Emptiness and Its Futures Staying and Leaving As Tactics of Life in Latvia

Emptiness and its futures Staying and leaving as tactics of life in Latvia

Dace Dzenovska

Abstract: In the past 25 years, rural Latvia has become notably emptier. Th is emptying is the result of post-Soviet deindustrialization and large-scale outmigration, enabled by EU accession and exacerbated by the 2008 fi nancial crisis. It is accom- panied by lack of political protest, leading many to conclude that migration hinders political mobilization. Such conclusions derive from viewing leaving and staying as actions in relation to the state. Instead, leaving and staying should be viewed in relation to transnational forms of power. Th e people leaving the de industrialized Latvian countryside to work in the English countryside are seeking futures past, namely, futures of stable employment and incremental prosperity. Th ose who stay in the emptying Latvian countryside create the future as a little bit more of the present. Keywords: emptiness, future, Latvia, migration, United Kingdom

Th e proliferation of protest movements around sustained protest with regard to both (Eihmanis the world in the time period following the 2008 2017; Hudson and Summers 2011; Sommers global fi nancial crisis generated hope among and Woolfson 2014). To be sure, there were left -leaning scholars and activists that people’s some protest activities, which culminated in a discontent was bigger than dissatisfaction with demonstration on 13 January 2009. At fi rst, dis- concrete governments in power, concrete pol- content was directed at austerity measures, but icy measures, or corrupt politicians. It began it was subsequently appropriated by the Society to seem that a future diff erent from the one for Other Politics (a social liberal party that was inherent in the oppressive present was possi- a member of the party association Unity, or Vi- ble. Amid this proliferation of hope for a global enotība), which blamed the fi nancial crisis on spring, Latvia stood out. It stood out because the corruption of the oligarchs in power. Th e of the depth of crisis—Latvia’s gross domestic protests led to a change of government, with the product (GDP) fell by 25 percent and unem- incoming prime minister, Valdis Dombrovskis ployment reached 20 percent (Eihmanis n.d.: (Vienotība), implementing an even harsher, if 14)—the severity of austerity measures imple- transparent, austerity agenda. As argued by Ed- mented in response to the crisis, and the lack of gars Eihmanis (n.d.), the new Latvian govern-

Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 80 (2018): 16–29 © Stichting Focaal and Berghahn Books doi:10.3167/fcl.2018.800102 Emptiness and its futures | 17 ment was so eager to overachieve with regard plausible alternatives to free-market capitalism to austerity measures that international insti- also contributed to the widespread acceptance tutions, usually thought of as propagators of a of neoliberal economic policies. neoliberal agenda, urged the government to in- Th e territorial logic that shapes the view that stitute protection measures for the most vulner- migration releases social tensions and thus de- able segments of the population. creases the likelihood of political protest is also Some left -leaning intellectuals and pub- popular in scholarship. For example, several lic fi gures linked the lack of protest to migra- scholars have turned to adapted versions of Al- tion. One told me in a casual conversation that bert Hirschmann’s (1970) “exit, voice, and loy- “the only reason we have not had a revolution alty” model to explain the relationship between is because people have been able to leave” (see migration and politics in Eastern Europe and also Hudson and Summers 2011; Sippola 2013; beyond (e.g., Sippola 2013; see also Ådnanes Sommers and Woolfson 2014). Indeed, people 2004; Colomer 2000; Hughes 2005; Ma 1993; had been leaving ever since the collapse of the Meardi 2007; Moses 2005; Pff af and Kim 2003; Soviet Union. Moreover, outmigration inten- Ruget and Usmanalieva 2008; Woolfson 2010; sifi ed aft er accession to the European Union Woolfson et al. 2008).2 Hirschmann’s “simple in 2004, and reported reasons diversifi ed aft er hydraulic model”—whereby “deterioration gen- the 2008 fi nancial crisis—in addition to leaving erates the pressure of discontent, which will be in search of work, livable wages, or a more ap- channeled into voice or exit; the more pressure pealing social and political environment, peo- escapes through exit, the less is available to fo- ple also left to escape or repay debts that they ment voice”—has been adapted since it was fi rst had accumulated in the process of becoming formulated, allowing for more nuanced inter- proper capitalist subjects (Dzenovska 2018a; pretations of the relationship between leaving, Halawa 2015; Hazans 2015). However, positing staying, and protesting (e.g., Hirschmann 1993: a causal link between outmigration and lack of 176). However, even in the adapted versions, protest is speculative and insuffi cient, as it tends the territorial logic of the state continues to to assume that people would have protested shape conceptions of modes of power in rela- economic policies and austerity measures had tion to which particular forms of action gain they stayed in Latvia. Eihmanis (n.d.) unsettles meaning (Hoff man 2008; see also Wimmer and such assumptions when he argues that eco- Glick Schiller 2002). Th is seems analytically nomic policies were not at the forefront of pub- insuffi cient in conditions when it is widely rec- lic discontent in 2009, because they had been ognized