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Marginalization: the life beyond the frontiers of normality

«Reality» as we consider it, tends to be restricted to what we assimilate as tangible. Inside that territory several norms determine the structure of those visual and touchable elements. Sight and touch as unarguable conditions for a “real” existence. Specters and ghosts as commonly related to most, have the ability of transgressing those «boundaries» and physically appear into the real world. When they do, they are automatically executing an act of re-territorialization: the feared invasion from a foreign space assumed by normality as the occupation of a territory which is only designated for real bodies, for the domination of the flesh embodiment above all else.

To this perception, Ghosts appear as fragments of an original form lost and transformed, dead and deformed, a body without organs, one of limited functions and whose uncertainty and unpredictability awakes horror with the same intensity as it raises a certain enchantment. These sudden and random sprouts of the far beyond through their inherent elusiveness, appear to bend and break the rules and barriers that we assume as inflexible, the rules of the real, the rules of normality.

Specters (or humans in their behave) seem to fight inch by inch with reality for a validation in the “Interiority”: the comfortable core where the sane and normal reside. The transgression of the specter is seen as a major divergence, described as intolerable for the norm. The installation of any alternative notion of reality co-existing with our tangible reality, acts against the established order that normality so jealously protects. Specters suggest a threat to the irreversibility that this power pretends for itself.

Marginalization surges then as an urgent tool to adjust whatever is loosen inside the system. With the perpetual purpose of maintaining in line that that for the powers who structure the world, should never deviate from the core of normality.

“Marginalization towards another being starts to exist when this element becomes dangerously close, it is in that moment when the precaution of keeping threats in a convenient distance awakes”.  

J. Baudrillard.

The motives? Basically safe keeping those distances and maintaining them impenetrable, nevertheless, a constant threat of possible invasions from the outsiders arises.

The danger for the norm and order is always latent, normality reacts expelling any type of outsider to what Foucault described as the space for the excluded: the interior of the exterior. In this territory the specter is no different to the madmen or any other marginalized being; all of them in perception of the norm are relegated from the interior, expelled due to particular deviations. The “stultifera navis”, Latin for “the vessel of the mad”, carries away in it all the exteriorized beings, taking them away from the interior, from normality, from order and in that very moment, igniting the clash between these two worlds. A clash of constant and unpredictable invasions, abhorred by the order.

Inside this symbolic universe the battle with reality is never massive and always subtle. Territorial occupation is the main motive. While in our structured universe the order fights to keep the boundaries impenetrable, these other beings from the exterior bring within themselves a certain power, a certain fear towards it too: the subtlety of seduction, its enchantment promoting an unexpected reversibility of reality, bringing in new layers and gammas, uncertainty and danger. Their virtues will be rapidly dismissed by the conservative rules of the norm, pointing their strangeness and alien status as a valid reason for exclusion.

The outsiders invade the normalized reality in a surreptitious mode; the «horrific» stampede from the exterior exists only in the interior’s darkest paranoia of losing power and control inside its boundaries, holding desperately to the practices of relegation and exclusion. Its curious then that maybe all this aggressive migration from the exterior towards the interior might not be executed by the specter’s own powers and potentialities, more than it is motivated by our own urges for an eternal existence, an extension of our own caducity. Is it us, from the inside, who incite paranormality, are we the creators of it? Is it just enchantment and seduction what we are craving for? Specters never fail when it comes to providing these sensations. Marginalization fails to prevent those feelings to filtrate inside, specters reproduce the cloudy embodiment of an ingrown idea about these beings whose inexact and foggy surface possess in its simulations, as a reality or just as a desire of it, an unavoidable and magnetic fascination.

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