Page - 150 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

150 siting futurity about Hut in the Woods and whether his politics had changed since The Edukators, he replied, “Es scheint so. Der Kapitalis- mus ist ein Zug, der auf den Abgrund zurast. Ich glaube nicht mehr so recht daran, dass man ihn aufhalten kann, indem man sich auf die Schienen setzt. Vielleicht ist es sinnvoller, runter- zuspringen“ [“It would seem so. Capitalism is a train speeding towards the abyss. I no longer believe in the same way that we can stop it by sitting on the tracks. Maybe it makes more sense to jump off”] (Weingart ner 2012). However, it is not that the protagonists in 303 are any less rebellious or critical than his earlier ones. As one critic noted, his protagonists always react against a capitalist society they experience as repressive and in which those who either do not want to or cannot participate in the hunt for money, a career or power sink; they all rebel in their own way against the system (Taylor 2018). Important in this observation is that his characters are de- picted as not only experiencing but recognizing the world they live in as repressive. That one can experience repression without recognizing it is the point of Lauren Berlant’s work on cruel op- timism, something Vegso and Abel refer to in their biopolitical reading of The Edukators, in which they identify that: [t]he pressing political problem, in other words, is neither that people somehow “want” to be repressed nor that they are tricked by ideological lure into passive submission to power. Rather, as Daniel W. Smith argues, the problem is that people invest serious stakes in social systems (such as neoliberal capitalism) — despite the fact that these systems thwart their interests — because our desires (drives, affects), far from being owned by us as subjects, are part of the capi- talist infrastructure itself. (Vegso and Abel 2016, 5) Weingart ner’s contribution is to show that such a fate is not in- evitable and that it is possible to make alternate forms of invest- ment that claw back one’s desires from the capitalist infrastruc- ture by taking one’s life into one’s own hands, whether in the