The future is that which is yet to occur in a portion of time that is yet to arrive. The future can be predicted, invoked, hindered, imagined. In many periods of history, such activities fuelled the great aspirations of scenarios that were yet to occur, and the capacity for projection experienced significant oscillation until acquiring a consistent force in the period of the great utopias of Modernity. Between the Sixties and Seventies, a strong reformist tension was manifested, which went hand in hand with a notable interest in technology, and the potential of technical/ scientific progress to contribute to this chang. Today, the imaginative thrust towards future scenarios has been replaced by the need to describe and elaborate the present, to immerge oneself in the immediate: “presentism”. We are now living a performative phase of contemporary culture, wherein the construction of a story becomes the construction of an era, with specific articulation between a hypothetical past, an in fieri present, and a past future, consumed from the moment in which we narrate it. Therefore, “presentism” is elaborated as a therapy, an antidote that contemporary culture has produced to counteract a future that is “no longer a bright horizon towards which we advance, but a line of shadow that we have drawn towards ourselves, while we seem to have come to a standstill in the present, pondering on a past that is not passing.
Future. The egemony of the present
giulia menzietti
2014-01-01
Abstract
The future is that which is yet to occur in a portion of time that is yet to arrive. The future can be predicted, invoked, hindered, imagined. In many periods of history, such activities fuelled the great aspirations of scenarios that were yet to occur, and the capacity for projection experienced significant oscillation until acquiring a consistent force in the period of the great utopias of Modernity. Between the Sixties and Seventies, a strong reformist tension was manifested, which went hand in hand with a notable interest in technology, and the potential of technical/ scientific progress to contribute to this chang. Today, the imaginative thrust towards future scenarios has been replaced by the need to describe and elaborate the present, to immerge oneself in the immediate: “presentism”. We are now living a performative phase of contemporary culture, wherein the construction of a story becomes the construction of an era, with specific articulation between a hypothetical past, an in fieri present, and a past future, consumed from the moment in which we narrate it. Therefore, “presentism” is elaborated as a therapy, an antidote that contemporary culture has produced to counteract a future that is “no longer a bright horizon towards which we advance, but a line of shadow that we have drawn towards ourselves, while we seem to have come to a standstill in the present, pondering on a past that is not passing.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