that people’s lives are shaped by reter- marginalized in the Latvian political landscape, ritorialized and multiscalar forces, with states which was dominated by an ethnic divide be- serving as connectors of power rather than— tween Russians and “Russian parties” and Lat- or in addition to being—containers of power vians and “Latvian parties”: Latvians voted for (Brown 2010; Harvey 2003; Jessop 2002: 108; “Latvian parties” but were split over corruption, Ong 2000; Sassen 1996). To be sure, people’s whereas Russians fairly uniformly voted for discontent continues to be framed in national “Russian parties” (see also Auers 2013).1 As Eih- terms in public and political discourse, because manis writes, “Th e established divisions over representative democracy is still predominantly nationalism and corruption eff ectively distorted linked with the nation-state model. However, the political competition, allowing ethnically this framing should not be reproduced in schol- Latvian anti-corruption parties to pursue as arship that seeks to understand the political as a radical economic policy as they preferred, with “wider fi eld of contingency and struggle that ex- hardly any political cost” (n.d.: 27). Moreover, ceeds established regimes of ‘politics’” (Dzenov- the widespread belief in the failure of socialist ska and De Genova, this issue; see also Mouff e economics and the conviction that there are no 2005). 18 | Dace Dzenovska

In this article, I analyze the interplay of leav- apolitical action that partakes in spatially de- ing and staying in contemporary Latvia as tac- ferring the tensions produced by contempo- tics of life that have emerged in the context of rary forms of capitalism (Harvey 2003; Jessop post-Soviet capitalism. I analyze leaving and 2006). In turn, staying, the least political of ac- staying as actions in relation to multiscalar and tions according to the “exit, voice, and loyalty” reterritorialized forms of power, and in doing framework, might open space for the political so, seek to reterritorialize thinking about the in the form of maintaining the future as a little political in the context of migration (see also bit more of the present in conditions when cap- Graw and Schielke 2013; Lucht 2012). For ex- italism creates favorable conditions for leaving ample, I argue that one must allow for the seem- (Ringel 2014). ingly paradoxical possibility that leaving might be a form of staying: when someone emigrates to fi nd work, this may signify leaving a partic- Emptiness and ruination ular state yet remaining beholden to contemporary forms of capitalism. Moreover, physical As I conducted fi eldwork in rural Latvia from movement in space can also be a temporal prac- 2010 until 2012, many people talked about the tice—for example, pursuit of existential mobil- emptying countryside.3 During this period of ity, of a life worth living (Hage 2009). Th us, in postcrisis austerity, talk of emptiness and its addition to rethinking the spatial confi gurations futures dominated many conversations and of power in relation to which staying or leav- took on special urgency, even a tone of despair. ing gain meaning, I also seek to refl ect on the People across Latvia’s cities, towns, and villages temporal orientations that can be discerned in reported that social life had broken down, that people’s practices of moving or staying. there were less children in schools, that the Th e focus on both spatial and temporal con- streets of many of Latvia’s cities were notably fi gurations of power and action enables me to emptier than they used to be, that it was diffi cult consider the relationship between mobility, pol- to fi nd someone to fi x your roof. However, the itics, and the political in line with the questions emptying of the countryside was not caused by posed by the editors of this theme section (Dze- the crisis alone, or by post-EU accession migra- novska and De Genova, this issue). If power tion, for that matter. It was a process of long du- is multiscalar and reterritorialized, then how ration shaped by the deindustrialization of the can one think of objects of protest that diff er- countryside following the collapse of the Soviet ent movements or acts of protest assume (e.g., Union and the subsequent forms of post-Soviet Krastev 2014)? What is that object in relation to agrarian capitalism that could not absorb the which particular forms of action—for example, left over labor, and “fi xed” its impending crisis leaving, staying, or protesting—gain political by expelling surplus labor to territories of other traction? Viewing leaving, staying, or protest- states (Dzenovska n.d.; Harvey 2003; Jessop ing within a nation-state frame overlooks their 2006). Most of those who remained living in the meaning in relation to the transnational logic countryside combined a variety of subsistence of capital and reterritorialized forms of politi- strategies. Husbands of local schoolteachers with cal authority and therefore, I suggest, overlooks meager salaries worked as long-distance truck their relation to the political. If, however, one drivers. Many people engaged in some form of reconceives national politics as a reterritorial- subsistence agriculture, though very few sold ized political in relation to both economic and their produce for profi t, largely because of in- political power, another view becomes possible. suffi cient access to markets (see Annist 2014). For example, leaving, which some may perceive Many received some EU subsidies, if only for a as a political action in relation to the territorial cleared meadow that they owned because of re- state that people leave, may