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“Margins and Mainstreams” is a Mixed Metaphor of Duality
Although I suppose “margin” is a word for a riverbank or a swampy verge adjoining a main stream, we who grew up in the print era usually visualize it as something like the blank space alongside a page of text or image: a place where something is written as an aside or an addendum. I don’t know what comes into the minds of the digital generation, and indeed “marginality” is generally no longer spoken of these days, despite or because of the pushing of whole economic classes out of the main currents of global commerce.
But I have been re-reading essays in the dual MIT Press anthologies Out There and Over Here, about the shifting destinies and destinations of margins and mainstreams and how the whole business got so muddled and muddied in the age of globalization and global economic crises. (I suppose it is the inevitable business of margins or verges to muddy up the mainstream in times of difficult weather.)
It has all reminded me of how in the previous version of this joculum journal I used various marginal historical moments that fascinated me for other reasons. I now realize that what is most interesting, somewhere between 75 and 125 years after the particular cases I discussed on the other joculum journal, is how historically humiliated cultures have again and again used the most despised aspects of their inheritance to insist upon the validity of their entire experience; or else have exaggerated the distinctiveness of the cultural accomplishments of their particular region, to the point of mythologizing them. They are more productively thought of in terms of parallel cultural structures, or appreciated as human artifacts in their own right.
Of course nothing is ever “appreciated as a human artifact in its own right,” as the slightest glance at the reception history in Europe of traditional African sculpture shows us. (The proto-modernist artists of a century or so ago rescued African art from the trinket bins of flea markets—or in notorious later cases, purloined it from the dusty back rooms of ethnographic museums.)
The notion of what constitutes a mainstream is also historically relative; I hope someday to get around to analyzing the eleven issues of Civiltà [Civilization] published in Rome in 1940-1942 as a lead-up to the Universal Exposition of 1942 that never took place. It was meant to be an Olympics of Civilizations, buttressing the Fascist state’s claim to be the modern inheritor to the great civilizations represented by the Roman Empire and the Italian Renaissance, and the magazine published in its support is full of tales of the Grand Tour and the Renaissance masterpieces to be found in cities in the newly acquired eastern Adriatic littoral ruled long ago by Venice. (The newest established Independent State of Croatia had its own cultural stories regarding these Italianate cities.)
Today we have our own competing stories about what does and does not constitute the global mainstream, and it would be interesting to see if art can be kept out of the fray, or at least extracted from it, since nothing is ever exempt from social conflict.
In any case, art that is not explicitly intended to address the question of social conflict (and there are those for whom this is the only valid function of art today) contains aspects that can and should be addressed from many perspectives, shaped if not shared by many different cultures and differing personality types.
My sense is that there have always been cross-cultural personalities, shaped by their own psychologies and their individual experiences, who have found points of commonality and unexpected moments of useful conversation across gaps—gaps in culture that their fellow citizens viewed as intrinsically unbridgeable chasms.
Why that is, and how that is, and what mixture of physiology and philosophy and physical dislocation and/or economic fortune brings this phenomenon about—that is one of the topics I have discussed and hope to be allowed to continue to discuss.
For lack of discussion of it is one of the factors that has led over the centuries to mass murder—probably not a major factor, to be sure, but a factor, nonetheless.
Although I suppose “margin” is a word for a riverbank or a swampy verge adjoining a main stream, we who grew up in the print era usually visualize it as something like the blank space alongside a page of text or image: a place where something is written as an aside or an addendum. I don’t know what comes into the minds of the digital generation, and indeed “marginality” is generally no longer spoken of these days, despite or because of the pushing of whole economic classes out of the main currents of global commerce.
But I have been re-reading essays in the dual MIT Press anthologies Out There and Over Here, about the shifting destinies and destinations of margins and mainstreams and how the whole business got so muddled and muddied in the age of globalization and global economic crises. (I suppose it is the inevitable business of margins or verges to muddy up the mainstream in times of difficult weather.)
It has all reminded me of how in the previous version of this joculum journal I used various marginal historical moments that fascinated me for other reasons. I now realize that what is most interesting, somewhere between 75 and 125 years after the particular cases I discussed on the other joculum journal, is how historically humiliated cultures have again and again used the most despised aspects of their inheritance to insist upon the validity of their entire experience; or else have exaggerated the distinctiveness of the cultural accomplishments of their particular region, to the point of mythologizing them. They are more productively thought of in terms of parallel cultural structures, or appreciated as human artifacts in their own right.
Of course nothing is ever “appreciated as a human artifact in its own right,” as the slightest glance at the reception history in Europe of traditional African sculpture shows us. (The proto-modernist artists of a century or so ago rescued African art from the trinket bins of flea markets—or in notorious later cases, purloined it from the dusty back rooms of ethnographic museums.)
The notion of what constitutes a mainstream is also historically relative; I hope someday to get around to analyzing the eleven issues of Civiltà [Civilization] published in Rome in 1940-1942 as a lead-up to the Universal Exposition of 1942 that never took place. It was meant to be an Olympics of Civilizations, buttressing the Fascist state’s claim to be the modern inheritor to the great civilizations represented by the Roman Empire and the Italian Renaissance, and the magazine published in its support is full of tales of the Grand Tour and the Renaissance masterpieces to be found in cities in the newly acquired eastern Adriatic littoral ruled long ago by Venice. (The newest established Independent State of Croatia had its own cultural stories regarding these Italianate cities.)
Today we have our own competing stories about what does and does not constitute the global mainstream, and it would be interesting to see if art can be kept out of the fray, or at least extracted from it, since nothing is ever exempt from social conflict.
In any case, art that is not explicitly intended to address the question of social conflict (and there are those for whom this is the only valid function of art today) contains aspects that can and should be addressed from many perspectives, shaped if not shared by many different cultures and differing personality types.
My sense is that there have always been cross-cultural personalities, shaped by their own psychologies and their individual experiences, who have found points of commonality and unexpected moments of useful conversation across gaps—gaps in culture that their fellow citizens viewed as intrinsically unbridgeable chasms.
Why that is, and how that is, and what mixture of physiology and philosophy and physical dislocation and/or economic fortune brings this phenomenon about—that is one of the topics I have discussed and hope to be allowed to continue to discuss.
For lack of discussion of it is one of the factors that has led over the centuries to mass murder—probably not a major factor, to be sure, but a factor, nonetheless.
