Article
Digital Version
Tigani, Francesco

Pantopia : nella trama di utopie, totalitarismi e internet

2013 - Editoriale Scientifica

27-70 p.

  • Starting from the concept of utopia, who writes outlines an excursus of the utopian genre in some of its main aspects, from political treatises of the modern age (More and Campanella) to science-fiction literature of the twentieth century (Huxley and Orwell). The fundamental divide between mythos and logos is of course The Republic by Plato, which not only opens the vein that will find its own epistemic statute only in the sixteenth century, but became the archetype of the ideal and totalitarian State. The link between utopia and totalitarianism is deep from the beginning of Western thought, and is revealed when the science and the State, combining their forces, put in place a system of population control based on a spy network. Information, close knowledge of individuals, is the bony structure of totalitarianism, whose aim is proportional to the satisfaction of "the will to knowledge" (volonté de savoir) that is essential to the exercise of power.
  • Orwell's Big Brother, the heir of Bentham's Panopticon, is the most emblematic of an all-seeing state that supervises the people, influencing their choices and existences. But in contemporary history, his figure has been replaced by the Internet, a "world apart", separate yet parallel to the real world: a "neverland" is apparently free and happy, where men constantly land on, browsing in a software searching for an escape route or a full stop, a place in which realize themselves as subjects and communicating spirits. Utopia has therefore changed her appearance and purpose. Passing by from a small and ideal society, as the one hypothesised by Plato and More, to a "social world" built on reality, but transposed into a virtual or meta-reality dimension.
  • The "no place" of utopia turns into the "overplace" of pantopia, a place that is summary and last synthesis of all possible and impossible, real and imagined places. The final ring of human knowledge, the encyclopedia of humanity that wants to know herself at any cost, even by shattering in a Babel of names and faces that gravitate in the obscure Hypertext Galaxy. [Publisher's text].

Is part of

Storia e politica : rivista quadrimestrale : V, 1, 2013