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siting futurity
aestheticizing “rubble into ruin” (High 2015, 151). As Apel warns,
“[w]e must recognize that the implicit warning against imperial
hubris and the burden of grief imparted by the images are in
conflict with the impulse to find beauty in the ruins. Yet these
contradictory narratives coexist — the beautiful and the terri-
ble — indeed, one mediates the other, beauty making the terri-
ble bearable” and thus assuaging the anxiety motoring disaster
capitalism (Apel 2015, 2).
Imperial hubris and grief are the cornerstones upon which
The Grand Budapest Hotel’s plot is erected. The terrible loss of
the hotel’s imperial splendor, which is desecrated first by the Na-
zis and then by the Communists, as well as the deaths of both M.
Gustave and lobby boy Zero’s beloved Agata, are redeemed by
being turned first into the tragic beauty of the novel that serves
to frame the narrative and then into the farcical beauty of the
film. In seeking to understand the attraction of ruin images,
“how this imagery engages the anxiety of decline and […] what
cultural and political work it does (ibid., 10), Apel ascertains
that “within the context of real economic precarity, sublimatic
depictions of urban abandonment assuage anxiety by exotifying
and safely situating ruins elsewhere on the map” (Steacy 2016,
254). That this corresponds to the workings of pornography
proper is something hoogland underscores. Pornography is, as
she reminds us, “always at a distance, always mediated. […] The
essence of porn, in other words, is the pleasure derived from
observing something that is not actually there, from an encoun-
ter with a two-dimensional (nowadays usually a screen) surface,
a visual reality without any real-life or social depth, an image
or imaginary realm without the presence of the real” (hoogland
2014, 115–16; italics in original). Ruin porn similarly acts to di-
chotomize between present and absent, in its case, between the
“out-of-towners — tourists of sorts” (Tange 2015, 9), who, after
the “experience” of having visited a ruined place, “enjoy the lux-
ury of going home to someplace stable, orderly, and altogether
more pleasant” (McLemee 2015) and those who have to live with
having been present for the experience as well as with the circu-
lation of potentially embarrassing and demoralizing images of
Siting Futurity
The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna
- Titel
- Siting Futurity
- Untertitel
- The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna
- Autor
- Susan Ingram
- Verlag
- punctumbooks
- Ort
- New York
- Datum
- 2021
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
- ISBN
- 978-1-953035-48-6
- Abmessungen
- 12.6 x 20.2 cm
- Seiten
- 224
- Schlagwörter
- activism, Austria, contemporary art, contemporary theater, protest culture, radicalism, social protest, Vienna
- Kategorie
- Geographie, Land und Leute
Inhaltsverzeichnis
- Preface 11
- Introduction 19
- 1. (Re)Forming Vienna’s Culture of Resistance: The Proletenpassions @ #Arena 39
- 2. Converting Kebab and Currency into Community on Planet #Ottakring 57
- 3. Lazarus’s Necropolitical Afterlife at Vienna’s #Volkstheater 81
- 4. Hardly Homemad(e): #Schlingensief’s Container 101
- 5. From Grand Hotels to Tiny Treasures: Wes Anderson and the Ruin Porn Worlds of Yesterday 119
- 6. Capitalism, Schizophrenia, and #Vanlife: The Alpine Edukation of Hans Weingarter 143
- 7. #Hallstatt: Welcome to Jurassic World 161
- Bibliography 189
- Filmography 215