Page - 118 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

118 siting futurity he turned his illness into a social sculpture: “[i]ch gieße eine soziale Plastik aus meiner Krankheit” [“I pour a social mold from my sickness”] (Dössel 2010).16 In mock-confessing in the manner of the Christian guilt that isolates and individualizes, Schlingensief stealthily sought its condemnation.17 After staging Area7 in a way that forced audiences to navigate the space of a deconstructed stage in small groups, in Mea Culpa he tried to give those groups a language to revisit and reconstruct those navigations. Over the course of his life Schlingensief reiterated how damaged he felt by his petit-bourgeois upbringing, a point on which he bonded with many in the artistic world, such as Elfriede Jelinek. Yet how exactly can one locate the great harm done by organized religion, including its participation in coloni- zation, in specific cultural performances? As this chapter has ex- plored, Schlingensief’s answers can be located in the significant slice of his oeuvre that was carried out in Vienna and Austria. 16 Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978) is an obvious point of connec- tion. 17 Exploring the question of whether all kinds of guilt, religious and oth- erwise, do so would take us far afield. My point here is to highlight the connection between Christianity’s sustaining ideology and capitalism.