Post-Industrial Times and the Unexpected

Author(s)

Felix Ringel

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of recent politico-economic changes on contemporary experiences of time from the perspective of the future. By discussing endurance, permanence, and sustainability in Germany's fastest-shrinking city, I present a set of future-orientated practices which are post-industrial, but unexpectedly so: namely, hopeful and not subject to the widely attested phenomenon of ‘enforced presentism’. I subsequently position the temporal logics of endurance and sustainability against current academic responses to accelerated change, captured in the misleading uses of the Deleuzian concepts of emergence and becoming. My informants' epistemic investments in the future allow for a different understanding of what I describe as post-industrial temporal agency and the conflictive politics that shape these otherwise unexpected temporal relations.

Organisation(s)

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

Journal

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Volume

20

Pages

52-70

No. of pages

19

ISSN

1359-0987

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12093

Publication date

04-2014

Peer reviewed

Yes

Austrian Fields of Science 2012

504017 Cultural anthropology, 509019 Futurology

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Anthropology, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)

Portal url

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/postindustrial-times-and-the-unexpected(7209abba-6346-44f7-8b5b-9c7941146256).html