also be seen as an claimed property. Quite a few received social Emptiness and its futures | 19 support, though local governments continuously also ruins of the postsocialist dream of an eco- claimed that support payments have degraded nomically productive and heritage-preserving people, as a result of which they no longer want countryside achieved through the restoration of to work. Some received remittances from rela- the pre-Soviet property regime and Latvia’s in- tives abroad, but I also encountered cases where tegration into European political and economic those who had stayed behind supported their structures. children abroad. People got by, but just barely. If the news photographer romanticized and Most talked about how their impoverished state aestheticized ruins (Hell and Schönle 2010; Stoler amounted to leading an existence rather than 2013: 9; Szmagalska-Follis 2008: 346), owners living a life. of single farmsteads, rural residents, and local Rather than the expected well-being, post- government offi cials exhibited diff erent aff ec- Soviet capitalism, exacerbated by the global fi - tive orientations. For them, the ruins were not nancial crisis, had created a palpable sense of only nostalgic objects of the past and the past’s emptiness. People in the countryside oft en re- futures but also harbingers of the dystopian marked that “we are slowly dying out.” A man futures inherent in the present. Th ey did not in a small town in southeast Latvia said: “Now observe but rather actively lived the pasts and you only see pupils and pensioners in the street. futures that these ruins both enabled and fore- Th ere are no middle-aged people. I live here closed (Stoler 2013: 9; see also Navaro-Yashin since the ’70s. Back then, it was busy like a bee- 2009; Szmagalska-Follis 2008). hive [tad te gāja kā bitītes]. Now most people One of the farmsteads that I regularly visited are gone. Th e feeling that you get walking down during my fi eldwork belonged to Viesturs, who the street … back then you had to squeeze past was born on the farmstead in the 1930s and had three people walking on the sidewalk, now you lived there permanently until he moved to Riga stand in the crossroads alone.”4 to attend vocational school. Viesturs’s mother For rural residents, emptiness was both an and father remained in the house throughout observable state of aff airs and an aff ective con- the Soviet years, as the land around the house dition that marked a consequential shift with was nationalized, cattle collectivized, additional regard to a particular form of life, a shift that families settled in the rooms vacated by family was experienced as a rupture detrimental to members who were deported or who had fl ed one’s ability to go on with life. When conveying abroad, and new collective farm buildings built the sense of emptiness that they experienced, on the land adjacent to the house: a cow barn people in the country and the city talked about and a residential building to house the milk- empty streets and homes, weeds overtaking maids working in the barn. Viesturs regained abandoned buildings, lack of work, disintegrat- the land in the process of post-Soviet privatiza- ing social relations, crumbling infrastructure, tion, but his property was marked by several ru- closure of rural schools, and, more generally, ins. Th e industrial cow barn was disintegrating extinction. Moreover, there were multiple layers from lack of use. It remained on the property, of emptiness and ruins visible in the landscape however, because it was too costly to disman- (Hell and Schönle 2010). Th e foundations of tle it. Th e residential building that housed the farmsteads destroyed by Soviet rural urbaniza- milkmaids was also no longer in use; its roof was tion stood side by side with crumbling Soviet leaking, and it was not safe to enter the build- collective farm buildings, as well as recently ing. Th ere were other ruins on the property as abandoned rural homes, where, as one interna- well: a pre–World War II stone animal barn, tional news agency photographer mused, “the several old wells, and a bathhouse with sinking morning cup of coff ee is still sitting on the ta- foundations. ble and the stove is still warm” (personal com- Viesturs and his wife oft en lamented their munication, 2011). Taken together, these were inability to keep up the farmstead due to lack 20 | Dace Dzenovska of resources and age. Th ey ignored the ruins of tomorrow, because everybody will be Soviet collective farming or pointed to them as drunk. Even students drink. Back in the markers of the violence of Soviet modernity. collective farm days, you also had to walk During the Soviet period, they worked not on around and wake up drunks, but gener- the collective farm but as civil engineers in the ally people pulled themselves together. city, rushing to the farmstead on weekends. In Everybody worked. But today we have contrast, those who had worked on collective raised a diff erent generation. farms viewed such ruins—abandoned collective farm buildings, old mechanical shops, or Infrastructure was crumbling along with houses, woodcutting facilities—as markers of a bygone industrial buildings, and people. Public trans- era of employment and, increasingly, social life. portation was cut in many places, and some “Th ere is no work in the countryside,” people areas were no longer accessible by means other told me over and over again, “there is only work than private cars. If they did not have a private in the post offi ce and the local shop.” car, people oft en walked long distances on foot Th e times when there was work and active to make it to