Page - 24 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

24 siting futurity pedagogical institutions” (Blau 2014, 182) as well as “the con- struction of 400 buildings known as Gemeindebauten, in which housing, social services and cultural institutions were distrib- uted throughout the city” (Blau 2016). Of all of the benefits the Gemeindebauten provided, Blau underscores that, in addition to extremely necessary affordable housing, they also “conferred new political, social, and economic status on Vienna’s working class” (ibid., 183) through “the new organization of dwelling space” (ibid., 189) “inserted into the existing urban fabric of Vi- enna itself” (ibid., 191) in such a way that “actually transformed the underlying organization of the city” (ibid., 197) according to social democratic principles, principles that continue to inform those who live in and around these massive structures. It is not an accident that contemporary gentrification is being driven by renovation of tenement and bourgeois “Altbau” apartment buildings and not the socialist Gemeindebauten, which decid- edly do not lend themselves to Dachausbauten (rooftop addi- tions) (cf. Zoidl 2019a). The strand of Vienna’s politicized culture that I call “feel good” is at least as worthy of attention as the much better known New Austrian “feel bad” cinema (von Dassanowsky and Speck 2011), such as Barbara Albert’s Nordrand [Northern Skirts] (1999), Ste- fan Ruzowitzky’s Academy Award-winning Die Fälscher [The Counterfeiters] (2007), the Austrian part of Michael Haneke’s oeuvre, or anything by Ulrich Seidl. That Austro-pessimism is not limited to cinema but rather cuts across other media can be seen in the title of Fiddler’s chapter on Robert Menasse’s Das Paradies der Ungeliebten (2006) [The Paradise of the Unloved]: “Menasse: Something is Rotten in the State of Austria” (Fiddler 2018, 166). What both “feel good” and “feel bad” modes have in common is a recognition of affect and its blockages. Since Fredric Jameson diagnosed “the waning of affect” as an integral part of the postmodern condition in 1984, we have been aware that changes in the form of capitalism have resulted in “a whole new type of emotional ground tone” and “a virtual deconstruc- tion of the very aesthetic of expression itself” (Jameson 1991, 10, 6, 11). The latter phrase is particularly evocative as it points