Teoria ironica e sprofondamento dell'utopia: Jean Baudrillard pensatore utopico

In this essay, Utopia is considered a “thought machine” which, according to Ernst Bloch and other scholars, allows to highlight the category of possibility in the structure of the real. Humour is, however, mainly considered in the socio-cultural meaning as mediator of social contradictions through figures and social facts endowed with an ambiguous statute between the categories of the sacred and the profane. The modal category of possibility, expressed in the well known Blochian formula “not yet”, is specifically read in relation to the concept of openness that, through the reflection of George Bataille among others, may be associated with various forms of experience and social phenomena, including laugh and distress, able to open reality to immanent possibilities. Based on this background, Jean Baudrillard’s Les stratégies fatales (1983) is read with reference to the concepts of Utopia and humour. On the one hand, and more in general, all Jean Baudrillard’s work can be read in the light of the concept of Utopia; on the other hand, from the end of the seventies, the theme of “ironic theory” emerges in his reflection as both a way of looking at the reality and an effect of the functioning of modern social systems. The contemporary world shows an excessive claim of truth and certainty, sense and value, in areas where, inevitably and systematically, it emerges far from what was expected and above all its opposite: the example of polls and statistics in the political sphere is a striking and fun example of an unpredictable and powerful reversibility effect that the social system generates against itself. Interestingly, the formulation of the “ironic theory” coincides with the recognition of a realization of Utopia. In our time, Baudrillard argues, “we must not believe that we live the realization of a bad Utopia, we live the realization of Utopia tout court, that is, its sinking into reality.” Irony is, together with concepts such as seduction, fatality, play and others, a hypothesis and a possibility of overthrowing the dominant force relationships: a reversal that could be inherent in the logic of the social system itself.