Il futuro come Utopia?

Mandich, Giuliana

2022-01-01

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Abstract

This paper aims to understand how the first phase of exit from the pan-demic has changed the temporality of everyday life and produced an affective atmosphere characterized by a positive attitude towards the future. I will start by analyzing the link between utopia and everyday life: on the one hand, as a privi-leged area of prefigurative practices in the different versions of utopian realism, and on the other, as trapped in the present in the theories of presentification. I will then examine some emblematic cases of a ‘need for the future’ that emerged in the first exit from the pandemic in the spring-summer 2021. Finally, starting from the affective and temporally complex nature of the present as conceptualized by Berlant (Berlant, 2011; Berlant, 2008) and Coleman (Coleman, 2020b; Coleman, 2020a), I will try to account for the push toward the future that the partial exit from the pandemic has perhaps brought out.