school or work. Moreover, since social life were remembered fondly despite crit- 2010, nearly one hundred rural schools have icism of the Soviet regime. In the summer of been closed all throughout Latvia. Th e old 2015, I attended a “collective farm evening” in school buildings stand empty and are at risk of one of the seaside villages in which I conducted falling apart, because, as I was told by one ru- fi eldwork from 2010 to 2012. Most of my in- ral resident, “buildings cannot live long, if they terlocutors who back in 2010 had talked about are not inhabited.” Th ese would-be ruins mark the dying countryside came to life in fi lms and the times that are gone and gesture toward dys- pictures, where they were depicted collectively topian futures, but insofar as they are freshly gathering hay and celebrating harvest. Th ey empty and not yet crumbling, they are also cru- remembered their youth, of course, but their cial for maintaining a sense of life for a little lon- youth was inseparable from collective labor, ac- ger. Amid emptiness, buildings—even more so tive social life, and public acknowledgment of than their social function—become central fi g- their achievements, however formal. Like those ures in the politics of future as a little bit more of exhibiting post-Fordist aff ect in neoliberal Italy the present (see also Ringel 2014). or the United States, they exhibited aff ective attachment to a form of life that had entailed stability, sociality, and a promise of a future, de- Maintaining life spite the violence that it may have also wielded (Berlant 2007; Muehlebach and Shoshan 2012; Similar to local residents, policy makers and Shoshan 2012). politicians also thought that the countryside My interlocutors also pointed out that even was emptying, but instead of an emplaced sense if there suddenly was work in the countryside, of emptiness, they talked about depopulation there were hardly any people left who could and economic effi ciency. I observed this during work (see also Cimdiņa and Raubiško 2012). It development planning that took place in rural was as if ruination of buildings coincided with districts in 2011, and I became interested in ruination of people. Th e head of a municipality how development planners would engage the in southeast Latvia told me: sense of emptiness that was widespread among the people who were supposed to participate in Th ere are 700 people in the municipal- development planning and subsequently carry ity. You could not even fi nd 50 workers out the development plans. Not unexpectedly, out of these 700 inhabitants. If you give while development planners and rural residents them money today, there will be nobody shared a view that the countryside was empty- Emptiness and its futures | 21 ing, they measured it diff erently and exhibited off er childcare services, they reasoned, it was to diff erent understandings of what ought to be their advantage. Th e school had already closed done in such circumstances. While continuously the previous year. Twenty-four local school- talking about the doom and gloom that was children were being bused to two other schools about to descend on the Latvian countryside, in the larger district. “But we should still save rural residents labored to maintain life in hopes the school building,” someone said. “Maybe that it would go on, if not in the long term, then we could establish a recreational center there? at least for a little bit longer. With everything Perhaps we could write a project to put some else being elusive, buildings were among the few exercise equipment in there?” Th e kindergar- concrete things that could be worked on. Th is ten also needed central heating, those present shaped the rural residents’ vision of the devel- concurred. Someone else thought that it was opment plan as a list of infra structure mainte- also important to build a playground, which nance projects. In turn, development planners had been planned long ago but still had not did not necessarily think that the future was been built. Th ese buildings and structures were doomed, but they did think that the future had important not only because of their primary to be diff erent from the one inherent in how functions but also because they stood as mark- rural residents inhabited the present. Instead of ers of sociality and community. In conditions maintaining local schools, school buildings, and in which social life around them had dwindled, public infrastructure, such as transportation, their materiality became especially important. development planners conjured up a future of Th e buildings had to be maintained, hoping resource optimization, polycentric development, against hope that sociality might return. concentrated populated spaces interspersed Th e local residents tried to maintain their with large-scale farming operations and resi- lives, to keep up futures past whose traces were dential rural enclaves. In the view of develop- evident in the landscape and that also shaped ment planners, this was the only kind of future the sensibilities and aspirations of the rural through which rural residents could participate residents (Koselleck 1985; Muehlebach and in and benefi t from economic growth that was Shoshan 2012; Shoshan 2012). Th e rural res- expected to occur in Latvia aft er the economy idents’ wishes were aimed at maintaining the recovered from the crisis. Development plan- kind of life where “weeds do not come through ners thought that rural residents lacked the un- the door,” as one of my informants put it, where derstanding, skills, and resources necessary to buildings are cared for and every district, if not