Regressionism

Regressionism is the tendency to invalidate the progressive approach towards arts and sciences or to undermine its being the only option for the development of western culture.It indeed puts in crisis the same concepts of linear time and development.

Regressionism evidently stems from a strong criticism of the very scientific system of knowledge and its methodologies, in this regard it can be solidly connected with a broad and hermeneutic embracing of historicism which is a fundamental characteristic of a large portion of what’s being recognized as the post-modern culture.The regressionist man is opposed to the one idealised by futurism. The latter, living at the fast pace of his industrialized world and obsessed with the idea of progress, has his evolutionary climax when thoroughly integrated and identified with his machines: when at war.Often, reacting to this model, the regressionist man is a peaceful creature, in touch with his humanity and the environment, immersed in a cyclic time.

While in the visual arts regressionism has been a recurrent modernist and postmodernist theme on both a theoretical side and a practical one, in epistemology a strategy of knowledge that was freer and less rigorous then the modern scientific one and which accepted the influence and the contribution of supposedly surpassed or alternative systems of knowledge was first proposed by Paul Karl Feyerabend in his book “Against Method” (1975).

Usually a reaction to globalisation or a more subtle form of luddism, regressionism is growing more popular and diffused in contemporary society and is manifesting itself in many forms of social production.
Primitivism, steampunk and stuckism are just a few nuances of a very complex, interdisciplinary and often discordant phenomenon.