects – the present. But if we accept Bourne’s claim that the actual future was at no point predetermined to become the future present, then no past present was ontologically predetermined either. This is not to say that, due to the non-existence of the future, ‘presentists should treat the past in the same way’ (Bourne, 2006: 41). The actual past did in some way indeed exist, namely as a former present. However, I challenge the ontological status we attach to this past – its contemporary quality. The important point about the actual past is the absence of a deterministic temporal property, which it shares with the present: it was no more predetermined to come into existence than any other present, despite the fact that it has done so.

It goes without saying that such a view caters conveniently to practice theory, phenomenological approaches and the methodology of fieldwork. Focusing on the present also leaves us barehanded when it comes to causation. It does not disallow comparison with the past; rather, it allows in-depth attendance to all temporal relations and experiences to be found in our fieldsites’ presents. The construction of particular temporal properties is thereby included, but only on our informants’ side. As presentist ethnographers, we nonetheless encounter a chain of different presents throughout fieldwork whose continuously indeterminate temporal existence I urge us to foreground. I will do so with regards to another set of buildings and material objects from Hoyerswerda.

One often repeated story of my informants presents a good example of the kind of surprising, undetermined historical turns I have in mind. It refers to the unexpected functional changes of a particular house in the old city, which had repeated implications for this house’s respective futures. Many informants saw these changes as indicative of the dramatic demographic transformations their city was undergoing. Originally planned as a residential home for Neustadt’s elderly in the 1950s, this building faced a peculiar problem: during Neustadt’s construction there were not enough old people around. Back then, the city’s age average was as low as 27 years. Planners quickly reconceptualized the building as a kindergarten, so it was slightly rebuilt and functioned as a kindergarten until the mid-1990s. By then, Hoyerswerda had become, demographically speaking, one of Germany’s oldest cities, with an age average above 50. Ironically, after another round of refurbishment, this house re-opened in its original capacity as a home for the elderly. It thus evaded its otherwise imminent deconstruction. From a presentist perspective, at no point was its actual use predetermined by its architectural properties; in new presents it had to answer to new possible futures. How would we have convincingly described its actual existence at any point in time?

Analytically, the unexpected turns in such stories should be taken more seriously in our accounts of the present. Consider Hoyerswerda’s First Sculptors’ Symposium from 1975. Located in WK 9, the living district most severely affected by demolition after WK 10, this symposium heralded a different future by declaring in its sculpted centrepiece that: ‘Happiness should always spread its wings over the city of Hoyerswerda’. In 1975 this sculpted speech act was considered felicitous. When the district and its shopping centre deteriorated severely in the late 1990s, however, these sculptures seemed lost despite, or perhaps because of, their daring invocations of a better future. Unexpected federal funding, however, permitted city officials and the communal housing company to move the symposium to the remaining clearance area of Hoyerswerda’s first demolished apartment house in WK 2. There, paired with high mirrors, these sculptures have become different pieces of art in yet another context. As with the recently renovated apartment blocks surrounding them, their future, luckily, seems to have been procured through recent investments.

These examples of local preservation and maintenance of particular buildings and objects, indeed, of the production of a different ‘temporality’ for them, are part of a large variety of local temporal practices that are directed towards the future. They are a central part of processes of communal self-assurance and dominate Hoyerswerda’s many socio-political negotiations in times of shrinkage. By going against all odds, they express a local belief in the indeterminacy of the present: despite all bleak expectations the present remains open enough to allow for unexpected endurance.

Another example is the fight for a future for Braugasse 1, the former Children and Youth Club building located in the centre of the old town, which was originally opened as a Ball Room in the late 19th century. This building had been closed according to German building law in 1998, approximately one hundred years after its erection. During the first decade of the 21st century it was in continuous danger of demolition and replacement by an apartment house for pensioners. Its insecure future sparked the formation of the activist group, Braugasse 1 e.V., aimed at saving the building. Through club members’ endless efforts, the building’s various re-narrated pasts and newly envisioned futures entered a field contested by all people concerned, but especially by supporters of a swift renovation (Ringel, 2014). The building’s existence in time was stressed, particularly its long history of socio-cultural importance, in order to claim its right to a future. As a property of the building, this fabricated temporality, a well-defined futurity, had to be imposed, since its material property depended urgently on actual physical support. After all, a ‘normal’ building is only built for 80 to 100 years. To many people’s surprise, this building was indeed saved and is now fully renovated and has reopened as a socio-cultural centre in a still deteriorating city.

Such practices of preservation and maintenance ‘against all odds’ suggest that the issue of time forcefully poses itself as a matter of contested knowledge practices (in the form of different and contrasting expectations as much as conflicting historical references), imbued with local relevance, as well as indeterminate effects. If we as anthropologists want to understand these local constructions of ‘temporality’, then we should attend their relevance and not impose our own temporal narratives and logics. The theory of presentism, as I have argued, provides a valuable theoretical framework to accommodate on equal footing the role the past and the future are made to play in these practices in the present.

Conclusion: Towards a non-ontology of time

The ways in which people relate to the future are not fixed and stable. Indeed, there is no time as such and there are, I argue, no discrete temporalities. Rather, such temporal matters evolve in (and are reproduced by) everyday practice, in which all things social, political and ethical are at stake. This presentist approach to time does not deploy the concept of a discrete temporality as attributed to particular objects, forms, groups, and social relations; it does not discover some inherent quality of how these objects of anthropological analysis exist in time. Rather, I approach issues of time via the knowledge and the politics that are produced around their pasts, presents and futures, and via the effects that stem from these temporal practices. Importantly, I also perceive these practices themselves to be indeterminate. I thereby accept Bourne’s argument against deterministic fallacies by claiming that nothing has a temporal character for a presentist apart from being (in the) present.

