Retrotopia. L’utopia che guarda al passato

sua parziale valorizzazione connessa ad una memoria e ad un oblio selettivi che volgono uno sguardo particolaristico e non oggettivo rivolto agli eventi passati. La privatizzazione e l’individualizzazione dell’idea di progresso che ne conseguono conducono alla riconsiderazione del modello della comunità tribale, al ritorno alla concezione di un io primordiale, all’abbandono della nozione di ordine civile come contesto regolato da princìpi non negoziabili e, infine, alla giustificazione di un diritto di gruppo, frequentemente identificato con la nazione. L’attestazione di una filosofia e di una politica manageriale pone le basi per il ritorno al paradigma della tribù e della lotta tra tribù estranee che esistono e sopravvivono per differenza, ovvero, nel reciproco rimando negativo. L’ottimistica utopia della modernità si specifica allora, nella società complessa, come retrotopia diffidente e rassegnata, indicante la strada di un narcisistico ritorno al grembo materno. Retrotopia, the title of a recent work by Zygmunt Bauman, evokes the idea of an age of nostalgia in which the future is demonized and is faced with an debatable re-evaluation of the past. This type of utopia, on the contrary, derives from the negation of the classic utopia and is based on the insurmountable riskiness of every decision and the unknowns that this entails in the attempt to reconcile individual security and freedom in post-modern society. The hopes for individual and collective improvement are therefore relocated from their natural home, the future, into particularist interpretations of the past that are presumed to be stable and more reliable precisely because they have already been given. The backward process - determined, in large part, by the set of political, economic and social conditions and processes that are generally defined by the term globalization and by the progressive transformation of the individual into consumer goods to be advertised and sold on the market - it does not consist, however, in a return to the past as such, but in a partial valorization connected to a selective memory and oblivion that take a particularistic and non-objective look towards past events. The privatization and individualisation of the idea of progress that follow leads to the reconsideration of the model of the tribal community, the return to the conception of a primordial ego, the abandonment of the notion of civil order as a context governed by non-negotiable principles and, finally, to the justification of a group right, frequently identified with the nation. The attestation of a managerial philosophy and politics lays the foundations for the return to the paradigm of the tribe and of the struggle between foreign tribes that exist and survive by difference, that is, in mutual negative reference. The optimistic utopia of modernity is then specified, in the complex society, as a diffident and resigned retrotopia, indicating the path of a narcissistic return to mother's womb.