Page - 25 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

25 introduction to the way that new technologies have contributed to a loss in communicative ability. renée hoogland cogently explains how this necessitates post-poststructuralist theorizations involving affect: “[a]ctualized in the expressive event, affect or intensity is that which remains outside and eludes theories of significa- tion that ‘are still wedded to structure even across irreconcil- able differences’” (hoogland 2014, 10). What I find valuable about such theorizing are the spatial implications of its focus, that “[a]ffect is thus not the description of a concept, but rath- er a term that attempts to think, in Braidotti’s terms, ‘through flows and interconnections,’ to expand a theoretical reason that is ‘concept-bound and fastened upon essential notions,’ in fa- vor of representations for ‘processes, fluid in-between flows of data, experience and information’” (ibid., 10–11), which helps me locate where, and why, my focus diverges from the scholar- ship on “feel bad” cinema. While this cinema does contribute to important consciousness-raising about society’s ills, one of the characteristics of “feel bad” films is, as Robert von Dassanowsky and Oliver C. Speck have shown, that they tend to take place in “non-places”: “[t]he people we see drifting through Austria in these films could also be travelling through any other landscape” (Dassanowsky and Speck 2011, 3). Moreover, “no relations, his- toric roots or regional identities can help the protagonists posi- tion themselves” because they find themselves at the mercy of a temporarily created “zone of exception,” à la Agamben (ibid., 4). The cultural practitioners I am interested in do precisely the op- posite. They activate site-specific histories in their work to cre- ate theater performances, films, and photography projects that don’t demoralize audiences by presenting them with brutality but rather in depicting forms of agency in places with deep his- torical traditions, re-enliven activist traditions. However, not all “feel good” modes work in the same way. The mode I detail here is emphatically not that of melodrama, specifically the “left melodrama” common in American popular culture. As Joe Tompkins nicely details in his reading of The Hunger Games franchise, melodrama works to contain activism