Le forme est/etiche di Alberto Abruzzese = Alberto Abruzzese's est/ethical forms

Abstract

Fifty years after its first edition, "Forme estetiche e società di massa" by Alberto Abruzzese remains a book to be read as a precious testimony of the crucial transition from a sociology of social subjects, in their political and economic relationships, to a sociology of the imaginary, in its contemporary communicative and relational declinations. Furthermore, is equally important and fruitful a rereading aimed at identifying further suggestions and orientations regarding the dialectic between hyperrealism and virtuality, in the cultural horizon of the digital revolution and today's mediamorphoses of values. The objective of this contribution lies precisely in the proposal of a philosophically and semiotically oriented rereading of some important chapters of the book in question, dedicated to the code switching involved in the procedures of monumentalisation. These are traditional procedures of decontextualization and spatiotemporal delocalization, which found an innovative and emphatic development especially in the context of the great nineteenth-century Exhibitions, but which still appear capable of highlighting, from an aesthetic and ethical point of view, some crucial phenomena of postmodernity: charismatic powers and political correctness, the fetishism of identity claims and the fickleness of media consumption.