prepare for the future of economic opportunity every municipality, has its own museum that and prosperity that would inevitably arrive (see records local history. People devised plans for Guyer 2007). As I oft en heard them say, rural the maintenance of deteriorating infrastructure residents did not think about tomorrow but so as to postpone what they called “slow extinc- lived for today. tion.” For them, development meant not pre- In the summer of 2011, during one devel- paring for a radically diff erent distant future but opment planning meeting in a municipality in rather maintaining life in a harsh present with southeast Latvia, a small group of participants hope, but not certainty, that life would go on. discussed the need to change windows in the Th e situation was similar in other parts of kindergarten. Although there were not many Latvia as well. For example, in a municipality in children in the municipality, and those present northwest Latvia, local politicians and residents reasoned that the number of inhabitants would similarly planned how to maintain various pub- continue to decline, the participants neverthe- lic buildings, even as over the past decade the less decided to maintain the kindergarten oper- population had decreased by about 20 percent. ational a while longer in hopes of keeping some Th e people gathered at the development plan- of the young people from leaving. If they could ning meeting in the town in northwest Lat- 22 | Dace Dzenovska via were certain that choosing not to invest in normal development process. Valdis was critical further maintenance of the school building or of the planning process he himself coordinated. other communal buildings meant that the mu- Valdis thought that the development plans that nicipality would die out. Th e head of the district came out of this process were simply lists of in- council tried to argue for maintenance of build- frastructure projects, because nobody dared to ings as a matter of both capital investment and reject these projects, as that would amount to possible futures: a rejection of the will to maintain life. In turn, thinking themselves unable to do much about A great deal of money has been invested the departing people and emptying countryside, in [the renovation of] the school. We re- rural residents worked to maintain life as their ceived two hundred thousand [lats] from contribution to the possibility of the future as a the government [via EU funds]. We can’t little bit more of the present (Ringel 2014). simply let these buildings go, because that Such a vision crucially depended on what would be a great loss. If we don’t maintain was left of buildings and infrastructure. Build- life [neuzturam dzīvību], our town will be ings and infrastructure emerged as the most con- crossed off the map.5 crete things that could establish a link between the past, the present, and the future (see Anand Valdis, the development consultant whose 2015; Bowker 2015; Fennell 2015; Schnitzler company had won the bid to guide the planning 2015). Th ey were simultaneously markers of a exercise, said: “I want to scream—what are you developmental state that was withdrawing from people doing!? You are not going to need most the Latvian countryside and a temporary guar- of this infrastructure!” He pleaded with those antee for the continuation of the public sociality who had come to consider whether it wouldn’t created by the Soviet modernity. Th e region’s be better to concentrate on a “qualitative leap” successful entrepreneurs, of which there were in one of the district’s municipalities rather than few, could not single-handedly recreate or up- maintain infrastructure all across the district. keep this sociality. Having themselves succeeded, It’s not that Valdis did not care for the district they argued that most rural residents kept com- or for the people who lived there. He did. It was plaining about lack of jobs and poor living but this care that made him exclaim in anger, “What “didn’t do anything,” thus suggesting that peo- are you people doing!?” Valdis elaborated his ple had to author their own economic activity development vision as follows: “Th e vision of rather than expect “the state or someone else to the future is that three-fourths of all people live give them a job.” In saying so, they exhibited a in cities. Th e myth that jobs can be created in radical post-Soviet ideology of individualized the countryside is dangerous. Th e consolidation success that erased the state altogether, even as process will happen, but it is being delayed by they themselves benefi ted from “state support” small property owners.” It was also being delayed in the form of EU grants and subsidies. by the rural residents who wanted to keep up the kindergarten and the school building even though there might not be many people to make Moving in search of futures past use of them in the future. In Valdis’s opinion, “a vision of place” (and life) was not appropriate While some people maintained life in rural for such circumstances. People needed to think localities, others did exactly what Valdis sug- about how and where to increase their incomes, gested—they went somewhere else in search and if it couldn’t happen in the place they pres- of work.6 Many went to small towns in north- ently were, they needed to go somewhere else. east England and took up jobs in the fi elds and And if the village or town disappeared from the food-packing factories. Long-term inhabitants map as a result, then that was simply part of a of the town in northeast England where I have Emptiness and its futures | 23 conducted research over the past few years