Philosophical and Aesthetic Contexts of the Phenomenon of Marginalization in Late Modernity
Philosophical and Aesthetic Contexts of the Phenomenon of Marginalization in Late Modernity

Summary/Abstract: In the postmodern period we are dealing with many manifestations of marginaliza-tion, the understanding of which requires the use of a different language and different categories than those employed during the high phase of modernity. Giving an axiological meaning to the manifestations of marginalization in art is a comparatively recent phenomenon, a product of modernity. Divisions of art before and after its autonomization occur according to different rules. The article recounts the views of J. Habermas, C. Greenberg, and J. F. Lyotard on the central and the marginal in art, and it asks the question about their usefulness today in analyzing the phenomena of the marginal. To understand the ongoing paradigmatic change it might be advisable to consider the reflections of D. Mersch, who points out the ambivalent status of the concept of art and the avant-garde, which permits us to vindicate other concepts, for example that of the rearguard (arrière-garde). The age of modernity produced and already partly overcame the totalizing discourse on art, which condemned whole areas of artistic activity to exclusion. The size of the margins seen from this perspective turns out to be variable and dynamic, which calls into question the practice of giving an axiological meaning to the concept. The arguments for the change in thinking that take place in late modernity is the positive appreciation of events and individual experiences, the phenomena of the ephemeral as understood by G. Böhme, and the return to the idea of the whole built on different foundations.

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