La trasformazione ideologica del concetto di ‘flusso’ dal romanticismo al modernismo

My article aims at analyzing the concept of ‘flux’ in some key literary, philosophical, and sociological texts from romanticism to modernism. Firstly, I clarify how the emergence of this concept was intrinsically linked to the cultural romantic revolution and to two intellectual turns (the birth of aesthetics and the birth of historicism) that challenged normative approaches to objective truth (Baumgarten, Hamann, Herder, Cuoco). Secondly, I address the presence of this same concept in some fields of the 19th and early-20th century culture (literature, sociology, art history, philosophy), where ‘flux’ is condemned as the cultural outcome of the fragmentation of the social fabric caused by capitalism (Ibsen, Tönnies, Wölfflin, Weininger). Finally I investigate how the ‘flux’ becomes again a positive element in early modernism (Pirandello, Bergson, Mach). I clarify how, however, and differently than in Romanticism, now the image of the ‘flux’ is not considered any longer in relation to a historical and historicist perspective (and in a dialectical connection with a social praxis), but immortalized as a natural and anthropological part of existence. I argue then that the apparent emboldening of this concept in modernism actually hides its own deactivation: a deactivation of the historical idea of transformation that underlines a new phase of bourgeois culture