say Migrants moving to northeast England— that “things changed when the supermarkets people who were “left over” aft er “post socialist came.” Supermarkets needed cheap standard- transition” in Latvia, that is, people who could ized produce in fl exible quantities, which meant not fi nd a place for themselves in the fl exible, that the organization of horticultural produc- entrepreneurial, and debt-fi nanced capital gains tion changed. Most notably, there emerged food economy—encountered spaces and subjects distribution companies that mediated between produced by what might be thought of as the growers and supermarkets, as well as a vibrant capitalist version of “postsocialist transition.” food packaging and processing industry that As Tom Brass has argued, most “gains made by supplied supermarkets by using local produce labour since World War II were stripped away but also products brought in from other places, by Th atcherism, and the ending of ‘actually ex- such as tomatoes from Spain. Th is, in turn, cre- isting socialisms’ increased the size of the indus- ated demand for a cheap, fl exible, and always trial [and agricultural] reserve army of labour available labor force in a place where seasonal on which British and European capital could farm work used to be carried out by temporary draw” (2014: 232). Moreover, the end of “ac- guest workers from within the United Kingdom tually existing socialisms” also dismantled the and Ireland. Th e dispossessed rural Latvians— political counterpoint upon which domestic re- and other Eastern Europeans—fi t the bill and sistance could rely, as well as imaginaries of alter- were actively recruited aft er 2004 under a gang native futures (Dzenovska and De Genova, this employment structure, where gang masters issue). keep a fl exible labor force on zero-hours con- Contrary to the Latvian countryside, where tracts that can be supplied to growers at a mo- “postsocialist transition” meant deindustriali- ment’s notice and just as easily dropped (Brass zation and deurbanization, in the English coun- 2004; Findlay et al. 2012; Rogaly 2008). tryside “postsocialist transition” meant intensi- Ben Rogaly argues that “the buyer-driven fi cation of horticultural production in order to structure of the horticultural supply chain has meet the buyer’s demands and renewed precar- enabled retailers to appropriate ever-greater ization of labor. Th is is to say, the processes un- value from horticultural producers” and has folding in the English countryside are connected resulted in intensifi cation of horticultural pro- to the end of “actually existing socialisms,” the duction mainly based on increasing worker vul- neoliberalization of life and economy that has nerability as a way to ensure a compliant labor ensued, and the evacuation of socialist imagi- force (2008: 499). Foreign nationals have been naries of the future (Dzenovska and De Genova, used “as instruments of the newly intensifi ed this issue; see also Harvey 2003). Whereas there workplace regimes in horticulture”—as both was no work in the Latvian countryside for the zero-hours workers and as supervisors who “left over people,” there was work for them in determine which vulnerable workers should be the English countryside, but the nature of this kept and which dropped from the gangs, that is, work had changed. It was hard, unstable, and de-employed (502). My own interviews, as well low paid, the kind of work that local inhabitants as multiple media and scholarly sources, indi- considered demeaning. Nevertheless, for Lat- cate that growers criticize British workers for vian migrants, these jobs represented moving not wanting to do this kind of work. Th eir state- somewhere within this precarious employment ments are then used to suggest that, rather than structure. First, from no job or low-paid job taking away jobs, migrant workers are doing the and debt in Latvia to a job, however unstable, jobs that British workers fi nd too demeaning. in the United Kingdom, and subsequently, from Rarely is the British refusal to do the work done a zero-hours contract with an agency to a fi xed by migrants interpreted as legitimate criticism contract in a factory. Th e availability of work of exploitative agrarian capitalism. and the prospect for upward mobility, however 24 | Dace Dzenovska small, was what many Latvian migrants aspired rather than lack of resources. Arvis, who lost a to. Guided by memories of employment and job and family home in Latvia, continued to live futures inherent in it, instead of making the fu- in Latvia for a while on seven euros per week, but ture as a little bit more of the present in Latvia, then moved to North England and made £340 they decided to pursue the “near future” (Guyer in the fi rst week he was there. He told me that it 2007), where hard work today brings tangible made him feel like a human being rather than a improvements of life tomorrow. As put by Ieva, bum. But life in North England was diffi cult in who has lived in the United Kingdom for about other ways: “It’s very diffi cult to live here. Every- 15 years, “In England, you suff er for half a year one back home says: you are living a good life, as a slave, but aft er that you can move ahead a you have money! But it’s not about the money, bit. In Latvia, you work like a slave, but noth- aft er all. I want regular cilvēcīga attieksme [a ing changes.” Ieva felt that moving in space humane way of relating to each other], I want had also enabled her to move ahead, to have to go somewhere … Morally, it is very diffi cult a sense that she was going somewhere, even if here.” For Arvis, ensuring livelihood came