Il futuro come Utopia?

Abstract

This paper aims to understand how the first phase of exit from the pandemic 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 privileged 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.