Around the margin in eighty worlds and twenty years. Remarks on the paradoxical nature of the notion of a margin
Around the margin in eighty worlds and twenty years. Remarks on the paradoxical nature of the notion of a margin

Summary/Abstract: This article obviously aims at messing around, checking if borderlines of disciplines can be ignored, so as not to lose sight of their margins. The increase in the interest in margins may be associated with the change of the cultural paradigm at the turn of 1980s and 1990s, the so-called “spatial turn”, i.e. a rediscovery of the cognitive indispensability of spatial meta-phors. This turn was also influenced by intrinsically ex-centric and centrifugal strivings of the avant-garde. However, a much greater incentive to deal with the topic is provided by the common uncertainty of our own position, role and usefulness in the global circulation of culture. A strong sense of marginalization or marginality in the culture described as global is paradoxical in the light of geometry’s “intuition-free” generalizations. There is no margin on the surface of a sphere, at most each point of the spherical space can be described as peripheral locality. And in each such locality, peripheral vicissitudes may occur and do occur, as dramatic as they are uninteresting to anyone outside the locality. It is quite a precise model – more geometrico – of the cultural processes which are most frequently called alienation, defamiliar-ization, disillusion, enstrangement or estrangement. Only having referred a margin to a triangle formed by the three terms остранение, Verfremdung, dépaysement, can we can fully under-stand the reasons for the constant fascination with the marginal.

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