ENZO D’ANGELO – The 19th-century legacy of the past as a nostalgic realm of imagination, along with its related ambivalences, is still present, across the board, in all layers of Western society. And it is not merely a matter of the lack of updating—which is in itself no easy task—of most contemporaries regarding the problems of art, aesthetics, and thought in our century. If, as is obvious, a univocal reading of the past cannot be hoped for, nor its re-proposal in place of the present, the “Eros of distance,” to quote Klages, remains ever alive, with its manipulability. The past and monuments have been at the root of the emphasis of nationalisms and of functionalist adjustments, accompanied by numerous ideological manipulations.

ANTONIO LANDOLFI – Do you see functionalism as close to dictatorships?

ENZO D’ANGELO – Partially, if we refer to the Modern Movement. But we cannot forget the losses caused by adaptations to the symbolic and celebratory functionality of authoritarian regimes from Napoleon III to Ceaușescu with the gutting of historic centers, the construction of grand boulevards, restorations and projects of cultural endorsement that sought out classical testimonies at the expense of Baroque and medieval ones. Nor can we forget the ambiguities of the so-called universal functionality of the Modern Movement itself, with its rationalist utopia of an architecture that would embody equality and truth, capable of unifying peoples. Here too, we are dealing with an ideology that like dictatorships ended up ignoring stratifications and diversity, that is, history, identities, and cultures, reducing renewal needs to uniformity through a totalizing shift in scale.
Thus, even starting from opposing premises, significant presences and artifacts from the past and the present have often been sacrificed to the needs of a global industrial civilization striving to optimize its production—destroying or adapting them through deliberate mystifications. In historic cities, one cannot even count the internal and external disguises of surfaces, materials, and structures. The picture also includes post-war reconstructions, which are not always above reproach, the so-called development of real estate speculation, the destruction of many landscapes… so why be surprised at the widespread disorientation, the sense of estrangement, and the retreat into the past?

ANTONIO LANDOLFI – Doesn’t this path end up justifying nostalgia? What meaning can the idea of the past have as a destination for escape?

ENZO D’ANGELO – Without forgetting that, before dissolving as a pathology and undergoing semantic erosion, nostalgia has a clinical history that runs parallel to that of the city and modern urban planning and how difficult it is, in hindsight, to claim that the problem never existed. Of course, we may feel uneasy about mourning something we never actually knew. But if there is a Sartrean désir de rien, there is also a discomfort in facing the irreversibility of time, which the loss of testimony and the absence of history only sharpen.
It does not matter whether nostalgia is a variant of melancholia or its final stage. I think of Benjamin’s angel of history, who looks upon the ruins of the past but, with wings caught, is propelled by the storm into the future. In the no-man’s time-space in which we risk finding ourselves suspended even as we fall forward into the future we must accept change by looking back, but without regret.
Escape is desirable if we understand it as the ability to react and initiate responses; to formulate, as in music, a thematic paradigm in which different voices coexist—or, geometrically, a meeting point of projections. It is not desirable if by escape we mean self-exclusion, or the renunciation of the present and its historicity.

ANTONIO LANDOLFI – When escape leads to a place or a time in the past, doesn’t it take us to utopia and therefore to an ideology?

ENZO D’ANGELO – Today, the tendency is rather to escape ever more into the future—through virtual reality, hyper-communicability, and simultaneity—pushing into the background the original text, the document, and even narrativity itself, that is, the structuring of literary, artistic, and architectural texts, which allows us to read and remember them. Technological achievements distance us from the objectivity and physicality of the present, turning a future time into ideology and devaluing the viability of the hic et nunc. From utilitarianism to monofunctionality: a process of absolute reduction determined by the ideologization of science and technology, which ultimately excludes principles, and critical and communicative activity. Habermas had already described this very well in the 1960s with his critique of ideology.
As for the continuity between utopia and ideology, if we understand them as complementary, we also know that the former, despite all its statistical weakness, is the strongest alternative to the latter and in fact, precisely because of this strength, has at times legitimized ideological impositions. Of both, we reject authoritarianism; in any case, various levels of these concepts must be considered—both in linguistic use and in historical or philosophical terms. Ideology, which for Condillac and the sensualists once defined the formation of ideas, has now been reduced—at least in Europe—to signify their crystallization. In contrast to manipulative uses, emphasis, exclusivism or racism, the ability to idealize and aggregate through ideals is a positive force. As for utopia, beyond its social and intellectual fascination, we cannot ignore its imaginative and liberating capacities. And when Ricoeur recognizes its role in maintaining the gap between hope and tradition—since “to imagine the non-place is to keep open the field of the possible” he brings us back to Ernst Bloch’s “principle of hope” and his related ontology. Bloch’s “concrete utopia” offers us Aristotle’s potentialities of matter with its “hunger for form,” a progress made of plurality and difference, and a nature “that is not a past, but a buildable area,” inviting us to the project or, for now, to the meta-project of a periphrasis by which I would say that the past is a natural form of culture, as opposed to the organized form of history. Still open, however, remains the issue of historiographical models after the crisis of unitary theories and the philosophy of history.

ANTONIO LANDOLFI – The crisis of the idealist-oriented philosophy of history has been evident for many decades now. It dates back to the historiographical revolution of the Annales school. In Italy, the overturning of the neo-idealist position culminated, already in the early 1960s, in the debate sparked by Eugenio Garin’s essay Philosophy as Historical Knowledge.
All this upheaval, with the changes in direction it brought to historiographical trends, has nevertheless stimulated historical research, and in particular, specialized research. Once neo-idealist monism and what had become its counterpart, namely Marxist materialistic monism—was interrupted and overcome, historiographical research was able to unfold its potential, directing itself toward multiple objectives, and branching out into specific fields: from economics to customs, from linguistics to folk traditions, from science to art and the landscape; from the social sciences and institutions to cinema, photography, and the visual arts.
This new path in historiographical research—already heralded in the interwar years by Huizinga’s reflections aims, as Falco wrote, to tell us “how things actually happened” without carrying us away “into the rarefied atmosphere of speculation (…) so that the language of facts is at the same time the language of ideas.”
Throughout this orientation echoes the lesson of Vico, in the New Science, according to which history is nothing other than the understanding “of the way in which things came to be.”
The impetus given by this new direction to specific historiographical research, though it leaves open countless problems of method and meaning of the relationship between specificity and universality—has opened the way to historical inquiry across many fields, among which a priority must be given to the real, visual, urban, and artistic setting in which cultures and ways of life took shape, and in which events unfolded in each historical moment.