If we take seriously Barbara Adam’s aforementioned claim that ‘[a]ny reality that transcends the present must itself be exhibited in it’ (1990: 38), we stay inherently presentist in our analysis. As Marilyn Strathern has it in her Partial Connections, ‘in one sense, everything is in place: sociality, the values, relationships. But what must be constantly made and remade, invented afresh, are the forms in which such things are to appear’ (Strathern, 1991: 98). I include in this ongoing process of explication the many temporal considerations relevant to my fieldsite, presuming that ‘time’ is already in place. In this vein, we can analytically transcend the simple ‘recognition that people make history in conditions outside their control’ (Adam, 1990: 98) and treat the role of the past and the future in present temporal practices, in Strathern’s formulation, as ‘a concern with representation, with how people make things known to themselves’ (Strathern, 2005: 42). Time, as Arjun Appadurai has pointed out, is as much part of the ‘production of locality’ (1995) as spatial concerns; locality (including temporal embeddedness) thereby is not ‘a non-negotiable here-and-now’ (Appadurai 1995: 206). Munn (1992) even more forcefully demands that we attend to practices of strategic temporalization as indicative of ‘ways in which time is not merely “lived,” but “constructed” in the living’ (Munn, 1992: 109). Her term, ‘temporalization’, might help in this regard to foster a more consciously presentist approach in our analyses: it ‘views time as a symbolic process continually being produced in everyday practices’ (Munn, 1992: 116). Such processes of production of knowledge about aspects of the past and the future are open to political conflict and social negotiation. Because Hoyerswerda’s problematic present incites a broad variety of temporal references, the process of shrinkage has profoundly challenged its inhabitants’ self-understanding, manifold ideas, interpretations and imaginations drawn from different pasts (post-socialist, socialist as well as pre-socialist, for that matter) and directed towards competing future visions that have become essential tools for dealing with current changes. Whether in private or public discourses, contemporary problematizations of life invite conflicting temporal notions.

By analytically emphasizing the future as an important experiential dimension, I have countered the clear-cut linear temporal narrative of post-socialist transition, taking theories on the influence of the post-socialist and other pasts into the future in the present. Importantly, I am not imposing yet another temporality. Philosophical presentism helped me to see how ethnographic presentism can be given increased analytical value. Rather than advocating what Jane Guyer criticizes as some form of neoliberal ‘enforced presentism’ paired with ‘fantasy futurism’ (Guyer, 2007: 409f), or endorsing an idea of ‘enforced futurism’, made suggestively tenable by my shrinking fieldsite, I have proposed a new perspective on the present, with help from the anthropology of the future. Due to our presentist methodology, however, we anthropologists should be careful when prescribing temporal properties and all-encompassing temporal logics to whatever we study. Therefore, I propose a presentist exploration of the roles that time in general, as well as the past and especially the future, are made to play in the present.

If we uphold the contingent and indeterminate quality of our objects of analysis (may they be social institutions and relations or socialist apartment blocks), we might be able to focus more thoroughly on their endurance, a neglected property that I find more fascinating than their change, i.e. to attend the, in a presentist approach, always surprising, social, epistemic and actual maintenance work of our informants and the only ever retrospectively reconstructive persistence or stubbornness of any given object of analysis (Ringel, 2014). As Hodges (2008) might agree in his Deleuzian inspired temporal ontology of flux, endurance is not a property of a given object, but something continuously made and facilitated. Change, for that matter, does not happen randomly due to ominous temporal or historical forces; like continuity it is also subject to ever new and indeterminate presents.

Importantly, I am not abandoning the study of time by critically engaging with the category of temporality. In contrast, I argue for temporally expanding our analyses to the multiplicity of temporal references by, for instance, attending more thoroughly the many references to the future that are part of our informants’ lives. Yet, there is a clear-cut difference between attending to a variety of temporal notions and the analytical prescription of temporality as a property. The way people exist in time, amongst other things, also depends on practices of representation and variously imaginable forms of temporal agency; it should not be presumed as an ontological given.

With that in mind, I return to WK 10 in Hoyerswerda Neustadt for the last time. Despite many temporary artistic and socio-cultural interventions in – and subsequent late revivals of – some WK 10 blocks, virtually all but one have found retrospectively logical destinations in their own destruction. Their windows have been taken to some Eastern European country to be included in new apartment houses; remaining rubble from their walls was sold for new infrastructure projects like roads and bridges. However, during one temporary reprieve, the socio-cultural project ‘TimeOut’ (in German: ‘Auszeit’), something unforeseen happened yet again.

As organizers pointed out, this project specifically focused on Hoyerswerda’s present – for a change – and not on its future. In one workshop, a group of people came up with a new idea for the WK 10 block’s ultimate ‘survival’. They proposed the two following ideas. One was to produce a QR barcode path through WK 10 and all other areas of deconstruction. Attached to trees and lampposts, these black-and-white squared matrix barcodes will store old images and other information about the district’s demolished buildings, rendering them accessible in future presents by any smartphone user. The second was to create an app that allows for real-time production of a so-called ‘augmented reality’ of WK 10’s past. Any future visitor will then be able to virtually see how these blocks looked and where exactly they stood. Somewhat uncannily, the blocks could then – with the help of this new technology – forever belong to the present, i.e. to all the presents yet to come. Alternatively, such technologies might soon become obsolete and this high-fly representation of the past might disappear in the internet’s endless oblivion. Or the ideas might never be realized. We cannot know.