Page - 26 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

26 siting futurity because the “facile nature” of the conclusions and solutions it offers “fails to smooth over the contradictions manifested in the happy ending” of boring domestic bliss (2018, 79). Viewers, who are not dupes, are aware of the contradictions, and that knowl- edge helps the blockbusters to function ideologically to main- tain “business as usual — by encouraging our cynical distance from those underlying fantasies” (ibid., 89). While the cultural phenomena I deal with here similarly make us conscious of “the fundamental antagonisms that structure our society,” they do not encourage us to “live out the dream of revolution as mere entertainment” (ibid., 90). On the contrary. In offering us the opportunity to engage the histories of their environments, these enjoyable productions confront audiences with histories of ac- tion and invite them to participate and to make possible futures worth inhabiting.7 How and why histories of place mattering can have a political impact is what I am working to establish here. It may be something of a truism, but it is nonetheless worth pointing out in this context that it is the ruling powers in cities that determine the look a city takes on during their regime. Just as we are now experiencing the hegemony of the globalizing form of financial capital that came to power over the course of the last third of the twentieth century (cf. Boltanski and Chia- pello 2007) and is resulting in the construction of cities of glass à la Vancouver (Coupland 2009), historical circumstances led to Vienna’s primary look being Baroque with a historicist core. As is detailed in Wiener Chic, Vienna, like Rome, Paris, London, Moscow, and Brussels, was an imperial city during the periods of its main growth prior to contemporary gentrification. To speak in its local language, it was a Residenzstadt, the permanent 7 It should be clear that the theoretical underpinnings of this study offer an implicit critique of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s very outmod- ed critique of the “culture industry,” in which they, as my colleague Dan Adler so concisely phrases it, “equated fun with notions of false conscious- ness and political idiocy” (Adler 2018, 6). The works in this study are clear proof that art need not be “‘dissonant’ in its refusal of the immediacy or presentness of pleasure” to nonetheless be politically savvy (Adler 2018, 7).