Page - 22 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

22 siting futurity communication. […] In contrast, there is a fundamental affinity between a work of art and an act of resistance. […] Counter-in- formation only becomes really effective when it becomes an act of resistance” (Deleuze cited in Didi-Huberman 2018; ellipses in original). Art, in this understanding, is necessarily resistant. It does not reaffirm what we already know but rather “creates a rupture, forcing us to see and think things differently” (hoog- land 2014, 13).5 To be considered worthy of the name, art “should seek to attribute blame, to dig deep, to publicly pinpoint this wound of history. To behave, to put it frankly, in a critical form” (Didi-Huberman 2018; italics in original). By this standard, Ai Weiwei’s refugee documentary Human Flow (2017) should be understood as a work of philanthropy and a celebration of an artist but not as art, as it approaches the topic from on high, deigning to look down on and mingle with subjects understood as unfortunates, and in the process humiliating them in ways Hannah Arendt warned against (Didi-Huberman 2018). While its global reputation has come to be primarily based on what Didi-Huberman would consider decoration and not art, Vienna also has a tradition of critical, resistant art because it is a place that history has taught to appreciate what Gayatri Spivak has called “the invaluable clue” left to us by Raymond Williams. Although he “certainly could not imagine a globalized world, nor did he take note of gender,” Williams nevertheless recognized that, in capitalism, “the dominant ceaselessly appro- priates the emergent and rewards it as part of the thwarting of its oppositional energy, channeled into a mere alternative” (Spivak 2010, 41). What I am interested in is how strands of emergent Viennese culture somehow manage to maintain their opposi- tional energy and resist the lure of the dominant. An impor- tant precursor to this study, Allyson Fiddler’s The Art of Resist- 5 Art is intended here broadly to encompass the strong tradition of interest in the intersecting relationship between political struggle and aesthetic innovation that stretches well beyond art history. For a recent example, see the international conference on Transnational Radical Film Cultures at https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/conference/fac-arts/clas/transnational- radical-film-cultures/index.aspx.