Page - 20 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

20 siting futurity heavily on cultural theorists.2 Not only does space continue to be “the valorized site of political life” (Sharma 2014, 10), but in our age of extraction, it has morphed into what Saskia Sas- sen has termed “extreme territories” (Torino 2017). What now dominates our political imaginary is, as Bruno Latour makes a point of in his recent work on climate change, regressive territo- rial language: an “attachment to the soil” [“attachement au sol”] based on a refusal to recognize common ground or share the planet’s limited and increasingly harmed and drained resources (Delbourgo 2018). This attachment, as Delbourgo perceptively notes, tends to be characterized “by a yearning to retreat from ‘the global’ to ‘the local,’ and to define ourselves as defending our soil from external enemies who will not only land but also somehow destroy us.”3 As the readings in this book make clear, flights toward the lo- cal need not involve retreat, nor need they be based on a regres- sive “attachment to the soil.” On the contrary, even among the Europeans so rightly provincialized in postcolonial discourse, there are territorial languages of location worth recuperating because they reflect progressive, indeed often radical ways of engaging with the local, ways based on principles that focus on the amelioration of social inequality by fundamentally altering value systems so as to discourage capital reproducing by exploit- ative, competitive, and hierarchical means. The question is how to go about locating and analyzing these local languages. The 2 Mark Fisher’s work and fate are emblematic and deserving of further at- tention (Fisher 2014). 3 Delbourgo further notes that “Ironically, such nativism — truth to soil, if you like — is driven by escapist flight: flight from the reality of anthropo- genic climate change, and flight from empirical evidence to ‘alternative facts.’ Trumpism is the ultimate mental staycation: there is only here, and there is nothing outside of here to care about. Let’s lock ourselves in. In other words, the political world now under construction is one of paradoxical flight toward the local, rather than away from it; we don’t share the same planet, and so there’s no common ground. If any grassroots con- nected all of us once upon a time, those roots seem to have been pulled up like so many inconvenient weeds in the name of protection from our enemies” (Delbourgo 2018).