Page - 142 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

142 siting futurity tels in the first place, which is to say, the kind that generates the anxiety that drives disaster capitalism and that, for places with failing industries, can result in ruin porn. We have seen in this chapter how this spirit chews up the profits of once-new technologies like spa hotels and automobile factories for breakfast and then moves on to a new technology, if necessary in another part of world, for lunch, leaving the places that have sprung up around the often massive technological in- frastructure that has been produced to their own devices. As we have seen, how they turn the wreckage they have inherited into something that can be exchanged for profit in the new economy that has evolved thanks to the new technology varies. We have also seen how the production of art and artistic events, such as installations in which furniture is flooded at regular intervals and literary readings and concerts held in hotels on the verge of collapse, can breathe not only new life into distressed places but a new kind of life, one which prioritizes the kind of non- economic exchange artistic creation has the potential to make possible. Apel concludes her study of Detroit by noting that “[t]he imagery of ruination challenges us to imagine a society that would eliminate the bankruptcy of cities and the impover- ishment of their inhabitants, and to ask how ruin imagery might be harnessed to an emancipatory struggle that would eliminate the constant drive for accumulation, privatization, commodifi- cation, and monetization” (Apel 2015, 158). While Wes Ander- son’s Grand Budapest Hotel may not inspire such imagining or questioning, as we have seen here, probing the history of grand hotels in the context of Vienna can.