Page - 185 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

185 #Hallstatt As my case studies underscore, it is not only the case that we are thoroughly enmeshed in the various invisible cultural, histori- cal, and psychic layers of our surroundings. As Mitchell reminds us in What Do Pictures Want?, mediation has always been an in- tegral part of those surroundings: “If images are life-forms, and objects are the bodies they animate, then media are the habi- tats or ecosystems in which pictures come alive” (Mitchell 2005, 198). However, Mitchell’s conclusions are not mine, primarily because of the considerable distance in our respective ‘we’s and in the material we are dealing with. Mitchell’s could not be more us-centric: The Hooded Man of Abu Graib, accused terrorist, torture victim, anonymous clone, faceless Sone of Man, will remain the icon of our time for the foreseeable future. And behind the veil of this spectral enemy, the faces of Jesus, Moham- mad, and Moses will continue to haunt us. (Mitchell 2011, 167; italics added) My examples demonstrate a different kind of hauntology, name- ly, a posthuman one whose ‘we’ understands that category as Rosi Braidotti does, which is to say as negotiated: “‘We’ catego- rize ourselves as a ‘we’ of humans and humanity, where actually ‘we’ are a group of subjects who all have very different agendas, experiences, and knowledge” (Wilde 2020, 1039). What follows is “an understanding of ‘we subjects,’ as a type of recognition of similarity yet difference” (ibid). From the reviving of the Pro- letenpassion in the Arena to the politically pedagogical demon- stration of alternative forms of currencies and community in Planet Ottakring, from the necropolitical performances of La- zarus in the Volkstheater to the hijacking of Christoph Schlin- gensief’s neo-colonizing container performance in the square in front of Vienna’s Staatsoper, and from the dedicated keeping op- erational of at least one sleeping-giant Kurhotel in Semmering and Hans Weingartner’s repeated figurings of natural settings as potential spaces for the practice of new forms of collectivity to Hallstatt’s parrying of tourist masses attracted by its sleeping