at going somewhere entailed only a small rise in the expense of living life as a particular form of salary, a slightly better job, or the ability to go emplacement. He—and others like him—lived on vacation. with a distinct and constant sense of displace- Many of Latvia’s citizens whom I talked to in ment. He may have been moving ahead in terms northeast England articulated their life trajec- of being able to secure a living, but he did not tories precisely in those terms. Th e hoped-for feel that he was living a good life. path was moving from a zero-hours contract with an employment agency (aft er about two years of working on a zero-hours contract) to a Beyond futures past fi xed contract with a factory, from working on the assembly line to working as a team leader, “Postsocialist transition” seems to have pro- from living in multi-occupancy housing to be- pelled Eastern Europe from Europe’s past ing able to rent one’s own place, from going to Europe’s future. During the intensive pe- to Latvia once a year to going to Latvia and to riod of “transition” from centrally planned to Spain for holiday. For some, it stopped here. As free-market economy and from authoritarian Tanya, a 26-year-old woman from Daugavpils, government to democracy, “transitology” nar- put it, “all cannot be managers.” Having become ratives posited Eastern Europe as lagging be- a team leader, Tanya did not aspire for a better hind (Burawoy and Verdery 1999). Now, when position. Instead, she hoped to have a family the eff ects of “transition” are starkly evident, and to move out of shared accommodation into the former socialist world seems to be ahead her own apartment. Some others enrolled in lo- rather than behind. For example, some East- cal colleges or professional schools and moved ern European states, such as Latvia, are ahead ahead that way. Th eir movement was predict- with regard to implementing radical neoliberal able, and that’s what they wanted: hard work reforms. As Eihmanis (n.d.) has noted, the Lat- led to a contract, more education to a better job, vian government has implemented radically neo- a better job to a better salary, a better salary to liberal policies, overachieving even in relation greater mobility. to its teachers. It is in this sense that Andrew At the same time, many felt that they may Grann (2013), writing in Anthropology News, have improved their fi nancial situation, but lost points to the irony of history: it was “transition” quality of life. Somewhat paradoxically, those in Eastern Europe—“with degrees of abused la- who had left talked about existing rather than bor, capitalist license, and shrinking social wel- living in ways similar to those who had stayed, fare”—that forecast the neoliberal future of the only now living was hindered by displacement West. Emptiness and its futures | 25

Th us, it could be said that the people who ing are actions adapted by people to navigate have left for the United Kingdom in order to “go capitalism’s “spatiotemporal” fi xes (Harvey 2003; somewhere” may have misdiagnosed the pres- Jessop 2006). On the other hand, leaving and ent. In pursuing the future by moving to north- staying are actions shaped by developmental east England, Latvia’s residents may be seeking logics that arrange particular places in relation a future past in a place where its traces are still to each other within a broader frame of the good visible within the current forms of precarious life promised by modernity. Decline in one labor that nevertheless enable upward mobility place, thus, can be momentarily overcome by and are soft ened by the still existing welfare pro- moving to another, provided that movement is visions of the British state. Th ey carry the belief not hindered, as is the case for many “left over” that it is still possible to “go somewhere” and people who are either rendered immobile (e.g., that all they have to do is fi nd a place where such Li 2009) or who risk their lives for the sake of “going somewhere” is possible. In the tradition survival or moving ahead (e.g., Gaibazzi 2015; of Western temporal and spatial hierarchies, Graw and Schielke 2013; Lucht 2012). they move West in search of existential mobility. In the case of Latvians moving from the Lat- Leaving Latvia, then, is an action shaped by vian countryside to northeast England within the patterns through which particular places are the framework of EU-granted freedom of labor integrated into structures of state-regulated neo- movement, leaving—as a form of action that liberal capitalism, by memories of futures inher- aims to change conditions of life—does not nec- ent in the Soviet mode of organizing economic essarily question the foundations of dominant and political life, and by historically shaped and modes of organizing political and economic life. at the same time profoundly postsocialist spatial Rather, it is a short-term “spatial fi x.” For most imaginaries (and material realities), which posit Latvians whom I have encountered in northeast “the West” as the measure of past, present, and England, dissatisfaction with life in Latvia has future and as a desirable location. It is genera- led to “reinvestment in the normative promises tive to compare these aff ective orientations and of capital and intimacy under capital” (Berlant spatial imaginaries with what Andrea Muehle- 2007: 281; see also Neilson and Rossiter 2008: bach and Nitzan Shoshan (2012) have called 57). Th at is, in making use of the freedom of “post-Fordist aff ect,” that is, the longing for the movement granted as a result of EU accession, stability, consumption patterns, social relations, they uphold the