Il luogo e il senso: creazione e significazione degli spazi nel mondo globale

Place and meaning: the creation and signification of spaces in the global world “This will kill that. The book will kill the edifice”. These are the sober word that Victor Hugo makes the priest pronounce when, at the down of modern age, he looked on with prophetic dismay at the advent of printing with movable type, a revolution that would completely transform not only the face and features of the human being, but even the stones, the physical and material space of signification, the dimension of belonging and the sacred, that an “emancipated humanity” would change with the use of reason, undermining every form of dogmatic authority and its symbol. If the ways human beings shaped the space around them indicate their evolution - the changes in their anthropological profile - then we wonder what form stones could take in an era when even the paper book is replaced by the changing words that appear on bright and seductive screens – the irreplaceable extensions of a super-emancipated species. Actually, the digital revolution also contributes to the current changing in the organization of physical space. After all, anthropogenesis is always a “Home business” , evolution is “the unspoken drama” of creating space. Phenomenologically and biologically living means “positioning oneself”, being in space first as sentient and signifying body, even before the logos has formalized – in the sense of representation – this original experience. So living is always a delimitation experience, the delineation of boundaries. The “Sapiens 2.0” continues to construct his world as a place of signification and habitability, modelling his own “surroundings” in a way that is once again unprecedented, due to the transformations that he produces and which, in a circular and recursive process, continue to renew his features As plastic, versatile and changing entities, we exist in a global world, we easily move between semantically relevant places – home, neighbourhood, square, café – and the so-called “non-places”, spaces of transit, from airports and shopping malls to the web, which has now became the sapiens’ second home, the home within the home, or rather the ubiquitous home, in which we spend most of our time. The end of the strong subject of Cartesian metaphysics, replaced by a nomadic and fluid subjectivity, seems to be in line with a new reconfiguration of space: the temporary exposition replaces the monument; event supplants the codified liturgy of the ritual; online forum or the participation to the initiative through the click “Going”, replaces the square and the physical space of the relationship and contestation; smart working succeeds the factory and the office as spaces of production and sharing of work and ideas. From these renewed material and existential assumptions, does it still make sense to think the space as a cultural homeland? Moreover, globalized contemporaneity is developing through paradoxes that affect our own political, economic and social organization and have repercussions on spaces. Politically, the old nation-state, the space par excellence of belonging and identity, seems to have been supplanted by a series of supranational agencies who actually make decisions. The lucky inhabitants of the West easily traverse a seemingly borderless world, feeling themselves citizens of the world; neo-liberalism relies on the freedom of movement of goods and men reduced to commodities. There is a clear division that determines two hierarchically places: a center and a periphery that is always a marginality to be kept under control through more or less overtly violent practices of control-exclusion. This dossier intends to investigate the anthropological evolutions affecting the present, starting from the way in which contemporary man shapes and signifies spaces. The perception and configuration of space is in fact changing abruptly, in the light of the end of “grand narratives”, that is, of the possibility of investing places with mythical-ritual elements capable of establishing shared values and a feeling of “us”.