logic of capital. In contrast, in and futures promised by the Fordist model of conditions when movement is hindered and the economy. For example, Kath Weston notes that only way to pursue survival or existential mo- “for emerging economies in which industrial bility is through clandestine migration, move- production still constitute a rising rather than ment itself may become political insofar as it a waning force,” the changes described as post- either challenges dominant migration regimes Fordism have yet to arrive, and the aff ective or produces forms of togetherness that are in- attachment to the good life promised by Ford- vested with hopes for the political, as in the case ist structures is a future-oriented rather than a of Dimitris Papadopoulos and Vasilis Tsianos’s past-oriented nostalgia (2012: 432). Th e simul- (2008, 2013) analysis of migrant socialities as taneous occurrence of post-Fordist aff ect in the productive of mobile commons. West, future-oriented attachment to the good Organization of economic life is shaped by life in “emerging economies,” and the post- translocal forces, which many people aff ected by socialist pursuits of futures past suggests a com- them can grasp or infl uence only marginally. In plex interplay of capitalist temporalities and spa- rural northeast England, for example, the struc- tialities, and the imaginaries and aff ects shaped ture of horticultural labor has shift ed due to by and directed at them (see also Ferguson supermarkets pushing down prices, whereas in 1999). On the one hand, then, leaving and stay- rural Latvia there are no jobs due to postsocial- 26 | Dace Dzenovska ist deindustrialization. But such explanations an interruption. At the same time, staying and are merely nodal points in broader processes, working to maintain life might have a stronger momentarily fi xed as causes and themselves as political dimension precisely because it draws eff ects. Changing the way in which localities on futures past to resist the new futures inherent are connected to translocal economic processes in contemporary forms of neoliberal capitalism. is not a matter of local or even national policy It does not off er specifi c articulations of alter- making, but rather entails a series of multiscalar natives, but the intertemporal confl ict between decisions that are never visible in their entirety. futures past and the distant futures promised by It is therefore not surprising that Latvia’s rural the hegemonic forms of economic and political inhabitants wish to change windows in a kin- power might generate futures whose contours dergarten rather than embrace visions of a dis- cannot yet be grasped. tant future of prosperity off ered by development planners, or that they wish to leave rather than make a revolution. Th ose who stay and those Acknowledgments who leave generally share the sentiment that “nothing changes” and “nothing will change.” I would like to thank Nicholas De Genova, Th ey exhibit a pervasive sense—pervasive be- Daniel Knight, Larisa Kurtović, Kristín Loft s- yond wanting to remove concrete politicians in dóttir, and the participants of the workshop offi ce—that time in the place they come from “Political Desire in/of Europe: Sites, Subjects, no longer fl ows in a recognizable manner. Th ose and Forms of Politics” held at the University who stay seem to want to slow down time by of Oxford in 2014 for their generous engage- extending the present, whereas those who leave ment with my and each other’s work. Research seek a recognizable fl ow of time by moving in for this article was funded by the European space. Social Fund project “Changing Development How do these insights with regard to leav- Strategies and Cultural Spaces of Latvia’s Rural ing and staying bear upon the question about Inhabitants” based at the University of Latvia politics and the political? Th ey certainly suggest (2009/0222/1DP/1.1.1.2.0/09/APIA/VIAA/087) that viewing leaving and staying within the ter- and by the University of Oxford’s John Fell ritorial logic of the state, whether that of Latvia Fund. or that of the United Kingdom, overlooks the relational constitution of local economies and people’s spatiotemporal imaginaries of the past Dace Dzenovska is Associate Professor of the and the future in relation to which they craft Anthropology of Migration at the University of their actions in the present. If viewed in rela- Oxford’s School of Anthropology and Museum tion to the political as a critique of the domi- Ethnography. She holds a doctoral degree from nant ways of organizing political and economic the University of California, Berkeley (2009) life, neither leaving nor staying are necessarily and has held a research and teaching appoint- political. In order to evaluate whether these ment at the University of Latvia. She writes actions are interruptions productive of futures about rebordering and migration in the context that are not inherent in the present’s hegemo- of European Union enlargement, as well as tol- nies, analysis needs to be attentive to the spatial erance promotion and the postsocialist democ- and temporal orientations in leaving and stay- ratization agenda in Latvia. Her book School ing as particular forms of action that respond of Europeanness: Tolerance and Other Lessons to particular logics of capital and territory. As in Political Liberalism in Latvia is forthcoming I have suggested in this article, Latvian migra- with Cornell University Press. tion to northeast England is not currently such E-mail: [email protected] Emptiness and its futures | 27

Notes References

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